Early life and education
Fernández is a fifth-generation tejana from Laredo, Texas. She received her B.A. and an M.A. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Towards a Contextualization of José Carlos Mariátegui’s Concept of Literary and Cultural Nationalism," examined the role of José Carlos Mariátegui in the early 20th century Peruvian cultural wars.
Fernandez held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT, Austin; she received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Womanist Consortium of the Institute of African American Studies at UGA to study Chicana literary feminism and nationalism.
Art advocacy
- Assistant to the Director, Mexican Museum in San Francisco
- Director, Bilingual Arts Program, Oakland Unified School District
- Founder, Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women's Literary Review (1979—1982) at Mills College
- Directed two major conferences: "The Cultural Roots of Chicana Literature, 1780-1980" (Mills College and Aztlán Cultural, 1981; see here for photo of the exhibit's poster) and "Latinos in the United States: Cultural Roots and Diversity" (Brown University and Casa Puerto Rico, 1985).
Editorial and curatorial work
- Editor, Arte Público Press, from 1990-1994. Several of the women she worked with received national awards for their novels.
- Curator, "Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literature of the United States, 1965-1990" (traveling), sponsored by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.
Marriage and children