It's Time for Las Cafeteras!

They are Las Cafeteras, a seven-piece ensemble born in El Sereno under the watchful care of Roberto Flores and his brood, a clan of family members—some only symbolically adopted—that gathers still at a space called the East Side Café. Home to the spirit of collective cultural and political work, the East Side Café on Huntington Drive had long been an outpost of Zapatismo, progressive politics and a return to the roots of communal labor that seeks to uplift the needs of the many and eschew the glorification or gratification of the few.

Quiet and humble, Roberto Flores refused then and refuses still to be considered a patriarch. His has always been the spirit of collectivism. His own children, among them Quetzal and Xochitl and Angela Lucía, took those lessons… that kind of life learning gleaned as children of the movimiento and made music with it.

But it was not just music or even just movimiento music. It was black music, African music that had been molded and shaped by its marriage to indigenous Mexican cultures on the tropical shores of what is now known as the state of Veracruz. While not commonly known, only ten percent of the African slaves brought to new world were destined for the colonies that later became the U.S. The rest, 90% or more, were bound for Mexico and the rest of Latin America.  Nowhere is the African influence in the land of our forebears more evident than in son jarocho, a sound created by red and black slaves, human beings forced to labor under threat of whips, chains and guns.

Resisting their oppression at the hands of the colonizers and enslavers, they often came together, combining their respective musical and cultural traditions to celebrate freedom and liberation with joy. While their bodies may have been shackled, their hearts could still create, imagine and dream. Son jarocho is thus, at its core, the music of protest and resistance, the music of the original freedom fighters who knew, even then, that none could stem the tide, the inevitable triumph of those who would reshape the world into a place devoid of violence, greed and oppression.

Although only three parts women and four parts men, they are still called Las Cafeteras in deference to those slave women who worked on coffee and tobacco plantations throughout the Americas. Their debut, full-length CD is entitled It's Time. And the anthem which reveals the essence of their debut album release, a song titled “La Bamba Rebelde,” is a bold re-tooling of the traditional Mexican-American party track, a century-old song made famous in the U.S. by Ritchie Valens (Richard Valenzuela) and later given new life by Los Lobos for the Luís Valdez biopic of the “kid from Pacoima.”

In the Cafeteras version, however, the traditional son jarocho call and response dialogue directly addresses the poignant political issues that propelled Obama into the White House for yet another term. Jabs at anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and elsewhere, support for same-sex marriage, and an anti-war stance are just three examples of what give the song new teeth.

The group is comprised of Annette Torres on the marimbol, Denise Carlos on jarana and lead vocals, Daniel Jesús French on jarana and back-up vocals, Hector Flores on jarana and back up vocals and David Flores on requinto as well as quijada keeper Leah Rose Gallegos on lead vocals and José Cano on flutes and caja. Carlos, Hector Flores (brother of David), Gallegos and Torres also chime in with zapateado during the bands thrilling and universally popular live performances.

The opening track “El Chuchumbé” refers directly to a style of music and dance that was banned by the Spanish Catholic Church in colonial Mexico for its physically expressive, playfully romantic and flirtatiously suggestive lyrics or rhymes. Not only were the native and African slaves enriching the invaders through their forced labor, but they were being denied even life’s most simplest pleasures  

Produced by Aparato's Alexandro D. Hernández Gutiérrez, a PhD. candidate in ethnomusicology and chronic musician and Eguene Toale, It’ Time teems with the energy of Canto Nuevo and son jarocho fused at an East Side back yard happening in honor of a good cause, but it also vibrates with production virtuosity. Recorded at Bedrock Studios in Silver Lake, the album’s primary vocals are delivered by Carlos, Gallegos and French, the first two trading turns with haunting, torch-singer voices that seem to have been schooled by exposure Lila Downs and La Santa Cecilia’s Marisoul Hernández and perhaps even Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star.

The opening a cappella zapateado on “Café con Pan” is more than an invitation to dance in happy communion with Las Cafeteras. It is also a call to action as much as a preamble to the traditional “fandango,” a musical fiesta where composers of improvised décimas and dancers come together. “Luna Lovers,” the subsequent song, is a soft quiet reverie, a ballad that speaks to the sweet surrender that is love. It is a stroll through the landscape of yearning and eternal companionship, illuminated by the ancient grandmother in the sky. With the addition of French on vocals, the love song is a lyrical balance between the three voices and delicate, jarana string pucking (requinto).

Addressing a heavier, yet no less emotional subject, “Ya Me Voy” begins with minor chord flamenco-esque riffs created on the jarana (as a opposed to the guitar). The lyrics speak to exile, to the circumstances that lead to emigration and of the dreams that promise a better life. The song is a melodic reminder that leaving home for a far off land is journey also fraught with danger and uncertainty. By contrast, “It’s Movement Time” is a resounding hip-hop poem that underscores the history of race relation across the continent and the birth of civil rights struggles in the U.S. From Benito Juárez, who abolished slavery in Mexico, California’s United Farm Workers and the Chicano Brown Berets to imprisoned black activist Mumia Abu Jamal, murdered teenager Treyvon Martin and Chicago Young Lords, the rap is a roll call in support of progressive causes across the last century. Ultimately, it is a call for unity as we move forward in an era where poor and working class people of all colors and creeds need, now more than ever, to stand together.

As a whole, the collection of songs is an erudite and musically potent blend that brings son jarocho, Chicano protest music, hip-hop and trova nueva together for a peek at the future of Chicano-Latino music in Los Angeles. From music that speaks directly to the Juárez femicides in “Mujer Soy,” a moving song made all the more powerful by Cano’s Native American flute, to “Trabajador-Trabajadora,” a tribute to the humblest of working people everywhere delivered in harmonious song and hip-hop rhyme, the album lingers like a searing vision that leaves brightly colored tracers on the back of your eyelid. It’s time for It’s Time and it’s time for Las Cafeteras.

Literalocos-Literatontos

It’s me and Chapulín. This kid calls me maestro, and there is no more humbling an attribution. We’re at a neighborhood bar working on our second or third beer after walking through the Mobile Mural Lab which has been stationed strategically at the regular Friday afternoon Boyle Heights Farmer’s Market. It’s getting cool, and until just moments before taking a seat on these stools, our pockets were empty. For poets, this is not a surprise. Penniless poet is a redundancy.

“No problem,” I had uttered an hour or two earlier. We see a client and a Brooklyn & Boyle contributing writer, a successful attorney who supports the arts and advertises here regularly. He doesn’t have a problem with an advance payment on the next issue. Chapulín is a poet, and, of course, poets never think about the weather or whether they’re dressed appropriately. He’s in a t-shirt, shorts and the inevitable Chuck Taylors. As the sun goes down, I can see he’s having a tough time with the drop in temperature.

“We have to start your Eastside poe-tour and cantina crawl with a stop at the Proyecto Pastoral segunda to get you a long sleeve flannel, homie,” I tell the young vato sporting a goatee and Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses. Bronze and maybe just a bit on the chonchito side like me, he is covered in a grip of tattoos. Daniel Morales León, AKA El Chapulín, is the resident poet at La Mina Collective, over in City Terrace. Relocated from South Central to LA’s Eastside, he is part of a circle that also includes the charmingly magnetic boys in a lively cumbia band called La Chamba, young dudes who also happen to take political organizing with a zeal and a seriousness that provokes and inspires. They are LA’s first and foremost exponents of cumbia chicha, a Peruvian variation of working class cumbia where the accordion has been supplanted by the electric guitar. Daniel’s jefitos are from Oaxaca, and they don’t necessarily always understand, he says, that he is a “poeta necio,” a handle I’ve managed to get friendlier with myself over the years.

“They have a hard time understanding just exactly what it is I do,” says Chapulín, who has also begun extending his Eastside residency with regular gigs as the host of the Corazón del Pueblo bi-monthly open mic series, Flowers of Fire.

“You know why we named it Flowers of Fire, right? Flores de Fuego,” I say. “Not really, but I can pretty much guess,” comes the reply from a sage and wise young bard who I’ve watched the sun come up with more than once already.

“When we first came together as the original Corazón del Pueblo collective board, we were thinking of the floricanto, you know, ‘in xochitl in cuicatl,’ which is nahuatl for ‘flower-song,’” I explain. We weave back and forth on a hundred subjects but mostly we get back to the poetry and what it means and why we have to write. And then there are references to Neruda and Roque Dalton. I’m trying to tell him about the argentina Alejandra Pizarnik and her “ extracción de la piedra de la locura,” that stone of madness we both have lodged in our brains.

“She committed suicide,” I say. “Say what?” says Chapulín. “Yeah, she OD’d on seconal on purpose,” I say. Later, we sit in my car and I extract a manuscript to share some more of that madness, the kinds of craziness that keeps Chapulín awake at all hours when he has to write, when he has to let the ink dribble in spades from his fingertips, allowing it to pour forth onto a page before it hemorrhages in his veins.

These are the musings and sharp reveries that have pulled him here, to a barrio not unlike the South Central hood where he was raised, a community that drew me 12 years ago after a decade of nomadic gypsy wanderings in Mexico City, Chiapas, Barcelona, New York, Matamoros, El Paso and Houston after a childhood in Austin marked by movimiento politics, Brown Beret marches against police brutality and the tutelage under an ex-pinto poet named Raúl Salinas, or raúlrsalinas, as he himself signed his named. “Tapón” (the placazo Raúl was given during his own childhood) had authored the now renowned “Un Trip Through the Mind Jail Y Otras Excursions,” and I’m trying to tell Chapulín that lineage and an appreciation for the literary opportunities we have been handed from elders who made it a point to step outside of their traditional homes to embrace brotherhood with distant relatives from all of the tribes is important. I’m telling him that I wouldn’t be publishing this paper in the barrio I recognize as ground zero for Chicano culture worldwide if it weren’t for them.

Chapulin, like many of the young brothers who share spoken word, did not grow up surrounded by nurturing poets who arrived with an armload of books and told them, “you should read this and come back later so we can talk about it.” No, Daniel and many of his peers brought themselves up, literally. They did not have guides or XicanIndio mentors who led them through sweat lodge ceremonies. They looked for and found their poetic voices on the street and in the immigrant stories of their indigena parents.

“I’ve been spittin’ for about a minute,” says Chapulín. And I know he’s the one. He’s the one who can only sit still long enough to let the poem live through him, pound itself out of him until it sees the light of day. I see a grittier, angrier yet somehow still less tortured version of myself in him.  So we chill, we make the rounds. We break bread and follow the moon, howling into the wind and pretending we don’t care. That life is only loaned to us and that we’re on borrowed time. Of course, I tell him that in an effort to let my own street-wise profe know how much his influence and love had meant to me, I coined a word. How I sat in a South Austin restaurant called Little Mexico over a plate of tacos de carne guisada (steak picado to folks here in Califaztlan) and a bottle of cold Corona with the legendary barrio bard, a traveler who had been invited to Cuba and Nicaragua and Libya and Palestine to share revolutionary poetry. How he was at the same time a die-hard radical AIM (American Indian Movement) activist and a co-founder of the national Leonard Peltier Support Committee. How I looked at him with reverence and said I would forever be proud of having been inducted into the great hall of the “literalocos y literatontos” he had adopted and raised.

I tell Chapulin how Raúl used to humbly refer to himself as the cockroach poet because he never took it so seriously that he had to act like a diva and demand green M & Ms backstage at readings where he shared the stage with truly great writers such as Ernesto Cardenal and Fernando Alegria and Mikey Piñero. When he heard me say literaloco-literatonto, or literary krazy-klown-fool, he laughed and nodded his approval. These days, veteranos like Jose Antonio Burciaga, Raúl Salinas, and Trinidad Sánchez are gone. And it seems like so many of the young poets are trying too hard to be rock stars who worry about pecking order or whether or not they’re going to be on the radio instead of just trying to be the guys that don’t mind taking out the trash and cleaning the refrigerator and loading sound equipment even though they don’t have to. Chapulín is one of those dudes. He gets down and dirty, he loads gear and slangs beers at fundraising events, but he can also slang words and spit fire with the best of them. There is something simultaneously charismatic and travieso about him. Much later, after I’ve published his gut-wrenching poem about Mexico, I watch him dance around a room holding the printed pages in his arms and waving them about with a contagious glee. And again, I know he is the one. I can ask for no one better to help me uphold the literaloco-literatonto banner. And more than any of the other youngsters on the scene right now, he really is mexicano. 

“Yes, I’m  Chicano and all that, but I was born in Mexico,” he says proudly.  While still heir to a powerful Chicano literary tradition, he is unique among all the other serious young wordsmiths mixing it up on the Eastside right now with poetry rooted in rap and hip-hop. He holds up his mexicanidad for all to see and still skips easily back and forth between two languages like a wizard of wordplay, straddling all kinds of borders… a lad after me own heart, neta.

“Literaloco-literatonto, huh?” says Chapulín. “I like it.”

Trio Los Machos: Un Bolero Infinito...

Trio Los Machos opens with the bristling demise of a musical trio, three life-long friends who are being summarily dismissed from their regular gig as entertainers in a Mexican restaurant where they have plied their trade as strolling balladeers for years. Written by Josefina López (Real Women Have Curves) and directed by Edward Padilla at Casa 0101, the play is a warm tribute to the stellar musical repertory of legendary Trio Los Panchos, Mexico’s famous bolero kings. A romantic musical genre that is to love and heartbreak what salt is to savory food and seawater, the bolero, as typified by Trio Los Panchos, is one of Mexico best, if not most well-known exports.

From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero guest worker program brought thousands of agricultural laborers from Mexico to the U.S. to harvest crops which would have otherwise rotted in the field due to the limited supply of U.S. workers willing to work so hard for so little. Trio Los Machos uses popular songs by Trio Los Panchos, as well as original tunes written by Claudia Durán (also Rosario in the play) and Josefina López with music by Danny Weinstein, to propel the story of Lalo, Nacho and Paco, three young braceros who discover their talent for making people fall in love through song and are thus able to leave the indignity of their guest worker status behind.
 
Now in their twilight years, the trio must come to terms with mortality, masculinity and changing musical tastes. Played by Miguel Santana, Roberto Garza and Henry Madrid respectively, the three are portrayed in moving flashbacks often graced with musical elegance by Gilbert Martinez (Young Lalo), Josh Durón (Young Nacho) and Adrian Quiñonez (Young Paco). While the characterizations among the actors who play the three in their latter day incarnations are marked by better musicianship than acting chops, the reverse is true for the trio as young men. On the whole, however, Padilla is to be commended for his impeccable casting and for his luminous staging, which relies on silhouettes and scrims as much as it does on the ever-present live music fusillade to evoke mood, feeling tone and memory.

Durán, as the fiery, sex-pot singer hired to jazz up the trio after they’re fired for being too old, is played perhaps a bit too much as caricature, but this is countered by the appearance, in flashback, of Rocío Mendoza as Aurelia, Paco’s long deceased wife. With a voice that captures the essence of this timeless music perfectly, Mendoza delivers the play’s truest notes. It is a sound that brims with late night trysts, love hangovers, too many cigarettes and not enough tear-filled tequila shots. It also provides the perfect foil for the comedic twist that gives the story an endearing, if unexpected, jolt of tender, and, yes, politically correct sensitivity.

A world premiere, Trio Los Machos is a reminder of the truly great state of theater on LA’s Eastside under the watchful care of award-winning playwright Josefina López, whose own father first came to the U.S. as a “bracero.” It is a fitting homage to him.

Bro': Motocross Mayhem & Redemption

How many times a day do we hear or say the word bro’? Short for “brother,” it has come to us as abbreviated speak from the ’60s era rise of the Black Power movement. Funny how no one ever seems to notice or acknowledge that. And we use it all the time now. We don’t even think about it. The word is understood universally. It has become, arguably, the most widely used three-letter slang designation in the world.  It cuts across all ethnic, racial, class and national divisions. It spawned the Chicano equivalent, “carnal,” a word that even more closely reflects the symbolic flesh and blood nature of bestowing brotherhood on those we choose to call our own.

Filmmaker Nick Parada knows this. He knows how we anoint our closest male friends with special status when we address them in this way. He understands that we also invoke the word as an overture of peace and a willingness to overcome our competitive and territorial instincts as men. He is acutely aware of the fact that in Southern California, the term has an even deeper significance among the skater, surfer, snowboarder and motocross crowd. Here, it signifies an extreme sports elevation to non-poser authenticity. It makes you one of the young men who other men envy; the fearless, ultimate risk-takers who women want to hook up with.

In Bro,' his first full-length feature, Parada focuses his lens on one facet of this world even as he crafts the story of a young man’s descent into  an exotic world of death defying motorcycle stunt riders, drugs, fast money and easy sex with hot girls drawn to the dudes who call each other “bro” only when they’ve proven to be more than mere pretenders.

With a cast that includes veterans such as Danny Trejo, Larry Fessenden and Gunner Wright, Bro’ also marks the feature debut for freestyle motocross champions Beau Manley and Colin “Scummy” Morrison, both members of the Metal Mulisha. Written, directed and produced by Parada, Bro’ is ultimately a story of redemption. At its center is Johnny (newcomer Will Chavez), a tame suburban kid working the counter at an athletic club. Enter unblemished co-worker (Rebekah Graf as Stephanie), and Johnny’s head gets immediately turned. When he finally overcomes his shyness and ask her out, she takes him to the track and introduces him to her older brother Jesse (Beau Manley), a daredevil party animal covered in tattoos who lords over the scene as the untouchable master of outrageously dangerous motorcycle stunts. Unfortunately, Jesse is the perfect antithesis of his younger sister.

Taking his sister’s new boyfriend under wing, Manley as Jesse, leads into the alluring depths of a world he could never have imagined, while inviting him to participate fully in its mayhem. It’s an age-old formula. Boy meets girl. Boy goes slowly bad and falls out of favor with girl while earning stature with the wild bunch. Boy eventually embraces badness with a no guts, no glory, gung-ho attitude. Badness bites boy in the ass. Hard. Parada, however, has graced his solid, straight ahead story with nuanced reflections of honest teen angst, even as he opens a window to a lifestyle and youth culture around a relatively new sport that has not yet been examined to such an electrifying degree in a narrative picture.

Though still a young director, Parada began making short films while still a teenager and was already an award winning regional television producer and director when he invited Kim Mackenzie to help him flesh out a coming of age story based on the pitfalls, challenges and moral dilemmas facing young people today. In Johnny, we identify a symbolic depiction of so many boys who have been raised by single, hardworking and often religious moms. As a result, like him, we are naturally drawn to the savvy, cool attitude and lust for life his newfound “bro” represents, a world of drugs and danger epitomized by Danielle (played perfectly by Alexandra Mason), an under-aged seductress who uses Johnny to break away from home.

In crafting a thoroughly believable thrill ride through the dark side, Parada gets a powerlift from sound supervisor Frederick Howard and a soundtrack that resonates and thrums with vitality. The music, a cross-section of the best contemporary underground alternative grunge core, hyper-hip-hop and cross-pollinated pop available anywhere with Kotton Mouth Kings, Eyes Set to Kill and Brokencyde being the three most notorious. Visually, the film is pristine, with motorcycle stunts, chases working to bolster the intense emotional moments that happen both indoors and out, during daylight and at night.

Working with non-actors and actors alike, Parada has culled surprisingly even overall performances that drive the narrative forward and, at moments, even enhance the gritty, real world plot. If the inexperience evident in some of the characterizations also leads to an occasional slight stumble and sputter as the tale unfolds, Parada remains undaunted in an a nearly invisible effort to show what he is capable of as a director. He succeeds in spades. We feel for his hapless hero and believe in Johnny’s ability to push past the delirium for an honest look at himself and the decisions he has made. At the same time, we root for his mentor and friend, his adopted big bro’ Jesse, a sympathetic, albeit  flawed and self-destructive, anti-hero who confronts equally life-changing choices.

The Crumbles: Coming to Rock LA

It’s Friday night and I’m running late. My friend Francisco Hernández, a filmmaker born in Boyle Heights and raised in San Juan Bautista, has invited me to the L.A. premiere of a film he has co-produced. Written and directed by Akira Boch, one of his life-long friends, the film has a buzz. For the last two years, I have connected with him, and a mutual circle of friends I love and cherish, only sporadically. I miss them, and the opportunity to help celebrate this milestone achievement is reason enough to make the rare trek west, all the way to the West Hollywood environs that glitter with a tangible movie business patina.

It merits mention that Francisco and Akira were reared alongside Kinán and Anahuac Valdez, scions of the Luis Valdez-led Teatro Campesino theater clan, an extended Brechtian guerrilla theater crew forged in the heyday of the Chicano Movement that took shape in the ’60s and ’70s. In support of farmworkers and labor leader César Chávez, Teatro Campesino earned a well-deserved place in the annals of American theater history as the first family of Chicano theater, spawning a score of like-minded Chicano theatre troupes throughout the southwest in its wake.

The company, of course, later became renowned for its production of Zootsuit, a ground-breaking musical which shed light on the heavy-handed police and military efforts to thwart a Mexican American expression of pride and sartorial style. In the ‘80s, Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez wrote and directed La Bamba, a film about pioneer Chicano rocker Richie Valens that hipped Hollywood to the ever elusive box office draw of the Mexican American experience.
Ambitious forerunners of DYI filmmaking, who witnessed the making of Luís Valdez’ La Bamba first-hand as toddlers, Hernández, Boch and the Valdez brothers formed a film company together while still in high school. “It sounds funny now, but, believe it or not, it was called Funky Flicks,” Francisco says about his peer group’s first ambitious foray into media over the phone several weeks in advance of the LA screening at the Directors’ Guild of America theater on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. The screening is part of the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival organized by Visual Communications.

So I’m running late because I have to drive to Southgate to pick up table cloths and chair covers for a wedding scheduled tomorrow at the hall where Boyle & Boyle is currently camped out. I suddenly find myself tearing down Franklin to avoid the Friday night 101 and Sunset traffic.  All I know about The Crumbles, Akira’s feature debut, is based on a cursory look at a web-site and Francisco’s excited description of the film’s effusive reception at a recent Bay Area screening. The DGA screening I’m careening to is, naturally, sold out. Francisco has graciously provided a comp ticket at will call.

Luckily, I’m able to nab a still vacant seat on the last row and fall quickly under the spell of a funny but riveting film about friendships, expectations, aspirations, disillusion, betrayal and, ultimately, the infallible belief in the power of music, art and the creative impulse inherent in us all to transcend the challenges and obstacles we face every day. The Crumbles, a fictional indie, alt-rock start up band around which the film is based, resemble the real world in a way that Hollywood still resists. In spite of that sad fact, they become, nonetheless, the band we want to believe in and root for. 
Unfortunately, the industry continues to have an incredibly hard time believing that the Katie Hipol, Therese Michelle Lee and Jeff Torres and are the new Winona Ryders and Brad Pitt, respectively, of cinema.

A nuanced, well-crafted film that features Hipol as Darla, a brown-skinned, ethnicity neutral, guitar-wielding songwriter who recruits her talented, but flaky Asian-American slacker BFF for a musical project with Torres along as “Dante,” the penultimate “awkward and awesome” drummer who crushes on Darla is, despite what so many well meaning young executives (and yes, Scott Budnick, I am talking to you, and believe me, I’m not kvetching) will say about how they can’t sell a movie without a goofy but lovable white boy or white girl in the mix as a lead. All that excuse making and hem-hawing aside, The Crumbles rock. Their story is universal and every bit a part of the mainstream because this is where we live. This is who we are.

I’m watching what is a standard LA reality that, given half a chance, would otherwise be an amazing sleeper box office smash. I understand that it will be studiously ignored by studios and the Fox Searchlight types precisely because it is every bit as good as an early Woody Allen dramedy. And it’s a homegrown, organic expression that has none of the exotic allure of an import vetted by the likes of Diego Luna or Gael Garcia, who are generally sympathetic guys. But they don’t, however, automatically or readily assume that we also grew up reading Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez while we were discovering, unlike them, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Rodolfo Anaya, Corky Gonzales and Americo Paredes. 

Boch has assembled a cast that represents the real Echo Park, the real Boyle Heights and the real downtown L.A. But the industry is loathe to accept that filmmakers like Boch and Hernández are the arbiters of what is quickly becoming the new smart, quirky cool. It is uncomfortable with outsiders deciding what constitutes culture and taste with an edge.

So what? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Hipol and Torres and Lee and Seth Millwood as Serge and Ebony Perry as Francine, an independent bookstore manager who just happens to be black, are believable and true and indicative of what this country will become in spite of backward, xenophobic Arizona-style legislation. The Crumbles embody an idea that flies in the face of the ignominious, visceral and latent assumptions that black and brown and red and yellow people are intent on subverting traditional  American values.

The latter is more than evidenced by the recent retard laws which criminalize immigrants and seek to ban empowering studies and books that have led to an increase in graduation rates for all students and allowed for the kind of learning that boosts graduation statistics and college prospects for kids emerging from a community that has the highest drop-out rate in the nation.

As The Crumbles unspools on a screen at a bastion of American cinema, I feel pangs of empathy for Darla, who realizes that her rock star aspirations are perhaps a pipe dream. She tastes the possibility and then sees her hopes dashed because she trusts a girl she cares about. It may be that she has a more intimate interest in Elisa, but she can only recognize them as platonic feelings colored by a need to help a sister trying to make her way out of relationship with a wannabee rock star that has worn thin.
A lucid and cogent musical score by Quetzal Flores bolsters the story of a little band poised to make the big-time that can’t seem to overcome the dead-end inertia that plagues so many in a contemporary generation that has all but given up on real social interaction in favor of safe  iPhone and Facebook distance. In many ways, the music makes the film flow seemlessly. 

Through it all, Boch proves to be a sensitive, gifted story-teller who is, by virtue of his integrity and experience, able to muster the efforts of talented friends who support his vision and believe in the redemptive power of collaboration. There are moments in the film, some of them uncomfortable and ungainly, just like real life, which trigger laughter and others that lend to the sad emptiness that can sometimes invade your spleen with that sick, broken-hearted, almost sinking feeling you get when life seems bleak and insurmountable.

This is what makes the film soar, what makes it resonate with truth. The ensemble cast and crew that gathers for the Q & A afterward gives ample credence to the “awkward and awesome” mantra that has informed Boch’s aesthetic. Their nervous, tentative answers to audience questions are refreshing as a reminder that engaging, independent, underground cinema, which reflects the inevitable veracity of our times, is alive and well in L.A.

Floricanto en DC: Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.