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Tundra EscapeBy: Nino Campos If you can escape from the Tundra in two days, Mr. Ballard, you will be automatically rewarded with $20,000 in your bank account at the end of 48 hours.” |
Mi Patria By: Amalia Gonzalez The sun was coming down, the moon rising. I was walking alongside my two cousins, Vicente and Johnny, and my Aunt Leticia. The road was crowded with people, all walking in two single file lines and chanting Christmas carols. Well, not exactly Christmas carols. In Mexico, my family, and their entire pueblo, celebrate the journey Mary and Joseph took from Jerusalem to Bethlehem by taking long walks from an old church, through the town, and finally arriving at the new church. Two men carried a ceramic baby Jesus, displayed on a small table and held aloft by the men with poles that ran underneath the table and rested on their shoulders. READ MORE |
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My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King By: Juan Anguiano Reymundo Sánchez is young man from Puerto Rico that has just moved to Chicago’s Little Village barrio. His family later moves to the Humboldt Park neighborhood. He lives with his mother, his stepfather, and three sisters. He doesn’t get along with his stepfather and they always fight. Before moving to Chicago, he lived in Puerto Rico, where his cousin raped him. Rey was threatened never to tell anyone about what happened, and brings that scar with him to Chicago. His stepfather loses his job and the family is forced to move back to Puerto Rico. The relationship he had with his stepfather only gets worse. The mother decides to send Rey back to Chicago to live with her stepson Héctor. Here is where the making of a Latin King begins. READ MORE |
A Congregation at Saint Sylvester By: Carlos Marban There is a little boy sitting with his mother at church. He wears an overgrown Machu Picchu hat on his soft head. The kind that many of his grandfathers and great grandfathers wear as they traverse the mountain landscapes of Peru. There are a few people scattered and populating the brown benches all over the dimly lit brown church. The people couch and sniff and are all very attentively paying attention to Padre Domínguez as he gives his end of the service speech. Outside the day is grey and brown, wet and icy, mist seems to be converging and shyly dancing on the first doorsteps to the church. Mist that seems to be afraid to come in, seems to want to be asked to come into the holy church. The boy sitting on the bench next to his mother is young, small, and full of sugar and impatience. He nudges and fuzzes in his seat. READ MORE |
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DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
Death and the Living
By: Sonia Perez Gandara
It was November 1. An altar decorated with flowers and the pictures of loved ones in their past lives, was surrounded by a group of students.
Their faces were skeletal replicas. They represented death. The students shared stories of their relatives that have departed the earth and its wonders. They weren’t mourning the death of their loved ones, instead they were celebrating the life that they once lived. When they finished their stories, they continued their journey onto another Columbia College building. READ MORE
FICTION
RAFI
By: Jenine Arteaga
For Angel
I remember Rafael Sosa with his slightly crooked, definitely pointed nose, heavy eyebrows with even darker eyes beneath them and a broad forehead with lazy hair that always fell over his temple. He was a good kid, you know. We would sit on the front steps of school, sometimes leaning against the cool red bricks when it was hot out. He would wait for my ride to pick me up and wave goodbye, setting out to a destination he never spoke about.
But while we sat there we’d talk about all the things nobody would ever figure were important, like the sound of the trees and how it reminded him of the ocean in Puerto Rico. He’d put his finger to his mouth and the both of us would fall silent, listening to the rustling, me imagining what the ocean looked like and asking him because I’d never seen it. READ MORE