Working Class Heroes

Manuel Ramos

WORKING CLASS HEROES
To commemorate Labor Day and the beginning of a long weekend for many of us, here's a review I posted a couple of years ago about an excellent example of working-class literature.

Music of the Mill
Luis J. Rodriguez
Rayo, 2005


What could be more natural than a Chicano working class novel? In fact, saying "Chicano working class" is almost redundant. Work (hard, sweaty, mind-numbing work) and Chicanos go hand-in-hand. It’s a little surprising that there haven’t been more novels that directly deal with the labor aspects of Chicano life or that at least have the working class atmosphere. Dagoberto Gilb’s fiction comes to mind, as do the stories in Michael Jaime-Becerra’s Every Night Is Ladies’ Night. And, without a doubt, the classic farm worker literature of Tomás Rivera and Helena María Viramontes would qualify.

In any event, Music of the Mill by Luis J. Rodriguez is working class to the core. The book tells the story of the Salcido family over three generations, beginning in 1943 in northern Mexico and finishing almost in the present in an L.A. barrio. The family patriarch, Procopio, finds work in the massive Nazareth steel mill, and thus begins the hate-love relationship between the Salcidos and the mill. When at last the mill shuts down, the family has sent almost every male in the family to work in the mill. And without the mill the family flounders.

The book is rich with descriptions of working in the mill, especially from the millwright’s perspective. Rodriguez places the reader in the day-to-day toil of the workers. Rodriguez knows the heat, noise, danger and intensity of the mill (he was a steelworker in the Bethlehem Steel Plant of Maywood, California), and he conveys his knowledge in clear, crisp prose, almost as hard as the steel produced by the mill.

The story eventually centers on Johnny, Procopio’s son. A former gang member and ex-con, Johnny finally straightens out with the help of a good woman, of course, and much of the book is taken up with his struggle for necessary reforms in the working conditions inside the mill, and with his fight against corruption in the union. Rodriguez presents a varied and intriguing cast of secondary characters: Communist organizers, Ku Klux Klan thugs, the first women steelworkers, union bureaucrats, corporate criminals, Mexika activists, pintos, workers of all races and ethnicities, and many more. They all come together in a story that rings as true as the pounding of a forge from the 32-inch mill onto red-orange steel ingots.

The final section of the book departs from the previous story line; in fact, to accent the departure, it is presented in the first person point-of-view of Johnny’s daughter, Azucena. For me, this was the weakest part of the book. I understand that the story had to go into the long-lasting effect of the closing of the mill on the community and families who had worked in it for years. But once the story leaves the mill, it meanders through drug abuse, domestic abuse, criminal life on the streets, and children who fall by the wayside (though they have what appear to be the greatest parents and supportive family) before a semblance of balance is restored in the Salcido family.

Even so, Rodriguez has crafted a book that should sit on anyone’s list of required reading if for no other reason than that he has given a strong and valid voice to the working men and women of an industrial era that has vanished. Rodriguez’s book ensures that their lives and struggles will not be forgotten.

Later.

Where Is Ana Mendieta?

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban performance artist who lived in New York in the 1970’s. The title Where Is Ana Mendieta, not only refers to the suspicious circumstances of her death, but to the nonexistent presence of the work of women artists in mainstream exhibitions, to the absence of work that portrays the aesthetic rooted in Latino cultural identity.

Mendieta boldly explored women’s identity, sexuality, and spirituality in pieces that were deceptively simple. Her work was constructed from the elements themselves, dirt, water, and light in their most basic forms; her themes revolved around the ideas of burial, rebirth, submersion in the natural world. From a perspective beyond the dominant culture's construct of nation, a construct of governments, the hegemony of conquerors, Mendieta's work reverberates with a older, indigenous idea of nation. It challenges the viewer to envision an idea of nation and identity based on a direct relation to the Earth itself.

In a series entitled Tree of Life, Mendieta flattened herself against a large oak tree. She is naked, covered with gesso and paint to simulate tree bark. Where does the tree stop and Medieta begin? Where do we stop and our connection with nature begin? Simply done and deeply resonant. I immediately saw a connection between this piece and a Mexican/Chicano idea of rootedness to place that is not hemmed by borders, but by history and ancestral links to land, to nature itself.

In another, untitled series, Mendieta is shown in a series of photos. Again, she is naked, this time in an isolated field. Next to her is a skeleton. The photos show her climbing onto the skeleton, embracing it. She creates a powerful image of the life/death cycle, as well as a quintessential Latino commentary on mortality. At the heart of existence, life and death are united in an eternal embrace. In the midst of life, its fullness, its lushness, its sensuality, Death is constant companion. While modern, European-based culture constantly seeks to avoid aging and mortality, there are traditions that accept its centrality. Mendieta brilliantly illustrates that death is both the beginning and endpoint of all things.

Mendieta worked closely with a variety of feminist artists, but did not label herself as feminist, and I understand the reticence in using the label. The women's artistic community did not offer a truly supportive relationship, and while she had meaningful connections with individual artists, her work was not be adequately appreciated by feminist and post-feminist critics. In a nutshell, Mendieta did not invent a new relationship to body and Earth, she reclaimed an ancient one, but was never embraced by the 'larger' artistic community.

I was profoundly moved by her work. The work is poetry, visual poetry, poetry made flesh. These are clear, visceral, and direct images that I hope to use as a touchstone in my writing and performing, particularly in performing. I want to tell a personal and universal story with my body, and Mendieta has created a standard for me, as well as strengthening and deepening a physical lexicon.

Blocker’s writing is dry and extremely formal, making this difficult going as a reader, but don't be dissuaded by that. I wonder if some of the density of language was more an expression of Blocker's own inability to grasp and express the power and simplicity of Mendieta. However, the book sings when Blocker allows the work to speak for itself.

ISBN-10: 0822323249
ISBN-13: 978-0822323242

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Jane Blocker is a specialist in contemporary art and critical theory. She offers courses such as Art Since 1945, Contemporary Art, Alternative Media: Video, Performance, and Digital Art, as well as courses on gender and sexuality, and 20th century theory and criticism.

Her research has focused primarily on performance art as it developed concurrently with postmodern, feminist, and constructionist theories. Her first book, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile (Duke University Press, 1999), considers the artist's work in relation to the performative production of identity. What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), her second book, critically examines the historiography of mid-twentieth century performance. Her current book, called Seeing Witness: Essays on Contemporary Art and Testimony, examines the witness as a privileged subject position by analyzing installations, performances, photographs, and films by such artists as Alfredo Jaar, James Luna, Eduardo Kac, Christine Borland, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Ann Hamilton.

In addition, she has published the following essays: "This Being You Must Create: Transgenic Art and Seeing the Invisible," Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 192-209; "A Cemetery of Images: Meditations on the Burial of Photographs," Visual Resources XX, no. 2 (May 2004) ; "Binding to Another s Wound: Of Weddings and Witness," in After Criticism: New Responses to Contemporary Art, edited by Gavin Butt. (London: Blackwell, 2005); "Failures of Self-Seeing: James Luna Remembers Dino," Performing Arts Journal XXIII, #1 (January 2001):18-32; "The Art of Renters," in From Your House to Our House, exhibition catalogue (Atlanta: Nexus Contemporary Art Center, 1999); "Woman-House: Architecture, Gender and Hybridity in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?," in Camera Obscura 39 (November 1998):126-150; "Ana Mendieta and the Politics of the Venus Negra," in Farquhar, et al, eds. (Un)fixing Representation, special issue of Cultural Studies 12, #1 (January 1998):31-50; "The Bed Took Up Most of the Room," in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The End(s) of Performance (New York: N.Y.U. Press, 1997); and Nancy Spero/Leon Golub: Contemporaries, exhibition catalogue (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, 1997).

Lisa Alvarado

Macondo 2007 Highlights

René Colato Laínez

These pictures are courtesy of many Macondistas. ¡Gracias!


*The Macondo Writing Workhop was celebrated from July 29 to August 5 in San Antonio, Texas.

*Most of the Macondistas stayed at the Our Lady of the Lake University dorms.

*Our famosas workshop teachers were Joy Harjo and Dorothy Allison.

*Our Macondistas teachers were Levi Romero, Liliana Valenzuela,
Alex Espinoza and Jackie Cuevas.

*We had great seminars throught the week. Just check the titles and presenters.
-Borderlands With in Us by Dr. Marga Speicher.
-Creating Real Life Characters- Yourself and Others by Gregg Barrios.
-Making Peace in Time of War by Baldemar Velasquez and Amelia Mesa-Baines
-The Political Essay by Norma Alarcon and Macarena Hernandez.


*Our invited literary agent was the talented Stefanie Von Borstel from Full Circle Literary.

*Natalia Treviño organized the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center visit.

*Noche de Macondo at Esperanza Peace and Justice Center was a blast. Joy Harjo gave us a great concert.


*Jump-Start Theatre featured Dorothy Allison. Two or Three Things I know For Sure are that Dorothy is great, great and great.

*Lucha Corpi and Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains received the Gloria Anzaldua’s Milagro Award.

*The yoga teacher was our Macondista Michelle Otero.

*The readings at Macondo BBQ were amazing and unpredictable.

*The talented children's Book Author Amada Irma Pérez read at the San Antonio Public Library.

*And as always Sandra Cisneros was our angel, amiga, consejera and la mera mera. Sandra all the Macondistas love you!



About the Macondo Workshop

The Macondo Writing Workshop is a unique summer gathering for writers working on geographic, cultural, social and spiritual borders.

Founded in 1995 by writer Sandra Cisneros and named after the sleepy town in Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the week-long workshop transforms San Antonio, Texas — and more broadly, La Frontera — into a space of intense artistic and cultural creativity.

Macondo is a master's-level workshop, meaning that participants are expected to take their writing seriously and to have fulfilled at least one of the following:

1. published a book or several stories in journals or magazines,
2. enrolled in or completed an MFA program, or
3. studied under at least three professional writers.


An essential aspect of the Macondo ethic is a global sense of community; workshop members should, in addition to being already established and capable of participating in a master's-level class, recognize their place as writers in our society and the world.

A second element of the Macondo ethic is a spirit of generosity. In the spirit of Sandra Cisneros, who volunteers valuable writing time for the nourishment of other writers.


Monetary contributions are accepted from those with better means to assist workshop participants who cannot fund their own airfare and lodging.

In addition, workshop members are expected to review each other's work with rigor and vision. Time is viewed as a gift equal to that of money, so time given is as valuable as cash!

The workshop is divided into three mixed-genre groups, each of them headed by an accomplished writer or team of writers. After attending one year, participants are allowed to enroll in Sandra Cisneros' class.

Mornings are spent individually reading each other's work, afternoons consist of "workshopping" by groups, and evenings are spent discussing various artistic, political and spiritual issues related to writing.



For more information visit www.macondoworkshop.org

Review: Telling Tongues. A Latinarroba Anthology on Language Experience.

Edited by Louis G. Mendoza & Toni Nelson Herrera. Cover art by Nuvia Crisol Guerra. ISBN 0-9717035-8-2 / 2007. Perfectbound / 224 pages / $15


A powerful feeling of deja vu sweeps over me while leafing through the pages of Telling Tongues, a poetry/prose anthology about English Spanish speech, published in 2007 by Calaca Press and Red Salmon Press.

The editors take pains to collect accessible material on issues that swirl around the role a triad of languages--Spanish, English, Code-switching-- play in the Chicana Chicano community. The present volume may indeed be the first published "vulgate," i.e. not academic, collection on Chicano linguistics. It's a worthwhile assemblage that should go onto the resource shelf of any school teacher.

If you want a single reason to own the collection, it's the first poem, Olga A. Garcia Echeverria's absochingaolutely perfect "Lengualistic Algo: Spoken-Broken Word." (Search around Calaca's site for an MP3 file of the poet reading her work.)

The deja vu comes in eerie (to me) coincidences between Telling Tongues and the first published collection of literature with the "Chicano" subtitle, Quinto Sol's El Espejo: The Mirror in 1972. Romano and Rios include Ernie Padilla's "Ohming Instick," a farmworker child's monologue about the horrors of being a monolingual in a monolingual classroom. It ends with the child estimating the amount of cotton he could pick tomorrow instead of sitting in classroom torment. Joe Sainz' "The First Day of School" echoes Padilla's lament of 35 years ago. A monolingual child thinks, "The sidewalk is my only friend." He goes through the day bouncing from confusion to dependence. "there is no language in eating" he thinks, "I can eat; I've done that before." First he must learn what "caf" means. Even music is foreign, "I can hum, I've done that before. / The music is stranger than the words; / I open my mouth and pretend." As at the end of "Ohming Instick" tomorrow promises worse. The boy imagines, "I think about tomorrow,/and I tremble."

Among the classic actos of Chicana Chicano teatro is Luis Valdez' "Los Vendidos." A gem of absurdity, the play is set at Honest Sancho's Used Mexicans sales lot, where a glib salesman offers a variety of stereotypes, each offering a complement of hilarious features, advantages, benefits. Paying a poet's hommage to il miglior fabbro comes Paul Martinez Pompa's "Commercial Break," covering much the same ground as Valdez.

"Are your images inefficient?
Does your diction feel bland?
Are you tired of writing poetry
that simply does not work?

If you answered yes to any of these questions,
consider what a Mexican can do for you.
Strategically placed, a Mexican will stimulate
and fire up your drab, white poem."

In place of Honest Sancho, Pompa posits "Pretty White Poetry", adding a backhand to an uninformed reader, "Don't worry about mixing Mexican / and Puerto Rican imagery--/ most of your readers won't know the difference!"

Closing the poetry section, a scant 55 pages, is raulrsalinas, who also appears in El Espejo, where "A Trip Through the Mindjail" was among the poet's masterpieces of tecato poetry. The poet now speaks with the voice of an elder in "Loud and Proud." The title evokes a popular 1968 James Brown song, more of the El Espejo era, que no? Salinas also evokes Omar Salinas' "Robstown," a WWII poem, that alluded to a soldier's being refused service in a local cafe, the town's refusal to bury a local medal winner in the anglo cemetery. Salinas remembers, and updates the story, "Flying of the flags/used to disguise body bags/ that carried medal of honor winners/ back to hick towns of/ coffe-serving refusals/ & cemetery of heroes burial denials."


Telling Tongues is a book about language, bilingualism, code-switching. The poet Pompa raises a provocative issue that occupies the prose essayists of the book's bottom half. Who's Pompa skewering? The monolingual latina latino who "ought to be" bicultural but isn't? the non-latin fad-follower, the comfortable white liberals who buy books?

Several writers confess--that's the right word--to having once been monolingual in English and came late to their bilingualism. It's a fiercely political identity issue, as several essayists examine. For example, Aureliano Maria DeSoto in "A Querencia of One's Own" explains, "so often it seems as if some essential quality of latinidad is grounded in language. For Anglos and Latinos alike, lingistic ability in Spanish appears as the basis from which identity springs." Ana M. Lara in "A Change of Manta, Santo Domingo, 2004", takes a similar stance, noting, "The legacy of nationalism is alive and well in our use of language: it fosters insecurity around identity that leads to the creation of a strict, narrow definition of belonging. That is the legacy that I resist". Typical of the confessional approach is the sad remembrance by Stephanie Li, "The Secret American" who's Chinese Mexican ancestry added an extra dimension to assimilationist pressures on the child. She remembers in fifth grade, "A group of girls named themselves after their cleaning ladies. Tosa, Elena, and Dolores. I giggled along with them even though my family didn't have a cleaning lady, and one of my favorite tias is named Rosa. But no one knew that, and no one would."

I am not complaining about the deja vu. Yes, I am--that here's a 2007 copyright covering the same territory-- because not much seems to have changed for gente who live within the cultural mainstream. Language prejudice persists, as in the story of the Ivy League "Professor X" who accuses a woman of having no culture because she has no Spanish. Ethnic divisions continue to plague raza of all stripes, and from within and outside las colonias, barrios, and tony neighborhoods we populate. Such persistent exigencies make a collection like Telling Tongues so necessary. A teacher will inevitably confront the issues dealt with in the poems and stories. It's one thing for an old veterana veterano to tell the class, "back when I was your age...", it's another to open a book and have a kid read out loud personal experiences that have telling reverberations across their culture.

A final word about the inflection of Spanish and the lack thereof in English. I wish to high Hell folks would drop the unpronounceable @ to substitute for the gender markers. There's an irony in the book's subtitle; to me, the @ represents a kind of linguistic nationalism that forces another language's rules upon the lingua franca of most Chicana Chicano readers. Then there's the subvocalic violence the @ does. In Spanish, the character is called "arroba", in English web addressess pronounce "at". Hence, "chican@" [sic] would be pronounced either, "chicanarroba" or "chicanat", unless one calls @ ideographic in which case it might be said "chicana-ow". Sheesh, gente, just type both words, Chicana Chicano, Latina Latino, Pendeja Pendejo.

Con cariño, un abrazo,
mvs

Bottom Line: Calaca Press is a small, Chicana Chicano owned business. Distribution through commercial channels doesn't extend to fine resources like Calaca, so readers need to buy direct, or contact the publisher to learn a local bookseller who can order Calaca's catalog for you. Their web is linked in the title above or here.
http://www.calacapress.com/

Until next week, looking forward to your comments on the above or any related subject, ate,
mvs

Misfits with Moxie

Book Review by Daniel Olivas

Dahlia Season

By Myriam Gurba

Manic D Press

Paperback, $14.95

Myriam Gurba populates her debut story collection, Dahlia Season (Manic D Press, paperback $14.95), with young people who are often marginalized by a society too afraid or too exhausted to respond otherwise.

But because she creates characters who are complex and, in their own way, courageous, one does not pity them. Indeed, in honest prose peppered with sardonic humor, Gurba transforms her misfits into people who, under their goth makeup and facial tics, are not much different from the rest of the world.

Gurba's protagonists attempt to make meaning out of their lives under the sunny skies of California. In "Cruising," a teenage girl dresses in male clothing to cruise the pier and public restrooms in Long Beach along side gay men looking for anonymous sex. She eventually hooks up with a young man: "His face slowly came at mine and he kissed me. His mouth tasted good, dirty and boyish, and his cheeks scratched my face." The tryst, of course, cannot be consummated, and the girl runs home when the boy discovers that he's been fooled. Her heartbreaking explanation: "I had spoiled everything. I ruined it by being myself, by being a girl."

In "Just Drift," Roberto is stuck in a "ghetto" high school where keeping a lid on violence trumps true education to such an extent that quirky teachers are highly valued for their police skills: "I've figured out that the way things work around here is that as long as a teacher can control us and there aren't total race riots happening everyday, administrators look the other way when it comes to eccentricity."

As he struggles with hopelessness both at home and school, Roberto daydreams about "drifting," a form of Japanese street racing where the driver allows his car to lose traction and "drift" out of control for a few seconds -- a perfect metaphor for Roberto's life.

Gurba's young Chicanas often rebel against family expectations as they don goth attire and makeup and fall in love with other girls. In "White Girl," the narrator develops a crush on an "exotic" girl named Gabriella: "She came from another world. Pale skin, green eyes, and casseroles for dinner. She spoke nothing but English." And in the story "Primera Comunión," Esperanza seems marked from birth to be different and defy her traditional family. As a teen, she starts to dress like a boy and eventually joins a male street gang. But in both stories, the girls simply want one thing: to be loved and accepted unconditionally.

Gurba's skill at creating believable characters is at its strongest in the longest piece, the 125-page novella "Dahlia Season," from which the book derives its title. In it, we are privy to a decade in the life of Desiree Garcia from her teen years, through college and finally her first real job as an English as a second language teacher.

Desiree tells us in the first lines: "I used to pride myself on being a freak magnet. Yes, los weirdos de este mundo had a sweet tooth for me."

But she eventually learns that others consider her a "weirdo." We watch as Desiree's mordant humor keeps her afloat while she attempts to understand why she harbors violent thoughts and has trouble keeping obscene and otherwise inappropriate comments from leaving her lips.

Though Gurba's young men and women might seem unconventional, their hopes and desires are really no different from others. Her characters are simply trying to make their way on a treacherous odyssey in search of love and self-understanding.

Gurba's debut collection brings us a strong, sincere literary voice that seems to say: "Look at me -- I'm really just like you."

[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]

◙ Luis Alberto Urrea, author of many wonderful books including The Hummingbird’s Daughter (Little, Brown/Back Bay Books), is blogging his heart out on immigration. “Immigration Monday” is back, he announces, so drop on by, read and post a comment.

◙ Dagoberto Gilb is interviewed on Paper Cuts, the New York Times’ blog about books. He says, in part:

“The novel I am now on will be an epic in poetic prose, a bestseller, and deep, although it will maintain a romantic and accessible biculturalism. Unless this is already what I have achieved with the novel ‘The Flowers’ my publisher is releasing soon. (Yes, I am making a small joke/chistecito in the first sentence - you know, like saying I’ve decided to write my very greatest book next. The second sentence, however, is absolutely true, probably.)”

I’m delighted a new Gilb book is coming. You can read the entire interview (and post a comment if you wish) by going here.

◙ On August 16th, Helena María Miramontes appeared on Michael Silverblatt’s radio show, Bookworm. She discusses Their Dogs Came with Them (Atria). Take a listen. It really is a revealing and interesting interview.

◙ You are invited to a special planetarium screening of Gronk’s BrainFlame, the West Coast premiere of an extraordinary animated short in 180-degree projection. It is presented by UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and Glendale Community College.

WHEN: Saturday, September 8, 2007
WHERE: Glendale Community College, Planetarium and Science Center, 1500 North Verdugo Road, Glendale 91208

BrainFlame Screenings: 2:00 pm, 2:30 pm, 3:00 pm, 3:30 pm

Art exhibit on BrainFlame and signing of the new book Gronk (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press) reception: 2:00 pm to 4:30 pm.

Screening ticket reservations required. Please reserve early, limited seating. Please RSVP for a specific screening by Sept. 4th: Bryan Robinson (310) 825-7716 or brobinson@support.ucla.edu.

◙ Speaking of Gronk, he and Ricardo Garcia will have a joint show entitled Momento at the Metro Gallery: Contemporary Fine Art, 1835 Hyperion Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027, (323) 663-2787. The opening reception will be Saturday, September 8, 6:00 to 9:00 pm, with an artists lecture beginning at 7:30 pm. For more information, visit here.

◙ All kinds of literary news from Rigoberto González. First, he reviewed for the El Paso Times a new book entitled, Conversations With Chicana/o Writers (University of New Mexico Press), edited by Hector Torres. You can read the full review here. Also, check out his poetry reviews focusing on writers of all colors here. Finally, González offers his "fun summer reading" list at the National Book Critics Circle: http://www.bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/ (scroll down to his big picture).

◙ Daniel Hernandez blogs on the untimely passing of writer Aura Estrada, wife of the novelist Francisco Goldman, in a surfing accident while on vacation in Mexico in late July. Estrada was a second-year MFA student at Hunter College which posts this tribute page that includes samples of Estrada’s writing as well as tributes.

◙ Agustin Gurza of the Los Angeles Times tells us of our nation’s art museums’ failure to understand and attract Latinos. It’s a fascinating piece that also touches on Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Latino Art Initiative which is headed by Chon A. Noriega, director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. On a personal note: even with very little money, my parents made certain to take their five children to art museums, a habit my wife and I continue to this day with our son. We are members of LACMA and strongly urge you to join and support and enjoy your local art museum. By the way, Gurza welcomes e-mails with comments, events and ideas for his weekly feature on Latino music, arts and culture. Write to him at agustin.gurza@latimes.com.

◙ My review of Julia Alvarez’s wonderful new book, Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (Viking), appeared yesterday in the El Paso Times. In note, in part: “…Alvarez's book is a captivating and fascinating ‘behind the scenes’ peek at quinceañeras. We are honored to be invited into the lives of these young women for a brief moment as they stand -- eager and hopeful -- at the cusp of adulthood.”

◙ Time magazine raves about Junot Díaz’s long-awaited second book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead). Lev Grossman writes that Díaz has written “a book so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights -- Richard Russo, Philip Roth -- Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field.”

◙ All done. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres at La Bloga. ¡Lea un libro! --Daniel Olivas

Adios, Gina Marysol Ruiz. Bloguera, Farewell.

Blogmeister's Note: La Bloga's Wednesday face changed on 8/22 with the departure of Bloguera Gina Marysol "Sol" Ruiz. La Bloguera and Los Blogueros already miss her contribution and suffer the loss of her history with resignation. On Monday, 8/27, all of Gina Marysol Ruiz' La Bloga posts will be removed from the archive at her request.

michael sedano
gina marysol ruiz contributed her esfuerzos through thick and thin. gente probably understand that la bloga is puro labor of love for all the blogueras and blogueros. and, although limitless love is its own reward, labor has its limits and gente get to choose their rewards. sol, adelante and best wishes.

mvs.


lisa alvarado....
Gina Sol Ruiz has her finger on the pulse of what makes a special book special. She is a voracious reader, someone who thought globally about what will intrigue and lift up children, what will open their hearts and minds. Her passion, her hard work and her humor will be sorely missed. And a special thank you for making me laugh, for welcoming me to Bloga
and starting all those killer haikus.

Lisa.


manuel ramos....
Gina Marysol Ruiz rolled into La Bloga like a coal train -- strong, loud, and proud. She lit up the blog with her humor, perseverance, endless lists of books, recipes, photos, and intimate knowledge of all things related to la cultura. Now the train heads down the line. I'm sorry you had to move on, Sol, but I wish you only the best. Muchísimas gracias por todo.

Manuel.


rudy garcia....
Sol's contributions were pivotal to the building of La Bloga's rep and helped in so many ways to create the unique identity of this site. Her scholarship will be missed by all of us, especially our readers.
Que le vaya bien,

RudyG.


daniel olivas....
La Bloga is an effort of love and dedication and Gina brought to the table both of these elements in large measure. We and our readers will miss her presence.

Daniel.


rene colato....
Gina, thank you for that incredible 15 de Septiembre fiesta. Mary Wynton from the Eagle Rock Public Library invited me to the fiesta. I was a colado, but you welcomed me as one of your friends. I had a great time. Gracias for presenting me to the rest of the blogueros and La Bloga.

Great writer and friend
Inspiration for literature
Nurture for children’s books
Amazing bloguera.

Gina, Gina, ra ra ra…

René Colato Laínez.

New Children's Books From Piñata Books/ Arte Público Press

René Colato Laínez

Thank you for your comments about my posts. Now I have a new day, los miércoles. Keep reading and look for my posts every Wednesday.

And following Manuel Ramos' post, these are the new bilingual children's books from Piñata Books, an imprint of Arte Público Press.


Butterflies on Carmen Street / Mariposas en la calle Carmen
by Monica Brown, April Ward (Illustrator), Gabriela Baeza Ventura (Spanish Translator)

This engaging bilingual picture book about migration combines the wonder of nature with the places we carry in our hearts

“Today is Butterfly Day!” Julianita excitedly tells her grandfather as they make their way down Carmen Street to school one morning. Today is the day Julianita and her friends have been waiting for—they’re going to learn about monarch butterflies. But what’s even more thrilling is they’re each going to receive their very own caterpillar to raise! When Julianita gets hers, she names him Tiger because of his striking yellow and black stripes.

Ms. Rodríguez teaches her students all about the monarch. But Julianita already knows that they fly south thousands of miles every winter because her grandfather remembers seeing the beautiful monarchs in his village in the highlands of Mexico. As the children feed and care for their caterpillars, they anxiously anticipate the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

When Tiger finally emerges from his chrysalis, Julianita doesn’t want to let him go. She worries that he will get lost on his way to Mexico. “Tiger knows the way to Mexico because it’s in his heart,” her Abuelito reassures her. She feels sad to see Tiger fly away, but Julianita knows that someday, she will follow him to her grandfather’s magical Mexico.

Paired with April Ward’s charming illustrations that depict Julianita’s neighborhood—her home on Carmen Street, the bench where Abuelito rests in Palo Verde Park, her parents’ store that sells everything in the whole wide world—this book by award-winning author Monica Brown is sure to entertain and educate kids ages 3-9. This is a perfect choice for children learning about insects and the forces of nature.


Ricardo’s Race / La carrera de Ricardo
by Diane Gonzales Bertrand, Anthony Accardo (Illustrator), Rocío Viegas-Barros (Spanish Translator)

This inspiring bilingual biography for children recounts the story of an All-American athlete and scholar

Ricardo Romo never dreamed that running to catch the school bus would lead to a college education, and ultimately, to a long and respected career as a teacher, administrator, and university president.

He grew up in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Mexican immigrants, and worked in his family’s small grocery store, where he learned to work hard and respect his family and neighbors. In school he learned that, as a Latino, he was expected to go to the technical high school rather than the one that prepared students for college, yet his teachers and coaches encouraged him to pursue his studies. They also fostered his natural athletic abilities as a runner.

In high school, Ricardo set numerous records in track and cross country, including the country’s second fastest recorded mile at that time. While still a sophomore, he began to receive invitations from colleges and universities urging him to consider running for their schools. Ultimately, he went on to run for the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in history.

While injuries ended Ricardo’s hopes of competing in the 1968 Olympics, his educational dreams were achieved when he obtained a master’s degree from California State University, Northridge and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles, both in history. Currently, he is the president of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a time line detailing Dr. Romo’s accomplishments as an athlete and a scholar is included.

Award-winning author Diane Gonzales Bertrand presents an inspirational biography of this All American’s quest to accomplish his goals. With vivid, realistic illustrations by Anthony Accardo, emerging readers will be inspired to discover their own talents and chase their dreams.


We Are Cousins / Somos primos
by Diane Gonzales Bertrand, Christina Rodriguez (Illustrator)

A simple bilingual text paired with colorful illustrations tells a loving, humorous story about playmates who are more than just friends

Cousins are friends and rivals. Cousins are funny and frustrating. But the most important thing is that cousins are family. We are Cousins / Somos primos celebrates the joy of this special family bond.

The children explain that they are cousins because their mothers are sisters, and from the moment they get together, the fun begins. They march in a make-believe parade, gobble up a pizza, and share a cozy story on Abuelo’s lap. But they also blame each other if something goes wrong, don’t want to share their toys, and wiggle against each other to nab a spot on Abuela’s lap.

Written in simple language for children ages 3-5, the brief English and Spanish text will become a valuable tool to encourage children to think and talk about their own families. It will also become a favorite book for children and grandchildren to share with their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and of course, cousins.

Vivid illustrations by Christina Rodriguez in bright, primary colors complement this story that will be as much fun to read at story hour as it will be to read on the family sofa.


The Woodcutter’s Gift / El regalo del leñador
by Lupe Ruiz-Flores, Elaine Jerome (Illustrator)

This appealing bilingual picture book for children celebrates community and folk art

One day, a terrible thunderstorm knocked down the giant mesquite tree that grew in the town square. After the storm, the townspeople gathered to gawk at the large obstruction blocking the street. They weren’t sure what to do with it, but they all agreed that the wood was good for nothing except a fire.

But the woodcutter Tomás sees something in the huge tree that the rest of the townsfolk don’t. “The beauty of this tree is not on the outside but on the inside,” Tomás tells them. In the following days, everyone watches curiously as the woodcutter carves and chips and whittles the wood into blocks. At one point, he moves the chunks into his shed, increasing everyone’s curiosity. What could the woodcutter be doing with all that lumber?

Finally, Tomás calls the townsfolk together to see his creations: a wonderful collection of life-sized animals for the children to enjoy. Children and adults alike are thrilled with their private zoo! But a few weeks later the woodcutter is visited by strangers from a folk art museum who want to buy the pieces for their collection. Will Tomás sell the town’s new zoo animals so that others can enjoy them too?


Benito’s Sopaipillas / Las sopaipillas de Benito
by Ana Baca, Anthony Accardo (Illustrator), Carolina Villarroel (Spanish Translator)

This tantalizing bilingual picture book for children shares the magical history of a favorite treat

Everyone loves the taste of the puffed pillows of fried bread known as sopaipillas, whether they’re drizzled with honey or sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. But most people, young Cristina included, don’t know about this Southwestern treat’s magical origins, or how it got its name.

One hot summer morning, Cristina’s abuelita promises to teach her how to make the tasty fried bread and explain how she knows that making sopaipillas will bring rain! Long ago, Cristina’s great-grandfather Benito was desperate. His crops were dying because it hadn’t rained for months. One day, exhausted and weak from working the fields, Benito watched in amazement as a scarecrow came to life and begged him to help bring rain. The worried scarecrow claimed to know how. But could a scarecrow—and pieces of dough—really bring rain to the dry and dusty fields? Could Benito really save everyone’s crops?

And so Benito—and many years later his great-granddaughter Cristina—learned about the pillows of bread known as “soup catchers” that, like clouds, catch rain drops and bring them down to earth.

Benito’s Sopaipillas / Las sopaipillas de Benito is a magical bilingual picture book for children aged 3-7 that celebrates a delicious staple of Southwestern cuisine. And for those children who want to test the magic of the sopaipillas, a recipe is included in English and Spanish.


Mimí’s Parranda / La parranda de Mimí
by Lydia M. Gil, Hernán Sosa (Illustrator)

A Puerto Rican holiday tradition comes to life on the pages of this colorful bilingual picture book

Like most young children, Mimí loves Christmas time, so much so that she doesn’t even mind the bitter cold. But while her friends plan to ask for skates, sleds, coats and boots for Christmas, Mimí wants a straw hat, new sandals, a polka-dot bathing suit, and maybe even a beach ball. She’ll need toys and clothing for warm weather because she goes to Puerto Rico every Christmas, and she can’t wait to go again this year!

Mimí especially looks forward to her annual parranda, the Puerto Rican version of Christmas caroling. She loves it when everyone arrives late at night and wakes her up by playing their instruments—güiros, palitos, maracas, guitars, tambourines. And the food … she dreams about a table brimming with all her favorites: roasted pork, pasteles, and arroz con leche.

But when she learns that her family won’t be able to go to Puerto Rico this year, Mimí is crushed. She is so sad that she loses interest in her class’s holiday party, and on the day of the party, she decides to stay home in bed. Just as Mimí is falling asleep, though, she hears the unmistakable sounds of musical instruments. Could it be that she’ll get her parranda after all?

Rich with Puerto Rican cultural traditions and complemented by vibrant illustrations, Mimí’s Parranda / La parranda de Mimí will have children ages 3-7 eagerly anticipating their own holiday traditions.


Goodnight, Papito Dios / Buenas noches, Papito Dios
by Victor Villaseñor, José Ramírez (Illustrator)

Popular Chicano author shares his family’s bedtime story with children in English and Spanish

“Papá, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m scared.”

Everyone knows that the trick to putting children to bed is creating a bedtime routine, and in this new children’s story from Victor Villaseñor, he recreates his own family’s bedtime tradition.

Papá tells his son that every night when he was a boy, his mother would sing him to sleep with the turtledove song. “Coo-coo-roo-coo-coooo,” he sings, and tells the little boy about his very own Guardian Angel who will take him through the night sky to be reunited with God, or Papito Dios. “Then in the morning, you’ll come back refreshed, rested, and powerful as the wind.”

As Papá sings the turtledove song to his son, he reminds the child that Mamá loves him, the dog and the cat love him, and his brothers and sisters love him too. Even the trees and grass and the flowers that dance in the wind love him. Gradually, the boy drifts off to sleep, feeling safe and warm in God’s love and dreaming of the day when he will sing the turtledove song to his own children.

New From Arte Público and Su Teatro at 35

Manuel Ramos

This week I present new books from a well-established publisher and the upcoming season lineup for a well-established community theater group. The idea is to keep reading, go to a play, enjoy life with a bit of cultura.

I'd like to think that La Bloga is getting to be well-established, too, but even if we are, there is always something new happening with the blogueras and blogueros here at La Blogita Casita. Stay tuned.

NEW FROM ARTE PÚBLICO
Arte Público recently released its latest catalog, where I found these forthcoming titles. Plenty of good reading. Everything from the earliest work of an acknowledged literary legend to the poignant non-fiction account of a young, immigrant girl adjusting to life in the U.S.

Dante's Ballad by Eduardo González Viaña, translated by Susan Giersbach-Rascón (September)
On a journey filled with the joy of music and the pain of flashbacks from his small-town life and marital bliss in Mexico, Dante encounters a series of eccentric characters: Josefino and Mariana, known to radio listeners as the Noble Couple, who change their listeners’ luck in an instant; Juan Pablo, a young man who uses his computer genius to rob a Las Vegas casino so he can pay for his college education; and the Pilgrim, a famous balladeer who has crossed the border via underground tunnels so many times that even years later he smells faintly of dirt and death. In this bittersweet tour de force originally published in Spanish as El Corrido de Dante, the First and Third Worlds join hands, and Mexican pueblo life and Internet post-modernity dance together in one of the most memorable fables to shed light on issues such as immigration, cultural assimilation, and the future of the United States with its ever-increasing Latino population.

Some Clarifications y otros poemas, Javier O. Huerta (September)
Fluent in English and Spanish, Huerta writes poems in both languages, and occasionally combines the two in the same poem. In this, his first full-length collection of poetry, he explores themes of dislocation, loss, love, and art. Whether mourning the tragic suffocating deaths of immigrants in a tractor trailer, lamenting the loss of a lover, or writing about childhood fears, Huerta sketches haunting pieces about a bilingual, bicultural experience. Winner of the University of California-Irvine’s 2005 Chicano / Latino Literary Prize, this debut collection marks the arrival of a vibrant new voice in Mexican American literature.


Cantos de adolescencia/Songs of Youth (1932-1937), Américo Paredes (September)
Originally published in 1937 by Librería Española in San Antonio, Texas, this new edition contains the first-ever English translations of the original Spanish poems and an introduction by the translators, scholars and poets in their own right, B.V. Olguín and Omar Vásquez Barbosa. Paredes, who died in 1999 at the age of 84, is widely considered to have been at the forefront of the movement that saw the birth of Chicana/o literary and cultural studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. This collection of poetry written during his teenage years lays the groundwork for themes he explored in later writings: culture conflict, race relations, gender relations, materialism, hybridity, and transnationalism. In his youthful, first-person voice, Paredes explores intimate, angst-filled issues relevant to all young people, such as love, memory, and rebellion.


The Truth About Las Mariposas, Ofelia Dumas Lachtman (October)
Sixteen-year-old Carolina “Caro” Torres is excited about spending six weeks of her summer vacation working for her Tía Matilde. But her excitement turns to bewilderment when she finds her aunt hobbling around on a broken foot and, much to her surprise, the owner of a bed and breakfast called Las Mariposas. For reasons no one understands, the mayor is trying to put her Tía Matilde out of business. His efforts have forced many of the townsfolk to stop doing business with her. A broken foot and a relentless antagonist are too much for Matilde. She is ready to give up her home and her livelihood. Busy with cleaning rooms, buying groceries, and cooking meals for their guests, Caro and her new friends still find time to wonder why the mayor is so determined to run her aunt out of business. When Caro finds a piece of a mysterious, old letter that makes reference to a fortune left to an unknown individual, the young people are sure there’s a connection to the mayor’s attempts to gain ownership of Las Mariposas. Who could have written the letter? What “bequest” is it talking about? Popular young adult author Ofelia Dumas Lachtman has once again crafted an entertaining and intriguing mystery novel for teen readers.

Mi sueno de America/My American Dream,Yuliana Gallegos, translated by Georgina Baeza (October)
Yuliana Gallegos recalls her move from Monterrey, Mexico, to Houston, Texas. Initially excited about moving to Houston, where the huge freeways make her feel like she’s on a roller coaster, her excitement quickly wanes when she starts school. Everything is different at Yuli’s new school, and her discomfort is magnified by her classmates’ stares. And to make matters worse, she learns that in spite of studying English in Mexico, she can’t understand anything that’s being said. All she wants to do is go back to her school in Monterrey.Yuli poignantly records the fear and anguish experienced by all immigrant children as they strive to adjust to a new language and culture. With the help of a compassionate teacher, a Japanese girl who becomes her friend, and her own determination to excel at her studies, Yuli gradually learns to speak English and feel comfortable in her new environment. Accompanied by black-and-white line drawings, this bilingual story will encourage other kids—whether immigrants or not—to write their own stories. Gallegos is a native of Mexico and has lived in Houston, Texas, since she was nine years old. She is currently a sophomore at Bellaire High School. Baeza is a teacher at the San Jacinto Intermediate School.












The catalog also features several bilingual, illustrated children's books scheduled for release in October and November. Go here to look at the listings.

EL CENTRO SU TEATRO'S 35TH SEASON
Su Teatro is a rock-solid cultural institution. The dedicated people of Su Teatro are a proud bunch and they have good reason. This is genuine community theater with national ties and a formidable international reputation. In honor of their longevity, here's their latest press release.

In 1972, a group of student activists from the University of Colorado at Denver, inspired by the agitprop work of groups like El Teatro Campesino and Teatro de la Esperanza, started a theater company aimed at articulating the concerns of Denver’s marginalized Chicano community. 35 years later, Su Teatro is, more than ever, a relevant and revolutionary voice in the Denver arts community.

In celebration of this landmark year, Su Teatro proudly announces its 2007 – 2008 35th Anniversary Season. This season offers all the best of what Denver has come to expect from Su Teatro—groundbreaking new works, world premier performances, divine comedies, delectable dramas, and tantalizing satires, as well as national and international visiting artists.

This season Su Teatro brings you musical pioneer Daniel Valdez, national recording artist Tish Hinojosa, and screen star Jesse Borrego, as well as the regional premiere of a cutting edge performance straight from Mexico City. A Denver institution for almost four decades, Su Teatro throws everything into the ring this year. Don’t miss Su Teatro 35—Colorado theater at its finest.

Sept 20 – Oct 27: A Bowl of Beings written by Culture Clash, directed by Hugo E. Carbajal. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Thur, Fri, and Sat nights at 8:05 pm. The irreverent comedy that takes Chicano icons, stereotypes, and history, stirs them up and serves them like a hot bowl of frijoles. Featuring comic takeoffs of Christopher Columbus, Ché Guevara, Carlos Santana, Edward James Olmos, and more.

Dec 14 – 23: Á Colorado en una Noche de Navidad Written by Tish Hinojosa and Anthony J. Garcia, Directed by Anthony J. Garcia, and featuring Tish Hinojosa and the Su Teatro coro. The King Center at Auraria, 855 Lawrence Way. A special theatrical interpretation of renowned recording artist Tish Hinojosa’s Christmas album Aquella Noche.

Feb 14 – March 22: Ollin written and directed by Daniel Valdez. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Thur, Fri, and Sat nights at 8:05 pm. World-renowned composer Daniel Valdez returns to Denver to direct his original play. Ollin is a poetic interpretation of the fateful meeting of Hernan Cortez and Moctezuma—“a musical performance bordering between performance art and theater…a creation story, the birth of the Mestizo…in 80 days.”

April 24 – May 3: Little Hands Hold the Wind written by Anthony J. Garcia, directed by Laura Cuetara. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Thur, Fri, and Sat nights at 8:05 pm. In the small Texas town of Alma, El Viento arrives amid a gust of hope and excitement, unraveling the complicated lives of the locals, including 7-year-old Amalia whose one wish to San Antonio (patron saint of lost things) is that he return what she has lost and must find—her papi.

Visiting Artists Series

November 1 – 3: Drive My Coche written by Roy Conboy, directed by Anthony J. Garcia, and featuring film and television star Jesse Borrego. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Thur, Fri, and Sat nights at 8:05 pm. Jesse Borrego and Valeria Hernandez return to perform the engaging tale of a young Chicano on the eve of his induction into the army as the Vietnam war rages.

Feb 7 – 9: Las Chicas de 3.5” Floppies by DramaFest from Mexico City. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Thur, Fri, and Sat nights at 8:05 pm A funny and edgy theatrical production where traditional mores meet the modern age. Dangerously skirting the boundaries between existential comedy, Mexican telenovela, and social documentary, this play exposes the human repercussions of globalization and poverty with incisive humor and relentless honesty. Performed in Spanish with English subtitles.

Special and Annual Events

Oct 7: Catástrofe written by Samuel Beckett, translated by José Luís Suarez-Garcia, directed by Eric Prince and José Luís Suarez-Garcia, presented by CSU. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street. From Nobel Prize winner and master of the absurd, Samuel Beckett, comes a short play about authoritarianism and the degradation of the human spirit. Back to back performances—one in Spanish, one in English.

April 5 – 8: XicanIndie FilmFest 10. Starz FilmCenter, 900 Auraria Parkway. One word says it all. It’s Chicano Independent film; it’s Mexican Cine de Oro; it’s Latino World Cinema—it’s the XicanIndie.

April 17 – 19: Neruda Poetry Festival. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street. Nationally recognized spoken word artists join the hottest local word slingers for this annual rhythm and rhyme feast.

August 7 – 10: 12th Annual Chicano Music Festival and Auction. Location to be announced. The best party of the year returns with son, huapango, mariachi, and rock n roll.

For more information about Su Teatro’s 35th Anniversary Season, give us a call at (303) 296-0219, or email us at elcentro@suteatro.org. Please also visit www.suteatro.org.

Later.

Women and Dance: sylphs and sirens

Christy Adair is a freelance writer and cultural critic, contributing to such dance journals as Spare Rib and Everywoman. Women and Dance: sylphs and sirens (Macmillan, 1992), is a text used on dance and performance courses in Britain, America and Asia. Adair contributes reviews and articles to journals, magazines, radio and television both nationally and internationally. She also facilitates a range of performance and education events. Adair is a Reader in Dance Studies at York St John University and is committed to radical performance which communicates an exhilaration of moving and challenges social contexts. Christy has significant links with the dance performance industry both locally in the UK and internationally. Her current research interests focus on gender and ethnicity in relation to dance studies and performance. Her forthcoming book is entitled Dancing the Black Question: The Phoenix Dance Company Phenomenon.

In Women and Dance, Adair introduces the reader to an analysis of Western dance from the point of view of gender and post-feminist analysis. Despite the traditionally high profile of women as principal dancers, Adair asserts that modern Western dance is far from a woman-centered medium. Due to the lack of women choreographers and directors, the genre’s vision of women continues to be rooted in patriarchal notions of the female. It is a representation of the female body that is seriously limited, still unable to reflect the depth of women’s reality.

Adair sees the most synchronous images of women having their origins in dance/performance companies that evolved as in the period post 1970. According to Adair, these groups reflected the fluid, politically progressive images of women following the last wave of the feminist movement. Their major contribution was the development of a type of performance that pushed the boundaries of gender and sex-role expectations. In a piece entitled She Is Giving Birth to Herself, Adair describes how the group Bush Mama explores the primacy of woman relating to other women, not woman-as-male-love-object.

The most useful portion of the book was: “The subversives...women’s dance practices.” It underscores Adair's central tenet that images of women will only be expanded with women themselves taking control of developing, directing, and mounting their own work. This, according to Adair, must occur despite the social and economic barriers involved.

This is particularly potent for me as I try to work more on dance and spoken word pieces. I came to the same realization over the last ten years that I needed to do whatever was necessary to control my own work, how it was showcased, etc. It's also an opinion I've shared with other writer/performers, such as Tara Betts and Sharmili Majmudar, as well as initial discussions with dramaturg and performer Coya Paz, founding member of Teatro Luna here in Chicago.

My only two hesitations in recommending Women and Dance are these: it's an extremely dense read, which made for laborious, although worthwhile reading, and that the book is expensive and better gotten through library sources. But simply put, Women and Dance a vital sourcebook for women performers across the board.

• ISBN-10: 0814706215
• ISBN-13: 978-0814706213

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Speaking up about immigration ---

Sam Quinones's new book ANTONIO'S GUN AND DELFINO'S DREAM,
a book of vignettes on immigration that has been lauded in the San Francisco
Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal,
as well as having been featured by La Bloga's Daniel Olivas.

Quinones has spoken about immigration--indeed a hot topic again as
Homeland Security begins cracking down on companies that hire
"illegals"--on NewsHour, NPR, and CSPAN.

The newest feature of Sam's website, www.samquinones.com is a link
where the public can tell their "True Tale," the name of which taken
from Sam's first book, TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER MEXICO.
Here's the link, which has five or six stories from people on it.
http://www.samquinones.com/other_stories.asp 

Lisa Alvarado

An interview with Christianne Meneses Jacobs, editor of Revista Iguana.

René Colato Laínez

IGUANA is a Spanish-language magazine for children ages 7-12 who grow up learning and speaking Spanish. IGUANA features fictional stories with characters, experiences, and settings that are familiar to the targeted readership. Additionally, IGUANA presents biographies / interviews with personalities that have influenced the lives of Latinos in America; historical articles; stories about children around the world; science articles, with related experiments to be tried at home; nature articles; interesting facts; recipes that kids can make at home; craft projects; artwork; reader-submitted works; puzzles; games; humor; poetry; and contests. www.nicagal.com

This interview was also published by Multilingual Living Magazine September/October 2007. biculturalfamily.org/magazine.html


What is the story behind your publication, Iguana magazine?

My husband and I created Iguana because we are raising our daughters in a bilingual environment. We searched, but could not find quality literature originally written in Spanish. Our desire to read in Spanish to our oldest daughter, who was three years old at the time, inspired us to start Iguana. We researched the idea for about a year and discovered that there is no other Spanish language magazine for children published in the United Sates. We were encouraged by the positive responses to the idea by librarians and teachers.

What’s your magazine’s mission? Who is your audience?

The mission of Iguana is to serve as a tool for Spanish language retention and Latino cultural preservation. Our primary audience is Latino families with children who are growing up learning Spanish. Additionally, schools with dual language programs, bilingual families, libraries and Anglo families who want their children to learn Spanish, as recommended by their teachers.

Why the name “Iguana”? Is the iguana on some of the covers a real one?

Many of the children magazines in English have names of animals. We thought it was a good idea to use a word that can be spelled the same way both in English and Spanish. Besides, I grew up in a tropical country, Nicaragua, where every day at noon all the iguanas living in our backyard would come out to take sun baths. The iguana that appears on some of the covers is T-Bo and he is a real iguana. T-Bo is a 16 year old rhinoceros iguana owned by Reptiles Adventures here in the Phoenix area. T-Bo is very professional and is always a joy to work with.

Tell us more about yourself, your background and how do you handle bilingualism at home.

I grew up in Nicaragua and came to the United States when I was 17 years old. I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and earned a degree in Government. I returned to California after graduation and then began my career as an elementary school teacher. I was a bilingual teacher for several years in Los Angeles before the program was eliminated by a state wide proposition. I moved with my family to Arizona five years ago. I have a Masters’ Degree in Education and a Reading Specialist Certification. I am currently a first grade teacher in one of the lowest socio-economic areas of Phoenix. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to grow up bilingual. I did, however, study English from the time I was nine years old. Now I am married to an Anglo and have two daughters, Isabelle Selene, 5 and Katherine Celeste, 21 months. My husband and I decided before Isabelle was born that he would speak English and I would speak Spanish. Both of our girls understand everything we tell them in either language. Katherine is not talking yet, but Isabelle needs to be reminded to switch languages. She feels more comfortable speaking in English. It can be a challenge to get her to speak in Spanish. We are considering spending next summer vacationing in Nicaragua to immersed the girls and my husband in the Spanish language and Latino culture.

Your magazine is wonderfully creative and very attractive with its high variety of content – you present not only factual, historical and even scientific tidbits of information, but also cartoons, short stories and poems. Where do you get your ideas? Who inspires you?

Iguana wants to introduce children to a wide variety of topics that schools either glance over or do not cover due to lack of time. As an educator I am knowledgeable of school curriculum. Our students are only taught the basics in schools while general culture is neglected. An educated person has knowledge about a variety of topics and can sustain an intelligent conversation with anyone. We try to encourage our readers to know more. Therefore, Iguana contains various sections such as Inventions that Changed the World, Mythology, Children Around the World (with history and geography) and a feature on exotic animals, recipes, arts and crafts and comic strips. One of my favorite features is the interview section in which I select a successful Latino/a who can be a role model for Latino children. I highlight their beginnings and their accomplishments. The goal is to show Latino children that Latinos can be successful and contribute their talents to society.

Who writes and illustrates for you? How do you collaborate?

Iguana has a core group of approximately 30 writers and 35 illustrators who live throughout the United States and around the world. Our writers must be native Spanish speakers who can write in Spanish and are familiar with all the intricacies of the language. I have writers who only write fiction pieces, and writers who contribute both fiction and non-fiction. Our illustrators do not have to be native speakers. There is more flexibility in that respect. We are very fortunate to live in the Internet era since a large portion of our job is done through email and the Internet.
As the Editor of Iguana I plan the editorial calendar for our six issues and brainstorm topics of interest to children. I assign articles to the writers and give feedback. I discuss illustrations with my husband, who is Iguana’s Art Director. I then communicate with the artists and assign illustrations. I maintain the deadlines and make sure everyone turns their articles in on time. I assist my husband reviewing the illustrations and requesting changes. I then communicate the changes to the artists. I also write several pieces for each issue.
I handle other work involve in running the magazine. I take care of subscriptions and renewals. I send out press releases several times during the year. I constantly meet with businesses and individuals, and attend meetings related to the Latino community. I also travel to book festivals and conferences.
As the publisher I keep a tight grip on the budget. I pay all of our contributors. I attend business meetings seeking financial support and sponsorship for Iguana. Additionally, I give interviews. I read newspapers and magazines to keep informed. My husband and I have more than 25 subscriptions to magazines, not including our daughters’ subscriptions. We are magazine junkies!
My husband deserves credit as well. I am able to work full time as a teacher and run the magazine thanks to his unconditional love and support. He does an amazing job taking care of our daughters, designing the magazine, keeping the accounting and supporting me.

What particular advice or message would you have for bilingual kids? Parents and educators?

My advice to bilingual children is to continue learning more about their chosen language. Learning to speak the language is not enough, children must learn to read and write like native speakers. We are living in a global economy and parents need to help their children understand that being bilingual, or multilingual, is an asset to them. They will be able to communicate with more people around the world as well as opening the possibilities to obtain great jobs because of their language skills.
I would advise parents of bilingual kids to keep trying hard everyday and do not give up on the journey toward raising bilingual children. It is difficult at times, but be persistent. Traveling with your kids to countries were the language is spoken can be a great experience. Try to expose your children to the beauty of your language and culture.
I would advise educators to show respect for and support the minority language that their students speak at home. Educators need to teach other children about tolerance and acceptance of differences. The Unites States is a diverse nation and children need to start getting along with all kinds of people from they time they are small.

Review: Their Dogs Came With Them

Helena María Viramontes. Their dogs came with them : a novel. New York : Atria, 2007. ISBN 0743287665 9780743287661

Read Daniel Olivas' interview with Helen Viramontes


Michael Sedano
An arresting title is all it takes to intrigue a book browser’s interest, which poses a happy future for Their Dogs Came With Them. Author Helena María Viramontes temporarily satisfies the browser’s question in an epigram quoting an eyewitness that when the Spanish invaded, leading the invading columns came the dogs, “their saliva dripping from their jaws.”

So, who are the dogs of the title?

Viramontes begins her story in 1960. The new freeway is invading an East Los Angeles neighborhood. One side of First Street remains. Across the street, the homes have been condemned. One day the home is filled with neighbors, the next day empty shells signal the coming of the Pomona Freeway that will connect the inland valleys to the sea.

The turmoil and destruction take years to wend their way through the land, in the meantime, four neighbors take the novel’s center stage, their stories alternating and combining ultimately to arrive at the same time and place.

There’s the abused orphan Ermila whose distance from her grandparents is all the more ironic because she is going nowhere. Ben Brady, the half Mexican boy with the Anglo father, like Ermila, is badly damaged, even before he survives being hit by a truck. Turtle née Antonia, goes about head shaved striving to fit in with her little brother who himself strives to fit in with gangbangers. Finally, Tranquilina’s family, itinerant missionaries who manage to do good.

Viramontes guides us through the four lives as they intersect. We see Ermila transferred by social services from a foster home to her grandparents’ house. The child becomes a burden that neither grandparent allows the child to forget. Ermila finds solace across the street until the day the old woman has to leave. We learn about Turtle’s family, the tattooed uncle who comes and goes from prison, her indoctrination into fist fighting watching her father punch out her mother, her uncle taking revenge against the father, the mother jumping in to protect her husband, in the process trampling Ermila’s nopales. Ben’s decline is the saddest. He sinks from a brightly alert boy to a totally dissociated victim of mindless violence. Viramontes’ treatment of Ben’s mental illness is sickeningly accurate and so deeply disturbing that readers with friends or family suffering mental illness will find a few pages almost unbearable.

The author doesn’t always tread deadly serious, even about deadly serious subjects. As Turtle’s little brother is practicing to be a tough guy cholo, his veterano uncle and aunt will have none of it. Readers who may have watched a primo sink into gangs will recognize the point, the uncle and aunt don’t go far enough.

…and he gestured to Tio Angel with a slight lift of his chin, barely acknowledging his question. Hanging with the McBride Boys, Luis was learning how not to talk and it was all about learning the unspoken for him now…the confident badass walk protecting a nation of city blocks claimed by McBride... And Tio Angel understood. He read the missing words and he slapped Luis upside his crew-cut head to get a word out of him. Speak up, he ordered, one combat ass-kicking boot coming out of the door…. I don’t take shit from nobody, sabes mi’jo? And Tio bent a little more to rub the spiky section where he had Three Stooges-slapped Luis, regretting his outburst…. You been hanging out too much with men, ése, Aunt Mercy said, a tumbler with flat beer in front of her. She wore a striped halter top, and her breasts cushioned her crossed arms…Luis walked past her still holding the clothespins…Wash my clothes too, would you, tuff homeboy? Aunt Mercy continued, because she thought humiliation captivating. 158

Reality remains on tenterhooks throughout the second part of the novel. Not only are the neighborhoods disrupted by the heavy construction, there’s a rabies quarantine surrounding the east LA neighborhood. Barricades across the sidewalks control resident travel, identity card checks pose their own dangers aside from being denies access to one’s own street. Helicopters buzz the sky, armed patrols track down strays, gunshots fill the night sounds as authorities dispatch the sources of disease. And we have met the dogs. Uniformed guys with Spanish surnames.

Yet, there's a more vital question: Who are the they who brought these dogs? It’s not stretching the metaphor too far to inquire, but it’s bootless. To me, this remains the most serious question that begs to be answered if the book is to realize it's fuller possibilities. Helena María Viramontes has produced a work of enduring quality. The 1960s are a watershed period in history that Chicano fiction has traversed before. Viramontes avoids the movement perspective of the mass to focus on the intensely personal issues of survival, or the futility thereof. And this is one issue that bothers me.

Does a writer have an obligation to build and support her culture by crafting affirming characters and stories, or should a writer allow herself to craft depressingly dismal dioramas of doomed lives? Should I alliterate? In this novel, one character runs off into the night, another is a murderer, another is murdered, another stands in a spotlight at the brink of death as the book closes. Did these characters will these outcomes, or did these outcomes have a lot to do with powers that invade neighborhoods with earth-moving machinery that bulldozes through people's lives with impunity? And really, who are "they"?


End of August 2007 fast approaches. Milestone events for me, as shall be seen. In the meantime, please post comments and responses to this, or any, La Bloga review. And if you've a mind to share with La Bloga, click here or send email to a Bloguera Bloguero.

See you next week.

mvs

Alias Olympia

Mind you, gente, there can be no substitute for a Daniel Olivas post, but he's getting a little well-deserved R & R, so consider this a humble placeholder. -- LA

Alias Olympia
by Eunice Lipton

In French Seduction, art historian Eunice Lipton explores her sensual obsession with the icon of France, the pool of memory and the way that obsession is fused to a contradictory history of her childhood and her connection to the Holocaust. But before that, Lipton authored a biography on Degas and in Alias Olympia, she attempts to cast light on a pivotal, but now obscure figure in the Impressionist movement.

Victorine Meurent was the model for Manet’s notorious painting, Olympia. In it, Manet re-stages that ancient pose of the odalisque, however, Victorine appears in the painting as bold, sexually aware and powerful. This caused an outrage in Paris at the time, and sadly, is still the reaction a sexually self-aware woman receives in present time. I stumbled upon this book, looking for more role-models, fodder, inspiration, other lifelines.

I was glad this book found me. The story is so much more than the telling of the painting controversy. Meurent was an artist, a brilliant one in her own right. She and her work were buried in a barrage of lies as result of her posing for Manet. The popular story about Meurent was that she had descended into prostitution, drunkenness and despair. Not so different than the double-standard of scrutiny and criticism that women who push the barriers, especially, barriers of the body and sexuality continue to face. There still is a threat, albeit more sub-rosa perhaps, that in claiming one’s full physical and sexual power, a woman leaves herself open to the psychic version of public stoning for her ‘lewd’ behavior.

While Meurent did know despair, it was one born out of a career thwarted, and a reputation slandered. She lived a ‘comfortable’ life as bourgeois wife, but not one in which she could move freely, express her ideas or create within the confines of women’s roles at the time. Lipton wrote the book in a narrative style, so that it reads and moves like a novel. No stuff of fiction here, but the complex and brilliant story of a women who dared conventions, and was meted out the punishment of a gilded, dulled existence and obscurity as a result.

I was struck with how women are still offered the choice of ‘comfort’ vs. authenticity, with the implied message that an authentic one will surely be the more painful, the one with the greatest social and emotional costs. To the extent that this blackmail is still being played out, Lipton’s book is a sadly cautionary tale.

ISBN-10: 0801486092
ISBN-13: 978-0801486098

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Raúl Niño , author of Book of Mornings will be appearing at:


Rudy Lozano Branch Library,
August, 22 at 7:00PM
1805 South Loomis Street
Chicago, Il 60608
312-746-4329

Please come and enjoy the readings, and diversity of Chicago neighborhoods.


And also.....

In preparation for City of Austin's Mexican American
Cultural Center's grand opening September 15, 2007,
The Public is invited to a MEET AND GREET Sneak
Preview featuring--

AMORINDIO:
Tributo y Celebracion for
raulrsalinas/Fundraiser for Red Salmon Arts:

Join us to honor and celebrate the life of Austin's elder
Xicanindio poet/human rights activist. A veterano of
Chicano literature/letters, raulrsalinas' writing and
activism have earned him international recognition as
a spokesperson for a diversity of political causes,
ranging from prisoner rights and national liberation
struggles to gang intervention and youth arts
advocacy.

raulrsalinas is the author of three collections of
poetry: Un Trip Thru the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions
(Editorial Pocho-Che, 1980; Arte Publico Press, 1999),
East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi pueblo (Red
Salmon Press, 1995), and Indio Trails: A Xicano
Odyssey thru Indian Country (Wings Press, 2006).
Recently, UT Press published a selected collection of
his prison wirtings, raulrsalinas and the Jail
Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen (edited by Louis Mendoza,
2006).

The tribute will feature performances and
presentations by renowned Chicana/o and Latina/o
writers and scholars: Miguel Algarin (NYC), Sandra
Cisneros (San Antonio), Carmen Tafolla (San Antonio),
Norma E. Cantu (San Antonio), Alejandro Murguia (San
Francisco), Rosemary Catacalos (San Antonio), sharon
bridgforth (Austin), Roberto Vargas (San Antonio),
Tammy Gomez (Fort Worth), Celeste Guzman Mendoza
(Austin), Levi Romero (Albuquerque, NM), Tony Spiller
(NYC), Jessica Torres (San Antonio).

Presenters on raulrsalinas' life include: Antonia
Castaneda (San Antonio), Roberto Maestas (Seattle,
WA), and Alan Eladio Gomez (Ithaca, NY). There will
be an opening ceremony by Danzantes Concheros y musica
movimiento Chicano by Conjunto Aztlan.

The celebracion will also include a Silent Art
Auction, curated by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, with
over 30 pieces by artists throughout the Southwest,
and food and refreshments provided by Alma de Mujer
Catering Dept.

All proceeds will support Red Salmon Arts, a Native
American/Chicana/o based cultural arts organization
with a history of working within the indigenous
communities of Austin since 1983. This event is
sponsored by Red Salmon Arts, Alma de Mujer, PODER,
and UT Press. $10 dollar suggested donation.

Saturday, August 25, 2pm - 7pm.
Mexican American Cultural
Center, 600 River Street.
For more info:
512-416-8885/ revolu@swbell.net.

Donation: Please send to Red Salmon Arts, 1801-A South
First St., Austin, TX 78704 Austin, TX.
For tax-deductible contributions, please contact Rene
Valdez first at
revolu@swbell.net


Bios for Performers:

Miguel Algarin (NYC) is the "poet laureate" of the
Lower East Side - and founder of the Nuyorican Poets
Cafe in New York City, where he has nurtured the
spoken and written word for nearly three decades.

Sandra Cisneros (San Antonio) is an American novelist,
short-story writer, essayist, and poet, whose works
helped bring the perspective of Chicana women into the
literary mainstream. Author of House on Mango Street,
Loose Woman, and Caramelo, among other works.
President and Founder of the Macondo Foundation.

Carmen Tafolla (San Antonio) is an internationally
acclaimed writer and regarded as one of the masters of
poetic code-switching. She often employs the
bilingual idiom of her native San Antonio’s Westside
in her poems. Author of various works, including
Sonnets to Human Beings, Sonnets and Salsa, and
Curandera.

Rosemary Catacalos (San Antonio) is the author of
Again for the First Time (Tooth of Time Books, Santa
Fe, 1984). A past Dobie Paisano Fellow, Stegner
Creative Writing Fellow, and the recipient of an NEA
grant, she has been the Executive Director of Gemini
Ink since 2003.

Norma E. Cantu (San Antonio) currently serves as
professor of English at the University of Texas at San
Antonio. She is the author of the award-winning
Canicula Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, and
co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and
Change.

Alejandro Murguia (San Francisco) is is a two-time
winner of the American Book Award, most recently for
This War Called Love: Nine Stories, City Lights Books.
His memoir The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in
California, University of Texas Press, has been
nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic
Writing.

sharon bridgforth (Austin) is the Lambda Award winning
author of the bull-jean stories (RedBone Press), and
love conjure/blues a performance/novel (RedBone
Press). Bridgforth has broken ground in the creation
and presentation of the performance/novel and in doing
so has advanced the articulation of the Jazz aesthetic
as it lives in theatre.

Roberto Vargas (San Antonio) is a community/labor
organizer and author of two poetry collections:
Primeros Cantos and Nicaragua, yo te canto besos,
balas y sueños libertad. He was a founding member of
The Pocho Che Collective, a loose coalition of writers
who published some of the first books of the
contemporary Latino literary renaissance taking place
in San Franisco.

Tammy Gomez (Fort Worth) is a native Texas writer and
performance poet, is featured in the PBS documentary
"Voices from Texas." She has published the work of
Yoniverse, a women's poetry group she founded, in the
anthology In a Loud Kitchen (Tejana Tongue Press,
1998); a second anthology, North Texas Neruda Love,
published by Tejana Tongue Press, was released in
January 2006.

Levi Romero (Albuquerque, NM) is an Embudo Valley poet
& author of In the Gathering of Silence (West End
Press).

Celeste Guzman Mendoza (Austin) is a San Antonio
native. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as
Salamander, Poet Lore, and 5 a.m., and in various
anthologies, including Telling Tongues, Red Boots and
Attitude, and Floricanto Si. She won the Poesia Tejana
Prize in 1999 from Wings Press for her chapbook of
poems, Cande te estoy llamando.

Jessica Torres (San Antonio) is a youth filmmaker,
activist, visual artist, and singer/musician. Her
short film, Los Punkeros, Chicano punk rock movement
with a twist of Conjunto, appeared on San Anto TV, a
TV Magazine produced by local youth through the San
Anto Cultural Arts Multi Media Institute (SAMMI).

Bios for presenters:

Antonia Castaneda (San Antonio) is a Chicana feminist
historian, teaches in the Department of History at St.
Mary's University. Her research and teaching interests
focus on gender, sexuality, and women of color in
California and the Borderlands from the 16th century
to the present.

Roberto Maestas (Seattle, WA) is the co-founder and
Executive Director of El Centro de la Raza, a center
for Seattle’s Latino Community. He has long been
involved in the ongoing struggle for civil rights in
the city.

Alan Eladio Gomez (Ithaca, NY) earned a Ph.D. in
History and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the
University of Texas at Austin. A community organizer,
scholar, and radio journalist, Gómez studies post WWII
social movements involving multiracial and
transnational alliances of U.S. Third World peoples,
prison rebellions, political theater, and Latin
American revolutionary movements.


Bio for Conjunto Aztlan:

Conjunto Aztlan (Austin) represents a spiritual and
musical journey expressed through poetry and song.
The Conjunto was born of the Xicano Movement in
Austin, Texas, in 1977. Their purpose is to
celebrate, defend, and expand the musical, cultural,
and spiritual legacy of the Chicano people.

Lisa Alvarado

El castillo de la reina

René Colato Laínez



This was my third time participating at the Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Workshop in San Antonio, Texas. I was a Chuparosa, this year and my intention was to write in my dorm while the rest of the macondistas were in workshops. But at the last moment, I signed up for the Translingual Poetics Workshop led by Liliana Valenzuela and Levi Romero.

I wrote El castillo de la reina for a homework assignment. The homework was to observe a place in San Antonio and to write a poem using English and Spanish about that particular place. Most of the Macondistas stayed at the Our Lady of the Lake University dorms. I was not sure what to write about and decided to take a walk around the campus. When I saw the beautiful towers of the main building, I got the idea. I became a child and instead of the main building, it saw a castle but not any particular castle. It was el castillo de la reina. If you are familiar with the campus, you will recognized the talking traffic light: Wait Wait Wait…


El castillo de la reina


Today, I stood in front of a castle.
It must be the castle of a queen
Because I saw her white estatua in the entrance.
This must be el castillo de la reina.

This castillo is big.
It has two big cones on the top
Like giant party hats.
It has round circle windows
Where the reina may seat
And observe the busy street.
There are rectangles and square windows
And big crosses.
This reina must be a catolica.
This castillo de la reina is very pipirinais.

The doors of el castillo are big and I saw people
Coming in and coming out.
This reina must have many friends.
I wish I could visit her.
I will say, “Reina, your are la mera mera and
Your castillo is retequebonito.”

Uno, dos y tres
Here I go, to el castillo de la reina.


El semáforo

I need to cross the street to visit el castillo de la reina
But the traffic light is bien malcriada.
It says bad words, que grocerias fuchi.

I push the button to cross the street
And the traffic light spoke to me
This reina is very smart,
Tiene un semáforo que habla.

But it has a big mouth.
When I push the button
It says Güey not only one
But three times.
Güey, güey, güey

I frown at the red light
And say, “I will tell la reina, to change you.
You are not a nice semáforo.”

Yesterday, la reina told
That she did not have any visitors.
And I know why, “This semafaro malcriado,
Is el culpable.”

“Shame on you, “ I say
and I begin to cross the street.
This time the semáforo begins to count
One, two, three.
Don’t give me carrillas now
I am running as fast as I can.

La reina must know this right now.


El teléfono

El castillo de la reina
Has very beautiful gardens.
This reina has many trabajadores.

Every time I walk in the jardines
I see trabajadores cutting the bushes
watering the roses,
And driving carritos full
with boxes and bags
that go everywhere.
This reina esta en todo.

But suddenly a telephone rings
And a trabajador who is cutting
The leaves of a small tree
Answers the phone
And hides behind the tree.
He begins to whisper
And looks from left to right
Like if he looking for moros en la costa.

This is really strange,
Is he telling chismes about la reina?
How can he dare to do that!

In the meantime the manguera looks like a fuente
And is making a big pond of water.
Poor reina, the water bill will be very high next month.
And la reina is trying to conserve energia.
She must know about this too.

Soon the man in rolling with laughter
On the grass,
Is he now making chistes about la reina?

Stop it! I stomp my feet.
Don’t make fun of la reina.

And the man stands up
And put his hand in front of his forehead
Like a soldado.

“Yes, Reina,” the man says.
“I will change that traffic light right now.”

And he walks to the semáforo and it says
Güey four times.
This semáforo no respeta a nadie
Not even los trabajadores de la reina.

I will tell la reina to put a bilingual semaforo
That says espera and stop for the green light
to you visit el castillo de la reina.

Bits

Manuel Ramos

SAM QUINONES
We received the following note from the University of New Mexico Press:

Sam Quinones' Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream (UNM Press, 2007), a book of immigration vignettes, picked up great reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, among other publications. The newest feature of Sam's website is a link where the public can tell their True Tale, based on Sam's first book, True Tales From Another Mexico (UNM Press, 2001).

Here's the link: http://www.samquinones.com/other_stories.asp

You can read La Bloga's interview with Quinones, by Daniel Olivas, here.

And a review of Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream, by R. Ch. Garcia, here.


GENERATION TO GENERATION
Stories on Stage (Theater of the Imagination) begins its 2007-2008 season on August 26 with a program entitled Generation to Generation. Stories on Stage has taken a great concept and turned it into a great series of entertaining events. The concept? Excellent literature read by accomplished and acclaimed actors. Not plays, not performances: readings. The motto for Stories on Stage is Adults Deserve a Great Story ... and Cookies & Milk, Too!


Generation to Generation features four selections: The Queen of Mold by Ruth Reichi, My Son the Fanatic by Hanef Kureishi, Vanderbilt Genes by Augusten Burroughs, and an excerpt from Migrant Souls by Arturo Islas (William Morrow, 1990). The Islas piece will be read by Adriana Gaviria, who performed last year in Hermanas at the FringeNYC and the 52nd Street Project's Power of Ten: Plays That Count at the Public Theater in New York. Her other credits include Anna In The Tropics, September Shoes, and The Birds. She's worked with numerous theater companies including the Immigrants' Theater Project, Young Playwrights, Inc., and Pregones and Repertorio Español. Other readers are Annette Helde, Joshua Coomer, and Shishir Kurup.

Migrant Souls has an excellent reputation. The Library Journal's review of this book said: "Continuing the saga of the Angel family that began in Rain God, Islas explores the effects of life on the border. Burdened by the pride of matriarch Mama Chona, all her children and grandchildren are raised to hate their Mexican, dark-skinned heritage, valuing a mythical light-skinned Spanish ancestry. Islas contrasts rebel Josie Salazar, dark and divorced, who fights the family on every front, with Josie's widowed aunt, Jesus Maria, who attempts to maintain Mama Chona's values despite the scorn of her children. The author displays consummate skill in portraying the anguish of Hispanics living on both sides of a literal and figurative border in the second volume of a proposed trilogy. An excellent addition to fiction collections."

Generation to Generation is scheduled for August 26, 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM, Stage Theater, Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

WHAT HAPPENED AMERICA?
SEIU Local 105 and the Laughing Bean Café present: What Happened America?, featuring The Laughing Bean Players. This fundraiser is tonight, August 17, at 7:30 PM at the Mi Casa Theater, 360 Acoma, Denver. Tickets are $20. Call 303-698-7963, ext. 150.

SEIU Local 105 represents 5,200 employees in health care, property services, and public services.

ELVIS
Hey -- how about this:

The Elvis Presley Tribute is this Sunday, August 19, at Rick's Tavern, 6762 Lowell Boulevard, Denver. The folks at Rick's are inviting everyone to stop by for a good time as The King of Rock 'n Roll is honored: Elvis music, costumes, and impersonators. More info about the event and The Rick Garcia Band on the website. Rick Garcia and his band will perform some of Elvis' songs - in addition to their signature blend of Tex-Mex, New Mexico, country, rock and oldies music.

That's all I got.

Later.

Coco Fusco -- English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas-

Coco Fusco

In this series of essays, Fusco concentrates on examining the work of Latino/a performance artists born in the U.S., and the themes of “otherness” and culture clash. Performers such as Andres Serrano, Laura Aguilar, and Fusco’s longtime collaborator, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, are held up to the light for close consideration.

In the essay targeting her collaboration with Gomez-Pena, she details a performance done in public venues (museums, municipal buildings) where she and Gomez-Pena created a living exhibit, posing as “specimens” of a fictional indigenous tribe. They displayed themselves in a cage, with dress and talismans gleaned from Pan-Latino/a and popular culture. Her commentary on the experience, on being the observed ”other,” and what she saw as the fascination of the predominately Anglo audience as observer, underscored the themes of objectification and the blurring of public and private.

I had mixed feeling in reading about this performance. On the one hand, I think it was a bold and important artistic move to skewer the dominant culture's idea of 'preservation' and 'curation ,' to challenge it as a kind of pandering to that culture's fascination with they perceive as the 'exotic' indigenous. Never mind that in many cases, these exhibits are only possible as a direct result of colonialism, genocidal practices, and grave robbing. How different is Fusco's and Gomez-Pena's living exhibit behind bars from the guided tours held on the the rez, or in barrios, in farm worker camps?

I wonder to what extent the audience grasped that under the rubric of "Latino," there exists hundreds of complex societies, with a heterogeneity of language, practices, rituals. I'm concerned that the work only engenders the knee-jerk, superficial shudder of guilt in primarily white, middle-class audiences.

In the post-performance discussions of Housekeeper's Diary, the comments from some middle-class people reveal discomfort and their own lack of knowledge as to how to even treat their own maids in a more real, humane way. But there are also comments about what is the vitality and vibrancy of working people--comments about the inherent dignity they sense, despite an external objectification. This, to me is the kind of dialog and engagement I find most satisfying as a performer.

While those points of divergence are significant, I felt I had read something that will challenge me to keep thinking about the political context of performance. One last reservation with this book was Fusco’s tendency make referential comments about to different artists, without always placing them in context. This can make for a limited appreciation of the the work as a whole, as well as perpetuate an unfortunate tendency of performance artists conversing amongst themselves. (Particularly since Fusco plumbs the legacy of imperialism, colonialism in her work, it strikes me as odd that she gears her writing to the art intelligentsia. ) It's a challenge, however, worth the effort of cross-referencing and research for the reader.

ISBN-10: 1565842456
ISBN-13: 978-1565842458

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Una Notita Del Teatro Luna (A Note from Teatro Luna)

Teatro Luna has a VERY exciting show opening in early November. It is called Machos, and it is based on interviews with 50 diverse men nationwide. Our ensemble members will be performing as men (we have a movement coach and everything) talking about their lives, their work, and, of course, women. If you'd like to bring a group of students to see the show, please contact info@teatroluna.org. We'd be happy to arrange a group rate, a post-show discussion, or even a classroom visit.

Volunteers Wanted!!!

We desperately need volunteers to help us transcribe the last few interviews. Transcription is a time-consuming, tedious process, but nothing could help us more as we work to finalize our script. We're looking for people who can dedicate 10-12 hours in the next week - a lot of ask, we know! In exchange, we will offer you your choice of $50, 4 tickets to MACHOS, or 2 VIP tickets to a MACHOS special event. And of course, a thank you in the program and our undying love. Well, at least MY undying love. I can't speak for everyone. if this sounds like something you can commit to, please e-mail Belinda at bcervantes@teatroluna.org.

Oye-Listen! Call for Submissions for September & November

So far, OYE-LISTEN! - a new collaboration between Teatro Luna and Jane Addams Hull-House Museum- has been a blast. Our June and July series had packed houses and vibrant performances from Yolanda Nieves, Sandra Santiago-Posadas, Lani Montreal, Francis Allende-Pellot, Gesel Mason, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cristal Sabbagh, Andrea Wukitsch, Keiko Johnson and more. There's still time to join the fun! We are currently seeking performers for slots in September and November.

For submission guidelines or questions, please email to submissions@teatroluna.org.

Proyecto Latina - AUGUST 20th

The next Proyecto Latina is on Monday, August 20th @ 7 p.m. Our August feature is Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez, she shares from her collection of poems. As always there will also be Chisme box and open-mic . Free. Join us at Tianguis, 2003 S. Damen.

Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez A native of Chicago's South Side, has been involved with a number of organizations including Teatro Luna, About Face Theater, and el Cafe Teatro Batey Urbano. Stephanie has facilitated journaling and poetry workshops for young incarcerated women and adult female survivors of domestic violence. She moved back home to Chicago after a two and a half year stint in the hippy Bay Area. Her work addresses issues like anti-oppression, survival, healing, and hope. Stephanie is currently working as Associate Director of the Chicago Freedom School.

About Proyecto Latina: Proyecto Latina is a collaborative between Teatro Luna, Tianguis, and Mariposa Atomica Ink. We are excited about showcasing Latina talent and are always seeking outgoing Latina poets and performers for our monthly open mic series. Proyecto Latina takes place the third Monday of every month. Its an open mic so everything's game: Poetry, spoken word, music, monologues, shorts y en el idioma que prefieras. And if you're too shy to get on stage come and be one of the lucky spectators.

***Proyecto Latina takes place the 3rd Monday of every month.
Held at Tianguis Books
(2003 S. Damen, Chicago, IL)***

Teatro Luna Upcoming Season!

Get ready for a whole year of Teatro Luna! We have three brand new shows coming up.

Machos, a new ensemble performance based on interviews with men nationwide, opens November 8th. Solo Tu, a collection of four solo plays about four very different women, opens February 28, 2008. Restaurant Spanish, an ensemble play about immigration and communication, opens late summer (dates TBA).

Visit us at www.teatroluna.org or www.myspace.com/teatroluna

Lisa Alvarado

INTERVIEW WITH ANA CASTILLO

Ana Castillo is a renowned poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Castillo’s books include the novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (Bilingual Review Press, 1986; Doubleday, 1992), for which she received the Before Columbia Foundation’s American Book Award in 1987. She is also the author of Sapogonia (Bilingual Review Press, 1990), So Far From God (Norton, 1993), and a work of non-fiction, Massacre of the Dreamers: Reflections on Mexican-Indian Women in the United States 500 Years After the Conquest (University of New Mexico, 1992).

As a poet, Castillo is the author of several works including the chapbooks, Otro Canto (1977), and The Invitation (1979); these were followed by several volumes of poetry which include Women Are Not Roses (Arte Público, 1984), My Father Was a Toltec (West End Press, 1988), and I Ask the Impossible (Anchor Books, 2001). She recently published Water Color Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (Curbstone Press, 2005).

In addition to the above books, Castillo’s other works include Peel My Love Like an Onion (Doubleday, 1999), and a children’s book, My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove (Dutton Juvenile, 2000). In 2005 she published a dramatic work Psst…I have something to tell you, mi amor (Wings Press).

In her new novel, The Guardians (Random House), Castillo ventures into controversial terrain as she explores the issue of undocumented immigration through the hardships of one family. She tells her story through the voices of several distinct and unforgettable characters as we follow Regina, a middle-aged widow living in southern New Mexico, who cares for her teenage nephew, Gabo, an undocumented immigrant. Gabo’s mother died seven years earlier attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. Now Gabo’s father, Rafa, might have met a similar fate. As Regina and Gabo embark on their search for Rafa, they confront the underground and dangerous world of coyotes who are willing to smuggle immigrants into the United States for a steep price.

Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo currently lives in New Mexico. For a complete listing of her publications, awards and scheduled appearances, visit her website.

Castillo kindly agreed to take time out of her busy book tour to answer a few questions for La Bloga.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Undocumented immigration is such a hot-button issue which, sadly, brings out some of the worst xenophobic feelings in some people. Writers such as Luis Alberto Urrea and Reyna Grande have stepped into the fray in non-fiction and fiction, respectively. Why did you decide to put this issue at the center of your novel’s narrative?

ANA CASTILLO: Living in the desert in Southern New Mexico, near the border since the end of 2003, brought this reality front and center for my imagination to run with. I’ve taken on subjects of concerns in a variety of genres, and I have to make a decision each time as to which genre I will choose. I have found that storytelling is the way to reach out to audiences who might not come to an article or a poem.

OLIVAS: The Guardians is not a traditional novel in the sense that you use many different voices to tell your story. Did you try other structures first or did you decide on this structure from the start? What are the benefits to you, as a writer, to the multi-voice structure?

CASTILLO: The quartet of narrators happened as the story evolved. I don’t work with an outline. As the story develops the structure takes shape. In this case I felt it was important to give Gabo, the young man, his own voice. And Miguel/Mike, the Chicano, naturally had to speak for himself. And as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so Miguel’s grandfather also spoke for himself.

The benefit it gave me was the challenge of trying something I hadn't done in a previous book. For me personally as a writer, structural challenges are very important. They keep things interesting. I call myself a “genre jumper.” For example, a few years ago I started to re-work a long poem while I was supposed to be writing a novel. Six weeks later,I had written a novel in verse, Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (Curbstone Press, 2005).

OLIVAS: One of my favorite characters in your novel is El Abuelo Milton. Is he based on anyone in particular? How did you create a character who is so different from you?

CASTILLO: I believe for every novelist it’s the same. All our characters have some of our selves in them just as they do in our dreams. We dream about our dead grandfathers, have arguments with old lovers, but in fact, all of those dream characters are ourselves. We’re working it out. In the novel, we writers do that and to make it accessible to the reader, we further develop a character that is a composite of many people.

OLIVAS: Do you have a favorite character in your novel?

CASTILLO: I put the same amount of love in each of them and each returned it.

OLIVAS: As you were writing The Guardians, did you have any friends or family members read drafts?

CASTILLO: I credited the friends who read a late draft in the acknowledgements. Sometimes I read passages out loud to people close to me as I'm writing. Basically, it’s to anyone who will listen! It started with my poetry -- to hear cadences. It helps me to hear it out loud.

OLIVAS: If there’s one thing you’d like readers to take away from The Guardians, what would it be?


CASTILLO: Extraordinary reading pleasure.
First and foremost, and I teach this about fiction: it’s for pleasure. No one reads a novel or short
story for the news of the day. “Pleasure” doesn’t necessarily mean that the subject has to be “pleasant” or comfortable for the reader.

OLIVAS: What are you reading these days?
Any recommendations?

CASTILLO: I'm reading Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life, by New Mexican Governor Bill Richardson. Let’s not rely on CNN and NPR to give us all the information we need to make responsible decisions for our communities. When I’m writing, I don’t read fiction. My other recommendation is: Vote in the primaries.

OLIVAS: Any advice for beginning writers?

CASTILLO: Short and sweet: Read, read read. Write, write, write. Re-write, re-write, re-write.

OLIVAS: Thank you for spending time with La Bloga.

Children’s Books for August

René Colato Laínez



This poem was published in the Spanish Children's Magazine, Revista Iguana (July-August 2005)

http://www.nicagal.com

El calor del mes de agosto

El calor del mes de agosto
me manda derechito al mar
a correr, a jugar y a nadar
con un delfín y un calamar.

El calor del mes de agosto
llena de arena mis manos
y hago con mis hermanos
castillos y dragones tiranos.

El calor del mes de agosto
llena de sudor mi frente
le pego a la pelota muy fuerte
y me mojo en una fuente.

El calor del mes de agosto
siempre hace agua mi boca.
Me como un elote en la roca
y carne asada en la troca.


Take a look at these summer books. Get a hat, a lemonade and enjoy reading.

From the Bellybutton of the Moon and other summer poems/Del ombligo de la luna y otros poemas de verano by Francisco X. Alarcon. Illustrated by Maya Christina Gonzalez.

Coral y espuma, abecedario del mar por Alma Flor Ada. Illustrado por Vivi Escrivá.

Icy watermelon / Sandía fría by Mary Sue Galindo. Illustrated by Pauline Rodriguez Howard.

Hello Ocean: Hola Mar by Pam Munoz Ryan. Translated by Yanitzia Canetti. Illustraded by Mark Astrella.

El verano by María Rius. from Catalan by Eulàlia Pérez.

Lemonade sun : and other summer poems by Rebecca Kai Dotlich. Illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist.

Not a copper penny in me house : poems from the Caribbean by Monica Gunning. Illustrated by Frané Lessac.

Torch fishing with the sun by Laura E. Williams. Illustrated by Fabricio Vanden Broeck.

Colorado and The Big Read (Red?)

Manuel Ramos

COLORADO
There are at least six Latina/o novelists who are Colorado based. Here are very brief summaries about five of them, in no particular order.



Abelardo Lalo Delgado
Lalo Delgado is best known, of course, as a premier Chicano poet (he passed away in 2004). Stupid America, a brilliant and succinct exposure of racism and its painful legacy, is a masterpiece of literary accomplishment, Chicano or otherwise. His one novel, Letters to Louise, is not as well-known but it does have a solid reputation and I think it deserves a broader audience. The book was published by Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol International in 1982, and copies can still be found in unique book stores and online. One of the gems of my sprawling library is a copy of this book in excellent condition with a very personal and friendly author's autograph. I noted in an earlier review that the novel "tells the story of a man struggling with the contradiction of a good person involved in a moral dilemma, an ordinary person making complex choices in order to live the life he thinks he should."

Alan Cheuse, in the New York Times, said: "The narrator of Delgado's novel is a middle-aged Chicano poet/social worker/administrator named Santiago Flores. His job as an expert on the problems of migrant workers takes him across the Southwest, and his search for himself carries him back into the world of his childhood. In the warm, slightly wacky letters that he writes to an unknown correspondent --possibly you? possibly me? -- there's a touch of Whitman and also a swatch of Cantinflas, and finally a great and appealing personality, a new and attractive voice. By peering over Abelardo's shoulder you may catch a glimpse of yourself in his highly polished Chicano mirror."

Gene Guerin
Gene Guerin's debut novel, Cottonwood Saints (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), won the Premio Aztlán and the Mountains and Plains Regional Book Award for Adult Fiction. I reviewed this book for La Bloga, where I noted that the "author says in the book's Acknowledgments that Cottonwood Saints is a work of fiction but it is based on forty handwritten pages of reminiscences by his mother, Margaret Ortega Guerin. Without her memories there would be no book."

I also said: "At its heart this book is about the essential strength and dignity of hard-working, unpretentious people. In that way this book compares favorably, in tone, depth and sweep, to Luis J. Rodriguez's family saga of steelworkers in Twentieth Century Los Angeles, Music of the Mill (Rayo, 2005). The New Mexican rural poor of Cottonwood Saints overcome hardship and tragedy; raise families and provide for their children against all obstacles, natural and man made; they love, hate and disappoint; they overcome or succumb, yet they manage to leave something to pass on, something to cherish, in the same ways as Rodriguez's urban working class characters also survived and endured. They lived stories that cried out to be told."



Mario Acevedo
Mario Acevedo has staked out the Chicano-private eye-war vet-vampire turf and made it his special place. His first two books of a projected three book series have entertained and amused readers across the country. La Bloga has featured Acevedo several times -- interviews, reviews, and he did a guest post for us, too -- and at this point we eagerly wait for his next piece in the series. The first, Nymphos of Rocky Flats (Rayo, 2006), garnered this praise from La Bloga's Daniel Olivas:
"Acevedo gleefully debunks vampire lore and creates new rules of the game with a bit of romance thrown in for good measure. In the end, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats delivers fast paced fun topped off with wry humor and dead-on social commentary. One wonders who will play Felix Gomez in the screen adaptation."

His second, X-Rated Bloodsuckers (Rayo, 2007), also received rave reviews, including this from La Bloga's Michael Sedano:
"X-Rated Bloodsuckers will make an excellent, if perhaps ironic, gift for Easter. Harper Collins’ Rayo imprint has the novel scheduled for a March 2007 release. Outright hilarity in places, downright revulsion in others, e.g. rat chorizo and coffee mixed with Type B, and an involving yarn make it a standout. Hopefully, a recipient won’t be superstitious, but at any rate, the engaging character of Felix Gomez will win you as many friends as you give copies to."

The third Felix Gomez book, The Undead Kama Sutra, is set for a March, 2008 release.



Lynda Sandoval
Lynda Sandoval is a former police officer-turned fiction writer with fourteen book sales to her credit.

Sandoval writes women's fiction for HarperCollins Rayo; romance for Silhouette Special Edition; romantic suspense for Silhouette Intimate Moments; and young adult novels for Simon & Schuster.

Her books have won awards such as the 2000 Rising Star, the 2002 Golden Quill, and the 2002 Beacon—all sponsored by regional chapters of Romance Writers of America. She was also a finalist in the 2002 Booksellers Best, and a two-time Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist prior to selling.

Her novels include Chicks Ahoy (Simon & Schuster, 2006); Unsettling (Rayo, 2004); and And Then There Were Three (Harlequin, 2003). She also wrote True Blue: An Insider's Guide to Street Cops for Writers (Gryphon, 1999).



Aaron A. Abeyta
A few weeks ago I interviewed Aaron A. Abeyta and offered some comments about his debut novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid (Ghost Road Press, 2007). Abeyta's interview is worth looking at if you haven't read it yet. For example, here is his take on being a storyteller:

"I learned early on, mostly from my abuelo, that a story is a living thing. I don’t ever remember hearing a story that began at A and ended at Z. I didn’t grow up with typical plot structures as a model. My mom didn’t read Mother Goose to me, or anything of the sort. I tell people that and they look at me like I was abused, as if to say that my parents not reading to me was some sort of 20th century crime. I never felt deprived, however. Everyone around me told great stories, and those were my bedtime stories. For example, my abuelito would tell a story and then a few weeks later I would hear the same story from the sheepherder and they were remarkably different, yet essentially the same. The teller of the story was always the heart, the information the blood and the listener the soul. I try and remain true to this model, not only in the novel but in all my writing. I guess my people were born of circles because that’s the way we still communicate."

Abeyta teaches English at Adams State College in Alamosa. He also has published two poetry collections, As Orion Falls (Ghost Road Press, 2005), and Colcha (University Press of Colorado, 2000). Colcha won an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award.

THE BIG READ

Rudolfo Anaya sent information about his participation in The Big Read, so I checked out the website and pulled the following (all quoted from http://www.neabigread.org/):

"The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The Big Read brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.

"The Big Read answers a big need. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that not only is literary reading in America declining rapidly among all groups, but that the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young. The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture would study the pages of this report in vain.

"The Big Read aims to address this crisis squarely and effectively. It provides citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities. The initiative includes innovative reading programs in selected cities and towns, comprehensive resources for discussing classic literature, an ambitious national publicity campaign, and an extensive Web site providing comprehensive information on authors and their works.

"Each community event lasts approximately one month and includes a kick-off event to launch the program locally, ideally attended by the mayor and other local luminaries; major events devoted specifically to the book (panel discussions, author reading, and the like); events using the book as a point of departure (film screenings, theatrical readings, and so forth); and book discussions in diverse locations and aimed at a wide range of audiences."

I've seen the discussion and study materials for Bless Me, Ultima, and I was impressed. These include a Teacher's Guide and a Reader's Guide, which look to me as though they are very good tools for a deeper understanding of the novel.

Here's what the NEA says about Anaya's classic:

Bless Me, Ultima

One of the most respected works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya tells the story of Antonio Luna Márez, a young boy who grapples with faith, identity, and death as he comes of age in New Mexico.

Other current featured novels in The Big Read are:

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury

My Ántonia
Willa Cather

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett

A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan

The Age of Innocence
EdithWharton


Later.

Aracelis Girmay/TEETH

Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & essays. Teeth, her collection of poems, was published by Curbstone Press in June 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Callaloo, & MiPoesias, among other journals. Her collage-based picture book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow & former Watson Fellow. She teaches writing workshops in New York & California.

(That's the official bio, gente, but I think you'll love hearing Aracelis on Aracelis in a recent email I received.)

*****

"I've loved books & the idea of reading since I was little. The story goes "you used to memorize the books & sit & read from memory before you knew how to really read." I used to sleep with my books. I LOVED to read, and then, I used to tell my younger brother stories. My grandmother still has folders of stories I'd write at her house. When I was 13, though, I read The Bluest Eye, I remember thinking: Oh, god, we're allowed to write like that? The way we think? The way people talk? The ways my people talk? Oh, really? It opened up this door of permission---I didn't know, really, that writing could represent me, not until then. wow, something in the way that I perceived writing & reading changed in me then.

I started sharing my work with other people when I was in college--Writing has always been my lifeline--my way of figuring & making sense & asking questions & maintaining hope, a hope. But it wasn't until college that I realized that I HAD to cultivate this work--that I HAVE to write. It is one of my absolute necessaries. Circulation, breath, communication, memory, wildness, & order. My mom is Puerto Rican & African American (Georgian)--from Chicago, & my dad's Eritrean, born in Gondar, Ethiopia. Both of them are amazing story-tellers--who tell the stories in very different ways. But, oh! The stories--they are essential--I always had the sense (even when I was very small) that these stories would be the only landscapes in which I'd meet, say, my Great Aunt Tiny, my uncle Samuel, my grandparents, my countries.

I knew, too, that the stories were not only important for me & my brother to hear (my sisters weren't born yet), but for my parents to say out loud. I remember witnessing the powers a story can have on the person telling--the way connections that weren't made before can be made in the telling. I write because it is my way of speaking, my way of figuring, my way of connecting, moving deeper into my life. I write, too, in the words of Carolyn Forche: against forgetting. I write the things that others wish I would forget. The things I cannot bear forgetting. The things I cannot survive forgetting. I write to get something back: world, that is, to still myself, somehow, & consider the things the world is constantly showing: see, see this! hear, hear this! say this! remember, remember!

I write to undo time, to go back & fiddle, to sit with what I've been given, to learn something, really, to visit the ghosts & let them know I see them.

Influences--poets, fictionists, painters, musicians: Helene Cixous, Aime Cesaire, Audre Lorde, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Frida Kahlo, Martín Espada, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nazim Hikmet, Anna Akhmatova, Ovid, Etta James, Derek Walcott, Naomi Shihab Nye, Cy Twombly, Lucille Clifton, Caetano Veloso, Pharoah Sanders, Taha Muhammad Ali, James Tate, my students, a few of Hayden Carruth's poems knock me out--hugely, church stories, my family's stories, my parents, my family's dead; and every accordion: every accordion is my influence."

*****

And if you haven't already fallen in love with her and her writing, take a look at what others have to say about the Divine Ms. Girmay.

"In Teeth, the poems of Aracelis Girmay ring out with a burning truth as she transports the reader into the world of despair, discrimination, sorrows, triumphs, joy and the courage it takes to flourish as a woman of color. Her keen observations are put forth with an appetite for life without fear or self-consciousness as she weaves her words into a range of potent poems." -- Nicholasa Mohr

"The poetry of Aracelis Girmay is so strong, so brave, so lyrical, so fiery, so joyful, that the usual superlatives fail. I think of Sandra Cisneros and her words of praise for another writer, Denise Chávez: 'I love this book so much, it sounds like I’m lying.' Exactly." -- Martín Espada

"In the foreword, [Espada] calls the poems, 'hard, cutting, brilliant, beautiful.' As I read Teeth, I have to say that it did not take long for me to agree with [his] opinion. But more than that, I have to say that Girmay has put together one of the best debuts by any poet in recent memory...This collection is sure to continue to create a significant amount of well-deserved buzz. No doubt it will garner more praise and will be mentioned among nominees for literary awards. Indeed, Aracelis Girmay is the real deal."-- Jose B. Gonzalez, Co-Editor of Latino Boom

"In her powerful debut collection of poems, Teeth, Aracelis Girmay reaches out to her various cultural lineages (Eritrean, Puerto Rican and African American) and weaves them into a distinct voice, political and beautiful as 'bullets of ivory'...Teeth delivers on its promise to be a fierce, proud book of poems that provokes thought and invites its readers to be a poet's unique and expectant universe, where celebration and protest, lament and solace, sound and silence, intertwine and thrive."-- El Paso Times

Aracelis Girmay makes me want to be a better writer. TEETH is a stunning piece of work de sudor y socorro. She has the gift -- able to craft indelible work fashioned from the bones of ancestors and living, singing blood. Girmay's been blessed to be mentored by Martín Espada but make no mistake, her voice is wholly and fully her own, as is her subject matter. Her mastery of poetic form and an almost ruthless, heartbreaking beauty is shot through this unforgettable volume. Like Espada, she seamlessly fuses the personal and political, revealing where the wounds lie. And Girmay always, always, returns to the indomitable, unquenchable spirit that saves even the most disadvantaged, the most abused from being mere victims. She is also brave enough, wise enough, to show her heart in love and at play.

But the social power of this book is never diluted At its essence, TEETH reminds me of a passage in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. A young woman, a peasant girl, has completed her training to become a soldier, the means by which her family and her village will seek justice against the overlord. With a whisper-thin blade, her parents inscribe the history of abuse which all of them have suffered. The girl's back becomes her eternal oath, a record laid into the flesh, but it is never reduced to a scar.

ARROZ POETICA

I got news yesterday
from a friend of mine
that all people against the war should
send a bag of rice to George Bush,
& on the bag we should write,
“If your enemies are hungry, feed them.”

But to be perfectly clear,
my enemies are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.
My enemies ride jets to parties.
They are not tied up in pens
in Guantanamo Bay. They are not
young children throwing rocks. My enemies eat
meats & vegetables at tables
in white houses where candles blaze, cast
shadows of crosses, & flowers.
They wear ball gowns & suits & rings
to talk of war in neat & folded languages
that will not stain their formal dinner clothes
or tousle their hair. They use words like “casualties”
to speak of murder. They are not stripped down to skin
& made to stand barefoot in the cold or hot.
They do not lose their children to this war.
They do not lose their houses & their streets. They do not
come home to find their lamps broken.
They do not ever come home to find their families murdered
or disappeared or guns put at their faces.
Their children are not made to walk
a field of mines, exploding.

This is no wedding.
This is no feast.
I will not send George Bush rice, worked for rice
from my own kitchen
where it sits in a glass jar & I am transfixed
by the thousands of beautiful pieces
like a watcher at some homemade & dry
aquarium of grains, while the radio calls out
the local names of 2,000
US soldiers counted dead since March.
&, we all know it, there will always be more than
what’s been counted. They will not say the names
of an Iraqi family trying to pass a checkpoint
in an old white van. A teenager caught out on some road
after curfew. The radio will go on, shouting
the names &, I promise you,
they will not call your name, Hassna
Ali Sabah, age 30, killed by a missile in Al-Bassra, or you,
Ibrahim Al-Yussuf, or the sons of Sa’id Shahish
on a farm outside of Baghdad, or Ibrahim, age 12,
as if your blood were any less red, as if the skins
that melted were any less skin, & the bones
that broke were any less bone,
as if your eradication were any less absolute, any less
eradication from this earth where you were
not a president or a military soldier.
& you will not ever walk home
again, or smell your mother’s hair again,
or shake the date palm tree
or smell the sea
or hear the people singing at your wedding
or become old
or dream or breathe, or even pray or whistle,
& your tongue will be all gone or useless
& it will not ever say again or ask a question,
you, who were birthed once, & given milk,
& given names that mean: she is born at night,
happy, favorite daughter,
morning, heart, father of
a multitude.

Your name, I will have noticed
on a list collected by an Iraqi census of the dead,
because your name is the name of my own brother,
because your name is the Tigrinya word for “tomorrow,”
because all my life I have wanted a farm,
because my students are 12, because I remember
when my sisters were 12. & I will not
have ever seen your eyes, & you will not
have ever seen my eyes
or the eyes of the ones who dropped the missiles,
or the eyes of the ones who ordered the missiles,
& the missiles have no eyes. You had no chance,
the way they fell on avenues & farms
& clocks & schoolchildren. There was no place for you
& so you burned. A bag of rice will not bring you back.
A poem cannot bring you. & although it is my promise here
to try to open every one of my windows, I cannot
imagine the intimacy with which
a life leaves its body, even then,
in detonation, when the skull is burst,
& the body’s country of indivisible organs
flames into the everything. & even in
that quick departure as the life rushes on,
headlong or backwards, there must, must
be some singing as the hand waves “be well”
to its other hand, goodbye;
& the ear belongs to the field now.
& we cannot separate the roof from the heart
from the trees that were there, standing.
& so it is, when I say “night,”
it is your name I am calling,
when I say “field,”
your thousand, thousand names,
your million names.


IN THE CANE FIELDS

You are a steel-blade woman,
I am a steel-blade man.
When we dance like this,
head-high in the cane,
my heart beats red with want.

It’s a dangerous taste
gonna swing me from some hanging tree.

I am a steel-blade woman.
You are a steel-blade man.

If the Boss Men follow
down the dirt red road,
accuse us of blackness & of love,
let us live again, sweet,
come back & haunt these fields.


FOR ESTEFANI LORA, THIRD GRADE, WHO MADE ME A CARD
for Estefani Lora, PS 132, Washington Heights

*
Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle
meaning sun.
6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top
meaning flowers.

*
The first time I peel back the 5 squares of Scotch tape,
unfold the crooked-crease fold of art class paper,
I am in my living room.

It is June.
Inside of the card, there is one long word, & then
Estefani’s name:

Loisfoeribari

Estefani Lora

*
Loisfoeribari?

*
Loisfoeribari: The scientific, Latinate way of saying hibiscus.

*
Loisforeribari: A direction, as in: Are you going
North? South? East? West? Loisfoeribari?

*
I try, over & over, to read the word out loud.
Loisfoeribari. LoISFOeribari.
LoiSFOEribari. LoisFOERibARI.

*
What is this word?

I imagine using it in sentences like,

“Man, I have to go back to the house,
I forgot my Loisfoeribari.”

or

“There’s nothing better than rain, hot rain,
open windows with music, & a tall glass
of Loisfoeribari.”

or

“How are we getting to Pittsburgh?
Should we drive or take the Loisfoeribari?”

*
I have lived 4 minutes with this word not knowing
what it means.

*
It is the end of the year. I consider writing my student,
Estefani Lora, a letter that goes:

To The BRILLIANT Estefani Lora!

Hola, querida, I hope that you are well. I’ve just opened the card that you made me, and it is beautiful. I really love the way you filled the sky with birds. I believe that you are chula, chulita, and super fly! Yes, the card is beautiful. I only have one question for you. What does the word ‘Loisfoeribari’ mean?

*
I try the word again.
Loisfoeribari.
Loisfoeribari.
Loisfoeribari.

*
I try the word in Spanish.
Loisfoeribari
Lo-ees-fo-eh-dee-bah-dee
Lo-ees-fo-eh-dee-bah-dee

& then, slowly,

Lo is fo e ri bari
Lo is fo eribari

*
love is for everybody
love is for every every body love
love love everybody love
everybody love love
is love everybody
everybody is love
love love for love
for everybody
for love is everybody
love is forevery
love is forevery body
love love love for body
love body body is love
love is body every body is love
is every love
for every love is love
for love everybody love love
love love for everybody
loveisforeverybody


Last words on TEETH ---

Sigh. Sigh Again. Glorious. Go. Buy. The. Book.


ISBN 978-1-931896-36-8

*****

Un Abrazo a Julia Alvarez!

Sister Chicas gets a fantastic mention in Julia Alvarez' Once Upon A Quinceañera. We were completely bowled over to find that Julia had written a glowing paragraph about our book on page 48, as well as listing us in the reading guide! The project continues to be blessed and we are all so grateful for the kind words and the support.


Lisa Alvarado

Ana Castillo At IMIX Books Eagle Rock

Michael Sedano

Ana Castillo's new novel, The Guardians, had been published only the day before. Literally, hot off the presses, the novelist has brought the work to the Eagle Rock community of northeast Los Angeles. Over a hundred people pack the space, standing room only as the seven o'clock hour arrives. No CPT at IMIX.

Elisa Garcia-Rodriguez welcomes her guests to the world's smallest bookstore, IMIX Books. But it's not the size of the bookstore in the game, it's the game in the bookstore that matters. And Elisa and IMIX have plenty of what it takes to be all the bookstore a reader needs.

All of which accounts for the evening's featured guest and packed house. Author Castillo reads four selections from the novel, introducing its key characters and reinforcing the audience's decision to buy a copy of the novel. Or several.

The booksigning, following an hour's question period, consumes an hour of its own. What exhausting work it must be. Seated at the table, the author chats extensively with anyone who strolls up to her chair. Several appeared to be old friends. Several brought shopping bags filled with the novel, ten copies.

I didn't get a photo of Castillo's silver bracelet, a spectacular wrap around sculpture that extended from wrist to elbow.

From my spot near the end of the line, having watched her sit, sign, stand, smile, flash, sit, greet, sign, stand, photo. Another, with a friend. Hey, get Marta in here, too. Flash. Wait, one more!

Speeding along the process, the bookstore had interleaved the dust jacket to the signing page, and an IMIX staff coursed the line with a handful of Post-It notes and printed one's name for Castillo to personalize the autograph. Then along came a woman named Diana Faust holding an open novel showing the lined up purchasers "Do you know she's signing this page?"

Best laid aft agley and all that. Most gente placed their copy on the author's table with the cover closed and the dustjacket pulled, forcing her to leaf through to find the page and add the valued dedication.

To view these images at a larger size, click the link in the title or visit Read! Raza for the layout.

IMIX books inventories an excellent collection of literature for all ages. Elisa will order any title and have it ready for pick-up within a few days. A bricks and mortar bookstore is the only way to fly.

Look for a review of The Guardians upcoming from one or another of La Bloga's blogueras or blogueros.

Eighth month second week tempus fugit. Remember, La Bloga welcomes your comments and observations on the day's column. If you've an idea, an finished review or other commentary you'd like to share at La Bloga, click here, or email one of the blogueras blogueros.

Hasta next week, hasta.

mvs

Raúl Niño Reading

“Days take on the character / of an unmarried uncle / hesitant to linger too long.”

Open Mic Poetry Reading & Bicycle Show-and-Tell
Show off your bike and tell its story, or bring a poem to read.

Ages 14 and up.
Refreshments will be served.

Hosted by:
Raúl Niño

Raúl Niño was the recipient of a Significant Illinois Writer’s Award
from Gwendolyn Brooks, and a Sister Cities award from the City of Chicago.

Niño will read from A Book of Mornings, his second volume of poetry published by MARCH/Abrazo Press.

Thursday, August 9, 2007
6pm – 7:55pm
Bezazian Branch
1226 West Ainslie Street
Chicago, IL 60640
312-744-0019
Hours: M-TH 9-8; F-SA 9-5

INTERVIEW WITH JULIA ALVAREZ

Julia Alvarez is the author of five books of fiction, a book of essays, five collections of poetry, and five books for children. She and her husband, Bill Eichner, founded Alta Gracía, a sustainable farm in the Dominican Republic that produces organic coffee and also serves as a literacy center. She lives in Vermont, where she is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In her newest book, Once Upon A Quinceañera (Viking), Alvarez takes on this celebration that brings a girl into womanhood. In this finely-crafted and moving book, Alvarez expertly weaves the stories of several young women with musings of her own adolescent and young adult struggles to define herself. For Alvarez's book tour schedule which kicks off today, go here. Alvarez kindly agreed to sit down with La Bloga and answer a few questions.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Why did you decide to write Once Upon a Quinceañera, a non-fiction book, rather than using the “coming of age” celebration as fodder for a novel or a series of short stories?

JULIA ALVAREZ: I was actually asked to write this book by an editor at a Penguin imprint, who was doing a series of books to be packaged with DVDs on cultural issues. He and his staff were intrigued by the quinceañera tradition in the Latino community. When they contacted me about writing a book about quinces, I thought, "No, no, no! First, I'm basically a fiction writer. Second, I'm not the girly-girl type, and these princessy parties are not my thing." But the editor was persistent and asked me to think about it. . .

One of the things I love about being a writer is that it offers me an opportunity to get an education and learn all kinds of new things! Even when I'm writing fiction, let's say I have a story set in 1803 about a doctor, I've got to learn all about medicine in the 19th century, so I can write credibly from his point of view. So as a writer, I love it that I'm always learning. The quinceañera book gave me the opportunity to learn new skills. That appealed to me. I got to be a journalist and travel around, get into scrapes, interview people, collect first hand information.

Also, I live in the "Latino-compromised" state of Vermont (though this is changing). I get a hit of my Latino culture when I travel down to the Dominican Republic four or so times a year to see my viejitos and visit Alta Gracia (a farm/literacy center my husband Bill and I started there--to learn more, write to cafealtagracia@gmavt.net). Researching quinces throughout the USA allowed me to travel and connect with different Latino communities all around the country. That also appealed to me.

Finally, as I began to read the research on Latina youth and realized the crisis situation among our young people who were topping the charts for most at-risk behaviors (teen pregnancy, high school drop outs, poverty, drug use, gang membership, etc.), I grew curious about the disjunction between this "fantasy celebration" and the alarming, very real situation out there. What was going on? I wanted to find out.

OLIVAS: You talk about the “Malinche fear” in writing this book, i.e., the fear that you would be betraying your people if you didn’t “fall in line and praise this important tradition of nuestra cultura.” Have you felt this fear in writing your novels or is this something particular to Once Upon a Quinceañera?

ALVAREZ: I think the Malinche fear is pervasive among writers, no matter where they come from.

As storytellers we belong to the human family, but as individuals we belong to families, particular communities, we live in relationships, bound to individuals, and they often want us to tell stories that promote and affirm their point of view or their "take" on the world. But we fail in our mission as storytellers if we try to be spokespersons or apologists for any one point of view. Our task is to tell the truth, "manifold and one"--a quote by Joseph Conrad I've always loved! And this means that we often present not just the one truth, our tribe's truth, but the manifold truth, which includes the complexities, competing realities of any situation. That may feel like a betrayal of what we "owe" our families, communities, our particular tribe.

This is why I often tell young writers who have felt marginal in the dominant discourse, that theirs is the best angle from which to write about that mainstream world because they are not embedded in it, so they can see it as a whole and are not beholden to uphold it.

But that still leaves the issue of loyalty to one's own marginal communities that--because they are marginal--need our strength and support. But as storytellers our community has to be the whole human family, not just one tribe, even if it's your own. You write from and about that community--this is true. But with your vision and objective to make that specific story belong to all of us.

Maxine Hong Kingston has spoken about the negative response she got from her Chinese-American community after publishing THE WOMAN WARRIOR: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, a wonderful book that really helped a lot of us minority women writers feel permission to tell our stories. That book begins, "My mother told me never ever to repeat this story"! I think every writer could begin his or her books in this way. Every story we tell we rescue from silence and segregation, from partisanship and privilege, from "us and them" mentality, and we give that story wings, we set it free. It now "belongs" to all of us, but none of us own it. As storytellers we are trying to knit us together as a human family with our stories, but that means that our loyalty is bigger than private alliances and allegiances and grievances. This is difficult for our little clans to understand. And often we ourselves feel pulled apart.

OLIVAS: In exploring the lives of young women who are preparing for their quinceañeras, you also explore your own personal history and choices. What did you learn as a person and writer while working on this book?

ALVAREZ: From the start, the editor asked me to write about my own experience as a Latina coming of age. I explained that I had never had a quinceañera as we were recent immigrants and money was scarce. Not only that, we weren't part of a Dominican or even a Latino community who could celebrate with us.

But my editor's request made me revisit those very difficult and painful years when really I began to feel torn between my parents' old world culture and this new American culture. My parents were trying very hard to control their four daughters, just at a time when the women's movement was encouraging us to be more assertive, more self-reliant, more liberated. In writing about that time from the standpoint now of an older woman, I could see oh so clearly the legacy that had come down to me from my mami and abuelas about being a good Latina. I felt a lot of understanding for these women, who, after all, had inherited this legacy themselves and were unquestioningly passing it on to the next generation. But I also understood in a very comprehensive way why it was a crazy time for me and my sisters. We were really torn in so many directions and with no models to help us navigate our way. . . It was either/or, and that tore us apart.

What surprised me in writing this book was how much those forces are still at play among the young Latinas who were coming of age and having their quinces today. Their mothers might not be as antiquated as my mami & tías had been but a lot in the culture is still telling these girls to be submissive, to sacrifice everything for la familia, not to wander far from the protective patriarchy of male authority. The message many are still getting is that their bodies are not really their own but some sort of showcase for the honor of the family. The tapes go on and on and on. As a community we need to look at how we might be hobbling our young girls. Writing about that time in my own life I hope will help with that larger conversation. It's definitely a conversation we need to have because we do, we have a crisis on our hands!

Check out, for example:

Rivera, Elaine. “Young Latinas and a Cry for Help.” The New York Times. 21 July 2006. (Link to article.)

Here's the opening paragraph:

"A recent series in the Spanish-language New York newspaper El Diario/La Prensa sheds some light on a mostly overlooked national phenomenon, the misunderstood and endangered young Latina, who represents one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population. Hispanic teenage girls attempt suicide more often than any other group. They become mothers at younger ages. They tend not to complete their education. They are plagued by rising drug use and other social problems."

García-Febo, Loida, FROM THE EDITOR: "Our Daughters--Young Latinas in Crisis" in Críticas. (Link to op-ed.)

Here's how this op-ed ends:

"We were all adolescents once. We know how intense and confusing that period is. Imagine adding to that mix two major forces, American culture and Latino traditions, and you might understand why growing up Latina in the United States is shocking and difficult.

. . . One in four women in the United States will be Hispanic by the middle of the century…. If we want our quinceañeras [adolescent girls] and mujeres [women] healthy and productive, ready to conquer the world, we have to take action now."

OLIVAS: You became very close and even protective of your interview subjects (“my girls” as you call them) and had to reassure them that you would not be using their real names, etc. What was the most moving experience you had in getting to know these young women?

ALVAREZ: My heart was constantly in my throat as I trailed these young girls. First off, it's such a tender age: they are just at that cusp of becoming women, which is what the quince tradition is meant to mark and ritualize and celebrate. Full of illusions and dreams. So impressionable, so easily a "target" as the market calls this new boom demographic group. But does this market really care what happens to them? So, I grew, yes, fiercely protective of them. As I mentioned in the book, every time one of them entered the ball room, her first entrance as a young woman, I--and many others in these ballrooms--were in tears.

One of those moments when my heart was in my throat? I was interviewing a young girl in Idaho whose parents are undocumented immigrants and who hardly had a formal education. This girl had gone through this wonderful program, the Stay at School Quinceañera program, which takes girls and boys in their fourteenth year through an intensive workshop for four months, meeting twice a week, culiminating in a group celebration. They are taught about their culture from the viejitos in the community; they go on field trips; they have projects. The program also brings in speakers, Latinos and Latinas who have made it professionally. The point is to give these young people both a sense of their history and culture but also a taste of the possibilities out there if they stay in school and get an education.

Anyhow, this young girl was one of the success stories. She was now in her first year in college! She was telling me how this program really opened her eyes. She realized that she had options and other choices she could make. Before the program, she explained, she was just "your typical Hispanic girl." I was curious as to what she meant by "your typical Hispanic girl"?

"Oh, you know, we don't go to college. We have kids, we work, we stay home and take care of our families."

We don't go to college? We don't have choices? That's who we are? Imagine if at fourteen, no matter what the grand party says that is what you see ahead as your future? We need to reach those girls, and the parents of those girls! Otherwise, no matter how much we spend on them for that night we are failing them for life!

OLIVAS: At times in your book, you sound like a detective or a cultural anthropologist as you track down the origins and various permutations of the quinceañera. What do you think readers from various cultural backgrounds will think of your descriptions and conclusions?

ALVAREZ: One of the things I found really intriguing was trying to track down where this quinceañera tradition had come from.

I started getting suspicious when I heard time and time again how the quinceañera was "an ancient Aztec tradition." I don't mean I heard it once! I heard it often! It's all over the Internet. It's in books about quinces. It falls from the mouths of many adults who are preparing the young people for the celebration. How can this tradition in which a young girl dresses up in a Victorian ball gown with a crown and has a "court" of fourteen couples called damas y chambelanes and dances a first waltz with her papi be "an ancient Aztec tradition"? I wanted to find out how and what was going on with this tradition.

Quinceañeras didn't really become "an ancient Aztec tradition" until about fifty or so years ago! As many working class people came north and were able to earn money and gain economic power as well as political and social empowerment through the civil rights movements of different countries, they began to claim their indigenous heritage as well as appropriate practices that really were reserved for the upper classes back home. Suddenly it became okay to "be Indio." Or, in our Caribbean countries, to claim our African heritage.

These courtly parties and presentation balls, straight from Europe, by which the rich showed off their Spanish credentials suddenly were being appropriated and democratized in "our image" even as they kept the trappings of royalty (tiaras, courts, waltzes)! I find it amazing and also a sign of how our traditions evolve and are resilient. Which, in turn, means that traditions can be changed to serve us better.

It's also interesting to ask ourselves from "a sociological point of view" why we feel a need to legitimize this tradition with an invented history? There is a very curious book, called, as a matter of fact, The Invention of Tradition in which sociologists talk about this interesting way in which societies and groups invent themselves, especially in America, and especially when a group is undergoing fast change and having to cope with many challenges--this certainly defines our Latino community at this point in time.

OLIVAS: What did your fellow Latina/o writers say when you let them know you were going to write a book on quinceañeras?

ALVAREZ: I think many of them did a doubletake! "You're writing about quinceañeras?!" As if suddenly I'd gone fluff-headed, a kind of Latina Paris Hilton, if that's even possible! But as I started talking about the book, I think the doubts faded away, because many of my Latina friends and fellow writers saw that this was an ideal lens through which to talk about our legacy as Latinas. In fact, in talking about quinceañeras, I had some of the best and most probing conversations with fellow Latinas of my generation about our legacy as women, what was valued, what were the messages encoded in our upbringing. The conflicting messages that we were virgins and would someday be mothers to be honored and respected. That we were also frail and sexual and had to be monitored and watched over by the men in the family. All those different threads of our Latina legacy are present in the quinceañera celebration which makes it a great starting point for rich conversations.

OLIVAS: My sisters didn’t have quinceañeras but I attended several when I was in high school and was even chosen by a friend to be his younger sister’s escort for her quinceañera (I was a “nice” guy, i.e., safe). I don’t have a daughter but our son had a bar mitzvah so “coming of age” ceremonies are clearly important to many cultures. Obviously, not all Latinas have quinceañeras and you note that you didn’t have one, either. Do you now wish you had one?

ALVAREZ: I didn't have a quinceañera. I did have a kind of group "quinceañera" when I was seventeen and returned for the summer to my parents' hometown in the D.R. And you know, I'm glad I did it. Because through the experience, I learned a lot about myself, including that I could no longer go "home" to stay. That is valuable information. In fact, as we grow up and become our own persons, we outgrow some of our cultural experiences, but they do form us, and we need them to go on to the next stage, to know, if nothing else what to leave behind.

That said: do I wish I had had a quinceañera? I can say this: I would have loved to have had--at that moment of my entering womanhood--a year of bonding with my mother and the women in my family, tías, madrinas, abuelitas. That's something I saw over and over that I found very moving in these celebrations. Sure the party and the ritual at the end were the crowning moment, but all along the way, for a year or six months, there was this transmission going on. All the women in the family making the recuerdos in the living room, going shopping together, sometimes returning to a home country, to have the dress made by a family or community seamstress more economically. Meanwhile, there was lots of talking, laughing, telling stories. The girls were often getting a kind of informal/invisible transmission of the lore and know-how by the women in the family. This would have been a wonderful and affirming and empowering way to be accompanied into adulthood.

Then, too, the bonding with twenty-nine other young people who are traditionally in the court (fourteen couples, plus your escort). Many of these court members are cousins, family friends. Again, what a great way to spend six months at that age, bonding with a close group of friends, off the streets, talking about life as you practice waltz and salsa and hip hop steps. One young quinceañera I spoke with who had a fabulous and expensive party told me that the best part of the whole experience was how you really forged close friendships with kids who would be her friends for life.

Where else do we create spaces like this for our young people to share culturally with each other?

OLIVAS: Did writing Once Upon a Quinceañera present many challenges or pleasures that you have not encountered while writing fiction?

ALVAREZ: Challenges, ay, Dios santo! "Challenges" is putting it mildly! Unlike fictional characters, who do present their own challenges and whom you have to coax and research and write into being, writing about real people means you have to convince them, first of all, to talk to you! What I found was that the people I wanted to talk to most were often the busiest because they were passionate and committed to what they were doing. That meant they were in demand. Talking to teenagers also was tough at times, because I had to really listen well and draw them out. Teens are often trying to figure themselves out so I had to be patient with their inarticulateness or their lack of answers. Earning their trust was important and then respecting their privacy. That is why I made the decision not to use real names. What you say when you are fourteen, fifteen shouldn't haunt you for life! Also, I didn't want them to in any way feel criticized or judged if I critiqued certain aspects of the tradition. A tricky balancing act.

One thing that I learned writing nonfiction was to be real prepared when I interviewed someone, do all my research first, because I often would not get a second chance to come back with a question I thought of later after I typed up my notes and realized that in the fluid and free-floating conversation I forgot to ask a crucial or burning question that now I wished I'd asked. Be prepared! the Boy Scouts had it right!

That said, I was often surprised and gratified by the generosity of our community in giving of their time, sharing their experiences and expertise. At the end, when I went to write down my thanks in the acknowledgements, I had pages and pages of names. It reminded me of the wonderful Mexican practice of having many madrinas and padrinos for the quinceañera, each one sponsoring a certain element of the ritual: la madrina del cake, el padrino del D.J., la madrina del vestido, and so on. It's a way to share the cost but also a symbol of how all these people are invested in this young woman flourishing as an adult. And so, at the end of my book, I have three or four pages with my own madrinas and padrinos, including, madrinas & padrinos of networking, who helped connect me with young girls and with key events providers in a community; madrinas & padrinos of autobiography, who helped me with their memories of our shared past as teenagers in this country!

One pleasure that stands out was the opportunity to interact with young Latinos and Latinas who are the new generation of coming up. I feel real proud of our young people! They are smart, strong, beautiful, talented, and many of them are trying to bring together all the different parts of their heritage under tremendous pressure. That was a pleasure, being with them, their friends and family. Also the opportunity to really reflect upon and study what is becoming of us as a Latino community in this country, made up of different countries of origin and heritages.

OLIVAS: Could you describe your writing process? For some writers, it’s a painful experience. For others, it’s a joy. Where do you fall in this continuum?

ALVAREZ: I think every writer has this whole continuum inside her! There are glorious, soaring days when you are riding the currents of a story and feeling totally free, a transformed, expansive, visionary being. And then there are the other kind of days that are awful enough without the benefit of describing them! To be a writer is to contain both and not to give up on the bad days and not get a big head on the great days. . . It's not about "me," after all, it's about the stories. We work at our craft in order to have the best words to give to the stories, as we receive them, and discover how to tell them. Maybe a few will be worthy to pass down the generations. And we never know which those will be. It doesn't matter because as storytellers, we have to give them all our talent, all our patience, all our craft, in order to pass them on. They are not ours to keep.

My writing "process" is to show up for work everyday! Yes, I tell my student writers that the best thing I can hope they will learn in my workshop is the "habit of writing"! It should not be something you have to decide on every day. If I ask myself on any given day, "Do I feel like writing today?" the answer is likely to be, No! So many other things to do and be in one short life! Every day brings its lovely temptations, its urgent distractions. . . But a habit is something you get up and do. You've built it into your life. You don't always have to be "making" the time and creating the space for it. It's a given.

If you practice your craft every day, you are bound to get better at it, like anything else. When a great story comes your way--via your imagination, inspiration, something you read or experience, you will be ready.

I love the prayer that Mayan weavers supposedly said before they began weaving: Grant me the patience and intelligence to find the true pattern.

Amen!

OLIVAS: What are you currently working on? Are you interested in doing another non-fiction book similar to Once Upon a Quinceañera?

ALVAREZ: I'm currently revising and tightening a children's book about a mythical Dominican figure known as La Vieja Belén. She's an old woman who comes on Three King's Day, Epiphany, but her special devotion is to bring gifts to poor children, who might not have received anything from Santiclos or El Niño Jesús or los Tres Reyes Magos. I've always loved her sense of social justice! I've always wondered who she is, where she came from. . . And so I wrote this book to find out!

As for what next. . . Let's put it this way: I am open. Or as the Buddha described his religion, "I am awake."I don't like to predict or foretell because then I'm not staying open to whatever new story will take me somewhere new. That's why I don't like talking about new projects before they are done or almost done. I'm a believer in listening to the silence to find out. . . And if you start yakking about what it might be, well, you're often getting in the way, getting impatient. . . So, I'll just end by going back into that silence now to listen. . . It's how I keep my promise to my readers and earn the privilege of being one of the storytellers of the tribe.

OLIVAS: Gracias, Julia, for spending time with La Bloga. [Late-breaking news: Alvarez is interviewed this morning by Renee Montagne on NPR's Morning Edition.]

◙ COMING TO YOUR NEAREST BOOKSTORE SOON: For the last two-plus years, I’ve been working on a project that is near and dear to my heart: an anthology of Los Angeles fiction by Latina/o writers. Well, the dream is coming true, soon. We have a tentative release date of November for Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, that will be published by Bilingual Press. The anthology includes stories and novel excerpts by:

Kathleen Alcalá ◘ Frederick Luis Aldama ◘ Lisa Alvarez ◘ Victorio Barragán ◘ Daniel Chacón ◘ Kathleen de Azevedo ◘ Alex Espinoza ◘ Rudy Ch. Garcia ◘ Estella González ◘ Melanie González ◘ Rigoberto González ◘ Reyna Grande ◘ Stephen D. Gutiérrez ◘ Alvaro Huerta ◘ Michael Jaime-Becerra ◘ Manuel Luis Martínez ◘ Alejandro Morales ◘ Manuel Muñoz ◘ Daniel A. Olivas ◘ Melinda Palacio ◘ Salvador Plascencia ◘ Manuel Ramos ◘ Sandra Ramos O’Briant ◘ Wayne Rapp ◘ John Rechy ◘ Luis J. Rodríguez ◘ Danny Romero ◘ Conrad Romo ◘ Jorge Saralegui ◘ Jennifer Silva Redmond ◘ Mario Suárez ◘ Luis Alberto Urrea ◘ Richard Vásquez ◘ Helena María Viramontes

You will recognize many of the authors whose books are on high school and college reading lists throughout the country. Some of the names you might not recognize: these are the new writers, those voices that are just beginning to get into print. In any event, an ad will soon appear in several venues including two of our finer literary journals, the Santa Monica Review and EPOCH (check out the websites for these journals and consider subscribing…you will be happy you did). Unfortunately, the ad did not reproduce well on La Bloga but above is the cover art that has been chosen. It's "Heart Like a Boat" by Maya González (yes, Maya is from Northern California but I fell in love with this painting which perfectly captures the spirit of the anthology...so, I've made Maya an honorary citizen of Lotusland). More later.

◙ Bilingual Press has completed Corazón descalzo, the Spanish translation of Elva Treviño Hart's award-winning Barefoot Heart, a memoir about being raised in a family of migrant workers. If you’re a reviewer of Spanish-language books and would like to receive a review copy, please drop an e-mail to Adriana Brady, Associate Editor, Bilingual Press at: adriana.brady@asu.edu.

◙ Kathleen Alcalá is racking up great reviews for her essay collection, The Desert Remembers My Name (University of Arizona Press). Here are what the critics are saying:

“Alcalá’s articulate and engaging collection is an important addition, and one that will enlighten and educate for years to come.” —El Paso Times

“Steeped in Mexican history and culture. . . . Her essay on the Opata peoples of Mexico is fascinating , and in another essay, she masterfully blends the harrowing experience of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five young children, with the mythic stories of Mexican folklore.” —Publishers Weekly

“The Desert Remembers My Name makes an important contribution to discussions of ethnicity, identity, and the literature of place.” —Bloomsbury Review

“Alcalá’s life work has been an ongoing act of translation—not only between languages, but also between cultures. She has been building prismatic bridges not just between the Mexican and American cultures, but also across divides of gender, generation, religion, and ethnicity.” —Seattle Times

“Seattle writer Kathleen Alcalá’s first nonfiction collection of personal essays explores her connection with her family, her heritage and what shapes her as a writer of fiction.” —Bellingham Herald

◙ Manuel Muñoz’s second collection of short stories, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin), received a wonderful review yesterday in the New York Times. Jeff Turrentine notes, in part: “Muñoz writes elegantly and sympathetically… His stories are far too rich to be classified under the limiting rubrics of ‘gay’ or ‘Chicano’ fiction; they have a softly glowing, melancholy beauty that transcends those categories and makes them universal.”

◙ In today’s Los Angeles Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli reviews Ana Castillo’s new novel, The Guardians (Random House). She says, in part: “This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience... This world and these people are anchored in a specific reality, but Castillo achieves what every novelist should aim for: Her characters feel as if they belong to all of us.”

◙ Speaking of the Los Angeles Times, since Al Martinez was brought back by the paper, he’s been in top form with his brand of humor and thoughtfulness. Here are the links to Martinez's pieces.

◙ Over at PopMatters, Kate Soto reviews Helena María Viramontes’ new novel, Their Dogs Came With Them (Atria Books). Soto says, in part: “The real strength in this novel is that endowed in the characters, and the way Viramontes attempts to understand the complicated relationship of the part to the whole.” We're delighted to see that in her review, Soto quotes from La Bloga's recent interview with the author. Viramontes will also be interviewed on the August 16th episode of Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm on KCRW. Silverblatt's show is simply one of the best literary programs on the air.

◙ Adolfo Flores of the Ventura County Star recently profiled the artist Gronk in conjunction with an exhibition at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 South C St., Oxnard, California. Gronk’s work will be part of the exhibit Regalos: Gifts of Latino Art, which will be running until August 19. As La Bloga readers might remember, I reviewed the mid-career book on Gronk by Max Benavidez and published earlier this year by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press. If you haven’t had a chance to see a Gronk in person, I strongly urge you to go to this exhibit.

◙ All done. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres at La Bloga. ¡Lea un libro! --Daniel Olivas

Libros bilingües para el verano

Since other Bloguistas have been recommending summer reading books, I thought I might share the list I gave to my elementary school parents. There's still time to pry that GameBoy out of a kid's hands and take him down to the library. One of the biggest obstacles at the start of the year is asking how many books kids read and hearing the word, "None."

And since I haven't read all these books, I'm excluding any reviews. You're on your own there, although you should definitely check out René Colato Laínez & Daniel A. Olivas . - RudyG

Para edades 5-8 o más:

• A Gift for Abuelita /Un regalo para abuelita, Nancy Luen
• A Spoon for Every Bite / Una cuchara para cada boccado, por Joe Hayes
• A Gift from Papá Diego / Un regalo de papá Diego, por Benjamin A. Sáenz
• Angel’s Kite / La estrella de Angel, por Alberto Blanco
• A Movie in My Pillow / Una película en mi almohada, por Jorge Argueta
• Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems / Los angeles andan en bicicleta y otros poemas de otoño, por Francisco X. Alarcón
• A New Sun / Un nuevo sol, por Max Benavidez & Katherine Del Monte
• Antonio's Card / La tarjeta de Antonio, por Rigoberto González
• Brother Anansi and the Cattle Ranch / El hermano Anansi y el rancho de ganado, por James de Sauza
• Benito’s Bizcochitos / Los bizcochitos de Benito, por Ana Baca
• Calling the Doves / El canto de las palomas, por Juan Felipe Herrera
• Benjamin and the Word / Benjamín y la palabra, por Daniel A. Olivas
• Carlos and the Carnival / Carlos y la feria, por Jan Romero Stevens
• Big Enough / Bastante grande, Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• Carlos and the Cornfield / Carlos y la milpa de maiz, por Jan Romero Stevens
• Carlos and the Skunk / Carlos y el zorrillo, por Jan Romero Stevens
• Chave’s Memories /Los recuerdos de Chave, Isabel Delgado
• Carlos and the Squash Plant / Carlos y la planta de calabaza, por Jan Romero Stevens
• Chiles for Benito / Chiles para Benito, por Ana Baca
• Carlos Digs to China / Carlos escava hasta La China, por Jan Romero Stevens
• Dancing Miranda / Baila, Miranda, por Diane de Anda
• César Chávez - The Struggle for Justice / La lucha por la justicia, por Richard Griswold del Castillo
• Estrellita Says Good-bye to Her Island / Estrellita se despide de su isla, por Samuel Caraballo
• Family / Familia, por Diane Gonzalez Bertrand
• Friends from the Other Side / Amigos del otro lado, por Gloria Anzaldúa
• Family Pictures / Cuadros de familia, por Carmen Lomas Garza
• From the Belly Button of the Moon and Other Summer Poems / Del ombligo de la luna y otros poemas de verano, por Francisco X. Alarcón
• Family Stories / Cuentos familiares, por varios autores
• Gathering the Sun, por Alma Flor Ada
• Fernando’s Gift / El regalo de Fernando, Douglas Keister
• Grandma and Me at the Flea Market/ Los meros meros remateros, por Juan Felipe Herrera

• I Am René, the Boy / Soy René, el niño, por René Colato Laínez
• Isabel Allende: Memories for a Story / Recuerdos para un cuento, por Raquel Benatar
• Icy Watermelon / Sandía fría, por Mary Sue Galindo
• It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way: A Barrio Story / No tiene que ser así: una historia del barrio, por Luis J. Rondríguez
• Iguanas in the Snow and Other Winter Poems / Iguanas en la nieve y otros poemas, por Francisco X. Alarcón
• Kikirikí / Quiquiriquí, por Diane de Anda
• In My Family / En mi familia, por Carmen Lomas Garza
• Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems / Jitomates risueños y otros poemas, por Francisco X. Alarcón
• My Grandparents and I / Mis abuelos y yo, Samuel Caraballo
• My Very Own Room / Mi propio cuartito, por Amada Irma Perez
• My Name is Celia: The Life of Celia Cruz / Me llamo Celia: La vida de Celia Cruz, por Monica Brown
• Pepita Finds Out / Lo que Pepita descubre, por Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• My Name is Gabriela /Me llamoGabriela, Monica Brown
• Pepita Takes Time / Pepita, siempre tarde, por Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• My Tata’s Guitar / La guitarra de mi tata, por Ethriam Cash Brammer
• Pepita Talks Twice / Pepita habla dos veces, por Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• Pepita Thinks Pink /Pepita y el color rosado, por Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• Remembering Grandma / Recordando a Abuela, por Teresa Armas
• ¡Pío peep!, por Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy
• See what you say / Ve lo que dices, por Nancy María Grande Tabor

• Playing Loteria / El juego de loteria, René Colato Laínez
• Telma, The Little Ant / Telma, la hormiguita, por John M. Nieto-Phillips
• Prietita and the Ghost Woman / Prietita y la llorona, por Gloria Anzaldúa
• The Adventures of Connie and Diego / Las adventuras de Connie y Diego, por Maria Garcia
• The Bakery Lady / La señora de la panadería, Pat Mora
• The Gift of the Poinsettia / El rega-lo de la flor de nochebuena, por Pat Mora & Charles Ramírez Berg
• The Desert is My Mother / El desierto es mi madre, por Pat Mora
• The Gullywasher / El chaparrón torrencial, Joyce Rossi
• The Empanadas that Abuela Made / Las empanadas que hacía la abuela, por Diane Gonzales Bertrand
• The Harvest Birds / Los pájaros de la cosecha, por Blanca López de Mariscal
• The Frog and his Friends Save Humanity / La rana y sus amigos savan a la humanidad, por Victor Villaseñor
• The Invisible Hunters / Los cazadores invisibles, por Harriet Rohmer
• The Land of the Riddles / La tierra de las adivinanzas, por César Villarreal Elizondo
• The Upside Down Boy / El niño de cabeza, por Juan Felipe Hererra
• The Last Doll / La última muñeca, Diane G. Bertrand
• The Woman Who Outshone The Sun / La mujer que brillaba aún más el sol, por Alejandro Cruz Martínez
• The Spirit of Tio Fernando / El espíritu de tio Fernando, por Janice Levy
• This House is Made of Mud / Esta casa está hecha de lodo, por Ken Buchanan
• The Three Little Javelinas / Los tres pequeños jabalíes, por Susan Lowell
• Tina and the Scarecrow Skins / Tina y las pieles de espantapájaros, por Ofelia Dumas Lachtman
• Tomasa the Cow / La vaca Tomasa, por Pietrapiana
• Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí donde brillan las lucíernagas, por Lucha Corpi
• Uncle Chente’s Picnic / El picnic de tio Chente, por Diane Gonzalez Bertrand
• With my Brother / Con mi hermano, por Elleen Roe
• Uncle Nacho’s Hat / El Sombrero del tio Nacho, por Harriet Rohmer
• Xochitl and the Flowers / Xóchitl, la niña de las flores, por Jorge Argueta

• Waiting for Papá /Esperando a Papá, René Laínez
• Yes, We Can! / ¡Sí, se puede!, por Diana Cohn

Libros bilingües para edades 6-12

• Antonio’s Card, por Rigoberto Gonzalez
• Featherless, por Juan Felipe Herrera
• Lucha Libre – Man in the Silver Mask, Xavier Garza
• Uncle Nacho’s Hat, por Harriet Rohmer
• Woman who Outshone the Sun, Alejandro C. Martinez
• The Harvest Birds, por Blanca López de Mariscal
• Magic Dogs of the Volcanoes, por Manilo Argueta
• Platero & I, por Juan Ramón Jimenez
• The Story of Colors, por Sub. Insurgente Marcos
• Benjamin and the Word, por Daniel A. Olivas
• It Doesn't Have to be This Way, por Luis J. Rodriguez
• Yes, We Can!, por Diana Cohn
• My Diary from Here to There, por Amada Irma Pérez
• Calling the Doves, por Juan Felipe Herrera
• Where Fireflies Dance, por Lucha Corpi
• Family Pictures, por Carmen Lomas Garza
• In My Family, por Carmen Lomas Garza
• Coqui and his friends, por Alfonso Silva Lee
• Mason Moves Away, por Amy Crane Johnson
• Read About Abraham Lincoln, por Stephen Feinstein
• Read About Martin Luther King, Jr., Stephen Feinstein
• Read About George Washington, por Stephen Feinstein
• Read About César Chávez, por Stephen Feinstein
• The Weeping Woman, por Joe Hayes
• Chave's Memories, por María Isabel Delgado
• Green Bird, por Joe Hayes
• A Spoon for Every Bite, por Joe Hayes
• Watch out for Clever Women, por Joe Hayes
• The Piñata Maker, por George Ancona
• Laughing Out Loud, I Fly, por Juan Felipe Herrera
• The Tree is Older Then You Are, por Naomi Shihab Nye
• Laughing Tomatoes & Other Spring Poems, por Francisco X. Alarcón
• Red Hot Salsa – Bilingual Poems on Being Young and Latino in the United States, por Lori Marie Carlson
• Wiley’s Ways, Katherine Anne Porter Young Writers
• A School Named for Someone Like Me, por Diana Dávila-Martinez
• Upside Down and Backwards, Diane Gonzales Bertrand
• Those Fabulous 50 States
• Tina Springs into Summer, por Teresa Bevin

Author Amy Costales Presents Her First Picture Book LUPE VARGAS AND HER SUPER BEST FRIEND

René Colato Laínez



La Bloga interviewed author Amy Costales about her first picture book. Where did she get the idea? What was the process from manuscript to published book? This is what Amy shared with us.

I started the book Lupe Vargas and Her Super Best Friend after giving my students a writing assignment. It was 2000, and I was teaching Spanish in Thailand. I told my students to write about a childhood friend. They were supposed to practice preterit and imperfect verbs. I modeled for them, talking about my own childhood friend. That got me thinking, and while my students were writing, I picked up a pen and wrote right along with them.

I wrote about the funny things I used to do with my friend Clara, and how we used to annoy our neighbors, and how we got in a pretty bad fight one day. I was trying to focus on the essence of childhood. For me that is having enough free time that is not controlled or planned by an adult. I had a lot of time like that when I was a child. In the story, Lupe and Maritza enjoy their free time, making up games and having adventures. Every thing that occurs in the story, even the fight, is something that Clara and I did as children.

After getting all those memories down I decided to shape them into a story. I looked for a structure, and suddenly got the idea of using a week in the life of the two girls. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea. I tried to imagine the reaction of an editor and I wondered if the structure would seem interesting or unsophisticated. I went ahead and tried it. I wanted to show that day after day these two girls play together, just being kids. When one is gone, the other one misses her. At the end of the week, however, they have a fight. That fight, like I said, is one I had with Clara. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of shame that came over me, nor how I felt the next day when I knew I was not going to play with my super best friend. I also remember the feeling of relief after apologizing, and being forgiven. I included that fight because it is part of childhood, and because I wanted the story to have a conflict that needed resolved.

I finished the story, but lacking confidence, I put it in my filing cabinet, where it rested for a couple of years. I moved to India, where I also taught Spanish. My son was born. I guess I was busy teaching, raising my children, and exploring Delhi. But one day I visited a friend in California. She had stayed home for fifteen years, raising her kids and baby-sitting to supplement their income. She secretly saved half of her babysitting money all those years and one day surprised her family with the down payment for a home. I was so amazed that I immediately wrote This House is Ours (Luna Rising 2008). Determined to submit it, I went to our school library in Delhi and looked at bilingual picture books. I decided that Luna Rising was the publisher for me. Well, they rejected that story at first, but did ask me for more work. I pulled Lupe Vargas and Her Super Best Friend out of my filing cabinet and sent it. I was scared. I felt like this was my big chance and I was worried they wouldn’t like the story.

A couple of months later I got a message from my mom to call Theresa Howell at Luna Rising. When Theresa told me they wanted to publish the Lupe story I was so quiet that she asked me if I was excited. Of course I was. I was so excited that I could barely talk! And it was, after all, the middle of the night in Delhi.

At first I was worried about the whole editing and illustration process. I thought I might feel like I had lost control of my story. But I never did. Theresa asked for three big changes. Señor Ramírez became Señora Ramírez. Lupe now has adult supervision while preparing food. Lastly, the way in which Lupe apologizes changed. I originally had Lupe make a quesadilla. Theresa suggested that the apology should reflect the fight, so now Lupe makes a magic potion, because the fight occurred when Lupe refused to share their magic potions. As for the illustrating, Theresa asked me for my opinion during the process, which I appreciated. I love the playful style Alejandra Artigas used, and she added details that strengthen the story. It was really cool to see the images the words created in her mind. To me it felt like some intimate form of communication with a person whom I have never met. I loved the editing process.

Lupe Vargas and Her Super Best Friend is very different than the six other stories that I have now had accepted. It’s the only one that comes from my childhood. All my other stories come from people who are currently in my life and have touched me deep inside; my son, my daughter and her cousins, friends and their children. Those stories move me, perhaps because most of them focus on a deeper message. However, there is validity in a story about two Chicana girls, who could really be any two little girls, who play, and fight, and make up. All human beings have that experience, thus, the story celebrates childhood, and that part of a child’s life that adults barely penetrate. Most importantly, the book teaches kids to say, “I’m sorry.”



Amy Costales has lived in Spain, Mexico, Thailand, and India, but recently returned to the United States with her family, where she is a Spanish teacher. As a little girl she shared her adventures with her super best friend, Clara. They inspected tadpoles, looked for counterfeit money, planned pet parades, and climbed Clara’s oak tree. One day they had a fight over magic potion and Amy Costales had to learn how to apologize to her super best friend. Nowadays she shares her adventures with a dog named Gracie, a kitten named Lola, and her children, Kelsey and Samuel.

New York City? ... y más

Manuel Ramos

A pair of blogueros and one of the blogueras made excellent reading suggestions this week beginning with Daniel Olivas' list of seven diverse books, continuing with Michael Sedano's review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's latest Captain Alatriste swashbuckling saga, and moving on to Lisa Alvarado's spotlight on the poetry of Johanny Vázquez Paz. I want to add to your TBR pile with a brief survey of a few Big Apple crime fiction writers. Choice summertime or anytime reading.


STEVEN TORRES
Steven Torres is the author of five crime novels and several short stories. He was born and raised in the Bronx, although he spent some of his youth in Puerto Rico and attended high school in Manhattan. His Precinct Puerto Rico series, featuring Sheriff Luis Gonzalo of Angustias, P.R., is consistently praised by critics and readers. The four books in this series are: Precinct Puerto Rico (2002), Death in Precinct Puerto Rico (2003), Burning Precinct Puerto Rico (2004), and Missing In Precinct Puerto Rico (2006), all originally published in hardback by St. Martin's Minotaur. The first book in the series, Precinct Puerto Rico, is now available in paperback from Leisure Books. Steven's short story Early Fall is in the just-released Bronx Noir anthology (Akashic).

Here's Torres' website blurb for his first book, to give you an idea of what this author is all about:

"In his years as sheriff of Angustias, a small town nestled in Puerto Rico’s mountainous heart, Luis Gonzalo has seen his share of violence. People kill for love and money in Angustias just as they do anywhere else. But it is only during a visit to family in the seaside town of Rincón that he encounters his greatest challenge.

"It begins with a midnight call that brings Gonzalo to a beach where bodies are washing ashore, victims of a shipwreck, victims of the illegal traffic of humans from the Dominican Republic. When he discovers evidence that the shipwreck was no accident, that the ship’s captain was murdered, he is warned off the investigation. A young photographer brings him proof that Puerto Rican police were involved in the deaths of the undocumented immigrants, and when Gonzalo follows this lead, all hell breaks loose. It will take a shootout in Angustias, an attack on his family, and the murder of one of his deputies to get to the bottom of this mystery – a mystery no one else in Puerto Rican law enforcement dares to help him solve."

Several months ago I was lucky enough to get my hands on a preview copy of Torres' latest, a stand-alone noir tragedy, and the book blew me away. Here is what I wrote when I had finished:


The Concrete Maze is a tough, brutal and disturbing story about lost innocence, a desperate search to avenge a young victim, and the reluctant “hero’s” inevitable acceptance of the notion that sometimes justice has to be imposed – with force. Steven Torres gives his readers a black and white, finely drawn picture of a heinous crime and the emotional aftershocks suffered by the victim’s family. The predators who prowl the Bronx streets in Torres’s book are straight from a dark and terrible nightmare; the victims are young, rebellious thrill-seekers; and the would-be rescuers are everyday people thrust into inhuman chaos. The human toll -- the damage -- is on the page where there is no place or time for soft-peddling. Most of us do not want the world to be this way but we know that Torres got it right. His characters have the kind of texture that connects readers to them at basic levels -- pain, anger, frustration. We share their need to act, to strike, because there is no other way of dealing with the terror. These people have only themselves and there cannot be a happy ending in this story but there will be a bloody, violent and scarred resolution. This is fiction that hurts.

The Concrete Maze is now available from Dorchester/Leisure. In addition to his website, StevenTorres manages two blogs where he posts about anything that he wants including the strange world of publishing and writing. Go here for the Crime Time Cafe.


MICHELE MARTINEZ
Michele Martinez writes about Melanie Vargas, described as a "betrayed wife and dedicated mother" who also happens to be an ambitious New York City prosecutor. Martinez was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York for eight years, so you gotta think she knows what she's writing about. Her books so far are Most Wanted (2005), The Finishing School (2006) and Cover-Up (2007), all from William Morrow. There also are paperback and audio editions.

Here are the kinds of reviews this writer gets:

"Martinez enthralls with her first-rate first novel, which has sizzling romance and gripping suspense. . . [Most Wanted] excels with its gritty realism, exploring everything from New York's drug wars to the dark side of its most esteemed law firms." --Romantic Times Magazine (Top Pick)

Library Journal's review of The Finishing School was starred and concluded that "the romance is hot and the suspense high in this absorbing, fast-paced thriller. Highly recommended.”

Publishers Weekly gave the latest in the series, Cover-Up, another starred review and gushed:

"The brutal rape and murder of Suzanne Shepard, a scandal-mongering New York City TV journalist, provides a welcome high-profile case for Melanie Vargas in Martinez's stellar third thriller to feature the sharp and sexy federal prosecutor . . . . Martinez, herself a former federal prosecutor, supplies plenty of insider savvy as she juggles the large cast with élan."


JERRY A. RODRIGUEZ
Jerry A. Rodriguez is a writer and director whose plays have been staged Off-Broadway; a music video writer and director; and a short film writer and director. His bio says that he "serves as the Assistant Director of Housing at CitiWide Harm Reduction in The Bronx, one of the most innovative social service agencies in New York City, which offers a wide variety of outreach, services and care to homeless and low-income drug users living with and at risk for HIV/AIDS." This year he published The Devil's Mambo (Kensington), and it looks as though this is the first in a projected series centering on Nicholas Esperanza, ex-NYPD, current salsa club owner, and winner of $30 million from the NY lottery. Hey, why not?

The Devil's Mambo is about as edgy and gritty as it gets. The basic plot has some resemblance to Torres' Concrete Maze but this is a very different animal. Esperanza is tough, macho, and good-looking. His girlfriend is tough, sexy, and good-looking. He not only knows how to throw a right hook, he can sing on the stage with Eddie Palmieri and enjoy an expensive gourmet meal at one of the City's finest restaurants. This guy has it going, that's for sure. Here's what Rodriguez says about his protagonist (from an interview included in the book): "I'd read so many mystery novels in which the private investigator is struggling with being an alcoholic, is a loner and doesn't have any kind of personal life. I decided that Esperanza should be happy, successful and in a loving relationship." And just in case you had any doubts, here's why Rodriguez thinks his book is different from other mysteries and thrillers: "I think the fact that Esperanza is Latino and there haven't been many lead Latino characters in crime fiction gives the novel a distinct style and flavor. As much as crime writers deal with violence, they tend to stay away from sex and eroticism. I wanted to explore both sides of sex -- when it's tender and loving and when it's dark and twisted. And it's not just sex for sex's sake; it's a major theme of the novel." Yeah, there's a lot of exploration in this novel. And plenty of plot twists and surprises in addition to a vivid glimpse of street life, glitzy and seamy.

As Mario Acevedo says in a blurb for the book: "Double-barreled, twelve-gauge pulp. You'll love it!"

COMING IN 2008
Next year A.E. Roman publishes the first in a proposed series of private eye books from St. Martin's Minotaur. The protagonist is NYC detective Chico Santana and the first book is entitled Chinatown Angel. That's all I know about this author and his books except that his website is called What's Up Essay? (scribblings of A.E. Roman). I like that.

EL LABORATORIO - TIM HERNANDEZ READS FROM SKIN TAX ON AUGUST 4

In case you can't read the graphic: Tim Hernandez reads from his 2006 American Book Award Winning Collection, Skin Tax on August 4 at The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St., Lakewood, CO. Reception 6:00 PM, main event 6:30 - 8:00 PM.

CHICANO MUSIC FESTIVAL



And if you can't read that graphic, it's all about the Chicano Music Festival at El Centro Su Teatro August 3-5. Check out the website for details.

This is the party of the summer and you all are invited.

LITERARY MAG LOOKING FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Here's an announcement that just got shoved under my door:

"Wolverine Farm Publishing (Fort Collins, CO) is seeking submissions for their flagship publication, Matter. Now in it's fifth year, Matter has been hailed by Utne Magazine as full of epiphanies both big and small, and continues to test the boundaries of what a literary/art magazine can do in the world.

"The 11th issue is themed THE WOODS. We are actively seeking fiction, poetry, non-fiction, interviews with authors/activists, hand drawn illustrations, photography, maps, lists, and other ephemera.

"Please send in your creative work by 30 September 2007.

"For more information please visit www.wolverinefarmpublishing.org."


Later.

Johanny Vázquez Paz -- A Force of Nature

Johanny Vázquez Paz was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She holds a Master of Arts in Hispanic Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Indiana State University. Her book Streetwise Poems/Poemas Callejeros was recently published by Mayapple Press (Michigan, 2007). She co-edited the anthology Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazón y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001) and was included in the compilation Poetas sin tregua (Spain, 2006) of Puerto Rican poets from the 80's generation.

Some of her poems appeared in the anthology Más allá de las fronteras (Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, New Jersey, 2004), and she was published in the collection Carpetas de Luz after winning the Voces Selectas 2000 poetry contest of Luz Bilingual Publishing. Johanny has been published in the literary magazines VOCES Journal (Univ. of California), El Centro Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, N.Y.), Beyond Borders (De Paul Univ.) and Yagrumal (Puerto Rico), among others. She currently teaches Spanish at Harold Washington College in Chicago, IL.

Johanny Vázquez Paz nació y se crió en San Juan, Puerto Rico. Posee una maestría en Estudios Hispánicos de la Universidad de Illinois en Chicago y un bachillerato en Sociología de la Universidad del Estado de Indiana. Su libro Streetwise Poems/Poemas Callejeros fue recientemente publicado por Mayapple Press (Michigan, 2007). Co-editó la antología Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazón y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001), y fue incluida en el libro Poetas sin tregua-Compilación de poetas puertorriqueñas de la generación del 80 (España, 2006).

Además, algunos de sus poemas aparecen en la antología Más allá de las fronteras (Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, New Jersey, 2004), y fue publicada en la colección Carpetas de Luz después de ganar el certamen Voces Selectas 2000 de Luz Bilingual Publishing. Johanny ha sido publicada en las revistas: VOCES Journal (Univ. of California), El Centro Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, N.Y.), Beyond Borders (De Paul Univ.) y Yagrumal (Puerto Rico), entre otras. Actualmente es profesora de español en Harold Washington College en Chicago, IL.

Aside from the obvious descriptors in her bio, Johanny Vázquez Paz is quite simply a force of nature. She's warm like earth, clear and bracing as running water, and bright as the canopy of morning sky. She's also a Chicago literary fixture, and it's been our very good luck indeed that she's been the host of Palabra Pura since its inception. It's Johanny's voice you hear each month at California Clipper welcoming you, teasing you, coaxing you to relax and enjoy. With her inimitable presence, the bar becomes nuestra joint, an opportunity to savor. And the experience is made richer by her sharing her own poetry, setting out the first course in that feast of words that is a Palabra Pura reading.

There is so much to appreciate. She is also a poet of what I like to consider working class sensibilities -- direct, honest, but full of profound feeling, true feeling. In the 2007, the release of Streetwise Poems/Poemas Callejeros, Johanny shows us how deeply the streets run in her veins, the public and private ways her heart holds the love of family and their stories. No matter how much her work is anchored in an urban base, she is tethered always to la isla, to Puerto Rico and its sorrow and strength, always writing from an solid place of female dignity. Take a moment and read for yourself.

Daughter of the City

I feel the streets in my veins

avenues

highways

alleyways

boulevards

roads without stop signs or lights or signals

live within me

circling the bewildering labyrinths of my being,

noises echo loudly at every corner,

each step banging like a hand on a drum,

horns demanding that others move out of the way,

shots crying farewell to their reasons for hate,

screams hiding by the anger of a barking dog.

Daughter of the city

citizen of hell

resident of purgatory.

I am a skyscraper inhabited by urgency,

a map of nameless streets,

only the suicidal wind dares to speed

past the danger signs of my curves.

Hours merge without boundaries into dawn;

my anxieties open for business twenty-four hours a day

without ever finding peace and quiet

inside the insistent beating of my sleepwalking heart.

Letter to My Mother from Chicago

Don’t worry about me, madrecita,

everything seems fine in the northlands

and I perfect myself before your eyes.

No problem disturbs me

more than ten hours a day

my health is excellent

without doctors or healthy diets

and there is no one to interrupt

my eternal solitude.

But, don’t be worried, mami,

it’s not as bad as you think.

There are millions of jobs here

that don’t pay well

there is a lot of money

in other people’s accounts

new buildings go up every week

with people trapped behind each door.

If I sound sad maybe it’s because

I miss my homeland, my family and everything,

because the weather chills my bones more each year,

because of the things-to-buy list

that grows like a well fed child,

because of the problems that visit me daily

without an invitation.

I’m fine,

I survive day by day

taking care of things myself,

don’t feel sad, viejita,

life is perfect here.

Reasons of Worth

because I sin in secrecy and silence

keeping before the world

a record of impeccable morality

because I have withstood deserved insults

in the dark corner of rancor and hate

because I could have taken advantage of many men

but I chose solitude over lies and convenience

because I did not prostitute my ideals under the assault

of those whose only ideal is profit

because I was born woman and I bleed

and I am impregnated and I give birth

and I raise and nurture and clean and organize

and I stop bleeding

for these and many other reasons of worth

I deserve fame right now

be it fifteen minutes of praise,

be it an ovation of applause and roses,

be it my image glowing on television,

or my touched-up photo in some important magazine,

be it an honorable mention in some contest

or a trophy with my name engraved,

whatever it may be, but let it be grand...

because

I deserve fame!

I deserve glory!

For more of Johanny's writing, please enjoy the following:

PUBLICATIONS-

Book Poemas Callejeros / Streetwise Poems published by Mayapple Press, Michigan, 2007.

Poem published in the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Cracked Slab Books, Chicago, 2007.
Poem: Our Revolution.

Poems published in Poetas sin tregua compilation of Puerto Rican poets published in Spain, Ráfagas, 2006.
Poems: Sentada en la arena mirando el mar, Anónimo Lo que queda, Un infierno mío, Fuerza de voluntad, En comunión, Jardinera.

Poems published in Más allá de las fronteras anthology published in New Jersey, USA, Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2004.
Poems: Sentada en la arena mirando el mar, Sin debida sepultura.

Article "Café con demasiaaaaada leche: I am a Black Woman Trapped in a White Woman's Body" and poem published in Que Ondee Sola, Northeastern Illinois University-Chicago, IL, March 2003.
Poem: Anhelo africano.

Song lyrics written included in the compact disc Compromiso by Luis Jahn, Chicago, IL, Del Sur Music Publishing, 2003.
Poem: Cada familia.

Co-edited and published poems in Between the Heart and the Land/Entre el corazón y la tierra; Latina Poets in the Midwest anthology published in Chicago, IL, 2001, MARCH/Abrazo Press.
Poems: Liviana / Light Heart (both versions in all indicated), Por un hilo / By a Thread, A la vida / To Life, Morning After.

Poems published in VOCES: A Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, Volume Three, Number One and Two, University of California, Davis, Spring 2001.
Poems: Con fe / With Faith (both versions in all indicated), Dedicado a Soledad / Dedicated to Solitude, Veinticuatro Horas / Twenty-four Hours, Liviana / Light Heart, Razones de Peso / Reasons of Worth.

Poems published in Centro Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, in the article "New Rican Voices", Volume XII, Number 1, Hunter College, New York, Fall 2000.
Poems: African Yearning, Carta a mi madre.

Chapbook El filo de la esquina published in the collection Voces Selectas 2000, Carpeta de Poesía Luz Número 4, Luz Bilingual Publishing, Sherman Oaks, CA, 2000.
Poems: Por un hilo, Con fe, Palabras cortas, Juerga de dos, mentira de muchos.

Poems published in ¡Sin linderos ni arrabales, hacia el Siglo XXI!, Segunda Parte. Anthology published in Madrid, Spain, 1999, Calíope Press.
Poems: Liviana, ¡Qué grande estás!

Poems published in El Otro Newspaper, Chicago, IL, December 1999.
Poems: Si alguna vez, Razones de peso.

Poem and short story published in ¡Sin linderos ni arrabales, hacia el Siglo XXI! anthology published in Madrid, Spain, 1999, Calíope Press.
Poem and Short Story: En las mañanas, Con fe.

Poems published in Yagrumal literary magazine, 1999 issue, Peñuelas, Puerto Rico.
Poems: Callejón, Cada familia, ¡Hay que...!, Con fe, Bailando bolero sola, Resolución de fin de año.

Poems published in ¡Y Dios la hizo mujer! anthology published in Madrid, Spain, 1998, Calíope Press.
Poem: Razones de peso.

Poems and article published in La Raza Newspaper, Chicago, IL, July 1999.
Poems: Bailando bolero sola, Callejón.

Interview published in Que Ondee Sola, Northeastern Illinois University-Chicago, IL, March 1999.

Poem published in Que Ondee Sola, Northeastern Illinois University-Chicago, IL, April 1999.
Poem: Our Revolution.

Poems published in Beyond Borders: Más all de las fronteras literary magazine, De Paul University, 1997-98 issue.
Poem: Cada familia.

Poems published in Diminuendo, volume ii, issue 1, Loyola University literary magazine, October 1998. Poem: Alleyway.

Poems published in Karacola literary magazine, 1998, Santiago, Chile.
Poem: Razones de peso

Poems published in Abrapalabra University of Illinois literary magazine, Chicago, IL, 1996
Poem: Anuncio.

Poems published in Fe de erratas, August and November 1993 issues. Poems: Mujer, Débil.

Lisa Alvarado