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.
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.
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!
