Dr. Melissa Hidalgo’s summer stipend project and other research highlights

On February 25, 2020, Boom California published Dr. Melissa Hidalgo’s essay, “A Chumash Line: How an old email and five PDFs revealed my Native Californian roots,” linked here. A creative non-fiction piece, “A Chumash Line” explores a set of family documents—including church bulletins, newspaper clippings, and a family crest—that affirm our Chumash ancestry as descendants of one Maria Antonia Guerrero. Guerrero, my mother’s maternal great-grandmother, died in East Los Angeles in November 1952, and her death made local headlines in at least two area newspapers because she was a “Native Californian” born in San Luis Obispo. As Hidalgo writes in that essay, “For us colonized Mexican Americans in the 2010s, these papers raised a lot of questions about ancestral indigeneity, land, borders, and the meaning of claiming ‘Native Californian Chumash blood’ via our ancestor born in 1863.”

Hidalgo’s Summer Stipend project, “A Chumash Line, Continued: Research Stage,” continues to explore these questions by picking up the work started in this Boom essay towards future creative and scholarly writing.

Hidalgo is also giving a lecture/talk at the University of Limerick on March 7, 2022:

“From Erin to Aztlan, I remember”: Making Irish Connections in Chicano/a Literature 

This seminar explores the representation of Ireland in Arteaga’s Cantos (1991) and House with the Blue Bed (1997), with a focus on the some of the literary, historical, precolonial, and cultural connections he forges between “Aztlan”—Chicanos’ colonized mythical homeland—and “Erin.” Beyond identity and cultural nationalism, Arteaga routes his affinities to Ireland through contexts and conditions of loss, displacement, memory, remembering, and finding home away from home. 

Arteaga passed away in 2008 after a long illness. In 2020, his works were published in a volume called Xicancuicatl, edited by David Lloyd with a preface by Cherríe Moraga. This new collection has revived Arteaga’s work within Latinx literary studies and reintroduces him as a Xicano poet whose work resonates with new relevance in our current globalized, transnational era, one that continues to see Irish-Chicano/a-Mexican cultural kinships and connections flourish outside of official state channels and beyond national borders, from a taco truck called “Tacos Chicanos” serving L. A. style street food in Dublin, to Che Diaz, the “nonbinary, Irish-Mexican” TV character on the new Sex and the City reboot, …And Just Like That.