Señora Power: A Chicana Mapping Project is an ongoing, public-facing project produced by our team of three Chicana PhD candidates, two from Rice University and one from the University of California, Los Angeles. This project recovers the political consciousness journey of señoras, or women of Mexican descent, during the early 20th century in Houston and Los Angeles. In both cities, the continued, consistent, and intergenerational effort to support and advance communal places marks a space of critical Chicana consciousness. Despite the fact that Houston and L.A. have been hubs of Chicanx activism, the connection between the two has gone largely unstudied. This comparison/contrast analysis reveals collective strategies of community-building, highlighting key differences in respectability politics and burgeoning Chicano activism. In both cities, we focus on specific sites within hyperlocal neighborhoods where señora communally created power— often in places that disrupt masculinist notions of power, such as parks, churches, and recreational clubs.

Our project showcases the history of Chicana political consciousness, not only through established research methodologies, like archival work, but also through unrecorded, unofficial histories, circulating within the communities that hold the most stakes in the representation and transmission of these narratives. Our goal is for this project to exist within the Houston and L.A. communities in the form of accessible, free, and educational resources. These resources include a website with a GIS “thick” map of each site in both cities, the sites’ relevant histories, including archival material, señora profiles, and oral interviews. We are also producing an audio podcast series and physical, non-digital pamphlets for local sites.

This project has been funded by Rice University’s Expanding Horizons Fellowship. My collaborator from Rice, Sophia Martinez Abbud, and I used this funding in the Summer of 2022 to travel to Los Angeles, create community connections, and advance the project to its next stage. The following blog entries details our travel, our experiences with Los Angeles communities, and the difficulties of researching during COVID.