Demasiada, y más que Demasiada

Sandra Cisneros arrived in San Antonio in 1984 to work as the Literary Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center on San Antonio’s West Side. She only held that position for a year, but she made San Antonio her home for the next thirty years. This talk situates Sandra Cisneros’ poems from Loose Woman (1994) within the multidisciplinary, multilingual rasquache aesthetics of the fin-de-siecle arts scene in San Antonio’s West Side. Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and essays, Professor Dr. Geneva M. Gano will examine how Cis¬neros’ sexy, silly, and simultaneously sophisticated albures, adivinanzas and dichos resonate with the sly and politically infused art of her fellow San Antonians, Franco Mondini-Ruiz and Alejandro Diaz.

Dr. Geneva Gano, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Dr. Gano received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California-Los Angeles in 2007 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Bill Lane Center for the American West from 2007 to 2008. Before joining the Department of English at Texas State University in 2015, Dr. Gano also taught at Indiana University and Antioch College. She is the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, chapters, book reviews, and papers presented at national and international meetings. Among her works in progress is a book, U.S. Modernism at Continent’s End: Carmel, Provincetown, Santa Fe. 

She is the current Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies.  During her three-year appointment, Dr. Gano will convene a symposium on the influences of the Mexican Revolution on the development of U.S. modernism across the arts and a lecture series on women writers in the greater Southwest. In conjunction with The Wittliff Collections, Dr. Gano will help to establish further research on Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’ relationship to San Antonio and Texas. She is also developing a study-in-America program that will take graduate and undergraduate students to Santa Fe and Taos to further their studies in the history and culture of New Mexico.