Tania Libertad Balderas

Originally from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Tania Libertad Balderas is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, an MA in English Literature from l'Université de Lausanne, and a BA in Theater Arts from New Mexico State University. Her fields of study are 20th Century Comparative Literature, centering on Chicanx, Latin American, Francophone Caribbean, and Native American Literature. She specializes in Marxism, feminism, theater studies, anti-imperialism, and decolonial theories.

Her current book project, Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico, emphasizes how the narratives from the Mexican Insurgency, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the leftist faction of the Chicana/o Movement in the 1960s and 1970s articulate intersecting notions of resistance, liberation, and transnational solidarity. The comparative analysis of the testimonial novel Las mujeres del alba (2019) by Chihuahuan novelist Carlos Montemayor, the autobiographies Lakota Woman (1991) and Ohitika Woman (1993) by Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta writer and AIM militant Mary Brave Bird (formerly Crow Dog), and the memoirs and plays by the San Diego-based group Teatro de las Chicanas, collected in Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays (2008), traces how the Indigenous oral tradition anchors the narrative resistance of these social movements. Although adapted to modern contexts, they hold on to their roots as transmitters of stories and knowledge that authoritarian regimes would have otherwise erased. Emphasizing the role of women as storytellers and historical agents, Resistance Narratives underscores how women played crucial roles in liberation struggles, arguing that the internalization of colonization and heteropatriarchy devalued their contributions and labor.