Phyllis Tashlik - Hispanic, Female and Young

AN ANTHOLOGY

EDITED BY PHYLLIS TASHLIK

This volume is made possible through support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund.

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Houston, Texas 77204-2004

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Cover design and illustration by Gladys Ramrez

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hispanic, female and young: an anthology / edited by Phyllis Tashlik.

p. cm.

ISBN-10: 1-55885-080-5

ISBN-13: 978-155885-080-4

1. American literatureHispanic American authors.

2. Hispanic American womenLiterary collections. 3. Hispanic American youthLiterary collections. 4. American literature20th century.

I. Tashlik, Phyllis

PS508.H57H56 1993

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Second Edition, 1995
Copyright 1994
Printed in the United States of America

6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

For Las Mujeres
of Manhattan East

HISPANIC, FEMALE
AND YOUNG:
AN ANTHOLOGY

We began in a circle. Twelve eighth-grade girls met with me, their teacher, on a sunny September afternoon, in an ancient red brick public schoolhouse on East 99th Street in Spanish Harlem (El Barrio). We were pioneering an elective named Las Mujeres Hispanas, a class designed to introduce Hispanic teenage girls to Hispanic female literature and to their own potential as writers.

Slowly, tentatively, they began to share their life stories. Sara spoke of being half-Mexican and Monique of being half-Cuban. Others offered tales of family journeys to the United States from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Panama. Our group represented a mosaic of cultures, histories, and backgrounds. I recall the words of Olga Mndez, the state senator the girls would later interview. She cautioned them that all people should know and be proud of their roots, that simply being called Hispanic isnt sufficient when your background is Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Mexican.

For my young mujeres, this classroom experience was definitely strange. It was probably the first time they had been asked to share in school their perception of themselves as young women and Latinas. There we were, a huddled group of females discussing our lives, while eighth-grade boys gathered outside the closed classroom door. We could see their heads bobbing up and down as they sought the girls attention and organized a mild protest against an all-girls class in our small, alternative school. The class may not have seemed right to the boys, but the girls saw it as an honor and a personal mission. As they later wrote in the introduction to the first anthology of their written work:

A class like Las Mujeres is something that helps you learn about yourself and others and find compassion in your heart to appreciate other cultures while finding in yourself who you really are. Las Mujeres helped us to understand ourselves in a better way. To take charge of our lives. To look at the world in a better way.