Maylei Blackwell
Maylei Blackwell’s book, Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Organizing (Duke 2023), draws on twenty-five years of research accompanying indigenous women’s organizing in Mexico and its diaspora and over 70 oral histories. She is the author of the landmark ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (University of Texas, 2011) as well as a co-editor of ¡Chicana Movidas! New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (University of Texas, 2018). She is the co-editor of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities special issue of Latino Studies and has organized the working group of the same name. She is a Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research on social movements in the US and Latin America, transborder activism, and indigenous politics and migration have appeared in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil in journals such as Latino Studies, Meridians, Signs, Aztlán, Journal of Latin American Studies, Desacatos and Revista Estudos Feministas. She co-created and co-directed the digital story platform Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles (mila.ssc.ucla.edu). Maylei is currently working on rematriating historical memory and seeding Indigenous social movements through the Mobile Indigenous Community Archive (MICA) in collaboration with Indigenous social movements.
Supervisors: Angela Y. Davis, Patricia Zavella, Sonia Alvarez, and Jonathan Fox
Address: Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies
UCLA
Box 951559
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Supervisors: Angela Y. Davis, Patricia Zavella, Sonia Alvarez, and Jonathan Fox
Address: Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies
UCLA
Box 951559
Los Angeles, CA 90095
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Books by Maylei Blackwell
In Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women’s roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, decolonizing gender hierarchies and creating new scales of participation. Blackwell reveals the importance of moving across different types of scale and contrasting colonial divisions of scale itself with Indigenous conceptions of scale, space, solidarity, and connection.
¡Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.
Papers by Maylei Blackwell
In Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women’s roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, decolonizing gender hierarchies and creating new scales of participation. Blackwell reveals the importance of moving across different types of scale and contrasting colonial divisions of scale itself with Indigenous conceptions of scale, space, solidarity, and connection.
¡Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.