Post-Peak Oil

 

Detail of photo by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
for Bloomberg Green

Perhaps the most profane guest lecturer I ever brought to campus was James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. I qualify this with "perhaps" because I also helped to bring Junot Díaz to campus. Kunstler is certainly the more curmudgeonly of the two: a professional pessimist for whom dire predictions are a moral imperative. It is as if we were stepping off a curb in front of a fast-moving bus, and he is trying to push us out of its path with books, lectures, and profanity-laden blog posts.

I was reminded of this by a recent story from Bloomberg. In Toxic Spills in Venezuela Offer a Bleak Vision of the End of Oil, journalists Fabiola Zerpa, Peter Millard, and Andrew Rosati describe the multiple environmental catastrophes that are accompanying the financial collapse of what was once a leading national petroleum industry.

As the article describes in detail, the demise of petroleum in Venezuela is following a path that is not likely to play out in other producing areas. It is, after all, failing to refine oil while it still has plenty. Most other oil fields -- and the global oil field as a whole -- will not run aground financially until reserves are proportionally much scarcer than they are in Venezuela at the moment. 

But the tale is a cautionary one for another reason: it is difficult enough to get polluters to take financial responsibility for the havoc they cause while they are profitable. It is much more difficult when they have run out of money. It is for this reason that regulatory programs such as RCRA in the United States require industries to show strong financial reserves as part of any process of permitting potentially polluting facilities. 

As oil reserves dwindle worldwide -- and all of them will -- abandoned fields and infrastructure will require close scrutiny. Unfortunately, many of the costs of our oil addiction are likely to be borne by generations who do not enjoy the benefits.

Latin America: Globalization & Cohesion

Visiting the Elqui Valley of Chile for a solar eclipse in 2019.

Where is Latin America exactly, and why is it called that?

What causes deforestation in the Amazon, and why does it matter?

Infamous BR-364 
See note below

What do migration patterns have to do with the price of coffee?

How is land connected to political upheaval in the region?

How does climate change affect Latin America, and how are people responding?

What can we learn about Latin America from its music?

These questions and many more are part of one of my favorite courses -- 

GEOG 381 is Latin America: Globalization & Cohesion
Tuesdays 11:00am-12:15pm
In the spring 2021 semester it is offered fully online, partly synchronous. This is a complicated way to say that we will have one Zoom meeting a week, with students working independently otherwise.

International development amid the diverse global cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean is considered as globalization is balanced with local identities from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Common themes that define the region are contrasted with unique developments at national and local scales. 

The course meets four requirements of the Core Curriculum: CGCL; CMCL; CSOC; CWRT
Global Culture; Multiculturalism; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Writing Intensive
It also fulfills requirements in all four geography concentrations, the geography minor, and the LACS minor. An Honors Contract credit is available for students completing departmental honors in geography.

I became a Latin Americanist geographer because of one of the problems mentioned above: Amazon deforestation. As I learned more about the region -- eventually earning a doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies -- I have become enamored of its many cultures, climates, and landscapes. I have had the good fortune of visiting all the countries shown in green below -- returning many times to Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua. I also lived for seven years in the Borderlands of Arizona and Texas, which should be included in any discussion of the region.

Map from MapChart

For more ideas related to this course, please explore the posts I have labeled GEOG381 in this blog.

Photo Notes

I struggled to find a photo to illustrate this blog post -- even my own modest experience in Latin America has been quite varied. I have been hot, cold, high, low, wet, and dry. I have seen beautiful and occasionally terrible things. I have met so many wonderful people. I compulsively take photos, and each of the thousands I have taken (or have been taken of me) tells a different story.

At the top of this page is a photo my spouse (who is a BSU librarian and Spanish professor) took during our July 2019 visit to Chile and Argentina to view a total eclipse of the sun. We learned why people make such a big deal out of those journeys. Traveling as two Latin Americanists made our travel to view the eclipse a very rich experience, as we could do so independently and appreciate many things about the people and places we traversed.

The BR-364 photo is one that I did not take; I found it on a Facebook group called Rondônia, Minha Querida Rondônia. Like many groups, it features nostalgic photos of a particular place, in this case the Brazilian state where I did my dissertation research in 1996 and to which I returned in 2000, 2003, and 2019. The phrase "minha querida" means "my dear" and it signifies the affection many people feel for their home state, despite it being a place I chose to research specifically because of its many problems. The muddy road BR-364 (usually called Três-Meia-Quatro) is at the heart of thousands of migration stories and one of the world's most severe and prolonged episodes of deforestation. The story behind this photo will occupy about two weeks of our course, and will touch on many aspects of the geography of an entire region.

The final photo -- the sea of flags -- was taken in the spring of 2018 in Nicaragua, not by me. I led study tours in Nicaragua almost every year from 2006 to 2018, almost always in January. In April of 2018, politics in the country took a very dark turn, which I describe in a series of posts tagged #SOSNicaragua -- a hashtag that is also on the back of my car to this day. Although this looks like an ordinary photograph, to understand the photo and the reactions to it is to understand a complicated story of political geography that stretches back decades.

Plantation Discourses

The story of Dutch podcast partners Peggy Bouva and Maartje Duin began with an awkward conversation about the connections between their families. Both live in Holland, but Duin -- a journalist -- discovered that they were connected by a plantation in the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

They discuss their podcast, their friendship, and their travels together in a recent appearance with Joanna Kakissis on NPR's Morning Edition. (Careful listeners will notice that "slaves" is used as a noun in the introduction to the conversation, though "enslaved persons" is used in the conversation itself. This reflects a growing recognition that it is dehumanizing to identify people solely by the bad circumstances or crimes that have affected them.)

Although the podcast itself appears to be available only in Dutch at the moment, Google Translate offers some sense of the summary of each episode of The Plantation of Our Ancestors in other languages, and includes links to other resources, some of which are available in English. These include Mapping Slavery NL, which portrays historical places relating to slavery on the map of the Dutch colonial empire.

The description of the mapping project highlights on advantage Dutch and some other European folks have over those of us in the United States: they know that their countries were part of the metropol, that is, at the centers of global empires. Denial of its imperial nature is a treasured myth in my country, even though no empire has ever been bigger.

As pro-slavery statues are toppled by vote, by edict, or by protestors, some decry the loss of history. In most cases, however, the history remains to be uncovered, whatever happens to icons of bronze men on bronze horses. As we finally grapple seriously with the ongoing implications of slavery, conversations such as those between these Bouva and Duin are essential. 

Lagniappe 

Even at my seemingly far remove, I have derived a benefit from the ill-gotten glories of Holland's trafficking in humans. Among the artists supported by that immense wealth are both Rembrandt and Vermeer. My answer to the Getty Art Challenge of 2020 was a recreation of Vermeer's The Geographer. 

My entry in the Getty Art Challenge, special edition for Pride Week.

COVID Policies and Trans Communities in Latin America

Social-distancing protocols in some parts of Latin America have been gendered, because this seemed to be an easy way to reduce potential crowds by one half. In some cases, however, the rules facilitated abuse by police and others. As reported by Jennifer Bitterly for the Christian Science Monitor, some trans activists in the region have found a silver lining in the responses.

Coffeeland as Empire

I had already begun to read Augutine Sedgewick's hefty tome Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug when a fellow geographer passed along Oliver Taslik's much more manageable review, The callous roots of caffeine capitalism.

Taslik confirms my impression that Sedgewick's work has a great tendency to wander and meander across time and space, making me feel a bit better about already having gotten a little bit lost in its pages. He also reminds us that the James Hill -- the "One Man" of the book's subtitle -- is not the real subject of the book.

Rather, it is the broader story of the hazards of economic and social -- and political -- development that is dependent on a single crop. Diversification to other crops is scarcely better, if they remain within a narrow range and share post-colonial patterns of dependency.

I hope to have more to say on the work when I reach its end, and I hope some day to reach El Salvador itself -- a country I have studied a fair bit but not yet visited.

Lagniappe

Those who know me well may notice that the title of this book is very similar to a word I use often -- Coffeelands -- as a term of endearment for all of the places around the world that provide our coffee, and to the people of those lands. It is also the name of one of my very favorite coffee shops, whose owner has been with me on three coffeelands journeys (so far).

Crypto-Judaic Latin America

I remember the first hours of my first (and so far only) visit to Cuba in 2003 as being a bit rushed. We had experienced a bit of delay at the airport and hotel check-in late on a Friday afternoon, so there had been little time for our group leaders to explain what the first part of our anthropology travel course would be. We simply piled on to our big Mercedes bus for a short drive across Havana, and were deposited into the foyer of a fairly large, modern synagogue.

The rush made sense in retrospect: we were trying to get to the sabbath services, which would begin at sunset. As unprepared as I was for the experience, many of the students in our group were even less prepared, moving out of several layers of their comfort zone in short order: first time on a plane for some, first time in a Spanish-speaking country for most, first time in an authoritarian country as well, and now the first time in a synagogue. In fact, it was adjusting to this that was a more immediate concern than any of the other layers: many of the students had never been to an Orthodox service and did not understand the segregation by gender or the need for men to wear yarmulkes. We got all that sorted, enjoyed the service -- in Hebrew and Spanish -- and then went downstairs for an experience that felt very familiar to me. The potluck supper in the basement felt like hundreds of church suppers I had attended.

Since Pamela discovered a terrific recipe for latkes in 2012, having friends
over for latkes during Hanukkah has become a cherished part of
our late-December traditions. Rowing the rest of the year helps, as
I insist on processing everything by hand. Photo credit to our friend
Korin, who kept me company as I cooked round after round.

This experience was on my mind during first day of Hanukkah, as I prepared our annual latke dinner for friends and considered the story of Genie Milgrom, which I had heard as I made coffee that morning. (Listening to BBC and NPR is an important part of my daily coffee ritual.) In it, journalist Greg Allen tells the story of a Cuban-American in Miami who was raised Catholic but discovered her Sephardic heritage from family recipes.

Her story is told in just five minutes, but it spans five centuries and three or four continents, so I have listened to it several times already, and look forward to listening with students in my course on the geography of Latin America.

This is because Milgrom's family story begins in her kitchen but passes backward through Cuba to Spain and Portugal, and then forward through generations of crypto-Jews throughout the Americas. These are people who lost their lives or their identities in the wake of the Inquisition. She now travels throughout Latin America, helping others to recover their stories. It is fitting that her story originates in Miami, which some consider the de facto capital of Latin America.

Her story reminds us that the Inquisition was not just the Spanish Inquistion, but that its abuses were found throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

A colleague with far greater expertise than I have confirms that this GIF is
a reasonable summary of shifting identities across Iberia, except
for the exclusion of Andorra. The Inquisition involved pushing both
Muslim and Jewish peoples out of the entire realm, or forcing their
religious conversion.

Inquisition door
Photo: Pamela Hayes-Bohanan

Olinda is a beautiful little corner of Recife, Pernambuco, and in 1535 it was one of the first Portuguese settlements in what was to become Brazil. Today it is known for its fine arts, and my family was indeed browsing a gallery there in the year 2000 when we noticed something unusual about the building we were in.

Although brightly painted and opened to admit the midday sun, we noticed narrow windows, heavy doors, and some walls nearly two feet thick. When we inquired about the architecture, the gallery staff informed us: this had been an Inquisition prison. It was in that moment that I realized the global scope of those atrocities. Genie Milgrom's story took me right back to that visit.





Lagniappe

Our own Hanukkah tradition continued, with our friend Scott lighting the Menorah for the first night. Between him and my son and daughter-in-law, photographer (and Scott's wife) Korin noticed an interesting figure looking down from the wall: Ché Guevara stares down from a plate I purchased during that 2003 Havana visit.

Not-Plain Vanilla

Papantla, Veracruz
Image: Zona Turística

Spoiler alert for those taking my Secret Life of Coffee seminar in the spring: the final exam always asks students to identify some other common product they use -- food or otherwise -- whose origins they would like to understand better. Just as coffee is taken for granted (often used as a metaphor for anything commonplace and inexpensive), so too is vanilla given no thought at all. Those who have been learning about coffee with me will not be surprised to learn that the production of vanilla is fraught with challenges both economic and environmental.


NPR journalist Carrie Kahn tells the story of vanilla from the point of view of Papantla, a small town in Veracruz, near the Gulf of Mexico and just a bit north of the city of Veracruz, where Hernán Cortés began the Conquest on behalf of Spain.

It is also not far from Puebla, where my wife Pam and I (known as El Matrimónio de Miami) spent the summer of 1989. Because we spent much of our time in Cholula -- the city that stood between the landing of Cortés in Veracruz and the major target of his ambitions in Tenochtítlan (Mexico City), we learned a lot about the treacherous Cortés. We also learned about the importance of chocolate -- especially mole -- in this region. But we had no clue that we were also so close to the origins of vanilla.

It was Cortés, in fact, who first transported vanilla to Spain, one of the earliest instances of transatlantic movements that would be known as the Columbian Exchange.

Columbian Exchange
Image: Nystrom

Sense of place is a very important concept for geographers and travel to the point of origin is a powerful way to learn about the places to which we are connected by global trade. Although we cannot possibly complete such travel to all of the communities upon which we rely, the internet can provide intriguing glimpses into many of those places.

Wanting to know something about Papantla as a place, I started with an image search and was delighted to find this charming video. Even if you do not understand Spanish, I recommend spending the two minutes in which the people of Papantla share their pride in the "three hearts" of their town; the three major sources of pride are the Bird Men, the vanilla (perfuming the world), and the remarkable pre-Conquest architecture.

A second video depicts the art and heritage of the Voladores in more detail.


Lagniappe: A Thousand Thanks

For me, knowing anything at all about the places where my food, beverage, or other goods originate increases my gratitude for all that I have. This is the thinking behind the book Thanks a Thousand by A.J. Jacobs, in which the author finds -- and thanks -- 1,000 people connected to his morning cup of coffee. The book is a quick and uplifting read that will be the community-wide read for Bridgewater One Book One Community in the spring 2020 semester. A great number of activities related to coffee and gratitude will take place between March and April, including several led by me and my students (who do not even know about this yet).

Os Melhores

"The Best" -- pronounced "Oos Mel-YOR-ays"

I am not fond of college rankings -- the U.S. News lists keep university administrators running from pillar to post trying to game the numbers, and bragging about all the wrong things if the rankings tilt in their favor.

But a recent headline from Brazil caught my attention, and gives me an excuse to make the case -- again -- for public higher education in general. The statement, shared online by various Brazilian friends, reads Entre 20 melhores universidades do Brasil, 18 são públicas. I am not sure why this is major news in Brazil, because public universities already carry the most prestige; the statement reads. "Among the 20 best universities in Brazil, 18 are public."

Most of these universities are federally funded; a few are funded by city or state governments. As I rightly guessed from the headline, the only "private" universities on the list are at least nominally Catholic. Number 19, for example is Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, pronounced POO-kee HEE-oo.

To my knowledge, all university acronyms have a distinct pronunciation that is widely known. My friends at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul can pronounce UFRGS at UHR-geese without hesitation. Likewise, the main rivals -- and sometime partner -- of my friends at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (UDESC or oo-DESK-ee) are across town at UFSC (OOF-skee), the Federal University of Santa Catarina. At the top of the list is USP (OOS-pee), funded by the city of São Paulo and a leading winner of grants from many sources.

What the major universities have in common is relatively low faculty pay (some of my friends parlay the prestige of public-university sinecures into better-paying side gigs at private colleges) but even lower tuition. If fact, public universities charge ZERO tuition and no hidden fees. The only payment students make to the universities is the fee for the vestibular, the departmental entrance exams that serve as the vestibules to public higher education.

Here is the tricky part, though: Brazil is far ahead of the United States in honoring public higher education. The fetishes of Grover Norquist have been gradually reducing funding for our universities, with xenophobic migration policies reducing the pool of international applicants for our programs. But in Brazil, support for public universities is not simply about enlightenment: it is in fact the epitome of enlightened self-interest.

That is to say that the entrance exams do create a kind of meritocracy in which students of modest means can qualify for a free education (except room and board and the opportunity cost of not being fully employed while in school). On its surface, the vestibular system is objective. If 30 seats are available in a geography department, the students with the 30 top scores on the geography exam get admitted to that department. (Changing majors is not a thing in Brazil.)

But that is only on the surface, of course. The reality is that the children of those with higher income and more education are likely to score better on the vestibular than are their less-connected peers. In fact, it is common for the wealthy to invest in tuition for private primary and secondary schools, with the expectation that this will allow them to have their offspring educated at public expense at the university level. In effect, public higher education represents a net transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Brazil's former president Lula -- himself with only a fifth-grade education -- spent considerable political capital in trying to reduce this tendency, but setting quotas for low-income or minority appliands. This is -- to say the least -- highly incongruent with Brazil's recent embrace of more conservative (nay, authoritarian) politics. It will be interesting to see how public higher education fares in the days of Bolsonaro.

Mexican Countries

By now, this screenshot will be familiar to many:

Fox News screenshot, as reported by Newsweek
and everybody else.

This filled my weekend newsfeed, an some have asked for my thoughts on it. Here is what I posted in response to a query from a BSU alumnus:

I have a few thoughts, in no particular order, other than the first:

• I am glad so many of my friends thought of my efforts in geographic education when they saw this.
• I am also reminded that our most prolific geographer -- the late, great Dr. Harm de Blij -- told us that he wrote 1,000 letters a year to public officials and the editors of various programs and publications about errors of this kind or erroneous maps. Some stand out more than others, but many are made. Dr. de Blij, incidentally, was the first person to put a map of Kuwait on television when Iraq invaded it; he knew instantly that it would be an example of Americans learning geography through war.

And some more thoughts:

• We wonder why Americans are so bad at geography, but we don't actually teach it much. The world is big and complicated; it needs more than a quick class in middle school. Massachusetts is about to increase it from a miniscule part of the curriculum to a tiny part. We need more, but someone in state government is working very hard against us.
• It remains illegal to become a certified high-school geography teacher in Massachusetts.
• Seeing this post did motivate me to get the publicity together for our next advocacy day (April 17, 2019) at the State House.

Photo by BSU Alumna Ashley (Costa) Harris
Massachusetts State House 2012
As published in National Geographic's
Geography for Life

And two more thoughts about the story:

• The xenophobia of the people involved is giving the quote more attention.
• The attention is a distraction from the important part of the story, which is the application of hamfisted negotiation tactics to a matter of extreme complexity in the international sphere.

Lagniappe

My doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies can now be called Mexico & Stuff.

Antidote

The essential site Latino Rebels provides an antidote to the ignorance, in the form of a map (hurrah!) and a poem that is as instructive as it is tragic: Central American (In)Visibility.

Map: Latino Rebels

Shanay-timpishka

I started my Sunday with this discussion between journalist Guy Raz and volcanologist Andrés Ruzo, whose childhood conversations at home led him to an amazing discovery in the Amazon Basin of Peru. (Because it contains have of the basin, Brazil is the best-known of the Amazon countries, but several upstream neighbors also have vast tracts of the basin and its forests.)

I recommend listening to the audio and then watching Dr. Ruzo's full TED Talk, given in 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. His story begins with curiosity, legend, and history. It provides insight into indigenous knowledge, geothermal science, ecology, and the concept of ecotourism.

It even touches on coffee! And from the TED Radio summary, I learn of Dr. Ruzo's coffee connection. In addition to growing up in Peru, part of his childhood was near volcanoes in Nicaragua, which means he is not far removed from coffeelands.

Andrés Ruzo has written his story in The Boiling River

Nicaragua Update and Parallels

Journalist Carrie Kahn reports on legal measures that Nicaragua's increasingly authoritarian president has recently implemented to restrict dissent. In the guise of fighting terrorism, new laws appear to make free expression and free assembly even more difficult.

Ortega signals a willingness to continue ignoring human-rights organizations, the international community, the Catholic Church and to embolden a violent minority of Nicaraguans to commit atrocities in support of his regime.

For more details of how such a beautiful country arrived at such a terrible impasse so quickly, please see my #SOSnicaragua (May) and Nicaragua's Kent State (July) posts, as well as journalist Jon Lee Anderson's Fake News article, appearing in the current issue of the New Yorker. He describes Ortega's application of lessons learned from autocrates abroad.

Parallel

Just as Ortega is intensifying his attacks on dissidence by branding protestors as terrorists, parallel strategies are emerging in the United States. While largely ignoring frequently violent white supremacists and allied fascist organizations, U.S. security forces are labeling their "antifa" opponents as terrorists.

It seems ludicrous to suggest that the United States could fall into a vortex such as the one that has engulfed Nicaragua, but the U.S. government is not currently signaling any contrary intent.

Nicaragua: Agualí

Over the weekend, New York Times journalist Kirk Semple and photojournalist Daniele Volpe provide a comprehensive update on the dire condition of Nicaragua. For those of us who love Nicaragua -- meaning anybody who has visited -- the title is heart-breaking, because it summarizes a dire condition that we could not have imagined six months ago: ‘There’s No Law’: Political Crisis Sends Nicaraguans Fleeing. (See my July 27 Nicaragua's Kent State post for a bit more about recent developments.)

Semple details the losses in the tourism industry that have resulted from
the government's lawless response to protests since April.
Photographer Volpe captures one of my very favorite places in this photo --
the usually bustling main square of Granada, now idle.

The NYT article hints at a question I have had since the very beginning. The second political life of the FSLN has relied on a strange combination of revolutionary rhetoric and nostalgia on the one hand (left) and alliance with ruthless economic elites on the other (right). Both are suffering in this crisis; I am especially surprised that the economic elites have not reigned in the president.

What to Do

From the United States, there is little that we can do, other than support international diplomatic efforts and the recent bipartisan Congressional Resolution 981. Given the sordid history of U.S. intervention, it is not productive to go further than this; we must leave it to the people of Nicaragua and diplomats in the region to bring about a political solution.

Meanwhile, we can provide moral support and material aid, which we have begun to do.

As of this writing, we are a few dollars away from wrapping up a fundraiser for emergency relief in several communities in Nicaragua. We -- a team from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia -- raised $1,500 in just over a week, which our close contacts in Matagalpa and Managua will use to provide food and medical supplies. This follows $3,000 raised in previous fundraisers by Bridgewater State alumni.

We are not done, though: we will soon be joining with friends in Nicaragua to launch an even bigger fundraiser, one that will have a longer-term impact. A team from Matagalpa Tours -- which has organized travel for me and more than 100 BSU students and faculty since 2009 -- has proposed an expansion of its non-profit Agualí program.

Details and an opportunity to donate will be added to this post in coming days.

Quesadilla with Cheese

The title of this post is redundant -- like "chili con carne with meat" -- but it is in fact how a U.S. visitor to Mexico City would need to get a quesadilla that would meet the key expectation of queso-ness.

Reporting for PRI's The World, journalist Maya Kroth recently explored the culinary and linguistic story of the cheeseless quesadilla.

Venezuela Fallacy

The once-thriving country of Venezuela has been suffering severe political and economic problems for close to two decades, under the presidencies of Hugo Chaves and Nicolás Madura. The distress is now so severe that at least 2 million Venezuelans are refugees, and many who remain in the country are suffering badly.

President Maduro fails his country

Because both presidents have been socialists, some opponents of socialism apply several logical fallacies to conclude that it proves socialism is disastrous. Writing for Yahoo! Finance, market journalist Dion Rabouin explains why socialism per se is not the cause of Venezuela's woes.

This is especially important to me as I watch a different kind of political and humanitarian disaster unfold in Nicaragua. There the president continues to speak as a leftist while governing from the far right; this has created a dangerous kind of confusion among those few U.S. politicians who are paying attention.

Lagniappe

With the recent rise of democratic socialist in U.S. politics -- most notably with the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- the word "socialist" is getting even more attention. It is also being deliberately confused with the national socialism, which of course is abbreviated "Nazi." Thus do people who write more than they read and speak more than they understand spread the idea that Bernie Sanders and Adolph Hitler share a political philosophy.

Querida Tierra de Leyenda

The PRI radio program The World is -- as the name implies -- a font of geographic knowledge. Sometimes I am lucky enough to catch the entire program. Yesterday I heard only a few short bits during the broadcast and the rebroadcast. It turns out that what I heard was the last minute and later the first minute of a two-minute story. Entitled The History of Latin America in One Song. PRI has recently improved the online archive of the show, so that the segment can be found by that title at the end of the list of segments comprising the entire episode.

The story is about Mexican-Canadian musician Boogát's upbeat homage to Latin America.

The song includes a bit of slang and a lot of proper nouns, so people who only somewhat speak Spanish -- like me -- might want to consult the printed lyrics and translation on Musixmatch.

Boogát - Aquí

The song indeed celebrates history and biography, but I notice a lot of geography in these few words. The song might just push aside Santana's Africa Bamba as the selection with which I launch my Latin America geography course next semester!

It will certainly be featured in the course, because it celebrates a lot of the people and places I would be including anyway. Here I am using the lyrics as a way to provide links to some of those people and places. It will take me a while to get them all. Where possible, I will point to links on my own blogs.

Y me gusta así, querida tierra de leyenda
Ahí, todo tiene onda
Y me gusta aquí, América Latina

Frida Kahlo, Diego Maradona
Jodorowski, Liniers, La Mona
Quino, Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Pelé, Jorge Luis Borges

Iñarritu, Iguazu
Mercedes Sosa, Copacabana
Chespirito, el Popo
Victor Jara, la Cordillera

Luis Alberto del Paraná, el Paraná
Pancho Villa, el río Amazonas
Allende, el Caribe, Aguanile
Pablo Escobar, Simon Bolivar

Dj Playero, Astor Piazzola
Machu Pichu, el lago Titicaca
El desierto de sal de Atacama
Atahualpa Yupanqui, Ipacaraí

Aquí, todo tiene onda
Y me gusta así, querida tierra de leyenda
Ahí, todo tiene onda
Y me gusta aquí, América Latina

Geography, Race, and Colorism

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic focuses on race, and begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them."

From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider
 shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue.
The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people
seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology.

Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media.
On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege, an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts.

Together, I believe these items are good starting points for deeper discussion about the depths of bias. The National Geographic article is particularly important for geographers who are trying to renew interest in geographic education. We already must overcome a stereotype of geographic education as boring; to the extent that the magazine spoke for the discipline, we must also overcome the notion that doing away with geography might have been a progressive choice until the very recent past.

Masa No Más

One of the first things I ever posted on the web was an article about lyophilisation, better known as freeze-drying. It was for the Wornick Company, my employer at the time and one of the pioneers in the process. Even though we no longer produced freeze-dried products, they were part of our history and I was involved in some very nerdy financial machinations about freeze-dried fruit. I even took a bunch of the product with me on my first trip to the Amazon.

So I know something about freeze-drying, and about what it is good for.

To the ever-growing list of things I have learned from my wonderful alumni, we can add this: I just learned freeze-dried corn meal is a thing, that I have probably had it, and that it is not good.

Mexican food guru Diana Kennedy is not a fan.
Image by Eleanor Skrzat for Taste.

In The Tortilla Cartel, journalist Elizabeth Dunn describes the strange story of Maseca. This powder gives home cooks and even some restaurants the idea that they are making tortillas (or tamales, as I have done) from scratch, when in fact they are simply reconstituting the dough. She makes a comparison to instant Folger's coffee which, like NESCAFÉ, no es café. Just as these concoctions are not really coffee, Maseca is not really cornmeal.

I thought I had no illusions about industrial-scale cornmeal, but I was wrong. What is in those boxes and bags looks like cornmeal, but it really is not. I am now even more grateful that the traditional method does still exist in some places, and that one of those places is the home of the host family I visit every January in Nicaragua. Doña Elsa enjoys teaching my students and me how to form and cook tortillas, which she does by the dozen every morning without any utensils. Just as described in Dunn's article, she is using corn grown on her own property and ground in a communal stone mill at a neighboring house. This imparts one thing that Dunn's article does not mention: minerals from the grinding stones, now missing from the diets of millions in Latin America.

A real tortilla in my home-away-from-home in Nicaragua!

Because corn is essential to the agriculture and foodways of Latin America and because commodity corn has been such a problem in both the United States and Latin America, this blog includes quite a few additional posts, which readers of Dunn's article might find interesting.  These include The True Cost of Farm Subsidies (2010), Elevating Profits (2014),  Seed Saving (2017), and Rey de Maíz (2017).

All of these articles point to something I find missing from almost all discussions of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), which tend to focus on food safety. As important as that is, the biggest threat posed by GMOs is that they accelerate the narrowing of the genetic diversity of our food supply.

Fortunately, Dunn's article points to some efforts to recover some of the diversity of maize. Unfortunately, for those who are not going to grow and process corn at home, the alternatives are so far limited to high-end grocery stores. Perhaps a way can be found to get real cornmeal back into neighborhood bodegas and restaurants.

Lagniappe

Doing some minimal processing of corn for my beloved's birthday party.
#cornmaven

Two days after I posted the foregoing, I had three personal encounters with maize. First, I had the honor of husking the corn for a family gathering. Second, my good friend Alfredo -- and the son of the tortilla expert mentioned above -- sent me photos of corn his family had just planted. (In the photo above, I am wearing a coffee necklace made for me by that very same young man.)

Third, my modest abilities in Spanish gave me the opportunity to chat with a man from El Salvador, who told me that he grew up farming both corn and coffee. It was a reminder that coffee in Central America is part of an agricultural landscape that includes basic grains that were being cultivated for many centuries before its arrival.

Good News Update

Not exactly news, but rather a connection I have only today made. Readers in New England can find real chips from Mi Nińa Tortilla in Newton, Massachusetts.

The company has been making Aztec-style tortillas from real corn since 2011. I just enjoyed some of these chips with guacamole from a brand new local company.

Across Many Aprils

When I was in elementary and middle school in Virginia in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil War from many sources, including battlefield visits. The title of one book has stay with me, because Across Five Aprils is a very handy mnemonic for the dates that bracket this horrible rift, from Fort Sumter to the Appomattox Court House: April 22, 1861 to April 9, 1865.

In many ways, of course, the war never ended. I first learned of the war through a southern lens, but neither my teachers nor my community embraced the Lost Cause continuation of the conflict, as I later learned many thousands still do. Even where I live today, in a part of Massachusetts where nearly every town boasts a Union Street and an honor roll of those who defended the United States against its most serious (to date) insurgency, the Confederate Battle flag sometimes flies ... and more so since the 2016 ascendency of white supremacists.

As odd as it is to have "traitor" flags this far north of the Mason-Dixon line, it is even stranger to know that the Confederacy is somewhat widely celebrated several thousand miles south of the South, in Brazil, where "refugees" of the war's end moved in order to continue their "right" to enslave others. At the time the war ended and the 1863 de jure emancipation took effect, slavery was still legal in Brazil, as it would be until 1888. Of course, nobody knew how long it would last, nor that it would last longer there than anywhere in the Americas, but it seemed to these deplorable folks that it was a place where they could their "lifestyle," as this form of oppression came to be known.


The government of Brazil encouraged this migration by offering free land in parts of São Paulo and elsewhere, mainly in that first decade following the end of the war. It was already illegal to import people in bondage to Brazil, but some of the migrants brought with them "servants" who were free only in name and others managed to enslave people who were already in the country. Following the success of Brazil's emancipation movement in 1888, of course, those who had not returned home or moved elsewhere found some way to adapt to a new reality without legal slavery.

I was thinking of this strange history yesterday, as I was exploring a large-format map of Brazil with a Brazilian friend who did not know the story. He did know the city of Anápolis, Goiás, which I had read was the main target of the migration. As I looked for information about it, I learned that the São Paulo towns of Santa Bárbara D'Oeste and Americana were more important destinations.

I also learned some of the details mentions above, and one more startling fact: the Confederado culture is still widely celebrated among descendants of those migrants! Two recent articles describe the persistence of the annual commemorations of the confederacy -- more than 150 Aprils later: Dixie Roots and A Slice of the Confederacy describe the celebrations and questions of racism of both the past and the present in both countries.

Photo: Associated Press. Apologies for inclusion of the insurgency flag, which I usually avoid sharing because of the racist intent with which it is usually displayed. The juxtaposition with U.S. and Brazil flags, however, captures this story perfectly. It brings to mind the thought I always have when I see the Confederate and U.S. flags together: "Choose a side!"

Lagniappe (added July 2020)

More photos from the Lost Cause settlements in Brazil are shown in Melia Robinson's 2017 Americana photo essay on Business Insider. As she warns readers, these images can "cause discomfort." I would go a bit further, since they are intentionally disturbing icons. But with that caution, I make them available to those who wish to see them in context.

In September 2019, the NPR Podcast Throughline featured the story of the Confederados in American Exile, an episode about inter-American migration. The program begins with the contemporary story of the tragedy and travesty of Central American migrants interned, abused, and killed near my former homes on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Attention then turns to two much earlier tales of migration away from the United States. One is a flight to the north to get away from slavery; the other is the flight far to the south to get away from the lack of slavery. Among those interviewed for the story is geographer and Latin Americanist Cyrus (Sonny) Dawsey (with whom I was not previously familiar), editor of the 1995 volume The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil. A copy of this book is now on its way to me; as an educator I am particularly interested in seeing the worksheets it includes.

Codex Quetzalecatzin

The Library of Congress has recently acquired the Mapa de Ecatepec-Huitziltepec, a manuscript that was prepared in 1593 and is one of the few original documents surviving from 16th-Century Mesoamerica. It was apparently created by indigenous Nahuatl cartographers but reflects the rapid transition of a society under Conquest.

LOC screenshot of the Codex. Follow link above for the full story,
and the link below for a more detailed view.

An image of the map is directly viewable (with panning and zooming) on the Library of Congress web site. The entry includes important metadata, including some modern landmarks to orient the viewer. I have included them in the map below to give readers a sense of the area covered by this treasure.

My favorite librarian and I spent the summer of 1989 in the region covered by this map, and encountered evidence -- four centuries later -- of the imposed fusion of cultures that it manifests.

ESRI: Envisioning the Embattled Borderlands

PLEASE CLICK MAP for a BETTER VIEW

The map (above) that ESRI geographer Krista Schlyer chose for the top of her photo-map essay response to the so-called border wall is indicative of the care she and the rest of the ESRI team have taken with this entire exhibit. As a geographer who lived in this map for seven years (1990-1994 in Tucson and 1994-1997 in Pharr), I notice a few important things that this map captures nicely.

First, the borderlands are identified by the border, but not strictly defined by it. As Oscar Martinez argues in Border People, it is a zone that extends approximately 100 miles in each direction from the line that gives the region its identity. In every sense except strict legalities, this region is neither the United States nor Mexico. It is a third entity that is both divided and united by a line that meanders through its center. In addition to Border People, I recommend Tom Miller's On the Border as an introduction to the place; I had the privilege of knowing both writers during our Tucson years.

Second, the United States of America and the United States of Mexico are both federal republics comprising a number of states (50 and 31, respectively, plus a federal district in each). For people living in the border region, connections between neighboring states are important. Residents of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas become familiar with Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas.

The cultural and environmental landscape of the border is not well understood by pundits and demagogues who make their living from caricatures of it. The misguided policies that result threaten real damage and will deliver no benefits.

ESRI's Krysta Schlyer has made an important contribution with this well-researched borderlands geography project.

The embedded version of this project condensed -- see the full Embattled Border story map here.

More about borders and The Border from this Environmental Geography blog

The threats posed to the people and environments of the border by outside demagoguery have certainly increased under the current administration, but in many ways are a continuation of a militarization of the border that was under way when I was living in Arizona. Although my own writing on the topic has become more focused in 2017, my earlier writing could also be instructive. I think that my "human sieve" metaphor is especially important, and that the wall is part of a broader effort by politicians who prefer to choose their voters, rather than to allow the opposite to transpire.

Each of these posts includes links and images to the work of many journalists, artists, and geographers.

Take Our Jobs, Please (June 2010)
The Border: A Human Sieve (June 2010)
Murder City (November 2010)
Where Are the Humans? (November 2011)
No se olviden Mexico (June 2012)
Precious Progress (November 2012)
Economic Baggage (April 2014)
Why Walls Won't Work (November 2014)
Not One Human (August 2015)
Hiring Humans (February 2016)
Borders: What's Up With That (August 2016)
Border IRL (November 2016) -- includes a map of all of my border crossings
Bridges and Habilitation (July 2017)
Through the Wall (October 2017)