An altar to "integrative solidarity": A mestiza (Xicana, Filipina, and Euroamerican) approach to creative texts

Abstract

La mestiza embodies a multiplicity of ancestral locations, ethnicities, and cultures. On the borders and in diaspora, she is often internally divided within a socially constructed white masculinist framework that would have her locate herself from one homeland and identify as either “woman of color” or “white” Interconnected with colonial and patriarchal epistemologies, this study explores how the dominant framework, more often invisibly, encourages racism within the mestiza's psyche and women's spirituality communities.

This study seeks to heal traumas of racism by employing a transdisciplinary mestiza approach — bearing feminist and indigenous decolonial lenses — to engage with the nuances — in between binary racialized identities where the mestiza is situated. In mestiza situated space are stories of recovering indigeneity by recognizing, grieving, and deconstructing the dominant framework. This study focuses on, in particular, stories of mestizas nutured in colonial mentality as well as contextually read as white.