On display until May 1 at the Art Auction in The Washington Pavilion Visual Arts Center, Sioux Falls, SD, then up for auction May 7 (Click at Art Auction).

Hector Curriel, of Lima, Peru, is an artist and illustrator;

his email address is: hcurriel777@yahoo.com.

↧

Just a century ago: the war against Mexican Americans in south Texas

October 27, 2015, 10:02 pm

≫ Next: Worshipping a former love

≪ Previous: A vision of South Dakota on canvas

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Interview of John Morán Gonzales, Associate Professor, Department of English and Center for Mexican American Studies, UT Austin

Host:Joan Neuberger, Professor, Department of History, UT Austin; Editor of “Not Even Past”

In the early part of the 20th century, Texas became more integrated into the United States with the arrival of the railroad. With easier connections to the country, its population began to shift away from reflecting its origins as a breakaway part of Mexico toward a more Anglo demographic, one less inclined to adapt to existing Texican culture and more inclined to view it through a lens of white racial superiority. Between 1915 and 1920, an undeclared war broke out that featured some of the worst racial violence in American history; an outbreak that’s become known as the Borderlands War.

John Morán Gonzales, from UT’s Department of English and Center for Mexican American Studies has curated an exhibition on the Borderlands War called, “Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920,” and tells us about this little known episode in Mexican American history.

[The podcast can be heard at Podcast Audio (mp3—right click to download).

The transcription follows:

Q: Our topic today is the Borderlands War that took place between 1915 and 1920 approximately, on the border between Texas and Mexico. Could you start with a definition or outline of what happened?

A: Essentially it was a period of violence, in which there was an undeclared war between the Anglo Texan and Mexican American communities, in which there was violence perpetrated by both sides, but the brunt of the violence was directed by the state and local authorities against the Mexican American population.

Q: What made this period so violent? What was the situation at the time?

A: The context for this was the rapid change in the economy — a ranching economy dominated by Mexican Americans into a farming economy dominated by newcomer Anglo Texans. The rapid change during the previous 10-20 years had resulted in a displacement of the old order, the old Mexican American order along the border, with the new Jim Crow style segregation.

Q: Under the ranching economy, was there more cooperation, or were there fewer Anglos?

A: There were certainly fewer Anglos coming to the border region prior to the turn of the century, prior to the arrival of the railroad in this region in 1904. And so those Anglos who did come in tended to inter-marry into established Mexican American ranching families and became essentially Mexicanized. After that, the number of newcomers coming in with decidedly different views about Mexican racial inferiority went there to exploit cheap land and cheap labor.

Q: Who were the main targets of the violence?

A: The main targets of the violence were the general Mexican American population of the area who were often perceived to be in cahoots with raiders and other guerilla fighters who were against the changes that occurred.

Q: About how many were killed during this violence?

A: Estimates are very hard to come by precisely because many of the incidents were covered up by those who perpetrated them, particularly those of law enforcement. The estimates range from a low of 300-500 to 3,000-5,000, which was a figure that Walter Prescott Webb, the hagiographer of the Texas rangers, came up with in his 1935 history of the rangers.

Q: Why did the violence escalate at this point?

A: The violence escalated because the Mexican Americans of that region who had been displaced from their place with the society and economy of the region very much resented the new racial order imposed upon them by the Anglo newcomers.

They were disenfranchised in terms of their social status, they were disenfranchised literally in terms of their votes as white only primaries became the norm and therefore they saw their power ebbing away. So this built up a great deal of resentment with the new order.

Q: Did the state of Texas play a role in supporting or trying to limit the violence? Were they on a particular side?

A: The state authorities, particularly as embodied by the Rangers, were perpetrators of some of the worst violence of this period. Extra judicial killings of Mexican Americans by the Rangers was quite common in this period, often taking the form of “shot dead attempting to flee” kind of scenarios. So the Rangers were very much part of the problem rather than an attempt to ameliorate the situation.

And certain segments of the newcomer community very much welcomed what they saw as putting the local Mexican American population in their place. There were lynchings, shootings in the back, decapitations, mutilation of bodies. There was one instance in which bottles were inserted into the mouths of those who were executed. The violence was extreme and the kind of symbolism attached to it was equally extreme.

Q: One Texas newspaper you quote as saying that this was a good thing because there was a serious surplus population that needed eliminating. Was that a widespread sentiment?

A: It was to the extent that the Mexican population was viewed as a kind of necessary evil. That is, on one hand, many newcomers came to that region of Texas expecting to be able to use a cheap labor force for their economic endeavors. On the other hand they represented a threat because of their ability to vote and hence the idea of a surplus population that needed trimming is an expression of this latter sentiment.

Q: Can you give us some examples of some of the things that happened?

A: Yes, the summer of 1915, particularly the months of August through October, saw the height, the most intense violence in the region. In one instance, in late September of 1915, there was a clash between Texas Rangers and about 40 Mexican Americans in Hidalgo County, where Rangers took a dozen prisoners and promptly hung them and their bodies were left to rot for days.

In another instance that same month, Texas Ranger captain Henry Ransom shot landowners Jesus Bazan and Antonio Longoria once again leaving their bodies out in the open to rot. And at one point Ransom reported to Ranger headquarters in Austin that: “I drove all the Mexicans from three ranches.”

Q: Did state officials just turn a blind eye to the violence in the sense that they supported it? Or were there investigations? What was the state role here?

A: The Rangers had received clear signals from the Governor’s office and other authorities that they had a free rein to handle or control the situation as they saw fit. That is, a clear sign that no one would be prosecuted for any extra judicial killings. The depredations only came to a stop when Brownsville State Representative José Tomás Canales initiated an investigation of the Ranger force and their actions over the previous decade in 1919.

Q: So why would the Rangers, a force that was created to protect the residents of Texas, commit this violence against Mexican Americans?

A: Essentially, they were in the service of consolidating the new, white, supremacist order in south Texas. That is, essentially, the purpose of the violence was to send a clear signal that Mexican Americans would be dealt with harshly if they attempted any opposition to this new order, whether through the ballot box or other means.

Q: Did the Mexican government play any role in what was going on?

A: The Mexican government did not have a direct role in this, because the country was in the middle of a revolution. There was constant instability over which faction controlled which parts of the border. It was more the climate of instability that allowed raiders to cross back and forth across the Rio Grande with impunity and created a sense of siege by the Anglo community in this part of south Texas.

Q: Can you say anything about the raiders themselves, that is, the people who were resisting changes taking place in the economy and then eventually the violence being perpetrated on them by the Rangers and other forces?

A: This group is often referred to as Los Sediciosos or seditious ones and they attempted to essentially oust the new Anglo order by these guerrilla raids upon ranches, the derailing of a train near Brownsville, and these sorts of actions, but they were very much constrained by the small number of raiders as well as the state’s overwhelming use of force against them.

Q: So you said that the violence finally subsided when State Representative Canales called for an investigation of the Rangers in 1919. And that’s the conventional ending of the violence. Did it continue after that?

A: Well, in fact, it did. I think the most egregious episode was the Porvenir Massacre in West Texas in 1918 when Rangers executed 15 Mexican men, separated them from their families, and then executed them. Now I have to say the role of the U.S. Army was crucial here in beginning to tamp down the extra-judicial actions of the Rangers and local vigilantes.

U.S. soldiers, sent to deal with the violence along the border,
on the bridge connecting Brownsville and Matamoros,
with Mexican counterparts

Courtesy Runyon Photograph Collection, The Briscoe Center for American History,

The University of Texas at Austin

Q: What did they do?

A: Essentially they very much saw the Rangers and the local sheriffs as part of the problem, as continuing the violence rather than defusing it. Mexican Americans began to see the federal government, in the guise of the US Army, as being on their side in some respects.

Q: So we have this very complicated picture where we have a changing economy, we have a revolution going on south of the border, we have people trying to make a living, a small group of people violently resisting the changes, and the representatives of the state of Texas trying to suppress them but also carrying out violence against people randomly as well. What was the response of other people? Was there any sort of peace movement? Was there any cooperation among newcomers, Anglos, other European settlers, and the Mexican Americans there? How did other people respond?

A: Yes, it was a complicated picture because certainly there were Tejanos who were aiding the Rangers and other parties in the suppression of the Mexican American community and, on the other hand, there were Anglo settlers who were very much appalled at the violence being perpetrated against local communities. One of them was Brownsville lawyer and historian Frank Cushman Pierce who compiled a list of 102 victims, entirely on his own time. Then he also confronted Lon C Hill who was one of the major developers of Harlingen, Texas, about his role in these incidents.

Q: In supporting the Rangers, in supporting the violence?

A: Yes.

Q: What then are some of the short-term consequences of this violence? It must have been incredibly disruptive.

A: Absolutely. The violence in the lower Rio Grande valley in particular resulted in the depopulation of rural areas as Mexican American residents fled to the relative safety of border towns or crossed into Mexico for safety. This only accelerated the transfer of land to newcomer Anglos as Mexican Americans abandoned their lands.

This also had implications for Mexican Americans from this area as they were drafted into military service for the First World War. They resisted the summons to serve precisely because they could not reconcile the violence visited upon them by the U.S. with service in the same military that they saw as part of the problem. And they were termed slackers in the language of the day for allegedly slacking off their duty as patriotic citizens.

One other implication was that Walter Prescott Webb essentially launched his career, his academic career, in reaction to the Canales investigation. He wrote his 1922 Master’s thesis as an apology for the role of Rangers during this period and later transformed that piece into his hagiography of the Rangers, the 1935Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which is still a perennial best seller for the University of Texas Press.

Q: What are some of the long-term consequences of the violence?

A: This event tremendously impacted the development of Mexican American civil rights organizations. During the 1920s, Mexican Americans began to organize in new ways, in new kinds of political and civic organizations devoted to the promotion of Mexican American civil rights. The exemplary one from this period would be the League of United Latin American Citizens, which formed in 1929. LULAC emphasized the idea that Mexican Americans had to cement their political allegiance to the United States rather than to Mexico because the United States would be the nation that would protect them from any future violence directed against them. This was the cultural project of this civil rights organization.

Q: This is a really fascinating history that people don’t know much about. You got involved because you’re part of a group that is putting on an exhibit about the Borderlands War at the Bullock Museum of Texas History, is that right? Can you tell us a little about that exhibit and what its purpose is?

A: The exhibit is called, “Life on the Border, 1910-1920,” and the purpose is to raise the public’s awareness of this incident and the major role it’s had in shaping Mexican American life in Texas. The role of the state in perpetrating this violence is something that we as a group have wanted specifically to highlight with this project with the goal of making connections with questions of policing communities of color, which are obviously relevant today.

Q: We’re looking forward to that exhibit and you’re hoping to have the exhibit, after its run at the Bullock, travel around Texas to the Borderland region but also to the rest of Texas to bring this story to the population?

A: We’re hoping to take it nationally.

Even better.

John Morán Gonzales, a Brownsville, Texas, native, is an Associate Professor in the English Department at The University of Texas at Austin and Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies. His works include Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009), The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, (Ohio State University Press, 2010), and is currently editingThe Cambridge Companion to Latina/o Literatureand co-editing (with Laura Lomas) The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature.

Photo by Andrea Kurth
Daily Texan Staff

Joan Neuberger, professor in the UT Austin Department of History, studies modern Russian culture in social and political context. She is the author of an eclectic range of books, from Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (California: 1993) to Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (Palgrave: 2003); and co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (Duke: 2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (Yale: 2008). She is Editor of the History Department's website, Not Even Past and co-host, with Christopher Rose, of the podcast series, 15 Minute History.

The interview was podcast as Episode 73 on October 7, 2015; it can be accessed at Life and Death on the Border.

↧

Worshipping a former love

April 3, 2016, 7:22 pm

≫ Next: Where reality slips into trance

≪ Previous: Just a century ago: the war against Mexican Americans in south Texas

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Follow us on Twitter @Somosenescrito

A

love

song

and

three

verses

La Coquetona, a short story/un cuento...

...accompanied by three poems

By Davíd Vela

Do you love me?

Yes.

Why did you stop calling me, then?

Because losing your friendship was too much.

Don’t you want children?

Yes.

Why didn’t you tell me that then?

Felipe, it’s midnight. Please, let me sleep. I am sleeping.

Alright. Just a minute, though. I have a few questions . . .

. . .

Gaciela de la O. Gaciela M. de la O. Where are you, and why do you call me on my birthdays? Is it because we were twinned at birth five hundred and ten years ago?

Why do you continually seek me, then not let that kiss, that intimacy, that coupling of souls, happen? Why do you not pursue what you want, what we both want? Why do you doubt?

Is it because we were children of what Octavio Paz calls the grand rape? Spain conquering – la madre patria– straddling our Mexícas inseminating, then leaving? Is that what our European fathers did? Leave us? Is this what you are so afraid of my, our love? Because, like your father, you think I will leave you?

Her voice is like harp strings touched by the hands of an Archangel – baroque, sad, fallen. Her mouth tastes like the ripe sweet juice of a mango when I split it open with my tongue. And kissing you, Gaciela, was like opening an exotic odiferous flower. Kissing you was like touching with my own tongue a honey-laced voice, a flowering of delicate and fine Mestizo tequila, the fragrance of la flor del naranjo.

Gaciela’s eyes: I have no words for them in this language. Neither in Castellano. Nor in English.

You think, Gorda, that I am fascinated, like Fuentes or Rodríguez, with green eyes, and with blue eyes, because my last lovers had them.

–But you are wrong.

The loveliest eyes in the world are my mother’s, color de café, café Veracruzano, eyes from Oaxaca and Puebla, and Madre México’s ojitos, nutbrown, smooth like tamarind, swirl of chocolate; next to hers yours are the prettiest eyes I have ever seen.

Como color de chocolate mexicano, tus ojitos, mamá. Como color de la bahía de San Francisco cuando hay sol, los tuyos, Gaciela.

And they change, your eyes. Just like your moods. Like your sugar-surges that blind you and put you into a blissful place. Those eyes are seachanging eyes. Those amber, then coffee, then seagreen, then cinnamonspeckledwithgreenandgold eyes. Yours. Shaped like almonds. Beautiful.

Sometimes smiling eyes, tus ojos. (I loved them most when you were smiling at me and laughing and when you let go with your body, your eyes, sparking green and gold and tamarind slits, eyes that turned into arches . . .) Your ojitos más bonitos cuando se hacen arcos en alegría.

Once I saw in those eyes an abyss of loss, anger, then nothingness, like an astronomer staring into naked singularities and brown dwarfs . . .

Y tus manos. Esas manos tuyas. – Your hands, yes. Those hands. Sculpted like fine marble. Whatever Spanish or French blood you have, those hands are not Indian hands. No. Those hands are porcelain, and long, and thin. Your nails are healthier than any other part of your body.

Luminescent hands, those hands. Hands that clasp and clap. Elegant hands. Hands I held until November, and then only once. Only once did you allow me to hold your hands. Warm, those hands, soft, like white corn tortillas; I placed them in mine, asking you if you would accept me, my offer to court you. You mocked me in your silence and in the pained look on your face.

Gaciela.

Yes.

¿Puedo sentarme junto a ti? ¿Me dejas?

We were in the pub that looked onto the trains as they roll forward into Jack London Square. Those trains, which take one to Santa Clara, San José, Sacramento, trains like the ones our fathers worked on in México.

I have something to tell you, Gacielita.

O.K., Felipe. Tell me.

We both looked ahead, the sun was setting, reflecting off of the windows. That sun was setting forever.

The waitress, alta y rubia, sunny herself, was smiling at us; perhaps she also admired the sun setting. Or maybe she knew from my body torsion, its attitude, that a declaration, a proposal, something romantic, was at hand.

I placed myself right next to your sweet little soft white mestizo body, nestled next to your left hip, Gaci, a hip I wanted to caress, to trace the shape of with my darker hand.

This is going to be hard for me to say because we have been friends for so long.

O.K. Let me know. Tell me.

I love you.

Yes.

I have always loved you.

Your face blushed and your eyes registered not surprise, not wonder, not joy. No. They registered something akin to humor and to pain. We are comic, tragic beings, Gaciela. This is what Fuentes and Reyes and Paz have said: Mexicanos: Comic and tragic beings.

Ja ja ja ja, ja: Humor and pain. A worthy Mexican response, Gaci.

I am flattered. – That’s what you said. Flattered. What an ugly, crestfallen response.

I am not asking you if you are flattered.

By now I was holding your hands closer to my heart, trying to turn to you, but the floral green and white cushioned bench inhibited me, making the feudal declaration all the more comical. Your blouse was opening, and I could see your abundant mother-of-pearl breasts, a nacre bosom, fresh like gardenias, fragrant. I wanted to bury my head into your breasts and discover your silence.

Well, Felipe, I’ll have to think about what you’re saying. You’re putting me on the spot. I don’t know what to say. We’re friends. We’ve been friends for so long.

I am willing to risk that friendship, Gaci.

I don’t know that I am.

Cuerpo de una mujer (13)
March 12, 2016

I trace the earthbrown curve
Of your foot, caress your instep.
Your feet touch clay neither I nor you
Knew was home.
I kiss your sunblest shoulders,
Your dress cascading over fertile breasts.
I trace my learning finger over your small soft ear
While wind and hands lift your nightblack hair
Falling over your eyes.
Your eyes speak softly one-thousand gestures as
You rest your hands in your lap where I wish to lie;
I trace my hands along earthly ochre curves,
Your half-moon hips, your life-full thighs.
My lips taste your lips,
My eyes taste your eyes.

I walked you to your truck, that vehicle which swallows you up, that black hulking ship that reminds me of the Serbian warlords marauding in Croatia and Bosnia, their automatic weapons hanging out of their windows. The same kind of vehicle los narcos use today.

That vehicle of yours was menacing, just like your response, your scorn, your indecision.

I walk you over. I gently spin you toward me before you drive away. (On the sidewalk you are on the inside, and naturally I move to the outside as we cross the street. You notice and ask me where I learned that, that you only encountered that in Chihuahua, where your uncles lived. I replied that I learned such normal things as that, from my father, and brothers and uncles.

You smiled an almost pretty but what was more a sarcastic painful smile, a smile I know now your mother smiles when she knows that she knows more than you or me, or anyone else.

I turn you round to me.

I ask you not to go. Not yet.

You drop your head and smile, reminding me of a story my father told me of the coyote he tried to adopt, una coquetona, but he had to let that coyote go. She was wild and had to go back to the wild. Indomable, Untameable. His father, my grandfather, warned him.

You drop your head, Gaci,

– I pull you to me.

I kiss you. It’s awkward at first, then delicious.

My hand cradles your perfectly-shaped head. I feel your silken dark brown hair, hair that falls out because you change the color of your hair every month, fickle that hair, fickle you.

–I kiss you, cradling your precious small face with its high cheekbones.

An abrupt kiss. But it savors of sweet mango, of México, and leaves me with incipient desires.

Te dejo.

And you leave in that menacing black vehicle. And you do not call, even though I ask you to.

- -

We did kiss again, though. Yes, we did. You came to me then, just as you always did (and do).

That one long kiss, a kiss not true, not false, a kiss you denied happened for twelve years.

We were under the clear skies, rare for where I live, no fog, constellations smiling on us.

Look how pretty the stars are, you said.

Yes, finally I get to see them with you. I have waited to be under the stars with you, mijita, mi linda. We could always speak in two languages, pero no atropellamos, combinamos con gusto los idiomas.

And you were quiet. I had to turn your body around so we both could look up. You fit perfectly against my chest and neck. My hands were around your soft middle. You wore grey sweat pants, nothing underneath but a light white frilled underwear. A soft white top, and your beautiful breasts, full, pendant, harnessed by your modesty.

Your eyes were sparkling like those stars. When a star dies, what becomes of it, my dear Gaci? (Will I find you again after our lights become one light, matter, debris, then infinite darkness?)

That kiss that night was the kiss that defined all for me, for good.

Yes. That kiss, which remains the deepest, richest, most satisfying and delicious kiss any woman proffered me. That kiss went down to el alma, my soul. That kiss re-emerged with an essence that was created over four-hundred years ago with the tomato and the orange, orange-blossom, naranjo, chiles y chocolate, xocoát, y el alhelí.

That was a soulkiss.

Besasme hasta mi alma, Gaci.

I turned you around, for you had pulled me to your warm soft body . . .

- -

I am near your house, you said.

¿De veras?

Yes.

Why?

I am taking a friend to catch her BART train home. We were at the gym, and then we ate dinner.

Why did you call? Your offices are nearer the trains than to my home. You need only emerge at 12th street and descend . . .

Ah, a little game, Gaci. O.K. I am game.

I have a question for you, Felipe.

O.K. What is it?

What is this Adam and Jason’s?

A pub. It used to be The Lobby. Marjorie and I would listen to live music there; Jazz, seafood, it was a better place then– and then I’d put her on the train and make my way home. Why?

I know your schedule, Felipe. You were headed to the gym.

True. You are right. I like to lift at nights. I could tell you were near. Driving my streets. Hunting, questioning, wondering.

What is Manila Street?

My cross street. A little dance, Gaci?

I still don’t know how you can do that and not stay awake all night.

It helps me sleep. It’s like a prayer; my body needs exhaustion before I can sleep.

Now I am at McPherson’s Pub. What kind of long route is she taking? She’s driving in circles. I doubt she took anybody to the BART station.

Yes, that pub’s gone downhill, too. The bartenders ignore the people who have lived here for years and cater to the tech people, the snotty juvenile, loud types. The ones who think they are clever, those.

And now I am heading back. (Oye, Gaci. ¿Que haces?)

Heading back? Where are you going, Gaci?

She flipped a U-turn (regression).

Finally she arrives.

There’s a man greeting a little cat.

Yes, that’s Gerold, my neighbor, and Melanie, his cat.

You are in front of my house. Why don’t you come in?

(I was packing my gym bag, placing my shoes, my gloves and shirt inside, ready to leave when you roll up in all of the glory of your soft brown hair, and your delicate white hands, those full lips, those hazel eyes . . . and that sonorous if musical voice, speaking to me in the perfect intercalation of Castilian and English.)

Why don’t you come in and have a glass of wine with me? (Yes, please come in, I don’t need to work out, your beauty and voice are enough to get my pulse up, my muscles ready, my testosterone up.)

Monterrey, Mexico:

As far back as I can remember, the heat was oppressive, but the evenings on Mount Chipinque were a cool, pleasant refuge from the heat and aridity and the noise of the lowlands. This is where some of my mother’s people arrived, close to where the San Patricio battalion fought American invasores in the now celebrated battle of Monterrey. The irony for us now is that Irishmen and Germans, abused by the West Point officers, swam over the tributaries of the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo to fight for México. Lt. John Riley, expert at cannon, aimed his eight-pounders at Zachary Taylor’s, Old Rough and Ready, emerging columns, the defense from El Obispado and the hills which made for keen firing.

Irish snipers and cannon men were at the ready when the Americans arrived . . .

Felipe, we also come from the desert, two states over from Nuevo León, Parral, Chihuahua. though I was born in Sunnyvale, I spent all of my summers in Parral, with my uncles and with my maternal grandmother. We ate papaya and mango, and fresh bananas, and we drank piping hot coffee (the only cure for the humid heat of summers there). Our eggs scrambled with machaca, drowned in green chiles, the juices freshly squeezed, and the birds singing in the trees of my grandfather’s farm.

Y yo, mi Gaci, con mi tío Heberto, comiendo bien en la mañana, tomando cafecito, huevos divorciados o en salsa verde, las guacamayas, loros y los cenzontles cantando, averiguando. In the trees, amor, aves, mocking birds, and below the terrace, peacocks. Swallows everywhere, squirrels stealing sesame seeds and sunflower seeds from the birds’ cages, a chattering and a singing and a joy every morning.

We ate, Felipe, my uncles laughed, teased me. Their dark brown eyes, Felipe, I remember. My mother is the only one who had the light blue eyes. My uncles’ hands were manicured, though they worked hard on the farm as boys and young men; they had rings on their fingers, foulards on their necks. What they smelled like, each neck, I knew one by one who was who from the time I was a girl until now: when I kissed them goodbye as they went to work they all smelled of cologne, fresh soap, tortillas, café.

The pressed suits and the inimical heat of Monterrey is what I remember from age nine onward. This mirrored the heat, was twin to it, of the Mojave desert, where I grew up.

I stayed with my grandmother, Felipe, living in a Spanish that was equally for me my first skin, the language you and I play with, communicate with when I let myself go, and when you remember who you are with me.

Les orteils de Ghenwa

I want to dip your toes into honey and

Chocolate, then count them by kisses;

I watch you weave with fingers and hands

Like waves of water and wind tender meaning.

I want to bite the condyles of your ankles,

Tasting the peach-pit – then travel up

The blades of your shins to bashful knees with

Anticipation like arriving at the temple of Baal.

I want to hear your voice, primed by primal honey,

Mother-inflected, before we imbibe champagne

Pink, salt, bubbling -- before I pour soft warm water

On your feet – before I suck your toes in primal waters,

Then kiss your lips smeared in chocolate, kiss your feet,

Fingers, mouth, and hands into salt, into oblivion.

Sí, mi vida. Some names are not the same in English, are they? Parrots: Perícos. Mocking birds: Cenzontles. Swallows (much better in Castilian): Golondrinas. Peacocks: Pavos Reales.

Amor, Cariño – There is no translation for this word (tenderness, perhaps?) –

My people are from the lower part of the sinuous República, Puebla, Puebla y Apizaco, Tlaxcala. That latter land is as passionate and rugged as your Parral. As durable as the Mexican alma. Winds and rain arrive with a celerity to wash away the dust and to soak the plants and the trees.

My father was born and raised there.

Mami was born in Puebla. And Puebla is like my mother: clean, colonial, proper, the presence of Holy fathers and nuns undeniable, the Jesuits’ imprint indiscutible.

The food, Ah, distinto del barbacoa de Apizaco, cabrito, carnero, carne de res. Mole Poblano derigueur – chocolate, los chiles distintos, nueces, todo molido, like us, my dear, like us, mesclados, un meztizaje, like ours, yours, mine, blood and colours; you and I, tu blanquita, cremosa, you, And I morenito, quemadito.

The food, oh yes, the food, and the rains that fall like something apocalyptic while we eat under the roof of the terraces, the drops dancing off of the red tiles: my madrecita’s food: tortillas fritas con puerco, mole poblano, chalupitas, tortillas fritas con carne deshebrada y cebolla picada. Fried tortillas, salsa, shredded carne, diced onions, the mole made of three chiles, pasilla, ancho y mulatto. (Why mulatto, mi linda? Because of its color, like the skin of a mulatto, in-between dark and light, my mother would relate to me); Almendras, ajo, pasas, pan, dorado y remojado, todo esto se muele junto. Se disuelve en el caldo. One dissolves this in broth, almonds, garlic, raisins, toasted then soaked bread. Sale como un puré. It comes out like a puree. Se disuelve en el caldo – one dissolves it in the broth, se agrega el chocolate, and one adds the chocolate.

Para el mole verde: tomatillo, ajo, chile verde, mucho cilantro, todo este se muele, luego se le pone la carne de puerco. For the green mole small green tomatoes, garlic, green chiles, lots of cilantro, all of this one blends together, then one adds the pork. This my mother taught me. . .

Ah, but that kiss, dear, what about that kiss? You denied that it even happened.

- What happened last Wednesday?

- I don’t know.

- What do you mean you don’t know?!

- Just saying goodbye?

- What?! Goodbye?

- And you kissed me.

- I kissed you?!

- Yes. (So sure of yourself.) I don’t know what that was about . . .

- Well, if you are going to deny . . .

When I let you into my home you were in your mousegrey pants, a dovegrey sweatshirt. Your cheeks were the colour of mamey, flushed. You were full and blush as the mamey fruits we ate together the first time we spoke Spanish on the red-tiled terrace in Northern California, land that used to be continuous with México.

You swayed your little head back and forth. You drank some wine, asked about my books, what I was teaching, what writing. It was pleasant, your visit, pero no me dejé – I didn’t let myself be taken in by you. You smiled more that night than in all of the seventeen years of friendship we shared.

Your lips were full, your eyes darker and larger than the night.

Though those eyes began to drift, they registered an opening to me, light. That night, too, they were hazel and brown, green and speckled. I remembered café veracruzano. We chatted. Laughed. Then you began to sway. Sugar. Or lack of it. I recommended that you go before – but I did not want you to leave. I wanted you to stay. I offered to take care of you, help you find insulin. But you said no.

-Pápi, what happened to your coyote?

La tuve que dejar en los cerros.

¿Porqué?

Porque me mordió. No se le podía quitarle lo salvaje.

She bit me. You can’t tame a wild beast.

Oh. Me da tristeza, Pápi.

No, mijito. Los coyotes deben de estar en los campos.

- I recommended that you leave before your blood sugar levels plummeted. You assented and we walked to your vehicle.

Look how pretty the stars are, you said.

Yes, finally I get to see them with you.

And you were quiet. You leaned against me. You began to surrender your body to mine.

I had to turn you around to see the sparkling stars.

_________________________________________

Les os d’echo
Like Echo and Narcissus your beauty shall dissolve,

Your body evanesce; See in your daughter yourself,

What you lose – youth, beauty, promise –

Now all still yours, soon lost, fleeting

Like the Lebanon of your youth.

Voice smoky, hard -shaped – like you –

All you leave shall be bodiless – if you wish,
Sexless, as you want: How to recapture
Your voice, your soul, your body
Your desires?
You are made of fire, enlightening others’ fears,
Delimiting, leaving behind dead leaves,
Autumn lives, for a future far too-old for a woman
Who should bear our world one more child.
Stars, Surahs, valleys and snows you no longer see nor feel.
You do not believe in them any longer,
For men have shown you not to.
I want you to believe. Once:
Again: In me. In You. In Lebanon.
In Life - and in the promises of your youth.

___________________________________________

Your eyes were shining and sparkling with them. When a star dies, Gaci, what does it become? A black hole? A naked singularity? No light escapes these.

(Please Felipe, define for me what a naked singularity is. Tus ojos, mi linda, así es.)

Yes.

Luego el beso.

Then that kiss.

That kiss, which remains the deepest, richest, the most satisfying and sensual kiss any woman ever proffered. That kiss that went down to my soul, mi alma, reemerging with an essence created over four-hundred years ago.

Huelo jasmin en tus senos perfumados. – I smell jasmine on your perfumed breast. –

A kiss deep to the soul.

Did you bite me?

Yes, you did.

You bit my lips!

I spun you around so that you might see the stars better. You had pulled my body to yours, to your core, your center, your hips and the wetness of your body.

Your hair, your skin smelled like a baby’s.

Hueles a bebe.

Quisiera, you said.

Even then you could not take a compliment.

I held your head in my right hand and my left was cradling your hip. I reached down to glory.

I wanted to make love to you, but felt a deception. (The night was turning cold. I could not see past the now blackness of your eyes.) I pulled my body away from yours, but the kiss went on long after that – long and deep and rich and wet. Nos besamos en castellano. And in English, too, we kissed. We kissed and your tongue became one with mine. Ese beso se fue más alla de la noche. Brighter than the refulgence of the stars, that kiss. Redolent of evening and of death.

Your tongue was salacious, even (I never knew you had that in you, Gaci.) Your kiss reached my diaphragm, my lungs, my liver.

Tu saliva fue un dulce veneno para mi.

I had to twist my body around to see the stars with you.

Look how pretty the stars are.

Yes, I finally got to see them with you.

You know you can stay here with me.

No. I have to go. My mother is waiting. I have to inject myself. I don’t have any insulin with me.

I’ll get up early. There is a pharmacy nearby. I won’t be fresh. Te sere fiel y bueno. You can sleep in my bed. I’ll carry you.

No, Felipe.

No?

No.

Climbing back into that menacing black vehicle.

I asked you, but you said no.

I asked you to call when you arrived home, just to know you were safe.

But you didn’t.

Davíd Vela, formerly of Las Vegas, Nevada, now of Oakland, California, is an English professor at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California. A dedicated scholar of the giants of Latin American and Irish literature, he has a book on Jorge Luis Borges in the works, and is a budding short story writer and poet in his own right. He is a frequent and welcome contributor to Somos en escrito.

↧

Where reality slips into trance

April 27, 2016, 10:12 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Three poems in a crucible of meaning

Excerpts from sombra : (dis)locate, a collection of poems

By Raina J. León

All that time, waiting to bloom

Bathed in orange water,

she blossoms from her mouth,

alstroemeria, orange rose,

bupleurum, orchid, lily.

They unfold slowly,

the buds open one

after another

in the silent music

of wonder. Her

palms became rocky.

Even they have broken

to glory in orange bloom.

Mother is garden,

life in stillness.

Kiss her lips,

light as the bee

searching for nectar.

Burst, woman.

Alright, the songs die,

but the color music

plays on. Play on.

She flowers her eyes.

I can’t remember

the shade if it’s not light.

Çemberlitaş hamami

Without my glasses, all the world becomes Monet:

a fine pierced window in the hararet’s dome,

its pointed star to conjure a summer night

softens to pulsing circle that

enchants the steam to hiss and rise.

On the hot marble, my glasses

lie useless, the first wave of heat enough to fog

me near blind, so even my eyes are naked.

I simulate delicate decorum; soon I am near splayed

as the sweat forms rivulets running

down all this reddening earth.

My forehead hosts liquid pebbles. I turn and press

to gray marble, smoothed by the skin of generations.

The small becomes a newly formed lake.

Tiger marks stretch at my hips. For the first time,

I am not ashamed of patterns. I am surrounded

by taut and hang, girls in their play and crones

whose bodies have glowed, carried, birthed,

mourned. My breasts are among many breasts.

We are a tribe of sweat.

The attendant calls me over for my turn

of lemon-scented suds and the raw scrape

of loofah mitts until the dead flakes crust

in rolled balls of dirt. She washes them away

with vigorous hand, over and over again.

I have never been touched this way by a woman,

intimate and rough in the cleansing.

I am steeped in citrus spray from head to toe.

She pulls my hair as she washes,

then leads me to the founts,

fills a metal bowl with cold clean.

She sets to her ruthless work

erasing the frizzle of soap.

She points the way back to the dark pool,

the heated waters where nymphs are descending.

I dangle my feet a while. Those bathing

look hungry for flesh.

The slab receives my meditation again:

pulsing stars in a cloud stone dome. The scent of lemon

and musk, heated air so thick as to swim.

When the salty slick returns, I feel out

shining bowl and the frigid,

feel the silk that stretches across muscle and bone.

Querencia

Here the space where reality slips into trance,

the gossamer haunting of habit – a side of the bed, a tumbler

tapped on the bar before slipping fire down

an upturned throat, the ghost trail of fingers felt

on the breast before the seeker searches the hand

out to do its real work – querencia. More than fondness

for a place or a certain light, it is the tip of poison

in the pleasure, the lily of the valley with its curved,

white petals perched on a child’s tongue like a bell

just about to be rung.

Raina J. León, an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and this, her latest, sombra : (dis)locate, which is available from Salmon Poetry publishing, local bookstores, and online booksellers. León is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of LatinX writers.

↧

Wisdom from the ditch banks

May 5, 2016, 4:06 pm

≫ Next: My mini-Aztlan: Making Science Friction in 64 square feet

≪ Previous: Where reality slips into trance

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Follow us on Twitter @Somosenescrito

"Ditching"
G. Tom, A. Coleman, L. Medrano

Bringing our youth back to learning

In memory of Dr. Henry Casso, life-long advocate for education as a human right, who died February 25, 2014. He was Founding President of both the National Institute for Professional Development and Project Uplift, national programs which prepared Hispanic and New Mexican students for high technology careers.

By Mia Sosa-Provencio

Humans are born curious, born to act upon the world in ways we can see and touch. For anyone who has pulled buttons, quarters, hairballs, or pencils from the mouth of a baby, found the remote control lying with its wiry guts exposed, or answered unending questions like, ‘why is the sky blue’, you have witnessed curiosity. Many a living room wall has been the place where our children first acted upon the world with brilliantly colored crayons and markers. When we were children, we crossed the street without asking, read things we weren't supposed to, and walked into darkness just to see what lay on the other side.

We just couldn’t help it. Humans are intrinsically wired to investigate the world around us and to shape our surroundings. The hunger to know, to question, and to act upon that knowledge is our birthright but for many of our students, this curiosity and the ability to see oneself as an actor in the world has been lost along paths of schooling.

"Rather not go to the other side"
I. Smith, A. Gallegos, L. Medrano

Throughout my professional career in education spanning nearly 15 years, I have spent time consulting with experts in academic disengagement: panels of teenagers who convene on ditch banks, in school hallways, bathrooms, and parking lots when they should perhaps be in class. Their knowledge and wisdom is essential to reframing issues of truancy as issues of academic (dis)engagement.

Part of the work to improve truancy and graduation rates is statistical: counting the numbers of kids who are not physically with us. We count those who attend, who advance, who graduate, and those who do not. It is essential work, but there is no metric to measure the young people who leave us while remaining seated in their desks every day because they believe education has nothing to do with them, how they live, what they face, what they are best at, or their future.

Curriculum to Heal Our Histories

Improving truancy is deeply rooted in building curriculum and schools with the power to bring young people back to us not just in body but in mind and to reclaim our purpose as educators within notions of curiosity and love of learning. For many of us, education has given us a great deal. It has empowered us, enabled our lives and the lives of our families, but we must not silence what we often had to leave behind in our schooling: birth names our parents gave us, home languages, accents, hometowns, the ability to dream in farfetched and seemingly impossible ways, our desire to work and think with others in joyful collaboration, and our ability to know things in our minds, gut, and hearts that we could never prove on a test.

"School's upsidedown"
L. Loya, L. Medrano, A. Roacho

For young people of color, those below the poverty line across all racial lines, LGBTQ youth, undocumented students, those with disabilities, females, and young people of diverse spiritual origins, schooling stands in a legacy of segregation, removal, containment, silencing, historical erasure, assimilation, and domination. Our students are the inheritors of these painful histories.

We are all the inheritors of these histories, but that need not be the end of the story. Curriculum can engage students’ unique interests, diverse identities, home knowledge, languages, worldviews, and histories. Curriculum must do more than celebrate diversity—we must teach through the lives of our students. Armed in this knowledge, the educators and adults who shape schooling can design spaces where young people can reclaim the gift that is education and together we can recover all that we have lost by providing young people with curriculum necessary to act upon the world in ways that improve the quality of their lives.

In 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr., in an essay titled The Purpose of Education, wrote, “a complete education gives one not only the power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.” Curriculum must be more than arduous practice in mental gymnastics or knowing the right answer or the best answer. It must be a rigorous process of inquiry for the purpose of authentic and meaningful action. Education has the power to prepare young people to live, to think, and to act in the real world in ways that sustain and empower them, their families, communities, and our nation.

"Tag, You're It"
L. Loya, L. Medrano

There are myriad ways to keep young people in our classrooms and schools in greater numbers and even usher them across graduation stages, but we must ask ourselves: Are we keeping their bodies or capturing their minds, hearts, and imaginations? For if we do not, we lose them anyway.

Educators, we must ask ourselves: Do our students feel validated, challenged, heard, and seen in our classrooms and schools? Do students feel like who they are and how they make sense of the world are central to their learning? Are we using curriculum itself to undo damage that schooling has been a part of?

I am encouraged by the work of school districts in my home state of New Mexico and others across the country who have committed themselves financially to approaching truancy beyond criminalization. Because of their efforts to bring together health and community resources to partner with schools and families, educators can get down to the business of creating the systemic change in our schools we so desperately need.

We must reframe the national discourse of educational success and high school completion as one of engagement. We know that high school graduation rates matter both with regard to income potential and quality of life, but if we believe that the greater purpose of education is to teach young people to question, theorize, analyze, make connections, dream, collaborate, and create, we must challenge the ways in which we continue to construct it. These questions remain:

"Trapped in school"
M. Armendariz, L. Loya,
L. Medrano

Are we preparing kids to graduate or are we preparing them to make a life?

Are we preparing them to live, create, question, communicate, collaborate in a complex world? Are we preparing them to understand their inherent worth as researchers, thinkers, and scholars?

Curriculum to Bring Our Young People Back to Us in Mind, Body and Spirit

When kids are engaged—when curriculum touches their lives and experience and the vast knowledge resources they bring with them to our classrooms, lives are transformed. For those of us who have the power to change the structures of schooling, we must use this power. Education is a beautiful weapon against inequity, but we must wield it as such—this is our ethical calling.

We situate attendance as a students’ responsibility to be in school; however, more than that, students have a right to an education that keeps them engaged, that serves them. Students have a right to school spaces and educational professionals that stand up to the agents who utilize fear as a way to paralyze our schools and districts.

In the face of standardization, high-stakes Value-Added Models, and gross de-professionalization, we must ground ourselves in the decades of scholarly empirical research which contends that meaningful academic preparation is found in challenging young people to communicate, to calculate, and to engage scientific and mathematical principles and historical understandings in the service

"The Bluff"
L. Medrano, L. Loya, Y. Villarreal, A. Roacho

of authentic action. We can have the courage to anchor ourselves to what our own deep knowledge and experience tell us: Curriculum needs to speak to who students are, what they know, and what they need to know in the world.

We as educators must also have the courage to admit that we don’t always know what transformative or emancipatory curriculum looks like or that perhaps we are not comfortable with the messiness and the surprise that comes with inquiry based, social action, social justice curriculum. These conversations are where our work begins.

As we continue to look to improving truancy and graduation rates, we remember that they are but one measure of our educational system. Terms like, achievement gap and underperforming schools and kids which focus on recovering those who have fallen behind, but perhaps it is we who have fallen behind—we who have been both wooed and strong-armed into measuring academic success by so-called accountability measures which do not account for the intellectual and communicational complexity that our young people and communities hold.

"See you later"
M. Bustillos, Y. Villarreal

Educators are professionals. We have always been accountable to our craft, to our students, and they to us. Even as non-educator policy makers at the state and national level define professionalism for teachers and administrators within the willingness to comply with mandates, we will no longer be held hostage by these. We will resist because we know better than they.*

We became educators because we believe that education matters. We ourselves have gotten to where we are professionally because we learned to think deeply and critically about the world around us, and our place within it. Somewhere along the way we grew to believe in our own capacity to utilize all that we know for the purpose of action.

Education has earned its value in our hearts and we must give young people, especially those disengaged and disenchanted with schooling, this same opportunity. We can begin here with courage and hope.

We must seek the wisdom and knowledge of young experts in academic (dis)engagement, those teenage curricular theorists who would rather seek the ditch banks, the bathroom stalls, or the refuge of their own faraway thoughts and dreams than be present with us in our classrooms and schools. That is where our work begins: the work to build curriculum and school spaces with the power to heal us—to heal all of us—and to reclaim all that we have lost.

"Sports > Learning"
M. Armendariz, L. Medrano

Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio taught 9-12 Language Arts for 7 years in Albuquerque Public Schools and is now an assistant professor of Teacher Education in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. This essay is adapted from a speech she delivered to teachers, administrators, behavioral and health community organizations, and community advocates at an APS district-wide forum focusing on improving truancy and graduation rates.
Language Arts students in the ninth grade of one New Mexico high school planned and snapped the photo essay as part of a collaboration between area high schools and the University of New Mexico’s Teacher Education Department toward building more challenging, student-centered, and culturally relevant school spaces especially for Youth of Color.

* References

American Statistical Association. (2014). ASA statement on using value-added models for educational assessment. Retrieved from: http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf.

Apple, M. (2006). Educating the “right” way (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Crawford-Garrett, K., Perez, M., Sánchez, R. M., Short, A., & Tyson, K. (2016). Activism is good teaching: Reclaiming the profession. Rethinking Schools, 30(2), 22-25. Retrieved at http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/30_02/30-2_crawford-garrett_perez_sanchez_short_tyson.shtml.

Hagopian, J. (2014). More than a score: the new uprising against high-stakes testing. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

King, M. L., Jr. (1947). The purpose of education. In C. Clayborne, R. Luker, & P. A. Russel (Eds.), The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume I: Called to serve, January 1929-June 1951. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Shavelson, R. J., Linn, R. L., Baker, E. L., Ladd, H. F., Darling-Hammond, L., Shephard, L. A., Barton, P. E., Haertel, E., Ravitch, D., & Rothstein, R. (2010). Economic Policy Institute.

Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. EPI Briefing Paper# 278. Retrieved from http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/.

↧

My mini-Aztlan: Making Science Friction in 64 square feet

May 10, 2016, 9:58 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
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Con artist's sketch of 8x8 cell, Sonny Boy's favorite place to think, and write on

Chicano Confidential

High-Tech Bato: “If the SHU Fits, Wear It!”

By Sonny Boy Arias

In this article I present direct evidence that I provided the basic logic behind the software design allowing for networked-work over the Internet, Google and Facebook. Said differently, I am not (like Al Gore) claiming I created any of these entities. I am claiming, however, that I provided the logic leading to the software that allowed people to work together while apart and this is what landed me multiple years behind bars on three separate occasions. In other words this story is about the troubled life of a highly skilled Chicano (me) caught in the entanglements of digital technology and crossing boundaries that led to imprisonment because of "presumed" violations of "laws."

Today is the first day of my fourth year in the “SHU” (Solitary Housing Unit). I have a couple more years before they put me back with my paisas or in with the guys in the general population; lengua franca, as odd as it may seem, I prefer staying in the SHU, because I am able to self-reflect and get a lot of work done. Thing is that over the last dozen years this is my second time in prison, hence, I’m a believer that if the SHU fits, wear it; entre nosotros, I am getting addicted to the SHU as it provides me a very personal sense of place, it’s like a mini-AZTLAN, no kidding, puro Chicano.

I had always heard such terrible things about the SHU, like it is possessed by evil spirits and that some of the evil spirits spoke Spanish because so many Chicanos had spent time within the confines of the 8-by-8 cell. People knew that unless you accepted The Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior or started praying a lot, you would go crazy by the end of the first week. I believe it, too, especially for some of the guys from México; they are like free-range chickens, having been raised out on the ranchos and all.

But chalici, man, just between us chickens I got used to life in the SHU early on, fact is, I am really enjoying myself. I am, in fact, amusing myself to death, something that was becoming increasingly difficult to do when I was with my raza in the general prison population. Now don’t get me wrong, I love those guys; they would take a bullet for me even though they know deep down inside I wouldn’t take one for them—you have to love that shit!

No doubt the SHU was designed as a means of cruel and unusual punishment; it’s dark, there are no windows, only 1 door, a bed and a toilet, and that’s it, hijole!

Notes from one of the walls of the SHU--Note the similarity
to the opening paragraphs of this essay

One is left to their own thoughts—they didn’t have me in mind when they designed the SHU; for me it became an experiment as well as opportunity for self-development. I totally prefer daily life in the SHU over life in the general population. The first time I got sent up was just before the Internet became popular. You see, Ulf Maggerquist and his team had designed ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet and in my capacity as a human factors analyst (one who makes observations about the way people behave over computers that are networked), I was taking cues from their systems engineers and inadvertently developed DEC NET on behalf of the Digital Equipment Corporation.

DEC NET acted very much like the Internet does today, but it was by invitation only; they (FBI) say that this is the point when I started breaking the law because I started sharing proprietary information (copyrighted intellectual property created by the ARPANET team) with others (namely the Digital Equipment Corporation), “outside the realm of the Federal Government,” at least that’s how the federal judge who put me away put it. Caught up in my own emotions, all I had to say to the judge at my sentencing was, “How the fuck was I supposed to know I was breaking the law; I was just performing research?” and before I could regain my composure, he added two more years to my sentencing because I swore at him. Hijo de la chingada!

I can see how the FBI bundled the charges—they added up to four felonies and in California it only takes 3 “strikes [felonies] and you’re out,” put away for life. The only plea bargain I could provide was to hand over my research in exchange for two of the trumped-up charges or I would never see my family in the free world again. The biggest charge was that I was a secret agent, a spy working against the U.S. Government (specifically trying to derail ARPANET) because I shared software that was under production with systems software engineers at the Instituto Tecnológico de Mexicali (ITM), located in Baja California Norte. Hijole!

Again, I wasn’t a spy; I was a researcher, but the FBI depicted me as one who was using research as a smoke screen for stealing and sharing information. I collaborated with engineers at the ITM because they were quite innovative and cheap to hire, not because we were conspiring to overthrow the government.

I saw the way corporations would garner contracts from the federal government, so I formed a corporation and called it “2Chicanos and a Vax” (a Vax is a mini-mainframe invented by the Digital Equipment Corporation) and we went after minority set-aside contracts. It worked out great; we got more contracts than we could handle, probably because at that time there weren’t any Chicanos involved in systems design engineering nor human factor analyses, still aren’t. We need Chicanitos/as to study systems engineering. In our work with the ITM, we pretty much perfected the art and science of working together while apart and that was our major-most contribution to the Internet, Google and Caralibro (Facebook).

A closer view of the SHU notes reveals Sonny Boy's
first attempts to encrypt his research findings

We designed software we called “Emiliano” (after Emiliano Zapata because it was quite technologically revolutionary), which is similar to Chat Boxes and email, Instagram and Twitter today, but it involves a logic that is actually designed for much deeper thought and discussions leading to multiple levels of predication and meaningful social interactions.

We applied a theory known as symbolic interactionism to our work that helped people work collaboratively (on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border) while developing shared meanings about any topic at hand; it also helped groups come up with common visions and goals.

Said differently, we turned our group work into nouns that became abstract notions and linked ideas from individual group members in tenuous ways that were productive. It’s as though the mind of the group takes over the mind of the individual and creates groupthink (binationally). This was the concept for which I was charged, stealing and sharing with people from another country (Mexico) and being a spy, go figure!

What I learned is that rule-breaking exists in a cooperative as well as conflictual world and you can be blamed for breaking rules if it is perceived that you are breaking them. The reality was that it was perceived I was breaking rules (laws) but they had not yet been established, because no one could identify a rule or law I had broken. I never saw myself as a rule-breaker or an outlaw.

The Emiliano software came with each Vax that was sold, thing is, computer engineers had no appreciation for its design (helping people to perform collaborative work while they are apart) so they would throw the software away upon receipt of the Vax, in turn, it never became popularized until one day an engineer brought it to the attention of John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix who used it as the premise to start the online side of his academic program offerings.

While alone in the SHU I used my imagination and started writing on the wall how Emiliano would work over computers that were networked over the Internet. While standing in the darkness of the SHU I began writing on the wall with my index finger, I imagined the letters and words I was thinking and could envision what I was writing.

On occasion the female guard would swing open the small door located within the larger door of my cell and a ray of light would pierce the darkness and at the same time “erase” what I had written. She would look at me and at the wall in a curious way as if to try to read what I was writing. After a few weeks I convinced her to sneak pencils to me so that I could write on the walls; it took a couple of months before other guards took notice of my writings.

One day when I was returning from my hour in the yard; my cell was swarming with FBI agents and the warden. They were taking pictures of what I had written on the wall, some of it was in Spanish and I could hear them talking about intellectual property and the production of ideas and how they simply could not agree on how I was theorizing about the etiology of rule-breaking; I also heard degrees of disagreement about whether or not I had broken any laws. At the same time they moved me across the block to a new SHU. The next day I observed that a large piece of plexi-glass was being placed over my writings in my old-SHU. My sense is that it was not being preserved for esthetic reasons.

Uncannily, a microvax cpu board looks like the binary code-like notes scrawled on a prison wallby Sonny Boy. Or, is it vice versa?

When the Second SHU Dropped

The second time I got sent up was related to the first time except I hadn’t quite broken the law until a few months after the initial charges. In short, I received a major grant-contract from the U.S. Department of Commerce that would allow us to set up large scale high-tension towers that transmitted digital information in the middle of the desert in the Imperial Valley (southern-most end of Southern California not far from the U.S.–Mexico border). The engineers on the U.S. side all agreed that high-tension towers would not be feasible because the heat from the desert floor would “bend” the digital signal, a high speed T3 line.

Conversely, Mexican engineers from the ITM argued otherwise. We spent millions of U.S. dollars, set up the towers and created a consortium encouraging common research and collaborative work. The moment I threw the switch, however, I was arrested for not having a permit or permission to send a signal across the U.S.–Mexico border. The FBI called it “treason.” Well, call me “pendejo,” but it’s true I didn’t think about getting a permit because I had received federal dollars from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Telecommunications Information Agency! All I could think about was, “Why didn’t anyone just stop me?” and “Why did it have to come down to this?”

And wouldn’t you know it, this time when I was sentenced I went before the same judge and he spoke down to me in a big way; it was a degradation ceremony to the max. He said, “You should have learned from your mistakes,” and I’m thinking “How the hell was I to know, why the hell didn’t anyone tell me what I needed?” and as he kept repeating himself, he caught me rolling my eyes and so he added another year. Hijole!

Had somebody stopped me we would have saved the U.S. government several million dollars and I wouldn’t have been charged and sent away to prison, nor labelled as a “spy.” I’m not a spy, I am just a Chicano with a Vax. My colega in crime disappeared into Mexico and the Feds thought I knew where he was, but I didn’t, still don’t. He most likely went to Jalisco where he is from. I don’t even give a shit! But the feds didn’t believe me and came down extra hard on me because I didn’t rat on him. Curiously enough years later while going up an escalator I locked eyes with a guy coming down and I could have sworn it was him, but I didn’t pursue him, I just couldn’t as I was still on probation.

The Third SHU Drops: Call It the “Chancla”

I was on house arrest for 6 months following my second release, followed by a year of probation. About 3 months into probation I came home to my house in total disarray. My neighbor “Flaco” said three guys in dark suits pulled up in a van, ran out, broke my front door open and were out in 5 minutes. It reminded me of when I made a similar observation of the raid on his house when they caught him dealing drugs. There was shit everywhere.

I noticed the empty leather case of a prototype of a Cryptex USB drive once left in a PC following a highly descriptive Power Point presentation I attended at DEC World, the biannual trade show held at the Embarcadero in Boston. I didn’t think anything would ever become of my having the USB drive as I viewed it as an antique and a paperweight; boy, was I wrong.

Early model of Cryptex USB drive,out of focus on purpose to hideits secret workings

The Cryptex USB drive was accidently left behind by the director of the Waxahachie-Texas Super Collider Project, the world’s first super collider funded to the tune of 4 billion dollars and defunded half-way through the project. I figured I would run into him within a few hours but to no avail, so I kept it. When the FBI had its content analyzed they said two things led to felony charges against me, again as a spy and traitor; they said, “The information contained on the drive had thousands of pages of secret documents for how to design the super collider (particle smasher) and that only government officials should have access to such secrets.”

My attorney argued that I was not a particle physicist and could not decipher the information found in the files.” I was also charged with possessing the Cryptex USB drive which was said to be government property, but technically the information contained in the drive and the drive itself did not become government property until after the project was funded and I came into possession just prior to funding by the National Science Foundation. Madre mia!

I told them “I didn’t know shit about shit about technology.” I added that, “Around the barrio people laugh at me because I don’t carry an iPhone, I’m not on Facebook, and I don’t know about ‘apps.’” But the FBI said it was just a cover for me to act like I didn’t know anything about technology.

At one point I had once downloaded everything on the Cryptex drive to my Vax in order to download legacy applications, now that was a fact, but I did so just in case the USB drive was ever lost or damaged. Because I had networked several mini-Vaxes together, several of which were located in Mexico I was viewed as a traitor committing acts against the U.S. government without permission.

The FBI said that during the course of their decommissioning legacy data, thousands of project pages had been deleted yet these pages were located on my Vax as well as Cryptex drive, so I was had. They said I was stealing and deleting data I didn’t want for anyone to see. They even placed a value in excess of 100 to 200 million dollars in damages. My attorney was really convincing when he pointed out that the probable reason so many pages were missing was the size of the file was simply too massive to move all at once from one PC to the next so they must have downloaded the data into more than one part; it sure as hell made sense to me, but to them, they insisted I was covering up.

One of things the super collider project discovered early on was how to transfer tremendous amounts of inactive yet valuable data (legacy applications) that can expose strategic-historic data and at the same time feed the data needs of new applications more readily. Said differently, the data found in old-school applications can be infused with today’s “apps” in a seamless manner and this was highly important to the research and study of particle physics.

Interesting to note is that this ability became especially important once the Waxahachie project closed down and the Hadron Super Collider (CERN) came up in Southern Switzerland-Northern France. The logic behind this thinking is what I wrote on the walls in my former SHU, but no one ever bothered to ask me to explain what I was writing. I figured they would ask me but they didn’t.

Secretly, I wanted to serve more time in the SHU due to the idealization and consolation bestowed to my consciousness by solitude as a state of mind over long periods of time—this is why the SHU fits!

Hasta la victoria siempre!

Sonny Boy Arias periodically writes “Chicano Confidential” for Somos en escrito Magazine, a column about the world from his uniquely warped perspective, casting the commonplace in a new, uncommon light. By trade, he is a social psychologist, but by avocation a story teller. Watch for his forthcoming book, Theorizing Cesar Chavez, in bookstores and online booksellers.

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From Dallas to Deep in the Heart of México, by bus

May 11, 2016, 11:24 am

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Altar at “Transportes San Miguel” bus terminal, Dallas, Texas

Photo by Jesús Chairez

Café conLeche

Busing it to México with St. Toribio

as my co-pilot

By Jesús Chairez

The week after Thanksgiving, the beginning of the 2012 Christmas holiday season, I again traveled to Mexico, but this time I trekked in a way I thought I never would – by bus.

I had never considered traveling to México from Dallas by bus because of the news I kept hearing about how dangerous traveling in México is, especially along the Frontera. But being on a fixed income I could not afford another round-trip airline ticket after having flown to Puebla City the month before to take some things to a friend from Dallas who had just gotten deported. Being that I had promised friends to housesit for three weeks in San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato, while they traveled to Italy, I had to go.

I could just kick myself in the butt because I wouldn’t be having a bus travel headache if I would stop calling friends in México when I have been drinking. I really need to check into seeing about a computer interlock device: the one I must blow into when using my computer, and if alcohol is detected, my Skype won’t work.

I calmed my nerves by telling myself that I wouldn’t have a problem traveling along the border of México because the evils that befall bus travelers only happen to Central Americans as they travel through and while leaving México – not Chicanos.

In the past, I would just make flight arrangements into México by booking my flights via the Internet on American Airlines and I would fly over the border towns. But looking for a bus in Dallas was sort of complicated because as a first-time bus traveler I was not familiar with any of the small bus companies that traveled to México from Dallas. Each bus company has their specific state and city destination and I was at a loss where to begin since San Luis de la Paz is located almost smack dab in the center of the United States of México.

My research consisted of doing things the old-fashioned way: driving up and down Jefferson Boulevard in Dallas’s barrio, Oak Cliff. I drove around and wrote down bus company names and phone numbers off buildings – some companies listed their destinations on the building, some didn’t.

Once I got home with my data, I found that online information about destination cities and departure times to México did not exist. For even if the bus company had a website, it didn’t list any detailed information, just a company name, address and telephone number. I wondered, how do I find the bus going in my direction without calling every Mexican bus company in Dallas?

The friends I would be housesitting for always flew or drove their car when visiting family and friends in Dallas so they were of no help – they didn’t know. Though I didn’t know anyone in Dallas to ask who travels by bus to where I wanted to go, I did finally remember a couple Dallasite friends of mine that now live in the neighboring town I would be visiting, a smaller town named Mineral de Pozos.

I knew from visiting my friends annually in Pozos that they always used the bus to travel from México to Dallas and back. I e-mailed my friends for advice and they said that they always travel to and from Dallas without having to transfer, by using Transportes San Miguel, a bus company I had missed.

I looked up Transportes San Miguel on the Internet and though they did not have a website, I did find a directory that listed their address and telephone number. I called and was informed that they have one daily departure to my destination seven days a week and that I had to make a reservation at least a day before I wanted to travel, so I made my reservation.

There are no shuttles to the bus company like there are for the airport, and not wanting to take a taxi, I asked a couple of gringo friends to take me to the bus station. As we arrived at Transportes San Miguel my friends immediately asked me if we were in the right location. Seeing the place for my first time, I myself had to wonder – for the place looked more like an old WW II vintage airplane hanger than a bus depot.

As I was getting my luggage out of my friends' car they kept looking at me with uneasy faces and asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?” And without showing a face of hesitation, I said yes. My friends began to drive away slowly, and all the while they continued to glance at me like they hated to leave me behind – almost like saying, this is your last chance.

Before going into the office to buy my ticket I looked at the only bus parked at the station; it looked fine and clean but it did look dated. I couldn’t help but look at the tires to make sure there was enough tire tread to make it to México. Though it looked okay, I was sure it was going to be nothing like the first-class buses I use when traveling in México: a bus with a steward, roomy seats and Internet.

After inspecting the bus, I walked into the office and told the lady, in English, that I had called and made a reservation to San Luis de la Paz the day before. With a face that looked like she hoped I spoke Spanish she said, “Que? Well, why not Spanish?” I mean, I was in Oak Cliff, a community of Dallas I considered a faraway suburb of México. So from that moment on, just like being in México, I began to speak only Spanish.

The lady confirmed that I was on the list and said the total was $95, cash only, which was three times cheaper than flying. The lady hand-wrote my ticket and as I was about to walk away from the ticket window, I noted that I was assigned an aisleseat. I had failed to tell the lady that I wanted a window seat because I wanted to look out. So I turned around and kindly asked for a window seat.

The lady took my ticket back and scribbled out my old aisle seat. As she was about to begin assigning me a new seat by a window, I interrupted her and further requested that I not be put too near the restroom. I explained I didn’t want the door opening and closing, nor the smells, to keep me awake.

She smiled at me, but also gave me a little look that I think she thought I was being a little too high maintenance. She assigned me a window seat by scribbling over the old ticket number and writing my new seat number over the scribble. She then took the lined spiral notebook she was keeping track of customers and pulled out some whiteout correction fluid. And like a skilled painter, she brushed out my name on the old seating position and wrote my name next to the new seat number she had just assigned me.

As she made the changes in the notebook, I thought, whiteout correction fluid? I didn’t know they made that stuff anymore, much less used it. But then I looked through the glass of the pay window and looked around the office and saw that there were no computers in the place. Everything was done the old-fashioned way: paper, pen, scribble, and whiteout correction fluid.

As I was walking out of the office, other people had also started arriving and they too only spoke Spanish; it was already feeling like México and I had not even left Dallas. The other bus travelers, like me, were dark-skinned and also appeared to be low- to moderate-income working class Mexican folks.

When traveling by airplane there are always, migrantes fresas, but there were none in this crowd; migrantes fresas means “strawberry migrants,” a term used to light-skinned wealthy Mexicans coming to live in North Texas; these people would never travel cross-country by bus.

I couldn’t help but notice the large volume of luggage and boxes the other travelers were taking with them. Well, it was getting close to Christmas which is why there was so much stuff. Though there were numerous sizes of luggage, there was no Samsonite or Louis Vuitton in the mix. Like my bag, the luggage were off brands bought at Target or one of the local weekend Mexican flea markets and now overstuffed. Or maybe the other travelers were like me – not wanting to draw attention to themselves with expensive items, in case some bandits did stop the bus.

I was sort of surprised to see a few large white plastic tub containers, those I see in the aisles of Wal-Mart being used to transport personal items – plastic tubs too big and too heavy to take on an airplane without having to pay extra. I noticed that it didn’t matter if the container lids didn’t lock for they were all skillfully sealed and held together with duct tape to make sure the items would make their way to their destination.

Like at the airport, though I had a ticket, I would have to wait awhile before I could take my seat. So with time to kill I walked across the terminal to the huge altar that was set up for prayer and meditation. The altar was so beautiful I took a picture of it and checked in with it on Facebook: status was a bus station, traveling to San Luis de la Paz, GTO.

The altar reminded me a lot of México because there are always altars to saints in public spaces. Like in México, this altar had Christmas lights, decorative plastic banners, flowers and burning candles. The area for the altar was big and had enough seating for like eight people: if this altar had been enclosed, it would be considered a chapel.

There were several saints placed on the altar – most of the saints were repeated in various sizes in folk art media; evidently the altar was ever changing and a work in progress. It changed and grew every time someone added a saint to the altar before they got on the bus or possibly after making the trip to Dallas. There were pictures of Jesus Christ and several pictures and statues of la Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of México. There were also several size pictures and statues of San Judas, the saint of lost causes, a saint revered by some criminals and drug users. There were also other saints on the altar that I was not familiar with. The altar area was tranquil and beautiful and I thought this folk art altar was superior to those sterile chapels at the U.S. airports or hospitals.

Because I was sort of anxious about traveling along the border of México by bus, I did think about prayer – but to which saint? Though I was raised a Catholic I had not practiced Catholicism in years.

Before my meditation was over, I got a bing on my iPhone, a comment to my posting of the picture of the altar. A gringa girlfriend of mine in México City said she saw Saint Toribio Romo on the altar. I asked, where was he on the altar and what were his energies? My friend identified the saint and she said that Saint Romo is the saint of border crossers. I thought great and hoped he could work a miracle for me since I was going the other way – into México.

As I was finishing my mediation at the altar I could see it was time to get on the bus, not because of a PA system announcement, because there wasn’t one, but by seeing people climbing into the bus and having their large luggage placed in the luggage compartment.

Though it would take longer to travel to México than my usual 2-½ hour air flight, so far it was not bad for having saved $300. Seats were OK, but reminded me of my dad’s comfy TV chair: worn and comfy.

Like clockwork, and not Mexican time, we leave the bus station at 4 P.M. sharp. As we were leaving Dallas and traveling south on U.S. 35 towards Laredo I noticed that the bus was half full and once we left the bus station people moved around to the empty seats they wanted – so now I know: the next time don’t make fuss.

I fell asleep right away and woke up as we were making out first stop in Waco. Though we exited the freeway we didn’t go into town to any bus terminal; we just stayed on the service road. We stopped at a taquería next to a gas station and picked up a couple of people and got right back on the freeway. We did this very quickly, no waiting for future passengers, just off the highway and on again, all in a matter of minutes. We did this all along the way, Temple, Austin, and San Antonio, always stopping at a taquería beside a gas station or a gas station that had a taquería inside.

Though our stops were quick, there were a couple times we stopped not only to pick up passengers, but also long enough to stretch our legs. The driver would announce we all could get off at the store if we wanted to eat and drink something and use the bathroom. Though the bus had a toilet, it was obvious that seasoned travelers didn’t use the bus restroom and would get off these stretch-your-legs-stops with their own toilet paper in hand.

I didn’t carry my own toilet paper because it was something I wouldn’t need since I have a policy of fasting the evening before a long trip and pigging out once I got to my destination; nothing goes in, nothing is coming out. Anyway, being seen carrying a roll of toilet paper off a bus is just too much information; can’t these women hide the roll underneath their rebozo? Before leaving our stops, the bus driver would always take a head count to make sure no one was left behind. That was good to know for I was always afraid of being marooned at a taquería along the highway.

After our last stop in San Antonio, I dozed off again and when I woke up, it was night. The evening wasn’t too dark because the night sky was clear and the ground well lit by a bright full moon. I gazed at the moon and noticed that it was surrounded by what looked like a giant smoke ring, something I had never seen before. I took it as a sign from the heavens that my trip was being safely guided to my destination. Funny how I, too, look for signs from God, something I picked up from my Catholic abuela and mother: they would always claim they had seen “a sign” from God when they were expecting good fortune.

Though the moon gave a bright light, I wasn’t sure how far we were from the border until I saw the helicopters shining their lights down to the terrain: I knew then we were close to the border for the bright big search lights were looking for border crossers.

When I first saw the helicopters I couldn’t help but think about my neighborhood in inner city Old East Dallas – helicopters shining their lights down on the streets in search of a criminal, someone who had just robbed a convenience store. But in this case, there were no convenience stores around, just grass and brush and those conducting the search were not the police, but the Border Patrol.

We make it to Nuevo Laredo, México, and the trip didn’t seem to take that long. It happened quickly and my butt was not too numb from sitting so long – the bus stop breaks helped with that. I had misgivings as I was getting close to the border. Though I didn’t have to deal with the Border Patrol, I knew it was time to deal with Mexican immigration and customs officials. I always hate dealing with people of authority, like the police, immigration and customs officers in the U.S. or México for I never know how many hoops I have to jump through. Often I am selected and over-searched and asked lots of questions, so border crossings always give me the jitters. Maybe it is because of those jitters that I get stopped so often?

We didn’t have to wait long to cross the bridge into México: we passed all the cars and got into a special bus lane. Being that it was 11 P.M. we were only the second bus in line and the other bus was leaving as we pulled up to the immigration office.

Though I wondered how all the immigration and customs routine was going to work, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by looking like an amateur so I thought, “Don’t ask questions, just learn my way in crossing the border via the bus by looking, listening and following fellow passengers.”

We parked in front of the immigration office and an officer got on the bus and in Spanish gave us instructions as to what was required in visiting México. Being a by product of total assimilation, with English only while growing up, I didn’t understand everything the Immigration officer was saying, though I understood enough to know that the officer asked that all Americans had to get off the bus to get a visa in order to continue their travel into Mexico.

As the immigration agent got off the bus to go into his office, I followed and I thought it strange that I was the only person that needed a Mexican visa, but then again, I was the only American. I walked into the immigration office and handed my U.S. passport to the immigration officer who greeted me. As the officer was looking at my passport, she asked me a question that I have never been asked when traveling into México by air: she asked, “Do you now have or have ever had Mexican documents and do you have them with you now?”

And I said yes, and as I gave the officer my old Mexican documents that I had when I lived in México City and I mentioned that they had been canceled.

After the immigration officer reviews my documents, she says they have expired, but they have not been canceled. This statement struck terror into my heart because the two other immigration officers who were just standing around in the small office for a routine entry into México had now walked over to me, and they too were also examining my old expired, not canceled, Mexican documents. Apparently immigration officials in México, like in the U.S., don’t like foreigners not following their immigration laws – expired and not canceled sounded like a fine to me, or so I hoped.

The immigration agents are now telling me that I cannot continue further into México until I get my immigration papers cleared up at the immigration office in Nuevo Laredo. My heart was beating fast and I tried not to look too nervous. Are these guys for real, in not letting me, an American, cross into México? I knew better than to try to pull an “I am an American" card for I was at their mercy, but I had to wonder if this was just a story to get me to pay a mordida, a bribe. And if they wanted a mordida, it appeared it would be expensive because I wasn’t dealing with a traffic cop. I was dealing with three immigration agents who were saying I had a problem entering México.

The immigration officers were now telling me to spend the night in Nuevo Laredo because I had to go to the immigration office in the morning. I had been horrified to think I would be left behind at a taquería when making stops along the highway and now I was even more horror-struck to think the bus would leave me behind at the border of México. I just wanted to get into a fetal position – but I knew I just couldn’t just lose it.

As I thought about what to do next, I stared out the open door of the immigration office: I could see the International Bridge and I thought about just getting my things off the bus and walking back across the bridge and going back home. But then I remembered Saint Toribio Romo, the patron saint of border-crossers, so I said a short silent prayer to Saint Romo that consisted of, HELP, I need ya now. I had come too far to go back home.

As I finished my prayer to St. Romo, one of the immigration officers takes my U.S. passport and scans it in their reader and says, “Look, he has come and gone numerous times since his Mexican documents expired.” He said, “Let him through,” and the two other officers say, “LET HIM THROUGH?” He said yes, and then they all agreed and asked me that if anyone asks, they did not know I had, nor had they seen my expired documents. I said fine, deal.

They handed me my U.S. passport and my old Mexican papers and I was told to hide the expired documents and not show them to anyone else. Since I had told them I was also going to México City, the officers highly recommended that I go to the immigration office there to have my documents cancelled. I said OK, I agreed to whatever they said.

They gave me my visa to enter México and I finally had a good and calm feeling – Saint Toribio Romo had my back. I got on the bus and all the people were staring at me like, FINALLY.

As I sat in my seat it felt good to finally have the immigration issue behind me. As I got in my seat and got comfortable, I looked out the window, and saw the immigration officers looking at the bus as we began to slowly drive away – and I sort of hid behind the window shade, not wanting them to see me, afraid they would change their minds and stop the bus and make me spend the night in Nuevo Laredo.

But we didn’t leave the immigration officials in the dust like I had hoped – we only traveled like two bus lengths before we stopped again. For now we had now stopped in front of the customs office that was the next building over and in the same parking lot.

A customs officer got on the bus, and in Spanish, she says, welcome to México and instructs us as to who would have to pay a duty for goods being brought into México. The agent said that any new items, even Christmas gifts, that had a value of over $300, had to be claimed and a duty paid.

The customs lady also said that if we didn’t pay the duty for any required item and that item not claimed was found in our possession it could get confiscated. So all those claiming any items for duty had to get off the bus with the item and with receipt and follow her. Well, as a favor for my friend that had recently gotten deported, I was carrying a new Nintendo game to give him, his Christmas gift.

I got the gift and followed the agent and again, I was the only one getting off the bus. At this moment I realized that though I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by looking like an amateur in asking questions, I was looking like an amateur anyway because I was the only one always getting off the bus to deal with government officials – I was learning.

In the customs office I showed the agent the game and the receipt for $350 and she barely looked at the game and receipt and said it was OK and didn’t charge me anything. And I thought, no wonder no one got off the bus, they know better.

As I started to walk out of the office, the customs agent stops me and says wait, you have to push the button, and I thought “What button”? The customs lady was pointing to what looked like a miniature traffic light that had a green and a red light, no yellow.

Since I was the only one that had gotten off the bus the agent said I had to push the one and only button on the contraption. The agent said, that if I got the green light everyone on the bus could go, no searches. But if I got the red light, everyone’s luggage had to be taken off the bus and everything searched. I thought oh my God, and clutched my pearls.

Before pushing the button, I hesitated for a moment for I was thinking, “Saint Romo, are you still around?” I pushed the button and I got the green light. The agent said we could go and I hurriedly walked out the customs office and across the parking lot. As I climbed back on the bus, the passengers were again giving me stares, you know those stares of, “It’s him again.” I wanted to say, “Shut up, I got the green light,” but I didn’t say anything: these people had no idea of the mental torture and anguish I had just gone through to cross the border.

As we were leaving I sure hoped that this time we would travel more than two bus lengths and make it out of the parking lot. I found the whole experience with the immigration and customs agents exhausting so I fell asleep right away for it was now way after midnight. I woke up like almost 7 A.M. and I could see that the sun was coming up and we were surrounded by farmland. I looked around the bus and I could see that some people had gotten off the bus and I had not even noticed.

At 9:15 A.M., my prayers had been answered. I arrived in downtown San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato. Though I had not eaten since Tuesday evening I was fine and thought that it was terrific that I had left Dallas at 4 P.M. on a Wednesday and had arrived at 9:15 A.M. Thursday morning. I was ready to eat some tasty Mexican food for I was now starving.

As I got off the bus to claim my luggage, I again found myself at another nontraditional bus terminal. In front of me was my bus company, located in a building that looked more like a public storage structure than a bus terminal – and it was closed.

No problem, – I would just call my friends to pick me up. I pulled out my Mexican cell phone, the cell I use to make calls in México. I turned it on – nothing happened. I had forgotten to power my Mexican cell phone before leaving Dallas. There was no place to make a call or to power my cell at a local business nearby because they too were closed; it was still too early for small-town San Luis de la Paz to be awake. A couple of taxi drivers stopped and asked if I wanted a ride and I thought yes, but I didn’t know the address or how to get to my friends house, so I just let them go.

As I thought about what I was going to do next, I got an idea, a revelation. Not wanting to drag my luggage around with me as I looked for a payphone, I turned on my Dallas cell phone and tried to call my friends to pick me up. I had never called my friends from my cell phone; I always used my computer to Skype them. When calling my friends, I kept getting a Mexican prerecorded operator message saying something to the effect: fool, you are not using the correct sequence of numbers to complete your call. Damn international calls.

I thought great, I am really in a jam after having just traveled 17 hours and I can’t make contact: I am going to starve to death on the sidewalk. Then I got a bright idea: turn on the data feature on my iPhone, get on the Internet and use Skype to call. So I Skyped my friends and I said hello, and before I could say anything they asked, “Are you here already?” Already? How can 17 hours on a bus be already? This wasn’t the time to have a debate so I said, “Yes, I am here now, pick me up – I am hungry.”

As I waited to be picked up, I knew that traveling from Dallas to México by bus would now be my new way of traveling internationally: for it was cheaper than flying and it was safe. Though I had a somewhat uneasy experience crossing the border, nothing seriously bad happened to me or anyone else, no one got on the bus and kidnapped anyone nor were we hijacked, and no one had gotten robbed either – I was now a seasoned bus traveler and Saint Toribio Romo had my back.

Jesús Chairez is second generation Mexican American, Chicano: he is a writer, published author and artist, originally from Dallas, Texas, now living in México City. Follow him on Twitter @JesusChairez or on FaceBook/JesusChairez. We look forward to hearing more from Jesús in this new Somos en escrito column, Café con Leche, about his observations of life in México.

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Letra por letra, canto por canto hacia la verdad

May 16, 2016, 2:42 pm

≫ Next: A father dies; two families become one

≪ Previous: From Dallas to Deep in the Heart of México, by bus

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Canto de las Palabras

Por José Manuel Solá

He visto las palabras

dormidas en la estación del Metro,

en los bancos de los parques,

bajo los puentes de San Juan y Buenos Aires

y en las escaleras de algunas catedrales.

Las he visto acurrucadas

una noche de frío

en una esquina anónima de São Paulo

y en Managua.

He visto las palabras

arropadas en la tibieza de su propia caricia:

gorriones de ojos grandes

contando a la las estrellas de la noche.

Es que alguien las dejó

abandonadas...

II.

He conocido la palabra homeless

en las calles de New York y de Los Ángeles.

A esas las he visto escarbando los tachos de basura

en Londres y en Madrid,

en todas partes,

el corazón como un trombón

que acaso Dios escucha... acaso...

Harapos de la noche que olvidaron,

que pasaron tosiendo su adiós entre la gente

y cargan un morral con las locuras

de todo lo que amaron

y una que otra esperanza envuelta en celofán.

Son palabras que cuelgan como cintas y flores

de un paraguas roto

y pasarán la lluvia y las ventiscas

viendo pasar la vida

en un improvisado cobijo de cartón.

III.

La casa de las palabras fue allanada una noche.

Después, nadie supo de ellas.

Eran palabras nuevas, palabras de esperanza,

palabras que escribían libertad y justicia

por las paredes del pueblo,

palabras inocentes como pájaros;

tenían pelo largo y eran solidarias

y cargaban guitarras y poemas.

Desaparecieron en Santiago y en Montevideo,

las mataron y las enterraron sin su nombre o su número

en El Salvador y en Buenos Aires.

Violaron las palabras, les cortaron las manos,

les arrancaron hijos desde el vientre.

Nadie vio nada. Nadie.

Pero tal vez una palabra anciana lo vio todo

y a todo el mundo dijo quiénes fueron.

Esa noche vinieron y arrestaron

la palabra indignada.

Hoy nadie sabe de ella.

IV.

Hay palabras sin tierra.

En los tiempos antiguos florecían silvestres

por todas partes,

al lado de las cataratas y los volcanes

y besaban el viento:

eran palabras hijas de nueve lunas.

Crecían junto al maíz y la anaconda.

Contemplaban el paso del quetzal y el cóndor y la alondra:

la tierra era de todos.

Entonces las palabras caminaban la aurora con la frente emplumada

y asignaban un nombre a cada cosa,

a cada lluvia, a cada fuego, al beso, a la ternura...

Las palabras poblaron las cuencas de los ríos

y pulieron la piedra y cocieron el barro.

En los tiempos antiguos las palabras eran libres

como Quetzalcóatl.

Y eso fue así hasta la tarde

en que tierras y hombres y maizales

se vieron sometidos y asolados, confundidos,

diluidos por todos los confines de la noche.

Hay palabras sin tierra ni esperanza.

Hay palabras que son Julia de Burgos,

palabras río, fauno, palabras llanto grande;

hay palabras Vallejo cualquier jueves,

palabras Alfonsina que el mar lleva y regresa.

A esas las he visto en todas partes,

en la mirada amiga, en la tristeza,

en el bar de la esquina, en los ferrocarriles,

en el pan y en la rosa, en el abrazo.

Hay palabras que son Miguel Hernández,

palabras de cebolla y rayo y lucha

y también hay palabras minerales:

son palabras Neruda en veinte cantos.

Esas van junto al pueblo hacia el futuro,

van levantando el fuego en manos vivas

constructoras del sueño liberado.

VI.

Hay palabras que cuelgan de los ojos,

esas son las más tristes.

Las he visto en los ojos de mi madre,

en un temblor de manos arrugadas;

las he visto caer con mansedumbre

desde la sombra azul de su butaca.

Esas palabras guardan el silencio

con un olor a sándalo en las tardes

por la luz amarilla de la casa.

Y ese adiós... ese adiós... y aquellos ojos crepusculares,

caídos como el agua.

Hay palabras que vuelan como pájaros,

como un susurro tibio, desde el alma,

¡ay...! cómo las recuerdo cayendo de sus ojos

tras la puerta de sombras y de flores

de una casa perdida en la distancia...

VII.

En tí nacían mágicas:

ángeles con candiles y ojos negros,

de tu piel, de tus besos, nacían las palabras

y en tu vientre, en mi boca,

con sabor a hoja fresca

de tu pubis dorado caían en mis manos

aleteando, como niños con hambre;

crecían por mis brazos como fiebre tatuada

y subían mi frente como una enredadera,

ascendían al fuego de la última hoguera

galopando en el grito la caída del sueño.

despavoridas,

locas,

desesperadas,

libres...

en tí nacían mágicas...

VIII.

Canto de las palabras,

las que me habitan,

las que van decididas del corazón a la garganta,

las que se saludan en las calles, en los trenes,

las que llevan al hombro los trabajadores,

las que saltan en las mochilas de los estudiantes,

las que revolotean sobre el arado, la palabra semilla...

Canto de las palabras que son como de Dios,

las que gestan al hombre del futuro

en el vientre de luz de las alondras,

las palabras de amor inevitables;

las que recuestan su soledad

en las ventanas de los hospitales,

las que desandan los días de lluvia en los cementerios;

las que bailan con los labios pintados en los burdeles

y sueñan una mañana de sábanas limpias, tibias

y noches de unicornios...

Canto de las palabras que convocan,

las que van a la marcha de los hombres de paz,

de los sencillos, de los perseguidos,

de los que luchan sin descanso, día a día...

De esas palabras canto y de estas otras,

las que me miran desde las fotos viejas,

las que me hablan mudas

desde el recuerdo de los amigos que cayeron;

las que pasan anónimas en tardes de aguaceros

bajo la sombra gris de los paraguas;

las que se saltan del alma, silenciosas, invencibles,

por los ojos de los niños de Etiopía;

canto de las palabras redondas

que cuelgan de los árboles,

las que se vuelven manzanas y naranjas,

de las palabras dulces como dátiles;

de las que me acompañan cada noche,

de las que irán conmigo hasta el adiós

cuando caiga el saludo

que aquí a todos dejo...

José Manuel Solá, nacido y residente en Puerto Rico, es Maestro de Estudios Sociales e Historia, jubilado. Por varios años, ha sido editor del boletín literario, “Bodegón de los poetas,” y facilitador del Taller de Narrativa Colegio Católico Notre Dame, Puerto Rico. En el año 2001 ganó 1er Premio en Narrativa y 2do. Premio en Poesía en el 7mo Certamen Nacional de Literatura FMPR. Sus publicaciones mas recientes incluyen Opus 9, de mi locura en sol mayor, 2012, poesía, y Actos vandálicos, 2014, poesía.

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A father dies; two families become one

May 20, 2016, 11:39 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Illustration by Xochitl Cristina Gil-Higuchi

A Fragile Hope

Excerpt from The Cost of Our Lives, a memoir

By Linda González

Chapter 17

I arrived in Los Angeles to give my sister Susan a mini-reprieve from caring for Mom, as the Alzheimer’s was slowly leeching her mind. It was two days before my flight to meet my Mexican sisters for the first time. As I drove her home, Susan casually mentioned she had met our older sisters several years ago, between the time our father confirmed their existence and his death.

“I worked for Mexicana Airlines at the time, so I saw Rosita on my business trips. It hit me when she introduced me to Tere—I think she’s my sister, too. It was really nice. I met Tere’s two children very quickly and they showed me pictures—it was like our honeymoon period. It felt good.”

Meeting my sisters was such a big deal for me, held so much meaning, and she was telling me she had already met them. If I wasn’t going, would she have ever told me?

In childhood, Susan and I had lived in our own separate worlds, even if my mom dressed us like twins. As young girls we watched TV and chose different characters as fantasy marriage mates. On Star Trek, I chose Captain Kirk AND the doctor, ‘Bones’. Susan chose Spock. She identified with his logical approach, eschewing feelings in favor of what was measurable and provable. We shared the same bedrooms with matching bedspreads for sixteen years, but rarely shared our secrets and never talked about our dad’s secrets.

After I graduated from college and moved back to LA for five years, we cautiously circled closer to our own and each other’s corazones. I encouraged her through her first pregnancy, including being present at the home birth, and she supported my decision to join a social justice community on Skid Row, buoying each other up each time our parents shook their heads in disapproval.

The slight variation in skin tone between us, she a cappuccino to my café latte, shaped her experiences in profoundly life altering ways. She told me how excited she felt when another brown Latina joined her class in second grade so she wasn’t the only one. Feeling not fully comfortable in our home or outside cultures, she chose Latinos and I fled to white people for approval.

By the time our father died, we were speaking openly of our daily quandaries. She and Fred were now contemplating divorce and I had ended my 11-year relationship. We were like moths that had been touched roughly by life’s hands, unable to fly because we had lost too many of our precious dust scales.

Like the mom who now drove us loca with worry with her Alzheimer’s and depression, we burrowed into tasks instead of what we needed—a good, long cry—several, in fact. Susan translated her need for care into manicures and pedicures, I with occasional massages and long, hot showers after soccer games. It wasn’t nearly enough. She was way too skinny and the manchas on my face way too dark and pronounced. Susan couldn’t muster any excitement about my trip. She was focused on managing mom’s “housemate,” our provisional solution to mom’s mental and emotional surrender.

“Frances called to say Mom yelled at her.”

“Big deal.”

Frances required as much care as Mom, but the thought of searching for another caregiver made us both cringe.

“There’s more. She went out to the backyard to calm down and Mom left the house.”

“Incredible. Did she find her?”

“No, she was on the phone with me when a car pulled up and Mom got out. Apparently she walked to her bank five blocks away and asked a stranger for a ride home.”

“What is the matter with these people?” I asked.

“I know.”

We arrived at Susan’s apartment. She rummaged through her desk when we entered and pulled out a photo.

“This is Arieti, Tere’s daughter. She must be about twenty years old now.”

I looked at the school portrait of a lovely brown-haired child of about eight, her resemblance to my daughter Gina striking, the sparkling dark eyes, the strong cheekbones, and full lips.

She sighed.

“Give them saludos de mi and call me when you get back.”

I hugged her goodbye.

÷÷÷

My Mexican brother Miguel and I settled into our airplane seats for the three and a half hour flight to México City. I had known him for many years even though he didn’t talk about the two sisters he left behind until the last year. I took out my journal and drew a Mexican family tree, opening up chambers that had long been buried. The circles identifying the females and the squares signaling the males grew on the page as he walked me through our sisters’ marriages, their children and grandchildren, his uncle’s two families, Rosita’s divorce and la familia’s living arrangements.

“And Tere’s son is Toño.”

We continued with the tree as we crossed the many miles to his birthplace, and I looked for changes in tone or facial expression to ask questions. He grimaced and waved his broad hands in front of his face when he spoke of his uncle Abilio and how he had taken his mother’s inheritance. He retold the story he had shared with me when his mother had died a year and a half earlier, almost word for word. There was something underneath his surface anger, the grief of being rejected by the two men who should have taken him under their wing—our father and Abilio.

Miguel, Rosita, and Tere only stayed in touch with Abilio’s “second” family. Their own experience contributed to this, even though they were my father’s first family chronologically and legally.

“So why go now?” Miguel asked.

“I am trying to understand how the man who raised me abandoned you, thinking I’d never know why he did that now that he is gone. And then I realized that our sisters are not gone.”

“Pues asi es. They are excited for your visit.”

One of my son Teo’s favorite stories over the last year had been that of Mulan, the Chinese girl who, disguised as a man, goes to war instead of her father. The Disney movie had been played many times over the last six months because when Teo loved a movie, we watched it until we knew all the songs. I was like Mulan, doing my father’s work. My father was never able to bring his two families together, but maybe I could.

÷÷÷

As Miguel and I walked out of Customs my right eye twitched. Each step toward the frosted glass doors felt like the slow climb up the first hill on a roller coaster as I gripped the safety bar and asked: Why, oh, why, am I doing this?

Miguel’s familia ran to embrace him affectionately. He was the tawny center of a sunflower, they the golden petals that surrounded him. Standing awkwardly, words from a Sesame Street song came into my head about one thing not belonging here, one thing not being the same. The outsider designation descended on me like it did on Miguel in Los Angeles. The hugs that came my way were sincere, but less so, the smiles welcoming, but cautious.

They asked after Susan and Eddy. Rosita expressed her wish that one day all six of our father’s children could be together. I smiled, right with her in that dream. My new oldest sister was fifty-five, with short blonde hair and dark roots. Her face was as round as mine was narrow and tapered.

Tere, only three and a half years older than me, also showed the remnants of a dye job, the dark orange waves cascading to just below her shoulders. Her face was round as well and smaller than my big cabezota.

I wished for some undeniable feature that, if substituted from one body to another, would fit perfectly, corroborating without a doubt we shared the same father, but it wasn’t there.

We squeezed into two cars. Victor, Tere’s husband of twenty-three years, arranged our luggage in the trunk of his Ford, his sturdy frame bristling with energy. I slid into the back seat between Arieti, Tere’s daughter, and Joanna, Rosita’s daughter. My nieces easily called me Tía, and that little word was like the soft kisses I gave my six-year old twins before I left.

“Now I practice English!” Arieti smiled, her dark brown hair pulled back in a clip, a contrast to her peach skin.

“Yes!” replied Joanna. She had a darker olive tone and a short sporty coif.

“No, no, no!” I insisted. “¡Quiero hablar español!”

“You can each speak the other language,” Tere responded in her lilting voice.

It was late and we agreed to get a good night’s sleep. We would meet the following day to visit Chapultepec Park. I collapsed into Rosita’s bed, feeling bad that she insisted on sleeping in the den before quickly falling into a deep sleep.

In the morning my stomach grumbled, and knowing their schedule might mean I didn’t eat a meal until close to noon, I found a few crackers and wandered into the living room, sitting gingerly on the cream-colored couch next to a large glass vase full of life-like lilies.

About ten o’clock Rosita descended the spiral metal staircase, her short robe displaying firm, full legs and red toenails. Speaking about our father with cariño, she lit a cigarette and recounted her numerous trips to Los Angeles. She had flown in to shop once a month for three years. She had even brought her three kids up a few times to meet their abuelo.

She put out her cigarette.

“I spoke with nuestro papá three days before he died.”

It was the same day I spoke with Rositaas I created my altar. Not having my premonition that he was more ill than we wanted to admit, she thought he was fine.

“I felt the loss,” she said. “I was too sick to go to the funeral.”

Her loss was profound, much more than the death of her distant father. It marked the death of his return, of his confession, and of any absolution she may have wanted to give him. She dabbed at her eyes. My mind wandered back to the funeral again. What would have happened if she, the first born, had exerted her right to bury her father? And what would have been my mother’s reaction? Or mine? We would not have been able to continue with the script, the one that kept her and Tere hidden like I used to hide my stained underwear, an embarrassment I didn’t know what to do with.

The phone rang and Rosita spoke briefly with Tere, where Miguel was staying. After hanging up, we climbed up the stairs to shower and change. When we reached the top, she turned to me.

“Era un lobo.”

I nodded. Her description of our father as a wolf, a ‘loner’ was true. He traveled across the border and kept any indecision or pain inside himself, his actions rarely explained or challenged. His children were now left as the older generation to decide which of his footprints they wanted to step in and which they would sidestep.

Joanna chauffeured us to Chapultepec Park to celebrate Miguel’s fifty-first birthday. We had the restaurant almost to ourselves, and while the day was overcast, the curved glass walls of the restaurant created a light feel to our initial meal together.

At one point Tere told me she knew a lot about “tu cultura,” placing me in the gringa box. Her Spanish became higher and sharper.

“The Americans think they can come and do whatever they want. But they forget we are the descendants of nobility—the Aztecs who survived longest and whose blood is in us were the ones who were the fiercest, the wisest, the proudest.”

Tere was a professor at one of the universities and loved sharing her in-depth knowledge. I was invading their hard earned sense of familia, slowly recovered after my father left them for good. Miguel must have been feeding them information for years about me and I wondered what picture he had painted of the family that kept him at a distance until recently. Who I was to them now was colliding with the stories they had had of me for thirty years, even longer for Rosita who had met us briefly as children who did not understand the importance of her visit. I had a clean slate as Miguel had only spoken about them with Eddy and I had not been in LA when Rosita had traveled for business and had seen Susan.

The waiter arrived just then with a candle in Miguel’s dessert and graciously took our picture. Miguel, a big grin on his face, was surrounded by his hermanas and sobrina, our hands resting on his red and black Nike sweat suit jacket. To the few other diners we looked as if we had been together our whole lives.

÷÷÷

I had attempted to take a short nap when we returned from our meal, but I was too anxious to do much other than move from one position to another on Rosita’s bed. When I heard the doorbell, I wrapped a shawl around me and descended the curved staircase. I was met with the smiling faces and abrazos of Arieti and Victor joining us for a light supper around Rosita’s dining table.

After dinner, we all settled into the living room. Miguel’s brow wrinkled and he rested his large hands on the edge of a sofa, telling me how his mother worked for thirty years in a tortillerafrom four a.m. to four p.m., making masa, having to stand the whole time. A quiet wave erased the lie written on the sand of my mind that her parents had coddled her.

“That’s because your querido padre left her,” Tere said.

I gazed up, but she was looking at Miguel.

“She was too tired to give us much attention when she was home,” Miguel said, shaking his head.

“She never saw anyone else?” I asked.

“No.” said Rosita, her throaty voice cutting through the smoke of her cigarette.

“When our father left for good,” continued Miguel, his speech slower, “my mother’s parents came, saying they needed to raise the girls and I needed to take care of my mother.”

“For good?”

“Yes,” Rosita replied. “Nuestro papá had begun going to the states several years before he left and never came back. I was nine and Teresita was one year old.”

“How old were you?” I asked Miguel.

“I was five.”

His face crumpled and tears streamed down his cheeks. The little boy peeked out of his face, the one who cried when separated from his hermanas. Tears rolled down my face and Rosita and Tere were both sniffling. They had lost their mother as well as their father.

Miguel leaned forward, his fingers interlaced, his forearms resting on his knees.

“In my early teens I was sent to work with my Tio and supervised one hundred workers at the molino, where they ground the corn for tortillas. Can you imagine me doing that at that age?”

I shook my head.

“And then?”

“Then they sent me to a military school.”

Tere looked at me.

“Would it have been better if we had told a different story?”

“I didn’t come to hear more lies, I came to understand my—our father’s secrets.”

Their words pushed over another cart full of sweet connections I had shared with my father, especially over the last ten years before he died, tumbling glassware, lounge chairs, and TVs into the mud, laying waste to my birth and my childhood losses. My mother worked, but she did not work ten-hour days, did not have a brother who pushed her around and kept the best for himself. Any punishment she felt was mostly self-inflicted as she slowly got to know the man she had picked, the man she chose to stay with again and again as his secrets revealed themselves. The man who did not marry her until their firstborn was four months old and never directly told her she had married a married man.

“When yourfather died I felt nothing,” Tere responded. “My abuelo was my father. He was the one who raised me.”

We had fallen back, one by one, into our seat cushions. Victor looked at his watch; it was midnight.

We gave the goodnight abrazos and besos that I cherished, and the cumbersomeness of the tangle we were loosening lay between us, so much still to be unraveled.

As I slowly entered sleep after writing in my journal, I could almost hear my father’s voice. It pleaded for me to imagine him in México, a poor man who married the young daughter of a man of some stature, believing he could prove his mettle. But she adored her father and brother and they let him know everyday he was not good enough for her. He was working ten-hour days, making babies, and straining at the bit in his mouth. When his friend Arturo invited him to go to el norte, he went. At first he believed his wife would join him across the border with their growing family, but she was traditional and refused to leave. His pride compelled him to act decisively, thinking it was his only chance to live his own life.

But at what cost? I wanted to yell. You knew how badly Abilio behaved toward you. You had to see he treated others with disregard, driven by greed. You probably knew about his second family. Yet you convinced yourself that your family would be safe without you, that Teresita’s parents would step in a different way than they did, would not punish her for choosing you. Forgot the way parents, women, and children forgive men too soon, too often, and too much.

I slept in with the rest of the household, my nighttime dream still simmering. How much was really what happened to my father and how much was me continuing the legacy of lies?

My goals for the day were simple: Parcel out the gifts I brought, don’t get too hungry since their meals were less predictable than mine, and visit Frida Kahlo’s house. Joanna drove las treshermanas to the historic Blue House. Rosita looked at her paintings and wrinkled her nose. Tere was more conciliatory, acknowledging, “Frida suffered a lot.”

That evening, we again gathered at Rosita’s home, this time with almost all the grown children and their uncle Abilio’s “illegitimate” second family. I met la mamá, a short, very serious, religious woman, and two of my siblings’ cousins. Miguel’s relatives here called him “Mike.”

Near the end of the gathering, one of their cousins asked me if I had known about my father’s Mexican family. His eyes darted around and he rubbed his hands together, admitting how hard it was to be the family with no rights and no acknowledgment.

“I can see why you are close,” I responded, “especially since Abilio was as neglectful of you as he was of my hermanos.”

Tere admitted that her two children didn’t know about our father having two families – my coming forced her to tell them. This did not match up with Susan saying she had met them, and I wondered whether Tere had kept the whole story from them as had been done to us, each person diluting or deleting facts to protect themselves and others.

Tere’s voice rose as she told the story of first meeting our father.

“I was eighteen when I came to Los Angeles. Mike went to hug Rosendo, who put out his arm to stop him, his own son. I saw the hurt in my brother’s face and rejected him as my father.”

This was news to me, as I had thought Miguel had come alone.

“Ay, Mami,” said Arieti, stroking her mother’s hair gently.

As Arieti continued to comfort Tere, I went to the bathroom, closed the door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat down. Bowing my head, I reached back with my hands and dug my fingers into my rock-hard shoulder muscles, breathing deeply. Extricating ourselves from this meant ripping open all the floorboards and airing out the dank lies of almost fifty years. Washing and drying my hands slowly, I returned and sat down next to Tere, leaning into the family circle.

“What about your last name, Miguel? Why is it Durand?”

“It’s my mother’s family name. Our father’s last name was Manrique. When mi papá told me to change my first name, I also dropped his family name.”

My last name was yet another sign of betrayal, of a father deleting his past by dropping his father’s name and keeping his mother’s. My last name should have been Manrique.

“Enough of the sad stories. What should we do on your last day?”

Tere’s voice was soft and sweet. We agreed to drive to Teotihuacan and visit the pirámides. I fell into the goodbye besos, and Arieti gave me a long hug and expressed her regret she could not join us tomorrow because she had to work.

Alone in my room, I wrote down stories to share with Susan, since they had not talked about this with her. Turning back to the family tree, I added the three children of Rosita’s oldest son and corrected a few ages. I then went to the top and added an empty square for my father’s papá and a circle for his mamá. Inside her circle I wrote “Concepción.” Inside my abuelo’s square I wrote “¿? Manrique.”

Another pleasant and inviting morning welcomed me after a restless night. An hour drive took us away from the congestion of the city and into the open savannah that used to be a series of lakes surrounded by the southern stretch of the Sierra Nevada ranges. After parking, Tere, Joanna and I climbed up to the top of the Templo del Sol. The many steep steps and Mexican altitude sucked the air out of my lungs. Rosita rested down below, and we waved at each other from across the distance.

As we walked across the Street of the Dead to the Pirámide de la Luna, Tere was in her glory, the yellow flowers on her outfit blossoming like the facts she shared as la profesora. She described the tunnel-like cave, ending in a cloverleaf-shaped set of chambers, below the Pirámide del Sol. This cave may have been a “place of emergence,” the “womb” from which the first humans came into the world. I locked arms with my hermanas and Joanna snapped a picture.

÷÷÷

The next morning came too soon and we entered the hustle of the airport. After checking in, we sat in the café near my gate and drank a final cafecito together. Arieti commented on my last name, González, thinking it strange that Americanos use their maternal family’s name.

“I think mi papá dropped Manrique when he left México and his family in an attempt to cover his tracks, so his niños couldn’t find him,” I said.

Reaching out, I put my hand on hers.

“I am glad his plan didn’t work.”

Soon my flight was announced. I gathered my backpack and started toward the gate. Arieti handed me a piece of paper. We hugged and I turned to hug my hermanas, flooded with the grief of what we had missed, of the wounds that were still tender to the touch. Of those yet unexposed because trust takes time and courage.

On the plane, I fished around in my backpack for my journal and tissue as tears came. I was glad the next generation wouldn’t carry our secrets. My fingers touched the squares and circles that were real people now. There were my three nephews who I barely saw and the two nieces who welcomed me from the beginning. Manrique was my shadow name, the name that carried my father’s secret.

I opened Arieti’s card:

Auntie,

I hope you’ve been as happy as I was with you here. I want to thank you for your love and tenderness to us. We want you to know how much we love you and miss you. I want you to leave with a big smile and with many wishes to come back. Please send our love to the family there and tell them that we are expecting them and above all this thank you for your help.

I hope the love grows fast and lasts forever. We love you all a lot and hope you come back soon. Remember to tell Teo and Gina how much we love them.

Arieti

That was a promise I could keep. Closing my eyes, I sat in a fragile hope that enveloped me like a silk rebozo so fine it could slide through a wedding band.

Linda Gonzalez, a San Francisco Bay Area resident, is a life coach and writer with a focus on supporting women and people of color step more deeply into their authentic leadership and purpose-filled lives. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and has been featured in literary fundraisers for Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) and WAGES. Born in Los Angeles and raised by immigrant parents, her father from México and her mother from Colombia, Linda offers this excerpt from her memoir, The Cost of Our Lives, which is in search of a publisher. You can read more about her writing and coaching services at lindagonzalez.net or email her directly: linda@lindagonzalez.net.

Xóchitl Cristina Gil-Higuchi, born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and raised in Arizona, a graduate of the University of Arizona, is part of a new generation of Chicana/o artists shifting and expanding the traditional themes found in Chicana/o art. She has participated in over 30 exhibitions including the Jose Luis Cuevas Museum in Mexico City. Publications include the Chicana/o Contemporary Art Anthology (Bilingual Press, 2003), the complimentary DVD-ROM “Triumph of Our Communities: Artists and Arts Organizations” (2007), and the Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture (Greenwood Press, 2004). In 2010, she was awarded a Contemporary Forum Award from the Phoenix Museum of Art. She currently lives in New York City. She may be contacted at: xochitl@artexochitl.comor 917-588-8023.

↧

An Image to Unify the Work for Earth-Justice-Peace

May 30, 2016, 11:15 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

“Healer's badge”

Button adaptation of Earth-Justice-Peace Flag

Guest Editorial

The sacralization of the Earth, of Life

By Rafael Jesús González

In solidarity with the worldwide movement to achieve “a whole Earth capable of supporting all life” through social justice and non-violent means, we publish this guest editorial by a noted Chicano poet and peace activist.

Family, friends, colleagues, fellow activists for Earth-Justice-Peace

The weekend of May 19-21, 2016, I attended a Nonviolent Strategy Summit with the Albert Einstein Institution focused on Climate Change. There was so much of value (much of it ineffable) that we shared and explored, but in trying to determine a “Grand Strategy” the one thing that I found of utmost importance was articulating and arriving at a consensus of the “Grand Vision,” goal to which any “Grand Strategy” must be subservient: a whole (entire, healthy, integral) Earth capable of supporting all life.

This is our Grand Vision and our hope though the Earth is already compromised so by our myopic vision and toxic values that our future is bleak. Our utter disregard for our “inanimate” relations (the waters, the soil, the minerals) except as “resources” for our consumption has already caused the extinction of many of our animal brother and sister species, many species of our plant relations. And many of our human brothers and sisters throughout the Earth are even now suffering greatly from the effects of “climate change” (droughts, hurricanes, floods) and there is much more suffering to come.

So we must hold two simultaneous visions, one “Grand” vision of our hopes and dreams for which we must strive, and a clear vision of the disasters and suffering we face now and will have to soon increasingly face. Hence our “Grand Strategy” must be two-fold: 1) to mitigate “climate change” and heal the Earth and 2) to prepare ourselves to deal with the disasters that we now face and are yet to come. I state the obvious, but perhaps the obvious must be said for us to truly own it, such as putting a “Grand Vision” into words.

One thing that struck me at our gathering, something so obviously taken for granted that unified us all, patent in our faces, our demeanors, in everything we said, our very presence, and upon which our “Grand Vision” itself is rooted, was not once said during the entire day of our deliberations: love — love of life above all else.

Because our task is huge beyond imagining we must be very clear of what motivates and empowers us to undertake it. The task, enormous beyond measure, is to foment and realize a world-wide revolution, a revolution of consciousness, of the mind and of the heart that transcends nation, race, ethnicity, gender, language itself.

And the Grand Vision for the Earth must include the demands for Climate Justice, for Justice in every aspect (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.) without which there can be no peace.

Granted that all aspects in a strategy of nonviolent struggle as presented to us are to be engaged simultaneously, in my assessment, the foremost is that of propaganda. Suspect term in light of its coinage and its past use as it is, it is defined as information to propagate (transmit, disseminate, promote) a particular point of view or cause — win hearts and minds.

I cannot imagine a more firm, solid, irrefutable base on which to base such a world-wide revolution of which I speak than love of life. Not life as an abstraction, but the concrete experience of the Earth in all its exquisite (as well as terrifying) forms. Is this not the very root of divinity we humans imagine? This is what the indigenous cultures, which the Western world with its hunger for wealth and its imperialistic drive have brought to the brink of extinction if not already made extinct, can teach us. Our task is nothing less that the sacralization of the Earth, of Life. That is the revolution that we must propagate.

We must change, convert the dominant culture on a huge scale and to do this we must recruit and engage the most powerful agents of cultural change, the artists: the poets, the musicians, the dancers, the painters, the sculptors, all. Nothing is worth propagating if it is not rooted in love, informed by beauty and joy. If life is devoid of beauty and joy, what is there in it to love? Let us be very clear in our premises and base our strategies according.

To propagate a belief and a cause we need symbols and signs, flags to identify and unite us. Obvious in western history are the Star of David, the Cross (in hoc signo vinces), the Nazi swastika, the Stars & Stripes (not to mention the myriad logos on which corporations spend millions to sell their “goods.”) Several folk at the summit said that our various organizations confronting “climate change” need a common symbol or symbols to unify, identify us in our common cause. And our common cause is social change, our common cause is Justice and Peace for all.

I put forward then and do so now the “Universal Earth-Justice-Peace flag” that adorned the podium at the summit as fit symbol of all our struggles for Justice, for Peace, for the well-being of the Earth:

Since, as some at the summit said, the stories behind symbols are important, here is its history:

In 1982 I took a leave of absence from my teaching at Laney College, Oakland to work with the Livermore Action Group to organize the International Day of Nuclear Disarmament. One of the issues we had to work out was setting the date for the international actions that were to take place throughout the world. As you might imagine, it was not easy to find agreement, but Starhawk (of her many books, I recommend her futuristic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, which is in the process of being made into a movie) whom I met at the time, and I were adamant that the day had to be a universal world-wide holy day free of national, political, religious, partisan overtones. It had to be a holy day set by the Earth itself in her movement around the Sun and that meant either one of the equinoxes or one of the solstices. After long discussions (with the consensus process you may imagine how long it took), the date was set for the Summer Solstice, June 21, 1983.

A logo for the day of action was needed, one who’s meaning embraced the issues involved, and whose meaning was immediately clear and went beyond language, nationality, political bias, etc. The logo accepted by the organizers was the image of the Earth, superimposed upon the Sun and spanned by the wings of Peace. It was this logo (with many variations of design) that went around the world for the 1st International Day of Nuclear Disarmament.

The day was a huge success as far as the number of actions and people involved went. At the Livermore National Nuclear Laboratory blockade alone, 1,000 of us were arrested for civil disobedience. At Santa Rita prison, a huge circus tent had to be set up for the arrested men; the women were crowded into a wing of the prison.)

Well, that was the first and last International Day of Nuclear Disarmament. We came out of jail and, exhausted from organizing demonstrations, the Livermore Action Group dwindled away. (Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser https://www.directaction.org/ is especially useful for the appendix including valuable material from the Livermore Action Group about organizing the world event.) No one else took on the gigantic task of organizing a second day, and the logo of the action was forgotten.

Then the summer of 2011, at the inception of the Occupy Movement, some veterans of the Livermore Action Group got together to organize demonstrations throughout the financial district of San Francisco that Summer Solstice (“Solstice in the Streets,” we called it) and the logo was resurrected.

For these actions, the logo was superimposed upon the international rainbow flag for peace that was flown throughout Europe and Latin America (as well as in the U.S.) just before and during the last war on Iraq. We called it the “Universal Earth-Justice-Peace flag.”

Universal Earth-Justice-Peace flag, Solstice in the Streets,

San Francisco, June 6, 2011

Photo by Steve Nadel

An artist friend, Joaquin Newman painted a huge, beautiful banner with the image of the flag and the words “Despierta/Awake,” which has been carried in many a demonstration since Summer Solstice 2011. (Joaquin was 14 years-old at the time of the International Day of Nuclear disarmament and the youngest member of Lifers, our affinity group.)

A group of activists (which includes many of you reading this) have become so associated with the banner, that people refer to our group as the “Despierta/Awake Contingent.”

We have wanted to have the flags made, but the expense was beyond what we could afford so we only have one. So we settled for having a button made, “healer’s badge” we call it, extrapolated from the flag.

Because the quantity of buttons that we have been able to afford has not been large, we have given the buttons to other activists for Justice, Peace, well-being of the Earth, healers throughout the world whom we meet wherever we find ourselves. People invariably respond to its beauty and ask, “What does it mean?” We always decline answering the question and ask, “What does it mean to you?”

We have not met a single person who did not know how to interpret it, no matter what their culture, their language; always they identify the Sun, the Earth, the bird of peace, and the rainbow (harmony in diversity, auspicious sign throughout the world.) We also tell them that if someone asks them to explain the badge’s meaning, not to give it, but instead ask for an interpretation from the receiver. We also ask that if they see someone else wearing the pin, ask how they came by it. Thus a connection is made, a net woven of folk sharing values: Earth-Justice-Peace.

There have been many stories related to the Earth-Justice-Peace healer’s badge, of which I share with you an e-mail received from someone who was in Paris for the climate talks in November. She wrote:

“A quick story: this morning we got mega hassled on the bus en route to cop21 for not paying. Like super agro crazy French guards yelling at us asking us for papers and surrounding us. They kept trying to charge us for not paying and we tried to explain we were with the UN delegation and we didn't understand the bus system. Finally I showed her the peace button and we explained in English and the crazy cop woman completely changed her energy, was begging us for forgiveness! I took off the button and gifted it to her. She kissed me and they let us go!!! The peace and justice button saved us!!!”

The power of symbols is enormous, especially those that transcend culture and language, especially those that are beautiful in themselves. I offer you this one as the logo or one of the logos to use in conjunction with those of our organizations to link and unite us in our movement to heal the Earth. The more widely that we use it, the more ubiquitous it becomes, the greater the impact visually and psychologically. Imagine if it appeared in all our marches and demonstrations and direct actions, not only here, but throughout the world: flags, banners, posters, billboards, fliers, t-shirts, incorporated by artists into their art, etc.

The flag, as I said, has been expensive for our group to have made, but the more flags ordered from a company, the more affordable they become. Groups could come together to place a large order and share the lower cost of having them made. As the demand increases and more flags are ordered, a company could be convinced to make the flag in large quantities and have it ready for sale to groups and individuals at a lower price (as it happens with the U.S. flag and such.)

The Earth-Justice-Peace flag and symbol are protected under a Creative Commons License so that anyone may use it as they like and no one may claim exclusive rights to it.

Our group had the pin/button/badge made by:

Just Buttons

59 School Ground Road

Branford, CT 06405

https://www.justbuttons.org/

1-800-564-2924

Buying them in large quantities considerably lowers the cost. Groups coming together to buy them in large quantities and sell them at demonstrations and other events would be a good way to disseminate the image and raise funds for one’s organization.

Our task of healing the Earth and mitigating the suffering that climate change is causing and will increase to cause is huge, daunting. The task of bringing Justice to all, Peace to all is an essential part of the task. But not because of that must we lose hope. Let us undertake the task with heart, with joy, with beauty, and celebrate the Earth, all that she bears, Life, and each other. Let our struggle be a dance.

Rafael Jesús Gonzálezof El Paso, Texas, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an internationally known poet and peace activist. He conducted the open ceremony of the International Tribunal of Conscience held last September in New York City. A professor of Creative Writing and Literature, he taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland, where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Department. Somos en escrito has also featured his book of poems, La Musa Lunática/The Lunatic Muse. Follow his blog at rjgonzalez.blogspot.com.

↧

...she welcomed the universe into her hands

May 25, 2016, 10:52 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Follow us on Twitter @Somosenescrito

Poems

By Iliana Rocha

Self-Portrait with Headphones On

I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know

Everything that shines ain't always gonna be gold

I'll be fine once I get it, I'll be good...

—Kid Cudi, “Pursuit of Happiness”

But what is happiness? It's a moment before you need

more happiness.

—Don Draper, Mad Men

I was born drunk, listening to music

in the womb, rap videos

projected on the chapel walls of my mother's

uterus, a little sheen,

a lot of strut, dropping it like it's hot

with my eyes still sewn

shut. I wish I wouldn't have been told

what it was, promised it

by the simple act of being alive.

I've been trying to trace its origins from Schoolboy Q

& A$AP Rocky to Lissie

to Kid Cudi, see it braless & sparkling

on a microphone

like getting blown by a drag queen.

When I squint, I can see

it slowly revealing itself, glowing beige on the horizon

like an apple bottom

falling out of a g-string. Holy Kathleen Lights,

holy stiletto, holy

stripper. The incompleteness

of instant gratification, my lacquered heart

the minaudière carrying lipsticks in all the same

color like Morange & Lady Danger,

fashion in Spanglish,

la payasa. Dad used to stand in his drunk

kitchen trying to chase it down

with his glass of shine,

starching my jeans until they were glitterbest,

while other half-alive things crowded

around: iron & frying pan

of Spam. Versions of it are extinct, like cursive

& men with crushes, my best

friend's breasts. Gone, &

all I can do is talk shit with my jumper

cable lips. I know there isn't much

of it, anyone, & you

always have to be left for a different,

more reachable one.

Looking at Women

My father taught me how. His curious eyes, perpetually amber

from drinking, would scan a woman, rest on a bold curve

they liked: tits or ass. He was not a leg man. It would begin

innocently enough, his arm draped across a bench at the mall,

my mother shopping. I'd sit in his armpit, matted hair in Old

Spice while his gaze trucked each body teetering on stilettos.

Weekends, my father watched Sábado Gigante, would hoot &

holler at the women wearing nothing but dark eyebrows &

overdrawn lips, occasionally an accordion as a dress. ¡Damn!

he would exclaim. Damn. There were also the pornos, soft-

core, half-naked women with their hard breasts mistakenly

attached to ribs. “Hot blonde” was a universal phrase, &

brunettes became sexy only when they removed their glasses &

shook their tight buns loose from their heads. Teachers can be

hot too. Sometimes I slept on the living room sofa, & the TV's

glare would wake me: nude mermaids fingering each other in

the gills, merman sucking their shiny pennies of nipple. Then

there was the internet history. More women—some pregnant,

some just chubby. I noticed my own body, legs half-tree trunk,

half-lightning rod. Tried to pinch the skin around my knees

& ankles into neater shapes. A waist strangled into a waist:

el número ocho, la guitarra. Some have found that waist,

others reached right through it to other women everywhere:

one positioned obediently in the emptiness of one boyfriend's

computer screen, sunny & grinning in bikini. Continuous

others popped up, contained in rectangles, snapping a thong's

hot pink. I started to look, too, at one in a commercial licking

barbecue sauce from her fingers. My stare isn't all that different

than his—start from the face, scroll down. I love a woman in a

tight dress, done up like a drag queen.

Hot Mess

for Allison

breasts boobs tits knockers funbags hooters ta-tas

jugs The Twins Elmer Fudds &

bouncing Buddhas frost detectors high beam lights

ode to joys Gerber servers Holy Grails rubber

baby buggy bumpers your boobs have done us

good girl my god they were amazing

I've seen them in fitting rooms bedrooms falling

out of a tube top to Fatman Scoop (no, that was me)

men offered to pay to see your bazongas rack Lucy

Lius now its the

anesthesia mixtape off-beat xylophones dull out

of tune tin stars rubbing their bodies

against each other like a

faded Super Mario Bros theme song

eking out a Nintendo along with your high school

crush chanting “Owner of a Lonely Heart” into a

plastic cup

nothing glows & your mammogram never

predicted the response of classic beige yawns

pulling closed their trench coats

all drafty & loneliness in the waiting room

you won't cancel your Vegas show your date

nights but we agree that people can no longer

disappoint us

I'll tell you something when Courtney

Love

sang I'm Miss World somebody kill me she

didn't mean it

when Sandra Cisneros wrote about

being beautiful & cruel she meant

how did you say goodbye to them did you light

a candle at their altar was it more like flowers or a note

of condolence I can't imagine you Miss

Thang getting the news or being rolled into the

O.R. all the talk of deform-

ities & motherhood & bodies turning against us &

no man no man no man there isn't it sad

we love men in

dresses Jinkx Monsoon Latrice Royale Willam

Manilla Luzon Jujubee Ben De La Creme

Bianca del Rio Alexis

Mateo Papi, I want you to come back home!

How they wear their

boobsforqueens.com!

you say you admired them one last time let

them overwhelm the width of your

hands said fuck it & thought about an umbrella

trying to hold the wind how much your last

bra cost oh the shame the shame of losing those ragtime

funnies those drugstore cowboys

those Travoltas

White Mexican Girl
for Kristen
for Monica

This world was an accident. If we
picked a place on a map,
this would be it
[a globe of pregnancy].
Mexican girls
standing ankle-deep in piles of vanilla
bean carcasses, relieved
of their sweating embryos.
Running barefoot
in the streets to chase the wandering tune
of ice cream [blue ghost, bubble
gum eye]. Where we dug
squirrels’ hearts out of their chests
with a rusty grapefruit spoon;
laughed at our violence.
That old, stupid
pain will always be here, but over time, it’ll
be harder to diagnose. Oh uterus,
haphazard creator
of our bodies, collapsing stacks of Lisa
Frank erasers [hallucinogenic,
unicorn, pout]: we faked
our way through Cumbia
[bougie cumbia, poseur cumbia]
King lyrics, repeating azucar, as if
our mouths were filled with glass,
as if we were chewing on bullets
aimed at our pasts: [love this old school just visited
Corpitos, memories from back in the ‘90s
looking for the person who sang“Nunca
Mi Amor te Olividare,” it was half English
half Spanish, Que Viva La Raza].

------+++++------

Still Life with Aunt Carmen
at Bravo’s Mexican Restaurant,

2009

Sorrow drizzles down, a gray feather, like a Vietnamese woman
painting the Virgin Mary’s minutiae on an acrylic nail—

she taps her finger on the margarita glass, claims
the antihero for holiness is inside. What exactly have I evolved

past? El diablo no duerme written in red lipstick on the edge
of her cup stuck with salt; the clouds on hangers

like my grandfather’s blue satin Houston Oilers jacket, oil derrick
erect. Donkeys, globes; assorted cartoon characters mid-

cumbia from the ceiling by string, she takes out a CoverGirl
compact powder in the lightest shade, cakes on layers

in a way that no one understood when I did it in high school
in lieu of hanging out with the Mexican girls.

The trumpets’ relentless barking, serenading the table with “El
Rey," she is never afraid to confront nostalgia: Remember when we

crumpled up the rice fields, put them tequila-lit in barrels? When Daddy
telegrammed himself back from Normandy? Our sticky mouths

of masa harina not a platitude, but a plea for domesticity
we disowned? As a little old woman behind glass pounds

dough into tortillas, we line our newborns up in neat rows,
build animals from shredded newspapers; papier-

mâché. I connect my skeleton with brass fasteners, adding a bow
to my mouth with too-dark lip liner.

------+++++------

My Grandmother as Erté’s Starstruck

When the gold ran out, she crocheted
each star until her knuckles
collapsed, a piano exhausted
from the day’s dirges [Lil Keke’s “Chunk
Up the Deuce”], anthems for those
who unwillingly escaped Texas’
five-pointed blankness. Star:
another name for smithereen,
for Detroit, for the gun’s firecracker
that shattered him, mirrors
draped in black cloth; rosaries
[Hail Mary, full of grace].
She’s always tried to outrun the dark
erasing her neon tornado of crushed Bakelite—
the memory of his body
unpacking its losses, lacquered
bloody, on a city street—
spiraling her into borealis.
[No me gusta la noche. Los aviónes, barcos.]
Reverse Guadalupe, silver-strained
by cigarette, if she could give back her daughters
to the womb, she would, follow
the disappearing curls
of smoke strangling her organs
into plasticity. Her wedding
[ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores]
dress’ papel picado lace,
all rectilinear
like the building that reflected
his death in every
window while she welcomed the universe
into her hands.

Iliana Rocha is originally from Texas and is currently a PhD candidate in English-Creative Writing at Western Michigan

Photo by Alyssa Jewell

University. She earned her MFA
in Creative Writing-Poetry from Arizona State University, where she was Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her work was chosen for the Best New Poets 2014 anthology and has previously appeared in Blackbird, Yalobusha Review,Puerto del Sol, and Third Coast. Her first book, Karankawa, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

↧

Research group to study spoken and written Spanish in US

June 8, 2016, 3:15 pm

≫ Next: Memoirs de un Emigrante /Memorias of an Immigrant

≪ Previous: ...she welcomed the universe into her hands

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

CONTACT/O: Frank Gómez, fgomez@riuss.org, 917.593.8764

NUEVO INSTITUTO EXAMINA EL ESPAÑOL DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS

Una nueva organización de investigaciones estudiará el uso formal del español hablado y escrito en los Estados Unidos

Nueva York NY – 8 de junio de 2016 – Expertos de la lengua española se unieron para fundar una organización dedicada exclusivamente a entender y fomentar el uso del “español de los Estados Unidos”. The Research Institute of United States Spanish, o RIUSS, responde a la realidad de que el español es el segundo idioma de facto de la nación pero carece de normas específicamente nacionales para guiar su uso en los sectores público y privados, los medios de difusión y otras áreas.

“Con alrededor de 38 millones de hablantes (sin contar 3.5 millones en Puerto Rico) y con la proliferación del español, en una generación seremos el país con mayor número de hispanohablantes después de México”, dijo Leticia Molinero, traductora y fundadora de RIUSS. "RIUSS responde a realidades críticas en los ámbitos comerciales, sociales y mediáticos en español que requieren coherencia en el reconocimiento de las preferencias nacionales. También realizará investigaciones para determinar el equivalente de “US-Spanish plain-language”, o lenguaje claro, en las comunicaciones de la administración pública a fin de procurar el mayor alcance posible”.

Entre las naciones hispanohablantes, puntualizan los fundadores de RIUSS, Estados Unidos se distingue singularmente por cuanto 1) el español vive en contacto diario con el inglés y por lo tanto es influenciado por este y 2) los hispanohablantes en los Estados Unidos vienen literalmente de todas las tierras donde se habla español, además de incluir al sudoeste estadounidense donde se habla desde hace cuatro siglos.

Laura Godfrey, Directora de Multilingual Strategies y de la Multilingual Community of Practice en la General Services Administration, aplaude la llegada de RIUSS. “Nuestra oficina trabaja 2 para mejorar y estandarizar el uso de la lengua española en las comunicaciones del gobierno, por lo tanto la terminología de uso común y las instrucciones claras para solicitar beneficios – para mencionar algunos ejemplos– revisten una importancia crítica para los usuarios hispanohablantes de los servicios gubernamentales”, dijo la funcionaria.

RIUSS, una organización de miembros, planea trabajar en estrecha colaboración con una amplia gama de organizaciones gubernamentales, sin fines de lucro e hispanas. “Los servicios de atención de salud se encuentran entre las áreas más críticas en las que es indispensable expresarse en términos comunes y comprensibles”, dijo María Cornelio, una fundadora de RIUSS y coordinadora del programa de traducción e interpretación en Hunter College, City University of New York. “El uso de términos e instrucciones precisas y comprensibles son literalmente una cuestión de vida o muerte en el campo de atención de salud”.

Entre los servicios que ofrece RIUSS cabe destacar:

• Investigaciones sobre el uso de la lengua española que se compartirán ampliamente a través de su sitio web y otros medios

• Webinarios periódicos dedicados a áreas de comunicación clave

• Encuestas de uso y de comprensión de la lengua española en campos profesionales; publicación de hallazgos en el sitio web

• Encuestas RIUSS© sobre el uso de la lengua española

• Seminarios y conferencias RIUSS© y participación en otros eventos

• Convenientes categorías de membresía

• Colaboración con entidades interesadas en entender términos de uso nacional en lengua española

• Servicios a entidades gubernamentales a nivel federal, estatal y local

• Consultas y asesoramiento sobre el uso de la lengua

Dada su misión y enfoque únicos, RIUSS abordará los intereses de diversas profesiones que abarcan el entorno académico, los medios de difusión, el sector privado, traductores, intérpretes y otras disciplinas. La membresía está abierta a todos los interesados. Para mayor información sobre RIUSS y su membresía sírvase visitar www.RIUSS.org.

New York NY – June 8, 2016– Spanish language experts have come together to found an organization dedicated exclusively to understanding and promoting the use of “Spanish of the United States.” The Research Institute of United States Spanish, or RIUSS, responds to the reality that Spanish is the de facto second language of the nation, but one without standards or norms to guide its use in the public and private sectors, media and other areas.

“With about 38 million speakers (not counting 3.5 million in Puerto Rico), and with Spanish proliferating, in a generation we will be the world´s second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico,” said Leticia Molinero, a RIUSS founder and a translator. “RIUSS responds to critical commercial, societal and media realities about Spanish that cry out for consistency in recognizing national preferences. It will also conduct research to determine “US-Spanish plain-language” in public administration communications so as to ensure the broadest possible reach."

Among Spanish speaking nations, RIUSS founders point out, the United States is unique in that 1) Spanish lives in daily contact with and, hence, is influenced significantly by English, and 2) Spanish-speakers in the United States come literally from every land where Spanish is spoken – including the American Southwest where it has been spoken for four centuries.

Laura Godfrey, Director of Multilingual Strategies and Chair of the government-wide Multilingual Community of Practice at the General Services Administration’s office that works to improve and standardize the use of the Spanish language in government communications, welcomes the advent of RIUSS. “Official Spanish language agency names, common use terminology, clear instructions to apply for benefits, for example, are critically important to Spanish-speaking users of government services,” she said.

RIUSS, a membership organization, plans to work closely with a broad range of government, nonprofit and Hispanic organizations. “Health care services are among the most critical areas in which common, understandable terms are indispensable,” said Maria Cornelio, a RIUSS founder and head of the Spanish translation/interpretation program at City University of New York’s Hunter College. “Accurate, understandable terms and instructions are literally a matter of life and death in health care.”

Among the services that RIUSS offers are:

● Spanish language usage research to be shared broadly through its website and other means

● Periodic webinars focused on key subject areas

● Spanish language usage and comprehension surveys in professional fields; posting of findings on the website

● RIUSS© surveys on Spanish language usage

● RIUSS© seminars and conferences and participation in other events

● Convenient membership categories

● Collaboration with entities concerned about the proper use of Spanish in the US

● Services to federal, state and local government entities

● Consultations and advice on usage

Given its unique mission and focus, RIUSS will serve members from diverse professions, among them academia, media, the private sector, translators, interpreters and others. Membership is open to all interested parties. For further information on RIUSS and membership please visit www.RIUSS.org.

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Memoirs de un Emigrante /Memorias of an Immigrant

June 11, 2016, 9:29 pm

≫ Next: Poems to an abuelo and to hope far off

≪ Previous: Research group to study spoken and written Spanish in US

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

La Calera, Michoacán, México

De Campesino a Catedrático y Activista

By Cirenio A. Rodríguez

The author, born in Michoacán, Mexico, has collected a number of vignettes about the origins of his family in Mexico and Texas, which he plans to publish as a memoir soon. Some segments of the Mexican phase are published here.

In my family there lives a rich tradition of story tellers: both of my grandfathers used to tell us cuentos and family stories. As a faculty member, I often found myself following this rich tradition by telling stories as part of the teaching methodology. Following the footsteps of my grandparents, I decided to write and share personal narratives about aspects of my life as a Mexican immigrant growing up in the United States (student, activist, professional) and my formative years in a rural setting in Mexico. Adalberto Aguirre Jr. (2005) claimed that personal narrative is valuable as a method for understanding everyday life because it gives substance to the story and identity to the storyteller. According to Spindler, G., and Spindler, J. (1992), each individual has at least three different identities, 1) “enduring self,” 2) “situated self,” and 3) “endangering self.”

The enduring self consists of the formative years of a person: the first 14 years rooted in childhood. In my case, the first 14 years living in a rural environment in La Calera, Michoacán, formed the enduring self. The situated self is constantly changing in response to the necessity to make sense in whatever situation one finds oneself. It changes, within limits that are set by the enduring self, depending on the demands of the situation, such as a recent immigrant in Los Angeles, California, farm worker in the fields of Northern California, college and university student activist, community activist and professor, father, husband, grandfather, school board member, etc.

Each situation demands different understandings, gestures, way of speaking, demeanor etc. I don’t put myself in an endangered situation. That's what happens to those who can’t navigate from the enduring to the situational self.As participant of two societies, I acquired certain social and cultural traits that social scientists call “Social and Cultural Capital.” Social and cultural capital are generated collectively but also reflect or are part of an individual’s identity. My social and cultural capital were influenced and transformed by the life experiences in rural Mexico and California, thereby, influencing my perceptions, impressions, observations and ultimately my own bilingual and bicultural identity. My personal narrative will also reflect on important historical events of Mexicans/Chicanos in the United States.

En mi familia hay una gran tradición de narrativa oral o mejor dicho de cuentistas. Mis dos abuelos solían compartir cuentos e historias de los miembros de la familia. Yo muchas veces empleaba la tradición oral de decir cuentos para complementar la metodología pedagógica cuando compartía clases en la universidad. Siguiendo la rica tradición de mis abuelos, decidí escribir y compartir mi narrativa personal sobre mis experiencias como emigrante en Los Estados Unidos y también cuando era niño/joven en el rancho. Adalberto Aguirre Jr. (2005) comenta que la narrativa personal es valiosa como método para entender la vida cuotidiana de un individuo porque le da substancia a la historia e identidad al cuentista. Según Spindler, G., y Spindler, J. (1992), cada individuo tiene por lo menos tres identidades (seres) 1) “identidad (ser) perdurable,” 2) “identidad (ser) situada,” y 3) “identidad (ser) en peligro.”

El ser o la identidad perdurable consiste en los primeros 14 años que son los años formativos de una persona. En mi caso los primeros 14 años en un ambiente rural en el rancho La Calera, Michoacán. El ser o la identidad situada cambia constantemente en respuesta a las necesidades con el fin de conocer el sentido de cualquier situación que uno se encuentre. La identidad cambia, dentro de los límites que establece la identidad perdurable, dependiendo de las demandas de la situación, tales como recién llegado a Los Ángeles, campesino en los campos agrícolas del Norte de California, estudiante y profesor universitario, activista político y social, esposo, padre, abuelo y miembro de mesas directivas de distritos escolares.

Cada situación demanda o exige diferentes concepciones, modos de hablar o actuar, etc. No me pongo en situaciones peligrosas (identidad en peligro). Eso pasa cuando uno no puede navegar de la identidad perdurable a la identidad situada. Como miembro y participante de dos sociedades tengo dos identidades sociales y culturales, lo que científicos sociales llaman capital social y capital cultural, que se crean, se generan colectivamente, pero también reflejan o son parte de la identidad individual de una persona. Estos rasgos sociales, culturales en el rancho y después en California contribuyeron a la transformación de mi identidad, la cual influye en mi concepción del mundo, mis observaciones impresiones, opiniones y finalmente en mi misma identidad bilingüe y bicultural. Mi narrativa personal también reflejara en eventos históricos de la comunidad mexicana/chicana en los Estados Unidos.

~~~~~~~~~

Rural Roots

Allá al pie de la montaña

Donde se oculta temprano el sol

Deje mi ranchito triste

Y abandonada ya mi labor

I was born in 1946 in La Calera, Michoacán, México, of USA-born parents. Both my paternal and maternal grandparent migrated to the USA during the Mexican Revolution, along with a number of their brothers, sisters and cousins, and both my parents were born in Garden City, Kansas, father Marcos Rodríguez (1919) and mother, Teresa Ayala (1927) . During the 1930's, as part of the repatriation of Mexicans by the US government, my grandparents and their kids, mostly US citizens, were sent back to México. They returned to their native village in Michoacán. Many years later my parents were married and gave birth to several kids while at the rancho. I and four of my sisters survived. In 1960, since both of my parents were US citizens, we entered the USA at San Isidro, Califas, as citizens of this country. My parents gave birth to five other girls while in California. I am the only male in the family (besides my dad).

La Calera, Michoacán, formerly known as El Colado, is located in the northern part of Michoacán and is part of Municipio Sixto Verduzco. Its basic economy is agriculture. In the 1800’s, when it was called El Colado, it was moved to its present location because of flooding. It was part of an extensive Hacienda de Zurumuato (now known as Pastor Ortiz) and most, if not all, of its inhabitants worked for the hacendado Carlos Markassuza. It is situated al norte del estado de Michoacán along the Rio Lerma Valley. It coincides with what Kirchoff (1940) calls XVI Century Mesoamerican boundaries. It is a very important natural passage (corridor) for the transportation of ideas, men and goods.

Chichimecas lived in this region which was also the border of the Tarascan/Purépecha people in their northern expansionist efforts, on the eve of Spanish expansionism. During the Spanish Colonial days, this became a very important part of the complex economic, agricultural, commercial and industrial development of el Bajío (Jose Napoleon Vargas Robledo, 2012).

La Calera was probably a ceremonial site for the Purépechas/Tarascan people. On the outskirts of the rancho there was a series of Yacatas, which are religious/ceremonial temples of the Purépechas. They also used Yacatas as their center of government and cemeteries where they buried their dead leaders. I clearly remember these religious, ceremonial structures that we called Yacatas de Cunda. In addition to the Yacatas there were other Purépecha structures. In the middle of the ranch, there is a structure we called, “El Alto,” which is probably a hill or an old Yacata. This place is right next to “El Corral de la Hacienda” where they used to house the animals and agricultural equipment/tools of the hacienda. We used to dig in and around this place and often found archeological items such as arrows, dolls, whistles, shells, etc. One of my uncles, once told me that when they were digging in El Corral de la hacienda to build the foundation for the new school, they found a human a skeleton with many items, such as dolls, and two shells. One of these shells he used on special occasions to call the people to meetings and/or religious cultural events. The burial must have been of an important ruler.

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Nací en La Calera, Michoacán, México de padres nacidos en Estados Unidos. Mis abuelos paternos y maternos migraron a Estados Unidos durante la Revolución Mexicana (1910-1917), acompañados por otros hermanos y primos. Mi padre Marcos Rodríguez Montes y madre Teresa Ayala Castro nacieron en Garden City, Kansas. Sin embargo en los años 1930s estas familias, incluyendo niños y niñas de ciudadanía estadounidense fueron repatriados por el gobierno de Estados Unidos a México. Regresaron al rancho La Calera. Varios años después mi mama y papa se casaron y dieron vida a cinco, a mi y cuatro hermanas. Mi papa regreso a los estados unidos a trabajar en los campos agrícolas o la industria ferrocarril de California en los años 40 y 50 del siglo pasado.

En 1906, ya que ambos mi papa y mama eran ciudadanos americanos, los cinco de nosotros entramos a los Estados Unidos como ciudadanos de este país. Tiempo después mis padres dieron vida a cinco mas de mis hermanas. Yo soy el único hijo en esta familia. La Calera, Michoacán, antes conocida como El Colado, está situada en el norte del estado de Michoacán y es parte del Municipio Sixto Verduzco; su economía básica consiste de la agricultura. A los finales del siglo XIX, se mudó a su presente ubicación debido a inundaciones. El rancho era parte de la Hacienda de Zurumuato y la gente trabajaba para el hacendado de nombre Carlos Markassuza.

El Municipio Sixto Verduzco está “Ubicado al norte del Estado de Michoacán, en el ‘Valle del Río Lerma,” coincide con lo que Kirchoff suele considerar como límite de Mesoamérica en el siglo XVI y un corredor naturalmente importante para la circulación de bienes, hombres e ideas. (Kirchoff, 1940). “Esta zona estuvo poblada por chichimecas movedizos y sirvió de frontera a los tarascos o purépechas en su afán expansionista hacia el norte, en vísperas de la otra ola expansionista, la española. Tiempo después, ya en plena época colonial hispana, esta región se integró al desarrollo agrícola, ganadero, comercial e industrial que significó el complejo económico del Bajío.” (José Napoleón Vargas Robledo, 2012).

La Calera quizás fue un sitio ceremonial Purépecha, ya que en las afueras del rancho se encontraban unas Yacatas en la loma camino hacia el cerro. Las Yacatas son templos religiosos de los Purépechas. También los Purépechas las usaban como centro de gobierno y enterraban a sus gobernantes. Recuerdo perfectamente estas Yacatas de Cunda. En el centro del rancho hay un área que le llamamos el alto en el cual se ubicaba “El Corral de la Hacienda,” donde encerraban el ganado de los hacendados. En este lugar, encontrábamos objetos, de los antiguos pobladores Purépechas, tales como muñecos, trastes, silbidos, flechas, caracoles, etc. Me relató un tío que en los años 60 cuando se construyó la actual escuela del rancho encontraron un cuerpo humano el cual tenía tales objetos, incluyendo dos caracoles. Uno de estos caracoles los usaba mi tío como silbido durante algunos eventos culturales/religiosos.

Revolución en la Calera

Año de mil novecientos

Y doce que pasó

Murió Benito Canales

El gobierno lo mató

In 1876, Porfirio Diaz came to power that lasted over 30 years. He is given credit for modernizing Mexico but also his reign is known for its brutality toward the poor classes, especially native communities. During his regime, foreign investors entered Mexico and began to own much of its land and other resources. The hacienda system of large land owners took root. Much of rural Mexico was owned by a very few including foreigners. Such was the case in my little ranchito which was part of a large hacienda owned by a person by the name of Carlos Markassuza. Opposition to Díaz’ brutal regime surfaced in many parts of Mexico, some of it led by the social anarchist Flores Magón family in Mexico City.

In the rural areas, armed opposition surfaced. As in many parts of Mexico, the people from the rancho and other nearby communities rebelled against the hacienda system and the Porfirio Díaz regime, leading to the 1910 Mexican Social Revolution. Such individuals from our area were the famous Benito Canales and Ines Chavez García. Benito Canales was born in a nearby rancho (Tres Mesquites) but had many followers from El Colado/La Calera. As a child, I used to hear stories from the village elders about the actions of Don Benito Canales y Los Chinacos. Some family members were part of his troops, in particular a person by the name of Carmen Bernal, who ended up marrying my grandfather Cirilo Rodriguez’ sister. It is interesting to note that in the Spanish colonial days, Mexican mestizos (part Spanish and Native) were called Chinacos.

Years later some of them became guerrilla fighters that opposed the Spanish (1810-1821), USA War (1846-48) and French (1862-1867) invasions of Mexico. However, the Chinacos became internationally known for their bravery and defeat of invading French Napoleon III troops (1862-67). More than likely the term survived and was applied to guerrilleros that also opposed the Porfirio Díaz regime during the last decade of the 1800’s and early 1900’s leading to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). It is also interesting to note the similar spelling to the current term Chicano.

Once the revolution exploded, it had a significant impact on the rancho. My dad’s mom, Angela Montes Roa, used to tell us stories of some of her cousins that fought in the revolution. One was Manuel Roa and another Ines Chavez Garcia. The latter one was very famous and became a general. Many corridos and books have been written about him.

On one occasion, Inez Chavez Garcia stopped at my grandmother’s house as he had just robbed some rich people and government troops were chasing him. In his possession, he had some of the booty he had stolen, and did not want to endanger the family so he left and hid the treasure in the nearby hills. Some years later a lucky campesino found the loot and became very rich. Many families joined the fighting and others had to flee or be killed.

Among those families that left the rancho were my two grandparents (Cirilo Rodriguez and Jesus Ayala) and some of their brothers, sisters and cousins. Many of the families ended up in the United States. Some went to California, such as the Bernal family and others (Rodriguez and Ayala families) went to Colorado and then Kansas. Both of my grandparents, their brothers and sisters, and their families settled in Garden City, Kansas. Both of my parents were born there and went to school until the mid-1930’s when they were repatriated back to La Calera.

~~~~~~~~~

Porfirio Díaz llego al poder en 1876 y gobernó por mas de treinta años. Según los historiadores el modernizo a México pero también se le conoce por su brutalidad, especialmente contra las clases menos privilegiadas e indígenas. Durante su régimen capitalista, extranjeros invirtieron en México y se apoderaron de las riquezas nacionales. En las áreas rurales de la república unos cuantos capitalistas se apoderaron de la mayor parte de la tierra. Así ocurrió en mi ranchito, el cual era parte de la hacienda de Zurumuato. El dueño de esta hacienda fue un francés de nombre Carlos Markassuza, quien era dueño de otras haciendas en el bajío. Cansados de los abusos del gobierno y la clase privilegiada, el pueblo se levantó en armas resultando en la Revolución Mexicana (1910-1917).

Los hermanos Flores Magón, Francisco I. Madero y otros al nivel nacional lideraron esta revolución. El descontento también se manifestó en las áreas rurales y el rancho y los ranchos vecinos no fueron una excepción. A finales del siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX surgieron revolucionarios en la comarca, tales como Benito Canales, Inés García Chávez, y otros. Benito Canales nació en un rancho cerca de la Calera llamado Tres Mesquites, y tenía muchos partidarios.

De niño escuche muchas veces historias de los revolucionarios, partidarios de Benito Canales en el rancho. Uno de ellos fue Don Carmen Bernal, cuñado de mi abuelo Cirilo Rodríguez. A estos revolucionarios les llamaban Chinacos. Es interesante notar que durante la era colonial se les llamaba Chinacos a los mestizos, quizás por su forma de vestir.

Años después estas personas se rebelan contra la corona Española (1810-1821), pelean en la Guerra contra estados unidos (1846-1848) y contra la invasión francesa (1862-1867). Sin embargo, los Chinacos obtuvieron fama internacional por su valentía durante la Guerra contra los franceses. El nombre Chinaco sobrevivió, al menos en esta parte de México, hasta principios del siglo XX ya que se les llamo Chinacos a los guerrilleros que se opusieron al régimen de Porfirio Díaz y pelearon durante la Revolución Mexicana (1910-1917). Es también importante notar el parecido del deletreo Chinaco con Chicano.

Al estallar la revolución, gente del rancho se vio involucrada. Mi abuela paterna, Ángela Montes Roa me contaba que algunos de sus primos fueron revolucionarios, tales como Manuel Roa e Inés Chávez García. El último llego a ser General de las fuerzas revolucionarias. Se han escrito muchos corridos y libros sobre este personaje. Mi abuela me conto que en una ocasión Inés Chávez García llego a su casa huyendo de las fuerzas federales ya que había robado a un rico hacendado y llevaba con el el dinero robado. No quiso comprometer a la familia y se fue a esconder el tesoro en la loma/cerro del rancho. Años después un campesino encontró ese tesoro y se convirtió en una persona rica.

La revolución causo que varias familias salieran del rancho, algunas emigraron a los estados unidos, tales como mis dos abuelos, sus hermanos, hermanas, primos y primas. Algunos se fueron a California (la familia Bernal) y otros (Ayala, Rodríguez) a Texas, Colorado y Kansas. Ambos de mis abuelos y sus hermanos /primos se establecieron en Garden City, Kansas, donde nació mi papa Marcos Rodríguez y mama Teresa Ayala. Alli vivieron, fueron a la escuela pero a mediados de los años treinta fueron repatriados a México y se fueron a vivir a La Calera.

Repatriation to La Calera and Land Reform

During the 1930’s the world experienced economic difficulties as a result of the “Great Depression.” In the United States of America, the economic difficulties were blamed on the Mexican immigrants, and over half a million Mexicanos, both legal residents and their sons and daughters born in the USA were deported back to Mexico. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez documented such travesty in a 1995 book titled ‘Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.” Most of the families (Ayala, Bernal, and Rodríguez) that left La Calera during the Mexican Revolution were part of such a repatriation process. Many of these families had spent over 20 years in the USA and brought with them sons and daughters born in the USA, my dad and mom among them. However, a small number of families did remain in the United States. During this particular time, Mexico had elected a Michoacano, General (Tata) Lazaro Cardenas as its president. Tata Cardenas was a former revolutionary. His election brought many changes to Mexico. He nationalized the oil industry, took land away from the hacendados and distributed it among the poor peasants as advocated by Emiliano Zapata. Many of those families (Rodríguez, Ayala, Bernal), etc., that returned to La Calera benefitted from the land reform movement. They received land and became part of El Ejido de La Calera. One of the regional leaders of the land distribution movement known as “Agraristas” was Jose Ayala García, one of the younger brothers of my grandfather, Jesús Ayala García. Tío Jose was one of five regional leaders that fought for land reform and made it possible for those returning to la Calera to receive land. There was great opposition from the church and conservative members of the rancho, and those who had been close to the hacendado. I heard stories from my grandfathers about threats against them for accepting the land and against Tío Jose because he was a “Revoltoso” (troublemaker). The Agraristas were also labeled as “Anarquistas.” The rich and conservative people from the region aligned with the church called themselves Sinarquistas. Several people were killed in the region during these times as conflict between Sinarquistas and Anarquistas/Agraristas emerged. Tío Jose’s life was threatened too many times and he had to flee the rancho, otherwise he would have been killed. He ended back in California where he spent the rest of his life. Up to this day, his contributions have not been officially recognized by the people from La Calera. Jose Napoleon Vargas Robledo (2012) claims that the fight for land redistribution in this region of Michoacán gave birth to the biggest social movements that Mexico has ever experienced.

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En los años 30, el mundo sufrió una depresión económica, y los estados unidos fueron afectados gravemente. Los políticos, los racistas y clase gobernante culpó a los emigrantes, especialmente a los mexicanos. El gobierno de estados unidos deportó a mas de medio millón de mexicanos, la mayoría ciudadanos de este país. Francisco E. Balderrama y Raymond Rodríguez (1995) documentaron esta injusticia en su libro “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930’s.” Casi todas las familias (Ayala, Bernal, Rodríguez) que salieron del rancho hacia los estados unidos durante la Revolución mexicana fueron repatriados, entre ellos mis abuelos, sus hermanos, primos y los hijos e hijas de estas familias. Algunas familias permanecieron en Garden City, Kansas, y otras en California, pero la mayoría regresaron al rancho.

El pueblo mexicano había elegido como Presidente de la República al revolucionario General (Tata) Lázaro Cárdenas, quien nacionalizo el petróleo y repartió las tierras de las haciendas, cumpliendo una de las metas del General Emiliano Zapata. Las tierras de la Hacienda de Zurumato fueron repartidas a los campesinos que habían trabajado en ellas. Las familias norteñas se beneficiaron de esta política pública del Tata Cárdenas, y también recibieron tierras. En la región hubo seis líderes agraristas que abogaban por la repartición de las tierras, entre ellos se encontraba mi tío, José Ayala García, hermano de mi abuelo Jesús Ayala García. La iglesia y miembros de la clase dominante y conservadora de la región se opusieron a la repartición de la tierra. Los líderes agraristas fueron agredidos y a mi tío José se le acusó de ser “revoltoso” y “anarquista.” No hay que olvidar que en la región, especialmente en el estado vecino de Guanajuato, había surgido un movimiento “Sinarquista/Cristero.” El conflicto entre agraristas y sinarquistas/cristeros causó un gran conflicto en la región causando muertes y asesinatos. A mi tío José allá se le amenazó de muerte varias veces y tuvo que salir del país hacia los estados unidos donde permaneció hasta el día de su muerte. Hasta hoy el rancho no ha reconocido oficialmente sus contribuciones sacrificios. José Napoleón Vargas Robledo (2012) escribe que las haciendas y tierras de la región vieron nacer a los movimientos sociales mas grandes del país.

~~~~~~~~~

Here’s an example of the later segments—his motivation for pursuing an education no matter what:

El Día del Aire Acondicionado / The Day of Air Conditioning

Many have asked how it was possible for me to obtain a PhD and work as a professor at a major university, since I received limited formal education in Mexico and did not attend elementary school in the USA. There are many factors that contributed to my success: my parents valued education and reinforced it every day; they had high expectations and sacrificed much for our success; I was a studious student and liked school.

However, one particular event kept me going every time things got hard. Every summer (1960-1969), my family would go up north to Lodi, California, to pick cucumbers, tomatoes, chilies, plums, etc. We lived at a family government operated labor camp, Harney Lane Labor Camp. One day after work my parents and I went to a government office (Welfare, EDD, Social Security, I am not sure which).

It must have been 110 (F) degrees outside; but when we walked into the government office for the first time I experienced AIR CONDITIONING. We walked to a window and behind it was a young man with a bow tie. I told myself this is the type of job I want. Every time school assignments became difficult, I recalled the air conditioning incident and it gave me the desire (ganas) to continue studying and not give up.

Cirenio A. Rodriguez, originally from La Calera, Michoacán, México, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Woodland Joint Unified School District, Woodland, California, where he lives, and a former president of the Yolo County Board of Education. He has taught at Woodland Community College and CSU Sacramento. He holds a doctorate in Policy and Organizational Analysis.

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Poems to an abuelo and to hope far off

June 20, 2016, 9:33 pm

≫ Next: A Page Hidden in American History

≪ Previous: Memoirs de un Emigrante /Memorias of an Immigrant

Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Illustrations by Giovanna Espinoza

Two poems filled with insight and the future

By Giovanna Espinoza

The Scholarly Abuelo

He came into my life

Suave, muy suave

In all his unassuming glory

El jefe tan chingón

His own brand of exuberant joy, radiating

A todo dar

Así como dicen "Great things come in small sizes” His signature style, ese.

The Hat - to keep that fountain of wisdom

Contained, but siempre

Overflowing

¡Vale! What about them shoes?

Declaran: Este vato, he's a man of pure class!

Pero, he is not without a bit of

Sassss ¡Ey! ¡Wachale!

He's on a mission, you see

Está abriendo camino

For who?! Why?!

You might ask

'Pa la gente, la raza

For you, 'pa mi Without a doubt, sin duda

Es el mero mero

Why?

Exactly

Think: pedagogy

Can you see it? ¿Lo puedes ver?

The forest Él es el más grande

Fooool

Pero, he makes us all look

Como los verdaderos idiotas

¿Y qué?

Porque we need to be

Irreverente

¡Andale! Porque, my abuelo

Well, es un escolar,

A scholar

So, I will take that Hat

And claim it, own it Y caminaré el mismo camino

In my own shoes, mi estilo

Because ¡chale! Sere una force of nature

La tempestad

Shaking the very foundation

Down to the raices

¡Si se puede!

¿Verdad?

~~~~~~~~~

Hope en distancia

Hay distancias que nos

S e p a r a n

They d/i/v/i/d/e U.S.

‘Pa crear una frontera

Between us So

I am

Waiting

Esperando, hoping

For what? You might ask

Chhhh…

I forgot

It’s shhhh now Yo quiero

Desire

NO!

¡Que feo!

My, my what a nasty

Little mind, you have there I demand

El derecho de poder

Compartirlas

With you, hermanita

Las delicias del mundo So, I will make a proposition

Let’s build it!

A wall? You little-

No.

A bridge, un puente I want

To breathe

El mismo aire

Polluted and open Escucha, mija

You’re playing with fuego

¿Quién te dio la autoridad?

To make all these demands Who? You ask

Es muy fácil

Simple even, sir

I did, yo solita Look here, chamaca

No tienes idea de lo que-

¿Qué?

Of course, I have ideas! Mira aquí, señor

I am a LOUDmouth, oh yes

Toda una chismosa

So beware Recuerda, nosotras las mujeres

We’re patient

Waiting, esperando

Exactly

Giovanna Espinoza, born in Victorville, California, spent her early childhood in Mexico City but now lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she is a Spanish major and senior at Trinity University. She “strives through her writing to express the strong values that motivate her, making a difference in the world and encouraging growth through inquiry.” “The Scholarly Abuelo,” she notes, is Dr. Arturo Madrid, one of her professors at Trinity, now retired. The illustration is by Giovanna of his signature hat.

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A Page Hidden in American History

June 21, 2016, 9:53 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Guest Viewpoint

The Mexican American Story—yet to be told

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

American demographic knowledge about the Hispanic Southwest and about Mexican Americans in the United States is dismal, evident by spurious remarks by Donald Trump and tweets emanating from Republican presidential election activities this year. Many Americans think that Mexican Americans are a recent immigrant population, troublemakers, and thugs.

They are none of these! Though they are fierce defenders of their culture, language, and national origin. They are Mexican Americans in what is now the United States with roots that stretch back centuries. For example, a branch of my mother’s family settled in San Antonio in 1731 as founders of the city—all too often I have to remind my fellow Americans that 1731 is a few years before 1776. Many families in New Mexico trace their Hispanic roots to the mid-16th century, some 60 years before the founding of the English colony of Jamestown in North America in 1607.

For the record: the 3 million Mexicans who were settlers on the territory of the Mexican Cession in 1848 per the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo became Americans by conquest and fiat, holding on tenaciously to their cultural roots and traditions, though their political roots were sundered. Bear in mind that their land was now a land occupied by an invader force. They did not trek across a border to reach the United States. In other words, the border crossed them.

The territory of the Mexican Cession was larger than Spain, France, and Italy combined (529,000 square miles: third largest acquisition of territory in US history). Americans had coveted that territory for a long time. They got it with President Polk’s trumped up war against Mexico in 1846 on the pretext that on March 12 Mexico had invaded American territory in Brownsville, Texas. Despite the Texas Rebellion of 1836 and the subsequent U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, Mexico had not ceded territorial rights to Texas. Ergo, Mexico did not invade American territory when its troops crossed innocently into Texas in 1846.

Of the 60 million American Hispanics today (per current Census count), 66 percent or 40 million are Mexican Americans, scattered from California to Maine, the majority of them in the Hispanic Southwest with the next largest population cluster of Mexican Americans in Chicago where I was born. In what I call the Ohio Valley Crescent, that arc of the United States stretching West to East from Northfield, Minnesota, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania and South to include Iowa some 4 million American Hispanics live and work, most of them Mexican Americans. In all, the Ohio Valley Crescent includes the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania.

In this arc, American Hispanics (differentiated from Hispanic Americans from Latin America) have created vibrant communities full of Hispanic culture and language, and except for the Chicago area have been until recently historically “invisible.” It’s in this arc of the Ohio Valley Crescent in Indiana where U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born, but who Donald Trump keeps referring to as that “Mexican” judge.

Eight million-plus Puerto Ricans (on the island and continental U.S.) make up 18 percent of the total U.S. Hispanic population. Cuban Americans make up 6 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. That’s a total of 90 percent of the U. S. Hispanic population made up of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans.

The remaining 10 percent comprises the “Latino” population of the U.S., that is, Hispanics from the 16 other Latin American countries not counting Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. With the exception of Salvadorians and Dominicans, none of the other Latino groups in their individual aggregate make up more than 1 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. One can readily see that the elephant in the room is the Mexican American: 2 out of 3 American Hispanics are Mexican Americans. Given these stats one wonders why “the Donald” is alienating them.

Unfortunately, representations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans have tended to cast Mexican Americans and their Mexican kinsmen in the most lurid light, as Professor Cecil Robinson pointed out in his work With the Ears of Strangers. Mexican Americans were inaccurately and superficially represented in books, movies, television and other mass media, sometimes by well-meaning romanticists who distorted the image of Mexican Americans for the sake of their art.

Mexican Americans were characterized at both ends of a spectrum of human behavior—seldom in the middle—as untrustworthy, villainous, ruthless, tequila drinking, and philandering machos or else as courteous, devout, and fatalistic peasants who were to be treated more as pets than as people. More often than not Mexican Americans were cast as bandits or as lovable rogues; as hot-blooded, sexually animated creatures or passive, humble servants. Mexican and Mexican American women fared just as badly cast as females of easy virtue.

Mexican American youngsters were taught about the cruelty of their Spanish forebears and the savagery of their Mexican-Indian ancestors; they were taught about the Spanish greed for gold, of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, of Aztec human sacrifices, of Mexican bandits, and of the massacre at the Alamo. Seldom, if ever, were they told about the other men at the Alamo, their Mexican kinsmen—unknown and unsung in American history—who were killed fighting on the Texas side for independence. American children have still probably never heard of Juan Abamillo, Juan Badillo, Carlos Espalier, Gregorio Esparza, Antonio Fuentes, Jose Maria Guerrero, Toribio Losoya, Andres Nava and more than a hundred other Texas Mexicans at the Alamo.

Information about the historical accomplishments of Mexican Americans from the end of the U.S. War with Mexico (1848) to the present has been nil in American history or social science texts. Editors and writers of American history texts have excluded or minimized the literary achievements of Mexican Americans, first, and Chicanos later, for reasons ranging from jingoism and racism to ignorance and disdain.

A current effort by the Texas State Board of Education to adopt a book about Mexican Americans for social studies characterizes Chicanos as set on destroying America. The book is full of errata and misinformation. Again, one wonders why Texas elected officials are deliberately alienating Texas Mexican Americans. A day of reckoning is coming when Texas Mexican Americans will be the majority population in the state. In 2004, in a Foreign Policy article, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington ranted about American Hispanics posing a major potential threat to the country’s cultural and political integrity. As Hispanics, Mexican Americans seem to be and have been fair game for American xenophobes.

Like the Palestinians, Mexicans and Mexican Americans are in their homeland which was invaded by the U.S. in its rush from “sea to shining sea” during the era of American imperialism. In the 19th century, when the American empire beheld Mexico to its south, it saw only a nation of brown-tinted people working like serfs (peones) for the elite of Mexico on their plantations (latifundias). And like Cotton Mather in an earlier time who sought to free the Indians of Mexico from their Spanish oppressors, driven now by Manifest Destiny, American disdain for non-white people seized the moment to wrest more than half of Mexico’s sovereign territory as booty of war for its slave economy. Hawks in the U.S. Congress pressed for the total acquisition of Mexico but were staved off by those who argued that Mexican land south of the demarcated Mexican Cession was worthless.

In my work on The Black Legend (la Leyenda Negra), I maintain that the enmity toward Mexicans by Americans was the product of The Black Legend—that historical process of defamation, slander, libel, and stereotyping engendered by the conflict between Spain and England, brought to a head by Spain’s invasion of England in 1588 with the Spanish Armada in an effort to force England into submission and to return to the Catholic fold.

The Spanish Armada was totally destroyed by an unexpected perfect 10 storm. Spain left the field, and capitalizing on Spain’s retreat, England declared victory over Spain due to superior seamanship and because God willed it. England immediately initiated a barrage of propaganda against Spain, maliciously branding it a nation of infidels in league with the devil. That propaganda blitz perdured over the centuries to this day and accounted for the contempt and vicious attitudes of Americans toward Mexicans in the 19th century aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848.

Like the “Jewish Problem” in Germany in the last century, the Mexican Problem has loomed large in the United States. In time, anti-Mexican laws a la Jim Crow were passed, creating thus a Mexican-Dixon Line comparable to the Mason-Dixon Line. Americans quickly reduced Mexican Americans to a stage of peonage corresponding to what existed in Spanish colonial Mexico and after the Creole interregnum from 1821 to 1910 at the end of the Porfirato—the 35 year despotic presidency of Porfirio Diaz.

Important to note is that the Mexican War for Independence, 1810-1821, profited only the Criollo elite and a few of the indigenous elite of Mexico. The rest of Mexican society remained a macerated mass subject to the winds of fortune. Much the same befell the Mexicans of the ceded Mexican territory after 1848 in the now United States.

Becoming Americans posed problems of considerable dimension for the Mexicans of the ceded territory —now Americans in name only. They were confronted with a new language, a different political system, and an educational system that did not know how to educate them (see “Montezuma’s Children,” Ortego). Moreover, regarded as a half-breed population they were not wanted in the United States unless they could be herded like black slaves.

Narrative portraits of Mexican Americans by Anglo American writers have exerted extraordi-nary influence since 1848 down to our time on generations of Americans who have come in contact with them. Disparaging images of Mexican Americans were drawn by such writers as Richard Henry Dana, who, in Two Years Before the Mast, described the Mexicans of California as "an idle, thriftless people" who could "make nothing for themselves." In 1852, Colonel John Monroe reported to Washington,

that the New Mexicans are thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-government, and there is no latent quality about them that can ever make them respectable. They have more Indian blood than Spanish, and in some respects are below the Pueblo Indians, for they are not as honest or as industrious.

In 1868, The Overland Monthly published an article by William V. Wells in which he wrote that

in the open field, a charge of disciplined troops usually sufficed to put to flight the collection of frowzy-headed mestizos, leperos, mulattoes, Indians, Samboes, and other mongrels now, as in the time of our war with them, composing a Mexican Army.

In our own time Walter Prescott Webb characterized Mexicans as possessing" a cruel streak" he believed was inherited partly from the Spanish of the inquisition and partly from their Indian forebears. “On the whole," he went on,

the Mexican warrior . . . was inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to Texans. The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with, rather than against, the music. He won more victories over the Texans partly by parley than by force of arms. For making promises and for breaking them he had no peer.

In that 64-year period from 1848 to 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona became states, the Conquest Generation of Mexican Americans suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous discrimination and contumely much of which continues to this day evident by public characterizations of Mexican and Mexican Americans via media sources. This transition period of two generations did not assimilate Mexican Americans as such a period had assimilated European immigrants. But Mexican Americans were not immigrants. They were sentients in an occupied land that had once been their homeland—and now they were strangers in their own land.

American Hispanics have been present in the United States since its founding in 1776 with Hispanic Jews (Sephardim) in the population mix from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam which became New York, plus the addition of Hispanics to the American population with the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the addition of Florida (1819), the U.S. War with Mexico (1846-48), the U.S. War with Spain (1898), the Mexican diaspora from 1910-1930), the Mexican Bracero Program (1942-1964), and the steady stream of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean since the founding of the nation.

Despite their historical presence in the United States, American Hispanics receive scant coverage in the U.S. Media despite the fact that they constitute 19 percent of the total U.S. population--about 1 out of 5 Americans is an American Hispanic. By 2040, Census projections estimate that 1 out of 4 Americans will be Hispanic. And, according to the Census Bureau, by 2095 half the American population will be Hispanic—if fertility and motility ratios remain constant.

American Hispanics receive news coverage only when events cast them in adverse roles or stereotypes or situations of buffoonery. In film particularly, Mexicans have been cast as passive and benign in subservient roles or as jocular and bellicose characters in boisterous saloons or crowd scenes, there to be tolerated as riff-raff. More recently, Mexicans and Cubans have been cast as thugs or gangsters. In whichever roles they are cast they are always “the usual suspects” to be rounded up. American mainstream media has tended to regard American Hispanics as Mr. Hyde rather than as Dr. Jekyll. Simply put, it’s as if the American media sees American Hispanics as a population suffering from mass bi-polarism.

The most intense period of Americanization for Mexican Americans occurred between 1910 and 1930 in a migration north from Mexico that Ernesto Galarza, the Mexican American labor activist, called historic. More than 1½ million Mexicans trekked north from Mexico to escape the hardships of Mexico’s economy despoiled by Porfirismo. American labor shortages accommodated the exodus. But the Great Depression of the 1930s annulled the initial benefit of their presence in the American economy.

The remedy was rounding up the Mexicans and returning them to Mexico. Figures indicate that less than 500,000 Mexicans were repatriated, including many of whom were American citizens. That situation is a lot like the situation today in rounding up undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Santayana, the American Hispanic Harvard professor, had it right: those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.

This exodus of Mexicans trekking north is important in establishing the basic Mexican American population of today. Despite repatriation in the 1930s, the exodus added to the Mexican American population of the Conquest Generation, augmenting the U.S. Mexican American population considerably.

The third augmentation of the U.S. Mexican American population occurred between 1942 and 1962 with the Bracero Program—permitting an influx of about 1 million Mexicans to harvest American crops in the face of a shortage of American agricultural workers (off to war)—and to work in specialized employment categories such as millwrights, rolling-mill cutters, sheet shearers, and other steel mill categories. These specialty workers were contracted from the Mexican steel center in Monterrey, Mexico. At the same time, Mexico fielded,

the 201st Fighter Squadron (Escuadrón Aéreo de Pelea 201), a Mexican fighter squadron, part of the Mexican Expeditionary Air Forcethat aided the Allied war effort during World War II. The squadron was known by the nickname Aguilas Aztecas or "Aztec Eagles.” –Wikipedia

That Mexico was a key ally of the United States during World War II is lost in American amnesia—so much for “hands across the border” along which Donald Trump wants to build a wall should he be elected president of the United States. Que tonteria! What foolishness!

The Mexican American story is not a Mexican story; it’s an American story. Moreso since 1960 and the advent of “The Chicano Movement” and a people’s coming of age, asserting their rights as Americans. In my essay on “The Chicano Renaissance” (Journal of Social Casework, May 1971), I wrote:

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan explains that “the medium is the message . . . that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves— result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves.” Applying McLuhan’s proposition to the Chicano Movement, for example, we can see that the Chicano Movement is the medium for extending ourselves as Chicanos in American society, and, as such, the Chicano Movement becomes the message. Such slogans as Ya Basta, Venceremosand Chicano Power are only elements of the total message; they are simply part of the new scale introduced into Chicano affairs by each of our individual thrusts toward greater participation in American society. Indeed, the personal and social consequences of our extensions into American society have been the result of a new scale of values and aspirations that we have created with each extension of ourselves.

Via the Chicano Movement, Mexican Americans served notice to America that enough was enough; they were not going to be second-class citizens any more. Just as their forebears had done in resisting with arms the American occupation of their homeland after 1848, to emphasize their intent to achieve self-determination Chicanos staged school walkouts, blowouts, sit-ins, protests, civil disobedience, strikes, and defiant acts of non-compliance. In 1971, for example, Chicano students at the University of Texas at El Paso seized the administration building and held the President hostage for 36 hours by way of overcoming the intransigence of the university in establishing a Chicano Studies Program (“Blowout at the University of Texas at El Paso,” Newspaper Tree, December 9, 2013).

The Mexican flag is part of our patrimony, that’s why we carry the Mexican flag at protests—to remind people of American atrocities against us since 1848. This doesn’t mean we are ready to renounce our American citizenship—on the contrary, Mexican Americans are not only a transcendent group but are the most decorated of the American military during World War II and subsequent engagements. Of the 16 million American men and women in uniform during World War II, almost 1million were American Hispanics, principally Mexican Americans (see In America’s Defense, Department of Defense). At 90, I’m among the few surviving Mexican American World War II veterans, dying at the rate of 465 a day. By 2030 there won’t be a single World War II veteran alive.

It’s not thuggery Chicanos have been exhibiting at Trump rallies but acts of defiance at being characterized maliciously by Trump and his Trumpsters who are of recent immigrant vintage compared to Mexican Americans who are of the Americas and whose indigenous forebearers stretch back on the continent some 20,000 years. Most of the time Trump does not know whereof he speaks, for when he speaks about Mexicans an inchoate rush of incoherent babble gushes out in torrents of malice from his persona as “imp of the perverse.” The defining feature of the Mexican American story is the diaspora created by the U.S. War against Mexico.

Felipe de Ortego y Gasca is Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Public Policy), at Western New Mexico University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Cultural Studies, Texas State University System-Sul Ross.

Addendum:

Keynote Address presented at the commemoration for Martin Luther King, Jr., Texas Woman’s University, January 15, 1991, by Dr. Ortego y Gasca:

In a Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I wrote:

Dear Dr. King:

I was flattered and honored when asked to speak on the occasion of your birth. I said “yes” immediately, but on reflection wondered what I could say that has not already been said? Thinking on it, I remembered a poem by John Milton on the death of his dear friend whom he identified as Lycidas in the verse. It is a paean to his departed comrade and begins with “Once more, O ye laurels.” I realized how apt an epigraph that was in commemorating this day the nation has set aside to remember you and your work.

And though you were honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1967, and your work was respected abroad, you received few laurels from your countrymen, save from those who rallied to your cause. But it was not “your” cause you bore, but the cause of humanity. Many did not realize that then, and far too many still do not.

Yes, forty-seven of the states have memorialized your work by establishing holidays in your honor, but mean-spiritedness persists in three. And in those states that have a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, things are not as they could be. But you know that already. Perhaps you knew even then–in the tumultuous days of yore–that the seeds of brotherhood sometimes take longer to bloom in some hearts than in others.

Iknow about equality. Just as you knew about equality. We traveled that road together. Not on the actual stones, but on the shoulders of that same road. For blacks and browns could not set foot thereon when we were young. Though I was born a few years earlier than you, we are of the same generation, the same clay.

The schools of our day segregated us by color. Mexican Americans and Indians were placed in schools separate from blacks and whites. Our names were changed from Carlos to Charlie and Felipe to Philip. I repeated the first grade twice because I started school speaking only Spanish. School counselors in the Mexican-Dixon region of the Hispanic south-west did not encourage Mexicans in academic pursuits. Instead I was shunted into shop courses, manual training to ready me for the work Mexican Americans were expected to perform. I dropped out of school in 1943 after the 9th grade and joined the Marines. I survived World War II.

And if we spoke Spanish on the school grounds, we were punished corporally and detained after school until we mended our ways and became good English-speaking Americans. But you know that. Just as you know that we could not eat in white restaurants either. We too were segregated in movie theaters, and institutions like the YMCA had “Mexican quotas”–if they let us in at all. In cities like El Paso and San Antonio where we were the majority populations, we had no political visibility–poll taxes and English literacy requirements kept us politically impotent.

Municipal cemeteries would not bury us. Like blacks, we too had separate burial grounds. Except for those of us who did not look Mexican, miscegenation laws kept us separated from Anglos. The 1947 Westminster v. Mendez ruling in California and the 1948 Delgado v. Bastrop ruling in Texas declared segregated schools for Mexican Americans in those states unconstitutional. Both cases were critical precedents in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools, however, defied that Supreme Court ruling.

It is the same road our people have traveled. In 1896, the year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that blacks could be separated from whites and some 10 years before the founding of the NAACP, Mexican Americans organized the Alianza Hispano Americana to help them in their half-century struggle for civil rights. In 1929 another Mexican American organization came into being, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), to pick up the baton for Mexican American civil rights. Yes, our people have traveled the same road.

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Poetry… the only language that reads me

June 24, 2016, 11:25 pm

≫ Next: Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley...

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

Three Womyn Poems

By Lluvia de Milagros Carrasco

Excerpts from The Storm of La Niña: A Chronicle of Today’s Professional Womyn

“JOURNALS”

Ink is dripping,

Disappearing,

Dissipating

Into my paper where only the marks

Crease my invisible words.

Ink is fading,

But only when I write

It fades away from me…

Search my dear,

For what is inspiration

Search my dear,

For that which cannot,

Does not,

And will not

Fade.

Sometimes poetry

Is the only language that reads me,

Sometimes poetry

Is the only scripture praised to me,

The only rhythm my world dances to

Words you are my drum,

The echo of a heart beat

Seeking to transpire

Into all that I desire

You are the heartbeat

To take my veins

And pulsate

Like the wine

Of the world

Drunk,

Drink off of pure oblivion

Sacred space that has yet to be

Permeated

Oh, Land of Lovelies! What should happen?

When there is no more ink…

And the creased lines

Of a forgotten marking

Simply turns into a licked pen,

A locked pen.

Hoping to still have the blood of my rants,

A series of titles

To writings yet written…

Rants bleed

My unspoken

And unwritten

Revelations.

Poetry is when fantasy meets reality.

Too much of either, alone –

Can never exist in each world.

A blend of fantasy and reality

Explores the soul existence,

The soul discovery

Of creative equilibrium.

~~~~~

“Awaiting to Awake”

Cansada morenita,

Cansada de lo que soy

Estrella morenita

Mi Linda aquí estoy

Abreme la ventana

Respira ser de Chicana

Saludos al universo

Y todo que es hermoso

Si mi cansada morenita,

Brilla de sueños latente

latente pero todavía soñando

Y desapareciendo sin ser desaparecida

Estrella morenita,

Dejas de existir

You cease to exist!

Cansada morenita,

Cansada de lo que soy

Estrella morenita,

Mi amor aquí estoy

Aquí estoy

Double-tongued Malinche

I, too

Speak the language of two

~~~~~

“Cenote”

Al cenote me voy,

Al cenote me quedo.

Through time,

You drop,

And build upon me.

Redefining my sculpture

Bringing the light,

Into my Allegory cave.

Such as seeing the light

For the first time in a dark room

The power of a switch

Sends a shock through the body

Consumed of light

And in pure discomfort

Startled by brightness

For it becomes a reminder

Of a new sight

My lonely cave,

All I have known to be…

It is home,

The roots,

The leaves,

The depth of its waters…

Into the unknown

Al cenote me voy,

En el cenote me encuentro.

Lluvia de Milagros Carrasco, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently graduated from St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California. During four years of studies, she was active in various art forms and media, for example, she performed spoken word pieces, joined a Chicana Feminist Writers Collective and helped coordinate the college’s first Hip-Hop club named “Elements.” Overall, Lluvia says, she “believes in the power of the womyn author who has been too many times historically erased.” Lluvia co-published The Storm of La Niña: A Chronicle of Today’s Professional Womyn, with Angélica H. Salceda, Amber Butts, Myrna Santiago, and Magdalena G. Carrasco. Copies are available at www.thestormoflanina.com, local bookstores or online booksellers.

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Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley...

July 24, 2016, 4:07 pm

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Pedro Barrera, the author's father, typing up a
prescription in the family drugstore, late 1950s

On the wrong side of the tracks, a memoir

By Mario Barrera

Texas'LowerRio GrandeValley was a complex place in the 1950s. Right on the Mexican border, it was evenly divided culturally between Mexican American and “Anglo,” known elsewhere as white. My hometown was economically and politically stratified, with city offices and the larger businesses monopolized by Anglos. Clear-cut residential segregation was marked by the railroad track. The paved streets were mostly on the Anglo side.

My family's modest frame house was a couple of blocks on the “wrong side” of the tracks, in a mixed working class and middle class neighborhood. On one side of our house was a migrant worker household, on the other a plumber's family. A line of fruit and vegetable packing sheds clustered by the railroad tracks.

The social atmosphere at MissionHigh School during the 1950s was marked by a deceptive outward congeniality. Latino and Anglo students mixed easily in classrooms, the school marching band and all sports teams. I and my best friend, Fausto, played on the otherwise Anglo tennis team. I was also on a bowling team with three Anglo students whom I considered friends.

However, friendship was one thing, dating quite another. That is where the rubber met the road, all four tires. At one point one of my brothers went on a movie date with a Danish exchange student, where they were observed by some of the school's Anglo cheerleaders.

Mission Theater, where the author viewed the world
outside his hometown for 9 cents a ticket, ca 1963.
Both the theater and barbershop next door are gone.

The next day the girl was pulled aside by one of the cheerleaders and told that “we” don't date the Mexican boys here. I'm not sure if a European teenager would have been completely clear on that particular concept of “we.” My mother had attended that same high school during the 1920s. Here is how she described the situation in her day:

There were some very good looking Mexican boys in the high school who started dating Anglo girls and there was quite an uproar about it. The superintendent of schools told the Anglo girls in front of some Mexican girls that the best of the Mexican boys were worse than the worst of the Anglo boys. The Mexican girls went home crying.

So if that was one of the downsides of South Texas ethnicity, there was also an upside. That was brought home to me vividly one warm Valley evening. I and three of my bowling buddies were out rabbit hunting that night, basically just an excuse to hang out and shoot guns. Certainly none of us was eager to eat those tough Texas jackrabbits. That we all survived these types of excursions over the years without getting shot is something of a minor miracle. That particular evening's misadventures included two of us being thrown from the car's fenders when the driver mistook some tumbleweeds for boulders in the road. It hadn't helped that the two fender riders had covered the car's headlights with their legs in a vain effort to get the driver to slow down.

There weren't a lot of muddy spots in the roads in our dry part of the state, but we managed to find one to get stuck in. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to free the car. It was well past midnight, and cell phones were off in the distant future. So now what? It was unlikely that any other cars would be coming down that forsaken dirt road at that time of night. For lack of a better plan, the car's owner stayed with it and the rest of us set out to look for help. In the distance, a couple of coyotes seemed to mock our plight. Fortunately for them, they were out of gun range.

After perhaps a half hour of walking on a dirt road even smaller than the one we got stuck on, we came across one of the small ranchitos that dotted the area. The house was dark. Since I was the only one who spoke Spanish, I became the spokesman by default.

“Buenas noches,” I called out, or something to that effect. No answer at first. I called out again. Still no answer, and no light came on in the house. But we all heard, crystal clear, the ominous clack-clack of a shotgun shell being chambered. Uh-oh.

To our relief, the next thing we heard was “Quien es?” that is to say, “Who is it?”

“My name is Mario Barrera,” I answered, and went on to explain that we were from Mission and our car was stuck in the mud. Still no lights. I hoped he wasn't looking for more shotgun shells.

“Well, who is your family?” the male voice inquired in Spanish.

I explained that my father was Pedro Barrera and he owned the Barrera drugstore in town, the only one in the Spanish-speaking side of town.

After a short pause: “Do you know Cayetano Barrera?”

“He's my uncle.”

“Oh. Well, he delivered me.”

So that was it. We were in like flan, thanks to my father's older brother who had at one time had a medical practice in Missionand regularly drove out to rural areas of the county in his Model T Ford to bring medical care to isolated families. My tío Cayetano had been the first Mexican American to graduate from a Texas medical school, in 1920. He practiced in Missionuntil dying of tuberculosis in 1947, years before my little nocturnal hunting misadventure.

At any rate, with ethnic solidarity established, the Mejicano rancher graciously revved up his old pickup truck and pulled our car out of the mud. A clear victory for roots and bilingualism.

We capped off the evening by throwing two defunct jackrabbits up on the corrugated tin roof of The Eagle's Nest, the local high school burger hangout. Why? No particular reason. To the best of my recollection, it was not my idea. At least, I'd like to think it wasn't.

The next day, our family doctor examined me and assured me that the bruised arm I had suffered as a result of being thrown from the car's front fender was “bent, but not broken.”

I suppose I should have suggested to my father that we drive out and thank the Good Samaritan farmer, but even if it had occurred to me, it's unlikely we could have found the place.

Mario Barrera, born and raised in Mission, Texas, attained a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Berkeley; he taught there and at four other UC schools until retiring in 2000. His best known book, Race and Class in the Southwest (Notre Dame, l979), won a national award from the American Political Science Association. His comedy novel, Kitty and Shep, (Dog Ear Press, 2015) is featured in Somos en escrito. This vignette gives us a taste of the book-length memoir he is working on about his hometown. He lives in Ventura, California.

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Oh, to have “steely blue eyes and jutting jaws…”

July 26, 2016, 12:33 am

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

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…and “a strong, healthy, superior egoism”

Editor’s Note: The author’s insights into the mindset of Ayn Rand in this story bear some provocative parallels to today’s political conflicts, wherein the issue itself of the role of government is being fought through electoral politics—is the individual solely responsible for oneself and unconcerned about societal issues or should the good of the whole be paramount among the goals of a society, that is, achieving social justice?

An excerpt from Abortive Romances or The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand

By Gene Bell-Villada

The successes and the sorrows of young Joe, formally christened Jose Victoriano Gonzalez, are the chief subject of this story. Born and raised in Merced, Arizona, an obscure little border town ninety-six auto miles southeast of Tucson, Joe received crucial encouragement and support from two of his high-school teachers, and was the first of his sizeable extended family ever to attend the University.

There he majored in Applied Music (piano, trumpet, and string bass) on generous state scholarships, and found out, much to his delight, that his playing had the potential to charm girls, some of whom, for their part, saw in his playing a resource they might turn to their advantage, without his much realizing they were doing so.

A devout Roman Catholic until age seventeen, he began quietly doubting religion in his final year at Merced High, thoroughly though still quietly abandoning his faith early on as a college freshman, and in time latching onto the then-fashionable thought of Ayn Rand. Thus did young Joe discover the power of ideas, those of rational egoism overcoming the evils of altruism, in particular. But, of that, more later.

At this point let us start out with Joe in his music practice room, seated at the upright piano one mid-April morning in 1961, and dressed in his Army ROTC uniform, which he was required to wear Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had been working on Chopin’s “Black-Key” etude, and, having just muffed the final measures, he was poised to attempt the octaves once again, only to be stopped by the sound and breeze of the door swishing wide open, and further startled by the sight of Jennifer strolling in with minuet-like grace and saying, “Excuse me, Joe, I believe I forgot my book.”

The scent of her perfume brought back certain vivid memories.

In the room next door a trumpet player was going through Haydn’s concerto slowly, note by note.

She walked behind Joe all the way ‘round to his right, stretched her smooth, pale arm toward the furthermost top corner of the piano, and retrieved her copy of Jude the Obscure, which Joe had indeed noticed though failed to think of as hers, the book being so omnipresent at that time of the year.

“Thanks,” she said tersely, heading toward the door. Whereupon Joe blurted out, “No, wait, I’ve got to talk with you.”

Spinning around on her low heels she looked at him without expression and asked, “Oh, what about?”

And in order to understand just what it was about, we must flash back a full eight months to Joe Gonzalez’s initial weeks on campus and the start of his long correspondence with his elder brother Al.

(Joe’s letters to Al follow…)

And now, for the first time in months, in the same practice room where they’d first met and our story had begun, Jennifer and Joe were together again.

“But, Jennifer, what did I do wrong?”

The pianist next door had skipped on to the second theme of the Rachmaninoff.

“Joe. Oh, Joe, you just don’t understand. It’s what you didn’t do.”

“Didn’t do? But I thought I was being tender and considerate.” (In his mind he heard his mother’s words, in border Spanish, “Try to be more considerate.”) He rolled his khaki sleeves down and buttoned them up.

“No, Joe.” The bell-like voice had never been more beautiful than when Jennifer, her face almost roseate from inspiration, said, “All that tenderness was about the last thing either of us needed. You never should have let me get away with acting as I did that night. You should’ve asserted yourself,” she stopped briefly, “and maybe threatened me with a slap or a put-down, anything but sit there and take it from me.”

Joe’s blood was coursing faster even as Rachmaninoff’s arpeggios rose in volume.

“And you never should have let me out of the car. But once you did, I’d actually have felt much more respect for you if you’d simply driven off and let me fend for myself out in the desert and then maybe phoned me at the dorm next day. Or even done to me what Roark first does to Dominique.”

“What? Who’re they?”

“Oooh, yes.” She cut the second word short. “I forget, you’ve never read The Fountainhead.” He could see her laugh, but somehow she made no sound. “Anyway, Dominique’s this beautiful, brilliant architectural writer, and powerful men worship her. One day she’s out in the country, getting distant glimpses of Roark, a genius architect who’s been reduced to cutting rocks at the local quarry. She struts about in her high heels, oozing scorn for him as he sweats down below. His own disdain for her is much stronger, though, and she can’t resist him. That night the guy shows up at her mansion, flings her silently onto the bed, and teaches her a lesson she’ll never forget. Being degraded like some piece of property was just what she wanted. She loves it.”

Joe remained steadily mute and immobile.

“There’s too few strong-willed men in our world, and too many people content with being second-raters. And Joe,” she shook her head, “the fact is, you’re not strong enough for me; it became painfully obvious that night.”

Joe’s grimace was involuntary. “I guess I’m not that lucky, to be so strong.”

Again Jennifer shook her head, much faster. “Lucky? No, Joe. I don’t believe in luck, I’ve told you more than once. Really, life is what the individual makes of it. And a superior man controls his life. He does not depend on others.” For at least a minute she said nothing and gazed toward the keyboard. Then she hummed briefly to the Rachmaninoff, and turned toward the door. “I must go.”

“Wait, Jennifer.” The question seemed to come to him from nowhere. “Lemme ask you: Did you start this whole thing just so I’d accompany you on the piano?”

Flushing red, the pretty face took on a deeply offended aspect. Her lips pursed up, looking fearsome as her indignant retort thundered out, “How could you say such a thing to me? For your information, Joe, I can manage perfectly well by myself, thank you. Did it ever occur to you that I sincerely admired your superior gifts? And still do? I am shocked at your unfair accusation.”

“Sorry, Jennifer, dunno, I was just wondering, OK?” He felt ashamed of having asked, and held out his right hand. “Friends, OK?”

She raised her eyebrows, rolled her green eyes, and, taking a deep breath, spoke more softly. “Oh, all right,” was her reluctant response. “I’m not so sure, though, after hearing you suggest something so vile. I don’t use people, Joe.”

He had already withdrawn his hand. “OK, OK, I apologize, honestly. Friends?” For a long time thereafter, Joe would feel a confused anguish and guilt about his accusation, but now he simply raised his hand once again.

Still radiating her noble fury, Jennifer extended her stiff palm and brusquely shook his, then hastened out. She left the door slightly ajar, and the lingering click of her high heels out in the hall mingled with the sounds of Rachmaninoff’s and Haydn’s difficult passage-work.

Joe stared at the keyboard, then positioned both his hands. Stretching all four outer fingers he surged through the black-key run as if it were a single and indivisible fluid entity. Flawless, his very best. He tightened his necktie, straightened his eyeglasses, and stared again.

Suddenly he reached for his scores, stacked them in no particular order, noticed his hands were trembling slightly, and just sat there, his music on his lap. Out in the corridor, the voice of a redheaded baritone, familiar to him from Theory class, was cracking some joke about parallel fifths. Another guy guffawed, a girl giggled. The trumpeter and pianist on either side were silent.

He donned his ROTC cap, leaped up, gave the door a little push, rushed out and veered left to his locker, gaze fixed downward and never once taking note of the still-bantering threesome, the baritone in a plaid shirt now laughing, in turn, at the Texas couple’s one-line jokes. Joe grabbed his battered schoolbag, threw in his scores, slammed the door shut, and caught sight of Wayne Belli, seated far off in the bandspeople’s cubbyhole with drummer Jake, who was also duly clad in Army ROTC uniform.

As he scurried toward the stairs, always looking downward, he could hear his regulation plain black shoes squeaking rhythmically, then Wayne joshing in his ever-jovial voice, “Hey, there’s our house Mex, goofin’ off again.” Joe bounded up the stairs two at a time, wondering why Wayne pronounced his last name Bel-eye instead of Belly, didn’t seem exactly right. Eleven forty-four, the wall clock said.

“Oh, damn, English class, I’d almost clean forgot,” he muttered.

The bike ride across campus felt almost exhilarating. There was almost no one on the paths as he coasted alongside the Library and on to Liberal Arts, where English 3, advanced section, took place in a basement room. Arriving more than ten minutes late, he took off his cap and sat alone in the back row, unable to shake from his mind what Jennifer had told him. Fumbling in his bag, he realized he’d left Jude the Obscure in his dorm room or his locker. It hardly mattered, though, inasmuch as there was little Joe could glean from class discussion while he sat in a back corner, staring at his open notebook. He did wonder if it were more than just coincidence when a pretty blonde coed in the front row firmly asserted that “Jude’s problem is he’s weak,” and he duly wrote down and pondered her insistent comments on this score. He also caught a few stray sentences from Mr. Green’s short lecture about Hardy’s “fatalism,” and considered looking up the word later that day, yet never did. The entirety of his notes added up to about twelve lines. Writing to his brother Al later that day, he related the morning’s episode, and finished saying, “Feel worthless. Wish I was dead sometimes.”

During the weeks that followed, Joe’s lack of appetite led to a seven-and-a-half pound weight loss. Even his letters to Al became shorter and less frequent. Still, the Chopin etudes he performed in a mid-May recital went well enough, if a trifle fast. Meanwhile he began being hired to play piano regularly, and trumpet occasionally, for Wayne Belli’s group –“Wayne’s Five” – and its series of end-of-year gigs. The relationship with the band was thereby cemented, and would last throughout Joe’s remaining three years up at the University. The group actually played another engagement at Kaibab Hall, and there as most everywhere else Jennifer Jaspers was in Joe’s thoughts. Save for a brief passing “hello,” however, the two never spoke again, scarcely saw one another in fact.

Because Jennifer was the first girl Joe had ever dated much or (excepting prostitutes) tasted physical contact with, he remained strongly attached to the memory of her, dwelling on it in his mind persistently if not obsessively. Yet he also felt that the romance had remained an incomplete and abortive matter, given Jennifer’s grasp of topics of which he, alas, knew nothing. And so, still overwhelmed by the experience, and hoping to understand it and learn from it, before departing for Merced for the summer he spent a portion of his most recent gig payment on crisp new paperback copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and a collection of essays, all by Ayn Rand. Reading her books was to be among Joe’s summer projects, along with some weekend dance jobs and other forms of employment.

Back in Merced, when not otherwise busy, Joe sat for hours on end in the bedroom he had once shared with Al, or on the front porch of the modest adobe-style house, immersing himself in one of Rand’s volumes – much to the annoyance of his parents, who occasionally would come looking for him and urge him to join in a family activity or meals. Being a slow reader, he needed time and exerted no small effort in getting through the two heftier tomes, but eventually he understood and gradually assimilated Rand’s thinking, and indeed was strongly persuaded by her logic and art as to the depth and power of Objectivist philosophy. Often he daydreamed of him and Jennifer, reclining side by side on their favorite lawn, holding hands, and reading long passages from The Fountainhead to one another. Sometimes he faintly wished he had been blessed with the steely blue eyes and jutting jaws of Ayn Rand’s strong, noble heroes.

Joe attended Mass exactly twice that June, if only to please his mother. On the afternoon of July 4th, however, he informed her that he no longer accepted “mysticism” and would not be going to church again, a development she accepted silently. At any rate, whenever he had a Saturday job with “Wayne’s Five” he’d usually been staying up in Tucson, so that he wasn’t back in Merced till Sunday afternoon. At his mom’s suggestion he did drop in one evening on Mrs. Pratt, who was warmly gratified at his rapid musical progress, while her husband, also a teacher, humorously asked Joe how he’d been treating “that old upright heap” they’d sold him at a nominal price some years ago. Joe smiled and said that he still practiced on it every day.

At the time of this visit Joe was temporarily employed part time in a work crew at the nearby stone quarry, and the boss’s leggy teen-aged daughter –a tall, aloof, strawberry blonde – actually used to come strolling in her tight capris and red pumps, making him wonder whether he or anybody else could be Howard Roark to her Dominique Francon someday.

Toward summer’s end he had thoroughly imbibed Ayn Rand’s system, so much so that both Joe’s parents (and brother Al, on furlough) expressed to him a certain curiosity about these books, this writer who seemingly had cast a spell over their Joe. In response, he tried summarizing Rand’s complex plotlines, as a means of conveying to them her philosophy, though time and again they’d either yawn and doze off without much comment, or give him a bewildered look and reflect, for example, thus:

MOTHER: ¿Que cosa es esa?

FATHER: ¿Que ideas mas extranas.

Or, AL: Esa mujer está loca!

Paquita, his kid sister, attempted to read Anthem but soon gave up, laying it aside on the turquoise-colored sofa and saying, “This stuff’s simply weird,” which made Joe assume that at her age – twelve-and-a-half – she was just too young to understand. During the last weekend in August, when their parents were off seeing friends in Las Cruces, Joe went for a solitary walk by the quarry and, standing at the rocky ledge while contemplating the rich sunset, he raised his hand and, slowly, made the sign of the dollar.

On his return to University the next month, Joe was hoping to impress Jennifer with his new knowledge. To his disappointment, however, he soon discovered that the girl hadn’t come back, and no one really knew why. His casual inquiries yielded conflicting accounts: she had eloped with a football-player sweetheart from high school, she had transferred to USC, she had done both or neither. Joe never found out for sure; nobody seemed to have her Palo Alto address, nor had he and she traded such information while they’d been dating. And it did not occur to him simply to inquire at the Registrar’s office.

Meanwhile Joe only dimly sensed the specifically personal, academic, and political reasons that had motivated Jennifer’s past interest in him. Rather he dwelled on the disturbing set of concepts that she’d introduced him to in the practice room during their final meeting, and he now accepted the painful lessons of those few months as his necessary initiation into the opaque, strange ways of male-female romance.

Joe was coming of age at a time when notions such as those voiced by Jennifer were far from uncommon fare. Certainly he’d always known that men sought and needed women who’d submit to male control. What was newly revealing for him was to think back on women who had made stray statements eerily suggestive of his ex-girl friend’s own. Sitting around Merced High cafeteria, the Desert Shack, or the University’s buildings he had actually overheard on different occasions a girl remark to another, “I want to be dominated,” “I need someone who’ll push me around,” or “If a man’s weak enough, I’ll walk all over him.” In the light of his learning experience with Jennifer, he began to grasp that those catch-phrases of late-adolescent and young-adult love-talk were indeed casual instances of the laws of life and love.

For the moral to be drawn from this whole episode, Joe grimly came to realize, was that, yes, Jennifer was right; alas: he had indeed not demonstrated manly strength out in the desert. He now recalled comparable past moments during which he had responded with sickly altruism and despicable weakness when a strong, healthy, superior egoism was what was called for. To his current regret, back in high school he had once allowed flute-player Cristy to send him fetching coffee, instead of his remaining seated and simply telling her, “Fetch it yourself.” He had let classmate and neighbor Angie be consistently grumpy with him at junior prom, had let newcomer Lucinda sass him for mispronouncing English words like “covet” or “won” at a party after their movie date, and so on... And yet, though they’d initiated verbal force with him, he’d then seen them home and even asked for a good-night kiss, rather than counter-mock them or maybe leave them stranded somewhere, as they deserved. Brooding on these matters over his sophomore year at college, Joe felt an odd gratitude toward Jennifer and wished he could drop her a note of thanks. But he also knew that any such token of gratitude would be taken by her as continuing weakness on his part.

And so Joe now readied himself to apply the lessons learned from Jennifer. The initial opportunity arose in February, just a few days after the anniversary of their key experience out in the desert. It was on a cool Thursday night; he had biked to a Juilliard String Quartet recital at the Music building and there casually encountered a pixyish little freshman from back East named Sue. He walked his bicycle as they headed for coffee at Mac’s (their third time out) and later sat on the grassy mound next to the Library, where they continued to chat about the concert and the new semester.

Then, at some point, as Joe was recounting the first-rate piano riff he had come up with at a gig last Tuesday, Sue got up and started dancing the Twist, a new rock-and-roll style that he did not much appreciate.

He stopped midway through his sentence and asked, somewhat irritably, “Why don’t you sit down?”

“’Cause I wanna dance, that’s why,” was her slightly defiant answer.

Joe bolted up, said curtly, “OK, you dance,” hopped onto his bike. As he pedaled off he scarcely heard her shouting, “Joe, wait, no, come back.” Thereafter he was approached by her a couple of times in the Music front hall and library, but he just ambled on, saying, “Have to go, see y’,” feeling that on each occasion the experiment had proved satisfactory.

An episode the following month provided him another measure of pride. He was at the A & W Drive-in up on Speedway with a cute sophomore from Kingman, Liz Willis, a psychology major and marching-band clarinetist, who for a good portion of their date had been discoursing on her many admirers and boy friends, both past and present.

“Strange breed, men are,” she said.

It being a weekday night, cars were few, and service was fast. Joe finished his root beer, signaled to have the tray picked up, and switched on the ignition as she talked, now about Ed, the engineering grad student who had a mad crush on her.

Suddenly he leaned over, unlocked her door and gave it a sharp push, followed by a soft tap on her bare shoulder. “Well, Liz, I guess you should be dating Ed and all those other guys instead. So why don’t you get out of my car.” He stared calmly through the windshield.

She gazed at him, speechless, and after some seconds had ticked by, shook her small blond head. “I don’t understand. I mean... is this a joke?”

“No, baby, it’s not.”

“Well,” she hesitated, “aren’t you supposed to escort me back home?”

Whipping his face around, he saw her huge, pained, sky-blue eyes, and stated coldly, “I have no obligation to you whatsoever.” Then, pointing with his right index finger, he added, simply, “Out.”

Biting a slightly curled lower lip, she plucked up her pink cardigan from the middle of the seat, placed it over her shoulders, slowly stepped out, gently shut the door, and presumably returned to Maricopa Hall by taxi, or perhaps by bus, he never knew, since he never troubled to speak to her again.

Meanwhile Joe was slowly evolving into the “make-out artist” he had once yearned to be. A major step took place next summer, in Tucson, where he’d stayed on to play a series of dance jobs that Wayne Belli had lined up at several hotels and rest homes, some as far away as Flagstaff. Needing to work on some new tunes, Joe headed for his habitual practice room one afternoon, absent-mindedly pulled open the door, and nearly collided head-on with a petite, slim coed with flaming red hair, sea-green eyes, and a UCLA T-shirt. The two of them burst into laughter, struck up a conversation. She was actually from Scottsdale, near Phoenix, a music education major and Spanish minor, who couldn’t take the L.A. smog and so’d come to U. of A. summer school to get her science out of the way and also keep up with oboe; Lynn was her name.

On their first full evening out days later they sat at one of the scarce free spots available around the “grassing” area next to the Library. She tried practicing her Spanish with him, he answered only in English. When a lull eventually ensued, the girl slithered up slowly onto her legs, yawning mezzo-piano as, fingers interlocked, she let her bare, freckled, moonlit arms stretch forward.

“And what if I were to step down right this minute?” she now inquired, raising a shapely, besandaled foot just inches above Joe’s flat belly.

Thinking fast, Joe grabbed her by the ankle, flipping her down onto the soft grass. She giggled in astonishment, her bright eyes big and wide. Then they hugged and kissed with a tremulous passion, necking as long as her dorm hours would permit, tonguing, petting, and pressing their denim-clad flesh to the allowable erotic limits of the time.

More than once over the next few weeks, as Joe lay on top of Lynn, taking his limited pleasures with her amid the aroma of freshly-cut grass, always by the same fruit tree, he’d wink at her and whisper, “Come on, Lynn, let’s go all the way. I know a nice secluded spot up in Sabino Canyon.”

She in turn would look up at him with her roguish smile, shake her head in a wide arc from side to side, and reply, “Naughty boy. Uh-uh, that’s for my wedding night.” The banter, with variations, became almost routine with them. Conversely, as they’d go strolling or be simply relaxing somewhere about the University grounds, Lynn would ask, “Hey, Joe, like to accompany me at oboe lesson tomorrow?”

And Joe too would shake his head, he in a fast quiver, then flash her a small grin and raise his jaw. “Nope. I’m not a boy scout, or some dumb altruist either.”

“God, you are really selfish,” Lynn observed once.

“That’s right,” he retorted quickly yet modestly.

As the couple sat at Memorial Fountain one cloudy night toward session’s end, at the height of the dog days, Lynn elbowed him and coaxed him yet again with, “C’mon, Joe, I need an accompanist for oboe jury this week.”

“OK, Lynn, I’m game,” he at long last conceded. “What’ll you pay me?” he asked.

Her green eyes now almost glowed bright with incredulity. “Pay? Are you serious? That’s so mercenary.” She emitted a nervous chuckle. “Greedy.”

“Greedy, right,” Joe echoed her. “Anything wrong with that? There’s no free lunch, you know.” He pushed on. “OK, I’ve got a better idea. We find some quiet place tonight and go all the way; then I’ll accompany you on your jury.”

After turning utterly silent, she remarked. “That’s really disgusting, Joe. You’re sick.”

“Not at all,” Joe struck a dignified, noble pose as he consciously drew from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. “I’m a trader, and all I want is fair exchange and equal value. You give me sex, I’ll give you top-quality musical service.”

The girl merely said, “You’re weird.”

He blew out a gush of air, stood up to face down at her, gestured with his left index finger as he announced carefully, “So go accompany yourself.” Hands in his pocket, he rushed off, and managed never to cross paths with her for the remainder of summer school.

What kept surprising Joe over the next few years, as he’d often reflect to his brother Al, was the number of Anglo girls who seemed to appreciate his attitudes and actions. Repeatedly he’d pass their tests, prove to them he was strong, and their romantic interest in him actually increased.

On the other hand, the following summer an olive-skinned sophomore from New York called Ruthie, whose exotic features Joe at first construed as gypsy-like, responded differently to his newly-found philosophy of strength. A combined Art and History major at some progressive college back home, she also played decent alto sax, and the two had blown impromptu duets, just for fun, in her practice room.

As they drove up to A-Mountain one starry Friday night, Joe discoursed on his system of selfishness, and in time placed his hand on Ruthie’s bare knee.

Calmly, she plucked off the hand as if it were a starched clean napkin, restored it to the steering wheel, and said melodically, with good Spanish phonemes, “Macho, macho, macho.” Shifting back to her New York voice she then remarked, “Trying to pull some Latin-lover shtick on me? Looks like Spanish mentality dies hard.”

“False,” Joe countered quickly. “I picked up my ideas from Ayn Rand, who’s Anglo.” He raised his chin triumphantly. “And,” he added with a heightened sense of victory, “a woman, by the way.”

“So? I don’t care what she is.” As Ruthie got more impassioned her New York accent turned thicker. “Besides, since when are Russians ‘Anglos’ as you say? And for your information,” she remarked, “Ayn Rand is full of shit.”

“What?” Joe was completely taken aback. A “nice” girl who’d swear like that was something new to him.

“You heard me,” Ruthie continued, now more softly, with a smile, “Ayn Rand’s full of it and a fascist creep, too. Maybe you’re this hot-shot musical prodigy, Joe Gonzalez, but you don’t know zilch about much else.” She gave him a charming, friendly smile that contradicted the harsh judgments and made him feel better.

Her two words, “shtick” and “zilch,” were also new to Joe, and he asked for definitions on their next night out, since his dictionary had failed to list either of them. “Fascism” and “fascist” did have entries, though he couldn’t see how they squared with Rand’s opposition to tyrants and staunch belief in freedom, an inconsistency that he later mentioned to Ruthie yet elicited from her only a chuckle, a shrug of her shoulders, and then silence.

Photo by Stephanie Chiha

Gene Bell-Villada, born in Haiti and raised in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Venezuela, is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. His essays include critiques on Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life (1996), and an autobiography, Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics. As a novelist, he has published a collection of stories, The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand, and the satirical novel, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror. Both are available from Amador Publishers, local bookstores and online booksellers.

The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand, a novella and 13 stories was originally published in 1998, copyright Gene Bell-Villada, but recently reprinted by Amador Publishers.

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What makes America “good”

August 6, 2016, 11:08 pm

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Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine

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How to Define the “Character of America”

Thoughts on Searching for America in the Streets of Laredo, a memoir

By Fernando Piñon

The author reflects on his memoir, set in the border town of Laredo, Texas, which he offers as a starting point for a broader assessment of what makes America “good,” a quality of social order that, he points out, has been sought since the writings of the Greek philosophers dating back 2,500 years. Such soul-searching, sadly, has become extremely critical in light of what is happening now in the electoral politics of the USA. –Editor’s note.

To the ancient Greeks, the word “arête”meant that which makes a person be good at something. A woman’s arête, for example, was measured by her beauty, by the purity of her manners, and by her wise economic management. The arête of a farmer was determined by his work being done at the right time and with the rhythm of nature, the arête of a warrior was his “valor” in battle, and that of a ruler was what Plato referred to as a “philosopher-king.”

But the Greeks would not take thearête of anything for granted, and they would always search for that particular element which made someone “good” at something. What, they would ask, is the arête of being a good father, a good husband, a good blacksmith or a good citizen?

In a way, my search for America was a search for America’s arête, a quest to determine just exactly what makes America “good.” Is it its Constitution, its democracy, its electoral system, its economy, its judicial system, or its people? But like the ancient Greeks, we must be forthright and truthful in our assessment of America’s arête. Otherwise, we will never find the true essence of our country’s “virtuousness” and our private and public lives will always be in a state of continuous dissonance.

As such, we cannot merely assume America is “good” simply because of the lofty declarations that are deeply engrained in the American narrative. America did not become a “great” country just because Thomas Jefferson declared it to be “the world’s best hope” or because John Winthrop defined it as “a city upon a hill.” Moreover, Americans did not become “exceptional” because Thomas Paine believed it was within our power “to begin the world again,” or because Herman Melville asserted that “Americans are the peculiar, the Chosen People, the Israel of our times. We bear the Ark of the liberation of the world.”

These famous utterances of the American narrative did not make America great; they merely helped to create the mythological ideology upon which the American narrative is based -- an assumption of what America was supposed to be and of the chosen Western European people who were destined to make it so. These are the assumptions which led to the Melting Pot, the theory which held that to be “an American” one had to shed the culture of one’s native country and become a WASP. It is a narrative so deeply engrained in our psyche that most Americans believe we are, indeed, an “exceptional people” and why any criticism of America is often taken as being “un-American.”

In a way, I started searching for America’s arête since I was growing up in Laredo during the 1950 and early 1960s, and I did so because the American narrative through which America’s arête was defined did not reflect my reality as a Mexican American living in a barrio a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande. America, I was taught, was the land of the brave and the home of the free, the country which prized equality before the law and which offered immigrants the opportunity to work so they too could share in the “American Dream.”

But the reality in which I was growing up didn’t reflect these lofty ideals. My reality was that of a South Texas in which Mexican Americans were segregated, where the vote was manipulated, where Mexican American students were herded into a vocational education curriculum, where their culture was devalued and where they were denied jobs of power and delegated into jobs of service. I realized that as a Mexican American, I was stuck in an American ideology that did not reflect my reality, thus creating the socio-political dissonance that predominates in the lives of most Mexican Americans even today.

Yet, as I searched for the America I was taught really existed, I soon learned that not only Mexican Americans but American society itself have been living in a state of dissonance for several years, if not decades. As Americans, for example, we worship the motto of E Pluribus Unum, but are distrustful of each other and characterize each other as “givers” and “takers.” We cherish our democracy, but do not trust “government,” and allow for the manipulation of the electoral mechanism. We praise the American worker, but hesitate to establish a living wage and deny them the power to organize.

We relish “America the Beautiful” but criticize government when it attempts to curb pollution and permit the destruction of our “spacious skies,” and “mountain majesties,” and the fields of “amber waves of grain.” We revere the concept of equality but are caught in a systemic web of intolerance and discrimination that we seem powerless to eradicate. We glorify the immigrant as being the building block of our society, but rail against the newcomers from south of the border.

So what and where is that arête which we believe makes America great? What has happened to the American narrative so gloriously -- but fictitiously -- described in our American narrative by our “Founding Fathers?”

While attempting to deal with all these questions, I came to the realization that America’s arête was right in the very town in which I grew up. Laredoans have lived under the political authority of seven flags. Yet, even as they have seen countries come and go, Laredo still remains a closely-knit community whose people are tied more to its history and its culture than to its flags. Laredoans understand that while governments can be created by one generation – such as Mexico in 1810, Texas in 1836, or the United States in 1789 – societies evolve in history.

This is what Edmund Burke, the English philosopher, told us this many years ago, when he wrote that “society… is a partnership in all science, in all art, in all virtue and in all perfection. Since the objective of this partnership cannot be obtained in one generation, this contract becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.”

Like Burke, Laredoans have understood that it is not the state that empowers people, but the cultural cohesiveness of the people that empowers the nation. The greatness that was Rome took centuries to achieve – and it was not built by the strength and power of its emperors, or by the privileged status of its patrician population, but through the character, diversity, talent and dedication of its common people, the plebe. Christianity itself became a great religion not because of the eloquence of papal encyclicals or by the benevolence of bishops but by the actions of its common believers.

In fact, Scripture describes the Kingdom of God as a woman who sweeps the house in search of a coin, and like a father who has a great feast upon the return of his prodigal son, both prophetic examples which demonstrate that it is the common people in society that are the guiding force in history. And perhaps what is even more important is that countries that fail to understand this do so at their own peril.

The monarchies of Europe, for example, fell not because the Kings became despotic and people rose up against them, but because common people who used to believe in “divine right” ceased to do so. It was they who decided that Divine Right was no match for the vitality and relevance of the “social contract” which they had accepted. The monopoly of dogma which the Catholic Church enjoyed for centuries crumbled not because Christianity lost its fervor, but because the Catholic doctrine of “papal infallibility”could not compete with the principle of“freedom of conscience”which the common people had begun to accept.

By the same token, mercantilism succumbed not because the nation states lost their power to protect their colonies and their trade, but because mercantilism could not contain the onslaught of “free enterprise” capitalism launched by small merchants.

As a Laredoan, I know that Laredoans have always given the “Founding Fathers” their due, as demonstrated every year in February when the whole city celebrates “Washington’s Birthday” with a multi-day celebration that includes a man and a woman portraying George and Martha Washington. But as working people, they also understand the greatness of America is not due to the triumphant ideology which clothes the American narrative, but to what Carl Sandburg observed in his poem, Chicago: “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and course and strong and cunning….Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness. Bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth under the terrible burden of destiny -- laughing as a young man laughs…proud to be the hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and freight handler to the nation.”

Sandburg didn’t see the hog butchers, tool makers and stackers of wheat as immigrants or as citizens, nor did he notice the languages they spoke nor the texture of their skin. He saw them merely as workers whose toil was reshaping American society into the diverse, energetic and dynamic society which made possible the industrial revolution – and ultimately modern America. And if he had written his poem a generation later, he also would not have noticed that the hog butchers, tool makers and stackers of wheat were now mostly Mexican immigrants – like my own parents who, like thousands of other Mexican immigrants who fled from the violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, ended up in Chicago in the 1920s.

In Laredo, I grew up with people who every year would go “al norte, a las piscas,” with recently arrived immigrants who spoke little or no English and worked in the fields, with Mexican students who were here only to study, with people with “green cards” who crossed the international bridge every day to work in the different department stores, with people who were descendants of the original settlers of Laredo and were involved in ranching and agriculture, and with people who had come to Laredo to open up new businesses.

All of us lived in what for many years was considered to be the poorest city in the country, the one with unpaved streets, scorching heat, and the one identified as the “most Mexican” of American cities. But while we may have lacked the wealth, municipal services, and public infrastructures that people had in other cities, we always knew who we were, where we had come from and where we were going.

My grandfather used to collect cardboard at Sears, and then load them into a little red wagon I had been given one Christmas so he could sell it at a business some 20 blocks away. My mother was a seamstress and my father was a bracero in the Napa Valley in California. As most Laredoans, our family was money poor but culturally rich simply because we were raised in a culture of inclusion and empowerment– the very modelthrough which the United States can truly become e pluribus unum– from the many, one.

Somehow, Laredoans have always understood what Harvard historian Orlando Patterson meant when he wrote that “Americanculture doesn’t belong to any group; it is constantly changing, and it is open. What is needed is recognition that the accurate metaphor or model for this wider literacy is not domination, but dialectic. Each group participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed, as much as any other group.”

This was the lesson that was given to me by another Laredoan, one of my students at San Antonio College. After class, a young, enthusiastic, bright girl whose features were unmistakably Anglo asked me in perfect Spanish, “Es usted de Laredo, Profesor Piñón?” I was surprised she could speak Spanish so well, and I told her so. “Yo también soy de Laredo,” she told me. Then, in perfect English, she goes on to tell me who her grandfather was – one I knew as a prominent Anglo American attorney. Her father, she told me, married a Villarreal.

As she talked to me, I realized I had, indeed, found the real America. This young girl was the proud product of two cultures and histories converging with each other on equal terms, not one culture seeking to dominate the other.

She understood that speaking Spanish and clinging to her Spanish/Mexican culture did not minimize her identity with America but expanded on what it meant to be “an American.” And her confidence and cheerfulness showed me that it is people like her who will, indeed, change, and legitimatize, the character of America and that this can happen if the country will follow what Laredo has done for decades.

Fernando Piñon is a recently retired professor of political science at San Antonio College and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Among several books he has published on Mexican American politics are Of Myths and Realities: La Raza Unida Party in Texas, Vantage Press, New York, 1976, and Dynamics of U. S. Government: Culture, Ideology, Politics and Law,” Kendall-Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 2009. Searching for America is available from the publisher, Centro de Estudios Sociales Antonio Gramsci A.C., UAM Iztapalapa (2015) and from the usual online booksellers.

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Con artist's sketch of 8x8 cell, Sonny Boy's favorite place to think, and write on

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Early model of Cryptex USB drive,out of focus on purpose to hideits secret workings

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Illustrations by Giovanna Espinoza

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