Introduction: “Feministas,” Not “Feminists”

The words of Ana Nieto-Gómez and Leticia Hernández in the title of this chapter and the opening epigraph may seem contradictory to the reader. Both women were members of one of the first Chicana feminist groups, Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc [The Daughters of Cuauhtémoc] at California's Long Beach State University; both women struggled with what being a Chicana feminist meant and what feminist organizing might mean for the Chicano movement. Emerging roughly at the same time as other second-wave feminisms, with the first Chicana feminist organizations being formed in 1969 and 1970, Chicana feminism came out of Chicanas' experiences in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The year 1968 having been a significant one for feminist organizing in other racial/ethnic communities, Chicana feminists worked in a social movement sector where the possibility of feminist organizing was established, and thus they organized in the face of constraints that were different from those confronted by either Black or white feminists. Chicana feminists maintained organizational distance from white feminists, while being sympathetic to many of the issues raised by white women's liberationists, especially socialist ones.