Tag: Salvadoran culture
-
Mamá Prays for My Mind
My wife Michelle and I became my mother’s caretaker last year. It’s gone relatively well. Mamá’s going on 91, her mind is sharp, she eats like a horse. She scoots through the house with her walker. She’s a fairly pleasant elderly who helps out where she can, washing clothes, picking up dishes, threatening the cat…
-
Find Your Homeland
The Spanish word terruño has captured my imagination as of late. It means “homeland,” which, in both languages, has a loving tone to it: one’s native land, the first soil, the place where we began. Of course, if your first soil was pock-marked with cruelty, abuse, neglect, drunkenness, violent parents and predatory uncles, the word…
-
El Testimonio: The Latino Memoir
Every once in a while, I do a Spanish podcast on The Writing Bull. This is a little cut of me recording it, in my “studio.” In this film, I talk about my own quest to regain my Salvadoran roots in my life, which I did, an obsession that began in high school and has…
-
“We Look At the World Once, In Childhood”
I’m not much of a Louise Gluck lover, I find her poetry a bit distant, cold; but I sure like that one line she wrote, We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. To think of our entire life, and that, all that happened after our childhood is the memory, and…
-
Poet Alexandra Regalado: Life Seen Through the Bulletproof Glass
When I attended the Associated Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida in March, I sought out Latinos, because the last time I went to the conference, about ten years ago, AWP truly deserved the nickname that people of color gave it: “All White People.” It’s still a majority white, but I found the Latina/o/x writers…