Adelaide Socki
LITR 4332 2002
Research project: journal

Poetry as Cultural Mediator

 Introduction: Desire or Need to Know

This journal is focused on Arte Público Press of Houston.  I will explore some of its history and survey a few of the categories of titles they offer. I will then focus on two of its female Hispanic poets.  The point of this journal is to see how this Houston Hispanic press can convey Hispanic minority experience across cultural boundaries to me, a white, forty year old female suburbanite, cross-cultural want-to-be. I live in a culture which can be conveyed to anyone with just a field trip to Walmart, while Hispanic culture feels more authentic, more real; it’s got red blood pulsing through its veins while my culture offers me beef gravy from a can. So maybe that’s not a great comparison. But perhaps I love the rich Hispanic culture because mine seems so spare.  How can this press, and its titles and poetry mediate the two cultures?   How does our culture compare to theirs?

My interest in the Hispanic voice dates to my fieldwork in 1983 with the Yucatec Maya, in Yucatan, Mexico while earning an MA in Cultural Anthropology at Louisiana State University.  The women I worked with spoke Yucatec Mayan as their primary language, and Spanish as a second language.  I spoke tourist Spanish and hired a Mayan interpreter.  The Maya fit the definition of minority as defined in class, and would be considered Indios in Mexico, and probably Hispanics if they came to Houston.

As a young graduate student, I read some Hispanic literature: enjoyed Pablo Neruda’s poems and cried over Octavio Paz.   After graduation, I married, moved to Chicago, then quickly moved to Houston, Texas, in the late 1980s.   With a child on the way and a budding mental illness, I did not get into contact with Houston’s rich Hispanic culture until the last few years.  Even now, my exposure with Hispanic culture is extremely limited. It extends to only to some shopping in Hispanic Markets, and speaking my limited Spanish when I can. I am taking this course and two other literature courses this semester to fulfill my course requirements to enter trained to be certified to teach English as a second language in an area high school where I hope to work with Hispanic students and their families. 

            How does a 40year Anglo female gain entry into the Hispanic culture of Houston?  It would seem so easy in a place like Houston where Hispanic culture is everywhere.  First I could blame the language barrier.  My tourist Spanish baffles me and the people I try to use it on.  It was bad even when I thought it was good 15 years ago.   The Spanish I use when I speak with the garbage men and the guys who put on my roof can be reduced to basic, “me Tarzan you Jane” with a couple of smiles and pantomime.  Maybe this is why I chose poetry as a way for me to gain entree into the Hispanic world.  I don’t have to look foolish in front of the poem. No one sees me as I sit baffled in the face of words.  Poetry offers a private arena for me to work out the linguistic and cultural puzzles. 

            My poetry interest started about three years as I began to write poetry and join poetry groups and writing workshops. I am still developing my poetic voice and I know the more time I spend with poetry the better I will understand it, and improve my writing.  I read with a local Hispanic poet Eliza Garza at  “Voices Breaking Boundaries” reading last fall at Notsuoh’s downtown Houston, and took a couple of writing workshops from Sarah Cortez a Houston poet and writer, an Arte Público author to whom I will return later in this journal.

I picked Arte Público Press because it is located in Houston and has established itself as a major publisher of Hispanic literature. My interest in Arte Público Press stems from its association with the University of Houston Writing program.  It has been a dream of mine to apply to and be accepted to this program.

The Press

Arte Público Press emerged on the artistic edge of the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s.  It’s founder and current director Nicolás Kanellos, PhD found there was no outlet for Latino writers.  No major press published them and at the time the only outlet was orally through performance.  This made me think of the move from the traditional oral culture to the modern written culture, and how Hispanic culture mediates between the two.  To prevent Hispanic work from being condemned or forgotten, he published Revista Chicana- Riqueño in Gary, Indiana in 1972.  It was published quarterly and it was renamed the Americas Review and won accolades from such established and respected authorities as the New York Times.  It was dissolved in 1999 (Arte Público).

Kanellos started Arte Público Press in 1979 so Hispanic literature would have a national forum.  In 1980 he was offered a position with the University of Houston and was invited to bring Arte Público Press with him, which he did.  Kanellos’s work in Hispanic literature has gained national recognition. In 1988 he was honored by President Clinton with the White House Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature (Arte Público). 

Arte Público Press offers Poetry that is written by Hispanic men and women.  I have chosen to explore female Hispanic identity by looking at female poets published by this press. Before I delve into the poetry I wanted to see what else they publish.  In 1992 they started the U.S. Hispanic Literacy Heritage Project.  This is a ten year recovery project whose mission is to bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences.  They are recovering and indexing lost Latino writings that date from colonial period through 1960 (Arte Público).

They also publish children and young adult titles under the imprint Piñata, which is aimed at an accurate portrayal of Hispanics in U.S. literature directed at youth.  There was a void in this literary genre in the U.S. as far as Hispanic faces and stories go.  Many of these titles are bilingual and feature stories from Hispanics in the United States and also from other countries.  This imprint was started by a 1994 grant from the Mellon foundation.  I thought it was interesting that there is a title about Mexican folktales from the American Southwest (Arte Público).  It wasn’t until I came to Texas 15 years ago that I realized this was once part of Mexico.  Before that I thought America was all about Pilgrims and Pioneers.

Who works at Arte Público Press?  Could I ever work there, a white, 40 year old, Anglo suburbanite (one of my ancestors started the Peach War on Manhattan Island in the 1600s, which involved shooting a Native American girl for picking a peach off one of his trees)?  According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, which is funded by the Philip Morris Company, the “racial” make-up the Arte Público Press is as follows:

            Majority of Board Persons of Color   Y (not yes but Y)

            Majority of Staff Persons of Color            Y

            Majority of Constituency composed of persons of color    Y

            Are there programs designed to serve interests

                        Of people of color    Y

            Directory of Race they are Considered             5    (Hispanic or Latino)

(Art Organizations of Color).  When I checked Arte Público’s web page I found 11 of the 13 employees listed had names I could identify as Hispanic (Arte Público). What I thought was interesting was that this Arts Agency considered Hispanics persons of color.  I have never seen Hispanics categorized this way, nor refer to themselves this way.  I have heard and read in some of the poetry references to “brown hands,” or “black eyes” but not, “persons of color.”  I’m not sure what to do with this.

The press also publishes anthologies, a few titles in Spanish that I could not translate adequately, some fiction and a Hispanic Civil Rights Series.

The Hispanic Civil Rights Series caught my attention.  I only read the summary of the books on the web site but it helped me realize how diverse the Hispanic world is.  This series publishes works by Latino (their word) civil rights leaders of the early part of the 20^th century.

The first book to catch my eye is Black Cuban/Black American: A Memoir by Evelio Grillo.  He lived in the town of Ybor, Florida, near Tampa, Florida.  In the early part of the century it was full of cigar makers, streets filled with horse and buggy teams, and was mixed racial and linguistically.  People were grouped based on whether they were Black Hispanic Cuban born or Black Hispanic U.S. born, White Hispanic Cuban born, White Hispanic U.S. born, poor or rich. It illustrates that Hispanics can be black.  It adds another dimension to the complexity of Hispanic identity (Arte Público). 

I have to know about horse and buggy days in Ybor.  I can see it in my imagination because I went there with my family last summer.  There are still shops there where men take leathered sheets of tobacco leaves and roll them into cigars, place them in the cigar molds, them pile them man-high.  I couldn’t speak Spanish and I felt a little weird watching strangers (Hispanics) roll cigars like they were in a human zoo to ask many questions about what they were doing.  Would I have felt more comfortable to talk to them if they were white? We smiled and nodded, and then we went off to lunch.  We even had to ask someone how to pronounce Ybor.  I think it’s EE-bor.  It’s all duded up as a tourist site but it’s still charming.  As an aside, my husband made us take the Ybor exit off the freeway because he knew about the Cuban men there that roll cigars.  I had never heard of it. 

Hector García wrote In Relentless Pursuit of Justice: Ignacio M. García.  In 1948 . Ignacio. García  came upon the Three Rivers Funeral Home in south Texas which refused to bury the remains of World War II veteran Felix Longoria.  This was enough to get García to start the American GI Forum to encourage Mexican Americans to participate in the American political system and to spread word about the situation of Longoria and his family.  García emigrated from Mexico, overcame discrimination found here, and became a doctor in 1948.  He went to war; received the Bronze Star and 6 Battle Stars then came home to segregation, discrimination and racism.  The American GI Forum is the most powerful civil rights agency for Hispanics in the United States.  The forum also worked to get the first Catholic president in the White House, John F. Kennedy. It is interesting that a Hispanic group would support a white Yankee for president because they both shared the same religion.  It shows how important the Catholic religion is for Hispanics as a marker of cultural identity (Arte Público).

The title A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans by José Angel Gutiérrez made me laugh aloud.  I thought, “Hey man, I need one of those!”  Gutiérrez was a “firebrand” leader in civil rights in the 60s and 70s.  In Crystal City, TX he mobilized the Mexican American community to win some contested city council seats, a real victory for Hispanics there.  This book was first self-published, and it is a tongue in cheek, humorous look at political self help.  I’m not even sure what the publisher’s description means.  I have to get it (Arte Público).

Arte Público Press also publishes the memoirs of Antonia Pantoja, a Puerto Rican who after different career paths founded many still existing Puerto Rican organizations in New York City.  She is well known for her abiding philosophy that humans have the ability to alter their own conditions.  This advice is useful for people of any minority, ethnic, or dominant cultural group (Arte Público).

            According to their web page, Arte Público has published books about César Chávez, the renowned migrant farm worker labor organizer, Julian Nava, the first Mexican American to serve as American Ambassador to Mexico, and the Cuban Raft people.  There is a highly praised, four volume Handbook of Hispanic culture which covers literature, art, history, sociology and anthropology, that they also publish.

Arte Público Press Female Poets

I chose the female poets because I had to narrow down the field of Hispanic Poets.  I chose Arte Público Press because they are based in Houston and I thought, right or wrong, it would add some home flavor to work of the poets Arte Público chooses to publish.  I think I was wrong on that.  I was able to obtain twelve of the fifteen female poet’s works.  I am only able to cover two, but I will read them all.  As I read them, it became clear some poets spoke to me more about Hispanic life that others. Some mediated or crossed cultural boundaries from Hispanic to Anglo, to me. These are the ones I spent more time on. 

Sarah Cortez

I chose Sarah because I took a Memoir course from her at the Jung Center here in Houston, and flew to San Antonio to take another workshop from her as part of the Gemini Poetry Series, and I also heard  her lecture. I realized again how much I like her work after reading some of the other female poets Arte Público Press publishes.  Her book is called How to Undress a Cop and was published in 2000.  The foreword is by Naomi Shihab Nye, a noted poet who I saw interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS not too long ago. Cortez is also a visiting scholar at the University of Houston, and teaches creative writing there.

Her biography reflects the nuances and contextual nature of identity, meaning who you are is who you say you are. She says she was raised to be white, in a white neighborhood and when to schools that were mostly white.  As she examined her Hispanic Identity and started to recover her past she felt “really stupid” because she doesn’t speak Spanish. When she was a kid she was white, and now that she’s an adult she chooses to be Hispanic.  Although, in some media, she has been described as “a person from a Latino background” (poetic voices).  She has been through a number of careers, several degrees and has settled on police work for the last ten years. She won the 1999 PEN Texas Literary Award in Poetry, and has authored two chapbooks.  She placed as a semi-finalist in 2000 14^th annual Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry.  Her poem “Glance” was featured in Houston METRO buses as part of national program Poetry in Motion.  One web site has a black and white close-up with her holding a gun over her shoulder (Houston Institute for Culture).

Her book is called How to Undress a Cop.  The poem “Foundations” (Cortez 24) is about the women of a family, the girl cousins, aunts, nieces, give her sexy underwear, “frilly red lace holding B-cups/sweet with satin pointelle” (24).  She says, “Its and old family tradition,/I say to questioning gringo lovers” (24).  This poem is short and addresses how to move between two worlds romantically, what is appropriate between lovers.  It also addresses the fun and close relationship the women of the family have.  It is a kind of bonding ritual.  Only people very close to you would be so bold as to give you something so private.  The close relationships expressed between the females make me feel a kind of loss.  I tried to do this with my sister last year for Christmas.  I gave her a multicolor job that evoked coconut shells, light fringes and all.  It did not go over well, and I gave it all in fun.  This poem spoke to me about the differences between Hispanic and American cultures.

It also addresses the nature of the family ties.  The speaker of poem has a close relationship to all these women, and they all probably live near each other.  Anglos can live far and wide.  I live 2000 miles away from anyone outside my nuclear family and I’m probably not the only Anglo on my block in that situation. Hispanics can also live far from family but I get the feel from the poem that they have closer family relationships, even geographically.

The poem that blew off top of my head, as Emily Dickinson might have put it, was “Dream Man” (24).  The first part of the poem addresses the Modern Hispanic Woman,

we are modern women beyond

Catholicism, fresh tortillas at every meal

Each, one husband already gone […]  

One speaker states

He’s got to be Mexican.

She stopped. She paused.

She seriously said, “Oh, no, they’re all

wetbacks. Right from Mexico. You don’t

want one of those.” I think

”Why not?”  Wanting a lapse,

a free fall into strong arms

streaked with sweat. A chest

smelling of fields. A man

whose thickened palms tenderly rub

a three-year-old’s fat cheeks

“Heal me,” I whisper. Grant Me

to stand again on cold linoleum watching

Grandma uncoil her thick grey braid.

Give me words to understand her

Spanish. Make love to me

on a white, cast-iron bed

as the outside calls to us---

steers bellowing, roosters,

the haunting swish of mesquite trees

on Grandfather’s farm. Sleep

with me curled around pillowcases

Grandma embroidered and edged

with strong lace. Heal me. Heal me.

Make love to me and give me

a black-eyed child.  (27-28)

            In the first part of this poem there is a disparagement of the “Mexicans,” the men straight from Mexico, even calling them “Wetbacks” in the poem.  The women see them selves beyond that class. Both groups are Hispanic but are very different,.  In the dream in the third stanza. they are idealized in a perfect homey Hispanic world, simple but not deprived. It’s a bountiful poverty with strong ties to the past with the speaker on pillowcases with strong embroidery done by her Grandmother tied to a potent Hispanic past.

There are the references to nature in the second half, with the mesquite trees, cattle and roosters, as opposed to the taquería mentioned in the first half of the poem which to me refers to a town or a city.  In the first half of the poem, not shown above, the women don’t even require their man to know English, but he has to know enough to perform well in bed. He has to know, ‘aquí,’’allá,’’ahorita,’ / and, of course, ‘otra vez’.” (27). This translated means here, there, now and, one more time, or do it again. The women speaking in the poem laugh at this.  It brings the potential of their relationship with a man down to the essential between them, the differences between different types of Hispanics forgotten (Cortez 27).

All of these references, a longed for simple Hispanic past, images of nature v. town, Spanish v. English point to the traditional v. modern continuum that Hispanics travel as they negotiate their identities in the American cultural landscape. This poem brings out difficulties of this negotiation by repeating the phrase Heal me.  It occurs three times in the poem’s last stanza as seen above.  For me it turns the poem into a prayer.  It forces the reader to ask, “what needs healing?”  I conclude the speaker feels a hole in her identity.  The speaker is Hispanic but far removed from her Hispanic roots or essence. The speaker in this stanza is a modern woman who feels a wound from the loss of her historic Hispanic identity.  Again we see the ambivalence between the modern world and the traditional world.   In the last couple of lines of the poem she pleads to be healed to be pulled by the seat of her universe, her womb, back into the Hispanic world by giving birth to a black-eyed child, and through this, give birth to her Hispanic identity.  This poem is a lament of her lost heritage.

The next poem of Sarah Cortez’s that addresses Hispanic cultural identity is called “Driving Home” (Cortez 31). The first stanza describes a driver who comes upon a young Mexican road worker waving a red flag at a road work site in a thunderstorm. The driver is stopped but he keeps wagging the flag and she compares his look to a matador:

            [I] recognize that movement-I’ve seen it

in bullfights when the matador dances

against hot death, teasing. Impatient

breath, black hair dappled in gore,

strong legs careening into unstoppable death  (31).

            This poem is a metaphor for the plight of many Hispanic immigrants into this country.  It seems their whole life here is a struggle against the bull of American culture ready to run them down. Many people look down on people who do the work Anglos would not do, either because the pay is too low or the work too hard.  But the Hispanics work hard and have “strong legs.” The reference to dancing “against hot death” reminds me of all the men, women and children who have died horrid deaths on the way here over the U.S. Mexican border, and those who languish and die in rail cars and hot trailer trucks.

            These are the only poems of Cortez’s I chose as they evoked the most emotional response of the Hispanic focused poems.  Many of her poems are erotic as suggested by the title of the collection, How to Undress a Cop.  There are lots of nipples and thighs and tongues. The cop experience is also addressed, including the motorcycle accidents with a hot chunk of yellow brain bubbling on the pavement or an Hispanics boy’s one-call-too-many to “Mommie”  to bail him out.  He tells his brother, “I’m the littlest. Remind her. /Write down “Tu negrito.” Tell her I love her. /She’s got to bail me out” (43).

Pat Mora

            Pat Mora is an prominent figure in current Hispanic poetry, and has three books published by Arte Público Press, Borders (1986), Chants (1984), winner of a Southwest Book Award, and Communion (1991) (Pat Mora).  I was able to obtain all three.   She has two other books of poetry I feel drawn to, Agua Sante: Holy Water and Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints.  Agua Sante is based on both oral and written tradition and addresses what is holy in many different female voices from a migrant worker to an Aztec Goddess.   Aunt Carmen is a story of a women who explores the ordinary and divine through the Northern New Mexican tradition of carving saints to express one’s individual devotion to Catholicism (Pat Mora).  These books call to me as an Anthropologist, reader and seeker of things sacred. On a personal level, I am working out a relationship to this image of the Divine Mother and visited an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Tampa in Summer 2002.  I am also interested in the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Pat Mora also has two memoirs. One titled House of Houses is written “through the voices of her ancestors” (Pat Mora), and was given a good review in the “New York Times Book Review.”  Mora wrote a collection of essays called Nepantla: Essays from the Middle, a word from Nahuatl language still spoken in parts of Mexico which means "the land in the middle”  (Pat Mora).  According to the reviews on her site (one by noted Anthropologist Renato Resaldo) Mora addresses how she has negotiated her Hispanic identity through her life. This along with the title appears to refer to the Hispanic status of ambivalent minority that moves between and among categories of self-definition as she finds her place in the world (Arte Público).

She has also written children’s books both in English and in English and Spanish.  Among these are Listen to the Desert/ Oye al Deserto (Clarion, 1994), Pablo’s Tree (Macmillan, 1994), and two published by Piñata Books/Arte Público Press, The Desert is My Mother, and A Gift of Poinsettias.  She has another that I would like to get from the library and read to a bunch of kids, The Race of Toad and Deer (Orchard, 1995) (Milligan, Milligan, Hoyos, 279).

Themes of lost heritage can be found in her poetry collection Chant.  The First poem ”Bribe” describes Indian woman, “chanting, chanting /I see them long ago bribing / the desert with their turquoise threads.”(Mora, Chant 7).  Mora connects with this past and the earth as follows:

                        Secretly I scratch a hole in the desert

                        By my home. I bury a ballpoint pen

                        And lined yellowing paper. Like the Indians

                        I ask the Land to smile on me, to croon

                        Softly, to help me catch her music with words. (7)

Her ancestors of the first stanza used what tools they had to communicate their identities to the world, the earth, while they were communing with it.  Mora continues their ritual, their sacred performance by giving birth to it in her life and burying what she will use to communicate her identity to her world, the pen and paper.  She gives it to the earth as a sacred offering. Maybe she feels a lost of heritage, as we saw in a poem by Sarah Cortez earlier.  Mora claims the desert as her home and it shows up in other poems in Chant.  Why does we bury her tools of her identity in secret?  Is there a risk involved in conjuring one’s lost heritage?  As a whole, this poem spoke to me of lost heritage and a wish to actively reclaim it.

            Another poem about lost heritage is “Leyenda.” In this poem the ancient city of Tula is described in grand terms.  The poem describes giant ears of corn that grew over night with enough corn silk to fill mattresses and pillows.  It recalls that the Toltecs planted red and green cotton (this is genetically possible) and that “Indians harvested rainbows’ (Mora, Chant 14), and covered their castles with the plumage of the colorful Quetzal bird, and when the wind blew, colored bits of feathers “landed on Indian heads” (Mora, Chant 14). To read this poem is to read a painting, full of colors, and nobility and as the first line states, “They say there was magic at Tula” (Mora, Chant 14).  This recalls the magic sometimes referred to in Hispanic heritage and current Hispanic culture. Also, when conditions are not so good in the present, one gain comfort by imaging the heroes of your past.   The dominant culture in the United States has Columbus Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day, to show us how great we once were and how we can be again.  Maybe this is the dream for some Hispanics.

            There is one poem in Chant which addresses the Hispanic status of ambivalent minority.  It’s called “Legal Alien”  (Mora, Chant, 52)

                        Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural

                        Able to slip from “how’s life?”

                        To “Me’stan volviendo loca,”[…]

                        American but hyphenated […]

                        (their eyes say, “You may speak

                        Spanish but you’re not like me”)

                        an Amerian to Mexicans

                        a Mexican to Americans […]

                        masking the discomfort

                        of being pre-judged

                        Bi-laterally.  (52)

This poem illustrates the ambivalent nature of identity for some Hispanics. There is the problem of not being white enough for whites, and not Hispanic enough for some Hispanics.  There must be a group of Hispanics where the reality of identity lies somewhere in the middle.  The last few lines of the poem address the author’s frustration with there not being a safe “Land in the Middle” to recall the title of one of her memoirs. It is like the author is pointing out she is always “on the spot” and never truly comfortable with her identity and viewed as and “alien” by both Mexican-Americans and Americans.  In this poem the speaker refers to herself as “a handy token /sliding back and forth /between the fringes of both worlds” (Mora, Chant 52).  The speaker sees a problem not only with being on the edges of society, but having to deal with being judged by both sides and not fitting in either one.

The poem “Bruja: Witch” by Mora (Chant 16) brought me right back to Bless Me Ultima by Ruidolfo Anaya.  It is about the owl and the Witch.  The Witch is the narrator and in the first line she declares, “I wait for the owl” (Mora, Chant 16). She leaves her body only on Tuesday and Thursday nights to “Leave my slow body, to fly” in the body of the owl (Mora, Chant 160).  In the poem, the Witch is commissioned by a wife to catch her husband making love to another woman. It is filled with beautiful imagery.  She is light and agile in the air but when the rooster crows she has to enter her tired body, saying “I tilt and dip and soar. /I smell mesquite. Beneath white /stars, I dance (Mora, Chant 17).  This poem brings together the themes of magic and heritage.  The idea that in Hispanic culture there could be a person so “gifted” that they could transform into another creature addresses the richness of Hispanic culture.  It points to the traditional aspect of the Hispanic culture and would be apart of your heritage whether one was a modern Hispanic, traditional or somewhere in between.

Arte Público Press offers so much about the Hispanic experience it’s more than I can adequately cover in this type of essay.  I initially wanted to cover all 15 female Hispanic poets they publish and I could only cover a several poems.  One theme that came up repeatedly for me as I looked at the history of the press, the types of titles they published and the poets’ works covered was that they all seemed at some level to be talking to each other.  The theme of discrimination came up often, from how to be a good soldier overseas and get a decent burial in the United States like Felix Longoria,  or how to walk through the world un-judged as Pat Mora addressed in her poem “Legal Alien.”   There is a search for lost heritage, as found in the poem by Sarah Cortez, “Dream Man” and in “Bribe” by Pat Mora.  These works and others I have not mentioned display intertextuality.  None of the works I have read in the class and for this project were written or read in isolation.  This goes back to the question, “Is this literature or is this culture?”  This is an exciting question for me because we were criticized for asking this type of question in the college literature courses I took 20 years ago.  But this question is important.  Yes, this is literature, but it is also culture.  Somewhere in Houston, there is a Hispanic woman wondering what it was like for her great grand parents in Goliad, Texas, or Anywhere, Mexico, just like Sarah Cortez does in her poem “Dream Man.”  Is there someone in Houston thinking about his or her great aunt no one talks about, the witch, and did she fly like on owl on Tuesdays?  My imagination spins. I ask, “What about the Black Hispanic Cubans in Ybor City?”  Where are there descendants now and how are they negotiating their Hispanic past?

Without getting too melodramatic, I think this press is doing wonderful things in the world.  White girls (ok women) like me read this and learn about the richness and beauty of the Hispanic culture in all its complexity.  It helps me rediscover myself and gain entry into a world I wish to learn more about.

  Works Cited

Arte Público Press Home Page University of Houston. May 2002.

            http://benito.arte.uh.edu/

Cortez, Sarah, How to Undress a Cop: Poems by Sarah Cortez. Houston:Arte Público Press, 2000.

Arts Organizations of Color, National Association of State Art Agencies,

            Arte Publico Press http://www.indians.org/color/52.htm

Houston Institute for Culture,  Houston People, Sarah Cortez,

            http://www.houstonculture.org/people/cortez.html

Milligan, Bryce, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos, ed. Daughters Of the Fifth Sun:A Collection of Latina  Fiction and Poetry. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Mora, Pat. Chant. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984.

Pat Mora Home Page,  http://www.patmora.com/