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Meet poeta/profesora Emmy Perez

(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 … Read More

Speechless…

Medicaid Wants Citizenship Proof for Infant Care Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, Bush administration officials said Thursday. … Read More

What is Chicana scholarship?

Webjefa’s prerogative/Occasional nuggets found on the web:

A brief statement from Elisa Facio’s faculty bio

Works by Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Emma Perez, and the anthology, Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, have been most influential in my development as a Chicana sociologist. As racial/ethnic women scholars, I feel our works are attempts to explore our realities and identities (since academic institutions omit, erase, distort and falsify them) and to unbuild and rebuild them. Our writings and scholarship, built on earlier waves of feminism, continue to critique and to directly address dominant culture and “white” feminism. However, our works also attest to the fact that we are now concentrating on our own projects, our own agendas, our own theories, in other words on our own world views. This process is recognized by racial/ethnic scholars as “de colonization of the voice.” For others, it is considered unscholarly, unscientific; words of colonization associated with a monocultural society.

Chicana scholarship reveals our struggles as Chicanas in the United States, and expresses in a society which attempts to render us invisible. Historically, Chicana voices have not been chronicled. They have gone largely unnoticed and undocumented. In spite of the academic claims of “value-free inquiry,” Chicanas have not been deemed worthy of study. When they have been studied, stereotypes and distortions have prevailed. Yet Chicanas have spoken out around kitchen tables, in factories, labor camps, in community and political organizations, at union meetings. Rooted in the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, our scholarship, like other currents of dissent is a Chicana critique of cultural, political, and economic conditions in the United States. It is influenced by the tradition of advocacy scholarship, which challenges the claims of objectivity and links research to community concerns and social change. It is driven by a passion to place the Chicana, as speaking subject, at the center of intellectual discourse.

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