The 2014 story of the year: Immigration

In 2014, for a Latino news media organization — and particularly one in the Philadelphia area — there could be no more significant news story, or collective of stories, than immigration.

In January of 2014, President Obama’s new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, took over the department which had long incurred the wrath of immigration reform advocates and activists thanks to an unprecedented deportation rate that split up families and disproportionally impacted longtime residents with no criminal backgrounds. Early in March Johnson was charged with reviewing the administration’s deportation policies.

Also in March, after an uncomfortable White House meeting between immigration advocates and the President, in which Obama famously “chided” advocates for their criticism of his administration’s policies, the venerable National Council of la Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, followed the lead of more activist organizations and publicly named President Barack Obama the "deporter in chief.” Obama and some organizations with strong ties to the Democratic party tried to push back by redirecting that “title” to Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, but they were largely unsuccessful in diverting the mounting frustration directed specifically at the administration.

In April, in Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order saying that local police would no longer cooperate with ICE in holding those suspected of being undocumented immigrants without a warrant to do so....

Read the rest of this editorial here, at AL DÍA News, which you should be reading regularly anyway ;)

Some words about San Giving

In the face of the first step taken this year to allow some undocumented immigrants to sit around the Thanksgiving table without fear; in the face of the massive work we must do to make sure African-American families don't live in fear for the lives of their children every single day; in the face of an out-of-control economic disparity that is making a lie of our shared belief that hard work is rewarded ... let's agree to be thankful for the grit, the vision, commitment and determination we will need to ensure that our future is more just and grace-filled for everyone in our nation.
Read the full column by clicking here.

Tonight, in South Philly...

No other words necessary. ;)

The treatment of unaccompanied minors on the border reminiscent of dystopia

This week someone pointed out on Twitter that what is happening at our border — the characterization of children fleeing violence or hoping to be reunited with their families as security and public health threats rather than refugees; their dehumanizing detention conditions; the proposed expedited repatriation — is reminiscent of what happens in my novel, Ink.

Ink is an immigration-based dystopia. I wrote it imagining xenophobia the scale of which I thought was exaggerated, unimaginable in today's United States.

And I have watched in horror as piece by piece, bit by bit, we inch toward that unimaginable.

In my novel one of my characters paraphrases St. Augustine:

"Father Tom says Augustine had it right," says one of my characters, Mari, "that the soul takes more pleasure in what it has lost and recovered than what it has had all along. He says, given enough time, even a nation remembers it has a soul."

I am a person of faith. I believe in the soul, and the mercy and compassion it enkindles in us as individuals, as communities, as a community of communities. Perhaps we've simply forgotten, as we speak with cruelty or indifference about the fate of the children on our border, that we collectively have a soul. Perhaps we have lost what is best in each us as we dismiss or disregard the conditions of their detention, conditions we would fight tooth-and-nail to change if those detained were our own children. Perhaps what calls to be recovered is the mercy that prevents adults from preparing to send children, alone, back to horrific danger.

"Don't let the future be written for you," says another character in my novel, toward the end, after they've all suffered and sustained immeasurable losses in the struggle to keep their humanity alive and recover the soul of their dystopic America.

I cannot help but think we are poised at a crucial juncture here, now. What future are we letting cynical legislators, Minutemen and haters write for those powerless and vulnerable children? What future are we letting those same legislators, Minutemen and haters write for us, and in our name?

I love the Aloe Blacc, Alex Rivera and NDLON collaboration represented by the video that follows this post. It uses distinct signifiers — in music, in image, in activism — to write a story of human connection, of solidarity, of compassion and a future of hope ...  Life's a game made for everyone, and love is the prize.

#Not1MoreDeportation

Dream cast and playlist (sort of) for my novel INK

I took a page from mystery writer Carmen Amato, who recently posted the dream cast for her book Hidden Light of Mexico (along with a playlist of songs to read by) and decided to do the same for  INK.  Not that the novel is imminent danger of being filmed — can you see Hollywood optioning a book that has been described as "a call for justice;" an immigration dystopia set in the near future, with significant Latino roles? But it is fun to imagine anyway. So here goes ...

Character: Mari
"I am their storyteller.
Others try: Francine retelling myths, Abbie turning tweet to story. But the children always come back to me. Satchel only hears my stories once a month, when he comes up to the woods to visit his father, but he's got the kind of mind that holds forever. Even as the years pass and Gus gets tall, Lucero fills out, Satchel turns contemplative, they come for the stories.
I tell them the one about the boy shapeshifter, and the star girl, and the child who bridges worlds. I tell them other tales, too, so they will know that everyone is made of stories. 
Each of them at a different time obsesses about my tattoo."

Actor: Dalia Hernández
29. Mexican. Film credits include Apocalypto, Miracle Underground and Soho Square. She has Mari's quiet intensity.

Character: Finn
"I can't remember when we started calling them inks. After all, it isn't until know it's certain they'll be tattooed when they enter the country. Actually, unless I'm misreading the soon-to-be-law even the permanent resident and citizen inks will end up with tattoos, with a color scheme to indicate terminal status.
I lean back a moment and stare across the newsroom while I consider how to best shape the lede. There isn't a single ink in the Gazette's newsroom, never was. Even at the big papers there hadn't been a glut of them. Melinda catches me looking around and glares at me. They must teach that look in journalism school because all my cohorts go silent and lean into their monitors as if to convince her they haven't been goofing off.
Me, well, I keep smiling. I'm her favorite reporter even though I haven't seen a day of j-school. 
I file the story a full five minutes before she expects it. She edits it in two. A minute after the new media dude gives us the thumbs up, we watch as my lede floods the fall."

Actor: Ryan Reynolds
38. Canadian. Film credits include R.I.P.D., Green Lantern, The Proposal, Harold & Kumar go to White Castle, among many others. Reynolds isn't as stocky as I'd imagined Finn, nor at 6' 2" quite as tall — but  almost...

Character: Meche
"Cuban. A former chemist. Well, I guess she's still a chemist, just no longer employed by the pharmaceutical company that holds her patents. On her own she's developed this absolutely dead-on synthetic skin. All you need is a small jar of the compound, one of the powdered catalyst, and water to activate it. Sets up quickly. Can ve dyed to match different skin tones so it's perfect to cover tattoos. And it's undetectable. For a few weeks at least, until it starts degrading. Some of the Cuban inks have been paying through the nose to get it at her peña. As long as you have money and don't have an accent it's the way to go."

Actor: Jessica Alba
33. U.S. Latina. Film credits include Sin City, Machete, Valentine's Day, Fantastic Four, among many others. Meche is almost a goddess — all gold surface and grit beneath — so is Alba.

Character: Del
"I cross behind the cabin, down to where the stream has nearly iced over. Up the steep bank roughly parallel to the cabin's south window I start scanning the ground looking for the tracks I spotted earlier.
Moonlight pools in the glade as I squat down to them. I put one hand on the footprint, digging into it until my fingers hit ground, and close my eyes.
It is a slide I take, down to the chambers of my heart. I can count the seeds slumbering in this piece of land, and the fiddleheads curled under snow waiting for a distant wake-up call. My blood can course along the sappy viaducts of birch and oak, the resinous gullies of hemlocks. And deeper still, I can hear the molten buzz of a mantle perpetually in motion. 
And the footstep? The land lets me know where its owner headed from here, and how long ago."

Actor: Freddie Prinze Jr.
38. U.S. Latino. Film credits include To Gillian on her 37th Birthday, Scooby Do, I Know What You Did Last Summer, along with many TV roles. Since Del isn't Latino, it would be a nice switch on the more commonplace non-Latino playing Latino role (I'm looking at you, Ben Affleck).

Character: Abbie
"I convince my mother to put me on computer work for the duration of my community service so I don't have to grapple with what the inkatorium is, and my part in it. I particularly don't want to run into Pete.
I do some of the work I'm supposed to, but mostly I try my hand at sabotage. First I hack into the state public health consortium's system, into the human resources department server. 
They've got dirt on all the inkatorium's administrators. My father's DUI is in my mom's file, along with her terrible credit rating and the lien on property taxes she hasn't been able to pay in full yet. Also the number of inks who have escaped the inkatorium under her watch."

Actor: Adelaide Kane
24. Australian. Film credits include Donner Pass, The Purge, Louder than Words, along with TV roles. She plays a credible teenager and the camera loves her without making her look too perfect.

Character: Toño
"Each line is really a number," he says, then recites them as he glides his finger across the tattoo.
"It tracks everything the government cares to know about me. From who I was born to and where, to whether I get the full rights of citizenship or not. Their measure of who I am."
"Someday it won't be that way," I say.
"They'll still see me as they want to see me," he says. "That's really the mark inks bear that you'll never understand, America."

Actor: Alex Meraz
29. U.S. Latino. Film credits include The New World and four of the films in the Twilight Saga, along with TV roles. Let's see what he really can do as actor, shall we?

There was only one secondary character I wrote with a film actor in mind — I pictured  Chato as veteran Chicano actor, Danny Trejo.

To my utter delight I was able to meet him and be part of an AL DÍA interview with him in advance of the release of the movie Machete Kills.

And, no, I didn't manage to screw up my courage and tell him he had been the inspiration for one of the characters in my novel. But I did get him to autograph one of my INK book cards, and that makes me unaccountably happy.

Unlike Amato in the post that inspired this one, I'm not going to include a playlist fitted to different scenes in the book (I'm far too lazy). But I did write the book to music (I dance around while I type) and Los Lobos, Chris Isaak and Three Days Grace are all mentioned in the book.

If I were to include a playlist La Santa Cecilia's El Hielo/ICE ; Aloe Blacc's cover of Avicii's Wake Me Up, and Las Cafeteras' wonderful La Bamba Rebelde would be on it. All of which draw attention to our current broken immigration policy which separates families and loved ones from each other, which detains without due process, and which is considering electronic monitoring of immigrants ...

One of the minor characters in my novel says this near the end of the book: "Don't let the future be written for you." The time to prevent the dystopia outlined in my novel is now. Urge your congress person to support just and humane immigration reform that:

• Provides a path to citizenship for undocumented persons in the country
• Restores due process protections to immigration enforcement policies
• Preserves family unity as a cornerstone of the national immigration policy
• Provides legal paths for low-skill immigrant workers to come and work in the United States
• Addresses the root causes (push factor) of migration, such as persecution and economic disparity

Thinking about my father ... Hope is the thing with feathers

May 7, 2014: I've been watching the movie "Missing," the Costa-Gavras' film rendition of Charles Horman's death during the Pinochet coup in Chile. The last time I watched the movie was with my father, not long before he died from pancreatic cancer. We didn't talk much during his lifetime about his experience being kidnapped and held and hurt during Guatemala's armed internal conflict, but we did that day and on subsequent days. 

I remember telling him I thought he was brave, but now I wish I had told him every day. Because these kinds of experiences ... they are relived and refought every day. At a recent Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma workshop I attended, I heard about the long term effects of immigration and refugee trauma (including, but not limited to, those who have been tortured) so the analogy I made in this post isn't as far-fetched as it might seem.

I wrote this post in 2008, four years after my father died. I'm startled now by how little has changed for immigrants in the U.S. (although all the links in the original post were dead and I had to remove them). The rest of the post is unchanged — even though the line about Guatemala was far too naive and optimistic, and written before a former military man from an earlier repressive regime, Otto Perez Molina, was elected president.

--------------------------  

“You must have been so scared when you were kidnapped.”

It is a few months before my father’s death in 2004, and I’m riding home with him from an appointment with his oncologist. He is driving because he still can – and because it is one of the few routines he has been able to retain from his pre-cancer days. No matter that all of the family actually likes driving more than he does, it is a way of taking care of us so ingrained that wresting the steering wheel from him would be viewed as an act of high treason.

He doesn’t answer me immediately, concentrates on guiding the hulking Land Rover through the twisty Chester County back roads on which he’s chosen to drive home. This is another idiosyncrasy of my father’s – never choose the easier road, go for the one that requires attention to navigate.

“Scared? No,” he finally answers. “Not exactly.”

He rarely talked about the experience. We lived in Guatemala when it happened. He was driving home from work one afternoon when three cars boxed his in – you’ve seen the maneuver in movies. The men dragged him out of his car, hooded him, shoved him to the floor of one of their cars and drove around to disorient him before taking him to a room. There, they alternately abandoned him to hooded isolation, or harangued him with the details of my mother’s whereabouts, and ours, and how easily we, too, could be where he was.

In those days in Guatemala we lived on tenterhooks – no family got through without some brush with terror. Cars were pulled over, houses were forcibly entered, schools and workplaces were raided. Neighbors denounced one another, and people were picked up for interrogation on the slightest suspicion of malfeasance, or misfeasance, or nonfeasance. Torture, disappearances, assassinations and all manner of the collateral damages associated with an undeclared war were commonplace.

Kidnappings funded arms purchases, and despite ransoms paid, most of the kidnapped were never seen again. Or, their bodies turned up much later.

So how could my father not be soaked in fear, not be paralyzed by the impossibility of his circumstance?

"I was too busy for fear,” he tells me as we traverse the bucolic Pennsylvania landscape where he found a home a few years after his kidnapping. “I had to figure out how to stay alive. I had to convince them to let me go, so I could get back to you kids and your Mami. To make sure you were safe.”

I look over at my dad that day in 2004, and see a man much diminished by the ravages of chemotherapy and radiation. He had always been too short to cut an imposing figure, but he had the presence that comes from years of obligations met, of words held as bond, of a fire banked so deep that no circumstance – no matter how dreadful – could extinguish it.“

Don’t you hate the people who put you through that?”’ I ask him.

“How can I hate?” he answers after a moment. “I’m here.”

Years after we moved to the United States, my dad met the father of one of my brother’s friends. The man – roughly my dad’s age – had been detained by Pinochet’s henchmen after Allende was overthrown in Chile. He was an impressive person – a man of deep intellect and erudition. His twisted hands and wrists were the result of torture. He conversed quietly about his experience – about the grotesque things human beings are willing to do to each other in the name of politics, or for fear of what that other person represents.

My dad wasn’t a man of many words – so he had to be prompted to tell his own story. He never described it as a form of torture – it hadn’t left a physical trace on his body after all – but it was clear to all of us listening that torture, indeed, was what it had been.

Listening to both of them talking that day, I felt a little pity for their captors. (Okay, not much pity, but still, some.) They had sought, by inhuman treatment, to make these men less than human. To make their lives unlivable. To make them forget to hope.

They had failed.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” American poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.”

As much as I miss him, I am grateful my father didn’t live to see the country he loved embroiled in the sordidness of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the debate about whether waterboarding truly qualifies as torture. I’m relieved he wasn’t alive for the revelations about extraordinary rendition, nor to see the Patriot Act enacted.

Mostly, I’m glad he – a proud U.S. citizen – didn’t live to see the fear we are visiting on undocumented immigrants in this country. It would have sounded alarmingly familiar: Cars pulled over at random. Workplaces raided. Neighbors denouncing each other and people picked up for interrogation on the slightest provocation.

If you are recoiling at the analogy, you are not alone. So did I the first time I heard it drawn for me by a priest friend who works with the undocumented. Even more, his analogy for the way we treat and deport the undocumented uses the word torture.

Told you – recoil.

But then I think back on my father’s experience and I see troubling parallels. He was plucked suddenly from his life. He was taken somewhere he didn’t know by people who held power over him. He was isolated. His family was threatened with the same treatment. Read my blog post of Oct. 23, “Disappeared in Philadelphia,” and you’ll see that Beto’s experience is not far removed from my father’s.

A number of people with voices in the immigration debate have claimed that whatever treatment undocumented immigrants get it is no more than what they deserve. That they’ve broken laws. That they negatively impact the economy. Even, as Pat Buchanan says in his book “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” that they are threatening the very nature and ideals of the nation.

The same arguments were made in Chile under Pinochet. And in Guatemala during its slow slide into genocide. Thankfully, both those countries have since come out of their long, fearful darkness.

We, on the other hand, stand poised on the edge of a feather.

Originally posted December 14, 2008.

--------------------------  

Jason Vourvoulias ¡presente!

Must read from Alberto Vourvoulias - Undocumented Journalism: "The Mediterranean is a graveyard."

Undocumented Journalism: "The Mediterranean is a graveyard.": Ruined watchtowers dot the easternmost point of mainland Italy.  A crippled ship weighed down with over 500 refugees caught fire and...

Miércoles Mudo, Wordless Wednesday: El Hielo

“Miércoles Mudo” es un carnaval de blogs o blog hop iniciado por Maybelline de Naturalmente Mamá y participar es muy fácil, solo debes publicar los miércoles una foto (s) sin escribir nada para explicarla (s) (de ahí viene lo mudo). Luego no olvides enlazar en el linky que está debajo y dejar un comentario en cada uno de los blogs que decidas visitar. Para conocer como nació el Miércoles mudo y sus reglas, puedes hacer click aquí.

¡Feliz Miércoles!

1.	Naturalmente Mamá	49.	El pequeño Nicolás
2.	Soy Mama Blog	50.	La libreta de mamá
3.	Adriana-Hogar-Mujer	51.	Pequeña Fashionista
4.	Una Mamá Diseñadora	52.	The Diary of My Dreams
5.	Mamá Moderna	53.	Subida en mis tacones, mamá en prácticas
6.	Mamá y maestra	54.	Sra Díaz
7.	Chica Perika	55.	Diario de una Madre
8.	Una mujer, una historia.	56.	Alba de Ya estoy Aqui Mama!
9.	Bebés de Pecho	57.	La estrella de Gael
10.	Mamá Merlin	58.	Una boticaria enredada
11.	En paro biologico	59.	El armario de mis princesas
12.	Tremenda Aventura Ser Madre	60.	La mamá de Joan Petit
13.	Mami Talks - From Hispanicize	61.	La Mami en Apuros
14.	Los Angeles de la Sierra	62.	La Felicidad de las cosas Insignificantes
15.	Shhhh...hoy es MM	63.	El blog de Ami
16.	Diario de Mujer	64.	SER MAMÁ DE UNA FLORETA
17.	By Terenya con mis ojos y mis manos	65.	No sin mis hijos
18.	Cuestión de madres	66.	Apaga la tele que vamos a...
19.	Simplemente yo misma	67.	Diario de una endorfina
20.	Trimadre a los treinta	68.	La agenda de mamá
21.	Mamá y las Redes Sociales	69.	Kiti Loves
22.	El horno de mami	70.	El horno de Lucía
23.	El blog de Bebemon	71.	El Perro de Papel
24.	Mà a mà, pell a pell, cor amb cor	72.	Ludoteca
25.	Diario de Algo Especial	73.	vinividivinvi
26.	Experiencias de una madre primeriza	74.	El rei de la casa
27.	sofico & mum	75.	Mamirami
28.	Acompañame	76.	Ser psicóloga educativa hoy
29.	Lo veo y me gusta	77.	Dollys
30.	*La Sonrisa de Pepa	78.	Alokawa
31.	La Orquidea Dichosa, ahora Mamá	79.	Mamá Holística ॐ
32.	Contras y pros	80.	El Gris de los Colores
33.	La Nave de V	81.	Elisa - CJ
34.	Babbupi's Mumm	82.	un millon dr silencios (Maria)
35.	a quien pueda interesar	83.	Labrando un HOGAR- ¡Mi ombligo exploto!
36.	My Points Of View	84.	NUTRICAMPEONES
37.	Menuda Manada	85.	Casigata en el zaguan
38.	Llamemosla Hache	86.	De Color Azul Lila
39.	La Alcobadeblanca	87.	La Familia Cool
40.	Cuando los sueños despiertan	88.	Itaca buscando a Ulises
41.	Aidixy y sus Cosas	89.	Bulalaica
42.	Blog Para Escribir	90.	Mi gordito relleno
43.	NoEsPaísParaMadres	91.	Princesa Miel Blog
44.	1MamaPara2	92.	MamáCachorro
45.	felizenbrazos	93.	Lianxio- Triciclos Vela
46.	¿Tú eres Pitipín?	94.	mami&baby
47.	la jungla de tus hijos	95.	El blog de la casita de algodonales
48.	Sindara Mum	96.	El Pahuichi de Julissa

Fox News Latino: Sabrina Vourvoulias releases novel Ink

Thrilled to have Fox News Latino showcase my novel, INK! Read about its immigration theme, its link to Guatemala and my love of magical realism:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/11/01/sabrina-vourvoulias-releases-new-novel-ink/

Another review of INK and interview

Somehow, I slipped up and forgot to link to this terrific review by The Future Fire: http://reviews.futurefire.net/2012/10/vourvoulias-ink.html

and the interview at the Hispanic Reader:
http://hispanicreader.com/2012/10/16/meet-novelist-sabrina-vourvoulias-author-of-ink/

The book is up at Amazon, and on Wed., Oct. 24 we'll be celebrating its launch at Cuba Libre restaurant and rum bar in Philly. Email me if you want more information about this!

Crossed Genres Publications releases INK, a Latino novel with immigration theme

Al Día News editor Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” highlights news media and anti-immigrant sentiment in novel combining dystopia and magical realism

On Monday, Oct. 15, on the last day of the observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, Crossed Genres Publications of Somerville, Mass., releases Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” a fictional look at what happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system. (To read a portion of the first chapter and order on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Sabrina-Vourvoulias/dp/0615657818/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350269229&sr=1-1&keywords=ink+by+sabrina+vourvoulias)

The near-future, dark speculative novel opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history - collectively known as inks. This “chilling tale of American apartheid, and the power of love, myth and community” (Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) has its main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community, and perceptions of “otherness” based on ethnicity, language, class and inclusion.

Set in a fictional city and small, rural town in the U.S. during a 10-year span, the novel is told in four voices: a journalist; an “ink” who works in a local population control office; an artist strongly tied to a specific piece of land; and a teenager whose mother runs an inkatorium (a sanitarium-internment center opened in response to public health concerns about inks). Vourvoulias, of Guatemalan-American descent and the managing editor of Philadelphia’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, Al Día, has described the characters as “complicated people in complicated times trying to live their lives as best they can. You know, us.”

“Readers will be moved by this call for justice in the future and the present.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The conflict driving the novel will fill readers with dismay, seeing parallels between what has already taken place—Japanese locked in concentration camps, narcos controlling swaths of territory in Mexico, rednecks with power—and the novel’s permutations of today’s ugly commonplaces.” (Michael Sedano, La Bloga)

 “In Ink, Vourvoulias masterfully weaves an increasingly complex parallel universe at once fantastical and eerily familiar: a not-so-farfetched future world where myth and legend cohabit with population control schemes, media cover-ups, and subcutaneous GPS trackers.” (Elianne Ramos, the vice chair of Latinos in Social Media – LATISM)

Ink’s publication is part of Crossed Genres’ commitment to bringing new and underrepresented voices into fiction. CG’s list of publications include Daniel José Older’s “Salsa Nocturna;” Kelly Jennings’ “Broken Slate;” RJ Astruc’s “A Festival of Skeletons;” as well as the anthologies “Subversion,” “Fat Girl in a Strange Land” and the upcoming “Menial: Skilled Labor in SF.”

For more information about “Ink,” or any of Crossed Genres’ titles, contact Bart Leib at 617- 335- 2101 or by sending an email to publicity@crossedgenres.com.

Dystopia, magic realism & immigration: INK is available for preorder on Amazon

INK's release date is Oct. 15, but you can...

Preorder from Amazon
Click here to to to Ink's page on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Sabrina-Vourvoulias/dp/0615657818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349884504&sr=8-1&keywords=sabrina+vourvoulias

Sign up to win a copy from Goodreads
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/34404-ink

Advanced Reading Copies of INK are in the house

Well, not my house — but at Crossed Genres Publications. I'll get to see my first perfect bound copy at Readercon 23 (where I'll be part of the Crossed Genres reading on Saturday at noon).

Excited doesn't even begin to cover how I feel...

For review copies of INK please contact publicity @ crossedgenres . com  

Format: Paperback (240 pp.) & Ebook
Release date: Monday, October 15, 2012
ISBN: 0615657818 / ISBN-13: 978-0615657813
Cost: $13.95 (print) / $5.99 (ebook)

Are we betting on hate?

(This column first appeared in Spanish on pontealdia.com)

In a lot of ways I’m a glass-half-empty person. If there is a worse case scenario to be imagined that’s the one I’m sure to worry first.

Except when it comes to people.

See, I think people are fundamentally good and that no matter our differences and radically different beliefs we’re all searching for the same things: love, a sense of community, peace, happiness. Every so often life conspires to knock this glass-half-full faith in my fellow humans right out of me.

I’ve been an advocate for immigrants for a long time. Nearly all my blog posts and stories and many of my articles or columns in the past years have focused on what others have named (rightfully, I think) the civil rights struggle of our time. And, yes, I’ve seen a lot of ugliness in what I’ve had to write about during these years of escalating anti-Latino sentiment and anti-immigrant rhetoric. I need look no further than the fatal beating of Luis Ramirez and subsequent police cover-up in Shenandoah, Pa., to admit that sometimes human intention is outright sinister and maleficent.

But there’s no use denying it — I’m always floored by the proof that my fundamental view of people might be completely, and utterly, wrong.

Earlier this month I chanced upon a terrible example connected with the Trayvon Martin case. There is no doubt that the case of the 17-year-old unarmed African-American youth shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., has brought out the worst in people — from veteran news commentator Geraldo Rivera to renowned film director Spike Lee — and yet I wasn’t prepared.

An Orlando television station, WKMG, reported that the Hiller Armament Company, a mail-order venue for gun enthusiasts located in Virginia, was selling paper target silhouettes depicting a hoodie with a target over the chest and a bag of Skittles and bottle of Arizona iced-tea held under the arm. The iconic symbols of the tragic Trayvon killing.

My horror at realizing someone thought to produce this grotesquerie was only surpassed by the horror that the company thought it was okay to market it (in packages of 10) and that people had, indeed, purchased it (at about $17 a pop, according to reports).

According to a post on the Daily Kos, the maker of the Trayvon targets alleges he made the targets “to make money off the controversy.” In other words, he was betting on hatred. Another web site, the Grio, reports the maker saying he had sold out of the targets. In other words, he had a winning bet.

I want to think that if whomever purchased the targets saw his/her daughter or son’s face in the opening of the hoodie, he/she would realize exactly what the purchase means. I want to think the same thing about the maker. I want to think that no matter how sinister and maleficent the intent of this, there’s the possibility of an epiphany. The realization that no child should go through life wearing a target.

I want to think that because, as I said, when it comes to people, I want to see the glass half full. But I’m sitting here, in front of the computer, with the image of the “Trayvon Target” filling the screen of my monitor as I type.

Who uses an image of a dead child for target practice?

We do.

Because if any one of us is betting on hate, none of us gets away without taking responsibility.

INK: Of butterflies, and my novel's due date

Advance Reading Copies of my novel, INK, set to be released by Crossed Genres Publications on Oct. 15, will be available soon... I know, because I just read through the final before it goes to proof.

In a word: Aieee! Excited and terrified at once.

Despite the photo at the top of this post, INK has nothing to do with butterflies (but certainly started producing that fluttery feeling in my stomach as soon as I saw the ARCs).


Here's a synopsis of the novel:

What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? The near-future, dark speculative novel, INK, opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history — collectively known as inks.

The main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community. Relationships reshape their lives in ways they don’t fully understand. Magic and “the other” breach borders, both personal and public. In this world, the protagonists’ magicks serve and fail, as do all other systems — government, gang, religious organization, news media and Internet — until two things alone stand: love and memory.

Despite its political underpinnings, INK is primarily a story about relationships: ink and non-ink; history and future; stories and life; and the magic that attends all of them.

INK will be published by Crossed Genres Publications Oct. 15, 2012.

Interested in reading for review? Email me at svourvoulias(at)yahoo(dot)com, and let me know.