Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social

Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays
Edited by Laura E. Garcia, Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez

This collection has been awarded the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women’s Studies in Popular and American Culture in 2008. This award is given by the Popular Culture/American Culture Association. The first print run paperback  of “Teatro Chicana” has sold out. University of Texas Press is reprinting.

As reviewed by Monica Teresa Ortiz at Feminist Review:
(also see this review at La Bloga)

Co-Editor Sandra M. Gutiérrez writes in her entry: “As far as the Teatro de las Chicanas was concerned, what we lacked in theatrical training and sophistication, we more than made up for with ganas and deter-mination.”  There is no better way to summarize this book than that. The editors put together a wide range of memoirs from Xicanas in the first part of the book and then have actos in the second half. Although Teatro Chicana covers an important and sometimes ignored aspect of the growing Chicano literary field, the strength of the book is in the memoirs – a gutsy group of recollections about the influence of theater on various contributing Xicana writers. (more…)

Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native — in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write — signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.

…..In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has locked up or thrown out dozens, probably many more, of its own citizens over the past eight years. A monthslong AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers say there are actually hundreds of such cases.

Full story at Yahoo News

Please see information at at New Mexico State University – http://malcs.nmsu.edu/