Janitors in Houston walked out of work this week, fighting for contracts with six of the largest cleaning companies in Houston. The janitors work part time for $5.30 an hour and no health benifits. The majority are Latinas. No one can live on those wages. Nadie puede vivir bien ganando tan poco en la ciudad de Houston. To find out more about what's going on, go to the Houston Justice for Janitors site. O en español, hay información aquí.
Lorna Dee Cervantes spoke at the U of H tonight about: free poems, blogging a poem a day for each death in Iraq, her five books in one Drive, a love a joy a long time coming, organizing stem cells in Taiwan for Alfred Arteaga’s heart, Chumash rebone and the foundation for our adobe cardboard palacios, the vagina, the vulva, the smell of poetry experience, the connection between the dead and the living, streetside tough cholas building a present future, a long time coming, people intimidated by books, finding ways to bridge the brecha, viva la raza cuz my legs are open, m’ija please, las esas, la malinche providing more counterrevolutionary dreams, thy prick, thy virgin, the truth of it, her muscular thighs, heathen dreams not making good catholic girls.Someone mentioned these shoulders were to stand on. I'll stand on the ground. Let the elders breathe a little.
Then in the kind of rush that comes in a parking lot streetlight:
Mi pasión, que my life's just fast enough, kay see you in the blogosférico, a half a million poems and counting for each wartime corpse, a light alight sixties movement politics, a tree to sit in and watch the beatings, no, my granpa was that gringo, i thought, do penance, fuck, a way to poetry through meetings, internet spreadsheets, conference calls, rejection, always striving, always más, maybe the problem’s taught in school, so life is unlearning or to try, don't think so much, you said, slow down, you said, thick words and infatuation, the meaning an organizing tool, language these words you are in love with words, gracias, isn't my poem, this one is yours, one for our legs kicked open in glee, for the black boy behind me giggling at the smell of your vulva, for small mounds of pecho and nipples, striving with arms in the air, with banging body blues, with running, with not caring about microphones because this hair made flow lucid, because politics isn’t over there, to be involved in again, here now in this room, in this ciberespacio, you reading this line, to breathe for it. for finding a way to my body, to embody.
Freddy Fender is dead.Mike Davis strikes back.
What few people -- at least, outside of Mexico -- have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.
Yes, in former California Gov. Pete Wilson's immortal words, "They just keep coming." Over the past decade, the State Department estimates that the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (or one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates). Remittances from the United States to Mexico have risen dramatically, from $9 billion to $14.5 billion in just two years. Although initially interpreted as representing a huge increase in illegal workers (who send parts of their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be mainly money sent by Americans to themselves to finance Mexican homes and retirements.
Ideas Davis presented this past summer at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana. Fully developed and terrifying. Full piece is here.
What is striking about these shifting linguistic allegiances is that they tend to favor the language that is culturally dominant on the international scene.
My point exactly. While there is a long tradition of writers shirking their less-dominant mothertongues to use another more-dominant language, I cannot locate a similar tradition that would operate in reverse. English speaking writers deciding to write in Spanish being the most obvious example. But Russians who switch to Kazakh, Germans who switch to Turkish, French who switch to Arabic, Spanish-speaking Peruvians who switch to Quechua, the list could grow further. Does anyone know of cases like this that escape me? Me fascina la posibilidad de cambiar de idiomas, como ya sabrán ustedes.
In an interesting endnote, a conversation with Jen Hofer in Tijuana this summer on this very subject has kept me thinking. As I understood her point: Writing in Spanish for a native English speaker is very difficult: instead of knowing ten ways to express something in English, knowing only six in Spanish. And then the big questions: Is it a colonial move for a speaker of a dominant language to take over a less-powerful one? To move into it and claim it? Is it a form of imperialism? The benefits of "moving up" the language food chain are obvious, but the politics of it are messy. Accusations of selling out or of not being true to your roots or your people. But what would be the benefits of "moving down" (even the term is ugly and locked in an imperialist way of thought)? Is switching down an imperialist move? A way to exoticize oneself? A cop-out pues?
Don't know myself, but I do know having the questions in my head has propelled me towards imagining a liberatory practice of translation, rather than trying to dissappear into another tongue. Pero seguiré escribiendo en español aunque, claro, no voy a salvar el idioma. Because the little misunderstandings que brotan when the languages trip over each other, los valoro tanto tanto.