Born and raised in East L.A., Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin has become a vibrant activist, writer, and visual and performing artist. Her new collection of poetry and stories, Chicana on Fire: Ignited by the 1970’s East L.A. Chicano Protest Movement, pays tribute to her Boyle Heights neighborhood. We’ve adopted this passage from a review of the book by Jimmy Centeno that has just appeared in Latino Rebels.

The 1970 police assault on a Chicano peace protest against the Vietnam War at Laguna Park in East Los Angeles sparked Aparicio-Chamberlin’s poetry of protest. In Attacked, Tear Gassed, and Bludgeoned by Sheriffs at the National Chicano Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam, East Los Angeles, August 29, 1970, Aparicio-Chamberlin writes: “I froze; lost my speech. I cried inside my head.” Her invisible tears, fossilized in this poem like amber.

In Don’t Open the Door, Aparicio-Chamberlin brings us close to the frightful drama of an undocumented family. The poem starts as a letter from a teacher to the mother of Alejandro, warning her to tell her son not to open the door, to be quiet and stay still if he hears a knock. The mother’s consecutive instructions of “don’t do this” and “don’t do that” string together like beads on a rosary. Aparacio-Chamberlin is rescuing and preserving memory that allows her community the space to become the authors of their own history.

Palestine, Haiti, Vietnam — all of the Global South — appear in her political poetry. In Oh, Palestine, Aparicio-Chamberlin yearns to build a perfumed bridge to be close to her Palestinian sisters in struggle. In her poem dedicated to Haiti, she describes her desire for a small plot of land for the poor: “No more quaking only the Earth stretching and scratching to loosen the soil for beans and corn to grow for you.”

Chicana On Fire blazes with the ganas  — desire — to build a different, more promising world for us all.

Jimmy Centeno has studied liberal arts at East L.A. Community College and Latin American studies at Cal State Los Angeles. He’s currently concluding a second master’s in art history.