… I had my own personal experiences with prejudice. I was the only child of color in primary school, junior high and high school. I went through all … - Elizabeth Martínez

[Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spaniards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who locked up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve.

From those two books, and others that examine student activism at length, you would never know that during a single week of 1968 at least 10,000 Chicano high school students in Los Angeles walked out of school to protest racist policies. You would never know there was a "Yellow Identity Movement" of Chinese and other Asian students at universities in California and New York City. You will learn nothing of the potent Third World student strikes of 1968-69 in San Francisco. Gitlin's book does not even mention any movement of color except the Black civil rights movement until page 433. There he speaks of "an amalgam of reform efforts, especially for civil rights (ultimately for Hispanics, Native Americans, and other minorities as well as blacks)." Six words, and in parentheses at that, for the thousands of Asian, Latino and Native American people who lived and sometimes died for liberation and social justice in those years.

In the provocation and shaping of that consciousness, Chicana artists and writers have had great influence. We would not be as far along as we are today without the heretical work of painters Yolanda López and Ester Hernández, whose militant transformations of the Virgin of Guadalupe offer a liberation never before available. We would not be this far along without painter Juana Alicia's images of Latina women as strong survivors. We would not be this far along without some biting poems from Sandra Cisneros, the multifaceted work of feminist writer Ana Castillo, the beautifully bold writing of lesbian authors Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa mentioned above. Not to mention the performance art of lesbian comedians like Marga Gómez and Monica Palacios. So many more names could be set down; all have nurtured the feminist impulse of young Chicanas, especially those in their upper teens and early twenties.