Cultural Production of a Decolonial Imaginary for a Young Chicana: Lessons from Mexican Immigrant Working-Class Woman's Culture

Abstract

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes a pivotal context in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their support in the completion of this article, Dr. Rosario Carrillo would like to thank the Mexican American Studies and Research Center, in particular Dr. Antonio Estrada, Veronica Peralta, Dr. Lydia Otero, Tom Gelsinon, Gloria Ferrell and Erin MacKinney, as well as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute.

Notes

1. Due to their link to Mexican heritage, Chicanas and Mexican women may share the same language, culture, race, class, gender, and history. However, young Chicanas in the United States may experience subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999) in which they are stripped of their Spanish language and other cultural practices. As they get older, Chicanas may relearn a version of Spanish (Anzaldúa, 1987), but it may not be the same Spanish of, say, their mothers and grandmothers. Therefore, Chicanas and Mexicanas may have very different sets of experiences. Still, we group them under the umbrella term Latina because this latter term is used in educational studies to point to the shared difficulties of academic success in mainstream US schools (see Castellanos et al. 2006; Delgado Bernal 2002; Delgado Bernal et al 2006; Latina Feminist Group 2001).

2. Pérez (1999) developed the concept of the decolonial imaginary as a historian for use by other historians. However, her concept has been extrapolated and employed by nonhistorians interested in a socially just outlook that enables one to identify systems of oppression, recover subjugated perspectives, and (re)claim space for Chicana/o creativity and agency (see Aldama and Quiñonez 2002). We find her concept fruitful for identifying an ideal type of learning for young Chicana and Mexican women.

3. There are three versions of the film that was released—an HBO nationally distributed big screen version, a version that aired on the HBO cable channel and that has additional scenes, and a 2003 DVD PG-13 version that includes, among other things, interviews of the leading actors and of the script's principle author, Josefina López. Here is also a theatrical play. Both the 2001 screenplay by Josefina López and George LaVoo and transcriptions of the 2003 DVD version of the film directed by Patricia Cardoso provide a rich development of the Real Women story for our analysis. Other analyses have been conducted on the film or one of the theatrical iterations of the script; however, those have focused on the topics of body image, standards of beauty, and the cultural and gendered connections to those topics (Berglund and Brown 2006; Figueroa 2003; Marrero 1993). We build on these previous analyses that highlight the myriad layers of this story and the ways to understand them. We hope to add to this body of work by focusing on the cultural production of Ana's decolonial imaginary.

4. In the screenplay, the company's owner is Mrs. Glitz. In the movie, it is Mrs. Glass.

5. Bonacich and Appelbaum (2000) write that a sweatshop is usually defined as a place of work where there are multiple violations of laws, like nonpayment of minimum or overtime wages and various violations of health and safety regulations.

6. The dollar amounts are different in the screenplay and DVD but are equally egregious and exploitive. To provide a picture of the abuse of seamstresses, Bonacich and Appelbaum (2000, 2) write that for a dress that retails for $100, only 6 percent goes to the individual who actually sewed it, but that the individual is “more than likely to have been paid by the number of sewing operations performed than by the hour and to have received no benefits of any kind.”

7. Hegemony involves multiple expressions of power and domination over the historically marginalized in the public and private spheres that are reproduced in various institutions including schools and workplaces.

8. In the screenplay, Ana uses the term tradicional (traditional) to mean a mujer that stays home and gets married and does not go to college. Broyles-González (2001) argues that today what is commonly referred to as traditional differs from indigenous definitions of traditional. Empowering indigenous definitions of traditional women's roles and power include having visions of social dignity, justice, community empowerment, spirituality, and personal fulfillment. We use the term traditional to mean the episteme where Latinas are expected to be submissive to males and their desires and not have independence.

9. In contrast, Marrero (1993) reports that in the play production performed at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Theatre, Carmen posed a counterexample to the notion of the patriarchal mother. This contrast points to the different versions of the rich story plot and its versatility in highlighting different possibilities in Latina/o households.

10. Sandoval (2000, 53) argues that mainstream feminism functions as hegemony because it “sets limits on how feminist consciousness could be conceptualized and enacted.”

11. The Spanish version is, “El que primero lo huele, debajo lo tiene.”