La Voz de Esperanza - June 2012

a publication of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

June 2012 | Vol. 25 Issue 5

San Antonio, Tejas

inside this issue:

Spinning San Antonio: Latina/o Resistance to Cultural Erasure in the Heart of San Antonio y mรกs . . .

La Voz de Esperanza June 2012

vol. 25 issue 5 © 2012 Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

Editor

Gloria A. Ramírez

Editorial Assistance Elva Pérez Treviño

Design

Monica V. Velásquez

Contributors Timothy Giddens, Roberta Hurtado, Karen Littleton, Laurie Posner, Elva Pérez Treviño, Catalina Frazier Soria, JoAnn Wypijewski

La Voz Mail Collective Bat, Ernesto Bernal, Marisela Candelaria, Fernando Centeno, Sara DeTurk, Susana Hayward, Gloria Hernández, Davina Kaiser, Elizabeth D. Leija, Ray McDonald, Maria Medellin, Sara Melchor, Angie Merla, Amanda Sih, Carmen Tafolla, Elva Pérez Treviño, William Wise y MujerArtes

Esperanza Director Graciela I. Sánchez

Esperanza Staff

Imelda Arismendez, Verónica Castillo, Monica V. Velásquez

Conjunto de Nepantleras

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

-Esperanza Board of Directors-

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Brenda Davis, Araceli Herrera, Rachel Jennings, Amy Kastely, Kamala Platt, Ana Ramírez, Gloria A. Ramírez, Rudy Rosales, Nadine Saliba, Graciela Sánchez • We advocate for a wide variety of social, economic & environmental justice issues.

• Opinions expressed in La Voz are not necessarily those of the Esperanza Center.

La Voz de Esperanza

is a publication of The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center 922 San Pedro, San Antonio, TX 78212 (on the corner of Evergreen Street)

210.228.0201 • fax 210.228.0000 www.esperanzacenter.org Inquiries/Articles can be sent to:

lavoz@esperanzacenter.org Articles due by the 8th of each month Policy Statements

* We ask that articles be visionary, progressive, instructive & thoughtful. Submissions must be literate & critical; not sexist, racist, homophobic, violent, or oppressive & may be edited for length. * All letters in response to Esperanza activities or articles in La Voz will be considered for publication. Letters with intent to slander individuals or groups will not be published.

The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center is funded in part by the TCA, AKR Fdn, Astraea Lesbian Fdn for Justice, the NEA, theFund, The Kerry Lobel & Marta Drury Fund of Horizon’s Fdn, Coyote Phoenix, Movement Strategy Center Fund, Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Foundation y nuestra buena gente.

Elva’s story:

Regreso al

Westside

Editor’s note: The May issue of La Voz brought 25 people together, (see names at left) to fold. Platicas crisscrossed the tables in Spanish, English and TexMex as we worked. Carmen Tafolla featured in the May Voz issue and her husband, Ernesto Bernal, were among the group.

We discovered that some of us were San Antonianos that had traversed the U.S. returning to San Antonio. Others, like myself, moved to San Anto for the richness of its historic cultural and linguistic heritage. Still others had never left SA or had immigrated directly from Mexico.

Several had lived in Boston for a time.

Among the group was Elva Pérez Treviño who grew up as a young lesbiana in the Westside and had felt compelled to leave.

She had recently returned to San Antonio.

I shared with her the significance of the LGBTQ community in Esperanza’s 25 year history but noted that we needed the stories of the Chicana/o queer community before Esperanza. She agreed to write a short piece for the May issue. In June, the Esperanza Center wll pay tribute to the LGBTQ community of SA with a special art exhibit, ¡Queers, presente! 25 años~25 artists. In the meantime, read on...

On my recent return to San Antonio I discovered ESPERANZA. Through them I am rediscovering my own Westside San Anto. The work ESPERANZA initiates in the Westside barrio preserves buildings, records oral histories and documents, through artistic and building preservation projects, – the urban Chicano culture that was developed over hundreds of years and has culminated in the modern music, art, and architecture that is, the Westside. Taking a retrospective look at the San Antonio I left, and the San Antonio to which I return, I can say that I and my cohorts left because nobody wanted us, nobody claimed us.

My generations of queer artists left San Antonio in the early to mid-80’s because we wanted to be more than jotas, mal-floras, or jotos y maricones. We left the local political scene, while the new vanguard llamada ESPERANZA was coming of age. We were educated, sophisticated and so out of place. We were QUEERS. We didn’t fit within the white gay community because we were a different experience for them. We didn’t want to be their mamacitas or papacitos, and we hated being patronized. We identified with the young drag queers down at Travis Park, the primo meat market of the late 70’s-early 80’s, or we identified with the “bull dyke”, but we didn’t want to be—we wanted more.

We didn’t fit within the Barrios because we were the family shame that got thrown out into the street. Within the Chicano movement we were a difficult and complex question that needed to take a backseat to more urgent needs. And within the general population, we existed as a group outside the offers of quick sex as educated, creative, gay people loved by families who did not speak of our homosexuality. We felt unwanted, so we claimed ourselves away from here. Those were the times when we, the Chicano youth, claimed our political identity: we were tired and angry about being treated like foreigners in our own land. We did not have the means to help the communities from which we sprang. ESPERANZA would come in a little while, but we would be gone.

While I and my fellow artist friends sought to create our identities, as artists and as sexual beings, there came in 1987 kindred souls to form esperanza, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center –an institute readily identifiable as a source of empowerment and development—as meaningful to San Antonio’s comunidad Latina as any existing institution of long-standing in tne Barrios, for it reflects the morality of our raza, our women, . . . cont’d on pg 13 our mejicanitas. ESPERANZA stands on the very moral ground ATTENTION VOZ READERS: If you have a correction you want to make on your mailing label please send it in to lavoz@esperanzacenter.org. If you do not wish to continue on the mailing list for whatever reason please notify us as well. La Voz is provided as a courtesy to people on the mailing list of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. The subscription rate is $35 per year. The cost of producing and mailing La Voz has substantially increased and we need your help to keep it afloat. To help, send in your subscriptions, sign up as a monthly donor, or send in a donation to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. Thank you. -GAR VOZ VISION STATEMENT: La Voz de Esperanza speaks for many individual, progressive voices who are gente-based, multi-visioned and milagro-bound. We are diverse survivors of materialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, classism, violence, earth-damage, speciesism and cultural and political oppression. We are recapturing the powers of alliance, activism and healthy conflict in order to achieve interdependent economic/ spiritual healing and fuerza. La Voz is a resource for peace, justice, and human rights, providing a forum for criticism, information, education, humor and other creative works. La Voz provokes bold actions in response to local and global problems, with the knowledge that the many risks we take for the earth, our body, and the dignity of all people will result in profound change for the seven generations to come.

Spinning San Antonio: Latina/o Resistance to

Cultural Erasure

in the

Heart of San Antonio

by Roberta Hurtado

W

Photo: Joan Frederick

Recalling the Catholic tradition of placing down when asking for a favor, Briseño’s request is very simple: re-narrate the Alamo’s stories to include those written out of its history and destabilize the antiLatina/o discourses for which the Alamo has become a signifier.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

statues of saints upside

hen the Daughters of the Republic appear to be offering an “olive branch” to Tejanos, two questions come up: the first, why? And second, do you take it? For local Chicano artist Rolando Briseño, the answer to these questions can be seen as originating on June 13, 2010 with the premier of his “Flippin’ San Alamo Fiesta,” or as early as the arrival of Spaniards/Mexicans in 1691 and the subsequent building of the Alamo as a shrine to the city’s namesake. Although rarely discussed by tour guides as they lead thousands through what has become a master symbol of U.S. Anglo Euro-centric capitalist patriarchal hegemony, the Alamo’s history begins before the defeat of U.S. troops in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the trail of blood begins long before that in a different form of colonization, and thus Briseño’s answers are centuries in the making.

So what better way for a visual artist to respond than through a cultural performance set in the very center of a contested colonial site? The annual event, now approaching its third reincarnation as “Spinning San Antonio,” represents Briseño’s attempt to re-member the lost voices of those who live beneath the Alamo’s shadow and remythologize the Alamo’s cultural symbolism—but on his own terms. And given the San Antonio Convention and Visitor’s Bureau’s launching of merchandise proclaiming “Remember the…” in direct reference to the infamous battle-cry currently documented in high school textbooks throughout the nation—Remember the Alamo!—this remythifying cannot come too soon.

“Flippin’ San Alamo Fiesta,” the first incarnation of Briseño’s vision, was set against a backdrop of anti-ethnic studies fervor rampaging across Arizona in combination with anti-immigration legislation that sought to eradicate Latinas/os as anything other than “enemies” from national narratives. In 2011, “Flippin San Antonio” pressed for continued support of Chicana/o activists in their resistance to cultural genocide here in Texas. This year’s event, however, seeks more: to set the stage for a new consciousness.

The event itself is a visual amalgamation of re-visioned signifiers. Taking place on Saint Anthony’s Feast Day, June 13th, Briseño’s cultural performance begins with a procession in reminiscence of a fiesta patronal. A little discussed (but important) fact about the Alamo: its original use was as a shrine to Saint Anthony, and it held religious celebrations during the first decades of its existence. And who participated in these “celebrations”? Spanish colonizers, the forced Amerindian laborers, and the mestizos born from unions between Amerindians, enslaved Africans, and Spaniards. Taking up this reality, Briseño’s statue of St. Anthony is carried by four actors in front of the Alamo. These actors, dressed as an undocumented Mexican prisoner, a Pachuco, an AfricanAmerican enslaved person representing the reintroduction of slavery to San Antonio following the U.S. colonization of Texas, and an illegal Anglo immigrant complete with a coonskin cap, place the statue on a table of reconciliation

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LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

in front of the Alamo and a ceremonial flip of the statue. Why flip the statue? Recalling the Catholic tradition of placing statues of saints upside down when asking for a favor, Briseño’s request is very simple: re-narrate the Alamo’s stories to include those written out of its history and destabilize the anti-Latina/o discourses for which the Alamo has become a signifier.

Briseño seeks to burst open the long held secrets that the Alamo has hidden within its walls. In this vein, a ceremonial Native American blessing kicks off the event to cleanse the space and recognize the indigenous ancestors whose bodies are buried beneath the structure and whose lives were lost in its creation and maintenance. Simultaneously, a parade of low-rider clubs, including local groups the Pushrods and O.G. Traditions, circle the Alamo, reminiscent of Comanche charges on the mission.

Following this cleansing ceremony, musicians Los Nahuatlatos and Bianca Sapet serenade the statue with songs honoring mestizaje and afro-mestizaje culture. As the event concludes, an Alamo shaped piñata is sacrificed to the crowd of spectators and explodes with a waterfall of multiethnic babydolls. The visual statement? That we must acknowledge all the persons of color who have been secreted away behind narratives of Davy Crockett, Anglo resistance to the “dictator” Santa Ana, and the importance of “freedom” for those who fought against “Mexico.” Once the

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Photo: Joan Frederick

Spinning San Antonio June 13, 2012 6:30pm in front of Alamo Plaza 8:45pm Reception @ Museo Alameda

social justice can peace exist.

As June 13th draws near, organizers and supporters eagerly await the opportunity to lay their olive branches in front of the Alamo. Join us for this event Wednesday June 13th at 6:30 p.m. in front of Alamo Plaza that will begin with a blessing by Ameyaltonal Tejaztlan. A reception donated by Mr. Jorge Cortez of Mi Tierra Restaurants follows at the Museo Alameda at 8:45 p.m.

This year, Briseño intends This year we give special thanks to sponsors to lay an olive branch of Dr. Rafael Guerra and Sandra Castro Guerra, Dr. his own in front of the Raul Yordan and Norma Bodevin, and Dr. Antonia Alamo for the DRT but with Castañeda and Dr. Arturo Madrid whose continued a personalized message: generosity over the last only when organizations, three years has once more made this possible. Inwhose foundations have deed, the support of San Antonio’s local communibeen the denigration of ty to keep this event going evinces a heart-felt dediothers’ existences, learn to cation to transforming the Alamo into a place where acknowledge the violence we can all reflect and contemplate the confluence of oppression and head the of our many cultures.

Briseño and coordinator voices of those demanding Roberta Hurtado look forsocial justice can peace exist. ward to seeing you there this year. Together we can help spin San Antonio one more time!

Alamo has spilled its secrets, the actors are able to place the statue right-side up on the table of reconciliation and remove it from the Alamo. This year, Briseño intends to lay an olive branch of his own in front of the Alamo for the DRT but with a personalized message: only when organizations, whose foundations have been the denigration of others’ existences, learn to acknowledge the violence of oppression and head the voices of those demanding

Bio: Roberta is now working on her dissertation, entitled “The Flesh of Empire: Psycholocal Enfleshment in Puerto Rican Women’s Literature,” at The University of Texas-San Antonio. Her main focus is Puerto Rican women’s literature and third space feminisms theory with a specialization on colonial and neoimperial studies. She is a BritoRican originally from Massachusetts but has lived New York and San Antonio. This is her third year organizing Spinning San Antonio with Rolando Briseño.

Reproductive Freedom

and the

Long Hand of Slave Breeding

I

by JoAnn Wypijewski past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the Pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harper’s Ferry and civil war, and concluding with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning.

They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery.

They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men.

Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population 2 to 1 by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-JezebelSapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, some of the Founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself.

That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

hate liberalism’s language of “choice.” I always have.

Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most intimate aspects of existence, of women’s physical autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life, death or liposuction? In that circumstance, capitalism’s only question is Who pays and who profits? The state’s only question is Who regulates and how much? If there is an upside to the right’s latest grotesque, multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of “a woman’s right to choose” for the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be.”

That requires that we look to history and the Constitution.

I found myself doing that earlier this year, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer to her now as Bridgewater—legal scholar, law professor at American University, reproductive rights activist, sex radical—but she is my friend and sister, and we were two women sitting around talking, so I shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.

“What a spectacle,” Pamela exclaimed, “Virginia, the birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America, is debating statesanctioned rape. Imagine the woman who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion. Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stirrups?”

“I suspect,” said I, “that partisans would say, ‘If she doesn’t agree, she is free to leave.’”

“Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and that’s by coercion, too.”

“Scratch at modern life and there’s a little slave era just below the surface, so we’re right back to your argument.”

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the

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female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808; that they did so to protect the domestic market, keeping the price of human flesh high and thus boosting their own nascent breeding operation.

Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue.

Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion. Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “If we could get a breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young uns,… I think’t would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is enshrined in the 13th Amendment. The amendment’s language is unadorned,

so it was left to the political system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant in all particulars. In a series of successive legal cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its “badges and incidents,” and recognized Congress’s power “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all [of those] in the United States.”

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the body and reproductive capacity of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty.

And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

The courts and Congress of the 19th century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor.

Women they understood wholly in terms of their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the 13th Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the 14th Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, whitecentric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.

Not long after that conversation in Pamela’s living room, the antiwoman spring offensive came on in full. Texas transvaginal ultrasound mandate went into effect.

Virginia lawmakers ended up imposing a standard ultrasound mandate, one of at least ninety-two new regulations or restrictions that states have imposed on abortion since 2011, and one of at least 155 introduced in state legislatures since the start of the year. Rush Limbaugh revealed himself to be astoundingly ignorant of female sexuality. Rick Santorum demonstrated many times over that, for him, no idea policing “the sexual realm” is too outlandish. They and their anti-woman allies have lobbed so many bombs it’s easy to get distracted, to assume a posture of defensive, and sometimes politically dicey, defense: But no federal money

Therefore, sexual and

reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy;

it is fundamental to our and

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

the law’s understanding

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of human autonomy and

liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not

simply unconstitutional; they

effectively reinstitute slavery.

cont’d on pg 8 . . .

Consumerism, Rasquachismo and Chuck Ramirez’s Minimally Baroque

by Timothy Giddens

T

Impression and Reflection The unfortunate circumstance of Ramirez’s death left impressions upon me. Arguably, Chuck Ramirez had a whole career ahead of him, and it is sad to know he was only a block away from home before he died. Since he was a local and a Mexican-American, it made the experience all the more personal. Overall, the Coconut series and the Trash Bag series exuded the most gravitation.

Oddly, I had never encountered the term “coconut” at the time that I saw the piece. Once I realized what “coconut” parlayed, then did I connect. The imposition of the traditional White AngloAmerican culture (read: White paternalistic hegemony) and the forced assimilation has internalized the stereotypes and modes of

existence in society, especially in the border regions of the U.S. Anzaldua’s1 critique of the border culture and notion of cultural boundaries highlights this social conflict between “real” Latinos and “coconut” Latinos. The notion that “one is hard skinned and brown on the outside, while soft, and white on the inside,” maybe a controversial topic in the Latino community, but it is a powerful, and simple commentary on the effects of American assimilation and the internalization of racial stereotypes.

The Trash Bag Series was more thought provoking, containing more images than the Coconut series, and offering a compelling query about the U.S. Pondering the deeper recontextualization that the bags may have represented and what emerged was my deeply rooted hatred for excessive consumerism in the world but specifically in the USA. American corporatism, advertising, mass media, and marketing have created an excessive American consumer culture—it is at the point that consumers “buy” culture. In Slavoj Žižek argues “[a]t the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism”: we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful.”2

Rasquachismo and Consumerism A further analysis of the elements found in Chuck Ramirez’s Minimally Baroque suggests an interesting relationship between rasquachismo, photographic art, and consumerism. A personal loathing of the excessiveness in American consumer culture exists because of capitalism and its offspring: marketing and advertising. These institutions and rugged individualism of American political thought result in a culture of mass production and mass consumption. When globalization perpetuates the production of needless wants and excessive products and makes the immigrant even more invisible3, the only result is waste.

Rasquachismo ties into this critique of consumerism in a couple of ways. As such, Ramirez uses rasquachismo in photography by using the mundane (i.e. waste products) as transformative art and social commentary on consumerism. What is striking of this rasquachismo is the virtual representation (photograph) of a waste byproduct (trash bag) of consumerism that ends up in a niche market of the art world and sold for what the collection

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he focus of this response centers around the work featured in Chuck Ramirez’s Minimally Baroque posthumous photographic exhibit that was part of FotoSeptiembre, held at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio, Texas. Held annually in September, it celebrates photography and photographers. I visited this exhibit with my sister—an artist—and my mother. We were greeted by Ms. Criss Ann Frost who gave us a brief introduction to Chuck Ramirez and the other artists apart of the exhibit—Carlos Betancourt, Puerto Rican and Rodolfo Choperna, from Mexico City. As I reflected on the exhibit, I concluded that it was direct evidence of the cultural “harvest of empire” Ms. Frost impressed upon us some of the “Chuckism’s” by pointing out vague remains of embossed letters on the wooden gallery floor left by an installation by the artist before his unfortunate death.

Ramirez was a local San Antonian, photographer, and graphic artist who worked for HEB. He was a proud, respected, and admirable gay man loved in the community. His untimely death was the result of an unfortunate bicycle accident not far from his home. My sister knew of him and attended a beautiful celebration of his life at the gallery that displayed Minimally Baroque. This exhibit was a collection of series of mundane objects: i.e. Broom Series, Coconut Series, and Trash Bag Series. It featured simple, isolated, and used objects, with little text or description, yet recontextualized to give new meaning and life to the original object, transformed into sociopolitical commentary. These are the collective minimalist and baroque aspects of the exhibit, which were altogether critical of the notions of excess and consumerism in the U.S.

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catalogue listed as $6,000! What personally reverberated was the notion of how society unconsciously uses and disposes of things, most times not thinking of where it ends up afterwards. Ramirez photography evokes a scene from Examined Life4, where Slavoj Žižek touches upon this notion of social ecology and the effects of globalized capitalism and consumerism, perfectly.

Personally, the Broom series represents society, in a globalized world of urbanized cities, constantly consuming. As such, society has or feels that need to be cleaning and maintaining a façade

up? It ends up where society is headed if it continues to consume and produce needless things—in dumps, out of sight, out of mind, the 99% of society under the control of the 1%...not a solution to waste accumulation. Worse, American assimilation has made/ makes the Latino/a invisible—something WE WILL NOT REMAIN, especially with artists like Ramírez, pointing out society’s faults in such simple yet provocative and evocative ways.

Ramírez left the Mexican American and Chicano/a culture something to be proud of in the world of contemporary art. His

of cleanliness because we consume unconscientiously. It screams that we dirty the earth with waste and products of nothingness marketed for sale, then used and thrown away, in the hopes of buying more nothingness. Also, it implies “who used these tools of waste maintenance?” Unfortunately, mainstream and popular culture depicts Latinos and other people of color as house cleaners, janitors, and other manual laborers. I cannot say that Ramirez was implying this, but this definitely crossed my mind.

The Trash Bags series connects to the Broom series immediately; because they are objects used in the accumulation of waste, and because what is swept up and gathered is usually collected in trash bags, to be unseen. The trash bags represent the result of a society fixated on excess and consumption. Where does it end

images of simple things depict deep and complex critiques of our country and its culture of consumption. His knowledge and photographic expressions reinforce how an excessive culture of consumerism is detrimental to society and the image world. Through critical art forms like this, others will start to see that the consumption needs to be sustainable, at cost—not for profit, or excessive accumulation. Simply, one must be thoughtful, frugal and grateful for the scarce resources that Mother Earth offers humanity still.

. . . reproductive freedom continued from page 6 pays for abortion; women who delay child-bearing are more productive; the Pill eases painful periods; most of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion; contraceptives help against rheumatoid arthritis; Mrs. Santorum might have died under the fetal personhood platforms her husband touts; Sandra Fluke is not a slut…

What of it if she were? By any other name, ain’t she a woman? A human being? The descendants of slave masters have no more right to control her sexuality and reproductive organs, to deny her self-determination, than did their predecessors.

Mother or slut, prostitute or daughter, lesbian or straight or transgender, celibate law student or lazybones who just wants to have sex all day, she and all women are heir in their person to a promise of universal freedom, one that does not make such distinctions but that recognizes an individual’s right to her life, her labor, her body, her sexuality and self-possession all as one. Forget trying to shut up a gasbag on the radio; there is basic liberty to uphold.

The preachers and lay men and women now raising the

Editor’s note: Timothy Giddens is a Chicano student at UTSA. This article was originally written for Dr. Josie Méndez-Negrete’s class, Latino Cultural Expressions. It was edited for purposes of La Voz. Endnotes for the article are available upon request from: lavoz@esperanzacenter.org

Personhood banner for their side have taken to calling the fetus and fertilized egg the new slave, and the national movement for their legal personhood the new civil rights movement. The director of Personhood Florida compares himself to William Wilberforce, the nineteenth century English abolitionist. A Catholic priest posting on Planned Parenthood’s “I Have a Say” video thread likens defenders of women’s bodily autonomy to slave traders. On their blogs and other propaganda, the foot soldiers of this movement call Roe v. Wade a latter-day Dred Scott decision; they invoke the 13th Amendment and vow to fulfill its promise.

These people are not stupid and some are sincere, but they are wrong. They pervert morality and history in the guise of honoring both, and thingify women according to the logic of this country’s cruelest past. There is another logic, and it calls us to complete the unfinished business of emancipation.

Bio: JoAnn Wypijewski writes a column for The Nation on sex, politics and culture called “Carnal Knowledge”. A version of this piece appeared previously on www.thenation.com.

g

Farewell to a Legend

Regardless of her incredibly busy schedule and ever widening sphere of political influence, Bettie kept tabs on all Texas organizations that dedicated themselves to equality for women, workers and the GLBT community.

She had frequently discussed the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center with me, often saying, “They have created an important resource for people in need, and they have given a voice to women, people of color, poor people and the GLBT community where none existed before.” Bettie delighted in hearing about the Esperanza’s victorious lawsuit against the City of San Antonio after the city had defunded them. She said, with a laugh, “That’s how you have to take on bullies who prey on those they perceive to be weaklings; you have to beat them at their own game. The Esperanza wasn’t going to take defunding lying down, so they fought like Hell in the courts and they won!”

One of Bettie’s best friends in Austin was the late Governor Ann Richards. In fact, in the dining room of Bettie’s home was a huge photo of the two of them, taken inside the Capitol in front of a portrait of Sam Houston. Inscribed at the bottom, in Ann Richards’s perfect penmanship, it read, “Bettie, what would Sam Houston think?!”

Bettie’s memorial service took place on May 5 at the First United Methodist Church in Austin. Nearly 1,000 people were in attendance, where they watched a beautiful interview Bettie and her partner Libby Sykora had given to G/L Magazine.

Heartfelt eulogies were given by her good friends and political allies, former State Representative A. R. “Babe” Schwartz (DGalveston), State Representative Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston) and Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-Austin/San Antonio).

Though the eulogies all contained similarities about Bettie being an indefatigable advocate, all three speakers mentioned how Bettie personally helped them better understand the importance of full civil rights for the GLBT citizens of Texas. While all three said they were always accepting of the GLBT community, Bettie helped them construct simple but impactful statements they could share with their constituents who vehemently objected to gay rights.

While Bettie Naylor led a life of exemplary public service, she was a devoted partner, a loving mother and grandmother, and a great friend. Bettie’s daughter and my sister have been together more than 25 years, so I had the great fortune of seeing Bettie often, especially on holiday occasions when families traditionally meet. Her inside political scoops were the highlight of our family dinners, and her sense of humor was extraordinary. She lit up any room she entered, and she will be fondly remembered by everyone whose life she touched. i - Karen Littleton

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

Her desire to become involved in the world of politics began in San Antonio during the 1970s, when she helped create the Women’s Political Caucus. Back then, noted feminist Sissy Farenthold was running for governor of Texas, and Bettie was invigorated by the idea that a female could be elected to govern her beloved Texas.

Born in 1927 in Wichita Falls, Bettie grew up with a great sense of self confidence and an easy way with people. Though she married Van Naylor, an Air Force pilot, and had three children with him, her 30-year marriage ended when she fell in love with a woman whom she had met through her political activities.

After an amicable divorce, Bettie faced head-on the issues battling women, gays and lesbians, and decided someone should speak out, so it may as well be her.

Though small in stature, Bettie was a proverbial Tall Texan when it came to recognizing and becoming enraged about unfair wages for women, racism, sexism and homophobia.

Though Bettie loved San Antonio, she moved to Austin in the late 70’s to get closer to the Capitol and the legislators who worked there. She was so determined to make an impact, she moved into the Westgate, a beautiful 25-story Austin condominium complex that overlooked the Capitol, so she could literally cross the street and be on Capitol grounds.She started work in Austin as a lobbyist for the First Amendment Coalition, where she advocated for GLBT rights.

Her daughter Sharron Naylor said, “Mom was such a force of nature, even the most outspoken right-wing conservative legislators liked and respected her. They may have vehemently disagreed with her political agenda, but they always made time for her on their calendars, and some of them even softened their anti women/anti gay stances because of her influence.”

Helping to found the Women’s Political Caucus in San Antonio gave Bettie a taste for creating coalitions, caucuses and other organizations where more impact could be made on the legislature.Perhaps her greatest political achievement was in co-founding The Human Rights Campaign in 1980, which today is the largest and most influential GLBT advocacy and political lobby in America, with more than one million members.

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Oxnard School Named After

Juan Lagunas Soria –Thirteen Years After His Departure

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

Editor’s note: We publish this tribute to honor the following request: In California as well as in Texas our people have suffered open violation of our Civil Rights. The 80th anniversary of Juan’s birth made me think of reaching out and requesting your help in disseminating the story of this outstanding man that did so much for our people with his limited means. He was recognized by changing the de facto segregation that existed in our schools with a landmark case.. In June 1997, it was requested by the community and voted by the School Board that a school be named after him, but it was not until 2009 after the constant demands of members of the community [that it happened]. I pray that you might consider it for the June publication, he died June 13, 1997. I feel that it might inspire young persons that have so very much to offer to read about a man that lost his parents at age 13, and did much for his people. – Kindest regards, Catalina Frazier Vda. de Soria

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uan Lagunas Soria was born March 28, 1932 in Oxnard, California. He was the second child of the 6 children of Antonio Soria and Maria de la Luz “Ramona” Lagunas de Soria. The couple met and married in Santa Ana, CA and moved to Oxnard. When Juan lost both his parents at age 13 he went to work as a farm laborer and as printer’s devil for the local newspaper. Juan attended schools in Oxnard and at Ventura College. He received a football scholarship to Midwestern University in Texas. While working as a psych technician in Camarillo State Hospital, Juan was publisher and editor of the El Sol Newspaper with political and social information dealing with the Hispanic population.

As a union organizer for the Teamsters throughout southern and central California, Juan became well versed with the problems of farm workers in the packinghouses, orchards and fields.

This knowledge covered their wages, working conditions, transportation and the double standards for local workers and braceros.

In Ventura County Juan Soria organized picket lines with local farm workers and increased the hourly rate to $1.25 an hour. He made a name for himself as an advocate for the needy, which was a majority farm laborers. Under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee he created a farm workers’ cooperative in California’s Central Valley. In Ventura County Juan Soria was active in the Community Service Organization and in 1958 he coordinated a group of 500 Mexican nationals to become American citizens and registered voters. When United Farm Workers union leader César Chávez came to Oxnard to work in union organizing, Juan Soria and his followers joined him. Juan also led the march to Sacramento along with local farm workers and active community members of Ventura County.

In October of 1963, Juan received an invitation from the VicePresident’s office to give input on the pre-War on Poverty programs (see letter signed by Lyndon B. Johnson). Programs under the Manpower Development and Training Act were organized in Oxnard. Operation Buenaventura, a 3B federal program to aid farm workers, was visited by Sargent Shriver, in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity; Operation Buenaventura received his compliments. Also, War on Poverty personality, actor Steve Allen, visited and inspected Operation Buenaventura and praised its operation. Mr. Soria’s experience in union organizing was resented by local growers and their servers while he worked for Operation Buenaventura and The Farm Workers Opportunity Project under the Manpower Development and Training Act. He was also an organizer for Citizens Against Poverty, an anti-poverty program in Ventura County. Some affluent individuals felt CAP was an extremely leftist organization. A state charted credit union, CAP Credit Union was organized and later managed

by Juan’s second wife, Catalina. A manpower training program, MDTA was created by Mr. Soria with the assistance of the State of California Department of Labor. This training and job placement gave farm workers the opportunity to receive training in different trades, it was held at Ventura Community College.

In 1968, Mr. Soria coordinated a group of plaintiffs against The Oxnard Elementary School District. Mr. Gerhard W. Orthuber, Attorney at Law, prepared and filed the de facto segregation case that proved with details that segregation was the main motive in the lack of academic achievement within the Hispanic students.

Soria vs. Oxnard Elementary School District became a landmark case. This was one of the reasons the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) which is well known

te Publications also contracted for private promotions of interest to the communities where it was disseminated. Ventura County chose Adelante Publications to prepare and disseminate a survival manual in Spanish for all the residents of Ventura County.

Bad circulation problems made Mr. Soria loose both legs to amputation. Yet he refused to retire and continued his endeavors.

He organized a non profit corporation, Pueblos Unidos that made affordable housing to community members. He was the executive director of this non-profit corporation that received federal funds for housing and renovation projects in the Colonia area of Oxnard at the time of his death.

Juan Soria had 5 children with his first wife, Julieta Flores de Mendoza – Juan Carlos, Adriana Snell, Leticia, Lilia and Armando. When he married Catalina he helped raise her son, David Scott Frazier. They had 2 daughters, Catalina Soria-Viorato and Isabel. He is survived by 3 brothers – Catarino “Manny”, Henry and Roberto. Juan was preceded in death by his sister Peggy Del Rio and Luis Soria.

During the school dedication [in 2009] the Honorable Julia Brownley, State of California Assembly member, 41st District, presented a five point resolution to the Juan Lagunas Soria Elementary School principal, Mrs. Ana DeGenna, and a copy of the same to his widow, Mrs. Catalina Frazier Soria.

Keynote speaker Angel Luevano, Vice President of League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) presented Mrs. Soria with a plaque honoring the memory of Juan L. Soria for his outstanding contributions to the Latino Community in bringing the landmark case Soria vs Oxnard School District. Words of inspiration regarding Mr. Juan Soria were presented by his daughter, Isabel Soria, who pointed out that Juan had attended intentionally segregated and elementary schools that were inferior to those the non-minority children attended; that he had lost both his parents at age 13; that he had worked as a farm laborer while going to school and more.

Isabel pointed out that from her father we all can learn that no matter what ethnicity we are, no matter how difficult out financial situation is, and no matter what physical limitations we may have, there is always the opportunity to stand up for what is right; to speak for those whose voices are not often heard and to contribute to the betterment of our communities.

Note: For more information and photos on Juan Soria’s life visit: www.juanlsoria.org

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

throughout the nation for legal representation of the underprivileged, sought Mr. Soria for the position of Director of MALDEF’s Community Education and Activation Program in later years.

Juan was always socially aware and in 1968 coordinated the political campaign VIVA HUMPHREY in Ventura County, the VIVA KENNEDY campaign; and participated in local politics as well receiving the endorsement of United Farm Workers President, César E. Chávez. Mr. Soria received the Mexican-American Of The Year award in 1966 by Mr. Bert Corona, State President of Mexican American Political Association (MAPA). Later Juan was nominated Ventura County Chairperson of the Mexican-American Political Association and in later years Chairperson of the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce in Ventura County. Juan received a personal gift from President Lyndon Johnson for his assistance in his campaign, a maroon filtered Texan hat, which Juan proudly wore during the UFW march to Sacramento. Central California Action Associates gave Juan the position of Ventura County Area Coordinator. CCAA was an evening school program for farm workers that gave these men the opportunity to learn English as well as reading and writing and basic math with the purpose of getting better jobs. Soon, Mr. Soria was promoted to Job Placement Director for all the California counties covered by CCAA. During the early 70s Mr. Soria traveled throughout the USA evaluating federal funded health clinics for farm workers. He was appointed by the Third World Board of the University of California at Berkeley to be the Associated Executive Director of the Associated Students Union Financial Projects for the University of California at Berkeley. Juan moved to the position of Regional Manager of the Office of Community Affairs at DQ University at Davis, California. When his contract expired he was offered the position of National Executive Director for National Chicano Health Organization (NCHO). In this organization Mr. Soria assisted many deserving young Hispanic Americans to obtain scholarships in the medical field, from technicians to medical doctors.

Mr. Soria and his wife Catalina operated a paralegal and accounting service in Oxnard since 1978. The Sorias also owned Adelante Publications which published a weekly bilingual publication disseminating information on education, politics and news of general interest to the communities of Ventura County. Adelan-

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Making Change

Casting Off “Yesterday’s Logic” to Transform Schooling

by Laurie Posner

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

W

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hile it is no longer so much in fashion to agonize about the death of one or another cultural institution (grammar!, romance!, rock-and-roll!), this did not stop Boston Globe writer Derrick Jackson from asserting that we are now witnessing “the death of public education” (2010).

Noting how many U.S. cities are facing major school closings and massive budget cuts, Jackson goes on to describe how the country chronically under-invests in education and underpays teachers, while blaming poor outcomes on student poverty and diversity. “In monetary terms,” Jackson writes, “we have given up on millions of children” (2010).

Funding education at insufficient or inequitable levels – and blaming poverty or diversity for poor outcomes – evokes what management consultant Peter Drucker (1980) called “yesterday’s logic.” As Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Remaining trapped in yesterday’s logic comes at a perilous cost. Already each year, the United States loses an estimated 1.3 million high school youth to attrition. And while only recently the United States led the world in the number of young adults with college degrees, it has now slipped to 12th among 36 developed nations.

Severe inequities persist, “Students from the highest income families are almost eight times as likely as those from the lowest income families to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24” (Lewin, 2010).

What can be done to reject yesterday’s logic and transform teaching and learning? Research and practical experience point to the need to take up three inter-related strategies: (1) community capacity building; (2) coalition building; and (3) school capacity building. Each strategy is an integral part of IDRA’s action model for transforming public education, the Quality Schools Action Framework (Robledo Montecel, 2005).

Community Capacity Building Community capacity building as a term and an approach is often associated with community development and the power of social networks (“social capital”). As a concept, social capital has been around since at least the early 1900s, when L.J. Hanifan promoted its value in supporting rural schools. Hanifan (1916) wrote: “If [an individual] may come into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital… which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the

substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community” (see also Putnam, 2000).

As Hanifan implies, social capital and community capacity grow where there is a sense of neighborhood. In strengthening education, the best efforts build on these connections and expand knowledge and leadership to take up shared concerns. As a recent national study finds, well organized communities can serve not only to influence education policy and practice but also to “disrupt the priorities, assumptions and practices that have sanctioned poor

school performance for so long” (Mediratta, et al., 2009).

Community capacity building also can overcome persistent barriers to family-school relationships, creating new forums for partnership and problem-solving. The United Way of San Antonio & Bexar County’s family-school-community partnership in Texas began just such an approach in 2006. Focusing on student outcomes at 10 schools, this initiative “shaped by and for parents” went on to create parent rooms at each campus, build parent-led networks from parent to parent home visits, achieve gains in student attendance and tutoring rates, decreased early dismissals, and fostered a dramatic increase in parental involvement (United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County, 2010). Expanding on this approach, through the Eastside Promise Neighborhood project, the United Way and seven partners (Family Services; P16+ Council; the City of San Antonio; San Antonio Independent School District; San Antonio Housing Authority; City Year SA; and Community Information: NOW) are blending strategies that work to simultaneously strengthen schools and neighborhoods. As another example, PTA Comunitario in South Texas, a grassroots PTA founded by the community-based organization ARISE in partner-

ship with IDRA, is combining Latina leadership development with education advocacy.

Through this PTA, family leaders are examining data on student achievement, attrition rates, and college readiness and hosting community-based meetings with school leaders to look together at how their schools are doing, focus on a shared vision for all children’s success, and work out roles each can play to bring this to fruition. In this way, the strategy both banks on decades of research linking family engagement with better student and school outcomes (Henderson, et al., 2004) and promotes partnerships that respect family contributions and leadership.

. . . Elva’s Story, cont’d from pg 2

Coalition Building Traced to the French and Latin terms for “fellowship” and “the growing together of parts” (as in coalesce), coalition building describes the process of developing a partnership of organizations to advance a common purpose. Needed as they are, coalitions designed to improve education have not always lived up to their potential. Too often, they have failed to include grassroots organizations and parents of children in public schools (Mediratta, et al., 2009).

Against this backdrop, a case-study review of the development of the Educational Justice Collaborative provides important insights. The EJC is a coalition of more than two dozen organizations in California whose goal is to attain high quality education for all children. Formed around the class action suit, Williams vs. State of California, the EJC has brought together community organizers, educators, researchers, and policy and legal advocates to coordinate research and policy and build community capacity to promote systems change.

One of EJC’s first actions, based on a review of statewide school outcome data, was to craft an Educational Bill of Rights. The bill highlights every student’s right to an education under the California constitution and, within this framework, to high quality teachers, and to safe and supportive learning environments. Importantly, the bill also calls for reliable public information on school outcomes, and regular community forums with public officials, to build in accountability for resources and results. Since the Williams settlement, coalition members have turned their attention to realizing these rights through work on school funding equity, college readiness and the state’s data system (Oakes & Rogers, 2006).

School Capacity Building

Bio: Laurie Posner is a senior education associate at the Intercultural Development Research Association, an independent, nonprofit organization in San Antonio, dedicated to promoting excellence and equity in public education for all children. This article first appeared in the IDRA Newsletter September, 2010. For full list of resources email la voz@esperanzacenter.org.

that ESPERANZA is us, the community that stands behind the women who became inspired enough, had will enough to seek a manifestation of what is just–and desire, stronger still, to return a sense of orgullo to the Barrios of San Antonio. To claim the right as women to speak for other women, for our children, our youth, our brethren, to speak for our right to the streets, to return a means for our voices to be heard. To this I have returned, a San Antonio full of ESPERANZA. When I first walked through ESPERANZA’s front doors it was to attend a Noche Azul concert. The first person that greeted me seemed so familiar to me. Turns out, I did not know her from anywhere in particular, but the familiarity struck me so deep that later that night words poured out of me. I felt compelled to record the experience. Under all circumstances the words remain inadequate for they do not fully translate the experience that is ESPERANZA for they do not capture the sense of belonging. These words are an attempt to describe this ancient connect we all feel when we see something good, something noble.

This is what I see in the women who are ESPERANZA. To them I say: I know you longer than I know your name I know you longer then this ancient game Called living

Among the Living I know you deeper then any dream you dream I know you holier than any holy thing I know I know I know I know you deeper then anyone I claim.

Gracias por darme tanta esperanza!

Bio: Elva Pérez Treviño is an artist, writer, political activist and attorney born and raised in San Antonio’s Westside.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

School capacity building, the most familiar of the three change strategies, involves the process of assuring that schools have the vision, leadership, faculty, curricula and resources to engage all students in learning. It begins with the recognition that substantial changes require interacting strategies, ensuring: that teachers are valued, prepared and well-equipped; that curriculum is rigorous, challenging and exciting; that students’ strengths are recognized and can flourish; and that families and community members are engaged as partners (Robledo Montecel, 2005). Rather than working apart from or at odds with the first two strategies, school capacity building depends on each for continuous self-renewal (Villarreal, 2006).

This holistic approach can be seen in work underway at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD in South Texas. Unlike traditional dropout recovery strategies, PSJA’s College, Career & Technology Academy, carried out in partnership with South Texas College, is re-engaging students who have dropped out of school in new learning opportunities and a curriculum that prepares them for college. The results include increased graduation and college readiness rates. Further, to strengthen mathematics and science teaching and learning, PSJA is partnering with IDRA on professional development and strategies to strengthen community-school-family partnership.

If public education is not just to survive but to be transformed and thrive, turbulent times must not have us retrench and revert to the failed logic of the past. We need a new logic, built on knowledge and experience, bold commitment and respect. v

At the Paseo por el Westside in May, Elva taught Ariana (left) and a friend to shoot marbles.

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* community meetings *

Amnesty International #127 meets on 4th Thursdays at 7:30 pm at Ashbury United Methodist. Call 210.829.0397.

Anti-War Peace Vigil every Thursday (since 2001) from 4-5pm @ Flores & Commerce See: ivaw.org veteransforpeace.org Bexar Co. Green Party info@bexargreens.org or call 210.471.1791.

Celebration Circle meets Sundays, 11am @ JumpStart at Blue Star Arts Complex. Meditation, Weds @ 7:30 pm @ Quaker Meeting House, 7052 Vandiver. 210.533-6767 DIGNITY S.A. mass at 5:30 pm, Sun. @ Beacon Hill Presbyterian Church, 1101 W. Woodlawn. Call 210.735.7191.

Fuerza Unida, 710 New Laredo, Hwy. 210.927.2297, www.lafuerzaunida.org Habitat for Humanity meets 1st Tues. for volunteer orientation @ 6pm, HFHSA Office @ 311 Probandt.

LGBT Youth Group meets at MCC Church, 611 E. Myrtle on Sundays at 10:30am. 210.472.3597 Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio (MCCSA) 611 East Myrtle, services & Sunday school @ 10:30am. Call 210.599.9289.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

PFLAG, meets 1st Thurs @ 7pm, 1st Unitarian Universalist Church, Gill Rd/Beryl Dr. Call 210. 655.2383.

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PFLAG Español meets 1st Tuesdays @ 2802 W. Salinas, 7pm. Call 210.849.6315

Be Part of a

Proyecto Hospitalidad Liturgy each Thursday at 7 pm at 325 Courtland. Call 210.736.3579.

Progressive Movement

The Rape Crisis Center, 7500 US Hwy 90 W. Hotline @ 210.3497273. 210.521.7273 or email Drominishi@rapecrisis.com The Religious Society of Friends meets Sundays @ 10 am @ The Friends Meeting House, 7052 N. Vandiver. 210.945.8456.

San Antonio Communist Party USA meets Sunday, June 10th, 3-5pm @ Bazan Library, 2200 W. Commerce St. (at Nueces St.) Contact: juanchostanford@yahoo.com San Antonio Gender Association. meets 1st & 3rd Thursdays, 6-9pm at 611 E. Myrtle, Metropolitan Community Church downstairs.| www.sagender.org SA Healthcare Now Coalition meets 1st Thursdays at 6:30pm @ National Nurses Organizing Committee office 7959 Fredericksburg Rd. 210.882.2230 or healthcarenowsa.org Shambhala Buddhist Meditation Center classes are on Tuesdays at 7pm, & Sun. at 11:30 am. at 1114 So. St. Mary’s. Call 210.222.9303.

The Society of Latino and Hispanic Writers SA meets 2nd Mondays, 7 pm @ Barnes & Noble, San Pedro Crossing.

S.N.A.P. (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). Contact Barbara at 210.725.8329.

Voice for Animals Contact 210.737.3138 or www.voiceforanimals.org for meeting times

in San Antonio

¡Todos Somos Esperanza!

Start your 2012 monthly donations now!

Esperanza works to bring awareness and action on issues relevant to our communities. With our vision for social, environmental, economic and gender justice, Esperanza centers the voices and experiences of the poor & working class, women, queer people and people of color. We hold pláticas and workshops; organize political actions; present exhibits and performances and document and preserve our cultural histories. We consistently challenge City Council and the corporate powers of the city on issues of development, low-wage jobs, gentrification, clean energy and more.

It takes all of us to keep the Esperanza going. When you contribute monthly to the Esperanza you are making a long-term commitment to the movement for progressive change in San Antonio, allowing Esperanza to sustain and expand our programs.

Monthly donors can give as little as $5 and as much as $500 a month or more.

What would it take for YOU to become a monthly donor? Call or come by the Esperanza to learn how. ¡Esperanza vive! ¡La lucha sigue!

Call 210.228.0201 or email esperanza@esperanzacenter.org for more info

Make a tax-deductible donation. $35 La Voz subscription

for more info call 210.228.0201

Please use my donation for the Rinconcito de Esperanza

Notas Y Más June 2012

The Mexico Solidarity Network offers summer courses June 3-30 in Mexico City on the Mexican Elections and from July 1-28 in Chiapas on Zapatismo and the Other Campaign. Contact MSN at 773.583.7728 or msn@mexicosolidarity.org Master the techniques of writing superior and winning proposals by attending A Professional Grant Development Workshop sponsored by The Grant Training Center on June 6th to 8th from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm to be held at the University of Texas @ Austin. See granttrainingcenter.com for more information.

The Smithsonian Latino Center (SLC) sponsors the 2012 Latino Museum Studies Program (LMSP), The Interpretation of Latino Visual and Material Culture, from July 2nd to August 10th with

Brief notes to inform readers about happenings in the community.

Send announcements for Notas y Más to: lavoz@esperanzacenter.org or by mail to: 922 San Pedro, San Antonio, TX 78212.

The deadline is the 8th of each month.

Literary Heritage in the United States Conference, “Literatures of Dissent, Cultures of Resistance” will be held on October 19th & 20th. Contact Dr. Carolina A. Villarreal in Houston 713. 743.3128 or at URBAN-15 sponsors the 6th Annual Joartrec@mail.uh.edu siah Media Festival Thursday, July 12th to Saturday, July 14th at the URBAN-15 The University of Cincinnati College Studio, 2500 S. Presa. Deadline for sub- of Law’s Center for Race, Gender, and missions is June 1st. For info: 210.736.1500 Social Justice 2012 conference, Social Justice Feminism, is on October 26th & or josiahfestival@urban15.org.

27th. Call 513.556.1220 or contact kristin.

Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Sokalsem@uc.edu for info. cial (MALCS) will hold its Summer Institute on July 18-21 at UC – Santa Bar- The Austin Tejano Music Coalition, hosts bara. This year’s theme is “Todos Somos the 2nd Annual CANTA contest in OctoArizona:” Confronting the Attacks on ber with auditions now underway. Contact Difference. Email malcs2012ucsb@gmail. Aggie Sánchez at 512.912.6925 or email info@austintejanomusic.org for a schedule com for more. of auditions. See: www.austintejanomusic.

The 2012 Recovering the U.S. Hispanic com or www.ATMC-Tejanoidol.com Smithsonian professionals, scholars from renowned universities, and leaders in the museum field. Visit www.latino.si.edu/ programs/programs_LMSP.htm.

Dear Esperanza staff~ What a marvelous

Rinconcito de Esperanza last

Sunday, May 6th! The lady who sang, managing her tracheotomy

“entrance” of Carmen Tafolla as

an old lady worked for me. I had never seen her before and was

happily surprised when she stood up and removed her “costume.”

After- the band, its singers,

the four power-house older

ladies, it could have been tough to follow, but Carmen Tafolla

was brilliant! And to have the May issue of La Voz focus on her was perfect! Thank you!

What a blessing you all are to

san Antonio, the WestSide, and all who live here. And I appreciate the image La Voz sends far and

wide of a literate, cosmopolitan, liberal and couragious force in San Antonio.

Love & Best Wishes,

–Ruth Lofgren

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5•

was especially inspiring! And the

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LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • June 2012 Vol. 25 Issue 5• Esperanza Peace and Justice Center & Jump-Start Performance Co. present

OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE A new play by Andrea Assaf and Samuel Valdez

that examines the nature of love as a straight man with cerebral palsy and a queer woman recount their adventures, and share their woes, of unsuccessful attempts to seduce (straight) women.

June 29-July 1 & July 7-8 at Jump-Start www.esperanzacenter.org

Noche Azul

108 Blue Star, San Antonio, 210.227.5867

Join us for our monthly concert series

de Esperanza

La Voz de Esperanza

922 San Pedro San Antonio TX 78212 210.228.0201 • fax: 210.228.0000 www.esperanzacenter.org

www.jump-start.org Non-Profit Org. US Postage PAID San Antonio, TX Permit #332

Haven’t opened La Voz in a while? Prefer to read it online? Wrong address?

TO CANCEL A SUBSCRIPTION EMAIL: lavoz@esperanzacenter.org CALL: 210.228.0201

Saturday, June 16th

8pm $5 más o menos Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

¡Queers, Presente ¡

*

25 años ~ 25 artists

June 9, 2012 7-9pm @ Esperanza, 922 San Pedro www.esperanzacenter.org 210.228.0201 *Honoring 25 years of LGBTQ presence at Esperanza Peace & Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas

Artist: Liliana Wilson, Deterioros Internos Exhibit, 2002

Esperanza Peace & Justice Center presents