Lunes con Lalo Delgado: Poetic Wisdom for your Week from the Poet Laureate of Aztlan - De Alamogordo a Alburquer, Samaritana, Guide - New Books in August - Latin America

LUNES CON 

LALO DELGADO

POETIC WISDOM FOR YOU WEEK

FROM THE POET LAUREATE OF AZTLAN

DE ALAMOGORDO A ALBUQUER

i just drank a bud and ate some peanuts

but penas remain my daily vitaminas,

penas mias y penas de otros.

someone, as i was entering

the el chuco airport,

yelled

...a como te vez triste, lalo...

and i felt like shouting back

….pos estoy triste,

pendejo...

but instead i forced a smile up

and merely greeted.

here i am aboard this frontier

convair 580

playing checkers con pueblitos

landing here and there,

here go down the wheels again,

i think it's albuquerque now.

today, un entierro,

mañana por la mañana

un heavy rap at monte vista

y por la noche un party

y la noche de hoy

i leave up to god

or is it satan.

en verdad que cansado

y que viejo me siento

...o es que estoy en verdad.

marching like a soldier

without orders

my soul alone establishes the borders.

===

                                      SAMARITANA

robbed early of life's meaning

beaten hard by fate's ice cold hand

I laid in misery spinning

unable with my wounds to stand

while people looked, passed, kept passing,

with lack of faith quickly winning

your coming was but my dreaming

but you were there my wounds dressing

====

GUIDE

dig a hole to die

so fossiled will remain

the organic thought of you

and scrape your elbows

if need be to the bone

with those about you

that the wound remain

impressed like a date

upon a calender

and care and share

and feel

and wise and long the smile

and deep and warm the sigh

while if a tear must come

then let it come

carrying in her baggage meaning

and while you see that

they may turn and seek

be sure and mark distinctly

your own way

and lost with them become you way

and way with them be sure and feel

their steps

and what am i if anything saying

but to live

but to know life

rather than doubt

the meaningless reality

of what we may perhaps be.

Poems above are from Refexciones by Abelardo Delgado. (c) Abelardo Delgado. Punished with permission of Dolores Delgado and the Delgado Estate.

NEW BOOK IN AUGUST 2010

LATIN AMERICA FOCUS

What If Latin America Ruled the World?

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (June 21, 2010)

ISBN-10: 1408805995

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera 

For most Europeans and Americans, Latin America is still little more than their underdeveloped sibling, its inhabitants pitching up on its shores or struggling across the Rio Grande into the USA. It's a place of exuberant music, mesmerizing football, extravagant beauty, fantastic literature, drug trafficking and guerrilla warfare -- in short, exotic, dangerous and exciting. 

In this counterintuitive and fascinating book, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, who teaches international Law and International Affairs at London University, shows how, unafraid to turn its back on some commonly held economic views that have now lost their currency, Latin America is in fact making its presence felt from Lima to Shanghai, from Brazilia to London and from Buenos Aires to New York. 

While the world acknowledges the continuing importance of the US in international affairs, few people have noticed that with Spanish language and culture in the ascendant the US is quietly but quickly becoming the next Latin American country. 

In fact, Guardiola-Rivera argues, the next Barack Obama is as more than likely to be of Latino origin. Both a hidden history of the modern world from the silver peso (the world's first truly global currency) to the recent shift away from globalism and an imaginative vision rooted in a sure understanding of the past, What If Latin America Ruled the World? is certain to provoke interest and controversy.

 

When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets 

Paperback  Vintage August 24, 2010 ISBN-10: 0307454878

Timothy Black.

This provocative and compelling book examines how jobs, schools, the streets, and prisons have shaped the lives and choices of a generation of Puerto Rican youth at the turn of the twenty-first century.

At the center of this riveting account–based on an unprecedented eighteen-year study are three engaging, streetwise brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts: 

• Fausto, incarcerated for seven years and in and out of drug treatment, an insightful and sensitive street warrior playing on the edges of self-destruction; 
• Julio, the family patriarch, a former gang member turned truck driver, fiercely loyal to his family and friends; and 
• Sammy, a street maven, recovering drug addict, father of four, straddling two realms–the everyday world of low-wage work and the allure of the drug economy–as he shuttles between recovery and relapse.

Timothy Black spent years with the brothers and their parents, wives and girlfriends, extended family, coworkers, criminal partners, friends, teachers, lawyers, and case workers. 

He closely observed street life in Springfield, including the drug trade; schools and GED programs; courtrooms, prisons, and drug treatment programs; and the young men’s struggle for employment both on and off the books. 

The brothers, articulate and determined, speak for themselves, providing powerful testimony to the exigencies of life lived on the social and economic margins. The result is a singularly detailed and empathetic portrait of men who are often regarded with fear or simply rendered invisible by society.

With profound lessons regarding the intersection of social forces and individual choices, Black succeeds in putting a human face on some of the most important public policy issues of our time.

Latin American Politics and Development: Seventh Edition 

Paperback Westview Press; Seventh Edition, August 3, 2010)

ISBN-10: 081334459X

Howard J. Wiarda (Editor), Harvey F. Kline (Editor)

For thirty years Latin American Politics and Development has kept instructors and students abreast of current affairs in Latin America. Now in its seventh edition, this definitive text has been updated throughout and features contributions from experts in the field, including three entirely new chapters on Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Other new material addresses the economic crisis in Argentina; Brazil’s continued economic and political progress; Chile’s successful—if still tentative—combination of democracy, economic growth, and social equity; the continued challenge to Colombia’s political system posed by guerillas, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries; Venezuela’s continued flight from liberal democracy under Hugo Chavez; and Mexico’s ongoing “civil war” as criminal organizations fight each other and the Mexican state to run drug trafficking and other criminal operations. In addition to detailed country-by-country chapters, Latin American Politics and Development provides a comprehensive regional overview. Five foundational chapters by the editors cover the context of Latin American politics, the pattern of historical development, interest groups and political parties, government machinery, the role of the state and public policy, and the struggle for democracy. 

Century of the Wind: Memory of Fire, Volume 3

[Paperback]

Publisher: Nation Books (August 24, 2010)

ISBN-10: 1568584466

Eduardo Galeano

The third volume of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, Century of the Wind offers a panorama of Galeano’s singular vision of the past, turbulent century: from the bucolic New Jersey laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison to the armies of Emiliano Zapata and Fidel Castro to the Reagan-era CIA “neutralizations” in the forests of Latin America. Dizzying, enraging, and beautifully written, Century of the Wind is a sweeping interpretation of the Americas no work of history has previously imagined.

Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective

(Johns Hopkins Studies in Globalization) [Paperback]

The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition

(August 19, 2010)

ISBN-10: 080189834X

William I. Robinson

This ambitious volume chronicles and analyzes from a critical globalization perspective the social, economic, and political changes sweeping across Latin America from the 1970s through the present day. 

William I. Robinson summarizes his theory of globalization and discusses how Latin America's political economy has changed as the states integrate into the new global production and financial system, focusing specifically on the rise of nontraditional agricultural exports, the explosion of maquiladoras, transnational tourism, and the export of labor and the import of remittances. 

He follows with an overview of the clash among global capitalist forces, neoliberalism, and the new left in Latin America, looking closely at the challenges and dilemmas resistance movements face and their prospects for success.

 

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The link we share with you today is: Alleged Drunken Driver Crashes into Chico's Tacos