"AS THE BARRIO TURNS AND THE MENUDO BURNS...."

 

During the 1980's one of my students brought me a cartoon drawing he had made of two barrio vatos,"Cho & Lo" (Cholo) asking what I thought of turning them into live characters. At the time, I was teaching Chicano Studies at Delta College in Stockton and working with the Chicano Community Program at the University of Pacific's radio station KUOP-FM, 91.3, an NPR affiliate, doing Chicano and Precolumbian poetry, and skits and so his idea was a natural for radio. He would play the role of "Cho" and "I" the part of "Lo" and his lovely wife would do the introduction to each episode "As the Barrio turns and the Menudo burns", over the background song, "Cisco Kid" by "War." 

 

Thus, began a run that would last through the end of the 1980s and become a Sunday staple for the weekly program, and we would be catapulted for local fame, with kids in the schools rushing us for autographs!

We decided to address issues we found relevant, important or humorous, always with humor, slapstick, tongue-in-cheek, and satire: education, cultural conflict, gangs, drugs, machismo, the farm worker struggle, discrimination, and immigration. Some episodes, of course, were non-nonsensical or just plain Locuras. Our episodes began live on the air as the two of us read from prepared scripts, with only a few minutes rehearsal before each show. In time, we began to add extra readers, and sound-effects and we progressed to taping them during the week for each Sunday's airing, and that allowed us to add stock sound-effects, dubbing and over-dubbing and to correct our flubs.

 

For years, all that remained of Cho & Lo were memories and compliments by a random listener we would run into a Walmart or the mall.

But fortunately I had a small stash of recordings of Cho & Lo which I had transferred to cassette tapes and recently I have been working on producing a CD with a collection of some of our Locuras.

 

The CD will be available in early August and I will post updates here, date of release, price, and how to order a copy. I can assure you this CD will be a "tripiazo." Stay tuned for the next episode!!!

 

My New Book is Available!

My new book, "Songs From the Barrio" is now available at https://www.createspace.com/3902152.  It is the culmination and distillation of an idea that festered in me for many years. I started writing when I was a young soldier in Germany in 1963. I had no idea then where it would take me. But I knew I wanted to write!

And here it is at last! Here I am at 74 and publishing my first book, proving that you are never to old to realize your dreams! But it is well that it all worked out the way it did, but I almost missed the boat; I have finally aquired all the the tools to do it with: experience, writing skill, a good memory, and the inherited gift of story-telling passed to me by my ancestors.

The stories in my book tell of a people, a time and place of which only remnants remain. They began as a series of disjointed stories I wrote about my childhood, growing up in a Mexican barrio in Central California in the middle of 20th Century, stories and poems of escapades and the amazing people I grew up around, Mexican immigrants who had so much to teach, to give. After reading my stories to audiences for years, and hearing them react: laugh, cry and applaud in approval, I began to toy with the idea of putting them all into a book.

Above all, it is a story about the beauty of culture, language and tradition. Much of the book tells of my mother, who married at 15 and emigrated to the US with my dad in the early 1920s and her detemination to single-handedly raise a family of 7. It is a story of triumph, my own and of a people estranged from their language and culture, finding their rightful place in an alien world.

If you read and enjoy it, share it with friends and family, and take a precious moment to share comments on this blog. If you read and enjoy it, take a moment to post a short "review" by clicking on my book at Amazon.com.

It is NOW available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and Kindle. Teachers: please look at it for a possible reader in your class. I believe the reading level to be 7-college. I can be contacted at rrios39@sbcglobal.net. I have a discount code for orders of 20 or more copies.

Orale, Chicanos In High Places!

Image via Wikipedia

Who woud'a thought it. First a Latina U.S. Supreme Court Justice, then a Chicano Astronaut! Dios mio!!

Jose Hernandez of Stockton (son of a migrant farmworker) will see the world not from the top of a ladder, but the window of the International Space Station.

Jose, who attended local Franklin High School, and University of The Pacific, will blast off on Friday, August 28 (?) for a 13-day sojourn into the heavens. UPDATE: Keep getting scrubs!! Will they ever get the thing up?

He will be Flight Deck Engineer, a job rarely given to first timers into space, and doing robotics both on the shuttle arm and the space station arm and helping "suit-up" fellow astronauts for three scheduled spacewalks.

Feels good to see Brown faces in High Places (no pun intended). He will be passing over Stockton every 90 minutes waving at the many Brown faces of his home town looking up.

Anybody, join me in a shot of tequila toast for Jose? Vaya con Dios.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Image via Wikipedia