Demetria Martinez - Böcker

We're everywhere, and it's time to come out of the closet: I speak of the tongue-tied generation, buyers of books with titles like Master Spanish in Ten Minutes a Day while You Nap. . . . We grew up listening to the language - usually in the kitchens of extended family - but we answered back mostly in English.""Demetria Martínez wields her trademark blend of humor and irony to give voice to her own ""tongue-tied generation"" in this notable series of essays, revealing her deeply personal views of the world. Martínez breaks down the barriers between prayer and action, between the border denizen and the citizen of the world, and between patriarchal religion and the Divine Mother. She explores her identity as a woman who has within her the ""blood of the conquered and the conqueror,"" and who must daily contend with yet a third world - white America.

Guadalupe Anaya, a waitress, is pregnant. She is also the newly elected block captain of Sunflower Street, in charge of raising awareness of safety in her southeast Albuquerque neighborhood. Her campaign platform: God helps those who help themselves. While she waits for the baby, Lupe writes letters to her unborn child, whom she names Destiny. It is Lupe's dream that her daughter will be a writer, pushing a pen instead of a broom.In this highly imaginative work of fiction by the acclaimed author of Mother Tongue, Demetria Martínez weaves a portrait of six unforgettable characters, whose lives intertwine through their activism as they seek to create a better world and find meaning in their own lives. At the center of this circle of friends is Lupe, and her heartfelt letters to Destiny punctuate the narrative. Until she crossed the border alone and without papers, Lupe worked in a maquiladora in Mexico. Rescued by strangers, she has made a family for herself among the kindhearted friends, swept up in various causes, who will be her daughter's godparents.Deftly alternating between first-person and second-person narratives, conscious states and dream states, The Block Captain's Daughter is full of delightful surprises, even as it deals with universal themes of desire and risk, death and birth, and the powerful ties that bind us all together.

"I can no more describe love," writes Demetria Martinez, "than mystics can light." Don't believe it for a minute. In this collection of fifty-three poems, the author of the award-winning novel Mother Tongue explores the themes that have long characterized her writing: the creative and destructive powers of romantic love, the failure of political systems, the spiritual life, and the need to forgive oneself in order to move on with the work of transformation, both social and personal. Through poems that confront mortality even as they demand social justice, Martinez writes of surviving in a culture where traditional values often get lost in the complexities of everyday life. Of nurturing relationships with nieces, nephews, and parents while pondering questions of life and death, love and loss. Of caring for one's own body when "each cough is an underground nuclear explosion, / Unraveling your body's hard-won peace accord." Martinez cauterizes old wounds inflicted by various agents: death, political repression, betrayal, and of course failed romance: "Don t bother, I did it / First. Broke my own / Damn heart."Here are "kernels of loneliness too stubborn to grind / Down to blue meal," and the struggle for a renewed sense of self as middle age approaches:At this age you touch what little sanctity you can muster.The yearning burns to do more, to do more by hand.To thread your very life through a needle's eye. Martinez serves up a heady blend of political and sensual imagery. Her keen observations and compassionate voice lead the reader on a journey of self-exploration, of coping with life's mundanities as well as its heartaches: "I could use a loving word, / A loaf of bread, a rose, / Help with the laundry." Through her unquenchable passion for life, Demetria Martinez leaves the devil's workshop and brings us closer to an understanding of what is real.