MALCS Archive

(MALCS) Women Active in Letters and Social Change

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

UCSB graduates first three Chicana/o Studies Ph.D.s

By Patricia Marroquin at the UCSB Grad Post (submitted by Aida Hurtado):

image of first three Chicana/o Studies Ph.D.s

UC Santa Barbara’s Chicana and Chicano Studies Department made history this summer, and it’s an achievement that has been at least 30 years in the making. In June, three students participated in Graduate Division’s Commencement ceremony, becoming the first graduate students in the world to earn Ph.D.’s in Chicana and Chicano Studies.

The students are Jessie Turner, Thomas Avila Carrasco, and José G. Anguiano Cortez. Jessie received a spring 2012 degree, while Thomas and José are filing for summer 2012 degrees. For Jessie, José, and Thomas, this degree is a “family accomplishment,” “a collective achievement,” and one that instills “great pride.”

The idea for a Chicano Studies Ph.D. program at UCSB has multiple origins….

Story continues at UCSB GradPost

New book: Speaking from the Heart: Herstories of Chicana/ Latina, and Amerindian Women

Congrats to Rose Mary Borunda and Melissa Moreno on their new book, Speaking from the Heart: Herstories of Chicana, Latina, and Amerindian Women!

At the heart of Speaking from the Heart: Herstories of Chicana, Latina, and Amerindian Women are cultural narratives, trajectories toward decolonization offered by Chicana, Latina, and Amerindian women. The series of cultural narratives in this collection interrogate the universal history commonly taught in schools and society and focus on the cultural knowledge used to resist and negotiate the deep effects of cultural colonization in everyday life. These accounts of experiential knowledge and epistemology chronicle a sense of belonging and web of relationships which provide snapshots of a larger and more inclusive cultural narrative. We call these Herstories. The series of narratives and discussion questions in this collection are intended to facilitate the deconstruction of the master narrative and promote critical thinking.

Readers of Speaking from the Heart are invited to:

  • engage in a critical examination of what one has previously learned about the self and culture(s).
  • unveil states of submersion within a reality that has been constructed by others in power.
  • develop the capacity to understand the essence of subjectivity and the capacity to reexamine one’s positionality in the world.
  • critically reflect on their own narrative.

Contributors include Jennie Luna, Maria Mejorado, Michelle Maher, Julie Figueroa, Angie Chabram, Cindy Cruz, Rebecca Rosa, Sofia Villenas, Margarita I. Berta-Avila, Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, and Ruth Trinidad-Galván.  This book can be of use in Mexican American, Chicana/o, Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, Education, Women Studies, and English courses.

Rose Mary Borunda & Melissa Moreno
ISBN: 978-1-4652-0239-0

Deena J. Gonzalez promoted to Associate Provost

Prof. Deena J. Gonzalez

History Professor Deena J. Gonzalez, Chair of Chicana/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and most recently Director of Faculty Development, has been promoted to Associate Provost at LMU.

LMU Provost Joseph Hellige announced:

“During the last year, we have been fortunate to have Dr. Deena González serving as Director of Faculty Development.  I am pleased to tell you that this position is being expanded to consolidate more aspects of faculty life and that Dr. González has agreed to serve as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs.  In this role, she will oversee and coordinate the faculty promotion and tenure process, the preparation of faculty contracts, the faculty sabbatical process, and Chair and Director appointments.  The Associate Provost will also continue to provide leadership and coordination for programs to support faculty development, including orientation, mentoring, recognition and awards, and work-life balance.  In these activities, Dr. González will work collaboratively with various constituencies including the faculty, Deans, and the Committee on Rank and Tenure.”

Dr. Gonzalez was named an ACE (American Council  on Education) Fellow in 2010-11; she was the first Chicana Ph.D. awardee from UC Berkeley’s history department (1985) and is a founding authority in Chicana/o history, Borderlands Studies, and U.S. women’s history. Author of the monograph, Refusing the Favor (Oxford Univ Press) as well as two major encyclopedia projects in U.S. Latino/a Studies, also with Oxford University Press, she  serves currently as series co-editor for the Chicana Matters Series, University of Texas Press, with fifteen volumes, to date, and four more forthcoming.

Dolores awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

Dolores Huerta receives Presidential Medal of Freedom
“I’m deeply gratified in receiving the Medal of Freedom. The freedom of association means that people can come together in organization to fight for solutions to the problems they confront in their communities. The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights. I thank President Obama for raising the importance of organizing to the highest level of merit and honor. It is a unique honor and privilege to be included in this group of distinguished individuals being honored here today and the communities they represent.”

–Dolores Huerta, 5/30/2012

Dolores Huerta

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

  

 
 

 

 

 

First photo: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Second photo: American Latino Museum

Chicana/Latina Studies names two new editors

From MALCS Chair Monica Torres:

Colegas,

Some good news from the journal. Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social has appointed two new editors to its staff.

Elisa Rodriguez y Gibson has been named co-editor. Rodriguez y Gibson is an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University. She teaches courses on Chicana/o literature, Cultural Studies, and feminist theory. She has written on the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Elizabeth Martinez, Carmen Tafolla, Naomi Quiñonez, Josefina Lopez, Joy Harjo, and Helena Maria Viramontes. She is the editor of Lorna Dee Cervantes: A Critical Anthology (forthcoming Wings Press, 2011) and has contributed to various reference works, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino and Latina History in the U.S. and the Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literatures published by Greenwood Press.

Linda Heidenreich, Associate Professor at Washington State University, has been named book review editor. Heidenreich teaches in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana/Chicano studies and history, Queer studies, and the history and culture of 19th-century west, especially California history.

Congratulations to Josie and the national board of Chicana/Latina Studies for bringing these selection processes to a successful close.  –Monica

Cindy Cruz awarded 2012 AERA Article of the Year

Congrats to MALCSista Cindy Cruz who has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 Article of the Year award by the Queer Studies Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her publication, entitled “LGBTQ street youth talk back: a meditation on resistance and witnessing,” has been lauded for its strong theoretical and counter-colonialist research frames.  Cindy is currently a fellow at the UC Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC).
To access the article, click here.

Abstract:
In this ethnography of LGBTQ street youth, I argue that despite the regulation and containment of their bodies, queer street youth consistently create spaces of resistance that move them away from the tropes of infection, contamination, and deservedness that are inscripted onto the bodies of queer youth. Using the work of feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, this essay articulates a framework for resistance researchers – scholars who enact a “faithful witnessing“ in solidarity with the communities they are describing, a movement away from the radical othering that often happens in social science research. It is in this positioning as a faithful witness that researchers can attend to the deconstruction of the discursive climates of deficit tropes that obscure the gestures and maneuvers of resistance. The tropes of contamination and irresponsibility intersect many of the experiences of LGBTQ street youth in ways that implicate not only LGBTQ street youth, but also other marginalized bodies.
Cruz, C. (2011). “LGBTQ street youth talk back: a meditation on resistance and witnessing.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24(5): 547-558.