For decades, scholars, activists, and artists have worked to define and understand the contours of Mexican American culture and ethnoracial identity. Chicanidad—or the cultural and political identity of Mexican Americans who ‘know their history’—and Chicane Studies continue to be troubled by questions of assimilation, colonialism, anti-blackness, homophobia, and Indigenous appropriation. If we cannot even settle the question of identifiers (is it Chicane, Chicanx, Chicano, Chicana, Chican@, or Xicanx/e/a/o/@?), how can we understand who and what is Chicanidad? How do we ethically, responsibly account for and tend to its past and legacy—our pasts and our legacies? And what does the future hold for Chicane communities as we contend with these complex identities and histories?

To work towards an empowering legibility of and decolonial engagement with Chicanidad, this dissertation takes up literary and visual representations of fashion and everyday dress as sites of Chicana identity-formation. By analyzing material objects in written and visual texts, this project uncovers a lengthy history of sartorial, affective practices as Chicanas deploy fashion and fashion accessories to strategically counter and/or comply with multiple colonialities. I use the term “self-fashioning” to highlight an active process in which Chicanas co-construct identities, communities, and politics through fashion and material objects. Chicana sartoriality identifies a distinct gendered realm of coloniality. If coloniality constitutes the ongoing evolution of colonial and settler regimes of power, Chicana sartoriality names a history of de/colonial processes where sartorial structures of control, accommodation, and resistance became a tool for subalterns to adapt and adopt to enact decolonial strategies. With the processes of Chicana sartoriality, self-fashioning constitutes an expression or evolving effort towards complex identity-making as well as generational, inherited strategies of survival, which is made all the more material in the form of textual and visual cultures.