Every Day is Magic: Ada Limón
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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Students now work longer hours than before to afford college, study finds
“UCLA students said they need to work long hours to cover high costs of living and other school-related expenses.
A study conducted in September by HSBC, a banking and financial services company, found students in the United States are spending more time working paid jobs than studying or going to class.
The survey also found the U.S. has the largest funding gap between parents and students across the surveyed countries, with college students spending six times more money than their parents on their education over the course of their college years.
The study found parents have had to reduce spending and more students have had to work paid jobs to afford college.
Paul Mullins, the regional head of international banking at HSBC, said in an email statement that researchers found 85 percent of current U.S. college students work paid jobs, with 37 percent of students looking..”
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Doctor on Video Screen Told a Man He Was Near Death, Leaving Relatives Aghast
“Julia Jacobs
A doctor on a video conference explained to Ernest Quintana that he did not have long to live. Mr. Quintana’s family members criticized the use of telemedicine in that circumstance.
Catherine Quintana’s father had been in and out of a hospital for weeks, and the family understood that his time was running out
Her 78-year-old father, Ernest Quintana, had lung disease and was struggling to breathe on his own. On March 3, he was admitted to a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Fremont, Calif., for the third time in 15 days, Ms. Quintana said. He had his wife of nearly six decades and other members of his family at his side…”
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Standardized tests pose issues but inequalities go deeper, say students, faculty
“Eliminating standardized testing from the college admissions process may not make the process more fair for students from historically underrepresented socioeconomic classes, UCLA students and faculty said.
Beyond the Score, a student organization, held a town hall Feb. 20 to discuss the drawbacks of using standardized testing in college admissions. Members of the organization are campaigning to remove standardized testing as an admissions factor because they believe it selects against certain groups of applicants based on their socioeconomic status.
Patricia Gandara, a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and co-director of The Civil Rights Project, said standardized test scores are strongly and positively correlated with the test-takers’ socioeconomic status.
“If you come from a high-income family, you have a much greater chance of scoring well on these than you do if you come from a low-income family,” Gandara said. “And that is socially unjust.”..”
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Baker Tilly Appoints Mexico Market Leader
“CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Mar 5, 2019–Leading advisory, tax and assurance firm Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, LLP (Baker Tilly) welcomes Angel Ramirez to its international services practice as Mexico market leader. In his role, Ramirez will strengthen Baker Tilly’s market-leading expansion solutions for clients, specifically in the area of U.S.-Mexico business growth, operations and trade regulations.
Most recently, Ramirez was Midwest market director for ProMexico – the Mexican government’s trade and investment agency. Following recent news by the Mexican government that all of ProMexico’s foreign offices are expected to close, and operations to fully cease by early 2019, Ramirez’s addition to the Baker Tilly team is both welcome and timely.
Ramirez’s experience includes working in the automotive sector and supply chain and production planning for large consumer product companies in the U.S. and Mexico…”
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UCLA diversity report shows general trend toward increased representation in TV
“Women and people of color continue to be left out of Hollywood, but the 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report details the proportional representation that is slowly and steadily underway.
Released Feb. 21 by UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the report is the sixth in an annual series and examines gender and racial diversity in the film and television industries. Zeroing in on 1,316 television shows from the 2016 to 2017 season and 2017’s top 200 theatrical films, the report shows an increase in gender and racial diversity in categories such as directors and digital scripted show leads.
“We think that information has begun to slowly sink in in Hollywood, and that’s one of the reasons we think we’re starting to see more diversity in Hollywood,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences and an author of the report. “Even though we have a long way to go, at least things seem to be moving in the right direction, particularly in television.”
[RELATED: Researchers study underrepresentation in film, TV]…”
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Erica Lopez: Mexican American Home Movies, Being ‘Seen,’ and Gauging Class in Amateur Films
“I met Erica Lopez at the AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) conference in Pittsburgh, PA. It was November of 2016.
It was a really weird situation because the actual conference was amazing. Some of the best panels I’ve ever experienced at AMIA. But we were all so goddamn numb because of the election results that we were somewhere between zombie, “Is this real life?” and wanting to go to sleep forever or the next 4 years (whichever came first).
But I met Erica Lopez and it was just remarkable. She’s an incredible woman and a real asset to the archiving and preservation field.
Erica got in touch with me just before she graduated and told me what her thesis was going to be about and I was floored…”
Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Front Page Items
Cowboys and Indians: The Great Diversion
“Gustavo Aguilar and Juan Cabrera, Mexican day laborers, are confronted by an angry protest against illegal immigration, which results in an enlightenment of grammar and ideas….”
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Designs on the Future
“It would be hard to find someone more prepared for a job than Silvia Perea. An architect by training — she earned a Ph.D. from the Polytechnic University of Madrid — she has spent the past 11 years as a curator of exhibitions around the world. Before that she was a university professor and edited architectural magazines. Today she is the new curator of UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, which holds the largest collection of architectural drawings in North America…”
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Latino homeless population found to be at disadvantage in outreach programs
“A UCLA researcher found Latino homeless individuals in Los Angeles are less likely to receive support due to cultural and language barriers.
Melissa Chinchilla, a Latino policy and politics initiative researcher, published a study on the Latino homeless population in LA on Feb. 12 using 2017 data provided by the LA Homeless Services Authority and interviews she conducted with researchers and providers of homeless services and resources. Latino people make up 35 percent of LA County’s homeless population, according to LAHSA data.
Chinchilla said she found Latinos are undercounted in the LAHSA homeless count because they are more likely to live in nontraditional homeless spaces, such as converted garages and households with multiple unrelated families, and less likely than other racial groups to use public services. She added that little research has been done on Latino homelessness…”
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‘The Future is Here’
“…In the late 1960s, so few other Latinos attended his college, Cástulo de la Rocha could find and personally call them all in a matter of days. And as a student activist in a growing Chicano Movement, he did just that.
“There was an ongoing debate at the time whether there were 20 or 40 or 50 Latinos here at that time,” recalled de la Rocha, then a student at UC Santa Barbara. “So I went to all the students one by one, by last name — Gómez, González, Martínez — all of them. Our number was small. Today the university is very different. Of more than 20,000 students on campus close to 30 percent are Latino, which is extraordinary.”
UC Santa Barbara now is one of two Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the prestigious Association of American Universities, a designation stipulating that Hispanic students comprise at least 25 percent of total enrollment.
And de la Rocha, alongside other passionate, vocal students, staff and faculty…”
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Border agents held 2 US citizens for speaking Spanish in public, suit says
“…When a Border Patrol agent asked two Spanish-speaking women — one of them former California resident — for identification in a Montana convenience store, and later held them for 40 minutes, they asked why he was doing it.
His answer, recorded on video: Speaking Spanish “is very unheard-of up here.”
The incident was humiliating, traumatic, and a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality, the women, both native-born U.S. citizens, said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in a Montana federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union against the agent and his employer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection…”
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Author of UCLA common book discusses experience as border patrol agent
“…The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border” was chosen as UCLA’s 2018-2019 common book in July. In months prior, thousands of immigrant children had been separated from their parents at the United States-Mexico border.
The campus-wide committee responsible for the selection had no idea that months later, just before the launch of campus programming for the common book, the federal government would shut down for over a month over funding for a proposed border wall.
The memoir details author Francisco Cantú’s experience as a U.S. Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. In the book, he said he reflects on his time as a part of a system that has normalized violence. This past week, UCLA hosted two events with Cantú – a book talk Tuesday and a panel Wednesday, featuring members from the legal community and UCLA faculty to discuss immigration. The discussions sought to connect Cantú’s work with the ongoing developments in immigration, said La’Tonya Rease Miles, director of UCLA First Year Experience.
“We hope that the book increases peoples’ awareness of the border and humanizes that experience, I would say in a way that perhaps our media is not right now,” Miles said. “That really was the goal there, recognizing that not everyone really knows what that experience was like.”
Cantú said he initially joined border patrol because he believed he could observe and change the system from the inside or use the insight for a future career in law or politics. Instead, he found himself deeply affected by the way in which he internalized the workings of the system, and felt the need to write about his experience to help him process the experience. Cantú felt the need to push back on the idea that one can step into institutions that have normalized violence and emerge unscathed, he said..”
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Hispanic Identity Fades Across Generations as Immigrant Connections Fall Away
“…As a result of high intermarriage rates, some of today’s Latinos have parents or grandparents of mixed heritage, with that share higher among later generations. According to the surveys, 18% of immigrants say that they have a non-Latino parent or grandparent in their family, a share that rises to 29% among the second generation and 65% among the third or higher generation, according to the Pew Research Center survey of self-identified Latino adults. And for those who say they have Latino ancestry but do not identify as Latino, fully 96% say they have some non-Latino heritage in their…”
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The Hummingbird as Warrior: Evolution of a Fierce and Furious Beak
“…If you want to know what makes hummingbirds tick, it’s best to avoid most poetry about them.
Bird-beam of the summer day,
— Whither on your sunny way?
Whither? Probably off to have a bloodcurdling fight, that’s whither.
John Vance Cheney wrote that verse, but let’s not point fingers. He has plenty of poetic company, all seduced by the color, beauty and teeny tininess of the hummingbird but failed to notice the ferocity burning in its rapidly beating heart.
The Aztecs weren’t fooled. Their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was a hummingbird. The Aztecs loved war, and they loved the beauty of the birds as well. It seems they didn’t find any contradiction in the marriage of beauty and bloodthirsty aggression…”
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Grammys showcased growing Latino clout. Wins? Not so much.
“…From the first Latino-focused act to open the Grammys to the first solo female artist to win Best Rap Album, Latino artists made their mark onstage Sunday, even though nominations weren’t fully representative of the Latin music boom that has taken place over the last year.
The 61st Grammy Awards kicked off with the Cuban-American singer Camila Cabello recreating a Latino-esque “block party.” She also paid tribute to her grandmother and her Cuban heritage with her hit single “Havana,” which was nominated for Best Pop Solo Performance…”
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Mexican scientist cures the Human Papilloma Virus
“…Gallegos has treated hundreds of patients with photodynamic therapy over the last twenty years, studying its effects. Now, she has successfully used this therapy to eradicate HPV in 100% of patients who present without malignant legions, and 64.3% of women with pre-cancerous lesions.
Her discovery will have a huge impact, as most sexually active people will have at least one HPV infection in their lives. Current statistics report that 79 million Americans have HPV, with 14 million new infections each year.
HPV is especially dangerous for women, as it can lead to cervical cancer, which, if left untreated, can cause infertility and death…”
Angela Aguilar: Meet This Week’s Billboard Latin Artist On the Rise
“…Angela Aguilar attends the 19th annual Latin Grammy Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on Nov. 15, 2018 in Las Vegas.
Starting a musical career at an early age is not easy. But growing up within a family of successful musicians can teach you a lot about how to develop a successful career. Therefore, Ángela Aguilar, daughter of Pepe Aguilar and granddaughter of Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre (legends of Mexican music), decided to continue her legacy and keep her musical heritage alive.
Ángela Aguilar released her first album, Primero Soy Mexicana, in early 2018, produced by her father, Pepe, and featuring 11 popular ranchera songs. The album was nominated for Best Ranchero/Mariachi Album at the 19th Annual Latin Grammy Awards and, also, she received a nomination for best new artist…”
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California’s attorney general gave a scathing Spanish-language rebuttal to Trump’s speech
“…That’s how California Attorney General Xavier Becerra described the State of the Union Tuesday during the Democrats’ Spanish-language rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s speech.
California’s top law enforcement officer gave a scathing review of the Trump administration during his 20-minute rebuttal, accusing the president of infecting the White House with “criminality, collusion, and obstruction of justice.”
“There are dark clouds following Donald Trump around,” Becerra said in his speech, which aired during a prime-time slot on the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo.
He also blasted the president’s immigration policies…”
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Seizing Opportunity
“…Carlos Marquez, the new manager of the Charles T. Munger Physics Residence, reflects on a long and fruitful career on campus…”
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94 percent of Latinos who voted in ’18 plan to continue voting By Rafael Bernal
“…A large majority of polled young Hispanic voters who participated in last November’s elections plan to continue voting, according to a newly released poll by Voto Latino and Change Research.
According to the poll, released exclusively to The Hill, 94 percent of 18-to-35-year-old 2018 Hispanic voters who responded said they will vote in 2020 and beyond…”
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