ABSTRACT

Chicana history is a vibrant field of study with scholars from across the disciplines working to recover and reinterpret the histories of Mexican and Mexican American women in the United States. When Chicano history emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the wake of the Chicano movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement, scholars – most of them men – virtually ignored Mexican American women in general and issues of gender and sexuality in particular. The result of the flurry of writings, publications, and organizations by queer and cisgender Chicanas was the emergence of Chicana Studies alongside the Chicana movement and Chicana history. Chicana writers not only reconceived notions of la familia but also worked to cast aside the traditional marker of "the" Chicano experience, namely the US conquest in 1848, oftentimes referred to as the crucible of the Chicano people.