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Happy Father’s Day with Mexican-American Poet and former California Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera … the immigrant experience

Juan Felipe Herrara (b. 1948), American poet and writer, photo by SlowKing
Juan Felipe Herrera (b. 1948), Mexican-American poet and writer, photo by SlowKing under GNUFDL

I posted this a few years ago here and just included it in this month’s issue of The BeZine.  I’m re-posting it now because it highlights the quality and character of immigrants to the United States of America, which seems a good thing to do at this time. I’ll post this Sunday’s Poesy later today. 

Juan Felipe Herrera is a Mexican-American poet and performance artist, a writer and cartoonist, a teacher and an activist.

“Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”  Punk Half Panther by Stephen Burt in the New York Times

Herrara incorporates into his writing his experience of family and the life of the compesinos, migrant farm-workers.

“Into the tilted factories, the smeared taxis,
the stunted universities, into the parlor of bank notes,
in the cramped cookhouse where the dark-skinned
humans still stoop and pitch the daily lettuce bags …”

He sometimes tells stories that arise from what is for him a pivotal moment: the early school experience of trying to fit in though he had no English-language skills. He also writes stories that illustrate the problems of immigration, which often separates families.

In 2012, California Governor, Jerry Brown, named Herrera California Poet Laureate, the first Chicano poet to be so honored.

Many of us – like Juan Felipe Herrara – had fathers or grandfathers who came to the United States to make a better life for themselves and eventually for their children and future generations and who went on to make substantive contributions to this country. Sometimes we like to remember and acknowledge them for their vision, courage and hard work. Today seems like a good day to do so. The video below is charming children’s story, A Tale for Father’s Day, about Herrera’s immigrant father. Enjoy! …

Happy Fathers’ Day to all the dads and to all the moms who, for one reason or other, are both dad and mom.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire … the dust of their labors, a poem

Triangle_Shirtwaist_coffinsits red tongue licked and
ate the fabric of their dreams, the
depth of their immigrant hopes,
it burned like greed, like it was
the only thing that counted,
it consumed their very breath
and the dust of their labors
– Jamie Dedes

Yesterday was the 105th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

MARCH 25, 1911: Until the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 (9/11), the worst large-scale disaster in my home town, New York City, was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It remains the fourth largest industrial accident in the history of the United States. Its victims were mostly immigrant young women with an average age of seventeen years. Many jumped from the building rather than burn to death.

146 girls were killed that day. This was the unmitigated result of corporate greed that kept workers earning their bread in an unsafe building, locked in workrooms from which they couldn’t escape, adding injury to the insult of long hours, abusive supervisors, and poor compensation with no benefits.

The legacy of this disaster was a turning point in the American labor struggle for fair wages and workplace dignity and safety.

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© Jamie Dedes; photographs are in the public domain

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A Chance for Peace …

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890-1969)

34TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

In office 1953 -1961

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed … “ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Note: I wrote this piece on December 13, 2011 after I learned of the first 100,000 Poets for Change. Seemed appropriate to pull it out, dust it off and share it once again since our theme for this year is “poverty.” 

The quote above is from Eisenhower’s speech, A Chance for Peace, delivered in 1953 three months after he took office and on the occasion of the death of Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union (1941 to 1953). The “just peace” that the world hoped for in 1945 at the end of World War II had not materialized. While the Korean War was coming to a close, the Cold War-era military conflicts in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) were slowly escalating. The United States would have advisory troops in Vietnam in 1954. The armed conflict in that region of the world would continue long past Eisenhower’s administration with U.S. involvement escalating in the 1960s and continuing until the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

Since the end of the Second World War and the Korean War, violent conflict continues unabated with thirteen wars (defined as 1,000 or more deaths per year) currently, including the War in Afghanistan and the Yemeni and Syrian uprisings of 2011. Smaller scale conflicts resulting in fewer than 1,000 deaths per year have been rife and in 2011 include the Sudan-SPLM-N conflict, the Yemeni al-Qaeda crackdown, and the 2011 clashes in Southern Sudan. (And now in 2015, we have to add among the world’s many current conflicts the war in Syria, which is displacing more people than any war since WWII. According to an recent and comprehensive article, How Syrians Are Dying (worth your attention) in The New York Times, 200,000 have been killed over the past four-and-a-half years.)

Genocides didn’t end either. We’ve had eight genocides since the Holocaust of WWII, including that which is ongoing in Palestine. The number of rebel groups is now over one-hundred, which probably errs on the light side. Conflicts rise from economic and social instability and what amounts to vigilante “justice,” most of which could be addressed if our governments invested in butter, not guns; if they included rather than marginalized; if they listened and responded rather than disenfranchised.

Even in 1953, Eisenhower pointed out that war isn’t sustainable:

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

If governments don’t recognize that Earth and her people cannot be sustained by war, many of their citizens do. One modern peaceful protest for a sustainable world is of interest to all of us who read, write, and love both poetry and peace. It is 100 Thousand Poets for Change, which held its first world-wide rally on September 24, 2011 with 700 events in 550 cities representing 95 participating countries united to support peaceful environmental, social, and political change.

Poets, writers, artists, musicians, and photographers the world over demonstrated in solidarity. The next global event is scheduled for September 29, 2012. Throughout the year small, local events are delivered at a various venues. By invitation, 100 Thousand Poets for Change was at the Sharjah (an Arab Emirate) International Book Fair, which ran through November 27.  Mujeeb Jaihoon reports,

“From time immemorial, poetry has built better bridges between people than those with bricks and stones. And these bridges do not get old or obsolete…” (Change Is Born in the Womb of Poetry)

In A Chance for Peace Eisenhower pointed out,

“No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.”

We do hunger, individually and collectively. Perhaps our chance for peace starts with you and me. Poem on …

… and join us this year at The BeZine blog on 26 September 2015 and add your voice to ours for our (yours and mine) 100TPC, poets and friends virtual event for a peaceful, sustainable and just world.  

© 2011, essay, Jamie Dedes All rights reserved; The photograph of Eisenhower is in the public domain.

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Selling the Shadow to Support the Substance: Ain’t I a Woman

373px-Carte_de_visiteOne of the many guises in which poetry presents itself:  Here American actress Alfrie Woodard delivers New Yorker Sojourner Truth‘s spontaneous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.” Sojourner gave this speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio in May of 1851.

SOJOURNER TRUTH (1797-1883)

African-American Abolitionist and Women’s Right Activist

Thanks to Laurel D. for sharing the video.