Local opinion: Silvia Wood, barrio Mistress of the Words by Salomón Baldenegro

Read the complete article at Arizona Daily Star

“No writer can be the ‘Master of the Words’ without loving them!” — Mehmet Murat Ildan, Turkish playwright and novelist

My good friend of over five decades, Silviana (Silvia) Wood, recently passed away at age 85. Our friendship went back to our John Spring Junior High School days in the 1950s. But Silvia was more than my friend. She was Tucson’s and the Chicano/a community’s friend, our cultural ambassador.

Silvia’s contributions go beyond the writings discussed below. Silvia was a veteran of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that fundamentally changed the educational, political, cultural and social landscape of Tucson and Arizona. She was a member of several barrio-based theater groups. She taught drama (at Pima Community College and elsewhere). Silvia and her children and her siblings were intimately involved in the 1970 “El Rio for the People” movement in Tucson, which was a defining moment in the political evolution of Tucson’s Mexican American/Chicano community. We walked many a picket line together.

Silvia had a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree (the terminal degree in the arts), a national reputation (her work appears in anthologies and journals used in high-school and college classes throughout the country). She received awards from many groups, including the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, and the University of California. She was a published author. Her many accomplishments never went to her head. Silvia never forgot where she came from — Barrio Anita’s fingerprints and DNA are all over her writings.

Per the criterion in the opening quote, Silvia was a Mistress of the Words. Silvia’s love affair with words gave us great poems, short stories, plays, and a memoir-novel in a delightful word potpourri in English, Barrio Spanish and a smattering of Yaqui….

Read the complete article at Arizona Daily Star

Silviana “Silvia” Wood — ¡Presente!