Demetria Martinez | |
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Born | July 10, 1960 |
Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Education | Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (BA) |
Demetria Martinez (born July 10, 1960) is an American activist, poet, and novelist. [1] [2]
She was born on July 10, 1960, where she was raised by her grandmother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is a graduate of Princeton University with BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. [1]
In 1988, Martinez was charged with conspiracy for allegedly transporting two Salvadoran women refugees into the United States; [3] she was working as a freelance reporter covering religion and the Sanctuary Movement at the time. [4] She was later acquitted of the charges. [3] [5] During the trial, prosecutors used Martinez's poem "Nativity, For Two Salvadoran Women" in an attempt to build a case against her, a decision Martinez has called a "major error." [6]
Martinez worked as a religion reporter for the Albuquerque Journal in August 1986. [7]
She has been an editor for the National Catholic Review in Tucson, Arizona, since 1990, [1] and teaches in the annual William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston.[ citation needed ]
Martinez has been associated with the Sanctuary Movement and with Enlace Comunitario, an Albuquerque-based organization that serves immigrant families experiencing domestic violence. [8]
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.
Ana Castillo is a Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Considered one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, Castillo is most known for her experimental style as a Latina novelist and for her intervention in Chicana feminism known as Xicanisma.
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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.
Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia, better known by his nom de plume Alurista, is an American poet and activist. His work was influential in the Chicano Movement and is important to the field of Chicano poetry.
Chicano poetry is a subgenre of Chicano literature that stems from the cultural consciousness developed in the Chicano Movement. Chicano poetry has its roots in the reclamation of Chicana/o as an identity of empowerment rather than denigration. As a literary field, Chicano poetry emerged in the 1960s and formed its own independent literary current and voice.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
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Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez was an American Chicana feminist and a long-time community organizer, activist, author, and educator. She wrote numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas. Her best-known work is the bilingual 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures, which later formed the basis for the educational video ¡Viva la Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History. Her work was hailed by Angela Y. Davis as comprising "one of the most important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporary era ... [Martínez is] inimitable ... irrepressible ... indefatigable."
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Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Lucha Corpi is a Chicana poet and mystery writer. She was born on April 13, 1945, in Jaltipan, Veracruz, Mexico. In 1975 she earned a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1979 she earned a M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. Corpi's most important contribution to Chicano literature, a series of four poems called "The Marina Poems", appeared in the anthology The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation, which was published by W. W. Norton & Company, in 1976 (ISBN 9780393044218).
Margarita Cota-Cárdenas is an American poet and author. A voice for Chicano literature, Cota-Cárdenas is known for her 1985 novella Puppet: A Chicano Novella and her works of poetry. She is a professor emerita of Spanish at Arizona State University.
Olga Ramos Peña is an American political organizer and activist from San Antonio, Texas. She was one of the first Mexican Americans to join the Democratic Women's Club and recruited other women from the Hispanic and African American communities to join the Club. She also served as campaign manager for her husband Albert Peña, Jr. who was elected Bexar County Commissioner.
Deborah Martinez-Martinez is CEO of the publisher Vanishing Horizons and is an author who explores the history of the Southwestern United States. She worked in higher education admissions and recruitment for 20 years and advocates for more Chicanas in education.
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Alma R. Gómez (1957) is a painter and art professor at Boise State University.