Conclusion: Globalizing Experiments of Western Thought, Patriarchal Christianity, and Environmental Wars in Chicana Sacred Iconographies

Abstract

The central focus of this book has been to uncover art, literature, and cultural theories produced amid nonegalitarian power relations by Chicana artists and writers who attempt to account for the persistence of racial, sexual, gender, and class intolerance in the borderlands. Subjects from the US-Mexico border, Chicanas are acutely aware of relations of power and privilege. They come from a land that was taken away from their elders through the Treaty of Guadalupe. They have experienced globalization firsthand, not as a solution for the huge problems of humanity, but rather as a force that exacerbates social, ethnic, and gender inequalities around the world. Within this context, borderland and feminist transnational methodologies provide the necessary analytical strategies to overcome established histories of marginalization and victimization in which third world women, including Chicanas, are cast as primitive and passive. Sacred Iconographieselucidates Chicanas’ emancipating ways of understanding knowledge, location, and subjectivity and enables the analysis of complex relationships of power in the local and global spheres that give rise to Chicana theories and cultural productions.