Category: Author Q&A

A Conversation With Norma Elia Cantú

Posted on by Mari Herreras

April 11, 2020

Maestra Norma Cantú, author, activist, and scholar, took time to talk with the University of Arizona Press from her San Antonio home about life during COVID-19, community, family, and her poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor.

Life in Cantú’s Texas-Mexico borderlands is centered in these poems, a collection that celebrates culture, tradition, love, solidarity, and political transformation from Spanish to English.

Cantú, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, currently serves as the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University. She is founder and director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Indigenous Persistence in California: Five Questions with Lee Panich

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

April 7, 2020

Based on fifteen years of archaeological and historical research in the two regions, Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of the Ohlone and Paipai alongside a synthesis of Native Californian endurance over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between colonial events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities, offering a model for how scholars of Indigenous histories may think about the connections between the past and the present.

Below, read an interview with Lee M. Panich about his new book.

What inspired you to embark on this research?

Narratives of Persistence has its origins in my dissertation research in Baja California, back in 2005, for which I conducted an archaeological excavation at the site of Mission Santa Catalina, in the heart of the Paipai reserve of Santa Catarina. The initial idea for my dissertation was to compare the Dominican mission system of Baja California to the contemporaneous Franciscan missions of Alta California. However, Paipai community members quickly convinced me to change my research questions to center on the tribe’s long-term history. They downplayed the importance of the mission, saying in effect, “We’re still here, while the mission is just ruins now.” 

This idea became the central focus of my dissertation and stuck with me when I shifted my research to the San Francisco Bay area about ten years ago. I saw a similar situation with local Ohlone groups, who had persisted in different ways during and after the mission period. Given the variables involved—different Indigenous cultural traditions, different missionary orders, differences between the U.S. and Mexico—I thought the two case studies would make an interesting comparison. I hope readers agree.

Why do the Ohlone people lack popular recognition and official acknowledgement from the U.S. government, even though they share a similar colonial history to the Paipai people?

That’s a great question and one of the key issues I try to address in the book. There are, of course, a lot of reasons for this discrepancy. One reason has to do with differences in how central California and northern Baja California were colonized by the United States and Mexico, respectively. Despite maintaining community cohesion, the Ohlone lost ancestral lands and were demographically outnumbered in the Bay Area shortly after the Gold Rush. The Paipai, in contrast, were able to hold onto portions of the ancestral homelands at the same time that Mexican settlement in the region remained relatively small well into the twentieth century. 

But, for the Ohlone in particular, I think the biggest issue is simply that outsiders have always had essentialized notions of what Native people should be like. This can be seen in the early twentieth century when anthropologists and government officials alike pronounced the Ohlone extinct. The people were still there, but they didn’t fit rigid stereotypes about American Indians. One of the arguments I make in the book is that expectations about authenticity continue to do harm to Native Californian communities today.

A portrait of Inigo, taken in 1860. Inigo was an Ohlone man who joined the missions as a child, rose to the rank of alcalde, and eventually received part of the former mission lands as a grant from the Mexican government in the 1840s. Use of this image is courtesy of the Santa Clara University Archives & Special Collections.

What do you think the biggest lasting changes colonialism brought to the Ohlone and Paipai peoples are? How do those changes manifest today?

Perhaps counterintuitively, people in both communities are quick to acknowledge how their ancestors incorporated aspects of colonial lifeways into their own. For example, Paipai men are well regarded vaqueros, or cowboys, and my hosts in Santa Catarina credited the mission system for teaching their ancestors how to rides horses and drive cattle. Here in the Bay Area, many members of the Ohlone community remain practicing Catholics, another direct legacy of missionization. In both cases, people today are adamant about the fact that their communities have suffered unjustly under different colonial regimes, but they also recognize that the issues are not always black and white.

Certainly, one of the biggest changes has been a long process of social and political coalescence. Prior to colonization, people in both regions were organized into myriad autonomous communities – communities that have come together in various ways over the past 250 years. What I think most people misunderstand about that process is that it was both intentional and shaped by enduring cultural practices. In the missions, for example, Ohlone and Paipai people drew on existing marriage patterns to expand the pool of potential spouses amid devastating population losses. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ohlone and Paipai communities opened their doors to other Native people seeking refuge from violence and exploitation. These changes look dramatic when one compares the situation in 2020 to that in, say, 1780. But when you view it from the perspective of lived experience, the overall picture is one of individuals and families striving for community continuity. That’s the perspective I hope readers take away from the book.

Could you please tell us more about the persistent Indigenous traditions of the Ohlone and Paipai peoples? What do those traditions and traditional ways of knowing look like in contemporary life in California?

There is so much amazing work that is happening across Native California, and especially in the Ohlone and Paipai communities. Here in the Bay Area, for example, you can get a meal of acorn bread and venison at Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley. Run by Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone), the café honors traditional knowledge, serves as a hub for Native cultural events, and simultaneously educates the non-Native public about continued Ohlone presence. There is also an active program of language revitalization. In addition to reintroducing Chochenyo Ohlone language to everyday usage, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe regularly renames important ancestral sites in order to undo the processes of erasure that have written them out of their homelands for the past two centuries.

South of the border, the Paipai are similarly working to maintain Native languages – there are several spoken in Santa Catarina today, including Paipai and Ko’alh. Paipai artisans are also renowned for their pottery, as Santa Catarina is the only Native Californian community with an unbroken ceramic tradition stretching from precontact times to the present. The potters, nearly all of whom are women, and other Paipai artisans are in high demand at workshops and cultural events throughout northern Baja California and southern California. In fact, many Native artisans from Baja California regularly connect with tribal communities in the United States—ranging from Kumeyaay groups in San Diego County to the Hualapai, Yavapai, and Havasupai in Arizona—to share knowledge and to rekindle connections.

The Paipai community of Santa Catarina in Baja California, taken in 2005. Use of this photo is courtesy of Lee M. Panich.

What are you working on now?

For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in several interrelated projects focused on bringing Ohlone perspectives to a wider audience, particularly at Santa Clara University where I work. Our campus is on the site of Mission Santa Clara, where thousands of Ohlone people lived and labored during the colonial period. To date, their descendants have been largely left out of the public interpretation of the mission and the ways we teach the history of the SCU campus to our students and visitors. 

This is all changing rapidly, and we’ve been working closely with the Bay Area Ohlone community — particularly those groups who trace their ancestry through Mission Santa Clara, including the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Ohlone Indian Tribe. This work is both top-down and bottom-up. We’re working with the University administration, for example, to assess official monuments and markers on our campus and to make sure we do a better job of acknowledging Ohlone history and continued presence. Along with faculty colleagues and undergraduate students, we’re also working with the Ohlone community to build pedagogical resources that instructors here at Santa Clara and elsewhere can use and that feature Ohlone voices and perspectives. The coronavirus situation has obviously put these efforts on the back burner for the time being, but the story of the Ohlone—like that of the Paipai—is one of overcoming obstacles big and small.

Lee M. Panich is an associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, specializing in the archaeology and ethnohistory of colonial California, particularly the Spanish mission system.

Video: Stephen Pyne on the To the Last Smoke Series

Posted on by Abby Mogollon

April 2, 2020

Stephen J. Pyne and the University of Arizona Press have just completed an 11 book opus series that explains the fire history of the United States. The series started with Between Two Fires and concludes this month with To the Last Smoke: An Anthology. In between are nine regional looks at localized fire history. Together, Steve has captured the environmental and human history of wildfire in America. In this short video Steve discusses his approach.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration, including The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager. Most recently, he has surveyed the American fire scene with a narrative, Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, and a suite of regional reconnaissances, To the Last Smoke, all published by the University of Arizona Press.

Simón Trujillo and Vick Quezada Discuss the Borderlands of Latinx Indigeneity

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

March 18, 2020

In the first episode of The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions podcast, University of Arizona Press author Simón Trujillo talks with The Latinx Project’s 2020 Artist-in-Residence Vick Quezada for an illuminating dialogue on Latinx indigeneity, representation, sexuality, and the politics of knowledge and activism. Click here to listen to the podcast and read more about the project.

Simón Trujillo is a professor at New York University, and is the author of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity. In his new book, Trujillo reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.

Five Questions with Poet and Scholar Molly McGlennen

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

March 3, 2020

Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in Modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements— earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, Molly McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.

Here, Molly answers five questions about her new poetry collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

Our Bearings has not only been part of an ongoing personal project of narrating my experience of growing up in Minnesota, but also part of a long-term creative and scholarly project which was focused on Native American urban experience more broadly. In my first book of poetry, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits (Salt, 2010) I submit in my preface that “poetry is a form of community-building, a means to locate oneself in relationship to a network of people and places and memories.” In my scholarly monograph, Creative Alliances: The Transnational Design of Indigenous Women’s Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), I explore how urban Native women demonstrate through their work the ways in which “poetry serves as a direction-finding tool for navigating various forms of (what I call) ‘dislocations’ and reclaiming urban centers as Indigenous territories.” Taken together, the projects are evidence of how I think about the ways Minneapolis, my hometown, has been historicized, shaped, and continually claimed by Indigenous peoples— and how my family’s stories add to that history and present reality. Our Bearings helped me think through what a poetic mapping of this history and reality would look, feel, and sound like: what Nativeness is in the present tense.

How do you think found poetry and poems which are rooted deeply in specific places help document the history of a city or state?

In general, poetry delivers emotional truths and accuracies that maps, written communications, archives— tools of western documentation— rarely convey. Some of the poems in the collection live as poetic documentation of my experience of the city based off of physical “findings” (such as flyers, signs, brochures, etc.). Some are experiential “findings” based upon the many trips back home with my two small children revisiting old (and new) stomping grounds with my family. And, finally, some are poems based upon my experience of working alongside my dad reading through documents archived at the Minnesota Historical Society, which consisted of correspondences and letters between my dad’s great grandparents begging for their children to be returned to them from the Owatoma School for Dependent and Neglected Children. My intention with the poems in Our Bearings was to offer the reader not an alternative history of Minneapolis, or even an alternative mapping of it, but rather to use poetry as a way to seek out stories of sustainability: Poetry as the vehicle to tell and tell again of what is undeniably and crucially Indigenous to this land. My poems are the stories of Native peoples shaping their own future, rather than the ones being acted upon by colonizing ideologies and racist federal laws, policies, and campaigns.

In the preface to this collection, you explain Anishinaabewakiing as an “ecosystem that explicitly includes people, their culture, and history.” Considering the cultural and historical impact of the current generation, what do you think the urban ecosystem of Minneapolis will look like in the future?

I think the ways we imagine the future are based on how we understand the instrument of memory. Poetry can be, in my opinion, one of many decolonizing efforts and materials needed to disarm the hegemony of settler colonial histories and realities. When we lean into specific Indigenous cultural knowledge to better understand a place (a city, a reservation, a suburb, an institution, a country), we harness tremendous power in recalling what has mattered to us, what works for us now, and the tools to safeguard Indigenous futures. I’m not certain what Minneapolis will look like in years to come. I am certain that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the planet’s future, as the logics of extraction and monoculture almost ensure it’s endpoint.

The poems in this collection range widely in form. In your opinion, what is the relationship between the form and content of a poem? How do you hope the form of your poems impacts your readers?

I feel I was especially attentive to form in this collection. Because of what I understood as both reflective impulses and storied impulses happening as I wrote, I was seeking a way for form to signal and enhance those influences. For the storied poems, I needed the prose poem form to stretch long those narrative lines and to distinguish the edges between story and verse. For the reflective poems, I leaned into lyricism, visuality, and experimentation. Often, I felt as if I was drawing elements of a mental map onto the page, where experience was imagistic and cycles could appear across the pages. I hope the reader can see each poem as a little story of Indigenous Minneapolis, a way to imagine how we connect to it and each other.

What are you working on now?

One of my interests for some time now has been Native women’s visualities: the way narratives are located and found in visual art; artists use of text in their work; and the conversation happening between and among Native women across artistic mediums. There could be a book of poems coming that interacts with the visual storytelling Native women are creating. We shall see!

Below, read a poem from McGlennen’s Our Bearings.

REMAINS IV

She wants to write about basketball in this poem
and #21—always a Timberwolf— 
Kevin Garnett. 

She wants to say Defensive Player of the Year
and franchise records in this poem. 

She wants to be able to just utter the fact
that she was there, finally made it
to the Target Center, for one
of his last nights in the NBA.
She was there. 

She wants to just type the word hip-hop
in her poem. Like it is her last poem to write. 
Where there are no rules about what she can say 
or not say, think or not think. 

She wants to speak the names Tall Paul and Chase Manhattan
in her poem, because she's a fan. 
Because if she's honest, basketball and hip-hop matter—
sometimes more than poetry. 

Wants to shout out 
90s R&B.
Mint Condition and Next
and Morris Day. 

Wants to just keep listing things. Because 
they sound good out loud, like KMOJ 89 dot 9,
and she can imagine saying them out loud—
the way poems are supposed to come into the world. 

She just keeps scribbling without
thoughts of editors or colleagues, 
about what she ought to type or censor. 
Because, when it comes down to it, 
she'd rather think about basketball and hip-hop and 90s R&B— 
and talk about it too. With someone.
Someone who loves it all the same. 

Someone who knows every street she utters in her poems, 
and the corners, and every person who's died and who's still living, 
every hospital visit and wedding, and giveaway. 
Every canoe trip and coffeehouse, 
every lake and swamp. 

She wants to give these words all away 
to that person. Again and again. 
And with them, trace and retrace
the designs embossed in her memories, 
the fibers that become the maps of home.

Molly McGlennen received her Ph.D. in Native American studies from the University of California, Davis, in 2005, and her MFA in creative writing and English from Mills College in 1998. She is an associate professor of English at Vassar College. She is the author of Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits and Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry. McGlennen’s writing has appeared in Sentence, As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.

A Deeper Look into Sown in Earth with Fred Arroyo

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

March 3, 2020

Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Fred Arroyo‘s memories of his father. By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer.

Below, Fred has answered a few questions that shed more light on the process and thoughts behind writing Sown in Earth.

This collection of essays is deeply personal and, at times, traumatic. How do you approach and process writing about topics that require you to be vulnerable?

That vulnerability is at the heart of almost everything I write. I can think of no other way to go about it. There is a desire, want, or yearning that drives my writing, and often that has to do with some kind of wound. Hurt. Loss. Psychic wound. In writing Sown in Earth I made a point of not using the word añoranza, which in Spanish relates to yearning, longing, and nostalgia— though it is a difficult word to translate or define in English because it’s much more than these other words or qualities. The longing and yearning of añoranza are tied to a deep need to return to a place. Maybe, in the mind, to be sown in earth. When I write, I don’t set about to approach this añoranza or loss; it is there in the form of mood, an atmosphere of meditation and exploration, a space where I might discover aspects of a vulnerability I would not have realized without writing. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been looking from the outside in. Given periods of sadness and depression, I am often inhabited by the “blues”, and that’s clearly an essential part of my poetics. What was it that Federico Garcia Lorca said, “I am neither all poet, all man or leaf, but only the pulse of a wound that probes the opposite side.”? You have to be open, without a purpose or agenda when writing about certain memories and situations, if you want to discover the other side of the wound, something new about the memory or situation.

In Sown in Earth, you write “Ever since I discovered things can be beautiful because of the care I take to see them….” Was this a sudden discovery, or a gradual shift in your worldview? How has it impacted your writing?

From the very beginning of my writing, if añoranza or loss existed, lyricism and a sense of beauty existed as well. My lyricism had always been unbridled though, passage after passage, flights that seem to soar without end. This lyricism often got in the way of a “story”, others would say. More to the point is that I have a particular way of looking at the world, and that makes for a different kind of story. The passage quoted in the question came about through a gradual discovery. I started to think of beauty and writing in terms of space, I suppose like sculpture, a library, or a field, about how you have to carefully mold or cultivate a space for beauty. And there was something about where you stood, or from what angle you looked at things. So if you were always walking in a field from one direction that only allowed you to notice certain spaces, but if you found new ways to walk the field, and you were carefully attentive in your looking and listening, you might discover a new grove of birches on the edge of the field, hear a spring, feel the way a meadow rolled towards the fence line. I can recollect that much reading of John Berger and José Ortega y Gasset helped shape my view, but it was also a gradual recognition that a seemingly rural and “poor” life had just as much dignity, honor, and beauty as any painting or sculpture in a museum. Or a book on a library shelf. And it was up to me to figure out how to create a space that allowed that life to exist in a way where others would recognize this life. A space of memory and imagination where others could recognize its dignity and beauty within their own lives.

Would you please discuss the balance between forgiveness and accountability when writing pieces about your childhood and your father?

I suppose I’m beholden to the notation that character is fate. Or in fiction writing, character is everything. I love the notion of energeia, that is, the possibility or potential of story is discovered within a character and the situation. That guides my writing of fiction and nonfiction. I’m the narrator, I’m the sentient being present in the making of the world, and so I do hold the character or situation to a kind of accountability. But not much. I think of people or characters like quicksilver— they have a spontaneity, a wild side, an unpredictability and chaos that’s not easy to control. What’s more important in the writing is the forgiveness. You cannot discover the gift of the past, a person, or a situation if you can’t approach it with openness, vulnerability, and forgiveness. Writing can create or offer islands of repair, as I wrote in Sown in Earth because I loved that phrase by Henry Miller.

I didn’t really think of writing Sown in Earth as a way to create accountability, or to “stop” or “recapture” time. I felt that way because I envision memory as material, and a force, moving through time and space. As a material phenomenon, memory can be held, shaped (parts discarded, parts held close), and re-made given where the material and force— like a creek, a watch, a knife, a name— takes you. I couldn’t have written this book if I didn’t discover how to forgive the past. More urgently: I couldn’t have written the book if I didn’t forgive myself for what I remembered. It was through this forgiveness that I discovered a lost self, peoples and places I might have forgotten, that I discovered sources of life, story, and spirit that could be vividly brought to life on the page. Always in my mind was Ortega y Gasset’s notion that an essay is a meditation, and borrowing from Spinoza, Ortega y Gasset wrote that at the heart of a meditation is amor itellectualis. I like to run from the things having to do with intellect as fast as I can, and yet I kept this feeling close in writing meditations of forgiveness, meditations of love.

In one essay, you write, “…or should I write, in memory, that he’s my uncle by blood?” I think this explores the fallibility of memory in an interesting way. Could you please discuss the role that misremembering, whether subconscious or intentional, plays in writing a memoir? Do you think that memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators?

Even though I suggested that memory is material, that it has an existence and force that is not simply found in the “past”, my memory is continually shaped by my imagination. Misremembering is present for sure. My memories, for example, are clearly shaped by my becoming a writer, so that the process of writing, the reading of books, words, and passages by writers, shape my memory, shape how I imagine certain memories. That has to create some form of selection and misremembering. And yet, at the same time, each memory in this writing is a glimpse and a seed, an image, scene, event, or experience I can’t deny. Involuntarily, without my doing anything, certain memories speak to me, flash and shudder within, invigorate the five senses, and make me pay attention. I assume everyone has this kind of memory writing within them. Though I have a sense, again, it also has something to do in particular with imagining yourself as a writer— and that’s why I admire the power of memory for writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Rhys, Patrick Modiano, or Anne Michaels. How the language of memory shapes their writing selves. So I’m trying to say that I’m not sure “memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators.” They exist, for sure. But for me you are striving to be as reliable as a person, irrespective of factual truth, because memory has its own language and emotion that cannot be denied.

In discovering this writing self, I’m often struck by how my best self is present— or, as Kristjana Gunnars proposes, a stranger has entered into my writing room and helped me to discover my writing in ways I am most grateful for. I would say this stranger or best writing self strives for a great amount of reliability because there’s a strong presence of authority and vulnerability in the moment.

What are you working on now?

I wish I knew. On paper I have a half a dozen stories for a collection of short fictions, The Book of Manuels, that I continue to return to, and in these stories various characters named “Manuel” are present, the stories have something to do with manual labor, a manual or a book, and they dramatize the power of sight (as in Immanuel: one with ideals, one who can see), and the conflicts of perception. I envision these stories as also being containers of fictional consciousness meditating on a lack of empathy for the working-class, and how their lives and stories continue to be marginalized— if not erased— from American culture and society. Also, I’ve written some 40 poems that I imagine as becoming a manuscript, Before Birches Blue. I’m still kind of haunted by writing Sown in Earth. I’m taking things slow in terms of writing. I can’t seem to take a break or stop writing, however. Whenever I finish a book, I always seem to mull over how I failed, what I didn’t accomplish, what I might have done better, no matter that when I finished I knew it was my best at the moment. I supposed this is why The Region of Lost Names, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging are in line with each other, create patterns across genres, peoples, and places. Maybe they are all a part of one big book. So I’m finding I have all these new essays to write, and wondering where they will take me, what I might discover, and how they might help me to get the writing right.

Fred Arroyo is the author of Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and The Region of Lost Names: A Novel. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Arroyo’s fiction is a part of the Library of Congress series Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers. Arroyo’s writing is also included in Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. In the past decade Arroyo has driven considerable miles along the northern border of the United States, particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and the maritime regions, where he’s camped, walked, canoed, and fished in a real and imagined North Country that’s influencing a new collection of short stories and a book of poems. Arroyo is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Five Questions With Editors of Voices From the Ancestors

Posted on by Mari Herreras

September 24, 2019

Central to the process of decolonization may be reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality, centering knowledge that goes back generations when our ancestors were connected to each other, nature and sacred cosmic forces. This exploration is central to Voices From The Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices.

In the following Q&A, editors Lara Medina and Martha R. Gonzales, talk to us about why this book is timely, and their hopes and dreams on how it is used in community and the classroom:

Is there something about this time we are living that makes Voices from the Ancestors an important book?

LM: Currently 20 percent of Latinx are unaffiliated with any religious institution, yet there is an increase in the phrase “I am spiritual but not religious.” For Latinx of the baby boomer generation, this departure from institutional religion, particularly Christianity, began during the civil rights era of the ’60s and ’70s when self-determination became an essential component of our liberation. A return to our Indigenous ancestries and their profound spiritual knowledge has continued among later generations and Latinx scholarship now reflects this within the discourse of spiritual decolonization. Many of the issues faced today by Latinx in the U.S.A., such as the violent treatment of refugees at our borders, the mass shootings of Mexican Americans, the murders of transgendered folks, the destruction of our planet, on-going police brutality, and the obstacles being placed upon ethnic studies programs in our universities, require a spiritual response in addition to political responses. As editors of Voices from the Ancestors, we wanted to offer a collection of spiritual reflections and healing practices that Latinx are doing in order to keep themselves strong and grounded as they face the challenges of these current times. These reflections and practices are grounded in an epistemology that understands the relationship and interdependency between all life forms and they offer pathways to return to this Latinx ancestral heritage.             

MG: There are some interesting conversations happening now within academia in the realm of Xicanx/Latinx Studies around identity, cultural appropriation of Indigenous identities to be more specific. Xicanx and Latinx people, people of mixed descent and cultural heritages, have been utilized as the “buffer” between colonial authorities and colonial subjects, between modern state authorities and state subjects deemed a threat to state projects pushing modernizing agendas thereby relegating entire groups of people, if one didn’t fit the image of a “modern” state subject, to the margins of society or zones of death. It has always been expected by the authorities that the mixed heritage subject would identify with state authorities, rather than the subjugated community or communities from which one might be descended. Today, presently, this continues to be the case. We still hear the terms “savages”, “uncivilized”, “barbaric” constantly being used in the media to describe people who don’t fit the image of a “western global subject” in line with neoliberal global policies or agendas. Within the context of the United States the proper Latina or Mexican American subject would be one who identifies predominantly with U.S. state policy both nationally and globally; it could be argued then, that given current U.S. national and global policies, the ideal U.S. Latina or Mexican American subject is therefore one who would betray her own humanity. 

This text aims to intervene by first demonstrating through cultural practices that identity when based only on conceptions of bloodline is first and foremost still today a project of the state meant to create political divisions between communities of people. Second, that culture and our cultural practices, no matter who you are, is really what defines anyone as a part of a community or a person, more so than your bloodline. 

Thirdly, to demonstrate that the narrative of conquest and colonialism must be continually revisited in order to contest the prevailing narrative that a conquest of the Americas or Turtle Island (an Indigenous name for this continent) was complete, that there is nothing left of our ancestors. While it is true that millions of people were destroyed, and hundreds of lifeways and practices eradicated, “speaking” books and knowledges obliterated in fires, many of them perhaps never to return, much has survived over the last five centuries. Survived, and as all cultural forms do, have been transformed in the hands of womxn over time and space. 

If, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko is correct in her collected essays Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, then we humans, we as Xicanx/Latinx womxn are not just individual subjects, but as people constitute a part of larger energetic forces operating within the natural world. And what I conclude from her writings, and the wisdom teachings Lara and I were able to bring together in this text, is that the knowledges, which we have retained in our families and communities, those practices that survived and some of which are beginning to thrive, have reemerged into our public spheres over the last fifty years because they have been meant to, because the survival of these practices were in fact mandated and foretold for generations prior to contact. 

In decolonizing our spiritual lives, is there room to keep both practices?

LM: Yes, many practices or traditions if desired. Latinx are people of various ethnicities, bloodlines, and complex histories. Religious traditions historically imposed upon us through colonization have survived among our people because in many ways we expressed them on our own terms when religious officials marginalized our communities. I am thinking here of the rich traditions found within Mexican American Catholic popular religion and Santeria, where Indigenous and African spiritualities and values survived under the guise of Christianity. Today, we have Latinx theologians and scripture scholars whose scholarship interprets Christianity through feminist and liberatory lenses. We are pleased that some of them contributed to Voices from the Ancestors. Many Latinx also choose to practice Buddhism in a way that coexists alongside or integrated into other chosen spiritual paths. In my scholarship, I call this nepantla spirituality, which means to be in the middle of rich cultural/spiritual diversity and respectfully choose what nurtures us spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

MG: Are you referring to both a decolonial practice and spiritual practice at once? Of course there is. In fact many leading scholars in decolonial studies would argue that you cannot have one without the other, or to put it another way, a decolonial practice gives way for a spiritual practice; an important part of decolonial practice is a transformation of the self and how one self-interprets the world and our role within it, this practice requires constant self-reflection and self-reflection itself can amount to a spiritual practice; self-reflection can lead one to accountability for one’s actions thereby a conscious claiming of one’s own agency and an understanding of prayer or spiritual practice as an intentional and mindful practice as Laura Perez, a contributor to this volume, reminds us. 

Furthermore, for those of us who study history, in ancient settings across the world, the modern differentiations between spirituality, science and/or religion among other subjects we have so neatly categorized, did not exist in the way they do today. The goal in a reconsideration of antiquity, or ancient societies, might be then to try to comprehend how these terms or practices coincided one within the other thereby contributing to a more balanced mode of living within the world and in relation to all of life. 

The book begins with morning prayers and ends with evening prayers, the rest of our lives in between. How do you see readers using this book?

LM: We hope readers will take in the introductions to each chapter that explains our intent in choosing those aspects of our lives. We also hope that readers will be enriched by the teachings held within the essays reflecting the spiritual perspectives and experiences of our contributors. And we hope that readers will be empowered to learn how specific spiritual practices can be conducted for themselves, their families, and groups they are involved in. This book could be used for personal, familial, and/or collective efforts to decolonize Latinx spirituality. We believe it can be used in college classrooms, community groups, and in homes. It is written in language for the general public and all the writings are “from the heart.”

MG: I don’t necessarily view this book as one which a person will sit and read from front to back. But rather as a text which a person may pick up, turn to a section which pertains to them in that very moment, and find a practice for themselves to serve the moment. Or perhaps the reader will feel inspired after reading a selection to look within their own homes/families to “see” if there is something there, has always been something there, a practice, a prayer, a home ritual, which they can recall for themselves.

I do think it is a text the same person can return to over several years when perhaps one part of the book may become more meaningful to that individual than when they first came across the book. These are the best kinds of books, the ones that become like a good friend you always have something to learn from. This is the kind of relationship I hope readers will develop to this text; a long lasting, well-worn relationship. 

In the early life of this book, when you began gathering the practices, essays, and poems, what was the community reaction that made you feel you were heading in the right direction?

LM: The idea was discussed among our professional networks, and we received affirmative responses. When we sent the call out widely the response was exceptional with Latinx across the U.S.A. sending us their contributions. We knew many people desired a text like this.

MG: We received a lot of positive feedback from most of our community. I would say about 95 percent. As someone who enjoys bookstores of all sorts and never having encountered a book such as this by Xicanx/Latinx women, I know this book is arriving at the right time, and I think most of our community feels the same way. We are living during a very interesting and intense moment; a moment which requires a radical shift in consciousness if we are going to survive and thrive as people; as humans. Most of our contributors, if not all, would agree with this statement and one could claim that their submissions to the project are reflective of this understanding.  

Do you have a special dream for this book of how it will be used or who it will touch?

LM: We hope that Latinx across generations will benefit from this book. We include blessings for newborns, teachings for our young ones, puberty or first moon rituals, rituals for our dying and deceased, holistic health care practices, moon meditations, songs, poems, and reflections on how spirituality can be expressed through the arts and our sexualities, and more … We have something for almost everyone! We send it out with the best of intentions, and we give thanks to our ancestors who speak through all of us!

MG: My biggest hope for this book is that it transcends or move between and beyond the artificial and real barriers between communities of people and the halls of academia. Lara and I purposefully set out to create a text meant for as a wide of an audience as possible. Both of us are aware of the power of the written word, we know the interventions that scholarly texts can make, do make and have made, within academia and the importance of these texts in wrestling with and shifting discourses. However, both of us as experienced scholars, Lara with more years than I, intentionally chose to write in a prose or language of the heart, of rhythms that reflect our daily struggles, joys and celebrations; in a prose that can set the stage for a different experience in the classroom and at the same time speak to the hearts of our communities: of our mothers, our grandmothers, aunties because they can read and see themselves in these words which would not be possible without the teachings that have been passed over to us generation after generation in our families, our communities. 

AURUM: Insights from Poet Santee Frazier

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

September 17, 2019

Unflinching and magnetic, the language and structure of Aurum never strays from its dedication to revealing the prominent reality of Native people being marginalized and discarded in the wake of industrial progress. With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier’s first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.

Below, Santee Frazier answers five questions about his second poetry collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

It’s hard to point to anything specific in regards to inspiration. My poems tend to be receptacles for research, lived experiences, and techniques acquired from other poets (mostly dead poets). In this way, poems manifest through ritual and mindfulness. For instance, the final poem of Aurum, “Half-Life”, was written on train rides from the Northeast to the Southwest. On stops along the rails I would write two to three lines. Over a period of 2-3 years the poem took shape, and you can see this process unfold in the form. This is representative of all my poems, but the ritual varies from project to project. I am continuously working in three voices, perhaps more, but there are three in Aurum. I am of the mind that a poet should have many voices, and through those voices different modes of verse making and revision.

Detailed descriptions of food appear frequently in these poems. What is the significance of food in your writing?

I had this idea of using images of food to introduce cultural leanings without exorcizing the figures that populate the poems. In Aurum, the food images or references to culinary knowledge are isolated to a specific milieu. For instance, in “Sun Perch” the image of the Vietnamese dish served to the speaker is elaborate, which contrasts with their experiences with food. This image also introduces the recursive image system that dominates the poem and the larger collection. Going back to contrasts, the references to food in “Half-Life” are basic. The world the speaker experiences is devoid of the vividness represented in “Sun Perch”, “Sanguinaria”, and “Chaac”. The images of corn, beans, and potatoes hold significance to many peoples and cultures indigenous to Turtle Island. (Note, I use the moniker “Turtle Island”, due to the fact that phrases and terms used to describe North America and the indigenous peoples are inaccurate, and were conceived within oppressive political constructs.) In some cultures, corn, beans, and potatoes will be the only food that grows in a prophesied dystopian future. Furthermore, corn, beans, and potatoes represent horticultural knowledge lost to many of us living hand to mouth.

Mangled is a character who appears in Aurum and who also appeared in your collection titled Dark Thirty. Could you tell us about what Mangled represents for you?

The Mangled Creekbed poems work in a serialized form. The character is a container for research in music, pop culture, violence, and oppression in America. Mangled is what I write when I’m not obsessing over another poem or set of poems. I get these long periods of silence where I am reading and taking in lots of information, but not making art. When this happens I revisit Mangled and see if he will give me any new poems. In Dark Thirty my research in the Impalement Arts dominated the poems, in Aurum, my research into the accordion factored into many of the poems. The serialized form allows for verse driven and prosaic poetic modes. Some of these poems can occur in a moment, some longer narratives delve into back story. Mangled’s world also serves as historical context to poems set in a contemporary milieu.

Speaking of Mangled, the title “Mangled & the Accordion” is ascribed to five of the poems in Aurum. What is the significance of repeating this title?

The title is both representative of his anatomy and the structure of the collection. At times the poems have a dense structure, sometimes fragmented while utilizing white space. Similar to the constraints of the accordion. There are certainly allegorical and biblical references. As many Indigenous people create identities rooted in western religious morals and ethics, Mangled suffers on multiple levels. However, he is unaware of the threads of oppression that lord over his life. This mainly harkens back to some of his origin story in Dark Thirty, but in Aurum Mangled attempts to reconcile his history of violence through performance akin to vaudeville.

What are you working on now?

I am working on these small vignettes which I am calling nonfiction, but at times they feel like poems. I have always been so interested in Eduardo Galeano’s nonfictions and histories, specifically, Memory of Fire. I am also a fan of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and by proxy The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover. So, I am writing these small pieces of text that take on different prosaic forms. There are no line breaks, but there is attention to sound. I’m hoping to shape some kind of book out of these vignettes, but I write slower and slower these days.

Below, read a poem from Frazier’s Aurum.

TWICE-RUINED

Mangled does not remember the beating outside the tavern,
just that when he woke the air under the rumbling bridge smelt
like hot engine oil, like tire. His twice ruined face inflated, cheeks
and hair crusted with muddy earth, boots spackled with blood. 

Crouched near a creek, saw his face wavy in the ripple, 
slit eyes buried under swollen flesh. He thought of the knife,
its baptism—flicker of sunlight in the current— blade hidden
behind the rust. As Mangled dipped his face in the water he saw 
the creek bed, minnows darting along the moss-covered stones.

From Aurum, by Santee Frazier. © 2019 The Arizona Board of Regents.

Santee Frazier received his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his MFA from Syracuse University. Frazier is director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Five Questions with Norma Elia Cantú

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

September 6, 2019

Norma Elia Cantú‘s new poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza, is a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands. Written by the award-winning author of Canícula, Cantú has crafted a collection which carries the perspective of a powerful voice in Chicana literature— and literature worldwide.

Below, Norma Cantú answers a few of our questions about her new collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

Meditación Fronteriza is a collection of poems from the last 40 years and many poems were inspired by my life… I was inspired to put the poems into a book by the need to counter the general view that the border is a violent place and to counter the erasure of our culture and our reality by the mainstream.

The speaker of these poems often asks questions. What is the function of posing questions within your poetry?

I believe life is a series of questions that we pose— to ourselves and to others. I often teach using questions. I write in search of answers.

Many of the poems in this collection appear in both Spanish and English. Could you tell us a little more about why you chose to translate certain poems, and have others appear solely in English?

Usually the poems that were originally written in Spanish stayed in Spanish without translation; however, I also found that I had already translated some of the poems that were first written in Spanish, so I kept the translations. I also want to honor the Spanish of the borderlands and to keep the language we use, so many poems include both Spanish and English. Translating everything seemed to be a betrayal of sorts to the linguistic spirit of the work.

The poem “Song of the Borderlands” calls for six voices to perform the lines. What do you think the importance of performing poetry out loud is?

Poetry has always been about sound and rhythm— about oral delivery, even when it went from oral to written, the essence lies in orality. Spoken word and slam poetry are rooted in this orality. I first recited poetry as a child in a tradition called declamación where one memorizes the poem and declaims it in public. Hence, my love of poetry is intimately linked to my love of hearing the voice and performing poetry out loud. This particular poem was written for my students to perform and it works really well as a performance piece for a class.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a novel called Champú, or Hair Matters. It is set in a beauty shop in Laredo, Texas. I am also working on a collection of poems called Elemental Odes, I am writing poems inspired by the Periodic Table of the Elements. It is challenging but so much fun!

Below, find the poem titled “Border Bullets” from Norma Cantú‘s new UA Press collection, Meditación Fronteriza.

BORDER BULLETS

Rio Grande flows
from the Rockies to the Gulf
holy waters heal the border scar
pecan, nogal, retama sway,
tower o'er mesquites, huisaches 
buried treasure brown

fiery gold crown
sun sets over Mexico 
death defies life
a packed train speeds by 
transports precious cargo
arrives with the moonlight
Norma Cantú and UA Press Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles

Norma Elia Cantú is a daughter of the borderlands, a scholar, and a creative writer. She serves as Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Aldama and González Unpack Latinx Representation

Posted on by Savannah Hicks

September 4, 2019

Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González‘ new book, Reel Latinxs, dives into Latinx representation in film and television in the twenty-first century. Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dig into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture.

Today, Frederick Aldama and Christopher González share with us some of the inspiration and thought that helped craft Reel Latinxs.

Frederick Luis Aldama: We both spend a bunch of time thinking, writing, and teaching all varieties of Latinx pop culture, film, and TV. I often get asked, “What shows or films do you recommend watching that get Latinx representation right?”. My reflex answer for recent brown televisual reconstructions: check out the representations of Latinas in Golden Globe awardee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the playful panoply of Latino-ness represented in East WillyB, and those awesome Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D webisodes that feature Cisco Ramone or Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez. My reflex answer for recent brownings of the silver-screen: Robert Rodriguez’ Alita, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and, of course, Bob Persichetti’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I add to this, that it’s not just the representation that matters, it’s the shaping of the representation, too. That is, we can have Latinxs in front of the camera, but we also need Latinx writers, directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and showrunners.

Christopher González: Those are all great examples, and we may as well confront the specific difficulty when it comes to representation of the Latinx community. Representation is not merely about casting a Latinx actor in a given role. We know that characters— their function within the narrative, their reliance on or avoidance of recognizable tropes or even stereotypes, and their capability of signifying a given community— all highlight why the kind of representation we encounter in film and television is so powerful. And you are correct in pointing to why it’s so crucial to examine the other major contributors to a given instance of representation such as writers, producers, and so forth. The shaping that you are referring to, however, is also something with which audiences must contend. What do you feel are the challenges audiences of these Latinx representations face with these emerging televisual narratives?

Frederick Luis Aldama: Subtlety. Nuance. Knowing the difference between an abuelitas throwing a spoon at us— that would never happen— and a chancla— always happens. If Lalo hadn’t been brought in to consult Disney in the making of Coco, it would have been a big wooden spoon that Mamá Coco would’ve launched at Miguelito. We would have noticed, and likely exhaled our inner Latinx-sigh of disappointment. But subtlety and nuance in other ways. How many times have you seen an East Coast Puerto Rican Latinx family preparing tamales or mole— and not, say, mofongo or lechon asado? A show like Ugly Betty did this in spades. It also cast non-Nuyorican actors to play Nuyoricans, including LA-born, Honduran ancestral Latinx America Ferrera and Cuban Latinx Tony Plana as the papa.

Christopher González: So, a kind of insider knowledge is helpful, then— someone who knows the nuances and subtleties you mention. But we also have to contend with what we might call unconventional Latinx representation. For instance, let’s take the example of the new version of Magnum P.I. (2018-present). Thomas Magnum is an iconic 80’s character that was a career-defining role for Tom Selleck, who is of English ancestry. This new reboot stars Jay Hernandez as Magnum. Thanks to his Hispanic surname and mestizo looks, most reasonable viewers will instantly recognize Jay as Latinx. The writers of the show, however, are much more reserved in expressions of Latinx identity for the character. The question as to whether or not Thomas Magnum, the character, is Latinx is made ambiguous for most of the first season. Hernandez is now playing a role that was conceived of originally as a white man, and it is nothing more than his physical presence in the visual medium of television that signals the possibility that this new version of Thomas Magnum is Latinx. More complicated still is Hernandez’ turn as the voice of Bonnie’s dad in Toy Story 4 (2019). Though he performs the role with no hint of a Spanish accent, Bonnie’s entire family is rendered as olive-skinned, dark-haired, people. I left the theater wondering, along with my family, if Bonnie’s family was Latinx. It was possible, but not confirmable. What I’m suggesting here is that Latinx representation is much more complex of late than it has been for most of the history of television and film.

Frederick Luis Aldama: We could say the same of a lot of Demi Lovato’s roles for Disney, right? As Mitchie Torres in Camp Rock (2008) do we read her last name and the fact that her mom’s a cook (aren’t all our mamas preternaturally good with food?) as Latinx? Gosh, I remember doing that way back when I was a kid. Starved of Latinxs on TV I wish-fulfilled the Addams family as Latinx. I guess what I’m saying, Chris, is that we haven’t arrived yet. We’re still so few and far between on TV and silver screens that I think we need clear, affirming Latinx identifiers. So, yeah, today’s Magnum should be loud-and-proud Latinx.
This brings up another important issue. Do we fault the Latinx actors for playing roles that whitewash a given character’s Latinidad? Do we fault an actor like Zoe Saldana for taking roles that either portray her as African American or Outerworld Alien, and not for roles, say, that would affirm a complex Afrolatinidad? I raise this because of late one of my brilliant PhD students had an Instagram exchange with Saldana. My student wrote this super insightful piece about how the industry itself is at fault for essentializing and simplifying— even alien-afying Saldana. I don’t know if you caught the piece, “Race and Alien Face“? Saldana read it as somehow a critique of her choice of roles played. My student, of course, wrote a heartfelt further explanation: that it was the industry at fault, not Saldana. My point here is that, well, in the end Latinx actors have to play the roles that pay the bills.
I have noticed that as Michael Peña, one of my favorite actors long with Saldana, has become more famous, he’s been either more choosy about his roles, or playing less-than-straight stereotypical Latinx roles. As far as I know, he’s the first Latinx actor to be the protagonist in a mainstream sci-fi flick. I’m thinking of Extinction. And, let’s face it, he steals the show from Paul Rudd in the Ant-Man franchise. And, when he’s playing a Latinx gangbanger, there’s always a wink to the Latinx audience. He knows he’s playing a stereotype, subverting it from within.

Christopher González: I am always very quick to point out that actors (Latinx or otherwise) are professionals who are pursuing their careers to the best of their abilities. We should not fault non-white actors for making business decisions in an industry that has often been inhospitable to them. In one of my current book projects, I uncover how the film industry has deep-rooted insecurities about how Latinx actors could and should appear in speculative films in genres such as Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, and more. Raquel Welch made a business decision to take on her white husband’s surname rather than use her own (Tejada) because she knew that doing so would limit the kinds of roles she would be offered. In the mid-1960s she had to whitewash her own Latinx identity in order to play characters such as Loana the Fair One in One Million Years B.C. and Cora in Fantastic Voyage. Now, over fifty years later, Zoe Saldana has to confront many of the same issues Welch faced. That Saldana took exception to your PhD student’s take reveals to me that Saldana is keenly aware that the roles she plays do matter, and that she perhaps feels frustration over how she is able to express her Latinx identity. But it should stagger us to consider that Saldana has starred in three of the five all-time grossing films at the box office (#1 Avengers: Endgame, #2 Avatar, #5 Avengers: Infinity War), and she still does not have the clout to make more forceful demands concerning the roles she takes. On the other hand, her Marvel co-star, Scarlett Johansson, is the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood, and she has taken roles that effectively whitewash characters. She came under fire recently for saying, and I’m paraphrasing, that as an actor she should be able to play any conceivable role. She later clarified that she was aware of how non-white, non-majority don’t have the same sort of access to roles of their white, cisgendered counterparts. In all of these cases, it is easy to get wrapped up with the actors and their decisions to take certain roles. What we should continue to critique is the system itself that allows these discrepancies in representation to occur. And, of course, we should take note of the opportunities some actors take to discretely subvert the stereotypical material they have been given.

Frederick Luis Aldama: Checking one’s privilege, now there’s a topic— and an urgent need, everywhere. We’ve seen a lot of push from historically underrepresented audiences for folks to check their privilege. We’re seeing the rearing of our collective ugly heads. We’ve had enough. I’m not only thinking of the #HollywoodSoWhite #OscarsSoWhite movements that have led to a lot of studios and television production units to create pipelines for young folks of color to become writers, directors, showrunners, and actors. I also think of the power of the internet as a platform to air our consumption needs and wants. Netflix canned the Latinx reboot of One Day At a Time. And, now after a hailstorm of internet mobilization, it’s back. We still need those boots-on-the-ground watchdogs like the National Hispanic Media Coalition and research centers like USC’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change, of course. However, with social media it seems like the power is really with the people.

Christopher González: Fede, our TV’s and silver-screens have shrunk. Elsewhere you talk about carrying these around in your back pocket, now. Sometimes I think this has emancipated #brownTV and also diminished our presence, representationally and physically.

Frederick Luis Aldama: The two-edged paradox: social media platforms like YouTube as well as spaces like VIMEO offering distribution channels to us Latinxs without deep Hollywood pockets yet the seeming continuation of stereotypical representation. I just watched a good friend, Ernesto Martínez’s short film, La Serenata, on VIMEO. It’s a masterpiece of short filmmaking, telling the much needed story of a Latinx niño telling his parents about his love for another boy. Queer Latinx Roberta Colindrez as the queer Latinx character, Devon, grabs the limelight in I Love Dick— a show made possible with funding from Amazon Prime. And, well, the way that Netflix’s One Day At a Time weaves into its one-familia storyworld the great variety of linguistic, religious, cultural, sexual, gender, class, regional resplendent variations that make up Latinidad is breathtaking. And, I have to say I love how Gabriel Iglesias uses humor to decolonize minds in Mr. Iglesias— an informal reboot of Welcome Back Carter from back in the day. Network TV could do these shows, but it doesn’t and it hasn’t. But then on the flipside, we have an abundance of us as “bad hombres”, not only in the super abundant narco Netflix offerings, but also in platforms like Discovery’s Border Live, where you can literally see ICE officers shake down innocents in real time.

Christopher González: Yes, distribution and availability are certainly enhanced. We can now watch these shows and films on the go, seemingly anywhere. That is the inevitable cost of the miniaturization of the screens we watch. The examples you just listed have benefitted from the almost grassroots efforts of audiences and creators to take more control of what they consume and what they make, even of the behemoth studios of Hollywood are still stuck in cement and antiquated ways of imagining the possibilities of visual storytelling. My sense is that there are many things that make this confluence of time, media, technology, and activism a great opportunity to see such change in how Latinxs are imagined within televisual spaces. There is no magic wand for instantly changing how things have been and where they are now. It takes hard work, bold choices, and the courage to be dogged enough to blaze a new trail. Our book, Reel Latinxs takes inventory of this shifting landscape and reveals what’s at stake for all of us, but particularly Latinxs like you and me who are old enough to see the progress that has been made and take stock of what work remains.

Frederick Luis Aldama: As we wrap this up, I wanted to mention that I’m super optimistic. At Stanford’s Great Books Program this summer, I got to spend time with a young, up-and-coming amazing Latinx actor, Emilio Garcia-Sanchez. He’s not bitter about having to step into the non-Latinx identified jock character, Jason, in Netflix’s The Society. He’s super comfortable with the fact that he brings his Latinidad with him, everywhere. Organically super-savvy about how he plays roles, he’s like a new gen Peña/ Saldana all rolled into one, and without effort. Like so many new gen Latinxs, he’s comfortable in his own skin— his self— as Latinx, y por vida.

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