Frank Romero, The Closing of Whittier Boulevard , 1984, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 120 in.  by Abel Salas Curator Edward Hayes, Jr. admits he may have gotten to the Chicano Art party in a roundabout, later-rather-than-sooner way. But as a curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach and one of the visionaries responsible for Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective , the recent MOLAA exhibition, he is now among a handful of trailblazing museum professionals making sure the art world understands how much Chicano Art matters and why. The son of a U.S. State Department satellite communications engineer who married a Mexican-born woman with roots in Sinaloa, Hayes spent his early childhood on an extended tour of U.S. Embassy outposts in Quito, Ecuador and Dhaka, Bangladesh, among others. His family eventually settled in central Texas, where remained until he joined MOLAA as the Curator of Exhibitions three years ago. “I was born in San Diego, but we lived all ov...

By Randy Jurado Ertll As we move into spring and summer, let us not forget that many individuals and families cannot afford to buy food or have a roof over their heads. We especially should not forget the children who are homeless. We, as a community, need to do more to address the problem of homelessness among young children, especially here in Los Angeles. According to the LA School Report, “estimates put LA Unified’s homeless student population at almost 16,000, which is more than the entire student population of about 900 of California’s 1,000-plus districts.” Homeless children are attending our public schools and live within our communities—in an invisible manner. The PBS News Hour interviewed LAUSD student Nora Perez in this powerful segment over two years ago: overall, homeless rates continue to rise in Los Angeles and throughout the United States since millions of people never recuperated from the 2008 economic recession. Former President Obama was asked about the home...

Writer Denise Chávez. Photo by Norm Dettlaff, High Desert News by María Nieto   The border is a space cast in a constant barrage of terms, from predictable prepositions like across, before, after, over and between to interrogatories such as how, as in how in the hell did such a line in the sand come to be drawn? The artificial separation between two nations, the borderland of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is where Denise Chavéz made her entry into this world. The playwright, short story writer and novelist has been gifting us with her words for more than forty years, Denise Chavéz’s first work of fiction in 1995, Face of an Angel , won the American Book Award. Since that first novel, she has delivered three more books. The most recent, The King and Queen of Comezón , was published in 2014. In it, Chavéz opens the door for her readers, inviting them to visit the small, fictional town of Comezón. On its streets, in the homes of its residents or in the Mil Recuerdos Bar, Chav...