Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Who is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American historian, writer and feminist.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1938 to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a half-Native American mother. Her paternal grandfather, a settler of Scots-Irish ancestry, was a landed farmer, veterinarian, a labor activist and a Socialist Party member in Oklahoma and also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, "Wobblies." Her father was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World—Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunba. Her father's stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.

Married at eighteen, three years later she and her husband moved to San Francisco, California, where she has lived most of the years since, although the marriage ended. Her account of life up to leaving Oklahoma is recorded in Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. She has a daughter, Michelle.

Dunbar-Ortiz graduated from San Francisco State College in 1963, majoring in History.