Dr. Maribel Alvarez’s Home Page
Maribel Alvarez holds a dual appointment as Assistant Research Professor in the English Department and as Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona.
She teaches courses on methods of cultural analysis with particular emphasis on objects, oral narratives, and visual cultures of the US-Mexico border.
Through her work as Public Folklorist at The Southwest Center, Maribel is the Animator of BorderLore, a cultural documentation initiative that includes an e-newsletter, a Blog, and several community-based partnerships to record and interpret vernacular knowledge in the borderlands.
She has a Doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and a Masters Degree in Political Theory from California State University, Long Beach. She taught the course ”American Government” for several years at various Bay Area community colleges.
In the last few years, Maribel has written and published essays about poetry and food, intangible heritage, nonprofits and cultural policy, the theory of arts participation, artisans and patrimony in Mexico, and popular culture and stereotypes.
From 1994 to 1998 she conducted fieldwork in Nogales, Sonora with a family of artisans who migrated from Tonala, Jalisco to the border in 1958 and became originators of the popular plaster mold figurines (“figuras de yeso”) common in the Southwest. She is currently completing a book manuscript about how artisans who produce “Mexican curios” at the US-Mexico border think of their own work and life experiences as “borderline” folk artists in relation to Mexico’s historically established apparatus of folklore and cultural patrimony.
In the late 1980s, Maribel was a member of MediaMix –a performance/poetry ensemble under the leadership of Margarita Luna Robles and Juan Felipe Herrera in Northern California. Eventually, her work in literature led her to serve as the leader of a group of multicultural artists that lobbied the largest city in Silicon Valley to make sweeping changes in the distribution of art grants. Her career and involvement in San Jose’s civic affairs led her to work in a diversity of positions in public service, including a stint as Press Secretary to San Jose’s Mayor during the height of the Silicon Valley boom era and as Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood during the peak of the 1980s cultural wars.
From 1996 to 2002 she served as the Executive Director of MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, a multidisciplinary, alternative urban arts center located in downtown San Jose, often described as a “lab for intelligent cultural interventions.” Under her leadership, MACLA became nationally recognized for its cutting-edge innovations in the practice and aesthetics of socially-engaged arts. MACLA has also been regarded as an intriguing experiment for the transformation of single ethnic identity-based artistic work towards a more performative, hybrid, and intersubjective paradigm. As Director, Maribel launched MACLA’s high profile Latino Authors Forum and helped craft the organization’s Performance Arts programming centered around Hip Hop, spoken word, and emergent aesthetics. She conceived and directed MACLA’s ethnographic/visual arts project “Ties that Bind: Latino-Asian Intermarriage in Silicon Valley” which was part of the national initiative Animating Democracy. In 2001, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts recognized MACLA as one of the 25 most effective “alternative art spaces” in the country. As Executive Director, Maribel has been widely recognized for raising the standards of excellence for small and mid-sized nonprofits, not only stabilizing organizational vision and operations, but most importantly inspiring a cadre of “new-generation” leaders and artists.
Maribel considers herself a tri-cultural Latina: she was born in Cuba, grew up in Puerto Rico, and has worked closely in the field of Chicano arts for more than 25 years. She is also deeply convinced that in another life she was born 100% Mexican.
For more than a decade, Maribel has served as a consultant on nonprofit cultural development to various organizations. She currently serves on the Board of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) and edits their national magazine, El Aviso. In addition, for the last five years she has served as faculty in NALAC’s summer Leadership Institute for emerging cultural activists. Since 2005, she has served as an Advisor to various Ford Foundation-funded programs dealing with immigrant, transnational, folk arts, and art and economic development.
Read Interview with Maribel Alvarez in The Community Arts Network (conducted by Jason Bulluck as part of the series “Bridge Conversations: People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds”)
