*This is very cool, and very relevant. VL
By Andrea Castillo, Fresno Bee (2.5 minute read)
Agustín Lira, whose music became the anthem of the farmworker movement in the 1960s, released an album Friday under the Smithsonian Institution’s record label.
“Songs of Struggle and Hope” is Lira’s first full-length album with Smithsonian Folkways, the institution’s nonprofit label that documents folk and world music. It is the 44th album in the Tradiciones/Traditions Series produced with the Smithsonian Latino Center. A 40-page booklet in Spanish and English accompanies the 16 songs, with photos and notes by musician and anthropologist Russell Rodríguez.
Lira and his band Alma (Spanish for soul) finished recording the album early last year.
The 71-year-old Lira is the driving force . . . READ MORE
[Phot courtesy of
Trinity.edu]
Suggested reading
The poems included in this comprehensive anthology run the gamut of styles and themes, but all are by Latinos writing from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Some deal with issues specific to the Hispanic experience, such as displacement, identity and language. Others ponder universal concerns, such as love, family and humanity. In “Letter to Arturo,” Mexican-American poet Lucha Corpi pens a song of love to her son: “You’ve hardly left / and already I miss the light / caress of your hands / on my hair, / and your laughter and your tears, / and all your questions / about seas, / moons and deserts. / And all my poems / are tying themselves together / in my throat.”
More than 60 Latino poets are represented in this wide-ranging collection that focuses on poetry from the four largest groups in the United States: Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans. In his introduction, scholar William Luis gives an overview of the origins of Latino literature in the United States, providing historical, political and cultural frameworks for these groups and their writings.
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