"Chicano writers from El Paso are the most progressive, open-minded, far-reaching, and inclusive writers of them all."

Octavio Romano

Friday, April 29, 2011

Best Blog Posts in March on a Chicano Writer Blog



Best Blog Posts in March on a Chicano Writer Blog
Once a month, and this month, very late, we give the last month's "best blogs by a Chican@ writers on their own blog."

So before April ends, I need to talk about the best blog posts of March and there are a lot. One thing I notice was the Chican@ solidarity with the people of Japan in the aftermath of the tsunami, the earthquake, and nuclear disaster.


"Almost seventy years later, politicians, supposedly representing the white majority, are still attacking their darker-skinned brothers and sisters during war, chaos, or economic uncertainty. They are spreading fear by lies and innuendo to turn Americans away from tackling the very real joblessness and home foreclosures spreading across the land (and afflicting people, regardless of race)."

9. César E. Chávez (March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) on the Rafael Jesus Gonzalez Blog

Enséñame el sufrimiento de los más desafortunados;
así conoceré el dolor de mi pueblo.
Líbrame a orar por los demás
porque estás presente en cada persona.

8. Wisconsin: Critical Junction for Labor on the Luis J. Rodriguez Blog

"Organized and unorganized, working people in this country are standing up against the corporate thieves and their government cronies (in particular, the Republicans in Congress and in state governorships and legislatures). A grass-roots response to Wisconsin Governor’s Scott Walker’s anti-collective bargaining efforts began in mid-February with the state’s public employee unions and then spread across the country with all facets of organized labor and other organizations protesting the deep social cuts and anti-labor moves perpetuated by politicians connected to or allied with the Tea Party Movement."

7. "Brown Astronaut on Thursday," March 17, 2011 of the Chicano Poet Blog by Reyes Cardenas: http://chicanopoet.blogspot.com/

"he sees you on Facebook
while orbiting earth

your brown face
and pretty smile "






"We Were Here is a powerful and necessary documentary. The thread of stories, the trembling voices of those interviewed, and the faces of those violently attacked, are all the weaving of a story tied to my own."
                    - Lorenzo Herrear y Lozano

5. The Birth Of Chicano Poetry, the The Wednesday, March 23, 2011on the Chicano Poet Blog by Reyes Cardenas: http://chicanopoet.blogspot.com/

after they’d ripped off
poetry

in broad
daylight

from the American public
and hauled ass

to the wordless barrio
when they got back


4. Archbishop Óscar A. Romero G. 8/15/1917 - 3/24/1980 on the Rafael Jesus Gonzalez Blog

Pongo la burda taza en su platillo
con un tierno cuidado
como si fuera cáliz
y digo la letanía:
-------Guatemala
-------Nicaragua
-------El Salvador.
Y un lado del corazón
me sabe blanco y dulce
como la caña
------y el otro,
-----------como el café,
------------------negro y amargo
.


"Poetry can be a bastard. Finishing a poem often feels impossible. Sometimes I deliberate over a single line, word, or image for outrageous amounts of time. I work on some poems for years. There are times I nearly murder them with revisions. It also takes a lot of time and effort for me to stick my hand into the depths of my subconscious and retrieve whatever goop is growing. Believe me, it’s not pretty in there. I’m weird in the head!"



"When you can’t make ends meet at home, you do two things: cut back and raise money. Maybe you stop eating out and cancel the cable bill. At some point, you can no longer slash your way through your household budget...Why can’t our state and national governments do the same?"
--- Michelle Otero

"Upon arriving, however, I was appalled to see so many young girls dressed like complete hoochies. Holy mother of baby Jesucristo, those girls looked like they were ready to star in a rap video. Some of them even appeared to be as young as eight or nine. The sight completely ruined my afternoon and even ruined my appetite, which is hard to do."
                       - oh hells nah

1. "Perigee Moon After Earthquake" on full moon on the Rafael Jesus Gonzalez Blog.

There is no need
of a perigee moon for that —
the Earth is powerful enough
in her violent unrest
to tear apart the ground..."


So a lot to look forward in April, but just a heads up . Lorna Dee Cervantes is blogging in full force again: Link. Also, a good post by Robert Vasquez on the California Poet Blog:  Notes on Writers and the Teaching of Writing, II.

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Thursday, April 28, 2011

A Ver: Revisioning Art History Series



A Ver: Revisioning Art History
Bueno, after posting a list of art books a few days ago, my friend Miguel Juarez informed me that many of them are off of this series called A Ver: Revisioning Art History out of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

The A Ver Series "stems from the conviction that individual artists and their coherent bodies of work are the foundation for a meaningful and diverse art history. This series explores the cultural, aesthetic, and historical contributions of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and other U.S. Latino artists.

Each volume contains a foreword by the series editor, a scholarly essay, full-color illustrations, an exhibition history, and a selected bibliography of writings on the artist."

Here are the titles they have already published.

Published titles

Carmen Lomas Garza, by Constance Cortez (2010)

María Brito, by Juan A. Martínez (2009)

Celia Alvarez Muñoz, by Roberto Tejada (2009)

Yolanda M. López, by Karen Mary Davalos (2008)

Gronk, by Max Benavidez (2007)

Forthcoming titles through 2011

Malaquias Montoya, by Terezita Romo (2011)

Raphael Montañez Ortiz, by Chon A. Noriega (2011)

To take a look at other Chicano(a) artist being considered, click here.

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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

New Fiction and Non-Fiction Titles in April: Topic: Central America





 New Fiction and Non-Fiction Titles in April: Topic: Central America

Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala
Paperback University of California Press; 1 edition (April 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0520267672 ISBN-13: 978-0520267671
Cecilia Menjívar

Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. 

While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering -- the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. 

Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin America) as having a cultural propensity for normalizing and accepting violence, Menjívar aims to develop an approach to examining structures of violence -- profound inequality, exploitation and poverty, and gender ideologies that position women in vulnerable situations -- grounded in women's experiences. 

In this way, her study provides a glimpse into the root causes of the increasing wave of feminicide in Guatemala, as well as in other Latin American countries, and offers observations relevant for understanding violence against women around the world today.


Global Maya: Work and Ideology in Rural Guatemala
Paperback University of Arizona Press (April 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0816529876 ISBN-13: 978-0816529872
Liliana R. Goldín

In the central highland Maya communities of Guatemala, the demands ofthe global economy have become a way of life. 

This book explores how ruralpeoples experience economic and cultural change as their country joins theglobal market, focusing on their thoughts about work and sustenance as a way oflearning about Guatemala's changing economy.

For more than a decade, Liliana Goldín observed in highland towns boththe intensification of various forms of production and their growing links towider markets. 

In this first book to compare economic ideology across a rangeof production systems, she examines how people make a living and how theythink about their options, practices, and constraints. 

Drawing on interviews andsurveys--even retellings of traditional narratives--she reveals how contemporaryMaya respond to the increasingly globalized yet locally circumscribed conditionsin which they work.

Goldín presents four case studies: cottage industries devoted to garmentproduction, vegetable growing for internal and border markets reached throughdirect commerce, crops grown for export, and wage labor in garment assemblyfactories. 

By comparing generational and gendered differences among workers,she reveals not only complexities of change but also how these complexities arereflected in changing attitudes, understandings, and aspirations that characterizepeople's economic ideology. 

Further, she shows that as rural people take ondiverse economic activities, they also reinterpret their views on such mattersas accumulation, cooperation, competition, division of labor, and communitysolidarity.

Global Maya explores global processes in local terms, revealing the interplayof traditional values, household economics, and the inescapable conditions ofdemographic growth, a shrinking land base, and a global economy always lookingfor cheap labor. It offers a wealth of new insights not only for Maya scholarsbut also for anyone concerned with the effects of globalization on the Third World.


Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl's Journey through Adoption
Hardcover University of Nebraska Press (April 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 9780803233621 ISBN-13: 978-0803233621
Mr. Jacob R. Wheeler (Author), Kevin Kreutner (Foreword)

“An adoption professional once told me, ‘At its best, there is no adoption system as good as Guatemala’s. At its worst, there is none worse.’”—from the foreword by Kevin Kreutner

In Between Light and Shadow, veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation’s poorest children. 

Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie’s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers — unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.

Following Ellie’s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms — and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.


Social Accountability in Guatemala: Towards an End of Impunity?
Paperback VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (April 6, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3639342321 ISBN-13: 978-3639342321
Katrin Ulrich

On May 10, 2009, Rodrigo Rosenberg was assassinated on a street in Guatemala City. 

It seemed to be just another of ca. 6,000 homicides per year, however, the next day a video appeared on YouTube?, a testimony in which he accused the Guatemalan president of his murder. 

Shortly after, protests dominated the country and the Guatemalan government was facing an existential crisis. Next to demanding the president's resignation, many protesters called for an end of impunity. Sadly to say, more than ten years after the civil war (1960-1996), Guatemala is still dominated by violence, corruption and impunity, and the tensions between citizens and the state has increased. 

Social accountability has won importance during the last years. In Latin American countries, both vertical and horizontal mechanisms of accountability are weak, alternative mechanisms of social accountability however intend to counter these deficits. Hence, they appear to be more successful and bear promising outcomes. 

This analysis of the Guatemalan case builds on the theoretical framework of Social Accountability by Smulovitz and Peruzzotti and will be aimed to contribute to the ongoing discourse.


The Crossroads of Religion and Development: Guatemala's Ixil Region, Evangelical Religion, and General Ríos Montt
Paperback LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (April 7, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3844314970 ISBN-13: 978-3844314977
Blake C. Scott

This book explores how a group of evangelical Christians aided the Guatemalan army's counterinsurgency campaign logistically, financially, and theologically in the highlands of Guatemala in 1982 and 1983. 

It explains how the military government of General José Efraín Ríos Montt turned to evangelical Christianity to buttress anti-communist and neoliberal development programs in one particular highland area, the Ixil Region. 

The book also sheds light on why U.S and Guatemalan evangelical missionaries willfully supported a right-wing dictatorship, embracing their role as "spiritual soldiers" and legitimizing the Guatemalan army through theological teachings and relief work.


The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town (revised)
Paperback University of Texas Press; Revised edition (April 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0292723989 ISBN-13: 978-0292723986
Robert S. Carlsen (Author), Davíd Carrasco (Foreword), Martín Prechtel (Contributor)

This compelling ethnography explores the issue of cultural continuity and change as it has unfolded in the representative Guatemala Mayan town Santiago Atitlán. 

Drawing on multiple sources, Robert S. Carlsen argues that local Mayan culture survived the Spanish Conquest remarkably intact and continued to play a defining role for much of the following five centuries. 

He also shows how the twentieth-century consolidation of the Guatemalan state steadily eroded the capacity of the local Mayas to adapt to change and ultimately caused some factions to reject -- even demonize -- their own history and culture. 

At the same time, he explains how, after a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, Santiago Atitlán stood up in unity to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave town.


This new edition looks at how Santiago Atitlán has fared since the expulsion of the army. Carlsen explains that, initially, there was hope that the renewed unity that had served the town so well would continue. He argues that such hopes have been undermined by multiple sources, often with bizarre outcomes. 

Among the factors he examines are the impact of transnational crime, particularly gangs with ties to Los Angeles; the rise of vigilantism and its relation to renewed religious factionalism; the related brutal murders of followers of the traditional Mayan religion; and the apocalyptic fervor underlying these events.


Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town
(Child Development in Cultural Context Series)
Hardcover Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 6, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0195319907 ISBN-13: 978-0195319903
Barbara Rogoff

Born with the destiny of becoming a Mayan sacred midwife, Chona Pérez has carried on centuries-old traditional Indigenous American birth and healing practices over her 85 years. 

At the same time, Chona developed new approaches to the care of pregnancy, newborns, and mothers based on her own experience and ideas. In this way, Chona has contributed to both the cultural continuities and cultural changes of her town over the decades.

In Developing Destinies, Barbara Rogoff illuminates how individuals worldwide build on cultural heritage from prior generations and at the same time create new ways of living. 

Throughout Chona's lifetime, her Guatemalan town has continued to use longstanding Mayan cultural practices, such as including children in a range of community activities and encouraging them to learn by observing and contributing. But the town has also transformed dramatically since the days of Chona's own childhood. For instance, although Chona's upbringing included no formal schooling, some of her grandchildren have gone on to attend university and earn scholarly degrees. 

The lives of Chona and her town provide extraordinary examples of how cultural practices are preserved even as they are adapted and modified.

Developing Destinies is an engaging narrative of one remarkable person's life and the life of her community that blends psychology, anthropology, and history to reveal the integral role that culture plays in human development. 

With extensive photographs and accounts of Mayan family life, medical practices, birth, child development, and learning, Rogoff adeptly shows that we can better understand the role of culture in our lives by examining how people participate in cultural practices. This landmark book brings theory alive with fascinating ethnographic findings that advance our understanding of childhood, culture, and change.


The macahuitl and the sword: Historical novel (Volume 1)
Paperback CreateSpace (April 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1461019079 ISBN-13: 978-1461019077
Mr Juan Carlos Morales

This historical novel intertwines the conquest of Guatemala with the romance that blossomed between the princess Tecuelhuatzín and Pedro de Alvarado. In the midst of the bloody battles between K'iches and Spaniards, emerge the real heroes.


La ciencia de los mayas: conocimiento y cultura
(Colección clásicos espirituales y teológicos) (Spanish Edition) Kindle Edition
File Size: 591 KB Debrus Producciones (April 13, 2011) ASIN: B004WKWJ76
Mario Roso de Luna (Author), Debrus Producciones (Editor)

Este estudio es uno de los más valiosos que se han realizado, además de uno de los primeros, sobre el legado del conocimiento maya, más precisamente de los conocidos “Códices Anáhuac”. 

Escrito a principios del siglo pasado por Mario Roso de Luna, este análisis arqueológico y lingüístico de los famosos códices, arroja muchas revelaciones sobre le magnificencia de la gran cultura de lo que ahora es México y Guatemala.

Junto con el Popol Vuh, otra obra que es parte de esta colección en libro electrónico, este otro estudio son quizás dos de las grandes piezas de estudio inicial de esta gran cultura.
Lo que usted descubrirá en estas páginas, sin duda, lo llenará de asombro, sobre todo al enterarse de que los mayas fueron una cultura de gran desarrollo científico y cultural; una gran nación de pueblos conocedores y estudiosos de su entorno, no unos bárbaros como equivocadamente los españoles dijeron.

Que esta contribución pueda también abrirle los ojos a usted sobre el gran legado maya, y no tanto sobre el fin del mundo – que se dice los mayas predijeron para diciembre del 2012 -- como del futuro de la Humanidad.


Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944-1966
Paperback University of Texas Press (April 6, 2011
ISBN-10: 0292729685 ISBN-13: 978-0292729681
Richard Newbold Adams (Author)

The result of many years of research in Guatemala, this volume utilizes the author's fieldwork as well as that of his colleagues and students to construct a set of concepts explaining how Guatemala reached the difficult circumstances in which it found itself in the 1960s-and still finds itself today.


Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas
Paperback SAR Press (April 11, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1934691410 ISBN-13: 978-1934691410
Matthew Liebmann, Melissa S. Murphy (Authors, Editors)

Enduring Conquests presents new interpretations of Native American experiences under Spanish colonialism and challenges the reader to reexamine long-standing assumptions about the Spanish conquests of the Americas. 

The contributors to this volume reject the grand narrative that views this era as a clash of civilizations a narrative produced centuries after the fact to construct more comprehensive and complex social histories of Native American life after 1492 by employing the perspective of archaeology and focusing explicitly on the native side of the colonial equation.


Overcoming the Persistence of Inequality and Poverty
Hardcover Palgrave Macmillan (April 12, 2011)
ISBN-10: 9780230249707 ISBN-13: 978-0230249707
Valpy FitzGerald (Editor), Judith Heyer (Editor), Rosemary Thorp (Editor)

International experts evaluate new policy directions in economic development and poverty reduction, building on the ideas of a pioneer in the new discipline of Development Studies, Frances Stewart. Combing ideas and evidence on technological change, human development and conflict prevention to address the issue of the persistence of inequality


Concherías (Spanish Edition)
Kindle Edition File Size: 243 KB
Editorial Legado S.A.; 1 edition (April 13, 2011)
Language: Spanish ASIN: B004WKQ6RK
Aquileo Echeverría (Author) 

“Costa Rica tiene un poeta. Tiene, en verdad, otros poetas, pero su poeta, el poeta nacional, el poeta familiar se llama Aquileo J. Echeverría”. 

Con esas palabras, el ingenio mayor de la poesía hispanoamericana, Rubén Darío, dejó señalada — para siempre — la envergadura, la fuerza y la autenticidad de esos versos que, en Concherías, logró producir el más genuino poeta costarricense. 

Al prologar la obra, Darío se amparó en Antonio Zambrana, Brenes Mesén y otros, para disimular un tris sus poliédricos afectos, pero los mayores elogios son propios y llega a decir, por ejemplo, que “aquel verso bien modulado, demuestra su descendencia clásica… fuente original de donde ha fluido el admirable y bien sonante romancero castellano… Su poesía me conmueve, me perfuma y melifica el humor, me brinda el impagable regalo de la risa, de la honradez literaria”. 

Lo que el virtuoso leonés percibió en aquellos profundos cantos de alma campesina y sabor a jocote, la tradición secular lo confirmó: convertidos en dominio público, los épicos octosílabos —síntesis del ser costarricense— se recitan de memoria en cualquier tertulia intelectual y son chascarrillo frecuente en la conversación cotidiana.

Signo claro de su graciosa originalidad inmortal. La presente edición los rescata de su fuente más prístina: la que se publicó, bajo firma del autor, en Barcelona, en 1909, y supera cambios y “correcciones” que se acumularon en un siglo de travesías. 

Aquileo Echeverría Zeledón nació en San José el 22 de mayo de 1866 y murió en Barcelona el 11 de marzo de 1909. Tenía apenas 43 años. Su vida alegre y fogosa, aunque pobre, lo derivó a ser militar en la lucha centroamericana contra Rufino Barrios; ayudante de campo del Presidente Cárdenas, en Nicaragua; periodista en Costa Rica, El Salvador y Guatemala; diplomático improvisado en París y Washington; pulpero en Heredia; bohemio en todas partes y máximo poeta del alma nacional por los siglos de los siglos.


Nicaragua 1984: Reagan's Forgotten War
Paperback CreateSpace (April 25, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1460936760 ISBN-13: 978-1460936764
Rachael L. Lehmberg (Author)
Getting Old: Eden Pastora and the Sandinista Revolution
Kindle Edition File Size: 126 KB
ASIN: B004X71L1I
John Enders (Author)

9,900 word book about the Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua after 30 years. Focuses on Eden Pastora, "Comandante Zero," one of the most controversial figures of the Sandinista Revolution and the "Contra" war of the 1980s, as well as President Daniel Ortega and the internal contradictions facing the Sandinista government.


State Violence and Genocide in Latin America
Paperback Routledge; 1 edition (April 11, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0415664578 ISBN-13: 978-0415664578
Marcia Esparza (Editor)

This edited volume explores political violence and genocide in Latin America during the Cold War, examining this in light of the United States' hegemonic position on the continent. 

Using case studies based on the regimes of Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay, this book shows how U.S foreign policy -- far from promoting long term political stability and democratic institutions -- has actually undermined them. 

The first part of the book is an inquiry into the larger historical context in which the development of an unequal power relationship between the United States and Latin American and Caribbean nations evolved after the proliferation of the Monroe Doctrine. 

The region came to be seen as a contested terrain in the East-West conflict of the Cold War, and a new US-inspired ideology, the 'National Security Doctrine', was used to justify military operations and the hunting down of individuals and groups labelled as 'communists'. 

Following on from this historical context, the book then provides an analysis of the mechanisms of state and genocidal violence is offered, demonstrating how in order to get to know the internal enemy, national armies relied on US intelligence training and economic aid to carry out their surveillance campaigns. 

This book will be of interest to students of Latin American politics, US foreign policy, human rights and terrorism and political violence in general.


Economics and Politics of South and Central America
Hardcover Nova Science Pub Inc (April 2011)
ISBN-10: 1612097804 ISBN-13: 978-1612097800
Jane A. Nicholls (Editor) 

This book presents and discusses current research in the study of the economics and politics of South and Central America. 

Topics discussed include urban history and cultural studies in Latin America; China's foreign aid activities in Latin America; terrorism issues; Latin America and the Caribbean; and, Merida Initiative for Mexico and Central America and the Fifth Summit of the Americas.


The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones  
Hardcover University of New Mexico Press (April 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0826347630 ISBN-13: 978-0826347633
Miguel Angel Astor-Aguilera

Although anthropologists have been observing and analyzing the religious practices of Mayan people for about a hundred years, this perceptive study suggests that anthropological interpretation of those practices and of Maya cosmology has never escaped the epistemological influence of Christianity. 

Whereas sacred objects used in Christian rituals are treated with deifying awe, objects such as Mayan crosses can be recycled, bartered with, communicated with, manipulated, disregarded, or destroyed the apparent equivalent of extorting or defacing a holy image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. 

Astor-Aguilera holds that we cannot fully understand these indigenous practices by fitting them to our European Cartesian mindset but must instead recognize and try to understand native Mayan epistemology. 

The binary based western concept of religion, he suggests, is not the best framework for understanding experiential Mayan cosmology or practice. Using ethnographic, archaeological, and glyphic evidence, he traces modern Mayan attitudes toward ritually charged objects and imagery back to the Classic Maya. 

No scholar of Mesoamerican religion, archaeology, or history can afford to overlook this long overdue approach to a widely misunderstood subject.

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Monday, April 25, 2011

Lunes con Lalo Delgado: Some Not To Objective Observations About Himself






Lunes con Lalo Delgado

The Chicano Movement: Some Not Too Objective Observations

About the author
By Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado

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I'm quite privileged, and, therefore, bear a greater obligation – privileged to move about the country and met my hermanos, who accept me readily and confide in me their greatest secret frustrations and ambitions – privileged to live in Denver where the hear of the movement beats faster; to ride, like now, in planes sitting next to Corky, to meet, as we say, the “heavies” and even at times, throw a few ideas their way which may or may not assist the movement?

Before anyone mistakes me for a mere observer of the movement or a journalist taking advantage of the confidence given me, let me say, that the movement is more...I am the movement and the movement is me. My bag, as it is now said, is to try to match the various shapes of talent floating around to complete the jig-saw power puzzle in the Chicano Movement. I learned this from two persons, a Jesuit priest I worked with for ten years in South El Paso*; and from Salvador Ramirez, who successfully assembled a good set of talented Chicanos to start a chain reaction of institutional change in El Paso – which, only God know where it will end.

Being executive director of a Migrant Council, I saw the phenomenon of what combined talent can do. I was fortunate to have assembled on the one goals of assisting the migrant while in the stream, such giants in the movement as Mario Compean, José Angel Gutíerrez, Rubén Barrera, Narciso Aleman, Lupe Rivera, Pablo Delgado, Lali Sáenz, Gabriel Tafoya, Jesus López, Daniel Quintanilla, Guillermo Cantu, and many others who in that summer of 1969 were all over the nation instituting change in the favor of the migrant.

Playing such combinations, the movement stands all possibilities of being successful, but isolating talent or flinging it in opposite courses, we do not stand a chance.

I cannot help but date even these chapters about myself, because the pace of the movement is fast and strong. I am referring to the incarceration of Cesar Chavez last Friday. This even is of major significance in our movement, particularly since just weeks ago, Cesar went to testify on behalf of Corky in Los Angeles, who was facing charges of carrying a concealed weapon. That event showed Chavez for the first time publicly assuming the national role of leadership, he so deservingly has earned. No Corky cannot stand idle and see him in jail.

Back to my attempts to try to describe myself to the readers, for greater credibility in some of my comments which are not meant as mere descriptive ideas but which aim at provoking thought.

I do not claim to have a total view of the movement, even with my great freedom of mobility through the country. There are factions within the movement with a great deal of secrecy about them, and other active and militant factions, which will not wait for a cue from anyone; but act on their own anger at the status quo and the turtle-like pace of social change which does not spell out signs of meaningful advancement, soon.

There are, too, the many bureaucratic moves with heavy political overtones which I fail to see and care not to see, in relation to the movement, but which must also be acknowledged.

I write with the hope of educating ourselves and making more sense as to what is happening about us, and hopefully, we will be moved into some sort of commitment and action.

I have very little concern with academics or sociologists eating off this paper, but my main concern is my own carnales, my own Raza getting rid of an apathy foreign to our Chicano nature; and asking them to join the “Tropas” at the Crossroads.

*Father Harold Rahm


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Other parts of this series:

 
from The Chicano Movement: Some Not Too Objective Observations by Abelardo B. Delgado, (Denver: Colorado Migrant Council, 1971), prepared by the Colorado Migrant Council. Published with permission from the Delgado Family. Special thanks for Dolores Delgado. (c) Abelardo Delgado 1971, all right reserved. This may not be republished with out the permission of the Delgado estate.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

New and Recent Chican@ and Latino@ Art Books







New and Recent Art Books
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Today the Easter Bunny delivers new and recent art books. By recent, we mean in Chicano Standard Time, not Anglo Savings Time. Questions, what did Europeans use to make Chocolate Easter Bunnys before they had chocolate?


Malaquias Montoya
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-89551-107-2
$60.00 cloth/jacket
ISBN 978-0-89551-106-5
University of Minnesota Press
Terezita Romo
The first major book on the influential Chicano painter and printmaker

Working for more than four decades in a variety of media, from drawings and paintings to murals and the silkscreen prints for which he is best known, Malaquias Montoya has pursued a singular artistic vision that promotes the dignity of labor, exposes assaults on human rights, and provokes resistance in the face of injustice.
Montoya cofounded the influential Chicano artist collective known as the Mexican-American Liberation Art Front in 1968, inspiring a generation of artists and activists and continuing to do so today through his teaching and by widely exhibiting his overtly political and visually arresting works.









Gronk

The University of Minnesota Press
(95 color photos ISBN: 978-0-89551-105-8 | hardcover (comes with DVD about the artist)(also in paperback), A Ver Series.
Max Benevidez

The first major book devoted to the influential Chicano artist.

This is the first major book devoted to the influential Chicano artist.

Gronk was born in 1954 in East Los Angeles. He began his career as an urban muralist and has grown into an international figure who has created sets for operas and computerized animation for panoramic screens. In this sweeping examination of Gronk’s oeuvre, Max Benavidez elucidates how the artist can cross genres, sexual categories, and ethnic barriers, yet still remain true to himself. From street murals to mail art, from large-scale action painting to performance art and operatic set design, Gronk has made a lasting mark on the Chicano art movement, the punk scene, gay art, and the cultural world stage.

“There is no question that underrepresented artists like Gronk are a vital part of 21st century art history.” —Los Angeles Times

“Benavidez offers a riveting, clear-eyed and contextualized midcareer examination of Gronk’s development not only as an artist but also as a person.” —El Paso Times

For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/benavidez_gronk.html

For more information on the A Ver Series:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/aver.html


Chicano Graffiti and Murals: The Neighborhood Art of Peter Quezada
(Folk Art and Artists Series) Paperback
University Press of Mississippi (December 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 161703066X
ISBN-13: 978-1617030666
Sojin Kim

A study of an artist and his art that proliferates over north Los Angeles


Avant-Garde Art and Artists in Mexico: Anita Brenner's Journals of the Roaring Twenties 
 (Univ of Texas Press Oct 15, 2010 ISBN-10: 0292721846), 
Susannah Joel Glusker (Editor), Carlos Monsiváis (Foreword). 

The Mexican Revolution or that violent, inchoate, never-quite-complete break with the pastoopened a new era in Mexican art and letters now known as the "Mexican Renaissance." In Mexico City, a coterie of artists including Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco & David Alfaro Siqueiros explored how art could forward revolutionary ideals and, in the process, spent countless hours talking, gossiping, arguing & partying. 

Into this milieu came Anita Brenner, in her early twenties already trying her hand as a journalist, art critic and; anthropologist. Her journals of the period 1925 to 1930 vividly transport us to this vital moment in Mexico, when building a "new nation" was the goal. Brenner became a member of Rivera's inner circle & her journals provide fascinating portraits of its members, including Orozco, Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo & Jean Charlot, with whom she had an unusual loving relationship. 

She captures the major and minor players in the act of creating works for which they are now famous and records their comings and goings, alliances and feuds. Numerous images of their art brilliantly counterpoint her diary descriptions. Setting the scene for the journal is well-known Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, who offers an illuminating discussion of the Mexican Renaissance and the circle around Diego Rivera.


Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution
Paperback- The MIT Press (October 31, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0262514966
Rubén Gallo 

In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. 

Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artifacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanization of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication; cement architecture and its celebration of functional internationalism; and the stadium and its deployment as a mass medium for political spectacle.

Gallo traces the ways artists and writers, armed with these artifacts, revolutionized representation by breaking with the traditional modes of production that had dominated Mexican cultural practices: Tina Modotti rose against the conventions of "artistic" photography by promoting a radically modern photographic aesthetics; typewriting authors rejected the literary precepts of modernismo to celebrate the stridencies of mechanical writing; and young architects abandoned older building materials for the symbolic strength of reinforced concrete.

Gallo uncovers a secret history of Mexican modernity that includes a number of fascinating episodes: the pictorialist backlash against Modotti and Edward Weston; the postcolonial Remingtont typewriter; Mexican radio in the North Pole; the campaign to aestheticize cement through journals and artistic competitions; and the protofascist political spectacles held at Mexico City's National Stadium in the


Textura Dos: Buenos Aires Street Art
Hardcover Mark Batty Publisher October 26, 2010
ISBN-10: 1935613030
Guilherme Zauith (Author), Matt Fox-Tucker (Author)

Buenos Aires is the second largest city in South America. It should come as no surprise then that it boasts a sprawling and distinctive street art scene that reflects the civic pride of the porteños - the word used to refer to the city's citizens - as well as the influences of global graffiti, street art and visual cultures.  

Textura Dos: Buenos Aires Street Art breaks the city down into neighborhoods, or barrios, providing a stunning visual tour of the city. The authors recount their experiences exploring the featured barrios, meeting the artists and photographing their work. In revealing these visual aspects of Buenos Aires the authors also share their views of Buenos Aires, one of the world's great cities. From the murals of Palermo and San Telmo to the tags, burners and politically charged work of La Boca, the richness of the city's urban art takes shape between the covers of this book.

Like the original Textura,Textura Dos also makes available to readers via download files of high-resolution graffiti patterns and textures that can be used for any number of design applications.



Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López's "Irreverent Apparition" 
Chicana Matters Series Paperback
University of Texas Press (April 1, 2011) 
ISBN-10: 0292726422 ISBN-13: 978-0292726420
Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Editor), Alma López (Editor) 

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. 

Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition.

Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America).

Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.



Carmen Lomas Garza
University of Minnesota Press 2010
ISBN 978-0-89551-125-6 | paper
ISBN 978-0-89551-124-9 | cloth
Constance Cortez

Explores the art of the celebrated Chicana artist who depicts her childhood in the Mexican American community of South Texas

Widely known for works celebrating the traditions of her family and community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children's book illustrator since the 1970s. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza's artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza's own political and social activism.

"I saw the need to create images that would elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture."
-Carmen Lomas Garza


Celia Alvarez Munoz (A Ver)
Paperback Chicano Studies Research Center (October 22, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0895511126 ISBN-13: 978-0895511126
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada (Author)
A conceptual and multimedia artist known for her writing, photography, painting, installation, and public art, Celia Alvarez Muñoz has been invited to exhibit and to create site-specific works for more than fifty major U.S. museums and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. In her work Muñoz draws on family and communal memories to explore her own experiences growing up Catholic and Mexican American on the Texas-Mexico border, as well as larger issues concerning the spaces between languages and cultures and the histories that connect place to community.
With more than one hundred color photographs, this book in the landmark A Ver series surveys Muñoz's career from her earliest bookmaking project, the Enlightenment series, and such installation pieces as Stories Your Mother Never Told You to her more recent works of public art and digital photography. Throughout his in-depth essay, Roberto Tejada illuminates Muñoz's feminist perspective, political engagement, and provocative use of ideas and artifacts from two cultures.


Yolanda Lopez (A Ver)
[Paperback]
Univ Of Minnesota Press (February 10, 2009) ISBN-10: 089551110X ISBN-13: 978-0895511102
Karen Mary Davalos
“It is important for us to be visually literate; it is a survival skill. The media is what passes for culture in contemporary U.S. culture, and it is extremely powerful. It is crucial that we systematically explore the cultural misdefinition of Mexicans and Latin Americans that is presented in the media.” —Yolanda López

Chicana artist Yolanda López achieved international recognition for her groundbreaking and controversial Virgin of Guadalupe series of paintings (1975–78) in which she transformed the beloved icon in order to celebrate and sanctify ordinary Mexican and Mexican American women as hardworking, assertive, and vibrant. Born in San Diego, California, López formally trained as a painter but has since expanded into a variety of media, including installation, video, and slide presentations.

Karen Mary Davalos identifies the themes and concerns that unify the artist’s diverse body of work. At times playful, political, and feminist, López is unwavering in her commitment to representing the experiences of Mexican American women in the United States, confronting stereotypes about Latin Americans and challenging U.S. immigration policy.


Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California
Paperback University of Texas Press (December 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 029271906X ISBN-13: 978-0292719064
Guisela Latorre 

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenous imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. 

Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print. 

An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. 

In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas." Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. 

Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.


Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte 
(Mexican American Experience)
Paperback University of Arizona Press; 1 edition (February 14, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0816526478 ISBN-13: 978-0816526475
Carlos Francisco Jackson

This is the first book solely dedicated to the history, development, and present-day flowering of Chicana and Chicano visual arts. It offers readers an opportunity to understand and appreciate Chicana/o art from its beginnings in the 1960s, its relationship to the Chicana/o Movement and its leading artists, themes, current directions, and cultural impacts.

Although the word "Chicano" once held negative connotations, students -- along with civil rights activists and artists -- adopted it in the late 1960s in order to re-imagine and redefine what it meant to be Mexican American in the United States. Chicanismo is the ideology and spirit behind the Chicano Movement and Chicanismo unites the artists whose work is revealed and celebrated in this book.

Jackson's scope is wide. He includes paintings, prints, murals, altars, sculptures, and photographs--and, of course, the artists who created them. Beginning with key influences, he describes the importance of poster and mural art, focusing on the work of the Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada and the significance of Mexican and Cuban talleres (print workshops). 

He examines the importance of art collectives in the United States, as well as Chicano talleres and community art centers, for the growth of the Chicano art movement. In conclusion, he considers how Chicano art has been presented to the general American public.

As Jackson shows, the visual arts have both reflected and created Chicano culture in the United States. For college students -- and for all readers who want to learn more about this fascinating subject -- his book is an ideal introduction to an art movement with a social conscience.



Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
[Hardcover] University of California Press; 1 edition (April 2, 2008)
ISBN-10: 9780520255630 ISBN-13: 978-0520255630
Rita Gonzalez (Author), Howard N. Fox (Author), Chon A. Noriega (Author) 

Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement is the first comprehensive consideration of Chicano art in almost two decades and the largest exhibition of cutting-edge Chicano art ever presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Traditionally described as work created by Americans of Mexican descent, Chicano art first emerged during the vibrant Chicano rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

This catalog and exhibition explore the experimental tendencies within today's Chicano art, which is oriented less toward painting and polemical assertion and more toward conceptual art, performance, film, photography, and media-based art, as well as "stealthy" artistic interventions in urban spaces. 

Three essays by Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega explore the topic in depth. With more than two hundred color illustrations, twenty-five individual artist portfolios, and a wryly subversive chronology of significant moments in Chicano cultural history, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement charts new territory and provides a conceptual sampling of Chicano art today.



Fire of Life, The: The Robert Legorreta-Cyclona Collection
(The Chicano Archives)
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press; Pap/DVD edition (July 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0895511207 ISBN-13: 978-089551120 Paperback
Robb Hernandez

The Fire of Life, the collection of performance artist Robert Legorreta, is a fascinating and eclectic archive. Correspondence, artwork, photographs, and other materials document Legorreta's artistic career and trace the development of the East L.A. arts scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

The collection contains more than a thousand LPs, gathered primarily for the Latino imagery on their covers, and toys, coupons, and ads, that show how Latino themes have been used to promote consumer products.


Con Safo: The Chicano Art Group and the Politics of South Texas
Paperback UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press (July 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0895511215 ISBN-13: 978-0895511218
Ruben C. Cordova (Author)

Ruben C. Cordova traces the history of Con Safo, one of the earliest and most significant of the Chicano art groups, from 1968, when it formed as El Grupo, to the mid-1970s, when Con Safo gradually disbanded. 

Founded by Felipe Reyes, the original group was made up of six San Antonio artists. The fluxuating membership over the decade of the group's existence included Mel Casas, Jose Esquivel, Rudy Trevino, and Roberto Rios. Although the structure of the original group changed, its mission did not: Con Safo defined possibilities for Chicano art at a time when Chicano culture was largely invisible.

Cordova's painstaking research, which included extensive archival work and interviews with group members and activists, resolves many of the contradictions and fills in many of the gaps that exist in earlier accounts of the group. Con Safo: The Chicano Art Group and the Politics of South Texas is an important resource for anyone interested in Chicano art and Chicano history. The book concludes with reproductions of original documents related to the group, including Casas's Brown Paper Report.


Contemporary Chican@ Art: Color and Culture for a New America
Paperback University of Texas Press; 1 edition (February 15, 2010)
ISBN-10: 029272117X ISBN-13: 978-0292721173
George Vargas 

From its inception in the 1960s to its present form, contemporary Mexican American or Chicano art has developed as an art of identity, asserting the uniqueness of Chicanos and their dual Mexican and U.S. American cultural backgrounds. 

Because it emerged as a social phenomenon, however, many people outside the Chicano community have perceived Chicano art as merely protest art or social commentary, and Mexican American artists have been largely ignored in mainstream museums and absent in art history texts on American art. 

Yet more than ever before, Chicano art is diverse in medium, style, technique, and content -- the cutting edge of a bold attempt to redefine and advance the American experience through new ideas of who we are as Americans and what American art is.

Contemporary Chican@ Art is a general introduction and guide to one of the most exciting and meaningful expressions in contemporary American art. Intended for the casual reader as well as for art history scholars and students, the book provides an overview of work created from the 1960s to the present. 

George Vargas follows the dramatic evolution of Chicano art within the broader context of American cultural history. He shows that while identity politics was and still is a prevailing force in Chicano expression, Chicano art has undergone a remarkable transformation, shifting from a strict Chicano perspective to a more universal one, while still remaining a people's art. In the concluding chapter, Vargas takes an in-depth look at selected Chicano artists who share their thoughts about the Chicano artistic enterprise and their own work.


Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago: My Life, My Work, My Art
Latinos in Chicago and Midwest Series Paperback University of Illinois Press; 1st Edition edition (June 28, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0252077350 ISBN-13: 978-0252077357
Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez (Author), Marc Zimmerman (Editor)

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. 

Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home.

Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s.

With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.


Moctezuma's Table: Rolando Briseno's Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes 
Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions Series 
TAMU Press (August 11, 2010)
ISBN-10: 9781603441834
ISBN-13: 978-1603441834
Norma E. Cantu (Editor)

The table provides the food that sustains physical life. It is also the setting for people to share the fellowship that sustains cultural, community, and political life.

In the vision of artist Rolando Briseño, food is a powerful metaphor, a way of understanding how culture nurtures the spirit. When cultures collide-as they inevitably do in borderlands settings-food, its preparation, and the rituals surrounding its consumption can preserve meanings and understandings that might otherwise have been lost to the mainstream social narrative.

Briseño’s exhibit, La Mesa de Moctezuma/Moctezuma’s Table, originally hosted by San Antonio’s Instituto Cultural Mexicano and later by the Instituto de México, Montreal, Canada, brings to vivid life the artist’s conception of food as life source, social symbol, and embodiment of meaning.

Now, editor Norma E. Cantú has gathered the art, along with the words of fifteen poets, writers, artists, and scholars who reflect in various ways on the layers of interpretation to be derived from Briseño’s works. Their thoughts provide focal points for musings about food, transborder relationships between food and art, personal connections to food, individual works within the exhibit, and the intense and immediate connections among culture, food, and self.


L.A. Xicano
Hardcover UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press (November 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0895511452
ISBN-13: 978-0895511454
Chon A. Noriega (Editor), Terezita Romo (Editor), Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Editor)

L.A. Xicano accompanies four interrelated exhibitions that explore the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican American and Chicano artists to American art and to Los Angeles's artistic development since 1945. 

The volume's six illustrated essays examine the life and works of dozens of artists and photographers. The authors consider the context of their turbulent history, particularly the development of the Chicano Movement.

The L.A. Xicano project was organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with the Autry National Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art


The Pocho Research Society's Field Guide to Erased and Invisible Histories
Paperback UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press (November 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0895511460 ISBN-13: 978-0895511461
Sandra de la Loza (Author)

Visual and performance artist Sandra de la Loza presents a wry commentary on the Chicano history of Los Angeles in this field guide to Downtown and East Los Angeles. 

Using the format of the photographic essay, she documents the exploits of the Pocho Research Society, an organization dedicated to commemorating sites in Los Angeles that are of importance to the Chicano community but that have been erased by urban development or neglect. 

Through the unauthorized acts of commemoration, the Pocho Research Society calls our attention to their absence from official narratives.

The field guide also offers playful tours of the murals at Estrada Courts and the Fort No Moore Secret Museum, founded by the Pocho Research Society to preserve the history of the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial (a history that includes accounts of the Lizard People, who lived in catacombs far beneath the monument).

By drawing attention to these invisible monuments and lost histories, de la Loza asks her readers to consider the broader question of what constitutes a community's history.


Ytrebil: Prints and Drawings by Enrique Chagoya
Paperback CreateSpace (June 26, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1453634436 ISBN-13: 978-1453634431
Galería de la Raza (Author), Carolina Ponce de León (Introduction) 

Galería de la Raza is a non-profit community-based arts organization whose mission is to foster public awareness and appreciation of Chicano/Latino art. To implement our mission, Galería supports Latino artists in the visual, literary, media and performing art fields whose works explore new aesthetic possibilities for socially committed art.

 
The Beautiful Walls: Photographic Elevations of Street Art in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris
Photography by Larry Yust
Text by Patrick A. Polk
University of Washington Press October 2010

Graffiti is a forceful way of inscribing presence or "being" in the world as well as a means of creating affective links to the potency of natural wonders, religious shrines, and ancient ruins as well as the contemporary cityscape. The photographic elevations presented in this volume represent a graffiti-punctuated pilgrim's progress built around the aesthetics of defacement. Graffiti- and mural-covered walls, buildings, automobiles, and railcars are the artful wonders, the vibrant shrines, and the dynamic ruins that structured Larry Yust's pilgrimage to some of the most famed metropolitan centers of the world. He has brought back panoramic souvenirs; vistas that let us be there in a way that is perhaps better than being there. This book celebrates the artistry and audacity of the taggers and uncommissioned muralists who decorate and deface contemporary cities.

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