Activism doesn't come easy. It requires an astonishing commitment to a worthwhile cause, a deep-rooted desire for change, and an overwhelming love of people. The Feminist Movement, specifically the Chicana Feminist Movement, addresses race, poverty, and other issues that directly impact the Mexican American community. An empowered, influential woman, Alicia Gaspar de Alba has made it her life's duty to create change through activism while also advocating for women's rights.
A Chicana writer, poet, scholar, professor, and activist, Gaspar de Alba, born on July 29, 1958, in El Paso, Texas, grew up no more than a mile from El Segundo Barrio on Barcelona Street, only two streets away from the Rio Grande River. "I can literally say I was born on the border, and I say I was born in the middle."
Gaspar wrote for the Eastwood High School newspaper. In an interview with Dan Guerrero from La Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, she says, "There was no girls' athletics. I was writing for the newspaper at the time, and I had been assigned to cover sports and of course that meant boys' sports, and so I started wondering, Where are the girls' sports? I started writing editorials in the student paper. I guess I made enough noise about it that we got girls' athletics." And a good thing, too, for women's athletics can be just as engaging and even more captivating at times than men's. The El Paso Chapter of the National Organi:ation for Women recognized her for, as she puts it, "Raising Hell" from an early age, creating change and advocating for equal rights.
Image caption: Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sexy Corazon Symposium, UCLA. Courtesy of UCLA.
Upon graduating with a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, Gaspar de Alba moved to San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, hoping to live, what she calls, a "writer's lifestyle." After six months, she moved to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue a doctorate in American studies. "I was absolutely flabbergasted that I was meeting queers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Venezuela," she says. Although she loved the snow and her community of queer Latinos and Latinas in Iowa, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where she invested $60 in a used typewriter and spent every morning pecking diligently on the keys. Then in 1990, Gaspar de Alba moved again to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to complete her studies at the University of New Mexico, acquiring a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1994.
Gaspar de Alba has been a top-rated and well-known professor of Chicano Studies, English, and Gender Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles since I 994. Greatly admired and loved by her students, they affectionately call her "La Profe" or simply "Gaspar." She is also a founding faculty member and former chair of the UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicano/a Studies. Currently, she sits as the Chair of the LGBT Studies Program, providing an academic home for those who wish to study cultural traditions that have shaped our current understanding of sexuality and gender.
In an interview with Mary Anne Caton from Vanderbilt University, Gaspar de Alba reminiscences about books from her past that have inspired her:
You know, before college I would say I was an avid Nancy Drew fan, and it was all the Nancy Drew books, again the very independent-minded sleuth who is always allowed to do whatever she wants. Her upbringing was so different than mine because I grew up with a Mexican grandmother and grandfather who were very strict about things. I couldn't just run off with my friends to do whatever I wanted after school. I had to come right back home and come clean the house and cook and whatever, so it was such a different kind of life.
This likely reflects experiences that many who have been raised in remarkably similar situations can relate to.
Gaspar de Alba remembers entertaining a wealth of thoughts and wanting to express them through journalism. She became intrigued by books and the stories people tell through them. "I think that all that reading had generated that spark to write. It was a way to talk to myself." Her lifestyle and growing up in a border city inspired her. To some, it might feel like living two different lives. She remembers wanting to leave El Paso but now realizes El Paso follows her everywhere she goes. A great city, many can say the same thing about El Paso. We can leave it to pursue personal interests, but this wonderful city's foundation and philosophy remain embedded, as it did for Gaspar de Alba.
Various interests whirl around Gaspar de Alba's mind, such as Chicano/a art, popular culture, border studies, gender and sexuality, the maquiladora murders, femicide and creative writing. Each can be the center of an entire lifetime, but Gaspar de Alba handles them all. Of extreme importance to the Juarez/El Paso community, Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders addresses the 
epidemic of young women and girls violently murdered since May 1993 on the U.S. Mexico border. Such vile acts of inhumanity should attract media attention. However, still, with little coverage in newspapers, television shows, or the internet about these voluminous and gruesome murders in Juarez, Gaspar de Alba says, "In an effort to break the silence, I decided to write a mystery novel about the crimes based on research and on what I knew from growing up in that precise paradoxical on the map to inform the broadest possible English-speaking public about the femicides." It is baffling at times what the media chooses to cover and what it chooses to ignore.
Irene Mata of Wellesley College writes, "Gaspar de Alba's novel is distinguished from other fictionalized accounts because it goes further than simply addressing the violence of the border. The text moves beyond the quest for answers. It provides an oppositional narrative that demonstrates the opportunities divergent thinking offers in the analysis of transnational systems of power." Mata further states that Desert Blood's "protagonist, Ivon Villa, embodies the energy of reading signs and symbols that Chela Sandoval identifies as a 'methodology of the oppressed' by employing a transnationalist feminist analysis of global networks of oppression."
Image caption: Book cover of Desert Blood. Courtesy of Amazon.
Soon after completing Desert Blood, with the help of a handful of students, Gaspar de Alba organized an international conference called The Maquiladora Murders, Or, Who Is Killing the Women of Juarez, Mexico? The Chicano Studies associate director at the time, Gaspar de Alba brought together scholars, journalists, artists, writers, activists, forensic investigators, policy specialists, and, arguably the most important, the mothers of the victims. At this international conference, a series of roundtable discussions and presentations took place to bring consciousness to Los Angeles about the crimes in Juarez and to break the silence protecting the perpetrators. Gaspar de Alba describes in Latino Policy & Issues Brief from UCLA, "Their bodies were found strangled, mutilated, dismembered, raped, stabbed and torched; some have been so badly beaten, disfigured, or decomposed that the remains cannot be identified." The alarming description should raise eyebrows, as Gaspar de Alba hopes, and cause others to stand by Gaspar de Alba to bring about the needed action to stop senseless killings, such as those experienced by these innocent girls and women.
Gaspar de Alba has been an ardent contributor to today's Feminist Movement. Project Muse, in a segment called "Frontiers: A Segment of Women's Studies," says of Sor Juana's Second Dream:
Gaspar de Alba's biographical novel formulates a counternarrative to readings that have concentrated on the rise of the seventeenth century nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz ( 1651- 95) as a criolla intellectual, while downplaying or effacing her identity as a woman who loved women. Using a self-referential genre that may be termed 'lesbian authohistoriography,' Gaspar de Alba recreates the historical figure as a symbolic foremother of contemporary Chicana lesbians' ongoing struggles for legitimacy and voice among heteropatriarchal institutes such as the Catholic Church. Sor Juana emerges as a passionate protofeminist artist whose intellectual ascent countered the misogynistic social restrictions of her time.
The University of New Mexico Press argues of the Mexican nun that "scholars have attempted to deconstruct Sor Juana's brilliance, her feminism, and her decision to enter a convent at the beginning of her candescent, intellectual career as they try to unravel the affairs of the heart. The novel is often heralded as a beautifully written masterpiece about the Mexican nun who has fascinated readers worldwide for centuries."
Gaspar de Alba has received many awards, which is no surprise because most of her works have high ratings: Sor Juana's Second Dream and Desert Blood for Best Historical Fiction, Best Lesbian Mystery, and Best English Language Mystery. Gaspar de Alba wrote Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders, the thriller that sheds light on the killings in Ciudad Juarez, because the media was not reporting on it at the time. Her other publications include La Llorona on the Yellow Fellow Bridge: Poetry y Otras Movidas and Beggar on the Cordova Bridge. Premio Aztlan for Emerging Chicano/a Fiction Writers awarded Gaspar de Alba the literary prize for her collection of short fiction The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories. She authored Unframing the "Bad Woman": Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause. This work in particular took 20 years of research on gender stereotypes. According to the University of California at Los Angeles' Department of English, "years of Alicia's research went into the gender stereotypes by which women across time and culture have been 'framed' i.e., bad girls, bad mothers, bad sisters, bad daughters, and 'mujeres malas' with special attention to three iconic female figures of Chicana/Mexicana history."
Image caption: Book cover of El Segundo Sueño. Courtesy of Amazon.
Gaspar de Alba considers Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz the foremother of Chicana feminism. Sor Juana advocates a woman's right to an education and a woman's right to learn, study and publish in the 17th century, 300 years before feminist theory. In an interview with Gig Patta from LRMonline, Gaspar de Alba says, "I attribute the fact that I am a Chicana writer and poet to the fact that I am part of that lineage of Sor Juana. I want to call myself part of that lineage of Sor Juana." Perhaps a modern-day Sor Juana, Gaspar de Alba embraces change and understands that to achieve change, activism is the primary ingredient.
From an incredibly early age, Gaspar de Alba knew her future would be in writing and had always aspired to be a great Chicana writer and poet. She recalls starting a journal when she was about eight or nine, where she wrote her first poem about a cat that would often hide out in her family's garage. A book that inspired her to be a Chicana writer, as it has many others, is Adolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultimo, exhibiting exquisite prose with an exquisite sense of storytelling. Completely swept, it was the first time she had heard of Chicano literature. Gaspar de Alba recalls being astonished at being the only Chicana in her Chicano literature class at the University of Texas at EI Paso because, at that time, roughly 75% of Mexicans/ Chicanos lived in El Paso.
Our young generation needs more women like Gaspar de Alba, an incredible influence on young women, especially those who want to break the machismo traditions. Alicia Gaspar de Alba currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with her wife, digital artist and muralist Alma Lopez. She is a fighter who advocates for what is right and does not let any situation discourage her from moving forward for change. We shouldn't either.
