Recognizing editorial and archival practices as underexplored sites of scholarship, this panel takes as its starting point a wide range of examples of what women of color can see when they edit the work of their peers. These U.S.-based author-editors bring together regional and intergenerational multilingual texts, fostering print cultures that become embodied textual and digital communities. Focusing their attention on newspaper, novel, and academic journal editing alongside digital archiving, papers by Linda Garcia Merchant, Annemarie Pérez, Jean Lee Cole, and Allison Fagan address the contemporary history, experience, and impact of women of color as editors, drawing together theorizations of print and digital culture with feminist editorial praxis. Imagining multilingualism both literally and metaphorically, their papers articulate the unique complexities of the editorial relationships amongst women of color, both historicizing and theorizing feminist editorial practices at work, offering a more nuanced and meaningful engagement with the ways editors “make, as well as mend” (D.F. McKenzie).

Each presenter will speak for a maximum of 15 minutes, leaving 20-30 minutes for discussion.

Annemarie Pérez will discuss Enriqueta Vásquez, Elizabeth Martinez, and Maria Delores Varela’s contributions to the women’s liberation anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Liberation Now! as part of the Chicano newspaper El Grito del Norte's editorial collective. Theirs was an attempt to bridge divides between the Chicano and women’s movements and make Chicana voices audible to U.S. white feminism, expressing the feminism already part of the Chicano Movement. They did this through their “editorship” and authorship, with their work expressing Chela Sandoval’s model of differential U.S. feminism, in order to circulate and amplify a Chicana feminist vision of the El Grito's textual community and editorial praxis

Allison Fagan will discuss Toni Cade Bambara and Gloria Anzaldúa and the editorial history of their posthumously published texts - Those Bones are Not My Child (1999), edited by Toni Morrison, and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro (2015), edited by AnaLouise Keating. Arguing that Morrison and Keating serve as secondary agents to Bambara and Anzaldúa - writers whose roots wrap around the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back - I trace the complex methods by which such editorial work embraces and refuses “an appropriation of their tongues” (Bambara 671). A reading of these posthumous editorial relationships demonstrates the ways Chicanx feminist and Black womanist perspectives reshape our understandings of authorship, bringing intimacy to the heart of secondary agency.

Linda Garcia Merchant will argue that building Latino digital collections builds a collective of practitioners, scholars, students and community members in a democratized relationship to the cultural production of a collection. Through the work of these Chicana Por Mi Raza and Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage, this presentation highlights processes crafted to center community-based knowledge and experience through the transformative act of intergenerational witness, or praxis based on best practices of self care, attention to trauma, and with a dynamic relationship to the archive as a “space of encuentro” (Cotera) where students, faculty and practitioners of culture and technology center community-based knowledges and experiences. This ethic applies the understanding that each member has visionary insights because all voices matter in projects on subjects that live in precarity, have been neglected, or remain silenced.

Jean Lee Cole: As an editor of women writers from marginalized populations, I am attuned to the ways that writers who lack access to the institutions of print culture are not just refused access to readers, but also to entire editorial infrastructures. As the editor of American Periodicals, a journal that has worked hard to make its contributor pool, subject matter, and approaches to periodical studies more inclusive, I have become sensitized to the ways that academic publishing today persists in ignoring issues of access and inclusion among scholars from marginalized groups and those working in marginalized fields. And as someone who grew up in a “semi-bilingual” household—my parents spoke Korean (fluently) and English (not well), whereas my brothers and I learned to speak only in English — I personally grapple with the anxieties of editorial responsibility, competence, and expectation that confront both writers and editors. I propose a model for editorial practice - "editorial mentorship" - rooted in an attitude of editorial humility necessary for the creation of a truly inclusive academe.