The Chicana After 1977
After IWY NWC, the National Council of La Raza publishes an issue on La Hispana with a photo of a delegate to IWY NWC on the cover. The issue goes on to highlight MANA women, with no mention of the NWPC Chicana Caucus. Comision Feminil, or Las Mujeres of the Raza Unida Party as recognized Chicana/Latina leadership.
An issue related to the funding of the Chicana Caucus' marketing booklet is the first crack in the foundation that had kept this group of women working together for six years. The 1979 NWPC conference in Cinncinnati signals the end of the original membership. Rhea Mojica Hammer leaves the NWPC entirely, Martha Cotera continues as a national member, focusing on the political needs of women within the Texas state chapter. Margaret also leaves the Caucus and the NWPC, receiving an opportunity to go to law school. Rose Marie Roybal and Rita Trevis of New Mexico are elected a vice chairpersons however, the shifting tides of the women's movement, the emergence of the pro-life movement, the end of the Carter presidency, the resulting era of Ronald Reagan and republican conservatism, all contribute to the rapid decline in interest in the NWPC and the women's movement as a whole.
The last reference to a member of the NWPC Chicana Caucus occurs in 1983, in a pamphlet for MANA’s conference where an unnamed member of the Chicana Caucus will present on a panel about politics. MANA’s promotional materials indicate the groups desire to “represent Latinidad” in DC and on the east coast.
In 1983, Washington Post journalist James J. Kilpatrick writes of the NWPC convention, " to women who met at San Antonio were mostly Democrats on the far left fringe of their party." Kilpatrick offers that the NWPC a mere six years after the organizations significant involvement in planning and implementing, International Women's Year conference is now a shell of itself--a curiosity, populated by fringe groups of the left.
The 1980s introduce the exhausted feminist as indicated in the anthology Voices of Color, published in 1999. Nancy Reiko Kato offers an analysis of a 1983 Lesbian of Color Conference that mentions the desire of many attendees have a space to take a break from the challenges of movement politics.
Reiko Kato goes on to mention the continued political, cultural and economic disconnect that, at one point in the earlier part of the 1970s seemed possible to overcome, but by the early 1980s, seems impossible to even consider.
