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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L Bannai, R Chang, C Garden – 2015
… teachers.”2 2 The MAS program was previously called “Mexican American/Raza Studies.”
Plaintiffs assert that “La Raza” more generally refers to Mexican Americans. See
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Case …
Link to case
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 …
Link to book preview
Mural at a popular New Mexico restaurant
When I travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I marvel at how the Native American, Spanish, and Mexican cultures exist within one state. At least on the surface, there seems to be a great deal of respect for each other’s customs and inclusion of all culture in art and architecture.
The photo below is a good example of the blending and inclusion represented in the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico campus. It shows Pueblo Revival architecture at its finest, with its heavy wood lintels to its striking viga-and-corbel ceilings.
The photo below is another good example from the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park near Albuquerque. Here we see the entrance to the center showing a corrugated culvert that was probably salvaged from a nearby acequia.
Many years before Spanish settlements, ancestral Puebloan peoples had developed an organized manipulation of water resources as early as 800 A.D.
This skill continued to be developed and by 1400 they had managed to create a gravity-fed irrigation system on the major rivers in New Mexico.
The very word acequia is from early Spanish settlements that inherited an amalgam of irrigation systems from the Roman Empire and the Moors. With the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, this amalgam of Spanish and Indian laws and customs was mixed with existing American law and custom.
Beyond New Mexico’s cultural inclusiveness and diversity, there are still several areas that the state has failed at achieving.
New Mexico’s population is 47.7% Hispanic and 38.9% white (not Hispanic or Latino), but only 23.6% of firms are owned by Hispanics, and 5.3% are owned by American Indians—a very poor showing. According to the National Center for Higher Education, “New Mexico’s personal income has fallen from 83% of the U.S.average in 1960 to 74% in 2000.”
Speaker on the Student Quad at the University of New Mexico
The National Center for Higher Education also concluded: “The education system in New Mexico (from high school to college completion) fails to retain Hispanics and Native Americans at nearly the rate of whites and Asians. These racial/ethnic disparities are also evident in the graduation rates of baccalaureate students…”
In summary, New Mexico is an outstanding example of a multicultural state but has some work to be done in addressing the disparities of their majority and minority ethnic groups.
GM University, C Dorington, S Work, SA Bell
… together received less than 6 percent ofall baccalaureate degrees, and 4.3 percent of all graduate
and professional degrees, representing … familial and individual characteristics as they pertain
to the educational achievement of a group 0f300 Mexican American women who …
Link to article
FD Blau – 2015
Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES IMMIGRANTS AND GENDER ROLES:
ASSIMILATION VS. CULTURE Francine D. Blau Working Paper 21756
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21756 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC …
Link to paper
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. …
Link to article
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…
Link to article
MRV Carranza, E Zapata, FI Madero, P Villa, P Orozco…
… Prior to Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the US military focused mainly on just warning
the Mexican military that decisive action from the US military would take place if lives and
property of North Americans living in the country were endangered. …
Link to article
JJ Mendoza – 2015
… There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an
Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that
society only if they dream in English. (Huntington 2004, 256) …
Link to chapter
EDINBURG — In a first for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the entire UT System, a faculty member was recognized as Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Of the more than 300 applications for the award, Stephanie Alvarez, professor of Mexican-American studies at UTRGV, was selected as one of only four recipients of the national award, which she accepted last week in Washington, D.C…
Link to article
A new CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 55 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Hispanics said it was easier for them to achieve the American Dream than their parents. That’s compared to only 35 percent of whites. Blacks and Hispanics interviewed by CNNMoney said they feel they have more opportunity these days in terms of education and jobs…
Link to article
NEW YORK, NY — A job at the investment bank Goldman Sachs is one of the most prized positions in the country. The company prides itself on attracting some of America’s most talented professionals—ambitious, smart and highly motivated. Many people would probably be very surprised to discover that at least one undocumented Mexican immigrant was working shoulder to shoulder with the country’s corporate elite.
Former Goldman Sachs vice president Julissa Arce, 32, wants to change the way Americans think about immigration by sharing her story. And in her upcoming September 2016 memoir, “My (Underground) American Dream,” she aims to describe her long and difficult journey from undocumented to documented, which took her from selling funnel cakes in Texas to Wall Street…
Link to article
(CNN) Debra Aust sees it in videos of recent police shootings.
Alex Sproul reads about it in his Facebook feed.
Sheryl Sims senses it when she walks down the street.
They are three Americans from three different demographic groups living in three different states. And they believe the same thing: Racism is a big problem.
Their voices are just a few in a country of more than 322 million people. But they are far from alone…
Link to article
The Hispanic market is traditionally underserved, but that may change soon. Several firms with the financial services, insurance and retail sectors have discovered that reallocating funds and increasing ad dollar spending on Hispanic media could mean a greater return on their investment.
The national trade organization Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) published the latest addition to its insight series on Nov. 8, “Financial-Insurance Services & Auto Hispanic Media Allocation Trends 2010-14 & Impact on Total Market Revenue Growth Study.” According to findings in the report, which were also sourced via Nielsen, insurers and financial service companies that effectively target the Hispanic market with publicity campaigns see a higher…
Link to article
A Scott – 2015
… An additional role he has taken on during his years at ExxonMobil has been to encourage other
Mexican Americans to establish a scientific career. … Mexican Americans continue to be poorly
represented in STEM subjects at the university level, Florez says. ..
Link to article
More Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico from the U.S. than have migrated here since the end of the Great Recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from both countries. The same data sources also show the overall flow of Mexican immigrants between the two countries is at its smallest since the 1990s, mostly due to a drop in the number of Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S…
Link to article
The capacity of Texas schools to prepare students for college varies significantly by community. Use the Texas Education Scorecard to compare data on key education milestones from Pre-K through college completion.
Scroll over a county to see its education scorecard rating. Click through to see a detailed Education Scorecard with information on how your county can improve…
Link to article
AL Higginbotham – Yale Law & Policy Review, 2015
… of Clarence Thomas has accomplished anything, it has accomplished this: it has made it safe
for the enemies of racial progress, such as Professor Lino A. Graglia of the University of Texas
Law School, to assert openly that “[b]lacks and Mexican- Americans are not …
Link to article
One focus of the Republican debate on the economy last night was immigration. Donald Trump, echoed by several other candidates, again called for increased border security between the U.S. and Mexico.
But when it comes to Latinos and the U.S. economy, absence won’t make the heart grow fonder. A new report from the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) shows that the number of Latino-owned businesses is expanding at a breakneck pace — three times the national average — and that the Latino population is a major force in the country’s economy…
Link to article
While admiring the sunset from the bell tower of Santa Fe’s La Fonda Hotel, it occurs to me that the sunset represents the contrast and diversity that New Mexico enjoys. The sun’s light makes life possible on this earth but also functions as a massive hydrogen bomb. How ironic, life and death all in one.
Living together in the state of New Mexico is a very diverse group of communities: Indian, Spanish, Mexican, Spanish American and Anglo. At the same time, this heterogeneous group lives in a place where the first atom bomb was developed and exploded.
New Mexico’s history is a sequence of encroachments of the area’s communities by waves of newcomers claiming the land as their own; from the early native peoples to the arrival of American fur traders.
New Mexico is the home of Los Alamos National Laboratories, where the first atom bomb was designed and built, and White Sands Proving Ground, where that bomb was exploded. At the same time, Santa Fe is the home of the New Mexico Museums of Natural History and Science that elegantly exhibits the story of our earth, from the Big Bang to the present day.
What a contrast the state presents; the Big Bang, the birth of our universe, and the atomic bomb, as it’s inventor, Robert Oppenheimer, described it as the “destroyer of worlds” that when detonated looked like “the radiance of a thousand suns.”
Walking through the Rio Grande’s gorge, where ancient petroglyphs can be seen, and visiting the communities and museums of New Mexico, my senses are immersed in the state’s natural beauty and invigorated by its Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American cultures. My kudos to New Mexico for investing vast resources in its many fine museum celebrating the state’s rich natural history, scientific, and cultural heritage.
