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| Songs My Mother Sang to Me
ISBN: 9780816536993
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Arizona Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Oral tradition; Oral tradition; Mexican American women;
As a counterpoint to the largely urban and California/Texas orientation of Chicano scholarship, Martin ( Images and Conversations ) has interviewed 10 Arizona-area Mexican-American women born in the early part of the century, showing the mosaic of life in rural and urban areas as well as ranching and mining towns. Aware of negative stereotypes of Mexicana women, Martin notes that her subjects have a wide range of experiences--one working as a radio journalist, another a laundress and a third a Eucharistic minister at a hospital. The oral histories--presented as narratives, not dialogues--are full of details of the women's daily lives, from cooking to childhood songs to religious practice, but they likely will interest only specialists. There are notable moments: Julia Yslas Velez adopted a political maxim from a black activist: ``I want Mexican faces in high places''; Carmen Celia Beltran recalls how her father's political involvement in Mexico forced her family to hide in the mountains. However, one wishes Martin also probed issues like class consciousness and marriage to Anglo husbands. Photographs, mainly of the subjects in their youth and their parents, add texture to the interviews. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Patricia Preciado Martin is a native Arizonan and a lifelong Tucsonan. She is an honors graduate of the University of Arizona. She has been active in many facets of the Mexican American community of Tucson and for ten years has devoted her time to writing, the collection of oral history, and the development of the Mexican Heritage project at the Arizona Historical Society.
Her first book, The Bellringer of San Agustín , is a bilingual children's book published for the International Year of the Child. Her first collection of oral history was Images and Conversations: Mexican Americans Recall a Southwestern Past , which won the Virginia McCormick Scully award for the best book of history by a Native American or Chicana. She has also written a book of short stories, Days of Plenty, Days of Want .
The author and her husband, Jim, whom she met while serving in the Peace Corps, have two college-age children. Although the author still lives in Tucson, she says, "I have left my heart in Aravaipa Canyon."
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