•Dispulque, ¿qué va a tomar? -An essay about the last pulquería in Romita and the photographs of Marco Antonio Cruz - Pretty Obscure, Far West Press, 2024 "La Hija de los Apaches, one of the oldest pulquerías in Roma, opened in 1934 on La Piedad, later called avenida Cuauhtémoc. The bar survived several earthquakes, clinging to the islet that became La Romita, surrounded by a man-filled lakebed prone to rattle Doctores, Roma, Condesa, el Centro and Juarez. In 1987, Cruz and his Leica spent six months documenting the nocturnal goings-on of the place where Luis Buñuel’s film crew once hung out on breaks from shooting Los Olvidados around the corner. " (excerpt)
•Ballot Box Blues: The Indirect Road to Direct Democracy -An essay about the complex system of ballot proposals in California - The Passenger, Iperborea Press, Italian version February 2022, English version July 2022 "Critiques of the ballot initiative system often include commentary on its exclusivity, citing not only the $2,000 filing fee—an $1,800 increase passed in 2015 to counter frivolous initiatives after someone filed a proposal to kill sodomites and another person filed a response proposal to force bigots into sensitivity training—but also the prohibitive costs of collecting signatures in California’s fifty-eight counties. Even with large volunteer support, the cost-per-required-signature is several dollars, costing proponents millions just to get on the ballot. This type of direct democracy, its detractors say, is arguably neither democratic nor direct." (excerpt)
•Why Sing Along When You Can Sing Alone? -A profile about songwriter Ruthann Friedman and her time in the hippie scene of California in the 1960's. -"Ugly Things Magazine," #58, Fall 2021 "So what is she? She often gets labeled as folk, due in large part to the ubiquitous acoustic guitar and fingerpicking style of her first album. Everything with an acoustic guitar up front gets called folk music. Chow mein is not Italian food just because it has noodles. She is a postmodernist. Her music is as folk as Harry Partch’s hobo operas. Plus, many of her compositions, especially in her later years, are either song cycles or long-bar song forms that do not mimic the simple eight- or sixteen-bar choruses common in traditional American folk. No, her music is not folk, but it is a mixture of the musicals she grew up on, the blues, and a series of unique fingerings and complex chord clusters that incorporate many nines, thirteens, pedal points, chord substitutions. If this is starting to sound like a jazz review, it is because the musical language is the same despite the difference in vernacular. But her music is not jazz either. She writes songs; songs that are stories and are complicated and long and complex, they breathe and take their time, they have a heartbeat rather than a tempo, developing like people do, but mostly they are stories of an outsider’s journey." (excerpt)
•Violence in the Calm -An essay exploring a triple murder in Mexico in the 1950's. -Pushcart nominated. -The Knot Wound Round Your Finger, Bell Press Anthologies 2021 "After Ernesto heard the gun fire several times, he heard someone yell, He got shot! When Ernesto yelled down the hill from the granary to ask who got hit, the voice called out that it was his brother Juan. The twelve-year-old Ernesto grabbed a .38 pistol that was in the granary and ran down the hill towards the commotion by the main gate. His mother had tried to intervene and Ernesto arrived in time to see Juan Limón shoot her two times in her swollen stomach. He stood frozen looking at his mother on the floor, not moving, and he was unable to pull the trigger and shoot Juan Limón. I feel that this is the moment that haunted him most of all, not just because it has haunted me since he told me, and not just because of the murder of his mother and unborn sibling, but because of his inability to react. He, like many of the men in my family, is unforgiving of his child self. It is here where these images of the child and the man collapse in my mind, flattening time as they do. I picture my cousin Nene in La Puente, lying in his own pool of blood, and I imagine my child self there with him, armed and unable to fire back at his killers." (excerpt)
•The Loneliest One -An essay about a family murder in Los Angeles.. -Winner of the AWP Intro Journals Project 2021. -"Puerto Del Sol," June 9, 2021 "We cruised for a while through the City of Industry, a sliver of factories and warehouses that overlapped with and trifurcated the La Puente, Bassett, and Avocado Heights neighborhoods. The Los Angeles sun was mercifully tucked behind wave clouds and contrails, the tracks to our right, desolation everywhere, a stuccoed motel to our left, then nothing, unmarked buildings, then a tire shop, a liquor store, another motel, more nothing, every structure some vapid shade of grey or tan. I wondered how many of these motels Marco had hidden out in at some point in the past, how many secret histories lay in shadows." (excerpt)