Recently in Latina/o Category

I'm so excited, like I always get right before classes begin.  So please forgive me, everyone else, but this post is dedicated to my fellow teaching geeks out there.

In my Chicana/Chicano Lit class, a new course for me, I'll be teaching these great books:

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya, a classic

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which I've been teaching now for over ten years--it never wears out!

Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, which blew me away in graduate school (though I remember that it freaked out a few of my fellow grad students)--the title page of that early edition still bears my sweetly awed, breathless, scrawled note:  "the most amazing book I've ever read"

the anthology Latino Boom, edited by these great guys, John Christie and Jose Gonzalez, who also have a very helpful website on Latino lit

and the brand-new, still damp from the presses memoir by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough:  My Life between the Borderlines. 

By sheer happy accident, I ran across an advance copy of Mexican Enough  at the Pine Manor residency this summer, and I got hooked by just the first five pages.  It's a lark, a romp--but with serious brains.  Then--again, by sheer happy accident--I was lucky enough to meet Stephanie herself, very briefly, at Macondo, and I'll tell you what:  even on only a first impression, she's a way fun girl.  That carries over into her narration, so I thought her book would be a livelier intro to some of the cultural and historical material we need to cover than me lecturing at the front of the classroom.   We'll see if the ENGL 245D students agree!

I'm in love with the books for my graduate course in creative nonfiction, too, especially Telling True Stories (a brilliant craft guide, co-edited by Wendy Call, one of the terrific participants in our workshop at Macondo), Food & Booze, the collection from the journal Tin House, and a beautiful collection of essays, Never in a Hurry:  Essays on People and Places, by Naomi Shihab Nye, who (hurray!) will be our writer-in-residence here at UNL next spring. But I won't rave about them now, because I've got to finish thinking through my opening-day spiel. 

I'm reading Barry Lopez's Resistance, and I love the first story and the deep seriousness that it opens up.  Read it, read it. 

But--call me cranky--the rest of the collection just doesn't sustain.  At least so far.  Maybe it'll pick back up, but it's becoming just a shade monotonous, predictable, and the voices of all the fictional narrators are so similar that it's hard to distinguish them.  The first story's wonderful, seriously, but I'd rather just have imagined the rest.

I'm also reading the Bhagavad Gita again.  Like Arjuna, I'm feeling reluctant to charge into battle (another start-of-the-semester feeling), so I'm trying to listen up and see if Krishna will make any sense this time. 

On a totally unrelated note, I saw Bill Maher on Larry King last night.  My Dad used to love Bill Maher--he watched him religiously, if I can use that word in regard to anything Maheresque.  We don't get HBO, so I don't watch Bill Maher's show, but I must say, his interview with Larry King was refreshing.  You don't hear people speak so frankly in the public sphere very often.  Whether or not you agree with Maher's perspectives, his honesty and directness are bracing.  

I think he's the kind of guy that the best of the U.S. founding fathers--the best of them, mind you--would have liked hanging out with.  Little perceptible b.s., little perceptible spin.  There's a kind of unassailable vulnerability that comes when you just tell the truth about who you are and what you believe.  He has some of that, and it's refreshing because that's not a quality that makes it to prime-time very often.

Lastly, how is it that, according to a recent poll, McCain and Obama are tied?  Huh?  Hello?  What did I miss?  Nation, what's happening?

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . .  My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.

My husband James and I are heading out tomorrow morning for Macondo, the writers' workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros.  (Isn't she pretty in that picture on her website?  And gotta love those boots, too.)

That's Sandra's house, the site of the original Macondo Workshop, below.  Now the workshop has grown so big that it's housed at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. 

I'm excited to be co-teaching a workshop on memoir with the gifted and hilarious Lorraine López, author of the great story collection Soy la Avon Lady, the YA novel Call Me Henri, and the forthcoming novel The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters, which I can't wait to read.  Our masters-level students are knockouts, too:  editors, authors, professors, and award-winning journalists.  It's going to be tons of fun. 

Macondo is terrific:  warm, nourishing, and focused on both writing and on social justice activism.  It's a great place, and I can't wait to reconnect with writer Maribel Sosa, who first suggested Macondo to me.  It's where I've met so many cool people, including writer and Chicana lit scholar Amelia Montes, who brought me here to Nebraska, and Pat Alderete, about whom I've blogged before (here and here). 

James & I'll be driving down from Nebraska and stopping along the way in Oklahoma City and Austin, to see my brother Tony, his wife Cool Julie, and fearless baby Indigo.  I'm so excited. 


My

Despite therapy for it (from a psychotherapist/commercial pilot, no less, and I recommend him), I am still afflicted by a lingering anxiety about flying.  At least I can get on a plane now, though, and magazines or light reading help to distract me at thirty thousand feet--an excellent reason, I think, to have bought a novel for my trip this Tuesday to teach in the Pine Manor low-res MFA program. 

I got Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Playing With Boys, her 2004 follow-up to the chica lit breakout The Dirty Girls Social Club.  (And $5.99 in hardcover at Walgreen's--you can't beat it.)  I just finished the first chapter, and I'll share this little bit from the voice of one of her co-narrators, Alexis:

As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast.  Tortillas now outsold bagels.  Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup.  Wal-Mart carried plantains, yuca, and Goya products.  Kraft in the U.S. had come out with something they called "mayonesa," a Mexican mayonnaise with lime.  Why?  Not because they were nice.  Because they had to.  The top FM stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now broadcast in Spanish, and the U.S. had become the world's fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country.  I was one of those lucky people who had long existed in a United States that spoke Spanish and English with matching facility.  I swung with ease between the cheesy comedy of Sábado Gigante and the cheesy comedy of WB sitcoms.  Some academic types, like my professors at Southern Methodist University, called people like me bicultural.  But with Latinos poised to make up one in four Americans in the blink of a big brown eye, I preferred to call it American.

And here's one more clip:

Dangit.  He was married?  I'd been hoping he wasn't, and was a little surprised, given the shameless way the boy had flirted with me, that he was married.  Or at least I thought he'd been flirting.  But that was the problem with me.  I misread men all the time.  I thought they wanted me when all they wanted was a sandwich.

I laughed out loud.  Playing with Boys will be a frothy counterbalance to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is 2600+ pages of Bible-paper, dense with theory, and from which I'll be teaching while I'm Boston.  It's very, very good, and my friend, the lovely Laurie Finke at Kenyon, co-edited--but, as you can imagine, it's way less fun.  Give me drama, sex, quips, and cultural observations any day.

LNK-ORD-BOS, here I come. 

My novel manuscript, The Desire Projects, went into the mail to my agent last week--hurray!--and I'm now looking forward to my upcoming stint at Pine Major College's low-residency MFA program in Boston.  If you're in the Boston area, check out the series of author readings, free and open to the public, which is kicking off on Friday, July 11 with Randall Kenan and Dennis Lehane.   (I wish I were going to be there for that one, but I'm only on duty from the 15th to the end.)

Later in July, I'll be down in San Antonio, co-teaching a workshop on writing memoir with Lorraine López at the Macondo Writing Workshop.  Macondo is a wonderful experience, generously founded (and funded) by Sandra Cisneros. 

As someone whose post-novel-writing eyebrows still remain untweezed, I love Sandra's comment on her writing process:

I do know I am a very slow writer, and I don't write at all on the days I wear shoes and comb my hair. In other words, I am a writer when I stay home, don't see anyone, don't talk too much (which for me is very hard), and am quiet enough to hear the things inside my heart.
With Macondo, Sandra has created a very upbeat, supportive environment for writers, and the week-long program is designed as a masters-level workshop for writers committed not only to their work but also to activist and community engagement, so it's a wildly cool bunch of people.  If you're interested, check it out.

Besides the fun of getting to live in the dorms at Our Lady of the Lake University for a week with a slew of great people, I'm excited to see San Antonio again.  As a young person, I lived in San Antonio for six years (16-22)--it's where my son Grey was born--and it's always great to go back.  

Still dizzy with happiness over Obama's serious, nuanced, honest speech about race, I got pulled up short by a piece in Slate by Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick titled "What If Hillary Gave a Speech About Gender?  (And Why She Won't)."   I'm not sure about the piece as a whole (I disagree w/some of the authors' views), but I was interested in the talking points Henneberger and Lithwick suggest for such a speech (although--business as usual--when they say "women," they sometimes actually mean only "white women"), and I thought I'd share them here:

1) I am proud to be a woman and a mother and the first serious female contender for the presidency, but my gender is only a part of who I am, and it doesn't define or constrain me.

2) I am part of a generation that faced and still faces all sorts of gender slights and slurs, and I honor the women who came before me for their commitment to achieving equal rights for women in the face of that.

3) But I would ask the women of this country to stop engaging in petty warfare over who has suffered more—women or blacks, women or men—as it is corrosive and fruitless. This country was founded on the promise that you can become the best thing you can dream for yourself; you are not trapped by the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

4) Things have improved for women in America in the last decades. They are not perfect; there is still much to be done. But women have made enormous strides in a few short decades, and to suggest otherwise is to devalue the life's work of too many heroes of the women's movement.

5) It is possible, indeed it is probable, that just as women have faced barriers and obstacles and derision, so have Hispanics, so have blacks, and so have men. No one in America can corner the market on suffering. Who the hell wants to spend their life in a corner, anyhow?

6) Men. What are they thinking? (Pause for applause.)

7) But seriously, if we in this country are ever going to move beyond Hooters, beyond date rape, beyond the wage gap and the glass ceiling, beyond Girls Gone Wild, and bulimic 12-year-olds, we need to start working together. We need to work with men on the gender signals called out by the media and with business about the value of women workers. We need to talk to one another respectfully and listen to one another's complaints.

8) Men, we understand and honor that many of you are taking paternity leave and folding the laundry and eating takeout because we forgot to turn on the crockpot. We get that everything has changed very, very quickly, and it's hard to come home to a wife who's coming home at the same time. You are doing more than your dads ever did around the house, and we still get mad when you forget to clean out the lint filter. It's nuts. But it's getting better. Stay with us.

9) Married guys, don't fool around with hookers. Don't fool around with staffers. Don't fool around with interns or Supreme Court justices. It's insulting to us and to you and to them. Marriage has to mean something. Gov. Spitzer. Bill, darling. I can respect the heck out of your political achievements even as I berate you for demeaning marriage. Life is complicated that way. Deal, buddies.

10) People of America, I understand why some of you are anxious at the prospect of a woman president. Sometimes I am nervous, too. But it's time. Also, I am sorry about that whole cookie comment.

Honestly, some of this is just a tad cutesy for my taste, but I like #2, #4, and #7, and I'd love to hear those points get amplified in a smart, gorgeously crafted talk.  A serious speech about gender could also address the root causes of and the best ways to end male-on-female violence in the U.S. and around the world.  It could bring national, mainstream attention to efforts like the UN's Campaign to End Violence Against Women, Eve Ensler's V-Day's 10th anniversary celebration in New Orleans (wish I were going to be there!), and the myriad of regional and local grassroots programs that help women of all backgrounds lead better, safer, healthier, more autonomous lives.

Eve Ensler interviews Salma Hayek on V-Day, art, activism, and raising her baby daughter Valentina in this month's Glamour, btw.  I like what Hayek says about the natural link between art and activism:

Art and activism seem to go together naturally, the idea being that if you’re an entertainer, you can have a voice, and if you have a voice, you can make a difference. But if I were not an actress, I would still try to extend myself beyond my little micro-universe of my job, family and personal joy. I think that it’s important for every single person, no matter what they do in life, to participate in the well-being of humanity and the planet. Don’t let a year go by knowing you didn’t make an effort to do something—no matter how small—outside your own problems and drama.

Take issue w/Hayek's conflation of artist and entertainer if you want to, but her general point holds.  Artists or not, we can all use our voices on behalf of each other, peace, and the world, no matter how tiny our platform.

If you've raised your voice this year, write in and tell us how you did it.  Seriously!  Don't be shy.  You might inspire somebody else.

In light of the Seltzer scandal, if you're hankering for good news on L.A. gang intervention programs, see the latest post by Luis Rodriguez, whose memoir of having been an actual member of an actual gang is called Always Running:  La Vida Loca:  Gang Days in L.A.  It looks like real community-based intervention alternatives--including education, job training, re-entry programs, spiritual/faith opportunities, and arts programs--have been approved by the L.A. City Council and will soon be implemented in poor and working-class communities of color in L.A. 

Check out Rodriguez's lovely book Hearts and Hands:  Creating Community in Violent Times, which Rodriguez wrote "to convey the complexity of working with youths . . . most people would rather write off, but who are intelligent, creative, and quite decent. . . .  Given other circumstances, these young people might have been college graduates, officeholders, or social activists." 

I love it that the Community Engagement Advisory Committee included the arts in their model.  "Art is the heart's explosion on the world," writes Rodriguez.  "There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art." 

 

Rockin’ Chicana writer Pat Alderete, whom I met at the Macondo Workshop down in San Anto, will be here at UNL on Tuesday!  She reads at 7:30 p.m. in the Bailey Library, which is on the second floor of Andrews Hall on the UNL campus.

 

Born and raised in East Los Angeles, Pat Alderete writes from an insider’s perspective about the beauty and brutality of varrio life, rendering the complex inner worlds  and strict social hierarchies of a community too seldom observed in literature. 

 

Her reading’s free and open to the public (and there’ll be a reception afterward—i.e., free eats).  Come out! 

¡Cubanas!  Finally, a one-woman play for us!  Playwright and actor Carmen Peláez has a new off-Broadway show, Rum & Coke.  The New York Times says Peláez “acts these characters beautifully” and “has obviously honed each piece to its essence” to demonstrate “the courage of survivors and a heritage of artistic, strong-willed women.” 

 

“You are not free, because you’re Cuban and you’re not home,” the grandmother (played by Peláez) tells her U.S. born granddaughter (also Peláez).  Sound familiar?

 

If you’re in Nueva York, go see it—the show runs through March 2 at Abingdon’s June Havoc Theater at 312 W. 36^th Street (between 8^th and 9^th Avenues).  Tickets are available at smarttix.com.   If you see it, please write in with a review.

 

Brava, Carmen!