Monthly Archives: May 2012

On Doing Work that Matters and Sustaining Ourselves in the Interim

May 28, 2012

sinkByWade

By Brenda Sendejo

It’s a week since the 2012 El Mundo Zurdo Conference at UTSA. I feel a rejuvenated sense of purpose about my work, my heart is full, and my mind and soul inspired. I sat at my desk working on an essay today, and as I did, I periodically glanced over at the brightly painted rock I got at the conference. I got the beautiful rocks with quotes by Gloria Anzaldúa for friends, and minutes before the conference ended decided to go ahead and get one for me. The lavender rock with the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, “Do Work that Matters” called out to me as the one I should keep (Zapotec curandera Doña Enriqueta Contreras once taught me that lavender is the color of healing). The rock serves as a reminder to me that I do the work that I do because I believe that it matters and because I hope that it makes a difference in the world. The rock is also a reminder to myself to stay on that path and focused on doing the work as a teacher and scholar. Because, while it’s a rewarding path and at times a healing path, it’s not an easy one. I reflect here on the conference, thinking about the stakes involved in doing work that matters and how we sustain each other and ourselves in the process.

 

At the opening plenary of the conference Northern New Mexico College President, Dr. Rusty Barceló discussed what I view as doing work that matters. She talked about working to diversify the academy as we make our way down our individual — and often lonely — paths at our perspective institutions of higher learning. We are often the only, or one of few women, people of color, and/or LGBTQ staff, faculty, or students “at the table,” whether in a meeting of college presidents, department meetings, diversity enrichment committees, or in our classes. Dr. Barceló talked about the meaning of diversity and instances where we might be “at the table” with regards to representation, but have no voice. Engaging head on with issues of diversity means more than increasing the number of faculty and students from underrepresented groups at our institutions. It’s about the inclusion of our voices and responding to our calls for equality, inclusion, and an end to institutional violence. It’s about working to ensure recognition for the diversity work we do in our teaching and research at tenure and promotion time, and it’s about helping to promote the idea that a real commitment to diversity — in perspectives, life experiences, and beliefs — must permeate through all facets of an institution.

 

Doing work that matters can be frustrating and draining. It requires opportunities for us to rejuvenate our spirits through community, at conferences such as the MALCS Summer Institute, SSGA and NACCS. In the interim between seeing our comadres and compadres whose support, encouragement, spirits, and intellect fill us, in between moments when students remind us that the struggles we faced and continue to face as women, people of color, and queer people in the academy are worth it, and in between the inspirational conversations with colleagues who “get it,” we need to cultivate strategies for sustaining ourselves, strategies for being in those spaces and doing work that matters. I would guess that tenured professors, junior faculty, community members, graduate students and undergraduates all experience those in between spaces. I’m fortunate in that I possess the resources to attend conferences, trips to Anzaldúa’s grave in Hargill, a cell phone to call my comadres from grad school when I need a little pick me up and reassurance. But what about when we don’t have those resources in place to lift our spirits? Where do we turn in the interim to help pick us up in the struggle to do work that matters? Where do those who don’t have access to conferences and comunidad nearby find fulfillment in moments of alienation, homophobia, sexism, racism, in our hometowns, universities, communities, familias? I write this for those who have been or are or will be in that in between space and don’t have those resources. I was there once, and I so I offer our community an invitation. It’s an invitation to share via this space, to share your virtual words of encouragement and consejos, strategies for how you sustain your mind, body, and spirit in the interim – between now and the next conference, or between now and any other moment that feeds you. And so I put this out to you. I ask you to respond to this blog entry with your strategies for continuing to hold on to that light from within. Some of us have the privilege to get to attend conferences. Others do not. Others are alone, sin comunidad, fighting the fight and I write this for you. There is a lot of healing that needs to happen, mentoring, guidance and this is just one small, humble attempt to see if we can work as the strong community we are to offer support to one another in this wonderful space that has been created.

 

Dr. Barceló offered a reminder that as we pursue our career and personal goals as we all do, that we keep this awareness about us; keep an eye towards working for inclusion and diverse ways of thinking and being; for inclusivity and creating change. While it’s not an easy place to be, perhaps we can locate allies and continue to use this and other spaces of community to remind us that we are not alone as we navigate nepantla towards the goal of shifting consciousness and conocimiento. It may feel like a lofty goal at times, but it is one in which I have much hope, in particular as I reflect back on Dr. Barceló’s talk, on the numerous fierce and stimulating presentations, performances, and experiences at the conference, and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, constant reminders, like my lavender rock, to keep moving forward in doing the work that matters.

Brenda Sendejo is on the faculty of Southwestern University and an At-Large Representative of MALCS. 

Comments:

  1. Mujeres Talk Moderator  June 2, 2012 at 5:59 AM

    Thanks Brenda for your blog essay. I’ve been thinking about your question in terms of the differing missions of MALCS, SSGA and NACCS. Whereas SSGA is all about examining Anzaldúan thought and practice at the conference and in publications, one of MALCS’s purposes is to support and sustain us both at the Summer Institute and in the interim so I appreciate your work in doing that in this forum.

  2. Bren  June 15, 2012 at 12:20 PM

    thank you so much for your comment. i agree that MALCS is an important space for sustaining ourselves, and as i’ve heard from a few people since this essay posted, there are many out there who are seeking out strategies for doing so. so i hope this is a conversation we can continue, both online and at the institute.

Considering Transformations at the SSGA Conference

May 28, 2012

"Grapes of Light." October 6, 2007. Photo by Maria Yu. From Flickr.

“Grapes of Light.” October 6, 2007. Photo by Maria Yu. From Flickr.

By Theresa Delgadillo

Back home from another stimulating gathering of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, a conference held every 18 months at the University of Texas at San Antonio, hosted and sponsored by the Women’s Studies Institute. Kudos to Professor Norma Cantú, Chairperson of the SSGA, for putting together a great program, and to Professor Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Director of the Women’s Studies Institute, and Carolyn Motley and other WSI staff, for the program, funding and logistical support to SSGA.

The theme of the 2012 conference was “Transformations,” and so many of the presentations and lectures and papers shared at this conference so thoughtfully and productively addressed this idea and practice in both Gloria Anzaldúa’s ouvre and from the perspective of other fields and bodies of knowledge in relation to Anzaldúan thought. Dr. Nancy “Rusty” Barceló, President of Northern New Mexico University, and Dr. Norma Alarcón delivered plenary speeches that challenged us to do the transformative work, in our actions in higher education as well as in our consciousness and self-growing, that so occupied Anzaldúa. I was not able to make the trip to Anzaldúa’s burial site, where Dr. Aida Hurtado also delivered a talk. The Noche de Cultura was a beautiful and energizing evening of song and dance with original compositions performed by Nancy “Rusty” Barceló, traditional and original mariachi songs from Carmencristina, folk music from Brenda Romero, fandango from Martha González and Quetzal who also joined the finale performance of Fandango Tejas. Fandango is fun! Since my explorations of Anzaldúa’s work have centered on how she queers the religious imaginary, I was particularly interested in the panels on indigenous worldviews, spirituality and religiosity in all its forms, though I could only, lamentably, attend a couple, but that’s a good reason to look for these papers in published form in either the published conference proceedings / Mundo Zurdo volumes or the MALCS journal Chicana/Latina Studies, or to research on a trip to the Gloria Anzaldúa Archives at UT-Austin.

From readings of and about Anzaldúa’s work, from conversations with those who worked with her, from hearing and witnessing her in action — in my case, in the early 1990s at a campus-wide lecture/presentation she gave at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (where I was a returning undergraduate student many years ago) — we know that transformation was at the center of her project, that it was a life-long project, that she hoped to win others to engaging in this life-long project, and that in every level of academia or sphere of community or professional/career/work life in which she found herself, she lived that project, consciously and daily.

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty at Ohio State University and a Moderator/Editor ofMujeres Talk Blog. Her book Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (2011) addresses Anzaldúa’s theory and method of spiritual mestizaje. 

Guatemalans’ Missing Children

May 21, 2012
Tucson, AZ Immigrant Rights Protest. April 2006. Photo credit: Laura Briggs

Tucson, AZ Immigrant Rights Protest. April 2006. Photo credit: Laura Briggs

By Laura Briggs

Last week, the U.S. State Department announced that it would not return a girl adopted from Guatemala in 2008, even though courts there found that she had been kidnapped. The child’s mother, working with Fundación Sobreviventes (a feminist group that works on femicide, child sexual abuse, and children lost to adoptions) has said that she will travel to Missouri to ask a court there to return custody of her daughter to her. The child’s adoptive parents, Timothy and Jennifer Monahan, have consistently said that they have a complete and valid adoption, and, after an appearance on the CBS Early Show in 2010, have hired a publicity firm and refused to speak to anyone about the case.

According to Erin Siegel, a journalist who has done some of the best  U.S.-based reporting on adoption from Guatemala, the child, Anyelí Hernández Rodríguez, was 2 years old when disappeared from the patio of the family’s home in San Miguel Petapa, a small community outside Guatemala City, while her mother was bringing in groceries. Although the family searched for her–putting up posters, contacting the police, and attempting to visit orphanages, Anyelí was offered for adoption to the Monahans in 2007. A DNA test found that the supposed birth mother who was relinquishing Anyelí was fraudulent. According to emails published by Siegel, Sue Hedberg, the director of the Christian adoption agency, Celebrate Children International, told Jennifer Monahan that although increased scrutiny had made it much more difficult for the company involved, LabCorp, to “bury” the DNA test, Monahan might be offered the child again under a different name. Subsequently, Hedberg made “Karen Abigail” available to the Monahans for adoption, a child of the same age who was allegedly abandoned. When Anyelí’s birthparents got access to adoption records in Guatemala with the help of Sobreviventes, they identified “Karen Abigail” as their daughter from the photo on the birth certificate. By then, however, she had already left the country with the Monahans, on her way to Liberty, Mo., with the help of Susana Luarca a Guatemalan lawyer notorious in human rights circles, and identified in the US press as a participant in abusive adoption practices at least six years earlier.

I’m always afraid people think I’m making stuff up when I write about adoption from Guatemala, but this case has published documents and multiple convictions of people involved. It’s also a lot like other cases I wrote about in Somebody’s Children.

Anyeli’s mother, Loyda Rodríguez, participated in the 2008 Sobreviventeshunger strike that finally led to the halting of most adoptions from Guatemala to the US (as most other nations had long since stopped them). As she continued to pursue the case, through activism and the courts, Rodríguez also faced stepped up harassment: her sister was abducted (although she escaped), and she was followed by strange cars. Finally, Rodríguez took her three children and fled the Guatemala City area in terror.

The manifest unhelpfulness of the U.S. State Department, the Guatemalan police and government agencies that Rodríguez turned to for help, and the fact that she has been harassed and terrorized should not surprise us. Adoption from Guatemala to the United States  became a huge money-making enterprise carried out by courts, lawyers, and government agencies together with criminal mafias in the 90s and first decade after 2000. Before that, disappearing children was a practice carried out by militaries and paramilitaries to terrorize their supposed enemies on the political Left. As the human rights groups Todos por el Reencuentro has documented, thousands of children were disappeared during the civil war in Guatemala, beginning with a vengeance in the 1980s. This story, along with the attempted genocide of indigenous people there, has been thoroughly ignored in the United States. Most of these children were adopted within Guatemala, but some made their way into adoption to the US, Canada, and Western Europe. By 1994, when the Peace Accords were signed, adoption had become a very lucrative enterprise. As the war to defeat Communism in Guatemala was ending, members of the military and others began engaging in a particularly spectacular form of neoliberal capitalism: the disappearance and sale of children for up to $30,000 each in adoption “fees.” The worst was that most of it was all perfectly legal, a fact that hindered the efficacy of international human rights activism against “trafficking” or “illegal” adoption.

Fortunately for Anyelí’s mother, there were actual crimes committed in her case: a falsified birth certificate, a documented abduction. Whether the Missouri courts will find those issues relevant remains to be seen. But for thousands of Guatemalans–as for Salvadorans and Argentines–one of the legacies of the wars and their aftermath is children disappeared, alive, and still unaccounted for, or known to be raised by other families.

But when Guatemalan and other Central American survivors of the civil wars and US proxy wars in the region in the 1980s and 90s arrive in the United States, they encounter other “security” forces that prosecute them for the crime of fleeing without the visas the US refused (and refuses) to grant them. Sometimes, they also take their children away here.

For example, in a case that has received widespread attention, Encarnación Bail Romero, one of 136 immigrant detained in a workplace raid of poultry processing plant in Missouri in April 2007, had parental rights to her six month old son terminated as a result. Hers was among the first raids the Department of Homeland Security pursued as part of a campaign they called “Operation Return to Sender,” which promised to aggressively prosecute “crimes” related to false identification, to sentence and hold people on those crimes, to conduct workplace raids, and to deport people whose status was suspect. So Bail was charged with possessing a fake ID, and served a year and a half in jail for that crime, waiting to be deported after she had served her sentence.

At first, her baby, Carlos, stayed with two aunts. But they were sharing a tiny apartment with six of their own children, and had very little money. When a teacher’s aid at one of their children’s school offered to find someone else to care for Carlos, they agreed. Three months later, the aid visited Encarnación in jail, saying a couple with land and a beautiful house wanted to adopt Carlos. She said no. A few weeks later, an adoption petition arrived at the jail, in English. Encarnación was not literate in Spanish, never mind English. Still, with the help of Mexican cellmate, a guard, and a bilingual Guatemalan visitor, she prepared a response to the court: “I do not want my son to be adopted by anyone,” she wrote on a piece of notebook paper. “I would prefer that he be placed in foster care until I am not in jail any longer. I would like to have visitation with my son.” Although she repeatedly asked judges and lawyers for help, it was a year before she found a lawyer who would take the case. By then, it was too late. The couple caring for Carlos complained that she had sent no money for his support and had not contacted him. A year and a half after she went to jail, a judge terminated her parental rights and permitted the other couple to adopt him. “Her lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into the country illegally and committing crimes in this country,” Judge Dally wrote, referring to the false ID, “is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child. A child cannot be educated this way, always in hiding or on the run.”

In another closely watched case, María Luis, a Guatemalan, a Maya-Kiché woman in Grand Isle, Nebraska (the site of another large workplace raid, although Luis had come to the attention of authorities earlier) had her parental rights terminated as well, following her arrest for lying to the police and subsequent deportation. María had taken her one-year old daughter, Angelica, to the doctor for a respiratory infection. Although she was a Kiché-speaker, the doctors instructed her in Spanish about how to care for the child. When she failed to arrive for a follow-up appointment, social services went to her house with the police. When asked if she was her children’s mother, María, frightened that she would be in trouble because of her immigration status, said she was the babysitter. The police arrested her on a criminal charge for falsely identifying herself, and she was deported. Angelica and Daniel, 7, went to foster care, and state social services began proceedings to terminate her parental rights. Federal immigration officials gave her no opportunity to participate in those proceedings, and she lost the children. In April, 2009, four years after the children were originally sent to foster care, the Nebraska Supreme Court restored her parental rights, saying that federal immigration officials had denied her due process rights in interfering with her ability to participate in the state proceedings, and that state officials had never provided her with an interpreter, never explained the process through which she could seek custody of the children, and never made any effort to reunify the family, largely because social service workers “thought the children would be better off staying in the United States.”

Stories like these are unusual, in that the mothers finally were able to obtain effective counsel and were able to contest the state social services efforts. National organizations sent out press releases; the cases were publicized in national media and on the Internet. More commonly, no one hears about these cases except the people who know the family and the officials involved. The Urban Institute, in two recent reports, has suggested that there may be hundreds of thousands of children affected by federal immigrant deportations, an unknown number of whom may also be caught in state social welfare cases.  An estimated 4.5 million children in the United States in 2005 had at least one undocumented parent.

Although there is no organized campaign to separate immigrant parents from Guatemala or elsewhere from their children, it is a consequence of workplace raids, criminalization of undocumented status, the absence of civil rights in immigrant detention (including the right to make a phone call to notify people of your whereabouts, or finding out what’s happened to your children), and stepped-up anti-immigrant attacks.  In October, when Alabama’s harsh anti-immigration law was passed, a mother told the UK Guardian that she was drawing up power-of-attorney papers to allow her niece to assume custody of her U.S. citizen children if she were detained by immigration officials. She described her concerns in exactly these terms: “I’m afraid I could disappear without anyone knowing what’s happened to me,” she said, “who knows what would happen to me in jail.”

Nearly two decades after the end of the civil wars in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America, mothers and children are still being disappeared, some of them in the United States.

Laura Briggs is Chair of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption and Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. She blogs at somebodyschildren.com.

Comment(s):
Mujeres Talk Moderator  June 2, 2012 at 6:14 AM

Thanks Laura for this essay. Your presentation at NWSA – and that whole panel on the impact of new anti-immigration legislation on children and families was important. Your essay also reminds us of Maya-Kiché undocumented – and the problem with assuming that all undocumented from Latin America speak Spanish.

Women of Color and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)

May 14, 2012

By Susan Mendez

Photo by javacolleen on Flickr

Photo by javacolleen on Flickr

This past academic year, I have served as the Women Studies liaison to the Women’s Center on my university campus. In this capacity, I had the privilege of working with work-study students on a variety of issues, one of which being gender-based violence. The culmination of programming and events on this issue was our “Take Back the Night” rally in April. To prep for this event, the work-study students and I read “Domestic Violence Policy in the United States: Contemporary Issues” by Susan L. Miller and LeeAnn Iovanni, which brought our attention to the timely issue of the congressional debates surrounding the reauthorization of the “Violence Against Women Act” (VAWA).

The “Violence Against Women Act” was a federal law passed in 1994. It was groundbreaking at the time because it was national-scope recognition of the problem of gender-based violence; it acted as an agent of social change and had the large budget of $795 million dollars a year. It targeted underserved and rural populations and ultimately saved on future victimization costs over the years. It was renewed in 2000 and 2005 and consistently had congressional bipartisan support at all these times. Back in November 2011, the Act was up for reauthorization and this process started with a bipartisan bill written by Senators Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. The bill attracted fifty-eight sponsors including Republican Senators from Maine, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Although the new version of this Act passed the Senate on April 26, by a vote of 68 to 31, the House Republicans are not pleased with the Act as is and are drafting their own version that will be submitted for a vote at the House of Representatives level during this month.

So just what has made House Republicans so upset? The new version of the VAWA is ground-breaking yet again for it expands efforts to reach Native American lands and rural areas, increases the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, expands the definition of domestic violence to include stalking, allows more battered “illegal” immigrants to claim temporary visas, and includes same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence. These very points that would rejuvenate the VAWA in its efforts to target underserved populations, one of its original goals, are the ones most objectionable. House Republicans believe the new VAWA unfairly expands immigration avenues by allowing “illegal” immigration survivors to claim battery, dilutes focus on domestic violence by expanding protections to new groups like same-sex couples, and fails to place safeguards to ensure domestic violence grants are well-spent. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa phrased Republican opposition to this new version of the “Violence Against Women Act” best when he stated that this legislation “creates so many programs for underserved populations that it risks losing the focus on helping victims, period.” Other critics of the Senate-passed version of the VAWA explain that their reservations lie in the fact that the VAWA takes away from the state and local levels’ abilities and resources to address domestic violence; such efforts should not rest solely with Washington as this would go beyond constitutional limits. Lastly, a fear of fraud and abuse of the U.S. Immigration system is another specific reason for some to object to the Senate-passed version of the VAWA.

Needless to say, Democratic Senators and Representatives have come to defend the Senate version of VAWA and oppose the House-revised version of the VAWA, which strips away protections given to Native American women, the gay and lesbian community, and “illegal” immigrants who are battered. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, are just two Democrat congressional members who have labeled the House-revision of the VAWA as the latest evolution of the Republican War on Women, where rights and services provided to women are systemically being cut-back. Moreover, those active in the Native American community are taking issue with the House-revised version of the VAWA. According to Karla E. General and Robert T. Coulter’s “Violence Against Women Act: Overdue Justice for Native Women” in Indian Country Today, “Tribal Authority to prosecute non-Indians for crimes against tribal citizens was removed by the Supreme Court in 1978, creating an Indian country landscape where non-Indians violate Native women with impunity…. Because 77 percent of residents of Indian lands are non-Indian, and because 88 percent of these offenders are non-Indian, the long-standing jurisdictional loophole creates a human rights crisis where some of the most heinous crimes go unpunished solely because the victim is Native and was assaulted on an Indian reservation.” There is a desperate need to close this legal loophole on Native lands so as to ensure that those guilty of domestic violence are punished. Relying on federal and state law enforcement agencies in the past to prosecute these crimes has not worked well; General and Coulter assert that federal and state authorities have failed to properly address 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters that are referred to them from Indian country.

Notably, the revision of the Senate-passed “Violence Against Women Act” does not honor its original goals: to be national in scope and to serve underrepresented populations who experience domestic violence. It appears to regard domestic violence as a crime that only happens to heterosexual, “legal” white women. Notions of wanting to handle the problem of domestic violence in a “clean” Act does not leave room for dealing with the “messy” intersectional aspects of life such as race, class, gender, legal status, and sexual orientation.

Thus, the ultimate fate of the “Violence Against Women Act” should be on the minds of all of us who deal with and care about the rights of women, especially women of color.

Susan Mendez is on the faculty at University of Scranton.

Comments:

Mujeres Talk Moderator  June 2, 2012 at 6:10 AM

Thanks Susan for this update on where VAWA stands. You’ll be happy to know that the week of your post there were 311 visits to the page so many were interested in reading more about this!

Living Without a Car

May 10, 2012

By Theresa Delgadillo

I rode home the other day in the pouring rain, on my bicycle. A few drops fell as I left my office, a few more as I packed the bike and headed into traffic. The umbrellas were out, the windows on passing cars were all rolled up. Then the deluge hit. I stopped under the thick, spring-green leafy branches of a beautiful old tree by the law school to keep dry. From the pace of the clouds crossing the sky it would probably be about twenty or thirty minutes before it let up enough to get home fairly dry. The safest thing would have been to stay under the tree for a half hour … but I didn’t. As nearly everyone else – with the exception of other bikers and runners along the way – ducked for cover under awnings and bus shelters or hopped into cars, I headed into traffic and in short order was completely drenched. The other bikers mostly sped by – those with rain gear looked just so comfortable (I hadn’t packed mine that day). The runners seemed mostly okay in the rain, several laughed and waved, recognizing another intrepid spirit. Bystanders exclaimed and pointed as this completely empapada bicycle commuter passed by. I hadn’t expected to have a hard time keeping my eyes open, but I did – the rain was that hard and fierce.

It felt glorious. It was a moving massage. It inspired joy. If I go on, I will wind up romanticizing – or maybe I already have – a ride on a warm, spring, rainy day on which I welcomed a change in my daily routine. For the past eight months, my bicycle has been my primary mode of transportation. I actually sold my car in the fall – my way of making sure I didn’t backslide on this new adventure. That’s when I realized anew something I had, in fact, long known: in the U.S. only poor people and New Yorkers don’t have cars. I’ll tell you about the many ways I’ve re-learned this another time, but for now let me note that people look at me a little funny when they learn about my “transportation status.” Part of the surprise has to be about the gap between what people imagine a university professor makes and the lack of an automobile as a sign of lower income levels, but another part of it is surely about the difficulty most of us have imagining life without a car. A friend reports that in her neighborhood the parents have started a “bike ride with the kids to school in the morning pool” rather than the traditional car-pool. At a recent conference, I heard several people comment on how they’d like to live in a more ecologically sound way, but we just don’t provide the structures to allow it. I’ve found myself advocating for those structures more often and in more places now that I’m on the bike everyday, getting myself where I need to go on my own Chicana-power; getting a little bit of daily exercise; saving money on car payments, car maintenance, insurance and gas; not making the environment any worse. I highly recommend it. There’s great rain gear available for commuters so you don’t have to ride in the rain if you don’t want to … but I’ve re-discovered that it’s just rain.

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty at Ohio State University and is the Moderator of Mujeres Talk blog.

Comments:

  1. Ktrion  May 10, 2012 at 7:27 AM

    Love the image of you traveling under your own Chicana power!

  2. Danielle  January 20, 2013 at 8:55 PM

    I never owned a car and perhaps ten years down the road, I will eventually own one.