A Century of Caring: Doña Cora de Wagon Mound

April 6, 2014, 12:12 am

≫ Next: Chavez the man vs Chavez the movie

≪ Previous: Words from a Wise Latina from the Bronx

$

0

0

By Irene I. Blea

 

Santa Clara Parish Cemetery, Wagon Mound, NM

Carolina P. Wengert was proud to say, “I’m older than the state of New Mexico.” She passed away peacefully surrounded by her large family on Monday, April 9, 2012, the year of New Mexico’s one-hundredth birthday. I knew the lady as Doña Cora from Wagon Mound, the place where the Great American Plain meets the Rocky Mountains. However, she was born in Cebolla in 1909, only a few miles from my own birth place. For nearly forty of her one hundred and two years I visited her house, her family, attended her birthday parties and holiday celebrations. I never stopped to think about what Doña Cora saw during her life time. Her husband, Jose V. Wengert, preceded her in death well before I met her. They raised their family in Wagon Mound and were cattle ranchers. She was my friend, Gloria’s, mother.

There are many ways of talking in the archaic Spanish of northern New Mexico. When I talked about Carolina it was always in the context of Dona, a highly respected elderly woman. When talking about her to another person I called her "Grandma" because members of the family referred to her in this manner. After Jose died, Grandma, her sons and daughters, along with hired help continued to run the ranch. She was the boss, no question about it.

It was ironic that this small, bent over woman was as strong as she was, and that she didn’t seem to age. She lived alone after Jose died, but when Gloria needed her, she moved to Tucumcari to help raise Gloria’s two children. Doña Cora lived there for thirteen years. The family moved to Albuquerque and Grandma lived with Gloria for twenty-one years until her passing. Albuquerque or Tucumcari, it didn’t matter, where ever she lived Doña Cora made good friends and impressed people with her energy and quick, sometimes cutting, wit.

She was a wealth of knowledge about herbs, Spanish dichos, language, culture, money and, parenting. No matter where she lived, Wagon Mound was home to Doña Cora. It was the place to which she returned often, and visiting her usually meant house or outdoor work. Thus, it was customary, in earlier days, to get in the truck with Gloria and, “Go check on the cattle.” Nor was it unusual to shake out bedding for twelve or more people, cook beans, potatoes, fry meat and, sleep on a mattress on the floor next to gunny sacks full of beans and potatoes. One night after she took us home early from a dance to “fix the beds,” for visitors, Gloria and I talked as we tried to sleep in the stuffy storeroom. The door opened quickly and Doña Cora said firmly, in Spanish, “Go to sleep, don’t you know people are trying to sleep.” She was mad at us for dancing too much with the same young men. I guess she thought our behavior was scandalous.

It was in Wagon Mound that I once saw her, wearing her customary bonnet in a senior citizen van waving at the crowd that multiplies the village population of under 300 to well over 2000 people on Bean Day. The number of attendees changes each year. What did not change is that the village is so small the parade went around twice. Doña Cora was as old as Bean Day(s), which takes place each Labor Day weekend. The celebration is rooted in the work of Higinio Gonzales and others, who cooked up beans in wash boilers behind the schoolhouse in 1909 for what was then called the Mora County Farmers Harvest Jubilee. Wagon Mound was a major center for the production of pinto beans. The bean tradition stuck and in 1910, the name of the celebration was changed to Bean Day. I bet Doña Cora knew some of these people.

She knew her beans. She knew how to grow, pick, store and cook pinto beans. In fact, she lived mostly on beans and yeast bread. Her home was never without beans, the crop that was a mainstay of the local farming economy well before white settlers arrived. It was that economy that fed the soldiers of Fort Union, met the travelers along the Santa Fe Trail several years before Doña Cora was born.

The Wengert house is near the railroad tracks that delivered a variety of articles via the old Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe Railway to Fort Union via a stop at nearby Watrous. The night we slept in the storeroom, Gloria and I heard and felt the train as it rattled by. Doña Cora told time by the passing of the train. She knew the tracks well, and she saw the old two lane Highway 85 become Interstate 25. Vehicles rush past Wagon Mound north and south on four lanes now. Some of them stop to read the historical marker, but not many.

Unlike years ago, Wagon Mound is now a poor community with few people living there. It has a high school that serves the surrounding rural area and, is now a National Historic Landmark, named after the shape of a butte that resembles a covered wagon. The butte was the last great landmark that American soldiers and pioneers saw on their journey to Santa Fe, Mexico and California. Before it was Wagon Mound, it was Santa Clara. The Catholic Church and the cemetery where Doña Cora’s funeral was held and where she is buried are named Santa Clara.

Doña Cora was a devout Catholic who prayed the rosary daily and received Holy Communion every Sunday. Catholicism was brought by the Spanish and has been the main religion in Wagon Mound, including when the Americans came there on the Cimarron Route of the Santa Fe Trail. The trail was shorter and more suited to wagon travel. It shortened the traveling time to Santa Fe by about ten days, but it was considered more dangerous than the Mountain Route due to the shortage of water and the fear of Indian attack. As a student of the Santa Fe Trail, I’ve read about how sweet the water and how kind the people of Santa Clara were to the weary travelers. The sign declaring Wagon Mound a National Historic Landmark went up in 1963.Nearby are wagon train ruts. Doña Cora knew where they were, and she told me.

We never talked about the US-Mexican war that made New Mexico a United States Territory in 1848, but she told me about how women worked the ranches and fields while waiting for men to return from World War I and World War II. I visited during Viet Nam, the war that never was declared a war, and the wars that followed. She had strong opinions about war, but we also talked about the many cattle they owned, the winter storms that delivered over four feet of snow, how helicopters dropped hay to feed the cattle in the dead of winter. She gave me cuttings from her plants and seed from her Hollyhocks. Much later, we sat and talked about the quilts she made, the caps she crocheted from yarn. One day she honored me with one.

At her funeral I thought about how Doña Cora had traveled on horses, buggies, automobiles. She saw the introduction of home radios, saw rockets to the moon on television, heard rock and roll on record players, disco on eight track tape players and operated the microwave oven even though she preferred to cook and heat her meals on top of the stove: cast iron, gas and eclectic stoves. She saw her daughter, Gloria and me become professional women that she sometimes did not understand or appreciate but, she stuck in there with us, through our divorces, career struggles, single parenting, and mischief. No matter how old we were, it made no difference to her, she still scolded us, advised us even if we didn’t want advice. Yes, Doña Cora saw many things, heard many things, knew many things. She was on this earth for one hundred and two years with Wagon Mound on her mind.

Carolina P. Wengert is survived by her children: son Art and his wife, Dorothy; daughter Brenilda and her husband, Moises Sandoval; daughter Bessie Namath; son Maurice and his wife, Carol; daughter Dr. Gloria Wengert; over fifty-two grandchildren; nineteen great-grandchildren; a large number of great-great grandchildren; nephews, nieces and friends. Funeral and burial services were held on a most windy day in Wagon Mound, New Mexico, Saturday, April 14 at 11:00 a.m. at Santa Clara Parish.

Irene I. Blea

Irene I. Blea, a New Mexico native, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and retired as a tenured Full Professor and Chairperson of Mexican American Studies at California State University-Los Angeles. Suzanna, the first novel in a trilogy about a 13 year-old girl married off to a 32 year-old man in 1920's New Mexico, will be followed soon by the second novel, Poor People's Flowers. Visit Dr. Blea at www.facebook.com/blea.

---

Chavez the man vs Chavez the movie

April 6, 2014, 11:31 pm

≫ Next: “…what’s mine of light”: Poems

≪ Previous: A Century of Caring: Doña Cora de Wagon Mound

$

0

0

Cesar Chavez testifying before the Subcommittee on Labor of the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, April 16, 1969. California Senator George Murphy is in the background.  Photo provided by Armando Rendón

Movie Review by Frank Barajas

In anticipation of the premiere of the movie Cesar Chavez, and immediately thereafter, commentary circulated critical of the film’s central narrative on the leader for which it is titled.

Critics pointed out the minimization of the role of people such as Dolores Huerta (the National Farm Workers Union’s founding vice-president), Helen (Cesar’s wife), Larry Itliong (the labor leader of Filipino workers that initiated the Grape Strike of 1965), and the supporters of the farmworkers movement from all walks of life. These are valid points that subsequent motion pictures on the experience of Mexican-origin farmworkers can focus greater attention.

I am culpable of this rather imperious criticism.

When an English department colleague with whom I co-teach a course on the Sixties suggested we assign the film to our students, I replied that the early buzz was that Cesar Chavez was hagiographic—a trite criticism that many privileged sons and daughters of el movimiento (the Chicano Movement)have vouchsafed to suggest an elevated insight in relation to recent histories that reveal the shortcomings of Cesar’s leadership.

One flaw was his refusal to delegate control of the union’s authority to his subalterns at the union’s headquarters in Delano, California, and organizers in distant parts of the nation who found themselves empowered by Cesar’s focused determination for social justice.

But Cesar was a human being.

My colleague reminded me that we assigned Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Rob Epstein’s documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Both hagiographic films.

As a veteran of the protean movements of the Sixties, she pointed out the significance of these movies lay in how they portrayed the struggle and sacrifice of people for civil rights. Cesar Chavez accomplished this forcefully.

The film highlighted the realities of what farmworkers experienced in the past and present. People who watched the film were brought to tears by episodic scenes of farmworkers, Filipino and Mexican, being terrorized by vigilantes.

Cesar Chavez also illustrated the feudal rule of the agricultural industrial complex consisting of growers interlocked with the institutions of law enforcement, politics, agencies of the state, and finance.

In fact, prior to the Grape Strike of 1965, citrus mogul Charles Collins Teague coordinated the resources of such interests in the creation of the Associated Farmers in the 1930s to bust unions.

This translated to a culture of violence inflicted on farmworker families that entailed grinding economic deprivation, substandard housing, the fragmented schooling of children, and work conditions that denied campesinos (fieldworkers) basic human rights such as free and clean drinking water and porta potties for men, women, and teenagers to relieve themselves.

Another scene of the movie depicted how helicopters hovered directly above the picket line of striking grape workers of the San Joaquin Valley. As picketers dispersed, Kern County law enforcement officers pursued them as they wielded their batons.

A similar event occurred in Ventura County, the community where I was born and raised and whose single-parent abuelita (grandma) from Batopilas, Chihuahua, in Mexico toiled in the strawberry fields of the Oxnard Plain with her three teenage daughters. She too was an activist of the la union de campesinos, the United Farm Workers AFL-CIO.

In 1974 over six hundred Ventura County strawberry workers joined Cesar’s UFW. Like the grape workers in Cesar Chavez, they went on strike to win a living wage and humane labor conditions.

As strawberry workers picketed one field in the suburb of El Rio, a Ventura County Sheriff helicopter hovered directly over them to break the protest line. When strikers allegedly threw rocks at the aircraft and defended themselves they were arrested and charged with felony and misdemeanor charges of assault and trespassing.

The use of the department helicopter to intimidate the strawberry strikers ceased only after a recently elected county supervisor of Irish Catholic descent made the demand to the sheriff.

In listening to the stories of farmworkers and their allies, the film poignantly shed light on this abuse. Therefore the film succeeded in exposing the exploitation inherent within industrialized agriculture and the collective struggle of people to overcome.

So the film is both inaccurate and is true.

It is the former because it is a commercial representation of a complex narrative embedded with the usual contradictions of history. For example, as Cesar Chavez depicted, farmworkers themselves were prone to violence. Indeed, Cesar embarked on a 25-day fast in 1968 to recommit his movement to nonviolence. He also admonished people not to glorify farmworkers as they were people like everyone else.

At the same time, however, Cesar Chavez is true in its conveyance of a narrative of struggle and perseverance through the life of one person.

Que Viva Cesar Chavez!

Frank P. Barajas is a California State University Channel Islands professor and the author of Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961.

“…what’s mine of light”: Poems

April 8, 2014, 1:03 am

≫ Next: A literary first: Latino Science Fiction Conference this April 30

≪ Previous: Chavez the man vs Chavez the movie

$

0

0

By David Vela

Poem 1

I place the sun in your hands, what’s mine of light,

Your soft warm body braced against mine,

You say you are cold, but I feel nothing

Because I have lain my weapon at your feet

Bent and burnt from summer’s time.

‘I miss the sun on these wet dark days, rain

Retracing life to Lebanon, my daughter,

Youth, father -- what sensual olfactory delights:

Remember: A bomb splits our day in half;

We drink and dance at night. Lebanon is thus,

But you are not, because my daughter is not

Yours, her father’s perhaps, or only mine.

There is no desert in Lebanon,

Only green hills and our hopes.’

So in the hour of night I shall steal past

Any burden, candles smite, those

I lighted from the tip of my head, not out of spite

To let go your hand as Orpheus lost twice

His wife: I shall lose you to nothing,

Not to desert, memory, chance, oblivion – night.

Not once but twice.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Poem 2

Your eyes sing green life and hope;

Your hair shines black desert night;

Your voice tastes honey in my mouth,

Your steps fall graceful as the deer in fall.

Your name shows gem-like to those who know you

Because fire burns in round earth’s

Hips: Nothing like the sun, the bowl of your

Sex draws lunar dark and light.

Your grace is your walk: Deception

Your music and light, intellect is not your

Sword; your lips are charged with spite:

Your words wound, don’t soothe.

Yet the desert chants your name; the hills sing

Your youth. Mortal lines outlive your lies

And your lips spit, concretize, contra-dict, spew.

Velleity defines you, your loss, you realize, is you.

David Vela

Davíd Vela, a scholar of English and Irish literature, is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California. He is preparing for publication a book on Jorge Luis Borges’ influence on and from Irish writers. “Somos en escrito” has published his first short story (“Redlands” in October 2012) and his first poetic obra this past January.

A literary first: Latino Science Fiction Conference this April 30

April 14, 2014, 12:17 pm

≫ Next: Two brains are better than one

≪ Previous: “…what’s mine of light”: Poems

$

0

0

A panel of sci-fi writers: Mario Acevedo, Rudy Ch. García, Ernest Hogan, Beatrice Pita, and Rosaura Sánchez will kick off “A Day of Latino Science Fiction” on Wednesday, April 30, at University of California, Riverside. This first of its kind conference is hosted by the UCR Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program.

The event is free and open to the public, and will be held in the Interdisciplinary Symposium Room (INTS 1113).

Science fiction is a more diverse literature than is generally acknowledged and includes a vibrant tradition of Latino science fiction writers, said Sherryl Vint, professor of English and a science fiction studies scholar.

“Latino science fiction conveys a distinctive vision of the influence of science and technology on daily life, and connects with a strong tradition of speculative writing from Latin America,” she explained. “Our event will foster discussion of the specific ways Latino writers negotiate science fiction’s relationship to the colonialist imagination, and its possibilities for imagining more ethnically inclusive futures.”

Mario Acevedo is the author of the bestselling Felix Gomez detective-vampire series from HarperCollins. His debut novel, “The Nymphos of Rocky Flats,”  was chosen by Barnes & Noble as one of the best Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Decade. He is also the co-author of the financial thriller, “Good Money Gone.” He was a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards and the International Latino Book Awards. His short fiction is included in the anthologies, “You Don’t Have A Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens” and “Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery” from Arte Publico Press.

Garcia, co-founder of and contributor to La Bloga, is perhaps best known for his alternate reality/fantasy novel “The Closet of Discarded Dreams,” which took honorable mention in the International Latino Book Awards’ Fantasy/Sci-Fi category in 2013.

Author of “Cortez on Jupiter,” “High Aztech,” and the cyberpunk novel “Smoking Mirror Blues,” Hogan has also worked as a consultant, illustrator, and cartoonist.

Co-authors of “Lunar Braceros 2125-2148,” Sánchez is a professor and Pita is a lecturer in the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego.

Following lunch and informal discussion, a short film screening and panel titled “Latinos in Hollywood and Beyond” will take place, featuring Jesús Treviño, writer and director of “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “SeaQuest DSV,” and “Babylon 5”; Michael Sedano, La Bloga Latino literature blogger; and UCR Ph.D. candidates Danny Valencia, Rubén Mendoza and Paris Brown, who will address the topics of Latino science fiction, SF as pedagogy in Latino communities, and Mexican dystopias and religion, respectively.

The event will culminate in the donation of Treviño’s papers to UCR Libraries’ Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the world’s largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature, which is housed in Special Collections & University Archives in the Tomás Rivera Library. The donation ceremony will followed be immediately by an interview with the writer and director.

For more information or to be added to the SFTS event listserv, visit www.sfts.ucr.edu.

Look for Latino sci-fi works in the upcoming Science Fiction section in Somos en escrito, on the website: www.somosenescrito.com.

Two brains are better than one

January 14, 2014, 12:27 am

≫ Next: Cinnamon and the Bat People

≪ Previous: A literary first: Latino Science Fiction Conference this April 30

$

0

0

Extract from The Bilingual Brain

By Arturo Hernandez

Chapter 1 Antagonists, Parasites, and Symbiotes

It was at the age of 20 that I first

encountered the paradox that would come to dominate my academic life and that serves as the major impetus for this book. I was taking a class in cognitive neuropsychology at the University of California, Berkeley, with Art Shimamura, a newly minted assistant professor, who had moved up the coast from La Jolla after a postdoc with Larry Squire. During class we learned about patients who had suffered strokes and lost the ability to do things that most people take for granted. Some lost the ability to remember new things (amnesia), some lost the ability to focus on things on the left side of space (spatial neglect), and others lost the ability to use language (aphasia).

But the class unit on language actually began with a discussion of presurgical mapping. The pioneering work by Wilder Penfield in the 1930s (Penfield & Boldrey, 1937) had been extended by George Ojemann, a neurosurgeon at the University of Washington Medical School. In this work neurosurgeons stimulate the brain directly in order to map out the language zones. Based on this literature, Kolb and Whishaw (1985) suggested that individual variability in the size of the language zones was most likely due to how well a person used the language.

Two facts supported this view. First, females had smaller language zones than males, a likely reflection of their superior verbal skills according to the authors at the time. They suggested that less ability in a language results in a more diffuse brain representation, which “is supported by his [Ojemann’s] observation that in multilinguals the poorer language is disrupted over a larger area than the better one” (Kolb & Whishaw, 1985, pp. 570–571). In short, there seemed to be a relationship between how focally a language is represented in the brain and how well it is spoken. Surprisingly, the entire chapter we read on language contained no additional reference to the neural representation of bilingualism or multilingualism.

My curiosity piqued by this topic, I made an appointment to see my professor. Art Shimamura was personable and approachable and he patiently sat with me as I asked him about bilinguals. He pointed me to the work of Ojemann that had been mentioned in the class textbook (Ojemann & Whitaker, 1978). I quickly went to the library and looked the article up only to find that the two cases presented showed a very different profile. There was no place in the brain for each language. Furthermore, the patients had very different language profiles. One was a late bilingual, whereas the other was an early bilingual.

Intrigued by this topic, I spent time in the library hunting through the aphasia literature looking for cases of bilinguals who had lost the ability to use one of their languages after some form of brain damage. I asked a teaching assistant, Felicia Gershberg, whether she thought it would be appropriate to do my final paper on bilingual aphasia. She said yes. Luck would have it that there was a special issue of Brain and Languagededicated to this topic.

As I read through the different articles, I stumbled across a case that caught my attention. A.S. was a 49-year-old experienced orthopedic surgeon who spoke Farsi as a native language but went to college in Germany at age 18. During this time, he also spent a year doing research in England. Although Farsi was his native language, the patient also spoke German and English, his second and third languages.

On September 2, 1985, at the age of 49, A.S. was injured by an explosion that led to left frontotemporal trauma. He lost consciousness temporarily and was hospitalized that same day. After regaining consciousness he could say a few words in Farsi for the first 16 days before he switched to German. Much to everyone’s surprise, he could understand both Farsi and German, but could only speak in German even to monolingual Farsi speakers for the next 3 weeks, after which he switched back to Farsi. As he alternated between German and Farsi during these first few weeks, he was unable to speak or understand English. He regained the use of English only after having completely recovered his mastery of both Farsi and German.

Why did this particular case study capture my interest? Just two years earlier, I had experienced a similar episode during my first few months in Brazil, where I was immersed for the first time in Portuguese, my third language. In a brief period of time, speaking Spanish, my mother tongue, became extremely difficult and labored. In addition, English, my dominant language, was quickly becoming less and less accessible. I found it very difficult to write, read, or speak it with the fluency I had possessed just six months earlier.

Over two years, I became so proficient in Portuguese that people mistook me for a native. But my newfound proficiency in Portuguese came with a cost. My return from Brazil was marked with a couple of semesters of agony as I slogged through textbooks that used to be a breeze. And my Spanish, which had been native-like, now sounded strange to my grandmother.

At the age of 20, like patient A.S., I had suffered my own alternating antagonism, during which increased accessibility in one language was accompanied by loss in another language. But this interference between languages was not due to brain damage. It was simply the product of being immersed in a third language.

Cases of language loss and recovery bring up an intriguing paradox. If two languages are stored in the brain, how can it be that a person could lose a language and gain it back? My own experience and the cases of bilingualism that I was reading at the time suggested a very different model of how a language was represented in the brain. It appeared that languages could be inaccessible even though they were not entirely lost. Hence, stress, whether it be due to foreign language immersion, sleep deprivation, or brain damage, could lead to the apparent loss of one language and not the other. In my case, even though Spanish was my mother tongue, it was a language that I had used to a much lesser extent. English was my most literate language and as such it withstood the onslaught of Portuguese immersion much better.

This episode also showed me that the brain was not egalitarian. Rather than giving similar representational privileges to all languages, it favored some languages over others. And so I set off on a quest to understand the factors that might help to predict how two languages are coded in one brain. This book fleshes out this topic with results that have come out in the 22 years since I first stumbled on this field of study as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. In this time researchers spanning the globe have generated a lot of new information. However, interestingly a lot of this information builds on existing notions that were introduced many years ago.

Familiarity and Its Neural Instantiation

The phenomenon of alternating between languages shown by patient A.S. (and by me) shares the flavor of the conclusion that Kolb and Whishaw suggested in the third edition of their classic textbook. Stronger languages are more efficient and hence may be most resistant to brain damage. The weaker language may be more spread out across the cortex and hence may be less resistant to damage.

The idea that stronger languages might be more resistant to damage was also present in early work carried about by Pitres in 1895. Jean-Albert Pitres was born in Bordeaux in 1848 (Lebrun, 1995). He studied medicine in his birthplace before joining the army and serving as an auxiliary physician in Paris. He completed his studies in Paris and went on to work with Charles Emile Francois-Frank (1849–1921). Upon completing his training he returned to Bordeaux, where he took a position in the newly formed school of medicine.

Pitres noted that selective impairment of a language in a patient who was bilingual or multilingual was quite common. He then went on to review a number of cases in which he describes the loss of language in multilingual aphasics. Some patients retain access to only one language. For example, consider the case of a 56-year-old male who lived in France but learned German as a child and Basque, English, Spanish, and Italian as an adult. After a suspected stroke during which he lost consciousness, he had difficulty moving the right side of his body, what neurologists would call right-sided hemiplegia. Over time he recovered his ability to use French but not his other five languages. Although other cases reviewed by Pitres showed recovery in several languages, there was always a differential amount of recovery of some languages relative to others.

Based on these cases, Pitres formulated the generalization that the strongest language would remain resistant to damage. This is known as Pitres’s rule. In addition, Pitres noted that many cases showed temporary “inertia” and that once this was overcome there was no need to think that aphasics were growing new language centers for each language.

The idea that familiarity of language is important for the recovery of language has played an important role in the child and adult bilingual literature. Language proficiency, as it has been termed today, has been found to play a central role in the neural representation of bilingualism (Abutalebi, Cappa, & Perani, 2001; Chauncey, Midgley, Grainger, van Heuven, & Holcomb, 2004; Chee, Hon, Lee, & Soon, 2001; Elston-Guettler, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2005; Mechelli et al., 2004; Meschyan & Hernandez, 2006; Perani et al., 1998; van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Xue, Dong, Jin, Zhang, & Wang, 2004) and in the behavioral responses seen in the cognitive literature (Birdsong, 2006; Costa, Santesteban, & Ivanova, 2006; Kotz & Elston-Guettler, 2004). To this day, the idea that stronger languages are represented differently than weaker languages remains.

Age of Acquisition

In addition to language proficiency, the age at which a language was learned, age of acquisition (AoA) can also be seen as playing a role in the recovery of function observed with patient A.S. The alternating antagonism he experienced was between German and Farsi, his first and second language. The third language, English, took the longest to recover. This case suggests that when a language is learned may also play a role in its speed of recovery. This can be seen in some case studies. The question remains whether other cases show the importance of AoA in their recovery.

Other cases show a similar resistance to damage of earlier languages (Bianchi, 1886). There is the case of A.A., a healthy 24-year-old man, short and muscular but well proportioned. He was an excellent businessperson working successfully as a traveling salesman abroad. Aside from Italian, his native language, he also spoke French and English, which he had learned early in life. One day following an episode of extreme convulsions he was promptly taken to the doctor for treatment. Like A.S., A.A. suffered from hemiplegia, difficulty moving half his body, and had difficulty producing any speech. Upon examination it became clear that he could say some words in Italian but did not understand the link between these words and the corresponding objects in the real world. However, over time, the link between a word and its real-world referent became stronger. Unlike A.S., A.A. was never able to fully recover all the languages he spoke. Whereas he showed a considerable amount of recovery in Italian, he was never able to say a single word in French or English again. In the case of A.A., the first language was the last one left standing.

On the surface, the case of A.A. supports Pitres’s rule, since Italian, the most familiar language, is preserved relative to the other two. But in this case, familiarity is confounded with AoA, since Italian was also the patient’s first language. A.A. learned both French and English early and spoke both of them very well before the damage. However, they were learned after the first language was already in place. This would suggest that the first language might have some strength over and above pure familiarity. At least in this case, we would have to accept that AoA may not just be familiarity in disguise.

The notion that age of learning was a principal driving force in recovery of language for bilingual aphasics predates Pitres. Ribot, considered by many to be the father of French psychology, had proposed that language representation in bilinguals would be driven by when a language was learned (Lorch, 2009; Ribot, 1881,1882). He saw this as a natural extension of the general laws that ruled the organization of memory. He noted that when patients had difficulties with word finding they would show the same order of loss: proper names, common nouns, adjectives and verbs, interjections, and finally gestures.

In each of these categories, patients would forget their most recent memories first and their earliest memories last. This regression would proceed from items that were new, complex, voluntary, and least organized to items that were old, simple, automatic, and best organized. In short, Ribot proposed the idea that “age of acquisition” played a profound role in the formation of memories.

Ribot also proposed an interesting view on what today would be termed automaticity. He noted that there are very simple organic or motor memories, which are deeply engrained and not available to consciousness. This is what many today would term procedural memory (Squire & Zola, 1996). In addition, there are conscious memories that are formed over time. As we encounter a number of events across time, the time stamps associated with individual instances are lost.

This would naturally lead to the loss of specifics for a particular episode and the retention of commonalities across memories. In short, these new conscious memories would take on the form of organic memories in that they would be deeply engrained. Furthermore, these new memories would involve the characteristics that were common across all the different episodes.

At the time that Ribot was developing his theories, there was little in the way of theoretical or empirical psychological work with children. However, there was an existing literature on second language acquisition that built on then-current ideas that distinguished between speech (motoric memory) and comprehension, which was considered a component of the mind. In fact, Ribot was hinting at the distinction between speech and other forms of memory. As we will see in this book, AoA seems to have effects on certain types of language functions, especially those related to speech. However, other components of the mind seem to be less influenced by AoA to a certain extent.

Finally, Ribot considers the case of the recovery of lost languages in multilinguals. Of particular interest to him were patients who under anesthesia showed amazing recovery of a language even after protracted periods of little use. One example that he uses is the case from Duval’s article on hypnotism.

An old forester had grown up on the border with Poland, where he only spoke Polish.  Afterward he lived in the German districts, and his children verified that for more than thirty years he neither heard nor spoke a single Polish word. However, upon being administered anesthesia he spent close to two hours, speaking, praying, and singing, exclusively in Polish (Ribot 1881, 1882, p. 181).

The forester had these memories even though he had used German exclusively during his adult life. The deeply engrained memories were released as soon as the conscious mind was put to sleep. Hence, even though new memories can become very well engrained during an adult’s life, the primary memories will remain over time when the conscious mind is put to sleep. The fact that the second language is built using the conscious mind and the first language is built using organic and motor memories is the basis for Ribot’s claim that AoA plays a crucial role in the neural representation of both languages in a bilingual.

Beyond Language: The Role of Control

Whereas Pitres and Ribot proposed the two mechanisms of AoA and familiarity/proficiency as playing a crucial role in the neural instantiation of two languages, there still exists the possibility that impairment may not have to do with damage to the cortex that is involved directly in language. Rather, the impairment may involve mechanisms that are involved in helping to select or switch to the correct language. Loss in the ability to switch from or to a language would result in the apparent loss of that language. However, it would not be loss per se but rather loss in the ability to control which language is available.

The first to propose the idea of a switching mechanism was Otto Pötzl, an Austrian neurologist born in 1877 in Vienna, Austria, where he completed his medical training. He is best known for his work during his tenure at the Vienna Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic, where he joined Freud’s psychoanalytic movement and became one of its most ardent supporters. But our story takes us back to 1922, when he took a position as head of psychiatry in Prague (Pötzl, 1983). During this time he encountered a bilingual patient who had a strange syndrome.

The patient was a 60-year-old Austrian businessman, a native speaker of Czech, who had learned German at 14. As an adult he had moved to Vienna and used German exclusively in his family and daily life. The patient suffered two strokes that had caused him to lose the ability to see the space that was directly to his right. Furthermore, he suffered from a peculiar language impairment. He could understand both Czech and German but he could only speak Czech. A subsequent patient with a very similar problem led Pötzl to conclude that some bilinguals suffered from a problem with language fixation. Although they understood both languages perfectly, they remained fixated on the language they had used during their first few days after the stroke.

In 2000 Franco Fabbro (2000), one of the premier experts in the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, encountered a similarly odd case. A 56-year old Friulian man, patient S.I., was a prominent land surveyor who learned Friulian as a native language but was educated in Italian for 13 years. Although close to a million people speak this dialect in the northeast portion of Italy, the vast majority also speak Italian, the majority language. During a vacation with an Italian monolingual friend, the patient noticed that he began to intersperse Friulian sentences with his Italian friend. He kept apologizing and translating for his friend. But it was quite unnerving. Later he began to notice problems moving the right side of his body and eventually found walking more and more difficult.

The patient met with Fabbro and it was quickly determined that he had a tumor, which was resected. After the tumor had been removed, the patient presented with a very odd pattern of communication whereby he would alternate between his two languages across sentences. He never mixed languages within a sentence. But the patient would consistently say one sentence in Friulian and one in Italian even when he knew the person listening spoke only Italian. When tested with a set of standardized neuropsychological instruments, he showed no real language deficits. He understood each language very well. He could repeat words in each language almost perfectly. He could even translate between his languages. The problem seemed to be restricted to spontaneous speech.

The two cases presented by Pötzl and Fabbro provide us with an intriguing insight. These two individuals understand both languages very well. Hence, these two syndromes do not involve language loss. Rather it is a problem with the ability to access each language. Researchers have come to think of this as a problem with language switching.

The metaphor of a language switch, originally proposed by Wilder Penfield in the 1950s (Penfield & Roberts, 1959), has gained popularity in the literature in recent years. The idea is that bilinguals have to use general control mechanisms in order to access each of their two languages at the appropriate time. However, the importance of control has also been explored in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. These findings suggest certain advantages for bilinguals on tasks that, at least on the surface, have nothing to do with language.

The three themes that arise from the bilingual aphasia literature, AoA, proficiency, and cognitive control, serve as the main guiding posts in the present book. Hence, this book is divided into three main sections.

The first section, which consists of two chapters, expands on the role of AoA in determining the nature of the bilingual mind. Chapter 2 presents a model for understanding how language and mind develop. For centuries, philosophers, theoreticians, and researchers have debated two opposing viewpoints on how humans acquire knowledge—nature versus nurture. Is knowledge innate or learned? I consider the issue of language and cognitive development in light of this question. A review of the literature quickly leads us to realize that certain things are learned earlier than others. Also discussed is recent work that suggests a different metaphor for language learning.

In this view, early language learning may actually build itself using basic sound elements of language. The ability to make fine phonological distinctions even for sounds from an unspoken language is present very early in life. In addition, young children spend hundreds of hours focusing on the spoken form of language. This emergentist approach in which larger skills—like language—are built from the bottom up provides the overarching themes that are explored further in the second chapter of this section.

In chapter 3, we expand this view to consider how age affects language learning in bilinguals. We begin by considering the nature of language learning in bilingual children. One of the central questions in the literature is whether bilinguals use one system or two. Initially, some researchers have suggested that bilingual children start off with a single integrated system that later develops into two. However, researchers have found that children can differentiate both languages very early in life.

In addition, there appears to be considerable flexibility in the system. Skills appear to transfer fluidly from one language to another. Results from these studies add further support for the emergentist notion that was proposed in chapter 2. Specifically, bilingual children build up two language systems from the start. This creates a different neural representation than that seen in adult learners of a second language.

The second section of the book considers the role of proficiency in the neural and cognitive processing in bilinguals. This is covered in two separate chapters.

In chapter 4, we consider the nature of proficiency, starting with the wider issue of expertise. Expertise exists across many domains. This is best exemplified in the work of Anders Erikson, who has found a set of general principles that apply across domains. Specifically, expertise is built up across time through deliberate practice in which individuals seek out or receive specific feedback about what is correct or not. This is thought to occur across many nonlinguistic domains. For example, recent work suggests that adults show similar types of acquisition profiles for nonfaces as those exhibited by children for faces (Gauthier & Nelson, 2001).

This view is also mirrored in the monolingual literature, where adults and children are seen as utilizing similar skill acquisition systems (M. H. Johnson & Munakata, 2005). In its essence this view suggests that practice leads to changes in proficiency or expertise that are specific to language.

Chapter 5 considers the neural bases of language proficiency, focusing on bilinguals. Recent work on language proficiency has begun to identify the neural underpinning of improved skill. In general, experts tend to show smaller foci of activity relative to nonexperts. Most importantly, language proficiency seems to affect certain types of functions more than others. Language functions that involve the processing of meaning are more highly affected by language proficiency. Others, however, are less likely to be affected as strongly by language proficiency. For example, accent is much less likely to improve past a certain point even with continued increases in vocabulary and other higher-level forms of language in second language learners. Hence, proficiency has a bigger impact on certain language forms than on others.

The third section of the book moves beyond the AoA/proficiency factors that dictate the neural representation of language and considers the role of cognitive control in language processing. As noted earlier, researchers have used the metaphor of a language switch to explain a third type of deficit in which patients exhibit an inability to control which language is being spoken. The two chapters in this section shed light on current research in this area.

Chapter 6 addresses the nature of control in the context of monolinguals. I discuss how control develops across childhood and eventually declines in older adulthood. I also discuss how control plays a central role in task- or set-shifting. Chapter 7 expands on the nature of control within the bilingual context. Both Pitres and Ribot alluded to the fact that language loss could reflect temporary difficulties that were not directly due to damage to the language cortex. Pötzl took it one step further by suggesting that some regions of the brain were specialized for controlling access to one or the other language.

The notion of a switching mechanism within the brain had already been proposed by Penfield, who suggested that bilinguals might employ a switch that could be used to maintain access to each language. In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of studies on language switching were conducted, with mixed results. The studies often explored whether there was a cost to switching and under what conditions this cost appeared. This increased cost could be in the form of absolute reaction time or in reduced ability to process the meaning of words in mixed language conditions.

In the late 1990s the field turned to brain imaging techniques in order to uncover how the brain handles language switching. During the first decade of the 21st century, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Editor’s note)  research led to one clear finding. The brain areas involved in language switching do not appear to be specific to language. Rather it appears that the bilingual brain uses areas involved in cognitive control when switching between languages. Finally, there is evidence that these control mechanisms may also get recruited in a less proficient second language. This suggests that bilinguals may be using more cognitive control in their everyday lives.

The importance of control also appears to have unintended benefits. Early research found that bilingual children showed better flexibility. For example, they understood that the sun (e.g., the object) was not the same as the word “sun” at an earlier age than monolingual children. This early ability to distinguish a word from its concept is due to the fact that bilinguals learn very early that there is more than one word for the same thing. Pioneering work by Ellen Bialystok found that this flexibility in the language system extended to tasks that require attentional flexibility. Furthermore, recent work suggests that bilinguals are able to modulate control on nonlinguistic attentional tasks. This bilingual advantage is most likely to appear in a person’s 30s or 40s but is much more visible after age 60.

Chapter 8, the final chapter, brings these three strands together into a more coherent whole. In the first section, we considered the role of AoA in language learning. What emerges from the developmental literature is a clear view of how the brain is built up in expanding and overlapping systems. The earliest systems are devoted to sensorimotor processing. As development proceeds, later developing brain areas (e.g., the prefrontal cortex) become devoted to more complex processing. However, adults come to the language learning environment with a fully developed system. The use of these higher order systems provides certain advantages when learning explicit rules. However, this specialization naturally impedes the use of sensorimotor processing in later learned languages.

In the second section, we considered the role of proficiency. Proficiency is interesting because it builds over time and is the result of intense practice. In the bilingual domain, proficiency has come to be associated with higher-level cognition, which appears in the processing of semantic violations and in certain higher-level grammatical forms. Finally, the third section builds on these earlier two sections by considering the role of cognitive control. There is clear evidence that the brain areas involved in language switching are involved in many other cognitive control tasks.

Newer work suggests that bilinguals may show advantages when performing tasks that require cognitive control. This link is particularly interesting in the elderly, who exhibit larger language switching effects relative to young bilinguals but show significantly larger advantages relative to monolinguals on nonlinguistic control tasks. These results point to a link between cognitive control and language processing. In short, the neural bases of bilingualism are defined by AoA, language proficiency, and cognitive control. All three factors work together across time.

The book begins with a paradox. There are cases of patients who lose a language that seemingly lead us to think that bilinguals have separate areas for each language. The reality is much more complex than that. The reason for this complexity has to do with the nature of language itself. What researchers have come to call language is actually a collection of things that develop over a protracted period of time.

This collection of things is affected by three different factors. AoA affects the order in which these things are put together. If two languages were assembled in slightly different ways, then they might actually break apart differently. In addition to this there is the component of expertise in a language that develops over time. This expertise is due to the amount of use over time. And finally, there are different control components that come into play that may affect one language and not the other.

To date many researchers have suggested different types of models. Some have suggested an information processing approach, in which bilingualism is conceptualized as a set of mental programs. Others have suggested a more localizationalist approach, in which different languages are placed in specific areas of the brain. Others have taken a more linguistic approach, in which they describe the structure of each language and how it breaks apart after brain damage.

These different approaches are all rooted in different disciplines and emphasize different aspects of language processing. Whereas each of these serves as a framework for certain aspects of the field, they have fallen short in attempting to provide a framework for understanding the neural bases of bilingualism.

What I propose in this book is to extend recent work that has begun to take a biological or natural systems approach. In short, I propose that two languages live inside one brain almost as two species live in an ecosystem. For the most part they peacefully coexist and often share resources. But they also compete for resources especially when under stress, as occurs when there is brain damage.

Finally, the nature of bilingual language processing is intimately intertwined with the developmental profile of the brain. Because some brain areas develop earlier than others, this plays a role in the way in which early and late learners of a second language are instantiated in brain activity. That is, each language will take root in a network of brain areas depending on when that language is learned and at which rate it is learned.

An interesting aside here is the relatively slow development of the frontal lobes, which coincides with its slower developing ability to perform cognitive control tasks. In a similar vein, learning languages at different ages should be affected by and affect the particular control circuits used by different individuals. Although there are still many questions to answer and many puzzles to solve, this book will argue that the nonlinear dynamic models that have been used to uncover the underlying mechanisms seen in natural systems and more recently in language and cognition can be used to shed considerable light on the neural bases of bilingualism.

Arturo Hernandez, who attained his doctorate in Cognitive Science and Psychology from the University of San Diego, is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Houston. His research centers on the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition in children and adults. 

Arturo speaks Spanish and English, which he learned as a child, Portuguese having spent two years in Brazil, and German.  

Cinnamon and the Bat People

April 18, 2014, 2:57 pm

≫ Next: “I sing for you…” Poems to beloved homelands

≪ Previous: Two brains are better than one

$

0

0

Her eyes became wider than a hoot owl’s when she saw Mama Bee waiting for her at the entrance of her house.

“Hurry up, child! You’re slower than a turtle,” Mama Bee said, clapping her hands to speed Rose along. Then she snatched the baby right outta her arms and laid her on a massive big bed.

Rose didn’t complain when that gray-haired ol’ woman took Cinnamon into her large hands. She knew, as big as Mama Bee was, she had a heart that was bigger still.

Cinnamon slowly opened her tiny eyes, looked around the curious room, and could hear her mama talking with the strange-looking ol’ woman. But she didn’t understand a word they were saying. Bored, she yawned and closed her eyes again, falling right back to sleep.

“But I can’t do that, Mama Bee!” Rose wailed after Mama Bee explained what was so important and what Rose needed to do. “What if the storm hurts my baby?”

“Listen here, Rose, if this here is anythin’ like the last heat wave, then on the eighth day, the heavens are gonna open up and pour down rain so heavy it will wash away any evil that’s about. But iffin that don’t work, the skies will open up again and bring ’bout the devil’s storm, and there ain’t nothin’ on God’s green earth that can stop it! It will kill everythin’ in its path.”

Mama Bee paused to catch her breath, dug her chin in so she could look Rose straight in the eye. “Child, evil is amongst us! 

“It pains me to say it, but it started on the day Cinnamon was born. Only Cinnamon can break the storm, and only she can save you and the farm. You put the baby’s cot right at the entrance of the house, and let Cinnamon do the rest.” Mama Bee explained intently, “She’s a storm-breaker, Rose. You’ll see. She’ll split the evil storm away from the house. You, Charlie, and Ol’ Man Howard need to take cover in the cellar ’til the storm is over.”

Rose began to sob as she rocked herself back and forth. “Ol’ Man Howard will never let me do that! If he finds out we’ve been to see you…Charlie will lose his job! And there ain’t no other work out there for us, Mama Bee!”

“Shush, child! Ol’ Man Howard will thank you for what you’ll have done. Now get goin’! Go get ready for the storm. I can feel the evil comin’.”

Cinnamon says: View a trailer for my book at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLBRHhlNlg4

Gloria Alcozer Thomas

Gloria “Cookie” Alcozer Thomas was born in Des Plaines, Illinois. By the age of 12, her poetry had been published in Harvard University’s magazine and the same year earned her the title of best young poet of Chicago. Her recent book, Feeding My Children, (TMC London, Ltd, 2012) is a collection of poems and short stories. At present a British citizen, she lives with her husband in Northamptonshire, England. For copies, visit http://www.cinnamonandthebatpeople.com.

“I sing for you…” Poems to beloved homelands

April 18, 2014, 6:07 pm

≫ Next: Mi madre quería una princesa......

≪ Previous: Cinnamon and the Bat People

$

0

0

Extracts from For the City that Nearly Broke Me

By Barbara Jane Reyes

For the City that Nearly Broke Me

                               Ang sakit ng kalingkigan,

                                 sakit ng buong katawan.

                                     --Tagalog Salawikain

1. Taga Ilog

I was hoping I’d see someone else; not you,

suffocating your children in your full skirt’s

folded barbs. Hooded ladrones, bones

jutting, skin abscessed, discarded bodies.

At your banks, dengue fever swarms, thirsting.

Flowers with basura drift, toxic, silted, rank.

Into your murmuring waters, Rizal’s moon once

spilled his verse, and your whims once swallowed

bridges alive. Now, we sing your dirge, snaking

giant, you who named our fathers’ tongue.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

12. The Expat Speaks of Memory

After Langston Hughes and Anisa Onofre

I've known home:

I've known home fierce as the drum and fragrant as the

bloom of sampaguita in tangled vines.

My memory thirsts mythic for home.

I bathed in its young waters, cool and crystal.

I made poems at the river's mouth and it opened me with music.

I prayed to the serpent who slithered its path to the bay.

I heard the singing of elders who slaughtered

chickens at its banks, and I've seen the first seedlings

sprout, fed by these offerings of blood.

I've known home:

Drum, sampaguita home.

My memory thirsts mythic for home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

West Oakland Serenade

I sing for you, Dogtown to West Grand Ave. for freeways splitting the neighborhood’s sides. I sing for liquor stores, I sing for the taco truck. I sing for the summer fruit stand man.

I sing for Adeline Street tenement electrical fires. I sing for boarded up windows. I sing for charred roofless homes. I sing for diesel exhaust.

I sing for the stains on Reverend JD’s T-shirt, and for the good Reverend’s bowler hat too. I sing for Mrs. Ruby who for decades now has known the neighborhood boys are good.

I sing for refrigerators parked in front yards, for washing machines chillin’ on the sidewalk. I sing for tireless cars raised up on wooden blocks. I sing for salvage and sculpture.

I sing for you, Dogtown, your nowhere going traintracks, your chainlink fence lined streets, your barbwire lined chain fences.

I sing for your Chinese food and donuts, I sing for your corner stores. I sing for your shopping cart pushers, I sing for scrap metal and aluminum cans.

I sing for grandfather oaks of deFremery Park. I sing for tomato vines growing in barrels, I sing for bougainvillea, for waist-high weeds and brown grass.

I sing for you, West Oakland, for your boomin systems and your Baptist churches, for your black cowboys and your Sunday barbecue.

I sing for the sugarpie lady, I sing for her curlers and slippers. I sing for the chainsmoking lady in second hand sneakers, who used to be homeless, and who now is dead.

I sing for the gunshots. I sing for the gunshots. I sing for the gunshots. I sing for the gunshots.

Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes, born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, is the author ofDiwata(BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), winner of theGlobal Filipino Literary Award for Poetryand a finalist for the California Book Award. An adjunct professor in the University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program, she is co-editor with her husband, poetOscar Bermeo, of Doveglion Press in Oakland where they reside.For the City that Nearly Broke Meis available from Aztlan Libre Pressat: editors@aztlanlibrepress.com; and at: www.spdbooks.org. 

Mi madre quería una princesa......

April 23, 2014, 10:58 pm

≫ Next: Songs for a Broken “I”

≪ Previous: “I sing for you…” Poems to beloved homelands

$

0

0

...pero le salió un caballo

Por Pilar 

Gascón-Rus

A Iria, por regalarme la frase que da título a este cuento

Que yo quisiese de niña ser un caballo me parece lo más natural, he pensado muchas veces de mayor. Y es que yo no prestaba atención a las princesitas bobas de los cuentos que venden para las niñas. En ellos se habla de infantas que no saben quién es su madre, perdidas como estaban en casas de brujas que querían robarles el trono. Otras esperan a que las bese un príncipe para seguir existiendo. Y hasta las hay que no pueden mirar al galán porque sólo él mira sin ser mirado. Pues por eso, porque yo sí supe de siempre quién es mi madre, porque para besar sólo me basta con desearlo y beso a diestro y siniestro, y porque miro de frente siempre y no bajo los ojos al suelo, por todo eso, no quise nunca ser una princesa, sino un caballo.

Como mi madre trabajaba, cuando mamá y papá estaban fuera de casa, a mi hermano Toño y a mí nos cuidaba la abuela Herminia. A nosotras dos nos gustaba leer y ver las fotografías de un libro de caballos que había en el mueble de la tele. Siempre me dijo: “Si yo hubiese podido elegir mi destino, no me hubiera casado con tu abuelo, al menos tan joven como me casaron mis padres. Hubiera cuidado los caballos de la cuadra de Eleuterio, el de la finca de enfrente de tus bisabuelos, sin montarlos, sólo para atenderlos y ver lo preciosos que son”.

Y es que a mi abuela, además de sufrir por los caballos de la cuadra de Eleuterio, lo hacía por “a rapa das bestas”. Ella, tan sensible y tan insumisa a la brutalidad de los hombres, no entendía la barbarie de la celebración, el contraste entre animales tan ágiles e indómitos y fuertes que de haber querido, habrían podido tumbar y pisotear al adversario y protagonista de esta fiesta: la triste fuerza masculina. “¡Claro, así se puede -decía mi abuela-, varios contra una yegua. Y qué bestias, cortarles crines y cola para pretender ser más fuertes que ellos”. La superioridad de los caballos está en que ellos nunca habrían acorralado a ningún hombre para someterlo.

Ni las mujeres tampoco. Mi abuela decía que los caballos mejor domesticados eran los que habían elegido ellos mismos vivir junto a los seres humanos. Y entonces me contaba la historia de Flavia, la única hija de un matrimonio de hidalgos. Liberales ambos, a él lo habían enterrado a sus setenta y ocho años en el cementerio civil, mientras que ella había sufrido una existencia mezclada de tortura y delicia: la tortura de haber nacido mujer, la delicia de la liberación. Nacer mujer, como nacer hombre, es una simple cuestión de combinación de cromosomas que no debe decidir más ocupaciones en la vida que en la mujer la facultad de elegir ser madre o no. En cambio, en el hombre ser pacífico, no usar su fuerza muscular para dominar, no es una elección sino una obligación. Si pensamos en la cantidad de mujeres que no son dueñas de su existencia aun hoy día, un derecho que está en nuestra constitución, entenderás mejor el porqué de la insistencia de mi abuela en hablarme de Flavia y de sí misma. Mi abuela había sido una Flavia en potencia. Al ser pobre, no eligió su futuro, de ahí que le atrajera tanto este personaje de la historia de su ciudad. Al ser también hija única, tuvo el favor del padre. Esto eran algo que aunaba a estas dos mujeres de generaciones tan distantes, pues Flavia había nacido en 1895, y mi abuela en 1952.

Gracias a que Flavia fue hija única, el hidalgo de su padre, don Emilio, dueño de un pazo y de una mentalidad nada religiosa, consiguió juntar en ella las cualidades de un hombre culto de la época en un cuerpo de mujer. Flavia no tuvo un hermano que compitiera con ella, y eso lo supo porque sus amigas no habían tenido la misma suerte y sufrían al ser excluídas de una vida cultural normal. Flavia aprendió a montar primero la yegua y luego el potrillo de don Emilio. Leyó desde muy niña y husmeó en la biblioteca familiar, hasta que tuvo edad para inventarse las historias que los patriarcas pedregosos y venáticos de la literatura no habían conseguido representar de la realidad. Porque, a ver, ¿dónde estaba ella? No por cierto en la heroínas melancólicas, ni en las esposas obedientes ni en las rebeldes castigadas. Ella se reservó su propia narrativa. Y contó su vida y la de otras que conoció.

Y dio vida literaria a las mujeres del pueblo; y creó antecedentes que luego se hicieron auténticas en la existencia de las mujeres de las generaciones que la siguieron, especialmente las que sirvieron de modelo a las republicanas antes de que la guerra civil se adueñara del destino de las españolas. Lo consiguió porque los hombres de letras de la época no la tomaron en serio: la dieron por loca. Yo tuve la suerte de que mi abuela fue una de estas mujeres que habían leído las novelas de Flavia Delicado Resa, la misma que ahora es estudiada y recuperada por el tropel de estudiosas que, ya de profesoras, ya de periodistas, ya desde otras profesiones, rescatan las figuras literarias que los historiadores de la literatura quisieron olvidar, porque ignoraron que los valores que Delicado Resa reclamaba para la liberación de las mujeres nada tenía que ver con las historias de mujeres que escribieron sus contemporáneos. Don Emilio, por su parte, hubo de reconocer para sus adentros que en su logro como padre había fracasado como esposo porque, al fugársele su mujer luego de la segunda paliza, no hizo otra cosa sino pretender que la hija se le pareciera a la madre.

Así que yo crecí rodeada de dos ejemplos de amazonas: una real, y la soñadora de mi abuela. Quizás porque mi abuela fue una caballista en su imaginación no tuvo problema en rejonear las mandonerías de su suegra y de mi abuelo, y no le quedó más remedio que tener su vida de fuera para capear el temporal, y la quimera de sus adentros, cimentada a base de una tenacidad para hacer prevalecer sus sueños. Era ama de casa de día, pero una vez que se acostaba mi abuelo para poder ir al día siguiente a la oficina, mi abuela leía. De dónde sacaba los libros es cosa que nunca sabré con certeza. Lo que es seguro es que no los compraba. Si yo supe de sus lecturas fue porque me las refería una por una, por eso tienes que creerme tú a pies juntillas como yo la creí a ella. Pero esta fue sólo una parte de cómo me hice caballo. El resto la elegí yo.

Nací cinco años después de Toño, mi único hermano. Mi madre fue feliz con la parejita, con la suerte de los cromosomas de mi padre –decía ella- que nos distribuyó en niño y niña, dos equis para Toño, una equis y una y griega para mí. Lo que yo he hecho de estas dos letras disímiles lo sabe bien mi abuela, que me daba la razón en todo mientras mi madre me la quitaba. Claro que yo, como niña, tenía que entender a mi madre, a mi abuela y a mí misma. Esto era lo más fácil. Lo difícil fue conseguir ser el caballo que sigo siendo después de haber toreado con arte y salero principescos las aspiraciones de mi madre.

Todo empezó con los vestidos de nido de abeja y de jaretas para salir a jugar. A mi madre le parecían preciosos, pero yo no podía moverme a mi aire. Y mis aires eran las carreras de los chicos, sus juegos de directa mandonería, mirándome a ratos como si fuese uno de ellos, y otros como a una chica, con toda la arena metida por aquellos calcetines de perlé tan blanquísimos que mi madre me ponía y que yo me encargaba de enarenar. Y escribo bien, sin la hache intercalada, pues enarinar era pasar calcetines y zapatos por la gruesa arena del parque. Por eso mis pies también quedaban enarenados. Al llevar la noche, a la hora del baño, mi madre suspiraba cuando conseguía sacarme el quintal de arena, como ella decía, de mis enrojecidos pies. Y luego, como si se arrepintiera de lamentarse, me cogía cada pie con las dos manos mientras me decía: “Son dos panecillos de manteca y miel. Tienes los pies más bonitos que he visto, hija”.  

Ahora los llevo siempre que puedo metidos en sandalias de tiras, algunas incluso atadas al tobillo. La especial belleza de los pies es una idea que me enseñó mi amiga Macarena mientras paseábamos por la avenida del puerto de nuestra ciudad o nos sentábamos donde podíamos a comer pipas, dejando el sitio perdido de cáscaras en una complicidad de a ver quién comía más y más rápido. En la literatura árabe medieval los poetas hablaban de lo mucho que les gustaba verles los pies a las mujeres cuando ellas caminaban descalzas por las alfombras y medio a oscuras. Entonces los hombres escribían poemas para representarlas con los pies descalzos y como un anticipo al encuentro amoroso. Macarena es lectora asidua de temas alusivos a las mujeres y a la reivindicación de sus derechos. Por su insistencia sobre estas cuestiones de igualdad entre hombres y mujeres sé que los pies de los hombres erotizan tanto como los de las mujeres, lo que pasa es que cuando las mujeres lo pensaban no lo escribían en poemas. ¡Como la mayoría eran analfabetas y no sabían escribir, pues no tenemos poemas donde se hable de los pies de los hombres!

Por eso cuando conocía a un chico era lo primero en lo que me fijaba. Si salimos y es verano, le pido que se ponga sandalias. Desde luego, ellos se preocupan por el vestir ahora mucho más que antes, la moda lo demuestra. Y si no, ahí quedan las sandalias de dos tiras anchas que llevan ahora todos. Pues eso, que molan más unos pinreles en condiciones que una cara que presuma de viril. Después de todo, somos nosotras las que nos sometemos a un calzado antianatómico: lo sé bien por dos razones. La primera te la puedes imaginar. No he llevado en mi vida tacones, dictada más por la pasión de mi madre por mis pies que por mis anhelos de caballo. Aparte, este amigo animal mío sería absurdo si se calzara cuñas y se elevara con alzas. El segundo motivo de mi negativa a los tacos es que soy médica. Y a ver, ¿qué sentido tendría cuidar a otras personas y descuidarme a mí misma?

Pues eso, que a las chicas de ahora nos gusta ver a los hombres arreglados. Ya sabemos que las grandes compañías sólo piensan en hacerse ricas. Para las mujeres hay vestidos estrechos, calzado torturador, medias que duran menos que un bizcocho a la puerta de una escuela, pero también las modas nos han dejado usar nuestra imaginación y experimentar con lo que nos ponemos en el cuerpo. Es hacer de los trapos lo que nosotras queramos. Sin embargo, el reparto sigue siendo desigual: por cada tres plantas con artículos para ellas hay una para ellos. Es ya hora de que los hombres protesten y exijan perfumería y cosméticos para sus barbas y otros pelos, además de los complementos, bolsas para llevar colgadas con el dinero y los libros, y muchas otras necesidades que tantas mujeres dicen tener. Los hombres siempre pueden hacer lo que yo: como soy un caballo, me ahorro cantidad en maquillaje y demás artilugios. Voy con la cara lavada y mirando al sol y a los planetas.

Mi constelación favorita es la del centauro, sólo que en lugar de medio hombre yo veo una media mujer, o sea, a mí. Y acaricio la grupa de mi media mitad mientras le digo con las rodillas si tiene que girar a la derecha y ver al sol o a la izquierda y mirar a la luna.

Hay quien piensa que los gallegos somos todos muy blancos de piel, ya sea porque no tenemos mucho sol o porque nos viene de los pueblos que habitaron nuestra tierra. Mentira y gorda. Si mi madre se fijaba en mis hechuras, mi padre no le quitaba ojo a mis colores: negra de pelo, marina de piel. La alazana de los sueños de mi abuela. Cuando le seguía la broma a mi padre, me ponía a relinchar. Porque mi padre estaba con la abuela, con Macarena y conmigo. No se piense por ello que mi madre se rendía a sus fijaciones de quererme hacer linda, femenina, lo que ella llamaba “una mujer”. Mientras mi hermano se negaba a hacer la cama, yo refunfuñaba estirando la mía. Cuando Toño me mandaba por agua, yo meneaba la cabeza de un lado a otro. No, no y no. Lo que no entendía de mi madre era que nos diera un trato distinto a sus dos hijos trabajando ella como trabajaba. Toño no se liberó con mi madre, por comodón y caradura. Tampoco lo ha hecho con su mujer, que cuando llega del trabajo limpia por los dos. Luego acompaña a mi hermano frente al televisor. Son un par de aburridos los dos. Por eso se encontraron.

No supe durante mucho quién gozaría de mis crines y los fulgores fragrantes de mi aliento, porque además de caballo era algo haragana para andar de aquí para allá queriendo conocer a chicos. Recuerdo cuando algunas de mis compas del instituto rondaban a los mozos que les gustaban para luego esquivarlos si ellos respondían. Ni hablar, yo no quiero eso. Lo mío ha de ser como lo de tía Amapola. Supongo que lo que tanto me ha contado de cómo conoció a Juan, su marido, tiene que ser parte de una poetización recíproca, porque si es verdad yo quiero que lo mío sea como lo de ellos. El caso es que nada más conocerse, y ya talluditos, los dos se gustaron y se quisieron, pese a que pasaron año y medio para estar completamente seguros de su intuición. Y eso después de varias declaraciones de amor más o menos al descubierto. Entonces lo mío, cuando sea, que sea. Y si no es con el eterno del sueño, pues con varios, que ya sabré yo quererlos como se me vayan presentando.

Si a algo le estoy agradecida es a mi generación. La de mis padres fue fenomenal, lo sé, con esa Transición que prometía tanto tras una dictadura de la que siempre oí hablar de chica. Era como para temerla y no repetirla, como para no mencionarla ya, si no fuera porque de lo poco que recuerdo de la Historia de COU se me quedó colgando lo que un profesor decía entre bromas temiendo a los carcas de la clase, aquello de que en los dos últimos siglos, España proveyó con su mentalidad militarista y caciquil dictadores, no sólo a España, sino también a los criollos de ultramar. En verdad que hoy día a nadie se le ocurre pensar que habrá un gobierno similar de vuelta, pues que de vuelta andamos todos de semejante tolemía, que es como los gallegos llamamos a la locura. Te cuento todo esto para que te enteres, porque no siempre hemos sido tan prósperos como nos ves, ni nos ha lucido lo que mi tía llama “la política de la inclusión” tal y como ahora parece.

Mi madre, tras cuatro lustros, se convenció finalmente de que las princesas sólo piensan en su estampa, que son aburridas y que por no faltar al protocolo se aburren sin decir nada. En cambio, de potra eterna me hice médica, para corretear por los pasillos mientras relincho de felicidad cuando hago curas y administro medicamentos.

Y de potra me enamoré de otra. De ti, amor mío.

Pilar  Gascón-Rus

Me llamo Pilar Gascón-Rus, Ph.D., y nací en Palma de Mallorca de padres andaluces. En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid estudié la lengua española, por eso me gusta estudiar idiomas y leer muchos libros. Llegué a Estados Unidos para trabajar enseñando español, y aquí estoy, en Western New Mexico University como maestra de estudios Chicana/Chicano.

---

Songs for a Broken “I”

April 24, 2014, 11:36 am

≫ Next: Article 0

≪ Previous: Mi madre quería una princesa......

$

0

0

From the cover of Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes' award-winning poetry book

Review of For the City That Nearly Broke Me: author, Barbara Jane Reyes

By Robert Andrew Perez

The chapbook, For the City That Nearly Broke Me, by Barbara Jane Reyes, is at its front and core an urban book. Physically, the book has the trappings of scrawl—that is, graffiti—perhaps as a way of announcing itself as public language, which becomes the counterpoint for such intimate poems. The polyglossic impulse of the text pivots around identity, swinging between the larger spheres of historical and present culture and that oscillation constructs the poem’s lyric I.

The book opens with a litany of negations, which owes itself to the father of American Poetry, Walt Whitman, and to the anaphoric language of liturgical Catholicism. The effect of the accretive repetition is confessional while the negative construction is anti-confessional, providing the feeling of discovery while denying the reader the relief of fixity:

No, I am not the aping of you, escaped from your captivity.

No, I am not anything that is anything I am not.

Through this introductory poem (with the help of its Stevensian final line), the reader is primed not to receive identity as a zero-sum transaction, but as a thing that pulls in and at itself through the act of being looked at and looking out: self-hood as a social game.

To parallel this, through the multilingual impulse of the poetry and the locational (in)specificity of the speaker, the reader experiences the imprint/interaction of Spanish (the language) and The Spanish (the colonial entity) on the I and the spaces she inhabits: Texas (where the book is published), California (where she lives and writes), the Philippines (a place of ancestral origin).

The braiding of Tagalog, English and Spanish acts as a sort of textile making; lines of poems loomed with intricate syntactic patterning, made poignant by its delicately punctuative diction. Occasionally, a poem is presented with an untranslated epigraph in Tagalog.  The effect, though possibly distancing to a reader who most likely does not read or speak the language, is in fact intimating, perhaps because the meaning of the word is evident in the intent of the music of the poem’s body. This happens, too, with the plaintive use and existence of Spanish here and there.

The aesthetic through line of these poems is music, specifically, the music of ode and of incantation. Here, the poet tasks herself to sing of identity and to sing in honor of those seemingly orphaned—the irony that home exists predominantly in what feels liminal and transient: “My memory thirsts mythic for home.” The music is often (like the text) repetitive and list-y, like a lullaby, a prayer. [It happens that the anaphora of the Catholic Mass refers to the offering and consecration of the bread and wine, or the Eucharistic prayers.]

The singer is historically minded, psychometric almost, in the way she moves through poems. In other words, the depths of things come to the surface as if conjured up by and through her song. With this eidetic persona, Reyes has the capacity to be didactic, though not by sacrificing music but by using it, and, in so doing, teaches the reader to sing:

I will teach you the song                    to break your iron shackles.

I will teach you the elder’s war song,            the bolo knife in fist song.

I will teach you the song of flight,     the song of purging demons.

I will teach you the song for healing,            the song of lighting fires.

The brilliance of Reyes’s chapbook lies in the immediacy of memory. A type of memory that is both backward reaching and obstinately present. The voice of the speaker draws from the traditions of other racialized singers—Langston Hughes, Bob Marley, Yusef Komuyakaa, Anisa Onofre, Juan Felipe Herrera, and others—to prove the truth of poetry—that it is all one song. At the end of the chapbook, the litany of I’s become a litany of we’s. A we not trapped by the descriptive gerund, but liberated by the present participle, of action happening:

we lovin’ the wind, we kissin’ the sky.

Robert Andrew Perez of Berkeley, California, works for the English departments of UC Berkeley and Saint Mary’s College in a variety of academic pursuits. An associate editor for speCt!, a letterpress imprint based in Oakland, he also co-curates readings in Berkeley and Oakland and occasionally emcees the Studio One Reading Series. A recipient of the Lannan prize at Saint Mary’s and is a 2012 Lambda Literary fellow, he's also appeared in other publications such as The Cortland Review and The Offending Adam, and forthcoming in Omniverse and Manor House Quarterly.

Article 0

April 24, 2014, 3:56 pm

≫ Next: Writing to the Tejano Conjunto Sound

≪ Previous: Songs for a Broken “I”

$

0

0

3 Poem(a)s from Houston’s Streets

By Gabriel Barbieri

Works crafted for a National Poetry Writing Month Project

Here’s a scathing piece on Texas summer and how it begins in March and ends in November

Summer/Verano

Como siempre, la ola tejana se muestra más temprano que nunca,
It has always been and will always be.
Sin sombra, te empapas de sudor en tres minutos,
Poolside Keystone to forget that it’s barely April.

If you’ve never survived a Texas summer, then frankly,
No sabeis lo ques ‘la calol’
If you’ve never loved someone in the Texas heat, then honestly,
Tranquilo, que ahora es que falta pa que se acabe.

~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

April Hogwash Day

I am becoming, in fact, some delusional wolf
Watching Kafka disregard the youngins, aloof is aloof is aloof.
Some days we rest and relax, some days we pass gas
Some days are worth taking, some days are unrelenting.

Simmering in hostility, grounded in love
Burning bridges is a skill like a beetle is a bug.
Some hearts will remain flattered, others battered and bruised
El mío tiene cojones, mi reina, that don’t mean I ain’t confused.

That’s why every day I sit and I gaze, I converse and I praise, I fault and amaze
Por si acaso me alboroto, chingao, y me convierto en ideólogo.

~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I’ve taken awhile to warm up to the idea of (writing about) marriage, so I’ll just write about my favorite marriage: Enrique Barbieri and Aymará Boggiano.

Una base de compasión

I shan’t know in a million years how it came to be
That a country boy from Bachaquero and a
Caraqueña discovered unending devotion.

Modestly, gracefully, considerably attacked by
The quiet glances, gestures, words & romance
Of the immutable, unflappable arrow of the heart.

Decades-old, young love ceremoniously and
Humorously humbled by triple-male-progeny:
Having kids together indubitably breaches hearts & minds.

They’ve come a long way from those big people
I met 27 years ago; exemplary sacrifice is my training,
Selflessness, not to a fault; simply to awe the masses.

Gabriel Barbieri, born in Columbus, Ohio, has lived in New Orleans, Louisiana; Naguanagua, Estado Carabobo, Venezuela, and since 2002 in Houston, Texas, where, he says, “la movida artística callejera en Houston me inspira a diario,” hence the opening illustration for these poems. Barbieri, who earned an MA in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston, teaches high school Spanish in the YES Prep Public School system. In his spare time, he sings his sociopolitical lyrics as a member of the rock group, "Brown vs. Board." We look forward to more of Gabriel's works in these pages.

Writing to the Tejano Conjunto Sound

May 12, 2014, 10:14 am

≫ Next: Latinos in the Mennonite Church—Another facet of our complex Latinidad

≪ Previous: Article 0

$

0

0

For the past few years, the Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio, Texas, has invited young writers to submit poems and short stories related to the conjunto sound to be reviewed with the goal of selecting and honoring the best of the contributions. Juan Tejeda, one of the primary organizers of TCF and a co-publisher of Aztlan Libre Press, recommended these to Somos en escrito for publication. We believe they are inventive, insightful and entertaining, and we are proud to print them here.

This year's 33rd annual festival runs from May 14 to 18 at the Guadalupe Center and Rosedale Park. For more information, call 210-271-3141 or visit guadalupeculturalarts.org.

The Day the Music Died

By Fernando Esteban Flores

The day the music died

La Raza kept the faith

Dance halls & juke dives

Didn’t miss a beat

Big band brassy boys blew away

The visionaries with their toys

Innovators synthesized

Techno-cats tried

To disco-fy squeeze box

Sound grew fuzzy

Pyschedelic tone

Made for crazy pyrotechnics

Pero la gente

Quería chanclear

De cualquier manera

Let it ride

At La Villita

Randy’s

Lerma’s

Frío City Bar

No matter where you were

Under party lights La Estrellita

Clutched in hand to ground you

Parked with Cadillacs & cars

Out on the snarly street

Conjunto pounding the bar

Marcando el tiempo con el corazón

TierraSanta steady underneath your feet

Neo-Chicano never more alive

Than when you dived straight

Into the classic culture clash

Soul afire sleepless with desire

Scouring westside taverns to score

An ounce of insight a gram of poetry

In a city crammed with restless revelers

& petty literary thieves

Stalking Coyolxauhqui

Through ghostly alleys

Moon marked mutineer

The song of the desperate

Cleaving to your heart

La voz del acordeón

Calling the wanderer home

La guitarra llorando

For another lost son

Y el pueblo siempre soñando…soñando

Dancing away the work week blues

Reaching for the stars

Howling at the moon

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At El Camaroncito Night Club

By Fernando Esteban Flores

Aftera painting byAdán Hernández: El Diablito #2

Luck’s got everything to do with it

It’s written all over him

Tatts of a whole lifetime

Inked in signs & symbols

Every conceivable charm

Penned into his arms

He tips his brown fedora

Just at the right slant

Black glossy Dolce & Gabbana

Contours his sleek torso

A Lucky Strike balanced

At the right degree of cool

Glows between his lips

Ace of diamonds peeks

From his shirt pocket like a calling card

The joint is jumping

Vatos y rukas slow slammin’ conjunto jammin’

You’ll always be queen of my heart…

Strobe lights’

Shimmering rays

Cascade over him

Like a fallen star

The dice cast

Jax beer on tap

All souls up for grabs

He’s looking for the lucky one

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Kelly Polca Cantina

By Susana Nevárez-Márquez

“Told you that new rail yard would bring in customers,” Sammy told Rocky at the grand opening of their Kelly Polca Cantina. “Looks like a Mexican wedding in here. Every table’s filled.”

“They’re lined up like grackles on a wire,” agreed El Capitán as he tended bar.

Suddenly, the floor began to rumble. Glass rattled against glass. The train horn blasted into the bar like a bomb. Metal wheels clattered against the tracks like the banging ruckus of an earthquake.

“Órale,” complained the customer at table four. “Half my drink just jumped out of my glass.”

“Mine, too,” griped a man in an oil field jumpsuit. “That bartender better make it good.”

“I can’t even hear myself belch,” barked another customer as the freight train roared by just yards the other side of the bar’s south wall.

El Capitán twirled like a circus acrobat to catch liquor bottles before they crashed to the floor. Rocky flitted table to table reassuring customers that the Kelly Polca Cantina would replace their spilled drinks. Sammy implored patrons to stay as they walked out the door complaining. 

In ten minutes, the Union Pacific had run its course, quiet had been restored and the bar had emptied out. El Capitán and Rocky glared at Sammy.

“You knew the cantina was next to the railroad tracks,” Sammy told them.

“But you didn’t say the train shakes the place like a jackhammer! I never should have invested in this pinche cantina. I want my money back.”

“Me, too,” said El Capitán.

Suddenly, a chair scraped the floor. The three partners shot stares towards the noise. A dark-haired woman with an eye patch stared back with her good eye. She toasted them with her pale frothy drink.

“I don’t remember mixing a piña colada,” said El Capitán.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and said, “You need a conjunto in here.”

El Capitán and Rocky grumbled, shaking their heads. Sammy only stared as the woman put her glass down. She turned and walked out the door.

“I wonder why she didn’t leave when everybody else did?” asked El Capitán.

“Haven’t you ever heard of La Tuerta?” Sammy asked.

“Hell, yes!” cried Rocky. “They say La Tuerta brings you either good luck or bad luck. Her good eye can see right through you.”

“Calm down, pendejo,” Sammy told him. “She was right about the conjunto. Music will bring in the ladies. They like to dance.”

“How are we going to pay musicians if we don’t have customers?” asked El Capitán.

The three partners began to close up for the night. Three tequila quarts hid the crack in the mirror that seemed to double the liquor bottles lined up in front of it. The scruffy vinyl and steel barstools mismatched like ladies’ clothes at an end-of-season sale. Each table on the floor sat ringed by a hodgepodge of beaten chairs.     

 The next day, Sammy walked in carrying a guitar and barking orders.

“Get your asses outside and help me unload the rest of the equipment.”

Sammy had backed his pickup right up to the front door. Rocky’s eyes grew big when he spotted the red Hohner Corona Classic button accordion.

“Hey, it’s just like the one I had.”

He hopped up on the truck bed and strapped on the instrument. He worked the bellows and danced his fingers over some buttons.

“You still got it, vato,” Sammy told him.

They set up a Yamaha drum kit, amplifier and microphone in a corner. Rocky leaned the red button accordion against the amplifier. The makeshift stage looked as though the musicians would return at any moment after a break.

“Did you bring the musicians, too?” El Capitán asked Sammy.

“They’re already here.”

El Capitán and Rocky stared at Sammy as though he had gone crazy.

“I can’t play,” said El Capitán. “Besides, who’ll run the bar?”

 “And I haven’t played a button since my third baby was born,” Rocky added.

A chair scraped the floor. All three turned and stared at La Tuerta who toasted them with her customary frothy drink.

“She brings either good luck or bad luck,” said Sammy. “Maybe she’ll work for tips.”

La Tuerta grinned at them as though she knew every secret they had ever promised to keep but didn’t.

“Hang out a sign that says the Kelly Polca Conjunto is practicing here tonight,” she suggested. “That way nobody will mind that you can’t play worth a damn.”

Sammy grinned and said, “How come neither of you two nincompoops thought of that? Rocky, tune the Capitán’s bajo sexto.”

“I can’t play bajo sexto.”

“I can’t either,” Sammy told El Capitán. “I’m tone deaf and you better not be.”

“Órale,” moaned La Tuerta.

But Rocky had already picked up the Hohner and started fingering it.

“Like riding a bicycle,” La Tuerta said.

That night, moonlight filled the sky as the conjunto played the first polca. Rocky tickled his buttons as though they were the delicate spine of a beautiful woman. He manipulated the squeezebox as gently as a new husband with his virgin bride. Amor vibrated in his voice.   

El Capitán held his bajo sexto with the tender hands of a first-time father. The body nestled against his stomach. The visor of his cap hid his eyes, but not his smile, as he plucked strings. 

Sammy cracked the snare drum. His right foot pounded life into the bass drum as he toed the pedal. He vowed to next tackle the cymbals that sat before him.  

Behind the bar, La Tuerta mixed drinks like a busy magician. She seemed to be everywhere at once. Behind the bar. At every table. Even out on the dance floor with the best looking caballeros.

Ladies had started eyeballing dance partners as they walked through the door of the Kelly Polca Cantina. The men had puffed up their chests and began requesting dances after only a few drinks. The dance floor looked like Saturday night on pay day.

The conjunto had just finished playing their third polca when the first bottles tinkled against each other. The partners exchanged glances. The Union Pacific rolled again. Rocky quickly riffed into “Un Puño de Tierra” as the clamor of glass mushroomed. Barstools teetered towards each other. Unoccupied chairs edged nervously around tables. La Tuerta caught tilting liquor bottles as metal wheels banged against steel tracks. The train roared by.

On the floor, dancers clung to each other like it was earth’s last night. No one seemed to mind that Rocky played a C note instead of a G. When El Capitán’s rhythm outraced the melody, couples still slid around the dance floor. No one seemed to care that Sammy attacked his cymbals when Rocky was trying to hold his vibrato.

The Union Pacific train rattled and roared yards away from the bar. No one complained. Nobody walked off the dance floor. When dancers lost their balance with the chaos of the train passing, couples fell into each other’s arms. Electricity sparked like fireworks. Romance bubbled like champagne. 

Sammy, Rocky and El Capitán grinned like lucky teenagers. To some, La Tuerta brought bad luck. To others, good. And the Kelly Polca Conjunto kept on playing.

Susana Nevárez-Márquez lives in Southeast Bexar County. She was recently published by VIA Poetry on the Move and Chicken Soup for the Soul and is a regular at the weekly Sun Poets' Society open mic.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Walk Among Us

By R.A. Villareal

You can’t remember the exact circumstances but you do remember someone telling you that every Shakespeare tragedy has five acts. Well, let’s just lay it straight and say you’re in Act IV. That’s how bad it is right now. Your old man used to say: “I’ll be ahead now if I quit while I’m behind.” Hadn’t thought of that in forever. Thinking about it now, though.

Esteban Jordán stands at the end of the sidewalk from San Fernando Cathedral in a slight stoop. Thousands of people stand around him but he might as well be the only person in that area. Everyone watches and listens as the bellows of his accordion lift and sway with the F and G notes of the mournful funeral march of “Symphony No. 1 in D Major” by Gustav Mahler. He has been playing for over an hour and the sweat drips down his far flung hair. A wounded heart that will never be allowed to heal. 100 years ago he would have been celebrated as a prophet. But today he’s just a future earthquake waiting to rip the third coast. So bring your pitchfork ‘cause the coup starts here.

The 2006 United States immigration reform protests have brought a flood of people to the streets of San Antonio but the voices of the angry are rendered silent by the wailing of an accordion in the middle of the square.

And today you woke up and I could see the judges being judged—and everywhere there was famine. And no one knew it. Tomorrow truly appears terrible and every day after. You have spent so many years as a bystander. There is no joy in seeing yourself as a cog in a large apparatus with no future. Like someone tapping the same nerve every second of the day. It all looks so bad. Esteban is well into the third movement of the symphony and the solemnity has brought tears to the faces of the protesters. You avert your eyes to the gloom and the very first thing you see is a man in the middle sitting lotus style encircled and crowded with enraged protesters pent up with anger at their short lives of struggle and resentment and hardened police outfitted in garish armament like a time travelling musketeer—and the lotus man was like a sun storm of lapping flames, an obvious product of self-immolation. And you could see every outline on his face, every wrinkle, every frown of complete sadness through the flames that scattered around his head. His light shown from every angle, as all eyes focused onto his entity. Some people screamed in rage with spittle flying from their frothed mouths while others collapsed in tears and sobs—and others completely immobile and silent. So selfless an act and you shed a tear you thought you never had in your eyes.

And Esteban Jordán continues the funeral march with his shoulders slumped but his fingers continue to pull and prod the accordion into sounds you never thought existed. He moves closer to the flames and the charring body while the music rolls throughout the crowd and one day he will be considered a seer, and this day will go on forever.

R.A. Villareal was born and raised in San Antonio and attained his Bachelor’s at Texas A&M. A graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, he now conducts a law practice out of his office in Westside San Antonio. He says: “I feel Tejano and Conjunto music are an essential part of our past and future.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Polka Dancing Polka Dot

By Tomás Salas

The chavalos are sitting on the window sills of Salón Feliz waiting for the music to start. It's 8 pm y el sol Tejano is just above the horizon on the west side of San Antonio. We approach at a slow trot. Yo, el único Nimo Vela, am riding my horse la Polka Dot to the baile on my 15th birthday. My Abuelo asked me to do this. I am wearing my best vaquero outfit but my white Appaloosa mare with the big round brown spots llama la atención de todos. I wave hello to my friends and gently pull back on the reins.

Polka Dot sticks her head in the open window. Some mujeres gasp and others laugh. I notice Paloma Martínez giggling. She is sitting at a nearby table with her parents. We used to play together when we were kids but now we don't talk much. She's a year older than me. I say hello to her and her parents. Me conocen desde que nací.

We hear a commanding voice from the bandstand. The MC is my Abuelo Praxidis Vela. He has been organizing conjunto dances here since it was just a pasture. Now we have a brand new dance hall con techo y todo. He puts on these bailes because he loves Conjunto music.

Abuelo welcomes everyone and speaks eloquently about the importance of this event. Este baile es muy especial. Not only is it the first one in the new building, but the band is led by his brother Tío Nicho who plays the bajo sexto and sings. Cousins Sabas and Mateo play the accordion and drums. Tía Fela toca el bass y canta. There will also be a surprise performance by a polka dancing horse. 

Conjunto Vela starts up with a beautiful waltz. Paloma's parents and others rush to the dance floor. Paloma and I look at each other but I get the feeling that someone is watching us. I glance over and notice Carlos standing nearby. He is giving me el mal ojo. He is 19 years old and a little taller than me. Se cree muy hombre pero yo no le tengo miedo. Carlitos, that's what I call him, is wearing a store-bought suit that does not fit him too good. He looks goofy and makes me laugh. 

Ever since his parents gave him that old Ford, Carlitos drives it everywhere. He follows Paloma around like a puppy, begging her to ride in his jalopy. He told our friends that he's going to marry her. He said he would go and steal her in his car, but that his parents want him to ask Mr. Martínez for her hand in marriage. What a pendejo. Paloma doesn't even like him or his ugly car.

I start watching the dancers. After a few polkas, Tío Nicho asks Tía Fela to sing a bolero. She dedicates the song to me for my birthday. Paloma looks at me. She wants to dance. I slide off the saddle and jump through the window. I ask Mr. Martínez for permission to dance with her. He approves. I lead her to the dance floor holding her hand. We dance slow and close. She fits perfectly in my arms and we glide smoothly. We separate with my hand still holding hers and she does a vuelta under my arm. Someone steps in between us. It's Carlitos.

"Can I have this dance?" he asks Paloma. She does not answer and looks at me. I can tell she doesn't want to.

"No quiere bailar contigo," I tell Carlitos. 

Without looking, he shoves me back with the palm of his sweaty hand.

"I'm asking her, not you, little boy. Go play with your horsie!" Carlitos replies.

I'm about to punch his face.

"¡Ya cálmala, chamacos!" Mr. Martínez says loudly to stop the fight before it starts. Paloma sadly walks back to the table with her father. Carlitos follows them.

    "Nimo, go get ready," Abuelo calls out to me.

Abuelo announces our performance. I spur Polka Dot towards the front door. She stops. She needs to drop a load of horseshit. I let her finish because it's better out here than in there. She climbs up the steps and through the door. 

The accordion melody of a fast polka is our cue. I squeeze my knees and Polka Dot starts prancing, lifting each foot high to the beat of the music. We reach the center of the dance floor. I lightly tap her right side with my heel and she sidesteps several feet to the left. Her body is still facing forward. I tap the left side and she moves to the right. I touch the rein to the right side of her neck, she goes into a fast spin to the left. Her hind legs are turning in place. She spins fast like the melody of the accordion. I say, "whoa!" She stops instantly. I cue her to spin in the opposite direction. The crowd cheers us on. 

We go back into the high step prance. She takes us in a wide circle around the edge of the dance floor. The clapping and gritos get louder. The Conjunto brings the polka to a crescendo. We return to the center and I tap Polka Dot's front legs with the toes of my boots. She rears up. Standing on her hind legs she takes a few steps back and forth. The band plays the final notes. Polka Dot drops down into a low bow. Her front legs are extended and her nose almost touches the floor. We have been practicing all year and she knows what to do.  She bows to all four directions.

"Miren nomás, mi gente. La Polka Dot, the Polka dancing horse and my grandson Nimo Vela. ¡Un fuerte applauso, por favor!" Abuelo shouts out with pride.

I feel bien chingón and ride over to Paloma who is standing with the applauding crowd near the dance floor. I extend my hand and she grabs it. I pull her up behind me on the saddle. We ride out the front door. We hear shouts and commotion as we go down the steps and reach the ground. The first one out the door behind us is Carlitos, screaming at me to put Paloma down. He is followed by Paloma's dad and the crowd. Carlitos attempts to grab Paloma but we take off at a fast gallop. He runs behind us. Paloma and I are laughing so hard we almost fall off of Polka Dot who slows down. We circle around Salón Feliz and end up by the front door. My Abuelo is standing next to Mr. Martínez and they are not pleased with what I have just done. I help Paloma climb down to her father and apologize.

"Discúlpame, Mr. Martínez," I say.

"Aw shit, dammit! Carlitos shouts out as he staggers around the corner. He is out of breath. His new shoes and the bottoms of his pants are covered in Polka Dot's horse shit.

"¡Pinche ranchero and your stupid shitty horse, me las vas a pagar, cabrón!" Carlitos yells.

Everyone laughs. Even my Abuelo smiles but then he sternly tells me to go home. I wave bye to Paloma, she blows me a kiss. Polka Dot and I take off at full speed. I'm in big trouble pero todo está bien. Feliz Cumple to me.

Tomás Salas is a lover of Conjunto/Tejano music and enjoys burning up some chancla on the dance floor. He lives in Austin but always feels at home in San Antonio. He is currently working on his first novel and also on a book about polka dancing in Tejas.

Latinos in the Mennonite Church—Another facet of our complex Latinidad

May 13, 2014, 11:03 am

≫ Next: A fire storm... like lightning across the sky

≪ Previous: Writing to the Tejano Conjunto Sound

$

0

0

Parishioners at La Iglesia Menonita del Calvario, Mathis, Texas, early 1950s

Extract from Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith & Evangelical Culture; author, Felipe Hinojosa

From Chapter 3 The Fight over Money: Latinos and the Black Manifesto

This chapter explores the political and ethnic realignments of the URC (Urban Racial Council) from an organization that began as a resource for addressing white racism to one that became a vehicle for exploring the meanings of race and ethnicity in a multiethnic context. The move to include and expand the conversation on race in the church was not a given, however. Latinos questioned whether the URC (See Editor’s Note below) was a good fit for them given the organization’s focus on urban and black communities. But that sentiment quickly changed when Latinos realized that their credibility and national recognition depended on how closely they worked with African Americans. At the center of these political and ethnic realignments was the fight over money.

In 1969 John Powell introduced a funding model for the URC at the biennial Mennonite Church convention in Turner, Oregon. Inspired by James Forman’s “Black Manifesto,” Powell’s plan called for a “Compassion Fund” that appealed to white Mennonite constituents to help sustain the work of the URC. But while the idea received initial support, growing anxiety over how the church used its resources and fears that it would help fund racial militancy, or worse a communist conspiracy led to the Compassion Fund’s demise as the 1970s began. But instead of damaging their movement, the fight over money led the URC to place a greater emphasis on building an interethnic movement with leadership coming from both African Americans and Latinos. They hoped this would have broader appeal and strengthen two emerging movements within the church.

In 1969 John Powell introduced a funding model for the URC at the biennial Mennonite Church convention in Turner, Oregon. Inspired by James Forman’s “Black Manifesto,” Powell’s plan called for a “Compassion Fund” that appealed to white Mennonite constituents to help sustain the work of the URC. But while the idea received initial support, growing anxiety over how the church used its resources and fears that it would help fund racial militancy, or worse a communist conspiracy led to the Compassion Fund’s demise as the 1970s began. But instead of damaging their movement, the fight over money led the URC to place a greater emphasis on building an interethnic movement with leadership coming from both African Americans and Latinos. They hoped this would have broader appeal and strengthen two emerging movements within the church.

This chapter also repositions the role of religion and interethnic politics within Chicano and Latino civil rights scholarship.

If the 1970s constituted a “Latino religious resurgence,” then it was also a time when movement politics “took over” the sacred spaces of Latino churches. As the Reverend Jorge Lara-Braud wrote in 1971, “the road to renaissance [for Latino evangelicals and Catholics] lies unmistakably in their willingness and ability to insist on indigenous leadership and to make their forms of church life consonant with the spirit of self-assertion sweeping through the entire ethnic community.”

Lara-Braud’s point about the “spirit of self-assertion” was a nod to Chicano struggles in the Southwest, but also to the black freedom struggle and its influence among other movements for social change. This is a point that is often overlooked when examining the rise of Latino religious activism in the 1960s and 1970s. While religious studies scholars have highlighted the role of Latin American liberation theology in shaping Latina and Latino religious activism, the important role of the black freedom movement has received less attention.

Even as Latino evangelicals sympathized with liberation theology and the inspirational movements in Latin America, they resonated even more with the religious and Protestant underpinnings of the black freedom movement and preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr.

The appeal of the black freedom struggle helped launch Latino evangelicals into the middle of some of the most important civil rights struggles. In organizations like the National Farm Worker Ministry Board, which was made up of religious leaders, Latinos stood on the picket lines and worked within their own religious bodies to garner support for the farm worker movement. There was also a host of groups within Latino evangelical and Catholic churches that worked to bring about institutional change: groups like Católicos Por La Raza, Las Hermanas, PADRES, and the Latin American Methodist Action group all came on the scene during this time. These were groups that like the URC took the lead in pressing white church leaders to be more attentive to the needs of Spanish-speaking communities. More importantly, they challenged the secular origins of the Chicano Movement by infusing it with a religious and moral fortitude that it sorely lacked. The legacy of these movements resulted in the development of Latino leadership that emerged in Protestant and Catholic groups well into the 1970s and 1980s.

As important as these movements were, however, they were for the most part made up of Latinos who focused primarily on the needs and struggles of Latino communities across the country. What made the URC significant and unique was that it was one of the few religious groups that merged the concerns of Latinos and African Americans and to a lesser extent Native Americans. This was a multiethnic context that simultaneously worked to balance multiple concerns and struggles all while trying to maintain some semblance of unity. The irony, of course, was that the multiethnic context of the URC was housed in one of the whitest denominational groups in the country, the Mennonite Church. This is a point that surprisingly even Mennonite historians have overlooked. While Mennonite historians have addressed the struggles of African Americans in the church, they have ignored the important role that Latinos played in forging an interethnic movement with African Americans during the civil rights era.

This chapter follows the ways in which these groups worked collaboratively, but also investigates how the tricky politics of interethnic alliances led to battles over funding, radical politics, and ultimately how to define the group’s identity. With the national prominence of the farm worker movement and the growing chorus of “Brown Power” across the country, Latino involvement in the URC was more important than ever. As African-American leaders captured the attention of white Mennonites in the 1950s and 1960s, it was clear that Latinos had now become a political force in the Mennonite Church and the civil rights movement.

Editor’s Note: The Urban Racial Council (URC) later changed its name to Minority Ministries Council which disbanded in 1974. This facet is covered elsewhere in the book where Hinojosa discusses the shift from interethnic politics to Latino religious politics in the 1970s. 

Felipe Hinojosa

Felipe Hinojosa, a Tejano from Brownsville, Texas, and a Mennonite,is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Hispanic Theological Initiative Dissertation Fellowship and a First Book Grant for Minority Scholars from the Louisville Institute. 

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith & Evangelical Culture is available from Johns Hopkins University Press at https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/latino-mennonites.

A fire storm... like lightning across the sky

May 13, 2014, 3:13 pm

≫ Next: When you’re young it’s good to just see how things go…

≪ Previous: Latinos in the Mennonite Church—Another facet of our complex Latinidad

$

0

0

Chicken Pot Pie

Excerpt from The Border is Burning

By Ito Romo

Will Ramirez looked in the rearview mirror to the backseat, eyes focused, opened wide, and scolded the two of his three boys that were sitting in the back. “Eat the damn chicken pot pie, for Christ’s sake.”

They were complaining about the food. He’d gotten the pies for them at the truck stop at the exit to Artesia Wells. Zapped the pot pies in the micro. He seat-belted the kids back into their seats, two in the back, one in front with him—cold Mountain Dew between their knees, a warm pie in each lap, white plastic spoon stuck into each pie—and got back on the highway.

“But, Dad, it looks like vomit,” Memo said from the backseat. That’s what had brought on the scolding.

The pies were cheap, though, and Will Ramirez was determined to save money, especially on food, since the kids would get a late supper at their grandmother’s house in Laredo. His ex-wife’s mother. He had offered to drive them down there; she was stuck in a seasonal job, gift-wrapping at the Dillard’s in the mall downtown. Although the drive was not that long—just 154 miles—gas was expensive. He saved wherever he could. Three kids and an ex-wife cost a lot. He never had any money left.

He loved the boys, though, loved them in his own way—macho, hard. They were boys after all, not little sissies.

It was dark already. They still had about an hour to go. But the kids said they were hungry, so he stopped.

At the Truck Mart, Memo, the oldest, had said, “We want pizza. There’s a Pizza Hut across the street, Dad.” He pointed out the huge glass window.

“No, corn dogs, Dad,” Tony, the one in the middle, had said.

“No, Dad, McDonald’s. We want a McDonald’s. McDonald’s. Dad, McDonald’s.” This was René, the little one.

“The pot pies are better for you. They have vegetables. I’m gonna get them, and you’re gonna eat them,” he had said. “Better than no damn hot dog. And a hell of a lot cheaper than McDonald’s or Pizza Hut.”

“Dad!” they had all yelled together.

“Be quiet. Go wait in the car. Memo, take them to the car. Roll down the windows a little. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

When he stopped yelling at the kids in the backseat, he looked at René, who was sitting up front with him, to see how he was doing with hischicken pot pie. The kid’s eyes were teary.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. The kid wasn’t eating. “Why are you messing with your food? Do I have to get mad at you, too? Eat the damn food, René.”

Will returned his gaze to the road, angry, biting his lower lip.

The little one threw up the four spoonfuls of chicken pot pie he had force-swallowed. They went right back into the pie tin. He turned to look at his father, maybe to tell him what had just happened. But nothing came out. He just stared.

“Eat the damn chicken pot pie, René!” he yelled without turning. Then, looking into the rearview mirror, “Eat it all now, all of you. Finish it all, or I’ll turn right back around and go back to San Antonio, no damn Christmas vacation for you. We’ll go back home and take you back to your mamma’s house. You guys hear me? I’m tired. Worked hard all damn day long just to hand the damn check over to your mother. Now eat your food. You hear me?”

“Yes.”

The radio got snowy. Will pushed in a cassette that was popped halfway out of the player.

René was terrified because he knew he had to finish the chicken pot pie. Or no Christmas. And he planned for Christmas at his grandmother’s all year. His grandmother set up a Nativity scene every year in her living room with about five hundred miniature figurines in it, and she never said no to him when he asked if he could “put something on there, Wela,” no matter how “stupid” it seemed to his older brothers. The very first Christmas that he could remember at his grandmother’s he had added a dinosaur he’d gotten in a box of cereal during the movie Jurassic Park. So for the last three years, he’d search for months and months before Christmas for the perfect toy, the perfect trinket to add to her Nativity scene. Last year he placed a giant plastic goldfish he’d traded from a kid in school after show-and-tell. It was made out of clear, squishy plastic that made the fish look particularly real, except for its size, of course. The giant goldfish hadn’t fit into the foil river his grandma had molded to simulate the water cascading from one level to another, so she went into the kitchen and brought out a big piece of heavy-duty foil and molded it into a kidney-shaped lake and placed it at the end of the river on the lowest tier, as if the river emptied there. In it, she placed René’s plastic fish and said, “See, m’ijito, it fits perfectly.”

The huge scene had grown from one small corner to half the size of the living room in the fifty plus years his grandmother had been putting it up. This year, he’d begged his father to take him to McDonald’s for his birthday lunch. Will, no matter what, made it a point to pick up all the boys for lunch whenever it was one of the kids’ birthdays, even if it was during the week, on a school day. He’d get special permission to let them all out at the same time for lunch.

René didn’t particularly like McDonald’s; ketchup made him feel like throwing up, and Will refused to special order for any of his kids. “You should learn to eat your food like a man,” he’d say. But the food wasn’t the reason he’d wanted to go there. It was the plastic Star Warsfigurine he saw advertised on TV, free with every kid’s meal, that he was after—the Jabba the Hut. It was the only animal he could think of that she didn’t have.

He swallowed slowly, spoon after spoon after spoon of thrown-up chicken pot pie until it was all gone. When he had finally finished and felt as if he’d throw up again, he reached to touch Jabba the Hut tucked away underneath his thigh. His stomach started to settle. Now he knew his dad would not turn around. Now he could go see his grandmother’s nacimiento, and there they’d decide together exactly where among the clay figurines they’d place Jabba. Perhaps among the shepherds and their sheep, or with the farmers and their burros. Maybe with the women balancing trays of bread on their heads, or among the children carrying pails of water or small bundles of wheat on their backs toward the manger. A dreamlike land of sparkling lights and dried moss before him, a miniature universe of crushed paper grocery bags spray-painted to look like stone, darkened ceilings filled with a thousand silver stars dangling from invisible wire, tails of silver icicles, swinging across the sky like comets every time someone opened the living room door. Here, sitting in front of that Nativity scene, René realized what magic was.

After a while, Will looked again into the rearview mirror and asked, “You eat your food?”

“Yes,” they answered.

“No, you haven’t, Memo,” said Tony. “Dad, he’s lying.”

“No, I’m not. Don’t believe him, Dad. I’m almost finished. Look,” Memo said. “Don’t stop, Dad, don’t stop. Look, last spoon.” He shoved the last piece of crust and two tiny pieces of carrot and a pea into his mouth.

Will looked at René. He was crying. He felt like throwing up again.

“What’s a matter with you now?”

“Nothing,” he answered.

“Nothing? Then why are you crying, huh?”

“No reason.”

“Then stop crying. If you have nothing to cry about, then don’t cry. Stop crying, dammit. You know what, I have three little girls, don’t I?”

The kids in the back started laughing.

“Muchachita,” said Memo. “René is a muchachita.”

“Yeah, mu-cha-chi-ta, mu-cha-chi-ta, mu-cha-chi-ta,” chanted Tony.

“I’m not a muchachita,” said René, turning, clicking open the seat belt to jump into the backseat, arms flailing, tears flying. “You’re a bitch. The both of you. That’s what you two are. A bitch.”

Will reached over instantly, slapped the kid on the mouth hard with the back of his hand. Saliva flew into the back seat. Some landed on Memo’s face. He didn’t even dare move to wipe it off.

René sat back in place. He was bleeding. Tender, tiny lip cut. He didn’t say a word. Just looked ahead over the dashboard to the stars in the sky, thought about his Wela, cried silently.

Will wrung the steering wheel’s rubber cover. He knew what he’d done. Lost control. Just lost control. He flipped on the cabin light. Saw the blood.

He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and handed it to the kid. Turned the light off. Stared at the road in front of them.

A huge whitetail jumped out into the middle of the road and froze.

“Dad!” yelled one of the kids from the backseat.

“Watch it, Dad!” yelled the other.

They barreled right into it. The windshield exploded. Will’s eyes filled with shattered glass, then blood and coarse deer hair. He could see nothing, just a bright red glow—one of the headlights had twisted on impact onto the crushed sheet metal of the hood. It was still lit, still wired, shining into the car. As tightly as he held on to the steering wheel, he still couldn’t control the car. The two right wheels grabbed the edge of the road’s shoulder like a track. The car must have hit a stone or a break in the asphalt or something because, suddenly, it flew off the shoulder into a shallow ditch that acted like a ramp and made the car flip, then roll over twice before landing back on its tires, smoking.

There was silence for a while. Then Will started to hear cars drive up, doors slam, talking.

One man jumped out of his truck and sparked two bright red flares in the right-hand lane about fifty feet from the huge mangled buck, which someone was already pulling by a leg off the interstate. The deer’s antlers left white trails as if a giant had scratched his nails against the asphalt like a chalkboard.

Will reached over instinctively. The seat was empty. He brushed deer hair off his face, and blood. He wasn’t sure if it was the deer’s blood or his own. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God!” he yelled.

He unfastened his seat belt, hurt, but still scooted over and patted the floorboard to see if the kid was there. Nothing.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,” he said again.

He reached over the car seat to the back, almost jumped over, but felt a pain so severe in his stomach that he bent forward and threw up. He spat a few times and turned again, reached over the seat despite the pain. Touched Memo’s legs, then Tony’s. Yelled at them, “You guys all right?”

There was no answer. “René, René, you back there, hijito?”

There was no answer. He pulled himself over the seat as much as he could. The pain made him black out for a minute. He forced himself back to. Pulled himself over. Felt around the floor, around Memo’s legs, over the hump in the middle, under Tony’s legs. Nothing.

He pulled himself back into his seat, reached at the windshield, knew what he was looking for, knew there’d be a big hole. He could feel the unusually cool South Texas winter breeze before he made contact with the heated hood, then with what little glass was left along the edges, cut himself, blacked out again. Almost immediately he came back to, his hands on the hot hood. The headlight still bright. He imagined the huge hole in the red glow.

Someone was at the car door. “You all right? Everybody all right?”

“Yes . . . no, my kids . . . they’re in the back. Check on ’em, please. The little one, René, I can’t find him. Find him. Find him, please. I can’t see. Please, help me find him.” Will reached at the man’s shirt and gripped it, then let go. “Help me, please, help me find the little one. Get the kids out of here, please. I smell gas. Do you smell gas? Please get them out of here. Get them some help. Do you have a phone? Call the cops . . . the ambulance. Please. Help the ones in the back, please.”

The man at the door turned to listen to another person yelling something at him; Will’s bloody hand was printed onto his shirt. You could see it clearly in the bright headlight lighting up the whole bloody scene.

The man walked off toward the person yelling at him. Will thought he heard the word “child.” He pulled himself up, closer to the door to hear better, couldn’t hold it, folded over. He slowly, painfully moved his hand back to the passenger’s side, started feeling around in vain, again. His fingers brushed the handkerchief. He grabbed for it, knew immediately what it was, still folded, thick, took it in his other hand, put it to his face, breathed deeply. His other hand, back to searching aimlessly, found Jabba the Hut.

Ito Romo

Ito Romo teaches literature and creative writing at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. He is also the author of El Puente/The Bridge (UNM Press). The Border is Burning (UNM Press  © 2013) is available at bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico Press. To order, call 800-249-7737 or visit www.unmpress.com.

When you’re young it’s good to just see how things go…

May 13, 2014, 3:41 pm

≫ Next: The ZYX’s of Life in the USA--A Primer

≪ Previous: A fire storm... like lightning across the sky

$

0

0

Excerpt from The Deportation of Wopper Barraza: A Novel

By Maceo Montoya

IV Jorge Barraza

Did I stunt him? Did I keep him from growing? That’s what my wife always told me. “Jorge, no more!” she’d yell at me when I’d walk in the door with Roberto holding an ice cream. “Jorge, no more!” she’d yell at me when she’d see him approaching with stuffed animals or toys, eating a candy apple. “It’s the county fair,” I’d say. “It’s only once a year.” And she’d yell some more, telling me that for my son it was always the county fair. She never claimed Wopper as her own. The girls were hers, but Roberto was my son, your son, the son you raised! Maybe she’s right. She is right. She’d yell and swat him for some stupidity—she was always the one to scold—and I’d wait for her to leave the room, then I’d take him into my arms (the girls too but she wasn’t as rough with them) and tell him, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, my little boy, your dad is here to protect you.” Then later she’d yell at me, tell me I was going to raise a son just like myself. “Which is what?” I’d ask. “A weakling!” she’d yell. And I’d laugh. I’d laugh because it struck me as funny to be called a weakling. I lived with her, and I dealt with her for how many years? And I’m the weakling? I consider myself strong as a pack mule.

No one shares this high opinion. Not my wife, not my daughters, not even my son. They never listened to me. You’d think they’d return my kindness. The kind father who always gave them their way. But no, I rarely cared enough to assert my authority, and when I did, they just ignored me. And sometimes, as hard as it is for them to believe, I’m right. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve lived life, I’ve seen many things, I know a situation when I see it. But if you want people to listen, you have to be stern from the beginning, from the very start. Once you let them push you over, they will continue until you’re dead. Which is the story of my marriage. But that makes it seem like I live a miserable life. I don’t. I’m comfortable with what I have. I am a simple man. I deal with what comes my way, always have. My father was a simple man. I adored him. Does Wopper adore me? When he’s older he will. Right now he can’t separate me from his failures. I say, what failures?

When I brought Wopper to the airport, I spoke the entire way, reminding him to go see Don Martín as soon as he arrived and bringing up other details about the property that I’d already told him a hundred times. It was dark, but the moon was low in the sky, and dark clouds must have covered the lower portion because it looked like a huge orange that someone had stepped on. It was cold outside, and Wopper turned on the car heater full blast. My little Toyota’s air conditioning hasn’t worked in a decade, but the heater might as well be a furnace. I felt sweat build around the brow of my hat, and my face and ears were hot, too, so I cracked the window for fresh air. But then a minute later I rolled it back up because the wind was so loud that I feared I wouldn’t be able to hear him if he actually responded to one of my questions. Wopper finally turned off the heater, but I was still sweating.

I kept asking him if he had put the money I’d given him in a safe place. When he just shrugged, which I assumed to mean yes, I invented other questions to fill the silence. I don’t even know what I said or what I asked. I spoke out of nervousness. Woodland is only ten miles or so from the Sacramento airport, just a few corn and rice fields away, so we didn’t have much time. I wished we had hours more to go. I parked right in front of the Mexicana Airlines sign, and already he had his door open. I told him, “Wait, wait! There was something else I was going to tell you . . .” But I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had run out of questions. Finally, he said, “Dad, I have to go now.” Then something came to me: I cautioned him about the conniving ways of taxi drivers, but as I was doing so I felt my voice grow weak until I realized that I was crying.

He stopped me. “Dad, don’t cry,” he said in English. I heard the irritation. I looked up at him. I recognized the embarrassment. I stopped my crying. I wiped my eyes even though no tears had fallen except maybe a few, and when he stepped out of the car I cursed myself, which is something I never do, because I’ve never seen the point. I just said, “Goddamn you, Jorge. Goddamn it.”

I got out of the car too and rushed around the front to give him a hug, but then I saw that he had moved to the rear and was waiting with his hand on the trunk. “I need to get my stuff,” he said. I hurried back around, opened the driver side and popped the trunk, and then rushed to help him with his luggage. I reached for his suitcase and he told me, “I got it, Dad.” I wanted to help anyway, so I grabbed one side, but then I ended up dropping it because all I had to hold on to was a wheel, not to mention my hands were sweaty. “Sorry! Sorry!” I said. “It’s okay, just leave it alone,” he muttered under his breath.

His bags in hand, he stood on the sidewalk as if unsure what to do next, or as if he didn’t know how to say good-bye. I thought maybe he was waiting to see what I was going to do, so I lunged toward him, grabbing him as tight as I could. He was a child full of laughter the last time I’d hugged him like this. He just stood there at first, but then after a few seconds I felt his arms around me, too. Then he said, “Okay, Dad.” So I let go, stared into his eyes one last time, and tried to remember my son’s face at twenty-four years old, because who knew how old he’d be when I saw him again? Then he turned around, and I watched him disappear into the terminal.

V

Wopper Barraza entered the airport terminal and had no idea where to go. He gripped the handle of his large bag, holding it at his side as if he were about to head somewhere specific. But he found himself frozen in place, unable to move. Finally, he turned around, half-hoping to see his father behind him, instructing him, pointing him in the right direction. He regretted telling his father to just drop him off. But then he imagined the two of them stuck in the middle of all these people, neither of them knowing what to do. His father would have at least pretended.

He turned back to face the rest of the terminal, and several people stared at him rudely or confusedly, as if he were blocking the only way from one side of the concourse to the other. He moved aside and followed a Mexican family: a short round man with a cowboy hat, his short round wife, and their three young kids, who looked like miniature versions of their parents, each with suitcases as large as Wopper’s and two oversized boxes precariously tied with rope. After following them for a few yards, stopping when they stopped, checking his documents just as the father did, and moving forward when they did, he realized they were as lost as he was. At one point his eyes met the father’s, and he recognized not his own apprehension, but an expression similar to one his own father would wear. It said, IhavenoideawhatI’mdoing,butI’llfigurethisout!Wopper could muster no such expression. And at that point, no one would have cared if he did.

He smiled, and the man said, “Guadalajara?”

Wopper nodded.

“Over there?” the man pointed. “Right?”

Wopper looked in the direction they were headed. Now he saw the signs. Now he saw the snaking rows of people. “Yes, over there, it looks like,” he said.

He and the man struck up a conversation. The man did most of the talking. He introduced his wife and children. He told him where they were heading, explained the reason for their trip, briefly wondered about the weather in Guadalajara, and informed Wopper of how long it had been since his last visit. He even felt the need to describe the contents of the two boxes tied with rope. Wopper was too nervous to give much of his attention. He registered nothing except that the man was from Woodland.

The family was held up at the ticket counter because their bags weighed too much. They emptied the contents—countless pairs of shoes, boxes of packaged junk food, a toaster, a game station—and the man kept saying something about, “I told you, the scale, the scale,” and the wife mumbled, “I know, I know you did, you’re right.” Wopper watched them from the front of the line and tried to piece together what was happening. A space opened up and he was beckoned forward. His bag was over the weight limit too.

“Do you want to move stuff into your backpack or another bag?” asked the woman behind the counter.

He didn’t understand what she was asking. She repeated the question, and this time he saw what the family was doing, the mother on her knees, frantically unzipping bags, handing belongings to each of the children to hold while she reorganized each suitcase to fit under the weight limit.

“You can just pay the fee. Would you prefer that?” the attendant asked, clearly noticing the dread on Wopper’s face as he imagined himself doing the same thing.

“Yes,” he said.

When the bag was checked, she handed him his boarding pass and pointed him in the direction of security. He followed others who seemed to know where they were supposed to go. He felt freer without the huge suitcase that his parents had so diligently packed with gifts. They had given him detailed instructions about what was to go to whom; instructions he had barely listened to.

He passed through security, following the actions of those around him, and he removed his jacket, wallet, and belt, hesitating before taking off his tennis shoes. The man before him passed through the monitor and it beeped loudly. The security agent asked the man if he had anything else in his pockets, but the man didn’t speak English, so the agent asked him more loudly and pointed to the man’s pockets. Still confused and merely following the hand gestures of the agent, the man dug into his pockets and removed some change.

Wopper felt his body heat rise as he wondered what he had on him that might cause the alarm to go off. He braced himself as he walked through, and he was almost surprised when there was no sound and the security agent pointed him toward his belongings. As he was putting on his shoes, the man who’d been ahead of him was guiding his orange leather belt through the loops of his brown slacks. He heard the man muttering in Spanish, “That was tough, man. What a bitch that was. What was the point of that?” Wopper thought maybe he was talking to him. He looked up, but the man was still looking down at his belt, making sure the buckle was centered.

Wopper found his seat and waited nervously for the plane to take off. He had the window, and an old couple soon joined him in the adjacent seats. The old woman wore a colorful shawl; the old man a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“Where you are headed?” the old man asked him.

“Outside of La Piedad,” Wopper said. “How about you?”

“We are headed to Cuatla, Jalisco,” the old man answered. “That’s where we’re from originally and where we now live for half the year.” After a pause the old man continued unprompted, explaining that they had come back for medical appointments and to visit their children.

“How long are you planning to be in Mexico?” the old woman leaned over and asked him.

Wopper paused a long time before answering. “Forever,” he said finally.

They looked at him oddly, until the old man said, “When you’re young it’s good to just see how things go, right?”

Wopper nodded and forced a smile.

The airplane started to move and then picked up speed, the roar of the engine growing louder and louder. He clenched the armrests and held his breath. He glanced at the old man and woman. They didn’t seem the least bit worried. He felt embarrassed. He tried to relax a little and even turned to look out the window. After a second of confusion, he realized they were already in the air. He stared out into the darkness and saw a thin strip of lights in the distance. It took him a moment before he recognized the moving cars. He wondered if it was Highway 5. As they rose higher and higher, he noticed thousands of lights clustered closely together, surrounded by blackness. Woodland, he thought. And he wondered if that would be the last time he ever saw it.

Maceo Montoya

Maceo Montoya is an assistant professor in the Chicana/o studies department at UC Davis and an affiliated faculty member of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA), a community-based art center in Woodland, California. The Deportation of Wopper Barraza (© 2014 by the University of New Mexico Press) is available at bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico Press. To order, please call 800-249-7737 or visit www.unmpress.com.

The ZYX’s of Life in the USA--A Primer

May 15, 2014, 10:48 am

≫ Next: Trio of poems: Facets of life

≪ Previous: When you’re young it’s good to just see how things go…

$

0

0

By José-Manuel Navarro

“Zest for life!”

You demand of me in this

Xenophobic system of daily consternation and

White skin privilege.

Victory eludes me in this battle, I fear.

Unfettered anger pummels, storms at

Temples, brain and soul.

Searing pain—my brand of Cain.

Racism triumphs again.

Quiescent society lets it fester—

Purulent infection stains us all:

“Others” of non-white skin or heritage.

Nary a nugget of hope have we.

Millions stung by hunger and neglect.

“Latinos are expendable” is

Kyrie of white supremacists.

Just another day in our U S of A.

I live it within the castle of my skin and the fortress of my name.

Hell is my daily struggle to survive.

Get no respite or release.

Fouled are our lives and selves.

“Expect no less,” shrieks the daily breath of life.

Damnéd are we to this reality.

Cures seem wanting, non-existent.

“Brave souls, rage!” is our battle cry.

¡Adelante! ¡Adelante!  Es nuestra la Victoria mi gente.

The backstory of this poem by the author:

On Tuesday, April 23, 2013, I was listening to the National Public Radio Show “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. She interviewed a poet, whose name escapes me.   April is National Poetry Month.  They chatted; both were very amicable and she asked him to read some poetry. 

The poet read two poems.  The first one was a standard non-rhyming poem.   The second poem, he said, would be an abecedarian poem.  He explained that this is an old form/style of poetry.  In this style, the poet uses each letter of the alphabet to start each line.  His take on it, he emphasized, is that he wrote the poem not in the usual English alphabetical order from A to Z, but in reverse order, from Z to A.

I was so struck with the form of the poem that I was unable to read and critique two pieces of writing submitted by two members of my writing group until I had written my own abecedarian poem in reverse order. I began it that same day.

The writing and editing of this poem took place as follows:

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:32 to 3:40 P.M.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:00 to 10:30 P.M.

Friday, April 26, 2013 10:06 to 10:13 P.M. and 10:37 to 11:09 P.M.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 11:24 to 11:47 P.M.

Thursday, May 2, 2013 12:20 to 1:22 P.M. 

Tuesday, March 11, 2014 12:20 to 12:25 P.M.

Thursday, March 27, 2014 3:07 to 3:16 P.M.

Friday, April 25, 2014 9:35-9:40 A.M.

Saturday, May 10, 2014 7:00-9:00 P.M.

I wrote the first letter of each line in bold to make it easier for the reader to follow.

José-Manuel Navarro

José-Manuel Navarro, born in the Barrio Quemados in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, the eldest of 10 children, left la Isla del Encanto in 1956 at the age of 8, settling in Philadelphia. A professor of History and Spanish, he has taught at several universities and colleges throughout the United States and published Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898-1908 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).  He lives and writes in Philadelphia.

---

Trio of poems: Facets of life

May 18, 2014, 6:57 pm

≫ Next: What’s in a name, especially if it’s “Hispanic”?

≪ Previous: The ZYX’s of Life in the USA--A Primer

$

0

0

Hawk carved from ironwood Photo by the author

Ironwood

By Lisha Adela García

The Zapotec Tule tree of Oaxaca,

is the 4,000 year-old guardian

that forever breathes

resistance to conquest and decimation.

One twig of its canopy becomes an ambassador

to the Seri Shaman who plants its remembrance

in the sand of the Sonoran Desert shore.

Its majesty beseeches the ghosts

of ironwood tree for forgiveness.

Tourists, craving new oxygen

away from square boxwood hedges

hunger for carvings and fetishes

made from holy limbs shaped into quail,

hawks and sea turtles.

Totems shaped by idle Seri hands

who can no longer fish for food

among the tankers and debris

sold the immortalized spirit helpers

until world demand ate all the trees.

In a piece not fit for market,

a splintered ironwood branch lies in an arroyo

that leaks its flash floods to the mother sea. 

The running rainwater smashes its grey

fibers against rocks to mingle

with mica sand and whispers—

laments only the Seri can hear.

The Tule twig moistens in the mist-wind,

softens with the fog and summons

ironwood with sacred incantations.

Will the Shaman’s entreaty

entice the wind,

persuade hidden ironwood seeds

to return and uncurl forgiveness

for the last of the Seri,

who rode with Turtle

in the beginning breath

and walked naked as pristine

coral reefs hummed along the coast?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hasta Siempre

for Carlos Mariano García

Twenty years walking

on parent glass

to learn the ocean cannot

be nailed to the shore.

Lakes are ideal in their enclosure.

Children cannot be contained by goodness

or right intention. Their eyes

see through a blinding fog

to a road where I cannot name the trees.

I let go of my son the way an ocean

gives up a whole sand dollar to the beach,

and then retreats to noise and froth

against the rocks.  He is now on his own

tarmac of grief and joy, each decision

framed by the doors I placed around his body

when he could not walk alone.

The mother conch is empty,

sand fills the center-pink vulva.

When he returns, I want him

to find home again in the grey

of my hair and the lines of my face. 

Hasta Siempre means Until Forever

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Artists for Dinner

Like love,

artists rise from ditches

convinced they are the razor

that tempts the wrist.

The tiny mirrors that exist

beneath their flesh

encompass unique luminosities;

distinct wicks of unshackled color

that play with light,

air, sound or canvas. 

Their words are ochre antlers that butt

heads on Texas Oaks,

preen what others take by force,

or take for granted.

They dance to the arc of a Bonsai tree,

stare all day at birds on a fence

to capture the vacancy

in a human eye.

At dinner, artists are conversation

gypsies wrapped in warm

loaves of bread.

They are cattails in potato soup

who laugh and write opera

from the stones

they carry on their backs

bathed in vinegar and brine.

Lisha Adela García is a bilingual, bicultural poet who has México, the United States and that land in-between in her work. She has an MFA from Vermont College and a Masters from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Lisha is a small business advisor at Texas State University and also a simultaneous interpreter and literary translator who is influenced by the American Southwest and border culture. She resides in San Antonio, Texas, with her beloved four legged children. 

What’s in a name, especially if it’s “Hispanic”?

May 26, 2014, 11:46 am

≫ Next: A room of her own, in a prison

≪ Previous: Trio of poems: Facets of life

$

0

0

Cuéntese Censo '80 Button aimed at all residents in the U.S. identifying with the message

Extract from Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats & Media Constructed a New American, author G. Cristina Mora

Promoting “Hispanic” on the Airwaves:

Mobilizing Spanish-Language Media

Desi Arnaz at Destino 80, puffing on a cigar as he reads his script. Note the Censo 80 button on his lapel

While these community forums and national meetings were effective, the bureau also needed a way to connect to the Spanish-origin population on a broader, more massive scale. For advice, it turned to the SOAC (Spanish Origin Advisory Committee), which in turn suggested that the bureau hire a full-time Spanish-language media consultant who could forge networks with key Spanish-language radio, newspaper, and television executives. In effect, the consultant would be in charge of producing Spanish-language census advertisements that could be tailored to different local needs.¹¹⁴ The idea was not completely novel, for the bureau had a long history of working with media. To publicize the 1970 census, for example, the bureau had solicited the help of the Advertising Council, which created an English-language media campaign about the count and then distributed it to radio, television, and print media groups across the country. At that time, however, no Spanish-language media equivalent of the Advertising Council existed, and Spanish-language media tended to be highly localized and disparate ventures. For example, the country’s two largest Spanish-language newspapers, La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario in New York, were not connected to each other through ownership or marketing conglomerates. ¹¹⁵ Spanish-language radio stations also often operated as distinct firms with few links to professional or national organizations.¹¹⁶ It was not until the late 1970s that sizable Spanish-language media professional organizations such as the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the National Association of Spanish Broadcasters emerged.¹¹⁷

Censo '80 promo photos showed Latinos as census takers

Nonetheless, in the late 1970s the bureau hired Armando B. Rendon, who was an early member of NCLR, as its Spanish-language media liaison. ¹¹⁸Through Rendon, the bureau established contacts with three important Spanish-language media executives: Ed Gomez, Antonio Guernica, and Rene Anselmo. Ed Gomez was one of the country’s few Mexican American owners of Spanish-language radio stations. Based in Texas and Albuquerque, Gomez had connected with other Mexican American broadcasters and established the Southwest Spanish Broadcasters Association (SSBA) in 1978.¹¹⁹ On August 16, 1979, Rendon and Barabba met with Gomez and other members of SSBA.¹²⁰ Rendon and his Census Bureau team introduced their idea for a Spanish-language radio commercial, and SSBA agreed to produce it and to persuade its members to air it repeatedly on their broadcast stations.

Comic book created for Censo '80  stressing benefits eventually was used  to reach all racial and ethnic groups  by changing skin color tones.

Anselmo and Guernica were executives at Spanish International Network (SIN), which was at the time the country’s only Spanish-language television network.¹²¹ Guernica was head of market research for SIN and was helping to prepare Spanish U.S.A., the country’s first national Hispanic marketing survey.¹²² Anselmo was SIN’s president. Rendon and Barabba presented the bureau’s Spanish-language media campaign to SIN executives, asking them to produce and run the bureau’s ads on their stations. They agreed, but Guernica and Anselmo had their own ideas for promoting census participation. They wanted to create a series of commercials that would run on SIN stations. The commercials would encourage Spanish-language television viewers to fill out the census forms and, equally important, would emphasize the importance of answering the Spanish/Hispanic-origin question. Additionally, Anselmo and Guernica revealed that they planned to have Spanish-language station managers make the census a topic in their weekly news magazine shows. In Los Angeles, for example, census participation would be spotlighted in a weekly segment. SIN executives also planned to air a special documentary on the role that Hispanics would play in the census. Titled Destino 80, this documentary would “explain government procedures and demonstrate how to fill out census questionnaires.”¹²³

The media efforts launched by SIN would not only convey the importance of census participation but also show audiences how to respond to the Spanish/Hispanic-origin question. Just before census forms were mailed, Rendon and SIN officials broadcast a daylong telethon, replete with Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban musical acts. Rendon recalled that

“we had people manning the phones with a hotline number for people to call in. . . . Off to the side we held up the [1980] census form and the camera zoomed in on the Hispanic question, introducing viewers to the new categories.”¹²⁴

Armando Rendón, then president of Los Cerezos Television  Company in Washington, D.C., with Emilio Nicolás, founder  and president of KVOR-TV in San Antonio, Texas, at SIN  gala launching "first Spanish language service" in D.C. in 1980.

A page from the SIN invitation shows an early pan-ethnic Latino media group

A number of circumstances undoubtedly contributed to the cooperation of Spanish-language broadcasters. Destino 80 and the ads promoting the census counted as public service announcements, which helped the networks fill their quotas for their impending renewal applications. However, this was likely not the most important reason for their cooperation, since SIN executives could have aired the advertisements provided by the bureau without spending resources on creating their own commercials, not to mention the documentary and telethon. The major reason that SIN and other media executives were supportive of the bureau’s efforts was because the census would provide much-needed consumer data on Hispanics. In the newsletter for the National Association of Spanish Broadcasters, Guernica laid out this argument:

“An accurate count of Hispanics in the 1980 Census is a key issue with Spanish broadcasters in that the Census count directly affects station revenue by defining the potential Hispanic audience of the stations and by serving as a basic body of raw data for the development of marketing information and material.”¹²⁵

In effect, accurate census data would allow Spanish-language media executives to identify where Hispanics lived and show advertisers the size of the potential audience for Spanish-language media. Furthermore, sample surveys would provide additional information on Hispanic consumer behavior, which could be used to attract more advertising revenue from certain industries.¹²⁶

This mutually beneficial relationship between the Spanish-language media and the bureau had been overlooked during the 1970 census preparations largely because the Spanish-language broadcasting industry was nascent. At the time, the industry included only three full-time television stations and fewer than fifteen full-time Spanish-language radio stations. ¹²⁷Additionally, there were virtually no Spanish-language media marketing agencies or Spanish-language consumer data firms.¹²⁸ By 1980 Spanish-language media had spread across the Southwest and along the East Coast, and they now had sufficient capacity to broadcast mass advertising for the Census Bureau.

Race Analogies and the 1980 Hispanic Data

After several months of publicity, the 1980 census was launched and the data were compiled. The Census Bureau reported data on Hispanics mainly by comparing Spanish/Hispanic-origin respondents to two newly defined populations: non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks. Even though the “Hispanic” category was technically a pan-ethnic classification, the comparisons with whites and blacks made the idea of Hispanic pan-ethnicity seem race-like.

Promotion photos stressed how important it        was for families to fill out the Census form.

These racial analogies soon became a staple of most census reports. For example, a 1987 census report noted, “The educational attainment of Hispanic persons was considerably lower than that for persons of White or Black races.”¹²⁹ Another report, published in 1990, stated:

“The Hispanic share of the total population, and the share of all race groups except Whites, increased from July 1, 1980 to July 1, 1988. The proportion of Blacks grew from 11.8 percent in 1980 to 12.3 percent in 1988 . . . while the proportion [of] Hispanic[s] was 8.1 percent, up from 6.4 percent in 1980.”¹³⁰

In effect, by 1990 the Hispanic category had become institutionalized in all census surveys and was used in comparisons to highlight the characteristics of other racial groups in America.¹³¹

By interpreting the Hispanic data in comparison to racial data, the bureau made the notion of Hispanic pan-ethnicity seem commensurate with, although not equal to, race. Moreover, the racial analogy served as a categorical filter: by describing Hispanics through racial comparisons, the bureau insinuated that a person might be Hispanic if he or she was neither white nor black. This was never a written policy, and the bureau did explain that Hispanics could be of any race, but its reports and charts insinuated that Hispanics constituted a distinct group that was commensurate with whites and blacks.

To be clear, the bureau did at times break down statistics to show differences among some of the larger Latin American subgroups.¹³² These statistics were included only in special Hispanic population reports, however, not in the general reports issued by the bureau about, for example, housing, poverty, and education. In these broader national reports, the Hispanic data were simply presented as commensurate with racial data.¹³³

Conclusion

The bureau continued to work closely with Hispanic community leaders throughout the 1980s, using this connection to try to popularize the Hispanic category and to convince other government agencies to also collect Hispanic data. For example, in the mid-1980s the bureau worked closely with community leaders to gain leverage with vital statistics agencies across the country. Even in the 1980s, these agencies often still classified persons of Latin American descent as white on birth and death certificates, thus weakening the bureau’s ability to estimate a Hispanic undercount.¹³⁴

Officials in several states, especially those who believed that their state had a minuscule Latin American population, refused to implement a Hispanic category. Hispanic civic and media leaders helped the bureau by lobbying and meeting with these officials and imploring them to institute a separate Hispanic category. By 1992 all fifty states had instituted some kind of Hispanic category.

And by the time the 1990 census was administered, the Spanish/ Hispanic-origin question had become institutionalized in all census surveys. For the most part, the bureau no longer entertained the notion that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans were simply white, and self-identifying Hispanic leaders readily volunteered to serve on the SOAC. Some activist organizations even sent their members to the bureau’s statistical training workshops to learn how to better analyze Hispanic data.¹³⁵

Indeed, the emergence of the “Hispanic” census category between 1970 and 1990 was the product of ongoing negotiations among several sets of actors, each of whom had distinct interests and abided by distinct organizational logics. This history shows that the federal government is not necessarily an external force that simply imposes data categories on its population. It was through interactive relationships with others in the new field of Hispanic politics that the bureau came to construct new identity categories and to institute new forms of racial and ethnic classification.

G. Cristina Mora

G. Cristina Mora, originally from the Los Angeles area, earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2003. After living in Cuba for a bit, she took up graduate studies in Sociology at Princeton University, obtaining her PhD in 2009. Living back East exposed her to the diversity of Latinidad and inspired her to explore how broad and diverse the Hispanic/Latino category is. After a stint at the University of Chicago, she returned to the Bay Area, where she is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Professor Mora's research interests include the study of racial and ethnic categorization, Latino migration, and ethnic politics. Reprinted with permission from the University of Chicago Press, © 2014 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. To purchase the book, click:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo15345128.html.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo15345128.html.

Editor's Note: The U.S. Census Bureau recruited me in 1979 to conceive, plan and execute a promotional campaign to reach the people of Hispanic origin. I worked as a Census Promotion Specialist in the special unit set up to promote the 1980 Census. My contacts with the Spanish language media of that time afforded me entrée to decision makers who quickly recognized the importance of numbers for their companies and the Latino community. Before joining the Bureau, I had been working with SIN officials and community activists for some time to launch Channel 56 via a satellite feed to serve Spanish language viewers in D.C. Coincidentally, one of our goals was to have a "pan-ethnic" Board, to use Prof. Mora's term, and we had Chicano, Chilean, Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican members. The June 1980 gala to launch Channel 56 also served to highlight the diversity of the Latino community in D.C. I divested myself of ownership in Los Cerezos not long afterward.

Armando Rendón, Editor

A room of her own, in a prison

June 3, 2014, 10:06 pm

≫ Next: The Latino Legacy in World War II: Retelling like it was

≪ Previous: What’s in a name, especially if it’s “Hispanic”?

$

0

0

Extract from the novel, Strong Women Grow Here: author, Mona AlvaradoFrazier

Chapter 1

I didn’t run because I killed him. I ran because I didn’t. He was alive when I left, but that wasn’t important to the judge who sentenced me to San Bueno Correctional Facility. He was sure of two things: my husband Alek was dead and I was guilty.

Early morning fog surrounds the van as we drive out of the gates of Centre Juvenile Hall. The cold steel on my wrist vibrates against the car window attached to a steel ring. For many minutes, the only sound I hear comes from the clicking handcuffs on us three girls.

The officer driving the transportation van has large unblinking yellow-brown eyes like the iguanas near the river in my hometown of Santa Isabel, in Chihuahua, Mexico. His eyes watch me in the rear view mirror before they dart to the girl next to me, the one with the neck tattoo.

She looks like a boy with her cropped hair combed back, shiny with pomade. Large blue black letters on her neck spell WF 13, letters I’ve seen before on the walls of buildings from my seat on the L.A. city buses. My eyes travel up and down her neck, tracing the letters. This girl must be very tough to have her gang letters tattooed on her neck.

 “What’re you looking at paisa?” The girl twists her husky body to face me, chin up in the air. The deep scar above her eye rises with her thick eyebrow.

In Centre Juvenile Hall, a girl told me about gang bangers. “Stay away from them and keep your mouth shut.” When I turn to look out of my window the van swerves and throws me sideways. The handcuff yanks me back towards the window. Metal cuts into my wrist while my stomach leaps. My other hand flies to the neck of my jumpsuit, where my crucifix used to be, and travels to my mouth, where my fingers press against my lips. I swallow to stop the sour taste flooding my mouth.

The tattooed girl crowds against the other side of the seat. “No vomites.” She scrunches up her nose while her pale lips curl.

My free hand trembles so much that I slide it under my thigh while the tattooed girl bangs on the metal screen that separates us from the officers. She shouts something to the man in the front passenger seat, waving her hand in the air. He pushes a paper towel through the square opening in the partition. “Quiet down.”

A soft voice drifts from behind my seat. “Are you okay?”

It’s the girl we picked up from the last juvenile hall. Her eyes and skin are the color of piloncillo, the raw sugar cones my mother used to make Mexican chocolate. She seems older than most girls in juvenile hall, with her hair tight in a bun.

“She said she’ll make you wash her clothes for the next year if you throw up on her,” she says in Spanish. “Me llamo Belinda.”

“Me llamo Juana, I say as I press myself against my window, as far away as I can from the tattooed girl.

 Belinda closes her kind eyes. She doesn’t want to talk. I understand. She is trying to stay out of the way too.

“Hunh.” The girl with the tattoo lowers her eyebrows and pinches them together, giving Belinda a cold-blooded stare as if she could punch her if her free hand reached to the back seat.

If I don’t say something, the girl will think I’m frightened. I am, but I don’t want her to know that. Part of me wants to stay quiet. When I speak, people know I’m not from the United States since my English isn’t too good. Makes me scared that others might not treat me well or think I’m stupid. But better to think I’m ignorant than afraid.

“No worry, I no get sick. What is you name?”

Dark squinting eyes travel from my feet to my face, without blinking, like a cat waiting to pounce on a mouse. I have seen those stares during the three months I spent in juvenile hall. I stop breathing.

“Jester.” She spits out her name, keeps her eyes on me.

My smile comes out lopsided through the nausea I feel. I repeat her name, “Yestur.” The girl shakes her head, grins crookedly, showing one dimple and turns to her window. That’s okay, it’s probably better that I don’t make friends with a girl who has tattoos on her neck.

Outside, the mist lifts with the suns bright rays, showing agricultural fields. Long narrow dirt rows with tiny mounds of deep green leaves spin by in a brown arc like long legs running. We pass empty fruit stands boarded up for the winter. A small roadside blue sign says, “SBCF 2

 miles,” with an arrow pointing toward straw colored hills. I don’t know what city I am going to, but it is far from where I have come and further from my baby.

Through the screen on the van window, a large sign appears, “State of California, San Bueno Correctional Facility.” We drive up a small rise and down into a valley. In the clearing, gray concrete walls, two stories high, rise out of the surrounding earth and up towards low-lying clouds above it. Towering chain link fence surrounds red brick buildings. We pass a big parking lot filled with cars, then another gate with a sign, “Inmate Processing.” I recognize the words. My chest tightens around my ribs squeezing my heart, while my stomach churns.

We turn onto a narrow road, where the tires dip and bump, stirring up dirt. The uneven path reminds me of my first life, in Mexico, when I traveled on buses painted with sunflowers and vines with my mother and my sister Lupe. In my second life, I rode graffiti marked buses through Los Angeles with Alek, my husband and my baby Katrina. Now I am seventeen years old, driving into my third life, alone.

With each bouncing movement, my breakfast bubbles up in my throat until the spoiled milk and oatmeal pushes out, past my lips and splatters on the floorboard where it sprays the bottom of Jester’s pant leg.

“Fuck.” She pulls her leg up on the seat, her face in a wince, “stupid chuntara,” she yells before grabbing the limp paper towel from my hand. She swipes at her ankle, throwing the sheet on the floor and bangs on the screen in front of us shouting at the officer. The bitter smell rises like the fear in my face.

 “Ah, shit,” yells the driver while the other officer gives Jester a paper towel.

The van jerks to a stop in front of a soaring gate with crisscrossed patterns of steel gray. Silver coils like thin ropes of a lariata curl across the top of the fence, their sharp edges flash through the gloomy sky. I feel dizzy looking up and shut my eyes tight, praying to God to take me back to my first life.

The transportation van rolls into a narrow parking area where a lady stands with a clipboard. A wide headband holds back a mound of curly hair tied into a high ponytail. A thick belt loops around her purple blouse that drapes over black pants. Several keys dangle from a braided strap attached to her belt.

Officer Iguana Eyes slides open the door, reaches in with his big hands, and unlocks Jester’s handcuff before he pulls her out of the van.

“Watch it,” Jester yells.

She strolls across the driveway the way the gang bangers at the park walk, slow and unafraid. Sometimes I wish I could walk like that, but my legs wobble when I’m scared.

“What’s up Montes?” Jester says to the staff lady, who smirks.

The other officer unlocks my handcuff. Red splotchy marks surround my left wrist, like an ugly bracelet. My legs feel so weak that I don’t want to step out of the van. I may fall. Instead, I concentrate on breathing in the grassy scent from the apiofields around me to calm myself.

 For a brief moment, the familiar moist celery smell takes me back to my mother’s vegetable garden in Santa Isabel. It makes me miss her, but the scent brings me some comfort, steadies my legs. It may be years before I can return to my home town to see my baby and my family. I close my eyes tight, so no one can see the sadness in my eyes. I can’t draw attention to myself.

“That damn chuntara threw up.” Jester sticks her leg out towards Ms. Montes. “She’s lucky I didn’t give her a bump on the nose to match the one she already has.” I glance over to Belinda but she has her head down, staring at the asphalt.

“Shut up, Gonzales,” Ms. Montes says before she walks to Officer Iguana Eyes who hands her several papers.

Belinda doesn’t have to tell me what Jester said. I know the word “chuntara” means wetback. I can tell she’s angry, that’s all I need to know.

“Ivanov?”

I don’t raise my hand; the others might see it shake. I step forward.

“What are you, a soldier in the army?” Jester salutes Ms. Montes, exaggerating her movements, “Ivanov, present, sir.”

“Gonzales, go get some supplies.” She points to the building next to us.

Jester’s shadowy eyes glare at me before she walks into the building.

 “I was expecting a tall Russian girl, not a tiny Mejicana,” Ms. Montes says and marks the paper.

Jester returns with a bucket of soapy water and shoves a rag into my hand.

“Gracias.” My cheeks burn with embarrassment; she will probably tell everyone what I did. I bite my lip and get into the van.

After I finish cleaning the smelly mess, Iguana Eyes gives me my cardboard property box and wags his long finger toward Ms. Montes. She unlocks a thick door, pulling at it with two hands. I follow Jester and Belinda inside.

A dim light struggles to brighten the hallway, flickering off and on. It’s cold, with smells of pine cleaner and a sour mop. The only sound I hear is our footsteps and the clacking of Ms. Montes’ keys against her full hip. It seems as if we’re going through a tunnel, a tunnel into my third life.

She opens a second door, where we walk through to a sunnier and noisier building, stopping in the middle of a hallway where orange doors line both sides. We walk towards the middle of the hall before Ms. Montes lifts her hand in a stop sign.

“Your room,” she tells Belinda, who glances at me before she steps inside. Belinda’s chocolate eyes look as miserable as I feel.

We move to another door. Jester taps her foot on the floor as if she is eager to go inside the room. When Ms. Montes unlocks the door, Jester asks, “Who was in this cell before me?”

 Ms. Montes points toward the door, ignoring her question. We move to the cell next to Jester. When the door opens, cold air whooshes out of the room, hitting me in the face.

“Your room.”

The door lock clunks shut while I stand at the entrance to the cell. Everything looks mud colored, from the beige ceiling to the brown concrete floor. Brick walls cover all sides. A mattress sits on a steel bed frame within inches of the dingy toilet with a square wood lid. A rusty metal locker stands at the foot of the bed.

The room is so small I think my husband Alek, who was six feet tall, could lie crossways on the floor with his head against the bottom of the bed, and his toes would touch the other wall.

My feet stick to the cold floor while my heart sinks. This is where I’ll be for the next six years while my baby girl grows up without me.

Mona AlvaradoFrazier began writing in 2008 after a 28-year career in the California Department of Corrections. She has now penned three novels, which feature Latina protagonists in urban multicultural settings dealing with incarceration, love, loss, family, hope and friendship. In 2013, Mona was awarded a writing fellowship to A Room of Her Own (AROHO) writers’ retreat in New Mexico. In April 2014, the working draft of Strong Women Grow Here was chosen a quarterfinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. A resident of Oxnard, California, she can be reached via her blog: http://alvaradofrazier.com/.

The Latino Legacy in World War II: Retelling like it was

June 5, 2014, 6:32 pm

≫ Next: Writing about all the things we should write about

≪ Previous: A room of her own, in a prison

$

0

0

Excerpt from Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology: co-editors, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B. V. Olguín

Introduction:Mapping Latina/o Mobility, Agency, and Ideology in the World War II

In the academy it is often said that all research is a reflection of the scholar’s own values, concerns, and obsessions. This certainly is true for this anthology, as most of the writers have a personal link to the topic: they are the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, or grandchildren of Latina/o World War II–era military veterans and defense department workers. Yet beyond this shared legacy, the origination and inspiration for the essays in this book are as varied as the individual writers, whose case studies come from the family stories passed on through generations, boxes of family photos, and archived newspapers, as well as ongoing research projects for graduate school and monographs.

One of those starting points was the 2002 weeklong workshop in Austin, Texas, where the U.S. Latina & Latino World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin brought together scholars from across the country. The goal of the workshop was to provide a foundation for research into Latina/os and World War II, as well as to stimulate scholarly use of the primary source materials that have been gathered by the oral history project since its foundation in 1999. A palpable excitement pervaded the fifth floor conference room on the University of Texas at Austin campus where we met daily for a week. The presenters, all experts on World War II–related matters, recognized the tremendous potential of investigating the Latina/o experience during World War II. They also knew that the interviews being recorded by the U.S. Latina & Latino World War II Oral History Project would provide the primary source material for future research projects. Presenters were assigned topics such as California and World War II or Latinas in World War II. Some of the presenters—Richard Griswold del Castillo, Dionicio Valdés, Joanne Rao Sánchez, Emilio Zamora, Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, Rea Ann Trotter, and Ricardo Ainslie—had written chapters for a previous book,Beyond the Latino World War II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation. Others—Naomi Quiñonez and Erasmo Gamboa—had contributed to the project’s first book,Mexican Americans and World War II, which got its start from the inaugural two-day conference in Austin in 2000. Two of this anthology’s writers, both senior scholars, Félix Gutiérrez and Gary Mormino, also took part in that workshop. The complicated process of meditation and dialogue among intersecting networks of interlocutors illustrates the long-term conceptualization and planning required to bring to fruition a project such as this one. We thank all of those 2002 workshop presenters for their help in shaping this book.

Latina/os, World War II, and Beyond: The Past, Present, and Future of the Voces Oral History Project

This book marks another accomplishment: the evolution of the oral history work that is based on U.S. Latinas and Latinos. When the project was inaugurated in 1999, it focused exclusively on the World War II period, and we immediately were asked when we would include the Vietnam War. From the start, we conducted several Korean War-era interviews; there was a remarkable overlap between World War II and the Korean War since many interview subjects were veterans of both wars. The Vietnam War would require a major refocus that required resources beyond our means at that time. But in 2009 a major grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services allowed us to expand the scope. As we finish this book, we are thinking ahead to similar research into Latina/os in the Korean and Vietnam War eras. With our expanded scope, the project has changed its name to the Voces Oral History Project (vocesoralhistoryproject.org). For consistency, in this book, all interviews from our collection, including those before the name change, are listed under the project’s new name.

Since its start in 1999 the project’s mission has been to create greater awareness of Latina/o participation during wartime, in the military as well as on the homefront. In addition to the nearly one thousand interviews it has recorded across the country (and which are housed at the University of Texas’s renowned Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection), it has digitized over six thousand photographs at high resolution, dating from the early 1900s to the present. But it is not enough to collect the archival material. In order to promote the archive’s use, the Voces Oral History Project has held symposia and conferences for both academic audiences and the general public, including one in Washington, DC, in 2004, and another in Tempe, Arizona, in 2006. It also has mounted photo exhibits; created educational materials; helped produce an original two-act play,Voices of Valor, written by Phoenix-based playwright James E. Garcia; and sponsored a video editing contest using World War II–era interviews with Latina/os as the basis. Its representatives have served on academic panels, have made speeches, and have engaged in numerous other related activities. This initiative has been the subject of stories that have appeared in local, national, and international newspapers, magazines, radio, and television newscasts, in addition to the web. It has become a resource that book publishers, journalists, and documentarians seek out for material to support their own work. In addition, when various entities are looking for World War II-, Korean-, or Vietnam-era participants for panel discussions, commemorations, or observances, we are often consulted. We are very happy to oblige.

In 2007 we were thrust into the spotlight. In late 2006 we learned that in nine months PBS documentarian Ken Burns was scheduled to present a fourteen-and-a-half-hour documentary on World War II that included no Latina/os. We responded by sending dozens of emails to supporters across the country, beseeching them to help address what to us was a deplorable example of the deliberate effacement of Latina/os in the epochal moments of this nation’s history. That effort became a national, grassroots campaign, Defend the Honor (see DefendtheHonor.org), that sent out weekly updates and staged pickets in various cities, as well as a teach-in in Austin. Burns eventually recorded additional interviews with two Latino World War II veterans and one Native American veteran and inserted them at the end of three of the seven parts of his series. But that addition is not included in the boxed set available for sale, nor was the additional footage shown in all markets. And in the accompanying coffee table book, there are no Latina/o voices. Burns’s and PBS’s omission resonated with Latina/os for a simple reason: we all had parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and spouses who served in World War II, with little public recognition. Many never returned from battle. It was a sore spot for us that we had repeatedly been left out, and this time with public funds—our taxpayer dollars—so we demanded our due recognition.

But the Burns issue was larger than World War II or Burns, PBS, or television. It was emblematic of the continuing omission of Latina/os in the U.S.’s broader historical narrative. This is the reason that our oral history project came into being and continues to expand. This is not to say that we will be afraid to address some of the contradictions, problems, and tensions among the Latina/o population. Our aim is to present an honest and full understanding of our complex role in U.S. history.

Recovering the Multiethnic and Multiracial Latina/o Experiences during World War II

This anthology addresses several topics that either have not been addressed or have not been addressed in depth in extant scholarship on Latina/os and World War II. They all, in one way or another, examine how the war affected Latina and Latino geographic and social mobility and agency or the ability to make changes in their own lives. We also address the broader issue of ideology, that is, the range of personal and political beliefs that are found among U.S. Latinas and Latinos. Indeed, the book’s contributors illustrate a healthy diversity of opinions, methods, disciplines, and analyses that will add to the ongoing debates about Latina/os and World War II. The book pays particular attention to Latina/os of different ethnicities and different races. Demographer Karl Eschbach and coeditor and journalist Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez have teamed up to explore the complexities of trying to determine the extent of U.S. Latina/o participation in World War II. In addition to recovering the most accurate estimate of Latino participation in World War II to date, Eschbach provides an innovative and groundbreaking methodology for extrapolating the numbers of Latina/os who served in the U.S. military during the war. His overview of the demographic profile of Latina/os in the war also extends to the present and provides new strategies for uncovering the effacement of Latina/os by institutions of power, specifically, various government agencies. Eschbach relied on census figures, weighing them to provide a measure of Latina military participation. Rivas-Rodriguez offers the human side of the equation, as discharged servicemen were labeled “White” in some cases, “N/A” in others, and “Mexican” in still others. As one West Texas World War II veteran put it, “When the war started I became a white man.”4 For him, segregation targeting Mexican Americans took a backseat to the U.S. need for front-line soldiers. Rivas-Rodriguez recovers important testimonial evidence in the Voces archive that dramatically illustrates the inconsistent, contradictory, and often baffling use of racial classifications for Mexican American soldiers.

Historian Gary Mormino introduces the book with a discussion of Ybor City’s self-identified “Latin” communities, which included Spaniards, Cubans, and Italians. Mormino, who has conducted and published foundational research on Ybor City, examines the support system and interactions between the three ethnic and racial groups, and he also writes about various generations of Spanish Americans who are integral to this unique community even though they are often excluded from Latina/o research.

The history of Spanish and U.S. colonization figures prominently in other chapters, particularly that of Jordan Beltrán Gonzalez, who writes about the Filipino and Mexican American experiences in the Bataan Death March. Ironically, even in the Philippines, New Mexicans, who claim “Hispano” heritage, are mistaken for Mexicans—a confusion that continues to this day. The intersecting Spanish and U.S. colonial legacies in the Philippines and Caribbean cast a long shadow that informs additional research by other scholars. Journalism professor Félix Gutiérrez examines the World War II era, Los Angeles-based Mexican American newspaper and magazine, theMexican Voice. He notes that readers were exhorted to claim their “Mexicanness” rather than try to pass as “Spanish” or Latin. The deliberate—and given the context of segregation, defiant—use of the wordMexicansignifies a larger transformation of the men and women journalists who contributed to this youth publication. It reflected their refusal to efface their ethnic and racial identity even as they insisted on their claim to civil rights. This small yet profound media intervention presages the more comprehensive interventions that ensued after the war.

The issue of Latina/o ethnic and racial difference, and identity in general, is woven throughout the Voces Oral History Project archive, and this anthology includes several intersecting chapters on the compelling story of Cuban American Evelio Grillo, a World War II veteran whose African roots led to his identification with, and embrace by, African American soldiers. He is renowned for requesting a transfer out of a white army unit in favor of a black one, which scholars Frank Guridy, Gary Mormino, and Luís Alvarez explore further in their respective chapters. Guridy analyzes the complex ethnic, racial, and ideological negotiations of Afro-Latino World War II soldiers, some of whom embraced the mobility that military service enabled and another who likened service in the segregated U.S. Army of World War II to slavery.

Significantly, historian Luís Alvarez observes how many Latina/o World War II veterans engaged in a multiplicity of identifications in the United States and abroad, including Americans of different races and ethnicities, Muslim Moroccans, as well as various European and Asian nationalities. These negotiations, which were occasioned by their military service, anticipated what later generations of scholars have identified as transnational subjectivity. Alvarez’s research underscores that the Voces Oral History Project archive provides evidence that these transnational models of Latinidad were already well under way before subsequent generations embraced and began theorizing transnationalism as an operative term in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and general American Studies. B. V. Olguín uses the Voces archive and other materials to complicate the ideological dimensions of Latino World War II transnationalism in his case studies of Latino-Japanese and Latino-white cross-cultural exchanges. The Voces Oral History Project archive, that is, reveals its potential to transform the field of Latina/o Studies.

Gerald Poyo extends the transnational dimensions of Latina/o mobility during the World War II era with an intimate family portrait of his father’s and uncle’s migration from Cuba to the United States and throughout Latin America before, during, and after the war. His account adds new insights into the social and economic spheres of Latina/o immigrants in this era outside of the usual focus on Mexican braceros or economic refugees from various Latin American and Caribbean countries. He thereby inaugurates a new avenue for mapping the class mobility of Latina/os in this era.

Painful Reflections: Dis-Covering Old Wounds and Introducing New Critiques of Latina/os in World War II

Having collected a large archive of interviews with Latina/o military veterans and civilians from World War II and most recently from the Korean and Vietnam War eras, the present challenge of the Voces Oral History Project is to continue collecting key interviews about unique experiences but also to continue theorizing this growing archive. This is both an exciting and a sobering venture. While new and productive discoveries have been made regarding Afro-Latina/o heritage, complex shifting transracial alliances, and even more convoluted transnational and supranational identities, other issues have emerged that require scholarly maturity, honesty, and bravery.

Much of the work related to the Voces Oral History Project has dutifully, and masterfully, recovered, honored, and contextualized World War II era Latina/o agency, and this anthology continues to participate in this important intervention. The jointly authored study by Angélica Aguilar Rodríguez, Julian Vasquez, and Allison Prochnow, for instance, features three new discoveries of Latina/o World War II soldier/scholars, with particular attention to the role of the GI Bill in promoting educational attainment for Latino veterans and their families.

Marianne Bueno brings new insights in her historiography of Carlos Castañeda’s complex negotiations of ideology and institutional politics in his role as head of the Fair Employment Practice Committee during World War II. Her study involves the use of new archival materials, in addition to contrapuntal arguments that help us complicate reductive assessments of the Latina/o World War II generation as assimilationist and accommodationist. Instead, Bueno maps Castañeda’s strategic negotiations of identity, institutional power, and ideology as part of a civil rights agenda that preceded the postwar generation, which is often credited as the instigator of Latina/o civil rights struggles.

Sexism is an issue that continues to be effaced despite its persistence, and this anthology deliberately seeks to expose the depths of this issue and especially Latina agency in challenging it during the World War II era. It is important to note that sexism during the period also involves Latino veterans, who were discriminated against for their ethnicity and race but were also party to gender discrimination. Patricia Portales demonstrates the complexity of working on this topic using an archive that involves family members. Her nimble weaving of thetestimonioshe collected from her aunt—a defense industry welder of bomb parts—with contemporary theatrical explorations of gender relations among Latina/os during the World War II era both honors the people whose voices make up the archive and illustrates the responsibilities of intellectuals to appraise and critique the archival materials. Significantly, she reads the archive’s utterances and silences, as well as theater’s immediacy and subtlety, to make new discoveries and analyses that sometimes extend beyond what is immediately apparent or intended by the interviewees or authors. In an illustration of the surprises that research sometimes present, Portales’s interview with her aunt actually began with questions about her uncle’s service in the war. But on hearing her aunt’s story about working as a welder in the Friedrich bomb factory in San Antonio, Texas, and Portales’s closer examination of her aunt’s scarred skin resulting from welding torch sparks, her research took an immediate turn toward recovering the story of Latinas in World War II, which has been even more effaced than male Latino service in the era.

Jordan Beltrán Gonzales introduces a similarly complex relationship to the archive and models a brave participant-observer methodology that is both respectful—after all, his Filipino grandfather was a survivor of the Bataan Death March—and critical. Beltrán Gonzales brings a scholarly responsibility in his critical interrogations of the macabre commodification of Latino soldiering through his discussion of the Bataan Death March Commemoration events in New Mexico. Moreover, he explores the even more controversial issue of ideology in the complex roles that Latino and Filipino soldiers have played both as subjects and as agents of U.S. empire. It is difficult to consider the issue of Latina/o and Filipina/o colonization, but these are historical facts: the United States invaded and colonized the Philippines and the U.S. Southwest in brutal and illegal imperialist wars of expansion. The subsequent inclusion of Latina/os in the United States is—still incomplete as well as unacknowledged—is forever undergirded by these interrelated historical crimes.

War, in fact, often involves crimes, and even if combat and killing are contextualized in the laws of warfare, other disturbing issues emerge that the scholar and reader are compelled to consider. B. V. Olguín, coeditor of this anthology and also the grandson, nephew, and cousin of World War II veterans—including Victor Montez Ledesma from the Chalmers Courts Housing Projects in east Austin, who was killed in combat in the Normandy invasion—ventures into the painful area of Latino death and dying, as well as combat and killing, in war. This is the elephant in the room that community members and scholars sometimes cannot see, or choose not to see, but which combat veterans and family members of soldiers killed in combat can never forget. It is even more difficult to process when we consider that some veterans have represented their military service and combat activities in ways that raise serious ethical and legal issues. In his treatment of Guy Gabaldon’s memoir of combat in Saipan and in a theatrical treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in a Latino World War II veteran, Olguín allows the record and texts to speak for themselves, however painful and disturbing they may be. Many topics and taboos emerge in his subsequent attempts to theorize the significance of these texts, from the issue of war crimes and Latino racial bigotries and fetishes to different performances of gender and sexuality. The Voces Oral History Project would do a disservice to the legacy of Latina/os in World War II and other U.S. wars if it did not address the many different roles that Latina/os have played in these conflicts, from combatants to conscientious objectors, as well as everything between and beyond.

Pete Haney complicates conventional accounts of Latino World War II soldiering, and especially over-celebratory discourses on “bravery,” in his archival work on the Latina/o carpa and popular theater tradition in San Antonio. His research adds to the understanding of Latina/o agency during World War II by introducing the many ways Latina/os symbolically critiqued as well as participated in the wartime patriotic fervor. His recovery of the rich tapestry of Latina/o popular theater during and after this era is significant for the case study of this city’s Latina/o community responses to the war, as well as for his extended explication of the role ofcarpaperformances in parodying discourses on Latino hypermasculinity. Equally important, he reminds the audience of the real cost of war through references to blood and other body fluids.

This anthology thus seeks to continue recovering and featuring new stories, adding complexity to known figures, and raising difficult questions about the overall nature of the Latina/o experience in the United States. It is important to recognize that this stage of the project has introduced the phenomenon of metacritical inquiry and dialogue, in which scholars use the same or similar archives and texts to debate and theorize the potential significance in a variety of ways. However contentious and controversial this may sometimes be, this metacriticism signals the maturity of the Voces Oral History Project and Latina/o military studies in general. This metacritical inquiry is interdisciplinary and involves scholars from education, history, literature, journalism, demography, anthropology, and numerous intersecting, as well as diverging, methodologies. This involves different modes of discourse and vocabulary and concepts that do not translate easily across disciplines or to the general public. The Voces Oral History Project, after all, prides itself on successfully bridging the “town and gown” divide with publications and activities that fully integrate laypeople and veterans from the community with university students and scholars in a broad-based dialogue of discovery. While we have endeavored to keep the writing in the chapters accessible to a general audience, we recognize that the authors’ use of discipline-specific theoretical tools is appropriate and has an important function. Sometimes a hammer is the right tool for the job; other times a scalpel is required.

The metacritical nature of these chapters, and the scholarly attempt to both recover legacies while challenging conveniently celebratory accounts, undoubtedly will be controversial. This is what scholars in Latina/o Studies, as well as intersecting fields and research projects, are charged with doing. We must recover and reassess, continually, honestly, and courageously. The veterans interviewed in the Voces Oral History Project deserve this; the ones who were killed in combat, or died before the project was inaugurated have earned it; and all their loved ones demand it.

A Note on Volume Design and the Enduring Legacy

We have organized this volume in two parts, one that explores ideological mobility and one that demonstrates cultural agency. The preface by Karl Eschbach and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez has presented the broad context for our exploration of the scope of Latina/o participation in World War II. The book also is framed by a coda by Gerald Poyo, who adds yet another newly recovered story about Latina/os and the World War II era, which he presents in an innovative first-persontestimonioformat about his own family. While we have endeavored to bring uniformity to the overall project, we also respect the unique disciplinary conventions and individual scholar’s choice of nomenclature. At the same time, several copyediting decisions were made regarding capitalization, accents, and italics that provide stylistic uniformity. For instance, we generally followed standard editorial practices for capitalization, which means that nouns such aspachucaandpachucoare lowercased. Regarding accents, we respected individuals’ decisions to use or to omit accents in their own names; the reader will therefore find inconsistent use of accents. We use “Latina/o” as the norm except in cases in which interviews, citations, or unique context determined the use of alternate terms.

Each contributor demonstrates and extends the legacy of Latina/os during World War II and the Voces Oral History Project in general: with each layer of documents, narratives, and cultural production that we pull back, ever new and more complex discoveries emerge. Indeed, this anthology seeks to challenge conventional understanding about Latina/os and the war and invites further theorizing about Latina/os in other wartime eras, from the nineteenth century to the present. We know from the small but growing amount of scholarship on Latina/os and war that Latina/os have participated in every one of this nation’s wars, from the Indian Wars, American Revolution, U.S.-Mexico War, U.S. Civil War, and Spanish American War to World Wars I and II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as more recent ones, from the Bay of Pigs to counterinsurgency operations in Latin America to the Gulf War to the ongoing “war on terror.” Significantly, Latina/os have participated in these wars in a variety of roles, from U.S. allies to U.S. enemies, as well as everything between and beyond. The research on Latina/o mobility, agency, and ideology that undergirds the essays in this volume promises to open new avenues for research on the broader legacy of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship.

Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez

Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, an Associate Professor of Journalism at the UT Austin, is founder and director of the U.S. Latino/Latina World War II Oral History Project (now Voces Oral History Project). Her prior work includes,Beyond the Latino WWII Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation.

B. V. Olguín

B. V. Olguínis an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. A poet, translator, and literary critic, he is the author ofLa Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture, and Politics.

Writing about all the things we should write about

June 21, 2014, 12:08 am

≫ Next: Here’s what really happened: A Revisionist History of the Spanish Influence in the U.S.

≪ Previous: The Latino Legacy in World War II: Retelling like it was

$

0

0

Extract from Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews: author, Daniel A. Olivas

A Pocho in West Hills

First published in The Raven Chronicles (2005)

Uno: Cada uno extiende la pierna hasta donde alcanza la cubierta.

One: Each person stretches his leg as far as the cover will allow.

I’m writing this longhand because Ben, our eleven-year-old son, has yet again commandeered our sole computer to tap out a book report on Flowers for Algernon (1966) by Daniel Keyes. I admit that I’ve never read the book. He’s just finished reading my wife’s battered copy that she read over 30 years ago when she was about Ben’s age. But I do remember seeing the movie on TV long ago, maybe when I, too, was a pre-teen. Cliff Robertson plays Charlie Gordon, the man with the mind of a young boy, who through the marvels of modern medicine, becomes a certified genius, as Wile E. Coyote is want to say as he impresses himself with his brilliant plans based on the Acme Co.’s Rube Goldberg-like, Roadrunner-catching contraptions. At the height of his mental powers (I mean Charlie’s, not Wile E.’s), he both delights and confounds the medical researchers by doing everything from blithely explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity to effortlessly learning dozens of living and dead languages. I’m sitting at our breakfast table, rain clouds threatening to soak the surrounding hills this Saturday afternoon, Bobby McFerrin’s malleable, playful voice bouncing on public radio, my 43rd birthday looming but two days away, and it is the fictional Charlie’s astonishing language skills that command my attention.

Dos: Las cosas hablando se entienden.

Two: Things become clear through communication.

My wife’s yellowed, dog-eared high school Spanish dictionary merely defines “pocho” as a Mexican born in the United States. My equally decrepit Cassell’s makes no mention of Mexicans or this country. Its entry is a bit more disturbing, actually. To Cassell’s, the word signifies something that is discolored or rotten. Rotten. Not a nice definition. Notably, my spanking new, gift-from-my-beautiful-and-brilliant wife, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary(yes, that is the title of this two volume version of the stout, and unwieldy, OED) pulls together both definitions rather nicely and adds that a pocho is a “culturally Americanized Mexican.” Cheers!

Tres: El que mucho habla, poco logra.

Three: He who talks much accomplishes little.

Rotten: moth-eaten, worm-eaten; mildewed, rusty, moldy, spotted, seedy, time-worn, moss-grown; discolored; effete, wasted, crumbling, moldering, cankered, blighted, tainted; depraved, decrepit; broke, busted, broken, out of commission, hors de combat, out of action, broken down; done, done for, done up; worn out, used up, finished; beyond saving, fit for the dust hole, fit for the wastepaper basket, past work. ¡Gracias,Roget’s!

Cuatro: Cada chango a su mecate.

Four: Each monkey to his own rope or each person to his position in life.

Ah! Ben has vacated the computer room and now my fingers dance happily across the keyboard as Susana Baca croons “De los amores” from my Labtec speakers. Where was I? Oh, yes. Pocho. When I started writing short stories a few years ago, I wrote a piece that was more a string of memories about my childhood. My story reads in pertinent part:

When I was born, Mom and Pop decided that they would raise me in both English and Spanish with an emphasis on English.

“Without good English, he’ll never get anywhere in this world,” I remember Pop saying on many occasions and I know that Mom fully agreed. So, they decided that Pop would speak only Spanish and Mom only English. At first, I favored English because I was very close to Mom as are most young boys. I know this now that I have a son. But I eventually spoke more and more Spanish particularly because Pop and I often went out together—”Just the boys,” said Mom—to play ball in the street outside our home or to go to the park. When I turned three, however, I stopped speaking completely. No English. No Spanish. Mom and Pop panicked. Had they done something wrong? Did they ruin my future?

They took me to be tested. I remember going to some kind of hospital with long cold hallways. My parents met a nice, tall man who wore a white doctor’s coat and who asked them many questions. Tall bookshelves groaned under the weight of large, broad-spined medical books while dozens of stuffed animals sat helter-skelter in one, soft pile on a large, blue plastic toy box in the corner. I ran to the toys and grabbed armfuls of the plush creatures. Every so often, I would look up and catch the doctor looking at me as he explained something to my parents. The doctor was very thin with blonde hair and pale skin that made his black-rimmed glasses the most prominent feature on his face. His smiled gently. I remember wondering what was going to happen to me.

After Mom and Pop finished answering all of the doctor’s questions, the doctor led me into a small room that had a large mirror covering one wall. At the far end stood a gray table with many little colorful toys scattered on its surface. Two chairs sat side-by-side on one side of the table. Mom was nervous about the whole process so she sat alone in the waiting room and Pop came in with me. The door closed and I sat on my hands so that I wouldn’t be tempted to play with the wonderful toys that lay before me. I knew my manners even though I wasn’t speaking. I then stared at the mirror and could see moving shadows behind it. Who lived back there? I thought. I figured that I should be friendly so I waved to the mirror. The shadows stopped moving. Suddenly, a sharp, metallic voice cracked the silence. My eyes jumped to a little box that hung sadly from one corner of the high ceiling.

“Hello, Joe,” the voice said. It sounded like the nice doctor.

“Say ‘hello,’ Joe,” said Pop.

I didn’t answer but I smiled up at the talking box.

“We’re going to ask you to do a few things with those toys. Does that sound fun, Joe?”

It sounded great to me. I grinned.

“Okay,” said the voice, “Pick up the red chair and put it on the blue car.”

I remember looking at the toys in front of me. What a stupid thing to ask, I thought. This is not fun. But I kept on grinning and followed the voice’s directions hoping that things would improve.

“Now,” continued the voice. “Put the green cowboy on the white horse.” And I did it.

This “game” went on for about twenty minutes and I never made a mistake but I grew very bored. Pop rubbed my back when the voice finally said: “Okay, Joe, we’re done playing with the toys. You did great.”

Playing? I thought. Is this how white people play? How boring! The door creaked opened and the doctor led us to another room for another “game” this time with a woman who held a little stop watch and timed me as I did various tasks with pegs and blocks. The doctor came in the room every so often and looked at the woman’s notes. Another hour passed and I think that I did very well but I was not having very much fun.

After a few more tests, the doctor came back and asked me and my parents to wait in a room down the hall. We sat in there for what seemed like hours. I looked at my parents. Pop nervously flipped through pages of a Lifemagazine and Mom stared straight ahead at nothing in particular. What was wrong? I thought. I don’t like this place. Finally, the doctor came to the waiting room. He was smiling.

“Well, he’s intelligent and his hearing is fine.”

Mom and Pop let out a sigh at the same time.

“We have a recommendation, however. He’s clearly getting confused between Spanish and English and his brain just sort of decided to shut down in terms of speaking.” The doctor rubbed his eyes without removing his glasses by sliding his thumb and index finger under the rims. He looked tired.

He continued: “We recommend that you stop speaking Spanish to him. He’ll eventually start talking again.”

Pop’s eyes grew wide. “Must we?” he asked hoping for a different remedy.

“That’s our recommendation.”

And so, they followed the kind doctor’s prescription for my muteness and cut all Spanish in the house. Eventually, after a year, I started speaking again, in English, and my parents’ fears disappeared. In fact, Pop started calling me “motor mouth” because I talked incessantly probably to make up for lost time. I was going to do just fine in the Anglo world...

That’s the beauty of fictionalizing one’s life. I can insert dialogue that I surely can’t remember, and I can offer unerring, lucid descriptions of the people, places and things, as well. But you get the point. Pocho. That’s how that word became part of me.

Cinco: La vida no retoña.

Five: We have but one life to live.

I am the grandson of Mexican immigrants who settled in Los Angeles over 80 years ago. All of my grandparents are now gone but I only knew one, Isabel, my mother’s mother. The others had died young: both grandfathers at 50 and my father’s mother at 35. Isabel (after whom my own mother is named) was our strongest link to Mexico. She came from Ocotlán, Jalisco, where many of her family members still live, doing quite well with money made from ranching and then, on top of that, interstate trucking. Isabel’s husband, Daniel, died a month or so before I was born. I took his name and, for that reason, I believe I had a special bond with my grandmother. Indeed, I wrote my first poem as an adult in her honor. I saw an ad in Poets & Writers magazine seeking poetry submissions by Latinos honoring mothers and grandmothers. The poem tumbled out of me and I submitted it to Lee & Low Books. Pat Mora, as guest editor for this project, accepted my work many months later. It appeared as one of thirteen pieces in a children’s picture book, Love to Mamá: A Tribute to Mothers (2001). The poem, entitled “Hidden in Abuelita’s Soft Arms,” reads:

Wrinkled and brown like an old paper bag,

Abuelita smiles with her too-perfect white teeth,

And she calls out as I run from Papa’s old, gray station wagon,

“Mi cielo, come here! I need a big abrazo from you!”

And I bury myself deep, hidden in Abuelita’s soft arms,

Smelling like perfume and frijoles and coffee and candy.

A whole weekend with Abuelita!

I shout, “Bye, Papa!”

Papa smiles and drives off in a puff of white smoke.

I bury my face deeper into her,

Just me and Abuelita,

For the whole weekend.

We march happily into her house

Painted yellow-white like a forgotten Easter egg,

And cracked here and there like that same egg.

But it is her home,

Near the freeway and St. Agnes Church.

On the wall there are pictures of Mama and my two aunts.

And there’s one of Abuelita, so young and beautiful,

Standing close to Abuelito on their wedding day.

“Mi cielo,” Abuelita says holding my sweaty cheeks in her

Cool, smooth hands.

“You are so big! My big boy!”

And I laugh and stand on my toes to be even bigger.

And I bury myself deep, hidden in Abuelita’s soft arms,

Smelling like perfume and frijoles and coffee and candy.

I wonder what my grandmother would have thought of my writing. I suppose it really doesn’t matter. I enjoyed her so much while she was here. And now I can bring her to others in my poems and stories.

Seis: Las cosas hablando se entienden (otra vez).

Six: Things become clear through communication (again).

I try my best to use Spanish in my fiction and poetry despite my struggles with the language. I’ve collected wonderful Spanish reference books that help me in this endeavor. Why do I bother? Well, perhaps I’m ceaselessly attempting to make up for my deficiency, my status as a pocho. That’s the psychology of it, I suppose. Artistically, I populate my stories and poems with people I knew while growing up the working-class, Mexican community sandwiched between Koreatown to the north, and Pico-Union to the east a few miles from downtown Los Angeles. They used a blended Spanish—Spanglish or pochismos—in their everyday speech. Thus, if I am to paint a true world in my writing, I have to make my characters speak like real people. At first I hesitated doing so. As a litigator, the only foreign language that ever seeped into my writing included such terms as respondeat superior, res judicata, inter alia, and other Latin terms. What would non-Chicanos think of my stories if I peppered them with another tongue? My answer came in the form of an e-mail one day a few years ago. I had finished a short story and posted it on the Zoetrope writers’ workshop Web page. A non-Latino writer offered some very kind words for my story but had one major criticism: I didn’t use enough Spanish. Apparently, she liked my use of the language in the early part of the story, but she noticed that it seemed to taper off as the story progressed. She wanted more! She thought it added a wonderful flavor to the dialogue. As far as I was concerned, this ended my internal debate. Spanish belonged in my writing. Period.

Siete: Hijo de tigre, tigrillo.

Seven: Son of a tiger, baby tiger.

One drab winter day, my son and I walked through the Topanga Plaza towards the food court chatting about his friends, homework and other such things. Suddenly, a person called to us. We looked up and saw a young woman standing by a kiosk equipped with two computer screens. She asked if we wanted to partake in a consumer survey and win a free gift. My son, who is a sucker for free gifts of any value, said, “Sure!” She directed Ben to read the questions displayed on one of the computers and choose whatever answers he wanted by touching the correct spot on the screen. So, he diligently went through questions about soft drinks, tennis shoes, clothing, fast food, etc. When he came to the final screen, he had to identify himself by age, gender and ethnicity. With respect to the last category, the choices included White, Asian, Black, Native American, Hispanic and “other.” He paused for a moment and thought. I thought, too. My wife is of Russian-Jewish descent and I converted to Judaism in 1988. Our son is a beautiful blend of both of us and is very proud of his mixed heritage. But what would he choose? Eventually, he smiled and whispered, “Hispanic” as he made his choice. The young woman returned the smile and offered him a choice of little prizes. Ben chose a padded CD case. We said our thanks and continued our trek to the food court.

“Isn’t this cool, Papa?” he asked as he held up the black and silver CD case.

I smiled. “Yes,” I said without looking at the prize. “Yes, mijo. This is cool.”

Ocho: El que la sigue la consige.

Eight: He who pursues it will get it.

One week has passed since I started writing this piece. The weather has turned hot—San Fernando Valley hot—and Ben swims in our pool as I read his teacher’s comments on the Flowers for Algernon book report. Grade: A. The teacher’s red ink spill out praise for Ben’s understanding of the book and use of language to describe his thoughts. The last page of the report is a mock letter Ben wrote to the author. The final sentence reads: “Thank you, Daniel Keyes, for inspiring me, and hopefully inspiring many others, because the more people treat others with respect and kindness, the better this world will become.” A beautiful sentence. A beautiful sentiment. ¿No?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Writers Write. Period.

First published in La Bloga (2006)

When I hear would-be authors proclaim that they could write the Great American Novel if only they had time, I simply want to laugh. It reminds me of the story (perhaps apocryphal) about a dentist who blithely informed Isabel Allende that he planned to become a novelist when he retired. She quipped: “Oh really? And when I retire I’ll become an oral surgeon!”

What I’m about to say will sound like tough love or even cruel, but here goes: A writer finds time to write regardless of hectic schedules, energetic children, and needy lovers. No excuses.

Rather than leave it at that, let me describe how I’ve written five books (four published, one making the rounds awaiting judgment), edited a 115,000-word anthology of short fiction set for publication next year, in addition to posting each Monday on La Bloga, and writing book reviews and essays for numerous print and online publications. I do this while juggling the time demands of marriage, parenthood and holding down a stressful, full-time day job as an attorney with the California Department of Justice.

First, I note that as a lawyer, I essentially write for a living. Though some time is spent in court, most of the “heavy lifting” occurs in my office at my computer as I write legal memoranda, motions and briefs. I work under tight, court-determined deadlines. There is no room for writers’ block. My goal with legal writing is simply to tell a coherent, compelling story. So, if you have a “day job” where you must write, you have an advantage that other budding authors don’t because you are constantly honing your writing skills. True, writing a memo to your boss on how to improve sales might not resemble that detective thriller brewing in your brain, but I truly believe that being required, on a daily basis, to craft sentences and paragraphs in a non-literary forum will benefit your creative writing.

Second, I specialize in short stories. Even the novel I’m working on is made up of interconnecting short stories. In other words, I write self-contained pieces that I can complete within a relatively short period. This works for me. But if you want to write a novel and you feel as though you can barely get an hour alone at the computer, let me suggest that you break it up into baby steps so that the mountain you’re about to scale doesn’t seem so daunting. Promise yourself to write 500 words a day. That’s two, double-spaced pages. Not so scary, right? I write in the evening, usually when my son is asleep and my wife is relaxing. I find that I can squeeze in one or two hours of writing each night. On weekends, I’ll sneak in another one or two hours in the morning. Those hours add up as do the pages.

Third, I don’t waste my time talking about what I want to write. Don’t get me wrong. I love discussing the craft itself when I’m in the company of other writers or on a book panel. But there is nothing more boring than someone telling me what he plans to write when that person hasn’t produced a word. It sounds like this to me: Blah, blah, blah. I’m sounding cranky now, right? Oh well.

Fourth, when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about plots, characters, dialogue, the perfect description of a book I’m going to review. This often happens during my long commute from the West San Fernando Valley to my office in downtown. In other words, much of my writing happens before I actually sit before the computer.

Finally, there is an element of writing that I have trouble explaining but I’ll give it a try. Words want to come out of me and take shape in the form of a story, poem, essay or book review. I am incapable of subduing these words. If I don’t get them out of my head and onto paper, I will explode. I’m lucky that some folks have wanted to publish my words, sometimes even paying me. But I suspect that I’d write no matter what. That’s why God created blogs. Now go forth and write. You have no excuses!

Daniel A. Olivas

Daniel A. Olivas, by day an attorney with the California Department of Justice’s Public Rights Division in Los Angeles, counts Things We Do Not Talk About as his first non-fiction book courtesy of San Diego State University Press. He’s written seven novels including the award-winning novel,The Book of Want(University of Arizona Press). He is also editor of the landmark anthology,Latinos in Lotusland(Bilingual Press) that brings together 60 years of Los Angeles fiction by Latino/a writers. He shares blogging duties atLa Blogawhich is dedicated to covering Chicano/a and Latino/a literature. He lives in the San Fernando Valley and can be reached at www.danielolivas.com or on Twitter @olivasdan.