Telling to Live: Latina Feminist ""Testimonios""

For a while in the late 1980s, it seemed as if all of Duke University's English Department had gone public with the complications and heartbreaks of the life of the star academic. After Duke's mainly white English Department finished telling their stories, the confessional narratives of academics have had a continued, and much more important, role as a genre where those marginalized by the academy for reasons of race or ethnicity tell about their complicated entry and then incorporation into the university system. In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, the 18 women of the Latina Feminist group, formed in 1993 and including Ruth Behar and Eliana Rivero, discuss immigrant and working class childhoods, developing a love of reading, an avoidance of K-12 teaching in order to partake of the larger promises of the (mostly literature-based) university positions. (Nov.)