BACK TO MY HOME PAGE

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.


A Case of Horticulture in an East San Gabriel Valley Household

The first groups of people in the New World, also known as "the Americas," were hunters and gatherers and relied on their foraging, hunting, and trapping skills to acquire plants and animals to subsist.  It meant their survival.  Under these circumstances, people were in constant motion, at the will of the environment (which was at times harsh and unforgiving), and in constant competition with one another.

Sometime between 15,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C., maybe sooner, people of the New World, learned how to domesticate plants, one such being maize (corn) zea mays, perhaps a cross-breed cousin of teosinte (a wild grass) and wild corn.  The domestication of corn, along with the addition of squash, beans, chili peppers, herbs, etc., and a supply of small game allowed early New World people to live sedentary lifestyles.  No longer having to forage and hunt so much for food, people developed horticultural practices–subsisting off a green food supply harvested from small household and community gardens.

Around 3,000 B.C., complex farming strategies like slash and burn, terracing, and the chinampa system, advanced horticultural practices, primarily in Mesoamerica.  HOWEVER, the use of small-scale household and community gardens remained an important subsistence practice, carried on well after “the Conquest” of the New World in 1521 A.D.

Today under the themes of “going green,” healthy living, organic farming, decolonization, and ancestral praxis, horticultural practices are making a comeback!  Appropriately so, the benefits are staggering!

In this blog, I have listed 10 benefits of household gardening, and provide an example of horticulture in an East San Gabriel Valley household (my parent’s home) which I have been happily maintaining over the summer.

1. Fresh greens prevent disease, cancer, and suppress illnesses.
2. Maintaining a garden is a component of bodily exercise, just try it!
3. When gardening the body benefits from a supply of sunlight, so absorb it!
4. Time spent outside is time spent away from the couch and TV.
5. Maintaining a garden is scientific, and thereby educational.
6. Maintaining a garden is collaborative, and everyone involved has a different task.
7. Market food prices are consistently rising, and over the long run, food gardens are a great return on investment.
8. Getting started on your own home garden is not expensive, we spend more money on things we do not need!
9. Sharing food from ones garden is a great way to share information, build alliances, and promote healthy sustainable living.
10. When eating fresh greens you immediately taste the nutrition and the deliciousness.

Chaak doing weed control
Agua de Pepino with Peppermint Plant (Cucumber Water)
6/19/2012 Harvest

More Japanese cucumbers will be added to the garden, since these seem to grow quickly.  We also added more Sweet Bell Peppers, and the newest addition, Crimson Sweet Sandia (watermelon).
Harvest from 6/15/2012
Roasted peanuts, zucchini, and deer
Newly sprouted corn from Jalisco, Mexico
Corn from Jalisco, Mexico
Cucumber
Yellow Squash
Green Beans
Beets
Beet close-up
Zucchini
Unknown Lettuce
Serrano Chilli Peppers
Close-up of Serrano Chillies
A Case of Horticulture in an East San Gabriel Valley Household
Cilantro
Native American Blue Corn
Strawberry
Posted by

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for commenting on my blogg - Santiago

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)