Memories, Moths, Enamoradas Pasadas

Nightime Walkabout: Visit With A Swarm of Unknown Moths

Michael Sedano

The night isn’t particularly dark on the concrete driveway entering the brightly lit mall parking lot. I’m walking, so I keep to the edge where a bed of dwarf lantana grow. Something, maybe a gum wrapper, maybe a critter, darts across the flowers into shadow.

I bend to gaze intently scanning the spot where movement has arrested my attention. I search around several plants, eyes primed to see a piece of paper that doesn’t exist. I straighten up surveying the bed at my feet where some natural magic shares this climactic moment of metamorphosis with me when these moths rise from the earth like silent chicharras, seeking nourishment from abundant lantana flowers.

I have no idea what moth this can be. When the moths stop to sip, their wings flutter in nonstop delight fully comprehending this nectar. Getting close and getting an iphone foto takes dozens of exposures, but at such wing velocities the iphone cannot catch a wing in space even with flash. By their wings will you know them, moths, I have no identification for these small souls.

I get to my car and a moth has posed itself on the windshield. Mira nomás.

Fast As You Can Wink An Eye

Michael Sedano  

 

She ripped my heart

Into tiny quivering pieces

scattered everywhere. 

A bloody mess.

The janitor complained

It’s not my job, man.

I gathered the shards

Myself

Thinking to put it back

The way it was, later.

 

Carolina haunted him with profound regret, and unrequited passion. Walking away straight-shouldered, she turns to smile over her bare freckled shoulder, hair wafting into a golden blur. The glint from her eye promises him everything he would ever want. But she is paper and gelatin and silver halides and a fifty-years old memory. He’d held the camera to his cheek watching her turn away. She had walked into the crowd and he’d never laid eyes upon Carolina again.

 

Until now. The novelty of being in Edison NJ wears off quickly. Yesterday, to conclude the day’s business routine, his local hosts insist on taking Mr. De las Costillas sightseeing. The blimp. Edison’s labs. The Raritan Canal. White Castle burgers stuns him as the epitome of everything evil about fast food, but Miguel keeps that to himself. The locals are delighted to introduce the big shot from the coast to sliders.

 

It is the final night of the annual three-week swing and Costillas finally gets to be on his own. Relieved at the absence of ritualized company dinners, Miguel walks in a bouncy quick time, excited at the prospect of dinner in a diner. A shiny aluminum railcar diner, just like in old movies or corny teevee situation comedies. Even better, it’s called Carolina’s Place. 

 

De las Costillas mentally leaps in the air to click his heels to read “Blue Plate Special” on the chalkboard. The menu goes on for pages. Burgers, knishes, pirogi, cabbage soup, borscht, steak, fish, spaghetti. Miguel orders the blue plate special, meat loaf and all the trimmings. When he tops off the meal with a slice of custard pie, he tells Mary how delicious this custard pie tastes, like home.

 

Mary laughs and tells Miguel frankly she can’t stomach that slimy shit in her mouth, pardon my french. But the owner insists they keep custard pie on the menu. It doesn’t sell. Mary tells him I gotta tell boss lady about this. And with that Mary wheels around and pushes her way into the back.

 

The piecrust has a hard shell of granulated sugar along the rim. The side of Miguel’s fork cracks into the crispiness and glides through dense orange pudding. Perfumes of cardamom, nutmeg, and canela tantalize his nostrils and quivering tastebuds. Miguel’s fork trembles remembering another custard pie.

 

His mouth fills with flavor when he crushes the morsel with his tongue. The custard has baked just to the point of perfection; light, solid, creamy smoothness. He thinks of the smile over Carolina’s shoulder, the fine hairs of her cheek fuzz glowing in the afternoon light, her eyes at once distant and urgent. Miguel draws a long slow breath through parted lips across the flan still resting in his mouth. He closes his eyes to concentrate on sensing this aroma filling his sinus as he exhales. He remembers the moment he’d called, “Carolina, soma pa’ca! look over here!”

 

When Miguel de las Costillas opens his eyes he is looking into a woman’s eyes. He knows her and he slowly angles his head to look at her from a different perspective. She looks at him intently, then suspiciously. “How’d you find me?” Her voice still carries that sweet timbre that had rested unheard in his memory for fifty years. Fifty years of cigarettes—she reeks of tobacco—ravaged it, but the woman speaks with Carolina’s voice.

 

“Hi, Carolina” is all he says. Then he adds, “Happy birthday, 50 times over.” It has been that long. Carolina sits.

 

Miguel takes another bite of custard pie, savors it, and takes another bite. He remembers watching a 16-year old Carolina bustling in her mother’s kitchen, whipping up a custard pie. That girl had spirit. He played “Billy Boy” on the piano and made up a lyric about custard pie. She had laughed and danced and sang along, and baked a custard pie fast as young Miguel could blink an eye.

 

Carolina’s biography serves up a litany of woes and five husbands. Hard luck turns into elation. But that doesn’t work out, and more hard luck. Only three kids, thankfully, who have troubles of their own. Lou, the last husband before she gave up men, had beaten the shit out of her but when he died he left her this diner and the parking lot. She is not eking by, doing all right, getting there. 

 

Does he want to, you know? Miguel holds her eyes with regret and she begins to sing “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” 

 

It was their song. He played the sheet music, she sang. Singing had been her tease. She would lean over him to read the words, squeezing him with both arms. Or she snuggled against him on the piano bench, an arm around his waist, leaning into him to turn the page with her right hand, occasionally sliding her nose into his neck. She drove him wild, a long, long time ago.

 

Costillas wishes he could photograph the empty darkened diner, shades half drawn, their corner booth in a pool of light. Two figures sit across from each other, their faces moving into and out of the overhead bulb like nighthawks turning in the gyre. The muted green walls scream out to be photographed. 

 

She sings the entire song and by the final measure she has reached her hands across to him. He takes both hands and caresses them. She begins to lose the melody and energy, her voice fades until she whispers haltingly “… long, long, time.”

My Own Puño de Tierra. Galarza Documentaries.

Red Is the Color Dreams Are Made On

Michael Sedano

I have lived in many places that I called home because those were places where, when I went there, they had to take me in, and because I had no other place to go, and because my heart was there. Home.

My hometown of Redlands, California, holds a special niche in my personal definition of “home.” My heart is there, the house in the orange groves, the hillside house through junior high, a teenage boy in puppy love with a girl, a student making good marks and winning speech contests, a chameleon’s existence moving back and forth between raza  cultura and anglo society. Redlands.

Anglo Redlands was a complex place whose astonishing experiences with racism betrayed the character of the town’s everyday gente, like that song, “dear hearts and gentle people.” 

My Dad, with Mom's help, built our first house on a dirt street one street over from where he grew up. The street dead-ended next door, and the groves started growing all the way to the wash. The sign at the city limits claimed Redlands had 20,000 people and was the navel orange growing capital of the world. Harry S. Truman was president.

From 5th to 9th grade, my folks had a house on the other side of town, with a view because Dad always wanted a view of those groves where he’d worked many hours, before Civil Service. 

Jobs at Norton AFB allowed Mom and Dad to build their dream home on a spectacular view lot at the city limits. I was in High School. Home sat on hard, rich, red tierra, solid like the ties that bound us to the land.

When I sold the house, I walked the lot one last time where I’d labored with my Dad to lay cement slabs and dig hillside trails, move rocks, turn the home’s fallow earth, leveled planting beds to cultivate its richness. 

I walked over to where Dad built an horno. He dug up some dirt, made mud bricks, fashioned the horno, plastered and smoothed the outside with more mud. The horno was the center of family celebrations, after banqueting on barbacoa, lounge in the warmth from the open oven and laugh and sing.

That’s where I found my clod of home, where Dad built the horno. My puño de tierra is that red dirt giving Redlands its name and is the stuff dreams are made on.

El día que yo me muera, no voy a llevarme nada

Hay darle gusto al gusto, la vida pronto se acaba

Lo que pasó en este mundo, nomás el recuerdo queda

Ya muerto voy a llevarme, nomás un puño de tierra

Un Puño de Tierra, Ramón Ayala

Early In Our History, Ernesto Galarza

Audiences at Occidental College will have opportunity to view a film composite of all five episodes produced by Jesus Treviño on March 24 in Choi Auditorium at 6 p.m. Two of the episodes are yours for a click or two at Latinopia.com. 

Galarza blazed many trails for Chicanos in high places doing good work back in the days when so few of us held pivotal social roles, Galarza had to be activist, diplomat, labor organizer, author and educator. 

Thanks to Latinopia.com's generosity making these, and an extensive library of film and essay covering arts, literature, history, music, activism, regional views, el movimiento, notables. The site is updated every Sunday with back issues easily obtained.

Putting A Piano In Its Place

Ashes to...Keyboards and Skins

Michael Sedano

I lost the piano I’ve had since 1950, a year ago in the Eaton Fire. Ever since, I’ve been able to play Thelma Reyna’s piano, so my fingers haven’t entirely forgotten how to find the right notes. Playing is not practicing so I’m a year out of practice. I’ve felt the absence of a piano in the house, and, peor, I haven’t had a permanent residence until only recently.

Three homes in Redlands, then Temple City, back to Redlands, rejoin us in Eagle Rock, Pasadena, Altadena. All those places and times, my piano keeps me satisfied and tormented at the same time. Practice tends to soften frustration and when it works and all the fingers come together, it’s a taste of the sublime.

I mourn the absence of that possibility, that momentary discovery of perfection, a line of notes becoming music.

Losing my piano in the fire creates a wound that can never heal. The piano and the sheet music that burned are unrecoverable things rich with memories. While all the things I lost and suddenly remember are emotional papercuts, losing that piano cuts deeper. Not that a new piano won’t assuage the loss. A ver.

Today, I have a piano. Mejor, the piano is a Kimball, same as my lifelong instrument, the one with all those memories. Time for new memories. Adelante, don't look back for too long.

Brandon, with Altadena Musicians, put me in contact with Steve from Santa Monica who had a piano he was donating to survivors of the Eaton Fire. Altadena Musicians understands what losing a precious instrument does to a person’s soul, and to professionals, livelihood. Brandon’s organization coordinates donors to gente like me who were burned out.

“What did you lose?” Brandon asks when I first contact him about a free piano. My inventory includes conga drums--a beautiful set Barbara gave me for Christmas one year--and my piano.

People are generous, wonderful, and truly good, sabes?

Brandon and the Altadena Musicians are not looking for credit, nothing formal-- like I don’t know Brandon’s last name. Nor Steve’s. In fact, these good people extended incredible generosity. When I texted Steve how I could not accept the piano owing to a costly professional mover’s quote, I thought that was that.

In response, Steve tells me all is not lost. And Brandon suggests the foundation can pay the movers. I am moved and grateful at the offer. On his own initiative, Steve connects with A. Garcia Piano Movers, a 30 years in business firm with no website, who move pianos for the Santa Monica music conservatory at discounts and at times pro bono. Steve makes all the arrangements for delivery. I cut short an Arboretum walkabout and get home in time to move furniture out of the path of the three vatos lifting my new piano into my new home. Órale.

I began today miserable, having abandoned hope of owning a piano again. In a rapid fire series of text and voice messaging I learn the piano will come to me within a few hours. At the same time, thanks again to Brandon and Altadena Musicians, another generous soul has placed conga drums in their unlocked patio for me to pick up sometime today. Ajúa.

And so it went, February 2, 2026.

2026

 Meditation for a New Year • January 1, 2026.

Michael Sedano

The sun this grey January day rises only to be shrouded by grey overcast making January First twenty-twenty six one of those cheerless winter days, wet, chilly, just the day for a fire, for remembering, for locating space to hold the fulness of memories.

This day, this year, is time for taking perspective. Now that so much has changed, there are ideas to pursue, experiences to relish, to find a place for some memories to rest.

2026. Another first day of the year. 80 of them in a lifetime, 57 of them since getting married and starting our tradition of eggs benedict on New Year morning. Three years since Barbara died. Today, I appreciate our tradition in a solitary meal, sorting out what was joyful and important.

Our first New Year, 1969, arrives clouded by dread it would be our only and last. I have 18 days remaining until reporting to the Draft. July of ’69 I’m immersed in high adventure, stationed atop the world’s highest missile site near the Korean DMZ.

I take R&R in Tokyo for Xmas and New Year 1970. (Link) Barbara flies to join me. We spend our second new year day in Tokyo, knowing we have only a few hours until my leave expires and her flight to LAX. We have a deluxe Japanese breakfast served in the Shibuya-ku Ryokan Barbara reserved for our reunion week. She wears the silk kimono jacket we bought on our first walkabout and shopping foray and smiles at my camera.

Tokyo is everything Korea isn’t. Abundance versus rationing.  I have not eaten fresh fruit since July. Army mess halls don’t serve fruit of any kind. Stores in Tokyo look like Grand Central Market in DTLA. I buy ten tangerines every day to devour sitting on the tatami, laughing with Barbara counting down our measured days together. 

We remembered that week for the rest of our lives.

I thickened the hollandaise in the microwave this year, and while it was delicious and mostly silky, it wasn’t quite right. Today’s breakfast is a good NewYear memory, packed into yet another January First. 

I sipped Korbel Brut and cleaned up the kitchen. Then, because I can, I finished the champagne reliving cherished memories of days before everything changed, relishing thoughts of the coming year. I always do that.

Stuff of Memories; Con Garro y Sin Paz

 La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes Guest Reviewer Rey Rodriguez and a book adding insight to a story of a neglected daughter-famous father, in this case Mexican Nobelist Octavio Paz’ daughter. Today’s lead article celebrates things found in the ruins of the Eaton fire.

 

 

Stuff Not Lost In the Fire: Treasures of Memory

Michael Sedano

 

Stuff that goes through fire and dug from the ashes come back like a scarred phenix, changed in its passage through the crucible into renewed versions of their essential selves, the memories they hold impervious to the firestorm.

 

My father’s strong box held his WWII memorabilia along with Dad’s high school graduation watch, treasures from his courtship of my mother, precious times of his days on this earth. The warped lid rests uncomfortably on the contorted blistered box. 

 

Barbara’s heart collection featured a colorful ceramic corazón that was born in fire and emerges from fire in two pieces, its bright contours coated with an orange oxidation sweated out of the glaze the clay’s second firing. I hesitate to wash away the sweat.

 

A Review: Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop at Beyond Baroque.

 

Rey Rodriguez

 

Iván Salinas continues to curate important events that transcend borders and draw on our Latino past to inform the present.

 

On December 5, 2025, I attended his latest entitled, Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop and held at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/). This event was a reading, conversation, and book signing of Marcela Magdalena Deschamps’ latest book, Con Garro y Sin Paz. It is an extraordinary story inspired by the life of Helena Paz Garro, the daughter of the famous Mexican literary couple of Octavio Paz and Elena Garro. 

 

Helena Paz Garro often talked about the distance that she felt from her father following the events of 1968 in Tlatelolco, where soldiers shot down hundreds of students, when she and her mother were accused of orchestrating the student movement. Ultimately, though, Paz Garro forgave him despite his abandonment of her. Elena Garro was considered one of Mexico’s finest writers, but because she was a woman, she did not receive the acclaim she deserved. Paz and Elena Garro were married in 1937. They had one daughter, Helena, and divorced in 1959.

 

It is with this backdrop that Professor Marcela Becerra García, California State University Channel Islands, interviewed Deschamps to discuss her fascinating book, which tells the tale of a forgotten house in Cuernava where Paz Garro lives the last days of her life among feral cats and ghosts of the past. Paz Garro is a complicated character who could not have children because she was raped at the age of three and contracted syphilis. The disease and its treatment ensured that she would never bear children. The rape likely led to a life of deep mental illness, which was largely left untreated. 

 

Nevertheless, Paz Garro was surrounded by books and literature and was extremely well educated in European boarding schools. As a result, her great legacy is her poetry, which Deschamps keeps alive in her novel by including unedited versions of some of her most lyrical verses. 

 

It is important to note that Octavio Paz often did not even mention his daughter’s existence. This absence is notable and makes Deschamps' work even more important than ever to ensure that both Elena Garro and Helena Paz Garro are studied and remembered. Any discussion of Mexican literature and Paz’s legacy is incomplete without a discussion of these two important female writers. Deschamps revives their memory and honors them by writing this extraordinary book that becomes a must-read if we are to truly understand Mexican literature and the unsung role that women played in it.

About Rey Rodriguez: 

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Home At Last, Floricanto and rrsalinas on Film

 Michael Sedano

Last January the fires of hell, aka Eaton Canyon, leveled miles of homes in Pasadena and nearly wiped Altadena off the map. My daughter's urban farm--where I'd taken residence following my wife's death with Alzheimer's Dementia--disappeared in the conflagration (link). 

We became nomads, finding shelter where we could. My granddaughter moved away to college leaving only my daughter and me in a painfully expensive, and profoundly unsatisfactory, rental house. I moved eight times since January 7, from motel to motel, city to city, rental to rental. 

From where I sit today, I can see forever. My daughter bought a beautiful home for me and my eighth move is the last one.

I'm home. I have a home. I have a place to call my own. There is life after Alzheimer's, here is some evidence.

After three days moving in and getting stuff fixed up, it was celebration time. My gente all showed up, and one, Margaret Garcia, presented me with her portrait of me, painted when I was only a few days out from losing my last known residence. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's report  (link) on sitting for that portrait, which now will grace my walls in my new home. My art collection, reduced to ashes and memories, has begun again.

Guest Columnist Rey Rodriguez

Review: Un Trip: raúlrsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, documentary screening, Q&A, Flor y Canto at Beyond Baroque.

By Rey Rodriguez

On October 4, 2025, I attended at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/), a celebration of raúl “Roy” “Tapón” salinas, an extraordinary Chicano poet who has since passed away but who left a powerful legacy of revolutionary poetry. 

Curated by Iván Salinas, the event included the screening of Un Trip: raúlsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, and a stellar lineup of poets.

The film credits La Bloga’s Michael Sedano for his photography. At the event, Mr. Sedano described how he located lost footage of raúl salinas as salinas reads his poetry at El Festival de Flor y Canto, the movimiento’s first large-scale literary festival, at USC in 1973. I highly recommend that the reader view rrsalinas’ reading at this link: https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF113JNMZ?&WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP . 

That first floricanto would have been lost to the passage of time, but for the efforts of Mr. Sedano to seek it out and ensure that videos of all the spotlighted artists are now available for viewing by a whole new generation of students, teachers, researchers, professors, gente en general.

Parts of the 1973 reading are included in Un Trip, a short documentary, which is still seeking distribution, despite winning an audience award in Texas. After watching the documentary, it is a film that definitely deserves to be distributed widely for its historical and educational significance in Chicano history and for filling in the gaps of rrsalinas’ contributions to poetry in general.

The event also included emotional and beautiful readings from: Abel Salas, founding editor of Brooklyn and Boyle, who was personally associated with raúl r salinas; Ben V. Olguín,

Professor, Robert and Lisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English, Director of The Global Latinidades Center at UCSB, who read of his experience with the poet; Luis J. Rodríguez, author of many books, essays, poems, and founder of Tía Chuchas Cultural Center along with his activist wife Trini Rodríguez, spoke movingly of his personal connection with this master poet and the power of poetry to transform lives that may have been lost to poverty, violence and drugs; Josiah Luis Alderete, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate and co-owner of Medicine For Nightmares bookshop, who performed a poem to tlaxcalli; Iris de Anda, who read her emotional poetry; and Soledad Con Carne, a self described casually Queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, who acknowledges that although they had never met Mr. Salinas, their poetry was in conversation with his.

It is this conversation that intrigued me, so when the evening was over, I was fortunate enough to meet Con Carne and ask them to sign their recently published chapbook, SFV or Die, Foo, published by Lilac Press (https://www.instagram.com/lilacpressdiy/?hl=en – requires Instagram registration). 

I went home and could not put the book down. Con Carne’s voice resonates so strongly throughout their writings with poems entitled, “Carne Poetics,” “Another Memorial for a Brown Man by Smiley’s Market,” and “everything I learned at CSUN.” 

Con Carne stands with the marginalized of the San Fernando Valley and proudly expresses their divinity in their work. They remind us through their work of all that is lost if their vital voices are not heard and honored. 

Con Carne carries on the work of Mr. Salinas, and I hope you will all support their work by buying this chapbook. It is deeply profound poetry that stands on the shoulders of so many others who understand that it is the system that is corrupt and needs to be rebuilt around our mutual humanity. 

Those living in poverty or on the margins do not need fixing. They need to be expressed and heard, and they are, through the work of Soledad Con Carne and all of those who participated in the evening to celebrate raúl r salinas. 

About the writer:

Rey Rodriguez and Laura Varela

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Fotos, Ése: Floricanto at Beyond Baroque 

foto: Rey Rodriguez

soledad con carne

Iris de Anda

Josiah Luis Alderete

Luis J. Rodriguez

Abel Salas

Ben V. Olguin

Michael Sedano

I was pleased to be a Special Guest at the film showing and floricanto. When I walked into Beyond Baroque's Wanda Coleman Auditorium, the video of rrsalinas' reading at the 1973 Festival de Flor y Canto played. As the evening's guest, I related briefly the surprise I experienced in 2009 as I was leaving the world of work: a video I thought did not exist!

That video of Oscar Zeta Acosta set me on a detective search for all the other poets and readers videotaped at the movimiento's historic first Festival de Flor y Canto. I found them at UC Riverside where Juan Felipe Herrera helped me secure use of a rare U-Matic Cassette player. The ¾" format, long since abandoned by broadcasters and universities, required access to the sole surviving player in the Inland Empire. Thanks to Herrera and the UCR Tomás Rivera Library, I returned the floricanto to USC, whose institutional memory had completely erased the floricanto from local history!

My goal in digitizing the U-Matics is to make an important historical resource widely available so poets, students, teachers, familias, can see and hear some of la raza's foundational writers in their youth. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's column on the digitizing process (link).

Coinciding with my 2010 presentation to USC of the digitized videos, I organized a reunion floricanto, Festival de Flor y Canto: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. I invited veteranas and veteranos from that 1973 festival for the "yesterday" element, and artists with publication history for the "today" element, and emerging voices just launcing their careers for the "tomorrow" element. USC's Digital Library also shares videos of that 2010 reunion, documented by Jesus Treviño's Barrio Dog Productions. Latinopia.com includes numerous videos from that 2010 reunion floricanto (link).

Here's the link to USC's digital collection that includes my photographs of the 1973 artists and the full performance videos from 1973 and 2010. You can request photographs via the library, and download the videos for non-commercial, fair use:

https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF15MA253?Flat=y&WS=SearchResults

Here's a compact index to the videos:

https://calisphere.org/collections/27333/

Late-Breaking News: From the Producer of Un Trip

You and a guest are invited to the special LA Screenings of the moving documentary - AMERICAN SONS  produced by Laura Varela, directed and produced by Andrew James Gonzales,  with producers Elizabeth Avellan, Fernando Cano, and Ray Telles.  AMERICAN SONS is a profoundly intimate documentary that traces the enduring scars of war through the story of Cpl. JV Villarreal, a Mexican American Marine from Texas, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. Told through raw, never-before-seen combat footage and the decade-long emotional journey of his Marine brothers and family, the film is both a tribute and a courageous exploration of grief, resilience, and love. 

Location: VIDIOTS (4884 Eagle Rock Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041)
Date and Time: Monday, October 6 - Doors/Drinks reception 7:00 PM | Film 7:30 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Moderated by Claire Aguilar

Drinks reception to follow

Location: BOB HOPE PATRIOTIC HALL (1816 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015)
Date and Time: Wednesday, October 8 - Doors 5:00 PM | Film 5:30 PM
 
Location: PBS SoCal (3080 Bristol Street #100 Costa Mesa, CA 92626)
Date and Time: Thursday, October 9 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Location: Film Independent (5670 Wilshire Blvd 9th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
Date and Time: Friday, October 10 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 
Moderated by Matt Carey
Reception to follow

RSVP at AMERICANSONS@DMAGPR.COM. Please advise which screening you'd like to attend and if you are bringing a guest. 

Vignettes In A Chicano Octogenarian's Journey

Vignettes In An Octogenarian Chicano’s Journey to Today

Michael Sedano, a man who one morning woke to find himself transformed into an eighty-years-old Veteran, reformed academic, and family man who found life after Alzheimer's.

1945, Leipzig, Germany

WWII in Europe ends when the first U.S. tank, after an 18-hour battle, rolls up to the front door of Leipzig city hall. My Dad is the machine gunner on that tank, the C’est La Guerre. Since the gunner sits forward in the tank, the first GI to reach Leipzig city hall is a Chicano. My Dad won WWII.

Bivouacked in Europe awaiting orders to Japan as occupation troops, word arrives that I am born on August 31. The birth gives my Dad enough points to rotate home instead of the Pacific. 

My Dad always bragged how his son got him out of the Army.

Circa 1949, Boy Caught With His Pants Down

The right field wall of Lynch Field borders my family’s property line. The green 8 foot wooden fence looms high overhead for a small boy, whose sense of adventure and challenge lead him to scale the wall. It is I.

I find a way to get to the top rail where I inch my way, belly against the wall, holding the tops of the planks balancing sideways on the 2X4 top rail. I get to the neighbor’s chicken yard and I look down noticing my predicament. The ground is a long way down.  Where am I going? How am I going to get down?

My hand-me-down Levi’s have no trouble getting down. All guangos, they settle around my knees, my nalgas to the breeze. Danged if I'm releasing hold on those planks to pull up my pants. I scream. I cry. My Mom hears me, calls my Dad. Dad scales the fence to rescue me. Mom takes a foto of the rescue. It becomes family legend, the day the boy lost his trousers and got stuck on the fence.

1956, Incident On Lugonia School Playground

No one I know likes Miss Goertler, an unpleasant  woman stuck with my gaggle of fifth grade Chicanos and a couple of Okies. We get along OK.

This day, Miss Goertler leads us across the street next to the monkey bars that made my first day of school misery—I climbed them against Mom’s orders and promptly fell from the top to the sand like an Homeric hero—I tasted sand. High places and I become a lifelong theme.

Miss Goertler has planned a game and explains the rules. We aren’t listening, jostling one another, having a good time ignoring that unpleasant person. Frustrated, she says “If you don’t pay attention and cooperate, we’ll  all just go back to the room!”

I don’t take to threats and blurt out, “Well, why don’t we all just go back then?”

The enraged Miss Goertler dashes across the sand, grabs me, bends me over and swats my ass. I’m sentenced to sit on the bench while my now-cooperative classmates play the game. 

I’m kicked out of fourth grade for weeks, sentenced to lying all day on the nurse’s couch behind the Principal’s office. When I’m permitted back into that woman’s classroom, they’re doing the times tables. Fudu and I team up and get to the 11s and 12s ahead of everyone in the class.

Mid-year, the familia moves to the other side of town where I’m one of two Chicanos. Another theme of my career, the only one.

1963, the Only Chicano At UCSB 

“There’s a Joint between Anacapa Hall and Santa Rosa Hall,” my Sequoia Hall dormmates exclaim. A Joint is not a pot party, it’s a record hop.

The girls from Santa Rosa Hall line up at one side of the cement patio, the guys opposite. Records play surf music, Beatles, Baby I’m Yours, We’ll Sing in the Sunshine, Do You Want to Dance? Oldies now, hits of the day then.

My eyes sweep the women’s side—blondes and blondes and auprés de my blonde it would be good to meet one and ask her for a dance. My history of being brutally shot down my Anglo girls ("My Dad doesn't let me go out with Mexicans") sensitizes me to the perils of unknown white girls. My eyes land on a tall, willowy girl whose brown skin screams “she’s the one!” The only brown girl in a sea of blondes. She is beautiful and I have hopes. My heart pounds as I move around the darkened patio.

“Would you like to dance?” She looks away mumbling negation. I fade back into the shadows to my side. It’s a slow song and maybe she doesn’t want to break the ice on a waltz.

“Would you like to dance?” It’s a fast one, we could really bust a move. “No.” Punto final. I skulk away.

I stand on the guy side staring longingly at the brown girl who hasn’t danced yet. Maybe the white guys prefer blondes? A short blonde appears at my side, taps my shoulder. A dance partner, I wonder?

“Hi, I’m Sancha’s roommate and she wants you to know, she’s Portugese and she doesn’t dance with Mexicans.”

I know now it’s going to be a long four years of no dates no romance for the only Chicano at UCSB. The Beach Boys sing, “and we’ve never missed yet with the gir-ls we meet…”

1968, Romance, Alice’s Restaurant, World’s Highest Missile Site

1967 arrives and by now I’ve met women who like me and we form a Platonic clique. My best friend and study partner introduces me to Barbara. When the gang graduates and heads out to their careers, I remain at UCSB, the Debate TA. A pretty good job. I teach public speaking and get to travel around the country as the Debate Coach.

Barbara is the only one from the old days and we find ourselves in Love. We marry on my birthday in 1968 and move into a ramshackle house on Ortega Street, the heart of Santa Barbara’s raza section.

A month and a half later, my Uncle Sam he says a’knock knock, here I am. Richard Nixon orders me to report just before Thanksgiving. I manage to postpone the dreadful day until January.

That Thanksgiving, the oven catches fire and I heroically douse the flames, wash off the first turkey Barbara's ever cooked. 

We roast the singed bird with friends in Isla Vista, laughing bitterly at Arlo Guthrie’s tale of draft resistance. Its absurdity is a slap in the face. Barbara fears this will be the only Thanksgiving she spends with her husband, if he’s killed in Vietnam. We are miserable that holiday season, counting the days to 18Jan69. My heels leave deep gouges in the cement when they drag me onto the bus taking us to the Induction Center where no one sings a chorus of Alice's Restaurant Masacree.

Every Thanksgiving thereafter, we put Alice’s Restaurant on the turntable, and play it over and over on repeat. Guests have no idea why we do this weird thing. We explain, they still have no idea. I'm glad for them. I am one of two Veterans in our circle.

At Ft Ord and throughout my service, I’m no longer the only Chicano. Lots of us Mexicans, lots of Puerto Ricans and other American Spanish speakers in the Army. It’s the first time in my experience, since 4th grade, to be surrounded by raza. 

"This is the highest toughest and most rugged missile site in the world. Be proud to be here. We are."

The Army doesn’t send me to the hot war, I get orders for Korea and no particular place to go. The replacement depot orders me to the edge of the DMZ where the 7th of the 5th Air Defense Artillery battalion maintains HAWK—homing all the way killers—missiles against commie hordes from the north. A few infiltrators, a MiG flyby, the mountain and a helicopter try to kill me, but I'm invincible.

We laugh, eat well, and grow strong. Koreans eat chile but it’s inspid, no fire. We get no semblance of our food in the mess hall. Care packages from “the world” sustain us. Barbara mails Hormel canned tamales, jalapeños en escabeche, and canned flour tortillas! Those tamales are the best tamales I’ve ever eaten, but then, you had to be there. I’m glad you weren’t.

My duty station is Bravo Battery. We occupy the highest missile site in the world, Mile High Mae Bong. There’s that theme again, me and heights. I totally dig the adventure, get a lot of reading done, doing three days and two nights on top of the mountain where fierce monsoon rains compete with raging blizzards to make life interesting. Down in the Admin Area base camp there are hot showers, hot food, and wondrous solitude for me. I'm not a Ville Rat and hang out at an isolated spot near the river.

I return from Korea and arrive in Temple City on August 28. I hear there’s a big antiwar march in East LA. Barbara doesn’t know where that is, and I have no idea how to find Belvedere Park. Ignorance saves my life. Had I been in Laguna Park when the police riot began, a week out of the Army, seasoned by the mountain, and a "rough tough fighting machine", I would have attacked the first cop to swing a club at me. I would have been beaten to death only one day after getting back home.

Happy Birthday, Happy 57th Anniversary

My Barbara dies with Alzheimer’s in 2023. Alzheimer’s kicked my ass, bad, and only now has mourning taken a turn for the future. I find a new life—there is life after Alzheimer’s. I celebrate in Claremont along with my daughter and granddaughter. We’re survivors of the Eaton Fire, moving on. Joining us is Thelma Reyna, who’s instrumental in my finding depth and emotion in life, after those years of defeat, living moment to moment, numb against feelings, guarding Barbara’s health and wellbeing.

We’re in Claremont because here is where Charlotte lives now, at Scripps College. We tour her dorm. I don’t ask if there are Joints between the dorms. Scripps is a women's school.

Note: that fire destroys everything we ever owned, but not quite. I escape with three portable drives, backups to the hard drives melted in the flames. All my archives ashes. I’m relieved to find fotos like these displayed here. I recognize all that is lost is only stuff, prosthetics for memory. I have memories, and over 80 years, there are a lot of them.

 

Love, Horror, Evil, A Dementia Caregiver's Story

Review: Hiroko Falkenstein. Sinking Together. Honorable Acts with Love. Dallas: USA Book Services, 2025. ISBN (paper) 978-1-967178-32-2

Michael Sedano

I am living After Alzheimer's. Dementia books provide valuable insight for spouses or families. When undertaking caregiving for a person living with dementia, it's like taking on a new career. Reading and research provide valuable insight into what's to be. Here is such a story.

Sinking Together brings readers a horror story of unadulterated evil people exploiting an elderly couple. Sinking Together is also a story of the power of cultural mores, and above all, a story of love and character, reflecting the book’s subtitle, Honorable Acts With Love.

Haruko is a Japanese-born daughter-in-law whose cultural norms demand she be caregiver to her estranged husband’s parents. Bill, Jr., doesn’t visit his parents and grows to resent Haruko’s presence in their lives. “You’re in it for their money,” he whimpers. 

Marriage difficulties create a parallel world of misery and resentment even as caregiving provides joy and fulfillment. Life continues its pace irrespective of the singular importance of caregiving.

The old couple, Bill and Mary, are easy prey to a series of daytime caregivers. One after another enters the home and begins stealing and conducting themselves in brazen, shameless, manners. One moves her husband and kids into the main house while Bill and Mary live in a smaller studio. Instead of paying bills, caregivers write themselves generous checks. One takes an “all-expenses paid” vacation to Hawaii on her employers’ money. When confronted, the thief lies and gets away with all sorts of crap because finding caregiving is difficult.

These are not isolated, nor rare,  occurrences. My own in-laws hired a caregiver who, like Mary and Bill’s caregiver, started feeding her husband and kids in the home. Rosemary and her husband cleaned out my in-laws’ checkbook. "I had their permission," she said. And that was so. I hired a caregiver for my wife who inflated her hours to three-times the hours she’d actually performed. Did she think I didn’t notice? I discharged her and the agency repaid the theft. 

It's not just caregivers who spot easy prey. Haruko rescues Mary and Bill—she calls them Daddy and Mother—by relocating them to their mountain cabin. It’s a two and a half hour drive, but Haruko visits regularly and responds to calls for help with frequent unplanned drives out and back again. Bill hires a “carpenter” to build a greenhouse. The thieving louse buys wood for his other jobs, expensive tools, and the greenhouse never gets finished. Haruko confronts them while they're eating Mary's lunch, one of the bennies of the job. 

A reader turns the pages wondering how this evil exploitation can happen, not just once, but caregiver following caregiver does this stuff. At first the caregiver is all nice and considerate. When no one’s around, Bill gets punched and bruised. Another uses psychological torture to terrorize helpless Bill, who’s by that time, blind in both eyes.

Mary is a domineering woman whose Alzheimer’s Dementia hasn’t been diagnosed as the book opens. Mother’s behaviors reflect symptoms of dementia but, like many families, the behaviors are attributed to other causes. A former dancer, Mary’s strength challenges Haruko and the caregivers. Mary’s behavior is dangerous, not to herself alone but Bill.

Mary demands to see Bill’s eye under an eyepatch. The surgeon instructed Bill to keep the eye covered, and he refuses Mary’s demand to see the wound. Irate, Mary punches Bill in that eye and he loses that eye.

Mary’s dementia doesn’t incapacitate her. She wants to be Bill’s caregiver. But she burns the food when she cooks, and leaves the house unkempt. Caregivers complain to Haruko that Mary interferes with their work caring for Bill.

A reader will wonder why Haruko doesn’t hire better people? Haruko relies upon recommendations that so-and-so is a good Christian woman the recommender knows from church. These good Christians emerge as brazen thieves and elder abusers.

When Mary begins to wander—a typical Alzheimer’s behavior—Bill can only call police when Mary’s “escaped.” Why not move Mary to a memory care facility? Out of the question; the couple’s Will specified they would not be placed in nursing homes. Not many families can afford Memory Care, so in-home is their only option. I told my wife that I'd find us assisted living but Barbara told me she wanted to remain in her home. Of course, I acceded to my wife's desire and it was the right thing to do. I am so relieved my story is not Sinking Together.

Haruko is trapped by her Japanese culture. Bill, Jr., wants nothing to do with her parents and wants Haruko to obey his commands and find other people to care for the parents. In the middle of the book, they divorce. Haruko, however, remains dedicated to her culture and her commitment to Daddy and Mother.

Culture doesn’t fully explain why Haruko does the right thing. This is character. Faced with onerous demands, Haruko complies without complaint. A late-night phone call for help summons Haruko’s presence. Bill and Mary live only a few blocks away. But when they’re up in the mountains, that call obligates the loving daughter-in-law to make that two and a half hour drive up to Idylwild and back to Laguna.

Haruko is the nom de plume of the author, Hiroko Falkenstein. The author wrote the book thirty years ago and only this year, 2025, has the experience and memory bubbled up to the surface driving Falkenstein finally to tell this story.

Dementia of the Alzheimer’s type is a growing health issue in the world, not just the U.S. Falkenstein’s/Haruko’s experiences are neither rare nor unexpected. Sinking Together, Honorable Acts With Love, offers a cautionary message for spouses or families beginning their own careers as caregivers to a loved one stricken with this uncurable, untreatable disease.

Vetting caregivers comes first. No one can be a full-time caregiver without help. A spouse has to find respite hours, if not daily, regularly. This subject is not entirely absent from Falkenstein’s narrative. Haruko takes a European vacation and feels guilty about leaving her in-laws to the hands of such strangers.

Consequences come into demand when a thief is discovered, but only one gets jailed. Haruko accepts feeble excuses, in part because she is “nice” and in part because firing a caregiver without a replacement puts the onus on Haruko to devote 24/7 to Mary and Bill, while still working to please that resentful husband. Jail time would be a suitable reward to elder abusers of the ilk whom we encounter in Sinking Together. My mother's elder abusing, thieving, caregiver was a family member whose crimes go unpunished to this day. 

Dementia behaviors are unique to the individual. Mary’s outlandish behaviors were particular to her personality, the book is not a prediction of anyone else’s Alzheimer’s Dementia experiences. There is only one Mary, only one Bill, in the world.

Much of the narrative, however, is universal to all dementia caregivers. Adult diapers. Bathing. Diarrhea covering the floor and person’s body. Impatience and anger both from the cared-for and the caregiver.

And death. Mary dies with Alzheimer’s but Bill won’t learn the fact until later. An ugly later, as a caregiver torments Bill telling him Mary’s dead.

Falkenstein ends the story with tenderness.For his 90^th birthday, Haruko locates several of Bill’s former friends and employees. These people celebrate their memories of a generous, kind and giving, boss. Bill’s gratitude to be reminded of who he used to be provides a boost to his spirit. It’s that Bill, not the weak exploited abused husband, who lies on his futon on his final day.

 Readers will be aghast at the depths of human depravity, reading about the bad caregivers. But there’s respite for readers, tenderness as Falkenstein closes the story with Bill’s death. He lies on a futon with Haruko and another caregiver holding his hands. “It’s OK to go, Bill.”

Falkenstein keeps her focus on behaviors without moralizing on the depths of depravity she witnesses. The book reflects the work of a talented story-teller. Despite the awful events, readers will keep turning pages, led by the writer’s foreshadowing of events at the ends of chapters and the arresting details of living with dementia and old age.

Reliving events like these brings profound trauma. I admire Falkenstein’s strategy. Hiroko Falkenstein maintains a safe perspective on the developments by turning her first-person story into the third-person story of Haruko. I have not yet been able to write extensively about my five-year career as a dementia caregiver. It took Falkenstein thirty years to get this story into public.