Let us Gather in a Flourishing Way by Juan Felipe Herrera

To be honest this is the only poem that after reading it around a hundred times... I still can't understand it, nevertheless it sounds nice and the words seem to have a logic. I want to believe that it is talking about a beautiful place where some people would like to live in. Since the author is a chicano, also I think that he is describing like the place or country where chicanos hope to live in...

"where we toil siempre

in the garden of our struggle and joy

let us offer our hearts a saludar our águila rising

freedom"

He is like trying to say that they want a place where they are not critizised because of the way they speak and to be able to use their many dialects. I might be wrong but this is the only thing I could comprehend of the poem, any comments and help will be accepted. 

How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua

This is a very intresting essay, I can say that it is the other side of the coin form "Los Vendidos." In Los Vendidos we have a big and very direct critic for chicanos, but here one chicana is telling us her story, of how difficult it is for her to feel accepted either in one country or another because she speaks "Spanglish."

"I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess-that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler."

With this she is telling us how everyone tried to correct her, but what no one can understand is the suffering that living in a frontier of 2 different countries implays... to be judeged by everyone most of the times. Her way of speaking is something no one can change, because where she lives everyone speaks like that. 

"For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest-For many chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East."

 So I can really say that this people that suffer of critizism from both countries, Mexico and the USA, have a story that makes us think different, the way they speak is not intentional, it is just the way they are. Remember that the coin has to faces...

Virtual Love by Nephtali de Leon

This poem is quit intresting and difficult to know the real intention of it, if it's a critic, a description or any other thing. I believe it is a critic and a description of how many realtionships work nowadays, they don't even know each other phisically but they are in love but...

"they were window voyeurs

who made love

on their tabletops..."

I believe that is a critic because that doesn't happen, and well another critic for me is when their love is "hacked" and nobody understood their love. I think those two are the only critics, but the rest of the poem is just a description saying that, that love is beautiful in a way and this is how relationships work, you start dating someone because you want to know him or her better, and that is happening in the poem, they are knowing each other and they are falling in love even though they hadn't meet each other face to face, but they are okay with that...

"and they knew this was the place

for real abstract love

without even once

stepping out

to be kissed by the moon

perfect icon gleaming

in the microsoft night!"

The Napkin Poets by Nephtalí de León

I enjoyed this poem because it is giving a personification to the napkins some people uses to write in moments of inspiration, maybe a letter, maybe a song, maybe a poem...

"and the napkins 

wnat the

wait for them

With a pen

spilling 

their passions"

Appart form giving a personification to the napkins, it tells you what napkins are used for in many ocassions and mostly in a "café". But the bestest peronification of the napkins was last one, when the author descibes new napkins...

"like a young

virgin girl

dressed in white

anxiously

waiting

for her far-away

poet"

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

I enjoyed this story because it is realistic, it has important messages, and you need to analyze it well to understand it the way it deserves to be understood. Cleofilas is actually mexican, but she is a romantic woman that when she gets married she wishes to have a better life like in "telenovelas", but suddenly she finds out that not everything is like in tv. She finds herself living with a violent and non-understanding husband and in a house between Soledad and Dolores and nearby a river named "Woman Hollering Creek".
You can loose yourself in the story because it is really confusion but in the end that is what makes the story different, and also the symbols, the names of Dolores and Soledad have a very strong and important symbol in Cleofilas life, and the name of the river she lives by also. Felice is a symbol we can't leave behind, since she represents the freedom and the happiness of leaving the fears, the pain and the loneliness in the past to look forward to a new life.

"Then Felice began laughing again, but it wasn't Felice laughing. It was gurgling out of her own throat, a long ribbon of laughter, like water."

Wild Blessings by Lucille Clifton

This poem is really intresting and it says something that is very true about the understanding, that sometimes revelations is something hard to handle or to look at even if we understand it there is something inside us that can't undestand it or at least wishes not to have heard or seen that...

"I am grateful for many blessings
but the gift of understanding,
the wild one, maybe not."

In this case she is talking of "the wild one" because thru all the poem she mentions situations that can happen, but that are hard and not ethical or moral, like the father that abused from her daughter, a suicide... and many things...

"in that hand the hand of a man who
emptied into his daughter, the hand
of a girl who threw herself
from a tenement window, the trembling
junkie hand of a priest, of a boy who
shattered across viet nam
someone resembling his mother,
and more. and more."

I believe that she is trying to say that she can understand the reasons for those people to do that, but she can't finish to understand it or she wishes she hand't because it might be something that goes against her way of thinking.