Publicist and journalist Nilki Benitez recently caught up to Ms. Alvarado and conducted the following audio interview:
Showing posts with label Latino Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Latino Books. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
Interview with award-winning Latina Poet/Author Lisa Alvarado
Friday, July 30, 2010
Latina talks about gang life-syle in new book
In Memory of Johnny
Teresa Carbajal Ravet, Austin Latino Neighborhoods Examiner, July 30, 2010
I received Lady Q, The Rise and Fall of a Latin Queen to review as part of Condor Book Tours and it was a very difficult read on numerous levels. Authors Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez were former gang members of the Latin King/Queen Nation of the Humboldt Park area in Chicago, Illinois. It is the bloody, raw experience of gang life, a fraught life on the streets of Chicago amid drugs, violence, unprotected sex, and family dysfunction. A life in which children experience a bitter and distant, if not absent, family connection, young boys and girls yearn for personal warmth and acceptance and do not find it within their home, and the adolescent experience is that of a violation in order to belong and feel protected. The life of immature girls abused by the sexual predators among their relatives and finally giving into the sexual advances from the males in their gang families, all completely unrelated to human love or nurture. And the dysfunctional cycle goes on and on and on without hope of closure. A most difficult read indeed, almost to the point of disbelief. MORE.
Teresa Carbajal Ravet, Austin Latino Neighborhoods Examiner, July 30, 2010
I received Lady Q, The Rise and Fall of a Latin Queen to review as part of Condor Book Tours and it was a very difficult read on numerous levels. Authors Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez were former gang members of the Latin King/Queen Nation of the Humboldt Park area in Chicago, Illinois. It is the bloody, raw experience of gang life, a fraught life on the streets of Chicago amid drugs, violence, unprotected sex, and family dysfunction. A life in which children experience a bitter and distant, if not absent, family connection, young boys and girls yearn for personal warmth and acceptance and do not find it within their home, and the adolescent experience is that of a violation in order to belong and feel protected. The life of immature girls abused by the sexual predators among their relatives and finally giving into the sexual advances from the males in their gang families, all completely unrelated to human love or nurture. And the dysfunctional cycle goes on and on and on without hope of closure. A most difficult read indeed, almost to the point of disbelief. MORE.Monday, January 25, 2010
Latino Literature at its best
Championing the Diversity and Excellence of Latino Literature
Latino Book Tour
Every author knows there is more to selling books than appearing at a bookstore and signing books. In today's climate, exposure is important on a grand scale through the internet. Virtual book tours give you that exposure.
What you gain in a book tour is something that cannot be bought. Word of mouth publicity and name recognition are vital products to any author's marketing and promotional book campaigns.
Word of mouth is when all these visitors tell their friends that they spoke to the author and found them to be fun and pleasant. A fan is born.
Name recognition remains in the visitors mind, and when they enter a bookstore, they are immediately drawn to the author's book cover. A formented thought tells them that they know this author, somehow, not sure how or where, and they remember reading that the book was good.
To earn your sale, I can car-salesman promise you tons of books sold and flounting your reputation throughout cyberspace.
The reality is we are a group of Latino/a bloggers who value our writers. We want to offer them an opportunity to speak to our visitors in the hopes that everyone will like the Latino/a author and tell people about them. We advocate books, reading, and supporting our authors. If you have been in the book selling business for a while, you will know that this attitude is rare.
Latino/a Virtual Book Tours has the distinct advantage and pleasure of putting you in front of a Latino/a audience, an audience who is willing to be educated about the pleasures of reading your books and learning about how you write. One people you would never be able to reach in any with-walls bookstore.
Latino/a Virtual Book Tours offers you the audience reach that has economic strategists boasting of brand loyalty beyond any other group.
Others may boast bigger numbers. No one can "shout out" like Latino/as.
Latino Book Tour
Every author knows there is more to selling books than appearing at a bookstore and signing books. In today's climate, exposure is important on a grand scale through the internet. Virtual book tours give you that exposure.
What you gain in a book tour is something that cannot be bought. Word of mouth publicity and name recognition are vital products to any author's marketing and promotional book campaigns.
Word of mouth is when all these visitors tell their friends that they spoke to the author and found them to be fun and pleasant. A fan is born.
Name recognition remains in the visitors mind, and when they enter a bookstore, they are immediately drawn to the author's book cover. A formented thought tells them that they know this author, somehow, not sure how or where, and they remember reading that the book was good.
To earn your sale, I can car-salesman promise you tons of books sold and flounting your reputation throughout cyberspace.
The reality is we are a group of Latino/a bloggers who value our writers. We want to offer them an opportunity to speak to our visitors in the hopes that everyone will like the Latino/a author and tell people about them. We advocate books, reading, and supporting our authors. If you have been in the book selling business for a while, you will know that this attitude is rare.
Latino/a Virtual Book Tours has the distinct advantage and pleasure of putting you in front of a Latino/a audience, an audience who is willing to be educated about the pleasures of reading your books and learning about how you write. One people you would never be able to reach in any with-walls bookstore.
Latino/a Virtual Book Tours offers you the audience reach that has economic strategists boasting of brand loyalty beyond any other group.
Others may boast bigger numbers. No one can "shout out" like Latino/as.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Book Fair features Latino voices
Dallas' International Book Fair to feature variety of Latino voices
Dallas Morning News, October 10, 2009
The need for Latino voices in the American literary landscape keeps growing.
There's just one problem: Publishers still don't understand the multiple Latino groups in the country and are looking for one-size-fits-all authors.
"They're still searching for that one Latino voice to represent all Latino cultures, and it doesn't exist," says Max Rodríguez , founder and publisher of QBR The Black Book Review.
His HBF Publishing, a print-on-demand collaboration with Author Solutions Inc., targets African-American and Latino readers and writers.
Rodríguez will conduct a workshop for aspiring authors during the fourth International Book Fair in Dallas from Oct. 29 through Nov. 1.
About 40 national and international authors will participate in the book fair, sponsored by the Dallas Public Library. The event will feature artistic and cultural performances, multilingual story times, dance and musical performances, plays, writing workshops, music and children's activities. Check the schedule at www.dallas internationalbookfair.com.
Rodríguez, who works with black and Latino writers to help them develop their craft, will talk about the Latino reader market and how to identify it.
Rather than becoming more cohesive, he said, this market has become more segmented and poses a conundrum for publishers: "It's both similar and very distinct. It's become a Rubik's cube – how do we bring it all together?"
Perhaps we can't, when we consider the second- and third-generation Latinos whose language has become urbanized, he said.
Daniel García Ordaz, who calls himself the "Poet Mariachi," is a good example of just how eclectic and multifaceted the U.S. Latino culture has become.
García Ordaz, who teaches English in McAllen, will share excerpts from his new book, You Know What I'm Sayin'?, on Oct. 31 at the downtown library.
He said his collection of poetry juxtaposes the politics of urban hip-hop America with the sociology of rural, deep South Texas, where he grew up.
On a typical day as a youth, he could go from watching MTV or listening to rap music to helping his mother make tamales, he said.
"Many Chicano poets tend to focus on the negative," he said "This book is a celebration of my life and culture. I'm having fun with the language."
Miriam Rodríguez, assistant director of public services for the library, said she expects the public will find the book fair was designed to be both educational and enjoyable.
"It also reflects the diverse community that Dallas has become," she said.
The broad range of writers, performers and activities at the book fair is designed to attract every age group of book lovers – and music aficionados.
Fans of Mexican singer José José will have a chance to see the famed performer, who sang to sold-out audiences in 100,000-seat venues during the 1980s, at the central library Oct. 30.
He will be interviewed by a local Spanish-language radio host, and then autograph his book, José José, Esta Es Mi Vida (This is My Life). The book contains a CD of his most popular songs.
Dallas Morning News, October 10, 2009
The need for Latino voices in the American literary landscape keeps growing.
There's just one problem: Publishers still don't understand the multiple Latino groups in the country and are looking for one-size-fits-all authors.
"They're still searching for that one Latino voice to represent all Latino cultures, and it doesn't exist," says Max Rodríguez , founder and publisher of QBR The Black Book Review.
His HBF Publishing, a print-on-demand collaboration with Author Solutions Inc., targets African-American and Latino readers and writers.
Rodríguez will conduct a workshop for aspiring authors during the fourth International Book Fair in Dallas from Oct. 29 through Nov. 1.
About 40 national and international authors will participate in the book fair, sponsored by the Dallas Public Library. The event will feature artistic and cultural performances, multilingual story times, dance and musical performances, plays, writing workshops, music and children's activities. Check the schedule at www.dallas internationalbookfair.com.
Rodríguez, who works with black and Latino writers to help them develop their craft, will talk about the Latino reader market and how to identify it.
Rather than becoming more cohesive, he said, this market has become more segmented and poses a conundrum for publishers: "It's both similar and very distinct. It's become a Rubik's cube – how do we bring it all together?"
Perhaps we can't, when we consider the second- and third-generation Latinos whose language has become urbanized, he said.
Daniel García Ordaz, who calls himself the "Poet Mariachi," is a good example of just how eclectic and multifaceted the U.S. Latino culture has become.
García Ordaz, who teaches English in McAllen, will share excerpts from his new book, You Know What I'm Sayin'?, on Oct. 31 at the downtown library.
He said his collection of poetry juxtaposes the politics of urban hip-hop America with the sociology of rural, deep South Texas, where he grew up.
On a typical day as a youth, he could go from watching MTV or listening to rap music to helping his mother make tamales, he said.
"Many Chicano poets tend to focus on the negative," he said "This book is a celebration of my life and culture. I'm having fun with the language."
Miriam Rodríguez, assistant director of public services for the library, said she expects the public will find the book fair was designed to be both educational and enjoyable.
"It also reflects the diverse community that Dallas has become," she said.
The broad range of writers, performers and activities at the book fair is designed to attract every age group of book lovers – and music aficionados.
Fans of Mexican singer José José will have a chance to see the famed performer, who sang to sold-out audiences in 100,000-seat venues during the 1980s, at the central library Oct. 30.
He will be interviewed by a local Spanish-language radio host, and then autograph his book, José José, Esta Es Mi Vida (This is My Life). The book contains a CD of his most popular songs.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Latino journalist's book highlights Hispanics
Geraldo on Hispanics’ new era of prosperity
Award-winning journalist chronicles Hispanics’ evolving role, cultural impact
Today, Sept . 1, 2009
In his new book “The Great Progression: How Hispanics Will Lead America to a New Era of Prosperity,” award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera details the evolving role of Hispanics in shaping every facet of American culture. Read an excerpt on how the Hispanic community has socially, economically and politically impacted our future.
Introduction
For the first time in modern world history a powerful nation is changing complexion right before the eyes of its citizens. In real time it is possible to watch America become more culturally diverse, its face physically darker. The United States has vastly more Latinos than it did just a relatively few years ago, and their numbers are increasing at an explosive rate, on average almost four thousand per day.
This book is about what that dramatic trend means for the country.
Story continues below Å´advertisement | your ad here
Aided by the vast oceans that separate the United States from the planet’s densest population centers, and by America’s early instincts toward isolation, for most of the twentieth century our nation managed to exclude most Asians, Africans, and Latinos. With passionate vigilance and a largely race-based immigration policy, the country remained overwhelmingly white and Anglo for the first two and a half centuries of its existence.
The relaxation of that restrictive policy in the 1960s civil rights era resulted in a tsunami of Latino migration, which, when coupled with an explosive domestic birth rate, inflated the U.S. Hispanic population to a size almost ten times bigger than it was just fifty years ago, in both absolute and relative terms. In 1950, there were 5 million Latinos. Today, there are more than 46 million. And the recent downturn in illegal immigration due to the lack of good construction jobs in our faltering economy will only marginally slow the pace. During that half-century, Asian and African-American populations also increased, but by not nearly as impressive a rate as that of Hispanics.
A library of scary books and an almost infinite galaxy of anti-immigration opinion pieces warn of how the inexorably increasing numbers of Latinos in the United States are or will soon be overwhelming the existing social order and making America a fundamentally different nation from the one contemplated by the fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence, who were all white Anglos (and only one of whom, Charles Carroll of Maryland, was even Catholic, a then still exotic religion in the thirteen original colonies).
By fundamentally different, I mean a nation other than the industrious, God-fearing, ethical, family-valued, disciplined, self-governing and moral New World colossus the Founding Fathers contemplated. Those fears are widespread, and whether you think them justified or overblown, it is undeniable that the phenomenal Latino population surge in the United States since those revolutionary days is stunning and irreversible.
The percentage of Latinos in the United States population stands at 15.4 percent, which in April 2009 amounted to about 46.7 million people, if not yet strong, getting stronger politically, culturally and economically. Despite the dramatic decrease, even reversal, in recent immigration caused by the collapsing U.S. economy, by the time you read this that 46.7 million figure will already be an understatement of a rapidly expanding demographic, which grew more than 3 percent in the single year between July 2006 and July 2007, and more than doubled just since 1990. Hispanics for the first time outnumber non-Hispanic whites in Dallas, Texas. They are 37 percent of the population of Houston and over 28 percent of the population of Chicago, Illinois.
Similarly, when the Census Bureau announced in March 2009 that New York City had reached a record 8,363,710 people, the bureau revealed that 28 percent were Hispanic, 2,341,839, up 27,000 between July 2007 and July 2008, and most of them native-born. The Latino populations of New York City (2.3 million) and Los Angeles (1.86 million) both outnumber the entire population of Barcelona, Spain, which has just 1.6 million residents. As Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, a professor of globalization and education at New York University, said when the population of the United States hit the breathtaking 300 million mark on October 17, 2006, that 300 millionth American was probably born in Los Angeles and was probably the daughter of Mexicans. “Probably, her name is Maria .... She is the future of America. She is a child of an immigrant. She is a U.S. citizen like you and me.”
In political terms, what makes that historic 15.4 percent statistic even more impressive is that it is comprised mostly of native-born Hispanics, citizens born in the U.S.A., not immigrants either legal or illegal. That is the most potentially profound political development since the silent majority.
As Rosario Dawson reminded us during the Inaugural Gala, as an ethnic group, Latinos are already second in size behind only non-Hispanic American whites. And the percentage of Hispanics is growing by twice their rate and almost that much faster than American blacks whom they supplanted as the nation’s largest minority, far ahead of the date predicted by the social scientists of the 1960s. CONTINUED…
Award-winning journalist chronicles Hispanics’ evolving role, cultural impact
Today, Sept . 1, 2009
In his new book “The Great Progression: How Hispanics Will Lead America to a New Era of Prosperity,” award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera details the evolving role of Hispanics in shaping every facet of American culture. Read an excerpt on how the Hispanic community has socially, economically and politically impacted our future.
Introduction
For the first time in modern world history a powerful nation is changing complexion right before the eyes of its citizens. In real time it is possible to watch America become more culturally diverse, its face physically darker. The United States has vastly more Latinos than it did just a relatively few years ago, and their numbers are increasing at an explosive rate, on average almost four thousand per day.
This book is about what that dramatic trend means for the country.
Story continues below Å´advertisement | your ad here
Aided by the vast oceans that separate the United States from the planet’s densest population centers, and by America’s early instincts toward isolation, for most of the twentieth century our nation managed to exclude most Asians, Africans, and Latinos. With passionate vigilance and a largely race-based immigration policy, the country remained overwhelmingly white and Anglo for the first two and a half centuries of its existence.
The relaxation of that restrictive policy in the 1960s civil rights era resulted in a tsunami of Latino migration, which, when coupled with an explosive domestic birth rate, inflated the U.S. Hispanic population to a size almost ten times bigger than it was just fifty years ago, in both absolute and relative terms. In 1950, there were 5 million Latinos. Today, there are more than 46 million. And the recent downturn in illegal immigration due to the lack of good construction jobs in our faltering economy will only marginally slow the pace. During that half-century, Asian and African-American populations also increased, but by not nearly as impressive a rate as that of Hispanics.
A library of scary books and an almost infinite galaxy of anti-immigration opinion pieces warn of how the inexorably increasing numbers of Latinos in the United States are or will soon be overwhelming the existing social order and making America a fundamentally different nation from the one contemplated by the fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence, who were all white Anglos (and only one of whom, Charles Carroll of Maryland, was even Catholic, a then still exotic religion in the thirteen original colonies).
By fundamentally different, I mean a nation other than the industrious, God-fearing, ethical, family-valued, disciplined, self-governing and moral New World colossus the Founding Fathers contemplated. Those fears are widespread, and whether you think them justified or overblown, it is undeniable that the phenomenal Latino population surge in the United States since those revolutionary days is stunning and irreversible.
The percentage of Latinos in the United States population stands at 15.4 percent, which in April 2009 amounted to about 46.7 million people, if not yet strong, getting stronger politically, culturally and economically. Despite the dramatic decrease, even reversal, in recent immigration caused by the collapsing U.S. economy, by the time you read this that 46.7 million figure will already be an understatement of a rapidly expanding demographic, which grew more than 3 percent in the single year between July 2006 and July 2007, and more than doubled just since 1990. Hispanics for the first time outnumber non-Hispanic whites in Dallas, Texas. They are 37 percent of the population of Houston and over 28 percent of the population of Chicago, Illinois.
Similarly, when the Census Bureau announced in March 2009 that New York City had reached a record 8,363,710 people, the bureau revealed that 28 percent were Hispanic, 2,341,839, up 27,000 between July 2007 and July 2008, and most of them native-born. The Latino populations of New York City (2.3 million) and Los Angeles (1.86 million) both outnumber the entire population of Barcelona, Spain, which has just 1.6 million residents. As Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, a professor of globalization and education at New York University, said when the population of the United States hit the breathtaking 300 million mark on October 17, 2006, that 300 millionth American was probably born in Los Angeles and was probably the daughter of Mexicans. “Probably, her name is Maria .... She is the future of America. She is a child of an immigrant. She is a U.S. citizen like you and me.”
In political terms, what makes that historic 15.4 percent statistic even more impressive is that it is comprised mostly of native-born Hispanics, citizens born in the U.S.A., not immigrants either legal or illegal. That is the most potentially profound political development since the silent majority.
As Rosario Dawson reminded us during the Inaugural Gala, as an ethnic group, Latinos are already second in size behind only non-Hispanic American whites. And the percentage of Hispanics is growing by twice their rate and almost that much faster than American blacks whom they supplanted as the nation’s largest minority, far ahead of the date predicted by the social scientists of the 1960s. CONTINUED…
Monday, August 17, 2009
Latinos need to learn E-book reading
E-book reading is on the rise as smart phones challenge Kindle
Dallas Morning News, August 14, 2009
A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.
"Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself," Castaldo thought.
He didn't have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble Inc. had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo, 54, downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
As others also are discovering, the North Haven, Conn., banker found e-books quite accessible without a Kindle.
"The BlackBerry is always with me," Castaldo said. "Rather than just sitting there, if I can fill that time by reading a good book, I might do that, in addition to doing the other things I might do, like reading e-mail and twittering."
Thanks to Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle, e-book sales are finally zooming, after more than a decade in the doldrums.
But the pioneering device may not dominate the market for long. As Castaldo found, many phones are sophisticated enough to be used as e-book reading devices.
E-book sales reported to the Association of American Publishers have been rising sharply since the beginning of 2008, just after the release of the Kindle. It's the best sustained growth that the industry has seen since the International Digital Publishing Forum began tracking sales in 2002 – a sign that e-books finally could be about to break into the mainstream.
U.S. trade e-book sales in the April-to-June period this year more than tripled from the amount a year ago, as reported by about a dozen publishers.
Total reported sales at wholesale prices were $37.6 million. That's less than 2 percent of the overall book market, but the number understates e-book sales, because not all publishers contribute to the report. The figure also excludes textbooks, an area where e-books have made substantial inroads.
While other digital media such as CDs, DVDs and MP3s showed sharp growth rates from the get-go, e-books have puttered around as a tiny fraction of overall book sales for more than a decade. In several periods, sales actually declined from year to year as publishers wavered in their commitment and interest.
The technology also has faced unique resistance from consumers because printed books work so well.
The most well-known dedicated reading devices, the Kindle and Sony Corp.'s Reader, try to emulate the look of the printed page with a display technology known as "electronic ink."
While many find the result pleasant to read, e-ink also imposes significant limitations on the devices. They can't be backlit like other screens. They can't show color. They're also slow to update, making them difficult to use for Web browsing or other computer activities.
The Kindle has a wireless connection directly to Amazon's store, meaning users can buy and download books to the device within minutes, just as Castaldo could do on his smart phone. The Reader lacks a wireless capability and thus needs to be connected to a computer to load books.
Amazon isn't betting solely on the Kindle. It released an iPhone app for the Kindle store in March. It has snapped up some other developers of book-reading applications for smart phones, but these programs don't use the Kindle store.
Shanna Vaughn, a university worker and voracious reader in Orange County, Calif., has read e-books on a computer or handheld organizer for at least 10 years, but it was only an occasional habit until she got an iPhone last year. It's mainly the convenience that's winning her over: Because Vaughn can buy and download books nearly instantly to the phone, she doesn't need to plan a trip to the book store.
Vaughn, 35, is not interested in a Kindle or a Reader.
"I never really wanted something that was a single-function device. I just couldn't see spending ... $300 for a device where I'm sort of locked in to one retailer. Whereas my phone, that does everything."
Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said that although the Kindle has sparked interest in e-books, downloads of e-reading applications for smart phones have far outnumbered the Kindles sold.
The Stanza app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, for instance, has been downloaded more than 2 million times since last summer, compared with Rotman Epps' estimate of more than 900,000 Kindles sold through the first quarter of this year.
"There will be a market for dedicated reading devices, but there's potentially an even bigger market for reading on devices that people already own, like smart phones," she said.
According to a survey of 2,600 adults by research firm Simba Information this spring, the most common way to read e-books is on another general-purpose device: the personal computer. It found that 8 percent of adults had bought an e-book last year, a high figure considering that Kindle sales were less than half a percent of the adult population.
Bob LiVolsi, the founder and chief executive of independent e-book retailer BooksOnBoard, said two-thirds of his customers read their books on their PCs. Romance, thriller and mystery titles costing $5 to $7 are the big draw for his customers, who aren't high earners and have trouble justifying the cost of a dedicated device.
Though adoption has been slow, PCs have had a big head start in e-books, said Michael Norris, senior publishing analyst at Simba. Their ubiquity also means they provide some camouflage to avid readers who want to "read a romance novel at work while pretending to work," he said.
Robert Lisi, a construction estimator in Charleston, S.C., reads on his BlackBerry when he doesn't have his Sony Reader handy.
He's even signed up for The Daily Lit, a service that sends out books in e-mail every day, broken up into chunks that take about five minutes to read on a BlackBerry or computer screen.
"I have books on tape, and then I have books on paper and as e-books," Lisi said. "I want to get to where I'm reading a book a week, but I work, so I can't do that."
Peter Svensson, The Associated Press
Dallas Morning News, August 14, 2009
A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.
"Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself," Castaldo thought.
He didn't have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble Inc. had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo, 54, downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
As others also are discovering, the North Haven, Conn., banker found e-books quite accessible without a Kindle.
"The BlackBerry is always with me," Castaldo said. "Rather than just sitting there, if I can fill that time by reading a good book, I might do that, in addition to doing the other things I might do, like reading e-mail and twittering."
Thanks to Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle, e-book sales are finally zooming, after more than a decade in the doldrums.
But the pioneering device may not dominate the market for long. As Castaldo found, many phones are sophisticated enough to be used as e-book reading devices.
E-book sales reported to the Association of American Publishers have been rising sharply since the beginning of 2008, just after the release of the Kindle. It's the best sustained growth that the industry has seen since the International Digital Publishing Forum began tracking sales in 2002 – a sign that e-books finally could be about to break into the mainstream.
U.S. trade e-book sales in the April-to-June period this year more than tripled from the amount a year ago, as reported by about a dozen publishers.
Total reported sales at wholesale prices were $37.6 million. That's less than 2 percent of the overall book market, but the number understates e-book sales, because not all publishers contribute to the report. The figure also excludes textbooks, an area where e-books have made substantial inroads.
While other digital media such as CDs, DVDs and MP3s showed sharp growth rates from the get-go, e-books have puttered around as a tiny fraction of overall book sales for more than a decade. In several periods, sales actually declined from year to year as publishers wavered in their commitment and interest.
The technology also has faced unique resistance from consumers because printed books work so well.
The most well-known dedicated reading devices, the Kindle and Sony Corp.'s Reader, try to emulate the look of the printed page with a display technology known as "electronic ink."
While many find the result pleasant to read, e-ink also imposes significant limitations on the devices. They can't be backlit like other screens. They can't show color. They're also slow to update, making them difficult to use for Web browsing or other computer activities.
The Kindle has a wireless connection directly to Amazon's store, meaning users can buy and download books to the device within minutes, just as Castaldo could do on his smart phone. The Reader lacks a wireless capability and thus needs to be connected to a computer to load books.
Amazon isn't betting solely on the Kindle. It released an iPhone app for the Kindle store in March. It has snapped up some other developers of book-reading applications for smart phones, but these programs don't use the Kindle store.
Shanna Vaughn, a university worker and voracious reader in Orange County, Calif., has read e-books on a computer or handheld organizer for at least 10 years, but it was only an occasional habit until she got an iPhone last year. It's mainly the convenience that's winning her over: Because Vaughn can buy and download books nearly instantly to the phone, she doesn't need to plan a trip to the book store.
Vaughn, 35, is not interested in a Kindle or a Reader.
"I never really wanted something that was a single-function device. I just couldn't see spending ... $300 for a device where I'm sort of locked in to one retailer. Whereas my phone, that does everything."
Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said that although the Kindle has sparked interest in e-books, downloads of e-reading applications for smart phones have far outnumbered the Kindles sold.
The Stanza app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, for instance, has been downloaded more than 2 million times since last summer, compared with Rotman Epps' estimate of more than 900,000 Kindles sold through the first quarter of this year.
"There will be a market for dedicated reading devices, but there's potentially an even bigger market for reading on devices that people already own, like smart phones," she said.
According to a survey of 2,600 adults by research firm Simba Information this spring, the most common way to read e-books is on another general-purpose device: the personal computer. It found that 8 percent of adults had bought an e-book last year, a high figure considering that Kindle sales were less than half a percent of the adult population.
Bob LiVolsi, the founder and chief executive of independent e-book retailer BooksOnBoard, said two-thirds of his customers read their books on their PCs. Romance, thriller and mystery titles costing $5 to $7 are the big draw for his customers, who aren't high earners and have trouble justifying the cost of a dedicated device.
Though adoption has been slow, PCs have had a big head start in e-books, said Michael Norris, senior publishing analyst at Simba. Their ubiquity also means they provide some camouflage to avid readers who want to "read a romance novel at work while pretending to work," he said.
Robert Lisi, a construction estimator in Charleston, S.C., reads on his BlackBerry when he doesn't have his Sony Reader handy.
He's even signed up for The Daily Lit, a service that sends out books in e-mail every day, broken up into chunks that take about five minutes to read on a BlackBerry or computer screen.
"I have books on tape, and then I have books on paper and as e-books," Lisi said. "I want to get to where I'm reading a book a week, but I work, so I can't do that."
Peter Svensson, The Associated Press
Monday, July 20, 2009
Book tells of Hispanic population growth
Book tells stories of Hispanic population growth
Charles Oliver, Dalton Daily Citizen, July 19, 2009
In 1980, the Census Bureau reported there were just 526 Hispanic residents in Whitfield County, 237 of them in Dalton. By 1990, the census found there were 2,321 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 1,422 in the city of Dalton. And by the 2000 census, the bureau reported 18,419 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 11,219 in Dalton.
Those numbers, which many people believe underestimate the growth, gave Whitfield County, and Dalton in particular, one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations in the nation. And much of that growth has been fueled by immigration, particularly from Mexico.
The rapid changes that has produced has been the subject of numerous stories in newspapers across the country as well as various academic studies.
Now, many Dalton residents, Hispanic and non-Hispanic, are telling what they have experienced, thanks to a new book, “Voices from the Nueva Frontera: Latino Immigration in Dalton, Georgia.”
Donald Davis, a professor of sociology at Dalton State College and one of the editors and authors of the book, said the idea for the book began when three Hispanic students from DSC spoke at a meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association in Helen, Ga., in 2002. The ASA, headquartered at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., promotes dialogue and research into Appalachian life and culture.
“They just told their stories, how they came to Dalton. And the response was amazing,” Davis said. He said the scholars were impressed by the journeys those students and their families had made.
Davis and David Boyle, dean of DSC’s School of Social Work, began talking about creating an “oral history” book that would let the residents of Dalton tell their stories.
“We always felt those stories had something powerful to say,” he said.
They and co-editors Thomas Deaton, a professor of social sciences at DSC, and Jo-Anne Schick, former director of the Georgia Project, and others spent the next five years interviewing dozens of people in Whitfield County. The Georgia Project was founded in 1996 to help educate Latino students which then made up almost 40 percent of the Dalton Public Schools enrollment.
“We identified themes relating to the Latino community in Dalton, and they had to do with areas of community life or community development,” said Boyle. “We knew there had to be a chapter on public education. There has to be a chapter on business development. There has to be a chapter on social work. We tried to find someone who was knowledgeable about that area.”
The book is divided into nine chapters covering everything from “the economic impact” to “the public school response” to “the social problems.” The voices of Dalton residents are put into context with introductions and scholarly analyses by the authors.
One of the voices in the book belongs to America Gruner. A native of Mexico, Gruner moved to Dalton from Los Angeles in 2000 because she had heard there were opportunities here for bilingual people. Her first job in Dalton was as a translator for Dalton Public Schools.
“The schools didn’t have many teachers who were bilingual. The health department didn’t have enough bilingual people. But things are changing,” she said.
Deaton said there have been Hispanics in Dalton at least as far back as the 1950s but probably the first large-scale immigration to the area came in 1969 when Hispanic laborers came to help build Carters Dam. Most left the area for other construction jobs when the project was finished, but others remained behind to work in chicken processing and, later, the carpet industry.
Deaton said the Hispanic immigrants to Dalton followed many different paths, but he said that many were related as much to family as to jobs.
Charles Oliver, Dalton Daily Citizen, July 19, 2009
In 1980, the Census Bureau reported there were just 526 Hispanic residents in Whitfield County, 237 of them in Dalton. By 1990, the census found there were 2,321 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 1,422 in the city of Dalton. And by the 2000 census, the bureau reported 18,419 Hispanics in Whitfield County, with 11,219 in Dalton.
Those numbers, which many people believe underestimate the growth, gave Whitfield County, and Dalton in particular, one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations in the nation. And much of that growth has been fueled by immigration, particularly from Mexico.
The rapid changes that has produced has been the subject of numerous stories in newspapers across the country as well as various academic studies.
Now, many Dalton residents, Hispanic and non-Hispanic, are telling what they have experienced, thanks to a new book, “Voices from the Nueva Frontera: Latino Immigration in Dalton, Georgia.”
Donald Davis, a professor of sociology at Dalton State College and one of the editors and authors of the book, said the idea for the book began when three Hispanic students from DSC spoke at a meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association in Helen, Ga., in 2002. The ASA, headquartered at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., promotes dialogue and research into Appalachian life and culture.
“They just told their stories, how they came to Dalton. And the response was amazing,” Davis said. He said the scholars were impressed by the journeys those students and their families had made.
Davis and David Boyle, dean of DSC’s School of Social Work, began talking about creating an “oral history” book that would let the residents of Dalton tell their stories.
“We always felt those stories had something powerful to say,” he said.
They and co-editors Thomas Deaton, a professor of social sciences at DSC, and Jo-Anne Schick, former director of the Georgia Project, and others spent the next five years interviewing dozens of people in Whitfield County. The Georgia Project was founded in 1996 to help educate Latino students which then made up almost 40 percent of the Dalton Public Schools enrollment.
“We identified themes relating to the Latino community in Dalton, and they had to do with areas of community life or community development,” said Boyle. “We knew there had to be a chapter on public education. There has to be a chapter on business development. There has to be a chapter on social work. We tried to find someone who was knowledgeable about that area.”
The book is divided into nine chapters covering everything from “the economic impact” to “the public school response” to “the social problems.” The voices of Dalton residents are put into context with introductions and scholarly analyses by the authors.
One of the voices in the book belongs to America Gruner. A native of Mexico, Gruner moved to Dalton from Los Angeles in 2000 because she had heard there were opportunities here for bilingual people. Her first job in Dalton was as a translator for Dalton Public Schools.
“The schools didn’t have many teachers who were bilingual. The health department didn’t have enough bilingual people. But things are changing,” she said.
Deaton said there have been Hispanics in Dalton at least as far back as the 1950s but probably the first large-scale immigration to the area came in 1969 when Hispanic laborers came to help build Carters Dam. Most left the area for other construction jobs when the project was finished, but others remained behind to work in chicken processing and, later, the carpet industry.
Deaton said the Hispanic immigrants to Dalton followed many different paths, but he said that many were related as much to family as to jobs.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Latina Book Club enjoying reading
Enjoy a summer read with Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club
Teresa Carbajal Ravet, Examiner, July 12, 2009
Las Comadres Para las Americas is a national Latina network of women that was born in Austin of a desire to build knowledge and community among all Latinas. Nora de Hoyos Comstock, founder and president of Las Comadres, took an informal Latino gathering of women and made it a national organization that advocates community education and involvement. Historically comadres have been Hispanas helping Hispanas, sharing news, sharing secrets, and simply sharing, as well as midwives and godmothers supporting women and their children in their everyday life.
The vision for Las Comadres is to empower women to be actively engaged in the growing Latino/Hispanic communities through online and face to face networks. By connecting women everywhere through community building and networking, culture, learning, and technology Las Comadres’ mission to empower Latinas is reaching international success.
One of its supportive initiatives is the Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club. Reading with Las Comadres is a book club with membership open to anyone interested in reading works written by Latina and Latino authors in the English language. Comadres and friends are encourage to be a part of a local reading group to gather and discuss “high quality literature by and for the Latino community” and all of its friends. Latinas, Latinos, and friends meet once a month to offer diverse perspectives on the month’s book selection. In Austin there are two such clubs, one in North Austin and another in South Austin, that meet during the third week of the month.
The Las Comadres & Friends book club of North Austin meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 7 PM at Borders bookstore in The Domain. Contact Nora de Hoyos Comstock or the North Austin book club coordinator, Cynthia Ramos, to join in the discussion. The South Austin book club meets on the third Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Borders in the Westgate Marketplace. Contact Nora de Hoys Comstock or the South Austin book club coordinator, Teresa Carbajal Ravet, to join in the discussion. Explore the 2009 book selections and their consequent author teleconference to enjoy a cultural and bilingual literary experience.
June’s book selection was Rogelia’s House of Magic by Jamie Martinez Wood published by Delacorte Press. Tune in to Austin Latino Neighborhood Examiner’s book review coming up soon and get a foretaste of the enchanting perceptions emerging at the book club gatherings! For the month of July the book selection of Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos, published by Atheneum, will prove to be an award winning read!
Enjoy!
Teresa Carbajal Ravet, Examiner, July 12, 2009
Las Comadres Para las Americas is a national Latina network of women that was born in Austin of a desire to build knowledge and community among all Latinas. Nora de Hoyos Comstock, founder and president of Las Comadres, took an informal Latino gathering of women and made it a national organization that advocates community education and involvement. Historically comadres have been Hispanas helping Hispanas, sharing news, sharing secrets, and simply sharing, as well as midwives and godmothers supporting women and their children in their everyday life.
The vision for Las Comadres is to empower women to be actively engaged in the growing Latino/Hispanic communities through online and face to face networks. By connecting women everywhere through community building and networking, culture, learning, and technology Las Comadres’ mission to empower Latinas is reaching international success.
One of its supportive initiatives is the Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club. Reading with Las Comadres is a book club with membership open to anyone interested in reading works written by Latina and Latino authors in the English language. Comadres and friends are encourage to be a part of a local reading group to gather and discuss “high quality literature by and for the Latino community” and all of its friends. Latinas, Latinos, and friends meet once a month to offer diverse perspectives on the month’s book selection. In Austin there are two such clubs, one in North Austin and another in South Austin, that meet during the third week of the month.
The Las Comadres & Friends book club of North Austin meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 7 PM at Borders bookstore in The Domain. Contact Nora de Hoyos Comstock or the North Austin book club coordinator, Cynthia Ramos, to join in the discussion. The South Austin book club meets on the third Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Borders in the Westgate Marketplace. Contact Nora de Hoys Comstock or the South Austin book club coordinator, Teresa Carbajal Ravet, to join in the discussion. Explore the 2009 book selections and their consequent author teleconference to enjoy a cultural and bilingual literary experience.
June’s book selection was Rogelia’s House of Magic by Jamie Martinez Wood published by Delacorte Press. Tune in to Austin Latino Neighborhood Examiner’s book review coming up soon and get a foretaste of the enchanting perceptions emerging at the book club gatherings! For the month of July the book selection of Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos, published by Atheneum, will prove to be an award winning read!
Enjoy!
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Hispanic novels evolving
Writers sense a trend as modern Hispanic novel evolves
Peter Kelton, EXAMINER, July 9
While literary meetings in Albuquerque haven't quite gained the stature of Big Sur conferences, they do rise to the level of a healthy literary tributary, according to many of the writers who attended this year's annual National Latino Writers Conference and other seminars at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
The novelists that these Hispanic writers recommend gives a clue to what's going on in their thinking. They indicate they have begun to see their words morph into a new kind of Hispanic modernism, an evolutionary maturing that shows a broader perception of what the novel can be. And it's not sensed only in Albuquerque, but wherever Hispanic writers let their thoughts be known.
For example, Sandra Cisneros, founder of The Macondo Foundation in San Antonio, held a book signing at the Hispanic center in October of 2006 for her 2002 novel "Caramelo" (Random House). Last month she completed a book tour for the 25th Anniversary edition of her novel "The House on Mango Street" (Arte Público Press, reprinted by Vintage Random House). Both novels were clearly autobiographical. Yet today, among the books she recommends on her web site is "The Uncommon Reader," a novella by Alan Bennett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The British author imagines a world in which literature becomes a subversive bridge between powerbrokers and commoners. The genre is a long way from Cisneros' coming-of-age Mango story of 1984.
Writers at a recent seminar suggested a variety of Hispanic novelists as "must" reading. They were: Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Benjamín Prado (Spain), Blanca Riestra (Spain), Israel Centeno (Venezuela), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Ricardo Menéndez Salmón (Spain), and the venerable Carlos Fuentes (Mexico).
What's happening apparently involves a combination of traditional magic realism and the newer gritty reality of the McOndo movement. The latter pokes fun at Macondo, the fictional town created by Nobel Prize writer Gabriel García Márquez in his classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (HarperCollins). Cisneros named her foundation after Macondo, a graphic example of magic realism, but the foundation's writing workshops work toward helping all kinds of young writers in a variety of venues, and has led to numerous book publishings by Macondistas. The next such workshop is scheduled July 29-Aug. 1 in San Antonio.
The term magic realism, according to Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University in Pennsylvania, describes the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), as well as the work of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Gunter Grass (Germany), and John Fowles (England). These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.
Fuentes, of course, has written in both styles for some time. "La muerte de Artemio Cruz [The Death of Artemio Cruz]" (Spanish bySuma, English by Penguin Group USA) for example, has a McOndo touch. The revised edition, "The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux – 1991) is a better translation. His "Terra Nostra" (Dalkey Archive Press) uses magic realism to move through history brilliantly, according to its reviews.
About the McOndo trend, the maturing Fuentes told The New York Times six years ago, "I really support what they're doing," and joked that Fuentes himself belonged to "the prehistoric age." He's published 24 novels.
The Hispanic center bestows a literary award every couple of years. Early recipients included Rudolfo Anaya, considered by many to be the founder of modern Chicano literature. Anaya is far from "prehistoric" in the Fuentes sense. He's professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. His early novel, "Bless Me, Ultima" (Grand Central) is set in the 1940s, is highly moralistic, and quite distant from the newer Hispanic novels. He still deals in a world of magic, mystery and redemption in his recent book, "The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories" (University of Oklahoma Press). That distance from Anaya to current Hispanic novels appears about as great as the upcoming 2010 Census will be from the first Census in 1790, done on horseback. The 2010 Census will be done with hand-held computers.
Peter Kelton, EXAMINER, July 9
While literary meetings in Albuquerque haven't quite gained the stature of Big Sur conferences, they do rise to the level of a healthy literary tributary, according to many of the writers who attended this year's annual National Latino Writers Conference and other seminars at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
The novelists that these Hispanic writers recommend gives a clue to what's going on in their thinking. They indicate they have begun to see their words morph into a new kind of Hispanic modernism, an evolutionary maturing that shows a broader perception of what the novel can be. And it's not sensed only in Albuquerque, but wherever Hispanic writers let their thoughts be known.
For example, Sandra Cisneros, founder of The Macondo Foundation in San Antonio, held a book signing at the Hispanic center in October of 2006 for her 2002 novel "Caramelo" (Random House). Last month she completed a book tour for the 25th Anniversary edition of her novel "The House on Mango Street" (Arte Público Press, reprinted by Vintage Random House). Both novels were clearly autobiographical. Yet today, among the books she recommends on her web site is "The Uncommon Reader," a novella by Alan Bennett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The British author imagines a world in which literature becomes a subversive bridge between powerbrokers and commoners. The genre is a long way from Cisneros' coming-of-age Mango story of 1984.
Writers at a recent seminar suggested a variety of Hispanic novelists as "must" reading. They were: Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Benjamín Prado (Spain), Blanca Riestra (Spain), Israel Centeno (Venezuela), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Ricardo Menéndez Salmón (Spain), and the venerable Carlos Fuentes (Mexico).
What's happening apparently involves a combination of traditional magic realism and the newer gritty reality of the McOndo movement. The latter pokes fun at Macondo, the fictional town created by Nobel Prize writer Gabriel García Márquez in his classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (HarperCollins). Cisneros named her foundation after Macondo, a graphic example of magic realism, but the foundation's writing workshops work toward helping all kinds of young writers in a variety of venues, and has led to numerous book publishings by Macondistas. The next such workshop is scheduled July 29-Aug. 1 in San Antonio.
The term magic realism, according to Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University in Pennsylvania, describes the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), as well as the work of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Gunter Grass (Germany), and John Fowles (England). These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.
Fuentes, of course, has written in both styles for some time. "La muerte de Artemio Cruz [The Death of Artemio Cruz]" (Spanish bySuma, English by Penguin Group USA) for example, has a McOndo touch. The revised edition, "The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux – 1991) is a better translation. His "Terra Nostra" (Dalkey Archive Press) uses magic realism to move through history brilliantly, according to its reviews.
About the McOndo trend, the maturing Fuentes told The New York Times six years ago, "I really support what they're doing," and joked that Fuentes himself belonged to "the prehistoric age." He's published 24 novels.
The Hispanic center bestows a literary award every couple of years. Early recipients included Rudolfo Anaya, considered by many to be the founder of modern Chicano literature. Anaya is far from "prehistoric" in the Fuentes sense. He's professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. His early novel, "Bless Me, Ultima" (Grand Central) is set in the 1940s, is highly moralistic, and quite distant from the newer Hispanic novels. He still deals in a world of magic, mystery and redemption in his recent book, "The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories" (University of Oklahoma Press). That distance from Anaya to current Hispanic novels appears about as great as the upcoming 2010 Census will be from the first Census in 1790, done on horseback. The 2010 Census will be done with hand-held computers.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Latino authors featured in virtual book tours
Virtual book tours especially for Latino/a authors
by Mayra Calvani, Examiner.com
There's a new blogger in town offering virtual book tours especially for Latino/a authors and her name is Jo Ann Hernandez, the lady behind BronzeWord Latino Authors. An author herself, Jo Ann knows how hard it is to promote books in the very competitive world of publishing. She has many contacts in the Latino blogosphere and will plan and coordinate your virtual book tour according to you and your book. Jo Ann is the award-winning author of the young adult novels, White Bread Competition and The Throwaway Piece.
The first Latino virtual book tour is happening right now and Jo Ann's first client is 20-year old novelist Estevan Vega, author of suspense thrillers. In this tour, he's promoting his 2nd book,The Sacred Sin.
I recently did an article on Estevan. If you'd like to read it, please click HERE.
Below is the full tour schedule. If you're a book lover, consider visiting the blogs and leaving comments. Vega will be giving away an autographed copy of his novel to one lucky winner EACH day of the tour! I'll be hosting the author here on the Examiner on June 27th, the last day of the tour.
Full schedule:
June 14
BronzeWord Latino Authors, http://authorslatino.com/wordpress
Eljumpingbean, http://eljumpingbean.blogspot.com
June 15
Latinitas Magazine, http://www.mylatinitas.com
June 16
The Art of Random Willynillyness.com, http://theartofrandomwillynillyness.blogspot.com
Carol In Carolina, http://caroincarolina.blogspot.com
June 17
Caridad Pineiro, http://www.caridad.com/
June 18
Writing to Insanity, http://www.locacrazywriter.blogspot.com
June 19
Lara Rios http://juliaamante.blogspot.com/
June 20
Musings http://Nilkibenitez.blogspot.com
June 21
RafaelMarquez.me http://www.rafaelmarquez.me
June 22
Latina Reader http://blogs.qoobole.com/latina-reader
June 23
Café of Deams http://cafeofdreams.blogspot.com/
June 24
Latino Pundit http://www.latinopundit.com
June 25
Queer Latino Musings on Literature http://charlievazquez.wordpress.com/
June 26
Mama Latina Tips http://www.mamalatinatips.com
June 27
Latino Book Examiner http://www.examiner.com/x-6309-Latino-Books-Examiner
More info: http://authorslatino.com/wordpress
by Mayra Calvani, Examiner.com
There's a new blogger in town offering virtual book tours especially for Latino/a authors and her name is Jo Ann Hernandez, the lady behind BronzeWord Latino Authors. An author herself, Jo Ann knows how hard it is to promote books in the very competitive world of publishing. She has many contacts in the Latino blogosphere and will plan and coordinate your virtual book tour according to you and your book. Jo Ann is the award-winning author of the young adult novels, White Bread Competition and The Throwaway Piece.
The first Latino virtual book tour is happening right now and Jo Ann's first client is 20-year old novelist Estevan Vega, author of suspense thrillers. In this tour, he's promoting his 2nd book,The Sacred Sin.
I recently did an article on Estevan. If you'd like to read it, please click HERE.
Below is the full tour schedule. If you're a book lover, consider visiting the blogs and leaving comments. Vega will be giving away an autographed copy of his novel to one lucky winner EACH day of the tour! I'll be hosting the author here on the Examiner on June 27th, the last day of the tour.
Full schedule:
June 14
BronzeWord Latino Authors, http://authorslatino.com/wordpress
Eljumpingbean, http://eljumpingbean.blogspot.com
June 15
Latinitas Magazine, http://www.mylatinitas.com
June 16
The Art of Random Willynillyness.com, http://theartofrandomwillynillyness.blogspot.com
Carol In Carolina, http://caroincarolina.blogspot.com
June 17
Caridad Pineiro, http://www.caridad.com/
June 18
Writing to Insanity, http://www.locacrazywriter.blogspot.com
June 19
Lara Rios http://juliaamante.blogspot.com/
June 20
Musings http://Nilkibenitez.blogspot.com
June 21
RafaelMarquez.me http://www.rafaelmarquez.me
June 22
Latina Reader http://blogs.qoobole.com/latina-reader
June 23
Café of Deams http://cafeofdreams.blogspot.com/
June 24
Latino Pundit http://www.latinopundit.com
June 25
Queer Latino Musings on Literature http://charlievazquez.wordpress.com/
June 26
Mama Latina Tips http://www.mamalatinatips.com
June 27
Latino Book Examiner http://www.examiner.com/x-6309-Latino-Books-Examiner
More info: http://authorslatino.com/wordpress
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Latino book award goes to race care driver
Duno book wins Latino award
USA Today
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A book by IndyCar driver Milka Duno has been selected the best young adult sports/recreation book of 2009 at the 11th Annual International Latino Book Awards.
The book, "Go, Milka, Go!" features the Venezuelan driver sharing the importance of education to children of all ages.
She calls the award, presented in New York on Thursday, a "wonderful surprise and a cherished honor."
Duno says the story was designed to be "both entertaining and inspiring" for youngsters.
USA Today
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A book by IndyCar driver Milka Duno has been selected the best young adult sports/recreation book of 2009 at the 11th Annual International Latino Book Awards.
The book, "Go, Milka, Go!" features the Venezuelan driver sharing the importance of education to children of all ages.
She calls the award, presented in New York on Thursday, a "wonderful surprise and a cherished honor."
Duno says the story was designed to be "both entertaining and inspiring" for youngsters.
Monday, June 1, 2009
E-books lack Latino titles
Lost in translation: The Spanish-language puzzle
By HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — The long-rumored e-book boom at last has arrived. But publishers still wait, and wait, for another supposed surge: Spanish-language titles.
Thousands of booksellers, publishers and authors gathered for BookExpo America, the industry's annual national convention, which ended Sunday. Along with much discussion about rapidly growing digital sales, there was disappointment, and some confusion, about the relative slowness of Spanish sales in any format.
Publishers have looked for years to the Hispanic market, which back in 2000 was spotlighted at BookExpo as one of great promise. The Hispanic population is at least 45 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and ever more prominent, especially after the recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
But Spanish-language sales remained small and sporadic. A handful of books — translations of such blockbusters as the "Harry Potter" series and "The Da Vinci Code" — might sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Otherwise, a Spanish work is lucky to sell more than 10,000, according to Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy.
And the e-book market for Spanish titles is virtually nonexistent, publishers said.
Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins where the Spanish-language imprint was cut during recent companywide layoffs, said the publisher was in a "holding pattern" on that market until the economy improves.
Although Simon & Schuster had success with the translation of Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret," Reidy said the market "just hasn't coalesced."
Publishers are as unsure of solutions as they are of causes. They debate the need, or the possibility, of a single breakthrough book with the impact of Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale," which sold millions in the 1990s and awakened the industry to the size of the African-American market. And they wonder whether immigrants are more eager to learn English than to read in Spanish.
David Young, CEO of the Hachette Book Group, said the industry needs to hire more Hispanics and develop a more focused strategy.
"We've been taking baby steps, but we should probably accelerate it," Young said.
Carlos Azula, vice president and director of foreign language sales at Random House Inc., said most publishers don't understand the people they're trying to sell to. The Spanish-speaking population is too diverse and spread out for a unified, best-seller approach, he said, and Spanish-speaking immigrants need time to adjust, to figure out where to buy books, what to read and even whether to read.
"I started at Random House 10 years ago and I said then that this would be a long-term project," Azula said. "It's not going to be 5 years or 10 years. It's going to take 20 to 25 years."
The BookExpo America, held at Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was a low-budget, low-celebrity convention, with fewer parties and fewer advanced copies of books than in the past, and a sense that the best way to meet expectations was to lower them.
Publishers speculated about BookExpo's future. So much business is now completed online and the number of independent booksellers, who have traditionally been the heart of the convention, has dropped by more than 100 to 1,401 core members in less than five years.
"A lot has changed, and this show will have to morph into what the industry needs," said David Shanks, the CEO of Penguin Group (USA).
With a fingers-crossed outlook that the worst was over for publishing sales, the industry offered a long lineup of potential hits for the fall, from Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" to Pat Conroy's "South of Broad." One of the Spanish-language market's most popular authors, Isabel Allende, has written "La Isla Bajo el Mar" ("The Island Below the Sea"), which will be available only in Spanish at first.
Other highlights included new nonfiction from Jon Krakauer, Malcolm Gladwell, Tracy Kidder and Barack Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe. Novels were expected from Patricia Cornwell, E.L. Doctorow and Jane Smiley, with a posthumous work from Michael Crichton.
Barnes & Noble Inc. fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley had special affection for Audrey Niffenegger's "Her Fearful Symmetry," the follow-up to the million-selling "The Time Traveler's Wife." She also liked Barbara Kingsolver's latest, "The Lacuna," which Hensley read on a recently purchased Sony e-book reader.
Hensley, who said that both she and her husband own electronic book readers, admitted she liked the device for its travel convenience but pointed out its inferior qualities to a book.
"The problem is, I like to flip back and forth in a book, but that's hard to do with the Sony," she said. "Another thing I like about a book is that you can bang it up — and you can't bang up a Sony reader."
By HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — The long-rumored e-book boom at last has arrived. But publishers still wait, and wait, for another supposed surge: Spanish-language titles.
Thousands of booksellers, publishers and authors gathered for BookExpo America, the industry's annual national convention, which ended Sunday. Along with much discussion about rapidly growing digital sales, there was disappointment, and some confusion, about the relative slowness of Spanish sales in any format.
Publishers have looked for years to the Hispanic market, which back in 2000 was spotlighted at BookExpo as one of great promise. The Hispanic population is at least 45 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and ever more prominent, especially after the recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
But Spanish-language sales remained small and sporadic. A handful of books — translations of such blockbusters as the "Harry Potter" series and "The Da Vinci Code" — might sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Otherwise, a Spanish work is lucky to sell more than 10,000, according to Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy.
And the e-book market for Spanish titles is virtually nonexistent, publishers said.
Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins where the Spanish-language imprint was cut during recent companywide layoffs, said the publisher was in a "holding pattern" on that market until the economy improves.
Although Simon & Schuster had success with the translation of Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret," Reidy said the market "just hasn't coalesced."
Publishers are as unsure of solutions as they are of causes. They debate the need, or the possibility, of a single breakthrough book with the impact of Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale," which sold millions in the 1990s and awakened the industry to the size of the African-American market. And they wonder whether immigrants are more eager to learn English than to read in Spanish.
David Young, CEO of the Hachette Book Group, said the industry needs to hire more Hispanics and develop a more focused strategy.
"We've been taking baby steps, but we should probably accelerate it," Young said.
Carlos Azula, vice president and director of foreign language sales at Random House Inc., said most publishers don't understand the people they're trying to sell to. The Spanish-speaking population is too diverse and spread out for a unified, best-seller approach, he said, and Spanish-speaking immigrants need time to adjust, to figure out where to buy books, what to read and even whether to read.
"I started at Random House 10 years ago and I said then that this would be a long-term project," Azula said. "It's not going to be 5 years or 10 years. It's going to take 20 to 25 years."
The BookExpo America, held at Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was a low-budget, low-celebrity convention, with fewer parties and fewer advanced copies of books than in the past, and a sense that the best way to meet expectations was to lower them.
Publishers speculated about BookExpo's future. So much business is now completed online and the number of independent booksellers, who have traditionally been the heart of the convention, has dropped by more than 100 to 1,401 core members in less than five years.
"A lot has changed, and this show will have to morph into what the industry needs," said David Shanks, the CEO of Penguin Group (USA).
With a fingers-crossed outlook that the worst was over for publishing sales, the industry offered a long lineup of potential hits for the fall, from Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" to Pat Conroy's "South of Broad." One of the Spanish-language market's most popular authors, Isabel Allende, has written "La Isla Bajo el Mar" ("The Island Below the Sea"), which will be available only in Spanish at first.
Other highlights included new nonfiction from Jon Krakauer, Malcolm Gladwell, Tracy Kidder and Barack Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe. Novels were expected from Patricia Cornwell, E.L. Doctorow and Jane Smiley, with a posthumous work from Michael Crichton.
Barnes & Noble Inc. fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley had special affection for Audrey Niffenegger's "Her Fearful Symmetry," the follow-up to the million-selling "The Time Traveler's Wife." She also liked Barbara Kingsolver's latest, "The Lacuna," which Hensley read on a recently purchased Sony e-book reader.
Hensley, who said that both she and her husband own electronic book readers, admitted she liked the device for its travel convenience but pointed out its inferior qualities to a book.
"The problem is, I like to flip back and forth in a book, but that's hard to do with the Sony," she said. "Another thing I like about a book is that you can bang it up — and you can't bang up a Sony reader."
Monday, May 25, 2009
Latino book of the month giveaway continues
Latino Book Month Giveaway 3rd winner announcement
Examiner, May 22, 2009
Latino Book Month Giveaway continues...
The third week of the Latino Book Month Giveaway has reached its end and it's my pleasure to announce the winner...
Our third lucky winner is... Color Online!!!!!
Congratulations! You've won the set of five books listed below!
Please send me your snail mail address to mayra.calvani@gmail.com so I may forward it to Valerie Russo, the publicist at Hachette who will be sending you the whole set of 5 books listed below. Happy reading!
The Latino Book Month Giveaway will continue for one more week until the end of the month, so please keep sending comments for a chance to win. People who have left comments since the contest started (May 1st) are still eligible to win in the upcoming week. New visitors, all you need to do is leave a comment during any of my posts dated May 1-31.
The 4th and last winner will be announced next Friday, May 29th
Examiner, May 22, 2009
Latino Book Month Giveaway continues...
The third week of the Latino Book Month Giveaway has reached its end and it's my pleasure to announce the winner...
Our third lucky winner is... Color Online!!!!!
Congratulations! You've won the set of five books listed below!
Please send me your snail mail address to mayra.calvani@gmail.com so I may forward it to Valerie Russo, the publicist at Hachette who will be sending you the whole set of 5 books listed below. Happy reading!
The Latino Book Month Giveaway will continue for one more week until the end of the month, so please keep sending comments for a chance to win. People who have left comments since the contest started (May 1st) are still eligible to win in the upcoming week. New visitors, all you need to do is leave a comment during any of my posts dated May 1-31.
The 4th and last winner will be announced next Friday, May 29th
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Professor promotes Latino comic books
OSU professor shares story of Latino comics
Steve Skok, The Lantern, 5/21/09
Rocketo is a futuristic superhero who discovers lost cultures and civilizations. Paco Ramone is a street savvy break-dancer who uses sound and music to defeat his enemies. Ohio State professor Frederick Aldama hopes that these characters can teach people about a range of subjects: from the historic representation of Latino characters to how the brain interprets stories and ideas.
Aldama's new book, "Your Brain On Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez," includes 21 interviews with Latino authors. It seeks not only to catalog a variety of comics, but also to examine how the human brain reacts to images and text while reading stories.
"The book not only tells you the story about Latinos in comic books," Aldama said, "it tells you something as foundational as how we can imagine other places, how we can feel, or be emotionally moved by, something that is not in our present tense experience."
Take for example the series "Rocketo," created by author Frank Espinosa. The series takes places 2,000 years in the future and Rocketo is the only person who can navigate Earth after a disaster that shifted continents and oceans.
"The character Rocketo is special because he is the only living memory of spaces, where the different continents are on the planet," Aldama said.
Aldama says comics such as "Rocketo" can be used as an alternative way of portraying actions, events and situations to readers who may not otherwise be able to imagine them.
"Storytelling is one aspect of being able to imagine a hypothetical situation," Aldama said. "It's just that novelists, comic book authors, artists, sculptors, scientists, we've all sort of chosen different ways to educate and refine the direction of that foundational impulse."
One detail unique to comics, which Aldama examines in his book, is the gutter that separates each illustration on a page. Aldama says these gaps allow readers to interpret for themselves what is happening between frames.
"In that movement you might imagine, more clearly, something like a leap, and I might imagine more clearly a step," Aldama said.
Aldama also explained that the book will study different representations of Latino characters over the course of history.
"For the sociology professor, for the history professor it's important because it can tell us something about the kind of audiences that were being imagined by those comic book authors in a particular place and time," Aldama said.
"Your Brain On Latino Comics" will be featured at Comic-Con in San Deigo, one of the world's largest stages for comic books and popular arts. Aldama is confident that it will appeal to academics as well as everyday comic enthusiasts.
"I wrote it with a crossover audience in mind," Aldama said. "What I do is sort of digest all the brain science and stuff to make it very user-friendly."
"Your Brain on Latin Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez," set for release June 1, will be available at the Wexner Center Bookstore. The store will host a book signing for Aldama at 5:20 p.m. on May 22.
Steve Skok can be reached at skok.2@osu.edu.
Steve Skok, The Lantern, 5/21/09
Rocketo is a futuristic superhero who discovers lost cultures and civilizations. Paco Ramone is a street savvy break-dancer who uses sound and music to defeat his enemies. Ohio State professor Frederick Aldama hopes that these characters can teach people about a range of subjects: from the historic representation of Latino characters to how the brain interprets stories and ideas.
Aldama's new book, "Your Brain On Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez," includes 21 interviews with Latino authors. It seeks not only to catalog a variety of comics, but also to examine how the human brain reacts to images and text while reading stories.
"The book not only tells you the story about Latinos in comic books," Aldama said, "it tells you something as foundational as how we can imagine other places, how we can feel, or be emotionally moved by, something that is not in our present tense experience."
Take for example the series "Rocketo," created by author Frank Espinosa. The series takes places 2,000 years in the future and Rocketo is the only person who can navigate Earth after a disaster that shifted continents and oceans.
"The character Rocketo is special because he is the only living memory of spaces, where the different continents are on the planet," Aldama said.
Aldama says comics such as "Rocketo" can be used as an alternative way of portraying actions, events and situations to readers who may not otherwise be able to imagine them.
"Storytelling is one aspect of being able to imagine a hypothetical situation," Aldama said. "It's just that novelists, comic book authors, artists, sculptors, scientists, we've all sort of chosen different ways to educate and refine the direction of that foundational impulse."
One detail unique to comics, which Aldama examines in his book, is the gutter that separates each illustration on a page. Aldama says these gaps allow readers to interpret for themselves what is happening between frames.
"In that movement you might imagine, more clearly, something like a leap, and I might imagine more clearly a step," Aldama said.
Aldama also explained that the book will study different representations of Latino characters over the course of history.
"For the sociology professor, for the history professor it's important because it can tell us something about the kind of audiences that were being imagined by those comic book authors in a particular place and time," Aldama said.
"Your Brain On Latino Comics" will be featured at Comic-Con in San Deigo, one of the world's largest stages for comic books and popular arts. Aldama is confident that it will appeal to academics as well as everyday comic enthusiasts.
"I wrote it with a crossover audience in mind," Aldama said. "What I do is sort of digest all the brain science and stuff to make it very user-friendly."
"Your Brain on Latin Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez," set for release June 1, will be available at the Wexner Center Bookstore. The store will host a book signing for Aldama at 5:20 p.m. on May 22.
Steve Skok can be reached at skok.2@osu.edu.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Latino books grow in popularity
Fine collection should engross any lover of mystery (not just Latinos)
Daniel A. Olivas / El Paso Times, 04/19/2009
"Hit List:The Best of Latino Mystery" (Arte Público Press, $19.95 paperback).
With the newly released "Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery" (Arte Público Press, $19.95 paperback), editors Sarah Cortez and Liz Martínez have succeeded in bringing together some of the best mystery fiction being written today.
This anthology features the work of Mario Acevedo, Lucha Corpi, Sarah Cortez, Carolina García-Aguilera, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carlos Hernandez, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Bertha Jacobson, John Lantigua, Arthur Muñoz, R. Narvarez, L.M. Quinn, Manuel Ramos, S. Ramos O'Briant, A.E. Roman, Steven Torres and Sergio Troncoso.
In the foreword to "Hit List," Ralph E. Rodriguez, an associate professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, observes that the reader "will find no boring Latino caricatures or stereotypes in this volume." There is no doubt about that.
The anthology begins with a tightly wound, two-page bit of tough-talking noir by best-selling novelist Mario Acevedo titled "Oh, Yeah." In it, the narrator attempts to teach a seemingly dimwitted accomplice named Canela how to play a supporting role in an armed robbery. Of course, things go awry, but with a twist only an accomplished writer such as Acevedo could pull off.
There's some great humor here, too, such as S. Ramos O'Briant's sardonic "Death, Taxes ... and Worms," where we're introduced to a very proper Nellie Gallegos, who knows a trifle more about the death of her neighbor than she initially admits.
Several of the stories veer into wonderfully strange territory. "The Skull of Pancho Villa" by mystery novelist Manuel Ramos is based on various rumors as to the whereabouts of the Mexican revolutionary's head. The narrator, Gus Corral, informs us that the skull ended up in his family and recounts how it gets stolen from his sister's house. If you don't laugh out loud while reading this story, you have no sense of humor.
In "Nice Climate, Miami," award-winning author Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, brings us an icy killer named O'Hara who is hired to kill a man who has failed to pay a debt. The fact that O'Hara does not appear to have any connection to Chicano or Latino culture is proof that the editors saw no reason to pigeonhole or unduly restrict Latino mystery. Hinojosa-Smith's piece is crisp and smart and fits perfectly in this anthology.
But ethnic identity is certainly part of the collection. Sergio Troncoso's "A New York Chicano" involves one Ricky Quintana, an El Paso native who has made it in New York working for Merrill Lynch and who has developed a deep hatred for a bloviating, anti-immigrant host of a television show titled "America's Watch." What Quintana does to appease this hatred proves that he hasn't lost his identity at all.
No mystery collection would be complete without a lost soul or two. Alicia Gaspar de Alba's "Short Cut to the Moon" gives us exactly that in a troubled young woman who goes deep into alcoholic homelessness when she believes that her cousin has been murdered. Her search for the truth eventually converges with an understanding of her desperate need for help.
Space constraints do not allow for a description of each story in this landmark anthology. Suffice it to say that the stories in "Hit List" will engross, entertain and fully satisfy any lover of mystery fiction.
Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and editor of "Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature" (Bilingual Press). His newest book, "Anywhere but L.A.: Stories" (Bilingual Press), will be published this fall. He shares blogging duties on La Bloga (http://labloga.blogspot.com). His Web site is www.danielolivas.com and he may be reached at olivasdan@aol.com .
Daniel A. Olivas / El Paso Times, 04/19/2009
"Hit List:The Best of Latino Mystery" (Arte Público Press, $19.95 paperback).
With the newly released "Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery" (Arte Público Press, $19.95 paperback), editors Sarah Cortez and Liz Martínez have succeeded in bringing together some of the best mystery fiction being written today.
This anthology features the work of Mario Acevedo, Lucha Corpi, Sarah Cortez, Carolina García-Aguilera, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carlos Hernandez, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Bertha Jacobson, John Lantigua, Arthur Muñoz, R. Narvarez, L.M. Quinn, Manuel Ramos, S. Ramos O'Briant, A.E. Roman, Steven Torres and Sergio Troncoso.
In the foreword to "Hit List," Ralph E. Rodriguez, an associate professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, observes that the reader "will find no boring Latino caricatures or stereotypes in this volume." There is no doubt about that.
The anthology begins with a tightly wound, two-page bit of tough-talking noir by best-selling novelist Mario Acevedo titled "Oh, Yeah." In it, the narrator attempts to teach a seemingly dimwitted accomplice named Canela how to play a supporting role in an armed robbery. Of course, things go awry, but with a twist only an accomplished writer such as Acevedo could pull off.
There's some great humor here, too, such as S. Ramos O'Briant's sardonic "Death, Taxes ... and Worms," where we're introduced to a very proper Nellie Gallegos, who knows a trifle more about the death of her neighbor than she initially admits.
Several of the stories veer into wonderfully strange territory. "The Skull of Pancho Villa" by mystery novelist Manuel Ramos is based on various rumors as to the whereabouts of the Mexican revolutionary's head. The narrator, Gus Corral, informs us that the skull ended up in his family and recounts how it gets stolen from his sister's house. If you don't laugh out loud while reading this story, you have no sense of humor.
In "Nice Climate, Miami," award-winning author Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, brings us an icy killer named O'Hara who is hired to kill a man who has failed to pay a debt. The fact that O'Hara does not appear to have any connection to Chicano or Latino culture is proof that the editors saw no reason to pigeonhole or unduly restrict Latino mystery. Hinojosa-Smith's piece is crisp and smart and fits perfectly in this anthology.
But ethnic identity is certainly part of the collection. Sergio Troncoso's "A New York Chicano" involves one Ricky Quintana, an El Paso native who has made it in New York working for Merrill Lynch and who has developed a deep hatred for a bloviating, anti-immigrant host of a television show titled "America's Watch." What Quintana does to appease this hatred proves that he hasn't lost his identity at all.
No mystery collection would be complete without a lost soul or two. Alicia Gaspar de Alba's "Short Cut to the Moon" gives us exactly that in a troubled young woman who goes deep into alcoholic homelessness when she believes that her cousin has been murdered. Her search for the truth eventually converges with an understanding of her desperate need for help.
Space constraints do not allow for a description of each story in this landmark anthology. Suffice it to say that the stories in "Hit List" will engross, entertain and fully satisfy any lover of mystery fiction.
Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and editor of "Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature" (Bilingual Press). His newest book, "Anywhere but L.A.: Stories" (Bilingual Press), will be published this fall. He shares blogging duties on La Bloga (http://labloga.blogspot.com). His Web site is www.danielolivas.com and he may be reached at olivasdan@aol.com .
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Latinos urged to read to children
Latino community urged to read to kids at early age
By ROEL GARCIA, The Holland Sentinel, Apr 19, 2009
Tony Castillo knows and believes in the importance of education at an early age.
He impresses upon his daughter to read to his 2-year-old grandson.
“I tell her, ‘Are you reading to him?’” said Castillo, owner of several Holland-area McDonald’s restaurants.
When he visited his daughter, Castillo saw his grandson sitting on her lap, listening and repeating words as he was being read to.
Castillo is assisting the cause to help Latino families get an early start in reading by using his restaurants as drop-off locations for books to give away to parents during Fiesta on May 1 and 2.
BOOK DROP-OFF LOCATIONS:
• McDonald’s restaurant, 657 E. Eighth St.
• McDonald’s restaurant, 213 N. River. Ave.
• McDonald’s restaurant, 12645 Riley St.
• Western Theological Seminary, 101 E. 13th St.
Latin Americans United for Progress’ theme for the event is Educate Now for a Better Tomorrow. Several groups will work at the event at the Holland Civic Center to inform Latino families of the importance of starting to read to children at an early age.
“It’s a very deliberate effort on our part to engage with the Latino and migrant communities,” said Jan Shangle, Great Start coordinator for Ottawa County.
Shangle’s group and others like Ready for School and InterCare will have a reading nook set up at the north building of the Civic Center where they will pass out books and also have someone reading books to children.
To help make this happen bins have been set up at the McDonald’s on Riley Street, North River Avenue and Eighth Street and at the Western Theological Seminary. New and gently used books in English, bilingual or Spanish will be accepted.
The groups will share information with parents and talk to them about the importance of reading to a child from birth.
Castillo agrees with this philosophy. The former educator attended a workshop where it was pointed out that education is from birth to death.
“We are to be lifelong learners. That struck me. We should always be learning,” Castillo said.
For information about dropping off books or questions about books, e-mail Shangle at jshangle@oaisd.
By ROEL GARCIA, The Holland Sentinel, Apr 19, 2009
Tony Castillo knows and believes in the importance of education at an early age.
He impresses upon his daughter to read to his 2-year-old grandson.
“I tell her, ‘Are you reading to him?’” said Castillo, owner of several Holland-area McDonald’s restaurants.
When he visited his daughter, Castillo saw his grandson sitting on her lap, listening and repeating words as he was being read to.
Castillo is assisting the cause to help Latino families get an early start in reading by using his restaurants as drop-off locations for books to give away to parents during Fiesta on May 1 and 2.
BOOK DROP-OFF LOCATIONS:
• McDonald’s restaurant, 657 E. Eighth St.
• McDonald’s restaurant, 213 N. River. Ave.
• McDonald’s restaurant, 12645 Riley St.
• Western Theological Seminary, 101 E. 13th St.
Latin Americans United for Progress’ theme for the event is Educate Now for a Better Tomorrow. Several groups will work at the event at the Holland Civic Center to inform Latino families of the importance of starting to read to children at an early age.
“It’s a very deliberate effort on our part to engage with the Latino and migrant communities,” said Jan Shangle, Great Start coordinator for Ottawa County.
Shangle’s group and others like Ready for School and InterCare will have a reading nook set up at the north building of the Civic Center where they will pass out books and also have someone reading books to children.
To help make this happen bins have been set up at the McDonald’s on Riley Street, North River Avenue and Eighth Street and at the Western Theological Seminary. New and gently used books in English, bilingual or Spanish will be accepted.
The groups will share information with parents and talk to them about the importance of reading to a child from birth.
Castillo agrees with this philosophy. The former educator attended a workshop where it was pointed out that education is from birth to death.
“We are to be lifelong learners. That struck me. We should always be learning,” Castillo said.
For information about dropping off books or questions about books, e-mail Shangle at jshangle@oaisd.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Latina publishes poetry and short stories
Cisneros crosses all reader boundaries
By FRITZ LANHAM, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, March 30, 2009
At 110 pages it’s slight in size, but The House on Mango Street,written in the early 1980s by a then-unknown Sandra Cisneros and first published by Houston’s small Arte Público Press, has become a landmark book. A series of lyrical coming-of-age vignettes in the voice of a 12-year-old Mexican-American girl in working-class Chicago, it’s sold more than 4 million copies in the United States. It’s also become a fixture in classrooms from middle school to college and a favorite of one-city, one-read programs.
Cisneros, a Chicago native who lives in San Antonio, went on to publish collections of poetry and short stories and in 2002 the multigenerational family saga Caramelo. She also founded the Macondo Foundation, which brings writers dedicated to social change to San Antonio for workshops and seminars.
Cisneros’ current projects include a collection of essays, to be titled Writing in My Pajamas, and a screenplay of The House on Mango Street.
She will read Wednesday at Rice University as part of a tour promoting the release of The House on Mango Streetin a new 25th anniversary paperback edition. She spoke with the Chronicle’s Fritz Lanham.
She will read Wednesday at Rice University as part of a tour promoting the release of The House on Mango Streetin a new 25th anniversary paperback edition. She spoke with the Chronicle’s Fritz Lanham.
Q:The House on Mango Street was published 25 years ago and has never been out of print. To what do you attribute that?
A: I think I had the good fortune to write the story the community was hungry for. Whatever that community may be, whether it’s women, or young people or Latinas, or teenagers or grandmothers. I just happened to hit on something that was going to nourish people at this time. I think of books as being medicine, or food. It happened to be the right recipe.
Q:You’ve said literature should “save people’s lives.” Do you still believe that, and what does that mean?
A: I certainly do. I live by it with the foundation I started to nurture writers doing that work of saving people’s lives. Obama talks about an arts corps. We are an arts corps at the Macondo Foundation — writers who are serving underserved communities and who believe our work can make for nonviolent social change.
Q: I’ve heard The House on Mango Streetdescribed as “a wedge book,” one that introduced Mexican-American writing to Latino and Anglo readers who may never have read anything by a Mexican-American writer before. Is that a fair statement, do you think?
A: I don’t know [laughter]. A lot of one-city one-read [programs] have kept me very busy. It’s a book that bridges many communities and many generations. One of the reasons it gets selected a lot for one-city, one-reads is it’s rare to find a book that will appeal to children and adults at once.
When I was writing it I wanted it to be inclusive of all readers — people who were workers, people who were educated, people who were educated in the university of life. I was mindful not to use language that wouldn’t allow the book to be used in schools. But I was also mindful to myself that it was not a children’s book.
Q: That follows with something you say in the introduction to this new edition about how the younger you back then wanted to write stories that ignored borders between genres, between highbrow literature and children’s books. …
A: Right. I was an experimental writer. People seem to forget that and think sometimes that I’m this naive, primitive writer who wrote these things in a child voice that was all I could do. Quite the contrary. I was looking at experimental fiction, which was all the rage at the time.
Q: Is that mixing of genres and ignoring borders still something you strive for in your writing?
A: Yes. Now I’m more aware that that’s what I can do and that I don’t have to worry about compartmentalizing. When I began the book I was in a graduate writing program and my poetry adviser said, “These aren’t poems.” I was too young to argue with an authority figure. I think if I had to go back I’d argue they’re not exactly stories either. I would argue for some place in the middle.
I am always looking for those borders, whether it’s borders of culture or gender or genre.
I’m always exploring those places where things don’t quite match. I find that a very rich and fertile place to write from.
Q: While your books are not directly autobiographical, you often take and remake people and incidents from your own life. Correct?
A: Yes, but I mix it up with people not myself. Sometimes I’ll take my story and mix it with a cousin or students. I feel like I’m this artist who uses whatever is at hand. It’s kind of like cooking with whatever is in the pantry. I don’t know any other way.
By FRITZ LANHAM, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, March 30, 2009
At 110 pages it’s slight in size, but The House on Mango Street,written in the early 1980s by a then-unknown Sandra Cisneros and first published by Houston’s small Arte Público Press, has become a landmark book. A series of lyrical coming-of-age vignettes in the voice of a 12-year-old Mexican-American girl in working-class Chicago, it’s sold more than 4 million copies in the United States. It’s also become a fixture in classrooms from middle school to college and a favorite of one-city, one-read programs.
Cisneros, a Chicago native who lives in San Antonio, went on to publish collections of poetry and short stories and in 2002 the multigenerational family saga Caramelo. She also founded the Macondo Foundation, which brings writers dedicated to social change to San Antonio for workshops and seminars.
Cisneros’ current projects include a collection of essays, to be titled Writing in My Pajamas, and a screenplay of The House on Mango Street.
She will read Wednesday at Rice University as part of a tour promoting the release of The House on Mango Streetin a new 25th anniversary paperback edition. She spoke with the Chronicle’s Fritz Lanham.
She will read Wednesday at Rice University as part of a tour promoting the release of The House on Mango Streetin a new 25th anniversary paperback edition. She spoke with the Chronicle’s Fritz Lanham.
Q:The House on Mango Street was published 25 years ago and has never been out of print. To what do you attribute that?
A: I think I had the good fortune to write the story the community was hungry for. Whatever that community may be, whether it’s women, or young people or Latinas, or teenagers or grandmothers. I just happened to hit on something that was going to nourish people at this time. I think of books as being medicine, or food. It happened to be the right recipe.
Q:You’ve said literature should “save people’s lives.” Do you still believe that, and what does that mean?
A: I certainly do. I live by it with the foundation I started to nurture writers doing that work of saving people’s lives. Obama talks about an arts corps. We are an arts corps at the Macondo Foundation — writers who are serving underserved communities and who believe our work can make for nonviolent social change.
Q: I’ve heard The House on Mango Streetdescribed as “a wedge book,” one that introduced Mexican-American writing to Latino and Anglo readers who may never have read anything by a Mexican-American writer before. Is that a fair statement, do you think?
A: I don’t know [laughter]. A lot of one-city one-read [programs] have kept me very busy. It’s a book that bridges many communities and many generations. One of the reasons it gets selected a lot for one-city, one-reads is it’s rare to find a book that will appeal to children and adults at once.
When I was writing it I wanted it to be inclusive of all readers — people who were workers, people who were educated, people who were educated in the university of life. I was mindful not to use language that wouldn’t allow the book to be used in schools. But I was also mindful to myself that it was not a children’s book.
Q: That follows with something you say in the introduction to this new edition about how the younger you back then wanted to write stories that ignored borders between genres, between highbrow literature and children’s books. …
A: Right. I was an experimental writer. People seem to forget that and think sometimes that I’m this naive, primitive writer who wrote these things in a child voice that was all I could do. Quite the contrary. I was looking at experimental fiction, which was all the rage at the time.
Q: Is that mixing of genres and ignoring borders still something you strive for in your writing?
A: Yes. Now I’m more aware that that’s what I can do and that I don’t have to worry about compartmentalizing. When I began the book I was in a graduate writing program and my poetry adviser said, “These aren’t poems.” I was too young to argue with an authority figure. I think if I had to go back I’d argue they’re not exactly stories either. I would argue for some place in the middle.
I am always looking for those borders, whether it’s borders of culture or gender or genre.
I’m always exploring those places where things don’t quite match. I find that a very rich and fertile place to write from.
Q: While your books are not directly autobiographical, you often take and remake people and incidents from your own life. Correct?
A: Yes, but I mix it up with people not myself. Sometimes I’ll take my story and mix it with a cousin or students. I feel like I’m this artist who uses whatever is at hand. It’s kind of like cooking with whatever is in the pantry. I don’t know any other way.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Latino Book and Family Festival in Chicago
The Latino Book and Family Festival
Mayra Calvani mayra.calvani@gmail.com, examiner.com March 27, 2009
If you happen to be in Chicago this weekend, don't miss your chance to meet an oustanding lineup of Latino literary talent at the 10th Annual Latino Book and Family Festival. Some of the guests will include:
Raul de Molina, Univision TV host of 'El Gordo y la Flaca', and the author of La Dieta del Gordo, in which he shares the secret of how he lost 70 pounds without starving. Molina has earned many awards for his outstanding television career.
Maria Marin, motivational trainer and the author of Mujer Sin Limite. Her national newspaper column, named the same as the book (Women Without Limits) is published weekly in the top 30 markets of the US and Puerto Rico. She's the motivational expert for 'Despierta America'.
Susan Orosco, public speaker and the author of Latino Power. In her book, she teaches Latinos how to overcome the challenges of being a Latino in an all-white world, as well as how to unlock the power we have within ourselves to achieve what we want.
Xavier Serbia, radio personality, financial analyst, and ex-member of the band Menudo. He's the founder of XavierSerbia.com, a financial site to help Latinos.
And many others. The authors will be there to talk with fans and sign their books.
The Latino Book and Family Festival is presented by Edward J. Olmos and Latino Literacy Now, and was created to celebrate Latino literature in both Spanish and English and meant to appeal to a wide range of ages and interests.
For more info: http://lbff.us/chicago-nov-10-11
Mayra Calvani mayra.calvani@gmail.com, examiner.com March 27, 2009
If you happen to be in Chicago this weekend, don't miss your chance to meet an oustanding lineup of Latino literary talent at the 10th Annual Latino Book and Family Festival. Some of the guests will include:
Raul de Molina, Univision TV host of 'El Gordo y la Flaca', and the author of La Dieta del Gordo, in which he shares the secret of how he lost 70 pounds without starving. Molina has earned many awards for his outstanding television career.
Maria Marin, motivational trainer and the author of Mujer Sin Limite. Her national newspaper column, named the same as the book (Women Without Limits) is published weekly in the top 30 markets of the US and Puerto Rico. She's the motivational expert for 'Despierta America'.
Susan Orosco, public speaker and the author of Latino Power. In her book, she teaches Latinos how to overcome the challenges of being a Latino in an all-white world, as well as how to unlock the power we have within ourselves to achieve what we want.
Xavier Serbia, radio personality, financial analyst, and ex-member of the band Menudo. He's the founder of XavierSerbia.com, a financial site to help Latinos.
And many others. The authors will be there to talk with fans and sign their books.
The Latino Book and Family Festival is presented by Edward J. Olmos and Latino Literacy Now, and was created to celebrate Latino literature in both Spanish and English and meant to appeal to a wide range of ages and interests.
For more info: http://lbff.us/chicago-nov-10-11
Friday, March 27, 2009
Latino bookstore feeds more than the mind
Outpost of literature feeds the body and the mind
Bookstore and restaurant
Hector Tobar, LA Times, March 24, 2009
Somewhere up in poet heaven, Roque Dalton is a happy man.
Just across the street from MacArthur Park, the town square of Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, a tiny storefront has an entire shelf dedicated to the works of the Salvadoran writer, who died in 1975.
Dalton's poems celebrate the tenacity of Salvadorans and their diaspora across the Americas. If his books had eyes, they could look through the store's glass window and see his countrymen hawking snow cones and tacos outside.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lives inside the Librería Hispanoamérica too. His "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" is a popular item there, as is the work of another Nobel laureate, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias.
Spotting great literature in the shadow of the park's aging palm trees, in a corner of the city once infamous for the sale of crack cocaine and sex, felt at first like stumbling upon a mirage.
One of the local alcoholics thought so too. First, he wandered over from the park's lawns and skeptically inspected the freshly swept sidewalks in front of the bookstore. Then, persuaded they were real, he stepped inside.
"Señora, you've earned a spot in heaven," he told owner Aura Quezada. "Because in this place where everyone opens liquor stores, you have opened a bookstore."
The bookstore is still open, despite some recent hard times, thanks to an informal network of activists, shoppers, businesspeople and city officials. Together, they believe MacArthur Park can remain a place where good people gather. And they're not going to give up just because there's less cash floating around.
They've tossed the old, bottom-line ways of thinking about this neighborhood out the window. And whether you call their philosophy anti-economics or just plain solidarity, we need more of it to get our city out of the hole we're in.
Aura and her husband, the Guatemalan novelist Roberto Quezada, started selling books instead of cheap wine on 7th Street because they saw something more than money when they looked at the people who reside and shop there.
"We don't live from what we make here," Aura told me. "It's a kind of hobby for us. We do it for our customers because they depend on us."
The Quezadas live on Roberto's salary as a court interpreter. They've survived as booksellers, in part, thanks to a neighbor -- the legendary tamale cook Sandra Romero of Mama's Hot Tamales.
Sales have dipped for Romero's tamale restaurant so she's rented a part of her space to the bookstore in the hope that together they can weather the economic storm. If either had to close, Romero said, "We would lose our eyes on the park."
The bookstore and the tamale restaurant, along with a handful of other nonprofits and development projects in the surrounding streets, are anchors that keep the park from drifting back to a crime-ridden past.
The restaurant draws connoisseurs with its excellent tamales. The bookstore's customers, for the most part, are hungry too -- for knowledge.
The Quezadas' most loyal patrons include a Salvadoran bus driver, a school janitor from Honduras and several dozen Guatemalan garment workers who buy a new, thick Spanish-language dictionary-encyclopedia every year.
The garment workers are Kanjobal Indians for whom Spanish is a second language and English a third. To them, the Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, with its "200,000 word definitions and 5,000 illustrations" is well worth the $42 price.
The Quezadas founded the bookstore in 1996 with books from Roberto's private collection.
They gave their store the name of a large and famous bookseller in San Salvador, thus triggering happy memories for many of the Salvadorans who walk past.
Many of the customers are like Julio Lozano, a Salvadoran bus driver from the San Fernando Valley who used to live in the neighborhood. He shops in MacArthur Park instead of his local mall, he said, because it's "the cradle of Central Americans" in Los Angeles. CLICK HERE FOR MORE.
Bookstore and restaurant
Hector Tobar, LA Times, March 24, 2009
Somewhere up in poet heaven, Roque Dalton is a happy man.
Just across the street from MacArthur Park, the town square of Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, a tiny storefront has an entire shelf dedicated to the works of the Salvadoran writer, who died in 1975.
Dalton's poems celebrate the tenacity of Salvadorans and their diaspora across the Americas. If his books had eyes, they could look through the store's glass window and see his countrymen hawking snow cones and tacos outside.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lives inside the Librería Hispanoamérica too. His "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" is a popular item there, as is the work of another Nobel laureate, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias.
Spotting great literature in the shadow of the park's aging palm trees, in a corner of the city once infamous for the sale of crack cocaine and sex, felt at first like stumbling upon a mirage.
One of the local alcoholics thought so too. First, he wandered over from the park's lawns and skeptically inspected the freshly swept sidewalks in front of the bookstore. Then, persuaded they were real, he stepped inside.
"Señora, you've earned a spot in heaven," he told owner Aura Quezada. "Because in this place where everyone opens liquor stores, you have opened a bookstore."
The bookstore is still open, despite some recent hard times, thanks to an informal network of activists, shoppers, businesspeople and city officials. Together, they believe MacArthur Park can remain a place where good people gather. And they're not going to give up just because there's less cash floating around.
They've tossed the old, bottom-line ways of thinking about this neighborhood out the window. And whether you call their philosophy anti-economics or just plain solidarity, we need more of it to get our city out of the hole we're in.
Aura and her husband, the Guatemalan novelist Roberto Quezada, started selling books instead of cheap wine on 7th Street because they saw something more than money when they looked at the people who reside and shop there.
"We don't live from what we make here," Aura told me. "It's a kind of hobby for us. We do it for our customers because they depend on us."
The Quezadas live on Roberto's salary as a court interpreter. They've survived as booksellers, in part, thanks to a neighbor -- the legendary tamale cook Sandra Romero of Mama's Hot Tamales.
Sales have dipped for Romero's tamale restaurant so she's rented a part of her space to the bookstore in the hope that together they can weather the economic storm. If either had to close, Romero said, "We would lose our eyes on the park."
The bookstore and the tamale restaurant, along with a handful of other nonprofits and development projects in the surrounding streets, are anchors that keep the park from drifting back to a crime-ridden past.
The restaurant draws connoisseurs with its excellent tamales. The bookstore's customers, for the most part, are hungry too -- for knowledge.
The Quezadas' most loyal patrons include a Salvadoran bus driver, a school janitor from Honduras and several dozen Guatemalan garment workers who buy a new, thick Spanish-language dictionary-encyclopedia every year.
The garment workers are Kanjobal Indians for whom Spanish is a second language and English a third. To them, the Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, with its "200,000 word definitions and 5,000 illustrations" is well worth the $42 price.
The Quezadas founded the bookstore in 1996 with books from Roberto's private collection.
They gave their store the name of a large and famous bookseller in San Salvador, thus triggering happy memories for many of the Salvadorans who walk past.
Many of the customers are like Julio Lozano, a Salvadoran bus driver from the San Fernando Valley who used to live in the neighborhood. He shops in MacArthur Park instead of his local mall, he said, because it's "the cradle of Central Americans" in Los Angeles. CLICK HERE FOR MORE.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Hispanic draws from life for art form
Finding the Source of Passion in Latino and Latin American Art
By Gina Vergel
As a youngster growing up in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Daniel Contreras, Ph.D., spent many hours with his grandmother while his parents worked. During those after school and summer vacation days, he saw abuela indulge in her one true passion—U.S. soap operas.
“She didn’t speak a word of English, yet she could tell you what was going on. I always thought that was such a weird thing,” said Contreras, assistant professor of English. “My aunt would ask her what happened in the story and my grandmother would explain it in great detail.”
His grandmother’s penchant for the drama of daytime soaps, as well as the popularity of prime time Spanish-language telenovelas, raised Contreras’ curiosity about the themes in these and other forms of entertainment.
“I was always fascinated by images and incidents of people who would suffer so much for love,” he said. “It seemed to be happening a lot in Latino literature. Telenovelas, which are an easily mocked form, are examples of people living completely passionately in a way that isn’t realistic. Our lives are generally filled with more everyday concerns, but it’s very attractive to imagine what it would be like.”
Contreras began asking himself why these stories of smoldering passion and unrequited love form such an attractive image in Latino and Latin American culture. Furthermore, are they limited to Latino and Latin American culture?
“It’s hard to talk about because you don’t want to culturally stereotype,” Contreras said. “In my first book, I was worried about suggesting that Latinos are more emotional, more passionate. That’s an available cultural stereotype, and sometimes we say it about ourselves. So there’s something to that, but it’s a mystery in a lot of ways.”
Contreras avoids stereotyping by getting to the bottom of specific novels in his book, Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture: What Have You Done to My Heart? (Palgrave, 2005).
Drawing on a range of material from art, theater, music and literature, Contreras argues that historical memory is embedded in these art forms and can perhaps take us “somewhere better than this place.”
Unrequited love was a sense of believing in the impossible, Contreras said. “It was a utopic urge, and I wanted to historicize and politicize it.
“Isn’t the idea of believing that change can happen, that social justice could happen, an impossible thing? Then again, if we just believe in bleakness and hopelessness and nihilism, then the world stays exactly the way it is—that the many have nothing and the few have everything. So it was a sense of being able to dream being important. And I saw that kind of faith and hope in unrequited love.”
Many of the characters Contreras researched for his book are gay.
“That was another complication—people trying to find happiness in a homophobic world,” he said.
The novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig combines homosexuality, unrequited love and fantasy used to deny the bleakness of reality.
“It’s about two men in a prison in Latin America—one is a revolutionary and a Marxist and very serious about social struggle. The other is this effeminate gay who’s obsessed with the movies and who’s been thrown in prison on a morals charge,” Contreras said.
“The gay guy loves movies and relates everything to them and starts telling the revolutionary stories about movies to pass the time. Movies become a way of surviving. The men have a very complex relationship—one is so masculine and the other is so feminine—so it touches on many different kinds of issues. It’s a fascinating story.”
Recently awarded a fellowship grant from Fordham, Contreras will travel to Mexico City this summer to work on his second book, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Latino Literature in the Cinema, to be released sometime next year.
In it, he examines Latino and Latin American novels that portray movies as central to what the characters are experiencing.
“These books feature a way of talking about how movies help us imagine something outside of ourselves,” he said. “They are about the world of fantasy, not just something that we like or enjoy, but necessary if we want a different kind of life and world. It’s in movies that, in a sense, characters find the most fulfillment.”
For instance, in Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros, the author is constantly comparing her life to a movie. And in Junot Diaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007), the title character lives his life in quasi-fantasy, as his crushes take on a life of their own.
“He relates everything back to a fantasy or a sci-fi movie or comic,” Contreras said, “You almost go crazy. I wonder if it’s even like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which Don Quixote reads so many romance novels about chivalry that he loses his mind?”
By Gina Vergel
As a youngster growing up in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Daniel Contreras, Ph.D., spent many hours with his grandmother while his parents worked. During those after school and summer vacation days, he saw abuela indulge in her one true passion—U.S. soap operas.
“She didn’t speak a word of English, yet she could tell you what was going on. I always thought that was such a weird thing,” said Contreras, assistant professor of English. “My aunt would ask her what happened in the story and my grandmother would explain it in great detail.”
His grandmother’s penchant for the drama of daytime soaps, as well as the popularity of prime time Spanish-language telenovelas, raised Contreras’ curiosity about the themes in these and other forms of entertainment.
“I was always fascinated by images and incidents of people who would suffer so much for love,” he said. “It seemed to be happening a lot in Latino literature. Telenovelas, which are an easily mocked form, are examples of people living completely passionately in a way that isn’t realistic. Our lives are generally filled with more everyday concerns, but it’s very attractive to imagine what it would be like.”
Contreras began asking himself why these stories of smoldering passion and unrequited love form such an attractive image in Latino and Latin American culture. Furthermore, are they limited to Latino and Latin American culture?
“It’s hard to talk about because you don’t want to culturally stereotype,” Contreras said. “In my first book, I was worried about suggesting that Latinos are more emotional, more passionate. That’s an available cultural stereotype, and sometimes we say it about ourselves. So there’s something to that, but it’s a mystery in a lot of ways.”
Contreras avoids stereotyping by getting to the bottom of specific novels in his book, Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture: What Have You Done to My Heart? (Palgrave, 2005).
Drawing on a range of material from art, theater, music and literature, Contreras argues that historical memory is embedded in these art forms and can perhaps take us “somewhere better than this place.”
Unrequited love was a sense of believing in the impossible, Contreras said. “It was a utopic urge, and I wanted to historicize and politicize it.
“Isn’t the idea of believing that change can happen, that social justice could happen, an impossible thing? Then again, if we just believe in bleakness and hopelessness and nihilism, then the world stays exactly the way it is—that the many have nothing and the few have everything. So it was a sense of being able to dream being important. And I saw that kind of faith and hope in unrequited love.”
Many of the characters Contreras researched for his book are gay.
“That was another complication—people trying to find happiness in a homophobic world,” he said.
The novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig combines homosexuality, unrequited love and fantasy used to deny the bleakness of reality.
“It’s about two men in a prison in Latin America—one is a revolutionary and a Marxist and very serious about social struggle. The other is this effeminate gay who’s obsessed with the movies and who’s been thrown in prison on a morals charge,” Contreras said.
“The gay guy loves movies and relates everything to them and starts telling the revolutionary stories about movies to pass the time. Movies become a way of surviving. The men have a very complex relationship—one is so masculine and the other is so feminine—so it touches on many different kinds of issues. It’s a fascinating story.”
Recently awarded a fellowship grant from Fordham, Contreras will travel to Mexico City this summer to work on his second book, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Latino Literature in the Cinema, to be released sometime next year.
In it, he examines Latino and Latin American novels that portray movies as central to what the characters are experiencing.
“These books feature a way of talking about how movies help us imagine something outside of ourselves,” he said. “They are about the world of fantasy, not just something that we like or enjoy, but necessary if we want a different kind of life and world. It’s in movies that, in a sense, characters find the most fulfillment.”
For instance, in Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros, the author is constantly comparing her life to a movie. And in Junot Diaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007), the title character lives his life in quasi-fantasy, as his crushes take on a life of their own.
“He relates everything back to a fantasy or a sci-fi movie or comic,” Contreras said, “You almost go crazy. I wonder if it’s even like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which Don Quixote reads so many romance novels about chivalry that he loses his mind?”
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