2010 Festival de Flor y Canto Launch; Review: Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Glass of Water.

Michael Sedano

Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative at the University of Southern California has awarded a grant funding 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto to Barbara Robinson, USC Libraries Curator of the Boeckmann Center Collection for Iberian and Latin American Studies, and Maria Elena Martinez, Associate Professor of Latin American History and American Studies and Ethnicity.

As chronicled in La Bloga over the past two years, Tuesday Bloguero Michael Sedano has been organizing this reunion of the landmark first Festival de Flor y Canto held in 1973 at USC. Dozens of poets, writers, and academics shared work at the 1973 event. Of these, thirty-nine presentations were preserved on videotape, including one musician and three teatros.

Sedano has focused his reunion efforts on the videotaped artists from 1973. Sadly, José Montoya and Roberto Vargas presentations are absent from both UC Riverside and Texas A&M Kingsville libraries. Those are the only known repositories of the 1973 videos. Contacted to date--most of whom will be appearing at 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto, September 15, 16, 17--are Alejandro Murguía, Alurista, Avelardo Valdez, E. A. Mares, Elias Hruska, Enrique La Madrid, Estevan Arellano, Frank Sifuentes, Javier Pacheco, José Montoya, Juan Contreras, Juan Felipe Herrera, Olivia Castellano, Roberto Vargas, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Ron Arias, Teresa Palomo Acosta, Tomás Atencio, Veronica Cunningham, Vibiana Chamberlin. In addition, Marco Antonio Dominguez, a 1973 poet not videotaped, will read, perhaps accompanied by his son, an MFA candidate at UTEP. Remote hope exists that José Montoya and Richard Montoya will also present a father-son reading.

A number of 1973 readers have died, including Oscar Zeta Acosta, Lynne Romero, Omar Salinas, raúlrsalinas, Mario Suarez, Marcela Trujillo, Ricardo Sánchez, Tomás Rivera, QEPD. Honoring these deceased luminaries, 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto's program includes ¡Presente! a program of memorial readings performed by actors or friends of the late artists.

A number of contemporary poets have submitted materials for consideration and inclusion in 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto. Numerous invitations have been accepted, with others pending. Based on preliminary responses to the Call for Artists, the three-day event will provide a full schedule blending the reunion voices, many of today's established Chicana Chicano Latina Latino poets, and up-and-coming newer voices.

In addition, Francisco Aragón and University of Notre Dame's Letras Latinas, is co-sponsoring with 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto a program featuring three poets including Diana Garcia, Emmy Pérez, and Maria Melendez.

2010 Festival de Flor y Canto also includes the opening of a semester-long photographic exhibit of Sedano's photography from 1973, together with the debut of the digitized video recordings of the original festival. Doheny Memorial Library's Digital Library Initiative will allow world-wide access to the historic, nearly lost, 1973 performances, as well as those documented during 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto.

The 1973 anthology, Festival de Flor y Canto, (Los Angeles : University of Southern California Press, 1976. ISBN: 0884740315 and 9780884740315 ) edited by Alurista et al, will have a companion multimedia volume, 2010 Festival de Flor y Canto, within a short period following the completion of the September event at USC. Publishers interested in the project contact msedano.

2010 Festival de Flor y Canto will be celebrated at Doheny Memorial Library on the USC campus on September 15, 16, 17, 2010. La Bloga will post developments, schedules, attendance details, as these are defined.

The Call for Artists for 1973 readers--whether or not in the videotaped collection--as well as contemporary poets and writers, is at Read! Raza. Open Call closes in mid-April. Institutions wishing to sponsor a panel of readers will contact Michael Sedano.

Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative is a year-long program featuring outstanding arts presentations that reaffirm the University of Southern California's Core Values. The grant is a singular honor marking the University's ongoing commitment to Chicana Chicano students, arts, and culture.

Review: Jimmy Santiago Baca. A Glass of Water. NY: Grove, 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-1922-3

Michael Sedano


A murdered singer, her stroke victim widower, a major league pot dealer, a Chicano Muhammad Ali, a love-smitten urban Latina grad student, a background cast of migrant farmworkers and Anglo landowners, Time.

This is the cast of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s novel, A Glass of Water. As such, the cast fulfills the canonical demands of some Chicano literature: the romance of el campo, downtrodden farmworkers, angry organizers, oppressive bosses. Santiago plays out threads of these characters in unexpected ways, and, as such, A Glass of Water is not just another Chicano farmworker novel.

Baca refuses to allow his story to follow a pedestrian mold. This begins with that title, which offers a bit of a mystery, as in the classic half full hall empty conundrum. Does murder demand retribution, and, if left to fester unavenged, does it exert its own vengeance more terrible than death or imprisonment? Is eye for an eye murder justified, the actors vindicated for their actions? With such concepts at hand, Baca grows the canonical notion of Justice beyond a raza-specific agon to encompass more generalized ideas about carnalismo, hubris, renascence. Readers will be pleased to discover such complexities woven into a cloth of Chicanismo.

Time looms in the plot as an almost tangible character. Baca plays with sequence in chaptering the story, flashing back to earlier events to wrap context around ongoing outcomes. The novel begins with the voice of a dead singer, brutally murdered, leaving behind her bereaved husband and two barely mothered boys. When the novel closes, one of the few spiritual acts the mother conducted for her youngest develops into the agency that pulls him out of his mindlessly self-destructive path and points him right. All this time, he's been waiting for his mother's invisible hand to guide him.

Casimiro, the dead woman’s husband, knows the land, crop, workers. He’s tired, sick of the fields but knows nothing else so he puts in his time, tormented by the memory of a murdered wife while haunted by memory of a man he himself murdered unjustly years ago back in Mexico. Felled by a stroke, Casimiro can only impotently pass time, remembering his dead wife, the man he killed, and observing his older son pick up where Dad left off, with a twist.

Lorenzo, the older son, takes over as majordomo of the Anglo’s ranch. He not only husbands the land but becomes a paternalistic boss to the Mexicano and Chicano laborers. He mounts teevees in the packing shed so the women can watch their telenovelas while they sort and pack chiles; installs basketball courts and baseball fields so the kids can organize their time through sports; brings in literacy tutors to give the next generation a better chance. The twist is the money comes not from savings and hard work but from increasingly large marijuana deals. A duffle bag of weed becomes a truckload becomes a tankertruck filled with top leaf; fancy customers flying in from across the country to turn their deals.

Middle class Chicana from San Diego, Carmen comes out to the Texas / New Mexico fields to conduct field research. At first, she flirts with the smitten younger son, Vito, but soon relations up with Lorenzo. For the Chicana grad student with options, hers is a life choice. Blending field research with worker organizing and roping in Lorenzo, she takes the money from the dope deals willingly, to buy the trappings of advancement for her gente. Her efforts to organize the workers meet with frustration and excuses. Workers, in fear of losing a paycheck plus getting hauled away by ICE, don’t buy Carmen’s political philosophies.

Vito knows the leverage of the Anglo landowner. Not from having ICE sicced on him, but exiled nonetheless. The landowner’s son and a pal want to see Carmen strut her nalgas for them. Vito punches out their lights for their salaciousness. Casimiro has a choice: banish the boy or abandon his own livelihood.

Vito’s exile to New Mexico becomes his felix culpa. Dismantling a bloodied crumpled car he discovers a pair of boxing gloves. The gloves, and Vito’s mouth, launch him on a career from free-for-all bare knuckle brawls to a pay-per-view shot at a championship belt. Baca does a skillful job giving readers just enough ring action to keep them turning the page. Vito’s mouth riles the crowd and his fists are equal to the taunts. Vito’s chief shortcoming is lack of discipline. He nearly throws it all away for no discernible reason when a twist of fate—he spots his mother’s killer’s boots—brings him back to Lorenzo and Carmen. The fellow has it coming—he raped the dead mother years ago on her journey north—and the brothers' slaughter of the rapist wraps the Time and Justice motifs into a tidy package. They get away with it. Right place at the right time serendipity appears to answer life’s most pressing exigencies. Absent those, there’s Casimiro, paralyzed helpless, watching and observing.

Baca washes his hands of canonical thematics, his farmworker motif illustrating worker resistance to persuasion rather than crafting a romanticized huelga producing justice and higher wages through collective resistance. Lorenzo, Vito’s and Carmen’s involvement with one another illustrates a more compelling truth. Individual decisions produce wealth and lifestyle improvement, whereas collective action illuminates a path not much further than just beyond one’s lips.

As A Glass of Water concludes, Lorenzo and Vito are are out there tilling their own fields, purchased by dint of their own labor and serendipity. Carmen brings her daughter and a cold glass of water to slake the brothers' thirst. If it’s half empty or half full doesn’t matter, they'll soon drain it and be left with an empty vessel and more rows to how. And so it goes.


2010 Festival de Flor y Canto fulfills a dream for me. It's a pleasure to announce its realization today, this first Tuesday of April 2010, a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga. See you next week.

mvs

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Pedazos y Pedacitos

Manuel Ramos



PROVOCACIONES: LETTERS FROM THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN ARVIN by RAFAELA G. CASTRO
Last week Daniel Olivas mentioned this book and I wanted to give it a bit more attention. It's a new work from Chusma House, the respected publishing enterprise of Charley Trujillo (Soldados) that offers fine literature sometimes overlooked by readers and reviewers. Here's the announcement from Chusma House about Castro's intriguing book:

"A collection of sensitive essays that depict the lives of a close knit Mexican family living first in Arvin, in the San Joaquin Valley, and later in the San Francisco Bay Area. These insightful, loving, guilt ridden, and at times very sad narratives, reveal the religious, moral, cultural, and ethical values of a young girl raised in the 1950s and 1960s in a Mexican Catholic working class home. We are told stories about a special Mexican mother-daughter relationship; about loving one’s family but needing to leave it; about living in another country and loving it; and about the role of the Peace Corps in the lives of young Americans of the 1960s. The essays cover the years from the late 1930s, when the author’s parents married and came to California from New Mexico, to the 1990s when their lives ended. In between those years their special marriage experienced intense love and intense tragedy."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
"Rafaela G. Castro was born in Bakersfield, California, but has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent two years in Brazil with the Peace Corps before receiving degrees in English Literature, Library Science, and Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley. She has lectured in Ethnic Bibliography and Chicano Studies at UC Berkeley, and recently retired from the Humanities/Social Sciences department of Shields Library at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Dictionary of Chicano Folklore."


CHILDREN'S STORY WORKSHOP
The Aurora Central Library and the Colorado Authors League presents another workshop in the CAL Speaker Series, "I Wrote (or Have an Idea For) a Children's Story - Now What?" CAL speaker Denise Vega is author of, among others, Click Here (To Find Out How I Survived Seventh Grade) (Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers, 2005) and Build A Burrito (Cartwheel Books, Scholastic, 2008). The workshop takes place at 6:00 p.m., March 29, Aurora Central Library, 14949 E. Alameda Parkway, Aurora, CO. The event is free, but please call 303-739-6626 to reserve a space.

CALL FOR CHILDREN'S LITERACY VOLUNTEERS
Friends of Food For Thought, a children's literacy group that works with low-income youngsters in Denver, is recruiting volunteers and board members.

The organization has been in existence for about 14 years. Find a short description at http://www.ffft.org/

The board usually meets the second Wednesday of the month from noon to two p.m. in Denver.

Volunteers can work on developing participants for and planning book drives, fund-raising, marketing, and events.

For more information, Bonnie F. McCune, Library Community Programs Consultant


WHAT I'M READING NOW
One of the books resting on the small table next to my bed is Murder & Other Acts of Literature, edited by Michele Slung (Book-of-the-Month Club, 1997). I picked up a pristine copy of this short story anthology at Miss Prothero's Books on Santa Fe Drive here in Denver. (Check out this store the next time you are cruising the West Side, visiting the Museo de Las Americas or the art galleries, including CHAC, or grabbing a bite to eat at El Noa Noa or El Taco de Mexico. It's address is 1112 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO 80204, 303-572-2260.)

The basic idea for the collection is that the crime fiction was written by authors not necessarily recognized as crime fiction writers. That attracted me immediately -- here was an opportunity to stretch my understanding of several writers. This book provided a chance to read mystery and detective stories by authors I respect but who are not usually associated with those genres. And what a lineup: John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Naguib Mahfouz, Alice Walker, Isak Dinesen, Louisa May Alcott, William Faulkner, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf and fourteen other esteemed and honored writers from around the world. For a reader this type of collection is a treasure, something to linger over while propped against a pillow with a book light the only illumination in an otherwise pitch-dark bedroom. And linger I have, limiting myself to one story each night, no matter how tempted I am to flip the pages from the James Thurber piece to the Rudyard Kipling story.

I haven't finished the book so I can't say which of the stories will turn out to be my favorite, but Mahfouz, García Márquez, Allende and Woolf so far have set a pretty high bar (no surprise, right?) The Mahfouz story, By A Person Unknown, is a troubling, ambiguous detective story centered on a serial killer whose crimes are works of heinous art. Perfect and cold-blooded, the killer appears to have no motive for his cruelty; he leaves absolutely no clues nor does he make any mistakes. He appears seemingly out of nowhere and leaves the scene untouched, undisturbed except for the blood and protruding eyeballs of the strangled victims. The horror mounts and normalcy becomes a lost ideal. The detective, Muhsin, grapples with trying to solve the crime but he realizes that, essentially, such acts of violence can never be solved, they can never be explained. Where is the reality in that?

Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness by García Márquez is creepy. How's this for an opening line: "When we came back to the house in the afternoon, we found an enormous sea serpent nailed by the neck to the door frame." A classic tale of misdirection, the ending surprises the reader who can only say, "Yeah, that's it."

Monk is quintessential Faulkner, almost Gothic in its tone, while Allende's An Act of Vengeance reads like a Shakespearean tragedy with a depressing but romantic Latina twist.

Ah, nothing like a good murder story to stir up the literary juices. As the editor says in her Foreword: "Murder and Other Acts of Literature implies what we already know, that the pen can be lethal and that the book is indeed a blunt instrument. Thus, when those wielding these weapons are among the world's greatest and most honored literary figures, what more desirable fate than willingly, for a few hours, to allow oneself to become a victim of their artistry?"

MARKETPLACE WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU ABOUT BUSH'S RECENT TRIP THROUGH THE AMERICAS
Joellen Easton of the public radio program Marketplace sent in the following survey that she thought some readers of La Bloga might want to answer. She invites you to answer questions on their website, found here. Here's her message.

What was the impact of President Bush's Americas trip? Was this all political theater? Or do you expect Bush’s trip to affect your life or the lives of other Latinos in the U.S.? What do you expect to happen as a result of the trip? Share your insights with us. The trip highlighted some tensions between the U.S. and its neighbors to the south. Bush and Chavez's dueling tours underscored their ongoing tug-of-war for influence in the region. In Mexico, president Felipe Calderon pressed Bush for U.S. action on comprehensive immigration reform focused on creating jobs, not a fence. What do you make of the Bush visit, and what it means for relations between the U.S. and Latin America?

Joellen Easton
Analyst, Public Insight Journalism
MarketplaceMarketplace Money
American Public Media


Finally, the answer to the question I asked a few weeks ago is Jack Kerouac. If you don't remember the question, you can find it here.

Later.