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Great Lives from History: American Women

Martha P. Cotera

by Joseph Dewey, Micah L. Issitt

Mexican-born activist, educator, and historian

Cotera is an academic who authored groundbreaking studies that defined the pivotal role of women in Chicano political and cultural history in both Mexico and America, She also distinguished herself within Texas's Latino community by her passionate defense of civil rights and her advocacy of expanded educational opportunities for women and minorities.

Born: January 17, 1938

Area of Achievement: Activism, education, scholarship, women's rights

Early Life

Martha Piña Cotera (MAHR-thah PEE-nah koh-TEH-rah) was born Martha Piña in 1938 in Chihuahua, a Mexican state that borders Texas. One of four children, Cotera learned from her grandparents to take pride in her Mexican heritage, especially its politics. Her mother, a strong woman who raised the family, encouraged Cotera in school, where the girl excelled. Indeed, when her family immigrated to El Paso in 1946, Cotera was initially placed in the first grade but quickly tested up to the third grade. Cotera respected the opportunity to obtain an education, and in 1962 she received a B.A. in English, with a minor in history, from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso). A year later, she married Juan Estanislao Cotera, who would become an architect, and in 1964 she accepted a position at the Texas State Library in Austin as both librarian and director of its archive of documents central to Texas history.

From the earliest days of her career, Cotera was committed to bettering educational opportunities for young Hispanics. To this end, in 1964 she helped form a collective of Hispanic teachers and school administrators known as Texans for the Educational Advancement of Mexican Americans. Four years later, she was instrumental in tutoring more than two hundred Hispanic students who boycotted classes in Crystal City, Texas, over discriminatory practices. In 1971, she and her husband moved to Mercedes, Texas, where she helped establish Jacinto Trevino College (later Juarez-Lincoln University), a pilot campus designed solely to prepare Hispanic students as teachers in bilingual curricula. Cotera herself completed her master's degree in education there.

Life's Work

Cotera and her husband became increasingly involved in Chicano activism, joining La Raza Unida, a political party founded in 1970 that aimed to offer Texas's large Hispanic population a viable third-party option. It was during this time that Cotera, while serving as director of the Crystal City Memorial Library, noticed what she would later term the entrenched misogyny of the Chicano Civil Rights movement, and she was moved to organize Muejeres de La Raza Unida (Women of the United Race). Through her activism, Cotera began to investigate the historic role of women in Chicano history.

After moving to Austin in 1974, Cotera worked to establish the first-ever resource bank geared to providing minority women with information about funding for community projects. The next year she accepted a post as a special collections coordinator for the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the nation's largest archives dedicated to a single ethnic group. Her position at the archives allowed her the opportunity to research the role of women in Hispanic culture in both Mexico and the United States. Cotera published dozens of groundbreaking articles and two landmark works: a historic survey of nearly three centuries, Diosa y Hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the United States (1976), and a sampling of her speeches and essays, The Chicana Feminist (1977). Her work, grounded in meticulous research into records sometimes centuries old, encouraged a generation of cultural studies programs which reassessed the position of women in a Chicano culture that had long been regarded as patriarchal.

In addition to her scholarly work and political activism, Cotera during two decades spearheaded pioneering causes within the Austin Latino community, organizing funding for arts programs, starting committees aimed at encouraging minority professional women, launching citywide education projects, helping fund programs for battered women and rape victims, and, most notably, establishing a first-of-its-kind database company, Information Systems Development, that focused on providing critical business information for entrepreneurs. In addition, she became a much-sought after speaker at state and national conferences promoting women's rights and minority opportunities. Although she declined to pursue political office herself, her public advocacy of fair housing, improved public transportation, and a wider embrace of cultural diversity in public education curricula, as well as her tireless efforts on behalf of candidates sympathetic to minority rights, made her a fixture in Austin city politics.

In 1997, her twenty-five-year-old son was brutally murdered after a carjacking; he and another man were locked in the trunk of a car by two armed teenagers and subsequently drowned when the teens rolled the car into Town Lake, a reservoir in downtown Austin. Both Cotera and her husband, however, publicly advocated imprisonment rather than capital punishment for the convicted teens.

After leaving her position as archivist and bibliographer for the Benson Collection in 2009, Cotera continued to work for women and minority representation in Austin city politics. In the wake of growing concerns over long-term environmental damage to Texas and its resource-based economy, Cotera, while in her sixties, worked to help minority students who were interested in environmental studies pursue green-based career opportunities. In 2010, she was recognized with a lifetime achievement award by the Veteran Feminists of America. Cotera's daughter, Maria Cotera, worked with her mother on the creation of a new online resource for Chicana feminism and literature, Chicana por mi Raza, through the University of Michigan. Martha Cotera, as a pioneer in Chicana activism, was the first person interviewed for the project.

Significance

Although her scholarly work in Chicana studies was trailblazing, Martha P. Cotera, in a long and distinguished career of activism and public advocacy of social justice issues, embodied the spirit of politics made local. Within the Austin community, she used her position in numerous advocacy groups and social agencies to encourage cultural development in order to better represent the Chicano arts, increase educational opportunities for minority children (particularly at-risk adolescents), and, perhaps most important, expand business opportunities for women and minority entrepreneurs.

Further Reading

1 

Garcia, Alma M. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historic Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. Brings together the key writings of feminists critical to the Chicano rights movement in the 1960's and 1970's, including Cotera.

2 

Garcia, Juan, ed. Mexican American Women, Changing Image. Vol. 5 in Perspectives in Mexican American Studies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays that address the role of women in Mexican American culture. Includes an essay by Cotera.

3 

Torres, Eden A. Chicana Without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2003. A sweeping vision of the role of women in Chicano culture, representing the generation grounded in Cotera's scholarly work.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dewey, Joseph, and Micah L. Issitt. "Martha P. Cotera." Great Lives from History: American Women, edited by Mary K. Trigg, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLHW_0118.
APA 7th
Dewey, J., & Issitt, M. L. (2016). Martha P. Cotera. In M. K. Trigg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Women. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dewey, Joseph and Issitt, Micah L. "Martha P. Cotera." Edited by Mary K. Trigg. Great Lives from History: American Women. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.