Wal-Mart hosts Communist Party
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 23:56 - Category: Unfiled ;
Archive for December 18th, 2006
West Maui road trip
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 18:04 - Category: Uncategorized Tags: Maui;
We drove today around the northern tip of Maui on route 340, skirting the West Maui mountains. The road for at least ten miles is one lane, cliffs on one side and a sheer drop on the other. The views are spectacular in this remote part of the island, however sometimes there is no guard rail and there are lots of blind curves, so driving caution is highly recommended!
Yet another idyllic beach in Maui, there were just a few others here too.
These bluffs had to have been formed by volcanoes.
Once more on Apocalypto — we need to extend the dialogue
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 09:45 - Category: Unfiled ;
En Lak Ech – You Are the Other Me
by Luis J. Rodriguez. Author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and several other books in short fiction, children’s literature, nonfiction, and poetry. Co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural in Sylmar, CA. (Via the RockRap newsletter. It’s not on his blog yet, so I’m printing all of it here. It’s long and absolutely worth reading.)
Once in 2001 while on a two-week speaking tour of schools, Boys & Girls clubs, colleges, and other venues in the state of Delaware, I heard a strange but familiar language. As I washed clothes at a local Laundromat in Georgetown, I noticed about a dozen dark-skinned indigenous men and women addressing themselves in a tongue I recognized as Mayan. It turned out that several hundred Mayan families from Guatemala had migrated here to work in produce, factory, and service jobs.
The following weekend after a church service, I addressed around 300 of these migrants who were then calling the area around Georgetown their home. In my travels as a writer, lecturer, and poet, I’ve met other Native Mexican and Native Central American migrants, including Nahuatl-speaking people from Puebla, Guerrero, Veracruz, and El Salvador; Mixtecos and Zapotecos from Oaxaca; and Yaquis, Huicholes, and Raramuris from northern and central Mexico. There are in fact millions of native-speaking people (many don’t speak Spanish very well) from south of the border now living and working in the United States.
One organization, EcoMaya Festivals based in Los Angeles, claims there are around two million Mayans from Mexico and Central America in the greater LA area alone. I don’t have actual numbers, but I would say indigenous people from those countries now outnumber the official Native American population (currently at around 3 million people).
Among many Chicanos (US-born or raised persons of Mexican descent) there has been a long history of consciousness and connection to tribal/native roots. Today you see Aztec dance groups in Pow Wows and other community gatherings; Day of the Dead altars and processions sprouting around the country; and Nahuatl (known as the language the Aztecs and other tribal groups spoke, currently in use by 1.5 million people in Mexico) being taught in schools and community centers.
Many Chicanos have also linked with Native American communities and their ceremonies such as sweat lodges and the Sundance, including with the Lakota, Navajo, Hopis, Chumash, and Pueblos. In the US Southwest, intermarriages and alliances between Chicanos and Native Americans have been going on for generations.
Mayan sayings like En Lak Ech are being used by poets and in greetings – this particular expression means “you are the other me.†Implicit in this is what these native peoples carry over to this country – a fascinating and complicated, yet accessible, way of being, living and relating. Another cosmology.
As for me, I have spent about a dozen years linking to my own Native roots as well as studying and practicing indigenous spiritual traditions from the United States, Mexico, and Central America. My mother has family ties to the Raramuri from southern Chihuahua (also known as “Tarahumarasâ€Â). My father comes from a large Nahuatl-speaking area in Guerrero that also had significant numbers of former African slaves and Spanish ranchers. I’ve visited the Copper Canyon region of Chihuahua where some 80,000 Raramuri people still live in relatively traditional ways, using their own languages and customs. My wife Trini and I also helped create sweat lodges in our present home community in the San Fernando Valley – and Tia Chucha’s Café & Bookstore has a large section on indigenous books, including Nahuatl-English dictionaries.
Around 10 years ago, a Navajo medicine man, Anthony Lee, and his wife Delores adopted our family; we’ve been driving to the Navajo Nation for ceremonies ever since. This month, Trini and I travel to Peru with some of our sweat lodge circle to partake in healing ceremonies with Native elders and medicine people.
Despite borders, differences in customs and tongues, we are all connected in more ways than one – there are linguistic ties, for example, between Aztecs, northern Mexican tribes, and US tribes such as the Hopis, Shoshone, Arapaho, and Utes. And according to my Purepecha/Chicano friend, Luis Ruan, there is a linguistic connection between Purepechas of Michoacan, Mexico and Quechua-speaking people in Peru.
Two weeks ago, Trini and I went to see “Apocalypto,†the Mel Gibson film about Mayans in the Yucatan a moment (according to Gibson) before the Spanish conquerors arrived to the so-called New World (in reality most Mayans had abandoned the thousands of structures in culturally advanced urban centers some 600 years before the Spanish ever set eyes on these shores).
Taking into account the license film makers have to change history, mix cultures and times, and generally distort whatever they want, I must say there is a deeply disturbing aspect to what is an otherwise visually-arresting and emotionally-wrenching motion picture.
Whatever authenticity in details Gibson claims he achieved in the film, he continues to promote some historically-destructive “Big Lies†that may be missed by those who aren’t as attuned to the subtexts, the messages beneath the messages, that some of us in this culture have had to deal with to orient and maneuver ourselves into the world.
Bolivia boiling over?
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 00:30 - Category: Unfiled ;
From reader Joe Hartley
Bolivia is boiling over. The prosperous east and south are resisting the probably unconstitutional attempts by Evo Morales to take over the state governments. (Think of George Bush deciding to remove the Democratic governors who were irking him as a comparison.) Several thousand Indian peasants have descended from the highlands to the lowlands to try to prevent open town meetings from happening in the eastern agricultural regions, but they’re (1) seriously outnumbered, and (2) exhausted by the tropic heat (couldn’t send Indians to the lowlands in colonial times).
It’s not clear to me which side the army, such as it is, is on. It’s clear you can be expecting a lot of fighting in the months to come.
You heard it here first!
“Sugar in the Raw”
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 00:23 - Category: Uncategorized Tags: Maui;
The sugar in those little brown packets of “Sugar in the Raw” at Starbucks are processed here at Hawaii’s largest operating sugar mill in Maui. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of sugar cane. Next door is the Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Musuem, which explains how the sugar is processed and doesn’t attempt to gloss over the indentured servant status of Japanese migrants who used to harvest the cane, all part of the history of colonialism in Hawaii.
Wind power creates hydrogen from water
Bob Morris @ Dec 18th 2006 00:08 - Category: Renewable energy, Wind turbines ;
It “uses electricity from wind turbines to produce and store pure hydrogen, offering what may become an important new template for future energy production.”
If hydrogen-powered cars become viable, this could become an important source of renewable energy for them.
HT: Colorado Water
