DONATE NOW TO SUPPORT ETHNIC STUDIES!

(L-R) Writer Matt Mendez, CLASS member Juan Valdez, CLASS member Maradorin Rocha, Bianca Sierra, Writer Helena Maria Viramontes, CLASS member Issa Mena, and Writer Manuel Muñoz. 

In response to the Tucson Unified School District dismantling Mexican American Studies classes in Tucson, we have started Chican@ Literature After School Studies (CLASS), which meets at the John Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson and is free for all students who attend. We meet for at least two hours each Sunday and Prescott College will be offering college credit to these students for attending Sunday classes. 

It is incredibly important for CLASS to remain free for this small group of young scholars. Thus, we have established the Chican@ Literature And Studies Scholarship (CLASS) Fund in order to raise tuition funds for the students to receive college credit for their participation. Will you invest in these dedicated young people by donating to CLASS today?

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO DONATE - http://chicana.kintera.org/

Kerouac.

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born. 

― Jack Kerouac