Top 15 Anna Nieto-Gómez Quotes

The Chicana feminist culture is still in development. There are stories of "men's work" yet to tell: of men creating a cultural forum to challenge male roles. It is the story of the democratic challenge to the authoritarian values that depend on the sexual inequality of women and violence.

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.

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.

Articles from Chicana print media and the development and publication of oral histories played a vital role in the development of the Chicana studies curriculum. The Chicana press included Francisca Flores's Regeneración, a magazine published in Los Angeles; Chicana newspapers such as Hijas de Cuauhtémoc and Pepita Martinez's El Grito del Norte from New Mexico; and journals such as Encuentro Femenil, a Chicana feminist journal from Long Beach, and San Francisco's Dorinda Moreno's La Mestiza. In addition, there were special edition community newspapers from all parts of the nation.

Because culture is a remnant which mirrors people's accumulative economic adaptations in history, the social-psychological roles of Mexican men and women are the products of the economic and class conditions of 300 years of oppression.

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.

The veneration of the Virgin Mary defined the woman's identity as a virgin, as a saintly mother, as a wife-sex object, as a martyr.

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

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

In the middle class, the employment issue is social mobility, it's promotion, tenure. Women with Ph.D's don't want to be secretaries. The issue for the Chicana is just employment. "Give me a job. Give me a good-paying job. Let me have access to training." Again, pure class difference.

Rape is an act of violent aggression, and it's something we have the right to defend ourselves against.

When was the last time you heard Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan talk about welfare rights?

Here's the double standard: "If I have a meeting, you stay at the house and take care of the kids. If you have a meeting, have it at the house and take care of the kids at the same time." Male privilege is, "Let's fight for equal pay for me, and maybe later on for you." Male privilege sometimes makes the Chicano movement just like a male liberation movement.