Review: Denvercentric Chicano Literature

Review: The Last Client of Luis Montez. Manuel Ramos. Arte Publico Press, 2024. 

            ISBN: 979-8-89375-001-0

Michael Sedano

Luis Montez runs a one-lawyer Denver firm surviving from client to client. In a major victory, Montez frees a low-life. His reward is getting arrested for murdering the low-life, a scion of wealth. The innocent lawyer descends into a moral hell in his quest to gather evidence of his innocence of murder. Who done it?

Author Manuel Ramos gives this plot of innocence in quest of vindication his signature chicano noir treatment in The Last Client of Luis Montez: A Luis Montez Mystery from Arte Publico Press (link).

Readers who enjoyed Ramos' 2023 The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz will be happy to see Arte Publico Press' release of its fourth of the five-title series of Luis Montez mysteries. The Luis Montez series, first published in the nineties by other houses, comes together for contemporary readers in the hands of Houston's Arte Publico Press.

The University of Houston-housed Arte Publico Press launched the series in 2023 with The Ballad Of Rocky Ruiz: A Luis Montez Mystery. That was followed by a pair of titles in 2024, The Ballad of Gato Guerrero: A Luis Montez Mystery, and the recent release of The Last Client of Luis Montez. Not yet published is Blues For the Buffalo. The press'  silence on the fifth title, Brown On Brown, adds mystery to when the series will be complete. 

Book marketers note how mysteries sales go up when other adult fiction sales decline. They attribute the jump to readers needing "cozy" literature, stuff that doesn't overdo the gore and psychology of lethality. Not mentioned is the inherent expectation that mystery novels will bring vicarious excitement, tension, interesting characters and setting, and above all, atmosphere.

With a Luis Montez novel, it doesn't pay to get all psychological. Montez, for all the seriousness of serving clients, is impetuous and wild. He would be a mujeriego, a roué, but younger women don't throw themselves at him. Then again, Montez feels himself past his prime y casí ya no puede but his imagination pushes him into erotic fantasy:

It was Glory Jane, of course. She stood very close, bending and weaving from the crush of the customers and effects of the Sin Fron's ghastly version of margaritas. Her breasts squirmed beneath her loose blouse, straining to pop out in freedom, and I was tempted to hold them to secure their modesty. The point of Glory Jean's knife, pressed against my kidney, brought me back to the immediate agenda.

Montez is more likely to be the old pendejo, getting seduced by a scheming conspirator and winding up in deep caca of his own doing by falling for the hottie. She wasn't after Luis, she was in it for the money.

The situation would be funny but for the darkness Luis sinks into questing to prove himself innocent. He goes on the lam, kidnaps a con man and his sister, burgles a client's house and get busted by them then holds them hostage. There's a chicano dick who wants to chalk up a score to even old resentments from movimiento days. And Luis has been thoroughly dumped by his former lover. And maybe Montez' beloved father is dying. Ramos builds some really dire circumstances.

Lower and lower the detective-malgre-lui sinks in the lawyer's astonished mind but survival and innocence drive the character.

Denver in winter becomes a meterological hell with slushy streets, punishing wind-driven cold, treacherous traffic. The atmosphere challenges Ramos to capture the misery that cold weather visits upon denizens of frozen cities:

At 3:30 in the afternoon, cold long shadows draped across the skyline, covered the parking lots and darkened most of downtown Denver. The streets were cold; the buildings were cold; I was cold. The January air whipped through the canyons of the skyscrapers, then aimed straight for me. Gusts twirled around my legs, raising bits and pieces of ice that clung to my heaviest pair of wool socks. I inhaled coldness through clenched teeth. Frigid slivers of oxygen and pollutants knifed down my throat and into my lungs. A drop of moisture stubbornly clung to the numb tip of my nose, and I ached like an old miner. I coughed and wheezed.

For this reader, synesthetic miserable cold awakens miserable memories of being miserably wretchedly unbearably cold while serving on a Korean mountaintop missile site, the world's highest. But weather isn't the novel's most important element. The Last Client of Luis Montez is a classically outstanding murder mystery, it keeps readers turning pages to assemble clues and confoundments Ramos masterfully doles out.

Who not only killed the liberated low-life, but why cut him into gory pieces? That happens off-stage, like the coziness criterion holds. Ramos holds down the intensity, talking about sex, for example, and not writing it. Blending telling with showing keeps the action flowing, leaving readers to fill in their own blanks, like Glory Jean's blouse.

Fill in those blanks on a cold day when all you want is to sit in front of a glowing space heater or a crackling fireplace. Give yourself a day or so to devour the story of this chicano lawyer up against all sorts of odds; a broken love affair, a seriously ill father, possible disbarment and imprisonment. Heck, he could have been shot as a felon on the run. When a cop drives his car off a remote precipice into thin air, detectives search for ways to connect Montez to that.

Ramos creates not only exceptional mystery stories, he's writing Chicano Literature. The character, his intimate and familia environment and hangouts, his history as a student activist in the movimiento, hasta the food Montez likes, it's raza. And it's exemplary writing; Ramos is a writer's writer.

There used to be a common complaint that our gente can't readily find themselves in mass media. Arte Publico Press makes it easy to find Ramos' soon-to-be four resurrected masterpieces. Navigate to the publisher's website (link) and place orders. Or give the ISBN to your indie brick and mortar bookseller, the book will soon be in your hands. 

The five Luis Montez novels make a worthy addition to a reader's library. Readers relatively new to cozy literature should welcome finding Luis Montez stories. Fans of the character will scoff at "cozy" because they enjoy filling in those blanks while tsk-tsking the character's pendejadas and empathizing that the character's exigencies drive him to darkness. That's what makes it good.

In The Last Client of Luis Montez, when light shines on everything, happy readers delight in already guessing the outcome, or slap their knees admiring the writer's craft.

Ramos' mysteries may be coming to streaming channels soon. I read somewhere the author's work has been optioned for broadcast development. A ver.

September Promise Realized

Early September this year, La Bloga-Tuesday celebrated the reincarnated Huizache (link), that moved from Texas to Davis, California. It was Houston's desmadre and Davis' windfall, publishing the distinguished magazine's tenth edition. La Bloga promised to share Number Eleven's appearance.

Students and aficionados of Chicano Literature need this collection of contemporary work. "The Magazine of a New America" offers a definitive snapshot of the state and nature of Chicano Literature. It's an important journal that libraries and bookstores should shelve.

Number 11 is here. Link. 

Rocky Ruiz Endures: The Second Time Around

Review: Manuel Ramos. The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. Houston: Arte Publico, 2023.(link to publisher)

 Michael Sedano

Re-reading a mystery novel is the same as reunion with a friend you've not seen in ages. From page one into the heart of the story, it's like all those years never separated us. But then, after a while, into chapter 4 or maybe it strikes around chapter 8, you notice how that old friend has a few wrinkles you didn't see before, and new twists you had not considered as a younger reader.

 

The more you hang out together your friendship gains dimensions formed out of newer friendships-- many of these subsequent titles by the same author. 

Right before your reading eyes, your old friend divides into two personae: the friend you remember from first-reading, a version frozen in time, it remains unchanged; the friend you're seeing now with new, older, eyes. Now you see stuff you hadn't noticed and maybe some stuff you didn't like so much but you're glad to see it. Most of all, it's grand to be back together again.

 

Meet my old friend, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. I met the vato in 1993, from St. Martin's Press. Then Rocky gets a new life in 2004 from Northwestern University Press. Clearly, my old carnal has a strong life force because now, Arte Publico Press has republished The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Manuel Ramos' first detective book, the book that gives Ramos the honorific title, "the godfather of Chicano noir." (Readers interested in the father and mother of the genre will seek out Rudolfo Anaya and Lucha Corpi).

 

The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz introduces a burned-out lawyer whose movimiento activism comes to haunt him 30 years later. Old friends Montez sees from time to time come into his life and as we go from chapter to chapter, Luis Montez begins seeing wrinkles on those old carnales and pretty soon everything turns to puro chaos. When the dust settles, the bodies buried, the suspects fingered, Montez is the one left standing. The once-broken lawyer has shed his disillusionment and emerges renewed, and rededicated to the world of work and his next four plots.

 

Ramos got himself a good character in Luis Montez. He's a big pendejo in a lot of ways and here's what strikes me reading as a 78 year old widower: That young Chicana lawyer was too young for you, Luis. She played you and that's how you came this close to losing it all. Like a total pendejo, Montez smiles at the memories of the alluring Teresa, and doesn't look back, even as he realizes he knew the woman as a baby when Montez the activist has a desperate adulterous afternoon with the baby's mother.

 

Montez' world offers a mélange of murder, sex, intrigue, betrayal, a narc, brown beret phonies, corrupt real estate tipos, opportunists, and one of the funniest courtroom scenes in literature. Laugh, pendejo. The comedy nearly costs Montez his license in a tour de force by the writer Ramos, who weaves a seemingly extraneous bit of local color into the hero's most serious threat and the novel's highest bit of suspense: will the Bar yank his license?

 

Readers know it's a yarn and Montez will work his way out of the murder and crime morass. But in noir fiction, there's the possibility of pyrrhic wins when forces outside the central plot wreak havoc. Like Teresa, febrile sexiness becomes a mujeriego's special memory: Teresa hatched that diabolical plot, did she shoot Tino? That time she points the pistol at Montez' heart, does horniness save the dirty old man? 

 

Questions of dirty old men aside, Luis is one and that makes him easy pickings for the crusading Teresa. First time I read the novel, I missed this in my identifying with Montez. Teresa's a gem Manuel Ramos needs to polish. The woman, whom Luis knew as a little girl, beds Luis as a tactic in her campaign to uncover her father's murderer. While Teresa develops a soft spot for the old guy, that could be a fluke. Let's find out: Teresa needs a series of novels that set her loose upon the world.

 

Fans of detective fiction and Chicano Literature will want to order copies of the Ramos oeuvre as AP reprints the titles. There's time if you order from the link below, right now, to get copies of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz for this holiday season. 

 

https://artepublicopress.com/product/the-ballad-of-rocky-ruiz/=

Cuesta's Quest for Missing Farmworker

Review: John Lantigua. REMEMBER MY FACE: A WILLIE CUESTA MYSTERY. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-55885-907-4 

Michael Sedano

 

Let’s not call Remember My Face “problematic,” let’s call this detective yarn a cop-out. And no, not because Willie Cuesta, the Cuban-American private investigator formerly served Miami’s finest, and relies on a super-cop mentor for strategic grounding, and because we meet good cops. Let’s call Remember My Face a cop-out because it lets some really serious issues punch you in the gut then pulls a switcheroo and makes itself into a story of individual evil.

 

The story--a Spanish-speaking private eye tracking down a missing Mexican farmworker—takes us down an immigration exploitation rabbit hole of deep South corruption mixing wingnut political machinations and heroin.

 

The story skillfully introduces its characters effectively and spins the plot with interest. Readers will find the storyteller’s voice offers a reliable narrative and insightful reading of good guys and bad guys. It's a fun read, not a hard read. When you learn a fact, it’s a fact. When a bad guy dissimulates, you know it. 

 

Note, however, the author does like to toss in misdirection, and that’s some of the fun. For example, the incredibly hot daughter of a villain, comes looking for Miami action, and while she’s breathing hotly into Cuesta’s ear, he’s raising a reader’s suspicion the villain sent his daughter to Mata Hari the dick. (Give a woman credit for knowing what she wants).

 

There’s a lot of grey coloring perceptions of Cane County. Quite a number of folks open-carry in a mixture of defiance and entitlement--women wear rhinestone automatics in designer holsters, for example, and pick up truck rear windows wear gun racks. Those Mexicans get here illegally, but the harvest isn’t going to get done without all these Mexicans coming in and turning things around, so the big labor contractor is a pillar of the community.

The name Cane County may be alluding to Jean Toomer's seminal novel Cane. Lantigua seeds the writing with numerous allusions such as to song lyrics. Except for some of the local color descriptions, the allusion just sits there, but it's good to remember Toomer.

 

Some stuff is invisible, in Cane County and everywhere else. For instance, it’s really easy to disappear a worker. This deeply serious fact is part of the cop-out of the novel. Cuesta discovers this enormous problem right under our noses, and it’s a plot device, not a causa.

 

People, recruited from deep down in Mexico and Central America, land in Florida at the end of a coyote trail. These anonymous souls work with false names and follow the seasonal pisca, month to month like the wayward wind. If some man goes off without a word, that’s it. Maybe he went to California to get work? Maybe he found good pay, but not in the fields? Maybe he found a mate and settled down somewhere? All they know back home is the money stopped arriving and there’s no food.

 

Maybe a right wing zealot kills these men for fun and racism? Wouldn’t it be a kick in the head if, amid the decades-long struggle of the Immokalee farm workers, a novel tackled the facts of that head-on?

 

Then again, maybe Florida’s politics of hate has nothing to do with the fun of reading Willie Cuesta’s mystery, despite using a landscape screaming with actual real-world injustice?

 

Remember My Face, despite the evocative title hearkening the burdens of sending money back home, isn’t really about those issues. They’re the background and don’t have to be more.

 

In a large sense, that’s O.K. Like Dick Cheney during Vietnam, the novel has other priorities. For one, there’s a strong purification motive operating within Remember My Face, a Cubano-Mexicano rapprochement.

 

There’s little love lost between some Cubans and some Chicanos. Fidel Castro popularized the term “gusano” describing Cuban capitalists who fled the island rather than serve the revolution. Chicanos, quick to pick up a colorful slur, found a sizeable conservative Cubano population whose politics earned “gusano,” making the term part of the lingua franca of political speech. That’s the kind of language that lands a person in Facebook jail.

 

Author John Lantigua and Arte Publico work to dissolve ethnic boundaries entre raza. The Cuban-American dick, hired by a flag-waving loud Cubana, finds lethal danger in search of a missing Mexican. Noble and brave, the Cubano saves the day for a couple of Mexicans in an unexpected happily-ever-after resolution of the original case that opened the rabbit hole we went down but didn’t touch the sides.

 

Having a Cuban exile sugar-plantation owner with a decent heart play an honest role in one of the novel’s multiple climaxes, is another offering of cultural amistad. That his trusted employee is deeply involved offers a token to the disbelief that such a character could exist.

 

Black folks get caught in the middle with the short end of the stick, and aren’t left out of the book as allies. Willie Cuesta discovers disappearances of black workers, too. And finds a cooperative black labor broker to fill in important plot points. The labor contractor is useful in the author’s instructional motive telling about serious, and real, consequences of migrant farm labor so essential to the economy people look the other way from the desmadres.

 

Among the more interesting tactics Lantigua employs in his informative mission is having the farm owner characters be the voices who explain how readily disappearable--and thus exploitable—is Mexican migrant labor. These people know what’s going on and they’re that cold-blooded about it. 

 

The reader wants to see the landowners get theirs in the end. Lantigua uses the reader’s prejudice to set up the seduction scene, and to goad suspicion the dowager plays an enthusiastic role in the bloodshed. The grower image numbers among the many expectations Remember My Face raises, then doesn’t necessarily deliver. 

 

In the end, it’s a regular murder mystery, remember that. There’s fun in what you expect to happen, what you know could happen, then you the reader get to watch action unfold for its own sake and what happens, happens. You read the novel you have, not the novel the author could have written. Remember My Face is a fun read for when you want just relaxation for a few hours. That's what mystery writing's all about.

Order Remember My Face from your local Independent Bookseller, or publisher-direct at this link.

 

Summer reading starts here. The Gluten-free Chicano. On-line Floricanto.

Review:  Linda Rodriguez. Every Hidden Fear. NY: Minotaur Books, 2014.
ISBN 978-1250049155

Michael Sedano

Something there is that does not love a Summer Book. The intent grad student with one hundred years of novels to read by September. The television programmer who wants you to sit open-mouthed in the dark watching re-runs. The curmudgeon who wants no one to have any fun and sneers at “genre fiction.”

Those tipos don’t love a Summer Book.

But grad students can use a break. Re-runs, give me a break. Curmudgeons will refuse to have fun, even with the kind of book tolerant gente want to read cover to cover--non-stop si se puede and the phone is Off.

When you pick up a Summer Book you intend to be happily absorbed by cool characters in rip-roaring stories. While you don’t intend to take notes you dog-ear provocative, memorable, artful passages where the author’s having lots of fun, too. In short, you intend to be entertained, and that’s what’s in store from Every Hidden Fear by Linda Rodriguez.

Rodriguez writes like she’s enjoying herself. Lavishing pages to develop a hateful asshole character who deserves to be dead, introducing detective Skeet Bannion and various residents of a small Missouri town threatened by real estate moguls from nearby Kansas City, killing him takes a while. Then the author kills the jerk with gruesome excess. Justice requires Skeet Bannion to step up in the face of inept local policing.

Bannion comes with a history of hair-raising times in cases sketchily alluded in passing detail. In fact, Every Hidden Fear will motivate readers to seek out Linda Rodriguez’ two earlier Skeet Bannion novels, Every Last Secret and Every Broken Trust. The Cherokee connection adds a unique resource to the character’s potential.

The detective’s a real-looking character, not some hot chick but plain old her. But there’s something about Skeet that has the local cop and a big muscular vato sniffing around. Skeet says it’s not important, keeps her nose to the grindstone as compense for no sex “in a while.”

Everyone else is hooking up. The little town has lots of good-looking women, old and young, who fell for the young heartthrob who left town and a knocked-up beauty behind. When the appropriately named Ash returns as front man for the mall developer, he threatens to name names. He claims fatherhood of the son in a public cuckolding of teenager’s father. He lives up to his name, ash-hole.

Skeet's teenager finds himself in a love triangle between the railroaded suspect, a teen heart throb girl, and himself. The girl lives with an evil stepmother, the one who gleefully describes Skeet’s beauty faults. The evil stepmother is hooking up with Ash’s rich, evil employer, himself a rapist.

What a suspect list. "Joe, you've got a strong suspect in Peter…Bea was most likely sexually involved with Ash when he was a kid…Walker was furious with Ash for causing all this trouble".

No spoilers here. Summer reads are supposed to be fun and Linda Rodriguez has enough formula to keep the pages flying by. There’s romance, intrigue, back-biting, crummy people you can’t do anything about. And there are serious issues like senior abuse versus senior love, steamroller economic development, growing up.

Rodriguez weaves a lament for hometowns throughout the book, in frequent references to passing trains, and walking. Trains become particularly potent. Every chapter carries at least one instance where Skeet hears a train rumbling through town. The motif becomes eccentric, noticed. It’s a set-up.

 “You noticed?” the author seems to say, having fun, when she has the failing cop, Joe, make her point about disappearing hometown economies. “Wish they hadn’t destroyed the trains. America’s railroads were the envy of the world, but we gutted them, and now can’t get to most places in this country by train. Damn shame!” I dog-eared that page.

With summer’s slower pace and vacation time, a Summer Book fills the leisure time need for fun, entertainment, and every now and again, something to make you sit up and take notice. Turn off teevee. Take a break. There’s a lot to “genre” writing that deserves attention. A good start in 2014’s Summer Book list is Linda Rodriguez’ Skeet Bannion novel, Every Hidden Fear.


The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks
Gluten-free Breakfast Crepe

Crunchy peanut butter and maple syrup wait on the table for the morning’s sweet beginning. You can prepare bacon, weenies, or ham in advance. These delectable delights cook in about five minutes, and you can turn out a batch of these in a short time.

This recipe makes a thin batter that spreads to fill a cooking surface. Two eggs create a creamy texture. Enhanced with sour cream and equal portions flour and milk, the batter cooks into a thin, flexible pancake you can use as a dinner entrée, a breakfast treat, or a quick merienda when the occasion fits.

Breakfast Crepe
Serves two or more, half hour refrigerator to table.

Two eggs
¼ cup King Arthur gluten-free flour
Pinch baking soda
Pinch baking powder
Vanilla or other flavoring to taste
¼ cup milk
1 tbs sour cream
greased non-stick frying pan, hot

Hold the Vanilla when you plan a savory filling like garlic butter. Look for The Gluten-free Chicano's Garlic Crepe in a future La Bloga.

Beat the eggs frothy with the dry ingredients and vanilla. Then add the flour and incorporate it into the eggs.

Whip in a tablespoon of sour cream. Be vigorous but don't mind a smattering of white spots where you didn't get all the sour cream into the mixture. You could substitute melted butter.

A non-stick surface is essential. Ladle a small amount into a hot pan, just enough to cover the bottom. Hot means the flame touches the bottom of the pan and nearly smokes. Let the crepe bubble before turning.

If you're good, flip the pan. I use a spatula, tilt the pan and delicately flip over. Don't worry about liquid; lift the crepe and let the liquid slide under then flip the crepe atop that.

The dappled surface indicates a hot surface. This thin batter cooks quickly once turned, half a minute or less.

The eggy batter is rich and flexible. The pockets formed on this side capture fillings if served this side up, or rolled with the outer side the first pour.

On-line Floricanto

Frank de Jesus Acosta, Xico González, John Martinez, Fernando Rodriguez, Francisco X. Alarcón

Maya's Gift (Honoring Maya Angelou) 

by Frank de Jesus Acosta

Today a poet became her poems

Soulful songs of the caged bird

Child of Africa, cradle of humankind

Legacy of slavery, an American anathema

Inheritance of hope, spiritual defiance

Heart of conviction, defying abhorrent hate

Unbroken by bigotry, sexism, or poverty

Claiming the inalienable ways of love

Walking a life of advocacy, sovereignty

Inspiring women to rise in inherent divinity

Admonishing men to live in fullness of equality

Spirit pen of justice, revealing painful truth

Lies of history, dogma of tyranny, canons of greed

Envisioning a world with prose of possibility

Verses of healing for wounded generations

Women, mother, sister, friend, warrior shaman

Today you ascend, our guardian lyricist ancestor

Leaving us a literary legacy of eternal living words

Seeds of love; that the poem within us all may rise 

Poem by: Frank de Jesus Acosta

Original Dreamers

by Xico González

In the immigrants’ rights movement

often times we hear of the Dreamers

with their graduation gowns

fists in the air

and beautiful butterflies

Marchas, rallies and sit-ins

that lead to deportations

Sacrificios de sueños soñados

In senators’ offices

self-sacrificing dreamers

get arrested and deported

to prove a point:

the US immigration system is broken

For the dreamers,

la escuela o los guachos

Dos caminos

that end in papeles and green cards

Let me ask you a question,

what about the original dreamers?

Who speaks for them nowadays?

They have sueños too

Have we forgotten about the

padres, madres

hermanos y hermanas

that came to the US too old 

to go to school

or join the armed forces

They have sueños too

Pero le tubieron que chingar

In low paying jobs

como los files, la construcción, los hoteles,

rich people’s homes, and restaurants

You know the ones bumping

cumbias, norteñas, banda y racheras

in kitchens across the United States

The ones that yell,

“Apurate güey,”

“ya esta listo güey,”

“No mames güey,”

They have sueños too,

They dream that their children

will have a better life in this country

instead of discrimination and exploitation

They have sueños too

Migra raids at workplaces

that lead to deportations

Sacrificios de sueños soñados

For the original dreamers,

el trabajo y la explotación

Dos caminos

that end in fear and shadows

They have sueños too

Jesús

El jóven que trabaja en la construcción en la Bahía

has dreams too

María

La señora que cuida güeritos en Hollywood Hills

has dreams too

Jóse

El señor que trabaja en los files del Valle de San Joaquín

has dreams too

So let us help the original dreamers

dream their dreams of a better future

without the fear of being deported,

Exploited and used

Next time you hear of the Dreamers

think of their parents and siblings

because they share the same dream

They have sueños too.

© Xico González 

5/21/2014

C/S

I wrote this poem for the event "Filed Away: The Undocumented Experience,"  a conversation and exhibit sponsored by UCD SPEAK and the UCD Cross Culture Center.  The poem was inspired by two posters that I created for the 1ro de mayo: Dia del Trabajador Rally and Marcha in Sacramento.

I Love You Forever Olivia

by John Martinez

For my mother

It is not a dream, but a loop,

A replay of her breast falling

From my sleeping face

The dawn, the sycamore

In the window, her hand

Hushing my lips

When I cried out,

Squeezed between

Her soft folds

And time doesn't fade,

But lingers in the crevices,

Between sweat and laughter,

How she combed my hair,

With hands of pain and joy

No, the sky won’t bring

Her back, bundled

In wings, as promised,

No golden chalice

Pointing her path to me

She lives right here,

In the journey of my blood,

She will always be-

So when the wind smiles

Into my window,

With the fruit of her breath,

I will always say:

"I love you forever, Olivia"

© John Martinez

All Rights Reserved

Mother

by Fernando Rodriguez

A single human being

can take many jobs

can make many shifts

Vacations there's not 

Courageous, brave, strong 

Delicate to the touch 

Yet hard to the bone

A restless being

Night without sleep

Sacrifice all and all that she has

Kisses and love struggles and more

The hardest profession

The worst valued one

There's billions of women 

but mother just one 

A day in a year for sure it’s not fair

To thank all the efforts

And all that she cares

Thank You mother

Today in your day

AZUL SIN FRONTERAS                     BORDERLESS BLUE

por Francisco X. Alarcón                 by Francisco X. Alarcón

Via James Downs:

From a new book of bilingual eco-poems by Francisco X. Alarcón, Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus And Other Poems / Mariposas sin fronteras: Haikús terrenales y ottos poemas that will be published by Poetic Matrix Press in 2014.

BIOS

Frank de Jesus Acosta, Xico González, John Martinez, Fernando Rodriguez, Francisco X. Alarcón

Frank de Jesus Acosta is principal of Acosta & Associates, a California-based consulting group that specializes in professional support services to public and private social change ventures in the areas of children, youth and family services, violence prevention, community development, and cultural fluency. In 2007, he authored, The History of Barrios Unidos, Cultura Es Cura, Healing Community Violence, published by Arte Publico Press, University of Houston. Acosta is a graduate of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His professional experience includes serving in executive leadership positions with The California Wellness Foundation, the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Downtown Immigrant Advocates (DIA), the Center for Community Change, and the UCLA Community Programs Office. He is presently focused on completing the writing and publishing a two book series for Arte Publico Press focused on best practices to improve the well-being of Latino young men and boys. Acosta most recently co-authored a published “Brown Paper” with Jerry Tello of the National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute (NLFFI) entitled, “Lifting Latinos Up by Their Rootstraps: Moving Beyond Trauma Through a Healing-Informed Framework for Latino Boys and Men.” Acosta provides writing and strategic professional support in research, planning, and development to foundations and community-focused institutions on select initiatives focused on advancing social justice, equity, and pluralism. He is also finalizing writing and editing a book of inter-cultural poetry and spiritual reflections.

Xico González is an educator, artist, poet, and a political and cultural activista based in Sacramento, California. He received a MA in Spanish from Sacramento State, and a MFA in Art Studio from the University of California at Davis.  González currently teaches Spanish and Art Studio at the Met Sacramento High School.

The work of Xico González seeks to empower people uniting in common cause against a common oppressor disguised in different máscaras.  Gonzalez's silkscreen posters address and support numerous political causes, such as the struggle for immigrants' rights, the Palestinian and Zapatista struggles, and the right for Chicana/o self determination.  González is not only an artist, but is also an activist/organizer that puts his artistic skills to the benefit of his community.  Xico's work contributes to the long dialogue of art, activism and the legacy of the Chicano Art Movement.  González has been influenced primarily by his mentors, Chicano artists Ricardo Favela (RIP), and Malaquías Montoya, and by early Chicano art collectives like the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALA-F), and the Rebel Chicano Art Front also known as the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF).

Website: www.xicogonzalez.com

John Martinez studied Creative Writing at Fresno State University. He has published poetry in El Tecolote, Red Trapeze and The LA Weekly. Recently, he has posted poems on Poets Responding to SB1070 and this will be his fifth poem published in La Bloga. He has performed (as a musician/political activist, poet) with Teatro De La Tierra, Los Perros Del Pueblo and TROKA, a Poetry Ensemble (lead by poet Juan Felipe Herrera) and he has toured with several cumbia bands throughout the Central Valley and Los Angeles. For the last 17 years, he has worked as an Administrator for a Los Angeles Law Firm. He makes home in Upland, California with his beautiful wife, Rosa America y Familia.

My name is fernando Rodriguez and i decided to express myself in this poem as a gift for all the mothers because of what they do all year round. Writing gives me freedom and freedom gives me joy, joy gives me happiness and happiness is what we look for.

Francisco X. Alarcón, award winning Chicano poet and educator, was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and now lives in Davis, where he teaches at the University of California.  He is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, including, Ce • Uno • One: Poems for the New Sun (Swan Scythe Press 2010), From the Other Side of Night: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press 2002). He has two books poems coming out this year, Borderless Butterflies / Mariposas sin fronteras will be published by Fall 2014 by Poetic Matrix Press, and Canto hondo / Deep Song will be published by the University of Arizona Press at the end of 2014.

Francisco is also the author of four acclaimed books of bilingual poems from children on the seasons of the year originally published by Children Book Press, now an imprint of Lee & Low Books: Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems (1997), From the Bellybutton of the Moon and Other Summer Poems (1998), Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems (1999), Iguanas in the Snow and Other Winter Poems (2001). He has published two other bilingual books for children, Poems to Dream Together (2005) and Animal Poems of the Iguazú (2008). 

He has received numerous literary awards and prizes for his works, like the American Book Award, the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award, the Chicano Literary Prize, the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award, the Jane Adams Honor Book Award, and several Pura Belpré Honor Awards by the American Library Association. He is the creator of the Facebook page, POETS RESPONDING TO SB 1070.