A Radical Blogger Profile

That's my baby!

Uh, what’s a doula?

At the end of my pregnancy, I met a doula who specialized in supporting immigrant non-English speaking women. I didn’t really know what a doula was or how having a stranger at my delivery fit in to the big picture, so I didn’t follow up. I later read about Miriam Zoila Pérez, another doula, in Latina magazine. I figured it was time to look into this.

Pérez blogs at radicaldoula.com.  She describes a doula as “the one person who’s not worried about anything else that’s going on,” someone who provides emotional and psychological support to a mother during childbirth.

After deciding that pre-med wasn’t for her, and seeing the natural birth documentary The Business of Being Born, Pérez decided to become a midwife, but was advised to become a doula because she wanted to work with lesbian and immigrant women. She spent a semester in Ecuador and volunteering in a maternity ward (not as an official doula). After returning to the States, Pérez trained to become a doula,  working mostly with Latina immigrants.

Working with Immigrants

While working with immigrants, Pérez saw a discrepancy between the quality of care for Latina immigrants versus insured white women. One of the biggest issues was the language barrier. The hospital where Pérez worked only brought in an interpreter when papers are to be signed. The doctors “chose what they wanted to communicate and spoke English otherwise . . . imagine – what does that do to your quality of care?”A doula is not a translator, but Pérez was still challenged on how much to communicate to the mother.

According to Pérez, most Latinas give birth in a hospital instead of choosing natural birth at home or in a birthing center. She attributes this to the fact that in Latin America there is a “big push” by the World Health Organization and other developmental organizations for women to give birth in hospitals, because they see it as “a marker of development.” Immigrants also choose hospitals as a sign of class and social status – “in Latin America you go to the hospital if you can afford it,” Perez says.

When it comes to second and third generation Latinas, their positions on childbirth tend to come more in line with the general American population.

Full-Spectrum Doulas

Giving birth is not the only life-altering event in a woman’s reproductive health. Women also face abortions, miscarriages, and other events. This is where full-spectrum doulas such as Pérez come into play. A full-spectrum doula  supports a woman not only during birth but for abortion, adoption, surrogacy and miscarriage.

Supporting women during abortions (some of these procedures are actually to help a woman who had a partial miscarriage) is quite controversial in the doula community. “I felt like I wasn’t connecting in the doula community] and wanted to talk about why being pro-choice made sense to me,” Perez says. She started the blog – a “new arena” at the time – to build the connections she sought.

Blogging/Feministing/Activisting

Perez has expanded from being a doula to blogging about it to writing, editing at feministing.com, and activism. She is a consultant for The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. She also has been nominated her for the 2011 Women’s Media Center Social Media Award! If you go to the Women’s Media Center website, you can scroll over to read about her nomination and then vote for her to win!

Punto

Having a baby is a beautiful and disgusting, exhausting and exhilarating, joyous and terrifying. Everyone gives you their crazy advice and horror stories. As a Latina, others might not understand your culture and family dynamics.

Even if you have a supportive husband and family visiting during labor, you wish they would get the hell out of the way during the trying moments of labor – but at the same time, you want someone to be there with you. This person could be a doula.

Latinas have diverse backgrounds and individual experiences with chilbirth, and our cultura should be taken into account to provide a supportive atmosphere during childbirth.

Other reproductive issues are often fraught with the same conflicting emotions. Thanks to doulas/bloggers/activists like Miriam Perez, we know that there is someone out there that can provide support to us during those tough times.

Weekend Roundup!

Leal Award Winner Announced :: via University of California – Demetria Martínez has been awarded the 2011 Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.

What is Latino? :: Maria Browning discusses the soon to be published The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. Also, a search for “Latino” on Amazon results in like, over 1,000 hits! And, it includes mainstream books! OMG There are like so many books about them LOLZ. Sigh. I think that the news flash for this book isn’t that it is supposed to point out that Latinos are a diverse group, or to further Other-ize us, but that the essays explore identity formation in the Latino community, a fraught topic I know I have struggled with. P.S., there’s a tiny excerpt on the University of Arizona Press website linked above.

Another Award Winner :: via The University Star – Alex Sanchez accepted the 2011 Tomás Rivera Book Award for his book, Bait.

Watching TV in Spanglish:: via the New York Times – NYT writes about Telemundo’s plans to incorporate more English, invite non-Latino guests to the new Cristina show, plus other programming. Grab your sombrero and dale un grito, folks –  of course the article isn’t complete with the words salsa and saucy. And who says Univsion doesn’t throw English into the mix? I distinctly remember this hysterical Tom Hanks spot from a few months ago:

Weekend Sonrisa – So here’s your weekend funny. The other day at a meeting with the group I volunteer with, we were actually able to crack jokes while discussing how the immigration law is affecting students. Because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Full disclosure: the Colbert Report always cracks me up, anyway!

Latinocentric news

Source: Flickr/micora

If you want to get news about and from the Latino perspective, where do you go? Many years ago, I realized that just watching the local news and the Today Show is not going to cut it in terms of consuming news stories that interest me and matter to me. In fact, no one should probably only rely on those sources, because 1) there’s just no way they can cover everything, especially if it’s local news and especially if you’re like me and you don’t live in an area with a decently sized Latino population and 2) segments with Martha Stewart, while interesting, just lack the heft of serious reporting. Here are some of my regular online sources of news:

The Latin Americanist 

I started reading the Latin Americanist several years ago and it has definitely kept me informed. Basically, the Latin Americanist has short daily posts on what is going on in Latin America (Daily Headlines), with a separate post for global news (Global Watch). They tend to report right on target regarding things like elections or coffee or trade agreements, as well as some lighter pieces like soccer news (now, some of you may disagree with me on whether soccer is a light subject, but that’s another matter). They also have a regular column called Nuestro Cine, which examines movies about/by Latin Americans.

There’s a reason I’ve been reading this for years. If you want to be informed about what’s going on with our neighbors to the south, and the rest of the world, this is a great place to start.

The Chicanísima Daily

I just started checking out this source. Paper.li has “content curators” that cull the daily headlines to create a daily “newspaper” created from other news sources. You get your news based on your own niche.The Chicanísima Daily features pages on immigration and the Dream Act, as well as other topics. So far, I really like the kind of content I get here. It’s out there in the mainstream media, but it’s hard to get it all piecemeal. The Chicanísima Daily takes care of that for you.

News Taco

I started reading News Taco after seeing one of the founders interviewed by Jorge Ramos on Univsion. It seems that in the short time since I saw that interview, the website has exploded. They seem to be featuring more original content, which I love. Their articles are fearless and feature all kinds of topics, mostly in the interest of U.S. Latinos. I find one writer, OhHellsNa, very compelling. She wrote about her cruel grandmother and afterwards, her family’s backlash in response to the article she wrote. There’s a lot of stereotype-smashing going on over there. Overall, I’m going to keep watching this site.

Latina Lista

I follow this website via Twitter (@Latina Lista). What you will find is thoughtful, well written articles covering a variety of topics.  My favorite section of the site is Palabra Final, which gives “a viewpoint on anything and everything from a Latina perspective. I was struck by the quality of the content, and then I noticed that the publisher, Marisa Treviño, is a syndicated journalist. Well, no wonder! Definitely a winner.

Guanabee

If you like your celebrity news with a side of snark, this is the place to go. I discovered Guanabee several years ago when I was searching every way I could think of in Google Reader trying to find blogs with Hispanic topics – this was pretty much all I found. Thank goodness things have changed! I like to click over every once in a while to see what’s going on in celeb world.

Punto

If you want to find relevant news, you have to look for it. These are just a few internet places to start. So, where do you go to get your news from a Latin@ perspective?

My dream came true!

I disappeared for a few days – I was getting ready for an interview (which are hard to come by these days), among other things. Anyway, I just had to brag show y’all (I’m from Texas, I can say that) my new bookshelves! They are nothing fancy, but I finally have all my books in the living room with a few of my favorite tchotchke, and I still have room to grow!

I’m still debating an e-reader, so I may not need room for more books. I did go through these books and put together a box of books that I’ll donate. I tried to keep books that I really enjoyed and that are meaningful. There are a few in there that I haven’t read yet.

Yep. I MIGHT have a book shopping problem – as in I buy more than I can read at a time. I’m trying to use the library more often, but the only bad thing about that is that I like to (GASP!) dog-ear the pages.

So what’s more weird – that I have a ton of books, or that (save for a few sections) I organized them by color?

Weekend Roundup

This week there was a lot of news in nuestra literatura! Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

A “weird” place to write :: via Poets & Writers – Oscar Casares breaks down the literary scene and festival in Austin, Texas.

Spanish Harlem author dies :: via the New York Times – Piri Thomas is a new discovery for me. I searched my library’s catalog for Down These Mean Streets, but they don’t have it. Added it to my Amazon wishlist!

Latino theater in Dallas :: via Dallas South News – Eliberto Gonzalez discusses his experiences with racism growing up and his theater company.

Latino children’s literature:: via scrippsnews – Monica Brown, a Pura Belpre Award winner,  discusses her books for children.

Rising Stars:: via Huffington Post – Pablo Manriquez writes “7 Young Latinos In Online Media To Watch In 2012.”

Quinceañeras! :: via NPR – Malin Alegria discusses role models, spanglish, and the lack of literature for Hispanic teens.