Maria Cotera Interviewed on Chicana Fotos Exhibition

U‑M Professor Maria Cotera is interviewed in advance of the new exhibition Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos, a collaboration with Stamps faculty and students opening at WSU on Friday, Feb. 17.

For the past seven years, University of Michigan Professor Maria Cotera has been documenting the work of Chicana and Latina artists, writers and organizers who were active in civil rights movements in the 1960s and ​’70s in her digital humanities project Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective.

It was during this work that she met U‑M alumna Nancy De Los Santos, an accomplished filmmaker and proud ​“Chicana from Chicago” who has dedicated her life and career to rewriting and redefining the image of Latina/​os in the mainstream media. She co-produced ​“The Bronze Screen: 100 Years of the Latin Image in Hollywood Cinema” and was an associate producer on the feature film ​“Selena.”

Photos taken by De Los Santos are now part of ​“Chicana Fotos,” an exhibition curated by Cotera that shows De Los Santos as a woman armed with a camera, capturing historic events in the struggles for social justice of the 1970s.

‘Chicana Fotos’ exhibition highlights civil rights struggles | Arts & Culture