In Transit: Mobilities and Movidas in Chicana Aesthetic Practices, Post-Movimiento

In Transit examines how Chicana artists and writers engage movement not as freedom or displacement, but as a site of constraint, negotiation, and possibility. Focusing on cultural production from 1975 to the present, I trace representations of Chicanas on the move across spatial and temporal registers in literature, performance, and visual art. Rather than treating mobility as a neutral condition, I argue that movement is governed by expectations of progress, legibility, and belonging that are unevenly distributed along race, gender, class, and citizenship. By expanding on and theorizing movidas as everyday tactics for navigating and rerouting these conditions, In Transit shows how moments of unresolved or stalled movement expose the limits of dominant mobility ideals while enabling alternative forms of social, cultural, and political agency. Drawing on works by Marisela Norte, Michele Serros, Judith F. Baca, Jaime Hernandez, and others, the project demonstrates how Chicana aesthetic practices articulate modes of relation and action that do not depend on arrival, recognition, or incorporation. Instead, In Transit reframes political action and belonging in the post-movimiento era by showing how Chicanas contest mobility’s normative demands rather than seek their fulfillment.