Your True Colors

This poem reflects the author’s heartbreak, disappointment, and the realization that people may not show who they truly are to one. The author describes feeling disappointment and a sense of guilt from a previous relationship. The person she thought she knew turned out to be someone who did not align with her values. The author is a Mexican American woman who immigrated to the United States as a teenager from Mexico. She found within herself to educate herself through her adult life seeking to erase internalized patriarchy and oppression. Living through such divisive political environment between 2017 and 2020, she began to realize people around her, in specific the relationship illustrated in the poem, were not who she thought they were. The author describes the end of the relationship with a play on words declaring that she does not want to see this person’s dull colors again.

Composing Her Growing Identities as a Mexican American

This article studies the growing and changing cultural identifications of one early adolescent Mexican American girl as represented by her engagements with literacy. Her writing behaviors in particular manifested a changing cultural identity that reacted to and represented her response to a changing world. Her bilingualism and biculturalism manifested a dialogic innervation of distinct voices and truths, particularly set in the Trump-era United States. Through a theoretical framework of cultural hybridity and bordered identity, this study analyzes the complex linguistic, developmental, and cultural identities of a young Mexican American woman in the rural South.

UFO (Unusual Female Other) Sightings in Saucer Country/State: Metaphors of Identity and Presidential Politics

This final chapter shows us how a strong female lead might resist monstrosity in the pursuit of political power. As an abused, divorced, Mexican-American woman, Arcadia Alvarado, is solidly situated in the margins of the fictional US society depicted in Saucer Country. Despite being marked as monstrous because of her race and gender, Alvarado finds her strength in resisting the monstrous political norms that dominate her U.S. context, rather than embracing them. I In this science-fictional world (which reveals the real intersectional failings of the American political world), Alvarado transgresses her assigned role as marginalized “other” by powerfully performing as a political leader without becoming a monster.

Flowers Disguised

Since the late twentieth century, Latina artists have used Catholic images, such as depictions of altars and the Virgin of Guadalupe, to speak both for themselves and for women’s issues at large. Maria Tomasula seems far from that norm, since she focuses on tightly constructed, dramatic still life, painted in the traditional European illusionistic manner. She reveals, however, Catholic influences and feminist messages in her flower paintings. This article aims to unveil the woman’s voice in the works of still life by Tomasula, as communicated through embedded Catholic symbolism and references. It will examine how her works evoke the home altar tradition as well as images of saints in martyrdom to speak for the Mexican American woman. This article also applies the concept of the abject, as espoused by Kristeva to denote a woman’s realm, to Tomasula’s art. Tomasula’s still lifes thus ultimately delineate a woman’s space and her discrete experience.

My Second Life as a Cyber Border Crosser

This article explores Chicana (Mexican-American woman) experiences of being a cyber border crosser – someone of both and neither real life and Second Life. The presumption and privilege of whiteness as the foundation of Second Life is seen to limit participation of people of color. Further, I write against the notion that cyber worlds provide transcendence from the limitations of the non-normative body. Second Life and official Linden discourse are devoid of references to race, ethnicity, disability, or any other type of salient identity that might interfere with Linden Lab’s vision of a perfect world. Indeed, there is a pervasive blindness to color which has negative rather than positive effects for people of color. As long as SL persists mostly as an entertainment platform, the larger SL population may not consider the lack of interest by people of color anything to be concerned about. However, the SL grid will continue to grow and engage with educational and commercial operations that will desire the participation and economic resources of people of color. The issue that needs to be addressed now is will the borders that limit users of color be build up or knocked down?