by Alejo Sierra HUIZACHE has become, according to several among its small crew of editors, designers, proofreaders and support staff, the nation’s leading Latino literary magazine, easily home to world-class poetry, fiction, and essays from the original American West. Subscribers and long-time readers of the seven-year-old publication are thrilled, they say,  at the launch yet another blockbuster issue featuring writers from the established Latino literary cannon and, as always, new voices with cutting-edge talent impossible to ignore.   “Today, the West and Southwest are exploding with art and culture rooted in centuries of tradition and fueled by history and a new contemporary culture. The cities that once circumscribed our western frontier—El Paso, San Antonio, Chicago, Denver, Tucson, Austin, San Francisco, Juárez, San Diego, Fresno, and Los Angeles—are pounding with life,” says HUIZACHE founding editor Dagoberto Gilb, an acclaimed writer who also directs th...

Gael García Bernal in Pablo Larraín's Neruda . by William Alexander Yankes For those unfamiliar, Chile has fielded two Nobel laureates in literature. Poet Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. Pablo Neruda, born in 1904, took the Swedish laurel home in 1971. But just who was this Neruda whose body of work has made his name immortal? His birth name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basualto. Because he admired the Czech poet Jan Neruda, he adopted his surname, taking it in a break with his father, a railroad worker who thought him less of a man for his pursuit of poetry and literature. He was born and raised in Chile’s south, in the heart of an indigenous region where the invasion of foreign Spanish colonizers had been most fiercely resisted. There, a millennial Mapuche cosmology sought to preserve an equilibrium between man and the natural world with its rivers and forests and rain and sea. This harmony between man and nature inspired Neruda, who took his ...