Q&A with Cynthia Orozco about Mexican American Civil Rights Activist Adela Sloss-Vento

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last

More info

presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader. 

Cynthia E. Orozco's Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist is the first comprehensive biography of a formidable civil rights activist and feminist whose grassroots organizing in Texas made her an influential voice in the fight for equal rights for Mexican Americans.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Adela Sloss-Vento was one of the most important Latina civil rights activists of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the rise of the Mexican American civil rights movement before 1960 and the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She operated independently in predominantly male environments: civil rights activism; politics; and, as an essayist, public-affairs journalism. Even though she lacked a college education, lived in rural South Texas, was married with two children, and worked as a jail matron, she left an unprecedented array of writings in English and Spanish. She even wrote the presidents of the United States and Mexico offering advice. She was unique.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I met Adela Sloss-Vento in 1978, when she was seventy-five and I was college sophomore conducting research on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest and most important Latino civil rights organization in the nation. She had written a book on Alonso Perales, its founder and her co-activist. Sloss-Vento helped me by sharing her archives, which dated back to 1927. At the time, she did not mention the central role she herself had played in the Mexican American civil rights movement and even the Chicano movement. Thirty-three years later, I saw some of her writings in the Perales archive and realized how important she had been.

What lessons can activists learn from Adela Sloss-Vento’s work in grassroots organizing in Texas?

While Sloss-Vento’s efforts toward racial desegregation, women’s rights, labor justice, and immigrant rights did not result in any change in state or federal legislation, she provided a voice for all these interests during the era of Jim Crow/Juan Crow and before the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. With every op-ed, letter to the editor, or letter to an official, she made a political statement—a statement few other Mexican American women were making. Her tenacity is most impressive.

How did Sloss-Vento advance her progressive views rhetorically and how was her voice unique and impactful?

Sloss-Vento never studied government, social sciences, or literature at a university; as a public intellectual, she appealed to morality and Christianity. She believed in democracy and justice, even criticizing European fascism during World War II and calling for true pan-Americanism for Latinos and Latin America.

In what ways did some of the long-forgotten archives you consulted in your research challenge outdated scholarly trends?

There is not enough research on “organic” public intellectuals, those who never received college degrees. Before the internet, to be a public intellectual activist meant really having something valuable to say and saying it repeatedly. Sloss-Vento reminds us that sometimes we are surprised by those whom society underestimates—in this case, Mexican American women.

Cynthia E. Orozco is a professor of history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement and coeditor of Mexican Americans in Texas History.

www.utexaspress.com

Stephanie Sauer on Evoking the Royal Chicano Air Force

How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? Employing a creative mix of real and fictive events, objects, and people that subverts assumptions about the archiving and display of historical artifacts, Stephanie Sauer's innovative new book The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force both documents and evokes an arts collective that played a significant role in the Chicano movement.

More info

The RCAF started as the elusive Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, its ongoing subversive performance stance, and its key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. Reimagining herself as a fictional archaeologist named 'La Stef', Stephanie Sauer documents the plight of the RCAF, suspending historical realities and leaping through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

A cofounding editor of A Bolha Editora, a bookshop and publisher in Rio de Janeiro, and executive editor of Copilot Press, Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary text-based artist and visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. We talked to her about her approach to this project and how institutions should embed experiential learning, i.e.: "embodied knowledge," into pedagogical approaches.

What informed your approach to how you presented this archive, which is described in the introduction as your “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing”? 

Before I conceived of what is now The Accidental Archives, I spent a year writing what I had been expected to write. That is, I wrote a history of the Royal Chicano Air Force as I encountered it in the 21st Century. It was a story one would expect to read. It was a story I had read many times before. I was in Chicago then, a microcosm of a United States obsessed with its divisions, and found myself answering to the expectations of readers who wanted me to translate Chicanismo for them, to act as a type of mediator whose task it was to create a didactic, easily digestible history. This way of writing bored me, and I found it deeply problematic. I saw myself as facilitator to a kind of colonial fantasy that pitted me as an objective, rational (read: white, anthropological) narrator of an RCAF documentary. I didn’t want to perpetuate such ideas of otherness, so I threw out that entire manuscript and started fresh from three scraps, the very first notes I’d written.

Inaugural Flight of LaRuca 2012. With permission of use of Los Files © Juanishi V. Orosco.
Courtesy of Juanishi V. Orosco.

What Dr. Diaz noted in her introduction as “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing” is, for me, the richest way to present any history. Rooted in feminist practices of testimonio, embodied knowledge, “disruptive excess,” and collective witnessing, I found it vital to foreground the multiplicity of voices and their contradictions, the tactile ephemera, and the biases. Otherwise, when one tries to smooth over these elements in favor of a clean, linear narrative, the tremendous violence of silencing distorts the humanity of those making history. It is this type of silencing that alienates us from our own power to impart change. I wanted to offer an alternative. I wanted to upend the so-called logic of traditional, Western, male-centered historiography and imagine what a new kind of archive might include. 

A Promising Problem: Latina/o, Chicana/o Voters

In just over thirty weeks, Americans will elect the 45th President of the United States. The campaign trail is contentious and many of the issues the candidates are debating pertain to Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, a coveted demographic for both Republicans and Democrats. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, a new edited volume, A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History, presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple,

More info

overlapping identities. Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination. We asked a few contributors to the book to comment on how their research has informed their views on the 2016 presidential election, providing new perspectives on America’s culture wars.

The Chicana/o and Latina/o vote is much debated this presidential election year. Does the history you uncover point to new realities or future directions for Chicana/o or Latina/o communities that are of importance for the 2016 election cycle?

**********

Carlos Kevin Blanton, March 7th

Having just watched one “Super” Tuesday in early March with additional such Tuesdays to go as well as some scattered “Super” Saturdays and Sundays thrown in for good measure, I am struck at what a contradictory role Chicanas/os and Latinas/os play in this 2016 presidential election. Chicanas/os and Latinas/os are simultaneously celebrated and vilified, normalized and exoticized, and reflect both “promise” and “problem.”

As I write this, Cuban Americans named Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio remain credible Republican candidates running for President; another Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has jingoistically called for harsh deportations against Mexican immigrants as well as the construction of a massive wall on the U.S.-Mexico border for which he intends to force Mexico to pay, a claim former President of Mexico Vicente Fox has pugnaciously repudiated; and two Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are vying for the support of Latina/o voters in states all over the country as a key demographic group for the success of their party. “Problem” and “Promise,” it seems, define this 2016 election cycle for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. 

Suffice to say, I am very appreciative that I titled this new edited collection A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History. The word construction of “a promising problem” in the title, while it perhaps seems overly ironic, was one of the best ways I could concisely describe the very precarious balance we practitioners of Chicana/o history feel about working in a rich, growing, diverse, and intellectually promising field that, simultaneously, is the target of very public attacks and anti-Latina/o hysteria in the political sphere. As this 2016 election cycle continues, Chicana/o and Latina/o peoples and their issues will be front and center of the public debate as desired partners in electoral and governing success and also as being perceived as problems to be solved.

The essays in A Promising Problem add new insight into the Chicana/o past, present, and future. Transnationalism, civil rights activism, inter-Latina/o relations, the role of religion, the role of place and region such as the Nuevo South and the Midwest, and the production of culture and identity, are all important to understanding Chicana/o-Latina/o communities today in a very interdisciplinary sense. The history of these topics and more are intelligently explored in this collection. While A Promising Problem may not help anyone predict the next meaningful evening of voting, it will help readers understand Chicana/o-Latina/o people at the center of this presidential election and their pasts in fresh and insightful ways.