March 26, 2024
Have you ever wanted a writing and research manual that centered Chicanx and Latinx scholarship? Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies does just that. While it includes a brief history of the roots of the fields of Chicanx literature and history, Writing that Matters emphasizes practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories.
How did you first come up with the idea for this book?
When teaching writing, whether in literature or history classes, we were both frustrated with a lack of resources for teaching from a Chicanx or from a Latinx base of knowledge. Most handbooks are written with white, Eurocentric frameworks and/or from a white, Eurocentric lens. Using the supposedly generic writing and research manuals was alienating for us when we were students. As professors, we found ourselves altering assignments and reworking prompts so that our students would connect with them and see themselves and our communities represented.
In our early careers, we both kept hoping for a handbook in our respective fields. As senior scholars, we realized we were the generation that needed to do this—that we could create our own handbook. Aside from our writing materials, we were fortunate to know an incredible artist, Anel Flores, who could create images and a book cover to help inspire our students. At the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), the organization where we first workshopped our ideas, many of our colleagues and friends who teach writing gave us their unanimous endorsement; therefore, we crafted the handbook we had needed all along.
What do you mean in the book when you say: “Research is Me-search?”
This is an expression that Dr. Urquijo Ruiz learned while at the University of California, San Diego, and that she shared with Dr. Heidenreich. Of course, we use it because it rings true with us and we have found that it rings true with our students. To say that “research is me-search” is to say that the best work we do tends to come from a connection within us. When we allow ourselves to be inspired, to do work that matters to us, that resonates with our life experiences and those of our multiple communities, then we have the energy to do great work. We teach our classes, we encourage students to seek out questions that resonate deeply within themselves. We have worked to make sure that our handbook takes a similar approach.
How will students use this book to crush the patriarchy?
Words, research, and a solid argument are all tools that can be wielded to create fissures in the structures that create inequality in our lives and the world around us. The handbook is structured to help students develop their tool sets so that they have strong research, writing, and rhetoric skills with which to challenge multiple systems of inequality—systems constructed by, and constitutive, of patriarchy and heteronormativity.
What are the challenges that Chicanx and Latinx students face when interviewing family members or others in search of oral history, pláticas and testimonios?
Wow, there are many challenges; so here are just a couple of them. On a very basic level, it can be hard to find a quiet place to hold the interview. Our homes are busy places. So, we encourage students to take advantage of library rooms – both public libraries and campus libraries, which are much quieter. On a deeper level, because of the ways in which sexism and racism function in society, many of our family members experienced difficult, if not traumatic experiences either in coming to the U.S., or here in the U.S. itself. This is why, even when interviewing family members, it is important for students try to have a preliminary meeting where they can discuss their goals with the interviewee and let their family member ask them questions about the process. Of course, it is always critical to make sure family members know they can skip questions, take a break, or just change their mind about doing the interview. The wonderful thing about interviewing family members is that the family gains a narrative of their own history that they can keep and share with present and future generations.
What are you both working on now?
L Heidenreich: I am working on a book about women religious (Catholic sisters) and the United Farm Worker movement. Not much has been written about the women of the movement, and since women religious were a strong influence on my formative years, I wanted to start the project there: excavating the work of Catholic sisters and the Union. Of course, women of the UFW, in general, are grossly under-researched and so the project will not be exclusively about the sisters. My m.o. is to draft a mini proposal, produce a couple articles or book chapters, and then draft a book proposal proper.
Because I started the project right as the Covid pandemic began, I had to start with online and print sources. So, the first article wound up being about Dolores Huerta and a 2009 speech she gave at the Twenty-first National Conference on LGBT Equality. That was published in Catholic Women’s Rhetoric in the United States (Lexington, 2022). Huerta is an inspiring figure and being able to do that work during the pandemic kept me grounded and hopeful. I now have a broader article coming out in U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer, 2024) titled “Saintly Protest: Women Religious, Religious Women, and the Early United Farm Worker Movement.” That brings me to “two”; and so now it is time for me to sit down and draft the book proposal–which makes it all very real.
Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz: I am currently enjoying my work as a culturally and linguistically sensitive translator of children’s books (from English to Spanish). Because my siblings and I were raised in Sonora, Mexico, in an environment that lacked basic needs, books (except for textbooks) were rarely present when we were growing up. I want to change that for the new generations of children in my family and in my communities in general. Thus far, I have translated six picture books for ages K-5th grade, and I translated one novel in verse from Dr. Carmen Tafolla, the first Texas Poet Laureate, titled Warrior Girl / Guerrera. The novel is about a pre-teen Chicanita from San Antonio, Texas, raised in a mix-status family, who is proud of her Mexican and Chicanx heritages.
On the research side: we just finished the last edits for our book Latinidad and Film: Queer and Feminist Cinema in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, July 2024) that I co-authored with my dear colleagues-friends Drs. Dania Abreu-Torres and Rosana Blanco-Cano. On the creative side: I continue to work on my memoir and I’m proud that my piece “First Visit” was published in the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings, co-edited by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guiñansaca (HiperVia, 2023).
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L Heidenreich is a professor of history at Washington State University. They are the author of “This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California and Nepantla2: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift. Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz is a Mexicana/Chicana fronteriza queer educator, translator, writer, activist, and performer from Sonora, Mexico, and southern California. She is a professor of Spanish as well as Chicanx studies, queer studies, and global Latinx studies at Trinity University.
The University of Arizona Press
