The scholarship for this issue delves into Chicana literature to illustrate non-heteronormative ways of understanding intimate female relationships and place-based articulations of identity, and into Chicana art to illustrate depictions of Chicanas that transgress patriarchal and religious norms. Specifically, in “Homointimate Friendship and Queer Possibility in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters,” Meagan Solomon offers a queered reading of the aesexual friendship between the two Latina protagonists depicted in Ana Castillo’s 1992 debut epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters. Additionally, Shelli Rottschafer deconstructs the short story, “Remedies” by Kali Fajardo-Anstine in “Querencia and Curanderismo in Fajardo-Anstine’s ‘Remedies,’” to reveal how its female characters demonstrate the power of reclaiming traditions and generational knowledge, drawing on a sense of identity grounded in geography. Similarly, the images of Chicana artists are read as autobiographical in Rosita Scerbo’s essay, “Ciber Arte e Intervenciones Autobiofráficas de Mujeres Latinas en las Humanidades Digitales,” alternative self-representation that usurp conventional depictions of Chicanas and Latinas delimited by sexist and patriarchal ideologies.
The scholar’s essays in this issue also highlight the multiple critical interventions offered by an archival text, and a critical analysis of the limitations of the shelter system for unhoused Black and Brown women into this issue. For instance, in the essay, “Archival Movidas in the Classroom: Teaching from the Clotilde P. García Papers,” Alexandrea Pérez Allison masterfully illustrates how to utilize archival material to illustrate rhetorical persuasive maneuvers, to map out the evolution of feminist thought, and to provide an example of a movida, as articulated in the anthology by Dionne Espinoza, Maria Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell (2018). Odilka Santiago’s ethnographic study of New York City’s shelter system described in her essay, “Homeless Shelters: Reproducing Ethno-racial Division Among Black and Brown Women,” (2022) documents how ethno-racial and gender hierarchies of women of color are reified through the bureaucracy of this social service, preventing coalition building amongst Black and Brown women.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Maíz Memory: Decolonizing Art through Mestizx Media
Suzy González
COMMENTARY
EDITOR’S COMMENTARY:
Itzpapalotl: The Life-giving and Knowledge-producing Spirit of Chicana/Latina Studies
Sonya M. Alemán
ESSAYS
Homointimate Friendship and Queer Possibility in Ana Castillo’s “The Mixquiahuala Letters”
Meagan Solomon
Archival Movidas in the Classroom: Teaching from the Clotilde P. García Papers
Alexandrea Pérez Allison
Querencia and Ethnobotany in Fajardo-Anstine’s “Remedies”
Shelli Lynn Rottschafer
Homeless Shelters: Reproducing Ethno-racial Divisions Among Black and Brown Women
Odilka Santiago
Ciber Arte e Intervenciones Autobiofráficas de Mujeres Latinas en las Humanidades Digitales
Rosita Scerbo
CREATIVE WRITING
EDITOR’S COMMENTARY:
Looking to the Land: Environmental Writing
Grisel Y. Acosta
Un mar de lagrimas
Respira profundo
Oscuridad
Cristal Briseida Almonte
Huentellao
A la hora de recordarte voy a ti Montaña
Ester Gonzalez Barrientos (Ester Orellana)
What was the experience of death like for you?
100-word love story (1)
100-word love story (2)
María Fernanda
Queen Nopal
Carolina Hinojosa
Lo que la memoria recuerda: A Journey in Sewing
Lydia A. Saravia
Knots
Joanna Beltrán Girón
IN REVIEW
Contesting the Historiography of the Chicano Movement with Marginalized Movidas
Daisy Robles Herrera
Intersectionality and Criminal Justice Experiences
Kathleen E. Padilla
