Recent Features
Singing Agaves: An Interview with Violin Maker Anthony Belvado
Anthony Belvado is a violin maker from the San Carlos Apache Tribe. Traditional Apache violins are made by hand from a hollowed agave stalk and embody respect for plants and community. Their song is said to be a way of summoning true love, and the tradition—which dates back to the…
Asylum/Asilo: Bearing Witness as Cultural Practice
by Kimi Eisele Tens of thousands of migrants, many from Central America, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last year seeking asylum. While the law allows them to arrive and seek refuge, the backlog of cases and ever-changing policies have mired their arrivals with injustices. For many Jewish Americans, these injustices…
Essays
Lola’s Quince: A Lesson in Belonging
Essay by Mele Martinez | September 2019
My Sunrise: How I Came of Age the Apache Way
Essay by Brooke Gregg | September 2019
Interviews
Ofrenda: Altar Makers Create Bridges between Life and Death
Ofelia Esparza and Rosanna Esparza Ahrens are altar makers from East Los Angeles. Ofelia is a sixth generation altarista and printmaker, who was recognized by…
Ascendant Culture: An Interview with Gustavo Arellano
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal Historyand Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and a features writer for the Los…
Fat Mama: A Street Sandwich from Myanmar Comes to Tucson Meet Yourself
by Adiba Nelson Fat mama. When you see those words, I doubt the words “gangster” or “sandwich” come to mind. I also highly doubt that…
Thinking like a Folklorist
How Writing Docudramas Taught Me to Listen
by Milta Ortiz I came to playwriting from poetry, where I focused on writing from personal experience. When I started writing plays, I carried that along, writing from my own…
Remapping LA
by Alison M. De La Cruz On April 17, 2019, ArtChangeUS: Arts in a Changing America convened nearly 400 arts and cultural workers for ReMap LA, a Cultural Equity Summit at…
A Photo Is Not Reality
Story and photographs by Steven Meckler When I was in middle school, I had a dream in which I was walking around framing things I saw with a little black…
Data, the Fire Department, and Porous Boundaries
by Adriana Gallego Sometime during the 1980s, in my formative years, my father shared a memory that started with a fire in Heroica Nogales, Sonora, and ended with a hole…