Last month I posted a “Quote Roundup” from the memoir Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era and following that I posted one of my favorite Barbara Smith quotes. To backtrack, I’d like to introduce “Quote Roundup” as a quick way to show our readers how historians and other thinkers and activists before us have struggled with similar issues that we have. These ideas inspire us to continue having difficult dialogues. This week’s Quote Roundup is from Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol’s Latina Legacies, a book we all (RE/VISIONIST staffers) read in Lyde Cullen Sizer’s Visions/Revisions in U.S. Women’s History class.

These women represent a re-envisioning of Latina history, one that takes into account gendered genealogies of power as mapped through grassroots activism, literature, education, and entrepreneurship…. Latina Legacies complicates the notion of labor to include women who work for themselves and those who create literature and art. The entrepreneur and the writer stand shoulder to shoulder with the rabble-rousing reformer to render a fuller recounting of Latina history. (Ruiz and Sánchez Korrol, 4)

Women’s motivations should not be judged on a continuum with resistance on one end and accommodation on the other, but instead “should be placed within the centrifuge of negotiation, subversion, and consciousness.” (Ruiz and Sánchez Korrol, 4)

– Kate Wadkins