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

United States, Canada and Mexico to recognize each other’s arquitects

Architectural licensing bodies in the United States, Canada and Mexico have forged an agreement to allow architects to work across North American borders.
Following a decade of negotiations, the Canadian Architectural Licensing Authorities (CALA), the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) in the US and the Federacion de Colegios de Arquitectos de la Republica Mexicana (FCARM) have finalised an agreement that will allow registered architects to work across all three countries.
Currently, individuals have to register with the governing body of each country to be able to legally call themselves architects when working abroad…
Link to article

Study: Biculturalism has positive effect on Mexican-American youth

COLUMBIA, Mo., Feb. 10 (UPI) — New research suggests biculturalism has positive effects on young Mexican-Americans.
According to new survey data, Mexican-Americans who are connected to both American and Latino culture tend to have higher self-esteem and engage in prosocial behaviors, like empathizing with others.
The surveys were conducted researchers at the University of Missouri and included the responses of 574 Mexican-American adolescents living in Phoenix, Ariz…
Link to article

The Collision of Cultural Memories on the Texas_Mexico Border

GW Gómez – How Myth Became History: Texas Exceptionalism in …, 2016
… Texan memory carries traces of the coun-terdiscursive practices voiced in the nineteenth-and
early twentieth-century corrido,“a Mexican folk ballad that celebrates the resistance of Mexican
Amer-ican everyman against the oppression of Anglo Americans”(Sorensen 112). …
Link to book preview

Eating Together, Separately: Intergroup Communication and Food in a Multiethnic Community

A Wenzel – International Journal of Communication, 2016
… feeling ‘other.’ And you feel like your neighborhood is being invaded by people who are other
‘other’—and they seem to be the ones that everybody’s interested in.” He said he’s seen similar
divisions before, such as between African Americans and Mexican immigrants in …
Link to study

LULAC Hits Goal of 10,000 Iowa Latinos Pledging to Caucus

Leaders of a group that has been trying to increase Latino participation in Iowa’s caucuses said Monday they hit their goal of getting at least 10,000 Latinos to pledge to participate.
Joe Enriquez Henry, LULAC’s national vice president for the Midwest region, was upbeat when reached by NBC News Latino Monday morning as LULAC Iowa made its final push to get Latinos out to the first-in-the-nation caucus for their choices of presidential nominees…
Link to article

How The SAG Awards Nailed What the Oscars Could Never Get Right

Amid the controversy enveloping the Oscars this year, the Screen Actors Guild Awards made diversity the big winner Saturday night [January 30, 2016].
Among the winners were Queen Latifah for her role in HBO’s Bessie, Viola Davis for her work as Annalise Keating on How to Get Away with Murder and Uzo Aduba who took the prize for Best Actress in a TV Comedy for Orange Is the New Black…
Link to article

Latina Lives in Milwaukee

T Delgadillo – 2015 – books.google.com
102 days ago – … people of many different backgrounds and experiences but that there are many
forms of achievement—personal, professional, communal—large … local troupe, whether it involved
actors posing as French and Mexican or actual Mexican or Mexican American performers …
Link to book preview

Racial and ethnic differences in leaving and returning to the parental home: The role of life course transitions, socioeconomic resources, and family connectivity

L Lei, S South – Demographic Research, 2016
… Using the answers to the question of whether a respondent has Spanish, Hispanic,
or Latino background, we divide the respondents into three groups: non-Hispanics,
Mexicans (including Mexican Americans) and other Hispanics. …
Link to article

IDENTIDAD RASGADO Y LA LENGUA PERDIDA : THE IMPACT OF A TRADITIONAL LITERARY CANON ON LATINO PERCEPTIONS OF IDENTITY

A Hernandez – 2015
… Web. 8 Dec. 2015. Urrieta, Luis. “Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Mexican
Americans Become Chicana/O Activist Educators.” Urban Review 39.2 (2007): 117- 144.
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. Web. 8 Dec. 2015…
Link to thesis

latina/o Sociology

R Sáenz, KM Douglas, MC Morales – Expanding the Human in Human Rights: …, 2015
… Due in part to the lobbying efforts of Mexican American leaders who argued that
Mexican Americans were white (Snipp 2003, 69), the issue of how to classify the
Latina/o population of the United States remained a work in progress. …
Link to chapter

Meet 19-Year-Old Ismael Fernández, Elected to Idaho’s First All-Latino City Council

In Wilder, Idaho – where 75 percent of the population is Latino – a completely Latino city council has taken shape. And 19-year-old College of Idaho student Ismael Fernández is one of the council members who will influence law in Wilder. Mayor Alicia Almazán’s city council group includes Tila Godina, Robert Rivera, and Guadalupe García. Univision reports that this is the first all-Latino city council in Idaho…
Link to article

More Millennial Than Latino

More Millennial Than Latino
As millennials embrace progressive politics, the conservative Latino narrative is unraveling.
Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton attend a rally during a campaign event, Thursday, Oct. 15, 2015, in San Antonio.
A new generation is charting its own course in politics and ideology. Latinos represented 8.4 percent of voters in the 2012 presidential election, and because the Latino population is increasing, much ink has been spilled about their future influence on American electoral outcomes. But population size is just one moving target. One such monumental shift is that while only 46 percent of Latino 34-year-olds were born in the U.S., 81 percent of Latino 18-year-olds were, according to the American Community Survey…
Link to article

Both Mexico and the US Are to Blame for Ruthless Drug Lords Like El Chapo

Sean Penn, actor and activist, has made a name for himself as something of a renegade journalist, pursuing interviews with controversial figures such as Cuban leader Raul Castro, the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and most recently Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Penn’s interview with El Chapo is perhaps his most provocative, for the narcotics trafficker has been America’s most wanted man since the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. While the interview, printed in Rolling Stone, is certainly intriguing, it is important to remember how much of a point of contention the war on drugs has become for the United States and its southern neighbor. Since the 1960s, relations between the U.S. and Mexico have grown increasingly strained due to not only the growing presence of drug cartels in Mexico, but the seemingly endless flow of firearms south and the insatiable American appetite for marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. As the U.S. and Mexico negotiate the extradition of the world’s most powerful drug trafficker from his home base in Sinaloa state to a correctional facility somewhere north of the border, distrust between the two countries remains palpable, particularly after El Chapo’s previous escapes from two out of Mexico’s three maximum security prisons…
Link to article

Job Opportunities for Latinos — Marketing Specialist

Information is the key to success these days especially in business. Most companies, entrepreneurs and organization are even willing to spend millions just to gather important details they can use to know more and understand their customers. That’s why jobs that are inclined to its niche, like Market Specialists, have a projected demand increase of about 41 percent from 2010 to 2020…
Link to article

Latinos Who Won Big At The 73rd Golden Globe Awards

When the cameras weren’t at the heels of Jennifer Lopez in her swoon-worthy daffodil Giambattista Valli gown or catching America Ferrera and Eva Longoria’s classy shade for Latina’s in Hollywood, the cameras saw Latinos making their mark in film and television.
Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (pictured above) won Best Director for the motion picture drama The Revenant, which also won Best Motion Picture Drama…
Link to article

Skin Protection Behaviors among Young Male Latino Day Laborers: An Exploratory Study Using a Social Cognitive Approach

JF Boyas, VK Nahar, RT Brodell – Dermatology Research and Practice, 2016
… 26]. If a Spanish version was a not available, the research team, which consisted
of two Mexican Americans, one Peruvian, and one Venezuelan, translated the
instruments. All translations were first carried out independently. …
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…