Review: Zoot Suit. Sapo and Culture Clash. Guest Column: David Bowles

The Devil and Luis Valdez 

Review, Zoot Suit. Mark Taper Form,  Los Angeles. Now through March 26.
Michael Sedano

Center Theatre Group publicity fotos

Any comparison between the history-making 1978 production of Zoot Suit with its 2017 retelling would be unfair to the latter. It’s not the same Zoot Suit  We are older but the audience is younger. The times have changed and the crap hasn’t. We are still here. Frail memories of that 1978 experience and surrounding hype elevate expectations that will not be satisfied. I saw the 2017 production in preview and last Saturday the 18th. Both times were satisfying theatrical experiences of themselves, and definitely a cut above the Taper’s regular programming.

The devil came to Los Angeles wearing a black silk zoot suit carrying a paper-still-wrinkly script by Luis Valdez and backed by the big band sounds of Lalo Guerrero with inspired choreography by Maria Torres. In a contest for Henry Reyna’s soul, the devil beguiles the teenager with lots of huisas, frenetic dancing, infectious swing rhythms, but leads Henry through a set of crises that will force Hank to choose between pachuquismo or whatever is out there.

The idea of Zoot Suit as a morality play pales in the face of the infectious music and smile-inducing throng of jitterbuggers filling the stage in constant movement with slick vocal arrangements and show-stopper solos. But that’s the devil at work, to keep you from doing anything but sit back in your expensive upholstered seat and let Zoot Suit work its magic.

El Pachuco is puro myth, from the switchblade he uses to part the curtains to his wonderful admission that the play reflects “the secret fantasy of every vato, living in or out of la pachucada, to put on a zoot suit and play the myth, mas chucote que la chingada. Pues orale!” But his is a persuasive myth that holds young Reyna in its grip and Reyna does everything possible to meet pachuco demands.

Henry Reyna is young and virile, a rooster loose in the chicken yard. El Pachuco is Reyna’s alternate self, an alter ego who swaggers and snarls across the stage, is quick with fist and filero, philosophizing to Henry about being a man, having a place in society, offering Henry a role model by embodying defiance and competence, recklessness and explosive spontaneity, and a quick ironic wit.

Being pachuco exacts a heavy penalty on Henry, as when Henry and Della are jumped. Henry’s first thought after having his ass kicked at Sleepy Lagoon is to go get some pachucos to raid the Downey Boys and get even. It’s the event that the court farce converts into life in San Quentin. In prison, Henry confronts the cost of playing into the myth. In a profoundly anguished speech, Henry tells el Pachuco to disappear, allowing Reyna to manage his life on his own. At first, el Pachuco doesn't speak, then he breaks the silence and discomfort by quipping , “relax, ese, it’s just a pinche play.”

Is Henry lonely, or is he playing the field, playacting the ever-irresponsible macho? Something is going on between Alice and Henry, even with a guard peering down at their intimate conversations. When he gets home, he’s estranged from Della, who did a year in juvie for being Henry Reyna’s huisa. El Pachuco isn’t around to offer consejos on women and love. It’s a plot thread that didn’t need to be, especially to make room for more of the elders.

The parents have insignificant roles and cursory scenes. Cultural transition and generational change play important roles in pachuco ethos. When the father complains about the language the kids speak they rebuke him with loving tenderness. When the kids gather to leave for a dance, the father demands the boys kiss his hand to demonstrate their obedience. One obedient son then gets puking drunk at the party leading to a knife fight between Henry and Rafas from Downey. The dissonance between core family values and destructive public behavior offers fertile rows to hoe, but sadly, the play lets it lie fallow, to our loss.

Director Luis Valdez and the casting trio of Rosalinda Morales, Pauline O’Con, and Candido Cornejo assembled a powerful company who are still growing into their roles, given the preview and last weekend’s matinee. It’s a wonder seeing so many dancers and actors of color, purportedly Chicana Chicano artists. How refreshing to see a Taper cast filled with local actors, including the two leads. A number of out-of-towners come from el Teatro Campesino’s hometown of San Juan Bautista. Carrying el papel of el Pachuco is a film and television actor who grew up in Mexico, Demian Bichir. It’s Bichir’s Mark Taper Forum debut. Hank Reyna is Matias Ponce, a local television and stage actor who has appeared for LATC, the city’s major raza theater.

Among supporting cast are Rose Portillo and Daniel Valdez as the mother and father. Portillo portrayed the ingénue lead, Della, in the 1978 run. There’s a special warmth in the fact Valdez portrays his own father. In the first-run production, Daniel Valdez was Hank Reyna. Before that, Valdez was the original el Pachuco in Zoot Suit’s New Theater For Now run.

The el Pachuco role makes strenuous demands of an actor who must go from repartee to fast dancing and prancing then back to narration, without sounding out of breath nor soaked in sweat. Demian Bichir handles the role with grace. Bichir doesn’t need the growling voice, especially as he doesn’t sing with it, and loses it regularly to talk just like a normal actor. If he thinks growling makes him menacing he needs to re-think that, instead use presence to turn on that persona so that people all the way in the back row feel the heat.

Matias Ponce left me wanting more. Hank Reyna is magnetic, draws pachucos pachucas to him where they act with dangerous stupidity just because it’s Hank’s word. Ponce’s Henry Reyna isn’t yet fully alive with commanding charisma. At the climactic moment when the cast shouts out, “Henry Reyna lives!” I don’t feel like standing up and cheering like the line is supposed to work.

Hank hasn't made me feel all that bad when fate sends Hank back to the pinta only to OD later. I’m not as moved as I’d like to be, hearing that alternative Hank got KIA in Korea and his body got the Medal of Honor. I like to think Hank and Della are happily ever after in Frogtown and their kids go to school and learn to read "See Spot, see Spot run." Henry matters. I want to stand teary-eyed and cheer. It’s in the role for Ponce to find it.

I’d buy a ticket just to see if Bichir and Ponce ever get to the top of their roles, but the run appears to be sold out except for a smattering of seats. Not insuperable; you will take seat N18, your date can have the one closer to the action, K55.

¿Pero sabes que? Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum deserves to be the hottest ticket in town. Don’t let your own pachuco devil whisper in your ear that it’s too much trouble, that it’s just a pinche play, don't take it so seriously. Chale, ese. Zoot Suit is a great Unitedstatesian play, the greatest Chicano play. Audiences across the region deserve to get up to the Music Center and treat themselves to a memorably magical afternoon, or evening, of Teatro Campesino and Luis Valdez at the top of their game.

Here's Jesus Treviño's Latinopia review of Zoot Suit. Treviño attended opening night on Sunday, February 12.


Sapo at the Getty Villa

The guys with the worn scripts in their hands are having a blast with the rapid fire repartee and ad libs that sizzle. Even mistakes like being on the wrong page and having no idea get turned into laugh riots. The guys are Culture Clash, in the final workshop performance of Sapo at the Getty Villa in Malibu, and they work with script in hand and lots of friendly energy coming from the packed house.

Sapo is beautiful comedy altogether, with several precious bits, too many to enumerate. There’s a hilarious slow-mo embrace, lots of convoluted speed talking and double entendres, asides directly to the audience, a beautiful voice belts out the sensuous “Sabor a mi” accompanying herself on the guitarrón. At one point, Richard Montoya steps into the audience and runs up the aisle talking to people. There is a beautifully emotional moment of purity when a child recites a hopeful lyric.

Richard Montoya congratulates The Poet

Montoya addresses the house at the end, telling the packed rows today’s has been their best work. There’s no word on where they go from here. Workshop means to ferment and hone ideas. Sunday’s Sapo was all that and more.

A visit to Malibu Getty takes planning. Admission is free but parking is $15.00. For the workshop performances, tickets are only $7.00. Plan to be there five or six hours to browse in the gardens and galleries. The things you’ll see!

Figure from Cyrpus, 3000 B.C.

Guest Columnist: David Bowles 

Political Resistance in Chupacabra Vengeance

Latino speculative fiction quite often takes a subversive stance of resistance and critical response to longstanding power structures that marginalize and erase the experience of Latinx in the US. In Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias, a near-future America with biometric tattoos, and an underground network of gente protects refugees from government oppression. Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech pits a cabal of American Christians against followers of indigenous religion. Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older features young people openly opposing cultural appropriation and gentrification, using magical graffiti as one tool of resistance. 

With the rise of neo-fascism in Trump’s America, this role we Latinx writers of spec-fic play — as creators of alternative or future worlds in which marginalization and erasure can be fought with magical or science-fictional tools —has become even more crucial. And it’s in our modern setting of immigration bans, border walls, public lists, and deportation squads that Broken River Books publishes this month my short story collection Chupacabra Vengeance with what I dare to hope is poignant timeliness.

Chupacabra Vengeance consists of fifteen stories that range from science fiction to fantasy, horror to weird, and various subgenres in between. The pieces are arranged as five interrelated triplets, but the book itself is woven together by Latino culture, characters, and aesthetics. 

But more relevant for this discussion is the social and political resistance that threads through a good number of the stories. In “Aztlan Liberated,” for example, the US Southwest and part of Northern Mexico has been walled off by both governments, the remaining raza inside abandoned to deal as best they can with alien monsters trapped with them. When a US military mission to wipe out the chupacabras fails, a band of cholos decides finish what their oppressors started … but broadcasting their bravery live so it won’t be erased or appropriated.

Border brutality also shows up in the title story. Their father dead, the family goats slain by blood-sucking aliens, a brother and sister from Puebla risk their lives aboard the train known as The Beast in order to reach the US and search for the their mother. But when they arrive at the border, they encounter even greater horror at the hands of men and women who treat refugees with cruel inhumanity.

Small-town politics, even in Mexican-American communities, often requires resistance from la raza. “Barbie versus el Puma Negro” features a scheming right-wing politician who hires a brujo to ensure his electoral victory. When black magic brings a dead luchador back to life, however, a schoolteacher who moonlights as the Río Grande Valley’s spiritual protector will have to face zombies and past trauma to preserve her community. 

One of the great things about science fiction is that it allows a writer to flip present sociopolitical realities on their head, and that’s what I sought to do in “Undocumented.” A few centuries from now, climate change has triggered a new ice age that plunges the US into turmoil. After most of his family succumbs to the environmental devastation, a young Mexican-American sets out on a trek to cross the border into Mexico — facing the dangerous sentinels put in place to keep gringos away — in hopes of securing a better future for himself. 

Another sort of speculation I enjoy for its power of social critique is alternate history. I set “Flower War” in a world where the Nahuas (“Aztecs”) were never conquered. It’s the 1960s, and the scientists of Cemanahuac (“Mexico”) are engaged in a race to the moon with the Soviet Union. The major obstacle is a group of extreme religious terrorists who view the moon as sacred and will do anything they can to keep human boots off her surface. 

I also take aim at Anglo/European patriarchy and oppression in two weird West tales. “Ancient Hunger, Silent Wings” centers on a teenage tlahuelpuchi or Mexican vampire in 19th-century Las Vegas, New Mexico. When her appetite for innocent blood begins leaving a trail, she tracked down by a pair of monster slayers. They try to bring her to heel, but she refuses to compromise her nature: “To hell with you and your threats. I’m done submitting. I will never relent!”

Set a few years later in the same universe, “Iron Horse, Mythic Horn” is narrated by an 18-year-old Chiricahua Apache. She is rescued from an abusive white adoptive father by Shaolin monks who have come to the US with the last ch’i-lin or unicorn, hoping to do something about the deaths and unceremonious burials of so many Chinese immigrants. Toward the end of a harrowing and tragic voyage by train, she deals with the grieving guilt of an Anglo “hero” in a way that brooks no compromise: “I didn’t want to comfort him. In that moment, I figured he just would have to bear the blame, even though he was never involved. His people done the crime, and he was the kind of man what would try to make amends. That, it seemed to me, was justice of a sort.” 

This slippery justice, born of resistance from the shadows and margins, is of primal importance to me as an author and member of the Mexican-American community. Speculative fiction may seem an odd venue for exploring those themes, but sometimes seeing the monstrous injustice we face depicted as actual monsters helps clarify a vision for revolutionary reform. 

David Bowles is a Mexican-American author from deep south Texas, where he teachers at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Recipient of awards from the American Library Association, the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Associated Press, he has written several titles, including the Purá Belpré Honor Book The Smoking Mirror and Lords of the Earth.

His work has been featured in Rattle, BorderSenses, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Asymptote, Translation Review, Huizache, The Journal of Children’s Literature, and Voices de la Luna, among others.

March 11 & 12 Art Acquisition Bonanza

Arte by well-established artists, like those listed below, usually have prices starting at a thousand dollars and escalating from there. Here's an arte offer that's tough to refuse, five hundred dollars or less to acquire work by some of the most well-established artists of contemporary Chicanarte.

Chilean Miners Untold Story Told. Chavez Ravine Revival.

Review: Héctor Tobar. Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2014.

Michael Sedano

Sometime during their two and a half months living buried under 2300 feet of mountain, much of the time under fiber optic gaze feeding a media frenzy on the surface, thirty-three miners decide the full story of their collective survival must be told by a select storyteller. They don’t want to be seen as heroes and they want the truth.

The 33 choose novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar to write Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. The truth Tobar tells is how 33 remarkably ordinary men survived impossible danger. Truth being told, there are heroes in the story but Tobar leaves it to readers to decide.

Journalist Tobar adopts a reporter’s disinterested voice and keen eye for illustrative detail even in deeply emotional moments. He’ll rely on quotations and dialog to flesh out anecdotes, but the majority of pages consist in description and indirect speech.

Striving for exactitude the bilingual writer adds appositional translations citing a speaker's actual words and expressions. In places, footnotes gloss on the Spanish translated into English, as in a poem a miner composes, or the colloquialism spoken as "If you fuck up I'm going to put you in jail" which was "Si vos la cagáis, yo te meto preso." Much of this makes little sense to English monolinguals, but Tobar's bilingual audience gets a kick out of some of this.

Novelist Tobar sees connections and sequences events and facts to spotlight them, often to foreshadow something significant later, sometimes an ironic parallel. These help the writer delineate themes to keep the story flowing without becoming bogged down in the enormity of each miners’ looming tragedy.

Tobar names all thirty-three, gives each an identity in the narrative. The author develops shorthand to  give men distinctiveness; one man’s sister, another’s good-bye kiss, a son, a daughter, an attitude, the football player. Like a Homeric noun formula, once established Tobar needs only a word or phrase to inject a character’s story into the ongoing complex of unfolding events.

The drama of trapped miners and the particulars of this inevitable disaster would easily lead some writers to romanticize the danger in the geology of mineral deposits erupted eons ago and the century plus history of mining this mountain. And why not? A rock the size of a skyscraper plunging into the heart of the mine seals off 33 men without killing anyone. Something like this is sui generis and will be the only story like this.

Despite knowing the men make it out, daily and minute-by-minute tension keeps readers on edge. Rescuers drill multiple holes that twist and bend through the rock before missing the chamber where the miners wait, listening as grinding sounds approach then fade into distant stone.

The cave-in is not a single trauma. First the miners are sealed off by sheer walls of stone. Then the entire two and a half months captivity, the mountain continues to explode and scream and collapse, as if every noise might bring the slab that crushes them.

Miner lore believes the devil lives in the depths of mines; one miner feels the devil breathing down his neck in the deepest part of the mine. In Milton, the devils complain the angels dropped mountains on them during the battle in heaven, and here a mountain has dropped on the 33 Chilean miners.

Easy to get carried away, but Tobar lets the story tell itself with the writer’s nudge and shove in the right directions. Reading Deep Down Dark is a rich experience. Tobar’s penetrating descriptions of the heat and wet of the mine will be as unexpected as the scale of the holes the 33, and men like them, dig through mountains, tunnels wide enough to drive pickup trucks and high enough to dump huge skiploaders into giant ore haulers that drive to the surface.

The journalist’s straightforward style keeps the narrative tight, while the novelist’s imagination sends the story flowing with cinematic ease. The reporter doesn’t point fingers where facts cry out for accusations. Instead, without saying the obvious, several pages track cascading events that are signs the disaster could have been avoided.

There’s no hysteria nor alarm in this sample from the publisher’s excerpt. Tobar dispenses three facts in three sentences, signposting in a final line into the following paragraph where the first crack appears.

Generally speaking, the diorite provides an excellent, stable structure for a tunnel, requiring relatively little reinforcement. The Ramp has been carved through this stone, and is the only true way in and out of the mine. Until recently, no one who works in the San José believed it was in danger of collapsing. Then, several months back, a finger-wide crack was discovered in the Ramp at Level 540.

Mario Gómez showed the crack to his shift supervisor as soon as he saw it. Gómez is a sixty-three-year-old miner who drives a thirty-ton-capacity truck into the mine. “I’m pulling my truck out of this mine,” Gómez said then. “And I’m not going back in, and no one else will, until you get the mine manager and the engineers…

At key points in the miner’s untold story, Tobar steps away from the hired gun’s coldly assessing eye on facts to allow himself to draw insights that explain events, like the irony he sees in trapped miners celebrating the country’s national holiday for miners:

Chile was built on the labor of men who risked their lives and suffered inside mountains and mining is tied up with Chile’s national identity: Pablo Neruda wrote poems to the miners of the north, and Chilean students still grow up reading books such as Baldomero Lillo’s Sub Terra, a collection of early twentieth-century stories about mining work. The men of the San José are miners going hungry inside a mine on the Day of the Miner, and the feelings of pride-tinged suffering this simple truth brings lead them to end their talk by singing the national anthem. p123

Adding to a reader’s belief in a brotherhood of miners, readers gain a deeper understanding of Chile’s geography and nationhood in the story’s accounts of where miners live, distances machinery must travel to the San José mine, the remoteness of the mineral-rich Atacama Desert, the numerous times miners break into chants of chi-chi-chi le-le-le wearing their national team jerseys in macabre underground pep rallies.

The heart of Deep Down Dark lies in the human condition of that randomly-selected group of men. It could have been you, all other things being equal. Empathy awakens primal fears of isolation, starvation, darkness, cannibalism. That is stuff of fiction and folksongs, and with Deep Down Dark, engrossing literary nonfiction.

“What-would-I-do?” empathy frontloads a reader’s expectations Tobar doesn't disappoint. But it's truth that needs telling. In seventeen days facing certain death los 33 formed a society, found individual resources, made errors and adjusted, just as normal people would. Then, for another two months, the 33 disparate individuals waited for rescuers to bore escape tunnels 2300 feet into the mountain that had collapsed around them.

The miners chose well in bringing Héctor Tobar into their confidence. So much of their public story lay open to all who followed the news, and anyone would draw their own conclusions about the events and the men who emerged from the San José mine. They did not want to be seen as heroes, the miners. Tobar honors that wish.

This untold story of their days of total isolation holds your attention spellbound. The miners do not come off as heroes in their own eyes and stories. They did what needed doing and they survived. Most remarkable is their ordinariness. The mine collapse yanked them out of time and their places in the world, but the world went on without them and continued after they got free.

Some of the men acted with maturity and leadership. Some emerged changed, with newfound purpose. A few of them returned to work underground.

They got out. When they returned, the taste of money they earned with their fear made their futures what each man and his loved ones made of it. That's the truth.

Culver City's Kirk Douglas Theatre occupies a revived old-time movie house so there was a good vibe in place for my only visit to this westside sucursal of downtown's elite Music Center Hill establishments. Culture Clash's Chavez Ravine: An L.A. Revival, directed by Lisa Peterson, fit right in with the nostalgic vibe.

With a background of Don Tosti's Pachuco Boogie Boys revving up the crowd before curtain, the audience files from either side of the house to seats arrayed in long rows. On stage, they see musicians occupy the back left corner and an essentialist set featuring center and prop-laden tables to either side.

The audience sits on a sharp slope. In a house this size there are no bad seats or sight lines. Almost. My seats and those of my eight friends were in what can only be called the sin vergüenza seats. High above the stage, the actors don't play to the peanut galleries. Except when Ric Salinas signals we sin vergüenza seat sitters to rise for the seventh inning stretch.

Nothing is getting in the way of today's fun. Especially with Culture Clash running in peak form this performance. They work their asses off to fuel the madness of this gloriously inspired comedy. Seeing the performers in puro profile, against the flat blackness of the stage the high illumination catches their breath as it aerosols out of their mouths, droplets of glistening spittle spraying out with the forceful projection of their lines.

Lisa Peterson keeps the frenetic pace pounding. Patter, set piece, more patter, a muslical interlude, another set piece. The players destroy the third wall, turning to the audience as the character, disclaiming "how else am I going to be the narrator?" or in a madcap bit of genius, Montoya wiggling his legs helplessly as he confesses he's forgotten his next line and he's too darn up in the air for someone to prompt him.

CC opens the second act with "Who's On First" which was the highlight the first time I saw this confection on the Mark Taper main stage ya hace años. The routine continues to be worth the price of admission, though in Saturday's matinee "Who's On First" came off with the polish of a long run rather than the raw irritation and spontaneity the piece deserves.

Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza fulfilled the audience's expectations for characterization, timing, clowning, unbridled fun. Sabina Zuniga Varela fits right in as the gorgeous straight woman and indomitable guerrera. Her performance announces that Culture Clash is now los tres mas una.

The musical Rodarte Brothers, Randy and Scott, were great but made greater by the third member of the band, bassist Vaneza Mari Calderon. When the music got hot and everyone got singing, it became clear that Culture Clash needs to do a lot more singing. Dang, they were cool with all their voices raised in sophisticated rhythm.

Even clearer, this performance screams out loud for artistic director Michael Ritchie's attention. Bring Culture Clash out of exile, bring them to the main stage downtown. Baseball season's upon us, and fans attending the stadium (there's no teevee) should sit there made uncomfortable by the contradictions seen amid the silliness of CC's arch comedy.  Chicanas Chicanos are diehard Dodger fans. They party on the buried ombligos left behind when generations-old barrios like Palo Verde, La Loma, Bishop--Chavez Ravine--were razed for this parque.

Pendejos but they don't give a hoot as long los Doyers are winning.

But sabes que? There's a reminder, maybe an explanation why they shouldn't feel bad. As Chavez Ravine, an LA Revival winds toward final curtain over in Culver City, a character looks across from the stadium site to Bunker Hill where the DWP, the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and beyond, Disney Hall sit.

"How can we fight that?" the character laments. "Whack!" a hot line drive to center field and the crowd goes wild.

Unless Ritchie and the Center Theatre Group decide to hold over Chavez Ravine: An LA Revival, o mejor, move it to the main stage, audiences have until March 1 to catch this highly popular show. It's the best theatre to hit LA's Music Center Hill since Gordon Davidson retired.

The lot adjacent to the theatre displays cardboard casitas constructed by students who workshopped the play as part of the LA schools arts curriculum.

Fonda's Sublime Moments On Stage; On-Line Floricanto

Review: Jane Fonda in 33 Variations. Written and Directed by Moisés Kaufman.
January 30 – Marc h 6, 2011 Ahmanson Theatre at the Los Angeles Music Center.
Also starring Samantha Mathis, Don Amendolia, Susan Kellermann, Greg Keller, Grant James Varjas, Diane Walsh, Scott Barrow, Caitlin O’Connell, Yvonne Woods Slaten, with Zach Grenier.
Music by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Michael Sedano

The first time I saw Jane Fonda in propria persona, 1973, she was hanging in effigy. Targeted by a gaggle of screaming angry partisans, not even singing the National Anthem stilled their vitriol.

When I more recently see Fonda, on stage in the Mark Taper Forum’s temporary digs, the Ahmanson auditorium, all the screaming signals that Fonda and company, in the middle of the run and in full stride, are delivering on the promise of a 2009 Broadway hit, revisited for the hustings.

On entering the sparely-decorated auditorium’s cavernous space, theatergoers in the front rows take in the two balconies and the fancy private boxes reigning above the orchestra seats before negotiating a path to the selected seat.

Dismay sinks in with center row seats. 17 laps 40 shoes assorted purses in the path. Multiply that by 1600 seats, an early arrival makes excellent sense. Shorter rows with lots of aisles sacrifice a few dozen seats. But then, anything that takes the ordeal out of being a paying customer of the Ahmanson Theatre makes sense.

The Ahmanson packs them in, but I imagine seeing this performance in the intimacy of the 760 seat Mark Taper Forum. Heaven. (FYI: 33 Variations is on the Taper bill, but housed in temporary quarters.)

After the shock of getting to one’s seat, the stage before one comes with a pleasant minimalist intensity. Hanging in six-high rows four across suspended on a grid, rectangular sheets flutter lazily in air conditioning currents. The sheets appear to be handwritten music paper, now serving as the projection surface for the musical notes coming over the loudspeaker.

The frames holding the sheets whirl on unseen wheels, becoming the curtain that flips open to frame Jane Fonda. It’s the only awkward moment of the performance, Fonda waiting to be recognized, the audience waiting to applaud maybe because they don’t recognize the thin woman waiting upstage to advance on the first handclaps.

Music by Ludwig van Beethoven. Talk about big credits. The piece, by Moisés Kaufman, holds its own in face of such powerful music, running parallel stories. One, set in 1819 and 1823, tells of Beethoven finishing the variations and dying. The other story moves from New York to Bonn, hospital room to library stacks.

Fonda embodies her role of Katherine Brandt, a musicologist driven by fatal disease to finish a scholarly investigation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. The composer, superbly played by Zach Grenier, is dying, racing to complete the masterpiece 33 treatments of a simple tune. The researcher is dying, racing to complete her research using Beethoven's papers in Bonn. The crusty Brandt is obsessed with Beethoven’s obsession with Diabelli’s simple tune. Beethoven obsesses over the possibilities unleashed by this final spurt of composing. The Ninth. The Mass. The Diabelli Variations.

Stop. Before reading today’s La Bloga further, put The Diabelli Variations on the record player and let Beethoven’s mind-numbing genius pour in. Listen. The waltz. Variation 1, a march. A march! Mockery! No, listen, Genier von Ludwig tells his assistant Schindler, ably interpreted by Grant James Varjas, four notes. Dum dum tat a. Now listen to this variation, the same four notes, dee ti ta t... Now this variation. The same four notes. Four notes that Beethoven takes off from to create new musical forms. Schindler sees it, the publisher-composer Diabelli (Don Amendiola) sees it, and you the audience see it. Playwright Moisés Kaufman fills the play with delightful moments musicaux that pass quickly to other treats: "Here, read this!" the excited Schindler tells the delay-frustrated publisher Diabelli. The actor takes the manuscript, scans it silently, "This is the greatest music I have ever heard!" they explode in delighted agreement at what their eyes have heard on the page.

Pianist Diane Walsh sits at the Steinway and provides the music that Beethoven/Grenier/Fonda describe. Walsh luxuriates at the keyboard, offering lengthy sure fingered passages--this is difficult music, and synchronized beautifully with the actors’ voices and words. Play and music achieve sublime dramatic artistry. Aside from being a dramatic tour de force, 33 Variations is everything your Music 101 class should have been. Trained musicologists aside—they already know this stuff--emotionally spent audiences take solid musical tutoring away with them.

The story wrings one’s emotions bare. There’s hardly a dry eye in the house as we lose both Brandt and Beethoven just as they attain their apex. Brandt’s last words are especially moving because they are so mundane yet they complete the cycle of Brandt’s life. As Dr. Brandt, her life has pursued the fine critical distinction. Her daughter—brilliantly cowed in Fonda’s presence is Samantha Mathis--has been such a lifelong disappointment owing to the girl’s refusal to dedicate herself to any systematic endeavor. She has never met the standard, never been good enough for mother’s approval, but as Dr. Brandt dies she asks a question, thinks about the answer, nods slightly, and her final words to her daughter are, “All right.”

Jane Fonda’s breasts make a spectacular cameo appearance that cannot escape notice.

Stage nudity has long been a staple of the Taper. “The Robber Bridegroom” opens at a rustic forest fest where a totally naked actress does a slow 360 degree turn back to front to back again. A woman in the audience complains loudly “for shame! For shame!” as she is ushered out the auditorium. “Blade to the Heat” shoehorns full male nudity when an actor showers then strolls across the stage drying his face with a small towel.

Not that I hold anything against Fonda’s breasts. The scene works perfectly. Dr. Brandt is getting sicker. She must undress to be examined. In silhouette she removes her blouse and sits upon a table. Bright white light flashes on. Fonda sits bolt upright, her breasts exposed her arms at her sides. The lights go black. Bright light. Fonda’s arms begin to move. Black. Bright lights. Fonda’s arms reach her breasts. Black. Light. Fonda has covered her breasts. Black.

While I suspect the sight of Fonda’s bare chest would shut even the traps of those assholes from back in '73 (more fotos here, click), the five or six views of Brandt moving in slo-mo strobe light to cover herself heap more pathos on the character and her growing vulnerability than some tear ducts can handle. When Brandt is gone and her daughter—not worthless at all but the key to mother’s final triumph—must stand in and fill mother’s shoes, then there will not be a dry eye in the house.

Greg Keller as Mike Clark deserves mention for comic relief but underdeveloped character. Clark lives one of those desperately boring lives. He’s floored by Clara’s allure. To Clara, who has slept around, Mike is such a nerd, but comes with such a decent heart. Although Mike's choices,other than Clara's love, deserve investigating, Kaufman leaves them alone. Maybe puro love is blind?

The love story between Mike and Clara will be another reward when you take the fast-diminishing time to get to Music Center Hill in Los Angeles to be floored by Jane Fonda’s artistry.

You can castigate me for omitting mention of the superb work of Susan Kellermann, whose flinty Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger softens and becomes Katherine’s Schindler, Gertie the confidante. Castigate me for failing to praise adequately Grant James Varjas’ Anton Schindler. Historical hindsight casts suspicion on Schindler’s veracity and motive, an aspersion slimily captured in Varjas’ movement and posturing. This entire production team merits special mention, I know. There’s a Tony for Outstanding Revival. With 33 Variations the Mark Taper Forum will win it or keep trying--reruns are the Taper's specialty. All those whom I fail now to mention will have a place in the limelight when they accept their Tony. When's the last time you saw a sure thing Tony winner?


mvs

On-Line Floricanto

Last week, La Bloga's On-Line Floricanto featured poetry for yesterday's festivities, St. Valentine's Day. What a joy to behold 13 love poems. Click here to revisit those selections. For today's first post-Valentine floricanto, Francisco Alarcón and the moderators of the Facebook group Poets Responding to SB 1070 offer five works for your delight.

1. "Dear World, Dear Earth, Dear Angel of Despair and Joy" by Alma Luz Villanueva

2. "Your America, My Turtle Island" by Susan Deer Cloud

3. "Hating the Haters" by James O. Michael

4. "Prose Poems, V1, Bracero Project" by Rachelle Linda Escamilla

5. "For Christina at 9" by Arlene Biala



Dear World, Dear Earth, Dear Angel Of Despair And Joy

January 6, 2011

by Alma Luz Villanueva


Early morning, as we land in Mexico
City, I see the immense angel, I
blink my eyes, I stare and
stare, it doesn't disappear, it

remains firm, hovering at the
edge of Mexico City's sprawl,
Cloud Angel, Spirit Angel, Angel
Of Despair And Joy, Begging Angel,

Starving Angel, Murdered Angel,
Tortured Angel, Child Prostitute
Angel, Angel Of The Well Fed Loved
Child, Angel Of Loving Parents,

Angel Of Those Who Feed The Hungry,
Angel Of Those Who Give To Beggars,
Angel Of Those Who House The Beaten
Human body, Angel Of Those Who

Weep For Mercy Compassion Harvest,
Angel Of Those Who Rage For Poverty's
People, Angel Of The Unashamed
Who Bellow, Angel Of The

Shamed Who Whimper, Angel of
Our Humanity, Angel Present Alive
Every Where, Angel At The Edge Of
Mexico City, I didn't know you

were there until this morning,
December 9, 2011, if I flew
city to city, country to country,
continent to continent, I would

see you firm, hovering, your
immense wings folded softly,
fiercely, your speed of light
eyes balancing the terror,

the wonder, of being
human, you temper our
blindness, give us sight,
Angel Of Diamond Light

Eyes, watching, weeping, gazing,
our strange, stubborn, human
beauty, we persist because of
you, Angel Of Despair

And Joy, at the edge of
Mexico City, every city, town,
village, every Turtle Island,
our Earth.

(To the city of Tucson, the nine-year-old
angel, Christina Green, killed on January 8, 2011.
May the Circle Of Angels Of Despair And Joy unfurl
their soft, fierce wings, tip to tip, around Tucson at this time.)
* * * *
Los Angeles, The Angels, at noon,
Angel Of Illegal Immigrants, Spanish,
Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian spoken
on the streets, many more, do you

sing in every human language,
Turtle Islands once the massive
Tortoise emerging from primal,
cellular swirling sea, from

space blue blue blue womb
water, I hear you singing on
the streets of Los Angeles, your
sweet clear voice pierces my

stubborn, persistent, will-to-live
human heart...Angel Of Dreaming
Immigrants, Angel Of Native People
Of This Continent (their drums, their

voices, their rattles, dance, song,
keeping us alive, ancient prophecy
coming home, coming home to the
streets of Los Angeles, The Angels, the

Earth, coming home), Angel Of The
Ancient Trade Routes, Angel Of
Shimmering Shifting Borders,
Angel Of The Dispossessed,

Angel Of the Possessive,
Angel Of Diamond Light Eyes,
I hear your sweet clear voice
piercing even the concrete, flowing

over the Pacific, her still fertile,
swelling waves, piercing every
stubborn human heart, our
Angel Of Despair And Joy,

I hear you singing in every
language, I don't know
the words, what I hear/feel,
your harsh, persistent healing.
* * * *
Santa Cruz, Holy Cross, ancient
symbol of healing (not crucifix),
night, oh Angel Of Scattered
Families, oh Angel Of Gathered

Families, how do we stand to feel
so much, I wonder, these gathered
memories from sheltered womb to
open door, the delicious, terrifying,

lush, killing, O beauty, O horror,
this human world,
this perfect Earth,
O Angel Of Diamond Light Eyes,

O Angel Of Terror And Wonder,
O Angel Of Despair And Joy,
O Angel Of Scattered, Gathered
Families, the families we're

born to, birth to,
the families we create,
O Angel Of Endless Weeping,
O Angel Of Endless Laughter,

we heard your harsh, persistent
voice, healing, and we danced,
oh we danced to your song,
terror, oh the wonder,

at the edge of Santa Cruz,
at the edge of Los Angeles,
at the edge of Mexico City,
at the edge of every floating,

rooted Turtle Island continent,
at the very edge of our Cosmos,
O Angel Of Diamond Light Eyes,
keep watch as the ancient prophecies,

the ancient trade routes, come
home, keep singing your harsh,
persistent, healing song, every language,
O Angel of Despair And Such

Joy.
* * * *
Watsonville, Califas, a few miles south of Santa Cruz-

My granddaughter works with the
Farm Workers, their children born
two fingers to each hand, im
perfect (as my four children

were born perfect, spraying
of the fields, their parents
with cancers, dying to
pick the food of millions,

fresh cheap food at the supermarkets,
ICE separating illegal parents from
their legal children- we marched
the streets with Chavez, La Huerta,

over thirty years ago, still they
spray the fields (every where, this
Turtle Island), two fingers to each
hand, the im perfect children, to

their parents perfect- my youngest
son works with the families of the
dispossessed, the hungry, no
food or refrigerator to hold it, no

place to sleep (bed, mattress), no
place to sit (couch, chairs), no
table to gather (food food), the
country of wealth, abundance,

one in four children are hungry,
Martin Luther King, "The worst violence
is poverty," O Angel Of The Farm
Workers, O Angel Of Toxic Food,

Angel Of The Im Perfect,
Angel Of The Perfect,
Angels Of Violence,
Angels Of Healing,

surround each field, unfurl
your wings, tip to tip,
O Angel Of Diamond Light Eyes,
the terror, and always

the wonder.


*To my youngest son, Jules...and to my granddaughter, Ashley.
To all the daily human angels, wing tip to wing tip, every
Turtle Island, into the Sixth World.

Alma Luz Villanueva
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Always crossing the ancient trade routes, Kokpelli's song.






YOUR AMERICA, MY TURTLE ISLAND

by Susan Deer Cloud


In your America, you watch CNN for hours,
eat junk food, cheer your cowboy-president
when he brags about invading Iraq.
In my Turtle Island, I watch polluted sky
through South Side window, imagine
what Binghamton was like before the white man
invaded these hills, this river valley.

In your America, your flags sprout
on your porches like dyed carnations …..
red, white, blue in a forced spring.
In my Turtle Island, I grow flowers
in small pots filled with the earth
your America stole from us.

In your America, no one dies when you bomb
human beings in another country.
They just get liberated.
In my Turtle Island, I grow a red geranium
for my mother who died of your cancer …..
a white gardenia for my father who died
for your freedom in your “Good War” …..
a blue violet for the sky of my heart.

In your America, you make believe
that everyone lives in a nuclear family,
instead of the nuclear fission of dysfunction.
In my Turtle Island, I’m a mixed blood Indian woman
who loves a Korean-American poet
with a full blood’s eyes and hair ….. and
a Persian cat, our daughter, color
of Iraqi sands.

In your America, you shout “Democracy,”
even though money is king, and brings
your God into it. The one I don’t trust.
In my Turtle Island, I speak my vision with what
Haudenosaunee people call the Peacemaker’s voice.
I only need enough fried bread to live on …..
and silence for the Great Mystery.

In your America, you support Homeland Security,
confident no soldier or policeman will ever force you
onto a Trail of Tears, no lawyer, no trial.
In my Turtle Island, people are too poor to buy
their way out of reservations, cockroach-slums,
jail archipelagos. I know what it’s like
to be invaded by your freedom.

In your America,
will you ever know how it feels to love
a family, a tribe, this sweet bitter beautiful country,
my broken home …..
the way I have loved
my Turtle Island for centuries?

© Susan Deer Cloud ... published in The Last Ceremony (FootHills Publishing)






Hating the Haters


It’s hard not to hate the haters
To kill the killers
To take an eye for an eye

But in doing so
We become blinded by our own hatred
Our thirst for revenge

We harden our hearts
And feel no compassion
For the uncompassionate
We show no love
For the hateful

So we become them
Without realizing that
the enemy is us

-Jim Michael

Odiar a los que odian

Es difícil no odiar a los que odian
No asesinar a los asesinos
No cobrar ojo por ojo.

Pero al hacer esto quedamos
Encegados por el odio
Y por la sed de la venganza

Se endurezan nuestros corazones
Y no sentimos compasión
Hacia los incompasivos
No ofrecemos amor
A los que odian.

Nos convertimos en ellos
Sin darnos cuenta de que
El enemigo somos nosotros

-Jim Michael




Prose Poems, V1, Bracero Project

by Rachelle Linda Escamilla

*
She wonders about the growing Mexican-American population in Pittsburgh. You smile at her position in front of the comal. Food family dancing. She dances while sizzling the tips of her fingers, for the sake of a hot tortilla. She tells you about the time her brother and her snapped crosses with ragged jeans in el cemeterio del campos. How when she tried to find her brother she couldn't because he had sat in the mustard blossoms fixing the crosses with gum and shoe lace. She huffs hot-hot while patting the tortilla between her hands and onto your plate.


**
Consider, for a moment, the weight the
financial burden of such a heavy nose on
a small, flat faced people.

We have mulled over the potential gains
hand-picked barrios containing short
coffee colored, mud streaked children.

We have calculated the cost of and cannot
apologize for Operation Wetback c. 1954

***
She tells you about that term, wetback, how it means that people crossed the river, she smiles we she says it. You know she loves the water. She directs your attention to the artichoke plants, the ones that look like a large scarecrow, dipping darkly against the shade of the mountain range. They look like people, well, she corrects herself, they almost look like people.








For Christina at 9

by Arlene Biala


i am trying to write you a love letter
but i don't know how to begin.
look both ways before you go, i hear your mother say,
as if blurted from my own lips. her words meant only
to guide you safely through the parking lot,
not deliver you into the arms of yemaya.

where are you now, sweet angel eyes?
i need to write you this love letter
to say how sorry i am that we have failed you.
i didn’t know the colors of your voice,
the scent of your sunkissed hair, like cherries,
or the spark of your tourmaline smile. i didn’t know

until after he killed you that you were born
on a day slammed with grief and dust,
that someone had reason to tremble in joy,
to raise your purple body to her lips
and whisper your name like rain.

can you hear me, little one?
do you see all these people crowding the room,
dressed in their finest, trying to behave?
at last they sit together, these warring
brats, trying to behave in your honor.
your mother is here. are you holding her hand?

our president voices his sorrow, he vows
to redeem you, her slaughtered lamb.
but, she will not be moved. angel eyes.
only the ache of missing you is clear.
all she wants is you. all she wants
is you.




BIOS
1. "Dear World, Dear Earth, Dear Angel of Despair and Joy" by Alma Luz Villanueva
2. "Your America, My Turtle Island" by Susan Deer Cloud
3. "Hating the Haters" by James O. Michael
4. "Prose Poems, V1, Bracero Project" by Rachelle Linda Escamilla
5. "For Christina at 9" by Arlene Biala

Susan Deer Cloud

foto:John Gunther

Susan Deer Cloud is a Métis Indian of Mohawk/Seneca/Blackfoot lineage. She has a B.A. & M.A. Literature & Creative Writing from Binghamton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She has received various awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Chenango County Council for the Arts Literature Grant, First Prize in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition (twice), Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award, and Native American Wordcraft Circle Editor’s Award for her multicultural anthology Confluence.

Deer Cloud’s poems and stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies (Sister Nations: an Anthology of Native Women Writers on Community, Unsettling America & Identity Lessons multicultural anthologies, American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, To Topos (Poetry International), and The Florida Review, to name just a few). Her most recent books are The Last Ceremony and Car Stealer (FootHills Publishing) and Braiding Starlight (Split Oak Press).

Deer Cloud has edited two anthologies ~ multicultural Confluence and Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) ~ plus the 2008 Spring Issue of Yellow Medicine Review, a Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought. She is now an adviser to Yellow Medicine and also on the board of University of New Orleans Press. Currently she is editing the re-matriation chapbook series of indigenous poetry for FootHills Publishing, as well as a special Native issue for on-line journal Big Bridge (to be published in early 2012). Her proposed panel on re-matriation of Indian people through writing was a part of February’s 2011 Associated Writers Conference in D.C., where she also took part in three readings and a book signing.


James O. MichaelAlthough raised in a monolingual English-speaking culture in Illinois, I learned Spanish in College and have been speaking Spanish for more than 50 years. I taught English to Spanish speakers and Spanish to English speakers. Most of my students were Mexican farm workers or their children. I retired from the McFarland School District in 1997, but continued teaching part-time until recently.

I joined Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol in 1998. I write poems in English y en español, a veces mixtiando los dos languages. Mi esposa es del mero Chihuahua Chih. ¡Ajúa! El año pasado celebramos 50 años de casados.

Rachelle Linda EscamillaRachelle Linda Escamilla is a three time James Phelan Literary Award winner, the recipient of the Virginia de Arujo Academy of American Poets, and the Dorritt Sibley Poetry prize. Her poems have been published by Hinchas de Poesia, A Joint Called Pauline, The Villiage Pariah, La Bloga, CaveMoon Press, and A Women's Journey. She is a student at the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program where she also teaches US History.

Review: The Lieutenant of Inishmore. We have a winner. On-Line Floricanto July 20

The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown Los Angeles.

Michael Sedano


If a comedic genius ever writes a black comedy about Arizona’s breathing while brown racism, I advise this genius to model the piece after Martin McDonagh‘s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the zany ethnic comedy running at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum now through August 8.

This well-directed and acted production (other than some unintelligible dialect work) is among the rare good decisions by Artistic Director Michael Ritchie. Although this is another re-run developed elsewhere, it’s highly worthy. Sadly, the production also marks Ritchie’s almost total dismemberment of the Taper’s connection to its artistic history. Except for Lighting Designer Brian Gale and Sound Designer Cricket S. Myers, no one in cast or crew has any association with the Taper. When I read that in the playbill I had to allow myself a moment of silence to mourn the passing of an era. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but so it goes. Ave atque vale.

McDonagh’s Northern Ireland has come to accept terrorism as the natural course of inhuman events. When Davey brings a dead cat to Donny’s isolated home, Davey’s worried that Wee Thomas’ owner, Padriac, the self-appointed Lieutenant of an IRA splinter terrorist group, will return to his father Donny’s house to torture Davey and kill them both over the dead cat. They decide their best course is a series of phone calls to Padriac, spinning-out a yarn that Wee Thomas is doing poorly, hoping that by killing Wee Thomas gradually, the terrorist won’t rush home for revenge.

When we meet Padriac in the next scene, he’s in the middle of torturing James, a marijuana dealer hanging upside down, blood dripping from his feet down to his chest. Padriac offers the opinion he’s being nice, taking two toenails from the same foot so as to allow James to limp to a hospital on only one excruciatingly painful foot. James admits that’s a considerate gesture.

Padriac’s cell phone delays James’ election of a least favorite nipple to be sliced off. It’s Donny’s news that Wee Thomas is doing poorly. Padraic turns to James for consolation. James offers the likelihood the cat suffers worms, and a few pills wrapped in cheese should cure the ailing pet. Padriac frees the ungrateful James, gives him busfare, then rushes off to head home.

Matters devolve completely bizarrely out of control from these opening scenes. Three clownish assassins camp out in the rocky countryside, hatching a plot to kill Padriac. The trio are a Northern Ireland version of the stooges, lacking only Moe’s faceslap and Curley’s “yock yock yock,” except these three carry Glocks. Then there’s Davey’s 16-year old sister, Mairead, who prides herself on her accuracy with a pellet rifle. That she honed her skill by putting out eyes on the area’s cows is neither here nor there, a family in-joke. And, since Mairead’s sharpshooting will save the day, a few half-blind cows is a small price to pay.

Arizona hasn’t grown this extreme in violence—yet. No blood-soaked wretches have been discovered dismembering dead bodies with garden tools (the Taper audience gasped with mostly delighted asco). But news reports place oddball Nazis on the ready, traipsing around the border hunting down brown targets. And the impetus reaffirming their hatred comes from elected legislators. Arizona’s appointed governor proclaims her intolerance of racial profiling by law enfarcement, while simultaneously spinning a few yarns about decapitations and murder sprees by bogeyman immigrants. Poor Arizona. So close to California, so far from Decency.

Playwright Martin McDonagh‘s characters have grown so inured to torture and terrorism that conversational patter about such matters comes with the cadences of the mundane. In their world, such acts not only make sense, they are the rules of these people’s culture. It’s only a play, it’s only a pinche play, Donnie and Davey might say. These are funny characters in absurd circumstances. But monsters is what they are. That’s a sobering fact McDonagh masks with hilarity and gross special effects. The Lieutenant of Inishmore’s plot presages with bloody, stomach-turning exaggeration what could come of Arizona’s blind hatred, just as it did to Northern Ireland. Who foresaw “The Troubles” in Ulster? As another Irishman says, the center cannot hold, things fall apart, mere anarchy is loosed upon this world.

La Bloga / Hachette Book Give-Away Winner

Felicidades and congratulations, too, to Aïda Valenzuela from Lafayette Indiana. Aïda's correct answer to the question, "How many miles did Charles Bowden walk to get to Tacna?" was selected from the entries. Hachette books is mailing Aïda a free copy of Belinda Acosta's novel, Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over. In last week's review of Tom Miller's border literature collection, Writing on the Edge, Ms. Valenzuela noted, Bowden walked a mile in a border crosser's shoes 45 times.

On-Line Floricanto. Poets Respond to Arizona Hate Laws

This weekly feature has become one of the most popular events La Bloga has sponsored. Please leave comments on poems or graphics you enjoy. Scroll to the bottom of the column and click the Comments counter. If you're a poet who'd enjoy sharing your work in La Bloga's weekly On-Line Floricanto, know that Francisco Alarcón and his colleagues at the Facebook group "Poets Responding to SB1070" select the line-up from work submitted through Facebook. Click here to visit, read, and submit.

Click here to read Francisco's explanation of the selection process for La Bloga's On-Line Floricanto.

1. “Border” by Sharon Doubiago
2. “If You Leave Your Shoes" by Joseph Ross
3. “Justicia para Nativo!!!” por Miguel Robles
4. “On My Grocery List: Virgin de Guadalupe Candles and Hope" by Rosa Valencia Sánchez
5. “Give Me a Name” by Genny Lim
6. “Let Freedom Ring!" and "Rock and Roll Raza!" by Nephtalí De Leon
7. “Transforming Volcanoes” Terri Weist


BORDER
By Sharon Doubiago


Border
our mother is looking out our picture window with her binoculars
tracking the dark men
trekking across the blue mountains, our
southern horizon. Our
million dollar Ramona view. Our

illegal workers our father has hired. This has always been
illegal, the smudge pots in the avocado and orange groves
burning cold nights throughout
the Santa Maria Valley

and the boys of my class
are sneaking the other way
across the border
to get to the girls for sale
in the Tijuana whore houses

so beside themselves, so swollen
with merciless lust, we must allow them
this relief. Girls can’t imagine
such pain though our fathers
ache in remembrance

in this end of America, cornered
all sides, the East and North our families are in exile from, the
West the unfathomable ocean, and South

the Border. South of which is
nothing Nothing
always there in our picture window, the blue
turning purple mountains a vast
unknowable inhuman Ocean

“Mexican” like the n word. The dark people
are trying to get here, we are not
trying to get there
except for the boys and the fathers
to the houses of prostitution

inside our house, inside our view, an armed border inside
the family

2.
our mother is sneaking food and water to them hiding in the rocks
past our father, she is telling me this, as if a question, as if to answer
a question, as if she knows I’ve gone beyond
the border of her understanding

like the wives who hid the Natives
in their closets and food storages
while their husbands hunted them down
on command of the California Governor
in 1852

always adding, piercing me with her eyes
the legal ramifications
if we are caught, what would happen, but
the good we are doing by breaking the law, the bravery it takes, our
integrity and compassion, and always the savings so necessary
always the savings so admirable

and then always her indignant “but only English in the schools!”
To me getting my Masters in English.
“English: the one and only official language.”

Oh, Mama, that’s your beloved grandmother
washing your mouth out with soap

your Indian grandfathers moonshinning
to feed you

your brain of two realities, Mama
imagine the brain with no borders, every language
a different soul, imagine all the many other worlds united
as in the beginning, Mama

3.
and your mother, Ramon, your unknown Nothing
Kumeyaay Mesa Grande
mother is disappearing
Tijuana, August, 1955, the year
you are told
who you are, ward
of the Court

your mother
walking with friends
down from San Diego
arm and arm up Revolucion

when two men grab her from behind, pull her
into the alley

men full of lust, merciless nature
perhaps too poor to buy
a body worker

the last she is ever seen, your

border your
mother your family
you will never be able to cross
“she disappeared with the Mexicans,”
you sneer and sneer, then disappear
into Vietnam

though you are “Mexican” too
though you could not know this
Mexico
when California too was Nothing
and for 12000 years before that, your

ancestral graves
both sides
the International Border
through the heart
of the Kumeyaay nation

from 50 miles south down Baja
to 50 miles north up Cupa
from the Colorado to the Ocean

a whole nation

and Cupa, the international
crossroads capital, a great city
of the world

4.
I am listening to the sprinklers going on
in my sister’s Solano Beach condominium, the illegals
beneath my guest bedroom window
gardening in the dark
so as not to be seen
whispering in Spanish, p’lapaneco

Healer, she has to charge a lot
for her body work, she is explaining again
to afford this magnificent place

and our mother with her binoculars is looking out the back window
of their RV in Oaxaca. She is telling me this again and again
as if trying to say something
about the “Indian girl with the baby on her back”
climbing the rocks. Who is turning

and looking back at her
through the tinted glass. “She knew
I was watching her. She knew
exactly where to look. She looked
directly into my eyes, though she could not
have seen me. She looked at me
with hate. That was when I knew
this was her home. And so strange, she looked like
Chelli.” My brother’s daughter, her
granddaughter

5.
I finally say okay. My sister has me lie down
on the cement flower slab outside
I heard them working on last night. She is working
on me, the tightly secured border
of our family

the whispering P’lapanago
your mother so long dead, Ramon

you are Vietnamese
missing in action

and Tecate
is Ramona’s sister city now

and on Mesa Grande

your Coyote brothers
are setting off for work

“Gees!” she exclaims. “You should be dead!
I’ve never worked on anyone
who had all their points dead.”

Our family reinforcing the burning smudge pots
of my soul

What’s on the other side?

Cross it *




If You Leave Your Shoes
By Joseph Ross


If you leave your shoes
on the front porch
when you run

to the city pool
for swimming lessons,
you might end up

walking across the sand
of the desert in
scorched feet,

bare, like the prophets,
who knew what it was
to burn.

If you leave your lover
to run to the market
for bread and pears

you might return
to find your lover
gone and the bed

covered with knives,
hot and gleaming from
a morning in the sun.

If you leave your country
in the wrong hands,
you might return to

see it drowning in blood,
able to spit
but not to speak.




Justicia para Nativo!!! por Miguel Robles
English translation by Virginia Barrett

JUSTICE FOR NATIVO!!!


Nativo
is el cenzontle singing
wisdom’s irony
a youth who lives in his heart and rebels
he has not changed
he is the youth who lives in his heart and he rebels every minute
he has learned what is necessary
but he remains the youth that sees the water outside the glass
the poem without accents periods commas
rules they invented to be broken
by poets by immigrants by activists
and he sees in the immigrant a wounded brother
and he is the doctor and the nurse
and he gets sick to experiment with new remedies on himself
vaccines pills cure-alls or whatever tonic that might grant him a breath on the verge of death
he knows himself to be chased by a shamanic scheme
we know him to be harassed by a hoard of frightened warlocks
that don’t want him to provoke a tsunami that would crush them for being brutes
we know he is persecuted and we know that we are persecuted
from Arizona to Prince Williams
from Los Angeles to the infernos of hell
by Republicans Democrats and Greens
by politicians of all colors that have failed to put aside politics
in order to pass a decent bill to legalize
need
reality
reason

Nativo has an obligation that won’t let him rest and we are his allies
immigrants in all the corners of the country
we who will not let them lock him up
if they imprison him who will open the golden cage?
so that the canary can go out and sing and fly freely as a human should
we are his life’s duty
and now he is our struggle’s commitment

If they incarcerate him we will all remain behind bars in our impotence and limitations
and the truth is this will not grant Nativo much grace
he trusted in the experience passed on these years he has faithfully dedicated to us
and if we enclose ourselves in our own laments who will liberate Nativo
el cenzontle whom we all want to be set free
whom we all respect as a radical
because if he is not a radical then he is not a teacher
because if he is not a radical then he is complacent with the system
the same system that at one time or another has screwed us
as in right now when the justice system wants to fuck him over
because it knows that by screwing him we are all fucked
in the end I think that we have not understood the teacher’s message
maybe they need to throw us all in jail
because we are all Nativos
revolutionary youth with boiling blood
old wolves that can’t be defeated
and we have not lost our dignity because Nativo will be released
he represents the pride of the oppressed
of the exploited
of the expelled
by a system that feigns to silence us
by silencing our leader
but we will not lose the dignity that he represents
because then we would all lose
we will petition
we will sue
we will demand
we will cry out
we will protest

We want justice for Nativo!!!

We are all Nativo
and Nativo has been all of us because he has worn everyone’s shoes
to march for everyone
to insist on open passage for immigrants
and we must all wear Nativo’s shoes
to march for freedom for Nativo
for all the Nativos we carry inside of us
and so we will not allow a deceitful system to take him from us
for revenge for fear for radical acts and incorruptibility
we the immigrants want:

JUSTICE FOR NATIVO!!!


JUSTICIA PARA NATIVO!!!


Nativo
es el canto del cenzontle
la ironía del sabio
el joven que vive en su corazón y se rebela
el no ha cambiado
el es el joven que vive en su corazón y se rebela a cada rato
ha aprendido lo suficiente
pero todavía es el joven que mira el agua sin vaso
el verso sin acentos puntos comas
las reglas se inventaron para ser quebradas
por poetas por inmigrantes por activistas
y el ve en el inmigrante a un hermano herido
y el es medico y enfermero
y se enferma para experimentar consigo mismo nuevos remedios
vacunas pócimas píldoras o cualquier jarabe que le de un respiro al moribundo
se sabe perseguido por una suerte de chamanes
lo sabemos perseguido por una horda de brujos asustados
que no quieren que provoque un tsunami que los aplaste por brutos
lo sabemos perseguido y nos sabemos perseguidos
de Arizona a Prince Williams
de Los Ángeles a los infiernos
por republicanos demócratas y verdes
por políticos de todos los colores que no han podido dejar a un lado la política
para lograr el bien común para legalizar
la necesidad
la realidad
la razón

Nativo tiene un compromiso que no lo deja descansar y somos sus aliados
los inmigrantes de todos los confines del país
quienes no permitiremos que lo encierren
si lo encierran quien abrirá la jaula de oro?
para que el canario salga y cante y vuele libre como ser humano
somos el compromiso de su vida
y ahora el es el compromiso de nuestra lucha

Si lo encierran nos quedaremos todos encerrados en nuestras impotencias y limitaciones
y la verdad es que a Nativo eso no le causaría mucha gracia
el confía en la experiencia transmitida en los años que devotamente nos ha dedicado
y si nos encerramos en nuestras pesadumbres quien va a soltar al cenzontle
al Nativo que todos queremos libre
que todos respetamos por radical
porque si no se es radical no se es buen maestro
porque si no se es radical se es complaciente con el sistema
el mismo que una y otra vez nos ha chingado
como en este momento el sistema judicial quiere chingarlo a él
porque sabe que chingándolo a el nos chinga a todos los demás
a fin de cuentas creo que no hemos entendido bien el mensaje del maestro
tal vez tienen que encerrarnos a todos
porque todos somos Nativos
jóvenes radicales con la sangre hirviendo
viejos lobos que no tienen que perder
y no hemos de perder la dignidad porque Nativo va a salir
el representa la dignidad del oprimido
del explotado
del los expulsados
por un sistema que pretende callarnos
callando a nuestro líder
pero no hemos de perder la dignidad que el representa
porque todos juntos pediremos
solicitaremos
demandaremos
exigiremos
gritaremos
protestaremos:

Queremos justicia para Nativo!!!

Todos somos Nativo
y Nativo ha sido todos porque se ha puesto en los zapatos de todos
para marchar por todos
para pedir por la libertad de transito de los inmigrantes
y nosotros hemos de ponernos en los zapatos de Nativo
para marchar por la libertad de Nativo
de todos los Nativos que llevamos dentro
y que no permitiremos que un sistema corrupto nos lo quite
por venganza por miedo por radical e incorruptible
nosotros los inmigrantes queremos:

JUSTICIA PARA NATIVO!!!



On my Grocery List: "Virgin de Guadalupe Candles and Hope" by Rosa Valencia Sanchez

I observed them with affection at the grocery store.
Large, multi generational familias,
Dark skinned, beautiful
Spanish speaking people,
filling their grocery carts,
with the most interesting things.

Papayas, melons, and beef tongue.
Sopa, arroz, y frijoles.
Virgen De Guadalupe candles,
bottles of Fabuloso,
value packages of 48 rolls
of toilet paper.
Charcoal for barbecues.
Tres Leches birthday cakes,
seemed to be a popular item.

In the past, they were out going,
quick with a joke or a smile,
always offering me a "con permiso"
if they accidentally walked across
my pathway.

I could reach out my hand,
to softly tousle the coal black curlies,
on a baby girls ribbon festooned head,
as she sat in the front seat of the grocery cart
happily munching on pan de huevo or a "cochito"
My comment
"que bonita!"
was a conversation starter.

Now,
I have noticed.
They shop quickly,
no longer making an afternoon
out of selecting weekly groceries.

No eye contact.
No smiles.
I find this so painful,
that I have cried.

Families are left at home
"just in case"
the head of the family is detained.
Then,
Stripped of dignity.
Robbed of hope.
Thrust into the terrifying maelstrom
known as "illegal immigration."

I hope they remember my smile!
Oh please senor!
Oh please senora!
Please know me in your heart!
I am not one of the hateful!
I understand that the majority of you
come here to take up the work,
others find too distasteful to do.
I am not the hypocrite who eats the food
they picked and prepared.
I don't allow them to work in my garden,
pay them under the table,
then suggest we
turn blind eyes south and
"let them work things out on their own!"

I went to the grocery store this evening.
It was like a ghost town.
Quiet, aisles free of laughing children.
Not a sign of Comadres gossiping in the front entrance.
It may sound foolish or melodramatic,
but a tear ran down my cheek,
I couldn't buy a thing.
My guilt so deep.
My sorrow so crushing.
I am so sorry
I live on the same side of the man made border,
with people who just don't give a damn
about you.

I will pray.
I will fight.
Maybe one day,
not tomorrow,
not next week,
but one day soon,
I will see you again,
we will smile,
as our eyes meet
when we both reach for
Virgen De Guadalupe Candles
and hope.



Give Me a Name
By Genny Lim


Give me a name for my memory
the day the enemy of love comes
knocking on my door and sits among
the ruins of outcasts and exiles
Taking everything behind the window sills
even the hand-sewn curtains mother
fashioned from factory scraps

Give me the names of songs
we can now only remember bits and pieces of
because our voices are choked in tears
and silenced into smoke
Don’t let them take the hours of the day and
rip them from the sun as if light belonged to night!
As if the budding heads of crocuses were
born to be trampled underfoot!

Give me a name for daybreak!
One that bullets can’t penetrate
One that boundaries can’t blur
And wipe the swords clean of bitterness so
their heavy blades be shorn of flesh
into forgiving temples of light!
Oh, tear these sinister maps from my heart!
And give me back my memories
so that the soles of my feet find wings
in the confession of winds

By Genny Lim
May 17, 2010


Let Freedom Ring!
By Nephtalí De Leon


how many times
can we demand justice
and not get it

how many times
can millions march the streets
and not be seen

how many times can we scream
about the promised liberty
and not be heard

in how many cities
can we fill the streets
with our bodies and our screams
and not be heard or seen

how many murders
how many must drown
how many in the desert sand
how many in airless trucks
before our people cry enough

are we going to open our eyes
to the martyrs and the sacrifice
to stop living with the lies
that America is for u and me

are we ever going to stand
for the truth about this land
the genocide goes on
while the occupation sings a song
about sweet land of liberty
sends us all -- to fight its wrongs

Raza! you of a perennial race
you can trace all your bones
underneath all the stones
you do not stand alone

our ancestors wrote
with chisel upon stone
that our spirits shall rise
shake off the cudgel yoke
we´re nobody´s vassals
to be treated like tassles
to tie our dreams fast
to the grounds of our past

our mythical proportions
are the giant become real
no longer to demand a square deal
but to dispense a fair meal
and just in case our claim legít
is not accepted
clarito lo dijo el jefe
let it ring from north to south
-- to baja --
¡ la tierra es del que la trabaja!

© NephtalíRock and Roll Raza!
by Nephtalí


I celebrate Arizona
and sing
to the Nation of Aztlán

forget the tapados
and the taco-loving racists
trying so hard for our color
and part of our bilingual brain …

La Raza Cósmica is here
in its manifest destiny truth
no Hollywood re-make
of forefather lies
but native re-birth
from the ashes
of genocide war

I celebrate Dr. Cintli
Dorinda Moreno
and Tejaztlana
Dr. Rudy Acuña
and Armando Rendón
and the Facebook Poets
of Francisco Alarcón
inspired to the hilt
by criminal laws
like SB 1070
Arizona´s rope
from which
the whole nation swings

and the students
and the lawmakers
and the butchers
and the breadmakers
and the Raza, just plain
brave Raza all over Aztlán

willing to live
willing to die
willing to be behind bars
or shot in some deserted street
or killed upon some public place

in the name of our race
la Raza Cósmica de Aztlán
can anyone crush our spirit
can anyone kill our soul
tell me my friends
go tell everyone
we have already won!


© 2010 Nephtalí


nephtali3000@hotmail.com
http://Nephtali.Net/




Transforming Volcanoes
by Terri Weist:


If I am to survive it will be here
with pen and paper in hand
unable to reenact the way things
dribble down, not unlike the way
a trickle leads to an explosion.
If I’m to make it here, I must mutate and fight
with pen and paper, to differ with gods
pushing stones uphill of Sysiphus’ will.
Open the cloud and find a seat among
the heaven’s futile solutions.
Patience asks to wait and see.
Roses are difficult to keep
but a stately rhythm
finds a thorn and holds on.
The vitality of daily ritual.
The strength behind the truth.
Corazones sin fronteras ?
I have watched you from a distance,
on the other side and married your brothers.
A barbed wire ensnarled around your heart.
Food will keep you alive, but you won’t notice
until you go hungry and you stop counting the days.
And coyote lives up to the name of the desert’s trickster.
Food stamping in the land of Oz.
Now my child, born into this country
to a white and a brown parent, can start to resist seriously
the buy in, the sell out, the overhaul,
the process of putting borders around the heart.
One by one we are all planting seeds when to think no one is looking.
If the revolution starts with a poem, let US be.
Prepared with weapons of mass peace. Do you think it is not working?
Is speech still free? I hear 7-11 is trying to franchise it as well.

Mother always typing fast to test the ink.
I was finally old enough to read what those frantic
fingers were typing, bullets firing the keys onto the paper.
Always the same words to test the ink ribbon and see
if it was thick and black and leaving its mark.
“ Now is the time for all good men to come to the aide of
their country.”
I asked her what it was.
She replied,
“The Declaration of Independence”.
Even then I could sense something was wrong.
There was a crack in the bell of Liberty.
It was obvious.
The Native American’s weren’t free,
Our bi-racial neighbors across the street were not free, cars stopped to unload insults.
letting them know, not free.
Two black women school teachers who were mentors to me,
baked cookies with such love,
you mean to tell me now
they were not free?

1968 West Oak Lane, Philadelphia.
I was four years old at the movies
they said “Honkies, sit down.!”
I was ugly and did not know why
so the barbed wire started to grow.
She kept typing the same thing
each time her child wondering
what did it mean?

But today is the day.
A woman is denied access to a state building because of a latino last name.
Desert saguaros stand next to strip mined sites.
They are over two hundred years old.
The cactus will flower, in spite of its thorns.
The moon will illuminate the path,
forever mysterious, beckoning justice be.
A lusty lover waits to pop out of a magical box.
The sun will blind US.
Do not judge the blood born into bodies
the horn blowers the false history books,
the tea baggers giving false head to each other.
For sure.
NOW is the time for all good men
and women to come to the aide of their country.
Declare independence and take up arms,
into the clouds, the four corners, the wind in all directions.
The civil war is a heart with no borders.
The civil heart is a war with no manners.
And around her heart, she is choosing sides.
She hears them both
and bleeds them both.
What am I ? I have seen her eyes figure it out:
Not white enough,
not brown enough, but
smarter still to swallow her big heart
and play the game anyway.
The difference is cubicle, a slur
a stereotype, it wants to punish
the other half of herself.
Already the wires are trying to form
a scar from a czar around her freedom to exist.
Spirit shouts and breathes heat, flames, hurtful names.
In between the crevice of confusion
a flower refuses to be uprooted and
washes away the patriotic colors of hope.
She stands in front of the jury.
A nation of promise.
A land that lies about freedom and justice for all.

Hearts without borders is her doctrine,
on trial for the rest of her life.
Carrying documents to prove your existence is food stamped.
Rebellious mountains cheating death.
Sweet song of protest, justice and pig
roasting, just in case...si por las moscas.
Pollinate intelligence and stop hate,
what will it take?
The dark of day,
the cold bright night.
The balance of love and passion
you seek but cannot find?
Stuck in a shoe box, stuck in time.
Love is a quiet footstep into the night.
Molotov cocktails straight up Columbian,
Salvadorian, Aztecan, Mexican-American.
Can’t take off the wires without cutting flesh.
Love without borders, and cover the scars.
Coffee grinds its teeth.
I am insulted with the dream
each time I leave your bed.
Walk outside and life reminds me.
Only sweating skin will leave one to contemplate,
exhausted from the exchange of love’s taste and its fate.
Facing racism in the light of the day
and our difference is superficial,
I wear your body’s scent, the soul’s laughter
from the night before.
An unconstitutional whore, like you Arizona.
Yes Arizona, we are still with you.
The transparency of your Hallmark sunsets,
the hypocrisy in “ You’re Welcome”
the snowbird state of mind.

Go down to the wash and scrub your hands
with the blood of a boy who threw stones at your feet
from the wire around his heart to the fence around yours.
He hears shots and hides his head in the sand.
Boys throw stones in the wash, that is what little boys
are supposed to do in the desert that is owned, armed and operated by who?
And those who once picked up pens to fight, are now
picking up rifles. You can not shoot a poem,
it will not die.’ You’re Welcome’ to try.

Its blood will live to nourish the skeleton of revolutions to come.
You can shoot a child who is curious about the absurdities of
hatred formed against his right to exist.
This has the penholders willing
to take up arms and rise to cut
the barbed wires, and fire back
bullets word for word.
There is nothing civil about angry pens and jumping guns.
A heart without borders will never be killed.
The magic papers called “The Declaration of Independence”
will jump off the page and into the trenches.
Because NOW is NOT the time for all good men and women to
come to the aide of their country.
It is the other way around. Time for the country to take care of US.
Right here at home, remember ?
We? The people.



BIOS
1. “Border” by Sharon Doubiago
2. “If You Leave Your Shoes by Joseph Ross
3. “Justicia para Nativo!!!” por Miguel Robles
4. “On My Grocery List: Virgin de Guadalupe Candles and Hope" by Rosa Valencia Sanchez
5. “Give Me a Name” by Genny Lim
6. “Let Freedom Ring!" and "Rock and Roll Raza!" by Nephtalí De Leon
7. “Transforming Volcanoes” Terri Weist

Sharon Doubiago

Foto: Andrena Zawinksi

Bio, 2010
Sharon Doubiago was born and raise in Southern California. She’s a graduate of Ramona High School and Palomar College (San Diego County) and of Cal State University, LA. Her memoir, My Father’s Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume One, November 2009, Wild Ocean Press, was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Non Fiction, 2010. Volume Two is forthcoming. Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems, was published by the University of Pittsburgh, November 2008, and received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award, and was a finalist in the Paterson NJ Poetry Prize, Feb 2010. She has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the booklength poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections, El Niño (Lost Roads Press), and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Graywolf Press) which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list: Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast and a California Arts Council Award. She’s an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota (Split Rock) and a board member of PENOakland. For two decades she has been writing Son, a memoir about the mother-son relationship, for which she has received two Oregon Institute of Literary Art Fellowships. Her new collection of memoir stories, Why She Loved Him, is circulating. She has published over a hundred essays—from the personal and creative, to the scholarly. An extensive interview of her experience re South America Mi Hija has just been published in Brújula, “Theoretical Cross- Pollination in Latin America: Mapping Transnational Exchanges,” Vol 7, Spring 2009 (Spring 2010), University of California, Davis. (brujula@ucdavis.edu)

sharondoubiago@yahoo.com
www.sharondoubiago.com






Joe RossJoseph Ross is a poet, working in Washington, D.C. whose poems have been published in many journals and anthologies including Poetic Voices Without Borders 1 and 2, Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Full Moon on K Street. He co-edited Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib. He has given readings in Washington, D.C.’s Miller Cabin Poetry Series and in the Library of Congress’ Poetry-at-Noon Series. He teaches in the College Writing Program at American University in Washington, D.C.

About Miguel Robles
Nació y creció en la Ciudad de México, estudio historia del arte, orfebrería y creación literaria en Morelia Michoacán. Desde muy joven trabajo en los mas variados oficios, desde vender libros de ciencias políticas y literatura, hasta trabajar en maquiladoras de la frontera México/EEUU, y despachar autobuses de transporte publico. Habiendo vivido en los ambientes y lugares mas disímiles. Artesano, poeta y activista, desde 2002, radica en San Francisco, California.

Born and raised in Mexico City, he studied art history, silversmithing, and creative writing in the city of Morelia in the state of Michoacán. Since a young age he has worked a wide range of jobs including bookseller, factory worker on the Mexican/U.S. border, and public transportation bus dispatcher. Artisan, poet, and activist, he has lived in diverse environments, residing in San Francisco since 2002.

Rosa Valencia SanchezRaconteuse,
ornamental to some,
symbolic to believers
insouciant with friends,
enigmatic to foe.

Please contact Rosa at heyroze@gmail.com if you are interested in reading more of her poetry. Rosa can also be found daily on "Poets Responding to SB1070" poetry group on Facebook. Rosa writes to express her feelings in regard to mainly social issues, children and her family.

Rosa loves words!

A. D. WINANS
A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet and writer. His work has appeared in over a thousand literary magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Journal, Margie, Poetry Australia, the New York Quarterly and, the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is the author of numerous books. In 2002 a song poem of his was performed at New York’s Alice Tully Hall. In 2006 he was awarded a PEN National Josephine Miles award for excellence in literature. In 2009 he was given a PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award. Cross-Cultural Communications just released his newest chapbook, Love –Zero.

Genny Lim
Genny Lim is a native San Franciscan poet. She has toured international festivals in Naples, Italy, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Caracas,Venezuela and performed with major jazz artists such as Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong and Herbie Lewis.

Her award winning play, Paper Angels, broadcast on PBS in 1985, focused on the plight of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island during the early 1900s. She is the author of two collections of poetry and co-author of ISLAND; Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.

Nephtalí de Leon

Grew up as a migrant worker. Spent later years in West Texas, bordering with several middle-America states, as his early years bordered with Mexico. The artist is a self taught creator with no formal or institutional higher education. After attending several lower schools, wherever the migrant trail would take him, he made it through high school. With an authentic non-academic approach to his craft, he freely practices the visual and literary arts that have a resonance and relation to the community he comes from. His art forms and reflections have developed as a result of his multi-lingual multicultural dialogue with a great part of the immigrants and natives he has come in contact with. He is often thought of as the Gypsy vagabond poet of his community.

Terri WeistTerri Weist has lived half of her life in the Mission District. She has published stories and poems over the years. She has a nine year old Mexican American daughter. Terri is also a healer and musician. After taking a break for ten years she is writing again.