MALCS Archive

(MALCS) Women Active in Letters and Social Change

Cecilia Preciado Burciaga diagnosed with cancer

Please join us in sending love, prayer, good thoughts, Cecilia Preciado Burciagaand all the good juju you can muster to Chicana veterana Cecilia Preciado Burciaga.  Querida Cecilia has been fighting off pneumonia, which led to the discovery of a cancerous malignancy in her left lung.   She is currently getting good care at Stanford Hospital with various procedures to make her more comfortable while she undergoes chemotherapy.

Few women have been more influential and beloved in encouraging Chicana/os and Latina/os into higher education and beyond than la querida Cecilia.  Her daughter Rebeca  and son Toño write on their website  that they read all of the various emails, letters, and notes to Cecilia that friends are sending, and that Cecilia enjoys them very much.  Right now, they are asking that you hold off on visits until she is more stable.  Rebeca and Toño write:

BUT . . . she really does love your cards, letters, emails and posts on this site. It is especially wonderful to read her messages about how she has helped others – she tends to shy away from compliments but she’s trapped ;o). What a blessing these have been for her spirit.

Today is our father’s birthday – he would have been 72. 
Happy birthday Dad!
Thank you for watching over us.
Mom’s still fighting
. . . not that you’d surprised by this news . . 

Please send any emails to moc.liamgobfsctd-219ce4@agaicrub.odaicerp.ailicec   For further info and regular updates, see the website at Caring Bridge.

Burciaga Mural at Stanford University's Casa Zapata

Update:

Family friends Juana Guevara and Ay Nieva  also write, if you would like to offer further local support:

So many people have offered help that a few friends have brainstormed and talked to Cecilia’s two children about what might be best. So here are a couple of suggestions if you should decide to gift the family with a blessing:

  1. A gift card to Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Safeway, or an American Express gift card (that they could use anywhere) would be amazing. Gift cards will allow the family flexibility for everyday needs and a way to send family and friends to the store without worry about having cash to give them to pick up meals or other items that they may need for Cecilia. Email Juana at moc.liamgobfsctd-5a0727@nnaujiajo to help with this.
  2. If you prefer to help out with a meal for the family, Rebeca’s friend Amy will be coordinating meals for Thursdays and Sundays. A group of colleagues from Cecilia’s Stanford days are already doing Tuesday dinners for the family. Email Amy at ten.tsacmocobfsctd-57219a@ylimafavein to help with this.
  3. Please continue prayers, thoughts and posts on the Caring Bridge site. When Rebeca reads them to Cecilia, her spirit soars.  As Cecilia starts her second day of Chemo treatments, we would love to have everyone join in a “virtual” prayer circle at 9 PM each evening.

Thank you,
Juana Guevara and Amy Nieva

 

Pussy Riot statements and the failure of media

The Russian feminist punk band has been in the news lately; three twentysomething young women rockers were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”– that is,  their guerrilla rock performance on the altar of a Russian Orthodox Church. For less than a minute, the women danced, singing “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” and crossing themselves until they were apprehended by security guards.   What you probably haven’t read is their own insightful analysis of what their acts meant in Russian’s current political context.  From their closing statements in their Moscow court trial:

Yekaterina Samutsevich charged that Putin has been “exploit[ing] the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic…” by making use of

the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself….

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

[Read more…] about Pussy Riot statements and the failure of media

Remembering the Life of Aaronette M. White

Aaronette White

African American Studies Professor Aaronette M. White of UC Santa Cruz passed last Tuesday at the age of 51, possibly of an aneurysm.  In a facebook thread, Angie Chabram writes “let’s memorialize her by putting her picture and the write up in a public place other than the net. I am going to put this lovely person I didn’t know outside my door!” I did the same.

Here is an excerpt from Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ essay (at Feministwire 8/18/12) celebrating Aaronette’s life:

It is with deep sadness and profound devastation that I share that radical Black/Pan-African feminist activist and social psychologist Aaronette M. White, Ph.D., recently made her physical transition. While there is presently uncertainty about the exact date and time of her sudden death, no foul play or harm was done to her in the last hours of her life. Her body was found in her apartment on Tuesday, August 14, 2012. The belief is that she suffered an aneurysm. She was 51-years old.

….Aaronette’s activism, scholarship, and writings were frequently ahead of the curve. She constantly championed unsung warrior feminist women who were predominantly of African descent. However, she celebrated the resiliency and (sometimes armed) resistance of all women she defined as freedom fighters. [Read more…] about Remembering the Life of Aaronette M. White

CFP: Word Images: A Norma Elia Cantú Critical Reader

Although ethnography is defined many times as “the study of the Other,” in Norma E. Cantú it becomes the study of the subjective self and the others who relationally define the self.

Author Norma E. Cantú’s writing describes a border culture not only because it speaks Spanish, is bilingual and bicultural, and is mostly located in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the U.S. and México, but also because it depicts a bicognitive reality. Sara García has pointed out that Cantú writes about “the border from within the border,” what Mary Louise Pratt calls “the contact zone.” In her work, Norma E. Cantú depicts the internal, moral, and linguistic borders that Chican@s cross continually throughout their lives in various and diverse manners.

With its mixture of writing and orality, past and present, all mediated by memory, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, Cantú’s first groundbreaking novel, could also be read as testimonial literature if defined by Margaret Randall as “the possibility to reconstruct the truth.”  We invite submissions on Norma E. Cantú’s oeuvre and vision, including but not limited to her criticism, folklore, theory, and literature, as well as her newspaper articles. We welcome academic papers about Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera and all other works authored by Norma Elia Cantú, including poetry, short stories, opinion pieces, etcetera. [Read more…] about CFP: Word Images: A Norma Elia Cantú Critical Reader

Catching up with Aurora Guerrero

From your webjefa:

I’ve been following the production and success of Aurora Guerrero’s Mosquita y Mari for  a while now. I was fortunate enough to meet Aurora back in the late 90s when she screened one of her first short films, Ixchel, for my class in Chicana Feminisms at Occidental College. It’s been a pleasure to see her career blossom, and see her newest project, Mosquita y Mari, take multiple honors including Sundance and the SF International Film Fest.

Mosquita & Mari is a Chicana coming of age that was recently reviewed in the New York Times as “unassuming indie jewel, [that] resists all of the clichés that its story of the fraught friendship between two 15-year-old girls invites.”

Here’s a recent interview with Aurora by Melissa Silverstein at Indiewire. Here she talks about how worked to make her film a community project, and gives advice to other women filmmakers:

WaH: You were very deliberate in putting together grassroots partnerships like the one with Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) to help get the film done. Talk about that experience and what you learned from it?

AG: I didn’t want to do what so many entitled people do to marginalized communities. I didn’t want to just take from this community and not give anything in return. Ideally, I think there should be a partnership between you and the community you’re documenting. If they open up their doors to you, then in what ways can you be of use to them? That’s the question I came to CBE with. I wanted to make sure Mosquita y Mari was somehow beneficial to the community of Huntington Park. Together, CBE and I developed a hands-on mentorship program for the youth in the area. Anyone interested in media was brought on to the film and mentored by one of the department heads, depending on the interest of the young person. CBE and I also talked about making the film available to the community however possible, especially because it can serve as a tool to talk about identity within an immigrant community. I went into this partnership with CBE a firm believer in its potential to make filmmaking a positive and powerful experience for many. I guess I walked away re-affirmed that collaborating in this way is how I’m meant to work as a filmmaker.

WaH: What was the one mistake you made that you will do differently next time?

AG: There were a couple of times I didn’t trust my instinct and paid for it. No more of that!

WaH: What advice do you have for other female filmmakers?

AG: Don’t shy away from telling the story you want to tell. I think we often look for permission to be able to make the films we deep down want to make. Give yourself that! I bet if you allow yourself to create freely you’ll probably end up with something unique.

Read the complete interview at Indiewire

Special issue: “Chicana/Latina Testimonios: Mapping the Methodological, Pedagogical, and Political

Equity & Excellence in Education 45:3, 363-72 (2012)
Dolores Delgado Bernal, Rebeca Burciaga & Judith Flores Carmona,

While the genre of testimonio has deep roots in oral cultures and in Latin American human rights struggles, the publication and subsequent adoption of This Bridge called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983) and more recently Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latina Feminist group, 2001) by Chicanas and Latinas, have demonstrated the power of testimonio as a genre that exposes brutality, disrupts silencing, and builds solidarity among women of color (Anzaldua, 1990). Within the field of education, scholars are increasingly taking up testimonio as a pedagogical, methodological, and activist approach to social justice that transgresses traditional paradigms in academia. Unlike the more common training of researchers to produce unbiased knowledge, testimonio challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. These approaches have resulted in new understandings about how marginalized communities build solidarity and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity. This special issue contributes to our understanding of testimonio as it relates to methdology, pedagogy, research, and reflection within a social justice education framework. A common thread among these articles is a sense of political urgency to address educational inequities within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities.

–from the introductory essay by Dolores Delgado Bernal, Rebeca Burciaga & Judith Flores Carmona [Read more…] about Special issue: “Chicana/Latina Testimonios: Mapping the Methodological, Pedagogical, and Political

Chicana por mi Raza fundraiser: Get VP to EP!

We posted here earlier about the Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR) Archival Online Database project co-directed by Maria Cotera of University of Michigan, and Linda Garcia Merchant of Voces Primeras.  The project seeks to provide “broad-based public access to oral histories, material culture, correspondence, and rare out-of-print publications for use in both scholarly research and the classroom.”  MALCS leadership is currently considering organizational  sponsorship of the CPMR project.  Chicana por Mi Raza projectMeanwhile….

The Voces Primeras production team is seeking support for their travel to El Paso, Texas for the 4oth anniversary celebration of the Raza Unida Party Convention.  The team will be recording interviews with the Women of the Partido as they share their memories of their involvement in the party and throughout this movement. These women participated as not only political candidates, but also as caucus chairs, precinct captains, and organizers. This is an unprecedented opportunity to record this reflection as it happens.  The Indiegogo campaign here seeks financial support to fund their travel, lodging and airefare.

The production team would appreciate your donation at the Indiegogo site, and are offering various small incentives.  Or, they write, “Share our link! We don’t have a lot of time to gather these funds, so let your friends and family know about our campaign! If you would like to donate but would like to mail us a check, here is our information:  Voces Primeras, 47 West Polk Street, Suite 100-275, Chicago, Illinois 60605.”

Please don’t miss Maria Cotera’s comment below – click on “Comment”