Luz María "Luzma" Umpierre-Herrera (born October 15, 1947) is a Puerto Rican advocate for human rights, a New-Humanist educator, poet, and scholar.
Luz María Umpierre was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1947,[1][2] and grew up in a working-class neighborhood called "La veintiuna" (Stop 21) in a household with sixteen people.
Umpierre studied at the Sacred Heart Academy and the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón,[1] both in Puerto Rico, graduating with honors.
She was the first Puerto Rican to receive tenure at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University, where she taught the first graduate-level course on Colonial Latin American Literature.
[citation needed] She was banned in 1989 from teaching at the university for her texts on the inclusion of Gay and Lesbian authors in her literature classes and also after speaking at the March on Washington, DC, of 1987.
After leaving Rutgers, she worked as Head and Professor of the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies and Folklore at Western Kentucky University (WKU).
Umpierre eventually relocated to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she was an Associate Professor for Classic and Romance Languages and literature, along with Women Studies in 1998.
She also expanded the curriculum of this university to include adding courses dealing with Latina Literature and Culture, Creative Writing, and Latin American Studies.
[11] She also supported de la tierra's other magazine, conmoción, which was a continuation and expansion of esto no tiene nombre meant to be a platform for conversation about Latina lesbians through publishing work like Umpierre's.
[citation needed] She also explores these topics in her second and third books, En el país de las maravillas (Kempis puertorriqueño) (1982) and .
She advances a "homocritical" theory of reading, which she labels as "Homocriticism", suggesting that homosexual readers can be more attuned to perceiving hidden queer meaning in a literary work.
Her first article on this subject appeared in Collages & Bricolages in 1993 under the title "On Critical Diversity" and dealt with the book Fragmentos a su imán by José Lezama Lima, although it was written in the early 1980s and taught at Rutgers University in Graduate Seminars during that decade.