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Welcome students and colleagues, friends and family, if you have made it this far, I encourage you to stay a bit longer and read about some of my work. The writings reflect many of the thoughts that I carry with me throughout the course of a day, evening, and often times, the dreams that take hold of me while I sleep. The verses represent the inner voice in me that speaks of the past, the present, and the future. Writing is my ultimate form of expression that allows me to reflect, inspire, get well, and grow. The energy that feeds my work, I pull from themes that correspond to Mesoamerica, my ancestral place of birth, and the area I study. References to symbols of the past, deities, and natural phenomenon, dominate certain pieces, and blend with current verses of life, love, and death. I have never taken a writing class... the only "style" that exhibits my work is the one that I create from my imagination, heart, and dreams.
I’m an avid builder and horticulturalist, and so I spend a lot of my time building things and growing different types of herbs and plant food. I do not identify as an artist nor do I make art for aesthetic purposes; my work solely materializes a ritual-ceremonial or utilitarian function. The craft of working with wood I learned from my father, by watching him design and build homes throughout much of my adolescent youth. I also learned how to work with stone by watching my uncles construct brick and rock landscapes, in the wealthy neighborhoods were they labored during much of the 1980s, when construction was booming. My paternal grandpa Juan was also a craftsman, hence why all his sons became builders of some sort, and so building has always been an integral part of my family’s trade history. I learned about plant cultivation from my abuelita Mercedes on my paternal side and my abuelito Severo on my maternal side. Much of the landscaping strategies that I learned from my grandparents came with them from Mexico when they migrated to Alta California, in the early 1960s, along with my parents. A lot of the building and planting strategies that my family has implored have been in use for over 3,000 years. It is my purpose to revitalize and sustain these ancestral practices through ceremony, household building, and plant cultivation.
My fascination with building and growing food is not only familial, but also physical-skeletal (see my Physical Anthropology 101 blog), and because so, I have an admiration for the morphology of the human hand. The hand is unlike any part of the body, and because we use our hands every day, we literally take them for granted, sometimes failing to notice their full potential use. Our hands are our first weapons of choice in an attack, yet they are the first part of the body that we extend when helping or consoling someone. With our hands, we build shelter, writer letters, prepare food, and unknowingly, make love. Our hand-digit coordination is unique because it is precise, well adapted for creating, and for using and making tools. Hand-digit use coordination has been a part of our human evolutionary past since we inhabited arboreal environments, way before we developed bipedalism. When combined with tool use, the creative use of the hands has the capability of decolonizing our minds and bodies.
My inquiry into the relationship between hand-bone morphology usage and social behavior remains in the early stages. Nonetheless, some preliminary findings I modeled in a recent paper where I discuss the role of the hands, and early human tool making, in the creation of spatial wellness. The paper is published in Vol. 3 No. 4 of the International Journal of Development and Sustainability.
look up to the sky for answers, uh hm. and down below too. and doesn't the avian serpent, the jaguar and the tree connect the upper, middle and under realms? does social dialogue include a response from the upper world to the projections of the people in the middle world? outside of the mysticism this question might provoke in pleading to an idea rather than planetary and star alignments, how can we tell there is dialogue in this direction (middle to upper and upper to middle)? e.g. if we are experiencing a severe drought in the middle world, can we ask the upper and under worlds for help?
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“In times of need one looked toward the sky for answers (Aldana 2005:318), surely after a long emotional journey, after the cup of tears overflows, and a new life begins.”
Responding to the ban on Mexican-American studies.
You cannot learn a language in all of its colour without living in the country where that language is spoken. Language is not merely words. It incorporates the culture of its people, their history, their way of thinking, their humour, yes, and even their prejudices. This is often so subtle that, as a novice, and focused on the basic words, you cannot detect the deep-rooted aspects, the intonations, what is said jokingly, or with sarcasm. Following on from a ban on Mexican-American studies in Tuscon, I would then have to ask how far can this go? Why should history so threaten a nation that it criminalises its study? Pulling a card of “promoting the overthrow of the current political power” or even “that advocating any form of ethnic solidarity is dangerous to the current political regime” would imply that the regime is very fragile or that it is, in fact, a totalitarian regime that will not tolerate diverse cultural groups.
Back to language. I am British, of Irish descent. If I then choose to learn Gaelic, am I committing what could be viewed as an undermining act against my own country? The penalty, of course, for speaking Gaelic when the country was “taken over” by the “British” was immediate death. To force a language underground and into extinction removes more than merely words. It removes the culture. To do the same with history and alternate views on that, is not “democratic” (and I use that word lightly). To feign democracy but to act in a totalitarian manner against “difference” is to silence. Where, within that, is the right to freedom of thought and speech? Basic human rights. To understand more of where we come from makes us whole. To deny a quest for that knowledge so openly and publically under the pretence of “insurgency” is a blatant attempt to subjugate and silence a valid area of inquiry. When a country as a whole has such policies, they cannot then name themselves as “the land of the free.” The fact that in its own history, this free land committed genocide to take that land, a genocide that is also quietened through propaganda of wild and savage natives being bravely slaughtered by white armies of white settlers, never mind the disease, the forced marches, the starvation policies, the removal of native children for forced Jesuit education, the biological warfare (blankets purposefully infected with smallpox), etc., shows that the policies of forced ways of thinking, however civilized they now appear to be, are still central to the political powers in that particular country.
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ReplyDeleteFrom the biological perspective, to eradicate difference and diversity is to actually weaken the species. The search, for example, for a “pure race” would actually equate to the search for a “sick and disease-ridden race” in genetic terms. The search for uniformity and lack of diversity is a self-destructive route. It is through diversity that we find new ways to adapt, to think, and to survive change. My take on the Tuscon judgement would then be to explain to the judge concerned, that, in doing as he has done, he is working against his own country’s ability to withstand future shocks, be they biological, environmental, or otherwise, by purposefully reducing the diversity of his own people. To ban one particular area of study is a very dangerous precedent, and following on from that, could be, for example, bans on learning languages, as these, too, could be viewed as undermining the “culture.” Then bans on other areas of study and research that do not “align” with the “power” holders.
In my mind, when a society starts to impose such severe sanctions, that society is unwell. To heal, it needs to change and adapt. To change and adapt, it requires diversity. This ban is a sign of a failing society, one that needs to open its eyes and heart to the beauty and strength held in the diverse cultures that make up its people, and integrate all of those cultures fully into its group psyche to develop its own health, and strength. If only this country looked to the skys, opened up its dialog, allowing for those creative multiple viewpoints to be heard. A course banned is a dialog banned. Dialog is language. Language is communication. History and our knowledge of this language is an essential aspect to that dialog being genuine and knowledgeable. Without our history (Zinn) we cannot speak from a place of knowledge. The judge in this case should perhaps incorporate into his worldview something of the Venus star and Avian Serpent, “as both forces, one of worldly significance (Avian-Serpent), and one of universal significance (Venus), worked jointly to bring about a social order while people negotiated resolution(s).”