Ombligo Sereno de la Luna

Floricanto en DC: Part II

2011-04-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

Ed. Note: This is in the new issue of Brooklyn & Boyle and reflects on a trip made several months ago. It seems to be gestating and gelling in parts. There will be in the end, three parts, I believe. And when they are finished, I hope to collect them in one complete monograph or chapbook. Please accept my humble gratitude for your patience and your willingness to follow along, even though there will be other posts that don't necessarily adhere to a specific chronological order.
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FLORICANTO IN DC: Part II

While leaving the ballroom auditorium where Zurita has just delivered a series of epic poems, I am able to greet LA translator and poet Jen Hofer briefly before Francisco Alarcón, Odilia Galván, Javier and I must rush to prepare for the official Floricanto in DC, which is being held at the True Reformer Building on U Street in the U Street arts corridor. Dedicated on July 15, 1903, the building was the first in the nation to be designed, financed, built, and owned by the African-American community after Reconstruction.
Spacious and well appointed with all the modern conveniences, it now serves as the home for the Public Welfare Foundation. The second floor auditorium is nearly full by 7 p.m. Poets from across the country have gathered for an event being presented by Acentos Foundation, Poets Responding to SB1070 and Split this Rock, the organization behind the annual Split This Rock Poetry Festival built on the premise that poets “have a unique role to play in social movements as innovators, visionaries, truth tellers, and restorers of language.”

Looking around it has become obvious that more than just the two-dozen or so previously confirmed writers have gathered to share poetry in protest of Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation. In addition to the confirmed list, which includes Francisco X. Alarcon, Tara Betts, Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Carmen Calatayud, Susan Deer Cloud, Martín Espada, Odilia Galvan Rodriguez, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Randall Horton, , Dorianne Laux, Marilyn Nelson, Mark Nowak, Barbara Jane Reyes, Abel Salas, Craig Santos Perez, Hedy Trevino, Pam Uschuk, Dan Vera, Rich Villar, and Andre Yang, Chicago area poet and activist Susana Sandoval, has jumped on board to lend her voice and her considerable experience as a press liaison. Roberto Vargas, the honorary poet laureate of Bay Area Mission District has actually flown out from San Antonio, Texas where he now lives, to participate.

It is thrilling to see that even literary luminary Sonia Sanchez, who had appeared earlier on a panel celebrating the work of Langston Hughes at the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference, has come out share her words and her support for the wellspring of poetic action as well. On a personal note, I am moved almost to tears when I see my older sister Gloria in audience at the back of the room. Because we are scheduled to read alphabetically, I take advantage of being near the end to slip out and grab some chili at Ben’s, across the street. The weather is cold and damp. According to my sister, the residual snow that still glistens on the ground is from a storm that has blown through several days before.

Ben’s Chili Bowl is an institution. The crowd at the dining counter is three deep, yet the small bowl of chili and a small order of thick steak fries come pretty quickly. Back in the True Reformer, the poetry is round and full and powerful. By the end of the evening there is a sense of joy and euphoria that floods the room. People don’t seem ready to leave. It is the first opportunity that many of the Facebook Poets Responding to SB1070 have had to meet face-to-face.

A group of us spend the next hour looking for a restaurant where we can all eat together. Because the group is large, we are unsuccessful. Every place is packed, and it’s nearly impossible to seat us as a party of 14 during the late evening rush. It’s Friday night in U Street section. Walking by a restaurant called Poets & Busboys, a place named in honor of Langston Hughes, we see LA poet/author Luis Rodriguez, founder of Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural in Sylmar. The handshakes and hugs between him and so many of his long-time colleagues and contemporaries from around the nation are contagious. Luis is in D.C. for the AWP Conference and a meeting with the author of a book Tia Chucha Press is preparing to publish.

After finally giving up on the possibility of finding a restaurant nearby, we are invited to the home of Carlos Mauricio and his wife Ruth Goode. who live a short drive away. Their apartment is in a classic older building, which feels very New York or Chicago. Our hosts are both very involved in cultural affairs here and outside of the U.S. Ruth is a consultant on several U.N. projects and Carlos is a photographer with roots in El Salvador who spent many years in San Francisco where he documented murals and became acquainted with the Mission District Latino arts community. I say goodbye to my sister and those of us that are left begin sharing poetry around a living room coffee table. Ruth and Carlos have gone on a grocery run and I’m later enlisted to help prepare a modest dinner as well as a salad.

The poetry and the pasta are incredible. I feel so entirely privileged to be part of a new poetic family. We listen to jazz music and sip red wine while we listen to each other share. Am I dreaming? It this real? In the middle of it all, I wonder if I won’t wake up back in our own beloved Boyle Heights barrio where all of this began. To Be Continued...

Tejaztlan Tour, Again

2011-03-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

The sky is gray and heavy with the rains that haven't come. My daughter Alma Ixchel and I are sitting with Mamá Cynthia at the 24 Diner next to the legendary Waterloo Records where we've just missed a free set by Los Lonely Boys, who have just released a phenomenal new record called Rockpango (a play on huapango, for you LA pochos who don't look past the son jarocho or the norteño standards we all grew up with). A surprise encounter with Alejandro Escovedo reminds me that I come from a community of musical brothers. I'd nearly forgotten about a translation gig I did for him when he was being interviewed by Telemundo a while back. A fortuitous reunion, it results in a guest list slot for me at his Continental Club show tonight. We're in a hurry because mi'ja has to be at ballet folklorico practice by 7 p.m. This trip to the ATX is the result of the poetry in response to Arizona SB1070. The Washngton DC Floricanto and its impact both online and in Mexico have led directly to the invitation from the National Latino Congreso to organize a Floricanto Tejano in Response to Arizona SB1070 and Texas HB 12. It's always so strange being back your hometown. It's where I first wrote about music for magazines like The Austin Chronicle, the equivalent of the LA Weekly, except that the music coverage is about ten times as good, perhaps simply a function of the fact that Austin is a music city in a way that LA can never or will ever be. Here you have son jarocho and Chicanismo alongside Tex-Mex and bluegrass and country dosed with straight-ahead rock, indie-rock, rock en español and blues. This is the city that made Stevie Ray Vaughn a legend. It should come as no surprise that Ozo and Santa Cecilia try to play Austin as often as possible. The food is good. And the city is an oasis for craft brewers. I've had a Pecan Porterville, a Jester King-brewed Black Metal, which is like a sweet espresso with a kick, a Fireman's 4, and at least least four other locally brewed and bottled beers, this go 'round and I have to say it's definitely part of what makes the city I was reared in great. Imagine listening to young Chicanos in a group called Son Armado in the back yard at an Eastside home which you find out three hours later belongs to a girl you went to high school with. Reggie Villanueva has opened her house to the future and still remembers me from Spanish class in Mrs. Olivares' Spanish for Native Speakers 5th period blow-off hour. Later, I find myself and my younger half brother, Abraham, who I call a Chicatracho (Chicano-Catracho, beause Catracho is slang for Hondureño, gente) at a trendy downtown bar called Beso Cantina, where a rock en español band called Kalua with a skinny lead singer who sounds like a cross between Roy Orbson and Buddy Holly sings a rock version of La Malagueña. You can't make any of this up. It's so real in its beauty and so beautiful in its realness. I do miss Boyle Heights and the family that I have there. I honestly wish I could bring everyone here. It was great to see Matt Sedillo fly himself to Dallas where he visited with his father, who then drove him down to Austin for the Floricanto, where he was able to see his son Matt "Seditious" Sedillo bring the down the house with his poem. I can honestly say it was the best reading I've ever seen Matt present. It was just as great an honor to see Sarah Rafael Garcia, founder of Santa Ana's Barrio Writers settling in and making her way as a writer/performer in Austin. She was nice enough to read at our Floricanto, and she's also in the middle of cooking up a really cool beer blog. I hadn't realized that when she said she would be in Austin, she meant that she had relocated here permanently after visiting a sister that lives here. She's actually preparing for a move to the Eastside, my other Eastside, East Ostion, East Austin, East of the Freeway like the title in Raul Salinas' book. East of I-35, because in Austin it's all about two zip codes... the 78704 and the 78702, the former being the South Austin hippie-ville turned trendy, somewhat gentrified hipster, coolified "SoCo" (South Congress Ave), and the latter being what was once a mostly Mexican American barrio that kids on my high school gymnastics team used to worry about. Can't tell you how many times I heard "Uh, oh. We're in the Eastside, better roll up your windows and lock the doors." on the way to tournaments at high schools on the black and brown sides of town. No modo. Everyone wants to live in the '702 now, much like they're finding their way to the '033 in LA. Seeing the parallels simply makes me wonder how we live and work around the inevitable. Is the Wyvernwood housing project in Boyle Heights doomed to go the way of downtown lofts and condominiums? I'm just glad sisters like Sarah are making their way to traditionally Chicano neighborhoods and doing creative cultural work with young people. Stay tuned... Maybe my older brother Tomás has the right ideas with a little tree-lined, open land spread outside of town and a back porch with a hammock and a beautiful paint horse, a mare he calls 'Spérame Sister, because "she's a fast girl." So more on the homecoming as it transpires. The Congreso was firme. Agenda and policy were on the front burner, but they made space for la poesia y la cultura. I was pleased with the opportunity to interview Nativo Lopez, a leader at MAPA (Mexcan American Political Association), based back in Boyle Heights. The internationalization of our struggle as indigenous people is on, he says, and we stand firmly behind those wise words. The fact that he's been branded an "American traitor" and a "menace" by the yahoo minutemen commando wannabees of "American Patrol" is just funny. Let them add me to the list of menaces who make sure they go the way of the cowards who killed Brisenia Flores and her father.

La Gran Calavera Modista

2010-12-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Once again, Trópico de Nopal’s Reyes Rodríguez raised the bar on himself with an extravagant yet still elegantly simple “Ofrendas 2010” Calavera Fashion Show & Walking Altars exhibition. Now in it’s ninth year, the annual Dia de Los Muertos couture and ambulatory altar spectacular has become a signature Day of the Dead art event and easily ranks among the most interesting and enjoyable exhibitions mounted in a city that has elevated the annual Muertos celebration to a city-wide festival on the order of Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro.

Complimenting a visceral, and emotionally moving altar installation organized inside the Trópico de Nopal Gallery and Artspace by Marialice Jacob, the Calavera fashion show brings together a score of artists for an evening of cutting-edge fashion, design and visual art that unfolds along a custom runway created to enhance the semblances to a haute couture seasonal debut. The individual fashion designs—as often elaborated as conceptual or performance art pieces as they are staged in runway promenade—are dedicated to family members, well known artists, personalities or and close friends no longer among the living. In the case of Abel Alejandre’s "Gallo Giro," a stunning rooster suit built with a spring action spine and neck to which a human sized rooster head was affixed, the dance moves with which Alejandre showcased his creation, complete with a bobbing cockscomb and feet that were entirely realistic down to the spikes and spurs. My tocayo is a gifted draughtsman whose almost photorealistic large scale graphite drawings have now given way to silkscreens and monoprints produced at Self Help Graphics and three dimensional work such as the delightful gallo macho who brought a smile to everyone’s face with a Mexican funky chicken dance to the sound of an obscure south of the border band called, guess what… Los Funky!

Conversely, Poli Marichal, whose puppet entries have stolen the show in previous years, went one step further this time by becoming her own harlequin marionette in a touching mime play paying tribute to a fallen family member. As the white-faced, child-like cross between a court jester and a sad, motherless orphan, Marichal came onto the stage to a mournful tune. In one hand, she carried a bird-cage with a metallic, heart-shaped balloon bearing a photo recuerdo. In the other, she carried a wistful butterfly net. When the balloon was un-caged and released into the night sky, Marichal waved goodbye. Around me, more than one pair of eyes in the sell-out, standing room only crowd was damp with sadness. The knot in my own throat was a palpable weight as all of us watched the helium balloon float slowly and forlornly away.

Moving 180 degrees away from the folklórico skirts hand sewn by his own mother and printed with his ornately intricate designs in gold last year, printmaker Daniel González entered a monumental calavera puppet complete with moving parts and a glowing electric light source in the center of each dark eye socket hollow. To help you imagine the scale of his creation, it is enough to say that it took three men to move the giant skeleton across the runway and work all the hinged, superhuman sized limbs, uh… er… bones.

New to the fashion show as an individual artist, Elena Esparza has, of course, assisted in the creation and exhibition of pieces by members of her family for several years now. This year, she joined the fray with a live tableaux populated by humanoid symbols of earth and a treasured garden. In this instance, it would be safe to assume that the garden represented is Proyecto Jardin, a project with which Esparza has been associated since its inception. Attired as trees, bee hives and flowers, the denizens of Esparza’s earth were a call to environmental action and a gorgeous romp through Esparza’s eclectic chromatic and textural palette. Cloaked in her lush, vibrant designs, the models in Esparza’s piece were regal in their symbolic roles as elements in the natural world we must protect. While Esparza is heir to the traditional healing arts as a child of Ofelia Esparza, an accomplished artist and altarista, Esparza’s first fashion foray marks the beginning of her ascent as an artist with a conscience who embodies, perhaps by blood, a sense for the majesty of our ancestry and the the earth as our mother.

CiCi Segura, as evidenced by her entry this year, is an heir to David Alfaro Siqueiros. Her walking altar in tribute to the famed Mexican muralist, currently the subject of retrospectives, mural restoration efforts and discussion throughout the LA art environs, was a fitting addition to the dialogue on the master’s legacy. Particularly original was the three-dimensional fabric banner cape bearing stuffed cloth bas-relief replicas of well known Siqueiros paintings. It was at once a witty remark on all the Siqueiros hype and a visually striking exercise that once again pegged Segura as a risk taker and a visionary pioneer who responds to contemporary art currents and still somehow manages to make them her own. Segura’s original designs and her bold use of color and texture on textile were in keeping with her distinctive and always witty artistic explorations.

Taken directly from current headlines, the tongue-in-cheek piece by Carolyn Castaño was a direct reference to the recent news that a former Mexican beauty pageant queen had been arrested alongside her narco-kingpin boyfriend. Castaño makes her statement by depicting the narco as a fat cat “patron” who can buy love from and status through a romance with a popular beauty contest winner.

Robert Quijada took popular lore around Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and created a meaningful and fearlessly innovative sculpture using flat metal bands decorated with mosaic tile to evoke the towers built by the Italian bricklayer using left over materials so many years ago. Made to be worn as a mini-replica of Rodia’s opus magnum on the shoulders, the piece ranked easily among the best of the presentation from a technical and visual perspective. Of all the fashion tributes, Quijada’s was the only one based on a public art piece that is so entirely indicative of Los Angeles. Stretching another into the air , Quijada’s walking altar was poetic in its evocation of a monument born in the nearly miraculous dream of an Italian bricklayer, monument so structurally sound it has remained standing for well over half a century.

The round up would be remiss if there was no mention of the collaboration between Rocio Ponce and Joe Bravo. A flamenco dancer and musician (frontwoman for La Bestia), Ponce pounced triumphantly upon the runway in a piece by Bravo, who has often worked with models who bring their own talents and strengths to the process. The Coatlicue piece he did with poet and performer Arianna Gouveia two years ago was a case in point. Bravo is a gifted painter who turned giant tortillas into canvases that have brought him world-wide acclaim, but as his work is brought to life on the calavera fashion stage, the dimensional aspects of his art are refined. The skeletal hand transformed into a flamenco dancer comb worn in Ponce’s slicked back hair was riveting.

Through it all, Reyes Rodriguez spins a soundtrack punctuated with rhythm and style, segues into music selected expressly for each piece and transitional overdub. Lalo Alcaraz, a notoriously acerbic comic commentator who co-founded the satirical comedy troupe Chicano Secret Service before becoming a nationally syndicated political cartoonist, is a go-to MC who brings humor and razor wit to his role as a host in the commentator box. More than a fashion show, the event brings together a community of artists who are given free reign to create with out the constraints of a gallery and the stationary nature of the traditional altar. Reyes has uncorked an avalanche of sight and sound that explores the limits of what Día de Los Muertos has come to represent for Latino artists who are allowed to venture forth with explorations that both reinvent the Day of the Dead traditions and breathe new life into them at the same time.

The Tao of Funkahuatl

2010-10-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

One part tantric medicine man, one part Boyle Heights barrio advocate, one part broken-hearted love poet, one part rock star lover boy, one part visionary producer and one part life-long political and social activist, Rubén Guevara would squirm if he heard himself referred to this way. He might roll his eyes and say “come on, now, that’s too many parts.”

For Guevara, whose alter ego as Funkahuatl—the Aztec God of Funk—resurfaces on vinyl here with a definitive musical masterwork entitled The Tao of Funkahuatl, life and its lessons are to be savored as tantalizing experiences that reveal the paths to divinity. The sacred, as expressed in his first new album in over 30 years, is sexual, sensual, loving and tender. It is platonic and political. It is deeply rooted in community.

His new disc distills a lifetime of lovemaking and learning, of memory and mysticism. Backed by an arsenal of musical giants as legendary as Guevara himself, Funkahuatl once again jumps and turns with the fever pitch and whispers of trance-like storytelling.

The Tao is a come hither and dance with me, a shake rattle and roll from your hips clarion. For Guevara, the spirit of Funkahuatl redeems and purifies each of us with a soul throttling release that is captured here on a record that comes dressed in stunning sleeve art by John Valadez and a calligraphic package designed by Joel “Rage One” García.

With the collector’s record, an album complete with a fine art, limited edition lithograph printed by Francesco X. Siqueiros at El Nopal Press, Guevara restores vinyl to its original luster. And while the presentation is positively mouthwatering, it is finally the music and the voice that take shape and flight on the eight compositions that lace themselves together as The Tao of Funkahuatl which define the core of Guevara’s latest offering at the altar of joy, love and triumph.

It is no accident that he is joined by sidemen collectively known as the Eastside Luvers, among them: Steve Alaniz (tenor sax); John Avila (bass); Ramón Banda (drums) and Bob Robles (guitar). With the Luvers, Guevara bridges spoken word, funk, rhythm and blues. He scatters words, poetry, chord progressions, harmonies, brass, wind, fretwork, bass lines and percussion across the auditory spectrum in a steady torrent as if seeding the clouds with invitations to sacred gathering of song on LA’s Eastside.

Catch the upcoming issue of Brooklyn & Boyle for the complete review by Abel Salas

SpinCity Terrace y Environs

2010-10-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

Back with more than just poems and long, adulatory postings that come too few and far between. It's been an eventful season. What else can be said? Corazón del Pueblo is thriving. The "Un Floricanto Adelanto" at Corazón was a milestone gathering of 40+ poets and a sense of community that was not exactly matched at the equally stirring USC reprisal of the original 1973 Festival Flor y Canto. Meeting Festival coordinator and photographer extraordinaire Em Sedano, hosting the spirited Pocha Catalana, traveling to San Pancho to read at the Mission Cultural Center 40th Anniversary Celebration in honor of the Bay Area's El Tecolote newspaper on Aug. 29th were nothing short of breathtaking. We can probably dispense with the obligatory recap, but reconnecting with poet/artist mentors from 25 years ago was just the shot in the arm this pobre vato loco needed. Can't say enough about the renewed sense of purpose, the writerly compromiso...

And the ride hasn't stopped. It's taking me to Cal Sate Monterey Bay to read poetry in protest of SB 1070 in a former U.S. military base on October 28th. Will try to find a ride to Big Sur and Carmel while I'm there. Taking the train to Salinas. At Corazón, Teatro Urbano has extended the run of The Silver Dollar, a gut-wrenching play about the death of periodista Rubén Salazar. They perform the historic drama every Saturday in October at 8:30 pm.

The move to City Terrace brings me closer to Corazón and the work we're doing as part of a firme collective. Still in the middle of a do-or-die Dia de Los Muertos issue of Brooklyn & Boyle but it will come. The 1st St. corridor is hopping like mad. The Metropolitan Bar is open for business. I've had the glorious opportunity to meet the 70-something Doña Teodora Sanchez, proprietor of the tintoreria up the block. More on her later. The Boyle Heights Farmers Market is a Friday staple. Un Solo Sol Kitchen is serving healthy Mexican-Salvadorean fusion, ie. pupusas made with spinach or mushroom or squash as well as asian salads and chick pea guisos. Sorry if you're unfamiliar with "guiso." Just try to think of it as a Mexican stir-stew-fry in a pan and not a wok. 'Nuff said. We'll skip the litany of ultra-cool happenings you can't miss but must perforce mention the Latino Book Festival at Cal State LA today and tomorrow. Thank you Eddie Olmos. I'll drop in tomorrow for a panel on "Latino Diaspora," a discussion among Latino exiles from Latin America living in the U.S. as a result of the civil wars and political persecution by U.S. supported dictatorships that were installed in many countries to protect U.S. business interests and the landed local elite in often violent opposition to labor and indigenous rights activist movements. Which has nothing to do with the "Batalla de la Loncheras" at the Cornfields and the Mole cook-off at Placita Olvera tomorrow, two separate events I hope to hit before settling in at the Cal State LA Book Festival...

Por ahora, we'll just have to table

Poema Puro

2010-08-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Es ser escogido
nacido en el gemido
generado por
el suspiro
como una
orquidia
frágil y
timida
Es amanecer
bajo un colibri
vestido de
angel
sobre la
cama a
donde
ha llegado
la mujer
con piel
de nuez
como una
paracaidista
emisaria de
las nubes
alegres y
sonrientes
es tocar la
luna con mis
dedos y manos
asombrados
es pronunciar
su nombre
en mil y una
lenguas
para
escuchar
y sentir
la pureza
del poema
escrito en
cada paso
en cada
abrir y
cerrar de
sus ojos negros
en cada
gota de
agua que
escurre
como conejo
suelto y silvestre
de mi boca
al verte a
mi lado

Concierto Sin Fronteras y Beyond...

2010-07-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

On a Father's Day jog around Evergreen Cemetery, the brilliant sound of mariachis serenading beloved jefitos near their final resting grounds floats over the retaining wall as I run along the eastern perimeter. To my left, the smells and colors of El Mercadito bear witness to the touching and tender rites taking place. To my right, David Kipen, a friend who stands slightly more than six-feet tall, can actually jump high enough to see the musicians in their burnished regalia. I am satisfied with his report that, yes, they are indeed real músicos. Kipen is a right fine cuate with a literary bent and an undeniable love for books and words. He has installed himself in the storefront across the street from Corazón del Pueblo and plans to open a small lending library and used book shop called Libros Schmibros there. In light of the fact that libraries across the land are being closed due to budget cuts (while the war machine continues to grow fat from our tax dollars), it is no small feat. Kipen was formerly the director of literary programs at the NEA in Washington DC but was recently downsized and thus encouraged to make his way back to LA. Before the DC gig, he was the book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.

I won't harp on the whole gentrification vs. gente-fication brou-ha-ha anymore because I'm sure my friend Kevin Roderick at LAObserved and many others are done with my soap box rants on Eastside vs. hipsterville Eastside aspirations. Kipen comes recommended by Luís Rodríguez and has known one of my personal mentors--Francisco X. Alarcón--for many years. I for one, was impressed so much by his palabra credentials and his sensitivity to the neighborhood that gave birth to Brooklyn & Boyle, I mistakenly added about 10 years to his real age, a gaff for which I hope to be forgiven someday.

Anybüeys, here we are... learning how best to work and love and struggle in a collective manner that is supportive and encouraging. Kipen gives shout outs to Corazón del Pueblo and Brooklyn & Boyle in a story describing his humble bookstop project this week in Publisher's Weekly. Elsewhere, since we're making an effort here to be a bit more timely, play catch up and further procrastinate on the production of yet another vaunted print edition of Brooklyn & Boyle, it was a beautiful weekend for the 1.8 Million Dreamers fundraiser at Self Help Graphics, which featured performances by La Santa Cecilia and Conjunto Nueva Ola, a rollicking, cumbia-on-high-octane band of black patent leather Mexican Lucha Libre mask-wearing lords, who seem to have taken their fashion cues directly from the Sergio Arau playbook and simply substituted the guacarock thrust with the sonidero and cumbia vibe that has become all the rage among LA's Chicano and Latino cognoscenti since Very Be Careful followed Ozomatli onto the dance floor with the infectious, danceable ritmos del caribe. I had a brief glimpse of Nueva Ola's steaming set at Eastside Love on Friday night and got the low-down from Gabriel Jiménez, a musician himself and a stalwart Plaza de la Raza staffer.

And if that weren't enough, it's safe to say that the success of the SHG fundraiser for the movement to support college bound immigrant students was replicated at Tierra de la Culebra park in Highland Park at the Farce of July (now over a decade old) commemoration presented by Xican@ Records & Film and hosted by Felicia "La Fe" Montes and Olmeca. It was a solidly beautiful Sunday, and I was happy to bask in the late afternoon sun listening to live tunes with little brother Yaxkin Chumacero AKA MC Yoshi, who will be featuring at the Corazón del Pueblo July 14th "Flowers of Fire" open mic. And if you can muster up enough love to support the work CdP is doing, please come down to our "Concierto Sin Fronteras" for a look at el maestro Hugo Martinez Teocatl's amazing mural work and some of the best xicano music, hip-hop and poetry you'll ever witness in LA, including the above mentioned Olmeca, whose latest project, La Contra Cultura, demonstrates both a lyrical and political maturity coupled with a production polish that explains the wide interest in his music both in and outside of the U.S. and as far away as places like Ecuador, where he recently attended a north-south native people's gathering.

Mother's Day in Mexico City

2010-05-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

It´s Mother´s Day at home in the States right now. Although it isn't officially Día de la Madres here in México until tomorrow, I can still hear "Las Mañanitas" being amplified from within a church or a home nearby. The lively, cumbia-inflected band delivering the music slips suddenly and unexpectedly into Santana's "Samba Pa' Ti." The volcanic rock from which many of the streets and retaining walls in Coyoacan--the long-time artist's enclave where a group of us from LA are staying--are built, seem to bounce the sound about even more. Coming to quickly in spite of very little sleep, I realize it should really come as no surprise that a band in the middle of Mexico City would serenade mothers with the traditional birthday song and follow it with a signature song by Carlitos.

I am part of a writer group that includes: Roberto Leni, a Chilean emigré raised in San Francisco; Polina Vasliev, a polyglot Russian-born, U.S., Argentina and Brazil trained linguist; current KPCC radio reporter Adolfo Guzmán López, who also happens to be a founding member of the Taco Shop Poets, the performance poetry troupe that burst out of San Diego onto the national poetry scene over a decade ago; and me, honorary nephew and self-appointed heir to self-described cockroach poet raúlrsalinas and a proud member of the Corazón del Pueblo: Arts, Education & Action Collective based in Eastside LA's Boyle Heights neighborhood. Three years ago, I would have called my mother to describe the journey that has taken me from LA to Toluca, one hour north of here for a poetry reading in a 100-year-old building and former brewery that has since been transformed into a stylish museum dedicated to science and industry. The reading is part of an exchange dubbed the Encuentro de Escritores México - Los Angeles, and we represent the Los Angeles contingent. The exchange has also taken us to a very formal reading complete with a grand piano and a musical interlude that included a poem by Federico García Lorca set to music on a polished stage in the Aula Magna ¨José Vasconcelos¨ auditorium at CENART, the Centro Nacional de las Artes as well as a pulquería on Avenida Insurgentes in the historically picturesque community of Colonia Roma.

Sadly, the phone call is no longer possible. For the second year in a row, I am unable to make that Día de Las Madres llamada because our madrecita has already passed on. And my instant melancholy at hearing the music from outside this morning pulls me from a guest room bed on the second floor of a nicely appointed studio and office structure in the small yard behind the bright orange home where our host, photographer and poet Kary Cerda, lives with her 18-year-old son, Altair. The impulse to reach for my mother and wish her a happy Mother's Day beats within me with disquieting regularity.

I want to call even though, I'm still exhausted from a late night at El Pericazo, a Colonia Roma bar where I'd gone to hear a turntablist known as DJ Apocaliptzin and run inadvertently into a young woman named Amaranta who has just returned to the Mexican capital from LA. It was astonishing to learn that, while in LA, she had attended several Mujeres de Maiz events including the all-woman poetry celebration at Corazón. I would have called my mom with breathless excitement, explained to her how warm and receptive everyone has been, how happy I am to be alive and in el ombligo de la luna once again. I would have told my jefita how much I loved her. The fiercely beautiful hummingbird woman who bore me would have not forgotten--before saying goodbye--to tell me how proud she was and to come home safely. The thought occurs to me then that my four sisters are also all fiercely beautiful, hummingbird warrior women, who--though small figured and fine boned like their mother Juliana--are formidable thinkers, artists, activists, organizers, healers, homemakers and mothers in their own right. A kind word or praise from any one of them is always simply an extension of the empowering love I was given by a mother who gave everything while asking for nothing in return. I know undoubtedly that I would have intoned the words to Las Mañanitas and described our group's final reading the day before at El Chopo, the rocanrolero swap meet near Tlatelolco, the site of the 1968 student massacre. I would have shared how six of us, a gang including two young poets from Mexico, had gathered at three mics and broken out in a style reminiscent of the Taco Shop Poets with two poets on each of three microphones, repeating words for an echo effect and layering phrases from our own individual poems, launching them across the street-level stage for a couple hundred hard core punks, goths, metalheads, emos and straight up old-school roqueros in a symphony of sound.

I would not have failed to recount how just before we were invited to the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo stage, we were all mesmerized by the gripping, visceral power of a dance performance troupe called Butoh Chilango whose members had chalked a square on the dark street surface in the center of the audience. With their faces contorted under nylon stocking masks, some lay prone on the ground as others drew crime-scene outlines around their bodies and scrawled words inside the residual shape. "SB 1070" wrote one. Dancers also traced outlines of sneakered feet among the onlookers. I would have said how, at one point, I was handed a lipstick and been given a subtle cue to make a dancer's stocking masked face and head my canvas. I would have gone on about how others in the audience were given chalk sticks to do with whatever they wished. How one pale, thin dancer wore an open passport around his neck, covers facing outward as he stabbed at it with colored chalk. In the center of the square, a long, circular rubber loop like giant rubberband made from thin tubing about six feet in length was unfurled from within a large round birdcage. The dancers had twisted and wrapped themselves around each other using the taut bonds to rope and tie their own limbs, struggling all the while as if for life and air. Would I have recounted how my throat welled up and my stomach knotted because I thought immediately of families separated by deportation and draconian immigration laws creating orphans whose dreams of education are ignored and belittled by a broken U.S. immigration policy? Of the arrest and detention of those least able to speak up for themselves? I'm absolutely certain I would have. My mother would have understood.

On Mother's Day en el Distrito Federal, I would have liked to tell mamá that her granddaughter Alma Ixchel in Austin, the child of two amazing and powerful women who invited me to participate in their dream some thirteen years ago as a donor, has written and performed her own autobiographical monologue for Grrrl Action, a program created by the award-winning avante-garde theatre ensemble Rude Mechanicals. I would have had to say to her as well that Los Angeles también is full of incredibly amazing activista, artista and artesana mothers who are single-handedly teaching their sons to be more gentle and more kind and more complete. How East LA in particular is brimming with sisters who try to understand and live balanced, healthy lives, showing all of us by example that ancestral sadness does not have to drive us to the kind of self-destructive behaviors that she struggled to keep me from, at times with little success. I would have talked to her about the work at home in LA with Corazón del Pueblo, a space that has become a true community arts headquarters. I would have told her how beautiful and transcendent the Mujeres de Maiz poetry reading at Corazón del Pueblo had been during the month of March and how proud it has made me to represent that kind of energy and commitment to community outside of Califas and outside of the U.S. in our spiritual homeland. I would have reminded her about our pilgrimage to Chalma together sixteen years ago alongside my younger sister Patricia for a danza azteca ceremony that would alter all of our lives forever.

Can you imagine? I would have asked her. A modern, practical, even if a little bit evangélica, Tex-Mex grandmother with no real connection to our indígena past beyond her own long-lost grandmother who was rumored to be a curandera, traveling with my sister and her baby Ultima, a child named for the curandera in a book by Rodolfo Anaya. My mother hanging with concheros, riding peseras and participating in velaciones because two of her youngest were all about reconnecting with la tradición and her wayward son Abel so thrilled at the time to be running around with D.F.-bred roqueros in New York, Austin and here, in center of the moon, connected to her, to the raíces and to all creation.

Back again more than a decade después, I would have to say how it feels more than familiar, how one block off the Avenida Miguel Angel de Quevedo, surrounded by sounds and smells that caress my senses, I know she is not far. I feel her, hear her encouraging me to write more, to read more, to create more, to forgive more, to love more. I want to let her know that the Eastside of LA is becoming, for me, a satellite, a kind of D.F Norte. More than all of this, however, more than the chronicle of a poet's plight, I want to tell her that now, at 44, in a world so different and yet still so much like the one she knew, I miss her more than ever. I miss her because she really could imagine. And she could always make what she imagined real.

¡Mujeres de Juarez y Mujeres de Maíz Presentes!

2010-03-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

Although the venue has changed, the Mujeres de Maíz throw down beginning this Sunday, March 7th is moving forward full tilt. In honor of International Women's Day and in alliance with the series of month-long events to raise awareness and help healing happen in our communities here and across the border under the banner of "A Prayer for Juárez," the firme sisters and compañeras and guerrilleras in the struggle for peace and justice bring "13 Baktun: Return of the Wisdom of the Elders." The event marks the 13th year since the birth of the Mujeres de Maiz movimiento. Filmmaker Maritza Alvarez informed me several months back that the MdM collective was actually begun in Boyle Heights, so it is only fitting that the 13th anniversary is celebrated on tierra sagrada, ground zero for Chican@ and Latin@ culture in LA. The 13th letter of the alphabet is "M," so I feel perfectly justified saying that in year 13, and forevermore the letter "M" will commemorate, for me, three very important terms that begin with "M," Mujer, Madre and Maíz. A whole slate of programs, performaces, pláticas, panels, women's self-defense workshops and more will be held at several venues on the East Side in honor of Wombyn's Herstory Month. The kick-off alone features an afternoon of free performances at the Mariachi Plaza Metro stop. Las Ramonas, In Lak Ech and Raquel Salinas are all part of the bill. Sunday will also feature an art exhibition at Primera Taza a half a block east of the Metro stop performance program. The evening portion of the Sunday launch moves to Salones Casa Grande on César Chávez (Brooklyn Ave.), a historic ballroom on the second floor just east of Mott St. La Santa Cecilia will perform with Afro-Peruvian cantautora Susana Baca, alone worth the price of admission. Mujer Mercado will be occupy the Salón before hand from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Hope to see you there. Please visit www.mujeresdemaiz.net for specific dates, times and locations. We're particularly proud that the MdM have chosen Corazón del Pueblo for a MdM Core Members/Co-founders panel discussion on March 14th and for an MdM Poetry Night on Wednesday, March 18th.

All of this follows the inaugural Saturday, March 6th opening of three complete Boyle Heights arts district exhibitions dedicated to the women of Juárez and an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 400 young women. Corazón del Pueblo will open an exhibition entitled "Mujeres de Juárez: ¡Siempre Presente! The show includes work by over 21 artists from LA to Texas, among them artists such as Grace Barraza-Vega, José Lozano, Joe Bravo, Anna Alvarado, Lalo Alcaraz, Arturo Urista, Emilia García and Mary Nuñez Delira, just to name a few. Luís J. Rodríguez, Gloria Alvarez, Olivia Chumacero and Felicia Montes will share poetry beginning at 8 p.m. Victoria Delgadillo, who works out of Self-Help Graphics is curating a separate exhibition that will be installed at both Casa 0101 and the Casa 0101 Annex. Please check www.aprayerforjuarez.org for a list of the artists and poets participating in the Casa shows. Image above: Juárez, Mary Nuñez Delira, 2010, prisma pencil on paper.

Love Poem for Our Mothers

2010-02-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

I want to write a love poem for my mother
and dress it in the sugar frosting flowers

she made with her hands as if by magic

I want to write a love poem for your mother

to say her child is beautiful and strong

in the world as more than just a song

or a stone encrusted silver memory

I want to write a love poem for my mother

to tell her all I did not say before or share

in those quiet moments on the telephone

before she found her way beyond the

hurt that tore so suddenly inside her

I want to write a love poem for your mother

over knitting and crochet like the iridescent

silk tie she once gave me when I went to cry

I want to write a love poem to my mother

with the hummingbird whir she left in

my chest as a permanent reminder to love

and love again

I want to write a love poem to them both

a poem that rings with the bright bells of

a birthday Valentine and a gathering of

artisan and healer women at an Eastside

carnival of love like whispers of kindness

a grateful poem that says in no uncertain way

that without each of them, neither one of us

would have ever known what it was like to

once have loved each other.

Día de los enamorados,

el amor y la amistad

2010

Como Quisiera

2010-02-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Como quisiera ser como solo una de tus palabras, nacida en tu vientre o en tu rabia o en el anhelo, palabra hecha de carne y sangre y hueso y locamente efímera a la vez. Como deseo traducirla a mis extremos y convertir las puntas de mis dedos en tus sílabas, inyectarme con cada letra de solo una de tus palabras, estar en la cima de todos tus sinapsis cerebrales para luego descender como rocío o la humedad esencial de las zonas erógenos, ser esas vocales suspendidas sobre tu lengua, recargadas en tu boca de canela y mar. Como quisiera sentirme como solo una de tus palabras y subir como tu susurro en mi oido al momento del estremecer.

Flowers on Fire, the New Floricanto

2010-01-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

Just when you couldn't feel more thrilled about the modern day floricanto at Corazón del Pueblo, the space formerly known as Brooklyn & Boyle and now home to the first-ever Boyle Heights Art, Education & Action Collective, Flores de Fuego comes galloping at you with a third installment that riveted the 100 or so poets, musicians and aficionados gathered for the Wednesday night MICrófino Libre. Maestro raúlrsalinas and world renowned Peruvian poet Cecilia Bustamante must have been peering down in pride. What was especially touching was the presence of high school-aged students from ArtShare LA who delivered spoken word arsenals of consciousness and truth speak like true MVT Def Poetry Jam pros. The experimental piece created by Willy Herron and Sid Medina with additional vocals by Greg Esparza juxtaposed Beatles chord progressions and actual songs with poetry de tu servidor y amigo, yours truly and Brooklyn & Boyle assistant extraordinaire Christy Ramirez, who has grown considerably as a writer and arts maven/up-and-coming curator in the year or so that she came on board as a firme carnala and general all around support system. Audience members asked what we called the ensemble, and I had to shrug my shoulders. We'd only rehearsed once at Will's City Terrace hideaway and even then, inconclusively and incompletely. The Juanita's Restaurant crew, headed up by David and Julio Carrera, dropped in towards the end. From storytellers and blues singers to Kristopher Escajeda on the three-string guitar, from an emotionally taught original delivered with verve and attitude by Angela Flores, who accompanied herself on guitar, the evening unfolded like one of the best peña's or tertulia's you could have imagined. Doña Dora Magaña, a former Salvadorean guerrilla fighter literally stopped the show with her true-to-life story and several poems dedicated to the women in her brigade who gave up their lives fighting for a just world free of oppression and poverty. Really, all of the performances were stellar. Kudos once again to the Boyle Heights Bards, Bus Stop Prophet, Kristy Lovich and John Carlos de Luna, who are coming into their own as the honorary hosts and a major part of spiritual backbone that goes into this bi-monthly expression that has opened a doorway into the psychic healing ward built by poetry and song. Whew! This after a screening and plática to benefit Alex Sanchez and then the very first-ever public showcase for the Garfield High Poetry Club. Thanks to Lisa Cheby for making it happen. People say our young people are politically and socially apathetic but you wouldn't know it based on the kids who came to share. They know what's up and they know what time it is.

So that said, check out the latest issue of Brooklyn & Boyle for more art, community and poetry than usual, more on the reasons behind Corazón del Pueblo and a schedule of upcoming free classes for youth at 2003 East 1st in the heart of the Boyle Heights Arts District. If you can't make one of the many Haiti benefits this Saturday or if you find yourself itchin' to dance late night, stop by a "Corazón del Pueblo Dance Party." You won't be sorry and you'll be helping keep the lights on. Come by the Casa 0101 Annex on Sunday to recover over potluck (tamales y champurrado welcome as per the Candelaria tradition!) It'll be your last chance to see the second annual exhibition dedicated to nuestra señora reina de los angeles... la virgen morena, madre de las américas.

El Corazón del Pueblo!

2010-01-05T05:46:00.000-08:00

Am I not getting something? Será el pueblo tuvo algo que ver? Espero que sí. Or how is it that over 150 people showed up on a Tuesday night to hear the poets? How is it that we had to bring chairs in from elsewhere and still had a standing-room only crowd at the spot? Desde el mero corazón para el pueblo… though Jimmy Mendiola and Oscar Garza might remind me that this phrase comes lifted from a title of a Les Blanc film about conjunto music. And while this may be true, Tex-Mex conjunto doesn’t have the same resonance for the crowd that came for the palabra last Tuesday as it does for the three of us. It was Mexico D.F. meets East Los and luchadores enmascarados with shades of Chile and Colombia and El Salvador for good measure. It was canto a la liberación and barrio autonomy. It was Watts and South Central out in solidarity. It was Richard Montoya and Consuelo Velasco who came to support John Carlos de Luna and Kristy Lovich, who speak love and commitment to the ‘hood and to each other through art and poetry. It was Rubén "Funkahuatl" Guevara puttin' it down as the one true East Side beat hipster who gave shout outs to veteran organizers and activistas who came in from the four directions to support their kids and and in some cases, grandkids. It was the lil’ monsters from 700 Pound Gorilla and it was the chamacas from Gorilla Queenz, who were on their way to San Pancho to open for Africa Bambaataa at a New Year’s Eve show I would have loved to attend. How about that? Da South Bronx was, as such, was none too far away, either. And if I sing the broken-hearted love poem, perhaps one last time too many, I don’t really feel like such a culero anymore. And if the poem is about lost love, la chilanga que se me fue, or if it touched upon missed opportunities or the pain which eventually subsides, we can simply remind ourselves of the words in a poem by one of the beloved Boyle Heights bards, the Bus Stop Prophet, who, in a piece that invokes the "Blueprints of the Heavens," tells us that while life’s lessons can be hard, every hard knock is an opportunity for growth.

Yes, Brooklyn & Boyle as a space has been reborn. El Corazón del Pueblo has emerged in it’s place. The magazine will continue to flourish and grow. The new year is upon us. Make it one you will remember. Make a difference. But remember to dance, to sing, to write, to never be ashamed of who you are or where you come from. Braid your sister’s hair in a good way and tell yourself that peace and prosperity are possible in the world. Love more, live more, forgive more. Like Francisco Hernández, my soul brother, said on New Years Eve. “If it is to be, it is up to me.”

"Flowers of Fire" will return on Wednesday, January 13. Get there early. We may run out of room. As always, it's open mic. On January 23, stay tuned for Ojos de Mi Pueblo, Voces de Mi Barrio, a digital media and spoken word celebration of youth, by youth & for youth. More on this incredible project in a minute. And on January 27, Big Joe Hurt will be there to show us what Chicano Blues is all about. The Boyle Heights bards will be there in force.

Flowers of Fire: Poesía de Lucha y Amor

2009-12-26T15:41:00.001-08:00

It is poetry from the Bay to Santiago de Chile, from the hilltops of Lincoln Heights to jarocho hollows and D.F. escapes, the flowers of the floricanto and the fires fed by restless revolutionary spirits. Please join us as we hand the symbolic torch to the Boyle Heights bards. I will spend more time with words, with the magazine and the blogs from here henceforth. I welcome Estrella and Leticia especially because they instigated my return to Chilangolandia and the poetry lulls between el rock pesado at el Chopo in the shadows of the Tlatelolco '68 masacre two years ago. I giggle at the sudden flock to Guadalajara by those who have finally equated the 80s Chicano punk explosion with the rockero counterpart and try to verbalize it all in catalogues and academic papers. It's a long way from eating hongos with Maria Sabina and dancing with concheros at Chalma while sleeping in the cemetary and an even longer way from the bomb explosion aftermath that greeted me at Plaza Universidad seven days after Marcos and the Zapatistas made a stand at San Cristobal. Leticia Luna, publisher and editorial director at la Cuadrilla de la Langosta, an imprint more strident and feminist than any I've seen in a long time, has been a midwife to punk poetry and youth culture in la mera capirucha for some twenty years, her yearling and protege Estrella del Valle was just awarded a prize in Colombia for a book called Vuelo México - Los Angeles Puerta 23, a searing indictment of privilege, even Chicano privilege here on the northern side of the border like a wound that cleaves a people apart. Ms. del Valle hails from Veracruz and lets us know that there is a darker side to life there and here, that happy, fandango music is not the only export the jarocho's can share with a vengeance. And what can I say about Leni? Un camarada de letras and a writer's writer, who writes from a place where narrative structure, memory and the genetic imprint of a dictator's torture delivered directly onto the backs of his own kin are salved with sweetness and justice and redemption. We welcome Angelinos, native and non, to the Corazón del Pueblo, home of a homegrown art and community paper, Brooklyn & Boyle (now a year old)... we're bringing it to you here, bringing it home, aún el hecho de estar en casa en ambos países. No es por nada el nombre de este sitio virtual... destino del los chilanguanacoides xicanos. If you fee up for poetry that moves and rattles, words that have been strewn across continents in beautiful volumes and in the pages of periodical perhaps a wee bit more erudite than you are used to, favor de acompañarnos con una buena vibra este martes a las 8 pm!

Coatlaxopeuh AKA La Guadalupe

2009-12-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

Reading Gerry's ardent piece about Pedro Pans and how we fall somewhere in the middle of the 9-to-5 vs. the happy-go-lucky roustabout bohemians who purport to be so above it all and live with no concern about tomorrow, I am finally compelled and driven to blog a bit. The Brooklyn & Boyle toil has consumed me, but it's work for and commitment to something I hope will be lasting. It is an idea and a presence that has allowed me to find a place and a sense of community. And it has been the culmination of work that began shortly after my own mother's death. I want to tell Mr. Meraz, a down-ass vato who really does get it and really does give a f#%*, that his mamita his here, in him and in all the small miracles that occur everyday on the block, on the curb, on the sidewalks in those lugares, the places where we dwell. At the A.R.T.E.S. meeting recently, Gerry spoke up and said what I know and feel. He spoke to the Chicano artists who still look down on the truest rasquache evolution and like to imagine an East Side with primrose flower gardens and some sort of 70s, pre-mexicanización idyl. He said he was grateful for the vendors with who make every street a tianguis out of necessity. My mom embraced new immigrants and spoke to them in exceedingly fine Spanish despite the fact that her great-great grandmother was born north of the Rio Grande. My father married a catracha (look it up, raza, or ask someone from centroamerica) but still complains about how the mojados are taking over. He speaks good Spanish but is more willing to put down paisas than he is to recognize the fact that his own children are fueling a retro-acculturation movement. Then you have the indigenazis, mixed blood mestizos who glamorize and romanticize an azteca past that they only know from one or two trips to el D.F., Chicano Studies introduction to our raices pre-colombinos and a movimiento that revolted against the imposition of a Western or European hegemony. Voila, presto. They are suddenly proud to wear the beads and the ayoyotes as an antidote to the racist system that has made being indio somehow inferior. They're the ones who put down Ché because he was an argentino of European descent. In Gerry's thought provoking post, he leaves out the queer and lesbian quotient and talks about Pedro Pans who feel they are beyond relationships with the opposite sex, but I would add that there are also Patrici@ Pans who seek release and an unburdening in a series of souless couplings, unhealthy relationships. I watched Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence again last night and cried because the robot boy wanted so badly to be real and be held by his mother, wanted so much to hear her say that she loved him and wanted, finally, to know simply that he was every bit as human as she was. The Mexica-tihaui brothers all claim to honor the earth and our ancestors but I never see them cooking or cleaning at any ceremony or encuentro or blessing or drum circle. I was there when Maestro Andres Segura, un verdadero jefe de la danza, scolded a group of mostly male Mechistas once at a gathering near the border in South Texas, because they kept raising their fists and shouting "Mexica tiahui!" "No!" he told them, wagging his finger in reprimand. "No solo los mexicas! Todos tiahui!" "All forward." Just because you lead a sweat lodge or can say "Aho, mitakweasin" after beating on a handheld drum does not mean that you have overcome our inherent tendencies to propagate and further an unjust gender-class system that relegates us to certain roles. The day I go to a pow-wow or a danza and see all the men cooking for the women and allowing them to eat first and, by the same token, see all the young people cooking for the elders and letting them eat first, then perhaps I will have a little more hope. Gerry is a gifted writer and a homeboy from the hood. Self-analysis and self critique are important. I just wish more of the compañeros would step up and do the same. It's one thing to invoke the animas and in the palabra apologize if any mistakes or errors were committed in the process, to say aloud and in public that we want to walk and heal in a good way, surrounded by beauty and light and love, but another thing entirely to live that with each other, to beg forgiveness and seek redemption for our human flaws face-to-face within our families and with our past loves, perhaps peel the papas for the papa con huevo tacos and bring flowers for a friend, humbles ourselves and say nothing when the palabra traverses the círculo. It's what I've tried to do with the revista, a space where we can speak and allow others to speak and let arte, al final, provide the truths we seek. It shouldn't have to take the loss of our mothers to help us understand, as men, that we would be nothing if not for a womb that cradled us and brought us to life. Think about it, ese. And give thanks, today and everyday. In being good to yourself, you honor her, and I'm saying this as much to myself, porque la sangre y las lágrimas escurren igual de las llagas ancestrales.

Muertos de la Guerra/War Dead at Brooklyn & Boyle

2009-10-21T15:29:00.001-07:00

Hope everyone can stop by. I know there's an important fundraiser for Claudia Mercado and Maritza Alvarez featuring La Santa Cecilia, but it would be great if you could stop by Casa 0101 and support the filmmaker and then check out the Muertos de la Guerra/War Dead exhibition. Or even just attend one of the later screenings for small donation of $7. Mil gracias de antemano. Laura Varela is a long-time friend, a fellow danzante who did ceremonia with us on the frontera between Matamoros and Brownsville. She will be leading the construction of an ofrenda for veterans at Brooklyn & Boyle to compliment the powerful, striking and moving work already on the wall. We will screen her film (which won't air on PBS until next year) at 7 pm at Casa 0101 then open Galeria Brooklyn & Boyle for a reception to honor Los Muertos de la Guerra. We will screen the film again on Friday at 5:30 pm, on Saturday at 6 pm then again one last time on Sunday at 7 pm. Her film is truly inspiring and Día de Los Muertos is a significant part of her narrative based on Chicano artists who went to Vietnam and made it back alive but not without psychic wounds that they deal with in a Circulo de Hombres with prayer and drumming.

Moratorium Revisited

2009-08-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

If you can imagine what it feels like to watch the legendary Willy Herrón install a monumental 7' x 10' painting on the wall at your own space, then you get a sense for how last month unfolded. If meeting Joan Jett was like being in the company of rock stardom, opening a show with impassioned political work spanning three generations of Chicano and Mexicano artists that includes Herron's Munch-worthy painting of a tormented figure lifted from a photo of the actual Chicano Moratorium and celebrating my birthday with him and a slew of the city's best poets and art activists just a few days later was been like finding myself at home in a majestic galaxy that outshines Eta Carinae, long a contender for the Milkway's brightest sun. At this juncture, it is appropriate to credit Pete Galindo at the Federal Art Project, who debut the Herrón piece earlier this summer at a retrospective for the artist.

The opening of the "Chican@ Resistance & Revolution" exhibition was a powerful reminder of all that movimiento art and activism stood for and should continue to stand for. Maritza Alvarez, 13 Visions Productions cinematographer/photographer as well as member of the Mujerez de Maiz collective, stole the show for me with poetic black-and-white portraits depicting indigenous women, but references to the MacArthur Park melee where police used undue force on people in a stand-out painting by Wenceslao Quiroz harkened back to the 1970 and 1971 clashes between peaceful protesters and law enforcement agents and drew uncanny parallels..

In the process, we managed to whip out another issue of the paper with John Carlos de Luna's monochromatic image of Rubén Salazar on the cover. So the sharpest (and meatiest according to Random Hero) issue to date is currently filtering out into the East Side environs. The twin wedding day stories by Brandy Maya Healy Maramba and bass player Joey Maramba made the wait worthwhile. We closed the show on the Moratorium anniversary and were honored to have Carlos Montes and Elena Dominguez, both original LA-area Brown Berets, in the audience, after which Galería Brooklyn & Boyle was host to the filming of a new video for retro-cabaret, border-straddling lounge act Santos de Los Angeles. We were almost in overdrive at that point, but I still managed to slip into the Federal Art Project gallery for "Burn," a show of hauntingly sad, but still very disturbing images by Vincent Valdez, a young brother who wields a Vermeer-meets-Crumb paintbrush with deadly force. Valdez is, like me, a Tex-Mexile transplant who is just at home on LA's East Side as he is at San Anto's quintessential Bar America, the gateway to that city's South Side. Pete Galindo is on the leading edge of the burgeoning downtown LA art scene and a former SPARC staffer, so he knows Chicano art better than most. The show is the perfect allegory for the hottest side of the summer and the incendiary mountains that surrounded us with plumes of thick, black smoke for weeks as a result.

About our current exhibition, "Neo-Indigenismo," I can only say you don't know what you're missing. Curated in conjunction with the CASA 0101 production of Thy Kingdom Come, an ambitious new play set during the conquista, the show features new work by Aztlan Underground's Joe "Peps" Galarza, a striking Zapata portrait by John Carlos de Luna in his inimitable style, and of course, a piece titled "Martian Nopal" by maestro Sergio Hernández, who while at Con Safos magazine in the early '70s, published and illustrated raúlrsalinas' epic paean "Un Trip Through the Mind Jail," this while the vato everyone now calls the original Xicanindio poet was still doing prison time. I would be remiss of I didn't mention Arturo Urista, who has come out of a hiding to support Brooklyn & Boyle by showing his newest and most exciting work with us. It's also important to mention work by Francisco T. Norazagaray, Dolores González Haro, Sonji, Raul González from Mictlan Murals and his camarada Ricardo Estrada, the latter two artists being gifted neighborhood cats who believing in taking art to the streets and the people. And, of course, Maritza Alvarez, whose photos were so good, I had to show two of them again.

Tonight, we premier a new music video featuring bandleader leader Big Joe Hurt, directed by Victor Parra, yet another Tex-Mexile who seems more Angelino than otherwise. Come see the play at CASA 0101 and stay for the free live music and video presentation at Brooklyn & Boyle! (Image Above: "Burn" by Vincent Valdez)

La Santa Cecilia & Joan Jett

2009-08-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

All in one night. That's right. At the risk of sounding ridiculously cliché, it doesn't get any better. Trip out on this... we start with a slow pan on the surprisingly well-attended Friday night opening for our 1st Annual Hot Summer Art Extravaganza at Brooklyn & Boyle where even Adrian Rivas of Gallery 727 finally made good on his threat to come visit. He managed to bring along Carolina Caycedo, the conceptual artist de la isla del encanto--who conducted the monumental barter art installation and happening at his place (which I kick myself for having missed). Adrian and Caro joined the cuates, Ernesto and Eduardo Espinoza who jointly head up the East L.A. Cine Sin Fin Chican@ Film Festival, and Conchita de Sousa and Fernando Cruz from Casa de Sousa as the late-comers who left a glowing energy lingering in their wake long after we locked the doors at nearly midnight. I was particularly proud to exhibit a piece by the ladies from Mi Vida. The corazón de papel maché over a beautiful serape background is a steal at $75 but I'm making it $65, so I can buy it for myself.

Anybueys, we all hung out at East Side Luv and helped Danell celebrate her cumple in style. We also met the Colombian Napolean Dynamite. No lie. He had brown hair instead of red, was a foot shorter, but had the glasses AND the dance moves. Noelle, it turns out (sshhh, don't say anything), has a book project she's working on, and I'm utterly intrigued at the idea. Closed the joint down and I turned into the proverbial pumpkin. Had to save some steam for Cal Plaza where I trundled along to with writer and former interim Self Help Director Rose Ramírez as well the baddest, toughest, coolest gallery and magazine collaborator/crimie (crime partner in the parlance of my lil' banger foo's from Eastlake) in town, Christy Ramírez. At Cal Plaza, I did the hot-foot for our usual camp-site with Fabiola Torres, Reina Prado, and my life-long cuate-carnal Francisco Hernández, AKA Smokin' Mirrors man-about-town. Francisco, who's always busy on a film or a tour with any number of biz heavies, cuts me off near the facilities after a glittering set by La Santa Cecilia, a band fronted by Marisoul Hernández, who must have pipes made of platinum because her voice is a shimmering echo of love and heartache and, yes, soul. Think Mercedes Sosa and Astrid Hadad and Lila Downs all rolled into one sweet melody over tango and cumbia and too many other post-millenial LA hybrid sounds to list.

We were about forty minutes into the Mentiritas set. Wil-Dog was going full-tilt and CAVA (Cavaliscious when she lends her vocals to the atomic rancholo party band project) had already been escorted in on a litter fit for a queen after which she promptly dismissed her subjects with a haughty wave. "Let's go the wrap party for THE RUNAWAYS," Francisco says. "Where?" I ask. "El Cid, open bar and a spread. I have to say high to Joan Jett," he explains almost nonchalantly, like no big deal. Of course my jaw drops. He also mentions the need to drop by the Los Angeles Theater Center for a party with Very Be Careful, but I'm already walking alongside him headed to the car. El Cid is hopping with the cast and crew. We catch Ms. Jett on her way out. She's on a flight to a couple of stadium shows in Japan, no surprise. I'm too dumbstruck to tell her she was my first and only

vinyl record crush. Period. She looks exactly the same, hasn't changed. All cut, black-and-white Chucks, eye-liner curled up slightly at the ends, spiked bangs hanging low over her forehead. Awww, man! And I'm speechless... something which almost never happens. I was "scirrred" of rock royalty for the first time in my life.

After that, we cruise downtown and it was all incredibly cool. Said hi teatrero maestro José Luís Valenzuela. When we finally rolled into Trópico de Nopal for a last call at the "official" Mentiritas after-party, I couldn't have been happier. And that sums up another unexpected evening in Los. Sometimes it makes no sense to make plans... so that said, I've spent the week in delerium. Played hooky on Monday and went for a swim. Watched the goats on Tuesday at Farmlab and here we are again, Friday, juggling a blog, the chivos, a sale of a two-piece work by Steven Amado (Chatismo), the beginnings of a poem that I will read tomorrow at Self Help Graphics for the "16 years later, Femicides in Ciudad Juarez" event being organized by Rigo Maldonado and Victoria Delgadillo. Please come show your support for an important issue in our community. Todos somos las víctimas de los femicidios en Juaritos. The situation there has not changed.

Brooklyn & Boyle... A State of Mayan

2009-07-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

If the ever-so-kind and generous Kevin Roderick over at LA Observed has followed the progress of Brooklyn & Boyle, I think I can ascribe it to a parallel sense of optimism and a general commitment to media both in and out of our respective communities. Roderick, an amazing journalist and scholar of everything LA, is a model and an anti-model simultaneously, and there's a part of me that would like to think he's genuinely pleased with me and the David-and-Goliath allegories inherent in what we're trying to do. Lil' bit upstart mag on paper, no less and without a website tilting at windmills, while the big time daily paper dwindles and founders. While the legion-like online community that assembles at Roderick's site daily is scattered nationwide and formally entrenched in all media matters having to do with LA (an unheralded feat he is to be commended for), over on this end we’re just as excited about reaching those with maybe less access to the web. I’m talking Metro riders who sit in front of the space where the magazine is assembled (also called Brooklyn & Boyle, BTW) every morning to catch a city bus to work. I’m talking Metro commuters who bus it to Union station from City Terrace and Red Line it to Hollywood where they staff restaurants and offices and medical centers. These are the readers we look for, the ones we want, and we’re thrilled at the possibility that the Gold Line will make transit for them more fluid, giving them a few extra minutes to read the latest issue and still get them to where they need to be more quickly. Though I'm not ruling out the possibility that we might eventually have an online presence, I'm pretty psyched at simply being out on paper with ink that stains your fingertips and a broad range of writing.

So, here we are feeling both goofy and giddy, at some kind of a midway point, on our sixth and—I dare say--finest issue yet, a newsprint tabloid created in the spirit of community. Organically, B & B has evolved into just the kind of locally-based arts journal I’ve imagined for nearly 10 years, a neighborhood voice which looks forward and inward and outward, all at the same time, while spotlighting the very real arts and culture treasure trove to be found on this side of the river. I find it hard not regard the project as the child I never had, a small saludo content to circulate in hand-to-hand exchanges and at bus stops throughout the still largely Latino neighborhoods it hopes to cover and serve as adroitly and honestly as possible.

Above all, it is an expression of gratitude, a thank you to la ciudad de Los Angeles, the world-class pueblo that took me in as a child and then again as a grown up. It is, for me, akin to that mythical place of herons, a homeland that continues to open magical doorways into a multi-layered, global mystery, a world where hipsters and Southsider cholos and norteño cowboys with glittering accordions slung over their backs rub shoulders with each other on a daily basis. A place where the fantastic media convergence that is LA Observed can nurture and root for a start up newsprint platform that hopes with plucky chutzpah that it will see another month and another edition.

Being indignant about gentrification and the hipsterization of our barrios is odds, perhaps, with a need to create a tentative peace and a lasting harmony, but it is a worthy exercise. It is a conversation that is far from over even if the progressive, liberal, tattooed and pierced peaceniks are tired of hearing it. Even though I’m no one to tell the new neighbors flooding in that they’re not wanted, I do feel a tinge of dissatisfaction when I see a transplant from outside of LA settling in Los Feliz then launching a website called Eastside Living Los Angeles, to cover the “fabled Eastside.” Sometimes, the hippest and coolest folks in the ‘hood are the ones with third-generation ties to the sacred lands where our ancestors grew corn and squash for centuries before the hemisphere was colonized. Please be mindful and respectful of that in your attempts to find and "break" the cool new spots. In some cases, these third-generation Angelenos wind up being the most worldly, navigating between the Getty and Skirball while doing business in downtown and heading home to unincorporated East LA county at the end of the day for te con miel de maguey with their parents.

From where I sit, on a maguey and cactus and palm and lemon tree-encrusted bluff overlooking Obregon Park, just blocks from Self-Help Graphics and under a new moon, I think of the Lakota brothers, warriors who often said hoka hey, meaning, roughly, "it is a good day to die," the implicit converse being equally true. "It is a good day to be alive." And while I may miss Warwick Ave. y la familia Perez in El Sereno, I bring it here, to these new digs on an Eastside cliffside that still feeds and nourishes in a way that the Gold Room in Echo park will never do again. Here atop the five-story drop, I must simply remember that I bring all of the Chicano barrios and suburbs I’ve ever inhabited along with me, glued to the luminous fibers stretching outward from the metaphorical ombligo, the belly-button that connects us to all to one another and finds itself reflected in the serenity of the lunar mirror, the face of our abuelita lending light to earth after the sun has set. And who cares if Castañeda merely imagined or made up the curanderos we have come to know and love as Don Juan and Don Genaro?

So yes, thank you, Rosaura Ramirez, for giving me the opportunity to inhabit a hilltop precipice, and thank you Dona Ofelia Esparza for carrying the light these long many years. Gracias por exponer su obra en la galeria y por haber traido tantos hijos e hijas al mundo. The talent and visionary grace you embody have transferred to your children, who have earned every right to ask hipsters and newcomers and even die-hard Chicano literalocos y literatontos like me, “Where you from?”

Welcome to Brooklyn & Boyle, not just an intersection but a state of Mayan…

Doña Ofelia y El Papalotero

2009-06-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Fridays suddenly trickle in under a June gloom cloud cover, even if our disposition is disproportionately sunny. But the afterglow and after burn like psychedelic tracers from a glorious dream are completely justified. I can start with yesterday's tranquil spin at goat tending within the Anabolic Monument where I decided that Chiquita's little dude should be officially christened "Deer Dancer." Chiquita is a sheep and deer hybrid who leads the small group of chivas who are helping bring nature back to the park many Angelinos used to know as the Cornfields. After herding goats and feeding the foul, I was scooped up by none other than Brandy Maya Healy, a new contributing writer at the magazine, a dancer and longtime City of LA Cultural Affairs department staff member--okay, okay... also Wayne Healy's kid--and her companion Joey Maramba who straps on an electric bass regularly as part a band called the Ninja Academy, fast forward to a small reception at Homeboy Industries where Luís Rodriguez shared some poems as part of the celebration honoring the launch of Homeboy Review, a literary journal now being published by Homeboy Press, a division of Homeboy Industries. It was great to finally meet Father G. live and in person. Next stop: Señor Fish, where ChicanArtista Leo Limón unveiled an incredible show of paintings and oil pastel drawings. We can never get enough of those wry and extremely witty River Catz, bro'! So then it's a Downtown Artwalk to The Hive Gallery where the aesthetic is goth-meets-graphic novel zine, laced with graffiti and Giant Robot-plus-tattoo and Heavy Metal (the adult illustrated fantasy magazine and not the musical genre, Random) imagery. Talk about sensory overload.

Okay, so that was this last Thursday night. Rewind slightly to just over a week ago when Brooklyn & Boyle, the small art space that's grown up around the publishing effort, opened a one-woman show for maestra Ofelia Esparza. About 200 folks came through to congratulate the beloved 77-year-old community artist and an elder who continues to mentor young artists on the Eastside while teaching us how to be kinder and more forgiving human beings. Ofelia's work as an altarista is well-known, but her paintings and monoprints are luminous. Cheech Marin would do well to consider including her work in his storied collection of Chicano art.

Then on Monday, after a quick visit with good people at a send off cena for East LA Cityhood advocate Dr. Oscar Gonzales, (he's going to be a deputy director for the Agricultural Department in D.C.), it was back to ground zero for Eastside cultura, vida y comunidad, where Lilia Ramirez of Liliflor Studios was kind enough to host a meeting with Council Member José Huizar and the group we're calling A.R.T.E.S. (Artists Revitalizing the East Side). It's enough to say that we aren't waiting around to be "discovered" by the next wave of urban gentrifiers and artsy pioneers like those in Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Echo Park who are under the mistaken impression that they are living on the Eastside.

Of course, this all brings us back to a Farmlab/Metabolic Studios morning visit today where I picked up the carrot cake I left in small brown paper bag on the roof of the small barn and gallinero built for the goats and chickens which will fertilize the parkland as part of a reclamation and renewal effort that includes the cultivation of native pants like sage and xempaxuchil (marigolds for the uninitiated). While I was there this morning, I was able to speak at length with Don Esequiel Contreras, an 86-year-old master kite maker from Lincoln Heights who spoke of his childhood in the neighboring hills. I thought of his young tocayo, Esequiel Hernández, the young U.S.-born goat herder who was killed by Marines patrolling the U.S. border near Redford, Texas in 1997. The trigger man was a Chicano from Califas. Is it any different now? Gangbangers killing each other. Chicano cops harassing cholos. Latino soldiers forced to brutalize Iraqi and Afghani people. They say the murder of Esequiel was an accident and that absolved the U.S. government, who compensated the Hernández family with over a million dollars in blood money. Everything goes in a circle. I'm tending goats now myself and stand in awe of an octogenarian kite builder whose youthful spirit humbles me. The Mujeres de Maiz offered a song in honor of Ofelia at the June 4th opening here at the gallery and my heart soared. I knew in my soul that my jefita's huitzilin spirit was elated at the outpouring of love and energy for a true maestra. Between Ofelia and Don Esequiel I stand transfixed... transformado, pero de a deveras. Image above: "Tus Recuerdos" Monoprint by Ofelia Esparza.

Brooklyn & Boyle, Vol. 1, No. 5 y ke?

2009-05-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

It was an arduous journey, a long-uphill climb, a long distance run punctuated by a trip to the Piaute-Shoshone reservation in the high Eastern Sierras, where I met the Tribal Council and returned to the circle, the ceremony of light on the slopes at the foot of Mt. Whitney. I'm talking about the effort to get one more issue of Brooklyn & Boyle out. I won't launch into a litany of all the "you should have been there" happenstances of art and wonder on the eastern and central edges of Los Angeles during the interim, won't mention how impressed I was that State Senator Gil Cedillo gave the keynote address at an immigration conference and how, as much as I've been pleased with the plucky chutzpah demonstrated by young Emanuel Pleitez, I officially throw my support behind Cedillo. His sincerity and empathy are genuine.

'Nuff said. I won't digress into a discussion of the several incredible art exhibitions I managed to catch since the last post or how cool it was to visit the Museum of the Southwest with chingón sculpturor Michael Amescua, who will show there for the Museum of the Arroyo Day on May 17th, by the way. No, it'll all have to be left for the next visit. Instead, I offer the fifth and finest edition of the little tabloid newsprint periodical that could, a new kind of community arts magazine for the REAL Eastside. In this, our Mother's Day issue, find an essay by Dr. Karen Dávalos and Chris Torres on our cover artist, Margaret García. The painting featured, a sumptuous piece entitled "Our Daily Bread," oil on canvas, recently sold at her Fremont Gallery one-woman show.

We also feature a review of Sleepdealer by none other than Ehecatl Chumacero, an interview with the illustrious Ruben "Funkahuatl" Guevara, a review by Brandy Maya Healy on the Poli Marichal exhibition at Tropicó de Nopal Gallery and Art Space titled "Sleepwalking in LA,"a review of the new Octavio Solís play Lydia and, as if that weren't enough to entice your interest, a poem by Peter J. Harris and a poem by David R. Díaz, respectively. On the younger end of the spectrum but no less poetically powerful, we interview Frank Escamilla, your friendly neighborhood Bus Stop Prophet. Look for it. Ask for it. I have a feeling you know how and where to find it. If not, well, sorry. I just don't have the time to list the locations of all the drops I'll be making in the next few days. And if did have time, I rather spend it thanking everyone who makes the magazine possible time after time. Stay tuned for issue Number 6. I promise the wait won't be as long. ¡Que viva la palabra y nuestra comunidad!

Sleep Dealer Opens in LA & New York

2009-04-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

It's finally here. While the buzz has been electric for over a year as New York's Alex Rivera made the film festival circuit with a sci-fi film that turns that reinvents the genre. If you've ever read Gibson's Nueromancer, imagine that with a heavy dose of Fuentes, Borges and Cortázar and even a peek of Bolaños joining the cyberseer on the page. Rivera has crafted a riveting chronicle of a world where immigrants are still shunned but connected via nodes to a network that allows them to operate robotic labor from the big border cities such as Tijuana. We get all of their labor but none of their actual physical presence, an idea I'm sure the minutemen and the zenophobes will go simply apeshit over.

Though I only caught snippets of the film at LALIFF last year, I look forward to seeing it in a bona fide movie house, chocolate crunch loaded popcorn with a smidgeon of butter included. Confession: I had a Mr. Spock doll as a child. I treasured a mass produced lithographic portfolio collection of early acrylic and watercolor renderings which would eventually become the storyboard designs for Star Wars. When I discovered the still as yet unfulfilled promise of the internet in the pages of the dark and foreboding cyberpunk novel that started it all, I was home. Alex Rivera is the international heir to the noir prophecies unfurled in those early tomes. Look for an official review of Sleep Dealer in the pages of an upcoming issue of Brooklyn & Boyle. I promised not to describe in detail the ski trip a former girlfriend and I took with Alex and a former girlfriend of his so as to spare everyone the nostalgic resurgence of romantic melancholy (everyone says, "enough already, vato. Give it a rest!"). Maybe it'll go in the book. Reindome desenfrenadamente about now!!! Let's hope I can corner Alex at the NALIP conference (which I'll attend without a badge by the way to help Josefina Lopez at her book table) long enough for a real sit down interview.

And on the subject of the upstart Eastside arts and life magazine now headed for it's fifth installment, it was a monumental pleasure talking to Ruben "Funkahuatl" Guevara. I'm probably scooping a local weekly by mentioning the fact that he's going in their annual "people" issue. But he'll also be published almost verbatim in Brooklyn & Boyle over the next several issues. The first segment, as told to your most grateful editor/publisher, is tentatively titled "Ruben Guevara on Music, Eastside Arts and the Tao of Love." Stay tuned for more. The next issue of B & B has got a music and film focus, but we'll be exuberantly proud to publish a spring poem by Peter Harri s, a bard's bard and arts educator who I happen to have some serious history with. He attended a journalism workshop at Berkeley about 20 years ago for writers of color with my sister Joanne and now widely published author Luis J. Rodriguez. Only fitting, by the way, that Ruben Guevara has been helping Tia Chucha (the bookstore/cafe Rodriguez founded in el valluco de San Fernando) with fundraising strategy. We come full circle yet again.

I know, I know... I've been less than diligent here, pero ya saben... we have been far from fallow. Trying to score a photo of Ollin for the cover and may wind up having to write the story myself if another extremely talented but also extremely busy scribe doesn't come through.

Blogero or Bloggero?

2009-03-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

I can't decide which is better, blogero or bloggero. The correct spelling in Spanish would be "bloguero," (Correction thanks to Abelardo at LatinoLA.com) but somehow the double "g" gives it heft, no? Anybuey, I suppose I could make an argument for adding the @ sign at the end to make it genderless or include the female blogera simultaneously in one of those genius coinages that came out of the "mechista" attempts to examine our internalized sexism, that is, machismo built into the language itself. Still, the irregular words are interesting. Like the word for problem, for example. "Problema" should be preceeded by the feminine article "la", but is instead introduced properly with the masculine article "el". Does this mean that, most of the time, problems are of male origin? All of this is round about way of saying that I was impressed with the 12th Annual Mujeres de Maiz presentation at Farmlab. Roughly a thousand participants caught some of the heavy hitter wombyn poets, musicians, actors, dancers, drummers, artisans and visual artists from the West Coast and beyond. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of wrapping up the latest issue of Brooklyn & Boyle, and I was also signed on to watch the goats Farmlab brought in to graze the former cornfield which will soon be a garden in the shape of a mystical pre-Colombian symbol, according to former Teatro Campesino stalwart as well as Native and Environmental rights activist/media artist Olivia Chumacero, who was the Farmlab liaison. Thanks to Felicia Montes and "y la tropa indefatigable de mujeres" that includes Womyn Imagemakers Aurora Guerrero, Maritza Alvarez and Claudia Mercado. Aurora was in town to begin work on a new movie. Karla Legaspy is helping her. Even Sleepdealer writer/director Alex Rivera popped in to check out the MdM event.

Still more MdM events to come, and it so happens that I'll post as I go. For the moment, I'm pleased that the Brooklyn & Boyle gallery space has hosted three exhibition thus far and is working on a fourth in honor of Earth Day in April. The East LA blogeros/as were here on Monday and we had a round of Purgatory Pizza. It was extremely cool to finally meet some of those on my blog roll in person. Random Hero was, of course, the star. This is partially due to the fact that he's been adopted by most of us viejos and viejas, and blogs from his iPhone in a manner befitting a true Bladerunner boy. I've warned him about growing up to to be completely "necio" like Gerry Meraz or Victoria Delgadillo, the two most sardonic of the Eastsider bloggers. Talk about dry wit and detached bemusement. It'll take me some time to upload links and an image or two... it has indeed been a minute or so since this semi-weekly spatter of notes and observations from El Sereno and the rest of NELA down to 4th and Boyle was kept current. Don't forget the Grand Opening at Tia Chucha's new location. You won't want to miss Ruben "Funkahuatl" Guevara jamming with former Doors drummer John Densmore.

I was fortunate to hear Funkahuatl get down on on the mic with sum poetree & bluez at a birthday soiree for Adolfo Guzman López, founding member of the Taco Shop Poets and a reporter at KPCC. A certain "clashero" described the event as a chicano/chilanga/chileno collision of culture. Couldn't have said it better me-self. Props to Willy Herron for hosting. Willy was joined by Sid Medina and Xiuy Velo for some new musical material and a few choice blasts from the now glittering punk past. Can't get over how cool Willy has ornamented his goth-rock pad. It's a veritable museum to not-too-over-the-top classical "churrigueresco" (let the art mavens, the phantom sightlookers and the cultural curators look that one up, que no, Will?) done up City Terrace style.

Muralismo Part 2

2009-03-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

At home, he nurses the muse, gets his hands dirty on a few guerrilla mural projects, including an anti-apartheid mural on a makeshift shanty on the west mall in the middle of the Univerity of Texas campus, which he paints alongside his brother-in-law Rolando Castro, a gifted young artist from Del Rio, Texas. The mural and shanty are torched within days by anonymous perpetrators. It is his first experience with politically motivated vandalism that seeks to whitewash the historical facts and erase the evidence of oppression. Perhaps the low-budget mural had made frat boys and racists uncomfortable enough to lash out.
Today, as an editor and a cultural curator who was finally brave enough to make his way westward to the creative homeland that first touched him with those monumental murals born in the fire of change and anEast LA renaissance, he has to ask himself, have things really changed that much? Fledgling graffiti artists are persecuted and often mistakenly profiled as gang-affiliated even though the art form has been validated at the highest echelons of internationally elite art institutions. A moratorium on new murals in Los Angeles is gridlocked in a process that city politicians, policy makers and bureaucrats seem unable to unravel. And finally, the children in neighborhoods that are consistently deprived of arts and humanities in a steadfast effort to deny them the very things that make them less likely to become statistics and vandals are no longer connected to their own cultural and artistic traditions. They are largely disassociated from the history and thus the significance of murals that spoke to the generation that came before.

They have no idea who Yreina Cervantes or Judith Hernandez or Judy Baca are or what SPARC (Social & Public Art Resource Center) was all about. They were never told or taught about Wayne Healy or Frank Romero or Carlos Almaraz or even Eloy Torrez, all artists who have lived or worked on the Eastside or in Downtown LA. Meanwhile, the iconic Anthony Quinn mural, a symbol of everything good and beautiful in Los Angeles, falls into disrepair. Almost makes one think there are those only too happy to see a legacy fade. All soapbox rants aside, the mural is LA. The city is not Hollywood, not some snooty invitation-only reception at the Getty that helps the landed or the moneyed gentry feel somehow superior. It lives, instead in it’s forgotten status as the mural capital of the world, a laurel that no longer applies.
Murals are an antidote, and art heals. There can be no other explanation. Consider this: millions are spent yearly on graffiti abatement while NOTHING is spent on mural programs that engage the young people who are crying out desperately to be noticed. Where do you think tagging and graffiti begin? They are emblematic symbols of fragile human identities, young souls who spray paint on walls because they have no other modes for self-expression. The solutions are there. The artists are still here. They are only too happy to revisit the neighborhoods where they first began transforming public spaces into outdoor galleries and museums. Our city needs them more than ever. Our children will die without them, rotting in jails or medicating themselves into oblivion because art is necessary. It is not a luxury or a privilege. Don’t you see? (Image above: El Corrido de Boyle Heights, mural at César Chavez and Soto by David Botello, Wayne Healy and George Yepes.)

Muralismo in the Mirror of Nostalgia, Phase I

2009-03-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

The murals loom large and surreal over downtown LA. While his studies have not thus far included a formal survey of Chicano art history, he knows enough from magazines sent home to Texas by a sister on the West Coast to appreciate the spectacular vista before him. A two-year stay during childhood in La Puente and regular drives along I-10 had exposed him early to some of the movimiento politics and the Chicano-centric images gracing walls on buildings and public spaces he suddenly finds himself gawking at in amazement.

A Che Guevara t-shirt at nine, a copy of Black Elk Speaks at 12 and marches in protest of police brutality alongside a local chapter of the Brown Berets had solidified his ideas but the luminous beauty of the LA murals had already marked him forever in more important ways. They were beyond the ideological, beyond the politics of liberation and justice for the descendents of Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest. Skimming through copies of Con Safos, Regeneración, Avance and Xismearte magazines while assisting at a small space in Austin called the “Museo del Barrio” established the League of United Chicano Artists (LUChA), an arts non-profit), he was often lost in his own world, a universe colored in brilliant hues and peopled by a panorama envisioned by LA’s Los Streetscapers.

One might say he was steeped in art, art history and Chicano art history in particular long before the formal exposure in a college reader compiled by Dr. Jacinto Quirarte for a groundbreaking class with Dr. Ramon Favela, an instructor who introduced him to the Cubist work of Diego Rivera. Shortly after that pivotal visit to the City of Angels, he would enroll in Favela’s course. Similarly, he was destined to immerse himself in the learning even more, avidly devouring the lesson plan in Favela’s class before moving on to a Latin American Art History section with Dr. Jacquelyn Barnitz. The small, bird-like professor would bring him to the work of many others, successors to revered Mexican mural masters— “los tres grandes” as she liked to call them—who had triggered the LA Chicano mural movement still lingering in his imagination.

So at the moment, he’s tooling around the left coast in a BMW with Daniel Verches, a young political operative he’s met only once before in at a “Latinos in the Peace Movement” conference held in Denver. Danny, who prefers to go by Dan, is an aide to California Assemblyman Art Torres. While obviously the less strident of the two, Verches is, in fact, the Eastside native, even if his aspirations are more middle class than revolutionary, more Gucci and Armani than Mexica and Red Road brotherhood. He is patient and kind as he humors the art hungry activist kid from Austin.

From Placita Olvera he is whisked away to a Democratic Party presidential campaign function at a community center on Brooklyn Ave. in East LA where he is introduced to Mrs. Michael Dukakis and a smart young woman who also happens to be student body president at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights. From there, the pair head first to Melrose and then toward Venice Beach. For days after his departure, the murals decorating walls from East LA to the Victor Clothing Company building downtown and a score ocean front rooming houses, surf shops and head shops glow incandescently in his head. (Image: Kent Twitchell, Bride and Groom, 1972, Victor Clothing Company, 242 South Broadway. North wall, latex and acrylic on masonry. 70'x70')

The Mural is LA.

2009-03-11T14:07:00.001-07:00

So we haven't been posting for a few months. Took the time to launch the REAL Eastside arts and culture magazine. And I don't say that lightly. Kind of interesting that New Angeles Monthly, who I was happy to write for, is now only going to publish quarterly. Say hello to Brooklyn & Boyle: Art & Life in Boyle Heights and Beyond, our humble effort to create a print space for good writing and community. Everyone knows by now that Tu Ciudad Los Angeles went belly up. The gravy train was good for awhile, but again, the business model was flawed. Not that mine isn't, but we're four issues into our modest monthly and the response has been overwhelming. Most of our support has come from small art galleries, studio spaces, local eateries, mom-and-pop businesses and artists or arts promotion professionals themselves. Who says EastSiders aren't proud of their progress and their cultural contributions? I'm happy to host the next blogero meeting at the gallery/artspace that came about as a result of a collaboration with Josefina Lopez (REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES), who is one of the most produced Chicana playwrights in the country and a now a formidable novelist in the Chica Lit scene. So here's a piece in the current issue, now that that the mag is catching it's stride. With four down and another in the hopper, B & B is a proud part of the emerging East 1st arts corridor as a new neighbor on a three block stretch that includes East Side Luv, Liliflor Open Studios, Casa 0101 theaterspace and the soon to be open arts hall where our very own Josefina López will be celebrating the publication of her book with a birthday party. Read the essay in several parts over the next few posts and try to make it by the community fundraiser for An Unfinished Dream, a documentary film in progress on students working their way through college next Thursday on the 19th. We're hosting the event and have invited Darren DeLeon, a Bay area poet and spoken word artist to throw down some palabra.

An excerpt from this month's Brooklyn & Boyle: The Mural is LA - Part I

It's a Beautiful Day

2008-11-05T07:42:00.000-08:00

A new dawn rolls down over the hilltops here in El Sereno. Despite a slight haze, I bask in the residual euphoria from an election victory that signals an end to the monstrous greed and warlust that drove those foul Machiavellians to greater and greater heights of hubris and a false sense of invincible superiority gleaned from so many decades of late nite prowls along the marble-floored halls of our nation's capital. It was a supreme joy to hear our friend Roberto Lovato, a writer and essayist who covers politics from a sharp vantage (read his take on how to take on the Homeland Security militarization of immigration issue and ICE raids, please!) on KPFK radio with Amy Goodman as Roberto Leni and I searched for an address in Silver Lake where a group of us had a greed to gather for the election coverage. We missed the concession but arrived in time to hear the victory speech. The world was suddenly new. We danced and celebrated with musica troopical, enchilada and tequila. Ric Salinas, one third of Culture Clash, was ever the gracious host. Since, I 'd voted early and drove a borrowed vehicle to pick up the first issue of Brooklyn & Boyle all the way down in Gardena, I had a double reason to be uncontrollably joyful. Yes it is finally here. The long promised revista/periodico... Along with the coolest rock star President-elect in this country's history, we have a new mag. And the winds of sea change and rebirth that were clearly marked by the slew of ceremonies and celebrations in honor of Dia de los Muertos I was privileged enough to witness in the week or more leading up to this historic moment.

It began with the Secretos y Cartas del Los Muertos show at Ave. 50 where Barbara Carrasco curated a show of which included collaborations between writers and visual artists. For this, Ofelia Esparza created a small but poignant nicho while Harry Gamboa, a writer and a visual artist, created piece using a rain slicker that evoked the finest moments of ASCO and LA punk as political fashion. Over at Cactus Gallery in Eagle Rock, Sandra Mastrianni and her crew showed smaller works that were part of an exhibition called "Skullz." Film Xica Leticia Castañeda spearheaded the community altar there, her first. ChimMaya was also part of the mix with a superlative show the following day that featured a much larger altar by Ofelia Esparza and some of LA's hottest Latino artists, too many to name here, unfortunately. The ensuing week was highlighted by an Obama Te Ama fundraiser I helped promote at Hecho en Mexico here in El Sereno held immediately after a lively and inspiring encounter with teatreros and filmmakers at a Director's Guild of America event held to honor Luís Valdez, an activist, filmmaker and playwright who needs no introduction.

Day of the Dead the following week unfolded with all the promise and beauty of a sunrise over East LA and the San Gabriel Valley. A Thursday night visit to Trópico de Nopal Gallery & Art Space, where artist and visionary Reyes Rodriguez hosts his annual Ofrendas extravaganza (complete with a Calavera Fashion & Walking Altar show) for the altar viewing was moving in a way that communicated some of what my mother has been trying to tell me since she passed onward in April. It's about moving forward while honoring all of our relations. Ofelia Esparza's tribute to a renowned native woman from this region was just as powerful as the one created by her neice Juana Flores. Saturday at Hollywood Forever Cemetery was much more carnavalesque. Three bandstands, music and long food/beverage lines were a bit daunting but the festive atmosphere carried Leni and I well into the wee hours as we traded jokes with Lalo López who sold out of his Viva Obama posters (pictured above). During all the madness, I managed to sneak away to see the altares at Self Help Graphics, where I added a tabacco prayer to my mother as part of interactive the Mujeres de Maíz altar. Maritza Alvarez and Felicia Montes and Claudia Mercado and all of the firme guerreras were on the blessed side of a world crying out for justice and peace, for healing and an end to ICE immigration raids as well as an end to borders that separate native people. I was transported and empowered. Rigo Maldonado and Alma López created an altar which was at once a diaphanuos mobile and an reminder of how we make family outside of blook kin. It also celebrated 35 years of the Self Help Día de los Muertos tradition.

Of course, the picture and they cycle of destiny would not have been complete without a final DDLM fix at Self Help Graphics on Sunday, the following day, the actual day upon which the celebration is acknowledged. At 4:40 p.m., Self Help was already crowded. Moving through the parking lot in a face painted by a talented young woman named Brenda Gonzalez (who had a friend drive her to my El Sereno redoubt for the make-up session), I parked myself upstairs and painted faces for the better part of three hours. It was honestly and literally a blast... exhausting, but well beyond rewarding. The support for Self Help was more than evident. The important cultural work begun by Self Help over three decades ago will continue, even if it does not occur in the same physical building. This much I know... ahí nos vemos. Viva Obama!

Bajo Las Estrellas All Across Los

2008-10-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

The weeks were a dizzy spectacle. One of those dizzy in-a-good-way friezes that stand out in bold relief and linger like a warm day spent soaking in cool water. Eloy Torrez, painter, musician and muralist was asked to perform songs from his repertoire of original music on October 13th at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) where he currently has work in a show of paintings from the much-heralded Cheech Marin collection of Chicano Art. While many might know of his brilliant mural on Broadway or the Hollywood High School tribute to the film industry, not many are aware of his work as a singer-songwriter or the fact that he painted a mural in France in a Algerian neighborhood that was not immediately receptive. His work, like his music is—as a result—about inclusion, erasing differences and redefining what it means to be a person of color. With an almost Psychedelic Furs-inflected selection of about ten songs, Eloy and two of the boys from Maria Fatal along with Charles Jefferson on bass delivered soul searing music on the LACMA West patio to a small but enthusiastic crowd. Ofelia Esparza was there to hand out marigolds on honor of los muertitos as Eloy opened the set with a song to his late mother. Self Help Graphics was there in spirit and with giant paper mache calaveras as stage decoration. It was pretty near perfect.

And this while I was still glowing with euphoria at having attended and participated in a more personal fundraiser for Daisy Tonantzin “Bajo las Estrellas” on our end of town just a week-and-change before. To go from the booming and melodic vocals of Rocio Vasquez AKA Lobamora, the ultra-lounge Latin retro experiments (all successful) of Chicano Batman and sage spoken word from Los Poets del Norte on the East Side at First Street Studios to equally soulful sounds at LACMA would have been itself a marvelous, but then you follow that with a birthday party for Ruben “Funkahuatl” Guevara, a tried and true rocker, music historian, producer as well as poet and you have something on the order of miraculous. Guevara founded Ruben and the Jets once upon a time and even has the onerous distinction of having jammed with Frank Zappa before pioneering LA’s Rock en Español movement. With a crushed-velvet robe and a pork pie hat, he was channeling the Dalai Llama and shared a set that was barely contained by the teaming East Side Luv Wine Bar. The guests included so many artists, poets and musicians that you couldn’t turn 10-degrees to either the right or left with out literally bumping right up against one.

And Rubén’s show only brought us through to Thursday, if you can believe that. Hence my description of the recent weeks as dizzy. I’d have lost my blogging rights if I’d even thought about missing the Epicentro Poets and their Poetic Epidemic the following night at Casa 0101. Born in the Salvadoran and Central American Diaspora the followed the civil wars and those fleeing to LA and San Francisco to avoid the right-wing paramilitary death squad inspired chaos, Epicentro refers to the center of the earthquake that hit San Salvador and these poets put it down with all the might of a major magnitude terremoto. Leticia Hernandez-Linares and Gustavo Vásquez are the most familiar of the group, but the new faces were not far behind in terms of depth and delivery. It was one of those nights when, instead of the music, it was the poetry, pure and right-out-the-barrel, that drew tears to my eyes. The photographs from Cuba in downtown gallery on Saturday (the next night) were the proverbial frosting since they took me back to a recent time when poets from throughout the hemisphere gathered for a tribute to indigenous people. And finally, there was Willie Herron’s Boyle Heights open mic on Sunday night, which took me back to the birth of Chicano Punk and Los Illegals. Willie might have been joking but he said he’ll christen the weekly forum for music and poetry “I Am” as in “yo soy” but it can also be read as an acronym… IAM or Illegal Acoustic Movement, a fitting name and a fitting end to 14 days in LA. You’ll forgive me if I just want to nest for awhile… maybe try to finally get that first issue of Brooklyn & Boyle out. Even if I have to crank it out on a borrowed machine.

Ménage à trois as never imagined...

2008-10-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

The islands of myth and the participles of pain, the tree of knowledge and the aching emptiness of lost love or childhood… They are all here, here in this room where the trio comes together to confide in whispered essences. Ménage à trois, the fabled threesome assembled here under “A Very Old Tree” (Marichal) where the watchers are also seekers, brings together the work of three very distinct printmakers. Poli Marichal, Victor Rosas and Marianne Sadowski, a group that represents, in many ways, the antithesis of the triumvirate, have launched much of their radically different work from Self-Help Graphics and its Los de Abajo Collective, perhaps the most sincere and community-based arts institution in East LA if not the entire metropolis.

As creators, they live and breathe and dream a world and a space where love and longing are tempered by life and still informed by myth and fantasy. They are all here. In this room, this room that has been transformed, that has become for brief moments a Los Angeles or Washington D.C. skyline, the bleak underbelly of urban landscapes, political surfaces where hypocrisy and corruption are rooted out and underscored.

Here in this room, a room that has also become a shifting, a transcendence and an escape from those things marked by the fear and the violence and the excess that have become emblematic of sex and the simultaneous violation or debauchery of our planet… here in the sweetness of three disparate voices, three gentle artists who work quietly into the wee hours with images carved from wood or etched into linoleum or scratched into plexiglass, here we are also transported to the “Island of Mysterious Flowers” (Sadowski) and a realm where memories and myth float across the maps of our innocence and a time when fantastical beasts and creatures roamed both land and sea.

All soft spoken and serious, Sadowski, Marichal and Rosas come together here in this room as necessary elements, as a tri-colored banner or tri-part whole. Incredibly, their conversation here is not hermetic. It is not sealed and inaccessible. Instead, it resounds with the pain and pleasure of creation, of birth and death surrounded by the flora and fauna of timelessness and written in the hues of a public entreaty, a call to the common good.

These images are thus missives to our subconscious desire for the exotic that does not turn other beings or objects into fetish but imbues them with their primordial significance, unlocks their grace and allows us to peer into entirely new dimensions. This is the secret. This is what makes us voyeurs. We are the seekers and the watchers. We are the eyes that float eerily inside the tree of knowledge. We are drawn, fascinated by the idea, the sense that these images and these artists have learned a hidden dance, uncovered a buried ritual and that—in their voyage from beyond—they have broken the code and created a universe where the work and images speak among themselves to each other. We can imagine a conversation that occurs on the walls at Self Help’s Boccalero Gallery after night falls in the dim light when no one is there, when no one is looking.

It is a ménage of epic proportions and a simple a menagerie, a skeletal reduction where we see ourselves reflected in the dark foreboding knowledge that not all is well, that the world is not always accommodating and kind, a place where we say, “Fuck Hope” (Rosas) with almost no irony or sarcastic humor, a place where the blueprints of injustice are conceived and executed.
Yet in the context of that conversation, the dialogue that occurs as Rosas, Sadowski and Marichal share their witty and—at times caustically bemused— vision, we are flown directly on the wings of desire and yearning to a geography of hope populated by magical hybrids and the beaming tides of imagination unchecked, unhinged and unleashed without fury, without the glare of a gallery spotlight or a Hollywood cliché.

We travel to “The Day the Nests Were Left Alone” (Sadowski), an antidote to a place where gumball machines are all that remain to dispense the deer, the turtle and the honeybee for profit in a private “Zoo” (Rosas), the terrain where “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys express outrage (Marichal) at the havoc the “Ciego/Blind” (Rosas) continue to wreak upon the earth. Yet we can still awaken, we are made to understand here, in the world where “Trees Can Dream” (Marichal) and where the possibility of change is real in spite of the insomnia, the strong coffee well into the dawn when we are compelled to share a story, a picture, a song, in spite of our anger at what is often done to nature in our names. We can float over and beyond the residual sadness and the idea that our lives are bleak or that we are unequipped to make things better. In the hands of these three, the images have become totems of fire and rebirth. There can, in fact, be a tender unfolding, a renewal of the psyche.

(Excerpted from "Ménage à trois: A Tender Unfolding," a review of the last exhibition at Self Help Graphics. Images: Poli Marichal)

The Butterscotch Guayabera and Notes From the Film Festival Frontlines

2008-09-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

So I bounced into First Street Studios for the first-ever Tlalpaleria event a few weeks back. The muestra brought an even newer group of talented Chican@/Latin@ artists to the storefront's forefront. Chalk another one up for Lilia Ramiriez, the fine artist and jeweler behind many of the explosively creative events going down consistently in Boyle Heights of late. For the opening, Liliflor gathered spoken word artists, a capoeira troupe, DJ Poncho and a score of gifted artisans who, as a whole, were part of what was being billed as an "astral" experience. Among those who populated the "Stellar Artisan Alley" were Noelle Reyes and Danell Hughes, a pair of fashionistas, El Sereno community activist moms and owners of the Mi Vida boutique in South Pasadena. Specializing in classic vintage wear, cool contemporary threads, hand crafted accessories and original art, Mi Vida is, above all, an elegant aesthetic expression that marries their love for beautiful clothing and an allegiance to the philosophy that encourages neighborhood and community self-sufficiency as a precursor to political and economic independence. Both Reyes and Hughes have children who attend Academia Semillas del Pueblo, where Reyes also works and both practice danza azteca.

Thus, I found myself in the middle of Artisan Alley, chatting with the firme Mi Vida proprietors after a quick hello to Elisa Rodriguez of IMIX Bookstore. Upon a closer examination of the clothing rack they'd installed as part of their booth, I spied what must have been the sweetest guayabera I'd ever laid eyes on. Hanging on a wire, the butterscotch yellow, short sleeved, Cuban-style shirt was immaculately pressed. It whispered to me in unheard melodic strains of guaguanco and rumba madness. I swear I heard it call out my name and had to laugh aloud at my own looniness. It goes without saying that I voiced my attraction to the textile wonder I've been lucky enough to behold. Promising to make Tejano-style papa con huevo y queso breakfast tacos for them the following day, I begged and pleaded and cajoled the honorary sisters because I didn't have cash in my pocket.

Maybe it was the novelty of having breakfast made and delivered by a dude... in any event Danell saw fit to take the guayabera off the rack and return it to a box under the table. The following day, I'm walking out of the store on Huntington Dr. just before Fremont in the finest shirt I've ever worn. Two smiling mujeres are talking about how I look like the mayor of poetry and, wouldn't you know, I head straight for a spoken word presentation in Altadena. There, I read seven poems and walk away--still in the butterscotch guayabera--with $50 I never expected to receive. Who gets paid for poetry these days, huh? Unheard of, right? It's almost as if the guayabera has endowed me with unbelievable luck, super-human powers of literary extraction and a little Caribbean charm tossed in for dressing.

The guayabera later become even more symbolic because I've come to work at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, a yearly celebration of moving pictures held in Hollywood at the famed Egyptian Theater. I'm charged with wrangling volunteers for the 12th annual edition of the festival co-founded by actor Edward James Olmos. In my head, I'm thinking about The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a 1998 film starring Olmos and written for the screen by Ray Bradbury (based on his 1958 short story which he later turned into a play for a collection of pieces written for stage). In the story, a magical suit inspires a group of young men to yearn for and imagine a world where they can walk the street in the dazzling radiance of a suit that will give them the ability to realize all of their inner-most hopes and goals. And here I am, working for Olmos indirectly while at the same time whistling with glee and smiling effusively to myself each time I think of the guayabera in my closet. It is a not-so-literary descendant of Bradbury's white linen suit and a reminder that the business of movies and movie-making is not all bad. It's also a reminder that inspiration can come from anywhere, not just the anger, bitterness or pain that can often accompany personal disappointments or lost love. Hay que celebrar el truinfo humano de vez en cuando, que no?

Look for a film festival blog after the fact at the LALIFF website. It will detail my life as an occassional wordslinger marooned on film festival island for several weeks. From the festival front lines, you'll hear about films and filmmakers, festival chisme and perhaps a tiny bit of celebrity revelry. I'll try to make it a day-by-day, blow-by-blow chronicle of as much as I can remember now that it's over and I can get back to the serious business of launching the much bally-hooed Brooklyn & Boyle magazine. It's amazing how a festival can put your life completely on hold. Try an entire three weeks since this blog was active. More on the Brooklyn & Boyle project next time. It's high time for a real East Side magazine, no crees?

Moratorium Remembered, Oaxaca Under Assault

2008-08-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to wax ebullient, cantar la celebración, deliver idylic prose on the beauty of poetry as well as both political and cultural convictions restored at Teocintli in Boyle Heights, where veteranos del movimiento such as David Sánchez, an original Brown Beret, and Carlos Montes joined two successive generations of resistance in the floricanto tradition. De verdad, quería decir cuanto me impactarón los poemas compartidos por Felicia Montes, Nico, y Javi--estos dos últimos miembros del la colectiva llamada Los Poets del Norte. Commemorating the August 29th, 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the war in Vietnam, a small yet insistent group gathered to rally around the same root causes, the painfully similiar conditions that continue to plague people in marginalized communities. I wanted to proclaim how positive it was to see Ollin's Scott Rodarte and visit with El Random Hero himself, who has agreed to be part of the Brooklyn & Boyle magazine staff.

But the glow is dimmed this morning when I read that on the very day we commemorated an attack against our community 38 years ago, the federales in Mexico stormed a community radio station in Oaxaca organized and sustained by the Mixteca people who are allied with La Otra Campaña. Everywhere the repression rears its ugly head. And here, in addition to the belleza and collective energy over the recognition that our work as "artivists" (nod to Ms. Montes for the term) must continue, I was still basking in the residual peace and joy leftover from the gathering of poetas románticos at East Side Luv a couple of weeks ago. Rubén "Funkhuatl" Guevara delivered a line in one of his poems at the Moratorium commemoration last night. "I am a weapon," he intoned. The phrase is allegorical and it expresses my particular conundrum. Rubén was also part of the genesis for the "Literoticana Chicana: Una Noche de Luz, Deseo y Lengua" reading where about a eighty people joined six poets for a celebration of passion and romance and language in verse. How can we cling to our humanity, make consistent attempts to share life, love and consciousness in the face of the buffeting realities at home, in Iraq, in Oaxaca? No tengo la respuesta. raúlrsalinas, RIP, my Xicanindio poet-mentor, friend and fellow literaloco-literatonto and an AIM activist who worked alongside Leonard Peltier in prison before being released and establishing Resistencia Bookstore so many years later, used to throw up his hands in the air and shrug. "Sometimes it just bees that way, bro."

In all fairness, I had meant to meander into the realm of ennui, of the perhaps even somewhat shmarmy sweetness, the sacharine roll call like a litany of rose petal blossom gossamer whispers. Wanted to say how Ruben Guevara and Gloria Alvarez and Rafael Alvarado and Reina Prado and Corrie Greathouse--the poets who comprised the "literoticana" experiment--were stunningly warm and magnetic on the Luv stage. And I also sincerely wanted to follow up with a heartfelt expression of gratitude for la familia Esparza and everyone who dropped by the potluck BBQ in honore of August birthdays, great friends, beautiful artists, heart broken poets, restless dreamers and rambunctious dancers. Al fin, I'll leave that to chance and simply end with a recommendation that you read Ruben Mendoza's essay on the "Phantom Sightings" exhibition at the LACMA. It is beyond doubt, the most effective, cogent and fully actualized critique of the exhibit anyone has written.

Two-Tone Wingtip Staceys Serve It Up Serio

2008-08-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

If you didn't hear about The Panza Monologues, a one-woman show written by San Antonio homegirls Vicki Grise and Dr. Irma Mayorga with contributions from several Texas-based scribes--among them Barbara Renaud-Gonzalez--that brought down the house at Plaza de la Raza on Saturday night, then you were probably among the five or six people that Rip Van Winkle their way along in the world. A Chicana tour de force as far as live theatre goes, the show opened for a one-night only showcase and at least twenty people were turned away. Karla Legaspy and Felicia Montes helped spread the word only too-well. Using stories that range from the hilarious to the deeply moving, Vicki Grise romps back and forth, carving up the stage with panza moon goddess prowess or alternately touching vignettes that address ancestral sadness, movimiento politics and feminist issues. Special mention should be made of Marissa Ramirez' lighting design and general theatre know-how. It couldn't have happened without her tirelesss stagecraft. Of course, Adelina Anthony's turn as the host didn't hurt none either. Está bien funny la Ade. But her rapier wit skewers you while it leaves you wanting more...

For the LA incarnation, which was videotaped by Roberto Oregel for the production of a Panza DVD, las muchachas enlisted the assistance of several jaraner@s, among them el Tejarocho Alexandro Hernández, another Tex-Mexpatriot, who put together a live backing band called Los Flacosos. Hernandez is working on a PhD in ethnomusicology and plays just about any instrument con cuerdas. He also performs as a regular member of the "world jarocho music" group zocaloZüe. Joining him on stage were Eduardo Arenas, Soul Rebel Radio's jaranera extraordinaire Laura Cambrón and violinista Jacqueline Mungía who, as a group, added an entirely new dimension to the production. Can anyone say soundtrack? The capacity crowd rose immediately to its feet at the end of the show for an ovation that recognized the play's world class caliber.

Hernández has also been recently recruited by fiery hip-hop MC Olmeca. And we followed the Saturday show at Plaza with the John Anson Ford Theater benefit for Tia Chucha's Café Cultural where a near capacity crowd was treated to a dazzling flurry of words and sound from the young East Side poet and mic master, who was once again in peak form. With the addition of an electric guitar, Olmeca's live sound takes on an urgency that lingers along more interesting lines that communicate whispers of canto nuevao or la nueva trova. Lyrically, in both Spanish and English, he balances a muscular vocabulary and a litany-like staccato burst of non-stop rhyme with relevant and socially conscious story that is both accessible and inspiring. I would even dare call it hopeful. despite my own proclivity to cynicism. And I would be remiss if I didn't confess a desire to see the boys live again for an entire show, even if it's just to marvel at the two-tone, black-and-white wingtip calcos pachucos. The benefit also featured a dance-your-nalgas off set by the heirs t0 Ozomatli, a young East Side band called Upground, who delivered cumbia, salsa and rock fusion worthy of the South By South West Music and Media Conference selection they were part of this year. No es por nada that they were invited to play the most important music industry conference in the nation right there in my hometown of Austin, Tejaztlan. The city likes to bill itself "the live music capital of the world," and I really can't argue. The finale last night featured comedian and actor Cheech Marin, who strapped on his own hollow body guitar and lead Upground in a slew of musical numbers, among them the perennial "Born in East LA." It was puro Califas, a moment unlike any other I've ever experienced before, serio foo'. It was sicccc.

All about the son... jarocho and otherwise

2008-07-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

Grooves and good vibra here in the wake of the Self Help Graphics storm. Para empezar, I offer a strident shout out to Nico of Los Poets del Norte and his partner Mayra, who operates Teocintli, a cultural space and store in Boyle Heights that offers clothing, accessories, books and other relevant gear as well as a small gallery space. They recently relocated from a smaller home a block away, and the grand re-opening was well attended. Got my eye on one of Nico's paintings neart the register, so "hands off," please! Just keeding... Regrettably, I couldn't stay long enough to catch the poetry performances or the music from Buyepongo, but the art exhibition was definitely worth the trip over the hill.

The community meeting at Self Help reminded all of us just how important it is to create ownership of our own cultural spaces. The influx of investors who merely seek to "flip" property for a profit is a historical fact and since we weren't even safe in the hands of the church, it's time to remind all the well-connected and politically installed Chicanos that they have an important roll to play financially, that they shouldn't just come around when they're looking for votes or want some high quality and somehow still inexpensive art to decorate their fancy homes. They should get behind and on board a capitalization project that would create enough funding for a permanent Self Help home on the East Side.

Diatribes and tirades and soapboxes aside, the música jarocha showcase held at Trópico de Nopal last Sunday was pure sonic deliciousness. Reyes and his family should be proud of the space they have built from the ground up. The backyard at Trópico was awash in the sound of jarana and tololoche the likes of which had not likely ever been seen or heard in LA's Rampart vecindad. Of course, with Son de Madera having already played McArther Park as part of the Levitt Pavillion summer concert series and the unequivocably stunnng performance on the same stage last night by Quetzal, it's safe to say that son jarocho and sonfusión Chicano inspired by son jarocho are fast finding an audience in that neck o' the cityscape. And speaking of which, I can't miss CAVA, a band led by Claudia Gonzalez, whose older sister Martha sings lead vocals with Quetzal. CAVA performing tonight at the Zona Rosa Caffe in Pasadena, not too far from this little second floor redoubt in el sereno... Claudia also lends vocals to Mentiritas, the band I profiled for Tu Ciudad magazine and will have to do so again somewhere else since Ciudad's August issue (where the story was slated to run) was never published. For now, you can check out the piece on the Mentiritas page. I send special thanks to artist Rick Mobbs for the image above called "The Kiss of the Fourth Wind." I've borrowed it for a flyer to announce the "Literoticana Chicana: una noche de luz, deseo y lengua" poetry event I helped put together at East Side Luv on August 14th with Ruben Funkahuatl Guevara and maestra Gloria Alvarez. More on that shortly.

Calling All Superhero Hoop Girls to Self Help

2008-07-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

Calling all superhero Hoop Girls! We need your sassy, take-no-prisoners strength. We're in a crutch. Right about now, your fuerza and in-it-to-win-it incandescence would come in quite handy. Can you please take a small leave of absence from the stage and the pages of the brilliant new play by Gabriela López, the production I was fortunate enough to catch at a closing Casa 0101 performance? You see, the nefarious powers that be over at the LA Archdiocese have sold Self Help Graphics & Art out from under the community to some nameless, faceless real estate developer and investor who says he wants to get $30,000 (!!!!!) a month in rent and that the artists, community members and world renowned art programs that have called the building at César Chávez (Brooklyn) and Gage home for 30 years are going to have to vacate the premises at the end of the year. With no prior discussion or warning, the Sisters of St. Francis, Mount Alverno allowed the LA Archodiocese to hawk the building on the block for a whole lot less than the original $1.5 million asking price they quoted to members of the Self Help board of directors back in 2007. There are even some who say the money is being used to help the church settle lawsuits stemming from the abuse scandals.

The community is aghast. How could the cruel and allegedly Christian leaders let a priceless cultural legacy go so easily? How on earth could they have tossed a glittering institution that has nurtured two generations of artists into the wind without so much as a discussion? Why would they have shuttered or attempted to shutter a center responsible for the creation of so much beauty within a neighborhood that has suffered marginalization and neglect for a century? With no attempt at engaging the real stakeholders, they kept the deal secret and even asked the new owner to stay away from the property until the sale was final. How's that for desgraciadamente descarado?

Hoop Girls, we're flashing the silver-gold hoop signal, the golden beam of circular power into the Gotham-Metropolis-Boyle Heights night sky because you are, like so many of us in Eagle Rock, Highland Park, El Sereno, and Lincoln Heights, the children Self Help. We came of age with knowledge of ateliers and silkscreens and the selfless dedication of one Sister Karen Boccalero, who nurtured and trained and cajoled a multitude of artists who have been our role models, mentors and teachers. We beseech you because the profiteers are trying to turn back the clock. Property is at a premium and they know the subway is coming. It's a blatant landgrab and the officeholders (many of our own, in fact) think we're going to roll over on the East Side just because they took the farm in South Central away with nary a scuffle. Hoop Girls, we call on you as masters of the universe who can fight crime and overcome the idiocy of politicians and businessmen while balancing on four-inch heels and mastering the art of how to wear the four-inch hoop earring with unparalleled style and grace. Please hear our plea. Would it be possible to bring that ensemble magic, that trancendent love, care and concern that enveloped audiences and inspired us with its truth to Self Help for a final stand?

LA County Supervisor Gloria Molina, demonstrating a bit of Hoop Girl panache herself, has promised to help make the church answer for its ungodly and seemingly intentional disregard for Self Help, this when the organization has been in comeback mode for over a year with several successful print shows and cultural celebrations behind it, enough to make the glimmer of hope and a phoenix-like rise from the bumpy transitions it weathered for a minute there a distinct probability and not just a possiblity...

Next episode: Will Supervisor Molina deliver on her Hoop Girl promise? Will the Mayor and Council Member José Huizar do the right thing and join the forces with the Hoop Girl justice league? Will Self Help find a new home on the East Side? Tune in next week for answers to these and many other life or death questions... (special thanks to artist and blogger Ed Fuentes for the SHG press conference photo above)

Nostalgia and the farce of July

2008-07-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

It is sadness and hope at the same time. It is the winded glow that comes from an afternoon climb to the hilltop pond at Debs Park alongside the decent and kind profesor Felipe Castruita, for the stunning views of Highland Park, the downtown LA skyline, Montecito Heights and El Sereno from a place as tall and serene as you will find en esta tierra de mil lomas. This the day after the first Proyecto Jardín Wednesday capoeira workshop I've ever attended. Talk about toe-up! So then June 28th, tres días despues, it was once again essential Los, and it began on Saturday morning with kids who are currently detained at Eastlake Juvenile Hall, where a fifteen year old girl who had just read my dog-eared copy of Bless Me, Ultima, said that it didn't matter if she was locked up or not because her mind and her imagination were free. Wisdom from the mouths of children... Immediately thereafter, I tended bar at a backyard wedding. The groom was a periodista friend and an LA newcomer from Oklahoma who met and fell in love with a beautiful colombiana during his first visit there a little over a year ago. Michael is a child of the bible belt holy rollers and another testament to the transformative power of Los Angeles. Although he struggled with his vows in Spanish, there were few dry eyes there. Best wishes for the happy couple from opposite ends of the universe.

In the face of all the hoopla about a McCain visit to Colombia and the release of prisoners by the guerrilla forces, there's the unspoken undercurrent. While the media talks about some sort of daring rescue, I see no proof. Some have even said that there was a hefty ransom paid and that McCain was the bagman. The released military contractors (read mercenaries ala Blackwater) can now go on CNN and talk about how they were held hostage by terrorists. Let's bring the farce of Iraq closer to home so we can create more unfounded fear and somehow link Hugo Chavez. We can't let him get all the credit for getting prisoners of war released, now can we?

All of which brings us to the Xicano Records & Film Farce of July, which reminds us that all the patriotic hoopla is once again a way to distract the numbed and medicated masses glued to their screens. Should we mindlessly admire celebratory fireworks against the backdrop of a useless war that bankrupts our nation and enriches the war profiteers while everyday folk struggle just to come up with gas money? Anyguey, enough of the ranting. I would have liked to hear the musical and poetic presentations at both Farce of July events held in LA last Friday but missed both. Y en mi opinión humilde, it was good sign that we, as angelinos, could support and provide decent sized audiences for at least two events staged to create that kind of awareness. My nephew, who works at a progressive radio station in Buffalo, New York, took his new bride to Canada for the 4th and rode a ferris wheel. "I went to Canada to celebrate," he told his mother, my sister Joanne.

Many who dropped by the closing night celebration at Antigua Cultural Coffee House, here in El Sereno a week before the chantaje del cuatro de julio will recall that the assembled crowd was so joyful and upbeat, spilling out onto the street for Luis Vega's incendiary public performance art piece that LAPD even dispatched a helicopter to buzz the sky over us and flash the ghetto buster light on the huge contingent of former patrons who had come to say goodbye. Too many people enjoying the jaraner@s or the reggae grooves of Pachamama to handle or what? I should be glad I live in a country that sends the po-po just because we came out in strength and peace to support a neighborhood business that was literally being forced out to make way for a Starbuck$ or a Coffee Bean? NO creo yo, chuy.

Cut to the "Nostalgia" exhibition at Lilia Ramírez' First Street Studios which opened on Saturday, July 5th with a set of unplugged and spine-tingling music from El-Haru Kuroi. If you thought the Herban Mother-lode show was a smash, the selection of paintings, prints and photographs gathered for the current exhibition are irridescent in their ability to evoke sadness over lost lives and loves as well as melancholy over the immutable past while embracing optimism simultaneously. The show includes work by Javier Barboza, Cesar Gonzalez, Rogelio Gutierrez, Jennifer Gutierrez Morgan, Andrea LaHue, Rosalie Lopez, Manuel Lopez, Rick Mendoza, Esmeralda Montes, Stephen Romio, Victor Rosas, Alexander Schaefer, Mariacruz Velasco and Rosalie Villegas. "Nostalgia" runs through July 26th.

Before 'n after

2008-06-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

The crash landing in dizzy-land after the magia of a visit to tierra liberada comes suffused with mixed feelings. Have to say, at the onset, that it's always refreshing to read compa' Jimmy Mendiola's critical take on the pop cultura tip. Recently annointed with a kudo in Ciudad Magazine's "Best of Latino LA" issue, his blog--monikered with a tongue-in-cheek "Ken Burns Hates Mexicans" sobriquet--is right on in pointing out how we are truthfully devoid of Chican@ superheroes. His criticism of the brown folk dearth in New York-generated rock histories deserves mention. And I particularly enjoy his terse, unadorned writing style. It's in that spirit that I almost feel like offering up a joke about how Ciudad fingered his blog for notice and then went belly up. While I personally disagree with JMs blanket dismissal of Journey as a serious musical standard, I can condone the efforts to separate punk rebellion from the '80s extension of the oldies heart-thump songs that fueled Whittier Blvd. cruises and crushes and heartbreaks while many of us were in diapers far away from East LA. That said, or as Jimmy often adroitly observes in classic Marvel Comic guru Stan Lee-speak "Nuff Said."

The last three weeks, while defined by post-poetry withdrawal symptoms have also been largely balanced by what seems to be an explosion on the cultural front. From the exhibition at LACMA of art by Chicano painters from the personal collection of Cheech Marin (picture above: "Chino Latino" 2000 by Chaz Bojorquez) to the black-and-brown "Changing Ties" show at Ave. 50 as well as the eye-popping "Rebel Legacies" show of abstract Latino art curated by Ave. 50 director Kathy Gallegos at the Pharmaka Gallery in downtown LA, there has been very little time to breathe. Toss in a healthy mix of music and theatre at California Plaza's "Grand Performances" that included former Tijuana No rocker Ceci Bastida, new work from playwright-actor-director Adelina Anthony and music from Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80 and the mercury in LA's ahts-n-kultcha thermometer skyrockets. Makes one dizzy just getting from one show or worthy cause-related event to the next.

As a sweat-drenched and stirring example, this recent weekend began with a stop Friday night at Cal Plaza for Egypt 80 and a barrage of African beats. Saturday started with a Very Be Careful headliner performance at El Cariso County Park during the Tia Chucha Cafe Cultural's third annual Celebrating Words Festival held out in Sylmar which was followed by a garden party to celebrate the 80th birthday of Don Normark, a photographer who was on hand to document when Chicano families were being evicted and having their homes razed in 1949 to make way for Dodger Stadium. The Highland Park hilltop backyard was literally aglow with about 75 friends and artists for a sit down, serve-yourself-on-real-china and crystalware affair that rivaled the poshest La Brea Avenue art happening. Flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts were the encouraged optional attire. Sunday found me at a Cornfields park in Chinatown for an equally lovely birthday potluck BBQ in honor of Daniel González, a printmaker and artist who turned 28 and was recently commissioned to create a public art piece for a station on the new Metro Expo line. Meanwhile Ave. 50 hosted Trekking LA's summer-long demonstration of traditional comida eaten in LA's distinct art communties by hiring a Pachuca, Hidaldo family now-based in Riverside to prepare barbacoa in a fire pit filled with maguey cactus leaves. It smoked for 12 hours and guests who didn't eat lamb or chicken could still make due with grilled veggies. Trekking LA is a project of LA Commons, which art and stories to help foster better understanding between communities.

If you get out to one thing this coming weekend, check out the goodbye event at Antigua. We're all upset that it's closing down since it was the source of so much El Sereno pride and leaves a hole in the cultural and politically active community that calls this beloved neighborhood home.

Encuentro Mundial & Chronic Cubanitis

2008-06-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

Still reeling with the euphoria of it all. Que les puedo decir? Imagine poetry in the original Guaraní delivered with quiet elegance and dignity by Suzy Delgado, an elder, poet and journalist from Paraguay. Just imagine contemporary poems shared in Mapuche and Aymara from the altiplanos or Wayú desde Colombia offered selflessly by indigenous bards and word warriors who represent the soul of the hemisphere. From El Sereno to the sierra andina where the eagle and the condor soar as one, I bask in the afterglow. Suficiente decir que en algunos lugares, los poetas son bienvenidos como sagrados sacerdotes. Never before have I felt so welcome. As a result, I'll have a poem appearing in a Peruvian literary magazine. I'll eventually make my way to Madrid for a "lectura" organized on by a poet originally from Las Islas Canarias. If that were not enough to celebrate, uno de mis mejores camaradas, Francisco of Smokin' Mirrors, and I will one day be able to share a documentary on the state of poetry in the world today and its urgency in our time. I'm thankful to the grandmothers and grandfathers, to all my relations, for providing the doorway and the words with which to express my amazement and gratitude. Stay tuned for oblique references and periodic stammerings in a effort to share at least slivers and snippets of the glorious cascade, the fusilade of spoken word and glistening verse I was blessed by only recently as a participant en un encuentro increíble.

Respite from the Sun

2008-05-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

From the jam-packed Very Be Careful show on Friday at Grandstar's Firecracker in Chinatown to the Amsterdam Cafe in the North Hollywood arts district on Sunday for an afternoon of poetry, there was no avoiding the extreme heat that laid low the greater LA-area. At the moment, the much cooler sound of an El Sereno rooster accompanies the hint of fog under partially overcast skies. He must think it's the breaking of a longer-than-average dawn. This contrasts with the smoking VBC fusilade of Colombian cumbia and happy-fingered accordion riffs which was brief but beautiful. Unexpectedly caught sight, from across the room, of a healthy contingent from Proyecto Jardin, a squad of white-clad artisans and community comadres who support, nurture and cultivate--literally--the independent Boyle Heights green space and gather once a month for the Mercado Caracol to break bread while trading/selling books, jewelry, crafts and herbal products. Bumped into Azul and his camera yet again for an equally pleasant surprise. Of course, the foursome I was part of raced madly thereafter to Eastside Luv for last call with Guillermo "Pata de Perro" Uribe, whose entirely too hip and too cool night spot was the subject of an LA Times feature the following day. Felicidades to Guillermo and Arlene. You have to love an in-house DJ that plays Morrisey and Ramón Ayala back to back. And what's with all these husband and wife teams showing the rest of us how that sort of thing is possible? Unfortunately, I missed the Mentiritas show there the next night, but that's another story. Do yourself a favor and catch Lysa Flores there this Friday if you can't make the history of LA DJ culture event on Thursday.

Running on Firecracker fumes and residual Eastside Luv glow from the night before, I still managed to catch the last part of the First Annual Latino Student Film Festival at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, the neighborhood directly south of here on Saturday morning. Organized by Harry Liflan and the Latin-American Cinemateca of LA, the one-day fest was chock-full of future directors, producers and writers. Alternately touching and hilarious, the short films were marked by uncanny understanding of teen angst and its place in the world as a harbinger of passion and the creative spirit. And the vegetarian tamales I brought home are off the hizinges.

Qwik-ee Round Up: I'll save the personal take on Linda Arreola's "Vaguely Chicana" exhibit, which closed on Saturday afternoon at Trópico de Nopal Gallery and the Vexing show which opened at the Claremont Museum of Art on Saturday night for another post. Suffice it simply to say here that Arreola is an El Sereno neighbor whose work is con[text]ually divine in its geometric and mathematical precision. At the other end of the spectrum, the Claremont exhibition is intended to highlight the contributions of women to the underground LA Chicano punk scene during the late 70s and early 80s as well as the bastard, hybrid art spawned by that era. Much of the work, which ruptured outward into the mainstream consciouness with an LA Weekly article on ASCO and again with the opening of "Phantom Sightings" at LACMA, is reprised, but not a rehash. Despite the fact that at least two of the show's curators were children being reared in places other than LA when the scene unfolded, the exhibition is extremely well put together. The research was spot on. The raucous opening night performances by queen of Chicano rock Lysa Flores and Alice Bags were fever pitch odes to the Sex Pistols and Clash-inspired turbulence I flirted with in high school while at the same time, I was ordering by mail a compilation album titled Los Angelinos: The Eastside Renaissance, a 1983 issue that included tunes by both The Brat and The Plugz. And who will ever match Alice Bags neé Alicia Armendáriz shouting "Chinga tu madre" in a song at the top of her lungs repeatedly then joking about the need to end her set because the vehicle from the senior citizen's home was waiting for her outside?

In the sin verguenza, mire lo que hice department, I read a few poems at the Amsterdam Cafe in the North Hollywood (NOHO... How pretensious is that?) Arts District on Sunday alongside Gloria Alvarez who has been like a sister, a literary co-conspirator and all-around comandante brillante through a tumultuous year, and Gabriela Jauregui, a heavy-duty wordslinger packed into a tiny, five-foot frame all decked out in a gauzy white dress, red undergarments and cat-eye glasses. Her book, Controlled Decay, is available on Chris Abani's Black Goat poetry series. Born and raised in Mexico City, she out-Conrads Conrad with an urgent, dangerously sublime command of el idioma de los gringos. Her poems are visceral yet captivatingly femenine. Obviously, being educated at some of the best schools in two countries as part of the elite, privileged class is no hindrance. But hers is a language that trancends, that couples freedom and liberation and dreams of a society without class distinctions or exploitation. Muscular and at times venturing compellingly into the realm of the pyrotechnic, her work is necessary frontburner reading and at the leading edge of Latina letters in the U.S. Props to Rafael Alvarado for coordinating the monthly Amsterdam event.

Dualities and Line Drawing

2008-05-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

Have to begin this post with a resounding plug for Alberto Ibarra and Christi Burgos, who celebrate 13 years of matrimony and art. Beto is a founding member of Teatro Chusma in East LA, and they both make stunning visual work they've grouped together for a show called "Giving Birth to Duality." The husband and wife collaborative exhibition is currently on display at Antigua Cultural Coffee House here in El Sereno and features serigraphy and painting as well as the vivid 3-D paper mache pieces Burgos creates as the force behind Mayan Inspirations. I wasn't able to make the opening, but the work will remain on exhibit for the next few weeks. Be sure to check the wedding photo that pictures the happy couple in front of a classic bomb lowrider straight from the 1940s. Kind of makes you proud to be in LA.

"Herban Mother-Lode," a photo exhibition at First Street Studios in the heart of Boyle Heights featuring work by several photographers I admire, opened last Saturday with a daylight outdoor performance by East LA's favored musical sons Ollin and beats by Spaceways Radio DJ Carlos Nino. The exhibition offer eye-catching and thoughtful work by Sandra de la Loza, Dalila Mendez, Heriberto Oriol and his son Esteban Oriol. Definitely worth checking out. I plan to stop by for a second look myself. It was definitely cool to finally catch up with Azul, the artist behind the "Peace in Iraq" photo project.

Of course, the weekend would not have been complete without a predictable stop at Ave. 50 after the Boyle Heights run for a showing of new work from The Los De Abajo Printmaking Collective, an informal group working out of Self-Help Graphics. "Drawing the Line," as the exhibition is titled, is a tantalizing show of experimental prints that use line as a point of departure for exploration and examination of social demarcations, internal and external emotional states as well as the intersections of art with political and personal ideologies or transfigurations. Among the artists exhibiting are José Lozano, Emelda Gutierrez, Judith Durán, Kay Brown, Poli Marichal (who will also be part of the "Maestras" show opening in several weeks at Self-Help), Mariana Sadowsky, Antonio Escalante, Victor Rojas and fellow Echospace Poetry Collective member Don Newton.

Emelda Gutierrez and Kay Brown deserve mention here because I had not yet realized how singularly powerful and evocative their respective print work has become. Beyond that, I'm wearing a nugget-sized quartz crystal in a brass wire setting that hangs from a leather chord around my neck these days. It is a gift from the hyper-energetic Gutierrez, and it has become the amulet that fuses both poetic and earthly energy for me as the waves of melancholy nostalgia and fear-laced sadness are gradually replaced with peace and light and joy.

Mother's Day Tribute & Post-Chicano Blues

2008-05-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

In El Sereno and environs, life will not be the same but it goes on, because go on it must. After turning the final pages of The Shadow of the Wind, an extraordinary novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, I linger on the moderate attempts made over the last few days to once again inhabit the land of the living and to once again be inspired by the landscapes of love and art. The annual summer youth play at Plaza de la Raza, an adaption of Teat ro Campesino's El Soldado Razo by Culture Clash's Herbet Siguenza, reminds us of the need to examine the costs of war, both literally and metaphorically, in our community. Doff o' the old bowler hat to me friend Herb for a putting together a play in Lincoln Heights with more than a score of neighborhood and community youth, righteous kids who helped write the script then put on quite a show and even danced salsa with Vicky Grise and the ever fabulous Karla Legaspy at Friday's opening night after-party. Compound that particular joy with a Saturday night splash at Ave. 50 by the Inspiration House Poetry Choir. Joining the usual crew was the "Chola con Cello" herself, María Elena Gaitán, who lit up the already intoxicating fusion of improvised music behind live poetry delivered at volcanic intensities with her relentless bow. Y finalmente, I was able to sit in on the discussion between Sandra de la Loza and Harry Gamboa at Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the "Phantom Sightings" exhibition. Not a whole lot of new ground covered, but at least it wasn't a rehash of the same old tropes. Ms. de la Loza, if a bit nervous before such a large crowd and for the fact that the show has been the subject of far ranging polemics, discussion and criticism, reminded us that we can and must reappropriate media and public symbols in order to restore forgotten or intentionally whitewashed history. It is this re-write of truth and distortion of historical fact to create myths and collective amnesia, she seems to suggest, that makes possible a world where urban youth are criminalized and dissent, critical thought or free-speech, at every level, is quelled before it truly ever even begins with the complicity of corporate thought control as issued by mass media in support of a hegemonic state and both its internal and external policies. So here we are, folks, well into the hyperglorified Cinco de Mayo celebration, a holiday rarely celebrated in Mexico, if you must know. Stay tuned for this Friday's "Homenaje Dia de las Madres: Honoring our Mothers and the Earth." It's a fundraiser and tribute at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock. The reading begins 8 p.m. and will include sets from spinmasters Fermina D and DJ Hugo Molina.

Para la quien ya no volveré a buscar

2008-05-04T23:24:00.001-07:00

Con un agradecimiento sincero a la maga kenia.

Adios mamá, aneh huitzilincuatzintahtli

2008-04-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

The hummingbird whir of her hands, nimble fingers that stitched quinceañera dresses, built delicate sand castle-sized cakes from roses and flowers made with sugar frosting can be heard faintly. Her small, strong and stoic hands, hands that once picked cotton and tomatoes and okra, are pressing against my breastbone gently in the dark. Her spirit has returned to remind me of those moments as a child when only a warm glass of milk and her thumbs in circular motion along my temples could get me to sleep. She is gone you see. Se nos ha ido la bella picarrosa. She ascended on Saturday night in a room far away. I would have spoken of weeklong dread, a foreboding that was countered by a good meeting on Friday with old friend, author and community advocate Luís Rodríguez at Tia Chucha's Café Cultural and a visit to both Ave. 50 Studios and Trópico de Nopal as a tag along with friends who knew I was anxious to be near my mother's side. I searched frantically for a one-way flight because I could not change a previously purchased reservation in order to arrive sooner, but it was not soon enough. Juliana Zepeda Vela, the woman from whom everything beautiful, my appreciation for all things creative, aesthetic, sensitive or artistic comes, is no longer here. I know hurt greater than any heartbreak now. My artist friend Daniel Gonzalez, a printmaker from Boyle Heights says "Que tragos amargos nos da la vida!" Media artist Maritza Alvarez sends me into the aftermath of my beautiful mother's ascencion with "fuerza y paz." But the loss is no less painful. At 69, she succumbed to liver cancer, almost as if the posting of the previous poem was a prophetic foreshadowing. We knew it would happen. We just didn't think it would happen so quickly. The poem was posted shortly after a run along Huntington Drive to Alhambra--a stab at cardiovascular health--where I discovered a hummingbird on the pavement midway between the El Sereno Community Garden and Fremont Street. Irridescent, the nestling was barely alive, its tiny heartbeat racing uncontrollably. I moved the injured baby bird to a cooler, less visibe place. And I did not realize it was a message for me until I opened the box of adornments my mother had often worn and wished me to have as a gift when she was gone. Last night inside my mother's home, my sister Alma handed me what seemed to be a watch or bracelet case. Inside, I found a silver a hummingbird broach. It lay alongside a pendant, an antique woman's watch and a bracelet, keepsakes meant for me by a mother who embodied style and grace as the visible evidence and an extension of her natural talent as an artesana. Remarkably, the pendant--a silver Thai circle with an aqua-colored stone set in its center--suits the dress she selected for her burial, perfectly. Since she had never worn the dress, we removed it from her closest with the price tag still attached. I've decided she will take the pendant with her. I have my family's permission to place the pendant around her slender neck during a memorial service tomorrow. The brocade huitzilin I will keep as a reminder of the mission she has symbolically entrusted to me. Y como me mandó mi querida madre, voy empezar pidiendole publicamente las disculpas a la hija de ehecatl. Ojalá que un día me pueda perdonar. Pero no la culparía si nunca quisiera jamás. I will honor her memory as well, while I seek transformation and peace. As instructed by my mother, I will leave the past where it belongs and hover fearlessly in the face of the future.

fantasmas personales: poesía COMO movimiento

2008-04-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

It is the iron and blood offered on blue black

flower stems or rusting hulks of palm tree decay,

the children who rage and perish in green cellblock

isolation, medicated under guard and lock and key,

a street-bred godson lost in the slow suspicion that his

chameleon gifts are unwelcome and misunderstood,

the propaganda that paralyzes thought and dissent with

threat and fear amplified on screens and speakers

bought and paid for with clueless taxpayer complicity.

It is the bitter sound of homelessness on worn sneaker

soles under the anonymous face of addiction and exile,

the Iraq war veteran with a gun to his head as he recalls

atrocity in a desert he should never have known,

his grandfather who cries silently at dawn for lost loves

and the borders like walls and turrets that drove them away,

the bent and fractured poet who twists with insomnia

and recalls every unfinished dream like the color of dread,

his mother with a blooming flower of death in her liver,

as if to say innocence can only be rewarded with fire.

It is the unforgotten beloved he could not regain,

the stainless steel memory of refrigerated nausea

against the gray-smoke haze of anguish or remorse

or the sound of a blackboard under his fingernails

until the blistering exhaustion encircles his neck

and rakes all of his pores along barbed-wire truth

like the time he woke up on the curb, his face tired

and the spring a season of despair longing for hope.

El Sereno
November, 2007

LA Phantom Sightings

2008-03-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

The last weekend of the monthlong Somos Medicina celebration organized by Mujeres de Maiz coincided with the opening of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement." I am proud to say I made it to the video screenings at Self-Help, a soul stirring presentation of conscious hip-hop, rap, spoken word, jaraneras and the closing ceremonia at Proyecto Jardín as part of the former. Can't say enough about how true and powerful and uplifting the art exhibit and the films and the energy were. If I'm mum for a moment about the hotly anticipated LACMA show, it's because I agree with Oscar Magallanes and feel like the sisters got it going on with the kind of work that people need to know about. I can rattle off names, hurl shout outs to film and visual and word comadres Dalila Paola Mendez, Felicia Montes, Claudia Mercado, Marisol Torres, Maritza Alvarez, and Cihuatl Ce, all chingonas who don't need to be validated at the institution or by dry academics who barely ever even make their way to the Eastside unless it's to check out a collection of Chicano art owned by luminary collectors such as Gilbert Cardenas. It means more to me that Gloria Alvarez and Yreina Cervantes are invited and included by their legitimate heirs. It's the conversation that flies in the face of this tacit generational erasure, as if to say that Chicano art and movimiento politics are evolving into a more hybrid mainstream, one that brings a few emerging art stars to an invitation-only party at LACMA. Of course there are hold-outs, my own contemporaries who do stand up with serious critiques... Sandra de la Loza, la Space Chola and Arturo Romo are head on here. Ms. de la Loza was in both shows. And she is an El Sereno native. Call her a bridge and artist that can help redeem the inexcusable elitism of an exhibit that only tries to patronize and annoint... the kind of exercise that only further encourages some cool, hip youngsters. They are the kids who can tell you about ASCO and Rage Against the Machine. They'll know all the groovy nightspots around town but are losing the legacies of Emma Tenayuca or Reyes Tijerina or Raul Salinas in the process. Meanwhile, lofts and development get approved and poor people have to leave. Excuse me if I'm a little jaded and cynical, but I'd still much rather talk and write about what's happening in the 'hood. How come we haven't allowed the conversation to include the influence and beauty of Centro America on our politics and struggle? Why has Chicanismo not been there to prevent the exportation of a deeply embedded gang culture, furthering the criminalization of our youth in a global context and an interminable line of kids going to jail for making "terrorists threats" or just hanging out together on the street in the same neighborhoods being gentrified to may way for the next wave of starving artists? Why have we not spoken about the next generation of resistance to hegemony and colonialism coming from the artists that have as many roots in Mexico City and Guatemala as they do in the City of Angels?

Enough tirade. Go to First Street Studios and check out the new show curated by Lilia Ramirez and Juan Ochoa. Go there before you make the trek out west to LACMA. These are companion and complimentary exhibitions, in my own personal and highly opinionated point of view. I do want to see the "Phantom" show, and support the artists who have contributed work but I also want to be like Adelina Anthony, a Tex-Mex-patriot, playwright and luchadora. I want to cross my arms, click my teeth and palette and say for all time that I'm Xican@ with an "X" and an "at" sign at the end.

Y mis mas sinceros perdones/disculpas al anónimo quien dijo que debo aprender no mirar, porque me podrían picar los ojos. I apologize profusely and confess that I have no idea where I'm looking at most times. I've been so severely inhabiting my own head and heart for two years now and especially since a return from the tomato fields in Florida, that I'm not exactly sure how I could be faulted for looking too long or untoward at anyone. If there was a mistaken perception that I was staring or engaging in some form of lurking disrespect, I would like to know and would be happy to have my eyes poked out by an honest, truthful person willing to tell me neta, to my face that they were feeling something I did was unkind or came from some machista objectification. This is exactly what I'm rebelling against. And it's what we all need some good healing from.

Immokalee, U.S.A.

2008-03-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

Immokalee, Florida sits 80 miles southeast of Ft. Myers. Appearing out of morning mist within the lush palm, pine, cypress and orange tree groves that stand sentry as a gateway to the Everglades, the small agricultural outpost is "My Home," the Seminole word hanging as ironically in the air and as divorced from reality as the the nylon banners hanging from street corners on its modest Main St. with silkscreened images of a cornucopia overflowing with fruit. For the last week, between serving soup as a volunteer at the Guadalupe Center kitchen where Chiapanecos, Oaxaqueños and Guatemaltecos who can't find work in the fields come for lunch and a visit to the hyperreality of Disneyworld, I find myself in the middle of a post-industrial, slave-wage, stoop labor central, harvesting tomatoes alongside said undocumented migrant workers who speak Zapotec, Tzotzil and Quiche just as readily as they do Spanish. For fifty cents a bucket, I toil in a quivering exhaustion, my neck and shoulders beet red from the ravages of an unforgiving tropical sun. It is the first year in eight that I have not been in Los Angeles for the annual Ollin San Patricio show. Appropriately, the Rodarte twins, Scott and Randy, were actually gigging outside of LA this year and my so sojourn to the lands where the harvest of shame is far from over did not actually overlap the traditional Pogues cover tribute.

Imagine being on the Dana Point bluffs on the Pacific coast midway between San Diego and Los Angeles for the NALIP conference with independent Latino filmmakers and emerging industry players--among them Frida Torresblanco and Carlos Cuarón, two darlings of the recent renaissance in Mexican cinema--for two days of surfside schmooze and Mariott Hotel shenanigans then flipping the script 180 degrees for a rude awakening on the other side of the continental U.S. among the most humble and hardest working people on the planet, gente who work 12 hour days in an effort to earn 50 cents for every 20 pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest by hand. To call it a study in contrasts would be overstating the obvious, but here it becomes necessary to underscore how shallow and meaningless all the movie business and creative pretension seem alongside the sweat and pesticide-stained efforts of so many who toil under brutal and savage anonymity so that we can glibly and innocently consume our salads, sandwiches and pasta sauce. The next time some anti-immigrant, zenophobic rube tells me that Mexicans are breaking the law and should be deported, he'll be lucky if I don't slug him. I know. I did it. I picked 50 buckets and earned a measley $22 for an interminable day in the mud and steam of ripe tomato decay, picking green tomatoes in exchange for plastic coin-sized, wafer-thin chips, each the equivalent of two quarters. Those who rail against immigration only blame and persecute those least likely to defend themselves. They would wither and die in the shoes of the fieldworkers who pick the crops we see so many days later in the grocery store. Take your Whopper. I won't go near one. Go try to pick tomatoes in Immokalee for a day, then talk to me about how "illegal aliens" are taking jobs from U.S. citizens. I dare you. Grow some courage, please. Earn your right to talk about who this country belongs to and then tell me I'm unpatriotic. You took the land by force and now you're afraid that the brown-skinned natives from southern climes will inherit the soil you so easily claim as your own. Five hundred years does not an owner make. The earth will belong, as even your biblical references proclaim, once again to the meek. Those quiet, long-suffering Indians you hound and defile with your illiterate and uneducated invective, your hate and fear, are the only ones left with the strength and perseverance to harvest your meals at pennies per pound... And lastly, let me ask you to please support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their efforts to end exploitation in the Florida fields by signing the petition to end sweat shops and slavery and by avoiding Burger King, which refuses still to pay an extra penny per pound.

All the Streets and Saints and Sinners

2008-03-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

Head nigh into spring, otra primavera colorida en Califas, check your shoelaces and remember to greet the Southern California sun, which has rolled in mightily almost as if to snub the cloudy fog, the remnants of our public sayonara to the poet-mentor. Threaded throughout, are the engines of prose, the need to organize at least of few of these writerly impulses, an incurable curiousity and the need to celebrate who we are and where we live. Couple these with any number of similarly LA-born effusions and you get a flurry that motivates and stimulates.

The Flowers, by Dagoberto Gilb, who likewise rolled through mightily (and oddly enough, during the week we lost the beloved elder) is a perfect place to begin and simply one more lustrous example. On a brief local tour that included a vivid LA Library conversation with poet Marisela Norte, Dago introduced us to his new novel, a rivetting tale told in the elegantly provocative and tastefully restrained prose Gilb is known for. The story is delivered through the precociously muted voice of Sonny Bravo, the proto-antihero who embodies the search for self amidst the chaos of a suburban landscape that we know without a single specific reference to be Los Angeles. The streets team with danger and possibility in a world where black, white and brown dance with shadows and skirt the hidden layer of tension that informs a stark reality grounded in truth and tenderness. 'Nuff said.

With another worthy riff on the streets we've come to know as our own, artist and author J. Michael Walker has concluded his seven year love letter to Los Angeles with a major exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Walker walked the nearly 100 streets in LA named for saints and has created an epic elegy with paintings and drawings that reverberate with meaning and emotion and history. Caught a brief glimpse at the opening and obviously need to go back because it was just too much to absorb during a crowded reception. All of the Sain ts of the City of Angels is presented in a baroque, very bilingual manner that enhances the intensity of work that addresses contemporary issues of class and race and gender with remarkable sensitivity. Walker is unafraid to speak truth to the dominant elite within their very own sanctums of privilege and cultural power while addressing the turmoil and tension that keep so many of us from connecting with others. A companion hardcover book wasa published as part of the project and a booksigning at Book Soup is scheduled on March 6th.

Others who spoke truth did so in theatrical presentations and panel discussion offered as part of a two day conference on the prison industrial complex and the proliferation of torture and violence as legitimate tools of the state to suppress dissent, interrogate alleged enemies and as part of a multi-million dollar for-profit "correctional" enterprise that makes mass imprisonment and dubious criminalization of our young people big business and a tragic fact of life. On Saturday night, poet, professor and now playwright David Lloyd presented a staged reading of The Press, a play revolving around a painter and a poet imprisoned by a brutal regime. The proceedings, loosely tied together as "The Politics of Art and Imprisonment" took place at the the 24th St. Theatre and were followed on Sunday by an afternoon presentation of a play developed by USC professor Brent Blair and writer/youth activist Mario Rocha--himself once imprisoned for ten years as part of two life sentences for a crime he did not commit. The production culminated with the real parents of real children who have been incarcerated filing across the stage, carrying photographs and sharing their own stories, many with very real tears in their eyes, their voices trembling in English and Spanish. Blair is a cofounder of the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and Applied Theatre Arts.

Roll Call Dispatch & Radio Days

2008-02-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

The February 16th funeral services for maestro raúlrsalinas in South Osten near the campus of St. Edwards University where Raúl taught as an adjunct professor in media studies were met with chill winds, a cold, drizzling rain and finally a rainbow, a fitting signal that the poet had been lifted into the great hogan in the sky and declared a human being. The list of despondent and solemn mourners who offered music, sage, poems and prayer was long. Among those who paid their respects were: UFW's Dolores Huerta; poet and famed Royal Chicano Airforce founding father José Montoya; San Francisco-based writer Alejandro "Gato" Murguía; Dr. Louis Mendoza, who co-edited Telling Tongues: A Latin@ Anthology on Language Experience published jointly by Red Salmon Press and Calaca Press; artist/activist Jane Madrigal; Pocha and Victor Payan who are now coordinating the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Cinefestival in San Antonio; director/actor Rodney Rodriguez; documentary filmmaker Andrea Melendez; playwright and poet Sharon Bridgforth; NOKOA Newspaper publisher Akwasi Evans; painter Anna Salinas; cinematographer Lee Daniel, documentary filmmaker Susanne Mason... the list goes on and on. Laura Varela is working on a documentary about "Tapón" as we speak and made her way north from San Anto to attend as did Victoria Garcia, another S.A. artist/administrator. The creative tide left in our mentor's wake was and is a tanglible gale force of energy that goes on. This week's national broadcast of Latino USA offers my own humble tribute to Raul. The radio essay is called "Death of a Poet."

Amorindio... descanse en paz, maestro raúlrsalinas

2008-02-13T10:01:00.000-08:00

Llantos y lamentos y aullidos y un dolor profundo desde el mero corazón, because the world has lost a blazing warrior, a down crusader for human rights and social justice and a literary lion. Just a month or so shy of his 76th birthday, my mentor and honorary godfather and the vato who kept me off the streets and out of trouble for so many years during a troubled post-adolescence, one ex-pinto, self-described cockroach poet and the founder/owner of Resistencia Bookstore, author of Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions and so much more, raúlrsalinas caught the bus early this morning. The legendary poet, who shared the stage with Oscar Zeta Acosta, José Montoya, Ernesto Cardenal, Piñero, Pietri and a multitude of others took me on twenty-four years ago and put me to work. Dusting bookshelves, painting rooftop bookstore signs and loading boxes of books onto the back of a pick up for trips to the San Antonio Inter-American Bookfair where he introduced me literally to Luis Rodriguez, Dagoberto Gilb, Trinidad Sánchez and many others, I soaked up jazz monsters and read with a voraciousness that stemmed from his plain, matter-of-fact revolutionary stance. From Angela Davis and Leonard Peltier to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, my South Austin residency at Resistencia, Casa de Red Salmon Press was all about the education I would never have gotten in the halls of academia. I was proud to lug around the jailhouse graphics department in a plastic file folder case. We ran together for ten years until I ventured out into the world as a reverse mojado in Matamoros, then a music flack for La Mafia in Houston and finally as a sometime wordsmith in East LA. The last time we spoke, a month before Christmas, he had not even the energy to give me my requisite regañada. Just a year before that, at a fundraiser tribute for him hosted by actor Jesse Borrego, he'd given me a serious tongue lashing over the fact that I'd let a good woman get away or run her off, rather. "Nephew, what did you do to her?" he'd asked with his traditional good-natured gruffness, the slight scolding implicit. I could only look away in shame and offer a nervous laugh while shrugging.

Raul spent many years in the prison system and thus became an engaged political activist. His transformation enabled my own eventual commitment to kids caught up in the juvenile justice system. It's ironic that his passing comes a week or so after my own introduction to the inside of a county jail complex and a troubling first hand glimpse at how that jail machine is built to break you down. Raul stood up. He wrote and he taught and he blessed us with his wisdom, a sage body of knowledge acquired through a lifetime of experience filtered through one of the keenest intellects I've ever encountered. His work on behalf of Native American rights and at-risk youth in detention facilities across the nation, his struggles against oppression and political censorship around the globe, and his gentle demeanor as a humble bookminder shall be heralded through the end of time. Adios, uncle. I'm a better human being for having known you and need you to know that your work will go on. It will continue far beyond those admiring liner notes for your first spoken word CD from Calaca Press, te lo prometo... La lucha continua.

Even Malverde Nods to San Valentin

2008-02-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Insiders know that Machete Music recording artist Malverde, who takes his name from the patron saint of smugglers, is on the verge of a national breakout. His conscious hip-hop and bilingual rap first came to my attention at about four years ago when he crashed a couple of NALIP conference receptions and offered a demo and some righteous plática. The lyrical eloquence of his palabra, bespoke an awareness of his role as an agent of change, as a young man concerned about the violence in our communities and a visionary who crossed easily in and out of either language. The CD release party held downtown last night was a celebration of his maturation and a second major label release. Distributed by Universal Music, Malverde rallied guests from here to Riverside. Spotted in the crowd were jeweler Araceli Silva and Magdaleno "Guic" Robles, who launched Creativo Management after our own ill-fated feature film project (and his directorial debut) went haywire and bust amidst dubious support from our producers. Taco Chihuahua catered directly from the discos and Jarritos introduced their semi-urban marketing campaign which is highlighted by the phrase "What the fruit?!" Gimmicky but effective. It bears mention that the fiesta was sponsored by MTV3. Mad, mad props to a young artist who's paid his dues and continues to spread positive messages. Aplausos para Daniel Hastings as well, the Chicano-panameño NALIPTster and long-time member of NALIP and president of the Atomicus Creative Group who directed Malverde's scorching new video and a long-time NALIPster who wants to get us in to a Grammy after-party on Sunday.

After the primaries and the optimism derived from Obama's muscular showing in a gap-closing Super-Tuesday election, Malverde was a follow up signal that life is looking up. Malverde delivered his own flows as well as refrains from "Volver" and "Tragos de Amargo Licor," both chicano and paisa sing along standards. He also offered a track to his grandparents who have been married for about 50 years, evidence that life-long love is possible and it leads directly into a round up of the Valentine's Day events and activities that will perhaps make all of our love lives (or lack thereof) interesting this weekend. I'm pleased to confess that I'll be writing love poems on demand with original illustrations by José Lozano at the Self-Help Graphics "Botánica de Amor," a love fair featuring tarot readings, love potions and prints from the SHG print taller. Spoken word artists who will share "sexy-love" poetry include Adolfo Guzmán López and Consuelo Flores.

And if that weren't enough, San Anto-bred Ana Guajardo, la switchera extraordinaria, also hosts a can't miss artesanía and love-stuff happening on Sunday. "Amorarte," as she's dubbed the sale and gathering of good friends over food and wine, brings together a number of LA's best Latina/Xicana/Mexicana artisans, designers and fashionistas who craft their wares by hand at home. Contact her at her website for an invite and details. Meanwhile, Karla Lopez, founder of the enormously popular Mamacita's Market has organized "A Day for Love: As Sweet as Chocolate" with a special performance by musical soulmaster Alex Painter on Sunday as well over at Placita Olvera in conjuntion with Casa de Sousa. Support local artists and taste the fruits of cariño in the process, por fa'...

La Candelaria & the Beyond the LA County Blues

2008-02-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

Today marks the second anniversary of the celebration I came to host at my cantoncito in honor of "Candlemas," La Candelaria. Traditionally, if you find a baby Christ figurine in your slice of rosca cake on Jan. 6th (Epiphany/Reyes Magos) you are obligated to host a fiesta on February 2nd. This year, we've moved the feast to Ave. 50 Studio in order to honor our brother Peter Harris and the spoken word event he's put together as part of the LA Black/Brown Dialogues, a series which seeks to shed light on how we can better understand one another. Peter created and hosted "Inspiration House" over at KPFK once upon a time and actually participated in a journalism program for writers of color at Berkeley alongside my sister almost a lifetime ago.

And on the subject of family tradition, here's the latest from queridisima Vicky Grise, playwright and dramaturge from San Antonio, as well as author of the Panza Monologues, who's written a play about her Mexican/Chinese ancestry. Check out her blow by blow on the nascent production of the piece at Cal Arts where she's getting a Masters.

It wouldn't be a blog without a weary confession of the fact that I'm still nursing my soul after a sojourn into the maelstrom of the LA County lock up on an old traffic violation I never took care of. More on how I earned my County Blues in another blog or an article. It's enough to say that you never want to go there. On another level, it brings me closer to the kids I've worked with in juvenile hall as a creative writing teacher for the last four years and gives me a bonafide perspective from the inside. It was, simply, a tragic and overwhelming, soul-searing, chain-gang rattling mindfreak through the halls and cellblocks of misdemeanor time. Never before had I been on the receiving end of such a brutal, systematic process, a journey that strips you of your dignity and humanity in the worst possible ways. In light of this, the Candelaria has an exponentiated significance... I am once again on the outside under the vibrant glow of a Southern California sun. Light a candle and thank your lucky stars. A community of artists and writers was ready to send out the search party, and I realized, once again, how fortunate I am clan-wise. Mil gracias a mis amigos y a mi familia. Los quiero muchisimo...

Fruit Trees, Music and the Art of Creation

2008-01-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

Since I'm prone to side with long-time camarada Jimmy Mendiola and heave an exasperated sigh with respect to all the Democratic party South Carolina side show antics. He rightfully and insightfully defers to a brilliant take by Roberto Lovato for New America Media which was reposted over at Huffington. Add to that the endoresment of Hillary by the UFW and I won't even begin to bother. Rafael Childress, my lifelong friend and a former child actor on a bilingual educational PBS series called Carrascolendas (created by Chicana TV pioneer Aida Barrera) sent a text from Texas or New York or wherever he's got himself to recently about how César Chávez must be rolling over in his grave. Como se llama?! Se llama Obama and go tell that to yo mama!!! According to the poorly equipped and eerily under-informed pundits in the mainstream media we are "overwhelmingly" supporting a former Goldwater republican and the daughter of an old school racist/segregationist because of an alleged animosity against blacks. Give me a frackin' break! Check out these fotos from the aforementioned TV show that ran for eight years in the 70s for a look at where the Rainbow Coalition was actually born. No, mis queridos lectores. Best leave well enough alone. Even if I have been tapped to do a little sribblin' about Mr. Paul, the charmin' lil' old doctor feller from Tay-haas for a local mag. Instead, I'll jump up and down beside myself with pride and glee because my El Sereno neighbor and righteous Zocaloc artist Pete Carrillo is curating a bang up exhibition right under everyone's nose at the Sony Pictures Entertainment Studios in Culver City. With music as a thematic thread, the exhibition features work from Poli Marichal, Timoi, Eriberto Oriel, his sun and Jokerbrand kingpin Esteban Oriel as well as Sandy Rodriguez (these are just the folks whose work I know and admire) among many others. The show includes photos, paintings, mixed media, and art created on musical instruments. House that for subversive knocking on the White House back door in the middle of the night? Can't wait to check it out tomorrow mañana. Should be a good party.

And as an antidote to all of the madness and chaos nosotros los pobres poetas are so eager to embrace while railing against it at the same time, there's comadre Daisy Tonantzin, mujer caracol, supervising the great fruit tree giveaway at Proyecto Jardín, the Boyle Heights community garden that continues to thrive in spite of everything. If you're around, head over there between 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. to help out. Proyecto Jardín is located at 1718 Bridge Street in BH just behind White Memorial Hospital. Urban farming... get with it. Support the garden, Tree People and Girls Today, Women Tomorrow, a leadership mentoring program for young women in our community.

New Year, New Day y El Destino Ante Amor

2008-01-05T01:02:00.000-08:00

How does one begin? Fiestas navideñas on and across the supple backs of four weeks that literally flew by, perhaps? And so it was back from Tejaztlan and the bright lights and big music of mi querido Austin. Flying in to LAX after dark for a Christmas rendezvous with myself and the shades of destiny. It was a return to temporary work at NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers), but more importantly, a fundraiser a few days after for a few of us who've been invited to the Decimo Tercero Festival de Poesia Internacional en La Habana. Held at Miss T's Barcade, the retro-cool arcade-cum-cantina co-owned by Ricardo Gómez, accordion player with Very Be Careful, a band that turns in Colombian vallenato and cumbia standards with celebratory joy and musical madness over trago 'tras trago. Compa' was kind enough to let us keep the nominal cover. So here we are en el año del dinero or so I'm told by a lovely dominicana in Boston. Finished it all with a New Year's Eve party of one, alone in El Sereno. Followed it a few days later at the birthday pachanga for KPFK's Pocho Hour of Power co-host and reformed bad boy Esteban Zul in Silverlake. Tamales and tequila with a bang. Esteban is an official ambassador of Aztlan as recognized by the Cuban embassy attaches in Mexico City.

The holy-days would not, finally, have been complete with out the traditional Rosca de Reyes on January 6th in celebration of the Reyes Magos. I was honored to have LA's premiere Chicana Poetas Chingonas (CPC)--Gloria Alvarez, Reina Prado and María Elena Fernández as well as cultural arts maven and camarada Fabiola Torres over to the humble cantón for tamales and champurrado. Friend and brother for life Jesse Katz read from his upcoming memoir soon to be published by Crown Books. Last year we celebrated the Three Kings Day at Rudolpho's in Silverlake. Much cozier at home and can't wait for the candelaria, the party those who find the tiny niño santo figurine in their slice of rosca (King Cake). Of course, Francisco Hernández would wind up with one as did pintor y artista del grabador extraordinario José Lozano. Props to Reina who baked her own! This is the season... and stay tuned for a poem titled as such written on January 12th, a day imbued with uncontainable personal meaning and magic and memory and melancolía nostalgica. Promised myself I wouldn't use this blogspt for poetry, but I'll renege. Recommended: the exhibition of Graciela Iturbide photographs at the Getty. There are no words to conjure the mastery yet. The title suffices in a way these humble excursions can't. See her photo from Tijuana at the top. See, it isn't just Chicanos that make a fetish of Guadalupe-Cuatlicue...

Vuelos de Fantasia/Flights of Fantasy

2007-12-26T18:06:00.000-08:00

Nothing like an ennui -laden visit to childhood stomping grounds in South Austin, post-pubescent, Lone Star beer-fueled sex and scramble runs on the West Side of San Antonio and a return to the scene of so many youthful experiements in teatro, muralismo, arte Chicano and poetic transformations. For the last ten days or so, it's been a non-stop rocket ride or a roller coaster descent into the maelstrom depending on your perspective. It was extraordinary to see my brother's latest salvo from the culture ward. Tomás, the artist who gifted me with a Che Guevara t-shirt when I was only nine, spent the late 80s and early 90s in San Juan Bautista as an apprentice at Teatro Campesino under the tutelage of the extended Valdez clan. In 1997, he revived the historic Pastorela tradition and staged a version very loosely based on the one our Californio brethren had been mounting in that marvelous mission church up north for years.

Have to say I could not have been prouder. The show ran at a 15-years-in-the-making Mexican American Cultural Center, in a building designed by Mexico City architect Theodoro González de León. I was pleased to see that support for such a staple of our annual holiday celebration was supported so strongly. Latinos make up about 30% of the population there and with nary a review or an article in the local (read: general market) press, La Pastorela had sell-out houses for its entire run.
Also managed to get my dose of Tamaleville (coined by Marisol Perez, my niece) nourishment while indulging in a laconic big screen marathon that consisted of I Am Legend one night, Beouwoulf 3D the next and The Golden Compass on the night after that. Finished it all with a Saxon Pub visit to hear Stephen Bruton and the Resentments. Bruton's played with everyone including the late great Stevie Ray Vaughn. He's also produced albums for Alejandro Escovedo, rocker, troubador and everyone's favorite músico under the influence as well as a spoken-word CD for indio-poet-honorary uncle raúlrsalinas. I know the Wolfe school says you can't go home, but Christmas trips to the land of bluebonnets and pecans can definitley put you in a place that makes for nostalgia and recovery.

Meanwhile, a dinner at the world-famous Guero's on South Congress Ave. saw me in the company of my 7th and 8th grade English teacher, Rosa. She and her husband Joe Pérez--both now retired educators who settled and taught in Brownsville after leaving Austin in the 70s--have my undying love and admiration. They tour together these days performing traditional border tunes in two-part harmonies. Rosa writes poetry and composes songs to pad their already considerable considerable repertoire. All of this is really her fault because she once whispered quietly into my ear about destiny and a mission and the need to transcribe these tales.

Brown is the New Green

2007-12-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Coming off of the hand-crafted, artisan-fueled weekend excursion, I find myself thinking of Phillip Rodriguez and the economies of autonomy. Phillip is a filmmaker whose last film, L.A. Now was a poetic rumination on the tide of change and eternal flux that makes this city such a fascinating place to inhabit, discover, study, and forgive. I missed the screening and the discussion around his new film Brown is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream held at USC last month, but the crux is that this so-called "Hispanic Market" explosion--that marketers and purveyors of mass consumerism are trying to figure out so they can slam more burgers and trendy gadgets down our already constricted throats--is a curious exercise in cluelessness. He is correct in pointing out that Latinos and U.S. Latinos in particular are not easily categorized, commodified, dissected as a generic demographic. Proudly, I purchased the new novel by Luís Rodríguez, Music of the Mills, a jar of hand-made sea-salt scrub, hand-made earings, boutique Christmas cards and a calendar printed in a small downtown art studio and bathed in the tradition of fine Mexican printmaking. Needless to say, this was all residual glow from the Virgen de Guadalupe: Diosa Inantzin spectacle I ws lucky enough to witness on Friday night. Sal López as Juan Diego was an example of flawless casting if ever there was one. El compa' Francisco Hernández reminded me, after he heard me rave about the musical and theatrical perfomances in the production, that Sal has probably incarnated Juan Diego more than any other single actor. Opera star and East LA native Suzanna Guzmán was luminescent as the Virgen de Guadalupe. Mad respect and props to Evelina Fernández for her libretto and José Luís Valenzuela for fine drecting. The show left me breathless, and I promise to attend again his holiday season if at all possible.

I find it infinitely beautiful that politically progressive Latino community activists in LA have been able to carve out so many accessible spaces where we can put our hard earned money directly into the hands of the people who have created the gifts I will take home to family in Texas. That spaces such as IMIX Bookstore in Eagle Rock, Trópico de Nopal Gallery and even a little gallery in Boyle Heights can exist and perhaps even thrive a little in an era when war is big business and more mass profit for the corporate raiders and financial captains of the global conglomerates is ample testimony of our survival instinct and the creative spirit that drives so many of those among us who resist. And in the spirit of resistance, I ventured out as far as Hollywood to see José Montoya, a original member of the Royal Chicano Airforce, read his poetry. Su hijo Richard Montoya de Culture Clash and Mario Rocha rounded out a slate of Chicano literary muscle. Termine cansado but still managed to make it back to Boyle Heights to congratulate the always pugnacious and plucky playwright/screenwriter Josefina López and the folks who put together BHLIFE (Boyle Heights Latina International Film Extravaganza). Mi admiración por su trabajo noble en el corazón de un barrio netamente angelino. If your free tonight, come to Self Help Graphics for a reading in celebration of Guadalupe-Tonantzín. Voy estrenar mi primer librito en 10 años, a self-published chapbook titled "Hija de Guadalupe."

Bienvenidos a Guadalupe Central

2007-12-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

Got an email from Daniel Hernández, periodista poca madre who's in Mexico City writing his book (dig his pictures of El Chopo posted today). He wondered what prompted my playful schoolyard tackle of Yepez. Perhaps I was as estridente as the columnist likes to think, but in the ironic interest of furthering the cultural critic's scattershop argument, I'll defer to my good friend Adolfo Guzmán López, radio reporter at KPCC-FM in LA and a founding member of the Taco Shop Poets. And I'll also gleefully encourage everyone to see La Virgen de Guadalupe: Diosa Inantzin, a musical play directed by José Luís Valenzuela, which previews for free at the downtown Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral before opening for a formal run at the New Los Angeles Theater Center next week.

Los Angeles is transformed this weekend into an awe-inspiring outpouring of faith that happens just as fanatically in Mexico City as it does here. In 1995, I wrote about doing danza azteca in el D.F. To me, she was bigger than the Rolling Stones. While they had merch tables, she had merch islands. Beyond the virtual explosion of mercados navideños all over town including the print sale at La Mano Press, more of last week's pachanga y arte magic at Frank Romero's studios, witness as well the Just Holiday Marketplace at SAJE (Strategic Action for a Just Economy) near USC. Catch any and all of your favorite community artisan and craftspeople at any one of these festive gatherings. Avoid the malls at all costs!

In the self congratulatory category: my article on Fidel Rodriguez and Divine Forces Radio appears now in New Angeles Monthly. He's a solid red road brother, and like most of the gente más chida I've gotten to know in Los, is an honorary child of maestros such as Luís Rodríguez, José Montoya (also being honored with a tribute at the LA Theater Center this Sunday), raúlrsalínas and maestras such as Angela de Hoyos, Gloria Alvarez, Cherrie Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes, all activist writers and media artists who were and continue to be comprometidos con la comunidad. If that makes me a neo-cristero nacionalist who adores Che as Christ, pues, que con gusto, guey!

La Virgen y El Che Rifan y Que?!

2007-11-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

For some time I've been meaning to respond to the snotty superiority of Tijuana writer-cum intellectual Heriberto Yepez who penned an essay on how Chicano artists are fixated on la virgen de Guadalupe, Frida Kahlo, Che Guevara and that we are reactionary neo-cristero nationalists in an attempt to make himself appear literary while dismissing the cultural integrity and value of the remedial, almost childish spanish of Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street. His rant against the dominant paradigms posit him as a frustrated and envious climber who goes on to rail about how most Chicano poetry sucks and how there is no formal innovation in the Chicano novel. He obviously hasn't read Salvador Plascencia. And he continues by complaining that a prominent Chicano intellectual was above criticism and that he himself has been attacked as a burgues when the Chicano academics who make three times what he makes should look at themselves before making these types of accusations. All in all, pretty vicious if hackneyed approach derivative of Octavio Paz albeit with much less finesse and style. The article ran in a supplement to El Milenio, an important nacional daily that publishes regional editions throughout Mexico. His tack, clearly, is an attempt to create noise and generate a little polemical juice for himself, since he's virtually unknown in the U.S. I responded in a couple emails. But Ruben Martinez, a writer I respect and admire, had him here for a charla a while back and I missed my opportunity to respond in person. If not for the fact that he gets most of it all wrong, there even seemed to be a bit of anti-pocho racism that lumps Chicanos in with the hegemonic white culture. All that being said, I link the article and leave it for you to judge. I might take it upon myself to translate it as the poor bastard is much less fluent in English as a great many of us on this side, who on principal, make it a point to speak as naturally and comfortably in the tongue that has been virtually denied us in the U.S. No love or respect from Heriberto about the Mexica Tiahui recovery movement. Maybe he isn't even familiar and should spend a little time El Sereno.

I'm actually quite proud that I'll be participating in a poetry event in honor of Guadalupe-Tonantzin at Self-Help Graphics on Dec. 12th and I'm nostalgic aobut the Che Guevara t-shirt I was given at nine by my older brother, then a 17 year old Brown Beret in Austin, Texas. And so tonight I'll head to the Cactus Gallery in Eagle Rock to hear my friend Ricardo Acuña, who rights in English, Spanish and French, read from his self-published book, Under the Influence. And then maybe, just maybe, I'll crash the Christmas art sale at Romero Studios in Frogtown... perhaps a small celebration and the crush of holiday love will be an antidote to my own mispanthropic mini-rant about Yepez.

Feliz Navidadddeeeeooooosssss

2007-11-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

Couldn't bear to be away for too long, even in the throes of post-overeaters weekend recovery. After nearly needing to be carried back to El Sereno from Santa Ana in a half-ton pick up or at least a wheel barrow, I pulled up to the downtown LA loft of artist and jeweler Consuelo Campos, who was hosting a dinner for the occasion as well. An interesting and eclectic array of folks. Had just enough room for some incredible postres and a little dish washing with good wine. Also grabbed some take-out stuffing made cajun style under the gourmet watch of la connie. Her astounding designs in silver make most of the hot ticket stocking stuffer items lists. Gal pal and printmaker Emelda Gutierrez has been working with Consuelo and will be debuting some new designs of her own this season.

On Friday, even more blessings were bestowed my way... I was afforded the opportunity to cook enchiladas for the lady folk who descended on poet and beloved mentor Gloria Enedina Alvarez' kitchen. It had been about a year since I prepared green sauce and stewed pollo con chile pasillo, tomate, cebolla y trozitos de zanahoria. Needless to say they were a hit. Parece que ahora me puedo casar. The warmth and plática among good friends was priceless. And it was extended well into the next day at a birthday party for artist José Lozano hosted by Ave. 50 Studios. Maestro Lozano went all out, even turning on the disco lights. I wrote about his killer-back alley clowns for Artillery Magazine a while back. Gloria Alvarez and I produced a collaborative poem which we had mounted in a deluxe gold frame. The gathering of dancers, family, friends, artists and poets nearly approximated "lavish" proportions but retained a healthy dose of homespun Chicano celebración.

Of course, I made it by Mercadito Caracol on Sunday to load up on all natural soaps from Daisy Tonantzin at Yerberia Mayahuel before heading off to the X-mas sale at Self-Help Graphics. Too many cool things to buy and way to many cool peeps to list. Support SHG. The annual X-mas market happens again next Sunday. Better see you there!

Frida at Olvera

2007-11-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

My tocayo Abelardo de la Peña, Jr., founder and editor of LatinoLA--the complete guide to LA as filtered through tan-colored lenses--just hit me with a heads up on the Frida Kahlo lecture being presented next Wednesday, November 28th by Gregorio Luke. Abelardo has been a major part of the creative revival at Placita Olvera's Mexican Cultural Institute, bringing artists and ambitious exhibitions to the venue regularly while scouring the Southland for potential boardmembers who can assist him in the efforts to recast the struggling institution as a dynamic addition to Latino arts and culture in LA. He says its best to RSVP at 213-624-3660.

The former director of the Museum of Latin American Art and now an Instituto boardmember, Luke draws from his extensive research libary for what promises to be a revealing discussion on the artistic life, personal journey and influence of Frida Kahlo, illustrated by a multimedia presentation using slides and film. I admit to being pleasantly surprised to see that it's being sponsored by The Walt Disney Company. Head to the Plaza Methodist Church at 115 Paseo de la Plaza in the middle of Placita Olvera around seven. It free and open to the public. I'll be making my way there.

Tonight in Carson, Califas, thousands of diehard Soda Estereo fans are singing along to the 80s argentino pop-rock cult phenom that took Latin America by storm long before the phrase rock en español had come into usage and, as Chicanos, we collectively discovered an affinity for Maldita Vecindad, Los Fabuloso Cadillacs and Café Tacuba. Props to recovery efforts in the blogosphere by San Anto and LA students of the 80s Chicano punk explosion here in Los that often goes unnoticed, but at the same time I also encourage them to check the greater mundo-at-large and the influence of seminal bands such as Soda and the more political and indigenously rooted efforts of Tony Mendez at Rockotitlan who bridged the grandfathers of modern Latino rock--como El Tri y Rockdrigo, por ejemplo--with the pan-latino revolutionary punk-ska-rapero scene that now unfurls across LA, through El Chopo and all the way to Buenos Aires. Off my didactic soap box now por fa' porque luego mañana hay que irnos hacia Santa Ana for a late lunch with a tia and primos, one of whom has been a teacher at Garfield High for 30 years... both pre- and post Jaime Escalante, portrayed by Eddie Olmos in Stand and Deliver. Go Bulldogs! It's the very same East LA high school that recently had its auditorium torched by an irate student. Los Lobos lent their considerable talent to a fundraising concert held Oct. 14th at the Gibson Amphitheatre to restore the fire damaged structure. If that isn't enough East LA and Mexico City nostalgia to float your memory cards to down to the Long Beach harbor, I don't what it is... Y aunque no soy de aqui, mi niñez en el valle de San Gabriel como que me dió para siempre las ganas de ocupar los espacios orientales...

Political Equators, Transitorio Public and Amtrak Back

2007-11-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

Running a week long, the glistening silver tendrils of thought and dialogue emanating from the gathering of artists, activists and scholars aptly titled TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO | PUBLICo TRANSITorio continued unabated, culminating in a two-day trans-border event that criss-crossed the Tijuana-San Ysidro checkpoint. Disappointed at not being able to attend a daytime program called L.A.’s Un/Freeways: Collectivized Practices in the Dispersed City on Thursday with presentations by Daisy Tonantzin of Proyecto Jardin, Womyn Image Malers (WIM; a collective of activist filmmakers that includes Aurora Guerrero, Dalila Mendez, Maritza Alvarez and Claudia Mercado) as well as platica, arte y poesia from Gloria Alvarez and Yreina Cervantes, I followed work on an Amtrak Surfliner and inadvertently landed in the middle of The Political Equator II, a think-tank rendezvous with San Diego-Tijuana architect and artist Teddy Cruz, who led a group of international artists and urban strategists who work with public space and concepts elaborated around the issues of social justice and equity on a similar train trip south. I was amazed to discover a newly restored 1927 storefront designed by Louis Gill in San Ysidro and now owned by Casa Familiar, a community development organization that is transforming the very core of a marginalized and neglected border community. I was pleasantly surprised to see Ms. Space Chola herself, installation/conceptual artists and photographer/printmaker Sandra de la Loza as well Luis Alejandro Vega, both El Sereno proud..

I forewent the walking tour over the border to observe the wall that fails to truly divide what cannot and should never be divided, Baja y Alta California and opted instead for a drive to the U.S. side of the said divider as it spills out into the ocean at Border Fields State Park, a recreational retreat that marks the end of the Tijuana River Valley and its link to the Pacific. Trippy and revolting at the same time. And I hear it used to be called Friendship Park before the onslaught of anti-immigrant hysteria. The Amtrak ride home after a hot pastrami in San Diego's Little Italy--the Mona Lisa Deli and Restaurant to be more precise--was highlighted by convesation with de la Loza and her two firme camaradas, Jessica and Joy.

Mercado de las Mamacitas

2007-11-16T14:40:00.000-08:00

Under the banner of "conscious consumerism" former Blue Chips Gallery co-owner Karla Lopez has organized a moveable feast of fashion and design she calls the Mamacita's Market. Tonight, she and a gang of righteous women celebrate cool togs, couture and tricked out accessories by notables such as Virginia de la Luna and artists such as Gina "Guadalupe Gurl" Ramirez. Zocaloc designer/artist Peter E. Carrillo will also be on hand with his wares to represent the papacitos. The "Viva La Chica" extravaganza goes down tonight at Placita Olvera. Unfortunately, I'm previously committed to a Tu Ciudad Magazine party at the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Arts). I'll neither confirm or deny the rumor that I have a personal interest in promoting the work of one designer in particular, though a certain gifted artesana comes to mind...
In the shameless self-promotion department, I suggest grabbing the current issue of Tu Ciudad for a guide to good food and, not one, but two pieces by your friendly neighborhood blogger, one on the custom ice cream truck built for Ry Cooder by the Ruelas brothers--founders of The Dukes, LAs oldest custom car club--and painted by San Antonio artist Vincent Valdez (see previous blog) and another on Cristela Alonzo, a comedian (and fellow Tex-Mex-patriot) who opens for Carlos Mencia these days and knows her way around the funny like nobody's business.

Ollin Mondays

2007-11-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

The quaking sons of City Terrace, Randy and Scott Rodarte have fronted Ollin since its inception in 1994. An often unheralded band of musical heroes who make legions from Berkeley to Boyle Heights dizzy with delight, they deliver high energy live sets with an eclectic range that takes punk through organic twists and turns in a laberynth of folk rhythms drawn from throughout the world. Their annual St. Patrick's Day show of Pogues covers is unworldly. And on Mondays through November, they're holding court at Mr. T's Bowl, a former bowling alley turned dive music venue in the heart of Highland Park. Have to confess that this Monday was particularly rivetting. Following a live open mic jazz jam at the classic Columbo's in Eagle Rock in the company of poets and printmakers, I stepped in and was lucky enough to catch a few signature tunes at the tail end of the gig. And it being Veteran's Day, Ollin once again had me throat knotted with a version of "Waltzing Matilda," a stirring Australian folk song at that follows a young soldier to war. Sad, true and moving in light of the stream of casualties coming home from Iraq... Ollin's featuring San Antonio Visual artist Vincent Valdez on trumpet these days. Valdez also did the cover art for San Patricios, a new CD that alludes to the brave and noble Irish lads who fought on the Mexican side during the U.S. invasion and subsequent landgrab that looted over half of Mexico's territory.

Clumsy Goodbye

2007-11-12T18:19:00.000-08:00

So the kid I baptized in jail four years ago is out. Hosted him for almost two months and have to vouch for him in court on Dia de la Virgen, December 12 before he's completely done with probation, but it's been an incredibly difficult journey. Se me fue mi ahijado. He's hangin' in the San Fernando Valley with a girl he met inside an institution because they've recently conceived a child. Where do we steer them? Why do the the little vatos feel so entitled and angry and in love with a lifestyle that won't allow them to ever become actualized? It's almost funny that we're living in an era that makes exotic gods of bald-headed cholos. Cholos as rock stars? Yes. And I'm not so sure it's a good thing. I don't know yet if it's a bad thing, but the neighborhood beefs go on, even if Mr. Cartoon scores a big-time movie deal and photographer Esteban Oriol is slated to direct. The young men are raised by institutions that remove their sense of compassion and often, remorse. Clumsy, you are not alone... even if I denied you the request to bring your pregnant girlfriend home to stay with us while you wait for your court date, a date I agreed to attend when I told the judge you would be staying with me until you got your life together. Perdoname, hijo. But in two months you've done little to seal the break with the banger mentality that was only reinforced during the last four years as a ward of the county probation system...

Espero que te vaya bien, lil' brother. Please be successful. Please be who I know you have the potential to be... If not like me, then like the artist, my tocayo Abel Alejandre, who opened a show of works in graphite at Ave. 50 on Saturday. If I were ever to imagine that my poetry could aspire to some scope or emotional depth which was manifested in the visual realm, it have to be the pencil drawing that pulled me so deeply into memory and love and loss, that I was almost forced to walk away. Large faces rendered with exact parallel lines become intimate relatives, lost loved ones and people we remember in our dreams from childhood. Four-and-half stars. I'm proud to bear his name. I'd spent the better part of Friday in Santa Monica preparing material and setting up a meal delivery for the opening part of a NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) board meeting and strategic planning retreat. Wore me out. Pleased to be working with NALIP again after a four-year absence. The organization, which nurtures and trains independent mediamakers with programs and an annual conference has more than doubled since I've been away at another gig with yet another membership organization.

Director Kathryn Galan, no relation to either Hector or Nely, had me hopping, so I schlepped things back and forth and got some good left overs in the process. Sunday was dank and wet on the westside. Finally got to sample the brunch fair at Swingers, a west coast landmark akin Mel's diner, only a little cheekier. I recommend Edwin's Pasta, a breakfast plate you'll love even if may seen strange to mix farfalle pasta with scrambled organic eggs, sausage, ham, bacon and parmesan. You'll get over the Warhol-inspired wall art and worship the well-stocked jukebox instead, as you chow like an A-list screenwriter. Trust me.

365 Days, Plays, Birthdays and Orales

2007-11-07T23:04:00.000-08:00

As an L.A. Center Stage project, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan Lori-Parks took it upon herself to write one play a day for an entire calendar year. The result, a monumental production eponymously titled 365 Days, 365 Plays, has had left those who live, breathe, sweat and dream theatre across the U.S. with mouths agape. Hundreds of companies nationwide have been staging them as if their livelihoods depended on it. Last night, a hometown of version of the final seven were delivered at California Plaza, the downtown home of the Grand Performances series. Every week for a year, seven short plays were thrown down somewhere in the land of voiceless angels and sweetly courteous immigrant mothers. The plays in the final throw down were funny, poignant, bold, revolutionary and bizarre... more evidence of the playwright's downright genius. Thought there was a decidedly Eastern, Hindu/Bhuddist/Chakra-slanging tilt to the entire assemblage of short theatrical pieces staged end to end seemlessly, the audience was almost a perfect balance of black and white. I sat next to the venerable poet and performer and friend, Peter J. Harris, author of Safe Arms: 20 Love & Erotic Poems. Even though Parks made an obvious effort and included an memorable Latino character in a brief comedic episode called "Talkback to the Playwright," there were none of us in the audience. Other than one of the the show's producers, LA theatre doyen, Diane Rodriguez, a playwright and director in her own right, the only other Chican@ I recognized in the audience was Debra Padilla, from SPARC (Social & Public Art Resource Center), where the digital mural by Judy Baca featured above can by found.

Thinking about how much work the downtown art scene and the theatre world in LA still has ahead of it in the way of bringing more of us into public art presentations, I was taken back to a night last week when I missed a friend who works near Crash Mansion and wound up having a beer at Hank's, a serious dive in the old Stillwell Hotel at 9th and Grand. Wouldn't you know I'd have to wind up in the middle of a birthday party for a blonde sweetheart, the blue-eyed, dimpled icon of All-American perfection, not bulemic but buxom in a tiara with more than a few shots of Maker's Mark under her belt. Eavesdropping on her friends, all of them equally young and pretty while going on about Port Arthur and Beaumont and Houston in a verifiable twang, I finally caved in and swaggered around in my Texas Longhorn guayabera (perhaps oxymoronic). I was the sudden toast, the new kid who even managed to get a peck on the cheek and a "thank you , sweetheart" from the girl of the hour, none other than Ryanne Duzich who had starred in, according to the Texas-natives there, Friday Night Lights. Someone else made it a point to bring a bottle of Wild Turkey as a gift for Ryanne. Turns out a lot of them live in the Santa Fe Street Lofts downtown, and I was caught between dreading the fact that a covey of beautiful Hollywood hipsters had finally invaded my last refuge and the pleasant glow that comes from being around so many genuinely nice folks from back home. In a city so full of Chicanos, Mexicanos and Latinos, maybe I do like to find myself ashore on stretches of the stratified and dissonant streets where difference and distances are built in, where it takes an effort to reach someone with a different history and an accent, someone walking around behind walls they don't even see...

Fog-Neblina

2007-11-05T14:21:00.001-08:00

Dia de los Muertos blew by, and once again, Self-Help Graphics played host to an outpouring of community and art and music and altars. Monte Carlo 76 has added sultry singer and Phoenix, Arizona emigre Marisa Rondstat. I wrote about the band a couple years back for Tu Ciudad Los Angeles Magazine. Jeremy Keller and dgomez, former members of Slowrider, did right to bring her on board the suavecito sounds of the plush Monte Carlo cruisin' along the highways and byways of Los Angeles. The set last Friday was rock solid. A liberal dose tequila and wine to take us all the way to Grand Star in China town to catch the last few songs by Domingo Siete, and there we were dancing with complete strangers and making our way to underground after hours reggae fun in a downtown warehouse nearMission. Missed the Dia de los Muertos in El Sereno, but caught up with the poetas at Ave. 50 for the monthly La Palabra reading where the Echospace Poets were featured!

Flikas y Los Fieles Difuntos

2007-11-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Finally saw the new Benicio del Toro and Halle Berry flick, Things We Lost in the Fire and was reminded why I hold the former in such high esteem. His talent and emotional range are such that I could watch him smoke a cigarette for ten minutes, an eternity in film. Here he plays a recovering heroine addict at odds and occasionally in cooperation with Berry. Painful and ultimately redemptive, the film struggles with Berry's two note breadth. She goes from maniacally desperate freaking out to cold and aloof with no sense of the humor a simple smile or nod of the head can imbue a gesture or a look. She delivers it but it falls flat more often than not. Meanwhile Benicio squints, rolls his eyes, bares his teeth and can make it all part of a real sense for the silly and the comedic truths in an everyday conversation about riding the white horse. One-and-a-half thumbs up. Look forward to Benicio's dyptich on the life of Che Guevara, The Argentine and Guerrilla.

I also saw the Hillary Swank led Freedom Writers about a high school teacher in Long Beach who walks naively into an urban campus where war on the streets spills into the classroom. Based on a true story, the tale is a modern take on Stand and Deliver, also based on a true story, where the good hearted maestra bonds with her kids and gets them all the way to graduation and makes published writers out of them all. What gets me, however is the incessant need to cast Puerto Ricans with obvious New York caribeño-urban enunciation. How am I supposed to believe the little Chicana chola gangster girl when she sounds like a J-Lo knock-off. Worse yet, all the cholos in the film speak exclusively in perfect Spanish (subtitled). Chicano gangmembers stopped speaking formal spanish 50 years ago. The filmmakers should have hired Manny and the boys at Suspect. It almost reeks of something more sinister... a subtle attempt to criminilize immigrants. What up, foos?

From Lunada to Days of the Dead

2007-10-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

Scene and heard, and I mean that in the most laudatory way... La Cita Bar was transformed last Wednesday into a virtually unpretensious Latino hipster getaway for the appearance of Nacotheque. DJ Marcelo Cunning, working out of New York along with his punk fairy princess and partner Amylu Meneses on a movable feast that can only be described as pyramid of sound, spins the absolutely, without a doubt, coolest alternative, Spanish-language dance music that draws from every corner and every era of música latina for a groove like you've never heard anywhere before. But if that weren't enough, draught Tecate was three dollars a pint. Heads up to cantinero Joe, who was particularly pleasant in Buddy Holly glasses and non-attitude approachablity.

If you missed the Lunada: An Evening of Erotic Poetry & Performance at IMIX Bookstore under the Hunter's Full Moon on Oct. 26th, you missed out. Lo que se perdieron. And not just because I read a selection of previously unheard poems. I had the honor and privilege of sharing a stage with poets/writers Peter J. Harris, Reina Prado, Consuelo Flores, Estrella del Valle, Victor Carrillo as well as venerable playwright, performer, stand up comedian Monica Palacios, who headlined a steamy series of performances under the largest full moon of the year. Reina Prado and Gloria Enedina Álvarez--one of the three best Xicana poets I alluded to before--concocted the idea for the show. Afterwards, we managed to make our way to Columbo's around the corner for Italian comida deluxe and live Latin jazz. Eagle Rock rocks, I'm realizing.

Also had the incredible opportunity to hear Carlos Guitarlos at the Ave. 50 Studios tardeada and art auction the next day. Scores of artist donated work for "An Afternoon of Visual Delights" and a smorgasbord of Chow Hound worthy eats. Carlos is a veteran of the proto LA bar band, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs and a survivor who could launch a second career as a deft, coy and riveting master of satire and innuendo. His blues fret work channels Robert Johnson as easily as it registers compositional genius on his own material. Bring him back to liven any gathering up and set it on fire with nearly six decades of the hard boozin', blues-in and brawlin' life gathered up into songs that rip and soar and crest in a melodic howl from the gray-bearded ghost on the Stratocaster. Kudos to Ave. 50 Director Kathy Gallegos and artist Poli Marichal who curated the art. Let's hope they raised chingos of feria... the museum-caliber and architectural stand-out home of Judge Ricardo and Maria Teresa Muñoz way up in the South Pasadena hills was a fitting site for the fandango. Sweetest digs with a view this side of El Sereno I've seen.

Sierra en Llamas

2007-10-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

I can see the fires on either end of the Los Angeles River Basin from the window of my westward bound flight. As we begin a descent, I see San Bernardino flames first then peer out through the window across the aisle and see Malibu's red orange glow below in the nightime darkness. It is disturbing and a sharp dose of reality after a week on Miami Beach for the Florida Media Market's Global Conference 2007, where I discovered a previously unknown affinity for all things dominicano, broke bread with independent producers and directors and writers and documentarians from Italy, all across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Colombia, Cuba and beyond while schmoozing in subconsciously Caribbean-inflected filmspeak. Spent the final day of down time in the ocean and on a Collins Ave. bus in search of lunch. Fortune was on my side. Aside from having connected the previous day with Daniel Herrera of La Razza Films , I was rewarded with a seven buck lunch special at Varanda's Brazil Cafe, an east coast equivalent of our own down-home El Sereno bound Taste of Brazil.

Daniel is a cat from El Paso living in Cape Coral and working on a doc about Immokalee, an alligator alley town on the west coast of Florida where the loosely Catholic Church affiliated Centro Guadalupe shelters, feeds and bathes immigrants in search of work and dignity. Dan's working with Miami-bred cineasta Georg Koszulinski, and they restore the meaning of subversive cine with an edge and an educated bite. Download the trailer and do yourself a favor. The conditions in which our (shhhssshh, we won't tell) "guest" worker are forced to live is enough to make you fume.

Filmmakers and distributors as well as panelists and executives pow-wowed and partied for several days at the Alexander Hotel. It was an insulated bubble and made my discovery of the hell-spawn fires that now rage across the Southern California landscape all the more shocking and awesome. Of course, we're all waiting with our breath in check for Bushie to make his photo op appearance and declare a national emergency. Yeah, right. More money for war and none for heat in poverty stricken homes and then they want to console those whose homes have been engulfed and destroyed by flames run rampant amidst the raging Santa Ana winds? No creo yo, chuy... to use the expression of incredulity handed to me once not so long ago on the Brownsville-Matamoros border where I took up residence in the late '90s as an Austin exile, mexilidado, mojado al reves.

Days Between Stations

2007-10-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm on the red eye to Miami and couldn't leave my palm tree lined neighborhood--which no longer squawks with the morning parrot armadas in full color regalia since temperatures have descended--without a return to the final throes of a weekend I'm still thrumming over. And since I broached the subject of Dia de Los Muertos at the close of an earlier entry, it's approriate to point out that last Sunday was similarly filled with art forays and extremely delightful company. After a tasty feijoada at Taste of Brazil, conveniently next door to Antigua and now finally serving beer and wine, a friend and I then dropped in on the second Day of the Dead exhibition of the weekend at ChimMaya on Beverly Blvd. just east of Atlantic. That part of unincorporated LA county is now actually considering cityhood. Imagine, the "City of East LA."

So there I was with the annual arts holiday-holyday still a week out, even. Goes to show how seriously we take Dia de Los Muertos on this side of town. The exhibition at ChimMaya, a full-on gallery and hand crafts store in the heart of the Garfield High School neighborhood, brought everybody together and included an altar by Ofelia Esparza, madrina to just about every mural painter and silk screen printer who ever stepped foot inside Self-Help Graphics. Props to Leo Limon, painter, printmaker and muralist for his art and his patient friendship. His work is here up top and the print here is a portrait in a linocut print. Not sure who it's by but I guess I could troll around on the net and find it. Dig the linocut print portrait of Leo by Artemo Rodriguez of La Mano Press on the left. They were created for an exhibition of prints based on Cheech Marin's collection of Chicano art.

Followed up the ChimMaya visit with a stop at Self-Help Graphics for the closing of the a print show featuring work by master printer Poli Marichal, poet and artist Don Newton, Judith Duran, Emelda Gutierrez, Kay Brown and Victor Rojas, among others. Titled H2O, the exhibition was a love letter to clean water and the issued around the liquid gold that have plagued Los Angeles for two generations and now threaten the world. Eco-warriors and barrio angels are not mutually exclusive categories and the two twin up well in a show that needed more attention. Politics and poetry conceived a tribute to Yemaya, the Afro-cuban orisha and goddess of water in a show that takes printmaking into to new territory. Los de Abajo, as the printmaking collective is called, delivered a stridently beautiful prayer in honor of a planet that is mostly water, inhabited by human, whose bodies are also mostly water. Oye!

Monday Blues

2007-10-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

Damp and dreary here en las lomas de El Sereno. Still coasting on the estrogen fix at WITHIN. The urban mujeres delivered in spades. Sirens, the all girl punk band from East LA, capped the show which included MCs, DJ, artesanas, flowmasters and fashion designers. There had to be about 500 people there. Timoi, who curated the show, should be rightfully proud. Next up at Crash Mansion is a graffiti show. I'll be out for the week and won't be able to catch it. Props as well to Sandy Rodríguez who hung high heels and dress up kicks for men and women from the ceiling as part of her altar installation to James Brown at Ave. 50. Of course the evening would not have been complete without the daring and delightful burlesque show at the M Bar next door to El Floridita and Vine and Fountain in Hollywood. Friends gathered to take in the "Trick or Tease" show and celebrate a dual birthday for poet-sister Reina Prado and artist Raul Balthazar. Ms. Prado is helping put together a "Lunada" in celebration that will feature erotic poetry and performance on Oct. 26th. I look forward to the privilege of sharing a particularly succulent poem or two.

Mariachi crooner and native Zacatecano Antonio Aguilar, one of the very few latinos with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, passed away in June of this year. Aguilar spent time in LA at the beginning of his career, sleeping at Placita Olvera before he could afford rent and get settled in. He eventually returned to Mexico and became the icon popularly known as "El Charro de México." Printmaker and artist Daniel González is helping his aunt Theresa, of Teresita's restaurant in East LA, with a project to establish a permanent memorial and life-sized sculpture of Aguilar at a location still to be determined. According to Daniel, she is taking up a collection of used keys and hopes to have enough of them eventually to melt down for the statue. Look for a key donation bucket at Teresita's, a family-run establishment since 1983. I actually began going there years ago at the recommendation of LA Times reporter Robert López. It's a good excuse to go back and close enough to Self-Help Graphics, which, if you haven't realized it by now, is Día de Los Muertos central in the city of angels. More on Day of the Dead when we come back.

Dia de la Raza or Die, Columbus, Die?

2007-10-12T08:49:00.000-07:00

The internal dialogues bristle and pop with even more kinetic energy this time of year as the growing legion of Chicano, Mexica and Red Road activists make friends with technology and begin using spoken word, the internet and recovery of ancestral knowledge to discuss and define a post-Chicano movement that is much more clearly articulated as an indigenous wave that counters colonial and Western hegemony. Sorry if that seems sort of dense. What it boils down to is a barrage of music, art and ceremony in celebration of all that was before, what Los Poetas de Norte and many others, including playwright, filmmaker and founder of T eatro Campesino Luis Valdez have often referred to as a return to Anahuac. It's about erasing artificially imposed borders between nations in North America from Canada to El Salvador and Honduras, all turf that was part of a greater trading and cultural region that the Spanish, the French and the British just couldn't keep their hands off of. So eager to get some, they divided Anahuac into separate nation states in order to make the partition and re-distribution seem orderly and inevitable.

I wouldn't, under normal circumstances, be so willing to offer a Dia de la Raza round up, but for sheer magnitude, this weekend belongs to the artists and cultural warriors, DJs, bands and artisans who don't celebrate Columbus Day, but instead gather to celebrate something bigger, older and equally inevitable. And if you saw Aymara elder and the first ever indigenous president of Bolivia Evo Mor ales on Jon Stewart, you'll understand why the descendents of the original inhabitants of Anahuac and its rightful heirs have a right to be cheeky and in your face this week. We are not liberal, left-leaning commie pinkos, just humble gente trying to teach the world that excess is killing the planet, that violence and war are natural symptoms of opression and suppression in the wake of excessive industry, excessive wealth, excessive consumption that leaves so many of our kids on the street, undereducated, in gangs and on a suicide mission that breaks my heart every day. That ends the diatribe (for now, hazme el pinche favor!).

Eventos recomendandos hoy: Peace & Dignity Journeys 08 Benefit Concert at Proyecto Jardín (Boyle and Bridge), noon to 8 p.m. in support of runners who will run for six months beginning in Alaska to meet runners from Southern indigenous communities in Panama;. Within: The Urban Woman Experience, at Crash Mansion, 1024 S. Grand Ave., 4 p.m. - 8 p.m. featuring DJs, artists, artisans, designers, performers and more!; A Funk and R & B fueled Dia de Los Muertos tribute to James Brown at Ave. 50 Studios, 131 N. Ave. 50 (Highland Park), 7 p.m. - 11 p.m. Mañana: Insurgent Verses at the Knitting Factory, 7026 Hollywood Blvd., 8 p.m., featuring Rubén Guevara, 2Mex, El Vuh, Cihuatl-Ce, Quese IMC, Tolteca and Los Poetas del Norte.

Tragedy and Majesty

2007-10-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight, LALIFF presents Fuera del Cielo, a new film by Javier Patrón, a recent addition to the crew comprising Mexico's emblematic holy trinity of cinema: Cuarón, del Toro and Iñárritu. Actorazo Demián Bichir stars as Marlboro and the film follows his 6 a.m. release from prison for 24 hours while he reunites with his younger brother Cucú. Ostensibly about orphans and life on the grittiest, most hopeless streets of Mexico City, the film, from what I've read, purports to reflect some sad truths facing those at every socio-economic level in the nation of my forebears. Juxtapose this with former president Vicente Fox's new memoir, Revolution of Hope and you begin to see why I might be curious. Ironically, the film screens on a night when the Festival fetes the Lucha Libre tradition and screens an old Santo film while throwing a party on the roof of the parking structure behind the ArcLight Theater complex. Think I'll skip the good, clean, campy fun with Santo and see the Patrón film while hoping it doesn't drag me down into a morose stupor. And in any event, I'm sure the Lucha Libre party scheduled immediatley after the Santo film screening might be in order as an antidote if another tragedy in the wake of Babel and Amores Perros gets too burdensome. For the record, I saw Babel on Valentine's Day with an ex-girlfriend I was still yearning for. Not a good idea in spite of the smuggled in wine, homemade Greek salad and tuna.

For wit and intelligence, check out a blog written by Laura Martinez, a chilanga in New York whose site, Mi Blog Es Tu Blog, was recently posted by Advertising Age. Her essay on how the zippiness of advertising aimed at Latinos outpaces and outstrips the television programming it sandwiches should be the subject of some serious discussion. It's why we brave the Hollywood traffic on a Thursday night for the Latino film festival. Who the hell wants to be more impressed with the comercials on Spanish language television while sitting through some of the worst programming on any grid? Gracias, Laura. At least someone has the chutzpah to tell it like it is. And don't get her started on Ugly Betty.

Miercolicos (Hump Day Hi-jinx)

2007-10-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

Confessional pena: I registered as media at the Congreso Latino and never even went by to pick up the badge. I did, however, make the Sunday night dinner at the downtown Sheraton and heard U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (Newark, NJ) stump for Hillary Clinton. Antonio González stoked the crowd, thinned somewhat by the opening night red carpet pachanga hald as part of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival launch at the ArcLight Theater in Hollywood, as best he could. Antonio, an earstwhile childhood friend of LA's golden boy mayor, delivered a treatise on the strategy of joining evangélicos and environmentalists, a brilliant way to engage immigrants and tree huggers politically with a constructive, what can we do together to save God's earth agenda. Pretty amazing, and heady stuff.
Missing the always interesting Latino film festival opening night festivities are we now? Sorry Mr. Olmos and Marlene, but sometimes ya' just need to be reminded, just need to hang where raza is still more interested in resolutions and action committees composed of delegates who traveled to Los Angeles from across the country to participate in a downtown discussion that was actually even protested by Minutemen.

California State Senate Majority leader Gloria Romero spoke spiritedly on behalf of Barak Obama. Chicanos with an ounce of self-repect and any semblance of molecular memory vis-a-vis the movimiento and what it stood for would do well to quit frontin' and get behind the man who opposed the debacle in Iraq from the get go. Working within constraints, you have to applaud the gente behind the Congreso Latino for opening up a forum for serious dicussion of immigration and the changing complexion of the nation. Gloria Romero gives East LA a good name.

Unfortunately, I missed out on most of the townhall-style discourse, but from the little that I saw, it obviously reflects a shift, an honest-to-goodness political shift. The fact that there were Minutemen a hundred deep outside the Macy's downtown is ample evidence that Chicano-Latino agendas led and driven by emerging and increasingly successful political operatives from our side of the river are resonating across the board.

Weekend Recap

2007-10-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

What can you say about SoundEye? Held at Taper Hall on the USC campus, it was intimidating insofar as the gathering of poets had to compete with a Trojan game, so parking was beastly. Enough discussion about hermetic insularity vs. accessibility and transference. The reading, held in a small conference room/library filled with faculty work (T.C. Boyle's titles seemed to predominate along the section of shelving where I sat to get my SoundEye fill), was intense and aloof at the same time. I won't even shy away from saying flatly that some of poetry was breathtaking. Alfred Arteaga, recently out of the hospital, read from a book that came of a sojourn in Ireland in addition to work from Cantos and Fred Moten, author of In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, revealed essences of a poet-philopsher who takes the work of writing seriously.

Equally urbane and riveting, Marisela Norte invited the boys, her male contemporaries in LA artes y letras, to read some of her work while she delivered a piece penned by each of them as an introduction. Sesshu Foster, Rubén Martínez and Michael C. Ford did her justice and the words blistered with innate fire and devotion. I bear witness, even if the residue of the late night before left me a might wee bit on the sedate side. One the three best Chicana poets in the country, Norte stalks the city on Metro buses and reveals the real LA in every line etched neatly along the pages of her notepads and composition books. Coincidentally, La Palabra featured a counterpart from across the cultural divide the following day. Steve Abee, in a vein similar to Norte, mines material from the street forward. His style is perhaps less subtle and distinguised by construction as muscular, run-on, free form prose, but the work converges on the same tender perspective. Ultimately, it is a take that doesn't skew the inherent ironies of life absorbed from a rolling perch ambling along the city's surface like blood cells in a body culled from a rainbow of angels.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

2007-10-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

The whirlwind art and music and magazine and poetry and community activism tour takes an extended run this weekend. Teatro CHUSMA's Cervantino send-off was barely the beginning. Followed that with an action painting demonstration by Fernando Barragan at the Salon Belleza which was highlighted by an inadvertent encounter with long-time teatreras Mónica Sánchez and Tonantzin Esparza, and then a stop in at Union Station for the Tu Ciudad mag Hip, Hot Now issue release and celebration to fete Daniel Hernandez, Alexis Rivera and Sandra de la Loza, among others. San Gabriel Valley girl Linda Chavaria and her gal pals were surprised to hear me make references to Sangra and Lomas, old-school clikas they've left behind in their sem-suburban climb. New York's emerging electronica sound-luxe stars Pachamassive stole the show with a song called "Don't Let Go (No Te Vayas)" that underscored how there really is nothing quite like a party in one of the LA's architectural marvels.

A brief layover thereafter amidst the Congreso Latino late-night lobby bar loitering resulted in a first-time ever meeting with poeta nicaraguense Roberto Vargas, a OG, Floricanto-founding scribe who has run with maestro Raul Salinas, owner of Resistenica Books in Austin, for as long as I've been alive. Hearing him read impromptu was moving. Throat got all knotted up. Then over to Sabor Lounge to catch a last set by Mezklah, where guitarrista Greg Hernández took us all to another planet. Stay tuned for more on SoundEye West wrap up and a phenomenal reading of Marisela Norte's work by Rubén Martínez, Sesshu Foster and Michael C. Ford. Que suertudo me siento.

Latino Congreso

2007-10-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

Kicking off with a media breakfast today, the Southwest Voter Registration Project's William C. Velásquez Institute sponsored Latino Congreso brings Latino activists and organizers to LA this weekend for plenary sessions, workshops on enfranchisement and climate change as well as environmental issues elaborated through the prism of immigration and urban issues that Latinos confront in the U.S. The list of participants is too long to list here, but it all transpires at the downtown LA Sheraton and it's definitely worth a second look. Personally it pleases me to see that the Congreso coincides with an opening at Salon Belleza at the Wilshire Grand that features new work by Fernando Barragan, a badass painter who runs with filmmaker and documentarian Ernesto Quintero, an OG in the El Sereno artistic renaissance who's working on a film about Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a charter school in my neighborhood that teaches Nahuatl, danza azteca, Mandarin and Spanish as part of a curriculum that makes right wing talk show radio hosts fume. La reconquista is real, no matter how many apologists want to feign a distance, speak in halting, barely coherent Spanish and dismiss the paisas because "they don't like pochos, anyway." No excuse. You, of all people, need to make an effort, force yourselves to speak, at the very least, the language of your immediate forebears, no matter how assimilated or "adjusted" you believe yourself to be. Otherwise, be prepared to be left behind and get recruited by the asshole minutemen who can't fathom a nation overrun by poblanos and oaxaqueños and purepeche and otomi. Get comfortable with an end to your "guerito" or class privilege if you've used lana and intelectualismo to buy your way out of comparisons and links to the chuntaros and tarudos, because the world can't turn without them. Sure, we can go to the private, invitation-only Ciudad Magazine party at Union Station, but on my way home, I'll stop at El Tarasco, a cantina that Echo Park and Silver Lake hipsters haven't yet discovered, where I can meet blue collar immigrant fathers who once auditioned for Amalia Hernández' Ballet Folklorico in Mexico City and can still recite poems by Guillermo Aguirre y Fierro, a poet who penned the unforgettable "El Brindis del Bohemio" in the early 1900s.

This doesn't preclude, however, a couple of out-and-about literary recommendations around town this weekend. I'll make a concerted effort, myself, to attend a reading at Tropico de Nopal as part of Mariela Norte's Sociedad Anonima exhibition that includes Rubén Martinez, Sesshu Foster and Michael C. Ford on Saturday at 8 p.m. On Sunday, Ave. 5o hosts the monthly La Palabra reading led by Echospace poets Don Newton and Laura Longoria and featuring poet, essayist and local literaloco Steve Abee, who rails against MySpace on a MySpace page and makes complete sense to the Pixies soundtrack classic "Where is My Mind."

The plan woud be to make a mad morning run to the South Central Farm tianguis to support sustainable agriculture and neighborhood autonomy then head to Highland Park at 2 p.m. for La Palabra. Get off the computer and do something. Mix it up and contribute, por fa? Stick around after the reading for a closing reception in honor of "Appetite," a show of impressively muscular charcoal drawings by Reyes Rodgriguez, founder/owner of Tropico de Nopal. The drawing here to the right is called "Lust," and it's the last chance to see the work which is introduced by text from Sesshu Foster, a firme wordslinger whose Atomik Aztex has got heads spinning from City Terrace to Boston.

Mystery Hang Up

2007-10-05T11:30:00.001-07:00

Teatro CHUSMA and a housefull of well-wishers restored my faith in community with a resounding and emphatic nod to the antecedents of Chicano movement politics and neighborhood love. Quinto Sol, an East LA outfit that fuses cumbia and reggae while remaining true to the spirit of our roots and early education at the hands of those who embraced Chicanismo, played a paired down set that could verily redefine "unplugged." An art auction with work from Zach de la Rocha, Leo Limon, gift baskets from tienda Teocintli and IMIX Bookstore and a host of artists who donated work to help CHUSMA make it's way to México for the Cervantino inspired several fierce bidding contests. The CHUSMA sketches and still guerrilla-style, in your face theatre were the culmination of a barrio happening that included a hyper-soul liberation set from Olmeca and a high throttle turn from Mystery Hang Up, an all-girl Orange County punk band that could have walked right out of an Hernandez brothers Love and Rockets comic book. I noticed (kind of hard not to) the sisters, one of whom calls herself Cat and leads on a low-slung electric guitar behind the lead vocals mic while her carnala Lux does double-time duty on the drums in the audience at the Girl in a Coma show a week ago and was psyched to see them take the small Eastside Cafe impromtu stage with vengeance. More when we solve the riddle of the 80s Chacha-meets- Chola Mystery Hang Up gang from Orange County. Oooooyyyyy!!! These gurrrls could thrash El Chopo and have enough verve left over to kick in your teeth in with high heeled tacones and glam-glitter fringe leather jackets tossed laconically over their shoulders.