160 Years Later: 12 Years a Slave
If you were to judge the movie by its trailer, you would expect 12 Years a Slave to be a Spielbergian epic—pretty in the wrong places and sentimental at its core. You would be mistaken. Director Steve McQueen’s film is an unsparing look at the dark heart of slavery and its devastating effects on all touched by the institution.
The physical suffering of slaves is graphically depicted, but this movie illustrates that the greater injury is psychological and emotional. It is not simply bodies that are being damaged; it is souls...
La Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde: Narco Saints?
“I may be big but I’m very scared,” Jorge answers as we work our way through narrow streets in the Tepito district of Mexico City, searching for either the church or the “santuario” of La Santa Muerte (the Saint of Death). We’ve heard that this increasingly popular saint is the protector of drug users and dealers and want to get the real story. Jorge is a highly successful Mexico City lawyer but, most important, he is big and powerful looking.
I first read about La Santa Muerte in a 2008 New Yorker article, “Days of the Dead, the New Narcocultura”, by Alma Guillermoprieto. She said that, “The cult is known for the drug traffickers’ devotion to it ...”
Weekly Poem: Garden Report
The last of the roses are on the bush,
one red bud caught in the brief dips into cold,
it's final form a tight embrace.
The other opening, opening, insistent and resolute,
bearing the last gleanings of warmer nights...
Weekly Poem: A History of Faith
Man. Woman. Huddled. Crouched in a dark corner.
He hears scuttling roaches. Phantasmagoria. Demons. Pixies.
He hears Stygian depths downward.
“Listen carefully,” she says,
so gently, to calm a child in a schoolhouse of terrors
long before she purportedly stole from the apple tree...
Land, Migrants and Poets: The Day of the Dead 2013
New Mexico and the borderland will come alive this weekend with activities related to the annual Day of the Dead celebration, which falls on Saturday, November 2, this year. As befits a cultural boom that is drawing in thousands and thousands of people, this year promises bigger and broader events than ever before, encompassing art, music, literature, and culinary treats.
“Without a doubt,” the growth of immigrant and Mexican populations on this side of the border is “exponentially” related to the expansion of the Day of the Dead, said Albuquerque poet and longtime community activist Jaime Chavez...
Book Review – The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society. Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life. What Alexander found shocked her. As I read her book, it shocked me. The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader...
Book Review – Leaving Tinkertown: The story of a father, a daughter and a museum
The first sentence of Leaving Tinkertown,—“I was conceived in a pickup camper on the New Mexico State Fair Grounds when my parents were on the road with the carnival.” — is definitely a keeper. You immediately sense you are going to hear about some unusual people. And you do.
This memoir tells the story of Ross Ward, the artist and collector who created the unique Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park. It is also a story of Ward’s developing Alzheimer’s disease, of his daughter’s love and effort to cope with her father’s decline, of a young woman coming to terms with the end that awaits us all...
Weekly Poem: At Gathering for Mother Earth | Tewa Women United, written on site
The corn is singing
all colors of corn are singing
and we are listening.
The sun is singing
the sky is blue singing
to all manner of listening.
The listening when
we don’t even know
we are listening...
Hidden Treasures
“Some people say that they are “basura humana” or human garbage but I feel that they are “tesoros escondidos” or hidden treasures, Pastor José Antonio Galván says of the one hundred mental patients in his asylum in the desert on the west of Juárez, Mexico.It’s been almost three years since my first visit with him, this imposing, quick witted, relentlessly optimistic man who has saved the lives of so many of Mexico’s mentally ill...
Weekly Poem: Dad’s Visit
What did we do
to deserve this beauty -- our blooming cactus flowers, the emerald green shine of our chiles, the boys
and girls the backbones of our families, taking a stab
at adulthood in middle school? In a city of strong kids, under a sky so wide and this blue,
it’s as though we’re being showered
with praise by a gorgeously generous god...