Deborah Paredez

Deborah Paredez is a Hispano American poet and scholar in the field of Latino Cultural Studies. She currently teaches as an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin with the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of English where many of her courses focus on race and performance, and she is also affiliated with the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Life

Paredez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Her family migrated there in the 1730s when it was still a part of Mexico under the Spanish Empire. She graduated from Douglas MacArthur High School in San Antonio, and was active in both theater and the Creative Writing Club while in high high school. She has lived in Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Illinois, Oaxaca City, Mexico, and New York City before moving back to Texas, and she now resides in Austin. Paredez’s education was largely “informal and self-taught”, and she received a PhD in Theatre from Northwestern University in 2002, and since then has taught classes at Vassar College and the University of Texas. She served as the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for the 2009-2010 school year and the Interim Director for 2011–2012, and she also serves as the Director of Arts and Community Engagement.

Works

Scholarly

The following are a few of the scholarly works that Paredez has written:

• Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009)
• About My (Absent) Mother: Latina Aspirations in Real Women Have Curves and Ugly Betty
• Beyond El Barrio : Everyday Life in Latina/o America (NYU Press 2010)

Poetry

In addition to being a Professor and scholar, Deborah Paredez is also a poet. In 2002, she published her first book of poems entitled This Side of Skin (2002). Some of the works in this collection were included in other publications including Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of U.S. Latina Fiction and Poetry (1995), This Promiscuous Light (1996), Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry (1998), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007) and the literary magazine Mandorla: Writing from the Americas (2011). The following is one of her poems from The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, entitled “The Fire”:

The night Tony decided to end it all,
bathing his head and limbs in gasoline
and igniting himself into effigy
in the third floor dressing room of the theatre,
roaring and tumbling down the stairs
like the damned on their way to hell,
you were working late in the scene shop,
goggles on, all safety procedures met,
guiding plywood through the table saw’s teeth.

The night Tony seared the shop’s doorframe
with the stench of flesh in flames and the
screams pouring from the O once his mouth now
melting away, you stayed calm, moved
quickly, took all the necessary precautions,
you knew what to do to save his life
and your own and you did it and then you drove home,
pulled two six-packs from the fridge,
hauled them to the back porch, tilted your face
toward the heavens and drank
until every spark of light blazing from
the stars went dark, you drank
until your body could hold nothing more
and then you pissed right there in the yard, your bladder
now emptied of its fire.

That night you learned the danger of a body
burning and pleading and staggering towards you
so that years later when I, a bright girl, ablaze
and reckless, rushed to embrace you,
you did only what you knew best to do:
you stayed calm, moved quickly,
took all the necessary precautions,
snuffed out every ember,
saved yourself.

Paredez is currently working on a second volume of poetry, which will be called After the Light.

Deborah Paredez was also a co-founder of the organization CantoMundo. CantoMundo is a collective of Latina/o poets who work to “1. nurture and enhance their poetics; 2. lecture and learn about aspects of Latina/o poetics currently not being discussed by the mainstream poetry publishers and critics; and 3. network with peer poets to enrich and further disseminate Latina/o poetry.” The organization states on their website that “While CantoMundo envisions developing workshops specifically devoted to the craft of poetry, every aspect of the work, including discussions around aesthetic issues, will be firmly rooted in social concerns. This open acknowledgment of larger concerns honors the sociopolitical underpinnings of Latina/o poetry.”

Honors and Awards

• She has received the 2008-2009 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Her book Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory won the 2010 Latina/o Studies Book Award Honorable Mentioned as well as the 2011 National Association of Chicana/o Studies Honorable Mention

• In 2002, she was awarded the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Writing Award, which is a foundation created by the well-known Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros to honor her father.

• At the University of Texas at Austin, she was honored as a Katherine Ross Richards Centennial Teaching Fellow in English and Fellow of C. B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in United States-Mexico Relations.

Theories

According to Paredez, Selenidad is not about Selena but about her afterlife. Its about the collective mourning of her fans. that ways she is remembered, the representations and symbols that are still remembered today. Concepts related to Selenidad: Transculturation as Fernando Ortiz coined, is the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation occurs as a three-stage process acquisition of new cultural material from foreign culture. Transculturation appears in aspects of society where two or more cultures interact such as in wars, ethnic conflict, racism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and interracial marriage. A historical example would be the period of colonization in Latin America. Diana Taylor describes transculturation as a new form, which denotes the transformative process undergone by all societies as they come in contact with and acquire foreign cultural material, whether willingly or unwillingly. Angel Rama utilizes transculturation to think beyond dualism and dichotomies. Transculturation can be seen in the term Selenidad as well as the book by observing what Selena represents to fans even after her dead. In her life, music and performance Selena included her personal life style as a Tejana, and American cultural practices. At the same time Selena’s music and performance utilized Mexican culture and Latino culture; through Spanish language and Latin dance moves. In Chapter one, in Selenidad, Paredez utilized Selena last concert to highlight the way Selena would go back an forth in her performance from American music to Latin music. The specific music is the “disco medley” where Selena sings and dances to music of the disco era and her Spanish songs such as “Como La Flor.” The mergence of all these cultural references contribute to the phenomenon Selena became after her death. Many people around the world were able to identify with parts of Selena’s life and music. Latinidad: Latinidad is describes in a sense as a collective Latina/o identity. Felix Padilla first introduced the term Latinidad. Latinidad is based on the study of collective identity in Spanish- speaking countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America. Arlene Davila describes this notion of Latinidad as the “out-of-many, one-people' process through which 'Latinos' or 'Hispanics' are conceived and represented as sharing one common identity.” Latinidad is also part of pan-Latina/o solitary. In the introduction and Chapter four, Becoming Selena, becoming Latina Paredez explains the collective memory of Selena as a Latina among Latinos in the United States as well as in Latin America. Among Latinos there was a collective grief of the dead of Selena that remains after the many years that have passed. Selena is also used as the representation of what a Latina should look like. Her Black hair, tan skin, lipstick, well formed buttocks have become iconic characteristics of Selena and Latinas. From girls, teens, women, and queers all over Latin America as well as United States haven imitated her look as well as her dance moves.

Bibliography

Ortiz, Fernando (1995), Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-1616-1. Trans. Harriet de Onís. (Original Spanish edition published in 1940. Original translation by Onìs published in 1947, New York: Knopf.)

Miguel, Guadalupe San. "Embracing Latinidad: Beyond Nationalism in the History of Education." Journal of Latinos & Education 10.1 (2011): 3-22.

Morrison, Amanda Maria. "Chicanas and “Chick Lit”: Contested Latinidad in the Novels of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez." Journal of Popular Culture 43.2 (2010): 309-329.

Parédez, Deborah. Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Durham [NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

(2000) Mapping Latinidad: Spanish, English and “Spanglish” in the Hispanic TV Landscape. Television and New Media. Vol. 1(1):73-92. Reprinted in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Citizenship and Capital at U.S. Borders. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, editor. St. Martin Press.

Rama, Angel. Transculturación Narrativa En América Latina. México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982. Print.