Año Dos/Volumen Cuatro LA TOLTECA Summer Solstice 2012

LA TOLTECA Año Dos/ Volumen Cuatro SUMMER SOLSTICE 2012

Al Diablo con Editors and Critics Moments of Illumination Interview with Martίn Espada Tributes to Carlos Fuentes and Akilah Oliver What to Look for in an Indie Editor Judy Sternlight Poetry: Martin Espada, Marcelo Castillo Ronnie Burk Reports from the Front: NATO in Chicago Ana Castillo in Tucson Reviews, Workshopistas' Palette & Announcements

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EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

Ana Castillo Digital Operations Samuel S. DuBois

Contributors Marcelo Castillo, Montserrat Fontes, Judy Sternlight Copy Editing Melissa Flores and Paul McClennan

Cover photo YolyŠ Mora 2012

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CONTENTS Departments Departments pg. 4 Ana Castillo’s Page pg. 52 Letters to the Editors pg. 53 Announcements/casita/awards/worksh Announcements/casita/awards/workshops casita/awards/workshops/ ops/ posters ESSAYS & REVIEWS pg. 6 Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends Review by Marcelo Castillo pg. 13 What Makes a Good E Editor? ditor?

Essay by Judy Sternlight Pg. 25 Trouble Ball by Martίn Mart n Espada Review by Samuel S. DuBois pg. 30 Poems from Race Traitor Essay by Ronnie Burk pg. 37 Precious Knowledge, Knowledge, Documentary Review by Yovani Flores pg. 39 Carlos Fuentes Essay by Rachel Panton pg. 43 Goddess Goddess Ink: Publishing Our Way Essay by Anne Key, Candace Kant INTERVIEW pg. 18 With Martin Espada Samuel S. DuBois POETRY pg. 12 A Letter to Akilah & Oluchi (underlined title) Marcelo Castillo pg. 27 Isabel’s Corrido Martín Espada pg. 29 Mr. and Mrs. Rodríguez Have been Deported, Leaving Six Children Behind with the Neighbors Martín Espada WORKSHOPISTAS’ ORKSHOPISTAS’ PALETTE pg. 34 My Captured Captured Audience Audience Teaching College Credit Sociology in a Prison Essay by Janine Stubbs pg. 41 Empanada:: A Lesbiana Story en Probaditas

By Anel Anel Flores Review by Montserrat Fontes pg. 44 Reports from: the Front Front Ana Castillo in Tucson pg. 46 NATO and the Occupy Movement Comes Comes to Chicago Samuel S. DuBois and Tolteca friends

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LA TOLTECA welcomes writing from anyone who has participated in a workshop or class with Ana Castillo. Submissions may be in any genre or artistic medium. We also welcome new books to review: Castillo/P.O.B./Anthony, NM 88021/U.S.A. If you would like to send a donation to be attributed toward payment to new writing contributors—how miniscule it may be—please send check to Ana Castillo at the same address. Indicate what it is for or go to your Paypal account and do the same at: sales@anacastillo.com. 4 times a year!

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Dear La Tolteca Readers: This issue: Al Diablo with Editors and Critics

La TOLTECA as a zine aims not only to reach far and wide, back into the past and hopefully, glimpses into the future of writing, intellectual thought, aesthetics and performance, simply, we don’t discriminate against the dead. If a poet or artist has departed and we find he or she fits in our goals, you just might find him or her here. We are therefore happy to feature el gran escritor, Carlos Fuentes along with two American contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver (RIP 2011), and Ronnie Burk (RIP2003). We hope to bring new readers to these dedicated writers who left the world much too soon.

In this issue of sending to devil editors and critics we included advice from Judy Sternlight, formerly a senior editor at Random House, the largest publisher in the world.

Ms. Sternlight contributes an essay here on how to identify the right editor when you are self-publishing. Self-publishing, on the rise, is on every writer’s and would-be author’s minds. Sternlight’s recommendations are, therefore, that much more valuable. Check it out. We also have a brief essay by a pair of new indie publishers, Goddess Ink. Along this line, we featured a review by a fiction writer, Anel Flores, who took the plunge in selfpublishing.

As part of our own Mission to address borders and censorship we have published here photographs and links to two events that staff and I participated in Tucson, Arizona and the N.A.T.O. meeting in Chicago.

Last but not least, in this issue we showcase with a recent interview the distinguished poet, activist, attorney and professor, Martín Espada. We hope his readers, new readers and in particular, new poets are inspired by the poet’s lifetime commitment to his craft and convictions.

This fall there will be presidential elections in the United States and Mexico. We plan to feature in the Autumn Equinox issue essays that address prominent concerns, in particular, with the intranational relations between these two conjoined countries.

Finally, we will proudly showcase an exclusive interview with the New Mexico novelist, Rudolfo Anaya.

I wish to thank all contributors and staff who help make this labor of love a reality. We hope you enjoy La Tolteca. Please subscribe: It’s free!

Have a safe, productive and happy summer, everyone.

Ana Castillo, New Mexico, U.S.A. tolteca@anacastillo.com 5

Aki's Wild $tylez: Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends Marcelo Castillo When I was given Akilah Oliver's book of poetry, "A Toast in The House of Friends,” as a gift (from ‘My Dear Mom’), its title immediately conjured up images and daydreams of Cupcakes’ famous toasts or raps in Miguel Piñero's renowned play, "Short Eyes." I could see myself writing and memorizing my own toasts and getting my friends in spontaneous uproar as I called them out by nickname and giving them their props in outspoken rhyming formations. I had learned to break down words, phrases and entire sentences as a way to embrace language and motivate the inspirations hidden inside my sometimes, lethargic mind.

Once I cracked open Aki's book (as I like to call her, now acts as a spirit guide for me.

RIP. After reading her luxurious language so many times I feel like we are old friends.), I sifted through her life's stories and could almost taste, like scrumptious soul food, our mutual love for the written word. The poet began to teach me how to manipulate the structure of stanzas, the way I saw my welder father skillfully heat up and cultivated metal.

As relatively young and new Latino writer, my welding torch is my pen. I light it with the spark of will power and before long I have constructed a sculpture made of palabras, poetics, and phraseologies. Aki has shown me Prometheus's proverbial fire. Having been raised by a bi-sexual feminist mother myself, around her gay artist and intellectual friends and protégés, and enjoying several courses in Women’s Studies that I took as an undergrad, I can thoroughly relate to what Aki was doing with her work. The book, in general, is an embodiment of who she was as a person, the radical gender politics Aki stood for and lived. Beyond her personal beliefs, the collection is an alcove of metaphorical treasure of poetic slurs and spoken word performances.

As now an ardent fan I will be the first to admit, that some of Aki's pieces can be repetitive, like her poem "Hyena," and sound like random stream of consciousness, but even so, they become part of the beauty of her mystic poetry. Hints of the subject(s) of her poems can be read in the titles of her poems. Aki wants to show us that poems, like shamans, can take many forms and that everything can be a metaphor for anything. In the way first rate poetry speaks to each of us, her words, like spies, take on double lives to see what we are indeed capable of as artists and as a human collective. Words can mean something else or relate to words that they sound like.

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Aki loves the use of italics and to experiment with spacing to further give her poems depth and breath and, like a fisherwoman, reels in the reader. Likewise, to keep you re-reading, sentences start with lower case letters, as if in mid-sentence and end abruptly with no periods.

In “Milady’ she devises ingenious combinations of wordplay when she says, "whispering with ghosts,” "enthralled in vanishings" and "detonate & plummet." Simultaneously, she uses words like "brouhaha" in "Milady" and "hoopla" in her poem "Wishes," and it reminds me of a mother who is extremely hip but can't fathom what is cool to the youth of the ‘new school.’ Then, in her poem "Pop & Mockery” the poet responds to this thought with the use of “symbologies,” and with lines like "]sadness: then+/ who might be@com taking me for a ride--" Her poems are so inspired (and inspiring) they almost seem like she wrote them to Jesus himself or that she is having an ongoing discussion or maybe even a heated argument with God. It seems to be a goal. In her short and simply stated poem “Ache“ she says: “I just want to know

God." As if they are old friends (and/or enemies), or as if God knows what she is doing, she constantly questions Him. She embodies His voice, her voice, as well as the voices of the disenfranchised. Aki is political, sarcastic, and satirical which makes her poetry invigorating. "A Toast in The House of Friends" is so diverse in its imagination that one can constantly find new tricks and meanings contained within its pages. Aki encourages the participation of her readers as she uses the underline to leave blanks within her poems as in "fib #198291" and for us to go so far as to give her poems our own titles as is the case in her last two poems "________," and "________." (How cool is that for an aspiring poet to be invited into the poetry of another poet?

Aki Oliver is truly a word genius! :)> ) One piece stood out to me as the brightest because of its incorporation of her son Oluchi's graffiti art (included in plates) and because it reads like an intellectual grieving mother’s attempt to understand and define the art that her son valued as part of his own identity. It is called, "the visible unseen." Oluchi tragically died in 2003 at twenty-years-old due to intestinal gangrene, but mostly because of negligence in the emergency room at the hospital in Los Angeles, named after

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the great Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but that has ironically earned the name "Killer King."

Aki, as a spiritual thinker, is aware of the nature/sorrow/condition(s) of living in this daydream on Earth, but that does not take away from the fact that she misses her son and hopes that they might have accompanied each other longer on the journey, like two soul travelers, and that her womb was the cosmic portal that brought her dear Oluchi to this sometimes hellish reality. Having a Chicana poet as a mother and as once a graffiti artist, I can relate to Aki's piece and quite possibly the relationship she had with Oluchi.

As a teenager in Chicago what initially attracted me to graffiti was what I perceived as its exciting placement in the urban landscape.

Graffiti could be right on the busiest intersections, forcing itself into peoples' retinas or sky high on a rooftop, off the elevated train tracks where I found my own gaze glued like staring at a TV screen of the city 25 feet off street level. I was drawn to its rebellious nature (even though by the time I got involved with graffiti in the late 90s and 2000’s it had long been incorporated into mainstream culture) and the fact its obtuse qualities mean that not everyone could read it or, perhaps, do it. Graffiti is a culture of coded wordologies, an evolving art form of visually painted words. They combined my passion for spray painting and contemporary coded messages that I could be a part of, could lord over non-graffiti writers. I also took refuge or comfort in it. Graffiti consumed many nights and arrests in my young life but I saw it as the veritable plight of the graffiti artist as vandal. He lives on the fray of society's expectations while trying to show we are word revolutionaries, not petty criminals.

It was not until my late twenties that I realized how hard people worked for their businesses and homes and how foolish it felt being on train tracks scaling fire escapes and risking my life when I had a young family at home who needed me. Then, I realized that I should put my can down and pick up the pen to pursue my desire to write.

By this time, I’d come to the realization that in the great graffiti lineage, I was nobody magnificent. In fact, like so many urban youth I had been a mere molecule trying to proclaim my existence and sometimes in the wrong ways. How did I know I wasn't a giant in the graff game?

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Well, street fame is relative. I was bigger/more established in my techniques than many but in the whole gamut I wasn’t very original or dedicated. In fact, my passion for graffiti was waning out. I definitely wasn't a professional in any sense of the word. I wasn't getting paid. I wasn’t getting business owners seeking me out to paint.

Then again, I guess that was part of the appeal, that as a graff artist, I could create my own spaces to paint. The graffiti artist sees himself as a hero, a folk hero, or anti-hero who feels empowered by his chosen craft but, in actuality, he may have turned to it incapable of finding socially acceptable ways of showing his revolutionary or anarchist beliefs.

Oluchi, as far as I can tell from the book, was a promising graff artist. On the color plates, you see that he used the name "Links" for a crew humorously called "Assholes." "Links" initially conjures up images of cufflinks, the Elvin character in the videogame Zelda "Link", or perhaps the links in a bling chain. "Links" mostly reminds me of the word used to describe when website addresses are shared.

Or maybe Oluchi was the "link" between his Mom's hip/spoken word poetry to the younger street poets whom she genuinely longed to understand. It takes years to develop and learn the graffiti techniques necessary to do huge murals with their intricate phrasing. I wish I could have seen the artist Oluchi was training himself to become. He might have become angry at the world, like I was, for all its contradictions and hypocrisies. Or he might have come to experience racism and racial profiling to the point that graffiti would become his only way to cope and process.

Finally, and this is a big speculation on my part of what might have been if only he had lived, maybe "Link" was just having fun.

Graffiti, like most things in life, is not a game. It has real consequences like arrest and, even worse, occasionally, death. I learned the hard way how the graffiti lifestyle can ruin lives, if not destroy them, having had friends swallowed up by the greedy mouth of death's desires. Recently, an acquaintance, DARE CAB, was shot to death in a botched car jacking while dropping off some weed on Chicago’s Southside. A couple of years back a friend of 10+ years drowned in the Chicago River during the dead of winter after running from some pigs who were trying to arrest him for painting on an abandoned paint factory with some other writers.

In Aki’s beautifully rendered poetic essay, "the visible unseen," we see a black woman who is very informed in the ways of the world but wants to officially document, intellectualize, and define what graffiti is/was for her other poets. She enlists the help of her son Oluchi (God bless 9

his soul and hers), by using examples of his sometimes sketchy, but definitely wild style version of graffiti art. Once again true to form,

“She admits that

she starts her dissertation/study by not capitalizing the first word

while she

"the" and organizes her work in 8 "paragraphs," alternating them

"recognized it,” as

between standard text and italics.

an intellectual, she

She makes a critical point about the invisible authorship that goes into putting your name up on public spaces and notes a very poetic comparison between the body of the writer, the body of his/her work, and the body that is society. When first encountering

had to define what graffiti is, what it means/says.”

graffiti, she states she, "recognized in it an ugly ecstatic, a dialects of

violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph." She admits that while she "recognized it,” as an intellectual, she had to define what graffiti is, what it means/says. For example: who are the artists doing it? And what they are trying to say to society by forcing it into the public space?

Aki likens graffiti writing to "cultural activism," and her first definition of it is, straightforward: "graffiti uses collage, bold gestures, concerns itself with fonts, stylistic conceits, concerns itself with not just its public nomenclature, but in upsetting and reconstituting the visual forms of public discourse, of public space." She goes on to say that "it advertises difference and insurgency, illegality, vandalism, distraction." These acknowledgements mean a lot to me as a former serious graffiti vandal/tagger. One of her "paragraphs" on graffiti art formed by four words and 6 periods in italics, states, "...it reconstructs the lies..." This proclamation alone is what the graffiti writer aims to do in, unmitigated street post-modernist terms, to deconstruct and imagine the socio-cultural power that graffiti art has, Reconstruct the lies that society/the media/authority feed us.

We retaliate with sandpaper, diamond-tipped scribes, etch bath, markers, roller paint, and aerosol cans of spray paint. (My generation even had spray paint that was designed for graffiti with colors, caps, and pressures that the legendary pioneers of the art form could never have imagined!)

I liken Aki piece "the visible unseen" to a symphony comprised of words, ideas, and phraseologies.

The second part of her adeptly orchestrated opera poem falls inside our heads stealthily and swiftly like the sharp sword of a trained samurai. She recognizes that while we paint our names on places that we don't have "no legitimate right to..." but "in its [graffiti art and its participants that is] refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we 10

would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning." WOW! She pulls out the ace of spades, so to speak, and hits the crux of the matter so succinctly, that Aki being an observer/outsider there were parts I chose to cross out in order to feel the empowering effects of graffiti.

The last two paragraphs in "the visible unseen" are particularly intriguing. She finds it difficult to empathize or identify with an author/writer that does not take credit for his/her work.

At the same time, she states that we know graffiti "speaks to and through cultural productions, specific identities, home communities, but still manages through encoding to evade." Aki makes references to ancient graffiti terminology, such as "piece" (a gun) and "throw up" (which could mean actually puking but also refer to a bubble letter usually consisting of two or three colors) placing it in the loving grasp of Memory. When she says that "memory, then is history's mistress,” it is nothing short of a miraculous metaphor. Aki qualifies her observations by saying that we must "accept that history and memory are lovers," and moreover, that "graffiti posits history in the process of becoming undone." Graffiti, at the heart of it, is mainly about the stories/experiences related to the act of vandalizing, the pig chases and the preparation. It becomes the stuff of urban myths.

Links is gone. So is Aki. Akilah Oliver, language poet, teacher and mother of a graffiti artist—one more young man of color gone as testimony of the lies about society he so passionately fought through his illegitimate art concludes her poetic essay by posing a serious question to the reader about the nature of "the body." "…what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated."

Finally, she came to see graffiti not solely as an anarchist, vandal or the youths’ way to represent/express one's existence/influence on/within society she is among the few outsiders’ to see the graffiti credo: We are all separated from each other, from our own selves, and from the society that, ironically, we create.

MarceloCastillo©USA.2012

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A Letter to Akilah & Oluchi (underlined title) Marcelo Castillo I am "HE", HIM (underlined)*, Herr, and Dem. Can A___________Poet like "Aki" live 4 ever th rou g h Herr Poet Tree (Question Mark.) ?

?

?

*[Guerilla Tactix][

? ]

I A POLO GIZE if this Poema sounds like a if these wordz make "U" REMINISCE, like Mares spraypainted on The Complex wallz of your MEN

eulogy,

s s

tall

s St. ate s

You are A Teacher, PLEA$E teach ME HOW (underlined)* to "teach" ((her(underlined)*))...

Sociali$t studie$ & Mathematic@l Equatorz: *Me + MARI = YOU & Oluchi (Herr Sun) R.I.P. r.i.p...

Reast in Paz (Peace) Repainting Intricate Pieces (CREW)!

You Are such A $treetwyze Feminist Poet, Akilah! :) YOU have he lp ed /ME/ (be)come a SEEN(scene)/Unseen Poet, Myself.

An (In)visible Author of The Ultimate Graffiti Thesis.

MarceloCastilloŠUSA.2012

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Finding the Right Indie Editor Judy Sternlight I began my publishing career at Random House in 2000, working briefly in the sales department, and then moving over to editorial. Over the next nine years, I acquired and edited books for the Random House and Ballantine imprints, working with a fascinating collection of authors including Rita Mae Brown, Ana Castillo, Bret Anthony Johnston, Peter Matthiessen, Patricia T. O’Conner, and Kwei Quartey. I also commissioned new translations of major literary works for the Modern Library imprint.

In 2009, I left the corporate world and founded my own book-editing consultancy—Judy Sternlight Literary Services (www.JudySternlightLit.com). Today, while traditional publishers have been scaling back, new opportunities (due, in part, to digital publishing and self publishing) are multiplying. More editorial work is done on a freelance basis, outside of the traditional publishing houses; in other words, it’s a great time to be an independent book editor.

So what does an independent book editor do?

I help authors to improve their manuscripts at various stages in the publishing process. Copy editors focus mainly on grammar, punctuation, and accuracy. That’s not what I do. I’m a developmental editor. So while I do fix occasional bloopers, my main focus is on content, structure, audience, and style. I provide my clients with editorial reports on their novels and nonfiction proposals. This involves reading their material and writing detailed editorial letters, spelling out what’s working and what isn’t. I look at aspects such as the “voice” of the narrative, plot structure, pacing, continuity, character development, and the ultimate impact of the book. When

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appropriate, I also do full rounds of editing, marking the author’s manuscript with queries and suggested line-edits.

Sometimes I’m hired by publishers or agents. But most often, my clients are authors. They come to me through literary agents, writers I have worked with, and other publishing people who know my work.

In the good old days, in-house editors had the freedom to sign up a promising book and then work with the author—however long it took—to make that book live up to its full potential. But given the recent economic downturn, and the pressure on corporate publishers to make a certain level of profit each year, this has changed. These days, it’s tougher than ever for authors and agents to land book deals. Unless an author has a big platform (a public profile and lots of fans) or a lucrative sales track with their previous titles, publishing houses are reluctant to sign up books that still need work. It’s too risky. It stretches already overburdened editors too thin, and it takes publishers too long to earn their money back, after paying the author’s initial advance.

This is why experienced independent editors are in demand. We can strengthen a book before an agent submits it to publishing houses; we can troubleshoot if a book has been rejected by a few publishers; we can jump in to streamline a book that’s already signed up at a publishing house but isn’t ready for prime time; and we can help authors to polish their material before they self-publish.

When is the right time to consult an independent editor?

The answer is different for every writer, but here are some factors to consider: 1. Have you already taken your book as far as you can and carefully reviewed your manuscript? Showing unpolished work to developmental editors—work that has obvious 14

typos, for example—won’t give you the best bang for your buck. You don’t want us to spend our time (and your money) focusing on basics, rather than the substantive elements that could make your book stand out in a crowded marketplace.

2. On the other hand, there are times when it pays to consult an editor early on, to make sure you’re on the right track. By looking at a portion of your book, or a book proposal, an experienced editor can often shed light on whether your book has the potential for a sizable audience, and whether there are changes you can make to steer the book in the right direction.

3. Do you know how much it will cost to hire a freelance editor and are you comfortable making the investment? Calling in a professional will most likely give you a better shot at creating a book that will interest agents, publishers, and ultimately, readers. But it’s important to discuss a budget with your prospective editor before the work begins.

Freelance editors charge by the hour or by the project. Fees vary, depending on our level of experience and the complexity of your material. If an editor is interested in working with you, he or she will give you an estimate. Different factors may increase or decrease the fee.

For instance, a full round of line-editing is more time consuming (and therefore more costly) than an editorial review. And if your book needs more than one editorial round (most of them do), your editor can probably offer some alternatives. For instance, after an initial editorial review, I sometimes invite writers to show me a revised synopsis of the book before they embark on a full rewrite. This can save hours of work down the road, for both author and editor.

How do you find the right indie editor?

Connections:

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Ask writers, teachers, and any other publishing people you know for recommendations. If you don’t already have a good literary network, you should think about expanding your circle by attending workshops, conferences, and literary events, and connecting with fellow writers and book lovers online.

Research: Explore online and you’ll find some good leads.

I’m in a new indie editors’ group called 5E. Here’s our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/5E/171548696287829 And here are two more groups to consider:

Consulting Editors Alliance http://web.me.com/karlweberliterary/Consulting_Editors_Alliance/Home.html

Independent Editors Group http://bookdocs.com/

If you discover a couple of editors who might be a good match, Google them; check out their websites or LinkedIn or Publishers Marketplace write-ups and see if they might have an affinity for your work. The next step is to contact them directly. Freelance book editors will often ask to see a brief description of your book and a writing sample. They will also want to chat with you by phone, to give both of you a chance to ask questions and decide if you’re a good match. In that initial phone call, the editor will be looking for a clear picture of the author’s expectations and hopes for the book. And it’s a good opportunity for you to ask how the editor works, and what the cost might be.

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Intuition: All editors are presumably book lovers, but we each have different tastes and areas of expertise. We also have distinct personalities that might mesh beautifully, or clash terribly with different authors. Some writers will interview two or three editors before selecting the one that feels right. I think that’s a wise approach.

In order to successfully guide an author, the editor should feel a genuine connection to the author’s material. I have turned down projects when I felt that the chemistry was off or I didn’t truly connect with the writing. Those authors were better off finding another editor who could bring more enthusiasm and vision to the table.

Authors, if your gut is telling you that a particular editor might not be the right one—take it seriously, and talk to another editor or two.

After all the passion and hard work you’ve put in, you deserve the right match!

Judy Sternlight worked as a senior editor at Random House, New York. Her indie editor website: www.judysternlightlit.com

Latolteca©USA2012

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Moments of Illumination Interview with Martín Espada

Recently Samuel S. DuBois of LA TOLTECA interviewed award winning poet, professor, attorney and human rights activist Martín Espada. Espada addresses the present task of the poet by reminding us of the task of the poet and creative writer: to make clear the meanings of words. Doris Lessing in her non-fiction work, A Small Personal Voice (1956) expressed similar concerns of the generation that experienced the discovery and use of the Atom Bomb. Calling novelists (and creative writers) to establish in language shared values as humanists she wrote: “All the great words like love, hate; life, death; loyalty, treachery; contain their opposite meanings and half a dozen shades of dubious implication.”

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The following is online conversation between La Tolteca and Martín Espada on May, 2012. Espada responded from his home in Massachusetts:

La Tolteca: How is the "political imagination" an integral aspect of poetry? And is it necessary?

Martín Espada: What I call “poetry of the political imagination” is a confluence of vision and language, craft and commitment. There is a long tradition of the political imagination in poetry: Whitman, Neruda, Hughes, and many others I could name form the bedrock of that tradition.

In these times, poetry of the political imagination is essential. We live in an age of hyper-euphemism, where language has become divorced from meaning. This is how torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.”

Governments and corporations bleed words of their meaning; they drain the blood from words. Poets can reconcile language and meaning; they can restore the blood to words, for the present and for the future reader.

This, indeed, is how poets can become poet-citizens, the “unacknowledged legislators” envisioned by Shelley. There are many contemporary examples of poets speaking out as citizens of this republic, individually and collectively (the best example would be Sam Hamill’s organization, Poets Against War).

LT: In The Trouble Ball, your poems travel through time and across borders. The 20

poems witness death, struggle, struggle, and the heroism there within. Why is it necessary for these voices to be heard?

M. E.: If we are concerned about the poetics and practice of justice, then these voices must be heard. If we are committed to unveiling hidden histories, even within our families and communities, then these voices must be heard. The title poem, for example, is about my father, segregation, racism and baseball, among other things.

LT: And what stories and voices are not being heard?

M. E.: These days, the stories and voices of immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are not being heard, and they must be heard if we are to call ourselves a democracy. For that matter, there are precious few Latino voices in the media, as writers, reporters or commentators. We should be consulted; we should take part in the national dialogue.

LT: With the popular and critical success of The Republic of Poetry, in writing The Trouble Ball Ball, were there any new challenges or approaches that you took?

M. .E: There are new challenges that come with maturity. Friends die. The book is dedicated to five people who have died. (If it had been published a few months later, it would have been dedicated to seven people who died.) There are poems about each of them in the book. Some of these are elegies in the usual sense; some of these poems focus on the epiphanies—the moments of illumination--that made these individuals the people they came to be.

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There are also early memories that return and will not be denied. There are emotionally charged subjects I could not previously address in poetry. I now have the ability to address them. One of these poems is all about a woman from México, an immigrant I married so she could stay in the country, who died tragically young. Until recently, I couldn’t even talk about her, much less write about her.

LT: Speaking about maturity and understanding the past, becoming a fully empowered poet, from your present standpoint what words might you offer the young poet today?

M. E.: Read and write as much as you possibly can. Seek out the community of poets, but never forget the community from which you emerge. Remember that your life is the stuff of poetry, but so, too, are the lives around you. Speak for those who lack the opportunity to be heard.

LT: With Arizona's Arizona's dismantling the MexicanMexican-American Studies program in Tucson, removing and banning Zapata's Disciple: Essays, Essays, as well as the works of James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, and Ana Castillo out from classrooms, what is the message that the government of Arizona is sending? sending? And why do they fear these remarkable writers?

M.E.: .E.: First of all, when I found out—by reading about it in The Progressive— that my book, Zapata’s Disciple, had been banned in Tucson, I wrote a response that was posted on the magazine’s web page. That response reads, in part: Indeed, this book has been banned before—by the Texas state penal system, on the grounds that it might incite the inmates to riot.

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“They need not

“Being banned in Tucson, however, is a far greater honor. On

read the books

the list of banned authors I am keeping company with the likes of César Chávez, James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau and Howard Zinn, four great icons of resistance in this

they ban. Theirs is

country. I am keeping company with ancestors. I am keeping

the logic of fear,

company with some of the finest Latino/Latina writers alive

the reasoning of

today. May our words always trigger the sweating and babbling of bigots.”

racism.”

There is an essay in Zapata's Disciple called "The New Bathroom Policy in English High School.” This is how the essay ends: “On October 12th, 1996--Columbus Day--I gave a reading at a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona. The reading was co-sponsored by Derechos Humanos, a group which monitors human rights abuses on the Arizona-México border, and was coordinated with the Latino March on Washington that same day… At 7 PM, the precise time when the reading was to begin, we received a bomb threat. The police arrived with bomb-sniffing dogs, and sealed off the building. I did the reading in the parking lot, under a streetlamp.”

I’d like to think that this tale of Tucson had something to do with the book being banned in Tucson, but this would give the censors too much credit. In fact, this book is banned because it appears on the reading list of the banned Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson.

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In the end, this is just another bomb threat. All they have done is force us to evacuate the building. We will gather ourselves in the dark, and keep reading to each other in whatever light we can find. …So, what message is the government of Arizona sending out into the world? The government of Arizona takes pride in ignorance. More to the point: the state of Arizona understands the relationship between the suppression of

“What does the political establishment in Arizona have to fear

education and the subjugation of its Mexican and Native

from the truth?

American populations. Think of Jim Crow Mississippi

Everything.”

half a century ago; Arizona is the new Mississippi.

What the banned authors have in common is that they speak a certain kind of truth through the Mexican-American Studies program—not the “truth to power,” but truth to the powerless, history from the perspective of the conquered rather than conquerors, taught directly to the descendants of those conquered peoples. What does the political establishment in Arizona have to fear from the truth?

Everything.

Imagine a whole generation of young Mexican Americans and Native Americans in Arizona, well educated, well read and well-spoken, steeped in their own histories, inspired to organize themselves, defend their communities and change the world around them.

Goodbye, Sheriff Joe. Goodbye, Governor Brewer. No wonder the bigots are sweating.

LT: Gracias, poeta. Thank you for taking this time to address our questions. With 24

The Trouble Ball winning both the 2012 Milt Kessler Award and a 2012 International Latino Book Award, we wish you continued continued success. success.

The Trouble Ball by Martín Espada Review by Samuel S. DuBois As a poet recognized for political guts and insight, Martín Espada’s, in his book recent collection, the work strolls through the streets just a step ahead of shadows of generations and friends past.

Trouble Ball (2011, W.W. Norton), expands from personal experiences to familiar and fertile ground for Espada, the turbulent history of the Americas. This slender collection of twenty-four poems (many on the fine line between prose-poem and vignette) is dedicated to activists, lovers, and friends that influenced his life, sometimes directly and at times, through the far reaches of the published word. Through these works, readers may discover the heroes and struggles within the poet. Thusly, they may travel with Espada’s stories and poems across borders and time.

Espada describes the collection as, “a series of epiphanies.” With such appreciation and reflection, in the vignette “Isabel’s Corrido,” both sadness and truth glare at us from the page. This poem is humble and honest. Isabel ‘s stoic image holds moments together in time, allowing for the depiction of a constant struggle in this immigrant narrative. Isabel disappears for days and no one calls the police. Two people are brought together. They are not together. It recalls the AntiPoemas of Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra. The U.S. citizen attempts to alleviate problems. He doesn’t or can’t. The young Isabel dies of illness. Espada gives us a close-up on Isabel when he 25

writes, “Quiero ver las fotos, She would say.” These haunting words represent a sentiment felt by countless immigrants, documented and without documents, who wish to see their dreams in photographs avoiding the stark realities of their current situations.

The collection is divided into two parts: The Trouble Ball and Blasphemy. Part One centers on the social environment by and large in the United States. Fans of Espada’s The Republic

of Poetry will find the connections The Trouble Ball. Selections about Nicaragua and Chile are included: “The Rowboat,” “The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi,” and “The Buried Book of Jorge Montealegre.” In “Mr. and Mrs. Rodríguez Have been Deported, Leaving Six Children Behind with the Neighbors,” the poet counts off the names, ages and shoe size of each child. Here we are reminded of a contemporary of Espada’s, Juan Felipe Herrera whose work also focuses on Latino immigration without frills or sentiment.

Espada’ new work accelerates through the streets and highways of Espada’s life. In Part Two, Blasphemy, the marriage of sacred and profane seem to the poet’s reflections. There is an homage paid to the longtime, independent publisher of Curbstone Press, known to his friends as Sandy and a prose poem on visiting the tomb of Frederick Douglass. Atypical of poetry collections Espada generously offers notes at the end on all of the selections, which perhaps will be especially appreciated by students and teachers.

The title of the book comes from the trouble ball thrown by the ballplayer Satchel Paige. Here, the trouble balls are tossed by the poet, who is unafraid to challenge social hypocrisies and even other poets. The result is as

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unpredictable and successful in capturing our attention as Paige’s best pitch.

S.S. DuBois.Latolteca©USA2012

Isabel’s Corrido

Martín Espada

Para Isabel Francisca said: Marry my sister so she can stay in the country.

I had nothing else to do. I was twenty-three and always cold, skidding in cigarette-coupon boots from lamppost to lamppost through January in Wisconsin. Francisca and Isabel washed bed sheets at the hotel, sweating in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.

I met her the next day. Isabel was nineteen, from a village where the elders spoke of the language of the Aztecs. She would smile whenever the ice pellets of English clattered around her head. When the justice of the peace said

You may kiss the bride, our lips brushed for the first and only time.

The borrowed ring was too small, jammed into my knuckle.

There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne in plastic cups.

Francisca said: The snapshots will be proof for Immigration.

We heard rumors of the interview: they would ask me the color of her underwear. They would ask her who rode on top.

We invented answers and rehearsed our lines. We flipped through Immigration forms at the kitchen table the way other couples shuffled cards for gin rummy. After every hand, I’d deal again.

Isabel would say: Quiero ver las fotos. She wanted to see the pictures of a wedding that happened but did not happen, her face inexplicably happy, me hoisting a green bottle, dizzy after half a cup of champagne.

27

Francisca said: She can sing corridos, songs of love and revolution from the land of Zapata. All night Isabel sang corridos in a barroom where no one understood a word. I was the bouncer and her husband, so I hushed the squabbling drunks, who blinked like tortoises in the sun.

Her boyfriend and his beer cans never understood why she married me.

Once he kicked the front door down, and the blast shook the house as if a hand grenade detonated in the hallway. When the cops arrived, I was the translator, watching the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable squaw from every Western he had ever seen, bare feet and long black hair.

We lived behind a broken door. We lived in a city hidden from the city.

When her headaches began, no one called a doctor. When she disappeared for days, no one called the police. When we rehearsed the questions for Immigration, Isabel would squint and smile. Quiero ver las fotos, she would say. The interview was canceled, like a play on opening night shut down when the actors are too drunk to take the stage. After she left, I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird tacked to the bedroom wall.

I left too, and did not think of Isabel again until the night Francisca called to say:

Your wife is dead. Something was growing in her brain. I imagined my wife who was not my wife, who never slept beside me, sleeping in the ground, wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her head, no epitaph and no corrido, another ghost in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin of dead Mexicans who staggered for days without water through the desert.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.

I kept a snapshot of the wedding: yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

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There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again.

Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company2011

Mr. and Mrs. Rodríguez Have Been Deported, Leaving Six Children Behind with the Neighbors

Martín Espada

Please donate shoes to this family care of the Mesilla Cultural Center.

Rodríguez family shoe sizes: Marina, age 17: size 6 Rocío, age 15: size 5 Memo, age 13: size 7 Jesús, age 12: size 7 José, age 8, size 4 Ana, age 5: size 3

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Racist Clichés in the U.S.A. Ronnie Burk Hula girls, Aunt Jemima, Stepin Fetchit, the Frito Bandito, the Disney version of Pocahontas: racist stereotypes prosper in the U.S. more than anywhere else in the world. As this short list suggests, they are especially brought forward to sell products and services. It is a sign of the times that the Point-of-Purchase Advertising Institute (P.O.P.A.I.) has revived the old cigar-store Indian as its official trophy; dubbed the “OMA” (for Outstanding Merchandising Achievement) it is awarded to firms for the ‘excellence’ of their pointof-purchase exhibits in stores, based on, of course, “the display’s ability to increase sales.” Typically, the attitude of industry and business is that racism is fine and dandy as long as sales keep going. (It is not for nothing that these people are also known for the exploiting class!) The consumer is expected to forget that way over 50% of Black Americans under the age of twenty-one are unemployed, that Hula dancers sell plane tickets to luxury vacations no real Hawaiian could afford. Just spend your money and have a nice day!

How much have things really changed since the days of the ‘old’ colonialism? The language of the white colonizer, quickly adopted by his financiers and political representatives in the mother country, reduced whole peoples—the great majority of the world’s population—to vulgar, hateful, one-dimensional caricatures, abusive

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characterizations that affected mass psychology and helped determine the destiny of nations.

Today’s cultural colonialism is a bit more subtle and incomparably more hypocritical—more likely to refer to minorities as “dysfunctional’ than “inferior”—but otherwise the same old repulsive show goes on. In addition to its big part in advertising and sales, the racist cliché is also highly visible in entertainment (the “fun” way of selling ideology). The most sophisticated techniques of a multi-billion dollar commercialized culture industry are used to perpetuate the pretense, on the part of those who have appointed themselves white, that their lack of pigmentation somehow makes them “superior,” and to keep the marginalized, disaffected, unruly minorities “in their place”— that is, wherever they are no threat to white delusions of grandeur.

At the end of the nineties one is still hard-pressed to find an authentic portrayal of the Latino experience out of Hollywood. To this day the broken English of a domestic or the “Latina spitfire” puta is more likely to be encountered. Star roles go to whites in brownface. Black men continue to be portrayed as buffoons in TV sitcoms, and demonized as cruel, evil criminals on the news. Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown may have set a record for the number of racist slurs used in one movie. Malevolent Asians and West Indians are still stock figures in many films.

Innumerable works of fiction, textbooks, comic books, politicians’ jokes, best-selling crackpot pseudo-science (The Bell-Curve and others), radio talk-shows and slick newsstand travel magazines convey the same sickening message: whiteness mysteriously (in truth, dishonestly and arbitrarily) confers privilege and power.

By word or image, the racist cliché is always a message of domination, and thus, reminders that the historic bases of U.S. capitalism—slavery, genocide and land theft—are 31

still plaguing us all. For those with white skin, such words and images are confusing and disorienting enough, but for people of color they are infinitely worse. For those who belong to the less populous minorities in the U.S., from childhood on the process of accommodation to white society is formatted in such a way as to liquidate all sense of who

we are. For too many of us, years of bombardment by whiteness lead to cynicism, selfhatred, and lack of confidence, despair, and submission to the white Christian cross of western imperialism.

Let’s face it, we live in a white supremacist society, and white supremacists control, to a horrifying extent, the words and images we use. The hard lesson—hard to swallow, hard to digest—is that minorities outside the colorless zone of whiteness will never (token exceptions aside) be portrayed with dignity, authenticity, and intelligence until the oppressed themselves seize the means of production.

It is in this light that we can begin to appreciate the surrealist movement’s subversive and revolutionary role. Surrealism is an excellent guide to seizing the means of production because that is where the experience of surrealism begins—seizing the means of production of language itself. Disregarding aesthetic criteria, social conditioning and other inhibitions, surrealists immediately recognized that the practice of automatic writing and free association topples mental blocks, dissolves reified notions, liberates the imagination and makes countless electrifying connections that otherwise would be impossible to make.

First on the poetic plane, and then in painting, collage, sculpture, film and dance, surrealism began unleashing new, unheard-of defiant images—images of the Marvelous, of revolt, of revolution, of freedom, in dazzling contrast to all that is banal, servile, cheap, and deadly to humankind and planet Earth. And ever since then, an inexhaustible supply of new surrealist games, experiments and techniques to provoke inspiration has immeasurably multiplied this liberated territory.

As the Czech and French surrealists wrote in their joint Platform of Prague in April 1968: “The role of surrealism is to tear language away from the repressive system and to make it the instrument of desire. Thus, what is called surrealist ‘art’ has no other goal than to liberate words, or more generally the signs, from the codes of usefulness or 32

entertainment. In order to restore them as bearers of revolution of subjective reality and of the essential inter-subjectivity of desire in the public mind.”

Is there a better way to start the Revolution?

For me, as a Mexican of Indian ancestry, born on this side of the border, of realize constraints, it is the practice of poetry that has allowed me to explore, beneath the surface world, the meaning of my Indianness, having no elders, no history, no tribe, no genealogy, no language and certainly no nation, I say that it is surrealism that has enabled me to penetrate the uncharted areas of my own being. Nothing is lost, everything can be found, in the Marvelous game of pure psychic automatism. It was this miraculous weapon, as Aimé Césaire so brilliantly put it that first gave me some leverage with “the master’s” language.

Seizing the means of production of language and images is no mere abstraction, but a living process that can only be the beginning of true life for all of us who live and struggle outside and against the miserabilist cliché-ridden destitution of official “whites-only” reality.”

Self-defined surrealist poet, collagist Chicano Buddhist Ronnie Burk (1955 – 2003) once took a ‘writing’ residency in the attic of the house provided for Ana Castillo during a teaching residency in Massachusetts.

Later, living in San Francisco shortly before his death he was noted for his scandal-provoking direct actions as a member of S.F. ACT-UP, an AIDS advocacy organization. This essay was first published in: Race

Traitor, Summer 1998, Number 9.

Adios, Surrealist Activist Poet!

(1956 - 2003) LaTolteca/RonnieBurk©USA.2012

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My Captured Audience Teaching College Credit Sociology in a Prison Janine Stubbs When I first walked into the empty classroom with bars on the windows, I was somewhat apprehensive of what my classroom experience was going to hold for me. Most of all, I hoped I had enough material to hold the attention of 25 men in a state prison for three hours, one night a week. I also taught in another community college 40 miles away. But those students were nursing students, recent graduates of high school, and sometimes students who were gaining credits to help them transfer to a larger college. They weren’t locked up, but they probably felt they were sometimes. How was I going to teach offenders, convicted of God only knows what sort of crimes?

I would find out shortly.

At the top of the hour, men in loose white pants and white blousy cotton shirts began to file into the classroom. As they entered the room, they greeted me and eventually left me in a polite fashion with words such as, “Hello.” “How are you this evening?” “How was your week?” “Thank you ma’am for coming to teach us.” “Be careful driving home.” “See you next week.” “Have a good week.”

Their politeness surprised me and made me feel welcome but I was always on guard and careful to be attentive to what went on around me. There was a mixture of men in my classes.

There were white men, black men, Hispanics, a few Asians, and an occasional Native American, from time to time. It was a young population, but, occasionally, I had older men in the class, as well.

Over the years, I was to teach a large variety of offenders. There were pedophiles, murderers, thieves, polygamists, transvestites, ex-cops, body guards, and one was an executive for a savings and loan institution. The latter guy was indignant at being in a situation where he was forced to live with such lower class people. He boasted of a couple of degrees and was taking an undergraduate class to have something to do. He said his mother was a concert pianist and he was used to a comfortable life. He said in a written assignment that when he got out of prison, he was going to run as far as he could and wouldn’t stop until he found someone who knew who

34

Buckminster Fuller was. I answered in his paper and caught him by surprise by saying, “You mean the architect who invented geodesic domes?”

For most, however, illegal drugs were the common denominator for their offenses. One young man told me he was in a daze part of the time because his body was experiencing sobriety for the first time that he could remember and he didn’t know how to handle it. The year before, when Ann Richards was Governor, there were psychological therapists to counsel with the addicts.

But when George W. Bush became Governor, the word was out that he didn’t sympathize with either alcoholics or drug addicts. So, there wasn’t any help for guys coming off the chemicals they had long been dependent upon.

Another offender told me he abused every chemical he could before he was arrested. He knew as soon as he was released from prison, his desire for drugs would uncontrollably return. But numerous individuals did confess that the incarceration was the only factor that had saved them from fatally destroying themselves. It was only this legal intervention that they felt might help them to turn their life around. They received guidance from church people who volunteered their time at the prison.

Much of the information that they revealed to me and the class was from the papers I assigned. After the first few classes, I realized that many of the guys didn’t know how to write essays. So, I began to assign reflection papers every week. I instructed the students to connect to the readings and lectures by comparing different perspectives and relating them to their experiences and other material they had read. My first year of prison teaching, I showed movies that related to the “Marriage and Family” course. They were easy to find and helped make the lessons come alive.

In the movie, “The Way We Were,” they compared the marital problems of Robert Redford’s and Barbara Streisand’s roles to the unhealthy communication practices that were discussed in the textbook. They also wrote about them in their reflections. Often, they made connections to their own marriage problems.

They had fun watching “Forrest Gump” and observed the parental love and guidance Forest received from his mother and contrasted it to his girlfriend’s lack of parental love and the abuse she received from her father. They were then able to analyze how it resulted in their different psychological developments and see it from a social structuralist perspective as well as the protest scenes of hippies in California, especially. They also related this to their similar experiences through the discussions in class.

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When I first gave these assignments, I soon realized I had to teach them the simple aspects of writing an introductory paragraph or statement and to support it with paragraphs and a closing.

One time, I had a visiting English teacher do a quick course in writing during the second week of class.

The movies came to a halt the second year after other offenders in the prison system challenged the right of students to see movies they could not watch but the written assignments continued for years after.

During classroom discussions, numerous students confessed their problems and sometimes received advice from other students. In some of my classes, we had peer grading of the papers, when I felt it was needed. It was done in a friendly manner and this helped students see others’ mistakes and be more cognizant of their own weaknesses while writing. Of course, I gave them an opportunity to revise their papers before they handed them in.

As the years passed, I had stronger students in my classes. They wrote more easily but many still needed more depth in their reflections. One summer, 28 student offenders walked into my class. When I read their bios and listened to their introductions, I decided to give them more challenging writing assignments. I introduced Bloom’s Taxonomy. When assignments are too demanding, students who don’t want to work will drop out. So, instead of punishing them, I punished myself because none of them dropped. Consequently, I read 28 papers a week, searching for Bloom’s criteria of high level writing in their reflections.

Over the years of teaching at a state prison for almost twenty years, I learned a lot from the offenders. I think they learned a lot from each other and from their shared experiences. I believe that writing is therapeutic and a wonderful learning tool, especially when it is shared through discussions. At the end of the semester, I encouraged my students to continue with their reflections and to keep a journal of their past and present experiences. To keep in touch with their families, especially their children, I also encouraged my students to write as many letters of their feelings and experiences as they could share with them. I believe that writing is a healthy bonding experience and one that we should all indulge in.

Janine Stubbs, San Antonio Memoir Writing Workshop, 2009. Ms. Stubbs taught creative writing in prison facilities for 24 years. janine-stubbs stubbs.blogspot blogspot.com/ janine stubbs blogspot

JanineStubbs©USA2012 36

Film Review of Precious Knowledge: Dismantling of Mexican-Indian Culture at the U.S./Mexican Border Yovani Flores

Inspiring. One word to best describes the documentary Precious

Knowledge, a sequence of events leading to the now dismantled ethnic studies program in Tucson, Arizona. Director Ari Luis Palo and producer Eren Isabel McGinnis capture alarming verbal attacks and public hostility instigated by Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) administrators and political bodies of power including legislative representatives. Precious

Knowledge unveils classroom scenes where individuals compare past learning experiences, new challenges, and high expectations set by M.A.S teachers Curtis Acosta and Jose Gonzales. Then, a wide lens spans across landscapes and neighborhood streets lined with mission-style homes and masterful community murals while hip-hop rhymes, weeping violins, and mariachi traditions set the tone for ultimate heartbreak.

TUSD originally implemented Ethnic Studies to close achievement gaps and reduce high dropout rates among Mexican-American students. Students who participated in the program exceeded in state standardized tests and a 93% graduation rate led to higher college enrollment.

Despite the program’s success, Ethnic Studies was banned leaving the 32,500 Latino students it served starving for precious knowledge. Ironically, TUSD's crusade to eliminate the program was launched to ensure everyone was treated as equal individuals - not by ethnicity. Yet, Latino students were cast as “angry young radicals” as opposed to critical thinkers engaged in their educational dreams and achievement.

With unsettled voices, Crystal, Pricilla and Gilbert reflect common threads in how they navigate personal barriers to find their place in education. Their passion for knowledge turns urgent compelling them to organize students, community members and families to speak at district 37

school board meetings. As a Latina mother living in Phoenix, I was outraged by the use of demoralizing comments and rhetoric by a ranting politician who stated that teachings based on African-American, Mexican and Asian cultures is not only anti-American - it’s illegal. These statements leave no room but for us to assume such comments were aimed at M.A.S students and people of color as a whole.

Our Arizona children have become targets of hate speech and racial profiling due to repressive laws such as SB 1070 and HB 2281. I am certainly not alone in dealing with educators or school principals who were quick to build baseless narratives about my daughter's academic abilities - regardless of her achievements. Arizona is fortunate to have young people like Crystal, Priscilla and Gilbert who continue to utilize their voices in this community with self-respect and passion; the heart and true purpose of precious, beautiful knowledge.

En Lak ech,Tu Eres Mi Otro Yo.

YovaniFlores.MemoirWritingWorkshopŠTucson.2012 38

Carlos Fuentes (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012)

Rachel Panton

When I was asked to write a memoriam for Carlos Fuentes for La Tolteca, my initial reaction was “why me”? I am an outsider; I am not Chicana or Latina in any way.

But as I began to reflect on the works and life of Fuentes in relation to my own it all made perfect sense. He not only influenced Latino literature, he made an indelible global impact on writing, period. Nonetheless, some of my most loved and memorable revolutionary teachers as a young student of literature: Rane Arroyo, Sandra Cisneros, Octavio Paz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Isabel Allende, and of course Ana Castillo, carried tools Fuentes imparted during The Boom. These lessons of self-authorship, spiritual representation, exploration, and social justice were my balms in Gilead; giving me, a woman of color, permission to study many authors outside of the Canon. Later, they would also influence my doctoral research on contemporary women healers practicing ancient Indian and African religions; indigenous spiritualities of antiquity we all possess, but often ignore, opting for Western 39

ways of being. The beauty and legacy of Fuentes, however, teaches us that there is great value in the spiritual and cultural life lived on the border.

To Fuentes, life was magical and sensual, like the times he would visualize the Aztecs while visiting family in Mexico, yet filled with practical realities of 20th Century Western ideals, like completing his law degree and working in International Affairs.

Borders of fact and fiction, reality and myth, space and time were fluid for Fuentes, as in Diana: The Goddess who Hunts Alone and Terra

Nostra, where spirit and body have limited boundaries. Even life and death, as seen in his 2001 text, Inez, were not completely contained as binary opposites. Like a Toltec, Fuentes skillfully blended art, culture, “civilization“, and magic realism. He summoned pre-colonization spirituality throughout his writing, expelling linear ways of thinking as the only means to meaningful prose, laying the foundation for stream of consciousness writing in Latin American literature.

Fuentes, then, was forever questioning absolute truths, pushing himself to learn beyond conventional wisdom and doing more, writing even in his final years. Nevertheless, his personal drive and evolution was connected to his convictions about individual purpose and its relation to social consciousness and justice. Many of his critics, though, have dismissed his writing and impact for his tendencies of bravado and vulgarity, even going so far as to label Fuentes pornographic. Like many great men and writers, these may have been elements of his work and life, but they certainly did not define him. Whether or not we agree with all of his methods, it cannot be refuted that Fuentes challenged his followers to never stagnate, to change old habits of the mind, to balance our multiple selves with boldness and yet above all to strive for authenticity.

And for that I say thank you, Señor Fuentes.

RachelPanton2009WORKSHOPChicago©USA2012

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Empanada: A Lesbiana Story en Probaditas by Anel I. Flores Review Montserrat Fontes Divided into three different sections: Food, Religion and Sex, Anel I. Flores’ Empanada, is a delightful collection of vignettes that traces the story of Paloma from childhood to age 17 when she leaves her family home to begin her independent life as a lesbian. Ms. Flores employs a variety of styles that demonstrate her promise as a writer.

Ineluctably, the reader is drawn in when Paloma describes her Saturday mornings and she’s been allowed to sleep in to 8 a.m. “because mami and buely were blessing us with homemade tortillas. The soft smell was so comforting, I often daydreamed there was a tortilla right under my cheek, between my pillow and me.”

We recognize that special moment and connect to some special time in our own Proustian past when smell, taste, comfort, and love were all connected.

This Food section continues to include café, carne guisada, Friday Whataburger day, onions, and endless family members coming in through the back door to eat whatever Buela has cooked. This section is familiar and fun. A potpourri of images flood each of the scenes and Ms. Flores makes us feel the love that transpires in this family, although Buela is aging and the end is in sight.

The most memorable and touching relationship in Empanada is between Paloma and Buela. Indeed, when Buela dies, the reader feels her death wants to comfort Paloma. A most poignant scene occurs in the Religion section in the vignette titled, “Buela’s Christmas Money Stops.”

Paloma asks her grandmother, “If you were at a dance right now, Buela, what would you wear?” Anxiously, we wait to read the response and after reading how, “Her cheeks hang down … past her chin…” and “the silence between then and now 41

makes me wonder if she’s dead already,” Buela smiles, “and slowly begins to laugh.”

She says, “If I could dance, mijita, I would dance to the canción, ‘Stardust.’”

The reader is so delighted with the answer that we celebrate with Paloma when she says, “The memory she must see behind her eyes makes everything about her face look new and young. She is in a fantasy of something dangerous or beautiful.” The bonding between these two generations is touching, and filled with hope.

The Sex section is both humorous and sexy, but not without its problems, especially when Mami is troubled by Paloma’s sexuality. Tia Chita, Paloma’s aunt and godmother, insists it’s “just a phase,” and insists that Paloma cannot possibly be a lesbian because she’s too pretty, too intelligent and too feminine. The vignette titled, “Te Ves Mas Sexy” airs out the conflicts of a young Chicana with her family, and we see why she has to leave her home: “My mami was feeling even less at home in the house she built.” She hates to leave, but we agree with her that it’s the only way.

In future writings of Anel I. Flores we will look forward to revisiting Paloma’s friend Chuy and of course the matriarchal Buely.

(Anel I. Flores) ______________________ American Book Award novelist Montserrat Fontes lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Montserrat.Flores©USA.2012

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Goddess Ink: Publishing Our Way Anne Key and Candace Kant

One lazy evening in Las Vegas in May of 2010, part way through a bottle of crisp Viognier, an idea long lodged deep within our wombs was fertilized. The sun had set, and the cool night breeze layered upon the rising warmth from the concrete and sand, bringing us to a state of ease that allowed the night blossom to unfurl fully. Both of us were college professors, one on the verge of retirement, and we knew the industries of education, research and publishing. Both of us were priestesses in a branch of Paganism that focused on the Divine Female, the multiple manifestations of Goddess. And both of us knew that mainstream publishers were not interested in what activated our minds and illuminated our hearts.

We knew there were books yet to be written that remained unwritten due to writers’ feeling that publishers were not interested; we knew this because we felt it ourselves. Like seeds without earth and water, books with an audience languished because there was no publisher. So we created a publishing house that would be the earth and water for the fiery blossoms, which, would brighten the shelves, nightstands, hearts, and minds of those wishing to read what had not yet been written. Uniting our skills as priestesses and scholars, we began.

Our first book was an anthology, which, we co-edited. As we are both devotees of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet – She of the lion’s head, woman’s body, fierce roar and strong heart – we began with a devotional to Her. There is little written about Sekhmet, and only a few slim volumes about Her, so the ground was fertile and ready for seeds. We called for writings from the many women throughout the world that hold a place in their heart and devotions for Her, and 43

they answered the call in spades. Our volume, entitled Heart of the Sun: An Anthology in

Exaltation of Sekhmet went through iUniverse for its first publication, so that we would be guided through the process. The anthology was well received, and we have subsequently planned three more: on the Irish Saint and Goddess Brigit (Brigit, Sun of Womanhood) edited by Michael McDermott and Patricia Monaghan; on Priestesses historical and present (edited by the two of us), and on the Hindu Goddess Kali (In Her Fierce Embrace: An Anthology for Kali, the Dark

Goddess) edited by Chandra Alexander.

Our second book was the memoir that Anne wrote about her three years as priestess at the Temple of Goddess Spirituality Dedicated to Sekhmet, located north of Las Vegas. Desert Priestess: a memoir. There are other books planned on the horizon.

Every step of the way, Goddess Ink is focused on sustainability. We use POD (print-on-demand), which means that only books that are ordered will be printed, eliminating excess and waste. Our printer utilizes a Chain of Custody (CoC), an accounting system that tracks wood fiber through the different stages of production, ensuring the integrity of the paper supply chain from responsibly managed forests. Our audio books are available as downloads from CD Baby, eliminating further use of material resources. In this way, we strive to bring the best and brightest works in the most sustainable way possible. ____________

Anne Key and Candace Kant Š 2012, USA, http://www.goddess-ink.com/ (Anne Key, workshopista: Memoir Writing Workshop, Spring, Taos, 2012)

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Ana Castillo Memoir Writing Workshop, Tucson

In Tucson: Listen: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kxci/.artsmain/article/14/218/1929065/KXCI.Public.A ffairs/30.Minutes-.Ana.Castillo/

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfjgbpOmvnM

Watch Precious Knowledge! http://preciousknowledgefilm.com/

Faculty of the Former Mexican American Studies Program Tucson High School with la Maestra (with canine mascot.)

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NATO and the Occupy Movement Arrive in Chicago .

S.S. DuBois

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On Monday, May 15th, Local activists, students, and families blocked the doors and crowded the walk ways outside of immigration and immigration custom enforcement offices calling for a moratorium of deportations, pathway to citizenship, and rights for immigrant communities nationwide.

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On Friday night, May 19th, activists, students, Chicagoans, and union workers rallied downtown. After a tense standoff with the police, the crowds were able to march on Michigan Avenue, then walking west to the Board of Trade. .

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On Sunday, May 20th, activists against war, austerity, as well as other people with similar social issues marched from Grant Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan, towards the NATO Summit at McCormick’s Convention Center. The police presence was extremely high. On a stage that faced the people, police surrounding its left and right sides, Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars tossed away their medals of honor on to an empty field behind the stage in protest. They spoke of their sorrows and regrets. The police looked into the crowd for trouble. After the veterans walked off stage, while encouraging the crowd to follow, a riot between the police and demonstrators sparked.

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LETTERS TO LA TOLTECA It gives me great pain to think that ONLY those who have attended your workshops can interact with your magazine.

As I look up your http I notice that it is not the latest issue of Spring Equinox but the fall of last year. This notice email you send me about your sign up for the magazine is to some ISSUU web site that was never mentioned and I left that door closed before I opened it. Hijole, with so few venues for the rest of us to share and post and address the limited audiences that we deal with, you dangle a carrot with this invitation. I am not happy at the moment. NO, I don't have an MBA in writing either and am not schooled by anyone but my heart. Gracias por nada. Que verguenza me da de sentir that all of life will soon become nada mas than a business venture.

-- One of the little guys, Don Jose Guerrero/yao tecatl ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beautiful magazine, Ana. Congrats, and thanks for including Carmen. Just tweeted a link to it and put up a note on FB. I'll add a link to the Wings website tomorrow.

-- Bryce [Millligan, Publisher, Wings Press, San Antonio -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

La Tolteca welcomes comments (and comments on the comments) . If you have trouble posting on Issu.com send to us at: tolteca@anacastillo.com

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CONGRATULATIONS to all!

2012 La Casita WriterWriter-inin-Residence Mónica Ramírez: NonNon-Fiction, Summer, 2012 Mónica Ramírez is an educator, organizer, attorney and activist. She is the founder and director of Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. An essay based about the trauma that undocumented immigrant immigrant women experience because of the sexual violence that they suffer at work will appear in the fall issue of La Tolteca.

Carmen Tafolla Poet Laureate of the City of San Antonio, 2012 (Workshopista, San Antonio 2010) “I am delighted to be able to to empower the community of San Antonio, from its younest to its oldest residents.” The celebrated poet is looking forward to spearheading new programming in her city, which will include a bilingual spoken word event.

Rachel Panton Panton , Ph.D., 2012 , Lesley Lesley University. Dissertation: Sassin' through Sadhana: Learned Leadership Journeys of Black Women in Holistic Practice.] (Workshopistas, Chicago, 2009) Samuel S. DuBois: DuBois: B.A., 2012 in Literature, Roosevelt University, Chicago Ana Castillo Writing Workshops, Workshops, Upcoming Writing Writing Webinars and OneOne-toto-One online. online.

To Apply Contact: anacastillowritingworkshops@gmail.com July 6th, Más Memoir Writing, Taos, New Mexico September 22nd, Memoir Memoir Writing, Salt Lake City, Utah

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NEXT ISSUE: AUTUMN EQUINOX Theme: Aquí y más allá U.S. and Mexico’s Presidential Elections: Concerns We Should Have Mayan Prophecies, December 21, 2012 Showcase: Rudolfo Anaya And much more!

Call for Ana Castillo Memoir Writing Participants: Submit Unpublished Writing, Any Genre!

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