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

(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.

Claudia Huesca writes:

“I am currently working for New Win Publishing and its imprint, WBusiness. We are in the process of writing a book about Latinas entrepreneurs in the U.S. The author will be a Latina entrepreneur, Maria de Lourdes Sobrino, founder and CEO of Lulu’s Desserts. I would like to ask for your help in finding a Latina co-author for this book.”

[Read more…] about Seeking co-author on Latina entrepeneurs

Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco, Divagaciones bajo la Luna/Musing under the Moon: Voces e Imágenes de Lesbianas Dominicanas/Voices and Images of Dominican Lesbians (República Dominicana: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), 2006.

[Read more…] about New pub: Musing under the Moon: Dominican lesbian voices

Speaking of books, don’t miss the latest Chicana scholarship by MALCSistas Marta Sanchez, Catrióna Esquibel, and Tey Diana Rebolledo.

Catrióna Rueda Esquibel‘s With Her Machete In Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians assertively maps the depiction of lesbian characters and desires in a wide range of plays, novels, and short stories by Chicana/o authors. More importantly, it makes Alicia Gaspar de Alba “wildly ecstatic…” 😉 Catrióna is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Don’t miss her website, an annotated bibliography, 20th Century Queer Chicana Fictions.

Marta Sanchez‘s latest work is “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965-1995). Marta “creates an intercultural frame to study the historical and cultural connections among Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chicanos/as since the 1960s.” Marta is Professor of Literature at Arizona State University and Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught from 1977 to 2004.

Few scholars are more experienced and respected than literary critic Tey Diana Rebolledo. In The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras: Essays on Chicana/Latina Literature and Criticism, she brings together old and new works to encourage “guerrillera” warfare against academia that will open the literary canon to Chicana/Latina writers. Beginning with a brief introductory essay about her own experiences as the daughter of a Mexican mother and Peruvian father, Rebolledo goes on to discuss “the historical development of Chicana writing…the representation of Chicanas as seen on book covers, Chicana feminism, being a Chicana critic in the academy, Chicana art history, and Chicana creativity.”

All three titles are part of the Chicana Matters series edited by Deena J. Gonzalez and Antonia Castañeda at the University of Texas Press.