By Alex Avila Anne Lewis and Laura Varela’s  Un Trip: raúlrsalinas and the Poetry of Liberation  is a short film that shoulders the weight of a lifetime. Clocking in at just under half an hour, it eschews the standard biographical mold and instead works like a piece of music—riffing, circling, and layering image, word, and sound. Its foundation is Salinas’s pivotal 1969 prison poem “Un Trip through the Mind Jail,” written while he was locked inside Leavenworth. The poem, once described in a doctoral dissertation by an Italian scholar as the Chicano equivalent to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," shimmers as the film's jazz-inflected pulse, a way of hearing not just Salinas’s voice but also the eternal echoes of the communities he wrote for. As a dynamic example of cinematic expression, its visual style mirrors this improvisational rhythm. Instead of a neatly ordered ch...

Guest Editorial by Extli Chávez On a warm morning last September, my mom and I woke up to flyers all around our neighborhood urging us to stop a diesel truck distribution center from being built just down the block from where we live in Lincoln Heights. The 60,000 square-foot distribution center would be built on an empty lot located across the street from Hillside Elementary School in a neighborhood that is densely populated, working-class, and mostly Latino and Asian. My family and I attended a town hall meeting hosted by Los Angeles City Council Member District 1 Eunisses Hernández where I heard city officials and community organizers talk about the dangers of diesel exhaust and about the empty lot where the distribution would be built. I learned that the empty lot used to be a dry-cleaning facility and is deemed a brownfield because it is likely polluted already. I also learned that the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) identifies Lincoln Heights as a disadv...