Lectura bilingüe / Bilingual Reading

Rosario Sanmiguel

Novelista, cuentista y traductora de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México
Lectura de su obra en español.
Novelist, Short Story Writer and Translator from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México
Reading in Spanish from her work.

con / with

John Pluecker

Estudiante graduado de literaturas hispánicas de la Universidad de Houston
Lectura de las traducciones que él ha hecho de la obra de Sanmiguel.
Graduate Student of Hispanic Literatures at the University of Houston
Reading from his translations of Sanmiguel's work.

Jueves, 8 de marzo, 2007 / Thursday, March 8, 2007
University of Houston, Agnes Arnold Hall, Room 444
4:00pm – 5:30pm

***

Biografía / Biography

Rosario Sanmiguel nació en Manuel Benavides, Chihuahua, en 1958. Inició su carrera como editora a principios de los años ochenta, en un suplemento cultural publicado por un periódico local. Durante la misma década, empezó a escribir los relatos que llegarían a formar parte de su reconocida colección, Callejon Sucre y otros relatos. La mayoría de los relatos fueron publicados en un renombrado suplemento cultural del periódico Unomasuno de la Ciudad de México, editado por Huberto Batiz, así como también en revistas regionales.

Rosario Sanmiguel was born in Manuel Benavides, Chihuahua, in 1958. Her career as an editor began in Juárez at the beginning of the eighties in a cultural supplement published by a local newspaper. During the same decade, she began to write the short stories that would come to form the acclaimed collection, Callejón Sucre y otros relatos (Sucre Alley and Other Stories). The stories were published largely in a well-renowned cultural supplement of the Mexico City newspaper, Unamasuno, edited by Huberto Batiz, as well as in regional journals.

Los relatos de Callejón Sucre se centran en el ambiente urbano de Ciudad Juárez, una ciudad fronteriza de más de dos millones de habitantes divididos por el Río Grande/Río Bravo de El Paso, Texas. La colección ha ganado elogios de la crítica como uno de los textos más importantes de la literatura fronteriza mexicana. El reconocido escritor del Norte de México, Eduardo Antonio Parra, ha escrito que la vida fronteriza ha alcanzado sus mayores alturas literarias en Callejón Sucre. Se han escrito varios artículos académicos sobre la colección, incluyendo un capítulo de Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (2002) por Debra Castillo y María Socorro Tabuenca.

The stories of Callejón Sucre are centered on the urban environment of Ciudad Juárez, a border city of over two million residents divided by the Río Grande/Río Bravo from El Paso, Texas. The collection has received critical acclaim as one of the most important works of Mexican border literature. The well-known Northern Mexican writer, Eduardo Antonio Parra, has written that life along the border has found its greatest literary depiction in Callejón Sucre. Various academic articles have been written on the collection, including a chapter in Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (2002) by Debra Castillo and María Socorro Tabuenca.

En 2006, Sanmiguel publicó su segundo libro de ficción, una novela corta titulada Árboles o apuntes de viaje. En los años entre la publicación de los dos libros, Sanmiguel se dedicó a la edición de revistas literarias y libros de poesía, así como a la traducción literaria. Además, inició su carrera como profesora universitaria en la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, donde impartió clases de Literatura Mexicana del Siglo XX y Literatura Latinoamericana del Siglo XX. Actualmente se encuentra preparando su segunda novela, al tiempo que escribe su tesis de doctorado en Arizona State University.

In 2006, Sanmiguel published her second book of fiction, a short novel entitled, Árboles o apuntes de viaje (Trees or Travel Notes).
In the years between the publication of the two books, Sanmiguel dedicated her time to editing journals and books of poetry as well as to literary translation. In addition, she began her career as a University professor in the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, teaching classes in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature and Twentieth Century Latin American Literature. Currently, she is at work on her second novel while at the same time writing her doctoral thesis at Arizona State University.

The Virgin of Flames

Just finished reading Chris Abani's new book, The Virgin of Flames. The book is by turns, gross, enlightening, deliciously tactile, strange and unbelievable. Abani immerses us in his vision of a post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles, complete with out of control brush fires burning California, a 50-foot tall illegal mural of a female Muslim freedom fighter crushing a dove, an implausible abandoned-lot, pseudo-porn male-on-male rape scene y más. The characters are a wildly, post-everything mix of racial, ethnic and gender identities.

I agree with Ruben Martinez' review in the LA Times that the book is at its best in its luxuriant asides about Los Angeles and the neglected river than runs through it. Like in his description of the old Mission at the center of L.A: as "no more than a glorified tourist attraction that attracted no tourists" and "sad, not in the way of a rejected wallflower, but more in the commonplace shame of a community center." And Iggy's lecture to the Black about being a native Angeleno, that since he did not come from somewhere else to L.A., "it is worse because you have nothing to fight against, nothing to let go of...That's why there's no visible native Angelenos...Ambivalence is the heart of this town."

The prose languors at times as the author seems bent on driving the plot forward to a predetermined end. And the unlikely plot twists (the rape or Ray-Rays death on wet) can seem contrived or forced. But beyond that, sentences like this save the book for me: "But there are no scriptures here in this city of angels where every moment is a life lived too fast, where the spines of freeways, like arteries, like blood, circle in hope. Permance is this River and with piety's conviction we make a home here."

There are a lot of similarities between the literature being written in L.A. now and what I wish I could find being written here in Houston. What I wish we could write one day. So for now, this new L.A. lit will nourish us. Abani, Nigerian transplant writing set in Latino East L.A. Next on the list: Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster. A barrio-raised, Chicano-identified Japanese American imagining an Aztek present.

Una nueva entrevista con Cherríe Moraga

Autobiography is always the grounding point or the point of departure in the writing process. I believe the best fiction comes through the truth of autobiography. There is no question in my mind that Toni Morrison personally drew from her own emotional experience of being the "free slave" in the twentieth century in order to write the nineteenth-century slave narrative of Beloved. We are that grand as artists. I always teach through autobiography first, whether the genre of the course is playwriting, fiction, poetry, whatever. If we cultivate a relationship with autobiography, there is nothing to be afraid of in our writing and we can allow for whole stories that we've never experienced to enter our psyches, without censor, in the same way we are gifted in our dreams. Because we've opened ourselves up enough to receive those collectively unconscious messages.

Read the whole interview (about teatro, acting, indigeneity) at Bomb Magazine here.

Stop the Clash



Awesome video. So important to reject this concept of a constant, ahistorical culture clash. The video lays out the lie of inescapable difference between "East" and "West" very well. If you don't know about Avaaz.org, go to their website. Seems like a powerful concept. Y viene en muchos idiomas así que puedes escoger el que te conviene más.

Guantánamo Poets

From the Guardian:

The pressures of confinement in Guantánamo Bay have led many in the controversial detention camp to turn to poetry...
Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format".

Read more here.

Coahuila bella y querida...y super progresista.

(English summary at the bottom.)

Me emociona la decisión reciente del estado de Coahuila, México de empezar a permitir que personas del mismo sexo y del sexo opuesto se registren sus relaciones con todos los derechos del matrimonio. Me acabe de informar de esta noticia interesantísimo aquí en El Diario de Coahuila y además dice que:

La figura del Pacto Civil de Solidaridad tiene validez en todo el país, en virtud de que está validado ante una Oficialía del Registro Civil, igual que un matrimonio.

O sea que en México ahora, además del D.F., se puede registrar bajo algo que se llama Pacto Civil de Solidaridad (PCS) y lo van a reconocer en todo el país. Además, uno no tiene que ser de Coahuila para que te registren allá. De hecho, la primera pareja de lesbianas tejanas se ha registrado su enlace civil. ¡Y en Ciudad Acuña en la mera línea! Se puede leer más de las dos mujeres "unidas en solidaridad" aquí (in English).

Y en La Jornada dice:

Erick Preston Steinmam, originario de Nueva York, Estados Unidos, y Joel Alberto Ríos Elizondo, oriundo de Monterrey, Nuevo León, formalizaron este martes una relación que comenzó hace seis años, al recurrir al pacto civil de solidaridad vigente en Coahuila desde el 13 de enero pasado.

¡La primera pareja fronteriza, interracial, queer de casarse en México! Lee todo el artículo aquí. Parece que son muchos que van a Coahuila ahora para casarse. La verdad, ya no quiero oír nadie que me diga que todos los mexicanos son muy conservadores, que no aceptan a los gays, que son muy machistas, que los anglosajones son más liberales, abiertos, etc. No es así de simple. Claro, hay mexicanos que son conservadores, que no nos aceptan y que son muy machistas, pero siempre me opondré a estas generalizaciones esencialistas.

Y parece ahora que en Chihuahua puede ser que hagan otra ley muy parecida:

De aprobarse el proyecto, según las declaraciones reproducidas por “El Heraldo de Saltillo”, en Chihuahua también se modificaría el Código Civil para permitir la unión legal entre personas del mismo o de distinto género que cohabiten en unión libre.

Lee todo el artículo aquí.
Y ahora en inglés para los que todavía son monolingües:

So, it appears that in the Northern Mexican border state of Coahuila, couples of the same and opposite sex can now register their relationships without getting married. It is called a "Civil Pact of Solidarity." Amazing. Read the AP summary of the news here. Read about two Texas lesbianas getting hitched in the bordertown of Ciudad Acuña here.

Honestly, I don't want to hear any more people saying that, oh, Mexicans are so conservative or they're so macho or "Mexican culture" is not as liberal as "Anglo culture." When two lesbianas en Tejas from Midland go to Ciudad Acuña to get hitched, we need to throw all the old stereotypes out the window.


The world is a complicated, damaged and dangerous place. But occasionally, it's also surprising and beautiful.

Hecho en Tejas

A reading in honor of the new anthology, Hecho en Tejas,
a compilation of established and new Mexican American voices from
Texas, edited by Dagoberto Gilb.

6:30pm - 8:30 pm, Thursday, March 1
Barnes and Noble bookstore 7626 Westheimer @ Voss. Admission is Free.

Participating authors: Dagoberto Gilb, Tony Diaz, Tammy Gomez, Cecilia Balli y más...

You can read the intro to the book on the Texas Observer website
right here.

El amor en tiempos del Norte: Monterrey loves Tijuana

Pues no lo puse en mi blog antes, pero es tan suave la foto que la tuve que poner. Y aquí va el texto que la contextualiza:

Tal evento simboliza el proceso de enamoramiento entre dos entidades: Monterrey y la ciudad fronteriza de Tijuana. Ocho jóvenes creadores de ambas ciudades –todos exponentes del arte actual– explorarán a través de la literatura el discurso amoroso de necesidad emotiva: la búsqueda, la exacerbación, el sentido del amor en estos tiempos postmodernos. Celebrar el amor en tal contexto es tratar de explicar que la idealización de las grandes urbes o metrópolis, no solamente exportan una imagen de límite, miedo y muerte; sino formas donde el cortejo, las prácticas del noviazgo, la verbalización del enamoramiento, la manifestación del deseo, han cambiado por la evidente globalización, pero que no se ha desvinculado, siguen permaneciendo en el interés social: es ontológico.

El evento “Proserpina está enamorada. El amor en tiempos del Norte: Monterrey loves Tijuana” presentará la unión de tales entidades a través e la lectura poética, donde el contrato fraternal entre ciudades susciten la necesidad de estrechar lazos y traducir el amor en estos violentos tiempos del norte.

Para mayores informes, puedes consultar las páginas de Lorena Mancilla y de Pepe V. Sández que están allí en los links...

La dictadura de la felicidad

...los Estados Unidos, una sociedad comprometida hasta el tuétano con la dictadura de la felicidad...

...the United States, a society committed at its very marrow to the dictatorship of happiness...

de crg del 13 febrero 2007

My Love

Your skin glows like the mango, blossoms juicy as the daisy in the purest hope of spring.
My heart follows your ukulele voice and leaps like a human at the whisper of your name.
The evening floats in on a great dove wing.
I am comforted by your shoe that I carry into the twilight of floorbeams and hold next to my penis.
I am filled with hope that I may dry your tears of sperm.
As my ass falls from my underwear, it reminds me of your joy.
In the quiet, I listen for the last bark of the day.
My heated toe leaps to my gloves. I wait in the moonlight for your secret cellphone so that we may move as one, toe to toe, in search of the magnificient red and mystical heart of love.


If you want to write your own computer generated love poem, go to: Love Poem Generator.

Resol

othertimes summerscape reverberations of reflected sunstroke. resol resol resol: repeat sun, resun resun resun.

keep us choking through la canícula entera.
no taking photos on long walks, no walking. period. a shame, conscious of the shame of it, the lack of exact connection, the passing, the poem a day a poem of disconnection. habitual spaces, the mechanical mechanistic wandering in well-tracked senderos to an end siempre defined. si hubiera sabido antes. the necessity of taking poems of nothing, of nothing sparked by gray skies. believing in the potential of the nothing, perhaps.

renothing renada remakes renegades remark regret and remembering. reject renoise. rechaza reruido. el resol cala.

Write for a dying

También yo. And thanks. Stating it clearly sin pelos en la lengua. Find myself rereading lines from el valle and not giving up yet on words. Despite. Resol is really a response.

Adúltero

Me gustaría dedicarme también a aprender otro idioma además del español bien bien, pero no puedo decidir cuál.
Sería como poniéndole los cuernos al español...

Outside In

Martín Ramírez...thought to have migrated from Mexico around 1915, not 1925, to work on the railroads being built in Northern California, where he was hospitalized in the early 1930s and shortly thereafter found to have schizophrenia. He lived out his years in DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, near Sacramento.

Retrospective exhibition in NYC. Read full Times article here.

Recovering

Saw part of this film last night. Gonna watch the rest as soon as possible. Very profound meditation on one family's struggle with the Catholic church. Brings up a lot of emotions. Specially for recovering post-catholics.

Watch Hand of God in its entirety online here at the PBS Frontline website.