SOURCE: Candelaria, Cordelia. “Engendering ReSolutions: The (Feminist) Legacy of Estela Portillo Trambley.” In Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez, pp. 195-207. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Candelaria considers Portillo Trambley's legacy as a feminist, provides an appreciation of her work, and assesses her place in Chicana literature.

When she died in 1998, Estela Portillo Trambley, a native of El Paso, Texas, left a public legacy of writing, storytelling, and several decades of teaching influence that I admire greatly and find solid as cuentos and important as cultural artifacts. At the same time I find her literary legacy ideologically complicated and complicating, as important legacies often are.¹ It is this tension between respect for Trambley's obra and my struggle with some of the thematics and signification of some of her representations that...