Su Poder (Your Power)

Creosote

wildcoyote — Sat, 07 May 2011 20:56:42 +0000

In the hot and seemingly barren expanses of the desert in inland Southern California, there is one plant that is seen to thrive, growing and expanding itself through cycles of drought and cold, for thousands of years. What would it be like to live a thousand years? The creosote, known in the local indigenous language as atakhul or the linnaeun marker Larrea tridentata, is an ancient creature, a plant which succeeds by cloning itself, allowing new replicas to sprout from its surroundings. Some plants, as can be found in the Coachella Valley of the Sonoran Desert west of the Colorado, have lived for nearly 10,000 years. Plants that have been breathing the dry air (usually at night when it is most moist) and soaking in the seasonal rains in this patch of landscape for a period longer than recorded human history. When the Spanish were first spotted by the local Cahuilla Indians with their ships and white-canvas sails exploring the coast of the now-extinct Lake Cahuilla (boats with “white clouds” sailing above them, as oral lore tells), the creosote of today was still there, drawing nutrients from the soil and providing medicinal aid to the native people. Further back, before the ancestors of Iceland landed in North America in the first century A.D., before Julius Caesar fell to his fate during the Ides of March, before a humble carpenter was sacrificed by the brutal power of an empire, the creosote bush of today remained, defining a California landscape before it was a state, a national outpost, a colony or even the gentle glimmer of imagination in the European mind. The creosote was still there, back in the beginning of the world, when the Cahuilla god Mukat had the Earth spun from darkness and void, raising the ground through earthquakes and tremors, materializing the immaterial world of the spirits, and providing for this land the creosote, atakhul, whose individual life and history matches that of collective human memory only when one stretches far back into the realm of myth.

[L]wAter

wildcoyote — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:08:58 +0000

LA–it is a city established on the desert coast of California, with few local sources besides the seasonal flows of the Los Angeles and Santa Ana Rivers. Near the turn of the twentieth-century, with a dry climate and ambitious plans, city officials helped pioneer the modern “hydrological civilization” of the Southwest. This began first in 1913 with the building of the Los Angeles aqueduct, a municipal construction of unprecedented size and extreme controversy. Stretching over 200 miles to the north where it drained the waters from rural communities of the Owens Valley, it was bitterly opposed and, at one point, dynamited by desperate upstream farmers. Several years later, this was followed by the Colorado River aqueduct, built in 1939. Although conceived primarily to acquire water for Los Angeles, it now helps deliver water also for San Diego and the many other urban inhabitants across Southern California. The final stage in the state’s massive water infrastructure was the construction, beginning in 1960, of the State Water Project. The Project boasts over 700 miles of canals and pipelines, siphoning from the water-rich estuary of the northern San Joaquin Delta to the parched central and southern portions of the state (“California State Water Project” 2011). The building of the project, which was strongly opposed by San Francisco and other communities of northern California, came about largely due to the power and influence of Los Angeles, with its many residents providing the votes and political will to make the construction possible (Hundley 2001; Rarick 2006).

SGV

wildcoyote — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:02:01 +0000

With greater Los Angeles comprising the second-most populous metropolitan area in the U.S., I plan to focus on the eastern end of the city, the stretch of urban sprawl lying between East Los Angeles and the Pomona valley. Nestled in the foothills east of downtown, this expansive suburb is home to about 2 million people, among them middle-class whites, working-class Latinos and a wide diversity of ethnic minorities. Much of it is comprised of domestic housing, while a small yet concentrated portion of the urban space is devoted to industrial transportation and manufacturing. Having been long-established a center for the region’s industrial growth, this corner of Los Angeles has served as a model of neoliberal municipal reform, linking local resources, capital and international trade. With tax-haven development zones and gerrymanderings of municipal boundaries, this suburb exemplifies the pattern of urban growth that came to define the economic trajectory of Los Angeles and much of Southern California (Valle 2009). Although manufacturing in the Los Angeles basin has significantly declined since the early 1980s, products from across the nation still converge here, passing into and through the metropolis, in addition to those goods that are still locally produced. Several miles west lay the bays of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest port through which crosses 40% of overseas goods and 70% of Asian imports, a pivotal point within the Pacific-rim economy and U.S. global trade (Sharpsteen 2011). To facilitate this massive orchestration of international exchange, this area provides rail lines, truck traffic and factory space, sustaining an infrastructure that both creates further demand for water while threatening the region with increasing pollution.

beetles

wildcoyote — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:54:20 +0000

Plans were made (by whom?) to purchase a bunch–perhaps several… thousand? Those you don’t use, refrigerate (they stay alive, fresh). Those you use, will eat others (undesirables), leaving a garden free. Lady bugs, small dots on glossy wings, being shipped and tracked across a continent (several thousands for only $16.99). Humans and bugs–plants and pests–transboundary ecologies converging in the home garden.

latin america

wildcoyote — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:21:58 +0000

In Latin America, as across the world, difference defines the processes by which power is exercised and contested, as lines of difference are alternatively rejected and accepted. With a history based upon the mixing of European, Indigenous and African destinies and founded on economic inequalities of colonial magnitude, Latin America offers a productive platform from which to examine the ways in which notions of difference are asserted and destabilized within various exercises and modes of power. The region is full of such examples, as personal experience may attest: A mestiza women, of modest means and living in the rural outskirts of the bustling capital, speaks to the populist idealism of “Bolivarian Socialism” as she tugs at her waves of long black hair, showing it as testament to her genealogical descendent and implied solidarity with Afro-Venezuelans, as her phenotypic pride points to an erasure of centuries of racial exclusion. A young woman of European descent extols recent genetic tests that she says prove, contrary to popular belief, that the lighter-skinned and uniquely middle-class Costa Rican majority are nearly all related to the nation’s native, poorer and darker-skinned minority. In signs protesting hostile laws and sentiments, Chicano activists display their self-identification with La Raza, embracing the idea of racial difference and its notion of a bi-national, empowered and legitimately unified people. Across Latin America, difference is uniquely contested and embraced, in different settings and in different ways, outlining the ways that power operates and circulates.

[n]

wildcoyote — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:15:30 +0000

Na jeg vil snakker i norske fordi jeg studerer norsk (men jeg vet litt!). Jeg vil gjerne reiser til Norge (men når?), till Oslo eller Bergen eller….

last days in Ecuadorian Andes

wildcoyote — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 04:40:26 +0000

Among the last days of my stay in the highlands, I’m siting at a long wooden table, in a hostel nestled in the tightly-packed hamlet-like town. I eat my soup, the twenty other twenty-somethings also enjoying the meal. The Dutch language rolls off their tongues (I don’t speak Dutch) as smooth as their laughter. A pause enters, I politely introduce myself in English, and continue to eat my soup, allowing their conversation to carry on. The hostel was started, I learn, by an Ecuadorian-Belgium. A non-profit, they benefit the local school(s). My stay in pleasant, especially: market day. Guinea pigs and tape recorders, sandals and vegetables, sweaters and pigs (plenty), plentiful weekly exchanges (actors on a stage, a la Market Day in Provance). Negotiating prices is easy, and enjoyable!

AMBATO

wildcoyote — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:08:46 +0000

Arriving in the small town of S., got to attend the tri-monthly meeting of the local irrigator’s society–just outside of the city. The gathering was large–at least 90 people filled the room–with mostly men but a few women representing their various regions. Mestizo seemed the dominant identity, though numerous indigenous folks were seen as well, their ponchos and hats signifying their ethnic identities. The president of the group spoke of the constitution–of managing our natural resources responsibly.

On the way to the meeting, previously, I had been riding in the pickup truck bed, with the wife of my host, discussing indigenous politics (although her garb matches that of the local native Andeans, she originally is from the Amazon). She talks of the inherent racism in the country, of being discriminated due to skin color, dress and ethnic solidarity. Especially: the monetarization in the country years ago, when the U.S. dollar was adopted as the national currency. The poor especially were hard hit, not knowing the prices of the new money, being disadvantaged by their lack of access to information, social isolation.

on distinguishing differences (Quito)

wildcoyote — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:26:25 +0000

Ecuador is little of what I expected–how greatly can histories and ethnographies convey the immediacy of the northern Andes? I retire to a hostel in the bustling district, getting my barrings as I notice the green hills rising (North) above the city. I meet with a friend and a local business owner. Be cautious of the crime, I’m told, especially in the tourist district. I’m fortunate not to experience this first-hand. The day before, the businesswoman tells us, she walked on the main avenue, in the bright morning just before noon, and two men stole her jewelry, ripping them from her ears. The insecurity of the streets is bearable, yet barely.

People go about their days. The businessman from the coast, with his wife, I meet on the bus. We discuss the local politics, my Spanish and my studies, and where we’re heading (he, back to Guayaquil and I, into the rural highlands). I respected Quito, the underlying sense of tension in the streets (the attempted coup erupted no more than 8 weeks after my travels). But the daily commotions of commerce continue, a vibrant city certainly.

Returning to San Jose, CR

wildcoyote — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:18:45 +0000

Pura Vida, maje! The concrete city is inviting, a familiar place of summer rains and high humid temperatures. My friend, an agronomist, greets me at the local university, his new project set and running. The World Cup is playing in the next building, an empty cafeteria closed for repairs, with a lone television watched by three off-duty folks. Mercifully, the rain has stopped today, so the walk home is less wet. Plans are made to travel back to the frontera, the dividing line between Panama and here. The tropical shore, remembering, is further afield, distant from the capital in language, time and travel.