Abstract
In the 1960s, the term Chicano emerged as an identity of empowerment for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and others in the United States. While initially widely used, terms like Latinx and Hispanic have become the primary categories in educational research. To better understand who Chicanas/os/x are and why educational researchers continue to study them, this article reviews contemporary, empirical education literature (2008–2023) that explicitly identifies its research participants as Chicanx. Findings reveal a range of variations. Many studies rigidly tie the term to Mexican heritage, while others present it as a political identity that transcends ethnicity. We also found feminist researchers employing the term as a methodological strategy. Here, Chicanx was used as a fragmented and fluid demographic to disrupt Western ontologies and highlight intersectionality. Overall, our review clarifies the contradictory uses of Chicanx, the varied rationales for studying this population, and the enduring woman-of-color feminist politics that keep Chicanx relevant today.
Keywords
In the late 1960s, the term Chicano (hence, Chicanx 1 ) emerged as a newly appropriated identity of empowerment for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and others living in the United States. For over a century, Mexicans had endured the terrors of US white supremacy, including violence and murder (M. M. Martinez, 2018), segregation (Foley, 2017), labor exploitation (Barrera, 1989), and mass deportation (Balderrama & Rodríguez, 2006). The term Chicanx worked to instill pride in Mexican Americans as well as signal a critical awareness of racism and injustice. Newly self-proclaimed Chicanas and Chicanos helped mount a cultural nationalist movement that sought to unify the Mexican American community as one people with a common history and struggle (Muñoz, 2007).
In the academy, many students and faculty embraced the Chicanx identity and the belief that Mexican Americans, as well as others, should be called by their self-given label of empowerment. This led to the creation of Chicanx student groups, Chicanx student centers, and the academic field of Chicanx studies. In the field of education, Chicanas/os/x became a population worthy of study (Barragán Goetz, 2020; Losey, 1995; Olden, 2022; San Miguel, 1987; Valencia, 2004). Researchers explored schooling in Chicanx barrios and the struggle of Chicanx students. Furthermore, Chicanx educational researchers sought to develop frameworks that honored the lived realities and wealth of knowledge that Chicanx families and students brought to their education (Solorzano, 1998; Solórzano & Solórzano, 1995). However, since its inception, the Chicanx identity has undergone a wave of critiques, reevaluations, and redefinitions. While the default definition of Chicanx became simply a more empowering term to describe Mexican Americans, it became clear that many were hesitant to adopt the term for themselves and preferred the label “Mexican” (Contreras, 2017). For others, like women and queer community members, Chicanismo was stubbornly invested in heteropatriarchy, which made it a complicated identity project to embrace (Anzaldúa, 1987; Rodríguez, 2009). Later, US imperialism in Latin America would ignite migration from Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries. Subsequent debates would question whether these new populations should be invited to embrace Chicanx identity, as well as whether these newcomers were even interested in adopting it. In response to a growing diversity of immigrants from Latin America, the term Latinx has risen to prominence in recent years to describe people of Latin American origin or descent. While Latinidad has also been scrutinized for its narrow and exclusionary boundaries (T. K. Hernández, 2022), the category Latinx has become the dominant identity category used in the United States, including in the field of education, to describe the diverse group of people and students from, or with roots in, Latin America (L. E. Gómez, 2020). This has led to a transition as educational researchers move from studying Chicanx education to Latinx education.
The following article is a critical scoping review of recent qualitative and quantitative education literature (2008–2023) that explicitly uses an iteration of “
Findings document a continued departure from the term Chicanx in empirical educational research, as well as inconsistencies in who Chicanx people are and conflicting rationales for why it is important to study them. Two broad categories of Chicanx emerged: essentialist and political identities. Essentialist identity adopted strict boundaries and tied Chicanas/os/x to Mexican heritage, positioning them as explicitly distinct from other Latinx groups. Here, researchers chose to study Chicanas/os/x in isolation to uncover the uniqueness and specificity of Mexican Americans. In contrast, Chicanx as a political identity abandoned preoccupations with Mexican heritage and instead emphasized the fragmented and blurred lines across a range of communities. Here, the purpose of studying Chicanas/os/x was to bridge Chicanas/os/x (who were not always of Mexican heritage) to a range of communities, especially other women of color. Lastly, we found that most studies in our sample used some form of Chicana feminist approach to research. These studies were often rooted in the lived experience of their participants and used the term Chicanx as a fluid and fragmented identity rather than an innate truth about their research population. Overall, our review helps clarify the complex and contradictory uses of the Chicanx demographic in the empirical educational literature, the varied logics used to study this population, and the enduring woman-of-color feminist politics that remain committed to the term.
Background
Chicanismo and the Study of Chicanas/os/x in Educational Research
The notion that Chicanas/os/x represented a clear and defined population emerged in the 1960s to help socially and politically unify the Mexican American community. At the time, the term was meant to signal a radical cultural nationalism for Mexican Americans who were marginalized under Anglo hegemony in the United States. This act of self-naming was empowering for young Chicanas/os/x, who had been made to feel like outsiders in the United States (Contreras, 2017). Chicanismo declared Mexican Americans a bronze nation and highlighted Mexicans’ Indigenous roots in the Americas (National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 1969). The notion of Aztlán—the mythic northern homeplace of the Mexica people—helped reorient Chicanas/os/x to see themselves as residing in their ancestral homelands of the US Southwest. To identify as Chicanx was to identify with a political awakening that unified Mexican Americans as a nation prepared to challenge internal colonialism, racism, and US imperialism (Acuña, 2011).
However, even at the height of the Chicano Movement, determining who was Chicanx was not straightforward. On one hand, many community members preferred the term Mexican and saw Chicanismo as an aspect of youth culture that did not align with their political perspective (Vigil, 1977). For those who claimed the term, it was difficult (and often exclusionary) to decide where the boundaries of Chicanx ended. In an article published after his death in 1970, journalist Ruben Salazar (1970) offered what has become a widely cited and open-ended definition, stating that “a Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” This politicized self-image also became extended, sometimes, to other groups from Latin America, especially political refugees from places like Chile and El Salvador, whose critiques of US imperialism led them to embrace el movimiento. However, despite a range of definitions, Chicanx scholars have struggled to settle on a set of criteria to define who is a Chicana/o/x. This ambiguity was later embraced in some corners of the community, led by women and queer Chicana/x scholars and activists, who maintain that the power of the Chicano Movement was not found in its strict nationalist boundaries, but rather in the political consciousness of marginalized people who sought to imagine new worlds (Pérez, 1999).
As the energy of the Chicano Movement began to fade in the 1980s, the term Chicanx has remained a lasting imprint. The term has various adaptations, including the rise of the Xicana/o/x spelling to signal a deep connection to one’s Indigenous roots (R. Hernández, 2005). However, the common consensus has generally left that, at its most basic and everyday usage, the term Chicanx has come to simply describe Mexican Americans in the United States—especially the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Mexican immigrants (Contreras, 2017). This straightforward definition has become widely used in educational research as the terms Chicanx and Mexican American have become used synonymously in the literature and projected onto even historical accounts of Mexican American education before the 1960s (San Miguel, 1987). This use of Chicanx, as well as the study of Mexican American or Chicanx communities, was widely used before 2008 (the year our literature review begins). This includes research on Chicanx bilingual education (A. L. Trujillo, 1998), frameworks to understand the educational pipeline of Chicanx students (Solórzano & Solórzano, 1995), the experiences of Chicanx students in higher education (Yosso, 2006), Chicana historical account of student activism (Delgado Bernal, 1998a), and the overall study of Chicanx education (Valencia, 2004).
Among the most impactful contributions to the study of Chicanx education has been the incorporation of Chicana feminist theories to study the experiences of Chicanas in schools and beyond. The use of Chicana feminist and women-of-color theorists (Anzaldúa, 1987; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983) helped articulate a Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE) in educational research (Cruz, 2001; Delgado Bernal, 1998b) and in Chicana interventions in research methodology (Villenas, 1996). While these conceptual interventions have been used to study Mexican American experiences in education, they have also adopted Chicana feminist theories that center research participants’ lived experiences and intersectional identities rather than affiliation with the Mexican state. This expansive conceptualization of Chicanx welcomed those of non-Mexican heritage to embrace the term as a political and feminist identity that was rooted in solidarity rather than ethnic specificity.
Contemporary Critiques of Chicanismo and Latinidad
In part, the declining use of the term Chicanx in educational literature stems from larger critiques of identity. On one hand, the process of being recognized or interpellated as a specific identity can be oppressive. Dominant discourses can discipline subjects into performing proper ways of being (Butler, 1990). Women, queer, and nonbinary Chicanas/x quickly recognized the limits of Chicano nationalism, which many found to be both liberatory as well as oppressive for those who sought to challenge not just racism but also cis-heteropatriarchy (Galarte, 2021; A. M. Garcia, 1997; Moraga, 1993; Rodríguez, 2009). This made many ready to move beyond investment in Chicanismo for a politics detached from nationalism and identity.
Perhaps the largest factor leading to the decline in the use of Chicanx in educational research is the growing diversity of people from Latin America in the United States. Despite efforts to make Chicanismo an open and anti-oppressive ideology and standpoint (rather than a strict identity), it is undeniable that Chicanx has become stubbornly associated with Mexican Americans (E. Trujillo, 2019). This has led groups from other regions of Latin America, as well as Mexican immigrants, to feel that Chicanx is not an identity that describes them. In response, Latina/o/x has become the dominant identity to portray people of Latin American origin or descent. Latinidad represents a diverse range of people who find themselves united by a massive region (Vargas et al., 2017). This relatively new term is made legible, in part, by its marking as “Other” in relation to whites in the United States and the racist world system (L. E. Gómez, 2020). In response, Latinas/os/x have mobilized Latinidad in ways that challenge their marginalization and seek justice.
However, in recent years, the notion of Latinidad has also been criticized for its homogenizing tendencies and oppressive approach to difference (Pelaez Lopez, 2018). Critics assert that dominant representations of Latinidad have been severed from Blackness, Indigeneity, and radical notions of racial justice (Calderón & Urrieta, 2019; Chávez-Moreno, 2023; Gamez & Monreal, 2021; García Peña, 2022; Singh, 2025). In the field of Latina/o/x studies, the tendency to place the study of Latinx people in contrast to a perceived Black–white binary has served to erase the lives and epistemologies of Afro-Latinx communities. This parallels anti-Blackness in Latin America, which often positions Blackness as outsider (T. K. Hernández, 2003). This has been a similar experience for Indigenous people, whose culture, language, and existence have been placed in contrast to nation-building projects in Latin America. As a form of erasure, notions of a “raza cosmica” and the glorification of mestizaje (racial mixture) have been used to mask racial hierarchies within Latinidad as well as silence critiques. While Chicana feminists have sought to reclaim mestizaje as a shapeshifting ability and third space where intersecting identities build a nuanced social consciousness (Anzaldúa, 1987), the notion of mestizaje remains integrally tied to settler colonialism and the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous life and knowledge (Olguín, 2013; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019).
Aparicio et al. (2022) propose the concept of “unruly Latinidades” to help capture the strategic use of Latinidad by those who resist the racialization and marginalization of Latinx communities in the United States as well as Latinidad’s own role in reproducing white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. This reckoning with Latinidad reminds us of the fluidity and malleability of identity across time and space, and the discursive and strategic struggle to define and signal Latinidad. Ongoing debates about both the problems and utility of Latinidad are similar to past and present critiques of Chicanismo, which has also appropriated Indigenous culture, perpetuated anti-Blackness, and glorified mestizaje (Gamez et al., 2026). Today, Chicanx is an identity embraced and rejected, both beloved and resented. The following literature review maps who Chicanx people are in the educational literature and when and why the field of education sees them as a population to investigate. We also offer insights into future engagement with Chicanx identity in educational research.
Theoretical Framework: Chicanx Cultural Studies
This literature review uses cultural studies, and specifically a Chicanx cultural studies lens, to trace when and why the Chicanx demographic is taken up in educational research. Cultural studies emerged from an impasse in Marxist thought. In a rejection of the economic determinism of orthodox Marxism, cultural studies emphasizes the importance of culture and ideology in (re)producing societal organization (and domination), or what Gramsci (1971) called hegemony. Regarding race, Hall’s (1986) use of cultural studies illustrates the ways racial categories are made real through language and representation, rather than innate and predetermined boundaries. Here, both structure and culture are important in racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2014). In the realm of culture, racial identities are unstable signifiers that shift meaning through time and space. Cultural studies have been impactful for the study of race in educational research (Leonardo, 2010).
Chicanx cultural studies is the critical examination of the ways dominant discourses construct Chicanas/os/x as deviant and other in the United States. As a field, it traces how historical and emerging discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and other social forces shape the lives and subjectivities of Chicanx people. Chicanx cultural studies is also about resistance. It helps illuminate the ways cultural workers challenge racist and narrow representations of Chicanas/os/x for expansive and liberatory articulations of a complex people. Chicanx cultural studies posits Chicanx subjectivity as relational and forged through both structural and everyday negotiations that Chicanx people navigate. It identifies dominant discourses that marginalize Chicanx people, as well as those subjugated voices that engage with culture to assert, differentiate, and name themselves through representational struggles (Chabram-Dernersesian, 2005b).
Chicanx cultural studies challenge the notion that Chicanx is a static identity (Alarcón, 1990). The conceptual tools of cultural studies, as well as Chicana feminist theories, aided Chicanx cultural theorists in carving new and fluid positionalities within Chicanidad. While Chicanx cultural studies challenges white supremacy, which advances racist representations that harm Chicanas/os/x, it also challenges dominant notions of Chicano, which can also assert fixed notions of identity that homogenize the complexity of the Chicanx community. In her introduction to the Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader, Chabram-Dernersesian (2005a) maintains, Chicana/o cultural studies provides another “added layer” to the “war of positions” launched by Chicana/o movement intellectuals within the authoritative discourse. In this way, if early Chicana/o studies intellectuals scrutinized dominant culture and its regimes of representation, the Chicana/o cultural studies group extends the terms of this critique while scrutinizing the exclusionary forms and practices of (Chicano) self-representation inherited from canonical legacies of the Chicana/o movement. It is important to understand the criticism is not disloyalty but rather a way of “retaining the critical legacy of the Chicano movement” while introducing newer and more inclusive pathways of analysis. (p. 8)
A Chicanx cultural studies lens allowed us to interrogate the study of Chicanas/os/x in the educational literature without investing in strict boundaries of identity. Following Chicana feminist cultural theorists in education (Villenas, 2010), our approach to this project is uninterested in discovering the true essence of Chicanas/os/x in the literature. Furthermore, our approach to this work does not call for a return to an era in which educational researchers treated Chicanas/os/x as a true and fixed community to be studied. Instead, a Chicanx cultural studies lens helps us critically map how educational research continues (or does not continue) to take up the term.
Research Questions
Who are Chicanas/os/x in the contemporary educational literature (2008–2023)? How are Chicanas/os/x conceptualized and approached as a population of study?
Why do educational researchers choose to specifically study Chicanas/os/x?
Methods
This study was designed as a critical scoping review of contemporary educational literature (2008–2023) that describes its research population as Chicanx. Scoping reviews examine the range and nature of a given area of research with the goal of creating a profile of the literature. Arksey and O’Malley (2005) maintain that a scoping review “might not describe research findings in any detail but is a useful way of mapping fields of study where it is difficult to visualize the range of material that might be available” (p. 21). This type of review is ideal for this study because we are less interested in synthesizing findings of a given area of research but instead aim to map how educational literature conceptualizes, approaches, and frames Chicanas/o/x as a demographic and population to be studied. We describe this review as critical because we situate the term Chicana/o/x within a long and contested history. We draw from the Chicanx cultural studies lens to help critically examine and deconstruct the use of the term in the literature.
Inclusion Criteria
This review includes educational research that explicitly identifies its research participants as some iteration of “
Quantitative and qualitative studies were eligible for inclusion, and we set no limit on the number of research participants in the study. This led us to include autoethnographic studies in which the sole Chicanx research participant was also the author (e.g., Elenes, 2023). However, these self-reflexive articles were only included if they were designed as empirical research (e.g., autoethnography, testimonio). Conceptual papers written in first-person voice were excluded from the review, even if the author self-identified as Chicanx. This was a difficult decision; however, our specific aim in this study was to see how empirical research approaches and identifies its participants as Chicanx. This led us to remove conceptual articles that sought to advance a theory or concept but did not draw from empirical data.
Literature Search and Screening Procedures
To locate our targeted body of literature, we engaged in several phases of electronic and hand searches. First, we systematically explored the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database to build our search. An initial search of “Chican*” between 2008 and 2023 yielded 294 scholarly articles and 11 books. After a quick review, we saw that much of this work studied Hispanic, Mexican, or Latinx populations, and the word Chicanx was only briefly mentioned. We narrowed our search by searching Chican* + NOT Latin* + NOT Hispanic. We then adapted where these keywords could appear in the article (e.g., Chican* + NOT Latin* “anywhere” or “in abstract” or “in title”). We also decided to remove generalist journals that we identified as not traditionally in the field of education. This led us to remove articles published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. While this journal had several articles that broadly intersected with education and schooling, we chose to prioritize education journals to focus on how the field of education, as a cultural institution, approaches and engages Chicanas/os/x.
After completing our electronic search, we read through all article titles, abstracts and, in many cases, research methods sections, to determine if the study fit our criteria. This led us to identify a range of articles that used Chicanx theories, especially CFE, but did not study Chicanx research participants (e.g., Trinh, 2020). We also removed studies that used CFE but did not identify their participants as Chicanx, even though they conceivably could have been identified as such. For example, Oesterreich et al.’s (2017) study used a CFE to explore the experiences of “Mexican American males.” Lastly, we made the difficult decision to remove articles that consistently used a slash punctuation mark to combine Chicanx/Latinx (e.g., Pérez Huber, 2017). While it is conceivable that some intentionally embraced a hybridity or in-betweenness found in the slash, our screening led us to see the “Chicanx/Latinx” grouping as mostly signaling equivalency or a blending that did not need differentiation. Including these studies was thus counter to the aims of the scoping review. 2
After screening the studies we collected through our electronic search, we hand searched journals where research with Chicanx students and communities was common. These included the Journal of Latinos and Education and the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal. This allowed us to identify articles that were removed by the electronic search filter but fit the criteria for our study. For example, our hand search led us to add Abrica and Rivas’s (2017) study, “Chicanas in IR: Data-Driven Advocacy for Latinx Students from Institutional Research Contexts in the Community College.” Here, the study is a testimonio of two Chicana educators (the research participants) who reflect on supporting Latinx students. Overall, we reviewed 55 scholarly articles and three academic books, making our total sample 58 research publications (N = 58). For a chart overviewing all publications, please see online appendix table 1.
Analysis
The two co-principal investigators (PIs) created an Excel database with all 58 publications. We split the sample in half and conducted full readings of the 58 documents over 10 research meetings. Our initial reading examined methods, findings, and especially the theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses of studying Chicanas/os/x. At each meeting, the researchers input descriptive codes about each publication. This initial round of inductive coding allowed us to reduce and organize the large data set and identify similarities and differences across each publication’s theoretical orientation, research methods, definition (or lack of definition) of Chicanx, and whether the author(s) identified themselves as Chicanx. An illuminating finding from this process was the high number of articles with small sample populations, as well as the large number of articles that utilized Chicana feminism.
After completing our first round of analysis, our research meetings transitioned to deductive coding, which drew directly from our Chicanx cultural studies theoretical framework. This led us to interrogate how Chicanx—as an unstable subjectivity—was discursively constructed in the literature. As Alarcón (1990) states, “[T]he term itself, in body and mind, has become a critical site of political, ideological and discursive struggle through which the notion of ‘definitiveness’ and hegemonic tendencies are placed in question” (pp. 248–249). This problematization of a definitive or innate identity led us to identify whether a study used a fixed understanding of Chicanx or something more fluid. We independently built a list of codes tracing Chicanx subject formation in each study and then met to co-construct a collective codebook. This resulted in a plethora of codes, such as “essentialist identity” or “fluid identity,” as well as recognizing “Chicanx linked to gender” or “Chicanx linked to borderlands.” This list was long and complicated, and we collapsed our codes into parent codes that helped us handle and interpret our whole data set. This was difficult because some findings were fascinating yet simply not applicable across all the data. For example, we noted that some studies discursively sutured Chicanx to Indigeneity, while others positioned Chicanx identity as decidedly different from Indigenous people. While this was noteworthy, most studies did not directly discuss Indigeneity at all, which made it difficult to pursue further. 3 Together, we settled upon two general categorizations of identity: essentialist identity and political identities. We also added “journey of political consciousness” (JPC) as a subgroup within political identities. We then redivided the sample and coded the data together using these three categorizations. This allowed us to ensure rigorous and shared interpretation through discussing ambiguity and inconsistencies.
A third round of analysis was conducted to better understand a pattern we had seen during our descriptive coding: Publications using Chicana feminist methodologies were pervasive in the sample. This final round of analysis led us to develop a shared set of criteria for what constituted a Chicana feminist approach to research and count the number of documents in our sample that used it. Once again, our Chicanx cultural studies framework offered flexibility and openness when reflecting on how Chicana feminism may be conceptualized and applied. Overall, these three rounds of analysis generated a shared agreement on how to interpret and categorize who Chicanas/os/x are in the educational literature and why their lives and experiences are examined.
Researcher Positionality
The two authors and co-PIs of this article are educational researchers whose expertise and training situate us at the intersection of critical educational studies and Chicanx studies. We both proudly identify as Chicano and Chicana, are faculty in Chicana/o/x studies departments, and are intimately involved in Chicanx educational issues. It is also worth noting that while we both publish empirical research in education journals, our use of Latinx and country-specific demographics disqualified our work from this literature review (e.g., Rodriguez Vega, 2018, 2022; Singh, 2021, 2024).
Michael V. Singh’s PhD is in education, and his primary area of research brings critical and justice-oriented approaches to understanding the experiences of Latino men and boys in schools. He was born and raised in Woodland, CA, and is a third and fourth-generation Mexican American. His last name signals his familial roots in California’s Mexican-Punjabi communities of the early twentieth century. The experience of being Chicano without a Spanish surname, in part, influenced his curiosity in how research identifies and defines people as Chicanx.
Silvia Rodriguez Vega’s PhD is in Chicana/o studies, and her primary area of research is focused on the ways anti-immigration policy impacts the lives of immigrant children through methodological tools centering participatory art and creative expression. More broadly, she is interested in structural inequality, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), critical and creative pedagogies, immigration policy, childhood, humor/satire, mindfulness, undocumented youth and children, and arts and artivism through performance and digital media. She is a first-generation queer Chicana born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and raised in Arizona.
Scope and Limitations
Because we focused our literature review on empirical research in educational journals and books, a limitation of our study is that it cannot capture the breadth and full complexity of Chicanx identities and theories. Indeed, as our conceptual framework section outlines, Chicanx can and should mean many things to different communities, and the term itself resists a finite definition. While we approached this research with this in mind, it is undeniable that we were forced to create bounded criteria for what studies would and would not be included as data in this review. Similarly, during our analysis, we grappled with the contradictions of coding and classifying uses of a term that resists classification. While we ultimately find our study useful and illuminating, we also recognize this contradiction. Furthermore, because so many studies were ambiguous in how they presented the ethnicity of their research participants or blended terms like Mexican and Latinx into their publications, we also acknowledge that our final sample of 58 publications may have missed some studies that could have conceivably been included. To mitigate this risk, it helped to have both co-PIs evaluate a publication that vaguely or inconsistently used the term Chicanx before it was removed or included.
Lastly, we want to add that while our study included all iterations of “Chican*/a/o/e/x,” we did not explicitly engage with the various interventions and political struggles surrounding the last letter of Chican*/a/o/e/x. This was simply beyond the scope and capacity of one article. However, this clearly limits our question, “Who are Chicanas/os/x in the contemporary educational literature?” to a primary focus on the racial/ethnic identity of research participants. Further research is needed to explore the unique uses, politics, erasures, and possibilities embedded in the way empirical research genders research participants.
Results
Our literature review first uncovered the relatively low amount of education research that studies “Chicanas/os/x.” Our start date of 2008 followed a tremendous decline from the term’s popularity in past decades. For example, an unfiltered search on the ERIC database for Chicanx-focused research from 1992–2007 (the 15 years before our 15-year sample) yielded 340 hits. We also saw a steady decline across the 15-year sample. Furthermore, our sample of 58 research publications paled in comparison to contemporary educational research that uses terms like Latinx and Hispanic, which numbered above 7,000 (unfiltered).
A second revelation in building a general profile of the literature was that research explicitly studying a Chicanx population generally has a small sample size. Only 17 percent (n = 10) of the articles we reviewed drew from population sizes of more than 20 research participants, and only 26 percent (n = 15) of the articles drew from samples greater than five participants and less than or equal to 20. This meant that most articles in our review (57 percent, n = 33) drew from datasets that had five or fewer research participants. Of these small datasets, 14 publications, which are roughly one-quarter of our entire sample, were based on studies that had only one research participant. These studies were generally designed as in-depth interviews or testimonios with a single educator or student, or autoethnographic studies where the data from the study was collected from the researcher. It was also notable that only two studies in our review drew exclusively from quantitative methods (Covarrubias, 2011; Gloria et al., 2016). In the following section, we unpack the various conceptualizations and approaches to defining who Chicanas/os/x are in educational research.
Finding 1: Contradictory Definitions and Conflicting Goals
Our review found a lack of clarity in the literature regarding who exactly Chicanas/os/x are and why educational researchers consider it important to study them. We sorted our sample into two primary classifications of how research conceptualizes Chicanx identity. They were essentialist identity and political identities. Within the grouping of political identities, a subgroup emerged, which we called JPC. We also noted that in some instances, studies used Chicanx in ways that were inconsistent and blended multiple types of identities into their publication. However, all pieces in our sample used some form of these three. Furthermore, the purpose of studying Chicanas/os/x was also conflicting. While essentialist studies—which strictly tied the demographic to Mexican heritage—sought to emphasize the importance of studying Mexican Americans in isolation, political identities sought to do the opposite by deemphasizing the specificity of Mexicanness and emphasizing Chicanx as a fluid and expansive identity. This often served to build solidarity across multiple ethnicities and racial/gender experiences. In the following, we outline essentialist identity, political identities, and JPC.
Essentialist Identity
The clearest and most straightforward conceptualization of the Chicanx demographic was to treat it as an essentialist identity. By this, we mean that there was a strict and unambiguous definition of Chicanx people. Essentialist approaches to identity, like most traditional approaches to demography, have clearly delineated boundaries that separate who is inside or outside of the group. For Chicanas/os/x, we found essentialist identity reserved the term for Mexican Americans or people of Mexican origin living in the United States. Here, the boundaries of Chicanx identity were rigidly tied to Mexican heritage. This allowed researchers to get at the specificity of the Mexican American experience by studying this population in isolation.
In many instances, research publications quickly defined Chicanx as meaning Mexican or Mexican American in a brief footnote or endnote after the first use of Chicanx to offer clarification. For example, Orozco (2012) describes their research as being conducted at a segregated Chicana/o high school, adding the footnote, “In this work, Chicana/o refers to people in the United States of Mexican ethnicity” (p. 80). This quick and simple definition was typical of essentialist approaches to Chicanx identity.
From essentialist perspectives, it was often made clear that if Chicanx meant Mexican American, then all Chicanas/os/x were Latinx or Hispanic, but only people of Mexican heritage could be considered Chicanx. This formulation was important when disaggregating datasets. For example, in an article titled, “The reliability and validity of the cultural congruity and university environment scales with Chicana/o community college students,” Gloria et al.’s (2016) essentialist approach to Chicanx identity required them to differentiate between “Latina/o students” and “those of Mexican descent (who are hereafter referred as Chicana/os)” (p. 426). In part, this differentiation helped justify the importance of their study and the need to study Mexican Americans separately from other groups. They stated, Although modified versions of the CCS and UES scales have been used for community college students (Edman & Brazil, 2009), scales created and normed with Latina/o undergraduates cannot be assumed valid for Chicana/o community college students, or any community college populations of color, without measuring scale equivalence and cultural applicability. (p. 429)
Here, the boundary clarifying who is and is not Chicanx is important for the research. In total, 288 community college students participated in a larger study from which the data for this article were drawn. The researchers arrive at their final sample of 110 Chicanx students by removing other groups from their sample, such as Asian and African American students, as well as “26 Latina/os (i.e., South American, Central American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Other ‘Hispanic’)” (p. 430).
Similarly, in their book, The Chicana/o/x Dream: Hope, Resistance and Educational Success, Conchas and Acevedo (2020) approach their work with a clear understanding that Chicanx means Mexican or Mexican American. This led them to differentiate Chicanas/os/x from other Latinx students when building the context for their project. They state, Chicana/o/x youths make up the largest share of the young US Latinx population: about two-thirds of Latinx millennials are of Mexican origin, and nearly 70 percent of US Latinx younger than eighteen years of age come from a Mexican background.” (p. 18)
With great precision, the book notes when a reference or citation is drawn from either Chicanx or Latinx-based research. They also note that when they use the term Chicanx when drawing from their own research, Chicanx is meant to signal that their “data derives from students who maintain a Mexican ethnic background” (p. 183). These examples demonstrate not only the clear definition of Chicanx as Mexican or Mexican American but also the decision to only include data that maintains the specificity of the population sample.
In this literature review, we differentiate between essentialist identity and political identities; however, in many instances, essentialist identities have been used as a political act (which we still mark as distinct from political identities). This meant that Chicanx was directly tied to Mexican heritage, but the choice to use the term Chicanx rather than Mexican or Mexican American was a political decision—which is consistent historically with the foundational meaning of the term. At times, it was the context and critical approach to the research that gestured at this. For example, in a study looking at the ways Chicanx students use photovoice to articulate the importance of their high school ethnic studies course, de los Ríos (2017) quickly defines Chicanx, stating, “I examine excerpts of Chicanx (of Mexican descent) students’ photovoice compositions” (p. 15). While this equates Chicanx to being of Mexican heritage, the political context of attacks against ethnic studies programs underscores the intentional choice to use Chicanx, rather than Mexican, as an act of agency and to highlight the politicization of the research participants.
In other instances, researchers used Chicanx in essentialist ways while explicitly rooting their definition of the term in a critical race approach to the research. For example, in a study looking at Chicanx students’ perspectives of criminalization at school, Portillos et al. (2012) state, “Chicana/o is exclusively used throughout the paper. . . . Chicana/o is used because of its libratory and political connotation, and its importance to the struggle of people of predominantly Mexican descent” (p. 172). In another example, Malagón (2010) pauses in the article’s introduction to outline who Chicanas/os/x are as well as the political context that the term signals. In her study examining the experiences of 11 Chicano boys in a continuation high school, the author clarifies in the second sentence of the article, Chicanas/os, who for the purpose of this article are defined as people of Mexican descent living in the United States, carry with them a history of not only a physical colonization but also the lasting imprint of an intellectual apparatus of representation that reifies their status as inferior. Today, even 500 years after the initial invasion of the Americas resulting in the subjugation of indigenous peoples, we cannot come to fully understand the complexity of the continued marginalization of the Chicana/o community without acknowledging the lasting effects of colonization and the permanence of white supremacy. (p. 60)
Here, the study uses Chicanx interchangeably with Mexican American, yet also strives to assert a political orientation surrounding Mexican American history.
In most cases, an essentialist approach was clear and straightforward; however, we still found instances of confusion, homogenization, and erasure. For example, some researchers used an essentialist approach to Chicanx but still absorbed non-Mexican students into at least part of the study population or research instruments meant to represent Chicanas/os/x. This was often done when the study drew from large datasets that collected data under the demographics of Hispanic or Latinx. For example, in Alemán et al.’s (2022) article, “Chicana/o/x Educational Pipelines as Critical Race Heuristics: Tools for Pedagogy, Politicization, and Praxis,” the researchers use quantitative data to construct a visual instrument that represents the Chicana/o/x educational pipeline. They also use qualitative data, like focus groups and interviews, to see how Chicana/o/x educators might use the image of the Chicana/o/x educational pipeline as a critical pedagogical tool. The researchers bring a clear definition of who are Chicanas/os/x while also bending the demographic to accommodate the quantitative and qualitative data they have available, neither of which was exclusively collected with Mexican Americans. We quote their clarifying endnote in length, Although we are drawing from U.S. census data that use the term Hispanic, to identify individuals of Mexican or Latin American descent, we will primarily use Chicana/o/x throughout this essay to identify this population. When fashioned by the U.S. government in the 1970s, Hispanic was the first pan-ethnic term used to aggregate persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, South American, and Spanish origin based on the shared ties to the Spanish language. Because it is not a self-determined term of identity and it elides the Indigenous populations who comprise populations from these regions, it has been criticized by members of the groups it attempts to categorize. We acknowledge the troubled history of this term and opt to utilize terms that reflect our activist and decolonial frameworks. We use Hispanic in the essay only when referring to federal classifications and census data. Informed by the scholarship that cultivated educational pipelines and sought to deconstruct the Latina/o/x term to better account for the educational trajectories corresponding to specific Latina/o/x ethnic groups, we have opted to use Chicana/o/x to refer to these students and our participants. Because 87% of the persons in Texas who identify themselves as “Hispanic” in the U.S. Census indicate they are of Mexican origin and because the original meaning of the term referred to those living in the United States with Mexican heritage, Chicana/o/x is a useful way to identify the large Mexican-origin population in Texas we discuss in this article. When referring to the more diverse national population of Latinas/os/xs of various Latinidades, we will use Latina/o/x to refer to this group. (Alemán et al., 2022, p. 56)
Here, the researchers use Chicanx as an essentialist identity and an act of defiance. This move resists federal data decisions to exclude Chicanx identity, thus structurally limiting how quantitative researchers may make ideological decisions to engage with a Chicanx population. We believe a dearth of large datasets that include Chicanas/os/x directly influenced the low number of quantitative studies in this review. However, opting for the term Chicanx, which offered more agency and historical awareness than the government-created Hispanic, led the study to both define Chicanx as tied to Mexican heritage but also root their study in data collected from non-Mexican Latinx groups as well as survey data that included non-Mexican participants.
Finally, some studies differentiated between Chicanas/os/x—who were sometimes defined as Mexican Americans born in the United States—and those who were immigrants from Mexico. For example, in a study looking at the experiences of 12 Chicanx students who completed a baccalaureate degree at a majority school, Rincón and Hollis (2020) clarify in their introduction, “Throughout this article . . . ‘Chicana/o’ is an individual who self-identifies as a person of Mexican origin born in the United States” (p. 232, italics added).
In this essentialist approach to identity, Chicanx is inherently tied to Mexican heritage; however, there is an added qualification of being born in the United States. This differentiation between Chicanas/os/x and Mexican immigrants has implications for researchers who study immigrant communities, especially the experiences of undocumented students. This form of essentialism conflicted with most of the research we reviewed. For example, in stark contrast, Pérez Huber’s (2010a) study examining the experiences of 10 undocumented Chicana college students obviously includes research participants born outside the United States. In Pérez Huber’s research, the criteria for inclusion in the study required participants to identify “Mexico as their country of origin” (p. 712), thus tying them to Mexican heritage and differentiating them from undocumented students from other Latin American countries; however, like most studies we reviewed, being born outside the United States was irrelevant to one’s status as Chicanx.
Political Identities
The Chicanx demographic was also framed as a political identity. By political identity, we mean the term was defined through its association with the research participants’ political consciousness and relationship to a collective solidarity across oppressed peoples. While this nearly always centered on a racial consciousness, we intentionally say political identity or identities because Chicanx was also frequently used to signal political consciousness and solidarity across multiple axes of oppression, especially race, class, gender, and sexuality. While these political identities were sometimes given to or adopted by research participants who were also Mexican American, these political identities were often rooted in borderlands geographies that were uninvested in tying Chicanas/os/x to Mexico or Mexicanness. In this regard, we classified Chicanx as a political identity because it was tied to a political orientation and positionality, regardless of ethnicity. This was decidedly different from the essentialist perspective, which was tied to Mexican heritage. In many cases, research participants were identified (or self-identified) as Chicanx but were a) not of Mexican heritage, b) of mixed heritage, or c) declined to identify their ethnic heritage because it was irrelevant and even counterintuitive to the goal of honoring the fluidity and multiplicity of identity.
One of the most common ways researchers used Chicanx as a political identity was in testimonio projects that focused on small groups of research participants reflecting and/or self-reflecting on an educational experience (e.g., Delgado Bernal, 2018; Nuñez, 2021; Patterson-Stephens & Hernández, 2018). Here, collective political consciousness and reflection defined the Chicanx research subject rather than Mexican heritage or some innate identity. For example, Sánchez and Ek’s (2013) study looks at the ways two Chicana professors from immigrant and working-class backgrounds draw from their experiences in graduate school as resources for navigating the tenure track. In this testimonio project, both participants/researchers reflect on their lives leading up to graduate school. While their testimonios mention their Mexican heritage, the study does not define Chicana as inherently tied to Mexicanness. Instead, Chicana is recognized through its ability to critically reflect on experiences of racial, class, gender, and migrant consciousnesses. Rather than rooting itself in an essentialist identity, Chicana is used as a bridge to connect the research participants’ political identity to other marginalized experiences. For example, the researchers reflect on important friendships with Black women and other women of color in graduate school. They also discuss women-focused writing groups, such as the “‘Women Writers for Liberation’” (p. 23) and the importance of professional organizations like MALCS (Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social), which affirmed their lived realities across multiple axes of oppression.
Similarly, Saavedra and Perez (2012) draw from Chicana and Black feminisms to engage in co-testimonios that help them bring a social justice analysis to their teaching, research, and lives. Here, the two Chicana participants/researchers also acknowledge their multiplicity of identities that break from essentialist notions of Chicanx. One of the researchers/participants describes themselves as “Tejana Nicaraguense” and the other identifies as “Mexican American (although embodies Caucasian and African American heritages) and is a native Tejana” (p. 431). This disarticulation of Chicana from an innate Mexicanness was used as a strength in the research. As one of the authors states, “I identify as Chicana (while embodying a multiplicity of ethnicities)” (p. 434). These multiple identities were often fluid, and the authors used the Chicana identity as an asset in the testimonio to put themselves in conversation with different literatures and communities. In part, the fluidity of Chicana as a political identity, rather than an inherently Mexican identity, helps the researchers uncover a core finding in their study.
Chang (2016) similarly uses Chicana as a political identity while also being explicit about its disconnection from the Mexican nation-state. Chang (2016), who identifies herself as not of Mexican heritage, engages in a self-study project that reflects on her development of “undocumented intelligence” as an exceptional undocumented student navigating education in the United States. Here, her multiple identities as a Chicana enhance the autobiographical research, making Chicana, as an expression of political identities rather than an association with Mexico, particularly important for the study. Chang states, As a Chicana feminist educator, my approach to research is grounded in the unique life experiences of Chicanas. I suppose I would consider myself an unconventional Chicana in that I am not of Mexican origin, however, since my introduction to Chicana culture and feminism, it has always resonated with me in visceral ways and operated as a sociopolitical and cultural aspect of my identity. (p. 1170)
Here, while acknowledging the existence of “conventional” (essentialist) notions of Chicanx as inherently tied to Mexican heritage, Chang argues for the value and importance of her own self-identification as Chicana for the research.
We generally found that Chicanx, as a political identity or identities, was open and fluid.
This made it accessible to research participants and researchers who described themselves of mixed heritage (Elenes, 2023), of non-Mexican heritage (Chang, 2016), as well as those whose gendered experiences intersected with race in ways that demanded fluid and expansive expressions of identity (Caraves, 2020). However, while this fluidity was clearly an asset, it could also raise new questions about the politics of identification. For example, in a study reflecting on a graduate seminar that served as a Xicana Sacred Space of theorizing and reflection, Soto et al. (2009) described struggling to come to a collective and shared identity. They state, “We do not insinuate an essentialized notion of Chicana identity that assumes homogeneous experiences” (p. 757). Here, the Xicana Sacred Space in the study functioned as “a crossroads where a multiplicity of individual identities meets”; accordingly, those of “diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, shades of brown, nationalities, upbringings, genders, sexualities, and positionalities bring us together to a collective political goal” (p. 762). They continue, “Realizing that a homogenous identity was impossible and unnecessary for our research endeavors, we arrived at what could be considered a crossroads of positionalities, which we call Xicana” (p. 763)
Similar to other studies, Xicana transcends fixed identity to make space for multiple identities, genders, and nationalities. However, the researchers acknowledge the limitations and debates surrounding how expansive identities can become. For example, they share, Controversial discussions took place around the question of whether the [cisgender] males could in fact call themselves Chicanas after Ernesto firmly stated, “I am a Chicana.” As a veteran of the Chicana/o movimiento of the 1970s and 1980s, he described the process that transformed him from Mexican American to Chicano activist. Because of his alliance with Chicanas in their fight against patriarchy, he chose to identify himself socially rather than personally (Hurtado, 2003). Charlie, however, questioned his right to call himself a Chicana, acknowledging that his experiences as a male in a patriarchal society put him in a privileged position that hindered him from truly knowing and feeling what it was like to be a Chicana. (p. 763)
Here, the limitations of open and expansive conceptualizations of Chicanx identity create new discussion across race and gender. However, despite this ambiguity, Chicanx, as a political identity, embraced this betweenness, fluidity, self-critique, and reflection.
Journey of Political Consciousness (JPC)
A prominent subset within political identities emerged, where Chicanx identity was used to describe someone on a JPC. What made JPC unique was its emphasis on the use of identity to describe a research participant’s development of a political consciousness. Here, the emphasis is not on simply being Chicanx (i.e., essentialism) or describing someone’s political orientation (political identities), but rather the process by which someone becomes Chicanx through their politicization.
Examples of JPC were often small studies that focused on the experiences of a group of educators whose identity impacted their teaching. For example, in their study looking at the experiences of three Chicana teachers in their clinical teaching semester, Proffitt et al. (2021) describe a long and evolving process in which the Chicana teachers have become or are still becoming Chicana and how this JPC impacts their teaching. One of the participants/researchers began the research by “describing herself as ‘I’m figuring it out,’ having a mixed background and still very much investigating her identities and how she claims them.” Another, in contrast, was “very confident in claiming her identity as Chicana” (p. 134), which was attributed to the ethnic studies courses she took while earning her undergraduate degree. However, throughout the study, it is the process of becoming Chicana—as a JPC—that defines the utility of studying a Chicanx population. This sort of personal reflection approach to teaching came up several times (see Rios, 2013).
While this identity-in-flux was aligned with political identities, JPC sometimes risked framing Chicanx identity as an endpoint rather than a positionality of growth and reflection. We saw this as a limitation of JPC, which were often used in studies documenting Chicanx student and educator activism. In Keeton et al.’s (2021) study on the identity development of undergraduate students who led a campus movement 25 years prior to the study, the notion of identity development is central. They analyze the way student activism and praxis led them to adopt the Chicanx identity. In reflecting on educational oppression on their college campus and the ability to enact change, one research participant states, “‘That’s when I became Chicano.’” The authors interpret this by stating, “For Stevan, becoming a Chicano was directly connected with the social movement at CPP. Stevan’s recognition that racism created institutional barriers that kept Chicana/os and Latina/os out of higher education was key to his cognitive development and subsequent activism” (p. 16).
Similarly, in M. Martinez’s (2019) article, “Documenting the Literacy ‘Aha Moment’ From an Urban Chicano Perspective,” the researcher/participant uses autoethnography to trace the ways life and school impacted the evolution of his identification as “Chicano.” Here, the identity is tied to the research participant’s political evolution as well as a critical race literacy. The study finds that “for many college students of color, literacy formation helps support identity formation” (p. 233) and that literacy and coming to one’s own political identity (i.e., Chicano) are linked.
To summarize this finding, we found Chicanx identity generally fitting into two camps: essentialist identity and political identities. Within the political identity group, we included the subgroup, JPC. Overall, essentialist approaches to Chicanx identity usually had clear definitions. Here, Chicanas/os/x were people of Mexican heritage living in the United States. Researchers chose to study Chicanas/os/x because the uniqueness of this population was important to the study. Researchers disaggregated data sets to separate Chicanas/os/x from other Latinx populations (e.g., Conchas et al., 2020; Covarrubias, 2011; Gloria et al., 2016) or were intentional in their study designs to make Mexican heritage a criteria for participation in research (e.g., Pérez Huber, 2010a). Here, the uniqueness and specificity of Mexican Americans was important. Mexican American culture, racialization, and history were imagined to be (or potentially be) distinct and worthy of isolated investigation.
In contrast, however, Chicanx as a political identity abandoned preoccupations with Mexican heritage. Instead, the purpose of studying Chicanas/os/x served the contrasting goal of deemphasizing Mexicanness and took a borderlands approach that disrupted the notion that Chicanas/os/x were a fixed and definitive group. Here, Chicanas/os/x were sometimes not of Mexican heritage, mixed race, or multiple identities that felt meaningful and important to the research participants. Furthermore, even for Chicanas/os/x of Mexican heritage, the logic behind describing research participants as Chicanx was to deemphasize Mexicanness and instead bridge their data to a range of communities and experiences. This contrasting rationale as to why studying specifically Chicanas/os/x was important in educational research was among our most illuminating findings.
Finding 2: Chicana Feminism and the Affordances of Fluid and Fragmented Identities
A second key finding was that 60 percent (n = 35) of our sample used some form of Chicana feminist approach to research. These feminist studies constructed Chicanx as a fluid and fragmented identity and challenged the notion that an individual’s mind, body, and spirit are separate, compartmentalized elements of the self. We found that these studies, which were often rooted in CFE, resisted the notion that Chicanx was a concrete identity or definitive truth about the research participants. Instead, the label was used to honor the epistemological power that comes through thinking across one’s fragmented identities, or what Chicana feminists have described as “differential consciousness” (Sandoval, 1991). Here, a discernible “truth” about the research participant is abandoned to highlight a state of in-betweenness, growth, or nepantla (see Anzaldúa, 1987). We saw this as a form of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009). In many of these studies, describing a population as Chicanx challenged Western ontologies surrounding research participants as finite and definable beings (Smith, 2012) and instead created space for collective or individual analysis rooted in a desire for coalition and community (Roshanravan, 2014). This positioned the research population within interlocking systems of oppression, and the Chicanx label served as a bridge to other overlapping communities.
For example, in a study with Chicana and Arabiyya feminists, Hamzeh et al.’s (2020) use of Chicana as a socially located positionality and consciousness helped the researchers uncover the unique similarities between Chicana and Palestinian educational knowledge and struggle. The researchers state, What sobrevivencia is to Chicanas, sumoud is to Palestinians, standing on their land and insisting to merely be/exist in the face of the Israeli colonial-settler state and its military machine. Our sumoud is a “revolutionary praxis” (Meari, 2015, p. 82) that turns oppressive practices into acts of resistance and opens possibilities to subvert colonialism/coloniality and re/remember oneself. (p. 253, italics added)
This same praxis is what led Chicana feminist theory and methodologies to insist on the relevance and importance of the term Chicanx within the field of education.
This reveals that while the term Chicanx has declined in empirical research, it remains relevant to Chicana feminist educational researchers who resist finite truths about research communities. In particular, Chicana feminists have used testimonio and similar methodologies to challenge positivism and the divide between what bell hooks (1994) calls the “mind/body split” (p. 16). hooks states that the objectification of teaching within bourgeois education structures instills the idea of the mind separate from the body and therefore encourages the idea of compartmentalized individuals, thinking, and research. Here lies the importance of testimonio and the salience of the term Chicanx. Beyond a conventional demographic, it is an epistemological tool that Chicana feminist educational researchers have elevated in their research. For example, Delgado Bernal (2018) writes, “Chicana/Latina feminist theories offer ways to suture the mind, body, and soil split and ways to forefront and affirm the Brown body while simultaneously understanding how it is ‘othered,’ regulated, and governed in schools and society” (p. 26). Delgado Bernal affirms what hooks proposed—to teach, write, study, and understand the student and oneself in a holistic way. Testimonios conducted with Chicanx subjects attempt to do just that, capturing the complexity of a research participant’s thoughts, experiences, feelings, and spirituality. Here, a discernible “truth” about the research participant is abandoned to highlight a state of in-betweenness among research participants.
Among Chicana feminist studies focusing on a single or small group of participants, we saw this extending far beyond a demographic word choice. Instead, this was a radical departure from traditional Western research, which encourages “objectivity” and compartmentalized forms of labeling and studying a population. Relatedly, we believe the prevalence of small, testimonio-oriented studies in our sample directly contrasts with the epistemic foreclosures that large datasets impose when using conventional demographic information. This made us reflect on the dearth of quantitative studies in our sample. Here, the discursive struggle over meaning and intelligibility, as a form of subject making, was on full display (Foucault, 1980; Sandoval, 2000). We interpreted this mismatch as likely perpetuated by federal data collection choices, Institutional Review Boards, and Western research institutions, which prioritize positivism and unambiguous demographic labels. This conclusion was complicated for us. In one vein, we saw this hard-fought term of empowerment disappear from the realm of quantitative research due to data scarcity and positivist regulation. And yet, we also wondered if this loss was due to methodological tensions that may not be reconcilable. We open this debate to Chicana feminist quantitative researchers, who must navigate not just data availability but the methodological contradictions that come with quantifying such complex political identities.
Interestingly, we found Chicana feminist qualitative researchers strategically navigating this problem by using the term Chicanx in a manner that traversed exclusive demographic identities, outside of the expected Mexican American category. For example, authors in our sample used the term Chicanx to capture the ways communities create solidarity across racial, geographic, economic, and educational divides. Beyond examples of Chicanx-Palestinian solidarity (Hamzeh et al., 2020; Khalil & Rodriguez, 2017), many studies uncovered solidarity and support between Black and Chicana feminists. For example, in “Chicana and Black Feminisms: Testimonios of Theory, Identity, and Multiculturalism,” Saavedra and Pérez (2012) capture the nuances of researching and teaching through the lens of Chicana and Black Feminist thought. To further illuminate the impact of testimonio methodology, they share, “collectively, testimonios facilitate crucial lessons for examining the interconnectedness between Chicana and Black feminisms through the lived experiences of those living in or on the margins. They also provide critical self-reflection that is needed to unlearn oppression that exists within each of us” (p. 430). Similarly, in “Hermandad: Sista’ Scholar Bonds for Black and Chicana Women in Doctoral Study,” Patterson-Stephens and Hernández (2018) share their experiences as doctoral students, stating, “grounded in Black feminist thought and Chicana feminist epistemology, this narrative explores how two women of color operationalized sisterhood pedagogy and illuminated the importance of peer mentorship in the academy” (p. 396).
In similarly nuanced ways, the term Chicanx was used to describe the experiences of someone who may consider themselves Chicanx and also Native, Black, Mexican, Caribbean, and more. The term did not only apply exclusively to Mexicans and Mexican Americans but was used to bring fragmented identities together. Numerous articles in our sample dealt with the nuanced ways scholars who encompass multiple identities navigate academia and society at large. For instance, authors in our sample shared their perspectives as Chicanas who are also: Chicanas Indigenas, Chicarriqueñas, Central American, Nicaraguense, Guatemalan, Black, Asian, and Caucasian. The term was also used to describe extended identities that go beyond ethnicity or race. For example, some scholars describe themselves or their participants as Chicana mothers, Chicanas fronterizas, Queer Chicanas, Chicana Tejanas, Chicana activist-scholars, and Trans Chicanx. In Caraves’s (2020) “Centering the ‘T’: Envisioning a Trans Jotería Pedagogy” (2020), the study draws on foundational works of Chicana and Latina feminist pedagogies and transpedagogies to “envision a trans jotería pedagogy that centers trans migrants—and trans women and people of color—that is grounded in disruption and vulnerability through the unsettling of borders and binaries tied to systems of power” (p. 104). Indeed, Chicana feminisms as a theory, praxis, methodology, and epistemology had a broad reach in highlighting disparate and complex perspectives and lived experiences, speaking to its contemporary importance and relevance.
Chicana feminist research also examined life outside of schools. Like the mind/body connection previously mentioned, they emphasized the importance of all facets of one’s life on the intellectual. For example, in “Remembering and Revisiting Pedagogies of the Home,” N. M. Garcia and Delgado Bernal (2021) use Delgado Bernal’s (2001) theorization of pedagogies of the home to “understand the role of parent engagement not only in the college choice processes, but also in college completion and graduate school enrollment” (p. 567). Similarly, G. Reyes (2021) echoes the work of Valenzuela (1999) and the indispensable role of authentic care for students as a way to relationship building. In that way, G. Reyes (2021) uses care politics to “explore how a Chicana/Mexicana teen parenting educator along the US/Mexico border crafted her pedagogy from personalized care, conceptualized as borderland pedagogies of cariño (care)” (p. 613). This afforded readers insight into these specific challenges of teen Chicana mothers/students along the US-Mexico border.
Similarly, care politics and its theorization and application to student mothers have also been applied to mother-scholars in higher education. In “‘To my relations’: Writing and Refusal toward an Indigenous Epistolary Methodology,” Cisneros (2018) presents an “Indigenous Epistolary Methodology (IEM) used to reflect on what it means for Indigenous women to engage the notion of refusal in traditional writing methods and qualitative research” (p. 188). The author posits that this methodology, situated between Indigenous knowledges and CFE, can illuminate her experience as a mothering Indigenous and Chicana woman of color in academia. The perspective of mothering in Chicanx education research especially resonated during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a separate study, Cisneros (2021) similarly uses the lens of Chicana mothering to demonstrate the added challenges that mother-scholars who are also adjunct professors face during this moment of global and local crisis, stating, “Spirit Murder is experienced by adjunct professors facing excruciating layoffs, draconian sexist teaching evaluations, and outright exclusion from tenure line positions in their universities” (p. 87). Although this publication was meant to be an article rather than a published letter, the author writes, For a myriad of reasons—my severe lupus, white supremacy, isolation, settler colonialism, unemployment, #45, anti-Blackness, knee-deep patriarchy, Covid19 closures, the criminalization of Critical Race Theory, and lack of child-care—I was unable to craft the manuscript I planned for your special issue on Spirit Murder. (p. 85)
This powerfully captures the precarity and marginalization of mother-scholar adjunct professors in academia. Utilizing Chicana feminist methodologies, theories, and frameworks, this publication and the others illustrated here speak truth to power. These works vividly capture the complexities and importance of Chicana feminist research and its insistence on the relevance of Chicanx identity, which functioned less as a traditional research population and more as a bridge connecting multiple identities.
Overall, this finding provides context to not just who Chicanas/os/x are in the literature, but also why Chicana feminist scholarship continues to sustain and keep this population as a demographic vital to its politics in education research. This section has demonstrated that methodologically, engaging with an explicitly Chicanx research population enhanced researchers’ ability to understand the complex lives of their participants in ways that surpass the boundaries of traditional demographics in Western research. Here, Chicanx was not used for specificity and a descriptive truth about the research participants or population, but rather to honor and hold a multiplicity of identities (e.g., Tejana, Indigenous, Nicaraguense) and social locations (e.g., first-generation, motherhood, sexuality) as well as connect Chicanx experiences to other groups (e.g., Palestinian women, other women of color).
Discussion and Implications
Conducting this literature review led us to reflect on our own uses of the term Chicana/o/x in our research. While participants in our respective research projects come from various places in Latin America, we, like other education scholars, have not used the term in our work, despite our self-identification with Chicanx as a political and cultural identity. Amid shifting Latinx demographics, it was clear from our literature review that many scholars are abandoning the term for demographic labels that may better describe their research populations. Indeed, our review found contradictions and confusion regarding who Chicanas/os/x are, and it led us to question if participants in many of the studies would recognize themselves as Chicanx. While conducting this review, we also noted that it was not uncommon to see researchers appear just once in our sample. In investigating further, we saw many of these authors shifting to new terminology to describe similar populations in their later works. While we infer that some may have done this to access the broad inclusivity of terms like Students of Color or Latinx, others were explicit about this shift’s politics. For example, Urrieta’s (2009) book Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools is included in our review; however, Urrieta’s recent work seeks to disrupt the violence and erasure of Indigenous people in education, in part by challenging the “settler colonial logics that fall under the rubric of Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x” (Urrieta & Calderón, 2019, p. 146). These sorts of shifts reveal the generative possibilities in interdisciplinary engagement and dialogue (see Ramos-Zayas & Rúa, 2021). As a field, education must remain open to these interdisciplinary dialogues to better understand our own terminologies, vocabularies, and the racial grammar embedded in demographic decisions.
While the limitations and contradictions of using Chicanx to describe research populations were evident, we also saw Chicana feminist researchers using the term in ways that made sense to us. These studies used Chicanx as a fluid and fragmented identity that enhanced the project’s methods (usually, autoethnography or testimonio) and offered clear benefits to the research. Here, Chicanx was a demographic that almost did the seemingly counterintuitive work of resisting classification. Honoring the plural and expansive nature of identity led to rigorous investigations into the educational lives of research participants and bridged these testimonies to a range of overlapping communities.
Moving forward, this review has implications for educational researchers who do research in and with Chicanx communities (however it is defined). Primarily, our review reveals researchers’ confusion about who exactly are Chicanas/os/x. This impacts how Chicanas/os/x are (or are not) recruited to participate in research projects as well as how data is disaggregated to represent Chicanx people. Our review leads us to strongly recommend that researchers explicitly define how they use the term Chicanx. However, this literature review also led us to question the appropriateness of the term in all types of research. We saw that both qualitative and quantitative studies drawing from large datasets were often at risk of ambiguously representing Chicanas/os/x or narrowly policing who could be claimed by the term. Furthermore, we saw some authors seemingly insistent on using the term in their research, perhaps simply out of personal preference. We want to caution against these projections and remind researchers that the radical Chicanx spirit is not found in a label but a politics. Relatedly, in some instances, we questioned why it was important to study Mexican Americans in isolation from other groups. Indeed, we believed some studies purposely sampled Mexican Americans (and removed, for example, Central Americans) in school districts or regions where it did not make sense to us. To us, this signaled a Chicano nationalism that was unproductive.
And yet, Chicana feminist research often avoided these pitfalls by allowing participants to self-identify as Chicanx or abandon preoccupations with Mexican heritage. Furthermore, these studies resisted defining Chicanx as a finite demographic and instead used its fluidity to enhance the study and build solidarity across educational issues. Here, the label Chicanx served as an asset in intimate testimonio and autoethnographic studies. This review clearly found Chicana feminist researchers making a strong case for the continued relevance of Chicanx identity, even while other studies struggled to navigate issues of identity policing, exclusion, and erasure. In part, this was because Chicana feminist research discursively constructed Chicana as a fragmented and inclusive identity that was in solidarity with Indigenous and Black educational communities, which intersected and overlapped with Chicanx communities (also, see Méndez, 2025).
Lastly, it was beyond the scope of our review to analyze the gendered politics signaled by the ways educational research uses the final letter of
Conclusion
Amid ongoing reflection and reevaluation of terms and categories used for people of Latin American origin and descent, this literature review examined the way contemporary educational research employs the term Chicanx to describe its research population. In the late 1960s, the term rose in popularity and offered a self-defined, empowering alternative to terms like Hispanic or nation-specific categories. However, like other identities, the term Chicanx has been challenged and criticized for exclusions and erasures. Our Chicanx cultural studies framework helped us abandon fixed definitions of Chicanx identity and instead trace the ways Chicanx is evolving and shaped through cultural projects, including educational research. We found the educational literature conceptualizing Chicanx people in two primary ways: essentialist, which exclusively defined Chicanas/os/x as people of Mexican heritage in the United States, and political identity or identities, which posited Chicanx as a political orientation to the world that emphasized a range of critical politics but did not attach these politics to exclusively Mexican heritage.
Our second, and perhaps most revealing, finding was that over half of our sample brought some form of Chicana feminist approach to research. However, these studies often used Chicanx in ways that challenged Western notions of research populations. These studies were often small, self-reflective, and qualitative projects that positioned Chicanx as a demographic that resisted being a “real” demographic by Western standards. Here, Chicanas/os/x were fragmented and fluid identities. This rejected wholeness and the ability to be fully known as a population. As researchers continue to engage in Chicanx education, we offer this literature review as a critical reflection on how the field currently uses the term and represents Chicanx populations in education research.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-rer-10.3102_00346543261418041 – Supplemental material for Who Are Chicanas/os/x, and Why Does the Field of Education Study Them? A Critical Scoping Review of the Literature, 2008–2023
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-rer-10.3102_00346543261418041 for Who Are Chicanas/os/x, and Why Does the Field of Education Study Them? A Critical Scoping Review of the Literature, 2008–2023 by Michael V. Singh and Silvia Rodriguez Vega in Review of Educational Research
Footnotes
Notes
Authors
MICHAEL V. SINGH is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at the University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, USA; email:
SILVIA RODRIGUEZ VEGA is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA; email:
References
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