[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 17981-17982]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



   HONORING TWO REMARKABLE INDIVIDUALS DURING HISPANIC HERITAGE WEEK

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                          HON. LORETTA SANCHEZ

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Tuesday, September 25, 2001

  Ms. SANCHEZ. Mr. Speaker, a wonderful thing about our country is how 
we celebrate each other in art, custom, food and friendship.
  A ``nation of immigrants'' might have been blighted had Pilgrims not 
learned from Native Americans. Proof? Check the menu for the first 
Thanksgiving Dinner.
  Now almost everyone samples each other's traditional dishes, catches 
the color and feeling of each other's special days, senses the human 
goodness in each heritage and faith. This is how strangers turn into 
neighbors in so many ways that our ways of getting along have become 
unique in the world.
  It is so American no one else even comes close.
  Now we are joyfully in another such season of sharing and 
appreciation.
  On September 17, 1968, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives 
adopted House Joint Resolution 1299, creating an Hispanic Heritage 
Week. Twenty years later, Public Law 90-498 was enacted expanding the 
Week to a month eventually stretching from September 15 through October 
15 each year. The period includes the anniversary of Mexican 
Independence and ``birthdays'' of many other Latin American countries.
  Cultural sharing will take many forms across the United States of 
America. At heart, it will reveal itself in real people not only glad 
they are who they are but glad to be here.
  LOS AMIGOS OF ORANGE COUNTY, persons who have met weekly for 23 years 
to talk over community concerns in my district, asked that the two 
following stories be shared. Millions of people create a blur but 
sketches of two--a book creator and a bookseller--are offered in the 
hope they will convey very personal, human glimpses of America's 
lively, evolving Hispanic Heritage.

                      [From La Voz, Nov. 16, 2000]

                     Life's An Open Book? Crack It

                          (By Galal Kernahan)

       Miami? A big city in Florida? A river in Ohio?
       Or is it someplace baked and a little bleached? Is it where 
     the sun is a presence, winds sometimes mutter and deer browse 
     on the other side of the hill? Is it where you could read the 
     day away in an outhouse with no more interruption than a 
     buzzing fly?
       Rueben, the first of the five boys and two girls of 
     Cipriano Marfinez and Rometia Rivas de Martinez, was born in 
     Miami, Arizona, in 1940. There he grew to young manhood. His 
     parents were transplanted Chihuahuenses. One took root. The 
     other didn't.
       The children attached their mother to that small copper 
     town, but their father blew away on the notes of an alto 
     saxophone. He made it big with Big Bands like the Glenn 
     Miller Orchestra. By the time the road and that life got old 
     and he got old, his boys and girls were men and women who 
     remembered him no more clearly than he did them.
       Rueben came to love books during his school years. He took 
     them everywhere. They took him everywhere. All in Miami,
       When he was 10, the town, like other Southwestern copper 
     towns, was coming off its World War II-hyped mining high. By 
     the time he graduated from high school, nothing was being 
     hauled to the smelter anymore. At 18, he went to East Los 
     Angeles.
       Beside what books taught him, what did Miami teach? What 
     has stayed with him? ``My grade school was segregated to 
     Apaches and Mexicans, but the teachers were good. I loved 
     shop,'' remembers Rueben. ``And Miami? It was so ugly, it was 
     beautiful.''
       In California, he worked and read, got married and read, 
     attended East Los Angeles Community College and read, had 
     children and read and got divorced and read. Also, he raised 
     three teenagers and read and lived to tell the tale.
       Then he read and read and looked up to see he had nine 
     grandchildren.
       Rueben is more than 40 years a barber, more than 25 in 
     Santa Ana. There were places and times in human history when 
     barbers probably ran everything. They certainly knew 
     everything that went on.
       If they loved reading, too, they were formidable forces in 
     the life of their communities. Rueben is a formidable force 
     in the Orange County Latino community and far beyond.
       Locally? Consider that most Latino candidates for any 
     political office hold fundraisers in his Santa Ana bookstore. 
     And now with a unique cross-the-alley emporium of children's 
     books he is reaching for youngsters.
       Far beyond? Six years ago, he suggested to Community Leader 
     and Actor Edward James Olmos ideas that became the Latino 
     Book and Family Festival. Wherever it goes--Chicago, Los 
     Angeles, Houston, San Jose, San Diego, New York--Rueben's 
     books anchor a ``Book Village'' that contributes directly to 
     the goal of encouraging Latino parents to read to their 
     children and children themselves to read. Families come by 
     the thousands.
       Acting on his own advice, he reaches for future generations 
     with a unique emporium of children's books just cross-the-
     alley from his Santa Ana bookstore. It is full of color and 
     lined with stories in Spanish and English . . . and 
     Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, and  . . .
       It all makes you wonder. Which is its purpose. Rueben's 
     life is an open book he seems to read like a child. He turns 
     pages, laughs and says, ``What's this?'' Then he tries to 
     tell you he knew it all the time . . . that he planned it.
       He is a strong believer we all should write down our goals. 
     He writes his down. No one could have that many! And do 
     credit to them, too.
       On a coast-to-coast TV program, he commanded fathers to be 
     perfect husbands: ``Take out the trash and read to your 
     children!'' He, is a sought-after motivational speaker, a 
     consultant to publishers, a friendly prod to writers and 
     artists, an energizer to teachers and a media personality.
       The biggest independent bookstore in Orange County, 
     California, began as a few books for customers in a barber 
     shop. Now he carpets the space next door with kids eager to 
     be read to.
       Rueben's life is an open book with one new chapter after 
     another. He reads on and says, ``Amazing!'' And then, 
     ``That's me, too!''

               Victor Strings Words to Compute Life x 13

                          (By Galal Kernahan)

       As Victor Villasenor emerged from adolescence, his parents 
     sent him to Mexico City. He was overwhelmed by what he saw. 
     The world suddenly opened, widened, deepened.
       He became ill. A doctor was summoned. ``You are a doctor?'' 
     ``Yes.'' ``You are a Mexican?'' ``Yes,'' answered the baffled 
     physician. Victor thought that, though all Mexicans might not 
     be farm workers like his friends on his father's place in 
     Oceanside, it was unlikely they would be persons in the 
     professions,

[[Page 17982]]

       New realities shook him. The discovery of books catapulted 
     him into dawning understanding of human landscapes and 
     feelings, strivings and failures. A conflicted teenage 
     functional illiterate he started down an endless road to 
     finding himself. In writing.
       He drove himself for decades ten hours a day, six days a 
     week untying, re-ordering and retying strings of words. 
     Eventually, some books reached print and modest success. 
     Then, in 1981, he wrote the made-for-TV motion picture THE 
     BALLAD OF GREGORIO CORTEZ.
       Well-wishers came to the large, old Spanish colonial house 
     on a bluff in Oceanside, California. He paid an emotional 
     tribute to his parents, Salvador and Lupe. He promised he 
     would write their lives. All celebrated the Public 
     Broadcasting System (PBS) telecast. The picture was released 
     to movie houses the next year.
       In 1991, ten years later, a more-than-500 page work--parts 
     of it laboriously rewritten more than 40 times--became a 
     milestone in Latino literature. RAIN OF GOLD sold more than 
     200,000 copies in hardcover. Any given copy may have been 
     read by six-to-ten people.
       It recounts the Mexican youth of Lupe and Sal: surviving 
     the Revolution, their separate journeys across the Border, 
     how they met on this side. It ends with their marriage in 
     Santa Ana, but not before sketching the personalities of 
     their mothers, Victor's grandmothers. His father's 
     scandalized the faithful at her church in Corona. Her lively 
     conversations--even arguments--with God and Mary did not go 
     unnoticed.
       Now, more than another decade has passed. Victor has gone 
     through multiple rewritings of his latest book. It is about 
     Sal, Lupe and their lives in 1929, 1930 and 1931. It is 
     published by HarperBooks.
       Salvador has been dead for years. Lupe passed away in 2000. 
     Both are very alive in pages Victor has filled. So is the 
     cosmically talkative grandmother who, together with Sal, 
     finally makes clear to the author what lies behind all he has 
     been writing.
       There have been tumultuous first years of marriage not made 
     any smoother by Sal's profession. He's a bootlegger.
       Victor remembers what his father often told him: Casi todos 
     nacen y mueren y nunca abren los ojos. Poca gente abre los 
     ojos porque no usa todo su sentido. (``Almost everyone is 
     born and dies without opening their eyes. Few people open 
     their eyes because they don't try fully to perceive 
     things.'')
       What that really might mean became clear in a startling 
     brush with the law. Salvador is driving a truck heavily laden 
     with barrelsful of whiskey in Corona. His well-connected 
     mother is with him. A cop pulls them over.
       She begins telling God the officer will not see the barrels 
     and that she needs help for her son and that God owes her one 
     and that she wants it right now! The cop looks in the back of 
     the truck and says, ``Nothing here, but you better get some 
     air at a gas station because your tires are almost flat.''
       Crisis over, Sal asks, ``How did you do that?'' ``Easy,'' 
     she says, and explains.
       ``When people finish this book,'' Victor claims, ``They are 
     going to think magic is possible.'' The title: THIRTEEN 
     SENSES.

     

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