My name is Annika and I have nearly all the clothes that will be traveling to and throughout Brazil with me-- on my room's floor. The benefit of this spontaneous clothes-flying-and-then-landing-on-places-where-I-should-be-sleeping is that I go with my rhythm. Going with one's aire [air] can almost always be more enjoyable, no? By amassing the cloth into indeterminable shapes then I did get to clean out my dresser drawers, try on numerous pairs of pants - 95% of which I found to no longer fit me [specifically in the hips/waist region]. This is good, though-- there is a new consignment shop in town and I am thinking of taking the now-too-tight clothes there... and I feel refreshed. ..Although I do believe I will feel more refreshed as I directly leave the area of such packing pressure - my room - for Brazil.
Eek I just said it!
I am leaving!... Wednesday... LIVE LIFE WITH YOUR HEAD ALWAYS MOVING--!!!
Monday, February 23, 2009
Reflection
Wow. If you want to read a strong article that will reach to your emotions and put some rage into you [rage that always has the potential to turn into a critical analysis of the diverse world realities and then move on to transform into productive, ethical social action], then read the article previously posted.
While reading, I immediately wanted to highlight what I have copy-and-pasted below. These [below] sentences have immense reason and they have resonated a great deal with my past studies abroad in Latin America. Please Read:
The murder of women in Chihuahua state is certainly a socio-economic political issue. After NAFTA, workers from poor villages poured into Juarez, and the rise in violence in 1993 coincides with the boom of the maquiladora economy. On Saturday, the group La Mujer Obrera distributed leaflets avowing that the murders "are the consequences of a global economy that continues to promote the deterioration of the social fabric on the border." Multinational corporations take advantage of loose environmental regulations and cheap Mexican labor...
While reading, I immediately wanted to highlight what I have copy-and-pasted below. These [below] sentences have immense reason and they have resonated a great deal with my past studies abroad in Latin America. Please Read:
The murder of women in Chihuahua state is certainly a socio-economic political issue. After NAFTA, workers from poor villages poured into Juarez, and the rise in violence in 1993 coincides with the boom of the maquiladora economy. On Saturday, the group La Mujer Obrera distributed leaflets avowing that the murders "are the consequences of a global economy that continues to promote the deterioration of the social fabric on the border." Multinational corporations take advantage of loose environmental regulations and cheap Mexican labor...
"Eve Ensler and Amnesty Int'l March on Juarez to Stop the Murder of Young Women"
Originally published in:
The Village Voice
02/18/2004
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0408/chute.php
By Hillary Chute
February 14, Juarez, Mexico-"Ni Una Mas"-"not one more"-was the impassioned rallying cry this Valentine's Day as activist groups from the U.S. and Mexico converged on this gritty border city to protest the brutal killings of more than 370 women in Juarez and the nearby state capital, Chihuahua City, since 1993. Early Saturday, a rapt crowd of 500-plus men, women, and children, sharing seats and crammed against the walls, spontaneously chanted "not one more" and "you're not alone" at the local university as Mexican professor Marcela Lagarde addressed the "feminicido" that has plagued Chihuahua State for the past decade.
Between 5,000 and 7,000 anti-violence protestors then gathered at the Lerdo Bridge separating Texas and Mexico and marched down Juarez's central Lerdo Avenue, lined with wedding-dress stores and small restaurants. Screaming "justicia," protestors carried black balloons, blurry black-and-white photocopies of missing and murdered women, and decorated dresses hanging on tall pink crosses. Even a group of fraternity brothers from University of Texas-El Paso-decked out in T-shirts reading "men of character"-marched with an enormous canvas of handprints and the declaration "These hands don't hurt."
At the front was Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, whose international non-profit V-Day co-sponsored the march with Amnesty International, which last year issued a detailed report damning the quality of the criminal investigations in Juarez and Chihuahua City. Accompanying Ensler was press-magnet Jane Fonda and other so-called "Very Important Vaginas": actors Sally Field and Christine Lahti, PBS president Pat Mitchell, Lifetime CEO and president Carole Black, and Congresswomen Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and Hilda Solis (California). Solis wants to pass House Resolution 466, which supports the multilateral creation of a DNA database in Chihuahua state.
In the U.S., the right wing hopes to smear John Kerry for being within five feet of Fonda in 1970; for most in Juarez, the simple fact that Fonda, whoever she is, is a famous person agitating to draw attention to the murdered women is a hopeful sign. "I am rich, I am famous, I am white, and I have a daughter and a granddaughter," Fonda declared to a group of storming reporters. "If they were murdered or disappeared, I know the authorities would work very hard to find out who kidnapped them." Fonda concluded her comments by admonishing the press: "Why did it take international movie stars to turn up for you to be here?"
A little over ten years ago, according to an Amnesty Now article, the number of women murdered in Juarez-a city of roughly 1.3 million-averaged three a year. In 1993, the number skyrocketed to three a month. Many of these murders are classified by the police as "situational," as in domestic violence and drug- or gang-related violence, even though the similarities between the murders clearly point to a larger trend. The mutilated bodies of young, poor women are dumped in and at the outskirts of the city. The average age of the victims is 16. At least one-third of them work in the city's maquiladoras, or foreign assembly plants. More than one-third of the women are raped before they are killed, and most of their bodies show signs of captivity and torture. Once seen as a problem in the rough, crime-ridden Juarez alone, the murders have now spread to Chihuahua City.
Rumors about the killings identify its perpetrators variously as the state police, an international organ-trafficking ring, Satanists, organized-crime factions, serial killers from the U.S., a group of local serial killers, and the Mexican government.
So who is killing the women? At an emotional press conference in the crammed lobby of the Juarez's modest Monte Carlo hotel on Friday, one mother of a murdered girl answered, "We don't know. Why do they leave them like this [mutilated]? What are they trying to erase? . . . I am sure the state police of Chihuahua know what happened to these girls. I want to know. That's a mother's right." Amnesty's report declares that "the failure of the competent authorities to take action to investigate these crimes, whether through indifference, lack of will, or inability, has been blatant." Alma Guillermoprieto, who wrote about the killings forThe New Yorker this past fall, sees "active collusion" by the Chihuahua police as a logical possibility, and "active indifference" as the least-incriminating explanation. The police deny all involvement.
The murder of women in Chihuahua state is certainly a socio-economic political issue. After NAFTA, workers from poor villages poured into Juarez, and the rise in violence in 1993 coincides with the boom of the maquiladora economy. On Saturday, the group La Mujer Obrera distributed leaflets avowing that the murders "are the consequences of a global economy that continues to promote the deterioration of the social fabric on the border." Multinational corporations take advantage of loose environmental regulations and cheap Mexican labor-maquiladora workers are paid less than $5 a day. U.S.-run factories in Juarez-including Thomson/RCA, General Electric, Ford, and Dupont-have done little to ensure the safety of their female workers: girls have disappeared in the waste-grounds adjacent to factories, which are often unlit. Private companies have rejected the idea that they should pay for security for their workers. Claudia Ivette Gonzalez disappeared after her assembly plant turned her away for arriving four minutes late; she was found in 2001 in a ditch with seven other young women. Her employer, the Lear Corporation, stated that the company did not need to provide its workers with extra security because her murder didn't happen on Lear property.
Saturday's protest ended with a free performance of the Vagina Monologues in Spanish and English, featuring the Mexican actors Lilia Aragon, Marinitia Escobedo, and Laura Flores-and Fonda, Field, and Lahti-at a packed local dance hall. Ensler made the important gesture of including monologues (in addition to standards like "Bob," about a vagina-friendly man) that spoke directly to international violence against women. There was a long, moving performance in Spanish about the rape and assassination of women in Kosovo. And Field, occasionally crying, did a piece that focused on spousal acid burning in Islamabad and female disfigurement from bombing in Iraq before she ended with the situation in Juarez. American folk singer Holly Near-leading a chant for "ni una mas"-performed a song for Juarez that also targeted violence in Chile and Guatemala.
Global in focus, V-Day and Amnesty assert that the Juarez crimes are a human-rights scandal. And so while groups like Women in White, a government-sponsored activist party-and even a selection of victim's mothers-were said to oppose the protest in part on the grounds that the vocal agitating lacked dignity, Ensler made savvy choices: pointing to the worldwide problem of gender violence, she didn't single out Juarez for blame.
The Vagina Monologues clearly inspired and often amused its audience. Fonda played a woman who regards her vagina distantly as a "red leather couch" or a "mink-lined muffler," and another piece ran the gamut of orgasm types: "mariachi," "diva," "triple," etc. But the divide between the monologues' occasionally playful content and the issue of unsolved murder at times felt awkward. While the crowd for the most part whooped and roared enthusiastically throughout the show, a group of three mothers whom I recognized from the previous day's press conference-sitting in the front row, placards of their daughters' faces hanging over their chests-silently stood up and walked out mid-way through.
The mothers remain optimistic, but not overly so. In October, Vincente Fox appointed a special federal commissioner, Maria Guadalupe Morfin, to monitor the state's work, and last month, he appointed a special federal prosecutor, Maria Lopez Urbina, to run her own investigations. But for these appointments to be effective, they have to be well funded, and there's no promise yet that Fox won't be as effectively neglectful of the situation in Juarez as he has been since his election. Asked at the press conference if she had hope in Lopez, one mother replied, simply, "We hope to have hope in her." Ensler, for her part, declared Saturday V-day for "victory": the march was the largest in 10 years of anti-violence activism in the city. As one lawyer for several mothers stated, "This is the only thing that has pressured the government." Ensler vowed, "We will keep coming back to Juarez until women are free and safe."
The Village Voice
02/18/2004
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0408/chute.php
By Hillary Chute
February 14, Juarez, Mexico-"Ni Una Mas"-"not one more"-was the impassioned rallying cry this Valentine's Day as activist groups from the U.S. and Mexico converged on this gritty border city to protest the brutal killings of more than 370 women in Juarez and the nearby state capital, Chihuahua City, since 1993. Early Saturday, a rapt crowd of 500-plus men, women, and children, sharing seats and crammed against the walls, spontaneously chanted "not one more" and "you're not alone" at the local university as Mexican professor Marcela Lagarde addressed the "feminicido" that has plagued Chihuahua State for the past decade.
Between 5,000 and 7,000 anti-violence protestors then gathered at the Lerdo Bridge separating Texas and Mexico and marched down Juarez's central Lerdo Avenue, lined with wedding-dress stores and small restaurants. Screaming "justicia," protestors carried black balloons, blurry black-and-white photocopies of missing and murdered women, and decorated dresses hanging on tall pink crosses. Even a group of fraternity brothers from University of Texas-El Paso-decked out in T-shirts reading "men of character"-marched with an enormous canvas of handprints and the declaration "These hands don't hurt."
At the front was Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, whose international non-profit V-Day co-sponsored the march with Amnesty International, which last year issued a detailed report damning the quality of the criminal investigations in Juarez and Chihuahua City. Accompanying Ensler was press-magnet Jane Fonda and other so-called "Very Important Vaginas": actors Sally Field and Christine Lahti, PBS president Pat Mitchell, Lifetime CEO and president Carole Black, and Congresswomen Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and Hilda Solis (California). Solis wants to pass House Resolution 466, which supports the multilateral creation of a DNA database in Chihuahua state.
In the U.S., the right wing hopes to smear John Kerry for being within five feet of Fonda in 1970; for most in Juarez, the simple fact that Fonda, whoever she is, is a famous person agitating to draw attention to the murdered women is a hopeful sign. "I am rich, I am famous, I am white, and I have a daughter and a granddaughter," Fonda declared to a group of storming reporters. "If they were murdered or disappeared, I know the authorities would work very hard to find out who kidnapped them." Fonda concluded her comments by admonishing the press: "Why did it take international movie stars to turn up for you to be here?"
A little over ten years ago, according to an Amnesty Now article, the number of women murdered in Juarez-a city of roughly 1.3 million-averaged three a year. In 1993, the number skyrocketed to three a month. Many of these murders are classified by the police as "situational," as in domestic violence and drug- or gang-related violence, even though the similarities between the murders clearly point to a larger trend. The mutilated bodies of young, poor women are dumped in and at the outskirts of the city. The average age of the victims is 16. At least one-third of them work in the city's maquiladoras, or foreign assembly plants. More than one-third of the women are raped before they are killed, and most of their bodies show signs of captivity and torture. Once seen as a problem in the rough, crime-ridden Juarez alone, the murders have now spread to Chihuahua City.
Rumors about the killings identify its perpetrators variously as the state police, an international organ-trafficking ring, Satanists, organized-crime factions, serial killers from the U.S., a group of local serial killers, and the Mexican government.
So who is killing the women? At an emotional press conference in the crammed lobby of the Juarez's modest Monte Carlo hotel on Friday, one mother of a murdered girl answered, "We don't know. Why do they leave them like this [mutilated]? What are they trying to erase? . . . I am sure the state police of Chihuahua know what happened to these girls. I want to know. That's a mother's right." Amnesty's report declares that "the failure of the competent authorities to take action to investigate these crimes, whether through indifference, lack of will, or inability, has been blatant." Alma Guillermoprieto, who wrote about the killings forThe New Yorker this past fall, sees "active collusion" by the Chihuahua police as a logical possibility, and "active indifference" as the least-incriminating explanation. The police deny all involvement.
The murder of women in Chihuahua state is certainly a socio-economic political issue. After NAFTA, workers from poor villages poured into Juarez, and the rise in violence in 1993 coincides with the boom of the maquiladora economy. On Saturday, the group La Mujer Obrera distributed leaflets avowing that the murders "are the consequences of a global economy that continues to promote the deterioration of the social fabric on the border." Multinational corporations take advantage of loose environmental regulations and cheap Mexican labor-maquiladora workers are paid less than $5 a day. U.S.-run factories in Juarez-including Thomson/RCA, General Electric, Ford, and Dupont-have done little to ensure the safety of their female workers: girls have disappeared in the waste-grounds adjacent to factories, which are often unlit. Private companies have rejected the idea that they should pay for security for their workers. Claudia Ivette Gonzalez disappeared after her assembly plant turned her away for arriving four minutes late; she was found in 2001 in a ditch with seven other young women. Her employer, the Lear Corporation, stated that the company did not need to provide its workers with extra security because her murder didn't happen on Lear property.
Saturday's protest ended with a free performance of the Vagina Monologues in Spanish and English, featuring the Mexican actors Lilia Aragon, Marinitia Escobedo, and Laura Flores-and Fonda, Field, and Lahti-at a packed local dance hall. Ensler made the important gesture of including monologues (in addition to standards like "Bob," about a vagina-friendly man) that spoke directly to international violence against women. There was a long, moving performance in Spanish about the rape and assassination of women in Kosovo. And Field, occasionally crying, did a piece that focused on spousal acid burning in Islamabad and female disfigurement from bombing in Iraq before she ended with the situation in Juarez. American folk singer Holly Near-leading a chant for "ni una mas"-performed a song for Juarez that also targeted violence in Chile and Guatemala.
Global in focus, V-Day and Amnesty assert that the Juarez crimes are a human-rights scandal. And so while groups like Women in White, a government-sponsored activist party-and even a selection of victim's mothers-were said to oppose the protest in part on the grounds that the vocal agitating lacked dignity, Ensler made savvy choices: pointing to the worldwide problem of gender violence, she didn't single out Juarez for blame.
The Vagina Monologues clearly inspired and often amused its audience. Fonda played a woman who regards her vagina distantly as a "red leather couch" or a "mink-lined muffler," and another piece ran the gamut of orgasm types: "mariachi," "diva," "triple," etc. But the divide between the monologues' occasionally playful content and the issue of unsolved murder at times felt awkward. While the crowd for the most part whooped and roared enthusiastically throughout the show, a group of three mothers whom I recognized from the previous day's press conference-sitting in the front row, placards of their daughters' faces hanging over their chests-silently stood up and walked out mid-way through.
The mothers remain optimistic, but not overly so. In October, Vincente Fox appointed a special federal commissioner, Maria Guadalupe Morfin, to monitor the state's work, and last month, he appointed a special federal prosecutor, Maria Lopez Urbina, to run her own investigations. But for these appointments to be effective, they have to be well funded, and there's no promise yet that Fox won't be as effectively neglectful of the situation in Juarez as he has been since his election. Asked at the press conference if she had hope in Lopez, one mother replied, simply, "We hope to have hope in her." Ensler, for her part, declared Saturday V-day for "victory": the march was the largest in 10 years of anti-violence activism in the city. As one lawyer for several mothers stated, "This is the only thing that has pressured the government." Ensler vowed, "We will keep coming back to Juarez until women are free and safe."
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Thanks to a good woman, person
Ali Rapp (one of my most highly acclaimed blog-runners and readers;)--
Thank you to this individual I have been introduced to Pandora Radio. You've got to get connected to this online if you're a lover of open radio stations that allow you to simply type in an artist or song and then - ya! - you will have a smooth-transitioning playlist going along with the vibe you're feeling.
Currently, for me it's Sigur Ros.
Utilizing what we can in ethical and free ways---
Pandora Radio everyone.
Thank you summer Admissions Office times ~
Thank you to this individual I have been introduced to Pandora Radio. You've got to get connected to this online if you're a lover of open radio stations that allow you to simply type in an artist or song and then - ya! - you will have a smooth-transitioning playlist going along with the vibe you're feeling.
Currently, for me it's Sigur Ros.
Utilizing what we can in ethical and free ways---
Pandora Radio everyone.
Thank you summer Admissions Office times ~
Being alright (all right?) with what is unknown
You know, before (and I'm talking these-past-months-before) it was quite easy for me to get really, I mean substantially worked up while thinking about this upcoming summer... And this was even while knowing that I still would have a Brasil trip coming up this second semester, that I still would have weeks of time at home in Winona to spend with my parents and (partially)"stabilize" myself. But what is it that helps to change these non-stop, thinking, planning mentalities? What was it for me? Talking with people in a "real" manner helped. Trying to get the humanness into my conversations and dialogue about things that really had been going on in my life, processing them not just alone in my mind but with others... as Paulo Freire says in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - being in communion with the people to critically analyze life's realities and act upon a transforming reality.
Am I even making sense? Life, for me, I have realized more and more, is a lot of feeling what I learn and what I want to say... not so much being able to describe my feelings, my learnings in the most academically proficient or concise manner - but actually feeling some effects inside. I don't know if this is more frustrating or beautiful or worse or a mixture of some and all... But times like these do, at least, remind one of the profoundness of feeling and that one can do it - you know, feel.
Am I even making sense? Life, for me, I have realized more and more, is a lot of feeling what I learn and what I want to say... not so much being able to describe my feelings, my learnings in the most academically proficient or concise manner - but actually feeling some effects inside. I don't know if this is more frustrating or beautiful or worse or a mixture of some and all... But times like these do, at least, remind one of the profoundness of feeling and that one can do it - you know, feel.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Beehive Design Collective
I have got to promote this:
A dear friend sent a pamphlet about The Beehive Design Collective to me, illustrating a coloring book project they are doing about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Plan Colombia, and Plan Puebla Panama. The mission is to transform education by providing provoking, young-people-friendly images that can be used as a base to critically reflect upon and potentially take transformative action challenging US foreign policy and corporate power.
The title of this certain project I received a pamphlet on is Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Global Resistance to Corporate Colonialism.
Please take a look. Especially in you're interested in (alternative, political) art - you will really like this.
Education must go out-of-the-box, challenge the status quo, and be critical while promoting spheres for transformative student action. We need MORE of this in elementary school, junior high school, high school, ...
!
www.beehivecollective.org
A dear friend sent a pamphlet about The Beehive Design Collective to me, illustrating a coloring book project they are doing about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Plan Colombia, and Plan Puebla Panama. The mission is to transform education by providing provoking, young-people-friendly images that can be used as a base to critically reflect upon and potentially take transformative action challenging US foreign policy and corporate power.
The title of this certain project I received a pamphlet on is Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Global Resistance to Corporate Colonialism.
Please take a look. Especially in you're interested in (alternative, political) art - you will really like this.
Education must go out-of-the-box, challenge the status quo, and be critical while promoting spheres for transformative student action. We need MORE of this in elementary school, junior high school, high school, ...
!
www.beehivecollective.org
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Looking for Flamenco Shoes? Let me know.
Hand-made, black leather women's flamenco shoes from the Ainhoa flamenco company located in Madrid, Spain. Shoes made for foot size 9 to 9.5 (European size 39.5). Leather strap with slit in the middle and small portion of elastic on the side to ensure foot security. Nails located in the heel and toe-portion of the shoe's underside.
Shoes only previously worn once. I ordered them last spring 2008 and found the shoes were too large for my feet.
Original price of shoes: $150 (not including shipping and handling).
Selling price: $100.
If you're interested, post a comment to this blog giving me your email address and/or telephone number.
:)
Shoes only previously worn once. I ordered them last spring 2008 and found the shoes were too large for my feet.
Original price of shoes: $150 (not including shipping and handling).
Selling price: $100.
If you're interested, post a comment to this blog giving me your email address and/or telephone number.
:)
Thursday, February 5, 2009
I love NACLA.
When Xenophobia Meets Homophobia
Feb 2 2009
Marisol LeBrón
An ugly blame game ensued after the passing of California’s Proposition 8, which restricted the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. With exit polls reporting 70 percent of Blacks and 53 percent of Latinos/as supporting the ban on gay marriage, many white members of the LGBT community blamed people of color for the ban’s success.
The December issue of gay news magazine The Advocate stepped into the fray. The cover of the issue provocatively announced, “Gay is the New Black.” Although the cover story's author, Michael Joseph Gross, dismissed blaming Black voters as a "false conclusion" and a "terrible mistake," comments posted to the site took him to task for other reasons. Most comments strongly disagreed with Gross' Black/gay comparison, but many others asked why communities of color and queer communities are still considered mutually exclusive in the mainstream LGBT rights movement.
A comment posted by "Greg J," pointedly charged, "Gays of color, transgender, and yes, even lesbians are missing from the larger discourse of the gay rights struggle – primarily the gay marriage issue. The gay right's movement was and remains the 'gay, white, middle class' movement!"
The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.
Jose Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel were attending a Sunday evening church party on December 7, 2008. They later decided to end the night with some drinks at a local bar in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The two brothers left the bar at 3:30 a.m. and walked home arm-in-arm to support each other. Three men drove up to the Sucuzhañay brothers, one man got out of the car and began to shout anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs at them.
The man then attacked Jose Sucuzhañay and broke a bottled over the back of his head causing him to fall to the ground. His brother Romel ran to call the police. Romel saw the attackers kick his brother’s prone body and beat him with an aluminum baseball bat. The beating stopped when Romel returned and told the attackers that he had called the police. Jose was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital and remained in critical condition until he passed away five days later. He was 31 and left behind two children.
Sucuzhañay's killing comes a month after a group of Long Island teens fatally stabbed Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero; it also follows the murder of Luis Ramirez, who was beaten to death last July in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
The increased violence and surveillance against immigrant communities has coincided with violence against queers of color, including the murder of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman who was beaten by two Memphis police officers last February. Nine months later, she was found shot to death in North Memphis.
Blogger Angry Brown Butch reflected on Johnson’s murder: “Just to be trans, just to be a woman, just to be a person of color in this country is enough to drastically increase one’s exposure to hatred and violence; when oppressions overlap, violence tends to multiply.”
Although Sucuzhañay was not gay, his murder represents the danger and uncertainty facing queers, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities. For the most part, however, both mainstream LGBT rights groups and immigrant rights groups have failed to recognize the potential for collaboration and coalition, even in the wake of Sucuzhañay's murder.
Immediately after the attack, media outlets discussed the homophobic and xenophobic nature of the attack against the Sucuzhañay brothers. But as time went on, reports began to only highlight either the anti-gay or the anti-Latino/a nature of the attack rather than seeing the two as joint-causes.
“I have seen some members of the Latino community express indignation at some outside the Latino community using the attack for political gain," notes Andrés Duque of the Latino/a LGBT site Blabbeando. "I have also seen a Queens-based Ecuadorian community organization put out a call for a vigil highlighting the xenophobic nature of the crime while not mentioning that it might have also been a homophobic crime.”
Indeed, rather than illuminating the vulnerability that both Latino/a and LGBT communities face and interrogating the systemic inequalities that enable that marginalization, some are more concerned with shaping how the incident is described and remembered in the media. One example of this is Diego Sucuzhañay’s denial that the attack on his brothers was homophobic in nature. Although Romel told the police that anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs were shouted at them as they were assaulted, Diego denies that homophobia was an aspect of his brothers’ attack.
Diego told New York’s El Diario/La Prensa that, “My brother Romel told me that they shouted insults against Latinos, that they shouted 'Hispanic sons of bitches,' but not anti-gay insults.” But Romel has not publicly retracted his statement regarding anti-gay slurs. And other family members have spoken about the murder in terms of homophobia also being a motivating factor. So some observers following the case wonder whether Diego’s statements to the press are an attempt to disassociate his brother's murder from any implications of queerness.
Still, many others are people speaking out against Sucuzhañay’s murder by clearly connecting issues of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At his brother’s funeral in Cuenca, Ecuador, German Sucuzhañay told the Associated Press, “The brutal killing of my brother Oswaldo is the result of xenophobia, of homophobia and racism that our compatriots are experiencing in these times.”
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa condemned the xenophobia and homophobia behind Sucuzhañay’s tragic death. Correa told the press that Sucuzhañay was “vilely murdered because of xenophobia and homophobia. They confused him for a homosexual..." The President called on the public to fight against "xenophobia, homophobia and all types of phobia, all types of discrimination, all types of violence.”
While a number of U.S.-based organizations including Bienestar, The Audre Lorde Project, People of Color in Crisis (POCC), and Incite! have all been working to address the intersections between multiple forms of oppression, both the mainstream LGBT and Latino/a rights movements remain remarkably single issue oriented.
The killing of Jose Sucuzhañay, however, challenges Latino/a and LGBT leaders to build a broad-based vision for social justice that acknowledges the linkages between various communities and struggles. Hopefully, both immigrant rights group and LGBT rights groups will begin to see the parallels between a number of these ballot initiatives sponsored by right-wing groups – whether they are anti-immigrant, anti-choice, or anti-gay.
The fight in 1994 to repeal California’s Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing state benefits, can perhaps serve as inspiration for those working to overturn Prop 8 and provide an in-road for collaboration between these intersecting struggles. Though not identical, these grassroots struggles provide a crucial space for collaboration between marginalized communities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marisol LeBrón is a NACLA Research Associate and writes about pop culture for her blog Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo. She is a doctoral student at the Program in American Studies at New York University.
Feb 2 2009
Marisol LeBrón
An ugly blame game ensued after the passing of California’s Proposition 8, which restricted the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. With exit polls reporting 70 percent of Blacks and 53 percent of Latinos/as supporting the ban on gay marriage, many white members of the LGBT community blamed people of color for the ban’s success.
The December issue of gay news magazine The Advocate stepped into the fray. The cover of the issue provocatively announced, “Gay is the New Black.” Although the cover story's author, Michael Joseph Gross, dismissed blaming Black voters as a "false conclusion" and a "terrible mistake," comments posted to the site took him to task for other reasons. Most comments strongly disagreed with Gross' Black/gay comparison, but many others asked why communities of color and queer communities are still considered mutually exclusive in the mainstream LGBT rights movement.
A comment posted by "Greg J," pointedly charged, "Gays of color, transgender, and yes, even lesbians are missing from the larger discourse of the gay rights struggle – primarily the gay marriage issue. The gay right's movement was and remains the 'gay, white, middle class' movement!"
The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.
Jose Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel were attending a Sunday evening church party on December 7, 2008. They later decided to end the night with some drinks at a local bar in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The two brothers left the bar at 3:30 a.m. and walked home arm-in-arm to support each other. Three men drove up to the Sucuzhañay brothers, one man got out of the car and began to shout anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs at them.
The man then attacked Jose Sucuzhañay and broke a bottled over the back of his head causing him to fall to the ground. His brother Romel ran to call the police. Romel saw the attackers kick his brother’s prone body and beat him with an aluminum baseball bat. The beating stopped when Romel returned and told the attackers that he had called the police. Jose was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital and remained in critical condition until he passed away five days later. He was 31 and left behind two children.
Sucuzhañay's killing comes a month after a group of Long Island teens fatally stabbed Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero; it also follows the murder of Luis Ramirez, who was beaten to death last July in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
The increased violence and surveillance against immigrant communities has coincided with violence against queers of color, including the murder of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman who was beaten by two Memphis police officers last February. Nine months later, she was found shot to death in North Memphis.
Blogger Angry Brown Butch reflected on Johnson’s murder: “Just to be trans, just to be a woman, just to be a person of color in this country is enough to drastically increase one’s exposure to hatred and violence; when oppressions overlap, violence tends to multiply.”
Although Sucuzhañay was not gay, his murder represents the danger and uncertainty facing queers, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities. For the most part, however, both mainstream LGBT rights groups and immigrant rights groups have failed to recognize the potential for collaboration and coalition, even in the wake of Sucuzhañay's murder.
Immediately after the attack, media outlets discussed the homophobic and xenophobic nature of the attack against the Sucuzhañay brothers. But as time went on, reports began to only highlight either the anti-gay or the anti-Latino/a nature of the attack rather than seeing the two as joint-causes.
“I have seen some members of the Latino community express indignation at some outside the Latino community using the attack for political gain," notes Andrés Duque of the Latino/a LGBT site Blabbeando. "I have also seen a Queens-based Ecuadorian community organization put out a call for a vigil highlighting the xenophobic nature of the crime while not mentioning that it might have also been a homophobic crime.”
Indeed, rather than illuminating the vulnerability that both Latino/a and LGBT communities face and interrogating the systemic inequalities that enable that marginalization, some are more concerned with shaping how the incident is described and remembered in the media. One example of this is Diego Sucuzhañay’s denial that the attack on his brothers was homophobic in nature. Although Romel told the police that anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs were shouted at them as they were assaulted, Diego denies that homophobia was an aspect of his brothers’ attack.
Diego told New York’s El Diario/La Prensa that, “My brother Romel told me that they shouted insults against Latinos, that they shouted 'Hispanic sons of bitches,' but not anti-gay insults.” But Romel has not publicly retracted his statement regarding anti-gay slurs. And other family members have spoken about the murder in terms of homophobia also being a motivating factor. So some observers following the case wonder whether Diego’s statements to the press are an attempt to disassociate his brother's murder from any implications of queerness.
Still, many others are people speaking out against Sucuzhañay’s murder by clearly connecting issues of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At his brother’s funeral in Cuenca, Ecuador, German Sucuzhañay told the Associated Press, “The brutal killing of my brother Oswaldo is the result of xenophobia, of homophobia and racism that our compatriots are experiencing in these times.”
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa condemned the xenophobia and homophobia behind Sucuzhañay’s tragic death. Correa told the press that Sucuzhañay was “vilely murdered because of xenophobia and homophobia. They confused him for a homosexual..." The President called on the public to fight against "xenophobia, homophobia and all types of phobia, all types of discrimination, all types of violence.”
While a number of U.S.-based organizations including Bienestar, The Audre Lorde Project, People of Color in Crisis (POCC), and Incite! have all been working to address the intersections between multiple forms of oppression, both the mainstream LGBT and Latino/a rights movements remain remarkably single issue oriented.
The killing of Jose Sucuzhañay, however, challenges Latino/a and LGBT leaders to build a broad-based vision for social justice that acknowledges the linkages between various communities and struggles. Hopefully, both immigrant rights group and LGBT rights groups will begin to see the parallels between a number of these ballot initiatives sponsored by right-wing groups – whether they are anti-immigrant, anti-choice, or anti-gay.
The fight in 1994 to repeal California’s Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing state benefits, can perhaps serve as inspiration for those working to overturn Prop 8 and provide an in-road for collaboration between these intersecting struggles. Though not identical, these grassroots struggles provide a crucial space for collaboration between marginalized communities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marisol LeBrón is a NACLA Research Associate and writes about pop culture for her blog Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo. She is a doctoral student at the Program in American Studies at New York University.
Wake up Call -Mexico- by John Ross
Mexico: Due for Another Revolution?
Feb 5 2009
John Ross
Never before has the contrast between the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual clambake of the capitalist class in Davos Switzerland, and the World Social Forum (WSF), created a decade ago to beat back the corporate globalization of the Planet Earth, been quite so stark.
While the moribund masters of the universe met on their ice mountain in the midst of the most chilling world-wide depression in a century, largely triggered by the overweening greed of those in attendance, tens of thousands samba'ed in the tropical heat of the Amazon city of Belem to celebrate the demise of capitalism. Among those on hand at the WSF dance party were presidents Chávez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, and Brazil's Lula da Silva. Lula who is usually a devoted Davos-goer eschewed this year's funerary event to avoid the stench that inevitably results from rubbing shoulders with mummies.
"The God of the Market has been broken," the one-time São Paulo metalworker proclaimed to tens of thousands in Belem. Writing in the Mexican daily La Jornada, Luis Hernández Navarro pointed out that it was precisely the social forces represented by the WSF that propelled Latin America's social democratic presidents into power.
Indeed, the only two Latin heads of state to attend the caviar and champagne-laced charade in Davos were Colombia's widely-disparaged Álvaro Uribe and Mexico's questionably-elected president Felipe Calderón, both of them Washington's darlings – not even freshman U.S. president Obama, who recently lambasted the machinations of the same breed of bankers who gather each year on the ice mountain as "shameful," showed up in Switzerland, an event that his predecessor in power George Bush never missed.
Felipe Calderón's trip to Davos got off on an inauspicious foot. On the very day he flew out to the WEF, Bank of Mexico president Guillermo Ortiz confirmed that his country was in full-blown recession. For months, Calderón and his obscenely obese Secretary of Finance Augustin Carstens have characterized Mexico's economic health as only suffering from "a little cough" ("catarrito"). According to Bank of Mexico prognostications, the Aztec nation will suffer negative growth in 2009 (.8% to 1.8%).
The news hit Felipe like an ice ball from hell.
Seeking to put a happy face on his country's dismal future, Calderón championed Mexico's 1.5% 2008 growth rate but fooled few. Mexico's anemic performance last year put it in 24th place out of 24 Latin American economies in the International Monetary Fund's rankings, even behind Haiti, the economic basket case of the Americas. The IMF is predicting 1.1% growth for Latin America in 2009 and, like Ortiz, calculates that Mexico will fall into negative numbers.
The Mexican president's delusional optimism in the face of so bleak an outlook played to incredulous audiences at Davos. Calderón also sought to blunt the recent blockbuster report of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that Mexico is a potentially "failed" state by handing out trinkets like baseball caps bearing the ambiguous legend, "It's All In The Trust." The giveaway ("magic spikes" to keep the mummies from slipping on Davos's icy streets were also distributed) came during a session at which Calderón flogged Mexico's chances of weathering the current economic turmoil. The Mexican president's talk was slugged "Riders On The Storm," a title plagiarized from the Doors' 1971 apocalyptical anthem about a cowboy spree killer – lead singer Jim Morrison was reportedly heard thrashing about wildly in his Paris grave.
As a bonus attraction, Calderón teamed with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, now head of Yale University's Institute for Globalization Studies, in an act conducted entirely in broken English that verged on tragicomedy. Zedillo, who coined the term "globalphobics" in reference to WSF types at the 1996 Davos get-down, revealed that the bank bail-out he sponsored during Mexico's mid-1990s meltdown and dubbed FOBAPROA, has drained 20% of his country's gross domestic product (GDP), bragging that the 400 trillion peso outlay was triple that of what the Bush-Obama bail-out has cost U.S. taxpayers.
As might be anticipated, the Calderón-Zedillo act did not play well on the homefront. While the Mexican presidents cavorted with the living dead in Davos, a half million of their compatriots were marching through the streets of Mexico City to protest the economic wreckage the neoliberal ethos has wrought here. On January 25, former left presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador from whom Calderón stole the 2006 election, and his Movement to Defend Mexico's Oil & The Popular Economy assembled upwards of 200,000 in the great central Zocalo plaza. Five days later, farmers and trade unionists matched that outpouring to denounce the damage done by the current crisis.
Among the crisis indicators: 6% inflation, the highest in ten years, and 340,000 jobs lost on Calderón's watch – he campaigned as "the president of employment." Just what Mexico's unemployment numbers are is deeply obfuscated. Government bean-counters at the National Statistical and Geographic Institute (INEGI) claim it is no more than 4%, but under INEGI parameters, anyone who worked for more than an hour in the informal economy during the previous week is considered employed. Utilizing such criteria, the emblematic apple sellers of the 1930's Great Depression would not be determined to be jobless.
On the other side of the ledger, Enrique Galván who authors La Jornada's "Money" column calculates that 70% of the nation's 45 million-strong workforce does not have a steady job. A maquiladora industry that assembles consumer goods for the ravished U.S. market and which generated a million jobs in the best of times has gone kaplooey and the Big Seven automakers (including Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Volkswagen) have shut down their plants for the duration of the downturn.
Meanwhile, workers' pensions, privatized under Zedillo, have gone up in smoke with those paying in losing up to 30% of their retirement funds in the past six months. To compound the devastation, the peso has sunk to record lows, having been devalued by 32% since last August 4, when it weighed in at 9.87 against the dollar. (At this writing, 14.78 pesos will buy you one dollar Americano and the exchange rate is climbing for 15.) Nonetheless. Mexico's banks, rescued by Zedillo's 15-cypher bailout and subsequently sold to transnational financial conglomerates registered a 38% profit increase in 2008.
The current blasted economic landscape here bears striking similarities to another period of devastating downturn a hundred years ago: The 1907-08 depression was trip-wired when commodity prices collapsed and money dried up, casting tens of thousands of Mexican workers into the streets and accentuating the monstrous divide between rich and poor. To counter working class rage, dictator Porfirio Díaz cranked up repression, massacring hundreds of striking textile workers in Río Blanco, Veracruz and miners in Cananea Sonora. Synchronistically, workers at Cananea, the eighth largest copper pit in the world, have been on strike for the past 18 months in spite of Calderón's efforts to break the walkout.
Despite the shattered economy and his deep-rooted unpopularity after 34 years in power, Diaz decided to run for re-election in 1910, stealing the vote that June and jailing opposition leader Francisco Madero, a role model for López Obrador. To celebrate his "victory," Porfirio Diaz threw a huge party to mark Mexico's first 100 years of independence from Spain, expending the nation's entire social budget on useless monuments, many of them lined up along Mexico City's Champs D'Elysie, the Paseo de la Reforma. The pageantry culminated on Independence Day, September 16 with the installation of a gilded Angel of Independence on that glittering boulevard. Two months later, the Mexican revolution, led by Madero, exploded, and Díaz was forced to flee the country.
Just before Felipe Calderón took off to tete-a-tete with the dead in Davos, amidst patriotic bombast and flowery fireworks, the Mexican president announced the construction of the Arc of the Bicentennial to be inaugurated September 16, 2010, commemorating both the 200th year of Mexican independence and the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican revolution. Following the Porfirian model, the Arc of the Bicentennial, whose cost was unannounced, will be built at the foot of the Paseo de la Reforma.
Mexico's political metabolism seems to break out in insurgencies every 100 years on the 10th year of the century. In 1810, the country priest Miguel Hidalgo launched the struggle for independence from the Crown. In 1910, Francisco Madero ignited the fuse of the epoch Mexican revolution.
At this writing, there are less than 330 days until 2010.
Feb 5 2009
John Ross
Never before has the contrast between the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual clambake of the capitalist class in Davos Switzerland, and the World Social Forum (WSF), created a decade ago to beat back the corporate globalization of the Planet Earth, been quite so stark.
While the moribund masters of the universe met on their ice mountain in the midst of the most chilling world-wide depression in a century, largely triggered by the overweening greed of those in attendance, tens of thousands samba'ed in the tropical heat of the Amazon city of Belem to celebrate the demise of capitalism. Among those on hand at the WSF dance party were presidents Chávez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, and Brazil's Lula da Silva. Lula who is usually a devoted Davos-goer eschewed this year's funerary event to avoid the stench that inevitably results from rubbing shoulders with mummies.
"The God of the Market has been broken," the one-time São Paulo metalworker proclaimed to tens of thousands in Belem. Writing in the Mexican daily La Jornada, Luis Hernández Navarro pointed out that it was precisely the social forces represented by the WSF that propelled Latin America's social democratic presidents into power.
Indeed, the only two Latin heads of state to attend the caviar and champagne-laced charade in Davos were Colombia's widely-disparaged Álvaro Uribe and Mexico's questionably-elected president Felipe Calderón, both of them Washington's darlings – not even freshman U.S. president Obama, who recently lambasted the machinations of the same breed of bankers who gather each year on the ice mountain as "shameful," showed up in Switzerland, an event that his predecessor in power George Bush never missed.
Felipe Calderón's trip to Davos got off on an inauspicious foot. On the very day he flew out to the WEF, Bank of Mexico president Guillermo Ortiz confirmed that his country was in full-blown recession. For months, Calderón and his obscenely obese Secretary of Finance Augustin Carstens have characterized Mexico's economic health as only suffering from "a little cough" ("catarrito"). According to Bank of Mexico prognostications, the Aztec nation will suffer negative growth in 2009 (.8% to 1.8%).
The news hit Felipe like an ice ball from hell.
Seeking to put a happy face on his country's dismal future, Calderón championed Mexico's 1.5% 2008 growth rate but fooled few. Mexico's anemic performance last year put it in 24th place out of 24 Latin American economies in the International Monetary Fund's rankings, even behind Haiti, the economic basket case of the Americas. The IMF is predicting 1.1% growth for Latin America in 2009 and, like Ortiz, calculates that Mexico will fall into negative numbers.
The Mexican president's delusional optimism in the face of so bleak an outlook played to incredulous audiences at Davos. Calderón also sought to blunt the recent blockbuster report of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that Mexico is a potentially "failed" state by handing out trinkets like baseball caps bearing the ambiguous legend, "It's All In The Trust." The giveaway ("magic spikes" to keep the mummies from slipping on Davos's icy streets were also distributed) came during a session at which Calderón flogged Mexico's chances of weathering the current economic turmoil. The Mexican president's talk was slugged "Riders On The Storm," a title plagiarized from the Doors' 1971 apocalyptical anthem about a cowboy spree killer – lead singer Jim Morrison was reportedly heard thrashing about wildly in his Paris grave.
As a bonus attraction, Calderón teamed with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, now head of Yale University's Institute for Globalization Studies, in an act conducted entirely in broken English that verged on tragicomedy. Zedillo, who coined the term "globalphobics" in reference to WSF types at the 1996 Davos get-down, revealed that the bank bail-out he sponsored during Mexico's mid-1990s meltdown and dubbed FOBAPROA, has drained 20% of his country's gross domestic product (GDP), bragging that the 400 trillion peso outlay was triple that of what the Bush-Obama bail-out has cost U.S. taxpayers.
As might be anticipated, the Calderón-Zedillo act did not play well on the homefront. While the Mexican presidents cavorted with the living dead in Davos, a half million of their compatriots were marching through the streets of Mexico City to protest the economic wreckage the neoliberal ethos has wrought here. On January 25, former left presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador from whom Calderón stole the 2006 election, and his Movement to Defend Mexico's Oil & The Popular Economy assembled upwards of 200,000 in the great central Zocalo plaza. Five days later, farmers and trade unionists matched that outpouring to denounce the damage done by the current crisis.
Among the crisis indicators: 6% inflation, the highest in ten years, and 340,000 jobs lost on Calderón's watch – he campaigned as "the president of employment." Just what Mexico's unemployment numbers are is deeply obfuscated. Government bean-counters at the National Statistical and Geographic Institute (INEGI) claim it is no more than 4%, but under INEGI parameters, anyone who worked for more than an hour in the informal economy during the previous week is considered employed. Utilizing such criteria, the emblematic apple sellers of the 1930's Great Depression would not be determined to be jobless.
On the other side of the ledger, Enrique Galván who authors La Jornada's "Money" column calculates that 70% of the nation's 45 million-strong workforce does not have a steady job. A maquiladora industry that assembles consumer goods for the ravished U.S. market and which generated a million jobs in the best of times has gone kaplooey and the Big Seven automakers (including Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Volkswagen) have shut down their plants for the duration of the downturn.
Meanwhile, workers' pensions, privatized under Zedillo, have gone up in smoke with those paying in losing up to 30% of their retirement funds in the past six months. To compound the devastation, the peso has sunk to record lows, having been devalued by 32% since last August 4, when it weighed in at 9.87 against the dollar. (At this writing, 14.78 pesos will buy you one dollar Americano and the exchange rate is climbing for 15.) Nonetheless. Mexico's banks, rescued by Zedillo's 15-cypher bailout and subsequently sold to transnational financial conglomerates registered a 38% profit increase in 2008.
The current blasted economic landscape here bears striking similarities to another period of devastating downturn a hundred years ago: The 1907-08 depression was trip-wired when commodity prices collapsed and money dried up, casting tens of thousands of Mexican workers into the streets and accentuating the monstrous divide between rich and poor. To counter working class rage, dictator Porfirio Díaz cranked up repression, massacring hundreds of striking textile workers in Río Blanco, Veracruz and miners in Cananea Sonora. Synchronistically, workers at Cananea, the eighth largest copper pit in the world, have been on strike for the past 18 months in spite of Calderón's efforts to break the walkout.
Despite the shattered economy and his deep-rooted unpopularity after 34 years in power, Diaz decided to run for re-election in 1910, stealing the vote that June and jailing opposition leader Francisco Madero, a role model for López Obrador. To celebrate his "victory," Porfirio Diaz threw a huge party to mark Mexico's first 100 years of independence from Spain, expending the nation's entire social budget on useless monuments, many of them lined up along Mexico City's Champs D'Elysie, the Paseo de la Reforma. The pageantry culminated on Independence Day, September 16 with the installation of a gilded Angel of Independence on that glittering boulevard. Two months later, the Mexican revolution, led by Madero, exploded, and Díaz was forced to flee the country.
Just before Felipe Calderón took off to tete-a-tete with the dead in Davos, amidst patriotic bombast and flowery fireworks, the Mexican president announced the construction of the Arc of the Bicentennial to be inaugurated September 16, 2010, commemorating both the 200th year of Mexican independence and the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican revolution. Following the Porfirian model, the Arc of the Bicentennial, whose cost was unannounced, will be built at the foot of the Paseo de la Reforma.
Mexico's political metabolism seems to break out in insurgencies every 100 years on the 10th year of the century. In 1810, the country priest Miguel Hidalgo launched the struggle for independence from the Crown. In 1910, Francisco Madero ignited the fuse of the epoch Mexican revolution.
At this writing, there are less than 330 days until 2010.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Thinking about the money
Medical expenses...$200
Registering Brazilian visa in Brazil...$100
Books and supplies...
Independent Study Project... possible interpreter fees... extra travel...
And my father just asks me: "Did you find that you were able to be thrifty in Central America?...Thrifty when you wanted to or had to..."
--I pause to think. ..
So, of course, the kitchen is where nearly all of the big discussions go down in the Gunderson home. Today I sat reminding myself to breathe deep, or to even breathe normally, in order to lessen the effects of my father's hesitations and sometimes choppy thought processes- where, a few seconds before saying a word, his fingers would come down, sometimes drumming on the table as a prelude to his words... Man how that builds up the intensity, I tell you.
This all has been revolving around my up-and-coming study abroad experience that will be taking place in Brazil through SIT, the School for International Training. You would think that after studying abroad a few times already, I would be used to these days building up to the departure, that I wouldn't have so many questions, and even that the wonder about the trip and future comrades of the program as a whole wouldn't fill me with something of fear... Well, I must contest. The words stating that every experience is unique in itself hold reason.
I do not finish this post on a negative or even on a skeptical note; let's just say an array of feelings unable to be labeled continue to linger...
:).
Registering Brazilian visa in Brazil...$100
Books and supplies...
Independent Study Project... possible interpreter fees... extra travel...
And my father just asks me: "Did you find that you were able to be thrifty in Central America?...Thrifty when you wanted to or had to..."
--I pause to think. ..
So, of course, the kitchen is where nearly all of the big discussions go down in the Gunderson home. Today I sat reminding myself to breathe deep, or to even breathe normally, in order to lessen the effects of my father's hesitations and sometimes choppy thought processes- where, a few seconds before saying a word, his fingers would come down, sometimes drumming on the table as a prelude to his words... Man how that builds up the intensity, I tell you.
This all has been revolving around my up-and-coming study abroad experience that will be taking place in Brazil through SIT, the School for International Training. You would think that after studying abroad a few times already, I would be used to these days building up to the departure, that I wouldn't have so many questions, and even that the wonder about the trip and future comrades of the program as a whole wouldn't fill me with something of fear... Well, I must contest. The words stating that every experience is unique in itself hold reason.
I do not finish this post on a negative or even on a skeptical note; let's just say an array of feelings unable to be labeled continue to linger...
:).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)