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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Wait, so who is Nero, and why are people comparing him to Trump?
After a weekend of golfing in Florida, President Trump quote-tweeted a mysterious meme Sunday evening, depicting himself playing the violin in front of an orange and red background, with the caption, “MY NEXT PIECE IS CALLED NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT’S COMING.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/09/nero-trump-rome-burned-coronavrius-twitter/
What We Owe Columbus (And What We Don’t)
“Statue of Cristóbal Colón in Barcelona, Spain (Andrew Moore/Flickr)
I hated my father for a long time. Maybe hate is too strong a word; let’s say my thoughts about him were consumed by a smoldering resentment: first for what he did to my family, then for what he didn’t do — namely, stick around. Yet even now I cannot deny that a small part of me still loves him deeply, if only for the mere fact that he gave me life.
And so it is with Christopher Columbus for many, if not most Latinos. His name stirs up painful memories but, nonetheless, he is the man who started it all. He is why they’re here. The point was made in a recent op-ed by Jonathan Marcantoni, who made a strong effort to remind us that, despite how much liberals love patting themselves on the backs for their public curses of the man who stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, Latin America, the United…”
https://www.latinorebels.com/2015/10/12/what-we-owe-columbus-and-what-we-dont/
Four generations: Mexico to U.S. — a culture odyssey
“Arcadio Yniguez was barely a teenager when he crossed the border into the United States in 1913. He came from Nochistlan, a town in central Mexico; like thousands of his countrymen, he was fleeing the violence of the Mexican revolution. Family legend later said that he had run horse for Pancho Villa at age 12 and even shared meals with the notorious revolutionary…”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-26/four-generations-mexico-to-u-s-a-culture-odyssey
Mexican American textbook is courting controversy in Texas
“Mexican Americans might not recognize their cultural history as it unfolds in a new textbook proposed for Texas public schools.
Chicanos are described as people who “adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”
In another passage, Mexican Americans are linked to undocumented immigrants.
Illegal immigration has “caused a…”
Mexican-American Author Highlights in Comics The Heroism of Frontline Workers Amid Pandemic
“A comic book called El Pesos Hero by Héctor González Rodríguez III is about a superhero who defends people from various evil forces such as corrupt individuals. Furthermore, the literary masterpiece focuses on a superhero saving people from drug cartels. Also, the comic book tells the story of a superhero who also combats human traffickers, according to an article. Many of his heroic acts involve the US-Mexican border which for many years had played a significant role in the history of Mexico and the immigrants who crossed the borders to live in the United States…”
Mexico’s coronavirus-skeptical president is setting up his country for a health crisis
“…As Mexico fast approaches what’s highly likely to be a large coronavirus outbreak, the country’s leadership — mainly its president — mostly insists that everything is fineIn speech after speech, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known by his nickname AMLO, tells Mexicans they shouldn’t fear Covid-19, even as hundreds of thousands of people have confirmed infections worldwide. Despite warnings from global health officials, he continues to hold political rallies, kiss supporters, and request that Mexicans go out shopping to prop up the country’s sputtering economy during a global slowdown.“Live life as usual,” he said in a video posted to Facebook on March 22, showing him outside at a restaurant. “If you’re able and have the means to do so, continue taking your family out to eat … because that strengthens the economy.”…”
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/26/21193823/coronavirus-mexico-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-health-care
Agent of Change, Adela Sloss Vento by Cynthia E. Orozco
“… Sister Irma, a professional Spanish-language translator ix … me with historical
research, identifying contacts and thereby suggesting her support of young
Chicana professionals..
Link to book
Trace Elements
“…That’s where and when Ruth Hellier-Tinoco first saw a performance by the experimental theater company La Máquina de Teatro. She still remembers the work, part one of the group’s “Trilogía Mexicana,” in great detail: from the staging, set design and lighting to the actors’ movement and speech.
“The piece combined so many threads, traces and layers of history, crossing and combining stories from the 15th century through to the present day, and explored questions of power, ecology, belonging, identity and memory,” Hellier-Tinoco, a scholar of performance and theater, recalls now. “It was emotionally powerful, deeply moving and humorous, and highly subversive and complicated. I was totally captivated…”
Link to article
Their U.S. roots date back centuries, but these Latinos still wonder if it’s enough to belong
By Esmeralda Bermudez, Paloma Esquivel
Aug. 16, 2019
“It’s a tricky thing, what makes up an American.
There are Latinos whose families have been on this land since long before the Statue of Liberty greeted newcomers from New York Harbor, before the Civil War and the Declaration of Independence.
In the days since the El Paso massacre, many have found themselves reflecting, wrestling with their place in society and asking questions about how their heritage, their language and their skin color has shaped them and the way other Americans perceive them…”
link to article
Review: A Timely Take on ‘Oedipus’ by Way of South Central Los Angeles
“…In America, there are stories we like to tell. Stories about meritocracy and opportunity, about talent, hope and help. We tell them, in part, so that we don’t have to voice less comfortable truths — that the circumstances of a person’s birth often prophesy the life that follows.
That’s uniquely true of Oedipus, the limping princeling fated to kill his father and marry his mother. He’s crossed seas and centuries to appear in Luis Alfaro’s vigorous and pointed “Oedipus El Rey,” at the Public Theater, which resets the tale in modern-day South Central Los Angeles. Directed by Chay Yew with energy and flair, it’s the most successful offering yet from the Sol Project, an initiative dedicated to producing the work of Latinx playwrights.
The play opens in a prison complex, as a convict chorus rushes around the stage in orange scrubs and tries to decide what story to tell. Stories are boring, some prisoners say; they’re depressing, they don’t change anything. But one chorus member says, “Stories are all we got.” So they shed the scrubs and take on the roles in this Oedipus update.
As written by Sophocles, the original “Oedipus Rex” is an oldie but a goody, provided your definition of a goody is heavy on the incest and the self-mutilation. And so it goes here. When Laius (Juan Francisco Villa), a Los Angeles gangster, learns that his unborn son will kill him, he arranges to have the baby killed, slashing the bottoms of his feet for good measure. “I don’t want him chasing me in the afterlife,” Laius says…”
Link to article
‘Top Secret’ maps reveal the massive Allied effort behind D-Day
“…The Allied invasion of German-occupied France that began in the early hours of June 6, 1944, was long in the making. By gaining supremacy in the Atlantic in 1943, the Allies had cleared the way for a huge buildup of American troops and equipment in Great Britain. Between January and June 1944, nine million tons of supplies and 800,000 soldiers crossed the Atlantic from the United States to bolster the invasion, designated Operation Overlord…”
Link to article
Honoring Latino Military Heroes on Memorial Day
“…Latinos have a “proud and indeed enviable” record of military service that dates back all the way to the Civil War, according to a U.S. Army historical website.Latino military army service memorial dayAn illustration of Puerto Rico’s 65th Infantry Regiment, “The Borinqueneers” in South Korea, Feb. 2, 1951 (via U.S. Army Center of Military History, https://www.army.mil/hispanics/history.html).
About 20,000 Latino serviceman and women participated in Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, 80,000 in the Vietnam War in 1959-1973, and more than 400,000 in World War II in 1939-1945.
More than 40 Medals of…”
Link to article
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…”
Link to article
‘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…”
Link to article
Smithsonian Adds Gallery Honoring Latino-American Culture
“…The Smithsonian Institution announced on Thursday that it will add a gallery dedicated to honoring Latino-American experiences to the National Museum of American History. The addition was made possible by a $10 million lead gift from five members of the Molina family, who made the donation in memory of their father, Dr. C. David Molina, the founder of Molina Healthcare Inc.
The 4,500 square foot Molina Family Latino Gallery is scheduled to open in 2021 and will focus on sharing the stories of Latino communities through multimedia activities, artifacts and first-person narratives. The inaugural exhibition, “Making Home: Latino Stories of Community and Belonging,” will explore the history of various Latino cultures in North America and their influence in the United States and elsewhere…”
Link to article
Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture
“…Liminal Sovereignty examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen through Mexican culture. Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Mormons emigrated from the United States in the 1880s, left in 1912, and returned in the 1920s. Rebecca Janzen focuses on representations of these groups in film, television, online comics, photography, and legal documents. Janzen argues that perceptions of Mennonites and Mormons—groups on the margins and borders of Mexican society—illustrate broader trends in Mexican history. The government granted both communities significant exceptions to national laws to encourage them to immigrate; she argues that these foreshadow what is today called the Mexican state of exception. The groups’ inclusion into the Mexican nation shows that post-Revolutionary Mexico was flexible with its central tenets of land reform and building a mestizo race. Janzen uses minority communities at the periphery to give us a new understanding of the Mexican nation…”
Link to summary
Humanity’s Genes Reveal Its Tangled History
…”Reality, it turns out, is more complex and interesting than scientists ever imagined.
In the early 19th century, Jean-Fraconnçois Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to begin the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. We already knew Egypt through the Bible and the histories of the Greeks, but even Herodotus wrote 2,000 years after the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the translation of hieroglyphics, the legend of Egypt came to life. What had been cloudy became clear.
In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard’s Medical School and the Broad Institute, introduces us to the 21st-century Rosetta Stone: ancient DNA, which will do more for our understanding of prehistory than radiocarbon dating did. Where the latter allowed archaeologists to create a timeline based on the material objects they excavated, DNA sequencing allows scholars to explore the genetics of the people who created those material cultures. We may never see the face of Agamemnon, but we already have the DNA of the warlords of Mycenaean Greece, and in the future we could reconstruct their features from genes alone…”
Link to article
Anthony Acevedo, U.S. Army medic who endured prison-camp horrors during WWII, dies at 93
During the winter of 1944-45, Anthony Acevedo was a 20-year-old Army medic assisting wounded soldiers fighting against Nazi forces in World War II. The war in Europe was coming to an end, but for Mr. Acevedo the horror was just beginning.
His ordeal in German prison and labor camps, which he kept hidden for decades, led to his recognition as the first Mexican American soldier to be designated a Holocaust survivor…
Link to article
Little-known history of Hispanics must be found
Hispanics, mostly Mexicans, came into the Platte Valley throughout the early 1900s.
The essay titled “Latinos Along the Platte: The Hispanic Experience in Central Nebraska,” by Roger Davis of the University of Nebraska at Kearney, gives a glimpse of the impact the Hispanic immigrants brought to our area.
I have a direct connection to the first-known Hispanics who came into Nebraska, although it would be many years before there would be a more permanent settling of Hispanics in the state…
Link to article
Arm Your Mind With 2017’s Best Latino/Latin American History Books
Every year, university presses across the United States publish dozens of books documenting the Chicano-Latino experience through history, culture, music, immigration, biography, race, and so much more. Unfortunately, most of them – while tackling important and fascinating subjects – get next-to-no mainstream attention because they’re written for an academic audience, which means high prices, a bunch of egghead gobbledygook, and stilted writing that makes reading them a chore few people bother to undertake…
Link to article
