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Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana/ fronteriza historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is of Rarámuri descent and honors her grandmother Canuta Ruacho. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History and Associate Professor in the Department of History. She has spent her life listening to and documenting the lives of border people through research, writing and photography. She is particularly interested in telling the stories of the barrios that grew along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo in El Paso/ Cd. Juárez during the past 140 years. Professor Leyva specializes in border history and public & oral history. She came to academia after a decade of social work in the Black and Brown communities of east Austin, with a desire to make academia and especially history relevant and useful to people. You can catch her at www.fiercefronteriza.com and IG fierce_fronteriza_fotos

The Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers is LIVE and available for purchase. (CLICK HERE for a short sample of what's inside.) 

For the next several days we will be posting each of our contributors' bios and pictures here in the order that they appear in the anthology "Contributor Bios" page. 

The aim of this publication was to showcase some of the artistic talent that often gets overlooked by some when topics of the US-Mexico border arise. The artists and writers who contributed to the Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers anthology are some of the most accomplished. These are their bios...