DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say, and this one is worth every mile to hear. We're in El Paso, and the story belongs to Estela Portillo Trambley. Born here in 1926, gone in 1998, and in between — well, let me tell you what in between looked like.
Estela Portillo Trambley was a fiction writer, a playwright, a poet, and an El Paso native who spent her life drawing vivid portraits of strong and independent Mexican and Mexican American women in Texas and its borderlands. She is recognized as one of the first Chicano Renaissance authors, and she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature right here, from the University of Texas at El Paso. Then she turned around and taught high school in El Paso for more than forty years.
More than forty years. And for over two decades of that, she was specifically a teacher of home-bound students — folks who couldn't get to the classroom, so she brought the classroom to them. Now, if that alone were the whole story, it would be enough.
But Trambley was not a woman who stopped at enough. In the 1960s, she was on the radio, hosting a political show called Stella Says. In the 1970s, she directed and wrote a television cultural program called Cumbres.
She co-founded Los Pobres, a bilingual theater right here in El Paso. Her plays premiered in theaters all across the country, including the Chamizal National Memorial Theater and the Chicano Theater of El Paso Community College. And she lectured extensively at universities across the United States and Europe — internationally acclaimed, the marker says, and that's not a phrase they hand out easy.
Then comes 1972. That year, Estela Portillo Trambley became the first woman ever to win the Premio Quinto Sol — a prestigious literary prize recognizing the work of Chicano and Chicana authors. The first woman.
In the formative years of Chicana literature, she was there, contributin' and blazing a trail for writers who came after her and fought their own battles against gender stereotypes. She was the inspiration for many of them. And she knew exactly what she was doing.
In 1982, she told an interviewer — and I'm going to let her have the last word here, because nobody said it better than she did — she said, look at all the women in my stories. They're very independent. They create their own universes.
They are very unorthodox. They aren't held down by rules and regulations. That was Estela Portillo Trambley.
She wasn't held down either.
What the marker says
Estela Portillo Trambley (1926-1998), an El Paso native, was an award-winning fiction writer, playwright and poet known for her vivid portrayals of strong and independent Mexican and Mexican American women in Texas and its borderlands. Recognized as one of the first "Chicano Renaissance" authors, Trambley earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature from the University of Texas at El Paso. She taught high school in El Paso for more than 40 years, including over two decades as a teacher of home-bound students. An internationally-acclaimed author, she lectured extensively at universities across the United States and Europe. Trambley's contributions to the arts and to higher education are an important part of El Paso's artistic legacy. She was co-founder of Los Pobres, a bilingual theater in El Paso. Her plays premiered in many theaters across the country, including the Chamizal National Memorial Theater and the Chicano Theater of El Paso Community College. In 1972, Trambley became the first woman to win the Premio Quinto Sol, a prestigious literary prize recognizing the work of Chicano and Chicana authors. In the 1960s, she hosted "Stella Says," a political radio show. She also directed and wrote "Cumbres," a television cultural program, in the 1970s. Trambley contributed to Chicana literature in its formative years and was the inspiration for many writers who fought gender stereotypes. "Look at all the women in my stories," Trambley told an interviewer in 1982. "They're very independent; they create their own universes; they are very unorthodox. They aren't held down by rules and regulations." (2014)