May Day 2010 in Los Angeles: Some Photos

If you’ve grown up in the United States as an “other” or you just happen to look like one, you are probably quite accustomed to the regular indignities of not being one of them. Somehow you manage. You just want to get by. But then they do something so utterly outrageous and in your face that yer like “Fuck This, No Mas!” They push the indignities over that line you were hoping to avoid. Arizona did that recently, making any friends and family that look “other” open targets to harassment. It’s not like harassment wasn’t the norm before, its just that now it’s a protected and legal practice.

Fuck that.

Sometimes, enough is enough. Time to take it to the streets to show our collective disapproval.

Warning! Lots of pictures ahead.

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Arizona, again


My Great-Grandfather Zacarias Tellez Jr. and his documentation

In case you think what’s happening in Arizona is something new, I’d like to share this small bit of my family history with you. As cliche as it is to say, those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. Or is it those that know history remember how to repeat it?

In the early 1900s my great-grandfather Zacarias Tellez Jr. along with his parents and siblings traveled from Arizona to Cananea, Sonora, MX to work in the copper mines. It was a fortuitous journey. It is where he met and married my great-grandmother Matilde.  However, returning from one of his trips to Cananea,  a strange thing happened…

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Dark Crossing Opens Today!

Dark Crossing finally hits the theaters today! Never heard of it? Me neither. But hey, it has Miklo of Blood In, Blood Out fame so its got to be good. Showing in select theaters only, the nearest one seems to be in Texas.

Or you could wait a few weeks and check it out at your local library.

Action Packed!

Click ahead for some classic Miklo clips. You know you’re gonna.
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Paletero Man

Last night I was hanging out at a youtube party, where various folks pick a music video to share with the gathered crowd. It’s all the rage these days, didn’t you know? Vicente from the bay area shared this ridiculous video that had us busting up for minutes, which I thought was the stupidest video ever. A paletero without a properly insulated cart? Not even a damn ice chest? Plus no bells or horns either on the shopping cart, nobody’s gonna know the paletero is coming around. Even the poorest and dumbest ambulante in LA knows that this shit ain’t gonna work. What’s wrong with them fools from Frisco? At least they paid a visit to the laundromat, otherwise known as the functional local plaza.

This morning I can’t remember any of the other videos so I guess this was the best one of the night. Enjoy!

American Lit

Reading about John Fante Square being inaugurated on 5th and Grand I remember the passionate racial fights between Bandini and his Mexican girlfriend. Soon after, Kerouac comes into mind smoking marijuana in the desert heat of a Mexican afternoon, the gratifying pleasure he felt after eating the refried beans made by his Mexican girl. These page-turned memories rising on the same heat-rippled smoke of mirage like driving on the 15 into The Cajon Pass. Back in the city, Hunter Thompson’s friend, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s, attorney-rants in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, the Juarez prison cell, the judge demanding for him to learn his father’s language: Spanish. How many other aspects of American literary culture have been ignored, or forgotten, even by Chicano Studies courses, let alone more traditional literature classes, I ask myself?

Submitted by M. Saldivar Galindo

Mexifornia here I come, right back where I started from!

 

Wow! We must be becoming visible at last! Mexifornia, the paranoid fear of the Joe Arpaio’s, Walter “my radio is speaking to me in Spanish!” Moore, the forgotten Lou Dobbs, and the author of “Mexifornia” Victor Davis Hansen, who had to build a fence in front of his central valley home to keep the Mexicans from throwing beer cans into his yard.

On this xenophobic and paranoid produced Mexifornia driver’s license is a picture of one of the great actors in American and Mexican history, Alfonso Bedoya, who was a modern day Chicano, being born in Sonora, schooled in Houston Texas, residing for many years in Los Angeles. 

“Badges? Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinking badges!” One of the great lines in film history, from one of my all time favorite movies “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, about three gringo wetbacks that travel into the Sierra Madre of Mexico searching for gold but end up finding other treasures (except for poor Humphrey Bogart),

Seeing Bedoya on a driver’s license gives me great pleasure, I feel so good I feel like listening to a song to celebrate. I’ll also share it with you.

And get ready for an onslaught of this type of nativist racism when the coming ussue of immigration reform is debated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFbS_nVA-KI

Chicano Jewish School to Open in Boyle Hts.

The Breed Street Shul in Boyle Hts. has announced that they will soon begin classes for local residents to convert to Judaism. The goal is to tie Latinos to Judaism so that when Latinos have more political power they will continue America’s support for Isreal.

Ricardo Montoyiswich a recently converted Chicano Jew said, “This will help re-establish the Jewish presence in Boyle Hts. and hopefully lure Canters back to the heights!” Montoyiswich, who will be teaching several classes at the Shul, said his life has changed for the better since he made the switch. “As an actor I was having a hard time getting work, but out of no where, once I converted, I started getting all these cool gigs.”

Some of the classes that will be offered include: “Putting Down Those Whiny Santos,” “How To Leave La Virgen and still Love Your Mom,” “Circumcising The Chile: Grin and Bare It,” “Menorah and Dradle Care for Chicanos (Don’t smoke it and it’s NOT Pon),” and “How To Trace Your Distant Jewish Roots.”

Sleepy Tonatiuh, a next door neighbor to the Shul and proud Aztec dancer said, “This ain’t right. They should be teaching people about the people on this land and how this land was stolen, just like the Isreali’s stole Palestine.” He plans to protest the classes once they open by having his danza group do ceremonies during class time. When asked for a response, Montoyiswich said, “Sounds like that indio needs to see the play “Palestine New Mexico” and learn how Indians are Jewish.”

Will there ever be peace in the mid Eastside?

Jaime Escalante school proposal

Ron Unz announced that he was planning on opening an elementary school in the MacArthur park area to be named after his good friend and fellow Republican Jaime Escalante.

An Unz spokesman Will Garglio, stated that this will be called Jaime Escalante Westside Elementary School (JEWES). Unz plans to open a similar school on the Eastside.

JEWES curriculum will be total English immersion with a focus on media manipulation. Plans include having a student run television station just like professional Latino TV stations. They plan to staff the station with the lightest and blondest of the community, even if they have to import them all the way from Miami to do so. Will Garglio said, “We want these youth to feel like they are in the real world and that world doesn’t look or speak like them, so they need to get used to it now.”

Textbook orders have already been filed and include texts that exclude Sal Castro, Che Guevarra, Rudy Acu~a and other Chicano/Latino heroes that might instill pride in the students, something that must be avoided, according to textbook publisher: Bendover for Texas Press.