While attending the gala Hollywood launch party for When Skin  Peels, several people remarked they had enjoyed the review below. Here are photos of the poets, reading together. Then below are three high school women who declared themselves chingonas, to the delight of a supportive audience SRO at Hollywood's Espresso Mi Cultura bookstore. The three wrote their own poem, stode to the microphone, and spoke it out loud!

Dawn spread her rosy fingers and lavender tresses across the eastern sky, filling my drive into work with joy every day last week.

	Doubling my pleasure, the voices of my two riding companions, Elba Rosario Sanchez and Olga Angelina Garcia Echeverria, who, like brilliant morning light, started each day in a joyful reminder that chicano poetry lives!
(fotos:  CD Launch Party, Espresso Mi Cultura Bookstore, Hollywood, Califas 3/25/00) Olga, left, Elba, right

Elba begins our drive with a nationalistic anthem, Tepalcate al tepalcate, a dirge to amerindian paradise, lost to all-consuming hombres de ojos pálidos whose rapaciousness relegates descendant indio-meztizo a este frío hostil / pavimento gris / de mediocridad. Comes next De vírgenes y rebeldes. Readers familiar with -- and, owing to the excesses of some Chicano nationalists, perhaps suspicious of -- conventional indigenist thematics will be surprised and delighted by Sanchez' slyly humorous celebration of a woman's sexuality, smiling with her as she observes, yo imagino tu / mundo de secretos de / verdades ignoradas y de / sombras y se me / desliza por entre las piernas una / sonrisa  casi un suspiro y me / abro al placer que / mi cuerpo me / ha rendido / muchas veces / antes.

Sanchez' twenty short offerings blend language and theme for an interesting twenty minutes of driving pleasure. Eight en español, six puro english poems -- four are translations of one another -- and six mezcla, two featuring interlineal translation, devote themselves to nature (Moon Corn; Maiz de Luna; Lagartija; Lizard; Ristras; Como Golondrinas), sexuality and gender (De virgenes; Woman Blood; Lover's Ode Me Siento Continente); family or generational perspectives (Tepalcate, Baudelia, After Nuevo Mexico, Tunas a la Luna, Sowing Seeds, Urge, Sunday's Chicken); protest against the non-Chicano world, (For the Middle-Aged White Man; Hisspanicsss).

Listeners will delight in Sanchez' humor, particularly her Lover'sOde where she delights sensuously in the faithfulness and mouth-filling complete satisfaction as the poet softly calls out her lover's name, cilantro.

Critics do not have to read between lines nor extract thematic patterns to understand Elba Rosario Sanchez' motivation for her art, that's not required since Sanchez explicates her poet's motive in A gift of tongues:

this tongue of mine sets fires

licking hot all in its path

scorches the old

announces the new

this tongue of mine breaks through walls

setting free imagery of feelings

odors of dreams

tasting the bitter

the rancid

quenching its thirst

this tongue of mine invents the words

creating familiar signs

draws my days in bold hues

celebrates

affirming my world

this tongue of mine

opens wounds

heals the hurt

with warm breath savors the other

the you that is also me

this tongue of mine

Olga Angelina Garcia Echeverria's half hour comprises eleven works concentrating on gender (Quemando Tortillas; Tequila Blue; Mama Azucar; Beso); generational and family themes (Miquitzli; Abuelita; El Dia; Poem for Frida; Sonia on Hope Street; Fences); and an unparallelled masterpiece that begins Olga's presentation, Lengualistic Algo, Speaking in Tongues. Here is a superb performance, a tribute to chicanismo's most potent expressive resource, our language, la mezcla:

Qué quieren conmigo los puristas,

all tongue-tied

& sitting proper

behind fat stoic dictionaries?

I've already eaten the thin white skeletons

of foreign words

choked on the bones of Inglés Only,

learned the art of speaking in codes

and code switching,

learned to spit palabras

out of boca abierta

like bullets

like fire

like fuego

like poems

have already licked alive

the crevices of open-legged borders

bleeding the histories and languages

of my name

Have already been witness to silence

to white-haired first grade teacher

bringing finger to lips and saying,

Shhhhhh! Speak English.

You're in America now,

speak English.

Mi bisabuela fue Yaqui

Mi abuela Mexicana

Mi madre mestiza

y yo?

Your worst linguistic nightmare

hecho realidad

Aquí se le hecha

de todo; East Los attitude,

chile chipotle, Chicana power fist.

Aquí el inglés se quita sus moños,

wears khaki guangos

and dances slow motion to oldies.

Aquí el inglés trips over itself

Y el español comes down

off its high Spanish horse,

cruises down Whittier Boulevard

in a cherry-red Impala lowrider,

watchala it rides the bus,

eats chile spiced mangos

and elotes smothered in mayonesa,

it learns to say pá instead of para,

'cá instead of acá

'llá instead of allá,

travel pá cá y pá llá

pá llá y pá cá

pá Caló. Órale!

Somos las chicas patas lenguas que se rajan

cruzando fronteras sin papeles,

illegal tongues jumping over barb-wire fences

and running como las cucarachas

when you hit the light switch!

Córrele cuquita! Córrele!

Aquí el lenguaje existe en el momento

que Conejo hits up Pablo for a ride

con, Come on vato. Give me un aventón

to la marqueta. Y Pablo lo manda a la fregada

with a wave of a hand y con Chale dude!

Qué me vez? cara de taxi-cab?

Aquí se usa lo que sirve,

el rascuache, el mestizaje,

las left-overs y lo yet to be born,

Aquí cada palabra está viva. Respira.

And all the Chicas Patas, las Wátchalas,

los éses y ésas of the world

stand up and shout:

Hey! And ain't I a word?

Caigo from hungry mouths

of thousands. Salgo como bala

en los barrios de Califas,

broto como lluvia en el desierto de Arizona,

canto mi Tex-Mex junta a Flaco Jiménez

And tell me, ain't I a word?

Los académicos me ignoran

los puristas dicen que contamino,

Webster y el Pequeño Larousse

no me conocen y Random House me escupe.

No manchen!

Aquí mi raza no se detiene

cada nueva palabra remembers, relives, speaks

the many conquests of our bleeding tongues.

Our language, como cuerpo de serpiente, moves

it shape-shifts

it sheds

en un instante muere

y aún vuelve a nacer.

Powerful, powerful reading. Ironically, for a mezcla protest against language purists, Olga gets all the accents right. For that one reading alone, When Skin Peels is a bargain at twice the price, so poetry and chicano literature lovers ought to buy two or three copies of this CD, to share with friends and family, or send this poem to prescriptivist professors and newspaper columnists who decry the "bastardization" of english and spanish by chicano voices.

Olga Angelina Garcia Echeverria's presentations call attention to themselves; they define a singularly feminist voice that declares a chicana's confident self-awareness that young women and girls need to hear. Where else will they have it in so focused a presentation?

Echeverria's forcefulness and bitter humor, her sensitive interpretation of long ago yet unforgotten injuries, her joyful self awareness, offer constant reminders of who a girl should look to become, in a world filled with roaches and men, imposed expectations when the woman herself offers so much more: Corazón, no esperes tortillas / recien hechas a mano, redondas / y perfectas como la cara de la luna . . . . En vez de tortillas te haré poema / tras poema, recien hechos a mano / de mujer. Calientitos y blanditos. Like Elba's rebellious virgin, Echeverria's woman knows what she enjoys, and freely expresses its full understanding: this kiss / dizzy with laughter / has ridden on ferris wheels / and bumper cars / played hopscotch / on opened mouths / and necks / tagged her silhoutte / on white collars / and wine glasses /    she's played.

The double pleasure of two poetas chingonas is just the start, raza. Calaca Press' CD When Skin Peels triples--then quadruples--the pleasure of poetry with a printed booklet of poetry, plus a CD's programmability.

Eminently worthwhile listening start to finish, with booklet in hand a reader luxuriates in text alone, allowing close critical appreciation of la poesia chicana that only text provides, or multimodal immersion with eyes and ears to derive a more intimate acquaintance with this art, these two poets, all their women. My one complaint is Calaca's decision to print the booklet in 7 point type, sorely challenging this reader's visual acuity.

Enriching your experience, Calaca's January release -- as with all CD media -- allows one to program a structured listening experience, as a way of enjoying favorites, a technique for critical appraisal, or for classroom use. Program Elba's masterpieces: tracks 2, 15, 16, 7: Virgenes;Urge; Tongues;Middle-Aged White Man.. Olga's best: 21, 24, 27, 31: Lengualistic;Mama Azucar;  Tequila Blue;Beso. Program out the "fucks" (25, 27, 31, but how dismal omitting masterpieces, Sonia on Hope Street; Tequila Blue ; Beso.) Program for mezcla, spanish, thematic pieces, english. Program the best of the best: 2, 21, 31.

Teachers of United States literature, in particular teachers with chicana and chicano students, need to take advantage of this powerful poetic resource. In an industry where classroom anthologies of unitedstatesian or english language literature almost totally ignore Chicano writing, not just poetry, When Skin Peels, in highly worthwhile ways, corrects the omission.

Oracy and literacy comprise the 21st century's most important skills, abundantly showcased by When Skin Peels. Here is a collection of noteworthy art, most pieces suitable for any classroom, exciting. Each performance of itself plays havoc with a listener's comfort; wetly sexual or merely erotic, satiric or bitter humor, urban landscapes with sharp teeth. Nothing gentle or soft here, not really, and this is what makes the poems and the poetas tan chingonas. Pura chicana poetry. Sanchez and Echeverria's poetry delivers interesting combinations of language, gender, identitification motives, and figurative language, in sum, a rich resource for classroom study and quick writes.

Performing, reading aloud, memorizing, seem to have lost their role in educative systems. More the justification for buying this CD, especially for sharing it with chicano classrooms. Kids' ears and lips will find this excitingly new, yet familiar, accessible material. In a multicultural classroom, the works offer an unexplored, fully U.S. Perspective students deserve to hear.

Listen once to When Skin Peels, you'll listen another 50 times, basking in the linguistic and rhetorical richness of these two women. Maybe the CD will fulfill your own spiritual needs for cultural regeneración, or something cute and funny, or simply mark an enchanting 40 minutes of listening pleasure.

Driving home last week, the western sky echoes the brilliance of the dawn, darkness above blending into fiery horizon. I bask in the glory of our language, our poetry, my passengers' irrestible creativity.