Today is Tuesday, May 3rd, and so much has happened.  A brain tumor.  More yoga and walking.  A little less combat.  Weight dropping.  Spirit rising.  Back in the city, where I belong.  Looking for good photos to give you, organizing my crazy files.  And a new President!  So much to say, more than beating up on him -- that will only take us so far.  Time to hit the streets, challenge the fears that he represents.  Don't be afraid, no tengan miedo.  If I survived a massive brain tumor -- big as a grapefruit -- we can survive and transcend this. More tomorrow.  One day a week from now on. 

Okay, so today I met with Juan Lopez, who, like me, rides the VIA bus. If you live in the city, the bus is pretty good if you're going north/south.  It's the crosstown buses and the 551 Looper that drives me crazy.  I wish they were more colorful, like in Mexico, and that the drivers were allowed to play their music!  This Calvinist heritage!  But I love the bus.  Babies, tattoos, the elderly, ride the bus. Humanity.   For reals. Today, Juan said something really profound. "If the city is so concerned about DWIs (Los borrachos, he means), then why doesn't VIA offer 24-hour service during Fiesta?" Are you listening, VIA? I know you offer special service for the basketball games, the Rodeo, And God knows what else... Or is the City wanting the fines from the DWIs or maybe just wants to put more borrachos in jail? http://www.viasmartmove.com

I am the oldest of eight.  I am going to tell you something my siblings won't face -- the drugging and drinking that has destroyed us as a family. Alcohol.  Drugs.  All my siblings, addicted now or in the past, except me and the disabled Daniel.  The reason for prison, death, and jail and/or -- for three of my brothers -- each a separate story but the same one too. My father, Roberto Renaud, passed away a few weeks ago.  He was 95 years old, and had spent the last three years in a nursing home here in San Antonio, Texas.  He was a brutal father, but he tried.  He tried.  A sharecropper who worked infinite hours in the Texas Panhandle.  A WWII veteran. His family, an old Tejano family, has a family plot, a camposanto, outside of Raymondville.  It's all the family has left after the U.S. Mexican War.  It's a windswept acre of land a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico that includes our family's graves beginning in the 20th century...

Because of my brain surgery, I haven't been able to drive.  A few weeks ago, two teenage black men got on the 550 bus during rush hour.  In Texas, if you don't have a car, that is a liability, because we really don't have good mass trans. The taller kid was in a mood, and they sat at the front, which is generally reserved for mothers with babies, elders, and wheelchair riders.  The young man, let's call him Trey, sat besides an older, dishevled, white guy who was taking all the leg room, rocking to his IPod music. Trey told the white guy to make room, but the white guy, let's call him Mr. Z, didn't move an inch.  He was not about to be instructed by someone like him .  I could smell his fear.  Their voices got louder and louder, amidst the clamor of voices, the smoky, sweaty, murmuring of working-class accents, and the roaring bus. Young man, what has your mother taught you? The teenager looked at the older black woman behind him, and stopped fidget...

Susana didn't come to my mother, her mother's, funeral in 2000. Says she's not coming to my father's funeral, who is in hospice care in a nursing home. And hasn't visited our disabled brother in twelve years. I know she thinks she's too good for Texas.  Well, so is Wendy Davis. She is a licensed therapist, and a dharma leader in the Bay Area. D H A R M A.  She yelled this to me as I was recovering from brain surgery in February. Tell me, how did she enter the helping and healing professions?

La Bloga: Poetry: Laurie Ann Guerrero, Pablo Miguel Martínez, AWP, "Haciendo Caminos," the First Biennial U.S. Latina/Latino Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, Immigration Art y Mas--

They are all over the city, running geese with tails and woofs.  Many  have mange, others have the signs of wounded battles, and others are like these, bones and waiting for the last day.  Los perros flacos, and I saw this one a few weeks ago when I was reading at the Memorial Library on Culebra.  There are two of them:  one is a black pit, I call him "Negro," who loves me now, and this white one, "La Flaca," her bones crackle when she walks.  Negro runs the show, I guess. You need to get rid of these dogs, the homeowner says.  She says that people dump dogs here, and the City hasn't been able to catch them.  Since I've been feeding them, they come to me, and Negro jumped into my van this morning.  He's ready to go.  You ready for the doggie garden?  It was the deer strips, I think. 

There is music here.  A tango of polkas played with accordion.  There is kindness that fills the ache of lovelost that this city repairs in your soul from its people.  It's not the margaritas, it's the people who make you smile and  laugh again.  I don't know where this comes from, exactly, but I know that part of it is from being hated for so long, and how love is the only response to make it better.  This city is not about the Alamo, but the alamo -- the cottonwood trees the mission was named for, and the wet of fall and faces who have come this far.  This is not a perfect city, no, it is troubled too.  But when I saw this yesterday, I had to take this photo because Day of the Dead is coming on November 1st.  And in the days leading to this, our Halloween of telling those who have passed that they will get their favorite meal and drink that day, maybe a cold cervezita, here is my San Antonio.  (Upside down cause I can't f...

I don't know.  My laptop was stolen this summer.  Then I had to move, find homes for the cats and Perez my dog.  Can't take them where I live now.  The Willie Velasquez project is wearing me down. I know that it will help million of students but I can't seem to get my community, especially the activist women, to understand what I'm doing and how much help my team needs.  It's such a beautiful story of a boy's calling, and how he changes the world.  Yet I can't get my fellow activists to see what I've embarked on -- for all of us.  If we'd had some funding the interactive would be out by now and I could start working on the Lydia Mendoza book like I want.  Instead I'm so tired, want a vacation, haven't been to a doctor in 15 years and I guess I'm gonna go all crippled with a pauper's funeral.  Why doesn't my community value our work more?  We deserve so many stories, this is the freedom we are searching for.  So much I want to say....

I am the oldest of eight, with all the expectations that come with it.  Because I'm also a writer and an artist, I have disappointed my siblings, and my father thinks I'm very successful -- he has to think that, I"m the oldest.  My father was a demanding man, a World War II veteran, and a man who dreams of working on his tractor again. He doesn't remember the whippings he gave me, and I barely remember it myself.  This year, he's been named the Valentine's Day King at the nursing home where he lives here in San Antonio.  I cut his hair last night and gave him a manicure -- "you better make me look good, mija."  He's excited, and so am I.  He says I'm gonna live to be 100, and that he's gonna leave me his Social Security check.  I don't want the first, and I can't get the second.  Here we are on his birthday last month.  It was his second pinata, ever, and he made a speech thanking all the residents for coming to his party. 

Willie Velasquez was a voting rights pioneer, and is one of three Latinos to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom.   When I tell this story to children, they cry and cheer -- and want to vote. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/willievelasquez/the-boy-made-of-lightning For more information: http://www.wix.com/ anabarbararenaud/willie

When I was in my twenties, I was fresh out of a graduate program, newly married and totally stupid about professional men in the office.  Daddy just didn't prepare me enough, as I suspect happened to Anita Hill.  Sad but so true.  It was the late seventies, and my boss, who headed a non-profit organization in Austin, Texas, said so many things I don't know where to begin.  Here is a sampling: 1.  "I'm gonna sleep with every woman in this organization."  (I guess this included me). 2.   "Did you have good sex over the weekend with your husband?" 3.   "Can you get her for me?"  (On a return trip from Washington D.C. to Dallas) 4.  "We call you Miss Prim and Proper."  Because I had told the young women in the office about the sexual harrassment legislation, how they didn't have to sleep with him or any other "boss." 5.  "Your problem is that you aren't nice to the boardmembers."  (Mostly men and mostl...

www.wix.com/anabarbararenaud/willie Children deserve to know their stories, especially the stories of struggle, faith, love, and sacrifice.  It's time that writers tell great stories, and may this be just the beginning.

A miracle happened. Fluffie, the maltese-poodle mix, escaped the Dog Pound some weeks ago:  He was my dog, cause after the Dog Pound picked him up -- looking like a rastafarian with very bad hair, it cost me $50 to save him from death row at the Pound.   Why do you want this dog, lady?  Fluffie isn't tame you see.  He's Street. Not a bad type, just keeps a safe distance from people.  At the pound, on Death Row, I explained my whole year of trying to catch this cabron.  So, they felt sorry for the little hellion, and he got registered, neutered, shots, micro-chipped, and shaved down to his nakedness. I guess Lady Destiny had something to show me, cause when I went to get him the next day, he slipped under his collar and ran for the hills as he was getting into the back of my car, thanks to the help of a Dog Pound staffer who thought I was abusing Fluffie who was doing some twisty-tango moves.  It wasn't all my fault, I asked the Dog Pound Clinic to...

This is Fluffie, a dog from the Westside that I've been trying to catch for a year.  He's a mustang-poodle.  I've tried dog traps from the Animal Defense League, dozens of weinies, and almost illegal drugs.  Nothing worked.  He's a sweet dog, but afraid of people.  Two days ago he finally got trapped in a yard on Colorado Street, and Mike, a man who was my lookout called me and I went right over the next morning.  He was already on Death Row, curled up in a corner.  I paid to get him fixed, his shots, microchipped, the works.  I went yesterday to get him, ready with weinies, a training leash, a collar and leash.  He's a Maltese Poodle, apparently, but who knew?  Weighs about 15 pounds, so the dreadlocks weighed more than him. I told the woman in the Clinic to please make the collar tight so that he wouldn't get away, told her he was a wild one.  She told me that no way could he get away from the collar, though it wasn't as snug as ...

Ay, let's come together  and   behold  the cemented and unforgiving mind of our Governor in Texas.  There are pregnant teenage girls everywhere, sometimes you see girls with a baby and pregnant again.  Sometimes you see them on the bus with three children. These are girls who look like they're 14, 15, 16 years old. Can't get birth control in Texas, thanks to our Governor who wants to be President, and says our abstinence policies work -- well, they worked for him. The only reason I didn't have sex in high school was because I was afraid of Daddy's wrath -- but even that doesn't stop the young from the conspiracy of nature and hip-hop.

I'm a Chicana, a Mexican-American, an American citizen born in this embarrassing land called Texas who is rendered almost speechless by the continued impoverished, dream-toppling politics of the chosen tribe they call conservatives in this state.  Are these people on drugs?  Only legal ones, probly.  But they're living in the dreams of the past, the myths, the legends, the belief they would always have Texas as theirs, when, surprise!  It belongs to all of us. I have not been able to write about it cause the continued legislative hate is worser than a tsunami, a Joplin-category tornado, a Gulf Coast oil spill, it's been a series of Katrinaesque pendejadas coming out of that big-hair empty-headed Governor Perry and his ilk that make me....wanna cuss and spit. So I will.   Like who could possibly vote for a man who is proud of giving us a state when we could be the next silicon valley, but instead we're building more pulgas and jails?  Of course cor...

It is the inchoate fear of the increasingly virulent language and actions of the right-wing that led to this "senseless" shooting in Arizona today of the Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the killing of half-a-dozen people, including an aide and Judge Roll, along with injuring more than a dozen others. After listening to Limbaugh, Palin, and their arch-conservative cohorts, it has been clear to me they have encouraged hate, fear, and violence in their attacks against the President, with lies, distortions, a total ignorance of the U.S. Constitution, all with a crucifix around her neck.  I want our Democratic leaders and our President to call this for what it is:  Fear of how the world is changing, and how it must change, how it was destined to change.  In the next days, you will hear about the "senseless" killer(s).  Not true.  Everything is connected -- and the fearmongerers in this country who are making millions for their lies and hypocrisy need...