2 reviews of Transit by Anna Seghers

European Refugee Lit: Anna Seghers’s “Transit” Reviewed
By Joe Winkler On May 2, 2013

Transit
by Anna Seghers; translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
NYRB Classics; 280 p.

Anna Seghers, one the most respected and important German authors of the 20th century, wrote perhaps the earliest account of the Nazi concentration camps. That book, The Seventh Cross, tells a similar story to her own time in a camp. Now, NYRB Classics has released a sequel of sorts. Transit tells the story of a lesser-known component of the Second World War, the displacement of millions of refugees. While it pales in comparison to the genocide, the displacement of millions of refugees signified its own traumatic experience which ended up changing the map of postwar Europe. Seghers’s unnamed narrator escapes first from a concentration camp in Germany and then from one in Rouen, France. He finds his way to Marseilles, a port city, which in this era of refugees desperate to leave transforms into a bustling town of the lost. The narrator feels a sort of modernist ennui until he finds himself a hustler in the shady business of visas and departures. There, he begins to create a glimpse of a solid life while remaining on the precarious ground of a displaced person. He loves, he attaches himself to a family and friends, all with an awareness of the inherent transience of his situation and consequently life in general.

The book begins with talk of a downed ship of refugees, and then the narrator proclaims his manifesto:

Native American Shuts Down Anti-Illegal Immigrant Protest in Tucson, Arizona

At a Tucson, Ariz., anti-illegal immigrant rally, a group of self-righteous protesters were literally put on mute after a Native American decided to drop some knowledge on who the real “illegals” are.

Pushing a toddler in a stroller, a rightfully irritated self-identified Native American began yelling at the group, saying:

“Y’all f*cking illegal. You’re all illegal. You’re all illegal!

“We didn’t invite none of you here!

“We’re the only native Americans here.

“That’s right. We’re the only native Americans here. Y’all are all illegal. We didn’t invite none of you! We didn’t invite none of you here. Get on, get on, get on with your bogus arguments.”

Visibly shaken, an unfortunate protestor quickly found himself in the cross hairs of the unexpected lesson when the Native American turned his attention toward his diminutive flag and now-increasingly inappropriate sign:

“We should have put that sign up when you son of the b*tches came!”

“That [the flag] represents blood, that represents blood spilled by Native Americans protecting this land from the invaders. Yeah, that’s right, you don’t want to hear the G*d damn truth! Get on, b*tch! All the Native Americans you killed, you plant your houses here. That’s the truth.”

23 Defining Moments in U.S. Immigration Policy History

from http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/23-defining-moments-immigration-policy-history/story?id=17810440#.UOplQ4njmYo

By TED HESSON (@tedhesson)
Nov. 27, 2012

Ever wondered how we ended up with this cobbled-together immigration system?

Drawing on a mix of sources, including Guarding the Golden Door, here are the 23 defining moments in immigration policy history that helped create the system we know today:

1. Naturalization Act of 1790

– It restricted naturalization to “free white persons.” Naturalization restrictions by race were not completely removed until 1952.

The “Am I Not a Man And a Brother” anti-slavery medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787. (Wikimedia)

Chicano! a 4 part PBS Documentary (1996)

Part 1, “Quest for a Homeland,” examines the beginnings of the movement by profiling Reies Lopez Tijerina and the land grant movement in New Mexico in 1966 and 1967. It shows how Tijerina’s fight to convince the federal government to honor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) galvanized Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the Southwest. It then moves on to discuss Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales and his founding of the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1966. Focusing on the importance of his poem I am Joaquin, it highlights how Gonzales reached out to Chicano youth. This segment is useful for its discussion of the roots of Chicano nationalism through its affirmation of cultural identity grounded in Aztec myths such as that of Aztlán, the mythical Chicano homeland.

Part 2, “The Struggle in the Fields,” examines the importance of César Chávez and his efforts to organize farm workers in the central valley of California. It delineates the various components of Chávez’s strategy for farm worker self determination—strikes, boycotts, pilgrimages, fasts—and emphasizes his commitment to nonviolence and the importance of faith and prayer in achieving his goal.

Uncommon Senselessness: Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel — his first translated into English — views atrocity through an ironic lens

by Bill O’Driscoll
from http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/uncommon-senselessness/Content?oid=1340617

The genocide that accompanied Guatemala’s long-running civil war has been called “the silent holocaust.” From about 1960 until 1996, when peace accords were signed, an estimated 200,000 civilians died. Most were indigenous people of Mayan descent, and most perished, often horrifically, at the hands of the Guatemalan military. But the atrocities committed in this small country just south of Mexico are much less widely acknowledged than those that occurred even in Nicaragua and neighboring El Salvador, then suffering through their own bloody civil wars.

If awareness of Guatemalan genocide is scant, it’s not for lack of information. In the 1980s, at the height of the army’s reign of terror, human-rights groups issued reports with titles like Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder. And within three years of the war’s end, two major reports, one of them by a United Nations truth commission, documented the full extent of the horror. They identified the killings as genocide — the deliberate, systematic destruction of a racial or cultural group — and laid the vast majority of the blame on the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military.

In 2002, the acclaimed Salvadoran novelist and journalist Horacio Castellanos Moya was in self-imposed exile in Mexico City. He had fled El Salvador in 1997, after his controversial novel El asco (Revulsion) drew death threats. Broke and looking for work, he now began writing what became a new novel, one partly inspired by one of those human-rights reports, the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala’s Guatemala: Nunca mas! (Never Again!). Moya’s novel was structured as a book-length monologue by an alcoholic, anxiety-ridden editor assigned to proofread a similar report. The novel was published, as Insensatez, in 2004.

Poetry is Dangerous: An Essay by Kazim Ali

A reading of the essay “Poetry is Dangerous” by Kazim Ali from ORANGE ALERT: ESSAYS ON POETRY, ART AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE (University of Michigan 2010).

Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University.

Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque (2005), which won Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, and The Fortieth Day (2008). Ali’s poems, both lyric and musical, explore the intersection of faith and daily life. In a review of The Fortieth Day, Library Journal noted that Ali “continues his task of creating a rejuvenated language that longs to be liberated from the weight of daily routine and the power of dogmatic usage . . . writing in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Ali is clearly a poet of ideas and symbols, yet his words remain living entities within the texture of the poem.”

His prose includes The Disappearance of Seth (2009) and Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (2009), as well as the novel Quinn’s Passage (2005), which was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by Chronogram magazine.

In 2003 Ali co-founded Nightboat Books and served as the press’s publisher until 2007.

Proyecto Sur Los Angeles fundraiser December 1, Saturday 4 – 8 PM

Proyecto Sur Los Angeles will hold an auction and fundraising event on December 1—Join us! (información en inglés y en español)

Looking for holiday gifts that will give back to the community? Proyecto Sur Los Angeles and Vena Cava Bookstore make it possible for you to find special gifts for those you love, and support community-based activist cultural projects.

Saturday, December 1, 2012
4 – 8 p.m.
Vena Cava Bookstore
449 Savoy Street
Chinatown
Los Angeles CA 90012

Our silent auction will include art, books, services, and many other amazing items (examples include framed historical photographs, paintings, jewelry, gift certificates for local restaurants, and much more). Mexican singer Liz Retolaza will perform while we enjoy a delicious Oaxacan meal and excellent drinks—all thanks to generous donations made by friends of Vena Cava Bookstore and Proyecto Sur Los Ángeles.

The silent auction benefits Proyecto Sur Los Ángeles, a project of the community-based organization Cielo Portátil (Portable Sky). We promote autobiographical writing as a tool for the development of critical thought and free expression, among communities of Spanish-speaking exiles and migrants in Los Angeles, California.

Tammy Duckworth defeats Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh for Illinois congress seat

Tammy Duckworth just trounced Tea Party favorite Rep. Joe Walsh, which is to say that a half-Thai, Indonesian-speaking, double-amputee war hero who also happens to be a woman will soon represent Illinois’ 8th congressional district.
The race was among the ugliest—and most entertaining—of the election. The district, which Walsh currently represents, was redrawn by Democrats in the state legislature to better accommodate one of their own. Walsh accused Duckworth of feeling entitled to a gerrymandered gift from her fellow Dems. She, in turn, accused him of being a deadbeat dad who vacationed in Europe while his kids waited for their $100,000 in child support. Walsh responded with this rather unconvincing plea from his son to “stop attacking our family” and accused Duckworth of talking nonstop about her military service. She did like to talk about her military service, but voters didn’t seem to mind hearing about it from a woman who was co-piloting a helicopter as it was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade.

In one of the nation’s most expensive, most hostile and most closely watched Congressional races, Democrat Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Iraqi War veteran, defeated Tea Party-backed Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in the northwest suburban 8th Congressional District campaign.

Duckworth declared victory shortly after 10 p.m.

“A grandma’s parting shock,” by Kenneth Turan

KENNETH TURAN
FILM CRITIC kenneth.turan@latimes.com

ARNON GOLDFINGER’S “The Flat” probes a couple’s friendship with a Nazi.

There’s something shambling and unassuming about “The Flat,” a home-movie quality to much of its footage. But it’s not just any home that’s being examined, and that makes all the difference.

Israel’s top-grossing documentary of last year as well as the winner of that country’s best documentary award, “The Flat” succeeds by being wide-ranging as well as particular. It tells an out-of-the-ordinary personal story and examines broad historical issues of societal memory and selective amnesia, of what is hidden between generations and what is revealed.

Ted Rall on NYPD and FBI surveillance of Muslims

A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.
Read more:
http://huff.to/WKq8yW
Video:
Teen: NYPD Paid Me To Bait Innocent Muslims – YouTube http://bit.ly/TWrtwp

see also http://www.rall.com/rallblog/

Book Review: Crossing Into America: The New Literature of Immigration

Crossing Into America: The New Literature of Immigration
Author: Louis Mendoza (Editor), S. Shankar (Editor)
Publisher: New Press
Publish Date: 2003
ISBN: 1565847202
Pages: 336
Cover Type: Hard Cover

Reviewed by Paul Grant

One of the outstanding qualities of North American life is immigration. With 2 or 3% of us claiming exclusively indigenous heritage, the vast majority of us came from somewhere else. Throughout the recent few centuries, immigration has come in enormous waves, each of which permanently changed the face of the land.

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York:Viking Penguin, 2000), 346 pp., $27.95 cloth, $15 paper.

Immigrant labor has always been critical to the Market’s prosperity. Only by reining in that Market, by challenging its relentless grasp, by humbling its colossal power, can Latinos in this country move from incremental to qualitative progress, only then can they shatter the caste system to which they have been relegated.

With passion and eloquence, Juan Gonzalez presents a devastating perspective on U.S. history rarely found in mainstream publishing aimed at a popular audience. The United States emerged in just two hundred years, he points out, as the world’s superpower and richest nation. “No empire, whether in ancient or modern times, ever saw its influence spread so far or determined the thoughts and actions of so many people around the world as our nation does today.” The majority of U.S. people don’t like to think of their country as an empire.

33 Irish San Patricios were hanged by the U.S. between 10 September and 13 September 1847

The Saint Patrick’s Battalion (Spanish: Batallón de San Patricio), formed and led by Jon Riley, was a unit of 175 to several hundred immigrants (accounts vary) and expatriates of European descent who fought as part of the Mexican Army against the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Most of the battalion’s members had deserted or defected from the U.S. Army. Made up primarily of ethnic Irish and German Catholic immigrants, the battalion included Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and native Mexicans, most of whom were Roman Catholics.[1] Disenfranchised Americans were in the ranks, including escaped slaves from the American South.[2] The Mexican government offered incentives to foreigners who would enlist in its army: granting them citizenship, paying higher wages than the U.S. Army and the offer of generous land grants. Only a few members of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion were actual U.S. citizens.

Members of the Battalion are known to have deserted from U.S. Army regiments including: the 1st Artillery, the 2nd Artillery, the 3rd Artillery, the 4th Artillery, the 2nd Dragoons, the 2nd Infantry, the 3rd Infantry, the 4th Infantry, the 5th Infantry, the 6th Infantry, the 7th Infantry and the 8th Infantry.[3]

The Battalion served as an artillery unit for much of the war. Despite later being formally designated as infantry, it still retained artillery pieces throughout the conflict. In many ways, the battalion acted as the sole Mexican counter-balance to U.S. horse artillery.

—from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion

Salvadoran accused in 1989 killings admits US lies

In this Dec. 19, 2011 file photo, Inocente Orlando Montano, a former Salvadoran military officer, arrives at federal court in Boston. Montano, accused of colluding in the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests, admitted Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 in federal court in Boston that he lied to U.S. immigration officials, a guilty plea that could allow him to be extradited to Spain for prosecution in the killings. (AP Photo – Steven Senne)

DENISE LAVOIE
From Associated Press
September 11, 2012 7:46 PM EDT

BOSTON (AP) — A former El Salvadoran military official accused of colluding in the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests admitted Tuesday that he lied to U.S. immigration officials, a guilty plea that could allow him to be extradited to Spain for prosecution in the killings.

Inocente Orlando Montano was among 20 Salvadorans indicted in Spain last year for their alleged roles in the killings during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Montano has denied any involvement in the assassinations.

Montano, now 70, had lived in the Boston area for about a decade when he was arrested last year on immigration charges. Once a high-ranking military official, he said he had been working at a candy factory in the U.S.

Alejandro Murguia named San Francisco Poet Laureate

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced Alejandro Murguia as the city’s new poet laureate at a poetry festival in North Beach Thursday night, a library spokeswoman said.
Murguia, a San Francisco State University Latino/a studies professor, was appointed by the mayor as the city’s sixth poet laureate and helped kick off the third International Poetry Festival, first held in 2007, San Francisco Public Library spokeswoman Michelle Jeffers said.
Lee welcomed Murguia and other poets in town for the four-day festival Thursday night. Jeffers said the mayor spoke about bringing more poetry into the city.
When Murguia was nominated he shared his goals to make San Francisco the poetic center of the Americas and wants to incorporate more poetry into the community, according to library officials.
Jeffers said the new poet laureate wants to spread poetry into schools, library and even jails, “so that hope might also spring from poetry,” as Murguia wrote about his new position.
Held in Jack Kerouac Alley in North Beach, the poetry festival kickoff was hosted by former city poet laureate Jack Hirschman, who conceptualized the celebration as his duty to bring poetry to the public. The festival continues today through Sunday.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee named Alejandro Murguía the city’s sixth poet laureate Thursday.

“I am thrilled to announce Alejandro Murguía as the new San Francisco poet laureate, a position that exemplifies San Francisco’s rich literary history and tradition,” Lee said in prepared remarks at the kickoff for the third International Poetry Festival in Kerouac Alley. “Murguía, who founded the Mission Cultural Center, has been a champion of many local authors, artists, poets as well as a great contributor to the literary community in the city.”

If Murguía has his way, the Board of Supervisors might follow up roll call with a haiku at its next weekly meeting. The professor of Latino/Latina studies at San Francisco State University said he thinks city workers including elected officials, police officers and firefighters should participate in a poetry workshop.

“Everyone in the city could address each other with the greatest of salutations, which is ‘poeta’” Murguía said, referring to the Spanish word for poet. “I’m serious.”

Murguía, 62, came to San Francisco from Los Angeles in the early 1970s and never left.

“I came here precisely because it has such a vibrant poetic scene,” he said. “San Francisco is the city of poets.”

Tiempo verde / ofrenda 29, by Arnoldo Garcia

http://lacarpadelfeo.blogspot.mx/2012/04/tiempo-verde-ofrenda-29.html

Arnoldo García

Tiempo verde | ofrenda 29
(Improvisations | de repente)

How many worlds were destroyed
to get to this point

Mara Salvatrucha, Zetas Joining Forces? Guatemala Authorities See Disturbing Evidence

By ROMINA RUIZ-GOIRIENA, Associated Press

GUATEMALA CITY — Hardened in the streets and prisons of California and deported in the 1990s to the Central American countries where they were born, the members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang swiftly grew into a force of heavily tattooed young men carrying out kidnappings, murder and extortion.

FBI documents reveal profiling of N. California Muslims

FBI Assistant Director Michael Kortan defended the agents' activities,…

Reports obtained by the ACLU show agents gathered intelligence under the guise of outreach programs and shared it with other agencies. A legal expert calls the practice ‘outrageous.’

March 28, 2012|By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times

SAN FRANCISCO —Federal agents routinely profiled Muslims in Northern California for at least four years, using community outreach efforts as a guise for compiling intelligence on local mosques, according to documents released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Iraqi beating victim mourned (from the L.A. Times)

The husband of Shaima Alawadi pleads for help in finding her killer.

Kassim Al-Himidi with the body of his wife, Shaima Alawadi, during a memorial… (Nelvin C. Cepeda / Associated Press)

March 28, 2012|Tony Perry

LAKESIDE, CALIF — The husband of an Iraqi immigrant who was savagely beaten in the couple’s El Cajon home issued an emotional plea Tuesday for help in finding the killer “of this innocent woman.”

Kassim Al-Himidi told reporters after an Islamic memorial service for his wife, Shaima Alawadi, that he wants to confront the person who bludgeoned her to death and left a threatening note telling her to return to their native country and calling her a terrorist.

The New Barbarians: A Declaration of Poetic Disobedience from the New Border, by Guillermo Gómez-Peña

from http://www.kuikatl.com/the-new-barbarians-a-declaration-of-poetic/
Guillermo Gómez-Peña

(2004-Ongoing)

1. To the Masterminds of Paranoid Nationalism

I say, we say:

‘We,’ the Other people

We, the migrants, exiles, nomads & wetbacks

in permanent process of voluntary deportation

We, the transient orphans of dying nation-states

la otra America; l’autre Europe

We, the citizens of the outer limits and crevasses

of ‘Western civilization’

We, who have no government;

no flag or national anthem

We, the New Barbarians

Bookforum talks with Sergio González Rodríguez

from February 17, 2012, http://www.bookforum.com/index.php?pn=interview&id=9042
Margie Cook

American readers may not be familiar with Sergio González Rodríguez by name, but fans of Spanish-language fiction are likely aware of him. One of Mexico’s leading writers and political agitators, González Rodríguez has been featured in the novels of Roberto Bolaño (2666) and Javier Marias (Dark Back of Time) for his research into the more than three hundred female homicides in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez. In 2002, González Rodríguez published Bones in the Desert, an investigative account of the homicides that set out to prove that in Mexico, “the rule of law… is fiction.” Despite being banned from the State of Chihuahua and having endured chronic intimidation, he is a columnist for the Mexico City newspaper Reforma and received his doctoral degree in law. González Rodríguez is also the author of three books, The Headless Man, Infectious, and Original Evil. In his latest book and English debut, The Femicide Machine, González Rodríguez weaves almost two decades of research into a sharp narrative manifesto about the female homicides in Ciudad Juarez. He agreed to chat with Bookforum via email about the book, which comes out later this month, and is excerpted below.

Bookforum: You began your career writing art criticism for the Mexico City newspaper, Reforma. What led you to write about the female homicides in Cuidad Juarez?

Mexico: How Guns Are Trafficked Below the Border

Investigating the saga of the WASR-10, an AK-47 knockoff and weapon of choice for Mexico’s cartels. A Web-exclusive report.

By Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight, February 3, 2011

Mexico’s cartels have small teams that, among other assignments, procure weapons from different sources. However, according to law enforcement officials, it’s unlikely, unnecessary and dangerous for these teams to reach into the United States to develop their own networks or have contact with straw buyers like the ones who were purchasing weapons at X Caliber Guns in Arizona. Instead, the teams simply wait in Mexico where they already have in place contacts, protection, storage facilities and transportation services.

Sebastiao Salgado, photographer of “Migrations”

Excerpt from “The Spectre of Hope” a new film about the photography of Sebastiao Salgado, with John Berger

The Spectre of Hope Trailer:

 

“Nationalism in Exile: Following the political dreams of refugee communities,” an essay and book review by John Tirman

Nationalism in Exile
Following the political dreams of refugee communities.

John Tirman

Exile has long enjoyed a special place at the literary table. Bereft of the soul, estranged from the family, banished from the community, expelled from la patrie, lost in the diaspora—such tropes have formed a sturdy axle of poetry and novels for centuries. But something has changed about displacement since the explorations of Dante, Conrad, Nabokov, and countless other paladins of exile.1 That is the sheer scale and reasons for human migration. These qualities are transforming the tone, essence, and sensibility of the diaspora, and its political meaning.

The UN agency responsible for refugees estimates the total number of displaced to be 27 million as of 1995, up from one million in 1951. That current figure surely underestimates the numbers of “internally displaced persons,” dislocated within their own country. And it does not count at all those who have migrated “willingly,” to seek work or escape despair, a mass that makes the true count closer to one hundred million, nearly one in every fifty people on earth. The magnitude is also conveyed by country statistics: those newly uprooted in 1999 alone included 350,000 Afghans, nearly one million Angolans, 400,000 Burundians, 600,000 Chechens, 280,000 Colombians, 1.2 million in the two Congos, 100,000 Kashmiris, 500,000 Indonesians, 200,000 Sierra Leoneans, and one million Kosovars. (Large fractions of those people were able to return to their ravaged villages, and so they are no longer counted as displaced.) Because civilians are now the primary victims in warfare—nine times more than soldiers, a reversal of the ratio prevailing during World War I—the experience of displacement is not merely loss of home and town, but one of relentless, menacing violence.

Who represents these people in our culture, our literature, our politics? Recording the pain of displacement has been the work of the individual exile, expat, and émigré, who is, with few exceptions, someone possessing the refined ability befitting a successful author whose condition of removal from the homeland is often voluntary. “To concentrate on exile as a contemporary political punishment, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself,” writes Edward Said in the title essay from Reflections on Exile. “You must think of the refugee-peasants with no prospect of ever returning home, armed only with a ration card and an agency number…. Negotiations, wars of liberation, people bundled out of their homes and prodded, bussed, or walked to enclaves in other regions: what do these experiences add up to? Are they not manifestly and almost by design irrecoverable?”

Violence and Drug-Trafficking in Mexico

In Mexico, people will pay up to $70,000 dollars for a license to hunt and kill a bighorn sheep. Killing a man is much cheaper—about $2,000, according to the rates charged by hitmen in Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous city in the world.

And yet, on occasions, death comes free. On August 24, 2010, in Tamaulipas, seventy-two migrants were murdered before they could achieve the golden American dream. The workers, who had no passports, came from Brazil, Central America, and various parts of Mexico. They were intercepted by a group of hired killers, who tried to recruit them as drug-traffickers, offering them easy money and food, as well as that most important commodity in these lawless deserts: protection. After their difficult journey, the migrants were quite happy to undertake any of the illegal jobs on offer in the United States, but they were unwilling to get involved in organized crime. For a few minutes, they “negotiated” with the AK-47s of those trying to recruit them, but they would meet the same fate as certain mayors who have dared to reject similar offers from the drug-traffickers. In that no-man’s land where snakes and impunity from the law are the rule, saying “No” is an affront. The migrant workers were duly gunned down.

An Excerpt from the Forthcoming Voice of Witness Book, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice.

TWO EXCERPTS FROM VOICE OF WITNESS books, published by McSweeney’s Press

BY Voice of Witness

Last week, Representative Peter T. King, a conservative Republican from Long Island, convened hearings into what he says is the radicalization of American Muslims and their supposed refusal to cooperate with law enforcement officials. During the hearings, Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, denounced the inquiry and spoke of the heroism of Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a paramedic and N.Y.P.D. cadet who died on 9/11 trying to save the lives of others. Salman’s remains were not found until six months after his death. During that time, his reputation was smeared by speculation that he was involved in the attack simply because he was a Muslim. He was declared a hero posthumously.

Salman’s mother, Talat Hamdani, is among the narrators in the forthcoming Voice of Witness book about post-9/11 discrimination. Below is an excerpt of her narrative. Here, she describes the period following 9/11, during which she and her husband searched desperately for their missing son.

BRISENIA FLORES, killed at age 9 with her father, by racists in Southern Arizona, on _________________________________________.

Never Stop Fighting: A Q&A with Ben Ehrenreich about his February feature about Chicano activist Carlos Montes

Carlos Montes by Willie Heron's 1972 mural The Wall That Cracked Open in City Terrace. Photograph by Bryce Duffy.

A Q&A with Ben Ehrenreich about his February feature about Chicano activist Carlos Montes
3/1/2012

In the March issue of Los Angeles magazine, Ben Ehrenreich writes about how after a lifetime of activism, former Chicano power leader Carlos Montes is facing possible prison time on questionable charges. Ehrenreich, whose Los Angeles magazine story “The End,” about death in L.A., won the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2011, talks with executive editor Matthew Segal about Montes’s singular career—and why the case against him should concern us all.

‘No More Weapons’ billboard placed on US-Mexican border

Billboard with letters made from crushed weapons unveiled as President Felipe Calderón urges US to stop flow of weapons

• Associated Press in Ciudad Juarez
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012 03.19 EST

Dolores Dorantes, a poet in exile from Juarez, MX and an excerpt of her work, “Dear Factory”

Dolores Dorantes

from «Dear Factory»

translated by Jen Hofer

SECTION ONE

Tengo un pie arrancado y puesto sobre esta oscuridad. Tengo otro pie desnudo. Prefiero dormir en esta tierra.

No pensar en el aliento largo de las vocaciones. Tuve una vocación, pero la vocación me atormentaba: soñar