Archive for August, 2011

Be Grateful, London

Posted By Zócalo On August 25, 2011

As some went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.
- Alison Lurie.

by Miles Corwin

The rioting, looting and clashes with police in London a few weeks ago were familiar scenes to Southern Californians who had lived through the 1965 Watts riots and the 1992 conflagration in South-Central. The London riots were sparked when police shot and killed a young black man in a gritty north London neighborhood, just as the last two major riots in Los Angeles were set off by incidents between police and minority residents…

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A Sanctuary for Humans, Part Two

Posted By Zócalo On August 25, 2011

I should start by apologizing to my readers for the delay. I ran into some problems with my computer and was unable to write. I’m also beginning to realize that I need to rethink my pace in order to be better able to manage my time. It is not easy to keep up a regularly updated journal when walking every day…

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Cuba Libre?

Posted By Zócalo On August 24, 2011

Cuba has been envisioned by Americans as many things: island paradise,
communist stronghold, and Hemingway’s retreat, to name a few. Today, political reforms and a loosening of trade restrictions are giving rise to yet another Cuba. In advance of a panel about Cuba in the American imagination, we asked experts what they think the nation will look like in the next ten years…

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Here’s Your Cuba

Posted By Zócalo On August 24, 2011

Cuba is a small island nation that occupies a large, perhaps even outsized, place in the American imagination. Cut off by embargo from the United States since 1961, Cuba is as much a memory and an idea to Americans as it is a concrete place. Cubans are aware of this. They know that in many ways the peculiarities and hardships of their lives are, in the eyes of outsiders, scenery…

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Everyone’s Got a Havana

Posted By Zócalo On August 24, 2011

by Yoani Sanchez

The cast bronze sculpture rests one of its arms on the rail of the bar. It seems like he’s going to ask for another daiquiri, but in reality his metal eyes are watching everyone who comes and goes from El Floridita. Some turn the flashes of their cameras on that life-sized statue of Ernest Hemingway, while others see it as something from the past, that distant time when there was nothing unusual about finding an American drinking in some cantina or walking the narrow streets of Havana…

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Articles

Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

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