The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California

"People who live in California deny the past," asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where "what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo," no one has "the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred." From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been.
In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguía draws on memories—his own and his family's reaching back to the eighteenth century—to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history, including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico, destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system, violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush, Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s, and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors, and refusing to be one of the vanquished, he declares, "This is my California history, my memories, richly subjective and atavistic."

History

Murguía, Alejandro

Americas

University of Texas Press

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

From Mexico City to San Francisco's Mission District, nothing comes easyin life or in love. Here is an unstereotypical view of a world as treacherous as it is tender, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Authentic and honest, these nine stories focus on today’s Latino men, their strength and vulnerability, their fears and deepest desires.
 Danger, cruelty, lust, loss, blood, death and dance . . . . Couldn’t put the book down. So hot I had to smother it in half and half. Murguía's a master of hearts on fire, working his storytelling anvil late at night, in a wrecked cubicle of SF called La Mission. No doubt the hungriest fiction and the most ferocious collection in the last three decades.” Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Border Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream
Alejandro Murguía has returned the short story to the people. Though some of his characters are down on their luck, the author has hit the literary jackpot with this one. He’s been revered as an artist for decades among the multicultural cognoscenti, and the publication of this fabulous volume will confirm for many readers what we knew all along.” Ishmael Reed, author of The Reed Reader
This is a book of rare intensity and transcultural joy!" José David Saldívar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies
"The nine tales of life in Mexico City and the Mission District depicted ... crackle with energy without losing sight of their narratives...[ Murguia's] Mission district is not a hipster haven but a melting pot for Latinos from all over the Americas, and his Mexico City is a thriving cultural whirlwind." San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"Alejandro Murguía begins This War Called Love: Nine Stories, his second collection, with an unforgettable portrait of Mexico City in the summer of 1956. Murguía’s prose has the captivating quality that can only flow from a narrator who is himself captivated by his passions. A born storyteller, Murguía sustains flawlessly believable first-person narratives, which gives his prose much of its warmth and nuance." The San Francisco Bay Guardian"Equal parts funny and sad, Murguía’s short stories depict, with tender and sometimes unflinching detail, love, life, and growing up Hispanic. . . . Although the best of the collection are on the darker side, Murguía also shines in the more lighthearted stories . . . Free of stereotypes and always honest, this collection presents Latino Chicano life at full throttle." Booklist
"Authentic and honest, these stories focus on today’s Latin men, their strength and vulnerability, their fears and deepest desires." Latin Style
Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award,1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University.

This War Called Love

Literature & Fiction

United States

City Lights Publishers

American Book Award, fictions set in Nicaragua

Southern Front

Bilingual Pr

Stray Poems opens with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía's inaugural address, where he provides a brilliant and impassioned poetic account of San Francisco's Native and Latino literary history. What follows is a selection of Murguía's most recent work, composed over the past twelve years. These are poems of the twenty-first century, written in a combination of English and Spanishthe patois of contemporary America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local, global.
Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love, both winners of the American Book Award. He is San Francisco's first Latino Poet Laureate.
 Praise for Alejandro Murguía &amp; Stray Poems: "In the city of poets, Murguía has become the activist voice of refugees and exiles--as so many of us are, even as natives--at the center of the Americas. Disguised by its sensuous intimacy, soothing and ennobling, his is a poetry that arms the resistance."--Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood "Poet, teacher, publisher, lover, literary guerrilla--Alejandro Murguía is a San Francisco treasure. And I'm not saying this because he knows where to find the best pozole. Although he does."--Jack Boulware, Litquake co-founder "The powerful stream of rich, diverse Spanish spoken in the United States by millions of Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, has rushed into the huge river of the English tongue in such a way that a language and a literature have been born from those troubled waters, exploring multiple alternatives and choosing many paths. These Stray Poems from Alejandro Murguía speak with all those voices, crossing linguistic borders and really going out of the way to deviate from the standard path and let the multiracial and multicultural, all-embracing Latino beat flow into the heart of English."--Daisy Zamora, The Violent Foam "Murguía with a tango unleashed, a city on fire, a rendezvous of homage, manifesto, revenge and transcendence--he is alone, without a face, yet recognizable in every body that swims through the under-streets of the City, of Paris, of Havana, of bombed-out-Here's-and-There’s and the stripped down body of all of us. No stones are left unturned; hypnotic, alarming, 'melodramático,' rough-lovin’, unkempt, 'dangerous,' and ready to battle at the center of the scorched core. 'I didn’t cheat,' one poem admits. He is on trialfire-spitter and disassembler of cultural falsifications, in 'strange' and romantic moods, the poems scatter truth and aim and blow and burn and rise unto the flagless sky--'. . . a country of oceans and mountains.' Murguía gets there. Alone, because few embark on that voyage. An astonishing, brutal nakedness. Love, that is. No book like it. An unimaginable heart of and for the peoplea ground--breaking prize."--Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California

Stray Poems: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 6

Poetry

City Lights Foundation Books

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