In Betita's Garage

In Betita's Garage:Tracing the Archival Afterlives of Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez María Eugenia Cotera (bio) The last time I saw Betita Martínez was in the summer of 2010 at the tail end of a research trip to California that Linda Garcia Merchant and I had organized as part of our oral history and archive project: Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR). We were in California to interview Chicanas who had been active in the movement years, and among those interviews, Betita's had taken on a degree of historical urgency. Not only was she a monumental figure in the radical histories we sought to trace in our digital archive, she was also a critical link between a generation of organic intellectuals who were shaped by the decolonial upheavals of the postwar period and those who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Annmarie Perez notes in her close reading of Betita's writing and editorial work in the 1960s, Betita's supple and complex intersectional political framework was forged in this heady milieu, born from a profound sense of identification and disidentification as a mixed-race Chicana "gear-shifting" (Chela Sandoval) through multiple sites of struggle, from the Cuban revolution to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to women's liberation.1 In some ways, Betita was already a movement elder when she cofounded (with Beverly Axelrod) El Grito del Norte in Española, New Mexico, in 1968, and her incisive thinking and internationalist perspective, not to mention her disidentification with monolithic movement logics, shaped an emerging debate about the role of women in the Chicano Movement. Indeed, in the early 1970s Chicanas like Anna NietoGomez (whom we were also interviewing on our California trip), Enriqueta Vasquez, and my mother, Martha Cotera, looked to Betita as they formed their own feminist positions. Betita brought her experiences with global revolutionary struggle, the emergent Black Power movement, and women's liberation to an emerging feminist consciousness articulated, as Maylei Blackwell has documented, in the print culture, conferences, and organizations of Chicanas in the movement years.2 In adding her story to the CPMR archive, we wanted to document Betita's multivalent activist journey in order to trace the genealogy of intersectional feminism and illuminate the linked nature of freedom struggles in the 1960s and 1970s.3 [End Page 1011] This was only our second research trip for CPMR, and in many ways we were still figuring out the technical and conceptual dimensions of the project. The summer before, we had taken two students (Adonia Arteaga and Carolyn Racine) to central Texas, where we interviewed women involved in the Raza Unida Party. We stayed in my parents' home, a place overflowing with archival objects that my mother, Martha Cotera, had collected over her years as a Chicana feminist writer, researcher, and organizer. I vividly remember how the materials in my mother's collection captured Adonia and Carolyn's attention, so much so that on the last day of the trip, they got tattoos inspired by graphics culled from her collection of movement newspapers.4 Surrounded by the Chicana archive—captivated by its documentary richness and the story of struggle that it told—they were taken into a proximal past that somehow spoke to the urgencies of the present. It seemed to me at the time that the power of this dissident archive, now etched permanently on their flesh, was about something more than its function as documentary evidence of a radical past. Here was a live, and lived-in, space of embodied memory, where the past and the present (and even the future) coexisted. The archive in my mother's home was, in other words, uncontained, its meanings uncataloged and ready to be taken up in new and unexpected ways. I remember thinking at the time that if an archive like my mother's was made more broadly available to a new generation, it had the potential to transform not just how we understand the past but also how we frame the present and envision more liberatory futures. Our California trip the following year was, in many ways, inspired by this transformative experience, which marked an

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