Anaya is just bad literature

Anaya as bad literature

Hello folks. It a cool KC night and here's this week blog.

The Kansas City alternative publication, The Pitch published a story about the battle to ban books in the Blue Valley School District in Southern Kansas City. Rodulfo Anaya is one of their targets. Bless me Ultima was challeged, but was not removed. Now the Nazi parents are trying to get more organized. Check out the story where on this "bad literture": Meet the Parent: Blue Valley's book crusaders have a new mouthpiece who really knows pornography when he sees it.

Abarca puts out book

We put out out last issue of Pluma Fronteriza last week. One of our Chicana professors at UTEP did not let us know was comming out with a book and we caught it in Ramon Renteria's book review page last week: Voices' shows kitchen as a base of strength. I remember Meredith's focus on food, so this aught to be a good book. Denise Chavez also has put out a book on food. Then there's of course Laura Esquivel, Trinidad Sanchez, Jr., and Jesus Tafoya who do the same. I actually think Tafoya focuses his scholarship on it.

Abarca's book is published on Texas A&M Press and if I'm correct, Norma Cantu is still one of the editors.

Albert Armendariz

Veteran El Paso attroney Albert Armendariz who help found MALDEF and the Mexican American Bar Association is featured in a new book that focuses on the U.S. Latino and Latinoa WWII Oral History Project at UT Texas. The book is called: A Legacy Greater Than Words: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas of the WWII Generation (Paperback)(U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project, Univ of Tex at Austin May 1, 2006 ISBN 0292714181), Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez. Since 1999, the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin has captured the untold stories of this WWII generation. Altogether, the project videotaped more than five hundred interviews throughout the country and in Puerto Rico and Mexico. This volume features summaries of the interviews and photographs of the individuals. Among the people included are Mexican American civil rights leaders such as Pete Tijerina and Albert Armendariz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Virgilio Roel of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Others are community leaders such as Pete and Elena Gallego of Alpine, Texas, and military leaders such as Colonel Hank Cervantes and flying ace Richard Candelaria. Women who served in the military are also included. There are academic trailblazers, too, such as Frank Bonilla, who became a major figure in Puerto Rican studies. And there are a few Latinos who describe serving in segregated "colored" units during the war, as their physical features placed them in African American communities. Overall, the vast majority of the men and women interviewed in A Legacy Greater Than Words led private lives, and their stories chronicle the everyday existence of Latinos in the 1930s and 1940s—stories that generally have been omitted from historical accounts of either the Great Depression or World War II. One of the oral histories the published in their little newspaper they are putting out covered Ernesto Martinez, the El Paso muralist and one of the liberators of a concentration camp during WWII.

U of A Press

It might be me, but I think the University of Arizona Press revampt its website. Looks neat: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/. Check it out.

New books

Our next Libros, Libros is set to come out in about a week. There are some book that won't be listed until our Late Summer issue, but here's a glare. Texas Tech University Press is putting out a book on "community property." This might be above some of you who are not from Texas or Califas (I think Califas has com property), but the book, Hers, His, and Theirs Community Property Law in Spain and Early Texas by Jean A. Struntz shows how Texas when it wrote it constitution, instaed of swithcing to common law property ownership, decided to stay with the Spanish form called "community property.

Northwestern University Press will be releasing Mexican Village and Other Works. www.nupress.northwestern.edu. Its a collection of writing by Josefina Niggli, one of the first Latinas to have her worked published in the U.S. This book has been republished before, so no new news here. The University of New Mexico Press republished it in 1994. The description states, Nigglli was "Well ahead of what is now called Chicano literature." It I remember correctly, the book was published in 1945, so I'm not sure what the comment is suppose to mean as we had writers such as Mario Suarez, Mario A. Otero, Mariano G. Vallejo, Ireneo Paz, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Manuel Gamio, Miguel Antonio Otero Jr., Felipe M. Chacón, Fray Angélico Chávez, Arthur Campa, Vicente Barnal, Daniel Venegas, Américo Paredes, Antonio de Fierro Banco, Teodoro Torres, as well as other Transition and Interaction Period writers. Nigglli published her poetry collection in Mexican Silhouettes in 1928 and her Mexican Folk Plays in 1938. But she's beat out by many writers in year before her. I think a good dose of Arte Publico's "Recover Our Hispanic Literary Herigate" (or what ever its called) is needed. Or a good dose of Tey Diana Rebolledo's writings. Anyway, Niggli's work is still historical in a period when not many women were writing. I'm not sure who the next substantial writer in Chicana literature was between Mexican Village and Rain of Scorpions. I'll look into it.

Northwestern will also be distributing Frozen Accident: Poems by Alfred Arteaga on Tia Chucha Press in October.

See you next Monday