Final update: Panel complete. Please email kwells37@alamo.edu for the Zoom room ID if you'd like to join informally. 

Call For Papers: Teaching Jovita Gonzalez’ Caballero, Feminist Radical Domesticity, and Memory as Borderlands and Transformation

UPDATE: Papers on Cisneros, Moraga, Anzaldua: Mexican American studies feminist texts also highly encouraged. We wish to center student approaches to Mexican American studies of feminist/borderlands texts of all kinds as part of a conversation around Cabellero, but welcome other texts as well. 

Critical attention for this important Tejano/Latino/a text as “part history, part tragedy, part romance, part feminist tract," has been largely academic, and even today the text is frequently unknown and underexplored by many for whom it would be an enlightening subtle critique of patriarchal Texas history and representation of community and collaboration.

We seek an introductory, student-centered, accessible discussion of Caballero, including but not limited to its troubled history of publication, Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh’s co-authorship, the domesticity and representation of Chicana/Latina and female centered narratives within the text, and other approaches to be given at a small community college multicultural centered conference in San Antonio, Texas.

This CFP explicitly includes and encourages discussions of other comparable later texts like Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (also a nearby local landmark), Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back, Anna Castillo’s poetry and fiction and others.

Virtual papers/presentations are highly encouraged but in-person discussion is also welcome. The event is part of San Antonio College’s annual Multicultural Conference, and this year’s in-person and hybrid theme is Memory is Prophecy. Creative texts and presentations are also welcome. This presentation is a teaching and student-oriented panel at a small Hispanic-Community serving community college in the heart of San Antonio.  While academic approaches are acceptable, a teaching-focused approach is preferable.    

This one-hour panel event will be on April 5, @1:40pm CST and a roundtable panel is preferable. Any aspect of the text, (from an introductory discussion to themes and history and beyond) is encouraged, and a hybrid approach is welcome. Graduate students welcome, Texas community college representation hoped-for. Panelists may also choose to attend and enjoy other events of this two-day conference including a performance of Hope and Camaradas, a play by Mono Aguilar, a discussion of “Homies” figurines, popular culture, and education, a screening of Children Full of Life, a Zoom panel on Alejandro Perez’s History of Conjunto Dance Halls, mixed media poetry performance, and a memorial service for SAC professor Claudio San Miguel.

Submit proposals by March 13 to kwells37@alamo.edu. This is a short turnaround due to the ongoing pandemic concerns but the conference is expected to be collegial and friendly.  Email for questions or concerns.