The Sons Of Guadalupe

"Guadalupe, California, a town of 2,500 residents in 1965 contributed 228 Vietnam era veterans during the 1960s and early 1970s, at a ratio 300% above the national average. Of these men, 148 were Chicanos, 34 were Anglo Americans, 34 were Filipino Americans and 12 were of Japanese descent. There were also 56 sets of brothers which included at least 116 of the men. Read of their life in small-town America before the war, their war experiences and how the war continues to influence their lives today. Read the transcripts of over 25 word-for-word interviews that cover topics like their Vietnam War experiences and their town when they were growing up and their difficult transitions to civilian life since, photos during their war experiences and the multi-cultural history of their town. Read of the history of the town, from the filming of the first Ten Commandments movie at the local dunes to the return by the veterans to the town to form the Central Coast Chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America. Read of the war exploits of men like Ernie Serrano, recipient of 12 medals for valor and other stories of struggle and triumph."--Description from www.amazon.com

Pop-ups, pull tabs, and other moveable features illustrate scenes from the story of Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Nearly a decade after Spain's conquest of Mexico, the future of Christianity on the American continent was very much in doubt. Confronted with a hostile colonial government and Native Americans wary of conversion, the newly-appointed bishop-elect of Mexico wrote to tell the King of Spain that, unless there was a miracle, the continent would be lost. Between December 9 and December 12, 1531, that miracle happened, and it forever changed the future of the continent. It was then that the Virgin Mary famously appeared to a Native American Christian convert on a hilltop outside of what is now Mexico City. The image she left imprinted on his cloak or tilma has puzzled scientists for centuries, and yet Our Lady of Gudalupe’s place in history is profound. A continent that just months before the apparitions seemed completely lost to Christianity suddenly and inexplicably embraced it by the millions. Our Lady of Guadalupe's message of love replaced the institutionalized violence of the Aztec culture, and built a bridge between two worlds — the old and the new — that were just ten years earlier engaged in brutal warfare. Today, Our Lady of Guadalupe continues to inspire the devotion of millions. From Canada to Argentina — and even beyond the Americas — one finds great devotion to her, and great appreciation for her message of love, unity and hope. Today reproductions of the Virgin’s miraculous image can be seen throughout North and South America, in churches and homes, on billboards and even clothing apparel. Her shrine in Mexico City, where the miraculous image is housed to this day, is one of the most visited in the world. In Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love, Anderson & Chavez trace the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe from the sixteenth century to the present discuss of how her message was and continues to be an important catalyst for religious and cultural transformation. Looking at Our Lady of Guadalupe as a model of the Church and Juan Diego as a model for all Christians who seek to answer Christ's call of conversion and witness, the authors explore the changing face of the Catholic Church in North, Central, and South America, and they show how Our Lady of Guadalupe's message was not only historically significant, but how it speaks to contemporary issues confronting the American continents and people today.

From the town of Comfort in the Central Hill Country of Texas to the Gulf Coast of Texas, in 1971, four boys, ages 17 and 15, set out in two canoes to travel via the Guadalupe River 500 miles to the Gulf. Parents had given their consent and met them every Sunday. Two boys, kept daily journals and one took 80 pictures. Their adventure took them over huge Canyon Lake -- showing whitecaps -- an encounter with an attacking granddaddy cottonmouth moccasin -- a six-inch rainfall -- and logjams. The book concludes with brief biographies of the three remaining adventurers, (now successful businessmen) and one is a scientist at Texas A&M and also includes perspectives of how they view their daring odyssey from today's vantage point. It is dedicated to all teenage boys who not only dream dreams of adventure, but are lucky enough to follow them and live to tell the story.

Recounts the story of Juan Diego, who hears the voice of the Virgin Mary asking him to petition the bishop for a shrine to be built in her honor, but to which the bishop will not agree unless Juan can bring him a sign.

Following his ordination as a Franciscan priest in 1937, Chvez performed the difficult duties of an isolated back-country pastor, an army chaplain in World War II, and became an author of note, as well as something of an artist and muralist. Upon all of his endeavors, one finds the imprint of his religious perspective.

Luis D. León's compelling, innovative exploration of religion in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands issues a fundamental challenge to current scholarship in the field and recharts the landscape of Chicano faith. La Llorona's Children constructs genealogies of the major traditions spanning Mexico City, East Los Angeles, and the southwestern United States: Guadalupe devotion, curanderismo, espiritualismo, and evangelical/ Pentecostal traditions. León theorizes a religious poetics that functions as an effective and subversive survival tactic akin to crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. He claims that, when examined in terms of broad categorical religious forms and intentions, these traditions are remarkably alike and resonate religious ideas and practices developed in the ancient Mesoamerican world. León proposes what he calls a borderlands reading of La Virgen de Guadalupe as a transgressive, border-crossing goddess in her own right, a mestiza deity who displaces Jesus and God for believers on both sides of the border. His energetic discussion of curanderismo shows how this indigenous religious practice links cognition and sensation in a fresh and powerful technology of the body—one where sensual, erotic, and sexualized ways of knowing emphasize personal and communal healing. La Llorona’s Children ends with a fascinating study of the rich and complex world of Chicano/a Pentecostalism in Los Angeles, a tradition that León maintains allows Chicano men to reimagine their bodies into a unified social body through ritual performance. Throughout the narrative, the connections among sacred spaces, saints, healers, writers, ideas, and movements are woven with skill, inspiration, and insight.

Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, cats, a snake, and a strange fungus all serve here as mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature buried within us. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce and the impulse not to, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together. Each Nettel tale creates, with tightly wound narrative tension, a space wherein her characters feel excruciatingly human, exploring how the wounds we incur in life manifest themselves within us, clandestinely, irrevocably, both unseen and overtly. In a precise writing style that is both subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite. Natural Histories is the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.