Mario Funes con Jorge Ramos

'Little Armenia' sign in Hollywood feels strange, but right

Hector Tobar LA Times
January 27, 2009

A wise American once wrote, "You can't go home again."

If you're from Los Angeles, you know that truer words were never spoken.

Call this city home, and eventually L.A. will repay your devotion with a swift kick, a cold slap, and a mocking wave goodbye.

I learned this lesson the hard way after many years away. I decided to revisit the corner of L.A. where I was born and raised.

When I was a kid, I called this place Hollywood. The glitzier meanings of the name barely registered in my young brain. The Hollywood I knew was a sooty playground of concrete and asphalt where all my friends lived.

Then I got older, and moved to Montebello and many other places in California and beyond. I started telling people I was born in East Hollywood. I liked the gritty feel "East" added to its name.

But on my recent return, I found my old homeplace had a new name.

"Little Armenia" read the bold white letters on blue rectangular signs, installed by city workers on Hollywood Boulevard. Unfortunately, I am not Armenian.

Returning to your childhood home and finding it officially named for another ethnic group is sort of like going to your birthday party and finding someone else's name on the cake.

If the sign had read "Little Guatemala," I'm sure I would have felt a burst of pride: I might have called my immigrant mother to say, "There's a little part of L.A. named after us!"

The sense that the Armenians had picked my pocket, culturally speaking, lasted about three seconds -- three seconds in which I channeled my inner Lou Dobbs and scowled like Bill O'Reilly.

Then the great urban designer in the sky whispered in my ear, "Don't be a hypocrite."

My parents came here from Guatemala to reinvent themselves. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans followed after them, changing the L.A. neighborhoods they lived in.

Famous for both its transience and its diversity, Los Angeles is a place where any given street corner is rarely one thing exclusively for very long.

Little Tokyo, we read in this paper Saturday, is filling with Koreans. There's been a big Vietnamese and Cambodian presence in Chinatown for decades now. And my part of East Hollywood probably could just as easily be called Little Manila or Little San Salvador.

There's no denying the Armenian imprint on my old stomping grounds.

Armenian business owners have populated the neighborhood with signs written in the loops and arcs of their alphabet. My inability to speak Armenian led to a short conversation with a local merchant that ended with him apologizing for his poor English.

"I am not good listening already," he told me.

And when I thought about it, maybe I wasn't so good remembering.

Truth be told, there was always a little Armenia in the Hollywood of my childhood.
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Epicentro Poetic Epidemic

Feria Agustina in LA

TONITE

Body: JOIN US IN CELEBRATING
FLIGHT TO FREEDOM
ROSSANA PEREZ BOOK RELEASE
AND
ROQUE DALTON'S LEGACY
WITH A NIGHT OF MUSIC AND POETRY

Friday, May 30, 2008 @ 7pm - 9 pm
CARECEN
2845 West 7th Street / Los Angeles 90005

Lecture by Maya Professor Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez on Monday, April 14 @ CSUN

Professor Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez will be giving a lecture and reading on Monday, April 14, 2008, from noon-1:45pm in the Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall #451.

Professor Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez is a Maya-Q�anjob�al novelist, poet, painter, and literary critic. He is a graduate of the Universidad Mariano G�lvez in Guatemala City where he currently teaches Mayan literature and oral tradition. He is a member of the Academy of Mayan Languages . He has served as an official of the Ministry of Culture of Guatemala . In addition, Gonz�lez founded and serves as president of Sb'eyb'al, a leading Mayan cultural organization, which organized the First and Second Congresses of Indigenous Literature of the Americas in Guatemala City in 1998 and 1999. He has published several trilingual literary works (Maya-Q�anjob�al, Spanish and English). His book entitled Kotz'ib', nuestra literaturas maya (1997) is an important text that provides cultural and literary parameters in our interpretation of Indigenous cultural productions. His second novel, El retorno de los mayas/The Return of the Maya (2000) deals with the return of a group of Mayan refugees to Guatemala .
His other works published include The Dry Season; Q'anjob'al Maya Poems(2001) and 13 B'aktun: La nueva era 2012 (El fin del ciclo desde la �ptica maya contempor�nea) (2006). Gonz�lez�s two novels, collection of poetry and his text on Maya literature are widely used in university classrooms.

Deporting the American Dream (repost)

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Deporting the American Dream

El Salvadorean Deportees Create Hybrid Culture

New America Media, News Report, Video, Josue Rojas, Posted: Apr 02, 2008

Editor’s Note: Recent reports have shown that in some states, the number of police referrals to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has nearly doubled in the past year. A report by TRAC shows that ICE has the highest number of referrals for federal criminal prosecution of all law enforcement agencies. In El Salvador, these deportees are affecting the culture of the nation with their Americanized ways, working at call centers and struggling to survive. Josue Rojas is an artist and writer from San Francisco’s Mission District.

Salvadorean deportees, or DPs, have a few things in common: they think in English, they’re young and they’re influential. They’re importers of the culture they carry inside — the niche, regional culture of the American city they grew up in. Be it New York talk, L.A. talk, N’lawins or D.C talk… they speak it. Culturally, they’re intimately in the know of something else that is arguably the coolest thing in the hemisphere: Americana.

This is a streaming MP4 video - you'll need Quicktime 6 or later to view it.

In a country celebrated in Central America as one of the region’s greatest friends to the U.S (and is often paraded as a flagship for development) the DP’s influence spreads. They are simultaneously embraced and rejected. They’re the cool kids that society hates to love — Central America’s most beloved, betrayed bad-asses.

The seven deportees I spoke to were not all members of the internationally infamous MS-13 gang, instead they were rappers and artists; they worked to remove tattoos and manned phone lines at call centers. They’re marginalized in a marginalized country –– foreign bodies amongst the harsh antibodies of a prejudice, hyper-conservative society still dealing with the duality of right-wing conservative culture and a stubborn attempt at a socialist revolution. Coming in by the tens of thousands each year, El Salvador is sweating from the fever of their infection. They’re the ones who couldn’t make it on the other side, yet they’re successful here.

Once you’re deported, you don’t fall into a black hole. Your life continues, and with it your dreams. Disappeared from North America and rejected by the mainstream in El Salvador, DPs emerge with a hybrid culture of their own. They haven’t lost the ‘American Dream’ – they’ve just been deported along with it.

March 8- International Women's Day in LA