Sand and Bone Desert Spark

By George Hartley
December 10, 2010

Huesos arena spark
combine, conjunto
lost in the desert

burnt and callused feet
walking, hiding, running:

grain by grain the imprint
cry by cry the impact
trade agreement shipment of goods
more precious to the gods (capital)
than flesh (accident)

spark, phosphorescence, glimmer
what remains of lives given up
to the glow of memory—darkness

imprints in air and sand
their last breath
a suck of my own breathing
spin and dizzy the sand
sing and measure the sorrow

of a child at home now motherless
now fatherless
with only grain of bone of sand to testify
to the pull of love’s immediacy
responsibility
and strength

blood and bone and sand
to the rhythm of riches and nations
spilled and spent

left to the spark of memory

[Inspired by student art displayed in the University of Arizona library, December 5, 2010.]

Anzaldúa’s Backpack: Nahuala Inventories of New Mestiza Indigenism

By George Hartley, November 5, 2010

Presented at El Mundo Zurdo: An International Conference on the Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa: Art and Performance, University of Texas-San Antonio.

I. Prologue
I first want to thank Norma Alarcón, AnaLouise Keating, and Deborah Miranda for making this panel possible, and Norma Cantú for her encouragement and acceptance of our panel proposal. The talks today by Laura Pérez and AnaLouise Keating, as well as that by Randy Conner last year, have provided a perfect context for my presentation here.

I should mention that one of my motivations for writing this talk is that not so long ago I myself almost wrote a very similar argument against Anzaldúa’s Indigenism as the one my Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s, both in terms of what we’ll see as Saldaña-Portillo’s critique of Anzaldúa’s Indigenism as well as in Saldaña-Portillo’s move to Zapatismo as a “corrective” of Chicanismo more generally (which I do not develop in this paper).

Amoxtli X - The X Codex

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez


[Originally posted on SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 2010 on Dr. Cintli Blog.]


In Lak Ech, Panche Be & Hunab Ku & The Forgotten 1524 Debate
Eagle Feather Research Institute 2010 Collective Copyright

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, Arnoldo Vento, PhD, Vivian Garcia Lopez, PhD, Mixelle Rascon, Pricila Rodriguez, Norma Gonzalez, Crystal Terriquez, Jo Anna Mixpe Ley, Grecia Ramirez & Luis A Valdez

SAVE ETHNIC/RAZA STUDIES

Why did several communities support a run from Tucson to Phoenix through the Arizona desert in 115-degree heat in the middle of the summer last year? Probably for the same reason 15 of us were arrested for criminal trespass at Tucson’s state building this May: We did it to combat the effort to terminate, via HB 2281, Tucson’s highly successful Raza Studies program. This came on the heels of the anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070. One attacks our bodies; the other, our spirits.

An open letter from an artist to a Mexican crime cartel boss

By Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Señor XXX


Lord of the heavens and the beaches, the highways and the trailers

1. I have never met you face to face and I truly hope I never do.
Despite the fact you don’t know me, your actions affect my daily existence in profound ways. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of post-national Mexicans whose umbilical cord to my homeland has been severed by you. It hurts me to confess it but I don’t look forward to my increasingly less frequent visits to Mexico, because people like you have made it a terrifying place, a war zone. I have lost my country of origin to violence and fear; to the violence you helped create and the fear you continue to perpetrate.

Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

(What Happens When God No Longer Needs White People)

OR

North American Zionism and the Roots of White Panic and Apartheid in Arizona

By George Hartley, Associate Professor of English at Ohio University
December 2, 2010
Last modified December 18, 2010


The current wave of violence and hatred perpetrated by white people against brown people should not be seen as an aberration but rather as a long-standing North American tradition. While Arizona’s first wave of European invaders framed their conquest in terms made available by Spanish Renaissance Catholicism (complete with expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain), the Anglo Conquest of the mid-1800s was framed in terms provided by English Puritanism and its transformations under the concept of Manifest Destiny.