As summer rapidly turns into fall, people gather to celebrate, contribute aid, or take in a bit of culture.  Here is a quick quartet of upcoming events before Día de los Muertos kicks in full speed.





Join Dolores Huerta, her family members and staff of the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF) and support the community organizing work of DHF and celebrate the release of DOLORES– a feature documentary about Dolores Huerta’s lifetime work for social justice.

Friday, September 29, 2017
6:00 – 8:30 PM

Su Teatro
721 Santa Fe Drive, Denver -- All proceeds benefit the Dolores Huerta Foundation







Untitled: Stories
Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Avenue Pkwy
Denver, CO 80204
Included in general admission 

Tell your tales in a night dedicated to powerful voices and new constructions.

Produced with local creatives, Untitled Final Fridays is the museum's monthly late night program featuring workshops, performances, and tours with a twist. Experience the museum in an entirely different way—every time.

College students with valid ID receive 2-for-1 admission to Untitled Final Fridays.

Chulita Vinyl Club performances

DJ collective Chulita Vinyl Club (CVC) will be at the Denver Art Museum as part of September’s Untitled Final Friday event!

Chulita Vinyl Club is an all-girl all-vinyl club for self-identifying women of color, which launched in 2014, with the context of providing a space for empowerment and togetherness. ALL visitors are welcome to stop by, bring their own vinyl and watch, listen and dance to the sets of the CVC crew.
 
To kick off the evening at 6 pm, Chulita Vinyl Club will host a Bring Your Own Vinyl (BYOV) set and visitors are encouraged to bring a record from their collection to be spun in-house while they enjoy the exhibitions on view.
 
Beginning at 7 pm, participants from a workshop held earlier in the day will return for their final performance to showcase their learning, with CVC jumping on the 1s and 2s at 9 pm to finish up the night with a set of their own.

Bilingual (Spanish and English) guided meditation on the plaza, led by Noemi Nunez will be a unique experience at the rocking musical cadence of the interactive installation of La Musidora, located outdoors on Martin Plaza. Enjoy the melange of art and wellness with an implied invitation dialogue of cultural relevancy. No previous yoga or mediation experience needed, neither is it necessary to master Spanish, or to bring a mat. Let's raise Denver's vibration together by uniting breath and intention in community.

Craftsman & Apprentice will be leading Latin American-inspired embroidery adult crafting workshops. Learn techniques and create take-home projects.

The Narrators will be here performing a series of animal-inspired stories to kick off the new exhibition Stampede: Animals in Art, joined by musical performances by The Playground Ensemble. Exhibition-inspired storytelling also will be led by Stories on Stage.

There will be community and artist led talks around the work in Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place, facilitated by Flo Hernandez-Ramos of Latino Public Radio and including an artist chat with Jaime Carrejo about his border-wall inspired work.

MOTUS theater will be performing a number of monologues focused on issues surrounding immigrant rights and Latino cultural identity. Including monologues from actresses Ana Casas, discussing her brother’s deportation, and Teresita Lozano, leading a singing tour of Mi Tierra, focuses primarily on the Castas paintings and reflections on her Mexican identity, as a light-skined woman of color.

Warm Cookies of the Revolution and special guest Jason Heller (@jason_m_heller), writer and Hugo Award-winning editor, will be pushing us to exercise our civic engagement.

Buntport Theater is here to entertain with Joan and Charlie improv in the elevator.

Sing Car-aoke in the Toyota to show off your powerful voice.







Denver, CO - A consortium of collaborating organizations and individuals lead by the Latino Chamber of Commerce and Barrio E' would like to invite you to the CO4PR Benefit Concert on Thursday, Oct 12, 2017, 4pm - 11pm.

All proceeds will go towards helping the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the recent Earthquakes in Mexico. Amongst the organizers are Jose Beteta, director of the Latino Chamber & co-owner of Raíces Brewing Co., Tamil Maldonado, Director of Barrio E' and co-owner of Raíces Brewing Co. and Aquilles Quiroga, director of Los Hijos de Tuta Latin Rock band in Fort Collins.

The event will include a silent auction with donated art and items from artists like Arturo Garcia and items from Beto's Hair Salon. Food will be provided by Dos Abuelas Food Truck, fruit from Oasis Fruits by Haydee Caraveo and desserts from La MoMo Maes Bakery.

Entertainment includes Barrio E' (Puerto Rican Bomba), Colombian dance troupe, Mono Verde, Latin Explosive Movement (LEM), Los Hijos de Tuta (Latin Rock), Son Moreno (Cuban Son, Cumbias), Roka Hueka (Latin Ska) and Orquesta La Brava (Salsa). Dance groups COSA and Zumba Jose Jimenez will present dance exhibitions and Timbalin the Clown will be presenting.

McNichols Building 144 W Colfax Ave, Denver, CO 80202









Sul Ross University and Alpine, TX welcome award-winning poet Sarah Cortez on October 10th.
 
The Sage, a student literary and art magazine of Sul Ross University, the Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, and the Department of Languages and Literature are hosting Ms. Cortez at the Wildenthal Library on the Sul Ross campus at 2 pm on Tuesday, October 10th, 2017. Ms. Cortez will read from her new book, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials (Texas Review Press, 2016). 

Dr. Laura Payne, Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Sul Ross University said, “Sarah’s poetry and her current edited collection both beautifully resonate with the cross-sections of landscape and the human spirit, touching on Texan lives and shared experiences when we take the moment to stop, rest, and enjoy.” 

Ms. Cortez has invited Mr. Jacob Gernentz, the Rodeo Coach at Sul Ross University, as her special guest. He assisted Ms. Cortez with the authenticity of her poems in Vanishing Points, which reference the rodeo. 

Alyson Ward, in the Sunday, March 26, 2017 Houston Chronicle, described Vanishing Points as "a sobering, gorgeous collection." Selected as one of 2016 Southwest Books of the Year, it features the poignant drama of Texas’s lonesome highways and bustling intersections illustrated by the stunning photography of Dan Streck. Four poets respond to the visual summons of roadside memorials with lyric intensity: Jack B. Bedell, Sarah Cortez, Loueva Smith, and Larry D. Thomas. Graphic designer Nancy J. Parsons brings her award-winning skills to perfectly meld photography with poetry in this gorgeous volume. 

Ms. Cortez won the 2016 Award for Editing from the Press Women of Texas and the 2016 National Award for Editing from the National Federation of Press Women. 
 
For more information about this event, please call the Sul Ross Department of Language and Literature at 432.837.8151 

For more information on Sarah Cortez and Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, visit www.poetacortez.com.




Later.


Manuel Ramos is 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 Noir was published by Arte Público Press in 2016 and was a finalist for the Shamus Award in the Original Paperback category sponsored by the Private Eye Writers of America.

Meet and Greet 3 Laureates & A New USC El Centro Chicano 

Michael Sedano

After the closing of the 2010 reunion floricanto at USC, Mary Ann Pacheco, Alurista, and I had dinner at LA’s iconic The Pantry. The pair had organized the original 1973 Festival de Flor y Canto and edited the anthology. Mary Ann surprised the heck out of me with a revelation from back then.

I was having the time of my life on the GI Bill and a TA job. For fun I became Chief Photog of the campus rag, "shot" big-time USC sports, and documented everything I saw. In the eyes of the 18- and 19- year olds, I was this old guy who carries a camera everywhere he goes and is always taking their photo. They thought I was a narc.

“CIA,” Mary Ann interjects, as I relate that story to the invitees to a “meet and greet” reception for the three Poets Laureate who would read that evening, not at the postage-stamp Centro, but in prominent Bovard Auditorium.

Billy Vela, Robin Coste Lewis, Dana Gioia

Things have changed at El Centro Chicano and I wonder how much is a que plus ça change situation? Space is at a premium in the new ECC as people term it now. Unwelcoming linoleum hallways lead to anonymous institutional doors shutting-in unknown spaces. A display case outside displays government citations and awards.

My wife and I took surface rail to the late afternoon event and arrived a quarter hour early to locked doors. Despite that, the hallway holds warm memories. The Daily Trojan offices are on this floor, and the El Rodeo yearbook sign hangs on the wall opposite El Centro Chicano. Today's El Centro is in the heart of campus, a corner of the top floor of the old Student Union building. In its time, ECC’s been in a deluxe building of its own, before that cramped into antique charming surroundings of the campus cathedral, and started in la raza’s own storefront Centro, prime real estate at the juncture of Hoover and Jefferson.

With murals by Willie Herrón and Roberto Arenivar, El Centro Chicano became a prominent landmark along heavily-trafficked Jefferson Boulevard. across from Shrine Auditorium. El Centro Chicano was the first building anyone saw upon walking onto USC. A fountain and a mound of English ivy today mark the main entrance to campus here where Hoover t-bones into campus.

Original storefront El Centro Chicano 1973. Mural by Willie Herrón

"Ad astra" (my name) by Roberto Arenivar. This parking lot faced Jefferson Blvd at Hoover.

I rattle the door. Someone pushes it open and Billy Vela makes eye contact over Lety’s shoulder. “We’re not ready,” the director of el centro calls as the door snaps shut. El Centro now has a digital security system and I’m thinking paranoia has infected the once legendary hospitality of El Centro Chicano de USC. A terrorist in Las Vegas reminds that every institution must enact a policy of securely locked doors, lest some armed wall-building murderer walks in and starts shooting. Damn, it's not only el Centro Chicano that's changed, and it can happen here.

Billy comes out to chat in the hallway. The director is momentarily out of kilter with the late arrival of his caterer. Greeting Mary Ann Pacheco, my wife, and me, Vela tells us the caterer is usually reliable. Since Mary Ann and I are two of the original beneficiaries of el centro, Billy puts us on the a la brava program. We joke about what we’ll say and how we’ll each need an hour. Billy says “how about a minute?”

Vela is under pressure. It’s both subtle and obvious. He’s not alone. USC compartmentalizes non-traditional presences like black, chicano, and foreign students. In El Centro Chicano’s case, diminished space trades off for heart of campus location and continued existence.

No one has enough funding. Tonight’s engagement results not from ECC’s budget but out of inspired teaming with USC's Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs. Unity works. Together, the two programs won a grant from the campus’ arts initiative, Visions & Voices. Vela will write:

We hosted a Meet & Greet co-sponsored by CBCSA featuring the Three Laureates: U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, LA Poet Laureate Robin Coste Lewis, & CA Poet Laureate Dana Gioia at El Centro. It truly was a very special moment, you can feel it in the air! This pic captured the moment we showed a video clip of JFH performing at El Centro Chicano's Flor y Canto Literary Conference in 1973. We were all truly blessed for this opportunity and thank you again to all the students, staff, faculty, alumni & friends who came & shared in this once in a lifetime experience. Thank you again USC Vision & Voices and USC Libraries for the opportunity!

V&V funded much of our 2010 reunion floricanto, Festival de Flor y Canto. Yesterday • Today • Tomorrow. In 2010, Doheny Library added significant funding that illustrated the University's commitment to Chicana and Chicano Literature. It’s doubtful el Centro can host a major event like a floricanto on its own. A professor from the Spanish and Portugese Depto spoke about organizing a floricanto for the 45th anniversary of the first floricanto, next year. I raise it every time I talk to USC gente. How about the 46th?

That 2010 floricanto represents a good mailing list, word of mouth, and calls for poets. With a lineup committed, librarian Barbara Robinson, the V&V grant holder, and particularly Tyson Gaskill, executive director of communications and events at Doheny, put the plan into action for three days of reunion artists and contemporary and emerging writers. Check out the USC digital library for the readings.

Rosalind Conerly directs Co-sponsor CBCSA.

Before Mary Ann goes On, Billy welcomes the director of USC’s Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs, Rosalind Conerly. CBCSA Co-Sponsors tonight’s reading, Three Laureates: Poets of the New California. Conerly talks about shared interests and literary initiatives beyond one event.

While Billy introduces Mary Ann, Lewis grabs me to take a portrait of her and her compañera Rosalind Conerly. They embrace like long-time friends. We speculate a bit about doing poetry events with the Laureate, CBCSA, and poets from the eastside. A ver.

Rosalind Conerly and Robin Coste Lewis. Conerly's organization, Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs, Co-sponsored the reading.

Lewis is subject of the Sunday LA Times' Arts&Books section, an above the fold spread of photo with a dramatic introduction by Jeffrey Fleishman (link). It's a major piece, with a jump to the back page where it takes the entire print text hole. The web version displays added art, the print edition's giant spread features the third foto on the scroll. The paper  crops the group foto on that the web shares in  full, Lewis with three fellow 2015 National Book Award winners

Mary Ann relates the beginnings of el centro and how she serendipitously came to sponsor the historic first major institutional floricanto, 1973's El Festival de Flor y Canto. A retired English professor, Mary Ann knows how to work a receptive audience and exceeds her minute. Y que? We're having a good time. It's the old Centro atmosphere.

Mary Ann Pacheco organized the 1973 Festival de Flor y Canto where future Laureate Hererra, on screen, read.

In 1973, Mary Ann Pacheco introduced the poet frozen on screen.

I begin my minute by snapping the shutter a couple times. Just as I relate being a narc and Mary Ann chips in “CIA,” a commotion in the hallway announces the arrival of the emeritus United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera.
He was expected. Ever since ECC let us enter, young Herrera at the floricanto in 1973 has been frozen in time on la pantalla at the far end of the long, narrow space. The wall-length mural of movimiento and centro icons sets the ambience of the event--y no nos vamos.

Juan Felipe is guest of honor in keeping with the university motto, Palmam Qui Meruit Ferat, loosely translated, this is what you’ve earned, brother. And we’re ready to get down.

Juan Felipe Herrera knits together a narrative memoir responding to  Vela's question about floricanto and news developments.

The select audience will tell their grandchildren about the meet and greet. If they made a mental note, they’ll remember the digital library at USC holds a full collection of chicana and chicano writers reading their own stuff, from both floricantos. That’s a point Barbara Robinson is happy to reiterate to the assembly. Barbara purchased one of two extant sets of 1973 videos for UCRiverside. It’s owing to Barbara Robinson that Festival de Flor y Canto returned to USC via those DVDs (link). The first time I met Billy, he knew there had been a Flor y Canto but USC had lost its institutional memory.

I hope readers are devouring the work of the Laureates. Herrera read at both floricantos, and USC's digital library streams them. Click here, explore, set a bookmark, enjoy. The 2010 videography is courtesy Jesus Treviño's Barrio Dog Productions. Of special note, Herrera's 2010 opens with the same dedicatory poem he opens with in 1973. It's a wonderful parallel and time trip not to miss.

Gioia and Lewis weren’t at the floricantos, but they should read at the next one. Each has solid internet documentation via news accounts and recorded performances. Libraries and bookstores will supply all or some of the Laureates’ published work. My favorite Herrera title, out of an accomplished oeuvre, is still 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border. (link)

The California Laureate told me about an upcoming ballad and I'm glad he did. The Los Angeles Book Review, not affiliated with the Los Angeles Times, recently published Dana Gioia's ballad recounting his grandfather's fame and demise, "The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz." (link)

Dana Gioia's thought in word and gesture

Robin Coste Lewis emphasizes a thought

Rapt listeners include Herrera's granddaughter and daughter, Marisol Herrera.

California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia reminds me he’s half-Mexican. I don’t hold it against him, but I don’t tell him that. He presents himself with the aplomb and assuredness of the high-ranking corporate guy he used to be. I used to be one of those, too, and we chat easily. Nowadays, other than California Poet Laureate with a resumé, Gioia is a USC professor.



As Laureate, one of Gioia’s goals is a visit to all 58 counties of the state. The USC performance with Lewis and Herrera will count as another one for LA. Gioia visits Berdoo in upcoming weeks.

Here’s a heads-up link from the Laureate's website to the unpoeted counties (you know who you are, Mono, Tulare, but Santa Barbara County?). Hold a floricanto, invite your state’s Poet Laureate. The journey of a thousand Laureates begins with a single letter.

El Centro’s 3 Laureates event that evening and the afternoon’s meet and greet is part of what the centro is for, but more, why kids go to college. Open a person's eyes to more, and new, spend time in company of famous people, eat free.

Tardeada preparations ca. 1973

In grad school, a centro tardeada would be a highlight of the week. Lots of food and soft drinks. Billy Vela keeps up that custom with ample victuals. Crostini with a tasty salsa cruda, I’m told, for the wheat-eaters. Mary Ann, Robin Coste Lewis, and I, are happy for the vegan gluten-free choice, thank you, Billy. Lety urged a cup of freshly-brewed coffee.

I’m happy to meet a grandchild who can tell his grandchildren about this day. A high school senior, he is headed for USC and its biomedical programs. Events like this, and the reading, are vital for raza youth to see and hear and only the most fortunate get to. I’m happy he’s here.

Being from el centro’s earliest history, I am alone except for Mary Ann Pacheco here. But it feels good, the old guy with memories of the first Centro, la palomilla comes to USC, of down the hall and around the corner by the elevator, the darkrooms of the DT. Taking those fotos of Zeta and all the other movimiento poets stayed with me all those years. So when I retired from the world of work, I launched the campaign to return the lost floricanto to USC. And then… And that is how an old alumn talks, que no?

I wasn’t a narc.

Foto Gallery: 

Tyson Gaskill, top left, managed and executed the floricanto plan in 2010 Woman in green hat is a long-time friend of Juan Felipe Herrera Professor  Consuelo Siguenza-Ortiz, introduced segments of the 2010 floricanto

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Piñata Books
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558858407
• ISBN-13: 978-1558858404

Danny Trejo kicks off
reading at Vets' Hall                                               
    by
Daniel Cano                                                                   
                                                                   
                                                           A Spiritual Connection
                                                                       

     Culver City AMVETS Post 2 sponsored a reading by Otilio “O.T.” Quintero at 7:00 P.M. Saturday, September 23rd, at the Post’s historic Pete Valdez Hall.

     O.T., who retired in 2016 from his assistant director’s position at Barrio’s Unidos, a non-profit organization specializing in gang prevention and non-violence among Chicano/Latino youth throughout central California, says that after 25 years in the non-profit world he needed a change.

     It was a difficult, but a necessary transition, Quintero told me before his reading. I asked, “Does that mean not everyone at Barrios Unidos was happy with your decision?”

     He smiled, and said, “You could say that.”

    A natural raconteur, Quintero confessed he wasn’t sure where his new path would lead. He told the audience he felt like Moses heading into the desert.

     A mountain of a man, with a soul to match, Quintero said that in 1976, he’d stayed with a Chol Mayan family, near Palenque. His mentor had been a Mayan named don Manuel, who led him on an excursion into the spiritual world. Otilio wasn’t exactly sure why the family had taken him in, but he was glad they did. The experience changed Quintero’s life and set him on a spiritual quest.

     He described how his work with Barios Unidos and Homies Unidos, though gratifying, had shown him the dark side of life with adults lost in the prison system to kids suffering in juvenile hall. In El Salvador, he’d watched as street children, some no more than four years-old, huddled in groups sniffing glue just to make it through one more day. "We have no one but each other," one child told him when Otilio asked why they would do such a dangerous thing. Knowing that these children would succumb to the streets, Otilio remembered crying out to God one day, why? The answer came back, “How do you think I get my angels.”

    He has met and worked with many influential people, including Cesar Chavez, Tom Hayden, and Father Greg Boyle. Meeting Hugo Chavez was a highlight to his career. In 2005, Quintero was awarded the California Wellness Peace Prize. So, after all of this, where was there to go?

    Quintero began writing, mainly to clear his head. As he wrote, he began to explore the incredible journey on which “the creator” had led him. A funny thing happened. He couldn’t stop writing, even at times when his fingers cramped so much, he felt he couldn't continue. Before he knew it, he had written the story of his life, starting with his childhood, growing up in Three Rocks, a housing project for farm workers, a few miles outside of Fresno, “A real hell hole,” as he described it. It seemed that for many unfortunate souls in this “purgatory”, drugs or death was the only way out.

     Ultimately, Quintero completed a manuscript he called “Memoirs of a Barrio Warrior.” When he thought he needed a more literary title, he realized the title captured his life, exactly, so he left it. That’s what he’d been, in his youth, and in his professional career: a barrio warrior.

     The evening opened with a welcome by Francisco Juarez, a Vietnam veterans and Post 2 board member, who helped organize the event. Juarez said he is trying to connect, in a creative way, military veterans with the community, an effort to unify everyone, culturally. As a veteran, Juarez told the audience, “When military veterans and barrio warriors get together, something special happens.” With that, Juarez introduced actor/activist Danny Trejo, who attended the event to support his friend O.T. Quintero.

     Trejo picked-up on Juarez’ theme regarding the association of military veterans and barrio warriors. Trejo said, “I watched most of the Vietnam War from my cell in San Quintin, and I couldn’t understand why they’d send those beautiful kids to fight [a war] when they had an abundance of convicts in the penitentiary.”

                                                                                 

     Irma Velasquez, a spiritual leader and teacher from Puebla, Mexico started the night with a cleansing and meditation, which Quintero said helped create a sacred place for the audience and for himself.

     Quintero told the audience that for him, a reading was like a rainbow. His manuscript was the rainbow, and choosing what to read was like choosing a color of the rainbow. Sitting at a table, opening his manuscript, Quintero welcomed everyone, and began reading.

     Overall, Quintero read for more than two hours, taking a short break in between. Quintero’s strength is in the rich, though often, tragic situations he has experienced. Though, as he says, he always comes back into the light.

     One story that resonates was when Quintero and his group, visiting El Salvador's Homies Unidos, boarded a city bus. Trying to be friendly, Quintero turned to acknowledge a kid in the back. The boy returned the look with a blank stare. Quintero wrote that he’d felt annoyed with the boy. He waited a while and turned to look at the kid again. This time, the boy held his stare. After a few seconds, the boy pulled back his jacket to reveal a grenade in his waistband. Quintero prayed, thinking that his life was about to end. Luckily, the group leader announced they were disembarking at the next stop. As Quintero stood, he turned again to the boy, who, this time, nodded, his lips shaped into a smirk, maybe a smile. Quintero wrote that he was so shaken, he could hardly explain to the group what he’d just witnessed.

                                                                                 

    According to Quintero, his book will be released soon. It is now with the editor. I congratulated Otilio after the reading, and I told him that all of us could use good editing. Unfortunately, for many of us who publish with small private or university presses, good editing is expensive, and a luxury, and we don’t get enough of it.

     Some say that without a great editor like Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Hemingway, Wolf, and Fitzgerald might today just be second-rate writers. What I wouldn't do for a friend like Gertrude Stein, who mentored Hemingway while he was an apprentice writer in Paris.

     A big abrazo must be given to Francisco “Frank” Juarez, Chase Rivera, his staff, and Ray Delgado, and the veterans who assisted with the event. It might be true that special things happen when military veterans and barrio warriors get together.

Melinda Palacio

Fulton, Kentucky holds its annual Banana Festival September 9-16

When my friends came to visit Santa Barbara, it was the first time they had seen the Pacific Ocean. It was such a joy showing off my home state to folks from Kentucky, via New Orleans, where they now live. Last year, we went to Arroyo Burro Beach, Santa Barbara, Solvang, San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Paso Robles, and to Hearst Castle. This year, I visited their home town of Fulton, Kentucky, where the Banana Festival takes place every September. The center of the festival takes place in a border town that's known as the Twin Cities of Fulton, Kentucky and South Fulton, Tennessee.

Banana Festival in Twin Cities

A breakfast of waffles, biscuits, bacon, eggs, sausage, the Pecan Grove B&B pulled out all the stops.

I tried the ribs, but missed the sausage with gravy.

Many of the banana festival activities were things that I might have seen at previous small town festivals, such as the parade, the antique car show, concert, and juried photography show. However, one thing I had never seen was a greased pig contest. Despite my big love for bacon and eating all things pork, I must add that no pigs were harmed in the greased pig contest.

The pigs squealed over being doused in Baby Shampoo.

Listening to these little piglets squeal, you would think they are on their way to becoming applewood bacon. They were very wary about being separated from each other and even more put out by having Baby Shampoo squirted all over them. I hear the recent transition to use Baby Shampoo is more gentle and humane than the previous dish soap. I wonder if in days of yore they used bacon grease (this sounds so wrong), since it is called a greased pig contest.

cute little pigs

 There were several things that the organizers of the contest did to make the pigs' squeal more tolerable. Although the pigs were not being harmed, the squeal was enough to make you turn away. However, I was impressed that with each grouping of children, they brought out different pigs so as to perhaps decrease the amount of mental stress the pigs underwent. After all running from small children who are attempted to grab your hind legs sounds scary no matter what kind of animal you are.

more pigs

The groups pairings were ages Pre-School through first, grades second and third, and grades fourth and fifth. They younger children seemed just as baffled as I was upon first witnessing this contest. Initially, the lady in cut-off overalls, pink pig mask, and a whistle explained to the children that the idea is to grab a pig's back legs. However, many seemed afraid to go near the pigs. The pig's squeal and smell probably didn't help either. I sure wouldn't go near them. I don't care to ever be reminded of their squeal or smell. It didn't help that they tried to rub off the shampoo by rolling in the mud.  This city girl was happy to watch the action from behind the fence.

The youngest children gear up for the contest.

This piglet slipped out of the pig wrangler's hands.

Adults, including my friend Anthony, got involved when a wily pig escaped the corral.

The girl in pink wins for the older set.

I've been lucky enough to share the stage with a host of tremendously talented poets, among them Martin Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Maureen Seaton. What moves me about their work is a clarity, a lack of fussiness, and a celebration of the ordinary; reveling its sacredness, its ubiquity. Jessica Helen Lopez embodies all that and is searingly fearless in her writing and performance. 

Her poetry is both elegant and visceral, a true heart-opening experience. It is intimate, tender, sharp and focused. She captures the small moments, the inner life, and raises the banner of history and ancestry.

I have been fortunate enough to perform with her, too, and I celebrate not only her work, but her commitment to mentoring, teaching and community building.

Contact Jessica  via jessicahelenlopez@gmail.com






La Malinche is my Next Door Neighbor
for Mariah B.

La Malinche is my next door neighbor.  
She sometimes snubs her half-lit cherry-tipped cigarettes in
my rose bushes, wild crimson and tangled green thorns spilling
from my yard along the border of her yard and back again.

I don’t mind.  I like the swing of her hair,
her swagger, and when it snows, the way she 
walks barefoot in the dusted-over ash-like whiteness

as if she approaches the lip of volcan
a deity sacrificial offering and not just checking
her afternoon mail, as mundane as the rest of us

La Malinche is my next door neighbor
and she left her husband or he left her
who cares, but we’re both glad he’s gone—
conqueror, territorial land-whore, abuser,
whiplash tongue, Eurocentric,
son-of-a-motherless
goat bastard.

La Malinche taught me how to cuss, how 
to use my spit like the poison it is meant to be—
One fine Sunday I dropped by to have some tea
she walked about her house nude, a glowing stone
nipples like brown saucers, pubic
bone a mossy fern.  She anointed 
me with oil of rose and the steam rose
from the slumbering coil of her sleeping hair

Sometimes she looks at me, in this peculiar way
eyes ablaze as two gold discs, two fiery suns
a mantle of stars woven into
stems, cornea, lens and rod.

I do not mind.  I am not afraid.  
I warm myself against the small 
bonfires of her mouth.

Everyday that shadow woman braids my hair
her serpent tongue licking the strands
darting in and out the corded knots

La Malinche is my BFF, my road dog,
my homegirl, my ride or die bitch, my Nahuatl 
locura dream, my two-step partner, my grito-howling
moon woman.

La Malinche is my next door neighbor.
Sometimes she borrows money from me.  
Rent ain’t free, you know, and her baby daddy
don’t come ‘round here no more.

But we prayed to La Virgen Morena Tonantzin 
for that small miracle, so there you go.

Eeeoooo!  And that fat baby of hers, grows
rounder every day.  His borderland patas plush,
his mestizo purple-scented lips drooling,
only two chiclet-sized teeth in that whole 
head of his.

La Malinche is my next door neighbor.
So of course, I babysit for her. That’s how
Homegirls do. And that baby is always
hungry, voracious.  I slip him
slivers of dark chocolate, orange rinds
with some of the sticky sweet still attached
to the skin.  We split a sweet tamal and I fashion
for him figurines from the discarded corn husks.

His manos always stained yellow with sweet grass, copal.
The black orbs of his eyes starless but bottomless
A forever Mestizo. The first of his kind.
Pobrecito, all that pressure. And when I give him milk
he laps up with a small pink, forked tongue.

This boy is our angel, original la raza cosmica.

La Malinche is my next door neighbor.
She lives in the painted lady with the pitched pink roof.
She attends CNM Community College part-time and studies Linguistics.
Go figure.

la lengua que es una India desta tierra

She ain’t no victim.  She ain’t no traitor.
She ain’t your Rosetta Stone.

She is the goddess of grass.
Malinalli Malintzin Tenepal, one who speaks
much and with liveliness

A survivor who works part-time at the Dog House, 
Off’ve Central, likes to go out dancing
on Fridays, feeds her baby  cinnamon flavored blue corn mush
sometimes dyes her hair blond like those pinche guerras who live in the Heights
and she is my best friend.

She has been alive for 500 years and counting.
She is the oldest young person I know.

She is eternal.  She is infinite.  She is the mother of our siblings.

La Malinche es una reina de las estrellas 
La rosa de el volcan

La Malinche is my next door neighbor
la espina la sangre el petalo 
The thorn the blood the petal


A Poem for the New World


In the land of the white cranes
skyscrapers and bank buildings
glisten like the seven cities of gold.

Bricks sweat beneath a blood-fueled
sun and the dark-skinned arms of men
are etched in glyphs. Everywhere
everybody is a sacrifice.

I am not an optimist but I pretend
to be. It gets me jobs. Secures
my place in the academe. 

Mostly I scribble salt songs
on the back of napkins. Write
dissertations for the fanatics
in love with symposiums and
esoteric words.

Mostly I wish we all believed
in murder again.

This the quiet eye 
of my god.

The Mexica knew the way.
Knew that dismemberment 
coupled with good ol’ blood-
letting was the answer to all
things beautifully violent.

Knew that the heart was the
only organ worth wrenching.

I was born of the Seven
Great Caves. For 200 years
I went searching. Held the sun
in place with my bare hands.

The eagle clawed the nopal.
Juice spurt from the flesh.
Talon and truth.

I, the steampunk modernity
of Quetzalcoatl. All hose,
oil and piston. 

No one needs to colonize me.
I colonize myself.

When Depression and Marriage Happen

blame it on the sad summer air & the pale yellow
light of late afternoon when the bees swath the
lavender bush & the buzzing drives me mad

i have nothing left to prepare in the kitchen or clean
in the mud room & so I busy myself with the hatred of
you & me & the undeserved life we share

we exchange paltry kisses upon your arrival
our lips feign the ooh & ahh of our reunion
there is real kindness there but i never let it in

in 1978 i was born a wild ram
zodiac symbol for aggression
& stubborn to a damned fault

a squall of amniotic fluid & clenched
limbs grey-skinned like the dead
i was cut lengthwise from my mother’s gut 

you know now i was never born at all

blame it on the stillborn air of today’s fever
the mid-June monsoon that flirts but never delivers
the rusted branches of the Chinese Pistache that do not bud

our front yard looks like our first year of marriage
pristine & proper in all the right places
a cozy patch of dirt

in 1983 i entered school a tamed dove
pigtails wound in yarn & cheap plastic
shoes adorned my long eager feet

i let him touch me between the legs
at least five times and told no one
not even the soft-hearted teacher whom I loved

i remember laughing & swatting his hand
playing keep away across the heat of the black
tarred playground & my legs melted mid-run 

you know now i was wicked but didn’t mean to be
you know now i never knew the language of no

blame it on my small voice
blame it on my callous parents
blame it on the migration patterns of this heart
blame it on my drunk brother
blame it on the red-cheeked smear of shame 
blame it on the melancholia and the pendulum of 
my mood swinging 
swinging 
swinging

blame it on
me

i could have been a bigger brighter version of myself

but blame it on this & blame it on that
& blame you & always remember
to blame them

in 1990 I called the cops on my father at least six times
those boys in blue a dizzying disappointment
not so much as my mother dripping in her sorrow

in 1996 i kissed 15 boys in one night just because
in 1998 a late term abortion
in 2000 i wrote a poem and then buried it
in 2001 i swallowed a ball of light i named the moon
in 2002 a baby broke from between my legs

you know now that motherhood is a martyrdom 
you know now who i am

there is no blame in all of the world that could
help me unlearn the things i have learned

blame and sadness are a rootless endeavor
forgiveness even more burdensome

instead i want to float, hover above my body
airless into the pale yellow heat

let you know that i tried, i was trying
but those bees those bees those endless
incessant bees

keep at their mournful
choir of buzzing 
their pitiful song of
you and me


A Familiar Word

I do. I do love my
family, my daughter of onyx,
husband cut from natural light
my slim brothers like twin fists
who were my first children
and then the mother 

martyr my misty-eyed
foe and friend

and you father

suspended like a lie
an accoutrement to the pithy life
that bore my name

I admire the cruelty, the salt
lick you taught to me, the slap
happy of your tongue

so giving your insults
your five year silences
your glittering anger
but never your absence

I do. I do love 
the choke box, the five
foot chain that splintered
my neck, my wrist, my
shattered ankle that I chewed
through to the glistening bone

to escape
as a wild animal
who keens for its freedom must

that rusted room of yours
with no door
no chink of light to meditate upon

I do. I do
know how 
to love this lie
that tastes of truth 
and salt

that tastes 
of a familiar word
on the tip 
of my blunt shaped
tongue


I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.
-Billie Holiday

The Mother

I haven’t written a poem in your likeness for some time.
I tried.  I took the broom and beat the cobwebs.
Lit one hissing cigarette after hissing cigarette,
Let a dish fall to the floor, a porcelain scream.
I let the quiet shattering happen but could not eek it out.

Then I thought of this. You the young mother,
a knotted belt at your waist, slim and attractive
in photos.  Your teeth gleaming and straight
like a string of pearls.

You hosted one birthday party in honor
of me my whole life. I was four years young
and it was a California Easter Sunday.
The kind of Sunday people move to the West Coast for.

You drew caricatures of rabbits and fashioned
yellow tufts of baby ducks.  Dressed me in
my best cut-off jeans and plaited my hair.
Posed me in front of the cake, the cousins,
the wrapped gifts.

Picture after picture reveals that I was happy.

Mother, you were perfect as a plum then.
Slicing the cake. A knife just a knife in your hand
and nothing more.

I am ten years older than you then.
A whole decade and more of misdirected men
have come and gone for me, a daughter
of my own. Many birthdays have since 
passed that I care less to remember.

And it took me this long to notice
the one thing missing from those
Easter photos that long ago day.

The father.

The Daughter 

The evening that I notice my girl is changing, sprouting
with hair into womanhood, I see crisp lines like
small black lightning erupt from the inverted 
spoon of her left armpit.

The heat presses against the window a boiling
summer monsoon and she is a sweat tangle 
fast asleep on my side of the bed.

The butter pallor of the reading lamp permeates
every corner of my bedroom illuminates the
salt beads that congregate at her temples.

I sit awhile and watch her.

One arm is thrown above her head as if
she aims to catch a pop fly in her unconsciousness.
The other arm pressed to the small bell of her rib cage.
The arm is a branch a bird might perch upon.

The chest rises and falls like a doughy bread.

This is my life’s purpose,
monitor the breath, the hair
that takes to her legs like 
a brush fire across California 
summer hills. To move the
lithe body from one bed to another.
To notice the faint shadow like a dusty 
charcoal above the lip.

I know her body like I know my own.

I am prepared to be prepared for this shift,
this inevitable change of 
the cosmological order of her being.
I am her ordained keeper of body.

And it is when I know,
that I must let go
that the real dying will begin

That mother and daughter diploid cells
will have truly separated into their
own acts of insular creation.

That I must step away and watch
from the light house that all old 
mothers retire.

Now, I hold the golden meiosis of her body close,
this sweaty sleeping girl who almost
slips through my arms, 

walk from the buttery light
of my room and into that greatness
of the long dark hallway.


To the Woman Who Has Become My Daughter’s Stepmother

Your hatred for me is a biblical error,
a misstep or a twelve-year tragedy I should have seen coming.
You probably don’t know this but when your man was my man

he spat on my face once.
I allowed the sinewy rope of saliva to stay
there a bit, sluice-loosed in the corner pocket
of my eye, the thin ridge of my nose.  It glistened. 

Opaque, a rivulet of starry-eyed diamonds 
Above the dovetail of my lip.  A melting pearl.
My daughter has my lips.  It was the end.
The grand finale that all historical tyrants yearn

for;  the last act of warfare or matricide 
or mass swan dive into a suicidal fuck-it-all-I’ve-lost
Hail Mary.  You probably don’t know this either but he ran.
He ran from my doorstep

shrill with fright like a boy who lit the wrong end
of a Black Cat firecracker.  Odd how I
never thought to call on the cops.
Strange how our instincts can be pulverized to a dead end,

a pulp of echoless nerves. Live wires hollowed and sleepy-eyed 
for so many years. But you, with your terrible silences, your 
taciturn cheekbones (high and pointed not unlike my own) so 

colorless your glance and a double-barrel shotgun 
where your vocal cords would be.  Buckshot
choked back and the smoke amasses in my belly,
coiled like a sleeping snake.  Translucent, but

very much there.  Very much real.
It is not enough to call you trigger.  You hate 
me the way he hated me and it makes me hate
myself until I remember that I don’t.

Hate me, that is.

That is an old bone I no longer worry.
To the woman who, after all these winding and unwinding
Years, has become my daughter’s stepmother:
Reminder, her body is not a target.  Her spirit

not a pin-cushion for your sharpened daggers.
She is not your misplaced misanthropic antidote.
When you have imbibed all that is left to absorb
that thing that resembles compassion, remember.

When you have wrung the last dark waters from
The slack wash towel of his heart, remember.
My daughter is not you, is not your myopic version
Of me.  Is not him, a remote and angry island.

She is fidelity.  She is deliberate song and stretch of bone.
She is the impetus of a holy and naïve love.
And lest you forget, remember.  Her mother is a blade.
Your blood itching to be pulled to the surface


“Always this battle, this in-betweeness of the celebratory comfort of self-love and the devastating effects of self-loathing. Always, this tiresome conflict.  What a dazzling train wreck this life.” -  Some random patient said to their psychotherapist.


I Take My Poet Friends to (Briefly) Meet My Dad

I.

I am a master copy
cat copy cat copy
so I mimicked the love
my father pretended or
thought he copied
from television an emotion
that doubled for affection
and entertainment

and when we hugged beneath a bouncy
yellow sun bouncy yellow sun 
bouncy was the embrace 
a tasteful illusion like mimeograph
the poets looked on from
the travel car and admired how
he gave me silver cans of diet
sodas to quench my friends’ thirst

one poet even exclaimed at how
he looked so young and fit
for a man of fifty-five!

but I coulda’ told them that
looks go as far as a commercial
for toothpaste or an ad for Paxil
or a man’s cologne called Brute

and what we take for an original
facsimile always disappoints
so that sometimes the hurt almost
almost almost almost
almost mostly
feels real

II.

and so we drive away
a carload of waxen mannequins
and decide we should smoke
some grass at the park of
my childhood and feeling obtuse
and too-tight in my clothes
after a morning filled with fakery
I lie some more about the
fights I have seen or been in

all my tales are heroic accounts
of girls smashing girls’ faces
smashing girls' faces 
smashing girls' faces
in the dirt right over there
by the swing set or by the
carved out maple trees near
the near-rotted picnic benches
but really the only truth I never
did tell was the time I bullied
a wiry rope of a girl and how
she looked just like me and
called a man father who looked
just like mine hollered 
just like mine
prickly and certifiably insane
like mine

and how that girl died every
evening beneath a bonfire
of sightless stars, fingerless
trees and a limitless sky

right over there in the rolling
green moss that glowed like 
a family secret in the childhood
of my park among the 
white night moths that
fluttered and fettered until
they could fly no more
and finally fell home
to a mass grave of
tiny and individual
green sharp blades.

III.

and I never did tell how after 
each nightly resurrection
the girl worked to gather herself

to heave her way home 
where he waited in the 
house on the cul-de-sac
(just another way to say dead end)
where the light burned in the window 
blanch and white-hot
and empty-eyed
as always


There Are No Words for Addiction

i have been told to fight the good fight
but for all my brain cells and their synaptic worth

i don’t recall why fighting has ever been called
good or detrimental or virtuous and without blame

instead i remember skin beneath the nails
slivers of flesh like half-moons housed at the tip of finger

five digit reminders that I have clawed my way here
i could blame my addictions on you and you

i could pinpoint every sloppy drink and slurred avocation 
but i don’t because i am too lazy for counseling, too sideway

and hidden from Freudian couches and whatnot
so i go on with the bottle and suck the life from cigarettes

so i go on and on and ignore my childhood and i love my sins
i keep them caged like quarantined pets, my little maimed birds

pull them out during the dark hours of the night and on
and on i go plucking the drab plumage from the puckered skin

one feather for the night you opened your wrists and hollered
into the open mouth of midnight forever changing who I was

one quill, a barbed plume for the night you pounced upon my mother
and both tumbled about the couches spilling your savage blood

always the fighting and the self-righteous seething wanting
my forgiveness but still never asking for it

so sweet the fight like a fermented gift, such sugar
rotted fruit to pick from between the teeth

my little beautiful avarices
no i shall hold on to them

they are mine to give, ungive, or keep
and this fight, good or not, is the only thing that keeps me alive


Wednesday’s Wife

I am Wednesday’s wife
and you arrive fresh from 
the train with your crooked
smile and smell of the city
on your clothes and in your hair.

I have been playing good
woman all day –

all day soaping laundry,
boiling tea leaves and even scrubbing
the shit from the dogs’ kennel – 

all in the name of the woolly
musk of your maleness.  I didn’t
find your lost set of car keys, Love
and my disappointment 
was a dangerous sadness.

Today, I cried when I murdered
five blue bottle flies with the hot pink
swatter we bought from the thrift store
their oily bodies smeared across the kitchen window.

How could I mourn such pitiless creatures?
Such insignificant blood?

What new meekness is me?
Where is my flaming bra?

The delightful shuddering
fault line that you provoke,
with a single finger
a sideways glance
stirs me to a maddening surrender.

I am Wednesday’s wife, Thursday’s martyr,
a penny-pinching Friday mother.

I greet you at the door
like a loaf of starch white bread
like a commercial for laundry detergent
or Stouffer’s Triple Cheese Casserole.

I search your eyes for the weather.
It is five o’ clock everywhere in the world.

If you were a woman
perhaps I would 
take up no such issues
with my easy submission

but that was an old courage
that failed me long ago
and the tall masculinity of
you is a familiar robe

we are the newfound 
apprentices to our shared silences
 – waiting 

I could curl up like a lapdog
and let you watch me die
let you crush me with your
oh-so-larger-than-life love

I could slip the knife from
the woodblock and hold it
to my own neck to save
you the time

instead I shave the carrots
with it

insidious in its sharpness
laboring beneath my deft fingers
dicing potatoes, cutting chicken
from bone, paring away the
gristle and fat and meat of life

You settle into your evening
your shoulders a big chair
your comfortable love.

You eye me like a high-ball.

In the kitchen the water
is coming to a frantic boil.

Pots spit an urgent steam
from the side of their 
metallic lips, murmuring 
something 
something
indecipherable.

I lean recklessly
over the open range,
the heat of it enflaming 
the skin over my breasts
ear close as to not miss
a single sound of these 
individual flames
each pan sizzling
a new sing-song
that sounds like this:

Dinner is almost done, dear.
Dinner is almost
done.


Meat, Bone, and Blood

Today is meat.  Living in the body.  Legs are pistons,
boat propellers and rudder.  Mouth and loam.  I swim
close to some lake bottom, pounds of water 
pressing me into a cube.

Still I have to squeeze the oranges
and, in the morning, butter bagels.  Hair to be braided.
Nylon basketball shorts tumble in the dryer.  Daybreak
smells of Air Wick and sunny-side up.

Today is all bones but no time for that.  She has
algebra equations to coax, a button popped
from the top of her favorite blouse.  Dinner
is stinking on the stove top.

Here is the blood.  All stopped up inside of me.
Primordial mud, rusted paste, and iron cells
swimming in the veins.  The day still takes its roll call.
Warm the motor, pump gas.  Idle in traffic.  Drive.

Meat, bones, blood and motherhood.  The tallow of the willful.
Whittle the sound of this litany into your tongue.
The feral love for your daughter 
is a dead giveaway 
of your humanness.

This life rattles along.  Alarm clock, cat calls,
men in suits signing
your paycheck.

The punch clock. The hangover.
The trips to the mechanic and the 
morning commute.
Mid-term early voting and don’t
forget to take your birth control.
The meat, the blood of the bone stewing.

All of your friends think they are sadder
than you.  They pile their stories in
your ear.  Mandibles open and close.
One-upping your depression.

You let them
think so.

Knowing the truth.

Homesick

this house that no one
knows where it goes when
the lights go down –
porch bulb pops shut
and nobody admires the
calla lilies that die in
the back office, the front door
that closes like a suitcase
or a coffin lid or a boulder
wedged into the mouth of catacomb

incense smolders without the
usual admirers and the naked
lady collage I created
one sweaty summer ago wears
tiny beards of dust
not in the least bit pornographic
or offensive in the way I had
intended 

for none of my best provocateurs 
come ‘round here no more
to pay their sordid respect
or to drink up all the beer

that is how it goes these 
days the spider webs pile
in the corner and the laundry
may lay around for weeks
who cares but not you
or I or her as we simper
and a glowing lady painted
to hold hands with her glowing
self is the only impervious
shrine of beauty left
to burn above our watery bed
the only thing that reminds
me of home

this is where nowhere goes
to be left alone and 
no, I do not love it here
but I love you and for you
I name myself effigy
burn my way through seven
layers of hell until Judas himself
tells me to leave, leave already
all ready to leave?


The Poem I Most Fear

In my happiness still 
I burn, burn with the mad-eye of a jewel on fire
green like the stink of money or those silly sheets 
we bought from the Mexicana
dollar-store that one incendiary afternoon 
we drank, drank that funky wine.

I should have known since that limp-dick night 
we met at the bar, the stars, stars
would twirl like a drunken debutante and fall 
sometime some weekend like a toppled religion.

Love is a damned thing, ain’t it? 
All honey-eyed and beer fog brimming 
with promise and thoughts of processed sugar
green Kool-Aid and a lifetime of white 
picket fence fucking.

Don’t ask me to write a poem about your legislature, 
your esoteric double-tongued
political agenda, all the starving babies starving 
in this god-forsaken vacant land—

I know misery too.  My thighs ring true with this sadness everyday. 

Don’t say my poem ain’t 
woman enough.  
That I ain’t 
soft enough for you. 

Love is a foolhardy 
verb, a trite vowel.  
A mean little slit 
of a bitch.

Love be
that cowardly night I said,

I do.


A Poem for My Breasts

The striations are present.  The puckered zipper scars like trolley tracks.  The brown nipples my daughter never suckled. One small cherry mark on the left tit that I name Blood Star and an assortment of punctuated moles, heavy with the lack of touch.  Notice how our areolas sleep like nesting snail, warm mollusk body cupped by bra.  I wish this were a love letter or a Nerudaesque ode but you are thirty years of slanted rain.  I write this braless, without blouse and warmed by the dapple of white sun bleaching the skin.  
No, I lie to you breasts.  I sit twisted as always into this vise grip of black satin, underwire sneering.  The padding, the lift, the lace and trellis of the pinched breasts.  This embarrassingly expensive bra. 
Understand that I hoped for you before I knew what you were.  In my embryo sleep of dark matter and inner space, my phantasmagoric fever, I sought you.  First for my mother’s, and her already having cut them from her chest, there was nothing left for me.
And then for my own to rise like swelling tides, like a labored moon and tethered star.  I courted the both of you.  With the wistful mirror gazes of adolescence.  The kneading of the tart nipple, the pull, the stretch of skin.  The bemoaning vigilance that my body should open into symphony at last. 
And in the anger of spit I lashed at you. I despised you like a father.
When you finally rose like a dusty bread know that I never treated you like a spring break calamity. When you sat dripping with unused milk I mourned.  When you slept dreamless I let you rest.  When you became hardened soured apples I let you live.  When you drooped like eyelids I let you be photographed.   When you pushed against another woman’s body I let you sing.  When you agreed to take a husband I vowed we should always be free.
To my first fleshly children who grew despite me, I owe you something holy, reverent. I owe you an apology.

But what a foto. Serbian slab bacon.  

foto: Amelia ML Montes at the Farmer's Market in Novi Sad

Magic at UCI Magulandia Opening
Michael Sedano

Darling, I am growing older
Silver threads among the black

I am humming the tune to that song on the drive south from Pasadena to Irvine, where UCI’s art school scheduled the public opening of its PST:LA/LA blockbuster event, Aztlán to Magulandia: The Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert “Magu” Lujan. The song acknowledges my canas, and my forgetfulness. I forgot to bring the camera.

La Bloga shared some fotos captured at September’s gala reception, (link) an enchanted evening worth remembering. Absent from that time are the faces gathered at the October 7 public opening reception, many here for their second visit. The gente here have warm, engaging moments with peers, remembering their friend.



All things considered, the best foto of the two events could not be pictured, the visit from Magu’s spirit that manifested above the gathering. Really. On Facebook, several artists remarked on Magu’s joining the festivities on the non-smoking campus.

‪Peter E Carrillo noted, “Yup the Monarch Butterfly was All over. I definitely noticed it. Signs of reincarnation.‬‬‬” Kathleen Roman noted, “Yes with the Magical Mariposa !!” ‪Jose Lozano said, “Flew in front of my face, I grinned!‬‬‬” I was enraptured at the silent presence. I rocked back slapped my thighs with both palms and, like Lozano, grinned in recognition.

Naiche Lujan, Magu’s son, opens his welcoming remarks wondering “what my Dad would think about all this today?” The answer arrives within a few breaths, the question still hanging in the ambiente. A gorgeous Monarch butterfly floats out of the tree line and dives toward Naiche. Almost within fingertips of a mighty leap, the stocky monarch swoops away, gliding up on thermals rising from the white stretch of concrete. It was singing.


Naiche’s talk continues and the butterfly returns. Naiche reads his eulogy poem (link) to his Dad and the mariposa returns. And returns again. And again, each visit elusively out of frame with Naiche, the butterfly hovering a moment over him. A photographer’s “missed that one” impossible moment, people saw from all around the gallery quad, totally enchanting all with eyes to see. The moment offers, too, a bit of Magu’s humor for anyone not with the spirits. Asked by a collector to sign a prismacolor drawing on the front, Magu refused. How will anyone know it’s yours, the collector challenged? “You just have to know, that’s all.”

Did you see that butterfly? Órale, Magu, I’m happy you approved. The gente who put on this career retrospective worked their nalgas off making the show, opening October 7 continuing through December 16, pleasing and amazing to all in attendance. Especially your friends, ése.

Pola was there, with Kat Roman. Mario showed the delivery van. The Wilmington Dukes showed up with their rides. Totally sharp. Your brothers were there. You knew all those artists stopped in front of an arresting work, “I never saw this before.” “Don’t you love that one over there?” “Where did he keep all this?” “I have one like this!” “If only I’d bought one then.” I’m not going to name names, who showed up today. You saw them out there munching chips and churros.


In Search of Magulandia offers a studied panorama of the artist’s career in its paper and clay exemplars, from doodling studies to magnificent masterpieces. The two gallery-show informs a public’s appreciation for how and where a known work fits into a developmental arc across the life’s oeuvre. The show offers one delight after another. Magu sure loved automobiles. And friendly, companionable figures. And pyramidal construction. His sculpture turns Magu’s styled Magulandians into three dimensional personages of stunning presence. Displayed along a “U” each can be studied and loved from all angles.

Framed and showcased studies, pencil drawings and prismacolors, fill an elongated display case filling the centeraisle of the paintings and drawings gallery. Visitors bounce from case to wall then back to case when a space vacates.

Anyone who makes art appreciates Magu’s media on display at UCI. Magu’s work ranges from small cardboard palm trees to art paper primacolors to clay figures, often in mixed media constructions. Content includes a couple of nudes but mainly denizens of the Magulandia barrio, the vatos, kids cruising, tricked out flamed up lowered fanciful swollen carruchas, and most gente in peaceful relationships with one another and their world.

For the uninitiated, the show gives an introduction to foundational Chicano art. Arte grew from the movimiento at a time schools were churning out MFA artists and critics. This professionalized chicanarte via gallery walls. In turn, the movimiento encouraged the raza’s population of autodidacts with no training but fabulous output. Chicano arte exploded into view in conjunction with and due to Magu’s ideas, images, and way with words. Magu is the O.G. chicano artivist, probably invented artivism through Magu’s Mental Menudo series, a hybrid creation mixing customs of tertullia with literary salon with a good, structured platica.

I made a point to talk to Hal Glicksman and Rhea Anastas, the curators. Hal was all over the place and I ran into Rhea by happenstance bidding my adieus to Jaime DeJong, Director of Marketing & Communications, once again congratulating her on a magnificent marketing and publicity effort, particularly UCI’s rich gallery take-ones, a 16-page color pamphlet that includes Naiche Lujan’s poem and several details from drawings and sculptures, and a comprehensive gallery listing in the sculpture hall.

To curate a show like Magulandia is a career apex. Congratulations for merit and high standards to Anastas and Glicksman. Similarly, holding the show helps put Clare Trevor School of the Arts in sharp focus as a place to keep an eye on ongoing programming.

Glicksman, who was Gilbert Lujan’s MFA adviser, writes a spectacular essay in the show’s eponymous catalog. Get the book. Leaf through devour every image. Then treat yourself to Glicksman’s sparkling text placing Magu in context of his art history upbringing.

Though there may be few gallery-goers unacquainted with chicanarte, those few would find a complex and useful introduction to Chicano Art until December 8 at UCI. Seeing the show and having the book produces a uniquely informed experience. For the “know it when I see it” audience, the two galleries will have a life-altering impact. Three people won’t like it. The same three won’t get it.

The monograph-catalog of the show offers comprehensive scholarship on the artist’s style (link), Magu’s role in the emergence of Chicano Art, his inquiry via art of chicano sensibilities and aesthetics. Copies of the book might still be available signed by the family. The color plates alone make this a worthwhile addition to one’s fine arts library or coffee table book for idle visitors.

It’s as unlikely as likely your visit to UCI will be inspired by a butterfly, don’t let that deter anyone. Plan a full day to visit both galleries repeatedly. Viewers find compelling favorites and return time and again to stand and take in that particular piece. Photography urged. Ironic, considering my lenseless state. Take along a picnic lunch. The student food court features corporate branded fast food. There’s no in and out parking.


Bees Cereus

Drought claimed my front yard sin, a green lawn in this desert. Replacing turf with cacti and drought tolerant plants brings the front yard pleasure of cactus blossoms and honeybees. This night-blooming Cereus greets the morning light fully open to welcome honeybees and bumble bees and other pollinators.

The plant has bloomed three times this year, once I liberated it from its pot. It is from a cutting 40 years back, from my mom’s garden. Around this area grow several massive specimens, twelve feet tall that cover themselves in white trumpets.




SUKKOT and the Urban Farmer



Skirball Cultural Center made an irresistible offer to select local small businesses and urban farmers. A no-charge booth at the center’s first annual Harvest Festival in exchange for staffing the all-day event with displays of abundance and preferably locally-made goods to sell. And beer and sake to taste.

Cultural tourists moving up Sepulveda Pass from the Valley are likelier to head for Getty Center Drive than the exit to the spectacular Skirball campus with its ample parking, multi-level edifices, and beautiful promenades connecting the two principal buildings.

An elevated stage with a powerful PA system faces Skirball’s central courtyard where visitors join each other dancing to a multicultural lineup that segues from a “mostly Kosher” klezmer band to a Latina Latino band featuring drumming, dancing, and infectious melodies. The dancers play havoc with the local vendors’ customer relations, but during breaks in the music and dancing, people flock to stands like McDonald’s Urban Farm to taste black-skinned avocado, hot pepper jelly, learn what to do with beautiful curved squash abundance.

The Altadena family farm is the sole booth to capture the traditional Sukkah look. Farm Manager Amelia McDonald lashed grain corn stalks to her storefront and a few overhead to symbolize the open roof of tradition. Abundance here includes brown, green, and white free range eggs, hot peppers, grain corn for milling or decoration, chard, summer squash, early winter squash and pumpkins galore. McDonald’s Urban Farm is an enterprise of Michael Sedano’s daughter.



Familia and multiculturality are the words of the day at Skirball. The Harvest Festival launches the Skirball’s week-long sukkot festival. The welcoming pamphlet explains, “Jews around the world invite family and friends into their sukkot to eat, gather, and celebrate the bounty of the season.” I spoke with the center’s marketing director and a marketing entrepreneur who organized today’s event, the center’s first. Based on the early attendance and high spirits on a sparkling Fall day, Harvest Festival is sure to become one of three annual events at Skirball, Hanukkah, a puppet festival in Spring, and now Sukkot Harvest Festival. Head up the pass to the Skirball. And the Getty.

Home Boy Industries features merchandise and bread. The woman on the right pointed out the beautiful mulit-colored wheat bread she kneaded.

The center’s Ahmanson Building hosts a second marketplace in a sedate setting sans dancers and musicians. In place of traditional booths, or Sukkah, a half-circle of tables rings the glass wall. The space has the ambience of a fancy restaurant, plush, sound-absorbing carpet. Vendors have artisan cheeses, chocolates, soaps, candles, jewelry and clothing accessories. One woman sells black horchata and other aguas frescas. At midday her vessels hold about 2/3 of their original volume. People are curious but not that thirsty to buy an agua de guanabana, or naranjada.

The fresh produce at McDonald’s Urban Farm sukkoh aside, the find of the festival is Salsaology’s naturally gluten-free moles. Richly flavorful--the recipe thickens with semillas and chile--and just the right chiloso for generalized palates, the brand has a couple of jars worth of shelf space at Whole Foods markets.

Left, Lori Sandoval, right Diana Sandoval

Owners entrepreneurs sisters Diana Sandoval and chief cook and bottle washer Lori Sandoval are well on their way to culinary success. The company’s well-being comes not just from placement in the aery environs of “food 4 more” Whole Foods but from an outstanding product. I told them about the Sandoval sisters novel by Sandra Ramos O'Briant, (link) which provoked their interest.

I don’t shop at that store but I’m making an exception. Sadly, I won't be entirely satisfied. Whole Foods inventories only two of Salsaology’s flavors, not yet the knock-your-socks-off Mezcal variety that knocked my socks off. Or was it the Jamaica mole that did the trick? Visit Salsaology’s website here.


Five Clear Voices In Early October ‘s On-line Floricanto
Debra Winegarten, Edward Vidaurre, Jolaoso Pretty Thunder, Marisol S. Leza, Sonia Gutiérrez
Klu Klux Karma By Edward Vidaurre
The Spirit Eater By Jolaoso Pretty Thunder
Immeasurable By Marisol S. Leza
Rising Rosa By Sonia Gutiérrez


The Face of a Hurricane
By Debra Winegarten

If we said breakdowns
Before breakthroughs
How would we describe
A hurricane of the heart?

If we said HaShem promised
Noach never again to destroy the world
How do we explain Harvey, Irma, Jose,
To those whose worlds are no more?

When cancer kills a beloved
Thirty-seven-year-old son,
Husband, boss
What explanation soothes the ravaged spirit
Yearning for the comfort of peace?

Grasping for sense in circumstances
Wretched with impossibilities
Is what humans do
Stretching logic until it breaks in this quest for understanding.

What lessons lay hidden in mold-infested structures
Traumatized children's faces
Minds numbed with the loss of home, hearth,
Belongings, walls, pets.

And a mad man President who tore down laws
That mandated building codes designed to withstand disasters
Pummeling carbon emission regulations and the EPA
Foaming at the mouth about building walls.

Who will rebuild Houston, Donald?
The immigrants you've scared from coming here?
The Dreamers you want to deport?
The seekers to whom you refuse asylum?

People of all colors
Rush to help their neighbors
Not black, not white, not brown
Mud erases color, Donald,
But not humanity.

What will it take to soften the heart of a mad man tyrant?
How many hurricanes will it take to teach him his lessons?
The world cannot wait, Donald.



Debra L. Winegarten is an award-winning author and publisher. Her work is focused on Texas women's history and poetry. This April her company, Sociosights Press, published "Almost a Minyan," their first children's book. By day she teaches sociology, by night, she writes. Her work is found here: www.winegarten.com and here, www.sociosights.com.


Klu Klux Karma
By Edward Vidaurre

They don't know the
difference between
dreamers and non-dreamers.

They just see color.
They see a lesser them.
They see romance as rape.
They see drug dealers &
Criminals. They see minimum
wages & complainers.
They see food stamps & free
Lunches in schools.

They hear Spanish speaking
Drug deals in our conversations.
They hear kidnapping and plots
To rob and kill in our breath.

They smell dirty diapers and
Mud necks, leaky oil and brilliantine
On our hair, they smell lard and
Taco meat, chorizo and cerveza.

They smell sex and disease
They see clay skinned faces

They hear a revolution
They hear a revolution
They hear a revolution.

But from where?
From their paranoia
Karma strikes in different ways

With different generations
Always, at the right time.

Shhhhh, listen!

The engine of karma is revving up.


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.


The Spirit Eater
By Jolaoso Pretty Thunder

Forget about me. I am of lower class, a shame and have friends and family that you cannot bring home. You will never bring me home. I will never make enough money or own enough anything because I always give it away. Born from a grim heritage. You will have to disalign yourself from me often. Hide me from your mother and father. Don't let them see my mud boots, my EBT card, my track record of having gathered up my life with my own two hands, rebuilding it from the ground up, rebuilding it with 2,3,4 jobs. Split shifts, graveyard shifts, selling shoes, stripping, cage dancing, playing the good girl under the desk in the corporate world, playing pretend, giving the border patrol my panties, sleeping in the hidden rooms at the embassy. My nails are dirty. I laugh with hard women, we drink cheap wine, work on the farm. Poor and unproud we eat with our hands here. Skin animals, pluck our own birds, it is true. I have bad ways. My mother and her 4 sisters ate raw liver, raw meat. Cussed like sailors and taught me how to haul ass, shoot guns. I am a crude one, so don't name drop, I am dumb to it anyways, not caring who's who or where it's all supposed to be or what the latest fashion is. Someone laughed at me last year, I didn't know what a "coach" was. I spat, choked, rubbed the mucus from my nose hearing of how much maza is spent on a purse. I had asked if it was brain tanned. Disremember me. You don't know me, ever. An animal, I fight day and night for my children's freedom and safety. Dark skinned and careful we can't laugh any more with your kind. The spirit eater is out here.



Immeasurable
By Marisol S. Leza

Dedicated to all the Dreamers and their families.

There’s unseen walls all around me... you like to make walls…
statistics are against me
So they say
My culture is in Limbo.
No, you’re not like us, they say
You’re too much like your people, they say
My people...
You want to be like them, they say
you’ll never be them, they say
Where is my identity?
You don’t have it…you may be able to tell me who you THINK I am
But I know who I am and what I want to be….
You try and box me and my kind into a number a percentage, but you’ll never have enough of anything to know what is in my HEART
IN MY DREAMS
IN MY HANDS
not even with your summaries your reports your statuses your research your labels your structures or your percentages.
NEVER Can you ever be able to measure my strength, OUR strength...to fight to love to persevere to educate to learn and to reach beyond that box those unseen walls you like to put up...
Your numbers your statistics your fucking percentages...
your facts are relative to me... your reality will never be mine and mine will never be yours...
There is an unseen number an unseen heart an unseen warrior you will NEVER EVER be able to measure...
Or see...Because you are blind with greed, you are blind with possessions, you are blind to look beyond those unseen walls you built yourselves... MY PEOPLE THEY ARE THE WIND, FIRE AND LIKE WATER
constant and flowing, fluid hearts, fluid strength always changing always dynamic...
Too dynamic for you to even imagine or measure...
WE WILL ALWAYS BE IMPRECISE, something you detest...
IMMEASURABLE THAT’S WHAT WE ARE…
CONSTANTLY FLOWING
Ascription you say? I say destiny
Achievement you say? I say strength
Equality you say? I say WAR
Qualities you say? I say BLOOD
Mobility you say? I say fight!!!
Wealth you say? I say I’m almost there…we’re almost there...
And we’ll never stop fighting, working, loving, and there are millions of unseen soldiers you can’t even imagine you can’t
EVER measure...
We will never be like you, and I DON’T WANT TO
...but you better be ready when I COME THROUGH.



"Marisol Saldana is a Revolutionary Chicana. Born in Texas, she was raised in South Side McAllen,in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands by lifelong activists and migrant farm worker parents. Her passion is helping people. Her survivalist and aggressive approach to life was garnered from being a domestic abuse survivor. As a single parent, her 3 children are her complete inspiration and motivation in life. Her poems are filled with anger and thought provoking issues dealing with work, family, social inequality, feminism, and the world of academia. Her poetic influences are Immortal Technique and his brutally honest rhymes. From the Barrio to the burbs she credits her past and current struggles in life to her continued success."




Rising Rosa
By Sonia Gutiérrez

A tiny little rose with swirling yellows
and reds standing seven inches tall

woke up this morning to tell me,
“Breathe deeply when your head

hangs low. And when you forget
the smell of a tiny little rose like me,

breathe deeper. Last week, my petals
were caught in a downpour, and today

the sun with its long fingertips turned
life’s muggy colors into a cobalt blue.”



Sonia Gutiérrez’s bilingual poems have appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual, Konch Magazine, and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Change. Her fiction has appeared in the London Journal of Fiction, Huizache, and AlternaCtive PublicaCtions. Sonia’s bilingual poetry collection, Spider Woman / La Mujer Araña, is her debut publication. She is a contributing editor for The Writer’s Response (Cengage Learning, 2016).

Currently, she is moderating Facebook’s Poets Responding, working on her manuscript, Sana Sana Colita de Rana, and completing her novel, Kissing Dreams from a Distance. Her libro artesano for children, El Lugar de los Alebrijes / The Place of Alebrijes (Nódulo Ediciones and *Asterisco Editora de Poesía) is forthcoming. Her poem, “Rising Rosa” appears in her manuscript, Sana Sana Colita de Rana. She will be participating in Ilan Stavans's Don Quixote en Spanglish reading at the CECUT in Tijuana, Baja California, in October.

Intriguing new books from around the literary world. One novel, one novella, one poetry collection and two short story anthologies. And check out the dynamic cover art.

Proud to say that my latest short story (Night in Tunisia) debuts in the last book on this list --Blood Business: Crime Stories From This World And Beyond.  Join several of the contributors at the Blood Business launch, November 10, 7:00 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, Denver Colfax store.

As Chuy the Cholo says, "Oye, read to succeed."



Street People: A Novella
Michael Nava
Kórima Press - October

[from the publisher]
Ben Manso drifts through life, working as a rent boy, until a casual encounter with an eight-year-old street kid named Bobby at a convenience store changes everything. When Ben sees Bobby again, the boy is with a man who claims to be Bobby’s father, but Ben suspects the man is a pedophile and the boy his captive. A third encounter draws Ben deeper into Bobby’s drama and forces him to face his own haunted past. After Ben’s well-intentioned plan to rescue Bobby puts the boy in even greater danger, Ben is forced to make a life-changing choice.

Street People is the story of lives at the margin, about the throw-away people we see without seeing, and the real meaning of family.

Michael Sedano

I chalked it up to rasquachi art enterprises and let it go. I got a copy of the publication in the mail and a private apology from the publisher who’d stolen a photograph I’d shared on social media. "I couldn't find you," he said. Now I watermark anything I post.  But it wasn’t rasquachi when a Madrileño website splashed another photograph, then groused at my fee when I invoiced them. The editor vowed never to do business with me again.

So there’s a truism in business: It’s intellectual property theft only when you get caught. Photographers', and people's rights to memories, get caught up in some institutions’ presumptions that someone in their public will make public use of images without approval nor compensation. Maybe it’s the business dictum “you don’t give away what you sell” operating in those “no photography” galleries, who have a gift shop to support. But that’s a rare attitude among first-rate places like Los Angeles’ Autry museum. That's why the prohibition on photography in one show there is so perplexing.

Most major institutions permit photography. The Louvre. The British Library. Museo del Prado. You can’t photograph Guernica in Reina Sofia. El Castillo de Chapultepec used to allow cameras, more recently I was informed a guard would take my camera if I raised it. El Museo de la Antrolopología has no qualms about lenses. In LA, LACMA, the Norton Simon, the Huntington all allow photographs, save an occasional show.

In pre-prohibition years, the foto captures the scale of Gozalez-Camarena's magnificent evocation of 500 años cultural fusion.

There’s a special irony in prohibiting photos at a photo show, the long-sequestered negatives of La Raza newspaper. Blacking out photography is like the images came up for air, saw the light of day for a few weeks, then sank back into memory with nary an artifact to mark their place.. A third rueful irony comes in the p.r. copy for the exhibition.

archive of nearly 25,000 images created by these photographers, now housed at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, provides the foundation for an exhibition exploring photography’s role in articulating the social and political concerns of the Chicano Movement during a pivotal time in the art and history of the United States.

If photography still plays a role in “articulating etc.” there’s a big lacuna where this historic exhibit came and went with only a few “official” frames. No one is welcome to join excited gente at the exhibition, sharing reflections on important images and memories of coming-of-age events. Maybe someone sees themselves and wants a before and after portrait.

Nope. Nel. Chale. No one can grab La Raza memories off an Autry wall.

Someone—the Autry, the curator, UCLA, La Raza photographers—doesn’t want those personal images to exist. No cameras. No photography. What you remember is all you will ever have. Eventually, the exhibit will be a smear of good feeling on memory's windshield

No photography. It’s a challenging mentality. I find it mindless. In businesses other than art museums, flexibility is the best policy. Zero tolerance answers any suggestion to alter the policy. I’ve heard the arguments from curators and random Facebook flamers. No photos protects intellectual property. Punto. An absolute.

At dinner one evening I enjoyed a table conversation with various NHCC gente including the curator of the centro’s stunning El Torreón. Frederico Vigil covered the interior of the 45 foot tall cone with a raza history epic in fresco. No photos, the museum wants to control how their images are used in public. And the minimal likelihood of copyright violation by a private user? The museum has no control over who takes a photo, there might be a pro in the tower. Any private user could splash an image on their personal website without attribution, just a cool image. To assuage hurt feelings, NHCC offers a spectacular media experience on the internet. If you don’t have a screen, you’re out of luck. No personal fotos allowed.

I was happy to see the directors relent. Of course, I can take fotos of the people taking Vigil’s tour, just no direct frames of only wall.


That’s a really excellent compromise the Autry would do well to emulate. Those snapshots add to the fun of attending art shows. Fun becomes a compelling reason to return. Jackbooted absolutism gives one pause, what else will they control? Can I trust the snack bar?

The most unfortunate harm of all in the complexities of the decision to prohibit photographs falls on individuals.

What the museum or owner fears--the photograph—is a prosthesis for memory. For gente with short or damaged memories, especially, but for anyone, a foto is an aide-memoire providing substance not otherwise obtainable. So here is an ultimate irony. One’s most personal intellectual property--knowledge and experience—suffers abuse in an effort to prevent abusing intellectual property.

Magu and Beto de la Rocha pose in front of Oscar Castillo's © foto of  them with Los 4, taken 40 years earlier. Obviously, not prohibiting fotos allowed this now rare image to exist at all. QEPD Magu.

One internet flamer huffed that I don’t know anything about curation and intellectual property if I think the Autry’s prohibition on memory mindless. Gratuitously the flamer told me not to attend if I felt that way! What dire offense from foto denial springs. Of course I’m going to attend and not take fotos. I’m a member and entry is free. Wouldn't it be ironic if I get there and discover the rumor about no fotos is chisme?

Photographer’s note; the Autry’s dim lighting makes grabbing a foto not really worth the effort. But ni modo. No fotos. Punto.


Encuentro De Las Américas Coming to LATC

Three weeks, fourteen productions, from the Américas, in English, in Spanish. Los Angeles' most local theatre west of the river.

Click here for details and tickets. https://www.encuentrodelasamericas.org


Chicago's Latino Museum in Teatro Fest

• Age Range: 4 - 8 years
• Grade Level: Preschool - 3
• Paperback: 32 pages
• Publisher: Square Fish
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1250079454
• ISBN-13: 978-1250079459

Where Indigenous Rites Prevail

Daniel Cano                                                             

                                                           

                                                   

    The van moves north, along the highway R. Larrainzar. It rises gently up a green mountain, just outside San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. Below, I see ranches and settlements in the valleys, a peaceful sight, but my mind is a torrent of questions.

    Silvia, a woman I met on a tour to Palenque told me, “I didn’t feel safe there at all. And I’m from Mexico” Her traveling companion, Esteban, a college student from Valencia, Spain said, “It is a strange town, really strange.” Their friend, Paco, a hotel manager from Granada, Spain, said, “I felt the people didn’t like us. But it is enchanting. You must go.”

    The driver pulls into a dirt parking space at the edge of town. I am the last one out. I’ve heard about children selling bracelets and trinkets harassing visitors upon entering town. The children don’t bother with this van. I chose to take a local from the mercado. I am the only mestizo on board. The rest are Mayans.

    San Juan Chamula isn’t much at first sight, mostly air, space, and a view of the mountains, dotted with homes and the blue sky beyond. I see few people on the streets. Municipal buildings surround the large, square concrete plaza. There are few trees. At the far end, vendors set up booths. At the other end, where I stand, three large crosses rise on a raised stage. Chamula is the only town in Mexico governed by indigenous Maya, mostly Tzotzil.
 
    I see a young woman holding a child, standing before a souvenir stand. I buy Zapatista dolls from her. I ask if I can take a picture of her. She is nervous, but she agrees. She wears a skirt made of sheep's wool.

                                                                         

    I hear drums and trumpets. It isn’t a song but a repetition of five or six dissonant notes, and the same drumbeat. A procession of men, more than fifty, all wearing white and black sheep’s wool tunics and cowboy hats, comes toward three crosses, the musicians among them. One man carries a cross.

    A handful of tourists stands to watch. A blonde woman takes out her camera. As she raises it, a voice from the middle of procession hollers, angrily, “No fotos!” The woman nearly drops her camera as she shoves it into her bag. Without anyone noticing, I snap a picture from my camera hanging at my side. I can’t see what I’m photographing, maybe just the ground or sky. Another tourist, a young man, slowly raises his camera. Voices from the procession threaten him if he doesn’t lower the camera. He does, quickly. A voice calls, “Touristas, cabrones.” Another voice hollers, “Matenlos todos.” Laughter erupts from the middle of the procession as the men pass.

    I read that Chamulans expelled all evangelical Christians from the city for criticizing the way Chamulans practiced Christianity.  For years, traditionalist Catholics in San Cristobal have abhorred the Chamulan rites and have tried to excommunicate them from the Church. But progressive priests, going back to Bartolome de las Casas and more recently Bishop Samuel Ruiz, saw Chamulan rites as a beautiful thing, the blend of religious and social cultures.

    Chamulans believe their religious practice is a life and death struggle, something they’ve lived with since the Spanish invasion of 1519. To escape enemy eyes and ears, the Chamulan churches serve as religious, businesses, and social centers.

    Today, politicians in Mexico City know that Chamulans influence elections throughout Chiapas. During election time, politicians utter, “So goes San Juan Chamula, so goes Chiapas.” Chamulans control much of the trucking, including exporting and importing goods, especially soft drinks, which is like gold to the Maya. Sadly, Mexico's political parties are dividing Chamulans and causing violence not seen in years.

    When the procession reaches the temple of San Juan, sacred throughout Mexico, the marchers have doubled in size, including tourist at the rear. I join them and pay twenty pesos to enter the ancient temple, a small but charming structure, white with a blue trim.

                                                                       
                                                                   

    As I walk through the doors, the thick, pungent smoke blinds me. It’s difficult breathing. The ominous melody from the trumpets, drums, and now an accordion, echo, as if we’re in a cave. As my eyes clear, I see thousands of candles lighting the interior walls. Life-size statues lean against the walls, Catholic saints, I assume, mirrors on their chests. Some say Chamulans believe the reflection wards off evil spirits.

    Behind a rope, a sign reads, in Spanish, German, and English, “No visitors beyond this point.” As I look for a place to sit, I am disoriented. Then I realize there are no benches or pews, only a thick coating of pine needles covering the church floor. I turn to a Mayan man standing behind me and ask him why? He doesn’t answer my question. Mayan women and children, talking quietly, sit on the pine needles. It’s said that women conduct much of the community's business.

    The procession and musicians move forward slowly along one wall until they have surrounded the altar. Leaders, wearing high peaked hats with flowing blue and red ribbons, stand on the altar and give directions. My eyes rise to see the crucified Christ above the altar. But there is no cross and no Christ. Instead, in a glass case, stands John the Baptist. Not sure of what I’ve seen, I close my eyes. My heart pounds. I open my eyes. Through the lingering incense, I see it is John the Baptist, no doubt. The people at his feel look like specters moving about in a trance.

    Tourists press against me, closing in. I search for a way forward, to get a better view, or, maybe, to purge the evil spirits that lurk inside me. I slide, as if floating, through a separation in the rope. I stand there, hoping nobody notices me. Near the altar, a “no trespassing” sign, larger than the first, is posted on a gate. I’m not sure how much time has passed, ten minutes, an hour? Time doesn’t matter here. It doesn't exist. I move towards the gate, careful not to raise unwanted attention.

    More women join those already sitting on the floor. At the altar, men carry trays full of glasses, each with a silvery liquid--posh, I’ve come to learn, a strong fermented drink, a root from a plant used in Mayan religious ceremonies. Drunkenness, they say, is a sign of spiritual connection with “other” world. The mirrors on the saints’ chests also help a released spirit find his way back.

    I am close to the altar. Something inside me stirs. It's hard to explain. The men pass the drinks among themselves until empty glasses fill the tray. I stoop low. The music is a meditation. A few minutes later, men appear carrying more trays with glasses, this time a dark liquid inside. A man carrying plastic bottles of Coca Cola follows him. The coca plant was once a main ingredient in Coca-Cola. The soda makes them burp, and the Chamulan Maya believe burping exhales evil spirts. I have no idea the connection between the drink and Christianity, except maybe John the Baptist lived on plant roots.

    At the foot of the altar, the musicians continue their haunting melody. No one notices me, or if they do, they say nothing. More tourists have moved forward. I keep my eyes lowered. I find a place on the pine needles and sit, the smells rising to my head. I am in a state of contemplation. Nothing appears real. A sense of freedom fills me. Later, in my journal, I will write, ""It's difficult to explain what I experienced in the church of San Juan this afternoon."

    Time passes. Even without the drink, the ritual is intoxicating. The air is thick. Reverentially, the men continue passing the drinks. Some stand with arms crossed. Some teeter. Eventually, I am overwhelmed, my senses inundated. The service continues as I exit through a side entrance.

    Outside, I breathe in the clear mountain air. I’m in a large courtyard surrounded by white walls. A Mayan, drunk, hardly able to walk, approaches me. He babbles something I can’t understand. He looks angry. His flails his arms. Another man comes, apologizes for his friend, and takes him away.

    When I return to the parking lot, the vans are gone. A man tells me the van service stops at 7:00 P.M. He points to the taxi stand where two taxis wait. It’s dusk; the sun barely lights the mountaintops.

     One of the drivers, an older man, raises his hand. Next to him is a old model Toyota. It has seen, as they say, its better days. I ask him about the vans, as if I need a second opinion. He confirms the only way back to San Cristobal is by taxi or walking. He gives me a price. I accept.

     The driver, Geronimo, is Tzotsil Maya, and as he drives, he explains everything I’m seeing, who owns the ranches and who lives in the lone settlements, the process to cure sheep’s wool and turn it into clothing, and the different languages and beliefs of the various Maya clan throughout Chiapas.

    I ask Geronimo if Chamulans believe St. John the Baptist is mightier than Jesus. He hesitates, as if I’ve asked him to divulge a secret. “Some say so,” is all he answers.

Guest Post by Lucrecia Guerrero

Lene M. Johannessen

Lucrecia Guerrero

• Johannessen, Lene M. 2011. Horizons of Enchantment : Essays in the American Imaginary. University Press of New England. 166 pages. ISBN: 978-1-58465-999-0.

• Johannessen, Lene M; Sillars, Stuart; Dipio, Dominica, editors. 2009. Performing Change: Identity, Ownership and Tradition in Ugandan Oral Culture. Novus Forlag. 230 pages. ISBN: 978-82-7099-552-3.
• Johannessen, Lene M. 2008. Threshold Time: Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature. Rodopi. 204 pages. ISBN: 978-90-420-2332-1.
• Johannessen, Lene M; Sillars, Stuart John; Dipio, Dominica, editors. 2008. Performing Community. Novus Forlag. 275 pages. ISBN: 9788270994991.

• Johannessen, Lene M; Cahill, Kevin M. editors. 2007. Considering Class: Essays on the Discourse of the American Dream. LIT Verlag. 224 pages. ISBN: 978-3-8258-0259-2.
• Rønning, Anne Holden; Johannessen, Lene M., editors 2007. Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational. Rodopi. 262 pages. ISBN: 978-90-420-2163-1.
• Grønstad, Asbjørn; Johannessen, Lene M., editors 2005. To Become the Self One Is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 210 pages. ISBN: 82-7099-405-7.

The painted image cannot be without words. Neither the written work or visual work can exist without sound, without vibration, as all things on this earth carry a vibration. As such, Lopez' written and oral work is constantly shifting as it is performed or recorded The same poem, story, monologue or abstract diatribe shifts within the space it is performed taking into consideration audience and the theatrics and vibration of the moment.

CHICANO COLORING BOOKS

Patriots, Terrorists, Médecin-Spy Malgré Lui 

Review: Robert Arellano. Havana Libre. NY: Akashic Books, 2017. ISBN 9781617755835 1617755834
Michael Sedano

“Gusano” is one of those cuss words that sounds as ugly as the odio it expresses toward upper- and middle-class Cubanas Cubanos who fled Fidel’s revolution. Gusanos got out with burning resentment and all they could carry off the island. They landed in Miami and turned South Florida into the richest city in Latin America. That burning resentment led some to finance terrorism back on the island. And they call themselves gusanos, like that’s a good thing.

Back on the island, the abandoned gente adjusted to decades of hard times. A materialist would say a medical doctor in Havana earned less than a Miami taxi driver. That doctor might be an entitled pig like the director of a certain pediatric clinic, or a dedicated medical professional working at street level, seething at rationed medical supplies, lazy colleagues, an uncaring government.

That’s background for the events that unfold in Havana and Miami in 1997. Manolo, the doctor with the red lunar and open heart, is the main character of Arellano’s arresting Havana Lunar. Reading that one enhances reading Havana Libre, since the narrator alludes to information from that book multiple times. Ni modo. Read Havana Libre then read Havana Lunar. The two are equally fun, and isn’t that one reason to read espionage thrillers?

Other reasons to seek out your local bookseller, or the publisher direct route, include Havana Libre’s employment, with attribution, of a James Bond trope requiring capture torture hopelessness, followed by a deus ex machina escape and rescue. Despite its excitement, Arellano’s moments of brilliance will slow down appreciative readers. The writer’s landscapes make for superb experiences in irony and sardonic wit. Arellano grows especially evocative capturing the astonishment of an FOB, a rube in wonderland, that no one else notices the quotidian excess in la Yuma.

Readers need to be on their guard not to miss Arellano’s metaphor comparing liberation from abusive marriage to joining the gusanos in la Yuma. One of the supporting characters, Mercedes, a beauty from Manolo’s own rural hometown, threw herself into the wilds of the big city. When Dr. Manolo helps her get a job at the Havana Libre hotel, she reflects on her state.

Had she made a difficult choice? Yes. Did it involve what might be seen as a betrayal? Maybe. She was not able to conceive it but otherwise. It was a sacrifice for the well-being of the child. If she had not been in love with him once, she would not be here now. If he had not become abusive and that as such unrecognizable from the man she once loved, she could not have made the decision. But that did not mean that she couldn’t tell her daughter someday about her father. She could tell her about the one that her mother had loved. 235.

There’s purity in Mercedes’ spirit and appreciation of Love. Substitute “Cuba” for “him” and Arellano is arguing that defection makes a perversion of patriotism, yet the abusive power of the state and its endless “special periods” of deprivation influence a desperate person’s justification to abandon  home, family, friends. Mercedes looks to birth and motherhood, the old and new Cuba. The gusano looks to blow up buildings back there.

Betrayal, treachery, patriotism, loyalty, these are the coin of exile and the underpinnings of many novels of the Cuban diaspora. Arellano uses them without naming them, building a plot mixing the doctor's defection in Miami where he will infiltrate the terrorist organization bombing tourist places in Havana. One is Manolo's father, a gusano who fled alone decades before. Son intends to betray the father. The father has already betrayed la patria and la familia, now his betrayal of the stranger-son will cost lives.

Readers may be cruising along through the pages--Havana Libre is an engrossing story--thinking how you gonna keep him down on the farm, now that he's seen Miami? There’s lots of envy in that cynical eye the doc casts on aisles packed with merchandise, the money thrown down for lunch that would feed a neighborhood for a week back on the block, the existence of food. In Miami, Mercedes waits an hour for a scoop of low-grade vanilla ice cream.

Why go back to that crap, especially since Cuban secret service set Manolo up such good cover documents that defecting-in-fact would be a walk in the park, for a traitor.

But just as that unspoken plot twist seems imminent, Arellano pulls a fast one and has the terrorist Mendoza easily discover Manolo’s deception. He's not a spy, he's a sucker. And naive. No one is anonymous in this neighborhood, especially the new guy on the block identified in the chisme stream as the defecting homeboy.

Wrapping the novel in a James Bond secret agent pastiche propels the reader through the plausible and implausible, stupid captors, pain thresholds, the rescue and debriefing back in Havana, sans a roll in the saddle with some jinetera. But then, the alluring shrink makes an offer Manolo won't refuse.

Thousands of lives could have perished along with the Havana Libre hotel, but thanks to the doctor's patriotism, the plot failed. The perverted patriotism of the gusano foiled, the Salvadoran bombers captured, and in his wake, a large ambiguity back in Miami, the father-son plot in abeyance. Could be worth a third novel in the series. I'd like to see it.

I have one problem with the novel, its indecision on what expressions to translate and what to let speak for themselves. I hope it’s a heavy-handed mildly xenophobic editor insisting on these dilatory impositions on the flow of the story. They do nothing to build ambience and ethos. Code-switching has uses in the community that a novel ought to respect consistently. While there are some expressions that can be said only in the one language, Arellano or the faceless editor need respect other expressions and let them be. Whomever does it, there's preference for appositional translation, saying something in Spanish then a comma and the equivalent in English. Gente talk like this, but there's a grammar to it that does not demand automatic immediate translation.

But then, the imposition of English upon the Cubano's Spanish thoughts and encounters, is far from consistent.

In one case, the bomber speculates on glitches in his effort. If confronted he plans to leverage intimidation, useful with battered employees like these in Castro's showcase tourist hotel. The plan is wreak emotional terror by “exhibiting the usual signs of a burgeoning complaint. ¿Como te llamas? ¿Hace cuánto trabajas aquí? ¿Quien es el manager?” 243

Back in Miami, a few pages on, Manolo’s gusano father code-switches a farewell, but the editor or writer doesn’t trust the reader to survive without translation, electing instead of apposition, as if the character code-switched in conversation, we get a separate sentence. Because the reader wouldn’t get it otherwise?

I am going to speak with the American doctor and explain how you defected and chose not to go to the conference. Y quiero que sepas algo antes de irme.” I want to tell you something before I leave.245

The tactic makes little sense considering a putative readership. Gente interested in Cuban literature are gente in all likelihood with linguistic resources equal to the sentences provided. For the yanqui reader slumming in unaccustomed literature, foreignness is what they seek, foreign is what they get. Missing a phrase here or there adds to the ambience of the novel and a reader's understanding of  characters. Arellano's pointed descriptions of how crummy conditions are in Vedado, his elegant expressions capturing the immigrant’s disgust at consumerist excess, are bonuses. Even if you hated Fidel, you will be happy you read Havana Libre and will seek Arellano's two other novels.

Don’t come to Havana Libre expecting a thorough bashing of the Cuban revolu, though the title is a backhand of sorts. The rum coke and lime drink is called a "Cuba Libre," except in Cuban bars where it's called "Una Mentirita." But this novel isn't about a political Havana libre, nor an eponymous hotel. El pueblo keeps Manolo going, it's an evocation of revolutionary zeal but also the doctor's commitment; things are tough, but they're equally tough for us all. Keep going.

For soft-pedaled bashing, visit Miami. It's a disgusting culture which the denizens--exiles, gusanos, second generation--don’t see it anymore, they don't see much, whizzing past in their SUV. The cultura of Manolo’s neighborhood is warm, human, time-immemorial, and Mercedes might be in his future, he can take her for a ride in his Lada. Who wouldn’t go back?

Not that Havana Libre is for the quotidian reader. Reading it is reserved for people seeking interesting information about Cuba and insight into an immigrant’s culture shock upon landing on dry land. Robert Arellano writes for people who like excellent writing, who prefer a writer delve into important ideas rather fluff up a novel with a lot of bang-bang padding.

Brooklyn's Akashic Books is taking discounted orders (link) for the book in anticipation of a December release. Early December arrival will be just in time for the stocking stuffers your loved ones so enjoy, that you're known for. Havana Libre is sure to become the hit of the season's loot for those certain readers on your list.



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