Reading by Deborah Miranda

Deborah’s current projects include a collection of essays examining gender and survivance in California missions, based on the stories of Isabel Meadows, an Rumesen storyteller born in1846, who left behind extensive documentation of Indigenous cultures and histories in and around Carmel Mission. Deborah is also working on a “coffee-table” book about the missions told from an Indigenous perspective, tentatively titled When Missions Walls Talk, which deconstructs the glossy coffee table books sold in mission gift shops that function as genocidal propaganda against the lives of California Indians.  She recently completed a poetry collection titled maxana chempapisi: Blood Writing, exploring the depth of meaning in individual Esselen words or phrases, and has another chapbook, Pilgrimage, forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. Currently, Deborah and wife Margo Solod live in Eugene, Oregon. Please visit her site: https://www.deborahmiranda.com/

Estelle Tarica is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research and teaching examines colonial legacies in modern Latin America, Indigenous and Jewish memory cultures, and the transformative power of narrative and poetry. Her first book, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores the subjective effects of racialized national identity formations in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. Her second book, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022), is about the impact of Holocaust memories and terminologies as reference points for authors and activists confronting state violence in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala from the 1960s to the present. She is affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Jewish Studies. Read more about Professor Tarica here.

Presented by the Arts Research Center with co-sponsorship from the Departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese, and the Center for Race & Gender