About this Event
Beyond Barock! A Day of Latinx Punk, Social Justice, & Literature brings together the intersections between punk rock music and the legal system. Though countercultural movements and the challenging of systematic norms are in constant clash with the law, we invite audiences to hear from four punk authors turned public defenders, scholars, and activists of Chicanx and Latinx cultural background.
Come on early and visit the local organizations tabling at the festival. All Power Free Clinic will be handing out mutual aid resources, like hygiene supplies, narcan, know-your-rights handouts for the public, and more. The LA Public Defender’s Office will provide information on the importance of expungement, that is, clearing a criminal record from past convictions. If you or anyone you know is in need of these services, come and ask away and start your process!
Organizations will be tabling during the event, 12 - 3 pm.
At 2 pm, we will have an open mic for the community. Come and share your poetry before the featured readers take the stage in the infamous black box theater. Punks, poets, and non-poets, are welcomed! Please be respectful in the space and come prepared with one or two short pieces to share.
Punk authors & scholars Juanita E. Mantz, author of Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender; Richard T. Rodriguez, author of A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad; Michelle Cruz Gonzales, author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk, and Margaret Elysia Garcia, author of the daughterland poems will be reading from their collections which complicate and reveal a shared love (and frustration) with a genre of music and belonging to a scene while coming of age and in the later part of life. What drives individuals of Latinx/Chicanx communities to identify with the punk rock music scene?
After the readings, catch a musical performance by IE-based punk band Bad Boys Dance Party and grab a delicious bite from our food vendor of the day, Mañosa!
Doors Open: 12:00 pm
Open Mic: 2:00 pm
Readings: 3:00 pm
Music Performance: 4:20 pm
About the authors:
Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the short story collection Graft (Tolsun Books), the poetry chapbook Burn Scars, and the poetry collection the daughterland poems (El Martillo Press). She's the co-editor of the forthcoming Red Flag Warning: Northern Californians Living with Fire anthology (HeyDay Books). She’s currently working on a second poetry collection and an historical speculative novel.
Richard T. Rodríguez is a Professor of English and Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad (2022), both published by Duke University Press. He is currently finishing a book of poems—Exemplars and Accomplices—about his time living in Chicago.
Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a USC Law educated lawyer, writer, performer, and podcaster and has been a Deputy Public Defender in Riverside for 15 years and specializes in representing mentally incompetent clients. Her memoir "Tales of an Inland Empire Girl" (Los Nietos Press, 2022) about her chaotic IE punk rock childhood and high school dropout year is a finalist for the 2023 Latino Books to Movie Awards. Her chapbook "Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or how I became a punk rock lawyer" (Bamboo Dart Press, 2021) about the horrors of mass incarceration and the intersection with punk rock won a gold medal at the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for best first book nonfiction. Her stories have been published in literary journals, newspapers & anthologies. Juanita is a Macondista, a VONA alum and has presented at UCR Writers' Week, CSUSB, the UCR Punk Conference, the Tomás Rivera Conference, Pasadena LitFest, AWP & Beyond Baroque. She produced the ASA 2020 Freedom Course on Combatting Mass Incarceration and was the 2022 writer in residence at Pasadena City College teaching incarceration impacted students. She is in the low res MFA program at the University of New Orleans. On her video podcast, "Life of JEM" she does live interviews with writers. Find everything on her author website: https://juanitaemantz.com.
Michelle Cruz Gonzales is an English professor and the author of the memoir, The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk which is taught in colleges and Universities in colleges all over the United States. She has essays and fiction in anthologies by Putnam, PM Press, Seal Press, and Literary Kitchen, and she has published online in Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Latino Rebels, and Mitu. She recently completed a satirical novel about near-future-California that seceded from the US and forces intermarriage between whites and Mexicanos for the purpose of creating a race of beautiful, intelligent, hardworking people, and she is currently at work on a screenplay. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gonzales was a member of three all women punk bands, Bitch Fight, Kamala and the Karnivores, and Spitboy. Never interested in playing music with men, Gonzales, primarily a drummer and lyricist, toured nationally and internationally with Spitboy whose lyrics focused on women and gender issues. In 2016, Gonzales published The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band, about her experiences as the only person of color in Spitboy and what it was like being a person of color in the predominately white Bay Area punk scene. Gonzales and Spitboy are featured in the 2017 documentary, Turn it Around: Story of East Bay Punk.
About the musicians
Bad Boys Dance Party is a Skumbia Punk from the IE. Down to clown, we flip a frown upside down and into the pit. Played all over SoCal and even Arizona and Nevada. We get the party started and keep the mosh nasty. Newsy single Moving Walls just dropped! Energy thru the roof, gets you more wild then the high proof. Welcome to the dance party!
About the organizations
All Power Free Clinic is a nurse-founded, multi-disciplinary, decentralized, free community clinic building power and solidarity through health and mutual aid. We work within our scope and in partnership with mutual aid collectives to provide community members, both housed and unhoused, with blood pressure and blood sugar checks, wound care, basic fist harm reduction, health tactics and OTC medications. APFC is monetarily sustained through community-raised funds. Our mission is to build towards an alternative healthcare system in the U.S. that is completely free of cost in which patients have full autonomy over their care.
We recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are suggested while inside our center.
Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow attendees, or performers.
Because this is a free event seating is limited. Please arrive early.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00
