Author: Alejandro Murguía and Mission Short Story Writers

San Francisco's Mission District celebrate three of their most accomplished short story writers for Alejandro Murguía's new book release, The Other Barrio: New and Selected Stories. Mission District's native writers Norman Antonio Zelaya and Cathy Arellano, join Alejandro for this special celebration!

Off-site location: City College of San Francisco Mission Campus, Room 109, 1125 Valencia St. 

Alejandro Murguía

San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus Alejandro Murguía imbues his mostly brown, working-class characters with the grit necessary to face every day in this collection of short fiction. Several characters eke out a living in La Mission. In the title story, a once-elegant hotel—now a rundown apartment building for mostly single men and a few desperate families—burns to the ground, killing seven people. City building inspector Roberto Morales had recently reviewed it and knows there was nothing wrong with the wiring, even before he’s hustled off to a “meeting” with a local mafioso. As he pounds the pavement of San Francisco’s gritty Mission District, looking for clues to the fire, he realizes the lengths to which developers will go to make another million—even as far as sending seven innocent souls to “the other barrio.”

Norman Antonio Zelaya

Every cigarette trampled on the sidewalk is the ghost of lips and smoke, the artifact of fingers and tongue, and a moment of human breath unnoticed even in its occurrence, alone on the curb. Norman Antonio Zelaya brings the periphery into view: the embers of a long draw, the cough into a sweater sleeve, the shoe grinding ash into concrete. Gente, Folks is Zelaya’s second book, published by Black Freighter Press in 2022. His stories are linked by the shared setting of San Francisco’s Mission District, bringing forward a multiplicity of voices, fine hairs clung wet to the face of the neighborhood, each curling across its own crevice or contour. They are unseen but itch the skin. These are the kinds of stories Zelaya tells—ones of noticing.

Cathy Arellano

A professor at American River College takes on the topic of gentrification and how it affects communities in her collection of poetry, Salvation on Mission Street and I Love My Women, and Sometimes They Love Me. Arellano grew up a Mexican lesbian writer in San Francisco's Mission District and has first hand experience with gentrification. Her mother was evicted from the flat they rented in 1983 by new owners and died less than a year later. Arellano returned to San Francisco as an adult and the book's poems and stories reflect the love she feels for the people and places of Mission Street.