coming of age

Report from Barrio Walden: Chillin’ pondside with Enrique Thoreau

by

IMAGINE MY SHOCK.

I was living in Massachusetts for the first time. Adjusting. The first time I saw snow falling past my Somerville apartment window, I told a woman on the phone that a neighbor was on the roof shaking out a pillow. Not many snowstorms in my desertified homeland. The first time I saw ice on the sidewalk, I thought a prankster had smeared Vaseline on the bricks to watch businessmen fall down.

This old world was all new to me. I was manhandled by quotidian revelations, wrenched by the duende of Yankee cultural hoodoo. So when I realized I could walk over to Porter Square (where the porterhouse steak was first hacked out of some Bostonian cow) and catch a commuter train to Concord, to Walden freakin’ Pond, I was off and running.

Mas…Report from Barrio Walden: Chillin’ pondside with Enrique Thoreau

Pages: 1 2

Scientists ID Chicana who hasn’t seen ‘Blood In Blood Out’ (video)

by

bloodin(PNS reporting from ALTA CALIFORNIA)  Ethnic anthropologists recently discovered the last living Chicana who has never seen the coming-of-age movie Blood In Blood Out.

The woman, not named in the report, was spotted and identified last summer in the Los Angeles suburb of Cudahy, according to a study published in the prestigious journal Science.

The subject, 32, had no explanation for not seeing the film that is “required viewing” for a true Chicano or Chicana, according to the paper, although scientists have been analyzing her brain for abnormalities in her “cholo receptors:”

Mas…Scientists ID Chicana who hasn’t seen ‘Blood In Blood Out’ (video)

Meet ‘Pocho’ the novel, its author, and their times

by

The interview is three decades old but still amazing. Listen to the man that started “pochismo!”

As the University of Texas presents the Mexican American Experience writes:

Jose Antonio Villarreal discusses his 1959 novel, Pocho, and the ways in which his own life and politics influenced his writing. Villarreal first discusses his experiences growing up in the pre-World War II era in California. He traces some of the similarities between his own life and that of his character, Richard Rubio, but he stresses that his novel is not a biography. Villarreal says he wrote Pocho because he wanted to introduce the rest of the U.S. to a group of Americans they knew nothing about.

Click to listen