Anna Nieto-Gómez Quotes

Oral history was an important method because it created a body of knowledge about different types of Chicanas. Oral histories of Chicana leaders and their organizations illustrated the diverse political ideas Chicanas had about social change.

The roots of the psyche of la Chicana lies deep within the colonial period in Mexico.

a feminist can be a man as well as a woman-it is a group of people that advocates the end of women's oppression.

If something in our culture that is advocating oppression is unable to be criticized, evaluated and changed, this is wrong.

In providing adequate health programs, Anglo women contend with the cruel prejudice doctors have towards women patients. Chicanas must also contend with doctor's racism, insensitivity to the Chicano culture and the lack of bilingual medical staff.

I resent the usual remark that if you're a feminist you have somehow become an Anglo or been influenced by Anglos.

It is women's work to define what these feminist values are. What are these values? They are democratic values. Women and men are equally valued. Respect is not dependent on gender. Women are the decision makers of their individual lives. Women and children have the right to live in a violence-free environment.

At the 1972 conference, Marianna Hernandez spoke about the Chicana movement. She reassured Chicanas that they were doing the right thing. She asked Chicanas not to be taken aback at name-calling strategies, acknowledging that efforts to label the Chicana movement a "white women's movement" were attempts to discredit and stop the people who were organizing a new movement. She offered that one of the tasks of a new movement is to explain itself and that organizing Chicana conferences and publishing new ideas was an important way for the Chicana movement to do this.

I am a Chicana feminist. I make that statement very proudly, although there is a lot of intimidation in our community and in the society in general, against people who define themselves as Chicana feminists.

As minority women, the Chicanas have had to fight racism, sexism, and sexual racism. Racism oppresses the Chicana as a member of a Spanish speaking, culturally different, non-Anglo group in a society that values only one culture, and only one race as superior over all, the Anglo-Saxon race. The Chicana encounters sexism in a society that associates social and economic power, authority and superiority with male dominance and male control.

In order to truly understand the needs and problems of La Raza, we must include the Chicana in our study.

The Chicana feminist has had to struggle to develop and maintain her identity in spite of the paternal and material tendencies of two social movements to absorb her into their general movements as their own rank and file.

It is therefore the philosophy of the Femenistas that in order for a movement to truly fight for justice for all its people (both men and women) must it also, from the beginning, identify and fight the economic oppression delivered through sexism as well as through racism. It is the double responsibility for both Chicanas and Chicanos to become politicized to the economic implications of sexism-sexist racism; otherwise, the issues of employment, welfare, and education as they pertain to the Chicana are not known and therefore ignored and not resolved.

Marianismo forced Spanish women into acceptable sexual and social roles. The three basic images were of woman as virgin, woman as wife and woman as mother, all of which reinforced social, psychological and economic dependency for women.

The popular image of Mexican woman is as somber-clad, long-suffering females praying in dimly-lit colonial churches. Church teachings have directed women to identify with the emotional suffering of the pure, passive bystander: the Virgin Mary.