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and stories, interviews and autobiography, family photos and bibliography, as well as an entourage of critical essays from various academic persuasions. The criticism is interesting as testimony to the in-roads Tafolla, as well as the Chicano writers she has championed, has been able to make into the hard-held territory of American Literature. But, for my own tired-of-graduate-school kind of.tastes, the texts become a bit too rapturous about Tafolla’s great heteroglossic, polyphonic, bidialectal, multi-lingual code-switching. And the poetry comes from a place quite different from Tafolla’s earlier style. There is more formality, arrangement, manipulation of the vernacular at the service of scansion and rhyme, ANDERSON & COMPANY COFFEE TEA SPICES TWO JEFFERSON SQUARE AUSTIN, TEXAS 78731 512 453-1533 SeriSine your list. Name Street City Zip as if she has grown self-conscious in spite of herself. She has consistently aspired to affect the male-dominated university structure, but it has changed her in its measure. She wishes there were such a woman as the cigar-smoking intellectual Porfiria, who would penetrate the hypocrisies found in the Chicano Studies movement among those academics who can be bought for less than money title, publication, mention in the Central Office Minutes… But such a woman, she declares, doesn’t exist. And she urges herself by urging other women to become stronger, by reciting a litany of individual names to be carried into battle persecuted and tortured Latinas who were raised to be dependent on men and ultimately were tortured by them in peculiarly female kinds of horror acts. Tafolla’s poems have always exhibited a certain combativeness, kind of squaring off in the Tex-Mex marketplaces of her home turf, where tourists and pachucos many times find themselves rubbing elbows, pale contrasting brown, rubbing each other the wrong way and hair flying. In the Sonnets this squaring-off continues. The Chicano laborer has lost his finger because of the carelessness of a gringo boss pronunciation of his Hispanic name \(“In expanded to include the male-dominant power structures of Chicano and Gringo alike. Too many times now, she has been the lone woman in the roomful of power men, as when she once attended the “All-Male Tardeada, No Woman, No Anglos allowed.” She recounts one version of this old story in “You Don’t Know Marta” named for Marta Cotera, one of the leaders of Austin’s Chicano community who also wasn’t invited \(although “Gonzalo … would-be Texas Monthly coverboy” as well as the educators to Tafolla’s husband Ernie, if Marta stepped outside the city limits, the average IQ of the city of Austin would drop by 15 points.” As for Tafolla, her presence was completely ignored by all the men except for one “Amulfo” brave enough to break the ban against talking to gate-crashing females. I’m glad that Tafolla has retired from the academic drylands and has come back to wash off the alien dust in the Rio Grande, as the brujas have taught us to do after tripping between worlds. But I seriously doubt that she has retired for good. The fight is too much in her, the urge to grapple, one on one, with the unjust, unkind, and inhumane. It is with her as she quotes of Gloria Rodriguez: “Estos gringos en su Match-Match,1 y a mi me gusta Mix-Mix!” amazing education in itself to watch this poet mixing it up in any match of her choosing and I welcome her home. Ruffles and ‘Flourishes LIZ CARPENTER Foreword by Lewis L. Gould Between Eleanor and Hillary, one First Lady took up her causes with strength and style that were unassailable. In this humorous, best-selling White House memoir, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary Liz Carpenter tells the other side of the Johnson administrationthe Great Society as seen from the East Wing. Texas A&M University Press Drawer C College Station, Texas 77843 1-800-826-8911 LIZ CARPENTER will sign copies of the new edition of Ruffles and Flourishes at The Shoreline Grill, 98 San Jacinto Blvd., Austin, Texas Thursday, February 25, 5:oo to 7:oo p.m. Sponsored by Congress Avenue Booksellers If unable to attend, call 512-478-1157 to reserve a signed copy. 14 FEBRUARY 12, 1993