Nonfiction – Vickie Vértiz

KCET Story: Third-annual Southeast L.A. River Arts Festival held entirely online

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Where else are you going to see a Latinx Bob Ross in huaraches this weekend? And naturally, Beto RosSela (see what he did there?) will be painting pajaritos on a virtual riverbed. You can join Beto and dozens of other residents and artists as they perform this weekend for the third-annual Southeast L.A. River Arts Festival held entirely online.

The first art walk I covered in the Southeast was in 2014. On the corner of Atlantic and Gage in the City of Bell, the main stage stood proud in front of a spray-painted mural. The participating businesses included used car lots, a vintage thrift shop and a paleteria, among others. They featured grassroots organizations like Chicas Rockeras, visual art and DJs who could be seen up Atlantic all the way to Slauson. In the last three years, it’s moved from the street into the actual floor of the L.A. riverbed in South Gate, and last year, attracted nearly 8,000 visitors. Due to the pandemic, festival attendants will have to “walk around” and view art, watch modern dance and hear spoken word poetry via pre-recorded performances on the web instead.

Read the rest of the story below:

https://www.kcet.org/shows/southland-sessions/stories-in-the-stream-third-annual-southeast-la-river-arts-festival-goes

Watch the festival here!

https://www.selaartsfest.org/

To Collage, To Carry: A Fragmented Essay Writing Workshop, Sat. 8/24, NYC

Muriel Leung and Vickie Vertiz to teach in NYC.

To Collage, To Carry: A Fragmented Essay Writing Workshop, Sat. 8/24, 10am-12pm

ACE Hotel, $40 per person, limited full scholarships available. Register below:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdY9C2elvBW5NC_tdwFWL1CwD8rs0e46dCtvobZN92aTFWQ5A/viewform

Join Vickie Vértiz and Muriel Leung in a generative writing workshop that explores collage and fragments to illustrate the unreliability of memory in the personal essay.

Memory is only as reliable as anything else, that is, not very. What does it mean to remember something in pieces? What does it mean to tell a story in pieces? For many of our communities of color, queer, femme, women, and working class people, linear narratives do not serve our stories in the best form. We are constantly bombarded by efforts to erase our histories, our most intimate bodily knowledge, and the wisdom we carry through generations of survival. If our current political moment means we are left with fragments, then how can we use fragmentation to help us put our narratives back together again?

In this workshop Muriel and Vickie will lead participants through writing exercises to help generate or shape narratives that are nonlinear, in fragments, or as some might say, broken. No prior writing experience is necessary. Join these two award-winning writers and scholars as we figure out how to tell our stories in these broken times.

Hybrid reading/lecture at RaceCraft: A Symposium, Thursday, October 20

RaceCraft: A Symposium: A[…]* genealogy to the contemporary craft movement

Barbara And Art Culver Center Of Arts, 3834 Main St., Riverside, California 92501

Free and open to the public. Limited seating. To reserve a seat, navigate to: <https://artsblock.ucr.edu/Performance/RaceCraft-symposium

Slow. Sustainable. DIY. Green. Local. Anti-mainstream. These are some of the keywords associated with the contemporary craft movement. Enabled by technology and new media, craft culture has been described as a combination of traditional artisanal craftsmanship, punk culture, and a DIY sensibility. It often positions itself as a response to the problems of globalization, hyper-consumerism and environmental degradation. Crafting is now, in the words of the maker-activist Betsy Greer, “craftivism,” a politically active site of social change.

12 – 12:10 Welcome by Sarita See
12:15 – 1 Presentation by Aram Han Sifuentes
1:15 – 2 Presentation by Marie Lo
2 – 2:30 Coffee Break
2:30 – 3:15 Hybrid reading/lecture/presentation by Vickie Vertiz
3:30 – 4:15 Presentation by Bovey Lee
4:30 – 5:30 Roundtable with all speakers and
Clare Counihan and Jan Christian Bernabe

But has “green” become the new white?

Despite its activist and inclusive ethos, the contemporary craft movement has been dominated by a neoliberal model of middle-class whiteness. Localism and lifestyle choices have become valorized as the primary modes of social change. People of color are often invisible in the craft movement, except as victims of globalization and exploitative labor practices who need to be saved by first world crafters.

RaceCraft explores crafting not as a lifestyle choice but as an effect and response to systemic forms of discrimination. In this context, being “crafty” is not just a DIY attitude and aptitude; it is an enabling subterfuge that doubles as critique, in which the constraints of production are not just aesthetic but also racial. RaceCraft seeks to situate craft within global and local histories of exclusion, colonialism, dispossession and subjugation. We have invited speakers who explore the tensions and fissures of “craft” discourse and that expose its neoliberal underpinnings. Finally, RaceCraft seeks to deepen our current conversations about craft so as to generate new frameworks for thinking about the transformative possibilities of craft, one that takes into consideration, racial justice in relation to “green” modes of sustainability, political activism and community building.

The work of the symposium speakers is featured in the affiliated online exhibition hosted by the Center for Art and Thought, co-curated by Marie Lo and Sarita See and assisted by intern Martina Dorff. To explore the exhibition, navigate to: <http://centerforartandthought.org/work/project/racecraft

Sponsored by: UCR Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Center for Art and Thought, UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS), the City of Riverside, & UCR Department of Ethnic Studies. Special thanks to the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the California Institute of Contemporary Arts ; and Martina Dorff.

*Deletion is the author’s. To fully claim this knowledge around resourcefulness, I insist we affirm these ways of knowing as “geneology” and not “alternative.”

Southeast Los Angeles writing featured at AWP 2016

710 inauguration.jpg — The 710, Long Beach Freeway runs through Bell Gardens and dozens of southeast cities in LA county. (Photo: Hal Link, 1970, City of Bell Gardens Archive)

Join me as I moderate two panels at the #AWP16 writers’ conference happening in LA this year! Latinx writers from all over the southland will share our prose and poetry on the following panels, THURSDAY, March 31, 2016:

Panel R225. From New Wave and Punk: Musical influences on Latino Literary Aesthetics.

1:30 pm to 2:45 pm, Room 505, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

With special guest Michelle Gonzales from SpitBoy, Daniel Chacon, Carribean Fragoza, musicologist Marlen Rios, and Vickie Vertiz.

From all corners of Los Angeles and across this country, punk and New Wave music have influenced Latino writers for decades. This multigenre panel is equal parts reading, discussion, and listening party. Through poems, essays, and stories, the panelists highlight how, as listeners, they blend literary aesthetics with New Wave and punk sounds to tell new stories.

3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

Room 410, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Panel R252. Mistaking Planes for Stars: Los Angeles Writing from Freeways to Flight Paths.

With Vickie Vertiz, Aida Salazar , Steve Gutierrez, and Melinda Palacio.

From Bukowski to Viramontes, working-class writing in Los Angeles is a longstanding tradition. Latinos are the largest ethnic group in the county, bringing avant-garde aesthetics to literature. However, many of our stories have yet to be told. This reading highlights cutting edge poetry, story, and performance by working-class and queer Latinos from a little-known part of Los Angeles: the southeast. From railroad yards to factory floors, writers share their work of grit and heart.

See you there!

How Bell Gardens is Banking on Bicycle Club Casino’s Luxury Hotel

The sign illuminates eight lanes of the neighboring 710 Freeway. In contrast to the new monument to luxury, the gritty Long Beach Freeway leads into the post-industrial heart of Southeast Los Angeles. Thousands of eighteen-wheelers trucking in the majority of exports into the United States from the Pacific Rim make this the busiest highway with the most accidents in the state. The transported goods that make their way into every store across the country all pass by the Bicycle Club and the thousands of families who live along it.

Read the rest of the story here.

Protesters and police arrive at the soft opening of the Bicycle Club_photo Vickie Vertiz.jpg

Cha Cha Nail Covers Take Over the World

This story is part of KCET Departures’ series of articles and essays on the Informal Economies of L.A. and how local entrepreneurs create new opportunities outside of formal economic establishments. Read the whole story here.

“Don’t wait for everything to be perfectly aligned. I had to earn money and invest in my packaging. Earn more money and grow my inventory. If you wait for all the stars to align it never happens.” –Ana Guajardo, Cha Cha Covers CEO

Cha Cha Covers has 18,300 thousand followers (and growing) on Instagram. The photos feature glossy long nails encrusted with tiny jewels and images of the Virgen de Guadalupe–glamour and faith together at last. Her Etsy shop has over 2500 reviews and gets you one step closer to owning a set of papel picado nail decals. People can’t get enough of the playful and pop culture nail covers. Business is booming online and in person for Ana Guajardo and dozens of other local Latina and POC vendors.

At the Artistas y Empresarios Art Sale (AyE Sale) in Boyle Heights, Ana and her daughter, sold everything from nail decals to newer merchandise, like pencils embossed with the lyrics, “Bidi bidi bom bom” and “Some Girls Are Bigger than Others.”

[Raza loves them some Selena and Morrissey.]

El Monte Forever: A Brief History of Michael Jaime-Becerra

As the third installment of the Tropics of Meta series, East of East: Mapping Community Narratives in South El Monte and El Monte, in collaboration with the South El Monte Arts Posse, Vickie Vertiz contributed the essay, “El Monte Forever: A Brief History of Michael Jaime-Becerra.” The project is an anthology about the diverse histories, communities, and cultures of the California cities of El Monte and South El Monte, created by a wide range of scholars, artists, poets, activists and other community members. Visit the project website to read the essay and other entries.