THIS MARCH, I’ll be presenting at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s Transforming Race Conference. This article provides the backstory for why I began the Unapologetic Mexican blog as well as prefaces my talk at the conference.
THE PASSING OF “DON” LUIS LEAL marks the end of a long and fruitful life, and one lived by a pioneer in the field of Chicano Literature.
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, celebrated and prolific Chicano poet, has been awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award for his latest work, Half of the World in Light.
THE CONCEPT OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE is a concept that makes the comfortable comfortable. But is armed struggle the proper form of resistance to an oppressive State? Is there a biodiversity of Resistance that needs happen? Arundhati Roy muses on Resistance.
THE COMMON ELEMENTS OF OPPRESSION is a piece written by Suzanne Pharr, and should be required reading for all activists and media influencers and bloggers or anyone else who deals with society on a level more involved than waving to a few people on the way to the mailbox.
HOWARD ZINN: With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question anymore of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once-fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed, embrace of the idea…
STEPHEN COLBERT always jabs and parries and stutter-steps while most of his guests are busy arranging their facial expression or shouting out unfunny jokes to try and appear as if they are keeping up. Author Sherman Alexie gets off some fast shots and smart comments as he makes his case for Barack Obama.
LEO CHAVEZ: Those who foment terror of the “threat” of brown babies are not likely to listen to facts when they have deep-rooted prejudices to express. Among the biggest threats undocumented immigrants pose is that their vulnerability and our scapegoating of them for taking jobs we won’t do allow American citizens to expose themselves as hypocrites.
IN ALL WAYS it pays every day to turn our backs on the corrupt, corporate, soulless and mediocre messaging being pushed down our throats and into our ears. Hypnotists and salesmen for the Murkan SleepDream are working fulltime behind the glossy televised scenes, and they can shift from disaster to pablum to syrupycheer quicker than you can move your hands to plug up your ears.
PRESS RELEASE: After 20 years of archeao-astronomical research, Alberto Hagar-González has deciphered “keys’ hidden for thousands of years in thegeometrical patterns of the Mayan pyramids and the steles and glyphs of Yucatan, Mexico. Saturday, September 13th he will give a free talk at Southwest College, Little Theatre in Los Angeles starting at 11 AM.
EARTHLINGS need to know that I don’t feel interested today in a long post on any given topic. Yet—dammit—the planet requires my input on certain subjects and I’m not going to stand in between humankind’s need for that input and…me. Because that would just be selfish. Aside from spatially impossible.
NYTIMES: The child of migrant workers and now a professor at the University of California, Riverside, Herrera began to publish and perform verse in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amid the Chicano cultural ferment of Los Angeles and San Diego; he has been, and should be, admired for his portrayals of Chicano life. Yet he is no mere recorder of social conditions.
I am the Aztec Angel
fraternal partner
of an orthodox society
where pachuco children
hurl stones
through poetry rooms
and end up in cop cars
their bones itching
Mi corazón tendría la forma de un zapato if a siren lived in every village. Pero la noche es interminable when it leans on the sick and there are ships that want to be seen para poder hundirse tranquilos.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
