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Latino/a Literature Seminars
Manuel Hernandez has given seminars on how to integrate Latino/a Literature
in the English Classroom in cities across the United States, Puerto Rico
and Mexico. He is willing to visit your school, community center, corporation
and institution and share his view on this new literature. The literature
can serve as a bridge for further literary analysis and can help students
improve their scores on city, national and state testing requirements.
(Click here for curriculum vitae)
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| A Typical Californio Boy (Chapter 4)
by Manuel Hernández
They arrived in New York City in the hard cold winter of
1920. Thanks
to a cousin, Manolo, Maria and Joey found an apartment on
110th Street
off Third Avenue in Manhattan. It was a block of two-story
tenements
with brick fronts. Their apartment was a two-room second floor
walk-up.
It had a bedroom, a kitchen-living room and a bathroom. Joey
complained
about sleeping in the living room, but his father guaranteed
they would
move into a better place soon. Maria was silent but felt she
was living
in a fish tank. Every time she argued with Manolo about New
York, he
would remind her of the better opportunities that existed
for Joey. She
decided to keep quiet and hold on to the love she had for
her family.
Manolo bought books for Joey, not many but enough to spark
his son’s
interest. As he became a good reader, his father continued
to purchase
books for him. Joey found a job in the cigar industry and
was introduced
to a group of recently arrived Puerto Rican workers who worked
rolling
tobaccos and read books and talked politics. A lot of the
stuff they
talked about was unreal to him, but he found their conversations
amusing.
They often tried to pull him into the debates about whether
or not
Puerto Rico should be a state, independent or stay as a territory
of the
United States of America, but Joey could care less. He was
an American,
he told them, and they respectfully laughed at his response.
The
atmosphere at work compensated for the never-ending discussions
between
his parents at home.
Manolo found a job in an Italian restaurant earning a dollar
and
fifteen cents a day. He washed dishes, mopped the floors and
did
everything in the restaurant. He sometimes worked twelve hours
a day but
got paid for eight. For his overtime hours, Manolo’s boss
provided him
with meals, which Maria and Joey devoured during the cold
and freezing
winters of the early 1920’s.
It was during the hot and humid summer of 1923 that Joey fell
in love
with the wrong girl. She was Italian and the daughter of Manolo’s
boss,
the owner of Manhattan’s finest Italian restaurant. One day,
Joey just
happened to go by his father’s job to give him a message from
his mother
when he saw her for the first time. Alma looked like an Italian
goddess
with radiant light green eyes and natural blonde hair and
had a very
sensuous body. Her legs were ultimately perfect and her waist
seemed
like a road with never-ending curves. Her eyes were deeply
expressive
but had a profound sadness to them. Joey was twenty-one and
had never
had a girlfriend before. She was fresh out of high school
and helped her
father take care of the family business. She seemed out of
reach, but
Joey won her heart with his Latin charm.
Alma’s father was strongly against the relationship, and he
threatened
to fire Manolo. He liked him but never imagined his daughter
married to
a son of a Latino. He advised Manolo to tell his son to stay
away or
else. In the meantime, Joey and Alma met secretly. They were
madly in
love and decided to see each other against their parents’
will. Little
did Alma know that her father had promised her to the son
of the
wealthiest Italian in New York City. Alma’s father had lost
most of the
family money in a gone wrong financial deal with a bootlegger
in Long
Island. This new partnership deal would stabilize his financial
outreach
and put an end to his anxieties. Someone had to pay the price
in the
family. It seemed that Alma was in an abyss, and Joey dived
right into
it.
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Manuel Hernandez, a contributing columnist to HispanicVista.com
(www.hispanicvista.com), lives in Puerto Rico where he teaches school. He has
a B.A. and MA Teaching English. He is candidate for a PhD. He has just published
a textbook titled, Latino/a Literature in The English Classroom (Editorial Plaza
Mayor, 2003). For more information, e-mail him at mannyh32@puertoricans.com For
school orders, go to www.editorialplazamayor.com for more information or call
787-764-0455 For a complete bibliography: email me at mannyh32@puertoricans.com
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