Dr. Norma Elia Cantú didn’t grow up with the word Chicana in Laredo. “My father jamás decía eso,” she explained. It wasn’t until graduate school in Nebraska in the 1970s, that the name came to her. At the time, she was working with the Department of Education, visiting school districts to help teachers adjust to new immigrant communities, especially Vietnamese families arriving after the war.
One day, in a small Nebraska town, she was introduced to a room full of teachers as “Spanish.” She corrected the superintendent: “I’m not Spanish. I’m from Texas.” Nobody laughed. Later, over lunch, she asked him why he had chosen that label. His answer stunned her: “I didn’t want to insult you by calling you Mexican.”
In that moment, she pushed back. “What would you want me to call you?” he asked. She looked at him and said: “Chicana.”
“That was the first time I called myself Chicana,” she recalled. “Because I wanted to be in his face.”
Born on the border, she has carried language as both inheritance and question mark. English was not her first fluency, nor was Spanish untouched by doubt. In school, teachers marked her as “behind,” struggling with reading comprehension. At home, she remembers Spanish slipping away in half-finished sentences. “My literacy was always in between,” she reflected. “Spanglish became the first real language I knew. It was what I lived in.
“And it became a ray of light for all those U.S. border natives, writers, and storytellers, who needed to express ourselves both in English and Spanish, because one language was not enough to tell our stories,” she said.
This doubleness – of being too much in one language and not enough in another – would later define her work as a writer, editor, and cultural organizer. For her, the border has been less a line than a shifting syntax. “Writing in English was a way to survive,” she said, “but returning to Spanish felt like a way to breathe.”
She learned English in first grade, entering school without knowing the language, but already able to read and write in Spanish, thanks to her grandmother. The experience was a shock – her teacher, Rogelia García (who she later discovered was also a folklorist), guided her through those early years. Still, it wasn’t until around third grade that she truly felt she could read and understand English.
At home, Spanish was the foundation. Her grandmother and mother taught her poems to recite on Mother’s Day, and she began memorizing long declamaciones in Spanish from an early age.
By third or fourth grade, she was experimenting with her own writing, beginning with poetry. Switching between English and Spanish came naturally for her. It became a third language that she moved through with ease, depending on her audience.
Cantú was born in Nuevo Laredo, where her parents had briefly settled after marriage, but crossed to Laredo as an infant and grew up identifying as Tejana. The border shaped her, but she didn’t leave until her mid-twenties – not out of desire, but because the local institutions didn’t offer the graduate studies she needed.
As the eldest of eleven children, she had to work while pursuing her education. She spent years at Central Power and Light before finally earning her undergraduate degree at what was then Texas A&I at Laredo. When the university expanded, she took the leap – quitting her job to finish her studies. Eventually, in 1973, she left for Kingsville to pursue a Master’s degree, and by 1975, she was on her way to doctoral studies.
Still, the most persistent thread in her story is identity – the way she names herself and the way others try to name her. Chicana. Tejana. Fronteriza. Each word carries history, geography, and negotiation. She embraces the plurality. “Being from the border means you never stop translating,” she said. “Not just words, but feelings, belonging, even silence.”
When I visited at her home on a bright summer Sunday morning, she was returning from a ten-day self-retreat at Port Aransas – a space of solitude she created for herself while writing her latest book, Champú, a collection of stories that transpire at a beauty shop.
The stories of Champú are at once intimate and political. The book examines bodies, beauty, and the border with a gaze that is both playful and unsparing. Writing it has meant allowing herself to pause, revise, return.
“For a long time I thought speed meant progress,” she admitted. “Now I know slowness can be just as necessary.”
She has been teaching for 51 years, starting with her first college classroom in Kingsville, where she taught Introduction to the American Short Story.
One of her most unforgettable experiences came in Laredo, when she founded Literacy Volunteers of Laredo more than four decades ago. Working alongside her students, she helped test residents in the colonias. An elderly woman once came to her saying she didn’t want to learn English – she just wanted to learn to write her name before she died. Sitting down with her, she taught her how. The woman cried with joy, and that moment remained one of the most rewarding in Cantú’s career.
Her teaching in Laredo was transformative for many first-generation college students, many whom went on to become teachers themselves. Later, in 2000, she moved to start a PhD program in English, a decision she initially resisted because she wanted to stay close to her home, family, and garden. She recalls writing in her journal: “When I have graduated 20 students with this PhD program, I will have done my job.” By the time she retired in 2012, she had graduated 21.
Cantú is the Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Editing, too, has sharpened her relationship with language. As an editor, she has held to a clear ethic: integrity over trend, care over speed. “Publishing should expand voices, not flatten them,” she said. “You learn to protect the writer’s rhythm while also making the text sing.” In this, she sees no separation between craft and politics. Editing, like writing, she believes is an act of advocacy.
She learned early on that the work is the work – and she is herself. Her voice lives in the writing, but the work is not her identity. Editorial corrections, then, are about craft and perspective, not about who she is. And perspectives can clash: one professor insisted on the em dash, another forbade it. Editing, she realized, is subjective.
Over time, she learned to distinguish which changes serve the work and which threaten its integrity. When editors pushed for full translations of the Spanish in Canícula and Cabañuelas, she refused. Instead, she made the text accessible while preserving its bilingual form. To defend that decision, she pointed to the work of other published writers – such as Cormac McCarthy – who included untranslated Spanish in his writing. For Cantú, content choices that reflect culture are not negotiable.
This commitment has meant walking away from opportunities. When Duke University Press showed interest in Mexicana Fashions, but required the book to expand its scope to include other communities of color, she and her co-author declined. The project had a clear purpose, and altering it would have erased that focus.
She said that every publisher has a “book list” – a vision of what fits its catalog. Part of the process is finding the right home for a manuscript. That’s why Somos Tejanas took years before finding its place at UT Austin Press. Other publishers wanted it to be either fully academic or purely creative. For her, the strength of the book was precisely in its mix of testimony, poetry, and scholarship. She said UT Austin recognized that value.
Publishing, she acknowledged, can be slow, frustrating, and rejection-filled. But with patience, persistence, and an unwavering defense of the work’s integrity, a book ultimately finds both its publisher and its readers.
As our conversation ended, she circled back to language, to the girl once told she was behind. “Maybe I was slow,” she shrugged. “But slowness taught me to notice things. To sit with a sentence until it turned into something else. To trust that the words would come, even if they came late.”
In that lateness, she found not failure but form. The studio, it turns out, was never a room she lacked – it was the border of languages in which Norma Cantú was already living.
