Las Cruces Public Libraries is holding a series of poetry discussions/crafting sessions called Palabras y Artesanias (Words and Crafts).
The first session will begin at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, January 14, 2025, at Thomas Branigan Memorial Library, 200 E. Picacho Avenue.
Registration is required for each session and is now open.
This series is funded by the Latino Poetry – Places We Call Home grant, a project to foster nationwide conversations through a groundbreaking new poetry anthology.
The anthology is divided into eight themes:
- Ancestry and Identity – Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 /SESSION IS NOW COMPLETED
- Language Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025
- Voice and resistance Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025
- First and second homes Tuesday, Mar. 4, 2025
- Family and community Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2025
- Music and performance Tuesday, Apr. 8, 2025
- Labor Tuesday, Apr. 15, 2025
- Earth and Myth Tuesday, Apr. 22, 2025
The January 28, 2025, session reflects the theme of Language. “Tenango,” derived from the Nahuatl word for “place of walls,” refers to its place of origin, but its style and technique are deeply entrenched in Otomí/ hñähñu traditions. The designs, characterized by depictions of animals, plants, and rural life scenes, are not only artistic but also represent the stories, myths, and beliefs of the Otomí/hñähñu people. One’s fashions speak before the person has spoken, customize an embroidered design that speaks the language of your stories, myths and beliefs. We will help you transfer the design to your trucker hat, demonstrate the technique and supple an embroidery needle and thread.
The February 18, 2025 session is themed Voice & Resistance. Latino Poetry has a robust tradition of protest and critique. Latinos have participated in all the major social justice and liberation movements in the U.S. in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, from the civil rights movement to advocacy for LGBTQ+ and undocumented people, to workers’ rights. Freedom struggles in places such as Puerto Rico stretch back even further. Poets were essential in these movements: at the height of the Chicano movement poets were often featured at political events. What sort of language and imagery do we encounter in the political poems of the Latino poetic tradition? How do the poets understand their role in political struggle?
Our fourth event is on the theme of First and Second Homes. This takes place on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Many Latino poets have explored what it means to live in the U.S. while retaining, even over many generations, deep connections to an ancestral homeland. How do poets express a sense of displacement and exile? What role do cultural memory and nostalgia play? How do the histories of war, national sovereignty, shifting borders, and the quest for economic security affect how poets understand themselves, their families, and their communities?
Additional sessions of this series will take place beginning at 4 p.m. on select Tuesdays through April at the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library. You can find more information about the eight-session series on the library events calendar or click on the link to each session above.
We invite you to read the poems that reflect the session themes within the anthology prior to the session. Copies of the selected poems for the session will be available online through the events calendar link, and at Las Cruces Public Libraries Picacho Avenue location.
This program is presented as part of Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home, a major public humanities initiative taking place across the nation in 2024 and 2025, directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emerson Collective.
For information, contact Mindy Del Campo, Librarian, at (575) 528-4024 or by email at [email protected].
