Chicana scholar will speak at conference

Ruiz

T he foremost authority on Latina women's history will deliver the keynote address at the 11th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women to be held at the University from Friday, June 4, to Sunday, June 6. Vicki Ruiz, chair of the Department of Chicana/Chicano Studies at Arizona State University and a spirited and sought-after speaker, will discuss "What's Color Got to Do With It?: Representation, Segmentation, and Tactical Coalitions." She will explore what she calls "suburban legends" with regard to immigrants of color.

Ruiz has been researching, writing, teaching, and making presentations on Latina history for two decades. She is known for her work to reconcile two types of history: the personal stories she heard from family and the textbook history she learned in school. Through her interviews and drawing on a variety of sources from newspaper articles to poetry to census reports, Ruiz vividly portrays the Latina experience in the United States.

Her first book, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950, grew from her dissertation while at Stanford University. Her most recent book, From Out of the Shadows, Mexican Women in 20th Century America, shows how Mexican women in the United States managed multiple cultural, economic, and political demands in their everyday lives. The work was selected as Outstanding Academic Book of 1998 by Choice Magazine of the Association of College and Research Libraries. She also is co-editor of Latinas in the United States, a two-volume encyclopedia of Latina women from 1519 to the present, currently in preparation.

Raised in Florida, Ruiz earned her bachelor's degree at Florida State University. She received her master's and doctoral degrees at Stanford and taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Texas at El Paso, and The Claremont Graduate School, where she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and chair of the history department.