María Antonietta Berriozábal became the first Latina to be elected to the City Council of San Antonio, where she served from 1981 to 1991. She received a presidential appointment as the U.S. Representative to the Inter-American Commission on Women of the Organization of American States in 1994, representing the United States at United Nations Conferences and at the 1995 Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing, China. Committed to the empowerment of Latinas, she is the founder of several Latina organizations and continues her community activism in environmental, immigration, and social justice issues. Antonia I. Castañeda was one of the very first Chicana Ph.D.s in the United States. She has held teaching appointments at St. Mary's University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is the coeditor of the Chicana Matters series and a board member of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. She is also a founding member of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and the recipient of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies' Scholar of the Year award. Josephine Méndez-Negrete is the author of Las hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed and the editor of Chicana/Latina Studies, the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social journal. She is an associate professor of Mexican-American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They live in San Antonio, Texas.