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Jay's RESEARCH PARTY Post - Open-Ended Questions - Meaningful, Unique, Research-Driven Conversation - Oranges - Water Bottles - Mexicali (Mi Pueblo!) - Food - Drink - Marilyn Monroe - The Beatles - Let's PARTY Like It's 2024!

     The second week of the semester means RESEARCH PARTY.  We've already chosen our topics and learned how to navigate the campus databases. It's time to narrow our focus and map our course for our Community Profiles.  I teach my students to develop effective RESEARCH QUESTIONS.  I’ve developed the most exciting research activity - SAYS ME.  I  provide FOOD and DRINK.   My students  work in GROUPS - That's why I call it a PARTY.  Their OPEN-ENDED research questions lead to extended discussions.  No YES or NO questions ALLOWED. How FUN is that?  Where would you rather be?

Usually, I come to class with charts, images, and other materials to help students jump-start their research papers.  For the first hour, I hope for students to work in groups to create EFFECTIVE research questions.  The activity is designed to help them look below the surface at a topic.  There is no such thing as a BORING topic.  EVERYTHING is INTERESTING.  It will be their  mission  to find the MOST INTERESTING material about their research questions.  I encourage students to write with a PURPOSE.  We work together to formulate the best questions to address in our research papers.  What will  readers/classmates need to know about their topics?  If they can ask significant questions and provide interesting answers, their essays will draw their readers in.

To get into the Party, my students need the following:

• Community Profile RESEARCH BINDERs  -  THREE Research Articles based on selected topic - They will need a PRINTED version of their Community Profile  Freewrite - Summaries of Proquest articles -  Annotations

Students  learn to...

• Use invention strategies to develop a topic for their projects.
• Identify the characteristics of  strongresearch questions to narrow their focus.
• Apply their working knowledge to understand  academic articles. 
• Let their own purposes guide them - THEY WRITE ACCORDING TO THEIR INTERESTS!

Here is what we do FIRST: I pass out what I think my students will consider the most BORING topics ever for a researh paper.  Who in their right mind would want to be assigned a 5-7 page paper on dog food or water bottles. 

•  Each group  discusses one image.
•  Each group member creates three INTERESTING open-ended questions about subject in the picture - Write them out on  a  piece of scratch paper.
•  For example: Why do they seem to grow so many more oranges in Coachella Valley compared to Imperial Valley?
•  Group discusses questions - Which one is the BEST?  Why?  Where do they think the question will lead to?
•  Write the BEST question down on a piece of paper.  Be ready to share their question with the rest of the class.

Here is what we do SECOND - After we complete this first activity, we discuss topics that may be more APROPROS and/or EXCITING to select for our research projects  - My apologies to ORANGES and WATER BOTTLES - I find that my students know little about Marilyn Monroe or the Beatles - They know MORE about Cesar Chavez - I share my Mexicali Photo Album - Jaja - We discuss Cultural, Economic, Historical, Environmental, Religious ideas associated with  living in a Border Town.  This semester we are reading a novel about New York City - It would be COOL to share what we know about the BIG APPLE before we go any further.  Students return to their groups to create research questions for the topics represented in the images above. Each group is responsible for sharing their BEST QUESTION with the rest of the class. The conversation is ENGAGING.  The questions are CHALLENGING.  The activity is FUN. 

Leave the THIRD part to ME - Upon completion of our GROUP ACTIVITIES,  students are assigned to create SIX questions with SIX answers for their reserach topics on Canvas.  Each question demands a 100-word answer.  This means students show up to the next class with 600 words tucked away in their research binders.  I model canvas submissions below based on topics we have chosen from past semesters.

1. What impact could Marilyn's childhood have had on her career and/or adult life?

Marilyn was separated from her mother at a very early age. As a young girl she bounced between orphanages and foster homes.   Her mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.  She would never have a close relationship  with her again.  And, Marilyn never met her father. At age 16, the family she lived with and was closest to moved away from Los Angeles and were prevented by law to take Marilyn with them.  To avoid the harsh reality of Marilyn returning to another orphanage, the family arranged for her to marry a teen-age neighbor.   Marilyn entered the marriage without love and experience.  It didn't last.  Many writers believe Marilyn's obsession to be an actor had to do something with seeking love. As a child she may have felt ignored and/or abandoned.  Becoming a movie star changed all that. 

2.  Could the Beatles "Make It" today like they did in 1964.  Who would be a BIGGER draw.  The BEATLES or TAYLOR SWIFT?

These guys were no FLASH in the PAN.  You would have think they could make it any place, anywhere, any time.  Beatlemania had never happened really before. Maybe Elvis. And it never really happened again. Many historians note that the Beatles first appeared in America shortly after President Kennedy was murdered. The country was in mourning. We needed something, anything to bring people together. But the same historians don't explain the same type of excitement and chaos that the Beatles created in Europe, Asia, Austrailia... The Beatles were talented, ambitious, and very good looking; and they worked harder than anybody. THEY WROTE THEIR OWN SONGS. That had never been done before by any one group. They had CHEMISTRY. Like it wasn't any one guy in front of the band; rather, it was four guys working as one. The SUM was bigger than the PARTS. Of course, there success is more COMPLEX than what I'm writing here. But, if you are asking me if they could compete today, I say OF COURSE. Paul McCartney is still selling out arenas. He is 81 years old and he still ROCKS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4UsXksoGNg

3. How would The March to Sacramento – a 300-mile walk – benefit Cesar Chavez and  his famworkers union?

 In 1966, Cesar Chavez was leading a long, tough strike against the grape industry.  He was fighting for the rights of farmworkers.  For his union, he demanded better pay and working conditions.  However, it was a difficult road.  His farmworkers were poor.  The growers were rich.  Everyone knew that the workers couldn’t last very long without money.  In April, Cesar came up with this idea to lift the spirits of his union members.  They would walk from Delano in the Central Valley to Sacramento. Cesar knew he had to do something dramatic to capture the imagination of the country.   Young people, old people, Mexicans, and non-Mexicans came from all over the country to join in on the parade.  Televisions stations sent reporters and cameras.  Every night you could see Cesar and his followers on the news.  AS they walked, they carried pictures of La Virgen de Guadalupe.  They sang songs.  They waved the Black Eagle flag.   When they reached Sacramento, the world’s eyes were upon them.  Cesar’s friend and confidant took a microphone in front of thousands of people and said, “You cannot close your eyes and ears to us any longer.”

    I'm EXCITED for NEXT WEEK, for we have already begun our Community Profiles with great purpose and focus. I don't expect anyone to write about Marilyn Monroe or the Beatles, but several will relate the Cultural and Historical importance of Cesar Chavez in their lives.  My students realize they may not have made it to our college campus if it wasn't for the efforts of Cesar to elevate the educational opportunities for children of farmworking families.  Students were asked the following:

• To search The Valley for someone with an interesting story to tell– their profile could come right from their  past, present, family, job, school, reading. 
• To think about how their subject would represent a larger idea.
• To combine cutting edge academic research with personal interview.

Most of my students dont have to look very far to find an engaging story.  Many of them stay within their own families to document deeply personal observations of a life being lived. In submitting to Jay's Community Profiles, they open up their lives to their classmates and let the world into their writing.  Below, I provide a list of randomly-chosen examples of themes and topics:

• Immigration struggles and separated families.
• Parenting special-needs children.
• The stigma of becoming a Single Teen Parent.

I feel the essays are valuable.  My students share a sense of empathy and compassion for their subject matter. In these times of isolation and despair, the writing brings us closer together.  

Paz,

Jay Lewenstein

 

Jay's STUFF I HAVE BEEN READING Post - Sam Shepard Biography - True West - Patti Smith - Joni Mitchell - Jessica Lange

From this biography,  I read famous film director Robert Altman, who had just purchased the screen rights to “Fool For Love,” asked the author what the story was about,  but Sam wouldn’t tell him!   In rehearsal for “Geography of a Horse Dreamer,” famous British actor Bob Hoskins asked Sam, the writer and the director of the play, what he wanted for him to do with his part, and Sam handed him a record album.  I think it was Hank Williams. Hoskins gave him a blank look, and Sam told him, “That’s for you to understand, mate.  This is our secret.”  For Sam, writing was rhythm and jazz.  The more he wrote, the more meaning shifted.  Who cared what the actor thought?   When the words reached the audience they might be taken entirely different.  Sam’s not for everyone. Logic in his plays is random.  When I asked my professors why they recommended Sam Shepard for me to read, this is what they said: “Because you write like him.” (That was THEN - forty years ago - this is NOW.)  Sadly, Sam passed a few years ago.  I doubt any of my students will ever appreciate him as a writer, but some will see him as an actor.  I don’t know what my professors were trying to imply, that there were the slightest  similiarities between my writing and Sam's writing,  but I will be forever grateful I was pushed Sam’s way.  Each time I pick up Sam's work, I find something new.  I will read Sam forever.

  I can’t say I read Sam Shepard because I identify with the author or his work; in fact, I read him for I have little connection with him whatsoever.  Like opposites attract.  Greenfield repeatedly writes of his magnetism.  Sam is always the coolest guy in the room.  Maybe, the best looking, too.  I mean, I just can’t imagine.  But I like this scene that opens the book.  It tells me more about what Sam is like on the inside than the outside.  At age 20, Sam just picked up and left his sleepy San Gabriel Valley desert town, Duarte, and headed for new York City on the bus.  He knew nothing about New York City, but he knew there wasn’t anything for him in Duarte.  Like a lot of dreamers do, Sam arrived to the Big Apple cold and hungry, with no contacts or prospects.  This is the winter of 1963, shortly after Kennedy was shot. It must have been freezing in NYC!  Sam desperately sought out a place of shelter to escape the cold, and he  may have found one in a White Castle burger joint.  I’ll tell this story to my students because they know this place from the movie Harold and Kumer Go to White Castle.  Sam didn’t have the money to buy a burger, but he became distracted from the knot in his stomac, the hunger,  when he watched how the cooks slap the burgers on the grill   He had never seen anything like this back in Duarte.  I’m talking “sliders.”  It must have been the smell of the fried onions, or the image of the melting cheese, that reminded Sam of some advice a friend once told him:  If he ever reached rock bottom, he could always make five dollars by selling a pint of his his blood at various medical clinics strewn across the city.  And that’ what he did on his first night in NYC. No too far down the street and around the corner,  he sold his own blood for a plate of White Castle sliders.  Not surprisingly, he would later write that this may have been the best meal he had ever tasted!

OK, I admit, I don’t understand a lot of his writing, but I identify with his desire for a good burger.  Once I get an idea in my head, I often can't get it out.  Very soon, Sam became a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a veritable Hollywood movie star.  He’s traveled the word and rubbed shoulders with the most interesting people. It’s a desperate night at White Castle that he will always remember.  That’s what is so COOL about Sam Shepard.  I don’t care what other people say.

Whenever I read about Sam Shepard’s work, I get the mandatory dose of the playwright’s personal history.  Many of his plays bring up sporadic drug abuse, teen-age rebellion and busted relationships.  I think everyone who looks closely at a Sam Shepard drama is going to have difficulty drawing patterns for analysis.  Many of the stories are broken and disjointed, but that’s probably the point.   It looks like Sam has created meaning on stage that had eluded him at home. I like reading most about Sam’s combative relationship with his own father.  I mean, the estrangement between father and son seems to take center stage in Buried Child, Fool For Love, True West,  Curse of the Starving Class…Motel Chronicles.   Sam’s father was a the pilot of an air force bomber in World War II.  He was fluent in Spanish, and he was a Fulbright scholar.  It’s easy to see where Sam picked up the inspiration and the  tools for his trade, but at the same time, Sam’s father was a violent alcoholic.  Sam grew up in a dysfunctional household.  His father would often disappear for long periods of time without reason or explanation.   Sam always says that his father was always a mystery to him, and to me then,  it’s that blur in his perspective that makes his own plays so interesting.

In  the play True West  it’s  cool to see the split in the personality of two brothers.One brother clearly displays the bookish intellectual side of Sam’s father, while the other breaks out the dark side. They both have the same great idea in mind, but they will fight each other to the bitter end.  In Buried Child, a young son comes home to find his father doesn’t recognize him or remember him, but at the same time, he seems to understand him better than he understands himself.  I bring up Buried Child because of a great story about Sam’s father.  One night in New Mexico – I’m not sure if father and son had seen each other in years – Sam’s father gets totally juiced and makes it to a performance of Buried Child.  He takes his seat like everyone else, but when he sees his drunk representation in a character on stage, he begins yelling and disrupting the play.  He kept screaming at the actors that they knew nothing about what they were talking about, as security dragged him down the aisles and out the door of the theater.  That’s pretty funny.  When he was able to convince theater staff that he was actually Sam Shepard’s father, they let him back in only to see him start yelling again.

Even funnier:  later that year Sam drove back from New York to New Mexico to re-connect with his father.  At this point, Sam’s father was a hopeless recluse living by himself in the desert.   He spent his days drinking bourbon and staring at cut-out magazine pictures tacked to the walls of his kitchen.  I wonder what that discussion looked like when Sam showed him the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child.

I know I was well-read before I discovered Sam Shepard, but that didn’t mean I read well.  Through my struggles with Sam’s writing, my eyes opened up to ways of looking a things I had never considered before.  Somewhere in this biography, a theater critic says the same thing about Sam I was thinking: “You never knew. I always had this sense the lights go down anything can happen.”  Sadly, my students may not be as open to their reading.  They have been dragged and pushed standardized classroom lessons. I only hope one day they will stop waiting for me to tell them what to think, but look inside themselves for answers.    Sam Shepard may have started everything for me.  I came to realize I didn't have to understand everything about his writing. I kind of knew, though, I shared his sense of humor - that's the hardest thing to do in writing, to make people laugh and cry at the same time. 

I’m often the first one to arrive on campus.  That’s how I roll.  My students show up early to the classroom, not to work really, but to do things with their phones.  They sit there with headphones on while I organize my materials for the upcoming class.  This is where I can engage in musical discussions with them.  I mean, they are listening to music, right?  I ask them to share with me what they are listening too, and in this way, I learn about Lana Del Rey, Ricardo Arjona, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.  I believe if I can open the discussion about music, I can lead them to speak about literature.  Sam was an award-winning playwright, maybe one of this country’s best.   He had  written more than 50 plays, and many of them have been turned into brilliant films.   For his writing, he’s won multiple OBIE awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Cannes Palme d'Or.  I’ve studied most of his plays and seen many of his films, but for me, Sam’s greatest achievement just may be that Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him, “The Coyote.”  How could you top that?  Joni’s song?  It’s called “Coyote,” of course:  “No regrets Coyote…We just come from a different set of circumstances…”

   I bring up Joni, for author Robert Greenfield chronicles Sam’s history of broken relationships with his women.  True, he is a very attractive and intimate man, but at the same time always maitained a nerve-wracking distance from his lovers.  No surprize.  He was a DRINKER.  I remember reading about Sam in Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids.  According to Patti, Sam inspired her career as a punk rocker with his music and poetry.  Very soon after they met, they were a couple.  Patti didn’t find out that Sam was an award-winning playwright  until they had moved in together at the Chelsea Hotel.  He just never told her.  She had to find out from one of her friends.  She also found out that he was married with children.  This bit of information came from a note he left on her bed after he decided to move back with his family.

Probably my favorite scene in the biography – after White Castle, of course – reveals the confusion and tension Sam would have with women for his entire life.  He was so attractive and unique.  Greenfield describes him as a cross between Montgomery Clift and James Dean.  Apparently,  Sam’s one-time live-in lover, Joyce Aaron felt the same way about Sam as Greenfield did.  She lived with him for nearly two years.  She was a talented actress in her own right.  Together they made a good team.  When Sam asked her to marry him, of course, she said YES!  But soon after they had taken the blood test to apply for a marriage license, she found herself alone in their apartment staring at the mirror, and this is what she said: “Joyce, he’s a druggie, he’s a womanizer, he has a father who is an alcoholic… Stay with , do whatever you want, but don’t get married.”  And Joyce stood by that thought, later telling Sam’s biographer, that was the best decsidion se ever made in her life.

Hollywood film starJessica Lange carried on a furious love relationship with Sam for more thatn thirty years. They met on the set of Frances where they played two yyoung lovers.  They continued acting together far beyond the termination of their relationship.  Their last movie together, Don't Come Knocking, featured a scene where enraged Jessica fiercely kisses Sam and then beats him violently on the chest. Sam wrote the scene, knowing that their real-life relationship had hit rock bottom. In front of the cameras, Jessica may have improvised the brutality of her character's emotions, but at the same time, she captured in the moment thirty years of a ROCKY ROAD with Sam.

In the end, Jessica left Sam for the same reason Sam's other women did: his drinking and womanizing.   In a Vanity Fair interview, Jessica once said, "It would never occur to  me that Sam would be unfaithful, although he has a long history of it."  Sam died of ALS complications in 2017.  He could no longer walk or use his arms, but he kept writing until the end.  He was 71.  Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange were all strong, independent women.  They all spoke at a special celebration of his life, five days after his body had been cremated.  Now that I think of it, maybe I had more in common with them - his women -  than I ever did with Sam.  I’m sure all of us loved him, but none of us understood him.

 

 

Jay's WRITER'S PARADISE Post - New Classroom Blog - Sneak Preview - Connect with Blog thru Link Provided Below:

I do this every year.  Sometimes, twice.  I use my summer and winter vacations to create a classroom blog.  I share Canvas content I have written throughout the course of a semester and publish my best student writing.  I introduce the blog to my students on the first day of instruction of a new semester.  It PULLS them in.  The blog gives them an indication of where their instructor is coming from and where they are going. 

This year I call the new blog Jay's Writer's Paradise.  Here is the URL:  https://www.jayswritersparadise.org/

If you are curious about the blog's title, well, you will just have to read the first post.

It used to be like this:  My students would write three or four essays per semester.  They knew it.  I knew it.  The requirements for each essay are printed in the syllabus.  I worked hard to create engaging assignments, but in the end,  I just didn’t feel the enthusiasm or see the effort I was looking for.  Students went through the motions. Writing for publication, however, changes things. When students realize someone beyond their teacher will read their writing , they appear to step up their game.  They feel a greater sense of responsibility.  They take ownership for their ideas.   On Canvas, students write more, edit better, and revise more carefully.  Since I have begun creating classroom blogs, I have seen an increase in both the amount and quality of student writing.  Students  spend a lot of time sharing their ideas on classroom discussion boards, and they contact me more often with meaningful questions about their writing.  Now with the blogs in play, it’s more collaboration, and less isolation.

This summer in my English compostion class we read a bizarre and challenging play. CONGRATULATIONS to US!  The play is based on a strange but true story of a French diplomat who carried on a twenty-year affair with a Chinese actor and opera singer, not realizing that his partner was in fact a man masquerading as a woman. The diplomat apparently became aware of the deception only in 1986, when he was charged by the French government with treason it transpired that his companion had been an agent for the Chinese government, and had passed on sensitive political information that he had acquired from the diplomat. Weaving into the play many parallels with, and ultimately ironic reversals of, Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, the play’s author David Hwang explores the stereotypes that underlie and distort relations between Eastern and Western culture, and between men and women

In my Spring English 105 course, we read a sixties novel and wrote sixties research papers. One goal in this research project was for my students to explore how we got here today.  What is going on in this country relative to Race, Gender, Power, and Access. Here I encourage my students to discuss how gender stereotypes are reinforced and undermined under our current administration.  This isn’t anything new!  We all know about Cesar Chavez, but when I discuss Dolores Huerta, an eerie silence often overcomes the room.  Dolores fought most of her life for the rights of farmworkers, but sadly, as a woman, her accomplishments been pushed into the background of most history lessons. In high school, my students studied the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr to The Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, but they never have heard of Women’s Rights Leader Gloria Steinem, who TODAY is still speaking Truth to Power.   Several of the essays you will see published on this site express the voice of young women in this class, truly grateful for the unyielding courage, spirit, and sacrifice of the women who have paved their way.  

My English 1A and 110  students developed classification essays. We made it PERSONAL.  Students broke down meaningful ideas and/or experiences from their own lives.  Classification is simply about breaking down a topic into its subgroups.  A classification essay will then take each of those subgroups and describe how it is the same and  different from other subgroups.  For example, I modeled an essay about different types of Female Rock Stars.  I named my categories Leather, Love and Lace.  Several of my students classified their work-outs in the gym. Another popular topic is SHOES.  They write with great enthusiasm and insight for how they select their shoes, when and where they wear them, and of course, how they arrange them in iorder in the closet. I told you, it’s always PERSONAL.

This Fall 2024, I plan to read a novel with my classes I recently plucked off my shelf here in Mexicali. It's called Paradise Travel, and it is written by Jorge Franco.  I'm not giving any spoiler alerts, but it focuses upon the American Dream - two teen-age lovers, Marlon and Reina from Medellín, Colombia, who successfully make the long, ardous journey to New York City but learn tough, life-changing lessons along the way.   I like this novel, for the CHANGE in characters that happens right before our eyes.  Both Marlon and Reina become Hard and Knowing.  They are entirely different people at the end of the novel.  Did their journey to the U.S. change the way they saw each other? How did their struggle to fit in, to find their place, to define their identities...Affect Their Love?

I began creating my blogs maybe six or eight years ago after I attended an on-campus teacher workshop developed to help us engage our students.  Let’s face it:  Reading isn’t what it used to be. Our students are bored with their reading assignments.  In today’s world of social media, there are just too many distractions. I imagine my students will choose to do almost anything else in their time away from school than read.  How do I know that?  I know that!  Sometimes, I ask students to share a postive reading experience on our Canvas discussion board, and all too often, they choose to submit a reading selections from elementary school.  They don’t seem to remember what they read in high school.  So what do I do? In my blog I try to share books out of my past  that I have enjoyed reading.   

Over the years,I have enjoyed reading and re-reading this novel in both English and Spanish.  I mean reading for enjoyment is the best thing I can share with my students.  I just completed thirty-three online quizzes over the past month to upload to my Canvas curriculums.  That took me thirty-three days.  When I'm reading a book I love, I'm astonished by the amount of time and energy I can put into it.  I know.  I know Paradise Travel will not show up on many suggested reading lists or class syllabi, but that's pretty much why I have chosen it.  It's a gift to myself.   I'm going to tell my students that reading doesn't have to be a grind.  They  are not going to get much out of the book if each page is like tramping through the mud.  I'm confident my students will identify with bits and pieces of Marlon and Reina. Paradise Travel will push them to understand more about themselves. 

Jay's LATINA LOVER Post - Dolores del Rio in the Fugitive (1947) - Kamala Harris - Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory - Anti-Christianity and Racial Stereotypes

I rarely do this: watch the film version of a novel I'm reading BEFORE or AFTER; in fact, I don't watch many films at all these days.  As an English instructor, I spend way too much time in front of a computer screen designing lessons and activities for my students, and grading their work.  I mean, I'm not inclined to spend any more time in front of any type of screen.  Big Screen.  Small Screen.  I'm SATURADO.  I know, I know that a film interpretation of a novel often adds important meaning to the story, but the older I get, the more satisfied I am for what I get off the page.  I suppose my mindset may have changed over the last month - probably from the moment a Black woman has entered the presidental race.   Kamala Harris.  No one saw her coming, and no one forsees her going anywhere else any time soon.  Considering all the RACISM and HATE that is bleeding out of our television sets, I now look to film as a viable escape. 

  Last week, I read Graham Greene's 1930s novel The Power and the Glory.  It's about a Whiskey Priest who is hunted down my the Mexican government.  I'm still not sure of his real name in the novel, but I'm pretty clear of his flaws.  This priest is a hardcore alcoholic, and like most drunks I know, his life has become a pattern of withdrawl and remorse.  He wanders aimlessly through the jungles of Tabasco and Chiapas. I have to admit I never knew much about this period in Mexico's history, but at one point the Mexican government outlawed any and all forms of Catholism.  They burned churches and tortured innocent peasants for any knowledge of the whereabouts of runaway priests.   In The Power and Glory, our alcoholic priest becomes obsessed with staying.  Not for any faith in his religion, but for his pride in being the LAST ONE - the last priest to escape execution.  Why the poor and downtrodden still love the priest is the novel's great mystery.  This guy is a LOSER.  He thinks about drinking all day.  He has slept with and impregnated a young woman from his village.  He has abandoned his only child.  He is just as PHONY, if not more, than the people who want to kill him.  On Youtube, I found the film version of The Power and the Glory.  It has been re-titled The Fugitive, and it stars Henry Fonda.  Mexican Cinema Icon Dolores del Rio appears in the first scene.  She plays a poverty-stricken single mother who has never lost her faith under the most horrible of circumstances.  She is dressed in white.  There is nothing PHONY about her. 

Pues, I would be greatly intimidated to introduce The Power and Glory into my classroom curriculum.  I mean, I would be one of the very few non-Catholics in the room.   I've read the novel maybe two or three times now, but the religous components of several scenes still escape my understanding.  At the same time, I can see how a discussion of Dolores del Rio can relate to the election of our nation's first biracial woman. 

Here is what I would tell my students:  In the 1930s Dolores was considered one of, if not the most beautiful actress in Hollywood. She was a considered a cultural heroine in her home country of Mexico. She paved the way for many Latin American performers to come, the likes of Lupe Velez, Katy Jurado, Salma Hayek and many more.  She was treated as a major box office star in the same way that Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford were.  Yes, she was known as the LATINA LOVER.    But, THIS is what we will talk about in the classroom.  Dolores couldn't get the same parts as her white counterparts. She struggled with RACISM and RACIAL STEREOTYPES.  My students will know this.  The White women always received the best parts, but the dark skinned - Latina -  women would always be relegated to servants and villians. Will my students be listening to TODAY'S news?   Will they be able to draw a line between the way Latinas were treated in Hollywood to the way biracial presidental candidates are treated in election campaigns. Trump has a history of making racial slurs. As recently as this week, he questioned Kamala Harris's racial identity and intelligence.  He did the same with Obama.  If Dolores was alive today, she would share in the Harris experience:  “I lived in a hotbed of intrigue, of politics, of lies and malice, of crosscurrents of human purpose,” she once said. “I was hurt so often, I was afraid to express myself.”

This brings me back to The Power and the Glory.  In the second chapter of the novel, the Whiskey Priest is on the run from the police. He is desperate, for he has no place to turn.  There is a price on his head.  Everywhere he goes he will be recognized. So, he decides to go back to the village where it all began for him.  There he will find people who will protect him. This is where he meets Maria – the woman Dolores del Rio plays in the movie. On one level, it was the right move, because Maria takes him in and gives him a place to stay.  We learn she is his former lover.  We know that because the child produced from their relationship is at her side. This is what I mean when I say the Whiskey Priest is a LOSER.  His greatest LOVE is his greatest SIN. He is ashamed that Maria, the woman he abandoned with child,  is willing to risk his life for him.  The child, laughs at him, not because he is funny, but because he is pathetic.  The rest of the town is not too happy with him either.  The Mexican police are going from town to town and taking hostages – They promise to keep shooting the innocent until the townspeople give up the priest.  The presence of the Whiskey Priest puts everyone in danger.

I'm not going to write a book report here.  And since I began with Dolores, I will finish with Dolores.  She appears in the very first scene in the The Fugitive.   Dolores - playing Maria -  is waiting in the shadows of an abandoned church when Henry Fonda, the Whiskey Priest appears.  In contrast to the scene in the novel, Maria does not recognize the visitor to her village, but when he tells her he is a priest, she goes down on her knees and shuffles across the cold floor.  She is holding her baby underneath her rebozo. Maria has no one in her life.  Her man left her after she became pregnant.  She dances in a cantina for tips. Bowing to the Whiskey Priest,  she kisses his hand and holds her face against the side ofhis leg.  Does she expect a miracle? 

When I say CONTRAST, this is a big one.  Maria’s sexual relationship with the Whiskey Priest is critical  to the plot of the novel.  But any semblance of an interracial  relationship between the characters in the movie was deemed immoral by the Hollyood Code/Standard of the day. Maybe the implication of a relationship may have snuck by the censors of the time, but any notion of "miscegenation" was like a high crime and misdemeanor. Miscegenation refers to racial inter-breeding.  In the thirties and forties that was forbidden according to the Hays code.  Amor Prohibido.  The whole film could be shut down if there was even the mention of a biracial baby.  Henry Fonda was as WHITE as they come. Dolores had the skin tone of a copper penny. In this film, they changed the story to attribute Maria's baby to a Mexican father.   We don't know who Henry Fonda slept with, and we will never know.  Dolores has no chance with the Whiskey Priest.  None. 

Following this movie, I'm so happy to read more about Dolores del Rio's life story.  Like our presumptive presidential nominee, Dolores  was a FIGHTER.  In her early years growing up, her family lost everything during the Mexican Revolution.  Her father had to flee to the North to escape Pancho Villa and his rebel brigade. Dolores and her mother fled to Mexico City dressed as peasants.  They built a new life, starting from square one. The story of Dolores de Rio  is still relevant today.  Despite the fame and riches she experienced, she struggled with issues that still resonate for Latinas in film.   I'm loathe to mention Trump inside the classroom, for his name just doesn't lead our conversations anywhere good. He aspires to take this country back to the thirties and forties where segregation was the rule and opression of women was normalized. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, doesn't appear to take a step back from nobody.  It's a new day.  My students need to know they are part of it.  They all need to vote.

 

 

 

 

Jay's RESEARCH PORTFOLIO Post - Community Profile - Fall 2024 - Surprize Binder Check Preview

      On the first day of class, I will hand-out FREE BINDERS to the first thirty students who show to my classroom.  

•  The maintainance of a ORGANIZED and PROFESSIONAL binder will be an important part of  the course. 
• This Project Binder is designed to give students the tools they need to reflect on their work.  They can reflect before and after each Surprize Binder Check. 
• Each binder will contain  five to six sections arranged with dividers.  Each section may be as important as the next.

On the final day of class, I ask students to present and share their Project Binders in our Semester-Ending Student News Conference.

• Students who maintain the most organized and professional binders make the most effective presentations - Write the best reserach papers - Show the best insight for their topics - Funny how that works!

Section One:  Final Community Profile Research Essay

• MLA Cover Sheet
• Abstract
• Final Essay
• Works Cited

Section Two: Pre-Writing Activities

• Freewrites
• Graphic Organizers
• Formal Outline

Section Three:  Research Activities

• Research Questions/ Research Answers  * Annotated Research Articles  *  Research Images

Section Four:  The Interview Process

• Open-Ended Research Questions
• Summary of Interview Scene
• Quote Sandwiches

Section Four:  Drafts

• Quote Sandwich
• Jay's Delayed Thesis
• Summary of Research Article
• Definition  *  Character Analysis  *  Summary of Interview  *  Visual Analysis  *  This I Believe  *  First Draft

Section Five - Evaluation  *  Peer Review  *  Self-Reflection

Back Cover - About Me Page

Jay's Portfolio Highlights:

CREATIVITY:  Creative, extraordinary title.   Creative, attractive cover design that includes student name, title of project.  

ABSTRACT – Statement of intent and goals for portfolio.

PERSONAL CONNECTION:  a brief summary of student interest in selected topic that includes A brief annecdote related to the topic, a fascinating fact concerning the topic or a narration.  Must be extremely descriptive and creative and honest.  

RESEARCH  – At least six ANNOTATED research articles about topic.  Display of summary, paraphrase, quotation of  supporting information...

VISUAL AIDES – Illustrations – At least THREE must be in portfolio. (Use photos, drawings, color copies, magazine clippings, paintings, sketches, pen & ink drawings, free form designs, computer graphics). All visual aids must be related to student topic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE - that includes all the work included in student  portfolio.

An ORGANIZED BINDER will RELFLECT an EFFECTIVE STUDENT - SOMEONE WHO IS READY SUCCEED AT THE NEXT LEVEL

This is going to be Great!

Paz,

JL

Jay's STUFF I'VE BEEN READING Post - The Quiet American - M. Butterfly - The Asian Mystique

In my summer session, we just completed David Hwang’s M. Butterfly. It’s a crazy theatre piece based on a true-to-life love affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer. The action takes place during the sixties which I like because I get to discuss the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War.   While my students read M. Butterfly, I  read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.  This famous British author wrote much of his book in the years leading up to the American intervention in Indochina.  My students seem to like M. Butterfly, but I love The Quiet American.  Both stories follow similar themes: Cultural Revolution, Vietnam, Dark and Shady Espionage Figures – and last but not least, both stories are narrated by  Manic Pixie Dream Guys who throw their lives away for the love of much younger women.  I’m talking about Rene in M. Butterfly, and Fowler in The Quiet American.   I mean, these guys were both capable and intelligent characters, but they just couldn’t stop themselves.  They couldn’t keep it in their pants.   In the end, both were CRUSHED by the ASIAN MYSTIQUE.

What is the Asian Mystique?  From reading these two novels, I say it’s a White Guy thing.   It’s about Western stereotypes.  Upon landing at a Far-Eastern airport, Caucasians are open and looking for the beautiful dragon lady or the sexually submissive geisha.  Everything these guys have read or seen in movies leads them to assume a false sense of power when it comes to Asian women.  It’s like they have found themselves on Fantasy Island.  

In M. Buttefly, The protagonist of the play is a man named Rene Gallimard who is obsessed with the “Asian Mystique.”  In this case, he idolizes a character from the opera Madama Butterfly – an American sailor who marries a Japanese geisha girl while on leave.  He gets what he wants; then he “leaves.”  Abandons her.    “I have a vision,” Rene says.  “Of the Orient. That, deep with its almond eyes there are still women.  Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man.  Even a man whose love is completely without worth.” 

I had it difficult following Rene.  He’s a mystery from start to finish.  The story goes like this: working as a French diplomat, Rene carries on a torrid love affair with a beautiful Chinese opera singer only to find the women of his dreams is indeed a man.  How can that possibly happen?  They were friends, lovers and confidants – intimate the whole way – for TWENTY years!  Rene only learns of the deception much later when he is accused of treason by his own government.  In the courtroom, not the bedroom, he finds out that his Song (that’s her name) is an agent of the Chinese government.   Blinded by love, he’s been used – he’s passed on sensitive political information.    He’s thrown his life down a deep dark hole that he will never crawl out of.

I’m not sure I could ever imagine what Rene felt or thought, but I can feel empathy.   I mean, he is a man with a dream.  He wanted something different with his life.  I’ve read many critics of M. Butterfly who just can’t buy it.  Form a purely physical standpoint,  how could a man make love to another man and not know it?  I mean, it’s not a question of true love.  It’s a question of true anatomy.  But it’s all true to life.  The play is based on real story that appeared in The New York Times in the 1980’s.  Joyce Wadler followed it up with a nonfiction book, Liaison, about the tragic fall of one Bernard Boursicot.  Joyce  tracked down the Chinese opera singer. Then she interviewed Bernard himself.  She asks him the question that we all want to hear:  “How could you have not known?” David Hwang, the author of M. Butterfly, knows.  I think I know.  I think we all know.  Rene just didn’t WANT to know.  Like see no evil, hear no evil.  His love for Song was BLIND.

Graham Greene developed his novel, The Quiet American, off-and-on for three years while working assignments as a foreign correspondent for a major British newspaper.   This is in the early 1950s when the French are still fighting to hold on to their colony, Vietnam. They were not successful.  The French pulled out in 1954 and the Americans started coming in. Greene knew his way around a battle zone.  Vietnam wasn’t his first rodeo.  During World War II,  Greene served at the top of the British spy agency, MI6. Often the agency took advantage of his status as a writer to insert him into the middle of a international conflicts.  Greene was able to pass back important information to the agency.  I mean, he could always say he was just doing his job as a journalist.  In Saigon, the real-life Greene felt right at home with real-life American spies.  He knew how to talk to them.  He knew how to drink with them.  It was this way, he began putting together a novel about the evils of world-wide American intevention.  He was there when a flood of American advisors began to appear in places they had no business or jurisdiction. 

 In his novel, Greene created a British narrator/journalist, Thomas Fowler, who was cynical about the American efforts to bring peace and unity to Vietnam.  When he heard American officials talk about democracy and duty, and the urgency to stop the spread of communism, Fowler knew better. His suspicions intensify when he meets a young American named Pyle, who is fresh out of Harvard, and has come to Vietnam on an economic aide mission.  Pyle can talk the talk. They meet at an outdoor cafe in downtown Saigon, and Pyle speaks to the need of establishing a "Third Force" in Vietnam to stop communnism and bring peace to the region. Fowler sees it right off.  Pyle has "C.I.A." written all over him.   If you are looking for a Political Thriller, that's cool, that's what Graham Greene is known for, but very soon into the novel, like in the first ten pages, Pyle shows up dead.  Stabbed to death and thrown in a river. It's a dangerous place, we know that, but what I haven't told you yet is that Pyle was half Fowler's age and was making his moves on Fowler's lover.  Here, the book becomes a Murder Mystery.  

Here comes the Asian Mystique to The Quiet American.  Fowler is a bitter, cynical fifty-something who is married to a devoted Catholic woman back home in England who will never give him a divorce.  He knows this because he has asked her on multiple occasions.  This is a problem because he is in love with a beautiful Vietnamese teen-ager who meets his every physical and emotional need. Her name is Phuong, and she sleeps with him every night with the hopes that one day he will fufill his obligation to marry her.  Not only is she sexually attractive, she does things for Fowler that he will never get at home.  Phuong has turned Fowler on to opium.  Each night, she prepares his pipes, and cooks his heroin. Each night when he opens his eyes in the shadows of his bed, “The lamplight made her skin the color of dark amber as she bent over th flame with a fron of concentration, heating the small paste of opium, twilrin her needle.”

Apparently there is a Vietnamese supersticion that if a young woman supply her lover with a good smoke, he would never leave her.   Fowler smokes like five pipes per night until he passes out in a dream state.   He never leaves her; this is true.  But when Phuong discovers that he has been lying about his wife granting him a divorce, she leaves him - for Pyle.  At this point, you have to figure that Fowler is an UNRELIABLE NARRATOR in The Quiet American. A young handsome Harvard grad - half his age - comes out of nowhere and steals his woman.  This wasn't any part of Fowler's fantasies, whether he was sober or high.   As an MI5 veteran, Graham Green was no stranger to violence or espionage, but are we supposed to believe that seasoned professional journalist like Fowler could be capable of murder?  For a woman?  Once you understand that it's not politics or morals that is driving Fowler's behavior, it's the Asian Mystique that takes over this novel, this is when you yourself will become a believer in Greene's brilliance as a writer.  He wrote the Quiet American before hardly anyone knew where to find Vietnam on a map.  This was before American soldiers would burn down whole villages to protect them from communist infiltrators.  This was before the carpet bombing and dropping of deadly chemical spray.  In Pyle,  Graham Greene saw the worst of American intentions.  In Fowler, he must have seen a lot of himself.