Where I’m from is Cook County Hospital, no pain meds for mom. Sharing room with welfare moms. Lawndale, Mexican barrio.
Star trekking towards Cerralvo, Texas grip not releasing us. I’m from grupo nortenos, pasteles, tamales y mofongo, radio Cristiana, born sinners, la migra, the fields, “peel me like an onion.”

Mom says when she was little, she heard the men throwing bombas outside-at 30 hearing son jarocho de veracruz she told me this. and I never have asked her about the women in puerto rico, why they gave her away, why was she afraid of the dark.

There is no inheritance. There are no letters, no hidden boxes, no family bible, no white handkerchiefs. Somos pasajeros.

A Poem In My Name

that night I hid
under a cold desk
waiting for hands
around my neck again,
no thoughts of pictures
or photos
but scenes frozen
on doctor’s tables
mixed with
reasoning the why
no one asked the questions
so there’d be no answering
anyways and no verdad a medias
Dad told me only
that I was sinning
he told me
i had gained weight

mom said
he was like
her son

weighing on me

tv set crushing
exposed belly fat
harping:
why don’t you
just take your meds
maybe in that
semi-comatose state
bruises don’t appear
and you can’t say
no to fucking while
you sleep
and maybe
you won’t scream
when boot
meets your back
at the gate
adelante de tu familia
their hands did not work
their hands did not work
they just stood there
their hands did not work
their hands did not work

daughter communities

women and children in the canyons

amigos de confianza

daughter communities

social networks server as a source of emotional support and help dispel the loneliness and sense of isolation migrants often feel

can this be how social networks via the internet work? Attempt to work?

from Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Lives in American Society, Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, Leo R. Chavez

distance decay pattern

from Border Commuter Workers and Transfrontier Metropolitan Structure along the U.S. Mexican Border, Lawrence A. Herzog

lifeblood of the border…extraction of almost

all…short lived

from The US-Mexican Border into the Twenty-First Century, Ganster & Lorey.

This semester’s reading this-woah.

Bibliography

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Alonzo, Armando C. Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Anderson, Greta. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Texas Women. Guilford: Globe Pequot, 2002.

Anna, Timothy E. The Mexican Empire of Iturbide. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1979.

Barr, Alwyn. Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528-1995. 2nd. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Barron, Agnel Natasha. “Representations of Labor in the Slave Narrative.” English Theses. 2009. <http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/62/>.

Berlin, Ira. Slaves without masters; the free Negro in the antebellum South. Pantheon Books, 1974.

Bevir, Mark. “Slavery in the United States.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Theory. Vol. 3. Thousand Oaks, 2010. 1269-1274.

Blackburn, Robin. Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World. Ed. Randy J. Sparks Rosemary Brana-Shute. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2009.

Brenner, Ashley T. “The “Dutch have made slaves of them all, and… they are called Free”: Slavery and Khoisan Indentured Servitude in the Eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony.” Emory University, 2009. <http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/1bd7x>.

Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. “Indianizing Catholicism: Chicana/India/Mexicana Indigenous Spiritual Practices In Our Image.” Cantú, Norma Elia and Olga Nájera-Ramírez. Chicana Traditions : Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Byron, John. “Paul and the Background of Slavery: The Status Quaestionis.” New Testament Scholarship 3.1 (2004): 116.

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“The Continuing Destructive Effects of the Termination Policy on California Indians.” September, 1997.

Truett, Samuel and Elliott Young. Continental Crossroads:Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New Work: Norton, 1995.

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Zamora, Emilio. The World of the Mexican worker in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1993.

While he was alive, Posada received what amounted to just a few cents for each of his drawings. He lived a humble life and upon his death, was buried in a common grave, though there was nothing ordinary about him.

What I find most interesting about the use of La Catrina in popular culture is the juxtaposition of capitalism and the original intent of Jose Guadalupe Posada’s artwork. With the catrina he poked fun at the high life of elegance, we all die, the rich, the important government official, the famous, the tortilla maker, the punk, the lovers, the dancers. He satirized the current Porfirio Diaz regime of his time and became an icon of the Mexico Revolution and died dirt poor. Arriba.

Emma Tenayuca Biography
1916-1999

“I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

From South Texas, she returned to San Antonio in her later years and became a school teache after she was forced out in the due to death threats because of her organizing.

The San Antonio pecan-shellers’ strike was a virtual uprising by the most downtrodden workers. It shook the city and the state and significantly empowered the the workers. Police threw 1,000 strikers, including Tenayuca, into jail, but they could not hold back the struggle. Tenayuca later said, “What started out as an organization for equal wages turned into a mass movement against starvation, for civil rights, for a minimum-wage law, and it changed the character of West Side San Antonio.” As the mass movement gained momentum, the “bosses” felt threaten and Emma Tenayuca begin receiving death threats. Via Voz de Aztlan

Laredo women Leonor V. Magnon and Jovita Idar pose in front of the flag of their organization La Cruz Blanca, which helped wounded soldiers during the Mexican Revolution

Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas in 1885 to Nicasio Clemente and Jovita Vivero and was one of eight children. In 1903 at the age of 18 years she earned a teaching certificate from the Holding Institute in Laredo and taught in a small school but the conditions in which she had to teach Mexican children so frustrated her that she decided to join her two
brothers as a writer for her father’s newspaper “La Cronica.” She believed that by becoming a journalist and an activist she would be more effective in changing the deplorable conditions that existed in the public schools for Mexican children. During this time, Mexican school children were completely segregated and, in many occasions, totally excluded.

Throughout 1910 and 1911 she wrote weekly articles that called for equal educational treatment and exposed the extreme discrimination against Mexican children in the public schools. In addition, Jovita Idar started writing about the atrocities being committed by the Texas Rangers against Mexicans. She wrote about the lynching and hanging of a Mexican child in Thorndale, Texas by the Texas Ranchers and the brutal burning at the stake of 20 year old Antonio Rodriguez in Rocksprings, Texas. Of Antonio Rodriguez, she wrote, “The crowd cheered when the flames engulfed his
contorted body. They did not even turn away at the smell of his burning flesh and I wondered if they even knew his name. There are so many dead that sometimes I can’t remember all their names.”

Laredo women Leonor V. Magnon and Jovita Idar pose in front of the flag of their organization La Cruz Blanca, which helped wounded soldiers during the Mexican Revolution

The picture that comes to mind for most Anglo-Americans when women are discussed in the context of historical travels to California is that of the overland wagon trains moving westward, peopled by sturdy and daring pioneers who arrived in California after the discovery of gold in 1848. A few might also mention that some of the women came by ship, interrupting their voyage with an arduous trek—on foot or by mule—across the Isthmus of Panama, all the while with small children in tow. Even fewer people are aware that these women were relative latecomers to the Golden State, as California came to be known.

At the time Anglo-Americans began arriving in California in large numbers during the nineteenth century, they were part of the third wave of migration to the Pacific Coast. The first immigrants were Indians who had lived in California ten to fifteen thousand years before the region was visited by Old World explorers.¹ A prevalent myth that the rich land was empty, ripe for colonization, is refuted by recent studies indicating that “at the time of Euro-American contact, California was more densely populated than any area of equal size in North America, north of central Mexico . . . . What is labeled ‘wilderness’ in today’s popular imagination . . . harbored human gathering and hunting sites, burial grounds, work sites, sacred areas, trails, and village sites. Today’s wilderness was then human homeland.

Papagos. From United States. Dept. of the Interior. Report on the United States and Mexican boundary survey … by William H. Emory. 1857-59. Serial Set No. 861. Law Library.

WOMEN ON THE MOVE: OVERLAND JO URN EYS TO CALIFORNIA

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/aw06e/aw06e.html