Telling Border Life Stories: Four Mexican American Women Writers

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Through my participation as a member of the advisory board of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project I have come into contact with texts that have been lost and recovered.The Recovery Project has focused on the preservation and dissemination of texts from the colonial period until 1960, and three of the narratives that form part of the present study are recovered texts:Jovita González’s“Early Life and Education” and Dew on the Thorn, and Cleofas Jaramillo’s Romance of a Little Village Girl. Upon reading the life stories these women had to tell about their memories concerned withTexas and New Mexico,I began looking at other spaces, those of Arizona and California, in an effort to find additional narratives created by Mexican American women who write about life experiences prior to 1960. After I began reading the texts written by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce and Mary Helen Ponce,I found that these four women had much to say to those of us who live between two or more worlds. Closer to my personal experience, although I am not Mexican American , I do come from a multilingual family in Cleveland, Ohio, where my paternal grandfather spoke to my father inArabic and my maternal grandmother always spoke in Slovak to my mother and her siblings. Little did I dream that I would leave the United States after marrying a man who is from Mexico. My husband and I live in the sprawling metropolis of Monterrey, Mexico, where we have raised our three children who are dual nationals.In essence,for forty years I have lived,as have my husband and children, on the border of two worlds. Therefore, I do share that experience with the four Mexican American women authors that I have chosen to study here. My husband Roberto and my children—Monica, Roberto,and Denise—have to a great degree taken part in this endeavor. I have shared my thoughts with them, and they have generously given me time to work on what I believe is an essential project—the recovery of memory and women’s voices in literature.What better place to find these voices than in autobiographies that emanate from the margins, from border spaces. Throughout the course of this project I have had the support of a number of areas at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. viii aCknowledgMenTs Therefore, I extend my sincerest gratitude to the Center for Studies of Memory, Literature, and Discourse, the Department of Humanities Studies , and the School of Business, Social Science, and Humanities for their intellectual and material support. My colleagues in the Department of Humanities Studies:Alicia Verónica Sánchez, for meeting with me every week, for your continuous encouragement given with a smile and sense of peace; Blanca López de Mariscal, for your generous spirit and example ; Judith Farré Vidal, María Eugenia Ramos, Beatriz Mariscal Hay, Claudia Reyes Trigos, and Inés Sáenz Negrete, for your willingness always to share knowledge and experience; Robertha Leal and Hector Villarreal, for your technical expertise; Carolina Garza Amparán, my undergraduate assistant—this would not have been possible without your help in reviewing the technical aspects of drafts for each chapter of this book. Portions of chapters 2, 3, and 4 have appeared as “The Border Autobiographies of Cleofas Jaramillo and Frances Esquibel Tywoniak: Cultural Memory as a Dynamic Process,” in Interpreting the New Milenio (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2008);and as“EvaAntoniaWilbur-Cruce (1904–1998),”in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature,Vol. 2,ed.Nicolás Kanellos (Greenwood Press,2008). Telling Border Life Stories ...