La Chicana Dynasty: An Exploration of Intergenerational Chicana Feminist Activism

This thesis aims to explore how past revolutionaries influenced the empowerment of narrative as a form of resistance within the Chicana feminist movement. The introductory chapter seeks to set the foundation for this thesis by taking a look at how mother-scholars utilize revolutionary mothering as a theoretical framework to help identify stressors, manifest feminist thinking. In Chapter I, I draw examples of Chicana feminist theory and activism by discussing the substance and intentions behind the critical writings of scholars such as Anna Nieto-Gómez, Maylei Blackwell, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This chapter serves as an examination of Chicana feminist thought, which introduces a pedagogy that affirms literary influence within social justice movements and the different techniques of praxis within academia. In Chapter II, I provide historical context to the 1970s formation of the Chicana feminist movement by reviewing the movement's intersection with its predecessors, which played an important role as leading examples of success as a social justice movement, those of which are the early 1960s Black civil rights movement and the late 1960s Chicano movement. In Chapter III, I conduct a series of interviews (testimonios) with the scholarly descendants of second-wave Chicana feminist activists and explore the different ways in which their matriarchal dynamic with major contributors of the Chicana feminist movement shaped their own understanding of Chicana feminism, identity, and their own means of activism as storytellers. By conducting oral histories in conjunction with the theory and historical context of Chicana feminist activism and utilizing Victoria Duran's framework to measure paternal influence, this thesis argues that third-wave Chicana feminist narrators construct works that embrace the feminist rhetoric set forth by second-wave Mujeres and use their medium of expression to further expand the activist canon within the ongoing Chicana feminist movement.