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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The Power of Zero
Fifty years after founding the influential theatre company, El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez visited USF last Tuesday to give a lecture called “The Power of Zero.” The talk focused primarily on the connection between the Mayan zero and the influence it holds on different aspects of life, especially its capacity to allow for change. Being at ground zero holds great potential and is the root of development, which Valdez related to the Chicano movement…
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Educational Inequalities Reflecting Sociocultural and Geographical Embeddedness? Exploring the Place of Hispanics and Hispanic Cultures in Higher Education and Research Institutions in New Mexico
T Freytag – Ethnic and Cultural Dimensions of Knowledge, 2016
… The Hispanic population in New Mexico includes two particularly large subgroups: (a) immigrants
from Mexico (“Mexican Americans”) and (b) “Hispanos,” who represent the descendants of Spanish
immigrants and settlers from the sixteenth century until the end of the Spanish …
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George Lucas Just Donated $10 Million for Black and Latino Kids to Study Film at USC
Written by Andrew S. Vargas It’s widely known that the University of Southern California boasts one of the world’s greatest film schools, with notable alums among its ranks, including Judd Apatow, Ron Howard, and George Lucas standing out on a list of the literally hundreds of Hollywood big shots who have graced its halls. But much like the Hollywood dream factory that plucks its recruits directly from each graduating class, USC’s alumni list also happens to be pretty damn white, and while there are undoubtedly myriad reasons for this imbalance, it probably has a little to do with the school’s exorbitant private university tuition…
Mariachi Music as a Pathway to Higher Education in the United States
L Salazar – Journal of the Vernacular Music Center, 2015
… Due to low expectations, poverty, and possible language barriers, Latinos, particularly
Mexican-Americans, are plagued with low academic achievement and high high-
school dropout rates (Torres and de la Torre 1997:100). …
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Students need diverse teachers in their schools
While many San Francisco residents are aware of California’s teacher shortage, a second shortage threatening our schools may be less familiar: We don’t face just a numbers gap, but also a demographic gap. Statewide, 73 percent of students in California schools are nonwhite, compared with only 29 percent of teachers.
It’s the largest demographic gap between students and teachers nationwide…
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UC Riverside Library Awarded Grant to Participate in the Latino Americans: 500 Years of History Initiative
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) – The University of California, Riverside Library received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Library Association (ALA) to participate in the Latino Americans: 500 Years of History initiative…
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Conceptualizing Interpersonal Relationships in the Cultural Contexts of Individualism and Collectivism
CRPM Greenfield, B Quiroz
… There werc fifteen teachers from this school, including-eleven European Americans, two African
Amer- icans, and two Mexican Americans [one was born in the United States. and one had
immigrated thirteen years before). School “2 was an urban public school. …
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‘Breakout Moment’: More Books Reflect Mexican American Kids, Teens by Juan Castillo
SAN MARCOS, TX. – The growing movement to reflect the lives of Mexican American children and young adults through the power of words has come a long way.
Just ask new U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who over the weekend told a rapt audience of writers, illustrators and multicultural children’s book advocates at Texas State University, “This is our breakout moment.”
The first Mexican American to hold the position, Herrera spoke at the 2015 Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, which celebrated its 20th anniversary. Herrera spoke excitedly about mounting positive bellwethers – more Latino authors, more interest from Hollywood and from corporate America, “more global interest, more global writers and voices.” …
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From Factory To Classroom: A Worker, A Student — And A Mother
Today, Noramay Cadena is a mechanical engineer, fitted with multiple degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she came by her motivation in a place much different from the MIT classrooms: a factory in Los Angeles where her mother brought her one summer as a teenager…
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Report: Minority Teachers Are Quitting at Rapid Rates
Although small strides have been made toward diversifying the U.S. school system over the past couple of decades, a new report shows there’s still a long way to go.
At a national level, schools have made progress in the hiring of minority teachers, according to a report by the Albert Shanker Institute, “The State of Teacher Diversity in American Education.” The attrition amongst minority teachers, however, is higher…
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Bilingual Education In California
“They say that if you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak three or more languages, you’re multilingual,” said Texas Sen. Judith Zaffirini. “And if you speak only one language, well then, you’re an American.”…
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Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says
Study by researchers at Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis finds that while black and Hispanic graduates accumulate more wealth than non-graduates, they fare far worse than their white and Asian counterparts during periods of financial trouble; findings undermine long-held concept of college education as an economic equalizer…
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Uh oh…bad news on SAT test results
Teenagers who took the SAT test during the latest standardized testing season performed worse on the controversial test than they have in many years.
Students generated reading scores that were the lowest since the College Board began releasing annual reports in 1972; the math scores were the worst since 1999. The score for the writing section, which was launched in 2006, was the lowest ever…
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School dedicated for ‘forgotten’ Mexican-American scholar
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Decades after leaving New Mexico in disgrace, a noted Mexican-American scholar and key figure in school desegregation got a school dedicated in his honor in his hometown of Albuquerque…
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Healthy Learners: A Whole Child Approach to Reducing Disparities in Early Education
R Crosnoe, C Bonazzo, N Wu – 2015
… of Health and Education A Few More Words Before Moving On A Developmental Take on Early
Education and Inequality Voices Opportunities and Challenges Linking Health to Education with
an Eye to Inequality A Spotlight on Preschool-Aged Mexican Immigrants A …
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Bilingual Adults’ Language Use: A Study of High Level Spanish English Speakers
EK Sinkler – 2015
… languages. Previous research has focused on working class immigrants or first generation
Hispanic Americans in universities. Neither of these groups have advanced education,
so there is a need for more research in this area. This research …
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Opening the doors to more low-income students reshapes a university
Under its current president, Arizona State University has increased its student population to 84,000, making it the largest university in America. In particular, the focus has been on boosting the number of low-income students. Hari Sreenivasan reports on how ASU transformed itself, and why some are questioning the outcomes of its rapid expansion…
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Sacrificing a Latina/o Presence in the Professoriate: An Analysis of Affirmative Action as Racial Remedy and Silent Covenant
MM Espino – Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 2015
… I felt an obligation to (re)present the participants’ narratives in a responsible manner. Many of
these participants are the only Mexican Americans or faculty of color in their departments and
may be easily recognizable depending on their discipline and social identities. …
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Analysis shows fewer Hispanic young adults ‘disconnected’ from school, jobs
Near the end of the Great Recession, about one-in-five Hispanics ages 18 and 19 were “disconnected youth” – neither working nor going to school. But, helped by the economic recovery, the share of these young Hispanic adults not working or enrolled in school dropped from 21% in 2009 to a historic low of 16% by 2014, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal government data…
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A Chican@ Pathways Model of Acción: Affirming the Racial, Cultural and Academic Assets of Students, Families and Communities
E Alemán Jr, DD Bernal, E Cortez – … of Mexican American Educators Journal, 2015
… Association of Mexican-American Educators (AMAE) Special Invited Issue © 2015, Volume 9,
Issue 1 ISSN 2377-9187 … In particular, Emma shares how Americans (but really she means white
people) treat her mother unfairly because she gets underpaid for the amount and type …
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