Bios of Mayor’s Book Club participants (in alphabetical order):

Maria Azucena is from Mexico. She has been active in social justice struggles for women and immigrants rights and is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Central Texas Immigrant Workers Rights Center (CTIWoRC) that oversees the work of CTIWoRC through evaluation and strategic planning to create the most meaningful impact for Latino immigrant communities. She is mother to three beautiful children and aspires to return to school to better serve her community as a role model and organizer.

Bill Beardall is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Center, a non-profit, non-partisan employment justice and civil rights organization. The Equal Justice Center helps low-income families, individuals, and communities achieve reforms to improve their lives using combined strategies of community organizing, legal rights advocacy, leadership development, technical assistance, and community-based coalition building. EJC provides the critical support and infrastructure that enables low-income working people to organize and achieve fair treatment in the workplace, in the justice system, and in the larger civil society.

Heather Courtney is a filmmaker and photographer based in Austin. She recently spent a year in Mexico on a Fulbright, where she completed production on her latest project, Letters from the Other Side, which tells the side of the immigration story from the perspective of the women and children left behind. Her documentary Los Trabajadores was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens in March 2003 and received the Audience Award at the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival, among other honors.

Juan Manuel Escobar is a House Representative for the state of Texas. He served in the United States Marine Corps and as a Starr county deputy sheriff before becoming a U.S. Border Patrol Agent. He worked as a Border Patrol Agent for over 15 years and was promoted to Senior Special Agent with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, an undercover unit of the Department of Justice that specialized in illegal drug interdiction work. He retired from the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 with the grade of GS-13.

Ambray Gonzales is an Austin-based painter. She has contributed her work to murals around Austin, including at Habitat for Humanity. She has also worked on murals for Battery Park in New York, the Philadephia Zoo, the New York City Science Center, and the Dallas Light Rail System, “Pegasus.”

Jorge Guajardo is the Mexican Consul General. Before coming to Austin, he served as director of communications for the governor of Nuevo León. He is also an active member of Mexican President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) and was a Mexican congressional candidate in 2003.

Barbara Hines is the Director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the UT School of Law. She is Board Certified in Immigration and Nationality Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and has litigated many issues relating to the constitutional and statutory rights of immigrants in federal and immigration courts. She frequently lectures and writes on numerous topics in the area of immigration law.

John McKiernan-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UT. His professional interests include borderlands history as well as Latino history. He is currently researching disease and community on the Texas-Mexico border.

Lesley Nowlin is an Austin-based freelance photographer who received her degree from the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford. She has exhibited a number of her photographs documenting diverse subjects from the lives of twins to war protests. She was commissioned by the State Theater in Spring 2005 to produce images for the set of their production of Nickel and Dimed and currently serves as the photographer for the Capital Area Food Bank’s annual report.

Yolanda Padilla is a Professor in the School of Social Work at UT. Her professional interests include studies on poverty, immigration, the social inequality of the Latino population, and social welfare policy. She has published articles relating to the immigration and life history of Latino women as well as to the child development in the Mexican-American population.

Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT. Her research interests include the intersection of oral history and journalism and U.S. Latinos and the news media, both as producers of news and as consumers. Rivas-Rodriguez was on the committee that organized and founded the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 1982 and has more than 17 years of daily news experience, mostly as a reporter for the Boston Globe, WFAA-TV in Dallas and the Dallas Morning News.

Porfirio Rojas is from Honduras and has been active in workers rights movements in Honduras, Mexico and the U.S. He is a Leadership Course graduate of the Central Texas Immigrant Workers Rights Center (CTIWoRC). He has worked as a day laborer and immigrant worker in Austin, Texas for eight years. He is also active in his church and in his free time assists other Honduran immigrants in navigating the complex social networks in Austin.

Sylvia Romo is a graduate student in Latin American Studies at UT. She is currently working on her film, El Santo Pollero/The Border Saint, about the life of her great-uncle, the modern-day patron saint of the illegal immigrant, Toribio Romo.

Pablo Véliz is a filmmaker living in San Antonio. He currently attends the University of Texas at San Antonio where he studies communication. Currently, he is writing for his next film, which deals with human struggle and family values in the U.S.

Visit our previous Mayor's Book Club resource guides online:
Spring 2005: Writing Austin's Lives by Metro Austin Residents
Spring 2004: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Spring 2003: Holes by Louis Sachar
Spring 2002: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

To view what other cities across the country are reading visit
The Center for the Book