Movies Kids thought were GOOD and BAD
d get around to watching a movie I had on my list for a while now.
r something completely different, but still related to me in that I am still sick and very much thinking it's the Swine flu, I want to share with you a story about pigs. This story is by a very talented writer and also good friend of mine, Jose Enrique Medina. I have always admired and love his work and would like to encourage him to do more writing. I hope you enjoy his story.The chicken was running towards me. It looked super big. It was white with yellow legs, and it didn’t have a head. It was running really fast, and it knew how to run in a straight line. When my uncle tried to catch it, it flapped its wings, turned around and went running exactly in the opposite direction. It was taking huge spread-apart strides on the tips of its toes in a really straight line. I thought, “How the fuck does it know where we are, and how can it run so perfectly?”
In my home when we were children, they killed a lot of animals there. For example the chicken was going to be for a mole that my mom was going to make, which she made really rich with chocolate and a little bit of chile to give it a really delicious flavor.
I remember also a dark night. We were going to celebrate the baptism of my little sister. We didn’t have a lot of money, but for this fiesta my Tio Arturo was going to help us with money. My father looked real happy and proud. A shit load of people came to the house. We lived on a lot with two houses or rather three. The house in the front belonged to the landlady, she rented the back house to us, and on the side the garage had been converted into an apartment where lived the eldest son of the landlady. It had a big yard in the front, and all that property was super packed with people. Never had I seen it so full of people and so much happiness. It seemed strange to me. Because we were poor and not that many people came to visit us, it was like a really strange energy. Yes, I liked it, but I knew that things like that cost lots of money. There was lots of beer and food and birria.
And speaking of birria that’s how I got to meet a male goat that arrived. He was colored black and brown with his tippy-toes white. He had his ears real big and falling to the sides. And the eyes, I don’t know how to describe the eyes. They left you with an emotion, I don’t know how to describe the emotion, but you remembered his eyes.
The interesting thing is that there was a part of house, but I never remembered that this part of the house existed. It’s because the house of the landlady at the bottom had a basement or cellar, and there were stairs to descend down there. It was like a hole in the cement with four or five steps leading down there. On its sides was cement, and then a door. So it was like a hole of cement and with a door to enter the basement apartment. And there is where they killed the goat.
I was only a kid, like five years old, so it scared me to see that. I squatted down with my hands between my legs and watched while they were lowering the goat there into the hole of cement to kill it. I thought I was going to be able to see that, but then appeared a mallet, a huge hammer used to bust up cement, and I couldn’t watch. I didn’t have the heart to see, so I ran further away. The way the hole was, I could see the heads of the men, but I couldn’t see the goat down there in the hole of cement. I only saw that the hammer went up above the heads of the men, and then it went down. Something snapped into various pieces, like a piece of wood that broke into four pieces.
I didn’t have again the heart to see how that thing there looked dead, but yes the birria did taste delicious and strange and fresh. I confused myself, not knowing whether I should enjoy the taste or not.
Days later, after the party, I went back to the hole where they had killed the goat, and I only saw on the floor a cloud of half erased blood.
But I lived in East Los Angeles. Many people were recently arrived from Mexico, so they killed a lot of animals there. I remember some neighbors who lived six or five houses away from us on a little hill, and they there killed many pigs. And it seemed to me or I thought that they had a lot of money because every little while they were killing the big animals. Many pigs they killed there especially. The House of the Pigs, I called it. I never looked when they killed them, but I heard the pigs screaming and screaming. The noise sounded really ugly as if they were putting a knife of sound into your ear. And it lasted a long time the sound.
One time, I had grown more, already I was like seven years old, so I got the courage to see death, but I didn’t want to be too close. So I saw death, but from a distance of about four or five houses away. That was the size of my courage. I didn’t have the courage to see everything real close in detail. There were like three or four people trying to hold the pig down. A big-ass knife appeared. Even from my distance the knife looked humongous and reflected the light like a mirror. I thought, “I didn’t know that a knife like that could exist.”
The knife entered the armpit, and then started those sounds I already described which are so difficult to forget. I thought that already the terror had ended, but then they got a water hose and put it into the armpit of the pig. I didn’t know why they were doing that, but when they removed the water hose, then like a fountain the blood of the pig came out, making an arc in the air.
My mother died eighteen days ago and she took a part of my heart. With her she took the memory of my birth, my first words, steps and secrets only she knew.
aps I would not have judge her as harsh as I did. "Children should never judge their parents," she often said, but that never stopped me from letting her know that I thought she should have pursued all her dreams, all her passions. " You only get one shot at life, and you need to do everything possible to get things right, to be happy." I used to tell her this was my philosophy, why couldn't she stop living her life for us, for my dad?. Why didn't she marry for love, why didn't she travel more, why didn't she, WHY DIDN'T SHE?
Sale a darle clemencia al universo
Our Lady of the Night, is the story of Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer, better known as Isabel, La Negra, an important figure in Puerto Rican folklore and mythology. In a raw, sensual, prose Mayra Santos-Febres tells us the story of Doña Isabel, a black woman who through her brothel became one of the most powerful, respected and feared women in her town. A feat made even more impressive by the fact that she came out of nothing, was abandoned as a little girl and had to work as a maid, seamstress, even a liquor bootlegger. Mayra Santos-Febres uses multiple voices to depict a 1940's Puerto Rican society that is fragmented by race, class and socio-economic status. She gives us an accurate reflection of the social composition of the times, the hypocritical morality of the upper classes and the struggle of the poor to overcome their circumstances. By the end of the book, the reader has a complete story, that encompasses the different point of views of different characters and different times. 
