Feeling the Earth

Yes, I felt the earthquake at around 9 this morning but sadly, I had left its epicenter near Palm Springs the night before, so I only got the mild shakes from 62 miles away. It may seem strange to some, but I like to be where the geological action is, and I would have loved to be near a spring when the quake went off, to see if that had any effect. Oh well--at least I met some fine eco-warriors in Palm Desert, who are fighting the boondogglish Eagle Mountain Landfill, and may, after 18 years of struggle, put this terrible idea in the dust bin of history where it belongs. I also met a guy, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, who has found the Cradle of Aztlan, which every native California should know about. There's sacred ground all over and it was telling us something today, I think. We should probably listen.

Luis Alberto Urrea spoke at the Hillcrest Book Fair today and he was sacred, too. His latest book, The Hummingbird's Daughter, tells the story of his aunt Teresita, a holy woman of the turn of the 19th-20th canturies in Sonora, Mexico. Urrea's other works, which include fiction, poetry, and my favorites, journalistic studies of border life, exemplify the kind of writing that I think is most relevant to a San Diegan, Californian, or at this point Global citizen; as NPR's Martha Woodruff notes of writer Daniel Alarcon, the new writing by people who we usually call Mexicna-american like Urrea or Peruvian-american like Alarcon, "expands the hyphens" and exist along the borders between the cultures that are "mixed" into our culture. Nothing new to us San Diego natives; we and writers like Urrea have been mixing it up for so long it doesn't seem like a border anymore. And it's not a real line, anyway; butterflies cross it all the time, and aren't we lucky for that?

Take that, you Minutemen, you.