Poet, scholar and human rights activist Luzma Umpierre will attend a Nov. 6 reception to honor her for donating her artwork, poetry, photographs and documents that chronicle workplace legal struggles, lesbianism and the migrant experience to DePaul University’s John T. Richardson Library, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave., Chicago. The 2 p.m. reception is free and open to the public.

Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Umpierre has received awards for human rights advocacy and her pioneering work on the inclusion of issues of sexual orientation, gender, race, class and ethnicity in Latin American and Latino studies curriculum. Hailed as groundbreaking by feminist and queer scholars, her work is widely anthologized and incorporated in literary histories.

    
“Umpierre is one of the few Puerto Rican writers of her generation to come out publicly as a lesbian in her literary writing and her scholarship,” said Lourdes Torres, St. Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at DePaul. “She was writing poems in Spanglish (Spanish and English) in the 1970s when this practice was much maligned, and she helped shape discussions on the legitimacy of bilingualism and bilingual ways of speaking and writing.”

The collection, which spans more than 40 years, reflects Umpierre’s professional career, including legal documents chronicling cases of workplace discrimination that Umpierre experienced on the basis of her ethnicity, gender and sexuality. It also includes books, memorabilia and elements of her personal life, such as correspondence, photographs and some early family documents.

“My earliest memories of what it is to be in exile from Puerto Rico come from my cousin who migrated to Chicago looking for work. Thus, I have always perceived Chicago as a mecca for Puerto Ricans in exile,” Umpierre said. “I wanted to donate the papers to a place that would value them as part of the Puerto Rican diaspora. The fact that Prof. Lourdes Torres is part of the presence of Puerto Ricans in Chicago made the decision easy to make.”

“Umpierre has been a mentor to me and many other Puerto Rican women, as well as gay and lesbian scholars, so I am pleased that we can honor her life’s work by ensuring that her legacy will be preserved at DePaul,” said Torres, whose research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the United States and queer Latina literature. “Securing this collection contributes to our mission to make DePaul a model of diversity by honoring and making accessible the work and papers of an important woman of color.”

The reception will be held in Room 314 of the Richardson Library. The collection is available for research use in the Department of Special Collections and Archives in the library from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday beginning Nov. 6. For more information about the Umpierre collection, please contact Torres at ltorres@depaul.edu or (773) 325-7353 or Kathryn DeGraff, department head of Special Collections and Archives, at kdegraff@depaul.edu or (773) 325-2167.