Alpha Theta Phi Chapter - Phi Theta Kappa - LaGuardia Community College

By Charles Adames, The sharp winds of a cold January morning could still be felt in my mind, cutting deep beneath my face, and small pieces of ice were melting beneath the tips of my eyelashes, while a rapid flow of heavy snow, carried by strong winds hit the oily car lot pavement at a New York dealership. It was not the condition of my body that bothered me most, but the view of the disorder surrounding me resembling my life during those days. The hours were long and cruel, and I could still remember some of the things that made me feel helpless, but in short moments I regained strength to continue on, as I remembered the last time I had spoken to my grandfather, those words resonating in my mind, gave me the strength needed to finish that long day.             My grandfather, a man who still remains a mystery to most who knew his name, and even those who knew him, lived in Jarabacoa, a rural town in the city of La Vega in the Do...

Luis K. Feliz Writing has been an all-encompassing passion, and being Publications Officer for Phi Theta Kappa has allowed me to do what I love every day, and for that I am truly grateful. Nevertheless, as any writer can tell you, writing is not an easy process. In fact, it is excruciating; churning a morass of incomplete thoughts into a cohesive whole is a painful process. Hence, writing requires discipline, patience, conviction, and love. I can still remember staying up all night ideas swarming in my mind, dozing off atop a mountain of crumpled paper, and coaxing the past with trinkets from bygone days of innocence in order to flesh out its lessons. For example, I distinctly remember taking out old photographs and translating the emotions onto a paper with brushstrokes of words. Or I would listen to an old Spanish ballad and recreate in my mind’s eye a family reunion. Ice cubes submerged in an orange sea of rum. My uncle’s makeshift guitar wailing and coalescing with guffaws summon...

By Luis K. Feliz Poised on the edge, my legs wiggle. 20 seconds. 10 seconds. 5 seconds. Go! I dive. “Nadie nace sabiendo,” my uncle, Tirso, tells me as I spring up from the bottom of the pool. “No one is born knowing.” This has become my mantra. Yet, it took me many years to know the meaning of those words, to frame them accurately, to render them honestly. In many ways, quoted words are elusive: they cannot capture the full meaning their speakers intended. Trying to capture what my uncle was thinking that day, I have attempted to immerse myself in his world to understand his pain: a fisherman who wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming his town’s mayor. From his struggles, I have learned about the vitality of persistence and the joys of creativity. My uncle didn’t write poetry because it came easily to him. In fact, he was not formally educated, and never won recognition for the poems he crafted. He didn’t fish because it was easy either. Actually, he almost drowned once. He did these ...

By Jocelyn Perez Frida Kahlo’s“Lo que me Dio el Agua” provokes many emotions within me, as well as brings forth not just one in particular, but an onslaught of memories, specifically, the bathtub, and its significance to me. I had learned to perceive the bathtub as a place of cleansing and renewal, a place where, after the hardest of times, the water could simply wash away the pain of the day. I pictured some of my troubles rolling down my back and into the drain never to be seen again. The painting, however, made me wonder if my troubles truly vanish into the maze of pipes, or if they truly linger in the tub, present every time I step into it, rotting away in shadows. Could it be that they sit there waiting, watching night after night, prepared to reveal themselves when they so please? In the approximately fourteen years I have lived in this apartment, my bathtub has experienced countless showers, cleanings and those warm bubble baths, but it has also been stained numerous times by my...

By Luis K. Feliz When I stepped on someone’s sneakers, I said, “My bad” (sorry). When someone was overreacting to something insignificant, I said, “Why are you tripping.” That was during adolescence because since then my idiolect has evolved tremendously. As an immigrant to the United States, when I first settled in New York, I lived in a diverse working-class community. As a result, I mimicked the speech patterns of my neighbors and acquaintances. By the age of eleven, I had a “whole slew of” colloquialism to mark my successful "acculturation." In the microcosm of my community, the emulative process for success was not defined by vying for eloquence but rather by vying for how ungrammatical and non-standard your speech could be. You were in the “know” when you knew the metonymies for the police and other outsiders that threaten the sovereignty of the sub-state. It was a whole different world, with its own lexicon and its own traditions and secrecy. When I progressed in the e...