Special to Brooklyn & Boyle Founded in 2010, the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade was born from the understanding that our intergenerational traumas are not singular but rooted in the more than 528 years of systematic dehumanization that continues normalizing the violent erasure of black and  brown bodies everywhere. Our work was born from a very real need to affirm our existence, reclaim our agency, engaging collectively in efforts to propagate rage and rebellion. Our approach, while raw in its urgency, was still no less reactionary and misguided in practice, inverting power dynamics in the spaces created, the rhetoric, and wordplay. It falsely equated feminism with gender specific genitalia and genitals with our politics while completely ignoring non-binary ancestral teachings of the past and the fact that all of our bodies have been historically—and to this day—targeted, the recent assault on street vendor Benjamin Ramirez being but one example. We found ourselves replic...

Center Theatre Group's Diane Rodriguez performs in Matriarch By Rebecca Ramon & Abel Salas Motherhood fell early upon the shoulders of Boyle Heights native, neighborhood playwright and heavy construction vehicle operator Patricia Zamorano. Arriving unexpectedly during her adolescence, it was not something she asked for. It was not a choice she made, nor was it the result of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. According to the 30-something former homegirl turned barrio wordslinger and co-producer—alongside fellow playwright, director and youth advocate Jesse Bliss—of a stage play titled Matriarch , it was the last thing she expected. A flannel-shirted tomboy, nascent drug-runner, and occasional inmate at Eastlake Juvenile Hall raised in the Pico Aliso housing projects, Zamorano was little more than a child herself when her mother suffered near fatal burn injuries in a freak fire that ripped through the single-family dwelling where she and her younger siblings lived. “At a y...

Karsten Mielke and Helena Zengel in Dark Blue Girl. By William Alexander Yankes “Do you love me?” the little girl asks her father while she gazes at the Greek landscape. “Endlessly,” we hear him respond while the camera continues to focus on her. The exchange of dialogue, which constitutes this pithy film’s prologue, pays homage to Hitchcock’s sense of crisp minimalism. From the onset, we must brace ourselves for a film where a child is the axis of the story. She is the blonde sun around whom her parents orbit on divergent trajectories. Luca, the girl, is looking for her own idenity. Her effort to forge herself is reflected  in her eyes. Her referential pillars, her parents, no longer hold up one roof, but two, and they are in separate places, on disparate streets. Luca, an eight-year-old girl, tries to make sense of this puzzle while she grows ever more keenly aware of the world as it unravels chaotically before her in all its mystery. A psychological drama, Dark Blu...

Dr. Michael Calabrese and Juan Obed Silva By Mike Sonksen Juan Obed Silva is a professor at East Los Angeles College (ELAC) and, increasingly, a beloved educational role model throughout Southern California. In a moving 2011 Los Angeles Times tribute titled “Taking Advantage of a Second Chance,” award-winning novelist, journalist and University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications faculty member Héctor Tobar wrote: “Born in Mexico but raised in Orange County, Silva is a 32-year-old former gang member paralyzed from a gunshot injury who reinvented himself as a scholar.”  Six years later, Silva’s journey continues to reflect redemption and triumph. The parallels to a path previously trod by author, human rights activist, youth advocate and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luís J. Rodríguez are unmistakable.  A nine-year teaching veteran–with the last three on the faculty at ELAC, Silva has also taught at Homeboy Industries, Cypress College and Orange Coas...

Part II of a III Part Series By Abel M. Salas Photo by Estevan Oriol Sometime near midnight, the two-lane highway in the middle of Wyoming is shrouded in a ghostly dark. Four of us are traveling in a pair of import pick-ups loaded with winter clothing, medical supplies, non-perishable food, sleeping bags, tarps and more. Standing Rock, North Dakota looms like a mythical destination still roughly 12 hours away.  In the distance, a field of tiny red lights flash on and off in rhythmic synchronization with each set of lights arranged along a vertical axis. I imagine they are radio antennas at first. When our route brings us closer to the low rolling hills where they stand, it dawns on me, finally, that they are beacons affixed to the upright columns which support an armada of wind turbines. Maybe they twinkle with a regularity that says there is enough winter wind in these wide-open Wyoming prairies to generate a steady flow of electricity. Or perhaps they are simply meant to a...

A Rainy Day L.A. , Eriberto Oriol, 2016 by Abel Salas It is worth noting that photographer Eriberto Oriol knows exactly where to find the best Ensendada-style fish tacos on L.A.’s East Side. On the surface, he doesn’t look like the Chicano patriarch who paid his dues in the movimiento as a political activist or militant ’60s radical. Neither does he bear resemblance to the working stiff, barrio veterano or vato ruco who still keeps a wool Pendelton and a pair of Stacey Adams wingtips in his closet for special occasions. However, like both of the aforementioned East Los archetypes, he qualified for an AARP membership card more than a few years ago. With a camera on his shoulder as an extension of his unassuming, thoughtful, but undiminished revolutionary spirit, he is considerably taller than my own pops, and probably taller than yours.Wearing a Stevie Ray Vaughn soul patch gone grey and khaki shorts, he looks more like a retired Malibu or Imperial Beach surfer who isn’t quite r...

Frank Romero, The Closing of Whittier Boulevard , 1984, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 120 in.  by Abel Salas Curator Edward Hayes, Jr. admits he may have gotten to the Chicano Art party in a roundabout, later-rather-than-sooner way. But as a curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach and one of the visionaries responsible for Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective , the recent MOLAA exhibition, he is now among a handful of trailblazing museum professionals making sure the art world understands how much Chicano Art matters and why. The son of a U.S. State Department satellite communications engineer who married a Mexican-born woman with roots in Sinaloa, Hayes spent his early childhood on an extended tour of U.S. Embassy outposts in Quito, Ecuador and Dhaka, Bangladesh, among others. His family eventually settled in central Texas, where remained until he joined MOLAA as the Curator of Exhibitions three years ago. “I was born in San Diego, but we lived all ov...

By Randy Jurado Ertll As we move into spring and summer, let us not forget that many individuals and families cannot afford to buy food or have a roof over their heads. We especially should not forget the children who are homeless. We, as a community, need to do more to address the problem of homelessness among young children, especially here in Los Angeles. According to the LA School Report, “estimates put LA Unified’s homeless student population at almost 16,000, which is more than the entire student population of about 900 of California’s 1,000-plus districts.” Homeless children are attending our public schools and live within our communities—in an invisible manner. The PBS News Hour interviewed LAUSD student Nora Perez in this powerful segment over two years ago: overall, homeless rates continue to rise in Los Angeles and throughout the United States since millions of people never recuperated from the 2008 economic recession. Former President Obama was asked about the home...

Writer Denise Chávez. Photo by Norm Dettlaff, High Desert News by María Nieto   The border is a space cast in a constant barrage of terms, from predictable prepositions like across, before, after, over and between to interrogatories such as how, as in how in the hell did such a line in the sand come to be drawn? The artificial separation between two nations, the borderland of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is where Denise Chavéz made her entry into this world. The playwright, short story writer and novelist has been gifting us with her words for more than forty years, Denise Chavéz’s first work of fiction in 1995, Face of an Angel , won the American Book Award. Since that first novel, she has delivered three more books. The most recent, The King and Queen of Comezón , was published in 2014. In it, Chavéz opens the door for her readers, inviting them to visit the small, fictional town of Comezón. On its streets, in the homes of its residents or in the Mil Recuerdos Bar, Chav...

by Rocío Maya Dozens of South East L.A community members gathered on Tuesday, April 11th at the Ricardo F. Icaza Workers’ Center in Huntington Park for the southern California premiere of The Long Ride , a documentary film on the 12-day journey taken by a group of 106 riders from Northern California to the nation’s capital in 2003. Produced and directed by Valerie Lapin Ganley, the 77-minute, Spanish subtitled documentary details the caravan more than 900 immigrants and allies embarked upon from various states and cities across the country. Traveling by bus, the solidarity riders concluded their bold trek with a march onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. where they demanded that immigrant labor be treated with dignity.  The cohort of activists known as the Immigrant Workers Freedom Riders (IWFR) sought to spark the birth of a new Civil Rights Movement for immigrant workers in response to the anti-immigrant sentiment that sprang from the 9/11 terrorist attack...