Let’s start with my nearest and dearest,

brownfemipower on Domestic Violence in the Movies.  As usual, her insights blew me away. A snippet,

Women have the right to complete stories–They have the right to not be fragmented into the old and the new–they have the right to have the fragments of their lives joined back together into a healthy whole that will continue to grow. They have the right to be loved by those in their past, those with them now, those who they may some day get to know.

They deserve to heal and grow wrapped in the arms of a loving, supportive and also healing community. They deserve to celebrate their healing through dancing and singing and collective laughter and clapping.

Film can be incredibly depressing and problematic on many levels. But there’s a reason I love it anyway. Film allows us the space to imagine things we never thought possible. It has the ability to act as a conduit for a greater message.

And sometimes–sometimes, we are lucky to hear the ’something’ that needs to be heard just as it is being spoken: maybe, sometimes, the answer is not a new song, but an old song sung by all of us together on our own terms in our own way.

At the MidEast Connect, about Brahm Ahmadi on the accessibility of healthy eating. Ahmadi is the founder and Executive Director of People’s Grocery, which works in West Oakland, developing a socially just, self-sustaining and sustainable food system in the inner city.  They believe that eating healthy should be for everyone, regardless of income. Truly revolutionary, as far as I am concerned. Eating healthy was also a subject of discussion over at bfp’s- see comments on A small post. (which is of course, nothing like a small post!!! and highly recommended reading in and of itself). I have a post brewing about eating healthy, social justice, the impossibility of eating healthy (aka organic or the like) while poor, the environment, the corporatization of our food supply, organic or not, etc. One of these days all my disparate thoughts will cohere into something that makes sense. maybe.

In that vein, Richard Heinberg‘s Museletter, on oil and our food system. (h/t Groovy Green).  Among other things, he discusses the link between rising – ballooning – costs of food and the so-called biofuel,

One factor influencing food prices arises from the increasing incentives for farmers worldwide to grow biofuel crops rather than food crops. Ethanol and biodiesel can be produced from a variety of crops including maize, soy, rapeseed, sunflower, cassava, sugar cane, palm, and jatropha. As the price of oil rises, many farmers are finding that they can produce more income from their efforts by growing these crops and selling them to a biofuels plant, than by growing food crops either for their local community or for export.

Already nearly 20 percent of the US maize crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates. Last year US farmers grew 14 million tons of maize for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of corn. Both Congress and the White House favor expanding ethanol production even further – to replace 20 percent of gasoline demand by 2017 – in an effort to promote energy security by reducing reliance on oil imports. Other nations including Britain are mandating increased biofuel production or imports as a way of reducing carbon emissions, though most analyses show that the actual net reduction in CO2 will be minor or nonexistent.¹⁴

The US is responsible for 70 percent of world maize exports, and countries such as Mexico, Japan, and Egypt that depend on American corn farmers use maize both as food for people and feed for animals. The ballooning of the US ethanol industry is therefore impacting food availability in other nations both directly and indirectly, raising the price for tortillas in Mexico and disrupting the livestock and poultry industries in Europe and Africa.

Casaubon’s Book had an interesting response to the above article in Strategizing on the Transition to Organic Agriculture. I particularly liked,

“Top down strategies must be concurrent with and redundant to bottom up strategies” What does this mean? Well, I don’t happen to trust my government to act in my interests. So while I support top down strategies, I believe that the top down strategies we advocate should be built upon bottom up strategies, created by the people.

Phantom Scribbler on transforming Hanukah celebrations within her family in Oh Hanukkah. She sucks you right in from the beginning,

When I was growing up, each year had a predictable shape and weight, a center of gravity, a point to which it seemed to bend towards irresistibly: Hanukkah.

At Anti-Racist Parent, Deesha Philyaw introduces herself, on why she likes to talk about race. Here’s a bit,

Race is everything, and nothing. Nothing because race is a mere social construct (more or less, depending on which molecular biologists and geneticists you talk to); everything because we live in a world where children’s picture books with titles like Grandpa, Is Everything Black Bad? are necessary.

I like to talk about race because to talk about race is to talk about justice…and to talk about justice is to talk about what is right and fair for humanity…so to talk about race is to talk about what it means to be human, and how we should treat each other, on micro and macro levels, as human beings. How then, can truly progressive people not talk about race?

 

Finally, for your virtual eating pleasure, I give you Ilva at Lucullian Delights’ Rice Apple. Divine? I think so. I am going to make some with the left-over apples we have from our apple picking extravagance.

Update: and if you are *still* confused, head over to feministe (one of the bigger feminist blogs) and read the thread on kactus’ first post as a co-blogger there, in which she posted the video.

See, every one makes mistakes

Pero, who owns up to their mistakes

And who has to take on the mistakes of every last one

Who is to blame when white women

Just don’t get it

Who is to blame when colored women

Just don’t get it

Why is the answer to those two

the same

Who gets to stand up for every woman!, uh, everywhere!

And who has to be bitter and jealous and whiny

Who knows that the answer to those two

is different

Who gets to cry about being muzzled

And who is actually muzzled

Any guesses?

Before you assume

Before you blather on about nothing you know

Try listening

Try admitting you might be wrong,
mistaken

*My spanish is pretty crap, that’s okay with me. Hopefully those for whom I wrote this little poem (trying to step outside my own comfortable space) know what I mean. This post may not make any sense to many of you, if you are not familiar with various critiques of white feminist blogs by WOC bloggers and the ensuing crap raining down. If you don’t know what I’m talking about in the poem?- Not to be mean? But it doesn’t really matter if you don’t understand this.

In a post-script about the movie Bordertown, Castillo says,

A more provocative story about the Border today might be called:  When the $3 an Hour Jobs Closed Down and Headed to China Where They Could Pay Desperately Poor Women There Even Less, Also with No Regard for Their Health or Safety and Still Charge the American Middle Class Allegedly Under Seige by Immigrants Taking Labor Jobs in US the Same as They Would if US citizens w/ Unions and with Mandatory Testing for the Safety of the Products Were Producing the Goods and All the Maquila Bosses from Mayordomos to the Presidents, their families and CEOs Went Wee-Wee-Wee All the Way to the Bank.

Key: bold for movies I’ve seen, red for movies I’m never going to see (by virtue of Mel Gibson-ness, Dickens-ness, war or violence which I just.cannot.take), underlined for movies that I was dragged to see, *for movies I saw in school, italics for movies I might like to see, purple for movies that made me cry a river, green for I’ve read the book (or, at least, the book that the movie was based on).

2006 The Departed
2005 Crash
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002 Chicago
2001 A Beautiful Mind
2000 Gladiator
1999 American Beauty
1998 Shakespeare in Love
1997 Titanic
1996 The English Patient
1995 Braveheart
1994 Forrest Gump
1993 Schindler’s List
1992 Unforgiven
1991 Silence of the Lambs
1990 Dances with Wolves
1989 Driving Miss Daisy
1988 Rain Man
1987 The Last Emperor
1986 Platoon
1985 Out of Africa
1984 Amadeus
1983 Terms of Endearment
1982 Gandhi
1981 Chariots of Fire
1980 Ordinary People*
1979 Kramer Vs. Kramer
1978 The Deer Hunter
1977 Annie Hall
1976 Rocky
1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1974 The Godfather Part II
1973 The Sting
1972 The Godfather
1971 The French Connection
1970 Patton
1969 Midnight Cowboy
1968 Oliver!
1967 In the Heat of the Night
1966 A Man for All Seasons
1965 The Sound of Music
1964 My Fair Lady
1963 Tom Jones
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1961 West Side Story
1960 The Apartment
1959 Ben-Hur*
1958 Gigi
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai
1956 Around the World in 80 Days
1955 Marty
1954 On the Waterfront
1953 From Here to Eternity
1952 The Greatest Show on Earth
1951 An American in Paris
1950 All About Eve
1949 All the King’s Men
1948 Hamlet*
1947 Gentleman’s Agreement
1946 The Best Years of Our Lives
1945 The Lost Weekend
1944 Going My Way
1943 Casablanca
1942 Mrs. Miniver
1941 How Green Was My Valley
1940 Rebecca
1939 Gone With the Wind
1938 You Can’t Take It With You
1937 The Life of Emile Zola
1936 The Great Ziegfeld
1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1934 It Happened One Night
1933 Cavalcade
1932 Grand Hotel
1931 Cimarron
1930 All Quiet on the Western Front
1929 The Broadway Melody
1928 Sunrise
1927 Wings

Surely only interesting to me notes:

A lot of these movies, especially those prior 1987 (and obviously those pre-1973!) I did not see in the theatre. One glaring exception is The Chariots of Fire. Which I distinctly remember seeing at a movie theatre in Tucson at the ripe old age of 7 or 8 (depending on when it came out). I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand 90% of the movie. But when you hear a song like that one at that early in your life you are completely and utterly stuck with it forever. Not that this is a bad thing. I’m not sure what Mami Deer was really thinking, taking us to this. We also saw On Golden Pond that year in the theatre, another movie I’m pretty sure went over my head. Probably it was a good way to get us to sit quietly – more or less – for an hour or two. Maybe Bear and I were particularly obnoxious that year and she just needed a little relative quiet and company of adults, even if only on the screen.

1985′s winner was Out of Africa. I remember my father denouncing the Academy as a bunch of racists because The Color Purple did not win any (major?) awards that year. He vowed never again to watch or pay any attention whatsoever the Oscars. As far as I know, he stuck to this. Then again, he only lived two more years so maybe that wasn’t so hard! :) I wasn’t allowed to see The Color Purple (or read the book, but I did that anyway) on account of the fact – I think – that Mami Deer didn’t want me to know about rape.

It’s shocking to me that I saw Silence of the Lambs. My friend Faith dragged me to it one Father-Daughter Weekend, which was this horrible weekend that our Catholic, all-girls boarding school indulged itself in for god knows what reason (well the reason was to RAISE $$$ but as far as I was concerned the reason was to make me feel miserable, what can I say I was a teenager and actually, even if I’d had a father, I still would have hated it). We were both Father-less but her stand-in father, our Catholic Dogma teacher, agreed to take us to it, which she had already seen and insisted I *had* to see. I’ve never been so horrified and frightened. And did I mention that I saw it with my Catholic Dogma teahcer?! I mean, he was a pretty cool guy, but still.

Ben Kingsley will always be Gandhi in my mind, every time I see him in something else I’m like, “oh, there’s Gandhi.” The sad thing is that he looks more like Gandhi to me, than, you know, the actual man. That’s pretty awful; I hate it when (pop?) culture invades my sense of reality that way. But actually, I guess my sense of reality is fairly permeable. For example, every once in awhile I find myself using Harry Potter/Rowling made up words. That’s just embarrassing!

When I was a young I adored My Fair Lady. I saw it again some time in the late 80s / early 90s and almost passed out, it is so sexist and misogynistic.  Oddly enough, I was never very comfortable with Gigi and recognized what a fucked up world view it presents (starting from the “Little Girls…” song, right on through).

A lot of the movies that I absolutely will not see (Patton, Platoon, The Deer Hunter) were my brother Bear’s favorite movies as a kid. I remember a very big fight with our parents over whether he could rent The Deer Hunter. He liked guns and war. Now, being a totally different person, he only likes comedies or light-hearted romances where no one dies or is paralyzed or anything else vaguely traumatic – Mami Deer accidentally rented Muriel’s Wedding for the two of them to watch, just after he broke off an engagement, I’m not sure he’s forgiven her yet.

I saw One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest in college, as part the college’s film series. It totally rocked my world. As far as I am concerned Jack Nicholson could have quit after that movie (and save us from OCD not so funniness).

I will never ever see The Godfather (any of them) so don’t even try to convince me that I should.

I mean, really, what are you physicists doing with your days and nights? (Obviously if you are reading this blog, you are NOT working on this issue right now! Get back to work!!! heh)

We went to Mami Deer’s. But it is always potluck. So everyone cooks. Also at Mami Deer’s was Bear (my brother) and Giggly Girl and Giggly Girl’s sister. As well as five dogs, four of them pugs. It was fine. Bear and I practiced being ducks – i.e., any remarks that might be construed as criticism slid off our backs like water off a duck. This mostly worked. The conversation over the meal consisted of praising all the food which was all ridiculously good. We tried to avoid saying how much butter, eggs, and/or cream went into our individual dishes, suffice to say that we should have our own dairy to save money. And it’s a good thing this dinner happens 1x a year otherwise one of us would have to become a cardiac surgeon, also to save money and well, lives. Everyone picked a prayer to read from ones Mami Deer had chosen. I left “Lord” and “Amen” out of mine. The sqvirrel got one by Robert Burns which he did in accent. There was the semi-annual holiday fight between Bear’s husky mix and one of Mami Deer’s older pug, and lots of screaming and yelling ensued by the humans. We played VisualEyes and Catchphrase. And there was lots of laughing.

2. Main course: If it was the turkey, the whole turkey, and nothing but the turkey, was it prepared in an unusual way? Or did you throw tradition to the winds and do something different?

Snacks to start– dried (local) apples, baked brie with pecans

Main course: Turkey (brine & herb roasted by me; 1 stick butter), stuffing (by Mami Deer; 1 stick butter), mashed potatoes (by Bear; unknown but large amt. of butter, half-pint of heavy cream), sweet potato souffle (Mami Deer; 6 eggs, 1.5 sticks butter), brussel sprouts (braised, by Giggly Girl; 1/2 stick butter), cranberry sauce (whole berry by me), orange-cranberry relish (by the sqvirrel), gravy (Giggly Girl).

Dessert: Pumpkin pie (totally homemade from scratch- local pumpkins and lard-butter crust, by the sqvirrel; 1.5 cup heavy cream, 2 eggs in pie filling; 3/4 cup lard, 3 tbs. butter in crust plus whipped cream on top), pumpkin pie topped by hot brandy sauce (by the sqvirrel; butter in this too), apple pie (by the sqvirrel; lard and butter in crust), vanilla ice cream for some, with apple pie.

3. Other than the meal, do you have any Thanksgiving customs that you observe every year?

We play games.

4. The day after Thanksgiving is considered a major Christmas shopping day by most US retailers. Do you go out bargain hunting and shop ‘till you drop, or do you stay indoors with the blinds closed? Or something in between?

I don’t go to malls normally. They depress me horribly and I can only be in one for about 15 minutes before I totally freak out. So the idea that I would go shopping TODAY is quite ludicrous. Instead, we went to the next most crowded place in town– to the Walker Art Gallery to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Despite the mass of people, it was AWESOME. I just finished her biography, by Hayden Herrera, and Frida by Frida (letters, notes, writings), both of which I thoroughly enjoyed and which made my visit that much more informed. Frida was a complicated, many-faceted, fascinating person and an extraordinary artist. Her paintings I found tragic, funny, thoughtful, deeply emotional, macabre, witty, ironic, personal, universal….. I’ll have to go back again, maybe when there are less people. If this exhibition is coming near you (only Philadelphia and San Francisco), GO!

5. Let the HOLIDAY SEASON commence! When will your Christmas decorations go up?

I don’t really do indoor decorations. Outdoor christmas lights will go up when it’s a little bit warmer (today’s high was like 34 F). Need to have use of hands not frozen. And full use of lungs and vocal chords for yelling and swearing. I’m thinking of buying some LED lights to replace some incandescent xmas lights….

• Calling people illegal. Can we just STOP. Just stop. Humans are not illegal. (Should you need an example of what illegal *should* be, just look at what Bush/Cheney does on any given day in office.) It sickens, pains, disgusts me how often this word is said. It has looooooooooooong (i.e., before the current debate) been the word of choice of right wing types who somehow think that the US should be all-white, all-the-time. But lately a lot of liberal/progressive types seem to think it’s just fine to use this word to describe immigrants. Stop.

• Calling for a need to “secure” the border. Because there are terrorists fleeing through, for example, the Sonoran Desert into Pima County, AZ (by the way, that’s the land of my birth). Oh no, wait, that would be latinoamericanos, dying as they cross the Sonoran Desert (or the mountains, or Rio Grande, not to mention the hands of coyotes, the guns of the migra and those pinchado MinuteMen). [cue sarcasm, again] But MAYBE there are evil Iraqis that are using the Mexico border to cross into the US and into an “unidentified Indian reservation” And since Mexicans, Iraqis, and Indians are all brown, who can tell the difference? [/sarcasm]. But aside from those of us who have lived that border, and in whose historical memories live the creation of a border that crossed our land and other people who GET that this idea is racism masked as national “security,” a lot of politicians all over the country…like in Iowa and Wisconsin and shit…seem to think that securing the border with Mexico (odd how Canada gets mentioned only very rarely, wait, it’s not odd, it’s just that those people that live up there…they are white) is a really.really.important.issue. Anyone who buys into this argument has allowed right wing, seriously conservative, racist, hate-mongers to dictate their fear.

• Pitting people of color against each other. The conventional wisdom is that Black Americans are worried that (brown) immigrants will “take” their jobs (never mind the totally obnoxious, racist, “Mexicans are dirty people” idea that Mexicans/Latinoamericano immigrants do jobs that white people “won’t do” or that are “beneath” them and never mind the cases where Blacks and Latinos are linked together as forces that degrade our [white] communities). But actually Latina Lista talks about a new survey that shows this just isn’t the case.

• And actually, that’s all, for TODAY. Because seriously, there’s only so much I can take on a minute by minute basis.

For an antidote to all this total BS, please read…

Black Amazon’s Let the holiday season begin. Because mi ‘mana tells it.

Brownfemipower’s feeling like a macho man. Because she writes as if from my heart, in a way I can never seem to do. Thank god she speaks and loudly and always asks if we are willing to look the other way.

Power of Community’s Video testimonials from people in Wisconsin (see, Wisconsin isn’t homogeneous in its beliefs or color!) regarding immigration and immigrant rights.

• turtlebella once played rugby by herself. She went undefeated.
• turtlebella can drown a fish.
• When God said, “let there be light”, turtlebella said, “say ‘please’.”
• turtlebella got a perfect score on her SAT’s, simply by writing turtlebella for every answer.
• turtlebella was once charged with attempted murdered in Boulder County, but the Judge quickly dropped the charges, because turtlebella does not “attempt” murder.
• turtlebella once sued the Houghton-Mifflin textbook company when it became apparent that their account of the war of 1812 was plagiarized from her autobiography.
• Count from one to ten. That’s how long it would take turtlebella to kill you…Forty seven times.
• Rules of fighting: 1) Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. 2) Don’t bring a gun to a turtlebella fight.
• turtlebella let the dogs out.
• Lightning never strikes twice in one place because turtlebella is looking for it.

Get your own funny(?), random facts here.

[via Jane Dark]

There are two main reasons I (and many other people) don’t like it, one serious and one kind of goofy.

1. Hispanic is generally a term coined from outside the community. That is, by Anglo/Euro-Americans/white people in an attempt to categorize, codify a large, diverse block of people from Latin America, South America, Caribbean countries. The US government in all its (not) wisdom uses “Hispanic.” (See below the break for some stuff from the US Census Bureau that indicates how much the goverment flails around issues of race and ethnicity when it comes to Latin@s)  And “Hispanic” associates us with Spain rather than with indigenous people or other European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries.   “Hispanic” ignores those who speak something other than Spanish (be it Nahuatl or any number of indigenous dialects and languages or French  or Portuguese or whatever).  So “Hispanic” willfully ignores a lot of complexity within a people who are more often than not mestizo (literally, mixed)– all kinds of blood flows through our veins and to limit it to European and primarily the Spanish is offensive and ethnocentric.  The problem is that by identifying as Hispanic we allow our sometime and often current oppressors to identify us.

2. I am not ‘his’ panic (or anyone else’s panic). This play on words acknowledges the extent to which the dominant (white) culture is afraid of brown people themselves and particularly a politicized brown people.

What’s the alternative? Well, this kind of depends on each individual. I usually identify as Chicana. Or Latina.  Which is separate and different from saying I’m Mexican-American, which I used to say and which indicates nationality while they other terms are more political in nature.  Some people identify as Xican@. Lots of folks say they are Latin@. (using the @ is snazzy no? replaces what we used to do– o/a or the sexist but probably linguistically appropriate practice of just saying Latino).  Some say La Raza. Some break it down to nationality- Dominican, Puertoriqueño, etc. There’s no easy answer. But then, identity is not something that is easy nor should it be easily categorized.
Finally, I will note that there are PLENTY of Latino people who do not agree with this viewpoint.  And then there is the case of New Mexico, which is totally unique as far as I can tell.  In New Mexico there are still lots of people who consider themselves descended from Spanish settlers in Mexico. (As strictly an aside, but a very interesting one, relatively recently there has been lots of news about how DNA techniques have revealed that some Hispanic families have a Jewish heritage.  For many families this was a revelation- they knew that they had family traditions which didn’t match their Catholic religion but they had, over generations, lost track of the fact that these traditions were Jewish rituals.  Some people still maintained a Jewish identity.  Basically, the idea is that Sephardic Jews moved to New Mexico, which was on the fringe of the Spanish empire, to escape prosecution  see this article for more debate about this).  These people often self-identify as Hispanic, as literally being descended from the Spanish and consider themselves separate from more recent waves of immigrants from Latin American countries. I don’t *think* that they would argue that they are “pure” blood Spanish- but then again there’s plenty of bias within any Latino community towards “white” features and so I’m sure it’s there too. And that’s about the limit of my knowledge about New Mexico and “Hispanic.”

From the US Census on historical race/ethnicity categories, [hat tip to liza at Culture Kitchen]

In the 1930 census only, there was a separate race category for Mexican. This population corresponded closely to the population of Mexican ancestry who were born in Mexico or to parents born in Mexico. The 1930 census reports included estimates of the Mexican population for 1910 and 1920 based largely on data on place of birth. The race category of Mexican was eliminated in 1940, and 1930 race data were revised to include the Mexican population with the White population.

The 1940 census was the first to include tabulations on the White population of Spanish mother tongue. In previous censuses, published data on mother tongue had been limited to the White population of foreign stock (i.e., individuals who were foreign born or who were native of foreign or mixed parentage). There were relatively few individuals of Spanish mother tongue who were races other than White,³ and thus to the extent that Spanish mother tongue was a good indicator of the Hispanic population, 1940 census data provide a rough indicator of the size of the Hispanic origin population in 1940.⁴ Based on the relative sizes of the population of Spanish mother tongue and of Hispanic origin in 1970, 1940 census data on Spanish mother tongue appear to represent a somewhat low estimate of the population of Hispanic origin,⁵ but are included in this report in the absence of any other census data on the size of the total Hispanic origin population until 1970.

***

The history of census data on Hispanic origin (which is identified as an ethnic origin rather than as a race in federal statistics) is quite different from the history of census data on race. While there were various indicators of portions of the Hispanic origin population, including data on mother tongue, data on the population with Spanish surname, and the designation of Mexican as a race in the 1930 census, the first attempt to identify the entire Hispanic origin population was in 1970.

The Hispanic origin population of the United States was defined three different ways in 1970 census reports, the first and second based on 15-percent sample data and the third based on 5-percent sample data: (1) as the Spanish language population (the population of Spanish mother tongue plus all other individuals in families in which the head or wife reported Spanish mother tongue); (2) as the Spanish heritage population (the population of Spanish language and/or Spanish surname in the five Southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, the population of Puerto Rican birth or parentage in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and the population of Spanish language elsewhere; and (3) as the population of Spanish origin or descent based on self-identification. The Spanish origin population in 1970 was overstated in some states, especially in the Midwest and South, because some respondents interpreted the questionnaire category of “Central or South American” to mean central or southern United States.

Data on Hispanic origin were collected on a 100-percent basis in 1980 and 1990, reflecting the release of Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 1977).

***

In the case of Other race, there was a dramatic population increase from 1970 to 1980. This reflected the addition of a question on Hispanic origin to the 100-percent questionnaire, an increased propensity for Hispanics not to identify themselves as White, and a change in editing procedures to accept reports of “Other race” for respondents who wrote in Hispanic entries such as Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. In 1970, such responses in the Other race category were reclassified and tabulated as White.