Abstract
The conclusion explores how acts of negotiation are understood in terms of survival and sobrevivencia. In their negotiations, these women demonstrate sobrevivencia: “what lies ahead and beneath plain victim, our ability to saciar (satiate) our hopes and dreams in creative and joyful ways” (Galván). It echoes work seen in Native American literary practices, in the work on survivance by Gerald Vizenor, for example, and Black literary studies, by David Stirrup, Sadiya Hartmann, Jared Sexton, and others. Through the continuation, understanding, and reappropriation of their foremothers’ stories, Chicanas discard binary definitions of womanhood in favour of a mestiza approach that allows for the adoption of some lessons and the rejection of others; it is a process that changes for each individual in each familial generation.
La gente Chicana tiene tres madres. […] All three are mediators.
—Gloria Anzaldúa
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Notes
- 1.
The Chicanx people have three mothers. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 52.
- 2.
Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, xviii–xix.
- 3.
Ruth Trinidad Galván, “Campesina Epistemologies and Pedagogies of the Spirit: Examining Women’s Sobrevivencia,” Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, ed. Dolores Delgado Bernal, et al. (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 163.
- 4.
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
- 5.
Del Castillo, “Gender and its Discontinuities,” 212.
- 6.
Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii.
- 7.
Castillo, Black Dove, 84–85.
- 8.
Castillo, Black Dove, 85.
- 9.
Andrea O’Reilly, “‘I come from a long line of Uppity Irate Black Women’: African American Feminist Thoughts on Motherhood, the Motherline, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship,” Mothers and Daughters, 145.
- 10.
Quintana, “The Novelist as Ethnographer,” 74.
- 11.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 76.
- 12.
In 1975, noted Chicano critic Charles M. Tatum provided a useful teaching aid for those wishing to teach a course on Mexican American culture and suggests reading the works of Rudolfo Acuña, Raymond Barrio, John Burma, Ernesto Galarza, Ed Ludwig, Octavio Romano, Stan Steiner, and Richard Vásquez (Charles M. Tatum, “Mexican American Culture: A Model Program,” Hispania 58 (2) (1975), www.jstor.org/stable/338958: 317–22). Tatum’s ‘Model Program’ is thus populated with the works of male writers exclusively. Furthermore, Tatum’s 1975 essay “Contemporary Chicano Prose Fiction: Its Ties to Mexican Literature” describes the connections between Mexican American and Mexican literature; however, only the works of men are mentioned in this historical literary relationship. See also: Lewis M. Baldwin, “Pick of the Paperbacks: Chicano Literature in Paperback,” The English Journal 65 (1976), www.jstor.org/stable/814507: 78–80; Gerald Haslam, “¡Por La Causa! Mexican-American Literature,” College English 31 (7) (1970), www.jstor.org/stable/374613: 695–709; Raymond J. Rodrigues, “A Few Directions in Chicano Literature,” The English Journal 62, no 5 (1973), www.jstor.org/stable/814280: 724–9.
- 13.
Herrera, (Re)Writing the Maternal Script, 201.
- 14.
Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, x.
- 15.
Melinda Palacios, Ocotillo Dreams (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2011).
- 16.
Cristina García, A Handbook to Luck (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007).
- 17.
OED, s.v. “negotiation,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/125879.
- 18.
Richard Prince, “Big US Networks Ignored Epic Native Protest Over Pipeline,” The Root, 9 September 2016, http://journalisms.theroot.com/big-us-networks-ignored-epic-native-protest-over-pipeli-1790888968; Allison Keyes, “The Wall and Deportation: For Latinos, Life Under Trump Brings Uncertainty and Fear,” The Root, 17 November 2016, http://www.theroot.com/the-wall-and-deportation-for-latinos-life-under-trump-1790857750; Melinda D. Anderson, “How the Stress of Racism Affects Learning,” The Atlantic, 11 October 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/how-the-stress-of-racism-affects-learning/503567/; Peter Holley, “KKK’s Official Newspaper Support Donald Trump for President,” The Washington Post, 2 November 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/01/the-kkks-official-newspaper-has-endorsed-donald-trump-for-president/?utm_term=.0e247b5267c4.
- 19.
Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues,” This Bridge, 170.
- 20.
Castillo, Massacre, 194.
- 21.
Ibid., 146.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Castillo, Massacre, 192.
- 24.
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 59.
- 25.
Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border, 61.
- 26.
Castillo, Massacre, 146.
- 27.
Alarcón, “What Kind of Lover,” 105.
- 28.
Virginia Woolf, quoted in Rachel Bowbly, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 28.
- 29.
Téllez, “Mi Madre, Mi Hija y Yo,” 64.
- 30.
Mirandé and Enríquez, La Chicana, 98.
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Hall, E.A. (2021). Conclusion: Negotiating for Sobrevivencia. In: Negotiating Feminisms. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50637-7_5
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