Takin’ It Easy…
This will be a slow-blogging weekend, since a lot of folks (even blog-readers and a few bloggers) are out seeking big sales. DC will be doing his shopping online, or even buying gift cards. I suggest those that want to buy me gifts do the same (hint-hint).
Hint To Candidates
In a City Race like this, there’s no doubt Democratic-leaning candidates need to seek out some independent and even some Republican voters. But let’s not pander! But when you have a Republican and a Democrat fighting it out, it gets tougher to get that cross-over vote. In City Council races, Republicans have been demoralized lately, only being able to keep their usual district seats. So, they are obviously fighting hard. If you’re a progressive, live in a neighborhood that is usually Democratic, fight to get those folks out to vote. We are going to need every one of them.
Stupid Rules Should Be Broken
Here’s a story about the annual Jimenez Thanksgiving Dinner in San Antonio where over 25,000 people were served a nice dinner.
Back at the convention hall, Tejano music echoed across the room as Reyes weaved past servers carrying large food trays, his plastic bag swinging like a pendulum. Thanksgiving is the one day he said he doesn’t have to mow lawns or pick up paper to earn a couple of dollars to eat.
“Sorry you can’t take food out,” a worker said. “It’s not my rule.”
Reyes turned back into the crowd. He picked up more pie, stuffing the pastry and plastic bag into a vinyl backpack.
He zipped the bag and trudged into the tide of people spilling through the rear exit doors. His bag, heavy with Thanksgiving seconds, bobbed on his back as he disappeared into the crowd.
Everyone deserves seconds.
Gregg Barrios Writes About a Cool Experience
Playwright and writer Gregg Barrios provides a very nice piece, which was covered in an article in the SA Current.
by Gregg Barrios
“Deep within my heart lies a melody, a song of old San Antone.”
Upon my return to Texas in 2000, one of the first cultural events I attended was an evening of poetry to honor the winners of the Premio Poesía Tejana Awards. I had gone to celebrate my friend and poet Frances Marie Treviño. At the podium, she announced that her poem “Gregorio” was dedicated to me.
“Texas calls/ you home/ to cactus and/ a gulf coast/ this mesh of landscape/ of hill, canyon/ and desert is yours/ this vast/ stretch/ of humid crimson/ sky/ gently lovingly/ calling/ you/ home”.
It was the best welcome home I ever had. I stood and yelled a grito from the Jorge Negrete movies I’d watch as a niño sitting on my tia’s knee at the Alameda on Houston Street. That evening certainly augured well that coming home this time would be a new beginning.
There had been earlier homecomings.
When I returned after serving in the military as a medic during the Vietnam era, there was no welcome wagon — no flags waving, no trumpets blaring in this bastion of military installations.
I shed no tears. Instead I used my GI benefits to study at UT-Austin. I joined the student movement, joined the veterans against the war, wrote for the underground press, started a film club, and embraced a bohemian-hippie lifestyle. I earned my degree and left the comfort zone of Austin. Like many others, I was seeking that inner voice, that discovery of self.
I moved to Crystal City and into the nascent Mexican-American civil-rights movement. I had a front-row seat as a participant in what became el movimiento Chicano. Cristal had been home to writer Tomás Rivera (And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him) and to several migrant musicians, including Question Mark and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”). In Cristal, I received the belated homecoming that had been denied upon my return from military service. I became an educator, a journalist, and a budding playwright. Me sentia en casa. I fit in. But when the moment came to move on, I did. Armed with new confidence and resolve, I heeded Horace Greeley’s (and later The Village People and The Pet Shop Boys) clarion call to “Go West!”
Twenty years later I would leave a successful life in Los Angeles and return to Texas.
Why? How could I not?
I was hecho en Tejas — conceived in San Antonio but born in nearby Victoria. Yet the lure and longing for this pueblo was in my blood; it is my herencia.
When I was a child, San Anto was a city of enchantment. My father, a traveling photographer as a teenager, had come to Texas from Mexico in the late 1920s. He began a new life here as a professional photographer and started his own studio on El Paso Street on the West Side.
Earlier, San Antonio had welcomed the exiled Flores Magón brothers, anarchists whose local newspaper advocated revolution in Mexico. Another exile, Francisco Madero, later President of Mexico, wrote his Plan of San Luis Potosí here then started the Mexican Revolution.
This city is where my history, my raíces melded into the magic word: Tejano!
Its wonders began at Playland Park, my Coney Island. Later, my mother introduced me to Joske’s — my Macy’s — with aisles and aisles of toys, books, pastries, and music. The Aztec and Alameda theaters, dream palaces to this star-struck vato, inspired and provided a vision of a world outside the confines of the Alamo City. And with the advent of HemisFair, the city and my generation grew to the possibilities of a limitless future, of a new frontier.
“Trouble, oh we got trouble, right here in River City!” — The Music Man
And, yes, I mean our River City. Some things never change, but don’t you accept that.
The abysmal numbers of dropouts in our city schools; the treatment of homeless, transient, and newly arrived immigrants; the harassment and marginalization of the GLBT community; the lack of health and sex education to stop AIDS and other ills; the disparity in social and city services to the West Side and East Side — all these continue to prevent our growth as a generous and caring community, as a first-class city model for the 21st century.
Great art deserves a great city. Yet artists are still not seen as invaluable to our cultural lifeblood. Arts education is almost nonexistent in our public schools. Our largest university, UTSA, doesn’t have a theater department. Non-profits often fail to fund individual artists who work outside the mainstream.
“You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul.” — Doug Sahm, aka Doug Saldaña.
This year I was honored to accept a job teaching creative writing to incarcerated at-risk youth in Bexar County. I have never seen such enthusiasm, the way this diverse group desires to express their unique voices in a creative, nonviolent manner. This month, these teenagers invited me to celebrate Thanksgiving behind the walls. They wanted to show their appreciation. I accepted with great humility.
I had come full circle. My homecoming was complete and my residency in this city permanent.
Award-winning playwright and poet Gregg Barrios is the former books editor of the San Antonio Express-News and a frequent Current contributor.
