Background
Norma Alarcón was born in Villa Frontera, Coahuila, Mexico on November 30, 1943. There, her father worked as a steelworker and her mother worked as a candy packer for Marshall Fields.
Norma Alarcón was born in Villa Frontera, Coahuila, Mexico on November 30, 1943. There, her father worked as a steelworker and her mother worked as a candy packer for Marshall Fields.
Alarcón graduated from the Catholic school Saint Thomas the Apostle in 1961 as a member of the National Honor Society and started college at De Paul University, but left in 1962 to marry her first husband. She then entered the Doctor of Philosophy program in Spanish literature at Indiana University.
Her family immigrated to San Antonio, Texas in 1955 in order to find work, and settled in Chicago, Illinois by the end of that same year. Later, Alarcón returned to school at Indiana University in Bloomington to graduate Phi Beta Kappa in 1973 with a degree in Spanish literature and a minor in comparative literature. Despite the combined pressures of going through her first divorce, raising a son, making a living, and working on her Doctor of Philosophy program, Alarcón founded Third Woman Press in 1979 and completed her dissertation, “Ninfomanía: El Discurso feminista en la obra de Rosario Castellanos,” a theoretical study of Mexican feminist literary criticism, in 1983.
Alarcón taught in the Foreign Language department at Purdue University in Indiana from 1983 until she received the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986 and got hired by the Ethnic Studies department there in 1987.
She received tenure there in 1993. The press published more than thirty books and anthologies until it ceased publication in 2004, when Alarcon had a health crisis that left her no time to continue her unpaid volunteer work with the press, and also led her to retire from the University.
Alarcón has a long history with, an anthology of writing by women of color. She also co-edited the Spanish translation, Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos along with Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo.
She is the founder of Third Woman Press and a major figure in Chicana feminism. Alarcon is best remembered for her substantial contributions to "postmodern Chicana feminism.".