Friday, May 09, 2008

New Stuff: Books, Che Movie, Latina Book Club, Immigrant Blog

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Trigger
Carmen Aguirre

Talon Books (September, 2008)

This play by Chilean-born Carmen Aguirre has been called "intelligent, powerful, funny, horrific, theatrically stunning, and utterly free of victimology." Jerry Wasserman, Vancouverplays.com. As the publisher says, "The Trigger is for every human being who has ever been sexually violated and lives with that experience in their core, suffering again in all of their subsequent intimate relationships. The Trigger deals with the ripples of this kind of violation."

Aguirre has written and co-written fourteen plays. She is writing a memoir about her militancy in the Chilean resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship. As an actor, Aguirre has thirty film and TV credits, including a lead role in Quinceañera.

Unfinished Portrait
Luivette Resto

Tia Chucha Press (October, 2008)

From the catalog blurb: "The poems in this manuscript are a sociopolitical, cultural conglomeration of thoughts, reflections, observations, and experiences. As a first generation Puerto Rican, the privilege of a college education has been a blessing for Resto, but it has divided her from family and friends who did not have the same opportunities. ... Some of the poems ... depict the dichotomy of being true to one's culture and language, while taking advantage of the existing educational opportunities. Resto considers these poems as rebellious to the Latino status quo in the way women are perceived and treated. In addition, some of the poems question aspects of religion, specifically sexual experimentation, premarital sex, promiscuity, abortion, and the significance of life."

FLORICANTO PRESS
Esperanza: A Latina Story
Sandra C. López

Esperanza is an admirable and too real story of many Latino youth lacking role models, who find themselves lost and isolated in the paved jungles of the inner cities and overwhelmed by the dissonance of barrio life. Sandra C. López has created a resilient and likeable character, Esperanza, who seems closer to a naked truth-seeker than to a barrio kid—desperately trying to get out of a crappy world, but not knowing exactly where she was going to. Highly Recommended.” Andrea Alessandra, University of California, Berkeley.

Sandra C. López was born and raised in Hawaiian Gardens, California. This young writer is a senior at Cal State University Fullerton, working towards a BFA in Animation and Illustration. Esperanza is her first novel.

CHEVOLUTION
From the Program Notes for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival (April 23 - May 4):

"The iconic image of Ernesto Che Guevara is everywhere, from T-shirts to coffee mugs and even bikinis. How was the hero of Cuba's Communist Revolution transformed into a capitalist selling machine? With mordant wit and bitter irony, filmmakers Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez trace the evolution of the image from photograph to poster to pop art, as cropping and the removal of half-tones separated the moment from history and created an icon whose meaning was increasingly in the eye of the beholder. We meet Diana Díaz, the daughter of Alberto Korda, a fashion photographer-turned-newspaperman who took the picture at a funeral march in 1959, unaware that it would soon become the most reproduced image in the history of photography; Jim Fitzpatrick, the Irish artist who turned the photograph into an eyeball-searing pop art graphic; and author Carlos Calica Ferrer, who recalls his life-altering motorcycle trips with a young Ernesto through Latin America. Antonio Banderas, Gael García Bernal, Shin Fein president Gerry Adams, and masked Zapatistas in Chiapas weigh in on Che's enduring inspiration to new generations of the disenfranchised. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine reveals the band's run-in with Díaz's lawyers, who are well occupied suing for unauthorized use of her father's photograph. In this thought-provoking inquiry into the ethics and aesthetics of appropriation, Ziff and Lopez investigate how the enduring symbol of not only the Cuban Revolution but of 1968 Paris, Prague, Belfast, and Berkeley was ultimately devoured by capitalism. --Genna Terranova

NATIONAL LATINO BOOK CLUB

From Publishers Weekly:

"AAP, Borders and the Latina organization Las Comadres have teamed up to create a Latino book club that will meet at select Borders stores in eight states. The club will select and read an English-language book by a Latina or Latino author each month, beginning in June.

"Las Comadres Para Las Americas is an eight-year-old nationwide grassroots group of Latinas that started in Austin, Tex., and is now in 60 U.S. cities with 10,000 members. The book club grew out of a series of successful monthly teleconferences hosted by the Las Comadres network, with each teleconference featuring an author. The first live event was held at the Borders’ Columbus Circle location in New York last year and the selection was Broken Paradise by Cecilia Samartin (Washington Square Press). Starting next month, live events will take place at Borders stores in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, each one run by two Comadres members.

...

"The 2008 selections are:

June: A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia (Vintage)
July: The King’s Gold by Yxta Maya Murray (HarperCollins)
August: Mexican Enough by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Washington Square Press)
September: More Than This by Margo Candela (Fireside)
October: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
November: The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters by Lorraine Lopez (Grand Central)
December: And Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena Maria Viramontes (Washington Square Press)"

Read the entire article with more detail here.

THE SANCTUARY
I'm passing along a message about a new blog that some of you might find interesting.

Welcome to The Sanctuary, a new on-line community where human-rights, civil-rights, and progressive activists will be discussing issues of concern for all those interested in humane and practical immigration reform, migrant-rights, human-rights, and the greater struggle of all who those have left friends and family behind to start new lives in new lands. The Sanctuary is an effort to create a virtual community to share information, organize, engage in activism, and come together under one roof to unite in our efforts to effect change. It is intended to be a "cyber-sanctuary", free from the din of right-wing noise, where those working towards meaningful reform can come together in the hope of magnifying their individual efforts through community action and cooperation, and build bridges with like-minded activists from a wide cross-section of the political spectrum. Check it out at: http://thesanctuary.soapblox.net.

Later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I truly enjoy your blog and the wealth of information it provides!!

This time, I was very excited to read about the Latina Book Group! I was part of a group of teachers (who became very good friends!!) who read books from Latin America last year. We all went separate ways in June, but perhaps we can follow this guide and come together again!