Tag: memoir
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Writing From the Classroom: Valeree Morales
Here is an essay that I find most engaging, provocative, and I bet a few of you out there might feel the same way. Valeree touches upon a subject matter that, in the Mexican/Mexican-American community, is a difficult one–what it means to be a “pocho.” She’s a student at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles,…
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As a Professor, Sometimes I’m Pretty Stupid…
I was worried the past few days. I was getting sick–again. The manic depression that had hurled me into a psychotic attack in December nearly did me in. My family and I got through it, but it was a dangerous time. Bipolar is a progressive, organic brain disease. And it’s a killer. The brain deteriorates…
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Witches and Tamales
My mother Romilia had a husband before she met my father. She was fifteen, he was twenty-even. They say that another woman was after him in the town, and her mother cursed him for not marrying her daughter. “May he die within the first weeks of their wedding!” Well, he did. Just a few months…
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What I Reap From Mamá’s Stories
It’s been fun to post my mother’s memoir here on The Writing Bull. And it’s just as fun, and even more meaningful, to listen to her stories. Which, I have heard all my life. I have known, for decades, about her murdered father–my grandfather Pilar Reyes–who was shot in the street by some guy named…
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The Massacre of 1932
After my father’s murder, and my mother and I had to flee, my grandfather ¨Papa Polo” was the main figure in my life. Grandmamá had one of the women to be responsible about my care, which was not the best but nevertheless made my character of a survivor all through my entire life. Because of…