Daniella Echeverria

Hot Topic

Carol Rama
a self-taught artist whose unconventional painting encompasses an erotic, and often sexually aggressive universe populated by characters who present themes of sexual identity with specific references to female sensuality. 

Eleanor Antin 
an American photographer, author, and artist working with video, film, performance, and drawing.  

Yoko Ono
a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking 

Carolee Schneeman
an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. 

Gretchen Phillips
an American singer-songwriter known for her humorous and topical songs. Phillips has been openly gay throughout her life and her lesbianism has inspired much of her material. 

Cibo Matto 
a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994. Initially, the lyrics in their songs were primarily concerned with food 

Leslie Feinberg
a transgender queer and communist activist, speaker, and author. Feinberg’s first novel Stone Butch Blues is widely considered a groundbreaking work about gender. 

Faith Ringgold 
an African American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. 

Tammy Rae Carland
a zine editor, artist, filmmaker and owner of the independent lesbian music label Mr. Lady Records. 

Sleater-Kinney 
a rock band from Portland, Oregon that formed in 1994. The band was known for its feminist and left-leaning politics. 

Vivienne Dick
an Irish experimental and documentary filmmaker. 

Lorraine O’Grady 
an American conceptual artist, who has worked in the areas of performance art and photo and video installation. Her work locates universal and timeless values in such topical issues as diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. It also attempts a shift in art discourse to show how these topics have influenced the history of modernism. 

Gayatri Spivak
an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor atColumbia University. She is best known for the monograph “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. 

Angela Davis 
an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was most politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. 

Laurie Weeks
a writer and performer based in New York City. Her fiction and essays have been published throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including in Semiotext(e)’s The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading and most recently, Dave Eggers’s The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. She was a screenwriter on Boys Don’t Cry.[2] 

Dorothy Allison
an American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. 

Mr. Lady
a San Francisco-based lesbian-feminist independent record labeland video art distributor. 

Laura Cottingham 
an American art critic, curator and visual artist. Her most recent book is Fear Eats the Soul on Rainer Werner Fassbinder published by the British Film Institute in 2005.

Mab Segrest
an American feminist writer and activist. Mab Segrest is best known for her 1994 autobiographical work Memoir of a Race Traitor.

The Butchies
a punk rock band from Durham, North Carolina. The frequent focus of their lyrical content concerned lesbian and queer themes.

Gertrude Stein
an American writer, poet and art collector.

Marlon Riggs
a gay African-American filmmaker, educator, poet, and gay rights activist. He produced, wrote, and directed several television documentaries, including Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black Is… Black Ain’t. Riggs’ aesthetically innovative and socially provocative films examine past and present representations of race and sexuality in America.

Billie Jean King
a former professional tennis player from the United States. She won 12 Grand Slam singles titles, 16 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles, and 11 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles.

Ut
a British adult comic that was published monthly in the mid-1990s.

DJ Cuttin Candy

David Wojnarowicz
a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

Melissa York
a rock drummer (The Manacled, Born Against, Vitapup, Team Dresch, The Butchies, Amy Ray, Ex-Members, Humble Tripe).

Nina Simone
an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist widely associated with jazz music. 

Ann Peebles
an African American singer-songwriter who gained celebrity for her Memphis soul albums of the 1970s on the Hi Records label. 

Tammy Hart

The Slits
a British punk rock band. Although not all line-ups were exclusively female, the three main female members appeared on most record covers and publicity photos, and the group was generally presented as a female band.

Hanin Elias
a German industrial/techno artist. She was a member of Atari Teenage Riot and is now a solo artist.

Hazel Dickens
an American bluegrass singer, songwriter, double bassist and guitarist. 

Cathy Sissler
an American artist, born in Wisconsin. In 1997, her piece Lullaby for the Almost Falling Woman, concerning a woman seeking employment and experiencing a series of falls, won Prix de jury at the festival du Cinéma et des Nouveaux Médias. Her 1994 film Mr B. presented Sisler herself in drag as a man.

Shirley Muldowney
also known professionally as “Cha Cha” Muldowney and the “First Lady of Drag Racing”, is a pioneer in professional auto racing. 

Urvashi Vaid
an American activist who has worked for over 25 years promoting civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons.

Valie Export
an Austrian artist. Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts.

Cathy Opie
an American artist specializing in issues within documentary photography. Throughout her work she has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including LGBT community; surfers; and most recently high school football players. 

James Baldwin
an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Diane Dimassa
an American feminist author and cartoonist. Her works include comics, illustrations, and a graphic novel. She is best known for the character Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.

Aretha Franklin
an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. 

Joan Jett
an American rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer and actress.

Mia X
the first female emcee to sign with No Limit Records.

Krystal Wakem

Kara Walker
a contemporary African American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.

Justin Bond
an American singer-songwriter, performance artist, occasional actor and Radical Faerie.

Bridget Irish
In addition to making short films and videos, Irish also works in still image, installation, sound and performance art. 

Juliana Lueking
a musician, spoken-word artist and video maker.

Cecilia Dougherty
creates videotapes and digital films which focus on the themes of lesbianism and popular culture. While her early work places lesbians in a cultural territory separate from mainstream society, other projects portray the lesbian experience in terms of commonly-held norms; in her own words, “the life of an ordinary lesbian and her working-class family.”

Ariel Schrag
an American cartoonist and television writer who achieved critical recognition at an unusually early age for her autobiographical comics.

The Need
a queercore band that originated in Olympia, Washington in the late 1990s.

Vaginal Creme Davis
an American genderqueer performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer, and writer.

Alice Gerard
a journalist and peace activist.

Billy Tipton
an American jazz musician and bandleader. Born Dorothy Tipton, he is best known for the discovery, after his death, that he was female assigned at birth.

Julie Doucet
a Canadian former underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Her work is concerned with such topics as “sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues.”

Yayoi Kusama
a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation.

Eileen Myles
an American poet who has also worked in fiction, non-fiction, and theater.

20 quotes from US Latino Lit

I’m hoping if you’re into reading junk that you guys check out my favorite 20 quotes from the stuff I’ve read in the US Latino Lit class I took this semester. I had to do this for class, but figured I’d share it. Hopefully some of them will inspire you to pick up one of these books. We read most of these from a book called “The Latino Reader” from Mariner Books. 

1. Unknown Author The Comanches

I shall tell him Cuerno Verde,
With his numerous warrior band,
Have come to meet the Spaniard,
And drive him from this land.
That I come from the Napeiste,
Bringing him these tidings true,
That Oso Pardo and Cabeza Negra,
And here to give him battle too. 

2. José Martí A Vindication of Cuba 

…because our half-breeds and city-bread young men are generally of delicate, physique, of suave courtesy, and ready words, hiding under the glove that polices the poem in the hand that fells the foe – are we to be considered, as the Manufacturer does consider us, an “effeminate” people? 

3.  Pachín Marín In the Album of an Unknown Woman 

On Paper I set my unpolished lines
as a firebrand on a carpet.
Poor page this that was a flash of light
bathed by my poetry, a shadow. 

4.         Unknown Author The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez 

When the sherrifs got there

Gregorio gave himself up to go:

“You can take me because I’m willing.

If you force me, the answer’s no.” 

5.         William Carlos Williams All the Fancy Things 

Or what? a

clean air, high up, unoffended

by gross ordors 

6.         Bernardo Vega Memoirs of Bernardo Vega 

He dedicated the morning session to current news and events of the day, which he received from the latest wireless information bulletins. The afternoon sessions were devoted to more substantial readings of a political and literary nature. A Committee on Reading suggested the books to be read, and their recommendations were voted on by all the workers in the shop. 

7.         Julia de Burgos Returning 

              There’s no longer a voice,

or tears,

or distant sprigs of grain.

No more shipwrecks,

or echos,

not even anguish;silience itself is dead!

             What say you, my soul, should I flee?

Where could I go where I would not be

shadowning my own shadow? 

8.         Julia de Burgos Farewell to Welfare Island 

Where is the voice of freedom?

freedom to laugh,

to move

without the heavy phantom of despair?

             Where is the form of beauty

unshaken in its veil simple and pure?

Where is the warmth of heaven

pouring its dreams of love in broken spirits? 

9.         John Rechy City of Night 

(I would stare at it sometimes, in explicably racked with excitement, thinking: If I get a stick miles long and stand on a mountain, I’ll puncture Heaven – which I thought of then as an island somewhere in the vast sky – and then Heaven will come tumbling down to earth…) 

10.   Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles I am Joaquín

And now!

            I must choose

                                    between

            the paradox ofvictory of the spirit,

despite physical hunger,

                                    or

           to exist in the grasp

of American social neurosis,

sterilization of the soul

            And a full stomach. 

11.   Alurista must be the season of the witchP

must be the season of the witch

            la bruja

            la lloronashe lost her children

            and she cries

en las barrancas of industry

            her children

devoured by computersand the gears 

12.   Alurista to be fathers once again 

Chicanos have been born

to find

            a desert for an orchard 

13.   Rudolfo Anaya Bless me, Ultima 

And they smashed the fruits and vegetables that surrounded the bed and replaced them with a saddle, horse blankets, bottles of whiskey, a new rope, bridles, chapas, and an old guitar. And they rubbed the stain of the earth from the baby’s forehead because man was not to be tied to the earth by free upon it. 

14.   Oscar “Zeta” Acosta The Revolt of the Cockroach People 

She charges down the aisle in a black satin dancing dress that shows her beautiful knockers and she carries a golf club in her pretty hands. I am aghast! The Faithful are petrified. No one makes a move for her. Her big zoftig ass shakes as she rushes up to the alter, turn to the pie-eyed man in the red cape, and shouts:  

           ¡QUÉ VIVA LA RAZA! 

15.   Dolores Prida Beautiful Señoritas

Allá en el rancho grande

Alla donde vivía

Yo era un falca morenita

Que triste se quejaba

Que trista se quejaabaaa

No tengo ni un par de calzones

Ni sin remiendos de cuero

Ni does ghuevos racheros

Y las tortillas quemadas 

16.   Luis Valdez Los Vendidos 

MEXICAN-AMERICAN: Mr. Congressman, Mr. Chairman, memers of the board, honored gustes, ladies and gentlement. (SANCHO and SECRETARY applaud.) Please, please, I come before you an a Mexican-American to tell you abouthe problems of the Mexican. The problems of the Mexican stem form one thing and one thing alon: e’s stupid. He’s undeducated. He needs to stay in school. He needs to be ambitionus, forward-looking, harder-working. He needs o think American, American, America, AMERICAN, AMERICAN, AMERICAN, GOD BLESS AMERICA! GOD BLESS AMERICA!! 

17.   Luis Valdez Zoot Suit 

PACHUCO: You don’t deserve it, ese, but you’re going to get it anyway. 

18.   Helena María Viramontes The Moths 

There comes a time when the sun is defiant. Just about the time when moods change, inevitable seasons of the day, transitions from one color to another, that hour or minute or second when the sun is finally defeated, finally sinks into the realization that it cannot, with all it power to heal or burn, exist forever, there comes an illumination where the sun and earth meet, a final burst of burning red-orange fury reminding us that although ending are inevitable, they are necessary for rebirths, and when that time came, just when I switched on the light in the kitchen to open Abuelita’s can of soup, it was probably then that she died. 

19.   Judith Ortiz Cofer The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica 

…all wanting the comfortof spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portaitof her plain wide face, her ample bosomresting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interestas they speak to her and each otherof their dreams and their disillusions –how she miles, understanding,when they walk down the narrow aisles of her storereading the labels of packages aloud, as ifthey were names of lost lovers: Suspiros,Merengues, the stale candy of everyone’s childhood. 

20.   Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales Ending Poem 

I am not Taína.

I am a late leaf of that ancient tree,

 And my roots reach into the soil of two Americas.

Taína is in me, but there is no way back.