Dr. María Eugenia Cotera: Fleshing the Archive: An Intimate Genealogy of Chicana Knowledge Praxis.
The Nuestra Palabra Cultural Reading Series:
Celebrate our history, our culture, and our people with the release of this powerful new book by Dr. María Eugenia Cotera: Fleshing the Archive: An Intimate Genealogy of Chicana Knowledge Praxis. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin
As our writers, our studies, and our culture are being yanked out of higher education in Texas, convene with NP to spread our word, inspire each other, and stock your family libraries and underground libraries.
This is also a preview to the NACCS Tejas Foco Regional Conference taking place at the University of Houston Downtown Feb. 26 to Feb. 28.
Master of Ceremonies: Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, founder of Nuestra Palabra. Author of The Tip of The Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital.
Special guests: Chicana & Chicano leaders and debuts by new writers, including:
Dr. Maria Gonzalez, beloved professor from the University of Houston.
The Raza Student Alliance: Danitzia Quezada, President, & Andrea Silva , Vice President.
Poets from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts: Isa Gutierrez & German Ramires Torres
Mexican American Student Alliance: Hannah Martinez: Event Coordinator, Ilya Ramirez Porras: Treasurer, & Rafael Rangel-Guerrrero: Historian.
María Eugenia Cotera is an associate professor in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Native Speakers, received the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. Her groundbreaking edited volume, Chicana Movidas, has been adopted in courses across the country.
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an explosion of knowledge production by Chicana activists as they took part in the Chicano movement across the Southwest. Often published independently and distributed by readers themselves, these works embodied a praxis of feminist and queer consciousness-raising that profoundly shaped Chicana feminism. Today, thousands of these documents, including art, written works, and oral histories, have been assembled by the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, offering scholars a model of teaching and learning liberated from a corporate academy that is increasingly hostile to intellectual inquiry.
Drawing on these unique resources, Fleshing the Archive tells a story about the radical knowledge forms that Chicanas produced as they moved in, through and around sites of social, political, and institutional power in the 1970s. Tracing the “sitios y lenguas” or sites and discourses (Emma Perez) of these modalities of Chicana knowledge—from Martha Cotera’s work as an information specialist and feminist writer in Texas, to the generation of Chicana scholar activists who carved out a space for the study of “La Mujer” in California, to the queer worldmaking of poet, scholar and filmmaker Osa Hidalgo de la Riva—Cotera surfaces a hidden genealogy of Chicana knowledge praxis that demonstrates how these ephemeral (and always precarious) efforts to reimagine knowledge as a collective and community-building endeavor speak to the urgencies of the present moment.
Nuestra Palabra will provide book sales. Buy your signed copy at the event and get a picture with Dr. Cotera. if you miss it, purchase signed copies from the NP online store. Buy books by Latino writers who give back to the community at www.NuestraPalabra.org.
Sponsors:
Casa Ramirez Folk Art Gallery
The BIPOC Arts Network and Fund - BANF
The Law Office of Carolina Ortuzar-Diaz, PLLC
NHPO – National Hispanic Professional Organization
ALMAAHH
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