Native Speakers by Maria Cotera is Awarded
the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize

Congratulations to Maria Cotera, Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies, whose book Native Speakers was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 by the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). The prize is awarded
for "groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant contributions
to women of color/transnational scholarship" and honors Gloria Anzaldúa, a path breaking feminist scholar and valued and long-active member of the National Women's Studies Association.

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González and the Poetics of Culture is an intellectual history situated in the borderlands between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. Native Speakers charts the complex interconnected histories of women of color intellectuals working in the field of ethnographic meaning-making in the early 20th century by exploring the lives and the writing of three women: Ella Cara Deloria (Sioux), Zora Neale Hurston, and Jovita González, all of whom rose to positions of prominence in the related fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While Deloria, Hurston, and González collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key junctures in their careers, and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

The question at the heart of Native Speakers is: why the turn from "science" to "fiction"? Cotera answers this question first by tracing the various ways in which Deloria, Hurston, and Gonzalez contended with dominant forms of knowledge production about their communities in both their ethnographic writing and practice by articulating sometimes contradictory positions between various polarities: self/other, tradition/progress, insider/outsider. Cotera argues that the turn to fiction signified a reallocation of textual authority from the "impartial" observer to the storyteller, an epistemic and political shift in their writing that connects their novels to the work of contemporary women of color writers and theorists.


For information on Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González and the Poetics of Culture (University of Texas Press, 2008) see http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/excotnat.html