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FREDERICK A. CERVANTES STUDENT PREMIO, 2003
The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies announces its 2003 Frederick A. Cervantes Student Premio recipients. NACCS seeks submissions from Undergraduate and Graduate scholars. Submissions must contribute to Chicana and Chicano Studies, an interdisciplinary area of study. Papers will be judged on: their contribution to the field of Chicana and Chicano Studies; strength of scholarship (e.g., how well researched and/or theoretically well-developed they are); and originality. Composition and style will also be considered. The Premio carries a monetary honorarium of $350.00, the opportunity to submit the paper for publication review in the NACCS proceedings, and the opportunity to present the paper at the annual meetings.
Graduate RecipientNicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Cornell University. Title of Paper: "Stripping the Body of Flesh and Memory: Imagining Transnational Histories of Violence in Montserrat Fontes' Dreams of the Centaur"
Nicole M. Guidotte-Hernández paper applies Chicana feminist literary criticism to examine the omnipresence of torture, sexual violation and institutional violence in Fontes' novel Dream of the Centaur. According to Guidotti-Hernández, the novel "can be understood as a transnational narrative of violence that seeks to acknowledge how Chicana, Mexicana, India, and Mestiza actions and words spoken or unspoken continue to persist in narrative and history whether they are acknowledged or not" (pp 1-2). Dream of the Centaur chronicles the history of a Mexican family and the Yaqui struggle in Sonora between 1885-1900. The Yaqui struggle for survival extends over a 3000-mile radius that goes as north as Tucson, Arizona and south as Yucatán.
Guidotti-Hernández was born and raised in the Salinas Valley. She received her Bachelor's degree in Literature with Honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. She received her Master's Degree in English at Cornell University in 2000. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her dissertation is entitled, "Made By Violence: Chicana Narrative and the Remaking of the World, 1872-1996." Her next project focuses on representations of Latinidades in popular culture. This year she was awarded the Five Colleges Minority Dissertation Fellowship at Amherst College where she teaches Chicana/Latina Studies in the Department of English.
Undergraduate Recipient
Robert L. Hernandez, III, University of Colorado at Boulder. Title of Paper: "A Window into a Life Uncloseted: Exploring U.S. Queer Latino Cultural Readership and Film Culture"
Robert L. Hernandez III winning paper offers a Queer Latino cultural reading of the gay films Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss and Trick released in the late 90's. Hernandez provides an ethnographic reader-response cultural reading of the films by interviewing and surveying U.S. Queer Latino men. From the ethnographic study, four themes emerged: acceptance and rejection, language, identity construction, and engagements with power. Hernandez argues that although racial codes are embedded in these films perpetuating "Spice Boy" depictions, young Queer Latino men responded favorably to the films. Hernandez concludes that while it is surprising that these young men enjoyed aspects of the films, they were able to "confront and negotiate greater stereotypical notions of the 'Spice Boy.'" That is, these young men constructed their own story within the films, filtering the racial coding.
Hernandez is a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His honor's thesis "Queering the Latin Lover in Cinema: Understanding U.S. Queer Latino Cultural Readership" was developed under Professors Elisa Facio, Angel David Nieves and Katheryn Rios and earned him Magna Cum Laude Distinction. He is an active participant of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Certificate Program and the University of Colorado Honors Program. In the summer of 2002 he received a certificate in Political Management from the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. He was an intern with National Public Radio, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a policy fellow with LLEGO: The National Latina/o Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Organization. Of late, he is a research assistant with the Center for the Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA) at CU-Boulder and a guest teaching assistant for the Black Studies Program. Mr. Hernandez is currently applying to graduate school programs where he intends to strengthen his research interests in the politics of race, sexuality and cultural representation and cultivate deeper theoretical understandings of U.S. Queer Latino identity, visual culture and comparative film history.