Tag Archives: Theresa Delgadillo

Artists in the Americas Confront the Fracturing Effects of Violence

audience on stage with actors

Audience on stage set with actors. Pequeños Territorios en Recconstrucción by Teatro Línea de Sombra. Jan 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-NC 2.0

by Theresa Delgadillo

Strong Women?

Narratives of supposedly “strong” women who almost unwillingly enter into drug trafficking proliferate in the world of telenovelas, such as Reina del Sur, Señora Acero, and La Viuda Negra. Indeed, Telemundo advertises its television programs with the tagline: “nuestras protagonistas no se la pasan llorando” (translation: “our protagonists aren’t crybabies”). While not writing directly about these particular telenovelas, or the roles of women in them, Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez observes that a shift in telenovela narratives has occurred: the celebrated subject of these narratives is no longer the poor servant who marries the wealthy son of the household or discovers that she has been secretly wealthy all along, but instead the poor person who rises to wealth by any means necessary, drug trafficking included.[1] In contrast to these mass media representations, in two recent performances and one exhibit in Mexico City, artists engage the issues of drug violence, state violence, and gendered violence in ways that might inspire further dialogue, action, and community, and they do this by devising varied strategies for inviting the audience in to participate in a consideration of these issues.

Displaced Women Organize

Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción is an interactive performance that employs drama, documentary, collage, art-making to consider the effort by the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas to create not only new homes, but new societies. The play asks: under what circumstances would building a house, or, together with your peers, building a neighborhood, attract the ire, hostility, and violence of others? When and why is the act of creating a “home” for oneself an affront to others? When we say we want to do good, for whom is that good? “Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción” is a “fábula documental” or fictional documentary drama created by the company LAB/Teatro Línea de Sombra in Mexico City, and recently performed at Teatro Benito Juárez in that city, tells the story of the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (The League of Women Displaced) in Colombia, and the neighborhood they constructed with their own hands to give life to themselves and their families. The title of the play might be translated to English as “Small Regions in Reconstruction,” and what the work addresses is the act of reconstructing the world one small neighborhood at a time by telling the story of a group of women – the Liga — displaced from their original homes by the combined violence of the Colombian conflict and drug trafficking, yet not resigned to marginality or the acceptance of violence.

Instead, the women joined together in the space where they found themselves, and organized to support each other, naming themselves the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas, and eventually erecting an entire neighborhood of 98 homes with cement blocks they learned to construct themselves. Their neighborhood abuts a new housing development in the area that is a kind of suburban enclave, and yet the women’s neighborhood offers a version of “improvement” and defines “good” in ways that contrast with those advertised and offered by the model of suburban living. As we learn in this performance, this difference creates tension but also inspires other women and working people to initiate their own construction efforts.

Interactive and Collective Work in Performance

Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción tells a collective story in a collective way, re-enacting the physicality of making and placing concrete blocks to construct a home; shifting among varied voices; working to make the collective of women present visually on stage while also acknowledging the important role of human rights lawyer and activist Patricia Guerrero in advising the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas. Many of the women in the Liga and the “City of Women” are Afro-Colombian, and on their webpage they describe themselves as a multiracial and multiethnic community, though the performance does not explicitly address the questions of race and ethnicity as these intersect with gender in the experience of the displaced women. The violence that the women flee from and then encounter again when they have the audacity to build their own homes is juxtaposed in this performance with the violence of the drug wars and a luxurious home and zoo built by Pablo Escobar.

small concrete blocks on stage made into houses

Creating block houses. Performance of Pequeños Territorios en Recconstrucciòn by Teatro Linea de Sombra. January 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The playwrights, actors, and director first heard about La Liga in 2010 from an article in El Proceso about heroic women that included the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and women fighting against feminicide in Juárez, Mexico. They traveled to Colombia from Mexico to meet the women of the Liga, and visited them twice more in the following years to learn about the neighborhood they were constructing and to participate in arts workshops in the newly founded “City of Women.” Out of those repeated visits, a relationship developed, one that felt to the creators of Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción as something they could learn from, living as they do, too, in a country beset by violence. Yet the performance resists easy comparisons between Colombia and Mexico, and this collaboratively produced and enacted interactive performance asks audiences to attend to the specific contexts of each place. Auad Atala, Alicia Laguna, Eduardo Bernal, Jorge A. Vargas, and Noé Morales collaborate to tell the story of the “City of Women,” and the threats of violence and attacks that the women experienced for their initiative. They are joined in this performance, as they are in each run of the work, by two children from the “City of Women,” who also participate in telling the story of their home, of their mothers, of their neighbors, and of their peers – with great pride and delight! The story unfolds in various modes: the actors and children speaking as they construct models of the “City of Women” on stage intermixed with documentary footage as well as real and imagined text projected on a large screen at the back of the stage. As the story unfolds, the model-sized “City of Women” is slowly constructed on stage by the actors and children, and then populated with images of the actual women who built this neighborhood, concrete block by concrete block, with their own hands. The performance ends with an invitation to the audience to visit the “City of Women” that has been reconstructed on the stage, view the pictures and layout firsthand and discuss the project with the actors and children. The audience responded with much warmth and interest to this last section of the performance, engaging in dialogue both with the creators of this performance and with other audience members.

Remembering and Enacting Feminist Action

The “City of Women” in Turbaco, Colombia, is not new; it came into being fifteen years ago, and yet this performance conveys the significance of feminist action that it represents and positions the audience to consider its relevance in contemporary contexts. In this way, it both remembers and enacts, because the conditions that gave rise to the Liga and City are conditions that women face across the Américas. This interactive performance takes a distinctly different approach to the history of feminist action against violence in the Américas than that recently taken by the Argentine government in two important actions. In January of 2016, La Jornada reported that the Argentine Minister of Health stripped the name of one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plazo de Mayo, Laura Bonaparte, from the title of public hospital. Bonaparte’s name had been added to the hospital’s name upon her death in 2013 and in homage to her work on behalf of the disappeared and tortured. In addition, María Coronel, and other employees of the Escuelita de Famaillá in Tucumán — which was the first clandestine center of detention run by the last dictatorship, and which had been transformed into a memorial space dedicated to human rights issues – were dismissed. Coronel is quoted in La Jornada saying [my translation]: “Memorial sites are not just official jobs; they are the result of years of struggle and we will continue to maintain them no matter what, they are not going to disappear us.”[2]

Intimacy and Violence

Another contemporary performance that employs and combines the techniques of documentary and those of drama is Hugo Salcedo’s Música de Balas. Salcedo’s work won the 2011 National Prize in Dramaturgy and was reprised recently by four talented young actors – three men and one woman — at Casazul in Mexico City. The cast includes Christel Klitbo, Christhian Alvarado, Quetzalli Cortés, and Raúl Rodríguez. Música de Balas, or The Music of Bullets, took place in a small black box theater, the Sala Experimental Ludwik Margules, an intimate setting, with audience members sitting on three sides of performance space. The actors make use of the small performance space to great effect, and sometimes move among the audience, and include them as “extras” in some dramatic scenes. A series of first person accounts about the experience of narco violence in Mexico fold, and through these narratives we begin to take stock of the trauma induced by this violence and the danger of it becoming an everyday state of being. These dramatic accounts are sometimes supplemented by and sometimes alternated with documentary footage or photographs of violent events and acts in the country over the past decade. In Música de Balas the victims of violence lament their loss, manifest their trauma, critique government action and inaction, question the perpetrators of violence and those of us who witness it as it ultimately conveys how we are all victims.

pink cards clothespinned to wire line

El Tendedero by Mónica Meyer. March 2016 at MUAC. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The retrospective exhibit of Mexican feminist artist Monica Mayer’s work, Si tiene dudas…pregunte, or “If you have questions…ask” — now on display at the MUAC or Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, and running until July 31, 2016 — also explores the intimacy of violence in several projects, including an interactive piece titled El Tendedero or “The Clothesline,” an updated version of a 1978 installation pictured in the exhibit that questioned women about their experience of Mexico City. El Tendedero questions viewers about the experience of sexual harassment and violence. The piece asks a series of questions about when and where viewers experienced sexual harassment or violence, how they acted in response, how this changed their behavior, and what they’ve done to prevent such violence in the future. The questions and answers, written on pink cards, are attached with clothespins to wire lines, forming a wall of hanging pink cards, all seemingly the same and yet unique and distinct voices. The title of the piece explicitly challenges the sexist discourses that cast sexual violence and harassment as “private” and “intimate” dirty laundry that should not be aired (often to protect the “reputation” of perpetrators), discourses that remain prevalent throughout the world. A panel discussion linked to the exhibit, “Vocabularios contra el acoso,” offers a valuable discussion of the human rights of women in local and global contexts that begins from a consideration of this particular art project.

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Closeup of El Tendedero by Mónica Mayer. MUAC. March 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In these distinct and innovative ways, Mexican artists are engaging the fictional and the documentary to invite audiences to join them in exploring a series of questions relevant not only in Latin America but throughout the  Americas. Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción aims to have as much of an impact on theater audiences as the women of the Liga had on those around them by critically representing the ways that their collective creative and progressive energies destabilized acceptance of violence. Música de Balas represents the terror experienced by ordinary men and women subjected to extreme forms of violence as well as uncertainty in ways that combats de-sensitization and reminds audiences of the enduring impacts of trauma. El Tendedero allows us to hear the voices of women combatting sexual harassment and abuse as it opens a path for audiences to enact their own resistance to this violence.

[1] Sergio Ramírez. “La superproducción más cara de la historia.” La Jornada. 20 enero 2016.

[2] Stella Calloni. “Retiran nombre de fundadora de Madres de Plaza de Mayo a un hospital en Argentina.” La Jornada. 20 enero 2016.

Theresa Delgadillo is a member of the Editorial Group for the Mujeres Talk website. She is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University and the author of Latina Lives in Milwaukee (Illinois, 2015) and Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (Duke, 2011).

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by  government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes  yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

            You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

 

Dichos for Summer Research

by Theresa Delgadillo

For many years, members of my family often referred to my summer schedule as my “time off” or my “long summer vacation” in contrast to their one or two weeks. As the working-class daughter of working-class parents, I understand well the fascination and misunderstanding with which many view the summer life of academics. I’ve also spent many a hot summer working in a factory, mill or sweatshop or in what seemed like a hermetically sealed over-air conditioned office. From that perspective, an academic summer schedule looks pretty good. Yet, if you’re on the tenure-track or trying to get on the tenure-track, summer is definitely not playtime. It’s precious research and writing time. Here are a few notes to remind you that even though it may seem like campus is deserted or, if you’re teaching this summer, like the school year never ends, that there are many, many people, just like you, trying to get as much research and writing in over the summer as possible. Because we know that the readers of Mujeres Talk have a wealth of knowledge to offer us all, we wish you well in that work. In recognition of this seasonal shift in our collective work rhythms, Mujeres Talk will change from a weekly to a biweekly publication schedule in July and August. We will return to a weekly publication schedule in September.

“Cada maestrillo/a tiene su librillo.”

We each do things in our own way, so stick to what works for you. If you don’t know what your process is for getting to the writing and research, think back on how you’ve done it. Are you the kind of writer/researcher who needs to finish up all obligations to others (service, reviewing, reports, letters) before you can concentrate on your project? If so, create a reasonable schedule for clearing your desk of writing and work you owe others. Would making a map or list of what you’d like to accomplish this summer help you to achieve it? If so, consider penciling in some timelines or due dates for parts of the project. Do you know that support is essential to keeping you on track? Find writing/research partners. A colleague recently told me about her “writing accountability” group where everyone reports on their daily writing accomplishments. Another colleague is now away at the second two-day writer’s retreat with peers that she has organized already this summer. Do you need to have the physical stacks of books related to each piece of writing/research visible on your desk to keep you on track and moving through it? A visit to the library will get you started. Will working at the office or at home or some other third location make writing possible? I’ll never forget the poet Annie Dillard’s description of her choice of workplace and time: a deserted library in the wee hours, equipped with thermos and writing instruments.

“El comer y el rascar, todo es empezar.”

Even the shortest piece of writing, or note-taking or reading is a start, and we all have to start somewhere. Start. Begin. Are you going to start generating new text? Are you going to start revising and editing? Are you going to start by reviewing your field notes, or feedback you received at a conference or workshop? Are you going to start by reading and note-taking? Are you going to start by creating questions and goals for fieldwork? Do you need to begin interviewing or analyzing data? If starting is hard, set a shorter time period for beginning on first day and then add to it everyday until you get to your optimal working hours. Write down, every day, a short note on what you accomplished for that day. Once you really get going, it may be difficult to tear yourself away from your work.

“Más vale maña que fuerza.”

This saying cautions us to make intelligent use of our time and resources rather than muscling our way through. One way to think of this is to consider structuring your work so that you are writing and generating new text at times when you are most alert and creative, and revising and editing when you’ve temporarily run out of ideas or need a break from writing but still have time to do work. Flexibility and willingness to shift into another aspect of research/writing can work really well to complement the time you focus on writing and generating new work. This saying might also apply to establishing a regular writing practice for the summer, doing some work all the time rather than squeezing it all into a shorter period.

Reference: Bermejo, Belén. Refranes Populares. Madrid: Editorial Luis Vives, 2002. 33, 51,79.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as an Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

What is Mujeres Talk?

Post by Theresa Delgadillo, member of the Mujeres Talk editorial group

Mujeres Talk is an online, interdisciplinary, edited and moderated forum for the circulation and discussion of original research, commentary and creative work in brief and diverse formats such as blog essays (500-1500 words), multimedia presentations and short video. We focus on Chicana, Latina, and Native American women’s work, however, we continue to welcome work from allies, and diverse racial and ethnic authors within and outside of these categories. All posts represent the views of individual authors. All submissions are reviewed by two members of the Editorial Group to ensure that they are appropriate for publication in this venue, offer an original and interesting perspective, cite relevant research where necessary and meet our length requirements.

Mujeres Talk also publishes simultaneous cross-posts with peer sites provided the essay, multimedia or creative work appears on both sites on the same day and both sites agree to note simultaneous publication.

Mujeres Talk publishes on a weekly basis on Tuesdays. Online since January 2011, we took a hiatus in Autumn 2013 and resumed publication in January 2014. See our “Archive” for past posts.

Mujeres Talk publishes work on a wide range of topics of interest to academics, community members, and the general public. 

Mujeres Talk is governed collaboratively by an all-volunteer Editorial Group. Members include Inés Hernandez-Avila, Theresa Delgadillo, Lucila Ek, Miranda Martinez, Diana Rivera, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Seline Szkupinski Quiroga. Please see the “Editors” page for information on our Editorial Group. 

Mujeres Talk solicits submissions and accepts unsolicited submissions. See our “How To Submit” page for further information.

Mujeres Talk believes in providing a space for ideas, research and creativity that may not have a home in print and other publications. We also want to direct readers to important and interesting print publications. Our hope is that we will publish timely reflections, critiques or excerpts of research in progress to foster dialogue among women of color and our allies.

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Temporary Labor, Temporary Lives

June 10, 2013

Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

By Theresa Delgadillo

“In my mind, slavery has not yet disappeared. And in this case, we the Mexican agricultural workers are the slaves. I want to say to all of the employers that we are not machines. And I want them to consider, for just a moment, that the money they have is thanks to the work of all the Mexican agricultural workers who come to Canada to work.”

– Mexican agricultural contract worker in El Contrato (2003)

Advocates of U.S. immigration reform have long cited the importance of immigrant labor in making our daily meals possible. Immigrant labor drives all aspects of agricultural production in the U.S. — picking, packing and delivering to our local markets the vegetables and fruits we eat as well as slaughtering and processing the poultry and meats we consume. Yet, what we overlook when we focus on how much agricultural labor rests on immigrant shoulders is the wealth, income and economies the workers also produce. In Min Sook Lee’s 2003 film El Contrato, viewers hear how small family farms grew into major industries through the use of Mexican agricultural contract workers. But viewers also hear the male workers, who are at the center of this film, speak about the pain of their ordinary family and social life disrupted, their isolation and their powerlessness life as contract workers to improve the conditions of their labor. The film also shows us their efforts to support each other.

Since visas for temporary contract labor, skilled labor, and the temporary status of millions is on the table in the current immigration debate in the U.S., those interested in immigration reform might be interested in viewing Lee’s film to consider how guest worker programs affect all those involved, but also to learn about the historic and economic contributions of immigrant workers. For me, El Contrato drives a home a point that many would prefer to forget: immigrants are people, embedded in social as well as economic networks. El Contrato shows us men who are not able to both live and work among their families and social networks, but instead must forego life for work. Their labor, nonetheless, contributes to two economies: Canadian and Mexican. Though El Contrato addresses a Canadian/Mexican context, viewers might consider that the men’s voices in this film and their expressions of desire for a fuller family are sentiments shared by immigrants in the U.S. Today, we again revisit the debate between prioritizing family and social relationships in U.S. immigration law over that of worker supply and between inclusion of new immigrants via citizenship or forms of legal second-class status.

Filmmaker Min Sook Lee is at work on another film, Migrant Dreams, that focuses on women contract workers in Canada. The trailer promises even more intimate glimpses into the lives of contract workers, yet because these aspects of life are absent from El Contrato I wonder about the sources of this gendered difference — were these aspects of men’s lives not available to the woman filmmaker or a sign of the difference in men’s and women’s immigrant experience? Something to consider when Migrant Dreams is completed and published. In the meantime, view El Contrato in full online at the Canadian Film Board’s website.

 

Theresa Delgadillo is a Co-Editor/Moderator of Mujeres Talk and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Learning from Mexican and Native Women

August 20, 2012

Photo Credit: Pepe Rivera. Taken June 26, 2011. From Flickr.

Photo Credit: Pepe Rivera. Taken June 26, 2011. From Flickr.

By Theresa Delgadillo

Yesterday, as I continued my work on translating an oral history interview from Spanish into English, I was struck by something that this particular participant in the project said – as I often am in this work. I’ve had the honor of interviewing some very wise and determined Latinas in the project that I began in 2008 to collect the oral histories of Latina leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These are some very interesting women! Fortunately, I am near the end of the editing and looking forward to sending it off the publisher soon. To get back to my point: my interviewee, commenting on the social customs of Mexico and the U.S., says at one point, “There it is the same as here, exactly the same as here. The only difference is that there is still a fiction that in Mexico it’s different.” She was talking about the acceptability of divorce, but it resonated with me on other levels, such as the changes in daily life, work and environment, partially because there was some interesting news from Mexico recently in the The New York Times about a group of indigenous women in Cherán, Michoacoán, who mobilized against armed illegal loggers and are now defending their town from violence and their forest from deforestation. To readers of Latina/o literatures, or literature about migration, the name Cherán might be familiar, since it was one of the sites of migration to the U.S. portrayed in Ruben Martinez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail(2001). The August 2, 2012 article by Karla Zabludovsky titled “Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe,” describes the events in Cherán and the women’s actions as “extraordinary” as it details their effectiveness. Motivated in part by the loss of the beautiful forest that was once their patrimony, a loss that must be visible to them on a daily basis, the women see themselves acting not only for themselves but for future generations. When I read it, I wondered, and not for the first time, if Luis Urrea’s novelInto the Beautiful North (2009) hadn’t come to life – because this is not the first instance in recent years of Mexican women taking the lead to end violence and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, New York State is set to join the ranks of states allowing fracking. In an August 19, 2012 CBS News Report, “New York State to Allow Fracking,” Jeff Glor’s article notes that the process of fracking releases dangerous contaminants that have high potential to endanger air and water supplies, yet quotes local farmers who need the money. The women of Cherán, Michoacán, also need money to live and they are supported in part, according to the article, by remittances from residents who have migrated to the U.S., yet it seems they are living in the aftermath of a disastrous environmental decision and working to make it right. Like the people of Cherán, Michoacán, Mexico, we face some very difficult decisions in these energy-gobbling times, and we might consider what we can productively learn through a comparative perspective that doesn’t consign indigenous women to a lost past, but instead examines the experience of both residents and migrants from particular regions about what doesn’t work – because as my interviewee says: “There it is the same as here, exactly the same as here. The only difference is that there is still a fiction that in Mexico it’s different.”

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty at Ohio State University.

  1. María Antonietta Berriozábal  August 20, 2012 at 4:27 PM

    Dear Theresa:

    I find your work fascinating. I am a lover of oral history. Next month my book, María, Daughter of Immigrants, will be published. The first chapters include the stories that my parents told me as a child. With just their stories – no genealogical searches for me – I was able to share the story of my great grand mother and grandparents going back one hundred years. That is rather astounding. To think that these women can share a story, you chronicle them and one hundred years from now someone will be sharing them.

    Another reason for my interest in your work is that in 1995 I attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in China as a member of the US delegation. During the conference I met with women from Central America and some from Peru. Some could not even speak Spanish. They spoke their native dialects, but they had leaders who had learned Spanish and they were our interpreters. One of the reasons they had gone to the Beigjing conference, through great sacrifice, was to tell their stories of how their ancestral lands were being taken by businesses. It is the same story that continues to this day of multi-national corporations raping the environment in other countries so they can provide goods and food for the developed countries like the US and others. But the women were fighting; they were organizing and using their voices. I found it interesting that the leaders of the movements, at least of the ones I met, were mujeres. They wore their colorful clothing almost as the shield of warriors.

    In any event, I appreciate what you are doing very much.

    Sincerely,

    María Antonietta Berriozábal
    San Antonio, Texas

  2. Theresa (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)  August 20, 2012 at 6:14 PM

    Dear María Antonietta,

    I am looking forward to reading the preview of your book that appeared in Frontiers, and to your new book. Please send us an announcement for it as soon as it appears. My project was motivated, too, by the desire to record and share the life stories of Latinas whose experiences don’t appear elsewhere.

    Research in the U.S. has shown that indigenous migrants to the U.S. from Latin America often face difficulties precisely because of the language assumptions that you noted in your experience. Despite language differences, we are all struggling with the same difficult questions about how we use our natural resources.

    Thank you so much for your comments and encouragement, and thank you for sharing your work.

    Take care, Theresa

  3. Lourdes Alberto  August 28, 2012 at 8:31 PM

    In reading this post I am reminded that indigenous people think of themselves as planetary citizens–they fight for their people, their cultures, their history, but also all of our well-being and that of future generations.
    As an indigenous person myself (Oaxaqueña), I struggle with my own part in the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources.
    You know, three seasons ago I started growing a garden with the goal of eventually meeting all of my family’s summertime food needs. It was so fulfilling, so liberating, so unexpected. I know now that my challenge is to remember and live the knowledge my grandparents left me about the land, about plants and about the importance of well-being. As you mentioned, there are tens of thousands of indigenous people from Latin America in CA. Growing up we had an informal plant co-op/exchange. Someone would manage to bring over a plant, flower, hierba, from Oaxaca and we would literally share cuttings–yerba santa, varieties of avocado, ruda. It was amazing! A kind of urban indigenous transnational environmentalism!

  4. Theresa (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)  September 3, 2012 at 5:25 AM

    Dear Lourdes,

    It’s good to hear from those that grow gardens for sustainability, and I appreciate the work you’ve put into this important task for three seasons, which, as you say, is a combination of memory work, and living a connection to others and growing food. Thank you for your beautiful note!

    Take care, Theresa

Latino/a in Spain?

July 10, 2012

By Theresa Delgadillo

Storefront, July 2012. Photo Credit: Theresa Delgadillo

Storefront, July 2012. Photo Credit: Theresa Delgadillo

In Barcelona, Spain, while speaking with friends over lunch at a communal picnic table – switching from Spanish to English and back again – I heard the woman in the family sitting next to us say, in a whispered voice, “son Latinos.” She was referring to us, of course, answering what seemed to be a confused query from her partner about who or what we were. The term “Latino” has most definitely taken hold here to describe Latin American immigrants and their children, and it seems that just as in the U.S. it reflects a growing demographic that is welcomed by many and feared by some. 

Both Madrid and Barcelona have significant Latino/a populations and neighborhoods which have begun to appear in contemporary Spanish visual culture. The recent, very popular telenovela in the U.S. La Reina del Sur seems to acknowledge the issue of Mexican migration to Spain in the story of its protagonist Teresa, who flees drug violence in Mexico only to become an international drug smuggler herself in Spain. Latinos/as in Spain come from many different Latin American countries and some do have ties to U.S. Latinos/as, making the Latino/a connection global. As my colleague Dr. Miroslava Chávez-Garcia notes, the globalization of Latinos/as has its down side: Latinos/as and gangs are often linked in the popular discourse of both the U.S. and Spain. However, Spanish scholars Dr. and Prof. Carme Panchón Iglesias and Prof. Isaac Ravetllat Ballesté of the University of Barcelona suggest that Barcelona and Catalonia’s unique history and experience as a bilingual, bicultural people suggests that it may be well-equipped to create from these demographic and cultural shifts a society where difference is valued, where culture and language is shared rather than imposed, a society where inclusion and integration rather than assimilation predominates. If Catalonia is a particularly apt place for enacting that vision, let’s hope it spreads far beyond the borders of this region.

For many years, I have employed the pan-ethnic label “Latino” or “Latina” to refer to citizens of the U.S. who are Mexican American, Puerto Rican or of Latin American background. The term also generally refers to permanent residents of the U.S. from Latin American backgrounds, though individuals in this latter group often retain their identities as Latin Americans and prefer to be known as Latin Americans rather than Latinos/as, making it important to distinguish between Latin American and Latinos/as. My understanding has been the same as that of Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Mariela Paez, who suggest in Latinos Remaking America that Latinos are “made in the U.S.A.” However, “Latino/a” is no longer only a U.S. identity, as this recent experience revealed to me.

What research or leisure travel are you doing this summer? What is the Latino/a experience you have or are encountering in your travels? How are Latin@s seen and understood where you are?

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty of Ohio State University and is a Co-Moderator of Mujeres Talk.

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. 

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.

Glee and Chiquita-fication

March 5, 2012

by Theresa Delgadillo

The February 7, 2012, episode of Glee, titled “The Spanish Teacher” features Ricky Martin in a guest appearance as David Martinez, who, as a Latino teacher of Spanish, becomes a rival to Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) for both the affections of the Glee students and a tenured spot on the teaching staff. The episode opens with Mr. Schuester recognizing that his annual rendition of “La Cucaracha” on “Taco Tuesday” has been an embarrassingly tired class lesson. Alerted by the principal that a tenured teaching spot is opening up yet facing complaints over his glaring inabilities in teaching Spanish, Mr. Schuester tries to quickly improve his chances by taking Martinez’s Spanish class in night school, and recruiting Mr. Martinez to assist him in teaching the kids Spanish through Glee Club.

The students quickly become enamored of Mr. Martinez’s language teaching skills and knowledge of Latina/o popular culture, and they demonstrate this learning in bilingual performances of Gloria Estefan’s “Si Voy A Perderte (Don’t Wanna Lose You)” and a mash-up of the Gipsy Kings “Bamboleo” and Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero.” Student Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) calls attention to the contrast between, on the one hand, Martinez’s sophistication and savvy about Latina/o culture and language and, on the other hand, Will Schuester’s hackneyed, stereotypical representations of Latinas/os and Latina/o culture in his Spanish classroom. Santana engineers a showdown by challenging Mr. Schuester to defend his Spanish teacher honor in performance, and he accepts Santana’s challenge to produce a Glee Club number that demonstrates his competence, “coolness” and masculinity. In the Spanish teacher showdown, Santana joins Ricky Martin as Mr. Martinez in Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita,” a performance that seems to call into question the heteronormativity of the song given the sexuality of both fictional character and actual performer. Schuester does a Mariachi inflected performance of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” in Spanish, wearing a full matador costume. Santana’s role in this episode is interesting. Her anonymous complaint, though it eventually leads to the right spot for everyone involved, is taken by Schuester as a betrayal, and in a concurrent storyline in the episode Coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) also accuses Santana of betrayal on the false assumption that it was Santana who complained about Sue’s teaching. The notion of Santana as Malinche is upended, however, when both Will and Sue are shown to have been wrong about Santana. The episode thereby heightens its focus on a Latina/o student making an apt critique that hints at unspoken levels of discrimination, as it plays with notions of masculinity and norms governing gender and sexuality.

Jeremy Wetzel, who writes regularly on Glee, addressed the characterization of Schuester as incompetent, taking seriously the fictional show’s setting in Ohio: “However, such hiring practices have not been realistic in Ohio, or almost any other state, in quite some time. There is no way that Will would be hired to teach a foreign language without majoring in it in college and passing tests. The educational process in Ohio is pretty strict and he could not teach a subject he knows nothing about. As such, the entire episode is completely ridiculous.” (Jeremy Wetzel’s TV Review of Glee episode “The Spanish Teacher” on Gleekonomics web site, February 8, 2012). Wetzel overlooks the real issue in the episode, which Santana highlights when she tells Schuester: “you don’t even know enough to be embarrassed about these stereotypes that you’re perpetuating.” The issue is language but it’s also cultural competence when Latina/o students are in the classroom (or in our increasingly Latina/o future, as Mr. Martinez notes in his first lesson). Santana objects to what scholar Ana Celia Zentella calls the chiquita-fication of language. In this way “The Spanish Teacher” seems relevant to the recent ban on Ethnic Studies courses in Arizona K-12 education and the Tucson Unified School District’s banning of books by renowned Chicana/o, Latina/o and Native American authors. Could this be a pro-ethnic studies twist? Or is it about evaluations of teaching? What work is popular culture doing here?

Santana’s critique of Will Schuester is one that students in Arizona are now leveling: you don’t know our history here, our cultures, our languages, our literatures. Santana asks to be taken seriously as a Latina/o student in her school and asks that Latina/o studies be taken seriously. In the end, Schuester gets it, ceding his post to Mr. Martinez who he recognizes as the real expert (this is fictional, folks) and taking up teaching in his true passion – history (hmmm, what’s the subtext there?), while fiancée Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays) is awarded the tenured spot for her steady and dedicated work in health education (which Schuester previously derided as silly and gimmicky). A happy ending even for Latinas/os in this fictional Ohio school.

Theresa Delgadillo is Mujeres Talk Moderator. She is on the faculty of Ohio State University.

Comments:

  1. Between The Binaries  March 5, 2012 at 9:52 PM

    Brilliant! I had seen the preview for that episode but missed it when it aired. Can’t wait to catch up now ;D

  2. Anonymous  March 6, 2012 at 8:14 PM

    love it! i’ll be passing it on. thanks! :-)))))
    Francisca James Hernández, Ph.D.

  3. Anonymous  March 6, 2012 at 8:17 PM

    FROM: Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Associate Professor, Seattle University
    Love your piece Theresa, right on in your criticism. I know that in reality high school teachers need to be credentialed in their area in which they teach, however, I have seen this type of thing happen, where someone in Social Studies is given a couple of (leftover) classes in Spanish, that is, that language classes oftentimes are put in the category of PE classes, also wrong, but yet it is done, administrators feel that anybody can teach those classes.

    What was unrealistic about the episode is that if you have followed Glee all along you have seen a competent Spanish teacher in Will Schuester, and all of a sudden he does not know anything in Spanish. Also the torero outfit, is a bit much, yet I like what they have done by empowering Santana, but she also comes short in her Spanish, which is not addressed at all. Many of my Latina/o students are always complaining that people assume they speak Spanish because they are Latinas/os, which is not of course automatic, as we all know, that stereotype is perpetuated in the piece. It has it’s faults, but yet I find this type of pop culture program addressing these types of issues, and introducing these discussions to the mainstream viewer are absolutely timely. Thank you Theresa!!!!

  4. Anonymous  March 7, 2012 at 1:17 PM

    FROM: Jordan Kelsey, student at OSU
    Dear Dr. Gutierrez y Muhs, I agree that the episode does address these issues, but I think that it perpetuates just as many stereotypes as it seeks to discredit. In Theresa’s class we watched a documentary called The Bronze Screen. The film followed Latina/o depiction in American film from the early 20th Century on. One thing that the film discussed was the recurring patterns of Latina/o personas in film (the greaser, the Latin lover, etc…). This episode (perhaps unknowingly) contributes to that pattern in their depictions of Santana y Señor Martinez. The hypersexualized Latina/o appears throughout the film. The writers also make it a point to announce that Señor Martinez’s parents were undocumented immigrants. The way in which they do so seems very unnecessary and unrelated to any of the main concerns of the episode. It’s little things like this that perpetuate stereotypes in the episode.
In class we also discussed an article by Luis C. Moll and Richard Ruiz that talked briefly about the underrepresentation of Latina/o students in comparison to faculty demographics in public school systems. Although the authors were specifically talking about school in LA County with an overwhelming Latina/o majority, this episode speaks to the issue with the (in this episode at least) incompetent depiction of Will Schuester.

  5. Mujeres Talk Moderator  March 22, 2012 at 7:59 AM

    Thanks all for your comments! Gabriella, I’m glad that you noted that Will Schuester has not been portrayed as falling short in his teaching earlier in series, which adds the question of why now. I thought Santana’s singing in Spanish showed that it was not her first language but that she was bilingual, which tempered the stereotype for me a little. Jordan, I’m not sure I agree. In the episode, people are falling all over Mr. Martinez, but he isn’t acting that way, except for the performance of LMFAO song, which highlights the fact that it is a performance! I like the connection you make to Luis C. Moll’s and Richard Ruiz’s work — because the episode seems also about valuing the cultural resources of a community. Thanks all!