A Nice Shout Out on Tex[t]-Mex

Hispanic History Month Illuminates (Mis)Understandings/Hallucination of Mexican in America

 

Social Media as Tool for Change in Cartel Violence?

 "MEXICO: Decapitated woman mourned by social media website"

 From the Los Angeles Times:
 "
REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- A woman found decapitated in the border city of Nuevo Laredo is being mourned as an apparent member of a social networking site used by local residents to share information on drug cartel activity.
The victim was found early Saturday with a note nearby saying she was killed for posting messages online about violent or criminal incidents in Nuevo Laredo."
Read the rest here.

I heard this news story discussed on NPR Latino  as a part of their news roundup and it struck a chord because I think of myself as someone involved in social media, and as someone speaking publicly about issues affecting Latin@s. While there is great sadness in the death of someone who used technology as an extension of social action, the journalist's message on NPR Latino was that social media has become a tool for citizens to support the government in Mexico.

(Couldn't help copying this image from Latino USA blog post on Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

What I Should Be Reading

A Couple Cool Huff Post Stories

And a Vimeo vid about Latino positive collaboration:

LR1 Recap 2 Minutes from iNSPIRE! on Vimeo.

Some Digital Storytelling

Texas State University-San Marcos' Summer Predoctoral Fellowship Video Short

Back in Spring I announced I'd been awarded with a Summer Predoctoral Fellowship at TSU-San Marcos. Since I often encourage digital storytelling in my second semester composition course, I attempted to document my time on campus as a pedagogical practice of modeling. Put to a soundtrack of 70s funk and Pop en Espanol with a more overtly direct message at the end, I hope the medium fits the purpose and agenda.

Important Note: All footage "filmed" on my iPod's video camera, que rascuache no?



TSU-San Marcos Predoctoral Fellowship from Cruz Medina on Vimeo.

Sly and the Family Stone

Los Modulos

http://vimeo.com/27886607

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"

			.

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.