el fiiiiiiin

i really enjoyed this course. i am so honored to have met all the wonderful people in it too! méxico profundo was my favorite reading that we did. Some passages that really stuck with me were when the book talked about how indigenous communities were more focused on non-accumulation and the development of individual skills..."Contrast this with our own world, headed toward a greater and more fragmented specialization each day. Witness the specialist who knows more and more about less and less. And he or she learns differently, not in school, but through living, through contact with others, and through doing the work itself." (page 29). they brought up community norms of reciprocity, of cooperation and participation."Space is conceived more in terms of continuous collective relationships than in terms of privacy" (page 29). this reminds me of the idea of "collective liberation", which i really believe in. essentially, collective liberation is "nobody's free until everybody's free" (Fannie Hamer), the idea that all our oppressions and struggles are intimately  connected. i feel like this class really brought so many people together, it meant so much to me.
i've really enjoyed singing with the whole class, above all else. some of the songs have really touched me and i'm often singing "se me olvido otra vez" and "sin ti" when i'm biking around the east bay.
also how all of us, in this class together each took our weekly art projects in so many different directions and how every piece of art had super elaborate stories and it was beautiful to see and hear people opening up about their lives, hopes, futures, and pasts.
i hope everyone has a wonderful, wonderful life. and i cannot wait to go to méxico with angele this summer!

¡nunca te rindas!

hay cuatro componentes a este dibujo. primero, el cuento de Ry Cooter. segundo, mi amigo Abraham y otros activistas en Los Angeles. tercero, los dientes de león. cuatro, mi rata llama Cricket. el tema es, ¡nunca te rindas!
pues tengo que escribir en spanglish porque es más faicl para mi, ajajajaj!

---en el cuento de Ry Cooter, they mention the Zoot Suit Riots in the 1940s in East Los Angeles. los riots debería ser llamado "Racist White people Riots" porque it was really a series of attacks by "manly" Anglo sailors who went into Mexican American neighborhoods and tried to "cleanse" the city of Pachucos by attacking la gente que tenía darker piel o baggier clothes than them! el cuento reminded me of the Chicano movement and how l@s Chican@s fought so hard y nunca se rindieron en la cara de discriminación, violencia, opresión y también some cases of murder. puedo escribir forever about what i have learned so far about the Chicano movement, pero no tengo tiempo!

---la semana pasada mis amigos en Los Angeles estaban protestando at a circus por los animales that the circus exploits y enslaves. sies circus employees locked mis amigos en un pen-thing y beat them up! they smashed their cameras y gritaron racist and homophobic slurs at them! uno de mis amigos got arrested y charged a felony ("assault with a deadly weapon")! ¡they sent him to prison (not jail!) and treated him like mierda! as an immigrant, a person of color, y un homosexual, tiene mucho to be fearful of pero nada puede stop Abraham y los otros activistas! ¡right after he gets release they're all protesting together again in Chipotle! ¡hablando por los animales que la empresa mata! ¡¡¡me inspiran tanto!!! ellos are nunca going to give up!

---dandelions were used for medicine for thousands of years and were brought to this continent for their medicinal benefits. now they are treated as an inconvenience and people spend tons of money on toxic herbicides to try to annihilate these healthful and beautiful plants. aunque dumb gente rica están en guerra con la planta, they don't give up y crecen en todas partes! they grow between the cracks in the sidewalks and they continue to be a symbol de deseos y esperanza para el futuro. they're one of the most successful plants and are the masters of survival!

--- en la escuela secundaria i would collect all the left over comida que mis amigos no quieren comer. i would throw some of la comida on the roof de la escuela para las gaviotas. y pondría the rest of the food the woods cada día donde viven los mapaches. me encanraba digging en la basura (todavía lo amo) y hice un birdfeeder out of the trash. un día encontré una rata blanca en el birdfeeder. sabía que las ratas blankas no pueden sobreviver en la naturaleza. son domesticados. han sido selectively bred para ser usado y abusado en laboratorios. era noviembre y sabía que ella va a morir. decidí llevarla en al casa. recuerdo que i was sared she would bite me, pero i put out mi mano y puso sus manos around mis dedos y me olía. era ciega. era tan afectuosa. me di cuenta que estaba demacrada y la puse en una jaula que el rescate de ferrets (donde fui voluntaria) gave me. she gained weight and got healthy. y en dos semanas she gave birth to ocho bebés! it turned out that she was used for breeding by one of mis vecinos (por supuesto, i nunca told them i had found her). they would breed her and sell su hijos for dinero. she lived to be very old y le quiero mucho. descansa en paz little one!

la cama de piedra

Subí a la sala del crimen
le pregunté al presidente:
que si es delito el quererte,
que me sentencien a muerte.

this song made me think of so many things that i won't even try to write it all in spanish...
the lyrics above have been on my mind since i heard the song. it's such an intense thing for cuco to say..
i got all personal with the song and began to think about someone important to me (i don't want to put her name here though), as i often do when i think of desperation, love, and suffering. i love her immensely. she is so fixated on being loved, and has threatened to kill herself many times if she does not have a man to love. for most of my life this has hurt and scared me very much. her relationship with love has shaped mine. i feel like she is trapped in a dark box. my love exists outside of romance, it exists outside this box. i've realized that i am not interested in being in a relationship or fixated on being loved the way she is.
i'm a very silly person and i feel like people are trapped in a world where they take things so seriously. when we step back, maybe we can see things for how silly they really are?
i don't know why i felt compelled to put pikachu in my piece. maybe because i don't know what is real or if anything is real in these boxes or because we're so often in love with just the ideas of people and things that may not actually exist. i'm not sure where i'm going, but i don't mind. my thoughts are all over the place with this song!

estaba escuchando la canción "la barca de guaymas" y entonces encontré la canción "un mundo raro" de josé alfredo jimenez. elegí esta canción porque la letra dice:
"y si quieren saber de mi pasado
es preciso decir otra mentira
les diré que llegue de un mundo raro
que no sé del dolor
que triunfe en el amor
y que nunca he llorado"
empecé a pensar en las historias que nos contamos sobre nuestras vidas. específicamente cómo nuestros pasados, ¿qué realmente sucedió y qué nos decimos pasó? también, pensaba en mi mamá y las mentiras que le dice a ella misma sobre sus novios malos. me gusta la canción, casí todas de las canciones. tal vez porque la música nos distrae de la realidad. a veces la vida duele mucho ¿por qué no mentirte a ti mismo?
 

hice josé de arcilla. ¡mira qué feliz está, no puede dejar de sonreír! vive en un abrolito.

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