Of Poetics and Politics: The Border Journeys of Luisa Moreno
Opening Keynote Address, The Latino Midwest Symposium
Thursday, October 11, 7:00 p.m.
Shambaugh Auditorium, The University of Iowa
Reception, 8:30 p.m.
North Exhibition Hall, Main Library
~ in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the Iowa Women’s Archives ~
From the symposium website:
Vicki L. Ruiz is Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the former Dean of the School of Humanities. Over the course of three decades, she has published over fifty essays and one dozen books. An award-winning scholar, she is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth- Century America. Her edited or co-edited anthologies include Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History. She and Virginia Sánchez Korrol co-edited the three-volume Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, which received a 2007 “Best in Reference” Award from the New York Public Library. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians, and the American Studies Association. Since 2007 she has served on the advisory board for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. An elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, she was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first Latina historian so honored.
About Luisa Moreno
An immigrant from Guatemala, Luisa Moreno was one of the most prominent women labor leaders in the United States. From 1930 to 1947, she mobilized seamstresses in New York’s Spanish Harlem, cigar rollers in Florida, and cannery women in California. The first Latina to hold a national union office, she served as vice-president of the CIO cannery union (UCAPAWA). She was also the driving force behind the 1939 El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española, first national U.S. Latino civil rights conference. Moreover, as a Latina flapper during the 1920s, she published poetry and consorted with the likes of Diego Rivera in Mexico City before journeying to the United States. Relying on oral interviews with Moreno, her daughter, and many friends and associates as well as on Moreno’s own writings and moving beyond a traditional panegyric narrative, this presentation traces how Moreno embodied a quintessential transnational subject given her movement across discordant spaces, physical and intellectual, where she invented and reinvented herself. This presentation will also explore the politics of memory and biography given the bonds that developed between the historian, Moreno, and her daughter Mytyl Glomboske.
Poster for Vicki Ruiz events.
Vicki Ruiz will also present a lecture earlier in the day on Thursday:
“Big Dreams, Rural Schools: Mexican Americans and Public Education, 1870-1950”
Thursday October 11, 2012
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. 2520D University Capitol Centre