Founder & Director

Women on the Border

Board Members

Elvia Arriola

Donna Blevins

Josefina Castillo

Judith Rosenberg

Elvia R. Arriola is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. Her J.D. is from UC Berkeley and she has an M.A. in History from New York University.  She was formerly a staff attorney with the National Headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union and an Assistant Attorney General in the New York State Department of Law.  She began her law teaching career in 1991 at the University of Texas at Austin.  Arriola taught civil rights, employment law, family law and feminist legal theory at the UT Law School from 1991-1999.  In 1997, at a time when the University of Texas was under extensive public scrutiny over the impact of Hopwood v. Texas (5th Cir, 1996.) which abolished affirmative action in admissions, Professor Arriola developed a pedagogical experiment with her students enrolled in a course called Civil Rights Litigation that questioned the relationship between poor performance by students of color in standardized tests like the LSAT and distribution of education resources in the public schools. 

Arriola has served as a visiting professor at St. Mary’s University and De Paul University in Chicago.  As a 2001 Humanities Fellow at De Paul University  she produced, in collaboration with the American Friends Service Committee, a conference on cross-border trade, the Mexican maquiladoras and the global economy.  Arriola is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois.  She may be reached at a.elvia@grandecom.net . 

Publications by Elvia Arriola

 Josefina Castillo

As a sociologist and as a woman, I’ve always been concerned with issues addressing social and gender equality.  I also have a personal stance in non-violent answers to any type of conflict.  These factors have shaped the work that I’ve carried out throughout my life in academic and non-academic spaces mainly around educational issues.  I believe it is through critical thinking that people can best learn how to perceive conditions that call for social justice actions in order to improve their lives.  It is through education that people are able to increase awareness of the world around us, and transform our personal lives and those of our community. Women’s issues are of particular interest if we consider ourselves not only as life givers, but also as reproducers of culture.

Professionally I have worked as Adjunct Faculty of Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM) for 7 years, but later on, my enthusiasm for popular education was encouraged through the work with Mujeres para el Diálogo, a non-governmental organization based in Mexico City.  This job offered me an opportunity to learn how to design and implement workshops, seminars and Encuentros (meetings) with various groups of women on popular education projects such as literacy campaigns, women’s health, methodology of popular education and improvement of self-esteem. The work with urban grassroots and peasant women in Mexico has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. More

Judith (Hoodeet) Rosenberg

Coordinator, Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera (ATCF)

Board Member, Women on the Border

Judith has lived most of her life in New York City and upstate New York.  Throughout the seventies she worked for the Olivetti corporation. a multinational corporation that was headquartered in Milan, Italy.  In that work she learned how multinational corporations work the international angle to their profit. In that decade at Olivetti, the angle was manufacturing, and the targets of the exploitable labor were women. In the eighties, Judith also worked in an adult literacy program in Brooklyn with minority women in a program connected to welfare and welfare reform.  Judith returned to school for her Master’s at SUNY-Albany and obtained her M.A. in English in 1997, focusing her work on 19^th century U.S. women writers.  She has now completed the course work to qualify for a Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her dissertation topic will be focusing on the rhetoric of globalization with the central question being, “can the maquiladora worker speak?”  Given how new she is to Texas, her writing interest and her involvement with women on the border, Judith is sure she will never see anything in life the same way again.