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A Community of Limits and the Limits of Community: MALDEF's Chicana Rights Project, Empowering the "Typical Chicana," and the Question of Civil Rights, 1974–1983
LORI A. FLORES
To speak of Chicanas is to speak of a multitude of experiences, of histories, and of realities.
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| —Isabelle Navar1 |
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IN LATE MAY 1971, over six hundred Chicanas attended the first National Chicana Conference, La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza, in Houston, Texas.2 The weekend-long gathering provided a forum for Mexican American women of all ages to discuss issues ranging from fair employment to higher education to healthy sexuality. The resolutions developed from the two largest workshops at the conference, "Sex and the Chicana" and "Marriage—Chicana Style," called for control by Chicanas over their own bodies and access to free legal abortions, birth control, and twenty-four-hour child care centers. The resolutions also called for Chicanas actively to question "machismo," educational discrimination, the double standard, and the repressive ideology of the Catholic Church. |
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Although almost half of the participants walked out of the conference, protesting that it did not focus sufficiently on racism, the meeting signified an important moment in Chicana history.3 It certainly carried a different tone than a women's workshop at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver just two years before in March 1969. At that time the female workshop facilitator had reported to the conference, "It was the consensus of the group that the Chicana woman does not want to be liberated." In speaking of the workshop, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez recalled, "I felt this [statement] as quite a blow. I could have cried.... Then I understood why the statement had been made and realized that going along with the feelings of the men at the convention was perhaps the best thing to do at the time."4 At that point, the desire for ethnic solidarity within the Chicano movement surpassed Chicanas' desire to break away as women and risk being associated with Euro-American feminism. In contrast, as the first national gathering ever held for and by Chicanas in the United States, the 1971 Houston conference and its participants placed Mexican American women's demands, according to historian Vicki Ruiz, "very visibly on the [Chicano] movement table."5 |
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The Houston conference remained in the memories of Latina activists across the country. Although fewer than ten articles about Chicana issues had been published before 1971, over seventy articles appeared in Chicano newspapers and journals that year alone, with almost one-fifth of them addressing the conference.6 "The conference as a whole reflected a rising consciousness of the Chicana about her special oppression in this society," wrote Argentine-born activist Mirta Vidal.7 Francisca Flores proclaimed, "[The conference] was the beginning of a chubasco (storm) to say the least ... [it] represented such force and potential for a breakthrough against existing stumbling blocks and obstacles in the women's struggle for equality."8 Vilma Martinez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), declared in a speech years later that "the period of 1970–1972 ... [was] the time in which Chicana awareness truly began to emerge.... Chicanas realized that they were capable of organizing, that they were powerful.... With [the 1971 conference] the momentum for the Chicana movement was activated."9 |
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