Join us in the Martin Luther King Center on Wednesday, September 25^th  where we’ll be hosting one of Year of Mexico’s many events.

Come meet, talk to and eat with nationally syndicated columnist and bestselling author Gustavo Arellano presents a tasty trip through the history and culture of Mexican food in the United States, uncovering great stories and charting the cuisine’s tremendous popularity north of the border. Arellano’s fascinating narrative combines history, cultural criticism, food writing, personal anecdotes, and Jesus on a tortilla.

In seemingly every decade for over a century, America has tried new culinary trends from south of the border, loved them, and demanded the next big thing. As a result, Mexican food dominates American palates to the tune of billions of dollars in sales per year, from canned refried beans to tortilla wraps and ballpark nachos. It’s a little-known history, one that’s crept up on this country and left us better for it. 

The White Man’s the Devil~ The Black Man is King: Intraracial Sexual Politics and the Consequences for Black Women

On Wednesday September 11, 2013, The R&B Divas LA part two premiered. All of the women on stage discussed how they had been previously been beaten, sexually molested, and raped throughout their lives while in intimate relationships. On August 12, 2012 NFL player Chad Ochocinco Johnson was charged with “head-butting” his wife Evelyn Lozado. On February 8, 2009, singer Rhianna was beaten to the point of being unrecognizable by singer Chris Brown in a relationship dispute. All of these incidents have sparked huge debate within black communities. Unfortunately, the overwhelming response to these incidents has been to engender sympathy and forgiveness to the perpetrators, and to demonize these women for speaking their realities publicly. This in many ways, has given the message to young Black women and men that when Black women suffer abuse, whether physical, emotional, and/or sexual, at the hands of a Black man, the Black community historically and presently has not supported those women.

However, when Black women have accused White men of these same political ills, the black community has been overwhelming supportive, even if those incidents are found out later to be fabricated. Using the voices of the R&B Divas LA, and using the cases of Tawana Brawley, Crystal Magnum, Anita Hill, Deseree Washington, Rhianna, and Evelyn this presentation, will explore the historical and present intraracial and sociopolitical dynamics that are in play when a Black woman accuses a black man and/or white man of sexual impropriety and how the Black community has responded to such incidents.   

Translators Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich will read from their book of translations of Vsevolod Nekrasov, I LIVE I SEE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), offering a taste of the original Russian along with a rich selection of Nekrasov’s work in English. Gerald Janecek, Professor Emeritus in the UK Department of Modern and Classical Languages and author of the book’s afterword, will also speak about his history of working with Nekrasov and other poets of his time.

Vsevolod Nekrasov (1934-2009) was part of the “non-conformist” Lianozovo group, a founder of Moscow Conceptualism, and the foremost poetic minimalist to emerge from the Soviet literary underground. Before the fall of the USSR, his work appeared only in samizdat and Western publications. With an economy of lyrical means and a wry sense of humor, Nekrasov’s early poems rupture Russian poetic traditions and stultified Soviet language, while his later work tackles the excesses of the new Russian order.

Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. A longtime student of both literatures, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Slavic literatures at Harvard University. Recent publications include

Andrei Sen-Senkov’s Anatomical Theater (translated with Peter Golub, Zephyr Press, 2013). Ongoing translation projects include prose works by Georgii Ball and Viktor Ivaniv and polemical essays by the great Yugoslav writer Miroslav Krleža.

Bela Shayevich is a writer, translator, and illustrator living in Chicago. Her translations have appeared in It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev (UDP/n+1, 2012) and various periodicals including Little Star, St. Petersburg Review, and Calque. She was the editor of n+1 magazine’s translations of the Pussy Riot closing statements.