Chela Sandoval

Chela Sandoval (born July 31, 1956), associate professor of Chicana Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, is a noted theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism. Beginning with her 1991 pioneering essay 'U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World' Sandoval emerged as a significant voice for women of color and decolonial feminism.

Sandoval was born and raised in San Jose, California. She has described her working-class parents as a "machinist/philosopher father," Jose Machlavio Lucero-Sandoval and a "warehouse-fork-lift driver/spiritual-activist mother," Pearl Antonia Doria-Sandoval. She has four sisters, Janet, Robin, Sandy and Julie.

Sandoval received a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of science from UC Santa Cruz. She became interested in feminism in 1971 when she enrolled in a course "Women in Literature". As a result of this course, she became involved in the Santa Cruz Women's Media Collective, a group that made television programming for a local public access channel. In 1978, Sandoval moved to New York to intern at ABC News, a position arranged for her by Barbara Walters. However, ultimately Sandoval decided to pursue a doctorate rather than documentary film career. In a 2005 interview, Sandoval explained her decision as motivated by a desire to make activism more effective.

"I felt the activism was...frustrating; we were repeating the same practices over and over again. I really needed to think about what we were committing our lives to, to see if there was another way to make positive social change. That’s when I applied to HistCon to learn from activist- theorists and philosophers, in those early stages."

Her professors in the History of Consciousness program included Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, Vivian Sobchack and Janey Place. She has cited Hayden White, Donna Haraway, James Clifford and Teresa de Lauretis as her mentors at Santa Cruz. Although she initially intended to write a dissertation on women and video, Sandoval's reading led her to philosophy. Her dissertation developed her first major theoretical contribution, the idea of oppositional consciousness.

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