Chicana Leadership: The Frontiers Reader

Chicana Leaders: The Frontiers Reader aims to break the stereotypes of Mexican-American women and look at how they shape their own lives and communities. This collection looks beyond the often-thought perceptions of Chicanas as passive and submissive and instead examines their roles as dynamic community leaders, activists, and scholars. Chicana Leaders features fifteen essays from the notable women’s journal Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and uses them as a tool to demonstrate the strength and diversity of Chicanas as well as the struggle for their own voices to be heard. Noted scholars in the discipline discuss issues as diverse as the feminist prototype of La Malinche to Chicana writers and national ideology, from gender and identity to ideas of culture and romance, and from tokenism to the diversity within the Chicana community. These essays are an introduction to understanding this complex community of women and how they interact among themselves, their community, and the world around them. Yolanda Flores Niemann is an associate professor of comparative American cultures and the Director of Latina Outreach at Washington State University.