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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Education

Why Accreditation Reform May Benefit Hispanic and Black Students Most

When it comes to higher education reform, doing a better job of accrediting and evaluating individual colleges for quality and student outcomes is at the top of the list for many policymakers. In just the past year, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on reforming the accreditation process, the Obama administration went to court to force for-profit schools to better prepare their students for “gainful employment” and also lost a battle to create a new College Ratings system to track data on post-degree earnings and job placement…
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Why Accreditation Reform May Benefit Hispanic and Black Students Most

When it comes to higher education reform, doing a better job of accrediting and evaluating individual colleges for quality and student outcomes is at the top of the list for many policymakers. In just the past year, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on reforming the accreditation process, the Obama administration went to court to force for-profit schools to better prepare their students for “gainful employment” and also lost a battle to create a new College Ratings system to track data on post-degree earnings and job placement.
While policymakers hope these reforms will benefit college students overall, the push to emphasize quality may have a more profound impact on minority groups, particularly blacks and Hispanics…
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Latino/Latina students learn about higher education at Cuesta College

Cuesta College worked Friday to inspire the Latino population to break barriers that may be keeping them from higher education.
Cuesta reached out to local Latino and Latina high school students to let them know college is an option and explain the opportunities available.
“We give them motivational speakers, panelists, successful Latinos and Latinas so they can say ‘Oh my goodness, I can do what they did, I am exactly like them!'” explained Estella Vazquez, ESL Specialist Outreach/Recruiter at Cuesta College…
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Elsa Salazar Cade: a Chalkboard Champion

Elsa Salazar Cade, a Mexican American educator and entomologist, was born in 1952 and raised in the Lone Star State of Texas. After earning her bachelor’s degree in science education from the University of Texas, Austin, she was employed for two years as a fourth grade teacher, and for two years as a reading and remedial math teacher. When she completed her master’s degree in public school administration from Niagara University, she continued her career as a junior high school science educator in the public school system in Buffalo, New York…
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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…
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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

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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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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UTRGV professor first to win Professor of the Year award in UT System

EDINBURG — In a first for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the entire UT System, a faculty member was recognized as Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Of the more than 300 applications for the award, Stephanie Alvarez, professor of Mexican-American studies at UTRGV, was selected as one of only four recipients of the national award, which she accepted last week in Washington, D.C…
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Texas Education Scoreboard

The capacity of Texas schools to prepare students for college varies significantly by community. Use the Texas Education Scorecard to compare data on key education milestones from Pre-K through college completion.
Scroll over a county to see its education scorecard rating. Click through to see a detailed Education Scorecard with information on how your county can improve…
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Felix Arroyo’s Journey Through Public Education to Housing the Homeless

Growing up in Boston Public Schools, Felix Arroyo got to know the University of Massachusetts Boston through the Talented and Gifted (TAG) Latino Program, a program for young English language learners.
“In middle school I was running around those hallways at UMass Boston,” he says. “I’m looking forward to being a partner with UMass in my role now, while I have it, to make sure that the school is successful.”…
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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.

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