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You’re Invited! NUEVA YORK at the Woodlawn Cemetery featuring VL’s Mala

2 Oct 2010

New York City area peeps: yours truly will be participating in this tour giving an extra special performance of an original piece written just for the event gracias to el Museo del Barrio. So if you are interested, RSVP and come through.

Woodlawn Cemetery, 501 East 233rd Street, Bronx, NY
Sunday, October 10, 2010
2:00pm – 4:00pm
FREE ADMISSION

Prepare for the most lively cemetery experience of the year. As part of Nueva York, El Museo is partnering with the Woodlawn Cemetery and City Lore to offer a walking tour of the final resting places of renowned Latinos Celia Cruz, Carmen Miyares de Mantilla, Juan Machado, and others. Learn more about these notables through Calaveras, a form of poetry created during Day of the Dead celebrations to humor celebrities, performed on-site by poets and spoken word artists.

Please note: Participants should meet at the entrance of The Woodlawn Cemetery, located at the Jerome Avenue entrance.

Subway Directions: Take the #4 train (Lexington Avenue express or local) to the end of line – Woodlawn Station. At the base of the station, walk about a half block, and the Jerome Avenue entrance will be on the right.

RSVP required at www.elmuseo.org/en/event/nueva-york-woodlawn-cemetery

NUEVA YORK en el Cementerio Woodlawn en el Bronx

Domingo 10 de octubre del 2010
2:00pm – 4:00pm
Cementerio Woodlawn, 501 Este de la Calle 233, Bronx, NY
Entrada: Gratis

Prepárate para la visita al cementerio más alegre del año. Como parte de Nueva York, el Museo del Barrio se ha asociado con el cementerio de Woodlawn y City Lore para ofrecer un recorrido a pie de los sitios donde descansan latinos y latinas ilustres que forman parte de la historia de Nueva York, incluyendo Celia Cruz, Carmen Miyares de Mantilla, Juan Machado, entre otros. Aprende más sobre estos notables a través de Calaveras, una forma de poesía recitada durante el Día de los Muertos con la que con humor e ironía se honra a los familares difuntos, y que será presentada por poetas y artistas in situ.

El grupo se reunirá en la entrada del cementerio Woodlawn, ubicada en la Avenida Jerome y la Avenida Bainbridge.

Cómo llegar: Toma el tren # 4 (Avenida Lexington expreso o local) hasta Woodlawn, la última estación. Una vez en la calle, camina media cuadra y verás a tu derecha la entrada al cementerio sobre la Avenida Jerome.

Reserva tu asistencia: www.elmuseo.org/en/event/nueva-york-woodlawn-cemetery

Happy (?) Latino Heritage Month

8:17 am By Maegan La Mala · history|Latin America · 5 Comments

16 Sep 2010

Sigh inside Papa John's Advertsing a Fiesta Pizza Yesterday marked the official start of Latino (of Hispanic) Heritage Month, 30 days or so of corporate cafeterias serving tacos. Ok so I’m being cynical. The marketing is so over the top some time (see picture). The political pandering so offensive, especially at a time like this with the mid-term elections, it feels like all fluff and no substance.

It’s not that I don’t love being a Latina, it’s my primary identity above all others. I think in large part because of my political awaking when I was a teenager, whenever someone asks that tired old question and I am forced to limit myself to one answer, I’ll go with Latina over mujer. It’s just it is who I am, how I live. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how can I be more Latino and don’t try extra hard to be extra Latina during this month. But that, that not trying so hard to prove myself, is a shift for myself so maybe in that there is value in this month as a kind of “new year” of sorts for our multiple communities.
Read more…

Grito de Lares Event in NYC : 9/23

7:41 am By Maegan La Mala · history|New York City|Puerto Rico · Comments Off

8 Sep 2010

Stupid America

11:11 am By la Macha · history|Poetry · Comments Off

14 Jul 2010

Speaking of Chicano and violent revolution and the 60s…I found this poem here and it gives just a bit of the background of Chicano organizing back in the 60s. It came with the following poem, which I found to be a bit male centric, but very important and interesting anyway.

stupid america

stupid america, see that
chicano
with a big knife
on his steady hand
he doesn’t want to knife you
he wants to sit on a bench
and carve christ figures
but you won’t let him.
stupid america, hear that
chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write
he will explode.
stupid america, remember
that chicano
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand
masterpieces
hanging only from his mind.

~ Lalo Delgado (1930-2005)
(from Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind, 1969)

Tomorrow and Wend. In San Fran: NQAF Presents Before We Were Named

3:51 pm By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Arts|GLBT|history|San Francisco · 1 Comment

14 Jun 2010

Some friends of VivirLatino are here so if you are in the Bay Area and can represent, please do.

QCC and The National Queer Arts Festival Present

Before We Were Named:

A marvel of queer theater and interactive performance chronicling our spectacular existence via histories of violence, displacement, migration, revolt and spirit.

Conceptualized and Produced by Nico Dacumos and Cherry Galette

Featuring wondrous anomalies, expositions, curios and exhibitions by:

Maya Chinchilla

Irina Contreras

Nico Dacumos

Aimee Espiritu

Cherry Galette

Juba Kalamka

Gaston Mazo

Carlos Oxford AKA Karlangas

SoliRose

June 15 & June 16, 2010, 8:00PM

The Lab

2948 16th St. @ Capp

San Francisco, CA

$12 – $20 sliding scale

Advance tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111351

Enter scenes inspired by world’s fairs of years past and marketplaces at the edge of a distopian future. Move freely through a collaborative theater environment to interact with queer origin stories, myths, and fables told through music, dance, film, experimental performance and ritual.

Come witness new work from some of the Bay Area’s most innovative and notorious QTPOC artists and troublemakers centering migration, the birth of cultural mythologies, the queer body in diaspora and the many ways we’ve been named, celebrated, remembered, demonized and memorialized.

Artist Bios Here

Of Sleeping Giants and Cults of Personality

25 May 2010

With resistance growing against SB-1070, weekly arrests for real immigration reform, and students across the country amping it up for a DREAM, I have been reading more opinion pieces in the media that can be simply (and imperfectly) characterized into two categories: Behold the sleeping brown giant rubbing its eyes or Take me to your leader – once you all pick one. The problem with both these narratives is that they look at current resistance as happening in a vacuum and fail to see the rich legacy of activism within Latino communities. Additionally, these frames attempt to box what they see happening into more acceptable models of of protest, in other words co-option justified by wider mass appeal.

The Giant was Never Sleeping
The Latino community as sleeping giant is a metaphor that usually is reserved for election time and in reference to power as a voting block. The sleeping giant metaphor in this context can usually be exchanged with perceived monolithic swing vote power that is hyped up immediately before and after a major election. With anti-immigrant sentiment and violence growing across the country, acts of resistance, from boycotts to sit-ins are getting much media attention and have invoked sleeping giant metaphor use as if “brown” movements have been playing Rip Van Winkle.

RIP Dr. Dorothy Height

8:41 am By BiancaLaureano · Activism|history|Justice|Women · 2 Comments

23 Apr 2010

Three days ago Dr. Dorothy Height died. She has been called an “American Civil Rights Leader,” and although I have issues in general with people (mis)using the term “American” when they really just mean people living in the US, I believe the term was used correctly for Dr. Height.

Sometimes conversations about Civil Rights in the US may result in Latinos thinking the dialogue does not include us. The VL familia has addressed Civil Rights in various forms and hopefully you find this a space to interrogate and learn about how we DO and ARE a part of those conversations and have always been. From my LatiNegra perspective, and for many LatiNegr@s/Afr@-Latin@s/Afr@-Caribeñ@s/BlakTinos, Dr. Height’s work and legacy has directly impacted us. I too had the honor of meeting Dr. Height almost 5 years ago in Washington, DC at a National Council of Negro Women event where I staffed a table regarding cervical cancer with an organization I helped to create called Tamika & Friends, Inc.

I received an email from SisterSong on Tuesday April 21, 2010 that included: “Sisters Whose Shoulders We Stand On: A Tribute to Dr. Dorothy Height” by SisterSong National Coordinator, Loretta Ross. I’d like to share with you what Loretta Ross wrote below: Read more…

PART I. Puerto Rican Political Prisoners: 30 years in U.S. prisons

7:10 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · history|Puerto Rico · 1 Comment

14 Apr 2010

The following came via my Facebook feed and is part one of a presentation given by human and civil rights attorney Jan Susler on April 7, 2010 at the Union Theological Seminary. I feel it really gives some good background on Puerto Rican history and it’s colonial context.

In the past month, activists in Puerto Rico, New York and Chicago participated in art installations, voluntarily locking themselves into store-fronts converted into jail cells, each person spending a long and lonely 24 hour shift, symbolically deprived of their liberty, privacy, society, movement, and sensory stimulation.

Why on earth would dozens of people voluntarily submit themselves to such symbolic privations? To reflect on an historic moment: the 30th anniversary of the arrest of 11 Puerto Rican men and women who would be accused and convicted of seditious conspiracy, and sentenced to serve the equivalent of life in U.S. prisons. And to call attention to the fact that one of them—Carlos Alberto Torres—has been in prison for 30 years, another—Oscar Lopez Rivera—, for 29 years; and another—Avelino Gonzalez Claudio—, for 2. Of the 2,000 some Puerto Rican political prisoners since the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, Carlos Alberto is the longest held.

What could motivate a Carlos Alberto, an Oscar, or an Avelino, to risk not symbolic, but real, concrete, privations? What is it about the situation of the Puerto Rican nation that could lead to people being accused of conspiracies related to winning independence, including seditious conspiracy— conspiring to use force against the “lawful” authority of the U.S. over Puerto Rico?

Read more…

Update on the New Mythos Tour

7 Apr 2010

A few weeks ago I shared an exciting project with you, one that gets to the very heart of why I do what I do and how I live. Consider this your update and call for support.

I am writing because I’d like to tell you about a new project I am working on called The New Mythos Project. This project is building a network of phenomenal sistaz who are engaged in social justice work through spiritual and creative ways, in their everyday lives.

I’ve been working with a phenomenal crew of mamaz to identify the variety of communities and movements we are participating in and leading, and what ways we can more fully support ourselves as mamaz, social change agents, artists and truth-tellers.

We come from a variety of different backgrounds, share a variety of lived-experiences and are all interested in learning from each other and growing with each other. We are invested in radical movements AND we believe that there is a radical platform- a new articulation of our age- that we engage in from a holistic, spirit-based place; informed by our ancestors and our visions of our futures. In our lives, work, community care-giving and mama-ing we are manifesting feminist prophecies.

We are invested in building a network to share with other radical m/others, mamis and community caregivers to fortify our collective lives and work. We are excited to continue to learn and grow with you!

To this effect we are all participating, supporting and collaborating in The New Mythos Project— an ongoing national collaboration that began over the past few months and that we are designing to support ongoing participation, networking, visibility raising, resource-sharing and truth-telling between radical m/others, mamis and community caregivers. We are investing in this project to support our communities and ourselves and we are asking for your support to do this!

Afr@-Latin@s Y LatiNegr@s On TV

4:10 pm By BiancaLaureano · history|race · Comments Off

8 Mar 2010

I shared last week an update on the LatiNegr@s Project and the upcoming TV interview I did discussing the project. One part of the video by Associate Producer, Marlene Peralta, who interviewed me, can be seen below. To watch the full episode which features a discussion about unemployment in Puerto Rico, and additional commentary regarding the conversations about Afr@-Latin@s can be seen online at the Independent Sources website.

Afrolatinos from Marlene Peralta on Vimeo.

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