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…
Why This Poet Is Tired Of Trying To Prove He’s Both Mexican And American
n the 1997 film “Selena,” actor Edward James Olmos recited a monologue that resonated with many bicultural Latinos living in the United States. As he put it, being Mexican-American was “tough” because you have to be “more Mexican than the Mexicans, and more American than the Americans, both at the same time.”
And spoken word poet Christopher Martinez personally understands that struggle. The Mexican-American begins his poem, “An Untitled Brown Poem,” with a reference to the iconic words by the actor, who portrayed Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla’ father Abraham in the movie…
Link to article
République’s new wine director is now one of the most influential Latina sommeliers in the country
On the second day of January, Taylor Parsons, chief author of one of the most dynamic wine lists in Los Angeles, left his position at République — that day, by his calculation, represented his 1,000th evening menu at the celebrated Hancock Park bistro. He plans to spend the next year developing a restaurant project he can call his own, consulting, and helping his wife Briana Valdez expand her own business, the Loz Feliz Tex-Mex joint HomeState.
He left the wine program in the hands of 33-year-old Maria Garcia, who instantly becomes one of the most important wine directors in the city, and one of the most influential Latina sommeliers in the country.
Garcia is an L.A. native raised in Whittier. She was set on taking her history and political science degrees from UCLA into a career in education — in fact, she was teaching at a high school in Crenshaw when her interest in wine and cocktail culture drew her back toward..
Link to article
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…
Link to announcement
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…
Link to article
Mexican American Proarchive: Annual Report on Mexican American Professionals
News from the census American Community Survey is generally good for the 2015 year. Mexican American college enrollment was up from 18.7% to 18.9% in the 2014 and 2015 years. Graduate or professional degree attainment was also up from 2.9% to 3.0%. The number of bachelor’s degrees granted to Mexican American students rose from 7.6% in 2014 to 7.8% in 2015.
In spite of these gains, Mexican Americans still remain at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to earning a bachelor’s degree. Even after broadening the group to Latinos or Hispanics, this group still lags behind. According to the Pew Hispanic Center: “As of 2014, among Hispanics ages 25 to 29, just 15% of Hispanics have a bachelor’s degree or higher. By comparison, among the same age group, about 41% of whites have a bachelor’s degree or higher (as do 22% of blacks and 63% of Asians).” Pew reports that the main reasons for this low graduation rate is that Hispanics are less likely “to enroll in a four-year college, attend an academically selective college and enroll full-time.”
Also in the good news column, the University of California will continue to push for a greater number of underrepresented minorities; namely, Chicano/Latino students whose resident freshmen numbers rose from 2.7% to 32.3% of admitted California freshmen. In other good news, the proportion of Chicano/Latino students transferring from community colleges increased to 29.3% from 26.8% for 2015.
Occupations, including those in management, business, science, and art, fared better for Mexican Americans. The number of Mexican Americans filling these occupations rose from 17.4% in 2014 to 17.5% in 2015.
The total number of Hispanics filling these occupations was 16.1% in 2015, a bit lower than Mexican Americans specifically.
The report shows that industrial employment for Mexican Americans remained the same for 2014 and 2015 at 10.2%.
The figures for Hispanic or Latino employment for 2015 and 2016 show a healthy increase.
According to the Pew Hispanic center, “Construction, professional and business services, health services, financial services and food services…showed healthy gains.” Most of the jobs gained by native-born Hispanic workers were in manufacturing, mostly durable goods (82,000 Hispanic workers in this industry), followed by wholesale and retail trade (79,000), publishing, broadcasting, communication and information services (55,000), and construction (54,000).
Foreign-born Hispanics had the most job gains in construction (417,000), followed by business and professional services (179,000). Together, those two industries accounted for almost three-quarters (74%) of all jobs gained by foreign-born Latinos between 2005 and 2006.
The business and professional services sector, which ranges from management and technical services to janitorial, landscaping, and waste management services, is also a key employer for non-Hispanic workers. Of the total increase in employment in 2005-06, non-Hispanic workers accounted for 410,000 employees in the industry, native-born workers 327,000, and foreign-born workers 83,000.
Sources
- Census Bureau, Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2015
- Pew Research Center
- University of California
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
Visiting artists celebrate Mexican heritage in West Chicago
Mexican artist Juan Chawuk works with teens from the West Chicago Library’s young adult council on a mobile mural that spells out the words “West Chicago.” Chawuk is one of two artists who were invited to take part in People Made Visible’s artist residency program this summer…
Link to article
Latino Lessons
It’s a joke that probably dates back to the time of the Aztecs. Attempting to prove mental superiority, a poor schlub reveals a hilarious series of intellectual failings. In the Aztec version, that was probably some guy about to be sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl.
Or did the Mayans do that?…
Link to article
San Diego’s Chicano Artists Grab Some Comic-Con Spotlight
While the San Diego Convention Center is the center of the pop-culture universe this week, a thriving arts and culture scene is developing just a few miles away in Barrio Logan.
San Diego’s Chicano artists grabbed a piece of the spotlight this week at Comic-Con, attention that some thought was long overdue.
“But at least we’re moving forward,” said cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz.
Alcaraz was one of several Chicano artists and supporters who talked about the growing Latin art scene in San Diego…
Link to article
How Hispanic culture is changing America
This article is part of an ongoing Media Life series entitled “Catching the next big wave: Hispanic media.” You can read previous stories by clicking here.
Last month, Univision Deportes Network beat every other cable sports network in primetime among the key demos of adults 18-49 and 18-34.
It finished ahead of Fox Sports 1 and NBC Sports Network, which is an accomplishment of itself.
But it also beat cable sports’ big dogs, ESPN and ESPN2.
UDN carried the Copa America Centenario in June, which explains the big ratings, while the other networks were in a rare summertime lull between major events like NASCAR and the Tour de France.
But still, a Spanish-language network beating a bunch of English-language ones in the major sports demos?
A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable. In fact, five years ago, UDN didn’t even exist…
Link to article
Mexic-Arte’s Young Latino Artists exhibit is distinctly 21st century
The ten artists in “Amexican@” are millennials or younger, fluent in internet culture.
The at sign in the title of this year’s Mexic-Arte Museum “Young Latino Artists” exhibit is not just a typographical affectation.
The ten artists and one collective in “Amexican@” are millennials or younger, born in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fluent in internet culture, millennials have come of age with ain/nrr5L/the “@” sign no less readable to them than any letter of the alphabet…
Link to article
Neto’s Tucson: Photographer captured decades of Hispanic life in Tucson
On June 17, longtime Tucson photographer Frank Martinez passed away. He was 92. The ubiquitous figure on Tucson’s west and south sides had a small studio next to the old Sky Villa lounge on South 12th Avenue. Here’s a column I wrote in December 2000 about Martinez and his contributions as a documentarian of Tucson’s Mexican-American/Chicano families:
Through his camera lens, photographer Frank Martinez has seen Tucson’s social changes…
Link to article
These Latinos Won at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards
Three Latino artists took home some Billboard 2016 awards.
Romeo Santos, known for leading the Bachata group Aventura, won Top Latin Artist at the 2016 Billboard Awards for the second year in a row.
Nicky Jam and Enrique Iglesias’ hit tune “El Perdón” won Top Latin Song, marking the seventh Billboard Award for duo’s international smash hit.
Juan Gabriel won Top Latin Album for Los Dúo — again — at the Billboards. His album Mis Número 1…40 Aniversario was also nominated in the same category…
Link to article
Video: The Latino Artisans Who Power L.A.’s High-End Design Industry
For every luxe handmade leather bag or delicate blown glass lamp on display at Los Angeles’ high-end design stores, there is likely a highly-skilled craftsperson (if not several) who helped produce the object. In a new installment of Artbound, KCET highlights the work and stories of the primarily Latino artisans and craftspeople who, despite being responsible for the production of much of the city’s high-end design and retail, remain mostly invisible…
Link to article
Latino artists wrestle with representation, equity
San Antonio and Providence, Rhode Island, have something unexpected in common: A large Latino population that is still fighting to be represented in mainstream institutions.
Shey Rivera, artistic director of AS220, an arts center in Providence, Rhode Island, drew that comparison during her keynote speech Friday before an audience of Latino artists and arts administrators gathered at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center for the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture’s 30th Regional Arts Training Workshop…
Link to article
Latino Internet Sensations Shine at Hispanicize
MIAMI, Florida — At the young age of 19, Venezuelan-born Internet sensation Lele Pons has captured a huge audience. Her funny skits appear on Vine where she has over 10 million followers and her videos generate 7.7 billion loops. The bicultural, bilingual Latina was the first recipient of the Latinovator awards at Hispanicize 2016, which kicked off its 7th annual event on Monday in Miami.
The 5-day event is unique because it brings together Latino trendsetters from a vast amount of fields including journalism, marketing, tech entrepreneurship, music, and film…
Link to article
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
In this town, it’s as if Hollywood tries not to cast Latinos
In Hollywood, there is no Magical Latino.
That honey-tongued Mexican American dude who can help the white guy with his golf game while, more important, imparting life lessons before disappearing over the horizon? He doesn’t exist. That Salvadoran woman wisely guiding the “Chosen One” — another white guy — through an alternate-reality maze to his appointed destiny? You won’t find her…
Link to article
Alejandro G. Iñárritu is Best Director Oscar 2016 Winner for The Revenant
This is the sixth Academy Award nomination for Alejandro G. Iñárritu and his fourth win. During his acceptance speech, Iñárritu thanked his father and gave a shout out to Oscar nominee, Leonardo DiCaprio…
Link to Oscars report
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
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
