UC Merced

Despite the overrepresentation of Mexican American women and girls or Chicanas in the juvenile and criminal justice systems, research has paid little attention to their criminalized experiences. This is a surprising gap in knowledge, given that while imprisonment rates for all racially marginalized groups have steadily declined over the past 20 years, they increased for Latinas. Oversight may be explained by the central focus on race in criminalization scholarship, which privileges the racialized experiences of boys and men of color but fails to consider the conditions that shape criminalization for girls and women. This singular focus on race defines criminalization as a process of racialization, conflates criminalization with boys and men of color, and ignores other identities through which race is experienced.

This dissertation applies an intersectional perspective to the study of criminalization by investigating how race, gender, and sexuality condition the criminalized experiences of system-involved Chicanas living in California’s rural Central Valley. Drawing on life-history interviews with 38 formerly incarcerated and system-impacted Mexican American women, this multi-level intersectional analysis asks: 1) How do race, gender, and sexuality, as distinct and intersecting systems of oppression, shape the criminalization of Chicanas? 2) How is criminalization, as a concept and process, necessarily reconfigured by an intersectional approach?

Findings reveal three unique processes or mechanisms of punishment that differentiate Chicanas’ experiences of criminalization from those of their Chicano male counterparts. First, Chicanas’ interpersonal relationships with Latino men and boys exacerbated their experiences of criminalization. Second, Chicanas’ reasonable responses to gendered and sexualized interpersonal violence were criminalized by institutions traditionally associated with support and protection (e.g., schools, social service agencies, and the police). Third, Chicanas were criminalized through the “unfit hyper-breeder” controlling image, which ascribes sexual, reproductive, and maternal deviance, and operates in the education, family court, and welfare systems.

Taken together, I argue that criminalization is a multi-level, racialized, gendered, and heteronormative process and experience that is reflected in everyday interactions, reproduced in social institutions, and embodied in larger systems of white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy. I develop an analytical framework I call intersectional criminalization to capture this process. This is a more comprehensive framework for understanding how intersecting identities and systems of oppression criminalize and reproduce inequality for previously unaccounted groups. What is more, by centering the voices of a group of women who have been traditionally overlooked, this research makes visible structures of inequality and power that go unnoticed and that uphold the carceral state.