YO SOY JOAQUIN is a poem that means a whole lot to a lot of gente, and I am one of them. My father gave me the book in my late teens, and honestly, I didn’t look hard at it for another fifteen years or so. But when I needed it, it was there. Corky Gonzales‘ words were there for me when I reached for the strength I’d need to crawl out from under the cloak of shame that mainstream US culture reserves for the Mexicano, and embrace my proud, indian roots; my winding and intertangled—if not sometimes troubled—Mestizo roots; my enduring and strong Mexican roots. Señor Gonzales reminded us we are not historical drug dealers, knife-wielders, or dish-washers…and even when we are, we are something else, too. We belong to a legacy, we are tied to this land, we are descended from fierce warriors, and Indian kings, and beautiful culture and traditions that cannot be washed or stolen away by the dominant culture. We are something new, a combination of those things, and the unknown New that we forge here in an often-hostile environment.

Very empowering and proud ideas for the Indian still hunted on the land his ancestors once called home, a land he/her and his/her kin still call home. A land strewn with tangled paths, that disconnected from that understanding, can lead one to wander too far, and become lost.

Yo Soy Joaquín is un grito of solidarity and collective self-love and when it was brought forth in the late 60s, Chicanos gathered around this and waved it forth like a shining banner. My old man explained the impact of Corky’s poem like this:

“Here, finally, was our collective song, and it arrived like thunder crashing down from the heavens. Every little barrio newspaper from Albuquerque to Berkeley published it. People slapped mimeographed copies up on walls and telephone poles.”

—Juan Felipe Herrera

And not just on telephone poles! When I was born before the decade flipped, Jefito named me after this very poem. This is one small way that my fate and purposes and awareness were sown long before I knew that to be the case.

But one day in 2005, I walked up a hill with my back straight and with the light of ten suns in my eyes because I could carry a feeling of self-love and self-respect and a belonging to something much more beautiful and larger than myself…and it was the day I opened up this poem again and really took my time with it. Shortly after, I began this blog.

So thank you, Mister Gonzales. Once again.

On Friday, March 19th at the Denver, Colorado Auraria Campus Gym, there will be a symposium held to honor Señor Gonzales and his work. To register and find out more, call (303) 964-8993 or email char1551@comcast.net.

Also viewable (in a dark room) at the XOLAGRAFIK Theater, and of course, headlining every Sunday – Tuesday at La Frontera Times.

This week’s commentary is on Latinidad, or what it means—to me— to be “Latino.”

You can find past episodes in the News With Nezua category.

(a glimpse of a larger piece of art soon to be unveiled)

THERE IS A REACTIONARY NATURE inherent to the Internet dialogues, to the symbiotic nature between the many different kinds of writing. This reactionary process is necessary, and “good” as well as “bad,” as I see it. But at all times, it tends to have a current that moves you along rapidly.

Everyone once in a while I slow down and sit with myself to ask questions about the shape and function of the “us” that comes together out here.

Who are we out here? What are we doing? What way forward?

I’ve been asking myself questions along these lines since I began participating in the amazing new organism of collective conversation that the Internet makes possible.  Do they do any good? That is not, I’m sure, the point. The point is feeling out the fringes of a path forward, the point is simply to keep moving. And sometimes in moving forward, wander.

These posts do not promise any hard conclusions, just questions. Chances, are, too that it will be too long for a quick read. So please feel free to take a break at any spot to chew things over, and come back later when you’ve time. Maybe you’ll have some thoughts to share in the comments, then. Be open. Bring a cup of coffee, yerba mate, or tea.

CONTAINERS AND STICKERS AND A FRAGRANT FIRE AISLE

Lately there arises a tension between “Journalists” and “bloggers” having to do with traffic, mostly motivated by sinking revenues on the part of news organizations. It also has to do with who are “real” journalists, sometimes.

But what is the real core of the conflict? How real is this tension and how manufactured? Moreover, how important the conflict? How distracting? How that people so rather similarly vested become pitted against one another? Are we similarly vested? If so, what is the overlap?

I suppose there is a tiny bit of journalism in my own history. Or let me just say I at least got a taste through the stint I had with MTV News (Street Team 08). Hm. I at least own a copy of the AP style guide, although I rarely consult it. I write a weekly column for an independent news outfit. But “journalist” is never really how I see myself.

Whatever the label, I do think of myself as one of many today who makes it a regular business and practice to join in the effort to find truth between us, and in our society and in using words that address current happenings. I do take that seriously enough to take great effort with my words to be truthful and/or shaped in ways I feel may bring about, or help bring about, that end. Maybe I’m more of a general writer, or an “artist,” or a thinker (Bullshit Artist), commentator, I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that getting hung up over labels/titles seems a senseless use of time. Right?

Two different groups of people thinking and writing and talking with great energy about the challenges facing us all. Searching for a way out, a way through it. Trying our damndest to distill truth out of it all. But we cleave our numbers in two with words and then fight over whose survival matters more.

For me there aren’t little cubbyholes with all the different identities – intellectual, racial, sexual. It’s more like a fine membrane – sort of like a river, an identity is sort of like a river. It’s one and it’s flowing and it’s a process. By giving different names to different parts of a single mountain range or different parts of the river, we are doing that entity a disservice.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

A label for this kind of writing, thinking—I didn’t need one when I began doing it. And since (at least) the age of 14 when I sat in math class surreptitiously penning empassioned narratives on current events—papers not required by school but written purely from a personal need (I remember one day being so blown away that the Shuttle crew had exploded and we were all sitting in class and not talking about what it meant when it had instantly hurled me into an existential abyss of awe and hurt)—I’ve been doing this.

It is a joy to connect with the society manifested through the computer and the Internet, and find that there are many of us out here doing this new thing; this sifting through the gems and the trash and the bones and the rocks that teem at the foundations of our shared dwelling and along the shores of our freshwater springs.

I first met you all in 2001, in May of 2001 when I joined the online dialogues, though not in this blog. I was living in NYC, and when September dropped out of the sky later in the year, it was this global community I began talking to. I launched into high alarm and was ready to make war and was not considering soliciting outside opinions.

As time went on, through reading you, and talking with you about it (and sometimes fighting over it), I learned to absorb and integrate the many different points of view. Ones not necessarily Made in the USA, or at least not as loudly trumpeted. You attached roots to my thinking that span the world and feed on many waters and my vision has expanded as a result.

But my feet are here. My hands are here. I remain invested and interested in probing the cracks that wind through these cornerstones, the chasms rippling through the charcoaled stacks of our culture’s weakened concrete, reaching my fingers into hidden grottos to rinse under rivulets of errant rain and touch up on smooth shoots of greenery, seeking a better way. Inhaling the sunsoaked rays and sweet air that blows up out of new passages—pushing forward there. And finding new soil. And planting. And living in harmony with nature and what she brings.

YOU ARE JUST A PART OF ME

The standing system perpetuates its most corrosive elements quite easily and seemingly without our help—although we give it much. Even in interested  and continual observation lies the danger of getting caught up in the stream of symptomology and the surety of a joined reality.

Do you ever feel we are not even having the right conversations? Or that words don’t mean at all to some of us what they mean to others? As if a person comes running in a house screaming “The house is on fire, grow some mint!” And then another person in the room replies “No, we need to grow some Alfalfa!” And then a fight breaks out over alfalfa or mint. And then a third person says “This is unwise!!! Let’s do the radical thing and grow onions!!!”

The accepted modes of thought reinforce themselves and the standing order. What, then?

When grass is squashed under a board in the yard, it blanches, but it strikes out wildly toward light. it grows itself in new shapes. and it will find the day again. We need, sometimes, to think obstinately and passionately in a parallel non-symmetry, to be come  backward or sideways, or in someway find a new Way.

Are we helping things with all of this? What is being protected? Maintained? Are these areas in which I invest my energy worth the cost? Who is looking out for the return while we are busy worrying about food? Or finding it? Or while we are busy with an angry moment? Who is planning for the Winter? What will the Winter look like? Are we in Winter now? If so, how to prepare for Spring?

Watching the hulking machinery of government and the machinations of the global managers acting in these times, and the conversation that bellows and bounces about the airwaves and online as of late has me convinced we are spending too much time giving our energy to entities that would drain us until we die. And all the while, lie. And stuck to our IV tap, we stare, hypnotized.

Nor is it enough to keep our eyes on the national prize. It seems to me that the equations are egregiously incomplete without an eye cast over the world, entire. It’s only when you add up US actions domestically with US actions internationally with other nations’ concurrent actions and reactions and the history that ties all of us together that a bigger picture begins to emerge. I’ve been motivated to do this by the learning I did in late 2001.

Also, a broader view has been a natural outgrowth of exploring my lineage. In finding out who I am, and what has led me here. Wanting to understand the people in my history and in my bloodline who had to find a way to live, free from long knives and shattered crystal, free from fallow fields, times of war and barbed wire. And who found their way here, who struck out to come here. People who traveled across oceans and fields and war theaters to reach the U.S. of A.

Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on straddling of two or more cultures.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

And if only it were so simple as following dreams.

Here, today, in the land of opportunity and dreams and yet in front of us reveal themselves some unreliable or hostile actors. The White House is ultimately steered by bankers unconcerned with ‘constituents’ or ‘ethics’ or ‘humanity.’ The legislation that comes out of the White House is accordingly written. ”No taxation without representation” was a quote quite pertinent to the American Revolution. But do we really have representation now? No. “We” do not. Forget about domestic matters, Big Business calls even the international shots. It is clear that our massive media structures would in large part see many of us sicken and die. They simply don’t care about us. This is tyranny, perhaps of a subtler kind than proposed in our nation’s oldest documents, but nonetheless it is. Under layers of illusion.

I don’t intend to say that all is hopeless, nor that effort is futile. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t even bother writing here. Nor do I think outright revolt is needed. At least not by the typically understood definition of the word. I do think many tiny revolts are needed. From thought, mostly. Revolt from thought that binds and blinds and dumbly comforts and maintains.

When the People begin to learn the politics of the globe, the truth beyond their nationalized propaganda, their own government deems them increasingly Radicalized; a growing threat. Alberto Gonzales and Michael Chertoff have both confessed that they fear the Internet’s “radicalizing” nature, but that’s false. What is feared by the oligarchs is our gaining unfiltered information from other nations. They fear us talking to the Iranians in the street, or the Mexicans behind the “border,” or the Chinese, or the Venezualans, or Iraqis because they worry that we may—and by “we” I mean the people of many nations, the governed—may realize that we have more in common than not, that our strength is inexorable once organized, and that a very small elite is yoking us like beasts so that they can kick back and put they feet up on some plushy, leather seats.

Well, that’s how it is. That is the way of the world.

It’s been so as long as I’ve been alive. But just look them all now. Look at the lack of restraint. Look at how clear the lines. Artifice is nearly completely discarded because we all—us as well as them, if life could ever be so clearly dichotomized as I pretend with such a statement—are laboring under the illusion that things are, in fact, hopeless. That there is nothing to be done about it all.

But honestly, I don’t think that is true. I have a sudden and unreasonable hope that we can institute behavior that is incompatible with the larger and more destructive behaviors of our culture as well as cast off the illusion that makes so many give up before they might have a chance to start.

What behaviors do I maintain, in thought and action, that keep me rooted in one place? Or moving too slow or in the wrong direction? What tiny revolt is needed in my own life?

To be honest, there are very real challenges to our making real progress. One is that our own government worries more about putting punitive and deadly measures into place than it does in taking care of the People’s needs. Need a better example than the current pushback against a universal and humane health care plan?

Our own government fears peace as well as People Power. Containment areas. Protest permits. Arrests for showing up en masse, or just rubber bullets and tear gas on a crowd. Tasers, Tasers, Tasers, portable torture and terrorism. (Are you terrified to speak your mind to a cop now? You should be.) Borderwalls come in more sizes than 50 ft, or Virtual. They come in a conceptual flavor too. They attempt many walls around our thoughts, many fences cramming in the potential for possibility so that we never even consider what we can change. They give us TV shows into which we can fall and dream of freedom, drag it with us through a day, sweet scents in our minds, our hands on the levers and we keep working them.

The Eco-Terrorism charge is is a growing trend, I’d bet you. I see some of this up close where I live. DHS and the USA, too, fears those who care about the earth because that conflicts with the monied interests who care more about exploiting the earth’s resources than they do the Earth or her people. They put laws into effect that determine you are a “Ecoterrorist” if you do this, and they make those laws so that they can lock you up for the rest of your life. This is all in the name of businesses that would be hurt if their vampiric practices were halted across the board. I’ve reported on Ian Van Ornum, and the story took a while to unravel, but I should do a follow-up video. I learned that the reason the law came down so heavy on this kid was because DHS was in the area concerned with “EcoTerrorism.” There is a history here of activists

What are the well-monied elite factions prepared for? For increased war. For our suffering. They have no plans on changing their actions. But they are ready for us to react. They will put us down if we do, or we do too passionately. They will NOT, however, ease up on all the policies and actions around the world that engender more and more resistance. They simply prepare to find, control, contain, or kill the resistance to policies that do more for them than the greater WE.

Power never takes a back step – only in the face of more power.

—Malcolm X.

I see this in the US when our government invests more and more money and technology in crowd control weapons and surveillance of its own people and enacts more laws that controls our information gathering as well as our right to affect the government by use of civil disobedience, etc; I see it in Mexico, who under Felipe Calderón (and with the US’s great delight and help) is bringing violence to bear on social ills, and with the result of scores of horrendous human rights violations and over 12,000 dead in three years and no sign of a solution except a tired, wrongheaded, bloody Drug War model that continues to be shoved at fluctuating social symptoms. As the US does on the other side of the “fence.” The US’s border culture—which now riffs and zags across the entire country in the form of ICE—persecutes those belonging to the global South as it uses them for labor, as it drains their economic power and self-sustainability through treaties, and the answer proposed is a wall. “To keep us safe.” National Security.

This vampiric shape of dominance and hegemony is naught but pain, fence, concrete barricade, and bombs. We have to assume that the global managers are not stupid nor silly. The choices to keep hoarding wealth, to continue with State-sanctioned violence, and to refuse the treat the greater masses of people kindly are just that: Choices. Reasoned choices.

The insurance companies, themselves, are not the ultimate problem. Nor is Wall Street, the Corrections Corporation of America, the Pentagon, or Congress. Yet, all these things at their weakest, share an ailment.

There remains, eternally running rampant in the petri dish of the human soul, a virus of greed and powerlust and blindness that has bloomed brightly in the minds and hearts of the most powerful, and in a practical sense, makes them the enemy of the People’s better interests. This is most likely the nature of their pursuits, timeless, and I don’t see a cure for them. Especially when you look up, and around. At the past, at other nations, at the general work that is wrought by those we give our money, trust, and time to. At the age-old and unwavering patterns. At the monolithic and entrenched structures that feed and feed on our society. The agriculture business. The banking business. The criminal justice/corrections business. The media/entertainment business.

We cannot rely on these structures. Nor should we. As is said over and over, in the thick of all that is pressing—moral, economic, spiritual, social crises—our media is wrapped up primarily in incestuous, banal nonsense. The entire print/web/news industry seems for the most part more worried about bloggers stealing from their paychecks than they are in saving anything valuable in our culture or our world.

TAKE A SECOND.

I think the reactionary nature of what we do out here is good in the sense that it can help facilitate a few things: correct the deadthought that is blasted from the nationalized bullhorn; find ways to help those being harmed; organize around what is going on now. Be present so that if a timely move is needed, a timely move can be made.

But I think weaknesses are inherent to the shape and pace, too, in that reaction to faulty thought often presupposes a validity of the initial thought in/by/with its response. And in many ways today we need a new way, a new thought, a new reaction. Sometimes space and time is needed from a Thing in order to understand all the effects of that Thing upon your mind and being, and thus what the relation is, and then thus, what the desired relation is. And sometimes, again, one does not even wish to share the reality offered.

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Common denominator of violence, as well as shared focus.

Can we use the reactionary nature of the medium and social shape in a better way that we do? Can we substitute new reactions?

IS DREAMING OF/MAKING REAL CHANGE ONLY FOR THE YOUNG?

It may be expected to some degree, that I would underline certain things—Imperialism, Government control and abuse, surveillance, people power. After all, I am a child of a radical era in the US, having been born in 1969 and to a household of subversive types! However, I also see that that household assimilated itself pretty well into the culture, given a few decades. This may be, in part, because I am speaking of the “white” half of my family, and once the age barrier fell and they found income and cooled down a bit, they integrated comfortably with the overall cultural and social setup. I don’t know, and certain presumptions about others can be unfair to rest upon. Maybe I, too, will have less complaints with the system when I feel it is kinder to me, as well. And yet, I look out upon my fellow human beings and have a hard time stepping away from their suffering as it is tied to so much injustice and wrongness. And that causes distress within me, to see these things.

Either way, these people who (in part) raised me are not so subversive anymore (though I am sure they are hardly common types). They are as comfortable as you might imagine middle class people with integrity can get. The shape of thier dissatisfaction and conversations and actions produced nothing in and of itself (unless you count any effects upon me…and yes, I’d say that has to count). So I do not automatically prescribe similar forms of protest nor resistance, nor necessarily either of those things in the currently held definitions of the words.

Yet we do have to do something, don’t we?

Is there a window of time for radical movement and drastic action and then a window of time for growing things? A window of time for rest? One for teaching?

Which ways of making change are most important today?

I have friends in other nations who urge me to leave. Leave the US. And maybe that is the answer for me. But what about the US? What about the response that the global population should have to the very often maleficent deeds of the global managers?

What do we do to register our own truth?

Do we organize to bring all the homeless tent shelters springing up (and this will happen more and more) to rich residential neighborhoods? Do we stop buying supermarket food and band together for community gardens? Do we remove our money from the banks? Do we paste up signs all over the front of the Stock Market, little bloody dollar bills stuck to every glass window with red paint and crazy-glue? All of these?

All is not hopeless. We have far too many bodies and hearts and energy that we can access for us ever to think that.

But voting won’t do it. Letters to the editor won’t do it. Blogging won’t do it. All these things can be a part of the new way. I’m not saying it’s an either/or situation.

At the same time, is it really about what each person, what one person, can do? We often (and I’ve definitely been guilty of this) reduce these issues to ones of individual consumption or non-consumption or change. This feels a noble and right response. And it is, when it remains in the ideological and more abstracted range. Do what is right, live the right way. You remove your own contributions to harm, and you act toward good. And if we all did this, the problem would be solved. But will we all do this? Ever? Have you ever seen everyone do any one thing together?

Even were I to make my life as non-harmful as possible, or walk around Visualizing Peace every moment of the day, my doing so will not also equal my neighbor doing the same. As Derrick Jensen pointed out recently, (and linked above), “Shorter showers” won’t bring about Al Gore’s utopia.

On the other hand, enough wires braided to a thickness of one inch in diameter is still much stronger than a single wire of one inch diameter. And while one helium balloon in your hand won’t lift you off the earth, enough will.

IT IS NOT ABOUT GETTING THERE. YET. OR IS IT?

We will die before we see the world the way it should be. That is a fact.

In the meantime, we can aim. We can begin to move in the right directions, if we can’t get there. Aiming, in fact, is being there.

I wrote of actions incompatible with the sustenance of harmful structures and processes. I keep coming back to one of the biggest changes in my life, when I think about this. One of the few that remains unchanged. It is my putting cigarettes down over six years ago, probably a few more than that by now. I don’t count the years so much anymore.

I won’t take you through the entire cigarette tale. I started messing with them at 9 or 10, but didn’t begin really getting into them until 14. By my 30s, smoking had begun to become incompatible with life. I started to smoke my after-meal cigarette before I was even done eating. Not that I’m any Pavarotti, but I couldn’t sing as well anymore, my lung capacity as well as tonal quality was suffering. I would run out of breath during, ah, intimate physical endeavors.

It was the singing and that last mentioned fact that really did it for me. I wrapped the non-cigarette desire around a Dream I’d Always Had, and joined the local dojang (Tae Kwon Do school) on the first day I had zero cigarettes.

The increased exercise, joy, self-esteem of training passionately in martial arts was wholly incompatible with my smoking lifestyle. I did not “fight” smoking. I veered into a new direction totally.

I wrote of a virus of greed and blindness above. We need a new virus. We need not to jam needle after needle into our arm testing new virus-killers. You cannot kill a virus. We need a virus of positivity and kindness and fierce love reserved for the Real. We need to set it free, cheeks flushed red, hands glowing gold. We need to build, evoke, create actions and thoughts and structures that perpetuate themselves and reward people with results, with positivity, and with a joy that is incompatible to feeding the current structures and shapes.

I want to find what those are. I want to engage in those actions. I want to find new ways to see and be. I don’t want to get too comfortable in a bed of radioactive velvet. While I don’t want to bring violence to fight the greater violences (except if I walk across a human abusing another human, perhaps), I want to bring violence to the thought structures in my mind (and yours) that empower stasis or blindness.

While I have no answers, I am and have been thinking on it. I’m asking you to begin thinking too.

What can we do to undermine destructive practices in the world? To break our minds out of a dull and comfortable pattern of reaction that moves us very little if at all? What should we grow now to prepare for tomorrow? What should we teach our children, assuming we wanted them to see the world as it is, not as it should be? What should we pull the plug on?

It would be so easy to kick back and get in a rut of apathy, or even one of concern but well-lined with justified anger. Anger is not a low-temp fuel, a kerosene for a constantly-burning space heater. You’ll poison the air with soot that way. Anger is a a high-octane fuel that should be ignited when a swift or large movement is needed. And that is needed.

But so is careful thought, and actions taken up with no hesitancy, and much love.

NAGUALITY

When I found the brown blogosphere in 2006, 2007, I was all about learning and reinforcing Xicanismo. The old-tyme readers will remember those questions. And it was all about mi cultura. Much of what I missed out on in my youth. I read books on Mexican history, and sociological ones on Chicanos and the culture of Mexican Americans, the history of los Pachucos and studied Frida and Diego and Porfirio Díaz and so on. And so on. I still am. And I love knowing about, learning about all this. Getting in touch with the history of my people as well as indigenous philosophies/lifestyles and even later finding how much was projected gloss or glitz, and seeing how the important parts carry through today, and then—letting that settle…It is very important. It goes on. This, I think is something people need to do on their own. We become very dangerous when we think we belong only to ourselves and to a current moment, which is by necessity tied to a self-justifying upward climb. Such a detached existence knows nothing of another, of obligation, of interconnectedness, of what to fight or what to feed. Such an eye turns back upon itself with dissonance.

If you know your history
then you know where you’re coming from
Then, you don’t have to ask me
who the hell do I think I am
- Robert Nesta Marley

But like a vine will do, this understanding and study brought me to new areas. And so I embarked on the business and practice (still employed) of attacking, questioning, dismantling, confronting, replacing—whatever it takes—various types of thinking in my mind. I do it with efficiency and dispatch, leaning on other trainings to add force and vision (such as my study/education/experience with CBT—Cognitive Behavioral Training—in field of psychology). This is something we can do that is incompatible with much messaging out there which harms. In fact, I’d say this is seminal work. First work. But it, too, should not be named and dissected. This has been going on all of my life.

You note a few quotes in this post by Gloria Anzaldúa, whom I found by way of knowing women of color activists like cripchick and bfp. Gloria Anzaldúa is one of many great thinkers and writers that help to liberate the mind. On feminism, on mestizaje, on power and change. This is one place you can find the term Nagualismo.

I’ve done a lot of thinking and some writing about shifting identities, changing identities. I call it “shapeshifting”, as in nagualismo – a type of Mexican indigenous shamanism where a person becomes an animal, becomes a different person.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Another is here. If you read online in English-language pages (there are not many on the topic, of course), you will see some others focusing on various aspects of this type of Mexican shamanism. (This page, though hardly offering a coherent understanding overall, stresses the powers inherent in a Nagual to escape and elude enemies and oppressors.) Nagual is about magic, and fluidity, and identity…and a space where there is none. About the power of shapeshifting. This type of idea excites me, as it has long been a part of my mind, heart, body, experience. I’ve written of Tezcatlipoca, who is a protector of Nagualism.

Our natures are not static nor concrete. They never were. That is an illusion we are expected to maintain. It is a reaction to the terror of the void that spurs such early and insistent practice of this idea. But embracing the fluid and undefined nature of the human energy is a powerful form of resistance to many attacks and even social oppression. This part I can not or will not explain further. But I do encourage study and practice—not of the delineated and formal shapes of “Nagualismo” presented online, no. But of the overall idea. Try it out. Try it on. Take the energy you spend fitting into boxes and between lines and within expectations and set it free. See who it lets you be. You may find your strongest oppressor  takes the shape of containers you carry with you.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
—Noam Chomsky

Let’s get there. Let’s dare. Let’s think the impossible. Let’s unthink the possible. I may just be grunting and crooning in here, but it feels right. Let’s make strange noises as we dig through the rubble that weighs upon this world and our fellow humans. Let’s undo ourselves and speak a new language, one that at first sounds drastic and alien but very soon becomes the music calling us home.

LA SANTA MUERTE is threatening Jesus Christ. And she don’t mess. Those who champion Mister Christ are lashing back. Or perhaps we might say the Mexican Oligarchy is acting like terrorists and destroying symbols that are dear to groups of people who frustrate them. However you word it, the People are under seige on more than one front.

I’ve written a few things here about Felipe Calderón (FeCal) and his misguided US-prompted War on the Cartels. That’s a very big story, with a lot of capillaries that run off of it and touch other parts of the world and México’s history, too. And there are many points of view one can travel while mapping those histories. For now, let’s take one branch down Nuevo Laredo way.

President Felipe Calderon has launched an army assault on Mexico’s drug gangs, but the increased firepower has failed to contain the violence, with some 6,300 people killed last year.

In 2007, gunmen from the powerful Gulf Cartel handcuffed three men and shot them dead at a Santa Muerte altar in Nuevo Laredo, leaving lit candles, flowers and a taunting message for rivals.

Ah, La Santa Muerte. She is the refuge for those who are judged everywhere else and find no shelter until they find her. She is a favorite of Narcos, and many others who live on the margins of society, you see.

For decades, thousands in some of Mexico’s poorest neighborhoods have prayed to Santa Muerte for life-saving miracles. Or death to enemies. Mexican authorities have linked Santa Muerte’s devotees to prostitution, drugs, kidnappings and homicides.

“Linked” her? Interesting. Fingerprints? DNA? Is she peeking out from the background of crime scene polaroids? Forgive me, just seemed an odd phrase.

We know she will have many enemies when her disciples are these sorts of people. And as she promises to love them all equally—quite Christlike of her—she is dearly revered by them.

Either way, the Mexican army has launched an offensive against this icon, bulldozing 30 shrines built to Santa Muerte in Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana just last month. What was their excuse for this sacrilege? Apparently they were “built without the proper licenses.”

But wait, is it really sacrilege? Nope. Turns out bulldozing or otherwise smashing to pieces the shrines dedicated to Santa Muerte is not only State-sanctioned, but Church-sanctioned, too. After all, Doña Sebastiana (or Lady Sebastienne) is an offense against the very idea that Christ was resurrected. She is, the Catholic Church will tell you, a pagan figure, and officially has condemned any observance of La Santisima Muerte (The Most Holy Death) as “devil worship.”

That’s pretty strong. But when it comes to México, and when the Catholic Church begins condemning pagan icons in México, we do have to remember that this is how the very first holy oppressors appeared to the Indians back in the early 1500s. With a GOD that demanded their other gods die, and the destruction of their written histories…and so on.

Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of Death. Some connect Mictlantecuhtli to La Santa Muerte

Clearly, those demands and that destruction has not stopped. And apparently, the people are still not subjugated to a conquest begun almost 500 years ago. Which is why this post is in a category called “The Long War on the Indigenous.”

Santa Muerte’s precise origins are a matter of debate. Some experts say its roots lie with Aztec spiritual rituals that mixed with Catholicism during Spanish colonial rule. What is clear, however, is that Santa Muerte developed a large following only in the last quarter century among Mexicans who had become disillusioned with the dominant Church and, in particular, the ability of established Catholic saints to deliver them from poverty. Residents of crime-tossed neighborhoods like Mexico City’s Tepito began revering Santa Muerte more than Jesus Christ, experts say. Some of its devotees eventually split from the Catholic church and began vying for control of Catholic buildings. That’s when Mexico’s Catholic church declared it a cult.

—Santa Muerte: The New God in Town, Time

And so the particulars are a little clearer. If your idol has let you down, and in the face of that, demands too much in hard times you create another idol in your own image. One that only asks for devotion and judges not.

“All you have to do is believe and ask and she delivers,” Sanchez said. “The Santa Muerte does not discriminate.”

As La Santa Muerte requires no middle man to collect her tithing and better yet, delivers on the prayers sent her way, she begins to replace the former idol. And you and I know this will never do. Dios Mio! Was the Inquisition for nothing, then???

Yet another instance today where huge entrenched powers see their grip slipping away as the People take it on themselves to remedy longstanding ills. It is still not in these entrenched powers’ interest to cure the People’s ails at their core, but instead to patch them over or repress them and continue to shore up their own power with flimsy lines justifying the oppression. This behavior is wreaking untold damage from the US to Somalia and I’m sure in many, many other places. These are patterns that repeat.

“It isn’t fair to repress our faith just because there are some narcos who believe in La Santisima too,” Isidro Pastrana, a middle-aged cook and cross-dresser, said as he walked along with a papier-mache scythe in his hand. “Our faith is much bigger than them.”

More numerous than drug lords and other underworld operators are the devotees drawn from the vast numbers of Mexicans living on the edge of personal disaster and on the fringes of legality. They ask the Santa Muerte for protection and for favours, at least in part, because they have no faith in the institutions around them.

Men such as Sergio Hernandez, a 24-year-old toilet cleaner, who insists he was falsely accused of car stealing last year, but doesn’t believe his innocence has anything to do with the freedom he enjoys today.

He recalled during the Palm Sunday march: “I really thought I was going to have to spend a few years in prison, but I appealed to the holy Santa Muerte and when the verdict came they let me go. These are the kind of things that really make you believe in her.”

—Mexican ‘Saint Death’ cult members protest at destruction of shrines

Of course, in reaction to the desecration of La Santa Muerte’s capillas, Mexicanos are taking to the streets in number. That’s just the way la gente roll.

Worshipers of the cult figure plan to march through Mexico City later on Good Friday in the latest of a series of protests after soldiers and police bulldozed elaborate roadside shrines to the death saint near the northern border with Texas. …

“We are doing these marches because there has been a lot of aggression from the government … It seems like they are fighting a holy war,” said 52-year-old vendor Ernesto Hernandez at a protest last week.

Mmmhm.

DO YOU BLOG ON LATINO ISSUES regularly? Are you a literary sort? Do you enjoy history? Are you Mexican@ and English speaking and prone to reading billions of books? Dig: The latest book I’ve illustrated could benefit from a few more reviewers who are willing to post on the book or otherwise trade a review copy for some publicity etc, you know how it goes. It’s called Gods, Gachipines, and Gringos and it is a History of Mexico written in English. Rather than try to sum it up any more myself I’ll point you here.

Interested? Email me with your story/situation. Gracias.

December 16, 2008 UPDATE: This offer is now closed. gracias all!

 

Los Angeles Southwest College & The Latin American Student Association Present 
Hispanic Heritage Month

Mystery of the Mayas – 2012
&
The Mayan Calendar

From Yucatán, México

ALBERTO CÉSAR HAGAR-GONZÁLEZ

Archaeo-Astronomer Researcher and Author of The Sacred Codes of Hunaab-Ku

Saturday, September 13th • Southwest College, Little Theatre • Starting at 11 AM

Free Admission

For more information please contact Dean Miramontes at Academic Affairs at; 323-242-5512 or at miramor@lasc.edu

ALBERTO CÉSAR HAGAR-GONZÁLEZ

After 20 years of archeao-astronomical research, Alberto Hagar-González has deciphered “keys’ hidden for thousands of years in thegeometrical patterns of the Mayan pyramids and the steles and glyphs of Yucatan, Mexico. These ‘keys’ decode the messages that the ancient civilizations left for humanity in the sacred geometrical design and construction of their temples, and reveals fascinating esoteric teachings and prophecies relevant to our time. Alberto is a linguist and martial arts instructor and holds a degree in Science and Technology. He has authored several books, including 2012: The Serpent Prophecies, The Sacred Codes of Hunaab-Ku, and The Healing Keys of the Ancient Mayas.

Alberto has lectured internationally in more than 70 conferences and seminars, before audiences of more than 1,000 people, translated in up to four languages at once. Alberto was appointed by the government of the Yucatan as the official lecturer to internationally promote Chichen Itza as one of the New 7 Wonders of the world.

IF THE LEFT DON’T GET YA, THEN THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Or…maybe they both grab you up at once!

Before I knew the words duality, dichotomy, or mestizaje, I was at home there. Right here in the nowhere. In the there of the everywhere in the bothlands on the borderline in the neitherworld at the same time. Thus the inbetween, the transition. It is my truth, nothing fancy. I don’t know, when I think about it, how we ever became convinced otherwise. Ideas about self, time and the ethereal land on which we meet. Trying to summon impressions of stone under our feet. 

That is the illusion, isn’t it? Always? That we bang into? The one that hurts, the one that only lives to die, that only arises to be broken. Over and over and over. I can’t count how many times I’ve felt I had arrived. In one way or another. Remembering that even when I do arrive it is only a plateau in relation to where I had just been standing is a personal challenge and imperative. Which is why, of course, I always come back to that truth. Remembering that the bestowing of symbols upon events and times is purposeful and important. Ritual and recognition and reverence and reification. Important. But again, the conversation about Symbol and Essence.

I love how the Aztec and Mayan calendars are round. Symbols change. Essence repeats. Beginning meets the end in the middle. Time passing as a line marching left is both a tired tradition and modern riddle.

In all the ways I can forget this, there is an abundance of shame and pain and foolishness to be had. And the pain arises, again, from clinging to that illusion of a frozen moment, to the mask, to the rotted husk. To cramp within the seed and not to split the husk in two is to die into that feeling of security, stinking, small, cemented and with a dullness that will spread through the flesh and the veins and the fingernails and the teeth until nothing stirs but flake and ash.

Change is pain.

I was born on the sixth of March, which is the day that begins the Aztec month of Tlacaxipeualiztli. Tlacaxipeualiztli is a Náhuatl word that some sources claim describe the act of wearing skins, others as the act of flaying men. Tlacaxipeualiztli was a 20 day period of festivities and rituals and sacrifice that were meant to see the change of seasons throuvgh, from dry to rainy. It was believed that the old season—the dry, spent season—had to be peeled away like a husk, like a dead skin, to reveal the new. 

Xipe Totec was the patron god of Tlacaxipeualiztli and an “enforcer” of the agricultural change. (Xipe Totec is the creator god Tezcatlipoca’s Red Aspect, the god of transition and Spring and suffering.) And as you can see in my rendition above and in all renderings (that I’ve found, from sculpture to temple wall to codex though I’ve not see all codices, nor the entirety of the codices I’ve seen in part) Xipe Totec wears the skin of another over his. Depictions of the old gods will vary from codex to codex in style, and depending on which aspect is shown, in form. Sometimes you will see them in finery, and sometimes (as here) in scales of the skin of others. Sometimes in two dimensions and at times in three. Here, as a icon-like figure, there in a humanesque form. Xipe Totec also has different names to different tribes, but one of them is The Flayed God. 

There were many rituals that took place during Tlacaxipeualiztli, and much of them involved wearing the skin of another person. Of course, the removal of a living heart was also a part of the early festivities. Sacrifices were made where men were skinned alive and other men wore their skins dancing, in a symbolic act of a seed bursting from its hull. Games were played by younger men where all wore skins and fought to imprison one another.

During the 20 days of Tlacaxipeualiztli, the human skins began to decay, of course. And sometimes they were allowed to rot for as long as 40 days before being cast off into caves or holes prepared for the purpose, again in a symbol of Spring and the casting away of the old growth.

This would see the people through to the coming of the rainy season, where crops might begin to flourish and grow in abundance. Before, of course, being harvested and withering into the soil again.

Xipe Totec may have been a god of suffering, but was also a god of change. 

The US-acculturated mind says, perhaps, “Oh, the barbarity. Oh, how cruel. Oh, how gruesome and primitive.” I understand that.

Yet what cruelties do we provoke in the name of nothing at all? What blood do we shed today not as a sacrifice to a force we truly believe needs the ritual to continue blessing us, but simply because we hate?

The city and the people were engaged fully in the rites of Tlacaxipeualiztli. Young men paraded through all of Tenochtitlán’s streets and visited homes where they were let in to ask for alms given in exchange for Xipe Totec’s blessing. It lasted not a month, and then it was done. 

But how long our own bloody transition? And without a goal. And rife with lies. And the priests do not join with the people do not join with the warriors today. We are all at odds, enjoined by lies. And blood flows in many lands at the hands of our warriors—who know not even why or for what they fight. And we hide their rituals from the people. And replace them with lies.

O, but we do usher change. Of that I am sure. As sure as I am of the day of my birth. And we do suffer. But that is what Springtime is for. 

What shall bloom from so many seeds still underground? What transition does our sacrifice celebrate? We bathe in ignorance and hide our heads in the sand and look to the past and call them primitive. We wall off and destroy the descendants of those very same people and count ourselves safer.

Yet as always, I live here and there. On both sides. And neither. Always breathing the sharp, acrid, flower-soaked winds of Spring.