From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert

Michael Sedano

From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert. Aaron Michael Morales. Momotombo Press. Later 2007.

It speaks volumes for multiculturalism that a Nicaraguan volcano, the state of Indiana, and a big football school like Notre Dame can contribute to the world of chicano literature. Momotombo Press, hosted at Notre Dame University in South Bend, publishes Latina Latino literature that offers a reminder of the "all-American" nature of chicana chicano writing.

Momotombo specializes in chapbooks, small collections of mostly poetry or prose that bring new writers to a readership. The chapbook offers a taste of things to come, a teaser, of future work. Six titles available now are at the publisher's website, linked above. Coming soon is a seventh, Aaron Michael Morales' "From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert."

Aaron Michael Morales edits the journal, "Indiana English," for the Indiana Council of the Teachers of English. Morales is also a soon to be published novelist of Drowning Tucson , three of whose chapters comprise the Momotombo chapbook "From Here...".

Based on the chapbook, I'm looking forward to seeing what Morales does with his novel. The three stories in "From Here..." include the perverse and the perversely hopeful--a mother drowns her baby, an easter egg hunter turns murderous, a gay teenager escapes to his own life.

The purely perverse story of the suicide is a heartbreaker. A woman is stuck in a dead-end life with her wife-battering alcoholic husband. She feeds her baby a last meal of menudo, dresses the baby in his cutest dinosaur outfit, then drives into the Arizona desert in a monsoon. Her last sight is a floating little dino sock. 

Just as perverse but offering a different intensity is the battered little white boy who wants to capture the golden egg and give it to his resentful drunken father. A little girl gets the egg first and to please Dad, the boy attacks the girl, drowns her in the duck pond, but he gets that golden egg and what happens next?

The perversely hopeful story begins with a battering, a gay boy is kicked to the ground and whipped with steel chains. The Sheriff labels the attack an accident. The dead boy had just been kissing a boy whose father pummels for being a gay son. This son walks two days in heat, from Ft. Huachuca to Tucson, to escape that world.  A blast of refrigerated air  and thirteen dollars are all he needs to know he's free, doesn't matter what comes next.

I look forward to learning how the author connects the three stories into a novel. Battering seems to play a major role in characters' lives, how sad. I was a little surprised when the battering asshole's name from the first story pops up out of nowhere in the easter story, along with a racist's unflattering take on Rogelio Nuñez' wife, and Mexicans generally, and wonder how it could be the same Rogelio? Arizona clearly is the setting for two of the stories, two of the three characters are probably Mexican immigrants or Chicanos.

So, it's not entirely Indiana, and I suppose it's an unfair stereotype to be surprised to find good writing coming out of the heartland. After all, aren't Lisa Alvarado and Ana Castillo from Chicago?

Early July already! Looking for something new to read? Contact Momotombo and order the chapbooks, including "From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert". La Bloga will have publication data on Aaron Michael Morales' novel, Drowning Tucson, when it is available. 

As always, La Bloga welcomes your comments on every column, and encourage writers to join us as a La Bloga Guest Columnist. Joining as a guest is tan facil. Just send an email to a Bloguera Bloguero or click here right here. Until next week, then, hay les wachamos.

mvs

SPOTLIGHT ON LECTURA BOOKS

Lectura Books has been publishing and distributing bilingual (English and Spanish) children's books since 2001. The press focuses on quality bicultural and bilingual literature to offer Latinos a reflection of their diverse cultures and histories through relevant stories. The dual-language focus allows for Spanish-speaking parents and their children – who are learning English at school – a way to learn language together and be inspired by life-changing literature. Lectura Books partners with some of the best writers and artists from the Latino community to create books that inspire reading and dialogue. For more information, vist Lectura Book's website.

As noted recently on La Bloga, Lectura Books received Second Place for Graciela’s Dream in Best Young Adult Fiction – Bilingual, and Honorable Mention for Teo and the Brick for Best Educational Children's Book – Bilingual, at the Latino Book Awards. I've read both of these books and they offer something special to bilingual literature. In particular, I appreciated Graciela's Dream which functions not only as a short novel about a young girl's dream of college, but also a bilingual, step-by-step guide on applying to college.

◙ CALL FOR REVIEWERS: I’ve been writing book reviews for the MultiCultural Review for several years now. If you haven’t had a chance to read an issue, it’s a handsome, full-sized, glossy magazine that is used by librarians and educators. My editor at the MCR is novelist and environmental activist, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, who has assigned some terrific books to me through the years of all types including children’s picture books, poetry and short-story collections, novels, memoirs, you name it.

If you’re interested in writing for the MCR, please read the following guidelines. The MCR not only publishes reviews, but also articles and essays. I'm told that there is a particular need for reviewers of Latino/a and LGBT books, but all reviewers are welcome.

MCR GUIDELINES:

MultiCultural Review is a quarterly trade journal and book review for educators and librarians at all levels. In addition to regular columns, announcements, and news, MultiCultural Review contains four feature articles in each issue. These feature articles may be one of the following types: 1) discussions of current issues related to multiculturalism in the United States; 2) bibliographic essays or bibliographies on current issues related to multiculturalism; 3) ethnographic articles on specific groups; 4) bibliographic articles on specific groups, highlighting children’s and/or adult books; 5) articles on non-print resources (audio, video, software, online sources) that present diverse cultures; and 6) practical articles on multicultural pedagogy or librarianship. Article queries, with proposal, contents, and writing samples, are strongly encouraged. All inquiries regarding writing assignments (features and reviews) should include a resume and writing samples.

Articles should be no more than 6,000 words in length. The minimum preferred length for a feature article is 2,000 words. If appropriate, provide illustrative material (photographs, line art, charts, or graphs). DO NOT submit irreplaceable items! No remuneration, however, is offered for expenses incurred in the production of such elements. Work should be submitted in disk form (either Mac or PC format is fine), with one paper copy of the manuscript, double-spaced.

Writers are responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions from the copyright owners for publication of copyrighted work. In the case of photographs, permissions must be obtained from any individuals featured or from the copyright owner of any art works depicted. Copies of such permissions must be supplied with the final submission of the work. Writers are expected to follow traditional standards of scholarly /professional writing and reviewing. (The Chicago Manual of Style and Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary are the style preferences, but other commonly accepted references may be used.)

Please provide complete name, title, affiliation, address, and telephone number (include FAX number, if available) when submitting materials for consideration. Articles must be timely and geared specifically to the issues relative to or impacted by multiculturalism. The primary focus of the journal is on the United States, though articles that present comparative perspectives or focus on the roots of American ethnic, racial, or religious groups are also welcomed. Perspectives and opinions should demonstrate knowledge of and sensitivity to diversity. Alternative viewpoints, though, are encouraged, and articles featuring a dialogue of such perspectives will receive particular attention.

Please allow at least eight to twelve weeks for a response to submitted manuscripts. Submission of time sensitive news or features should be made at least three to four months in advance of the event.

Book reviewers in all subject areas are always wanted and needed. Include detailed information concerning areas of interest, specific formats (books, audio, video, or software), expertise, special preferences, and schedule requirements. Reviews should be limited to 200 words. Two or more works can be included in a single review, but the total length should not exceed 500 words. Remuneration is limited to the title reviewed and a copy of the issue in which the review appears. Reviewers are welcome to suggest titles for review, but approval for such reviews must be obtained from the editor-in-chief. Please do not submit unsolicited reviews.

Direct all correspondence to Lyn Miller-Lachmann, Editor-in-Chief, MultiCultural Review, 194 Lenox Ave., Albany, NY 12208, mcreview@aol.com.

◙ In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times book section, Michael Jaime-Becerra offered a thoughtful review of Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art (Abrams) by Steve Grody. Jaime-Becerra is the author of the story collection Every Night Is Ladies' Night (HarperCollins/Rayo), and is a contributor to Fifteen Candles (HarperCollins/Rayo), and the forthcoming Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press). Jaime-Becerra teaches creative writing at UC Riverside.

◙ La Bloga has been honored with a Thinking Blogger Award. La Bloga is acknowledged as an “outstanding project [that] focuses on Chicana and Chicano literature, writers, and related news.” For more information, visit here. Do we make you think?

◙ New Madrid, the literary journal associated with Murray State University’s low-residency M.F.A. program, announces its intention to dedicate its Winter 2008 issue to the theme of Mexico in the Heartland. The purpose of the issue is to acknowledge, investigate and celebrate the degree to which Mexico influences those living in the central United States, especially those in Kentucky and bordering states. Submissions may include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, interviews, translations from Spanish, etc. The main criterion for acceptance, aside from literary excellence, is how well the submission addresses the theme of the issue. Submissions for this issue will be read between August 15, 2007 and November 15, 2007. Please check the website for submission guidelines.

◙ All done. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres at La Bloga. ¡Lea un libro! --Daniel Olivas

Writing Multicultural Picture Books (Part 1)

René Colato Laínez

Prior to the 1960’s minority children could not find their own faces in picture books. The protagonists that they found were white children who did not reflect their heritage and did not speak their languages.

In 1975, Harriet Rohmer founded Children's Book Press. The San Francisco-based publisher was one of the first to offer bilingual and multicultural literature for the Hispanic children in the United States. Harriet was inspired to launch Children’s Book press after she enrolled her child in a bilingual day care center. Half of the children were from different Spanish-speaking countries; there were many African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans. She said in an interview with Children’s Writer:

"There were no role models. The typical book at a Head Start Center for young kids was ELOISE which takes place at New York’s Plaza Hotel, and that reality did not fit with any of the other kids at the center. Many of these children had come from migrant backgrounds, had come from rural areas in the South, had come from a completely different background than Eloise, and they were sort of looking and listening with blank faces. And it occurred to me that we really needed something different for our children. In part, I think there was the unspoken idea that books, particularly books for the very young, should be oriented to children of Europe’s roots."

In a workshop in the Reading the World Conference, Maya Christina Gonzalez illustrator of MY DIARY FROM HERE TO THERE/ MI DIARIO DE AQUÍ HASTA ALLÁ said:

"I have loved to draw and color for as long as I can remember. As a child I would go looking for my face in my coloring books, in my storybooks but I never found my round Chicana face, my long dark hair. So I would go to that blank page in the back or the front of these books and draw my own big face right there where it belonged."

The push for multicultural literature was a direct outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. African Americans began the initial push, and then the movement was followed in the 1970s and 1980s by Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

During the 1970’s and 1980’s, more than 17 million immigrants entered the United States, more than double the number that had arrived during the four preceding decades. Most of these immigrants came from Latin American and Asian countries due to war, political persecution, famine and unemployment. Immigrant children attending public schools in California, Texas, New York and Florida found that books did not reflect their culture.


An Overview of Latino Multicultural Picture Books

In the 1970’s Children’s Book Press in California and Arte Público Press in Texas became the pioneers in multicultural bilingual publishing for the Latino community. These new books allowed immigrant children to honor their heritage, their native languages and helped reinforce their identities.

Due to the great demand for books for Spanish speakers, major publishing houses began to publish books for the Latino community. Authors of the dominant culture wrote these picture books. They based their writing on observation and research. Some of these picture books were accurate but most lacked authenticity and were full of stereotypes. Also these major publishing houses had been translating popular American books into Spanish. Unfortunately, these books reflected a non-Hispanic culture.
In the last decade most of the multicultural picture books published in the United States have come from authors of color. They base their writing on their own personal experiences. In these multicultural books, the authors, illustrators, characters, and plots echo the realities of the Latino Community. Now publishing houses are more open to multicultural picture books. They seize the opportunity to make books in which children from every background can see themselves. But can authors write picture books outside the culture? The answer is yes. However, to write an authentic multicultural picture book, there are a number of crucial elements that we need to take into consideration.

First, let’s see the kind of multicultural picture book formats that are being published in the United States.

Most large publishing houses publish multicultural picture book in English and then they sell their rights to other countries. The book is translated under other publishing house (MY NAME IS YOON, published in the United States by FSG. Reprinted in Spain under the title, ME LLAMO YOON).

On the other hand most small presses specializing in multicultural picture books prefer to do their books in a bilingual format (Children’s Book Press) or they publish two versions of the same book in English and another language, most often Spanish (Lee & Low). Some books combine many cultures within one book. Other books represent a particular ethnic group within a larger culture.

Some presses specifically look for books about a particular culture that are written by an author belonging to that culture (Arte Publico/Piñata Books), but most will consider any well-written, well-researched manuscript.

But what is a multicultural picture book? These are some definitions by some multicultural publishers.

Multicultural stories reflect the diversity and experiences of minority and/or new immigrant communities in the United States today. We publish picture books about contemporary life in the Latino/Chicano, African American, Asian American, Native American, multi-racial and other minority and new immigrant communities. Folktales are not the focus of our current publishing program. (Children’s Book Press)

Our goal is to meet the need for books that address children of color by providing fictional stories and informational books that all children can enjoy and which promote a greater understanding of one another. We are not considering folktales and animal stories. (Lee & Low Books)

Our multicultural mission is to create books that work to preserve Latin American culture in the United States; books that value the strong language heritage brought to our country by children from Latin America, and books that promote bilingualism and will expand a child's cultural knowledge and perspective. We are especially interested in themes that deal with the contemporary bicultural experience of living in the United States, and stories that feature contemporary Latin American role models. (Luna Rising).

As John From Cincinnati Would Say, The End Is Near

Manuel Ramos



The earth surrounding my house has been adorned with changing color: sensual reds, outrageous yellows, haughty purples, mellow pinks, much more. We sit on our porch or in the back, eating chicken salad sandwiches, drinking red Kool-Aid and pink wine, and talk about the important stuff -- one of our neighbors is worried about his Marine son in Iraq; another neighbor finally got his re-wiring finished; where are we going to dinner with old friends -- and we are immersed in the growing, vibrant life around us that Flo cultivates and nurtures and protects; my simple job is to try to quench the incessant thirst of the small plot of lawn we still maintain.

Summer time in the city: hot, dry. We can be surprised in the evening with an explosion of wind while lightening scars the horizon, but there is no rain in my neighborhood. I sit next to a very quiet and peaceful buddha and drink it all in but I seem to have to work harder at my serenity.

Here are two book reviews that relate to some of what I just rambled on about. The books have been around for a while, and so have the lessons readers can take from the books, but I guess we still got a lot to learn. As the song says, in the grand scheme of things -- we're just travelers, never kings never queens -- we're just travelers. (Big Moon Shinin' - Chip Taylor)





IN THE PALM OF DARKNESS
Mayra Montero
Harper Perennial, 1998

Haiti, that exotic and, to most North Americans, unknown country that sits in the Caribbean, is the home for a red frog that has disappeared from the rest of the world. Vanishing species of amphibians tend to end up in God-forsaken places and if they are to be found and studied by scientists so that the reason for the extinction can be understood, then the scientists must go to these places. In the Palm of Darkness is the story of two unlikely men who join forces to find the elusive red frog, and around them Montero has crafted a story of love, sex, betrayal, violence, the occult, and the all-consuming and mysterious forces of nature.


Victor Grigg is an herpetologist, a man whose entire life has been devoted to the study and classification of amphibians, particularly the frog species who every year become extinct. He has come to Haiti because his dying mentor has asked him to find the "blood frog" that has been reported on a mountain in the Haitian interior. As a final favor to his teacher, Grigg takes on the mission although it comes at a time when his wife has left him and Grigg has begun to question the very meaning of his existence. He hires a man famous in Haiti for assisting other scientists on quests similar to Grigg's. Thierry Adrien is haunted by his own demons that stem from the reign of terror inflicted on Haitians by the thugs who represent the police and military. The guide also has his own trail of wives, children and siblings, many of whom have come to resent him and, in some cases, hate him to the point of wanting him dead.

Thierry regales Grigg each day with stories of his adventurous life and the bewildering nature of the Haitian mind. He describes hunts for the living dead and the casual way in which spells are invoked and defended against. Grigg listens in amazement or complete disbelief and often wanders to his own stories such as the one about his father who risked all on an ostrich ranch, or the clues he should have recognized as his marriage fell apart. The men are so dissimilar that they have nothing in common except for their bond to find the vanishing frog.

They are chased off of one mountain by a gang in the service of the latest strong man vying for control, one of whose lieutenants is Thierry's hate-filled half-brother. When they are threatened to be chased off of a second mountain they choose to remain because they have heard the frog's unmistakable call and nothing can stop their search, not even the brutality and savageness of the men who mutilate, massacre and torture their own people.

The setting for In the Palm of Darkness is as foreign to most North Americans as a society found on a distant planet, and yet Haiti sits in our back yard, a place where Yankee troops have been sent to prop up a politician who had been given the blessing of the U.S. President. The book, of course, is an allegory for many things that we in the U.S. have to start understanding, not the least of which are the explosive political, social, and cultural forces that churn the waves of the Caribbean, the same waves that pound the shores of our country.



THE RAG DOLL PLAGUES
Alejandro Morales
Arte Público, 1992

This is not an easy book to categorize. My first reaction -- science fiction. Eventually I understood that Morales had written an impassioned plea to save Earth and the people who inhabit her from the poisons and toxins spewed daily in our reckless drive for material accumulation. Even later I recognized a medical mystery story that brought together elements of ancient Mexican history, modern tragedy, and futuristic scientific investigation. Finally, I had to conclude that The Rag Doll Plagues cannot fit snugly into a category. This is an overwhelming book that raises important questions about the existence we have carved for ourselves on this fragile piece of dirt we call home.

Book I begins in 1788 in Mexico City. Doctor Gregorio Revueltas has been sent by the King of Spain to modernize the health care of the colony as part of a plan to nip in the bud the revolution of the colonized peoples. Don Gregorio arrives in Mexico with all the racism and superiority he was taught in Spain. However, he must battle a strange plague that is decimating the country, a disease known as La Mona -- the doll -- because it leaves a corpse that resembles a rag doll. After years of working with the people of Mexico, struggling to save lives from the ravages of La Mona, he comes to love his new country and to respect her people, so much so that he rejects his fiancée and never returns home.

Book II takes place in 1980 Los Angeles. Doctor Gregorio Revueltas, young and ambitious, falls in love with the beautiful Sandra, an actress. They begin a torrid love affair that drives Sandra away from her rich, white family and propels Gregorio on a surreal, mystical and spiritual trip to understand his roots and his connection to Mexico. But soon his medical skills and training are put to the ultimate test.

Sandra, a hemophiliac, is infected with AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion. They travel to Mexico where she receives the revered care of a curandera. The curandera tells Gregorio that Sandra suffers from La Mona, an ancient epidemic that appears and disappears, without notice or obvious reason. This part of the novel takes on a highly personal tone. Gregorio details the failure of his medical training to help Sandra and the different attitude towards death that the native people show him as they prepare him to accept Sandra's eventual demise. Book II also graphically portrays the hypocrisy and prejudice suffered by AIDS victims.

Book III takes place late in the Twenty-First Century. A confederation of California and Mexico has created Lamex, a rigidly stratified and technocratic society. Civilization has progressed, if this future can be called progress, to the point that the Earth has become a giant sewer, a dump for all of the waste and trash that we can produce. The air is deadly, the water is poison, and the garbage turns into living mounds of death and destruction that periodically attack the cities and generate plagues that kill thousands in a few hours. Doctor Gregorio Revueltas, grandson of the second Doctor Revueltas, is a physician in the official bureaucracy who is ordered to do something about the latest plague. He discovers a cure that calls on the strength and endurance of his people, the Mexicans. He understands that the mestizos who won over the first Doctor Gregorio and who inspired hope in the second Doctor amid the tragedy of his life, also offer the only hope for survival of the doomed civilization.


EL LABORATORIO
The first meeting of El Laboratorio: Thinking en Público, a Latino arts and cultural center housed within The Lab at Belmar, here in Denver, took place on June 23. Several Colorado-based writers (Tony Garcia, Sheryl Luna, Emma Pérez, Tim Hernandez, Angel Vigil, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Aaron Abeyta, Manuel Ramos) discussed a variety of topics related to Latino/a writing, while John-Michael Rivera, the Creative Director of the project, presented an ambitious and intriguing vision for El Laboratorio.

The highlight of the day was a performance by Lorna Dee Cervantes, preceded by a conversation between her and Professor Rivera. I intend to report more on this project as we move ahead with some of the plans and ideas.

Tim Hernandez will read from his 2006 American Book Award collection Skin Tax on August 4, reception at 6:00 PM, main event 6:30 PM. Angel Vigil, award-winning storyteller and children's book author may join Tim in this event.

Meanwhile, a few photos from the first meeting.


Sheryl Luna, Tim Hernandez, Angel Vigil smile about the vagaries and mysteries of the publishing world.

Tony Garcia and Emma Pérez work up a thirst.

Aaron Abeyta feelin' good about his debut novel.

Lorna Dee Cervantes makes a point.

John-Michael Rivera listens to that point. (Sorry for the "artistic" photo but I had to fix-up my sloppy camera work.)





Later.

Tara Betts: Truth in a Plain Brown Wrapper

The lovely photo is of an equally lovely and powerful writer, Tara Betts. (Not quite the plain brown wrapper...) It's been almost ten years ago that I was paired with Tara as her mentor in a City of Chicago arts program. To this day, I'm not sure what I taught her, but it has been my privilege to read her work, watch her develop and soar as a writer, a performer, and as a critical thinker. She is a person of crystal clear intent and ethics and it is that clarity and that moral compass that infuses all of her work. Tara is that rara avis who is able to dive into the canon, retrieve what she needs and resurface to the real world where the rest of us dwell. She knows her sestinas, her villanelles, her haikus, but she is not seduced by the prettiness of form over content. Her work is rigorously constructed, but framed with direct, clear language, unambiguous. Tara Betts knows where her loyalties lie --- the African American experience, femaleness, urban life, the place where class and race intersect, and as readers we are all the better for it. Take a close look at the pieces following this interview, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

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Describe your odyssey in becoming a writer. How does African American and female identity influence your work? What would you say are your major influences, both personally and in a literary sense?

My major influences initially were ntozake shange, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. When I was around 12 or 13, I kept a diary a little before this point, but began writing poetry shortly after I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I had always been a reader, but I didn’t always see books in the library that looked like they talked about people of African descent at all. When I was in high school, I worked at the Kankakee Public Library and learned the stacks better. Sometimes, I would sneak off and read. It was then that I aspired to be a journalist so Rolling Stone, Essence and U.S. News & World Report were also part of my obsession as well.

When I started attending Loyola University on the North Side of Chicago, I kept writing, indulged more and more in Vibe and The Source, and eventually did an internship in New York at BET Weekend magazine in conjunction with the New York Daily News office. It was an amazing summer too. It solidified that I had to keep writing, even though I was a student activist and editor for The Loyola Phoenix. It was in college that I read more about Hurston, the Negritude poets, Toni Morrison, Fanon and Cheikh Anta Diop.

Although I felt like these were eye-opening experiences, I felt like I was always challenged by the more conservative influences on a highly Republican, very Catholic Jesuit university that somehow managed to talk about social justice issues.

By the time I was in my second year at Loyola, I had started organizing poetry readings on campus. This was before poetry became trendy again, so I shared some of my favorite poets and collaborated with other student organizations to make the readings happen. I remember inviting Malik Yusef to campus and bringing Ramona Africa from MOVE Organization with help from Tyehimba Jess. Tyehimba and Malik were the first two poets I met on the Chicago scene. Shortly before I graduated from Loyola in 1997, Malik Yusef gave me my first poetry feature at The Cotton Club on Michigan Avenue. I started reading at Lit X, this jazz club called Rituals, Afrika West bookstore, Guild Complex and eventually Mad Bar, which is where I started slamming. I slammed once or twice at Green Mill, but it didn’t feel like an audience of my peers, even though I enjoyed the work from poets like Sheila Donahue, Cin Salach, Regie Gibson, Dan Ferri, Maria McCray, Marc Smith and most vividly Patricia Smith.

At this time, I was also exploring the feminist possibilities in my poetry. I performed with Sharon Powell, Marta Collazo and other women in a show about menstruation called “The Empress Wears Red Clothes.” I had sort of exited the hip hop heavy part of my life, even though I was still writing pieces here and there, going to shows, hosting a hip hop radio show called “The Hip Hop Project” with my good friend Lional Freeman (AKA Brotha El), meeting graf writers and admiring dj skills.

After leaving “The Hip Hop Project” and doing readings for about a year and a half, I started to slam at Mad Bar. I was on the first two Mental Graffiti teams in 1999 and 2000 with poets like Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton, Marlon Esguerra, Dennis Kim, Shappy and Lucy Anderton. Although slam became a very stressful thing for me, I got to spend time with a wide range of aesthetics and personalities that I really loved and admired for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to co-host, curate and promote an all-women’s open mic and performance space called Women OutLoud with women like Mars, Lucy, Anida Esguerra and Krystal Ashe.

While I was slamming, I started getting more into a range of poets like Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Julia de Burgos, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Carl Sandburg, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stanley Kunitz and others. I also started workshopping with various poets through the Guild Complex. My first workshop leader was Sterling Plumpp. He pushed me to keep writing, read more sisters and just be persistent. He’s a master of the poetic line and very much a blues man. More people should be reading his work. I also went on to do workshops with Afaa Michael Weaver who pushed me to be honest, vulnerable and study a diverse range of writers. I really wanted to just read writers of color at one point, and he still reminds me of how there is so much to learn from everyone. Lucille Clifton and Quincy Troupe were also poets that I participated in workshops with and these experiences led to my real urgency to be a part of Cave Canem, a workshop/retreat for writers of African descent started by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. There are too many poets to name that I have met through this retreat that have fed, taught and inspired me.

The students at Young Chicago Authors were also a big influence on my writing. Through YCA, I began teaching writing classes. Since I had to teach what I was doing, I was more conscious of what I did or explaining why a certain work moved me. I also got to develop my own classes, like an author study on Neruda, Hip Hop Poetics, Poetic Forms by Communities of Color and Women Writers as Essayists. By the time I left Chicago, I had firmly rooted my voice that I think is always expanding and refining itself. I had started the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College (graduated in January 2007) and moved to New York. Now, I think I’m trying to read as much as I can in fiction, new poets, history and the classics that I need to catch up on. Wanda Coleman, Martin Espada, Marilyn Nelson are just a few of the poets who really move me these days.

You've written extensively about African American labor leader, Ida B. Wells. Describe her significance as subject matter.

It’s funny you would ask about the Ida B. Wells’ poems. I started writing about her years ago, and I’ve never quite finished the series that I set out to do. I read about her and her own books like A Crusade for Justice, Southern Horrors and The Memphis Diary edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis, and I started researching lynchings. This was around the time that Without Sanctuary, a book of photographs taken at lynchings, was released.

In 1892, one of Wells’ close friends Thomas Moss and the co-owners of the Black-owned People’s Grocery Store were basically lynched for offering better products and better prices to Black customers than the white storeowners. Wells had already initiated a public transportation boycott and filed a successful lawsuit that was eventually repealed when she had been thrown off the train for refusing to go to a smoking car. She refused so adamantly that she dug in her heels, and it took two men to remove her after she bit the conductor on the hand. In fact, she started her paper The Free Press in response to this ousting, and convinced record numbers to leave Memphis and stop taking public transit.

As a result, at a time when women were not even considered able to handle the strong material of journalism, Wells convinced people to do things with the facts that she gleaned. She also started the first suffrage organization for Black women in Illinois, helped start the NAACP, ran an organization for Black men that was similar to the then-segregated YMCA who would not house or notify Black men of employment opportunities, and initiated the anti-lynching crusade in the U.S. and the U.K. So, her radical scope really drew me to her, but also some of the things she did that were just hilarious. For example, her daughter Alfreda Duster describes how she went into a department store in Chicago and was waiting to be served. Of course, they acted like this Black woman was not even standing there, so out of exasperation, she drapes a pair of men’s boxers over one shoulder and starts to walk toward the exit. Then someone finally asked her what she was doing, and she told them “trying to buy these.” So, her ties to Chicago, her sense of humor and strength, and her need to document her place in history when so many women were forgotten, omitted and erased, has brought me back to her example again and again.

You made a strong connection to Latino poets, Latino poetry and culture. Can you talk more about that?

In my youth, I studied Spanish in high school, and I hardly knew any people from Spanish-speaking cultures, but when I went to college, I finally met more than Black and white people en masse. I really tried to support all people of color, so I learned a lot and tried to understand how our experiences overlapped and differed. I also took a class with Dr. Susannah Cavallo called Afro-Hispanic Literature where we read writers like Carolina Maria de Jesus, Jose Lima and Nascimiento’s Brazil: Mixture or Massacre.

I would have to say that Pablo Neruda brought the metaphor to life for me in a way that no other poet has. After him, I was drawn to so many others like Xavier Villarrutia, Gabriela Mistral, Cesar Vallejo, Daisy Zamora and anthologies like Martin Espada’s Poetry Like Bread and Stephen Tapscott’s Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry. I also read Chicago-based writers like Luis Rodriguez, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros.

While I was living in Chicago, I got to read with so many Latina women who just wrote things that moved me. Some of them included Brenda Cardenas, the late Sulima Q. Moya, Susana Sandoval, Johanny Vazquez, Beatriz Badikian-Gartler, Katherinne Bardales, and of course, Lisa Alvarado.

In 2001, I had an opportunity to exchange with writers in Cuba at the now defunct Writers of the Americas Conference where my workshop leader was Jack Agueros, and we got to talk to writers like Junot Diaz, Maria Irene Fornes, Achy Obejas and Danny Hoch. While we were there, we met many local writers. One of them, Leo Navaro Guevara moved to the U.S., and his son Anton is my first and only godson.

Now, that I’m on the East Coast, it’s such an amazing experience to see the range of writers like Willie Perdomo, Magdalena Gomez, Tato Laviera, Sandra Maria Esteves, Jesus Papoleto among others. The Acentos series in the Bronx also gave me the chance to see a lot of these poets up close and to hear more of the type of work that I had only read.

What would you describe as your major themes?

History, family, politics, and love (mostly because we need to remember why we struggle in the first place).

You've had a lot of interface with spoken word, slam poetry, etc. How would you describe those genres v. 'literary' poetics and form?

Spoken word is an untapped wellspring of possibilities. Unfortunately, since people are catering to the lowest common denominator and writing pieces that will garner a shock, laughter or a tour through the spoken word circuit, there is not the same kind of interest in the work that I had before. Now, do I think that the slam offers young writers a chance to build their confidence and articulate themselves clearly in front of an audience? Yes. Do I think that it can lead people to read their work with feeling and internalize the meaning of what they’ve written? Yes. Do I think it can lead to people producing one-person shows, records, verse plays, books, creative collaborations and radical, through-provoking performance? Yes. And lastly, are there too many people competing for little-to-no-paying gigs for the big payoff of three-five minutes on television? Yes.

What most people don’t realize is that performance becomes a job. Even if you love it, you must maintain what will keep you working, and there are contradictions that compel people to ask hard questions about the growth and integrity of their work. Not enough people are asking themselves about that. I also think that if spoken word is continually pigeonholed as slam poetry and watered-down hip hop by wannabe emcees, then it will be relegated to the ghettos of forgotten poetry. There are too many good poets of color coming out of such performative experiences to be limited by this kind of categorization. Spoken Word is a category promoted by NARAS. Oral traditions across centuries and cultures have always existed, so we have to remind people that internalizing what we write and sharing it orally is not new. So, I don’t necessarily think there is a difference in the text, unless you’re a lazy writer who overcompensates through performance. Anything written can be performed, published or exhibited. It’s just about how it’s done.

What would you describe as your core strengths as a writer....where would you like to see yourself grow?

My core strengths. Now this is a difficult question. I think it’s been my willingness to always do what I feel like I need to do to grow. I haven’t always made many friends that way, but inevitably I wrote what I wanted and earned most people’s respect. I want to spend more time reading, trying to grow as a critical writer and write more prose. In terms of poetry, I’m intrigued with poetic form and how can we subvert with Eurocentric canonical notions that we have about it. I would like to collaborate with more visual artists and musicians since I’ve often been a solo writer sharing my work.

How would you describe your connection to young writers as it relates to your creative life?

My connection to young writers has kept me from being hyper-cynical/critical. They look at the world with new eyes, and when they have the breakthrough moments where they articulate something so honest and challenging for the first time. I live for those moments. Young writers make me always consider what it takes to keep writing new, how does writing work as an art and a disciplined practice. Sometimes, I think it’s only me who keeps me writing, which is true to some degree, but they are the ones who keep me writing.

Where do you see yourself in ten years, personally and creatively?

Ten years from now, I’m hoping to have published at least two or three books, not necessarily all poetry, maybe one of them is an anthology. I’ve thought I might have a Ph.D. in African American/Africana/Black Studies (whichever term people think they need to apply), American Studies or Women’s Studies by then. Teaching, traveling and balancing that with a family would be nice. Hopefully, I will be practicing yoga on a regular basis. I remember one time a student at Wright College asked me in a Q & A, what I wanted to do with my life, and I proceeded to tell her about all my professional goals and writerly aspirations when she cut in and asked, “other than that?” I felt like some inner voice had been plucked from my head and embodied in this girl. So, I thought about it, and yoga, having a garden, developing a spiritual life, staying politically responsible and critical and having good friends who could give a damn whether I write or not were my response to her question. All of that is still a work in progress.

What's something not in the official bio?

I always liked the fast, gravity-defying rides at carnivals and amusement parks. I recently freestyled on the mic with an all-female Afrobeat band in New York called Femm Nameless.

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Not On the Menu

If Portugal was edible, could it be swallowed
like some country fruit, goosebumped as unripe
avocado, heavy with sweet guava wet
that lingers inside the cheeks?

Would Africa taste bitter and glitter
on the tongue from its ripe diamond seeds?
Would the silt of India be the truest curry
bursting a heat against the mouth’s roof?’

Every day an international hors'douvres platter
crosses so many tourist imaginations like
a hectic maitre’de.
There are Indian families in steamy kitchens,
Taiwanese men’s bicycles crisscrossing
Manhattan’s traffic-glutted streets,
Puerto Rican girls smiling for bigger tips
when offering mofongo,
and Cubans proffer mojitos
and freshly killed chicken
for that one night at El Hueco.

America, though, would distance itself
from its bitter Billie Holiday image in stalls
of worldly produce. America would be slick
with campaigns on its nutritional benefits.
America would be so shiny the shellac needs
cracking and peeling. Imagine.
America’s fruit, so sweet it eats the teeth
with its ache.

While movies ripen into
culinary pornography
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman,
Soul Food
Tortilla Soup
Like Water for Chocolate
The cinematic menu sounds
like a veil pulled across the face,
the sweaty thump of samba,
a pinprick protruding
from a map of exotica
where spare grain
of days remains unsampled
since the trees of America
require so much tending.


There Goes the Neighborhood
for Maxine Kumin

Aerial shot omniscient view bent above
asphalt playground. Sidewalks become
concrete football fields where Brooklyn
accents weigh down boys’ tongues
that count like girls circle one another.

They bend clothesline, extension cords,
double helix style rotations beneath
spinning jumping sneakers.
Speakers turned walls claim
the street as official block
party bidness. Metal drums split
open with orang charcoal guts plead
for red meat, then sizzle relief.

Brownstone stoops fill with girls
clinging to gossip like the new neighbor
holding his golf club bag as if announcing
shift change for baggy pants & oversized
shirt-wearing boys who stand too long on
the corner. Count each baby
in mad math that’s called living.
Take a breath when change claims
one more before you blink.

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Some food for thought on visibility, race, class and the publishing industry from La Bloga friend, Manuel Muñoz:

African-American novelist Martha Southgate's wonderful
and thoughtful essay in the New York Times

Tambien, the writer Tayari Jones has a discussion
worth our attention re: this essay at her blog:


Lisa Alvarado

Guest Columnist: Sergio Troncoso. The General and the Jaguar...

La Bloga welcomes Sergio Troncoso as our guest. We're pleased also to share Sergio's review as published in the Summer 2007 issue of Multicultural Review.

The General and the Jaguar: Pershing's Hunt for Pancho Villa, by Eileen Welsome

By Sergio Troncoso

The General and the Jaguar (Little, Brown and Company), Eileen Welsome, is a historical account of General John Pershing's pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, after the latter's attack on Columbus, New Mexico in March of 1916. The book is a lively, highly readable history of this episode, and its aftermath, but ultimately, and unfortunately, it does not give a balanced view of its main characters, particularly Villa.

Welsome's view of history is to focus on the details, which is fortunate for the casual reader who wants to be entranced by a good story and fascinating characters. The author does briefly turn her attention to some of the systemic causes of the Mexican Revolution- the land concentration among the Mexican elite during the Porfiriato, the blatant and brutal usurpation of village communal lands, and the rampant political corruption of the Mexican regime. But the author truly lingers on the personal passions, and even savagery, of Villa, what he wore the night before the attack, and the minute-by-minute rendering of the action as Villa brazenly invades the United States.

Villa's attack is primarily, according to Welsome, a vengeful act to repay the United States for its support of Villa's archenemy Venustiano Carranza, an act born of a crazy hatred for gringos and other foreigners. The act, literally, of an animal human being. It's of course a stereotypical view of Villa, and perhaps Villa was in part such a person. But Welsome downplays what a great historian like Friedrich Katz, author of The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, concentrates on: Villa the military tactician, Villa the successful bureaucratic administrator, Villa the savvy counter-puncher. For the Columbus raid strategically resurrected Villa's revolutionary movement from a low point. It gave Villa a slim, but credible chance to regroup and regain momentum, and it was the best he could do given his dwindling resources and manpower. The Columbus raid was a gambit that almost worked to restore Villa to national power after his disastrous military decline of 1915.

But placing Villa's reasons for revolution and his subsequent raid on Columbus in historical context may seem boring to the reader, even if true. So an author like Welsome focuses instead on gripping hour-by-hour accounts of many of the seventeen American citizens who were killed in the raid, on the blisters, sunburn, and frostbite of Pershing's American soldiers deep in Mexican territory in a bumbling search for Villa and the remnants of the Divisíon del Norte, and on Pershing's indigestion and Villa's desire for a glass of milk. The historical characters come alive, at least from a certain perspective, and the reader is taken happily along an action-packed novelistic ride through border history.

What becomes a critical problem for The General and the Jaguar, however, is what we might call the 'morality of description.' What we focus on or how we focus on it, whether we are fiction or nonfiction writers, gives it importance, or takes it away from something else. In Welsome's book, the murdered American citizens are named, and given personal histories, and described in loving detail. But the one hundred Mexicans who die in the raid are, well, just formless 'Mexicans.' They die, but no reader feels their pain, nor knows them as full characters, nor why they died. And so it goes for much of the picture of Villa, the raid, General Pershing's punitive expedition, and the ensuing border drama: the perspective is primarily from American and British historical sources, like military documents and newspapers, and it's a limited one.

Too often, Welsome simply repeats the stereotypes from these sources: Mexicans are 'treacherous,' while American soldiers are 'professional' and 'magnificent.' When General Hugh Scott meets with General Alvaro Obregón in El Paso in May of 1916, to discuss the punitive expedition, the spotlight is on what the American War Department wants from the Mexicans. Scant attention is given to internal Mexican politics, and how they might influence Obregón's position. A glaring example of the problems of Welsome's limited, English-only perspective is her mention of the Cristero Rebellion, which she describes as 'a violent revolt that erupted in the 1920's when the Mexican government decided to deprive clergy of their civil liberties.' No mention is given as to why the 'revolutionary government' despised the Catholic Church: the church had eagerly supported the Porfiriato; the church had been one of the biggest landowners in Mexico; the church had promoted one of the most conservative perspectives against social change.

A careful reader of this book might uncover the basic reason for Welcome's limitations: Pulitzer-Prize winning author Welsome does not know Spanish, or at least not very well. The first clues are grammatical mistakes in the Spanish used in The General and the Jaguar. Another clue is Welsome's thanking a colleague, in her Acknowledgements, for reviewing the Spanish portions of her text. Finally, in her Selected Bibliography, only two of 385 sources cited are in Spanish. Unfortunately, this language deficiency distorts the often captivating character portraits and scenes in her history book.

As readers we are left only with what could have been: a picture of Villa and his men through their own eyes, a perspective of what Villa really meant to the poor people of Chihuahua and beyond, a view of Pershing and his men not only from the military's point of view but also from the perspective of Mexicanos who saw American soldiers hunting for Villa in their country, and imagined, correctly as it turns out, that powerful figures in the American establishment contemplated taking over Mexico permanently. The General and the Jaguar is an easy read, and that in turn is its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness.



Sergio Troncoso is the award-winning author of The Last Tortilla and Other Stories and The Nature of Truth: A Novel. Please visit his website at www.sergiotroncoso.com, or send him an e-mail at STroncoso@aol.com.


Blogmeister's Note: La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. Email a bloguera bloguero, mejor, comment on a post and express interest, or click here if you have a question.

Wishing all readers a pleasant holiday, Independence Day in the U.S. Naturally, this brings up the question of how many other nations have a fourth of July?

INTERVIEW WITH SAM QUINONES

Journalist Sam Quinones lived in Mexico for ten years writing freelance for a variety of US publications. In 1998, he was a recipient of the Alicia Patterson Fellowship. In 2001 he published a highly acclaimed collection of stories about contemporary Mexico, True Tales from Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (University of New Mexico Press). Since its release, True Tales has been used in more than 150 university classes at 75 universities in 26 states.

His second book of non-fiction stories, Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, was published in 2007 also by the University of New Mexico Press, and has been greeted with rave reviews from NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications including a review in yesterday's El Paso Times by Christine Granados. Quinones now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Sheila, and daughter, Kate, and is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Sam Quinones kindly agreed to answer a few questions from La Bloga:

DANIEL OLIVAS: Through non-fiction, fiction and satire, such writers as Luis Alberto Urrea, Reyna Grande and Gustavo Arellano have addressed Mexican migration. How does your book add to this dialogue?

SAM QUINONES: I suppose my books try to tell the stories of unnoticed people. My favorite stories to do are those where the people I’m interviewing have never met a reporter.

I don’t spend much time on the political/policy side of the immigration issue. I’m more interested in finding poignant stories of real people. So I shy away from this debate where the people with the megaphones yell at each other.

But I also don’t believe I’m an activist. Activists want only one side of the story. I want it all.

OLIVAS: Because undocumented immigration is such a hot button topic, have you encountered vitriol or even threats for your reporting?

QUINONES: At the University of Arizona one time people got upset because I said, in response to a question, that I felt that Mexican immigrants needed to assimilate faster, that holding onto Mexico and attitudes born in Mexico, while comfortable, hindered their full participation in the country, and threatened to recreate here in the states what they were escaping in Mexico.

Other than that, and my run-in with the Mennonites, which I recount in the book, nothing.

OLIVAS: How do you gain the trust of your subjects?

QUINONES: I do stories through immersion and repeated interviews and returning often.

I find it helps to spend time in a place or with a person, then go away for a while. During this time, I write about the story – maybe record vignettes or write chunks of prose that seem certain to be included in the piece. Then I return, now with a fresh perspective and new questions, which are usually more detailed and focused. I do this over and over.

This helps people understand that what I’m after is a fuller sense of who they are, and thus lets them trust me more.

OLIVAS: Delfino Juárez’s story, in particular, is heartbreaking I think because of his relative youth and his almost unflagging desire to improve his life. What did you, personally, take from his story?

QUINONES: I saw first hand what dedication was, what manhood was, how an ordinary human behaved in extraordinary circumstances. And in all of that, too, I saw just a simple kid trying to make his way, with the foibles and weaknesses we all possess.

I also realized what a disaster immigration is for Mexico because it forces people like Delfino to leave. As I say in the book, his absence would be unnoticed in Mexico, as he is uneducated and unpolished. But this is Mexico’s grand delusion – that it really doesn’t matter that much that these folks leave. After all, they sent back $23 billion last year, according to the government. What could be wrong with that?

But Mexico is bleeding to death at its border. No one – not the political elite, nor the private sector, the media, churches, the country’s right or its left – has been able to put pettiness behind it to confront the massive and wrenching changes the country will need to make to become a country that poor people don’t feel they have to leave.

Mexico spends a lot of time fretting over territory it lost to the United States 160 years ago. I don’t see anyone taking the loss of these people with the same gravity – though they are the greater loss.

OLIVAS: I’ve had a chance to interview Gustavo Arellano and I asked him about the flak he’s received for his ¡Ask a Mexican! column and subsequent book of the same title. He rejected such criticism and responded, in part: “There's an unfortunate virus in the minds of many educated Chicanos that tells them to call any Latino who doesn't adhere to a blindly leftist, loyalist ideology a vendido – and few Latinos get more grief than journalists.” How do you view his form of satire and the criticism he’s received from other Chicanos?

QUINONES: His column is terrific. Those who criticize it don’t understand the subtleties he’s getting at. I like his irreverence as well. Latinos, in LA at least, are the majority population. As such, they need to be scrutinized and have their sacred cows gored. That’s healthy and necessary.

I was once criticized for publishing a story in the L.A. Times about an immigrant woman who had three daughters, then triplets and finally quadruplets. So she had 10 kids – the same number her parents had in her village in Jalisco that she had to leave. She’s recreated Mexico in Los Angeles, and of course is now mired in virtually inescapable poverty, the same kind her parents faced. Her older daughters, born here, spoke English horribly.

That kind of story needs to be told. The media shouldn’t shy away from it.

People get sensitive at Gustavo’s column because it’s the kind of thing that hasn’t been written before.

OLIVAS: What grade would you give the “mainstream” press on its coverage of Mexican migration?

QUINONES: If you’re referring to U.S. TV and radio, then I’d say a D or something. They almost never cover it, and when they do it’s very thin.

If you’re talking about U.S. newspapers, some of them do much better. Still there’s a gap, due to lack of Spanish speakers at many papers, that keeps the coverage at some papers pretty superficial. Also, newspapers need to be more bi-national – that is, they need to send their reporters back and forth between the two countries a lot more, the way immigrants go back and forth. Instead, there are turf battles that keep that from happening. That hinders coverage also. Nevertheless, newspapers are where you’re going to see good coverage when it happens.

If you’re talking about the Mexican media, they do worst of all. Considering the enormity of the issue for the country, you’d expect better. But they don’t understand the United States, since most reporters have never been. They don’t understand immigrant Mexico, since they’re not from those parts of the country, and often don’t have relatives in the states. Nor do they understand how to tell stories, as the Mexican media is just emerging from the shadow of 71 years of one-party rule, where reporters were trained to focus on snippets of the political melodrama, avoid going deep, and forget all context or history. With regard to immigration, many just turn to parroting what they’ve heard about the lives of immigrants in the United States. There’s no nuance, subtlety or complexity in what they do.

OLIVAS: Your frightening encounter with the drug-running Mennonites really came out of left field. As a journalist, what did you learn from that experience?

QUINONES: To understand where I am. I’d had a lot of success penetrating worlds that weren’t my own in Mexico up to then. But sometimes you can’t.

I never really penetrated that world, as much as I tried. In this case, I was so foolish. I took dumb chances. So I learned to think twice.

Also, I learned that I’ll avoid that area from now on.

OLIVAS: Who do you enjoy reading?

QUINONES: A lot of different stuff. Calvin Trillin is the best journalist storyteller I’ve read. B. Traven’s stories are great as well. I just read the biography of this amateur scientist who both helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and was avidly into metaphysics and witchcraft. He accidentally blew himself up. But he was from that generation that was out there winging it, pardon the pun, untrained, unaware of what couldn’t be done.

I just read Merchant of Venice – though I didn’t like it as much as some of his other plays. John Le Carre is great. Alma Guillermoprieto is too.

I think writers need to read a lot of varied material. If you ever feel that you shouldn’t read something or someone because you wouldn’t agree with it, then you should probably read it. Doing that helps jostle your world a bit and that’s good. When you have lots coming in from all over, your brain is able to make the connections that lead to better insights. That’s my experience, anyway. Also, I read short story writers: Anton Chekhov, John Cheever. Eduardo Parras is hip.

OLIVAS: What are you working on now?

QUINONES: Two things, mainly.

One, I want to set up my website as a place people can tell their own true tales, or that of a relative, friend, or someone they’ve encountered. I want stories like Chalino Sanchez sang about: stories of valientes, of immigrants, of narcos. One man’s story, for example, is of his days as a cook on a marijuana plantation in the late 1980s.

But also I want stories of minor yet poignant things. I have a story of how I saved the life of a pelican that came out of the sea toward me as I walked along the beach in Mazatlan. That kind of thing. I imagine there are a million of them out there. I want to make the stories tight and readable narratives, with a beginning, middle and end. So I’ll edit and rewrite the stuff people send me. But the idea is to make the website a place where people can tell their stories.

So many students I’ve spoken to tell me about a relative with a wild life story. I’m going to be writing to English and creative writing instructors at universities and junior colleges to let their students know about it. People should send their stories to samquinones7@yahoo.com. They should keep in mind that I’m looking for stories of a specific event or moment – a shootout in the hills or how they crossed the border – and told like stories, with a beginning, middle and end, and not just recollections. 750 words is about the maximum. Also, I can’t pay anything. But who knows, maybe there’ll be a book we can publish with all those stories, if we get enough good ones. People can find out more at my website and clicking on the TELL YOUR TRUE TALE link.

The second project is a book of stories about immigrants in Los Angeles – immigrants from Korea, India, Cambodia, as well as from Mexico and Latin America. Los Angeles is what the country is becoming, so I’m hoping the stories will have wider appeal than just here in Southern California.

These are stories I’ve done for the L.A. Times, but I’ll be rewriting them. I’m aiming to get it done by December.

OLIVAS: Thank you, Sam, for spending time with us at La Bloga.

◙ Well, Al Martinez is back in the saddle at the Los Angeles Times with a column beginning today that will run each Monday in the California section. Many thanks to the Times for listening to the hundreds of readers who wrote in to complain about Martinez’s recent ouster.

◙ Over at LatinoLA, Rosa Martha Villarreal offers her views on why Latinos hate stories about gangs. Villarreal is the author of the novel, The Stillness of Love and Exile (Tertulia Press 2007), and is a member of PEN USA.

◙ Luis Alberto Urrea is blogging like a loco including this very helpful post on writing prompts.

◙ Myriam Gurba, author of the story collection, Dahlia Season (Manic D Press), is interviewed over at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. If you missed La Bloga’s interview with Gurba, click here.

◙ All done. So, until next Monday, enjoy the intervening posts from my compadres y comadres at La Bloga. ¡Lea un libro!