Elizabeth Martínez

Elizabeth Martínez
Born	(1925-12-12) December 12, 1925 Washington, D.C.
Occupation	Author

Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (born 1925) is a Chicana feminist and a long-time community organizer, activist, author, and educator. She has written numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas. Her best-known work is the bilingual 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures,^[1] which later formed the basis for the educational video ¡Viva la Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History.^[2] Her work has been hailed by Angela Y. Davis as comprising "one of the most important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporary era ... [Martínez is] inimitable ... irrepressible ... indefatigable."

Life

Martínez graduated from Swarthmore College in 1946 with a degree in English.^[3] In May 2000, Swarthmore awarded Martínez with an honorary doctorate. Martínez has worked for Simon & Schuster as an editor and for The Nation Magazine as Books and Arts Editor. Her daughter, Tessa, is an actress and co-founder of San Francisco’s Latina Theater Lab.^[1]

Activism

Martínez began her political work in the early 1950s.^[4] She worked in New York for the United Nations Secretariat as a researcher on colonialism and decolonization in Africa.^[1][5]

During the 1960s, Martínez served full-time in the Civil Rights Movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South and as a coordinator of its New York office. In 1968, she moved to New Mexico to start a newspaper to support the Alianza Federal de Mercedes.^[4] Along with lawyer Beverly Axelrod, Martínez thus founded the bilingual movement newspaper El Grito del Norte, which she worked on for five years.^[4] In 1973, she co-founded and directed the Chicano Communications Center, a barrio-based organizing and education project.^[1][3]

Since moving to the Bay Area in 1976, Martínez has organized around Latino community issues, taught Women's studies part-time, conducted anti-racist training workshops, and worked with youth groups.^[1] She ran for governor of California on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket in 1982 and has received many awards from student, community, and academic organizations,^[1] including Scholar of the Year 2000 by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies.^[3] In 1997, she and Phil Hutchings co-founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice,^[4] which "aims to strengthen the struggle against white supremacy by serving as a resource center to help build alliances among peoples of color and combat divisions."^[6] In 2004, she served on the advisory board for the group 2004 Racism Watch.^[7] She is also an adviser to the Catalyst Project, an anti-racist political education organization that focuses on white communities.^[8]

Selected publications

• De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century (1998) ISBN 0-89608-583-X
• 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures (1976) ISBN 978-0-9631123-0-9
• The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969) ISBN 978-0-273-31434-9
• Letters from Mississippi (1964) ISBN 978-0-939010-71-4

References

Further reading

• Table of Contents from El Grito del Norte (1966–1972)
• Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" What is White Supremacy? (1998)
• Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" A view from New Mexico: recollections of the movimiento left Monthly Review (2002)
• Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" Raza Protest A Day of Lies and Hate, (1998)
• Vidal, Mirta Women: New Voice of La Raza