Latinas in MX and US (Des+Stef Zamorano)

VIDEO: Beautiful teen's disappearance, death, crimes against females in Mexico (CBS News)

Protesters in Mexico demand justice for female victims of violence

(Al Jazeera English, April 25, 2022) Protesters in Mexico are demanding justice for females who have been killed and those who have suffered violence. Outrage follows on the heels of the murder of a law student in the northern city of Monterrey. Al Jazeera's Katia Lopez Hodoyan has more.

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• VIDEO: Missing teen girl [Debanhi Escobar] found dead, fueling outrage over gender violence in Mexico | Reuters
• VIDEO: Body of Mexican teen found in water tank, sparking outrage over crimes against women - CBS News

The Jimmy Dore Show co-hosts Jimmy Dore and Stef Zamorano (jimmydorecomedy.com)

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Oxy Professor Désirée Zamorano and her sister high school teacher/standup comic Stefane (Mrs. Jimmy Dore) Zamorano co-wrote a play based on the book The Amado Women, which Stef said on TJDS Live today ran for four years.

• 20 Chicana writers whose names you should know

Latina life in the U.S.A.

NOVEL: Southern California is ground zero for upwardly mobile middle-class Latinas. Matriarchs like Mercy Amado — despite her drunken, philandering (now ex-) husband — could raise three daughters and become a teacher.

Now she watches helplessly as her daughters drift apart as adults. The Latino bonds of familia ("family") don't seem to hold. Celeste, the oldest daughter who won't speak to the youngest, is fiercely intelligent and proud.

Colorism contaminates Chicanas, too

She has fled the uncertainty of her growing up in Los Angeles, California, to seek financial independence in San Jose, California. Her sisters did the same thing but very differently.

Sylvia married a rich but abusive Anglo-American and, to hide away, she immersed herself in the suburbia of her two young daughters.

And the baby Nataly went very hip into the free-spirited Latino art world, working on her textile creations during the day and waiting on tables in an upscale restaurant by night.

But one day everything they know comes crashing down in a random tragic moment, and Mercy must somehow make what was broken whole again.

Professor Désirée Zamorano

Prof. Désirée Zamorano says she was taken aback by the negative reaction to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remark. And she is appalled by stereotypical rendering of Latinas in mainstream literature, saying that true-to-life middle-class Latinas are invisible in the fabric of American culture. 

ABOUT: Director of the Community Literacy Center at Occidental College Desiree Zamorano is a playwright and Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, who lives in Pasadena, CA. She collaborates with InsideOut Writers, a program that works with formerly incarcerated youth.