Presenters

Luis Valdez is a playwright, writer, and film director, who is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the U.S. His play, Zoot Suit, written in 1978, opened in Los Angeles, then moved to Broadway the following year. In 1981, the play was made into a film, which he directed. In Zoot Suit, Valdez weaves a story involving the real-life events of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, when a group of young Mexican Americans was wrongfully charged with murder, and the Zoot Suit Riots, which rocked Los Angeles in 1943. His breakthrough film was 1987's La Bamba, about Chicano rock-and-roller Ritchie Valens, who was popular in the 1950s; the film was a box-office success. Both Zoot Suit and La Bamba were nominated for Golden Globe Awards in the "Best Musical Picture" category. Born in 1940 to farm worker parents in California, Valdez wrote his first play as a student at San Jose State University, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1964. The following year, Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino, a farm workers' theater troupe, which inspired the Chicano theater movement. Valdez is a founding faculty member and director of the California State University, Monterey Bay in the teledramatic Arts and Technology Department. Besides Zoot Suit and La Bamba, Valdez's films (which he directed and wrote) include The Cisco Kid (1994), La Pastorela (1991), and Chicanos Story (1982). He received a George Peabody Award for excellence in television for 1987's Corridos: Tales of Passion & Revolution, and is a recipient of other awards in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Demetria Martínez is an award-winning author, activist, lecturer, and columnist. Her latest book of essays, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana won the 2006 International Latino Book Award for Best Biography. Her novel Mother Tongue won the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction and has been translated into five languages. For the past nineteen years, Martinez has written a column for the National Catholic Reporter, an independent, progressive newsweekly, where she worked as a staff and religion writer in the 1980s and early 1990s. Martinez has been anthologized in over two dozen books. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (where she now resides), in 1960, Martínez earned her BA from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Martínez teaches at the annual June writing workshop at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In New Mexico she is active with Enlace Comunitario, an immigrants' rights group that serves Spanish-speaking victims of domestic violence. Her two books of poetry are Breathing Between the Lines and The Devil's Workshop. She also serves as a creativity coach for clients around the country.

Sonia Nazario is a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 (along with more than a dozen other awards) for her multi-part series Enrique's Journey about a young Honduran boy who risked his life to travel alone to the United States to find his mother; Nazario spent four months re-creating the boy's harrowing experience. She expanded the series into a 2006 book of the same name, which is being adapted as a television miniseries by HBO. Nazario has also won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998. Her stories focus on controversial social issues like immigration, poverty, and drug addiction. Nazario joined the Times in 1993 after returning to school at the University of California, Berkeley--where she earned an MA in Latin American Studies--and a stint at the Wall Street Journal, where she worked as a reporter earlier in her career.

Paul Espinosa, professor of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University, is an internationally acclaimed producer, director, writer, and host of documentaries and dramas. Espinosa's credits, spanning over twenty-five years, focus on U.S.-Mexican border topics. His production credits include 2006's California and the American Dream (which he directed), examining how demographic changes are transforming California and the nation; The Border (which he wrote), about contemporary life on the U.S.-Mexican border; The U.S.-Mexican War: 1846-1848, commemorating the war's 150th anniversary; and ...and the earth did not swallow him, an American Playhouse adaptation of a novel about a year in the life of a young Mexican American boy and his migrant farmworker family. Espinosa also produced and wrote several documentaries for PBS's The American Experience including The Hunt for Pancho Villa, examining Villa's raid on the U.S. and the American expedition which pursued Villa in 1916, and Los Mineros (which he also wrote), the story of Mexican American copper miners' fifty-year struggle for justice in Arizona. Espinosa has a PhD from Stanford University. The California Chicano News Media Association has honored Espinosa with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has inducted him into the NAHJ Hall of Fame.

Norma Elia Cantú is a professor of English/Folklore at the University of Texas San Antonio and has published extensively in folklore and literary studies as well as poetry and fiction. Cantú is author of the award-winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera and Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, among many others. She has won numerous awards and grants, including the Americo Paredes Prize from the American Folklore Society in 2003 for the Smithsonian Institution's El Rio Project. She served as editor for the book series, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition and the book, Flor y Ciencia: Chicanas in Mathematics, Science and Engineering. Cantú co-edited two award-winning books, Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change and Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. She has just finished a novel, Cabañuelas and is currently working on another novel tentatively titled Champú, or Hair Matters. In addition, Cantú is working on an ethnography of the Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a religious dance drama from Laredo, Texas, and a collection of poetry. She has published and lectured widely on Chicana/o culture and traditions along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Cantú has been instrumental in the formation of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, a prominent Chicana feminist.

Rachel Rubin is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she specializes in twentieth-century cultural history and popular culture studies. She is co-author, most recently, of Immigration and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction. Rubin's scholarship has focused on issues surrounding migration and cultural production, and she has produced many essays and books that treat the multiple ways that immigrants (and internal migrants) use and get used by popular culture industries. From her first book, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, to more recent studies of country music, Appalachian poetics, performance artist El Vez, the graphic novels of Los Bros Hernandez, and the literary politics of Ann Petry, Rubin's interest focuses on the complicated intersections of aesthetics and politics that define the cultural work of popular American artists of the modern era. She also co-edited, in 2005, American Identities: An Introductory Textbook for students of American Studies.

Marta E. Sánchez, professor of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University, is the author of two books, including Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature, the first critical analysis of poetry by Chicanas, and many articles. Her latest book, "Shakin' Up" Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965-1995), uses an intercultural frame to study the historical and cultural connections among Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chicanos/as since the Civil Rights movement. From 1977 to 2004, she was a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught Chicano, Latin American, and U.S. Ethnic Literatures. At UCSD, she helped establish the Preuss Charter School (grades 6-12), aimed at addressing the low numbers of Latino and African American students in higher education, and also served on the school's Advisory Board from 2000-2004. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Sánchez was born and raised in East Los Angeles. She received her doctorate from the University of California, San Diego in Comparative Literature. At ASU, she serves on the Pathways to Success Council, charged with fostering the recruitment and retention of ASU's most talented underrepresented undergraduate students into graduate school.

Laura Isabel Serna is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University's Humanities Research Center. She received a PhD from Harvard University in 2006. Her dissertation, "We're Going Yankee: American Films, Mexican Nationalism, Transnational Cinema, 1917-1935" received the Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize from the American Studies Association and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award. Her publications include essays on nationalism and early cinema in Mexico and the history of cinema distribution and exhibition on the U.S.-Mexico border. She is currently finishing a book project based on her dissertation entitled Making Cinelandia: U.S. Film and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age: 1896-1936, that examines the formation of a transnational cinema audience in Mexico and Mexican immigrant communities. She is also working on a new project that examines the early history of Spanish language television in South Texas and its relationship to a transnational commercial culture. In addition to her scholarly work on audiences and cinema, she is on the advisory committee of the Film and Video Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and a writer with Houston's Writers in the Schools Program. She has traveled widely but considers Southern California, where most of her family still lives, the madre tierra.

Matt Garcia is an associate professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies, and History at Brown University. His book, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, was named co-winner for the best book in oral history by the Oral History Association in 2003. His current book project, Nature's Candy: Labor, Protest and Grapes in the California-Mexican Borderlands, explores grape cultivation and the formation of the Farmworkers Movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Garcia received his PhD from Claremont Graduate School.

James S. Griffith is the former director of the University of Arizona Library's Southwest Folklore Center, which he directed from 1976-1995. He is currently a Research Associate with the University of Arizona's Southwest Center and continues to teach and lecture on Southern Arizona folk arts throughout the region. Dr. Griffith's many books include The Face of the Christ in Sonora: El Rostro del Señor en Sonora (co-authored with Francisco Javier Manzo Taylor), Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers and A Shared Space: Folklife of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands. In addition, he has published numerous journal articles. Dr. Griffith has been extensively involved in public programming throughout his career. His public projects include being the host of "Southern Arizona Traditions," a segment of Arizona Illustrated (community news program), 1980-1995, and the founder and director of Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival, 1974-1995; 2000-present. He has curated nine shows on regional folk and traditional art, including " La Cadena no se Corta: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community" at the University of Arizona and several web site. He has received many recognitions from various community groups and scholarly societies for his work.

Francisco Aragón is the author of the bilingual collection of poems, Puerta del Sol, and editor of the recently published anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. He is the founding editor of Momotombo Press, which promotes emerging Latino writers, coordinator of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and co-curator of Palabra Pura, a reading series in collaboration with the Guild Complex in Chicago. These projects form part of Letras Latinas, the unit he directs for the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. Aragón’s anthology publications include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California, and American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement. His poems and translations have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Chelsea, Luna, and the online magazines Jacket and Electronic Poetry Review. He is also the editor of Canto Cosas, a new book series with Bilingual Press featuring new voices in Latino poetry. A native of San Francisco and former long-time resident of Spain, he currently resides in Arlington, VA and works out of the ILS’ office in Washington, DC. For more information, visit: http://franciscoaragon.net.

Sam Coronado began his career as an artist in 1969, when he was hired as a technical illustrator at Texas Instruments, and he has worked in the graphic arts field ever since. He has owned art studios in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, and has illustrated books and magazines in the United States, Mexico, and France. Coronado is a painter turned printmaker. He started painting in oils and acrylics and has experimented in various media including printmaking techniques, which eventually led to his latest endeavor, serigraphy. Coronado's artwork has been exhibited in the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Africa. In Austin, he was a co-founder of Mexic-Arte Museum, the state's official Mexican and Mexican-American art museum. He also founded the Serie Project, a nonprofit organization with a mission to create and promote serigraph prints created by Latino artists and others in a workshop environment. Artists from Texas, the United States, and abroad have participated in this project. In conjunction with Coronado Studio, a print shop that produces screen-prints exclusively, the Serie Project administers and produces fine art prints, which travel at exhibition venues around the world. Currently, Coronado is a professor at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas, in the Visual Communication Department. Since 1986, Coronado has taught art and lectured on Chicano art in numerous museums, art schools, and universities throughout the United States.

Desirée J. Garcia is a Mount Holyoke Fellow and visiting assistant professor of Film Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity in American culture and American film. Garcia received her PhD in American Studies from Boston University. Her dissertation project was titled, "There's No Place Like Home: Race Cinema, Migration, and the Hollywood Musical, 1900-1950." Garcia has worked as an associate producer for the PBS documentary series The American Experience; her films include 2001's Zoot Suit Riots and 2003's Remember the Alamo.

Aleida Rodríguez is the author of Garden of Exile, which won the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The book went on to win the PEN Center West 2000 Literary Award in Poetry for the best book of poems published the previous year and was the only poetry book named to the Tops of 2000 list by the San Francisco Chronicle. Rodríguez’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her work has appeared in Dana Gioia’s California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present and various journals including The Seneca Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Spoon River Review, whose Editor’s Prize she won in 1996. Rodríguez was profiled in 2005’s The Face of Poetry, a book featuring the work and portraits of poets who have been part of the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley. A native of Cuba, Rodríguez resides in Los Angeles.

Grace C. Huerta is an associate professor in the Utah State University Department of Secondary Education, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Multicultural Education, ESL Instructional Strategies in the Content Areas, and Whiteness Theory. Her recent book is entitled Educational Foundations—Diverse Histories, Diverse Perspectives. She is also the principal author of the USU K–12 ESL Endorsement and Secondary ESL Minor Teacher Training Program. In addition, Dr. Huerta has received grants from the U.S. Department of Education, which support secondary ESL in-service teacher training in collaboration with local teachers. Prior to her appointment at USU, she taught English, ESL, and journalism in Los Angeles for nine years.

María de Jesús Cordero is an associate professor of Spanish at Utah State University. Her first book, Transformations of Araucania from Valdivia’s Letters to Vivar’s Chronicle analyses the rhetoric of representation employed in the first historical documents produced as a result of the conquest of Chile. She has published a series of articles on Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican poets and is editing a collection of essays about the narrative works of the exiled Cuban writer Zoé Valdés. While on sabbatical in Miami in 2005, she became involved with the Diaspora Vibe Gallery: Incubator for Emerging Caribbean Artists and has begun to use her writing to help bring recognition to Caribbean artists whose work has long been misunderstood and excluded from mainstream art circles. She has helped implement curriculum changes at Utah State which provide students with opportunities to apply their Spanish language skills and other academic expertise in the service of Hispanic communities both locally and abroad. For the past seven years, she has traveled with USU students during spring break to build adobe homes in impoverished communities in Sonora, Mexico. Dr. Cordero was the recipient of USU’s Diversity Award in 2006 and of the Humanist of the Year Award for the Department of Languages, Philosophy, and Speech in 2007.

Known as The Rio Bravo Duet, Anastacio and Elisa Castillo began singing together in 1982 for church and community functions and soon were hired to sing at local Mexican restaurants, private parties, weddings, and various music festivals. Anastacio started singing with his father in Mexican restaurants and bars in Austin, Texas, when he was six years old. Elisa's father rocked his babies to sleep with his favorite corridos (ballads) of Pancho Villa and his generales. She began singing and harmonizing with her brothers at the age of twelve at family gatherings, weddings, and while working in the cotton fields in west Texas. Anastacio and Elisa were married in 1963 and moved to Utah in 1979 with their seven children. They have recorded a folk arts CD, Hecho en Utah. For several years, the two worked for Utah's Ethnic Artist Bank and performed for schools and faculty functions. Anastacio has composed songs and corridos, including the opening song for the play Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega. The corrido and play are registered in the Museum of Carpas in San Antonio, Texas. Anastacio recorded the narration of "El Corrido de Kansis" for the CD Cowboy Poetry Classics with the Smithsonian Institution. Elisa recorded a single with a mariachi band from Mexico City featuring the songs "La Venganza de Maria" and "Una Paloma Blanca." Currently, The Rio Bravo Duet plays at two Salt Lake City restaurants, Blue Iguana and La Puente.

Lanny Langston graduated from Utah State University with a BFA in 2005, with special emphasis on performance, both acting and directing. As an undergraduate, he directed Richard Greenberg's The Author's Voice, which was selected by his peers as the best student-directed project of the year. He has performed in approximately twenty-five plays in roles including Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Creon in Antigone, and Scooter in Tracers. He is currently a master's degree graduate student at USU. He was asked to direct Alicia in Wonder Tierra, an annual children's show which dealt with an American teenage girl and her struggle to embrace her Hispanic roots and Mexican culture while, at the same time, embracing her American heritage. He also teaches the department's Understanding Theatre course to undergraduate students.

Lawrence Culver is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Utah State University, where his areas of research and teaching include the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Mexican American history, the American West, and cultural, environmental, and urban history. He received his PhD at UCLA in 2004. His dissertation received the Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation (U.S. or world) from the American Society for Environmental History. Culver’s first book manuscript, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America is currently under review by Oxford University Press. In 2007, he received the Excellence in Teaching First-Year Students Award at Utah State University. He has also been named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network.

J.P. Spicer-Escalante is an associate professor of Spanish at Utah State University and an active participant in the university’s Latin American Studies program. He is a specialist on the Latin American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is the founding co-director and managing editor of Decimonónica, a scholarly journal that focuses on nineteenth-century Hispanic cultural production. His first book Visiones patológicas nacionales: Lucio Vicente López, Eugenio Cambaceres y Julián Martel ante la distopia argentina finisecular analyzes the ideological intersection between state policy and the literary envisioning of the Argentine nation in the fin-de-siècle period. He has also edited critical editions of late nineteenth-century Argentine writers’ works. He is currently finishing Guerrilla Travel: The Diaries of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and the Search for the New Man. This work focuses on the travel writings of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine medical doctor who became famous for his participation in the Cuban Revolution and for his support of worldwide anti-imperialist movements.

Jamie Sanders is an associate professor at Utah State University who specializes in the history of nineteenth-century Latin America and the Atlantic World. His first book Contentious Republicans explores how indigenous groups, ex-slaves, and small farmers created a democratic politics in nineteenth-century Colombia. His second work will examine how Latin Americans imagined and practiced a republican Atlantic World community in the nineteenth century. He received his BA from the University of Florida (where he was co-valedictorian) and his MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He has lived and conducted research in Bogotá, Cali, Popayán, Quito, Mérida, Montevideo, and Guanajuato. Before coming to USU he taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Southern Methodist University, and Brooklyn College.