Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award

Elvira Cordero Cisneros and Sandra Cisneros Photo by Diana Solis

Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award Recipient in 2010

The Macondo Foundation is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2010 Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award is Dr. Norma Cantú.

The Macondo Foundation recently established the award to honor the memory of Sandra Cisneros’ mother, Elvira Cordero Cisneros (1929-2007). Recipients are selected for exhibiting exceptional talent, a profound commitment to their chosen form of expression, and dedication to the work of nurturing the creativity of others. It is the foundation’s hope that recipients will make use of the award to nurture their own creativity and wellbeing.

Sandra Cisneros has written, “We wanted to give it to someone who is too busy nurturing others to nurture herself. My mother was a deeply creative, but frustrated artist, and I don’t want to see others live their lives with regrets for what they didn’t do.”

Dr. Norma Cantú
Internationally recognized writer and scholar Norma Elia Cantú was born and raised along the U.S. Mexico borderlands, and the border remains the focus of her academic and creative work. Dr. Cantu received her PhD in English from the University of Nebraska and has held two Fulbright Hays Fellowships to Spain. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Modern Languages Association’s Chicano studies section scholar of the year award, the American Folklore Society’s Americo Paredes Award, and she was recently honored as a Veteran Feminist of America. Her poetry has appeared in Feminist Studies, Prairie Schooner and various journals and anthologies. Her award winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera is a fictionalized autobioethnography of life on the border. As a folklorist, much of Dr. Cantú’s work reveals the complexity of border cultural production; centered on women’s rites of passage such as quinceañeras, her scholarly work as well as her poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction explores the physical border as well as the often neglected dimensions of psychological spaces, where issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect.  Dr. Cantu edits a series for the Texas A&M University Press, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition, a series publishing work on the border by leading scholars in the humanities. In her co-edited works (Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, 2001; Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, 2002; and Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Studies Reader, 2010) Dr. Cantú has teamed up with leading Chicana and Latina scholars to gather the work of scholars concerned with issues of identity. In addition she is currently engaged in editing two collections focused on art and artists: La Mesa de Moctezuma: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes, 2010, and Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson’s Art of Resistance, forthcoming.

Her current book projects include an ethnography of a dance tradition in Laredo, Texas, Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz, and an edited volume on Tejana identity. She is currently working on a novel tentatively titled Champú, or Hair Matters among a myriad of projects including the establishment of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa that hosts an International conference every 18 months on the work of this important Chicana thinker; she along with a group of like-minded poets have also started an organization, CantoMundo, an organization for Latin@ poets, that will have its first workshop in July 2010.


The Macondo Foundation does not accept applications, individual solicitations or nominations for the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award. Previous recipients include Rosemary Catacalos, Dennis Mathis, Denise Chávez, Linda Rodriguez, Tony Diaz and Gayle Elliott.