Dunbar Library

09/04/2026

When she was ten, she destroyed her arranged engagement by chewing raw eggplant until her teeth blackened. Her family had chosen a husband for her, but she decided she would not let them decide her fate.

She went into the kitchen, stained her teeth completely black, and smiled as wide as she could at the prospective groom and his family.

The horrified guests immediately left, the engagement was canceled, and young Nawal El Saadawi won her very first fight for freedom.

She was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, a small Egyptian village, as the second of nine children. Growing up, her grandmother often told her that a boy was worth at least fifteen girls.

At six years old, the women in her family pinned her to the bathroom floor and subjected her to female ge***al mutilation. The pain stayed with her forever, but so did the deep feeling of betrayal.

She realized early on that society was designed to control women through fear, and she made a silent promise to fight back.

Her father believed in equal education, allowing Nawal to read every book she could find. She completed her first novel at thirteen and later earned a medical degree from Cairo University in 1955.

As a doctor in rural areas, she saw women dying from dangerous traditional practices, domestic violence, and health complications caused by social inequality.

She realized that medicine alone could not heal these women because the real sickness was patriarchal oppression.

In 1969, she published her groundbreaking book Women and S*x. In it, she boldly attacked female ge***al mutilation and the societal control of women's bodies.

The backlash was immediate.

The government fired her from her high-ranking post as Director of Public Health, shut down her magazine, and banned her books. Rather than keeping quiet, she remained completely fearless. She once stated,

"They thought they could stop me by taking my job, but direct action is my life."

While working as a prison psychiatrist, she met a woman on death row who had killed her pimp. That experience inspired her world-famous novel Woman at Point Zero, which became a pillar of Arab feminist literature.

In 1981, President Anwar Sadat ordered her arrest under fake political charges. At fifty years old, Nawal was thrown into Qanatir women's prison.

The prison guards denied her pen and paper, believing they could silence a writer by taking away her tools. However, a fellow prisoner smuggled an eyebrow pencil to her cell, and Nawal gathered discarded scraps of toilet paper.

Sitting on the concrete floor, she wrote her famous prison memoirs. She looked at the guard and declared,

"You took my pens, but you cannot take my mind."

During those same two months in captivity, she helped establish the Arab Women Solidarity Association with her fellow prisoners.

After Sadat was assassinated later that year, she was released and spent the next four decades speaking out against tyranny, gender violence, and religious extremism.

Until her death in 2021, Nawal El Saadawi remained an unstoppable force who proved that truth can never be locked away.

Nawal El Saadawi proved that real revolution does not start in government offices or polite boardrooms.

It starts when a ten-year-old child refuses to be owned, when a woman writes forbidden truths on toilet paper, and when we stop respecting the very traditions that keep us chained.

Nawal turned a handful of raw eggplant into freedom and a stubby eyebrow pencil into a beacon of hope for millions of women across the globe. She leaves behind a world where young girls can look at her legacy, stand tall, and know that they are worthy of dreaming without limits.

From the dirt floor of a rural village to the dark corners of a prison cell, Nawal never surrendered her belief in justice. She lived every single day as living proof that truth is far stronger than iron bars.

Today, her fierce spirit lives on in every brave woman who dares to stand up, speak out, and claim her rightful place in the world.

>We Are Human Angels<
Authors
Awakening the Human Spirit

We are the authors of 'We Are Human Angels,' the book that has spread a new vision of the human experience and has been spontaneously translated into 14 languages by readers.

We hope our writing sparks something in you!

09/02/2026

09/02/2026

🤠 Every silver button on that suit was placed by hand, every stitch of embroidery telling its own story of regional pride and generations of craftsmanship.

The charro suit isn't a costume. It's a tradition rooted in Mexican equestrian culture, each detail carrying meaning — the cut of the jacket, the trim along the trousers, the specific style of the sombrero, all developed and refined over generations of skilled tailors and craftsmen. Wearing one properly is its own form of respect for that entire lineage.

Did your family have a charro suit passed down, or a tradition connected to it?

08/31/2026

BREAKING🚨 ICE just locked up a Naval Academy midshipman's mother when she showed up for her green card interview.

Maria Rocio Rocha went to the immigration office in San Antonio on August 25 for her appointment. She left it in ICE custody, and was taken to the family detention center in Dilley, Texas.

Her son, David Garcia, had just started his first summer as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy.

Congressman Joaquin Castro, who nominated David to the academy earlier this year, says Rocha had already been granted parole in place — a protection the government gives to the immediate family of American service members. She was at that interview to finish getting her green card.

ICE did not answer the San Antonio Express-News when asked why she was detained.

On Friday Castro drove to the detention center to see her. He says ICE turned him away because he had not given 48 hours notice.

Her son is training to serve this country. His mother is in a detention center an hour from home.

Castro put it simply: "Release David's mom Maria immediately."

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08/31/2026

Entire generations of Mexican-American families built their lives around agricultural labor, moving with the seasons from field to field long before labor protections existed to make that work any easier. 🌾☀️
Migrant farmworker families often kept children out of consistent schooling simply to survive, following crop seasons across state lines, work that fed the entire country while rarely offering the families themselves anything close to stability or recognition. That resilience eventually helped fuel labor movements that reshaped protections for agricultural workers nationwide, but it started in fields exactly like this one, generation after generation, sack after heavy sack.
Understanding this history changes the way an entire era of American agriculture and Mexican-American sacrifice comes into focus.
Does your family have roots in agricultural or migrant farm work, and what was that experience like?

08/31/2026

On March 26, 1948, about 700 Mexican American veterans met in Corpus Christi and started their own group. They called it the American G.I. Forum.

They had come home from the war to find the benefits they had earned hard to reach. The Veterans Administration in South Texas was slow to process claims and slow to admit them to hospitals.

Dr. Hector P. Garcia, an Army veteran and a doctor, called the meeting. He had been treating veterans in his own office who could not get seen anywhere else.

The Forum spread across the country within ten years. It pushed on hospital care, on draft boards, on school segregation and on the poll tax.

These were men with discharge papers in a drawer who still had to organize to get what the papers promised.

08/03/2026

In June 1948 a federal judge in Austin ruled for a girl named Minerva Delgado. Texas school districts could no longer place Mexican American children in separate schools.

Twenty parents brought the case. They sued Bastrop and three other districts. Their lawyer was Gus Garcia. Six years later he would argue Hernandez v. Texas before the Supreme Court. LULAC paid for the fight.

The districts had no state law to point to. Texas never wrote this kind of segregation down. Schools had simply done it for forty years and called it custom.

Judge Ben Rice ruled on June 15, 1948. He found the practice illegal and ordered it stopped. Then he added one sentence. Schools could still separate first graders who did not speak English.

Districts read that line closely. They tested every Mexican American six year old and found what they needed. The same separate classrooms stayed for twenty more years. Winning the case and ending the practice were two different things.

07/30/2026

During the 1930s, as many as 1.8 million people were removed from the United States and sent to Mexico. Historians estimate around sixty percent of them were American citizens. 🚂

It is called the Mexican Repatriation, and it happened while the Depression was on. Jobs were scarce, and the message from officials and newspapers was that Mexicans were taking them. Local governments organized trains. Welfare offices told families that assistance would stop unless they left. Agents swept public parks and gathered people up in front of their neighbors. Most of it ran on pressure rather than court orders, so there were almost no hearings and almost no records. 🇲🇽

Children born in Los Angeles and San Antonio were put on trains to a country they had never seen, some of them not speaking Spanish. Many never came back. California formally apologized in 2005. There has never been a federal apology. 🕯️

This is not distant history. Some of the people it happened to were still alive a few years ago. Had you heard about it before today?

07/29/2026

Before you judge an elder for not teaching their kids Spanish, you should know what happened to them for speaking it. 📖

For most of the twentieth century, Spanish was punished in schools across Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Not discouraged. Punished. Children were struck on the hands, made to kneel, made to write I will not speak Spanish hundreds of times, made to stand in a corner, kept after school, fined a penny a word they did not have. In some Texas districts children were made to hold a mock funeral and bury the Spanish language in the schoolyard, so they would understand it was dead. Six year olds. That happened.

The kids who lived through that grew up and had children of their own, and they made a decision. My child will not go through what I went through. So they spoke English at home. They answered in English when their own mother spoke to them in Spanish. They did it out of love, and it cost them something they could never get back. 🖤

That is why so many families have a hole in them exactly one generation wide. The abuelos speak Spanish. The grandchildren are trying to learn it. The generation in the middle carries the bruise.

So when someone in your family gets quiet about their Spanish, or gets embarrassed, that is not laziness. That is a policy working exactly as intended, seventy years later.

If your family lost Spanish somewhere along the way, I would like to know where the break happened.