Cultural Production of a Decolonial Imaginary for a Young Chicana: Lessons from Mexican Immigrant Working-Class Woman's Culture

摘要

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes a pivotal context in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (199946. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. View all references, 200347. Pérez, Emma. 2003. Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard. Frontiers , 24: 122-131. [CrossRef]View all references) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 198919. Delgado, Richard. 1989. Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative. Michigan Law Review , 87: 2411-2441. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2010.496696