CINCO DE MAYO
Today all members of Greater Mexico celebrate the Battle of Puebla. I am celebrating with a son huasteco. You should really follow that link – it goes to a really classic performance which cannot be embedded elsewhere. Here is a good live performance of the petenera, with the audience dancing.
And there is much more huasteca music available. Here is a great huapango with a glimpse of formal dancers in native costume.
And here, finally, is a controversia huapanguera, recorded at the Cathedral of the Huapango in Amatlán. (The best videos in this post are the ones which would not embed.)
People do not realize it but the battle of Puebla was only the first major battle Mexico won against the French invader. It took another five years to defeat them utterly. When he saw the bullet ridden cadaver of the executed French emperor my national hero Benito Juárez, a Zapotec, declared drily, “Ya no es tan bonito.” (As we know, I really love Mexico.)
ON SEGREGATION
Being Black and poor is like being incarcerated in the ways one might imagine – not feeling safe in white neighborhoods and taking circuitous routes so as to avoid these, never having been able to afford car fare to go downtown – but also in some which do not meet the eye.
I learned this in theory in the first grade. I observed it in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago. The details of it came home to me in Brazil – and later on, in places like Washington and Cuba. Here I still continue to realize the depth of the phenomenon. I understood that one day last year, hanging out with a recently released prisoner who turned out to be uncomfortable in neighborhoods I would have thought would be familiar. My other friends might say this is the typical prisoner’s problem, they are unused to being free and so they self-limit, but it appears to have to do with accent.
Each neighborhood has an accent and a stance, and one is recognized. In the old days in particular to be out of one’s neighborhood was to be converted into a target. And so between the white neighborhoods, the neighborhoods one could not reach since car fare was prohibitively expensive, and the neighborhoods in which one was not welcome, most neighborhoods were out of bounds, and that was how people lived, and it was very limited and limiting.
And so in New Orleans I go everywhere and I can find anything and I am happy and free, but that is because I am I, meaning that I have coins in my pocket for one thing, and for another, that most people are happy to see me. I get to be my expansive self while many are confined to far more limiting identities. And yet so much culture is created from and within these.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Random thoughts:
So we still have tribes. Really not cool, despite Marshall McLuhan and his positive tribal speculations.
Another point: I wonder whether Lacan’s paradigm of being castrated into language involves the loss of a universalistic, highly adaptive and amenable spirit (children can learn any language or any culture) for the sake of receiving an identity that is rather more narrow (one becomes part of a tribe on the basis of developing specific linguistic as well as emotional nuances; one bonds within a particular tribal group by virtue of being this type of a person and not that type).
It seems to me that when Marechera went to London he was an outsider not only because he was black but because his throught processes were remarkably Zimbabwean, and therefore marked him as having outsider status.
On Lacan, definitely – I think that’s the point of his schtick, or at least I’ve always understood it that way. Marechera in London, certainly. McLuhan, I have never read and I see that I really need to. At random, because of some comments in this:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/gen7.html
Then there’s this:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/11/mcluhans_net.php
and this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=w02xf6OpiTUC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=McLuhan+tribes&source=web&ots=DBYt3Mrfjd&sig=T_BPfgT_MHTqq_d7rGzDwzpaJUI&hl=en
McLuhan, Baudrillard, Torgovnick, primitivism and modernity … ! Yes…
Have to read that McLuhan stuff later as the computer is being taken in for servicing.
I’m just not sure that Lacan understood the full implications of his theory, since his approach seems to imply a universalistic stance — ie. that there was ONE “civilisation” to be castrated into. But maybe the reality is that we are all castrated into very different versions of civilisation — ie. different tribal consciousness. This is more like the tower of babel theory than anything rationalist or universal.
One civilization, yes, but that’s because he’s French.
That was Kristeva’s point — that civilisation might be French. Personally, I think “civilisation” might be Western.
Do you mean she actually says somewhere that [postmodern play, or whatever … poststructuralist games], Tel Quel, and so on, only seem ‘subversive’ in the context of French centralization?
well, she wrote it as part of “strangers to ourselves”. I think her point was that French culture wasn’t properly universal and inclusive, however it sure had the quality of being culture.
Maybe she said Culture rather than civilisation. yep I think so. Pretty sure.
Interesting, indeed!
She saw the foreigner (eg herself in France) as being in the mindset of a Meursault. ie. s/he has a dour kind of negativity going on. I’d have to read it again to remember more of the gist.
Right – it’s this weird kind of postcoloniality she and Meursault have going on, because they are still so tied to the metropolis. And Meursault, of course, sees the Arab as Other, and so on. I always think when I read those Frenchies, including the Francophonies, but what if you came from, or could see, a *really* different cultural world?
Well yeah — it is a narrow range of reference to refer to and within French culture. AS I am starting to make notes for a new chapter, last night I hurriedly scribbled down a few impressions from the texts I am researching. The kind of deadened negativity that Kristeva describes might be left for dead by the following excruciating example of existential angst: 🙂
LOL! 😉
Actually, you can click on the smile. It’s a secret message.
I see! 🙂