Chola Work: A Genealogy of Homegirl Political Legacies of Resistance

Veronica Sandoval

doi:10.7273/000004402

Chola Work: A Genealogy of Homegirl Political Legacies of Resistance is an epistemology of La Chola, weaving, mapping, and analyzing the homegirl through the legacies of survival and resistance of Mexican women (Mexican National and Mexican American) spanning over a hundred years. This project reimagines Chola praxis as a methodology to create “political memory” and affective historical bonds between material subjects across time—specifically between the current day chola and the generations of women that came before her. Using Chicana materialism to outline Mexican women’s economic, political, and social conditions, I map a genealogy of Chola labor: antecedents, possibilities and lived realities. The survival work that contemporary Cholas engage within their communities, or “Chola Work,” consists of working-class Mexican women’s material and affective labor through alternative economies, alternative kinship structure, and the activist projects and education programs in Chola Agencies of Transformational Resistance. This work represents a new iteration in the genealogy of Chola labor. In this project, subjects “touch across time” through a framework/subjectivity of material Chola/s. Material Cholas are Mexican women who may not identify as Cholas but whose day-to-day survival strategies are contextualized via a political reimagining as Chola labor. Reimagining Mexican women’s survival work as Chola work and Chola modes of resistance incorporates non-Chola historical subjects (Soldaderas, Pachucas, and early Chicana Feminists) into a gendered and queer political history to empower those still working and resisting within Mexican American communities. Homegirl epistemologies gather, retrofit, and imagine from nontraditional histories and countersites where communities name themselves and tell their own stories in their own words. Using women of color feminism, queer of color critique and textual analysis I unpack the lives of “Revolutionary Cholas,” “Ride or Die Cholas,” “Welfare Cholas,” and “Activist Cholas.” From the making of the U.S. Mexico border to the impact of Reaganomics, this project examines discursive practices, Chicano nationalism, community making, organizing, Chicano cultural production, social media platforms, conferences, and celebrations. In unpacking the complexities and challenges of her community, writing La Chola into history acknowledges the life she makes despite social death and recognizes that her survival work makes my work possible.

Chola Work: A Genealogy of Homegirl Political Legacies of Resistance

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