Beyond Borderlands/La Frontera: The Legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa

The Latinx Research Center of UC Berkeley and Aunt Lute Books presents “Beyond Borderlands/La Frontera: The Legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa," an inspiring evening dedicated to celebrating the impact of Gloria Anzaldúa—a Chicana, lesbian, activist, and writer whose legacy continues to resonate with readers, writers, and scholars alike. Please join us on Thursday, September 26, 2024 at 6 pm, on what would be Gloria's 82nd birthday, for a rich tapestry of activities, including a poetry reading inspired by Anzaldúa’s life and work, a panel discussion featuring Anzalduan scholar Analouise Keating, chicanx author and poet ire’ne lara silva, and up-and-coming scholar Eileen Chung, and an altar installation honoring Anzaldúa’s memory by renowned artists Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes. This event will be free and open to all.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

AnaLouise Keating, professor of Multicultural Women’s & Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book); Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues; Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change; and The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook. Keating worked closely with Anzaldúa for over a decade. Keating co-edited, with Anzaldúa, this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation; and edited Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality; The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader; Interviews/Entrevistas; and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa (Palgrave MacMillan).

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections: furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers; two chapbooks: Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos; and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Most recently, ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine. Her first comic book, VENDAVAL, was released by the Chispa Imprint of Scout Comics in July 2024. Her second short story collection, the light of your body, will be published by Arte Publico Press in Spring 2025. http://www.irenelarasilva.wordpress.com 

Eileen Chung is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at TWU. She received degrees in Asian American Studies and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she nurtured an early passion for Asian American mental health. Desiring to provide culturally responsive mental health services, Eileen then pursued a Master of Social Work from the University of Pittsburgh. After the surge in anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Atlanta Spa Shootings being especially catalyzing, Eileen pivoted back to academia to pursue a Ph.D. in the hopes of enacting social change through interdisciplinary scholarship and inclusive pedagogy. Eileen’s current dissertation project examines how Asian American women dynamically resist the emotional, mental, and ontological impact of fetishization through Gloria E. Anzaldúa's theory-praxis of spiritual activism. By centering Asian American feminist perspectives, Eileen hopes to reinforce the agency Asian American women possess through a dialogic, empowering research process. Ultimately, she envisions this project as tessellating into broader coalitional women-of-colors solidarity movements, while creating transdisciplinary junctures between Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies and Asian American Studies.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Laura Elisa Pérez is professor in the Program of Chicanx Latinx Studies and the Department of Ethnic Studies, and since 2018-19, is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas Latinx Research Center, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and of the Department of Women’s Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Pérez received her Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation focused on the multiple cultural and ideological practices of the literary avant-garde of Nicaragua of the 1920s and 30s. She received her BA/MA Joint Degree from the University of Chicago, with a Master’s Thesis focused on the Spanish Civil war aesthetics and politics of the poets, Chilean, Pablo Neruda and Peruvian, César Vallejo. Her research and teaching focuses on Chicanx and Latinx feminist and queer literary, visual cultural, and performance art, and on US women of color thought. Pérez curated UC Berkeley’s first Latina/o Performance Art series, co-curated Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas in 2009, at 516 Arts Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, and curated Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now at the Richmond Arts Center, CA in 2011. Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), a work in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities. Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial was published by Duke University Press in the fall of 2019 and received a Book Award Honorable mention from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies in 2020. She is co-editor with Dr. Ann Marie Leimer of the forthcoming “Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision,” to be published by Duke University Press (June 2022), and which was awarded the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publishing Grant. Her work was most recently published in Theories of the Flesh. Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance, ed. By Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and José Medina (Oxford University, Studies in Feminist Philosophy, 2020), MeXicana Fashions. Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction, ed. By Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú (University of Texas Press 2020), and Voices from the Ancestors. Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, ed. by Lara Medina and Martha R. Gonzales (University of Arizona Press 2019). She is currently co-curating with María Esther Fernández a major retrospective of the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive which will open spring of 2023, and editing the exhibition catalog for “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory.” Pérez is part of the Decolonial Knowledges and Pluriversal University research initiative at the Latinx Research Center, which is placing in dialogue the philosophical thought of hemispheric Latinx Indigenous and Afrodiasporic traditional cultures with those of the modern westernized world.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Melanie Cervantes (Xicanx) has never lived far from the California Coast. Born in Harbor City, California and raised in a small city in the South Bay of Los Angeles Melanie now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area where she creates visual art that is inspired by the people around her and her communities’ desire for radical social transformation. Melanie’s intention is to create a visual lexicon of resistance to multiple oppressions that will to inspire curiosity, raise consciousness and inspire solidarities among communities of struggle. In 2007 she co-founded Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects that are grounded in Third World and indigenous movements that build people’s power to transform the conditions of fragmentation, displacement and loss of culture that result from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, genocide, and exploitation. and Dignidad Rebelde’s purpose is to illustrate stories of struggle, resistance and triumph into artwork that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it. Melanie has exhibited extensively nationally including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago); and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and internationally at the Musée d’Aquitaine (Bordeaux, France), Galerija Alkatraz (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico City, Mexico). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the Latin American Collection of the Green Library at Stanford, the Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College and the Library of Congress and the as well as various other public and private collections throughout the U.S. Cervantes is the inaugural recipient of the two-year Art In Resistance Fellowship (2019-2020), as well as being recognized as Dignidad Rebelde with The Piri Thomas & Suzie Dodd Cultural Activist Award from Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (2016), Community Award, National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (2015), the NALAC Fund for the Arts(2012) and the Exemplary Leadership award from San Francisco State University (2010)

She holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA in Social Practice and a Masters in Visual Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. He holds a BA in Raza Studies from San Francisco State University. He is a co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects and a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative a decentralized group of political artists based in Canada, the United States and Mexico. His work has been exhibited at the Galeria de la Raza, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF MOMA and the Smithsonian. From 2003-2010 he was a partner at Tumis design studio where he worked as web developer, graphic designer and project manager. In 2003 he was a co-founder of the screen-printing studio Taller Tupac Amaru that produced political posters and fine art prints. He is currently a lecturer in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley. Barraza has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. Printmaking allows Barraza to produce relevant images that can be put back into the hands of his community and spread throughout the world. He believes that through this work and the work of Dignidad Rebelde, he plays a role in keeping the history of graphic art activism alive. His work is work is in the following collections: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; CEMA at UC Santa Barbara Library; Green Library, Stanford University; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; McNay Art Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Native Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum.

COSPONSORS

Cosponsored by UC Berkeley's English department, Chicanx/Latinx Studies Department, Ethnic Studies Department, Art Practice Department, Decolonial Knowledges Group, Gender and Women's Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and the Comparative Literature Department.