Labor (of Love) Day: Special Edition

The Things We Missed

michael sedano

Last week, La Bloga-Tuesday shared a foto essay of a pair of extraordinary events. Any community can expand its literary horizons while discovering a hidden well of poets and gente who write. Here's a link to last week's La Bloga-Tuesday. Please enjoy it, as well as these vital additions to that week's celebration of cultura, poesía, and good people all around

 Altadena Laureates: The Fotos We Missed

Altadena Library Staff, far left and far right.

Altadena Poets Laureate

front: Teresa Mae Chuc, Thelma T. Reyna

back: Nikki Winslow, Library. Hazel Clayton Harrison. Carla R. Sameth. Linda Dove. Morgan Gaskell (special guest poet). Sehba Sarwar and Lester Graves Lennon, Poets Laureate 2024-2026. Ashley Watts, Library.

The unidentified library staff member won praise from the grateful poets for her wonderful assistance in everything from moving chairs to adjusting microphones. Mi'ja, we'll get your name. Note: Ashley Watts, Assistant Library Director.

Women Who Submit: The Essay We Missed

Editor's Note: La Bloga-Tuesday last week shared portraits of the WWS writers reading their own stuff at historic Campo de Cahuenga located at the back range of the Hollywood Hills. Independent writer, Paula Arechiga, attended the reading. La Bloga is happy to share Archiga's report of the event.

CHICANA WRITERS & COMMUNITY BEARERS

By Paula Arechiga

 

Gathered near the anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium - Aug. 29, 1970. It’s going to be 54 years this Thursday. Even at 36 years of age and having been raised throughout LA my whole life, this history, this lineage, is still only a handful of facts. Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ruben Salazar, Walk Outs, Chicano Power, Brown Berets. Maybe my mind collapses the Chicano Movement with the Chicano Moratorium. This is why events like this are so important. They help us root ourselves into our collective memory and help us orient ourselves on how we got here.

 

Miranda McCord

We were greeted by the Director of the museum, Miranda McCord who thanks us for attending and the panelists. Xochitl opens us up with a land acknowledgement and does not shy away from the truth of how this land came under US possession. The whole event is a harmonious song of remembering, facing, embracing, reclaiming. 

 

Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera is our first Chicana writer at the podium and we’re transported to the home of 5 young primas who “for the first time in never”, their spring breaks land on the same week - from her book “STORIES ALL OUR OWN”. But their plans for Disneyland, movies and adventures are changed when chicken pox infects the clan. The story of the chicken-pox covered primas puts the biggest smile on my face, it’s so wholesome, silly and familiar.

 

Annalicia Aguilar

Roberta Martinez, Mona Alvarado, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Xochitl introduces the next Chicana writer, the youngest among them, Annalicia Aguilar. She reads us works from her upcoming book “Broken but Holding” and her deliveries are felt deeply. One of her pieces she reads to us is “Weapons in the Womb”, the image of pregnant dolphins self aborting when captured comes to mind. 

 

The next Chicana writer Xochitl introduces is Mona Alvardo Frazier and she reads us two sections from her 2nd book “A Bridge Home”. We’re transported to a classroom where young latine students are watching a film of the Chicano Moratorium and they’re shaken to their core at how the event ends in violence at the hands of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. I feel the anger in my body activate as a new perspective of that fateful day weaves itself into my psyche. The internal mantra goes, “Our stories are so powerful.” The next thought, “No wonder the majority of shows for us and about us get canceled - Gentefied, This Foo and Gordita Chronicles come to mind.

 

If my memory serves me correct, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera comes up and introduces her Writer Wife, Xochitl who reads from her 2nd book “INCANTATION: LOVE POEMS FOR BATTLE SITES”. One of the last poems she reads to us is dedicated to the children of Gaza and all the children. There’s a heaviness in realizing while we are gathered in community, others around the world fight for their existence, their humanity.

 

Xochitl introduces the last of the Chicana writers, Roberta H. Martinez and she read us a number of shorter pieces. Before she starts though, she tells us one word “Vote” and begins to read a piece about the 4th of July. I loved the way she embodied the different voices of her pieces. 

 

Sometimes when I’m immersed in an experience, it’s hard to commit all the details to memory but what never fails me are the feelings. This gathering left me feeling  full, muy contenda, like I had just sat with tias, primas y hermanas for the last two hours and they shared their full selves with us. It felt like a returning home, to a remembering. It only strengthens my belief that more gatherings such as this need to happen. I’m grateful to a fellow community organizer who shared about this event or else I would’ve missed it and what a loss that would’ve been.