Celebration of the Publication of Mexicn Farm-Worker Book

Posted by on November 5, 2004

Philadelphia press announces publication of Mexican farm-worker book and visit by acclaimed Latino poet Jimmy Santiago Baca

WHO: JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA
WHEN: FRIDAY NOVEMBER 19TH 6-8 PM
WHERE: FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA, SKYLINE ROOM

New City Community Press is pleased to announce the publication of Espejos y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows: Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and their Families. To celebrate this event, we are hosting a reading by Jimmy Santiago Baca at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Skyline Room, from 6-8 pm on November 19th, 2004. (To get to the Skyline Room, enter through the Library’s main entrance and take the elevator to the 4th floor/roof.)

For the past four years, New City Community Press and a diverse array of dedicated volunteers have been hard at work creating a publication that documents the lives, hopes and dreams of the Mexican immigrants who work in the mushroom industry in Kennett Square, PA. Out of this work has grown a rich and beautiful volume that documents the working lives and the incredibly strong network of family and community that has been created by the farmworkers of Kennett Square. To honor their labor, we are bringing together writers, artists, and activists across Philadelphia to celebrate the publication of their stories. We are very happy that poet/author Jimmy Santiago Baca will be with us. Baca is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the
National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and the prestigious International Award for his memoir A Place to Stand. Baca’s long-standing support for those whose voices have been disposed and marginalized makes him an ideal speaker at this event to celebrate the lives of Mexican farmworkers in their own words. New City Community Press is grounded in the belief that recording and publishing oral histories is an implicit organizing tool that can produce social change. Among the Mexican farmworkers of Kennett Square, we have discovered a community that is struggling to gain cultural and political representation, a community that is striving for both independence and integration. Join us at this celebration of the lives and labor of the people of the Kennett Square community; come hear the voices of Mexican farmworkers and their families, as they are recorded in Espejos y Ventanas.

For more information, please contact New City Community
Press at 215-204-7347 or nicolem@temple.edu.