The Chicana After 1977
In 1974 the Mexican American National Women’s Association (MANA) emerges as a professional group of women, employed in government and the academy with offices in Washington D.C. One of the challenges for Chicanas of the IWY NWC 1977 Houston meeting was establishing a national Chicana identity—a topic discussed with regularity since the 1971 Houston conference of Chicanas. When the dust settles on the last election of a Chicana Caucus chairperson in 1979 what is left is MANA, now a collection of Mexican American, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Women many employed in government or the academy.
The last reference to a member of the Chicana Caucus occurs in 1983, in a pamphlet for MANA’s conference where an unnamed member of the Chicana Caucus will present on a panel about politics. MANA’s promotional materials indicate the groups desire to “represent Latinidad” in DC and on the east coast. In 1983, journalist James Kilpatrick writes an op-ed piece on the NWPC convention in San Antonio, implying that the organization is a shell of itself, now populated by fringe groups of the left.
The 1980s introduce the exhausted feminist as indicated in the anthology Voices of Color, published in 1999. Nancy Reiko Kato offers an analysis of a 1983 Lesbian of Color Conference that mentions the desire of many attendees have a space to take a break from the challenges of movement politics.
Reiko Kato goes on to mention the continued political, cultural and economic disconnect that, at one point in the earlier part of the 1970s seemed possible to overcome, but by the early 1980s, seems impossible to even consider.
