Chicana Power and Pedagogy

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the impact of social movement participation in the lives of Chicana youth who participated in the March 2000 student mobilization against Proposition 21 in Los Angeles, California. In keeping with radical traditions in education, the research contextualizes Chicanas within a wider historical context by using a materialist theory of consciousness, culture and politics. Critical narrative interviews are used to document the pedagogical power of non-alienated social formations in the context of movement labor. The analysis points to the centrality of struggle in the political formation of identity and reasserts the political vision of Chicana pedagogy as the practice of social movement linked to the feminist evolution of Chicana youth.