There were plenty of blue notes played at the now annual Fort Apache Band reunion last night, but Jerry Gonzalez wasn’t worried. Anchored by his brother Andy, who hovered over the bass as if he were guarding the entrance to heaven, Jerry calmly switched from a set of congas to flugel horn, penetrating the Monk-Rican […]
Read moreTrouble in Tuscon: The Battle Over Precious Knowledge
Like many dramatic films, Precious Knowledge, a documentary directed by Ari Luis Palos, sets up an inevitable conflict between two forces on a collision course. On one side is a group of students and teachers at an Arizona high school who want to use education as a tool for self-awareness and empowerment. On the other, is […]
Read moreEl Dilema del Bilingüismo
¿Por qué cruzó el charco el caribeño? Obviamente para llegar al otro lado. Citando al cubano-americano Gustavo Pérez-Firmat citado por el dominican-jersey Junot Díaz: “El hecho que te estoy escribiendo en (español) ya hace falso lo que te quería decir”. Y con eso entramos a otro nivel del dilema del bilingüismo, o sea, les doy […]
Read moreTaíno revivalism: Going back to La Tierra del Eden
Some artists and academics in the U.S. want to revive the culture of Táinos, a people indigenous to the Caribbean, but not without controversy. By ED MORALES Caridad de la Luz, better known as “La Bruja,” is a fabulous Nuyorican poet and actress whose performances echoes an urban style cultivated in her ancestral homeland, the […]
Read moreEx-Murdoch Tabloid and Phone-Hack Scandal Hack Axes Latin@s
SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS: (NEW YORK) The minions of Colin Myler, a cold-blooded fiend posing as a Good Samaritan announced this Saturday that the Daily News’s weekly Spanish-language publication Hora Hispana will cease publication, and that the editor of the Viva section, which focuses on Latino/as and has been edited by veteran journalist Maite […]
Read moreFrom North Philly to the Heights…A Pulitzer Prize Story
For Quiara Alegría Hudes, the recent news that she had won a Pulitzer Prize last month was shocking. “It was so far from my radar of anything that would possibly be happening in my life,” said Hudes, who lives in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. “It gives me permission to keep doing what I’m doing, […]
Read moreKelly From the Block
Here’s a photo of New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly with Jennifer Lopez at the 32nd annual New York City Police Foundation gala, from this slideshow of the commish’s increasing social activities. This of course in the context of rumors that the 70-year-old Kelly might make a run at the mayor’s office once Bloomberg’s term […]
Read moreThe Beauty of the Beasties
Somewhere on 6th Street in the mid-1980s a siren dressed in white played me a scratchy tape of “Cookie Puss”; she thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard and sensed that someday everyone would hear that crazy noise she could claim as her own. She had a baby bump from a local Rastaman […]
Read moreGirls and the Absence of Color
Been noticing all the hype about the new HBO series Girls, most notably the “controversy” about the all-white casting. Have to admit I’ve only seen one episode, the first one, and I found it remarkably tedious, although this is part of an aesthetic that has been referred to as mumblecore in the past. One good thing […]
Read moreColombian Cover-up
This is Dania Suárez, from Cartagena, Colombia and if you’ve been reading the Daily News or some other tabloid lately you’ve seen her picture several times by now. She is the sex worker at the center of the Secret Service prostitution scandal, which has since branched out into the El Salvador prostitution scandal and the Brazil prostitution […]
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ED MORALES 