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Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Women in Texas History Series, sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation)

Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Women in Texas History Series, sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation)

Teresa Palomo Acosta, Nancy Baker Jones (Foreword by), Cynthia J. Beeman (Foreword by)
$22.00
Publication Date: December 21st, 2021
Publisher:
Texas A&M University Press
ISBN:
9781623499884
Pages:
190

Description

This collection by Teresa Palomo Acosta—poet, historian, author, and activist—spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children’s story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that she experienced from her childhood to the present.

The plays, set in the Central Texas Blackland Prairies where Acosta was raised, provide a unique Latina vision of memory, identity, and experience and are a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought. The essays focus on Acosta’s literary heroes Jovita González de Mireles, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Elena Zamora O’Shea, important writers who contributed significantly to Tejana literature and to Texas letters. The children’s story, “Colchas, Colchitas,” is based on Acosta’s most notable poem, “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” which pays homage to her mother and the many women of her generation who employed needles and thread, creating both practical and symbolic artifacts.

This collection is a creative and, indeed, essential expansion of boundaries for what we think of as history, offering a unique and compelling look into the lived experiences and interior contemplations of a Texas artist well worth knowing. Readers will increase their understanding of Tejana experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tejanaland promises to become an important addition to the cultural record, informing historical perspectives on the experiences of Tejana women and contributing significantly to the existing body of work from Tejana writers.

About the Author

TERESA PALOMO ACOSTA is cofounder and former vice president of the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women’s History. She is the author of many works of fiction and poetry and is coauthor of Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. She lives in Austin.

Praise for Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Women in Texas History Series, sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation)

“. . . a revealing and beautiful compendium of plays, essays and poems that offers readers an intriguingly fractured reflection on the creative life of a Chicana writer. Grounded in Acosta's personal experience as a child and young woman, and engaging issues of memory, healing, and identity through deeply poetic writing and evocative staging, they represent a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought and especially to the history of Chicanx/Latinx playwriting. In her essays, Acosta turns our attention to a less proximal—but no less meaningful—history to chart a Tejana intellectual genealogy that has been a source of homegrown inspiration for Chicana writers in Tejas and across the Southwest. Lovely and quiet, Acosta’s poems offer paradoxically sensuous reflections on spirituality, time, and mortality.”—María Eugenia Cotera, author of Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture
— María Eugenia Cotera

“Tejanaland is an important work that weaves together riveting poetic aesthetic, profound historical insights, and literary brilliance in centering women as agents in the making of a Tejanx cultural, political, and historical legacy. Teresa Poloma Acosta’s compelling storytelling and gripping reflections on gender, race, ethnicity, and spirituality told through remembrances and reflections on love, loss, resilience, and resistance place her alongside her ‘literary abuelas’ as a seminal Tejana writer and chronicler of the borderlands.”—Brenda Sendejo, contributor to Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era
— Brenda Sendejo

“Beautifully sculpted as a testament to women’s experiences, Tejanaland is a profound journey through the love, loss and lives of generations of Tejanas. It is a must read.”—Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities and History at Texas A&M University-Commerce and Handbook of Texas Women Founding Project Director
— Jessica Brannon-Wranosky

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