Check back soon for information about high school outreach.

Check back soon for information about pre-med outreach.

LANAMA's principle projects at the medical school involve supporting our current members while striving to increase our numbers through dedicated recruitment efforts. These include Welcome Wagon, which provides housing, airport pick-ups, and welcome dinners to interested interviewees, and helping to organize Welcome Weekend for accepted applicants. We arrange for guest lecturers, social events, volunteer and professional development.

We are currently organizing our regional NNLAMS conference. Click here for more information.

LANAMA is dedicated to serving the greater Latino and Native communities. In addition to arranging talks about relevant health issues in our communities, we are active participants in local health outreach programs. We work with the Multicultural Health program to provide diabetes, cholesterol and blood pressure screening and health information at many community events. We have volunteered at Festival Latino, a large community celebration of Latino culture, church-based screening clinics and flu shot clinics, and the Dia de la Mujer Latina, an event focused on women's health and the health of their families. We hope to coordinate volunteers to provide screening and health information at this years Pow Wow. For more information about community service, please contact Andrea (aknittel@med.umich.edu).

This project is a listing of LANAMA-themed literary, cinematographic, and artistic resources aimed at the intersections of healing and culture.

On Finding and Nuturing the Inspiration to Heal
The Humanismo en Medicina Project is meant to offer a unique database/catalog of inspiring works that shed light on the fields of healing, illness, activism, and the medical arts. These pieces are offered to inspire new and old generations of healers and aid all interested in expanding their understandings of culture, health, illness, and spirit. We hope you enjoy our selection of favorite Latino and Native biographies, novels, articles, photographic essays, films, musical selections, Mexican muralists, and linked websites.

Special recognition of the NYU Literature, Arts and Medicine Database is due. This is a wonderful place to wander about. A number of the works listed below are cross-listed there or were selected based on the NYU recommendation. They don't have much in the way of Spanish language works, but do have artists/works listed by Latino and Native ethnicities among others, and by other useful topic areas (specific illnesses, death and dying, grief, etc.). Another site worth special mention is the Women Make Movies site. See below for more details on this multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization.

"Waking Up in America is the compelling, inspirational autobiography of a man who has emerged as a pioneer in the field of caring for the growing population of impoverished and homeless Americans, and as a force for social change. Dr. Pedro José Greer, the son of Cuban immigrants and the founder of Miami's Camillus Health Concern, has traveled from the trash-littered, drug-infested streets of one of America's toughest neighborhoods to the offices of corporate and political power brokers. Throughout his odyssey he has become known for his tireless efforts to bring health care to society's "untouchables" -- homeless drug addicts, hookers, alcoholics, runaways, or people who have simply lost their way. Many of them are in need of medical care, but all of them are in need of compassion, and "Dr. Joe" dispenses both for free."

For more info on Dr. Greer see: http://guide.miami.com/history/docs/100greer.htm (a father/son interview with Dr. Greer Sr. & Jr.), or search on the web for tons of articles on this incredible Latino leader and activist. His accomplishments, awards, and activities are simply too many to list here.

Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord (Navajo)
The Scapel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing

An appealing memoir of Alvord's progress from Navajo village child to become the first woman surgeon from her tribe. She describes her early years, her experiences at Dartmouth, her decision to go to medical school (at Stanford), cultural obstacles to becoming a doctor (including the Navajo reluctance to invade another's privacy), and the growth and evolution of her own appreciation of Navajo medical practices, especially as they fill gaps in conventional medicine that neglect understanding of the whole person who is seeking healing. -- Copyright © 2000 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR All rights reserved

For more information, visit http://www.winds.uthscsa.edu/2000/Spring/alvord.html.

Ben Carson, MD
Gifted Hands

Univ of Michigan Medical School alumnus, native Detroiter, and celebrated John Hopkins neurosurgeon, who performed the first separation of Siamese twins conjoined at the head, Ben Carson is one of the nation's leading African American health figures and motivational speakers. This memoirs tells his story of his rise from poverty and a pathologic anger through determination, the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, and the love and discipline of his mother. It is an inspiring story of one of our Medical School's most illustrious alumni.

William Carlos Williams, MD (Puerto Rican)
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

One of the most important modern American poets, Dr. Williams, is often forgotten among prominent Latino artists, though his mother was Puerto Rican and you will occasionally run into a Spanish titled poem or phrase in his poetry. Dr. Williams had a long and celebrated literary and medical career serving the poor and working people of Northern New Jersey. As he often remarked, his patients not only became his teachers and inspiration for his literary work, they often were the very subject of his work.

Rafael Campo, MD (Cuban)
The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity and Desire
From Kirkus Reviews , November 1, 1996

Graceful, insightful, often disturbing essays on the healing art by a doctor-poet who daringly reveals his own human vulnerabilities and longings. ``As a poet, my challenge is to create myself, in my own image, using the corporeal materials common to all speakers of English; as a physician, my challenge is to accept the absolute necessity of that process,'' writes Campo, who currently practices medicine at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Hospital. He writes poignantly of his boyhood as the dark-skinned child of Cuban immigrants in affluent white suburbia, of how the cracks about ``faggots'' by his jock roommates at Amherst steeled him to the possibility of his own homosexuality, of meeting in college the man who remains his life's companion. He tells us briefly of his medical education at Harvard and, with deep feeling, of his residency at the University of California in San Francisco, chosen in part for its rich mix of Asians, whites, Latinos, and openly gay and lesbian people. There, immersed in the care of AIDS patients, he contemplated conducting a poetry-writing workshop on the ward, until realizing that it was his patients all along who had been teaching him to write. They also taught him about living and dying, healing and loving. The author of two books of poetry (The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told), Campo has been teased by his colleagues for believing in the curative power of words. His joking response is that he's never seen a poem cause liver failure or bone-marrow toxicity, but his serious one is that poetry is ``the clearest drug of all, the essence and distillation of the process of living itself.'' Today Campo's patients are the mostly Latino poor of Boston; the rest of us must settle for his fine, perceptive writing.
-- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Black Elks Speaks
as told to John Neihardt
from the Intro by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Black Elk shared his visions with John Neihardt because he wished to pass along to future generations some of the reality of Oglala life and, one suspects, to share the burden of visions that remained unfulfilled with a compatible spirit. Black Elk might have been greatly surprised at the popularity of the book today. He could not help but be pleased by it. If the old camp circle, the sacred hoop of the Lakota, and the old days have been rudely shattered by the machines of a scientific era, and if they can be no more in the traditional sense, the universality of the images and dreams must testify to the emergence of a new sacred hoop, a new circle of intense community among Indians far outdistancing the grandeur of former times. So important has this book become that one cannot today attend a meeting on Indian religion and hear a series of Indian speakers without recalling the exact parts of the book that lie behind contemporary efforts to inspire and clarify those beliefs that are "truly Indian."

Reinaldo Arenas (Cuban)
Before Night Falls
From Kirkus Reviews , August 1, 1993

From Cuban novelist Arenas (The Doorman, 1991, etc.), who, ill with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990 shortly after completing this book: an extraordinarily powerful autobiography that's both a poignant personal memoir and a damning political indictment of the Castro regime and its supporters. The only child of a mother whose lover deserted her, Arenas was raised in his peasant grandparents' home. Living in the countryside (whose superstitions and rituals the author vividly evokes here), the large family barely grew enough to feed themselves. As a teenager, Arenas worked in a factory, but, bored, he joined Castro's rebels, whose battles against Batista turned out to be more propaganda than reality--the real killing began, Arenas says, once Castro was in power. Selected for further education, he was sent for accountant's training in a remote camp where Marxist- Leninist texts and dogma were taught by Communists. By now, Arenas, disenchanted with Castro's totalitarian regime, had begun to write. His work soon attracted attention and he moved to Havana, where he wrote two novels that, though unpublished, won prestigious awards. Shortly afterward, the harassment began that would lead to the smuggling abroad of his writings, which were published overseas to critical acclaim; to brutal imprisonment and torture; and, finally, to exile with the Mariel boatlift. A homosexual--Arenas is very frank here about his experiences and feelings--and political dissident, the author had been doubly vulnerable in a state where homosexuals were routinely imprisoned. Exile proved little better: New York was ``soulless,'' and for ``Cubans who have suffered persecution for twenty years in that terrible world, there is really no solace anywhere.'' Unable to ``write and to struggle for the freedom of Cuba,'' Arenas said in a letter intended for posthumous publication, ``I am ending my life.'' A last testament that resonates with passion for the freedom of the human spirit and for the author's beloved Cuba: a distinguished addition to the literature of dissent and exile. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

If you missed the movie based on the book, including the highly acclaimed lead performance of Spanish actor, Javier Bardem (nominated for an Oscar for Best Male Leading Performance), definitely check it out.

Piri Thomas (Nuyorican)
Down These Mean Streets
Book Description of 30th Anniversary Edition

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop.

As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.

Rigoberta Menchu (Quiche Mayan Guatemalan)
I, Rigoberta Menchu : An Indian Woman in Guatemala
as told to and translated by Ann Wright

Although surrounded by some controversy for inconsistencies later discovered in her story, this autobiography of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Rigoberta Menchu, is still often referred to as a Guatemalan "national epic." See David Stoll's "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" for a critical appraisal of the controversy and the powerful truth still presented in this text.
Review by Jesse Larsen "500 Greatest Books by Women" on Amazon.com

"This is my testimony. I didn't learn it from a book and I didn't learn it alone... My personal experience is the reality of a whole people." Born in the mountains of Guatemala into the Quiche, one of twenty-three mestizo groups, Rigoberta Menchu tells her story. The Quiche people's spirituality, much of which must not be told to outsiders, affirms community responsibility for village children and intensely personal relationships with the land and the natural world. The celebration of her ancient culture is all that strengthens in the face of a brutally repressed and poverty-stricken existence. Two of her brothers die as infants from malnutrition. When the Quiche begin their fight to keep the government and big-business people from stealing any more of their land, her family is forced to watch her youngest brother be tortured and burned alive; later her mother is tortured to death, and her father murdered. Obligated by circumstance and unquestionable responsibility to her people, Rigoberta Menchu assumes the role of organizer/leader. These interviews - conducted in Spanish, a language she has spoken for only three years - center on her role as a Quiche woman. Her politics are deeply personal: "They've killed the people dearest to me... Therefore, my commitment to our struggle knows no boundaries nor limits." Despite the layered nature of her written story - from oral history to transcriber to translator - Rigoberta Menchu's unadorned and selfless words ring like a clear and beautiful bell sounding both wonder and warning.

Che Guevara, MD (Argentinian in Cuba & Bolivia)
El Diario del Che en Bolivia (personal diary)
"On Revolutionary Medicine" (essay)
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by John Lee Anderson

Famous figure of the Cuban revolution, Rage Against the Machine regalia, and general pop-counter-culture movements, "Che" is rarely known to have begun his young adult life as a medical student in Argentina. In his essays like "A Revolutionary Medicine", one sees the public health spirit and concern for the poor that drove some of this fiery Marxist's revolutionary fervor. Acquainting yourself on the man behind the myth and propanga (for and against) is definitely recommended.

New York Times Book Review, Peter Canby on Jon Anderson's acclaimed biography of the man known to the world as "Che"

Mr. Anderson, a freelance journalist and the author of an earlier book on guerillas, spent five years on this volume--the first major biography of Che--and in it he portrays Che as a complex, volatile, ultimately tragic figure who was critical to insuring the victory of the Cuban revolution yet unable to live with the results. This book brings to light a rich collection of diaries and letters--many previously unexamined--and is especially interesting for being written from a largely Cuban perspective. Nearly three of Mr. Anderson's five years were spent in Havana, where he was able to gain access to important Cuban archives as well as to Che's famously reclusive widow, Aleida. He also conducted interviews throughout Europe and South America and on three occasions traveled to Russia, where he talked to figures who were crucial in establishing the Kremlin's policies toward Cuba and the United States.

Subcomandante Marcos (Zapatista Leader)
Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos
by Juana Ponce De Leon (Editor)

"I want to remind you that the divisions between countries only serve to illustrate the crime of "contraband" and to give sense to war. Clearly, there exist at least two things greater than borders: one is the crime disguised as modernity, which distributes misery on a world scale; the other is the hope that shame exists only when one fumbles a dance step, and not every time we look in the mirror. To end the first and to make the second one flourish, we need only struggle to be better. The rest follows of its own accord, and is what usually fills libraries and museums.

It is not necessary to conquer the world, it is sufficient to make it anew..."

William Carlos Williams, MD (Puerto Rican)
Doctor Stories
w/ Introduction by Robert Coles, MD

One of American's most famous physicians and poets, and perhaps its most beloved physician-writer, Dr. Williams would say "as a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was the very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write." Son of a Puerto Rican mother from Ponce, Dr. Williams served the poor and working people of Northern New Jersey who as Robert Coles mentions in the Introduction were "ordinary people, plain people who considered themselves lucky to be able to get by, barely, or not so lucky, because jobless--families who had one very important loyalty in common, no matter their backgrounds, and they were ethnically diverse: a willingness, an eagerness, a downright determination to consider one Rutherford doctor their doctor, W.C. Williams, M.D." His stories are a centerpiece in any discussion of medicine in literature, with classics like "The Use of Force", "Old Doc Rivers" & "The Girl with the Pimply Face" , his spirit a testament to the power and priviledge we as future healers have in caring for our patients. [Review by Cyrus Boquin]

from the Introduction by Robert Coles, MD

"There's nothing like a difficult patient to show us ourselves," Williams once said to a medical student, and then he expanded the observation further: "I would learn so much on my rounds, or making home visits. At times I felt like a thief because I heard words, lines, saw people and places--and used it all in my writing. I guess I've told people that, and no one's so surprised! There was something deeper going on, though--the force of all those encounters. I was put off guard again and again, and the result was--well, a descent into myself."

Ana Castillo (Chicana)
So Far From God & Peel My Love Like an Onion
from Penguin edition back cover of So Far from God

Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Latino and the Anglo, the women with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic narrative freedom of a Southwestern Cervantes, Castillo relates the story of crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family.

"Goddamn! Ana Castillo has gone and done what I always wanted to do--written a Chicana telenovela--a novel roaring down Interstate 25 at one hundred and fifteen miles an hour with an almanac of Chicanismo--saints, martyrs, TV, mystics, home remedies, little miracles, dichos, myths, gossip, recipes--fluttering from the fender like a flag. Wacky, wild, y bien funny. Dale gas, girl!"
Sandra Cisneros author of The House of Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek

Alfredo Vea (Chicano)
La Maravilla
From Kirkus Reviews , January 1, 1993

From attorney and onetime migrant farmworker Vea, a bewitching debut based on childhood memories of a squatters' settlement outside 1950's Phoenix. Most multicultural stories pale next to nine-year-old Beto's boyhood in the desert with his Spanish-born grandmother--who struggles to reconcile her curing powers with Catholicism--and his pagan Yaqui grandfather--who can leave his body and fly. Okies, Arkies, African-Americans, Indians who sing Irish railroad songs, transvestites, prostitutes, the Chinese grocer and cook regard each other with suspicious curiosity. Even the Fuller Brush man here is an outsider: a mutilated concentration-camp survivor. All fling about racial stereotypes but can never get away from shared food and music, mutual respect, love. (The Mighty Clouds of Joy Church allows even sinners to tap into its electrical service; the whole community is connected by extension cords.) People live in cardboard houses and junked cars, but much of the novel is very funny; and when people do suffer, it's not from their material poverty: White Vernetta became a prostitute out of sorrow following the lynching-murder of her black/Filipino boyfriend; jealousy leads to crimes of passion; people struggle with remorse for failings toward God and man. Meanwhile, Vea's cross-cultural translations weave enchantment as Beto's grandparents initiate him into values meant to sustain him in materialistic, nontribal mainstream USA. Vea's uneasy mix of magic realism, essay, tragedy, broad comedy, and didactic speech never quite blends, but each element- -like the different races thrown together in the desert--forms an integral part of this astonishing fictionalized tribute. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian)
Love in the Time of Cholera/Amor en los Tiempos de Cholera

Although the female protagonist, Fermina Daza, of this epic on the love does marry a doctor and sometime is spent on his views of his native land's health system and its policies to combat cholera, this is squarely a beautiful story on the endurance of love. As the NYU commentary by Delese Wear states:

In its final pages, this novel attends to a great unspoken in the youth-oriented culture of North America: sexual intimacy between two old people. Once on the boat, without hurry, they went beyond the pitfalls of passion, because "they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

Yet there was sensuousness. They spent "unimaginable hours holding hands in the armchairs by the railing, they exchanged unhurried kisses, they enjoyed the rapture of caresses." And she "accepted with pleasure" when Florentino "dared to explore her withered neck with his fingertips, her bosom armored in metal stays, her hips with their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins." All this they did without guilt or shame, in spite of her shocked middle-aged children at home who believed that "there was an age at which love began to be indecent." Happily for both, Fermina does not back away: "They can all go to hell . . . . If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders."

For more info of Love in the Time of Cholera visit the NYU page here

Luis Rafael Sanchez (Puerto Rican)
La Guaracha del Macho Camacho/Macho Camacho's Beat
by Gregory Rabassa from Intro of Macho Camacho's Beat

Life is a phenomenal thing,frontwards or backwards, however you swing.

Infinitely multiplied by the blare of radios, TVs and record players in San Juan, Macho Camacho's guaracha weaves its way across the city and through the lives of one family on a single day: Senator Vicente Reinosa, a crooked politician stuck in a gargantuan traffic jam; his neurotic, aristocratic wife; their son Benny, a fascist who is quite literally in love with his Ferrari; and the Senator's mistress, who inhabits a poorer world with her idiot child, her cousins (Hughie, Louie, and Dewey) and her friend Dona Chon. Macho Camacho's Beat blends the music of puns, fantastic wordplay, advertising slogans, and pop-culture references with the rhythm of the guaracha to satirize the invasive "Americanization" of the island and the way in which a momentary fad impacts the culture at large.

Have fun understanding the metaphoric significance of the hydrocephalic child and the startling conclusion to this cancion.

Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rican)
The Youngest Doll/La Muneca Menor
exerpts taken from the NYU database:


Summary: A maiden aunt never marries because a river prawn bites her calf and, due to minimal treatment by her physician, nestles there to grow. She devotes her life to her nieces, making for them life-sized dolls on their birthdays and wedding days. When only the youngest niece is left at home, the doctor comes to see his patient and brings his son, also a physician. When the son realizes the father could have cured the leg, the doctor says, "I wanted you to see the prawn that has paid for your education these twenty years."
Commentary: Rosario Ferre, a Puerto Rican writer whose mother came from the landowning elite and whose father, an industrialist, was a pro-statehood governor of the Commonwealth, is herself a supporter of independence for the island. Set in Puerto Rico in the era in which the old sugar cane aristocracy was giving way to the new industrial wealth, each class patriarchal in its own way, "The Youngest Doll" contains a shocking doctor-patient scene showing how social classes use their power and, in particular, how they use women as objects.

For more info of The Youngest Doll visit the NYU page here
For more info on Rosario Ferre, visit http://ensayo.rom.uga.edu/filosofos/puertorico/ferre/.

Rodolfo Anaya (Chicano-New Mexico)
Bless Me, Ultima

One of the fathers the the Chicano literary movement, Bless Me, Ultima is a classic in Chicano literature.
exerpts taken from the NYU database:

Summary: In this lyrical tale, Ultima, an old curandera or healer, comes to live with the family of a young New Mexican boy who learns from her about the healing powers of the natural environment and the human spirit. Antonio's family respects her wisdom and legendary power, though some in the community believe she is a witch. Antonio finds himself drawn to her and under her tutelage develops an awareness of the primal energies of earth and sky that affect human lives and fate.

He goes with her to gather herbs and to visit the sick and comes to understand a connection between healing powers and knowledge of nature. Though he never receives a rational explanation of how Ultima foresees events, cures illnesses, blesses or curses, or why and when she chooses not to intervene, he learns that the knowledge healing requires is threefold: knowledge of the patient, the healing substance, and one's own limitations. He learns that healing requires making oneself vulnerable to sickness and to the spiritual as well as physical needs of the sick.

For more info on Bless Me, Ultima visit the NYU page here

Sherman Alexie
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven & The Toughest Indian in the World
From Kirkus Reviews , July 1, 1993 on the Lone Ranger and Tonto

With wrenching pain and wry humor, the talented Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian--and previously a small-press author (The Business of Fancydancing, a collection of poetry and prose-- not reviewed--etc.)--presents contemporary life on the Spokane Indian Reservation through 22 linked stories. Here, people treat each other (and life) with amused tolerance--although anger can easily erupt in this environment of endemic alcoholism and despair. The history of defeat is ever- present; every attempt to hold onto cultural tradition aches with poignancy: Thomas-Builds-the-Fire is the storyteller everyone mocks and no one listens to; Aunt Nezzy, who sews a traditional full- length beaded dress that turns out to be too heavy to wear, believes that the woman ``who can carry the weight of this dress on her back...will save us all.'' Meanwhile, young men dream of escape--going to college, being a basketball star--but failure seems preordained. These tales, though sad and at times plain- spokenly didactic, are often lyrically beautiful and almost always very funny. Chapters focus on and are narrated by several different characters, but voices and perspectives often become somewhat indistinguishable--confusing until you stop worrying about who is speaking and choose to listen to the voice of the book itself and enter into its particular sensibility. Irony, grim humor, and forgiveness help characters transcend pain, anger and loss while the same qualities make it possible to read Alexie's fiction without succumbing to hopelessness. Forgiveness seems to be the last moral/ethical value left standing: the ability both to judge and to love gives the book its searing yet affectionate honesty.
-- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Leslie Marmon Silko
Almanac of the Dead & Ceremony
from the back cover of the Penguin edition of Ceremony

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.

Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions, despair.

Louise Erdrich
Tracks & Love Medicine

Louise Edrich is of mixed heritage with her mother being French Ojibwa, and her father being German American. She was raised primarily in North Dakota near a reservation where her parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Review by Erica Bauermeister "500 Greatest Books by Women" on Amazon.com on Tracks

The time is the early twentieth century. Epidemics, harsh winters, and the greed of white men are rapidly destroying the land and its Native American people. Tracks is the story of the Chippewa Indians and in particular one woman, Fleur, told through two voices of two opposing Native American viewpoints. Nanapush, respected male elder, relays to Fleur's rebellious daughter the history of her people and the power of her mother. But to awkward and rejected Pauline, who latches on to Catholic doctrine and twists her life into one of mortification and revenge, Fleur is an evil woman who couples with the water spirit in the lake. Aware of each other but always speaking to others, Nanapush and Pauline's alternating voices rise and clash like the two ways of life they represent. Whose representation is correct? Where does knowledge of the earth and its mysteries end and magic begin? And what is the fate of the Native American people in the midst of these different ways of knowing? This is a lyrical and passionate novel about belief, and about love for nature and individuals.

Ernest Hemingway
"Indian Camp"

Ernest Hemingway's father, Clarence, was a medical doctor and they often would vacation and fish near their summer home in Northern Michigan. Some helpful background for the story, which is a classic in the Medicine in Literature canon.
From NYU database

Summary: From a fishing trip the local doctor is summoned to an Indian village to assist a woman in labor. With him are his young son and an older male relative. The physician assesses the situation in the closed, pungent hut and determines that his only option is section--with a pen knife and fishing leader as his instruments, and no anesthesia for the Indian woman. The doctor arrogantly, but only briefly, celebrates his success as a surgeon only to discover that the woman's husband, apparently unable to tolerate his wife's pain and the racism of the white visitors . . . [deletion to conceal ending] The child, who has observed the entire proceedings asks, "Is dying hard, Daddy?

For more info of Indian Camp visit the NYU page here

Junot Diaz (Dominican)
Drown
From Booklist, Donna Seaman

Ever since Diaz began publishing short stories in venues as prestigious as The New Yorker, he has been touted as a major new talent, and his debut collection affirms this claim. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Diaz uses the contrast between his island homeland and life in New York City and New Jersey as a fulcrum for his trenchant tales. His young male narrators are teetering into precarious adolescence. For these sons of harsh or absent fathers and bone-weary, stoic mothers, life is an unrelenting hustle. In Santo Domingo, they are sent to stay with relatives when the food runs out at home; in the States, shoplifting and drugdealing supply material necessities and a bit of a thrill in an otherwise exhausting and frustrating existence. There is little affection, sex is destructive, conversation strained, and even the brilliant beauty of a sunset is tainted, its colors the product of pollutants. Keep your eye on Diaz; his first novel is on the way.

Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press
Edited by Martin Espada

An inspiring collection of activist poetry edited by an acclaimed Nuyorrican poet, Martin Espada of "A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen" and "Imagine the Angels of Bread." Although not exclusive to Latin American and Latino/a poets (a true "American" Anthology--de las Americas), this anthology showcases the poetry of Claribel Alegria, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Gioconda Belli, Ernesto Cardenal, Otto Rene Castillo, Roque Dalton, Martin Espada, Leroy Quintana, Roberto Sosa (Honduras presente!), Clemente Soto Velez, Daisy Zamora, and more. English Translations and original Spanish language texts.

Hugh Blumenfeld's reading guide can be found at the Curbstone Press website and has this to say:
"Poetry like bread, is for everyone." It's a sentiment that few students in the United States would find true. Poetry here is more like cake--a sweet luxury--or like caviar, an acquired taste of the well-to-do. Yet, in some areas of the world, poetry still has the nutritional urgency and universality of bread. In the recently liberated countries of Eastern Europe and Latin American, poets have become elected leaders. In countries still under the yoke of oppression, poets are jailed, tortured, and even killed for what they write. When large numbers of people read poetry, learn it by heart and pass it on, it can become dangerous to any government whose power depends on crushing the human spirit. Even a love poem, if it reflects people's dreams and aspirations or evokes a common history, can make a despot uneasy.

"Como Tu"
por Roque Dalton
Salvadoran Poet & Revoluntionary (1935-1975)

Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesia es como el pan, de todos.

Y que mis venas no terminan en mi
sino en la sangre unanime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesia de todos.

For more info on the inspiring activities of Curbstone Press, please visit www.curbstone.org

William Carlos Williams, MD (Puerto Rican)
Collected Works

Rafael Campo, MD (Cuban)
What the Body Told & Diva

Pablo Neruda (Chilean)
Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada

Gabriela Mistral (Chilean)

Yolanda Blanco (Nicaraguan)
Mistagogia: Ritual de Iniciacion

Yolanda Blanco, a Nicaraguan feminist poet, editor of the excellent "Dariana" homenaje/homaje website to Central American poetry, particularly the isthmus's most beloved, Ruben Dario. Mistagogia is a collection of short poems nicely posted on this site describing the iniciation rituals of menarche, menstration, and menapause. No Enlish translations provided.
For Mistagogia, see http://www.dariana.com/mistagogia2.html

Aloud : Voices from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe
by Miguel Algarin (Editor), Bob Holman (Editor), Nicole Blackman (Contributor)

Paul Farmer, MD, PhD
Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame
co-founder of Partners in Health (link HERE)
co-director of Infectious Disease and Social Change Dept., Harvard Medical School
From The New England Journal of Medicine ® 2000 The Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.

For Farmer, the causes of tuberculosis and AIDS, the two epidemics this book [Infections and Inequalities] addresses, have as much to do with social inequality as they do with microorganisms. Using data mostly from Haiti, where he has worked since 1983, in addition to data from the United States and Peru, Farmer argues that social and economic inequalities "have powerfully sculpted not only the distribution of infectious diseases but also the course of health outcomes among the afflicted." The pathogenic agency of inequality is so great, Farmer maintains, that "inequality itself constitutes our modern plague," a statement he seeks to demonstrate in the balance of the book. In doing so, he repeatedly acknowledges the work of his mentor Arthur Kleinman, economist Amartya Sen, epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, and others whose work in a variety of disciplines over the past two decades has focused attention on inequality and lack of social cohesion and their adverse effects on health. There are two distinctive aspects of Farmer's approach. First, Farmer has been a social activist since the early 1980s, when, as a medical student doing elective course work in Haiti, he began a long-term project to improve the health of rural Haitians -- the Clinique Bon Sauveur, which now sees more than 30,000 patients per year and trains hundreds of Haitian health care workers. Second, Farmer uses his experience as an activist to discuss critically the conventional wisdom about anthropology and infectious disease, specifically the causes of emerging infection.

Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down:
A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures
From The New England Journal of Medicine ® July 30, 1998 The Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.

"In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman tells the story of a Hmong family's experience with the American health care system and highlights many of the weaknesses of what some describe as the best health care system in the world. Fadiman writes beautifully and weaves the story of the Lees, their doctors, and the social and political history of the Hmong people and their unwilling immigration to the United States into a book that is difficult to put down once started. The Spirit Catches You will appeal to anyone interested in the culture of medicine and the interface between different cultures. It will also attract readers interested in the dynamics of power in the doctor-patient relationship and readers who can find inspiration in one family's devotion to a chronically ill child."
Winner of the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction

Although dealing with the cultural collisions involved in the care of an epileptic Hmong girl and her family, The Spirit will enrich any reader's/healer's understanding of the complexity of providing appropriate care for our multicultural nation. If you know little to nothing of the Hmong culture and the US involvement with the Hmong community during Cambodian military operations, this book provides a poignant introduction. It's a wonderful book and engrossing read!

For more on Anne Fadiman's work and The Spirit, http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/links/anne_fadiman.html

Daniel Rothenberg
With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today
Asst. Profesor of Anthropology at Univ. of Michigan
Amazon.com Book Description

With These Hands documents the farm labor system through the presentation of a collection of voices-workers who labor in the fields, growers who manage the multi-billion dollar agricultural industry, contractors who link workers with growers, coyotes who smuggle people across the border, union organizers, lobbyists, physicians, workers' families in Mexico, farmworker children and others. The diversity of stories presents the world of migrant farmworkers as a complex social and economic system, a network of intertwined lives, showing how all Americans are bound to the struggles and contributions of our nation's farm laborers.

Vine Deloria, Jr., JD
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

Vine Deloria is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He obtained a master of theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois in 1963 and a JD from the University of Colorado in 1970. A prolific writer, he has received three honorary doctorates and numerous other awards honoring his outstanding contributions to legal and historical scholarship. Professor Deloria's best-known book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto established him as an authoritative voice for American Indian history and contemporary Indian affairs. Other well-known works of his include God is Red and Red Earth, White Lies. With David Wilkins he recently co-authored Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations.

Paolo Friere (Brazilian)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Corrie Schoenberg, Continuum International Publishing Group , July 12, 2000

Synopsis: The methodology of the late Paulo Freire, once considered such a threat to the established order that he was "invited" to leave his native Brazil, has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.

 

Sebastiao Salgado (Brazilian)
Workers: An Archaelogy of the Industrial Age
Migrations: Humanity in Transition (1993-99)
The Children
An Uncertain Grace: Essays by Eduardo Galeano & Fred Ritchin
from the Kodak Legends On-Line website, great sample gallery!

His images are gorgeous and beautiful as photographic objects of tone and light. Yet they often express human suffering. "What I want in my pictures is not that they'll look like art objects," he says. "They are journalist pictures. All my pictures. No exceptions."
Salgado rose to international fame with his stark and moving photographs of famine in the Sahel (1984-85). Then he made an indelible impression on the international mind with Workers (1986-92), a documentation of manual labor in its most dramatically primitive forms around the world. And he continues to expand his vision and his scope even further today, with the massive project partly shown here, Migrations: Humanity in Transiton (1993-1999).
For Salgado's official website and his Instituto Terra, see http://www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/
For the NY Times on Salgado (photos, articles, etc.), see http://www.nytimes.com/specials/salgado/photos/
For more on Salgado's appointment as UNICEF Special Representative, see http://www.unicef.org/salgado/

Max Aguilera-Hellweg (Mexican-American)
The Sacred Heart: An Atlas of the Body Seen Through Invasive Surgery
Presently beginning a newfound medical student career at Tulane Medical school, Max Aguilera-Hellweg is a celebrated photojournalist who has been in Peru pointing his lens among the Sendero Luminoso, as they pointed their guns at him and writer-turned-presidential-candidate Mario Vargas Llosa; and among 12-year-old Thais who'd been sold into prostitution by their parents; and in California: in the orchards and fields with migrant labor leader Cesar Chavez, about whom Aguilera-Hellweg says, "It was like meeting Jesus Christ." Now he brings us "The Sacred Heart", read below:

In words and photographs, he chronicles more than fifty operations, including a liver transplant, knee replacement, spinal cord surgery, modified radical mastectomy, caesarean birth, removal of a brain tumor, and organ transplant. Aguilera-Hellweg brings to life the surgeons' skill - - and captures the shocking reality of what our bodies look like under the knife. Shocking, yet strangely beautiful, these vivid color photographs have been hailed by American Photo as a "new singular vision of the medical art." These taboo-shattering images are disturbing, intriguing and powerful. Without exception, these remarkable photos have a profound effect on everyone who sees them.

For more information, visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/23/12/21.html
or the AAMC's article at http://www.aamc.org/newsroom/reporter/nov2000/road.htm

Martin Chambi (Peruvian Indigeno)
Latin American's first Indigenous photographer, Martin Chambi (1891-1973), was described by the Argentinian photographer, Sara Facio, as "el primero que mira a su gente con ojos no colonizados/the first to look at his people without colonized eyes." There is a wonderful page in his honor at http://garnet.berkeley.edu/~dolorier/Chambidoc.html.
It is well worth a look to see some marvelous black and white photography of the indigenous people of Peru done by one of their own.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican)
from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1986)

Deeply rooted in the culture of the Mexican people, Manuel Alvarez Bravo has created a major body of photographic work the significance of which has gone unrecognized until recent years. He has focused on the subtleties of human interaction, particularly in the lower classes, to make eloquent images of dreams, death, and transient life. Bravo was born in Mexico City, the son and grandson of painters and photographers.

For more on Alvarez Bravo, see http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/alvarez_bravo/alvarez_bravo.html

Larry Towell
El Salvador
from Amazon.com

A deeply compelling look at a tumultuous country, Larry Towell's photographs are at once powerful and compassionate, revealing a country of violence, heartbreak, strength, and dignity. Magnum photographer Larry Towell first traveled to El Salvador in 1986 as a member of a human rights delegation. Towell is perhaps one of the finest photojournalists since Cartier-Bresson.

For more on Larry Towell, see http://www.noorderlicht.com/eng/fest97/eden/towell

Native Nations: First Americans as seen by Edward Curtis

Diego Rivera

Jose Clemente Orozco

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Nicaraguan Murals 1930-2000
This beautiful site, part of Stanford's "Expressions of Central America" project allows you to take a virtual/visual tour of hundreds of Nicaraguan murals organized into the categories: Primitivist, Mexican School, Political, Graffiti, Children, Myth and Ritual. Much of the compilation and credit for this project is is due to David Kunzle, author of The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992, [from the UC Press release on this work: "In the years following Nicaragua's 1979 Sandinista Revolution, more than three hundred murals were created by Nicaraguan and international artist brigades. David Kunzle was profoundly moved by the aesthetic and political power of these murals, and when he saw that they were being destroyed after the Sandinistas were voted out in 1990, he resolved to document them."]

The site is a part of Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies and School of Education "Expressions of Central America" Project, "an innovative, online, education tool to help teachers and students to uncover the artistic, cultural and historical heritage of traditionally underrepresented Central America peoples." It has a wonderful interactive format with pictures, video clips, interviews, and is certainly worth a visit.
For Nicaraguan Murals 1930-2000, visit http://www.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua/murals/index.html
For Stanford's "Expressions of Central America", visit http://www.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua

Women Make Movies
Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. Women Make Movies was established in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry. The organization provides services to both users and makers of film and video programs, with a special emphasis on supporting work by women of color. This was a helpful resource for the our HEM Project page and you'll see a number of their films described below.
For more on Women Make Movies, see http://www.wmm.com/

Men With Guns (set in Mythic Latin American country)
Spanish, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna w/ English Subtitles
Directed by John Sayles

Synopsis from the Men with Guns official website
Humberto Fuentes (Federico Luppi), a wealthy doctor who is approaching retirement, has never paid attention to the realities of the political life of his country. He considers the greatest achievement of his life, his "legacy," to be his participation in an international health program in which he trained young students to work as doctors in the poorest villages. When Dr. Fuentes announces his intention to visit his students in the mountains, his children and his most prominent patient, an army general, try to dissuade him.

One day in the market in the Capital City where he lives, Fuentes sees Bravo (Roberto Sosa), who was the best student in the program. He follows him to a squalid slum in the outskirts of the city, Los Perdidos, where Bravo operates a "pharmacy." Fuentes asks Bravo why he isn't in the countryside working among the poor. But Bravo will only say, "Go find Cienfuegos" (another of Fuentes' students). "He's got the whole story. . ."

For Sayles, it was important that the story not be set in a specific place. "I didn't want people to say, that can only happen in El Salvador, that can only happen in Guatemala or Mexico," says Sayles. "This doesn't just happen in Latin America. This kind of thing is happening in Africa, in the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. And it certainly happened in the United States. We were just more thorough in eliminating indigenous people than some other societies."

Review by Francisco Goldman from the Men with Guns official website
Without malice or vengeance or stridency, "Men With Guns" asks us to weigh the price between not knowing and knowing, between silence and acknowledging, between lies and truth, between "innocence" and self-knowledge. During the mythological journey narrated in this film, all the central characters finally confront those choices, and we do so with them. Just as the doctor, the priest and the soldier in the movie realize how the personal--that which affects only them-- also affects their country, we, watching the movie, make a similar journey. In that private, inner-space of our own where art is experienced, where anything is possible, where the imagination reminds us that we are alone and never alone in our common humanity, we feel what is at stake in this movie.

Casas de Fuego/Houses Of Fire (Argentina)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Written and directed by Juan Bautista Stagnaro
from UCSF's "The Synapse" review by Alicia Chang (1996)

Argentine Writer and director Juan Bautista Stagnaro bases his 1995 film on the life of Dr. Salvador Mazza, a respected physician and academician at a prestigious university in Buenos Aires. At the age of 40, Mazza has become focused on studying the elusive and mysterious disease first described by the Brazilian physician, Carlos Chagas. Also known as American Trypanosomiasis, Chagas' disease is endemic in various parts of South America, affecting a large proportion of rural communities. Chronic infection with the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruz, can lead to the development of cardiomyopathies, which often result in death.

In Casas de Fuego, Stagnaro artfully depicts the slow and difficult battle of one man against the formidable obstacles presented by a recalcitrantly conservative and unbelieving medical society, and an entrenched and comfortable bourgeoisie. Mazza's struggles are apparent from the film's opening scenes, in which he fights with a colleague for cadaver hearts. Mazza's pugnacity persists as he struggles for scientific recognition and funding for his research. His fighting spirit is also made apparent in rather comic physical and verbal outbursts of temper. Frustration, anger, isolation, and the need for physical release are skillfully portrayed by Sola under Stagnaro's direction.

Director Juan Bautista Stagnaro was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for a previous work, Camila, in 1983.

For complete review, see http://www.ucsf.edu/~synapse/archives/Sept26.96/reviews.html#ac1UCSF

Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)
A film by Susana Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo (1985, 64 min)
from Women Make Movies (WMM) website

This Academy award-nominated documentary about the Argentinian mothers’ movement to demand to know the fate of 30,000 “disappeared” sons and daughters remains as extraordinarily powerful as when it was first released. As well as giving an understanding of Argentinian history in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Las Madres shows the empowerment of women in a society where women are expected to be silent. Las Madres provides a banner of hope in the international struggle for human rights.

"A testimony to the most primal feminist power the moral authority of motherhood. The miracle of the film is that it doesn't merely leave you with sorrow or outrage, but with humanistic fervor." Michael Sragow, San Francisco Examiner

For the Official Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo site, see http://www.madres.org
For WMM catalog/ordering and description, see http://www.wmm.com/Catalog/pages/c85.htm

Macho (Nicaragua/Scotland)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Directed by Lucinda Broadbent (2000,26 min)
from Women Make Movies (WMM) website

In 1998, Managua, Nicaragua became host to one of the most publicized and controversial cases of sexual abuse to hit modern day Latin America. At the epicenter of the scandal stood none other than Nicaraguan Sandinista leader and ex-President Daniel Ortega. . . a group of pioneering men rallied around the episode to organize a radical campaign against domestic violence and sexual abuse. Their efforts eventually led to the formation of the internationally acclaimed organization, Men Against Violence.

"Macho", a film by Lucinda Broadbent, provides an in-depth profile of Men Against Violence and its ground-breaking work towards eliminating attitudes of male chauvinism (known as machismo in Spanish) that have perpetuated violent acts against women in Nicaragua and Latin America. The film strongly demonstrates that despite living in one of the most destitute countries in Latin America, this group has succeeded in providing a model that is used by men worldwide to discuss issues of violence and advocate for the rights of women.

For WMM catalog/ordering and description, see http://www.wmm.com/Catalog/pages/c527.htm

All About My Mother/Todo Sobre Mi Madre (Espana)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Like Water for Chocolate/Como Agua Para Chocolate (Mexico)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Directed by Alfonoso Arua

Bitter Sugar/Azucar Amarga (Cuba)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Directed by Leon Ichaso

This visceral, energizing look at contemporary Cuba is an impassioned love story set against the political and economic tensions of Havana. Gustavo, an ideal young Communist with a glorified vision of Castro's regime, falls in love with Yolanda, a disenchanted dancer who longs to escape to Miami. Despite their radically opposed beliefs, the young couple are inseparable. The city begins to erupt around Gustavo when his rebellious musician brother injects himself with the AIDS virus in suicidal protest, and his father realizes that he will earn more money as a hotel bar pianist than as a doctor. Spanish with English subtitles. Black and White, filmed in the Dominican Republic with documentary footage/stills from Cuba.

Before Night Falls (Cuba)
English w/ some Spanish
Directed by Julian Schnabel
Based on the novel by Reinaldo Arenas

Smoke Signals (USA-Native Crew and direction)
Directed by Chris Eyre
Based on the short stories of Sherman Alexie

Open Your Eyes/Abre Los Ojos (Espana)
Spanish w/ English Subtitles
Directed by Alejandro Amenabar

Mexican Cinema