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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Latina Elected Officials Make History in States like Colorado, Illinois
Latina elected officials are making strides not just on the federal level with the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate and sworn in on Tuesday, but on the state and local level.
Colorado in particular stands out: It’s making history in 2017 with two Latinas in top positions.
Democrat Crisanta Durán becomes the state’s first-ever Speaker of the House. Fellow Democrat Lucía Guzmán was re-elected Senate Minority Leader…
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San Gabriel Valley Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio appointed first Latina chair of human services committee
State Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, has been appointed as the first Latina chair of the Assembly’s human services committee, her office announced Tuesday
The committee oversees child welfare services, foster care, CalWORKs, developmental disabilities services, adult protective services and other human services programs.
Rubio, who was elected to her first term in November, was appointed to the position by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon…
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MABPA: Mexican American Business and Professional Association
Mission
MABPA: Prioritizing access, advocacy and prosperity for all San Diego Communities.
MABPA’s robust membership actualizes its mission with an informed focus on Business, Education, Community Leadership, and the Legislative domain…
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8 Great Latino Books Published In 2016
As the year comes to a close, here’s one final look at some great Latino books published in 2016.
This list includes titles by U.S. Latino and Latin American authors who have been translated into English. Together, these selections shape a compelling portrait of the Americas as a vibrant territory that welcomes change but holds firm to its ethnic roots and cultural histories…
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News Programs Need To Make Latino Representation A Priority
The Latino population is growing at the second-fastest rate in the country, meaning that the United States of the future will be increasingly Hispanic. But for television news, 2016 was a year in which Latinos were underrepresented — even in conversations about Latinos — misidentified, or simply not included.
In 2015, the number of Latinos in the United States grew to 57 million, and yet, during 2016, television news continued the disturbing pattern from previous years of marginalizing Latino voices in cable news discussions. This creates a blindspot in news media and marginalizes Latinos from discussions on the American experience. Latinos were even underrepresented or altogether ignored in discussions of stories that intimately affected the Hispanic community…
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International Friendships:The Interpersonal Basis of a World Wide Community
A GARCIA – International Friendships: The Interpersonal Basis of a …, 2016
… American migrants is greater in the United States, in recent years, some publications shed further
information about Latin Americans in Canada … In 2013, approximately 11.6 million Mexican
immigrants lived in the United States, compared to 2.2 million in 1980, representing…
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Hispanic Female-Owned Businesses On The Rise In Arizona
At about 8 o’clock on a recent Tuesday night, 36 small-business owners were working their second shift of the day at the Fuerza Local business accelerator.
The six-month-long program is for Spanish-speaking business-owners and is run by the Local First Arizona Foundation. The program trains small-business owners on the ins and outs of starting and running a business, from finances and budgeting to planning for growth, according to Edgar Olivo, the director of the program.
At the end of the program, each business will receive $1,000 to invest in their growth…
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WeHo’s John Duran Elected Chair of Latino Elected Officials Group
NALEO today announced the election of Duran as chair of its board and of two new members on the 15-member board. They are Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, executive vice president of government and corporate affairs at Univision Communications Inc. and Joseph “Pep” Valdes, executive vice president and director of new business development for Parking Company of America…
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Latino voters will reshape American politics as we know it — and here’s the proof
Twenty years ago, neither Democrats nor Republicans saw Latinos as a voting bloc worth wooing. Instead, they often pursued policies that actively played into xenophobia. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, set into motion today’s mass deportation. In that same year, future Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote a memo urging Clinton to “claim and achieve record deportation of criminal aliens.”
Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has changed its tune, and started trying desperately to woo Latinos. Today, leading Democrats overwhelmingly support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and are using executive orders to halt deportations, while Republicans, led by Donald Trump, continue to demonize Latinos and promise harsh countermeasures to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country…
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Latino ‘Genius’ Grew Language-Learning App Duolingo to 150M Users
Ask Luis Von Ahn why he decided to become an entrepreneur and he will tell you that the career actually chose him. When he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in 2005, he developed a program that websites could use to distinguish humans from robots. CAPTCHA became so popular that school officials urged Von Ahn to turn the program into something more.
“At some point the university was kicking the project out because it had too many users and they just said, ‘You can’t be in the university, you have to do something about it,'” he says. “I had to turn it into a company.”…
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Latino Theater Company Announces 2017 Season
LOS ANGELES: Latino Theater Company has announced its 2017 season at Los Angeles Theatre Center. The lineup will include three world premieres from local playwrights Jonathan Ceniceroz, John Pollono, and Diane Rodriguez, and the return of Encuentro, a festival and gathering of Latinx theatremakers…
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Mitú Partners With Snapchat To Create Content For Latino Youth
mitú, a digital network for Latino millennials, announced Monday the launch of its channel on Snapchat Discover. The new partnership will help Snap become a leader in delivering English language content with a Latino lens on Snapchat Discover…
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Mexican American Baseball in East Los Angeles
RA Santillán, R Peña, TM Santillán, A Padilla… – 2016 – books.google.com
Mexican American Baseball in East Los Angeles highlights the unforgettable teams, players,
and coaches who graced the hallowed fields of East Los Angeles between 1917 and 2016
and brought immense joy and honor to their neighborhoods. Off the field, these players and…
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New Mexico State University highlighted on list of Top 100 Colleges and Universities for Hispanics
According to the Top 100 Colleges and Universities for Hispanics list in the August 2016 edition of The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine, New Mexico State University has been recognized as one of the best institutions for Hispanics in the country.
Two women walk down the sidewalk.
This fall, the Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine ranked New Mexico State University as a top institution for Hispanics in the nation. (NMSU photo by Darren Phillips)
Using data from the Department of Education (2014), NMSU ranked in the top 30 in both first major bachelor’s degrees granted (26th) and first major master’s degrees granted (21st). NMSU awarded 1,302 bachelor’s degrees (48 percent) to Hispanics, and 305 Hispanic students (38 percent) were awarded master’s degrees…
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An Honor of Note
Francisco Lomelí had no idea he was being considered for membership in a prestigious organization of Spanish language scholars. And then out of the blue word came that he was in. A professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, Lomelí was elected as a correspondent to the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. The honor is given to a small number of scholars who have distinguished themselves in their fields. Known by its Spanish acronym ANLE, the academy…
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Berkeley muralist draws from the personal and political for her art
BERKELEY — Spanning the side of a liquor store across from the Ashby BART station, Juana Alicia Araiza’s arresting mural is impossible to miss and even harder to ignore.
A screaming skull floats against a backdrop of turbulent ocean and burning sky. Skeletal animals bob lifelessly in polluted, oil-slicked waters. Painted in response to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the ongoing Dakota Access Pipeline confrontation at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Araiza’s mural is a nightmarish vision of environmental degradation.
“That image came to me in 2010 when (the spill) happened, and then I was sick in 2013 and after that, I just felt really motivated to do the image,” Araiza said about her latest project begun during the recent Bay Area Mural Festival, which brought together master muralists, muralist groups and at-risk youths…
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Mexico President: NAFTA Benefits Both Sides of the Border
LIMA, Peru – Several U.S. allies expressed worry over what changes could take place when it comes to trade under president-elect Donald Trump’s administration at a summit of Asian-Pacific leaders in Peru on Saturday.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said NAFTA benefits workers and companies on both sides of the border. He expressed concern that the U.S. could be turning its back on a bilateral trade relationship responsible for moving $1 million worth of goods every minute…
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Access Latina is Looking to Boost Successful Latina Entrepreneurs
Latina entrepreneurs are among the fastest growing and industrious business owners in the United States, and one organization is looking to give a leg up to promising companies.
Access Latina, which is completely run by women, provides a platform for promising and pioneering Hispanic women who need capital or guidance to further grow their businesses. The platform seeks to uplift Hispanic women working in agriculture, social innovation and STEM fields…
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A Degree in Every Home
Jacki and Gilbert Cisneros, founders of educational outreach program Generation 1st Degree, bring Pico Rivera high schoolers and their parents to UCSB for a day of tours and talks…
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New mayor seeks cooperation, also higher developer fees
Developers with projects in the pipeline can expect to be asked to provide more affordable housing and a stronger community benefits package before being approved, Mayor-elect Jesse Arreguín said Monday during a far-ranging interview with Berkeleyside.
Now that the self-described progressives have the City Council majority (see below for more details) the “previous approach” to development will change, he said.
“I do think the voters wanted a change,”Arreguín said at PIQ on Shattuck Avenue. “That’s one of the reasons I was elected by such a large margin. One of the issues I heard throughout the city of Berkeley was a concern about the major demographic changes, the changes to the character of the place, long-time businesses being displaced, the scale of development.”
“I think the voters of Berkeley want more equitable, responsible growth,” he said. “That is not to say everything is going to come to a grinding halt. We need to create more housing so, certainly, under my administration, we are going to encourage the construction of transit-oriented development in Berkeley.”…
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