Sunday, July 26, 2026

Dos poemas por Xánath Caraza y Naty Blásquez

Dos poemas por Xánath Caraza y Naty Blásquez

 

Hoy les compartimos dos poemas “Los días circulares” de Naty Blásquez y “Agítense en su recuerdo” de Xánath Caraza. No olviden que el próximo martes, 28 de julio, de 6 a 7:30 p.m. en 4Regiones, Primo Verdad 23 en Xalapa, Veracruz, las que escriben compartirán poesía con los xalapeños. La profesora Malena Flores será la maestra de ceremonias para este evento poético y los asistentes podrán compartir un poema al final de la sesión. La entrada es libre y para el público de todas las edades.

 

Xanath Caraza

Para corresponder el apoyo de 4Regiones se sugiere el consumo de una bebida.

 

Ojalá nos acompañen y traigan un poema para celebrar la palabra.

 

¡Qué la poesía nos salve!

 

 

Naty Blasquez

“Los días circulares” por Naty Blásquez

 

Pero de esta catedral sin luz

salen moscas de flor podrida

y me baño con el agua verduzca

de los rezos dominicales.

 

Me bautizo, soy pecadora

y cambio mi nombre

porque esta manera

de llamarme no es mía

sino de la que se fue

con el alma de mi madre.

 

Polvo seremos

SOY

porque me desmorono

a cada instante

a cada flechazo de indiferencia.

 

Me vuelvo aire en

estas cuatro paredes

me impregno en las sábanas

y ya no camino con los

pasos toscos de mi herencia,

ya no me trenzo el

miedo de generaciones,

ya no paso mi mano

por el pecho

para sentir si sigo viva.

 

No quiero ser siempre

el mismo instante

de beso y despedida,

de despertar y el desayuno,

de la noche y la cama

la noche y la cama.

 

Ser yo la que se repite

y no el día,

siempre el mismo día.

 

Ni volver la cabeza al crucifijo

y llorar por lo que no hice,

por lo que no pienso.

 

Tampoco hacer reverencia,

ni sonreírle a figuras de cera

para que me salven del

martirio de despertar

sobre la derecha

y pensarme la vida

y pensarme el hambre.

 

Y entonces ya no

llamar catedral

a esta patria mía

que se desnuda.

 

Y saberme libre,

atravesada por la luz

que negué,

llamarme agua verduzca,

agua noble,

agua de flores de fe.

 

Levantar el ojo al interior

y saludarme en el sueño.

 

Sonreírme despojada de cadenas.

Sonreírle a mi patria,

a mi patria desnuda.

 

 

Xanath Caraza

“Agítense en su recuerdo” por Xánath Caraza

 

Como hiedra nace sobre el árbol. Su crecimiento es canto del bosque. Un crujir en las ramas colma el vientre de deseo. Espera. Sigue cuidando su esencia para el momento justo. La genealogía se expande y recuerda los ancestrales troncos, las viejas ramas que estuvieron antes que ella. Dioses ceiba, agítense en su recuerdo. Como serpiente de cascabel hagan sonar las ramas. Que los labios se humedezcan, la boca muerda la piel y las pupilas se alarguen.

 

 

El árbol

espera

su esencia

como serpiente de cascabel

 

“Agítense en su recuerdo” es parte del poemario Ejercicio en la oscuridad de Xánath Caraza (Lobo Estepario Press, 2021). 

Xanath Caraza


Friday, July 24, 2026

Scholar, Dropout, Leader, Mentor

In Memoriam: My Mother: Scholar, Dropout, Leader, Mentor On Her Heavenly 100th Birthday

By Thelma T. Reyna

My mother, Maria Elia Guerra—small-town Texas girl known for her beauty and school smarts—was destined for great things. But she was smitten with a Laredo sailor stationed locally and dropped out after the eleventh grade to marry him. He was a junior high dropout, and poor…but she was smitten!


She married the sailor—Raul Clemente Tellez, my father—and they went on to have nine children. Their rocky 20-year marriage ended inevitably in divorce, which broke my heart, for I loved him deeply, as I loved her. But this is her story, how contradictions filled her life and defined her. But overall, a propitious beginning for the stellar student was waylaid by a teenaged couple—he aged 19 and she 17—who made unwise decisions and moved too fast.

A high-school dropout, my mother was my first mentor, my first role model of female leadership and success in the professional world. Lacking educational credentials, my mother turned to her native intelligence to break past the gatekeepers. She scored highly on the entrance test and quickly became a highly-ranked administrative supervisor at the local military base. She was queenly, a turban-like “beehive hairdo” adding six inches to her height. “She liked to run the show,” my cousins tell me. Energetic, highly competent. Never shied away from speaking out. Never feared challenges in this male world. She became a rare Mexican-American woman leading White people, mainly, in their work, telling high school and college grads what to do. Mom was also the only career woman in our poor neighborhood. 

But she didn’t acquire a veneer of gentility. She cursed “like a sailor,” my uncles would say. She had a facility with, and penchant for, profanity. She learned it from her father, my laconic Grandpa Guerra. Even in calm kitchen-table conversations devoid of conflict, smiling, engaged, my mother peppered her sentences with curse words. “Just a habit,” she intoned nonchalantly, when criticized. But her tongue became an excoriating furnace of fire when angered. Her mother once chastised her, saying, “Las maldiciones de una madre duelen mucho.” Yes, indeed. Because of the environment her words created, I vowed as a young girl to avoid profane language, and have upheld this. Ironically, my mother’s focus on being her natural self taught me behaviors in the opposite direction.

Conversely, my mother’s tough but kind heart provided respite and refuge to disenfranchised souls. Like stray pups taken benevolently in, fed and housed, runaway kids, or kids kicked out of their homes by draconian parents, found a landing spot in our house. Admittedly, with two young girls in our home, this was risky. But my brothers watched their friends and sisters like hawks, always protective. We had five bedrooms and three bathrooms, sufficient space for those in need of compassion.

Finally, piety didn’t lose against the arts of the occult, both domains embraced by my mother. She consulted tarot cards and fortune tellers. She traveled a hundred dusty miles to lie under the healing hands of curanderos in remote ranchitos. In evening hours, if churches had locked their doors for the day, mother sat on their steps, rosary in hand, and whispered the prayers she could recite in sleep. But such it is with our culture, where tradition and modern community allow dualities to co-exist.

This was my mother, replete with contradictions: incompletely educated yet brilliant; lacking glass-ceiling-breaking credentials but making up for this through her native intelligence and drive; rising in the professional world yet clinging to crude, profane habits diametric to her new persona; speaking tough yet sheltering discarded youths; and dabbling in occult practices while continuing to practice her conventional religion. Our family survived and thrived to our utmost, but financial stability escaped my mother, though she worked hard all her life. My love for her does not dim with time.

IN MEMORIAM
Maria Elia Guerra Tellez Ruth
July 27, 1926 - September 11, 2008




  

 


 


Thursday, July 23, 2026

Chicanonautica: A Whole Lotta Little Apocalypses Going On

  

by Ernest Hogan



There’s a whole lotta little apocalypses going on. Apocalypcitos? Apocalypsettes? Apocalypsoids? Another interlinguistic breakdown?


Not only did I mess up my schedule last week, but there’s smoke from wildfires darkening the skies, ICE is shooting people, the denizen of the White House continuously secretes incoherent stream-of-semiconsciousness, the wars are getting worse . . . keeping up with it all is becoming impossible.


Meanwhile, while the rest of the planet has been following the World Cup, I’ve been checking YouTube for coverage of the running of the bulls at the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. More happens in one encierro than in entire shelves of novels. I’m reminded that modern life is running through crowded streets with dangerous beasts. It always blows my mind, as we said back in the 1900s.



I also get ideas for my sci-fi bullfighting novel–something that the world doesn’t seem to want, but that probably means it’s what it needs. Maybe if I pitch it as being about a woman on a spiritual quest . . .


I’m also getting ideas for a sequel to my unsold novel Zyx; or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin. Anybody out there interested in publishing a Chicano vs. AI novel? I’m wondering how long the publishing industry as we know it will continue to exist. 


Who knows when my books will go back online on Amazon again . . .


I’m seventy years old. I’ve given up on trying to be commercial in a world where the corporate masters of global culture are being taken over by hallucinating AIs. And I keep getting all these ideas! This deranged world is a treasure trove of inspiration!



Guess I should just keep going, work on my bucket list novels, and keep looking for openings in the chaos that will allow me to sneak in, cause a little trouble because it happens to be the right thing to do.


And the really weird thing is I can’t stop. My monstrous imagination never sleeps, it has no off switch. I’m just going to let it go wild, do my best to make what it produces into something that someone will be amused or terminally disturbed by. 


Maybe it’s my real job.


If I need diversion, I’ll read more of Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Does Carlos count as a Chicano or a Latino? Is Peru the Mexico of South America? A Chicano does seem to be someone who pushes the limits. Latinos are what show biz thinks they can sell. And Hispanic is what law enforcement calls us.


I knew some Castaneda fans once who were . . .


There goes my brain again.



Ernest Hogan keeps on writing. The Father of Chicano Science Fiction refuses to die!


Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Carmela Full of Wishes-- Los deseos de Carmela



Written by Matt de la Peña. 

Illustrated by Christian Robinson. 



Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers

Print length: 40 pages

ISBN-10: 9780399549045

ISBN-13: 978-0399549045

Reading age: 3 - 6 years

Grade level: Preschool - 3



In their first collaboration since the Newbery Medal- and Caldecott Honor-winning Last Stop on Market Street, Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson deliver a poignant and timely new picture book that's sure to be an instant classic.


When Carmela wakes up on her birthday, her wish has already come true--she's finally old enough to join her big brother as he does the family errands. Together, they travel through their neighborhood, past the crowded bus stop, the fenced-off repair shop, and the panadería, until they arrive at the Laundromat, where Carmela finds a lone dandelion growing in the pavement. But before she can blow its white fluff away, her brother tells her she has to make a wish. If only she can think of just the right wish to make . . . 


With lyrical, stirring text and stunning, evocative artwork, Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson have crafted a moving ode to family, to dreamers, and to finding hope in the most unexpected places.



Los deseos de Carmela




Hasta ahora el cumpleaños de Carmela no puede ser mejor. Hoy es lo suficientemente mayor para acompañar a su hermano en su recorrido por la ciudad.  La tarde que pasan juntos se llena con la magia de lo que ven a su alrededor: desde el brillante sol de los campos hasta las golosinas en la vidriera de la panadería. Pero cuando recoge un diente de león que crece en el concreto, se pregunta qué otra cosa podría desear ... y decide entonces salir en busca del deseo perfecto.


En esta nueva colaboración, Matt de la Peña y Christian Robinson, galardonados por su trabajo en Última parada de la calle Market, que ganó la Medalla Newbery y Mención de Honor Caldecott por la edición en inglés, han creado una oda, conmovedora y actual, al coraje de los soñadores y al poder de la esperanza.



Review


"The award-winning team behind Last Stop on Market Street portrays Carmela’s Spanish-speaking community as a vibrant place of possibility, and Robinson’s acrylic-and-cutout spreads introduce readers to street vendors, workers in the fields, and sweeping views of the sea. Sensitively conceived and exuberantly executed, Carmela’s story shines."—Publishers Weekly, starred review


“Full of rich details, sharp and restrained writing, and acrylic paintings that look textured enough to rise off the page . . . Another near-perfect slice of life from a duo that has found a way to spotlight underrepresented children without forgetting that they are children first.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review 


“Carmela’s journey of wishing, waiting, and wanting resonates on many levels; an important addition to bookshelves everywhere."—School Library Journal, starred review 


“[A] beautiful book about the love of siblings and community. . . . A must read for everyone.”—School Library Connection, starred review




Matt de la Peña is the Newbery Medal-winning author of Last Stop on Market Street. He is also the author of Love; A Nation's Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis; and six critically acclaimed young-adult novels. Matt teaches creative writing and visits schools and colleges throughout the country. Matt lives in Brooklyn, NY. You can visit Matt at mattdelapena.com or on Twitter @mattdelapena.


Christian Robinson is a 2016 Caldecott Honoree and also received a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for his art in Last Stop on Market Street. His picture books include the Gaston and Friends series; Leo: A Ghost Story; School's First Day of School; The Smallest Girl in the Smallest Grade; Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker; and many more. You can visit Christian at theartoffun.com or on Instagram @theartoffun.









Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Reluctant Climb to Blue Happiness

 The Blue Heron of Happiness Atop Tallac Knoll

Michael Sedano


Three mallard ducklings cut through Baldwin Lake’s green algae surface leaving a trail of open water in their wake. Algae quickly fills the gaps behind the ducklings, the sole bird life Thelma and I observe along this shoreline. 

Our previous visit to the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia, we’d twice come face-to-face with a magnificent Great Blue Heron. I’m hoping for another sighting today at the Turtle Pond. I hoped hard. I am daunted by thoughts of climbing the steps to the top of Tallac Knoll. 

Thelma and I point our way toward the Turtle Pond, a quarter-mile distant with a slight upgrade. I adjust the strap of my 300mm lens preparing to slide it off at first sighting. The blue could fly away when we arrive. More likely if it’s there it will tend to ignore me. A ver.


I don’t want to climb to the top of the knoll and the upgrade is a feature of the place but that’s where we need to be. I adjust the camera strap and pull the 300mm lens against me so it won’t bounce during the trek ahead. 

My eyes take in the road ahead. No shade at all every step of the way where we learn if that blue has hung around the Arboretum and is at the pond again.

The Arboretum’s eight-dollars-a-ride tram passes us on its way to the pond, the driver’s narrative keeps his tram entertained and informed. We pause. In a few moments the tram arrives at Turtle Pond. I watch with anticipation: will the driver stop and give his tourists a glimpse of a gorgeous water bird, my Great Blue Heron?

Thelma and I do an about face and head toward the herb garden. No heron today.

Suddenly a blue heron appears from the lake. It soars into the sky almost directly overhead, toward Turtle Pond. Then the magnificent silhouette wheels toward Tallac Knoll and its froggy feast.



Rustic cement steps twist and turn. The steps rise irregularly giving the ascent to the top of Tallac Knoll an extra measure of exercise. With urgency in my step as I pull myself up the handrail, I calculate the likelihood a crowd could spook the bird into flight. The Arboretum has good attendance today, but thankfully a sparse few appear as Thelma and I summit the knoll. 

The Great Blue Heron stands like a statue at the far bank of the narrow pond, waiting for a lens to point its direction.

Herons like to stand immobile for long passages of time. A twitch, a slow turn to the left or right offer more or less, the same picture. After long minutes the bird may lift a foot, stretch a bony leg, then freeze again. After some time, the bird will change locations and fly away in the blink of an eye, but not before a happy watchful photographer captures the despedida.


Today, the blue heron steps closer to my spot behind the rushes where frogs lurk. The creature resumes its statuesque pose. Slowly the heron does as herons do, it forms an “S” with its neck. When the bird straightens, we are face to face. The Great Blue Heron stares at me and gives me a yawing laugh.  

It has been a good day to climb to the top of Tallac Knoll.

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Tarde de poesía en 4Regiones por Xánath Caraza

Tarde de poesía en 4Regiones por Xánath Caraza

 


El próximo martes 28 de julio de 6 a 7:30 p.m. en 4Regiones, Primo Verdad 23 en Xalapa, Veracruz, Naty Blásquez y Xánath Caraza compartirán poesía con los xalapeños. La profesora Malena Flores será la maestra de ceremonias para este evento poético y los asistentes podrán compartir un poema al final de la sesión. La entrada es libre y para el público de todas las edades.

 

Para corresponder el apoyo de 4Regiones se sugiere el consumo de una bebida.

 

Ojalá nos acompañen y traigan un poema para celebrar la palabra.

 

¡Qué la poesía nos salve!

 

Malena Flores

Malena Flores es docente jubilada, feliz abuela y socióloga trotamundos. Promotora de lectura y escritura. Gusta del arte, especialmente literatura y cine. Prefiere escribir verso libre y relatos cortos

 

Naty Blasquez

Naty Blásquez es poeta originaria de Coatepec, Veracruz. Es licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Hispánicas y Especialista en Promoción de la Lectura. Se dedica a la enseñanza del español y, además, es estudiante de la Maestría en Educación. En el año 2019 obtuvo el tercer lugar del Premio Nacional al Estudiante Universitario por su obra titulada “Lord Ganesh”. Algunos de sus poemas se han publicado en revistas como Pérgola de Humo, Tintero Blanco, Tiempos Distemporáneos y Cuaderna Vía. Es coautora de la antología poética titulada Jacarandas floreciendo de este lado del patio. Poetas veracruzanxs nacidxs en los 90.

 

Xanath Caraza

Xánath Caraza es viajera, poeta, narradora y traductora. Escribe para La Bloga y la Revista Literaria Monolito. Es autora de Lágrima roja, Ocelocihuatl, Balamkú, Labios de piedra, Conjuro, Sílabas de viento, Donde la luz es violeta, Tinta negra / Black Ink, entre otros poemarios. En 2018 fue doblemente galardonada por los International Latino Book Awards, recibió primer lugar por Lágrima roja y Sin preámbulos/Without Preamble como “Mejor libro de poesía en español” y “Mejor libro de poesía bilingüe”. Sílabas de viento recibió el 2015 International Book Award for Poetry. Fue Writer-in-Residence de Westchester Community College, Nueva York, 2016-2019.  En 2014 recibió la Beca Nebrija para Creadores del Instituto Franklin, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares en España. En 2013 fue nombrada número uno de los diez mejores autores latinos para leer por LatinoStories.com. Ha sido traducida al inglés, italiano, rumano y griego; ha sido parcialmente traducida al náhuatl, portugués, hindi y turco. 



Friday, July 17, 2026

Photo Essay: Published Party with Women Who Submit

 Melinda Palacio

 

 

All aboard. Last week, I took the Amtrak from Santa Barbara to Union Station to support my friend and fellow Women Who Submit Ventura chapter member Stephanie Barbé Hammer. We met two other Ventura members Lori Anaya and Mona Alvarado Frazier. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo sure has grown this organization that started as a fun way to encourage herself and her friends to send their work out for publication. Women Who Submit have hosted writers conferences, open mics, workshops and more. Friday's Published Party was at the Democracy Center in Downtown Los Angeles. Fellow Santa Barbara friend, Stephanie, was one of the selected readers. I'm sure glad I made the last-minute decision to attend the party. It was a fun, inspiring event filled with several friends from my hometown. 



The cake

Back row, Mona Alvarado Frazier, Xochitl Julisa Bermejo, Stephanie Hammer

front row Lori Anaya and Melinda Palacio, the Ventura WWS chapter and Cofounder/Executive Director Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Stephanie Barbé Hammer


Melinda and Mona

A guy showing off on his bicycle before the reading and party

The Democracy Center was easy to get to from Union Station.

Melinda Palacio and Luivette Resto

Time to train back to Santa Barbara.