El Sueño Americano

The only word in the title that might give non-Spanish speakers any difficulty is Sueño, and the poster on the left should clear that up.

This post is based on an exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.  We went because they have an excellent children's space called Noah's Ark which I've posted about before.

There was enough for four or five posts, and given I still have grandchildren around, I'm just going to focus on one and try to get this done quickly.

Here's the artist's statement.  I saved it in higher than normal resolution in hopes you could read it.

Let me highlight this paragraph:

"These confiscations struck me as wrong.  The cruelty of stripping away such personal items from vulnerable people is dehumanizing, both to those whose belongings are taken and to those who enforce the policy."

Combs and Brushes

A few things here:

• The artist, Tom Kiefer,  started this in 2007, during the 2nd Bush administration, so dehumanizing immigrants isn't something that began under Trump.
• As someone who worked at a US Border Control Facility, he noted that it dehumanized the officials who enforced these policies as well as the victims.

And people are leaving ICE.  From the Los Angeles Times in January 2019:

"In March 2017, McAleenan said Customs and Border Protection normally loses about 1,380 agents a year as agents retire, quit for better-paying jobs or move. Just filling that hole each year has strained resources."

This is from an article that is focused on recruitment:

"In a sign of the difficulties, Customs and Border Protection allocated $60.7 million to Accenture Federal Services, a management consulting firm, as part of a $297-million contract to recruit, vet and hire 7,500 border officers over five years, but the company has produced only 33 new hires so far. " [Emphasis Added]

Some Items Confiscated

A large percentage of ICE agents are Latinx according to this Pacific Standard article by Khushbu Shah.  He reports on the 100 interviews by Assistant Professor David Cortez who examined the relationships these officers have with their jobs and why do their jobs.

"Cortez has found that many of the agents he spoke with drew a distinct line between their empathy and their careers. A Latino agent in Texas recently told Cortez he is aware that he might be on the wrong side of history, but the money was too good to quit. The cities where many of the agents come from in the Rio Grande Valley are some of the poorest in the state of Texas, a state in which nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line. The starting salary, in turn, under Customs and Border Protection is nearly $56,000, well above the region's median household income of $34,000."

This is the inscription plate from a bible with notes on travel through the desert and other dates and notes.

Gloves

These are pain tablets.


It's important to remember that the oppressor is dehumanized as much as the oppressed.
And to connect a few more dots, the breaking of unions has allowed the lowering of salaries for many jobs as well as the loss of health benefits and pensions.  And these conditions make it easier to recruit people into the military and other sorts of occupations where people are dehumanized.

And today is nearly the end of 2019 and we're just seeing these images, which began in 2007, now, 12 years later.  Justice takes so much longer than the original acts of abuse and criminality.  

Lots Of Kid Time

We went to the Cayton Children's Museum in the Santa Monica Mall.  It was crowded and noisy and I'd say that museum is a pretentious name for this indoor playground.

A recently refined definition of 'museum'  from the International Councils of Museums

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.
Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

Well, that certainly sounds like a definition created by a committee.  I imagine that many of the great museums of the world wouldn't qualify as museums under that definition.  I think the intention is good, but I'd probably separate those things that have been traditionally considered the basic of a museum  "hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society" etc. as the broad definition.  Then I would have listed the aspirational democratic standards (not for profit, participatory, diverse, transparent, etc.) as qualifications for museums that want to be members of the International Council of Museums.

I didn't notice any artifacts and specimens in this museum, unless they were thinking of this as a museum of children's play spaces.  I didn't notice too much addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present.  OK, I don't want to belabor the point.

There were great net tunnels hanging from the ceiling with kids climbing through.  And other fun spaces to navigate, but it wasn't much more than a glorified playground.  I didn't see any conflicts between kids, they all seemed to have enough to keep them busy.  And there was a diverse array of people enjoying the play space.

I've got lots of pictures, but most have my grandkids in them and I don't post their images on the blog.  Here's a picture of my son and myself as rendered in some sort of electronic wall.  I'm on the left.

And the quietest room had low tables with water colors and papers.

Car seat rules make life much more difficult than it was when I was a kid.  Even when my kids were kids.  Some of us drove home and some of us took the bus which had a pretty direct route for us and the SF kids are very used to riding the bus and we had lots of fun.

The weather has been kind.  The two rainy periods this week were during the night.  It was another sunny day, though the temperature only got up into the low 50s.

Back Home To Snow And Moose

We left from the D Concourse at SEATAC which has my favorite art piece there - Michael Fajans' High Wire.  I posted about it back in 2008.  (Back then I wrote that it was in Terminal B, but it was definitely in D yesterday.  Maybe the old post was wrong.)

After a couple of gate changes, trying to get in as much of the impeachment hearings as I could, we were in the air above the clouds over Alaska.  It was late afternoon - Anchorage's official sunset yesterday was 3:48pm, but if it's not too cloudy, we have long twilights - and the orange glow was on the western horizon, while out my east facing window there were snow mountains.

And around 4:20pm it was still light enough to capture these exquisite winter scenes with only a slight blur from the long exposure time.  

And as we circled over Cook Inlet to land in Anchorage, the sunset was still painted on the western sky.  

I went out to get our passes for the Anchorage International Film Festival which begins tomorrow night and to pick up some groceries and just on 36th there was a moose crossing the road in the dark.

One of those amazing moments when out of the darkness you realize there's a magnificent

moose and there's no time to react.  Fortunately it was still in the oncoming lane as I passed.  No time to even take a picture, even if I hadn't left my phone at home.  What a great welcome home.




At my dentist this morning this moose was on the wall.  Not quite the same.  But I was sitting still and so was the moose.



















And I'm pleased to say that my studded tires worked like a charm as I rode over to the dentist and back.  I'm getting a little more confident that they aren't going to betray me.  Hoping my trust in them proves warranted.  I won't be reckless, but a little less cautious.









So, let's just leave this post as it is - on light subjects or art, travel, mountains, moose, AIFF2019, and biking in the snow.

Alaska Heritage Museum - Seal Gut Parka, Wooly Mammoth Tusk, And Other Dazzling Objects

It's not exactly hidden away, but I've never noticed a sign outside announcing it.  The Alaska Heritage Museum is inside the lobby of the, now, Wells Fargo Building.  I say 'now' because this used to be the National Bank of Alaska Building (from Alaska.org):

"Even though the art-gallery-sized space feels intimate, this is the largest private collection of its kind in Alaska.  The museum was started by the First National Bank of Alaska in 1976, as a way for the bank’s owners, the Rasmussen family, to create a space for high-quality art and artifacts largely from Alaska's native tribes, such as the Northwest Coast Indian, Athabascan, Aleut, Yupik and Inupiaq tribes."

Alaska.org also says the museum is in downtown, but I think most Anchorage folk would disagree, saying it's in midtown.  A heftier walk for tourists in downtown hotels, but still doable.

My Pecha Kucha class was in the library of the museum and after the last class, I decided to take some pictures to give folks an idea of the range of items.  By the way, the museum is free, and as the sign says, it's open Mondays through Fridays from 12 - 4 pm.  

Those are murres, not penguins, as pawns on the left.

 The sign says this is an Athabascan Chief's Coat.  The beaded coat and the seal gut parka below were the two most stunning items for me.

   

Here are assorted SE Alaska items.











Mike Healy is an interesting Alaskan character - an important sea captain of the north as the story says.  All the while, it seems one of his major attractions to historians, is the notion that he 'passed for white" although his mother was a "light skinned" slave.  Of course, that sort of characterization reminds us that for the dominant culture, if you have 'a drop of black blood' then you are black.  Even though most of your heritage is white and no one suspects you aren't white.

I've put this sign up twice to highlight the problems I'm having with editing on iPhoto lately - the edits don't stick when I export the photo.  I upped the contrast so it would be easier to read.  So if I'm insistent, I have to take a screen shot of the edit and use that.  Which is what I did for the version below.  But, of course, that degrades the quality in different ways.

A reminder, also, that most pictures enlarge and focus better if you click on them.

Here are some much older artifacts.  Some 2000 years old.










Even older - 12,000 to 15,000 years old - is this wooly mammoth tusk.

And much more recent are these Russian samovars.


The museum is at the corner of C Street and Northern Lights, in the Wells Fargo Building.

Tomás Is Loose In Kentucky

My Spanish friend Tomás is in his first few days in Kentucky.  He's a wicked artist, particularly when he's doing caricatures.

We met in 2010 when he left a comment on this post about Exit Glacier and we connected before he and his family returned to Spain. Here's a post with pictures of Tómas and his family and his great kids book Salfón:  El limpiodor de tejados.

His wife will be teaching science (I think)  in a Spanish language high school program in Lexington.  And I'm sure Tómas will be drawing.  In fact he sent me his first US drawing.

I did mention that while he is visiting in Kentucky, he would surely be drawing McConnell.  Let's see how his take on the senior Senator from Kentucky evolves over the year.

Meanwhile I picked up a second book on Peron at the library today - Perón and the enigmas of Argentina by Robert D. Crassweller. This one starts out trying to capture who Perón was by looking at the many long term cultural influences.  One of them is "the heritage of Castille" which he traces to 1492 when the Moors left and the Reconquest.

"That long and arduous crusade had deeply marked the Castilian character and personality.  Society was pastoral and had lived by war for centuries, disdaining lesser and demeaning pursuits such as commerce.  A powerful and authoritarian state emerged, energized by effective government.  The parliament of Castile, the Cortes, lacked the power of the purse and soon languished.  Royal power, resolutely exercised, curtailed any political role for the aristocracy, which contented itself with social privilege, and there was no significant challenge from below.
Freedom in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the world was not a product of these tendencies, but that implies neither tyranny nor misrule  All the monarchs of the age were popular and intuitively sensitive to public moods and aspirations.  Thus royal authority was willingly accepted and viewed as consistent with freedom and liberty.  Absolutism, tied to religious values, was not seen as tyranny, since individual rights and dignity were protected." (pp. 24-25)

I'm just quoting, not saying it's accurate.  It's certainly simplistic, as a short synopsis like this must be.  After all, the subjects of the religious persecution - non-Catholics, particularly Jews - didn't have their rights and dignity protected and probably would disagree.

What I found particularly interesting was a description of the Spanish state and church ruled a much different culture than that in northern Europe.

"The State had never known feudalism in the the northern European sense of a system with centers of politics power apart from, and often in opposition to, the royal authority.  There had been no Magna Carta inSpain, no warlike barons jealously and successfully protecting their local powers, no system of courts enforcing laws that did not originate with the king's justice.  The Church was the Church of the Counter-Reformation, necessarily broad and pluralistic in many respects, a palace of many chambers, but nowhere in it had there been any experience in sharing of the power that was tightly consolidated in the successors of St. Peter.
Thus neither Crown nor Church could contribute to the traditions, the techniques, and the psychological attitudes that are essential for adjusting successfully the claims of competing power centers in a society containing many such.  The arts of compromise and conciliation, and the habits of mind necessary for their appreciation, were dormant and underdeveloped."(25-26)

 Again, I can't judge how accurate this is, but it seems appropriate to do a little Spanish history as I welcome Tómas and his wife to the US.  But let me do a little more.  So far he's talking about what the Spanish heritage Perón would eventually inherit didn't do well, but he goes on to talk about what it did well. He does a paragraph about the philosophy and political thought coming from Aquinas, Aristotle, and Renaissance Scholasticism, not from the social contract theory of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes.

"Rather, it was  a powerful stimulus to an organic theory of life and of the State, a theory of natural harmony in which every human and every institution had a purpose, a station, ordained and secure.  And it was also a powerful support for the prevailing Mediterranean and Iberian corporatism, defined in the broad sense of a 'sociopolitical organization that is  . . hierarchical, elitist, authoritarian, bureaucratic, Catholic, patrimonialist . . ."
"Castilian society exalted courage and honor and defined them in an exclusive and stringent code as ideals appropriate for the man of rank, the gentleman, the hidalgo.  For such a man and such an ideal ". . . work did not redeem and had no value in itself.  Manual work was servile.  There was little or no interest in science and its fluid experimentation, or in technology and technique in general, or in any kind of economic activity.  The superior man neither worked nor traded:  he made war, he commanded, he legislated.  He also thought, contemplated, loved, wooed, and enjoyed himself.  Leisure was noble." (26)

While it may seem I've taken quite a bit from Crassweller, he would probably say I left out the most important parts.  And this is only one of the cultural heritages he's telling us we need to understand if we are going to get a good sense of Perón.  Another will be the creole heritage.  I like the idea of going back like this to find influences on Perón, but I also realize it's a risky act.  Is he going back and finding things in Spanish culture that manifest themselves in Perón, leaving out much that is not 'Perón"?  I can't judge.  Maybe Tómas will be the best evaluator of this cut and paste Spanish heritage.


[Kathy, for some reason my brain says you're in Louisville, which isn't that far, but not that close either.  Am I right?]

Buenos Aires Tour With Small Start Up

Our host when we first came to Buenos Aires, Carolina, and her friend Belen have a small business for helping people who visit Buenos Aires and Argentina.  I wouldn’t call it a travel agency or a tour company - it’s more personal than that.  It’s like having a friend in Buenos Aires who will do what is necessary to help you make your trip perfect - even if you don’t even know what you want to do.  

And when we left Buenos Aires a couple of weeks ago, we agreed on a tour of some places we’d missed earlier.  

For yesterday’s tour we jumped into the car and drove to La Boca, one of the oldest parts of Buenos Aires.  

La Boca is the home of La Bombonera stadium, the home of Buenos Aires’ football (soccer) team - Boca Juniors.  This was, and still is, a poor neighborhood.  Lots of port workers lived and worked here.          

 These are low rise living space  compared to the more affluent neighborhoods.  This was the neighborhood that the tango was created in the brothels.






 



And this is part of the famous stadium.  Part of the scoreboard is on the upper right.

And you can see the shape of the stadium better here on the left.  There’s a line for people waiting to tour the museum and stadium.  

There are also lots of tourist shops here.  

Then we walked down to the key streets that lure tourists to La Boca and to the museum created by the famous artist Benito Quelquena Martìn.  

This sign was pointed out as an example of the kind of script that dominated this area in the past.  And then I started noticing it everywhere.

 This one below shows the building above in the past.  The date on it says 1959.  Well before it became a tourist destination.   The picture was in the artist Martín’s museum

    

Martin’s home is at the top of the museum with great views of the port - where he did a lot of his paintings - as well as of Buenos Aires. 

  

These two photos go together.  They’re from the roof of the museum and show the area.  (You can see the colorful  narrow house in the upper right of the picture above and then going to the left of the picture you get to the port.  That loop in the water is made up of recycled plastic bottles and is being used for some sort of water recovery program, but I didn’t get the details.  There are some water plants growing on the right side.

Benito Quinquela Martin is in this picture - I assumed he’s the one on the left.  The picture is from 1909.

And below is one of his pictures of workers in the port.  First a close-up, and then you can see the whole picture below it.   You can learn more about him at this Wikipedia page.  He was an orphan and adopted when he was 8.

 

I was going crazy with my camera - everything was begging to be photographed.  

I  think this is getting to be a very long post, so I’ll end here and  break up the day into two posts.  But here’s a link to ChoiceBuenosAires - the website Carolina and Belin are working on to help publicize their business.  As you can see, it’s a work in progress still.  But we can vouch for these two women’s ability help visitors to Buenos Aires make the best use of their time here.  

Santiago Murals And Other Street Art

We flew to Mendoza last night and then to Cordoba this morning.  Airbnb got us a two bedroom apartment (condo?) on the 8th floor with a balcony that’s been in the warm (about 70˚F) (I know, Anchorage that’s cool to you this week, but it’s winter here and after Santiago and Mendoza, this is warm) sun.

We also learned today that I misled you.  The SUBE card which I thought was good all over Argentina for public buses (collectivos) is NOT good in Cordova.  We had to buy a REDBUS card here.  The SUBE was good in Buenos Aires and San Juan.  A Dazzler posts mentions a SUBE is good in 12 other provinces (besides Buenos Aires.)

But this post is about street art - particularly murals in Santiago.  We were only in a small part of the city so this is just a sample by someone who doesn’t know all that much about the topic.  
 

       
   

 
OK, the one above isn’t ‘street’ art.  We went to a Turner exhibit on loan from the Tate at t he Moneda Cultural Center.  It slipped in so I’ll just leave it here.

 

These next photos are on Bandera Street, one of a number of downtown steets that are pedestrian only.  You can read this report on how it became a street of public art.

And then there are these other forms of art.

I’m guessing that this last one is a memorial of some sort, though it looks like it’s been a while.