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My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. . . . Abraham Tovar is a young man who works in a sausage factory and desperately longs to create a history of his own. As Abraham's life becomes absorbed into the blood and spice of pork, his thoughts explore his ancestry, roam the stars, and reflect upon the despairs and strengths of factory workers who live with "the unyielding memory of pig." I pulled into Galdini Sausage at noon. The workers walked out of production and swatted away the flies desperate for pork. Pork gripped the men and was everywhere, in the form of blood, in the form of fat, and in pink meat that stuck to the workers' shoes. Work Done Right is a sequence of narrative poems, told with a lyricist's tenderness and an eye for detail, that address the human condition in unexpected ways. David Dominguez explores Abraham's struggle to maintain personal dignity in harsh circumstances, juxtaposing bleak images of the sausage factory with the hope of finding one's true place in the world. Through his sensuously textured words, he pays tribute to people and place as he takes readers on a mystic journey toward redemption.

Poems.

On February 28, 1977, former police officer Billy Joe McIlvain entered his West Covina home with local 18 year old gang member, David Dominguez. McIlvain shouted out to his wife to grab the baby and run as Dominguez was there to kill them. She picked up her child and went to a neighbor's house. The police were called and when they arrived, a seige ensued that lasted many hours with over 100 shots fired. Finally, Billy Joe came out after killing David Dominguez with a gun he had hidden away. But soon, his story of being kidnaped and killing in self defense began to unravel as the evidence at the scene did not fit with the story he told. Was he the victim or the perpetrator of the crime? He was arrested, tried and convicted for kidnap and murder but always maintained his innocence. This is the true story as told by fellow police officer who witnessed the events first hand. It details the threats and many acts of harrassment that took place over several years building up to the killing and along the way, also introduces the reader to what it was like to be a police officer in Los Angeles County in the 1970s. Good Cop or Bad Cop? You decide! Book length: Approximately 178 pages

A war that started under questionable pretexts. A president who is convinced of his country’s might and right. A military and political stalemate with United States troops occupying a foreign land against a stubborn and deadly insurgency. The time is the 1840s. The enemy is Mexico. And the war is one of the least known and most important in both Mexican and United States history—a war that really began much earlier and whose consequences still echo today. Acclaimed historian David A. Clary presents this epic struggle for a continent for the first time from both sides, using original Mexican and North American sources. To Mexico, the yanqui illegals pouring into her territories of Texas and California threatened Mexican sovereignty and security. To North Americans, they manifested their destiny to rule the continent. Two nations, each raising an eagle as her standard, blustered and blundered into a war because no one on either side was brave enough to resist the march into it. In Eagles and Empire, Clary draws vivid portraits of the period’s most fascinating characters, from the cold-eyed, stubborn United States president James K. Polk to Mexico’s flamboyant and corrupt general-president-dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna; from the legendary and ruthless explorer John Charles Frémont and his guide Kit Carson to the “Angel of Monterey” and the “Boy Heroes” of Chapultepec; from future presidents such as Benito Juárez and Zachary Taylor to soldiers who became famous in both the Mexican and North American civil wars that soon followed. Here also are the Irish Soldiers of Mexico and the Yankee sailors of two squadrons, hero-bandits and fighting Indians of both nations, guerrilleros and Texas Rangers, and some amazing women soldiers. From the fall of the Alamo and harrowing marches of thousands of miles in the wilderness to the bloody, dramatic conquest of Mexico City and the insurgency that continued to resist, this is a riveting narrative history that weaves together events on the front lines—where Indian raids, guerrilla attacks, and atrocities were matched by stunning acts of heroism and sacrifice—with battles on two home fronts—political backstabbing, civil uprisings, and battle lines between Union and Confederacy and Mexican Federalists and Centralists already being drawn. The definitive account of a defining war, Eagles and Empire is page-turning history—a book not to be missed.

This article tells the story of Community Lawyering in action at the Boulders Apartments located in Provo, Utah. Community Lawyering at Brigham Young University Law School provides law students with a clinical opportunity to practice collaborative justice among low-income residents. We do this by focusing our attention on the untapped promise of the poor themselves to assert themselves as problem solvers. We prove to those with little or no access to justice that they hold the key to that door through joint-gain negotiation among themselves and with community agencies and public officials, not only with those who are already involved but other interested stakeholders as well. As much as experts - e.g., pro bono attorneys, public interest lawyers and ADR specialists - try to help by opening that door with respect to legal matters addressed in isolation from the larger context of privation, we impress upon those who live “24/7” with all the interrelated hardships of poverty that they must learn what more they can do for themselves to tackle the full range of their challenges. To this end, Community Lawyering acts as a catalyst for Boulders residents to find their group voice in public settings, making presentations on who they are, what struggles they face living in poverty, and how they would propose to take new steps and tell new stories. Early on in the 2003-2004 academic year, while law students and I were interviewing Boulders residents and working with them to form grassroots advocacy groups that would address a range of legal and extra-legal concerns, the residents started grumbling that there were too few public options for transportation to needed services and grocery stores. Then matters went from bad to worse: the bus company announced that the bus line that made a stop fairly close to their residential complex was being removed for lack of ridership. As an impending negotiation with the bus company, we saw several possibilities.