Label Me Latina/o Spring 2023 Volume 13

March 9, 2023 edited by Label Me Latina/o
Filed under: Spring 

Essays

The art of telling: Toward a genealogy of testimoniadoras

by Ella Maria Diaz

Ella Maria Diaz was a lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) between 2006—2012, until she joined Cornell University in the Department of Literatures in English and the Latina/o Studies Program. After earning tenure in 2017, Dr. Diaz departed Cornell in 2022 to join the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at San José State University as Professor and Chair. Her first book Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (2017) won the 2019 Book Award for the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Association (NACCS). Diaz’s second book, published in 2020, is a primer on Chicano artist José Montoya and volume 12 of the UCLA and Chicano Studies Research Center’s A Ver series. It received a Gold Medal for Best Arts Book and a Gold Medal for Best Biography in 2020 from the International Latino Book Awards. Published in numerous anthologies, Diaz has several journal articles, including her 2013 essay in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies that was anthologized in The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán1970-2016.

Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Immigration Crisis in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and The Lost Children Archive

by Ana-Christina Acosta Gaspar de Alba

Ana-Christina Acosta Gaspar de Alba is a Latinx scholar, activist, and writer. She completed her PhD in Comparative Studies with a focus on Latinx Literature and Politics.

Transnational Feminisms and Latina Interpretation of the Sanctuary Movement

by Leigh C. Johnson

Leigh Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Marymount University. Her recent essay on Chicano masculinity appears in Societal Construction of Masculinity in Chicanx and Mexican Literature (2021) and two essays on teaching Ana Castillo’s writing appear in New Transnational Latinx Perspectives on Ana Castillo (2021) and MLA Approaches to Teaching 20th Century Chicana and Mexicana Writers (2020). Dr. Johnson is currently at work on a monograph theorizing networked motherwork in Chicana and Afro-Latina contexts.

La cuentista cubana: Healing Powers of the Female Storyteller in Chantel Acevedo’s Love and Ghost Letters and The Distant Marvels

by Graham Ignizio

Graham Stefan Ignizio is a Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Before arriving at MSU Denver, Graham was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Union College in New York for three years. Graham received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. He also holds degrees from North Carolina State University and Middlebury College. He specializes in twentieth and early twenty-first century Cuban-American literature and has a particular interest in US Latino/a/x studies. In addition, he has broad comparative interests that reach into other disciplines and traditions, such as experiential learning, service learning, Caribbean literature, women’s studies, border studies, film, and post-Franco peninsular women writers. Currently, Graham is the 2023 Presidential Faculty Fellow at MSU Denver and is serving as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of the President.

Poetry

Tatara Abuela 

by Valerie Paez

Valerie Paez is a writer, a poet, and currently resides in Texas with her two adult children and her chihuahua mix, Bella. She attended The University of Texas at San Antonio and studied English with a minor concentration in German. Her work has been published on Label Me Latina/O and Hispanecdotes.

El monstruo que habita la historia

by Angela Acosta

Angela Acosta is a Ph.D. Candidate in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University that identifies as Mexican American. She grew up in Gainesville, Florida but currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Panochazine, Pluma, Toyon Literary Magazine, and Latinx Audio Lit Mag. She is author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Books, 2023) and the forthcoming chapbook Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (dancing girl press, 2023).

Extrañando Is Lost in Translation

by Anyely Dickerson

Anyély Gómez-Dickerson was born in Habana, Cuba and immigrated on a leaky boat from the port of Mariel in 1980. She grew up in Miami, Florida and knows firsthand the pain of assimilation in a home not her own. Anyély went on to earn a minor in Poetry and Shakespearean Studies from Florida International University. She holds a B.S. in Education from Temple University in Philadelphia. After graduation, she began her twenty-two-year career as an English teacher and designed creative writing and poetry curricula with a focus on diversity and inclusivity. As a school leader, she trained teachers how to use poetry, short stories, and essays as social commentary tools to empower students. For her, being a Latina writer means creating art with “teeth” that sheds light on social issues and injustices plaguing marginalized communities and fosters the tough conversations needed to catapult real change. She also had the pleasure of editing and publishing several literary journals, including editions of Voices from the Middle: A Literary Showcase, all before retiring to give her writing the full-time attention it demanded. Her current project involves researching and exposing her years living in those parts of Miami not included on the travel brochure, exploring her own mixed story of black, European, and Taína ancestry going back as far as Cuba’s time of slavery and its exploitation under Spanish rule. Anyély currently resides with her better half in Honolulu, Hawaii, her new island home away from home.

Short Story

Worlds Apart

by Reyna E. Vergara 

Reyna E. Vergara is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mississippi University for Women. She’s of Central American descent. Her writing focuses on the struggle of the colonial subject, whether in terms of gender or race. For her, being a first-generation Latina in the United States means living in-between. It is waking up every morning with a sense of displacement, a feeling that propels her to find her own sense of identity. Through writing, she’s able to revisit the land of her ancestors in an attempt to re-connect to that part of her that was left behind. Her pieces have appeared in Ámbitos Feministas, Confluencia, the Modern Language Studies Journal, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism.

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