Happy Children's Day/Book Day

Children's Day/Book Day, also known as El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día), is a celebration of children, families, and reading held annually on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Día is an enhancement of Children’s Day, which began in 1925. Children’s Day was designated as a day to bring attention to the importance and well-being of children. In 1996, nationally acclaimed children’s book author Pat Mora proposed linking the celebration of childhood and children with literacy to found El día de los niños/El día de los libros.

For more information visit www.ala.org/ala/alsc/diadelosninos/diadelosninos.cfm

Celebrate El día de los niños/El día de los libros

From http://www.colorincolorado.org/calendar/celebrations/dia

Send an e-card

Catch a kid reading… and show how proud you are by sending an e-card to a child, friend, or relative. This beautiful e-card was created for Colorín Colorado by David Diaz, the Caldecott Medal winning illustrator of Stormy Night, Roadrunner's Dance, and other favorites.

10th Annual Literary Conference

An Evening with the Authors- "Fiesta Style", Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The San Benito CISD Library Department.

Click on the flier for a better view

Pieces & Bits

Michael Sedano

Better Late Than Never - Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima Sculpture Park Opens in Santa Rosa New Mexico

La Bloga received an email from Chuck Braithwaite, Editor of the Great Plains Quarterly, whose issue on the television program "Deadwood", received

accolades from the author of Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya appended the P.R. announcing the March 1, 2008 dedication of the writer's and novel's eponymous sculpture garden, including a photo of the writer and sculptor (left, right).

The announcement describes the sculpture, by Reynaldo Rivera with an eye to what visitors to the park will see: The “Bless Me, Ultima” public artwork consists of a two-part bronze sculpture - one being a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of Rudolfo Anaya and the other a bronze bas-relief plaque set in a rustic adobe wall depicting historic representations of Santa Rosa, Route 66 and Guadalupe County, with the “Bless Me, Ultima” characters – Ultima and Antonio at the center of the piece. The landscape park will also feature a natural stone waterfall and a shallow pool with a golden carp tile mosaic, benches and sidewalks.

Next time you take a trip on Route 66, plan to cruise by Santa Rosa NM's Park Lake, where, near the north entrance, you'll come across the sculpture park. For more information, contact Richard R. Delgado, 575-472-3763.

Clarification on Readership for How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children / Cómo Criar Niños Emocionalmente Sanos.

Last week I shared news of a project I am engaged in, recording Dr. Gerald Newmark's important and useful book into an audiobook, in an effort to increase its accessibility.

In our conversation, Dr. Newmark had recounted a few anecdotes of people telling him they "hadn't gotten around to reading it yet." We'd discussed that many people are hooked on what Marie Winn calls "the plug-in drug" and have lost interest in reading books, and our mutual belief that our culture is growing away from books and toward other media.

Out of this nexus came my unspecific remarks that gente were not reading the book after gaining possession of one. The Newmarks were upset that such an impression had been miscommunicated, after all, over 300,000 copies are in circulation, and the book provides the core for numerous parenting programs across the nation.

Of course folks are reading the book! But more need to read it, hence the audiobook project I described last week. Much as I bemoan people not reading, there's no reason not to make the information available through their ears and the four CD discs comprising each set. After all, a book in the CD player is worth one on the "haven't gotten around to it yet" list.

Sometimes It's Better Not to Pay Attention to the Ads.

So I'm reading through my electronic NY Times and click on the horror story from Austria, a freak imprisoned his daughter in a basement, impregnating her multiple times. I'm about to click away from the text when I notice the ad bug running below the email this link, to the right of the text. "Love knows no boundaries" it reads. I wonder if this is an example of technology run amok context placement, where the ad robot "reads" text in the article and places advertising congruent with the lexical data. I browse a few more stories in the Grey Lady, and different stories have different ad bugs. So who knows how this happens, but criminy, I'd think the Times might want to hire an editor to avoid such unfortunate ironies.

Oaxaca Wood Carver Jesus Sosa Calvo at Avenue50Studio. Speaking of sculpture, Oaxaca produces some of the most delightful exemplars of sculpture. These critters beg to be handled, smiled at, given to someone who deserves them. When I received an email Highland Park's (Los Angeles) Avenue 50 Studio was hosting a trunk show featuring the work of master wood carver Jesus Sosa Calvo, I looked at my calendar with trepidation, hoping not to find a Taper show or Disney concert or some other obligatory fete that would keep me from enjoying the array of delights sure to be seen at Avenue 50.

I arrived early enough to take my time enjoying the current exhibit, "Natura: Mythology, Spirit, Memory," featuring paintings and assemblages by El Lay artists Pat Gomez, Karen Bonfigli, and Andrés Montoya. Intriguing work like this deserves leisurely involvement of eye and mind.

Jesus Sosa Calvo arrayed dozens of totally affordable pieces. I bought the two silver colored gatas shown in the upper left quadrant of the photomontage above. And as I was driving home I regretted not buying several of the gatitas in that photo. I have no idea why I didn't; maybe because the silver cats had so arrested my eye.

Sosa carves his figuras de madera copal. I asked if it were the same copal tree that gives incense, and he replied yes. But there's a difference. The copal negro is the resin-rich one that yields the aromatic sap. The copal blanco produces less resin and is the wood Sosa uses for his sculpture.

I asked him if he had access to the internet so I could email him the photos and he replied "it's an internet world." Of course he has correo electronico at home in San Martin Tilcajete, Ocotlan, Oax.

Folks planning to attend one of Avenue 50's outstanding events, such as the 4th Sunday of every month's poetry reading, "La Palabra," or the Saturday, May 3, 2008 poetry event, The Black/Brown Dialogues: Inspiration House Poetry Choir at 7:00 p.m., should arrive early enough to park behind the gallery, as the Avenue 50 events attract energetic crowds. From Avenue 50's website: Commissioned by Kathy Gallegos, Director of Avenue 50 Studio, “The Black/Brown Dialogues”, featuring Inspiration House PoetryChoir, honors healthy and ethical cultural dialogue between the African and Latino communities, at one of Latino LA's most important independent galleries. Using the Inspiration House PoetryChoir format, poets read their work while master musicians improvise musical responses to the poetry, blending words, intonations, audience responses, and dynamic silence into a sonic tapestry that's entrancing and exhilarating. The poetry series is curated by Peter J. Harris, artistic director, Inspiration House, which produces work dedicated to leaving its audiences renewed and recommitted to cultural work that contributes to the creation of a humane society.

Read! Raza. Buy! Raza. Support Your Local Indie Bookseller / Support Your Local Raza Bookseller!


Yesterday's Daniel Olivas column carried the dismal tidings of the impending shuttering of Orange County's Libreria Martinez. For most small businesses, the only remedy to this type of bad news is sales. People need to patronize these businesses and buy books there. Not at Amazon, not at some internet joint, but at a brick-and-mortar concern, or the internet outlet of a real bookseller, like Libreria Martinez.

Please comment, tell La Bloga's readers where you buy your books in your community. The greatest resource in your city could be around the corner from a reader who doesn't know it.

If you're in Los Angeles, you will want to buy your books at places like IMIX in Eagle Rock, or out in the Valley, at Tia Chucha. Support your local bookseller, buy books, buy art, buy curios, buy jewelry, buy coffee...whatever they're selling, be a customer. Please.

So it goes, this April's final Tuesday.

It's springtime. La Chickenada continues productive outlay, a reliable four brown blanquillos daily.

My Salmon Epiphyllums are blooming with spectacular gratification. the red epis are covered with blossoms promising a fabulous next two weeks' show.

Today, the first Aster opened a deep magenta bud. Giant blooms coming this weekend. And if California's 90 degree days continue unabated, I'll wilt as the flowers thrive. All in all, a worthwhile tradeoff.

See you next week!
mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments, just click below. La Bloga encourages you to be our guest for a day. Want to recommend a book or an author La Bloga hasn't discovered? Want to offer a counterstatement to something you read? Want to showcase an artistic or literary idea? Let a bloguera or bloguero know by leaving a comment on their post, or by clicking here to email your willingness to be a La Bloga guest columnist.

In the Grove special issue: homage to Andrés Montoya

In the Grove was founded by Lee Herrick in 1996. Since that time, In the Grove has proudly published established and emerging writers from California's Central Valley and throughout the state. Each issue features nationally recognized, award-winning writers alongside vibrant new voices.

Daniel Chacón, acclaimed author of and the shadows took him and the short-story collection Chicano Chicanery, guest edits the new issue of In the Grove. It is a special issue devoted to the life, poetry, and influence of the late Andrés Montoya, whose book the ice worker sings and other poems won the American Book Award posthumously and has been the subject of great respect and study for poets across the country. The University of Notre Dame established a memorial prize in his name, and there have been remarkable poets to win the prize--Sheryl Luna, 2004 (awarded by judge Robert Vasquez) and more recently Gabriel Gomez, 2006 (awarded by Valerie Martinez).

I asked Chacón if he could send a little something about this special issue. He kindly obliged with the following:

The title of the issue is Pákatelas, which is also the title of a long poem from Andres Montoya's Universe Breath and All, the posthumous manuscript. It's a beautiful poem that ripples down the page like spirit and water. It's an exploration of what Jimmy Santiago Baca calls Coming into Language, the moments in the lives of poets wherein we hear words for the first time, I mean really hear them, so much so that they connect us to the dead, our antepasados. Suddenly it's not enough for us to scribble our verses on napkins and college-ruled note paper, but to voraciously read other voices, to fall in love with poetry. It asks the question,

"when was it that poems came crawling
from the lonely
recesses of my
gut?"

Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan teaches us the difference between seeing and seeing. Artists will tell you it's harder to see than it is to express, and for poets, that seeing is hearing. Pákatelas is a journal about coming into the ability to hear. It is about how Andrés listens even to the pigs, "whose squeals opened to the sky like a peach."

Borges says when you read a book you breathe life into the dead, and the same must be true when a living poet writes a poem, they breathe life into the dead and the not-yet-living, those who will pick up their work and imagine their reality into being, hearing what they hear. For the dead, time is not linear, and hearing is outside of time, so Andrés may have influenced many young poets--even if they do not know it--but many young poets also have influenced Andrés--even if he didn't know it. In this journal, you can find Andrés spirit flowing through the conduit of every line of every poem, and when the lines break, his energy is released. (Montoya pictured above.)

Pákatelas is a gathering of voices that are somehow similar to Andrés' voice, "kindred spirits" you might say, singing their songs in different ways.

The first three parts of the journal are called Voices that Echo, Family and Friends, and Teachers.

The Voices that Echo section has poets like Javier O. Huerta. His first book is winner of the same prize Andrés' first book had won--the Chicano Literary Prize out of UC Irvine--and you can hear Andrés in his poems (and if you could go backwards in time to when Andrés was writing his poems longhand on a legal pad at a cafe in Fresno, when Javier was a child in love with wonder, you can hear Huerta's voice in his lines). This section also has Oscar Bermeo, Rigoberto González, and Sheryl Luna, whose first book won the Andrés Montoya poetry prize out of Notre Dame University. We include Mónica Teresa Ortiz (pay attention to that name), whose first chapbook is due out this month. There is David Dominguez, La Bloga's own Daniel A. Olivas, and so many others, including my favorite poet Sasha Pimentel Chacón.

The second section, Family and Friends, are the voices of those who knew and loved Andrés, like his baby brother Maceo, now one of the most exciting new Chicano artists (see maceomontoya.com), Tim Z. Hernandez, El Maestro José Montoya, and Lee Herrick. In this section is the poet Augustine F. Porras, who along with Jack Boyd went to the University of Oregon for his MFA.

We were all four friends in that MFA program, all of us Brown people, Andrés, me, Augie, and Jack, three Chicanos and a Skin, three from the barrio, one from the rez, all of us so close to the earth from where we came that we didn't have to develop a friendship, we were family from the first day we met.

Boyd is from Elwha Klallam, the rez in Washington State, and in his poem the "The Iceworker Still Sings" he writes, "the man made of songs sings."

Also made of songs is Michael Luis Medrano, whose first book is forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press, and who was a student in the only poetry class Andrés taught at Fresno City College. There is the voice of my own gang-banging-turned-English-professor brother, Kenneth R. Chacón, who allowed Andrés' friendship to lead him away from the streets and into love for poetry and justice.

The third section is made up of his poetry teachers, including Juan Felipe Herrera, Philip Levine, Garret Hongo, and Corrine Clegg Hales. It doesn't take much of an effort to hear the voice of these great poets in the work of Andrés, but if you really listen, you'll find the voice of Andrés in their work.

The final section is made up of Andrés' poetry, including some poems from The Iceworker Sings, translated into the Spanish by Verónica E. Guajardo. These poems are just as beautiful and powerful in Spanish as they are in English, showing that his voice can be understood in any language, can be sung in anyone's tongue.

The final poem is the story of the poet, our story, his story, her story, the story of how we are learning to hear. It is the poem "Pákatelas," in its entirety, over twenty pages.

"Pákatelas" is the sound the poet hears while working in the Central Valley's packing houses, the music of the belts and machines and the yells of the foremen to the fruit packers, Pákatelas! Move quicker! Pákatelas! the imperative to never stop working, Pákatelas! Pákatelas! Pack those things!

"there are no spaces

between borders
and it is in the spaceless
that i find my lips

shuddering
people"

cesar
ruben
cuahtemoc
gabriela
llorona
tiny y smokey
shy girl and monstro and chuy and boobi.

i find myself
in song
assaulting
the streets,

singing,
"i am large
i contain
multitudes,"

as if i was
busting out
cumbia style,
"pákatelas
pákatelas
pákatelas
da da da-ran"
with a line i saw scrawled
on a wall in pinedale.

◙ Many have already heard via the Web the upsetting news: Libreria Martinez, one of Orange County's last independent bookstores, is threatened with closure. As Lisa Alvarez notes in her blog, The Mark on the Wall:

As you know, it's difficult for independents to make a go of it in today's market of online bookstores and mega chains but Libreria Martinez is much more than a bookstore, it's a community resource and treasure. You don't see the kind of programming they offer at the big chains: bilingual storytimes for children, free creative arts workshops for young people, free ESL classes for the community, an impressive array of local, national and international writers...and much more. Check out their website for more information: click here.

Read Lisa’s entire post to find out how you can help. She notes that Gustavo Arellano will be appearing this Friday, May 2 at 7 p.m. to sign his bestselling book, ¡Ask a Mexican!. Lisa says: “Drop by then if you can or before would be even better.” And read Arellano’s take on this craziness. He notes, in part: “You know we live in dark times when a Macarthur Genius-winning mensch like Rueben Martinez has to close his legendary Libreria Martinez, the country's premier Latino-themed bookstore visited by every author from the legendary (Carlos Fuentes) to the terrible (yours truly).”

Libreria Martinez
1110 N. Main St.
Santa Ana, CA 92701
Telephone: 714-973-7900

◙ La Bloga’s favorite literary loco, Dr. William “Memo” Nericcio, appears today at CSUN. Go here for more information. Sadly, even though I live in the Valley, I will be in downtown toiling at my day job. But if you go, give Bill a big abrazo for me.

◙ Álvaro Huerta let’s us know that his essay, "La Pistola," was published by the prestigious literary journal, ZYZZYVA, and it is now available online here. But don’t forget to support your favorite literary journals…buy an issue and keep up with the latest in literature.

◙ I’m delighted to note that I have a poem in the collection, A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover Through the Eyes of Poets (CreateSpace) edited by Rick Lupert. Passover ended last night but get your copies for next year.

◙ In case you haven't already seen it, PALABRA is featured in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine in the Project LitMag special section (pp. 58-59) titled "Twenty New Journals Ready to Read Your Work.” If you want to submit and/or subscribe to PALABRA (which is edited by the brilliant elena minor), visit the journal’s website or drop her an e-mail.

◙ Well, the reviews are beginning to come in for Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press) edited by yours truly. The anthology (available in both hardcover and paperback and may ordered directly from the press, various online sellers or through your local bookstore) spans 60 years of Los Angeles fiction and features 34 stories and novel excerpts from new and established Latino/a authors. Writing for yesterday’s El Paso Times, Sergio Troncoso said, in part:

In California, the setting is more urban, often suffused with the world of Hollywood and movies, while the protagonists of these stories run the gamut from dirt-poor to those straddling the world of their fathers and mothers, and their own unique place in the sun. Latinos in Lotusland creates new possibilities to consider and explore for the community of readers and writers, and beyond. [Read the whole review here.]

◙ Speaking of Latinos in Lotusland, public radio station KCRW ran a piece on Friday by author and journalist Kevin Roderick (of LAObserved fame) who mentioned several new L.A. books including Latinos in Lotusland. You may read or listen to it here.

◙ All done. I had a wonderful day yesterday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books seeing wonderful writers such as Alex Espinoza, Dagoberto Gilb, Yxta Maya Murray, Michael Jaime-Becerra, and so many more. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres. ¡Lea un libro!

Anthology

an·thol·o·gy: a collection of selected literary pieces or passages or works of art or music


HECHO EN TEJAS, A LITERARY AND MUSIC ENSEMBLE
The Latino Cultural Center (LCC), Dallas, in collaboration with the Writer’s Garrett and Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, presents a literary and music ensemble performance with music by Santiago Jiménez y su Conjunto, David Garza and Joel Garza. Readings from the acclaimed Texas anthology Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, Dagoberto Gilb, editor, (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) by Tony Díaz, Christine Granados, Dagoberto Gilb, Macarena Hernández, Tammy Gomez, Diana López and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith.

Where: LCC Oak Farms Dairy Performance Hall
When: 7:30pm, May 3
Admission: $15 adults, $10 seniors & $8 students

Contact Phone: 214-671-0045

OPEN WINDOWS III
Fresh from the printer: Open Windows III is an anthology of poetry, fiction and essays compiled by the editors at Ghost Road Press (Denver, 2008). The 2007 edition won the Colorado Book Award and the 2005 edition was a finalist in that contest. Included in the third edition are the First, Second and Third prize winners in Ghost Road's annual creative writing contest as well as several other invited contributors. Among the writers are Juliana Aragón Fatula, Carol Guerrero-Murphy, Katie Gutierrez, and yours truly (represented by my poem, This Mestizo Thing Has Me All Mixed Up, which some La Bloga readers may remember. You can get more information including an order form on the Ghost Road website.


CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LATINO ISSUES TODAY
The following recently came across my desk:

This is a call for submissions for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Issues Today for Greenwood Press. This two volume set will offer a broad and succinct overview of current issues in U.S. Latino Communities through topical essays organized alphabetically. This valuable resource, targeting high
school and university students on to the general public, will include approximately one hundred essays focusing on different aspects of the Latino experience in the U.S. such as: education, health, lifestyles, history, politics, immigration and the arts. Numerous sidebars will also appear with bios, profiles, documents, snippets and the like. This will truly be a collection of crucial Latino Issues of the day.

Coverage

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Issues & Trends Today will feature short articles (2,500-4,500 words) authored by leading experts and emerging scholars offering an in-depth description of key issues, concepts, terms and trends facing Latinos today. In addition, the encyclopedia will provide a compendium of terms, definitions and explanations of concepts, models, and acronyms.

Invited Submissions

To ensure that this publication has the most current and relevant information possible, we are asking experts, practitioners and scholars for their particular area of research, to contribute short articles on suggested topics or other related topics in their area of interest. Individuals interested in submitting short articles on
suggested topics (This is quite a list that I won't reproduce here -- contact the editors for more information - MR) or other related topics in the area of Latino issues should submit an email with a proposal for an encyclopedia entry by May 14th, 2008. The proposal, not exceeding 3 pages, should include the possible title of the article, authors names and affiliations, one or more topics on which the short article could be contributed, background information and a brief description of the suggested article. We encourage potential contributors to also consider topics not included in our list of topics, especially if the topic is related to the area of their special expertise. This also provides an excellent opportunity in building a publication record for emerging scholars and graduate students. Proposals will be accepted based on pertinent criteria and topic balancing needs.

Please forward your e-mail with the proposal to Dr. Juan M. Benitez and Dr. Jose F. Moreno jbenitez@csulb.edu and jmoreno7@csulb.edu no later than May 14th, 2008. You will be notified about the status of your proposed entry by May 30th, 2008. First drafts of entries will be due to the editors by July 14th, 2008. Final drafts will be submitted to the publisher August 1, 2008. This book is tentatively
scheduled for publishing by Greenwood Publishing Group, www.greenwood.com, in 2008.

Upon acceptance of your proposal, you will have two months to prepare your article (2,500-4,500 words). Guidelines for preparing your short piece as well as a sample article will be sent to you upon acceptance of your proposal.

Important Dates for Contributors:
May 14th, 2008 Deadline for submitting proposals of encyclopedia entries (3 pgs)
May 30th, 2008 Notification of Authors regarding the acceptance of proposals
July 14th, 2008 Deadline for submitting first drafts of articles of the accepted proposals
August 1, 2008 Deadline for submitting final/approved drafts of articles to publisher

BITS AND PIECES

April 25: Latin Nights -- La Ley Scholarship Foundation sponsors Mariachi Vasquez, Mundo de Sol, Orquesta la Salsa, and others ... $30 tickets can be purchased at Tonalli, 3810 Pecos, Denver; 720-434-3164. 7 p.m. to midnight; Kiva: 3090 Downing, Denver.

April 26: artEXPOsed -- Free family event. Dance, performance art, culinary art, visual art; students of
artEXPOsed showcase their talent at the Thornton Community Center, 2211 Eppinger Blvd., Thornton, CO, 1 - 4 p.m. More info at 720-977-5817. Participants in the artEXPOsed program are between 11 and 16 years old, and over the past 8 weeks have studied in one of four areas: Visual Arts - features mediums such as watercolors, pastels and acrylic oil paints; Performance Arts - involves stage performance, dramatic interpretation and comic sketches; Culinary Arts - introduce kids to cooking and artistic food presentations; Dance - create and perform their choreography.

April 29: Zapatista -- a bilingual play, written by written by Dañel Malán, performed by Teatro Milagro, at El Centro Su Teatro, 8:05 p.m. Teatro Milagro’s new work, Zapatista, shares the struggle of the man behind the mask, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Join Teatro Milagro on the intriguing journey exploring the myth behind the man who, in his fight for human rights, proves that the spoken word is a powerful implement for social change. Zapatista opened at El Centro Milagro, in Portland, Oregon on January 11, 2008, before beginning its national tour that will continue through November of 2008.

May 1: Un Toque de Mexico -- 6th annual Cinco de Mayo concert presented by Newsed CDC, the Mexican Cultural Center, the Consulate General of Mexico and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Jeffrey Kahane, music director; Robert Alvarado Switala, violin; José Medina, tenor; Jeff Nevin, arranger & trumpet; Mariachi Sol de Mi Tierra, Juventino Romero, director; Bryant Webster School Mariachi Juvenil; Fiesta Colorado Dance Company, Jeanette Trujillo, artistic director. Boettcher Concert Hall, where you can pick up free tickets. 7:00 p.m., Performing Arts Complex, Denver.

May 1 - May 31: Return of the Corn Mothers -- A show about the sacred bounties of the earth; honoring women, art, music, dance, poetry, and the "divine creative energy in us all." Artists include Meggan De Anza, Renee Fajardo, Li Hardison, Santiago Jaramillo, Arlette Lucero, Mike Penny, Todd Pierson, Carl Ruby, Evelyn Valdez Martinez, Suzanna Vega, Rita Wallace, Holly Wasinger, Robert Lopez Dussart (in memorial). Opening night extravaganza on May 2, 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. CHAC, 774 Santa Fe Drive, Denver.

And speaking of anthologies: Rudy G. and I host a reading and celebration of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Southern California Literature, edited by Daniel Olivas (Bilingual Press, 2008), at the Tattered Cover, East Colfax and Elizabeth, Denver, on May 21 at 7:30 p.m. I'm thinking our topic might be What Are Two Illiterate Peasants From Denver Doing in a Book About Southern California? Stay tuned for more details about this and other Lotusland events.

Later.

Chicano Vampire Author Hits L.A. - Late Breaking News

Mario Acevedo signs his latest novel, The Undead Kama Sutra, featuring vampire-detective Felix Gomez Friday, April 25  and Saturday, April 26.

Friday. 7 to 8 p.m.

Dark Delicacies

4213 W. Burbank Blvd.

Burbank CA 91505

Saturday. 1 to 2 p.m.

LA Times Festival of Books

Booth #614 on the Main Campus

April is Poetry Month!!!!!! (and some other news)

cover of Raw Silk Suture
copyright Maria Arango 2008

Dear Reader: First of all, much love and congratulations to Daniel Olivas for the gorgeous work of Latinos in Lotus Land, and to Manuel Ramos, whose poetry continues to garner well-deserved attention and acclaim. (Ay, I am one lucky writer -- Michael, Manuel, Dan, Rudy, Rene and Ann make me bring (I hope) my best self every week....)

And if you only have limited reading time DO NOT HESITATE to buy the following books of poetry:

The Republic of Poetry -- Martín Espada

187 Reason Why Mexicans Can't Cross The Border -- Juan Felipe Herrera

Teeth -- Aracelis Girmay

Raven Eye and Naked Wanting -- Margo Tamez

I Praise My Destroyer -- Diane Ackerman

The Wind Shifts -- edited by Francisco Aragón

and Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon --- because if you're not reading Pablo Neruda, there is something seriously wrong with you

Personal Notes:

I'd be kicking myself for a very long time if I didn't share with you some wonderful news. I have recently signed a contract with Floricanto Press for the release of a volume of poetry, Raw Silk Suture, edited by Carlos Mock, author of Papi Chulo. This project has been blessed by Carlos' unflagging support, the wonderful layout by Bill Rattan and by the phenomenal illustrations by woodcut artist, Maria Arango. Advance copies should be ready mid-summer, with a full release scheduled in September.

Here are two advance quotes about the project I am very gratified to have received.

Alvarado's call for "a quiet remaking of cells" is northing short of revolutionary. Read this book, look at yourself and the world around you and know: anything is possible.
Demetria Martinez, author, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana.

The poetry of Lisa Alvarado thunders across the page. Fiery and smoky, these are poems for midnight whiskey and pre-dawn espresso. These are poems for what ails us.
Manuel Ramos, Moony's Road to Hell, Author La Bloga, Founder and Columnist

RECLAMO

En este sueño
estoy completa.
No tengo que guardar
las historias de otra gente.
No tengo que buscar y escudriñar
a través de los restos de sus palabras.
En este sueño
paso mis dedos
através de la cabellera de Frida.
Con esa cabellera,
tejo flores obscuras
del color de la sangre.
Y me dice
que el jaguar viene a traerme
su poder.
La medicina que calma este dolor
es como comida para
calmar esta hambre.
En este sueño
hago magia
con el lodo del Rio Grande.
Arropado en corridas y música ranchera,
que son el hechizo y el encanto
que anula la edad
del olvido y el adoctrinamiento.
En este sueño
tengo un amante
cuya cara es de piedra,
como el antiguo marcador del templo.
Su boca es carnosa,
sus ojos están entrecerrados y
murmura:
Ven conmigo mi India,
mi pequeña perdida.
Recuerda quien eres.
Recuerda quien eres.


MEXICO: 90 DAYS AND COUNTING OR YOU
REALLY CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

iridescent electric pink
bougainvillea
line the boulevard
next to where
someone’s pissing
right in the middle of the day
yesterday’s pozole
slick and greenish
stains the street
around the corner
from the Monument to the Revolution
where a golden angel
looks down on prostitutes
with imitation Chanel bags
and taxis are
green and yellow beetles
carrying sour businessmen
who ask the teenage pimps
how much
the cross-eyed
boy in the Lucha Libre mask
stares at me
and runs past barefoot beggar children
in clown makeup
but the clowns never smile
and they’re on every corner
they block the path
of women going to work
wearing not quite
put together
cheap copies
of clothes they saw
in Vogue or Cosmo
but nothing really matches
they always wear
white heels
or a belt with a giant buckle
and the requisite miniskirt that makes
their ass stand out
so that the pesero driver
with one gold tooth
always holds their change for just that extra second
I don’t get the shits
but baby-faced doctors run IV’s in both arms
for migraines and food poisoning
the fat man who served me
chiles rellenos
laughed at my buzz cut
and winked
when he slid me the plate
outside the ER
stand private guards
with tight lips and clenched pistols
working their job
they scowl at the howling sushi delivery boys
on motorbikes
who rush to the bar for a quick one
in between deliveries
inside the Museo Bellas Artes
I see the outstretched arms of Rivera’s peasants
and refuse the outstretched arms
of the Indian sitting at the bus stop
I clutch my postcards
with Frida’s self-portraits
the one with the red dress
the one with the hammer and sickle body brace
down the street from my favorite helado stand
the one with flavors like
guayaba mango cajeta
a man grabs my crotch
to see if I have any balls
I almost knock over
a tianguis stand of charro Barbies
the seller’s daughter
a girl with an olive oval face
blinks her long lashes in disbelief
What is this American doing here?

MARTIN ESPADA READINGS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Thursday, April 24: 7 PM, Studio Theatre, College of the Arts, California State University, Long Beach, CA. Contact: Víctor Rodríguez, 562-985-8560; vrodrig5@csulb.edu.

Friday, April 25: 8 PM, Fé Bland Auditorium, Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, CA. Contact: David Starkey, 805-965-0581, X2345; starkeyd@sbcc.edu.

MARTIN ESPADA READINGS IN MILWAUKEE AND MADISON, WI

Thursday, May 1: Lecture, 7 PM, The Redemption of Pablo Neruda,
Centennial Hall, Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee, WI.
Contact: Sandra Rusch Walton, 414-286-3000; slrusch@mpl.org.

Friday, May 2: Reading, 7 PM, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, WI.
Contact: Chuck Stebelton, 414-263-5001;
woodlandpattern@sbcglobal.net; www.woodlandpattern.com.

Saturday, May 3: Reading, 7 PM, Escape Java Joint, Madison, WI.
Contact: Allen Ruff, 608-257-6050; 608-255-0240; alruff@tds.net.


Lisa Alvarado

Happy Earth Day

The first Earth Day was organized in 1970 to promote the ideas of ecology, encourage respect for life on earth, and highlight growing concern over pollution of the soil, air, and water. Earth Day is now observed in 140 nations with outdoor performances, exhibits, street fairs, and television programs that focus on environmental issues. It is celebrated on April 22.

Facts and Tips from CNN to Save the Earth

Tune it up! Keeping your car tuned up is an easy way to help the environment. A well-tuned car uses up to 9% less gasoline than a poorly tuned car. (source: "30 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Energy," The EarthWorks Group)

In one year, we generate enough hazardous waste to fill the New Orleans Superdome 1,500 times over. (source: "Save Our Planet," Diane MacEachern)

Recycled glass uses only 2/3 the energy needed to manufacture glass from scratch. That means for every soft drink bottle you recycle, you save enough energy to run a television set for an hour and a half. (source: "30 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Energy," The EarthWorks Group)

Everyday Ways You Can Help Clean Up the Earth

It's a jungle out there: Increasing herbicide use has created a jungle of at least 48 "super-weeds" that are resistant to chemicals. (source: "Save Our Planet," Diane MacEachern)

Ceiling fans consume as little energy as a 60-watt bulb- which is about 98% less energy than most central air conditioners use. And ceiling fans can save energy in the winter as well as the summer. The secret: running their motors in reverse (there should be a switch on your fan). This pushes warm air caught near the ceiling down to where you can feel it. (source: "30 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Energy," The EarthWorks Group)


Installing the most efficient tire available on the market today would improve the fuel economy of most cars by 1 to 3 miles per gallon. (source: "Save Our Planet," Diane MacEachern)

We're talkin' trash: In 1987, Americans generated almost enough trash to fill a 24-lane highway one foot deep from Boston to Los Angeles. Disposable diapers alone make up enough trash to fill a barge half a city block long, every six hours, every day! (source: "Save Our Planet," Diane MacEachern)

¿Dónde jugaran los niños?

Cuidemos nuestra tierra.

If people won’t read, give them books on CD. Bits & pieces.

Michael Sedano

Back in October 2005, I reported on a valuable parenting resource, How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children and its Spanish-language translation, Como Criar Niños Emocialmente Sanos. In 1999, the company where I was working, gave a copy to every employee in the company’s 15 US and 4 Canadian cities, and to hundreds of trade show attenders. The NY Times’ November 19, 1999 business section carried a story about corporate support for family health, quoting me about my employer’s support for “family values.” As Human Resources Director, I made it a point to give a copy to new employees as I conducted their new hire orientation.

Recently, I had lunch with the author, Gerald Newmark, and his wife Deborah. They were excited about a documentary film in process, and the growing use of the book—now in its second edition--in social service, health, and educational agencies and schools. I asked Jerry what kind of feedback he’s getting from people once they’ve read the book. And ahí está el detalle, as Mario Moreno might quip. Newmark’s agency, The Children’s Project, was selling the book at a deep discount to the adopting agencies, but few people were taking the book home and actually reading it.

What a pity. The book is packed with valuable ideas and solutions to issues and problems revolving around child-rearing, family communication, and parental time-management. I asked the Newmarks if they’d considered offering the book in recorded form. It seems people in our cultures, neither the English-speaking nor Spanish-speaking U.S. cultures, can, do, or enjoy reading. Yet, given that many cars nowadays have CD players, kitchens and bedrooms have clock radio-CD players, CD technology might be a workable alternative to the labor and work of reading printed words.

The Newmarks were intrigued by the notion but lacked any concept of how to create a book on CD. That’s where I stepped in. I'm a long-time multimedia producer, dating back to the days of multiple carousel projectors synchronized by pulse-tones on audiotape soundtracks. Now technology makes quick work of what used to require six months or more. Hence, for the past three weeks, I have been working with three talented voice actors, Carolyn Zeller, Christopher Youngblood, and Reynaldo A. Pacheco, to create the aural version of Newmark’s book, in English and Español. We used an Azden wireless microphone received into a Macintosh PowerBook G4, recorded and edited using Bias, Inc.’s Peak Pro 5.2 software. This is fantastic technology. Back in the mid 70s, large studio equipment was the sine qua non of this type project. Audio editing required blank tape, a tape recorder, white china markers, razor blades, splicing tape, and infinite patience, not to mention long, uninterrupted hours of scrubbing marking cutting splice-taping trimming. Today, I follow along in the book. When the actor makes a flub, I mark the text, the actor retakes from the previous comma or period. Later, I open the file in the Peak Pro software, follow the wavy lines until the flub. I insert electronic place markers at the beginning of the flub and the beginning of the retake. Two keystrokes later, instant edit! Still a time-burner, but nowhere near the exhaustion of making hundreds of physical splices.

And the payoff! I visualize gente driving here and there listening to the good sense advice and sound analysis written by Dr. Newmark, read beautifully by the talented speakers, learning to, as Newmark writes in his Preface, use their abilities to help raise children who feel respected, important, accepted, included and secure, "who knows, we might just change the world."

U.S. Postage Stamp Honors Journalist Ruben Salazar Tuesday, April 22, the US Postal Service issues a 41 cent postage stamp honoring Salazar. Against a brown field and the outline of a water jug the designer has assembled like a ransom note torn from a newspaper pages the words, "during Chicano protest rally in East Los Angeles".

It was a police riot. And he was killed miles from the park rally.

It was August 29, 1970. The Chicano Moratorium had assembled massive numbers to march along Whittier Boulevard to a neighborhood park, where they would be entertained by poets, musicians, and speakers. But as the march reached its destination and gente had begun the rally, the cops, on a pretext (can you say agent provocateur?), went crazy, attacking people mindlessly, chasing mothers with babies in arms into private homes. By day's end, law enfarcement would notch three dead Chicanos: Lyn Ward, a 14-year old boy; Angel Diaz; Ruben Salazar.

Several Chicano novels cite the police riot in East Los Angeles. The earliest is Guy Garcia’s Skin Deep, where the riot marked a turning point in the character's life. Lucha Corpi’s Death of a Brown Angel, opens with her character fleeing the crazed cops. She turns into an alley where she discovers a murdered infant, whose dreadfully abused corpse will lead the woman to solve the mystery. More recently, Stella Pope Duarte's Vietnam war/movimiento novel, Let Their Spirits Dance, recalls the event as a focal point illuminating the contradictions of Chicano activism on one hand, military dedication on another. And I wish I remember the poet who wrote a heart-rending poem about a baby's shoe in the gutter littered with the detritus left in the wake of the panicked crowd fleeing the gas and batons of Laguna Park.

The deaths of those three Chicanos on August 29 was the third time law enforcement killed war protestors in 1970. Three anglo kids were shot by national guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. Ten days later, two black kids were shot by police at Jackson State University. Then came August 29. At Kent State, an iconic image of an anguished girl kneeling over the body of a fallen protestor, hit the cover of Newsweek magazine. The black kids were shot at night in or near their dorm rooms, with no “live” media, so their deaths largely went unmemorialized. The East LA event memorialized the Silver Dollar bar. The Coroner’s Inquest was broadcast live, for all the good that did. (See this satirical piece depicting Nixon’s Tape 231 discussing the Salazar, Diaz, and Ward killings). No police officer or Sheriff’s Deputy was ever brought to account in the shootings of Lyn Ward, a 14-year old Chicano, Angel Diaz, nor La Opinion and LA Times journalist Ruben Salazar. Salazar's murder included a mysterious phone call alerting Sheriff's to a "man with a gun" inside the Silver Dollar. The Deputy fired blind, through a curtain, decapitating Salazar, who was enjoying una chelada miles from the heat of the riot at Laguna Park.

None of this, of course, is in that stamp. Only the ongoing coverup, "during a Chicano protest rally".

There's something more, yet less, in the stamp story. It's "good" only for the next twenty days. The USPS issued the stamp at the current first class standard, 41 cents. On May 12, you’ll have to add a one cent mark-up if you want to honor Salazar with his stamp, since the first class rate goes up to 42 cents.

For a 300 dpi image of the Salazar stamp, click the image above. From the USPS site: Note: When reproducing the Salazar image, please include the following: Ruben Salazar, from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA


Author Alicia Gaspar de Alba fighting women’s cancers

La Bloga is happy to pass along word that the author of Sor Juana’s Second Dream, Desert Blood, and Calligraphy of the Witch, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, has set a goal of raising $2000 in the 5 kilometer event Revlon RunWalk for Women. The event raises money to fight women’s cancers. If you’d like to contribute a few dollars for an important cause, click here. If the link is broken, just go to Revlon’s find participant site and search for firstname Alicia lastname Gaspar de Alba. The resulting page will guide your commitment.

Here’s another way to lend a hand to combating breast cancer and other worthwhile projects. Make it a daily habit to click at the free mammograms website. In addition, you can click to support children’s health, combat hunger, give free books for kids, save rainforest land, and help animals in shelters.

I do not know how much help the above provide, but I suspect it’s as productive, if not more, than giving six grains of rice for every word you get correct, in that vocabulary game that fascinates a number of people. Maybe readers of Denise Chavez’ Loving Pedro Infante will click, remembering Tere’s hope that her annual check to help a Latin American child isn't a foolish act of kindness.

There we have it, the penultimate April Tuesday. La Bloga welcomes your comments on anything you read here. If you have something of your own to present as a guest columnist, La Bloga welcomes guests. Just click here, or leave a comment indicating your interest in being our guest.

mvs

Latinos in Lotusland is here!

I am delighted to announce the publication of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press) in both hardcover and paperback.

Spanning sixty years of fiction writing, this landmark anthology brings to life the Latino denizens of Southern California. You may obtain Latinos in Lotusland through your favorite bookstores and online sellers. Alternatively, you may contact Bilingual Press directly by visiting its website and calling the toll-free number.

Short stories and novel excerpts of thirty-four authors are featured here: 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, Álvaro Huerta, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Manuel Luis Martínez,Alejandro Morales, Manuel Muñoz, Daniel A. Olivas, Melinda Palacio, Salvador Plascencia, John Rechy, Jennifer Silva Redmond, Manuel Ramos, Sandra Ramos O'Briant, Wayne Rapp, Luis J. Rodríguez, Danny Romero, Conrad Romo, Jorge Saralegui, Mario Suárez, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Vásquez, and Helena María Viramontes.

The stunning cover artwork is Heart Like a Boat (2002) by Maya González.

In honor of this occasion, I am reprinting here the introduction to Latinos in Lotusland. Stay tuned for news about future book readings around the country.

Introduction

In spring of 2005, after receiving a “green light” from Bilingual Press, I set upon the waters of the Internet the following call for submissions:

I am editing an anthology of short fiction by Latinos/as in which the City of Los Angeles plays an integral role. I am interested in provocative stories on virtually any subject by both established and new writers. Stories may range from social realism to cuentos de fantasma and anything in between. Los Angeles may be a major "character" or merely lurking in the background. I'd like to see characters who represent diverse backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, profession, age, sexual orientation, etc.

What happened next both surprised and delighted me. My call for submissions quickly spread like a happy virus through the Web, showing up on numerous literary sites, personal blogs, and even on the home page of the Department of Urban Planning at the UCLA School of Public Affairs. With the exception of several pieces I solicited from authors I knew, submissions started pouring in over my virtual transom from writers who found my call on the Web or learned of it through an e-mail from a friend, agent, or writing instructor. It was almost overwhelming. After making some tough decisions, I chose the pieces that make up this volume.

The stories presented here span sixty years, with the earliest being “Kid Zopilote” by the late Mario Suárez, which first appeared the Arizona Quarterly in 1947. I begin the anthology with this piece not only because of its literary merit and historical importance, but because its sets the stage for the stories and novel excerpts that follow. In Suárez’s story, the teenage Pepe García ventures out of his seemingly boring Tucson barrio to experience the more exciting life in Los Angeles. His friends and family are shocked when he returns a full-fledged pachuco, decked out in a zoot suit and smoking marijuana. He eventually slides into selling dope and pimping and eventually winds up in jail after the police round up (and harass) other Chicanos who have donned the pachuco style. On one level, it’s a cautionary tale of what big city life can do to young people. But on another level, Suárez explores the economic struggles of barrio life in postwar Tucson as well as law enforcement’s endemic bigotry and abuses of power with respect to young Chicanos.

Latinos in Lotusland concludes with a chapter from the 1970 novel Chicano by the late Richard Vásquez that was first published by Doubleday. In 2005, Rayo, the successful Latino imprint of HarperCollins, reissued this landmark novel in honor of its thirty-fifth anniversary. As Rubén Martínez notes in his introduction to the reissue, Chicano had long been out of print despite its importance within the relatively young canon of Mexican American literature. Martínez tells us that prior to Chicano, the only other Mexican American novel was José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, which Doubleday also published—in 1959. The selection from Chicano brings us to post-war Los Angeles and the construction of the now-ubiquitous freeways; by joining unions and taking advantage of the city’s need for skilled laborers, we see Mexican Americans working toward the dream of economic stability and upward mobility. It also stands in stark contrast to the vision offered by the first story of this anthology: where Suárez paints Los Angeles as a dangerously intoxicating and ultimately successful corrupter of Chicano youth, Vásquez envisions the city as a land of opportunity for those who wish to learn new trades and comply with the requirements of union bosses.

The stories and novel excerpts sandwiched in between “Kid Zopilote” and the excerpt from Chicano bring us to modern-day Latino denizens of Los Angeles and the city’s surrounding communities. And what a complex and diverse group of people we observe: young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, the newly arrived and the well established. There’s a Cuban American screenwriter trying to pitch the “real” story behind the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We see a Mexican woman struggling with barrio life who believes she’s seen a miracle. There are youths trying to avoid gang life and others embracing it. And we’re introduced to aggressive journalists, cement pourers, disaffected lovers, drunken folklórico dancers, successful curanderos, teenage slackers, aging artists, wrestling saints, aimless druggies, people made of paper, college students, and even a private detective hot on the heels of a presumed-dead gonzo writer. These actors perform on a stage set with palm trees, freeways, mountains, and sand in communities from East L.A. to Malibu, Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley, Venice Beach to El Sereno. The storytelling comes in all packages: social realism, lyrical fantasy, tough-talking noir.

No anthology can give a complete picture of its theme because that would require a book of infinite pages. This is particularly true with this volume, which draws its stories from a wildly diverse group of people who can be loosely categorized under the umbrella of “Latinos” and who live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. But if I had one goal in editing this anthology, it was to bring together some of the best contemporary Latino fiction about my home. In doing so, I believed readers would not only be entertained, but also be reminded that no group of people is monolithic and that Los Angeles literature is not limited to stories about scheming movie moguls and dazzling starlets with surgically enhanced figures (though several of this anthology’s stories do concern the movie and television industries albeit through a decidedly Latino prism). And notwithstanding the fact that the characters who populate this anthology may have feasted on the City of Angel’s lotus flowers, they do not live in blissful oblivion and they certainly have not forgotten who they are.

I once had the opportunity to interview Luis Alberto Urrea (whose work is featured in this anthology) about his magnificent novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (Little, Brown), which is based on the miraculous life of Teresita, Urrea’s great aunt. One question I asked was why Urrea rendered Teresita’s life in novel form rather than biography. He said, “The simplest answer is you can’t footnote a dream.” I’d like to borrow this sentiment with regard to Latinos in Lotusland. While I could have recruited a scholar to write an extensive introduction analyzing the historical and literary significance of the pieces included in this anthology, I did not want to footnote a dream. So, without further ado, we invite you to partake of these stories and novel excerpts and enjoy them for their beauty, power, and eloquence.

--Daniel Olivas

The Other Path

No matter how long someone is gone, they can still reach out to you in the most interesting ways. My mother passed away thirteen years ago, yet just today I encountered her as I was surfing the internet. It seems Time Magazine has been working on their archives, and I discovered an article about my mother from March 27, 1944. Though the online version didn’t run the photograph as the print one did, the little personal “facts” they listed about her—equestrian, stamp collector and dancer in the Spanish manner—made me chuckle: they were totally made up. Classic PR propaganda. However I was so proud of the fact that she had won Columbia’s Hamlin award for architecture (she was only the second woman and certainly the first Puerto Rican to win it) and was featured in such a prestigious magazine. But reading the piece about that time in her life made me reflect on a choice she made which, if made differently, would have precluded my existence but given her a fascinating life. It was during that time that she made a choice that led her towards my father (also a student of architecture and a big Swedish football player), five children and a suburban life. But I often wonder (as we all do at certain points) what her life would have been like had she chosen a different path.

The pictures of her from those years are glamorous in the way only images from the 1940s can be: perfectly-manicured nails with blood red polish, the incredibly feminine hairstyle in Rita Hayworth auburn, the clothes that flattered every figure. But my mother was stunning by any standards, and back then she still had her accent, long gone by the time I came around. I’m sure it only added to her seductiveness.

In her early college years my mother’s boyfriend was an Ecuadorian man named Sixto. He was studying under a diplomatic visa, and from all accounts, was very taken with her. When I was 14, I encountered a photo of him taken in front of Columbia’s Lowe Library with my father and a group of their wild college buddies, all in suits (did everyone wear suits in the 40s?). Sixto had swarthy good looks, with a cascade of jet-black wavy hair falling into his dark eyes. I knew only the basic history: my mother had broken up with him, fallen in love with and eventually married my father. Many times I asked her, “Mom, why didn’t you marry Sixto?” and her answer was always the same – a classic response from my mother. “Honey, it was because I knew he was headed for political office, and I couldn’t imagine being a first lady and saying ‘fuck’ in the presidential palace.” I wondered how she could have possibly known that he would be a politician, and dismissed it as one of her colorful embellishments.

In 1992 Sixto Durán Ballen was elected president of Ecuador. Go figure.

In 1994 my mother lay in a hospital bed, suffering from cardiac problems that would take her life six months later. I visited her daily, and on one particular afternoon I stopped by the post office to pick up her mail. I signed for a certified letter, and, as I walked away from the counter, I stopped short. The return address was “the Office of the President, Quito, Ecuador.” It took all my self-control (of which I have little) not to tear open the letter then and there and I sped to the hospital. When I excitedly handed my mother the letter, she, in her typical fashion, feigned indifference, though I could tell she was as excited as I was. The letter was in English, handwritten in a lovely script by Sixto himself. It was an invitation to a class reunion that he was holding in Ecuador for the four living graduates of their class at Columbia. He had heard Mom was in frail health, so he offered to send his presidential plane to Vermont to bring Mom and one of her daughters (!) to the Galapagos Islands, where they would embark on a two-week reunion cruise on his yacht. I think in our hearts we all knew that this trip would never happen, but we lived off it for weeks. My sister and I argued about who would go – “But I speak Spanish!” “Yeah, well I’m a nurse!” – and my Mother spent the week telling all the nurses in the hospital, “My old boyfriend is the President of Ecuador and he wants to fly me to the Galapagos for a reunion on his yacht.” They would pause, and then say, “Sure Mrs. Hagman, whatever you say, honey, now be a good girl and take your medicine.”

The most ironic part of this tale is that Sixto called several months later to see if my mother was coming. He called on the day of her memorial service. The family was gathered at my sister’s house after we left the church, and when the phone rang I answered. He had called himself – no presidential secretaries – and his English was perfect. I wasn’t sure how to tell him, but the irony of his having chosen that day made it seem predestined. My uncle Jorge was there, and, as he was at Columbia two years behind Sixto, they were able to enjoy some reminiscence in my mother’s honor on that day that we celebrated her life instead of mourning her death.

I know that my mother didn’t regret her decision to marry my father. For all her bitching about him, she loved him, and to the day she died she said that the most important things she had accomplished in her life were her children. But though she would never admit it to me, she had to have wondered. I certainly have spent time thinking about who my mother would have been had she ended up the first lady of Ecuador. I’m sure Eva Perón said “fuck” in la Casa Rosada, so why not Mom?

Got Poets?

NERUDA POETRY FESTIVAL

In Arizona or New Mexico
in a clear midnight
go out and see
if you can see
only one star…

Lalo Delgado, from Harmony in Diversity

The 9th Annual Neruda Poetry Festival opened on April 17 with the annual tribute to Abelardo Lalo Delgado - great poet, great man. The performers presented their own interpretations of Lalo's words, everything from a couple of his sweet children's cuentos to rousing renditions of Stupid America and the Chicano Manifesto. It was an inspiring way to kick-off this event that grows every year. Thanks to John Kuebler of El Centro Su Teatro for the following information about this weekend's events at the Festival.

Give thanks to the women, the mothers and sisters
who were there when everyone else forgot about you
Who bathed you in their baptismal waters
of sacred nurturing, hanging with the weight
you suckled raw, cracked and callused.

Sandra María Esteves, from Give Thanks

A giant of the Nuyorican literary scene and longtime associate of the famed Nuyorican Poets Café, Sandra María Esteves is also the author of six published collections of poetry, including her 1981 debut, Yerba Buena, which won the Library Journal’s Best Small Press publication that year. Sandra will be a featured guest artist and headline performer at this year's Festival.

…street-corner born,
forlorn fugitives
of the total jail.
Hail Pachuco!

raúlrsalinas from Homenaje al Pachuco (Mirrored Reflections)

The Austin press dubbed him the Chicano Allen Ginsberg, but he called himself a cockroach poet. After serving 13 years in some of the most notorious maximum security prisons in the country, raúlrsalinas turned his heart to activism and took up a new and powerful weapon: the pen. Join Su Teatro and help pay tribute to raúlrsalinas this Saturday night (8:05pm). You will also meet and hear Nuyorican luminary Sandra María Esteves, 2008 César Chávez Community Award winner Bobby LeFebre, and 2008 Barrio Slam champs.

Call (303) 296-0219 for tickets and information, and click here to see great video footage of Raúl reading his work.



Thu 4/17, 8:05pm: Tribute to Lalo Delgado
Fri 4/18 , 7pm: Barrio Slam ($500 first prize)
Sat 4/19, 4pm: Tacos and Words Literary Salon - featuring John-Michael Rivera, Sheryl Luna, Rachel Snyder, J. Michael Martínez, Gabe Gomez and Sandra María Esteves. Food and drink, too!

Sat 4/19, 8:05pm: Palabras Vivas featuring Sandra María Esteves and a special tribute to raúlrsalinas, with Yolanda Ortega, Valarie Castillo, Tony Garcia, Debra Gallegos, Bobby LeFebre, and Angel Mendez Soto.

All events at El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street,Denver.

PULITZER CHISME
Junot Díaz:

Fresh off winning the top novelist prize in America, Junot Díaz says the literary establishment “should be embarrassed” he’s only the second Latino writer to snatch it.

“Two Latinos in a hundred years? Mmmh. I don’t think the problem is with us as writers. It seems like the problem is with them as judges,” says the Dominican-born, N.J.-raised author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile, Oscar Hijuelos says:

“Don’t let that overwhelm you,” says Cuban-American novelist Oscar Hijuelos. “Remember the work and keep your feet on the ground.”

For 18 years, Hijuelos was the only Latino writer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, thanks to his saga of Cuban musicians making it in New York, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

“It almost knocked me out,” he says of the moment when he heard the news of Díaz’s win last week for his book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Read more here.

BOOK & LOVERS' DAY
Tattered Cover Book Store April 23, 2008

Every year on April 23rd, Barcelona erupts in a celebration of chivalry and romance, Book & Lover's Day. It all began in the Middle Ages with an annual Festival of Roses to honor St. George, Patron Saint of Catalonia, who as a brave Roman soldier allegedly slew a dragon about to devour a beautiful young princess. According to legend, a rosebush sprouted from the blood of the dragon and the soldier plucked its most perfect blossoms to give to the princess as a remembrance. In 1923, the Rose Festival merged with International Book Day, established to celebrate the lives of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, both of whom died on April 23rd in 1616. Now, bookstalls and flower stands sprout up along the Rambla, a two-mile stretch connecting the city with the Mediterranean Sea. Thousands of Barcelonans crowd the streets to enjoy a festive atmosphere of readings, music, literature, and dance.

The Tattered Cover honors this springtime celebration of culture, beauty, literature, and love. On April 23, complimentary roses and commemorative bookmarks will be available with the purchase of any book; while supplies last.

Store locations, contact info, and more events, click here.

LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
The International Crime Writers Association recently listed several books as Crime Literature in Translation. Here are a few that might be of special interest to La Bloga readers (all translated from Spanish.)

The Island of Eternal Love, Daina Chaviano, translated by Andrea Labinger (Riverhead, 2008)

Nada, Carmen Laforet, translated by Edith Grossman (Random/Modern Library, 2007); originally published in Spain in 1945, this is a cult classic long regarded as a masterpiece. The publisher says: "Mario Vargas Llosa’s Introduction illuminates Laforet’s brilliant depiction of life during the early days of the Franco regime. With crystalline insight into the human condition, Carmen Laforet’s classic novel stands poised to reclaim its place as one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe." Read more about this book here.

The Bible of Clay, Julia Navarro, translated by Andrew Hurley (Bantam, 2008)


Havana Gold, Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush (Bitter Lemon, 2008)
From the publisher: "This is a Havana of crumbling, grand buildings, secrets hidden behind faded doors and corruption. For an author living in Cuba, Padura is remarkably outspoken about the failings of Castro’s regime. Yet this is a eulogy of Cuba, its life of music, sex and the great friendships of those who elected to stay and fight for survival."

The Painter of Battles, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Paden (Random, 2008)


The Ravine, Nivaria Tejera, translated by Carol Maier (State University of New York, 2008). The publisher's blurb: "Set in the Canary Islands at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, The Ravine is the provocative, disturbing account of a child’s experience with war. Narrated by an unnamed seven-year-old girl, the story begins in the early days of the war when her father—a staunch supporter of the Republic—goes into hiding. As the girl and her family await news of his whereabouts, they learn he is taken prisoner, brought to trial, and eventually sentenced to forced labor in a concentration camp. Confused and bereft, they visit him in the camp, hoping he will be spared the firing squad and the subsequent burial in the ravine, a fate that befalls so many prisoners.

"Acclaimed since its original appearance in French in 1958, The Ravine has been published in several languages and remains the novel for which Nivaria Tejera is best known."

DINAH WAS


Regional Premiere
A Musical by Oliver Goldstick
Directed by Jeffrey Nickelson
Featuring Rene Marie

An announcement from the Shadow Theater Company: "Suppose you'd been adorned the title Queen of the Blues and you are set to headline at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, except it is 1959 and the hotel management has reserved a special trailer out back, as blacks are forbidden from staying in the hotel. Grab your belongings and head for the door, Dinah Washington is about to enter the building! Always a lady but most often a diva, Dinah Washington had a unique way of getting in and out of trouble! Join us in celebrating the matchless music of Dinah Washington whose What A Difference A Day Makes is sure to bring down the house."

Performance Dates: April 24, 25, 26 and 27th, May 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17 , 18, 22, 23 and 24th
April 24th, 25th, 26th and May 17th are sold out.

Performance Times: Thursday, Friday & Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday matinee at 3:00 pm

Location: 1468 Dayton Street, Aurora, CO 80010

Tickets: $25.00
To purchase tickets please call (866) 388-4TIX (4849) or order online
Box office hours: 8 am - 4 pm Mon-Sun

Later.

Goddess of the Americas: Looking Back to Create the Future

Writer extraordinaire, Ana Castillo

photo/mixed media by Alma Lopez

This a brilliant collection celebrating the love of and devotion to the enduring influence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Castillo includes male and female writers, agnostics, traditional Catholics, feminists, and Santeras in this eclectic homage. This anthology contains essays, memoir, poetry and rhetoric celebrating a complicated relationship with a folk deity, one that is much less European, and traditionally Catholic, much more than that. This is a deity that is full-bodied, sensual, actively involved in the thrum and unraveling and reclamation of the world. In the preface, Castillo writes that this brown-skinned Mary appeared in 1531; but in reality, existed as Tonatzin, a thousand years before the conquest. The thread that weaves these essays together is the fascination with the ways in which Tonatzin, the moon goddess, morphed into this particular image of Mary.

She is essentially Latina, essentially an emblem of indestructible indigena roots, which survived through a syncretic practice. (Much like the ways Mejicanos/Chicanos themselves survived the conquest.) Authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, and Gloria Anzaldua write with clarity, precision and grace, depicting a 'Virgin' that has survived the conquest and embodies a multiplicity of identities, based on the multitude of goddesses that are her antecedents. Shaped in their image, this goddess is rooted in the indestructible, the indigenous. Each of imbue this goddess with qualities the colonizers could not imagine, let alone control.

This Virgin is an amalgam of mother, consort, liberator, guardian of the living and the dead, and wellspring of the revolutionary. Of particular interest to me was Sandra Cisneros' essay entitled, Guadalupe the Sex Goddess. In it, she traces the Virgin's pre-Columbian roots as icon of fertility and sexuality, central to a cosmology in which female sexuality was valued, not denigrated. In that cosmology, Guadalupe's antecedents included Tonatzin, the moon Goddess who embodies the feminine principle of cyclical re-creation. She (Guadalupe) is also linked to Tlazolteotl, patron of sexual pleasure and Tzinteotl, goddess of the rump. Lastly, there is a connection Tlaelcuani, the filth-eater, she who transforms the ugly, the corrupted, into the sanctified and renewed. Cisneros on her significance:

When I look at the Virgin of Guadalupe now, she is not the Lupe of my childhood, no longer the one in my grandparent's house in Tepeyac, nor is she the one of the Roman Catholic Church...Like every woman who matters to me, I have had to search for her in the rubble of history. And I have found her. She is Guadalupe the sex goddess, one that makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy, who reminds me I must...speak the most basic, honest truth...write from my panocha.

This is the vivid imagery, the hidden history I need in order to shape a reconstruction of identity, one woven with both Catholic and more ancient threads. The is the Goddess that saves and transforms sexual violence and abuse, celebrates the sacred, sexual body. A formidable read. This book has helped me think about what in means to be a Latina, in a personal and epic sense.

Noticias:

Check out what's happening around pop culture, racial stereotyping, social commentary, and William Nericcio here.

Lisa Alvarado

Tejas Star Book Award Winner

René Colato Laínez



Congratulations to Xavier Garza! His bilingual book Juan and the Chupacabras/ Juan y el Chupacabras (Piñata Books) won the 2007 Tejas Star Book award.

This is the description of the book:

A suspenseful and entertaining bilingual picture book for children

“The beast had dark green skin and glowing red eyes that were the size of two baseballs,” Abuelo tells his wide-eyed grandchildren. According to Abuelo, a creature called the Chupacabras lurks in the fields looking for fresh victims.

Young Juan and his cousin Luz savor Abuelo’s hair-raising stories. He tells the children of defeating terrifying fiends like the Chupacabras and La Llorona. The children cling to every word as he describes his brave stand-off with the Chupacabras, a terrifying beast with wings, claws and sharp fangs.

But yet they wonder if there’s more to his strange story than meets the eye. Plucky Luz hatches a plan to either disprove Abuelo’s tale or hunt down the menacing monster and put an end to it once and for all. Armed with a bag of marbles dipped in holy water and a sling shot, the children venture into a cornfield one moonless night in search of the truth.

Just like Chupacabras’s thirst for blood and the children’s appetite for Abuelo’s stories, young readers aged 3-7 will devour the pages of this exciting picture book that transmits the storytelling traditions of the Mexican-American community from one generation to the next.

The 2007 Tejas Star Book Award finalists are:

*Ay, luna, luna, lunita by Yanitzia Cannetti. Illustrated by Angeles Peinador.
*El enmascarado de lata by Vivian Mansour
*Little Crow to the Rescue/ El cuervito al rescate by Victor Villaseñor. Illustrated by Felipe Ugalde alcántara.
*Lover Boy/ Juanito el cariñoso by Lee Merrill Byrd. Illustrated by Francisco Delgado.
*Playing Lotería/ El juego de la lotería by me :) René Colato Laínez. Illustrated by Jill Arena.
*Spoon for Every Bite/Una Cuchara Para Cada Bocado by Joe Hayes. Illustrated by Rebecca Leer.
*The Ruiz Street Kids/Los Muchachos de la Calle Ruiz by Diane G. Bertrand.

....And the nominees for the 2008 Tejas Star Book Award are:

Andricaín, Sergio (Comp). (2008). Arco Iris de Poesía: Poemas de las Américas y España. New York: Lectorum [Scholastic]. Olga Cuellar (Illus.) ISBN: 1930332599

Argueta, Jorge. (2006). La fiesta de las tortillas/The Fiesta of the Tortillas. Miami: Alfaguara [Santillana]. María Jesús Álvarez (Illus.) ISBN: 1598200941

Brown, Mónica. (2007). Butterflies on Carmen Street/Mariposas en la calle Carmen. Houston: Piñata Books [Arte Público]. April Ward (Illus.) ISBN: 9781558854840

Colato Laínez, René. (2005). I am René, the Boy/Soy René, el Niño. Houston: Piñata Books [Arte Público]. Fabiola Graullera Ramírez (Illus). ISBN: 1558853782

Cuenca, Héctor. (2008). La cucarachita Martina. New York: Lectorum [Scholastic]. ISBN: 1933032367

Garza, Xavier. (2005). Lucha Libre: The Man in the Silver Mask: A Bilingual Cuento. Piñata Books [Arte Público]. ISBN: 093831792X (Hardback)

Lázaro, Georgina. (2007). Juana Inés. Cuando los grandes eran pequeños. New York: Lectorum [Scholastic]. Bruno González Preza (Illus.) ISBN: 1930332572

Pérez, Amada Irma. (2007). Nana’s Big Surprise/Nana, ¡Qué Sorpresa! San Francisco, Calfornia: Children’s Book Press. Maya Christina González (Illus.) ISBN 0892391901

Romeu, Emma. (2007). El rey de las octavas. New York: Lectorum [Scholastic]. Enrique S. Moreiro (Illus.) ISBN: 193303226X

Ruiz-Flores, Lupe. (2007). The Woodcutter’s Gift/El regalo del leñador. Houston: Piñata Books [Arte Público]. Elaine Jerome (Illus.) ISBN: 9781558854895

Tafolla, Carmen and Sharyll Teneyuca. (2008). That’s Not Fair! Emma Tenayuca’s Struggle for Justice/¡No es Justo! La lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la justicia. San Antonio, Texas: Wings Press. Terry Ybañez (Illus.) ISBN: 9780916727338

Zepeda, Gwendolyn. (2008). Growing up with Tamales/Los Tamales de Ana. Houston: Piñata Books [Arte Público]. April Ward (Illus.) ISBN: 9781558854932

Great Event at the University of Arizona!

Today at 5:00 PM.

For more info click on the image to enlarge.

A personal tribute & acknowledgment of two strong women. Chicag(n)o Poetry Reminder..

Michael Sedano

Last week I had the pleasure of reviewing Benjamin Alire Sáenz' Names on a Map. I noted that gente who'd gone through the Draft would form a personal connection with Sáenz' plot involving a community's response to war, and a twin boy's awareness that he'd soon open the mailbox to find his Draft notice waiting. I thought most young readers wouldn't immediately understand those feelings but should read the novel to get a sense of them. All our soldiers today are volunteers. Which doesn't make their shipping out any easier.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/333915.html

THE NEWS TRIBUNE. Published: April 13th, 2008 01:00 AM.
Kathy Fendelman tries to comfort her twins, Samantha and Benjamin, 9, on Saturday after saying goodbye to their father, 1st Sgt. Barton Fendelman. He was leaving Philadelphia for eventual deployment to Iraq. The soldier is a member of the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade. It will be his second tour of duty in Iraq.

---------------------------

I look at this photo and what I see is how strong that wife is. And my heart goes out to her. The kids, twins, are completely overcome at the grief of parting. Their dad, a First Sergeant--a really high position in the Army, there are only two ranks higher for EM (non-officers)--is shipping out for Iraq. Look at that woman's face. She's holding it in as much as she can, but you know she's giving in to her worst fears. What happens to a guy who's going into the invasion zone? Death isn't the fear--everyone dies. It's being blown to bits by a roadside bomb; it's thoughts of disability--how many people does she know who went off to that country only to come home without a mind, without a pair of legs, missing an arm or an eye? Maybe Top--that's what all First Sergeants are called, "Top"--will come home confined to a wheelchair, or bounce in and out of mental institutions for the rest of their "til death do us part" lives. But she has to be strong.

Then my thoughts shoot back to Fall, 1968.

My wife Barbara and I were married in August 1968. We were incredibly happy. Still are--this August it will be 40 years. But at that time, she didn't understand what I understood. Only a matter of time and I'd be heading off to some uncertain future, like the one captured in that news photo.

One day Barbara and I were on our way to a fun day at the Santa Barbara arbortetum, a lovely peaceful place. And it was free, all the more attractive because we were stone cold poor. Graduate students. From the front porch I see the mail has arrived. Barbara says "leave it 'til we get back." Something told me it was the day. I had to open that mailbox.

October 1968. I open the mailbox and see that brown manila envelope I knew would come. Richard Nixon has ordered me to report before Thanksgiving day.  This is why, every Thanksgiving, I play Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" the whole day. We played that song that November 1968 and filled the room with laughter. She laughing bitterly about Arlo's beating the draft singing that silly song, me laughing hysterically at the irony. I couldn't beat it. I was on my way and there wasn't a god-damned thing I could do about it. I was gone. Punto final. What a wretched Thanksgiving Day that was, but our friends the Greelis' shared it with us and we all put on happy faces and enjoyed one another's company.

I managed to delay induction until January 1969. The morning Barbara took me to the Santa Barbara Greyhound Bus station--really just a parking lot in the middle of town--she dressed in her best outfit, wore her brave smile and kept her head high as she drove me into town from Isla Vista.

It was one of those grey, drizzly Santa Barbara January mornings. (I tell everyone you can still see my heelprints etched into the sidewalk where they had to drag me onto the bus, but that's a fanciful tale. I went willingly.) A whole bunch of people like us had gathered to board the bus, to bid farewell to their soon-to-be-soldiers. Who knew what would happen to us in the next few years?

I waited until the final call to present my papers, lined up and boarded the bus. I found a seat and leaned toward the window where Barbara's anxious eyes finally spotted me through the darkly tinted glass. She smiled and waved. I smiled and waved. Her lips moved, "I Love you." My lips moved, "I love you." She held her head high. The driver gunned the engine. In the instant the bus lurched toward the street, Barbara buried her face in her hands. That's how she was standing when I lost sight of her, the Greyhound turning right onto the road that would take us to the Induction Center on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. We were on our way.

Please join me in wishing that family in the photo all the best. Parting is not a sweet sorrow. My heart goes out to that woman because I can only imagine what it must have been like for Barbara back on January 15, 1969.

In under two hours, the bus is in LA. Poke. Prod. Test. Move. No "Group W" bench, no singing that silly song. Pledge allegiance and swear to defend. Another bus ride. We pass through Santa Barbara in the dead of night and keep going, putting distance between ourselves and home. Ft. Ord in the pre-dawn stillness, following orders: "Stand on your number and shut the fuck up."

-------------
Poetry Reading in Chicago by Chicana Chicano Poets Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto Gonzalez

Lisa Alvarado gave a heads-up on this event recently. Tempus has fugit-ted and it's time to carpe the diem for this Palabra Pura in the city of the big shoulders. 

Wednesday, APRIL 16 -- PALABRA PURA
LORNA DEE CERVANTES and RIGOBERTO GONZALEZ
Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, Chicago
Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Reading begins at 7:00 p.m.
Free admission. Books for sale. Authors will be available for signing.

In honor of National Poetry Month, two internationally renowned poets -- Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto González -- will read for Palabra Para at the Center on Halsted.

A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes has been a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, and she has been the recipient of many honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for her book DRIVE: The First Quartet. She lives and teaches in San Francisco, California.

Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes a book column for the El Paso Times of Texas. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.

And here we are, April's third Tuesday in 2008. Still stuck with memory of that awful time waiting for the mail and that brown envelope. Sheesh. It's the Ides of April--tax day-- maybe the cruellest day of the cruellest month. No lilacs in my dooryard blooming, plethoras of sad thoughts looking at that photo, that woman, remembering. Thinking what Nixon's successor is doing with our tax money. See you next week. I'm gonna go find something happy to read.

mvs

---------- 

La Bloga welcomes your comments. Click below, next to the time 12:01 AM. We welcome also guest columnists. To find out about your invitation to be our guest, click here, or when you have something ready to go, leave a comment or send an email to a bloguera or bloguero.

Rechy remembers

El Paso native's memoir intrigues despite warning

Book Review by Daniel Olivas

[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times]

As a preface to his compelling new memoir, El Paso native John Rechy offers a two-line caveat:

"This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection."

In this day of scandalously false memoirs, it is certainly refreshing to read such words. But Rechy's story is, by now, well known to those who have read his critically acclaimed 1963 autobiographical novel, City of Night, which caused a literary sensation in part because of its subject matter: male prostitution, or hustling, as Rechy calls it.

In the new book, About My Life and the Kept Woman (Grove Press, $24 hardcover), Rechy revisits many of the events that wound up in that first novel and in subsequent novels -- but with an overarching theme to assist him in explaining decisions that led to a seemingly contradictory life of literature and sex-for-hire.

That theme is the "kept woman" of the title, the glamorous Marisa Guzman, mistress of the rich and powerful Mexican politician Augusto de Leon. It seems that Guzman's younger brother was engaged to Rechy's sister, Olga. Guzman had "conveyed her intention to travel from Mexico City and return to El Paso to attend her younger brother's wedding, thus challenging (her father), who had banished her years ago."

Intrigued by this alluring outsider, the young Rechy could barely contain himself when he caught a glimpse of the kept woman at the wedding reception. Throughout his memoir, Rechy repeatedly returns to this image of Guzman's defiant yet elegant appearance in the midst of those who were both fascinated and repulsed by her unashamed disregard for social norms.

Rechy struggled with his own outsider status, arising, in large part, from a mixed heritage as the son of a Mexican mother and a half-Scottish father.

Moreover, growing up in El Paso during the Depression and World War II, Rechy's budding sexuality and precocious literary tastes put him at odds with the socially conservative mainstream.

Rechy enlisted during the Korean conflict, which allowed him to travel in Europe while avoiding actual combat. After a two-year stint, he began his wanderings (and hustling) in New York, New Orleans and Los Angeles. But he kept alive the desire to express himself through the written word, a desire he possessed from a young age. He eventually wrote fictionalized accounts of his life as a hustler that appeared in a small but prestigious literary journal. These shockingly honest stories resulted in his first book deal.

In the memoir, Rechy tries to explain why he became a hustler. At one point, he turns to a vague and uncertain memory of sexual abuse at the hands of his father and father's male friends. But he pulls back and is unwilling (or more likely, unable) to give a definite justification.

As Rechy became more famous, he encountered other luminaries including, in one hilarious passage, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who told Rechy to "relax, take your clothes off." "Why?" asked Rechy. Ginsberg answered: "Because you said you'd never grow undesirable. I hope that is true, really. For now, I want to see your body when I know it's beautiful -- and then it will be so forever in my memory." Rechy declined to disrobe.

As one reads this book, Rechy's warning that his memoir "is not what happened; it is what is remembered" often comes to mind. Whether each word is the unvarnished truth is of no matter: Rechy's life has been remarkable by any standard.

With 45 years of publishing both fiction and nonfiction under his belt, Rechy continues to create memorable and vital works of literature that honestly explore the importance of creating one's own destiny.

Marisa Guzman would be proud.

◙ A special invitation from Andrew Tonkovich, host of Bibliocracy, heard each Monday, noon, on KPFK 90.7 FM (Los Angeles) and 98.7 (Santa Barbara):

Join me Monday (today) at noon for my interview of Helena Viramontes, author of the classic short story collection The Moths and a previous novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. She’ll read from and discuss her big, bold new novel Their Dogs Came with Them.

From Booklist: “In episodic vignettes, Viramontes follows the daughter of street preachers who is still reeling from a vicious assault; an androgynous, homeless female gang member who has lost her way since her brother left to fight in Vietnam; a group of teenage girls who support each other emotionally as they attempt to navigate between the danger of the mean streets and the old-fashioned discipline of their immigrant relatives; and a young woman who spends all her spare cash and time trying to care for and keep tabs on her mentally ill brother…those who are up for the ride may find that her emotionally raw novel reads, at times, like a crash course in survival strategies for those immersed in the despair and violence of the inner city.”

To get ready for this wonderful Bibliocracy interview, check out my La Bloga Q&A with Viramontes here.

And listen to Viramontes being celebrated on another public radio book show, Bookworm, hosted by Michael Silverblatt.

◙ Please join the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center as Laura E. Gómez discusses and signs her new book Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. In her book, Dr. Gómez traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States by looking at the Mexican population in what is now New Mexico. She explores the construction of racial status from the perspectives of law, history, and sociology. Her visit is part of a national book tour. Dr. Gómez is a professor of law and American studies at the University of New Mexico. From 1994 through 2005, she held a joint faculty appointment at the UCLA School of Law and the UCLA Department of Sociology.

WHEN: Tuesday, April 15, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

WHERE: UCLA Young Research Library Presentation, Room 11348, 1st Floor.

A reception will follow the lecture.

For more information contact: (310) 206-9185.

For more information on this and other CSRC events, go here.

◙ The Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at University of California, Irvine, as part of its Colloquia Series 2007-2008, presents:

Max Benavidez

“Before and After Asco (Nausea): The Difference between Chicano Art, the Chicano Avant-Garde, and Contemporary 21st Century Latino Art”

Benavidez is the author of Gronk, a recent book on the renowned L.A. artist. His work has appeared in several anthologies including The Fight in the Fields (Harcourt Brace) and Distant Relations (Smart Art Press). He wrote the lead essay for Chicano Visions (Little Brown/Bulfinch) and co-authored Carlito’s Story and the award-winning Graciela’s Dream (Lectura Books). He’s a contributing editor to Bomb magazine, and a contributor to Ciudad magazine and the London-based Monocle. He was an essayist for the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to Art Issues. He currently directs the Polanco Fellowship for the California Latino Caucus Institute for Public Policy and is completing his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate University under a Fellowship from the Ahmanson Foundation.

WHEN: Thursday April 17, 2008, 4:00 pm

WHERE: Cross Cultural Center

COST: Free and Open to the Public

For more information, please call (949)824-7180 or visit the Department’s webpage at http://www.socsci.uci.edu/clstudies/

◙ All done. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres. ¡Lea un libro!

Café Cultura

CAFÉ CULTURA
A flyer from Café Cultura, the long-standing and very popular series of spoken word performances. This event is set for April 11 at the Inner City Parish, 9th and Galapago, Denver. Café Cultura Open Mic happens the second Friday of every month. More info: cafe_cultura@yahoo.com; 720-436-1830.



LATINO PULITZERS
Junot Díaz, a 39-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who moved to New Jersey as a boy, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007)

The novel, which also won the National Book Critics Award, revolves about Oscar, an obese comics fan growing up in Paterson, N.J., and his dysfunctional Dominican family, going back to the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship.

Read more here ...

Prior to Díaz, the only U.S. Latino writer to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize in literature was Oscar Hijuelos, for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, (Farrar, Straus, 1989).

Michael Ramirez won in the editorial cartooning category. Ramirez is a senior editor and the editorial cartoonist for Investor's Business Daily's editorial page, Issues & Insights. He has won several awards during his career, including a previous Pulitzer in 1994, the UCI Medal from the University of California, Irvine and the Sigma Delta Chi Awards in 1995 and 1997. He has been the editorial cartoonist of the Los Angeles Times, the Commercial Appeal and USA Today, and is nationally syndicated in over 450 newspapers around the world.

DÍA DE LOS NIÑOS
April 27, Noon – 4:00 pm
Free general admission to the Denver Art Museum, Denver Public Library, Colorado History Museum and Byers-Evans House Museum. Enjoy hands-on art activities, storytelling, and live dance and music performances throughout the day. Introduced in Mexico in 1924, Día de los Niños is now celebrated in more than 120 countries as a way to recognize the important role of children in the community and to promote a sense of understanding among young people of all nations.
720-913-0169

MANIFEST DESTINIES
Dr. Laura E. Gómez will sign and read at the Denver Book Mall, 32 Broadway (between 1st and Ellsworth Avenues) at 3:00 on Sunday, April 27, 2008. She will discuss Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press, 2007). The book traces origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the U.S. The title of her presentation is Shifting Meanings of Race and Law. The book focuses on the experience of “the first Mexican Americans” -- the 115,000 Mexicans who became American citizens by virtue of the peace treaty that ended the U.S. war with Mexico in 1848. This event is a presentation by Who Else! Books, one of the shops in the Denver Book Mall.


BEYOND CHICANISMO
Another flyer, this one from Beyond Chicanismo, announcing an event scheduled for April 15 at the Tivoli, on the Auraria Campus, Denver.



Later.

Palabra Pura Celebrates Poetry Month

Palabra Pura Series:
Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto González
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 7:00pm

Note correction to starting time of event

Time: Doors open at 6:00 PM,
Reading begins at 7:00 PM
Cost: Free admission.
Location: Center on Halsted, Chicago's LGBT Community Center,
3656 N. Halsted, Chicago, IL


Lorna Dee Cervantes is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet from San José, California. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, including The Norton Anthologies of Modern, American, English, Contemporary & Women's Poetry. She is a recipient of many honors, awards & literary fellowships including the NEA, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for DRIVE: The First Quartet. A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. In 1976, she founded the influencial small press & Chicano literary journal, MANGO Publications, which was the first to publish well-known writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ray Gonzalez and many others. Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness and was an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently resides in San Francisco and teaches at SFSU and offers intensive poetry workshops from her home, the Mission Poetry Center. She is readying several new books of poetry for publication and completing her novel and a full-length screenplay. Visit her on her blog at http:lornadice.blogspot.com

Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes twice a month a Latino book column, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, on the Board of Directors of Fishouse Poems: A Poetry Archive, and on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.

And reasons why I love them both:

Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In The War Between Races
--- Lorna Dee Cervantes

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)

I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country
there is war.


Cactus Flower --- Rigoberto González

It's a sweaty forty-minute walk through the desert from the main road to the wooden shack. Though the desert is flat and Rolando thinks he can see for miles into the faded blue horizon, the shack remains invisible until it suddenly shoots up from the ground, becoming distinguishable from the clumps of golden tumbleweeds and the sand hill leading up the ravine, everything blanketed by the brightness of the sun. The leaves of the fresh head of lettuce he brings from the fields wilt inside his oily fingers. He thinks about his toes shrinking back from the steel-tipped boots, his scrotum pulling away from his sticky underwear. The smell of dirt rises pure off the ground. His hand trembles at the thought of an empty shack, of nobody inside to open the door for him and take the lettuce from his hands, of no one to gasp in gratitude to assure him that despite the journey through the sweltering heat the leaves at the center are cool and crisp. His fears dissipate with the presence of his wife standing at the doorway, still as a cactus flower in her diaphanous white blouse, which she wears not so he can peek at her small white bra or at the pudgy abdomen he likes to grab while she's washing her hair bent over a bucket of water. She wears it, she tells him, to let the faintest breeze blow on her blouse, so she can spread her arms and cool her sweaty undersides. She's posing that way now, arms outstretched, but this far back it's hard to tell if it's the desert breeze come her way or if she's greeting him. He looks forward to tonight when they will feed each other lettuce leaves and chew them slowly as caterpillars devouring the moisture. Suddenly his eyes go blank, victims to the beads of sweat mixed into the dust he picked up from the fields, giving the sweat a more powerful sting. He rubs his eyes with the sleeve of the blue flannel shirt, taking in the sharp contrast of the smooth cloth to the coarse skin of his brown hand. Out of focus, he tries to reclaim the image of his wife in her white blouse, and then saddens, thinking Mirinda may not have seen him coming at all because she no longer stands at the entrance to the shack and the door is shut, the padlock hanging heavy like a heart gone solid and cold.

The candle flame twitches violently, threatening to leave him blind. The weather changed during his nap, and he woke up surprised in the dark. The wind hurls small stones against the wooden walls and bumps the window shutters repeatedly. Only when the wind blows is Rolando painfully aware of the imperfections in the small one-room home he built for himself in the middle of the desert, what the residents of the nearby town call "el dompe" because they drop off their useless vinyl couches and urine-stained mattresses into the nearby ravine though this area is no longer a county landfill and no longer uninhabited. The whistling and hissing of the dust storm outside disrupt his concentration so he sits without a word in his throat, slurping the Campbell's soup as loud as possible to convince himself that the silence the wind has forced on him has not upset his late-evening meal. Mirinda remains expressionless, staring across the table at the way his large hand holds the tin spoon too delicately, as if she knows he's scooping properly to please her. Even with the dim light she's beautiful, her features sharply defined and smooth as mariposa lily petals. The shadows make her face grow thin, distant as a portrait; but the flickering flame dancing gracefully in the deep ebony of her eyes keeps her within reach. She is tangible and touchable like before. She is here again to disregard the shadows as they flutter wildly like moths above her head. If they flee they will take her with them. But until then they soothe him, giving him this gift, this light, this woman, who said she was going to leave him and who didn't leave him completely. Forgotten are the elbow cramp, the stiff neck and aching shoulder blades. He has the urge to find the pretty marigolds he promised her when she agreed to follow him here to this desolate place, far from the run-down trailer camps and low-income housing projects where beauty like hers withers and dies. No, instead they are closer to the ground they left behind in the deserts of Chihuahua, a space so large it is like living inside breath itself. The peaceful evenings are long and familiar. The peaceful evenings bloom with stars. Stars love Mirinda so much they confuse her for the moon and crown her head. Suddenly the wind breaks in and snuffs the candle out. Mirinda disappears. He wants to stand and ask her to forgive him for those pretty marigolds. The wind roars. He keeps quiet, knowing that with such a wind his plea is weak and will remain unheard.

The wind grows stronger when he rises at four in the morning to pack his lunch and set off on his forty-minute trek back to the road where the bus picks him up to deliver him to the lettuce fields. When he opens the door the moonlight bursts in, lighting up the wooden table, the tiny unmade bed with the yellow faded sheets, the gas-tank stove, and Mirinda's white dresser. The looking glass Rolando gave her stares out the door, confronting the moon with its own light. He squints at the glare, grabs his denim jacket and tries to find the stone silhouette of his wife standing near the darkest corner. He shuffles out swiftly and doesn't catch a glimpse of her. At dawn the desert is cold. He shivers at the thought of the weary march getting back after work. Red flashlight in hand, he walks behind the shack, bends over the broken-down Pinto to check for damage on the windshield. The green paint looks clean, smooth as skin, so he rubs his hand across it then draws back quickly when a nettle on the surface stings his thumb. Suddenly he's alarmed to be outside. The landscape of desert rocks and manzanita patches appears shrunken, pulled in toward the shack, which becomes its dead center. He feels trapped, like the snowman in the glass bubble Mirinda enjoys shaking up at the swap meet to watch the tiny white particles drop. For him the particles strike sideways, strike hard. He moves quickly back around inside, exchanges the jacket for a thicker coat and grabs the brown paper sack, tightening the grip to remind himself how many of yesterday's burritos he will have for lunch. He steps out and shuts the door. The padlock snaps. He wishes to retreat, crawl beneath the yellow faded sheets, which will always smell of Mirinda's nape, of a strong sunlight filtered in through the dampness of her long black hair. He walks a few paces forward, hesitating because there's something he forgot. He's afraid to turn around, afraid that when he looks the shack will have vanished and he will find himself alone and vulnerable as the snowman or the palo verde that looks twice as solitary at night. He keeps on walking, sensing his distance from his home, a length that doubles when he thinks Mirinda's not inside stirring like the delicate perfume she rubs into her earlobes so that any sound she hears is savory and sweet. Mirinda, savory and sweet, desires no earring over this, the lip clamp of his mouth that nibbles nibbles nibbles on the flower-scented skin above her jaw. He dares to grin; he's compelled to whistle. He remembers he didn't eat the lettuce.

Rolando doesn't wait long for the bus. It's an old school bus painted over in white with the agricultural company's name on both sides. He doesn't have to see it to know it's coming because it's backfiring all the way down the road. In the early mornings the sloppy paint job looks clean until it stops in front of him and the old yellow coat shows through the wild strokes of white. The doors squeak open and the fat driver in a red plaid shirt greets him with a nod of the head, shifting into gear before Rolando finds a seat. Rolando paces reluctantly toward the space next to Sarita Mendoza, who wears a sweatshirt with words in English neither of them can read. She likes to save a place for him near the front. Before he takes a seat, Rolando nods at the other lettuce pickers. Don Carlos calls him by the wrong name. He wants to relax for the next twenty minutes until he arrives at the fields. He wants to tilt his head back and listen to the small transistor radio don Carlos behind him is holding. But Sarita Mendoza wants to talk.

She likes asking questions. She asks about his wife because she suspects Mirinda doesn't exist. She accuses him of lying to keep her from making a match of him with one of her daughters. Today she invites Rolando and his wife to a family bautismo. He politely refuses. She asks why. The glassy look of her eye makes him nervous. The bus hits a bump on the road and he hears the blades of the short-handle hoes rattle in the back. He wants to look down at the oval blister beginning to callus on his right palm. He wants to pick at it but doesn't, imagining a more intense pain against his hand as he thrusts the hoe into the ground. Instead he traces Sarita Mendoza's chapped lips, smiles and tells her he'll be celebrating his third-year anniversary this weekend. She jokingly says he's a liar. Rolando laughs with her, trying to think up an answer in case she asks where he's taking his wife to celebrate. She asks. He still hasn't thought of anything, so he simply says it's up to Mirinda. Can Mirinda travel to México? Sarita Mendoza leaves her mouth open, the dry lips are cracked at the corners; one corner is clotted with blood. He answers no, though he should have said yes because now Sarita Mendoza says he should have married a woman with papers. All of her daughters have their documents in order and they can all work in the fields, cook in the kitchen and perform both chores in bed. Rolando shakes his head. He should try to stop by the bautismo anyway, she suggests, since she's never met this mysterious woman he keeps hidden away in "el dompe." She's heard so much about Mirinda she's willing to wear out her old huaraches on a trip to the middle of the desert just to meet her. And if there isn't anyone there it won't matter because she will bring one of her daughters along just in case. Rolando looks away, embarrassed. He watches his cut lip grin on the dirty window. He didn't comb his hair. He forgot his baseball cap. The red bandanna in his back pocket has been used on his nose all week.

He wants to correct Sarita Mendoza and tell her she's heard very little about Mirinda, that woman, that goddess, that light. Mirinda, passion and appetite, can eat a whole coconut by herself, using up an entire afternoon with a dozen limes and a bowl of rock salt by her side while his heartbeat races to compete with that fervor she has for breaking the shell with her hands—a fever that finally peaks with him taking her fingers in his mouth and pressing his tongue beneath her nails to suck the salty juice. Mirinda, fury and fire, becomes as silky as her sleeping gown when he braids his limbs into hers, sweating off the humidity from their skins, surrendering themselves like cactus owls on that tiny bed that prompts them toward one another no matter what direction they stretch. Mirinda can touch every place on him at once and make each place jump twice. Mirinda is more than a woman, more than a wife—she took his body in her fleshy arms exactly three years ago and she still holds him there. And when she said she was going to leave him, she said she was going to dissolve his soul, so he didn't let her leave, not entirely, taking her neck in his hands and widening her mouth and forcing his power on her love until it burst into the air like a puff of dandelion seeds, an explosion of stars in the sky, an outbreak of marigolds. Such beautiful flowers. He's dizzy. Sarita Mendoza gazes at him and he blushes.

When the bus finally stops she leaps up and hurries to the back, her gray sweatshirt coming up on her stomach. She wants to get a good hoe, one with a clean sharp blade that won't give her trouble when she's digging into the ground. The rest of the workers scurry right behind her. Everyone hops off through the emergency exit door. Rolando looks past the window and at the lettuce fields, the heads looking cool and bright. Beyond the lettuce fields grow the grape fields and next to them sit the onion fields and rise the orchards, all of them blossoming so majesticly in the desert. He works this land year after year, intimate with its furrows and soils, yet he despises it for breaking his body down, for keeping him alive and sucking back all that strength. He imagines returning the following season, the fields lush and ripe again, displaying no evidence that he ever touched them. He imagines Mirinda, buried beneath the broken-down Pinto, unable to comb her long black hair or unable to darken her plucked eyebrows slim as marigold stems or unable to redden those fleshy points in the middle of her upper lip. She left her reflection behind in the looking glass. She returns to the desert to reclaim it and be whole again, then she thins out into air to become that void he sees when he holds up her mirror. When the white-haired foreman taps on the window, Rolando slowly rises from the seat, unashamed to be the last off the bus. The air is chilly and smells of soil freshly watered, the scent of cool lettuce lifts off the ground. On the other side of the road lies the barren desert. At the other end of the desert Mirinda's ghost waits patiently inside the tiny shack for him to step inside and breathe her scent of dusty wood. When he arrives each afternoon, the shack listens carefully, detects his slightest movements, excites its joints and rusty hinges and entreats Mirinda to respond.

Lisa Alvarado

New Latino Biographies for Children

Hola La Bloga readers, take a look at these two picture book biographies about two people who love books. The first book is about Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. The Pura Belpré Award is given in her honor. It is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth. The second book is about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize Winner Author. My Name is Gabito: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez / Me llamo Gabito: La vida de Gabriel García Márquez won the 2008 Pura Belpré Honor Book Award for Illustration.

Enjoy,
The Storyteller's Candle/ La velita de los cuentos by Lucia Gonzalez. Illustrated by Lulu Delacre.

It is the winter of 1929, and cousins Hildamar and Santiago have just moved to enormous, chilly New York from their native Puerto Rico. As Three Kings' Day approaches, Hildamar and Santiago mourn the loss of their sunny home and wonder about their future in their adopted city. But when a storyteller and librarian named Pura Belpré arrives in their classroom, the children begin to understand just what a library can mean to a community. In this fitting tribute to a remarkable woman, Lucía González and Lulu Delacre have captured the truly astounding effect that Belpré had on the city of New York.



My Name is Gabito: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez / Me llamo Gabito: La vida de Gabriel García Márquez by Monica Brown. Illustrated by Raúl Colón.

Can you imagine a shipwrecked sailor living on air and seaweed for eight days? Can you imagine a trail of yellow butterflies fluttering their wings to songs of love? Once, there was a little boy named Gabito who could. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is perhaps one of the most brilliant writers of our time. He is a tremendous figure, enormously talented, and unabashedly admired. This is his story, lovingly told, for children to enjoy. Using the imagery from his novels, Monica Brown traces the novelist's life in this creative nonfiction picture book from his childhood in Colombia to today. This is an inspiring story about an inspiring life, full of imagination and beauty.

Review: Names on a Map.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz. NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.
ISBN: 9780061285691; ISBN 10: 0061285692

Michael Sedano

Younger readers today will have some difficulty understanding the center of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ masterfully crafted novel, Names on a Map. At the center of the story is a person’s decision to support an unjust war. Do you go to war because your country is at war. If not, what does this make you. Is there really a choice, and if so, are the consequences of your decision worth the pain? Today’s fighting men and women all are volunteers. Names on the Map centers around the Draft and a decision some made to resist.

Still, parallels between the Vietnam era and the Bush Iraq era sit silently in the novel’s 426 pages. Younger readers can pick up the book without burning their fingers on the author’s antiwar intent. But it’s there. The family’s surname, Espejo, is the most obvious indication that what goes around comes around. Look at the issues of Vietnam and see reflected issues of Iraq. Look at the soldiers soaked by incessant rain and see reflected the kids frying in the Iraqi summer. Look in the mirror at the guy who died in Vietnam and see the ones being killed in Iraq. But Names on a Map is not a war novel. If you want Chicano war action read Alfredo Vea or Charlie Trujillo.

Much of the characters’ conflict will be fully accessible—immigrant nostalgia, second generation assimilation, third generation identity; patriotism, obligation, conscience; lust, sex, love; boy, man, girl, woman. It’s the Draft people won’t understand—but the characters, or perhaps Sáenz, don’t understand the Draft either. Gustavo, because he is a boy in 1967, and has chosen a job rather than college following high school, faces an experience that today’s kids will find incomprehensible on the visceral level that tears at Gustavo, his twin Xochil, and their contemporaries. Until 1970, if you weren’t in school, you were sure to be drafted into the military. With the increasing numbers of soldiers shipping out for Vietnam, and daily television images of flag-draped coffins coming home, the draft seemed a sure route to death and killing.

Most of the events in Names on a Map take place in September 1967. The United States has been fighting an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam for years. By now, people and families have chosen sides, pro-war / anti-war. Gustavo’s long hair and friends announces his opposition to the war, engendering a vicious personal antipathy from pro-war people like Xochil’s boyfriend, like Gustavo’s boss at the body shop, especially like that from Octavio, Gustavo’s father.

Gustavo is a twin. His sister, Xochil, has her own story, apart from her brother, but inescapably linked to Gustavo’s. She is in love with an anglo boy whose father hates Mexicans. Strike one. The boy wants to go to war. Strike two. The boy wants to marry Xochil and make her his property. Strike three. The boy believes that joining the Marines and going to war will make him a man and people like Gustavo who don’t are less than a man. Strike four. The boy and Gustavo used to be friends but now they are at each other’s throats. Strike five. Yet, Xochil agrees to make a man of the boy by spending the night in a hotel with him a few weeks before he reports for boot camp. Is this a home run or just a ball? Xochil’s is a complicated story that enriches the novel in contrasting the male experience with a woman’s. I was hoping Sáenz would leave Xochil as a Lysistrata character rather than give it up to the disagreeable boy whom even her mother doesn’t care for. But her decision ties up some life-long loose ends and provides the reader with a perplexing challenge to accept Xochil’s decision.

The generational schism is uniquely immigrant. These are middle class people. The Espejo family fled Mexico’s revolution with enough money to live comfortably on this side. When Lourdes, the mother, sides with Gustavo’s antiwar beliefs, the father Octavio calls her an ingrate to this country. Octavio’s insensitivity characterizes his relationship with the entire family, especially Gustavo. The irony of this family history in the face of Gustavo’s activism is lost on the father, however. He’s deeply disappointed in his son’s appearance and politics, in his unmanliness.

Names on a Map is engrossing reading with a major flaw. Sáenz and Gustavo reason that the Draft meant the inevitability of Vietnam. The author misleadingly underscores this fear by presenting the Marines in Vietnam chapters. But Marines, with few exceptions, were all volunteers. Draftees overwhelmingly went to the Army. The day I was drafted in January 1969, one fellow was drafted into the Marines. He sat on a stairwell with red-rimmed eyes as the rest of us walked up to be sworn in. That was the only time I was overjoyed to be going into the Army. I ended up doing thirteen months in the Republic of Korea.

Gustavo can just take his chances, but not because of what his father, his boss, his sister’s boyfriend think. Absent from Sáenz’ and Gustavo’s reasoning is the wider consequence of refusing induction. Gustavo thinks about a poem Xochil wrote for him, about a wolf chewing off its leg to escape a trap. He thinks, “What good is a wounded wolf who limps on three legs? What good is a man without a country? What good is a man with a country?” The author and character trap themselves in self-absorption. Another question, this one with an answer, goes, “If not me, who?” Some other name would be pulled onto the involuntary roster, someone perhaps less able than a me or a Gustavo to survive their tour of duty. But then, over 50,000 did not. Survive. 4000 plus in Iraq, dead. Thousands more wounded. And there is Sáenz' story of a Marine who loses his legs and is sent home. His buddies get a postcard, a suicide note, “I guess I didn’t make it.” And as it happened, Jimmy Carter pardoned all those who did what Gustavo is considering.

Readers who went through the 60s like Sáenz--who talked to a friend who was a Vietnam Marine--or went through the Draft as I, will take this novel deeply personally. You will be moved. I wish there was the same level of concern for our soldiers today as then. Names on a Map would have a far more powerful impact than it already gives. It’s a novel that everyone of military age should read to lead them to avoid mindless decisions taking them into uniform. If you go, go for the right reasons. It’s a novel families of military age children and siblings need to read to learn how to support their family when someone is thinking about volunteering. Let us hope some president-elect doesn’t reinstate the Draft and make the novel all the more relevant.

mvs


CSULA stages reading of Bless Me, Ultima

La Bloga received this from Sean J. Kearns, Director of Media Relations, Office of Public Affairs, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032,
323-343-3050, skearns@calstatela.edu

Dear members of La Bloga, Libreria Martinez, and other fans of “Bless Me, Ultima”:

You and your friends are invited this week to a special staged adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya’s classic story at Cal State L.A. It will be presented both Thursday, April 10, and Saturday, April 12, at 7 p.m. And it is free.

Los Angeles, CA – “Bless Me, Ultima,” Rudolfo Anaya’s classic coming-of-age novel of a boy in post World War II New Mexico, will jump from the page to the stage in a free dramatic reading at Cal State L.A.’s Music Hall Thursday, April 10, and Saturday, April 12, at 7 p.m. A discussion will follow.

Starring veteran television and film actress Alejandra Flores (“A Walk in the Clouds,” “Friends with Money”) as Ultima, the production is adapted and directed by Theresa Larkin, a theatre arts professor at Cal State L.A.

Seating, though free, is limited to 115 for each performance. To reserve seats or for other details, call (323) 449-4942.

Anaya, born in New Mexico in 1937, begins the story in the immediate wake of World War II, from which Antonio’s three older brothers return as changed young men. Anaya wrote it during the Vietnam War; and the novel’s explorations into how wars shape those who fight them resonates with the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Roberto Cantú, a professor of Chicano studies and English at Cal State L.A., conceived the idea for staging “Bless Me, Ultima” at the University, obtained the author’s permission, assembled a team, and coordinated the production. Intimately familiar with “Bless Me, Ultima,” he first reviewed it when it was published in 1972 and subsequently became close friends with Anaya, who has visited Cal State L.A. three times. Cantú has published and lectured extensively on its art, structure, and significance.

At Cal State L.A., the University Library will host a discussion group Wednesday, April 16, from noon to 1 p.m., in Library North, Room 530; and Cantú will address the narrative cycles in Anaya's novels in a free public lecture Thursday, April 17, at 6 p.m., in King Lecture Hall 2.

View the press release and more info here.

La Bloga welcomes your comments on this review, or any matters that strike you. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. To join us as our guest, click here, or email a La Bloga Bloguera or Bloguero at your convenience.

SPOTLIGHT ON SUSANA CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN

Susana Chávez-Silverman earned her Masters at Harvard University in Romance Languages, Ph.D. at UC Davis in Spanish, and has as taught at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC Davis, as well as the University of South Africa before coming to Pomona College.

Chávez-Silverman grew up bilingually and biculturally between Los Angeles, Madrid and Guadalajara, México, the daughter of a Jewish Hispanist and a Chicana teacher. After a peripatetic university and post-graduate career, and years spent living in Boston, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Spain and South Africa, she is currently professor of Spanish, Latino/a and Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

She specializes in gender and sexuality studies, autobiography/memoir, Latin American and U.S. Latin@/Chican@ literature, poetry, and feminist pedagogy. She has published numerous essays on these topics and co-edited the books Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (1997) with Frances R. Aparicio, and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture (2000) with Librada Hernández.
Her book, Killer Crónicas:Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. This collection of chronicles began in 2001, after Chávez-Silverman was awarded a fellowship by the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project on contemporary Argentine women's poetry. She spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires where, in addition to research and writing on her official (academic) book, she began to send bilingual, punning "letters from the southern [cone] front" to colleagues and friends by email. Chávez-Silverman says:

"Living in Buenos Aires, that gorgeous, turn of the century city in a country on the brink of (economic) collapse-home to many of the authors and artists I had long admired (Borges, Cortázar, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, and before them the foundational Romantics, Sarmiento and Echeverría)-brought out a sense of self, dis/placed yet oddly at home, in a cultural, linguistic and even tangible way. In Buenos Aires, the fragmented parts of me, the voices, cultures, and places inside of me, rubbed up against each other and struck fire. I called my email missives 'Crónicas,' inspired by the somewhat rough-hewn, journalistic, often fantastic first-hand accounts sent 'home' by the early conquistadores, and refashioned by modern-day counterparts such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Cristina Pacheco."

One of Chávez-Silverman 's crónicas, "Anniversary Crónica," inspired by the June 16th anniversary of both Susana's parents' wedding and that of the so-called "Soweto Riots" in South Africa, was recently awarded First prize in Personal Memoir in the "Chicano Literary Excellence Contest" sponsored by the U.S. national literary magazine el Andar.

Chávez-Silverman will be doing a residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, from May 1 to June 30, 2008. For more information, go to the Center’s website.

Finally, the Department of Foreign Languages and the Latin American Student Association at the University of New Orleans are proud to present a special reading and performance by Chávez-Silverman on Wednesday, April 9, 5:00 p.m., at the Earl K. Long Library, 407. Click here for more information.

◙ Multi-talented author and editor, C. M. Mayo, gives us five lessons she’s learned about blogging on the second anniversary of her entry into the cyberworld. Click here for her funny, inspiring and quite truthful list.

◙ Man-about-town Rigoberto González offers a small press spotlight on poet Javier O. Huerta over at Critical Mass, the blog of National Book Critics Circle board of directors.

◙ The April issue of Tu Ciudad is out and boy, are we excited. Why? Well, per usual, it’s filled with juicy bits of Latino culture. This is the “design” issue so if you want to learn about those “Latino visionaries who are changing the way we live, work, and play in L.A.,” then pick up an issue. And there are the monthly columns by Marcos Villatoro (“Sunset at Chavez”) and Ayn Carrillo (“Sex y L.A.”), of course. Don’t forget the great lists of Latino restaurants and bars to fill that particular need. Also included are pieces for sports fans, political junkies, and art lovers. And there’s something else, something very special: the short story “Cement God” by Conrad Romo. This story is from the forthcoming Latinos in Lotusland (Bilingual Press), edited by yours truly. Anyway, for Tu Ciudad subscription and other information, click here.

◙ Please note this upcoming Self Help Graphics & Art event (click ad to get to SHG&A's website):


◙ The Latino Poetry Review is now live! Founding and managing editor Francisco Aragón says that the mission of LPR is to publish book reviews, essays, and interviews with an eye towards spurring inquiry and dialogue. LPR recognizes that Latino and Latina poets in the 21st century embrace, and work out of, a multitude of aesthetics. With this in mind, its critical focus is the poem and its poetics.

The webmaster at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) informed Aragón that in the first nine days of LPR's official existence, the site got 1800 hits, which accounted for half of all the hits for the ILS's entire website in that same time period, which was very encouraging to hear since a few years ago the ILS didn't have a literary component. Aragón asks readers to “seriously consider writing a ‘letter to the editor’ in response to any of the pieces in issue number one.” These letters will get posted in the “Letters to the Editor" section shortly after he receives them.

LPR cover art (pictured) is by Kathy Vargas, a San Antonio based artist. Each issue of LPR will always feature cover art that will be taken from and artist who has had an exhibit at ILS's Galeria América.

◙ Over at the El Paso Times, Poet Sheryl Luna reviews Gabriel Gomez's The Outer Bands (University of Notre Dame Press, winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. She says that Gomez’s poetry collection “engages with lyricism and syntactical play.” She also notes: “An El Paso native now living in Santa Fe, Gomez writes eloquently of distance, longing, need and survival in a series of poems that culminate with a section about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.” Luna, an El Paso native and award-winning poet, is the author of Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press).

◙ Agustin Gurza, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, tells us about a new exhibit, “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement” (April 6 to September 1) which provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

"Phantom Sightings" … features more than 120 works, including 10 commissioned specifically for the occasion, by 31 artists from across the country, some of whom don't call themselves Chicano. Most came of age in the 1990s and several have just recently started to draw international attention. Three -- Ruben Ochoa, Eduardo Sarabia and Mario Ybarra Jr. -- are currently represented in the sometimes reputation-making Whitney Biennial in New York.

Curated by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon Noriega, this is the first major Chicano group exhibition presented at LACMA since 1987's "Hispanic Art in the United States," which was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. And it is the first such show organized for LACMA itself in more than three decades, since its ground-breaking "Chicanismo en el Arte" in 1975 and "Los Four" the year before.

To read the entire piece, click here. For more information on the exhibit, visit LACMA's website. If you have story ideas for Agustin, email him at agustin.gurza@latimes.com. (Pictured: Jason Villegas' "Celestial Situations" (2006) combines video projection with a wall drawing; photo credit: Los Angeles Times.)

◙ All done. Tomorrow I turn (drumb roll) 49! Where does the time go? Happy birthday to all April children who read La Bloga. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres. ¡Lea un libro!

The gift that keeps on giving me the creeps.

Honey,

First of all, thank you so much for the lovely panties. They are so comfortable and cute too! I have to say, though, I’ve been concerned about your behavior lately. I mean, when I was jogging in the woods and you were suddenly there, it kind of creeped me out. And then when you burst into that job interview it was pretty humiliating. I mean, how did you know I was there? It was a good thing I had determined I didn’t want the position (though I was still really nervous…always am at those things) because I’m pretty sure you freaked out the CEO and he wouldn’t have hired me anyway.

Okay, this week you must indulge me, gentle La Bloga readers. Like my earlier “priestcake-calendar” entry, this is one of those “products that just vex me” columns. Occasionally I come across a creation that brings out the sociologist in me, something that allows me to ponder about the state of modern society. Well, if I were to judge our future on the Forget-Me-Not panties I would have to say we are doomed.

I found the site by mistake, I was searching for the phone number for my favorite shop in Johnson, Vermont—the Forget-Me-Not-Shop—and I pulled up this site: http://forgetmenotpanties.com/ The first thing I saw was the seductive photo of the panty clad woman with the ray-emitting flower appliqué. As you can imagine, I was intrigued. And that image…was the flower giving off heat? Massaging her hip? Despite these questions I was about to head back to google when the tagline “protect her privates” caught my eye. Needless to say, I read further.

“Ever worry about your wife cheating? Want to know where your daughter is late at night?”

And my personal favorite:

“Need to know when your girlfriend’s temperature is rising?”

Turns out, it is a pair of attractive brief-cut cotton underwear with a decorative flower that is actually a GPS device that can provide the wearer’s location, temperature and heart rate. Temperature and heart rate…I felt my own ticker pickup its pace with a touch of anger.

“Make sure you will never be forgotten,” it promises.

Now being a marketing professional, I delved further. How does one sell this kind of despicable, personal-liberty-stealing product? The section called “testimonials” give two examples. The first the one I can understand slightly, a father who was concerned about his teenage daughter’s safety after she spent many late nights out. Concern I understand, invasion of privacy I don’t. This goes way beyond reading her diary or rummaging through her purse (neither of which I condone). To top it off, his testimonial attests that the only improvement he suggested for the product was a video camera. I have no words.

The second testimonial was from a man who suspected his wife of cheating on him, which of course, she was. I mean, how creepy would it be to hear about a guy who tracked his wife through her panties and found out she was faithful? That wouldn’t sell too many bloomers, I’ll tell you that!

Okay, so as you’ve surmised, this is not a subject I’m on the fence about. It’s not the GPS, I mean we give our kids cell phones we can track, but it’s the deception that bothers me. Truth be told, I find this whole thing so disturbing it is almost beyond comment. I mean, why not added a banner that says, “Great for the stalker on your Christmas list!” or, “Paranoid? Delusional? Have we got the product for you!”

At this point I find myself asking, what is my raison d’etre for this blog entry? Is it enough to rant and rave about a bizarre and offensive product? Perhaps, but as I reflect on my need to tell you about this find I realize that it is more than that, more than a sociological study. I fear that we risk losing our dignity, our humanity when we give in to our darkest thoughts. There are always marketers out there to prey upon our anxieties, our innermost fears and insecurities. And if we are distrustful of our partners or our children and unable to confront them in a healthy and respectful manner, will we reduce ourselves to buying underwear that track their whereabouts and body temperature? Have we really sunk this low?

I’m being preachy you say? Yes, you’re right, and I apologize. I had intended this to have more humor, but honestly the forget-me-not panties frighten me. As they should you. And ladies, if your husband or partner gives you a pair of lingerie with an odd little appliqué on them, put them on the dog and set him loose through the neighborhood. But be sure to invite me to watch when the gift giver finds out he has been monitoring a mutt’s adventures through the neighborhood streets. I’m sure I could sell tickets, in fact.

P.S. My nephew Jedediah just informed me that this is a hoax created by pantyraiders.org "girls ambushing the media." (read the comments) Guess I got duped! As an art project this is so effective, I mean look at the depth of feeling they got in my reaction. Very powerful. I am not someone who is easily duped, I am often the one who sends you back the email about the toilet spiders or fake tsunami pictures and directs you to urbanlegends.about.com, but the fact that you have to go down so many layers to discover this is a hoax is brilliant (of course I did that once I found out). You click on order, then it gives you a selection of models of panties, and when you click on one, you get a note that flashes at you that says "Gotcha!" and gives the pantyraiders.org address. You should visit the site, it's fascinating.

As I said in my comment, what does it say to those people who actually click on the button with the full intention of ordering a pair? I would hope it makes them reflect.

Gente, this is what art is about.

Pedacitos de Abril

Spring is busting out - and April is Poetry Month. The earth thrives and the blood revives. My tuner is set to a variety of wavelengths. I'm reading things like Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan (Akashic Books, 2007) and South by South Bronx, Abraham Rodriguez (Akashic Books, 2008) and Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography, David Sandison (Chicago Review Press, 1999) and Literary Genius, edited by Joseph Epstein (Paul Dry Books, 2007) and Denver's Larimer Street: Main Street, Skid Row and Urban Renaissance, Thomas J. Noel (Historic Denver, Inc. 1981) and Ultimate Spider-Man, Volume 1 (Marvel Comics, 2002). I eagerly anticipate The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño, (Picador, 2008) and Mario Acevedo's The Undead Kama Sutra (Eos, 2008). I'm writing short stories but I failed to get anything ready for the Liquid Poetry Contest, which put out a "call for lyrics celebrating beer, beer culture, and beer-blessed fellowship and inspiration." The party is April 11 at the Wynkoop Brewery in Denver. Maybe next year. William Burroughs wrote: "The only real thing about a writer is what he has written and not his so-called life." That is so true it hurts.

And now, the news.


ISABEL ALLENDE - APRIL 10
Award-winning novelist Isabel Allende will read from and sign her new book The Sum of Our Days (HarperCollins, 2008), the sequel to her bestselling memoir Paula. In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss - the death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, bound together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved, indomitable matriarch. Free tickets for the book signing will be available at 6:30 pm; one per person in line. Seating for the presentation prior to the book signing is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis to ticketed customers only.

April 10, 7:30 p.m. Tattered Cover, LoDo, 1628 16th Street, Denver, 303-436-1070


NERUDA POETRY FESTIVAL - APRIL 17 - 19
Nationally recognized spoken-word artists join local word slingers for this annual rhythm and rhyme feast. Here's the schedule:

April 17 - Tributes to raúlrsalinas and Lalo Delgado, a reinterpretation of the words of these two writers by Su Teatro actors. 8:05 p.m.; $15 general, $12 seniors and students.

April 18 - Annual Barrio Slam; $500 Grand. 6:00 p.m. open mic, 7:00 p.m. slam; $10

April 19 - Literary Salon, in collaboration with El Lab at Belmar; 4:00 p.m.; $12 general, $9 seniors and students -- Taco Bar and poets!Publish Post

April 19 - Palabras Vivas. Featuring Sandra Maria Esteves, Nuyorican Poets Cafe founder, visual artist, poet, author. 8:05 p.m.; $15 general, $12 seniors and students.

El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, Denver, 303-296-0219

SWIFT JUSTICE DOCUMENTARY FUND RAISER - APRIL 10
Swift Justice tells the story of the families and community affected by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at the Swift Meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado on Dec. 12, 2006. The film’s goal is to present the issue of immigration reform in a balanced and responsible way to educate and inform people about this complex issue so they can contribute toward solving it. Little Voice is an award-winning, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that uses video, technology and grassroots outreach to raise awareness of social issues and inspire positive social change. For reservations call Strings restaurant at 303-831-7310. Cocktails from 5:30-6:30; dinner from 5:00-10:00. Suggested $50-tax deductible donation. The night of the fundraiser, 10% of all dinner sales will be donated to Little Voice's Swift Justice Documentary. If you cannot come, please consider making a donation to Little Voice.

April 10, 2008 from 5:30pm - 8pm
Strings at 1700 Humboldt St., Denver, Co.

GEORGE YEPES - APRIL 17
Announcement from Ventura College:

The Ventura College Spring 2008 Arts and Lecture Series continues with a lecture with George Yepes, Cultural Artist on April 17 at 7:00 p.m. in the Second Floor Reading Room of the Library and Learning Resource Center on the Ventura College (Ventura, CA) campus.

The event is free, parking is $1 and refreshments will be served. For additional information, call the Public Relations Office, Ventura College, (805) 654-6462.

George Yepes was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. He moved to East Los Angeles at the age of four. He earned a degree from California State University, Los Angeles, in business administration, and joined the Public Art Center, leaving behind his hard street life and gang membership. He also took painting classes at East Los Angeles City College and worked both as an accountant and a muralist.

One of the more prolific painters in the Chicano Mural Movement of the late 70's, Yepes gained his early reputation as a ferocious painter when he painted with notables from Carlos Almaraz and Frank Romero to Gilbert "Magu" Lujan. He then became an instrumental partner in the mural group East Los Streetscapers from 1979 to 1985 until he decided that group painting wasn't suited to his temperament or pace. With grand scale and furious momentum Yepes has painted over 800,000 square feet of eloquent social, historical, and sacred images onto the facades of everything from churches, hospitals and freeway overpasses to album covers. His 28 murals are landmarks in Los Angeles, as are the 21 murals his Academia de Arte Yepes students have painted. Yepes established the Academia de Arte Yepes, the first free mural academy for young students in Los Angeles. Yepes has taught nearly 1500 low-income students over the last decade through the Academia. His mural painting concepts and designs continue to be studied by graduate students and scholars across the United States.

Later.

The Courage to Create

Rollo May proposes the theory that, "Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center." The encounter is between the artist and the objective reality of what she is observing. The intensity of the encounter between artist and her world calls forth the creative act of bringing into being that which does not exist- the painting, the poem, etc.

The artist, by herself, does not conjure up the art, but rather is infused with the experience of relating to her outside world. This state, fueled by the unconscious symbols and myths about her place in that world that compel her to create being from non-being. I would also argue there is also a connection that needs to be explored by the artist--between the world of the present and the past, the living and the spirit world, the world of ancestry, the well of souls in which the heart of the collective unconscious resides. “Creative courage... is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.”

It's May’s contention that creativity is a courageous act because an authentic act of creation takes an intensity of commitment and a deep quality of passion. This is because the artist is moving into uncharted territory in order to sit with the deeper recesses of the psyche, the realm of chaos and anxiety. “This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness."

I've frequently felt that anxiety, that 'dis-ease.' I spent many years trying to out that blot that feeling, along with a host of others, via alcohol and other drugs. It's is no surprise to me that I could only fully actualize my creative self as a feature of sobriety. I think about the real lives of alcohol-ridden, doomed drug-addict, art world wunderkind, and wonder what wellsprings were sealed up in order to not feel a psychic pain to much to bear. Artists delve into the substance their own existence, but also the deeper collective unconscious of the society that they inhabit. Living, resonant art informs this collective unconscious and also shapes it in a new way and can be a touchstone for how a society views itself. Rigid societies afraid of hidden truths repress art; requiring artists to understand that courage is required, and not back away in the face of opposition.

I believe that art making is an act of survival and resistance. During the periods of my life when the creativity has waned and it's felt like the demands of the outside world have swallowed me up, I have definitely felt depressed.The act of creativity fights that depression and more importantly, transforms it into something else, something viable. In what I hope is my best work, that idea of Every/Mujer resisting outside control, outside definition is communicated as well.

For work of the deepest kind to to emerge, I have to look as clear-eyed as I can at losses on the personal level, as well as those with larger social causes. As uncomfortable as that may be, it's also becomes a motivator, a source of knowledge, a driving engine. Joy is as well, by it is joy that results from emergence, a flinty and hard-won joy. Looking at the scope of the themes that pull at me again and again, I can see the arc of trauma, its aftermath and reemergence. As I continue to think about this, imagery from forensic science and pathology come to mind. The initial part of the process is the point of entry, where the bullet entered. Mid process is all about ballistics and trajectory, and the last, is exit wound and the healing.

International Children’s Digital Library

René Colato Laínez

Last week, I wrote about lookybook.com and the wonderful books that you can read on this site just by clicking your mouse. I noticed that they don't have books in Spanish or bilingual format.
My author friend Amada Irma Pérez introduced me to www.childrenslibrary.org . This website has books in more than 40 languages, including Spanish and Quechua. Children around the world are reading and leaving comments in many languages.

This is their mission:
The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community – children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online.

Click on this link to start reading books in many languages: Leamos.

Author Reading at Aztlan Books Y Mas

Saturday, April 12th at 4pm

1014 E. Charleston Blvd. #102

Las Vegas, NV 89104

702-242-2626

www.aztlanbookslv.com

Bits & Pieces: Old and New Chicanarte

Michael Sedano

I have been digitizing negatives and slides I shot in 1973 during the first Festival de Flor Y Canto held at the University of Southern California. The project has made me nostalgic for the literature of el movimiento. It doesn’t help that so many of the people in those thirty-five years ago photos have died, most recently raúlrsalinas, preceded by Ricardo Sanchez, Oscar Zeta Acosta. Tempus fugit, que no? Carpe diem indeed.




I might be accused of mere wallowing in sentiment, except for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's publicity for this month's exhibition titled, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, described as “the largest exhibition of cutting-edge Chicano art ever presented at LACMA.” I’m troubled that there’s a certain rejection of movimiento passion in LACMA’s gloss on the difference between yesteryear and today: “Chicano art, traditionally described as work created by Americans of Mexican descent, was established as a politically and culturally inspired movement during the counterculture revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This exhibition explores the more experimental tendencies within the Chicano art movement—ones oriented less toward painting and declarative polemical assertion than toward conceptual art, performance, film, photo- and media-based art, and "stealthy" artistic interventions in urban spaces.” It all makes me wonder if some artists and curators have strayed so far from home that they’ll never find their way home, wey.

I cannot say that movimiento art and poetry were not experimental. I wonder further what constitutes polemical. Polemos, the Greek term, means war, battle, and from what one sees at today’s chicana chicano galleries, and for sure at LACMA’s Broad contemporary (not-chicano) exhibition, some of today’s “conceptual” and more “experimental” artists have declared war on content and taste in favor of whatever. This is not a new development. La Bloga addressed this a couple years back with Salvador Plasencia’s declaration of happiness that his superbly experimental novel The People of Paper had not been tossed into the barrio of chicano literature.

I’ll attend the LACMA show and UCLA’s symposia with great interest to learn what academics and curators think “cutting-edge” means today and how it differs from what happened back in the day. In the meantime, I’ll comfort myself with revisiting movimiento art as an aide-memoire of how useful art has always been to its contemporary audience. In attending I’ll make sure to go grounded with a firm foundation of what has come before. I believe one must understand the present in terms of the past.

In those vibrant times thirty plus years ago, poetry and literature modified by the adjective 'Chicana' or 'Chicano,' mirrored the Peoplehood and community-making rhetoric that characterized el movimiento. In fact, almost the entire poetry oeuvre of that day might be termed 'rhetorical' in keeping with the classic definition of 'the art of finding the available means of persuasion for a given audience.'

Chicano poetry of el movimiento gives us loud, passionate voices, demanding, cajoling, even seducing whatever audience sought out the poetry. Our literature, as with our movement, targeted the ethnic and social identities of readers and spoke to them in language and symbol only they would wholly understand. Movimiento poetry contrasts barrio landscapes to edenic Aztlan as a locational embodiment of who we are; relates the chicanismo shared by farmworkers, pachucos, protestors to place our ethos in high relief against the culture-killing motives of other Unitedstatesians; expresses regret, rage, unity, separation as a way of reflecting the actuality of our lives. This powerful body of poetry was useful. Those were the days.

Change is not bad, however, when art changes as the times change. I am reminded of this every time I read one of Rigoberto Gonzalez' book reviews. It’s less his significant insight into fiction that moves me and more my recollection of his first poetry collection, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks. Gonzalez' work illustrates the growth and maturation chicanarte is achieving. In literature, at any rate.

Gonzalez' expertise as wordsmith, cultural investigator, artist shines forth from these debut pages. His Michoacan and village landscapes evoke a warmth of allegiance to Mexican culture, absent the implied stridency of movimiento visions of our separate Eden. Gonzalez crafts a series of richly defined portraits, everyday people as well as extraordinary characters, abuelos, curanderas, lovers in triangle. Exigencies include broken hearts, passing generations, evocations of our fundamental humanity. One critique of movimiento poetry addressed its lack of 'universality' in speaking only to, or seeking to draw out from the mass, a distinctly chicano audience. Gonzalez shows how to combine some of the edginess of a movimiento perspective with a more universalist technique to address a chicanada readership without excluding any poetry lover.

Gonzalez' “Death of the farmworker's cat” illustrates his use of familiar chicano material while creating alternate ways to use its substance. The farmworker allusion frontloads the poem with that emotive history. The poem recalls farmworkers themselves, "Negra one man/ called her. Another, Sombra. Yet another named her / /Cascabel, what his sweetheart called her cat in Tuxtla./ Murmuring that name reminded him of murmuring// inside his lover's ear, of the indiscreet meows/ that made his lover whisper ssshhh! "

“Death of the farmworker's cat” is an incredibly sad poem, not owing to some dreary hopeless existence suffered by farmworkers--the usual movimiento motif--but because the cat had been locked in the migrant's hut at season's end, for how long does the cat move “from wooden sill to concrete floor. At once patient,/ leaning on the boots with the memory of feet, at once// restless, trapped behind the window with/ her wet nose drying up against the glass.” When the migrant workers open the shack next season they'll momentarily confuse for a left behind boot the cat's dried stiff body.

Definitely Chicano poetry. One need not miss the fire of the old stuff, “love thy master of the blue-eyed hatred” shouted Ricardo Sanchez. Rigoberto Gonzalez' small collection deserves a first reading, or a re-reading, to keep context around this emerging movement that chicanarte avoid linkages to its earlier incarnations, that it be less polemical, less declarative, more experimental. Readers of chicano literature and visitors to LACMA's “Phantom Sightings” owe it to themselves to read the old stuff, and this to add to their understanding of how our art grows yet remains inextricably linked to its progenitors.

A Unitedstatesian not-chicano poet, Robert Service, wrote that 'home is, where, when you go there, they have to take you in.' Rigoberto Gonzalez' work shows how some chicano poetry never left, so there’s nothing to come home to. It’ll be interesting to see if these phantom visionaries have lost their way.

JoAnn Anglin alerts La Bloga to a UCLA panel on finding a literary agent, forwarding the following material from Westwood: UCLA Extension Writers' Program
Finding and Working with a Literary Agent First-time writers often feel lucky to get an agent...any agent. But while the right agent can work wonders, an incompatible agent can actually stall a writer's career. With the publishing world in such flux, having the right literary agent ready to do battle for you has become more important than ever. Join author/moderator Aimee Liu and a panel of established literary agents as they discuss the right and wrong ways to approach an agent, how to decide which agent is right for you, how to understand an agency representation agreement, which fees are controversial within the industry, and ways to ensure a long and profitable agent-client relationship. The panel includes agents Jenoyne Adams, Betsy Amster, Angela Rinaldi, and Taryn Fagerness, who represent both fiction and nonfiction authors.

Registration is $95.00. More information at the website linked above, or by phone to the Writers' Program Office at (310) 825-9415 and ask for Mae or Daniel.


Eleven Black Clay Bells
Have you seen these bells somewhere? I have eleven of these hand-fashioned four-way bells. Each measures 6" X 6" X 3". I bought these at a flea market. A friend owns a single four-way that looks as if it could part of this set. She bought it at a Pasadena curio store--possibly The Folk Tree--thirty years ago. The clapper is strung with thread, some with monofilament line. They give forth a glorious tinkle. The rounded central hole suggests these were mounted on a rod. I can just imagine the wonderful music when they are all in motion. Gracias de antemano for any information you share with me. If you have an inkling, a guess, or an explanation, please click here.

Lest we forget, it's April Fool's day:
Knock knock!
Who's there?

A little old lady.
A little old lady, who?

I didn't know you could yodel.

And my favorite fool poem. W.B. Yeats' "Two Songs of a Fool."

I

A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think
Some day I may forget
Their food and drink;
Or, the house door left unshut,
The hare may run till it’s found
The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

II

I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,
The speckled cat slept on my knee;
We never thought to enquire
Where the brown hare might be,
And whether the door were shut.
Who knows how she drank the wind
Stretched up on two legs from the mat,
Before she had settled her mind
To drum with her heel and to leap:
Had I but awakened from sleep
And called her name she had heard,
It may be, and had not stirred,
That now, it may be, has found
The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

La Bloga welcomes guest columnists, as we did recently with Juanita Salazar Lamb's introduction to her chicana mystery writing. If you missed it last Saturday, enjoy the guest column now. If you'd like to be our guest, leave a comment, or email La Bloga to let us know your interest.

There's the first Tuesday of April, looking back, looking forward, looking foolish. See you next week.

mvs