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,”
Read More…

Front Page Items

Donald the Dangerous

IS there any scarier nightmare than President Donald J. Trump in a tense international crisis, indignant and impatient, with his sweaty finger on the nuclear trigger?
“Trump is a danger to our national security,” John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to the State Department under President George W. Bush, bluntly warned.
Most of the discussion about Trump focuses on domestic policy. But checks and balances mean that there are limits to what a president can achieve domestically, while the Constitution gives a commander in chief a much freer hand abroad…
Link to opinion

At the Core and in the Margins: incorporation of Mexican immigrants in two rural Midwestern communities

J Albarracín – 2016 – books.google.com
Beardstown and Monmouth, Illinois, two rural Midwestern towns, have been transformed by
immigration in the last three decades. This book examines how Mexican immigrants who
have made these towns their homes have integrated legally, culturally, and institutionally. …
Link to book preview

.

Moctesuma Esparza

August 18, 2010 | By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times
On the walls of his office on the second floor of the Los Angeles Center Studios, veteran filmmaker and Latino activist Moctesuma Esparza displays posters from some of the dozens of movies and TV series he has produced in his career. There are banners from the 1988 film “The Milagro Beanfield War”; “Selena,” the story of the slain Tejano singer; and the HBO film “Walkout,” about the 1968 Chicano student walkouts in East Los Angeles to protest school conditions and prejudice. The last one is a particular favorite…
Link to article

EXPLORING THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AND SALUTOGENESIS IN AGING MEXICAN – AMERICAN WOMEN

Intimate partner violence, a serious preventable public health problem affects one in three women in the US and a billion women worldwide, crossing all boundaries including age, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic. However, little is known about the experience of IPV in aging women, especially in aging ethnic minorities. Furthermore, there are countless hidden victims including the many children who witness repeated IPV, placing them at risk of becoming a victim of IPV or a perpetrator in their own intimate relationships. The purpose of my dissertation was to explore the lived experience of IPV through the lens of aging Mexican-American women with a history of IPV, to increase understanding of how their experience has shaped their lives today, and to identify the salutogenic factors that may have sustained health in the midst of adversity…
Link to dissertation

Austin Revealed: Chicano Civil Rights-Desegregation and Education

In the aftermath of desegregation, Mexican-American students and teachers in Austin realized the lack of equality in the school system and higher education. In the first installment of KLRU’s Austin Revealed: Chicano Civil Rights series, students and teachers who lived it share their stories about the disparate conditions and the fight for reform…
Link to article

Where Are They Now?

AI Conversation – Youth Voices, Public Spaces, and Civic …, 2016 – books.google.com
The Llano Grande Center for Research and Development was born in a classroom at
Edcouch-Elsa High School (EE HS) in rural South Texas as a college preparation program
in response to chronically low levels of college attendance of local youth. The founders of …
Link to book preview

Super Tuesday showcases electorate’s growing racial, ethnic diversity

The U.S. electorate this year will be the country’s most diverse ever, and that is evident in several Super Tuesday states holding primaries or caucuses on March 1 in which blacks could have a significant impact
In five of 12 Super Tuesday states, blacks account for at least 15% of the electorate, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 2014 census data. Black eligible voters have the largest footprint in Georgia (31%) and Alabama (26%), while Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas also have sizable black electorates.
In a reversal of historical migration trends, Southern states have seen their black populations increase more than twice as fast as non-Southern states since 1990. From 1910 to 1970, 6 million blacks left the South, with many pursuing industrial jobs in Northern cities in what is called the Great Migration. But since then, blacks have increasingly chosen to live in the South…
Link to article

INCORPORTATION OF LATINO POLICE OFFICERS INTO THE M ILWAUKEE POLICE DEPARTMENT: HOW A GROUP OF LATINO POLICE OFFICERS SHED THE “BLUE SHIELD” FOR A LATINO IDENTITY

AG Guajardo jr – 2015
… 87 ZERO SUM HIRING 90 CONCLUSION 91 Page 6. v CHAPTER 3 MILWAUKEE POLICE
AND COMMUNITY RELATIONS 94 MEXICAN AMERICANS 100 PUERTO RICANS 104
ORGANIZING THE LATINO COMMUNITY IN MILWAUKEE 105 …
Link to dissertation

Internet Flips Over College Gymnast’s Almost Perfect Routine

UCLA gymnast Sophina DeJesus not only helped her team squeak out a victory against Utah on Saturday, but her floor performance has managed to win the Internet.
Judges gave the 21-year-old senior a near-perfect 9.925 for her magnificent flips, tumbles and splits, according to Popsugar.
But it’s the hip-hop moves she made in between those physical feats that have made her a viral sensation…
Link to video

Mechanisms of declining intra-ethnic trust in newly diverse immigrant destinations [ post-print]

AF Williamson – 2015
… 23 whether the local schools should employ bilingual education as opposed to English immersion.
In Yakima, some prominent Mexican-Americans who experienced the Chicano movement eschew
cooperation with Anglo institutions for fear of co-optation. More recent Mexican …
Link to article

Intergenerational Influences in Body Image Among Mexican American Obese Adolescent Females and Their Maternal Caregivers: ¿ Llenita no más ?

YA Marroquin
… Grounded Theory and thematic analysis were utilized to examine interview responses from
Mexican and Mexican American adolescent females with obesity, their … family members, peers
and friends, and medical professionals). In addition, the messages …
Link to dissertation

How being a bilingual speaker might make your brain stronger

During a presentation this past weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC, Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State who studies bilingualism, described how speaking both English and Spanish “changes the architecture of your brain,” and that being bilingual could literally making your brain stronger…
Link to article

Jessica Alba’s father is Mexican American. She is an actress and founder of The Honest Company

Jessica Alba is a Golden Globe-nominated actress whose career includes roles in films such as “Fantastic Four” and “Little Fockers,” as well as television series like “Dark Ang Jessica Alba | Founder
Jessicel,” “The Office” and “Entourage.”
The California native comes from modest beginnings, and never lost her zeal to share her good fortune with others. She is actively involved with with charities such as Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, ONE, Habitat for Humanity, Project HOME and more…
Link to article

THE INTERSECTION OF AGRICULTURE, LATINAS/OS, AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE LAND GRANT SYSTEM: A MIXED METHODS STUDY

SL Archibeque-Engle – 2016
… The life span of a Mexican farm laborer is 56- he lived to be 38.” Gloria Anzaldúa in
Borderlands La Frontera, p. 112 … They went to bed as Spanish speaking Mexican citizens
and woke up as Spanish speaking American citizens (or at least …
Link to dissertation

SALUD, GÉNERO Y EMPODERAMIENTO hiv risk behavior knowledge among Mexican and Mexican American women along the U. S.-Mexico border Implications for health practices in clinical and community settings

BM Mancera, H Mata, LK Robbins… – SALUD
… The role of the fe- male is clearly defined within the Mexican and Mexican American cultures. …
Mental health professionals in El Paso, Texas have reported to us that their caseload of Mexican
refugees and traumatized mi- grants has exploded over the past two years–especially …
Link to study

John G. Florez Chemical engineering has taken this ACS Scholar around the world

Mexican American chemical engineer John G. Florez, 39, grew up with his parents working seven long days each week in their car body shop in the town of Las Cruces, N.M., close to the Mexican border. “We were pretty challenged financially,” Florez says. Neither of his parents had a college education. But both encouraged their son to get one as a vehicle to a better life…
Link to article


  

Poem
“…And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while…”

T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Mexican American Proarchive Annual Report for 2022

The American Community Survey is an annual survey administered by the federal government to help local officials and community leaders and businesses understand the changes that take place in their communities. It includes percentages of our population’s graduate school attainment and the employment of Mexican Americans in various occupations.  These important factors influence the allocation of federal resources. Mexican American Proarchives uses the data provided by the American Community Survey to better understand how Mexican Americans compare to the general population.

Read More…