Hola Colegas!

We are now less than three months away from the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) Summer Institute which will be held July 18-21, 2012 at UC Santa Barbara. One of the highlights of the Summer Institute is the Tortuga Award Dinner which honors  one special artist, scholar, activist every year, but in 2012 we also want to acknowledge the many significant accomplishments of all our members. Please send your accolades to my email address:  ude.bscu.tscihcobfsctd-988a40@adia. We look forward to learning and celebrating with you this summer!

Abrazos,
Aida Hurtado, UCSB Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and
Luis Leal Endowed Chair, 2012 Summer Institute Site Chair

Colorlines Magazine’s Seth Freed Wessler recently won a Hillman Prize in Web Journalism for this article on the impact of ICE raids and deportations on children. Based on work from the Applied Research Center in Berkeley, CA, the article is part of a series that document:

that at least 5,100 children whose parents are detained or deported are currently in foster care around the United States. That number represents a conservative estimate of the total, based on extensive surveys of child welfare case workers and attorneys and analysis of national immigration and child welfare trends. Many of the kids may never see their parents again.

These children, many of whom should never have been separated from their parents in the first place, face often insurmountable obstacles to reunifying with their mothers and fathers. Though child welfare departments are required by federal law to reunify children with any parents who are able to provide for the basic safety of their children, detention makes this all but impossible. Then, once parents are deported, families are often separated for long periods. Ultimately, child welfare departments and juvenile courts too often move to terminate the parental rights of deportees and put children up for adoption, rather than attempt to unify the family as they would in other circumstances.

While anecdotal reports have circulated about children lingering in foster care because of a parent’s detention or deportation, our investigation provides the first evidence that the problem occurs on a large scale. If these cases continue mounting at the same pace over the next five years, 15,000 children of detained and deported mothers and fathers will likely be separated from their parents and languish in U.S. foster homes.

An excellent series; check it out at Colorlines here.

Congratulations to Nicole Guidotti-Hernández and Maylei Blackwell – both finalists for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize for 2011. The winner will be announced in June. Nicole writes “I am so happy to be nominated amongst such strong intellectual prowess.”

Maylei’s work, Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement was reviewed here earlier this year. Miroslava Chavez-Garcia wrote “Blackwell analyzes Chicanas’ quest to bring gender and sexuality as well as race and class to the forefront of the Chicano movement. In documenting these women’s significance, she is not simply retelling a story but also making a political statement: until now, they have been relegated to the margins of both the Chicano civil rights and women’s liberation struggles. In fact, however, Chicana feminists built what Blackwell calls a complex “vision of liberation,” which shaped US women of color consciousness and evolved into the larger US and third world women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s—which in turn influenced activists, artists, writers, and intellectuals.”

Nicole’s work is titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, released with the Duke University Press series, “Latin America Otherwise.” The work addresses the epistemic and physical violence inflicted on racialized and gendered subjects in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Arguing that this violence was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández examines the lynching of a Mexican woman in California in 1851, the Camp Grant Indian Massacre of 1871, the racism evident in the work of the anthropologist Jovita González, and the attempted genocide, between 1876 and 1907, of the Yaqui Indians in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Unspeakable Violence calls for a new, transnational feminist approach to violence, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship in the borderlands.

Congrats to both our amazing scholars! Please feel free to leave your comments below! (no registration required)
[Read more…] about Two MALCSista historians nominated for Berkshire history prize

Renowned Chicana poet, essayist, novelist and author of So Far From God, Ana Castillo will be giving a reading from books banned by TUSD to Mexican American Studies students and the general public on Friday May 4th at 6:30pm at the John Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson.

The reading will be followed by a fundraising reception for the “Save Ethnic Studies” organization at 8:30 at 1030 N. 4th Avenue.  Please rsvp to

Ms. Castillo offered to visit the actual classrooms in TUSD and meet the students of the dismantled MAS classes. Unfortunately, TUSD administration continued their discriminatory behavior toward MAS students by banning the media from recording Ms. Castillo’s visit, although media had been allowed access for similar author visits earlier in the year.

Ms. Castillo who was saddened by TUSD’s response said today that, “they can keep me out of the schools but as a U.S. law abiding citizen they cannot keep me out of Tucson.” In reaction, a community venue became the obvious choice for the Tucson community for all to attend. Before the actual reading Ms. Castillo will meet separately with students who were enrolled in MAS classes at 5:30pm, and discuss her writing which was a pivotal part of the program.

What: Ana Castillo Public Reading
When: Friday, May 4th, 6:30 pm
Where: John Valenzuela Youth Center, 1550 S 6th Avenue, South Tucson, AZ 85713

Fundraiser Reception
$50 donation suggested
1030 N. 4th Avenue