YO ESCRIBO PORQUE TENGO CORAJE ¿A poco no te pasa? A veces quieres escribir una historia que se te ocurre y que te parece genial pero cuando te sientas y la comienzas a escribir piensas: pero qué pendejada estoy diciendo, esto es una mierda, ¿a quién le va a interesar este cuento? Yo por eso […]

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It took six days around the clock to transport by truck the records, files, digitized images, photographs, recordings, films accumulated through the eight years Dr. Chaim Benjamin Qaraite had directed the program. Jaffrey Francs, once an inquisitive and pushy medical student and now officially part of the company, had interviewed twenty-five candidates to staff Dr. […]

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(Traducción del inglés: Margarita López López) Seis días completos tomó para transportar en camión los registros, archivos, imágenes digitalizadas, fotografías, grabaciones, y películas acumuladas durante los ocho años que el Dr. Chaim Benjamín Qaraite había dirigido el programa. Jaffrey Francs, quien fuera, en un tiempo, un estudiante de medicina curioso e insistente, y ahora oficialmente […]

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Superman for a Day                                     (It ain’t what it’s all cracked up to be) “Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superman!”   Was all we needed to hear to drop everything and run en chinga to grab a front row seat on the cold linoleum floor in […]

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alternaCtive publicaCtions would like to honor contemporary Chicano/a authors who have preceded us in the journey to Mictlan. In the tradition of the Floricantos, we have gathered quotes from their work, book covers, and pictures. May they serve as one way of remembering these writers. We have included in this hommage those who published during […]

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In Mexico, there are dark places in the midst of the squalor and the pollution where there is no noise, little motion, where one can sit undisturbed. I live in the little village several miles from here. Here is El Toro, a bar or café. What could you call it? The men sitting at the […]

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She lost him before she even knew it. Tía Alicia lost her son, cousin Beto, to the letters carved on his stomach, the size of freeway signs, announcing cities and streets from far away distances. With those drawings under his clothes and skin, he relived the beatings that echoed in his memory, like the lighter burning the melting brown rock on a spoon, easing the pain only he felt. Too much trippin’ locked primo Beto up in the mind, like the hamster that overfeeds itself and doesn’t know how to stop eating—and dies. But primo Beto didn’t die. He’s locked up in the mind and behind bars.

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NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: alternaCtive publicaCtions is proud to offer its visitors the unique opportunity to read Rolando Hinojosa’s earliest preserved writings, published here for the first time. Hinojosa wrote these five short pieces when he was a senior in high school, during the 1945-1946 academic year, two in 1945 and three in 1946. Since […]

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Prefacio:
The principal narrator, Petra Leyva, is intrigued by Sebastián, a young Chicano academic who was born in Mexico but was raised in California. His father abandons him, his mother and other siblings by tricking them after bringing them to California from Mexico to live. His mother and his family work in the flower seed fields for a northern California company, including vast fields of sunflowers. Feeling the absence of his father, in later years he wonders as he is traveling through the streets of Michoacán whether he has passed his own father, half-brothers or sisters without knowing who they were. His cycle also explores being a Chicano gay or lesbian.
Petra elaborates the story of Jesús, a young Chicano activist who worked for the UFW and became close to César, the campesino leader. He and his best friend, Vickie Dee, were American-born, bilingual Chicano activists, who like Petra Leyva, learned about the farm-workers’ struggle and the goals of the Chicano Movement through their involvement with on-campus organizations for Mexican-American youth. Jesús and Vickie Dee differ in that in his case, his family at first did not always support his increasing activism. Vickie Dee, on the other hand, came from a family with grass-roots community involvement. Like Sebastián, Jesús and Vickie Dee are involved in the Chicano civil rights struggle.
More recently, at her sister Belita’s funeral, Petra Levya remembers other deaths of loved ones, including that of the young Jesús, and ponders the need to make several journeys which will ultimately enlighten the role of her own extended family in shaping her life’s direction. For instance, she felt compelled to help her adopted sister, Lupita, find her own Mexican natural family in the rural mountain region of Mexico. She considers that she shared much with these various young people besides the obvious interwined relationships and interests. She also shares with Sebastián a desire to know a mysterious half-brother whom her own father never acknowledged.
Without idealizing the rural campesino experience reflected in the narrators’ stories, the telling of the stories helps bring closure to their search for meaning and inspiration.

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DINNER IN THE MIDWEST In 1955, my father was laid off from his job as a mechanic on the railroad. He had been employed during the hey day of the American railroad boom repairing and maintaining the big engines that once moved a nation’s economy from coast to coast. My Dad often said that the […]

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