Michael Sedano
A literary anthology can be a snapshot or a portrait. Both supply value. Some snapshots present a marvelous glimpse of what the world looks like in that 1/250th second slice of time. Here, time and light come to a halt in mid act with no inkling if unheard pipes will trill or squeal. A studied portrait, in contrast, represents an artist’s determination to expose depth of character, make a significant statement about time and idea through an image that reaches beyond that 1/250th of a second exposure, out of the future through the present and into the past.¡Ban This! is a snapshot. Editor Santino J. Rivera cast a wide net and attracts dozens of new and emerging voices. Rivera buttresses the nouveau with the solid quality of several well-respected artists. In putting the collection together, as any editor, Rivera treads a hazy line between all the stuff that’s fit to print and selecting only superb exemplars of the best stuff.
Aside from making a great gift,¡Ban This! will occupy a valued space in anyone’s reference shelves. The collection has some literary gems, particularly among the poets and a couple of de rigueur essays. The editor believes the collection informs a notion of an arroba aesthetic, that weird spelling that supplants gender inflection with unpronounceability. This aesthetic finds a tongue with the publisher’s disclaimer, that the company “assumes no liability should you get your feelings hurt. Except you. And you. And you, too.” The attitude is more the editor’s than most of the collected writers.
Do Xicanarrobas bleed politics, nurture anger, shake fists at power structures, live for confrontation? Not really. The editor makes a big deal about orthography and readers like me who reject that arroba barbarism. Then he avoids analysis, deferring to the contents of the anthology as the “definition” of “Xican@” literature.
Despite the editorial shortcoming, ¡Ban This! makes a valuable contribution to a bookshelf or library. Rivera’s assembled a magnificent variety of work valuable for the breadth of coverage, from poem to political science to science fiction to anthropology and history.
Half the book’s 332 pages publish short poems. Opting for quality, the first two poets out the gate are Francisco X. Alarcón and Luis Urrea.
Alarcón’s bilingual work features intricate architecture that defies conventional use of the page. Instead, an Alarcón poem may be read from left to right or top to bottom, or alternatively, read an English stanza then its corresponding Spanish stanza, plus the left/right/top/bottom opportunity. Alarcón invests his poems with multiple possibilities and resources, at once thoughtful and diverting.
Urrea’s lead poem, “Arizona Lamentation,” is a spectacularly difficult poem. Opening with the strident phrase, “We were happy here before they came”, the persona expresses resentment of newcomers. Except the persona speaks in an anglo voice, projecting fantasy history onto the land, “Then their envy, their racial hatred / Made us build a border fence / To protect our children. / But they kept coming.” Just as the alarmed reader is about to toss the book out the window at that crud, the persona shifts, “But their wagons kept coming and coming. / And their soldiers.” And in closing, the one voice again becomes displaced by the other, while between the lines their sentiments echo one another’s fears. What an intractable mess.
Oddly positioned, near the end but not the final piece, is Odilia Galván Rodriguez’ title piece, “¡Ban This!” The piece reflects well off Urrea’s. Spoken in a raza voice, Rodriguez’ poem is one of puro affirmation. Addressing book banners, the poem illuminates qualities and beliefs supporting raza peoplehood, not a subversion of the anglo internal colony. The poet’s restrained anger sounds loud and clear. It doesn’t need a gimmick, an “X” or an arroba, to declare unequivocally, “words live / we remember / them, our love, our stories ~ / history, cannot be erased / not banned”
Chicanas Chicanos write a lot of poetry. Maybe that’s why ¡Ban This! has such a heavy proportion of it. The prose work--fiction, memoir, essay—offers a rich potpourri of information, but suffers from editorial neglect. As an editor, Rivera needed to get after sloppy spelling and stilted construction. Instead, it appears the editor simply cut and pasted submissions, favoring laissez-faire publication rather than exercise the editorial authority writers deserve.
Two seminal essays merit widespread reading. Roberto “Dr. Cintli” Rodriguez’ “From Manifest Destiny to Manifest Insanity,” and Rodolfo Acuña’s “Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name: Censorship in Tucson.” The essays are scholarly, and entirely readable. That’s less true of other prose work in the collection.
David Cid’s “Silent No Longer: The Visual Poetic Resistance of Chicana/o Cinema in the Experimental Films of Frances Salomé España” is a recycled term paper. Cid gives interesting information but it’s nearly indigestible owing to that seminar paper style. Cid promotes the “Chicana / o” construction, rather than the arroba. In one sentence the trick gets away from Cid and his editor; one woman is labeled a “Chicana / o”.
Del Zamora’s Los Angeles Times piece, “Where Are The Latinos In Films, TV?” is one of those pointless Op-Ed pieces that complains only to close with irony instead of constructive ideas. “It’s either that or stop purchasing tickets and renting videos of movies and television shows that do not include us. After all, as one Hollywood executive explained to me, ‘We don’t have to put you in movies…there were no Latinos in Gotham City and you still came.”
Miguel Jimenez, “Veterans Empathize: HB2281 and The Attack On Mexican History And Culture” illustrates the cyclical nature of Chicana Chicano history. Jimenez’ memoir of his Iraq service echoes draft-era complaints that military service validates one’s identity as a Unitedstatesian, even in the face of rejection and exclusion.
Maria Teresa Ceseña brings a homily on self-identity, “The Turtle Caught in the Fire.” She opens with a powerfully composed non-fiction equivalent of spoken word art. Here Ceseña the academica advances a feminist rationale she defines as “oppositional consciousness”. She follows that introduction with her poem, “Piecing It Together,” then spins off from there describing a life experience in much the ways anthologies describe the status of a literature. Put the shards together under a blazing sun and for one moment achieve a freeze frame of where everything is, in relation to anything else. Except the point of the essay curiously is about giving up. Ceseña encourages dreamers that it’s never too late to change by giving up an old dream in view of what’s hot right now.
This reader is grateful for the end-wrapper from Mario Barrera, “Science and Religion in a Border Town,” a generous helping of humor to lighten the weight of the deadly earnest essayists who’ve preceded Barrera’s memoir.
Andrea J. Serrano's "Lament" exemplifies how Chicanas Chicanos respond to banning books. Not with a big knife in a steady hand, but a broken heart and a loaded ink pen.
La Bloga friend Frank Sifuentes' body is shutting down, surrounded by love and family, as it should be.
Frank's daughter sends along her father's news. I'm sure Frank would have preferred to deliver the news en propria persona, with a joke and a winding tale with a twist at the end. Nos wachamos, Frank.
The crisis. Oscar Zeta Acosta refuses to go inside, where a full house awaits the Brown Buffalo's reading. Outside, spectators mill about in panicky unease. The door opens and Frank steps outside. Zeta explains his refusal to go on. They negotiate and Zeta enters to take the stage.
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| Tomás Atencio, Frank Sifuentes, Alurista, Oscar Acosta. Juan Felipe Herrera in background, and unidentified USC co-ed. © michael v. sedano |
Ay, Frank, so many stories, so little time.
Here's Frank at the 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto. Yesterday • Today • Tomorrow, that reunited dozens of artists from that first Festival de Flor y Canto.
You can hear Frank read at 1973's floricanto by visiting the USC Digital Library archive.
Mailbag
Barrios Interviews Junot Diaz
La Bloga friend Gregg Barrios advises his recent interview with author-on-the-ascendancy Junot Diaz is at the Los Angeles Review of Books site.It's a rewarding interview between two long-time compañeros, for, as Barrios points out:
Reading Díaz is to discover a new voice in American lit that continually amazes as it informs, his text a vast storehouse of literary references, footnotes, and genre-bending throwaways. His groundbreaking use of Spanish without italics or translation is deeply refreshing to Latino readers, as it is to any reader who recognizes it as part and parcel to the bilingual Latino experience.
Closet of Discarded Dreams at Tia Chucha's September 14
Garcia will be at the Latino Book & Family Festival on Saturday, as noted in Monday's Daniel Olivas column.
On-Line Floricanto for Nine Ten Twelve
Joe Navarro, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Fernando Rodríguez, Tracy Corey, Victor Avila
“It Must Be the Chicano In Me” Joe Navarro
“Search and Recovery” Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
“Indocumentado” Fernando Rodríguez
“Listen” Tracy Corey
“Ban This Poem!” Victor Avila
It Must Be the Chicano In Me
Joe Navarro
It must be the Chicano in me
But when I listen to the music of
Lila Downs singing from the depths
Of her soul or Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan
From Jalisco, the land of my ancestors
Celebrating el 16 de septiembre
I feel proud to be me
When campesinos demand fair wages
That their invisible hands have earned
Or when people openly declare,
“I am undocumented!” fearlessly
Yet knowing they will be forcibly
Detached from the only lives they know
I feel their plight and injuries
When I hear La Raza speaking
English, Spanish and Spanglish
At the mercado or in the park
And when I see mothers bringing
Their children to school in one hand
With younger siblings in strollers
I feel at home in my comunidad
At every tardeada, fiesta, baile or concierto
Where people dance and enjoy music
At marches where workers honor the
Tradition May Day and workers’ rights
At every gathering that honors heroes
Martyrs and luchas for human dignity
I feel the aspirations of my people
I extract pride from holidays
Inspired by people’s desires for
Self-determination and independence
And from magnificent murals and poemas
Honoring our indigenous traditions
And struggles to escape domination
…It must be the Chicano in me
Search and Recovery
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
for Brooke
is not like search and rescue, not like the 10 o’clock news,
not like blond daughters sucked out through windows
in the dark night. There is no line of volunteers
combing the woods at the edge of a peach town,
no fleet of police dragging the lake, no pencil sketches
or time-stamped videos of dark men in black hoodies,
no midnight vigils blurred by hundreds of burning white candles,
no posters, no milk cartons, and no alerts.
There is plenty of desert silence between two women
scaling the Atascosa mountains like two specs of dust.
They search for a young man shot by his coyote and discarded
by a wash with cement blocks and black kites fallen from the sky,
or maybe black tires taken from a truck. They exhaust
unreliable reports in a futile act of deciphering hazy, hot landmarks.
They hike and carry what supplies they can slung over backs:
extra water, socks, electrolyte pills, a couple of apples, peanut butter.
Before the sunsets, they set up camp beneath the sky
and wait for the sun to rise so they can try again.
In the day, they search for what remains,
In the night, they fear what remains will look like,
and each woman secretly holds hope close to her chest
that if she crosses a bundle tomorrow, it will once again be branches.
Indocumentado
Fernando Rodríguez
Colgué el teléfono y una lagrima rodo
Del otro lado de la bocina mi hijo el mas pequeño
Aun residen en México,
Como quisiera poder abrazarlos,
La vida si que es dura
No se puede tener todo
Pero valdrá la pena, si le hecho ganas y me supero
Al colgar ese teléfono
Le pedí a mi dios valor, fuerza y paciencia
Para lograr lo que el güero tiene
Su familia a su lado
Veo como todos los días gente se divorcia, separa y junta
Sin saber el verdadero valor de una familia
Sin entender la dedicación,
Yo no soy nadie pa’ juzgar
Solo relato mi versión
Mañana es lunes y otro día de trabajo
Otra vez me la rifo manejando
Iremos para el campo
Pizcando paso mi vida
Para ganarme la plata
Con la que vive mi familia
En mi pobre tierra mexicana
La vida no vale nada
Y menos acá
La gente le da importancia
A un pedazo de papel
Que a la misma vida
El cuello blanco controla todo
Sin ensuciarse las manos,
¿Y yo?
Un simple campesino
Que me ensucio de barro
¡No controlo nada!
Tiene más poder un perro
Por tener esos papeles
Desearía ser importante
Para ayudar a mi gente
El teléfono acorta y alarga mi dolor
Escucho a mis seres queridos
Pero no los puedo abrazar
Tengo que ser conformista
Para poder aguantar
La dificultad no es vida
Pero no hay para mas…
Listen
Tracy Corey
~ for my grandmother, Almira Miller (1924-2011)
Listen to your grandmothers. They are the voices
of your bones whispering to your wings
before grace has found you. When she warned
of that boy, hear her history, and when she closed
her eyes and kissed the baby, see her heart
wink at her feet for the blisters that delivered such beauty.
Listen to her cooking, informing you of the beauty,
of the beaches and the barrios that feed the voices
calling from the winding roads that lead to her heart
and breathe through her veins, giving air to her wings
that felt, when the nights got so dark, a longing that closed
the days with a notion of something that warned
her to listen. And when she did, she was warned
of a life begun again in subtitles, but a life of beauty
without the hardship of hungry days and closed
borders where her children spoke with their voices
bouncing in boxes rather than sailing on wings
that aren’t too heavy from the days to beat in the heart
that can listen because it can hear. And planted in her heart
she wrapped the deepest seeds of home’s garden, warned
of the days when nothing would feel so urgent as wings
to take her home, to the backbone of beauty,
and even the sorrow, just for the familiar voices,
enough to sometimes make you forget the closed
borders. Listen to the seeds she wrapped in the closed
petals of the bright flowers she planted in her heart
and you’ll hear the stories of so many, their voices
building a homesick choir that when warned
of wasted despair all they can recite is, “Beauty
is beauty, even when it flies on broken wings.”
Listen to their song, delivered on the aging wings
of your grandmothers, who know the secret to closed
borders is traveling hand-in-hand with beauty
in the exploding seeds of home’s garden, the heart.
And just for good measure, let despair be warned,
the secret is carried in the many voices
of secret-keepers who, despite being warned
by sorrow, listen to history and sing with their wings.
Ban This Poem!
Victor Avila
Before it is read
And the seed of its ideas spread-
Ban this poem.
For though subtle and unassuming
Consider this a warning
for those hard of heart and fearful of change.
Ban this poem-
Create a law and demand it!
Or it will be a curse to those who live by the tenets of hate.
Xenophobes and war-mongers
this is your chance
to rip up these thoughts before they escape.
Yes, ban this poem
before it is nailed into the door of our consciousness
or a transmutation will take place.
It will certainly gain entrance
and disrupt the lives
of those wrapped up in a barbed wire embrace.
For it does what a poem
is supposed to do
and tap into a humanity we thought once lost.
It is a glimmer of new awakenings,
and a fulcrum of tolerance.
It is a blanket for the homeless should the cold set in.
So ban this poem-It is dangerous.
And out of place with society's values.
Lock it up in the darkest of prisons for it is a contagion of enlightenment...
...And a missive of acceptance...a dispatch of hope.
So ban this poem.
YES, BAN THIS POEM!!!
BIOS
Joe Navarro, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Fernando Rodríguez, Tracy Corey, Victor Avila
“It Must Be the Chicano In Me” Joe Navarro
“Search and Recovery” Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
“Indocumentado” Fernando Rodríguez
“Listen” Tracy Corey
“Ban This Poem!” Victor Avila
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