Chicanx Latinx Law Review

Foreword and Editor's Note for Volume 32, Issue 2 of the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review.

Dean Moran provides opening remarks to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, "Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."

Remarks shared at the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, “Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."

From their inception, names—including first names, surnames, names of groups, and even story, book, and academic article titles—are embedded with meaning and coded with identity, and over time, they become layered with nuance and memory. In 1992, when I wrote my original article, I named it “Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas,” using Spanish to embed a rhetorical signal to the reader that s/he was being invited into the lived experiences (and legal reasoning) of a Latina. The first of several narratives begins with me as a seven-year-old child in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Thus, the article begins in “Brown space”—that is, the location, the perspective, the idioms, and the cultural references are intentionally racially and ethnically “Brown,” with skin color and phenotype serving as a synecdoche for the Latina/o racial category.

What a pleasure and honor to be celebrating the historic work of my sister-colleague, the sublime Margaret Montoya. It is doubly meaningful that this symposium is so thoughtfully coordinated with the one tomorrow, honoring the amazing Mari Matsuda. Events like these truly induce writer’s block, as the momentous import of the occasion seems to overwhelm our mere mortal ability to articulate an appropriate level of insight and wisdom that might even approach the original brilliance of a piece like Máscaras. Forgive me in advance, as I am certain I will fall short in such a tall task.

I am going to stand in tribute to Professor Montoya and her family and to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review, which brings us to this point where we are considering and celebrating Professor Montoya’s Máscaras, Trenzas, Y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, twenty years after its initial publication. Professor Montoya’s article is timeless.

Remarks shared at the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, “Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."

We celebrate Margaret E. Montoya’s Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas as a canonical article in critical race theory because its deft interweaving and unbraiding of stories helps us consider the marginalizing assumptions of the legal world, the way normativity translates into authority, and the means by which the mainstream is disguised as unbiased. She does these things effectively through an exercise of courageous candor that lays bare the kind of feelings and thoughts that we usually keep to ourselves or only share with intimates.

This essay is based on a presentation made as part of “Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia,” a symposium sponsored by the UCLA Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review, April 5, 2013.

From their inception, names are embedded with meaning and coded with identity, and over time, they become layered with nuance and memory. This was the first and last sentence in the reflection I wrote in 2013 to mark the twenty years that had passed since I wrote the article, Máscaras, Trenzas y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, which was the focus of the symposium volume in which this essay now appears.

We, the collaborators in the ongoing Name Narrative projects that are described in this short article, are three Latinas and one Native woman: Irene found Name Narratives to be a salient pedagogical tool in her Introduction to Chicana/o Studies course in Fall 2013. Diana and her colleague, Jeannette Stahn, have used the Name Narrative tool with administrators, teachers and students. Diana and I are a mother-daughter pair who have worked side-by-side in different settings, more recently creating opportunities for storytelling about names and identities.