Back in April, I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniela Capistrano, Jane-of-all-trades and founding member of the POC Zine Project for an online publication I edit called RE/VISIONIST. As if I hadn’t loved POC Zine Project and Daniela’s mission enough, I learned even more about her/their rich history of activism through the interview. Recently, at the screening of Afro-Punk we co-hosted with POC Zine Project, Daniela debuted her new zine, BAD MEXICAN!! #1.

Bad Mexican is about Daniela’s family, upbringing, and how her history affects her life now. She gracefully touches on issues like abuse, racism, and being a woman of color with white privilege – all while maintaining her sense of humor. She brings her own experience to the table and sprinkles each story with advice gleaned from her life. Her advice is both for us as individual people and as witnesses within a racist culture. Bad Mexican is in the lineage of perzines by women of color that are at once personal yet have larger implications for the ways we view history and the world around us.

I really love the way that Daniela incorporates family, history (personal and political), and her own life into one telling document; it is a reminder that these experiences are not separate, that in actuality, they are really fluid.

Bad Mexican is available for purchase directly from the author. Daniela is capping this release at 100 copies, so get yours while it’s hot at her Etsy store!

This scholarly attention is a giant step forward for Riot Grrrl as a movement, and to read about this news on The New Yorker’s blog The Book Bench was a real brain bomb. Author of the blog entry, Macy Halford, posits that archiving these papers means Riot Grrrl has passed into history, bringing sad news with the good news. I beg to differ! Something’s been aflutter in the girl punk scene, especially in our very own Brooklyn, NY, for sometime now, as collective bird Kate writes in her article Girls Germs: A Brooklyn Scene Report, printed in the October Issue of Maximum Rocknroll.

As if NYU hadn’t already won our (speed) hearts with this important archival, NYU Press also recently published Alison Piepmeier’s book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. The book is the first of its kind to fully explore the connection between zines and feminism for the past two decades as well as their joint role in our future. Piepmeier is the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.

IN BIRD NEWS: We will be tabling with our distro at the Anti-Valentines Riot Grrl Cover Band Show!

No, seriously, we’re not going anywhere.