Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios SYNOPSIS
Telling to Live embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their
differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic,
racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all
professional producers of testimonios-or life stories-whether as poets, oral historians,
literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women
have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience.
Reclaiming testimonio as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they
compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers.
Telling to Live unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to
an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the
cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the
echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of
sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of
this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican,
Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist
theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest
those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex
cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.
Contributors. Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcﾽn, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina
Benmayor, Norma E. Cantﾽ, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguﾽn Cuﾽdraz, Liza Fiol-Matta,
Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Inﾽs Hernﾽndez-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia
Lﾽpez, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
For a while in the late 1980s, it seemed as if all of Duke University's English Department had gone public with the complications and heartbreaks of the life of the star academic. After Duke's mainly white English Department finished telling their stories, the confessional narratives of academics have had a continued, and much more important, role as a genre where those marginalized by the academy for reasons of race or ethnicity tell about their complicated entry and then incorporation into the university system. In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, the 18 women of the Latina Feminist group, formed in 1993 and including Ruth Behar and Eliana Rivero, discuss immigrant and working class childhoods, developing a love of reading, an avoidance of K-12 teaching in order to partake of the larger promises of the (mostly literature-based) university positions. (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
"I write as much to discover as to explain," playwright Arthur Miller once declared. The same might be said for the authors of this groundbreaking anthology. Educators all, the 18 women whom the Latina Feminist Group comprises came together in 1993 to discuss their cultural and political identities. The group represents a diverse cross-section: lesbian, bisexual, celibate, and straight; working class and bourgeois; Christian, Jewish, and atheist; and of diverse national origins and skin colors. Its purpose was the exchange of testimonios, or what contributor Aurora Levins Morales calls "truth telling from personal knowledge." And what an array of truths they reveal. More than 60 essays, poems, and short stories explain how sexual harassment and violence stifle those who dream of educational and professional achievement; how anti-Semitism forces Jews of Spanish descent to feel uncomfortable owning their dual identities; and how ethnic prejudice collides with class indignities for low-income Tejanas, leaving them distrustful, depressed, and fearful. Throughout, sisterhood is celebrated, but not blindly. Competition between women is assailed, as is antifeminist backlash. Although the collection requires some knowledge of Spanish, it should be required reading for all women's studies, American studies, and American history students. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Telling to Live is a groundbreaking text-important in its outreach, inclusiveness, and
power-that expands, qualifies, complicates, and illuminates the ground of our discourse
the way the best texts do-through transformative narratives, stories, and poems that
resist the neat paradigms and -isms of our time. It is also a text that will fill an
alarming gap in the academy, where silence or simplification of Latina perspectives still
prevails.--Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents — Julia Alvarez
Twenty years after the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, this stunning
collection of writings by Latina feminists raises the stakes of collaboration across race,
class, nation, and sexuality. Telling to Live challenges prevailing research practices and
forges a model of deep collaboration for future generations of scholars.--Angela Y. Davis,
author of Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and
Billie Holiday — Angela Y. Davis
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