It's not just being a single creative force as an artist, but you connect to something that is based in the community how you can make an e ffective impact on your community directly. It doesn't have to be done in prosperity and over a period of time to be appreciated later on; you can have an immediate e ffect. You don't have to be muttering in your studio months and weeks and years: No one knows the creative genius I am and what I'm doing here, they don't appreciate me... Forget about that! Get out and do something , because to me that's your role as a creative person. Seize the moment. It's not always about you. It's about us.

 - Bert Samples in Houston Reflections: Art in the City 1950s 60s 70s

In 1950 John Biggers won a contest at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for his drawing, The Cradle. The museum, which permitted blacks only on Thursdays, did not allow Biggers to be present at a reception in his honor.

- TSHA

Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway




Where this round [Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators] really shines, though, is in the contrast between two installations: The Natural History Museum, presented in a collaboration between New York-based Not an Alternative and T.E.J.A.S., and the installation Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway, by Nuria Montiel and John Pluecker. Both ask for a deeper engagement and careful looking at a specific place–Houston–over time. And both pose significant questions about museum and community, politics and organizing, spaces between things and people, and how change happens. Most importantly, they consider how Houston’s own history is based on making certain peoples, histories, and things invisible.

 - Laura Wellen on Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway. Read the rest here.

Interpreting

Interpreting in Houston with the Interfaith Worker Justice Center
Since 2005, extensive experience interpreting in a variety of legal, medical, conference and community settings.

Trained in legal interpreting at the Agnese Haury Institute at the National Center for Interpretation at the University of Arizona.

Also trained in interpreting for social justice and multilingual space-building by Roberto Tijerina through the Highlander Research and Education Center.

Licensed as a Spanish-English Court Interpreter by the National Consortium of State Courts.

Co-Founder of Antena, a language justice and language experimentation collaboration with Jen Hofer, which works to create multlingual spaces using simultaneous interpreting technology.

For more information, contact me at plujo7 at gmail dot com.

Translations

2016

Les Figues Press: Antígona Gónzalez, by Sara Uribe.

 2015

Ugly Duckling Press: Sor Juana and Other Monsters, by Luis Felipe Fabre

Les Figues Press: Eduardo Costa: Writings. (Collaborative translation with Jen Hofer.)

 2013

Alumnos 47. Miedo / Fear. (Collaborative translation with Jen Hofer as Antena.)

2012

Producciones Gusanos de la Nada: Magnitud/e by Marco Antonio Huerta & Sara Uribe


Duke University Press: Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, Ed. Fiamma Montezomolo and Josh Kun with Heriberto Yépez, Tito Alegría, Rafa Saavedra and more

Eleven Eleven: Poems by Mónica Nepote

Aufgabe: Poems by Omar Pimienta

 Asymptote: "Primera ceremonia"/"First Ceremony" by Abigael Bohórquez


2011

Palgrave Macmillan: Feminismo: transmisiones y retransmisiones / Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions by Marta Lamas

 El periódico de poesía: Varios poemas de Craig Santos Pérez (traducidos al español con Marco Antonio Huerta)

2010

Grove/Atlantic: Los minutes negros / The Black Minutes by Martin Solares (Selected for the Longlists for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award and the 2011 Independent Booksellers Choice Award)

 Latin American Review: "Manifiesto por un neocorrido” / "Manifesto for a neocorrido" by Martín Solares

2009

Arte Público Press: El paraíso portátil / Portable Paradise by Mario Bencastro

 Third Text: “Tijuana: Hybrity and Beyond: A Dialogue between Néstor García Canclini and Fiamma Montezemolo”

 Literal: "Images of Reality: Minerva Cuevas"


2008

Arte Público Press: Bajo el puente y otros relatos de la frontera / Under the Bridge and Other Stories from the Border by Rosario Samiguel

Books


Ford Over
A book published by Noemi Press in 2016.
Cut up and aggregate and mashup: made of language drawn from the multilingual chronicles of explorers / colonial agents who traveled through the land now known as the state of Texas. At the heart of the book is the mystery of the physical act of crossing a river. Purchase through Noemi or SPD Books.

-


An Accompanying Text
A chapbook published by She Works Flexible from 2015.
Full of companions, conflict zones, gaps and generators.

-



Ioyaiene
A handmade, DIY chapbook from 2014.
Made for the Fresh Arts Community Supported Art Program.
Full of Karankawa words, anti-definitions, bayou sand, and drowning Spaniards. 
Click here for a slightly different online version at Hinchas de Poesía.

-


Three Manifestos and Two How-To Guides
A set of pamphlets collaboratively written with Jen Hofer published by Libros Antena Books in 2014.
Full of interpretation, instigation, language justice, experimental writing exercises and performance.
Click here for all of the pamphlets in PDF format on the Antena site.

-




When We Said This Was A Space, We Meant We Are People
A chapbook collaboratively written with Jen Hofer published by Libros Antena Books in 2013.
Full of small row houses, installation arts, small-press books, maps, Black Panthers and spray paint.
Click here for PDF and ISSU version on The Conversant.

-


Killing Current
A chapbook published by Mouthfeel Press from 2012.
Full of rivers, silt, mud, crossings, intricate maps, slight squiggles, crosshatches and cut-ups.

-



A collectively-written chapbook by Little Red Leaves Textile Series from 2012.
Full of alligators, cutting and pasting, Photoshopping, Riverside Terrace, cement-smelling stomachs and  hot, humid Houston nights.
A collaboration with the ¡Copy Pasters!, a.k.a. Patrick Dougherty, David Feil, Michael Henderson, Dawn Pendergast, Harbeer Sandhu and Stalina Villarreal.

-

 
A handmade, DIY chapbook from 2011.
Full of pants ripping on plastic chairs, BUENA VIDA, coladores de sueños, Master locks, Trapitos de Angel and City Cosas.
My collaboration with the Dusie Kollektiv Round 5.
Click here for a PDF version on the Dusie website.

A second edition was made in 2013 for Jen Hofer's CalArts class.

-



Routes into Texas
A handmade, DIY chapbook from 2010.  
Full of nose-grabbing, backwoods exploring, expropriations and other poety prose. 


-


cachitos / lil bits
A DIY art zine collaboration with Jorge Galván Flores from 2003.
Full of photos of murals from Houston's East End—unicorns, big-lipped fish, Selena, pool-playing bulls, crawfish, mustachioed beauty queens and a fading historical singularity.

Whiteness isn’t intellectualism.
Whiteness isn’t indigenous.
Whiteness isn’t anything.
Whiteness is just that blank space where a theft has occurred.
- Chiwan Choi, here

To be clear: disengagement or non-response is not possible for me right now. Friends have told me to walk away, to take a break, but I am a writer who wants to exist publicly. If I disengaged every time I was approached this way, it would likely mean disengaging from the professional poetry community entirely. When, in specific circumstances, I’ve disengaged, when I have said yes or okay or have just let it go, I have regretted it. I realize not all writers feel this way. I realize the burden brown and black or trans or queer people face to even exist, let alone write, could absolve some of us from engaging: the danger of this poison is real.

- Jennif(f)er Tamayo - more here

Efrain Huerta & Roberto Bolaño vs Octavio Paz

*

Brodsky, Akhmatova, Pushkin = weighty, heavy, too heavy Russian poets

I forgot what it was to remember.

 - Ayanna Jolivet McCloud

We don't always belong to the people who look like us.

- Kim Tallbear

maricela guerrero
comparing the work of poetry
to the work of domestic workers
not to the work of gurus or eternal priests or etc
a continual return to labor
that does not end.



labor has a value.
why should the work of a senator
be worth more than the work of a woman who works
for an outsourced company cleaning the building?
that's a question poetry can work on.

What I heard Robin Coste Lewis say here in Houston (I paraphrase from my notes):

Appropriation has been fetishized over the last year.
I don't want to talk about the fetishization of appropriation over the last year.
Brilliant books are buried in the fetishization of appropriation.
I don't want to talk about ___________________.
There's nothing new about appropriation.
Colonialism is a history of appropriation.
I steal with care and tenderness.
I wanted history to talk about itself, not talk about the death of the author.

Yo no soy original pero nadie me hace competencia. 

- Una amiga de Tijuana

I (...) ask my non-Indigenous peers to consider their roles in the ongoing colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples. The colonial moment has not passed. The conditions that fostered it have not suddenly disappeared. We talk of neo-colonialism, neo-Imperialism, but it is as if these are far away things (these days these accusations are often mounted with terse suspicion against the BRIC countries, as though the members of the G8 have not already colonized the globe through neo-liberal economic and political policies). The reality is that we are just an invasion or economic policy away from re-colonizing at any moment. So it is so important to think, deeply, about how the Ontological Turn–with its breathless ‘realisations’ that animals, the climate, water, ‘atmospheres’ and non-human presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ may not be so separate after all—is itself perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples.

- From An Indigenous Feminist’s take on the Ontological Turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism by Zoe Todd. More here.