Book Review by Abel M. Salas In a brilliant follow up to his break-out bestseller, Mexican American Boxing in Los Angeles , writer, historian and genuine L.A. boxing raconteur Gene Aguilera is back with a new blockbuster book, Latino Boxing in Southern California . A community bank vice-president by day, Aguilera has pursued one of his life’s greatest passions— boxing as a both a competitive and commercial sport—with an intensity and zeal more akin to that of a single-minded, indefatigable scholar than that of even the most fervent aficionado or enthusiast. Given his intimate familiarity with boxing history and his vast reservoir of knowledge and understanding vis- à -vis the sport he has been enamored with since childhood, it was really only a matter of time before Aguilera provided us with a fascinating new window into the world of championship boxing and its untold histories.  His first book, Mexican American Boxing in Los Angeles (Arcadia Publishing, 2014) is arguably t...

XTECA, the world's first Mexican American lager, has quietly become a Southern California craft beer success story. Photo courtesy of Fred Sotelo. by Abel M. Salas Motivated by their shared passion for cultural expressions—among them the Lowrider custom car and lifestyle traditions as well as Golden Oldies R & B music—rooted in California’s Mexican American and Chicano communities, a group of San Diego entrepreneurs has successfully, if somewhat quietly, introduced Cerveza XTECA to SoCal craft and microbrew enthusiasts after three years of research and development. Made available on tap at a number of the most popular pubs and tap rooms across San Diego County in February, 2018, XTECA, the world’s first Mexican-American lager, is the flagship brew from the eponymous craft beer company co-founded by business and civic leader Fred Sotelo, creative director and artist Mario López and nationally syndicated radio personality Xavier “The X-man” Soriano. XTECA, the craft beer...

Charter academy founder Rubén Alonzo (r.) tables at Mariachi Plaza to pitch the school to parents. Photo courtesy Exelencia Academy  By Richard Vásquez One place you never hear the term Chicano is on Spanish-language media in Los Angeles.  Because Los Angeles was ground zero for the historic Chicano movement, it strikes me as rather odd that this should be the case.  We have four over the air, twenty-four hour a day, Spanish-language television broadcast stations and dozens of radio stations, with corresponding digital bandwidth covering the Los Angeles Metropolitan region, a market indicator zone generously mapped to include as Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and most of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. A powerful demographic aggregate, it is synonymous with the definition of “Hispanic media” in the U.S. and the number one Hispanic market in the nation, comprising nearly 12 million Latinos. In terms of scale, the L.A. Metro Area is home to over one-fifth of th...

David Canul touches up a mural commissioned by ALOUD at the Central Library for Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A . Photo: Gary Leonard. Essay by Abel M. Salas In the early ’90s, when my brother Tomás followed his heart from the Bay Area and a hard-earned position at the renowned Teatro Campesino to Los Angeles, I followed him. A few winters before, I’d followed him from Austin to San Juan Bautista—where the teatreros, or “theater folk” led by director Luís Valdez had taken him in as one of their own—and gotten my first real glimpse of a California I could belong to. Although fleeting, it was a vision that shimmered, taking shape around the possibility of transforming communities everywhere into multi-hued beacons of art, culture and thought. In Los Angeles, the ALOUD reading series at the Central Library has cultivated a similar spirit through successful literary programming for 25 years. With the abrupt and inexplicable dismissal of ALOUD’s founding director Louise Steinm...

MOTU (cowwoman) embodies the memory of the universe in Alysse Stepanian's 3D video, at Coaxial on Sept. 15th. Review by Kelly Blunt We are witnessing war. Machine guns, drones, and explosions of a confused nature ricochet in our heads. The silence reverberates. Soldiers casually dismiss the dead. Refugees are left stateless. A plastic bottle floats across a waterspace. MOTU, the strapping and heroic cowwoman introduced earlier in the video, flies through the water. She encounters a massive oil spill as a dozen plastic beverage containers float downward to further pollute the water. MOTU nearly gets trapped in the underwater folds of an American flag. It hugs her body momentarily, before she swims on. It continues floating through the water, resembling a sea creature. On flat screen monitors factory farm pigs look sadly out from cages, and a monkey is rocketed into space. We see a mutilated boy’s body on pale sand. Sounds grate and dance in a frenzy. They mirr...

A 1993 hunger strike at UCLA that led to creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies was modeled on a 1987 student action, says Dr. Álvaro Huerta. Photo © 1993 by Abraham Torres/RumbleSkout3.com Editorial by Dr. Álvaro Huerta To borrow—more like crib—from the great James Baldwin’s writings and speeches, I declare to America’s racists that I am not your “wetback.” I am a man. I am a Chicano. I am a proud son of Mexican immigrants—the salt of the earth. I say these words from a place of privilege, having earned advanced degrees from world-class universities. These include a Ph.D. (city & regional planning) from UC Berkeley, as well as an M.A. (urban planning) and a B.A. (history)—both from UCLA. I also say these words because my personal and family backgrounds were indeed plagued by abject poverty, violence and a sense of hopelessness. I spent the earliest years of my life in a Mexican slum (Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Baja California) and my form...

L. to r. - Andy Imutan, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, and Senator Robert Kennedy in Delano, CA 1968. Photo by Dick Darby courtesy Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University by William Alexander Yankes June 5, 2018 (Los Angeles, CA) —Only a groundswell of grass-roots peace marches and civil protests can stop the current White House Administration’s onslaught against social justice in the United States. At this pivotal juncture in history, it’s up to us to turn our country into the compassionate nation Robert F. Kennedy imagined before his untimely and tragic death. He summed up his vision of social justice in his last speech, delivered fifty years ago during his visit to Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. After meeting with labor leaders César Chavez and Dolores Huerta—co-founders of the United Farm Workers union—as well as other prominent Mexican-American civil rights activists and political organizers here, Bobby invited Chavez to join him on the dais at the Ambassado...

by Alci Rengifo One of the great ironies of the year 2018 may very well be that while the ever so mighty United States descended into political madness, its “underdeveloped” neighbor to the south is poised to rise up to give the world a lesson in political sanity. Drowning in the blood of a decade-long “drug war,” slandered by the orange emperor in Washington for exporting migrants to states bearing names in their language (Nevada, Colorado, California, Arizona, Texas) , Mexico will vote for president on July 1st. Make no mistake, Washington, D.C. and right-wing regional governments will all cast their gaze on Mexico in two months. The reason for their inordinate interest has a name:  Andres Manuel  López Obrador, known to friends and foes alike as the acronym AMLO. Long the face of an electoral leftist alternative in Mexico, AMLO is making his third bid to become president of the Aztec nation. It took the complete implosion of Mexico’s institutional political system ...

Freeway Man and His Sack s, Mixed Media, 6' x 6,' collection of Cheech Marin. by Abel M. Salas David Flury is a Chicano artist. He will say so himself. He won’t say much about the early years he spent attached to a life on the streets of South Central. He will only acknowledge that it was based on loyalty to others. And it was what he did to survive during a time when he and his contemporaries felt compelled to prove they were beyond hope, beyond fear and capable of conducting themselves with no remorse. It is not something he cares to uphold as virtuous or worthwhile. He could have, like many of those he grew up with, been a less than memorable casualty or a permanent resident in one of the state’s penal institutions. His father, he says, was from the deep South and white. “But my mother was from Guatemala,” he shares in a comfortable office at the Goodwill Industries complex in Lincoln Heights where he has worked part-time for some 14 years. The trajectory of his ...

Detail from Aguilar's self-portrait in Don’t Tell Her Art Can’t Hurt (Part A) 1993. (Laura Aguilar / UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center) by Gabriela González To breathe in the streets of Los Angeles is to discover a blood bond with the cultures that, while not as ancient as the land itself, were tied to it for far longer than recorded history. Being present in this place, in the here and now and in the back when becomes an experience in truth-telling. I’ve fallen in love as a photographer myself with the essence of this heavy nexus. They say falling in love is like walking into a room blindfolded while waiting for a picture to arrive in your head. Others swear the secret to love is in the journey and the yearning for life. After ten years of prolific shooting in analog and work that approximates photojournalism, I’ve noticed I feel tied to places that speak discreetly of their native art. My father bled through the heaviness of this city with his hands tied to the crop, ...