Honoring Our Three Years Together

We all first met in person in November of 2014 at the American Studies Association Conference in Los Angeles, CA for our panel: “Mothers of Color in Academia.” Looking at the first picture of us, our babies look so tiny, our creativity still a seed, we would have never imagined how we would grow.

Over the years, our work has emerged organically but with a clear commitment to amplify the voices of Mothers of Color navigating institutions that were not meant to be accessible to us: the academy, political spaces, and digital media. As we gather ourselves to start thinking about what might come in the new year, we want to pause and acknowledge that our coraje, our trust in one another, and our commitment to this work has made 2017 a really pivotal year for the Chicana M(other)work Collective.

We, Yvette, Christine, Michelle, Ceci and Judi, want to share some of these 2017 moments with you:

Our self-designed Chicana M(other)work t-shirts, mugs, and stickers are being worn and used across the country! Our coffee mugs were the most popular and we are lucky to have our very talented Christine Vega lead our creative design.
Our supporters funded us to get to Baltimore, Maryland for the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) in November 2017 so that we could present our work and research. Thank you for supporting our hustle as we are committed to our labor of love by mothers of color, for mothers of color.
We also gave a presentation at the National Association of Chicana/o Studies Conference in Irvine, CA in March 2017.
We published our first article in Spring 2017, titled "Our Labor Is Our Prayer, Our Mothering Is Our Offering': A Chicana M(other)work Framework for Collective Resistance" in Chicana/Latina Studies 16:2 Spring 2017. The article can be purchased at: http://journal.malcs.org.
On Dia de Las Madres, May 10, 2017, we began publishing a Chicana M(other)work Blog series and have since posted ten powerful and insightful blogs. Cecilia’s blog, "Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit" has been viewed over 47,000 times. Her blog was invited to be republished by Chicana/Latina Studies and Third Woman Press. Don’t doubt the powers of mamas of color!
An Interview with the Chicana M(other)work Collective was published this fall in Mester Vol. XLV (2016/2017) by the UCLA Mester Journal.
Thanks to your support, we we were able to purchase our podcast equipment in 2016 which helped get our voices on the air. To date, we have over 4,500 listens. Some podcast highlights of 2017 include:
In Episode 5 we interviewed Ana Castillo who shared about her newest Lambda award-winning book Black Dove, a memoir about being a queer Chicana single mother, writer, and activist. It was amazing to spend time with her and record in Pasadena. Shout out to Juanita Davalos for opening up her home for the interview. We have over 4,500 listens!
In Episode 6: “Radiosonic Xicana Locutoras”, we held a podcast with Esther Díaz Martín who is a Mexicana mother-scholar working on her dissertation. We were honored to be included in her dissertation while also inviting her to be part of our podcast to discuss how our podcast came about. It was a powerful podcast where we discussed identity politics including positionality, roles as mothers, and our efforts to reach audiences beyond the ivory tower. Take a Listen!
We signed our book contract with the University of Arizona Press through the Feminist Wire Series and submitted the first draft of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolution which has an expected release date of Spring 2019! Our amazing contributors include:
Corina Benavides Lopez
Trina Brown
Nora Cisneros, Leigh-Anna Hidalgo, Yvette Martinez-Vu & Christine Vega
Mara Diaz
Victoria Duran
Alma Flores
Grace Gamez
Andrea Garavito-Martinez
Monica Hernandez-Johnson, Shahla Fayazpour, Sandra Candel & Ravijot Singh
Larissa Herrera & Cristina Mercado
Irene Lara
Katherine Maldonado
Nereida Oliva & Hortencia Jimenez
Rose Salseda
Gabriela Spears-Rico
Gabriela Valencia
Veronica Velez
Gretel Vera-Rosas

Upcoming Plans for 2018

We will continue posting amazing blogs; we have a few scheduled to be published soon thanks to your powerful contributions.
Similarly, we will also continue recording podcast episodes that amplify the voices of mothers of color. We look forward to interviewing more members of the Chicana M(other)work collective and community.
We hope to attend the El Mundo Zurdo Conference in San Antonio, Texas honoring Gloria Anzaldúa and return to NWSA in Atlanta, Georgia in 2018. We are also open to giving talks and workshops at campuses, non-profits, educational, and community spaces.
We would like to expand our website to receive art by mothers of color and their children. We want to see what your imaginary has to offer and we would love display it in our website. We and our children have so much to share!
In March 2018, we will return to Tucson, Arizona for our next writing retreat. We hope to accomplish a few things as we gather in sisterhood, to not only convivir with each other, and chismear, but to write, edit, dream, and move towards our goals of the next phase of our collective!
We hope to organize more Chicana M(other)work playdate events for the larger community.
We plan to start drafting a children’s book co-written and co-animated by all of Chicana M(other)work. There are so many books we wish we had for our children, and as we have learned, in these times, we need to write, animate, and publish them ourselves! What would it look like to write our own libros as first-generation, Chicana, mothers in the academy? What is our offering to the community? We want to explore, dream, and create.