Day of the Dead

Juchitán is about 5 hours by bus from Oaxaca City, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. I spent the last few days there visiting Radio Totopo, a community radio, in the seventh section of the city, that broadcasts almost exclusively in Zapotec. The seventh section of Juchitán is quite unique and it isn´t uncommon to go a whole day without hearing a word of Spanish spoken. There is a lot of mixing in the languages and more and more Spanish has crept in over the years. For example, numbers and times of day are often spoken of using the castillian vocabulary. Forces of Spanish influence are very strong, but there are always counter-forces. Carlos Sanchez, the heart of Radio Totopo and a fellow student of anthropology, explained to me using his chalkboard how numbers were written and spoken in Zapotec hundreds of years ago. They also try to use colloquial terms for times of day like "birth of the sun". All this in an attempt to reinforce their local culture, which, like all other non-mainstream cultures in Mexico and Latin America, are in danger of being overshadowed by capitalist-driven popular culture and forgotten by each successive generation. In between meals of fried fish and totopos (the isthmus' take on the tortilla: a hard chip-like corn bread with holes in it, and the namesake of the radio station) we talked about relations between men and women, myths, magic, and religion, and death. I was lucky enough to experience the preparation of an offering to a dead family member in the house of a friend. It occupied an entire room and took the work of the entire family (men doing the heavy-lifting and women doing the food preparation and final decorations). This picture really doesn't do reality justice (what pictures do?) but at least you can see the spectical of the thing. All the doorways of the house were arranged similarly so that the dead familiy member could find her way back and partake in the fruits and sweetbreads hanging from the alter. They say that after the celebrations are over (oct30-nov2) if you bite into one of the pieces of fruit, it will no longer carry a taste, supposedly sucked away by the spirit of the dead.

March for Brad Will

I went to a march today organized by the Oaxacan teachers' union and APPO (The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca), an organization that formed in 2006 in response to the governor's use of force against the striking teachers union.

The march started in the neighborhood of Santa Lucía del Camino with a memorial for Brad Will, an American journalist, who was shot in October of 2006 while covering the teachers' strikes and APPO demonstrations. Democracy Now did a great piece on Brad that summerizes the situation in Oaxaca at the time and the current development of the investigation of his killers. In short, the person accused of the crime is a member of the APPO and thus unlikely to have an independent journalist covering it's struggle. Three or four men were captured on film holding guns and shooting in the direction of the protestors. His parents are calling for a full investigation and justice.

At the march today, Los Raices, the Son Jarocho band that I saw live two weeks ago played a few songs including "Son de la baricada", about the APPO.
There was a shrine for Brad and some Union Officials planted a tree on the side of the road. We marched into the center of the city and the teachers all had meetings. I went home shortly after.

During the march, my friend Luz comented to me that Mexico is a country of institutions. Teachers, Police, even doctors all have their bosses to answer to and their orders. Teachers don't apply to work at specific schools, but are assigned one (usually far-away rural places when they first start working) and must put in their time at marches and meetings before they can earn enough points to be moved to a city in their seniority. It is being considered in Mexico to merge all police forces into a large homogeneous force under one control. As it is now, police operate with a certain level of impunity, and often their badges are more of a shield for themselves than for the people they are serving and protecting. The experience was interesting for its social and emotional power. And mom, rest assured there were no problems with the police this time.

Puebla

On Thursday last week I went to Puebla to a conference about alternative media. Puebla is a neighboring state, and like Oaxaca, home to some prestigious universities. The conference was held at La Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla. Present were members of Ojo de Agua Comunicación Comunitaria, Promedios, and Boca de Polen, the last two based out of Chiapas. Many communuity communicators spoke about their projects, many from indigenous communities throughout the south of the country with radio stations and video centers in various stages of development.

It was exciting to connect with more media activists and talk to Paco from Promedios and Eugenio from Boca de Polen, both of whom I interview in Los Con Voz. It was an opportunity to give them each copies of the film, which makes me indescribably happy to be able to do, as a means of honoring my asspirations to ethical filmmaking. I am also very interested in their feedback, something that I am often hesitant to pursue, but that I know is quite valuable especially from the very people that I interview.

It is something that I am going to engage much more in during this current project, both after and DURING production/post production.

I took a bus to Puebla at 7am and the trip was quite beautiful. I forget how much of the country is still very rural.

Video about Piña Palmera

I talked to Flavia, the director of Piña Palmera for the first time since coming to Oaxaca the other day, and I she offered me a hand in finding a place to stay for the duration of my production phase! All my interactions with PP thus far have been very rewarding and productive, both regarding this project and even before, when I was just a visitor to the beach.

I found this promo video about Piña Palmera on YouTube (okok, I guess it IS useful sometimes), unfortunately it´s all in Spanish but I´ve transcribed the text below.


Oaxaca has almost 4 million inhabitants, and 1 million of them go abroad to the US to work every year. 52% of the houses have dirt floor, and 79% lives in extreme misery. In this context, people with disabilities are hidden in the corners of their houses, and also the concept of community rehabilitation doesn´t exist in the communities, and their families look for miracle cures day to day. The ideology that we use, with rehabilitation based in and with the community, is taken from the World Health Organization. We are the only organization in the zone and we are designed with the conditions of Oaxaca in mind, as well as the customs of the Chatines and Zapotec communities in which we work. We are confronted with various problems: domestic violence, alcoholism, ignorance, lack of knowledge about disability, the lack of medical professionals in the communities, gender inequality, and the isolation of people with disabilities in the very communities where they live.

Piña Palmera is supported by national and international donations. We have productive workshops in making artesanías, paper-rcycling, and producing ecological products. We also have a store where we sell the products that we make. Piña Palmera follows the model of community-based rehabilitation in three of the higest-poverty municipalities in the region, which include nine communities, in which 450 people participate, more than half of which are children and young people. 20% are adults, and about 10% are seniors. We work with people with disabilities and their families, using physical therapy, speech therapy, language design, ocupational therapy, living independently, and we do this in both large and small groups. We also hold workshops for students on the national and international level in different areas of understanding and senitivity, as well as in the human rights of people with disabilities.

¨The society was invited to learn, and now, those of us with disabilities can now do all the things that we would like to- the disabilities are no longer limiting.¨ Mariano Enriquez, Special Olympics Champion, 1500 and 5000 meter dash.

All of my life, I´ve been involved with social jusctice and community issues because we´ve discovered the lack of attention to the human rights of people living in real disadvantaged situations, and in this case, people living with disabilities. My dream is the dream of everyone partciapating in our work here at Piña Palmera, the construction of a just society with a space for everyone and respect for all.

"Los Raices"

I went to a seventh anniversary concert of Los Raices, a Son Jarocho band from Veracruz. Jarocho is an interesting term that I've heard refer to people from Veracruz as well as their semi-improvisational Spanish/Afro/Indigenous long-form "son"s (songs). The lyrics, from what I could gather, are mainy about love and nature, although this particular group is somewhat political as well so the normal Oaxacan explitives about the government were present as well. The concert was at La Nueva Babel, only a few blocks from my house, in a small inner open-air courtyard.

Who's side are we on?

I was watching Democracy Now today and one headline in particular caught my attention. The headline was "Sen. Webb Calls on Pentagon to Cancel $300M Iraq Propaganda Program". The article is about Senator Jim Webb of Virginia asking the pentagon to halt a program that would hire four US-based companies to engage in what is often euphimized as a "hearts and minds" campaign and the DOD is calling its "strategic information” initiative. The contractors are the Washington-based Lincoln Group, the LA-based Leonie Industries, as well as MPRI and SOSI, both based in Virginia. This originally interested me because of an argument I got into with some friends about this Three Doors Down music video, which I first saw in a movie theater in Washington DC, and then again at Cinemark in Amherst. It was produced by the US National Guard to promote recruitment which has plunged since it started sending so many enlistees to Iraq to supplement the regular army.

One of the four companies contracted by the Pentagon, The Lincoln group, in the "job openings" section of their website, lists an opening for the position of "PSYOP Planner". PSYOP is army jargon for psychological operations. The wikipedia article about PSYOP is pretty crazy. This is my favorite line: "This euphimism for mind control is ironically an example of psychological operations -- i.e. using psychological techniques to persuade [manipulate] a large number of people to support something that they wouldn't normally support." It is attributed to William Dougherty in "A Psychological Warfare Casebook", John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979.

The US Military wants to "win", or as John McCain so often puts it "to return victorious and honorably". It is clear to me listening to this man so long steeped in military ways of thinking that we are never going to see a music video, commercial, PSA or any other piece of mass media produced by the military that promotes any other agenda. "But the military's agenda is to stabilize Iraq now", you may say. So why are we spending $300 million on a unidirectional PR campaign? Do you think that Iraqis have a skewed understanding of what is going on in their own country? There's a difference between selling a product and promoting an understanding (of actions, ideas, intentions...). All of the four companies selected for this contract also advertise their services to "large multinational corporations" and "the private sector", which indicates to me that they specialize in making people believe the messages that they are paid to disseminate. Similarly when I listen to the news about Iraq, the voices I never hear are the voices of Iraqi people. Seems to me that is what builds a democracy- but maybe the media just doesn't report on that.

My job as a filmmaker is to try and make things clearer (read: more complicated, but more intelligible too) not to convince people that what I say has more to do with reality than their own experience. In the end, it is my own experience that I represent, but the process of articulating that experience is also colored by it. Can the military say that its opinion of its own presence in Iraq has changed at all in the last eight years? I'm curious to know. I'm also curious to know if Three Doors Down has been to Iraq.

Biblioteca Fandango

So I've been having a busy but underwhelming experience visiting these libraries. Most of them have very little literature about San Pedro Pochutla, let alone about the small town of Zipolite. I have found a few articles in state tourism magazines which say things like "Zipolite is the perfect place for swimming or walking; it's also perfect for those that prefer to be alone and relaxed in perfect integration with nature, observing the natural rhythm of the ocean and listening to the happy calls of the birds". I started wondering what it must be like to live in such a comodified location. I'm sure that the identity of Zipolite to the people that live there is quite different than this short description, but to have the only visitors to your town be nudists (it is the only officially sanctioned nude beach in Mexico) and surfers must be so strange.

I went to talk to a friend that works for Ojo de Agua, Guillermo Monteforte, who, in his casually conversational and yet pointed way, advised me to start talking to more people and to less books. So I'm going to start following up on some leads on the coast and in Oaxaca city.

Oh I almost forgot to explain this picture. This is a language map of the Nauatl language in Mexico. Time is represented as moving from the bottom of the page to the top, and as the shape expands, so do the number of speakers of the language. Now you see what I've been dealing with.