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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Latinos Who Won Big At The 73rd Golden Globe Awards

When the cameras weren’t at the heels of Jennifer Lopez in her swoon-worthy daffodil Giambattista Valli gown or catching America Ferrera and Eva Longoria’s classy shade for Latina’s in Hollywood, the cameras saw Latinos making their mark in film and television.
Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (pictured above) won Best Director for the motion picture drama The Revenant, which also won Best Motion Picture Drama…
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Skin Protection Behaviors among Young Male Latino Day Laborers: An Exploratory Study Using a Social Cognitive Approach

JF Boyas, VK Nahar, RT Brodell – Dermatology Research and Practice, 2016
… 26]. If a Spanish version was a not available, the research team, which consisted
of two Mexican Americans, one Peruvian, and one Venezuelan, translated the
instruments. All translations were first carried out independently. …
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Mexican Astrophysicist Leticia Corral Recognized for ‘Cyclical Universe’ Discovery Which Corrects Stephen Hawking’s Mistake

A Latin American astrophysicist has debunked Stephen Hawking’s assertions about the origin of the universe.
Mexican cosmologist Leticia Corral has been recognized for her career-defining theory about how the universe came into existence. Contrary to what the world-renowned astrophysicist has been advocating over the years, Corral believes the universe is cyclical…
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Religion, Race/Ethnicity, and Norms of Intergenerational Assistance among Older Adults

CG Ellison, X Xu – Religions, 2015
… Results indicate that African Americans and Hispanics tend to express stronger support for
intergenerational assistance than non-Hispanic Whites. … Keywords: religion; race; African
Americans; Latinos; aging; intergenerational assistance 1. Introduction …
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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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Mexico Stubbornly Resists Accountability

When he campaigned for the presidency of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto used the title of his book, “Mexico, the Great Hope,” to explain the record he hoped to achieve and the nation he hoped to build. More than three years into his presidency, it seems more likely that he will be remembered not as the transformational leader Mexicans thought they had elected, but as a politician who skirted accountability at every turn…
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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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No Walls Here: Lalo Alcaraz Discusses the New Fox Animated Series, Bordertown

No Walls Here: Lalo Alcaraz Discusses the New Fox Animated Series, Bordertown
Many of us know him as the cartoonist-creator of the syndicated daily comic strip, La Cucaracha, where Alcaraz skewers bigotry and intolerance with a heavy dose of Chicano culture and humor. He is also a team member of the Pixar film COCO, consulting on the Día de Los Muertos-themed animated movie scheduled for release in 2017. Alcaraz has won five Southern California Press Awards for Best Editorial Cartoon, produced editorial cartoons for the LA Weekly for almost two decades, and creates nationally syndicated editorial cartoons in English and Spanish…
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All for One? And One for All? Mexican American Group Consciousness and Partnership

JL Urbano Jr – Minority Voting in the United States [2 volumes], 2015 – books.google.com
Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, and within this pan-ethnic group
are Mexican Americans who constitute over 66 percent of the total Latino population.
Because of its current size and future population estimates, experts frequently speculate …
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The Perceptions, Knowledge , Benefits and Barriers of Hispanics Regarding the Dietary Guidelines for Americans

LDA Gamboa – 2015
… 2005). However, the San Antonio Heart Study contradicted this paradox, showing
that Mexican- Americans indeed had a higher risk of cardiovascular and coronary
diseases than did non-Hispanic Whites (Hunt et al., 2003). …
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Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Immigrant Mexicans, and the California Farmworker Movement

LA Flores – 2016 – books.google.com
Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural
empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of
how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades …
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Digging for a Tale: Genomic Analysis Solves Mysteries Surrounding America’s Earliest People

T Tanenbaum
… and her colleagues undertook genetics as well as morphological analyses on historical Mexican
and South American populations, the latter to re-evaluate whether these ancient skulls were closer
in skull morphology to Australo-Melanesians than to modern Native Americans. …
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The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground

After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data…
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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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