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.

¡Mujeres de Juarez y Mujeres de Maíz Presentes!

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

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

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

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!

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

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!