Larissa M. Mercado-López

Doctoral Student and Freshman Composition Instructor

Office: MB 2.308

Phone: (210) 458-7885
E-Mail: Larissa.mercado@utsa.edu

Hometown: Gregory, Texas

Family: Johnny (husband), Yuriana and Yamila (daughters)

Education: Bachelor's Degree in Mexican American Studies, UTSA, Dec. 2003 (Cum Laude)

Research Interests: Chicana/Latina motherhood and maternity; Chicana/o Studies; Chicana poetry; borderland studies; archival and bibliography studies; social justice and scholarly activism

Dissertation Topic: For my dissertation, I am examining the invisibility of mestiza subjectivity within hegemonic discourses of maternal philosophy.  As my work will indicate, the writings of Cherrie Moraga, Carmen Tafolla, and Alma Villanueva exemplify a semiotic phenomenological understanding of the production of a brown maternal subjectivity and epistemology, and thereby demand recognition of mestiza bodies within maternal studies, as well as recognition of maternal bodies within Chicana studies.  Just as the marginalized brown body is upheld as a site of multiple visions and knowledge, I argue for the brown maternal body – an  embodiment of colonial memory and postcolonial subjectivity – as a site of epistemic privilege, a site of exceptional facultad.  In my polemical treatment of “the” philosophies of maternity alongside the writings and “theories in the flesh” of Moraga, Tafolla, Villanueva, and Anzaldúa, I expose the ways in which these works, when it comes to Chicana subjectivity, are conspicuously “pregnant” with silence.

Publications: “Con el Palote en Una Mano y el Libro en la Otra,” in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, 2007 (ed. Andrea O’Reilly), and Third Wave Mothering, 2007 (ed. Amber Kinser) from Demeter Press

“Untitled,” forthcoming in What? No Flan! Reflections of Latina/o Students in College

Projects: Currently compiling an anthology of unpublished/archived Tejana poetry, 1900-today; founded Tejidas: A Chicana/Latina Lecture Series

Non-academic Interests: Soccer, flea markets, politics, weightlifting, karaoke, ballet folklorico

Quotes that keep me going:  

My body now taking on the full shape of creation does not lessen my need for art…

…I feel a revolution in my womb…

I am afraid to look at how… our lives [have] changed.  There is no return.  Is it the past I mourn, that freedom?  I scarcely remember her.  Wonder of this new one.  This me.  This writer-mother.

- Cherrie Moraga, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood