Alisa Valdes | |
|---|---|
 Valdes in Mexico, August 2013 | |
| Born | February 28, 1969 Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, journalist |
| Genre | Women's commercial fiction / Chick lit; young adult |
| Spouse | Patrick Rodriguez (m. 1998;div. 2005) |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | |
| alisavaldes | |
Alisa Valdes (born 1969 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American author, journalist, and film producer, known for her bestselling novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club .
Valdes was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [1] Her father, Nelson Valdés, is a retired sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and emigrated from Cuba in the early 1960s. [2] Her mother, Maxine Conant, is a seventh-generation New Mexican of mixed heritage, including Spanish, Mexican, Portuguese Jewish, Puebloan, and Irish ancestry, [3] and is a descendant of Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Massachusetts, and Vermont revolutionary Ethan Allen. [4] [ citation needed ]
Valdes spent her childhood primarily in New Mexico, but also lived briefly in Glasgow, Scotland and New Orleans. Upon her graduation from Del Norte High School in Albuquerque she attended Berklee College of Music in Boston where she majored in jazz performance on the tenor saxophone. [5]
While a student at Berklee, Valdes began writing freelance music reviews for The Boston Globe . After graduating from Berklee in 1992, she took an unpaid internship at the Village Voice , before going back to school to earn a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1994. [5]
Valdes joined the staff of The Boston Globe in 1994, where she wrote for the Living/Arts section. Her essay for The Boston Globe Magazine, "Daughter of Cuba," won first place in the 1998 SUNMAG essay contest. [6] In 1999, Valdes left Boston for a position as staff writer in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times . Her articles have appeared in dozens of newspapers, and she has written cover stories for Glamour and Redbook . [7]
Valdes continues to work in journalism, writing a weekly parenting column for the website "Mamiverse", [8] an opinion piece for NBC Latino, [9] a travel piece for London newspaper The Guardian, [10] and contributing posts for The Huffington Post Books section. [11]
Her first novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, was purchased by St. Martin's Press a little more than a year after she left the Los Angeles Times. She was paid an advance of $475,000 after five publishing houses bid for the manuscript. [12] [13] In a profile of the writer, entitled "The Latina Terry McMillan?", Chicago Tribune reporter Patrick T. Reardon wrote: "What made [the book] especially hot was the belief among publishers that Valdes-Rodriguez could be the long-sought 'Latina Terry McMillan' -- a writer whose work would jump-start Hispanic book buying in the U.S. and create a new profitable publishing niche..." The Dirty Girls Social Club garnered media attention and went on to become a New York Times bestseller and a Booksense 76 top pick. [14]
Valdes has since written twelve novels: Playing With Boys in 2004; Make Him Look Good in 2006; a young adult novel, Haters , in 2006; Dirty Girls on Top, a sequel to The Dirty Girls Social Club, in 2008, The Husband Habit in 2009, and The Three Kings in 2010, All That Glitters in 2011, Lauren's Saints of Dirty Faith in 2011, The Temptation in 2012, Puta in 2013, The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil in 2013, and the short romance ebooks Billy, the Man; A Better Love Than Husband, and Forgive Me My Sins, all in 2013.
Valdes wrote a memoir, The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story, published in 2013. The book detailed her relationship with a conservative ranch hand and how it led her to rethink some of her feminist beliefs. After its publication, Valdes alleged that the relationship was abusive. [15] [16]
In 2005, Time dubbed Valdes "The Godmother of Chica Lit" and named her one of the 25 most influential Hispanics in the United States. Hispanic Business Magazine has twice named her among the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in America. In 2006, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus awarded Valdes with a Latina Leadership award, and she participated in the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress. She also received the Theatre of Hearts "Youth First" award in Los Angeles in 2004. [17]
Before its publication in 2003, the film rights to The Dirty Girls Social Club were optioned by Columbia Pictures with Jennifer Lopez and Laura Ziskin as producers, [2] but the option expired without going into production. The Lifetime Television network then began to develop the book as a television series. The project did not progress beyond development. Valdes next partnered with Nely Galán's Cienfuegos Films company, to make an independent film based upon the novel, with Valdes, Galán and Debra Martin Chase as executive producers and Valdes as creator and screenwriter, but the deal never came to pass. [18]
Ann Lopez, ex-wife of comedian George Lopez, optioned The Dirty Girls Social Club in 2009. NBC was developing the novel with Lopez and her company Encanto Productions for the 2011-2012 television season. [19] In December 2010, Valdes publicly accused Ann Lopez and screenplay writer Luisa Leschin of racism and homophobia after reading a draft of their proposed pilot script. [20] She later retracted some of her statements about Lopez and Leschin, while maintaining her displeasure with the script. [21] NBC ultimately did not order a pilot of The Dirty Girls Social Club . [22]
Valdes formed her own production company, Valdes Entertainment Enterprises VeeFilms.com is for sale, in 2013 to develop The Dirty Girls Social Club for film. Valdes teamed up with television producers MarVista Entertainment to help produce the film. [23]
Jennifer Lynn Affleck, known by her maiden name and also shortened to J.Lo, is an American actress, dancer and singer. In 1991, she began appearing as a Fly Girl dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color, where she remained a regular until she decided to pursue an acting career in 1993. For her first leading role in Selena (1997), she became the first Hispanic actress to earn over US$1 million for a film. She went on to star in Anaconda (1997) and Out of Sight (1998), and established herself as the highest-paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood.
Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, known mononymously as Selena, was an American Tejano singer. Referred to as the "Queen of Tejano Music", her contributions to music and fashion made her one of the most celebrated Mexican-American entertainers of the late 20th century. In 2020, Billboard magazine put her in third place on their list of "Greatest Latino Artists of All Time", based on both Latin albums and Latin songs chart. Media outlets called her the "Tejano Madonna" for her clothing choices. She also ranks among the most influential Latin artists of all time and is credited for catapulting the Tejano genre into the mainstream market.
Rita Moreno is a Puerto Rican actress, dancer, and singer. She is noted for her work on stage and screen in a career spanning over seven decades. Moreno is one of the last remaining stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Among her numerous accolades, she is one of a few performers to have been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony (EGOT) and the Triple Crown of Acting, with individual competitive Academy, Emmy, and Tony awards. Additional accolades include the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, the National Medal of Arts in 2009, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2013, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2015, and a Peabody Award in 2019.
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena, which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
Real Women Have Curves is a 2002 American comedy-drama film directed by Patricia Cardoso, based on the play of the same name by Josefina López, who co-authored the screenplay for the film with George LaVoo. The film stars America Ferrera as protagonist Ana García. It gained fame after winning the Audience Award for best dramatic film, and the Special Jury Prize for acting in the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. The film went on to receive the Youth Jury Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, the Humanitas Prize, the Imagen Award, and Special Recognition by the National Board of Review. According to the Sundance Institute, the film gives a voice to young women who are struggling to love themselves and find respect in the United States.
The House on Mango Street is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Based in part on Cisneros's own experience, the novel follows Esperanza over the span of one year in her life, as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community. Elements of the Mexican-American culture and themes of social class, race, sexuality, identity, and gender are interwoven throughout the novel.
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor, known professionally as Elena Poniatowska, is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she wrote about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. Due to her left wing views, she has been nicknamed "the Red Princess". She is considered to be "Mexico's grande dame of letters" and is still an active writer.
Marianismo is a Spanish American term that describes an ideal of true femininity with characteristics derived from the devotional cult of St. Mary of Guadalupe, a central figure of Roman Catholicism in Mexico. It defines standards for the female gender role in Hispanic American folk cultures, and is strictly intertwined with machismo and Roman Catholicism.
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement, theory, and praxis that scrutinizes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections impacting Chicanas and the Chicana/o community in the United States. Chicana feminism empowers women to challenge institutionalized social norms and regards anyone a feminist who fights for the end of women's oppression in the community.
Haters is the 2006 debut young adult novel by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.
Mexican American literature is literature written by Mexican Americans in the United States. Although its origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, the bulk of Mexican American literature dates from post-1848 and the United States annexation of large parts of Mexico in the wake of the Mexican–American War. Today, as a part of American literature in general, this genre includes a vibrant and diverse set of narratives, prompting critics to describe it as providing "a new awareness of the historical and cultural independence of both northern and southern American hemispheres". Chicano literature is an aspect of Mexican American literature.
Latinidad is a Spanish-language term that refers to the various attributes shared by Latin American people and their descendants without reducing those similarities to any single essential trait. It was first adopted within US Latino studies by the sociologist Felix Padilla in his 1985 study of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and has since been used by a wide range of scholars as a way to speak of Latino communities and cultural practices outside a strictly Latin American context. As a social construct, latinidad references "a particular geopolitical experience but it also contains within it the complexities and contradictions of immigration, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, color, legal status, class, nation, language and the politics of location." As a theoretical concept latinidad is a useful way to discuss amalgamations of Latin American cultures and communities outside of any singular national frame. Latinidad also names the result of forging a shared cultural identity out of disparate elements in order to wield political and social power through pan-Latino solidarity. Rather than be defined as any singular phenomenon, understandings of Latinidad are contingent on place-specific social relations.
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The Dirty Girls Social Club is a 2003 novel by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. Valdes-Rodriguez later wrote a sequel titled Dirty Girls on Top, which was published in 2008. The book is also credited with launching a new movement in Chicano literature and inspiring a series of "chick lit" novels about Latina women dubbed "Chica lit."
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Chicana art as a specific genre emerged as part of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and used art to express political and social resistance. Through different art mediums both past and contemporary, Chicana artists explore and interrogate traditional Mexican-American values and embody feminist themes through different mediums including murals, painting, photography, and more. The momentum created from the Chicano Movement spurred a Chicano Renaissance among Chicanas and Chicanos. Political art was created by poets, writers, playwrights, and artists and used to defend against their oppression and societal marginalization. During the 1970s, Chicana feminist artists differed from their Anglo-feminist counterparts in the way they collaborated. Chicana feminist artists often utilized artistic collaborations and collectives that included men, while Anglo-feminist artists generally utilized women-only participants.
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