Fitness and Poetry in Santa Barbara Photo Essay

 Melinda Palacio

Today marks a first, my poetry participated in a Fitness Block Party. Although January is the time for New Year’s resolutions and vows to shed any holiday pounds, I never imagined pairing poetry and fitness. The poems were on stands, a poetry walk for people to walk by, read the poems. The library’s Mobile Van was on hand to issue library cards and check out poetry books. 

The library’s mobile van. The block party meant Pandora could participate. 

My poem in the poetry walk. There were electric bicycles to try but I was too cold. The poetry walk, sponsored by the Santa Barbara Libary, originally was not part if the fitness party, but rains rescheduled the poetry event, until finally tge block party presented an opportunity to bring poetry to the folks downtown. 

Poet Ron Alexander with his poem.

Organizers prepared an obstacle course for the bike riders.

Roller dancers 

Let’s not forget about the wrestling club.

The Last of the Rule Breakers

          by daniel cano                                                                    

Stoner Park, home of the rule breakers

     The tough thing about writing a story like this is that I’m not sure whom I’m writing to. Then, there’s the wording, like in that first sentence. Let’s look at it. I don’t like using the word “whom” because it makes me feel like I’m trying too hard to impress someone. Who am I trying to impress? I don’t know. Or maybe I do but ain’t saying.

     So, I’d rather use “who” but the spell check on my computer won’t let me. It places a blue line under the word telling me that the “who” is used incorrectly, and it isn’t hard to figure out how to correct it. So, I’m stuck with “whom” unless I want to change the whole sentence and turn “whom”, the object, into “who” the subject, which I don’t.

     English teachers haunt me, going back to the third grade, giving us instructions like never ending a sentence with a preposition. But there it is at the end of my first sentence, the preposition “to” and it doesn’t sound so bad. It makes sense, but the rules…the rules must be obeyed, and I’m not, by nature, a rule breaker, like many people I know.

     Reminds me of a line in the play Zoot Suit, when the main character Hank Reyna questions the darkness in his life and wants more light, and his spirit, El Pachuco, says, “But, life ain’t that way, Hank,” as if something bigger than us controls the rules.

     In 1990, I read a review of Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel, Vineland. Before the book's publication, Pynchon's editor told the famed writer the opening sentence was a dangling modifier, grammatically incorrect. He should change it. Pynchon, supposedly, asked his editor, “Do you understand the sentence?”

     The editor, “Of course.”

     Pynchon, “Then leave it.”

     So, off I went to the local bookstore. In an impressive display reserved for top-selling writers, the bookstore had stacked Pynchon's books right next to the other "big boys" in American letters. I opened the book to the first page. God almighty, there it was, the very first sentence, a dangling modifier; though, I would have said it was more “misplaced” than “dangling.” Had I not read the review of Pychon’s book, I wouldn’t have known about the dangling modifier. Imagine, a writer like Pynchon, a rule breaker. Then, again, weren’t many of the "world’s greats” rule-breakers?

     I’m tired of obeying the rules, not just in writing but in life. Still, though, I’m one of those people who tries to follow the guiding light, you might say. So, I question every word I write, and I’m not even into the story, yet. See what I mean. Okay, even there, by writing the phrase: “see what I mean.” Should that line end with a question mark or a period? Is it a declarative sentence or interrogative? Does a writer have a choice? See, these kinds of things go through my mind, and I’ve nearly forgotten the story I was starting to write. What was once percolating is now simmering.

     Now, the first question I raised, “to whom am I writing?” often determines in which style I write. Do I want to use “vocabulary-chasing words?” You know, the words William Buckley and the James brothers throw around, no not the outlaw gunslingers, Jesse and Frank James, but the word-slingers, Henry and William James, famed novelist and philosopher.

     Well, those might be bad examples. Buckley and the James’ knew and understood the words they use, highly literate individuals. I know some writers who use a particular word, think the word is too simple, and make a dash to the thesaurus to find a more complex word. This gives the impression of intelligence and profundity, doesn’t it? Hell, I’m guilty of it. But I don’t want to struggle when I write, especially now, when the story I'm imagining is quickly cooling.

     Sometimes, I want to write to an audience that reads the New Yorker, or at least that’s what I unconsciously try for. Why? I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s so great about the New Yorker. When I used to read it, I didn’t know where one article ended and another began; though I must admit, it’s been a long time since I’ve picked up a copy. I figured that the New Yorker doesn’t really write for New Yorkers, especially not New Yorkers I’ve met. Besides, I’m from out west, California, the land of outlaws.

     I have published three novels and a few short stories. I’m guessing at least five thousand people have read my work, maybe more, maybe less. Occasionally I get a letter from a faraway city, like Philadelphia, or an email from England, even Spain. A Spanish student, a Ph. D candidate at the University of Burgos, was doing a dissertation on Chicanos and the Vietnam War. It just so happened my second novel was on that very topic. So, we corresponded for over a year. She even sent me a study by a Spanish professor in the Canary Islands who quoted from my book, Chicanos in Vietnam. So, you see, someone is reading our stuff.

     The man who wrote me from England, very respectful, asked me if I’d donate, autograph, and send him a few books. He was going to auction them off at a fundraiser in Manchester, England to raise money for physically challenged children, a group he has dedicated his life to helping. Auction, my books? I thought, as I read his letter. Who is going to put up money in a lottery for one of my books? 

     So, I sent him the books, attached with a letter thanking him for his effort. He wrote me back a few months later and said the auction was a HIT! His organization raised more money than he expected and my books went quickly. He asked if there was a possibility of my going to Manchester for a reading. What’s going on in Manchester that I don’t know about? Northern English folk read Chicano literature? Man, Chicanos don’t even read Chicano literature. Oh yeah, so back to my story.

     My cousin was a true rule breaker, who led something of a sad life, even if he was always laughing. He spent most of his life in prison, for drugs, of course, starting at an early age. He’s one of those statistics prison activists throw around to show how incarceration isn’t working. Look at all of those who spend their lives in and out of jail. Then you read the stats: “He’s spent two-thirds of his life behind bars.” Is that rehabilitation?

     Actually, one time a local newspaper gave Eddie the moniker: the Westside cat-robber, or some such name, claiming he’d committed fifty burglaries. When another cousin of mine asked him about it, Eddie had said, “That’s wrong, primo. I didn’t do fifty robberies. It wasn’t more than twenty.”

     Well, that’s Eddie. You name it, Folsom, Soledad, Pelican-Bay, San Quintin, Chino—county, state and federal prisons. If it’s in California and it’s got bars, he’s been there, earning a few boxing titles and the respect of other prisoners along the way. When I mentioned his name to Chicano inmate turned poet Manuel “Manazar” Gamboa, Manazar started looking at me differently, like I was "kin" to a celebrity or something. “Hell, yes, I knew Eddie,” Manazar had said. “Everybody knew Eddie. Good people, ay.”

     So, when I thought about writing Eddie’s story, a friend asked why I would write about him. I told her about Eddie’s life, how hard he’d had it as a kid. Then she started to lecture me about writing that romanticized the worst of the Latino culture. I told her that I’m not romanticizing it. I’m just writing a story, a pretty sad story, really, hoping others wouldn't follow his footsteps. I’m not even sure how it will turn out. I don’t even know to whom I’m writing, what audience.

     Then she said it didn’t matter to whom I was writing or what slant I took on it. It’s a topic that negatively stereotypes Latino culture. Why can’t I write stories about Chicano professionals--people who have succeeded beyond all expectations, teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, MBAs, CEOs, presidents of banks and corporations. I told her I’m not writing for Hispanic Magazine. I don’t know most of those people, anyway, even though I am one of them. Alright, I confess. I was a university administrator and a college professor. I taught at a respected community college in Los Angeles, which shall go, as they say, “unnamed.”

     I love higher education. It saved me. I requested an “early-out” from the military to go to college. I didn’t really care about college. I just wanted out of the military, and that was one way, an “early-out” to enroll in college. So, I kind of fell into the scholastic life, a world foreign to me, at the time. I never even liked school, as a kid.

     After I returned from Vietnam, I needed a sanctuary, a monastery, and I found a university campus worked just fine, the history, the quiet, the trees and plants, the silent walkways, the bells ringing, birds chirping, but I don’t want to get into any of that now. That’s a whole other story. See there. My tendency was to write “nother” instead of “other,” which is completely illiterate, but it felt good when I got the sound. It felt natural and real, even pure. But it’s wrong, linguistically and every other way.

     Hell, that’s my life, trying to give legitimacy to what ain’t always legitimate, just like a like a lot of Chicanos and working-class Americans. Anyway, back to the story.

     I’m trying to plot Eddie’s life in my mind. Remember, this is just a story, and I know I can’t wrap up a complicated life in one measly story, so I’ve got to find a structure, a format to carry the weight. Like if I can come up with a symbol, an extended-metaphor, definitely not a parable because there’s nothing spiritual in Eddie’ life--miraculous, maybe?

     You don’t know how many times he’s told me, “Primo, it’s miracle the cops didn’t get me,” during such-and-such incident in his life. Or how it was a miracle if so-and-so wasn’t there when Eddie had overdosed, or he would have died. He said it was a miracle he was still alive, miracle after miracle. To hear him tell it, you would be surprised he has only spent two-thirds of his life locked up. Listening to him, I mean if he wasn’t hustling you, you’d wonder how he ever saw a day of freedom.

     But he did see freedom. In fact, for a while, it was a running, sick, joke. People would see Eddie on the street in summer, and by late fall, somewhere around the third week in October, he’d be “busted” again and herded off to jail, where, everybody figured, was his plan, to spend the cold winter months off the street, in a warm cell, three-hots and a cot, instead of freezing in an alley someplace, having to worry about robbing somebody or breaking into a house because it was the only way to make enough money for a quick score.

     A drug appetite running hundreds of dollars a day can’t be easily fed. A job? Don’t be funny. Who, without an education or training, makes that kind of money legally? Eddie quit school early, probably the seventh or eighth grade. Mentally, he had checked-out of school in the third grade. I mean his body was there, but his mind was someplace else. Dumb? No way. Though, he could play it up to get sympathy, when he needed it.

     I remember getting a letter from him once when I was in college, a struggling student, which he knew. I forgot where he was locked up at the time. The letter came in an envelope decorated in overly stylized but perfectly penciled spirals, leaves, hearts, and flowers, beautifully sketched in multi-shaded colors, the work of a real street artist. As far as I know, Eddie couldn’t draw a cat or write a clear, coherent sentence, but he knew how to barter services with people who did.

     Eddie’s letter was transcendental. It moved smoothly from philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, God, Satan, heaven, hell, positivity, existentialism, quoting Socrates and Sartre, and saying how he had “seen the light.” It wasn’t Eddie, at least not until I got to the last line when he asked me to send him twenty bucks. That was the Eddie I knew. I wrote him back but didn’t send him the money. None of the relatives sent him money, anymore, too many years of it, the twenties, and afraid of enabling him.

     Oh, the family talked fondly of Eddie. Everyone knew he’d had a rough life, losing his mother to cancer when he was twelve and raised by a “fall-down” drunk father, a bullish but sensitive man, funny, artistic, when sober, who lived in life’s shadows, a skilled tradesman who couldn’t hold a job for more than a few days, so he passed Eddie off to whichever relatives would take him.

     People felt for Eddie but couldn’t trust him. Too many times he had broken the hearts of those who tried to help him. Okay, maybe I’ll start the story there, the day my dad asked if I’d drive him up north to visit Eddie. “Up north,” was a euphemism for prison. My dad, who didn't like travel, or driving long distances, but enjoyed the comfort of his Lazy Boy, asked, sheepishly, “Pobre, Eddie. He’s got no one. Maybe we should drive up north and go visit him.” Eddie was 50, at the time.

     I don’t know. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I can go there, into that dark place, those heavy emotions, pain and sadness, which is where artists must go to create meaningful art. I just don’t have it in me, sad, sad, sad. Then it came, the call from someone who had found Eddie in an alley near Venice Beach, dead, apparently, or ironically, of natural causes, last, in our family, of the rule breakers.

Daniel Cano's award-winning novel on the last days of Ricardo Flores Magon, Death and the American Dream is available on Amazon and the Bilingual Press.

A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters

 By Duncan Tonatiuh 

 

•Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

•Language: English

•Hardcover: 48 pages

•ISBN-10: 1419749420

•ISBN-13: ‎978-1419749421

 

Award-winning author-illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh sheds light on the significance of Aztec manuscripts and culture

 

Our world, little brother, is an amoxtlalpan, a land of books.

In the jungles where the jaguar dwells, the Mayas make books.

In the mountains the cloud people, the Mixtecs, make them as well. So do others in the coast and in the forests.

And we the Mexica of the mighty Aztec empire, who dwell in the valley of the volcanoes, make them too.

 

A young Aztec girl tells her little brother how their parents create beautiful painted manuscripts, or codices. She explains to him how paper is made from local plants and how the long paper is folded into a book. Her parents and others paint the codices to tell the story of their people’s way of life, documenting their history, science, tributes, and sacred rituals.

 

Duncan Tonatiuh’s lyrical prose and beloved illustration style, inspired by the pre-Columbian codices, tell the story of how—contrary to the historical narrative that European colonizers bestowed “civilization” and knowledge to the Americas—the Aztec and their neighbors in the Valley of Mexico painted books and records long before Columbus arrived, and continued doing so among their Nahua-speaking descendants for generations after the Spanish Conquest. From an award-winning author-illustrator, A Land of Books pays tribute to Mesoamerican ingenuity and celebrates the universal power of books.

 

**STARRED REVIEW** 
"Tonatiuh’s respect and reverence for the subject shine through loud and clear as he shares knowledge of Mesoamerican books almost lost to the past. . .Utterly indispensable."―Kirkus Reviews

**STARRED REVIEW** 
"In Tonatiuh’s engaging picture book, a Mexihcah child describes intricate wordless volumes created in Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans, interweaving Nahuatl words defined in a glossary. . . all shown in richly hued art that mimics the codices’ detailed format, and leading to a contextualizing author’s note that describes colonizing forces’ devastating effect." ―Publishers Weekly

**STARRED REVIEW**
"Once again Tonatiuh has gathered history, language, and stories into a cultural gift to readers; an excellent book for students who want to learn how books are made, those who love history (even the difficult parts), and anyone interested in learning about Mexihcah culture."―School Library Journal

**STARRED REVIEW**
"A loving and layered examination of culture, values, and the stories that shape them."―The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

**STARRED REVIEW** 
"An author’s note provides historical context, centering the importance of preserving Indigenous art . . . storytelling, and knowledge." ―The Horn Book

 

 

Duncan Tonatiuh is an award-winning author-illustrator. He is both Mexican and American. He grew up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and graduated from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College in New York City. His artwork is inspired by pre-Columbian art. His aim is to create images and stories that honor the past, but are relevant to today's people, especially children. He currently lives in San Miguel with his family but travels in the United States often.

Faster And Casí Instant, Always Gluten-free

The Gluten-free Caregiving Chicano's Casí Instant Lee's Green Soup

Living in a two-person one-caregiver home leads to any number of adaptations to normal living. Anything that can be done another time gets done in its own time. Anything that gets on your nerves, like a dirty kitchen, gets done right now. Then there's meal time.

Cooking should be one of the rare respite-inducing activities in a caregiver's day. Time at the stove or the chopping block belongs to the caregiver and his or her tools. Trouble is, caregiver demands rarely allow the carefree leisure of finely chopping vegetables, making a savory broth from a whole chicken, fashioning pork-beef meatballs, all the tasks of making a hearty soup on a cold wet day.

Things being as they are in a caregiving household, when the Gluten-free Chicano got all antojado for fancy caldo, el gluten-free chicas patas devised a store-bought adaptation to the world's best-tasting meatball soup, and that's not Mexican caldo de albondigas (second place), it's Lee's Green Soup.

Scroll to the foot of the screen page for the casí instant version. Here's the right way if you have all the time in the world and you don't expect an emergency any second now:

Zuppa al polpette, Lee's Green Soup
(Reprinted link from La Bloga November 2013)

As the weather outside grows frightful, gente head inside where it's so delightful, especially when you come inside to a steaming bowl of soup. And when you find yourself under that weather, hot soup for what ails you. For my grandmother's and mother's people, caldo de pollo cures everything and prevents the rest.

When the Gluten-free Chicano makes the panacea, he follows his people's simple procedure, boil a chicken, add rice, serve with lemon and crushed chile piquín. When the occasion calls for fancier fare, The Gluten-free Chicano's thoughts run to Lee's Green Soup, or as his fading memory recalls Lee's name for it, Zuppa al polpette.

Lee Stroud moved next door to casa Sedano when her husband, the Colonel, transferred to Norton AFB. Lee and mom hit it off. They exchanged recipes, Mexican food for a world-traveler's eclectic recipes. One day I disclosed that I'd recently eaten "pizza pie" for the first time at the drive-in theatre. That was when Lee told us she was Italian from Philadelphia, and what I'd eaten wasn't pizza. Lee made us pizza, from scratch.

Real pizza takes a lot of work. And it's expensive. So fill up your guests with soup and the cook gets away with making one slice per eater.

It's a winning strategy when soup comes to the table beautifully garnished with a sprinkle of parmesan, aromatic and dimpled with meatballs.

Lee's Green Soup is wonderfully easy to make. Here's the fundamental process.

Make a rich broth.

Earlier in the week, The Gluten-free Chicano roasted a chicken for dinner. He boiled down the carcass with a bouquet of carrots, onions, garlic, celery, and a bay leaf. Removing the particulates left a rich broth of concentrated flavor. With that, start the broth to boil lightly.

Add water sufficient to your need.

Seasonal suggestion: This year's November turkey carcass is going to become cocono Lee's Green Soup. 

Chop vegetables

Add to the boiling broth. The veggies--celery, onion, bell pepper, carrot, garlic--cook crisply fork tender.

Make meatballs

I use a Cusineart to process the carnes. Chop a few dientes of ajo, a medium onion, some parsley. Mix half and half ground beef with pork. Add an egg, a few pinches of grated dried parmesan cheese, a handful of gluten-free bread crumbs (or a couple Tbs of rice), coarsely ground black pepper, salt.

Wash hands well, leave them wet to make forming the meatballs easier. Hand-form meatballs. I make 2" albondigas that diners cut with their spoon. Lee's cost-sensible strategy featured 1" meatballs that fit a spoon. Plan on two or three meatballs per bowl.

Plop the meat into the water and increase the flame.

Add spinach

Break apart a package of chopped spinach and stir it into the water. Boil. When all the meatballs float to the surface, they're probably done. The soup can simmer a long time if it's the fourth quarter and Plunkett is driving to a winning touchdown.

When the meatballs and you are ready to serve, stir in noodles and get ready to call gente to table. The noodles won't require more than five minutes or so, to become al dente.

Prepare rice noodles

Lee Stroud served narrow egg noodles. The Gluten-free Chicano uses rice noodles from the Asian/Thai section at well-stocked supermarkets.

Rice noodles come in tightly-wrapped coils of hard, long strips of noodle. I find the noodles easier to cook and eat if I open one end of the cellophane package and use scissors to cut the bundled noodles along the fold.

Pull the noodles out of the wrapping above the boiling pot and let them float onto the surface. Stir them into the broth. Continue boiling until all the noodles are in the bottom and have grown elastic and translucently al dente.

Garnish with hot chile flakes

If the noodles absorbed too much broth, stir in some water. This chicken soup has a rich parmesan flavor that you can enhance with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese across the surface and a helping of crushed chile.

For my wheat-eater familia and friends I serve the world's best garlic bread, fashioned after Mom's Italian Village in Santa Barbara in the 1960s. Imagine a heavily parmesan-buttered sliced loaf heaped with tablespoonsful of chopped fresh garlic, dusted with paprika and toasted under the broiler.

2023 Casí Instant Adaptation

2023 Casí Instant Lee's Green Soup

1 box chicken broth
⅓ white onion
garlic powder
celery
carrot
bell pepper
store-made Italian style pork meatballs (read ingredients carefully)
flat rice noodle (pad thai)
i pkg frozen chopped spinach

Chop the onion.
Mince the top 2 inches off a bunch of celery
slice one or two carrots
chop 1 bell pepper
pinch aromatic herbs--herbs de provence, oregano, plain parsley

Wilt the vegetables with lots of garlic powder in olive oil. toss in a tiny pinch of herbs.

Add the commercial meatballs and stir to brown slightly.

Pour in the box of chicken broth. Fill the box with tap water, add to the pot.

Cover and boil until the meatballs float. That means they're cooked.

Add the box of frozen spinach and stir until the leaves begin peeling off.

Add the noodles. Some noodles come in 8" lengths. If you buy the nests of folded noodles, use scissors to cut both ends of the folded noodles.

The flavor of this soup depends on the quality of boxed or canned broth, and the amount of browning you perform. 

Start to finish: 20 minutes

Lee's Original start to finish: three hours

bon apétit, provecho, soup's on!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. por Xánath Caraza

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. por Xánath Caraza

 

El Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. es honrado en enero de cada año. Este 2023 lo recordamos el día de hoy, lunes 16 de enero.  Hoy comparto con los lectores de la Bloga un par de libros que escribió, entre otros tantos, más dos libros para niños que lo celebran y el enlace Nobelprize.org donde nuestros lectores pueden leer más sobre su vida, su visión y su trabajo con la comunidad.  Ayer y hoy el mensaje de Martin Luther King sigue vigente.

“At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.”

(Note from Nobelprize.org: This biography uses the word “Negro”. Even though this word today is considered inappropriate, the biography is published in its original version in view of keeping it as a historical document.)

 

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.” (Amazon.com)

 

Strength to Love by Dr. Martin Luther King

 

Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Be a King: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream and You

 

 

Buzzing Books

How great is it to write a book that gets heavy buzz before it is even published?  Really great, I would have to say.  Not that I've ever written such a book.  Here's a list of books (including several debut novels) scheduled for 2023 that have had reviewers reaching for a thesaurus of superlatives and readers saving their bookstore gift cards for the book launch date.  As is often said, these books are "much anticipated."

_________________________________

The House in the Pines
Ana Reyes
Dutton - January 3

[from the publisher]
Maya was a high school senior when her best friend, Aubrey, mysteriously dropped dead in front of the enigmatic man named Frank whom they’d been spending time with all summer.

Seven years later, Maya lives in Boston with a loving boyfriend and is kicking the secret addiction that has allowed her to cope with what happened years ago, the gaps in her memories, and the lost time that she can’t account for. But her past comes rushing back when she comes across a recent YouTube video in which a young woman suddenly keels over and dies in a diner while sitting across from none other than Frank. Plunged into the trauma that has defined her life, Maya heads to her Berkshires hometown to relive that fateful summer—the influence Frank once had on her and the obsessive jealousy that nearly destroyed her friendship with Aubrey.

At her mother’s house, she excavates fragments of her past and notices hidden messages in her deceased Guatemalan father’s book that didn’t stand out to her earlier. To save herself, she must understand a story written before she was born, but time keeps running out, and soon, all roads are leading back to Frank’s cabin….

Utterly unique and captivating, The House in the Pines keeps you guessing about whether we can ever fully confront the past and return home.

Ana Reyes has an MFA from Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Bodega, Pear Noir, The New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles where she teaches creative writing to older adults at Santa Monica College. The House in the Pines is her first novel.

______________

The People Who Report More Stress

Alejandro Varela
Astra House - February 7

[from the publisher]
The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.

In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs.

“The Man in 512” tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalog.

“Comrades” follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a long-term relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little tolerance for political moderates, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one.

A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.

_____________

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

Claire Jiménez

Grand Central Publishing - March 7

[from the publisher]
The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?

The years since Ruthy's disappearance haven't been easy on the Ramirez family. It’s 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.

After seeing maybe‑Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long‑lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future—with or without Ruthy in it.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.

______________________

Carmen and Grace

Melissa Coss Aquino

William Morrow - April 4

[from the publisher]
An emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama about two cousins lured into the underground drug trade at a young age and the inextricable ties that bind them, as one woman seeks power and the other seeks a way out—the debut of a vibrant and stunningly original new voice in fiction.

Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls—more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen’s upbringing too.

Durka is more than a beneficent force in their Bronx neighborhood, though. She’s also the leader of an underground drug empire, a larger-than-life matriarch who understands the vital importance of taking what power she can in a world too often ruled by violent men. So, when Durka dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, Carmen and Grace’s lives are thrown into chaos. Grace has been primed to take over and has grand plans to expand the business. While Carmen is ready to move on—from the shadow of Durka and her high expectations and, most of all, from always looking over her shoulder in fear. She’s also harboring a secret: she’s pregnant and starting to show, and desperate to build a new life before the baby arrives.

But how can Carmen leave the only family she’s ever known—this tight sisterhood of women known as the D. O. D., a group of lost girls turned skilled professionals under Durka’s guiding hand, all bonded in their spirituality and merciless support for one another—especially now, when outside threats are circling, and Grace’s plans are speeding recklessly forward?

As tough and tender as its main characters, Carmen and Grace will grab readers from the first page with its raw beauty, depth of feeling, and heart-pounding plot. A moving meditation on the choices of women and the legacy of violence, it’s a devastatingly wise and intimate story about the bonds of female friendship, ambition, and found family.

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The Haunting of Alejandra

V. Castro

Del Rey - April 18

[from the publisher]
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.

Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.

When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.

Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.

But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.

V. Castro was born in San Antonio, Texas, to Mexican American parents. She’s been writing horror stories since she was a child, always fascinated by Mexican folklore and the urban legends of Texas. Castro now lives in the United Kingdom with her family, writing and traveling with her children.

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The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants

Orlando Ortega-Medina

Amble Press - April 25

[from the publisher]
Award-winning author and immigration attorney Orlando Ortega-Medina returns to 1990s San Francisco in The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants, a powerful family drama that plays out within a captivating legal thriller.

Attorney Marc Mendes, the estranged son of a prominent Rabbi and a burned-out lawyer with addiction issues, plots his exit from the big city to a more peaceful life in idyllic Napa Valley. But before realizing his dream, the US government summons his Salvadoran life partner Isaac Perez to immigration court, threatening him with deportation.

As Marc battles to save Isaac, his world is further upended by a dark and alluring client who aims to tempt him away from his messy life. Torn between his commitment to Isaac and the pain-numbing escapism offered by his client, Marc is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils while confronting his twin demons of past addiction and guilt over the death of his first lover.

Inspired by events that forced the author and his partner to emigrate from the United States because of marriage inequality, The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants is an extraordinary and timely tale about the value of family and friendship, loyalty and love in the face of adversity.

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The Male Gazed

Manuel Betancourt

Catapult - May 30

[from the publisher]
Featuring deep dives into thirst traps, drag queens, Antonio Banderas, and telenovelas—all in the service of helping us reframe how we talk about (desiring) men—this insightful memoir-in-essays is as much a coming of age as a coming out book

Manuel Betancourt has long lustfully coveted masculinity—in part because he so lacked it. As a child in Bogotá, Colombia, he grew up with the social pressure to appear strong, manly, and, ultimately, straight. And yet in the films and television he avidly watched, Betancourt saw glimmers of different possibilities. From the stars of telenovelas and the princes of Disney films to pop sensation Ricky Martin and teen heartthrobs in shows like Saved By the Bell, he continually found himself asking: Do I want him or do I want to be him?

The Male Gazed grapples with the thrall of masculinity, examining its frailty and its attendant anxieties even as it focuses on its erotic potential. Masculinity, Betancourt suggests, isn’t suddenly ripe for deconstruction—or even outright destruction—amid so much talk about its inherent toxicity. Looking back over decades’ worth of pop culture’s attempts to codify and reframe what men can be, wear, do, and desire, this book establishes that to gaze at men is still a subversive act.

Written in the spirit of Hanif Abdurraqib and Olivia Laing, The Male Gazed mingles personal anecdotes with cultural criticism to offer an exploration of intimacy, homoeroticism, and the danger of internalizing too many toxic ideas about masculinity as a gay man.

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Rivermouth:  A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration 

Alejandra Oliva

Astra House - June 20

[from the publisher]
In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family’s long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone’s trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration and looks at how language and opportunity move through each of them; from the river as the waterway that separates the US and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border.

With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who “deserves” American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?

As investigative and analytical as she is meditative and introspective, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is compassionate, in Rivermouth, Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.

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Family Lore

Elizabeth Acevedo

Ecco - August 1

[from the publisher]
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor forseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.

But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets. Matilde has tried for decades to cover the extent of her husband’s infidelity, but she must now confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora is typically the most reserved sister, but Flor’s wake motivates this driven woman to solve her sibling’s problems. Camila is the youngest sibling, and often the forgotten one, but she’s decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted.

And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own: Yadi is reuniting with her first love, who was imprisoned when they were both still kids; Ona is married for years and attempting to conceive. Ona must decide whether it’s worth it to keep trying—to have a child, and the anthropology research that’s begun to feel lackluster.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces—one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.

Later.

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Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction. Read his latest story, Northside Nocturne, in Denver Noir, edited by Cynthia Swanson, published by Akashic Books.

Chicanonautica: Crossfire at the Chicano/Latinx Intersection

by Ernest Hogan

Way the chingau back in 2021, I did one of these columns titled “Whachacallus?” in which I pondered the problems of what all of us in the Latinoid continuum should call ourselves. Now in 2023, I’m starting on a new project, and stumbling over how to tell people about it. Is it Chicano? Latino? Latinx? Each one carries issues that can snafu the simple task of letting people know who we are and what we are doing.

Goddammit, it shouldn’t be such a pendejada.

I call myself a Chicano. The word that conveys how old I am, and what part of the planet I’m from, and the politics that spawned me.

A lot of markets that are willing to publish me (need I mention that not being Anglo has been a stumbling block in my career?) have called themselves Latino, and recently Latinx. As a Chicano who has been publishing since 1982, I’ve learned that I can’t be picky about who publishes me. When I find willing publishers, I tend to stick with them, even though they don’t pay much (if anything) and aren’t usually considered high-class. 

Going through my résumé, most of the places I’ve published have “science fiction” as part of my name. Also “Latino,” “Chicano,” and “Latinx.”

All of those are considered offensive to somebody.

Everything is offensive to somebody.

Anyway, I tend to not care about what people call me or how they categorize me. I’m a confusing mestizoid/ rasquache mess. I never know what people are going to think I am. I enjoy the confusion that telling them I’m a Chicano causes. I’ve been taken for black—Harlan Ellison assumed I was a negro. I’ve been told, “You’re so smart—I thought you were Jewish.” Also: "You look more like an Arab than a Mexican." And in Taos I was once called a “dumb fucking white" person.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying cyberpunk, but if you Google me there’s a lot about me being a Chicano cyberpunk.

Sometimes people doubt that I really exist. I’ve got to admit, I’m pretty damn unlikely.

Some of my fellow Chicanos not only don’t like the newfangled "Latinx" (I’m  reminded how the old gente bitched about Chicano back in the Seventies) but also hate "Latino", and "Hispanic." 

Latinx is popular on the campus and with academia. The Pew Research Center says that one in four “U. S. Hispanics” have heard of Latinx and only a third use the term.

 Academics teach and promote my work, and I fully acknowledge that they saved my career. They publish me in anthologies with Latinx in the title. 

They also pay me. I kinda gave up making a living as a writer years ago, but by the nature of the job, I am a dreamer . . .

Anglos keep telling me that nobody uses Chicano anymore. Meanwhile, across the border, in proper Latin America (isn’t Aztlán Latin America?) Latinx is considered a joke. And Spanish-speakers don’t like Anglophones telling them how to speak Spanish.

Ever try to speak Spanish replacing the Os and As with Xs? How do you pronounce it?

What do I do when the hipper New York publishers, trying to be woke, use Latinx, then get yelled at by angry Chicanos?

Looks like we are one long, hard, perpetual identity crisis.

Good thing I enjoy me some chaos.

Ernest Hogan keeps getting more Chicano sci-fi ideas and dreaming of global and intergalactic barrios.