María Elena Fernández to present “Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist” on Oct. 12 at IU
Playwright and performance artist María Elena Fernández will present her one-woman show "Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist" on Oct. 12 at Indiana University Bloomington.
Playwright and performance artist María Elena Fernández will present her one-woman show "Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist" on Oct. 12 at Indiana University hosted by Union Board.
Her story has been featured on National Public Radio as part of the "Day to Day" occasional series "My Fellow Americans," which are audio portraits that capture the extraordinary lives of ordinary Americans. Fernández's program will begin at 7 p.m. in the Indiana Memorial Union's Alumni Hall. The lecture is free.
From Catholic schoolgirl to cha cha feminist, Fernández tells an inspiring story about forging your own path on the bumpy road to bicultural womanhood. Born in Los Angeles in 1965, to Mexico City immigrants, Fernández's father was a silversmith and entrepreneur and her mother a housewife. At Yale University, she had her political awakening, fell in love with Chicano Studies and earned a B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in ethnic studies in 1987. She earned a master's degree in 1993 from UCLA, and after leaving the university setting she began to pursue her secret dream of becoming a writer.
Poets Gina Valdes and Suzanne Lummis and non-fiction writer Ruben Martinez served as her teachers and mentors. Seeking to give expression to her training in Chicano Studies and in the analysis of popular culture, she become an intern at the LA Weekly. She published steadily on Latino culture as a freelancer for the LA Weekly, writing book, music and film reviews and features. Fernández became among the first writers to cover the emerging rock en espanol scene. Inspired by the New Journalism movement and especially by the work of Ruben Martinez, during this period she also developed her expertise in writing the first person essay, exploring issues of womanhood, ethnic and class identity. Her essay "Bars and Belonging," about moving back to the neighborhood she grew up in, was published as an LA Weekly cover story and in the anthology Urban Latino Cultures.
The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico was the next political wave to galvanize the L.A. Chicano artist/activist movement and it was this local scene that nurtured her spoken word work and helped her birth her first solo performance. In the summer of 1996, young Chicanas were organizing a fundraiser for Zapatista women and made an open call for an all women live art show taking place at Regeneracion, a warehouse space in northeast Los Angeles that was the hub of the movement. Wanting to dramatize a monologue she had written about the clash between her obsession with hair removal and her feminist fervor, Fernández presented the first 20 minutes of "Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist." Not having memorized anything since she was 12 years old and facing an audience of 300, she was terrified, but the audience loved it and she was hooked.
Over the next few years Fernández developed two other short solos, one about her childhood fantasy of becoming the Puerto Rican torch singer Virginia Lopez her mother listened to on Saturday mornings and the other about her transformation from a Catholic school girl afraid of her own body to the emancipated woman embracing her sensuality. After completing these three pieces, she realized that they would all fit together for a full-length show. In the spring of 2001, the artist-run organization Side Streets offered her the opportunity to do her first solo show. She won a Durfee Foundation Completion Grant and for the first time worked with a dramaturge and director. Since that first performance in a Los Angeles warehouse, she has presented her performance work in New York, San Antonio, Portland, Denver, Albuquerque, Berkeley, San Jose, Mexico City and throughout Los Angeles.
Recognized as an essayist, poet and performance artist she was hired as a professor of Chicano/a literature at Cal State Northridge in 1998 where she continues to teach approximately 100 students every semester.
