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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Mexican Astrophysicist Leticia Corral Recognized for ‘Cyclical Universe’ Discovery Which Corrects Stephen Hawking’s Mistake
A Latin American astrophysicist has debunked Stephen Hawking’s assertions about the origin of the universe.
Mexican cosmologist Leticia Corral has been recognized for her career-defining theory about how the universe came into existence. Contrary to what the world-renowned astrophysicist has been advocating over the years, Corral believes the universe is cyclical…
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Religion, Race/Ethnicity, and Norms of Intergenerational Assistance among Older Adults
CG Ellison, X Xu – Religions, 2015
… Results indicate that African Americans and Hispanics tend to express stronger support for
intergenerational assistance than non-Hispanic Whites. … Keywords: religion; race; African
Americans; Latinos; aging; intergenerational assistance 1. Introduction …
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Hispanic Heritage Foundation Honors Outstanding Local Student
Thomas Jefferson T-STEM Early College High School senior, Jessica Zamarripa, received a gold award from The Hispanic Heritage Foundation. She was one of 21 award recipients at the Rio Grande Valley regional Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards ceremony on Dec. 10. As the gold medalist in the engineering and mathematics category, sponsored by ExxonMobil, Zamarripa was awarded a $3,000 scholarship to support her plans to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin…
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Mexico Stubbornly Resists Accountability
When he campaigned for the presidency of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto used the title of his book, “Mexico, the Great Hope,” to explain the record he hoped to achieve and the nation he hoped to build. More than three years into his presidency, it seems more likely that he will be remembered not as the transformational leader Mexicans thought they had elected, but as a politician who skirted accountability at every turn…
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One Test is not Enough: Getting to Really Know your Students
SL Osorio – … Early Childhood Education Research: Imagining New …, 2015
… Mexicans were not wanted here in the United States. This is a complicated issue for
many of my students since the majority of them are Mexican Americans. This
conversation between Alejandra and Lucia demonstrates the complex …
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Hispanic Chamber seeks scholarship applicants
The Solano Hispanic Chamber of Commerce seeks applicants for scholarships available to high school seniors and college students who attend schools in Solano County. Chamber leaders will award two $1,500 scholarships to college students, and two $750 scholarships to high school seniors. The scholarships are called “2016 Inspire Learning.”…
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Immigration to the U.S.: A Problem for the Republicans or the Democrats?
AM Mayda, G Peri, W Steingress – 2015
… “Many white Americans see that America is changing, believe that immi- gration is driving
many of the negative changes and know that one party stands largely on the side of
immigrants while the other party stands largely in opposition. …
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Ten Great Latino Books Published in 2015
Odyssean journeys of migration by Dominican boys, secret messages from underworld goddesses and Mexican gods and photographic volumes that capture the beauty and grace of Latin America: these 10 books by Latino authors published in 2015 will make you reflect, laugh, think and enjoy…
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No Walls Here: Lalo Alcaraz Discusses the New Fox Animated Series, Bordertown
No Walls Here: Lalo Alcaraz Discusses the New Fox Animated Series, Bordertown
Many of us know him as the cartoonist-creator of the syndicated daily comic strip, La Cucaracha, where Alcaraz skewers bigotry and intolerance with a heavy dose of Chicano culture and humor. He is also a team member of the Pixar film COCO, consulting on the Día de Los Muertos-themed animated movie scheduled for release in 2017. Alcaraz has won five Southern California Press Awards for Best Editorial Cartoon, produced editorial cartoons for the LA Weekly for almost two decades, and creates nationally syndicated editorial cartoons in English and Spanish…
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Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu pushes the limits with ‘The Revenant’
“The Revenant,” the latest film from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, could become a triumph. The film premiered on Christmas Day in the US, to have a shot at the upcoming Oscar nominations…
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Student Faculty Interactions: Understanding Mexican American Community College Students
G Román – 2015
… Figure 1. shows that Mexican Americans are the largest subgroup from the entire
Latina@ population and their numbers are expected to grow in the coming years
(Motel and Patten 2012). The reason why this is important is …
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All for One? And One for All? Mexican American Group Consciousness and Partnership
JL Urbano Jr – Minority Voting in the United States [2 volumes], 2015 – books.google.com
Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, and within this pan-ethnic group
are Mexican Americans who constitute over 66 percent of the total Latino population.
Because of its current size and future population estimates, experts frequently speculate …
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The Perceptions, Knowledge , Benefits and Barriers of Hispanics Regarding the Dietary Guidelines for Americans
LDA Gamboa – 2015
… 2005). However, the San Antonio Heart Study contradicted this paradox, showing
that Mexican- Americans indeed had a higher risk of cardiovascular and coronary
diseases than did non-Hispanic Whites (Hunt et al., 2003). …
Link to thesis
Maya Arce , et al . v . Diane Douglas, et. al
L Bannai, R Chang, C Garden – 2015
… teachers.”2 2 The MAS program was previously called “Mexican American/Raza Studies.”
Plaintiffs assert that “La Raza” more generally refers to Mexican Americans. See
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Case …
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Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Immigrant Mexicans, and the California Farmworker Movement
LA Flores – 2016 – books.google.com
Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural
empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of
how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades …
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New Mexico: Outstanding Multicultural State – Four Out Of Five Stars
Mural at a popular New Mexico restaurant
When I travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I marvel at how the Native American, Spanish, and Mexican cultures exist within one state. At least on the surface, there seems to be a great deal of respect for each other’s customs and inclusion of all culture in art and architecture.
The photo below is a good example of the blending and inclusion represented in the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico campus. It shows Pueblo Revival architecture at its finest, with its heavy wood lintels to its striking viga-and-corbel ceilings.
The photo below is another good example from the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park near Albuquerque. Here we see the entrance to the center showing a corrugated culvert that was probably salvaged from a nearby acequia.
Many years before Spanish settlements, ancestral Puebloan peoples had developed an organized manipulation of water resources as early as 800 A.D.
This skill continued to be developed and by 1400 they had managed to create a gravity-fed irrigation system on the major rivers in New Mexico.
The very word acequia is from early Spanish settlements that inherited an amalgam of irrigation systems from the Roman Empire and the Moors. With the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, this amalgam of Spanish and Indian laws and customs was mixed with existing American law and custom.
Beyond New Mexico’s cultural inclusiveness and diversity, there are still several areas that the state has failed at achieving.
New Mexico’s population is 47.7% Hispanic and 38.9% white (not Hispanic or Latino), but only 23.6% of firms are owned by Hispanics, and 5.3% are owned by American Indians—a very poor showing. According to the National Center for Higher Education, “New Mexico’s personal income has fallen from 83% of the U.S.average in 1960 to 74% in 2000.”
Speaker on the Student Quad at the University of New Mexico
The National Center for Higher Education also concluded: “The education system in New Mexico (from high school to college completion) fails to retain Hispanics and Native Americans at nearly the rate of whites and Asians. These racial/ethnic disparities are also evident in the graduation rates of baccalaureate students…”
In summary, New Mexico is an outstanding example of a multicultural state but has some work to be done in addressing the disparities of their majority and minority ethnic groups.
Mexican American Women in Higher Education: A Comparative Study
GM University, C Dorington, S Work, SA Bell
… together received less than 6 percent ofall baccalaureate degrees, and 4.3 percent of all graduate
and professional degrees, representing … familial and individual characteristics as they pertain
to the educational achievement of a group 0f300 Mexican American women who …
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Immigrants and Gender Roles: Assimilation vs. Culture
FD Blau – 2015
Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES IMMIGRANTS AND GENDER ROLES:
ASSIMILATION VS. CULTURE Francine D. Blau Working Paper 21756
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21756 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC …
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Digging for a Tale: Genomic Analysis Solves Mysteries Surrounding America’s Earliest People
T Tanenbaum
… and her colleagues undertook genetics as well as morphological analyses on historical Mexican
and South American populations, the latter to re-evaluate whether these ancient skulls were closer
in skull morphology to Australo-Melanesians than to modern Native Americans. …
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The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground
After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data…
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