Morrison Library Inaugural Address Lectures

Reconfiguring Nation and Identity:
U.S. Latina and Latin American Women’s
Oppositional Writings of the 1970’s - 1990’s

Laura Elisa Pérez

Introduction

It is a real pleasure and privilege to welcome you this afternoon to the Inaugural Lecture Series of The Library, co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Center for Latin American Studies. Our speaker today, Professor Laura Elisa Pérez, has an important role in the groups I have just named. This year she began an assistant professorship in a joint appointment with the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Spanish and Portuguese, and as a Latin Americanist (among other things) she is affiliated with the Center.

One of the reasons we were so pleased that Laura decided to join us at Berkeley is that she is doing the kind of research and teaching that many of us have said should be done, thinking through the relationship between U.S. Latino cultures and those of Latin America. In other words, she is beginning to redraw the disciplinary and cognitive maps of our fields and is working in Spanish and English, the bilingual expression that is a reality of both the US and of Latin America.

Laura was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990 in Romance Languages and Literature. Since then she has held teaching positions at the University of Michigan and at Cal State Long Beach. During 1992-93 she held a Susan B. Anthony Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester. She wrote her dissertation on Nicaraguan poetry and other cultural practices of the vanguard period, 1927-1936, and has since extended her work to a wide range of cultural issues in U.S. minority and Latin American literatures, performance and the visual arts, with particular emphasis on gender.

Laura herself is very eloquent in describing her research, but I will give you a list of the titles of some of her recent publications, which will give you an idea of her range and originality. In Fall 1994 she published, with Ali Behdad, "Reflections and Confessions on the 'Minority' and Immigrant ID Tour", another article, "For Love and Theory: An Ofrenda", which will be published this summer, and also forthcoming, "El desorden: Nationalism and Chicano/a Aesthetics" for the volume Between Women and Nation.

Her talk today, "Reconfiguring Nation and Identity: US Latina and Latin American Women's Oppositional Writing", is part of her current research project, "Negotiating Neocolonial Conditions: US Latina and Latin American Women's Writings, 1970s-1990s". Her research work has generated an extraordinary and positive response among students in her courses in both Spanish and Chicano Studies. It is a real pleasure to introduce Laura to you today.

Gwen Kirkpatrick,
Chair UCB, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Reconfiguring Nation and Identity:
U.S. Latina and Latin American Women’s Oppositional Writings of the 1970’s - 1990’s

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