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So You Wanna Be Indigenous, Taino Edition

9:13 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture| Puerto Rico| history · 4 Comments

14 Nov 2009

When I was in 7th grade I had to do a project on an Indigenous community for school. I’m sure the project was assigned to me sometime between Columbus Day and Thanksgiving the way these projects tend to be. I chose the Tainos, the indigenous people of the Caribbean and specifically what is now Puerto Rico. I chose the Tainos not because I identified as Taina or even as Rican at the time but because growing up I can remember Puerto Rican coloring books telling me of my Indigenous heritage and I remember being told that my great great grandmother was a Taina. I remember feeling shocked and angry when in my research I read over and over how the Taino were extinct. How could that be? It didn’t make sense to me historically. I thought of stories I was told of people hiding from the Spanish in the mountains and intermarriage. Does intermarriage/mestisaje = extinction?

It would be for another 5 or 6 years until I really thought about it again. As I claimed my Puerto Rican identity and became an activist I wold come into contact with Ricans claiming Taino. My new found political identity made this complicated for me and now, settled nicely into my identity as Rican via Queens, NYC, it’s an issue I struggle with. There is a resurgent movement of Ricans claiming Taino. As the mother of an Indigenous daughter I think about self-identification and when it crosses the lines into appropriation. Can a colonized person appropriate from their own history/bloodline? I know I don’t feel comfortable claiming Indigenous Taina, even if I can pull the stereotypical great great grandmother that many people do.

I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this.

Via / Literanista

Happy? Veteran’s Day

11:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Immigration| history| holidays| military · 4 Comments

11 Nov 2009

Today is the day set aside by the U.S. government to recognize those who lived and died in military service for the U.S. Despite my strong opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the countless smaller undeclared wars all over the world, that doesn’t mean there is no love from me for those who have chosen the military life. They include members of my own familia, primas and tios who have fought for the United States and they represent a growing number of young men and women of color who look to the armed forces as a way to survive and move forward with their lives. Pero as today’s editorial from el Diario/la Prensa points out, the role of Latinos in the U.S. military is nothing new, it’s just that people have failed to recognize it.

As many as 750,000 Latinos and Latinas served in the armed forces during World War II, according to the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project. During the Korean War, the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico won the praise of legendary military commanders such as General Douglas MacArthur. Yet, in the telling of U.S. history, Latino soldiers have received little mention.

Y porque? Is it because that if the history books were to acknowledge the role of Latinos then the U.S. would have to start acknowledging Latinos as humans as part of its’ policy including passing or hell even getting started on comprehensive immigration reform?

Mangos With Chili Presents Beloved: A Requiem for Our Dead in the Bay Area Tonite & Nov. 15th

7 Nov 2009

MWC_Front_Vert2 Porque we remember our loved ones from our familias and community everyday and porque the mujeres that are involved in the creation of this project are beautiful and kick culo.

Mangos With Chili: the floating cabaret of QTPOC bliss, dreams, sweat, sweets & nightmares
proudly presents the premiere of:

BELOVED: A Requiem for Our Dead
because we refuse to forget you

Featuring:
Nalo Hopkinson
Charleston Chu
E. Rose Sims
SoliRose
Nico Dacumos
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Ms. Cherry Galette
and more

With video by Storm Florez, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kortney Ryan Ziegler, and more

November 6th and 7th, 8PM
The Lab
2948 16th St
San Francisco, CA 94103
$12-16, no one turned away for lack of funds

November 15th, 8PM
Hechos en Califas Festival
La Pena
3105 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA
$12-16, no one turned away for lack of funds

In this highly anticipated premiere of the newest Mangos With Chili production, we invite you to join us at the crossroads for a night of conjuring, memory, mourning and celebration. Through elegies of story, song, dance, drag and more, the Bay Area’s noted and notorious queer and trans people of color performance crew will honor our erased, fallen and slain queer and trans people of color family lost to hate crimes, war, colonization, and genocide. We will celebrate our queer legacies and the ways we’ve found to survive through the beautiful resistance of memory, and whisper stories about grief, loss, healing, sweet darkness, and walking between worlds towards rebirth.

Beloved: A Requiem for Our Dead will feature the brilliance and blaze of renowned Caribbean speculative fiction storycrafter Nalo Hopkinson; multimedia invocation performance art heart wrench by playwright and poet Nico Dacumos; In Memoriam, a new collaborative dance theater work by Charlston Chu and Cherry Galette; ancestral prayer/spoken love letter by writer and theater artist Rose E. Sims; a mixed media jazz dance cabaret extravaganza by Charleston Chu, an autobiographical musical journey traversing the Middle East and African Diaspora by virtuoso trio SoliRose; the powerful truth renderings of queer Sri Lankan writer and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; and the premiere of Moorish Salt a burlesque-dance theater/ritual performance art piece by fusion dance artist and theater-maker Cherry Galette.

Mangos With Chili is a Bay Area based arts organization committed to showcasing high quality performance of life saving importance by queer and trans artists of color to audiences in the Bay Area and beyond. Founded in 2006 by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ms Cherry Galette, Mangos With Chili has performed to sold out houses across North America, wowing audiences in world class theaters, underground performance spaces, bars, and campus halls, with their high intensity, breathtaking performance, politics, and storytelling craft, reflecting the lives and stories of queer and trans people of color, while making art that speaks out in resistance to the daily struggles around silence, isolation, homophobia, and violence that QTPOC face. Mangos With Chili is a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco based arts organization CounterPULSE, which provides space and resources for emerging artists and cultural innovators: www.counterpulse.org. Mangos With Chili is supported by the Horizons Foundation, the Astraea Foundation, and the generous support of our community of donors.

Both venues are wheelchair accessible. The show contains material of adult nature. Parental discretion advised. Please refrain from wearing scented products to ensure that audience members and performers with multiple chemical sensitivity can attend.

For more information:
mangos.with.chili@gmail.com
mangoswithchili.wordpress.com

Monday Morning Musica y Moviemiento : All the Ladies Say

2 Nov 2009

The history of hip hop is often told in a male voice and from a male point of view. The role of mujeres, from MC’s to B Girls, is told as an aside. Enter the legendary Rokafella, a figure I knew growing up, as an example of fierceness, presenting a new documentary that highlights the lives of six street dancers exploring motherhood, sexual tension, femininity versus masculinity and the rap industry/mainstream images.

This coming Saturday at BAAD!, in the Bronx, NY you can catch a sneak peek screening of All the Ladies Say. The event includes performances by guest artists and photos by Vanessa Bahmani and Emily Lady Caprice. This event is a fundraiser to support the completion of the film and will be followed by an after party with an open jam.

Click here to RSVP

Monday Movie Clip, Voces : Special Circumstances

19 Oct 2009

While a restless toddler jumped on the bed, I watched pedazos of this documentary last night on Voces on my local PBS station.

Special Circumstances follows Chilean exile Héctor Salgado as he returns to Chile from the USA to seek and confront the men who imprisoned him and tortured and killed his friends after the coup of 1973. Through his journey, audiences will come to understand the legal, political and social obstacles standing in the way of a nation’s attempt, thirty years later, to overcome its brutal history. Throughout five years of determined digging, Héctor finds old friends and family members, victims’ families, survivors and others who express divided and passionate opinions about Chile’s past.The resulting film not only tells a dramatic story of Héctor’s encounters with former military personnel, but also gives audiences a rare look at contemporary Chile and the nation’s efforts to reconcile its troubling history.

From Hispanic Heritage Month to Hateful Halloween

9:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture| Shopping| history| holidays · 7 Comments

18 Oct 2009

As a Latina mami, I think I hate September through November more than any other time of the year. Hispanic Heritage Month, Columbus Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving provide way more damn teaching moments than I care to experience and the worst part of it is that I’m not teaching my children, but rather those charged with educating them, why certain things are just plain old fucked up.

So far, with la Mapu, my older daughter, in a new school, I haven’t had to send notes to her teacher or make copies of articles, as I have done in the past, about why it’s wrong to teach what a great guy Columbus was. For Latino Heritage Month, she wrote about Chile and it’s U.S. sponsored 9-11-73 military coup and was praised. I was pleased to hear that there was an actual discussion of how the conquistadors contributed to what amounted to Native American genocide. There was discussion not of the contributions the Europeans brought to the not so new world but rather of the diseases they brought.

Now comes Halloween. Now I love Halloween. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays. With a long family history of good relationships with muertos, it was more about dressing up in fanciful costumes, begging for candy, and decorating the house with carved pumpkins. I don’t ever remember thinking that it was ok for me to dress up as an “Indian Princess”, a stereotypical Mexican (or a Puerto Rican for that matter), and sure it sure as hell wasn’t ok for me to dress up as an “illegal alien”. I was a smurf, a vampire, a poodle skirted 1950’s girl, and a devil. I even wanted to be he-man one year because I was obsessed with He-Man pero that’s another post. My kids have been cats, hot dogs, turtles, pirates, dead punk zombies, mimes, dinosaurs, skeletons and ghosts. As if the racist costumes that have me pretty much boycotting most Halloween shops wasn’t enough, there’s a lack of appropriate tween girl costumes. My 12 year and I, thanks to my mom, have put together a pretty awesome costume but that came after hours of being disgusted by having to treat my daughter like a baby or a slut.

And then it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to thanks for nothing day or as I always used to hear Tiokasin Ghosthorse on WBAI say, “There goes the neighborhood day”.

What’s in a Name? New Mexico Hotel Owner Fires Workers Over Latino Names.

9:35 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture| New Mexico| history| language · 4 Comments

14 Oct 2009

According to my great-aunt Lucy (que en paz descanse), my last name, the name my daughters carry as well, means that I can be traced in Spanish language history books to Spanish language conquistadores. The last name my older daughter sometimes uses (legally she can’t because of her “bastard” status), reveals that she is Mapuche. Pero what if I had to be Maegan Ortz, as some people have pronounced my last name, or if my daughters’ Latina first and last names cost them their way of living? In Taos, New Mexico, which held a few languages before English, I’m sure, a hotel owner fired some of his employees because of their names.

What I find interesting about Whitten (shall we shorten his name to “White”), is how much this is about his comfort and his history. For example, he talks about him not being from the area and him not being of “Spanish” background and how he wanted English only spoken in his presence. So it becomes about everyone adapting to him and respecting what I perceive as his “fear” of being spoken about and about making sure that employees know their place, below and subservient to him. Whitten likens his employees to spoiled, ungrateful children and he the benevolent boss.

Via / Santa Fe New Mexican, Mi Blog es tu Blog

Reconsider (ing) Columbus Day

7:14 pm By la Macha · history · Comments Off

12 Oct 2009

This video is making the rounds on facebook and twitter. It’s message? A very polite and pointed request: Please, reconsider Columbus Day as a National Holiday–and support a National Indigenous Day.

The Annual I Hate Columbus Day Post

9:30 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Marketing| VivirLatino| history · 1 Comment

12 Oct 2009

The irony isn’t lost on me. Colombus Day, aka Dia de la Raza, aka Dia de Hispanidad, is the anniversary of VivirLatino’s launching so happy four year anniversary to us and to you all of our loyal readers who have been with us through transitions and shifts. I am proud of the site we are becoming. That said, I don’t know if I am getting old or if it has to do with fatigue that I feel from every damn year having to send a note to my older daughter’s teacher about how fucked up their history classes are (although this year has been different), pero I find my tolerance level lowered in terms of my reaction to the holiday.

Let’s just look at the way Columbus Day is marketed by big retailers who make the day about “discovering” great bargains.

I couldn’t find a version the Macy’s commercial that has been running on TV for the past few days but the picture above is related. Just like in the picture, in the TV ad, fairly “white looking” people, including a child, wear “explorer” hats made of newspaper and using old fashioned telescopes to conquer stores.

In my email inbox on Friday, office supply retailer Staples invited me to “Save like it’s 1492″ . Does that mean I just can take over the whole store?

This morning on my local Fox station (surprise) they announced that to celebrate the opening the Rockefeller Center today, there is someone dressed as Columbus handing out Italian flag cookies or some shit like that. I still want to know why so many in the Italian community look to Columbus or choose this day to celebrate their pride?

I’m gonna be on the look out for more Columbus Day marketing. In the meantime hop over here and read an old Columbus Day poem by yours truly.

Have You Contributed to Our 30 Days of Latino Heritage Site Yet?

17 Sep 2009

Don’t forget you can send in your links, images, quotes and videos regarding Latino heritage here.

There will be more videos coming soon pero trying to make videos with a toddler is no easy task. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

xoxo
Mala

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