The power of mestizaje

As often happens, e-mails to my friends serve as drafts for the blog notes I've been putting off writing. Don Monkerud asked if we has seen the The Aztec Empire exhibit at the Guggenheim.

Yes, we have, and I 'd been meaning to put a commentary on my blog ever since we attended the symposium last Saturday. It's a very good show -- different from the one at the Royal Academy in London ( "Aztecs") organized by the same curators last year. That one was all about one great city, Tenochtitlan, and had enough space to reproduce some of the feel of the Great Plaza in its heyday, and a large-screen demonstrations of the stages of building of the Templo Mayor, the pyramid with the twin temples to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. But this show at the Met has a different emphasis and also has things that they didn't have in London. Here the focus is on the great mix and reciprocal influences of very different cultures in ancient Mexico: Mexica ("Aztec") v. Mixtec v. Zapotec, etc. They were all learning from one another, while working the borrowed ideas into their own traditions and using local (quite different) materials to create things that were quite novel. Some Mexican archaeologists are beginning to refer to pre-Hispanic forms as parts of an "international style" -- which is a sly reference to the usual meaning of that term, and a recognition that these peoples were in fact separate, and often hostile, nations. And despite their differences, they were aware of and keenly interested in each other's art and architecture.

While you're in New York, be sure to see the show at the Met on Andean textiles and silverwork of the colonial period. Fascinating syncretism of ancient Andean techniques and Spanish and even Chinese models (Spain's trade with China passed through Peru, and Andean craftsmen were quick to pick up on new ideas from anywhere -- amazing Andean versions of Chinese lions, which are themselves fabulous representations of European lions, since neither the Chinese nor the Andeans had ever seen a lion).

We also were blown away by the show China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 250-750 AD, on the same floor as the Andean show. Here you get to see how many different cultures within what is today China, and contacts with India, Iran and Europe, all produced much more dynamic forms, highly differentiated by region, than we usually imagine in China. All three shows in effect celebrate the creative energy that comes from the meetings of disparate cultures. I don't know the Chinese term, but in the Americas we call that "mestizaje."

Whitey, go home! (Kicking oneself in the shins)

In case you missed this (from WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE ON THE AMERICAS, ISSUE #768, OCTOBER 17, 2004, NICARAGUA SOLIDARITY NETWORK OF GREATER NEW YORK, 339 LAFAYETTE ST., NEW YORK, NY 10012, (212) 674-9499 :

VENEZUELA: COLUMBUS STATUE TRASHED

In Caracas, Venezuela, demonstrators pulled down a 100-year old bronze statue of Christopher Columbus and dragged it through the streets to protest the Oct. 12 commemoration of Columbus' 1492 arrival in the Americas, which they described as the start of the biggest genocide in history against the continent's indigenous peoples. Caracas police recovered the pieces of the statue and arrested five people in connection with the incident. Earlier, President Hugo Chavez Frias had presided over an official event paying homage to indigenous chief Guaicapuro for his resistance to the Spanish invaders. The leftist Venezuelan government marks Oct. 12 as a day of indigenous resistance. [La Jornada (Mexico) 10/13/04 from Reuters, AFP, DPA; El Diario-La Prensa 10/13/04 from AP] In an Oct. 14 statement read by Chavez's minister of communication and information, Andres Izarra, the government condemned the trashing of the statue. The Chavez government "decidedly and totally rejects anarchy and any action of vandalism which attacks national heritage," according to the statement. [Communication and Information Ministry (MINCI) Press Release 10/14/04 via Colombia Indymedia]

It's really too late for Guaicaipuro. Venezuela is partly Amerindian, and to a larger part African, but most of all it is Spanish. It has developed the only history it has as a nation, since the first explorers nicknamed it's lake-dwellings "Venezuela" ("Little Venice"), in Spanish. Trashing the statue can't hurt Columbus, but it can hurt Venezuelans if it means attacking part of who they are.

Derrida on film

We caught this flick last night: Derrida. It is laughably stupid, as Derrida himself obviously thought but was too polite to say. He looks perplexed, like he can't believe they are asking him such stupid questions, like "Que pensez-vous sur l'amour?" What? What about "l'amour"? Posez une question! Sometimes the interviewer can't think of any, perhaps just awed to be in the presence of the dapper little man. There are long moments of silence, as he waits for some question or thought to come from "l'autre," in this case the filmmaker, that he can grapple with. Elvis Mitchell of the NYT is quoted as saying it was "Blissful -- a delight to watch," which I guess means he wasn't paying any attention to the dialogue. (Read the whole review to see how far Elvis was in over his head -- he has no idea what Derrida was about.) Oh, well, for all its inanity, the film was still fun to watch, because little Jacques is quite charming. He was a self-declared narcissist who fussed over his long white hair and was delighted and embarrased to see his image in a portrait; he dressed in outlandish patterned suits, patterned shirts and patterned ties (all different patterns), and was especially delighted by all the attention of film crew with lights, booms, cameras, and all the rest, who followed him for months, in Paris, New York and South Africa. But he was a generous sort of narcissist, too courteous to put someone down. Except maybe in this very funny scene: A British journalist asks him if "Seinfeld" wasn't an example of deconstruction. He stares at her. She tries to explain to him what "Seinfeld" is. He frowns harder. She explains that it is a popular television comedy. At last he takes a breath and says, "If people think that a television comedy is deconstruction, they should turn off the TV and start reading." Right!

Random celebrity

After months of unavailability, I now can view the page showing number of visits to my website. Amazing. With no promotion whatever, and without even updating this weblog more than sporadically, I've been averaging 355 hits a day. That's not a lot, I know, but it's a lot more than I expected. Without making the least effort, anybody with e-mail or an Internet connection can become notorious! For a more or less grievous example, see Laurie Garrett of Newsday's very frank report on Davos and commentary by Shaun Waterman.

Personal update

My friend and fiction-writing colleague R. D. Larson asked how things were going & how our trip to Spain went, so I told her:

Spain, good. World, not so good. Get well. My little story, "From a Trolley Stop in Amsterdam," has just come out in a second Ink Pot anthology, which seems awfully nice and extravagant of them.

Busy with tasks as co-chair of our New York chapter of the National Writers Union -- we have a major event tonight. Also working to finish draft of chapters for our editor at W. W. Norton, on history of Latin American architecture & urbanism. Also, I just got a surprise note from an agent apologizing for the many months without responding and asking to see my novel -- I'm not quite ready to send it, though. I have to finish the Latin American draft first, so I can focus on making the revisions I think will make it stronger. Also, I'm writing articles on minority careers for Monster.com (supposedly two a month, but not always possible to get the interviews as quickly as needed, so there's been a gap since the last one). I also have an essay in, of all the surprising places, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Turkish Literature (I know next to nothing about Turkish literature, but I did discover a charming old manuscript about a woman poet of the 15th century, which the Journal has now published, and I wrote the intro).

Now hear this!

Legacies

The Author's Guild just sent me a request to join The Authors Legacy Society, i.e., to remember the Guild in my will. That reminds me of when I was working with the indefatigable Sandy Levinson in the Center for Cuban Studies, where she too thought legacies would be a dandy way to raise funds. But she wouldn't let me send out the follow-up letter I drafted: "Dear supporter of the Center for Cuban Studies: If you have remembered the Center in your will, have you considered the advantages of an early demise?"

I'm still working on creating another kind of legacy, in words. And I've decided against an early demise.

Recent reading

I just finished reading "the greatest international success of the Spanish novel" which is now (just since 2002) in its 39th edition. It's awful, as Spanish critics have been quick to point out. Spanish readers, however, love it. For my detailed critique (in Spanish), click on Ruiz Zafón, Carlos. La sombra del viento. Characters are one-dimensional, save one -- Fermín Romero de Torres, a marvelous comic creation -- and the spooky plot is ridiculously complicated and utterly implausible. The truly evil bad-guy and the crazy failed novelist trying to destroy his own books become less and less interesting as you get to know them, until finally you (or at least I) don't care much what happens to them. Except for the puzzle interest, which must be why the goofy mystery kept me turning the pages. Apart from Fermín and his hilarious monologues -- imagine a Catalonian Cantínflas -- the other thing I liked was the evocation of Barcelona in the early, fear-saturated years of Franco's rule. Coincidentally, Alex Cockburn's essay in the current Nation, written from Barcelona, also discusses the notorious prison-castle of Montjuic, which figures large in this novel.

Peeking out from my hedge

On Thursday I went off to hear a panel at the New School on "DEFINING THE NEW MAINSTREAM: THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF LATINOS IN AMERICA," to see old friends -- Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos and Lorraine Cortés Vázquez, both of whom I'd interviewed, and others -- and to see if there was anything new to say on the subject since my 1996 book, Hispanic Nation. Not really. Guy Garcia, author of The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer is Transforming American Business, made the same points I had eight years ago.There are now more Latinos in the US -- over 40 million, according to García -- and consequently more buying and potentially more voting power. But there still is no unified "Hispanic agenda," and not likely to be one. Hispanics biggest contribution to the U.S. culture is making our old black-white racial distinctions obsolete. Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Raul Yzaguirre were the other speakers. Yzaguirre -- a generous, plain-speaking, common-sensical man -- got a huge standing ovation when we were reminded that just that day he was retiring after 30 years as President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. Good man.

The other event was Friday, and it was truly beautiful: a graduation ceremony in a Mexican restaurant for a dozen or so workers, members of various unions (DC 37 was prominent among them), who had taken a writing course offered for free by my colleague Tim Sheard of our New York Chapter of the National Writers Union. Tim is a crime mystery novelist, nurse, and dedicated union man. The group included people whose first language was Polish, Chinese or something else, as well as several native-born Americans, all people who have stories the needed to tell, and now they have begun to tell them in well-crafted English. And they are published! Tim arranged for the printing of a little book of their collected works. It was a very happy moment for everybody.

In training to be a hedgehog

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. -- Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox

It goes completely contrary to my nature, but I am trying hard to become a hedgehog -- at least for a while. The one big thing right now is the book on the history of Latin American architecture and urbanism. Which of course is part of an even bigger thing, my career. Except, fox-like, I've never settled exactly on what my career was -- pursuing "many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle," as Berlin describes us. But I'll try to be at least a temporary hedgehog, pretending to ignore all those other many ends -- fiction-writing, news commentary, social activism, etc. -- at least for the duration, until I get this draft done. I've managed to do something like that a few times before; it never lasts, but it does get a specific job done. I may sneak out of my hedge now and then to write something on this blog -- it's hard to control myself -- but I'm going to make an effort to just let those little inspirations go.

There are those who think I already have too many animals in my editorial team. Those are the people who have forgotten to think like children. Such a shame.

Portrait of a hedgehog