A Conversation with Maribel Alvarez

For 30 minutes this week, Amy Amoroso spoke with Maribel Alvarez about International Women’s Day.

Maribel Alvarez is an anthropologist, folklorist, curator, and community arts expert who has documented the practice of more than a dozen of the country’s leading emerging and alternative artistic organizations. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance and teaches courses on methods of cultural analysis, with particular emphasis on objects, oral narratives, foodways, and visual cultures of the US-Mexico border as an Associate Research Professor in the School of Anthropology and Associate Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona.

Maribel was born in Cuba and came to the United States at the age of seven; she lived in Puerto Rico for eleven years before moving to California in 1980, where she became active in the Chicano arts community and multicultural arts movement of that decade.

Maribel and Amy discuss the #Timesup and #Metoo movements, gender parity, the history of International Women’s Day and cultural dynamics of gender issues.  Maribel also shares her current favorite female music artist.

Recorded and produced by Amy Amoroso for broadcast on March 11, 2018