Back to School Jams

With classes about to begin, we all can't help but see ourselves in the back-to-school episode of cualquier 90210, old school 90210 or Fast Times at Ridgemont High as we navigate the halls full of new faces. You got to embrace the novel buzz of students doing everything new all over again, so here are some tunes to provide the soundtrack for the new semester. Thanks to Alt.Latino NPR.

Ceci Bastida


Some Mala Rodriguez:


Ozomatli:

Thinking about music, I'm reminded of a short story I wrote for Solstice Literary Journal called "Earth Angel" you can check out here: http://solsticelitmag.org/earth-angel/

Huff Post: Immigrants for Sale

Video on ALEC Supports NPR Story

Back in December, I posted on an NPR story linking the lobbyist group ALEC to legislation like SB 1070. This video does a nice job of summarizing the NPR story.

Huff Post Latino Voices

Arianna Huffington Introduces HuffPost LatinoVoices

First Al Madrigal on the Daily Show and now this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/latino-voices/
From Arianna's introduction:

"This is truly a Latino moment.

Latino Americans -- 50 million strong and counting -- are both the largest and the fastest-growing minority in the country.
They played a decisive role in the 2008 election, making the difference for Obama in Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico. They represent around a trillion dollars of buying power (roughly 10 percent of U.S. consumer spending). And with 32 million Hispanics online, they are among the most wired and connected groups in the country."

I'm interested in the 32 million Latin@s online figure because of the possibilities and potential I've always seen social media and blogging posing. A good story they posted from the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0811-computers-20110811,0,4966839.story

Good thing I never quit my day job...

Book News

Check Out Check Code-Meshing as World English from NCTE

I had a chance to check out a copy, and even though editor Aja Martinez had told me, I was elated to see a shout out. It's got some serious heavyweight contributors like MLA pres Gerald Graff, whose essay "Disliking Books at an Early Age" has been anthologized many times.

I plan on picking up a copy ahorita. A nice thing about it is that it's paperback so it doesn't hurt the pocketbook as much as hardback releases.
Let's hope it's not the last time my appears in a NCTE publication.

Another recent title from a Arizona professor is Chicana/o Sensibility and the Politics of Identity by Carlos Gallego.

¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement By Maylei Blackwell

 From the UT Press website:

"The first book-length study of women's involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ¡Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities.
¡Chicana Power!provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism"

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Arizona Senate President Pearce Has Been Recalled

From Jeff Biggers at Huffington Post:

"In a swift affirmation of Arizona's fast-growing and powerful new political movement, Secretary of State Ken Bennett notified Gov. Jan Brewer that the once seemingly invincible architect of the state's controversial SB 1070 "papers please" immigration law has officially been recalled. Bennett confirmed that the recall petitions delivered by the Citizens for a Better Arizona "exceeds the minimum signatures required by the Arizona Constitution."

Read the Entire Article at Huffington Post.com

 

 (Art by Xico Gonzalez)

 

Anti-SB 1070 Baseball Petition

Petition Asks Baseball Players to Wear White Ribbons During Next Week's All-Star Game in Protest of SB 1070

From Gustavo Arellano's blog:

"Next week, Major League Baseball will hold its annual All Star game in Phoenix, where Sheriff Joe Arpayaso roams and perhaps the only major metropolitan area in the United States that has more Know Nothings per ratio than Orange County. For the past year, activists have been calling on Commissioner Bud Selig to move the game away because of Arizona's reprehensible SB 1070--that obviously isn't happening, so those activists went on to ask Latino ballplayers such as Boston Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez and St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols to boycott the game" Read the rest

or Sign the Petition:

Tex[t]-Mex Re-posting: Intentional Conflation and Symbol Switching

Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog: Jihad? Jingoísimo? Or just un Jumento? The Aztec A...: "A fairly brief and not-so-crude documentary on Mexican identity, Chicano/a ideology, MEChA, education and politics in Los Angeles, and an id..."

If you've been following HB 2281 in Tucson, then you're probably familiar with accusations of racism and racial chauvinism against programs designed to engage Latin@ students' achievement. On the Tex[t]-Mex blog, a youtube "documentary" put together by a far-right wing group goes so far as to use the title "Aztec Al-Qaeda" to string together people related to a Chican@ charter school--of course, with regard to the school, there are no facts to substantiate allegations--thank you Fox News for popularizing that trend. The production relies on the development of logical fallacies constructed through ideological appeals to fear and erasure of context.


You can also see the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1XAQc8hS8&feature=player_embedded


Check out Prof. Nericcio's Tex[t]-Mex book.

Book Trailers the New Book Report?

More Visual Spatial Literacy Ideas

 So I was reading about a winner of a short film who used a cell phone to shoot and I found out the director had done a book trailer for Elmore Leonard. This got me to thinking about book trailers and I ran across a great Prezi presentation by Michelle Harclerode, which appears to be a lesson she does with students and has handouts with accompany the project. The point of the book trailer, like a movie trailer, is not to give a plot summary, but to entice readers.

How To Make A Book Trailer on Prezi

Of course I had to try my hand at the process, the result of which is the below trailer for Tijuana Dust

Summer Nostalgia

Cruz Medina Poem a part of César Chávez Day Programming on KXCI

July 1 Update:
There's something about Summer that makes me want to listen to music from high school--anyone else with me on that? With the fourth of July upon us, marker of time passage and reminder of fireworks past, I thought I'd re-post the link to the poem I read on KXCI as a part of their Cesar Chavez remembrance. As Victor Villanueva has said, memory is a friend, and experience is great teacher and source of knowledge, so instead of commenting on a timely piece of rhetoric in the public discourse, I turn to a fond experience during which I reminisced, remembered and reflected.  

Normally, I'll be the first to tell you that I am not a poet. But as someone in Rhet/Comp, I concede that some genres better convey certain kinds of messages. So even though I have written very few poems I would ever want to see the light of day, I had written and revised a poem over the last couple years that I read as a part of KXCI's César Chávez Day Programming.

You can hear me on the podcast recording of the day's contributors at about the 4 minute mark here:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kxci/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&id=1782835&pid=218&sid=16

An early post of mine on Chavez.

"The State of the Education" in Cape Town South Africa

A Documentary by a Student at Cape Town University
On Wednesday, a professor from Cape Town University and a teacher from a high school in Cape Town spoke at Texas State University San Marcos. The high school teacher provided background about the school where she teaches and the professor spoke about some of the projects the university has been doing with the high school. One of the salient issues raised by both instructors had to do with the segregation that continues in most of the schools through discriminatory testing and fees which serve to keep black students out of white schools. White schools since apartheid also continue to maintain what is referred to as their "cultural ethos."

The video below was done by the son of the CTU professor.

My ebook Tijuana Dust from Hungry Panther Press

Summer Reading de Cruz

In past posts I've mentioned the publication of some short stories Acentos Review and Solstice Literary Journal and I'm excited to announce the release of my novel Tijuana Dust now available on Kindle. Hungry Panther Publishing is an indie press with other authors and titles worth checking out in horror and sci-fi.

Tijuana Dust is a detective novel which takes place in San Diego where I contributed to the San Diego Reader from 2003-2006. The main character Martinez is a private investigator who wears pachuco suits and drives a beat up Integra, trying his best to not get mixed up again with the Mexican Mafia while learning too much about the structure of the City of Villages he calls home.

Martin Nakell provided a great review:

"We sorely are in need of serious literature which explores the frontiers of our country - which we too often think of as isolated and impermeable. Likewise, sorely are we in need of serious literature which explores the frontiers of our cultural realities, for herein lie the strains that we live with, that - in today's world - every country lives with. Cruz Medina's book [Tijuana Dust] addresses those needs head on."

 --Martin Nakell Settlement


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