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

Doing Work That Matters: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Preparing this Special Issue of Camino Real has been challenging but rewarding— challenging because of the expected obstacles of coordinating a publication from across an ocean and rewarding because I can continue to do the work around Anzaldúa’s legacy. Using an Anzaldúan style to write this introduction, I intersperse my personal testimonio and reflection as well as a conceptual framing for the pieces included. When we put out the call for papers for this issue, we were not sure what submissions we would get. I had confidence that the work submitted would reflect the myriad intellectual interrogations that Anzaldúa’s work elicits. Since 2007, I have headed the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, and I have seen the diversity of approaches to and uses of her work as reflected in El Mundo Zurdo, the international conference held every 18 months to honor her legacy. The conference seeks to carry on the work of that space she called, El Mundo Zurdo. As scholars, activists, and artists come together to share our work, I am invariably surprised at the serendipitous transformative work that happens there. It is my hope that readers of this issue will also find a similar opportunity for transformative engagement with Anzaldúa’s work through the selections published here. Moreover, I would hope that those who have not read her work will get an idea of its significance for Chicanx and Latinx Studies

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity. Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1162/thumbnail.jp

Interview with Norma E. Cantu

Recorded testimonial about the work of Gloria Anzaldua and how it has affected the research and life of Dr. Norma E. Cantu and her peers. Norma Elia Cantu is a Chicana postmodernist writer and the Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She focuses on issues of borders and boundaries, whether in academic disciplines or the geopolitical borderlands of Mexico and the United States, all through a Chicana feminist theoretical lenshttps://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/gloriaanzalduatestimonios/1005/thumbnail.jp

Barrio Dreams: Selected Plays by Silviana Wood

During the advent of Chicano teatro, dozens of groups sprang up across the country in Chicano/a communities. Since then, teatristas have been leading voices in the creation and production of plays touching minds and hearts that galvanize audiences to action.Barrio Dreams is the first book to collect the work of one of Arizona’s foremost teatristas, playwright Silviana Wood. During her decades-long involvement in theater, Wood forged a reputation as a playwright, actor, director, and activist. Her works form a testimonio of Chicana life, steeped in art, politics, and the borderlands. Wood’s plays challenge, question, and incite women to consider their lot in life. She ruptures stereotypes and raises awareness of social issues via humor and with an emphasis on the use of the physical body on stage.The play Una vez, en un barrio de sueños . . . offers a glimpse into familiar terrain—the barrio and its dwellers—in three actos. In Amor de hija, a fraught mother-daughter relationship in contemporary working-class Arizona is dealt an additional blow as the family faces Alzheimer’s disease. In the tragedy A Drunkard’s Tale of Melted Wings and Memories, and in the trilingual (Spanish, English, and Yaqui) tragicomedy Yo, Casimiro Flores, characters love, live, die, travel through time and space, and visit the afterlife. And in Anhelos por Oaxaca, a grandfather travels back in time through flashbacks, as he and his grandson travel through homelands from Arizona to Oaxaca.Part of Wood’s genius is the way she portrays life in what Gloria Anzaldúa called “el mundo zurdo,” that space inhabited by the people of color, the poor, the female, and the outsiders. It is a place for the atravesados, the odd, the different, those who do not fit the mainstream. The people who inhabit Wood’s plays are common folk—janitors, mothers, grandmothers, and teenagers—hardworking people who, in one way or another, have made their way in life and who embody life in the barrio.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1076/thumbnail.jp

El Mundo Zurdo: Selected Works from the Meetings of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa 2007 & 2009

This collection of essays, poetry, and artwork brings together scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa. The diverse voices represented in this collection are gathered from the 2007 national conference and 2009 international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (SSGA). More than 30 scholars, activists, poets, and artists contributed to EL MUNDO ZURDO, whose release coincides with the SSGA\u27s second annual international conference in San Antonio, Texas.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1079/thumbnail.jp

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts.Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1159/thumbnail.jp