UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary decolonial, queer women of color cultural analysis of Xicana representations of trauma. My examination of theatrical texts relies on a decolonial U.S. Third World queer and feminist methodology. Through this methodological lens, I situate Chicanas as (neo)colonial subjects by focusing on the colonial, imperial, and psychosocial context for Chicana trauma. I detail physical and ontological violence perpetrated upon people in the Indigenous Americas, especially in what has become Mexico and the southwestern United States. I also synthesize mental health statistics that quantify the psychic effects of colonial and imperial changes upon displaced peoples. Xicana plays and performances, I argue, aptly illuminate the embodiment of this locura, a psychosomatic and spiritual dis-ease rooted in colonial and imperial collective and intergenerational trauma. The primary texts for my analysis are Cherríe Moraga’s drama The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Adelina Anthony’s performance Las Hociconas: Three Locas with Big Mouths and Even Bigger Brains, and Virginia Grise’s play blu. These texts, I posit, illustrate how colonialism, internal colonialism, and imperialism have created subjects. I conceptualize what I term “subjects of trauma” through these three cultural productions that each make visible the social, political, and economic injustices experienced by Chicanas—many of whom live within internal colonies—in the United States. I interrogate the decolonial tactics that queer Xicana feminist playwrights employ to re-create themselves as subjects and subsequently alleviate psychic pain. I maintain that Xicana feminist theater promotes self-healing vis-à-vis self-making, as it theorizes our subject positions and intersubjective self-hood and, through consistent revisions of what have become traditional narratives, reminds us of the possibility of “decolonizing our selves” by remaking our selves.