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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.


Some thoughts on wood


No old resource(s) (natural or manufactured) should be wasted but allocated.  All old wood is to be reclaimed, restored (sanded, painted, and stained), and implemented in a structural or finish condition.  Wood is bold, wise, yet intricate and modern.  It comes in dark and light tones, soft and hard composition, and placed appropriately can last a lifetime.  Wood can be cut and carved to fit any dimension, and finished to bring about any desired mood or sensation.  When treated with sealers wood can be used to make exterior steps, fences, garden gates, patios, and animal housing.  However, care is cautioned as many sealers and penetrants release harmful gases, even after drying.  When cut wood releases a natural aroma and invites us to learn about its history through growth rings.  All wood is natural, a once living organism, and even after death it has the power to purify the air and sequester carbon (Joseph et al. 2010:411).  One German study (Gold and Rubik 2009:304) found that there was a preference for timber and its capacity to promote wellbeing and comfort.  Because wood can be seeded and grown, many considered it a renewable source of energy (Lafleur and Fraanje 1997:20; Kim 1998:15).  However, the growing and harvesting of wood is a leading cause of water, air, and soil pollution.  Deforestation leads to a loss of biodiversity on a mass scale.  Retaining our forest is vital to our humanity.  Scientists understand well the process of photosynthesis that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to release oxygen.  Reclaiming wood is easy and practical; in suburban sprawls, it is everywhere, terminated as wasteful trash.

References Cited

Joseph, Paul, and Svetlana Tretsiakova-McNally (2010) Sustainable Non-Metallic Building Materials.  Sustainability, 2, 400-427

Gold, Stefan, and Frieder Rubik (2009) Consumer attitudes towards timber as a construction material and towards timber frame houses – selected findings of a representative survey among the German Population.  Journal of Cleaner Production, 17, 303-309.

Kim, Jong-Jin (1998) Sustainable Architecture Module:  Qualities, Use, and Examples of Sustainable Building Materials.  Published by the National Pollution Prevention Center for Higher Education, 1-44, 430 E. University Ave., Ann Arbor, Michigan. 
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