R.I.P.

Groundbreaking Chicana Activist Elizabeth Martinez Dies at 95

One of the first activists to call herself “Chicana,” largely used as a pejorative at the time, Elizabeth Martinez came to define the movement’s voice.

Pioneering Chicana activist Elizabeth Martinez died Tuesday of vascular dementia at her home in San Francisco, The New York Times reports. She was 95. One of the first activists to call herself “Chicana,” previously used as a pejorative, to describe her Mexican-American identity, Martinez’s writing and advocacy came to define the movement’s voice. She was born to a white American mother and a Mexican immigrant father but went by the name Liz Sutherland for years when living in New York City while working as an editor and hobnobbing with the city’s literati. In the 1960s, she moved to the Southwest, began going by her given name as well as the nickname “Betita,” and founded an influential activist newspaper in New Mexico, El Grito del Norte, that explored intersecting issues of race, gender, and class.