Maria Cotera

Maria Cotera was born in Austin, Texas on July 17, 1964 to Chicana activist Martha P. Cotera and urban renewal architect Juan Cotera.

Cotera began her professional career at the Chicana Research and Learning Center, located in Austin, Texas.[1][2]

After editing her first novel Life Along the Border, Cotera went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University in 2001.[3]

Her first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women's Studies Association in 2009.[4] Her edited volume (with Dionne Espinoza and Maylei Blackwell), Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Feminism and Activism in the Movement Era, documented oral histories of women activists of color.[5] It was praised in a review published by Ms. Magazine as "a treasure trove of new materials from the Civil Rights Era."[6] Cotera stated that contributors to the collection often had to build their archives from scratch, due to the lack of institutional collections documenting Chicanas.[7]

Cotera is currently employed as an associate professor of American Culture and Women's Studies and the Director of Latino Studies at the University of Michigan.[8] Her latest project, the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, documents the work of Chicana and Latina artists and writers who were civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s.[9]