• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• ISBN: 978-1-55885-838-1
• Publication Date: March 31, 2017
• Bind: Trade Paperback
• Pages: 208

Fakarava

The beach at Fakarava, Tuamotu

This family invited me in their home and allowed me to use their shower after I snorkeled on the beach. Mama, on the left gave me coconut water, coconut meat, and a shell to take home with me. This was day three in paradise.

Tahaa

Paddle boarding in Tahaa was a challenge due to the strong current.  The next day my legs were very sore from repetitive kneeling, standing, falling, and getting back up. But it was a great way to pass the time. Taking in the beauty of Huahine, this is the island that inspired the setting for the Disney film, Moana. Also, the girl who voiced Moana is from Huahine. Steve and I agree that Huahine was our favorite island on the trip.

Our knowledgeable  tour guide, Manava. His name means power.

Huahine, my favorite island due to its remote, peacefulness.

The Sacred Blue-eyed eels

The Eels really do have blue eyes and are protected and revered.

Maneuver calling the eels.

 Days later, in Bora Bora, I had the grand opportunity to snorkel with sharks and stingrays. This was my favorite activity. The coral and fish were spectacular.

The eye of the stingray

reef sharks

The moment when I try not to panic because I am encircled by sharks.  Taking selfies helps. At least this wasn't the last photo ever.

shark in Bora Bora

The obligatory Fire and Dance show. I have seen many of these types of shows in the Hawaiian islands. I find the rhythms of the dances intoxicating. I was happy when the dancers asked me to join them. Dancers in Bora Bora, one of the most scenic in the  Society Islands

Fire Dancers in Bora Bora.

Feeling very happy in Bora Bora.

The last stop before returning to Papeete, Tahiti, was Moorea, home of the famous jagged mountains that inspired James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific.

Mel

California Poppies

The spring equinox this past Monday (March 20th) was a reminder of rebirth, growth, warmth, of leaving behind the cold or snow cover.  Winter months have been called dead months-- when all is encased in ice even though life is continually teeming underneath (think "subnivean zone").  In the desert, as well, winter can mistakenly be thought of as dormant, when various stages of life are present.  Therefore these seasonal markers emphasize summer into fall/winter, winter into spring/summer as continual and sharing multiple subjectivities.

I kept thinking of "continual growth" while in Los Angeles this past week.  Every morning, I would exercise by walking around the Glendale neighborhood where I was staying.  The cactus that the neighbors cultivate are splendid and give me much pleasure as I walk past.  Cactus also makes me think about regeneration, continual movement, or multiple shifts.

Look at the cactus plant below.  Notice how multiple leaves are imprinted into the larger ones.  Eventually, these leaves will generate into multiples.



Here's a close-up I photographed (below) so you can see how the leaf is generating and multiplying itself.



It makes me think of the following quote from Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands: La Frontera:

"Think of me as a Shiva, a many armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the woman's, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds.  A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web."

The cactus photographs above and below belie multiple subjectivities: a nascent leaf and fully mature leaf in one yet also in multiples.  Each will eventually separate to become a different shape and size. The nutrients it gathers are from multiple "worlds" around it.


On my morning walks, I noticed other cactus plants regenerating very differently (see below).  Notice the cactus paddle to the right.  It has some kind of injury or knot as if it were cut.

In reading Lora Arduser's book, Living Chronic: Agency and Expertise in the Rhetoric of Diabetes and taking photographs of the cactus,  I see connections to how Arduser posits the "agency" of individuals who are managing Diabetes. For Arduser, (and she uses Anzaldua's quote above as a link), individuals with Diabetes are in constant movement with their body, enacting several subjectivities.  Examples: a hyper awareness of one's own pancreas via technologies (glucose meters, testing, education); reactions to what one eats; gathering information through research and/or medical experts; listening/learning from others who are also managing the disease. The management of Diabetes is in and of itself a continual "becoming."

Notice the injury to the right of this cactus paddle

Arduser writes: "The mestiza rhetoric performed by Anzaldua in the quotation [above] is discourse that comes from a specific, complex cultural  background, but it also more generally recognizes a kind of internal multiplicity and multiple subjectivities.  As such, it creates tension with existing concepts of patient agency--a view that reinforces the concept of subjects as single and static entities--and subjectivity as a rhetorical form that 'exists only in its continual and aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming.' This becoming and re-becoming in the form of multiple subjectivities is an important way that people with diabetes enact agency." (116)

The cactus, then, serves as a metaphor of achieving "body knowledge." The cactus knows what to do, is programmed to gather, transmit, enact, and grow in a variety of environments.  It learns to survive despite smog, pollution, various kinds of injury.  It regenerates.

Every day, I walked around the neighborhood for a little over an hour -- the usual time it takes to jostle the pancreas and get it working in order to emit enough B Cells to gather up the glucose in my bloodstream.  Without the exercise, the pancreas remains slow or dormant, causing glucose to dangerously reside in the bloodstream.  Exercise, then, produces flow.  My job then: to manage the body for optimal "becoming."

Interestingly, eating cactus paddles (boiling the paddle, then cutting the paddle in strips, roasting the strips with garlic) lowers glucose levels, has anti-inflammatory properties, and is an excellent antioxidant.  Knowing this connects me with an awareness outside and within the body.

Another example of regeneration.  Look closely at the leaf.

A closer look (see bottom part of leaf)

Mario T. García

Review: Christine Granados. Fight Like A Man & Other Stories We Tell Our Children. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8263-5792-2

Michael Sedano

What does that mean, “like a man”? The question runs through a reader’s head throughout the eleven chapter title novella that Christine Granados opens with. It’s an arresting story about a pregnant woman caught in a pair of love and sex triangles, mother issues, other-woman troubles, and trouble in general.

Moni’s husband seems a decent tipo who doesn’t deserve to be cheated on—does anyone? Her Sancho turns a drug deal that gets him murdered and dumped in a trash bin. The affair is common knowledge, though no one calls her a brazen hussy.

People from both sides of the El Paso border will be coming to the funeral, politely looking the other way. Así somos, I guess, maybe a case of women will be women. Or is it Moni is acting like a man and turnabout is what it is? Again, that provocative issue.

Members of the second triangle will be crossing over for the funeral. The mourners will be Moni’s half-sister's mother. Half because Moni’s father had two familias. One on that side, the other on this side. There’s a lot of tension in this plot that readers will have to keep sorting out. Will Moni drink the curandera’s tea and abort? Will her father’s other wife like the daughter of her part-time husband? After all, Moni and her sister from another mother are compañeras. Can Moni defeat the anger that roils in her?

Is being tough and taking it—the pain, the angst, the guilt—‘fighting like a man”? Is having a husband and a lover “fighting like a man”? Is brazen treatment of a loving partner “fighting like a man”? Granados doesn’t spell it out and it’s up to her readers to figure it out. Or just sit there, read the words, and let stuff happen. Take it like a man, que no?

Much as that opening novella holds one’s perplexed interest, the short fiction comprising the book’s second half will enchant, delight, perplex, furrow brows. The rich variety of character and story in the  novella and the book’s seven short stories make Fight Like A Man & Other Stories a rewarding addition to the corpus of chicana literature. Indeed, here is a gem of Chicana literature.

The woman voice of the writer rings with the timbre of silver bells, clean, distinctive, and memorable. My favorite is “stupids.” The story is not the strongest in the collection—Granados and her editor bury “stupids” in the middle of the seven story lineup. But “stupids” takes one's heart and thrashes it good.

Springing from Abelardo’s timeless masterpiece, “Stupid America,” the story introduces three special education students and a first-year teacher, a local product but of the westside, not the brown and poor part of town where the three “stupids” live.

Meet Turi, a hyperactive kid perpetually distracted by whatever grabs his momentary attention. Jimmy, who never talks and whom the first-person narrator, Jennifer, believes probably doesn’t speak English. He does. And Turi is curious and bright. Mr. Hernandez pulls that out of them.

Jennifer is six-foot-something, most gente would say, a big girl. The other kids call her manflora, dyke, Lurch. As a result—and a lot of other factors—Jennifer has a chip on her shoulder and no expectations of benefit from the classroom. She says she hates school. Then Mr. Hernandez asks her to get out of her uncomfortably confining schooldesk. Based on past experience Jennifer figures she’s being sent to the Principal.

Hernandez pulls the desk away and replaces it with a table and his teacher’s chair. For the first time in a long time, Jennifer has a comfortable seat that she’s not banging her shins on all scrunched up. Her attitude begins looking positive.

Go to college. Tactile learning. White people on teevee talking down to the brown gente of the city. White teachers in other classes talking down to the dumb kids. They learn the word “patronizing.” They learn about Oñate and the invaders from the south, that the first Thanksgiving was in El Paso, not back East. They learn. They have possibilities. These kids, if Mr. Hernandez can keep them moving in this direction, aren’t going “to die with one thousand masterpieces hanging only from his mind.”

Christine Granados has taken a line from another wondrous poem and made it heartfelt. I sure wish that abomination De Vos would read and understand “stupids” because she would see how beautiful they are, and be ashamed. Hernandez teaches the kids, the foreign reader, they--we--too, are America.

Order your copies of Fight Like A Man & Other Stories We Tell Our Childrenpublisher-direct or have your local independent bookseller get your copies. For sure, get it into your local libraries. Fight Like A Man & Other Stories We Tell Our Children is a beautifully written work owing to its setting, characters, and interesting literary style, puro bicultural without half trying, and completely gratifying.



Route 66 Detour to Literary Fun in Historic Site

Docent shares her excitement at the upcoming reading in the Center Room of the Workman House

My panel was in the Workman House Center Room. I wrote a one-act play titled “The Feral Child of Temple City: A Horror Narrative in One Act.” Madelyn Garner read a warm tribute to her late sister, “Route 66: A Love Story.” Andrea Watson shared a wondrous Frida dream poem, “The Poem In Which Frida Kahlo Commandeers My Car And We Drive Like Bandits to L.A.” Dom Zuccone wrapped our session with a post cards from the road piece, “Get Hip To This…”

Madelyn Garner shares he work to an appreciative audience.

Our readings were effective, although our delivery was constrained by the tight space allowed by the small space typical of old houses. We all stayed at home base behind the music stand lectern. The tight geography of the room obviated the need, and ability, for a lot of movement. Instead the speakers put energy into their vocalics to keep the listeners engaged. Projection was not an issue. Normal conversational volume was adequate for all to hear, but we each added a bit more energy.

After the two hours of peripatetic audience experience, guests and readers congregated in the shady walkway outside the security-fenced structures for tasting of diner chili by Cordon Blue instructor Chef Ernest Miller. I displayed a set of flora and naturel portraits printed archivally--they will stay color-true for one hundred years. I was delighted that Melinda Palacio took home a memorable foto of flying Great Egrets. A sudden windstorm played havoc with the 13" x 19" prints.




On-line Floricanto: Writing On Water

On March 11 2011, the Tohoku earthquake devastated northern Japan and less than an hour after it hit, tsunami waves crashed Japan’s coastline. The tsunami waves reached run-up heights, which is how far the wave surges inland above sea level, of up to 128 feet and traveled inland as far as 6 miles. The tsunami flooded an estimated area of approximately 217 square miles. The number of confirmed dead surpassed 18,000. In addition to other very serious damage, the tsunami caused a cooling system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which resulted in a level 7 nuclear meltdown and release of radioactive materials. About 300 tons of radioactive water continued to leak from the plant every day into the Pacific Ocean, affecting fish and other marine life.

With pipelines, fracking, and other forms of dirty energy dependency, the fresh and salt waters all over this planet are threatened.  Tlazocamati.


“Fukushima Extinction” By Odilia Galván Rodríguez
“Clear Gold” By Dee Allen
“Water” By Jeff Cannon
“Trouble... the Water” By Edward Vidaurre
“Rupture” By Sharon Elliott
“Untitled” By Jasmin Garcia
“Water” By Lana Maree Haas
“In Solidarity with the Water Protectors” By Leah Wiegel
“Bless our Water” By JoyAnne O’Donnell
“Water Crossing” By Maurisa Thompson

Fukushima Extinction
By Odilia Galván Rodríguez

“Japan Declares Crisis As Fukushima
Reactor 2 Begins Falling Into Ocean”
March, 2017
2011

earthquake triggered
tsunami struck
700 miles of coastline
disaster at Fukushima
nuclear power plant
core damage
daily 300 tons
of radioactive water
flows into the ocean

Tepco, Fukushimi Daiichi’s
owners refused to build
sea walls to protect
the plant in the event
of such a disaster
walls to keep out death
too expensive

then their disaster
dealing with the disaster
while radiation
steadily continues
leaking into our seas
as pacific ocean slowly dies
mutant flowers and
plant life on the rise

massive die-offs
of marine life
spikes in cancer
along the Pacific Coasts
radioactive isotopes
cesium-131, 134, and 137
soluble in seawater
so radiation easily spreads

2017
death continues
it leaks and drifts
crippled Fukushima
not contained
its melted bones
continue to slip
into our sea
poisoned the Pacific

radiation levels up
from 73 Sieverts in 2011
lethal radiation
levels unimaginable
melted core damages
uncontrollable
fission unprecedented

now 530 Sieverts
per hour
An 8 Sieverts dose
incurable and fatal
gaping hole two square yards wide
caused by melted nuclear fuel
and no body knows where the fuel is


Clear Gold
By Dee Allen

Seventy-one percent of Earth.
Sixty percent of us.
Gathering grey clouds
Streaks of lightning
Followed by thunder-roll-----
Gaia takes another shower
Cleansed each time, refreshed by this-----
Absorbing into leaves from rain
Deer lapping it up from woodland streams
Pathway to the safety of the river bottom
for swimming fish
Cities’ steel veins flow it through our faucets
Matrix of life, sated by this-----
Corporations
Monopolise
Keep private
What was formerly free-----
Sold back to us, plastic bottles of this-----

Fear lingers in hearts
In some who care
That in future wars,
Soldiers or drones will fight
To the death, final prize: this-----
Clear gold.
Seventy-one percent of Earth.
Sixty percent of us.
OF GREATER VALUE
THAN ANY
SOLID GOLD.


Water
By Jeff Cannon

water, I run you, splash you, drink you, wash with you
swim in you, pee in you, brush my teeth with you
flush you, sprinkle you,
know you, forget you, abuse you
leave you turned on, use more of you than i need to
hear about what people dump into you that sickens you, kills you
makes me an accessory to your murder
the pillage that destroys your liveliness for my children and theirs

I‘ll try to save you
sometimes i forget
i'll respect you more, though, since so many don't, just take advantage of you
i'll tell others to remember you, take care of you
recognize how dear you are for us to live, and never take myself or my kind so seriously
as to forget you, your life and the life you afford other creatures not
just those of my kind that take themselves as supreme beings
entitled to do whatever they want to each other, other creatures, you
our water



Trouble… the Water
By Edward Vidaurre

When a poor kid sees clean clear water
he envisions a treasure, a hope
have you ever seen a murky
opaque wishing well?

When a woman kneels
along rivers edge to wash her sheets,
she thinks, a new beginning, a cleansing,
when was the last time you washed your clothes in oil?

When a thirsty stray dog walks for miles
along the gutters of this nation
wishing to quench his thirst
where does he find relief?

When have you seen
dogs or cats, blood dripping
from their jaw hair
laying on your front porch content?

It happens, blood and oil mix with mother earth’s tears, and
we watch as it happens. Soon we'll be drenched in oil
or blood, and water will be what we search for
at the bottom of our wishing wells.



Rupture 
By Sharon Elliott

water
can fracture stone
a slow drip drip drip
incessant grief
marked by tears
and offerings

no longer pure
she has not been cared for
defiled
by abuse and neglect

rock
is prepared to receive
embraces
the rupture
bears water on its back
filters her through
impenetrable membranes
of memory
and longing

agrees
to go on as two

Untitled
By Jasmin Garcia

If you love me, do not love me.
I am not somebody to love.
I am undeserving of kisses and warm hugs.
I am undeserving of dinner and a movie.

My mother is a Hurricane,
She birthed a Tornado.
I know what I am capable of doing.
I am a strong person
Because I have to be.
Nobody will be my strength.
Nobody could give me strength.

I am winds.
Powerful winds that drown men
Every so often
With a glare and if that doesn't work
Then I smile.

I am youthful but toxic.
My soul is old but wise.
I am the rain.
Do not overdose on antidepressants,
I told you not to love me in the first place.
I will drown you
And everything that matters most.

I have a tendency
Of filling lungs with smoke and dust.
Do not breathe me
Thinking I am a cigarette to pleasure you
For 10 minutes.
I am not the smoke you crave.
I am a tornado.

If you love me, do not love me.
I am not somebody to love.
My spirit shows no mercy to your bones.



Water
By Lana Maree Haas


I saw you in the river,
when ripples of green
were humming and singing,
they moved like glass,
unencumbered and laughing!
I knew it was you,
because when I knelt to touch you,
my fingers were blessed
and my face was caressed.


In Solidarity with the Water Protectors
By Leah Wiegel

After you put the mace and hose down
After you followed orders
After you did your job,
and did it well
After you raise the taser to the face
After the shock leaves your grip
After the dogs are unleashed
and the flesh pierced,
and and the skin burnt, and the eyes red
After they fell down, hard, and you leave, proud
After your trucks roll away
and you take off the holster,
and hang up the vest, and lay down the gun
Do you go home to a wife?
Does she ask how your day was?
How do you answer her?
What do you say?


Bless Our Water
By JoyAnne O’Donnell

Holy is our water
sparkling life
flowing with waves of truth
cleansing our swim
on the joy of a wave
bringing angels of blue light
shining so tender and bright.


Water Crossing 
By Maurisa Thompson

where would you go if you had to run?
through the canebrake, machete leaves
that draw less blood than the lash—
run from those that steal children
run, would you wade in the water
wade in the water children
god’s gonna trouble el agua, las fábricas
pockmarking the land like plantations
the two shirts on your back worth
10 cents per day—
run, on the snake-back of a train
burnish your footprints
from the earth with leaves
from the sand with wool
because they are always behind you
smelling for your blood your body
they would pick from their teeth, run
where would you go to find your mother?
because they think you hold a different god
on your tongue—run from the vice grips
from the armies who twist bayonets in your womb
who forge hells of fire falling from the sky
from bullets that blistered the walls
like tracks of heroin needles on arms
where would you run to?
what possible death
would you choose?
would you dare to ask whatever angels
for safe passage and water to cross
would you set your compass, your eyes
on a star tilting in your vision
and run, run, run, run, run—

and if you could finally stop running
if your heart for a day a week a century
pulled back from throttling your lungs
and rested, and rested, and rested
would you still shroud your own face
would you boil the seas to lethe
clutch guns at the doorway

or would you leave the door open
offer sweet water and maize
to strangers
at your hearth?
--first published in Poetry in Flight | Poesía en vuelo: Anthology in Celebration of El Tecolote.



Meet the Poets of Water On-line Floricanto

“Fukushima Extinction” By Odilia Galván Rodríguez
“Clear Gold” By Dee Allen
“Water” By Jeff Cannon
“Trouble... the Water” By Edward Vidaurre
“Rupture” By Sharon Elliott
“Untitled” By Jasmin Garcia
“Water” By Lana Maree Haas
“In Solidarity with the Water Protectors” By Leah Wiegel
“Bless our Water” By JoyAnne O’Donnell
“Water Crossing” By Maurisa Thompson

Odilia Galván Rodríguez, poet, writer, editor, educator, and activist, is the author of six volumes of poetry, her latest, The Nature of Things, a collaboration with Texas photographer, Richard Loya, by Merced College Press 2016. Also, along with the late Francisco X. Alarcón, she edited the award-winning anthology, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, University of Arizona Press, 2016. This poetry of witness anthology, the first of its kind, because it came about because of the on-line organizing work of Alarcón, Galván Rodriguez, and other poet-activists which began as a response to the proposal of SB 1070, the racial profiling law which was eventually passed by the Arizona State Legislature in 2010, and later that year, HB 2281which bans ethnic studies. With the advent of the Facebook page Poets Responding (to SB 1070) thousands of poems were submitted witnessing racism, xenophobia, and other social justice issues which culminated in the anthology.

Galván Rodríguez has worked as an editor for various print media such as Matrix Women's News Magazine, Community Mural's Magazine, and Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She is currently, the editor of Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal online; facilitates creative writing workshops nationally, and is director of Poets Responding to SB 1070, and Love and Prayers for Fukushima, both Facebook pages dedicated to bringing attention to social justice issues that affect the lives and wellbeing of many people and encouraging people to take action. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, and literary journals on and offline.

As an activist, she worked for the United Farm Workers of America AFL-CIO, The East Bay Institute for Urban Arts, has served on numerous boards and commissions, and is currently active in Women’s organizations whose mission it is to educate around environmental justice issues and disseminate an indigenous world view regarding the earth and people’s custodial relationship to it. Odilia Galván Rodríguez has a long and rich history of working for social justice in solidarity with activists from all ethnic groups.


Dee Allen. African-Italian performance poet currently based in Oakland, California.
Active on the creative writing & Spoken Word tips since the early 1990s.
Author of 3 books [ Boneyard, Unwritten Law & Stormwater ] and 12 anthology appearances [ Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating On The Water, the first 4 Revolutionary Poets Brigade, Rise ] under my figurative belt so far. Currently writing a potential 4th book & seeking a publisher.
E-Mail: deeallen415@gmail.com
Webpage: http://www.poormag.info/static/dee/index.html



Jeff Cannon is the author of three books of poetry: Finding the Father at Table and Eros: Faces of Love (2010, published by Xlibris Corporation), Intimate Witness: The Carol Poems by Goose River Press, 2008, a testament to his wife’s courageous journey with cancer. He first appeared in the anthology celebrating parenthood, My Hearts First Steps in 2004. He has been a featured poet at Manchester Community College, CT and at local Worcester poetry venues as well as in New Hampshire. From 2007-2008, he was the spoken word component with singer song writers John Small and Lydia Fortune as part of Small, Fortune and Cannon.  He was published in Goose River Anthology: 2009 and started at that time to write monthly essays and poetry for the “Sturbridge Times” of Sturbridge MA. He is the father of two daughters, retired and “can’t stop writing” although he does not read out as much as he would prefer.


Edward Vidaurre is the author of Chicano Blood Transfusion (FlowerSong Books), Insomnia (El Zarape Press), Beautiful Scars: Elegiac Beat Poems (El Zarape Press), and I Took My Barrio on a Road Trip (Slough Press). His new collection, Jazzhouse, is forthcoming from Prickly Pear Press. His work appears in Bordersenses, RiverSedge, Brooklyn & Boyle, La Bloga, Voices de la Luna, and Poets Responding to SB1070, among many other venues. He is the founder of Pasta, Poetry, and Vino, an ongoing poetry reading series in the lower Rio Grande Valley.


Sharon Elliott has been a writer and poet activist over several decades beginning in the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960s and 70s, and four years in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua and Ecuador, especially in multicultural women’s issues. She is a Moderator of Poets Responding to SB1070, and has featured in poetry readings in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has been published in several anthologies and her poem “Border Crossing” appears in the anthology entitled Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodriguez, eds. She has read it in Los Angeles at AWP and La Pachanga 2016 book launch, in San Francisco and at the Féis Seattle Céiliedh in Port Townsend, WA. Her book, Jaguar Unfinished, was published by Prickly Pear Press, 2012.


Jasmin Garcia, born and raised in Mercedes, TX, is an upcoming poetry writer in local areas of the Rio Grande Valley. She began her first step by performing at Poetry Nights hosted by The Prelude in Harlingen, TX. Being awarded with praise from her perfomance, Garcia decided to take the next step into writing a book which is currently under development. More of her work can be found on Facebook by following this link: https://www.facebook.com/jgarciapoetry


Lana Maree Haas started writing poetry and singing as a child. She also practices energy and body work and is a Yoga Instructor. She earned a B.F.A. at The University of Kansas where she studied Textile Design and Psychology. She has produced 2 albums of songs, “Stardust and Moonbeams” and “Riotous Singing!” with her band, The Sonic Mystics. She has also published a handful of poems. She is looking forward to publishing her first book of poetry, Unsung Surrender, and finishing her third album of songs Holy Feet on Holy Ground.


Leah Wiegel.


JoyAnne O’Donnell. I'm a poet have poems in hundreds of places. Published two chapbooks of poetry titled "Tea Time" in 2015, "Angels" in 2016. I'm a two time Pushcart nominee and Best of The Net nominated.


Maurisa Thompson was born and raised in San Francisco, and is a proud alum of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and VONA/Voices of Our Nation.  “Water Crossing” is part of the new anthology Poesía en Vuelo: Poetry in Flight—Anthology In Celebration of El Tecolote, released March 2017.  More of Maurisa’s poetry can be found in La Bloga, The Pedestal Magazine, The Black Scholar, Cosmonauts Avenue, the anthology A Feather Floating on the Water: Poems for Our Children, and The Haight-Ashbury Journal, which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize.  Maurisa is proud to have a home in the arts in the Bay Area, where she has worked with various organizations and actions, including Librotraficante Bay Area Califas and Richmond’s RAW Talent.  When she is not teaching high school in San Francisco or reading her students’ own poems, she is working on her first poetry manuscript that combines history and folklore with her grandparents’ stories from Louisiana and San Francisco, and a middle-grade novel exploring police brutality, for which she was honored to receive a Walter Grant from We Need Diverse Books.

There's something about the light. Some say it's the offspring created when the tropical white sun mates with the glittering blue-green sea, adorned with ruffles of primitive life; or when the wafting, healing breeze embraces the embers of a thousand pure cigars.  It could come from the rooster feathers that jiggle at the base of a red pineapple, or when the comic book taxis speed through Havana avenues, bouncing from corner to corner like pinballs in a diorama of the 1950s, creating blurs of hues and bravado. 

The artists know and trust that light, the musicians make the light dance, and the woman working in the tobacco shed yearns for a glimpse of the light outlining her grandson's thick African hair.

Maybe the light is simply the incandescent glow of the strength of a population unbowed by superpower bullies or home-grown bureaucratic bungling.  

Cubans thrive on art, music, literature.  "We export culture," a musician proudly told me.  "We create art from almost nothing," he continued.  "It's what we can do in any situation," he finished. 

Words like "bloqueo" and "the special period" pop up in everyday conversations. "Cubans know the faults and mistakes of their leaders, and everyone talks about those things," someone else said. "It's complicated," a few others repeated. 

The daily results of the World Baseball Classic were on everyone's lips, more urgent than anything happening in los estados unidos, and I came to understand that the passion for the series exceeded baseball. 

One afternoon we were on a beach – more like a rocky ledge from which we could gingerly ease into the water.  We nursed Cuban beers and papaya juice while we waited for our guide to return (long story.) The drink stand’s workers, three young men and one young woman, played checkers and listened to Yankee rock-and-roll.  When the Ritchie Valens’ rendition of La Bamba started up, I tried to explain why Richard Valenzuela had changed his name.  But they were familiar with Ritchie and his tragic story and it didn’t take them long to figure out that I was a pocho Chicano who spoke broken Spanish. They knew aboutChicanos in the States. They started giving me an “órale” for this and an “ése” for that and a “qué pasa, güey” for something else. They laughed every time one of them said “güey.” They eagerly pointed out the original equipment on the 1955 cherry red Chevy that parked at their stand, and whose driver obviously was part of their crowd. Eventually, our guide returned and we set off.  The workers exuberantly wished us a good trip.  When I shouted, “Ay te watcho,” they looked at me like I had spent ten minutes too long in the Cuban sun.  I’d taken the Chicano thing as far as it could go on the road to the Bay of Pigs Museum in Playa Girón.

A few nights later we found ourselves in abar that attracted tourists.  The place was overcrowded and loud.  A persistent rumor about Vanessa Williams had followed us around Havana and someone whispered that she was upstairs, eating beans and rice.  We had to wait for a table but we ordered drinks and food and I tried to get in the mood.  Then two musicians, stuffed in a corner with barely enough room for their instruments, began to play Night in Tunisia and we were suddenly in the coolest, most sublime bar in the world. The moon shone through the window, the jazz slipped into our mojitos, and Cuba entered my dreams.

The following photos were taken during a ten-day visit to the city of La Habana and the villages of Trinidad and Viñales on the island nation of Cuba. Click on the image for a larger version.

Color lives in Cuba.  

All photos © Manuel Ramos, 2017.














   







































































































































































































































































































































































































Later.



Manuel Ramosis the author of several novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction books and articles. His collection of short stories, The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories, was a finalist for the 2016 Colorado Book Award.My Bad: A Mile High Noirwas published by Arte Público Press in October, 2016

Persistence
Michael Sedano

Last August I monitored daily progress as yellowjackets built themselves an intricate paper home outside a dining room window. I first noticed the nest when only six cells had been constructed. Throughout the day and into early evening, the insects flitted away from the hive searching out raw materials for the ever-expanding nest, and food.

As the nest grew, yellowjackets flew to find a spot along the circumference where they added walls to form new cells. Other wasps worked the finished cells, depositing eggs and convering each pit with a white cellulose dome the wasps construct from chewing vegetation and spitting onto the growing hive.


As wasps and hornets go about their survival business their presence can scare the crap out of human beings when out of nowhere a hornet lands on a picnic hamburger and takes a bite. They love meat, wasps, hornets, yellowjackets, whatever the colloquial term used. There’s a difference but it’s an entomologist’s fine point.

Aerial acrobats, cruising wasps swoop in lazy slow arcs toward the spaces between lounging people, speeding up and turning sharply to ensure free flight and avoid colliding with a sweeping hand or rolled newspaper. Poor critter, just doing its thing. (Don't swing at them, blow a puff of air in their direction and the wasp flits away.)

People have good reason to respect wasps. They sting, hard. Happily, wasps are not highly venomous except to allergic bodies. But they’re well-armed and, unlike honeybees, the wasp stinger lances repeatedly, so it’s a blessing wasps aren’t vicious attackers when aroused.

Last month, a solitary yellowjacket found a spot on the porch arch opposite the front door. I debated myself for a couple of days then the other side won and I waited until the wasp was absent and rubbed it off the stucco. A few days later, it was there again. I used a sheet of cardboard and, with the yellowjacket hanging on, I separated young nest from the stucco and the wasp flew away.


She’s back. And working faster than before. With six cells completed, the wasp has deposited two eggs in their respective nurturing places. Tomorrow it will want to cover the holes and expand the hatchery. In a few days, the two eggs will be fully armed yellowjackets. They’ll fly away to gather food and materials, return to their home, begin constructing a larger nest to receive more eggs and grow more yellowjackets.

A front porch is not a place for a wasp nest. For the third time, it will have to go. Tomorrow.

Right now, she’s sleeping on her work. Several flash exposures do not rouse her. Let us see what the sun brings. May she forgive me. And not get mad if she catches me in the act.

Rosie Died

Rosie died. Of “Rosie and the Originals” and the timeless song, “Angel Baby.” QEPD Rosie.

When I read the news, I had a quick vision of Rosie sitting with my friend Carlos Vazquez. Carlos is telling Rosie about that gathering at Pasadena City College two years before Carlos was elected Student Body President on a Chicanismo platform. The pig in the president’s office refused to allow Carlos’ portrait in the student union gallery of presidents. Such was Cal State Los Angeles back in the 1980s.

I directed a performing group named Teatro a la Brava. The Teatro was mostly students amplified with a few community people who had loose ties to CSULA.

We were invited to perform an acto for at-risk youth. The writers put together a one-act on gang violence. We were the highlight and watched as the opening acts went through their paces. A couple of speakers, a poet.

The final act before Teatro A La Brava was a young woman who took the stage and began singing “Angel Baby.” Not quite a capella, she had a singerless soundtrack and was putting her heart into the performance. Out in the house, some of the mocosos started sniggering as only would-be pachucos can do, laughing and making derisive hoots at the woman. They thought she was lip-synching and they were going to make her pay for it, no matter the song. Or, perhaps because of the song, "Angel Baby" being the anthem to teen love with sacred Oldie status among the gente.

Carlos Vazquez was one of the best people I've known, and today he showed his character.

Carlos strode onstage and demanded the booth to shut off the music. He sat on a chair with his guitar and strummed out the intro to "Angel Baby." The badly shaken woman smiled and took her cue, singing in angelic voice the song she had been performing.

You couldn’t hear a voice in the enraptured and abashed silence.

When Teatro A La Brava performed its acto, Carlitos enacted a velorio for a character killed by a raging gangbaner. We didn't know it, of course, but Carlos performed his own velorio that day. A few years later, Carlos happily married, got gunned down by a raging gang asshole.

QEPD Carlos.
QEPD Rosie.

See you on the other side.

http://www.rosieandtheoriginals.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu2dAQ3xb8s



Not Even A Penny For The Little Guy

The raging gangbangers in the Oval Orifice want to kill funding for anything that takes money out of their pockets. Among the targeted programs, Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that supports national service programs including AmeriCorps and Senior Corps.


This means no money for the tutoring program I volunteer for twice a week. Let me tell you about my kid.

His teacher says he has a lot more confidence and his performance shows marked improvement since we've been reading together. My tutee, a 3d grader, in the Reading Partners Program at my local elementary school, is a smart kid with some reading issues, principally fluency.

I am so happy for the little guy, to see him smile when I tell him he's set a new world's record on the one-minute read aloud, a fluency-building strategy where the kid reads for 60 seconds three times, striving to read deeper into the text each exercise.

I can't get him to hold his head high when he returns to his classroom. But lately there's been a bounce in his step as I escort him back to his classroom and tell him to visualize himself walking into the classroom head high, proud of his achievement. This boy is becoming a reader.

Screw you and screw his future, says the cretin in the Oval Orifice. That's the message of the administration's hateful designs to shut down the federal agency that supports national service programs including AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, whose employees staff Reading Partners.

Most California Congressional Districts have human beings in offices up and down the bureaucracy. They'll resist cultural subversion and find means to continue some of the programs that make us a literate culture. In other places, there's a struggle for public opinion to pressure electeds to find the way to stop the pernicious policy hegemons of the far right.

One way to help is contacting one's Congressional representative and voicing support for national service programs that create jobs and help kids like my tutee get the skills needed to survive as adults. That's where Voices For National Service can help.

Voices For National Service has a tool that gives you talking points first, then connects you to your representative's phone lines. Here's how they say it works. Click the links for more information on the organization and the tactic:

Using the simple tool below (click link here), take just two minutes to call Congress and tell them why you care about national service. Enter your phone number and full address, and you will receive a call back from 202-517-9863 that will provide guidance on what to say to your elected officials, and then patch you through directly to their offices. You will first be connected to your congressperson.

https://voicesforservice.org/call-congress-save-national-service/

Editor's Note: La Bloga welcomes Daniel Cano as a Thursday regular writer, alternating with Ernest Hogan's Chicanonautica column. See Daniel's biography after his essay. La Bloga has long admired Cano's work. Here is Michael Sedano's review of Cano's novel, Death and the American Dream. Please leave a comment welcoming Daniel Cano to the ranks of La Bloga's blogueras blogueros.


Thinking about Einstein
Daniel Cano

I was walking my dogs this morning at the neighborhood park, a lot of trees, especially pines, which make me feel like I’m in the woods instead of L.A.’s suburban westside. I have been listening to a CD, a biography of Einstein. Oh, I’m not a science buff, not by a long shot, but if you tell me an engaging story about science or scientists, I’m ready to listen.


What first threw me was that Einstein was a high school dropout, a bright student, high marks in all subjects, as a kid, but disinterested in the kind of rote education forced upon him in those days, the late 1800s. He was also academically rebellious, arguing with teachers, and often, just sitting in class, bored, or staring out the window, daydreaming, like a lot of Latino(a) high school students I’ve known, including myself.

As he progressed through the academic washing machine, his grades suffered. Because of his unruly academic reputation, he had a hard time getting accepted into any universities. He settled on, what we know today as a Teachers’ or State College, focusing on physics and math but, by no means, excelling in either. When he graduated college, he couldn’t land a teaching job.

His father supported him until Einstein managed to find a job in a patenting office, mind-numbing work, his friends told him, discouraging him from taking the job. He worked there for nine years. Ironically, he liked the work, poring over proposals by would-be inventors. Einstein’s imagination always trumped his rote learning.

Einstein played a mean violin and analyzed Mozart and Bach. He was curious about all the arts and enjoyed hanging out with friends and discussing philosophy, science, and anything intellectually enlightening.

What surprised me was that he didn’t spend every waking moment reading science, though he did start at an early age questioning why nature acts the way it does, simple questions like if a man falls from a building and spills the change in his pocket will the coins rise or fall, and at what speed. His examples were easy to follow, but his abstract analysis of the problem was not, at least for me.

As I listen to his life’s story, I can’t help but think how we writers, like scientists, apply imagination and reason to our work, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. To Einstein, the image of a man falling from a building was a real situation not abstract or theoretical. The same way, he saw his character, we writers, too, see our characters and ask questions of their situations. Would a character really act a certain way in a certain situation? How much change is in his pocket and why is it there, anyway?

We are constantly using Einstein’s methods of induction and deduction. We also must consider a myriad of facts. For example, if I am writing a story, and I say the streetlights brightened the town at sundown, do I know for sure there were streetlights in, let’s say, 1910?

It is curious to me how Einstein approached the most difficult physics dilemma with basic common sense, the same way we approach moral and philosophical problems in our own stories, and in our lives.

Then there was Einstein the person. In addition to his delving into his intellectual and cultural work, the man also had to contend with a world of personal problems and romantic entanglements, marriage to a woman he didn’t love, an unwanted pregnancy, and parents who demanded much of him. Yet through all this, he was a prolific writer. He studied papers and books written by his scientific precursors, referencing those whose ideas supported his own.

He sent his early papers, attempts at a dissertation, to university professors, some who still carried ill-will towards the young man they remembered as a rambunctious learner. Finally, his work began to attract their attention and elicit responses.

A noted professor who understood the merit of Einstein’s propositions and/or questions accepted one of his papers, and awarded the wayward scholar a doctorate.

Now, you can understand my hesitation when I learned that while Einstein wrote his papers, he was never enrolled in a university. His learning method was completely “Kurtzian”, a lifelong independent learner. Yet, in our time, to receive a doctorate, before even attempting a dissertation, students must sit in a classroom for two-to-five years, at an exorbitant cost, I might add. Of course, Einstein was brilliant. That probably had something to do with. Even his independent studies addressed scientific problems that stumped many of the scientific thinkers of his day.

Then something struck me. As I grow older, my sense of learning, of imagining, and creating grows as strong as ever. It doesn’t diminish. It blooms. I remember people always telling me, “Stop daydreaming,” or “Focus, pay attention.” I too looked out the window when the teacher wanted our “undivided attention.”

Einstein pondered “time” not only as a problem in physics, but psychologically and philosophically, as well. Some of his ideas contributed to the construction of clocks and watches. I too ponder time, but for me, it is the realization that once we grow older, time becomes more precious, and how we use it may be one of the most important philosophical problems for creative people. Often, I hear myself say, “Where did the time go?” or “There isn’t enough time in the day.” Then I realize, the problem isn’t time. The problem is “We”, and how we choose to use it.

As for Einstein’s unorthodox education, of course, the rest is history, or, I should say--science. He not only became the famed scientist we all know but also a noted writer, professor, husband, and father. And, yes, he was forgetful, not because of a bad memory, but because of an active imagination, just too much on his mind, like the rest of us.

In anything I read, I am always looking for a message. I can’t help but wonder if there are lessons in Einstein’s story for us as writers, teachers, students, or readers?

I am not too proud to admit that I understood very little about the problems in physics Einstein’s biographer described. I suspect the writer knew many readers would be perplexed. But what the writer explained beautifully was the story, and the way Einstein approached the most complex, scientific problems, in a way that any thoughtful person would. Though he was a genius, he was also accessible.

I think I understand his famous quote a little better now, the one you see on posters and memes: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will be to know and understand.”





Daniel Cano is the author of three novels Pepe Rios, Shifting Loyalties (Arte Publico Press) and Death and the American Dream (Bilingual Press), which was awarded Best Novel, Historical Fiction by the “12 Annual International Latino Literary Awards.” His writing has appeared in such publications as Fire and Ink: an Anthology of Social Action Writing (The University of Arizona Press), Aztlan in Vietnam (University of California Press), Pieces of the Heart (Chronicle Books), Unnatural Disasters: recent writings from the Golden State (Incommunicado Press), and Bre’ves, a literary journal published in France. In 2006, Longman Press included Daniel Cano’ story “Somewhere Outside Duc Pho” in Latino Boom: an anthology of U.S. Latino Literature, presenting some of the best Latino literature from the past 20 years.”

Cano has held administrative positions at UCLA, UC Davis, and CSU Dominguez Hills, his alma mater. In 2016, he retired from Santa Monica College, where he taught English for 27 years. He continues to write, as well as work on numerous issues that affect veterans today.

Melinda Palacio

Michael Sedano

In a fun twist of roles, I had the pleasure of listening to Michael Sedano read from his work. He is usually the eye behind the camera, waiting to capture the perfect picture of a reader. He's been documenting my literary readings for several years and his portraits documenting poets and writers over the past couple of decades are archived at USC. He also coaches writers on how to read their own work. The photographs show a master, comfortable in front of the audience for Take a Detour from Route 66: Taos to L.A., a wonderful program put together by Karen Cordova and Andrea Watson of 3 Taos Press. Read more about the show on La Bloga's March post by none other than Michael Sedano.

Michael Sedano at the Homestead Museum

Michael read from his one-act play "The Feral Child of Temple City: A Horror Narrative in One Act. The dramatic and, yes, horrifying elements to the story are the first surprise. The entire show was a surprise because not everyone read work about the road, diners, or cars, stereotypical icons of Route 66. In fact, Sedano's story could be set anywhere. Lucky for the audience, it is set in Temple City on Route 66. The second surprise, which shouldn't come as a surprise at all, given the fact that Michael has offered coaching to writers on how to read their own work at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, is how well he read, projecting and addressing both sides of the bifurcated audience.

Sedano Makes the Lectern Disappear

Although my photographs, all taken on my iPhone, do not adjust well for the tricky backlighting, you can see how Michael kept his eyes off the page and on his audience. He used his facial expression and hands for dramatic emphasis, although he could have read the piece keeping his nose to lectern and it still would have held the audience's attention. Another favor he offered to the audience was a copy of the one-act play. I'm not sure if everyone received a copy, but I was fortunate to have been gifted one by the author. The nice thing about hearing a piece that's longer than a poem, is it gave me the opportunity to take several photographs and absorb the content of the writing (not an easy task). I have renewed respect for Michael who attends a vast number of performances, takes professional photographs with his camera, and then writes very thoughtfully about the works. I was especially moved by Andrea Watson's Frida dream poem, "The Poem in Which Frida Khalo Commandeers My Car and We Drive Like Bandits to L.A." The title says it all, a great poem. You had to have been there. I was so mesmerized by the poem that I did not take any pictures of Andrea reading it. I now understand why my husband Steve sometimes fails to take photos of my while I'm reading. Even though he's heard all of my poems read aloud a million times, he still gets caught up in my performance of them. I finally understand this phenomenon. As Michael said in his La Bloga post and write-up of the show, I hope this Detour to Route 66 becomes an annual spring offering.

Michael reads the dramatic conclusion to "The Feral Child of Temple City" by Michael Sedano

Andrea L. Watson and Madelyn Garner Read after Michael Sedano.

La Bloga in the House: Melinda Palacio and Michael Sedano

Cover Art by Penelope Dullaghan

Born in Havana, Cuba, Ruth Behar was five years old when she and her family moved to Queens, New York.  "I grew up in the sixties and seventies in crowded rental apartments . . . My parents longed to buy a house with a front yard where my mother could plant petunias.  But we were refugees and short on money. And in the back of their minds, my parents thought we'd return to Cuba someday" (from Behar's website).  But that did not happen. Instead, Ruth grew up to become a professor of anthropology at The University of Michigan.  She is also a writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.  Ruth is the first Latina to win a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the "Genius Grant").  In this new book of fiction, Ruth returns to her childhood to create a story based on her own experience living through a challenging year of recovery.  Welcome Ruth!

Amelia Montes:  What inspired you to write this book?

Ruth Behar:  What inspired me to write Lucky Broken Girlwas the thought that, if I didn't tell the story, no one else would.  The time in my life between the ages of nine and ten years old, when I spent a year in a body cast recovering from a severe fracture to my right leg, is very vivid in my memories.  I'd written an essay from the perspective of the adult woman looking back, but I'd never told the story from the girl's point of view.  So I just started letting Ruthie speak.  She was sassy and wise and I felt like there was a life rope tying the two of us together.  As I wrote, I recognized it wasn't simply my own story I had to tell, but the story of my Cuban Jewish family finding their way in New York, amid other immigrants struggling with them, and how everyone who surrounded me came together to help a child heal.  Whenever I felt uncertain, I turned for literary inspiration to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.  That was how I kept going until I got to the end.

Professor, Writer, Ruth Behar (photo by Gabriel Frye-Behar)

Amelia Montes:  Why write for a young adult audience?

Ruth Behar: I've been in academia a long time, and though I continue to love the world of ideas and scholarship, and have spent most of my career writing non-fiction, I never gave up my youthful hopes of writing fiction.  I'm a daydreamer at heart and it took an enormous amount of self-discipline for me to learn to think logically and rationally so I could be accepted in academia.  But once I acquired that self-discipline, I then became afraid to let it go.  It wasn't easy to give myself permission to make things up, to invent what might have been, to embellish my experience with a touch of magic.  Somehow, though, as I wrote Lucky Broken Girl, I began to let go of the reins.  Knowing I was writing for young readers, I felt I had the freedom to use my imagination.  I could create wondrous moments.  And just as important, I could create heart-opening moments.  I realized that writing for young readers called upon me to dig deep into the feelings of all my characters.  For example, there's a mean nurse in the hospital who makes Ruthie angry and sad.  I might have left it at that, but Ruthie dares to ask the nurse if she hates all children, and that's when the nurse opens up and tells her about her family woes and even apologizes, while Ruthie is so moved she feels her heart crack, "like the sugar crust on Mami's flan." I don't think I exaggerate in saying that writing from a child's point of view put me back in touch with my creativity and taught me empathy.

Photo by Ruth Behar

Amelia Montes:  How is Lucky Broken Girl important for this moment in history?

Ruth Behar: At this moment in history, we are experiencing a very frightening rise in sexism, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment.  We need to counter this trend by building more bridges between individuals and communities, not by erecting walls.  The cruel deportations taking place in the United States are splitting apart Latino families and destroying the hopes for a better future of countless young people.  The stories of immigrants, all immigrants, need to be told and heard, so our shared humanity can stand above all the misperceptions.  We need to instill, in children as well as adults, a sense of tolerance and respect for the diverse cultures that coexist in our society.

Lucky Broken Girl is an immigrant story but it doesn't limit itself to just telling the Cuban immigrant story.  There are several intersecting immigrant stories shown through Ruthie's friendships, with a boy from India, a girl from Belgium, a neighbor from Mexico, and a physical therapist from Puerto Rico by way of the Bronx, and her close relationship with Baba, her Polish Jewish grandmother who finds refuge on the eve of the Holocaust in Cuba and then has to uproot to the United States.

All I can hope is that the world of shared understandings that I try to conjure in my book will offer a bit of hope in these dark times.

Amelia Montes:  Thank you so much, Ruth!  And for you, dear reader, if you are in New York, don't miss today's "book launch" at Books of Wonder (4 - 6p.m.).  See flyer below.  

flyer created by David Frye

Blood, Frogs…
Do you know me, Adonai?
A latecomer to your Seder table?
A visitor waiting for Elijah?


You blessed the Moabite,
Ruth, with an honored place
in Ketuvim, so there must be
hope for me.


My people have suffered, too,
though nothing like the Inquisition
or the Holocaust.  But the Aztecs
were fooled and then slaughtered,
raped and oppressed by
the Spaniards who rode proud horses
roughshod over meso-America
creating a mixed gente,
the Mestizos.  And then discrimination,
a glass ceiling we hit, in this great
country, as we scratch towards
the American dream.

Hail, Locusts…
But here I sit, a Jew for only
twelve years, looking at the
matzo, bitter herbs, shank bone,
amidst other symbols of oppression
and subsequent Exodus, Diaspora.
My wife’s family (and even my son!)
easy and familiar with it all, as much
a second nature as my Chicanismo
is to me.  But each year, I
recognize more and more,
mouthing the Hebrew faster and
faster.  Is there hope for this old dog?

Darkness, Slaying of the First Born…
I took the name of Ysrael when
I converted because Jacob wrestled
with the angel and saw the face
of G-d, before he, too, became a
Jew and took a new name.
I wrestled, struggled (did I see
the face of G-d, too?), for over
six years before making the choice.
It is a choice I do not regret, but, at times,
when my ten-year-old son breezes through
the Four Questions in Hebrew (not English!),
I am a stranger searching in bewilderment’s
twilight for my soul.  Can an outsider
take on another people’s traditions,
burdens and history while maintaining
his own proud history?
Can an outsider ever stop wandering?
Will I ever be at home?

Review: Bárbara Renaud González. Las Nalgas de JLo/JLo’s Booty: The Best & Most Notorious Calumnas & Other Writings by the First Chicana Columnist in Texas 1995-2005. San Antonio: Aztlán Libre Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-9897782-3-7

Michael Sedano

I am bingeing on JLo's nalgas. The book, not the buns. You know what bingeing is. Not in the sense of overdoing something but in the way people will get their hands on the full season of some popular teevee program and devote hours on end to devouring the characters and plots.

But Bárbara Renaud González' collection of newspaper columns is nothing like teevee with teevee's predictable plot lines, telegraphic ironies, heart-throbs of actors pulling down millions of dollars per episode. Like JLo.

But the collection isn't really about JLo. It's about Texans. It's about raza. It's about humans. It's a voice we need and we need it now. Buy this book, gift this book, tell your library and indie bookseller to make JLo's Nalgas widely available.

González isn't going to get rich from this incredibly rich collection, but her voice makes her seem a heart-throb woman. Witty, incisive, a todo dar pulls no punches writing, the collection introduces readers outside of Texas to a Unitedstatesian gem.

Why'd you quit, Bárbara? If there's anything our culture needs right now is a sharp stick in the eye to wake us up to the crud that's a continuation of the kinds of characters, scandals, desmadres, fiery anger, profound humor, that occupy the book's eight sections.

The collection is tough to consume in one sitting because there are so many great lines and classic quips. A reader is forced to stop and savor the moment, read it again. Then, moving on to the next and the next reprinted piece, and a few poems and unpublished thoughts, one has to stop and go back to find a particular gem that won't let you keep reading until you find and relive that phrase.

I dog-ear my books to mark those places but I had to abandon the practice. Nearly every essay has a bent corner. Her subjects probably got bent out of shape when they read their names. Imagine if Henry B. Gonzalez were still around to have his pecadilloes picked over in the first essay ("the hero of San Anto who only saved himself," one poet wrote), or in a closing essay, Henry Cisneros, another would-be sexual athlete. "He is not rich but takes care of women as if he were." Ay, Henry. Both of you.

Excoriating archly-conservative Coors beer's razacentric spending, González lets a journo speak for his ilk, "'I don't think the contribution means we have been silenced,' says Gilbert Bailón, the advocate-minded president for the journalists. 'Some have questioned whether we should be taking money from, beer companies.' He didn't think that Latino journalists were compromised in any way, even if the stories weren't being written."

Reviewing Denise Chávez'Loving Pedro Infante, the columnist offers background on the Mexicano movie heart-throb:

It is no wonder, then, that in Denise Chávez' latest and best novela, the searching for love scorches and burns like a #5 Combination Plate at midnight. But ay, how good it tastes going down. Pedro Infante was a movie star and singer as close to a Mexican god as you can get after that feathered-serpent Quetzalcoatl left us promising to return. That god took to the east by sea, but Pedro Infante flew his own plane, crashed, and died on April 15, 1957, at age forty.
  Though, like Elvis, he has been sighted all over Mexico and even on the border at twilight.

I suppose owing to the strictures of a regional newspaper like the San Antonio Express-News Renaud's editor forced the italics on the Spanish words. Sadly, that's a concession to prescriptive rules that subverts the underlying conception of raza as equal partners in border cultura. Lástima. It's like González observes in Me And Kobe In The Back Seat,"Why don't we complain? Right away? Well, now I have."

As I noted, the richness of these essays could fill pages with great lines and insights.  Selected from a five year record but presented thematically rather than chronologically, it's fun to pick and choose by provocative title with no diminution of continuity. Everything fits. All 284 pages are as richly satisfying as your mother's tacos. That's a consequence not only of Bárbara Renaud Gonzáles' refined skill but also a tribute the publisher, Aztlán Libre Press. Title after title, this small press brings to market fresh ideas too long and conspicuously absent from our Unitedstatesian literary landscape--that is, if you're paying attention.

González is paying attention. As she puts finis to the volume on the eve of the sickness taking control in the oval orifice, she leaves the reader with a plate of sesos. "With this book, I want you to understand resistance, and the price of that resistance. But I also want you to love yourself so that you can love others. I hope I will not be in jail in the next decade, but who knows?"

You can, and should, order Las Nalgas de JLo/JLo’s Booty: The Best & Most Notorious Calumnas & Other Writings by the First Chicana Columnist in Texas 1995-2005
from your local indie bookseller, but it's a one-step process when you order publisher-direct here.

Désirée Zamorano and The Amado Women Meet Stanford Alumni Readers

The quarterly meeting of the Book Club of the Chicano/Latino Stanford University Alumni Association of Southern California met in the home of Mario Vasquez on Sunday, April 9, 2017.

The meeting to discuss The Amado Women with its author, Désirée Zamorano, engaged the readers with energy and passion. A novel featuring three distinctive women, their lifestyle choices, and matters beyond their immediate control, the book raises critical questions for both men and women. That proved true on Sunday.

Discussion flowed around issues and ideas woven into the arresting story such as battered women, cultural identification, randy unfaithful men and a couple of good ones, the uses and purposes of literature.

And there was food a-plenty. Pollo, ceviche, quinoa salad in the style of North African couscous, frijoles, arroz,  roasted jalapeños, salsas, German chocolate bunnies, layer cake, encouraged people to enjoy seconds and nibble on thirds.

It was the usual feast for the club's pre-discussion social hour. New members are welcome. See details below.



Concepción Valadez, the club organizer, makes her point as Zamorano smiles in the ambiente of lively discussion and analysis of her work.


Diedre Reyes launched the discussion with a question about "ownership" of a story. Angelique Flores and Manuel Urrutia listed intently. The club's discussions reflect attention to detail and the incisive critical skills the members employ in their professional settings.

Book Club of the Chicano/Latino Stanford University Alumni Association of Southern California. Front, L to R: Angelique Flores. Désirée Zamorano. Concepción Valadez Back: Angel Guerrero. Manuel Urrutia. Diedre Reyes. Michael Sedano. Margie Hernandez. Mario Vasquez.

Not-At-All-Cruel On-line Floricanto
John Meza, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Amanda A. Taylor, John Martinez, Rolando Serna

Ed's note: Leave a Comment below if you identify the allusion in the title of April's first On-line Floricanto.

Can I Ask You Something? by John Meza
Her Way by Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Brujeria by Amanda A. Taylor
MAMMA NATCHA by John Martinez
The Wetback Only Wants to be dry by Rolando Serna

Can I Ask You Something?
By John Meza

No, I'm not native American
No, I'm not a Spaniard
I'm a Mexican
Yes, this is my face
It's mexican too
Yes, I've been told I look Indian
No, not like Ghandi
More like Cuahetemoc
Never mind
Yes, I'm dark like this all over
My grandfather?
He was chichimex from Guanajuato
No, it's not in New Mexico
No, it's not in Arizona
It's where the chichimex are from
Haven't you been listening?


Her Way
By Odilia Galván Rodríguez

earth toned
her way of talk
even her gait, heavy
as if tethered by hidden cords
to land
water
surrounds her world
she dives in mute, ears first
taken in by blues, the music
is key
tempered
deadened by fear
affect: controlled sedate
her modified behavior
implodes
within
the unseen, seen.
a discovery, new.
uttered quick, like a sharp intake,
of air
silent
this forest talks;
nothing is as it seems.
you speak it from your heart, and then,
it’s true


Brujeria
By Amanda A. Taylor

I wear these stones around my wrist,
shining balls of onyx, quartz and jade,
To protect against “el ojo,” and other wicked things-
That look upon me with evil eyes or otherwise-
Because I was branded at birth.
My grandpa called me “guerita,” his shining, white light.
They put oil on my wrists,
And holy water in my car-
From the shrine I always drive past,
But never stop to go inside.
“Mijita, you can’t hide from the curse,” the curandera said to me,
As she lit a candle and prayed for my heart-
the hand-me-down stone.
A body between two cultures – a tug to make sense of each.
I search to fill the void in the dark-
Driving down caliche roads and wasting miles of gas,
to see that one fire that never goes out,
with the stars that echo this infinity.
“Curses are real and they live inside you.”
I still hold the hand that gave me the stone.


MAMMA NATCHA
By John Martinez

Abuelita Raquel, with her burned hair,
Her waddling walk, under crunched slippers,
Took me to her mother, who was dark
In her sockets, and ready to see God
The room was grey, wheat curtains
Letting in one dusty ray of light
Mamma Natcha was dying
In the beginning of my life,
My hair bunched, pinned up
Like a little tee pee
On my, still, hardening head
And level with the edge of the bed,
I reached to touch the branch of her lips
And one eye, a hawk’s eye opened
And took me flying, piercing,
The cold suds of pumped clouds
And bleached blue sky,
Like a musical flurry of notes;
Took me to where I am today,
Curled in her love,
Until I see her again.


The Wetback Only Wants to be dry
By Rolando Serna

The wetback only wants to be dry
Their minds that are drowning
With the news
Of the felony, they have committed
What felony?
Well the illegal crossing of the Rio Grande River
More grave
Than the Italians, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabs.
That crossed an entire ocean
When will the day come, that they will finally dry?
It is not possible that the documents that my government gives them
Will be made from terrycloth
So, they can use it too dry themselves
The magic day of five years so they can finally begin to dry
Only four years is not enough time
Because the river water is permanently attached
Too their backs for five years and nothing can dry it
The government, has trained the dogs
At the Falfurrias check point, too alert the immigration officers
When there is an illegal hiding. The dogs
Can tell the difference a Mexican American and an Illegal Mexican
Can that be possible? That an American military uniform be made
Out of magic cloth that will dry the wet-back?
This magic cloth will only dry their back after they return.
Return from where? Today they did not send you back to Mexico.
If you wear that uniform, they will send you too another country.
The wetback will dry their body and wet their minds with the bloody memories of
Assassins and if they sign the dotted line they won’t send them back home where it is safe.
I don’t remember if it is proper for a wetback too use the uniform of
My country that convicts them of being wetbacks
They rounded them up and gave them work
That pays $.12 cents an hour, $.88 cents per day
$19.20 per month
Minus 50% COST OF INCARCERATION
Minus cost of bar of soap
Their shoes, their exercise cloth, tooth paste
Cologne and food too survive during lock down
The prisons remind me of the old southern plantations where
White men would dictate what the blacks would do
What did they call the blacks in those days, was it slaves?
Because they worked all day
And when night fell they had not earned a single coin
Too send their families, this government
Has not mentioned that no wetback can earn more than $.12 cents an hour
$.88 cents a day, $19.20 a month
If they can put all the wetbacks into prison
It will be possible too pay 48 wetbacks too work for a whole day
For what it would cost to pay a single person to work for one hour at $5.75an hour.
How can our government require all employers?
to pay their employees a minimum wage?
They should be leading by example
And start paying their new slaves the legal minimum wage.
The wetbacks that have been made into government slaves
When will they explain to the American citizens who are the owners of these companies?
Why don’t they have to follow the law of our country?
They should be fined $5000.00 for hiring wetbacks
And not paying them a fair and legal wage for their work.
how is it possible?
Those wetbacks are now responsible for terrorism.
When the terrorist entered through Canada
They also entered through airports in New York
And some we don’t know they entered through where ever they entered
And they blame the wetbacks
Because my people come to work
When was the day that we started?
Too look like terrorists and when was
The day that we were implicated
In the deaths of our friends in those two towers?
When did they prepare to convert my people?
Into slaves for Unicore
The great corporation in all Federal Prisons, who demands that,
All prisoners will work or get acquainted with solitary confinement
When did the day come? That being a wetback?
Was converted into being a Slave?
It is not possible for me, not too be herd
It is also impossible not to take the truth into account.
A Fairytale maybe, but all this info is online under B.O.P.
There to read for you and me.



Meet the Floricanto Poets
Can I Ask You Something? by John Meza
Her Way by Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Brujeria by Amanda A. Taylor
MAMMA NATCHA by John Martinez
The Wetback Only Wants to be dry by Rolando Serna



This is John Meza’s first published poem. Meza considers himself a simple poet with a pen who loves to write about his culture, heritage and people. He says, “I am a chicano, born in Ohio, raised as a migrant by migrant parents, picking cucumbers and tomatoes for the first 17 years of my life. Raised in the Rio Grande Valley, San Benito.” An Army veteran of 10 years, John Meza currently lives in Corpus Christi, Tx and work at building bridges in Robstown, Tx.
“I have been writing poetry for over 20 yrs, and performing spoken word and slam poetry for the last 5 yrs. I am an activist supporting immigrants, clean water, the environment. As a member of Tacos Not Bombs we feed the homeless every Sunday afternoon at Artesian park in Corpus Christi.”

foto: Eldrena Douma

Odilia Galván Rodríguez, poet, writer, editor, educator, and activist, is the author of six volumes of poetry, her latest, The Nature of Things, a collaboration with Texas photographer, Richard Loya, by Merced College Press 2016. Also, along with the late Francisco X. Alarcón, she edited the award-winning anthology, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, University of Arizona Press, 2016. This poetry of witness anthology, the first of its kind, because it came about because of the on-line organizing work of Alarcón, Galván Rodriguez, and other poet-activists which began as a response to the proposal of SB 1070, the racial profiling law which was eventually passed by the Arizona State Legislature in 2010, and later that year, HB 2281which bans ethnic studies. With the advent of the Facebook page Poets Responding (to SB 1070) thousands of poems were submitted witnessing racism, xenophobia, and other social justice issues which culminated in the anthology.

Galván Rodríguez has worked as an editor for various print media such as Matrix Women's News Magazine, Community Mural's Magazine, and Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She is currently, the editor of Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal online; facilitates creative writing workshops nationally, and is director of Poets Responding to SB 1070, and Love and Prayers for Fukushima, both Facebook pages dedicated to bringing attention to social justice issues that affect the lives and wellbeing of many people and encouraging people to take action. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, and literary journals on and offline.

As an activist, she worked for the United Farm Workers of America AFL-CIO, The East Bay Institute for Urban Arts, has served on numerous boards and commissions, and is currently active in Women’s organizations whose mission it is to educate around environmental justice issues and disseminate an indigenous world view regarding the earth and people’s custodial relationship to it. Odilia Galván Rodríguez has a long and rich history of working for social justice in solidarity with activists from all ethnic groups.


Amanda A. Taylor is a writer and editor from the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. She has an extensive background in journalism, having worked in media for ten years. During her time as a reporter, she won two APME (Associated Press of Managing Editors) awards for feature writing. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English with focus in Cultural Studies while working on a series of novels.


John Martinez is a Chicano poet from Fresno living in the greater San Gabriel Valley. He recently celebrated his granddaughter Stella Nova’s First Birthday. Martinez has several collections in final editing for publication in 2017.


Rolando Serna is Father of the Seven with multiple publications, including Panorama UTPA,
Galley UTPA, 2006 Harper College learning communities. His awards and education include 2009 Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities & Colleges, Minor in Spanish, Bachelors in English, Masters of Arts in English. He is seeking a Ph.D. program. He is an associate of Nueva Onda Poets, Vice President Sigma Tau Delta, No Name Poetry Group, Novena Poetry member.

House Built on Ashes:  A Memoir 
José Antonio Rodríguez
University of Oklahoma Press - February, 2017

[from the publisher]
The year is 2009, and José Antonio Rodríguez, a doctoral student at Binghamton University in upstate New York, is packing his suitcase, getting ready to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents in South Texas. He soon learns from his father that a drug cartel has overtaken the Mexican border village where he was born. Now, because of the violence there, he won’t be able to visit his early-childhood home. Instead, his memories will have to take him back.

Thus, Rodríguez begins a meditative journey into the past. Through a series of vignettes, he mines the details of a childhood and adolescence fraught with deprivation but offset by moments of tenderness and beauty. Suddenly he is four years old again, and his mother is feeding him raw sugarcane for the first time. With the sweetness still on his tongue, he runs to a field, where he falls asleep under a glowing pink sky.

The conditions of rural poverty prove too much for his family to bear, and Rodríguez moves with his mother and three of his nine siblings across the border to McAllen, Texas. Now a resident of the “other side,” Rodríguez experiences the luxury of indoor toilets and gazes at television commercials promising more food than he has ever seen. But there is no easy passage into this brighter future.

Poignant and lyrical, House Built on Ashes contemplates the promises, limitations, and contradictions of the American Dream. Even as it tells a deeply personal story, it evokes larger political, cultural, and social realities. It speaks to what America is and what it is not. It speaks to a world of hunger, prejudice, and far too many boundaries. But it speaks, as well, to the redemptive power of beauty and its life-sustaining gift of hope.

José Antonio Rodríguez, Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is the author of The Shallow End of Sleep and Backlit Hour.





Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity
Robert Con Davis-Undiano
University of Oklahoma Press - March, 2017
           
[from the publisher]
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own.

Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. 

A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historical cultural homecoming.

Robert Con Davis-Undiano is Neustadt Professor and Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma and Executive Director of World Literature Today. Among his many publications are The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture and Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory.




U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance
Edited by Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernández
University of Arizona Press - March, 2017

[from the publisher]
In summer 2014, a surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America to the United States gained mainstream visibility—yet migration from Central America has been happening for decades. U.S. Central Americans explores the shared yet distinctive experiences, histories, and cultures of 1.5-and second-generation Central Americans in the United States.

While much has been written about U.S. and Central American military, economic, and political relations, this is the first book to articulate the rich and dynamic cultures, stories, and historical memories of Central American communities in the United States. Contributors to this anthology—often writing from their own experiences as members of this community—articulate U.S. Central Americans’ unique identities as they also explore the contradictions found within this multivocal group.

Working from within Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Maya communities, contributors to this critical study engage histories and transnational memories of Central Americans in public and intimate spaces through ethnographic, in depth, semistructured, qualitative interviews, as well as literary and cultural analysis. The volume’s generational, spatial, urban, indigenous, women’s, migrant, and public and cultural memory foci contribute to the development of U.S. Central American thought, theory, and methods. Woven throughout the analysis, migrants’ own oral histories offer witness to the struggles of displacement, travel,
navigation, and settlement of new terrain. This timely work addresses demographic changes both at universities and in cities throughout the United States. U.S. Central Americans draws connections to fields of study such as history, political science, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology, cultural studies, and literature, as well as diaspora and border studies. 

The volume is also accessible in size, scope, and language to educators and community and service workers wanting to know about their U.S. Central American families, neighbors, friends, students, employees, and clients.

Karina O. Alvarado is a lecturer in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Alicia Ivonne Estrada is an associate professor of Chicana/o studies at California State University, Northridge. 

Ester E. Hernández is a professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at California State University, Los Angeles. 





Starving for Justice:  Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity 
Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval
University of Arizona Press - March, 2017

[from the publisher]
In the 1990s three college campuses in California exploded as Chicano/a and Latino/a students went on hunger strikes. Through courageous self-sacrifice, these students risked their lives to challenge racial neoliberalism, budget cuts, and fee increases. The strikers acted and spoke spectacularly and, despite great odds, produced substantive change.

Social movement scholars have raised the question of why some people risk their lives to create a better world. In Starving for Justice, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval uses interviews and archival material to examine people’s willingness to make the extreme sacrifice and give their lives in order to create a more just society.

Popular memory and scholarly discourse around social movements have long acknowledged the actions of student groups during the 1960s. Now Armbruster-Sandoval extends our understanding of social justice and activism, providing one of the first examinations of Chicana/o and Latina/o student activism in the 1990s.

Students at University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Stanford University went on hunger strikes to demand the establishment and expansion of Chicana/o studies departments. They also had even broader aspirations—to obtain dignity and justice for all people. These students spoke eloquently, making their bodies and concerns visible. They challenged anti-immigrant politics. They scrutinized the rapid growth of the prison-industrial complex, racial and class polarization, and the university’s neoliberalization. Though they did not fully succeed in having all their demands met, they helped generate long-lasting social change on their respective campuses, making those learning institutions more just. 

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval is an associate professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is the author of Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice. He has been actively involved in struggles for human rights, labor rights, and social justice on the national, state, and local level.  



Soldados Razos at War:  Chicano Politics, Identity, and Masculinity in the U.S. Military from World War II to Vietnam
Steven Rosales
University of Arizona Press - April, 2017

 [from the publisher]
What were the catalysts that motivated Mexican American youth to enlist or readily accept their draft notice in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam? In Soldados Razos at War, historian and veteran Steven Rosales chronicles the experiences of
Chicano servicemen who fought for the United States, explaining why these men served, how they served, and the impact of their service on their identity and political consciousness.

As a social space imbued with its own martial and masculine ethos, the U.S. military offers an ideal way to study the aspirations and behaviors of these young men that carried over into their civilian lives. A tradition of martial citizenship forms the core of the book. Using rich oral histories and archival research, Rosales investigates the military’s transformative potential with a particular focus on socioeconomic mobility, masculinity, and postwar political activism across three generations.

The national collective effort characteristic of World War II and Korea differed sharply from the highly divisive nature of American involvement in Vietnam. Thus, for Mexican Americans, military service produced a wide range of ideological reactions, with the ideals of each often in opposition to the others. Yet a critical thread connecting these diverse outcomes was a redefined sense of self and a willingness to engage in individual and collective action to secure first class citizenship.

Steven Rosales is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Arkansas. 




The Latina/o Midwest Reader
Edited by Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, and Claire F. Fox 
Afterword by Frances R. Aparicio
University of Illinois Press - July, 2017

[from the publisher]
The Latina/o experience in a changing Midwest

From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population increased by more than 73 percent across eight midwestern states. These interdisciplinary essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.

Eye-opening and provocative, The Latina/o Midwest Reader rewrites the conventional wisdom on today's Latina/o community and how it faces challenges—and thrives—in the heartland.

Contributors: Aidé Acosta, Frances R. Aparicio, Jay Arduser, Jane Blocker, Carolyn Colvin, María Eugenia Cotera, Theresa Delgadillo, Lilia Fernández, Claire F. Fox, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael D. Innis-Jiménez, José E. Limón, Marta María Maldonado, Louis G. Mendoza, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Kim Potowski, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Janet Weaver, and Elizabeth Willmore

Omar Valerio-Jiménez is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands. Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an associate professor of Hispanic Southwest studies at the University of New Mexico and the author of One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen: Stories. Claire F. Fox is a professor in the departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa and the author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War.

___________________________________________________________________

Later


Manuel Ramosis the author of several novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction books and articles. His collection of short stories, The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories, was a finalist for the 2016 Colorado Book Award.My Bad: A Mile High Noirwas published by Arte Público Press in 2016.