Guest Blogger Natalie A. Martínez on Poch@ as Queer Racial Melancholia!

Author's note:

I was really inspired by Marissa's post. Thank you for letting me share my thoughts on poch@ this week. paz-Natalie

by Natalie A. Martínez

Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art, but art that takes us to another place, envisions a different way of seeing, perhaps, a different way of feeling.  

– Robin D. G. Kelley, “Freedom Dreams: Black Radical Imagination”

Cultural memory is, among other things, a practice, an act of imagination and interconnection. The Intermediary begins to imagine her heart—her memory. Memory is embodied and sensual, that is conjured through the senses; it links the deeply private with social, even official, practices…Memory like the heart, beats beyond our capacity to control it, a lifeline between past and future.

–Diana Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Américas” 

A Queer Assemblage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkqlmMmPGT8

The short film linked above, Hemispheric Memories: En cada mente, su propio mundo, co-created with friend, Alan Smith over the past two weeks, was no doubt an attempt to re-understand loss and melancholia, and perhaps even alter its effects.  The film is not only disorienting for the viewer because of the quality of the original VHS film, but its parts, like memory, are incomplete; assemblages of what I gathered as the most salient moments of loss, awkwardness, identity, and the familial of all bodies involved. I picked these 9 minutes and 40 seconds of images out of an archive of roughly two hours of film taken during a Martinez-Baca Family reunion in 1994 near Chama, New Mexico because it offered the most revealing tensions about the relation of memory and affect to identity. Specifically, if I can claim as much, I would say these are first and foremost poch@ memories. 

Poch@ as Queer Racial Melancholia

I became interested in Cruz’s invitation for me to posit poch@ as a form of queer racial melancholia for a number of reasons. 
In two critical texts I was reading, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, and A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia, author David Eng makes an interesting claim. By and large, structures of feeling like intimacy, privacy, home or freedom were “given ideological support” through the colonial legacies of New World material conditions like that of slavery and diaspora (12). Such an observation notes the colonial and racial dimensions that such structures of feeling carry. I see poch@ as a potential structure of feeling that is a product of these sorts of legacies.          
   In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, where Eng’s dialogue with Shinshee Han appears, the authors attempt to carefully investigate “depathologized structures of feeling" (344) and see marginalized people not as permanently “damaged” or incomplete subjects, but as subjects in “conflict” (363). Eng goes on to describe the sorts of struggles he saw among many of his Asian American students who experienced depression or conflict over issues of assimilation, immigration, and language. Similarly, work like that of sociology professor Gabriela Sandoval’s, uses Anzaldúa’s notion of Coatlicue state and mestiz@ consciousness to help explain self-injury among Latinas as a way of coping with the complexity of societal violence. Her use of Coatlicue, one particular expression of melancholia of the Américas, attempts to detach the stigma of self-injury to the individual, not to valorize the practice, but to recast it as a larger effect, an expression of melancholia on the skin, and an attempt to mark on the body publicly, very private losses, the kind of losses not sanctioned in everyday discourse.  

 Poch@ shares this similar strand of concern. Largely defined as a Mexican-American who is rejected or assimilated into dominant culture, this rejection has mostly been linked to the language or discourse one uses. I want to re-inflect the term with another shade of meaning or possibility. Or better stated, a similar meaning but from a different register. 

Of course the questions become for us then, in the context of positing poch@ as an expression of queer racial melancholia, what are we mourning? Grieving? And specifically, what have we lost?

When I think of the word poch@, being the word nerd I am, I can’t help but link it to its literal meaning— bruised fruit, and all that this image conjures up for me. At its most literal, I think of the skin. A distinct marked difference. A record of activity. I also imagine the labor, networks of capital, and communities connected to fruit as an industry. I think of fruta and its link to idiomas surrounding one’s sexuality. I think of strange fruit and artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s work that makes the absent present in his Erased Lynchings and Hang Trees series which chronicles “19^th Century concepts of difference” as a reason for immigrant latin@s in the Western United States to be hung at a time when black lynchings were epidemic and horrifically spectated as a norm. I think of Communication professor and GLBTQ activist Karma Chávez’s work on Victoria Arellano, a transgender immigrant who was denied AIDS medication while being detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in San Pedro, California and who later died while in custody because of inadequate care. These are some other hemispheric memories that largely go unseen or unfelt. These are the sorts of losses we grieve for, but often don’t have a discursive space to do so, perhaps, because discourse is not enough. 

When I have spoken of my work in these ways many have responded to it as a form of re-victimization or identity politics. The response is, “Well, eventually we need to get over it.” Another form this takes is looking only for positive representations of latin@s as in studying the rhetorics or emotional discourses of hope or pride contextualized within various hemispheric or Latin@ contexts. Our “political present” directs us otherwise. Rather, we need to dwell in these “despised states” (shame, brooding, grief…) a little longer or the very least feel their generative possibilities.

In this way, we can read poch@ as queer. Queer because its methods rely on a non-normative approach. I also read poch@ as “a conflict, rather than the damage” within the “continuum between mourning and melancholia” of an idealized form, never subsumed by idealized feelings or affects around the experience of being Mexican-American or mestiz@ but in a constant state of negotiating the demands of institutions, history, and society (Eng 363). Poch@ then is not an essential estrangement, an essential difference, nor an essential lack, but rather a state of constantly negotiating these various structures of feelings.

Genealogies of Affect in the Américas

            I think conceiving of poch@ as a form of queer racial melancholia and similar lines of inquiry are important and timely. Affect studies or what has been coined within many disciplines (including Rhetoric and Composition) as the affective turn (perceived as renewed interest in embodiment, corporeal rhetoric, and emotions) has for the most part continued to cite hemispheric rhetorics that analyze and theorize affect in the Américas as only “mining emotions,” but not much more (Micciche 16). Largely, the affective (re)turn or (re)valuing of “emotion’s rhetoricity” has by and large returned to Greco-Roman traditions in what appears to be a seamless recovery of the body for the discipline’s already unchallenged historiography. Doing so whether intentional or not erases the contributions writers, artists, and activists have long understood as an interstitial life: one felt, lived, and experienced in and on the body among other bodies—because of identities. 

There are exceptions of course. Outside of the discipline of rhetoric and composition, Anne Cvetkovich and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s assessments of Cherrie Moraga’s work are sustained and refreshing to say the least. And within the discipline itself, Kristie Fleckenstein’s work, Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom while greatly indebted to Cicero and Kenneth Burke for rhetorical concepts of antinomy and agency, is one of the first more mainstream composition and pedagogy books to engage rather than simply cite a hemispheric writer or artist, when she dedicates at least ten pages of discussion to performance artist Coco Fusco as a way of theorizing “empathic social action” and “corporeal rhetoric.” Still, I want to push the presence of these theories within dominant conversations about pathos and agency that preoccupy our field further. What if we placed María Lugones’ rhetorical theory of “active subjectivity/resistant agency” or “brooding” as a “complex incarnate memory” linked to invention which emerges as a re-enactment of Anzaldúa’s concept of Coatlicue alongside Fleckenstein’s discussion of agenic invention? What if we understood Lugones’ concept of brooding as a much more complex, rhetorical form?

An even more productive question we might begin to ask instead is: what does affect/emotion/ways of feeling do in the context of the Américas? And what would a methodology that frames itself around affect within in the Américas look like? Or to put it another way, what might a poch@ methodology or politic look like if affect were its terms?

            As a scholar, my work has attempted to map out a genealogy of affect within the Américas. The affective vocabulary I’ve encountered (and in no way is this list exhaustive) includes such concepts as coatlicue state, la facultad, intimate terrorism, nepantla, conocimiento, wounded skin, vendida, and now poch@. 

A Not So Final Cut—Una herida abrieta
 

To keep the wound open, or to engage in a “living melancholia” –a “refusal to view identities under social erasure as individual pathology and permanent damage” and instead commit to its “communal appropriation” is indeed a difficult and exhausting task (Eng and Han 366).

In this exhaustion, I want to come back to the film that begins this blog entry and the reason for the two epigraphs by Robin D.G. Kelley and Diana Taylor. 

In the past few years I have experienced what queer theorist, Anne Cvetkovich would call “an affective life.” It is a life where “[an] archive of emotions [has resulted] from ungrievable losses…”  called into question for me long held assumptions about agency, memory within the body, and the effects of trauma not just on an individual but collectively (qtd in Eng and Kazanjian 15). This affective life I speak of consisted of a few things in the span of two years:  First, I lost my father not to death, but to unspeakable trauma, and thus I lost a living link to my identity as a latin@. That same year I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A year later after moving to Tallahassee, Florida from Arizona, I lost my partner from the stress that illness put on our relationship and the very real struggles queer people encounter daily, advocating on behalf of, or for the rights and health of their loved ones in a system that does not recognize their relationship as valid in the first place.  

As if this loss were not enough, my illness was one that literally made my body disappear. I had nerve damage caused by an earlier viral infection which left my stomach paralyzed, among other things and made it so that I could not digest food. This condition went misdiagnosed for nearly eight months. Even with a diagnosis there was no treatment but hope that with time it would slowly heal. I witnessed, as if outside myself, the body rebel. In doing so, I began to question the way we largely make the individual body responsible without accounting for its history of affects, nor the effect it has on others. Despite no clear etiology, one fact remained. The muscles of my body had remembered, recorded years of trauma, but my mind, which was part of that body, forgot. One reaction to the intensity of these experiences in such a short period was the loss of my memory. A year later I am just beginning to recall things that happened.

Days before Cruz sent me a Facebook message asking if I’d like to write for his blog, I found among a stack of unpacked boxes a DVD recording of a 1994 Baca-Martínez Family Reunion. The day my father gave it to me, two days before his 50^th birthday, was the last time I ever spoke or saw my father in person. 

The title of the film came from a dicho my close friend and poet, Fernando Pérez, shared with me. The saying was in response to losing a close friend of ours who took his own life. In trying to make sense of this loss, Fernando’s father tells him in Spanish over the phone, essentially “In each person’s mind is their own world.” I selected this saying or because it is both true and not. While much of our thoughts and feelings may stay private, the way we relate to the world is largely through emotion and the bodies that feel, experience, and produce these emotions with us. 

Making this film was a way of altering or transforming memory in a way that produces a new feeling, imagines another path and therefore a new relation to its history and the history it purports to tell. The process included erasing some voices in certain places and looping or splicing them in at others:

Frame  1. That is my great-grandmother, Theodora Baca Martínez, correcting my grandfather’s memory. She moves seamlessly in translation. This was our first house. 

Frame  2. I try to imagine the interior life of my father. The sorts of longing he had behind his VHS camcorder capturing his history. A biracial, bicultural son. He was raised by his single-mother, a blond haired, blue-eyed daughter of German and Scandinavian immigrant farmers. On weekends he visited his father’s family in Ogden; the same families you see gathered here in these moving frames. I imagine a longing to know. A sense of grief or loss over a tongue that won’t turn, trill, or move in the ways it wishes it could. 

Frame 3.  This collection of film was the last thing my father gave to me. I have not spoken to him in over three years. This same year, 2008, I fall in love. This is also the same year I am diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is not to say the two, love and trauma, are related.

Frame 4.   Pocho/a.  Bruised fruit. Discoloring of skin. A queer feeling. 

Frame 5.  Memory in Mexica thought resided in the heart rather than the head. This gives new meanings to pulling at the heart strings, arrhythmia, and the fact my father had to have his fixed.

Frame 6.   If this is indeed the living museum, between my hand, sweeping red rock and canyon, I want to know then, who is its uneasy curator?

Frame 7.   Even in pain I was an unusually happy and smiling kid. But in these moving pictures, I am awkward, uncomfortable, picking at my skin.

Frame 8.   One of my students from last quarter reminds me that nostalgia means home-sick.  I think of my grandfather’s phrase which Alan and I engineer and make a refrain: There used to be home. 

Frame 9.   This is the last time you say out loud, I love you. Years later, I still think your body will bloom back and walk through the door waiting for me to greet you with my mouth. Instead, I am stuck with candles and virgins that bear your same name.

______________________________________________________________________

Natalie A. Martínez , is a poet and PhD candidate at Arizona State University in Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics. She was a 2008 CCCCs Scholar for the Dream recipient and 2009 RSA Queering Rhetorical Studies Workshop Participant at Penn State University. Her research is concerned with Queer Latin@ rhetorics that theorize affect and posit it as a methodology. She is fortunate enough to have Keith Miller, Damián Baca, and Duane Roen as her mentors and will defend her dissertation this fall of 2011. She is healthy and newly adjusted to the rain of her native Seattle where she currently resides. If you have questions or comments feel free to email her at Natalie.Martinez@asu.edu.

 

Coming Soon: Guest Blogger Natalie Ann Martinez

Flourishing during the Summer Flojedad

Coming up, Natalie Ann Martinez has promised to blog about Hemispheric Memory and Poch@ as Racial Melancholia, synthesizing David Eng, Anne Anlin Cheng, Cherrie Moraga with some sonidos archival.

 In addition to writing, Natalie has an eye for great urban art, so I couldn't help but raid her facebook photos for these.

Presenting Guest Blogger Marissa M. Juárez

A Chicana Feminist Reflection on What it Means to be Pocha

by Marissa M. Juárez

“I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue.” –Cherríe Moraga

The first time I ever heard the term pocho, it was in an undergraduate Chicano/a Lit class at the University of New Mexico. We were reading José Antonio Villarreal’s creative exploration of that word, and although I could be wrong, I do not remember discussing pocho in positive terms. (I am pretty sure we never discussed it in feminine—or feminist—terms, as pocha, either.) In fact, I am pretty sure that Richard Rubio, to many in the class, era un vendido—a punk-ass-sell-out who was too cowardly and ignorant to assert any pride in his Mexican heritage. I remember feeling embarrassed because I understood and empathized with Richard’s plight to find his identity between conflicting Mexican and American values. I kept silent, afraid that if I gave voice to this empathy, my classmates might find out my secret, might see me as less of a Chicana because of it.

But that secret has since been exposed, gracias a las feministas Chicanas. These women helped me to find strength in my mismatched upbringing; they helped me to name my experience. It all happened the first time I read Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of mestiza consciousness. At the time, I was an MA student in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at UNM. I had grown up in New Mexico, identified as a Chicana, and felt the push and pull of conflicting identities for all my life. And for most of my life, that experience remained unnamed, bottled up, aching for confluence. For me, the struggle to name myself was, as Anzaldúa describes, an embodied (lived) experience: I was born into a Mexican family to a single mother who met and married my dad when I was six. The only dad I know, my adoptive dad, has blond hair, blue eyes, and rosy skin, and he was the first Anglo I had ever really known. Growing up within and between two cultures—one biologically inherited, the other inherited by chance—I lived (still do) the world of la mestiza. So when I read Anzaldúa for the first time, something awakened in me—an intrinsic knowing, a sense of belonging, a validation.

(Abuelos)

Because for most of my life I have lived entre dos mundos, literalmente.  I have mi familia Mexicana and my Anglo family. And in more ways than one, these families are worlds apart.  One night it was carne guisada with arroz and frijoles and fresh-off-the-comal tortillas at my Mexican grandparents’ house, and the next it was baked chicken and fondue at my Anglo grandparents’ house. Growing up, I was constantly shifting back and forth between locations, cultures, and values.  We never talked about race in either location. It was as if race didn’t exist. But as mis hermanas Chicanas helped me to understand, you don’t have to be Cornel West to know that race matters.

(note: photo after marriage, but since divorced)

                                                       

Like Cherríe Moraga, having a white father provided me with access to white cultural capital.  After my parents were married, my mom and I moved from the cramped house we shared with mis abuelos, mi tía, and six or seven of mi primos and into a three-bedroom that allowed me the newfound luxury of having my own room with my own toys.  I changed schools. I got a pet Cocker Spaniel that my dad named—predictably—Duchess. A couple of years later, we moved to the country. There were almost no Mexicans in the country. Even though I was one of about four or five Mexican kids in my grade at College Lane Elementary (in the country), and despite being called “beaner” and “burnt tortilla” at recess, I excelled in school. I became friends with white kids. I was quickly learning the social codes of white culture.

 

 (Abuelos Juárez y Marissa)

But unlike Moraga, I could never pass as white, and the way I experienced the world was radically different from someone who could. 

I have been the brown (and unwed) pregnant body.

I have been the brown woman on welfare.

I have been the only brown body in a graduate seminar.

I have been the angry brown mother at the PTA meeting.

My point is, I know what it’s like to feel like my brown body is being read and signified by people who have no idea what it means to live in a brown body. So I have come to understand my Chicana identity as something that is embodied and bodily—that is, both my brown body and my experiences within multiple locations (Mexican, Anglo, and in between) have shaped who I am: A person some might call pocha. But one does not have to give up one culture in order to enter another. When I was adopted into my white family, I did not stop being Mexican. Instead, I learned to sit astride the plurality, and though that seat wasn’t always comfortable, I held on and adapted. (And in case you’re wondering, adaptation is not a code word for assimilation.) Yes, there were times when I was confused, when I felt out of place. But I held on.

From a Chicana feminist perspective, pocha might be better understood as one instantiation of mestizaje. In theorizing a mestiza consciousness, Anzaldúa recalls being accused of being a “cultural traitor” for speaking Chicano Spanish, “a language with terms that are neither español ni ingles, but both” (77).  As Anzaldúa perceptively notes, the “linguistic terrorism” enacted upon Chicanos/as who speak a border tongue results in a fear to speak that creates distrust: Will we be censured for our speech? Probably. Chicanos/as are, according to Anzaldúa, our language; thus attempts to discipline and domesticate our language are also attempts to discipline and domesticate our brown bodies. 

When people use pocha as solely a derogatory marker of identity, they become complicit in the systems of domination that have historically served to marginalize and to Other the brown body.  People who equate pocha with punk-ass-sell-out reproduce the kind of discourse that for centuries has equated Malintzín with La Malinche. I’d be remiss to say that these discursive moves are exact parallels given the history surrounding Malintzín’s so-called “fall from grace”; I mean instead to imply that the regimes of power inherent in these discourses are fortified. The result is self-inflicted historical erasure; people forget their own lived oppressions.  As Moraga puts it, “oppressed groups are forgetting all the time” because “to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality” (27). It’s even worse when a pocha starts to believe (as I once did) that she is somehow at fault, somehow less of a person, for not fitting in neatly within any one culture. When a pocha starts internalizing her oppression, what can she do but strive to forget? What can she feel but shame?

(Juárez family reunion)

Chicana feminist sister Cindy Cruz has contended that “the contemplation of the body…is essential in the development and evaluation of an epistemology of Chicana thought and culture” (61).  Reflecting on the concept of pocha got me thinking about my own experiences—those that are archived within my brown body—because I see pocha as a label that is inscribed upon bodies that fail to perform a Latinonormative identity. In that sense, I understand pocha as a performance of identity that disrupts unwavering assumptions about what it means to be Latina/Mexicana/Chicana. Pocha is a reminder that “there is no one Chicana experience” (Anzaldúa 80).

Pocha conjures a set of memories that are felt and lived. If being pocha reckons experience, then it becomes all the more important to document these experiences, especially for Chicana scholars whose reclamation work reminds us that we stand to gain as much in sharing our personal histories as we do in recovering our collective ones. Yet how we interpret these experiences is up to us. We can sit back while others infuse this term with assimilationist ideologies (and in so doing participate in the construction of normative ideals surrounding Latinidad), or we can broaden our interpretations of pocha to challenge assimilationist ideologies (and in so doing include multiple constructions of Latina/Mexicana/Chicana identity). In sharing this partial personal history, I aim toward the latter. I remember (and rearticulate) my pocha identity to value lived experience in the production of knowledge. I remember to celebrate my brown body. I remember to nurture la mestiza with multiple voices, with multiple selves—para mantenerme en solidaridad con mis hermanas Chicanas, mi familia, y mi comunidad.  Recuerdo por el bien de mi cultura.

Controversy over Navy's Plan to Honor Chavez

Intolerance and Non-Violence 

It's no surprise Republican congressman Duncan Hunter is complaining about naming a Navy ship after Cesar Chavez, claiming the decision is "more about making a political statement than upholding the Navy's history and tradition." Political-correctness is one of those ideographs with negative connotations attached to it which conservatives euphemistically deploy to cover intolerance to racial diversity.

 However, I'm not sure I much support Chavez' name being used on a Navy cargo ship either. Chavez is known for his non-violent practices, such as his hunger strike and boycott of grapes, so it doesn't seem fitting to name a vessel used for military use to bear his name. I tend to agree with Randy Shaw from the article who says "Chavez's "absolute core beliefs was nonviolence." Shaw goes on to speculate that Chavez probably wouldn't have wanted a military vessel named after him."

You can read the story about the controversy over naming a Navy ship after Ceser Chavez here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20110518/pl_yblog_upshot/navys-plan-to-honor-cesar-chavez-irks-lawmaker

On Tex[t]-Mex: Al Madrigal

Can't Help Re-Posting Humorous &Poignant Latino Daily Show Correspondent
 Mucho respeto to Bill Nericcio for posting this--watched it, tweeted the Daily Show clip and had to re-post. Tex[t]-Mex shouted out http://www.sarainescalderon.com/, so I will do the same.

There's a great dig on the Daily Show clip when Madrigal comments that Obama is pandering to the Latino vote in much the same way that certain Cable Shows pander by just now hiring a Latino correspondent.

Santana Uses Celebrity for Good

Atlanta/Arizona Civil Rights Baseball Game as Moment of Kairos

While honored with the "Beacon of Change" award, Carlos Santana criticizes recent Atlanta immigration bill passed similar to Arizona's SB 1070. Seizing the moment, during which he was honored for his contributions to civil rights, Santana attacked the bill for its lack of humanity. I have yet to read/watch any cable news interpretations of Santana practicing what he was being awarded for, but I am familiar with the irony of people who respond that they do not want think critically about politics during a sporting event, even when the sporting event is played in commemoration of civil rights.

 (photo by Curtis Compton ccompton@ajc.com of AJC)

 In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Santana is quoted:

“This is about fear, that people are going to steal my job,” Santana said of the law. “No we ain’t. You don’t clean toilets and clean sheets, stop shucking and jiving.”
Santana referenced his 1960s rock-n-roll background and said he is an artist unafraid to speak out.
"It’s an anti-American law. It’s a cruel law, actually," Santana said. "If you all remember what it was like here with Martin Luther King and the dogs and the hoses, it’s the same thing, only it’s high tech. So let’s change it.”

Read more of the story at:
http://www.ajc.com/sports/atlanta-braves/santana-blasts-georgia-immigration-946782.html?cxtype=rss_news

Tucson Writes Night Feedback

Tucson High Writing Center Blog

I just recently have gotten through the end of the semester and have had a quick moment to visit the Tucson High Writing Center's blog and I got the photo of your truly speaking below:

It was a really great opportunity not just to speak, but to hear all of the great writing coming from the writers at Tucson High.
Below is a screenshot of the Tucson High Blog and I'm going to contact the Writing Center to see if they're planning to post any of the writing on their site. In which case, I will be sure to provide a link.

Check out the blog at: http://tucsonwrites.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/tucson-writes-night-2011/

Tonight at the UA Poetry Center

Cruz Medina Speaks at Tucson Writes Night

Former Gabby Gifford intern Daniel Hernandez Jr speaking... 
From Tucson Writes Night website:
"Tucson Writes Night is an event-concept proposed by a group of student tutors (we prefer the term “peer mentors”) at the Tucson High Magnet School Writing Center.  We coordinate an event that brings together students, their families, teachers, and community members to celebrate the work of our Writing Center and to showcase examples of excellent student writing.

Tucson Writes Night 2011

Tuesday, May 3rd
5-7pm
@UA Poetry Center"

The event will run from 5:00-7:00pm on Tuesday, May 3rd.  Activities include guest speakers, a brief introduction to the THMS Writing Center through a student-directed multimedia piece, and the reading of selected student writings.

It's tough to make out on the image above, but I'm one of the invited speakers along with journalist Kirsten Boeles who will be kicking the night off, talking about writing.

See more at Tucson Writes Night website:
http://tucsonwrites.wordpress.com/tucson-writes-night/

Or at UA News: http://www.uanews.org/node/39028

Tucson High Grad & Current UA Student Speaks Out

Eliza Meza Comments on New American Media

I read this article because I am acquainted with Eliza and she expressed her disappointment with how this piece was attacked as propaganda. After I read her piece, I scrolled through the comments, which were posted, and in many cases re-posted. All of the posts attacking Ms. Meza were signed anonymous and seemed to take the space and anonymity to go on anti-liberal/anti-undocumented diatribes.

Hopefully these are a vocal minority, although they still indicate the presence of discriminatory sentiment and discourse in the collective conscious. Those posting would not feel they should post unless they knew they represented more than their own voice and flawed logic.

New American Media frames the Ethnic Studies Program as "popular" even though it is successful in raising test scores, graduation rates and rates of students continuing on to college.

Even the Rain/También la Lluvia

This Film Looks Scary Good

Thanks to one of my mentors Adela Licona for spreading the word about this film. I just watched the trailer and it's got me thinking of a course/unit I'll have to build around it.



Summary from Loft http://www.loftcinema.com/node/2293:
"A Spanish film crew helmed by idealistic director Sebastian (Gael García Bernal) and his cynical producer Costa (Luis Tosar) come to Bolivia to make a revisionist epic about the conquest of Latin America - on the cheap. Once on location, the filmmakers cast local resident "Daniel" (Carlos Aduviri) as a 16th century native in the film within a film. However, when the make-up and loin cloth come off, Daniel sails into action protesting his community’s deprivation of water at the hands of multi-national corporations. When riots break out in Cochabamba, protesting excessive fees for water, the film production is interrupted and the convictions of the crew members are challenged. Sebastian and Costa are forced to make an unexpected emotional journey in opposite directions.
With ample irony, EVEN THE RAIN explores the effects of Spanish imperialism, still resonating some 500 years later in the continued struggle against oppression by indigenous people.
This fictional Fitzcarraldo-like quest to make a film against all odds is set against the backdrop of the real life “Water Wars,” fought against the privatization of Bolivia’s water supply in the year 2000, and is anchored in the philosophies of historian Howard Zinn, as well as the stories of 16th century priests, Fathers Bartolome de las Casas and Antonio Montesinos, the first radical voices of conscience against an Empire."

A More Nuanced Ethnic Studies Narrative

Tucson Ethnic Studies Lawyer Speaks to Board Member
From the Arizona Public Media website:
"TUSD governing board member Mark Stegeman and attorney Richard Martinez, who is representing saveethnicstudies.org, join the studio to discuss the ongoing quagmire."
The choice of the word "quagmire" by Arizona Public Media seems to demonstrate some unsettling bias.



See the website: http://www.azpm.org/news/story/2011/4/28/1851-ethnic-studies-vote-postponed/

When Playing the Game Fails and Politicians Dismiss Rational Discourse
This came after the TUSD board meeting take over:




Tucson Teachers' Press Conference Ignored
Opponents want to argue that the Ethnic Studies program breeds civil uprising, but few paid attention to the teachers' press conference earlier this week. Here's a clip from one of the earlier press conferences that receives little attention because it does not feed into the salacious narrative in the media, which perpetuates and preys upon public fear.

Buzz in Tucson Weekly

'Cause if You Read it in Print, it's Got to Be True

Just announced, Gabrielle Gifford's former intern Daniel Hernandez will be speaking at the Tucson Writes Night event where I'll have the opportunity to speak a bit about writing before celebrating the work of some young writers.