Anthology Biography
Lavandería - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word was conceived at the ZSPOT writer's workshop in San Diego, California in 2005. In critique mode, workshop participants discussed the revision process, joking about how it compares to doing dirty laundry. Our faces blazed in that moment of possibilities and we formed the Wash House Collective, a group of artists, educators, and activists residing in San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Donna J. Watson, lead editor of Lavandería teaches writing at San Diego City College and is a founding member and editor of City Works Press. She helped write, develop and direct the original showpiece situated at the center of the anthology. After pitching the ideal to publish Lavandería to City Works Press in 2008, she and co-editors Michelle M. Sierra and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga began the year-long process of collecting, sorting and reviewing submissions from around the world.
Michelle M. Sierra is a writer, photographer and co-editor of Lavandería. She and Yukimi Levas-Anderson shot lavanderías in Tijuana, San Diego and Los Angeles. Their visual images inspired the workshop writers to cull stories that “focus on the strength and beauty lying inside the history of families and their everyday environments.”
Over time we wrote and collected stories--our own and those of our mamas, tias, daughters, abuelas, and great grand mamas--the women who mended, washed, ironed, and folded garments for their families and their employers’ families for pennies a day. Like laundry, the stories are soiled, funky, faded and tattered, and even after pre-soak, bleaching and softening with the best products money can buy, some leftovers of the original stains remain. And after researching history, we realized that although everybody does the dirty deed, traditionally the practice falls mainly on the shoulders of women.
Driven by the fashion and advertising industries, clothes unmake the woman. We adorn our bodies in someone else’s desire, often imitating rather than creating from the richness of our own daily lives. For those of us caught in cyclic poverty and its stress, sure to kill any inkling of creative energy, know that the secret to survival is embedded within our labors that safeguard the integrity of our families and our selves. We thirst to find and refine both word & image that rejoice those lives and the lives of our head-ragged fore-mamas, who, in the womanist words of Alice Walker referring to history’s unspoken wisdom, knew without ever having written a word of it themselves.”
Lavandería is a small harvest of the Wash House Collective’s labor. It reflects our hope and celebrates people around the world who continue to imagine possibilities, finding and maintaining vision and creativity among the common tasks folded in the creases of our daily lives.
Lavandería - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word was conceived at the ZSPOT writer's workshop in San Diego, California in 2005. In critique mode, workshop participants discussed the revision process, joking about how it compares to doing dirty laundry. Our faces blazed in that moment of possibilities and we formed the Wash House Collective, a group of artists, educators, and activists residing in San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Donna J. Watson, lead editor of Lavandería teaches writing at San Diego City College and is a founding member and editor of City Works Press. She helped write, develop and direct the original showpiece situated at the center of the anthology. After pitching the ideal to publish Lavandería to City Works Press in 2008, she and co-editors Michelle M. Sierra and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga began the year-long process of collecting, sorting and reviewing submissions from around the world.
Michelle M. Sierra is a writer, photographer and co-editor of Lavandería. She and Yukimi Levas-Anderson shot lavanderías in Tijuana, San Diego and Los Angeles. Their visual images inspired the workshop writers to cull stories that “focus on the strength and beauty lying inside the history of families and their everyday environments.”
Over time we wrote and collected stories--our own and those of our mamas, tias, daughters, abuelas, and great grand mamas--the women who mended, washed, ironed, and folded garments for their families and their employers’ families for pennies a day. Like laundry, the stories are soiled, funky, faded and tattered, and even after pre-soak, bleaching and softening with the best products money can buy, some leftovers of the original stains remain. And after researching history, we realized that although everybody does the dirty deed, traditionally the practice falls mainly on the shoulders of women.
Driven by the fashion and advertising industries, clothes unmake the woman. We adorn our bodies in someone else’s desire, often imitating rather than creating from the richness of our own daily lives. For those of us caught in cyclic poverty and its stress, sure to kill any inkling of creative energy, know that the secret to survival is embedded within our labors that safeguard the integrity of our families and our selves. We thirst to find and refine both word & image that rejoice those lives and the lives of our head-ragged fore-mamas, who, in the womanist words of Alice Walker referring to history’s unspoken wisdom, knew without ever having written a word of it themselves.”
Lavandería is a small harvest of the Wash House Collective’s labor. It reflects our hope and celebrates people around the world who continue to imagine possibilities, finding and maintaining vision and creativity among the common tasks folded in the creases of our daily lives.