Review: Cages. The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks.

Review: Sylvia Torti. Cages. Tucson, Arizona : Schaffner Press, Inc., 2017.
ISBN 9781943156184 1943156182

Michael Sedano

Big research university campuses have at least one featureless structure with heavy air conditioning units running noisily 24/7, security locks on the steel entry door, and if there’s a sign it might read “Vivarium,” or “Birdsong Lab,” as in Sylvia Torti’s 2017 novel, Cages.

Cages goes past the security gates into the labs where walls two stories high are lined with bird cages and the air a cacophony of tweets from thousands of captive birds.

Random males paired with a female produce songs designed to win sex from the experimenter's random selection. That's her reproductive choice, too.

Down the hall, in the quieter workspaces, scientists cut the birds open, hook wires to their insides, suture. Then the songbirds get wired to computers that count muscle contraction, breathing, and convert their melody into raggedy lines on a printout.

The fall of a sparrow is cursed for costing a week’s work and the necessity of doing another bird.

Torti’s writing offers rich enjoyment for birders and photographers who hang around birders. Scientists will get a kick out of a story about doing science that doesn’t pull many punches for the nonscientist and digs into thorny ethical territory. Some researchers might raise a brow at the author’s antivivisectionist tone. Some readers my be freaked out by casual euthanasia.

Torti’s focus is not for the birds but the people and their courtship patterns. Cages builds underlying tension drawing parallels between questions asked of birds that are answered as the people play out their everyday interactions. In some ways people's suffering comes from what they do to the birds.

The story grows from four people and their connections. A first-love story pairs two abused strangers, Rebecca, the lab factotum, and the Südtirolean Post-Doc researcher, Anton. A love triangle mixes the outstanding in his field principal researcher, David, his clinical psychologist wife, Sarah, and Ben, their best friend.

The author apportions each character space to find a place in the narrative. Anton is an emotionally damaged son of an absent mother, a famous photographer. Rebecca is a photographer fleeing violent rape by a famous photographer mentor. David’s research has him on the verge of publishing in Science. He wants to answer why do females prefer some males to others when the birds sing?

Sarah is the one character who remains an unkown. She’s an interesting woman. Sarah deserves some development. From David’s point of view, he’s been abandoned by his wife, who’s gone to the Peruvian jungles seeking Ben’s cot. Why, Sarah? Torti is perhaps intentionally withholding more insight, or she ran out of room. There’s a slew of answers pushed across the page as the novel closes.

Ben is supposed to be more presence than character. The best friend, he’s a birdsong recognition expert, the Practice to David’s Theory. In Hebrew Ben David means son of, a linguistic coincidence suggesting the two are the same man.

David torments himself envisioning Sarah in the sack with Ben in some virile jungle setting. She must see Ben as a magnificent and dashing adventurer while David is the solid experimentalist, wondering what makes a bird sing, why do females prefer some males to others? Why, Sarah?

Rebecca’s a humanist, multiplying her outsiderness at the bottom of the lab pecking order. Except she’s a looker, and David notices. But Anton makes a move. The lovers consummate their secret relationship while David is off to a prestigious conference.

At work, the lab assistant speaks her mind, and heart. For instance, David and Anton feverishly speculate on avian musculature and a method to answer surgically why one bird sings and another won’t? Rebecca offers a simple proposition, maybe they don’t want to sing. Deep down, she has an effect.

Anton has an answer, other than the bird’s feelings. Humans have a brain and opposable thumbs. Humans experiment on living creatures because we’re superior. The foreigner is joined in this arrogance by the boss, but David goes hot cold. One moment David holds warm thoughts for an aging dove, the next he’s coldly evicting the dove to make room for a useful bird. For the author's perspective on obsessive research praxis, Torti sends Anton to old age baking cookies for village kids. Someone else discovered the engram and now, in the end, it made no difference.

Big science makes big money. Torti says that’s not worth the human cost, David agrees. David does small science with big implications. David’s classmate rides a trajectory leading to billions of dollars from a pill and who knows what other discoveries? Fire the Post-Docs and hire three grad students for the same money. Throw cheap labor like firing a shotgun. Bound to hit something.

Engram is only one of the weighty considerations Sylvia Torti challenges herself to incorporate into her novel’s scientific dimension. Where Cages’ people live, vocabulary from the deeper reaches of science informs their daily patter.

Axons, synapses, syrinx and bird physiology, engram, instinct, learning, measuring technology, these rest far from the lingua franca of many an educated reader’s tongue. Without "mansplaining"Torti teaches enough to open readers to appreciating David’s sense of urgency about birds.

David believes his bird findings inform conclusions about human communication. Torti keeps this narrative can of worms firmly sealed. She doesn’t have another three hundred pages to develop that story line. Besides, David doesn’t see the answers slapping him in the face. What makes “his” female prefer Ben to David? He imagines he knows. He's wrong.

Because she wants to. Because she can. And there’s the rub, Sylvia Torti doesn’t want to explore that just yet, why Sarah makes her choices. As the novel winds down there’s a device, a diary like an omniscient Greek chorus, who lays out Sarah’s predicament, allays Ben’s paranoia, and epitomizes David’s career illustrating how some questions are only grammatical expressions that are incapable of defining the world about them. Some conflicts loving two people have no resolution, they only look like choices. You have to do both.

Cages by Sylvia Torti is different from her Chiapas-set novel, The Scorpion’s Tail., where women lead the way for a male protagonist. Here, David might be heading the right direction owing to the woman and Anton is exiled for his convictions, but it's page 296 and that's all she wrote. Readers will enjoy Cages and will want to read both. And if Sarah finally gets her say, we’ll all want to read that, too.


mail bag

It's OK to be raza and support the hispanics in New Mexico. Up there, they call themselves that without vomiting, so when in Barelas, do as the Latinos do.

The NHCC has an idea I recommend to other cultural organizations. NHCCmarketers promoted a deal with community retailers and a big internet marketer to fundraise from supporter purchases. The Shop and Give Program makes great sense. Click here for info.


Boyle Heights Street Pachanga November 30

Artists, performers, musicos can jump on the bill for this sure to be lively community event promoted by a host of people listed here:

Music, art, and food festival at Mariachi Plaza and along East 1st Street in Los Angeles (Boyle Heights).

Workshop Stations along East 1st Street:
- Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory
"Chicano Student Walkouts Silkscreen"
- Liliflor Art
"Stencils"
- Maricela Sosa
"Papel Picado"
- La Victoria Trio
"Corridos"

Art Curators & Artists along Paseo del Arte:
Quetzal Flores (626) 429-4261
Emmanuel Deleage (323) 263-7684 x1003
Nico Avina (323) 762-4564

Vendors & "Rising Stars" on Plaza Mariachi Stage:
Beatriz Zaragoza (626) 203-2050

Watch for details at the Facebook. 


The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks
La Cruda

Miguelito sat in the small unpainted room between the front room and the kitchen, leafing through a Your Hit Parade magazine. Dany Landeros was spinning rancheras on the radio. The boy looked away from the black marks on the paper to study the photograph of “Woozy” tacked to the wall by his Uncle John. “Woozy” must have been the name of the four-eyed man.

Woozy was an American, meaning a white man. Jesus next to him was white, too, hasta en color, but that's different, it was a drawing. Woozy’s grizzled unshaven face made him look like a bum in grainy black and white. Miguelito recognized retouching without having a word for it. Somehow the photographer had duplicated Woozy’s eyes giving the bum two sets of eyes, over-under. Fake but compelling to the small boy.

Pondering the provenance of Woozy’s photo—did Uncle John pay for it? Did Woozy give it to Uncle John? Why two eyes?--the boy had not noticed Uncle John stumble into the room. Tall, unshaven like Woozy, Uncle John smiled down at his nephew, his hard-working little sister’s own little boy. Smiling made John wince in pain.

John wore the suspenders and creased baggy trousers he wore last night at El Resbalón. His left leg bore a dark stain and drops of blood dotted his undershirt pointing to swollen crusty nostrils and a bruise coloring Uncle John’s face with black and blue and green and yellow blotches against his deep brown left cheek.

“Sientete, Mi’jo,” gramma told him. She didn’t say it the way she invited Miguelito to sit to a bowl of Cocido and her hand-made tortillas hot off the comal. Miguel detected sadness and the stress of helplessly aguantando the fact her oldest child was a wino. In a few weeks, she’d give him money for the Greyhound to Stockton or Fresno from where he’d pick his way down the valley. All his mother had to do every year was worry and send money.

John ignored the chair and leaned into the ice box. He took a drinking glass off the top of the white appliance and two eggs from inside. He hastily cracked each blanquillo into the jelly jar, bits of brown shell clung to the viscous egg. Juan looked at Miguelito with his one good eye, the other swiveling with it under the swollen lid. “Salud!” he saluted the youngster. John tilted his head back and let the raw eggs slide into his mouth.

“La cruda,” Uncle John said. Miguel recognized the statement as both fact and lament. The boy stared at the empty jar on the table. A single drop of albumen glistened on the rim in the light from the window. A thread of eggwhite stretched and slowly glided down the outside of the glass. Woozy stared blankly from the other room. The moment burned itself into Miguelito’s awareness and he would never forget it.

Gramma used her apron to pull open the firebox to stoke up the heat with a piece of orangewood that she pushed into the coals. Then she poured water from the olla into a shiny steel soup pot. In a practiced blur she peeled six tomatillos, sliced a small onion, halved and sliced a yellow lemon into the pot with a Bay leaf and black peppercorns.

She walked out to the garden to pick six slender green chile pods and all the red chile piquin on one bush. She tore off two leaves from the tall blue-green plant and walked back to the stove.

Uncle John breathed in deeply. The blooded nostril gave off a shrill wheeze and bubbled when he exhaled. He pulled a wadded handkerchief from his back pocket and emptied his nose. Miguel couldn’t avoid seeing the green and bloody mocos Uncle John folded away into his pocket.

Gramma added the chiles whole into the pot, followed with a generous sprinkle from a round cardboard box of salt.

She pulled the blue-green leaves from her apron pocket. Laying one leaf flat on her palm, she slapped the other palm sharply onto the leaf, three quick slaps. Gramma looked at the leaf between slaps. The surface had a whitish cast now. Gramma peeled off the transparent skin to produce a wet poultice. She did the same to the other leaf and placed them on Uncle John’s face. He went “mmmm,” the pain hidden below the leaves’ cool healing tissue. Gramma cured Miguelito’s frequent headaches with the same tall blue-green plant, whose name he never learned.

The scent of burning leña and earthy lemony steam filled the kitchen with deliciously fragrant breaths. Miguelito inhaled deeply and made a secret vow that he would never forget the aroma, nor the moment’s complex of feelings.

In a few minutes, gramma ladled some broth into a bowl adding a few tomatillos, onions, and lemon slices. Setting the clear liquid in front of her first born, she said a single word. “Caldillo.”

Caldillo
Caldillo is chiloso with lemony flavor from tomatillos and lemon. Not only does gramma’s Caldillo cure la cruda, it cures the common cold. Naturally gluten-free with about 70 grams of carbohydrates in the whole pot, according to Google.

6 – 8 whole tomatillos, dehusked.
1 yellow lemon (or lime), halved and sliced.
1 medium white onion, sliced.
6 pods fresh or dried chile arbol.
3 pods chile piquín.
2 cups water.
Salt.
Peppercorns.
Bay leaf.

Add to water and bring to low boil.
Serve steaming hot.
Breathe steam, sip soup, wake up, breathe clearly.

Make a pot of Caldillo for the steam. A bowl brings a good sweat and a clear upper respiratory tract. And it tastes really good.

¡Provecho!

Reflecting on NHCC. Bless Me, Ultima Opera Sets Date. Get Lit in LA. March On-line Floricanto

Time for NHCC to Bring Back the NLWC

Michael Sedano

A foto on Facebook brought back warm memories. There were Greta Pullen and Carlos Vazquez smiling out at the lens. I last saw Greta and Carlos at the 2014 Rudolfo Anaya academic conference Roberto Cantu organized at Cal State Los Angeles. It was a joyous reunion.

Pullen and Vazquez, along with Katie Trujillo, organized a decade of National Latino Writers Conferences, cementing a reputation for the National Hispanic Cultural Center (link) as a pre-eminent cultural incubator.

Seeing Greta and Carlos on the screen was a remembrance of good things gone too soon. The National Latino Writers Conference brought important raza writers, literary agents, and emerging writers into a paradise for writers. The event sparkled with spirit and sense of purpose, enhanced by the physical plant of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Times are tough in the land of enchantment, forcing NHCC's shift from identifying itself as an important cultural institution to a role as a regional entertainment venue. That should work in a high-culture deprived market, but I hope the director and staff get more out of the effort than they put in. It's a courageous undertaking. I hope also the gente on top open their hearts and squeeze a few thousand dollars out of the Off-Broadway road shows to resume hosting latina latino writers. A cultural center, especially one named for a gente, should be a place to nurture cultura, as well as display it.

I am following the evolution of the National Hispanic Cultural Center with concern. Recently reorganized in a changing of the guardians, the center took on the ethos of an entertainment center that keeps itself funded selling tickets and subscriptions to a mix of local productions and a steady diet of traveling acts, often those who rent the auditorium and put on their own show, a "four wall" production.

Entertainment programming takes a high risk for a middling return. But hit big with an audience and count the revenue as income rolls in from donations, subscriptions, individual seats, collateral spending, and customer loyalty. That’s how it works. Make a product, sell the product, satisfy customers. Then do it again.

NHCC survives facing off against an arts-hating governor who atavistically watches all the state’s cultural institutions twist slowly in the wind. They're going to have to make it on their own. Hijole, there’s no wonder major art acquisitions are a rarity at NHCC. Curators mount exhibitions from the art museum's stunning collection. This rich resource lets the museum fashion new themes out of familiar canvases and work rescued from the vault. Another strategy is long-running exhibitions.

An exhibition on the patron saint of farmers, Outstanding in His Field: San Ysidro—Patron Saint of Farmers, runs now, through the harvest. Curating on a shrinking subsistence budget must be daunting to people who care about art. They send out resumes.

Renting out the hall pays bills but it’s doubtful even the governor would want to see NHCC rent out one of its multiple performance spaces to cualquier tipo just to fill the calendar.

The impresario promoting NHCC’s season pursues bright lights, big city entertainment lineups. In March, for instance, the center drew a sold-out audience the night Pussy Riot performed the world premiere warm-up for its upcoming world premiere in Seattle. An Elvis impersonator rented the venue for a one-night stand in April. The Philharmonic—they rent the hall as their home auditorium—satisfies with a steady diet of sweeps week music featuring up-and-coming virtuosi soloists.

NLWC writers in el Torréon with muralist Frederico Vigil
NLWC policy forbids fotos of the mural.

There are food events, readings, crafts sales, workshops, gallery walks, and the myriad experiences that draw people to a place; couples for a big night out, families for an afternoon’s low-cost and educational recreation. A visit to the woefuly underplayed el Torreón is reason enough to detour off Interstate 25 at Ave. César Chavez and visit the arts center when in Alburquerque.

The National Hispanic Cultural Center is a gem of a cultural destination but it’s also the nation’s best-kept secret. United Statesians are hungry for affirmation, raza are starved for inclusion. The National Hispanic Cultural Center has a lot of what it takes to satisfy.

Interior, el Torreon. Link below opens interactive view of the Vigil mural.
http://mundos.nationalhispaniccenter.org/torreon_interactive/

Pero, sabes que? There’s a major emptiness in Alburquerque. What is missing from NHCC’s cornucopia of cultural delights is a writers conference. For ten years, NHCC’s National Latino Writers Conference admitted a small number of emerging writers to workshop various genres and issues with professional writers, meet with publishers and literary agents, hone their art. For three years, I workshopped “Reading Your Own Stuff,” with the goal of helping writers become more effective oral presenters of their own work.

The National Latino Writers Conference went by the wayside with a staff change-over a couple years ago. Chisme probably fills books over that but I don’t know anything I didn’t read in the board minutes. I lost track of the NHCC when NLWC went away and after a year, didn't renew my membership.

Over the years I saw a musical chairs game of new guys in charge. I met three of them, I couldn’t really figure them out, organization men, not arts people. The new leader is a woman, Rebecca L. Avitia. It’s her vision that drives the programming and audience strategy. She has to answer to the Board. Above all, she has to turn her cultural centro into an active, busy, modern theater. The rest is gravy, or goes away.

2010 NLWC Writers 

Avitia and her NHCC board need to reignite the center’s commitment to literacy and training writers, as a way of investing in their raison d'etre as a cultural centro or an entertainment destination. For sure, nothing gets on stage until someone writes it down. A libretto doesn’t write itself. A nonverbal dance performance follows a written score. Every movie and film started with words on paper and after every day’s filming someone sat down and revised tomorrow’s lines. It’s ironic in a sad way that a cultural center riding the coattails of talented writers isn’t proactive about nurturing writing.

It’s a bitter realization that when our cultural institutions don’t support our own writers, pues, peor. Writers and critics struggle to foster a culture of written expression, banging at the doors at AWP, starting their own presses, managing their own blogs. The noble struggle will go on, only without the national cultural centro. And that’s a lástima.

Years from now, historians will look back and wonder why New Mexico and the Nationial Hispanic Cultural Center abandoned writing, how NHCC didn’t find its way back to the NLWC. They shot our cultura in the foot. Rhetoricians will ask after the ethos of the place, how the institution made profits on spectacles and reinvested in more of the same without diverting a sum to support a renewed NLWC. How the institution recruited donors for highbrow endeavors but couldn’t scrape up the funding equivalent of a penny for the old guy.

Eliot’s vision of “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion” is what glittery stage happenings are, without writing. They don’t happen. Taking care to nurture and advance writers guarantees the possibility of having new spectacles to lure ticket-buying audiences. Avitia’s got her work cut out for her. I wish her energy and staff to accomplish all that, and one more goal next year: renacimiento of the National Latino Writers Conference.

NLWC writers 2012

Sponsoring the rebirth of NLWC defines a distinctiveness and importance for NHCC, an important step for NHCC recovering its national stature no matter how the political winds twist. I have a vision of talented raza writers walking across the broad plaza rushing to a seminar, smiling at the sound of the acequia's agua gushing into the pool. There's also a vision of those artists today, standing at the gates of the NHCC, shaking the bars and angrily kicking at the gates wanting to be included, wondering why they got kicked out in the first place?

Bless Me, Ultima Opera Premiere Scheduled for February 2018

La Bloga has followed with interest developing news of an opera based on Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima. In January 2017, La Bloga-Tuesday (link) featured an interview with the opera's creator Héctor Armienta. Performance dates were still pending as Armienta was still finishing the music.

Recently La Bloga friend Teresa Márquez shared the good news Armienta, Opera Southwest, and the NHCC have set a date for a workshop performance in February 2018. The company has hosted tryouts and workshops in San Jose, CA and is taking the show on the road for the first time.

This premiere creates the ideal opportunity to visit New Mexico in Winter, both to enjoy the state’s spectacular landscapes and to see the work in progress for Héctor Armienta’s opera, Bless Me, Ultima.

Ticket-buyers don’t have to wear tuxedoes or evening dress to opera productions, but it’s likely some tipas and tipos like to show for the opera all dressed up in their Thursday best, especially February 18 for the first night. Others will be equally well turned-out through the Sunday matinee on the 25th. I wear my Pendleton or a sweatshirt when I go to an LA Opera spectacular. Placido and crew don’t care, as long as I enjoy the show.

Opera is a genuine visual and aural treat, with a few conventions about when to applaud and stuff, that someone inevitably miscues and gets dirty looks from the cognoscenti. Raza can be cognoscenti, too. Just be there and dig it. And dig it you will.

A night at the opera is fun so long as one remembers it's the “u” in fun that counts. Wrap yourself in the music—the power of the human body to produce sound will be a punch in the gut to some. Ultima’s cast features a 14-year old boy singer. This could be the launch of a major career.

In opera, the story, humor, melodies, and visual riches like sets, costumes, lighting and staging can be enchanting. I don’t know if the Producers plan on supertitles so listeners can read the words in Armienta’s English-language libretto. Subscriptions are open now. Individual seats go on sale in July.

I would not wait. Click here for ticket information: http://www.operasouthwest.org/operas/bless-me-ultima


Mail Bag
Arte Público Press' Kanellos Honored

Click here for details from Arte Público Press

GetLit Poetry Slam Hosted by LATC
Michael Sedano


Los Angeles Theater Center is a theater multiplex of five performance spaces joined to a luxurious marble-walled grand hall and lobby. The descent to the basement rest rooms takes visitors along a massive bank vault. Remodeled stairs to the balcony feature half inch thick glass and stainless steel rails. the balustrade overlooking the lobby gives unobstructed vistas of the huge and luxurious space.

The LATC is a great place for theater and a fabulous place for a poetry slam competition among teams from local high schools. That's what drew me to Spring Street early Thursday and Friday morning. Lend a hand with administrative chores and share the energy of dozens of Get Lit staffers and a thousand or more kids gathering to perform or cheer on their spoken word artists.

GetLit Classic Slam follows a wondrous format. The contestant chooses a poem by a well-known poet and writes a response poem. The contestant knits the two with narrative, working from memory to meet a time limit. It's a beautiful way to link generations by remembering in one's own voice good work from another time.

Rachel Kilroy put me to work at the merchandise table where I would sell "Poet" merchandise. A jumble of colors, sizes, styles, teeshirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, beanies, filled plastic storage bins. Git Lit's first book is hot off the presses, and several boxes wait under the table skirts. Rachel's mother is there. Later I meet her dad. The family that supports literacy and oracy together make up just three of the dozens of volunteers and paid staff bustling through the lobby, theatres, and outside foyer, getting the crowd set to make a beeline for their seat.

Thursday, I worked with one other volunteer. Friday three knowledgeable women took over. Two, who were mothers of contestants, and a retired high school English teacher, organized the garments, folding and laying them out across twenty feet of table space. I hope the clean-up crew labeled those stacks before moving them to the bins and transport to the finals on Sunday.

Thursday and Friday, school teams competed in the quarter-finals and semi-finals. The winners move to the final competition, this year taking place in the opulence of the Orpheum movie house.

Registration keeps the kids outside as the coaches sign in and take a bag of credentials outside to waiting and cheering teams. A signal from Get Lit executives Diane Luby Lane or Amanda Pittman and the lobby doors fill with excited kids thronging toward their stage. There, an MC whips up enthusiasm before introducing the first contestant.

A panel of judges scores the panel of competitors. A few get selected to compete in the day's second round of competition, the afternoon's semi-finals.

The Get Lit experience cannot be matched by any other competitive activity. Reciting and performing spoken words to audiences of hundreds of peers produces pure exhilaration. At the end, the kid walks off stage into the waiting arms of the team.

For finalists, the experience of taking the Orpheum stage to a screaming full house will make all the work of honing the performance into a winner worth it. And it is.

Teams and individuals pose in front of a Get Lit seamless. An official photographer is there to document every team. 

When the formal pose is done, the cell phones come out for exuberant selfies.

Get Lit published its first collection of work by Get Lit participants. A single copy sells for fifteen dollars at the venue. For details, click here. I sold one person the show special, 10 books for a hundred dollars. In addition, Get Lit would donate ten books to a participating high school, or a school of the customer's naming.

My heart went out to the schools who prepared for the competition but didn't make it to LA on time. On Friday morning, two forlorn registration bags lay tossed behind a sign. Maybe those teams can find a donor to pay for an overnight stay in DTLA. These kids and their coaches deserve a night in the big city.



On-line Floricanto On the Verge of Spring
Chuck Cuyjet, Devi S. Laskar, Jolaoso PrettyThunder, Jenuine Poetess, Get Christie Love


“Untitled” by Chuck Cuyjet
“Alive, Burning” by Devi S. Laskar
“winds of the West murmurs” by Jolaoso PrettyThunder
"mother of all bombs" by Jenuine Poetess
“Dear Pepsi” by Get Christie Love

“Untitled”
by Chuck Cuyjet

We woke up 49 years ago and the world was on fire. Today we wake to gassed children and wonder...
Someone asked the question
Who raised these crazed men
who gas children
who poison our air
who pour filth into our water
who fill our schools
with ignorance called knowledge
and who pontificate on their
own greatness?
We did.
No, of course not.
We shield
our loved offspring
with our own bodies
and love.
We teach them to respect
themselves, our values,
to work hard, to look
out for the other fella,
to protect our tribe,
And honor our god.
But as we look across
oceans, into the
hearts of darkness,
as we rattle our self righteous
swords, do we seek justice
or vengeance, or glory?
The riches the few gather
befoul their souls yet
in our secret selves
we envy them their ease
and never question
the cost.
So we replicate it
in our screams and calls
to our god to punish
them and reward us,
the good fathers and mothers
who have no sin, no stain
for we gas no children
in our warm houses
in winter and cool our frosty
asses on patios in the summer
sipping tea with ice cubes
rum drinks mixed with faux
concern of deaths so far away.
We don't gas children
We starve their souls
with the contempt for those
we arm.



Alive, Burning
by Devi S. Laskar

Burn everything to the bone.
Start clean and again will rise
hibiscus, diesel, dung, mango
mingling with night skin in this taxi.
Start clean and again will rise
a rw odor of green—
mingling with night skin in this taxi.
Money, envy, hunger filling the air.
A raw odor of green—
cauliflower patches and cabbage replace the landfill.
Money, envy, hunger filling the air.
From garbage grows food, from thieves spring farmers.
Cauliflower patches and cabbage replace the landfill.
The road hooks like shoelaces around shantytowns.
From garbage grows food, from thieves spring farmers.
All you see are red clay roofs and jaded faces.
The road hooks like shoelaces around shantytowns.
On his dashboard the driver keeps a statue of Durga.
All you see are red clay roofs and jaded faces.
The bronzed feet of this goddess of war will never touch the ground.
On his dashboard the driver keeps a statue of Durga.
But for my American dollar I would be you.
The bronzed feet of this goddess of war will never touch the ground,
pounding a rich man’s laundry on stones by a man-made lake.
But for my American dollar I would be you
eating food off the sooty plate of the street,
pounding a rich man’s laundry on stones by a man-made lake
alive and filled with resentment and wonder.
Eating food off the sooty plate of the street --
hibiscus, diesel, dung, mango,
alive and filled with resentment and wonder.
Burning everything to the bone.



winds of the West murmurs
by Jolaoso PrettyThunder

we summon you winds
of the West,
mother sister Jaguar,
come protect our medicine space
hunt down and devour those energies that do not belong to us,
teach us your ways beyond fear beyond anger beyond death,
beyond guilt,
beyond shame,
beyond all the mythologies and beliefs that no longer serve us.

teach us to be impeccable luminous beings who have no need
to engage in battle,
internally or eternally,
unless we choose to.

help us to be able to support ourselves and
have the ability to ask for and receive what we desire
so that we may step into who we are becoming.



"mother of all bombs"
by Jenuine Poetess

you cannot call a bomb
"mother"
mother is one
of any gender
who protects life
who gives life
who cherishes life
who nurtures life
who sustains life
who fosters life
who celebrates life
who empowers life
who cultivates life
who nourishes life
who heals life
you cannot call that
which destroys
which kills
which carves scars into the flesh
of people
of villages
of Earth
"mother"
do not poison such a word
with your filthy
greedy
murderous
treachery
no bomb is a mother




Dear Pepsi
by get christie love

Dear Pepsi
If you want to be a product of the revolution
Then send yourself into the fray,
Get gassed and pepper sprayed get trampled
Become marginalized and scary
Become irrelevant then made into a fetish.

There are steps involved and you haven't followed even the first rule of a revolt.
Say
Something.

Are you for all lives matter, against women who receive lower wages and
Yes you hired the tatted up gurl with the weave to deliver soda but,
Wait,
Nevermind
That was coke.

Pepsi,
If you wanted a March you should have
Sponsored one.
If you wanted product placement you should have sent
The Million men to the March on
Pepsi buses.
Given away pink pussy hats with every
Case of pop sold or
Maybe pink cans with cat ears.

You could have sent backpacks to underfunded schools or
Put Pepsi swirls on the drum kits at HBCU'S

Pepsi if you want  to be a product of the revolution
Why send the most generic  culturally ambiguous person alive-
No ass
That flat
Ever created a civilization

Dear Pepsi
 if you want to
Be a product of the revolution,
Write your manifesto on a spool of aluminum
Then send it to factory for cutting into cans.
Then tell the people to talk to each other, ask each person to post
Hashtag-
'What part did you get'?

Pepsi,
No jenner, no Kardashian,  no trump
Will ever be culturally relevant to any group who ever needed a spokesmodel.
Madonna at least
Would drink  the Pepsi then lift her leg to pee it out on the boot of a stormtrooper.

Dear Pepsi
To be a product of the revolution,
You will need more than stolen recycled images from Vietnam protests

You will need a legacy of
Conscious thinking,
And permission from water protectors
There is water in Pepsi, right?

Fly Pepsi to  Syria for
A photo op-
And see if I don't
Drive it all back in my chevy.

Dare me
Be daring

Corporate redundancy
Lack of imagination
Lazy marketing

Zero empathy
Zero taste
Zero filling
Zero flavor

You managed to anti revolt.
And you spent a lot of money on
Air.

La Bloga On-line Floricanto April 25

“Untitled” by Chuck Cuyjet

“Alive, Burning” by Devi S. Laskar

“winds of the West murmurs” by Jolaoso PrettyThunder

"mother of all bombs" by Jenuine Poetess

“Dear Pepsi” by Get Christie Love

Chuck Cuyjet. I'm a sixty-nine year old leadership and executive coach. I grew up in Philadelphia, went to college at The University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Over the last decade or so I've featured at Busboys and Poets here in the DC area, but my primary focus with my writing is essay and memoir. The opening lines of the poem reference what it was like waking up the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Currently living in the DC Metro area and raising two children. .

get_christie_love (YPK) performs poetry in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor Ontario. She began writing on the Def Jam Poetry message board in 2002, where she connected with a Detroit poet, Legacy Leonard (may peace be with her),  and was invited to read poetry at her first open mic reading.. She taught herself how to use MIcrosoft Publisher and began creating Chapbooks to sell and trade. She founded OpenAir Publishing in 2004 which has produced 7 chapbooks to date. In October 2014 she hand painted chapbook cover art covers using oil paint on card stock which maintained the $5.00 price for her books and included small original works of abstract art.  Her  goal for 2015 is to publish a collection of poems from her Def Jam Poetry Posts.
She maintains her first poetry board OpenAir to this day, and enjoys writing and sharing poems.
She wrote this,
and left out a bunch of
stuff to save time.
 It’s not a poem.
She thinks she will save it and call it “Not a Poem”

fge

Review: Sci-Fi a la raza. Ultima the Opera. 11th Best Poem of 2016

Review: Matthew David Goodwin, ed. Latina/o Rising. An Anthology of Latin Science Fiction & Fantasy. San Antonio: Wings Press. 2017.  ISBN 978-1-60940-524-3

Michael Sedano

In a skillfully organized anthology, Latina/o Rising eases gently into the reader’s interest with short, softly imaginative stuff like Kathleen Alcalá’s time displacement fantasy, “The Road To Nyer,” and Pedro Zagitt’s pair of one-page fantasies. The collection races through a handful of dystopic and cybernetic futures, then reaches a climactic middle with “Caridad” about a Miami Cubanita forced to become the hive mind of her extended family.

To this point, fantasy and harmless dystopia are the stuff of smiles and reverie. There’s even a foto-novela of sorts. Editor Matthew David Goodwin then changes pace offering a couple of personal, hard-edged pieces that make for considerable discomfort owing to their intrusive failure to be escapist. But this subsides and the collection again finds its sweet spot to wrap with stories from José Older, poetry from Carl Marcum, and a story about Mexicans losing cultura and identity in a distant-future New York.

Some of these stories feel like they’re breaking the rules of fantasy and speculation. Stories can be thought-provoking, morally pointed, but a lot of fun. In Carmen Maria Machado’s “Difficult At Parties” a woman descends into insanity via eye-glazing hard core pornography. Giannina Braschi offers a pair of deeply disturbing pieces, one, a speculative essay centered around the collapse of the World Trade Center, the other an abstract playscript. Carlos Hernandez’ story about a soldier’s cheating wife, his missing legs, and their miracle baby, pierces one’s heart for hitting so close to current events. Reality and the hard facts of life are supposed to be over there, just beyond the margins of the page, outside the first word and the final period. Instead these stories impose not dystopia but ugly reality that sits there, big as life and twice as ugly in the middle of the paragraph, pounding a fist into that space between the eyes, hard. They’re not fun.

The reader takes a deep breath and turns the page to find ever more rewarding experiences. Alejandra Sanchez taps into one’s fear of something lurking in the drainpipes. “The Drain” will get the horror juices flowing with some masterfully crafted asco-inducing descriptions of warm, slimy matter enveloping a woman taking a shower. But “The Drain” is far more than a scary story. Sanchez weaves in elements of a woman’s perception of her beauty and how she presents herself in everyday life, and then domestic violence and the just desserts wrought upon an asshole woman-beater. It’s an unsettling yet satisfying story.

Wrapping up the collection are Daniel José Older’s wonderful futurist New York where the living, the dead, and the half-living compete to maintain order between their dimensions. There’s some thrilling emotion when long-dead African slaves emerge out of an entrada from the underworld. “I feel the wind of hundreds of years of pent up rage and frustration release across my face. Riley’s screaming as loud as he can beside me and we’re both laughing hysterically and crying at the same time.” So will readers.

So what makes sci-fi “latina” “latino”? The final story offers a blatant answer. A XicanaYork woman wants to explore history but by creating electronic games. Her hundred-fifty-years old abuela is worried about the future of Mexican cultura in the city, and frustrated the live-in machine exhibits more interest in carrying on grandma’s curanderisma than la nieta. In this world, identity and cultura feel the threat of technology and institutional power while a succeeding generation seeks its own way through those pressures, using cultura while adapting to what’s coming.

There’s a decidedly east coast and Caribbean lurch to the settings and characters, but for the most part decidedly raza. Gente will see themselves in these stories. Characters have brown skin, speak some Spanish or as in Junot Diaz’ story, get a hard time from friends for not speaking good Spanish, engage in word-play mixing languages. They have names like Mictan (not Mictlán but close), Jesús, Gordo (two of them, one in Ana Castillo’s New Mexico-set story and Older’s), and Paco.

These are “latina/o” stories as a result of character, setting, language, and writer. One thing the collection is not is an insider’s fiction. It’s highly accessible while providing intimate insights about the way these writers, and writers like these, see the world. For the most part, Latina/o Rising will keep any reader interested just because these are worthwhile, good stories.

I’m not a fan of the arroba as a gender marker. Does one pronounce the key title word “Latinat” or “Latinarroba”, or "Latinao," or just give up and ingloriously drop the diacritic and say “Latin”? Perhaps when Wings Press brings the book in a second edition to market they’ll yield to the insurgent use of el equis and make things even more problematic with “Latinx”. A ver.

See if you can read Latina/o Rising in one or two sittings to gain the full benefit of its stomach-churning ride that here and there gives you a fist to the face but more so wide-eyed gasps, some laughs, some primal fear, and a montón of fun.

Order Latin@ Rising from your local independent bookseller, or publisher-direct here: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=220



Bless Me, Ultima, the Opera

Rudolfo Anaya’s timeless novel, Bless Me, Ultima has entertained millions of readers and hundreds of film-goers. Today, there’s an opera in the works. Thankfully, the production will be more Giuseppe Verdi than Philip Glass. That’s the impression I have from a conversation with Héctor Armienta, who is writing the music and libretto for the 2018 debut.

Armienta is Artistic Director and General Director of San Jose California’s Opera Cultura. Opera Cultura, working with Albuquerque’s Opera Southwest and the National Hispanic Cultural Center, will premier the work as early as next January in Anaya’s hometown, Alburquerque. In addition to the opera performances, the NHCC plans an art exhibition of artworks inspired by Bless Me, Ultima, and created by New Mexico artists. The 2018 production moves in May, or in the Fall, to California.

Contemporary U.S. opera often yields musicality to favor spectacle. I’m thinking of the LA Opera’s “Akhnaten” whose singers performed in English, Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew and Akkadian in a visually stunning production that put me to sleep. To my unbridled relief, Héctor Armienta describes himself heavily influenced by late Verdi.

Armienta grew up in Los Angeles, near MacArthur Park. He completed his undergradudate work at California Institute of the Arts before moving to San Francisco to complete a Master’s at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

When I spoke to him via telephone he was in the final stages of the piano vocal score. This means the opera is nearly completed. The composer follows the piano vocal score with an orchestration draft. From here, the company brings in a Stage Director and musicians to workshop the piece. Composer and Stage Director consider issues as does it work dramatically, on stage with characters, musically, does it create “that important moment?”

Casting is all-important. Armienta has a strong sense of who will sing Ultima. Less certain is the young Tony. With three boys choirs in San Francisco there’s ample talent pool. Alburquerque may prove a bit more challenging in finding a Tony, though Armienta doesn’t say that.

Rudolfo Anaya and Héctor Armienta

The opera has been in development since 2013 when Armienta and Rudy Anaya met to develop the synopsis. Armienta focuses on three themes, good/evil, destiny, the natural world versus our physical world. The boy, Tony, and Ultima lead the cast, with Tenorio, Narciso, and Tony’s familia supporting.

The story contains all the essential elements in the novel: the question of Tony’s destiny, Ultima’s journey to her death, the imbalance in the order of things because of a curse. As with any book adaptation, characters and scenes will be omitted, and instead of a third person narrator, dialog will carry the story into action.

Bless Me, Ultima’s music will be neo-romantic with a modicum of modern dissonance. Musically it’s not New Mexico per se, although Armienta researched a trove of New Mexico traditional music and at least two corridos will reflect historically authentic regional song.

The National Hispanic Cultural Center, along with Opera Southwest, commissioned the opera. Multiple sources and donors are contributing as well.

Rebecca L. Avitia, Executive Director of NHCC says “We are incredibly excited about the project and its potential to bring the magic of Anaya's writings and this incredible novel into an unexpected, but important genre.”

Héctor Armienta adds, “These are our stories. We need our stories told in our community. How better to do it than with the magic of opera?”

La Bloga will report additional details as the opera of Bless Me, Ultima advances through its production phases. You can read more about the production and listen to a workshop aria here. Make reservations to attend a June 17, 2017 Bless Me, Ultima Workshop in San Jose CA by clicking here.


Tejer la Tarde is Eleventh “Best Poem of 2016”

Owing to a clerical oversight, last week’s collection of Best Poems of La Bloga On-line Floricanto 2016 shared only ten of the eleven nominated poems.

It’s a pleasure for La Bloga to join the Moderators of the Facebook poetry community Poets Responding to SB 1070: Poetry of Resistance in celebrating the work of Oralia Rodriguez and her poem, “Tejer la tarde.”


Tejer la tarde
Por Oralia Rodríguez

Montar la cadena,
de los primeros días
pespuntes a las paredes,
encontrarme en la risa
en la incertidumbre
de hilos rojizos
para bordar la tarde,
un derecho, un revés.

Buscar lo que no soy,
historias remendadas,
voces en la sangre,
una vuelta,
sobrehilar los pasos
de pájaros ciegos,
cuando la metáfora
es pecado
y el dolor es sólo
un derecho o un revés.

Los demonios deshilan
punto tras punto los miedos,
recodifican la identidad,
punzan el subconsciente,
me anudan a la soledad,
expandirme
y no encontrar
la geometría de un cuerpo,
un derecho, un revés.

Inocencia de palabras,
un punto al aire,
palabras que danzan silentes,
un derecho, un revés.

Adolecer apegos,
noches fragmentadas
que alfileres no sostienen,
códigos y puntos
para remachar
los días sin esquina
y remendar la casa de la infancia,
volver a ser niña
y no ser nombrada,
un derecho, un revés.

Fronteras trazadas al vuelo,
fragmentos de intimidad,
mariposas de caleidoscopio.
Anillar los instantes de tu sexo
al naufragio de tus muslos,
florecer en lluvia roja,
metamorfosis,
un derecho, un revés.

Trozos de tarde
para anudarlos
a la mirada,
volver, recorrer los rincones,
atar lo que me fue negado,
menguar y
gritar lo que no soy,
las palabras, los días,
el abandono.

Punto, tras punto,
remachar,
un derecho,
un revés,
un derecho,
un revés,
terminar.

Oralia Rodríguez. Originaria de Jerez Zacatecas, radica en Tijuana B.C. Estudió la Licenciatura en Informática en el Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana, y la Licenciatura en educación Primaria en la Normal Fronteriza Tijuana. La maestría en Cultura Escrita en el Centro de Posgrado y Estudios Sor Juana, cursó el Diplomados Creación Literaria certificado por el INBA.

Se desempeña como docente. Ha participado en diferentes antologías de México y Argentina. Publicó dos cuentos infantiles ¨Lobo, Lobito¨ y ¨Murmullos en el bosque¨. El poemario ¨Habitada de nostalgia¨ para el 5º Encuentro Latinoamericano de escritores Hidalgo 2013. Y el poemario Trozos de tarde para no ser olvido de Nódulo Ediciones 2016.


Here is the full complement of 2016's Best Poems (click for link):
Canto for Francisco X. Alarcón By Juan Felipe Herrera
To the Man Sitting across from Us at the Hospital in Harlingen, Texas By César L. De León
The Pulse of a Rainbow By Kai Coggin
Geographic Dreaming or what it means to be Chicana By Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Remembering Fukushima, Nagasaki and Hiroshima By Sharon Elliott
We speak of mighty things By Jolaoso PrettyThunder
Notes on the Holy Ghost and Her Atheist Daughter By Sonia Gutiérrez
Mni Wiconi By Iris De Anda
Leaving the Candle On Overnight By Edward Vidaurre
Nochixtlán Por Guadalupe González Pérez

Tejer la Tarde Por Oralia Rodríguez

Review: Indigenous quotient. Veterans. Librotraficantes. NLWC. On-Line Floricanto.

Review: Juan Gomez-Quiñones. Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian Heritage as Future. San Antonio: Aztlán Libre Press, 2012.

ISBN-13:978-0-9844415-2-5

Michael Sedano

   

In 1980 I attended the black caucus meeting at an academic conference in Manhattan. As I walked into the packed room, a friend advised me that he would handle it when a hothead would rise to challenge my presence in the room. What a crock of caca then, and now. 

That long-ago moment illustrates a fatal flaw plaguing cultural revolutions. Some adherents cling to a “we them” dichotomy that results in isolating homophilous groups from each other. In the particular instance, in that group of professors, “black caucus” implied other-than-old-guard academics, but the objecting member wanted “only black gente allowed, screw you others.”

Being who I am--or was then--I wanted to invite the fellow to kick my ass out, if he could. But I had not come for a fistfight but to drink in the topic of the day, thus readily accepted my friend’s taking lead when the brother stood dramatically and pointed across the room to me.

The assembly by consensus put down the objection and affirmed solidarity with the association’s sole Chicano. Then followed a worthwhile discussion of Molefi Asante’s newly published book, Afrocentricity.

Given stupendous excitement among the caucus with their predictions of the book’s impact on conventional thought, when my friend handed me a copy signed by his friend Molefi, I noted the modest page count. A good theory of cultural identity doesn’t need a lot of words when the author’s chosen the right ones.

All that comes to mind holding a copy of Juan Gomez-Quiñones’ Indigenous quotient / stalking words, from San Antonio’s dynamic Aztlán Libre Press. Two small essays bolstered by a montón of references and bibliography offer solidly academic work. Although conformance to the milieu of the academy obligates the writer to dense, unadorned prose, readers who can penetrate it will say “It’s about time.”

Indigenous quotient / stalking words can become as exciting a book for raza as Afrocentricty was when it arrived. Indigenous quotient / stalking words is a professional historian’s tool. However, since the subject of Identity belongs to all readers, anyone who manages to find the book will enjoy it. Seek it out. Gomez-Quiñones’ exposition will foster endless hours of discussion, which is the whole point of the book. Publisher Aztlán Libre Press makes the title available on its website. 

Gomez-Quiñones’ two essays call for “full integration of Native American histories and cultures into academic curriculums”.  We matter, the pissed-off professor argues. His anger seethes between lines, oozes from paragraphs, soaks pages in self-restraint at the old guard. The book is meant to engage them. The Profession declares que lástima, that history and those people are all gone now. Anyone can claim to be indio and hold ceremonies and stuff. Bottom line, indigenous American cultures don’t really matter, end of discussion.

The first essay, “Indigenous quotient”, seeks to revive that discussion, rejecting its a priori view reflected in a painting titled If Only described in an email by Daniel Cano. I remember when I was at Fort Bragg after I'd returned from Vietnam. I was walking down the hall, and I stopped to see a large painting of the embattled George Custer, surrounded by thousands of marauding Indians. In the background, high above the fray, the painter had inserted a line of airplanes and hundreds of parachutes dropping into the battle.

 “Indigeneity,” JGQ observes, “is a response to the genocide that is at the core of colonialism”.

When  colonialists aren't killing us, the scholar-advocate illustrates, colonialism’s concept of indios as aborigines results in keeping indian people from autonomous self-accountability on grounds natives are deficient.

This kind of restrictive historiography cannot conceal the persistence of indigenous history, nor obscure continuous archaeological discoveries enriching awareness of indigenous history, nor ignore popular sentiment reaffirming indigenous identity. We matter because we exist, it's time we insist on that.

The second essay, “Stalking Words,” is JGQ’s version of Afrocentricity, which Gomez-Quiñones terms “Indigenitude.” The abstraction welcomes the old guard’s trivializing condemnation of indigenismo that anyone can claim to be indigenous. That’s the point of the new paradigm, “a politics of truth” that changes the production of truth from a colonialized mind’s to a self-affirming indigenous stance: “Among some Indigenous, ethnicity, group membership, and cultural practices are all taken into account, encoded in a true heart whose sign is integrity. Among many Indigenous themselves, the defining truth is a historical and multifaceted ethos that can be identified, described, and valued (auto-valorizado), whose outlines can be imagined as an ethical paradigm.” (78)

Self-declaration is the first but not the entire process here. Gomez-Quiñones offers observations on ways to achieve effective historiography through academic tools and a paradigm shift.

The academic approach requires research into indio and simpatico sources liberated from colonialist bias.   Extensive endnotes provide a starting point for the scholar’s task of tracking back references, identifying valid resources, forming one's own conclusion.

Analysis freed from European colonialism-derived paradigms will more effectively construct indigenous historiography and impel it into its future. Specifically, JGQ talks about three strategies: keep geography in one’s foreground—Europeans stole our land forever nunca olvidaremos; engage, focus analysis and ideology on policies and practices, not people who oppose and disparage; be alert to those infected by  aboriginism and others who define the Problem as merely ethnicity. 

The author lays out a highly structured case befitting its academic genus. The table of contents helpfully outlines the argument and exposition.

Poets have been ahead of the curve on these elements of Professor Gomez-Quiñones’ prescription. Poets feature lost and ruined homeland themes in poems about the barrio, Aztlán as separate eden, the land itself and a host of farmworker poems. “La tierra is la raza’s kissing cousin” Abelardo writes. Geography and land occupy central roles in raza poetic consciousness.

Don’t scare the xenophobes is something poets ignore with relish. “love thy master of the blue-eyed hatred” Ricardo Sánchez screams in one of the movimiento's numerous anglo-as-devil poems. More often, poets turn within, looking at soft-focus illustrations of jefitas, pachuco ironies, mythic indios. “We don’t have to kill Sam or sacrifice his blood / Sam is suicidal” Alurista counsels in his edenic “Dawn Eye Cosmos.”

Clearly, the first two strategies have long occupied the cultural memory of chicanismo. Indigenism plays a crucial role in affirming identity in murals as in movimiento poetry. Talk about a rhetoric ideally suited to its audience. Poets and painters assert a separate Eden in Aztlán through allusions to razared, gente de bronce. A mythic pre-Columbian America is compelling because it is true.

Estrada Courts, Boyle Heights L.A., ~1980

In short, a crucial element in JGQ's rationale--shifted paradigms--has long existed. Gente comprehend an ethos of indigeneity.

Gomez-Quiñones’ third consejo can be a trap. For all who thirst for more and better history, some intently fashion alternative fantasy histories, others mindlessly dismissive of any but their way.  These are that fellow in the black caucus meeting, true believers whose nativism drives them into a Manichean frenzy separating “we” from “them.” 

On the precept that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world, the “battle of the name” illustrates one trap. Hispanic. Don’t call me Hispanic. Latino. I’m female. Latina. Be inclusive, nonsexist. Latino Latina. Awkward. I’m a Chicano, ese. Chicana Chicano. Latinos are Europeans, I don’t see any Italians around here. I’m Cubano. You’re a gusano. I’m from El Salvador. So, you’re a Mexican from El Salvador. I’m Mexican American. I’m Mexican-American. I’m an American.

With identity all over the place, finding a central heart continues to elude community cohesion. A theory like that presented here can provide a fulcrum. Fortunately, identification needs permission from only one other person to form bonds of mutuality. Mejor, indigenous gente don’t need permission from academia to develop and promulgate proper history into their classrooms. Except in Arizona. The only requirement for mutuality is communication.

The first step in any movimiento or paradigm shift is getting gente talking about ideas like these so each person can find at least one other like-minded voice. Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian Heritage as Future will get readers talking. Juan Gomez-Quiñones wants readers to do the math: divide European colonialism into indigenous history and the quotient is You.

Estrada Courts, 2012

A structural feature I appreciate of Gomez-Quiñones' book is his inclusion of a self-critique segment. In that spirit, I would expect someone to demand more evidence that poets already speak with indigeneity. This evidence, by La Bloga alumna Olga Garcia, blinds you with brilliance, an ostensive definition of Indigenitude:

A Poor People’s Poem 
This poem 
angry 
corajudo 
bold 
has got 
a bad attitude 
un genio from hell 

and you 
you’re afraid 
of my poem 

afraid of this 
deep dark red poem 
that bleeds 
woman words 

you 
you’re afraid 
cuz even though 
this poem 
*is* 
about survival 
it isn’t about 
endangered whales 
or dying forests 

Listen 
this is a poor woman’s poem 
a Mexicana 
Chicana 
Mestiza 
India 
Mujer 
Este de Los Angeles 
poem 

Yeah 
this poem’s 
got roaches crawling 
all over it 
and tiny pink mice 
nibbling at the edges 
and corners of 
simple-everyday words 

Listen this poem rides the bus 
works 12 hours a day 
7 days a week 
with no medical benefits 
and no paid vacations 

Listen 
this poem 
has crossed rivers 
and mountains 
jumped over 
and crawled under 
barb-wired fences 

this poem 
has slaved 
in hot-sun pesticide fields 
picking 
piscando 
your lettuce 
tomatoes 
oranges 
onions 
picking 
piscando 
the vegetables 
and fruits 
that make your meals 
nice and balanced 

And this poem 
has worked all kinds of shifts 
in inner-city factories 
sewing 
packaging 
stuffing 
cutting 
folding 
ironing 
the clothes you wear 
the jeans 
the shirts 
the jackets 
that keep you 
in style 

Yeah 
this is a poor woman’s poem 
a brown people’s poem 
so you see 
right now 
we don’t want to talk about 
the ozone layer 

We 
the people in this poem 
we wanna talk about where we live 
about affordable housing 
about how the hot water doesn’t work 
and the windows don’t close 
about the Never-no-heat-in-the-winter 
Sit-u-a-tion 

we wanna talk about drugs 
about the alcohol cocaine crack heroin 
impregnating our communities 
making modern colonized brown black slaves of us 

we wanna talk about food stamps 
about jobs and fair wages 
about 12 hour shifts 
and working conditions 

we wanna talk about the police 
about choke-hold 
and billy clubs 
about busted heads 
and handcuffed minds 
about sharp-teeth dogs 
and shackled freedom 
about racist cops 
who hate 
poor 
brown 
black 
people 

we wanna talk about dying 
about the river of blood 
flowing where we live 
about the heads of 2 year old babies 
scattered on concrete floors 
about the mountain of bodies here 
outlined in white chalk 

So you see 
right now 
we don’t wanna hear you preach 
about recycling 
cuz poor people like us 
we’ve always recycled 
we invented the damn word 
and out of necessity 
recycled our papers, cans, bottles 
recycled our socially constructed poverty 
recycled even our dreams 

So you see 
we do wanna talk 
but talk about lies 
about Am er i KKK a 
about treaties broken 
and lands and people stolen 

we wanna talk about 
S L A V E R Y 
U.S. colonization 
Third World penetration 

And you 
you’re afraid 
of my poem 

afraid of the East side poem 
holding hands 
with El Salvador 
Nicaragua 
Tijuana 
Chiapas 
Pico-Union 
holding hands 
with 
SWETO 
South Africa 
South Central L.A. 

Yeah 
I know 
you’re afraid 
of this 
brown black 
poor people’s poem 

©1998 Olga Angelina García 
copied from here

Librotraficante News

Where Are They Now?

Back on January 31, On-Line Floricanto enjoyed the pleasure of sharing a collective poem written by 

Pueblo American Government, formerly Social Justice Education Program.

Subsequently to that On-Line Floricanto, the Librotraficante Caravan began forming to journey through Aztlán from Houston to Tucson smuggling books banned in Arizona and leaving libraries of banned books in their wake.

The caravan leaves Monday, March 12, arrives in Tucson Friday, March 16 enjoying portable floricanto stops in Mesilla and Alburquerque and points along the way. The lineup of writers showing up for these Book Bashes y Mas and Literary Showcases updates regularly at the website.

La Bloga's Michael Sedano will join the trip with Latinopia's Jesus Treviño. A key goal along the route is to interview poets like these students in Tucson, to share their responses to the book ban, and to hear them read their stuff.

Visit the Librotraficante website for the schedule in your city, to donate books, money, warm wishes. Tony Mares contributes the following:

Ode to los librotraficantes

You carry books as you roll along
in your caravan through Texas, New Mexico,
and on to Arizona.  You are
the most dangerous caravan in America.

Once your ancestors crossed the Río Grande,
their bodies wet from the swirling water,
the sweat running down their backs.
Now you carry wet books in your caravan,
books dripping with wisdom.  You are

the most dangerous caravan in America.
You scatter books in underground libraries
along the highways of the Southwest.  You are
lighting the fires of imagination in young minds
of all cultures along your route.  You are
the most dangerous caravan in America.

Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Las Cruces,
‘Burque, and on to Tucson where the San Patricios
await you!  Irishmen who fought for Mexicanos
in the Mexican American War now hover
like a ghost army over your caravan
to remind all people to learn, to share,
to love books like members of your own family.

Beware, Inquisitors of Arizona.  Beware.
You are not welcome anywhere.
A caravan of librotraficantes is rolling
intellectual thunder your way.  It is
the most dangerous caravan in America
on a mission to bring illegal wet books
to your students so they may see the world
through eyes clear, intelligent, and free.

Inquisitors of Arizona, you lock up books.
Inquisitors of Arizona, you invade the classroom.
Inquisitors of Arizona, you bully young students.
Inquisitors of Arizona, you missed the news:
Inquisitors went out of style centuries ago.

Books have been, are, always will be
illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented
ideas to light up the visions that make us human.

Inquisitors of Arizona and elsewhere:
First you ban cultures.  Then you ban books.
Then you stoke the ovens to burn the books.
Then you stoke the ovens to burn the people
who love those books.  But not this time.

Librotraficantes you are

the most dangerous caravan in America
the most dangerous caravan in America
the most dangerous caravan in America


Tony Mares
02/18/12

VietnamVeterans Organize Welcome Home  Annual Observation in Whittier Califas

Via email:

Sunday March 25, 2012 from 11 AM to 4:30 PM at California High School in Whittier, CA.

Please be there and pass the word.  We are on, we are determined and we will have the best Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans event yet!!

The persistence of history is exceedingly well understood by Veterans of US military service. Some stuff just never goes away, the good and the bad and the unbelievable. Keeping some memories alive, putting others to rest, remains an ongoing process for Veterans. They aren't looking for thankyous. Maybe a little sense: when that draft noticed arrived everything about a person changed and would never be the same again.

In Southern California a group of Veterans, many of them combat veterans, dedicate themselves to recognizing what happened a long time ago and for a moment rekindling the camaraderie born from wearing the uniform, answering a call to duty. Less than 5% of the nation, and fewer every year, know how these women and men feel. It's fitting the rescue money for this year's event comes from several Veterans service organizations.

National Latino Writers Conference in 10th Edition

Applications to participate in this May’s tenth annual National Latino Writers Conference, organized by the History and Literary Arts division of Alburquerque's National Hispanic Cultural Center are available via the center’s website, http://www.nhccnm.org.

Conference faculty conduct workshops on each writer’s métier. This year’s May 16-19 includes Christina García, Tim Z. Hernández, and Jimmy Santiago Baca workshopping writing novels, poetry, short fiction, anthologies.  Rigoberto Gonzáles workshops writing book reviews and criticism. Kathryn Córdova works with Biography/News Writers. Vincent Gutierrez covers screenwriting. Demetria Martínez engages Writing for Social Justice. Iñigo Moré features nonfiction. YA fiction is novelist Alisa Valdés-Rodriguez' workshop. Among Publishers, Gary Keller will answer queries, Nicolás Kanellos keynotes the conference.

La Bloga-Tuesday’s intermittent feature, “Reading Your Stuff Aloud” stems from Michael Sedano’s role on several past NLWC faculty rosters as well as this May.

Individual meetings with agents and publishers highlight the experience for many a writer, especially when the feedback is “send me the first chapter.”

Writers with well-advanced projects will jump on this year’s innovation, "advanced consultations". A meeting with selected faculty to go through a manuscript—no more than 45 pages. The opportunity comes with a hundred dollar add-on to NLWC’s already affordable $300 registration.


On-Line Floricanto Leap Week 2012

The next Leap Week On-Line Floricanto is scheduled for Tuesday, February 29, 2028. Be there or be square. Levi's and capris O.K.

Today, Francisco Alarcón and the moderators of Facebook group Poets Responding to SB 1070, recommend work by José Hernández Díaz, Rossy Lima-Padilla, Danielle Jimenez, Juana Hernández, Sean Penna.

"I Am Still Joaquin" by José Hernández Díaz
"Las dos lenguas" por Rossy Lima-Padilla
"Ordering Charro Beans at the Food Court" by Danielle Jimenez
"Spiritual Ritual" by Juana Hernández
"Las Muertas de Juárez" by Sean Penna


I Am Still Joaquin
By José Hernández Díaz

We inherit pain
And pass it down.
-Homero Aridjis.

I am still Joaquin,
I wake
And see it
In the street;

I am still Joaquin,
I fall
And feel it
In my dreams.

The ground was always mine,
Because
My roots
Reside in rain;

The sky will soon be mine,
Because
Success rises
From pain.

The wall of infamy
Is now a
Reason to divide/

They set up unjust laws
And then they
Tell us to
Comply.

Once again,
They have overlooked
The cleansing
Fountain;

Once again,
I stand,
An Aztec man
Against a mountain.

I am still Joaquin,
Because
Mi raza
Is my core;

I am still Joaquin,
Because
I know
I will endure.


Las dos lenguas
Por Rossy Lima-Padilla

Mi idioma es una pared pintada
de obsesiones blancas y negras,
 es una pared alzada en un desierto,
aquí también hace mucho frío por las noches,
por el día se detienen a descansar
algunos tristes pájaros.
Mi idioma es una pared
alzada sin fin,
cuya sombra cae sobre mi sombra.
Es una pared de huesos,
con coyunturas profundas
 por donde pueden verse las extensiones
de mi realidad, buscando verte desarmado.
Pero no ves tú ni la pared,
ni los huesos, ni el desierto,
ajenos a ti son los pájaros tristes,
mismos que son origen de mi idioma.
Para ti no existe nada más que tu lengua,
esa criatura fría
que se adueña  de todo territorio.
Una lengua agria que no conoce otro comienzo
que su propia descendencia.
Para ti sólo existe tu lengua viperina,
lengua de serpiente que ha buscado
acorralarme desde el día que llegó a mi tierra
y comenzó a construir sobre mí
ésta pared que me ahoga.
Tu lengua es la serpiente
que busca por las calles,
en las leyes y en las escuelas,
encontrar mi lengua
para cercenarla,
para arrancar de tajo
el único pedazo de mí
que germina con el dulce canto
de mi madre.
Busca serpentina, mi lengua errante,
mi lengua de necesidades básicas,
mi lengua sumisa que simplemente busca
una humilde tregua por las tardes,
esas tardes que tu lengua siente
que también son suyas.
Buscas mi lengua
para arrancarla, para colocarla
junto a todas las otras lenguas que has arrancado.
Mis hermanos ya no entienden mis canciones,
no reconocen mi mano
que sujetó su mano por siglos enteros,
y no puedo gritarles
porque mostraría mi lengua desnuda
y vulnerable, y seguirías su olor
de flores y tierra fresca.
Mi idioma es una pared
con la que has impuesto tu idioma,
cada piedra la colocaste con saña.
Nuestras lenguas luchan
en una superficie no visible.
Mi lengua es la vida
que siembra cuidadosa por túneles secretos.
Tu lengua me persigue carnívora,
mi lengua sobrevive.
Mi lengua es la vida
arrullando a hijos y hermanos.
Mi lengua es la vida
agua limpia que busca redimir tu opresión.
Mi lengua es la vida
hay un mar de paz
al otro lado de esta pared.
No tengas miedo.
Mi lengua es la vida.



Ordering Charro Beans at the Food Court
By Danielle Jimenez

The food court diffuses with different kinds
of shoppers, and for thirty minutes I am one
of the rushed. The girl with Juana on her nametag
passes me my order over the silver counter: a bowl
of pinto beans, cilantro and bacon seasoning
the broth, brown and creamy. She wafts

the steam towards my nose, even though
five patrons wait in line, and urges me
to smell the freshness, but I smell my mother
and grandmother, the one from Reynosa,
the one who made charro beans in a jarro,
the one who could flip tortillas with her hands
and never burn her fingers with the black pillows.

I open my eyes because somewhere along
the memories I’ve closed them. The girl, smiling,
thanks me, when I should thank her for the scent,
that scent that was almost dark, now opened up
like flour-covered palms reaching for a jarro.




Spiritual Ritual
By Juana Hernández

Mama who rubs hand cream on at midnight,
who dresses in sheer silks and bright satin,
who smooths sheets and fluffs pillows
with arthritic hands
weary of waiting
for you to come home,
mama who rises at first light,
bird-like,
who wakes up alone,
no rooster crow even,
that old home–once known,
she long left behind,
mama who dresses in half-light,
sets off for yet another
beginning.

Mama who finds warmth in the kitchen,
finds solace in the linoleum floors
sturdy under bare feet,
brews a pot of tea,
sips it slow since it might
as well be the closest thing
to love, to girlhood dreams,
so sweet and soothing,
reassuring,
this hot bit
of spiritual ritual
still left on earth.

And so she steeps
leaves and crushed cloves
chopped guava, whole sugar cane
and fragrant sticks of cinnamon.
pours herself another
piping hot steaming
sticky spilling
overflowing
cup of more.




Las Muertas de Juarez
By Sean Penna

There are those who say
The Devil does not exist

Juarez will tell you
Differently…
The Devil walks her streets
And owns her soul

She had always been
half crazy…
Until NAFTA became the blade
That severed the remaining strands
Of her tenuous sanity

Now, she of rotted teeth,
And tattered skin
Crumbling bones,
And lunatic mind
Plays host to the Devil

Coursing through her veins,
Pulling her strings,
The malevolent puppet master
Whose show never ends

The Devil’s hunger is insatiable
Craving destruction of faith,
Hope,
Life,
And soul

A vile lachryphagous moth…
Drinking tears of sorrow,
Pain,
and misery
From those he has taken…
And those he will yet take

Las Muertas de Juarez
In life, you did everything
In your power to survive…

Swimming against life’s
Turbulent currents
Fighting to stay above water
Struggling to reach prosperity’s shore

To the Devil, you are not the
Vibrant,
Proud,
Strong women of Mexico…

You are his quarry,
His sport,
A tool to ply his trade
Of despair,
Pain,
Suffering,
And death

The cataract eyes of Juarez
Are blind to your suffering…
The sands of her outskirts
The only comfort she can provide

In Juarez
The Devil does exist…
Coursing through her veins,
Pulling her strings,
Drinking her tears



BIOS
"I Am Still Joaquin" by José Hernández Díaz
"Las dos lenguas" por Rossy Lima-Padilla
"Ordering Charro Beans at the Food Court" by Danielle Jimenez
"Spiritual Ritual" by Juana Hernández
"Las Muertas de Juárez" by Sean Penna

José Hernández Díaz

José Hernández Díaz is a first-generation Chicano poet with a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley. José has been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011, La Gente Newsmagazine of UCLA, Bombay Gin Literary Journal, In Xochitl In Kuikatl Literary Journal, The Packinghouse Review, among others. He has forthcoming publications in Blood Lotus Journal, The Progressive Magazine, and in the anthologies, El Norte que Viene, and Tan cerca de EE.UU. (poesía mexicana en la frontera norte). He is currently fulfilling an internship with Floricanto Press as an Editor. In addition, he is an active moderator of the online group, ‘Poets Responding to SB1070,’ where he has contributed more than 30 of his own poems. In his spare time, José enjoys collaborating with the poet, Claudia D. Hernández, in the English/Spanish translation of their poetry.

Rossy Evelin Lima

Rossy Evelin Lima ha participado en dos antologías poéticas: La Ruta de los Juglares, McAllen, y Letras en el Estuario, Matamoros. Además de haber publicado en revistas locales como Tierra Firme, Gallery, Interstice, Nuevo Santanderino y Panorama. También ha publicado en México en la sección cultural Ojo de Ciclope del periódico Expreso de Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. En la revista La Pluma del Ganso, Mexico D.F. en la sección Aquí está Usted; en Lenguaraz, revista de la facultad de filosofía y letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, quienes dictaminaron a favor de los textos El Río Bravo y Caminante. En España en la revista 3D3 Revista de Creación en Andalucía, en la antología Caminos Inciertos del Centro de Estudios poéticos en Madrid y en la revista internacional Negritud de Atlanta, Georgia.  Recibió el tercer lugar en el Certamen Literario José Arrese en el 2008, mención honoraria por la revista Gallery en el 2009; en su participación en el Segundo Coloquio Estudiantil Sobre la Lengua en la University of Texas Pan-American, su obra poética fue premiada por ser considerada como “La mejor entre las de su área académica.” En el 2010 recibió el Premio Gabriela Mistral por la Sociedad Nacional Honorifica Hispánica. Rossy ha organizado más de 10 eventos poeticos en la Universidad de Texas Pan-American, y organizó el Festival de la Mujer 2011.  En la actualidad es fundadora de la asociación Colectivo Huatsamara, la cual promueve las artes en el Valle del Río Grande y ha impartido tres talleres literarios en Mission, McAllen y San Juan Texas. Sus labores comunitarias incluyen el haber fundado y dirigido el programa Un mar de cultura, en el cual se motivaba a los jóvenes a seguir sus estudios académicos; con este proyecto se les dio información a un aproximado de 250 jóvenes y padres en iglesias, escuelas y centros comunitarios.

Danielle Jimenez

What you'll find on Dani Raschel Jimenez's bookshelf: Kafka and Murakami, as well as Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and the complete Fullmetal Alchemist manga series. If you ever meet her, tell her you read her poem on La Bloga, and she'll treat you to a Corona.

Juana Hernandez

Juana Hernandez is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in American Literature and Culture, with minors in Chicana/o Studies, Education Studies, and Political Science. Juana writes at the Wordpress blog I Am the Woman of Myth and Bullshit, and has contributed opinion essays on race and gender to Campus Progress, Feministing, and Fem 2.0. She has also published several poems via City Writes Literary Journal, Viva La Feminista, and Poets Responding to SB 1070. Born and raised in Southern California, Juana presently resides in Washington, DC where she works in higher education administration and covers education news and policy for Kitchen Table Politics (@TheKitchenTbl).

Sean Penna

Sean lives in Lodi, CA with the acclaimed Chicana poet Nancy Aide Gonzalez.  He enjoys cooking, wine tasting, and spending time with his children.