Maria Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life as a Chicana: 5 (Critical Intercultural Communication Studies) - Tapa blanda

De la Garza weaves a powerful examination of the complex processes that work together to constrain self-expression in a woman of Mexican ancestry. The book demonstrates the use of a variety of creative and reflexive methodologies, including poetry, prayers, de/reconstructed narratives, autobiography, and letters to historical and cultural female archetypes of Mexican origin. This methodology of «art as meditation», for obtaining insight into the dynamics of culture, is used to produce an autoethnographic study of how one can reclaim voice through rigorous interrogation of our own lives as cultural texts. De la Garza offers us a template for a new methodology, as applicable in academic studies of culture as it is in the everyday lives of those seeking to find voice within silenced cultural domains.

The Author: Sarah Amira De la Garza (formerly María Cristina González) received her Ph.D. in speech communication at The University of Texas at Austin and a D.Min. at the University of Creation Spirituality, where she later served as Academic Dean. She is presently Associate Professor of Communication and Southwest Borderlands Scholar in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.