Month: July 2015

My Crazy Familia

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One of the projects on my list is uploading all the details I’ve discovered de mi familia and sharing it with my relatives online. As you’ll notice, I have a link under the ‘Projects’ tab dedicated to my family – it’s a work in progress, but eventually, I hope to have a page full of family stories, picture albums, family newsletters, genealogy trees, and DNA tests.

I ❤ discovering new details about my family. I ❤ the chismes that keep us on our toes. I especially ❤ that my parents have allowed me to do Ancestry DNA tests on them to discover more of our ancestral traces! And I’m sooooo excited to share the deets with my relatives!

But, as I said…WORK IN PROGRESS!

delagarza
Familia De La Garza.

You Know What I’m Sayin’? by Daniel García Ordaz

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What would a poetry pachanga be without the Valle’s own Poet Mariachi? He is, after all, a force of language and literature in our community. His play with words and music taught me to be comfortable with our cultural imagery in my own work, and his work has introduced hundreds of students how powerful our own identities can be.

As pochos, we are not used to finding our own voices and colors define themselves in the literature we are asked to read in school. But his work is sure finding its way into the hands of librarians and educators that are more than happy to share his unique style of rhyming and emphasizing the patterns of our language.

Daniel García Ordaz approaches his audiences by sharing a universal approach to the written word. He writes about what he knows – of belonging to immigrant roots, pertaining to an American dream, of legacies and family, accents and superstitions.

Maybe you’ll even run into a mariachi song in his book, You Know What I’m Sayin’?.