Resisting intersectional marginality by developing a mestiza consciousness : undergraduate women of color challenging and shaping power

This critical qualitative study explores how power shapes the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy on social justice issues at the University of Missouri. The development and design of this study is grounded in a Critical Race Feminist (CRF) epistemology. The research questions were: 1) How does power shape the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy at the University of Missouri? 2) How do Women of Color experience exclusion in their activist/advocacy work and/or spaces on campus? 3) What strategies do Women of Color employ to resist marginalization on campus " in and outside of activist work? The research focused on the experiences of five Women of Color undergraduate students at the University of Missouri, four of whom were in their fourth year at the institution and one of whom was a junior. More specifically, there was one Black woman, a Chicana, a mixed-race Mexicana who is also White, and two South Asian Indian women. the use of testimonios, plnticas, and sista circles, participants shared their stories and experiences. The identification of these frames and methods is partly a result of my own position as a Boricua, Woman of Color, who seeks to conduct research in a way that is liberatory and reciprocal for participants. The findings of this research were interpreted using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2019) and Mestiza consciousness (Anzaldna, 1997). I found four over-arching themes: Engaging and Adjusting Behavior, Culture of Exploitation, Distrust Confirmed and Cultivated, and Developing a Mestiza Consciousness. Overall findings demonstrate how participants activism largely came in the form of creating awareness for others, predominantly White people. In addition, findings showed how those with privilege and power regulate participants' emotions; a lack of intersectional praxis and analysis in all areas of campus life, including equity and diversity work; a performative diversity culture that haed in equity and justice; dominant representation reflecting political investments; and how the development of a Mestiza consciousness is used by participants to challenge intersectional marginalization. Finally, this study demonstrates how participants' consciousness and activist work are continuously evolving and how they work to meet their needs and find reciprocity in their activist and advocacy efforts.

Recognition

Being multiracial can be a contradictory experience characterized by misperception and a lack of agency; however, embracing multiple identities can constitute an internal revolution of consciousness. This internal revolution of consciousness cannot occur without a societal recognition of multiracial identity. There needs to be a substantive social understanding of multiracial identity in order for true recognition to occur. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas serves as an opening anecdote to this chapter as it illustrates multiplicity, which can characterize multiracial consciousness. Racial identity and multiracial identity are explored through Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities, which also establishes the need for a substantive social understanding of mixed-race identity. An internal revolution of consciousness can be developed through Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queerness in Queer Phenomenology and Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands: La Frontera. The parallels between queerness and a mixed-race consciousness are further explored in this chapter to embody new ways of being and seeing the world.

The Coatlicue’s State in The Mixquiahuala Letters: A Postmodern Interpretation on How to Reach the Mestiza Consciousness

During the Chicana Literary Renaissance of the 1980s, Chicana writers–influenced by the Third World Feminist Movement–revealed new forms of representation of the Chicana experience. While concentrating on the subversive reading of the subject-object duality in Ana Castillo’s novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1985), Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s theory of the mestiza consciousness is also reviewed. Castillo represents the mestiza consciousness through her protagonist in a process of self-discovery through the reflection of autohistoria-teoría within the forty letters. The dichotomies of patriarchal ideologies that divide her from the Other are examined through the Coatlicue State, as inflected by such writers such as Julio Cortázar, Anaïs Nin and Miguel de Cervantes. Castillo creates a postmodern hopscotch style novel in which the reader is fundamental to the subversive interpretation of the three reading options (the conformist, the cynical, and the quixotic).

Traveling the Soil of Worlds: Haunted Forgettings and Opaque Memories

This essay works on the role of trauma and forgetting in the subjective formations of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza. I investigate how forgetting affects the resistant capacities of these figures. I argue throughout that the memory of the world-traveler is an opaque memory, which is unintelligible for the hegemonic demands of transparency, and which forms the silt upon which the resistant possibilities of the world-traveler rest. The first part elaborates María Lugones's conception of world-traveling in relation to Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza consciousness and Mariana Ortega's multiplicitous self. Here I draw attention to the role of opacity and forgetting in the ways in which one can inhabit a world. The second part develops the notions of trauma and haunting to establish the experiential memory of the world-traveler not as a traumatic rupture, but rather as a haunted memory that accompanies her travels. The last section turns to Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity as a resistant mechanism, which works not through the traumatic rupture of experience but rather through sedimentation of experience.