Telling to Live
Latina Feminist Testimonios
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
Telling to Live embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of testimonios—or life stories—whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience. Reclaiming testimonio as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers. Telling to Live unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.Contributors. Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcón, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina Benmayor, Norma E. Cantú, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguín Cuádraz, Liza Fiol-Matta, Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Inés Hernández-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia López, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For a while in the late 1980s, it seemed as if all of Duke University's English Department had gone public with the complications and heartbreaks of the life of the star academic. After Duke's mainly white English Department finished telling their stories, the confessional narratives of academics have had a continued, and much more important, role as a genre where those marginalized by the academy for reasons of race or ethnicity tell about their complicated entry and then incorporation into the university system. In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, the 18 women of the Latina Feminist group, formed in 1993 and including Ruth Behar and Eliana Rivero, discuss immigrant and working class childhoods, developing a love of reading, an avoidance of K-12 teaching in order to partake of the larger promises of the (mostly literature-based) university positions.
