Bamboo roll-up shade tying itself in a knot. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Knotty opine

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

MIMBRES, N.M. – Why is it that necklaces, bamboo roll-up shades, and extension cords tie themselves up in knots without any help, and intentional knots are so difficult to learn? Since I started making jewelry, I have tried several pendants that are more masculine, or at least earthy, and I wanted to use leather cords rather than metal chains to complete them.  First I took a lesson from Roberto Santos when I made pendants for the drum circle guys. He taught me one way to make the knots so the laces slid up and down to adjust in length. I could do it right then, but I couldn’t do it a few days later when I was working on something else. Next, I took my problem to a luncheon at the Sociology and Anthropology department at UTEP.

Lucia Durá speaks about nurturing habits of the eye to see the beauty of the pigeon. (Moushumi Biswas/Social Justice Initiative)

Just Story Hour features creative deviance

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Just change: media, stories, and actions

By Moushumi Biswas

EL PASO – It was a celebration of innovative minds at Just Story Hour at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, UTEP, on October 15. The theme for the bright and sunny early fall afternoon was “thinking to make a difference.” It was the signature bi-annual event of the Social Justice Initiative (SJI), which is housed in UTEP’s Department of Communication, held in conjunction with the YWCA’s Week without Violence and the Rubin Center’s exhibit, Shifting Sands: Recent Videos from the Middle East. The SJI’s motto is “cultivating the habits of the heart” instead of the “habits of the mind” to break the status quo in conversations and actions about issues of justice, equity and peace. In accordance with its motto, the SJI invited guests who have created new approaches to tackle existing challenges. For instance, there was “mathemusician” Larry Lesser who composed songs to increase awareness and motivation in mathematics.

El Paso’s culture war (Cont. 3) – Voters must defeat the bond propositions at the polls Tuesday

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EL PASO – Betraying their responsibility as democratically elected officials to represent the will of the citizens, El Paso’s City Council members have declared war on El Paso taxpayers by signing off on an unauthorized multimillion dollar baseball stadium that will transfer taxpayer money to the group of developers behind this coup d’état. I again paraphrase Henry David Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience that: Never have so few in the name of so many done so much harm. This action by the Central Committee composed of GPL (Gullible Political Leaders) or maybe consciously complicit usurpers of the public trust, constitutes a brazen breach of their status as representatives of the will of the El Paso citizens who elected them. With this betrayal, they lost all – I repeat all – credibility. The most serious ethical line they crossed, and it may be a legal line, was that by approving this baseball stadium boondoggle they attempted an end-run around the legal requirement to present any increase in tax rates to the voters.

Stones with holes made into pendants. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

The poet and the physicist…and the retired professor

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Last night a former student suggested I get into the political arena. I responded that art, not politics, was my new life and then I reminded myself of a quote from the poet John Keats: “beauty is truth, truth beauty, /that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Art, however you define it, is a well that never runs dry. It quenches a thirst that no day job could ever do. It expands your world in every dimension, even those we haven’t named. We can’t eat art, or if we could, most of us couldn’t afford it.

Armando Arocha. (Courtesy of David Smith-Soto)

Adios chico – Remembering the plumber of West Tampa, the Mockingbird of Guira de Melena, Cuba

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LAS CRUCES, NM – As an immigrant, the grandson of immigrants, covered by a quilt sewn of Spanish, Jewish, European and Central American patches, each stitched in firmly with ethnicity, I often wondered how it all fits into the American Dream, how to define that quilt, measure it. Now, after my father-in-law, Cuban born Armando Arocha, died last month, I think the best way to understand it is to place it gently over and around the life of a single person like piping on a quilt.

Arocha was 88. He came to Tampa before the Castro revolution looking for a better life for his family. He was the man Fidel said he was fighting for – a peasant guajiro with no formal education who cut sugar cane and drove a truck for a dollar a day. But Arocha had no use for Fidel and made his way in his own way in Tampa.

El Paso’s culture war (cont.) – A culture war of El Paso against itself

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EL PASO – It’s a culture war! It’s a culture war at several levels, the most serious one has been brought about by GPL (Gullible Political Leaders) caving to the developers who are imposing their vision of El Paso’s future upon this city without the consent of the governed. That is the main idea behind Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay his taxes, I quote my previous paraphrasing: Never have so few in the name of so many done so much harm. This baseball stadium boondoggle is ipso facto confirmation of my assertion of a culture war against El Paso. The majority of El Paso’s residents are Mexican/Mexican Americans.

With my mom at the ABQ BioPark Zoo. (©Selene Soria)

Even with extra planning, traveling in a wheelchair is challenging

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EL PASO – Traveling requires a lot of planning and a lot of more planning is required when someone with a disability or a wheelchair-bound person like myself is traveling with the group. Last summer my family and I decided to take a trip to Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We planned the trip ahead of time and made the hotel reservation in advance. My mother researched the main attractions for each city to map out the itinerary. Even with all the planning we still encountered some obstacles.

Tripper. Need I say more? (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

To catch a critter

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MIMBRES, N.M. –There is an old dicho from England, “it takes a thief to catch a thief.”  The theme seems to be a popular one. In 1955, Alfred Hitchcock directed a film titled To Catch a Thief starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Then a series of TV shows emerged with the same premise: It Takes a Thief, Remington Steele, and more recently, White Collar. Not too many thieves here in the Mimbres, but there are lots of critters. I can hear the cows lowing in the morning, the roosters crowing and hens clucking.

The beauty of San Carlos couldn't keep me from wandering through Sonora's rural towns. (Image taken by Victor Hugo de Lafuente Flores)

A meandering trip in Sonora brings back memories of my Pennsylvania boyhood

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I now know why I enjoy taking trips into rural Sonora in Mexico. It’s because those sweet trips remind me of my growing up in a rural western Pennsylvania town. I love reading maps, and when I spotted Ortiz, Sonora as a small, obviously rural dot on the map of Sonora, I said aloud to myself, “Why not go there?”

But for some mystifying reason, on my way there, I rented a small house in San Carlos, Sonora. I spent a couple of days there, exploring San Carlos’s rugged shoreline watching seals, dolphins, and seabirds fooling around in pristine tidal pools. But I soon grew restless, because, in general, I dislike tourist sites, especially ones that cater to middle-class Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans, as San Carlos does. Soon realizing the big mistake I’d made, I fled San Carlos driving southeast from San Carlos to Empalme, which was – once upon a time – an important, prospering railroad town. That was definitely confirmed when I crossed a double set of railroad tracks where off to the left and right of me I saw the rusting, tilted hulks of locomotives, boxcars, and cabooses.

El Paso's City Hall and the Insights Museum are part of the buildings that would be demolished to give space to the new stadium. (Luis Barrio/Borderzine.com)

Wake up El Paso: It’s not a new baseball stadium; it’s a culture war

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EL PASO – I won the bet. El Paso was the loser, along with my friend who bet Mayor John Cook would do the right thing and veto the proposed baseball stadium. The words of Henry David Thoreau in his Essay on Civil Disobedience, which I paraphrase, come to mind: Never have so few in the name of so many done so much harm. Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay the tax to finance the war against Mexico. He realized it was a blatant land grab to extend slavery and enrich a few in Congress and members of the board of the South Carolina Railway Company that wanted a cheaper rail line to the Pacific Coast.

Firefighters at a fire in Fabens. (Photo by Pink Rivera)

Fire has always fascinated me

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EL PASO – When I was younger, my dad would smoke his Marlboro’s outside in the porch and I remember always playing with his lighter. Once I figured out how to turn the wheel fast enough so that sparks came out, I was hooked. One of my most treasured memories is the day I tried on my uncle’s firefighter gear. Even though I was only 11 years old and I knew I could get in trouble, at that moment I knew what I wanted to do with my life. That day I decided I was going to become a firefighter.

As we exited the bar my friend decided to lean against a stranger’s vehicle and gossip outside. (Illustration by Loreli Hassan/Borderzine.com)

The trauma and resolution of a terrifying gunpoint robbery

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EL PASO – A night out with friends should be a positive experience. This sadly isn’t always the case. We’ve all succumb to peer pressure once or twice in life and have ended up at strange and unknown areas in town. We’ve talked to strangers, some good and some bad. We all have had strange and memorable nights out.

UTEP student, Nicole Chavez, shows Mexodus' Online Journalism Award. (©Stacey D. Kramer)

Borderzine’s teaching newsroom produced award-winning Mexodus

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EL PASO – Winning a national prize for an outstanding piece of journalism like the one awarded to Borderzine’s Mexodus project last week by the Online News Association goes way beyond public recognition for a job well done. To me the classy, foot-high triangular glass trophy that UTEP student Nicole Chavez brought home to El Paso is confirmation of what great work journalism students can produce when educators bust open traditional journalism classroom walls to create a teaching newsroom within the academy. That’s how we did it at our school on the U.S.-Mexico border five years ago when we created Borderzine, a web magazine by students about borders that is the capstone class in our multimedia journalism degree program and is run like a professional newsroom.  While some journalism education programs continue to resist technological and news industry changes, we’re proud to be in the company of major-league journalism schools that have adopted similar “teaching hospital” models. Our teaching newsroom produced Mexodus, a semester-long reporting project about the exodus of Mexican middle class families, businesses and professionals fleeing drug war violence in Mexico.  The project broke linguistic, national and even professional-student boundaries by including nearly 80 students from four universities, two in the U.S. and two in Mexico, journalism faculty and news professionals like Lourdes Cárdenas, who has run newsrooms in the U.S. and Mexico. The collaboration produced 22 professionally edited print stories and various multimedia, all of it translated and published in English and Spanish.  Trainers from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (IRE) came to UTEP to teach professors investigative reporting techniques that they in turn taught their students who used them to report and write the project.

Roasting serranos for the salsa on a comal. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Adiós Herdez, hola Ce Hache

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EL PASO – On Labor Day I went to the Food Basket, bought a gunny sack full of hot green chile and had it roasted.  This is an annual tradition.  Looking to the winter and smelling the incomparable smell of roasting chiles today, it has to happen.  Even when I think I will pass just this once, buy it when I need it.  The smell curls up in your soul; it gets to you, the tradition.  I have room in the freezer now. Five hours later, fire-roasted fingers, and a mess in the kitchen, I now have 18 quart size bags of peeled chiles, a gallon bag stuffed with “I’m too tired to peel any more, this one didn’t want to slip its skin, too curly to contend with” and a large plastic container of chopped green. On Tuesday, I pick tomatoes in the garden, gather up onions, jalapeños, serranos, garlic, cilantro, and limes.  I put on my apron that announces El Paso/Cd. Juárez as the Mexican Food Capital of the World.  Today I am learning to can salsa, from my neighbor Marion who, judging from her open shelf bookcase filled with Mason jars, appears to be an expert.  I have purchased a giant canning pot and some new jars at a place called Do It in anticipation of this lesson.  All this and my chopped green chile I take over to Marion’s. First, we roast tomatoes in the oven to make them easy to peel, and get the water in the canning pot warming.  While the tomatoes are roasting, we go out to her garden to cut basil because, after the salsa is done, we are going to make a batch of pesto, yum.  The garden is more than a garden; it is an organic sculpture, carefully tended.

(Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

The Black Range and young bucks

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

SILVER CITY, NM – Thursday, being adventure day, I packed a picnic lunch and my camera and headed out on Highway 152, accompanied by Carlos Montoya on guitar. Highway 152 begins in Grant County just east of Silver City off of Highway 180, right between Ft. Bayard and the town (not the pueblo) of Santa Clara. It takes you to the terrible beauty of the Santa Rita open pit copper mine. From the window seat of a jet flying over, open pit copper mines look like gigantic hand-built clay bowls.

A proud Andrew with his dad. (Guillermo Rivas/Borderzine.com)

Marine Corps values and a return to college help a veteran in his new business

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EL PASO – Returning home after his combat tour as a Marine in Afghanistan, Andrew Jenkins wondered like many veterans do what civilian life would have in store for him. He had two years of college before enlisting so he thought going back to school would be the wisest decision.  However, as a Marine veteran, Jenkins is not the average student. He found that his experience in the Corps had given him a strong dedication to succeed. He went from launching rockets in Afghanistan to going into business back home at the ripe age of 22. Starting in business is tedious and difficult especially in a struggling economy, but he found a way around that.

Rhinoceros beetle found dead on his back, apparently unable to right himself. See his horn? (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Lessons from the Mimbres

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SAN JUAN, NM – Clothes dancing on clotheslines, rusting tin roofs, propane tanks, trailers scattered around along with crumbling adobes, cattle guards, gates to open and close, more vehicles than people parked at the house, folks who wave (or rather put up a hand from the steering wheel) as they meet you going in the opposite direction. ¡Biénvenidos al valle bajo del Rio Mimbres! I have some lessons to learn here. I took the trash to the dump today. For a little more than five dollars a month, you can put most of your trash in your car or truck and drive about five miles, say hello to Frank, and unload you trash into container one or container two.

baby

A tale of friendship found and lost while looking for asparagus in Nogales

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NOGALES, Az. – I drove across the border from Nogales, Arizona this past April looking for the fresh-cut, thinned-stemmed asparagus spears you can only get there. Having long ago made a personal rule to spend only pesos while in Mexico, my plan was to use my Bank of America’s debit card to withdraw pesos from the ATM at my “sister” bank, Banco Santander. Banco Santander has several modern, first-class, efficient branches in Nogales, Sonora, which is also known, hereabouts, as our “sister” city. I wanted those pesos to buy a couple of pounds of fresh-cut, thinned-stemmed asparagus spears sold by an enterprising fellow up from the farming community of Imuris, Sonora, 60 miles south.

A home in San Lorenzo, New Mexico, near my new neighborhood. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

The odd psychology of living in the small towns of the Southwest

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

EL PASO – Lately, I have become a peripatetic professor emerita, traveling in circles among two rural small town areas in New Mexico, and the big city of El Paso that everyone (including me) says feels like a small town. I’ve heard a lot of stories lately. My new neighbor Jamie told me one day as we were discussing wood stoves, about the woman next door to him who banged on his door at three in the morning because his swamp cooler was making too much noise. Turns out, the noisy swamp cooler was the next house over, the place where I now live part of the time. Sam told one about walking down Market Street in San Francisco.

Nuestra querida Flor. (Myriam Cruz)

The Help – Una historia mexicana de nuestra querida empleada ‘de planta’

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EL PASO – Flor tenía 15 años cuando llegó a la casa de mis padres en 1971 desde un pueblo en la frontera entre Chihuahua y Durango, Villa Ocampo, uno de los lugares donde Pancho Villa tuvo una de sus haciendas. Venía a la “ciudad”  a trabajar como ayudante doméstica de planta, lo que quería decir que viviría con nosotros a partir de ese día. Según mi mamá, no sabía mucho del trabajo doméstico. Platicaba que le tuvo que enseñar desde hacer las camas hasta limpiar un baño; por supuesto no sabía cocinar. Con el tiempo aprendió a cocinar comida de mi tierra: pulpos en su tinta, plátanos maduros, bacalao a la vizcaína, y la mejor pierna de puerco en chile pasilla que he probado en mi vida.

U.S.-Mexico border. (Chris Karadjov/Borderzine.com)

Humanity vs. legalism – a first encounter with ‘illegals’ on the U.S.-Mexico border

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SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Arizona  – As an emigrant from New England to Arizona 15 years ago, my first encounter with “illegals” occurred near sunset on November 19, 1997 as an autumn chill settled in. Two teenagers suddenly appeared around a bend of the trail I’d discovered down in the Santa Cruz River Valley below my home. I’d rested there on a root of a huge cottonwood, my two dogs lying at my feet. Shoulders slumped but heads held high, the teens swung gallon jugs half filled with murky river water along their flanks. But I saw that their gait was a slow and weary one.

Ghostly cowboy and his horse at Ccncordia cemetery. (Photo courtesy of Hamilton Underwood)

The meaning and effect of childhood imaginary friends have different interpretations

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EL PASO – Almost every child has, at one time in his or her life, made the acquaintance of an imaginary friend, an entity that can help develop the child’s imagination and can also be a solace during times of great stress or loneliness. An imaginary friend, the opposite of an imaginary enemy, is, in most cases, a made-up person, animal or character created in the minds of some people, especially young children, and is sometimes seen in those with autism according to Marilyn Elias in an article entitled ‘Pretend friends, real benefits” published in USA Today. Despite an imaginary friend being unreal, the child will act as if the imaginary being is physically present by talking to it, playing with it, or even attempting to feed it. Of course, to another person it will seem as though the child is talking into thin air. If told that there is nothing there, the child will often retaliate in a defensive manner by stating that the so-called imaginary friend is invisible.

Working full time and going to college full time is hard, but it’s the only way

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EL PASO – Attending college is difficult enough, but imagine going to school full-time and working full-time. Many of us at the University of Texas at El Paso are living proof that this is very possible, but it is one tough trek. Affordable tuition makes it accessible to students who cannot afford more expensive universities and its location as a border city gives more people the chance to attend UTEP. The university is diverse in culture and in the ages of its students, since many of them take more time to graduate than expected because they are working full time. Going on my fifth year of college, I have felt a little ashamed at times that I wasn’t able to finish it in four years.

Ausencia innombrable

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CIUDAD DE MEXICO ­– Que a Uno se le desaparezca un pariente en México ya no es cosa nueva. A diario lo leemos en los periódicos, en el Internet, lo oímos en el radio, lo vemos en la televisión. Su ausencia se vuelve un número más. Nuestra familia pierde su nombre y apellido cuando alcanza el “honor” de ser un titular, una madre, una hermana, una hija es “cuerpo de mujer encontrado sin vida en” un hermano, un padre, un hijo  se vuelve “hombre sin cabeza aparece en”. El anonimato más cruel.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio on trial

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RIO RICO, Ariz. – When I was a little boy living in a small town in western Pennsylvania, it was the Italians that were disliked and discriminated against. They were the people that had darker skin, large families, spoke with accents, cooked “different” food, and were falsely accused of almost any problem our town had. Strange, isn’t it, that three prominent Italians – Justice Scalia, Secretary Napolitano, and Sheriff Arpaio – have taken such a hard stance against Hispanics, including those that are US. citizens.

Health care reform is here to stay and it will boost U.S. economic prosperity

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EL PASO – The Republican cries for repeal of Obamacare that followed the affirmation by the Supreme Court of the law’s constitutionality reminded me of my days as a young journalist at The Miami Herald in 1977 when U.S. Representative Claude Pepper (D., Florida) then chairman of the House Committee on Aging, spoke of nothing else but defending Social Security and Medicare. Pepper, then 76 and known as “Mr. Social Security,” seemed unimaginably ancient to me and the thought of defending a law that had gone into effect in 1935, 42 years earlier, seemed to be the ridiculous ravings of a nearly senile old man. Since then I have come to understand why the old congressman kept on fighting. The Republicans never gave up. Remember when President George W. Bush stumped to privatize Social Security after his win in 2004?

Dr. Stark and Dr. Tonn point out breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos to a group of students on the research team. (Photo courtesy of UTEP Communications Office)

Belize, still in the squalid shadow of British colonialism, reminds us of the value of independence

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EL PASO – Every year around the fourth of July, I am reminded of a trip I took many years ago to Belize with two UTEP colleagues, engineer Scott Starks and biologist Lillian Mayberry. It was for a NASA grant investigating whether remote sensing (e.g. pictures from satellites) could help predict specific areas where malaria would be most problematic. My role as a sociologist had to do with human behaviors that would be either protective or increase the risk of malaria. After the most harrowing airplane ride of my life, we traveled to many parts of Belize, except the tourist cays of this small country that was originally a Mayan city state. It subsequently became British Honduras and then in 1981 an “independent” commonwealth.

An installation at the UFO Museum and Study Center, Roswell, NM. (Ken Hudnall/Borderzine.com)

Earthlings gather at historic Roswell for the 65th anniversary of the UFO legend

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ROSWELL, NM – The 65th anniversary of the alleged crash of an unidentified flying object here attracted visitors from as far away as Australia and introduced a large number of people to the various aspects of the UFO mystery through displays, books and lectures. As has been the custom for many years, around the fourth of July, a dual celebration of this event was held in Roswell, one sponsored by the town and the other by the UFO Museum and Study Center. The Galaxy Fest, the event sponsored by the UFO Museum and Study Center, held its opening ceremonies in the UFO Museum at 9:00 AM, Friday, June 29th. Each year the Museum invites stars from the world of science fiction as well as the leading researchers and authors in the field of UFO phenomenon. Attending this event was Denise Crosby, the actress that played Tasha Yar on the first season of the television program Star Trek: The Next Generation.

La guerra en México viene escrita en carteles

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La actual situación de México y la nostalgia por recobrar lo que era

Las calles de México tienen un encanto como ninguno. La antigüedad, la limpieza y hasta los ruidos como del taxista desesperado tocando el claxon porque un carro no se mueve, o los vendedores ambulantes diciendo: “Llévelo, llévelo, marchantita”, son únicos. Sin embargo, todas esas imágenes son empañadas con la violencia y la pérdida de muchas vidas inocentes, todo por el narcotráfico y la corrupción. El gobierno mexicano le declaró la guerra al crimen organizado en el 2006 y todo porque en ese año murieron aproximadamente 500 miembros de los diferentes carteles. El acontecimiento que fue primero en su clase—porque nunca se había visto algún atentado tan violento—fue un atentado ocurrido en Morelia, Michoacán, el día 15 de septiembre del 2008.

Currently, there is a call in the El Paso Times for the EPISD board to resign, but the president of the board, Isela Castañon-Williams, is standing her ground. (Raymundo Aguirre/Borderzine.com)

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but memory is short in El Paso

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EL PASO – What is it about powerful people that makes them feel above the law? Dr. Lorenzo Garcia, Superintendent of the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) recently pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. One of the charges involves cheating on student test scores and the other deals with a $450,000 contract given to one of his lovers. Unfortunately, unrestricted power is a heady intoxication that once achieved is always craved. People jump when you snap your fingers, kowtow to you in all the little ways that make you feel above the crowd, better than anyone else.