A Sizzlin' Latin Night

Coming up this Saturday, the weekend's salsa scene will be at Indigo on Nuuanu Avenue. Chemisstry Hawaii and Alma Latina Productions promise a night full of popular salsa/bachata/merengue music and my favorite, REGGAETON! Free salsa lessons with Greg Henry from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. Bring a toy and get in for $5.

One more event coming up on Thursday is Salsa Thursdays at the Living Room. Definitely worth checking out. I actually like the Living Room - it's nice to dance at a venue near the water. This weekly treat runs from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Chicharrones Choke Chicana Child to Death (in Chino)

She's poet, writer, social commentator and a former producer for the George Lopez show, her name is Michele Serros, a blunt Chicana (falsa) from Oxnard, California. As part of Hispanic Heritage Week, one of my classmates Marsha Cordes, arranged for Serros to speak and share her writing with students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Serros read her obras, or poetry and short stories, with a raspy Chicana accent gently poking fun at her own culture through flashbacks of her choking on chicharrones and analyzing frozen veggies at the grocery store. Memories all tracing back to her vivid childhood made us laugh and sometimes snicker at how strangely familiar they were to our own childhood. The way she delivered her experiences of naiveté and fitting in sparked a little mini-Serros in all of us.

"I was told my work was not universal enough," Serros said, explaining how difficult it was to find a voice that suited mainstream society. It was a good thing she didn't change her voice, although influenced by Judy Blume novels, Serros' has such a tight grasp on capturing an audience and delivering her works with an original yet somewhat familiar style.

This is the real Michele Serros, who made her way down to Honolulu to share what some may not have known about being "Chicana."