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by Rudy Ch. Garcia
If you've got writer's block about your next novel, short story or lit piece to win that Pulitzer, read on.

On long-distance calls with my mom this year, one of her regular reports was about how the trees in her yard were dying in the Texas drought. No matter how much she watered, she still lost about half of them on her quarter-acre property on the outskirts of San Antonio, even her hardy mesquites. She, and her trees, are just another example of collateral damage from global warming. Mom's in her 80s and I'm in my 60s, so neither one of us will suffer long from this. However, a child of six will likely have a long thirsty future, maybe one with not very many trees.

Six-year-olds, Chicano and otherwise, dying trees, drought, an arid American Southwest (and northern Mexico), global warming--what's any of this got to do with a lit blog? Nothing more than the Occupy movement, Greenpeace and election politics have to do with latino lit. If we don't see connections to us, then we will make none.

This July's 60mph dust storms in the Phoenix area seem a reincarnation of the 50s Dust Bowl's immense storms, called "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers." Those eventually affected one hundred million acres, centered in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes. Many "Okies" families moved to California where economic conditions were little better than what they'd left. They affected author John Steinbeck enough to write about in The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, [wherein many of these "Hispanics" were portrayed as lazy shiftless drunks]. Those droughts began in the Southwestern United States, New Mexico and Texas during 1950 and '51; the drought spread through the Central Plains, Midwest and certain Rocky Mountain States, particularly between 1953 and 1957, and into Nebraska. Texas experienced the most severe drought in recorded history. 244 of Texas’ 254 counties were declared federal disaster areas.

Before I share the background of hard data that might kick-start or revive your lit career, here're some themes that sound like science fiction but could eventually qualify as nonfiction:

1. Epic war story: Drought-stricken Mexican peasants move across the border in the tens of thousands to avoid starvation, and successfully overcome thousands of troops stationed along the border. The forced-migration results in genocidal slaughter, but also overcrowding in homes far from the border. Oh, wait--that's already nonfiction.

2. Neohistorical fiction: An Irish-American-Chicano descendant of Billy the Kid finds safe harbor in those overcrowded homes because of his love for a mexicana and his Spanish poetry lamenting the loss of the few verdant patches in Aztlán. He's on the run from Homeland Security who used a security wand on him at the Denver airport, a violation he returned by taking out several with h