Claudia Isaac is a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her primary field of research is in urban and community-based development, which includes leadership in areas such as: poverty alleviation, food systems planning, affordable housing, neighborhood planning and land use, metropolitan redevelopment, and community capacity building. She has taught courses in urban planning, community-based practices, and research methods, and has produced numerous reports, case studies and articles focused on her hands-on community-based research and practice.
Isaac joined Frontiers’ editorial collective at the University of New Mexico as a new faculty member. During this period, the University of New Mexico witnessed heightened competition between Black and Latino forms of activism. These movements impacted her explorations of womanism and Blackness as directed towards her research, teaching, and scholarship. And although she does not identify as gay, Isaac aligned with queer Black women and their politics at the University.
As the only Black woman in the editorial collective at the time, her interview includes a discussion of her role in addressing racism within the Journal’s processes. For instance, when a racially-based controversy arose based on the published short story, Crickets, she shares that she felt puzzled at first. This tentativeness turned into a more formalized concern. As she perceived the editorial collective’s response to her to be defensive, she wrote a letter of concern to the broader Frontiers community. At this point, her concerns were finally taken seriously.
Find more about Professor Isaac here.
Selected Quotes from Frontiers at 50 Oral History Interview
“In UNM, in New Mexico, at the time, there was still a kind of suppression of Blackness as a fundamental category. Still a sense of the competition between Latino and Black activism, including Latino and Black activism within the feminist movement. And, you know, then when you add sexual orientation on top of that I found myself aligning myself with gay Black women, because I sort of understood their intersectionality and their marginal liminal space. And they were just much more easy to be around than white women who wanted me to teach them about race – and that was a dynamic, a subtle dynamic on the Frontiers board. From the beginning, it became an active dynamic with the Crickets controversy.” (p. 6)
“And Crickets was submitted as a literary submission, so the rest of the board had no access to it, we didn’t make the decision about whether to publish it, it was that subcommittee. And you know, when you have a subcommittee, it should always come back for board approval, but this didn’t. So, I didn’t see it until it got published. And then when it got published, I read it and I think I was more puzzled about why this was in this Journal. I got increasingly angry as there was (an) insistence of unreflective defense that had, frankly, really racist undertones – ‘we’ll deal with your issues once we’ve eliminated patriarchy.’” (p. 8)
“In fact, as I get old, I sort of often remind myself that, I mean, whenever anybody calls me wise, which sometimes they do, I challenge them and say that’s not really, I don’t want to be wise. I want to be engaged.” (p. 17)
“The whole concept of plain speech is not dumbing down. I draw on Collins a lot for that. She’s a genius at being able to express incredibly complicated and sophisticated scholarship in plain language. I think Frontiers did a pretty good job of that and one of the reasons to have a literary component to publish poems and short stories was that people outside of academia might be more drawn to read the Journal and then read the rest of it and not be eliminated in terms of their understanding of feminism and patriarchy and action. Not all of the articles were action or movement oriented, but they were accessible.” (p. 20)
The full oral history interview video and transcript can be found at the following Frontiers archives locations:
UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library:
University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library:
ACCN3283 Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies Oral History Collection