Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers

This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements.Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1196/thumbnail.jp

Poetics of the Majority Minority

My mother taught me to do laundry when I was a child in South Texas. To hang the clothes of our large family on a line, a soga, out on the yard to dry in the hot Texas sun. The color and size of the pieces dictated how and where on the line I was to pin them with the wooden horquillas, clothespins. I thought that such a skill would serve me for the rest of my life. But that was not to be. I have not hung clothes on a line in decades, and my friend tells me that now computer programs perform the calculations for analyses that only ten years ago had to be done by calculators and earlier than that by hand! As is often the case, we have moved on, and the old ways are no longer viable or needed. It is so with many of the skills that we learned fifty years ago, and for sure it will be so of what we are learning now in fifty years’ time. It is not our parents’ poetry, or our grandparents’ for that matter. We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Yet, the future looks bright. Due to our growing numbers and our growing stature in the arts in the United States, we will integrate into the fabric of the literary fabric of this country. But it is this threat that incites much of the reactionary politics at this juncture almost twenty years into the twenty-first century. The Latina/o community in the United States is currently experiencing considerable antipathy from much of the nation as it is poised, by virtue of demographic trends, to form the numerically largest population group by 2050. Having surpassed the African American population to become the largest minority group in the early 2000s, Latinas/os have only slowly gained visibility as something other than a secondary, “pathological” population but nonetheless are still plagued by accusations of illegality and criminality in an atmosphere charged by twenty-first century fears of terrorism. The poetry of our times reflects this situation and offers surcease as it points forward. In this brief paper, I explore the past, the present, and the future of our poetics and offer a grounding of the vision that poets offer us as we grapple with our contemporary realities

Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor

This collection is a beautifully crafted exploration of life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Written by Norma Elia Cantú, the award-winning author of Canícula, this collection carries the perspective of a powerful force in Chicana literature—and literature worldwide.The poems are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.Poems addressed to talented and influential women such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich, among others, pour gratitude and recognition into the collection. While many of the poems in Meditación Fronteriza are gentle and inviting, there are also moments that grieve for the state of the borderlands, calling for political resistance.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1132/thumbnail.jp