Huizache Movin' On

The many lives of Huizache

Michael Sedano

I’d just graduated from working for a living when Abel Salas asked if I knew Huizache? I did not. I learn from Abel Huizache grew as the brainchild of author Dagoberto Gilb. Him I knew, been following his writing since stumbling across a collection of stories, Winners On the Pass Line. Abel invites me to a kick-ass party celebrating the launch of the current issue.

There was pedo in Victoria, Tejas. As a result, Huizache moves to northern California where the Huizache tree doesn’t grow. Ni modo. Davis becomes the new centro for Huizache with a new editorial team. How impressive, I think, that UC Davis’ Office for DEI, C/S Depto, and other University organizations, support the literary arts magazine founded in 2011 by Dagoberto Gilb

Ya, quíen sabe porque, maybe DEI got axed at UCDavis, maybe “budget constraints”, maybe Texas wanted Huizache back? At any rate, Huizache has a new home at UTEP, El Paso Texas and a new editorial board.

There’s no geographical limit to excellence. Huizache established itself as the definitive monitor of contemporary Chicano writing, no matter where it’s housed. 

Huizache 12, Fall 2025, is on the market now, with an engaging array of graphics, essays, stories, and poetry. Plus, there’s a bonus volume, A Central American Folio: Part 1 and Part 2.

That bonus volume offers a bilingual treat. It’s one of those dual books, turn it over and it’s a different book with its own contents. Part 1 is Curated by Francisco Aragón, translations by León Salvatierra. Salvatierra curates and translates Part 2. It’s a collection of work by writers from America Central who live in the San Francisco Bay region.

H12 arrives as the swansong of Huizache’s UC tenure. The issue publishes people you know from extensive publication, like Lorraine M. López, Yxta Maya Murray ,Rigoberto Gonzáles, and Sesshu Foster, and writers who’ve published in journals with limited circulation whom readers are “discovering” in H12. 

There are six “special portfolio” sections that feature drawings and some hybrid text-drawing collections. One portfolio, “Dacaments” by Fidencio Fifield-Perez, is printed in color on polished paper. Authors obviously enjoy seeing their work in a prestige journal, I wonder if artists can be as pleased, seeing their continuous tone quality reduced to 120 lines per inch and puro b&w?

Readers will appreciate some gems in the overall high-quality work. Rigoberto Gonzáles’ “Dead You.” Dead you thinks about, remembers, your father. The story revolves around a child’s love for a father who enjoys eating like its his last meal, a father who had to retire from the fields owing to Parkinson’s Disease. There’s a gulf between father and this son, the one in his grave. Distance means little, when you’re dead and you realize “the greatest gift your father ever gave you was you.”

David Dominguez tugs at my heartstrings with a poem titled after a sweet childhood memory around a wood-burning stove, a voice singing that title, “Amorcito Corazón.” The poem is an ode to middle-class domesticity, turned completely inward. I like to compare the feeling of the piece to memories of early Chicano poetry, chest-thumping insistence that we exist, or the quiet calm of a Jefita making early-morning tortillas. Como hemos cambiados, and that’s a good thing.

Eric Alan Ponce’s Mc Nífica relates a companionship between primos separated by language and cultura. The primo from Chile is challenged by English, the storyteller challenged by Spanish. Out of their confluences over a comida chatarra hamburger—in Chile the fancy McDonald’s burger is the title—a star-crossed lovers tale emerges, quondam lovers electrocuted by a defective machine. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is.

Huizache comes from a rich history of Chicana Chicano publishing. El Grito from Quinto Sol set the standard, the Chicana Chicano, or, today, might be called Chicanx Canon. That standard got zapped by Revista Chicana-Riqueña that emerged to challenge the canon, pointing out that Latina Latino--“Latinx” per Huizache’s masthead—literature extends beyond the borders of Berkeley hasta to Central Ameríca and Puerto Rico. Huizache XII proves the point. Así somos.

There’s now an open question. Will Huizache 13 be like Huizaches one through twelve, or does the western edge of Texas produce a different eye? A ver.

Order the full set or subscribe to the biannual publication at this link: https://huizachemag.org/

Review: Sergio Troncoso. Nepantla Familias

Review: Sergio Troncoso. Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds. College Station: Texas A&M Press. 2021. Isbn 9781623499631 

Michael Sedano

There’s an unspoken rule that anthologies come packed with highs and lows, and that editors arrange contents to open with the near-best stuff and build to a big finish leaving readers fulfilled wanting more. In between, the table of contents hides more workaday stuff, selections that fit the collection’s theme by filling in a literary landscape and provide connecting tissue with the more chingón writing building toward the end and a big wrap.

Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds (link)  breaks all the rules, entonces. Editor Sergio Troncoso assembles a completely readable set of essays, poems, stories, each fully satisfying in itself, and in comparison to neighboring titles. Each piece is the best in the book. But something has to come first, second, next, before, and finally.

Readers won’t have any notion of the blood, sweat, and tears Troncoso must have shed organizing this exploration of its title concept, Nepantla. Go ahead and Google “nepantla.” The editor’s Introduction saves readers divagating into the term, reading deeply into entailed philosophy and art history, ontology, epistemology. 

Troncoso's purposive introduction lays out the editor’s understanding how liminality and nepantla help explain raza experience; it's sufficient to allow the art to do the talking.

Why “nepantla” when “liminality” is already a good word? The editor, and the gateway essay, use “liminal” to explain “nepantla,” but that’s partial. Troncoso assembles his “A” list of raza writers who illustrate, Why “nepantla,” with essays, poems, and stories displaying ways anomie, alienation, appropriation, assimilation, and anglos, define Chicana Chicano exigencies and help fashion responses in their own voices.

There should be little mystery to "nepantla," the title translates it as “in between worlds,” Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds. Back in the sixties, essayists liked to argue how the space, or hyphen, of “Mexican American” and “Mexican-American,” meant Chicanas Chicanos melded into a unique third culture, neither the one nor the other nor the space in between, but all at once.

Familia, the other title word, entails sex, pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, death, age, marriage, religion, spirituality, schooling. These are the literary and expository subjects covered in this collection and the motive and emotional features of raza nepantla landscapes. 

Troncoso explains his focus upon familia in the title and, thus, the contents he’s selected and arranged:

“So the middle ground or borderland that defines nepantla has been with me, in one way or another, all my life, and the essays, poems, and short stories in this anthology reflect the diversity and variety of experiences that might explain, reveal, and mysteriously explore this liminal land that is so essential to the Mexican American experience, particularly within families.” 

The overall structure of the anthology—Essay, Poetry, Fiction—gives readers three ways to read Nepantla Familias, randomly jump into the collection, riffle and read, find a few favorites, or begin at page 1.

Don’t skip the intro.

Sergio Troncoso frames his collection with the critical inspection of the Ivy League professor that’s his day job. The editor explans that this book is another outgrowth of Troncoso’s  career-long literary interest in familia, noting how in earlier work, the author “was trying to create a new ‘home,’ where characters from the border, American literature, and philosophical questions all belonged together in one place.” That's a lot like an identity outside and inside that hyphen space, que no?

The point is nepantla is a known locus. These stories, lines of poetry, prose expositions delve into themes of place, belonging, being out, outsider, insider, excluded. These themes, points of view, stand as loci pulsating around a center that will hold when things fall apart.

Things fall apart a lot in these pieces. Must nepantla entail suffering and misery?

I’d welcome an essay, or a poem, or a story, about happy places. The closest to a happy story is best-selling English language writer Reyna Grande’s chagrin at her Spanish fluency and her pain at losing her first language--she hires people to translate her work for Mexican readers then has to revert to the RAE to read her own book. Most writers place personae in far worse worlds of hurt, pain, danger, pendejismo, mental disintegration. 

Stress grows almost unbearably harsh in powerful  essays from David Dorado Romo, Sergio Troncoso, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza. Opening the collection one after the other, reading them supports my claim these are each and together the best stuff in the collection--personally, I prefer Fiction but these Nonfiction pieces kick your ass. If you have blood pressure issues, don't read them at the same sitting.

I’m not picking on José Antonio Rodríguez but I would really like it if Troncoso’s call for nepantla art had turned up a piece that really answered that kid’s question, “Letter to the Student Who Asks Me How I Managed to Do It,” instead of raking the kid emotionally over hot glowing coals. Hijole.

With almost 250 pages of joy—that’s what readers take away in the end—readers of Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds are certain to find themselves mirrored, cautioned, advised, thrilled, disappointed, deeply moved many times over. This is what Kenneth Burke says literature does, allows a reader facing related events to "size up" a situation as a personal resource in fashioning a response. In other words, “literature as equipment for living.” Come to think on it, "living" is a good synonym of "nepantla."

Texas A&M Press enjoys solid distribution through major academic booksellers and local brick and mortar booksellers. You can order publisher-direct, or provide the datos to your bookseller in this link.

Chicanonautica: Monsters Here and Now

by Ernest Hogan

Monsters. Monstrosities. You can't get away from them in this season of the Coronavirus. One step outside and you're in the middle of the latest dystopia, leaning toward an apocalypse.

I'm reminded of the intro to KTTV's Chiller back in my Space Age childhood: “Come with us now to a land where unspeakable monsters roam and terror is the order of the day. You have sixty seconds to prepare yourself . . .” Then they'd cut to commercial before showing something like Caltiki, the Immortal Monster or The Hypnotic Eye.

Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has suggested,“Pretend we are all performing in a sci-fi movie.”

Not a bad strategy. It got me through all kinds of monstrousness since the Sixties.

Another thing is to throw myself into work, but then, my work is about monsters.

I've already Chicanonauticized about American Monsters Part 2, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir, part of the Fox Spirit Book of Monsters series, illustrated coffee table books of stories about monsters from different part of the world, by writers from the same places as the monsters.

Support your local monsters.

American Monsters Part 1 was about South America. Part 2 cover North America. I did a story about the monsters of Aztlán.

To show that it isn't all about me, let me tell you about the other stories.

The book should be of interest to the La Bloga audience because most of them fall into Aztlán/Latinx territory, as do a lot of their authors. It's a good survey of this continent's monsters.

Starting at the top of the map as Western Civilization draws it, Matthew Scaletta's story is about Sasquatch in Alaska. Of course, the 'Squatch is native. Kind of Latinoid.

There are also monsters from Quebec. Annie Michaud's look like ordinary people, and Krista Walsh gives us a Loup Garou--do I have explain that it's a werewolf? Also, since the term Latin America was coined by the French when they were dreaming of an American Empire with a French elite, they're kind of “Latin.”

Crossing the U.S. Border, Cory Doctorow monsterizes a kind of Disneyland, and Lewis Shiner finds reptilian descendants of the survivors of Atlantis under Los Angeles. Ah, SoCal and Hollywood, are they or Washington D.C. America's number one monster factory?

Sometimes monsters are immigrants. Carmelo Rafala brings an England/New England “rawhead” to the Midwest.

And there are more native monsters. Catherine Lundoff writes of a wendigo in Minnesota. And Charles Payseur presents the hodag of Wisconsin.

Entering Aztlán, Darcie Little Badger shows colonialism as a monster in Texas. Kelly Sandoval reveals some strange things about crows in Nevada. And remembering that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.A., Pedro Cabiya shows the Chupacabras in its place of origin.

Approaching that other border (monsters and

Latinoids have no respect for borders), Pepe Rojo's story is about vampires and abortion on the place where some people want to build a wall.

Crossing the border, Federico Schaffler involves an Aztec water spirit in Mexico's past and future, and causes trouble for the country's first female president.

There are also stories of Caribbean monsters that blend Latino with African. R.S.A. Garcia's tale is about a douen—a kind of forest spirit. Tobais S. Buckell's zombies are of the Caribbean tradition, and Tonya Liburd's vampiric creatures are not the usual Hollywood breed.

It's a good book to help get you through the social distancing, and may have you keeping your distance even after the crisis is over.

Ernest Hogan is “on-call at home” from his library job, working on his monstrous novel.

Chicanonautica: ¡Remember El Espejo!

By Ernest Hogan

I buy a lot of books at used book and thrift stores. Not only are they cheap, but I often find lost treasures. I like rescuing books before they end up in the landfill to rot, or hopefully be restored by the archeologists of the future with brave new technology.

I also like finding Chicano and Latino lit. When I saw a yellowed copy of El Espejo/The Mirror: Selected Mexican-American Literature edited by Octavio I. Romano-V. I couldn’t help but grab it.

It’s from Quinto Sol Publications, in Berkeley, California, first published in 1969. The cover and title page of this copy of the fourth printing say Selected Mexican-American Literature. Later editions and internet call it Selected Chicano Literature. I remember those days. “Chicano” was still an insult, like the N-word, and proper “Mexican-Americans” didn’t want to be confused with those vatos who were rioting and writing on walls. Even back then we were arguing amongst ourselves over who and what we are.

The works are classic Chicano literature, poetry, nonfiction, poetry, prose, Spanish, English--sometimes all at the same time, and often similar to the experimental, new wave speculative fiction I was reading at the time. The Chicano imagination is powerful.

“The mirror is the rim of illusion.” as Miguel Ponce says in the “Notes for an Anti-introduction.”

History is 

presented like time travel, cruising from preColumbian times, to the 1910 Mexican Revolution, to Sixties flashes of post-psychedelic utopias that cross borders and break them down. From Rudy Espinosa’s scenario for a screen play “Kiko’s Tale:” “Ya know since traveling I’ve understood myself more clearly and I want out! Out of the cities of Americana, and all those tinsel time machines.”

“Minority” (I don’t like the word, it makes it seem like we can be ignored) writers and science fiction writers have a common problem: presenting cultures that are often alien to your publisher and audience.

It’s all about being and dealing with aliens.

Yeah, the writers are all men. In those proto-feminist days, when it was called Women’s Lib, most Chicanas had their creativity beaten out of them or channeled into more “practical” pursuits. Women who could become writers and artists back then were a special breed.

The writers are mostly Californios from San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose,Oakland, Berkeley, Olivehurst, and Lemon Grove, with exceptions from Tucson, Arizona, and Guadalajara, Jalisco.

They also seem to have broken into print through contact with academia. I wonder if it was anything like my struggles with commercial publishing.

Ocatvio I Romano-V. founded Quinto Sol, and was no doubt the driving force behind this and other books. Sometimes if you want something published you have to do it yourself. Writers owe a lot to people like him.

And some of the other writers have gone on to other accomplishments. Miguel Méndez-M. won the Premio Nacinal de Literatura Mexicana José and is ASU’s School of Transborder Studies. Nick Vaca became an author, attorney, and journalist. The poet Alurista won the American Book Award. José Montoya was Sacramento’s Poet Laureate. Juan Garcia’s imaginative works won him the Juan Rulfo Prize. And I’m sure Silvio Villavicencio, Miguel Ponce, Estupian, and Rudy Espinosa have done amazing things that can’t be found on a Google search. We often don't get documented.

In all, a welcome addition to your Chicano literature shelf.

Ernest Hogan creates Chicano literature without even trying.

Desde México

Desde México

Por Xánath Caraza

El pasado 3 de agosto a las 5 p.m. en el Centro Recreativo Xalapeño en Veracruz, México, tuvimos el honor de presentar el poemario Hudson y el libro de cuentos Metztli.  Los presentadores fueron Xóchitl Salinas Martínez de Los Doce Filial Veracruz y Juan Mireles de la Casa Editorial Capítulo Siete.  Nos acompañó con una interpretación artística, al cuento titular del libro Metztli, Karla Hernández como danzante.  Con lluvia y casa llena pasamos una muy agradable noche de poesía, danza y relatos.  Aquí, para la Bloga, un ensayo fotográfico del viernes pasado.  Quiero agregar que Metztli, traducido por Sandra Kingery y Kaitlyn Hipple, es mi primer libro que se ha publicado en México y, eso, es para celebrarse.

Agradezco a todos los que hicieron posible este evento, en especial a Formato Siete, Seattle Escribe, El Beisman, el Centro Recreativo y Difusión Cultural.