Movidas after Nationalism: Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez and Chicana Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Chicana feminism
• Chican@ movement
• cultural nationalism
• Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez
• aesthetics

Acknowledgments

The essay is a substantially revised chapter from a dissertation. The author also thanks Dr. Jacqueline Rhodes and the anonymous reviewers whose feedback vastly improved this final version of the essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ From this point forward, I refer to the “Chicano Youth Liberation Conference” as the “Denver Youth Conference” for ease of reading.

² The anthology by Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, published three years after the Denver Youth Conference, canonized “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” by concluding its volume with it.

³ Throughout the essay, I refer to the movement of Mexican Americans typically labeled as “Chicano” using the ampersand suffix “-@.” Following Holling and Calafell, who have made a compelling case for the gender inclusiveness of -@, I note here as well that the use of the ampersand gestures toward the increasingly global interest taken on by the movement’s activists in their resistance to the Vietnam War (see Wallerstein). In my use of the ampersand, I hope to make that connection visible. Similarly, I also avoid referring to “the” Chican@ movement throughout this essay, a formulation that would erase the diversity and multiplicity that this essay hopes to illuminate. Instead, I refer to “Chican@ movement” in a more phenomenological or “eventful” sense that acknowledges a diversity of associated rhetorics (Crick).

⁴ This is not to say that disagreements or tensions within and among Chican@ movement activists did not exist. There were variations in ideology, preferred strategies, and political objectives within “the” broader movement that created contentions between activists. What I am articulating here is that these disagreements were not simply differences of personal opinion but divergences between representations of Mexican American politics (Gómez-Quiñones; Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez).

⁵ For the sake of clarity with respect to my use of primary sources throughout the essay, I offer an explanatory note about Enriqueta’s last name “Longeaux y Vasquez.” Enriqueta married a man named Bill Longley, a mutual friend she shared with “Corky” Gonzales and an artist activist that contributed illustrations for the 1968 publication of “I am Joaquin” by El Gallo Press. After Bill and Enriqueta married, Vasquez dropped her surname from a prior marriage, while her new husband “Bill” changed his name from “William Longley” to “Guillermo Longeaux,” adopting for himself the French form of Longley. As a demonstration of his commitment to the “Chicano” movement (and undoubtedly to his partner), he and Enriqueta took on the shared surname “Longeaux y Vasquez” (Oropeza, “Viviendo y Luchando” xxix). There are discrepancies in the spelling of “Longeaux y Vasquez” in her articles in El Grito del Norte. At times her name is spelled “Longeaux y Vasquez,” while at other times the last name is spelled as “Longauex y Vasquez.” Given that contemporary published works use the spelling “Longeaux” instead of “Longauex,” I use the spelling “Longeaux” in my attributions.

⁶ I use the term “queer” here only to highlight the broad range of sexualities that Longeaux y Vasquez’s rhetorical expansions pushed to the margins of the Chicana/o movement. I do not mean to elide the importance of the Chicana lesbian experience to the evolution of Chicana feminism witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s nor do I mean to side-step how Chicanas utilize(d) the term “lesbian” to articulate their own identity and political subjectivity (Moraga, “La Guera” 24). Rather, taking a cue from Moraga’s push to “Queer Aztlán,” I mean to highlight how, at least in the late 1960s, Longeaux y Vasquez’s expanding rhetoric nonetheless also energized broadly exclusive registers that later feminist activists targeted for contestation.