From Dolores Delgado Bernal:

Mujeres–the Utah coordinating committee has been working very hard and is getting ready for next August. Please pass this announcement to mujeres in your networks, and save the date. A call for papers will be coming very soon. In the meantime, you should know that a number of mujeres have confirmed their participation including Alma Lopez, Cecilia Burciaga, Cindy Cruz, Mary Ann Villarreal, Margaret Montoya, Christina Zuni, Debrah Vasquez and many others. We hope to see you in salt lake city.

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The Fourth Annual Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Summer Institute
July 28 – August 8, 2008
Seminar: THINKING TRANSNATIONALLY: FEMINIST VISIONS

Seminar Leaders: Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spelman College) & Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University)
Seminar Description:  Over the past several decades, feminists around the world have variously and successfully transformed lives, communities, and institutions. Nevertheless, questions of social and economic justice, identity and self-determination, psychic and social decolonization, and solidarity and alliance-building across class, race, sexual and national borders, remain at the heart of feminist work. This seminar explores interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks for addressing the above issues, focusing directly on the challenge academic researchers face to “think transnationally” without losing sight of localcontexts and issues. [Read more…] about Cornell Minority Studies summer seminar deadline 1/15

MALCSistas, if you have advice or referrals for this teacher, please add a comment below or drop me a note (susana@malcs.net).  Thanks!

hello
my name is leah and i’m a 1st year teacher in NY. I’ll be starting (soon) a unit on HOUSE ON MANGO STREET and was wondering if you had any ideas for background information to handout to my middle schoolers. i’m defintely planning on making the unit strongly based on a creative writing ‘autobiography’ unit but was wondering if you have any resources for 7th graders. (poems, definitions, etc…)

Thanks,

Leah

Two positions to begin July 1, 2008

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA WOMEN’S STUDIES PROGRAM DISSERTATION SCHOLARS TEACHING FELLOWSHIPS 2008-2009

The Women’s Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for two fellowships for the academic year 2008-2009. Applicants must be advanced to candidacy and expect completion of the dissertation during the term of residence. Women’s Studies Dissertation Scholars will teach one undergraduate course and present one colloquium. [Read more…] about Diss fellowships: WomStu at UCSB

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.
The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.
Ms. Umanzor, 26, was arrested in her home on Maple Street in Conneaut, Ohio, on Oct. 26 and was released 11 days later on orders of Julie L. Myers, the head of the immigration agency. While in detention, Ms. Umanzor did not see her daughter Brittney, who had been fed only breast milk before her mother’s arrest. Ms. Umanzor remains under house arrest with Brittney and her two other children in Conneaut, 70 miles east of Cleveland, under an order for deportation. Her lawyer, David W. Leopold, has asked that her deportation be delayed on humanitarian grounds.

“….Just thinking that I was going to leave my little girl, I began to feel sick,” Ms. Umanzor said of the baby. “I had a pain in my heart.”
Ms. Umanzor turned over her daughters to social workers from the Ashtabula County Children Services Board, who had been summoned by the immigration authorities. In all, the social workers took in six children who lived in the Maple Street house, including Ms. Umanzor’s oldest child, a son born in Honduras. They also included three children of Ms. Umanzor’s sister, an illegal immigrant who was at work that day. Four of the children were born in the United States.
In jail and with her nursing abruptly halted, Ms. Umanzor’s breasts become painfully engorged. With the help of Veronica Dahlberg, director of a Hispanic women’s group in Ashtabula County, a breast pump was delivered on her third day in jail. Brittney, meanwhile, did not eat for three days, refusing to take formula from a bottle, Ms. Dahlberg said.

Story continues at New York Times

By Rosalinda Fregoso

Piedad’s father was a border crosser who died the year she turned 15. She was watching television on the morning her uncles appeared with news of his death, and much later she would be tormented by the day of his return. “My father’s corpse arrived in a cardboard package tied with plastic bands, like a large addressed mail package.” He was one of those pilgrims Eduardo Galeano writes about, “shipwrecked by globalization,” who left because he couldn’t make a living in Mexico. After years of crisscrossing the U.S.-Mexico border the “dangerous way,” led by human smugglers in the hike across the perilous Sonora desert, he slipped and drowned in four feet of water, near Escondido, Calif.

Ten years after her father died in 1996, I traveled to the colonial city of Queretaro (in central Mexico) to see the Colectivo Malaleche’s latest project, “Muerte X Agua” (literally “Death by Water”), an installation on display at the Museo de la Ciudad, the city’s museum. Piedad is a member of Malaleche, a collective of women artists who design memorials to denounce the explosion of violence and human rights violations against women, migrants and other vulnerable groups in Mexico…

A memorial to celebrate the life of pioneer Latina lesbian activist and beloved MALCS historian Yolanda Retter Vargas will be held at Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood on September 29th.

Yolanda passed away from cancer at her home in Los Angeles on August 18, 2007, after a short illness which stunned family and friends.

An activist and scholar, Yolanda was a major force in the early L.A. lesbian movement as a fierce advocate for lesbians of color. In her last two decades Yolanda became a highly-educated and much sought after librarian, archivist and editor.

[Read more…] about Rest in Peace, Yolanda Retter