Latinas Across Ethnicities
MLEA and the Festival embraced Latinas across ethnicities. Despite government efforts to divide Puerto Ricans from Mexicans geographically and otherwise, with a large Mexican and substantial Puerto Rican population and smaller communities from places including Cuba and Guatemala, Chicago was an early U.S. city where people of different Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean backgrounds lived and came together socially, culturally, and politically. From its roots in collaborative organizing of Puerto Rican women on the North Side and Mexicanas in Pilsen and the West Side, MLEA decided to use the term “Latinas” in their organizational name to serve Spanish-speaking women inclusively at a time when it was relatively rare for women’s groups to use this term and forge pan-ethnic alliances in the U.S. (Fernández, Brown in the Windy City).
Puerto Rican individuals and organizations were invited to participate in the Festival; powerful readings by Puerto Rican poets Salima Rivera and Marta Collazo were Festival highlights. Also reading her poems was a young Chicana friend of Diana who taught writing at Pilsen's Latino Youth Alternative High School, Sandra Cisneros, the year before she published her first chapbook, Bad Boys (1980). Also attending was Patti Sorrenduguy. A physician in Uruguay, she ran MLEA’s Dar a Luz program that helped neighborhood women have “safer pregnancies and healthier babies” through prenatal education (Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City, 256). Only a few years after the 1973 military coup in Chile, Salima Rivera recited a poem about the Madres del Plaza de Mayo, Chilean song and dance were presented at the main stage, and Flor Retamal sang Chilean folk songs. Flor, her husband Luis, and two children were able to flee Chile as refugees in 1976 when a Highland Park synagogue sponsored them after student leader Luis was released from almost three years in prison, including 194 days in solitary confinement (Adair, “Choosing not to hate”).
Learn more about writer Sandra Cisneros, whose many accolades include the American Book Award (1985) for The House on Mango Street and the MacArthur Fellowship (1995): (When you check out her bio, see her 1982 photo portrait taken by Festival co-organizer Diana Solís....)
SOURCES
Cisneros, Sandra. Bad Boys. San Jose, CA: Mango Publications, 1980.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1983.
Fernández, Lilia. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Adair, Amy. “Choosing not to hate.” The Covenant Companion, 2010. http://covchurch.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/2/2010/11/0201Choosing.pdf