Friday, May 23, 2025

The Question Everyone's Asking

Melinda Palacio, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2023-2025

There’s a question on everybone’s mind. If you follow this column, you’re probably curious about the answer too. Now that my two-year term as City of Santa Barbara Poet Laureate is over, it seems everyone I encounter wants to know how I feel. Most people who ask this question assume that my schedule over the past two year has been a burden. However, the truth is enjoyed every minute. I didn’t have a poetry boss forcing me to present my work or to bring poetry to different community spaces. Those were goals that I set for myself. I realize I was in a unique position, having received a post-pandemic laureateship, at a time when the world was opening up and recovering from our pandemic lockdown. My predecessor, Emma Trelles, SB PL Number 9, didn’t get a chance to receive all the pomp and circumstance of being crowned Poet Laureate at our city hall or have a gathering of friends and supporters after. I was lucky to have had friends attend my ceremony from as far south as Ventura, Oxnard, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Tia Juana. After the City Hall ceremony and photos, everyone walked to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum where there was a cake and champagne. 

 

It was such an honor and continues to be so. I was more than happy to be the public face of poetry, a poetry ambassador and teacher for the community and beyond. I am also humbled and honored that the Association of Women in Communications is honoring the work that I did as Poet Laureate in naming me one of five Women of Achievement in their 17th annual Women of Achievement Awards. The theme for this year’s awards is Creative Communication: Building Community Through Arts. Honorees include Adriana Arriaga, visual artist known at adriana la artista, entrepreneur and activist; Teresa Kuskey, Founder/Artistic Director of La Boheme Dance; Frances Moore, Co-founder/Artistic Director, Santa Barbara Ringhout Project; Melinda Palacio, and JoAnne Wasserman, Artistic Director and Conductor, Santa Barbara Choral Society. 

 

La Santa Cecilia

 I cannot deny being a little relieved that I will be able to slow down and take a little break from the whirlwind poetry tour that’s been the past two years. One of the things I had a chance to enjoy again was the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival or Jazz Fest. Jazz Fest takes place during the last week of April and the first week of May from Thursday-Sunday. Don’t let the term jazz fool you, there’s a large variety of music, something for everyone. The highlight for me this year was La Santa Cecilia. I saw her band over fifteen years ago at Tía Chucha's Words and Music Festival in Pacoima, well before they became internationally acclaimed grammy winners. La Santa Cecilia was recently in Santa Barbara as part of the Viva Artes program but it was fun seeing the band in New Orleans with the smells of Crawfish Monica and Oyster Poboys wafting through the air. 

 


In poetry news, I have a new collection I am working on and I am also aligning the stars to bring the Somos Xicanas anthology to Santa Barbara. This anthology, published by the independent press, Riot of Roses, features poetry from over 80 Xicana writers. Some names you might recognize and others will prove to be new gems you’ll want to explore further. The collection as a whole has been in the works for a long time and has endured multiple editors and survived changing publishing houses. I am honored to be included. I had the pleasure of reading with several contributors in March at La Plaza Cultural in downtown Los Angeles. I look forward to bringing this important anthology to Santa Barbara this Fall.

*an earlier version of this column appears in the Santa Barbara Independent

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Why Do They Fear Teaching Students the Truth?

 

                                                                                   

An important journey into ethnic America

     I wanted to say something about this Administration’s attack on Ethnic Studies classes and programs, especially after so many universities and school districts around the nation have introduced various classes on the subject, going back to the 1970s. Then, I remembered. I did write an essay back in 2021 on the topic, and it pretty much said what I had wanted to say, so I thought I’d polish it up and repost it.      

                                                                                      *****

     As I walked down the street, I saw a cardboard box filled with books in front of an apartment building. Most of the books were throwaways. Then, I noticed a familiar book cover. I picked it up. It was Ron Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993). It was practically new, which meant someone had taken really good care of it or had hardly taken time to crack it open. Me, I can’t even read a newspaper without a pen in hand to mark it up with my comments and ideas.

     Dr. Ronald Takaki, a Japanese Californian, by way of Hawaii, died in 2009. He was a preeminent scholar in the field of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. I’d read his book, Strangers from a Different Shore (1998), where he records the stories of Chinese, Japanese, Hmong and other Asian groups in the U.S., a topic few Americans, including myself, knew much about and I grew up on the West Coast, home to most Asian Americans in the U.S.

     After the publication of Strangers from a Different ShoreI heard Professor Takaki speak to a gymnasium filled with faculty at Santa Monica College, where I was teaching at the time. Takaki talked like he wrote, his words and ideas accessible to the public, whether scholars or everyday people, as if he was just another guy telling a story. Those who study pedagogy, the study of teaching, say students, especially African Americans and Latinos, learn best when teachers present information in narratives, rather than lecture in abstract, often vague facts and ideas couched in oblique academic language, like professors do in many university classes.

     Dr. Takaki started his presentation by asking, “How many of you know about Ellis Island.?” Every hand in the auditorium shot up, of course. “Good,” Takaki said, and laughed, something of a cackle, followed by deep breaths. He then asked, “How many of you have heard of Angel Island?” Slowly, as if needing to think about it, only a smattering of hands rose. The majority of educators sat silently, hands at their sides.

       Professor Takaki went on to explain Angel Island, adjacent to San Francisco, was the West Coast Port of Entry for Asian immigrants, mostly Chinese and Japanese, strangers from a different shore. He then said, “As educators, we should know about Ellis Island. We should also know about Angel Island, about the Middle Passage from Africa, and about El Paso del Norte, and so should our students.”

     In his presentation, he talked about stories he had uncovered in his research of Asians who had come to settle in the U.S. He told stories about their work, the living conditions, families, religion, and their culture characteristics, like the Hmong who had a difficult time settling into the cold Wisconsin winters, so different than the tropical weather of Southeast Asia. One would think students in Wisconsin or in Fresno, CA, where many Hmong settled, would benefit from a class about these new strangers living among them.

     During a short Q& A period at the end of Dr. Takaki's presentation, one teacher, though he didn’t explicitly say it, suggested Takaki’s degree and work in Ethnic Studies weren’t legitimate, even if he couldn’t explain why. Many of us in the audience took it as straight-up racism, or biased, to give him benefit of the doubt, definitely ignorance.

     The man's comment, I think, took Takaki by surprise, but I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he’d been faced with such criticism. Using his sharp wit, he told the man he’d received his doctorate in American History from the University a California, Berkeley, and as an historian, the more he taught American History, the more he felt obligated to teach the true history of America and not just the history of those who came from England and found their way to Plymouth.

     Takaki took us back to the 1970’s and the intense debates at Berkeley, when faculty decided students needed to take a course in Ethnic Studies to receive a degree in History. Takaki told us, at the time, one faculty member stood, obstinately, and asked, “What if a student chooses not to take a course in Ethnic Studies?” Takaki said he responded, “Then the student can choose not to graduate with a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley.” He said he recalled hearing a low murmur run through the crowd, so he answered, “If university students don’t know the real history of the U.S., they are not worthy of a degree in history.”

     In the late 1980s, early 1990s, “American Ethnic Studies,” as a discipline, was just taking hold in the academy, introducing students to classes like Chicano, Black, Asian, and Women’s Studies. The study of world cultures wasn’t’ new in the academy. In Anthropology, Archeology, Sociology, Literature, and Music teachers had been researching ancient cultures, teaching such courses as Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Mythology for decades.

     Noted mythologist Joseph Campbell first taught Mythology at Sara Lawrence College in 1938, introducing his students to storytelling from nearly every corner of the world, as documented in his bestselling book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces, which made such an impression on filmmaker George Lucas, the filmmaker followed Campbell’s research on the hero’s journey in his movie Star Wars.

     Educators like John Dewey, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Bell Hooks, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Gloria Anzaldua, and others had begun looking at U.S. history beyond our mythical borders. Somehow, the study of American ethnic groups threatened many traditional faculty. Some, outright, said they didn’t want to study or teach about other U.S. cultures and to leave that to the Foreign Language departments.

     After I finished Takaki’s book, I wished I had read it earlier, when I started teaching U.S. Ethnic Literature. Professor Takaki follows an interesting pattern and style of writing. His book is an engaging read, storytelling based on historical research, moving from the early days of the United States, starting with the relationship between the colonists and indigenous inhabitants, citing journals and early writings, and moving on to Irish and indentured servitude then shifting to early slavery, before it was even institutionalized, explaining why and how it became an institution and affected the future of labor in the United States.

     In the early chapters, Takaki focuses on the Founding Fathers, from a different perspective. He’s always respectful, but he doesn’t hold back regarding their “real” views of slavery and forced labor, or their treatment of the Indians, especially from men, like Thomas Jefferson, who suffered a moral dilemma, introducing laws to abolish slavery, yet, at the same, time, building his fortune on the backs of African labor, on native American lands.

     I’ve read many historians of the Founding Fathers. I noticed Takaki includes what many historians choose to evade, or completely, ignore, especially harsh language leading to the detriment of those the Founders and early Americans considered outsiders, like the French, Germans, and Irish, but, understanding, the outsiders were here to stay, a complex part of the fabric that would become America.

     In the last chapters, Takaki moves on to Mexican and Asian immigrants and how they became American, and the unique challenges they faced. Where Irish and Africans were often forced, or coerced, to come to America to work, often under hellish conditions, many Mexicans were already here or, when nearly half of the United States belonged to Mexico. In the early 1900s, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, hundreds of thousands crossed the border to flee violence and starvation, much like the Chinese and Japanese who emigrated out of desperation.

     As a former teacher of American, Mexican, Latino, and Ethnic literature, I’ve read much American and ethnic history.  I’ve always known about Takaki’s, A Different Mirror, but never took the time to read the book, until now. I’ve been working my way through biographies of the Founding Fathers, to get a better grasp of this country’s foundation and the way these men thought and behaved. I hear so many people say, “Well according to the Founding Fathers….”

     What I learned was many people, including politicians, who quote the Founding Fathers haven’t read or studied them. They spout what somebody else said, and often, it’s not even accurate, especially about religion and economics. Many of the Founding Fathers were agnostics or outright atheists but could never admit it. Many, like Jefferson, wanted to abolish slavery but knew they’d upset too many rich, influential Southern plantation owners if they did.

     Takaki’s book provides a conceptual foundation for ethnic history in the U.S., and not in a dry, analytical scholarly way but, as I said earlier, wrapped up in engaging stories about people, based on historical research, often in the words of the historical figures themselves, as uncomfortable and disconcerting as those words might be.

     Navajos, and many American indigenous people, as children, had their languages and cultures stripped from them in school. Ironically, commanders in WWII gave it back to them by asking Navajo Marines to resurrect their language and create a code the Japanese couldn’t break. A similar code was used in Europe against the Germans.

     We often talk about why we used the atomic bombs on Japan. We had no choice, some argue. We would have lost too many soldiers and Marines had we invaded, was what most historians taught. Takaki and other historians’ research points to another path, one few talk about, a cultural path to peace, one our leaders did not understand or refused to accept. They chose a more destructive path, an intriguing dilemma for teachers and students to discuss.

     It is all part of our history, the real history of America and Americans, not the sanitized or invented history some would like us to believe, the one being forced on our schools and children today. Ethnic Studies teaches us how we are much more united as Americans, even though we come from so many different countries and cultures, or as the Founding Fathers said, "Out of many -- one."

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Trini’s Magic Kitchen

 Written by Patricia Santos Marcantonio

 

ISBN: 979-8-89375-005-8

Format: Trade Paperback

Pages: 217

Imprint: Piñata Books

Ages: 10-15


 

Entertaining novel explores young girl’s family difficulties

alongside new adventures in the kitchen.

  

Trini has just started seventh grade in Denver when her mom loses her job. Money is scarce and they lose their apartment too. The girl must go live with her grandparents in Alamosa until her mother can find work and a place for them to live. She has always considered her grandparents’ house a second home, but the day her mom leaves her there she feels homeless.

Grandma Lydia and Grandpa Frank, who ride motorcycles and listen to rock, are the best, but Trini misses her mom and dreads being the new kid at school. Gradually she adjusts, making another best friend and setting her sights on a cute boy. And when her grandmother discovers Trini can’t cook, she begins teaching her granddaughter how to make traditional Mexican dishes. Through the cooking lessons, the girl learns more about her dad, who died when she was young, and why her mom doesn’t cook.

This warmhearted and entertaining novel about overcoming challenges will resonate with readers facing problems with family and friends. Recipes for the meals made by Trini and her grandparents—including tostadas, green chile enchiladas, calabacitas and albóndigas—are included and will encourage young people to begin their own adventures in the kitchen while learning the value of creating magical dishes for loved ones.

 

PATRICIA SANTOS MARCANTONIO is the author of Best Amigas (Fitzroy Books, 2023), Under the Blood Moon (Dark Ink, 2022), Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace (Crooked Lane Books, 2020), Felicity Carrol and the Perilous Pursuit (Crooked Lane Books, 2019), Verdict in the Desert (Arte Público Press, 2016) and Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). She lives and works in Boise, Idaho.






Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Poetry & Cookies 2025: Altadena Strong

Michael Sedano

Pauli Dutton

Altadena librarian, Pauli Dutton, invited a handful of local poets to read their work and share refreshments in a small intimate gathering. That was the first Poetry & Cookies. On Saturday, May 17, Altadena Library, and its Co-Poets Laureate, Sehba Sarwar and Lester Graves Lennon, hosted the 25th gathering of poets to read their work at Poetry & Cookies 2025.

Dutton’s initial years hosting P&C featured a spiral bound collection of the year’s readers. The relatively informal program grew to appoint a Poet Laureate, then Co-Poets Laureate, to host readings and publish the works as a retitled book, the Altadena Poetry Review Anthology (link)

In recent years, the Laureates expanded the publication program to include an Online edition during the Co-Laureates’ first year, and a printed book in the culminating year. 

January’s Eaton Fire devoured Altadena but the fire didn’t stop life as we know it, nor poetry. Indeed, the Laureates extended the deadline for the Online edition so poets could submit fire poems. But the fire has delayed the process of editing the journal and, at the 2025 Poetry & Cookies reading, the Laureates announced August as the publication date for this year’s Online Edition of Altadena Poetry Review Anthology.

Golden Foothills Press has published the most recent volumes of the anthology. La Bloga spoke with the publisher, Thelma T. Reyna, herself an Altadena Poet Laureate Emerita, about the publication process. 

The Laureates issue the Call for Poetry in late Summer, early Fall. The poems arrive until January when the editing process begins. There are always glitches when mail and email systems fail, and disorganized or confused writers have questions and issues.

There’s some truth in the rude belief that organizing poets is like herding cats. Receiving poems is only part of the submission process. Getting biographies and photos from the selected-to-be-published poets takes on the look of feline shepherding.

Organizing contents consumes weeks to find the most elegant sequence of poems. Then the book designer steps in to layout the print and covers. When the artist is involved, the book is nearly ready to go to the printer and it’s time to schedule Poetry & Cookies and the anthology release.

This thumbnail sketch of the editor’s and publisher’s calendar only hints at the amount of labor that lies ahead for Lester Graves Lennon, who will edit Altadena Poetry Review Anthology 2026. 

Lennon, along with Co-Poet Laureate Sehba Sarwar, must have breathed sighs of joy and relief as their first year’s service culminated at this year’s Poetry & Cookies reading. Now begins the year of the book. 

Altadena Poet Laureate Lester Graves Lennon 

Altadena Poet Laureate Sehba Sarwar

Poetry & Cookies Readers

La Bloga apologizes for not securing all the names to go with the portraits
Altadena Library District Director
Nikki Winslow

Roberta H. Martinez
Toti O'Brien
Thelma T. Reyna
Richard Dutton
Seven Dhar 
Alicia Viguer-Espert
Carla Sameth and Sehba Sarwar, Laureate-emerita and current Co-Laureate

Sunday, May 18, 2025

"Ante el río / Before the River" by Xánath Caraza

Ante el río por Xánath Caraza

 


¡¡¡Ay mis hijos!!!

 

¡¡¡ Ay jucheeti uachecha!!!

 

¡¡¡Ay mis hijos!!!

 

¡¡¡ Ay na noconehuaj!!!

 

Como llorona estoy ante el río

lamentándome por ti

niño perdido

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! ¡Llorona!

 

Como lagarto estoy sobre las piedras

esperándote

en el río

 

Ave negra que nace del agua

que abre sus alas

y deja su historia salpicada

en el cauce del río

 

dejando surcos en su vuelo bajo

con su vientre pegado al río

trinar sobre mis oídos

rumor del agua

 

Bugambilias anaranjadas, fucsias, rosadas y blancas

que están en mis sueños y

me llenan la garganta

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! ¡Llorona!

 

Eres tú el brujo y hechicero

que se mete en mis sueños

Con el agua te lavo

y te canto ante al río

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! Niño perdido

 

Como Llorona estoy

ante el río

llévate mi tristeza niño hermoso

lava mis penas en el río

 

 


Before the River by Xánath Caraza

 

¡¡¡Ay mis hijos!!!

 

¡¡¡ Ay jucheeti uachecha!!!

 

¡¡¡Ay mis hijos!!!

 

¡¡¡ Ay na noconehuaj!!!

 

As Llorona I am before the river

moaning for you

niño perdido

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! ¡Llorona!

 

As an alligator I am on the river stones

waiting for you

in the river

 

Black bird born of the water

opens its wings

and leaves its history sprinkled

by the flow of the river

 

leaves tracks in its low flight

with its underside close to the river

singing above my ears

murmuring of water

 

Orange, fuchsia, pink and white bougainvilleas

are in my dreams and

fill my throat

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! ¡Llorona!

 

You are the wizard and sorcerer

who enters into my dreams

with water I wash you

and I sing to you before the river

 

¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! Niño perdido

 

As Llorona I am

before the river

take my sadness with you beautiful niño

wash my sorrows in the river

 

Xanath Caraza

“Ante el río / Before the River” is part of the collection of poetry Conjuro (Mammoth Publications, 2012). “Ante el río / Before the River” was featured at the Smithsonian Latino Center in 2018. Listen to my Spanish (Purepecha and Nahuatl) and English version of the poem here, and also Son Jarocho singer Silvia Santos’ interpretation of my poem.

Friday, May 16, 2025

Focus on an Independent Press

Today's La Bloga is a quick look at an independent and highly regarded publisher -- Seven Stories Press.  A thorough summary of the history of the press can be found here.  Below is information about two recent books published by Seven Stories.  The books are quite different, one is historical nonfiction and the other is art criticism, but they share high quality presentations and a revolutionary world view.  Seven Stories has been publishing similar books for more than thirty years.  Thank you, Seven Stories.

____________________________________


Latin America Diaries
Ernesto Che Guevara
Seven Stories Press - May 12

[from the publisher]
The sequel to The Motorcycle Diaries, this book is Ernesto Che Guevera's journal documenting the young Argentine's second trip through Latin America, revealing the emergence of a committed revolutionary.

These letters, poetry, and journalism document young Ernesto Guevara's second Latin American journey following his graduation from medical school in 1953. Together, these writings reveal how the young Argentine is transformed into a militant revolutionary.
After traveling through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Central America, Ernesto witnesses the 1954 US-inspired coup in Guatemala, which has a profound effect on his political awareness. He flees to Mexico where he encounters Fidel Castro, marking the beginning of a political partnership that profoundly changes the world and Che himself. Includes a foreword by Alberto Granado, Che's companion on his first adventures in Latin America on a vintage Norton motorcycle, and features poems written by young Ernesto inspired by his experiences along with facsimiles of pages from his diary.

____________________

Theory of the Rearguard:
How to Survive Contemporary Art (and Almost Everything Else)

Iván de la Nuez
, translated by Ellen Jones

Seven Stories Press - May 15

[from the publisher]
Theory of the Rearguard examines how contemporary art is in tension with survival, rather than in relation to life. In the twentieth century, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde was a cult book focused on the two main tasks that art demanded at the time: to break its representation and to destroy the barrier that separated it from life.

Forty years later, The Theory of the Rearguard is an ironic manifesto about contemporary art and its failures, even though Iván de la Nuez does not waste his time mourning it or disguising it. He argues that our times are not characterized by the distance between art and life, but by a tension between art and survival, which is the continuation of life by any means necessary.

In the twenty-first century, Iván de la Nuez examines art in relationship to politics, iconography, and literature. This austere and sharp book—in which Duchamp stumbles upon Lupe, the revolution upon the museum, Paul Virilio upon Joan Fontcuberta or Fukuyama upon Michael Jackson—wonders if contemporary art will ever end. Because if it were mortal—“just as mortal as everything it invokes or examines under its magnifying glass”—de la Nuez argues would be worth writing an epitaph for it as he has done in this sparkling book of art criticism.

Later.

___________________

Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction.

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Chicanonautica: Notes on a Xicanxfuturist Spring

by Ernest Hogan



Once again, we got a whole lotta transmogrification going on. And it’s not just the loco-in-chief in the White House. All kinds of changes are happening.


We’re talking way beyond future shock here. As if just being a humble Xicanxfuturist sciifista trying to survive in a world that never was sure about what it should do with me wasn’t enough.



I don’t know what to do with my new novel. Or all the short stories that weird circumstances keep squeezing out of me.


An abandoned shopping mall is undergoing a transformation into . . . What? A metaphor for a new world?


Things I experience keep sending my grotesquely overactive imagination off into bizarre tangents.


It’s better than any drug.



I don’t need AIs to hallucinate for me.


Who’da thought that hallucinating algorithms would be a thing?


Tezcatlipoca, Tezcatlipoca, do you read?



Is there a Mission Control?


What is the mission?


Just a Chicanonaut reporting in to . . .


Who? Us? Them? The entire universe?



So I keep going. I can’t help it. I can’t turn the monster in my brain off . . .


Besides, I believe that we need all this weird shit, now more than ever. 

Sure, I feel like the guy in that meme with the world in flames, screaming, “Hey, anybody want to buy a book?” But it’s books, art, music . . . La Cultura! That gets us through this.



It’s not the cozy escapism that gives us the inspiration to do what we have to do to survive, it’s the rasquache kicks in the head that shatter the living nightmare and make better things possible.


Really.


So here I go.


This has been a pep talk from the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.



Ernest Hogan is feasting on the madness that surrounds him, getting ready to teach a class on what he does, so he has to analyze it, which leads to astounding revelations . . .