Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Happy Birthday, I love you

“The vision of radical Third World Feminism necessitates our willingness to work with those people who would feel at home in El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed world: the colored, the queer, the poor, the female, the physically challenged. From our blood and spirit connections with these groups, we women on the bottom throughout the world can form an international feminism. For separatism by race, nation, or gender will not do the trick of revolution. Autonomy, however, is not separatism. We recognize the right and necessity of colonized peoples throughout the world, including Third World women in the U.S., forming independent movements toward self-government. But ultimately, we must struggle together. Together we form a vision which spans from the self-love of our colored skins, to the respect of our foremothers who kept the embers of revolution burning, to our reverence for the trees – the final reminder of our rightful place on this planet. The change evoked on these pages is material as well as psychic. Change requires a lot of heat. It requires both the alchemist and the welder, the magician and the laborer, the witch and the warrior, the myth-smasher and the myth-maker. Hand in Hand, we brew and forge a revolution.”

 

--Gloria E. Anzaldúa, El Mundo Zurdo: The Vision

But is that a real story?

Cuauhtémoc: I'm really interested in 'what is a story? And, what qualifies a story, or storytelling, to be truth, or understood as history?'

The Glitter Shaman: Bitch! Even creation stories have creation stories!

Grandma Azúcar: I think what the Shaman was expressing, was the frustration we students have been having with "the school." Mi hij@z think truth es qué something we have not fabricated--but all receipts are recorded, made, reproduced, and stored, through some pinche flawed human methodologies. And, they always require careful translation and transcription in order to be shared. See mijo, I think your task isn't about truth at all, but a praxis of navigating dancing storytelling to produce transcriptions that are meaningful to those who are in need of that navigated knowledge, but do not have resources, honors, and credentials necessary to access the resources you so easily browse... También, be careful of your privileges mija...

The Glitter Shaman: Facts and alternative facts (lies), are all discourse, and are all chisme--and it all is glitter! It is important to acknowledge the creative bias that exists in all creation, but it is also gloriously necessary that you honor the differentiations and disidentifications in glitter.

Cuauhtémoc: Its like what a daughter of the Kiki House of Mona Lisa affirmed with me at the ball, "realness is first, everything starts with realness."

Sweaty Hugs are Necessary in Extreme Heat

It was quite chilly last night. And today, I awoke refreshed! More, I seem to have regained much of the clairvoyance I had lost to confusion, and thus lamented all through the weekend for its return. It is something, a heavy something, to know that heat affect me so much. And, it's not an issue of having A/C, but more an issue of needing to be outdoors, and do work, without dripping into the hungry earth, or the sensitive laptop. The heat seems to compound anxieties, forcing fragility in action, leading to inaction, frustration, and morose contemplation. Such a process, so dire and deep, is hard to escape. Yet, somehow, acceptance of the grossness of it all, is how I made it through my time in a 2009 Northwestern Summer; and with the wisdom of contact improv (in all its sharing of sweat), I have found hugs to be the medicine I need to jolt me back from linear destruction. Of course, cool weather, mist, and Karl the Fog, always seem to do the trick as well.
#PhDLife