GOSSIP VIEJAS
August 24, 2011
A person in the online class I’m taking said something interesting. It’s a course on the “Politics of Narration.” So as expected, we are discussing “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. In the discussion one person said that she thought the character of Richards–the friend of Brently Mallard–was “feminine” and “like a woman” because he was a “gossip.” Actually, if you go back and read the story, the character says nothing. Certainly he has been the purveyor of the bad (or good, depending on how you look at it) news that Brently has been killed in a train accident. At the turn of the century, certainly the newspaper biz was a man’s world. But here’s my gripe. The idea that he is a “gossip” makes him feminine? That’s a bad rap for women. I often hear people describe gossips as “viejas.” That’s a double whammy of a bad rap if I ever heard one. And look again….A vieja? Is gossiping just a woman thing?
I decided to catalog the people I know given to chisme. The most unrepentant chismosos I know are men. The women I know who do partake in gossip are a kind of bully. They wallow in the chisme, spread it around good and thick, because they are so unhappy in their own lives. Oh, yes, I know this to be true. It makes me sad and angry at once. Is it oh, just so human to want to gossip sometimes? I don’t know. It certainly feels wrong when we do it, doesn’t it? But I’ve gotta say, women do it and men do it. By the way, mean people suck.
San Antonio Loses Its Luz Woman
August 8, 2011
At a soundcheck for the Macondo Writers’ Workshop reading on Wednesday, the Sterling Houston Theater was dark. A tiny spotlight darted across the space like an apoplectic bee. A figure entered stage left and the light expanded to reveal a radiant Sandra Cisneros.
“That’s the theme of this reading,” she told my daughter and me. “In dark times, art brings us light. Writing is la luz, the light, that transforms the darkness.”
That’s the story of Sandra Cisneros inSan Antonio—the tireless champion for literacy in our town who organizes readings, donates books and her all-too precious time to schools and libraries, and mentors other writers.
In passing, she mentioned there is much to do before she leavesSan Antoniosome time in the next eighteen months. I hadn’t heard that news. My heart sank, and yet I felt glad that she’d just come out and said it out loud.
For as long as I’ve known her, murmurs and gossip and strange fabrications have swirled around this celebrity persona of La Sandra. She seems almost ignorant of that fact and unwittingly counters the chisme with her simple truths.
But now begins the speculation about her certain departure. I dread the next couple of years could be a time marked by an attitude of “What’s-your-hurry-here’s-your-hat” as far as our collective anticipation of this inevitability goes. It’s difficult not to start thinking about the unthinkable—a San Antonio without Sandra Cisneros. [To read the rest of this, please click on the link.]
http://www.plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1276-san-antonio-loses-its-luz-woman]
THE QUINCEAÑERA COMES OF AGE
July 22, 2011
I’m old enough to have celebrated a quinceañera three times over, but I’m not as experienced as you might think with the traditional Sweet 15 celebration observed by Hispanic families in the United States and throughout Latin America. New trends are changing the soft, supple features of the quinceañera as we know it, eschewing schmaltzy sentimentality for in-your-face millennial-generation merry-making.
I didn’t have a quinceañera. Before anyone asks me to surrender my Mex-Am card, the quinceañera was not en vogue when I was growing up; moreover, it just wasn’t a financially feasible family project.
Now that I’m a mom — and one that self-identifies as Mexican American — my 13-year-old daughter believes it’s her God-given right to have the full Chicana experience, including a quinceañera. [---To read more please click on the link---http://plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1255-the-quinceanera-comes-of-age ]
CASEY ANTHONY IS NO LA LLORONA
July 15, 2011
Around here, most of us have heard the story of La Llorona. Maybe some of us have even prudently, if sadistically, shared the story to deter younger siblings from swelling arroyos after a storm. Maybe we’ve even considered the legend of the star-crossed wailing wretch during this summer’s unexpurgated, unabridged Casey Anthony Carnival Cruise. Fact is, with the tragic stories of filicide in recent history, La Llorona has become the go-to metaphor folks pull out as if it were some novel idea no one’s thought of. It’s become as predictable as tomorrow’s rainless forecast. The irony is that what we can’t foretell or even begin to comprehend is a mother murdering her child. [...MORE...To read the rest, please click on the link. http://plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1231-casey-anthony-is-no-la-llorona]
‘TIS TRUE: PRE-TEENS AND TEENS STILL NEED VACCINES
July 13, 2011
photo by bioethicsinstitute.org
Last summer we received a letter from the state with a daunting directive. Seventh graders were required to have the Varicella (chicken pox) TDAP (tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular petussis), and the meningococcal vaccines.
I felt reticent to brandish my daughter’s bare shoulder for needles full of chemicals.We braced ourselves for weeks. The dread-filled pall of the doctor’s appointment hung over our heads, as did the amount of money we would be charged for all three vaccines—upwards of 300 dollars. Two words: necessary evil.
We’re in the blind-followers camp when it comes to the government. I’m less inclined to question and more inclined to follow the letter of the law. But this felt like a Big-Brother invasion of privacy—and an expensive one. For the first time in my adult life I researched a loophole.
That was my first mistake. I researched the diseases the vaccinations fend off—but not the CDC website itself. I walked around like a disease-ridden wretch, cursing the school, the state, diseases and vaccines. A little knowledge really is a dangerous thing. But information is power.
Lucky for us, our nurse practitioner was patient. My daughter chattered nervously with her for the duration. Before we knew it, she’d received all the vaccinations.
The nurse practitioner was where we received the best information one-on-one. She also directed us to the CDC website. My daughter asked a lot of questions and was suitably relieved that she’d not suffer unduly for her sincere efforts to follow the law. The nurse reassured us that the shots fend off untold troubles related to these diseases. Fortunately, my daughter did not suffer side effects. A little tenderness here and there was the worst of it. Priceless.
Now all that’s left to dread is high school. Ay, dios mio.
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The CDC sponsored this post. Check out their website @ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/who/teens/index.html
CROSSING THE CHECKPOINT
July 8, 2011
At the I-35 checkpoint between Laredo and San Antonio, I turn off the car stereo playing Marco Antonio Solís’ “O Me Voy O Te Vas.” I remove my sunglasses so the agents can see my eyes. I prompt my daughter in the backseat to put her shoes on and sit up tall. “Answer him clearly when he asks you,” I say to her.
“Okay, mom,” she replies, closing her book.
“And don’t say, ‘Okay.’” I tell her. “And no ‘Yeah.’ Say ‘Yes!’ Just like that.” I turn to my husband who is driving. “And, you, don’t joke with him,” I instruct. “Sit up straight, would you? Why didn’t you shave this morning? Oh, man, they are so gonna bust us!”
When the agent peers in, I feel myself transformed, my hair in two long black plaits, and my skin the caramelized pecan color of my forebears. “Please don’t shoot me,” I want to say. Instead I nod vigorously and squeak “yes” as if I’m responding for the first time to a new language. But it’s the same question I’ve heard hundreds of times before: “American citizen?” [...To read more, please click on the link: http://plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1207-crossing-the-checkpoint]
SUMMER TIME MEMORIES…AND A SMILE
July 4, 2011
Backyard family barbecues during my childhood in Laredo,Texas happened on magically long summer evenings when a stubborn twilight managed to eke out its last gleaming even after 9:00. We wore no watches. It was summer. For the only time in our lives we didn’t have to worry about homework or fret about bedtimes.
On the radio blared the sounds of the Four Seasons exclaiming about that night back in ’63 or Timi Yuro imploring us to “Smile.”
We ran and screamed and played with only intermittent trips inside the kitchen to find our mother seeing to the pot of beans simmering on the stove. We scurried back outside with her to “check the fire.”
Ah yes. The summer Saturday barbecue. Or as we said it in those parts, the “Carne Asada.” That phrase named the meal but also the family gathering.
My dad would set up the huge oil barrel pit, pockmarked and rusty from years of exposure under our orange trees. He purposefully poured in the charcoal. He chopped up leña—the mesquite that made the fire smell so much better than the chilly November bonfires of the city’s rival high schools.
After that it was a frustrating coin toss. My father had a weekly battle with the fire. Adding fuel to that conflict was the fact that he didn’t care much for the grilled fajitas or beef skirt–the inexpensive but mouth-wateringly delicious cut of meat we craved and awaited patiently.
That’s when my mother would charge out the back door to the barbecue pit toting a pitcher of water in one hand and in the other a large swatch of cardboard from some box long ago discarded. She was quite expert at it. She waved it over the fire, fanning some imperceptible ember, and then squinted as gray ribbons of smoke blew all around her. She waited patiently in a glowing serene vigilance.
My father protested saying he didn’t want to “quemar un palo” (which translates to “burn a stick”) just to be able to eat. He was inevitably distracted in the backyard by all of the other self-imposed chores he saw around him. He pulled weeds or edged the sidewalk. He hauled branches to the back of his truck or toiled in his workshop. He just couldn’t slow down long enough to wait for the fire.
My siblings and I were regularly recruited to assist in these impromptu chores or in the cooking happening inside the house. Mainly we played and turned up the radio if “Wooly Bully” or “La Bamba” came on; we smiled and swelled with pride over hearing Spanish lyrics coming from the top 40 station.
My mom came to the barbecue rescue not because she is such a brilliant cook. She is. No doubt about that. My mom corrected the stalling embers because she understands fire.
She was forced to forge a quick and trusting relationship with the element when she was a migrant worker. My grandmother, a single mother of eight, traveled with her brood up north to places where gradations of climate weren’t limited to warm, warmer still, and hot. Sometimes my granny cooked even the family breakfast over an open campfire before she and the children set out to meet the hard physical work of the day. Even in their little house back in Laredo, a small gas heater glared in the front room where they all huddled close and slept together on long winter nights that unexpectedly blew in.
My daughter is an only child. I wish for her these days a screaming, sweating swarm of siblings—even brothers like mine who were merciless in those endless, goal-less chases, scraping past tree branches, scratching at mosquito bites, plucking the stray thorny sticker clinging to our skin. Believe it or not, I wish that for her—that adrenaline rush abandon maybe only athletes can relive as adults.
Because of this summer’s merciless drought, I’ve not grilled much at all. However, in recent years I was indeed the keeper of the flame at my house. Maybe it bordered on pyromania. It used to be a weekend thing, but the addiction rendered me weak. If we scratched our heads over what to have for dinner, I could usually entice my little family into some small grilled feast at least a few times a week. The neighbors must have thought we had no stove.
In some strange way, taking on this role makes me feel more grown up. A kid can pull out a tiny cake from an Easy-Bake Oven, scramble eggs, or mash up the potatoes while mom checks on the pot roast. But children don’t have a very big part in the barbecue production. My brothers used to dare me to toss twigs into the roaring fire, but I didn’t dare tease the gods–or my mother–with that kind of horseplay.
Those endless summer nights decades ago were some of the happiest times of my childhood. They involved no rewards, no presents or toys or privileges. They were just times spent out-of-doors with the people that mattered most.
At the end of those nights, bathed and pajamaed, I made the rounds to finally kiss my folks good night. Dad busied himself with the outdoor clean-up and mom washed up the last dish. They hugged me tightly, and I carried the lingering scent of the summer night to bed with me, the last strains of an old song barely audible above the soft insistent whirr of the fan.
TxDot’s DUI Telenovela
July 1, 2011
Amigas, when last you tuned in to “Toma Mi Corazón,” handsome Arturo Enrique Barrigón drove drunk and recklessly in an effort to reach the church where he is to wed his true love, María del Agave. Will he get to the church on time? Will he be stopped by the police, fail the breathalyzer test and be thrown in the hoosegow? Will he die in a fiery accident that also takes the lives of innocent victims? Oh, amigas! An exciting chapter awaits you this evening! But first, a word from our sponsors, the Texas Department of Transportation. [Please click on the link to read the rest of the story...]
http://www.plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1184-txdots-dui-telenovela
THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS COMES HOME TO ROOST
June 24, 2011
As I write this, a steady rain is falling just outside my window. Gone from our radars for over a month now, it’s a welcome relief from weeks of the oppressive pall of heat and the resultant drought that has turned lawns across the city into desiccate wastelands.
Perhaps our summer vegetable garden will return to its springtime lushness. In the first part of May it yielded early bumper crops of tomato, cabbage, lettuce, and even fennel and celery. We have chickens, too, and happily rummage with an open searching hand in the dark, cool compartments of their nesting boxes for the incredible, edible fruits of their labor.
Toting our basket of eggs, Roma tomatoes, red onions, green beans and zucchini in from the backyard, for a fleeting moment I consider the incessant doom-and-gloom reports of looming worldwide food shortages and feel like we might emerge from it unscathed.
To coincide with today’s rainfall, the G20 will convene in Paris this week bringing together the agriculture ministers of the world’s largest economies. At the top of their agenda: food security, which refers to the availability of food in a household. The household is “food-secure” when occupants do not fear starvation.
[I hope you'll click on the link to read the rest of the story. http://www.plazadearmastx.com/index.php/culture/106-columns/1160-the-global-food-crisis-comes-home-to-roost
UNREAL! THE TRUTH ABOUT FOOD ON REALITY TV
June 23, 2011
I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. It’s what happens sometimes when I’m made somehow painfully aware that it might not be available to me because I’m about to deprive myself of it. Lately, I’ve been thinking about it–what I like to eat when I just let myself eat–because I’m painfully aware that it might not be available to me because someone or something else can easily deprive us all of it.
We are in a food crisis, plain and simple. Soon our concern about food will be as constant as and far more serious than our preoccupations with high gas prices or high taxes. Food is our simplest pleasure, that which we all feel most entitled to having.
One thing we must know is that many of our fellow citizens out there in this big beautiful world are hungry, starving in fact. That goes hand in hand with poverty, of course. And it is an all-too common plight, a fact of life for so many.
There is hunger and starvation right here in our backyard, too. Lots of it. And so many of us just aren’t aware of it, nor do some of us inform ourselves or attempt to do anything about it.
Food. Such a simple thing. But go to the grocery store and tell me that virtually every single item on those shelves has not gone up 50% or more, much more in some cases. On “Extreme Couponing” the subjects of the show get away sometimes without paying one cent because they have “member club cards” or because their grocery store has double and triple-coupon days.
I know everybody wants to give HEB big love these days, particularly after Charles Butt sent his letter to Governor Rick Perry lobbying hard for us little guys and our interest in education. However, HEB does not give big love to its shoppers. None. Prices go up. Combo Loco coupons (DREADFUL, INSULTING name) will get you a “free” bag of chips or a “free” packet of processed, very red baloney or processed spaghetti sauces. It won’t get you a bunch of bananas or a head of lettuce or fresh fruit. Nope. HEB does not give the little guy big love. I know they treat their employees very well. Glad for that. ( In fact more than one student who graduated from my university still has her HEB job and two graduates I know of decided to work at HEB instead of looking for teaching jobs.)
HEB has a monopoly here and throughout Texas. So they don’t have to have a preferred customer club or do anything but hand over their own coupons to us while we hand over another giant portion of our paycheck. We might save a buck or two next time at the store, but not much more than that. Not really. I once saved almost 18 dollars at HEB. It was a deliberate experiment. I used my regular weekly allotment for groceries. That means I PAID to save the 18 dollars, but I walked out of the store without milk or fruits or vegetables. I did, however, come home with ice cream and a frozen lasagna. Somehow, I couldn’t feel too excited about that. No, when things get really, really bad, we won’t have an HEB Buddy. We’ll be on our own.
But I’m not even sure the whole coupon club deal works well now that I’ve watched a couple episodes of “Extreme Couponing.” It is as maddening and un-real as any reality show out there, and it is almost an amalgam of several of them: these people are addicts like the ones featured on shows like “Intervention” or “Relapse” or Dr. Drew’s VH-1 celebrity peep show. They are hoarders, like the people featured on the many shows on that subject. They end up being “Freaky Eaters” and they end up having a “Strange Addiction.”
It’s evident to me that the subjects of “Extreme Couponing” have known hunger or the threat of it, and all it took was one trigger to forever connect them to clipping coupons and wearing a calculator like a St. Christopher medal through the aisles of the store. In fact on two different episodes the trigger seemed to be losing a job. The shows make me horribly sad as the subject of the show sits on furniture made of stockpile items–hundreds of boxes of pain reliever and off-brand cleansers. But where is the food? Oh, there’s brown mustard and fruit roll ups, but really not anything healthy or whole. We’re supposed to cheer along with onlookers and store clerks while the final totals are rung up and the subject walks off with a stash of hundreds of dollars worth of things you kind of pray they’ll donate to the food bank or homeless shelter because what are they going to do with all that dental floss anyway?
“Man Vs. Food” is another show that pretends to raise emotions that are probably not what most people feel. I don’t feel the least bit impressed or vicariously triumphant with this guy who eats the world’s biggest burrito or enough steak to feed a small town. It makes me ill. It makes him ill, but it makes me really ill. It’s disgusting. Gluttony is disgusting. Period. What does anyone prove by eating his weight in fried food or red meat? Got me.
There should be a show about gardening in small spaces. But who in the world is going to watch that, unless they stick some celebrity in there–some drug-addled ex ’80′s hair group guitarist or some ’70s child star or maybe some pseduo celebrity and her prematurely botoxed teen-aged sisters. Yes. That will keep the family garden show on the air. There should be celebrity gardeners. They can trump up some silly script about a garden party. They can don garden gloves and smocks, pull potatoes and weed the lettuce patches smiling in full make-up for the camera. The make-up person could smudge some mud on their chins to make it look more real because we all know that most people on reality shows (whose ways of ascending to this cheap brand of fame are still unclear to me), don’t do anything on these shows except drink white wine. Nah. Unless they’re growing the grapes (like we do in our family garden), I just don’t care.
The food crisis is here. What should we do? I mean besides turn off the television?
