Here is what people are saying about Bella:
​
“Carmen Baca’s work captures reality, mythology and the mystery of years gone by using vivid language and feeling. One can smell every tree, thunderclouds rolling by, fresh tortillas on the grill, or the balls of fire as brujas approach.”

                    Nicolasa Chávez, Deputy State Historian, Author and Curator
​
“An AWESOME read, a New Mexico fantasy in which readers will follow Bella, this book’s heroine, as she wanders the magical alternative world of the Dead and Forgotten. There she meets ancestors and other spirits of animals—both domestic and wild—witches, ghosts, birds, monsters, a curandera, her aunt and her grandfather. Bella Collector of Cuentos: entertaining, knowledgeable, and awesome.”

                                                                                                  Lani Kyea, NM artist

The title sums up the underlying roots of this collection; it takes Spanish, Nahuatl and English to tell the whole tale. This collection is a coming out party for raza re-interpreters of the past, the now and the future.

The line-up of authors includes:
Ernest Hogan, Mario Acevedo, Frank S. Lechuga, Martin Hill Ortiz, Pedro Iniguez, Nicholas Belardes, Armando Rendón, Lizz Huerta, Emmanuel Valtierra, Rios de La Luz, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, R. Ch. Garcia, Ricardo Tavarez, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Carmen Baca, Scott Russell Duncan, Gloria Delgado, and Kathleen Alcalá.

TO SCHEDULE INTERVIEWS, READINGS, MORE INFORMATION
Contact: editors@somosenescrito.com

Listen to a discussion of El Porvenir, ¡Ya! featuring top writers from the collection on the Reality Dysfunction podcast.

El Porvenir, ¡Ya! is available in paperback and e-book formats through online distributors, such as Amazon, your favorite bookstore, and at the Somos en escrito online Tienda/Store. Check Bookshop and Barnes & Noble in the coming weeks. 

Order your copy now and be a part of Chicanofuturism.

We at Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press are pleased to announce ​Postcards from a PostMexican by Alvaro Ramirez won bronze at the International Latino Book Awards. Specifically, The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English. 

Congratulations to Alvaro! If you would like to purchase Postcards from a PostMexcian, head to this link here at our Somos en ecrito store. Buying from us helps us publish more award winning books like Postcards from a PostMexican. 
  
To see this and other results of the International Latino Book Awards, click the link below.
https://www.latinobookawards.org/

In November 2021, Somos en escrito will observe the 50th year of the publication of Chicano Manifesto, authored by the founder and editor of Somos en Escrito Magazine, with the second reprint of the seminal classic on Chicanismo.

We invite persons who read the book when it was released by Macmillan Company in 1971 and in the following years and decades to recount the impact of the book on themselves, what they learned from the book that guided them through the years, and a word about the importance of preserving Mexican American history and culture for future generations.

Email your comments to editors@somosenescrito.com. Commentaries will be published in a special feature in the magazine upon publication of the reprint.

​The Editorial Staff of Somos en escrito Magazine

Postcards from a PostMexican peels away the façade of the nationalist, folkloric Old Mexico to reveal a country which each day looks more and more like its salsa-loving, border-sharing wall-building neighbor—the U.S.

Author Álvaro Ramírez, the self-defined PostMexican in the title, chronicles the amazing cultural transformation that is taking place in a transnational geographical area that encompasses Mexico and the United States. Ramírez shows that the world as we knew it is disappearing or morphing into another at a dizzying pace in the new millennium, thanks to massive migrations, NAFTA, the Internet, and social media.
These socio-economic and technological forces are deluding the unique cultural identities that differentiated us neatly into nations. What is emerging is a hybrid world where Americans set to a large degree the trends, the cultural models that define the inhabitants of both countries.

Interestingly, most people are unaware of the changes Mexicans are going through in the postMexican condition until they have a chance to visit either country. American tourists (especially Mexican Americans) are shocked and put off by the heavy presence of American culture (music, movies, sports, clothes, fast food) in Mexico; Mexicans are surprised at the amount of their national culture alive and doing well in the United States (food, mariachis, ballet folklórico, Cinco de Mayo, Día de los Muertos).

After witnessing and studying these phenomena for many years, presenting papers at conferences, and teaching many courses on the subject, Ramírez decided to start a blog where he could rant and rave on these matters in a non-academic style, free of jargon, accessible to all readers. In Postcards from a PostMexican, he offers short, lucid analyses of the transnational world in which he lives.

The twilight of Mexican nationalism, the relation of Mexico and its migrants, the rise of the NAFTA Generation, Mexican racism and xenophobia, the populism of Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are but a few of the issues that Ramírez addresses with flair and a good dose of humor, which leaves the reader with an understanding that Mexicanness is not what it used to be.   

See Postcards from a PostMexican in our Somos en escrito Foundation Press page, get it at Amazon, and follow @PostMexican happenings on its Facebook.

​ Álvaro Ramírez, born in Michoacán, México, of Purépecha origin, migrated with his family to Ohio as an adolescent. A Professor of Literature at various California schools, he has been  a Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s College (Moraga) since 1993, where he specializes in Spanish Golden Age and Latin American literature, Mexican Film, and Chicano Cultural Studies. His first book, a collection of short stories in Spanish, Los norteados, was a finalist in the 2017 International Latino Book Awards competition.

​Somos en escrito is pleased that the first two books from our press are ILBA finalists! Theorizing César Chávez is a finalist in the category "Victor Villaseñor Latino Focused Nonfiction Book – English" and Insurgent Aztlán is a finalist in the category "Best Political/Current Affairs Book – English." 

Congratulations to other finalists who have appeared in Somos en escrito, Alvaro Huerta, Eduardo Cabrera, Sergio Troncoso, and Juan Alvarado Valdivia.

​See more at the International Latino Book Awards site.
Click here for the full list of finalists.

Theorizing César Chávez: New Ways of Knowing STEM presents a new paradigm for examining and analyzing science through an understanding of César Chávez’s values and beliefs, theorizing the application of his innovative thinking to STEM, particularly to address its state in U.S. education today. Author Armando A. Arias ("Dr. Sonny Boy") forges connections between the arts, humanities, social and behavioral and hard sciences, using science friction, including his own visionary travails, to create a presence in the absence of César Chávez. 

​Learn more and get a copy here.

Best Latino Focused Fiction Book – English or Bilingual

Cabañuelas: A novel, Norma Elia Cantú; University of New Mexico Press; Mexico/Xicana; San Antonio, TX
Click here to read an excerpt of Cabañuelas. 


Best Play or Collection of Plays

Teatro de inmigrantes en los Estados Unidos, Eduardo Cabrera; Argentina; Chicago
Click here to read an excerpt of another book by Eduardo Carbrera.


Best Collection of Short Stories – English or Bilingual

A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, Sergio Troncoso; Cinco Puntos Press; U.S. Mexican American; New York

Ballad of a Slopsucker: Stories, Juan Alvarado Valdivia; University of New Mexico Press; Mexico/Peruano; San Francisco
Click here to read an excerpt of Ballad of a Slopsucker.


Best Political/Current Affairs Book – English
​
Defending Latina/o Immigrant Communities, Alvaro Huerta, Hamilton Books; Lanham
Click here to read an excerpt of Defending Latina/o Immigrant Communities.

​Theorizing

​César Chávez

New Ways of Knowing STEM
​
A Treatise in the Social Psychology of Scientific Thinking in Everyday Life
 
A social psychological treatise by Dr. Armando A. Arias, which offers a much-needed review of STEM studies: science, technology, engineering and mathematics, through the eyes of a theoretical César Chávez, renowned labor leader, to re-locate the focus of STEM on the people, that is, on the Chicano and Latino students being recruited into these fields of study.
 
Arias, a social psychologist by trade, is a professor and founding faculty member in the division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at CSU Monterey Bay.
  
Copies are available in print and ebook formats from online booksellers. Ask your local bookstore for copies and to stock it. See more at our Bookstore / Librería or the book's page to learn more.
Paperback https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086FZTPSG
​Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4SDRN
 
Theorizing César Chávez / New Ways of Knowing STEM / A Treatise in the Social Psychology of Scientific Thinking in Everyday Life is a publication of the Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, an enterprise of the Somos en escrito Literary Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization under the U.S. tax code. For more information, contact Armando Rendón, at armando@somosenescrito.com.

​Book Review of Theorizing César Chávez New Ways of Knowing STEM A Treatise in the Social Psychology of Scientific Thinking in Everyday Life
 
By Robert A. DeVillar
 
To what degree are iconic figures, even those whose characters have been transformed to virtual mythological status, relevant in informing and guiding policies and practices in areas that are deemed to be officially critical to our nation’s future, both domestically and as a global leader?

In his book, Theorizing César Chávez: New Ways of Knowing STEM, Armando A. Arias has tackled this intriguing question through creatively and imaginatively overlaying the ideas, thoughts, values, beliefs and actions of César Chávez, world-renowned as leader of the California-based United Farm Workers (UFW), upon the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math, known collectively in the United States as STEM.[i] The purpose of this overlay—used here in its computing sense of “transferring one block of program code or other into internal memory, replacing what is already stored”[ii] — is to effectively produce a framework to transform the manner in which STEM disciplines are pedagogically taught and professionally applied.

Two corollary questions immediately spring to mind. The first being what has been and continues to be a collective problem or set of problems in the current STEM framework that would demand a new framework? The second being what qualities—inherent, those acquired informally or learned formally through direct or indirect experience, and refined through his keen mental acuity—characterized César Chávez to such an exceptional extent that he, as the embodiment of these qualities, could serve as a model for constructing and implementing the proposed innovative STEM framework?

In response to the first question, STEM requires a paradigmatic shift from its targeted focus on curricula, methods and products to focusing on the people, which requires not only effectively recruiting, retaining and educating students and hiring professionals from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds as scientists and associated roles, but also effectively addressing needs of the people of our nation, and those on earth. Integral to this new focus is that STEM’s fundamental purpose is to research, discover and develop processes and products that serve the sustainability and regenerative needs of our earth (our natural resources) and the general well-being of its people across the dimensions—social, economic, political, cultural—of our individual and connected lives.

In support of the second question, Arias highlights the works of more than 50 innovative figures from diverse cultures, from distinct historical periods, and from the present. This array of thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting or paradigm-disrupting philosophers, social scientists, scientists, linguists, community organizers, dramatists, politicians, novelists and investigative reporters[iii] connects aspects of their thoughts and paradigms to the development, both self- and leadership-, of César Chávez and his actions.

César thoughts, ideas, and actions blend harmoniously with the respective thoughts, ideas and actions of the figures, and at the same time César’s self is disrupted and challenged by this harmony. That disruption motivates him toward further self-reflection, study and action in the endless pursuit of development of his Self and refinement of his role as a leader whose ultimate goal is to improve the conditions of his people—and, ultimately, we are all his people.

​César applied the scientific method within his everyday external activities as he engaged simultaneously in his self-development process, knowing that even as the method itself was being applied, it was also in a constant state of refinement. And he undertook all this intense application, learning, refinement, and leadership, without sacrificing his already uniquely strong individual and social resolve, charisma, humility, moral virtue, accessibility, graciousness, and ability to communicate with his people locally and across the globe, be they field workers, scientists, philosophers, artists, presidents, media representatives, academicians, the Pope, or whoever it may be.

But, as Arias illustrates throughout his book, César’s principles of the scientific method were bound within the larger and inviolate casing of social justice such that science would always serve the people by improving their living and working conditions. This paradigm of science, the scientific method, and scientific practice differs substantially, as we have seen, from traditional science serving those who use its discoveries and products to exclude, exploit, control or destroy others, or to exploit and manipulate through genetic alternation or other means Earth’s natural resources and living organisms.

César’s Science is one, and can only be one, with a universal social conscience, commitment and common goal to (a) improve the living and working lives of all people, (b) sustain and regenerate the natural resources on earth, and (c) protect the environment—to include discovered past or present life forms--of planets and space beyond Earth. A Science that will universally commit to and focus on the health and well-being of Earth, its inhabitants and its resources.

If we had in the US the requisite sensibilities and cultural inclusivity, which we have yet to generally display much less internalize as a value or practice, this transformative vision and approach for Science can and should be integrated within the STEM curricula along with, almost by definition, the concomitant focus and means to recruit and retain underrepresented students.

Arias provides intellectual evidence that César saw this need early on, as most fair-minded people would now, and would remain in solid agreement with the logic and justice of this new STEM-related strategy and the corollary need to establish and implement concrete tactics to achieve the recruitment and retention goal. This way of thinking and acting clearly and strongly aligns itself with the guiding adage that Arias’ César never tired of saying to himself and others: “It’s about the people.” Furthermore, César would always contextualize the adage; thus, he would actually say: “It’s not about STEM; it’s about the people.”

Arias probes further into the mind of César to semantically enrich the already-powerful “people” by adding specificity to it. He does so through the concept of culture and its multifaceted yet flawed relationship to critical, long-term, unresolved issues, such as worker exploitation, segregation and social injustice in the US, that prevent the people, in its inclusive sense, from sharing equally in opportunities to  develop and prosper. The role of science plays a fundamental role in our culture as it is, can be, and has been, used in ways that sustain inequitable practices rather than to transform US culture to reflect and live its foundational principles through a relentless, yet shared, drive toward equity. Equity is defined here as being a function of three essential, interrelated elements: access, participation, and benefit.v

In the immediate contextualized sense of the farmworkers’ continuing struggle for equity, this meant and means access to dialoguing within authentic communicative contexts, characterized by mutual respect, with farm owners and other influencers of policies and practices engaged in the issue in order to negotiate and achieve shared meaning to improve the working and living conditions of farmworkers in ways that are sustainably equitable. Arias’ demonstration that César would extend this same need to address issues of equity within the socio-academic contexts of STEM and science is threaded throughout the book and is effective in illustrating the necessity to tackle multiple major fronts of the same problem simultaneously.

At the same time, Arias shows César to be aware of how nefariously effective the cultural inequity model is on targeted major segments of the populous—that is, those groups (and the individuals within them) who are subject to social control that creates dependency rather than to social liberty that creates freedom within our work fields, schools and homes, and other domains characterizing our national context. The need to identify one’s own group dependency and ways to extricate the group from it, while simultaneously working to socially engineer the movement toward freedom in the critical domains of work, school and home, are solidly present in Theorizing César Chávez.

The array of historical and contemporary figures whose thoughts and actions Arias integrates into this work, as they influenced or paralleled César’s life and thought, and therefore his leadership actions and self-development, credibly and dexterously supports the uniqueness and strength of César’s character and values and their relevance to developing and implementing the transformative people-driven (rather than discipline- or problem-driven) framework within which STEM and science must operate to achieve its potential and goals.

• The role of culture in the school and science laboratory is viewed as problematic on two counts. The first is that traditional and current teaching and learning pedagogies are centered on controlled actions targeted to a particular type of learner rather than teaching being a transformative action that in its flexibility reaches all learners (what Arias terms cross-cultural).
• The second is that processes and products in the science laboratory can be detrimental to the earth and its inhabitants, rather than contributing to their mutual well-being, sustainability, and regenerative essence. For example, as Arias point out, intentional bias in approaching the scientific process has led to false premises or designs or interpretations of results, and products that support social control or otherwise affect the physical health and earning capacity, among other effects, of workers—such as the short-handled hoe and poisonous pesticides.

Culture informs Arias’ tour de force in another important way—as a model of survival for a particular group of people. The irony is not lost on César that the foundational rhetoric that characterizes and embodies US culture was meant for a selective group of people—male, white, and land owning.

The main reason we have not resolved this issue is a cultural one: the US survival model was meant for a particular group—white, male and landowning—and the model, which contained a fundamental racist value in its survival code, could accommodate those who were considered white.” This was far from scientific, but science still supported it, as mentioned above.

Thus, we need workers in the fields but we don’t need to pay them fairly, or tend to their health needs, or concern ourselves about their mobility and how that forced phenomenon affects their children’s schooling or their families’ living conditions, or how long the hours they work, the tools they use, or pesticides they absorb through mere breathing or touching, affect their health and mortality, and so on. They are not perceived as being part of our core culture, our core cultural group.

Yet, the saving grace, literally, in our nation’s character—as opposed to cultural character—relates to the universal rhetoric our founding documents guarantee to all Americans with respect to rights, responsibilities and freedoms, and that rhetoric took on a life of its own from Day 1 of our nation. Thus, we have fought since the inception of our nation and continue to do so to this day and foreseeable future to transform into general and equitable practice the legally attained rights, which should have been granted and adhered to in the first place, and those human rights issues we have yet to resolve.

Arias has penetrated the mind and heart of César, as he interacted with others of all ilks and in diverse contexts, as well as in solitude, to bring to the surface César’s dialectical relationship with his highly complex, constructed social and individual reality, and how that process informed his every thought, idea, and action, as a human being and leader. Arias demonstrates masterfully that the set of  values undergirding César’s thought processes and ways of seeing himself and his world and that of others remains a valid, supportive, creative and effective way of establishing frameworks that succeed, first at the human level, and concomitantly, at the issue level.

Transvaluation—that is, effectively transforming, say, a core cultural value prizing racism to a core cultural value of prizing unity, as in e pluribus unum—is itself at the core of César’s belief system, work ethic and leadership. This was true in all walks and facets of his life, including the fields where workers toil, laboratories where scientists test and produce, and schools where students learn.

​Arias has produced a creative, challenging and convincing narrative case that is always intellectually and experientially broad in scope and, in particular sections, thoroughly fine-grained. In Theorizing César Chávez: New Ways of Knowing STEM, Arias  has provided imaginative and critical insights into understanding that César’s values and way of seeing, reflecting and interacting with the world are key to the continued healthy development, sustainability and regenerative essence of our world and of people, both within our nation and our world. Moreover, the integration of his values, observing, thinking and acting combine to steer us—in work, school, home and community contexts—in an inclusive trajectory that ensures that quality access, meaningful participation and sustained benefit are enjoyed by all.

As always, there have always been two sides to our nation’s coin, which in keeping with the scenarios presented in the Arias’ volume can be metaphorically alluded to as
(a) staying the course represented by evermore scientifically effective ways of applying pesticides and producing hard-skinned square tomatoes; or
(b) transforming the current STEM curricula paradigm to produce scientists (e.g., social, mathematical, biological and physical) through effective, equitable student recruitment and retention, and the development of their creative and problem-solving learning potential through teaching that is at once flexible and sensitive to what students bring to class from their context.

Based on the evidence and insights provided by Arias, there is no need to flip the coin and take chances. My vote is to choose transformation.

_____________
[i] In the early 1990s, the acronym STEM was used in programs targeting talented students from underrepresented groups by Charles Vela, founder and director of the Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education (CAHSEE), and introduced through him to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which later adopted the term.

[ii] Lexico.com. Retrieved September 9, 2019.

[iii] The categories are not mutually exclusive; therefore, one or more of the more than 50 individuals cited may be identified as belonging to more than one category.
[iv] Due to the complexity of everyday parlance in the US, this last rather convolutedly expressed group-identity qualifier mentioned above attempts to include those who identify generically as Chicanos, Hispanics, Latinos, Latin@, Latinx, Mexican, Mexican American, Spanish, Spanish American, Caribbean, Central American, or, more specifically, as Mexico and Spain are already included above, any of the 15 other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America and 1 in Africa, or any combination of these.
[v] DeVillar (1986, 1998); DeVillar & Faltis (1987, 1991, 1994); DeVillar & Jiang (2011).

​Robert DeVillar, a native of San Antonio, Texas, has written and published academically for decades, but only recently began writing memoirs, covering his teen years in Spain and then Mexico, where he earned a dual degree in Latin American Studies and Social Sciences at the Universidad de las Américas near Mexico City. While seeking a degree in Mexican American Graduate Studies at San Jose State University (1973-75), he worked with Dr. Ernesto Galarza as coordinator of the Bilingual-Bicultural Studio/Laboratory (1972-1974) and Economic and Social Opportunities, Inc. He has traveled widely, engaged in private sector corporate affairs, but returned to complete a doctorate at Stanford University in 1985-87.