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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Why Gifted Latinos Are Often Overlooked And Underserved

Three million school children in the U.S. are identified as gifted. That’s roughly the top 10 percent of the nation’s highest achieving students.
But Rene Islas, head of the National Association for Gifted Children, says tens of thousands of gifted English language learners are never identified. We sat down with Islas and asked him why.
He started out by explaining that there are several different measures for identifying gifted children. The most common in schools is recognizing achievement, above grade level work. But that poses a problem for English language learners, or ELLs, he says…
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5 Reasons Brands Should Use Facebook Instant Articles To Engage With U.S. Hispanics

Last month, Facebook announced that on April 12, they will be “opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world.” Yes, this means that brands can now leverage Facebook Instant Articles to engage with consumers.
Facebook created Instant Articles to optimize the experience for users who click from Facebook to a third-party publisher’s website on their mobile devices. For brands, Instant Articles not only optimize page load times, but can be leveraged to create more immersive experiences that are integrated with the all-important Facebook news feed…
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Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers

The Hispanic Division and the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress have launched a collaborative series of recorded interviews, “Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers.” This series is co-sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
“Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers” features emerging and established American poets and prose writers of Hispanic descent who write predominantly in English. In each segment the featured poet or writer participates in a moderated discussion with the chief of the Hispanic Division, as well as reads from his or her work.
This series continues the tradition of the Hispanic Division Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (AHLOT). The AHLOT is an ongoing collection of recorded interviews and readings of contemporary poets and prose writers from the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Hispanics, which has been compiled by this Division since the 1940s…
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5 Latinos Forging New Ground and Breaking Barriers

We’re all familiar with prominent Latinos who have broken barriers to become national and international household names – from Rita Moreno and Gloria Estefan to JLo and Pitbull. Or think Sonia Sotomayor or Pulitzer prize-winner Junot Díaz.
Here’s a small list of Latinos who are breaking barriers in their professions and leaving their mark as they shake things up. They range from ranging from multi-millionaire techies to VJs and Vine stars. They’re in different stages of their trajectories, and they’re all fascinating…
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Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program Recruits Second Cohort For Online Education and Empowerment

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/– The Latino Business Action Network (LBAN) has opened applications for the second cohort of its Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program (SLELP). SLELP is an investment in helping Latino entrepreneurs to scale — i.e., to grow — their businesses through an immersive six-week program that provides owners the valuable education, enhanced networks, personal mentorship and better understanding of capital resources necessary to grow their businesses, create jobs, and build a stronger economy.
“Latinos are quickly becoming the new face of entrepreneurship in the USA,” said Remy Arteaga, the Executive Director of LBAN. “Several studies, including one by the Kauffman Foundation, support the fact that Latinos are creating more new businesses than any other group in America. We want to empower these entrepreneurs to grow large businesses.”…
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For Board of Education member Herman G. Hernandez, it’s all about timing

CHRIS SMITH
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | April 10, 2016, 3:03PM
Herman G. Hernandez speaks often to youngsters and teens, many of them Latino. He tells a bit about the oscillating arc of his own life and encourages the students to aim high, get involved, study hard and fail, fail, fail.
The sturdy, gregarious Guerneville native and nascent community leader might well recount how his first attempt at college crashed and burned. His parents, Herman J. and Guillermina Hernandez, were determined that, unlike themselves, both their son and their daughter, Daniela, would reap the benefits of advanced education…
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First Latino Newbery Medal Award winner set to visit Lee County Library

TUPELO – As the first Latino to win the prestigious Newbery Medal, Matt de la Peña writes stories that take place on the “other side of the tracks” by exploring identity and living as a young biracial boy.
De la Peña, author of the 2016 Newbery Medal award winner “The Last Stop on Market Street,” will visit the Lee County Library on April 11 to open up a conversation at the Helen Foster Lecture Series…
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Latino Internet Sensations Shine at Hispanicize

MIAMI, Florida — At the young age of 19, Venezuelan-born Internet sensation Lele Pons has captured a huge audience. Her funny skits appear on Vine where she has over 10 million followers and her videos generate 7.7 billion loops. The bicultural, bilingual Latina was the first recipient of the Latinovator awards at Hispanicize 2016, which kicked off its 7th annual event on Monday in Miami.
The 5-day event is unique because it brings together Latino trendsetters from a vast amount of fields including journalism, marketing, tech entrepreneurship, music, and film…
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Higher Education News from Northern Illinois: NIU to host ILACHE annual conference

The event is the first to take place outside Chicago – and, of course, it will mark the first time that NIU has hosted the conference.
Participants will discuss the reality of Latinos in higher education and reflect on the challenges that Latinos have overcome to open the path to new opportunities for future generations…
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The Elusive Nature of the Hispanic Category

By 2060, 115 percent more Americans will be of Hispanic origin than in 2015. Consequently, pundits identify “the Hispanic vote” as the next frontier for ensuring political success. Political elites have thus scrambled to investigate, quantify, and draw conclusions about this group in any way possible. They have asked Hispanic respondents about their political beliefs on a range of issues — principally, immigration­ — in an effort to define the policy matters that are most salient to Latinxs in the United States. This analysis propagates throughout campaign teams, interest groups, academia, and journalism, heavily influencing judgments about the allegiances of the Hispanic community. But, a central and largely unacknowledged point about mainstream political discourses regarding Hispanics are the inherent flaws in defining the Hispanic category itself. Because of distinct colonial histories between Latin America and the United States and between different nations within Latin America, the American mainstream cannot and should not…
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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…
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Raised in Two Cultures, But Uncomfortable in Both

EL PASO, Texas — “Can I have the rosa-pink sticker instead?” I would ask Miss Pat, my teacher at St. Mark’s when I was three years old. “I don’t like the amarillo-yellow one,” I would say.
Growing up as a three year old, I distinctively remember my obsession with “rosa-pink.” I wanted everything —from my Barbie’s dress to the color of my room— to be “rosa-pink.” My aunts and uncles knew me as “rosa-pink” because everything I owned was “rosa-pink.”
Strangely enough, I never really thought of the term “rosa-pink” to be an odd way to refer to the color pink. It was just the way my mother taught me how to say pink in both Spanish and English…
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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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Carlos R. Moreno, is the current Ambassador of the United States of America to Belize

Ambassador Carlos R. Moreno a Mexican American jurist, arrived June 21, 2014 in Belize and presented his credentials to Governor General Sir Colville Young on June 24, 2014. Previously, Ambassador Moreno had a long and distinguished legal career.
Ambassador Moreno served as an Associate Justice on the California Supreme Court from 2001 to 2011. From 1998 to 2001, Ambassador Moreno served as a United States District Judge in the Central District of California…
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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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