Accounting for MeXicana feminisms

In this article, I interrogate the iconic Mexican mother-wife image and practices of feminism of primarily U. S.-born, Mexicanas-Chicanas (MeXicanas). I anchor disempowering discourses about MeXicana motherhood as subordinate and problematic outside the family, but I look closely within the family context to see how the mother-wife image appears, becomes sustained, and is subverted. I argue for more than the fact of resistance to this image: for a range of practices ("differential movidas") that, in an ethnographic context, are used to dismantle it. I conclude that, through differential movidas, MeXicanas rework stereotypical ideas despite moments that seem to sustain them.