And then. . .

As I walk in the hot summer El Paso sun to my classroom at UTEP my shoulders sizzle. I sometimes feel like a rotisserie chicken. My skin browns more with each rotation to and from the parking lot to the Classroom Building where I meet with my students. Beads of sweat begin to pill at the base of my skull and race down my neck even as my hands snap to wipe them away. I loathe how hot I get. This is my daily routine. By the end of the month my shoulders and arms will be a deep coffee brown while my legs will be latte. I will never be evenly brown. As I walk I look at the people shuffling, biking, running, strolling past me. Today, a little girl around ten years old scurried toward campus as I walked away. She looked so odd because I wondered why she was by herself. As I stared, I forgot this. She ran pitched forward from the weight of an overstuffed backpack. The tips of her ballet flats were the only thing to touch the hot concrete. She skipped across as if she were skimming the surfa...

When one first begins to write, at least for me, I didn't have a sense of where the writing was going, who my audience was, and if there was a greater message of my culture, and I suppose more importantly where do I, Yasmin Ramirez fit into the literary landscape. I first started writing fiction. Short stories. I just wanted to write and I wanted it to be good. My first pieces fell toward a film noir surreal genre. Had a read any of surrealist? No. Were they good? I'm afraid to look. Later when working on my MFA I found I didn't know what to write about. I was finally simply supposed to write and my mind drew a blank, so I began to write what I knew. Stories I told many times over and made people laugh over the dinner table and now seemed to be working on paper and in workshops. These stories about my grandma, Ita, and being raised in El Paso became my thesis and now the book I'm attempting to finish by the end of this summer. Now, as I've published several (12 ...

If scars tell the stories of our lives, my grandma’s body, fair skin loosened by age, held a map of lines disclosing the life my Ita lived. These are their stories. I’ve pieced them together and filled in the rest. Forehead In a fight before I was born, she ended up with a scar at the peak of her forehead, where a widow’s peak would have been. The fight, I imagine from the stories I’ve been told, takes place in the living room. She yells about where he’s been, how much he’s been drinking. He, Gil, tries to walk away from her and she swings.  He ducks, “Mamita, todo esta bien,” he says, but he still wraps his arms around her and holds her to him like he will never let go, and in a way he never did. She struggles trying to pry her arms away from her side. She grunts and yells, "Dejamé carbon,” but he keeps his arms where they are. He knows if he lets go her left hand will come out swinging and instead throws his head forward.   Smack . The sound of two stu...

I wanted to write this post earlier in the week, but I got caught up in other things. I think perhaps it was better because the feeling I was left with after the two day music extravaganza was a mixed bag. Now that it's simmered and I've had some time to reflect I think I may have the right balance. The right words. I love music. Every part of live music. The anticipation before seeing a band you love. The drive over. The chatter in the car on the way to the venue. Walking over. The buzz in the crowd. Everyone is amped  to see --insert band name here--. Standing in lines for beer. Getting a little pushed and shoved as you try to get a viewpoint of the stage. The heat as people squish together a bit and sing off tune to their favorite song. I love that. I love the live experience of music. There are people who get this and people who don't. If you don't get this at all don't read on. I had all of this on Saturday at Neon Desert. I was amped. I was happy as I wal...

Javier Solis was born September 1, 1931 four months before my grandma. He dropped out of school after the fifth grade. My grandma dropped out of school after the eighth grade. They both held various jobs. Javier—I feel I can call him this because we are intimately acquainted, at least vocally—was a baker, a carpenter’s helper, and a car washer. He even trained to be a boxer but stopped after a few defeats and persuading. My Ita worked as an elevator operator, ticket taker, in a textile fabric factory, and a bartender among other things. His first hit, “ Lloraras ” was a favorite of hers, but she also liked to change the words to the song and sang, “ Choraras, Choraras mi partida… ” when she wanted to be funny. I think she choraras as much as she lloraras in her life. He sang and acted. She watched all of his movies and owned all of his records, then cassettes, and later CD’s. He was considered the last of Los Tres Gallos Mexicanos along with Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, oth...

I want to lie in bed for a few days and curl into the sheets until they become arms who embrace me as I sleep.  I want to sleep in until 9am, stretch in the sunlight streaming in through my bedroom window, and just stare with blurry vision at imagined dust motes.  I want to read voraciously,  the way I did when I was younger. I'd read through the night and force myself to shut the dog-eared pages when the sky night broke into indigo.  I want to curl into his arms, not because I'm tired, but because I can't help but breathe in the smell of his his hair even when it's ripe with the scent of last night's run.  I want to write until my book is finished, until the pages I've clung to for the last year finish their fight for freedom and I've nothing left but to begin again with something new.  I want to....

In my previous life, I worked for a giant retailer.  While working there I learned words like company culture, we stand for, we do this here, we wear smiles, goals, LY, TY, lead by example, etc. While working for this company many things happened: I became a "we" and not an "I"  I lost sight of what was truly important I didn't know what free times was I didn't see my family, ever I didn't, I didn't , I didn't To this day, and I say over and over, the best decision I ever made was leaving the corporate world. I still remember the flash of when I suddenly snapped out of it and "put down the Kool-Aid" as we commonly used to say about those who suddenly left the company or realized there was more to life. I sat at our monthly rally, a small sea of carefully coiffed, shined, scented, powdered, pressed people surrounded me. There was a slump in the economy and customers weren't so willing to pull out their black American Express ...