Dr. Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez Expresses Support for Efrén Paredes, Jr.

Dr. Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez expresses her support of Efren Paredes, Jr. To learn more about the injustice surrounding Efren's case please visit www.4Efren.com. You can support Efren by signing our online petition for his release at http://tinyurl.com/FreeEPJ.

A Chicana activist, author, and educator, Elizabeth Martínez has published six books and many articles on social movement in the Americas . Her best-known work is 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures, a bilingual history that became the basis for the video she co-directed. Her collection of essays published by South End Press is entitled De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. Other books include Letters from Mississippi and The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba.

After graduating from Swarthmore College , which awarded her an honorary doctorate in May 2000, she worked in the United Nations Secretariat as a researcher on colonialism in Africa , as an editor at Simon & Schuster; and as Books and Arts Editor of The Nation magazine. During the 1960s, she served fulltime in the Black civil rights movement with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South and as a coordinator of its New York office. Later she joined the Chicano movement in New Mexico where she founded the bilingual movement newspaper El Grito del Norte (1968-1973) and co-founded the Chicano Communications Center, a barrio-based organizing and education project.

Since moving to the Bay Area in 1976, she has organized on Latino community issues, taught Women's Studies part-time, conducted anti-racist training workshops, and worked with youth groups. She ran for governor of California on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket in 1982 and has received many awards from student, community, and academic organizations. In 1997, she founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice, a resource center to help build alliances among peoples of color. Her daughter, Tessa, is an actress and co-founder of San Francisco's Latina Theater Lab.

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