UTEP Grad Wins Prominent Literary Prize

Nov. 10, 2006

Media Contact: Laura S. Ruelas

Writer, University Communications

915/747-5085

UTEP Grad Wins Prominent Literary Prize

Author Part of University’s Unique Bilingual Creative Writing Program

Argentine writer and recent UTEP graduate Betina González has won the 2006 Clarín Novel Prize for her work, "Arte menor."

Sponsored by Clarín, a major Argentine newspaper, the literary competition drew more than 800 entries. A jury of distinguished authors selected “Arte menor” as the best unpublished novel written in Spanish. González was awarded a $100,000 peso (about $32,000 U.S. dollars) royalty advance from Argentine publisher Clarín-Alfaguara. She received the award during a ceremony last month at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

“It is a kind of a reward for my years and years of silent writing and for the daily exercise of discipline and dedication that’s (involved) in being a writer,” said González. “This is the beginning of a new phase in my career.”

Her book narrates the story of a daughter who follows the tracks of her dead father through the testimonies of his former lovers. She tries to understand who her father was--a failed poet, terrible parent, unfaithful husband--and in some measure, redeem him. The novel, written as a thesis project under the direction of UTEP professor of language and linguistics Luis Arturo Ramos, was praised by members of the jury, including Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago and the famed Spanish novelist Rosa Montero.

González attributes her success to hard work and the support she received at UTEP from her professors in the Creative Writing program, Ramos and Johnny Payne.

“This is a huge prize, pan-Latin American, about the equivalent of winning the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S. We are very proud of Betina,” said Payne, chair of the Department of Creative Writing.

González received her master’s in Bilingual Creative Writing from UTEP this past spring. She currently attends the University of Pittsburgh, where she is working on a doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures.

Since 1998, Clarín has awarded writers from across the globe an opportunity to have their works published. The goal of the award is to attract attention to the up and coming literary community and the art of classic fiction novels. This year’s entries came from Greece, Argentina, Costa Rica, Spain, the United States, Israel and Peru.

Clarín was founded by Roberto Noble in 1945. Based in Buenos Aires, the newspaper is distributed throughout Argentina. The electronic version, www.clarin.com, is one of the most visited Spanish-language newspapers on the Internet.

For more information about the Clarín Novel Prize, visit www.premios.clarin.com.ar/premio_novela/index.html.

—30—

Ariel Robello to Read at UTEP - Tejano Writers Visit the Big Apple - Chicana Play n Kansas City - Josefina Lopez in El Paso

Ariel Robello visits El Chuco

A Performance Poet Ariel Robello will visit the Sun City. Check out my review of her book My Sweet Unconditional on The Newspaper Tree.

Thursday, November 9, 2006
7:00PM
UTEP
Tomás Rivera Center
Third Floor, Union Building East

Free Admission 

Sponsored by UTEP Women’s Studies Program and
Women’s Resource Center   

Play “The Fat Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen: to be Staged in Kansas City

Elaine Romero’s play “The Fat Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen” will be staged in Kansas City, Kansas at Kansas City Kansas Community College, Nov. 9-12.

The Department of Theatre at KCKCC will present its first bi-lingual full-length production, Thursday through Sunday, Nov. 9-12.

Written by Elaine Romero and directed by Stephanie Kelman, the dram will be performed at 8pm Thursday through Saturday with a 2:30pm matinee on Sunday. Tickets are $7 for adults and $5 for students and senior citizens.

The play tells the story of a young Chicana who tries to change the menu at the family restaurant after learning in college that her Mexican diet is high in fat. Her struggle to come to term with her family’s value for tradition is heightened by the admonitions of the Snow Cap Queen, the character depicted on the canned lard label who comes to her as an apparition.

Tejanos to Visit the Big Apple to visit the Big Apple: Cristine Granados, Sergio Troncoso, to read along with Rigoberto Gonzalez and others

Schedule:

Carlito’s Café, TODAY --- Wednesday, Nov. 8, 7:30 p.m.
Pochisimo: Mexicano Americanos Readings in Nueva York
1701 Lexington Ave. NYC (bet. 106-107 sts., 6 train to 103st), 212/534-7168

For a little taste of Tejas and Califas drop by Carlito’s Café to hear celebrated Mexican American artists read from their works. The line up includes MC Rigoberto Gonzalez, Christine Granados, Erasmo Guerra , Ada Limon, and Sergio Troncoso but there will be many more talented writers, poets and artists on hand to entertain.

Night and Day Restaurant, Thursday Nov. 9 from 6-8 p.m.
230 Fifth Avenue at President Street Park Slope Brooklyn, 718/399-2162

Tejano Brooklyn Fiction: Brooklyn meets Texas! Featuring Christine Granados, Erasmo Guerra and Sergio Troncoso with other Chicano and Tejano writers.
For a little taste Texas in Brooklyn head over to the Night and Day Restaurant, Thursday, Nov. 9 from 6-8 p.m. where three celebrated Texas authors will read from their books.

The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, Sunday Nov. 12 from 4:30 p.m.
300 Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow, New York, (914) 332-5953

All three authors are featured in Dagoberto Gilb’s latest anthology Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, which will be published by University of New Mexico Press next year.

Erasmo Guerra was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. He is the author of the novel Between Dances, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and he is the editor of the non-fiction collection Latin Lovers: True Stories of Latin Men in Love.

His work has appeared in a number of journals and magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including New World: Young Latino Writers, and forthcoming in Hecho en Tejas and Fifteen Candles. Guerra is a regular contributor to The Texas Observer. He has been awarded writing grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He graduated from the New School and lives in Washington Heights.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including, the Iowa Review, Slate, Watchword, Poetry Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. Her first book lucky wreck was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book this big fake world is was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out in the Fall. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her new bike and doesn't have any tattoos.

Host: Urayoán Noel was born in 1976 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has lived in New York City since 1999. He is a poet, performer, critic, translator, and author of two books of poetry: the concept book Las flores del mall (Alamala Eds., 2000 & 2003), and the recently published Kool Logic / La lógica kool (Bilingual Press). A third collection, entitled Boringkén, is forthcoming (with spoken word CD) from Ediciones Vértigo in Puerto Rico.
He has given readings and performances throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Perú. In collaboration with composer/musician Monxo López, he recorded the rock/spoken word DVD Kool Logic Sessions: Poems, Pop Songs, Laugh Tracts (Bilingual Press).
His work appears in numerous journals (see below) and in such anthologies as eXpresiones: generación X (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña), Los nuevos caníbales v.2: antología de la más reciente poesía del Caribe hispano (Isla Negra Eds.), and the forthcoming 24 Latino Poets (Univ. of Arizona Press).

Urayoán serves on the board of directors of Latino Artists Round Table and ‘Spanic Attack and is lead vocalist for the rock band objet petit a. A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras) and Stanford University, he is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He lives, writes, and rocks in the South Bronx, near Yankee Stadium.

Christine Granados, a native El Pasoan, is a multi-tasking specialist, or as her father-in-law puts it “smart enough to know a little bit about everything and not know a lot about anything.” She is also a sleep deprived stay-at-home mother of two sons and a freelance journalist in Rockdale, Texas.

Her collection of short stories, Brides and Sinners in El Chuco was written piecemeal at three and four in the morning or while nursing her oldest son and finishing her MFA degree.

The book was published by the “kid friendly” University of Arizona Press in 2006. She was winner of the 2006 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, a grant given by Sandra Cisneros to further the aspirations of new writers.

Her stories have been featured in Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature, Texas Observer, El Andar Magazine, Big Tex[t] and the Newspaper Tree. She is a graduate of UT El Paso's School of Communications and the “kid friendly” MFA creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Erasmo Guerra was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. He is the author of the novel Between Dances, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and he is the editor of the non-fiction collection Latin Lovers: True Stories of Latin Men in Love.

His work has appeared in a number of journals and magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including New World: Young Latino Writers, and forthcoming in Hecho en Tejas and Fifteen Candles. Guerra is a regular contributor to The Texas Observer. He has been awarded writing grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He graduated from the New School and lives in Washington Heights.

Sergio Troncoso, the son of Mexican immigrants, was born in El Paso, Texas and now lives in New York City. After graduating from Harvard College, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico and studied international relations and
philosophy at Yale University.

Troncoso's stories have been featured in many anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (Pearson/Longman Publishing), Once Upon a Cuento (Curbstone Press), Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (University of New Mexico Press), City Wilds Essays and Stories about Urban Nature (University of Georgia Press), and New World: Young Latino Writers (Dell Publishing).

His work has also appeared in Encyclopedia Latina, Newsday, The El Paso Times, Hadassah Magazine, Other Voices, Blue Mesa Review, and many other newspapers and magazines.

In 1999, his book of short stories, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press), won the Premio Aztlán for the best book by a new Chicano writer, and the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association. His novel, The Nature of Truth (Northwestern University Press), was published in 2003, and explores righteousness and evil, Yale
and the Holocaust. Please visit his award-winning website at
www.sergiotroncoso.com.

Rigoberto González is the author of two poetry books, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, a National Poetry Series selection, and Other Fugitives and Other Strangers; two bilingual children’s books: Soledad Sigh-Sighs/ Soledad Suspiros and Antonio’s Card/ La tarjeta de Antonio, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; the novel Crossing Vines, winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year Award; and a memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa.

The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, including stays in Spain, Brazil, Costa Rica and Scotland, he writes twice a month a Latino book column, now entering its fifth year, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and is on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives and works in New York City.

Chicana Playwright Josefina Lopez to visit El Paso

Playwright Josefina Lopez will visit EP. Make sure to make the "Unleashing the Wild side: A Writing workshop" with Josefina Lopez.

Friday, November 10 from 1:00-3:00 pm

At the little temple (located on the EL Paso Community College Rio Grande campus),906 N. El Paso Street

(Free Parking in the lots surrounding the little

temple)

There are a limited number of seats so please call

831-2411 to sign up ahead of time!

Sponsored by: El Paso Community College & UTEP.s Women.s Studies; Theatre, Dance & Film; Creative Writing; Chicano Studies; women.s Resource Center, and Languages and Linguistics

Alberto Rios website revamped

I was flipping through the web the other day and caught on to Henry Rios’ web page and notice that it has been revamped. Pretty impressive. I miss “Red, Red, wine” though.

New Bilingual Title from CALACA Press

We mentioned this in our last “Libros, Libros” publication.” YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE. But we received an email about it so here it is again:

AQUI ESTAMOS...YA NOS VAMOS, HERE WE ARE...HERE WE GO by Bustos, Francisco J. & Wickert, Michael Cheno

$12.00 / Paper / pp.96 Calaca Press/RedCalacaArts, 2006 ISBN: 0-9717035-5-8

Poetry. Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. This bilingual collection of poetry and prose by Francisco J. Bustos and Michael Cheno Wickert explores the unique relationship between people and the places they inhabit in the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan area. As Bustos writes in his introduction: "there are those that say that here, there are only tornadoes wherefrom shadows come, step-on, usurp and shake to then leave; or, at times, to stay and rule temporarily, scarring our homes, our streets and our communal spaces. But there are also those who are aware of the shadows that envelop us; and so we confirm, between fragments and imbalances, that here, we can also witness the birth and flowering of a multifaceted culture which navigates and struggles to liberate itself...here, mixture is the root, and the root that we bear within simultaneously leaves its mark with every step we take."

http://www.spdbooks.org/details.asp?bookid=0971703558

Authors of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption to read in Minneapolis, MN

Join authors of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption who will be reading from their work on November 18th from 7 to 9 pm at the Barbara Barker Center for Dance, 500 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN. more info

Carlos Morton in Poland

Just got an out of office reply from Carlos. Looks like he’ll be in Poland until Aug. 2007. Wow.

OCTAVIO ROMANO AND THE CHICANO LITERARY RENAISSANCE

Guest post by the Dean of Chicano(a) Literary Criticism, Felipe Ortego y Gasca

OCTAVIO ROMANO AND THE CHICANO LITERARY RENAISSANCE
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Scholar in Residence, Western New Mexico University, Silver City, New Mexico

I was stunned by the email from Carlos Muñoz informing us that Octavio Romano had died on February 26. He was 82 (1923-2005).

I always thought of Octavio as indestructible. Yet here was the unexpected word that he had passed on. I was stunned. I mourn for Octavio not just because he was one of the leading luminaries of the Chicano literary renaissance, but because Octavio was one of those rare visionaries who tread the “boards of life” all too often unsung for the roles they have played in signif­icant events.

He deserves our most profound mourn­ing. Despite our differences over the years, I admired and respected him for his singular contribution to Chicano letters and for his dedication to the cause of Chicano literature. I venture to say that Octa­vio Roma­no gave Chicano literature its primary direction.

Octavio Romano and I met for the first time in Las Cruces, New Mexico in the summer of 1966, when I was an Instructor of English at New Mexico State University and he was visiting Las Cruces with his wife whose mother lived there.

I was still new on campus having only in 1964 left Jefferson High School in El Paso (where I had been a teacher of French) to join the English department at New Mex­ico State University, a relatively small agriculture school then just up the road from El Paso.

By the strangest of circumstances Octavio and I met on cam­pus in front of the library. We exchanged greet­ings and paused to chat. He told me who he was and offered that he was just strolling the campus. He and his wife were visiting relatives in Las Cruces. That serendipitous meeting changed my life.

I didn’t know that then, and would not until the end of that decade when I undertook the study of Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature at the University of New Mexico, first work in the field.

During that chance encounter I suggested a cafesito. Octavio and I talked about sundry academic topics over coffee and pan dulce. He explained that he was an anthropologist in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, having just received his Ph.D. in 1962. He also explained that he had worked briefly for the Public Health Department in Santa Fe.

I was sur­prised, for I had never met a Mexican American an­thropologist. I learned that he had received his B.A. at the University of New Mexico in 1952, the year I left the University of Pittsburgh where I had studied from 1948 to 1952. We swapped war stories. He serv­ed in Europe with the army during World War II. I served in the Pacific with the Marines.

I told him about my interests in literature and that I had just completed a study of Hamlet. He too was interested in literature, he remarked.

So much so that he and a cohort of Mexican Americans in the Bay Area, including John Carrillo, Steve Gonzales, Phil­lip Jimenez, Rebecca Morales, Ramon Rodriguez, Armando Valdez, and Andres Ybarra, had been think­ing about publishing a literary journal dedicated solely to Mexican American thought and expression.

That piqued my interest. He said he’d send me info as the journal developed. We parted and met irregu­larly over that summer.

Toward the end of the fall semester of that year, I received a note from Octavio with details about the journal which would be called El Grito: Journal of Mexican American Thought and would be published by Quinto Sol Press.

The symbolism did not escape me. The term “Chicano” was still percolating on the ideological stovetops of many Mexican American activists. Octavio encouraged me to submit work to El Grito. Several of my pieces were published in that first volume of El Grito. I thus became one of the Quinto Sol writers.

However, what radiated elán from the Quinto Sol enterprise was the editorial on the frontispiece of Volume 1 Number 1 of El Grito in the Fall of 1967: that publication of El Grito was a manifesto that Mex­ican Americans would be judges of their own cultural works; that Mexican Americans would speak for themselves henceforth, and that all Anglo discourse about Mexican Americans was suspect and, therefore, would be challenged.

This discourse, the editorial asserted, “must be stripped of its eso­teric and sanctified verbal garb and have its intellec­tually spurious and vicious character exposed to full view.” That has always struck me as a courageous pronouncement.

But the significance of that edito­rial lies in its last paragraph: “Only Mexican Ameri­cans themselves can accomplish the collapse of this and other such rhetorical structures by the exposure of their fallacious nature and the development of intellectual alternatives.”

That was the key: “intel­lectual alternatives.”

The rest is history. El Grito became the premier jour­nal of the Chicano literary movement, not the only one, but it led the way. There is no doubt in my mind that without El Grito the Chicano literary move­ment would have developed differently–if at all.

Without El Grito there would have been no Premio Quinto Sol, an award many of us in Chicano literature came to regard as equivalent to the Nobel Prize or, at least, the Pulitzer.

Who would have pub­lished Rudy Ana­ya’s Bless Me, Ultima? Some other publisher, perhaps, in an alternative dimension or universe.

This scenario reminds me of the film It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart who as George Bailey, the despondent president of a Savings and Loan Credit Union on the verge of bankruptcy, wish­es he had never been born and then learns how im­portant his life has been when the angel Clarence, who had negotiated that wish with God, makes it clear to George that since he had never been born he had never “touched” the lives of those he held dear in the life he did live. Octavio Romano touched many lives.

Manuel Delgado, a student at Berkeley in 1969, re­members Romano as a middle-aged guy in wrinkled khaki pants and a white shirt the day Romano at­tended a meeting of the Mexican American Student Confederation, precursor to MEChA on campus.

Romano and the Chicano students were trying to get a Chicano history course approved at Berkeley for the Spring Quarter of 1969. UC Berkeley was the last of the California campuses to offer a Chicano studies course.

Octavio Romano was tapped as the Instructor for The Mexican American Population 143X, a social analysis course which he described as overdue (Daily Californian, January 6, 1969).

Roma­no went on to say that the course would help to offset the John Wayne syndrome afflicting the Amer­ican population vis-à-vis Mexican Americans, closing with the prophetic words: “the Chicano must realize that he must regain control of his historical function.”

That was Romano’s consistent theme: Chicanos must define themselves.

This self-defini­tion was the same clarion call I sounded as I pre­pared to teach the first course in Mexican American literature at the University of New Mexico in the fall of 1969. There was a surprising congruency be­tween Octavio’s political philosophy and mine.

More importantly, though, Octavio Romano was a pragmatist in the Greek sense of ideation and ac­complishment. That is, for the Greeks praxis is the ideation of deeds and pragma is the deed done, actu­ally bringing them to fruition.

All too often in life, there is a disconnect between what we think should be and its actualization. El Grito (the journal) was actualization of the need for Chicano self-expression in a time when that need was paramount and urgent.

For me, the consequence of that actualization was a direction that gave impetus to my life not only in letters but in Chicano literature. Without Romano’s influence I would probably have completed a disser­tation on Chaucer, which was already in progress, before I decided to write a dissertation on Mexican American literature instead, not knowing it would be the first in the field.

That was how profoundly Octa­vio Romano affected my life.

My first efforts as one of the Quinto Sol writers were published in Volume 1 (1967-1968) of El Grito– “The Coming of Zamora” (a short story based on the trial of Reies Lopez Tijerina) and “The Mexican-Dixon Line” (about the Southern plantation mental­ity in the Hispanic Southwest).

In 1969 Octavio Roma­no published El Espejo–The Mirror: Selected Mexican-Amer­ican Literature, the first “anthologi­cal” salvo of Mexican American writing in the Chi­cano era, in effect “the first anthology of Chicano literature published by Chicanos” (1972, viii).

That September, I reviewed the anthology for The Nation, describing it as “a brown paperback book reflecting ‘brown’ literary hopes and aspirations in this country,” adding that “El Espejo represents the first fruits of a struggling nascent effort on the part of a nueva ola (new wave) of literary Mexican Amer­icans.”

This review engendered my concept of “The Chicano Renaissance” which was published in the May 1971 issue of Social Casework. In the fifth print­ing of El Espejo (1972), Octavio listed the Quin­to Sol writers as part of the introduction he and Herminio Rios wrote (xi-xii).

In 1971 Octavio Romano published Voices: Read­ings from El Grito 1967-1971, in which he included my piece on “The Mexican-Dixon Line.” My aca­demic and literary odyssey led me hither and yon in the 70’s and distanced my contact with Octavio.

That distance, however, did not lessen my regard and admiration of him and his consistent efforts in promoting Chicano literature. Without Octavio Roma­no and Quinto Sol Publications and El Grito would we know about Tomas Rivera, Rudy Anaya, Estela Portillo, Rolando Hinojosa, Jose Montoya, Alurista, and the host of other Quinto Sol writers?

For me, Octavio Romano was la joya inesperada, shining in a firmament of jewels that has become Chicano literature.

Copyright ©2007 by the author. All rights reserved.

Quinto Sol Writers 1967-1972

[From El Espejo (5^th Printing), 1972, xi-xii]

Acosta, Oscar Zeta

Alurista

Alvarez, Jorge

Alvarez, Salvador

Alvidrez, Samuel

Anaya, Rudolfo

Arias, Ron

Avendaño, Fausto

Ballester, Paula

Barron, Robert

Burruel, Francisco

Calderon, Bernie

Candelaria, Frederick

Cardenas, Rene

Carrillo, John

Castañeda, Irene

Castillo, Guadalupe

Chacon, Estelle

Chavez, Cesar

Chavez, Mauro

Clark y Moreno, Joseph

Cobos, Georgia

Cuadra, Ricardo

De Anda, Diana

De Anda, José

De la Guerra, Pablo

De la Torre, Alfredo

Elizondo, Sergio

Espinoza, Raul

Espinoza, Rudy

Estupinian, Rafael

Figueroa, B. G.

Galarza, Ernesto

Gallegos, Alberto

Galvez, Javier

García, Juan

García, Juan Antonio

Garcia, Mario

Garcia, Richard

Garcia, Rupert

Garza, Carmen Lomas

González, José Elías

González, Josué

González, Rafael

González, Steve

Guevara, Juan

Gutiérrez, F. N.

Gutiérrez, José Ángel

Gutiérrez, José E.

Guzmán, Ralph

Haws, Jak

Haro, Robert

Hinojosa, Rolando

Hijar y Haro, Juan

Israel, Harry

Jiménez, Francisco

Jiménez, J. Philip

Lefler, Clara

Lopez, Diana

López, Héctor

Maldonado, Jesús

Marín, Reymundo

Martines, Al

Martines, John

Martínez, Thomas

Mejia, Victor

Méndez, Miguel

Montiel, Miguel

Montoya, Jose

Montoya, Malaquias

Morales, Armando

Moreno, Raquel

Moreno, Steve

Najera, José

Navarro, J. L.

Noriega, Ramses

Olivas, Richard

Ornelas, Charles

Ortega, Frank

Ortego, Philip (Felipe)

Ortiz, Orlando

Padilla, Ernie

Padilla, Raymond

Perez Díaz, Roberto

Ponce, Miguel

Portillo, Estela

Ramírez, Javier

Ramírez, Manuel III

Rey, Tony

Reyna, Thelma

Ríos, Francisco

Ríos, Herminio

Rivera, Félix

Rivera, Tomas

Rodríguez, Ramón

Romano, Octavio

Salaz, Rubén Dario

Salinas, Guadalupe

Salinas, Ricardo

Sanchez, Armand

Sanchez, Ricardo

Segade, Gustavo

Sierra, Pedro Ugalde

Sol, Paco (pseudonym)

Torres, Jose

Torres, Salvador

Trujillo, Manuel

Vaca, Nick

Valdez, Armando

Vasquez, Ricardo

Vega, William

Velez, Carlos

Vigil, J. M.

Villa, Esteban

Villagomez, Edel

Villanueva, Tino

Villareal, Alberto

Villavicencio, Silvio

Yañez, Rene

Ybarra, Banjamin

Subcomandante Marcos Visits the El Chuco and Juaritos

http://www.elpasotimes.com/breakingnews/ci_4585505

Two Dia de los Muertos poems by Abelardo B. Delgado

Día de los muertos

Renacen los huertos,

también los muertos.

El día de los muertos

por siete minutos

podemos platicar

con los seres queridos fallecidos

I remember

tagging along

chasing my abuela

to el camposanto

to sell paper flowers

to make the somber tombs bright

That was back in Mexico

I was only seven years old.

Here in the U.S.

los muertos

are persona non gratas.

Here we do not wish

to hold dialogue

with los muertos

They remind us

we too

will eventually join them.

Here there is no luto

and there are no novenas

or puños de tierra

Here in the U.S.

the idea is to hide,

to ignore the dead

and to even avoid death

in our conversations.

in Mexico la muerte

is well known.

She’s la talaca, a feminine figure.

Our Puerto Rican

brothers and sisters

Call her “la flaca.”

Talking with the dead is necessary

to remind ourselves

to enjoy our lives

and not to go about

as if we already died

and no one said good-bye or cried.

By Ableardo B. Delgado

Chicanos and Death

The pinto bean

has always been

A close friend of death

Chicanos and la muerte

have carried on

a long intimate

r e l a t i o n s h i p.

They carry the pain

outside the skin,

they raise the chin

and go on

as if death

had the plague

and they were immunized.

El día de los

muertos

good grandmas will say,

-- makes us more

appreciative of life –

Chicanos do not allow

things that have meaning to die

they don’t allow love to die

Death for them

has a certain lust,

All else is dust

-- Abelardo B. Delgado.