TODAY, WE ARE ALL WRITERS

More than at any other time in the history of the world, we are writers. We write because we know: writing is power, it is beauty, it is life. Through writing we express our emotions and challenge what we do not even know exists within us. What an opportunity we have in this 21^st century to share our closest ideals with ourselves and each other! Even if we are master speech makers, it is text that is always proof. In order to truly prove anything, our lovers require us to write love letters, our potential employers to type up resumes, our friends to phone-text ridiculousness. This art of writing has always been the proof that what we believe really matters to us and the world. Inherited from this belief that writing has some type of gospel magic, writing must be true, for it is written. For the reader, he or she must read and listen to a silent voice in his or her mind; this listening required for reading is perhaps the most invasive and intimate communication we will ever hear in our lives. We can listen beyond miles; we can listen even beyond time, through hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Whether we like it or not, we are all writers, for today we are expected to be writers—writers in our professional, personal, and intrapersonal lives. What we do with our power is our own personal responsibility, but I believe that many people are unaware of the writing power they hold. A life-transformational moment: You are a writer. What will you do with your power? Will you pretend that it holds the same dynamic as your verbal voice? You must know that there is a difference.

Writing has not always been our privilege. In the not so distant past, only the wealthy had the power of the word. Now, however, for approximately ten years, en masse we have been fervently writing using our smart phones and other social media. Do not believe that because of texting or Facebooking we have somehow devolved our writing skills. Many of us happily and boldly write even though we may not know correct grammar. The writing revolution is here, and it is our duty to recognize the art that we all create in the sentences or fragments we share.

This new type of writing is not a hindrance or obstacle to academic or professional writing. On the contrary, this new type of writing is an opportunity for all of us to embrace a dramatic evolution in the history of writing. Let us, therefore, be conscious of the many types of writer we all are. No longer is writing for only the cultured class. Today the word belongs to everyone.

The next time you send out a text, an e-mail, or a blog, consider the voice and art you have created. Make it your best, and make it truly represent you. The writing of today no longer requires a teacher to correct it, unless you desire to make-believe that writing is only about academic type of writing. That is a farce. You must know you are a writer, so write with joy, confidence, and bravery.

Here I have assembled an incomplete list of writing contexts for you to consider in your everyday life. Know that the forms you use or ignore may help or hinder you from reaching your own potential as a writer, yet also know that you have the power within you to play with forms and create new styles of writing.

                                       Writing Contexts:

• Journal/Diary/Intrapersonal
• Social media
• Life planning/list making
• Intimate relationship
• Academic essay
• Professional
• Complaints/grievances
• Poetry
• Blogging
• Creative writing

This list is meant to show you your range and style; it is not an absolute list of the human complexity we use for writing. Nevertheless, it is my desire that we embrace our new identity of writer instead of ignoring the artist within us. To welcome and accept this new evolutionary persona can help you live a more exciting, investigative, and fulfilling life. Write with your heart, your humor, your intelligence, and your courage. Share your words so that we can all grow.

There is no capital, curriculum, counselor, plan, professor, or administrator who can solve all our educational problems. We must make a lifestyle change. Introducing genius to each other is a start; sharing innovative genius is a start. Forget a classroom as the root of education; spirit is always the root, whether you believe in it or not. Call spirit something else if you really want to, even call it nothing: you will not insult it because both spirit and you know that even nothing, the great emptiness, is something or eventually becomes something, even if it is simply death.

But we have this life, and we live. We live! Our lives cannot be meant to be binding to a piece of paper that is a degree, so that if you have that paper it is no longer your duty to think, or if you do not have that paper, you believe you have never had the duty to think. That piece of paper is dead: paper is dead. There is no longer a need for paper and pen. I have written this entire blog mostly on computer; some pages were written with a pad of paper and pen on BART, but that is a minority of the pages. Pen and paper—I do not predict we en masse will ever revisit those things again. Time passes. We are all now geniuses. That is the truth of this moment. Today in the year 2013 we, average gente, know more than any and every single human being knew in the year 1913, only one hundred short years ago, which is not even the blink of an eye in the dimension of the totality of time. We now know more than every single past human being—from the coffee picker to Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein did not know we would fly to the moon or that Mickey Mouse would rule the world. At the touch of our fingers, literally inside of our pockets, we have answers that no human being had in 1913 or even in 1983. The information is free to you through your I-Phone or laptop. We are literally geniuses if we can now access so much information so rapidly, so painlessly to satisfy most of our needs, either abstractly or concretely. I know and can know so much right now at this precise moment that it is like I am a walking library. Therefore, now we must admit that knowledge is not enough, and this should be proof that pure information alone is not enough for us to be truly educated. Just because we know things or can know things, this is not enough of a motivation for us to search for education! We must want to search for enlightenment, or else people will search for stupidity, and that is what we love to do to delude ourselves from truly thinking.

Purpose, purpose, even if it is illusory, it is what we have, and the first purpose that we have is life. Right now you are breathing, and if you are reading these words you have some type of purpose, whether it is to get through this page or to eat or to plan; you have purpose. Animals do not ask about purpose; they don’t care about that. But we question this existence, and we will never find the answer, no matter how educated we get; there are simply too many stories, and inside of ourselves we want to invent our own story before we die. The problem with education today is that education does not help us to invent who we are and who we want to be. The best type of education is one that allows us to invent ourselves: this is the best we can do. These are the most motivating and inspirational truths I can imagine. If we develop a lifestyle of learning, conversing, suffering, playing, and living, then we can change education from something that is stagnant to something that is honest. Our students no longer accept that education will solve their problems. My favorite ridiculous reason for education: We will all get happy jobs!

I don’t know what your purpose is for you, but I know what I want. The goal must be a giant pie in the face and smashed banana party; that must always be the goal, to laugh at our absurdity, to happily share our preposterousness with each other. With that spirit as a base we can accomplish anything and have a good time while we are doing it. If you don’t want this as a goal, then you can promote educational capitalism, but ultimately I believe even our students know that leaves a person with the delusion of emptiness. Like all of us, I have shot for emptiness, and it also keeps finding me, but in the process of venturing into the abyss, there is excitement and an addiction, a healthy addiction that keeps me learning and loving education.

We are in a crisis. Should I talk about how much education, even public education costs nowadays? Should I talk about what students are actually learning in the classroom? Perhaps I should rant about teachers’ unions and corporate conglomeration? I know nothing about myself; how can I know anything about those things? What can one man do?

My life for a righteous cause and perhaps this is it. I do not write as an administrator or as the best teacher, but I write with an energy to transform, and if you read this I am in your mind. We are in each other’s mind. I am not humble about it; I may actually be ashamed of it, yet I continue because this is what I believe inside of my heart that can no longer hold the dam. 

There is no truth except imagination.

Since a chiquito, I have attempted to understand my purpose in life. I hold such intense memories of meditating on top of Bernal Heights, above the San Fran city, how I worshipped the skyscrapers and nightmares, imagining my baby face as some sort of Scarface kingpin, pretending that the city would one day be mine. With a ludicrous laughter, I made that my little kid purpose, both laughing and crying when eventually I was kicked out of my own neighborhood, as most of us were due to prison, death, and the streets’ own demise—gentrification. As royalty we had claimed the streets as if we owned them, without appreciating how the homeboy streets, the actual tar and cement, could betray us; economics knows no friends. The years escaped me, and I made new goals, such as the Marines, such as education, such as family and children and writing it all down. Barrio Bushido. And I did it. I did what I wanted, what my brother wanted for me, and I paid for it, through blood and sweat and lots of beers downed. I tried to do something different, even though that meant, at times, my own sanity and shame, but I did it. No real regrets. I have been lucky. 

Now sometimes I believe myself some sort of sage, some sort of writer, and I fool myself pretty good, knowing I can do whatever I want because I believe in the power of crazy, la vida loca. But by writing this I do not mean to promote varrio craziness because that alone is ultimately destructive and defeating and pretty selfish, too. No, the craziness I have in mind is a more universal insanity, one that we all take part in that is called life. We all have the feeling, which is more powerful than knowledge, that this craziness does not make sense, yet we continue. Things may get better or emptier, but we move forward because of faith, which is invisible, which is some type of stupidity, which is what we like—to smile at our own stupidity. Our biggest laughs, however, do not emanate from witty American accolades or overly intellectual ideas that we finally grasp; our deepest hooting belly laughter booms from the craziness of the Three Stooges in our own life. We love pie in the face, food fight, smashed banana in the hair insanity, goofiness, stupidity, to take ourselves not so seriously—to remember, to agree that we have all been brainwashed in one way or another, some by Scarface, others by education or “normal” or a system—you choose. But in that acknowledgement of our own absurdity, we admit how none of this makes any sense, and that is ok. To laugh with smashed banana in your hair or pie in your face, that is perfect laughter, and that is my goal.

I come up with grand schemes, which I have written down and carry around in my hip pocket: the book I am now completing, the books I will write, the curriculums I will put into practice, the presentations and people I will inspire and offend. But sometimes I take myself too seriously, as if I am some sort of poisoned politician. I am not a politician nor am I an anarchist or nihilist either. I do have purpose, but it can’t be just about me or my decisions for a body of strangers who have their own dreams. This is my purpose: I want to do it all, all that I am supposedly incapable of doing, to do all the craziest, most impossible things I can imagine, the headaches and heartbreaks, the plannings and implementations; I want to continue to do it like no one else has done it because that is my duty to roots, roots that we all share, and once finished, once la locura is laid out, I want to have a gigantic Three Stooges food fight and beer party, so we can all together share the craziness that is this existence. After all the books I have read and pages written, this is as sincere and profound as I can be.

Joy does exist, but it requires a suffering. Therefore, I do not believe joy is a totally selfish motive. Genuinely I believe in a sharing; what good is the proof of my own will to power if it is only for myself? No, in order for it to be true power, it must be able to empower itself to others, or else I am only living in an illusion of myself. If I can entertain, empower, or inspire others through my words and energy, I am filled with joy. I do believe in a transfer of energy, but if it is less than my full force will to power, I am doing myself and others a disservice, a lie to myself and them. I desire that others apply my ideas, combined of course with their own ideas, and become even mightier than me; that is a true proof of power, that the student has learned to teach the teacher. That is not a betrayal but the way it should be. If I cannot risk being laughed at, I am just stroking my ego and attempting to be politically correct or normal, and then my entire writing is a farce, and I would not like to believe that true. I like to believe that my goal is truth, the ultimate will to power. Perfect laughter is perfect truth.

 

“You cannot love everyone; it is ridiculous to think you can. If you love everyone and everything you lose your natural powers of selection and wind up being a pretty poor judge of character and quality. If anything is used too freely it loses its true meaning. Therefore, …you should love strongly and completely those who deserve your love, but never turn the other cheek to your enemy!”

Without knowing who wrote this quote, I responded to it with the following:  

My greeting and my closing: Always Amor. Reading this above quote, therefore, forces reflection.

I do not doubt the speaker’s passion or authenticity for feeling that way about those who “love,” especially if he is referring to those who emanate a smiling face but in fact do not share genuine love—for true love is tough, just as hate is tough. Love searches for pain and betrayal, just as much as it finds joy. Both concepts of love and hate are, ultimately, illusory to the greater reality of existence. Of course we cannot love all the time, nor can we choose who we think deserves our love, and that is because love is irrational. As Nietzsche states, “Love is beyond good and evil.” Perhaps we should choose only those who deserve our love, but think of the possible consequences of that—I will carve out illusions of who I think I am and search for people who I think are worthy of all powerful me: e.g. you deserve my love because you look like me, you think like me, you laugh at the same insecurities as I do. I think we can already see the problem with this rationale: it builds a fortress around our soul.

Dostoevsky writes an entire novel about Idiot Prince Myshkin who loves too much. In his book, the only place for those who love too much is in an insane asylum! In my novel, Barrio Bushido, El Santo also goes mad from loving too much, and some have interpreted his deviant actions as a consequence of not objectively judging his drug addict parents and immoral homeboys—he stays true to them at the expense of his own life. The speaker of the above quote would call Santo a pretty lousy judge of character; Santo would rightfully deserve his own demise. But Santo did not believe of love as essentially something intended for self-preservation. If love was about self-preservation, then we would be logical about it and care about our survival first and foremost. Love’s essence is based in mystery, but there are some hints to what it is—emotion, raw illogical bleeding red heart drives love. To attempt to tame love is to attempt to tame the universe, and I do not believe I have that capability, except, perhaps, only in my own mind, and, frankly, I do not desire that!

I desire an exploration and a stupidity, a craziness, and a loving; loving always provides me an unrealistic ambition. And I may know it is a lie to believe and write “Always Amor,” but I would love to be so stupid as to believe that lie, instead of the forms of the many other lies we are bombarded with in this world. I choose love because it is hard, and it reveals about me who I think I am. Why am I uncomfortable? Why am I afraid? Loving only those who are closest to us does give us a precise focus, and with precise love, I do understand that much can be accomplished in a seemingly efficient manner. I have tasted the sweetness of watermelon on a sunny day At this point in my life, however, I want a more universal force more than my own selfishness. Universal love, I believe, can grant me more creativity, more happiness, more torture, more consciousness than living on my own island, even if that island is paradise.

Always, Always Amor,

Benjamin

P.S. I later found out that the author of the above quote was Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan.

SAINT GEORGE, THE DRAGON SLAYER

We revere the fighter, the warrior, the one who trains and hardens him or herself for battle. We enjoy a good fight between equally matched opponents, and we enjoy even more when the little pitbull beats the lion. Many of us, especially from underdog worlds, have taken on this fighter persona, whether we actually do it in the ring, the cage, or in life. I, myself, like to flatter myself as a fighter for ideas and maybe even, sometimes, justice, however abstract that may be. I fight to help; I fight to love.

 

Today I am reassessing this time honored role because it simply needs to be reassessed and the rhetoric of it must evolve. I am not arguing here that we should abandon the spirit of the fighter or stop training as if our lives did not depend on it. It is always a matter of life and death, and this I will never forget. But I do believe that this fighter identity can keep us stifled, confined. Allow me to explain:

 

There is one goal in fighting: victory through someone or something else’s defeat. In fighting there is a great, powerful purpose because there is so much strength in hate! Let’s be frank, when we talk about fighting we are not really referring to some type of healthy competition. We are talking about punching and kicking, in a literal or metaphorical manner. Therefore, to clinch the constant role of being a fighter is to constantly search for destruction. To search for destruction, one is fueled by feelings of anger, and ultimately hate. Now, these feelings are human, and they can definitely be put to great use. There are many examples throughout history of powerful feats accomplished due to hate.  

 

But to be brainwashed to believe that we are obligated to be warriors is to be confined to constantly looking for attack, continually defending ourselves, perpetually imprisoning our minds that our lives must be about us versus some other. Also, our instinct becomes to lash out and attack, and now I am not just referring to the violence of fighting, but about metaphorical fighting, which leads to stress, bitterness, ultra-critical accusations, and repetition of cliché themes. He or she who must always fight must always look to inflict blows to the other. We are a super critical society that are experts on how to tell the other what is wrong with the other, how to hurt and be vicious with our feelings and our ideas. We are flaw finders, and we expose those flaws mercilessly. We have drug problems, an obesity epidemic, educational despair, historical injustices, philosophical fallacies, and plain stupidity. Yes, we do. I agree.

 

And what then?

 

The fighter is victorious in destruction, but, I ask you, what has been created? Sure, we have made ourselves feel better by identifying how we are not like the other, and we have released our anger on some other thing that may or may not even realize it has been attacked! In fact that other may not even care about our feeble attempts at our own will to power. Let us admit this: very rarely is that other forever defeated. So what exactly has been accomplished? We may use this fighter identity to comfort ourselves into believing we have power, but if the above is correct, it is all a ploy and delusion to actually keep us static and passive. By being forced to be fighters, we are being victimized because the fighter identity keeps us fighting instead of creating.

 

There are injustices that must be recognized and understood, but the understanding alone does not create anything. In order to break the shackles of our anger, we must transfer our power into something positive and creative. We must invent. Inventors are ingenuous. Inventors evolve. Inventors are conscious of the past, but are future driven. We must become future driven innovators of our destiny.

 

One of the biggest problems I predict with transforming ourselves into this new inventor identity is that by pushing the inventor identity as our primary persona, we may feel like traitors or cowards. We have an honor code that promotes loyalty. Many of us think we must, therefore, be loyal to being fighters, or we will be betraying ourselves or our communities or our ancestors or our spirits. Here I am not advocating for an abandonment of that fighting spirit; it has its use and vigor, and it would be silly to promote passiveness instead of passion. I am not saying we must not be loyal to who we are, but we must re-evaluate our loyalty to ourselves and question our purpose. Are we loyal to destruction or to creation? Ultimately, we must decide.

 

I favor creation. I don’t care if someone wants to fight me. Bring it on. I come outside with nothing but dust in my hands. Win or lose, I continue, here or somewhere else. Yes, I enjoy a good fight of ideas, but how fruitful is my life if I am constantly bogged down in someone else’s fight or even in my own egotistical pursuit for battle and heroism. I want to multiply. I want to do something new and help others and create art and be entrepreneurial and be funny and silly and dance and love and laugh. Those things, too, are part of life, and those things, too, are our natural state. I refuse to be brainwashed that I am an angry man! We need struggle and competition, but we also need freedom from it in order to allow our imaginations to produce new, revolutionary evolutionary things. We need the option to create out of nothing, where there is no opponent, where there is no enemy. We need to find liberation in the air.

 

That is hard. That is frightening. That is so empty and unknown to us, to look into ourselves without bitterness or a past or a restriction or an excuse. That is, however, how we can get both inside and beyond ourselves and beyond others’ limitations upon us. The victim paranoid fighter identity is outdated. New ideas are in order so that we can fulfill our potential and be of service to our present and to future generations. Travel, meet new people, do crazy things, read, converse in a positive manner, practice inventing new ways to do things, which can be as simple as how you eat or how you communicate with others. Smile Search for ways how things can be improved, and then actually action upon your ideas. We need you. We need your love and your passion more than we need hate, or even worse, a critical indifference.

 

Be loyal to you. It is you, only you, who has the power of filling loot into your life. Tu, solo tu.

 

A new beginning is always dawning. It seems that I have been repeating that statement for the past twenty years. I have had the luck and creativity to constantly perform new and crazy feats, beautiful tricks. Soon I will be a professor on sabbatical, counseling youth in Oakland. I will be traveling to New York, and I will be reading and writing all the time—two new books, one which is an educational autobiography, tentatively titled, Bone Mountain, and the other will be an entertaining and profound novel. I also plan to spend much more time loving and caring for my children. Physical fitness and nutrition, especially after the two leg surgeries, is important to me as well.

 

One of my most pressing plans is to build a curriculum for our struggling students so that they embrace their genius within. As an educator for the past fifteen years, I have not felt student progress en masse. Certainly, I have seen many students develop to become great leaders and successful people. If I listened to cliché advice that says I should be content as long as I help one student, then I should now rest and be satisfied with myself. I have already helped more than one. Perhaps because of my ego and/or my own understanding of how complex ideas are valued in academia, I know I am responsible for so much more.

 

Of course students are bright, but they usually scratch only the surface of things, and who can blame them when our society promotes so much fakeness that is normalized everywhere. To be genius is to be strange, yet strangeness is exactly what our students need to evolve. I know there are many programs out there, such as college success classes, but those types of time management classes are not enough. Time, as a concrete and abstract concept, is much more complex than time management. Profound universal concepts can help our students become better university level thinkers, better universally human thinkers. I have outlined a curriculum that is going to present students the opportunity of embracing an intellectual identity. With this type of identity, they will become better writers and thinkers, true leaders for their communities.

 

Below is a sample of the ten week program I intend to develop. These students will be introduced to genius concepts and with that knowledge they will embrace higher abstract ideals. Normalizing an appreciation for genius is the ultimate goal.

 

DEVELOPING AN INTELLECTUAL, EMPOWERING, ACTIONING IDENTITY

BY BENJAMIN BAC SIERRA

This program is a ten-week multi-cultural curriculum designed to instill in students an intellectual empowering actioning identity so that they become successful leaders in their classrooms, careers, personal lives, and communities.

The ten-week program will consist of ten two-hour lectures/discussions on the following topics:

1. Introduction to Intellectual History and Transformative Leadership
2. Motivation
3. Time: the concrete and abstract components
4. Philosophy
5. Literature/Mythology
6. Physical Fitness and Nutrition
7. Law
8. Art/Invention
9. Entrepreneurship
10. Leadership

Students need this program so that they can gain an urgency and confidence for their academic studies and lives. The big challenge today is not that students cannot engage in intellectual activities; the problem is that they have lost faith in academics relating to their lives. They are alienated from their own minds. “Developing an Intellectual, Empowering, Actioning Identity” will teach them multi-cultural history, theory, and real life genius ideas in action so that students will truly reflect, desire to further develop their own ideas, and become active participants in transformative education both inside and outside of the classroom. With successful participants as leaders, they will offer social proof that intellectual discourse can be powerful and fulfilling, thus normalizing empowering dialogue and conversations in their communities.

My Friends, Reconnecting with nature: a poem on the power of tree. Who is the primitive one Enjoy!

PRIMITIVE PERCEPTION

Tree, you bless me with your stupidity.

Don’t you know you are designed to desire more?

To fly like crows that caw on your arms

To scatter like squirrels that climb your perch

To walk like man who steals your shade.

Tree, you are so stupid to not want more

To not choose evolution or ease.

You do not have answers nor do you care

Yet your roots contain mystery

Your branches veins of life

Your leaves live and die

As you live and will die

And you grasp that destiny

Yet you are too stupid to care.

Oh tree, what security you hold

Such silent stupidity.

All I Can Offer You is the Air Cupped in My Hands

My Friends,

We own the air, yet many are afraid to breathe. We must reclaim the air that enters our lungs. One way to do this is to allow our brains to flower. We own our brains, yet many of us do not feed our brains an intellectual identity, a philosophical, or metaphysical identity. That identity has been lost or beaten. It is not that we can’t think or care about these intense subjects. But for many, they have been whipped out of us. History, politics, economics have whipped our humanity out of us. We have traded in our profound power for superficiality and pettiness. I do not have all the answers for this dilemma. But I feel a purpose, a truth that is punching its way out of me. The truth to live a life of the mind, that is something we must respect and reintroduce in ourselves. Who says we are only dishwashers or gangmembers or “normal” people or safe, educated people with degrees? We cannot allow ourselves to be limited by anything. Imagination is a reality. Just look in the mirror for proof. You invented yourself!

We must extract the artistry from each other and create new ideas and identities for ourselves and our communities because if we do not, we will continue to allow others to create them for us. We must become entrepreneurs of the mind and give each other intellectual wealth. With ideas, passion, and purpose, it is much easier to sustain suffering and to hope as well.

“Of This I’m Sure” by the 70’s soul group The Main Ingredient. We would sing this song, and we knew the answers because of it: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going on.” I am writing the new book, Bone Mountain, which is now 70 pages in length. I am teaching and learning as always from my best teachers: my students. I am doing more interviews, presentations, and proposals for funding for new projects and new community empowerment. I imagine a non-profit organization that does not simply promote cliché education. But I predict a new type of organization that promotes an intense intellectual identity for people, especially those who are disenfranchised. We should understand exactly why the Maya are genius, learn about and discuss the abstraction and concreteness of the concept of time. We should read Garcia-Marquez, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Hong-Kingston. We should listen to international university lectures regarding business and politics. We should dance It should not be a sin to desire an enlightening. I am not here to argue to you that the truth shall set you free. On the contrary, the truth many times is a torture! The truth is very hard. Let us embrace our difficulties and learn to love them. A life of the mind is not the complete answer, but it is a process for us to feel life, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

The air is not our enemy. Reclaim your fundamental right to breathe, to breathe your own true life.

Your Brother,

Benjamin Bac Sierra

Video of Barrio Bushido at UC Berkeley’s Story Hour

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BARRIO BUSHIDO VIDEO AT UC BERKELEY’S STORY HOUR

 

Gente, last night was a beginning and today is also a beginning! Wow and thank you is all that I can say. Barrio Bushido at UC Berkeley’s “Story Hour” was a huge success. Check this out: homeboys, homegirls, students, professors, and intellectuals gathered to engage in an authentic new genre of literature—Homeboy/Homegirl Urban Literature! Reward yourself by clicking on the link and viewing the video of our evolution! See you all tonight at the San Fran Mission Lowrider Cruise!

 

This Thursday, December 1 at 6:00 p.m. sharp, U.C. Berkeley’s famous “Story Hour” series will host me reading from and providing literary analysis of my novel, Barrio Bushido. At the beautiful Morrison Library inside of the Doe Library building on the U.C. Berkeley campus, with arms extended, I welcome you to attend this unique, unprecedented event. Never before has U.C. Berkeley, ranked as having the best English department in the United States, opened its doors for urban literature. Many times urban fiction is portrayed as senseless and ultra-violent. At this event I will explain how Barrio Bushido both reinforces and smashes those stereotypes.

 

Many of you know my story and work. I come from the streets, the Marine Corps, and academia. Many of our gente can relate positively to my background. I have performed throughout the state and have led functions that go beyond the literary level, including a first ever Ya Basta! Leadership Conference and more recently a successful Leadership and Education conference entitled “Inventing Your Destiny.”

 

Do not miss the creation of our history. Do not allow only professional intellectuals to analyze for us; we must represent with our heads held high. I volunteer my head for our love! Please come to this U.C. Berkeley event and make it a field trip for your friends and family. If you are a student, ask to receive extra credit for attending this event that may change your life.

 

If you would like to find out more about this event, please click on the link below.

 

Always Inventing,

Benjamin Bac Sierra

 

 

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1479422798&ref=tn_tnmn#!/events/143674205737913/

 

 

Barrio Bushido is relevant literature for all people. It represents a new genre of literature that portrays the Latino street homeboy as a homeboy philosopher. Most have never seen or read about Latino homeboys who can dialogue or think about existentialism or a will to power. Barrio Bushido delivers the full human range with many different themes, such as the concepts of good, evil, purpose, sacrifice, guilt, shame, love, the sublime.

This book is an entertaining, twisted story, a roller coaster ride of action and reflection, great intensity and even greater downfall. All emotions are explored and poked at with a fire iron. This book shocks and transforms. It is a book that speaks from the first person perspective of locos, locos as philosophers, capitalists, community friends, and men of flesh and blood with all the lust, love, and paradoxes that all humans experience. While reading and learning about Latino homeboys and homegirls in the most intense situations, we learn about ourselves in the most intense situations.

Right now we have only a handful of urban Latino books that are used in our university curriculums: Always Running, Parrot in the Oven, A Place to Stand. While those books are great in their own right, Barrio Bushido speaks to a contemporary generation, one that is no longer a pure cholo generation. Our current generation has been heavily influenced by rap, international war, globalism, and the modern technological media. Modern student readers can identify with the characters and the book. This book also has a gigantic literary value, especially for the way it deals so rawly with timeless pressing issues such as machismo, violence, purpose, and the metaphysical. This book does not pretend to have answers. Because it is fiction, it does not attempt to offer tidy solutions. There is no neat conclusion, except that we know for certain that there is much work that needs to be begun and done.
If you still have questions about the book, you can visit my blog http://todobododown.wordpress.com/questions-and-answers-with-benjamin-bac-sierra/.
My Best,
Benjamin Bac Sierra

The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Ben Bac Sierra was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission district, at one time the heart of Latino culture in Northern California. Living the brutal “homeboy” lifestyle, at seventeen he joined the United States Marine Corps and participated in front line combat during the first Gulf War. After his honorable discharge, he completed his Bachelor’s degree at U.C. Berkeley, a teaching credential program and a Master’s in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Currently, he is a professor at City College of San Francisco.