Drought and Colby Wildfire equals unusually hot weather for winter in Santa Barbara

The Voice of the Voiceless: the Social Responsibility of the Artist Malaquias Montoya

Ernesto Hogan

Kathleen Alcalá

Jesus Treviño

Mario Acevedo

Sandra Cisneros at Macondo

Cristina García

Julie Trimingham

Dagoberto Gilb makes his pitch for Huizache.

Abel Salas, poet and publisher of Brooklyn & Boyle.

Co-host, Virginia Espino, and writer Daniel Chacón.

Writers Daniel Chacón and Héctor Tobar.

Héctor Tobar reads his poem from Huizache.

Conrad Romo reads his poem from Huizache.

Musical entertainment by singer-songwriter David Garza.

The crowd enjoys conversation, food and drink.

Writers Daniel Chacón and Michael Jaime-Becerra.

Andrew Tonkovich (editor of the Santa Monica Review) and author Lisa Alvarez.

Latinopia Honors First Publisher of Chicano Literature

In 1969, Quinto Sol Publications was publishing Mexican-American literature. Then, in 1972, editor Octavio Ignacio Romano-V was joined by Herminio Rios C. to put together the first collection of Chicano literature, the fifth printing of El Espejo: The Mirror.

Latinopia, the nation's leading site for Chicano visual documentaries, updates its offerings weekly. This week, Latinopia features Romano talking about mestizo and chicano literature. It's interesting to hear Romano declare an open door policy, especially given the academic pedo that flew when other scholars accused Romano of foisting a false canon upon Chicana Chicano literary theory.




Morro Bay Birds and Seals
Michael Sedano

Photographing writers reading their work to an audience is my chosen challenge. Capturing a reader in a dynamic instant, forming a sound, eyes looking at the audience, poised in readiness, requires a good ear to anticipate a gesture or an eye contact moment. Over the course of a 10 minute presentation, numerous moments pass, some of them photographed. Nature adds the challenge of once-in-a-lifetime moments.

A rustle and a chirp in bushes calls my eye to a mostly hidden brown beauty. It flits out of sight then flies over to a backyard fence bordering the wetlands. If that California Thrasher turns toward the camera the eye will sparkle. The bird flits away just after the shutter goes "click".


A modern camera takes lots of the work out of a photograph. A fast-moving bird moves in and out of focus except the photographer keeps a target on the moving animal and the lens quickly adjust to maintain focus. Given a bright sunshiny day allows both fast shutter speed and smaller apertures for sharp focus.

If the bird stands still in the early morning chill and the water is still the reflection makes a great photograph. Luckily, this Curlew is not far from the camera.

Bright sunshiny day describes my weekend in Morro Bay in this year's annual trek to the estuary at Morro Bay along the California coast north of Vandenberg Air Force Base. A night launch from Vandenberg caught my eye as I admired the sky. A fast-growing contrail rose from my right swiftly passing overhead, three spotlights of engine fire winking back at me as the missile climbed into space.


Up the coast, four and a half miles north of Charles Foster Kane's castle at San Simeon, Elephant Seals complete a migration to arrive and give birth. The State of California erected boardwalks and railing systems allowing visitors to peer down upon individual animals, neonate babies suckling sleeping mothers, bulls surrounded by mates, thousands of animals spread as far as the eye sees in both directions.


The animals flip sand over their bodies then lie motionless. The mothers protect their young with flippers of sand. Sand trickles off the tiny bodies that crawl along a mother's smooth belly, finding a nipple. One tiny body lies covered with sand. Sand has settled into the crevices of its skin. Successive flippers of sand pile atop the eyes, the unblinking eyes.




Across the beach animals conserve energy by lying as still as corpses. A shudder, a flip, a blinking eye is all to identify the living from the dead.




But this baby has not moved, has not knocked off the sand off its body, not off the soft rolls of loose skin, not off the unmoving eyelids. Some babies sidle up to a bull, the fleshy proboscis snorting sand at the offspring.

The still baby moves a flipper. It is not dead today.


The salt marsh stretches miles across a watershed grown with thickets of red-brown brush. Shallow channels form with the tides, bringing food that attracts roaming herons and millions of shore birds.



Long, long lenses are a photographer's boon. I did not rent a 500mm lens and relied upon a zoom lens up to 300mm. That isn't enough lens for a superior image. My camera has an 18 megapixel chip which means it produces a huge image that 25% of the frame offers satisfactory pictures, like those of birds in flight.




Some images are more challenging than others, despite their predictability. Flocking sandpipers take to air hundreds in a tightly spaced group. They fly in synchrony, their dark backs offering illusions of smoke moving across the water, instantly the cloud flashes a brilliant white when the birds turn their bellies toward the viewer. It's spectacular seen across the water in the Morro Bay estuary.



The sandpipers, like many sea animals, are dark on top, light on the bottom. A prey looking up at the animal sees white like the sky is white. A predator looking down at the animal sees dark, like the ground is dark.

The estuary gets the photographer close enough to see through the camouflage.


This Osprey, a sea hawk, heard the camera from several hundred feet and flew off a moment after this exposure.

Hola Blogueros, I am very happy to present the bilingual version of my book ¡Juguemos al Fútbol y al Football/ Let's Play Fútbol and Football.  As always, this book is also about my immigrant experience. When a group of friends invited me to play "futbol", I said "Okay, I can play." But when I saw the oval ball flying above my head, I realized that they were not playing my fútbol. They were playing football instead. 

Agustín Fernández: Ultimate Surrealist

an exhibition curated by Donald Kuspit

Doesn't take much to make a writer happy. The mere positive mention out of the blue of something I published four years ago is enough to get me clicking my heels. I'm enjoying some good news this week about my 2010 novelKing of the Chicanos(Wings Press.) Nothing's final yet so I don't have details, but just the fact that my book came up in a particular discussion made the arctic vortex a little more bearable these past few days. Fingers crossed that ultimately I can invite you all to a celebration.

Meanwhile, to keep the mojo working, here's the opening chapter of King of the Chicanos. Hope you like it.

Groans and Whispers
Las Trampas, New Mexico 
1999
copyright Manuel Ramos, all rights reserved

On another dry, hot summer day in the last year of another century, Pancho Arango stood in line by an open casket in a packed, abbreviated version of a church in northern New Mexico. The good and religious people of Las Trampas had resurrected San José de Gracia from ruin. They had patched the crumbling adobe, reinforced the ceiling and walls, and painstakingly applied a thick coat of sealant to the wooden floor that covered graves dating from the eighteenth century. Although he tried to lose himself in the heavenly mythology of the torpid funeral mass and the somber throng of mourners, he found himself reflecting on the secular life and times of a man he had loved and hated, feared and pitied.

He had promised himself that he would not attend the funeral of Ramón Hidalgo. The promise did him no good. He failed in the same way that he failed when he had tried to erase the part Hidalgo had played in his life. When the time came, Arango broke the promise without understanding what it meant. He had to be present when Hidalgo received his peace and his place in history and thus he broke his promise without hesitation, without calculating what the cost would be, what the price for attendance had to be.

The sunburned farmer ahead of Arango in the viewing line wore an ill-fitting black suit that exposed frayed cuffs of a shirt that once had been blazing white and an inch-and-a-half of gray socks that once had been midnight black. The man’s bushy, gray eyebrows, full head of gray hair that hung over the frazzled shirt collar, and the glassy, yellow eyes shielded his identity for several minutes, but just as he moved away from the coffin Arango recognized the scar -- the mark of the man who had stood next to him while policemen jabbed heavy metal batons at both of them, who had run with Arango when an errant missile of tear gas landed at their feet and exploded in the faces of the policemen.

Hidalgo’s dark, waxen face, surrounded by silk and velvet, glowed with serenity. Arango’s dulled senses strained against the uneasy peace that tried to overwhelm him. The inert body in the lustrous coffin, the deep-eyed, gravely-voiced priest, the somber, medieval church, the tense mourners: these images served their orchestrated purpose and what should have been a loud, wild celebration of a wild, demanding life was only another church funeral, one more procession of grief and prayer and fear. The fiery, glowing eyes were closed and the half-smile beneath the thin mustache betrayed the irony that even in death Hidalgo understood.

Arango found his way to a pew and sat on the hard wooden seat. Summer burned the wild flowers and weeds and heated the earth but inside the cool air of the adobe building comforted all. A panel of brightly colored, vividly detailed retablos framed the altar. San Isidro smiled ambiguously as a sweating angel plowed his fields. San Francisco stared off to the distant right, a skull in the background. San Miguel brandished a sword that dripped blood. The black San Martín de Porres lovingly cradled the Christ child, and The Little Flower clutched her heart and cried the tears of martyrdom for those who refused to see the beauty and power of the one true God.

Swallows twittered along the outside rim of the ancient building. A dog barked and growled near the massive doorway and Arango remembered the stories told by his grandfather about the dog that escorted souls to the underworld. He also remembered that many years before, the dead man’s wife had adopted such a dog.

The priest droned solemn entreaties and rhythmic refrains and the assembled crowd answered him with beautiful, resonant verses scripted for them by apostles and prophets.

Mi alma está alejada de la paz,
he olvidado la dicha.
Dije: Ha concluído mi vigor,
y la esperanza que me venía del Señor.
Recordar mi miseria y mi vida errante
es veneno y amargura,
Recuerda, sí, recuerda,
y mi alma se abate dentro de mí.

They prayed in Spanish and made the sign of the cross in Spanish and they kneeled in supplication in Spanish but Arango could not help but imagine that Hidalgo’s inanimate ears transformed the words into songs of praise and glory, into a patois of English and Mexican slang, into blues and jazz and tejano music that lifted his casket with the spirit of his life. The mass should have been punctuated by the sounds and colors of Hidalgo’s life. The loft should have echoed with gritos from a choir of angry protestors. The paranoia-inducing background noise of police riot-squad mobilization should have filtered from behind the altar. Young men and women wearing bandanas across their foreheads and huelga buttons on their faded denim shirts should have crowded the priest off the altar so that they could make speeches that demanded justice, revenge, y que viva la raza! Outside the church, a mass of swaying humanity, arms linked in a sign of perpetual resistance, should have been singing the verses of De Colores.

What Arango heard was something else and there was no way for him to know which sounds were real. Over the drone of the priest and his prayers, the groans and whispers of ghosts of penitentes begged their God for mercy and peace and forgiveness before they silently, humbly marched to the morada and the whip and the pain.

The mass ended and pallbearers whom Arango did not know carried the casket to the hearse. They might have been relatives; they could have been men from the village. Bodyguards and attendants often had escorted Hidalgo during his life. They were dark, burly men who kept to themselves and answered to his whims and phobias. Now older, more fragile men accompanied his body with far less ceremony than he had been accustomed to, and with far less urgency.

Arango sat in a rented car and waited patiently for an opening and then pulled in line for the long, hot, dusty drive to the weedy cemetery where the priest said final prayers in Spanish, then whispered his condolences to the few who lingered around the open grave after the prayers were finished.

Sad-faced, chipped angels hovered on an archway over the worn rut at the entrance to the cemetery. A rusty, broken iron fence enclosed the group of mourners and the small gathering of newspaper and television reporters from Albuquerque. The fence served as a sardonic symbol of futility, a reminder that, for now, everyone had destinations, other places where they could take up space but that, eventually, the final space was reserved behind that rickety yet immovable fence.

The tombstones carried the names that had etched themselves on the New Mexican landscape: Baca, Griego, Hernández, Martínez. Pancho believed that it was not right that Hidalgo was buried in the beautiful state of New Mexico. He had lived out the last years of his life where someone had chosen to plant his bones, but he belonged elsewhere. Maybe Texas, where he was born, or so he had boasted many times. Or California, where his myth had been nurtured in loud, agitated meetings on college campuses on the brink of violence. Or Colorado, where clamoring crowds of the poor had raised his silk-screened portrait as well as their fists at the nervous figureheads of their oppression.

No, not New Mexico. He belonged where his triumphs had been direct and personal; where he had staked his claim so many years before when he had called everyone's bluff and bet against overwhelming odds that paid off in defeat and death. He should have been buried where he had emerged victorious in a halo of glory and legend. The truth, however, was that the place no longer existed for him. He had lost it, as he had lost everything else, as Arango had lost it, as an entire generation had dropped that magical time and place and never would pick it up again. Hidalgo had to be content with beautiful but lonely New Mexico.

Arango shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted at the faces he recognized and, yet, did not know. They were faces from another time, another existence, and the details of their importance teased him, out of reach of his awareness but dancing at the edge of his consciousness, fading in and out of his sight as they had done over the years, through all the times and places Hidalgo and Arango had journeyed together.

The man with the scar along the border of his face had not come to the cemetery.

Arango could not hold back the rush of emotion that slammed him as the coffin was lowered into the hole in the earth. His tears fell and were sucked into the dust the same way that Ramón's physical remains were sucked into the dark void of the grave. A few of the others noticed Arango’s emotion, assumed wrong conclusions about him and what he was doing there, and one or two even nodded in recognition. Despite the crowd, the buzz from the television camera and the rolling sway of the earth caused by the burial of a man who once had been a god, Arango stood alone, as tall and straight as he could manage under the weight of all he knew, all he had witnessed, and he convinced himself that only he among all of them had a right to be there. He had been the one who had truly listened to Ramón when all the others heard only blasphemy, who talked, shouted, cursed at him when he failed to respond, and who walked out on him when it was much too late for such drama. Pancho Arango made himself believe that he, alone, knew the story.

__________________________________________________________________

Later.

1st latino spec?

Olga García Echeverría


This is a picture of the final Women Who Sit drawing, which is layered with the caras of 15 mujeres. It's difficult to articulate exactly how the layering occurred, but you can check out a cool, short video of the process here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVhlpoztxMI



When asked what inspired Women who Sit, Karina said, "I came up with this idea after envisioning a work that could excite me and would drive me to connect with other creative, powerful women. A beautiful component of site-specific work is to imagine how others will interact and be affected by the art. I wanted to make a project that was ambitious and yet simple."

Those of us who posed for Women Who Sit got to see Karina's genius up close and in action. Think Mad Scientist. Between quick charcoal strokes, Karina repeatedly stepped back and forth in front of a larger-than-life paper canvas. She seemed to be dancing to her own internal music as she drew, her hands constantly marking, smudging, erasing. As her eyes leapt from subject to paper and paper to subject, she seemed to be capturing more than physical features; she was eliciting each Sitting Woman's inner essence, our energía, miradas, moods. There was something electric about Karina as she worked. The words that kept running through my head as I watched her charcoal me into existence were Pulse, Pintura, Passion.

Charcoal Version of a  Serious Me

Invoked Mama

"Art can arouse emotion," says Karina, "If a piece of art directs a person to create more, become excited, or dream, the work has done its job." The sketch that Karina did of me definitely aroused emotion. When I looked into it, it evoked my own layered reality; I saw a past version of my mother staring back at me through time and space.

Pau: Oil Paint on Panel

Aside from charcoal, there is plenty of color and shifting light in Puente's art. Like a quartz crystal in the sunlight, her work flickers. Reflections and movement are common motifs. It's not surprising that her favorite times of the day are The Golden Hour and 4:00 AM, or that she loves the rain and is inspired by water in all its forms. Even her oil paintings, like the one featured here, seem to embody an agua essence. "I’ve always looked to the ocean for answers," says Puente, "Once, in a dream, whales beached themselves to bring me slides of paintings in their baleen. That is something that stays with me when I paint."

One of the elements I find most alluring about Karina's paintings is  how subjects and shapes constantly shift and morph. Karina says about this, "Morphing in my work symbolizes transformation and touching the unseen; it grows with me and continuously reveals information about where I am in my life emotionally and intellectually." 
 
"There is a vibrancy alive in your color choice and in the playful way you concentrate on mark-making. Something so valuable I see in you is that you shine after you make something. Often, people who haven't found their inner-structure bend at the site of their brush stokes and cower at their attempts. It takes real awareness to look at something you’ve painted –no matter what it is- and to be pleased. Good job!"

She is too kind. Thank you Karina for sharing a bit about yourself with La Bloga. To learn more about Karina Puente and to view more of her amazing work, visit:  www.karinapuentearts.com

Ana Castillo's Give It To Me 2014's Literary Sensation 
Michael Sedano
Review: Ana Castillo. Give It To Me. NY: The Feminist Press, 2014.
ISBN: 9781558618503
The literary sensation of 2014 is Ana Castillo’s Give It To Me. Castillo’s written no flash-in-the-pan-let’s-churn-out-a-series sensation.
Castillo’s outrageous storytelling creativity will have readers passing copies to all their friends, who will already have their own copy. Give It To Me is sure to engage many a graduate seminar, moving the novel toward the top of all United States novels for its character, Palma Piedras, the novel’s narrative voice, its satire of eroticism, and overall richness.

Ana Castillo sends a woman on a sexual odyssey that samples incest, orgy, rape, cougarhood. Palma Piedras is bi- though mostly prefers women. Palma repeatedly takes on random partners, men, women, gay, straight, singly and in pairs. Rather than move with deliberation, Palma is often simply in the way of other people’s passions. At 43 years old, Palma Piedras is at the nadir of a life in shambles in the wake of death, divorce, and hysterectomy.

Unabashedly sexual without being erotic, Ana Castillo introduces a new ethos to her cast of women. Highly competent as a book translator, emotionally directionless, Palma is neither strong nor in control of much more than where she sleeps. “Anything goes, why not?” would be Palma’s motto if she had one. If Palma has a motive or philosophy, the narrator keeps it well under cover, snarking out Palma’s views on men and sex.

Machismo is lonely, keep the front up, never let anyone in. Palma doesn’t object that a macho perceives himself at war with the world, she’s at war, too. Men are “sex, food, and leave me alone for the rest of my life.” Sex is teatro, performance. The act gets old soon enough, else people get "laid to waste." Women make emotional contact leading to an intimacy that replaces passionate sexual athleticism of early dates.

Palma Piedras is a normal woman with a freaky side that takes over Palma’s vulnerable moments, or asserts itself seemingly at random, in guise of something Palma wants to do. Palma and her enamorado, Pepito, go through a series of misadventures dating back to when he was fourteen and Palma left Abuela’s house and her lil cous’. Pepito focuses Palmas awareness--he is unfinished business, otherwise she’s careening from this to that.

Palma and Ursula split up. Pepito comes to town. Gay friend Randall and Palma prove that each has equipment the other needs. Palma gives it to some gardener by sunbathing nude while he trims the bushes. Pepito takes an intimate cellcam foto and promises to sell it, later sends her cash. Don Ed comes to town and Palma’s his sure thing blind date. Palma is arrested for lewd public display next to Abuela’s grave. Palma hooks up with a 25-year old Apple genius and poet who thumps her against the wall to a rap beat. Palma is having second thoughts about being on the bottom with Austin on her and Mischa on top of Austin, when the hotel maid walks in. Palma gets naked and alluring, Pepito keeps his clothes on then walks out.

Those are the misadventures just of Part I. The novel is put together in three parts.  In Part II, Palma is raped and exacts revenge on the woman. Palma meets her birth mother and unknown father in Los Angeles. The man looks Palma up and down and licks his lips, he’d take it from her.

Abandoned by the mother and raised by a resentful abusive abuela, Palma has invested longing that her mother will be the opposite of abuela and welcome the long-lost abandoned child. Mom can’t wait for the stranger to leave town. She has a replacement family.

Castillo draws an interesting parallel between Palma’s love life and family ties. Once the passion fades, emotional intimacy defines the value of relationships. Palma’s mother long lost passion borne of guilt. Mom’s world is so distant that there’s no absence to fill with emotional connection. Palma knows she can move on from a lover. How can she go home again when there was never a home?

Part III sees Palma and Venus break it off. Venus’ kids and in-laws probably hate Palma with a passion. Palma and Venus aren’t the belles of the quinceañera. It comes time for Venus to kick Palma out, but Part III presents a different Palma, a decisive, here and now attitude developing.

Rather than allow Venus the current lover to dictate the dissolution of their affair, Palma takes full control. She’s packed her bags, chooses the time, and heads out with determination.

Flying back to Chicago, she asserts herself to Jimbo. The narrator has painted a foul fellow in Jimbo and readers will enjoy when Palma and Pepito kick the worthless lout out of abuela’s house. He’ll get his cut of the sale. Pepito says goodbye, and Palma is happy about giving him her blessings. Palma doesn’t look back, her fashion line hits the market. The background world the narrator keeps at the periphery of Palma’s pansexualism pokes its head back onto the scene, Palma’s life pivots.

Give It To Me will inevitably draw comparisons to similar work, especially with Castillo’s direct allusions to Collette and Anaïs Nin sprinked here and there. Give It To Me is none of those and all of those and more, a capstone piece of writing and character. Terry Southern’s Candy, more than others, comes to mind. Not just all the happenstance sex, but details like Palma’s mistaken Dalai Lama broadly parallelling Candy’s guru with “total bodily control” add layers of delight when a reader happens on them. Give It To Me is Candy without Southern’s sophomoric though sometimes wickedly diabolical humor.

There’s lots of humor in this narrator’s sardonic, nonjudgmental voice. Unlike the comparison erotica, where prurience is its own reward, Castillo’s work uses counter-eroticism as a reductio ad absurdum. For instance, in the graveyard sex scene, Palma’s mind goes to her stolen uterus while Pepito is laboring mightily under her. The narrator grows wildly metaphoric, fleeing the sex, hiding behind colorful images, “after a few throbbing thrusts she knew he had sent his troops off to infertile territory.” Just as she’s about to orgasm the cop siren goes off.

The narrative voice of Give It To Me gets subsumed in a reader's “she did what?” response to what's caroming off the page. Castillo’s skill in weaving the story through flashback to flesh out a moment illustrates the value to telling opposed to showing. There’s little to no dialog, nor quotation marks. Except for the rape scene, there are no graphic sex scenes.

Readers have to take the narrator’s word for what’s happening. Does Palma feel a little guilty about having wild sex with her cousin, after acknowledging the two were raised brother and sister? Palma’s revenge on the rapist is a delicious moment of comedy and understated lethality, but the narrator doesn’t dwell on it, Palma just spins the chef into the pool and walks off. The next chapter does the most “showing,” with its responses to the pool fight.

Scholars are going to delight in linking Give It To Me to classical Greek teatro as well as the body of Castillo’s work. In Palma Piedras, Ana Castillo creates a textbook eiron, the “hero” of satire that dates back to ancient Athens, continues through Quixote, Euphues, Gulliver, Balso Snell, Yossarian. Like them, Palma’s life assaults her like a thousand blows, each successive lash taking a bit more skin than the one before. Not the eiron, not the reader has a clue how the character is going to get out of her headlong charge into a brick wall of empty relationships and impulse, if that’s what it is. At one point, Palma realizes if someone knew what she’d just done they’d have Palma hospitalized.

As Castillo wraps up the story, the author provides the literary connection that informs Palma’s seemingly sudden emergence from declivity. Peel My Love Like An Onion shows up as Palma’s gift to a friend. Then, Palma runs into a wheelchaired older woman with a younger flamenco dancer male attendant. Coja Ex Machina feeds into Palma’s intuitions. Palma’s desperate grasping at relationships have proved meaningless and harmful. Carmen La Coja reversed the role; she used to be a pawn. Now, the old woman continues relationships only when her satisfaction is served, a point to then that completely escaped Palma. Find your own satisfaction first, on your terms.

After giving her a hectic career, Castillo turns kindly to her Palma. Palma’s lifelong unfinished business with Pepito is now wrapped up. It wasn’t incest after all, and she doesn’t Love him. On the familia front, Palma may develop a relationship with her niece in LA, maybe familia can be made to work. And her fashion line is about to make Palma wealth and fame.

Not all is whole in Palma’s story. An element of her anomie drives Palma to see “mulch” where others see ordinary folk. Castillo scatters the outlook, the word, in numerous spots but the point of view never gets shown nor told, other than Palma acknowledges her quondam middle-class life was mulch. The Rocky allusion of striving and intensity has a more limited use. The prominent first reference had me looking to see how the narrator would slip in other Rocky allusions and was disappointed there are so few. It’s a personal failing I couldn’t locate again that gluten-free beer Palma ordered. I went looking for that brand multiple visits but inevitably found new insights, phrases, diction, and confirmations, those “that’s what I thought she said” moments.

Satire and erotic literature challenge sexual mores, follies, and excesses of the popular culture it satirizes. It gets people talking about important matters. Give It To Me challenges many a reader’s sexual mores and sense of humor. And that’s only one of its charms. I look to see Give It To Me leading a loud and public discussion. Then the scholarly stuff over time. That’s what literary sensations do.

Renews Quest For Lost Floricanto Videos

Magu. Private collection. Used with permission.

The Digital Library at the University of Southern California offers access to videos of artists who read their work at the first festival de flor y canto, El Centro Chicano's Festival de Flor y Canto, in 1973.

Hear and see California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Alurista as young poets launching legendary careers. The Salinas boys, Omar and raúlr read powerfully, as do Ricardo Sánchez, Veronica Cunningham, Lyn Romero qepd, Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin, Alejandro Murguía, Oscar Zeta Acosta. It's a stunning assembly of luminaries and antepasados, that first floricanto. And Roberto Vargas and José Montoya read, but that’s hard to prove.

Until USC acquired its digital copies, only two libraries in the world owned videos of the 1973 performances, UC Riverside and Texas A&M Kingsville.

Neither library can find their copies of Vargas and Montoya’s readings.

UCR traces their lost tape to an interlibrary loan to Cal State Bakersfield. TAMU couldn't find the box anywhere.

The performances I digitized were on ¾" U-Matic video cassettes. Elsewhere, I located audiocassettes of the missing video soundtracks, but these were poorly recorded and are unintelligible.


Videos of the 2010 reunion floricanto, Festival de Flor y Canto. Yesterday • Today • Tomorrow will be available from my files to USC this year. Along with those, my goal is to locate the missing videos of José Montoya and Roberto Vargas, and get IDs on all the "unidentified subject" fotos.

This is my 2014 project, find the Vargas and Montoya videos and return their performances to USC. They’re out there, somewhere, and who knows what more? The pianist accompanying Oscar Acosta’s reading, Javier Pacheco, sent USC a copy of Pacheco’s 1973 performance that had not been cataloged at UCR nor TAMU.

Click these Links for:
Index of Festival de Flor y Canto videos and photographs.

Background on the “lost” floricanto videos.

La Palabra's Double First In 2014

Avenue 50 Studio welcomes poets with open arms and mics. The Highland Park gallery is among Los Angeles' more active poetry sites, hosting two regular reading series, La Palabra Readings and The Bluebird Reading Series and supports the peripatetic Poesía Para La Gente.

Sunday, January 27th was a fourth Sunday, hence the first La Palabra of 2014 called a handful of spirited poets for Open Mic, and to hear the spotlighted guests. Karineh Madhessian is the new host and emcee for La Palabra, and her first reading featured Marisa Urrutia Gedney and Ramona Pilar Gonzales.

Here is a link to  a gallery of individual portraits included in the slideshow below. Photographing writers, poets reading their stuff aloud to an audience is part of The Oracy Project. The goal is capturing perfect moments of oral expression. There's eye contact, if not with the lens then with the gente out there. The body is all attitude--a readiness to act purposively--and exposed, away from a lectern. Hands and arms in motion, or holding a manuscript, add their own expressivity, the energy of a moment, a strategic gesture.

Effective text analysis and practice will produce photogenic moments that fit the profile of a "perfect"portrait of an orally literate writer. See theWriters & Oracy links at Read! Raza for tips on reading your stuff aloud.


I like a lot of these portraits. The light in the gallery spilled in through curtained storefront glass. Overhead lighting modeled the readers' left side and the off-white walls glowed with reflected ambient light. None is yet the perfect moment. Most of these reflect an eloquent moment, a point where the words demanded reaching out to the audience. A couple of readers need to use their eyes as one of their interpretive tools, because, as the old song reminds, "read to me only, with thine eyes, and I will buy your book."

Data: Handheld, ambient light. Canon T2i, 18-55mm. ISO1600. 1/50 f/5.6. In rooms like this I find it preferable to use a manual setting and the camera's RAW image. I use Adobe Lightroom to process the files.


On-line Floricanto: Marisa Urrutia Gedney



Firefall
By Marisa Urrutia Gedney

I open my eyes and remember I love you
when our faces pushed together and I didn’t mind
the scratch of beard, warm breath so close
the flowers of the bedspread
kicked off in the middle of the night
because I need to kick something.
Body a tangle.
I fight in my sleep for what’s supposed to cover both of us
wires firing from bone to muscle to anger
writhing with confusion.
But, I always have the answer.
I am always right.
Not when a nowordslongnight comes
I can only hear Christmas carols and children singing Silent Night in memory of other children. All of them? Or only the ones from those classrooms?

I think of what I will say in the morning
a commitment to not cause harm, or unleash everything
Las Fridas fight
sharing the same blood
boiling, popping for air.
Furioso, the word keeps saying itself
wishing gold swans would swim it away
with grace--
that only happens on stage.

And what about when the map turns topographical?
There are so many more mountains than we thought.
Yosemite Valley is the smallest part on this square of Sierra
Look, the triangle is so small and we wonder what it’s like in Cascade Cliffs, Horizon Ridge, Mt. Starr King, May Lake, and Merced Peak.
The John Muir Trail crosses through most of this big square
but I’m afraid of no bathrooms, and what about when I want a soft squishy pillow,
where will I find a blanket to steal in Pine City?

Should we go to the middle of it all instead,
stand on top of Glacier Point,
make an all day fire and then throw it down the side of a mountain
yell to the whole valley while
fire turns to water and doesn’t disappear.



Her Name Doesn’t Say Enough
By Marisa Urrutia Gedney

Were you mad when your Indio daughter gave us
a revolutionary name
a hard to say name
names with r’s that roll-
and tanned her skin to
deep, dark brown, parted black hair,
all the way down to her butt.
There was no mistaking that she was a shiny happy Chicana
fighting for her rights getting around in her own VW bus.
But then she introduced herself as Beverly and
white black brown, all were confused.
It’s not quite the movie star name you thought it was,
where did a Beverly come from?
She drove from East LA to Commerce, knew she was poor
really poor,
but she had her NO accent tongue,
perfect Spanish on the inside and her name,
no-ita can be added to that!
She’s pure, three syllables of
you fit right in.

You gave her this,
because she didn’t come out with milky skin
or eyes like a messy blue storm.

You gave her this,
and she passed it on.

Didn’t you understand
what happens
when people get here?
They want to be
More
American
More
not what their skin
or voice
or smells
or sadness shows.

Were you mad when you found out that your granddaughter wishes to speak Spanish like it rolled right out,
all natural, no books, no photographic memory to learn
the tenses.

Her name doesn’t say enough.




What the body shows
By Marisa Urrutia Gedney

1.
At the bottom, the base, the trunk
At the place that sticks to the ground,
are women.
Women in their hose and comfy shoes
still cute in a two piece suit,
long beaded necklaces.
It doesn’t matter how wrinkly your hands are, when you gossip
you gotta look good.
A woman with her hair done, 40s style, a hand on her hip
a red smile against orange brick.
Are we only strong on the bottom?
Another on the edge of the bed,
boobs hanging, far apart
seen through a button up blouse that she sewed for a party that night.
Two of them, same height, same dark almost black eyes,
holding hands in a driveway
white folded socks inside oxfords.


And that’s how you walk around, with other women
carrying each step
landing every jump
cushioning hard clumsy or aged falls.
In your calves, rooting down to the earth
they are the closest to their mother.

2.
At the top, the start
the highest reaching point
the place that gets the most sun
hang gold adorned picture frames
with color and cactus,
not the kind from the desert that you’ve never even seen,
but a gift for an illness you endured
and it made it through,
you made it through.
Emerging, more pink lines, green
splashed around
and one gold studded cactus
plump, fat, full of water

It must have just rained.


I trace chameleons
By Marisa Urrutia Gedney

I trace chameleons
in the dark
the raised lines on your chest
blue hues and greens of the place you
wish Comelona could have been set free
at the same time you were
sent off to college all by your own making
darkness there too, the fog horn always calling. The air was so wet.

At home, your mom opened the door to more people,
with you two hours away, your own room for the first time ever, with a long twin bed,
that meant more people she could take in: tios who aren’t tios, new babies, both grandmas at once.
Filling space that didn’t exist until her own kids had to do something to leave.
The one thing you asked her to take care of,
dead.
The other person you left, on his own, no more skateboard or big brother,
gone, living in a different kind of room.

I trace long rose stems
down your back to the curve of your stomach.
Those raised lines I know better.
To remember the men that worked hard,
drove all night, got their leg chopped off for you, not because of you,
but so that you
could live like they might have
near orange groves, growing greens, sawing benches and whatever else I might wish for.
Not able to give your reina whatever she wants
but the work and the imagination to thrill her.

I tell them to leave too to get an education
down the street, two freeways away, a three day train ride. Something, somewhere.
When I help 17 year olds tell their story and learn what they will leave behind
and what might not keep living, I wonder how they will handle their losses
and who will trace their pain.

Melinda Palacio

At the William Stafford Memorial in Santa Barbara

Barry Spacks

"Cama para Sueños" (Bed for Dreams) by Carmen Lomas Garza

"Empanadas" by Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza in front of her papel picado art

Jennifer De Leon

published by University of Nebraska Press

Professor Nicole Guidotti-Hernández

published by Duke University Press

"Baile" by Carmen Lomas Garza