In her 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist for poetry, Ada Limón writes of moving to Kentucky: “Confession: I did not want to live here.” It’s perhaps not a surprising sentiment coming from a coastally oriented person who was raised in Northern California, attended college in Seattle, and then spent over a decade in New York City.
But Limón and her husband, Lucas, have been in Lexington for seven years now and the effects of settling into this place are noticeable in her new book, The Carrying (Milkweed, Aug.). It’s a phenomenally lively and attentive collection replete with the trappings of living a little closer to nature. While Bright Dead Things is marked by a preponderance of light, such as images of fireflies and neon signs, The Carrying features numerous appearances by various trees, birds, and beetles. Limón also demonstrates a greater willingness to be explicit in naming colors, particularly green. “It’s crazy green, the whole book,” she says. “Lexington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived.” Similarly, where in Bright Dead Things, Limón tells a lot of stories and anecdotes, in The Carrying she is very present in her thoughts and experiences.
As it turns out, these shifts in focus have another, altogether unexpected source. While putting Bright Dead Things together, Limón was diagnosed with chronic vestibular neuronitis, which can cause bouts of vertigo. “If I’m really having vertigo, it’s pretty intense and I really have to focus,”
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“As the United States grapples with civil unrest, many people are questioning how we arrived in this situation and how the nation can change for the better. In his new book, “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise,” New York times economics reporter Eduardo Porter presents a comprehensive examination of how discrimination based on race has hurt not just members of marginalized groups, but the nation as a whole. While the U.S. has gutted education systems, healthcare programs, and assistance for the poor, he writes, the nation instead diverted resources to incarcerating people. Porter, who has previously served as economics columnist and editorial writer for the New York Times, joins us to discuss his new book and how it relates to current debate over dismantling systemic racism…”
“…Today, these brothers can be seen as key figures in a Brown Pride movement that might not readily recognize their names, but their influence on generations of Latinos and Hispanics in legacy media cannot be overstated.
They are pioneers in Spanish-language broadcasting who partly got their start in the Imperial Valley and went on to much success, as few Mexican-Americans have done in the corporate world, becoming major players in traditional media formats of television and radio, creating space for Hispanic/Latino communities to see and voice themselves in the United States…”
“After months of negotiations following US President Donald Trump’s pledge to scrap NAFTA, the 24 year old trade agreement between Canada, the USA and Mexico, a new deal was reached minutes before a midnight deadline on September 30, 2018. Despite a number of changes, the new agreement – rechristened the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – leaves NAFTA provisions for work visas untouched. The retention of the visa program is significant for workers in over 60 professional categories, and for employers across the continent, who will continue to have access to labor from all three countries..”
“..Lack of knowledge about cancer services, exacerbated by relatively limited access to those services, is considered a major contributor to those disparities,” said the study’s lead author, Marlene Camacho-Rivera, MS, MPH, ScD, assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York. “In this study, we aimed to assess trust in health information across various sources and evaluate how that trust may vary by gender, age, ethnic background, and socioeconomic background…”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-hispanics-wide-variation-health-sources.html
“…..”The rebound in jobs has not been shared equally across groups. The unemployment rate for white workers has fallen more than four percentage points over the past two months, to 10.1 percent. For Black workers, the rate has fallen just over one point, to 15.4 percent, and the rate for Black men actually rose in June. Asian workers, too, have seen only small gains. Latinos, hit particularly hard when the pandemic shut down much of the service sector, have had a larger drop in unemployment, but their jobless rate remains elevated at 14.5 percent…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/economy/jobs-unemployment-coronavirus.html
“On July 1, 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (“USMCA”) will enter into full force, when it will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”) as the primary agreement governing trade relations between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
President Trump’s April 2017 Buy American, Hire, American executive order threatened to end or severely limit the free trade agreement between the three countries, so its preservation is a victory for businesses and for professionals who qualify for entry under the agreement…”
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/goodbye-nafta-hello-usmca-45841/
“NEW YORK/TOKYO — The new North American free trade agreement that goes into effect Wednesday was touted by U.S. President Donald Trump as an engine of American job creation. But Japan’s automakers are largely opting instead to keep operations in place and pay Mexican workers more or even just pay tariffs.
The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement requires 40% or more of parts for each passenger vehicle be manufactured by workers who are paid at least $16 per hour as a condition to make them tariff free in the region. Trump hailed that feature as a way to boost production in the U.S., which has a higher hourly rate than Mexico…”
“Mexico and the United States are striving to reopen their integrated supply chains while grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. Mexico is the United States’s biggest trading partner and the U.S. buys about 80 percent of Mexico’s imports.
The two countries, along with Canada, also plan to launch the new North American trade agreement — USMCA — on July 1. That could help the continent’s economies rebound from the pandemic. To maximize the impact on jobs and prosperity, however, USMCA’s launch and reopening supply chains need to be managed well. ..”
“…“Whether his administration realizes it or not, they creating a significant handicap for US innovation. Our most innovative and impactful portfolio companies and many of their employees started as H-1b holders,” wrote Stonly Baptiste, the co-founder of technology investment fund, Urban.us. “We literally couldn’t have built our portfolio in an environment without H-1B. And we’re not even an immigrant focused fund.”
Also on the chopping block are H-2B visas, which are used to let short-term seasonal workers in landscaping and non-farm jobs into the country, J-1 jobs for short-term workers like camp counselors and au pairs and L-1 visas for corporate company transfers…”
“In a major rebuke to President Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s plan to dismantle an Obama-era program that has protected more than 600,000 so-called DREAMers from deportation. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the opinion.
Under the Obama program, qualified individuals brought to the U.S. as children were given temporary legal status if they graduated from high school or were honorably discharged from the military, and if they passed a background check. Just months after taking office, Trump moved to revoke the program, only to be blocked by lower courts — and now the Supreme Court…”
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/18/829858289/supreme-court-upholds-daca-in-blow-to-trump-administration
“…An irony of the coronavirus pandemic is that the idyllic Mexico beach vacation seen in the brochures really does exist now: The white sand beaches are sparkling clean and empty on the Caribbean coast, the water is clear on the Pacific Coast and the waters around the resort of Los Cabos are teeming with fish after 10 weeks with no boats going out. There are two-for-one deals and very eager staff.
It’s all only an airline flight – and a taxi ride and a reception desk – away, and that’s the problem…”
“The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity…”https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html
“…Hispanic women had the highest rate of unemployment in May (19.5%), compared with other women or men among the nation’s major racial and ethnic groups. The unemployment rate among white women jumped nearly fivefold, climbing from 2.5% in February to 11.9% in May. A steep increase in the unemployment rate among Asian women also pushed their unemployment rate in May (16.7%) to near parity with the unemployment rate among black women (17.2%)…”
“Mexican Americans might not recognize their cultural history as it unfolds in a new textbook proposed for Texas public schools.
Chicanos are described as people who “adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”
In another passage, Mexican Americans are linked to undocumented immigrants.
Illegal immigration has “caused a…”
“The San Francisco-based Koret Foundation has announced grants totaling more than $50 million in support of a dozen colleges and universities in the Bay Area.
To be distributed over five years, the grants will provide support for school leadership priorities, campus programs and initiatives, the creation and expansion of new models for learning, the modernization of campus technology and infrastructure, and efforts to strengthen relationships between institutions in the United States and Israel…”
“…Meanwhile white Americans saw the largest decrease in unemployment of any racial group, going from 14.2% in April to 12.4% in May. Historically, the white unemployment rate is lower than the national unemployment rate, while black unemployment can be nearly twice as high.Hispanic Americans are still seeing the highest unemployment rate of any racial group, with a 17.6% unemployment rate in May, down from 18.9% in April…”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/05/us-unemployment-may-jobs-report-five-key-points
“A comic book called El Pesos Hero by Héctor González Rodríguez III is about a superhero who defends people from various evil forces such as corrupt individuals. Furthermore, the literary masterpiece focuses on a superhero saving people from drug cartels. Also, the comic book tells the story of a superhero who also combats human traffickers, according to an article. Many of his heroic acts involve the US-Mexican border which for many years had played a significant role in the history of Mexico and the immigrants who crossed the borders to live in the United States…”
“…Hundreds of Mexicans and Americans who live south of the border enter southern California’s hospitals every day. But these are not the patients — they are medical workers and support staff keeping a saturated healthcare system running amid the coronavirus pandemic. Over a thousand nurses, medical technicians, and support workers who live in the Mexican border towns of Tijuana, Tecate and Mexicali work in the United States, Mexican census data shows. They staff emergency rooms, COVID-19 testing sites, dialysis centers and pharmacies. (Gottesdiener, 5/31”
“Examine the Latino experience during a war that placed its heaviest burden on working-class youth and their communities. Framing the documentary are memoirs of two siblings, Everett and Delia Alvarez, who stood on opposite sides of the Vietnam War, one as a POW and the other protesting at home.”
