Rubén Martínez
Writer and performer, author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and other books. Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
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The walls that have been constructed to divide — make them ours. Turn them into productive forces, dream them and tear them down.
Juan Gabriel played the Rose Bowl in the summer of 1993. It was billed as a benefit for his orphanage in Juárez, but the concert was a taking back of space -- cultural, political, social -- that Latinos had been denied.
Rubén Martínez recalls his near conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, who died this week at age 87.
Noah Purifoy spent the final years of his life in Joshua Tree making Junk Art
In the final installment, we come full circle, back to Fred Drake, the "gay cowboy rocker" who led us into the House of the Moon.
Rubén returns to Al's Swinger, a hangout for Marines and the High Desert working class, which suddenly find themselves wondering about whether the new arrivals to the desert are a harbinger of gentrification and its discontents.
In this installment, we get a close-up of the battlefield, via a young desert denizen's journey onto the California sand dunes that serve as a simulacrum of the Persian Gulf.