Amelia María de la Luz Montes (ameliamontes.com)
I ask you to
read literature every day of your life, Queridas y Queridos.
Read literature to save your life, to save another by reading to her, to
him. Read. Especially today, this very moment, we
are living in a time when quantity is prized, quality is ignored, speed is the
ticket, not time for thinking. We live in a time when technological proficiency
is expanding, yet empathy and curiosity about one another is waning. Our sense of community and communal
care is diminishing. The pithy quip is favored over the complex and multi-layered
explanation. “Just spit it
out. Time’s a wastin’” instead of
“Come. Sit. Tell me the story—all of it. I want to understand every dimension.”
And in the news this week, sequestration became the word: across the board cuts
without consideration as to the program, the individuals, or environment
impacted. Every one and every
program is the same. Nuance is
lost and replaced with generalizations.
Perhaps we are
living inside the pages of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time:
“As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball . . . Over and
over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm.
All identical. Like the
houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.”
Perhaps we have
forgotten to consider the pages of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “He spent six hours examining things,
trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the
hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”
Enter Laurie Ann Guerrero and Pablo Miguel Martinez whose books of poetry refuse to conform or
forget. Their words respond with breath, rhythm, pain, joy, truth.
Laurie Ann
Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying which won the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry
Prize (selected by Francisco X. Alarcón), sings of wildly unexpected
perspectives. To order a copy: CLICK HERE!
 |
| Laurie Ann Guerrero |
“My Mother Woke a
Rooster” is one splendid example:
My Mother Woke a
Rooster
She was amazed
by her wide presence in the tiny kitchen.
The incredible
strength in her thighs.
The ease of the
strut.
In a pan hanging
above the stove,
she caught the
reflection of herself and swooped her rubbery cockscomb back,
letting it fall
over her brow.
She pursed her
red lips, her mouth just visible deep inside a sharp beak.
She watched in
wonder.
The staccatoed
swivel of her neck rubbing what the night before was the wrinkled throat of an
old woman.
Her eyes now
fitting on the face of a fighting cock.
Her red tip toes
now claws and rough as rope.
Francisco X.
Alarcón describes Guerrero’s poetry as “filled with the nuanced beauty and
complexity of the everyday—a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens,
a grandfather’s cancer—A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of
creation and destruction.”
 |
| Pablo Miguel Martínez |
In Brazos,
Carry Me, Pablo Miguel
Martínez takes us to el Rio Brazos in Tejas, one of the historical sites of the
Mexican American war. Martínez
invites us to remember and to contemplate how this history has shaped us
now. (To order CLICK HERE!)
How brilliant it is, then, to
take such a complex epic event, and begin the book with the “paletero,” waking
the neighborhood early in the morning:
Toll
Listen to the
tinkling
of the
paletero’s simple bells—
they rattle a
religion deep
inside
you—escúchalas
con todo tu
corazón—
their song
reaches heaven
long before the
clang
of ponderous
cathedral bronze.
These poems
radiate with profound simplicity.
Michael Hames-Garcia writes:
“Pablo Miguel Martínez’s poetry reminds me what it is that I love about
language and its ability to evoke the profoundest of emotion from quotidian
description . . . Each poem is a gem—of wisdom, of passion, of sensuality, of
sorrow, of joy, and of everyday beauty and embedded history.”
And felicidades to Kórima Press on this new book of poetry. Check out Kórima Press to read about this important independent publisher (click here!).
__________________________________
As well as Pablo
Miguel Martínez and Laurie Ann Guerrero’s work, the artist Favianna Rodriguez
collaborates with other Latina and Latino artists, agitating with color, to
call attention to Immigration issues throughout the country. (click here to see Favianna in action!)
 |
| Favianna Rodriguez |
With her bold, eye
catching, and breathtakingly gorgeous art, she is placing a powerful lens on
the struggle of the undocumented.
And some of them have joined her team bravely identifying themselves as Undocu-Queer, advocating for LGBTQ rights.
In the face of
sequestration (which also means “to hide away”) U.S. Latina/Latino writers and
artists are boldly alive, loudly speaking through their art.
Click here for recent article on art and immigration.
___________________________________
More! More! ¡Mas! ¡Mas!
This coming
week, a number of Latina and Latino writers will be reading their work at The Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Boston, MA, (March 6-9). Read our La Bloga writer, Olga García
Echeverría’s important posting about working class economies (which explains "who" really can get to such conferences) (click here). She mentions writers such as Joy Castro, and Eduardo C. Corral. Also check out Iris Gomez, poet and nationally recognized expert on immigrant's rights, and Alex Espinoza, whose book, The Five Acts of Diego León is just out. Check out the AWP
site to find out more. Don’t miss
these writers if you are headed to Boston and the AWP!
Also this coming
week, (March 7-9) in New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) is
hosting the First Biennial Latina/Latino Literary Theory and Criticism
Conference (click here). The theme is: “Haciendo Caminos: Mapping the Futures
of U.S. Latina/Latino Literatures.”
The conference committee describes the conference as aiming “to draw a
critical mass of U.S. Latina/o literary critics and theorists, both
foundational thinkers and emerging voices, for the first time in the history of
the field . . . Located in New York City, home to one of the largest and most
diverse Latina/Latino populations in the country and birthplace to some of the
most important literary movements in Latina/Latino literature, this conference
boldly calls for a fundamental reawakening of the field . . . In an era when
Ethnic Studies is being attacked, we must brazenly champion, across our
departments and institutions, a brilliant literature and scholarship that
shines a path to a more complex and just humanity.”
Features
speakers: Ramón Saldívar, Mary Pat
Brady, José Esteban Muñoz, Helena María Viramontes
Our La Bloga
writer, Melinda Palacio mentioned “Haciendo Caminos” in her posting this week
(click here).
I will be
speaking at “Haciendo Caminos” as well.
So if you are in New York, check out my panel. I will be reading from my Diabetes Chronicles manuscript with Professor Meredith
Abarca and Karen Cruz Stapleton.
#53—Saturday,
March 9th
2-3:15p.m.
Food, Memory,
and Colonialism’s Inscription on Latina Bodies
Room 1.65
Meredith Abarca,
University of Texas, El Paso, “Latina/o Memoirs and Food Sensory Memory”
Amelia Maria de
la Luz Montes, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “The Diabetes Mestizaje
Cronica: Theory and Practice.”
Karen Cruz
Stapleton, North Carolina State University, “Sugar, Desire and Power in Loida
Martiza Perez’s Geographies of Home”
Moderator: Adam Berlin, John Jay College,
moderator
Gracias dear La
Bloga readers. I am wishing you a
month of March packed full of passion, reawakening, nuance, time for reading
and writing, pursuing your art, time for connecting with nuestras hermanas y
hermanos.
¡Les mando a
todas buenas energies!
Lots going on this week!
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