Review: Multidimensional Tripping. Armando Baeza, Sculptor. Gluten-free Chicano Cooks. Ellis Island Film. Veterans Day.

Review: Jesús Salvador Treviño. Return to Arroyo Grande. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2015. ISBN-13: 978-1-55885-819-0

Michael Sedano


Not only can you, you should go home again. But it will never be the same. That’s part of the take-away from Jésus Salvador Treviño’s stories about raza kids who leave their extraordinary hometown to make careers elsewhere. As many others do, the kids of Arroyo Grande scatter after high school, off to the town next door, sluggard jobs, Hollywood studios, big time New York art world. Then, when disaster looms for Arroyo Grande, there’s a hometown power that pulls the kids together, old flames rekindle, old memories live, old magic is new. And they save the day.

But what if, in a parallel universe, the old barrio is razed, a casino sucks out all the decency the kids once showed each other?

Then again, what if, in an alternate dimension you wake up and your dead wife is alive, as if almost everything has been a bad dream and you struggle when people around you think you mad?

Then you’d have Jesus Salvador Treviño’s latest collection of short stories, Return to Arroyo Grande, hot off the presses from Arte Publico Press. Return to Arroyo Grande is an intricate segue from Treviño’s two earlier collections, The Fabulous Sinkhole and The Skyscraper That Flew. Not that a reading of the earlier works is required. Still, Return to Arroyo Grande will have readers rushing to Arte Publico's website, or their local indie bookseller, to order the predecessors.

Treviño takes that “save the hometown from the developers” plot and sets it in a world where time shifting multidimensionality sends characters and events spinning in wildly divergent realities before folding time back on itself to beat the bad guys.

In the process, Treviño lets his imagination run freely, and delightfully, through the mind-bending conundrum of time-shifting and alternate dimensions. Yoli, Choo Choo, and Jeannie pass in and out of the same-but-different worlds, joined by a host of characters named Max Martinez, Rolando Hinojosa, Gary Keller (what, no Nick Kanellos?) whose resemblance to actual people is a coincidence, Treviño claims with a sly grin.

The Library of Congress calls Return to Arroyo Grande a short story collection, but Treviño weaves the collection into an eight chapter novel with chapters ending with a “no, he didn’t” cliffhanger. Will Yoli get to Parsons in NY, or is she destined to be a grocery bagger the rest of her life? Will Choo Choo make his movie, Attack of the Lowrider Zombies, or will he be stuck as a trash picker at Universal Studios? Will pragmatic Jeannie stay in the closet and go about a life of quiet desperation? And Bobby, will those critters turn him into floating protoplasm? Will Junior help Charlie get over killing Choo Choo?

You have to read Return to Arroyo Grande to get all the nuances and funny, funny stuff that happens on every page. Choo Choo, for example, wants to go to USC film school. He does, but he’s killed when, eyes in the viewfinder, backs into the street while filming his senior thesis. Or, the thesis film gets him financing from Paramount and Choo Choo becomes a big time movie-maker.

In Arroyo Grande, anything can happen. Magic is real. Imagine a world, your world, cruising along the time-space continuum, and it’s not alone. Looping along next to yours are infinite versions of the world you’re in right now. You’re always you as you slip through parallel dimensions and the other world hits the pause button.

Return to Arroyo Grande isn’t all fun and games. As with all top-notch speculative fiction, important perspectives lurk just beneath the surface, like the stuff that floated out of Mrs. Romero’s front yard in Trevino’s 1995 first book, The Fabulous Sinkhole.

Yoli does go to New York and becomes a fabulous painter. Her best work, a mind-bogglingly great portrait of Mrs. Romero, owes its appeal not to Yoli’s ability but the tube of light-defying Xenosium paint Yoli pulled out of Mrs. Romero’s sinkhole. You have a choice, Junior, a shrink, tells the unfortunate Charlie, who didn’t. Treviño sets up the choice option in the person of a street painter whose canvases hang in museums and major galleries, purchased by rich guys for millions. Disgusted by that, he reproduces his work and sells it on the sidewalk to ordinary gente for ten bucks or whatever you can afford.

Yoli makes a similar choice. She destroys all her work because she’d rather be known for her skill than her magic. She doesn’t want to become a fabulous artist with a gimmick, she prefers to make it big on her own.

Arroyo Grande isn’t a man’s world, either. Choo Choo aside, Yoli and Jeannie are the key characters as the novel-short stories reach their climactic end. Along with Mayor Nancy Cervantes and the ghost of Mrs. Romero, women take the lead in getting the kids back home to organize against developers Rebber and Barrón. And when the pueblo achieves what they assume is their victory, the archbishop wants to throw a big party, ¡Ajua!

The party’s the thing whereby to catch the conscience of el pueblo unguarded. Rebber, Barrón, and their corrupt pals on the city council approve the razing of the barrio. It looks like a bitter ending after all.

Arroyo Grande is a magic place. Magic takes over, saves la causa. Yoli and Choo Choo settle down in the old home town but it’s a completely different Arroyo Grande than the home they returned to save. In the final analysis, el pueblo loses by winning. Nonetheless, there's lots of joy in change.

Is this yet another time-shifted dimension? Ay, yi yi; there’s the rub. And the fun.


Arte Publico makes it easy to order copies of Return to Arroyo Grande, for you and all your reading friends--in fact, all three of Trevino's fantasies--by phone, 1-800-633-ARTE, or via the publisher's website. The trilogy makes an outstanding holiday gift, or hostess present if you're doing turkey day with friends.


Studio Visit: Armando Baeza, Sculptor

Two years speed by when you're in and out of a sickbed not having fun. A couple years ago, Mario Trillo and I planned to have lunch honoring sculptor Armando Baeza's birthday, as we'd done in years past. 

Then Mando was hospitalized and endured an extended recovery time. Around the same time, I was felled by illness that required too darn long to recover. I got back as much as I'll ever have only this Spring. 

Finally our health and plans coalesced to allow some friends and me to pay Alice and Armando a visit in their fabulously artful home. Collectors for years--before there was "Chicano art"--the house is a treasure trove of important artists and in many cases, early and highly distinguished work. And as one would expect, a breath-taking array of sculpture by the Maestro.

Alice Baeza, a retired bilingual teacher, is also an artist, a weaver. A founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, Alice persuaded Armando to sculpt CABE's annual award for the year's top bilingual educator. Such a wondrous piece, I regretted not becoming a bilingual educator just to be in consideration for the trophy. 

Alice and Armando offered gracious hospitality and warm conversation about their art collection, Alice's looms and weavings, and Armando's studio. The weaving behind Armando in the foto above is one of Alice's works.

Alice shows Angel Guerrero and Barbara Sedano one of the three looms in the living room.

Just as Alice was explaining the loom, two more friends arrived, Mario Trillo and Naiche Lujan. After abrazos, it was a perfect opportunity for Armando to show Naiche an early sculpture by his dad, Magu. In the mirror, Mario Guerrero and Naiche admire the Magu, a piece Naiche did not know existed.

Typical of Magu, qepd, the sculpture was a gift from artist to artist.

After lunch, dessert was Armando's tour of the studio.

Armando is a whirlwind of sculpting frenzy these days. The 92-year old Armando explains he's had so many ideas building up, projects in process, and long-delayed reworks, that he spends hour upon hour in the studio. Baeza has been working so intensely that he's injured himself and has to wear a protective glove to ensure a firm grip on his tools. 

The studio is amazing, so completely gratifying to see finished work, various stages of work-in-process, but not without its heartbreaks.

Above, Armando shows a piece he's finishing. Red wax figures are one step from the final mold that goes to the foundry. But not all of them. The horses in the foreground, for example, are slated for destruction owing to flaws or likely problems in the casting process. Such wondrous work, but imperfections don't make it out of the studio.

Armando Baeza explains the position of the figure's hand will likely not cast effectively. He's holding a piece that he altered the position of the hand and that will be cast in bronze.

Slated to be destroyed, not to Armando's standards.

If the horses look familiar, you probably know the My Little Pony toys Mattel sells by the millions. Armando Baeza's career as a Mattel toy-maker included sculpting numerous My Little Ponies.

Slated to be destroyed because of the problematic right hand.

The elongated mother and child wax will go to the foundry. When it returns, Armando will clean up the various manchas and pits that invariably accompany the casting process. Raul Baeza, Alice and Armando's son, will add patina and fashion a base. In the foto below, Armando shows a finished sculpture from the red wax model in the foto above.

Angel Guerrero fell in love with un angelito negro. Mario asked Armando if he could buy it for his wife. Armando looks at it lovingly, and agrees to part with it.

"Is it signed?" Mario asked. Armando wasn't sure. He searched the surfaces for the inscribed signature.

Armando is pretty sure he signed it but wasn't sure. Above, Baeza examines the piece with magnifying lenses and sure enough, he signed her. Behind Angel's angelita is the figure with the problematic hand that Armando has now corrected by flattening the palm.

For the visitors, Armando's tour of his workshop offered puro excitement. For Armando, excitement grows from a promise Mario Guerrero made. Mario, a Cerritos College Distinguished Faculty Awardee in Machine Tool Technology, is setting up a 3D scanner and printing lab and has promised Armando a hands-on visit in the near future. Mario jokes he can take one of Armando's hand-wrought pieces, scan it, and run off a thousand copies on his 3D printer. La Bloga hopes to cover that meeting.

Below, our extended familia. Seated, Armando Baeza, Barbara Sedano, Alice Baeza, Angel Guerrero. Standing, Mario Trillo, Michael Sedano, Naiche Lujan, Mario Guerrero. The Baeza garden features wonderful epiphyllum cacti and is shaded by several gorgeous colors of Plumeria, along with fruits and other well-established ornamentals.

The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks
Pork Chop Bake on Quinoa

A hallowe'en fest at Casa Sedano came to an exciting conclusion when The Gluten-free Chicano discovered Concepción Valadez' delicious quinoa salad left-over in the icebox. Quinoa not only is naturally gluten-free, the seed's complex carbohydrates are healthful alternatives to rice and potatoes. 

That aside, anytime one cooks quinoa, there's likely to be abundant left-overs. Así es. So it's likely there'll be opportunities to use the quinoa in several ways.

Concepción's salad recipe mixed almonds and fruit, much like some gente prepare couscous, which is wheat. With an abundance of cooked quinoa on hand, el GF chicas patas went with the flow--Concepción's dressing featured lemon juice--and amended Dra.Valadez' dish with some whole raisins, chopped dried figs, and the juice of a Bearss lime.

Here is an easy and simple preparation for any cook, company eating or everyday chop.

Squeeze the juice over the quinoa and combine ingredients. The piquancy of limón blends perfectly with the sweet fruit and almonds to bring out the flavors to plate-licking goodness.

Prepare a baking dish with non-stick coating then pack the quinoa into the bottom. Preheat the oven to 350º.

Season both sides of the chuletas with coarse ground black pepper, sea salt, and paprika.  ¿Is it still a chuleta if it's boneless?

Place the chuletas on top of the quinoa. Cover with aluminum foil and bake 45 minutes then uncover and bake ten or fifteen more minutes to brown the surface.

Test doneness by slicing halfway into a chop. If the pork is barely pink, or already white all the way through, it's done. The meat continues to cook while you let it rest for a few minutes outside the oven as you prepare the plates.

The Gluten-free Chicano likes a simple meal, so he prepared frozen mixed vegetables. A scoop of veggies, a scoop of quinoa, the chuleta, complete the serving. If gente at your table have a sweet tooth, serve chilled applesauce as an extra side and skip dessert.

If you don't find left-over quinoa salad in your refrigerator, you'll find recipes for quinoa salad in cookbooks and the computer. As noted, you'll often have generous servings of left-over quinoa, so this bake is an excellent way to repurpose an already delicious, gluten-free product.

Provecho.


Ghosts of Ellis Island Screens at CSULA

Although I'm not a movie-goer, I could not pass up the opportunity to appear on the same stage with Robert DeNiro, whose comic turn as a conflicted mob boss in Analyze This, tickled my funny bone.

DeNiro won't be in the audience when Ghosts of Ellis Island debuts in Salazar Hall on the El Sereno campus of California State University Los Angeles, but Michael Sedano and several panelists will be there to share the viewing and discuss issues related to the film.

The art film by fotograffitist JR, Ghosts of Ellis Island, isn't funny. It's deadly serious. And a must-watch film that will show at community venues in coming months. Look for announcements in local papers, and La Bloga.

View the trailer and abstracts of the panelists' talks at the Chicano Studies sponsored webpage:

http://ellisatcalstatela.blogspot.com

The premiere screening of the film Ghosts of Ellis Island, Salazar Hall C162, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
November 12, 2015.


Veterans Day 2015

Armando Baeza is a Veteran of WWII and Korea. Among the gente who visited with Alice and Armando, three are Veterans.

Mario Trillo did a Vietnam tour at the same time I was in Korea. I came home with wild stories. Mario came home with a couple of Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts. A few weeks ago, Trillo got a new knee, free, to replace the one that took the hit nearly fifty years ago. He'll never get back that chunk of finger.

Mario Guerrero was a United States Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

Naiche Lujan's dad, Magu, qepd, was a Veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

They also serve who stand and wait. My wife, Barbara, is an Army Veteran, too. We were married at the end of August 1968. A month later, I got my draft notice to report in time for Thanksgiving. I managed to delay induction until January 1969. The day I left, Barbara held it together until the bus pulled away. Like a silent movie, I watched through the window as her anguished figure grew smaller as the bus gathered speed. A few months later, Barbara left the comforts of Isla Vista for a tiny shack at the edge of Ft. Ord while I attended Radio School.

I went AWOL every night. When I got busted on the last day of training, I told the Captain all my wife would have of me would be this memory if I bit the dust in Vietnam. He nodded agreement and took half my pay and my rank.

The night before I was to report for Orders--I was told the Orders would be sending me to Vietnam--Barbara desperately pleaded with me to desert. "Let's go to Canada," was her first idea. No dice, I said, "too cold."

Irony. The Army sent me to spend a winter atop the world's highest HAWK anti-aircraft missile site. Dang, it was cold on top of that mountain.

"Mexico," she said. "Mexico extradites," I argued, and she doesn't speak Spanish.

"I'll take my chances." I had decided.

"You might get killed!" Those nightly news clips of flag-draped coffins coming in daily burned into her consciousness. When she went to the PX there were soldiers at Ft. Old whose fatigues didn't hide the scars of their wounds. And seeing other soldiers on post, hapless blank-eyed trainees without a clue in the world, was like watching the walking dead. I didn't want one of them to take my place. I was drafted out of an M.A. program and figured I'd be OK. Always a survivor, that's me.

"If I'm killed, I won't know it." That was my final answer. It's a desolate thought, but she was young and would be able to start over, live a long life with an increasingly distant memory of that stupid dead GI she was once married to, who thought it was his Duty and to accept the luck of the draw. It is what it is, no alternate realities.

Plus, she would have gotten my military insurance, ten thousand dollars.

Specialist 4th Class Michael Sedano, Mae Bong (Site 7/5), winter 1969.

The La Bloga interview with Brian Calvert, managing editor of High Country News

Brian Calvert is the managing editor of High Country News. He grew up in Pinedale, Wyoming, at the foot of the Wind River Mountains. Calvert studied English at the University of Colorado before starting his career as a freelance foreign correspondent. He has lived extensively in Cambodia and China, as well as in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. In 2011, Calvert moved back to the United States, spending a year and a half writing and producing radio from Southern California. In 2013, he was awarded the Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, at the University of Colorado – Boulder, where he studied climate change and the American West. Calvert was hired by High Country News in May 2014. He now lives in Paonia, Colorado, where High Country News is headquartered, with his dog, Perle Haggard, and cat, Luna.

Calvert reached out to me because he has a desire to explore the “hidden and under-reported connections between the natural world and under-represented communities.” I asked if he would be interested in a La Bloga interview, and he kindly agreed. 

OLIVAS: For those who are not too familiar with High Country News, could you give a brief description of the publication’s origins and mandate?

CALVERT: High Country News is a non-profit magazine that covers the environmental issues, natural resources and communities of the American West. We publish 22 issues per year in print and have a vibrant website with daily content. We have a small budget, but a lot of heart, and we punch well above our weight. We’ve been around since 1970, and were started in Lander, Wyoming, by a rancher who was concerned about the environmental despoilment of the region, and we hew to those roots, on one hand, while being the voice of the West overall, on the other.

Our approach is journalistic, which is to say that fairness and accuracy in our reporting is our top priority, though we do try to take the extra step of providing meaning from that reporting. We write with authority on a broad number of issues, and we devote a lot of ink to nuance, so that someone walking away from one of our stories will have a pretty good grasp of any number of complex issues. We’re a magazine for people really want to understand the West and all its facets.

In many ways, we work to conserve the environments of the region, and in other ways, we seek to report on issues that could use some improvement. So you might see in the same issue one story on fish conservation and another on which Western states are leading the way on higher minimum wage. We’ve won awards for reporting on deaths in the oil fields, and are currently running a feature on the war on coal. We’re just as likely to cover elections in Navajo Nation as we are to cover a mainstream politics. We cover energy—both extractives and renewables; drought and water; agriculture and farming; the recreation industry; the National Parks and other the public lands; wildlife; climate change; pollution; and a great many other issues that define the American West, sometimes through essay, sometimes through deep-dive analysis and sometimes through good old-fashioned narrative storytelling.

The American West has a diverse, yet distinct, geography, driven very much by ecological relationships between a lot of different people and cultures and a lot of different landscapes and resources. High Country News tries to make sense of that geography and of those ecologies, from Los Angeles to Portland, Yellowstone to the Rockies, Denver, the Grand Canyon, the Great Basin, Albuquerque, the Mojave, and on and on.

OLIVAS: You have mentioned to me that as the new managing editor, you are interested in the “hidden and under-reported connections between the natural world and under-represented communities.” How did you develop this interest and what are some examples of what you are looking for?

CALVERT: I grew up in a small town in western Wyoming, but through journalism I became a foreign correspondent. So I know what it’s like to live in the isolated West, but I also have had exposure to a lot of different cultures in my career. I’ve spent significant time abroad, and have lived in Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and traveled to many places in between. I would say that most of my life I’ve spent looking at the way people are the same, and understanding where they are different. Ultimately, though, I came to realize that some of the biggest questions of our age had to do with our environment and our resources, and so I ultimately came back to the West, where I think they come into sharp relief. High Country News offers a great vantage from which to ask these questions, and figure out these relationships—and I’d like to take the magazine further into that space. But I know there’s a ton that I don’t understand, or can’t even see, and I’m always looking for other perspectives and vantage points.

The West is a huge place, and it would be hubris to think I understand it even a little bit.

As the managing editor, I want my writers to help our readers understand the relationship different people have with the places they live. What kind of pressure will booming demographics in the Southwest put on the region’s resources? What kind of solutions to environmental problems can new and old Western cultures provide? What does “wild” mean to someone who lives in Los Angeles? Phoenix? What is life like for a Vietnamese community that lives along a polluted river in Seattle? What is it like for a family from Nepal running an ice cream store and gas station in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming? I’m interested in finding these “new” places that many of our readers may be unfamiliar with, old wisdom, fresh perspectives. I’m interested in finding new readers, by asking new questions. And I’m especially interested in learning what I don’t know about the West’s many dimensions.

At the heart of all these questions again are these ecological relationships, and I think High Country News is devoted to exploring them and very open to new ways of seeing things.

OLIVAS: If writers are interested in pitching ideas to you, how may they contact you and what should the pitch include?

CALVERT: We have fairly extensive submission guidelines on our website at http://hcn.org/about/submissions. Writers can send me their ideas directly: brianc@hcn.org. Deeply reported stories, powerful narratives, thought-provoking essays, quick scenes or short profiles all have a place in the magazine, along with news and analysis. We’re always trying to figure out what’s new about the West, so we often pass on stories that reinforce the stereotypes or mythologies of the region. We wouldn’t really write about a cattle drive, for example; but we recently ran a story about an abbey of nuns who make a living ranching.

I’m really interested in pushing the magazine into areas we haven’t been in before, particularly the urban wild, coastal economies, and diverse cultures and communities (again, though, with the focus on these ecological relationships). We’re also interested in multimedia storytelling online, and in opinion and personal essays, as well. High Country News is really in a period of expansion and experimentation, and I think our content reflects that, so I would love to hear out-of-the box ideas. Our focus will always be on solid reporting and good writing, but beyond that, I’d like to be surprised.

I should also say that we are developing a prize for journalists of color reporting on under-represented communities of the region. We’ll be announcing the details of that in January. And we also run a very well-respected, rigorous internship and fellowship program, six months to a year, respectively, that help writers really understand what High Country News is about and gives them the skills and training they need to continue writing (or editing) for us and shaping our future.

"San Francisco, Mi Amor!" Interview with critically acclaimed Chicana lesbian comic, Monica Palacios

Photo by Sunny Bak; design by Henry Pacheco

For over 30 years, Monica Palacios has been an important as well as hilarious voice on the comedic stage.  She was the first “out” Chicana lesbian comic to perform on stage in San Francisco (circa 1982). She is returning to San Francisco this month to perform her new show, “San Francisco, Mi Amor!” at the Galería De La Raza on 24^th Street, November 20^th and 21^st at 8p.m.  La Bloga is fortunate to have the critically acclaimed Chicana lesbian writer and performer, Monica Palacios, with us today. 

Thanks so much for being with us today, Monica!  Tell us about your new show, “San  Francisco, Mi Amor!”  What’s in store for us? 

It is my great pleasure to be on La Bloga.  This new show that will be presented on November 20^th and 21^st at the Galeria De La Raza will be a comedic and dramatic look back at my stand up comedy life during its early years:  1982-1986.  Gay comedy, as it was called back then was born at the Valencia Rose Cabaret, the first gay comedy club in the nation.  I zero in on this venue because I performed there on a regular basis allowing my name and reputation to float around and get noticed.  I talk about being a film student at San Francisco State and how being a student allowed me to study comedians as I would hang out at the comedy clubs—taking notes because I knew, one day, I was going to step on a stage.  I share my adventures about me and my lesbian sister, Eleanor, who I was living with in Oakland at the time.  I talk about co-founding the comedy troupe, Culture Clash, meeting Edward James Olmos on 24^th street which leads to a Hollywood audition, performing comedy during the AIDS crisis, trying to pick up chicks at taquerias—and other life-changing experiences. 

Photo by Luiz Sampaio; design by Robin Lowey

You are returning, as you say, to the “birthplace of your comedy career.”  Tell us a little more about your comedy history.

My comedy history goes back before I was born. Both of my parents were very funny in their own right. My father was more the clown where as my mother had a sharp tongue. It's ironic because my first ten years of life, I was extremely shy but then in the 6th grade I became a smart aleck--I'm pretty sure it was the hormones and the vodka in my Cheerios. By high school, I was outright performing sketches with my friends for class assemblies. I did a stand up comedy routine for my English class and I knew at that moment that I wanted to be a stand up comic but as an underage teenager, I couldn't figure out how to get to the comedy clubs. So I just nurtured that possibility in the back of my head and soaked up all the comedy I could absorb from the excellent television shows that were happening during the 70s. My little brother and I were always acting like we were on stage mimicking what we saw on television or making up our own talk shows. When I got into college, I started taking classes that supported my comedy chops and it definitely helped that I was living with my lesbian sister Eleanor who I think is the funniest person I know. I finally started going to San Francisco comedy clubs by myself and I would sit and watch these comics for hours and would always conclude--I'm funnier. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and I got myself onto an open mic night at The Other Cafe Comedy Club and I did a solid job. Hooked, I started performing at other mainstream clubs in San Francisco until I found The Valencia Rose Cabaret, a gay comedy club. This club truly kicked off my career as a lesbian performer.

And since then, how has the comedy scene changed for female comics, specifically queer women of color comics? 

Right now what I believe is happening is--there are more women in general who are performing comedy, as stand ups, television shows, films. When I first started going to the clubs in the early 80s, there weren't that many female comics. It was definitely a man's profession.  The women who were doing daring unapologetic bold material were all the lesbian comics who came out of the Valencia Rose Cabaret: myself, Marga Gomez, Lea DeLaria, Karen Ripley, Susie Berger, Linda Moakes and Laurie Bushman. We were doing our queer lesbian empowering performances long before Ellen DeGeneres came out. And yes there are more women of color and queer women of color doing their comedy thing, but there are still waaaaay more men.

Photo by Sunny Bak; design by Mayumi Hokari

Who are the comics who have most influenced you and who have been your greatest supporters along the way?  

My true role models of comedy would have to be my family members. Everybody in my family is funny. As a child I was able to be the audience for my four older siblings who would do some kind of performing on a daily basis and I would watch with great enthusiasm. My father was a self-taught musician and performer and he and my mother would entertain at our house with singing and comedic storytelling--mostly in Spanish. My entire childhood and teenage years were surrounded by this performance element. My family continues to be my biggest supporters of my comedy career and definitely my Facebook familia.

We all wish you a fabulous return to the San Francisco stage, Monica.  Is there anything else you’d like to share with our La Bloga readers? 

If you can make my show, I will love you forever.  If you can’t, please tell your peeps.  This show is very special because I’m reuniting with the Galeria De La Raza and Rene Yañez—two producers who were integral and supportive of my early career in San Francisco.  And it’s a time in my life and it’s a time in queer history that was very revolutionary—LGBT comics were out on stage despite the super homophobic atmosphere due to the AIDS crisis.  I will be showing some historical and hilarious images of this time period that have not been seen since the 1980s. 

So important!  Thank you, Monica.  Time for all of us to head on over to San Francisco and get a seat at the Galeria De La Raza on November 20th and 21st at 8p.m.!  Don't miss this!  

Photo by Sunny Bak

BIO:  International hip chick, Monica Palacios is the creator of solo shows, plays, screenplays, short stories, stand-up comedy, poems, and essays. Her work focuses on the Latina/o LGBTQ experience.  National and international scholars have critically engaged her work in academic journals, books, dissertations, and conference panels.  Monica has taught at numerous universities including University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), University of California, Irvine (UCR), Loyola Marymount University (LMU), and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.  Palacios was awarded a Postdoctoral Rockefeller Fellowship from the Chicano Studies Department at UCSB.  She is currently promoting her new solo show:  San Francisco, Mi Amor! and her play, I Kissed Chavela Vargas
Check out her website:  www.monicapalacios.com

If Trump not dumped, SNL should be

Unless something changes, tonight Saturday Night Live will have Donald Duck Trump as its host. In the "land of the free and home of the brave," the event will be a despicable indication of how right-wing concepts hog the political landscape.

You've probably heard of petitions to stop Trump's hosting. Then there's also the Declaracíon in Spanish of latino intelligentsia, among others.

There's still time to go here, here, y aquí to add your disgust to the thousands who've petitioned the producers and network to Dump Trump. Register your complaint, your beliefs, your outrage, for that matter.

This week Alvaro Huerta of the Tribune News Service posted "Trump is no laughing matter." Here's excerpts:

"Saturday Night Live should cancel Donald Trump's appearance on its iconic show.

"Trump has labeled Mexican immigrants as "drug dealers," "criminals" and "rapists." If elected, he plans to deport more than 11 million undocumented immigrants and strip their U.S.-born children of citizenship.

"For Latinos, Trump's proposals are no joke.

"Trump wishes to revisit dark chapters in America's past. He is doubling down on his proposed "huge" U.S.-Mexico border wall, which the Mexican government will somehow miraculously pay for under his plan.

"Americans everywhere need to speak out against Trump's verbal abuse regarding people of Mexican descent. As the proud son of Mexican immigrants and a scholar of urban planning and ethnic studies, I need not say more."

Alvaro Huerta teaches at Cal State Polytech Univ., Pomona and is the author of Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Towards a Humanistic Paradigm. Read his entire Trump article here.

Also, on Al Día, Sabrina Vourvoulias--author of Ink--compiled a great post entitled Flashing Trump: Latino writers tell off Trump in 140-character narratives. It includes a short piece of mine.

Assuming SNL proceeds with Trump tonight, the next logical step would be to give the network the kinds of numbers that would get its attention. Not only should Latinos and those who respect them not watch tonight's program, beginning tomorrow, if SNL believes there IS room for hate on its stage, then it should be time to post and spread this: