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"I
threw a couple of the peas in my mouth like they were a couple
of magic pills,
expecting them to make me as strong as ten men
and give me X-ray vision. But they tasted like ordinary raw
peas. And nothing happened. "What's up, Cuate," I said. "These ain't magic." Cuate
just laughed and raced around the garden in a hyperactive trance. Before I
could even blink, he collected every single pea-pod in the garden. To me,
they were just peas. They weren't worth any of the effort Cuate was giving. "What are
you doing?" I said, afraid that the old man would kick our butts
if he saw
his peas missing. "Do you like peas or what?""
-- Excerpt from "Butterfly Warrior" |
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Butterfly Warrior follows the progress of four
friends who grew up together
in Los Arbolitos Barrio of Santa
Fe, New Mexico. Bonded by a belief in the Aztec
legend of the
Butterfly
Warrior, they a drift apart in adulthood. One of the
four, commits suicide when he can no longer play his beloved cantares. Manny Lopez, now Cuate, Whitey, and Anna must resolve
their differences in order to discover
the strange truth
surrounding Manny's demise. Cuate is
the loose-tongued joker,
Anna,
Cuate's twin sister, was the voice of reason; Whitey was
the outsider craving acceptance, and Manny was the Prometheus
whose fire was music. The Butterfly Warrior, Iztpapalotl, is the
warrior aspect of the Aztec mother goddess,
Coatlique. She
grants both the souls of soldiers who die in battle and of women
who die
in childbirth the privilege of returning to Earth as
butterflies to collect the
eternal reward
of sucking on sacred
nectar. The time came for the group to go their
separate ways:
Anna
to become a literary star and political activist, Whitey to
become
computer scientist,
Cuate became
a womanizer. All the
while, however, Manny
kept the music of the
Butterfly Warrior
with the hope of somehow restoring the magic
of their youth in
the barrio.
But, Whitey's greatest technological innovation, the
nano-wasp, becomes the greatest
enemy the friends could ever
meet. Butterfly Warrior
brings technology and tradition into
direct conflict.
Though the conflict between language and customs
is at the heart of all Latino fiction,
Butterfly Warrior sets
these dichotomies at odds with such the usage of technology
and
its potential for both good and bad within the traditional
Latino community and the
power of music to heal. Juan Blea, MA,
Ed was born in 1971 in Santa Fe, NM.
Juan's first language was
Spanish, which has allowed him to navigate between Anglo
and
Hispanic cultures. He currently serves as the Software Quality
Assurance
and Documentation Team Lead at Envision Utility
Software. He is also a bilingual
poet and author with several
published stories; most recently From Tug of War to Dance
in Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul and one novella, Under the Same
Sky.
To Order:
Coming soon by Same Author:
Under the Same Sky
0-615111-56-4
Poetry/Current Events
$16.00/Paper
128 Pages
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