Elizabeth Martinez
| Elizabeth Martínez | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
December 12, 1925 Washington, D.C. |
| Occupation | Author |
Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (born 1925) is a Chicana feminist and a long-time community organizer, activist, author, and educator. She has written numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas. Her best-known work is the bilingual 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures, which later formed the basis for the educational video ¡Viva la Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History. Her work has been hailed by Angela Y. Davis as comprising "one of the most important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporary era ... [Martínez is] inimitable ... irrepressible ... indefatigable."
Martínez is the daughter of Manuel Guillermo Martinez and Ruth Philips Martínez. Her parents nicknamed her "Betita" for short. She grew up in a middle class predominately white neighborhood in Washington, D.C. because her father worked as a secretary in the Mexican Embassy. Her mother received a master's degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish. Some of Martínez's first jobs included a clerk-typist at an insurance company, a waitress at an ice-cream store, and a copy girl at the Washington Post. Martínez was the first Latina student to graduate from Swarthmore College in 1946 where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in History and Literature. When Martínez was twenty-three she married her first husband Leonard Berman and then divorced in 1952. She married her second husband Hans Koning in 1952 and they had their daughter Tessa Koning-Martínez together in 1954. In May 2000, Swarthmore awarded Martínez with an honorary doctorate. Martínez has worked for Simon & Schuster as an editor and for The Nation Magazine as Books and Arts Editor. Her daughter, Tessa, is an actress and co-founder of San Francisco’s Latina Theater Lab.
Martínez began her political work in the early 1950s. She worked in New York for the United Nations Secretariat as a researcher on colonialism and decolonization in Africa.
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