Kitchen Cosmos

The following post was published last month as my contribution to the blog for the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, where I am a fellow this year for the seminar on food.

Pots and pans, mortars and pestles, pitchers, whisks, knives: the implements for processing, cooking, and storing food represent some of the most elemental and yet creative of human inventions. Because of their familiarity through daily use, these utensils sometimes even become characters in legends, or the focus of certain traditions, of the kind my students and I examine and analyze in the Latin American Cultures course.

In Popol Vuh, the cosmology of the Quiché Maya, cooking tools famously rebel against their masters. The creation story relates that the gods needed three tries to create humankind. In the first attempt, the mud-sculpted proto-humans fell apart. In the second attempt, the mannequin-like figures made of wood could walk and talk, but they had neither heart nor mind, and could not recognize kindness and respect. They were punished by the gods, by their own dogs and turkeys (animals that were eaten), and even by their cooking utensils:

Then the grinding stones said this to them: “We were ground upon by you. Every day, every day, in the evening and at dawn, always you did holi, holi, huki, huki on our faces. This was our service for you who were the first people. But this day you shall feel our strength. We shall grind you like maize. We shall grind up your flesh,” said their grinding stones to them.

Then spoke also their griddles and their pots to them: “Pain you have caused us. Our mouths and our faces are sooty. You were forever throwing us upon the fire and burning us. Although we felt no pain, you now shall try it. We shall burn you,” said all of their pots. Thus their faces were all crushed. (76-77, trans. Christenson)

The mannequins were eventually drowned, and those few who survived became the monkeys.

The third try was the charm: humans were successfully amassed out of different colors of corn dough. In general terms, Mesoamerican belief systems hold that people are made of corn, and corn is kin. Even today there are those who believe that to sell corn is to sell one’s cousin, sibling, or parent–the same failure to recognize kindness and respect that doomed the wooden people.

El diluvio y la destrucción de los hombres de palo. Diego Rivera

Caribbean and Amazonian cosmologies tend to feature gourds as womb-like containers of treasured abundance. In Taino myth, for example, the ocean and all its fish are born from a dropped calabash when Deminán and his brothers try to return the gourd to its safe perch in the clouds. Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte, in his essay collection Las comidas profundas, writes of a tradition in eastern Cuba in which a gourd or a jug is kept in a secure spot out of the sun and away from animals, to be gradually filled with fruits as they come into season over the nine months of a mother’s pregnancy:

Poco a poco, entre el espíritu de la botella, figuración de Las Mil y Una Noches, y el espíritu del niño esperado, empieza a establecerse una relación muy estrecha. Todo lo dulce a la redonda, toda carne de fruta entra a la matriz de vidrio para componer un doble, un niño de tierra. La barriga de la madre y la del botellón se vuelven fermentaciones gemelas (48).

[Little by little, between the spirit of the bottle, allegory of A Thousand and One Nights, and the spirit of the expected child, a very close relationship begins to be established. All that is sweet from the surrounding area, all flesh of fruit enters into the womb of glass to create a double, a child of the earth. The belly of the mother and the belly of the jug become twin fermentations.] (my trans.)

The resulting mixture, a sangría-like drink called aliñado, is imbibed to celebrate the baby’s birth, or even stored much longer and fermented further as the child grows.

These mythological and ritual examples from the Americas blur the lines among humans, food, and food preparation utensils, as co-actors in one environment, to demonstrate an ancient truth: we are not only what we eat or drink, but also the embodied practice of how we prepare and consume it.

BRAZIL vs. MEXICO

There's a lot of me wrapped up in that headline, in many ways! What a great game it was today, one of the most exciting draws you could imagine in what was seen nonetheless as a victory for Mexico. Professionally, I've published more about Brazil than about Mexico. But I've taught more Spanish in my Mexican accent than Portuguese in my Brazilian one. If I were for some reason confined to either of those countries for the rest of my life, I would not care - I would be pleased, and I would feel at home. Such rich cultures, such variety. They are the two poles of what it means for me to be a Latin Americanist.

Because of their sizes, populations, and economies, Brazil and Mexico are the Latin American giants. But more than this, they are the giants of the soccer world. How can this be, if Brazil has won five World Cup championships (the record) while Mexico--though almost always a strong team and one of only a few nations to have hosted the World Cup itself twice--has not yet made it to the Round of Eight? It is because they have the largest populations in the world of soccer fandom. To start with the obvious, we can eliminate the global demographic colossi China, India, and Indonesia, which don't have World Cup-qualifying teams, nor do they seem to have the fan base for them. But what about Argentina? It's also an incredibly soccer-crazed nation with a large territory, yet its population is only slightly more than a third of Mexico's. In the Spanish-speaking world, Colombia and Spain have larger populations than Argentina's, but the two populations together are still shy of Mexico's.

Among the teams at this year's World Cup, it's true that the US, Russia, Nigeria and Japan all have populations greater than Mexico's (but--except the US-- lesser than Brazil's). Still, I would contend that the uniformity of soccer passion across practically all sectors of Mexican society (and including millions of Mexicans in the US) means that the nation as a whole is much more invested in its team than are the Americans, the Russians, the Nigerians, or the Japanese.

What this means is that the particular match BRAZIL vs. MEXICO holds the greatest possible combined national interest among the citizens of the countries whose teams are playing. No wonder it was an exciting game. It probably attracted the largest TV audience of the Group phase matches. Perhaps the teams will meet yet again before this World Cup is over!

de-cor-ar

A new room, more than one empty shelf,
spaces to fill with something about myself...

Brazilian books, a museum catalog
of Mexican art, a stylized frog
from Colombia made of clay,
a Chilean invitation for a special day,
en eclipse that was a gift for the wall,
more books to display to all
the visitors, some orchestral works from Brazil,
a brightly colored mug from the top of the hill
at Sugarloaf, a Taino statuette,
a Literature in Spanish encyclopedia set,
books on cinematic splendor and Panama's gold,
a compendium of maps from New Spain of old,
an Amazonian atlas, and from Paraty
a wooden boat a colleague gave to me,
a calendar in Portuguese,
and bookending all of these,
works by Fuentes and García Marquez.
But up in the corners where the shelves are darkest,
there are many more spaces to fill...

and it may be that to never fill them, I will.

Animating Neruda

"The most important living poet of the Spanish language," an oft-repeated epithet in Roberto Ampuero's The Neruda Case, situates the reader chronologically before 1973, before the September 11 coup in Neruda's and Ampuero's native Chile that led to the death of freely elected socialist president Salvador Allende and the power grab of Augusto Pinochet. Certainly still one of the most important poets--not just in Spanish but in any language--Neruda also makes for a tempting literary character. Not unlike Antonio Skármeta's Ardiente paciencia (1985; germ of the 1994 Italian film Il Postino), in which the master poet befriends a postman and unveils for him the power of metaphor, Ampuero's El caso Neruda (2008; English translation by Carolina de Robertis 2012) animates "don Pablo" through an imagined friendship with the protagonist.

In this instance the protagonist is the Cuban-American detective Cayetano Brulé, already known from Ampuero's earlier novels. But in The Neruda Case we learn the origin of Brulé's profession: it is Neruda himself who "creates" Brulé as a detective--encouraging him to try on that line of work as just one more  disguise in the parade of disguises we all wear in life, as the poet says--and giving him his first case. In his dying days, the repentant poet assigns Brulé the task of searching for someone from Neruda's past, and the search takes Brulé from Chile to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia before returning to Chile in the final hours of Allende's government. Brulé assumes that his search has to do with alleviating Neruda's cancer, but we learn, along with Brulé, that this particular "cancer" is best understood metaphorically: Neruda is consumed by regrets stemming from his series of lovers--Josie, Maria Antonieta, Delia, Matilde--and wants to achieve a certain peace with his conscience as a dying wish.

The choppy narrative shows us the mistakes and false starts of Brulé's learning curve as a detective, always hinting meta-fictionally at the process of detective-novel writing through Brulé's analyses of the Georges Simenon novels he reads along the way. Neruda has given Brulé the novels, featuring the French detective Jules Maigret, as "how-to" primers for the incipient detective. But both Neruda and Brulé hypothesize the absolute incompetence that the European literary detectives such as Maigret, Holmes, Poirot, Marple, et al would display if forced to operate in their beloved but chaotic Latin America.

Neruda's poetry appears throughout the novel, quoted by admirers and detractors alike. Brulé, often quite frustrated with or disillusioned by Neruda, experiences something of a demystification of the great poet who has so recently (in the narrative's chronology) won the Nobel prize. But chapters written in Neruda's autobiographical voice simply humanize him more than demystify him, and so do the final chapters depicting the near simultaneous demises of the Allende government and of Neruda himself.

An important motif throughout the narrative is "Latin America." At Mexico City's glorious and glorified Museum of History and Anthropology, Brulé has an uncomfortable but profound epiphany: "For the first time, he was clearly aware of the magnitude of disaster dealt to the indigenous people of the Americas by the invasion and domination of white men, whose blood, he could not deny as he glanced at himself in a windowpane, flowed copiously through his veins" (75). He realizes that he could "never again be the same Latin American as he'd been before": proud of the "legendary past of Havana and the vague origins of Valparaíso, [he] now understood that Mexicans, as a people, inhabited a realm unknown to him, rooted in millennial depths unimaginable to someone from an island that had barely five hundred years of recorded history" (75).

Brulé can recognize diversity within the vast geography of Latin America, but also commonality, as in his repeated rejection of European detective methodology as unsuitable in Latin America, or when, sharing the bed of a frank and casual lover in East Berlin, he identifies with "the Latin American school of love, which preferred amorous encounters with tentative beginnings and gradual consummation, wrapped in romanticism, and always initiated by the man." In contrast, his lover's "female emancipation, born of true socialism, made him feel uncomfortable and inhibited." (184).

Brulé is simultaneously undergoing the disintegration of his marriage, and if love is inevitable in a novel about the man who penned Veinte poemas de amor [...], Cien sonetos de amor, etc., then it is depicted here most often as a love of little endurance: Neruda's serial relationships, Brulé's failed attempts to save his marriage, and the tangled love affairs that Brulé must untwine in order to find the information he needs to resolve Neruda's nagging deathbed doubt. I think the novel entertains and engages most as an extended meditation on the ephemeral nature of love, of power, of life itself.

La hipérbole ridícula de una bala

¿Cómo responder a una masacre como la de Sandy Hook, una masacre que es una, y también una masacre más?

En su magistral cuento "La estampida," sobre la represión militar, escribió la autora uruguaya Cristina Peri Rossi del

sentimiento de piedad por tantas anécdotas truncas, por tantas biografías de pronto segadas, rasgadas, interrumpidas por la hipérbole ridícula de una bala [...] por todos los idilios bruscamente suspendidos, por las casas vacías, por los muebles abandonados, los niños huérfanos [...]

y la frase que no me abandona, la imagen que se niega a soltarme, es aquella de

la hipérbole ridícula de una bala.

la hipérbole ridícula de una bala

cuando el cuerpo es un cosmos 

y la vida un cielo, un viento, un río

y hay momentos en que nos percibimos 

como parte de una totalidad infinita

pero hay momentos cuando nos perecemos

de tanta hostilidad desacertada

de tanta violencia implacable

y basta una bala

hasta una bala

basta

bala

como para acabar una cosmografía

cada cabeza un mundo

cada esencia su espíritu

y no nacemos con armadura antibalas

nacemos vulnerables

desnudos

así como debemos vivir

porque la vulnerabilidad

es poder

y la bala

es despoder

deshacer

desvivir

destruir

la bala

en el blanco

es la negación

hiperbólica

hiperbálica

y ridícula

del futuro

El que teme el futuro

se desespera

y dispara.

¡Para!

¡Basta!

vivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevive

Matapalo

Valer

To be worth it. This is the name of a publishing house / bookstore / espaço cultural in central Manaus that specializes in Amazonia. They publish on the history, art history, literature, theater, geography and sociology of the region, in visually stunning and expertly edited volumes. They have published the multi-volume Coleção Poracé, for example, which features plays by Amazonas-area playwrights such as Jorge Bandeira and Sérgio Cardoso, and they have produced beautiful editions of poetry collections, including Portuguese/Spanish and Portuguese/English bilingual versions of Manaus-born celebrated poet Thiago de Mello's "Os Estatutos do Homem" and his translation of Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal's "Manaus resucitado."

Livros da Valer

I had the great opportunity of visiting Valer on several occasions during July of 2011, including attending an event in which acclaimed native-son writer Márcio Souza gave a talk on Hamlet and its staging, with ad hoc translation, in Manaus in 2007. It was my fortune to meet, as well, managing editor Tenório Telles, a generous and engaging man responsible for much of Valer's value!

After returning to the States I realized that I should have purchased the Valer books, that I need for research and wanted for our university library, when I was there. Ordering them after the fact proved daunting for the library as well as for me. But with the help of the New York-based Atlântico Books, we finally received the volumes in the photo above. Atlântico Books specializes in Portuguese-language materials from Brazil and other Lusophone countries, and I strongly recommend them.

The Valer catalog seems to be their only real online presence. This is an area they can definitely work to improve, and it would help to facilitate their overseas sales as well. But in all other aspects, Valer is definitely "worth it." Valer, valeu!

La Rueda del Sol

Going through old files I found this design I made for a class activity in a Hispanic cultures course:

The iconography represents a sun with the Mexica "Piedra del Sol," the Tiahuanaco "Puerta del Sol," the Iberian "sol y sombra" of the bullfight, and an aerial view of the southern Spanish "Costa del Sol." Looking at it again after almost fifteen years, I'm rather amazed by the effort I attempted to put into its detail, knowing full well that I'm no artist. I recall that the design was for an elaborate "missing information" activity in which the students needed to go find facts in the library. The design concept (if not its execution!), with its totemic animals and puzzle fit, was no doubt better than the activity.

The Day of the Race

The Day of the Race or, better, Day of the People, is a pretty silly moniker for a concept both superficial and alarmingly deep.

It was October 12, 1492 that Columbus and his crew made landfall in the Bahamas. In the US this commemoration has become Columbus Day, one of those push-it-to-the-nearest-Monday holidays beloved of those people who need so much love: bankers. While the Italian-American community has appropriated the day as a celebration of national heritage, and the Hispanic-American community regards it as an appropriate closure for Hispanic Heritage Month, some US  states have renamed the day "Native American Day," or let it be called both names.

In Brazil the date is widely ignored, since, as famed singer / songwriter Caetano Veloso elaborates in his memoir Tropical Truth (translated by Isabel de Sena):

"As children we learned that Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral on April 22, 1500. All other American nations consider it enough to have been discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492" (3).

Veloso highlights this fact as the beginning of a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism, and develops it to accommodate conflicting geographies of Brazil as island, continent, and nation. The slight has also to do with frontier finagling prior to the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the rejection of Columbus's financing needs by the Portuguese king João II, whom the admiral had visited before soliciting Fernando e Isabel in Spain.

But in the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, whose conquest and colonization were most directly linked to Columbus's meanderings financed by the Spanish monarchs, the day has taken on a polyvalence encompassing touchy subjects like nationhood, ethnicity, and race. In Mexico, especially, the day is linked to the masterfully succinct wording on this plaque at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, itself a site of incredibly mixed messages due to the 1968 massacre of Tlatelolco:

EL 13 DE AGOSTO DE 1521 / HEROICAMENTE DEFENDIDO POR CUAUHTEMOC / CAYO TLATELOLCO EN PODER DE HERNAN CORTES // NO FUE TRIUNFO NI DERROTA / FUE EL DOLOROSO NACIMIENTO DEL PUEBLO MESTIZO / QUE ES EL MEXICO DE HOY

Post-revolutionary Mexico's take on re-evaluating and promoting its indigenous heritage retains its strong link to the writings of José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), philosopher, politician, and education reformer whose 1925 essay La raza cósmica exalts mestizaje, or ethnic mixing, as a Latin American essential quality with the potential to redeem the other, less mixed "races." Fraught with difficulties, imprecisions and aporiae, and even having been interpreted as inherently racist itself, the concept of the "cosmic race" nonetheless continues to affect thinking about what it means to be Latino, Latin American, Hispanic, etc. vis-a-vis the wider world; witness the name of The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), "the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States."

Curiously, though, even in Mexican official discourse the celebratory idea of the "raza" is not always mestizo. The Monumento a la Raza, on the Avenida Insurgentes not far from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in northern Mexico City, recasts the Mesoamerican pyramid and crowns it with the cactus-perched eagle--the "sign" that the Mexica sought in order to found Tenochtitlan.

MONUMENTO A LA RAZA, AVENIDA INSURGENTES, CIUDAD DE MEXICO

In this iconic imagery, "raza" would appear to be exclusively indigenous. The monument's construction was completed in 1940, during the heyday of indigenous re-imaginings by artists such as Rivera, Kahlo, Siqueiros, Orozco, and Tamayo.

Perhaps the best name would be "Mutual Discovery Week," with days for Africans, Native Americans, Southern Europeans,  Polynesians, Northern Europeans ("Leif Erikson Day," already October 9)... But no more "bank holidays," please!

One Mic, Two Tongues

KARAOKE, Japanese word for "sing your heart out"? I don't know the etymology, but I do know that I've been to six gatherings at four homes within the past few months where karaoke was the main event. And these have all been gatherings with a mix of Spanish-speakers, English-speakers, and bilinguals.

There are several karaoke products on the market, most of them made in Asia, that can plug into your TV. They all seem to provide alternating-line lyrics over random shots of landscapes, and they give you a "score" at the end ostensibly based on how well you matched the rhythm. Many of the products include several languages beyond English and Spanish, but they vary greatly in the number and variety of songs per language they offer.

So at homes of Colombian, Mexican, and Mexican-American families and friends recently, I've been swimming in 80s rock one moment and 90s norteña the next. Billy Joel and Luis Miguel. Pandora and Queen. The Eagles and the Beatles and the Trío Los Panchos. Boleros, rancheras and rock anthems. Something like this:

Sing us a song, you're the piano mony mony el día que me quieras, vuelve que sin ti la vida ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the canta no llores who ya gonna call? Ghostbésame, bésame mucho I'm just a poor boy from a poor family probablemente ya de mí te has olvidado turn around every now and then I get a little caimán, se va el caimán, se va para Jack and Diane, two pencas nuevas que al maguey le brotan, vienen marcadas, con rock and roll, we built this city on una piedra en el camino, me enseñó que Billie Jean knockin' at my door, usted es la culpable, de todas mis angustias, que ya no como ni duermo, sigo pensando sólo en tu uptown girl, she's been livin' in her whitebread world, solamente una vez, amé en la vida, eres tú como el agua de mi dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, hey Jude, don't let me down, you have found Penelope, con su bolso de piel marrón, sacó sus pistolas, tiró dos balazos, y me dijo: KARAOKE!

La capital de Latinoamérica

es Miami. ¿Qué duda cabe? Es allá donde existe la probabilidad más alta de que, dentro del espacio de una sola cuadra, se puedan encontrar el mayor número posible de los ingredientes de la sopa de letras latinoamericana: argentinos, brasileños, cubanos, dominicanos, ecuatorianos, etc. Y las letras de una comida básica del Caribe son también las siglas de Young Urban Cuban Americans. Allá se asoman y se lamen mutuamente las lenguas: el criollo haitiano, el portugués brasileño en toda su gama de expresiones regionales, y el sinfín de variantes del español, para no mencionar alguno que otro idioma indígena, todos aproximándose, entre resistentes y resignados, al inglés.

YUCA

Para el beneplácito de todos, estas lenguas también se tantean y se reconocen de maneras culinarias en las que sobran platos para todos los gustos. Hace unos días, un amigo yo yo tuvimos el gran placer de cenar en el fino restaurante OLA de Miami Beach. Allá probé empanadas como entradas directas al cielo: rellenas de carne de puerco, en una salsa-crema de naranja con chile habanero. Un coctel como para volver a ponerle los pelos en la lengua de Hemingway, con ron DonQ y jugo de toronja fresco. Selección de vinos extraordinaria. Un plato fuerte llamado pionono: algo así como tamales de masa de plátano macho, con relleno de espinaca, pimiento y queso en salsa batida de tomate con frijol negro. Pão-de-queijo muito saboroso e ainda quentinho. Y un postre único, sencillo pero fantástico: pastel de tres leches, de sabor plátano, con salsín de maracuyá y la presencia sorpresiva pero bienvenida de dos ciruelitas pasas. Total: ¡maravilloso!

Pionono at OLA

El día siguiente, en busca de qué comer por la Española Way, mi amigo y yo comprobamos la casi completa saturación de la nacionalidad argentina entre los empleados de un restaurante ostensiblemente mexicano: un ejemplo más del generalmente alegre convivio pan-latinoamericano en la incomparable ciudad y playa de Miami.

 Ocean Drive

Chamizal Dream

Moment of peace
                             overlooking the river,
         changing flow and shifting banks
switching as often as its name.

Monument of peace
        setting a treaty
                        settling a boundary
             tracing a war wound.

Man of peace
          prizing vigilance
                   celebrating synecdoche
                                 chronicling dreams.

Mothers of peace
                                working on this side
                  working on that side
                       working, always working

Moment of peace
                         sweating the desert
                 reading the lines
         gauging prospects.

In Chamizal,
between wound and salt,
between undocumented and legal,
to dare to Act to Dream.


(Obama speaks on immigration, Chamizal National Memorial Park in El Paso, Texas, 10 May 2011, Mother's Day in Mexico)

El "rejistro": Una pedagogía radical

La BIBLIOTECA es

un archivo de conocimientos

y el DICCIONARIO

el Protocolo en que están rejistrados

la Imprenta lleva el rejistro

Poner impedimento á la Imprenta

es anular la Escritura

Prohibir libros nuevos

es prohibir la Importación de conocimientos

Condenar libros conocidos

es desmembrar el depósito

Los Conocimientos son PROPIEDAD PUBLICA

Puede renunciarla una jeneración

pero nó privar de ella á las siguientes

no lea; pero no oculte ni destruya

Me ha llamado la atención como un objet trouvé el breve texto arriba, de Inventamos o Erramos por Simón Rodríguez, edición de Monte Avila, Caracas, 1988, p. 112.

Ortografía y mayúsculas arbitrarias, márgenes al centro, falta de puntación: es así la escritura del controversial educador ambulante Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854), maestro de Simón Bolívar y fundador infatigable de escuelas por toda Sudamérica. Viajó y predicó, además, por los Estados Unidos y Europa durante un cuarto de siglo haciéndose llamar Samuel Robinson. El meollo de su pedagogía--escuelas mixtas abiertas a niños y niñas de todas las clases y etnias, con un enfoque empírico a través del estudio obligatorio de textos originales, de las artes prácticas (carpintería y albañilería, por ejemplo), de las lenguas indígenas por encima del latín, y de la anatomía por medio de desnudos en vivo--indignó a las autoridades civiles, académicas, y eclesiásticas de las recien nacidas repúblicas latinoamericanas. Rodríguez mismo reconoció lo avanzado de su metodología al incluir en su libro los supuestos comentarios de otros: "¡es mucho lo que se ha adelantado!" (104). Y efectivamente, sus bases teóricas junto a sus prácticas, desafortunadamente poco publicadas y leídas en su época, aunque a mí me parezcan atinadas me imagino que aún huelen a insoportables para muchos. Hay que luchar para que llegue la tan atrasada época de Simón Rodríguez.

Paradise Truncated

I see them approach*
the way that the light through the folia*...it's gold*
the way that the mist from the waterfall
their bronze and burnished skin uninterrupt*
then, parrots: concentrated explosions of color and sound
monkeys of several kin*, a sloth: kinetic and potential, spring from / hang from
abundan* trees reach for light
round, sticky, sweat*, the sun perm*
butterflies bubble, resplend transcend efferv*
I see them kiss, embrace in the waterfall:
an instan* washes over an instan* to sculpt a constan*
kinetic springs, finds potential
I see them, their torsos, their trun* forc* the water down new riv*
which way to go, what will be*
what are they searching for
have they found parad*

Novelas I'd Like to See

Attention Latin American telenovela producers:

PLOT IDEAS!! FEEL FREE TO STEAL THEM!!

Although I don't have much time to watch novelas, there have been a few over the years that I've enjoyed tuning in to view with my family (plus + great language practice!), such as Catalina y Sebastián (Televisión Azteca), América (Rede Globo), or the more recent En Nombre del Amor (Televisa). Telenovelas form a huge part--the most profitable--of Latin American primetime and are exported not only within Latin America but all over the world. The Rede Globo machine in Brazil, and certain Televisa efforts in Mexico (Carla Estrada productions), set the bar for excellence in all respects: filmography, acting, script, costumes, music. The best novelas not only excel in these areas but also engage with the viewers' social, political, and economic concerns and desires. A few suggestions for (tele)novelas I'd like to see:

(1) Setting: Chiapas, 1994. Daughter of rich hacendado falls for daring, but poor, Zapatista revolutionary. Yes, the same old formula, but it would be a way of getting a Mexican telenovela to actually deal with political realities in Mexico.

(2) Setting: Contemporary Brazil. Two non-white Brazilians, of different ethnic and geographic backgrounds, meet and fall in love. Protagonists' gender: open.

(3) Any novela produced in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, etc. that dares to set its story outside the country of origin. Brazil (Rede Globo) seems to be the only country that does this with any frequency, and I admire what it implies about the country's imagination and ambition. They've set novelas in Morocco, Greece, Mexico, even the US (for example, New Mexico of the Old West in the singular farce Bang Bang).

(4) A Mexican novela that dares to feature a main relationship that is not heterosexual.

(5) More of the lushly filmed Mexican historical novelas, like Carla Estrada's Amor Real and Alborada, but more proactively rehistoricized regarding women's roles and the roles of indigenous and African characters.

(6) More of the brightly comic, and satirical, Colombian novelas in the tradition of Betty la Fea and Pedro el Escamoso (and the current Chepe Fortuna, with its bald, though secondary, satire of Chavez's Venezuela).

More ideas / más ideas / mais idéias?

Lost Legends Triptych: Sonnet III

A beira do amplo rio inacabável,
deliravam soldados acabados:
numa beligerância formidável,
caiam os companheiros flechados.

Mas a força guerreira inexorável,
eram mulheres de seios cortados?
De cabelo longo e rosto implacável,
as Amazonas de arcos alongados?

Viram o que viram, ou o que quiseram?
Desvairaram, inventaram, fizeram?
Todos levamos, como com cadeia,

o que não podemos deixar de ver,
o que não devemos deixar de crer:
o Colombo atônito ante a sereia.

Lost Legends Triptych: Sonnet II

Escondida está la ciudad dorada,
sus tesoros envueltos en maraña.
Los fieles locales guardan con saña
su secreto, cual súplica sagrada.

Quien encuentre la entrada deseada
tendrá que dominar fuerza con maña:
el cacique, que en su lago se baña,
a sus guerreros manda a la emboscada.

Y El Dorado zambulle entre destellos
de su antiguo museo sumergido.
Sus riquezas son los reflejos bellos

de lo que los iberos no han intuido:
que en vez de espadas clavar en poblados,
hubieran aprendido a echar clavados.

Lost Legends Triptych: Sonnet I

Of youth the fountain Spaniards sought in vain,
its spurting plumes imagined, jets of froth,
crystalline showers of nourishing broth,
miraculous relief from age and pain.

Perhaps the font, difficult to obtain,
surged hidden from a swamp or barren swath.
Would it be wont to bathe bereft of cloth,
or only drops upon the tongue to rain?

The puzzle ground down into sterile loam.
The searchers were not used to giving up.
Had they but thought to make by hand the foam,

upon its form to ponder and to sup,
then youth had sprung from joyful font of bone,
its essence to imbibe from rustic cup.

Europe Syrup

There's a kind of a sticky-sweet pap that pervades Latin American cultural discourse: a syncretic residue, patina of questionable glories, that many accept at face value. It is a treacle preferred worldwide, and its main ingredient is Eurocentrism.

A majority of us in the Americas speak and write European languages, but try as Neruda might to declare that the barbarism of the Spanish conquest was forgiven by the wondrous gift of the Castilian language, European languages merely replaced indigenous ones. Many of these were already quite complex, and although they did not have, at the time of European contact, the chirographic and even typographical advances that some of the European languages had so recently developed themselves, they were rich in other ways, including synesthetic picture writing in Mesoamerica, and the tactile essence of the Andean quipus as well as the stelae of several cultures. In the case of Nheengatu, the língua geral of colonial Brazil, the vocabulary of an indigenous language (Tupinambá) was grafted onto the syntax of a European one (Portuguese). The happily wed pidgin functioned fine, far and wide, over several centuries and is still spoken today.

It is telling that nouns are the part of speech in which the indigenous languages most greatly enriched the European ones. Flora, fauna, and objects unfamiliar to the Europeans were either assimilated via their indigenous signifieds (often mispronounced or "adapted" to European pronunciations) or misnamed to fit European experience (i.e. tigre for jaguar). But verbs, as in ways of doing and being and thinking? Precious few. And yet certain cultural practices and cognitive processes persist in the Americas, evident in behavioral preferences. For example, why does traditional Mexican pedagogy continue to focus so intensely on penmanship, to the detriment of content, in the instruction of writing skills? Perhaps it is the result of a double legacy: the Mexica tlacuilos--scribes whose job was to copy words as objects, not produce new sequences of them--and the colonial New Spanish Catholic focus on teaching Latin, more than Castilian, as a language already set in stone, a language to memorize in inalterable prayers.

Inquisitorial proscriptions (among other factors) delayed the establishment of printing presses in the Iberian colonies.Yet in the Lusophone world today, Brazil dominates the publishing industry as well as film and television production. Huge and powerful Brazil is the "gigante acordado"; however, in the Spanish-speaking world, the majority of the main publishers are now Spanish-owned, despite strong growth in the publishing industries of Mexico, Argentina, and Chile in the late 20th century. Nonetheless, this imbalance pertains only to print. The Spanish American countries, and Brazil, compete very well with Spain and other countries in terms of television and film output. Such video productions often aim to promote, say, Mexican tourism or Brazilian landscapes, foregrounding contemporary interpretations of the autochthonous for viewers both domestic and foreign.

It is perhaps surprising that so many manifestations of autochthonous lifeways survived the Iberian invasions. But I find it more surprising that there still exists, in the 21st century, so much deference to Europe. European writers, especially theorists and philosophers but even creative writers, continue to be more widely studied in Latin America than their homegrown counterparts. But those European theorists and thinkers have so much to say, and they've said it so well, and produced so much over a longer period of time in the language, and it's so widely discussed!, one might object. Well, one thing leads to another, doesn't it? I would suggest that the underlying assumption is that certain kinds of thinking don't happen outside Europe or the Anglo West. As much as we like to think about how the expressions of a given language can shape (and thus limit) thought in that language, to assert that philosophy has not and cannot be expressed in a non-European language is absurd. The challenge is to not just take for granted that philosophy is all about the Germans or the French.

In Larry Baxter's novel The Mayan Glyph, the cure for an unknown epidemic hinges on the deciphering of classic-era Mayan glyphs that show that at least one Mayan scientist was on the track of the periodic table of the elements. The visual design of his discovery had been expressed in a way unfamiliar to Western convention. The premise is fictitious though not implausible, given how much we know about Mayan advances in math and astronomy. One wonders just how much can be recovered, or rediscovered, regarding American indigenous and also African attainments in the various fields of knowledge, including definitions of (or variations on) epistemology itself. It all comes down to language: visual, oral, even tactile.

Hold the syrup.

seis sóis

seis sóis de seis céus

coleção que são

coleção colagem

alguns mexicanos

outros estadunidenses

mais um dominicano

mas no mosaico

mais universais

vários sorrisos

só um sem raios
tem de metal, de barro, de vidro
naturais, pintados, até transparente

todos capturados

pela minha câmara

em dias de sol

quanto sol neste verão

quantos sóis verão?

seis sóis sós

cada sol no seio do seu céu