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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Hawaii’s Growing Latino Population
“…In 2017, one in every 10 Hawaii residents was Hispanic or Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While this number may seem small, it doesn’t provide the full picture of the rapid growth of Hawaii’s Latino population.
Standing at an estimated 159,737 in 2018, the Hawaii Latino population has increased over 80 percent since 2000. The bulk of the growth of the individuals of Hispanic or Latino origin took place between 2010 and 2018 as the increase over the 2000-2010 period was “just” 37.79 percent.
But wait, there’s more. That is, more Latinos in Hawaii.
According to data from a recent study, Hawaii’s Hispanic population is poised to reach 186,611 or 12.29 percent of the projected total Hawaii population in 2023. That’s a projected 16.88 percent growth in Hawaii’s Latino population from 2018 to 2023 compared to a much smaller 0.79 percent increase for the total Hawaii population…”
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NAFTA renegotiation signals little change for HE so far
“…In his United States presidential campaign in 2016, Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and to potentially withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trilateral agreement between Canada, Mexico and the US which has been in effect since 1994.
Trump kept his promise to end the US’ participation in the TPP and in January 2017 signed an executive order to withdraw from the agreement.
However, in the commercial interests of the major economic industries of the US, he agreed to begin the renegotiation of NAFTA. Talks took place between August 2017 and September 2018. The new agreement, which is to be revised and ratified by the three countries, includes important changes regarding rules of origin, wages, the review or renewal mechanisms, agriculture and e-commerce…”
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Verses and Flows: Migrant Lives and the Sounds of Crossing
“…Dr. Alex E. Chávez (Anthropology, Notre Dame) will present a talk titled “Verses and Flows: Migrant Lives and the Sounds of Crossing” on Wednesday, November 7, 2018 from 3:30-4:45 pm in Music Room 1145. Dr. Chávez will cover his new ethnography of Huapango music and US-Mexico border migration, Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017). Co-sponsored by the Department of Music’s Ethnomu’sicology and Musicology/Theory forums, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music (CISM), and the Department of Anthropology…”
Starting From the Bottom: Why Mexicans are the Most Successful Immigrants in America
Who’s more successful: The child of Chinese immigrants who is now a prominent attorney, or a second-generation Mexican who completed high school and now holds a stable, blue collar job?
The answer depends on how you define success.
In fact, according to a study by University of California, Irvine, Sociology Professor Jennifer Lee and UCLA Sociology Professor Min Zhou, contrary to stereotypes, Mexican-Americans are the most successful second-generation group in the country. The reason is simple: The study considered not just where people finished, but from where they started.
The report serves as counter-point to arguments raised by Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor better known as the Tiger Mom. In a new book, The Triple Package, Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, argue that some groups—namely Chinese, Jews, Cubans, and Nigerians—are more successful than others because they possess certain cultural traits that enable them to be…”
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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…”
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Against Trump’s wishes, Mexican professionals keep visas in new trade deal
By Anita Kumar And Franco Ordoñez
August 28, 2018 04:35 PM
Updated August 28, 2018 11:12 PM
WASHINGTON
Tens of thousands of Mexican professionals who come to work in the United States will be able to keep their visas as part of the new U.S.-Mexico trade agreement, the Mexican government says, delivering a political loss to the Trump administration who sought to slash the number of visas as part of NAFTA re-negotiations.
The Mexican Economy Ministry told McClatchy that…”
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A journalist’s journey, guided by curiosity for her father’s illness
“…Now the story of a daughter who grew up on the border between the United States and Mexico. She searches for herself, while also coming to grips with her father’s mental illness.
Amna Nawaz has the latest selection from the “NewsHour” Bookshelf…”
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Borders, mobility and belonging
M Gilmartin, P Wood – 2018 – books.google.com
Questions of migration and citizenship are at the heart of global political debate with Brexit
and the election of Donald Trump having ripple effects around the world. Providing new
insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US, this book …”
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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…”
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Most Hispanic parents speak Spanish to their children, but this is less the case in later immigrant generations
U.S. Latinos say it’s important for future generations of Hispanics to speak Spanish, and the vast majority speak the language to their children. However, the share of Latino parents who ensure the language lives on with their children declines as their immigrant connections become more distant, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.
Overall, 85% of Latino parents say they speak Spanish to their children, according to the Center’s 2015 National Survey of Latinos. Among immigrant parents, nearly all (97%) say they do this. But the share drops to 71% among U.S.-born second-generation Latino..”
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Upwardly Mobile
The number of Mexican-born professionals living in the United States has more than doubled since 1995. They’re not the undocumented workers you see in evening-news mug shots or aerial photographs of a littered and barren desert. They’re college graduates — some with multiple degrees — who join their blue-collar counterparts in their journeys north…
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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…
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Question of race not simple for Mexican Americans, author says
Those are assumptions drawn from the experience of European Americans, but they don’t match with the experience of Latinos, particularly those of Mexican origin in Texas, according to Dowling, the author of the new book “Mexican Americans and the Question of Race” (University of Texas Press).
For most European Americans, marking “white” likely means they experience little discrimination based on their racial background, Dowling said. For a Mexican American, it’s often a response to discrimination. “It’s for them a way of saying, ‘I belong, I’m an American citizen, and I want to be recognized as such,’ ” she said.
Her case in point: the border counties of southern Texas. Most are more than 80 percent Latino, and more than 80 percent of those Latinos marked “white” on the 2010 census…
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The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, reviews
“It is a lament for what a broken immigration system does to families, and its final third is a riveting, heartbreaking exploration of one such case … His lyrical asides about the border, from the history of its creation to quotations of poets who’ve written about it, are passionately delivered and speak to his urge to give nameless migrants an identity. But he spends less time scrutinizing the institutions that create the namelessness. His discussion of the Mexican government’s bloody escalation of the war against the cartels only glancingly mentions the U.S. government’s implication in it or the way border crackdowns only made crossing the border more expensive and risky. The imperfection of Cantú’s approach, though, mirrors the messiness of the crisis he’s facing.”…
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Young returnees start over in Mexico after growing up in U.S.
Even before recent raids by the Department of Homeland Security, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been deported annually. And those who grew up in the U.S. have found themselves living in what feels like a foreign country. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro talks to some young people who are starting over and feeling culture shock after having to leave the U.S…
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Colleges Scramble to Help Undocumented Students as Hopes for a DACA Deal Fade
On Wednesday afternoon, after House Democrats met with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, the spirit in Washington was one of stalemate. There was little progress toward a bipartisan deal to protect the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents the deportation of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, in exchange for Democrats’ votes to prevent a government shutdown by January 19.
But across the country in Sacramento, at a press conference held by University of California system president Janet Napolitano, the mood was one of urgency. Flanked by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and two other UC system officials, she urged the system’s 4,000 undocumented students to hurry to take advantage of the recent court ruling that reinstated DACA renewals after the Trump administration ended them last fall—a ruling the Trump administration has already asked the Supreme Court to review. The University of California is waging its own court battle to protect DACA: In September, Napolitano—who carried out the initial implementation of DACA as President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary—filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the administration announced the program’s repeal…
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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…
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Autentico: The Definitive Guide to Latino Career Success
R Rodriguez, AT Tapia – 2017
… When Judith Turnock and I wrote Cracking the Corporate Code we were aware that although
the book was about the success of the thirty-two African-Americans we cited, interest in the book
would go far beyond that group. … FRIDA KAHLO, Mexican painter W hy of whom this …
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Mexican Immigration and the Political Polarization of the United States
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” Engraved on a slab of bronze, these hallowed words, written by Emma Lazarus, greeted millions of immigrants as they gazed upon the Statue of Liberty with hopeful eyes. Yet, nearly one hundred and thirty years after Lazarus penned her famous poem, there is much confusion over the issue of immigration. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, paralleling Miss Lazarus’s beckoning, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,” recently complained, “When Mexico sends people, they’re not sending their best.” Disregarding political decorum altogether, Trump continued: “They’re…
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Carolina Herrera: A woman who broke the rules at the border with Mexico
Carolina Herrera: A Woman Who Broke the Rules at the Border of Mexico weaves a tale of the events that led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Carolina’s story is that of the revolution interwoven with a woman whose life was impacted by it. As she was growing up, Carolina had to navigate two cultures—her parents’ Mexican culture, and the mostly American culture she was surrounded with in El Paso, Texas…
