Chicana, Border, and Class-The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Class Consciousness in Mexican-American Women's Writings

This paper studies the emergence of historically repressed Chicana voices in terms of the intersection of class, race, and gender. Drawing upon Chicana cultural and hsitorical experience in general, and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera (1999) and Ana Castillo's So Far From God (1994) in particular, it aims to postulate the existance of a matrix of domination and subordination, which is shaped by the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender. The use of Mexican-American borderland experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a corrective to theories which, presumably, reflect only the ideology of the powerful. By emphazing the down-to-earth practicality of Chicana experience, this study structures a politics of difference in material life and eventually configures a totalizing blueprint of colonialism, gender, and class to chart the cartography of Chicana struggles.