Cindy Cruz

Last updated

Cindy Cruz is an urban ethnographer and educational researcher. She is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona. She is also a member of the National Association of Chicana/o Studies, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Anthropological Association. Her research looks at the embodied practices of resistance in homeless LGBT youth communities, violence and youth, problems in testimonio methods, and the school-to-prison pipeline. She is also interested in decolonial feminist theory, community-based learning, race and schooling, and U.S. Third World feminism.

Contents

Education

Cindy Cruz received her bachelor's degree in literature at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She attained her master's degree and Ph.D. in education in 2006 at the University of California, Los Angeles. [1] [ non-primary source needed ]

Work

Cruz's work focuses on the embodied practices of resistance that queer youth of color utilize. She outlines the forms of new identities that are emerging among lesbian and gay youth of color through practices and praxical thinking that are grounded in the writing and theorizing of women of color.

Cruz developed the concept of an "epistemology of a brown body" which acknowledges the multiple and often oppositional intersections of sociopolitical locations that the brown body appropriates and negotiates. "For the educational researcher, understanding the brown body and the regulation of its movements is fundamental in the reclamation of narrative and the development of radical projects of transformation and liberation." [2] In her article "Toward an Epistemology of a Brown Body" [2] she focuses her writing on her experiences as a Chicana lesbian.

"I had always thought that among my endless number of relatives I had the only queer story to tell. No matter about the one in ten statistic for lesbians and gay men (homosexuals make up at least 10 percent of the population), I could not even imagine there was another lesbiana in our family until the day of my grandmother's funeral." [2]

Awards

Cruz's article "LGBTQ Street Youth Talk Back: A Meditation on Resistance and Witnessing" received Article of the Year from the American Educational Research Association and the Antonia I. Casteneda Prize from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies in 2012. [3] [ citation needed ]

Activism

In 2012, Cruz signed a letter in support of a student protest at the University of California Santa Cruz. [4] Cruz also wrote a UCSC Faculty Letter of Solidarity in support of the UCSC General Assembly. [5]

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicano</span> Ethnic identity of some Mexican Americans

Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans that emerged from the Chicano Movement. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Teresa de Lauretis</span> Italian academic (born 1938)

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lesbian feminism</span> Feminist movement

Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cherríe Moraga</span> American writer and activist (born 1952)

Cherríe Moraga is a Xicana 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 since 2017, and in 2022 became a distinguished professor. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena, which is network fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights. In 2017, she co-founded, with Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice, located on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Anzaldúa</span> American feminist scholar (1942–2004)

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicana feminism</span> Sociopolitical movement

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicano studies</span> Scholarly field

Chicano studies, also known as Chicano/a studies, Chican@ studies, or Xicano studies originates from the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and is the study of the Chicano and Latino experience. Chicano studies draws upon a variety of fields, including history, sociology, the arts, and Chicano literature. The area of studies additionally emphasizes the importance of Chicano educational materials taught by Chicano educators for Chicano students.

Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as "Laura" – a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism" for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.

Chela Sandoval, associate professor of Chicana Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, is a noted theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism. Beginning with her 1991 pioneering essay 'U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World', Sandoval emerged as a significant voice for women of color and decolonial feminism.

Yvonna Sessions Lincoln is an American methodologist and higher-education scholar. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Lincoln holds the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.

Tara J. Yosso is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Yosso's research and teaching apply the frameworks of critical race theory and critical media literacy to examine educational access and opportunity. Specifically, Yosso is interested in understanding how communities of color have historically utilized an array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and networks to overcome structural discrimination and pursue educational equality. She has authored numerous collaborative and interdisciplinary chapters and articles, publishing in venues such as the Harvard Educational Review,International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,Journal of Popular Film and Television and The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities. She has been awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Diversity and Excellence in University Teaching and honored with a Derrick Bell Legacy Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association.

Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was a student Chicana feminist newspaper founded in 1971 by Anna Nieto-Gómez and Adelaida Castillo while both were students at California State University, Long Beach.

Carla (Mari) Trujillo is an American fiction writer, noted for her first novel What Night Brings, about the cultural contradictions of a Chicana lesbian growing up in a Catholic home. She is an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught courses in Women's Studies.

Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella's career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella's research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.

Eve Tuck is an Unangax̂ scholar in the field of Indigenous studies and educational research. Tuck is the Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Dr. Tuck will be joining the faculty of NYU in 2024 as the founding director of their Center for Indigenous Studies.

The Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz constitutes one of the oldest departments of gender and sexuality studies in the world. It was founded as a women's studies department in 1974. It is considered among the most influential departments in feminist studies, post-structuralism, and feminist political theory. In addition to its age and reputation, the department is significant for its numerous notable faculty, graduates, and students.

Michelle Melody Fine is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York and has her training in Social and Personality Psychology, Environmental Psychology, American Studies, and Urban Education. Her research includes the topics of social injustice and resistance and urban education. Fine is also an author and has written several works, one of her most known being Muslim American Youth (2008).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicana art</span>

Chicana art emerged as part of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s. It used art to express political and social resistance through different art mediums. Chicana artists explore and interrogate traditional Mexican-American values and embody feminist themes through different mediums such as murals, painting, and photography. The momentum created from the Chicano Movement spurred a Chicano Renaissance among Chicanas and Chicanos. Artists voiced their concerns about oppression and empowerment in all areas of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Chicana feminist artists and Anglo-feminist took a different approach in the way they collaborated and made their work during the 1970s. Chicana feminist artists utilized artistic collaborations and collectives that included men, while Anglo-feminist artists generally utilized women-only participants. Art has been used as a cultural reclamation process for Chicana and Chicano artists allowing them to be proud of their roots by combining art styles to illustrate their multi-cultured lives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Romero</span> American sociologist

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Daniel G. Solórzano is an American educator and researcher, known for his work in critical race theory, racial microaggressions, microaffirmations, and critical spatial analysis. Dr. Solorzano has authored more than 100 research articles, book chapters, and books on issues related to educational access and equity for underrepresented student populations and communities in the United States. His work and research as interdisciplinary scholar are ongoing and considered highly influential, with over 12,500 citations and counting.

References

  1. "Resume" (PDF). ccrec.ucsc.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-04-29. Retrieved 2018-05-04.
  2. 1 2 3 Cruz, Cindy (2001). "Toward an epistemology of a brown body". International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 14 (5): 657–669. doi:10.1080/09518390110059874.
  3. "Congratulations Cindy Cruz". Ccrec.ucsc.edu. Archived from the original on 2012-12-15. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
  4. "UCSC professors defend student strikers! « occupy california". Occupyca.wordpress.com. 2010-03-10. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
  5. "Lithium Hosting - Account Suspended". March1strikeucsc.org. Retrieved 2012-06-29.[ permanent dead link ]