Semana de los Muertos

The Smithsonian Latino Center offers cool teaching resources through the Día de Muertos theatrical interface and even more resources through the Latino Virtual Museum.

It seems that each year I begin to anticipate El Día de Muertos a bit earlier, and to learn new things about the cultural implications of the Day of the Dead. In fact, it is now my theme for an entire week -- my very own Semana de los Muertos.

Before adding a few new items, I am listing some of the posts from recent years:

• A perfect vacation at a cooking school in Mexico that has a special lessons for Día de Muertos
• The tragic story of Murder City, in which the drug lords of Ciudad Juarez have developed a very specific set of rituals and icons surrounding death
• PRESENTES! describes how traditions surrounding death have been incorporated into my coffee travel course in Nicaragua, and how this relates to our proposal for an ethical cafe on our campus
• Days of the Deads highlights -- and maps -- comparable festivals and traditions throughout the world
• Finally, my Alt-dot-musica post introduces the NPR program Alt-Latino, which captures the multitude of fascinating musical tendencies current in Latin America. After writing quite a bit about its work with my hero Manu Chao, I turn to a discussion of its special episode on Dia de los Muertos. Give a listen -- you won't regret it!

All of this is by way of background for a couple of short pieces that came to my attention recently, and that are not nearly as provocative. Those not very familiar with the tradition, in fact, might to best to start with these short videos.

From the Film School Shorts series of the Ringling College of Arts and Design comes a delightful introduction to the tradition. At first "Dia de los Muertos" (s2e5, 3mins) resembles the 2014 feature film Book of Life, which I discussed at length in Dia de los Libros. That film was intended to capture the essence of the holiday, but quickly got caught up in the pressures to conform to Hollywood norms that even "indie" films face. The short production from Ringling students is much more successful in its representation of a young girl encountering her dead relatives with a fearlessness and joy that would be out of place in many cultures.

Dia de los Muertos

Finally, the indispensable Tish Hinojosa describes the Day of the Dead in Hasta Los Muertos Salen a Bailar (When the Dead Come Out to Dance), from her children's album Cada Niño (Every Child). As with most of her music, this song is English/Spanish bilingual in the sense that entire verses are sung in one language and then the other, so everyone gets the message. This particular video version really captures the whimsy of the holiday by putting an obscure Disney short to Hinojosa's tune.

Of course, Casa Hayes-Boh and Whaling House are festooned for the week, and after years of acquaintance with the Mexican traditions, we do honor the dead in our own lives a bit differently that we otherwise would.

Photo by Pamela Hayes-Bohanan. Sugar skulls by the whole family. Miniature figures by artisans in Mexico. Candy bowl most likely from China.

Climate Injustices

A single hour that changed my life came in 2012, when I had the honor of being present in a hotel conference room with Dr. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former UN Commissioner for Human Rights. It was for her pioneering work in these roles -- and for her even greater contributions after leaving government service -- that my professional organization was presenting her with our highest award. As with many such awards, she was really doing us a greater favor by accepting the Atlas Award than we were doing her by presenting it. Nonetheless, it was an important moment for our entire discipline, and I hope others in the audience were as affected as I was.

It was from her acceptance speech that I learned of the concept of Climate Justice, as she challenged the geography profession to rise to the challenges presented by global injustices related to climate change. Specifically, she pointed out that we have the tools to understand and explain the geographies of responsbility, vulnerability, and power that lead to profoundly unfair relationships  between the causes and effects of climate change.

I was so moved by her presentation that I now offer an entire course on the topic, and more importantly her admonition to my colleagues and me infuses much of what I do in all of my academic work.

Haze obscuring skyscrapers and Ferris wheel in Singapore.

Just after a very productive session of my Climate Justice course this afternoon, two of the stories I heard on PRI's The World struck me as particularly relevant. From opposite sides of the world, listeners learned of two very different stories of injustice with complicated relationships to climate change.

The first was the story of indigenous Mexican farm workers who have been displaced from work because of drought in California, and their inability to collect any kind of unemployment insurance because of their status as essential but undocumented workers. What makes this especially complicated is that many were in California precisely because they had been displaced by drought -- and the pernicious effects of NAFTA (not mentioned in the story) -- in their home regions of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero.

Then, from the other side of the world and the other side of the climate coin came the story of toxic wildfires in Indonesia causing severe respiratory illnesses throughout Southeast Asia. In addition to the severe health consequences and fatalities in the short run, in just a few days the fires have rivaled major economic powers in their unwelcome contribution of greenhouse gases.

Iemanja Is Yemaya

I always begin my course on the Geography of Latin America with Carlos Santana's Africa Bamba, which I also use to open my 2012 post No se olviden Mexico. Santana ends the song with this admonition meaning "don't forget Mexico," but I like to play it because it highlights the multiplicity of Latin American identities, including relatively recent connections with Asia and the very deep influence of Africa in music, food, religion, and more.

Professor Santana always begins my class

Those connections are also evident in Mama Africa, a song by the inimitable Chico Cesar that was the soundtrack of my 1996 visit to Rondonia. His family introduces him in a video version that I featured in a 2011 post on our EarthView blog.


All of this is to set the context for my introduction of the idea of syncretic religious traditions in the Americas -- whereby Catholicism was blended in various ways with the traditions of the indigenous people who were being conquered or with those of people brought in bondage. In either case, the brutality of conquest and slavery has left a legacy of religious expression that is -- to say the least -- complicated.

For me, a favorite example is the story of Iemanja, which I always present as a spoken-word story, after listening to Angelique Kidjo's ode to this goddess of the sea.



For those who do not know the story of Iemanja -- also known as Yemaya -- this music offers a nice introduction, and this particular video also demonstrates the variety of ways that this deity is represented, from West Africa to Brazil and Cuba.

Iemanja has an important off-screen role in the otherwise silly 2000 romantic comedy Woman on Top, in which Penelope Cruz plays a cook in a seaside restaurant. When she leaves the restaurant for reasons essential to a romantic-comedy plot, the restaurant suffers from her absence. More specifically, it suffers from the absence of the rituals by which she had been showing her devotion to Iemanja.

Known as Iemanja in Brazil, this Orisha is known as Yemaya in Cuba, where she is strongly associated with the port town of Regla, near Havana. I was fortunate that during my one visit (so far) to Regla in 2003, a shrine was being created in her honor as part of an Afro-Cuban museum exhibit that was focused on the Orishas and on the terrible middle passage.

Confluences

I have gone more than a month without posting to this blog. To keep the blog alive, I'm going to cheat a little and point to a post I recently added on our EarthView blog. Written for middle-school geographers, this should be of interest to readers and explorers of all ages.

See Wedding of the Waters or Amazon Surprise to learn about the world's most famous and unusual river confluence -- which I was lucky enough to visit in 1996 -- and to learn about several around the world that are lesser-known but equally intriguing.

Lagniappe
And because yesterday I realized that nobody in my class had heard of Mr. David Byrne, I include this thematic song as a public service. (See all of the David Byrne geography references on this blog.)

A Good Read on a Vital Topic

The latest from my Good Reads account includes a link back to several posts on this blog.

The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World by Carl Safina
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I learned of this book when my librarian spouse was engaged in a year-long project of reading "year of" books -- an entire genre of books whose authors dedicated a year to a particular topic or practice. This meta project involved reading two such books each month, and we shared a few of them. Since I am an environmental geographer, she read this one to me.

Around the same time, I was realizing that the textbook in my introductory environmental geography class was becoming a bit out-of-date, and in particular that it was not adequately addressing climate change. I decided to try assigning this book as the main text in that survey course, and I am very glad I did. It is the only book that large numbers of students THANK me for assigning.

This is all the more impressive because students really do struggle with this book. It is a beautifully written account of some very unpleasant -- one could say inconvenient -- truths about a rapidly changing world. Some students are offended that Safina does not do more to soften the blow, but most eventually come to appreciate his approach.

Like Rachel Carson before him, Safina is both a talented writer and a consummate scientist. He also reveals a deep love for his chosen home on Long Island sound and the many other places around the world that his work has taken him.

I should emphasize that although I use this as a textbook, it is not written that way. In the process of telling his stories and making his case, this biologist happens to cover many of the topics I feel I need to include in my geography course. He does it so beautifully that I am happy to provide a few supplements to cover those areas, so that my students and I can immerse ourselves in this important and beautiful work.

My environmental geography blog includes a number of items about Safina and this book: http://environmentalgeography.blogspo...


View all my reviews

Archdruid Encounters

I have had a goodreads account for a while, but have used it very little. When I was prompted to write a review, this book came to mind, as it helped to change the course of my life. I still recommend it, 30+ years later.

Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book changed my life, I suppose. It was one of the very first environmental books I read -- assigned by professors in two different classes. By cosmic coincidence, we got to meet the "Archdruid" near the end of the course because one of the professors sat next to him on a plane. At the time, he had been drummed out of Sierra Club for being too radical, but the club eventually came around, and I met him again years later at a Sierra Club event.

The book itself set me on the path to the career I have 30 years later -- environmental geography -- and made me a fan of John McPhee and his approach to scholarship. Whatever he writes about -- and it is a wide range -- he approaches through individuals he finds who are deeply embedded in the topic.

In this case, the main individual is David Brower, champion of wilderness. Three separate segments of the book describe journeys to wild places -- an island, a mountain, and a lake -- with Brower and and engineer or developer with ideas about changing the place. It is honest and deep, and still important all these years later.

View all my reviews

Triangle Spring

News from the "Northern Triangle" of Central America has recently been full of terrible stories of such violence and corruption that parents would rather send their children north with human smugglers than to risk keeping them at home. The United States has responded poorly at best, incarcerating many children whom scriptures, laws, and conscience would mandate we take in.

The Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is a subregion with geopolitical problems distinct from the very real but somewhat less critical problems of its neighbors.

It is in this context that I was glad to hear some positive news from the region -- on the political front, no less. A failed drug war and unfair trade policies are part of the problem in the region. Corruption, though, is another common problem, and it has reached dangerous -- almost unbelievable -- levels.

And public revulsion at the extreme corruption is what appears finally to be galvanizing effective social movements across the region. As reported by The Guardian, coalitions are being formed under a broad umbrella known as Our Central American Spring. Some corrupt officials -- past and present -- are actually being held accountable as a result of recent public pressure.

Activists and journalists are still at some risk, however, if they expose the wrong culprits. Washington is beginning to offer some support, but seems reluctant to abandon allies on the far right that it has trained and supported over many decades. See my posts With Christians Like This ... and September 11, 1973 for just a couple examples from the past, and Outsourced Horrors for a more recent example misplaced U.S. priorities in the region.  This is a time to pay close attention to the region, and to whether Washington keeps human rights at the forefront of its policy-making.

For more scholarly analysis of the current situation in the Northern Triangle, see the Wilson Center report Organized Crime in Central America.

Of course, daily life is much more nuanced -- and ultimately more important -- than political movements. Those who are interested in learning about one small corner of the Northern Triangle can read Mi Aventura Hondureña, the blog of a young friend of mine who spent the better part of the last two years teaching in a small community on northwest Honduras.

I want also to point out that Nicaragua -- though it has its share of problems, including corruption -- is not part of the Northern Triangle. The problems that Nicaragua does have stem from a much different historical trajectory, one result of which is relatively safe conditions in recent years. This has allowed me to take more than 100 students to Matagalpa, Nicaragua over the past decade, in an annual exploration of the geography of coffee. I mention this only because the geographic proximity leads many to assume that all of the countries in the region have the same set of conditions, discouraging many from experiences that would be valuable.

Not One Human

When I was a high school student in Kansas City, Missouri, our history class included a great deal about the importance of Missouri in the Civil War. To hear my teacher tell it, Missouri is where the outcome really was determined. During my time in the Show Me State, I spent a couple of weeks in Columbia ... long enough to know that "Cruisin' the Loop" was the main weekend activity.

These Missouri memories came together for me today, as I learned about a very geographic scandal in the capital.

The scandal involves a peculiar case of gerrymandering, an all-too-common phenomenon by which politicians try to choose their voters instead of risking the opposite. I have written about the practice extensively on this blog, especially in the 2010 post Article One: Enumeration.

This quasi-governmental business district includes just one voter.
But its goal was to include zero.

The Columbia case goes far beyond the usual tricks in which geographic skills are put to sinister uses. The usual idea is to create legislative districts that will maximize the numeric advantage of incumbents. This is reprehensible and counter to the intent of the Framers of the Constitution. It turns elections into a game, a game in which the odds are stacked in favor of the house. But at least it is a game that allows humans to vote.

The Missouri scheme tried to go a step further. Business "leaders" along the Loop in Columbia conspired to draw a boundary around a "community improvement district" in such a way that humans would not be able to vote at all. If they could achieve that, Missouri law would allow the right to vote to transfer to the businesses themselves. The fact that Missouri allows voting to default to businesses if no humans are available suggests that this scheme might have a precedent.

The reasons for the scheme were complicated, and apparently they hoped nobody would notice. They formed the district in order to make some shared capital improvements. They even used it to levy a small property-tax surcharge on themselves.

The bulk of the improvements, though, would be paid (or more accurately, repaid -- they already spent the money) by a special sales tax. In addition to shifting the cost of capital improvements to retail customers in this way, the businesses (some of which would not even have customers affected by the tax) would be able to pay an executive director with those funds.

It was because they feared voters would not approve such a regressive form of taxation -- Robin Hood in reverse, really -- they conspired to make sure no humans would get to vote on the matter.

Taxation without representation. We had a little set-to about that in Boston a while back.

It is that executive director who comes out looking the worst when they discovered that the evil clever geographers involved in this scheme might have been evil enough, but they were not clever enough. They allowed a single, pesky human to be included in the district. Jen Henderson is a student renting an apartment in the district who is not only a voter, but also an informed voter. She was pressured to disenfranchise herself so that "voting" would revert to businesses. (Scare quotes used because I still believe voting is something that only human citizens can do.) Once she learned what a serious game she was now part of, this young citizen took her civic duty very seriously and learned all she could about the issues involved. She has not announced how she will vote, but she has made it very clear she WILL vote.

Politicians who seek to disenfranchise voters are sometimes called "conservatives," but they really have no interest in conserving "American values" of democracy. Rather, they eschew Lincoln's words about the purpose of the Civil War, which was to ensure

"that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Although the Columbia case could be dismissed as a quirky story with only very localized impact, it is indicative of a political climate in which the humanity of individuals is systematically separated from what they can provide in practical terms. The rights to vote, express opinions, organize, and peaceably assemble are essential aspects of our humanity.

They are increasingly separated, however, from our ability to provide work or, as it turns out, pay taxes and fees. My essays on immigration and the human sieve describe this phenomenon in the arena of immigration policy, in which labor somehow crosses the border, but civil rights remains on the other side.

351 Town Names; No Rules

Massachusetts comprises 351 cities and towns; as I have written elsewhere, each is considered something like a sovereign nation, with all the efficiency that implies.

Some of the towns -- such as Bridgewater -- are compound English words that are easy to pronounce. Some are compound English words that are easy to pronounce but strange -- such as Braintree, while at least one is a native-American word that sounds like an odd English word: Mashpee.

But just as some common surnames have Massachusetts-only pronunciations (Gonsalves and Lopez each drop a syllable here), many of the cities and towns are difficult for foreigners to pronounce. And in this context, "foreigner" might include anyone not born in the town in question. Even apparently simple names -- like Dartmouth -- are not what they seem. Others sound almost nothing like they are spelled.

For some levity and instruction, we turn of course to YouTube.

First, some out-of-staters try ten of the hardest. This includes maps and a lot of earnest, if failed, attempts. In some cases, it is actually difficult to avoid obscenity. The entire concept of letters is called into question.


The GuyBoys -- whoever they are -- give it a try. Listen to the end for some meta comments.


Finally, a few more, with funny pictures.

Brazil Buzz

From that bottomless font of listicles comes some subtle insights into Brazilian culture. Buzzfeed presented ten Brazilian cultural traits to a group of "gringos" and recorded their responses. I am not going to translate the whole article, but I do provide the highlights below. All of them ring true, and most of them are quite familiar to me, based on visits over the past two decades to various places, mainly in Rondonia and Santa Catarina. 

This image is from the "final considerations" portion of the article. See the original article for more cool and fascinating images.

See the original article for the replies from Buzzfeed's original panel. If you don't read Portuguese, ask a friend who does to read them with you -- some of the reactions are hilarious. My own thoughts are in italics below.

1. Tomar mais de um banho por dia.

Take more than one shower a day.

This is especially common in the warmer parts of the country, and in fact the chance to take a shower will be offered to guests arriving in a home, much as they might be offered a drink. When I was in the Amazon -- a place that can be humid, smoky, and dusty all at the same time -- I often took 2, 3, or even 4 showers in a day.

This is not as wasteful as it sounds for two reasons First, these are not the long showers that North Americans often take until their water heaters are drained. Second, most Brazilian homes do not have water-heater tanks. If anything, a water heater is a small electric heater attached directly to the shower head. Not being terrified of these is another cultural distinction!

2. Escovar os dentes no trabalho.

Brush teeth at work.

I am not sure why this is not more common in other countries. 

3. Sentar ao lado do parceiro no restaurante.

Sit next to a partner at a restaurant.
I had not really noticed this, but as one respondent noted, it does make kissing your date easier.

4. Segurar sanduíche com guardanapo e comer pizza com garfo e faca.

Hold a sandwich with a napkin and eat pizza with a fork and knife.
Brazilians also tend to eat while sitting down in one place. Eating while walking or driving seems uncivilized to them. Because it is.

5. Chamar todo mundo pelo primeiro nome (inclusive a presidente da República).

Call everyone by their first name, including the president of the country.

Surnames are sometimes complicated; first names are more fun and often more unique.

6. Jogar papel higiênico sujo em um lixinho ao lado da privada.

Put toilet paper in a wastebasket next to the toilet.
This certainly got the most animated reactions from the Buzzfeed crowd. I don't think the article explains that this is common throughout Latin America, and has to do with the limitations of plumbing. Even where the plumbing could handle toilet paper, though, the habit is deeply ingrained. Of course most of the gringos on the Buzzfeed panel were horrified by this, but it really is not a big deal. Most of those little waste baskets are covered, and most are emptied frequently. It is not something that Brazilians -- or frequent visitors to Brazil -- expend much energy thinking about.

7. Ter 30 dias de férias por ano e mais de dez dias de feriados.

Have 30 days of vacation per year and more than ten days of holidays.
Something else that should be common. Can we really not get our work done in 220 days? I think that one reason Brazilians are so productive is that they know how to take a vacation -- or even a coffee break -- in a way that allows them to return to work more focused.

8. Comer abacate como fruta, inclusive com açúcar.

Eat avocado as a fruit, even with sugar.
I actually never noticed this.

9. Marcar o horário de uma festa sabendo que as pessoas só vão chegar duas ou três horas depois.

Mark the time for a party, knowing that people are only going to arrive two or three hours later.
If a party is scheduled for six, people will start getting ready at six -- to go join other friends who are on the way to the party. Around 8:30, people who have been gathering in smaller groups for a couple hours will arrive, and the room will go from empty to electric.

10. Terminar mensagens com “abraços” ou “beijos”, mesmo com pessoas que você não conhece pessoalmente.

End messages with "hugs" or "kisses," even with people you do not know personally.

There is really no down side to this.

Cultural geography examines the patterns that help to give regions an identity, to distinguish one place from another. It often begins with "big picture" cultural characteristics such as language, religion, food, and music. These are certainly important, but the finer points of ordinary life -- the mores of a culture -- can be even more instructive.

See my Musica page for more thoughts on the relationship between visible features of a culture and its deeper components.