1 comments about Alisados: Vivencias de una Mujer Dominicana.

1. 
   Alisados: Vivencias de una Mujer Dominicana
   
   As a brown skinned Hispanic I could relate to the author. I find her anecdotes similar to mines and it shows the intricate details of ones culture. I encourage others to get this book and pass it along as a form of knot to tie each others past and cultures together--to share friendship.

5 comments about Something to Declare: Essays.

1. Julia Alvarez lets readers into her thoughts and imagination with a wonderfully readable collection of essays in "Something to Declare".



2. In Something to Declare Julia Alvarez give us rich insights into the process of being a writer and living the full but difficult life of a bi-cultural citizen. Her book helped me a lot to understand my dual citizenship, but also it helped me to deal with the voices that fill my mind in at least two languages. A must for anyone who enjoys ethnic literature, or emmigrant fiction.



3. Ever since reading In the Time of the Butterflies, I have been convinced that Julia Alvarez was a gifted writer. This collection of her essays was purchased for our library to add to our creative writing teacher's curricular tools. I couldn't resist being the first to sample same. Alvarez has a way of talking to the reader that makes her essays ever so readable. I especially love the personal illuminations of her family in the Dominican Republic and in the states. What a fascinating immigrant story! One of my favorite essays is "Chasing the Butterfies" which put chills on me as I recalled the power in her novel that made me into her fan. I am not surprised that she is connected to the Bread Loaf writers. What quality comes from that group! I was a late-in-life discoverer of writers outside of the CANON, but I never again shall believe that only the canon has quality. The multicultural writers that I have discovered since 1992 as a member of the NEH sponsored Common Ground at the University of Houston, have enriched my life and the lives of my students. Any would be writer should read these Alvarez revelations. Being able to come and go from the entries makes the work so very user friendly. Brava, Julia!



4. Alvarez has mined deeply into her childhood in Dominican Republic and her family's flight from Trujillo to Queens, NY, as sources for her lyrical fiction and poetry. At last she launches herself into nonfiction, and the result is Something to Declare. The book is a collection of 24 autobiographical essays focused on her life and her personal writing process. The first part chronicles her girlhood in DR, surrounded with a rich and varied cast of characters comprised of her huge family, the servants, her classmates and nursemaids. It ends with her family's escape to America and documents the beginning of the difficult assimilation process.
   In the second part of Something to Declare, Alvarez talks about her writing process, the difficulty balancing a writing life with teaching and her "real life," and concludes with her Ten Commandments for writing, a poster of which hangs above my computer.
   This book is a gift from Julia Alvarez to her many fans, and we thank her for it.



5. I am a great fan of Julia Alvarez's writing, and am also greatly appreciative of her strength of character as an inspirational Latina writer. Many of you may be familiar with her books "In the Time of Butterflies" and "How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents." In this book, we get a better sense of Julia Alvarez, the woman, the writer, the artist and (in her words) a "hyphenated American." (i.e, Dominican-American) These twenty-four essays offer a glimpse into her life, and what inspired her to persue writing. Alvarez had a lot of great material from her childhood, growing up the daughter of a revolutionary who was part of the opposition against Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic. Julia also possessed a great wit and imagination, throughout her academic and personal life.
   
   We are so honored that this great woman decided to convey her thoughts and stories through writing. This is definitely her true talent. What a true inspiration for all aspiring writers (Latina and otherwise). This book is engaging, warmly accessible and insightful. Highly reccomended!

5 comments about A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture.

1. This is no cookbook about tacos, but it is a food memoir reviewed here for its even wider-ranging survey of culture, family, and belief. Denise Chavez reflects on her coming of age in New Mexico, surveying her family's traditions, memories, and food-influenced lives. It's a fine leisure choice for any who would understand both family interrelationships and cultural infleunces.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. Uninteresting recipes, uninteresting writing. So uninteresting in fact that I skipped whole pages and sections and never found out if she even got around to explaining that the word taco means wadding or wedge, such as the wadding that used to be used to stuff cannons. Visual image, stuffing a taco "wad of food" into your mouth.
   
   The praised Delfina's tacos, which are a guisado of ground beef, onion, sweet peas, salt pepper and comino stuffed into a softened with oil tortilla and bake until crisp,well, it's an interesting recipe that I haven't seen before but a lot of work for not very much of a pay-off in flavor.
   
   Reading the book reminded me of times when I would be stuck having to listen to someone ramble on about whatever, and not having a means to extricate myself from the situation. Fortunately, in the case of the book, all I had to do was close it and shelve it.



3. As a resident of the author's city, I was looking forward to reading her much anticipated release. Unfortunately though, I was sorely disappointed. In fact, the reviewer who awarded A Taco Testimony two stars was generous. Unlike the 2-star reviewer though, I stuck with it, reading page after dull page, hoping it would improve (but never does), much like a monotonous "Saturday Night Live" skit that doesn't know when to end.
   
   Without semblance of structure, she haphazardly places poems, recipes, and anecdotes at random, repeating herself ad nauseam utilizing the sophomoric "Taco is life" metaphor. Moreover, her inchoate thoughts lack depth and detail. Riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, full of fluff and devoid of content, her style resembles that of a grade-groveling high school sycophant, trying to con her audience with melodrama and malaise, but inevitably saying nothing of note.
   
   In her weak attempt to explain "Culture", for example, she affirms that it is lack of cultural awareness that results in our inability to know and respect others which ultimately causes violence in the world. Here, I agree. Yet her very example epitomizes HER ignorance of culture. With awkward phrasing she states, "A man who lives here but is not from here is trying to sue the city to get the three crosses, the symbol of our town, removed from all public displays." Not only does she promote divisiveness by insinuating that he is an outsider, despite claims throughout her book that we are all one people, she fails to acknowledge that the crosses of Calvary are recognized worldwide as the autograph of Christianity - that the triumvirate could represent centuries of violence perpetrated against non-believers. By failing to recognize the identities of non-adherents of Christianity, she obliterates them from the landscape, engaging in her own brand of cultural imperialism. Thus, the crosses are not merely the symbol of our town, the simplistic notion that the author would like us to believe.
   
   Perhaps the author is better suited to writing fiction. I can only hope her tacos are better than her book.



4. It's so very true that you never really value what you have until it's gone. Such is the tone of A Taco Testimony. Like many of us, much of the author's life was spent wanting to get away from her small hometown and well away from her family. She wanted a life of her own where she could define who she wanted to be and where she could be a shining star.
   
   Fortunately, as being part of a family seems to do, the author could never quite shake off who she was, where she came from, and those that loved her. She was the one that ended up taking care of her parents. In doing so, she was given a gift- the understanding that her parents were human just like her, they made mistakes, they had regrets, and like her they were extremely stubborn which often left feelings unsaid. Throughout it all, during the good times and the bad, there were tacos.
   
   A Taco Testimony serves as both a memoir of the author's life experiences and a tribute to her parents. It was this latter aspect of the piece that really touched me. I started reminiscing through my own experiences, began seeing them in a new light and had the incredible urge to phone my mother and have a real conversation.



5. This book tells the story of the role of tacos in the author's life, but she also creates a coming-of-age memoir as well as a loving portrait of her mother, the champion taco-maker. It includes recipes, poems, moving personal history, and thoughts about Mexican culture in both Mexico and the US, but the word pictures it creates of growing up in the 50s and 60s have parallels throughout the various "cultures" in the US.
   
   I have recently read Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros, and Esmeralda Santiago's books on growing up in Puerto Rico and the US, and find it valuable to think about all these books at once--since there are parallels in all these women's experiences.

1 comments about 100 Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History.

1. 100 Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History by Rick Laezman is a remarkable collection of informative biographical capsule portraits introducing one hundred Hispanic men and women whose lives profoundly affected America. From the governor of Spanish Louisiana who secretly aided the Americans during the Revolutionary War, to the entrepreneur who made the Coca-Cola company a sensational success, 100 Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History is an amazing and eclectic collection of fascinating figures, each of whom is given a one-page biographical summary enhanced a black-and-white photograph or artistic portrait.

1 comments about Hispanics in Hollywood.

1. By JONATHAN KIRSCH, Special to The LA Times "...An illuminating and entertaining survey of films and television programs in which Latino actors, settings or themes figure prominently, "Hispanics in Hollywood" is full of such surprises. Anthony Quinn, perhaps best known as Zorba the Greek, is only one of many actors whose Mexican origins were once concealed, and there are many others whose Latino roots have only recently come to public attention, ranging from Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Cansino) to John Gavin (born John Anthony Golenar) to Raquel Welch (born Raquel Tejada). And it was a young Emilio Estevez who boldly reclaimed his own Latino family history and thus revealed to the world that the real name of his father, Charlie Sheen, is Ramon More often Latino actors found themselves in an awkward dilemma in Hollywood, as the authors of "Hispanics in Hollywood" point out--if their Latino identities were not concealed, they were put to use in depicting stereotyped Latino characters: "maids, slum dwellers, drug addicts and gang members," co-author Luis Reyes reminds us, or "cruel dictators, mustachioed bandits and beautiful señoritas." Only in the last couple of decades have Latino actors and directors enjoyed the opportunity to tell stories about their own heritage in a more open, honest and affirming voice in movies such as "Zoot Suit," "La Bamba," "Stand and Deliver," "Selena" and "A Walk in the Clouds." Reyes, a movie publicist who is also a chronicler of Hollywood's Latin American heritage, describes the book as "an attempt to show the way Hollywood has depicted Hispanic Americans and Latin America, while also pointing out the contributions to Hollywood movies and television made by unsung Hispanic Americans as well as those more famous." Thus, his book can be approached as a serious effort to ponder the issues of race and ethnicity in American pop culture and, at the same time, as one of those useful reference works that can be pulled down from the shelf when puzzling over some old and obscure movie on cable.

4 comments about We Took The Streets: Fighting For Latino Rights With The Young Lords.

1. Micky Melendez has written an excellent easy to read history of Puerto Rican efforts for social, political and economic empowerment from the Young Lords Party in the 1960's to today's struggle for a Latino mayor of Nueva York. This monograph by Micky Melendez is a powerful weapon in Boricua's long walk to freedom. palante



2. Miguel Melendez has given us a thoughtful,inspirational, and sensitive account of the Young Lords Party and also of the many pivotal events of his own life. I loved reading this book full of cultural tidbits and an insider's history of a group of dedicated individuals. This book offers important lessons for today's youth, many of whom feel no connection to the larger society. It serves as a tremendous contribution to young people by sharing positive ways to channel rage and frustration with one's social and emotional condition. The writer brilliantly shows what it is to search for meaning and purpose in one's life as he questions events occurring around him.

   Quiero agradecerle a Mickey para haber escrito un libro tan bello que demuestra que todos tenemos el derecho a la humanidad y dignidad.




3. I gre up during the 80's in west harlem, later the BX, went to manhattan center high school on 116 & pleasant ave .... you can't grow up anywhere in new york city and not recognize puerto rican pride, all you have to do is head up to Orchard Beach after memorial day, but it's a powerful part of the NY experience ....... I picked this up because of the Lincoln hospital story, and garbage offensives, these men and women are patriots of the black and latin community! The New York City minority community! great read, I learned about them in a american history class @ laguardia comm college, and was surprised I'd never heard of them before, I'd passed by lincoln hospital over 100 times, to hear about them being reason for it being built! I'll say it's a different time period now, but the children of NYC need to learn about this group, and movements like these, to learn discipline, and study the pride but learning journey of mister Melendez, then kids wouldn't get lost, because we are losing our city now as the rents are escalating, people are hurting now, and this knowledge is key to a new generation that needs to move forward and stand for something, not just accept circumstances, this book is excellent, powerful, and informative! True "hood", cultural, minority heroes! I'm glad and insprired by it



4. Mr. Melendez's book is well-written and gives the reader a great feel for what it was like living through 60s and 70s NYC as a latino. I'm old enough to remember hearing the stories on the news, but reading them in detail is a different experience altogether.
   
   I hope Mr. Melendez and his former colleagues publish more stories of these times and of the Young Lords. The work they did is still not part of regular curricula in NYC schools; more publications help to establish our history here in NYC.

1 comments about Mi Casa/my House (Somos Latinos / We Are Latinos).

1. My house is about the Rodriguez family and their home. I was excited to learn this family lives near my home. The pictures are wonderful. The author has taken much care when taking the photos.
   
   I enjoyed the dual language format. It allowed me to practice my knowledge of Spanish.

2 comments about Extraordinary Hispanic Americans (Extraordinary People).

1. This book has been a fantastic resource and addition to my classroom. Students use it as part of their research for projects each semester. Simply wonderful!



2. This browseable and highly readable book is a fine addition to a circulating or reference collection. The attractive cover features six recognizable Hispanic Americans. A table of contents features bold page numbers, with an icon of the person and name. Attractive layover text portrays a timeline: Exploring the New World, Early American Business and Culture, A Changing Nation, An American Way of Life, Making Their Mark, and Into the Twenty-First Century. The concluding chapter tells more about "The Growind Hispanic American Population". An impressive lineup of persons from all walks of life are given informative and interesting summaries, including Cristina Saralegui (talk show host), Alberto Gonzales (US Attorney General), Ellen Ochoa (astronaut), Richard Rodrigues (writer) and Mario Molina (chemist--1995 Nobel Prize winner).

5 comments about An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal [Or How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America].

1. Ms. Chavez is a wonderful writer. She's been through alot and describes her journey in very realistic terms. For those of you who would like to form your own opinion, please read the book. It's great!



2. My wife read the book and told me I should do so. It was impressive to see this woman use the experiences of her past..good and bad..to grow into someone who is successful, respected, and most of all Brave and Courageous.

   I admire the way she learned to think for herself, use her talents and ideas and find a path that often eludes many. I doubt I would be so clear thinking as she and I doubt I would be brave enough to write about the adventures along the way.

   She represents all that is truly good about our Great Country and all that is available to those who really want to achieve a better life. She took her experiences, both happy and sad, and built upon them. Despite serious disadvantages in her early life, she worked hard to advance and used her intelligence to think cleary and create her own set of beliefs and ideals.

   She has certainly shown us that by working hard, overcoming barriers, and by facing challenges one can still grow and bravely face those who are lining up against you. When in the end you have the respect of your friends and the public..and you can look around at those who were not brave enough to strike out and think on their own and do for themselves, the very ones who attack her daily..those who are still stuck in their own quagmires, it makes one truly think. This amazing Lady is an example of What ONE COULD BE if one has only the Courage to ignore those who say your time has not come. More people need to read this inspiring book ...maybe those very people who are still in the same old place despite years of phony promises..perhaps it is time for them to strike out and stop thinking they cannot achieve what this Brave and Courageous Lady has!




3. This is an awesome book that covers many issues, but as an author of a book on California politics, I would not have been able to write about English language issues in K-12 without this incredible resource.
   
   Linda Chavez has written "the" book for all parents and all voters who want to understand, first-hand, how the Left tricks the rules in the battle over English-only instruction in schools, and those who use race-over-reason to defend bilingual classroom instruction.
   
   The state of California had gone from award-winning public education status 30 years ago, to a dreadful 48th out of 50 in scholastic aptitude today. Much of this condition can be attributed to leftist Democrats, and teacher's unions, who savor power over what is best for children.
   
   California in 1998 overwhelmingly passed Proposition 227 (English-only) into law. Funny how this works. A millionaire businessman, Ron Unz, saw a need and responded to the FACT that poor working-class Latino parents were appalled by the lack of opportunity for their children who speak only Spanish in the world's richest English-speaking country.
   
   Linda brilliantly lays out how the Left worked to demonize Unz, and anyone else who opposed bilingual education. Linda also demonstrates in this book, how California Democrats, instead of looking out for parents, millions of immigrant children who want to learn English (the "keys to the kingdom), and frustrated educators - ignored the will of the people.
   
   The book is timeless as the battle over English literacy in schools continues.
   
   I highly recommend this book as well as the articulate and well-researched content brought forth by a dedicated soldier who, for all the false criticism, continues to place her passion for fact over fiction in her writing.
   
   The truth doesn't make the loudmouths on the Left happy. Nothing new there.
   
   Nice job Linda! Keep up the good work.
   
   Patrick Mallon
   Political columnist and author



4. This lady cannot resist savaging people she feels did her wrong. And like many people on the far right, there is a very dysfunctional home life. I swear to you, the Rush Limbaughs, the Newt Gingriches, the Tom DeLays all have had super unhappy childhoods. Maybe this is why their politics are so sour and anti-people.
   
   I don't like this lady - she took advantage of affirmative action whenever she could in her youth, now she has some problems with it and would like to throw the whole program out the door SO NO ONE ELSE CAN BENEFIT FROM IT. She makes me ill.



5. Linda Chavez has led an interesting life and has a great story to tell. Unfortunately, I found the writing style of this book to be completely flat. There seemed to be no highs or lows, everything was weighted equally. Rather a chronological bullet-pointed life rather than a real storytelling. I kept with it because of interest in her rather than being gripped by any powerful writing.

No comments about The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and NahuaPoetics.