True Blue

truth

/tro͞oTH/

noun:   the quality or state of being true.

"he had to accept the truth of her accusation"

Similar:

veracity
truthfulness
verity
sincerity
candor 
honesty
genuineness 
gospel

gospel truth

that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

noun: the truth

"tell me the truth"

Similar: the fact of the matter
what actually/really happened

As I've gotten older, I realized that the are things I stopped telling people and explaining. I asked some sister writers Elizabeth Marino and Yolanda Nieves to add their two cents. But before you hear from them, here's mine.

After eight years of living at the poverty level, I've finally decided to write about it. Fair warning to readers: if you are looking for poverty porn, move on.  There are enough stories of the desperation, the panic, the self-loathing; as well as the "I found the light inside me after I lost it all." paens.

This won't be about any of that at all. This is about denial and acceptance and what you finally face in yourself.

I am a recovering alcoholic/incest survivor/survivor of domestic violence and death threats. I wrote books, got some of them published, interviewed people like Martin Espada, and read with Juan Felipe Herrera. I went back to school in my late thirties and got a B.A. and an M.F.A. That history, both good and bad, has nothing to do with what I about to say.

I had to face my own powerlessness - over alcohol, over my sexual abuse history, over what I cannot control either within or without me, what casual acquaintances and those I love dearly will do or not no. I have accepted and let go of a million things...

Except for this.

My people are working people, pushing through and working hard always produced some bit of ballast, some piece of rock to stand on, some food on the table.

What I have fought against and am facing is at 63, I might never find another job. Instead of telling myself if I just keep pushing, keep reinventing myself, there will be a place for me right around the corner. I currently have 943 applications on file. I finished a program to be a TEFL instructor, as well as nailing a proofreading certificate. 

And yes, I have applied for jobs ranging from hotel front desk clerk, to Walmart greeter, to executive assistant, to Assistant Professor of English....and nada.

The new normal - I live on my social security, about $1000 a month, and whatever else I can hustle. This where the belief that hard work = improving my life passes away. 

I stopped thinking about next year, or visiting home, or a more comfortable pair of shoes. I stopped planning for the future, watching a shrinking horizon. 

Now l try to eat as well as I can, get enough water, walking and getting some sunshine, and finding one true piece of joy in myself, in my partner, in my day.

At the risk of hyperbole, I fight the wolf, whose teeth are fear, and whose claws can shred your self-respect, if you let down your guard for even a second. 

Gente, I'm tired.

I know there are millions out there like me.

I know there is no social contract to take care of each other, to provide a dignified life and death for anyone in this country. Friends have done so much, giving what they can freely, but that is not the safety net I mean.

What I stopped telling people is I'm sure a break is just around the corner.

Elizabeth Marino

As a self-identified socially engaged poet, one’s personal poverty can be flooded by pity, when you hunger for empathy. A sharp, piercing cry of pain is not the full sound of your humanity, and skimps on what you need to say. The literally starving artist, with unstable housing, lack of access to decent health care, and maybe one hot meal a day is as crushed as anyone missing the essentials for material survival. To choose impoverishment in some wrongheaded attempt to identify with some Other or “lift up the voice of the voiceless” ultimately rings false, and an artist must be free to get to one’s own truth of their own conditions. To be of use in the world demands such truthfulness.

I have survived through connection and solitude.  One cannot take the hand of opportunity when one’s own hand is trembling and faltering.  But one can rest and rise again. Keep holding onto your drive to communicate when much is expressed, as well as to those drafts which help move you along your journey, but do not need to be revealed to others. Delirium might be trippy, but not really nourishing.


One victory for those of us of color is that with the existence of projects like LaBloga, our voices are still here, telling our stories in our own ways. If we truly lack resilience and persistence, why are there volumes of our work, and more in production? If we do not craft our work properly, why are our audiences so moved, and our lines shared among our listeners? Know that there are people who in the name of diversity relish the pornography of our pain more than the tapestry of our living struggle. Keep moving. Keep working.


Yolanda Nieves

I have stopped sharing the story of how I grew up with an alcoholic father and am considered an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACOA). I am a survivor of a father who was a benign alcoholic (he’s dead now) and a mother who wrote herself into government history by applying and receiving welfare.  I was 9 years old when my father decided he didn’t want to live with us. That began the moment of my greatest shame-paying for grocery with food stamps and realizing my mom, infant sister, and I were going to be immigrants in the land called “abandonment.”

It’s terribly exhausting to keep labeling yourself an ACOA when your father’s been dead over a decade, your mother has found peace with all the decisions she made (like staying married to a damaged human being), and you’ve been through several of years of therapy to figure out you have actually been a decent person all of your life and it was “not your fault.”

I want to address what a “benign” alcoholic means to me.  My dad wasn’t interested in anything except drinking.  Liquor was the root chakra force that illuminated his world. The bottle was his wife and mistress at the same time.  My mom, sister, and I were just the afternoon matinee ticket holders who had to watch a bad movie where the hero is on a one-way trip to hell. He spent all his money on booze, forgetting that he had to pay bills and get groceries for us.  Yeah, we were hungry some days.  But he gave us provisional alms once in a while.

I suppose he was one of those periodic alcoholics.  He would stop drinking occasionally long enough to come up for air and say, “I’m sorry.”  My father was not physically or sexually abusive to my mother, me, or my sister.  He was, however, an expert in the area of neglect. He loved dogs and devoted a significant amount of love and time to the dogs we somehow adopted when he wasn’t drunk, which is weird because we were the human beings in need desperate need of his time and attention. (My connection with animals comes from the ying yang love/neglect our dogs suffered.)  

When he wasn’t drinking, my father would drop everything to help his neighbors.  I remember he was attentive to me in this manner: He bought me books. He took me to the zoo, the garden conservatory, amusement parks, and the movies.  When I was 8, he bought me a dictionary as a birthday present and gave me direct instructions. “Read it.”  And like Malcolm X I started with “aardvark” and ended with “zymurgy”.  

So now you understand. It’s complicated, but I have decided to uncomplicate it.  As a witness to my dad’s chronic disease, the memories of his ocean-like drinking episodes are still as awful, dark, and traumatizing as the moments they happened. Yet it is possible that I had an idyllic childhood in comparison to other children whose parent(s) have suffered addiction.  I still am an ACOA, but it’s not worth mentioning anymore.  I had it good.  That’s my story.  I’m sticking to it

She's baaaaack .....

(Me, thinking deep thoughts)

Well, boys and girls, I'm back at La Bloga. And frankly, it isn't because I have a burning desire to write. The opposite, really.   It's been about six or seven years since I have done any concentrated work, although I contributed to two anthologies - one edited by Annie Finch, wrote an essay on Alfredo Arreguin for a collection of his paintings, and set up a website for poetry about jazz.

Which brings me to what the hell I'm doing here. I reached out to Em to get back onboard, writing  as a conversation with myself and with you.

I am interested now in two things: publishing segments of the online jazz anthology here and launching a discussion with writers and readers. What I am trying to keep front and center is gratitude and joy, the ways we say  "Basta ya!" without a clenched fist by nurturing ourselves and others. I'm not the first person to say that radical self-care is a revolutionary act. We are surrounded by so much that tries to erase us, displace us, confuse us, and negate us. Our happiness, in whatever form, however we make it work is supremely defiant.

I'm done with the self-consuming loop of focusing on the wound, the scar. I will never stop speaking my truth or speaking out, but I need a sacred place in myself that is untouchable, that I can allow to flourish. Maybe you do, too.

Some things I'm doing as radical self care.


Cooking - making sure I eat well, and that's meant the effort of cooking and saying no to quick fix purchases that don't leave me enough money to get the food I want to eat.

I'm also taking the time and making the effort to step out of my comfort zone.  I tend to hibernate in the winter and I  chose to bundle up and go to the ABQ Biopark for the light show. Budget-friendly, lots of families, and I was on the arm of John Baca-Saavedra, my other self.

I hope this is the beginning of an ongoing conversation...

Join me as a contributor to "The Poor Writer's Almanac" - and the focus is how you thrive, what you do to stay sane, and reasonably joyful.

My first question to all of you hardscrabble geniuses is this: What's something you stopped telling people as an act of self-care?

email your answers to lisa@lisaalvarado.net

Iguala's Own, Author Reyna Grande, Brings Some Christmas Cheer to a Town Missing 43

Guest Post by Reyna Grande

Iguala, Birthplace of the Mexican Flag

On September 26^th, my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero was the site of one of the most horrific crimes in recent Mexican history. Forty-three students from a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa were abducted by Iguala police and handed over to the local drug gang, Guerreros Unidos. No one has seen the students since, and they are feared killed in a mass incineration. It was later discovered that the Iguala mayor and his wife were involved, and it is believed that the police was acting on the mayor’s orders. The failures of the Mexican government, and the incompetent way it has handled the situation has led the people of Mexico to say they’ve had enough; they are tired of corruption, impunity, and the continued violation of human rights. National protests have been held for the past two months across the country as the Mexican people fight for reform, justice, and change.

Before the tragic events that took place in Iguala on September 26^th, hardly anyone in the U.S. had even heard of my hometown. Iguala is a mid-size city surrounded by mountains located between Mexico City and Acapulco. Seventy percent of the people in Guerrero live in poverty. I experienced that poverty first-hand when I lived there. That poverty, and the lack of opportunities, was what drove my father, and later my mother, to leave Iguala and head to the U.S. Then one day I also left Iguala, and at nine years old I found myself running across the U.S.-Mexico border in search of a better life.  I made it across the border on my third attempt, and I vowed that I would never forget where I had come from.

A little girl who will benefit from Reyna's efforts.

This summer, I returned to Iguala to visit my family. I hadn’t been there in four years, and I was shocked to see that my old neighborhood had gone from bad to worse. More and more people are living in extreme poverty. Shacks have sprouted where there weren’t shacks before. As I watched the children playing in the dirt, I decided I was going to do something special for them. I decided that I would come back in December and make their Christmas unforgettable.

On September 6^th, I launched a fundraiser campaign for a Christmas Toy Giveaway. In sixty days I raised over $5,000 dollars with the support of friends and strangers who believed in my project. On December 17^th, I will go to Iguala with my son and host a Posada in my old neighborhood, where, in addition to a goody bag, all children will receive toys and every family will receive a special Christmas dinner.

The Grande Familia in Iguala, December 12, 1979.

I know this isn’t enough, and in the future I would like to do much more for the people in Iguala. But for now, I think that what I am doing is more important than ever. After what happened in Iguala in September—the disappearance of the students, the numerous mass graves found in the area, the fear and horror that the community has endured—I think that my Christmas Toy Giveaway will provide a little joy to what otherwise has been a bleak and sad time in the city, and in the country as a whole.   

I urge you to stand in solidarity with the Mexican people as they fight for a better Mexico. Together, we can all make a difference. 

Join Reyna's Email Newsletter!

Donate to Reyna's Toy Giveaway by contacting Reyna directly at: reynagrande@gmail.com

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times interviewed Reyna Grande for a story on how the missing 43 has affected L.A. immigrants. Read the article here.

Reyna Grande's Upcoming Toy Giveaway in Iguala, Guerrero

Watch the YouTube Video.