Exhibit Details
On View August 28 - December 9, 2019
UT Poetry Center, PCL 2.500
Perry-Castañeda Library
The UT Poetry Center at the PCL has a new exhibit up for the fall semester! This exhibit, entitled “Women of the Texas Mexican Earth” features the works of Tejana poets and is meant to honor the great literary contributions of these Texas-Mexican mujeres. In the context of this exhibit, “Tejana” refers to a woman of Mexican descent who was either born and raised in Texas, or was born elsewhere and eventually came to know Texas (even for a little while) as her home.
Poets like Carmen Tafolla, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Celeste Guzman Mendoza, and Ariana Brown were born and raised in San Antonio, while poets Liliana Valenzuela, Sandra Cisneros, and Angela De Hoyos are “adopted” Tejanas, and have lived in both the U.S. and Mexico. As Tejana scholars, Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú proposed “the reach of Tejas,” or Tejana cultural work, extends far beyond the South region of Texas, into Austin, San Antonio, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and to “wherever there are Tejanas.”
The title of this exhibition comes from Inés Hernández-Ávila’s introductory essay to Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art, an anthology that was instrumental to this project’s conceptualization.
Curated by Julia Coppedge, student in the School of Information and Graduate Research Assistant at the Benson Latin American Collection Library.
Poster artwork by Isabel Ann Castro, @queenoftacostx
Borderlands - La Frontera, 2nd edition by
Experimental, inventive, provocative and above all visionary, Gloria Anzaldua's work is widely recognized among scholars of Chicano/Latino, Gay and Lesbian, Women's, Postcolonial, Ethnic and Cultural Studies as a foundational elaboration of the politics and poetics of cultural hybridity. Both Borderlands/La Frontera and Making Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras are all about understanding the complex and competing social, political and cultural forces that shape-sometimes quite brutally-the experiences of women of color in the U.S., and they are all about taking that understanding and mobilizing it toward creative and revisionary efforts for making social change. "One of the 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century"-Hungry Mind Review (Spring 1999) "Anzaldua's voyage of discovery, focused on the border and the new mestiza, is a preparation for the future. The border is a bundle of contradictions and ambiguities... This hybrid crossroads is just the right kind of training ground. It is fertile area for mutations and transformations. In Borderlands/ La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua is our guide with an all-encompassing vision to charge the border with meaning."-The Americas Review "[She] explores in prose and poetry the murky, precarious existence of those living on the frontier between cultures and languages. . . .she meditates on the conditions of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. ...a powerful document."-Library Journal A "Best of 1987" Library Journal selection. "Anzaldua's vision encompasses spiritual and experiential aspects of female power, as well as the day-to-day courage and struggle that has characterized Chicano survival."-The San Francisco Chronicle
Volver, volver by 
Again for the First Time by
Originally published in 1984 to great acclaim, including being awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize, this stirring collection of poems pairs and often plays against the mythologies of the author's mixed Greek and Mexican heritage. A strong work of feminism, the pieces blend historical characters with contemporary settings and address issues that include San Antonio street life, racism, mass killings, and foreign wars.
A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying by
Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather's cancer. A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero's stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero's tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one's children, one's community in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.
Solstice by
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. At last! A new edition of Emmy Pérez's SOLSTICE expanded and with Spanish translations of selected poems, a book that set the highest standards for Chicana poets when first published in 2003, for its adroit mixture of lyricism and politics. "Emmy Pérez's poems are elegantly political, never polemical. They discover the beauty in revolution without romanticizing its hardships. From the first moment I encountered her poems, I knew I was meeting a singular voice; one that can find lyricism in struggle, dignity in injustice. Her voice sings of landscape and longing with deftness of image and diction. What a welcome debut." Allison Joseph "The new generation of Latina poets will be noted for the work of writers such as Emmy Pérez." Ray González
Curandera by
Featuring historic photos of the Chicano Movement in San Antonio and a new introduction, this is the 30th-anniversary edition of Carmen Tafolla's first solo poetry collection. Having filled a cultural and linguistic void in 1983, when it was first published, this compilation showcases the poet's creation of a literary language from the natural Spanish and English code-switching of the barrios of San Antonio. Banned in Arizona along with many other multicultural books, this work celebrates bilingual and bicultural diversity and the power of individual imagination while simultaneously examining social inequities. Many poems from this book have been widely anthologized throughout the past three decades.
Entre Guadalupe y Malinche by
Mexican and Mexican American women have written about Texas and their lives in the state since colonial times. Edited by fellow Tejanas Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche gathers, for the first time, a representative body of work about the lives and experiences of women who identify as Tejanas in both the literary and visual arts. The writings of more than fifty authors and the artwork of eight artists manifest the nuanced complexity of what it means to be Tejana and how this identity offers alternative perspectives to contemporary notions of Chicana identity, community, and culture. Considering Texas-Mexican women and their identity formations, subjectivities, and location on the longest border between Mexico and any of the southwestern states acknowledges the profound influence that land and history have on a people and a community, and how Tejana creative traditions have been shaped by historical, geographical, cultural, linguistic, social, and political forces. This representation of Tejana arts and letters brings together the work of rising stars along with well-known figures such as writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carmen Tafolla, and Pat Mora, and artists such as Carmen Lomas Garza, Kathy Vargas, Santa Barraza, and more. The collection attests to the rooted presence of the original indigenous peoples of the land now known as Tejas, as well as a strong Chicana/Mexicana feminism that has its precursors in Tejana history itself.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.
