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Ronald and Maricarmen Lemley are bilingual teachers who have worked for decades teaching English in California, New Mexico, China, Taiwan, and Lima before settling in their home in Cajamarca, Peru. Maricarmen and Ronald have been married for 35 years and have written and illustrated five bilingual children’s books with the help of Floricanto Press.

 During their five years in New Mexico, the Lemleys lived in a farming area where thousands of acres of red and green chile surrounded the countryside. In that southwestern culture, they would frequent the chile roasteries and learned to barbecue and peel enough green and red chile to last them through the cold winters. They also learned where to buy freshly ground chile powder, sopaipillas, enchiladas suizas, green chile stew, pozole, bizcochitos, and blue corn pancakes. They learned the secret of cooking and blending dried chiles to make a creamy salsa.

They are well-known by the fruit and vegetable vendors in the colorful Mercado Municipal de Magdalena del Mar as well as the Mercado Central in Cajamarca. They have traveled to the Cusco and Macchu Pichu and the Amazonian jungle areas of Iquitos and Madre de Dios. After much practice, they can find and prepare a wide variety of fresh herbs, fruit vegetables, meat products, and spices that can be used for cooking Peruvian food.

A whole spectrum of Andean, coastal and Amazonian ingredients are available in Cajamarca due to its unique geographical location. One can buy the tiny bananas called plátanos-manzanos, yucca, red, yellow purple and white potatoes, giant papayas, mangoes, passion fruit, five different kinds of avocados, and numerous other ingredients.

While this is their first cookbook, Ronald`s work history includes several years as a cook in French/Vietnamese restaurant where he learned to make Creme Brule, Coc au Vin, Ratatouille, traditional and sourdough French bread and Crevettes Cognac au Beurre.

The couple spent their free time in both Northern California and New Mexico, growing extensive gardens with a variety of Peruvian yellow chiles, black corn, tomatoes, and Peruvian purple potatoes.

Peruvians become experimental when living in the US, and Maricarmen would often buy Peruvian ingredients at a Latin market to make flan, aji de gallina, carpulcra, and other dishes.

In Lima, the couple earned certificates of achievement after attending professional cooking classes and often experiment with their newly learned recipes.

Please don’t be afraid to shop the Latin American markets and try out the recipes in this book that offers many unique and easy to prepare Peruvian recipes.

 

 

 

 

It is the story of Elizabeth Irene Martínez, an early Latina pioneer administrator in the library world—and a leading advocate of library services to Hispanics and the Mexican and Latino communities. She witnessed and suffered racial hostilities and fought the denial of library services to minorities. The story includes the spiritual strength she drew from her ancestors, her vigor, which helped her to stave off the professional criticism. This compelling narrative documents her struggles to provide library services to the underserved populations and the contentious issues that divided American librarianship then, and today, its persistent inability to recognize and serve diverse communities, the Latino population in particular. It also documents the hostile response and backlash from the white leading administrators and library board members to her legitimate demands. Her account is a story of enduring professional friendships, an indictment of the library profession, bitter betrayals, and overt racial discrimination by leaders of the American public libraries.

This book comes at an appropriate time when bigotry, racial discrimination, and inequities in public services have driven to exasperation victimized minorities and people of good conscience. When the wounds of racial divisions, lack of services, and conflict in American institutions—often very well hidden to this day in American libraries—have come opened and bleed shame, discontent, anger, if not remorse, sorrow, and regret. On June 26, 2020, four days before this book went to press, and about 144 years after its founding, The American Library Association (ALA), very likely forced by the unprecedented racial demonstrations in the streets of America, has issued a declaration of responsibility: "ALA takes responsibility for past racism, pledges a more equitable association." However, will the status quo change?

 Hers is a Chicana chronicle, a Latina woman’s story, an American story. It is a tale mainly written on the open stage of American libraries over the last four decades.  The White entrenched library world saw her mission of diversity and expanding services to minorities as aggression to white dominance over budget and services. She hopes that young people of all ethnicities, races, and cultures who are entering any profession striving for changes to address multicultural communities will find in her story inspiring to fight for a racially inclusive and pluralistic society.

This story needed to go beyond the hyper-realism usually associated with representations of the ghetto and its conditions. Searing and powerful, this work could not be more urgent in our present moment. --Roanne Kantor, Professor of English, Stanford University

Solo Cholo University chronicles the life of a young man of color. It describes in vivid detail the author's metamorphosis process evolving from the street smarts necessary to survive a gang war zone to achieving educational enlightenment at a higher learning institution

“By birthright Posada belongs to a manner that has left its stamp on the twentieth century: Expressionism. Unlike the majority of Expressionist artists, however, Posada never took himself too seriously.” Octavio Paz

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