OAK CLIFF ADVOCATE VOL. 18 NO. 9
4 Framing Oak Cliff
Encina
6 Oak Cliff Run Crew 8 Justin “GuitarSlayer” Lyons
The exotic animal whisperer
Uncovering Oak Cliff’s Freedman’s Town 20 Dulzorada Press
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40 years of Oak Cliff’s spirit is captured through Richard Doherty’s lens
Story by JILLIAN NACHTIGAL
by LAUREN ALLEN
At age 3 in 1954, with his father’s costly German camera, Richard Doherty took his first photograph.
In his house growing up, Doherty’s father had a darkroom built into the house where he taught him how to process film and make prints. Doherty’s father was infected with the hobby of photography, and soon he’d catch the bug as well.
“It’s my obsession,” Doherty says. “Art is an addiction, and it’s fatal. And I’ve got it.”
As a doctor, his father did not have time to continue the hobby, but Doherty picked up right where he left off. In high school, he bought himself a good camera to take photographs but didn’t take it too seriously.
Doherty got his undergraduate degree in psychology and did not take a photography course until his graduate studies.
Doherty moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas for school where he befriended Michael Peven, who went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Peven was the first MFA photographic artist to move to the state and he established a photo program. While Doherty didn’t take any of Peven’s classes, the two became close and developed a mentorship relationship.
Doherty was accepted to the MFA graduate program at the SAIC where he studied and taught with Ken Josephson and Joyce Neimanas who both helped him develop his aesthetic and teaching sensibilities.
In 1980, he graduated from SAIC and was hired as a photography professor at Louisiana State University a year later. In 1982, he
accepted a professorship at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth and retired as emeritus professor in 2016.
Doherty began photographing our neighborhood upon moving here in 1983. He captured the world around him whether that was his kids, neighbors or total strangers.
“I started photographing almost immediately because it’s a fascinating neighborhood,” Doherty says. “The photographs are just kind of a survey of that. I liked the neighborhoods, I liked the yards. I liked the streets, the Jefferson Boulevard strip, I liked the detritus and evidence that people live as they want to live their lives.”
Doherty has a classic style with a focus on street photography, and says he would “rather sell washing machines than do commercial photography.”
“I don’t fiddle around with any kind of techniques, goofy filters and all that stuff,” Doherty says. “I see something, it fascinates me and I photograph it. It puts it into my context and my point of view.”
About three years ago, Doherty was approached by the University of North Texas Press, and the head of collections wanted to display his work.
Doherty offered to donate his work, but after the idea for a book was brought up, he got started on a proposal. The book would be a visual diary of his beloved Dallas neighborhood titled Framing Oak Cliff.
“This is a slice of life. This is my reality,” he says. “This is my version of life in this beautiful part of the city.”
He hopes to convey the beauty and uniqueness of the area.
“We’re divided from the rest of Dallas by the Trinity River, and because of that, the developers did not come around,” Doherty says. ”It was an ethnically and racially mixed, economically mixed, and a beautiful kind of melting pot of a city. And that’s what I like. I like a city that has a pulse and soul and an interesting landscape.”
Accompanying the black-and-white photographs is a concise history of Oak Cliff by bestselling author Bill Minutaglio, as well as essays by curators John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum and Christopher Blay of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. These essays provide context for the photographs and anchor them in the landscape of contemporary photography.
“I feel like it really works, and I think if those essays weren’t there, the photographs wouldn’t be as effective,” Doherty says. “If people read the essays, and look at the work, they’ll really understand what’s going on.”
The placing of photographs throughout the book is intentional, and all work together to tell the story of the neighborhood.
“If you look through a carefully done book of any kind, you should be able to read one photograph and that should tell you something about the next photograph,” Doherty says. “There should be a train of thought throughout the book. It’s not just a random dump of images. They’re carefully arranged.”
While Doherty’s work has been displayed across the nation and he has had collections at several locations including the Amon Carter Museum,
The Oak Cliff Run Crew is changing the long-distance running game
Story by ALYSSA FIELDS
An army of five hundred stampedes up the back of the Jefferson Boulevard bridge, shadowed by the beaming setting sun. The Oak Cliff Run Crew (OCRC) is on their regularly scheduled Thursday night run.
Communal running is growing exponentially, the OCRC witnessed a 400% growth in participation in just the last few months, according to one of the founders, Patrick Kleineberg.
“There’s a running boom right now,” Kleineberg says. “We’re definitely benefiting from that at this time.”
Participation in 2023 averaged at 78 runners each Thursday. He was excited when 100 runners showed up for the first time in January. Now, he and his co-founders manage a group five times that size.
The crew started as four friends who met in a cafe, and it remained a quartet, give or take the random friend-of-a-friend, for the first year. “Four of us to more of us,” as their mantra goes.
Growth, though initially slow, was the goal from the get-go. The founding four, all with extensive backgrounds in long-distance running, knew they needed their crew to be as accessible and inclusive as possible.
“When people come and they don’t have much of a running background, they actually feel like they are welcome and not judged,” Kleineberg says. “There’s so many people that can be intimidated by showing up to a running group.”
Crew is an important verbal distinction, the slight but unique detail certifies OCRC’s intention and solidifies them as the only running organization of the like in Dallas.
“I would like it to be about not only the community, but having an emphasis on how we do things to create that culture,” Kleineberg says. “What is really the depth of that culture other than just saying, show up and come run? Let’s build something that not only we can be proud of.”
Diversity is an integral component of the run crew.
“Everyone’s welcome here, all faces, all races,” repeats Kleineberg, it’s another of the crew’s mantras. “When you get to our runs, you see that and you feel that.”
The crew, centered in the minority-majority neighborhood, aims to offer running opportunities to the often excluded community. Kleineberg’s greatest goal is getting Oak Cliff on the Dallas Marathon route.
The race notably excludes the largest neighborhood in Dallas proper, at 71 square miles.
“We try to take that as a little nudge to us,” Kleineberg says. “They say they put the most beautiful parts of Dallas on the route for the marathon. They don’t come to Oak Cliff at all.”
The Dallas Marathon is a big deal for the OCRC. The crew is showing up strong, preparations have already begun for the December race. Kleineberg hopes well-designed matching shirts, mass community presence and prominent racers will draw attention to their home.
The OCRC has some of the top racers in Dallas. One member, Kara Farroni, qualified for the Boston Marathon in her first ever marathon in December of 2023.
Farroni joined the OCRC, with limited experience in long-distance running, a year and a half before the qualifier.
“Throughout the race there were so many cheering sections,” Farroni says. “We all met at the finish line and immediately people were congratulating me. Even since then everyone has been celebrating and I feel so much love. I’ve never gotten this much attention in my life.”
The crew has blossomed dozens of runners from the couch, a testament to the power of their inclusive culture. They encourage anxious newbies to join the army for a Thursday run.
Kleineberg admits that city sanctions were initially a concern.
The sizable group paces through busy roads two hours past rush-hour. They find the infrastructure supports them, and the city has yet to step in.
The trails of Uptown and White Rock Lake don’t appeal to the group, who are happy to stay exactly where they started.
“We love Oak Cliff, and we have brands and vendors that ask us to do things outside of Oak Cliff,” he says. “We’re reluctant to do that because we want to bring everything back to this community.”
As for the mass boom in running, the recent influx is due in part to a social media trend that pushes the social exercise as an alternative to dating apps. While the run crew welcomes newcomers and appreciates the attention, the OCRC insists they are not your dating app.
“We can’t forget that the run comes first,” Kleineberg says. “If you’re coming for this intention of, ‘I’m going to go here and be on the lookout for who can I hook up’ that’s not what we want our culture to be, and that’s not what we allow it to be.”
If the numbers dip, and the trend dies, Kleineberg says the OCRC will still be running.
“You’re going to hear us coming because we’re here and we’re not going anywhere,” he says. “This is our city, and we want to be the best running crew in the city.”
The Oak Cliff Run Crew meets every Thursday at 7 p.m. at 1406 N Zang Blvd. Their routes range from 2.3 to 3 miles and loop down Jefferson. Longer runs are held on Sunday mornings for the more experienced. All runners are welcome.
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“GuitarSlayer”
JAZZ, POP PUNK, K-POP, GOSPEL, BLUES, R&B, HIP-HOP. IF YOU CAN NAME IT, JUSTIN LYONS HAS PLAYED IT.
That’s why he’s the GuitarSlayer.
His journey started around age 6. His foundation in music came from his upbringing in Oak Cliff in the church and an influence from his family members who also did music.
Around age 10, Lyons had his first studio session with a group that paid him to play, and by 13, he was excelling quickly.
“By age 15, I was super advanced,” Lyons says. “My oldest brother was the one who really made me not afraid of being out in front of an audience and being out in front of people. He would take me everywhere with him and just let me play for people.”
He went on a European tour at age 17, and upon returning, started a band called Connect Four.
“We rocked the city for four or five years straight, and it was great,” Lyons says. “But I didn’t see music being a mainstream income for me.”
On top of his music, Lyons worked a 9-5 job at an immigration office and also worked as a barber. Having so much on his plate, Lyons was burned out and stepped away from music for about a year.
“I just wanted to realign with my strategy and with my faith,” Lyons says. “And when I decided to go back, I told myself, ‘This time, you gotta go about it the right way. No drinking this time, no going crazy. You have to take this serious.’ Because I know my gift was given to me from God.”
Lyons ended up getting laid off from his job, but got a call a couple weeks later to do a show with Jesse Boykins. He had his first show back from his break in 2010 and hasn’t stopped touring since.
In 2012, he got the call that changed his life and his career. He got invited to be the guitarist for K-pop artists, which started his trajectory in a different way.
He spent 10 years in Korea with “every big K-pop artist you could name.” In the span of that 10 years, he got a call to play with Lil Wayne. He was on tour with Blackpink at the time, but was able to make it work.
“I learned a lot about myself during that time,” Lyons says. “And more importantly, my mental health. Being away from home for 10 years, I was by myself, nobody in my family has gone to this extent with music, so I didn’t have anyone to call or relate to.”
The pandemic rolled around in 2020, and Lyons found himself working at Amazon while continuing to work on records and having a short stint of a YouTube show.
“It was mentally stimulating in a way because we had to wear a mask,” Lyons says of his job at Amazon. “No one knew who I was, you know? It was so humbling. To just meet people and talk to people. There were so many people that I came across and it was humbling to just hear their stories and talk to them.”
Lyons worked at Amazon for six months — “six months too long” — before returning to the music scene full-time. He went back to Korea to work with Blackpink again for a short time. And upon returning home, he decided to use his gift to help others.
“I love producing music and I love when I’m walking down Deep Ellum and I see artists playing on the street,” Lyons says. “Me and my production partner actually used to do this all the time. We’ll go to them and say, ‘Hey, what do you want to do with your skill?’ And we’d say, ‘Well let us produce your project.’ And we started exercising our production skills like that, because I really want to change people’s lives. I know what it’s like to be a struggling musician.”
He then was offered to play for Machine Gun Kelly and has been doing so for the last three years.
“It’s been a whirlwind of greatness,” Lyons says. “I just took it on. They sent me 33 songs, and I had to learn them in two days. And I can’t even tell you the brain power I had to use for that. It was a lot.”
Fast forward to 2024, Lyons got the call from the Dallas Mavericks, who wanted him to perform the national anthem. Lyons gladly accepted.
They asked him to return, right on the precipice of the NBA Finals.
“I did it again, and that time it was even better,” Lyons says. “I was looking at it from a performance perspective and a stylistic perspective as well. I wanted to do something different. I feel like the National Anthem is such an honorable moment for a lot of people. I’m one of those people who thinks it needs to be considered a performance, not just, let’s hurry up and get this over with and get to the game.”
Then, the team asked Lyons to add his live guitar work to the classic intro music “Eminence Front.”
The Who’s anthem has been a staple before the Mavericks’ starting lineup is announced before tipoff since the last season at Reunion Arena (2000-01). The tune needed some updating, and Lyons was able to provide the perfect modern-age touch to the 42-year-old song.
“It was fun to have them receive it the way they did, and to have Mark Cuban’s approval was wild,” Lyons says.
Lyons has plenty of plans for the future, including tapping into the country music scene and starting his own podcast.
“It’s mind blowing to be doing this at this scale,” Lyons says. “Knowing where I came from in Oak Cliff — before getting the call to go to Korea, I was afraid of flying. I told my boys I would rather ride a bike than fly.”
Most importantly, Lyons plans to continue to use his gift for good.
“I lost a friend to suicide a couple of years back, and that is what really just had me thinking about how I approach what I do in a different way,” Lyons says. “It has nothing to do with guitar whatsoever. My guitar just gets me in the room. My guitar just gets me on the stage.”
Encina’s peach and burrata salad is served with candied pecans, bitter lettuce, kale, herbs and an apple cider vinaigrette.
Sunday brunch and blue corn pancakes put Encina on the map
Story by JILLIAN NACHTIGAL
Photography by KATHY TRAN
Opening a new restaurant during a global pandemic is no easy feat, but Encina survived.
Matt Balke, alongside his business partner Corey McCombs, took over Oak Cliff restaurant space Bolsa in February 2020. During the process of preparing to open their new concept, Encina, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the team had to put things on pause.
“At the time, we didn’t know. We thought oh, this will only last three, four, five weeks,” Balke says. “Who knew it would disrupt the service industry for so long?”
Balke held out, and decided to open in October 2020 at 25% capacity.
“Eventually it was like, if you don’t open, you’re going to run out of money,” Balke says. “Talk about struggle — having to be a new restaurant that doesn’t have a to-go program in a neighborhood where some people know me, some people don’t. It was very rough going for the first couple of months.”
As the saying goes, when it rains it pours. And when the “ice-pocalypse” hit the following February, Balke was about ready to call it quits.
“That happened during Valentine’s Day, and we lost about 700 reservations that weekend,” Balke says. “We really decided
that we wanted to close that Sunday, Valentine’s Day, as we were driving home. We had 700 people’s worth of food in the walk-in and no money coming in. But the next weekend, the ice melted. Everyone was just tired of being inside and we decided to keep going and building and growing.”
Last month, Encina set a sales record.
A main contributor to Encina’s success over the last few years is its blue corn pancakes. These sweet brunch treats have recently received recognition as part of “H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best” competition, in which the Texas grocery giant holds a competition for the best and most creative Texas-made goods. Winners are awarded sizable cash prizes and spots on H-E-B shelves.
Out of 450 entries, Encina’s blue corn pancake mix was awarded the third place prize of $10,000.
“It was really random,” Balke says of the origin of the pancakes. “We took my grandmother’s recipe for her cornbread when we opened and we were doing this blue cornmeal cornbread with whipped feta and sorghum butter, and decided this has potential for a pancake.”
The team took 11 shots at the pancakes, trying out flavors and toppings such as peanut butter chips, chocolate chips, white chocolate, blueberries, bananas, apricots and more. Balke’s favorite sweet treat is butterscotch, and adding that to the mix was an “aha” moment.
“On the 11th try, we added the butterscotch and salted caramel and a goat’s milk caramel that we make,” Balke says. “We all sat around, ate the pancakes, and were like ‘holy shit, this is it.’”
From there, word of mouth spread and the pancakes took off. In November of last year, in an effort to raise a little extra money around the holidays, Encina decided to package the mix. A perfect gift for stocking stuffers, teachers, parents, and anybody, really, they sold over 13,000 in a month.
Aside from these famous pancakes, Encina offers a rotating seasonal menu with a variety of classic items.
Duck-leg confit with melon salad, jalapenos, goat yogurt and sumac, and the Berkshire pork chop, an enormous portion served with poblano-cheddar grits, bacon and braised collard greens highlight the menu.
“We like this place to be where you can come in and spend 10 bucks, or 500 bucks,” Balke says. “You can come in in flip flops and athletic shorts or a tuxedo and you can still have a time where you’re comfortable, where you feel dressed to the nines, or dressed down for the couch.”
Balke strives to make Encina feel like home. The restaurant has had marriage proposals, held weddings and baby showers, and has become a comfortable neighborhood spot.
“It feels great, and there’s still battles to overcome, but between breaking a sales record and the H-E-B pancake mix, it’s awesome,” Balke says. “It’s still the restaurant business, you’re still hanging on by a thread every single day. But maybe our thread just got a little wider.”
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Story by JILLIAN NACHTIGAL |
CLIFF IN 2021, you may have seen Michael Roberts walking his camel around the neighborhood.
Since going viral for walking his camel Tazah, who has since passed, Roberts has become an exotic animal trainer who travels around the country for his work.
Back in 2021, sightings of Roberts and his camel were caught on camera and posted to social media where they gained traction and received thousands of impressions. One particular photo shows Tazah and Roberts standing at a car wash, with a caption that reads, “Nothing to see here. Just a pet camel at a car wash in Dallas. Oak Cliff, Texas.”
But how on earth did somebody in Dallas end up with a pet camel?
Roberts met a good friend who became his mentor and introduced him to camels for the first time in 2015. In the beginning, he wasn’t quite sold.
“I was terrified at first,” Roberts says. “But after being around them for a few years, I was confident enough to buy my own camel.”
As crazy as it may sound, Roberts says the process of getting a camel is quite easy, as long as you have connections and know the right people.
Tazah was sick when Roberts first bought him, but after a couple of years, he was able to show him off to the world.
“I used to take him everywhere,” Roberts says. “I would just drive around with him and take him to parks and nightclubs. And everyone got a kick out of it. That’s where the enticement kept going and going and going, because I just see the looks on people’s faces when I bring him out. It was just the joy that it was bringing to
Yes, it’s legal to own camels in Texas. Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) has some requirements for Camelidae, which includes camels, llamas, vicuñas, and their domestic relatives. The TAHC may require testing for brucellosis or tuberculosis if there’s a risk of exposure or infection. Camels also need to have official identification if they require an official test.
people that made me keep bringing him out.”
Roberts has since gotten another camel, TJ, who is still young. He hopes to bring him out and about like he did with Tazah in a year or so.
While he is Dallas-based, Roberts spends a lot of time in Tulsa where his family is from as he has a hard time being back in the city where he lost Tazah, as well as his dog, in a trailer accident. After the accident, a GoFundMe was created which raised over $3,800.
“It was hard for me to come back, because I lost two animals in that accident. Mike Mike, my german shepherd, was [Tazah’s] best friend,” Roberts says. “I’ve kind of taken a step back so I could come back without them.”
Over the last couple of years, Roberts has been on the go traveling the U.S. and Mexico as an exotic animal trainer.
Roberts had been coached through training Tazah, and it turned out he was a natural. After Tazah passed, Roberts’ mentor suggested he start training animals for a living due to his natural gift.
“My first job was in Las Vegas, and I haven’t looked back since,” Roberts says. “It’s mostly camels that I train, but I actually know how to train giraffes, and I’ve had my hands on a couple of zebras, cattle, llamas and alpacas. I’m trying to widen my species.”
In addition to his camel, Roberts also owns a lemur and a kangaroo. His lemur hangs out with him on the regular, and you may have to do a double take if you see them in public as King Julian sits so naturally on Roberts’ shoulder.
“My lemur came from a friend slash client, and I just fell in love with him,” Roberts says.
The kangaroo does not make public appearances quite as often, but does serve as the mascot for a bounce house company in Oklahoma where he will appear at parties.
It’s been a wild ride for Roberts, but he has no plan of stopping. He says he has always been an animal lover, but didn’t imagine it would lead him to where he is today.
“I really just loved animals growing up, and I didn’t know the difference in exotics, really, as a kid I didn’t even know you could have them,” Roberts says. ”There was a few times my mom sent me out to cut the grass and I would sneak a couple of turtles into my room. And I’d catch lizards; I had iguanas. So there’s always been something there. I just hope to keep growing and doing what I’m doing. “
An SMU student is documenting the hidden history of Oak Cliff Freedmen’s Town
Story by JILLIAN NACHTIGAL
Photography by AMANI SODIQ
Two miles south of downtown Dallas and east of I-35, the Oak Cliff Freedman’s Town, believed to be established in 1888, provided a safe haven for African Americans when Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black violence made it unsafe to live in other parts of the city. The Tenth Street Historic District was the epicenter and what remains of the freedman’s town.
The Tenth Street Historic District is still the largest, most intact freedmen’s town in the nation, with both local and national historic designations. Despite these recognitions, The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the 69-acre district as one of America’s most endangered places three times, most recently in 2019.
In 2021, after looking into her history, Tameshia Rudd-Ridge went to look for one of her family member’s childhood homes on Tenth Street. After circling around, she realized the highway is where her home would have been.
“Luckily, I have a very deep sense of who I am because of family history, what I studied, and how I was raised,” she says. “But I just thought about how other people might have returned to that and felt that their history is lost.”
Rudd-Ridge later went on a Freedmen’s Town bus tour.
“They were sharing some of the struggles with Tenth Street, and I was the youngest person on that bus,” Rudd-Ridge says. “And they were like, ‘What are you gonna do about this?’”
Rudd-Ridge and Jourdan Brunson work together at Kinkofa, a tech company that provides resources for Black families to document, share and preserve their stories. Southern Methodist University researcher Katie Cross is a doctoral archeaolgy student specializing in geographic information systems.
They’ve teamed up to map out and document the Freedmen’s Town’s hidden history.
“We thought about ways that the story could be told more compellingly,” Rudd-Ridge says. “We knew in the beginning that a lot of the narrative that’s told about the community is really through a lens of loss, and also partially told through the story of a former enslaver
giving people land and I kind of was like, I don’t think that’s true ... So I was like, let’s investigate the foundational story and see if it’s true, and if it’s wrong, we tell the new story that we know.”
The team thought about how much of Black history is passed on through oral tradition and not through records.
“We knew that one thing that would be beneficial would be the ability to do a story map,” Rudd-Ridge says. “So Katie has the GIS systems part of it. We have the oral history. Katie is helping us put those stories on the map, literally.”
The team interviews community members to map out their memories. Schools, churches, parks, community centers, plenty of family homes and businesses dot the area on their maps.
“The city directories will call one thing one name, but the residents knew it by another name, and the mapping brings in all these different things,” Cross says. “We’re taking the historical maps and aerial images and putting them in the GIS and wiring them on top of each other to look at the landscape through time and how it changed. We’re partly looking at how vibrant the com munity was, partly looking at how much landscape changed and how people have persisted through time.”
The project has a sense of urgency to it, particularly in record ing all the stories of the elders. Their long-term goal is to have somewhere permanent for the project to live such as a museum.
“There’s definitely mixed emotions around doing the work, because I think that in many ways, it’s rewarding, it’s definitely needed, and it’s impactful,” Brunson says. “But obviously, these communities like Tenth Street shouldn’t have had to face the history and disinvestment, and all these awful things that have happened.”
As a student, Cross says this is the type of work that truly matters to her.
“Using skills to support efforts like this, that will make everyone hopefully feel a sense of belonging in our city, it feels really good,” Cross says. “This is a step in the right direction in making Tenth Street our story as a city. This is a very important place in our city.” Helping
Dulzorada Press brings iconic Spanish literature to English readers
Story by SIMON PRUITT | Photography by JENNI CHOLULA
“This is one of the quintessential Peruvian novels from the 20th century,” says Jose Garay Boszeta about Martín Adán’s 1928 book, The Cardboard House . “The interesting thing about the book is that he starts subverting the language. It’s a very conscious attempt to go against the structure of Spanish, but also against tradition.”
Adán was a poet who wrote the book when he was just 20-yearsold. It’s hailed for its avant-garde storytelling, and for its visceral exploration of Barranco, an artistic haven located in Lima, Peru. Adán was Peruvian himself, and structured the book around an anthology of scenes based on his own experience as an artist in the country.
Boszeta was from a nearby area in Lima. He studied philosophy at San Marcos National University, one of Peru’s most prestigious institutions, before moving to the states at 22.
“I started having deep conversations with my dad when I was 11,” Boszeta says. “I was very inquisitive. When I discovered -isms, I wanted to know what all those things were. So I started asking my dad, ‘What’s anarchism? What’s Marxism?’”
His father was an economist, his mother a school teacher. When they noticed Boszeta’s interest in intellectual topics, they purchased him a Spanish Encyclopedia Britannica and sent him to local libraries.
“I was obsessively reading the encyclopedia at a young age,” he says. “Then I started reading novels because of conversations with my dad.”
Boszeta first read The Cardboard House when he was 16.
“I was blown away by it,” he says. “It’s one of the books that I always had. When I moved here, I brought five books and that was one of them.”
In 2012, publishing company New Directions released an English translation version of The Cardboard House , which Boszeta purchased and re-read.
“I was dissatisfied with the choices of the translator,” he says. “I felt that it flattened the language and missed a lot of language cues and historical facts. As I was reading, I was thinking, this should’ve happened like this, this should’ve been like that. I thought that I could do better, not only because I’ve read it so much but because it’s directly from the place I’m from.”
One error stood out to Boszeta.
“The original makes reference to a Peruvian President named Ramón Castilla, who abolished slavery in Peru much like Lincoln,” Boszeta says. “But the translator thinks it’s Castile, the city in Spain. It’s an honest mistake, but changes the meaning completely. It’s errors
that come from not enough familiarization with the context from where the book comes from.”
With Boszeta holding The Cardboard House in such high regard, the mistakes were a tragedy, but one that he could fix. The solution? Publish his own translation of the book, informed by his upbringing in Peru. Adán had no familial heirs, meaning that his work went into the public domain following his death in 1985.
Boszeta spent his days translating the book in 2018, spending his nights bartending at The Wild Detectives. By late 2019, he was ready to self-publish his version. He asked the bookstore bar’s management about hosting an event to sell copies of the book, and they were all for it.
“They were so excited for me,” Boszeta recalls. “They didn’t take any cut from the book, and it was very successful. I published it with no logo or anything, just 250 copies. They sold like hotcakes.”
Boszeta suddenly realized the potential in front of him. There were countless Spanish books that had never been translated properly, and countless more that had never been translated at all. He needed a brand.
Dulzorada Press was born in 2020, its name described as a polysemic neologism; a word composed from bits of multiple words all with different meanings. It combines the Spanish words dulzor (sweetness), luz (light), dorada (golden) and rada (harbor) into a singular word. Dulzorada was first coined by Peruvian poet César Vallejo in 1922.
Since its inception, Dulzorada has published 11 translated books, with three from Boszeta and the rest from Spanish freelance translators.
“I never really thought of being a translator or being a publisher,” Boszeta says. “I wanted to be a writer.”
But once immersed, Boszeta realized how much he could do with the medium.
“There’s so many possibilities,” he says. “There are many styles. No translation supersedes another.”
The latest Dulzorada release is Paciencia Perdida , a fiction anthology featuring short stories from some of the most acclaimed modern Peruvian authors.
“Sometimes I feel like a complete fraud,” Boszeta says. “I don’t think I will ever finish learning English, but I don’t think I ever finished learning Spanish. The depth to language is endless.”
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The Gateway Charter Academy announces that it will operate the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) under the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program for the 2024-2025 school year. Schools qualifying to operate CEP serve breakfast and lunch to all children at no charge and eliminate the collection of meal applications for free, reduced-price, and paid student meals. This approach reduces burdens for both families and school administrators and helps ensure that students receive nutritious meals.
For additional information
Gateway Charter Academy Child Nutrition Department 1015 E Wheatland Rd. Dallas, Tx 75124 gatewaycharter.org
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We worked with Bart during one of the hottest housing markets in recent history. Bart stuck with us through several offer cycles, and each new house he found was better than the last. His background in architecture and construction is a huge plus. He always has a flashlight in the car and is ready to crawl down below a house. You won’t be disappointed with his skills and work ethic.
Thanks Bart for everything! -Maggie M.
BART THRASHER Realtor® bartthrasher@dpmre.com 469.583.4819
