Introduction

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IntroductionDuring the academic year 1992-93, a group of UC Santa Cruz women of color faculty and graduate students came together in order to create a space wherein we might find/develop support for each other’s research and activism. In addition to the publication of this special issue of Inscriptions, we also sponsored a colloquium featuring women of color scholars and activists such as Haunani-Kay Trask, Elizabeth Martínez, and Angela Y. Davis. We share with you here the statement which guided us in our work:

“This research group comes together for the express purposes of studying, writing, and sharing ideas regarding some of the concepts and conditions of women of color in the U.S. Beginning with the construct of the term women of color, this group’s mission is the study of the shifting identities and coalitions which simultaneously exist within. We seek to explore the multiple interpretations and expressions of identity which emerge from women of color. We believe that it is important to discuss the ways in which women of color are purposefully and consciously enriching social and cultural processes by creating complex forms of resistance, reclamation, and reinvention of their collective selves. We say that these acts are important because we believe that to look at them is to uncover the ways in which women of color reclaim their right to self-definition; to uncover these different ways of knowing is to understand the ways in which women of color reject the cultural hegemony which forces objectification and fragmentation as a means of control; to discuss the ways in which women of color work with each other is to reveal some of the many ways in which they survive a white supremacist society.”

Enunciating Our Terms: Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict

Once upon a time enunciating the term women of color was an invitation to take up critical positionalities within feminist and cultural nationalist discourses. Once upon a time enunciating the term women of color was a celebration of a “particular but heterogeneous” community, (to borrow a phrase from Michelle Habell-Pallan and Jennifer A. González).

Collaboration and Conflict? Neither term sounds particularly inviting, neither sounds celebratory. Although we may remember successful past collaborative projects among women of color in labor, politics, or the arts, the word faintly echoes histories of betrayal and treason. (He was a collaborator. She was in collaboration with the enemy.) Nonetheless, with this collection we have attempted to transform the term, claim it for those projects which we consider profoundly loyal (insofar as innovation and criticism emerge from loyalty) to our communities, whether feminist, cultural nationalist, something in between, or something other. So when we enunciate the term collaboration, we evoke histories of coalition, alliance, and most of all, friendship.

Within this project, we want to simultaneously reflect on historical and current, celebratory and critical moments of collaborative work among women of color. Our desire to outline the contours of this terrain is shaped by a series of questions: What does it mean for us to share that which Chandra Mohanty calls “a common context of struggle”? Where does our heterogeneity work? Where does it conflict? What are the conflicting terms of our enunciation?

These questions are initially taken up in the tradition of “storytelling,” as we open this special issue of Inscriptions with a dialogue, an interview, and a collection of oral histories. Some illuminating responses are found in the conversation contributed to this collection by Angela Y. Davis and Elizabeth Martínez. By critically embracing and defining “a common context of struggle,” Davis and Martínez speak to a wide range of issues and strategies, and to the importance of acknowledging (but not indulging in the nostalgic replication of) important historical struggles. In an interview with Linda Burnham, Julia Curry, and Miriam Louie of the Women of Color Resource Center, we read their testimonies to contemporary instances of collaboration. Adding to these frequently invisible stories of everyday struggles, the cultural and economic empowerment of Northern New Mexican villagers is articulated here through a set of oral histories presented by María Ochoa. All of these works powerfully demonstrate the tandem endurance of coalition politics with friendship in the context of the struggle for social justice.

While the articles in this collection tend to emphasize the collaborative, there is also willingness to both acknowledge and learn from conflict. This is exemplified by the contribution from former smell this editors Rhacel Parreñas, Ruxana Meer, and Catherine Ramírez. Reflecting on their experiences with the first journal by and about women of color at UC Berkeley, Parreas, Meer, and Ramírez document its dramatic rise and fall, and their continuing search for a “homeplace.” But, how does one make a homeplace in the academy? (For indeed, the academy is the site of our enunications.) joannemariebarker and Teresia Teaiwa contribute a provocative essay within which they strategically situate their institutionally assigned, but not assumed, roles as “native informants” within the academy.

We find in this collection that INFORMATION and HIERARCHIES are some of the most contested issues for women of color. This collection as a whole attempts to “put stuff out there” and “deal with what’s out there.” Alma Sifuentes’s and Kim D. Hester Williams’s contribution to this issue poignantly illustrates some of our central dilemmas. Women of color, whether in critical mass or isolated, in the “real world” or in a “city on a hill,” in private or in public, are no less immune to structures of hierarchy/violence than any other subject. And yet, women of color have and continue to negotiate and make space for each other. Jennifer González and Michelle Habell-Pallan write eloquently of the ways in which two Chicana artists–Amalia Mesa-Bains and Marisela Norte–are marking new terrain within the social spaces of the museum and the cityscape, territory generally defined by the dominant culture.

With this collection we attempt to enunciate clearly our commitment to cultural production, political activism, and scholarship which are either based in, or which help to foster, community. Perhaps that commitment is most obvious in the contribution of Judy Yung and Martha Ramiacute;rez who developed a germinal annotated bibliography regarding works, books, films, videos, articles, etc. developed through the process of, or about, collaboration among women of color.

This publication is not intended to foreclose discussions and debates regarding the possible ideological implications of the category women of color. Rather, we hope that the material found in this issue contribute to the on-going collaborations among women of color, be they in the form of joint research, coalition work, cross-cultural alliances, or activist networks–at UCSC and out there, in the world beyond Santa Cruz. For we believe that enunciating the term women of color is still an invitation to take up critical positionalities within feminist and cultural nationalist discourses; and that enunicating the term women of color is still a celebration of a “particular but heterogeneous” community.

 

COLLABORATION
conversation + collage + altar + weaving
co-authorship + cooperative + collective + comadre + cluster

CONFLICT
street + church + classroom + museum + border + hotel
reservation + island + village + home + dorm + bus + city
factory + prison + office + library

HIERARCHIES
racial + spatial + cultural + sexual + color
class + generational + national

INFORMATION
is never neutral, it either reproduces or transforms

INFORMATION ABOUT…
Women of Color Resource Center + Heterotopias
Tierra Wools + Native InFormation + smell this
Coalition Building + Private Parts + Bibliographic Resources

María Ochoa
Teresia Teaiwa
Editors