Thursday, July 31, 2025

The New Elites and the War Against Knowledge

                                                                                   
The Breadth of Knowledge
                              
     I’m sitting back and watching the big boys go after each other, the government attacking CBS, Paramount, ABC, manhandling the most prestigious law firms in D.C., and shaking down major universities, like an old-time Mafia boss, threatening them all for millions of dollars, that or break their kneecaps. 
     Powerful institutions, like Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, the University of California, cowering under the pen of the Justice Department. Ironic, U.S. presidents, vice-presidents, Secretaries of State, department heads, Washington lawyers, judges and legislators have received degrees from many schools like these. Why don't universities put up more of a fight, many of them endowed with millions, if not billons, of dollars in reserve? 
     What have they done to receive such ire? The main infraction they committed was refusing to bend a knee to the government’s demand that they follow the ultra-conservative education agenda set down by the Heritage Foundations’ Project 2025, the new administration's agenda, of which the president during the elections said he knew nothing, and anti-immigrant brain, Stephen Miller, when asked about Project 2025, looked confused and said he knew little about it. 
     The universities have really done nothing wrong, so the government created infractions, such as antisemitism and racial discrimination on campus. If those don’t work, the government falls back on the old time-tested boogey man, DEI, “Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion,” a policy meant to increase the enrollment of black and brown students in college classrooms but is seen as divisive by the New Elites. 
     DEI encouraged faculty to design a university classroom curriculum that reflects the true history of the United States, including the contributions of immigrants who helped build the country. This isn’t new. In the 1960s, under a federal policy called Affirmative Action, different states designed their own equity programs. 
     In California, Cal State and UC campuses instituted the first (EOP) Education Opportunity Programs, which assisted “underrepresented” students in college admissions. Some academically talented high school graduates, unaware of university requirements, were admitted provisionally. They showed potential to complete a university education, and, according to studies, most did, becoming teachers, doctors, and lawyers. 
     It was during this time, around 1969, that I, a blue-collar kid from a working-class family, completed my stint in the Army and decided to enroll in a community college, not really understanding anything about the process since no one in my family had completed a university education. My mother did receive a cosmetology certificate from the local community college.
     I’d come from a military institution steeped in diversity. I remember one day sitting with some friends, looking across an army post, and commenting about all the soldiers of every color and creed walking the pathways. In Vietnam, we were an integrated military, in every squad, platoon, and company, Whites, Chicanos, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans. Naively, I took it for granted college would be the same, a place of learning filled with people of different ethnicities and religions. 
     It wasn’t, not in Santa Monica, not in Los Angeles, and not across the state of California. Even though our parents’ tax dollars helped support public higher education, we weren't benefitting from it, and we had every right to be there. 
     My first days on campus, I saw hardly any black or brown students anywhere. I saw a sea of “White” kids from L.A.’s influential Westside communities, even a few friends from high school. In time, my eyes adjusted, like moving from the dark into the light, I began seeing small pockets of Chicanos and African American students tucked away in corners of the cafeteria, a classroom, the library, or auditorium. The weird thing was my college sat right across the street from one of the largest Mexican and Black communities on L.A.’s Westside, Santa Monica’s Pico Neighborhood, where Mexicans had begun migrating as far back as 1920, when my grandparents first arrived from Mexico and settled in the area. 
     It took Mexican American students and teachers to walk out of high school classes in protest, getting their heads busted by police in the process, to bring awareness to the problem. Students wanted to attend college. Finally, federal and state governments facilitated the increase of Affirmative Action programs at more colleges and universities The numbers of minority students began to change, albeit slowly. According to a UCLA study, by 2006, Latino students, the largest population in Los Angeles, reached a whopping 7.6 percent enrollment at UCLA. African American student remained less than 5%, and Native American kids barely reached 2%. 
     As Affirmative Action staff scoured the local high schools for bright students, informing them how to register and survive the system, enrollments climbed. Today, the percentage of Latino students at UCLA is about 22 percent, Asian and Pacific Islander 35.5, Blacks and Native Americans still under 5 percent, and White students about 25 percent. 
     Of course, “White” students from Los Angeles, many educated in premier private schools, have the choice of attending universities across the country, both private and public institutions. Los Angeles Latino and Asian students remain closer to home and attend local public and some private universities, like USC. Los Angeles is the home to the largest number of Latino and Asian Americans in the U.S. In West L.A., Japanese Town is only a few miles from the UCLA campus.
     However, when I think of DEI, I recall a story I heard about the history of higher education in the United States. Diversity, Affirmative Action, or any other name we give equity programs, weren’t originally started for students of color. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Ivy League colleges began to see themselves as incestuous, years of breeding the same types of students, New England and East Coast blue bloods from the same privileged background who attended the same prestigious prep schools. 
     As the story goes, somebody in the Admissions Office of one school, asked, “What about the brilliant farm kids from Kansas and the steel workers' kids from the Great Lakes region? Shouldn’t we open our doors to them, so our students can have a more well-rounded understanding of the country?” Of course, this is a paraphrase of the actual conversation, which was longer and much more complex.
     The first so-called diversity programs enrolled “White” non-traditional students to the Ivy Leagues, males only, no females. It would take time to diversify and allow females to attend, in fact, not until 1972 at Harvard, 1968, at Yale, and 1969 at Princeton. Though many opposed females on campus, many educators and students saw the benefit of bright females on campus, a step forward. 
     This helped to open minds, to offer new voices, perspectives, and experiences, just as inclusion of Black and Brown students does today, the real America, not the manufactured, limited version. Faculty reevaluated their curricula and started researching and teaching the history, art, social sciences, and hard sciences of a greater, wider, and stronger America. 
     It must have been a cataclysmic transformation, since, education, like a large cargo ship at sea, turns ever so slowly. Liberal? A myth. Most universities might preach liberalism, but, at heart, most are traditional, orthodox, and, yes, conservative in their approach to education. It's an institution that doesn't handle change well. Most professors don’t really like change. They prefer to do it the old way, the way they've done it for years, especially in English and foreign language departments, where tradition reigns supreme. 
     Still, even with their so-called liberal bent, the Ivy League schools must have been enticing. Among its graduates it counts, Republicans like Donald Trump, his sons, Henry Kissinger, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegsteth, Steve Bannon, Mike Pompeo, George W. Bush, William F. Buckley, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, and Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, among others, including Founding Father John Adams. 
     Though, today, they demonize DEI, Affirmative Action, gender and ethnic studies programs, they all chose to study and receive their degrees from the same universities they now attack. Most were educated during a time when DEI was common in the college lecture. They benefitted from learning about other ethnicities, whether they wanted to or not. Now, they reject the concept, or they must face the wrath of the constituents they themselves have courted. 
     Their base is the largely non-college educated, hard-working laboring class from the red states., who somehow believe these Ivy League New Elites have their best interest at heart. What do Ivy Leagers have in common with coal miners from West Virginia and Kentucky, farmers from across the Bible Belt, or labor unionists from Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? They want their Base to believe they see no value in diversity, so they demand their alma maters revert to a time and place where exclusion led to an education closed off to reality. 
     While the New Elite in government received the finest educations in the country, they destroy education opportunities for the masses, as other totalitarian regimes have done, both left and right, following the same playbook, silencing intellectuals, writers, educators, banning books, and shuttering universities. The New Elite wants us to believe we should remain in an intellectual darkness and avoid the light, to stay asleep or distracted and never “wake.” 
      It is a travesty universities aren’t fighting for their First Amendment Rights. Legal experts say, in the end, though they might end up with a few broken bones, they will win. Instead, they are caving to their boards and the profit margin. Maybe that really is the state of higher education today, bigger and more beautiful buildings for the children of the New Elite, while the working class eats “cake,” an old term for stale biscuits. 

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Lotería Remedios Oracle: A 54-Card Deck and Guidebook Cards

Written by Xelena González. 

Illusttrated by Jose Sotelo Yamasaki.


*Publisher: ‎Hay House LLC

*Print length: 144 pages

*ISBN-10: ‎1401974724

*ISBN-13: ‎978-1401974725


A beautifully-illustrated 54-card oracle deck that reimagines the iconic game of Lotería by using the traditional symbols for divination, reflection, and healing.

La Rosa. La Muerte. El Nopal. These are just a few of the 54 iconic symbols that appear in the beloved card game Lotería, also known as Mexican Bingo. Since reaching modern-day Mexico in 1779, the deck has seen many artful incarnations, and across Latinx cultures, it has served the multilayered purpose of practicing the Spanish language, bringing loved ones together, and of course, trying our luck.

But Lotería Remedios enters the cards into the canon of cartomancy: it uses the traditional symbols for divination, reflection, and self-healing. Here author Xelena González, a member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, is continuing the work of her great-grandmother, a curandera sought-after and highly respected for her abilities. Through beautiful illustrations and lyrical written remedios, La Sirena (The Mermaid) becomes an invitation to view your own magic and beauty. La Bandera (The Flag) suggests the need to wave your flag high, so that you may discover who is ready to join your cause. And the much-loved La Luna (The Moon) encourage you to look within, and understand that night will always find its morning, that the tide always changes.


Xelena González practices the healing arts through writing and movement. She is a storyteller, dancer, and visiting author who centers self-love in her multi-disciplinary workshops for all ages. Her picture books include the multiple award-winning ALL AROUND US (Cinco Puntos Press, 2017), the recently-released WHERE WONDER GROWS (Lee & Low, 2022), and the forthcoming title REMEMBERING (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Xelena’s storytelling skills were honed as a public librarian in her hometown of Yanaguana/San Antonio and in Guangzhou, China, where she served as head librarian for an international school. Through her author visits, she has introduced a method of “tai chi storytelling” to more than 100 schools, museums, and libraries around the globe.

Jose Sotelo Yamasaki is a San Antonio based painter, screenprinter, and illustrator. He has garnered a national following as the owner and operator of El Fin, an exclusive online gallery showcasing the vibrant artwork that has made San Antonio a cultural mecca. His work is heavily influenced by Mesoamerican design, Mexican folk art, and Japanese Zen art. In this way, Jose’s creations pay homage to his mixed ancestries.




Tuesday, July 29, 2025

On-line Floricanto features Angel Guerrero

La Bloga-Tuesday proudly shares poetry from a recently-debuted poet, Angel Guerrero. Guerrero’s work has taken an upward trajectory ever since the poet made her initial public reading at the Eagle Rock branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in  May 2024. 

Since the reading, Angel Guerrero’s been published in Don Campbell’s So Cal Steps and the upcoming on-line Altadena Poetry Review. Guerrero has shared her work at Casa Reyna's Poetry Garden in a backyard floricanto. This is Angel's first On-line Floricanto appearance.

Guerrero enjoys a diverse artistic life. She’s a noted collector of Chicana Chicano artists, she studied sculpture and painting with Magu, Angel Guerrero was assistant to Pola López for the restoration of the Daniel Cervantes indigenous faces mural at the foot of Los Angeles’ endangered Southwest Museum.

Editor's Note: La Bloga's On-line Floricanto series started in 2010 in collaboration with Francisco X. Alarcón qepd, in anticipation of that year's three-day Festival de Flor y Canto: Yesterday • Today • Tomorrow, organized by Michael Sedano. Francisco and Michael reasoned that that Fall's reunion of poets from the first Flor y Canto in 1973 shouldn't be limited by geography, hence we took the opportunity to share established and emerging work, particularly work submitted to the Face group, Poets Responding to SB1070, via La Bloga-Tuesday.

Angel Guerrero, left, Pola López, right, restoring a heritage mural in northeast Los Angeles 

On-Line Floricanto Featuring Angel Guerrero



KEEP CLIMBING
by Angel Guerrero

I’ve been climbing these stairs, 
For what seems like forever. 
I’ve climbed Seventy-One, 
Each one has my name engraved on it. 
This is my path, and it is well-worn. 
I step carefully nowadays, 
gone are the days of 
Skipping and jumping 
and daring myself to fly, 
Slipping and falling to the bottom, 
only to start again. 
That energy has faded, 
and caution has taken its place. 
I dare not look down 
a dense fog threatens to overtake me. 
So, I look upward 
and refuse to lament the past.
I climb slowly, 
I am unsteady, 
but some days I get excited 
to see what awaits on the other side. 
But every step has its own lessons and wonder, 
One day soon I’ll reach my destination 
So, for now, 
I will continue climbing.


THINGS LEFT BEHIND
by Angel Guerrero

I run around my bedroom frightened by the familiar voice on my cell phone, 
The voice sends out warnings of 
Amber Alerts, Flashfloods, and Earthquakes. 
And now that voice insists, 
we must leave, leave our home, 
Our art, sculptures, books, our love letters,
Small and large items, mean something only to me. 
Everything is precious,
 our photographs, the kind you can hold in your hand, 
The images of life together, our youth, 
And family members we will never kiss or hold again, 
We must get out now, “it’s only stuff.” 
So instead, we gather necessary items, 
our survival kit is small, 
And our time is short. 
I search out my husband's eyes, 
His still-strong arms envelop my quivering body and still my fears. 
As we turn to leave, he whispers in my ear 
“It’s only stuff.” 
I realize that the things we leave behind are no longer 
more important 
Than our fingers holding on tightly to each other. 
He leads me down the staircase 
just in time to hear 
That the warning was not meant for us, 
But for another community of people.
We stand frozen. 
Our hearts are pained for them, in shock, for them. 
For the many who will now have to deal 
with this horrific loss 
we pray that your families survived 
And that it is only their things that were left behind.

*to be published in 2025 Altadena Poetry Review


CHARRED STAIRS
by Angel Guerrero

 I went to search for you, 
but could not find you. 
Everything was gone, 
Charred rubble, 
which was once precious memories, 
Was all that was left. 
Gone was the beauty that had once existed, 
All was scorched beyond recognition. 
So, on and on I walked, 
So sure, I would find the path that led to you. 
Finally, I looked up and there was your street. 
I followed the now-broken road 
Once edged by everything that was lush and green. 
I walked until I saw the stairway that led to your home,
 It was stark and blackened by the ravenous flames. 
My heart was filled with dread, 
but I climbed on. 
Once at the top, I fell to my knees in tears, 
As if it had been my home, 
As if it had been, my loss, my pain. 
Finally, I turned and slowly walked down those stairs, 
Which no longer led, 
to anyone or anything, 
I once knew. 



Saturday, July 26, 2025

Interpretamos la niebla / We Interpret Fog por Xánath Caraza

Interpretamos la niebla / We Interpret Fog por Xánath Caraza

 


Interpretamos la niebla en la concavidad infinita. En el alba reconocemos la opalescencia en las montañas y el aroma a madera penetra la piel. Descubrimos las aves en las frondas de la aurora mientras la lluvia se desliza en las calles empedradas y golpea los techos de teja. El rocío, en las violetas, se vuelve bruma con los áureos rayos de sol mientras un colibrí busca miel. Las sombras de los ancestros, bordadas en el follaje de los cedros, se vislumbran cuando la luz del amanecer las traspasa.

 


We Interpret Fog



We interpret fog inside the infinite concavity. At dawn, we recognize opalescence within the mountains while the scent of wood penetrates our flesh. We discover birds upon the fronds of first light as the rain slips along cobblestone streets and strikes tile roofs. The dew, on the violets, turns to haze in the golden sunlight while a hummingbird hunts for honey. When the morning light soaks through it, the shadows of the ancestors, embroidered within the foliage of cedars, can be discerned. 

 


 

Poema incluido en el manuscrito De niebla y olvido de Xánath Caraza. Traducido por Sandra Kingery.

 

Xanath Caraza

Friday, July 25, 2025

New Literature About a Pair of Icons of Resistance

Presenting two very different books, about two very different people. And yet ... Are you resisting? Need role models?  Inspiration?  Resurgence of hope?  Then these books should be on your TBR pile.  

_______________________


Mafalda: Book One
Quino
 
Translated by Frank Wynne
Elsewhere Editions -- June 10, 2025

[from the publisher]
Six-year-old Mafalda loves democracy and hates soup. What democratic sector do cats fall into? she asks, then unfurls a toilet paper red carpet and gives her very own presidential address. Mafalda’s precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her. Dissident and rebellious, she refuses to abandon the world to her parents’ generation, who seem so lost.

Alongside the irascible Mafalda, readers will meet her eclectic entourage: dreamy Felipe and gossipy Susanita, young-capitalist Manolito and rebellious Miguelito. You can clearly see Mafalda is small, when she is dreaming in bed or soaring on a swing — “As usual, as soon as you put your feet on the ground, the fun finishes,” Mafalda grumbles — but her hopes for the world and her heart are as huge as can be. Generations of readers have discovered themselves in Mafalda’s boundlessly adventurous spirit, and learned to question, rebel, and hope.

_________________________



Edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguín
Edinburgh University Press - July 31, 2025

[from the publisher]
Luis Rodríguez is a prominent Latinx poet, memoirist and activist renowned for his candid visceral accounts of urban working-class life that includes youth gang violence, incarceration and drug abuse, grueling factory work and union organizing activities and collective approaches to redemption and political empowerment, which have resonated across multiple communities in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, whilst Rodríguez has been the focus of some critical scholarship, huge segments of his life, work and legacy remain unexamined. This anthology has commissioned new and unique critical essays and reflections on Rodríguez’s life and works, putting forward new ideas about bringing the voices of 'barrio organic intellectuals' to the fore. The anthology deliberately includes traditional academics as well as more public intellectuals and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas to reflect Rodriguez’s own diverse outputs as a prisoner author and activist.

Later.
______________________________________


Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Chicanonautica: Chicano Art Interrupts This Pogrom . . . Program . . . De-Program . . . Re-Program . . .

by Ernest Hogan



One of the perks of being the Father of Chicano Sci-Fi is that people send me weird shit. And I love me some weird shit.


So, in the middle of this jam-packed bizarro summer, a small, slim, unsolicited package appeared in my P.O. box. It was from L.A. The handwriting, name, and address were all unfamiliar to me. I grabbed my Swiss Army knife and sliced.


It was a paperback book: Aztec Leisure Suit Or Brown People Under Fluorescent Light. Sounds like a Chicanonautica kinda thing. The author was Vincent Ramos. The front cover and the blurb on the back intrigued me.


Flipping through it, I found that there weren’t many words. Most of it was photos reproduced in full color on slick paper. They were of collages.


They fit perfectly with the title.


Collage is a good art form for Chicanos—do it myself on occasion—because we are collages.



Once at an event celebrating Latino science fiction, I met a brown girl who looked like she could still be in grade school. She wanted to be a writer and asked me and Rudy Ch. Garcia what the rules for being a Chicano writer were. We both immediately told her that there weren’t any. She looked confused.


You see, just being a Chicano is a do-it-yourself project. Rasquache!


I wonder -- what happened to her? Is she currently writing stuff that will soon astound the world? Or was she shocked into her senses and became a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or something else reasonable?


Weird, mixed-up, rasquache stuff makes me smile. It makes me feel at home—it’s not just where I come from, but what I am!


Some folks think I’m trying to be avant-garde, but we’ve been doing this stuff for centuries, since before diverse cultures got together in the marketplace of Teotihuacán, when we were smuggling the wisdom of the Centipede God and Giant River Serpents up from lost garden cities of the Amazon . . . 



This little book is a brain-battering barrage of conflicting symbols. Andy Warhol probably couldn’t handle it. It’s like a visual version of William S. Burroughs and Biron Gyson’s cut-up/fold-in technique and J.G. Ballard when he was writing The Atrocity Exhibition (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA) and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.”


Make art not war? Nah. Art is war.


That is, if you’re doing it right . . .


Someday scholars will study Aztec Leisure Suit, searching for clues to the arcane mysteries of Chicano (and its ever-mutating Siamese twin Latino Latin, Latine, Latinx . . .) identity as if it were an untranslated codex from a lost civilization. The problem is, we aren’t lost. We’re right here. We’re everywhere. 


Some people’s sensory arrays get overloaded when they try to focus on us.


“Ya got any ID?” they keep asking.


Good question .  .  .


Maybe I should carry around a copy, and when ICE asks who and what the quehquetza I am, I’ll hand it to them.


I wonder if their brains will explode.



Ernest Hogan is descended from Mexican circus performers who sometimes dressed like bullfighters.

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

A-Ztec: A Bilingual Alphabet Book


Written and illustrated by Emmanuel Valtierra.

 

 

*Publisher: ‎Levine Querido

*Publication date: ‎September 9, 2025

*Language: ‎English

*Print length: ‎64 pages

*ISBN-10: ‎1646145674

*ISBN-13: ‎978-1646145676

 

Chocolatl

and Axolotl

Guacamole

and Quetzacoatl.

Open up this treasury

Aztec words--

from A to Z!

 

From singular artist Emmanuel Valtierra comes a spectacular introduction to twenty-six words, concepts, and gods central to Aztec and Mexican culture, presented in both English and Spanish.

 

Emmanuel Valtierra is a Texan Mexican illustrator. He studied graphic design at the Visual Arts Faculty in Monterrey, Nuevo León. Since 2016, he has focused on creating different projects related to the Aztec culture, among which stands out Codex Valtierra that won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2018. Through his work, he intends to instill Mexican pre-Hispanic cultures and to show its ancestral arts to new generations.



Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Late Tuesday Antojo: Enfrijoladas

Flashback to 2016

Something makes a person hungry; for a certain taste, a particular food, a quién sabe que longing. An antojo, a feeling all antojado for enchiladas suizas, or all antojado for freshly squeezed jugo de toronja, or quién sabe que, right?

Today, el Gluten-free Chicano was hanging out with Michael Sedano and both of them got all antojado for enfrijoladas. So we looked into La Bloga's twenty almost 21-year archives to see if we'd previously featured this resplendent elegance of simple ingredients and memorable deliciousness worthy of an antojo that has to get satisfied pronto.

voilà



It was the department party for the TAs. A pot luck. The department would supply the beverages, the TAs brought the food. One of the TAs came up to me and, in a gesture of camaraderie, warned "Watch out for the enchilados, they're really hot."

The myth of Mexican food had struck again. The dish prepared by The Gluten-free Chicano is anything but chiloso. Some tastebuds are more sensitive than others, and that particular crowd, it turned out, was typical of many. "Mexican food" means burn your mouth delicious.

By now, most diners understand "Mexican food" doesn't have to start out chiloso, but that's always an option, either in the preparation or serving a hot salsa on the side.

The enfrijolada can be made really hot by adding any number of chiles to the mix. Serving a pot luck or dinner crowd, the Gluten-free Chicano tones down the fire.

Pre-heat the oven to 350º.



Cube chicken meat (the Gluten-free Chicano used a COSTCO roasted chicken and removed the breasts for this dish).

Mince a medium-sized onion, six or eight branches of cilantro, a couple teeth of garlic.

Add ⅓ can of diced tomatoes.

You can use black olives but the Gluten-free Chicano wanted a more piquant flavor so this preparation added a dozen pimiento-stuffed green olives.

If serving people with appreciative taste buds, finely mince two serrano chiles.

Add a cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese.

Fill generously.

Soften a good quality corn tortilla in hot olive oil in a small frying pan. The Gluten-free Chicano prefers Diana's brand of extra large tortilla de maíz. The manufacturer uses only corn, lime, and water, no xanthan gum and no additives.

Using tongs, dip the first tortilla on both sides until it is flexible. Transfer that to a plate. Dip the next tortillas on one side, and place the oiled side up on top of the stack.

The tortillas will cool enough to roll by hand.

Add a large pinch of filling and spread it across a softened tortilla. (You can soften the tortillas in a microwave oven. Wrap them in a dish towel and microwave for 30 seconds on high. But work quickly because microwaving makes them sticky as they cool).


Roll into a tight bundle
Roll the tortilla around the filling, packing it toward the edge. Slide it over and roll another one.

Repeat this until the baking dish is filled. If you run out of space while rolling, just roll on top of the done ones.

Fill the baking dish snugly
Prepare the frijoles. If you like the consistency of fried beans, make them a bit watery so they spread easily across the rolled surfaces.

Top with left-over stuffing
More than likely, you'll have some chicken remaining. Save that for tacos, or for a deluxe dish, spread the tops of the enchiladas with the mixture.

Add a layer of beans; fried or de la olla.
These are frijoles de la olla, straight from the refrigerator.

Slather sour cream or crema mexicana across the surface
Use a spatula or a fork to spread a layer of crema across the top.

Garnish with shredded cheese
Garnish with shredded cheese. Here you can get fancy and add queso fresco crumbles.

Set the timer for 45 minutes if using cold ingredients, 30 if using warm filling.

There are two schools of thought on service. I prefer to find the open-ends and spatula a single enfrijolada to each plate  (or two for larger appetites). You can cut through the top like a casserole and serve a 4" square.

Bake. Note the open ends for serving

Enfrijoladas is a low-cost, highly nutritious, and gluten-free dish. Beware "gourmet" tortillas as the "gourmet" part means some menacing industrial entity has added wheat to the masa.

A crisp green salad, a hearty red wine, or lots of Bard's Gluten-free beer will make the meal a major hit.

"Damn," one of the TAs said, pushing away from the table to get seconds, "I didn't know Mexican food could be so delicious! I'm sure glad you're in the program."

Friday, July 18, 2025

Wondering What My Mother Would Be Like at Age 76

 


Earlier this month. I attended Gunpowder Press’s release of their new anthology: Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. Since 2025 commemorates the 175th anniversary of California’s statehood, the anthology features 175 California writers. My mother, Blanca Estela Palacio, would have been the same age as many of the women represented in the collection. December 5, she would be 76. For the world, she is forever immortalized at age 44. I am older than she was the last time I saw her alive, but not old enough to contribute to this anthology. The collection gives me an insight into what her life concerns would be as an aging Baby Boomer. Many favorite people and poets are included in this impressive poetry collection, a few micro essays are also tucked in.


As a child, I remember thinking that my mom was an exceptional women who had grown up with the best music. I was the oddball teenager who preferred her parents’ music and dances to her own generation’s. My mother was proud of the fact that she was a Baby Boomer, the generation of children born to parents who lived through World War Two, who protested the Vietnam War, who marched for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and affirmative action.

Blanca Estela and Melinda Palacio


While my mother was born in Texas, she is very much a California girl. California is where she grew up, became a teacher, an activist, and a single mother who also took care of her parents and siblings during her short life. Because I keep aging and my mother does not, I often wonder what her life would be like now. I become wistful around women who have the opportunity for mother-daughter dates. There’s so much about my life in Santa Barbara that I wish I could have shared with my mother. We often took summer road trips from Los Angeles to San Francisco and on several occasions visited my uncle who was stationed at Vandenberg Airforce Base in Lompoc, but we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I don’t think my mom knew the town existed. Solvang was our usual stopping point. To this day, I have no explanation as to why we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I know she would have loved Santa Barbara, given that she enjoyed Solvang’s small town charm.


Ten years after my mother passed, I met a mother traveling with her adult daughter. I was so happy for the two of them. I told them how lucky they were. Mother and daughter Lucy agreed. They had the same round face and blue eyes. It still puts a smile on my face to think of the two women sharing an aisle on the airplane with twenty-year old younger me. While I can no longer travel with my mother, we sure shared some fun travels together to Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. In reading Women In a Golden State, I see my mother in so many of the poems. Sharon Langley’s poem, I Saw My Mom Today, reminds me that I only need to look in the mirror see my mother: “Purse. Pucker, now pose./That’s her smile for sure./I saw my mom today.”


Thanks to Gunpowder Press editors Diana Raab and Chryss Yost, there’s a collection of 175 poems that share the concerns of Women in a Golden State and the anthology my mother would be included in if she were a living poet. 

 

 

 

*This article also appears in the Santa Barbara Independent

 

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Emma Goldman and the Magon Brothers

                                                                                     

Mexican Anarchists in Los Angeles

      I’m nearly finished with the second volume of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, including the first volume close to 1000 pages. Not only a dynamic speaker, Goldman was a superb writer, making her life’s story read like a novel, but allow me to digress.

     I’d been at my ex-brother-in-law’s home as he was preparing to move to a senior citizen’s memory care facility.  His wife had died earlier in the year, and he was no longer able to care for himself. His doctor told him it was dangerous living alone, especially as his mind slipped a little more each year.

     I had my eye on a wall filled with books, all hard covers, and old. Jerry told me to take whatever I wanted. He’d inherited the books from a woman who had taken him in when he was a teenager, after her husband’s death. Flora Mae was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford with a degree in political science. She and her husband had no children, so she pretty much left everything she owned to Jerry.

     The first time I pulled Goldman’s autobiography from the bookcase, newspaper clippings poured out. Flora Mae had kept many of the book’s original reviews. The autobiography was printed in 1931, first edition, a classic, and in good shape. I had studied Goldman’s work, along with other anarchists, like her good friend, Russian-American Alexander "Sasha" Berkman, who spent 20 years in prison for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel who tried to stop striking workers using violence.

     I’d also read the writings and life stories of the Flores Magon brothers, Ricardo and Enrique, Mexican anarchists, the brains behind the Mexican Revolution, who coined Zapata's words "It's better to die on one'feet than to live on one's knees." The brothers had fled Mexico to El Paso, St. Louis, then on to L.A., where they continued exposing corruption and crime in Mexican politics. They believed American justice would protect them from Mexico’s autocratic rulers. It didn’t.

     Ironically, the U.S. government feared the Magon brothers’ speeches and newspaper, Regeneracion, would incite workers in the U.S. to defy their employers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration arrested the brothers, and, in something of a kangaroo court, found them guilty of sedition. What the court used to convict them was one line from a newspaper article they’d written, an inspiring, symbolic line telling workers to “…drop the tools and take up the rifle that is waiting for the hero’s caress.”

     For those words, Ricardo received 21-years in Leavenworth federal prison where he died under suspicious circumstances. Enrique received 15-years at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Unfortunately for the brothers, at the time, the U.S. had just entered WWI, and Woodrow Wilson had passed the sedition Trading with Enemies Act, a way to jail or deport immigrants they thought dangerous to U.S. national security. Wilson had also passed the country’s first Selective Service Act, and anyone who refused to register or submit to the draft could receive 30 years in prison.

     For me, all of this was material for my third book Death and the American Dream, an historical novel about Los Angeles politics and the media in the 1920s. As often happens when a writer gets lost in research, I might have gotten carried away by the politics of the time, mainly immigrant and workers’ rights, as well as the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. during WWI.

     In Rochester, New York, Emma Goldman, a Russian-Jewish migrant, had worked in sweatshops as a teenager. She absorbed the conditions and began to speak out against the injustices she witnessed and experienced. She became an anarchist, like the Flores Magon brothers. In fact, Goldman and her political partner, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman had helped raise funds for Ricardo and Enriquez’s defense.

     As far back as the late 1800s, U.S. industry, mostly agriculture and the railroads, flooded Mexican villages with flyers announcing employment opportunities in the American Southwest. The companies also sent U.S. contractors to Mexico who traveled through villages contracting workers to travel north. The companies promised a good pay, decent living and working conditions.

     When Mexicans attempted to cross the border, many were arrested and jailed for participating in unfair labor practices. The company contractors arrived and paid their fines. Once freed, Mexican workers were forced to labor without pay, until their debt to the company had been paid. It was a form of indentured servitude. If they purchased anything on credit at the company’s story, it was added to their debt. If they tried to escape, they were pursued by federal marshals or private detective agencies. It was in this environment that men and woman like Emma Goldman, Sasha Berkman, and Magon and his followers tried to educate the workers.

     Anarchism isn’t an easy concept to understand. When most of us think of anarchists, we think chaos, as in, “It’s complete anarchy.” Political anarchists do not support one government over another, neither capitalist nor socialist, democracy, fascism, or communism. In a sense, they don’t believe in governments at all. Here is where it gets confusing. Can a society exist without a structured government? Anarchists think they can.

     Francisco “Pancho” Villa was something of an anarchist, though he didn’t know it. After Villa attacked a town in Chihuahua and routed the federal soldiers, the corrupt mayor, and his cronies, one of Villa's men asked, “What do we do now? The people want action.” Myth has it that Villa asked the people what they needed. They told him they were starving. The government and army had forced them to work and taken everything they produced.

     Supposedly, Villa told the town’s bakers to start baking bread to feed the people, not unlike Jesus feeding the multitudes. It worked. Common sense. After that, Villa took one problem at a time and began figuring a way to solve them, using common sense and fairness, reminding me of a scene from Don Quixote, where the people of a town voted for Sancho Panza to be their mayor. From what I recall, Sancho, too, began solving problems by using common sense. So, why is governing so hard? Politics and greed, which any good anarchist abhors.

     In volume II of Goldman's book, the Wilson Administration deports both Emma and Sasha to Russia, where the communists have recently been victorious over the Tsar. Emma does not like what she sees of communism's early rise and begins to observe and report. As Americans, she and Sasha hold privileged positions over other foreigners in Russia at the time. The two land a job working with a museum traveling the country to collect historical documents to record the events of the revolution.

     Goldman does not hold back in her criticism of the communist system, sometimes barely making her way out of dangerous situations, especially during a time when everybody was under suspicion of being an anti-revolutionist. She traveled to the Ukraine, Kiev, where Russia set up its capital and where she learned of Jewish atrocities committed in the hundreds-of-thousands. She described the hatred between the communist proletariats who would love nothing more than to see communist intellectuals placed up against a wall and shot. The Cheka, something of a Soviet Gestapo, executed anybody accused of stealing food or even a pair of shoes to survive. The communists refer to them as speculators.

      After barely surviving the journey through Ukraine and the Crimea, both considered a part of Russia, at the time, she was allowed to travel to the north of Russia, where people in towns cooperated, shared food and other necessities and survived in relative peace, where there were no firing squads or people stealing from each other. Goldman’s autobiography is a marvel. She has a keen eye for detail and doesn’t hesitate to call out injustices wherever she sees them, whether in a capitalist or commuist state. She not naive and also understands Russia's difficulties as bands of anti-revolutionists continue to battle the communists, to return Russia to the Tsar. She is able to explain a complicated system, its early struggles and, possibly, downfall, like the idiological struggle between Lenin and Trotsky, so relevant to today’s crisis in Russia and the Ukraine.