The Tip of the Pyramid: Unearthing Community Cultural Capital

Community organizing ten years after the Librotraficante Caravan

This Book was written five hundred years after the Mexica relented governance of their land to the spanish pirates who razed our libraries, burned our books and art.

This Book comes twenty-five years after the creation of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say in Houston, where our voices and stories were silenced and ignored.

This Book is published ten years after Arizona officials enforced a ban on Mexican American Studies.

These erasures―and our resistance to them―have long themselves been erased. That ends now.

The Tip of the Pyramid renders the power of community to shatter the generalizations, clichés, and stereotypes that sentence us. It unpacks metaphors that are over 500 years old. And it documents the self-empowerment of our gente.

As new attacks loom, The Tip of the Pyramid impels our Community and allies to unite.

Writer and activist Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, is a Cultural Accelerator. He was the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. In 1998, he founded Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say (NP), Houston's first reading series for Latino authors. The group galvanized Houston's Community Cultural Capital to become a movement for civil rights, education, and representation. When Arizona officials banned Mexican American Studies, Diaz and 4 veteran members of NP organized the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle books from the banned curriculum back into Arizona. He is author of The Aztec Love God. The Tip of the Pyramid is the first in his series on Community Organizing.