Revolutionary Sisters

In: Aztlán: international journal of Chicano studies research, Band 26, Heft 1, S. 17-58

Abstract

I examine women's participation in the East Los Angeles chapter of the Brown Berets in order to unpack the dynamics of women's inclusion and exclusion in an organization proclaiming a commitment to liberatory social change. I argue that the organization's structure and ideology, which originally appeared to support participatory democracy albeit in tension with paramilitary procedures and self-representations progressively devolved into the segregation and subordination of women participants. This structuring of gender inequality, and the self-representations and behaviors that supported it, created the conditions for women Berets to recognize each other as hermanas en la lucha who could organize on their own terms. Chicana Brown Berets' gender consciousness and woman-identified solidarity enabled them to break with the organization and develop a new political identity that implied a linked, but autonomous, relationship to the Chicano movement as well as a feminist reconstruction of la familia as based in women's community.