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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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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Engagement, Content Sharing High Among Hispanic Millennials
A recent study released by marketing trade organization the Culture Marketing Council details many of the unique online engagement trends salient among U.S. Hispanic audiences today.
Social media was cited as the number-one digital activity among Hispanic Millennials ages 18-34, and these audiences also seem to view and share more online and social media content than their non-Hispanic white counterparts: according to the study, Hispanics ages 18-34 shared an average of 33 percent more content than non-Hispanic white respondents in the same age group…
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Brands Utilizing Hispanic Baseball Stars In New Ad Campaigns
What: Hispanic players, which make up nearly a third of opening day rosters, are starting to be used in national campaigns, even for non-sports brands.
Why it matters: Brands may be catching up to the crossover appeal of the sport’s top Latino stars.
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Mexico’s Indigenous teachers fight to preserve ancient cultures in math class
When Totonacú children in Mexico learn to count, they learn the numbers to count animals – one-two-three pigs, one-two-three chickens. Then they learn the numbers for counting wool. And earthen furrows. Those are different. And the numbers for grapes, and other things that grow in clusters? Different. And for round things? And long, straight things? Yep, different.
The Totonacú language has 71 different systems of counting, each for counting different things. Totonacú children have no trouble learning all 71, says Fanny Cruz Garcia, a Mixteco professor of culture and language at the Intercultural University of Puebla who is working with Indigenous teachers in Veracruz. But when those kids get to school, and they encounter the numbers in Spanish – uno, dos, tres, no matter what you’re counting – well, that seems alien. Then they start to learn math, with…
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Why don’t you look or act ‘Latino’?
Imagine having to wear a shirt for the rest of your life that labels you as someone you’re not
Now, imagine always having to check a box and identify yourself with people who are completely different from you. You never say your name or your origin, yet others readily assume who you are and where you are from.
This is what nearly 57 million Latinos in the United States have to live with, and if trends continue, by 2050, 106 million of them will have to live while wearing this shirt wherever they go.
I have never identified as a “Latino” until I came to the United States. Growing up in Venezuela and moving directly to Princeton, I have never in my life used, or even considered using, the term “Latino.” I was technically Latino whenever I filled out a box describing my race for a college application, because that is how the United States functions. We all knew we were technically Latino and brothers and sisters in the same continent, but it was more of a term that had been placed in our heads due to globalization, not because we decided to use it. We were all brothers and sisters in the South American continent, but we were not the same. At the end of the day, I was Venezuelan first, and then I was Latino…
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HSBC Highlights Corporate Optimism’s Resilience Over Global Trade Uncertainty
Protectionism has cast a shadow of uncertainty over global traders, and North America’s trade relationships are in flux.
Early in President Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One year later, the nation’s participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is also changing as the U.S., Canada and Mexico engage in negotiations that are expected to continue through April, according to Bloomberg reports this week.
Despite ongoing change and uncertainty, however, new analysis from HSBC finds corporates across North America remain confident in their future global trading operations…
…Eighty-seven percent of Mexican professionals, 77 percent of U.S. professionals and 70 percent of Canadian professionals say they are optimistic about increasing cross-border trade volume over the next year…
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Seeking better data on Hispanics, Census Bureau may change how it asks about race
Federal officials are considering major changes in how they ask Americans about their race and ethnicity, with the goal of producing more accurate and reliable data in the 2020 census and beyond. Recently released Census Bureau research underscores an important reason why: Many Hispanics, who are the nation’s largest minority group, do not identify with the current racial categories…
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Indigenous Poetry in Contemporary Mexico: Voices, Translations, Cultures
Event Date:
Thursday, April 5, 2018 – 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Event Contact:
Lety Garcia, Programs and PR Manager
805-893-2951 or lgarcia@museum.ucsb.edu
As part of the Conference “Verbal Kaleidoscope” hosted by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, several contemporary poets from Mexico, including the renowned Mazatec poet and Director of the Mexican Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), Juan Gregorio Regino, and prominent Zapotec poet Irma Pineda Santiago will read from their work written in indigenous languages (including their own translations into Spanish and English). This is a great opportunity to listen to these new voices that are re-defining the literary landscape of Latin America today…
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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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TRAMBLEY, ESTELA PORTILLO
(1926–1998). Estela Portillo Trambley, teacher and feminist author of books, poems, essays, and plays, was born on January 16, 1926, in El Paso, Texas. She was the oldest child of Francisco Portillo and Delphina (Fierro) Portillo. Her father was a mechanic, and her mother was a piano teacher, but Estela spent a considerable amount of her childhood with her grandparents, Julian and Luz Fierro, who were listed in a neighboring household on the 1930 census. Her grandfather was the proprietor of a store in the barrio. She maintained a positive attitude regarding the poverty that she witnessed as a child and later stated that “la pobreza nunca derriba el espiritu” (poverty never defeats the spirit). Growing up, Estela Portillo had a love for literature and was an avid reader. During her formative years, her diverse reading materials included English and American classics, poetry, and philosophy. She attended El Paso High School…
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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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Data: Latinos in Iowa City faced worst US bias in home loans
IOWA CTY, Iowa (AP) — Latinos seeking conventional home loans in the Iowa City area were nearly four times more likely to be denied than non-Hispanic whites in 2016, the widest disparity in the nation, a new analysis of federal data shows.
The findings suggest racial inequality in the mortgage market in the progressive college town and appear driven by a high rate of rejections for prospective Latino borrowers reported by a single financial institution, Hills Bank, according to the analysis of millions of records by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The analysis controlled for factors such as applicants’ income, loan amount, neighborhood that could affect the likelihood of denial…
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Smithsonian Latino Center Accepting Applications for 2018 Young Ambassadors Program
The Smithsonian Latino Center is now accepting applications for the 2018 Young Ambassadors Program June 24 through Aug. 2. The application deadline April 9. The Young Ambassadors Program is a national program for graduating high school seniors that fosters the next generation of Latino leaders in the arts, sciences and humanities through an intensive training and internship program at the Smithsonian. The program receives major and continued support from Ford Motor Company Fund…
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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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Starting From the Bottom: Why Mexicans are the Most Successful Immigrants in America
“…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…”
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Identity and Race: Millions of Latinos No Longer Think Of Themselves As Latinos, Study Finds
There are some 43 million people in the United States with Hispanic ancestry. Almost 90 percent of them identify as Latino or Hispanic, making it the nation’s second-largest racial or ethnic group.
But according to an analysis of two national surveys by the Pew Research Center, around 11 percent of all people with Hispanic ancestry—5 million people—don’t identify as either…
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The Making of America’s Culture Regions
RL Nostrand – 2018 – books.google.com
This outstanding text provides students with the essential foundation in the historical
geography of the United States. Distinguished scholar Richard L. Nostrand skillfully
synthesizes decades of historical geography research in an engaging and thought…
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