Maria Cotera

Maria Cotera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan. Cotera began her career as a researcher and writer at the Chicana Research and Learning Center, a non‐profit dedicated to supporting research by and about women of color. In 1989 she helped produce "Crystal City: A Twenty Year Reflection," a documentary about the role of young women in the 1969 Chicano student walkouts in Crystal City, Texas. As a Master's Student at the University of Texas, Cotera worked with Dr. Jose Limon on a recovery project that uncovered a lost manuscript by Texas folklorist Jovita González. Published in 1996, the manuscript, entitled Caballero, includes a critical epilogue by Cotera. Since that time she has published numerous essays on Jovita González and Sioux ethnographer Ella Deloria and has recovered other works by González inlcuding Gonzalez's Masters Thesis, published by Texas A & M Press as Life Along the Border (2006). Cotera's 2008 book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). The prize is awarded for "groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship." Cotera has been building the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory project along with project co-director Linda Garcia Merchant since 2009.