WRITER WAS VOICE OF CHICANA MOVEMENT
Elizabeth Martínez, a feminist, writer and community activist who helped organize the Chicana movement, which sought to empower people, like her, who were of Mexican descent and born in the United States, died June 29 in San Francisco. She was 95.
The cause was vascular dementia, said Tony Platt, a longtime friend.
Known as Betita, Martínez used her literary skills as an editor and writer to inspire, provoke, educate, strategize, organize and build cross-ethnic and cross-racial alliances, all in pursuit of social justice.
Half Mexican and half Anglo, she struggled for decades with her identity. As a young professional in Manhattan, she called herself Liz Sutherland, taking her mother’s Scottish middle name as her surname and sometimes passing as Anglo.
Only in middle age, after she had moved to the Southwest, did she embrace her Mexican heritage. In an act of self-empowerment, she called herself Chicana, a word previously considered pejorative. She reclaimed her surname and helped define an emergent Chicana movement, seeking rights and pride for people, especially women, who were often exploited in the labor market and oppressed by Chicano men.
In New Mexico in 1968, Martínez co-founded a bilingual newspaper, El Grito del Norte (The Cry of the North), one of the movement’s first newspapers and one of its most inf luential. Its initial aim was to fight for Chicano land rights in New Mexico, but it quickly took on broader struggles involving the war in Vietnam, socialism in Cuba and feminism around the world.
She was among the first to explore how issues of race, class, poverty, gender and sexuality could be connected under overlapping systems of oppression, making her a foundational voice for the concept of intersectionality long before that term came into vogue.
Born before the Depression, Martínez came of age during World War II. Full of youthful idealism, she wanted to work for world peace after the war through the newly formed United Nations.
Her mission, as she summed it up in a manifesto she wrote at 16, was to “destroy hatred and prejudice.”
In her 20s she landed a job at the U.N., where she researched colonialism in Africa. And for a time she led a high-f lying life in Manhattan while working first at the U.N. Secretariat; then at the Museum of Modern Art, where she assisted photographer Edward Steichen, the museum’s director of photography; then at Simon & Schuster, where she was a book editor; and then at The Nation magazine, where she was books and arts editor.
Martínez attended chic Fifth Avenue soirees and hobnobbed with artists and writers. She also wrote film reviews, translated a French novel, traveled to Cuba, where she declared herself a socialist (and drew the attention of the FBI); and visited Moscow to interview leading Russian poets.
Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez was born on Dec. 12, 1925, in Washington. Her blue-eyed, American-born mother, Ruth Sutherland (Phillips) Martínez, taught advanced high school Spanish and was an accomplished pianist and tennis player.