ABSTRACT
I provide a critical context for understanding the significance of ChicaNerds in Chicana YA literature. Using a theoretical framework influenced by scholarship in girlhood studies, psychology, education studies, and sociology, I examine how these disciplines have theorized stereotypes around Chicanx/Latinx educational attainment, nerds and intelligence, and young womanhood. Popular mainstream culture defines the “nerd” around a stigmatized identity, visible in films and even technology repair companies like the Geek Squad, and these representations are considered. Most importantly, however, this identity, even as it stigmatizes, nevertheless is complicit in the social script of the nerd as not only socially awkward but also as white and male. As a consequence, the overall lack of popular representations of nerds of color points to a harmful stereotype of Chicanas on the opposing end of the spectrum: the Chicana student labeled “at risk” by teachers and counselors and who is in danger of being pushed out of schools and thus abandoning her studies without choices.
