Jeff Rivera, the author of the novel Forever my Lady and the founder of Gumbowriters.com, has scored a sweet deal as a new blogger for book industry Web source GalleyCat.
Mr. Rivera's blog is called People of Color.
As usual, Gomez has mixed feeling about all of this. Gomez thinks there are no transparent people, and so includes "white" people in the "of color" category. Gomez also thinks the term "of color" is ridiculous when applied to white Latinos, who get to employ all the same racist stuff in Latin America that the see-through people do here.
Gomez would like to see the day when book industry Web sites - and indeed, book store shelves - stop segregating authors by skin tone, presuming culture and genre to be related to melanin. Gomez does not fault Mr. Rivera for the flawed paradigm in which we all toil, though we do feel a heavy sadness about it for reasons far too complex to list here.
And yet, Gomez is glad the formerly homeless Mr. Rivera is there, because he will probably feature writers everyone else at Galleycat say fit to ignore for their not having been...(un)colored as a new coloring book.
Gomez has a headache. Gomez need to take a pill.
Gomez was surprised and happy to hear from a woman named Miriam, who works for author and screenwriter Josefina Lopez's publishing company. This means that Gomez will actually soon start breaking news instead of just commenting on it. It also means that Ms. Lopez hearts Gomez just like Gomez hearts Josefina.
Reminder: Ms. Lopez wrote the excellent novel Hungry Woman in Paris, which Gomez brought to everyone's attention last week.
Miriam wrote to let us (and all of you) know about an interview she is conducting with Ms. Lopez, on Blog Talk Radio, next Tuesday 3/31 at 1PM ET. For more information, click here.
Fans can call into (646) 378-0039 to chat or listen online at the above link.
Gomez is trying to think of some good questions to ask Ms. Lopez, and is taking suggestions.
When Gomez saw an orgasmic NY Times review of the new book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by New Yorker writer David Grann, we wanted to wrap ourselves in fine mesh and avoid it like we might avoid a malarial mosquito. We were tired of the buzz already.
After all, it was the gee-whiz memoir of a squishy, bald white guy from NYC who decided to abandon his family so that he could march off to Brazil to follow in the wet, green, disease-infested footsteps of a long-dead imperialist and Inca-hater, Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett. And Hollywood, being Hollywood and loving a good old tale of cowboys and Indians, had scooped up the manuscript for a movie starring Brad Pitt long before the book even hit shelves.
To Gomez, the whole endeavor sounded exhausting and misguided. After all, it has been Gomez's experience that the only people who actively seek to "survive" in jungles (or use suffocating baby slings instead of comfy padded strollers) are middle- or upper-class white people from the US or Canada who admire the earthy nature of the Other. Them, and Robi Rosa, who does it because he thinks he's a vampire.
But then Gomez saw this review of The Lost City of Z, by former Washington Post Book World editor and current standout novelist Marie Arana. If Arana liked it, Gomez will probably like it too. Even if Arana's a Republican. Even if Brad Pitt is bringing sexy to genocide.
Gomez will now bow our head(s) in humble realization that we exist in a fog of anger and hypocrisy most days. Gomez understands the risk inherent in bitching at others not to prejudge, whilst prejudging with verve and might.
Gomez thinks we will read The Lost City of Z after all, but we will probably get it from the library.
Gomez thinks we should send this link to the site Stuff White People Like, because there's nothing white people in academia like more than studying supposed "Hispanic" issues that don't make any kind of sense unless you actually believe Hispanics are different from other human beings. Which Gomez doesn't.
In this case, a press release tells Gomez that "Carol Scheffner Hammer, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development, has received a $500,000 Head Start--University Partnership Grant to study the efficacy of a bilingual school-readiness program called Madres Educando a Sus Niños/Mothers Educating Their Children."
Gomez wonders why white people always draw weird conclusions about Hispanics, like that we can't get skin cancer, or, now, that we aren't reading to our kids because we don't have culturally appropriate books. Gomez thinks that if white people at Penn State were to extrapolate census data by poverty rather than "race" they would find that poor folks aren't reading to their kids because they're poor, not because the bunny in Guess How Much I Love You isn't wearing a sombrero like the Taco Bell dog.
Poverty is well-documented to lead to all sorts of problems, including low literacy. It is simplistic and insulting to assume that Hispanic moms (what about the dads, Penn?) would not read, say, Goodnight Moon or Hungry Hungry Caterpiller because those books aren't about rolling tortillas with abuelita. In the ghetto. The only people Gomez knows who want to read tortilla ghetto children's books are non-poor white people who hope to expose their children to "diversity".
Gomez thinks the $500,000 grant would be better spent studying why Hispanic moms are still paid less than any other women in the nation, for the same work. Maybe then Penn State could peg the blame for low literacy among many Hispanic families to the real culprit: Institutionalized racism that leads to low wages, bad neighborhoods and crummy schools.
Josefina Lopez, the brilliant writer/director behind the excellent film Real Women Have Curves, has penned a sexy new novel about a Latina who moves to Paris to learn to cook, called Hungry Woman in Paris.
Ms. Lopez, in a conversation with actress Lupe Ontiveros on the ColorsNW web site, says that the delicious novel was the result of two events in her own life.
First, Ms. Lopez says, she took up cooking classes to try to help ease her depression. Gomez is proud of Ms. Lopez for being open about suffering from this debilitating disorder - it will helps lots of other people with depression to know that someone as accomplished and motivated as she also deals with it.
Second, Ms. Lopez says she chose Paris as the setting for her book after she and her husband, disgusted with the Iraq war and W being selected for a second term, moved to France. After 18 months living abroad, Ms. Lopez decided to return to Los Angeles and dedicate her non-writing time to fighting for immigrant rights. Orale!
Real Women Have Curves was a terrific film that made Gomez feel better about eating buckets of menudo, and we are all about a Mexican chef in Paris. Congrats to Ms. Lopez for turning her talents to prose, and for taking a political stand, both at home and around the world.
Connecticut native Mark Gonzalves (pictured left) moves up two spots on the NY Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, to land at No 3 this week with his book Out of Captivity.
Mr. Gonzalves co-authored the book with Keith Stansell, Tom Howes and Gary Brozek. Mr. Stansell and Mr. Howes were captured, along with Gonzalves, and held hostage by Colombian FARC rebels in 2003.
Mr. Gonzalves, an imagery analyst trained in the US Air Force, was part a Northrop Grumman team said to be monitoring drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas in Colombia at the time, with a contract from the US government worth $8.6 million.
He was kidnapped when his small airplane crashed in the mountains.
Gomez is naturally skeptical of "stories" sent to us by public relations wires. But we did find the following claims made on behalf of a Puerto Rican motivational speaker and writer named Joachim de Posada pretty intriguing.
To wit: The very impressive and well-educated De Posada sold more than 2 million copies of his book, Don't Eat the Marshmallow Yet. He's doing a major book tour in Korea, where his book has been on the bestseller lists for more than a year, and where he has outsold The Da Vinci Code and the latest Harry Potter installment. Gomez thinks we should begin to publish The Gomez Report in Korean.
Gomez, forever honest, must confess to having watched this video of de Posada in hopes of getting motivated. It didn't work. Gomez had a hard time understanding anything de Posada said. Then again, Gomez doesn't live in Korea. Gomez assumes de Posada is in South Korea, but one never knows. Perhaps Kim Jong-Il likes da marshmallow. Perhaps Kim Jong-Il thinks marshmallows are something that squirt out of underage girls gone wild. Nothing would surprise Gomez.
Gomez would be a great motivational speaker ourselves, if only Gomez would get off our collective arse and say something out loud other than, "Yes, we'd like fries with that" or "Who dat Joachim dude tink he be, mehn?"
Envy does not look good on Gomez, but it probably looks better than Gomez's old Jordache jeans. Peace out.
University of Arizona professor and celebrated poet Juan Felipe Herrera has won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award for his book Half of the World in Light. The win marks the first time two poets have tied for first place for the award, which Mr. Herrera shared with some other ponderous dude whose name Gomez can't pronounce right now.
Gomez knows better than to post a 10-minute poetry video on our site and hope to actually have people return for more, but we sort of like Mr. Herrera's cheery, nasty, funny presentation. We apologize for taking - ah hem - poetic license on this one.
For what it's worth, Mr. Herrera's son is the famed blogger Nezua, aka The Unapologetic Mexican, lending credibility to the notion of inherited genius.
Gomez likes the dad's poetry a lot, but thinks the son is actually the stronger, unsung artist (he writes, paints, takes photos, etc). Gomez wonders when cool orgs like the NBCC will start giving awards for troubled, intellectual smart-assery on the Web.
Gomez hopes we can tie for first with the angry Mexican when they do.
Publishers Weekly reports that HarperCollins, faced with a 75 percent decline in profits over last year, has sought to plug the leaky dike by, among other things, gutting Rayo, its Spanish-language US imprint.
Rene Alegria, the pioneering head of Rayo, and Cecilia Molinari were two of the three people let go. Rayo will continue to operate, according to the article, but with far fewer titles.
Gomez has mixed feelings about all this. One the one hand, it was kind of cool to have Rayo pumping out books for a "domestic Latino market," in Spanish. On the other hand, no one was buying those books.
Here's a hint from Gomez to HarperCollins: Latinos in the US read, but we tend to read in English. Those of us in this country who speak primarily Spanish are usually too poor and too busy to read sex-diet books and Univision tell-alls in Spanish. By the time those folks' kids are old enough to read for fun, they are reading in English. It's simple math, really.
Those of us who are fully bilingual and read for pleasure are most likely to read in English, though we do get turned off by the plethora of books featuring us as the bad guys, maids, gardeners, miserable immigrants etc.
Maybe if HarperCollins focused on giving Gomez a more realistic version of ourselves, and stopped doing things like giving Donald Trump seven figures for a book that eventually sold 87,000 copies, they wouldn't be losing so much money.
Just a thought.
Children's book author Margarita Engle became the first Hispanic to win the prestigious Newbery Award, for her young adult verse novel The Surrender Tree, about the Cuban struggle for independence.
Library Journal has an interesting Q&A with the Cuban American author, in which she graciously names many of the Latino authors whose shoulders, she says, she stands on.
Gomez is glad there's great young adult literature out there, and encourages grownups to read this terrific book too.
Cuban-American Chicago-based novelist Achy Obejas has nicely captured the tattered, crumbling reality of contemporary Cuba in her new novel, Ruins, according to the Los Angeles Times and others.
Out this month, Ruins tells the story of a shopkeeper named Usnavy, who is blindly loyal to a failed regime.
While we love the gifted Obejas (and welcome any opportunity to shed light on the realities of life in today's Cuba) we did scratch our heads at the name of her lead character. Usnavy? Haven't we seen this before?
Oh, right. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's debut novel The Dirty Girls Social Club and its sequel Dirty Girls on Top both had a character named Usnavys. And the Tony-winning play In the Heights also had a character named Usnavy. Et tu, Achy?
We are sad to report there are several real people, male and female, with this miserable name in various Latin American countries, so none of the aforementioned writers can claim to have invented it. But, seriously, Gomez is tired of it already.
How about Frigidaire, or Usmail next time? We heard both in Cuba, as well as Mileidi.
The phenomenally gifted Chicago-born author Sandra Cisneros has had her book The House on Mango Street chosen by that city for its "One Book, One Chicago" citywide reading program, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced the selection of the lyrical, classic collection of stories by Cisneros last week.
In related news, a celebration event is scheduled for April 1 by Nuestra Palabra organization in Houston, for the 25th anniversary of The House on Mango Street.
We can't believe it has been that long, but we are proud to see Cisneros and her work still going strong. We still remember the first time we read the line about the boy with the hot sunlight that felt like a bowl on his head. Great writing, by a great writer.
