By Signe Hammer, Photo by Keith Dannemiller
“You can’t understand U.S. history or the present without Native Americans,» says noted historian, author, and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
«I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive,» says acclaimed author Sandra Cisneros. Her Mexican heritage connects her to a culture formed through mestizaje; the mixing of Native American and Spanish people.
Join San Miguel PEN on Zoom for an exciting, 60-minute conversation in English between two writers whose work explores territory too often ignored by the official narratives the U.S. tells itself about its history and identity.
Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant-farming family, earned multiple degrees, and has fought for restoration of Native American Nations’ lands and sovereignty.
Now professor emeritus at California State University, she is the author or editor of 15 books, winning an American Book Award and the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Her best-known book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” presents Native Americans as “territorially and treaty-based peoples” robbed of their North American lands through settler colonialism. Today, Native American values and culture offer a declining U.S. “possibilities for life after empire.”
Cisneros publishes both poetry and prose, most famously “The House on Mango Street.” Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She founded two nonprofits that foster the careers of aspiring and emerging writers: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation.
A citizen of both the U.S. and Mexico, she currently lives in San Miguel de Allende and makes her living by her pen.To receive a free Zoom link, register on our website, sanmiguelpen.com, where donations to San Miguel PEN are also welcome, or listen on our San Miguel PEN Facebook page (sanmiguelpen).
San Miguel PEN is a chapter of PEN International, the organization of writers that defends freedom of expression around the world. We take a special interest in assisting endangered Mexican journalists and the families of the far too many who are murdered. To register and for more information, visit sanmiguelpen.com.
San Miguel PEN Presents
Sandra Cisneros and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Native American History Is Our History”
Tue, Apr 19, 6pm
Zoom or Facebook
Preregistration necessary for Zoom; use link at sanmiguelpen.com
Free
