In this thesis, I am interested in transnational feminist scholarship and dialogue. Through close readings of Helena Maria Viramontes's texts, I place her writing in conversation with several transnational feminist scholars and themes. I begin with home, a frequently discussed topic within transnational feminism, as the experiences of diasporic and migrant populations challenge the notion of home. I locate the multiple homes presented in Viramontes's texts, arguing that these homes are unreliable spaces for their residents. I then consider male characters and masculinity in Viramontes's stories, as these men significantly influence the homes of women. In Viramontes's later texts, some of these characters support the women in their lives, as well as embrace the multiplicity of masculinity. I also explore invisibility and hypervisibility, two themes which figure prominently within transnational feminism and Viramontes's texts. Viramontes makes visible women, workers, and youth, challenging their invisibility and hypervisibility. In my analysis, I include Viramontes's two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), as well as two short stories, "Growing" (1983) and "The Jumping Bean" (1992). By analyzing these works, which were published over a period of twenty four years, we can more intricately see Viramontes's exploration of transnational feminist themes.

Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism investigates nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers' negotiation of women's rights discourses. This project examines the split between nineteenth-century women's rights groups and the Equal Rights Association to assess how American Indian, Mexican American, Anglo women, and, more recently, Chicana writers provide theoretical insights for new directions in feminisms. This study is grounded historically in order to learn from the past and continue efforts toward "decolonizing feminisms," to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty. To that end, current feminist theories about alliances and solidarity are linked to ways that writers intervene in feminisms to simultaneously imagine solidarity against white male colonialist violence and object to racism on the part of Anglo women. Like all the writers in this study, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) challenges Anglo women to not be complicit with Anglo male colonialist violence. Winnemucca's testimony illuminates the history of alliances between Anglo and Native women and current debates amongst various Native women activists regarding feminism. Between Women traces how Anglo American writer Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) protests effects of U.S. colonialism on Luiseno people and her negotiation of feminisms compared with Winnemucca's writing and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), novels that protest the effects of U.S. colonialism on Mexican Americans, particularly women. It then compares Ruiz de Burton's writing to Helena Mari­a Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Cherri­e Moraga's Heroes and Saints (1994), texts that acknowledge the difficulties of forming alliances between women in the context of exploitation, pesticide poisoning of Chicanas/os, and border policies. The epilogue points to Evelina Lucero's Night Sky, Morning Star (2000), demonstrating how an understanding of the history that Winnemucca engages elucidates American Indian literature in the twenty-first century. By looking deeply at how nineteenth-century conflicts effect us in the present, scholars and activists might better assess tactics for feminisms in the twenty-first century that enact an anti-colonialist feminist praxis.