I wanted to write a quick note to say hola and let people know that despite not having any new content for over a month (damn!), VivirLatino is still here just experiencing a little, ok more than a little slow down, as yours truly hustles for the holiday season and deals with family obligations.
I will try to add more content this week but in the mean time, please make sure you are following us on twitter, where I do post new links and info daily.
Abrazos and thanks for your support!
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, my city, where my family and so many of my friends live, I didn’t know what to do with my concern from Los Angeles. And now weeks after, there is still so much devastation and I still don’t know what to do. So I did and continue to do the little I can. I share information, especially for alternatives to the Red Cross who failed so many communities post Katrina in the Gulf Region. It seems that they didn’t do too hot in many areas following Sandy and not surprisingly many of these are poorer communities of color.
But this is more than just talking smack about organizations that you really don’t know what they do with your donations. This is about real people. Real friends of mine. Friends who have had my back and shown my two daughters so much love. This is about amazingly, brilliant friends who work their asses off and still write provocatively, with so much wisdom and truth. Friends who use their voices and their bodies to convey the complexity that is simply being a woman of color.
One of those friends lives, with her lovely mother, in one of the hoods most impacted by Sandy in New York City. She just got power back but still is without heat and hot water. And it’s cold in Queens.
So can we help a sister and her mama out so that they can recover in whatever way they need? Sydette is such a beautiful person. Right before I moved to LA, we saw a movie and broke bread together. Then, like now – she has the amazing ability to make me feel completely at ease and feel a little less out of sorts with all the injustice and ridiculousness of in this world. I want to be able to make her and her mom feel a little less out of sorts after Sandy.
Please consider donating directly to Sydette using the paypal link below.
With Love,
Mala
Desert America by Rubén Martínez, published by Metropolitan Books, takes the mythology of “the West” and turns it on it’s head, through a startlingly personal and historic look at northern New Mexico, Joshua Tree California, Marfa Texas, and the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona.
Martínez takes the reader on a journey, not just through the complicated history of displacement, migration, militarization and gentrification in these places, but he takes us through a trip of his own life, as he and his surroundings struggle with identity and addictions.
While interviewing and living among his subject, Martínez questions his own place. Is he participating in the wave of othering residents? Is he contributing to gentrification that is displacing families whose roots go back generations? What is the role that immigration enforcement plays in terms of relationships between people and nations? Martínez enters as both an insider and outsider into the West questioning the very nature of authenticity that so many who have been there for a long time and newcomers both like to claim.
In Desert America we are reminded of what happened in 1997 to 18 year old Eseqiuel Hernández, shot to death by U.S. Marines in Redford, Texas claiming they felt threatened by the teen who was herding his family’s goats when really they were helping to create and perpetuate the stereotype justification for a drug war that we know is failing on both sides of the Southern Border. The book also explores the role of real estate speculation especially in Northern New Mexico and the negative impact that has had on native populations. Travelling in Marfa, Texas we learn about how school desegregation was delayed specifically for Mexicans who were kept in their own “separate but equal school” for a little over a decade after Brown vs. Board of Ed. In the South Valley of New Mexico we enter the world of a different kind of Latin@ identity politics. Where you can be Native, Hispano, Mexican, Chicano or a mixture of all of the above. Martínez questions the roles of artists and literary figures like D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O’Keefe in exotisizing the West while erasing what existed prior to their discoveries. Martínez describes newcomers to the region as gentrifiers fleeing the gentrification of cities like Los Angeles and this gentrification is likened to recolonization. The segregation, poverty, and drug abuse Martínez recalls makes a strong argument.
This book arrived in the mail just as I was arriving west, in Los Angeles from New York City, and I hoped that as I read it, I would gain greater insight about the idea of the West now that I lived in it. I wasn’t prepared. Desert America forced me to look deeper at myself and the role that I played in arriving to the alleged ghetto of the City of Angels to live in a house that had been flipped by real estate speculators. A house that the family who lived here before probably lost in foreclosure. Was I now a gentrifier fleeing the gentrification of New York City?
Martínez positions the West as a looking glass into the future while simultaneously pointing that mirror on himself, of Mexican and El Salvadorian heritage, and us, readers and members of US society who keep buying into the West as landscape to be discovered when it, like everywhere else, has always been and has a story that preceded the arrival of the new conquistador class.
Check out Desert America by Rubén Martínez. It is such a unique combo of history, anthropology and autobiography that is especially relevant now as Latinos are looked at more closely and as we, hopefully look at ourselves more deeply.
I love me some Ana Tijoux. Part of it may be my latent Chile fetish. Another part of it may be just how on point her lyrics are and how real she keeps it integrating politics with her music. This is not a fad for her.
The beginning of this track Volver is haunting and the entire thing is unlike anything we’ve seen Tijoux do before.
The video below debuted on OkayPlayer, and was directed by B+ from Mochilla, the man responsible for iconic album covers from DJ Shadow, Mos Def, RZA, Eazy E, J Dilla, Damian Marley and many more.
The video was filmed in Medellin, Colombia while Ana Tijoux was visiting Quantic to participate in the Ondatropica recording sessions in the historic Disco Fuentes Studios. The video’s song ‘Volver’ was recently featured on Giles Peterson’s Brownswood Bubbler’s summer compilation and originally appeared on Tijoux’s newest album ‘La Bala’ which was nominated last week for a Latin GRAMMY for ‘Best Urban Album.’
September 15th marked the start of Latino heritage month, a month when the United States generally pretends that it cares about the diversity within the diaspora. Originally built around the independence days of countries like Mexico, this is the month for supermarket specials on stereotypical food items like taco shells, beans, and rice. It’s the month when corporations will hold brown bag lunches on diversity, and there are parades and specials on television and in major magazines. Ironically (or not) the month ends on the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s alleged arrival in the Caribbean which jumped off centuries of colonization that continues today.
As media makers on a site that was launched during Latin@ Heritage Month and as a site that will be celebrating 7 years of independent media, I would really like to focus this month on media, looking at the films, articles, books, events, television shows, and websites that are being made by us or marketed to us.
If you have media you would like to share please email info@vivirlatino.com, leave a comment below, tweet us, facebook us, or consider contributing to our tumblr.
PS – you will also notice that we are changing our look to offer you more specialized content. Please be patient.
Summer may be unofficially over but here in Los Angeles we are having a heat wave just in time to kick off Latino Heritage Month. Kicking off the celebrations and hopefully the conversations, are East LA locals Las Cafeteras, who will be celebrating the release of their CD “It’s Time”.
Joining las Cafeteras tonight at the Boyle Hieghts Farmer’s Market are Los Angeles based Bomba group Atabey and Chicano Batman.
As a newcomer to LA I’m not that familiar with las Cafeteras besides hearing them on NPR’s Alt.Latino and Remezcla. And this Rican definitely wants to see what’s up with Bomba in East Los (yes I will admit to being a little skeptical).
The party jumps off tonight at 6 at Mariachi Plaza, 1831 E 1st St., Los Angeles.
I’ll be livetweeting from @VivirLatino and @Mamitamala.
Edited to add on 9/14/2012 – According to today’s New York Times, 29 DACA applications have been approved so far. Hardly a huge number statistically and far from the relief that this is being sold as.
Earlier today there were new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals application numbers and sort of numbers. According the New York Times today, 72,000 DACA applications have been received since USCIS started taking application on August 15th of this year. This contradicts numbers reported on earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal stating 40,000 applications had been filed. It is also being reported that a “small number” of the applications have been approved. How small that number is remains unknown.
The numbers are actually kind of important. In June of this year the Department of Homeland Security released numbers on how many immigration cases that had come under review as low priority and eligible for prosecutorial discretion (Remember the Morton Memo?). Those numbers were far from encouraging. They showed that out of the hundreds of thousands of deportation cases allegedly reviewed, fewer than 2 percent of the cases were closed.
I would be surprised if any solid numbers on DACA applications accepted were released before the election. Especially if the stats don’t match the hype.
The Democratic National Convention may be over but there is no shortage of it being used as an opportunity to push the so called inclusion of immigration as part of the official party platform. This is especially true as both parties try to attract both the Latino vote and donor dollars. While immigration was barely touched at the Republican National Convention, at the DNC immigration was paraded around often, usually with direct or indirect references to the DREAM Act and DREAMers.
Many immigrant organizations touted and used the DNC speech of DREAMer Benita Veliz, the first undocumented person to speak at a political convention. And while I certainly do not want to take this history from her, her speech was as formulaic as Julian Castro’s. Of course I didn’t expect her speech in any way, shape, or form to challenge the very party that invited her to stand and represent what for many has become the immigrant rights movement, a little more nuance would have been welcome especially knowing that there are DREAMers who do look at the DREAM movement(s) with a more critical lens. Not once did she even call herself undocumented. Was this the peak of co-option or moment of simple and important recognition?
The Democratic 2012 Platform (which you can see here as a PDF) doesn’t contain anything on immigration that we haven’t already heard. It promotes law and order immigration reform as a party priority, emphasizing that the undocumented need to get right with the law and learn English as Obama strengthens the border. The platform repeats the finger pointing towards the GOP for the failure of the DREAM Act that Latinos have been hearing all along, distracting us from record breaking deportations while claiming shifting enforcement priorities which are more hype than reality.
The national media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) just released their latest issue of their monthly magazine Extra!. I think this particular issue will be of interest to VivirLatino readers as it is dedicated it to looking at Latin@s in the media.
Julie Holler, Managing Editor of Extra!, looks at where the Latinos aren’t. She writes in Missing Latino Voices :
While people of color and women have always been underrepresented in U.S. media, Latinos consistently stand out—in the coverage as well as inside the newsroom—for their exceptionally paltry numbers relative to their population size.
And if new media was to be the great brown hope for both Latino media makers and those hoping to see themselves reflected, yours truly begs to differ in Latinos in New Media On the verge of a breakthrough—or breakdown. As a longtime blogger myself, I was excited to get to interview some of my favorite Latinos in new media and ask them what’s going on. In it I write:
Many bloggers, though, note a downward shift over the past five years, in audience numbers and participation, which leaves many wondering: Are new media struggling with corporatization the way traditional media have been? Or have Twitter and the rise of mobile technology killed the Internet star?
Speaking of stars, there is interview in the issue with a Latina who has been working hard representing, Maria Hinojosa. In ‘You Have a Picture; See How Complex It Is?’ Hinojosa tells Janine Jackson :
I felt that from the moment I walked in the doors at NPR in Washington in 1985, that it was me that was opening the door, but that I was carrying this very heavy weight of responsibility. And that was the thing that motivated me, essentially, to be fearless—because I was scared. I was like a fish out of water.
I have been a long time fan of FAIR’s work so it was an honor to write for them and it’s really wonderful to have them look at Latin@s in the media and walk their talk, by having independent media makers provide perspective while looking at the full scope of the successes and challenges Latin@s face in the media.
As Latino Heritage Month approaches consider bringing one or both of Vivir Latino’s editors to discuss several different topics! With Maegan in LA and Bianca in NYC we can access many different locations (and we skype or do Google Hangouts!) Consider us for:
Reach out to Maegan for workshops and discussions on:
Reach out to Bianca for workshops and discussions on:
We know budget’s can be modest and we can work within various ranges. Contact us at info@vivirlatino.com to discuss!
