We’re honored to join LACASA Chicago in welcoming Joel Méndez, Pablo Ramírez, Antonio Zavala and Marc Zimmerman to the store for a reading, discussion, q&a, and signing.

Joel Méndez migrated with his parents from South Texas, to Chicago’s Near West Side. Moving on to Pilsen, Méndez graduated from public school and completed his educatkkion at UIC with degrees in Biological Sciences, Public Health, and Education. He then worked as a researcher, academic counselor, and administrator at UIC’s Medical Center Campus going on to serve as a science and math educator and school administrator (K-12). He is also a visual artist and photographer. According to Virginia Martínez, ex-MALDEF director and author of Latino childrens’ books, Forty Poems for City Living peeks at history throtgh the eyes of a young Chicano struggling to find his place in a community where ICE raids are common and young men are forced to go to war in far-off lands. Writes Leonard Ramírez, author of The Chicanas of Eighteenth Street.: “Forty Poems evokes a time, place, and life that refuses to be gentrified. … [as] powerful neighborhood images disrupt ongoing attempts to … transform … an immigrant community into an ethnic Disneyland.”

An emerging figure in Chicago’s Mexican Latino Poetry Scene, Pablo Ramírez shares his poetic exploration of 21st century Chicago’s ethnic and working-class Pilsen neighborhood. Soaked in a powerful collage of tattoo, wall murals, pop culture and Chicano graphics. Pocho Love, written in English and some Spanish, is a full- charged code-switching flow full of skill and humor. Ramírez brings his debut collection with passion for cultural expression amid life’s pleasures and pains in 90+ large pages. Influenced by José Guadalupe Posada and Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Ramírez is both a visual artist poet/activist/curator for cultural events in the Pilsen community. His poetry is inspired by the banging Boom Bap Era of Hip Hop and such Boricua/Chicano poets as David Hernandez. … “A gorgeous, dizzying, Chicano epic. Pocho Love’s a wild ride. I love it.”. – Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene. … “A love letter to the self. Stunning graphics, delicious, mischievous, and heartfelt poetry. A feast for the eyes and soul”. – Diana Solís, visual artist, photographer, and educator.

Antonio Zavala, a special friend of LACASA Chicago, has been a Chicago cultural activist, writer and journalist for several decades. With roots in Michoacán, Mexico, but growing up in Mexican Chicago, he studied at the U. of Iowa int Iowa City and advanced journalism studies at U. of California Berkeley. He has acted in and written for Chicago Chicano theater groups and almost all Chicago journals promoting and reporting on a countless number of cultural events and publications. Emerging as a budding writer of books in the new millennium, he has written and published three recent books: Our Barrios, Our Lives: Essays and Writings on Chicano Space, Art and Memory; Pale Yellow Moon, a short story collection and a non-fiction book, Memorias de Pilsen, a memoir of the remaking of a neighborhood by Chicano activists. For the December 8th program, Zavala will read, “The Cabaret Mambo,” a story from Pale Yellow Moon, about an old Pilsen veteran who befriends a freelance writer and tells him about the glory days of the Mambo era and about a dance hall he ran in Plsen during the 1950s.

Marc Zimmerman, U. of Illinois at Chicago and U. of Houston Emeritus Professor in Latino, Latin American and Hispanic Studies, and World Cultures and Literatures, has written and edited forty-plus books on Central American, Mexican, Caribbean and Latino, as well as Jewish, Italian and African American themes, including several books of his Illusions of Memory autofiction series—telling stories of the worlds and people he’s known and the life adventures he’s lived in narratives that mix memory and imagination, humor and pain, triumph and defeat, personal and social history, memoir and fiction. He will have his recent monumental study on hand, Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago. However for this event, he will read from his fictions written or re-edited in 2023: one of the many Chicago stories included in A Mexican Maze without Borders, plus excerpts from two much praised books re-edited works, Sandino on the Border and Martín and Marvin: A Chicago Jewish Mexican, His Friend with Boricua Wife, and their Latin Worlds. “A wonderful writer.” Luis Alberto Urrea. “An incredible opus.” Dick Goldberg. “Nothing like this series in American fiction.” John Beverley. “Wonderfully imaginative and truthful stories.” Marta Sánchez.

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Tags: 4 WRITING PILSEN & MEXICAN CHICAGO, Antonio Zavala, Chicago, Joel Méndez, Lower West Side, Marc Zimmerman, Pablo Ramirez, Pilsen Community Books