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Un Trip: raúlrsalinas & the Poetry of Liberation - A Review

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                              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...

EDITORIAL: PARKS NOT TRUCKS!

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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...

Performance Artist Megha Jairaj Discusses Her Work and Art Practice as a Bridge Between Worlds

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                                            An Interview with Megha Jairaj by Daisy Elizeth Magallanes for Brooklyn & Boyle   I recently sat down with artist Megha Jairaj in Los Angeles, California to discuss her work and the potential of art performance to disrupt power structures. In the tradition of artists such as Tristan Tzara, Ha rry Gamboa Jr., and Graciela Carnevale who used Art Performance as their weapon of choice to combat state and institutional authoritarianism, Jairaj’s interventions beg the audience to consider the fallacious nature and the structural oppression of imposed colonial hierarchies   DM: A lot of your work deals with the reclamation of ritual practice and place. How do both of these components intersect in your work?   MJ: I feel like “place” is…what is “neighboring” to me. To feel connected to...