Eliana S. Rivero papers

Eliana S. Rivero is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She was born in Artemisa, Cuba in 1941, in Pinar del Rio province, forty kilometers between Mariel on the north and Majana on the south. In 1958, at the age of seventeen, she traveled to the U.S. to study and settled there permanently in 1961. She did not return to Cuba until 18 years later in 1979, and again 31 years later, in 2016, while participating in an educational tour led by American author Tom Miller.

Rivero received her B.A. magna cum laude in Spanish Language and Literature in 1964 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literatures in 1968 from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Her research focus is in the area of Latin American and U.S. Latinx literatures, (colonial, modern, and contemporary,) especially poetry and women's writings. She has taught numerous courses on these topics during her 40 years at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she began her career as an assistant professor in 1967.

Since the 1980’s, Rivero has produced a plethora of publications, writing about the experience of Chicano/as, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and other U.S. Latino/as, and has published over one hundred articles, chapters in books, review essays, notes, bibliographies, and collection entries, on topics ranging from Caribbean authors to Mexican colonial nuns, as well as autobiographical essays on the Latinx experience, diaspora, Latinidad, “Otherness”, feminism, borders, and other topics. For example, in 1994 her widely-read autobiographical essay "Fronterislena," (Border Islander) was published in the journal Michigan Quarterly Review and reprinted in 2019. Her work has been influenced by feminist authors such as Donna Haraway and cultural theorists like Rubén Rumbaut and Salman Rushdie. Rivero has delivered keynote addresses and lectures at more than fifty university campuses in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Cuba, and Chile, and she has presented papers at over 75 national and international conferences.

In the 1970’s Rivero organized other female academics on the U of A campus to form the Committee on Status of University Women, which resulted in the approval of the first Women’s Studies program by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1975. In the 1990s, Rivero served as chair of the national committee for the Advanced Placement Examinations in Spanish (The College Board and Educational Testing Service) as well as served on numerous professional association boards both in the US and abroad, and was chair of the Fulbright Grants for Latin America committee. She has been the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, and others.

In 2000, she was named Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and was a pioneer for future scholars, being one of only two Latinas, and the first Latina scholar in the humanities, in the program’s 44-year history up to that time. During her year as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Rivero visited several institutions around the country, sharing her work in Latin American and U.S. Latino literatures, particularly theoretical and autobiographical approaches to Latina identity and consciousness, and Latin American representation of women's images in literature and popular culture. Her research topics included "Nun on the Web: Latin American Popular Culture and Their Icons" - a hands-on lecture on the construction of two cultural icons in Mexico and Latin America: the Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and the 17th century nun poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, "Dreaming, Hollering, and Dancing: U.S. Latina Writers," and "Border Islander: American(o) Living/Writing at the Margins."

Rivero has published four books of poetry, including De cal y arena (Of Limestone and Sand) (1975), Cuerpos breves (Brief Bodies) (1975), and Collected poems of Eliana Rivero (2005). A recording of Rivero reading her poetry in 1978 can be accessed through the Library of Congress. Cuban-American poet Eliana Rivero reading from her work | Library of Congress (loc.gov) Her collection of essays Discursos desde la diáspora was published in Spain in 2005 and her poems and autobiographical narratives are included in several anthologies in the US, Cuba, Argentina, and Spain. In 2012, she edited a special winter issue on the Cuban diaspora for Revista Caribe.

She co-edited with the Chicana writer Margarita Cota Cárdenas, Siete Poetas, a pioneer text of Latina women poets which was published in 1978 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her other co-edited works include the award-winning Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke University Press, 2001), with the Latina Feminist Group collective and the best-seller Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (University of Arizona Press, 1995, now on its third printing), which is widely used in college and high school curricula, with Tey Diana Rebolledo, a Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico and showcases the talents of more than fifty authors, including Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, and María Helena Viramontes. Her most recent co-edited publication is an anthology with Iraida H. Lopez, Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation, which was published by State University of New York Press in 2019. This latest anthology brings together works by ten distinguished and emerging Cuban American writers of the "second generation"-writers who were born between 1960 and the mid-1980s in the United States to Cuban parents or have a mixed ethnic background. Called "ABCs" (American-Born Cubans) or "AmeriCubans," these writers experiment with different formal approaches and lace their work with Cuban Spanish to give voice to hybrid identities and cultural legacies within the contemporary multicultural United States.

A research scholarship set up by Rivero in her name was established in 2015 at the Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University, Miami to promote the development of young scholars working in the field of Cuban and Cuban-American studies. For example, the 2017 winner was Alberto Sosa Cabanas, who used the funding to work on his doctoral dissertation "Racism, Celebration, and Otherness: Depictions of Blackness in Cuban Cultural Discourse (1790–1959.)”

Her video Melodías y memorias de Eliana Rivero, with her interpretations of traditional Cuban music and autobiographical commentary, was finished in January 2015. In 2016-2017, she participated in the documentary “The Cubans at Harvard”, a film recounting the experience of over 1,700 Cuban teachers, including Rivero’s maternal grandmother, who were invited to visit Cambridge and Washington DC in 1900. The film was screened at the Cuban research institutes at Harvard University and Florida International University (FIU).

Her recent publications include an essay on Cuban studies, "Leyendo a Cubamérica: Visiones y revisiones," in Reading Cuba: Discurso literario y geografía transcultural, edited by Alberto Sosa Cabanas in 2018 and her poetry was published in Catedral sumergida: Poesía cubana contemporánea escrita por mujeres, edited by Ileana Álvarez and Maylén Domínguez in 2013. Rivero formerly served on the Advisory Board of Latinx Talk (latinxtalk.org) in 2019. Rivero lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she enjoys the daily activity of playing her grand piano.