Guides to this sonic landscape of the Rio Grande Valley include: Fernando A. Flores; Jonathan Leal; Ronnie Garza and Charlie Vela (As I Walk Through the Valley, 2017); Primo Carrasco, and more.
Listen to the playlist here
Raj Tawney’s playlist for his memoir "Colorful Palate"
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"This is my soundtrack, a concoction like the meals that graced my family’s table."Raj Tawney shares a playlist for his memoir Colorful Palate at Largehearted Boy
Songs from Our Laundry, Our Town—A Memoir by Alvin Eng
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Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Listen to the playlist here
Roberto Tejada's Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham University Press, 2022) unites poetry, photography, and politics between the U.S. and Latin America along actual and surreal border zones; world building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux.
Listen to the playlist here
Larry Racioppo, a longtime NYC photographer, has published a new book about oft-overlooked memorials around the boroughs. Avery Loftis and Adithi Vimalanathan report. Listen here.
Writer Raj Tawney’s work largely reflects his multiracial American upbringing. Born to an Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian American family, Tawney has explored his identity and family history through personal essays, a memoir and now he’s applying the edict “write what you know” to his forthcoming young adult novel, “All Mixed up.” It’s a coming-of-age story that follows a friendship forged between Kamal, a multi-ethnic American and Jaz, a Pakistani immigrant in the aftermath of 9/11. Listen here
National chauvinism and racism are essential features of fascism. The practice of white racism in the United States during the Jim Crow era was something that Hitler’s party in Germany studied and emulated. This kind of anti-black racism went on in the United States from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1960s. It has never really gone away as the mass mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated. This Black resistance, this fight back, will be a central aspect of anti-fascist activity in the future. Listen here.
Joseph Heathcott discusses his latest book, Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic (Fordham University Press, 2023), an engaging hybrid of text and visual that features a trove of his personal photography of urban spaces throughout NYC's most diverse borough. Including: airports, overgrown yards, possibly the last living speakers of indigenous languages, the Queens Public Library, racial covenants and civil resistance in early real estate development, and much more that, like the borough itself, is centerless, mundane, surprising, vibrant, challenging, and beautifully contradictory.
Listen here
