Friday, May 03, 2013

Huizache - Latino Power - Manila Noir - Latino Alums - Art & Music

Bits and pieces from Manuel Ramos

New Literature





FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:                          
May 1, 2013    

Contact:
CentroVictoria University of Houston-Victoria  
3007 N. Ben Wilson 
Victoria, Texas 77901
(361) 570-4140

Los Angeles Times Features CentroVictoria’s Premiere Publication Huizache Magazine

VICTORIA, TX – CentroVictoria makes national news this week! The Los Angeles Times features Huizache magazine, the country’s premiere Latino literary publication from University of Houston-Victoria’s Center for Mexican American Literature and Culture.

LA Times Book Editor Hector Tobar interviews Dagoberto Gilb, CentroVictoria’s executive director and Huizache’s founding editor, about the significance of Huizache, the “ferocious riposte to those writers and editors who perpetuate a one-dimensional vision of the Latino U.S.”

“What I want Huizache to do is…to raise the awareness (and market viability) not only for publishers, but to educate our own about our own beyond what’s marketed by East Coast publishing,” Gilb said.

Huizache’s debut issue, featuring writers Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, Aracelis Girmay, and Gary Soto, shows the industry that there is a market for complex literature from the real population of the West.

The second issue follows the lead of its inaugural edition, featuring the leading voices in Latino literature—Lorna Dee Cervantes, Gary Soto, Luis J. Rodriguez, Michele Serros, Rigoberto González—as well names from the Southwest and nation—Naomi Shihab Nye, Beverly Lowry, Achy Obejas, and Carrie Fountain. Also in this issue, are the just-beginning, younger voices of Matt Mendez, Beverly Parayno, Melisa Garcia, Lupe Mendez, Laurie Ann Guerrero, and many more from across the country and continent. It also highlights the Librotraficante Movement, founded to defy Arizona's prohibition of Mexican American Studies, with prose by its leader, writer and activist Tony Diaz, and poetry by Margaret Randall and Levi Romero.

Huizache keeps the tradition of fine visual art as well, exemplified in the cover art by César Martínez and Patssi Valdez, arguably the best artists working today, and the gorgeous panoramic photography of Houston’s acclaimed photographer Chuy Benitez.

"A better headline for my interview with the inimitable Dagoberto Gilb would have been ‘Dago Unchained.’ In this Q and A, Dago talks about his new literary magazine, Huizache, and what New York doesn't get about Latino lit. He really unleashes. It's sort of gloriously angry and insightful. Proud to bring his voice to the Los Angeles Times," Tobar wrote after the interview.

“I wasn't 'unchained',” Gilb responded, “only enthusiastic for our very great magazine.”

Huizache’s third edition, featuring National Book Award finalists Domingo Martinez and Tim Seibles, laureate poets Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Tafolla and Alejandro Murgia, Cristina Garcia, and many new voices. It will be out in the fall of 2013. For more information on submissions and subscriptions visit: http://www.centrovictoria.net/huizache.html

Link to LA Times Book Editor Hector Tobar interview with Dagoberto Gilb:  http://lat.ms/13C06yc



New Books


The Power of Latino Leadership: Culture, Inclusion, and Contribution
Juana Bordas
Berrett-Koehler Publishers / May, 2013


[from the publisher]
Written by a distinguished, much-honored Latina leader, this is the first comprehensive book on Latino leadership
Offers ten principles that guide Latino leaders. Features numerous examples of these principles in action and interviews with nine accomplished Latino leaders.

Over 50 million Latinos live in the United States, the largest minority group in the country. Their numbers grew by 43 percent in the last decade, and it’s estimated that by 2050, one in three of the US population will be Hispanic.

What does it take to lead a varied and vibrant people who hail from twenty-two different countries? And what can leaders of all cultures and ethnicities learn from how Latinos lead?

Based on her personal experience as a longtime Latina leader, Juana Bordas takes us on a journey to the very heart and soul of Latino leadership. She offers ten principles that guide Latino leaders and features numerous examples of these principles in action.

Bordas begins with a concise history of the Latino people, from the Old World to the New, documenting how extraordinarily far Latinos have come—in every sense. Since Latino leadership ultimately stems more from who you are as a person than from what official title you hold, Bordas’s first three principles describe personal characteristics and qualities that have traditionally prepared Latinos to lead their communities. Culture is the soil from which Latino leadership grows, so her next two principles touch on common cultural values that unify this diverse people. And finally, she brings it all together, offering five action-oriented principles that animate Latinos’ inclusive, community-oriented, socially responsible, and life-affirming approach to leadership.

Bordas includes the voices and experiences of distinguished Latino leaders, vivid dichos (traditional sayings) that illustrate aspects of Latino culture, and even notes on how the Spanish language itself influences and reflects the Latino worldview. This unprecedented and wide-ranging book shows that Latino leadership is indeed powerful and distinctive and has lessons that can inform leaders of every background.

Juana Bordas is President of Mestiza Leadership International – a company that focuses on leadership, diversity, and organizational change. A former faculty member for the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL, she taught in the Leadership Development Program (LDP) – the most highly utilized executive program in the world.

As founding President/CEO of the National Hispana Leadership Institute, the only program in America that prepares Latinas for national leadership, she forged partnerships with Harvard’s JFK School of Government and CCL to provide training for Hispanic women. An active community member, Juana was one of 50 leaders chosen by the Colorado Legislature to design the state’s future plan and was selected by Colorado Business Magazine as one of 100 influential people in the state. In 1977 she was a founder of Denver’s Mi Casa Women’s Center and served as executive director until 1986. Today, Mi Casa is recognized as a national model for women’s empowerment.





Manila Noir
Edited by:
Akashic Books / June, 2013

[from the publisher]
Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the book.

Original stories by Lourd De Veyra, Gina Apostol, Budjette Tan & Kajo Baldisimo, F.H. Batacan, Jose Dalisay Jr., Eric Gamalinda, Jessica Hagedorn, Angelo Lacuesta, R. Zamora Linmark, Rosario Cruz-Lucero, Sabina Murray, Jonas Vitman, Marianne Villanueva, and Lysley Tenorio.

One of the most populous cities in the world, Manila provides the ideal, torrid setting for noir. It’s where the rich rub shoulders with the poor, where five-star hotels coexist with informal settlements, where religious zeal coexists with superstition, where “hospitality” might be another word for prostitution, where politics is often synonymous with celebrity and corruption, where violence is nothing out of the ordinary and pretty much anything can be had for a price.

From the Introduction by Jessica Hagedorn:

“Manila is not for the faint of heart. Built on water and reclaimed land, it’s an intense, congested, teeming megalopolis, the vital core of an urban network of sixteen cities and one municipality collectively known as Metro Manila. Population: over ten million and growing by the minute. Climate: tropical. Which means hot, humid, prone to torrential monsoon rains of biblical proportions.

I think of Manila as the ultimate femme fatale. Complicated and mysterious, with a tainted, painful past. She’s been invaded, plundered, raped, and pillaged, colonized for four hundred years by Spain and fifty years by the US, bombed and pretty much decimated by Japanese and American forces during an epic, month-long battle in 1945.

Yet somehow, and with no thanks to the corrupt politicians, the crime syndicates, and the indifferent rich who rule the roost, Manila bounces back. The people’s ability to endure, adapt, and forgive never ceases to amaze, whether it’s about rebuilding from the latest round of catastrophic flooding, or rebuilding from the ashes of a horrific world war, or the ashes of the brutal, twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos . . .

Many years have passed since the end of the Marcos dictatorship. People are free to write and say what they want, yet nothing is different. The poor are still poor, the rich are still rich, and overseas workers toil in faraway places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, and Finland. Glaring inequities are a source of dark humor to many Filipinos, but really just another day in the life . . .

Writers from the Americas and Europe are known for a certain style of noir fiction, but the rest of the world approaches the crime story from a culturally unique perspective. In Manila Noir we find that the genre is flexible enough to incorporate flamboyant emotion and the supernatural, along with the usual elements noir fans have come to expect: moody atmospherics, terse dialogue, sudden violence, mordant humor, a fatalist vision.”

JESSICA HAGEDORN was born in Manila and now lives in New York. A novelist, poet, and playwright, her published works include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, Danger and Beauty, and Dogeaters, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She also edited both volumes of the groundbreaking anthology, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. She is the editor of Manila Noir. Visit her website at www.jessicahagedorn.net

Events
Latin Fest V
Please join the DU Latino Alumni Association (DULAA), 
the CU Boulder Latino Alumni Association (CUBLAA),
and the CSU Latino Alumni Association (SOMOS)
for Latin Fest V at Su Teatro at the Denver Civic Theater!
Friday, May 10, 2013

Networking: 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Live Music and Dancing: 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm

Su Teatro at the Denver Civic Theater
721 Santa Fe Drive
Denver, CO 80204

$15 per person
Includes light appetizers, soft drinks and live entertainment from Denver band, Kruzin.

Cash Bar available

Please register at 
http://alumni.du.edu/LatinFest5

This event is co-hosted by the
University of Denver Latino Alumni Association (DULAA),
University of Colorado Boulder Latino Alumni Association (CUBLAA)
and CSU Latino Alumni Association (SOMOS)




 






The Legacy Project





I mentioned this exhibit previously on La Bloga, included photos of the opening night reception. You owe it to yourself to visit the Museo de Las Americas to see the varied and evocative art from several different Chicano artists. The exhibit catalog is an attractive booklet with summaries of all the participating artists and colorful reproductions of samples of their work. If you're lucky, you might still be able to get a copy of the catalog signed by all the artists. Contact the Museo for info about that.

Curated by Maruca Salazar
February 7, 2013 – May 26, 2013

Long before Chicano art was embraced as a true artistic expression this group of artists and thinkers planted seeds of a new world order and through their vision establish the importance and the role of hybrid society in the new Millennium.

This exhibit commemorates the artistic legacy of a generation of Chicano artists and the cultural contributions of Luis and Martha Abarca to the Denver Community.

Contributing Artists: John Encinias, John Flores, Ernie Gallegos, Arlette Lucero, Stevon Lucero, Carlos Martinez, Emanuel Martinez, Daniel Salazar, Carlos Sandoval, Fransico Zuñiga.
Thank you to the Abarca Family for lending art work to the exhibit.

That's it. Later.



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