Contact:

Rosemary Romero, 277-0084 Michael Padilla, 277-1816

February 28, 2002

María Elena Fernández to give solo performance
‘Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist’ March 23 & 24

Los Angeles-based performer María Elena Fernández brings to Albuquerque her one-woman show Saturday, March 23 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, March 24 at 4 p.m. at the South Broadway Cultural Center, 1025 Broadway, SE. The performance is sponsored by UNM’s Southwest Hispanic Research Institute and El Centro de la Raza.

What happens when you break free from traditional Latino culture, but still desperately want to look like a “cha cha?” (a glamorous L.A. Latina disco girls of the 80s who flaunted flashy hair, lips and hips). That is the question Fernández will address as she brings to life the poignant and hilarious contradictions a Latina faces on the path to bicultural womanhood. In this autobiographical coming-of-age story, Fernández chronicles her escape from the sexism of traditional Latino culture, finding freedom in both the uncompromising ideology of feminism and, ironically enough, in a traditional Latino aesthetic of femininity, the cha cha culture she grew up in.

Raised in a strict Mexican immigrant family to be a good Catholic schoolgirl and smartest in her class, Fernández is anxious to elude her parents’ iron grasp and flees to an Ivy League college across the country. Her rebellion begins as she slowly sheds the sense of shame about her body as she explores the sensual rhythms of 80s funk and house music at college parties.

In the classroom she discovers feminism, the dagger she uses to slay the double standards she grew up with, emancipate herself and emerge an independent woman. But she finds herself in a clashing contradiction because all she ever wanted to be since she was a nerdy Catholic schoolgirl was a cha cha. Not even feminism has defeated that longing, and she reveals the dogged dilemma between her hard-core feminist ideals and her beloved cha cha aesthetic, especially her obsessive ritual of shaving, waxing, tweezing and bleaching. (A bicultural woman’s work is never done!), Fernández proports.

From Catholic schoolgirl to cha cha feminist, Fernández tells an inspiring story about forging your own path on the bumpy road to bicultural womanhood.

A graduate of Yale University, María Elena Fernández came to the arts in her late 20s and since then has been excavating through Latino identity—especially Latina womanhood—using first person essay, cultural reporting, solo performance and poetry. Her work has been published in LA Weekly, LA Times and in the anthology Urban Latino Cultures and staged in New York, San Antonio and Mexico City, as well as in Los Angeles. She teaches Chicana/o Literature at Cal State Northridge.
Each performance will be followed by a conversation with the artist.

Tickets are available at the UNM Ticket Office, South Broadway Cultural Center and through tickets.com. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $8 for students and seniors.

For assistance call 848-1320, five days in advance. Voice/Relay 1-800-659-8331.

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The University of New Mexico
Public Affairs Department
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Albuquerque, NM 87131-0011
Telephone: (505) 277-5813
Fax: (505) 277-1981