Alicia Gaspar de Alba
b. 1958

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Biography / Criticism

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an award-winning novelist as well as a professor and poet. Gaspar de Alba was born in El Paso, Texas on July 29, 1958. She taught English to Mexican executives and staff members of General Motors' maquiladoras at the Instituto Interlingua in Juarez, Chihuahua from 1978-1980. In 1979, The National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, DC offered her a Ford Foundation fellowship for minorities due to her excellent academic performance. She earned her B.A. in English in 1980 and M.A. in English in 1983 from the University of Texas in El Paso. As a graduate student, she worked as a teaching assistant for the English Department, and then became a part-time lecturer in English and linguistics at UT-El Paso. She enrolled as a PhD student in American Studies at the University of Iowa in 1985 but then quit a year later due to culture shock. She worked as a computer braillist at the National Braille Press in Boston from 1986-1990, and she was also an adjunct lecturer in English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston from 1987-1990.

Afterward, Gaspar de Alba returned to her doctoral studies in American Studies, this time at the University of New Mexico, where she graduated with distinction. She focused her research on Chicano/a art, pop culture, literature, and writing. For her dissertation, "Mi Casa [No] Es Su Casa: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation Exhibit," she won the Ralph Henry Gabriel American Studies Dissertation Fellowship in 1993, a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1993, and a Chicana Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. It was named the Best Dissertation in the field of American Studies in 1994. The University of Texas Press published the dissertation as a book, titled Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition, in January 1998.

In 1993, she won the Premio Aztlan Award given by Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya for her book of fiction The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (Marchino 1998). Her first novel, Sor Juana's Second Dream, a seventeenth-century historical novel set in Boston during the witchcraft trials, which includes a mestiza leading role (Marchino 1998), won First Place in Historical Fiction in the Latino Literary Hall of Fame in 2001. It has been translated into Spanish and German. Her latest novel, Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders, was released in March 2005 by Arte Publico Press. Gaspar de Alba describes Desert Blood as "a mystery novel based on the 12-year crime wave of murdered, raped, and mutilated young Mexican women on the El Paso/Juarez border" (communication with the author).

Gaspar de Alba was a Minority-Scholar-in-Residence at Pomona College from 1994-1995. She was hired as an assistant professor in the Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana/Chicano Studies at UCLA in 1994, and was tenured in 1999. "Barrio Popular Culture" and "Chicana/Lesbian Literature" are a couple of the courses she has taught at UCLA that include issues of identity, family, sexuality, and religion. She is also very involved in committees at UCLA, such as the Faculty Advisory Committee, the Library Committee, and the Faculty Advisory Board. She is an external reader for graduate student dissertations, as well as a member of the editorial board for Chicana/Latina Research Center (Marchino 1998).

Gaspar de Alba has given many lectures since 1985. These include "Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore's Mask: The Gender Politics of the CARA Exhibition" in 1994 and "Alter-Nativity and the CARA Exhibition" in 1995. She was part of a panel presentation in 1996 in a "Live Interview with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz." The CARA Exhibition toured to many cities in the early 1990s; it was a very controversial exhibition. Her recent exhibits were "Lesbian Drag: The Separatist Habit of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz" for the Feminist Research Seminar at UCLA and "Between Sameness and Otherness: The Smithsonian 'Discovers' Chicano/a Art" for the Cultural Studies Academic Exchange Session at the conference of Ford Fellows in Washington, DC.

Selected Bibliography

Works by the Author

Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (Arte Publico, 2005)
Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (Palgrave 2003)
Sor Juana's Second Dream (University of New Mexico Press, 1999)
Chicano Art Inside/Outside The Master's House (University of Texas Press, 1998)
The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (Bilingual Press, 1993)
"Beggar on the Cordoba Bridge," collection of poems in Three Times A Woman: Chicana Poetry (Bilingual Press, 1989)
"After 21 Years, a Postcard?" and "Bamba Basilica." In The floating borderlands; twenty-five years of U.S. Hispanic literature. Ed. Lauro Flores. Seattle: University of Washington Press, c1998. 235-237.
"The Alter-Native Grain: Theorizing Chicano/a Popular Culture." In Cultures and differences: critical perspectives on the bicultural experience in the United States. Ed. Antonia Darder. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1995. 103-123.
"La Frontera," "Domingo Means Scrubbing," and "Beggar on the Cordoba Bridge." In Floricanto si!: a collection of Latina poetry. Eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela De Hoyos. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 135-138.
"Born in East L.A.: An Exercise in Cultural Schizophrenia." In The Latino/a condition: a critical reader. Eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. New York: New York University Press, c1998. 226-230.
"Facing the Mariachis." In Latina women's voices from the borderlands. Ed.Lillian Castillo-Speed. New York: Simon and Schuster, c1995. 37-49.
"The Last Rite." In Mirrors beneath the earth: short fiction by Chicano writers. Ed. Ray Gonzalez. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; East Haven, CT: Distributed by InBook, 1992. 312-321.
"Malinchista, A Myth Revised," "Literary Wetback," and "Making Tortillas." In Infinite divisions: an anthology of Chicana literature. Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, c1993.
La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge; poetry y ortras movidas, 1985-2001. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, c2003.
"Malinche's Rights." In Currents from the dancing river: contemporary Latino fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Ed. Ray Gonzalez. New York: Harcourt Brace, c1994. 261-267.
"The Politics of Location of the Tenth Muse of America: An Interview with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz." In Living Chicana theory. Ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkely, Calif.: Third Women Press, c 1998. 136-166.

Works about the Author

Marchino, Lois A. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Vivancos Perez , Ricardo F. Los discursos sobre sexualidad en la obra de Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Dissertation: Thesis (M.A.)--Texas A & M University, 2002.

Works in Languages other than English

Spanish El segundo sueo. Trans. Bettina Blanch Tyroller. Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori, 2001.

Alicia Gaspar de Alba b. 1958