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What would be the impact if our current policy to insure safety and prevent drowning were to pay people to swim with each swimmer? No one could go swimming unless they had a paid professional, or paraprofessional, swim with them. Our present policy in human services and mental health is kind of like paying people to insure the safety and well-being of others.

The post Building community: lessons from swimming appeared first on OUPblog.

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For our second blog post of 2015, we’re looking back at a great article from Katie Kuszmar in The Oral History Review (OHR), “From Boat to Throat: How Oral Histories Immerse Students in Ecoliteracy and Community Building” (OHR, 41.2.) In the article, Katie discussed a research trip she and her students used to record the oral histories of local fishing practices and to learn about sustainable fishing and consumption. We followed up with her over email to see what we could learn from high school oral historians, and what she has been up to since the article came out. Enjoy the article, and check out her current work at Narrability.com.

In the article, you mentioned that your students’ youthful curiosity, or lack of inhibition, helped them get answers to tough questions. Can you think of particular moments where this made a difference? Were there any difficulties you didn’t expect, working with high school oral historians?

One particular moment was at the end of the trip. Our final interview was with the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s (MBA) Seafood Watch public relations coordinator, who was kind enough to arrange the fisheries historian interviews and offered to be one of the interviewees as well. When we finally interviewed the coordinator, the most burning question the students had was whether or not Seafood Watch worked directly with fishermen. The students didn’t like her answer. She let us know that fishermen are welcome to approach Seafood Watch and that Seafood Watch is interested in fishermen, but they didn’t work directly with fishermen in setting the standards for their sustainable seafood guidelines. The students seemed to think that taking sides with fishermen was the way to react. When we left the interview they were conflicted. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a well-respected organization for young people in the area. The aquarium itself is full of nostalgic memories for most students in the region who visit the aquarium frequently on field trips or on vacation. How could such a beloved establishment not consider fishermen voices, for whom the students had just built a newfound respect? It was a big learning moment about bureaucracy, research, empathetic listening, and the usefulness of oral history.

After the interview, when the students cooled off, we discussed how the dynamics in an interview can change when personal conflicts arise. The narrator may even change her story and tone because of the interviewer’s biases. We explored several essential questions that I would now use for discussion before interviews were to occur, for I was learning too. Some questions that we considered were: When you don’t agree with your narrator, how do you ask questions that will keep the communication safe and open?

How do you set aside your own beliefs from the narrator, and why is this important when collecting oral history? In other words, how do you take the ego out of it?

The students were given a learning opportunity from which I hoped we all could gain insight. We discussed how if you can capture in your interview the narrator’s perspective (even if different than your own or other narrators for that matter), then the audience will be able to see discrepancies in the narratives and gather the evidence they need to engage with the issues. Hearing that Seafood Watch doesn’t work with fishermen might potentially help an audience to ask questions on a larger public scale. Considering oral history’s usefulness in engaging the public, inspiring advocacy, and questioning bureaucracy might be a powerful way for students to engage in the process without worrying about trying to prove their narrators wrong or telling the audience what to think. Oral history has power in this way: voices can illuminate the issues without the need for strong editorializing.  This narrative power can be studied beforehand with samples of oral history, as it can also be a great way for students to reflect metacognitively on what they have participated in and how they might want to extend their learning experiences into the real world. Voice of Witness (VOW) contends that students who engage in oral history are “history makers.” What a powerful way to learn!

How did this project start? Did you start with wanting to do oral history with your students, or were you more interested in exploring sustainability and fall into oral history as a method?

Being a fisherwoman myself and just having started commercial fishing with my husband who is a fishmonger, I found my two worlds of fishing and teaching oral history colliding. Even after teaching English for ten years because of my love of storytelling, I have long been interested in creating experiential learning opportunities for students concerning where food comes from and sustainable food hubs.

Through a series of uncanny events connecting fishing and oral history, the project seemed to fall into place. I first attended an oral history for educators training through a collaborative pilot program created by VOW and Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO). After the training, I mentored ten seniors at my school to produce oral history Senior Service Learning Projects that ended in a public performance at a local art museum’s performance space. VOW was integral in my first year’s experience with oral history education. I still work with VOW and sit on their Education Advisory Board, which helps me to continue my engagement in oral history education.

In the same year as the pilot program with VOW, I attended the annual California Association of Teachers of English conference in which the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) Voices of the Bay (VOB) program coordinator offered a training. The training offered curriculum strategies in marine ecology, fishing, economics, and basic oral history skill-building. To record interviews, NOAA would help arrange interviews with local fishermen in classrooms or at nearby harbors. The interviews would eventually go into a national archive called Voices from the Fisheries.

The trainer for VOB and I knew many of the same fishermen and mongers up and down the central and north (Pacific) coast. I arranged a meeting between the two educational directors of VOW and VOB, who were both eager to meet each other, as they both were just firing up their educational programs in oral history education. The meeting was very fruitful for all of us, as we brainstormed new ways to approach interdisciplinary oral history opportunities. As such, I was able to synthesize curriculum from both programs in preparing my students for the immersion trip, considering sustainability as an interdependent learning opportunity in environmental, social, and economic content. When I created the trip I didn’t have a term for what the outcome would be, except that I had hoped they would become aware more aware of sustainable seafood and how to promote its values. Ecoliteracy was a term that came to fruition after the projects were completed, but I think it can be extremely valuable as a goal in interdisciplinary oral history education.

What pointers can you give to other educators interested in using oral history to engage their students?

With all the material out there, I feel that educators have ample access to help prepare for projects. In the scheme of these projects, I would advise scheduling time for thoughtful processing or metacognitive reflection. All too often, it is easy to focus on the preparation, conducting and capturing the interviews, and then getting something tangible done with it. Perhaps, it is embedded in the education world of outcome-based assessment: getting results and evidence that learning is happening. With high school students, the experience of interviewing is an extremely valuable learning tool that could easily get overlooked when we are focusing on a project

For example, on an immersion trip to El Salvador with my high school students, we were given an opportunity to interview the daughter of the sole survivor of El Mozote, an infamous massacre that happened at the climax of the civil war. The narrator insisted on telling us her and her mother’s story, despite the fact that she had just gotten chemotherapy the day prior. She said that her storytelling was therapeutic for her and helped her feel that her mother, who had passed away, and all those victims of the massacre would not die in vain. This was such heavy content for her and for us as her audience. We all needed to talk, be quiet about it, cry about it, and reflect on the value of the witnessing. In the end, it wasn’t the deliverable that would be the focus of the learning, it was the actual experience. From it, compassion was built in the students, not just for El Salvadorian victims and survivors, but on a broader scale for all people who face civil strife and persecution. After such an experience, statistics were not just numbers anymore, they had a human face. This, to date, for me has been the most valuable part of oral history education: the transformation that can occur during the experience of an interview, as opposed to the product produced from it. For educators, it is vital to facilitate a pointed and thoughtful discussion with the interviewer to hone in on the learning and realize the transformation, if there is one. The discussion about the experience is essential in understanding the value of the oral history interviewing.

Do you have plans to do similar projects in the future?

After such positive experiences with oral history education, I wanted a chance to actively be an oral historian who captures narratives in issues of sustainable food sources. I have transitioned from teaching to running my own business called Narrability with the mission to build sustainability through community narratives. I just completed a small project, in which I collected oral histories of local fishermen called: “Long Live the King: Storytelling the Value of Salmon Fishing in the Monterey Bay.” Housed on the Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project (MBSTP) website, the project highlights some of the realities connected to the MBSTP local hatchery net pen program that augments the natural Chinook salmon runs from rivers in the Sacramento area to be released into the Monterey Bay. Because of drought, dams, overfishing, and urbanization, the Chinook fishery in the central coast area has been deeply affected, and the need for a net pen program seems strong. In the Monterey Bay, there have been many challenges in implementing the Chinook net pen program due to the unfortunate bureaucracy of a discouraging port commission out of the Santa Cruz harbor. Because of the challenges, the oral histories that I collected help to illustrate that regional Chinook salmon fishing builds environmental stewardship, family bonding, community building, and provides a healthy protein source.

Through Narrability, I have also been working on developing a large oral history program with a group of organic farming, wholesale, and certification pioneers. As many organic pioneers face retirement, the need for their history to be recorded is growing. Irene Reti sparked this realization in her project through University of California, Santa Cruz: Cultivating a Movement: An Oral History Series on Organic Farming & Sustainable Agriculture on California’s Central Coast. Through collaboration with some of the major players in organics, we aim to build a comprehensive national collection of the history of organics for the public domain.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

I know being a teacher can be time crunched, and once interviews are recorded, students and teachers want to do something tactile with the interviews (podcasts/narratives/documentaries). I encourage educators to implement time to reflect on the process. I wished I would have done more reflective processing in this manner: to interview as a class; to discuss the experience of interviewing and the feelings elicited before, during and after an interview; to authentically analyze how the interviews went, including considering narrator dynamics. In many cases, the skills learned and personal growth is not the most tangible outcome. Despite this, I believe oral history education can help to shape our students into compassionate critical thinkers, and may even inspire them to continue to interview and listen empathetically to solve problems in their personal, educational, and professional futures.  This might not be something we can grade or present as a deliverable, it might be a long-term effect that grows with a students’ life long learning.

Image Credit: Front entrance of the Aquarium. Photo by Amadscientist. CC by SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Building community and ecoliteracy through oral history appeared first on OUPblog.

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Martin Luther King devoted his life’s work to causes of equality and social justice. Today, to honor his teachings and legacy, people of all ages and backgrounds work side-by-side in volunteer service projects across the country on Jan 18, as part of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service. Through serving their communities, they are answering the important question “What are you doing for others?” as well as helping create the “Beloved Community” envisioned by him. Large or small, every project, every helping hand, heart and mind make a difference.

In many cases, the meaningful work being done on this day by so many won’t stop at the end of the day. During the next 40 days, thousands of individuals and organizations will be taking part in the 40 Days of Nonviolence: Building the Beloved Community initiative, created by the Corporation for National and Community Service, in 2008, to mark the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. The initiative’s aim is to encourage the development of service activities that extend beyond MLK Day and help create sustainable community changes.

On a related note, through Jen Robinson’s Lights from the Kidlitosphere I learned that Youth Service America is sponsoring Get Ur Good On, a network of blogs that inspire many to action by showcasing the diverse voices of youth who are “doing good” in their communities. There’s nothing like some inspiration from history and one’s peers to get the social activism flowing!

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Join us for our second installment of Raices (Roots) Fridays, a night of Afro-Latin music and culture with a philanthropic cause

This weekly showcase of some of Chicago’s finest traditional Afro-Latin music ensembles and will benefit a different charity every month. The entire month of April benefits the Chicago AIDS Marathon and The American Red Cross of Greater Chicago has joined the effort to host every Friday in May.

Proceeds of every Friday night over the course of the month will go to the pre-selected charity, including every sale of Las Tablas’ famous sangria, widely acknowledged as one of the tastiest sangrias in the city.




This Friday, 4/17:

OgundaMasá is a performance group committed to preserving and performing various African influenced musical traditions from Cuba. They are the only Afro-Cuban The group is comprised of musicians, educators, and cultural affiliates working as a collective to continue and promote these traditions in Chicago. The group performs folkloric genres such as Rumba and Güiro; which are the musical root of Salsa music.

Next Friday, 4/24:

OgundaMasá will be joined by Nuestro Tambó (1st and 3rd Fridays), a Chicago-based group that is comprised of second and third generation Puerto Rican men and women who hail from the inner-city of Chicago and have committed themselves to the promotion and celebration of the Afro Puerto Rican genres of Plena and Bomba. They are unique in Chicago in that they represent Bomba as a living musical form rather than a folkloric tradition. They will also be celebrating the upcoming release of their debut CD.

Raices Fridays:

Every Friday starting April 3rd
2942 N. Lincoln Ave, 9:30 pm – 1:30 am$5 Mojitos, $5 Donation
$4 Cuba Libre, $5 Donation
All Sangria sales benefit Chicago AIDS Marathon in April and Red Cross of Chicagoland in May
Nuestro Tambó: 1st and 3rd Fridays
Ogunda Masá: 2nd and 4th Fridays



Casa Aztlan is an educational and social center providing cultural activities, community service, leadership development services for teenagers and kids, adult education, citizenship, emergency services and community organization. Casa Aztlan is also on the vanguard of the human rights movement and immigrant's civil rights.

Since its foundation in 1970, Casa Aztlan has participated in organizing the power of the Pilsen community; it has fought for bilingual education, amnesty for undocumented workers, health services for the immigrant community, construction of the Benito Juarez High school and the West Side Technical Institute, development of adult education programs, program Circulo de Lectura Padre e Hijo which was converted into the Telpochcalli pre-school; and has helped create the alphabetical Hispanic council since 1980.

Casa Aztlan has developed an effective after school program for children between 7 and 14 years of age. This program offers kids academic help, sports, recreational activities, and cultural development through music classes and art. During the summer, Casa Aztlan provides community youth with work and safe place to spend free time.

Casa Aztlan also collaborates with many other community and educational organizations in order to better serve the Mexican Latino populations. An example of one such collaboration is the partnership between Casa Aztlan and the Chicago ENLACE program of Northeastern Illinois University which focuses on raising the percentage of Latino student enrollments and graduations in schools.

Casa Aztlan has also also developed a partnership with CALLIE and the Colaborativa Latina de Ciudadania, both of which help people in the Mexican community obtain United States citizenships through soliciting services and through Civics and English classes.

Casa Aztlan also sponsors annual events that incite community participation in the Pilsen neighborhood and immediate area. These annual events include, The Candlelight Dinner, The Viva Aztlan Festival, and La Posada. Aside from the above community events, groups of ceremonial Aztec dancers such as the Nahui Ollin and Quetzal-Yolotl, the Teatro Cuerda Floja, and the master of Folkloric dance Rene Cardoza were based out of Casa Aztlan.

Casa Aztlan also helped organize the largest Latino march in the history of the United States; the historic National March for Civil and Human Rights for Latinos in Washington D.C. in 1996. This event led to other activities in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., and San Antonio, Texas.

Casa Aztlan also works with the Pilsen Alliance. The Pilsen Alliance is a community project focused on questions regarding public transportation, employment development, and other aspects of life that are important to the community.

All donations are tax exempt.
Visit Casa Aztlan at 1831 S. Racine Ave., in the heart of the Pilsen community. http://casaaztlan.org

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THE BOOK:

Publication Date: March 19, 2009
Camino del Sol: A Latina/Latino Literary Series 64 pages
6 x 8 ISBN: 978-0-8165-2740-3, $15.95 paper

Luis Humberto Valadez is a poet/performer/musician from the south side of the Chicago area whose work owes as much to hip-hop as it does to the canon and has been described by esteemed activist writer Amiri Baraka as "strong-real light flashes."

His debut poetry collection what i'm on is frankly autobiographical, recounting the experiences of a Mexican American boy growing up in a tough town near Chicago. Just as in life, the feelings in these poems are often jumbled, sometimes spilling out in a tumble, sometimes coolly recollected. Valadez's poems shout to be read aloud. It's then that their language dazzles most brightly. It's then that the emotions bottled up on the page explode beyond words. And there is plenty of emotion in these poems. Sometimes the words jump and twitch as if they‚d been threatened or attacked. Sometimes they just sit there knowingly on the page, weighted down by the stark reality of it all.

José García put a thirty-five to me
my mother was in the other room
He would have done us both
if not for the lust of my fear

THE BUZZ:

This new Mexican American/Chicano voice is all at once arresting, bracing, shocking, and refreshing. This is not the poetry you learned in school. But Valadez, who received his MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa University, has paid his academic dues, and he certainly knows how to craft a poem. It's just that he does it his way. Luis Humberto Valadez works as a coordinator and consultant for the Chicago Public Schools Homeless Education Program.

Recordings of Valadez performing his poems can be found at MySpace.com, Reverb Nation, and other Internet sites. VALADEZ BLURBS: “Brave, raw, and exposing of a young mans consciousness. Luis’s work is not confessional in the limited, put-it-in-a-box way that big publishers like to market their material to liberal guilt.” -Andrew Schelling, author of Tea Shack Interior

“In voices colloquial and church, reverent and riotous, serious and sly; in rap and fragment, sound and sin; from gangs and minimum-wage jobs to astrology and Christ, Luis Valadez makes his fearless debut. This poetry is a painfully honest disclosure of identity and anger, and it is as mindful of falsity and as hard on itself as it is playful, loose, and loving. Sometimes the language is clear and cutting, while other times it disintegrates into sonic units and primal utterances: Luis calls upon the whole history of oral and verbal expression to tell his story—going so far as to write his own (wildly funny and disturbing) obituary.” —Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century

“On the trail blazed by innovators like Harryette Mullen and John Yau, Luis Valadez sends wild, canny, charged, and vulnerable prayers from the hard camp of contested identities. Each line, each word, is a blow against “impossibility” and the heavy pressure to be silent as expected. Interrogations of tradition(s) as well as celebrations, the irresistible poems in Valadez’s first collection exist at the exact fresh moment of deciding to live and to love.” —Laura Mullen, author of After I Was Dead

“Valadez’s work is not simply fierce language poetics… here is a writer—the genuine article—whose style is that of a truth-speaking curandero, offering sacred cantos to anyone interested in illuminating that inner revolution called corazón. To read his work is to discover the future of American poética! “ —Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Skin Tax

“Valadez’s impressions abruptly transport the reader from swaggering elucidation to raw pain. In a sometimes-resigned glance around for divinity, what I’m on triggers equally sudden heart-rippings, laughter, and cinematic naturescapes.” —Claire Nixon, editor Twisted Tongue Magazine

Holly Schaffer, Publicity Manager
University of Arizona Press
355 S. Euclid Ave., Ste. 103 Tucson, AZ 85719
Ph: 520-621-3920, Fx: 520-621-8899
[email protected]
www.uapress.arizona.edu

THE EVENT:



Lisa Alvarado

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Palabra Pura Series: Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto González
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 7:00pm

Note correction to starting time of event

Time: Doors open at 6:00 PM, Reading begins at 7:00 PM
Cost: Free admission.
Location: Center on Halsted, Chicago's LGBT Community Center, 3656 N. Halsted, Chicago, IL


Lorna Dee Cervantes is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet from San José, California. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, including The Norton Anthologies of Modern, American, English, Contemporary & Women's Poetry. She is a recipient of many honors, awards & literary fellowships including the NEA, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for DRIVE: The First Quartet. A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. In 1976, she founded the influencial small press & Chicano literary journal, MANGO Publications, which was the first to publish well-known writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ray Gonzalez and many others. Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness and was an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently resides in San Francisco and teaches at SFSU and offers intensive poetry workshops from her home, the Mission Poetry Center. She is readying several new books of poetry for publication and completing her novel and a full-length screenplay. Visit her on her blog at http:lornadice.blogspot.com

Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes twice a month a Latino book column, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, on the Board of Directors of Fishouse Poems: A Poetry Archive, and on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.

And reasons why I love them both:

Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In The War Between Races
--- Lorna Dee Cervantes

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)

I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country
there is war.


Cactus Flower --- Rigoberto González

It's a sweaty forty-minute walk through the desert from the main road to the wooden shack. Though the desert is flat and Rolando thinks he can see for miles into the faded blue horizon, the shack remains invisible until it suddenly shoots up from the ground, becoming distinguishable from the clumps of golden tumbleweeds and the sand hill leading up the ravine, everything blanketed by the brightness of the sun. The leaves of the fresh head of lettuce he brings from the fields wilt inside his oily fingers. He thinks about his toes shrinking back from the steel-tipped boots, his scrotum pulling away from his sticky underwear. The smell of dirt rises pure off the ground. His hand trembles at the thought of an empty shack, of nobody inside to open the door for him and take the lettuce from his hands, of no one to gasp in gratitude to assure him that despite the journey through the sweltering heat the leaves at the center are cool and crisp. His fears dissipate with the presence of his wife standing at the doorway, still as a cactus flower in her diaphanous white blouse, which she wears not so he can peek at her small white bra or at the pudgy abdomen he likes to grab while she's washing her hair bent over a bucket of water. She wears it, she tells him, to let the faintest breeze blow on her blouse, so she can spread her arms and cool her sweaty undersides. She's posing that way now, arms outstretched, but this far back it's hard to tell if it's the desert breeze come her way or if she's greeting him. He looks forward to tonight when they will feed each other lettuce leaves and chew them slowly as caterpillars devouring the moisture. Suddenly his eyes go blank, victims to the beads of sweat mixed into the dust he picked up from the fields, giving the sweat a more powerful sting. He rubs his eyes with the sleeve of the blue flannel shirt, taking in the sharp contrast of the smooth cloth to the coarse skin of his brown hand. Out of focus, he tries to reclaim the image of his wife in her white blouse, and then saddens, thinking Mirinda may not have seen him coming at all because she no longer stands at the entrance to the shack and the door is shut, the padlock hanging heavy like a heart gone solid and cold.

The candle flame twitches violently, threatening to leave him blind. The weather changed during his nap, and he woke up surprised in the dark. The wind hurls small stones against the wooden walls and bumps the window shutters repeatedly. Only when the wind blows is Rolando painfully aware of the imperfections in the small one-room home he built for himself in the middle of the desert, what the residents of the nearby town call "el dompe" because they drop off their useless vinyl couches and urine-stained mattresses into the nearby ravine though this area is no longer a county landfill and no longer uninhabited. The whistling and hissing of the dust storm outside disrupt his concentration so he sits without a word in his throat, slurping the Campbell's soup as loud as possible to convince himself that the silence the wind has forced on him has not upset his late-evening meal. Mirinda remains expressionless, staring across the table at the way his large hand holds the tin spoon too delicately, as if she knows he's scooping properly to please her. Even with the dim light she's beautiful, her features sharply defined and smooth as mariposa lily petals. The shadows make her face grow thin, distant as a portrait; but the flickering flame dancing gracefully in the deep ebony of her eyes keeps her within reach. She is tangible and touchable like before. She is here again to disregard the shadows as they flutter wildly like moths above her head. If they flee they will take her with them. But until then they soothe him, giving him this gift, this light, this woman, who said she was going to leave him and who didn't leave him completely. Forgotten are the elbow cramp, the stiff neck and aching shoulder blades. He has the urge to find the pretty marigolds he promised her when she agreed to follow him here to this desolate place, far from the run-down trailer camps and low-income housing projects where beauty like hers withers and dies. No, instead they are closer to the ground they left behind in the deserts of Chihuahua, a space so large it is like living inside breath itself. The peaceful evenings are long and familiar. The peaceful evenings bloom with stars. Stars love Mirinda so much they confuse her for the moon and crown her head. Suddenly the wind breaks in and snuffs the candle out. Mirinda disappears. He wants to stand and ask her to forgive him for those pretty marigolds. The wind roars. He keeps quiet, knowing that with such a wind his plea is weak and will remain unheard.

The wind grows stronger when he rises at four in the morning to pack his lunch and set off on his forty-minute trek back to the road where the bus picks him up to deliver him to the lettuce fields. When he opens the door the moonlight bursts in, lighting up the wooden table, the tiny unmade bed with the yellow faded sheets, the gas-tank stove, and Mirinda's white dresser. The looking glass Rolando gave her stares out the door, confronting the moon with its own light. He squints at the glare, grabs his denim jacket and tries to find the stone silhouette of his wife standing near the darkest corner. He shuffles out swiftly and doesn't catch a glimpse of her. At dawn the desert is cold. He shivers at the thought of the weary march getting back after work. Red flashlight in hand, he walks behind the shack, bends over the broken-down Pinto to check for damage on the windshield. The green paint looks clean, smooth as skin, so he rubs his hand across it then draws back quickly when a nettle on the surface stings his thumb. Suddenly he's alarmed to be outside. The landscape of desert rocks and manzanita patches appears shrunken, pulled in toward the shack, which becomes its dead center. He feels trapped, like the snowman in the glass bubble Mirinda enjoys shaking up at the swap meet to watch the tiny white particles drop. For him the particles strike sideways, strike hard. He moves quickly back around inside, exchanges the jacket for a thicker coat and grabs the brown paper sack, tightening the grip to remind himself how many of yesterday's burritos he will have for lunch. He steps out and shuts the door. The padlock snaps. He wishes to retreat, crawl beneath the yellow faded sheets, which will always smell of Mirinda's nape, of a strong sunlight filtered in through the dampness of her long black hair. He walks a few paces forward, hesitating because there's something he forgot. He's afraid to turn around, afraid that when he looks the shack will have vanished and he will find himself alone and vulnerable as the snowman or the palo verde that looks twice as solitary at night. He keeps on walking, sensing his distance from his home, a length that doubles when he thinks Mirinda's not inside stirring like the delicate perfume she rubs into her earlobes so that any sound she hears is savory and sweet. Mirinda, savory and sweet, desires no earring over this, the lip clamp of his mouth that nibbles nibbles nibbles on the flower-scented skin above her jaw. He dares to grin; he's compelled to whistle. He remembers he didn't eat the lettuce.

Rolando doesn't wait long for the bus. It's an old school bus painted over in white with the agricultural company's name on both sides. He doesn't have to see it to know it's coming because it's backfiring all the way down the road. In the early mornings the sloppy paint job looks clean until it stops in front of him and the old yellow coat shows through the wild strokes of white. The doors squeak open and the fat driver in a red plaid shirt greets him with a nod of the head, shifting into gear before Rolando finds a seat. Rolando paces reluctantly toward the space next to Sarita Mendoza, who wears a sweatshirt with words in English neither of them can read. She likes to save a place for him near the front. Before he takes a seat, Rolando nods at the other lettuce pickers. Don Carlos calls him by the wrong name. He wants to relax for the next twenty minutes until he arrives at the fields. He wants to tilt his head back and listen to the small transistor radio don Carlos behind him is holding. But Sarita Mendoza wants to talk.

She likes asking questions. She asks about his wife because she suspects Mirinda doesn't exist. She accuses him of lying to keep her from making a match of him with one of her daughters. Today she invites Rolando and his wife to a family bautismo. He politely refuses. She asks why. The glassy look of her eye makes him nervous. The bus hits a bump on the road and he hears the blades of the short-handle hoes rattle in the back. He wants to look down at the oval blister beginning to callus on his right palm. He wants to pick at it but doesn't, imagining a more intense pain against his hand as he thrusts the hoe into the ground. Instead he traces Sarita Mendoza's chapped lips, smiles and tells her he'll be celebrating his third-year anniversary this weekend. She jokingly says he's a liar. Rolando laughs with her, trying to think up an answer in case she asks where he's taking his wife to celebrate. She asks. He still hasn't thought of anything, so he simply says it's up to Mirinda. Can Mirinda travel to México? Sarita Mendoza leaves her mouth open, the dry lips are cracked at the corners; one corner is clotted with blood. He answers no, though he should have said yes because now Sarita Mendoza says he should have married a woman with papers. All of her daughters have their documents in order and they can all work in the fields, cook in the kitchen and perform both chores in bed. Rolando shakes his head. He should try to stop by the bautismo anyway, she suggests, since she's never met this mysterious woman he keeps hidden away in "el dompe." She's heard so much about Mirinda she's willing to wear out her old huaraches on a trip to the middle of the desert just to meet her. And if there isn't anyone there it won't matter because she will bring one of her daughters along just in case. Rolando looks away, embarrassed. He watches his cut lip grin on the dirty window. He didn't comb his hair. He forgot his baseball cap. The red bandanna in his back pocket has been used on his nose all week.

He wants to correct Sarita Mendoza and tell her she's heard very little about Mirinda, that woman, that goddess, that light. Mirinda, passion and appetite, can eat a whole coconut by herself, using up an entire afternoon with a dozen limes and a bowl of rock salt by her side while his heartbeat races to compete with that fervor she has for breaking the shell with her hands—a fever that finally peaks with him taking her fingers in his mouth and pressing his tongue beneath her nails to suck the salty juice. Mirinda, fury and fire, becomes as silky as her sleeping gown when he braids his limbs into hers, sweating off the humidity from their skins, surrendering themselves like cactus owls on that tiny bed that prompts them toward one another no matter what direction they stretch. Mirinda can touch every place on him at once and make each place jump twice. Mirinda is more than a woman, more than a wife—she took his body in her fleshy arms exactly three years ago and she still holds him there. And when she said she was going to leave him, she said she was going to dissolve his soul, so he didn't let her leave, not entirely, taking her neck in his hands and widening her mouth and forcing his power on her love until it burst into the air like a puff of dandelion seeds, an explosion of stars in the sky, an outbreak of marigolds. Such beautiful flowers. He's dizzy. Sarita Mendoza gazes at him and he blushes.

When the bus finally stops she leaps up and hurries to the back, her gray sweatshirt coming up on her stomach. She wants to get a good hoe, one with a clean sharp blade that won't give her trouble when she's digging into the ground. The rest of the workers scurry right behind her. Everyone hops off through the emergency exit door. Rolando looks past the window and at the lettuce fields, the heads looking cool and bright. Beyond the lettuce fields grow the grape fields and next to them sit the onion fields and rise the orchards, all of them blossoming so majesticly in the desert. He works this land year after year, intimate with its furrows and soils, yet he despises it for breaking his body down, for keeping him alive and sucking back all that strength. He imagines returning the following season, the fields lush and ripe again, displaying no evidence that he ever touched them. He imagines Mirinda, buried beneath the broken-down Pinto, unable to comb her long black hair or unable to darken her plucked eyebrows slim as marigold stems or unable to redden those fleshy points in the middle of her upper lip. She left her reflection behind in the looking glass. She returns to the desert to reclaim it and be whole again, then she thins out into air to become that void he sees when he holds up her mirror. When the white-haired foreman taps on the window, Rolando slowly rises from the seat, unashamed to be the last off the bus. The air is chilly and smells of soil freshly watered, the scent of cool lettuce lifts off the ground. On the other side of the road lies the barren desert. At the other end of the desert Mirinda's ghost waits patiently inside the tiny shack for him to step inside and breathe her scent of dusty wood. When he arrives each afternoon, the shack listens carefully, detects his slightest movements, excites its joints and rusty hinges and entreats Mirinda to respond.

Lisa Alvarado

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This is a multicultural anthology of spiritual writings by women. In rediscovering spirituality in a female context, this is ideal source material. By ‘source’ I mean personal soul food to feed my own yearnings, ground water for the wellspring of my daily life. Storming Heaven’s Gate skillfully bridges the everyday with the divine, featuring the writing of Pat Mora, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde. I would like to comment specifically on the work of these women and its impact on my creative life.


Pat Mora’s contribution is a list poem, in which she invokes the Goddess through her many Aztec names. In a cry for wholeness and renewal she calls on Coatlicue, Tlaliyolo, and the Virgin de Tepayac/Guadalupe. Coatlicue is the serpent mother, representing all and nothingness from whence all emerges. Tlaliyolo is the creator/destroyer of worlds, and the Virgin of Tepeyac/Guadalupe is the eternal maiden, ever able to renew herself across the ages. The world springs forth, eats itself, springs forth again, dissolves itself in velvet blackness, and rises again, as one, as many, divine and common. These facets of the divine reflect exactly the kind of sensual, radiant cycle of spirituality that are the hallmark of Storming Heaven’s Gate.

Creatively and personally, I needed to engage the Goddess in a Latin context. In doing so, I found freedom from restrictive ideas of female identity that have been Catholicism's and colonialism's legacy. It is precisely the idea of sin, of the inherent pollution of women’s bodies, that had to be broken through for me to fully claim my creative energy and direct it.

As I continue to try to make new work, I have to reach out for connection in an ever-deepening way. My personal spirituality is being plumbed for imagery, for language, for a way to connect with something larger than myself.

Ironically, and in a way I can only begin to comprehend, this spiritual connection is plumbing me as well. What I mean here is that I can't forget that writing is my tether to something divine. Personal success, critical or audience acceptance needs to remain a secondary consideration, as much as care about those things. ‘What is being worked though me?’ is the question that I have to ask myself, the question that demands an answer at the end of the day.

In 'brothers, part 6,' Lucille Clifton cries out to a silent God who turns a deaf ear to suffering. She asks:

tell me why
in the confusion of a mountain
of babies stacked like cordwood...
tell me why You neither raised your hand
nor turned away...why You said nothing. (p.28)

I can feel my own tears lodge in my throat as I write this. What a terrible beauty exists in her description of both a personal and global apocalypse. Her wound, her grief, the abandoned bodies of nameless children, unsaved, unprotected.


Clifton asks the eternal question of a God she desperately wants connection with but does not understand. I remember my own rage at what I saw at the time as God's silence in the face of my own childhood abuse. I see now that what happened was part of my story unfolding, the catalyst for who I've become. It was a singular gift, a defining moment, in which I had to choose to live and to transform. In my case, that moment is where I encountered a God/Goddess.


Lastly, Audre Lorde illustrates the kind of language and imagery I can only hope to achieve someday. She was poet, theorist, theologian, lover, survivor, and griot - someone who once tore down the Master's house and built a temple to the New/Old Mother. One poem in particular kept speaking to me, even in dreams after I read it for the first time. In it, Lorde writes:

Attend me, hold me in you muscular arms, protect me
from throwing any part of myself away. (p.67)

How perfect this quote is, to its vision of encountering the very dark and moving into the light. How moving it is to hear a call to restoration and rebirth in a woman’s voice, shaped by She-Who-Is.

• ISBN-10: 0452276217

• ISBN-13: 978-0452276215

Lisa Alvarado

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In Being Bodies, Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon offer the perspectives of a variety of women with varying Buddhist practices. The result is a contemplative and compelling work dealing with what it means to be female, what it means to fully and consciously inhabit the female body.

The last wave of the Western women’s movement critiqued the idea that a women was her body. In fact, a major focus of that movement was the position that biology was not destiny. This was primarily a response to the social construction of women’s identity, the objectification of a women as nothing more than physical self. However, there was little offered to support women in learning to fully live in that physicality, to know it as both vessel and endpoint. Being Bodies offers a view that a woman’s self-knowledge is rooted in the flesh. Women’s awareness is based in surrendering to the body’s impermanence, its joy, its suffering, and its death. One of the most thought-provoking essays is Linda Chrisman’s "Birth".

In it, she describes the process of labor, and giving birth to her son. What's striking about this experience was how Chrisman was both deeply enmeshed in that process and separate from it. The most telling lesson, for both Chrisman and the reader, occurred at the height of labor. Here she realizes that all her physical conditioning, all her contemplative practice would not save her from pain. This selection beautifully illustrates the message of Being Bodies. There may be another path for women, rooted in surrender to the fullness and limits of the body. Through that choice, a woman may find self-knowledge and ultimately, freedom. While the focus of Being Bodies is the female experience, it is a universal and object lesson about Buddhist ideas of impermanence, and becoming fully present in every moment by letting go. I was moved to tears reading this book. It reminds me that true beauty is the sum of both pleasing things as well the scars.

I feel such a strong, visceral connection to the stories of the women profiled in this anthology. (Interesting that "visceral" is the only word that comes to mind in reviewing a book dealing with the experience of being grounded in the body and the odyssey of transcendence.) This book is a pivotal one as I try to develop a deeper spiritual practice - moving East in order to come West, hoping to re-encounter and reinterpret my own ideas of embodiment, spirituality and existence.

ISBN-10: 1570623244 ISBN-13: 978-157062324

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Gente! Exciting poetry news here in Chicago...Palabra Pura kicks off their third year January 16th, 8:30 PM, at their usual local, California Clipper, 1002 N California Ave.

For those of you unfamiliar with this superb salon of Latino poetry, here's an interview I did with one of its founders, La Bloga friend and excellent poet in his own right, Francisco Aragón. Believe me, a Palabra Pura experience is NOT to be missed, and it's been my pleasure to be part of the local steering committee, especially in the company of the likes of Ellen Placey Wadey, Mike Puican, Mary Hawley, y La Divina, Johanny Vazquez. Below is the first line up of what promises to be a stellar year of local Chicago poets paired with poets who've made their mark on the national scene.


In her debut collection of poems, My Sweet Unconditional, ariel robello meets us at the horizon, where worlds blend in the blush of sunrise and sunset, where land meets sea, air – earth, and where man and machine interrupt the natural ebb and flow of life. Unapologetic, she declares her faith in a love that defies borders and with each poem she weds herself to a belief that unconditional love can still be found in the cracks of a urban sidewalk, dancing above puffing smoke stacks, behind a guerrilla’s mask, in the worn paint brush of an island love, blundering below a street lamp in Ensenada, spelled out in daisies on a Veteran’s tombstone, in the stitch of a huipil and most importantly—deep inside one’s own reflection. With language as radiant and dangerous as broken glass ariel robello cuts away at the political dogma and superficial beauty of a world unhinged to reveal a bloody but dignified glimpse of love in the hands of a New World survivor.

Having earned her chops on both the stage and the page, ariel robello represents a generation of poets as concerned with performance as they are with line breaks. ariel robello received a PEN West Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2002 and published her first collection of poems, My Sweet Unconditional in 2005 with Tia Chucha Press. The inspiration for her poetry stems from her work as a poet-in-residence and mentor to teens, advocate for immigrants’ rights, and teacher of English in schools, sweatshops, juvenile detention centers, and most recently at the community college where she now lives with her hijito in Tampa, Florida.

“Effortlessly, swimmingly, yet every line a ‘florescent ember’, seething and praying, these poems mark the debut of a powerful woman of letters; young yet wise, weary yet hopeful. ariel robello is the revolution in verse we’ve been waiting for – the spoken unspoken, the dreaded effervescence of truth conspiring with our souls. Chicana voices have always pushed deeper into the emotional terrain of conscience and witness, ‘My Sweet Unconditional’ does what poetry collections should always do – pull us into a universe so familiar yet frighteningly unknown with poems that awaken us to the political and personal traumas of our times, yet sweetened by the beauty of word and verse.

—Luis J. Rodriguez is an award-winning poet, journalist, memoirist, children’s book writer, essayist and fiction writer. He is author of the critically acclaimed “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.”

"Ariel Robello's My Sweet Unconditional is never insincere or sentimental. This first collection of point-blank narratives of the heart never misses. Playful and reasoned, witty and serious, My Sweet Unconditional's insinuation beckons and disarms. Ariel Robello's voice is one of a kind."—Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

"Poetry Lover, beware the fire-and-ice urban joys of Ariel Robello! These are brutally savvy and deliciously vicious paeans to life, relentless in their celebrations of love, sacrifice and sex--and once beheld by the eyeheart, humbles rescues redeems."
—Wanda Coleman, poet, Los Angeles

"Ariel Robello has crafted remarkable poems that demand no less than a pure appreciation of art from you, even as they break your heart. There is nothing easy here: the music is grafted from a painful if illuminating life, but they shimmer with a rage that is transformative.
A voice to watch for." —Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Dog Woman.

www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Paper -1-882688-29-5 $13.95

Available for sale on www.amazon.com

Juan Manuel Sánchez was born and raised on the US side of the San Diego/Tijuana border. He holds an MA in Literature from UC San Diego and is currently in the final throes of his MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked as an assistant editor for Ninth Letter, has lectured at various universities and is now Lecturer of Spanish at the University of Chicago. His work is forthcoming in Pembroke and in the anthology Junta: Avant-Garde Latino/a Writing.

LisaAlvarado

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Teatro Luna was founded in June 2000 by Coya Paz and Tanya Saracho, with an original ensemble of ten women from diverse Latina/Hispana backgrounds. They came together because they realized that the stories and experiences of Latina/Hispana women were undervalued and underrepresented not only on the Chicago stage, but beyond. Many of them had similar experiences of being asked to perform stereotyped images of that were often one-dimensional and, at times, offensive: spicy sexpots, voiceless maids, pregnant gangbangers, timid "illegal" immigrants, etc. They were also concerned that the few parts written for Latina women often went to non-Latina actresses. They felt that they had to do something. Their answer was Teatro Luna, Chicago's first and only all-Latina theater.

En el Futuro, they plan to perform published pieces and original works by new and established Playwrights along with their own original works. Teatro Luna is constantly looking for new works written by Latinas/Hispanas or about Latina/Hispana women.

If you'd like to make a submission, send a copy of your script to Reading Series Director, Teatro Luna, 5215 N. Ravenswood, Suite #210, Chicago, IL 60640 or email her at [email protected]. They look forward to nurturing la voz de la mujer Latina inside their artistic home, to giving Latina/Hispanas of all backgrounds an opportunity to tell their story.

In the meantime, a large percentage of their energia is spent on creating original pieces, developed by the ensemble. This has prompted the creation of the "Teatro Luna Developement Process." Poco a poco, the ensemble developed its own vocabulary and artistic vision which improves with every project. The ever changing process is described below. Ensemble members share stories, memories, ideas and thoughts with each other in a brainstorming session.

1 Members then bring in written stories, monologues, or more specific research to propose specific ideas for pieces.

2 During workshop/rehearsal, members divide into smaller groups (2-4 people) and experiment with adding movement, chorus, additional characters and other stylistic devices to the stories. The responsibility of these smaller groups is to find two or more dramatically different approaches to present the idea/story.

3 Versions of the story are "presented" or "pitched" to the rest of the ensemble, who critique and comment on the proposal. Often, different actresses will "try on" the same role to further expand and explore the possibilities of the subject and style of the piece.

4 Once the ensemble has chosen a "format", the scene is improvised several times (with the game of "character musical chairs" described above). The women who are watching write down character traits, story concept and themes, and any dialogue that stands out (at times particularly lively workshops have been videotaped).

5 The scenes are then scripted by an ensemble member and presented to the group in an "official" version.

6 Creating doesn't stop there. The rehearsal process remains open. Although actors work from the script in a relatively traditional manner, the entire process involves on-going discussion and collaboration from the ensemble. A couple of times, a finished scene or two were not finalized until a few hours before opening.

7 This is the "official" teatro luna process when developing original works, but they continue to refine and expand it to fit their needs, practicing our techniques in on-going workshops that include both established Teatro Luna members and newer Artistic Associates and Friends.

TEATRO LUNA ENSEMBLE

COYA PAZ (co-founder/co-Artistic Director) was raised in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Columbia, and Brazil, and moved permanently to the United States in the late 1980's. She is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, where she also holds her MA. She has collaborated with Teatro Luna on all of our ensemble built projects (Generic Latina, Dejame Contarte/Let Me Tell You, The Maria Chronicles and S-E-X-Oh!) Additional Chicago acting credits include Impassioned Embraces, Etta Jenks, Death of a Salesman and Baby Boom En El Paraiso.

Directing credits include The Maria Chronicles and S-e-x-Oh! (with Tanya Saracho), The Drag King Rooftop Karaoke Hootchie Cootchie No Name Show and Musical Latin Extravaganza (with Michelle Campbell), Diane Herrera's The Dress and Marisabel Suarez's Three Days (part of Teatro Luna's Sólo Latinas Project). She has appeared in numerous independent film and performance projects, and enjoys singing in the shower. Coya is a contributor to the Oxford University Encyclopedia of Latino/as in the United States, and is committed to using performance as a strategy for social and individual change. [email protected]

TANYA SARACHO (cofounder/co_Artistic Director) is a proud Co-Founder of TEATRO LUNA: Chicago's All-Latina Theater Ensemble and a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists. She was born in Sinaloa, Mexico and moved to Texas in the late 80's. Saracho attended Boston University where three of her plays, Miss Norma and the Alligator, Maya Takes a Moonbath and La Dueña, received Premiers. Tanya has studied writing with Maria Irene Fornes (Latin Am. Writers Retreat), Derek Wolcott, Kate Snodgrass and Claudia Allen. In Chicago, La Dueña received a staged reading at the Tony-Award-winning, Victory Gardens Theatre. Also while in Chicago, her writing has been featured in all of Teatro Luna's ensemble-built works including Generic Latina, Dejame Contarte, The Maria Chronicles, SOLO Latinas and S-E-X-Oh! Saracho's play Kita y Fernanda received a full production at Luna in early 2003, along with a reading at Repertorio Español while a finalist for the 2003 Nuestras Voces playwrighting competition. Other Awards include: The Ofner Prize given by the Goodman Theatre and Christopher B. Wolk Award at Abingdon Theatre in NYC (finalist).

Directing (and co-directing) credits include: The remount of Generic Latina, Piece of Ass for Estrogenfest and The Maria Chronicles for both the Goodman's Latino Theater Festival and the critically acclaimed full-length run at Teatro Luna, S-e-x-Oh!, Que Bonita Bandera and Three Days for SÓLO Latinas, and the upcoming Knowhatimean written by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval.

Chicago acting credits include: Sandra in Living Out with American Theatre Co./Teatro Vista, Vecina in Electricidad at the Goodman Theatre, The Angel in Angels in America, and Martirio in La Casa De Bernarda Alba with Aguijon Theater. In the winter of 2005, Saracho premiered her solo play To Red Stick at Chicago Dramatists, in Teatro Luna's critically acclaimed evening of solo work, SÓLO Latinas, which was later remounted in the 2005 Theatre-On-The-Lake Season. Tanya's voice can be heard around the country in many radio and television commercials. [email protected]

DANA CRUZ (artistic ensemble) loves the ladies de Teatro Luna and is excited to team up with them. Recent Chicago credits include the Let the Eagle Fly at the Goodman's Latino Theater Festival, Maria Chronicles, and S-E-X-Oh! with Teatro Luna and Generic Latina with the touring company Teatro Luna... Anda, CityGirl & Game/Place/Show with the Neofuturists and Acts of Mercy by John Michael Garces with Flushpuppy Productions to name a few. She has performed professionally with companies in Chicago, New York and Boston and is currently teaching theater at Our Lady of Tepeyac High School and working as a massage therapist in Evanston, IL. She is an Aries. She hates talking about herself in the third person and is oh so excited to be marrying the T-man on June 2005. [email protected]

MIRANDA GONZALEZ (artistic ensemble/touring director) is an original founding member of Luna. Teatro Luna credits include the original production of Generic Latina, Probadita, Mas Probadita, both the New York and Chicago mountings of Dejame Contarte, SOLO Latinas and S-E-X-Oh! She has appeared in numerous industrials and commercials in the midwest, as well as the dearly departed Joan Cusack television series What About Joan? where she played a recurring role. Miranda is a loan officer and mother by day, and a Lunatica by night. [email protected]

suzette MAYOBRE(artistic ensemble) comes to us from the sunny state of Florida, where after a life of sun and fun, she decided to move to the bitter cold of Chicago! Fortunately, she met the wonderful ladies of Teatro Luna, who have made the transition easier and have provided her with numerous opportunities to nurture her art. Her roots in entertainment were planted while at the University of Miami, where she co-hosted a live, weekly morning show, worked at the university radio station, and produced a feature-length documentary entitled Last Night In Cuba, which she holds very dear to her heart. After receiving her degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Miami, she decided that she wanted to pursue her acting. She has worked on several commercials, industrials, voice overs, independent films and television, most recently as a guest reporter for Control, a Univision Network program. Her theater credits includes work with Teatro Luna, Teatro Vista, Salsation! and Eclipse Theatre among others. [email protected]

maritza Cervantes (artistic ensemble) is a Mexican-American actress/musician/artist born and raised in Chicago. Past credits include: Al son..que me toques Lorca La Molecula Artistica: Nido del Mar, La Casa De Bernarda Alba, Aguijon Theatre, Polaroid Stories, En Mortem Flush Puppy Productions, and S-E-X-Oh! with Teatro Luna. Maritza is Co-founder of the acoustic/hip-hop/soul influenced musical outfit the LUNA BLUES MACHINE. [email protected]

yadira CORREA (artistic ensemble) Crazy curly haired Puertorican who's acting credits include: Vagina Monologues, For Colored Girls/Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enough, María Chronicles, Sketchbook and S-E-X-Oh! [email protected]





MACHOS: Be a Man?...
Men. Women. Women dressed as men. Teatro Luna, Chicago's All-Latina Theater Company, announces the world premiere of MACHOS, an interview based play about contemporary masculinities. In 2006, frustrated with boyfriends, brothers, and bosses, the company of Latina women set out to answer the question: what are men really thinking?

The result is MACHOS, a performance drawn from interviews with 50 men nationwide and performed by an all-Latina cast in drag. From a young man's relationship with his correctional officer father to man cheating on his wife with himself, to an epic confrontation between fraternity brothers, MACHOS presents a range of true-life stories with Teatro Luna's trademark humor and unique Latina point of view.

MACHOS follows the critically acclaimed shows S-E-X-OH and LUNATIC(A)S and moves beyond the everyday stereotypes of gender, offering a complex look at how 50 men (and eight Latina women) learned how to be men. As always, Teatro Luna is cheeky, straightforward, and willing to ask even the most hard hitting questions: exactly how did you learn to use a urinal? MACHOS is presented In English with a sprinkle of Spanish.

MACHOS
Developed and directed by Coya Paz . Created by El Teatro Luna. Coya Paz is the Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Luna, and was named one of UR Magazine's 30 Under 30 in 2005 and one of GO NYC! Magazine's 100 Women We Love in 2007. She was the 2006-2007 Artist-In-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Previous collaborations with Teatro Luna include Generic Latina, Dejame Contarte, The Maria Chronicles, and S-e-x-Oh!

Chicago Dramatists 1105 W Chicago Ave Chicago, Il 60622 Previews: November 5, 6, 7 @ 7:00 pm Runs: November 8th 0 December 16th 2007 Thursdays, Fridays, & Saturdays at 7:30 pm & Sundays at 6:00 pm

For more information, please call 773-878-LUNA or email us at: [email protected]

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Marion Woodman is a Jungian analyst—and is one of the most inspiring voices in the global movement for peace. Here she joins forces with Elinor Dickson, Director of Psychological Services at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto to produce an informed and penetrating investigation of a source of spiritual and creative power, not popular in Western circles. In Dancing in the Flames, they point to a constellation of archetypal ideas which they hope will be a source to inspire and inform: the mythical complex of the Dark Goddess. Their book operates on two levels, as a guide for individual transformation and ultimately transforming society.

The core of the book is a cluster of chapters using psychoanalytic material that draws on the mythology of the Dark Goddess. Mind you, the frame of reference is European, but Woodman does attempt to bring in a non-Western perspective, honoring as best she can the thousand years of Hindi veneration to Kali, the root source for this archetype.

At a broad-brush level, this initially involved the matriarchal phase, a belief in a living world where everything in nature held spirit-life flowing from source, the Great Mother. This was followed by the emergence of a separate. individual 'self', then the formation patriarchal and hierarchical power structures.

Throughout the early part of this history, the archetype of this Goddess progressively is split off more and more from that of the Great Mother, emerging as a her polar opposite---killer, and scourge. In reality, it's the cleansing aspect of the Good/Bountiful/Great Mother. The split of the Great Mother vs. Dark Mother mirrors that schism between matriarchy and patriarchy, the body and the spirit.

The authors make the case that in the period that followed, both the Great Mother and the Goddess are repressed, and driven into the "murky depths of our unconscious." Yet the culture of the Goddess lives on, underground, in succeeding centuries. It eventually finds expression, despite repression, in the form of the Black Virgin from the twelfth century onwards. And I would argue, our own veneration of La Virgen, of Tonatzin, who survived colonization, a remains a vital life force in the Chicano/Mejicano soul and psyche.

The authors make an impassioned case that society as a whole must reclaim the Dark Goddess. To underscore, they turn to personal analytic material, allowing the reader to make their own contact with the goddess archetype. The mythological aspects of Virgin, Mother and Crone, making up the European triple goddess, are followed through their appearance in the therapies of both men and women, these images used as tools in the process of personal evolution. In my experience of Eurocentric, new-age feminism, its subtle racism links creativity/goodness with the idea of light and so I found it powerful and liberating to be reminded of the imagery of the holy darkness, its power to cleanse, nourish and renew.

This idea of darkness, again, is no stranger to indigenous ideas of the Mother--She Who Is. I have a personal source of connection to the Santeria/Yoruba deity of Oya Yansa. Oya is also also Dark Goddess, keeper of the whirlwind, sweeping clean all that is decayed, corrupt. It was important for me to reframe my own ideas of Mother, particularly in contrast to the long-suffering Virgin of my youth. This book was a thought-provoking resource, stirring up a fleshy, full-bodied, powerful female deity, one with deep hunger, deep ability to consume, transmute and transform.

The authors give a picture of integration inspired by the qualities of the Dark Goddess, a process in which fear of death, fear of nature, and fear of our own femininity (whether we are men or women) are reconciled in the dark. They stress the dangers of yearning for a world of "pure" spirit and "light," a state where in our yearning for perfection, we confuse a certain kind of "perfection" with wholeness.

I would further challenge the notion of light equaling perfection---light without the regenerative power of darkness is half of what is and only half. And under the harshness of unending, unshrinking light, all fades and withers away, spent beyond resources, starving for rest, for the dream world, for losing oneself and finding the body made anew.

One of the most interesting parts in the book subdivides the process according to the traditional chakra system, while still basing the account firmly on the actual material of analysis. From this viewpoint, integration is seen as a process of “building the subtle body,” of embodying spirit in a complete and integrated way.

The key step in this process, for the individual, involves the recognition of our own autonomy, the acceptance of ourselves, and the finding of our own voice. For this to happen, "it takes great resolve to enter the darkness of our own chaos, to give up the familiar path and begin to trust in our own experience. The recognition and unconditional love of oneself is never a selfish journey."

It's a journey of seeking awareness, increasing confluence between those things we normally separate as "physical" and "spiritual." At the end, the book returns to the societal level, where the authors’ believe the protests of the Sixties "were the seeds, at a culturally recognized level, of a movement based on hope for a more meaningful existence.... What began as a protest has become a challenge, a challenge that will involve not only technology, but a new understanding of human mythology."

Depending on how we choose to phrase it, either ideas of ' science' must be revamped to include experiencing this relatively unused 'female' approach, or needs to be blended into a larger view that gives equal status to this view. The authors’ account at the end gives us a start -- some tools that may enable us to do this. They give us immense hope, and also a profound challenge. This new vision is not one that we can dream up intellectually: it can be reached only by transformation, only if we "throw ourselves into the flames and dance in the refining fire..."

Our traditional ideas of 'science' stresses the intellect, the rational—in archetypal terms, a 'masculine' construct. It operates with ideas of impersonal, 'objective' discovery and 'absolute' truth. While it's an important way of knowing, it has limits as a basis for a new world view. There are deep questions that emerge. How do we construct gender and identity? How are those concepts linked to to behaviors like violence and passivity? How can we integrate complicated, contradictory ideas of male/female that include ‘dark’ and healing forces in both?

This book kept me up at night. It was another piece of encouragement to let go, to delve deep, and look at what's revealed without flinching. I'm always on the lookout for things that will strengthen me, as well as shake me up. The themes of violence, sexualized violence in particular, are shot through the fabric of this American life, and to ignore them is one darkness I find unacceptable. Dancing in the Flames provides a kind of comfort, as well as a challenge.

ISBN-10: 1570623139
ISBN-13: 978-1570623134

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Luis DeLaTorre is an artist in constant motion translating through the language of colors, shapes and shadows his experience of being Mexican-American in the 21st century and the dualities of living between these two worlds. Luis DeLaTorre was born in McAllen, TX 1969 and raised in the states of Jalisco and Nayarít, Mexico. His mother migrated with Luis and his two older brothers to the Bridgeport neighborhood in Chicago.

DeLaTorre began using art as a coping mechanism to understand his new surroundings and fill the void of having been transplanted from the place that he had always known as home. The art work will later took on a life of it’s own incorporating elements of time, history, geography creating universal themes affecting us all such as war, spiraling economies and the commercialization of humanity.

While in high school DeLaTorre was inspired by the paintings of artists such as Salvador Dali, David Alfaro Siqueiros and comic book illustrators Alan Lee and Bill Sienkiewicz. It was then that he decided to pursue an education in art. After developing his art skills he enrolled at the American Academy of Art where he had the opportunity to study under Master Watercolorist Irving Shapiro and earn his degree in Fine Art.

DeLaTorre’s art is exhibited frequently in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. He recently received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. This fall he has been commissioned to do two murals one at Spry Elementary School and one at Columbia Explorers Elementary School. He will also be participating in two group shows one at Neleh Gallery in Chicago and the Owings -Dewey Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His artwork is currently in museum and private collections.

A huge part of his creative process is experimentation and constantly learning new things. DeLaTorre enjoys collaborating with artists of all genres. In the fall of 2006 DeLaTorre created visual elements for a Teatro Vista production and in 2005 included an enormous backdrop mural commissioned by Luna Negra Dance Theatre for a performance at the Harris Theatre for Music and Dance. His work has also been displayed at the Día De Los Muertos exhibit at The National Museum of Mexican Art. DeLaTorre has been involved in gilding restoration work at the historic Auditorium Theatre, the Illinois and Iowa State Capital Buildings and participated in the Frank Lloyd Wright House “Wing Spread” restoration project in Racine, WI.

DeLaTorre is committed to art in schools engaging kids to focus their energy on their own creativity. He is an advocate of artistic projects that enrich them and keep their creativity focused. He frequently participates as a guest speaker in Chicago Public Schools to encourage the exploration of the arts. In 2005 he also did a mosaic mural created for the Columbia Explorer Elementary School. The mural was done with children from the Yollocalli Youth Museum (a initiative of the MFACM).

DeLaTorre has also implemented an artist apprentice program in conjunction with the Big Picture H.S. in Chicago that includes the participation of two students a year. In the future he plans to create a scholarship program for young artists, and help implement more arts programs into inner-city schools. Check out DeLaTorre's new blog you can keep up with whats happing at the studio and read about the process the artist goes through in creating the paintings.
October 5, 2007
Opening Reception
6pm to 10pm

Looking for a way to CELEBRATE Chicago Artist Month? Celebrate with us! You can come and mingle with art lovers, meet the artists and learn about the INCREDIBLE work being produced in the Bridgeport neighborhood. There will be a variety of incredible work hanging on walls and easels. EXCITING NEW works featured by DeLaTorre, Cleeland, Gama, Noyes, Brasch, Ingold and Wyzensagel. DeLaTorre’s Oil paintings on richly prepared wood panels and watercolor portraits will have you spell bound. Runs thru Oct. 31 by appointment.

Eastbank Artist Group Exhibit
DeLaTorre Fine Art Studio
1200 W 35th Street – 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60609
773-927-7030
http://www.DeLaTorreArts.blogspot.com


Saturday, October 6, 2007
Opening Reception
Time: 6 to 9pm

Abstract Global Communities brings together four artists from differing backgrounds whose creative talents collectively represent our world community. The collective creativity of these artists represents the global concept of art without borders or boundaries. Come to this delightful gallery housed in a Frank Lloyd Wright gem in the Bronzeville neighborhood and Indulge your art craving with the rich layers and succulent colors of DeLaTorre’s newest work. You can be one of the first to see the unveiling of his painting “An Ode To Hillary” oil on canvas.

Abstract Global Communities/Neleh Galleries International
Chicago Artist Month Group Show
Opening Reception
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Time: 6 to 9pm
3219 S. Calumet Avenue
Chicago, IL 60616
http://www.nelehgalleries.com

Friday, October, 26 2007
Día de los Muertos Group Exhibit DeLaTorre’s art is on the move! If you happen to be in Santa Fe stop in and check out this fabulous exhibit at the Owings-Dewey Fine Art gallery. This exhibit will feature DeLaTorre’s take on this traditional Día de los Muertos holiday. Over the past twenty years the gallery has exhibited thousands of accomplished works by many of America's finest painters and exploring a variety of historical and contemporary themes.

Día de los Muertos Group Exhibit Owings-Dewey Fine Art / North 120 East Marcy Street Friday, October, 26 2007 Santa Fe, NM 87501 http://owingsdewey.com

Thursday, November 1, 2007 Opening Reception
This year, DeLaTorre dedicates his ofrenda to the U.S. Constitution raising questions on the contemporary and historical role of this country. The work emerges from subconscious inspired images painted on panels drenched in thick hand-made gesso resulting in glazes and paint integral to the artwork.

Thursday, November 1, Opening Reception Dia de Los Muertos Group Exhibit Latino Arts, UCC 1028 S. 9th Street Milwaukee, WI 53204 latinoartsinc.org New Mural Commission! Columbia Explorer Elementary

DeLaTorre will be creating a mural that will be 168” X 288” and will have three layers and images relating to hope and the ability to rise above faceless crowds and imagine the endless possibilities through the arts and education. Unveiling TBA.

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Santeria Garments and Altars is a literate, accessible, beautifully photographed book by a man who is a member/initiate in a house of Oshun. Its subtitle is, ‘Speaking Without A Voice.’ How appropriate! The emphasis is the striking photographs of the variety of altars to the different deities, members of a variety of houses preparing for, or engaged in aspects of worship.

By way of background information -- A ‘house’ is a group of devotees of a particular god or goddess under the leadership of a ‘babalawo’, or priest/priestess. Oshun is another one of the Seven African Powers who represents the archetypical female principle and the power of eros. Interestingly enough, abstinence or asexuality, and a virginal principle of female sexuality has no icon, nor any particular social importance.

Another interesting feature is that the author is a male practitioner, much in the tradition that the gods choose individuals to serve them regardless of gender. My own Catholic upbringing was full of gender separation, nuns as brides of Christ, servants of the male hierarchy, etc. While there are some tasks separated by sex, it does not appear to be as rigid, as attenuated as in a Christian/Catholic context.

One off the major tenets of this religious practice is the construction of altars, which every believer is required to do. There’s a synthesis between aesthetic and spiritual significance. It is considered one’s duty to create, as service to the deity to whom one has pledged oneself. A further illustration of the nexus between creativity and belief is the Santeria/Yoruba belief in ‘ache’, the universal life force present in all things. Each devotee is assumed to have within them the power to create a beautiful altar, one infused with ‘ache.’

In my performance pieces, there are ‘anchor ‘ points--static elements that have life infused into them. (In REM/Memory, there is a central, supine figure, hidden in a mass of blankets, who comes alive as the piece starts, and the nightmare begins. In Resurgam, a chaos of white fabric is stripped away to reveal a captive figure who finds release as the piece begins.) I see a similarity between a finished altar containing ‘ache,’ and a performance’s ‘anchor’pieces being the place where it all comes alive, more specifically, where it reflects at least the possibility of sacred ritual.

There are several points of connection for me here. When the author created an altar to Oshun, it was clear that it could also be seen as a ‘site-specific installation.’ Size of the space, mood of the space, prominent observation points are all taken into consideration. These are the same consideration I make with each piece, the same considerations any installation artist might make.

In the design of an altar dedicated to Oshun, ‘found’ elements are brought into the piece that symbolize her attributes. Since Oshun represents eros, obvious choices illustrate sensuality. Honey, honeycombs, silks and laces are standard items in such an altar. I constantly bring found items from daily life into my performances, hoping to create common imagery for myself and the audience as it unfolds as a shared experience. In Resurgam, during the 'communion’ section, I offer a papaya sliced in half to the audience, sharing its womb shape with them as the symbol of The Living Body--juicy, ripe, the source of all things, ever replenishing.

Lastly, I want to comment on the Santeria idea of ‘coolness.’ Essentially, it is the principle of balance, harmony, a reflection of the connectedness of all things. An altar, no matter how ornate, is not considered ‘cool’ if it does not have these attributes.

Even though my approach is spare, I try to layer things enough to suggest complicated ideas and experiences. It's work with a a consistent point of view, root motifs that I communicate to the audience, an arc of interconnectedness between myself, how I tell the story, the audience, and a unifying force that exists in the moment of performance, a force that I call Spirit.

Dr. Flores-Peña was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Studies: University of Puerto Rico, B.A, Catholic University of Puerto Rico, MA. Ed. UCLA M.A and Ph.D. Publications and lectures on Afro-Caribbean Ritual Art and Afro-Cuban religious cultures and Latino Folklore. Lecturer at WAC, Center for Afro-American Studies, and Adjunct Professor at Otis College of Art and Design.

ISBN-10: 087805703X
ISBN-13: 978-0878057030

Lisa Alvarado

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The lovely photo is of an equally lovely and powerful writer, Tara Betts. (Not quite the plain brown wrapper...) It's been almost ten years ago that I was paired with Tara as her mentor in a City of Chicago arts program. To this day, I'm not sure what I taught her, but it has been my privilege to read her work, watch her develop and soar as a writer, a performer, and as a critical thinker. She is a person of crystal clear intent and ethics and it is that clarity and that moral compass that infuses all of her work. Tara is that rara avis who is able to dive into the canon, retrieve what she needs and resurface to the real world where the rest of us dwell. She knows her sestinas, her villanelles, her haikus, but she is not seduced by the prettiness of form over content. Her work is rigorously constructed, but framed with direct, clear language, unambiguous. Tara Betts knows where her loyalties lie --- the African American experience, femaleness, urban life, the place where class and race intersect, and as readers we are all the better for it. Take a close look at the pieces following this interview, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Describe your odyssey in becoming a writer. How does African American and female identity influence your work? What would you say are your major influences, both personally and in a literary sense?

My major influences initially were ntozake shange, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. When I was around 12 or 13, I kept a diary a little before this point, but began writing poetry shortly after I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I had always been a reader, but I didn’t always see books in the library that looked like they talked about people of African descent at all. When I was in high school, I worked at the Kankakee Public Library and learned the stacks better. Sometimes, I would sneak off and read. It was then that I aspired to be a journalist so Rolling Stone, Essence and U.S. News & World Report were also part of my obsession as well.

When I started attending Loyola University on the North Side of Chicago, I kept writing, indulged more and more in Vibe and The Source, and eventually did an internship in New York at BET Weekend magazine in conjunction with the New York Daily News office. It was an amazing summer too. It solidified that I had to keep writing, even though I was a student activist and editor for The Loyola Phoenix. It was in college that I read more about Hurston, the Negritude poets, Toni Morrison, Fanon and Cheikh Anta Diop.

Although I felt like these were eye-opening experiences, I felt like I was always challenged by the more conservative influences on a highly Republican, very Catholic Jesuit university that somehow managed to talk about social justice issues.

By the time I was in my second year at Loyola, I had started organizing poetry readings on campus. This was before poetry became trendy again, so I shared some of my favorite poets and collaborated with other student organizations to make the readings happen. I remember inviting Malik Yusef to campus and bringing Ramona Africa from MOVE Organization with help from Tyehimba Jess. Tyehimba and Malik were the first two poets I met on the Chicago scene. Shortly before I graduated from Loyola in 1997, Malik Yusef gave me my first poetry feature at The Cotton Club on Michigan Avenue. I started reading at Lit X, this jazz club called Rituals, Afrika West bookstore, Guild Complex and eventually Mad Bar, which is where I started slamming. I slammed once or twice at Green Mill, but it didn’t feel like an audience of my peers, even though I enjoyed the work from poets like Sheila Donahue, Cin Salach, Regie Gibson, Dan Ferri, Maria McCray, Marc Smith and most vividly Patricia Smith.

At this time, I was also exploring the feminist possibilities in my poetry. I performed with Sharon Powell, Marta Collazo and other women in a show about menstruation called “The Empress Wears Red Clothes.” I had sort of exited the hip hop heavy part of my life, even though I was still writing pieces here and there, going to shows, hosting a hip hop radio show called “The Hip Hop Project” with my good friend Lional Freeman (AKA Brotha El), meeting graf writers and admiring dj skills.

After leaving “The Hip Hop Project” and doing readings for about a year and a half, I started to slam at Mad Bar. I was on the first two Mental Graffiti teams in 1999 and 2000 with poets like Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton, Marlon Esguerra, Dennis Kim, Shappy and Lucy Anderton. Although slam became a very stressful thing for me, I got to spend time with a wide range of aesthetics and personalities that I really loved and admired for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to co-host, curate and promote an all-women’s open mic and performance space called Women OutLoud with women like Mars, Lucy, Anida Esguerra and Krystal Ashe.

While I was slamming, I started getting more into a range of poets like Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Julia de Burgos, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Carl Sandburg, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stanley Kunitz and others. I also started workshopping with various poets through the Guild Complex. My first workshop leader was Sterling Plumpp. He pushed me to keep writing, read more sisters and just be persistent. He’s a master of the poetic line and very much a blues man. More people should be reading his work. I also went on to do workshops with Afaa Michael Weaver who pushed me to be honest, vulnerable and study a diverse range of writers. I really wanted to just read writers of color at one point, and he still reminds me of how there is so much to learn from everyone. Lucille Clifton and Quincy Troupe were also poets that I participated in workshops with and these experiences led to my real urgency to be a part of Cave Canem, a workshop/retreat for writers of African descent started by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. There are too many poets to name that I have met through this retreat that have fed, taught and inspired me.

The students at Young Chicago Authors were also a big influence on my writing. Through YCA, I began teaching writing classes. Since I had to teach what I was doing, I was more conscious of what I did or explaining why a certain work moved me. I also got to develop my own classes, like an author study on Neruda, Hip Hop Poetics, Poetic Forms by Communities of Color and Women Writers as Essayists. By the time I left Chicago, I had firmly rooted my voice that I think is always expanding and refining itself. I had started the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College (graduated in January 2007) and moved to New York. Now, I think I’m trying to read as much as I can in fiction, new poets, history and the classics that I need to catch up on. Wanda Coleman, Martin Espada, Marilyn Nelson are just a few of the poets who really move me these days.

You've written extensively about African American labor leader, Ida B. Wells. Describe her significance as subject matter.

It’s funny you would ask about the Ida B. Wells’ poems. I started writing about her years ago, and I’ve never quite finished the series that I set out to do. I read about her and her own books like A Crusade for Justice, Southern Horrors and The Memphis Diary edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis, and I started researching lynchings. This was around the time that Without Sanctuary, a book of photographs taken at lynchings, was released.

In 1892, one of Wells’ close friends Thomas Moss and the co-owners of the Black-owned People’s Grocery Store were basically lynched for offering better products and better prices to Black customers than the white storeowners. Wells had already initiated a public transportation boycott and filed a successful lawsuit that was eventually repealed when she had been thrown off the train for refusing to go to a smoking car. She refused so adamantly that she dug in her heels, and it took two men to remove her after she bit the conductor on the hand. In fact, she started her paper The Free Press in response to this ousting, and convinced record numbers to leave Memphis and stop taking public transit.

As a result, at a time when women were not even considered able to handle the strong material of journalism, Wells convinced people to do things with the facts that she gleaned. She also started the first suffrage organization for Black women in Illinois, helped start the NAACP, ran an organization for Black men that was similar to the then-segregated YMCA who would not house or notify Black men of employment opportunities, and initiated the anti-lynching crusade in the U.S. and the U.K. So, her radical scope really drew me to her, but also some of the things she did that were just hilarious. For example, her daughter Alfreda Duster describes how she went into a department store in Chicago and was waiting to be served. Of course, they acted like this Black woman was not even standing there, so out of exasperation, she drapes a pair of men’s boxers over one shoulder and starts to walk toward the exit. Then someone finally asked her what she was doing, and she told them “trying to buy these.” So, her ties to Chicago, her sense of humor and strength, and her need to document her place in history when so many women were forgotten, omitted and erased, has brought me back to her example again and again.

You made a strong connection to Latino poets, Latino poetry and culture. Can you talk more about that?

In my youth, I studied Spanish in high school, and I hardly knew any people from Spanish-speaking cultures, but when I went to college, I finally met more than Black and white people en masse. I really tried to support all people of color, so I learned a lot and tried to understand how our experiences overlapped and differed. I also took a class with Dr. Susannah Cavallo called Afro-Hispanic Literature where we read writers like Carolina Maria de Jesus, Jose Lima and Nascimiento’s Brazil: Mixture or Massacre.

I would have to say that Pablo Neruda brought the metaphor to life for me in a way that no other poet has. After him, I was drawn to so many others like Xavier Villarrutia, Gabriela Mistral, Cesar Vallejo, Daisy Zamora and anthologies like Martin Espada’s Poetry Like Bread and Stephen Tapscott’s Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry. I also read Chicago-based writers like Luis Rodriguez, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros.

While I was living in Chicago, I got to read with so many Latina women who just wrote things that moved me. Some of them included Brenda Cardenas, the late Sulima Q. Moya, Susana Sandoval, Johanny Vazquez, Beatriz Badikian-Gartler, Katherinne Bardales, and of course, Lisa Alvarado.

In 2001, I had an opportunity to exchange with writers in Cuba at the now defunct Writers of the Americas Conference where my workshop leader was Jack Agueros, and we got to talk to writers like Junot Diaz, Maria Irene Fornes, Achy Obejas and Danny Hoch. While we were there, we met many local writers. One of them, Leo Navaro Guevara moved to the U.S., and his son Anton is my first and only godson.

Now, that I’m on the East Coast, it’s such an amazing experience to see the range of writers like Willie Perdomo, Magdalena Gomez, Tato Laviera, Sandra Maria Esteves, Jesus Papoleto among others. The Acentos series in the Bronx also gave me the chance to see a lot of these poets up close and to hear more of the type of work that I had only read.

What would you describe as your major themes?

History, family, politics, and love (mostly because we need to remember why we struggle in the first place).

You've had a lot of interface with spoken word, slam poetry, etc. How would you describe those genres v. 'literary' poetics and form?

Spoken word is an untapped wellspring of possibilities. Unfortunately, since people are catering to the lowest common denominator and writing pieces that will garner a shock, laughter or a tour through the spoken word circuit, there is not the same kind of interest in the work that I had before. Now, do I think that the slam offers young writers a chance to build their confidence and articulate themselves clearly in front of an audience? Yes. Do I think that it can lead people to read their work with feeling and internalize the meaning of what they’ve written? Yes. Do I think it can lead to people producing one-person shows, records, verse plays, books, creative collaborations and radical, through-provoking performance? Yes. And lastly, are there too many people competing for little-to-no-paying gigs for the big payoff of three-five minutes on television? Yes.

What most people don’t realize is that performance becomes a job. Even if you love it, you must maintain what will keep you working, and there are contradictions that compel people to ask hard questions about the growth and integrity of their work. Not enough people are asking themselves about that. I also think that if spoken word is continually pigeonholed as slam poetry and watered-down hip hop by wannabe emcees, then it will be relegated to the ghettos of forgotten poetry. There are too many good poets of color coming out of such performative experiences to be limited by this kind of categorization. Spoken Word is a category promoted by NARAS. Oral traditions across centuries and cultures have always existed, so we have to remind people that internalizing what we write and sharing it orally is not new. So, I don’t necessarily think there is a difference in the text, unless you’re a lazy writer who overcompensates through performance. Anything written can be performed, published or exhibited. It’s just about how it’s done.

What would you describe as your core strengths as a writer....where would you like to see yourself grow?

My core strengths. Now this is a difficult question. I think it’s been my willingness to always do what I feel like I need to do to grow. I haven’t always made many friends that way, but inevitably I wrote what I wanted and earned most people’s respect. I want to spend more time reading, trying to grow as a critical writer and write more prose. In terms of poetry, I’m intrigued with poetic form and how can we subvert with Eurocentric canonical notions that we have about it. I would like to collaborate with more visual artists and musicians since I’ve often been a solo writer sharing my work.

How would you describe your connection to young writers as it relates to your creative life?

My connection to young writers has kept me from being hyper-cynical/critical. They look at the world with new eyes, and when they have the breakthrough moments where they articulate something so honest and challenging for the first time. I live for those moments. Young writers make me always consider what it takes to keep writing new, how does writing work as an art and a disciplined practice. Sometimes, I think it’s only me who keeps me writing, which is true to some degree, but they are the ones who keep me writing.

Where do you see yourself in ten years, personally and creatively?

Ten years from now, I’m hoping to have published at least two or three books, not necessarily all poetry, maybe one of them is an anthology. I’ve thought I might have a Ph.D. in African American/Africana/Black Studies (whichever term people think they need to apply), American Studies or Women’s Studies by then. Teaching, traveling and balancing that with a family would be nice. Hopefully, I will be practicing yoga on a regular basis. I remember one time a student at Wright College asked me in a Q & A, what I wanted to do with my life, and I proceeded to tell her about all my professional goals and writerly aspirations when she cut in and asked, “other than that?” I felt like some inner voice had been plucked from my head and embodied in this girl. So, I thought about it, and yoga, having a garden, developing a spiritual life, staying politically responsible and critical and having good friends who could give a damn whether I write or not were my response to her question. All of that is still a work in progress.

What's something not in the official bio?

I always liked the fast, gravity-defying rides at carnivals and amusement parks. I recently freestyled on the mic with an all-female Afrobeat band in New York called Femm Nameless.



Not On the Menu

If Portugal was edible, could it be swallowed
like some country fruit, goosebumped as unripe
avocado, heavy with sweet guava wet
that lingers inside the cheeks?

Would Africa taste bitter and glitter
on the tongue from its ripe diamond seeds?
Would the silt of India be the truest curry
bursting a heat against the mouth’s roof?’

Every day an international hors'douvres platter
crosses so many tourist imaginations like
a hectic maitre’de.
There are Indian families in steamy kitchens,
Taiwanese men’s bicycles crisscrossing
Manhattan’s traffic-glutted streets,
Puerto Rican girls smiling for bigger tips
when offering mofongo,
and Cubans proffer mojitos
and freshly killed chicken
for that one night at El Hueco.

America, though, would distance itself
from its bitter Billie Holiday image in stalls
of worldly produce. America would be slick
with campaigns on its nutritional benefits.
America would be so shiny the shellac needs
cracking and peeling. Imagine.
America’s fruit, so sweet it eats the teeth
with its ache.

While movies ripen into
culinary pornography
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman,
Soul Food
Tortilla Soup
Like Water for Chocolate
The cinematic menu sounds
like a veil pulled across the face,
the sweaty thump of samba,
a pinprick protruding
from a map of exotica
where spare grain
of days remains unsampled
since the trees of America
require so much tending.


There Goes the Neighborhood
for Maxine Kumin

Aerial shot omniscient view bent above
asphalt playground. Sidewalks become
concrete football fields where Brooklyn
accents weigh down boys’ tongues
that count like girls circle one another.

They bend clothesline, extension cords,
double helix style rotations beneath
spinning jumping sneakers.
Speakers turned walls claim
the street as official block
party bidness. Metal drums split
open with orang charcoal guts plead
for red meat, then sizzle relief.

Brownstone stoops fill with girls
clinging to gossip like the new neighbor
holding his golf club bag as if announcing
shift change for baggy pants & oversized
shirt-wearing boys who stand too long on
the corner. Count each baby
in mad math that’s called living.
Take a breath when change claims
one more before you blink.

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I wanted to help La Bloga celebrate LGBT Pride month by profiling Amigas Latinas, an affinity group here in Chicago and one of its founders, Evette Cardona. I was lucky enough to meet Evette through her partner, Mona Noriega, both of whom have done groundbreaking work in the Latina and queer communities, with local and national impact. As a typical example of the kind of support the organization offers, when I, Ann Cardinal and Jane Alberdeston Coralin launched the release of Sister Chicas in Chicago in 2006, the Amigas were in full force at a reading they co-sponsored with a landmark Chicago independent bookstore, Women and Children First. With love and gratitude, I offer this post.

Find out more about this remarkable woman who is also an inductee in the City of Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame and this vital organization.

Evette Cardona's lesbian activism began in 1993 when she came out "publicly" and became a founding member of WACT (Women of All Cultures Together), a gathering of lesbians, bisexual women, and heterosexual women allies taking advantage of Chicago's diversity to bridge racial, ethnic, and cultural divides. The group has held monthly potluck brunches throughout the Chicago area. During Cardona's tenure with WACT, over 70 brunches gathered suburban and city lesbians together.

As an organizer, she has helped to lead or found several community groups, including Women of All Cultures Together, Amigas Latinas, the Lesbian Community Cancer Project, and the Center on Halsted Steering Committee. As a philanthropic administrator, she has been especially helpful in funding organizations serving historically underrepresented community sectors.

In the summer of 1995, Cardona helped to found Amigas Latinas as an organization for Latina les/bi/questioning women. Through a model of monthly dining and discussion groups, the organization has provided a celebratory environment for English- and Spanish-speaking women to learn about the Latina community's diversity. The group addresses such issues as immigration rights, language barriers, and homophobia in special relationship to ethnic discrimination. In 1999, Cardona helped to create the Aixa Diaz Scholarship Gift Fund, named after an Amigas Latinas founder, to aid a Latina lesbian or bisexual student fighting high school homophobia and to aid children of Mozart Elementary School, where Diaz had taught first grade.

In 1997 Cardona became a member of the planning council of Color Triangle, a consortium of persons from various organizations who meet to discuss racism within the Chicago lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. She also co-chaired the Leadership Development Institute, designed to foster leadership in Chicago's LGBT community.

In 1998, Cardona joined the board of the Lesbian Community Cancer Project, which addresses lesbians' and women's health issues. In the autumn of that year, she aided in producing El Sexto Encuentro, the annual conference of LLEGO, the National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Organization, which was hosted in Chicago.

Most recently, Cardona has become a member of the Center on Halsted Steering Committee, which in conjunction with Horizons Community Services is developing a community center that is anticipated to open in 2004. The committee is seeking community suggestions and involvement.

Professionally, as a Senior Program Officer at the Polk Bros. Foundation, she co-chaired the Funding Lesbian and Gay Issues Group of the Donors Forum of Chicago, which is a regional association of grant-makers. She is a current board member of the national Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues and is an executive committee member of Chicago Latinos in Philanthropy. She received a master-of-arts degree from the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration in 1998. In 1997, Cardona received a Leadership Award for Community Service from Chicago's Association of Latin Men for Action (ALMA). In 2001, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois presented her one of its annual John R. Hammell Awards for her work in the LGBT community.


What is Amigas Latinas, and what need did it meet for Chicago area Latinas?

Amigas Latinas is a support, education and advocacy organization that provides safe spaces, educational opportunities and resources for Latina women who love and partner with women to explore, challenge and celebrate who they are as women, as mothers, as daughters, as comadres.

The need we fill is both to offer space for women to understand and explore their lives at the intersection of their identities - Latina and woman-loving-woman at the same time to just be in the same space as other women like themselves, speaking the same language and sharing
the same culture.

Can you talk about its constituency and the ways the organization is representational? What kind of outreach does Amigas do to meet its goals? Platicas? Events? Socials?

Our membership is close to 300 women from all Latina cultures and all ages. Our diversity spans the range from third-generation, monolingual English speakers to recently-arrived, monolingual Spanish immigrant women. Many are newly out, many have been out for years and years and seek us out for the friendships and affinity we provide. About a third have children from previous heterosexual marriages, some are still in heterosexual marriages, some have disclosed issues of domestic violence and struggles with alcohol/substance abuse.

In the past several years, we have seen a 50% increase in the number of immigrant monolingual Spanish-speaking women seeking services that are non-existent due to a chronic lack of bilingual, bicultural service providers that are sensitive to sexual identity issues.

We mail to our membership of nearly 300 once to twice a month to advertise our monthly platicas, workshops and events, we have a listserve with about 200 women on it that is a great way to advertise quickly and broadly. Our web site is increasingly becoming a way for women to find us, too. We also advertise somewhat in the gay rags especially around special events, but we rely a lot on word of mouth. We have linkages with other lgbt organizations and are present at public events be it LGBT or Latino events to ensure the Latinaqueer voice is heard.

Aside from social contact and support, what kind of community building is Amigas involved with in both the Latino and LGBT community?

We spearheaded the development of the Chicago LGBTQ Immigrants Alliance (CLIA) to look at the challenges, myths and realities that arise at the intersection of queer and immigration issues. (We're planning a town hall for CLIA on June 12). We also helped create Entre Familia, the first Spanish-speaking PFLAG in the Chicago area. It's been meeting for three years. We partner with ALMA ( a gay Latino men 's affinity group) to do that work. We also partnered with Center on Halsted to start the first Latinaqueer youth group that meets monthly at the Center's facilities.

This January we launched our Proyecto Latina survey to gather information about who we are and what our needs, dreams and challenges are. That data will be used to inform our future work mobilizing the Latinaqueer community to inform and challenge policyholders and legislators to respond to and improve our lives.

Our biggest non-queer partnership is with Mujeres Latinas en Accion (a social service/anti- domestic violence organization) and we have annually provided trainings and education sessions to help their staff better serve Latinaqueer victims/survivors of domestic violence.

Talk in depth about the organization's scholarship activities and it's significance.

In 1999, Amigas launched the Aixa Diaz Scholarship Fund in memory of founding member, Aixa Diaz, who brought vision and commitment to the Latina lesbian/bisexual community through her organizing efforts, and knowledge and encouragement to Latino children through her dedication as a teacher. Over the last 7 years we have raised money to provide financial assistance to a young, lesbian/bisexual student activist of Latina heritage entering or enrolled in college who actively works to fight homophobia in high schools. Awards have also been given to gay-straight alliances (GSAs) in high schools with large Latino student populations and to the Mozart Elementary School where Aixa taught first grade, served on the Local School Council and was the Chicago Teachers Union delegate.

This work reflects the commitment Amigas has to education as a means of empowering women. We have awarded 12 scholarships ($1,000 - $2,000) to date and will award 3-4 scholarships this June. Our biggest success with the scholarships was last year when we brought on a 2004 Aixa Scholar, Zaida Sanabia, to head up our youth group efforts. She has been a wonderful addition to the Amigas family and is doing excellent work reaching out to Latinaqueer youth.

There are been much invisibility in the Latino community for women who love women. How would you describe the importance of LGBT reality to our people.

Amigas is built on the philosophy that as Latinas who love and partner with women we cannot separate our identities and often are asked to do just that throughout our lives. Coming out is a life-long process and being able to successfully blend our identities to live as healthy and complete persons in our families, work environments and communities is the reality we strive for with every activity we provide. As our vision statement proclaims we "celebrate our lives with pride and acceptance, without boundaries or limitations, fearlessly and unapologetically."

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In the 1985 August/September issue of the Utne Reader, in an article entitled Revamping the World, Deena Metzger puts forth an challenging concept to consider in a post-feminist context. She challenges both men and women to consider the body and eros as a vehicle of communion, restoration, and redemption instead of merely recreation, or anesthetization.

Metzger decries the limits of the last wave of Western feminism, stating it negates women's inherent power in its disavowal of female body itself, its inherent receptivity. She is disturbed by what she views as the attempts of women to refashion themselves using traditional male, Western models of power and achievement. She believes that women, trying to access a kind of power based in patriarchy, are losing their inherent strength. It is a strength of intuition, and connectivity, a strength that Metzger herself struggled to embrace.

This is not a new belief for us. Our roots, our spirituality before the conquest is rife with images of cosmic coupling. It is a spirituality based on a cyclic wisdom, linked to eternal regeneration contained in bodies of our dioses y diosas, and within ourselves.

Metzger's idea of female power is one that is frankly, clearly sexual. It is not ashamed of the body and its uses, but rather uses that body as the primary vehicle for reconnection and redemption. A very different notion for the traditional ideas of female sexuality I encountered through a Catholic upbringing. Metzger finds it ironic, and somewhat dangerous that women are trying to fashion themselves into men, rather than men and women reconnecting with a holistic view of the body, the spirit and the planet.

According to Metzger, what is necessary is a vision that re-sanctifies the body of woman, both literally and figuratively. I was deeply moved and challenged by Metzger's assertion that a return to the body and its rhythms that will have a global impact on consciousness and society; that once reconnected, we must be charged with nurturing and protecting our communities and the larger world beyond.

In describing a meditation in which she encountered an image that forever altered her life, Metzger writes that she was irrevocably altered by an image that appeared in a guided meditation. In it, she confronts her own dread in encountering a large, luminous, all encompassing image of a goddess figure. This following quote reveals what this encounter made her realize. Metzger states it is precisely the role of women to embrace their sexuality, not only for themselves, but as a tool of revolution, healing and social change.


It means that we must become vamps again, sexual-spiritual beings, that we must act out of eros. This means we must alter ourselves in the most fundamental ways. We cannot become the means for the resanctification of society unless we are willing to become the priestesses once more who serve the gods not in theory and empty practice, but from our very nature. It means that we must identify with eros no matter what the seeming consequences to ourselves. Even if it seems foolish, inexpedient, even if it makes us vulnerable, it means that we cannot be distracted from this task (of re-feminizing the planet) by pleasure, power, lust or anger. It requires a sincere rededication.


As contradictory and difficult a commitment it may be, she calls upon women, (I would also argue that men must consider this as well) to become Holy Prostitutes, reconsecrating their bodies to vamp and revamp the world.

What are the implications of such a stance? What call to action is Metzger making? What does it mean to revamp a society?

First, I think it means we ask ourselves with whom are we having sex, and why? Is it pleasure alone, is it distraction, is it sedation, is it a way to control? For our young people especially, is it sport sex, trophy sex, where the physical, emotional and spiritual stakes are high? But I think we would be doing Metzger and ourselves a deep, deep, disservice if this article were read as a call to harken back to the sixties, seeking the answer in a massive love-in of sorts, some narcotic tidal coupling that will magically cures all ills.

What does Metzger mean by transforming one's self into the Holy Prostitute? What is the connection between her assertion and our daily lives? Again, Metzger throws down the proverbial gauntlet.


It is to commit to eros, bonding, connection, when the (Western) world values thanatos, separation, detachment...So it is not sex we are after at all, but something far deeper....The task is to accept the body as spiritual, and sexuality and erotic love as spiritual disciplines, to believe that eros is pragmatic. To honor the feminine even where it is dishonored or disadvantaged.


As an artist and writer, I was moved on the deepest level by her challenge to 'Re-vamp' the world. 'Re-vamping' calls us to use the power of the body, free from the shame of patriarchal culture to change the world. It is the supreme play on words, with Metzger throwing down the gauntlet to readers, challenging us to rededicate ourselves to eros. It requires fully reclaiming sexuality as vehicle of connection, not merely in the literal sense, however. It means merging body and spirit and in some way developing a personal practice that we must we offer to the community-at large.

This idea of revamping the world has inspired me to explore movement-based ritual pieces where I examine, exploit, recover, and reveal my own physicality and sexuality. To begin to reconnect with eros in these pieces has meant taking my personal story, distilling it and recasting it with poetry, spoken word and dance. Metzger mentions thanatos, separation, and detachment as the benchmark of Western culture. These ideas are precisely what I want to contradict. It has forced me to more deeply connect with my body, its sensuality, to sharpen and hone that sense of physicality in order to use it as a conduit for narrative. Each of the pieces has some element where I ‘vamp’ the audience, communicate with them in a visceral, voluptuous way.

It has also influenced me to write work that is explicit, where sex is a metaphor and a commentary, and to risk being vulnerable in other work, in the rest of my writing, and my personal life.

Metzger closes her article with a series of questions that I'm enclosing, hoping it will fire your imagination as it did mine.

Whom do I close myself against?
When do I not have the time for love or eros?
When do I find eros inconvenient, burdensome, or inexpedient?
When do I find eros dangerous to me?
When do I indulge in the erotic charge of guilt?
Where do I respond to, accept, provoke the idea of sin?
When do I use sexuality to distract rather than commune?
When do I reject eros becuase I am rejected?
When do I abuse the body?
How do I reinforce the mind/spirit?
When and how do I denigrate the feminine?
When do I refuse the gods?
When do I pretend to believe in them?
When do I accept the gods only when they serve me?
How often do I acquiesce to the "real world?"


It's been over ten years since I first read this article. I won't pretend to agree with all of it, or have fully integrated the things that resonated with me. In that respect, I'm still a work-in-progress. What I do know is this: I'm interested in waking up, in staying awake, in connecting with others personally and within the body politic. I want to talk about storytelling and its healing potential, and the communal experience of the body. Metzger's article shook me up, challenged me, made me think, and I hope it's the beginning of a conversation between us.


A post script from Deena Metzger's site: "Re-vamping the world: On the return of the Holy Prostitute." Utne Reader, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August/September 1985. Reprinted in: To Be A Woman, The Birth of the Conscious Feminine, ed. Connie Zweig, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. Los Angeles; Critique, ed. Bob Banner, P.0. Box 91980, West Vancouver,B.C., V7C 4S4. #33, Spring 1990; Enlightened Sexuality, Essays on Body-Positive Spirituality, ed. George Feuerstein, The Crossing Press, 1989; Iron Mountain, Florence, Colorado, Spring 1986, Vol. 1, No. 4; Reprinted (in expanded form) Anima, Chambersburg, Pa., Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring equinox 1986. Green Egg, 1996

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