Edited Books by Yolanda Padilla
Latinas Histories and Cultures: Feminist Readings and Recoveries of Archival Knowledge, 2023
This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from ... more This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture.
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
Articles by Yolanda Padilla
English Language Notes (ELN), 2018
Angel Rama’s concept of the letrado refers to Latin American lettered individuals who used writin... more Angel Rama’s concept of the letrado refers to Latin American lettered individuals who used writing to consolidate the nation. But what might it have meant to be a letrado in the geopolitical context of the US-Mexico border in the early twentieth century, one that combined territorial dispossession, migration, and revolution? This essay examines the contributions of border Mexicans to La crónica, an influential Laredo, Texas, newspaper that appeared at least from 1910 to 1914. These “borderlands letrados” engaged the Mexican nation from positions of opposition during the Mexican Revolution while contending with Anglo-American nativist imperatives, which shaped their cultivation of an ethnic identity in the United States. Mobilizing the concept of the letrado in the context of these borderlands writers makes them legible within larger Latin American currents while elucidating their place at the center of issues encompassing ethnic, national, and transnational concerns.
This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas’s The Rain God has had with narrati... more This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas’s The Rain God has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix’s sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano literature in the 1970s, for its emphasis on ethnonationalist novels that featured “positive images” of Chicanos, and he suggests that Quinto Sol rejected The Rain God for failing to conform to this mold. I speculate that the simple fact that the novel includes homosexual characters would have been enough for it to be deemed too negative in that era. I argue that Islas’s representations of homosexuality continue to disrupt notions of identity, but now the disjuncture is not that homosexuals are represented but that they are incoherent with the closet paradigm that is predominant in significant strains of queer studies. Drawing on recent scholarship that warns against a fixation on identity as the grounding principle for sexual experience and politics, I read Felix as a character whose transgressive expressions of homosexuality are shaped by a tangled web of power dynamics that are associated with his feelings of ethnic and masculine insecurity. Ultimately, I show that the very qualities that make Felix discomfiting to readers and resistant to narratives of identity are generative points of analysis for Chicano literary studies.
Women's Studies Quarterly 3/4 (2005): 90-114.
Book Chapters by Yolanda Padilla
Latina Histories and Cultures, 2023
This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from ... more This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture.
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
The Cambridge History of the American Essay, 2023
Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression,... more Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among literary and cultural critics. Authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, given that Latinx communities find themselves in a perpetual state of crisis, whether because of immigration policies, racial conflicts, or other structural inequities, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage pressing social and political debates, even if obliquely. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, so that the process they go through in reaching their conclusions and the dialogue the process opens with the reader are as important as the conclusions themselves. While Latinx authors blur and blend the boundaries among different types of essays, I identify three broad strands of the Latinx essay that have been significant: the Latinx crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.
Bridges, Borders, and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism, 2016
Writing / Righting History: Twenty-Five Years of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 2020
Chapter reflects on how U.S. literary studies' neglect of recovered Latinx texts results in a los... more Chapter reflects on how U.S. literary studies' neglect of recovered Latinx texts results in a lost opportunity for important field transformation. It provides examples of how to use recovered texts in undergraduate classes, discussing learning objectives and how those texts spark a rethinking of U.S. literary and cultural history.
I n the study of Chicana/o literature, few works have had the sustained influence of Ramón Saldív... more I n the study of Chicana/o literature, few works have had the sustained influence of Ramón Saldívar's 1990 monograph Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Since its publication, graduate students have carefully studied the volume as they prepare to enter the field, while literary scholars writing about novels, short stories, nonfiction, and film created by Chicana/o and Latina/o writers and artists have consistently cited the work. As we elaborate below, Chicano Narrative arrived on the scene at a crucial moment in Chicana/o literary studies, when a wide range of issues was being heatedly debated. These issues included everything from questions of identity and what should " count " as Chicana/o literature to political and ideological commitments, institutional considerations, and questions of aesthetic value and narrative form. Saldívar's work negotiated a number of competing imperatives as it positioned itself within these debates: the desire to develop a theory of the Chicano novel; the desire to maintain the political character of the Chicano even as Chicana/o novels entered the institutional realms of the university; an expectation that both the novel and its theory would recuperate and generate historical knowledge; and a desire to advance the presence and profile of Chicana/o letters. His navigation
Open Borders to a Revolution: Culture, Politics, and Migration. Ed. Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Adela Pineda, and Magdalena Mieri. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Scholarly Press, 2013
The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature, 2018
Mariano Azuela’s 1915 novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo, is considered to be the nove... more Mariano Azuela’s 1915 novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo, is considered to be the novel of the Mexican nation. This chapter complicates such orthodoxy by reading the novel through a transnational Chicana/o studies framework that accentuates Azuela’s thematization of dislocation, dispossession, and migration, and relating it to early texts by Mexicans in the United States that engaged the Revolution in similar terms. The chapter then focuses on a small number of exemplary writers to chart the divergent political spectrum represented by their literary output. These writings range from anarchist poetry calling for revolution, to conservative novels that urged Mexican immigrants to return to their war torn homeland or risk the corruption of U.S. influence, to feminist writings that argued for women’s centrality in the war’s military and political affairs. Taken together, these diverse writings reveal members of the Mexican diaspora to be producers of knowledge, as they elucidated through engagements with the Revolution Greater Mexico’s place of at the center of issues encompassing ethnic, national, and transnational concerns.
The Plays of Josefina Niggli, 2007
Scholars who go to Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library to examine
the papers of Mexican... more Scholars who go to Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library to examine
the papers of Mexican American writer Josefina Niggli may be
surprised to discover that a nearby building bears the author’s name. Fittingly,
the building houses the theater department and the campus stage.
Although Niggli is best known now for her novel Mexican Village (1945),
for much of her writing career her reputation rested on her folk drama.
The Niggli Theater is perhaps the only theater in the United States named
for a Mexican American woman. Niggli taught at the university for nearly
thirty years and founded and chaired its drama department. In conversation
with one of her former colleagues, we learned of a campus legend
about a ghost who haunts the Niggli Theater, a ghost who is none other
than the woman herself.1 This, too, seems fitting. Just as it has haunted the
Niggli Theater, Niggli’s ghost has haunted the fields of Mexican American
and Chicana/o studies, which have been uncomfortable with her exclusion
but hesitant to embrace her fully.
Interview by Yolanda Padilla
Bridges, Borders and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press., 2016
The following conversation between Ramón Saldívar (RS), Yolanda
Padilla, and William Orchard too... more The following conversation between Ramón Saldívar (RS), Yolanda
Padilla, and William Orchard took place in Saldívar’s faculty
office at Stanford University on 16 and 17 July 2015.
Q: In a 2005 article in Western American Literature, you discuss
your childhood in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, and your
relationship with your siblings, Sonia and José David. Since those
details of your early life are already available to readers, we wanted
to start this interview a bit later, with your arrival at the University
of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate, which was coincident with
the period in which the Chicano Movement was gathering momentum
on college campuses. Why Austin?
RS: When I was considering what colleges to attend, UT Austin
seemed the only realistic option. To my naïve and inexperienced
mind, it seemed like the best practical choice. At the same time,
UT Austin was a completely unrealistic choice. It was as far as my
science fiction imagination could take me. If somebody had said,
“Why don’t you attend Oxford University?” I would have seen UT
and Oxford as representing exactly the same kind of choice.
Reviews by Yolanda Padilla
Western American Literature, 2013
Calls for Papers by Yolanda Padilla
Call for papers
https://artepublicopress.com/recoveryvolume-cfp/
Uploads
Edited Books by Yolanda Padilla
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
Articles by Yolanda Padilla
Book Chapters by Yolanda Padilla
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
the papers of Mexican American writer Josefina Niggli may be
surprised to discover that a nearby building bears the author’s name. Fittingly,
the building houses the theater department and the campus stage.
Although Niggli is best known now for her novel Mexican Village (1945),
for much of her writing career her reputation rested on her folk drama.
The Niggli Theater is perhaps the only theater in the United States named
for a Mexican American woman. Niggli taught at the university for nearly
thirty years and founded and chaired its drama department. In conversation
with one of her former colleagues, we learned of a campus legend
about a ghost who haunts the Niggli Theater, a ghost who is none other
than the woman herself.1 This, too, seems fitting. Just as it has haunted the
Niggli Theater, Niggli’s ghost has haunted the fields of Mexican American
and Chicana/o studies, which have been uncomfortable with her exclusion
but hesitant to embrace her fully.
Interview by Yolanda Padilla
Padilla, and William Orchard took place in Saldívar’s faculty
office at Stanford University on 16 and 17 July 2015.
Q: In a 2005 article in Western American Literature, you discuss
your childhood in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, and your
relationship with your siblings, Sonia and José David. Since those
details of your early life are already available to readers, we wanted
to start this interview a bit later, with your arrival at the University
of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate, which was coincident with
the period in which the Chicano Movement was gathering momentum
on college campuses. Why Austin?
RS: When I was considering what colleges to attend, UT Austin
seemed the only realistic option. To my naïve and inexperienced
mind, it seemed like the best practical choice. At the same time,
UT Austin was a completely unrealistic choice. It was as far as my
science fiction imagination could take me. If somebody had said,
“Why don’t you attend Oxford University?” I would have seen UT
and Oxford as representing exactly the same kind of choice.
Reviews by Yolanda Padilla
Calls for Papers by Yolanda Padilla
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge.
In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.
the papers of Mexican American writer Josefina Niggli may be
surprised to discover that a nearby building bears the author’s name. Fittingly,
the building houses the theater department and the campus stage.
Although Niggli is best known now for her novel Mexican Village (1945),
for much of her writing career her reputation rested on her folk drama.
The Niggli Theater is perhaps the only theater in the United States named
for a Mexican American woman. Niggli taught at the university for nearly
thirty years and founded and chaired its drama department. In conversation
with one of her former colleagues, we learned of a campus legend
about a ghost who haunts the Niggli Theater, a ghost who is none other
than the woman herself.1 This, too, seems fitting. Just as it has haunted the
Niggli Theater, Niggli’s ghost has haunted the fields of Mexican American
and Chicana/o studies, which have been uncomfortable with her exclusion
but hesitant to embrace her fully.
Padilla, and William Orchard took place in Saldívar’s faculty
office at Stanford University on 16 and 17 July 2015.
Q: In a 2005 article in Western American Literature, you discuss
your childhood in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, and your
relationship with your siblings, Sonia and José David. Since those
details of your early life are already available to readers, we wanted
to start this interview a bit later, with your arrival at the University
of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate, which was coincident with
the period in which the Chicano Movement was gathering momentum
on college campuses. Why Austin?
RS: When I was considering what colleges to attend, UT Austin
seemed the only realistic option. To my naïve and inexperienced
mind, it seemed like the best practical choice. At the same time,
UT Austin was a completely unrealistic choice. It was as far as my
science fiction imagination could take me. If somebody had said,
“Why don’t you attend Oxford University?” I would have seen UT
and Oxford as representing exactly the same kind of choice.