It's here! It's here!
I just received the latest gorgeous copy of Chicana/Latina Studies featuring a cover image of Guatamaltecas demonstrating in the streets, and a preface by outgoing editor Alicia Partnoy. The Fall 2006 issue features articles on puertorriqueña filmmaker Frances Negron-Muntaner and the late Gwen Araujo, by Rosa Campos-Brito and Linda Heidenreich respectively, as well as poetry by Norma Cantu & Patricia Marina Trujillo. Joann Lo writes about global labor activism; Roselyn Costantino about femicide in contemporary Guatemala; Tiffany Ana Lopez about academic struggles, and Eden Torres about Catriona Esquibel’s new book.
Congratulations to Alicia, KarenMary Davalos, and all the CLS staff for a truly beautiful journal. If you haven’t received your copy soon, update your membership! The journal is free to all paid MALCSistas.
Feel free to add your own comments here by clicking on “Comments” below
Filed under Congratulations! | Comment (0)Latina/o Scholarship Opportunities
The siempre estimable Tomas Rivera Policy Institute has released a new report documenting the uneven availability of scholarships for Latina/o students. “The study finds that although a tremendous amount of online scholarship information exists for Latino students, the information is widely varied, often outdated, and not actively disseminated to the communities who need it most.”
So the committee report, “College Scholarships for Latino Students: Are Opportunities Being Missed?” is available here, and even better, they created a new online gateway for Latina/o students to find out about scholarship opportunities – see latinocollegedollars.com (opens in new window). The same info is also available in a pdf directory, available here.
–submitted by Valerie Talavera-Bustillos
Filed under New Publications | Comment (0)To the general public: a brief survey
Journal editor Karen Mary Davalos is conducting a survey for Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of MALCS. If you are not a member of MALCS, can you take a minute to answer these questions: Continue reading »
Filed under MALCS business | Comment (1)JOB: Asst. Prof, Chicana/Latina Studies, U of Arizona
A reminder, deadline 11/17 (previously posted)… Continue reading »
Filed under Jobs and fellowships | Comment (0)JOB: Educ'n, Culture & Society, open-rank, U of Utah
New pub: Malinche's Daughter by Michelle Otero
In this interview with Carolina Monsivais (poet and co-founder of the El Paso Women’s Writing Collective), poeta Michelle Otero discusses her new book, Malinche’s Daughter. In this collection of essays, Otero draws on the figure of Malinche as she details her own journey dealing with child sexual abuse.
I don’t remember the first time I heard her name—it seems she’s always existed on the margins of my consciousness—but I remember feeling it should be whispered. She was
one of those women, like the No Name Aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I’ve always been drawn to these figures, particularly the women—the ones who talk too much or don’t talk enough, the ones shunned by their communities, the ones who have somehow brought shame upon their people.
I wanted to call things what they are. The Spaniards didn’t arrive in the Americas. They invaded. Malinche was not Cortés’s lover. She was his property. He owned her. Their relationship wasn’t based on equality, but on domination. Where there is domination, there is no love.
I wanted Malinche to know across time that someone has her back. This is what I’ve wanted when I’ve felt the backlash of speaking the truth about racism or sexism or patriarchal violence, someone who will say, “I hear you,” and will stand by you as people call you disloyal or ungrateful.
I’m a writer. I have a voice. That’s an incredible privilege. I feel I have a responsibility to leverage that privilege for good—to speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, to stop patriarchal violence, and ultimately, to heal. Continued
Professor Norma Cantú writes that Otero’s stories “…take us to Mexico and back, but it is also a trip to the past and to spaces of conflict and tension, finally coming home to that space where we are “born and re-born.”
Read an excerpt from the book here, and/or the full interview with Michelle by Carolina Monsivais here.
Malinche’s Daughter is published by Momotombo Press, the Latina Letras project at the Institute for Latino Studies, Notre Dame University
Filed under New Publications | Comment (0)Meet poeta/profesora Emmy Perez
(No, not that Emma Perez)
El Paso poeta/writer/professor Emmy Perez is the author of Solstice, published by SwanScythe Press. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Texas-Pan American
Emmy Pérez grew up in Santa Ana, California. After graduating from Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, she received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in 
Prairie Schooner, North American Review, New York Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications.
In Spring & Summer 2006, she taught poetry in a juvenile detention center in El Paso as part of The Spoken & Written Word Poetry Project for underserved young adults that she founded and directs with the literary organization BorderSenses. From 2000-2005, she taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the West Texas Writing Project Summer Institute 2005.
As a member of the Women Writers’ Collective of El Paso, she has also helped organize readings that feature women writers to help raise awareness about issues related to women in the border community and beyond. She has taught writing to adult education students, women prison inmates, and college students. She has also facilitated writing instruction for adult education classes near the Navajo and Zuni reservations and for women prison inmates from Montana and Oregon at the McKinley County detention center in New Mexico. Emmy lives in El Paso’s Lower Valley.
Filed under New Publications | Comment (0)