jerga update: Chile, Mexico, Panama

again, i must postpone the blogging until after the slogging. but here's some jerga to keep you entertained:

-aventón: a ride (as in, pedir un aventón) - mexico. love this term, wish it was used everywhere.

-un pai: literally, "a pie" - but meaning a hot and sexy lady with lots of cleavage and ass. i think this is panamanian.

-pritty: cool. apparently this is the newest panamanian slang for 'cool' - chévere will no longer suffice. it feels weird saying it, but i'm going to do like the locals do and try it out for a week.

-che: hey. this is Argentinian, and it's the reason that El Che has that El.

-huevón: carajo/idiot, but sort of in an endearing way. this is very very Chilean.

funny joke recently told me by a funny Chilean:

Q: Qué dijo la mujer cuando alguien la preguntó si ella fue afectada por vivir cerca de la autopista?
A: noooOOOOOOoooo.

I think that this one works better spoken (doppler effect, etc). Okay, ciao for now, dearly beloved and sadly neglected blog. My digits are itching to do some prestidigitation on this mother of a board, but it'll have to wait.

so much to write, but i'm waiting for the work to subside

yes, exactly. many things have happened, but i've been lax in chronicling them, and now i'm swamped with grant applications and last-minute interviews and hurried visits to archives and the like. so dear blog, you will have to wait at the foot of the stairs, as it were, until after i get back to chicago. I should also mention that in my five minutes of spare time, i've been reading umberto eco's foucault's pendulum, and it's quite good. okay, that's all for now.

interlude - and some new jerga for your edification

hello - okay, much to report in the coming days (there's major blog-gridlock here, entries stacked and waiting to jump from the blocks like (appropriately) olympic sprinters - but fulbrights come first, sorry). to tide you over, blogfiends, here are some recent bits of jerga that i've picked up of late:

-pololo/la: chilean slang for an informal boy/girlfriend. not as serious as a novio/a, which is basically a fiancé/e. as in, "hoy voy a dormir en la casa de mi polola."

-chortizos: short-shorts. pronounced like chor-TEE-zos. kind of amazing-sounding; try it today!

-tomatera: hanging out, chilean-style. variant of 'tomar,' to drink.

-chupata: hanging out, panamanian-style. variant of 'chupar,' to drink/suck. (this sounds dirty but apparently isn't.)

-vaina: sort of like "shit," or "stuff," like the famous phrase "qué sopá con esta vaina?" (what's up with that shit?) Panamanians say this all the time. it's a very Panamanian thing to say, vaina.

-putamadre/chuchamadre: this means something like "whore-mother" or "vagina-mother," but people here say it all the time when commenting on topics as benign as the weather. i have not said it to date and probably won't be able to bring myself to do so. although who knows, really.

okay, i think that's all i've learned in recent days. only bad things! sorry jesus. i've failed you already; this must be why i'm not a jew for jesus.

post-hoc caveat

for those of you who have been keeping up with this blog - and there hopefully aren't too many of you - i've tried to keep it tedious enough that you're compelled to stop reading after the first five words or so, allowing me to plow on in uncensored, unreproached glory. but if you have been doing a sort of word-for-word checkup and are disgusted (or even mildly frustrated) by what you read, i have to say that this stuff is raw, raw, raw. i'm taking a sort of raw-foodist approach with this, throwing it all on the table (okay, i know that's somewhat disrespectful to the raw-foodists out there who do things like soak their raw beans for 29 hours before pureeing them and stacking them delicately atop a bed of shredded psyllium-husk soufflé - anyhow, i don't really care about stepping on the toes of raw-foodists. i'll just say that here and now) as a preliminary step to the processing of it. so you may notice that there's more journalism-type stuff going on here than there is academic-type stuff. OR you might feel like it's offensive in another of the million potential ways that it could be insulting to my fellow humans, mammals, and trees of all genuses. if this is the case, i exhort you to stop reading now, because i'm finding this steam-table buffet tactic to be productive for me as a sort of vestibule/waiting area for inchoate rants and nascent ideas. chthonic!

many things to tell! little time in which to tell them!

the march! the upcoming huelga! more notes on the canal zone's architecture! a scholarly breakthrough! a sweaty morning! an evening of more wine-drinking and "friendly" anti-semitism from the chileans! the afroantillean concurso de colegios! finally going into the belly of the imperial beast - in several senses of the term! this is all coming soon. be patient, long-suff'ring blogreaders.

march tomorrow

yeah, it's gonna be big. here's some of the rationale, taken from the site of one of the coordinators, FRENADESO:

Miles y miles de educadores aglutinados en el Frente de Acción Magisterial (FAM), respaldados por las organizaciones del Frente Nacional por la Defensa de los Derechos Económicos y Sociales (FRENADESO), la Comisión Médica Negociadora (COMENENAL) y Bases Transportistas, entre otros, marcharon hasta la Presidencia de la República para protestar por la violencia desatada contra los educadores, las medidas que se pretenden imponer contra su estabilidad, el alto costo de la vida, los planes para privatizar la salud, por un aumento general de salarios, por solución a la crisis del transporte, por seguridad laboral y ciudadana; por el reintegro de los institutores expulsados, por la rebaja y congelamiento de los precios de la canasta básica familiar, en solidaridad con los jubilados y contra los proyectos depredadores y de muerte como minas, represas, hidroeléctricas y seudo turísticos.

Well, i support that. i'm goin'.

goings-on around the town: religion overload, or god's good for business

So, after my perilous run-in with the jews for jesus, I’ve had a number of other adventures, and I feel like I haven’t necessarily had the time or mental vivacity to reflect upon these things lately. But it’s time to sit and grind out the reflexivity, as a preliminary step to a more rigorous journaling outlay of some sort. as a result of recent overloadings of religious pabulums of various sorts, i have to say that i can't stand the use of the word 'soul' right now. i just can't. apologies to every song/book/poem/greeting card/condom wrapper/1970s album featuring said pestiferous word. there's something about 'soul' that's just so overdetermined as to render it semantically vacuous. which can be used to advantage,but you've got to be really smart about it. can't just drop that word anywhere. it's like 'freedom.'

ooh! i want to interject. the parrots are flying in large green-and-yellow flocks right now. they tend to do this at sunset. their voices actually resonate in the timbres of squabbling children, or so it seems to me.

but anyway, back to worldly things. much work-related activity going on in the old cortex and world, which is good. two for two. I’ve been really getting into this kind of thing, and it’s nice because it feels both like “work” and “leisure,” which must mean that I like what I’m doing. Sunday was the first day of the week of activities related to canal history, “Conozca su Canal,” and it kicked off with this unbelievably bombastic mass in a dilapidated Methodist church that was celebrating its 100^th anniversary down in calidonia. The journalists from montreal were there, and we all sang every hymn as best we could (“washed in the blood of jesus” - “Christ died that we could live” – “doxology” - things of that nature) to the music blasting from hidden speakers and accompanied by this rail-thin and very Dimmesdale-esque (or actually looking more like a black Ichabod Crane) church pianist with the curliest eyelashes that I’d seen in awhile, plus this mane of hair that looked like controlled chaos, futilely tempered with grease. it sort of rose up in this cool-looking wedge of foamy spray. And the pastor was amazing: this very lithe and sexy (blasphemous! But true) man with an incredibly sweet smiling face and (again) extremely long and luxurious lashes. Worthy of all those adverbs. I found myself ogling him as he swung his bendable torso up onto the podium, then traveled across the altar in smooth motions to the left and right of the stage, to perch impishly in these sort of raised platforms with medieval-looking articulated woodwork (someone help me out here – someone Christian - ah, pulpits? Sacral chambers? Is that actually something located in the nose?). anyhow, so there were three hours or so of clapping, raucously singing, and boogieing down with the sashaying choirgals (in all actuality, all 70-year-old ladies or so, and a couple indestructible wiry dudes). then the sermon shifted to ‘testimonies,’ and the smiling pastor swept down the aisles with a cordless mike to see if anyone was willing to hold forth. This lady talked about her magical healing from car-accident wounds, and the giant party of people in from belize arose and pontificated about how god had given them the experience of being here, in this place, at this time, and then this guy got up and started basically freaking out about jesus. He turned out to be a Nigerian evangelical preacher, and he told this long and involved story about how he had come to the US to get a green card, and the first judge who oversaw his case was a mean and evil jew, clearly sent by god as an obstacle akin to those that faced jesus on his way up the mount (or what have you), but after this spiritual trial the clouds parted - the second judge was a lady who asked him about his Christian faith, and he told her, and she took pity on him and gave him the green card. so god was responsible for his blessed visit to panama with his beautiful African wife (she really was gorgeous, in a bright yellow gown and gold shoes), and ohh jesus ohh jesus ohh jesus thank thank thank you jesus.

Anyhow, this mixture of jumpy evangelism, circus music (scratchy piped-in organ-grinder sounds) and sort of staid Methodism (trefoils everywhere) was really wearing thin after three hours, and I could tell that the montreal guy was having some sort of atheist’s smug, grinning moment in his head. But I still clapped and sang and tried to keep my eyes unclouded. Then, afterward, we filed into the education center, in an adjacent building attached by a sort of castlelike bridge, and proceeded to see this awesome church talent show of biblical performance art (very ron athey circa “solar anus” – just kidding) and baile típico and c. wherever you look, someone’s always doing a baile típico in pollera, montuno, and the rest. It’s interesting to me that many west indians/afropanamanians of west indian descent have wholeheartedly taken on the wearing of these traditional Panamanian costumes. new research is emerging that suggests that the traje típico originated among afro-colonial blacks in panama, and then Panamanian “whites” (or at least elite rabiblancos) reclaimed it as some sort of banner of white-indigeneity, and then West Indians (and Zonians, while they were here) appropriated it once more, so now it’s ‘black’ again, but after being cycled through a course of blanquimiento. Hmm. the racial acrobatics of culture in Panama once again prove a bit too heady for my o'ertrammeled mind at present. anyway, i feel like this is one of those things that continually revolves, with no point at which one can settle upon a clear and definite answer, though different aspects seem "right" at different points. for example, though no one can agree on the degree of institutionalism of panamanian racism, many have experienced it and can pinpoint those moments at which relations of power have seemed to come into focus. like anything, there are glints here and there.

which brings me to another point about opinions, truth, morality/ethics, and the like. being here in panama is interesting because everyone is always trying to convince me that their opinions are the 'correct' ones, that they have a handle on exactly how the country is managing to unravel itself. but then, after hearing three similarly-shaded reports, i'll be blindsided by one very strong case to the contrary and have to rethink and refilter everything i've been told. this is especially true now that it's election season. typically, all of this back-and-forth causes me to settle into an ultimately neutral position, one of sympathetic and informed head-nodding. it's nice to be relieved of the duty of engaging in these polemico-moralizing battles right now about the downward trajectory of X, let me say. at the same time, i'm enjoying being privy to the debates, and i appreciate the rhetorical flourishes of others. taking a stance is a funny thing, often hastily done with malinformed posturing.

Anyhow, back to the World. another interesting thing to me is the way that many of these ‘historical’ west Indian activities in panama – the museo afroantillano, for example, or the Wesley Methodist church – are located in areas that could well be considered barrio (or casi barrio, i should qualify), like Calidonia. Yet a lot of the west Indians seem to reside in the far-away ‘suburbs’ of panama city – middle-class conurbations like juan diaz and chanis – and they commute in for these activities like tourists to the city, since many of them also grew up in the canal zone, which was geographically adjacent to but ideologically (and socioeconomically) quite distant from these areas. It sort of reminds me of how the jews in Milwaukee used to commute in from the suburbs to temple on the weekends, although we always walked because we lived around the corner when i was growing up (and that's another story in itself, replete with my father's and my games wherein we'd think of nicknames for the place, including "Ye Olde Pittes O' Helle and Eternal Damnation" and later, when i'd read a bit of the Rg Veda, in translation, of course, in my humanities class, the "House of Clay" (as opposed to the Vedic heaven, the "House of the Fathers" - shortened simply to the "Clayhaus") – and finally the congregation got fed up with this 15-or-so minute drive and decided to sell the old, grey, noble campus (the 'old man') and build a new one that looked like a smooth little red box, like a sketch in chalky pastel, with perfect brickwork that seemed all of a piece, like it had been airlifted into place beside a similarly red-brick little church. Blech. Hate that new place, down to its plaster six-point star. we still do high holy days in the belly of the 'old man,' but it's now owned by U-dub, which converted it to a theatre (interestingly enough), so i always feel like i'm seeing a b-list band in concert when the shofar's blown.

In fact, I'm having a bit of religious overload at the moment, as stated above. Lately I’ve been inundated with various forms of anti-semitism like some object permeated by radar or sonar or something: I can’t see or feel it going through me, but I sense that it’s having some kind of subtly radioactive or debilitating effect, like slowly sapping my strength. My lack of a natural lead apron (am currently trying to cast off my barriga) is really wearing me down. Whew! But sometimes the fact that I’m frank about being a secular-cultural-US-but-non-jewish-lobby-jew is a helpful thing. It gets people to talk to me, because I have a hint of the exotic and the commiserable (a word, that?) without being too exotic, and I’m emphatically not a rabid jew. I’m not really even a jew, as evidenced by my foucauldian laughter during the meeting with the jews-for-jesus. But you know, I’m completely okay with this west Indian man’s insistence that Judaism came from Africa, and jews were originally black, hence the peyot. As crazy as it is, I think that my tolerance of these things is endearing me to him.

Another silly thought: today I was reading some victor turner, and it dawned on me that the structure of social drama is very like that pertaining to a breakup. Maybe victor thought that one up while having problems with his novia/o. I mean, come on – separation, liminality, resolution (or ‘new culture’)? It’s too cliché not to apply in some fashion to that mystical metastasizing mass of ‘love.’ Mass of love! Choking off my left ventricle! Added to these histrionics, I must say that I’m learning some dirty words in Chilean Spanish. So pleasurable to roll those things off your tongue when you only half-know their meanings.

Anyhow, back to Events and reportage. We're on to Monday, people! Wake up! So Monday I was all business, waking at dawn to do the leg-slapping and poto-shaking exercises of eternal youth. Then I went to the ciudad de saber (the epically or wizard of oz-ian named ‘city of knowledge’), which used to be the US military base Fort Clayton, to take part in this capacitación about human rights and racism for highschoolers from all over panama. This thing was sponsored by the naciones unidas (UN), and it took place in this really well-appointed room, with computers over which the kids slobbered like craven young addicts in need of a digital-social-platform-networking fix. I was a little underwhelmed by the ponencia, which was much more about the UN’s origins and current peacekeeping efforts than about the specific conditions facing West Indians throughout Panamanian history and into the present. Of course, there was a section on the current state of racism/discrimination in panama, and that proved quite interesting, with several of the kids self-identifying as ‘black’ (in a black-pride way) and talking about their experiences with racism in Panama, which is often said (falsely, falsely! obviamente) not to exist.

I should add that to the outside observer from the Global North/US who visits Panama for a short time, the country initially has a sort of racial-utopia glow about it, akin to the Brazilian mythos, because it seems as though Panamanian ‘race’ is very difficult to quantify/classify, very slippery, evading categorization. And it’s true that there are more people of color in government, but this is fairly unavoidable given that the country is 90% people of color (my estimate, but probably not far off). Anyhow, but appearances are almost always misleading (oh! cartesian - or is it humean? - scepticism paying off again). despite what people call themselves, others call them whites or blacks. the afrocoloniales are a fraught case-in-point: they often disidentify as black, and politicians have variously played them off against the west indians, but in the final call they suffer from subtly racist acts like resource (mis)allocation, which are masked by euphemisms. people considered 'black' still get falsely arrested/racially profiled and kicked out of restaurants and clubs all the time. Housing still tends to be somewhat segregated, and hiring definitely is. The colonenses in particular were vocal about being turned away from social establishments or accused of being criminals/primitives, which I learned may have been due to the fact that a radical black rights organization, la coordinadora de la etnia negra de colón, had been going around and preaching racial consciousness in schools. Interesting considering that the atlantic coast has a high percentage of afrocoloniales, who haven’t historically considered themselves black (see above). the historical divide between afrocoloniales and afroantillanos has been ‘patched up,’ say some, while others maintain that it continues to be a problem. This all gets very hairy, too hairy to deal with at the present exhausted moment.

Anyhow, so SAMAAP, the group sponsoring the lecture, has quite a stake in the promulgation of a sort of race-first platform, albeit one with distinct class and cultural shadings. Several prominent SAMAAP members stood up and gave these very animated/forceful/concerned lectures about how there are now laws in place to address these grievances, and the kids need to take advantage of these channels and seek litigation and fight and suchlike, because otherwise the laws will be moot and dead. In fact, the two high-profile individuals were a bit exasperated, having personally worked hard to bring these this legislation into existence. They kept yelling out the phone number of this racial equity/black rights lawyer in panama. it was quite interesting. Also, I got to meet some excellent women who are in charge of this massive and very (very! extremely - extremadamente) cool oral history project masterminded by the same individual who happens to be editing my article as we speak (eek). I might help them with their project, and this could be a really exciting and cool opportunity for me and, hopefully, them. When this horse wants to work, it works. Yay! Good outcomes in that respect.

Also, I wanted to say a word about the city of knowledge. For those of you know don’t know, the canal was handed over (or "returned," as panamanians like to say) to panama roughly 8 years ago. every building that used to be owned and operated by the US was either turned into some panamanian thing or left to rot, essentially. which they do, looking like rusticated dinosaurs with totally a-tropical architecture, crouching among the creeping weeds, vomiting vines from their half-cracked windows. a large percentage of buildings were kept in use according to their original purposes (actually, there's an anal-retentive clause in the handover treaty that stipulates that those buildings that were hospitals, schools, churches, and other wholesome-activity community places must retain their former uses under the US regime. staging governance, anyone?) or lived in or modified slightly and converted into panamanian institutions. the architecture is really curious, though, and it's constantly giving you baleful, silent reminders that being in the canal zone is sort of oppressively/aggressively NOT like being in panama. for one thing, the buildings are of uniform composition, as you might expect on a military base of sorts, but with strange civilian touches, like a stern-faced man trying hard to smile. they're sort of generic-unusual, or stark-charming, in a way that comes off as creepy and cultish. i have to post some pictures some time, really. they're like triangular-rectangles composed of a narrow range of colors and materials - a weird thick butter-yellow paint and red tile roofs - and either comprising one, two, or three stories. they squat equidistant from each other in an area of well-clipped lawns and shrubbery and speed bumps and no garbage. the speed limit, i hear, used to be 15. it's about as immaculate as the jungle can get.

so, there are several areas of the former Zone on the pacific side (panama city) that engage a lot of panamanian traffic and daily use: fort clayton (which is now the aforementioned city of knowledge), balboa/ancon (the HQ of the ACP, the autoridad del canal de panamá), albrook airport (still used as an airport by the ACP, with this cartoonish mall that middle-class panamanians seem to love), and of course the miraflores locks. new people have moved into the old segregated townships too (like paraiso), although many of the 'silver' towns were abandoned an eaten up by the jungle, leaving basically no trace. people remember, though. when i went on the unbelievable west indian canal launch (getting ahead of myself! ack!), everyone on the boat was going crazy trying to locate their old neighborhood and pointing to invisible clubhouses and commissaries and baseball fields and the like. it was really cool and interesting and exhilarating and also emotionally overwhelming. more on that later in this blog. despite my desire to deviate from chronicling causalities, i'm aware that Events have their chronologies, with internal logics and 'flows,' shall we say (not to be all appadurai about it, but), and as an avid (though cynical) historiadora, i'm trying to honor those silly temporal counts to the best of my ability.

ennntonces...where was i. this is getting longwinded, and my apologies to the sick, old, and dying among you, o vast and expansive reading public, who are waiting so patiently for me to get on with it. so we're inside the green zone of panama, which is bedecked with all the emperor's NGOs, like unicef and the interamerican bank and something called the louis berger group (in a fancy half-revamped barracks) and protect-the-toucans-fund and naciones unidas and etc. and we're particularly perched in an upper barracks (everyone was well familiar with the former uses of these sites, because the buildings had barely been reincarnated as panamanian and still smelt of their former lives) listening to a presentation about racism and human rights in panama. and the two SAMAAP members gave these really impassioned and eloquent disquisitions on the issues of race and discrimination and mestizaje and all the issues mentioned above. i learned more about the divisions among the 'etnia negra' movement (essentially, the move to introduce affirmative action into panamanian government, as brazil and colombia have).

another thing i wanted to mention is that some of the old zone buildings have been repurposed seemingly by blind-deaf idiot clowns. for example: the current contemporary art museum is housed in an old masonic lodge, with those mystical eye-compass symbols carved everywhere. my roommate, who works there, says that on the second floor was a giant pentacle, which really freaked her out since she's into 'la magia y la brujería.'

so after this meeting, i left to do some work at the SAMAAP archive, and while there i became a passive onlooker in an all-out brawl between this really fat and charlatan-ish government worker (i think for INAC) and his supervisor. the gist of the fight was essentially that she wanted him to do some work, and he claimed some sort of disability in the knees. it was a big deal. and then he sat back down, smiling but with a reddish face, and proceeded to doze off again. hm.

entonces, yo fui a cenar con un amigo, pero tuve que levantarme muy temprano para las actividades del martes: the boat launch, the "romería." the word actually means 'pilgrimage,' and this is what it was. i woke and rose at 6 am to prepare for the day, which lasted until about 1 or 2pm, at which i slouched home completely drained in many senses. it was something very hard to explain - ironic, since this is what i want to write my dissertation about, at least in part. mmmmmm, where to start?

okay, in moments like these, brute chronology takes over. for those hardy few who have stuck with me until now, i congratulate you. you deserve some kind of neo-roosevelt medal. i'd really like to know who you are, so that i can come to your houses and personally kiss each one of you on the hand. you have humored the longest of long winds. think of yourselves as jesuses, with one last hill to climb before landing in beersheba and being touched on the head by a malevolent dragon...okay, i really don't know how the jesus part of the story goes. after moses, i'm basically out.

Anyway, so Tuesday. i got into the car with these impeccably-dressed and rambunctious women, the sprightliest being the 89-year-old miss christie, who wore mint-green linen and sported the funkiest nails ever. pinky outdid herself. we drove out to the pedro miguel locks, and i made friends with a thin, quiet, and very gracious older lady named martha, who, i learned, had 7 kids, all of whom were doing famous and incredible things in the world. her eldest headed a huge civil engineering firm in barcelona and spoke five languages; another daughter was in the US academy; etc., etc. it's really amazing how common these stories are among the west indian community in panama. martha herself had come to panama as a child, born in the zone to parents from barbados and antigua, and worked in panama for a while (making 56 cents an hour) until she transferred to the canal zone, where her pay immediately shot up to 3 dollars an hour, with benefits, and then to 6. like most of the west indians who worked for the canal, she gets a good pension and can afford to travel to spain almost every year. moreover, her children come to panama all the time. among the party was a woman from brooklyn whose father had been a prominent educator, teaching in 'colored schools' all over the zone. learned so much! so many stories about experiences in citizenship limbo, being forced to assimilate (or eager to - and disappointed that their parents hadn't taught them spanish) - all sorts of things. at about 10 we launched the boat, and everyone was there save a few. also present was a film crew, documenting the exploits for a canal once program and a separate fancy spanish-grant documentary (from the aforementioned 'betesda films,' all clad in wraparound or aviator shades and preppy-sport clothes, irking me with their yuppie presence) and one of the montreal journalists, this strangely bitter guy who was one of those people who have an argumentative tone but don't seem aware of this. when i asked him if he was going to link his coverage of the labor strike to that of the west indian memorial events, he said, "no...are you trying to fuck me up or something?" he really seemed suspicious that i was trying to sabotage his project in some way. strange!

anyhow, so we set off in two boats, the gaviota and the calamar, and i took ridiculous numbers of pictures of the centennial bridge and the construction being done on the third set of locks, the crane 'titan' and the perforator 'thor' and other such industrial fetishes. it was AWESOME. i must, must, must emphasize this. and the day was sunny, cloudless, with little trace of the heavy smog that sits over panama city. birds were around, and (apparently) alligators. we launched into the culebra cut, at which point the boats turned around and came to a halt for the rose-petal throwing ceremony, in which we all participated, saying the names of our great-grandparents (i said "herman zien") and then, interestingly, "ashé." half of the people didn't know what ashé meant, and there was some debate over why it was being said. a choir of old gals sang hymns, two pastors held forth, and the president of SAMAAP read from mathew parker's Panama Fever, specifically from the introduction, wherein parker talks about this very ritual. it was very intense. some people cried. meanwhile, huge cargo-laden boats cycled through the canal, painted bright blue and orange. so cool. and also incredibly hot, i should say. it was like 100 degrees on that boat deck. people were sort of fainting, and the boat was bobbing like crazy. there were several 90-year-olds in attendance. after a long stretch of this, we headed back into the boat.

actually, it turned out that we were going to gamboa, and on the way we had this fabulous tour guide, an old west indian man with gold teeth and jazzy shades, who knew basically everything that one could know about the canal. he was really cool. at one point, one of the awesome outspoken ladies demanded to hear stories of samuel whyte, who spearheaded the 1920 strike. the guide said that he didn't really know, being from the pacific side of the zone (panama city). this spawned a massive, fist-shaking outcry from half of the boat, which shouted themes of atlantic-side solidarity (like "colonenses!") and caused the pacific side to rally its yelling forces. at the end, the outspoken lady clutched her head and said to me dramatically, "i better hold down my wig so they don't pull it off!"

there were other fights: about which language must be spoken on the boat (the older WI's demanded english-only, but the panamanians protested), about how the current canal profits were being (mis)spent by corrupt panamanian government officials, and, finally, about panamanian party politics, and specifically the runoff between balbina and juan carlos navarro. several of the WIs invoked the 1941 constitution of the arnulfista party (which is still in existence), saying that they'd never vote along a party line that had tried to force them out of the country. anyhow, it was quite the circus.

at the end of the romería, as at the end of this drawn-out reportage, i was bone-tired. i think everyone was. there was some food and drink, and i sat with this really interesting lady who had been a community organizer among west indians in brooklyn for many years. we talked about citizenship claims and some of the litigation that west indians had taken on to acquire US citizenship, which they felt was rightfully theirs, seeing as how they'd been born in the canal zone, spoke only english, and had grown up reciting the US national anthem every day at school until the mid-1950s at earliest. then i felt rather spent, and i rode back into town with the raucous ladies who'd given me a lift to the zone. the 89-year-old demanded that we stop for a milkshake on the way back, and she kept calling for this necessary milkshake in an incredibly endearing manner. thus i was melted and spent. the end of a full morning.

in which K. gets pulled into a vortex of Panamanian Jews for Jesus - and sundry other goings-on en la vida

well (insert hearty chuckle here), little did i know that "messianic jews" were jews for jesus. and to be perfectly honest, i don't see what's so bad about it - it just seems like a lot of silly people trying to get in on the jewish fun without technically being one of the 'chosen' people. it definitely stretches the hermeneutics of things, and that's healthy in a way, although radical subjectivity is always a bit disorienting...okay, let's back up to the backstory. so i've been doing these preliminary interview-type things, you know (don't want to incriminate myself any further with the IRB by calling them interviews), and one of them was with this guy who's afro-panamanian, jamaican in origin, and was telling me that he's recently become interested in judaism and has been attending shabbat ceremonies at the house of a jewish friend.

he wanted to know if i was interested in accompanying him to this thing. well, to be honest, i'm usually not, but 1) being an MOT myself, i like the songs/food/jewishy things that are done on this occasion; and 2) he seemed really fascinated by my jewishness, so i felt like doing shabbat would sort of ingratiate me with him and guarantee more interview-esque chats, with questions and answers, sitting in chairs, etc. anyhow, what could be wrong with that?

well, as we were driving to this fête, he casually mentioned that these were 'messianic jews,' and that they believed in jesus-the-messiah, who they called 'yeshuah' or something. so i was like, 'hm' and really wanted to jump out of the car, rolling on the ground like a rugged fireperson, and go to this other, much more pleasurable appointment that i had foolishly turned down in favor of the jews for jesus. so but i arrived at this apartment - one of these new high-rise condos coming up like hideous, dark-windowed fungi along the panamanian pacific coastline - and was greeted by this smiling, jewed-out couple, the roly-poly man wearing a yarmulke and the lady with some sort of fiddler-esque babushka. the woman was especially scary: with every sentence, she trailed off into a softly emphatic purr, a sort of verbal coo that gave me that fuzzy-brained feeling (not good when in a room full of jews for jesus). wet-eyed and intense, she sang in a warbling voice and strummed the guitar solemnly, making all the most rollicking shabbat songs into doleful ballads. there was no brisket or kugel, per se, but rather a spare table set with empty plates and cups; the point was not to socialize but to defend this motley religious sect formed like twenty years ago. weird!

yeah, they had all the structural stuff right: they pronounced the words with rigorous accuracy, and there was challah from the nearby SuperKosher (apparently the largest kosher food store outside of Israel) and even that viscous Manischewitz vino tinto. they also talked at length about the Torah portion of that week, deuteronomy 44 - the scholarship got into that nitpicky realm of "moses's motivations" and "why did he do this and not that? climb this hill and not that? why didn't he wait to say X to the wandering jews? is that what god really intended?" - which made me bored and antsy. plus, there was all this weird stuff about jesus sprinkled in there - apparently, the major features of the jews for jesus bible/torah combo (like surf n turf) are a superficial aesthetic overhaul - even the introductory notes to david stern's authorized translation call the change "cosmetic" - and an extensive reordering of the texts (allegedly - i saw some cutting and pasting, but not too much), which really screws up that whole foreshadowing/triangulation thing that st. augustine liked so much. mary was miryam, etc. all the greek words were changed to hebrew, which seemed really problematic - this dismissal of the greek-language bible as a tool of the conquerers/oppressors of the jews and not a possible language of jews themselves.

still, this was not the scary cult that i had been warned about in hebrew school ("they look like jews, they sing like jews...but they're not jews!!!!" very bodysnatchers-esque stuff that was). it seems like 5 minutes of informed debate might go a long way toward clearing up some of this illogical mamada and making everyone feel less on edge about their places in things. but beyond a couple points, i did not care to get into it with these people. i was in their house, after all, and that woman kept staring me with an intent to kill through hypnosis or something. appropriately, she wore a military-style jacket riddled with faux bullet-holes - some of that guerrilla survival-fashion that might have reached its heyday in the nineties.

and anyhow, the whole thing seemed less threatening than silly - for one thing, a lot of the stylistics of the singing and dancing and praying were overtly taken from Fiddler on the Roof (i'm not kidding. this is what our prayer books said to do! sing like the actors in Fiddler!). also, it was noteworthy that these people believed so fervently in something so obviously fabricated, seams and all. it sort of typified all religious practice. they weren't exactly challenging me to defend 'my' version of judaism, but if they had, i would have sort of giggled and admitted that mine smacked of bullshit, indoctrination, and fanaticism as well. we were even on that count. also, they were incredibly serious about mining their cockamamie bible, held together with chicken-wire, and their empathy for how the jews had suffered under constantine was admirable. the woman said that every time she read the part where moses died before reaching the Promised Land, she cried. it reminded me of people and their sentimental romance-novels. i wanted to say, "hello! this is moses we're talking about, not some hunky lead!" but instead i just pushed forward the box of candy that i had brought like some kind of sacrificial plea for appeasement.

so the whole thing left me feeling both slimy and lighthearted. also, the smell of the couple's apartment was something that i haven't smelled since my four-year stint tutoring the blind taiwanese graduate student andy huang. i recall first walking into his tiny room, stuffed with refuse and apothecary implements, and almost falling over from the stench. it was this combination of decay, unwashed-ness, and something even more pungent that i can in no way name: the kind of scent that an exotic pet might produce. anyhow, so this place smelled like that. in fact, upon entering i immediately scouted around for said exotic pet. but the couple appeared to live alone in a new house filled with replicas of glass, painting, and china. the whole thing was eerie and depressing, suffused with rosemary's baby lighting. i actually experienced a wave of fear during the ceremony as i wondered if the wine were poisoned. just in case, i didn't drink it. weird.

i should also mention that the talk turned to tisha b'av - the ninth of av, which was this past saturday. apparently, this day is the worst-ever day for jews: lots of bombings, genocidal acts, and that sort of thing. the jews for jesus decided to try to chronicle all the bad things that had ever happened on this day, which freaked me out a bit. on the way out, i met them in the elevator and hoped that their saturday would not transpire as so many tisha b'avs did - with a horrendous calamity. they didn't really get the joke.

after this, i joined up with some friends, including (unexpectedly) my roommates, at the club that everyone goes to in this town. i must admit that it's an excellent scene, with the aforementioned queers/hippies/hipsters/radicals/punks/rastas/rastas/more rastas (this is a reggae-heavy area, as per my previous posts). so we were there, and among us was the cousin of a friend, who's a chilean artist person here. (i should mention that right parallel to the jews for jesus, i've been sucked into this chilean circle with strange affinities and cultural chauvinisms. another sort of ethnography, this). the cousin was hilarious - this faux-blonde supermodel from argentina who moved and behaved like a life-sized doll, sort of unable to control her limbs or lips. she had this unbelievably endearing, ready grin, a bright-eyed "ready for adventure" look about her that was infused with incredible innocence. her earrings bobbed and she smiled unknowingly. she was super-argentinian in that she did that "shsshshshsaaa" thing with every "ya," and her nickname was apparently something like "cheessi." i have no idea what her actual name was. but she was quite a sight to behold, lolling about in short shorts, with tons of men slowly circling her like flies do shit. this is not to say that she was shit - in fact, we all rather liked her. she was a lot of fun.

so cheessi had been in town doing a photo shoot, and she wanted us all to go to this bar that she'd visited on some previous occasion. we piled into a tiny taxi, six of us, with the driver hemming about how he'd be stopped by the police and everyone jibing him (this was sort of an awkward moment, the class-stratified interactions here in latinamer, but i just silently went with it). one of the people with us was the son of a prominent black alderman who presided over the casco viejo, and the son himself was a tax collector of sorts. interesting stuff, racial/socioeconomic politics here. he had an obama sheen to him. anyhow, so cheessi directs the taxi to this gas station, and we pull up and there's a bar attached to it. a bar attached to a gas station, indeed. the toilets are outdoor pits in the ground, and the spare semi-outdoor drinking space (beer garden?) is bedecked with diablo rojo-style murals and lovingly scripted tattoo-looking spreads that say things in cursive like "Y Que?" so we're there to drink 50-cent beer - the swill of the land, balboa/atlas brand - and cheessi then remembers that she only has an 100-dollar bill. she tries to break it at the bar, and the people look at her like she's insane. then she wants us all to play dominoes. within one minute of this, she no longer wants us to play, because she's spotted the pool table. this lady was nuts! at this point it was roughly 4 am, and i was wilting in a major way, so i went home soon after, while my roommate stayed behind to guard this strange figure and "protect her from men." apparently this directive to "protect X from men" is a compliment aquí, meaning that the goods are valuable and prized enough. yikes!

Okay, tomorrow commences the "conozca su canal" week, and as a result i must sleep, rise early for a methodist commemorative mass, and forge on with my documentation of the activities. adieu, fair blog.

brief observations

Hola all - not much time to linger here, but a couple things: so, recently I've started hanging out with the mother of my compañera de casa Salomé, whose name (creepily enough) is also Salomé, and she has brought me into her circle of rabid exercisers. she's this incredibly fit lady who can do headstands at any given moment and all sorts of other kundalini (?) moves. She told me about meditation, my chakras, etc. She also told me that if I do a series of five exercises 21 times each, I'll be young forever. So i wanted to learn this "ejercicio de juventud." we've started doing it in the morning, but the loophole is that the exercises are each incredibly difficult, so that at the end of each session i've almost vomited. YES. this is how hard they are. today, for example: a near-vomit after doing the juventud stuff. but she's totally fine and tells me that i'm in bad condition, and that's why i feel like hell after 20 minutes or so of the torture. she says that i need to keep doing them, so i think i will. here's to a solid 'trunk!'

also, the other day i went with a friend to visit the impoverished pianist and give her some stew and rice that i'd cooked. we sat and chatted, and she amazed me once again with her sprightliness and pride in the face of things. then we were walking in Rio Abajo, and this car pulled up to the bus stop for the diablos, and a man rapidly purchased this brown drink from another guy who was walking around selling it from a cooler. he leaned out of the car, took a quick swig, and then peeled off. the vendor, undeterred, poured the brown liquid into another container. it turned out to be a west indian aphrodisiac, 'sea moss and isinglass.' cool.

okay, that's all for now. oh, i also hung out with some reggae-roots people last night and saw my downstairs neighbors give a concert. their band is really, really great. how to work this into my fieldwork??? one of their songs, "la vida es caprichosa," was quite the rousing reggae-roots anthem to youth culture in panama. there was also a lot of kafu banton and other local reggae playing. very interesting, quite a scene.

Xica da Silva senses fecundity

yes, yes she does. the other day that baby ("Das Baby") was kissing me obsessively, grabbing my head and basically trying to french my nose. She also stuck my headphones inside my nostril. This is getting to be too much! I had to untangle my limbs from her diaperclad perspicacity today, claiming the need to work. Which really is a need. Sometimes being liked is worse than not being liked, huh?

But I think that Xica and I have truly made a peace pact. If there were a peace pipe, we'd be smoking it. That is, if she was more than three years old.

human zoos and basil on my fingers

this past weekend has been a motley assortment of the usual-unusual things: hanging out with my roommates-the-hipsters and their artist friends, exploring an abandoned building, riding in a police car at 3 am...okay, so these are not exactly "usual" things. and this is not exactly the place to explain them. but let me say that the new la casona (concert venue par excellence) is way better than the old la casona, whatever i might've said about that old one, with its diminutive charming garden and monastery mural and such. i mean, the old one was navigable and inviting, but the new one is cavernous and half-boarded up and mysterious, full of urbanized grottoes (read: holes in the wall made by bulldozers) and dust and collapsed/collapsing eaves and such. quite the place. it looks like the setting for some sort of video game. already some artists have come in and painted up the joint with the sort of décor that my friend E suggested was "churlish" (not his word, but the same sentiment), and some others have begun to fill the grottoes with dungeon-looking implements and couches for necking and the like. anyhow, it's an excellent space. you can still see the teller's area (it used to be a bank), and i learned that 2/3 of the space will not be used as such - although there were a lot of artists there on friday trying to negotiate some gallery deal. one of them said that he was "flirting with la casona," and when i told this to the owner, she adamantly stated: "no negocios!" This was, apparently, not the time for business.

so it was really really fun. i can understand that this social scene is intimate to the point of incestuous tendencies, but hey. i'm just passing through, trying to put out feelers to plant roots next year while i continue my fieldwork. and it's great that the cultural scene is so varied - among the people in attendance on the new casona's inaugural night was the daughter of SAMAAP president enrique sanchez, among others who i could name but for now am not going to. maybe later. entonces, pues...there are also a lot of chileans here, many of whom came as political prisoners when Omar Torrijos opened the door to those fleeing Pinochet's dictadura. they have a sort of strong flock, and though some of them espouse racist/racialist attitudes about panamanians (preferring to date other chileans, say), others seem to mingle quite a lot with certain components of the population here. so that's an interesting thing.

then today i went to the xxxi feria nacional de artesanías, the huge annual crafts fair. i admit that i'm not much into crafts, because of the many complicated and problematic issues that bubble up once the surface is scratched (cults of authenticity, the "local"/consumer-oriented regionalism, indigeneity, cultural traditionalism, the naivete of the colonizer, "going native," the colonizer as the most ardent preserver of the art of the colonized, definitions of art vs. ritual or everyday objects, the consumption/production factor, mystified means of production, the history of "folklore" as subsumed in conquest, violence, slavery, and rape; oh god, i could go on), but i decided to go and put aside my academicism for once. and it turned out to be sort of colorful and fun: young children in polleras and montunos and the very strange flipped-up sombrera típica...lots of accordion and hand-worked lace and spanish carryovers and imported stuff from china posing as folk art. it was a pastiche, in other words, and the scores of people thronging the place seemed rather entertained, and so was i. and i did buy some small things to "bring back," as they say, and overall i was feeling pretty okay with it until i stumbled upon the human zoo. aaaaagh! there were these half-naked indigenous women slowly making emberá baskets, or pretending to, and looking decorative inside of this sort of faux-jungle atmosphere. tourists took photos. it was the couple in the cage! aaagh. i also took photos for purposes of documenting the ridiculousness and the kitsch of it, but i felt sort of bad about it, seeing as how these were real people's souls i was stealing. the women seemed pretty cool with the whole setup. it was just one of those ethical dilemmas where no amount of moralizing will extricate us. on the way there, i chatted with a friendly taxi driver as we passed a giant megalopolis mall - and i thought about how the developers of such monstrous paean to consumerism probably rationalized it away by noting that "the people liked/wanted it." some marxists might come in and say, "but this is the alienation of labor! surplus value, etc!" but if this kind of institution was taken away, hundreds of shopgirls would lament its demise, having nowhere to spend their meager earnings on the weekends. and should we chalk this up to false consciousness?

okay, this was not supposed to be my academic blog, but this particular post is a little cerebral. sorry, guys! i should also report that i did two very rich and full interviews last week - one with an afro-panamanian author/historian who worked in the canal zone and undertook this exhaustive chronicle of west indians in panama, going through decades of chronology and biographies and the like. very fine-grained and interesting, the work of what E might call, after gramsci, an "organic intellectual." i'm still not too comfortable with that term, but hey. this guy, who will remain anonymous for now, is apparently part of a crypto-jew messianic cult, and he wants me to take part in the shabbat festivities next week. uh, okay.

the second interview was with a theatre director who i know somewhat well, and it was one of those "tip of the iceberg" things that require more in-depth study. sometimes an interview delivers such a huge amount of information that it demands several subsequent rounds of review and sifting through the words to the thoughts and arguments. if i were to spatialize this, i'd say that an interview is a very horizontal thing: everything gets laid out with different weights assigned by the speaker, which the listener may or may not take into account (posing its own ethical problems and issues of "mining" the tale). so you have this landscape of facts, opinions, references, interpretations, etc., and it's up to you then to put it in some kind of workable order for your purposes of retelling. so from the horizontal, you have to take it like some sort of glutinous agent and spin it out into these vertical bands of x, y, and z. it's like making spaghetti or something. all this flour that needs to be differentiated into strands, which are then eventually cooked and intertwined in various ways, speared on the reader's fork.

anyhow, so those were good. i'm still in the process of going through the material, trying to hone in on the information that i'm seeking - but really enjoying the act of just transcribing all of the narrative and seeing where it leads in novelistic style. interviews: what a process! such wunderbar things can be turned up in the tilling of that soil. you just never know who's going to explode into storytelling like some kind of amazing cabinet of curiosities opening inside their chests, spilling out all its collected refuse. it's like a sort of blossoming, or a geyser - people just burst into these active processes of memory-recall, with all the exigencies and embroideries...really a fascinating enterprise.

okay, last thing: this is somewhat unrelated, but i found this new york times article fascinating and extremely sad. there are so many things going on here: the failure of health care in the US, the failure of health care in other countries, our tension between the need to be delicate and respect other countries' institutions and our brute, scientistic knowledge of the superiority of US health care; immigration laws and the inhumane ways that people are labeled "illegal" and "alien," often both at once; the fact that the central figure here was nearly killed in a car accident involving a drunken, maleficent US citizen; and in addition to this, the fact that the patient was lonely and missed his family back home, so that when returned to Guatemala he seemed happier but would likely not live as long. i appreciate that rather than wrapping up with a nice little tied-knot solution or some sort of catchy final word, as many periodical articles are wont to do (and the nytimes is very guilty of this annoying marketing tack), the article sort of lays it all out in this solemn and respectful way without mucking it up by proposing a solution, identifying the way forward, or any of this. it's more of an unearthing or explication of a helix of problems and issues that are resulting in the deportation of people treated like animals. it's one of those morasses so deep and longstanding* that there seems to be little way out short of complete overhauls of several institutions regarding health and the borderlands.

at issue here also is US collective dismissal of the sick, elderly, and less-useful human fodder that often wanders to the wayside and, to differing degrees, accepts or fights the labels affixed to it. this is also an example of how publicity does not balance the scales, you know? or bring the "margins" into the "center." a million people can read this article and feel outraged and saddened, but how will this change the legal practices surrounding immigration and health care? which must change first, our ruthless eugenics-happy american zeitgeist or the legal structures that dictate where people fall within these rubrics of "valuable" and not?

and related to this, the number of people with HIV has been drastically underreported/underassessed. obviously! hello, people. this indicates that we still have not truly addressed the problem of "bodies that matter." the current administration is much more at ease with the idea that africans suffer from HIV because of lack of information and resources than it is with the fact that US queers and people of color - and queers of color! remember those? - exist and need support and resources as well. i second henry waxman in opining that AIDS discourse remains saturated with moralizing and ideology, in part because of its connections with sex and, in some cases, alternative sexualities and living arrangements, differing/"deviant" bodies and family structures. ehh, okay. inchoate rant!

so okay, to return to "real-time:" after all this, i went home and ate some eggplant with tomato and basil procured from the giant wholesale market - fresh basil that, when torn, left a complicated perfume on my fingertips. and this is where things stand at the moment.

*one thing that i missed from this article was a sense of the historicity of hospitals' errant deportation of ill undocumenteds. i have a feeling that we've been throwing the near-dead bodies of migrant workers over the border for as long as the US has existed. some of this might have enriched the discussion of how systematic an issue this is, though i was convinced by the article that it's happening all the time. ugh, ghastly.