Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (An Anthology), Lesbianas Latinoamericanas: Third Edition/Tercera Edición (Routledge Library Editions: Women and Writing) (Spanish Edition)

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This groundbreaking collection, originally published in 1987 by the Latina Lesbian History Project, allows women to speak about what it means to be Latina and lesbian in their communities. Well, actually, there are lots oflesbian couples who have been together for more than 20 years, you just have to meet them and ask how they managed to maintain the relationship for so long.

This can also be true of the women who turn to men after a bad relationship with a woman, but in the end it’s still about human behavior, not about gender.The scene captures Aguilar calmly sitting in repose, cooling off in front of an electric fan at a friend’s home. This book is a smorgasbord of poems, essays, diary entries, and other writings from Latina lesbians. In these and other documents, Aguilar expresses her anguish over her perceived inability to understand herself and other people, and over whether others could understand her. Whenever I go to events or groups themed LGBT the people there are overwhelmingly White, and when I go to Latino/Chicano related ones the sentiment is heavily Catholic and not so comfy with LGBT people. As art historian Sybil Venegas has documented in an oral history, Aguilar formed one of her closest relationships with her grandmother, Mary Salgado Grisham, who often brought her to a local river where they would collect rocks and study the natural landscape.

These later branched into masterpieces, which depict Aguilar nude in the natural landscapes that harken back to her riverside musings with her grandmother— Nature Self-Portrait (1996), Stillness (1999), and Motion (1999). I roll my eyes when straight girls announce at their frustration with men and that they are “going to girls.Como Sabes, Depresión is a fragment of a passionate bilingual poem written by an English-speaking poet enamored of the Spanish language, and To Sor Juana is a poem dedicated to the seventeenth century poet and nun who has become an icon among Latina lesbians. The stages of increasing awareness become clear when we begin to recount the story of our lives to someone else, someone who has experienced the same changes.