Deborah Paredez



Deborah Paredez is a Hispano American poet and academic.

Life
Paredez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Her family migrated there in the 1730s when it was still a part of Mexico under the Spanish Empire. She has lived in Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Illinois, Oaxaca City, Mexico, and New York City before moving back to Texas, and she now resides in Austin. Paredez’s education was largely “informal and self-taught”, and she received a PhD in Theatre from Northwestern University in 2002, and since then has taught classes at Vassar College and the University of Texas.

Paredez currently teaches as an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin with the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of English where many of her courses focus on race and performance, and she is also affiliated with the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She served as the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for the 2009-2010 school year and the Interim Director for 2011–2012, and she also serves as the Director of Arts and Community Engagement.

Paredez was also a co-founder of the organization CantoMundo. CantoMundo is a collective of Latina/o poets who work to “1. nurture and enhance their poetics; 2. lecture and learn about aspects of Latina/o poetics currently not being discussed by the mainstream poetry publishers and critics; and 3. network with peer poets to enrich and further disseminate Latina/o poetry.” The organization states on their website that “While CantoMundo envisions developing workshops specifically devoted to the craft of poetry, every aspect of the work, including discussions around aesthetic issues, will be firmly rooted in social concerns. This open acknowledgment of larger concerns honors the sociopolitical underpinnings of Latina/o poetry.”

Selenidad
According to Paredez, Selenidad is not about Selena but about her afterlife. It's about the collective mourning of her fans. that ways she is remembered, the representations and symbols that are still remembered today. Concepts related to Selenidad: Transculturation as Fernando Ortiz coined, is the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation occurs as a three-stage process acquisition of new cultural material from foreign culture. Transculturation appears in aspects of society where two or more cultures interact such as in wars, ethnic conflict, racism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and interracial marriage. A historical example would be the period of colonization in Latin America. Diana Taylor describes transculturation as a new form, which denotes the transformative process undergone by all societies as they come in contact with and acquire foreign cultural material, whether willingly or unwillingly. Angel Rama utilizes transculturation to think beyond dualism and dichotomies. Transculturation can be seen in the term Selenidad as well as the book by observing what Selena represents to fans even after her dead. In her life, music and performance Selena included her personal life style as a Tejana, and American cultural practices. At the same time Selena’s music and performance utilized Mexican culture and Latino culture; through Spanish language and Latin dance moves. In Chapter one, in Selenidad, Paredez utilized Selena last concert to highlight the way Selena would go back an forth in her performance from American music to Latin music. The specific music is the “disco medley” where Selena sings and dances to music of the disco era and her Spanish songs such as “Como La Flor.” The mergence of all these cultural references contribute to the phenomenon Selena became after her death. Many people around the world were able to identify with parts of Selena’s life and music.

Latinidad
Latinidad is describes in a sense as a collective Latina/o identity. Felix Padilla first introduced the term Latinidad. Latinidad is based on the study of collective identity in Spanish- speaking countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America. Arlene Davila describes this notion of Latinidad as the “out-of-many, one-people' process through which 'Latinos' or 'Hispanics' are conceived and represented as sharing one common identity.” Latinidad is also part of pan-Latina/o solitary. In the introduction and Chapter four, Becoming Selena, becoming Latina Paredez explains the collective memory of Selena as a Latina among Latinos in the United States as well as in Latin America. Among Latinos there was a collective grief of the dead of Selena that remains after the many years that have passed. Selena is also used as the representation of what a Latina should look like. Her Black hair, tan skin, lipstick, well formed buttocks have become iconic characteristics of Selena and Latinas. From girls, teens, women, and queers all over Latin America as well as United States haven imitated her look as well as her dance moves.

Poetry
In addition to being a Professor and scholar, Deborah Paredez is also a poet. In 2002, she published her first book of poems entitled This Side of Skin (2002). Some of the works in this collection were included in other publications including Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of U.S. Latina Fiction and Poetry (1995), This Promiscuous Light (1996), Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry (1998), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007) and the literary magazine Mandorla: Writing from the Americas (2011). The following is one of her poems from The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, entitled “The Fire”:

The night Tony decided to end it all, bathing his head and limbs in gasoline and igniting himself into effigy in the third floor dressing room of the theatre, roaring and tumbling down the stairs like the damned on their way to hell, you were working late in the scene shop, goggles on, all safety procedures met, guiding plywood through the table saw’s teeth. The night Tony seared the shop’s doorframe with the stench of flesh in flames and the screams pouring from the O once his mouth now melting away, you stayed calm, moved quickly, took all the necessary precautions, you knew what to do to save his life and your own and you did it and then you drove home, pulled two six-packs from the fridge, hauled them to the back porch, tilted your face toward the heavens and drank until every spark of light blazing from the stars went dark, you drank until your body could hold nothing more and then you pissed right there in the yard, your bladder now emptied of its fire. That night you learned the danger of a body burning and pleading and staggering towards you so that years later when I, a bright girl, ablaze and reckless, rushed to embrace you, you did only what you knew best to do: you stayed calm, moved quickly, took all the necessary precautions, snuffed out every ember, saved yourself. Paredez is currently working on a second volume of poetry, which will be called After the Light.

Recognition

 * At the University of Texas at Austin, Paredez was honored as a Katherine Ross Richards Centennial Teaching Fellow in English and Fellow of C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in United States-Mexico Relations.
 * In 2002, she was awarded the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Writing Award, which is a foundation created by the well-known Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros to honor her father.
 * She received the 2008-2009 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Fellowship
 * Her book Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory won the 2010 Latina/o Studies Book Award Honorable Mention as well as the 2011 National Association of Chicana/o Studies Honorable Mention

Scholarly
The following are a few of the scholarly works that Paredez has written:
 * Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Duke University Press, 2009.
 * About My (Absent) Mother: Latina Aspirations in Real Women Have Curves and Ugly Betty
 * Beyond El Barrio : Everyday Life in Latina/o America. New York University Press, 2010.