Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality. Biography. Gaspar de Alba was born on July 29, 1958 in El Paso, Texas near its border with Ciudad Juárez. She received a bachelor's in 1980 and a master's in 1983 in English from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1994 from the University of New Mexico. To her students she is known as La Profe or Gaspar  and currently teaches classes on border consciousness, bilingual creative writing, Chicana Lesbian literature, barrio popular culture, and graduate courses on Chicana theory. In 1994, she was one of six founding faculty members of the then César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Gaspar de Alba served as chair of that department from 2007-2010 and worked to approve and implement the second Ph.D. program in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Since 2013, Gaspar de Alba has been chairing the LGBTQ Studies Department at UCLA, where she is also working on  a proposal for the first Ph.D. program in LGBTQ Studies in the nation. Gaspar de Alba has published extensively, and her novels, stories, and poetry have won several literary awards. Her doctoral dissertation "Mi Casa Es Su Casa: The Cultural Politics of Chicano Art" won the 1994 Ralph Henry Gabriel American Studies Association Award. Her work has been published in several languages and focuses primarily on gender and sexuality. Her 2005 novel "Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders" won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery Novel and the Latino Book Award for Best Mystery Novel. This novel is based  on the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, around which Gaspar de Alba researched and organized a conference. The mystery is based on the unresolved murders of over five-hundred Mexican women and girls along the border in El Paso, Texas, the region where Gaspar de Alba is originally from. In the book, a Mexican Maquiladora worker is found dead with her disembodied baby. Another character in the novel, Ivon, a lesbian professor in Los Angeles who was supposed to adopt the baby, becomes outraged at the growing violence against women at the border. She also becomes suspicious of the border  patrol's role in the violence and of the similarities between the growing number of cases. The novel points out the injustices of the treatment of Mexican Immigrants/Mexican-Americans, the corruption of the government institutions on both sides of the border, femicide, and more.