Charlie Vázquez

Puerto Ricans are pushing for sustained interconnectivity between stakeholders doing the rebuilding in the islands and the diaspora and its allies advocating for long-term investment from the mainland — and these coordination efforts are largely driven by women’s networks.

Something bothered her.

We’re calling for significant, intentional investment.

Con los muertos no se juega.

These initiatives all demonstrate the combined power of local and global stakeholders who chose to make a difference in the wake of devastation.

Organizers Nora Comstock, Adriana Domínguez and Marcela Landres speak with Latino Rebels ahead of the annual conference in October in New York City.

Originally published by the author on his page. As the New York City coordinator for Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra, I have the unique fortune of working with authors and poets on both sides of the bilingual Puerto Rican divide. Someone once asked me why I expend so much energy in doing so and […]

Big props to Loisaida Inc. and its steering of the legendary Loisaida Festival, which kicks off this Sunday on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Continuing its commitment to showcase the Lower East Side’s independent and diverse spirit, Loisaida Inc. announced its lineup for the 2015 Loisaida Festival, which will include Chicano Batman, Calma Carmona,Herencia de Plena, and Papote Jimenez y […]

I’d just returned to New York from a trip to Puerto Rico in 2011, when my mother recounted a family tale to me that her paternal grandfather had told her many times when she was little, one that even I had heard throughout the years. (Photo by Bella Vida Letty.) I’d invented characters and worlds […]

Bronx Writers Center director and Rebelde Charlie Vázquez sat with Daniel José Older at a Brooklyn restaurant to discuss —among other things— the spirit world in storytelling, the importance of building community and how the publishing industry needs to restructure its acquisitions and marketing strategies if it wishes to engage more Latino readers.   CV: […]

Los Muros Hablan August 19, 2013 – August 25, 2013 Los Muros Hablan, a street-art traveling initiative arrives at NYC’s own El Barrio and the South Bronx. Beginning on August 19, artists from Latin America and the Caribbean arrive to the island of Manhattan to rescue and transform abandoned spaces in and around el Barrio, New York’s iconic […]

In an effort to support new and emerging artists, the streets around the popular Williamsburg, Brooklyn eatery Cubana Social were transformed this past Saturday into a landscape of flickering images and experimental, multimedia movie reels projected onto buildings, into abandoned alleyways and onto construction sites by Absolut vodka’s Open Canvas project. Open Canvas will move […]

Un poco de poesía para hoy. La sangre es un mar inmenso por Nicolás Guillén La sangre es un mar inmenso que baña todas las playas… Sobre sangre van los hombres, navegando en sus barcazas: reman, que reman, que reman, ¡nunca de remar descansan! Al negro de negra piel la sangre el cuerpo le baña; […]

It is National Poetry Month. Here is the first of many poems we will be sharing this month.   Hoy mujeres y hombres por Xánath Caraza Ciudad con campos de flores rojas. Cada pétalo lleva El nombre de estudiantes que conocí.   Hoy mujeres y hombres. Ya no niños inocentes, Ni adolescentes rebeldes. No hubo tiempo. […]

Mundo Cruel (Seven Stories Press, 2013) by Luis Negrón: Available February 26, 2013 A recent spike in publishing projects by avant-garde Puerto Rican writers and presses has caught the attention of some stateside industry professionals and Luis Negrón’s “Mundo Cruel” may just be the icebreaker that will hopefully reveal a largely unknown community of excellent writers […]

Seis del Sur is a photography exhibit running through March 8th, 2013 at the Bronx Documentary Center. The Bronx of the 1970s through the early 1990s comes back to life in this rare and emotional exhibit that showcases the work of six talented Puerto Rican photographers who were working side-by-side (often not even knowing so) […]

Beware: the front cover boasts a blurb line courtesy of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong—”Cristy C. Road is a badass.” This six-chapter graphic novela takes a curious look back at the often painful crossroads of the US-born Latino bicultural experience and the awkward gelling of artistic and sexual identity. Cristy C. Road’s Miami childhood, commandeered by powerful matriarchs and the […]

Based on a true story that unfolded in the deserts and mountains of the Devil’s Highway region—a landscape so harsh and brutal that it even claims the lives of people born in adjacent deserts, and one that became the preferred “crossing” route for Coyotes (guides that lead crossers from Mexico to the US) once the […]

Reviewed by Matt Mendez Manuel Muñoz’s debut novel, What You See in the Dark, may be difficult to classify at first glance (both editions are adorned with wonderfully pulp cover art). Is the novel a mystery? Historical fiction? Literary fiction? Latino fiction? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Written in both exacting and graceful […]

A majority of Latinos in the U.S., according to a few surveys we were able to find, support gay marriage nowadays. And although we’ve come a long way in this basic civil rights battle, it’s easy to forget that things weren’t always so sunny for those who found themselves at the crossroads of the gay […]

Xánath Caraza’s “Conjuro” is a textural salsa of clashing and dazzling cultures, languages, histories and ancestral memories assembled in poems organized as bilingual pairings, mainly in English/Spanish, yet also with embellishments of Nahuatl and other non-European tongues that lend her painting-like compositions a dimension all their own, invoking themes of diaspora, sensuality, the subconscious, nativism, […]