Category Archives: Expat Kids and Family

Ballenas Jorobadas: Whale Watching in Mazatlán

©2.DSC_0552-EditDo you know that only two types of whales sing? Lucky for us, the humpbacks that frequent the waters of Mazatlán are most definitely singers! The males are the ones that sing, and they do it to attract a mate. They invent new sounds in order to get noticed, and then, just like humans, other whales then copy their innovations.

Our family goes whale watching at least once each year (lots more info and pics in my posts from 2015, the trip with thousands of manta rays, swimming with dolphins in 2013, and a trip back in 2009 in which the whales approached nearly close enough to touch, and engaged in a lot of slapping and wrestling). We go out with Onca Expeditions, and they have a cute little gizmo (amplifier) they stick into the water to allow all of us on the boat to hear the whales’ singing. It’s awesome!

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Not only do the humpbacks sing, they also love to do acrobatics. Often you will see them curling up out of the water and then diving down, tail raised into the air. When they’re competing for mates you can watch them slapping each other around. The humpbacks will breach, often with their full body in the air above the water, in an attempt to impress a female. Once couples pair off, the acrobatics tend to die down as well; lovers in love are more gentle than that. Often times mothers arrive here with their calves, which is gorgeous to watch. Click on any photo to enlarge it or to view a slideshow.

Whale watching season here is during the winter, and it is one of the activities I most highly recommend for you to do here in Mazatlán. Onca’s guides are marine biologists who are actively engaged in researching the cetaceans that frequent our waters. According to Jesús, who took us out this time, Onca has catalogued 420 whales since Oscar Guzón started his research in our waters, but they’ve only gotten through 2010 data. Jesús told me he believes they have photos and data on 1100 unique tails!

While I’ve been told humpbacks live to be about 50 years old, Jesús said they can live to be 80 or 100. He told me the age of a whale is determined via DNA testing and sometimes via photo ID. They’ve also found whales with bone harpoons stuck in them—sort of reminiscent of Moby Dick, don’t you think?

The official viewing distance for whale watching is 16 meters; no boat in our waters should approach closer than that, although if the whales approach your boat, lucky for you. I was told the humpbacks swim about 10 knots per hour, and the babies drink eight liters of milk per day.

Do not miss your chance to see these magnificent creatures in their natural habitat! We do it every year, and never tire of the experience.

 

Cultural Appropriation of Day of the Dead?

As locals, expats and immigrants gear up for Day of the Dead festivities here in Mazatlán, I wonder how many of us realize that there has been quite a backlash to cultural appropriation and commercialization of Day of the Dead by non-Latinos.

I first realized how “hot” Day of the Dead was on my recent visit to a US liquor store. There, I was astounded by the quantity of Day of the Dead- or calaca-themed beer and liquor! To be honest, skeletons and skulls in and of themselves seem to be popular, and anything Mexican (amigos, lucha libre….), Spanish (Don Quixote) or mystical (voodoo) as well. The commercialization is, indeed, real. Click on any photo to enlarge it or view a slideshow.

Living here in Mexico, where we are privileged to be steeped in the traditions as well as the festivities, I hadn’t realized the concerns about appropriation of Day of the Dead until I read a post by one of the bloggers I follow, Aya de Leon, entitled, “Dear White People/Queridos Gringos: You Want Our Culture But You Don’t Want Us — Stop Colonizing The Day Of The Dead.”

In reading her excellent article and researching the matter a bit more, it seems that most Latinos are proud of this holiday. They understand that recognizing the dearly departed is a universal desire. Most are happy to share and ready to welcome us into the Día de los Muertos traditions, which have existed since Aztec times. But they most definitely and understandably resent our taking on the traditions as our own and transforming them into something they’re not — emptying the traditions of their soul. She writes:

And the urge to colonization is born when your own land and resources have been taken over by the greedy and your cultures have been bankrupted. Halloween has a rich history as an indigenous European holiday that celebrated many of the same themes as Day of the Dead, but you have let it be taken over by Wal-Mart… You have abandoned Halloween, left it laying in the street like a trampled fright wig from the dollar store. Take back your holiday. Take back your own indigenous culture. Fight to reclaim your own spirituality.

Please. Stop colonizing ours.

Aya gives examples of Day of the Dead festivals organized by non-Latinos in which Latino voices and faces are not even present! She talks of a sort of Cinco-de-Mayo-ization (my words) of Day of the Dead, in which white hipsters wear calaca face paint, stand amongst broken marigolds listening to white bands, and drink gentrified, holiday-themed micro-brews, without so much as a thought to what the true tradition is or means. She explains, and rightly complains, that we love Mexican culture when it’s convenient and fun, but not when it involves advocating to solve undocumented immigration, illegal gun exports, or rampant femicide.

So where, exactly, is the line between participating in and honoring Day of the Dead and appropriating or colonizing it?

Cultural appropriation is often used as an accusation, implying theft. But cultures, their traditions and artifacts, often aren’t clearly distinguishable. Throughout history people have intermingled, shared, and been inspired by one another.  As an interculturalist, I’m all about diversity, integration, collaboration, creativity. There is nothing inherently wrong in us learning from and building on one another; that is actually, rather, a really good thing!

The problem, Aya tells us, is many who are welcomed to the Day of the Dead table are poor guests. We don’t sit at the table; we take the table over. We don’t pay our respects, acknowledge our hosts, or say thank you. We need to be conscious that if we organize themed events, we should use them as opportunities to showcase Latino artists and musicians, and we should hold the tradition with reverence, respect, and a desire to learn and honor.

In an insightful piece in Quartz, Noah Berlatsky tells us that the problem with cultural appropriation is racism:

“There’s nothing wrong with Elvis loving and imitating Jackie Wilson. But there is something wrong with the fact that Elvis is hailed as the King of Rock n’ Roll, while most people barely know who Jackie Wilson is… White performers, like Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus, use twerking in their videos on the way to becoming more successful and awarded than the black women who developed the style in the first place. When the white borrower, predictably, earns more accolades than the borrowee, artistic freedom and admiration is transformed into something much more problematic… While country music loves black music, it mostly excludes black artists, in the sense that those artists are not considered central, and their contributions aren’t recognized.”

Therefore, all of us need to be vigilant to extend power and privilege, credit and honor, to the origins and originators, not just to those who adapt. However, our modern-day systems are skewed against us. Those who write a book are credited with ideas expressed by others; individuals and corporations can copyright and trademark something that has a long tradition and belongs to a group of people.

Did you know that Disney even attempted to trademark Day of the Dead? They were making a movie called, Day of the Dead, and wanted to trademark the title. Thanks to huge response to a petition on Change.org, Disney rather quickly pulled its trademark application. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, here’s what some of those opposing Disney’s trademark application had to say:

“Our spiritual traditions are for everyone, not for companies like Walt Disney to trademark and exploit,” wrote Grace Sesma, the petition’s creator. “I am deeply offended and dismayed that a family-oriented company like Walt Disney would seek to own the rights to something that is the rightful heritage of the people of Mexico. This is a sacred tradition. It’s NOT FOR SALE,” wrote Consuelo Alba, of Watsonville, Calif.

The trademark application was “odd” to Evonne Gallardo, executive director of the Boyle Heights art center Self Help Graphics. The center puts on one of the largest Day of the Dead celebrations in Los Angeles and has been sponsored by the Walt Disney Co. “The right thing to do is not to attempt to trademark a cultural and spiritual celebration,” Gallardo said. “I have yet to see a trademark on Christmas or Hanukkah.”

The movie was re-titled to “Coco,” no doubt so that Disney could trademark the title and create a website. One of the most spirited activists to oppose the trademark application was cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, creator of that incredibly powerful graphic at the top of this post. In a great act of corporate listening and learning, he was recently hired on by Disney to work on the film about which he protested! Our speaking up to defend our heritage can have positive results! The movie is being made, showcasing a beautiful tradition, and it now includes more representation from the very culture it portrays.

Today as I started to write this post, I read an interesting article in The Atlantic: “The Dos and Don’ts of Cultural Appropriation.” In it, Jenni Avins provides six recommendations to prevent appropriation, including involvement of and engagement with members of the culture. She points out that cultures are fluid and constantly changing, so we can’t ask that they stay frozen in time. On the other hand, foreign passion has often helped preserve native traditions, arts, handicrafts, music, dance, literature and even languages. Like Aya, she highlights the importance of acknowledging and honoring the source, the origin, of cultural arts and traditions. Jenni also provides two “don’ts”: never wear blackface, and never use sacred artifacts as accessories.

As we all gear up to paint our faces and create our altars, let us participate in and enjoy the festivities, and use this time to truly remember those who have preceded us in death. Day of the Dead provides a perfect time for us to learn from our neighbors and hosts in this country, and to share with them a human universal: remembrance and longing for those we’ve loved and lost.

When have you felt the tug between honoring and participating in the local culture, and appropriating it?

The Importance of Roots

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IndiaFest Milwaukee 2015

The life of an expat or immigrant involves integrating oneself and one’s family into a new home, while also maintaining ties to family and heritage. We all need roots to give us strength, help us grow lush and flexible. Thus, each summer, we do our best to return from our home in Mazatlán, México to Wisconsin, USA, where I was raised, to spend time with extended family and strengthen those root connections.

This weekend, we were looking for something to do with our nephew and his son—something that would be enjoyable for three generations of family. We read an ad on the internet that sounded too campy to be believed—in short, right up our alley: Bollywood and classical Indian dance, food, and the election of Mr/Miss/Mrs Wisconsin Indian…” Green Bay Packers and Bollywood dancers? Cheeseheads and rangoli-makers? It sounded like too good a combination to be missed! Click on any photo to enlarge it or view a slide show.

While we went to the third annual IndiaFest Milwaukee expecting to have fun, which we indeed did, the experience was so very much more than I expected. To witness these immigrants and expats maintaining their connections to their heritage, while we were doing the same, was a huge blessing. To watch my nephew dance on stage with a large portion of southeastern Wisconsin’s Indian-American community, to see the joy in my husband’s face as he wore a turban for an hour and spoke with local Sikhs about their experience, and to witness my great-nephew fall in love with chaat after having turned up his nose at it, was a privilege indeed.

Jason on stage dancing
Greg’s turban-wearing experience
Caleb and the rest of my boys digging into some chicken briyani

I have written before on this blog about the pleasure I get learning how parents pass their traditions on to their children, and IndiaFest is no exception. We saw multigenerational families dressed in traditional garb. We ate our fill of homemade food. And we felt the swell of pride as parents and grandparents watched their youngsters sing and dance to classical and modern Indian songs.

IndiaFest was held on Saturday, August 15th—Indian Independence Day, which in 2015 happens to be the 69th anniversary of the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. It was held in Humboldt Park, Milwaukee.

Over 25 million Indians live abroad, according to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs. In contrast, the US State Department says only three to six million US Americans live overseas. My nephew and his family don’t even have passports, and friends and family in the States frequently ask us if we are still US citizens—they are so incredulous anyone born here would willingly choose to live outside the USA. The expertise of the Indian diaspora was evident on Saturday as we experienced the local Indian-American community’s talent at involving those of us who attended the festival in their culture, motivating us to feel joy at their presence in Wisconsin.

Empathy-building was perhaps best created in the innovative yet simple turban-wearing opportunity offered by a few Sikh men who had set up a booth with a dozen or so lengths of cloth. They encouraged festival goers to let them tie a turban on their head, and then wear it for an hour. My great nephew Caleb and husband Greg participated, learning about mesh—the Sikh religious practice in which men do not cut their hair or beards, to show respect for the perfection of God’s creation. They also learned that not all Indians wear turbans, as they saw several Indian men do so for the first time in their lives.

The free blood pressure tests offered by Muslim hospital staff were another subtle empathy builder. When I was a younger interculturalist, I often would mentally poo-poo festivals like this as fun, but as not having enough depth to build real intercultural competence or empathy. However, my family members don’t know much about India or Islam, and like most US Americans are sadly taught via the media and society to distrust those who are different than them. So, to see them talking and joking with, respecting and thanking, Muslim nurses who helped them, was powerful.

My personal favorite activity was the rangoli-making, that gorgeous folk art we see created in courtyards during festivals, using colored sand, flower petals or dyed rice. Rangoli have different names in the different regions of India—kolam, mandana, muggu, alpana, among others. These decorations are welcoming areas for the Hindu gods and are thus thought to bring good luck. At IndiaFest, the rangoli were drawn on tarps with colored sand and white salt.

Saturday was my first opportunity to watch a rangoli created from start to finish. I was fascinated at the three different styles used. Rohini had hers drawn on a piece of paper. First she set down a reddish orange background, and then “painted” over it with white. She was expert at using her hands and fingers to put down fine lines. When she crowned Ganesha in a way she didn’t like, she swept the sand aside with her hand and did it over. She was the first person finished.

Rohini put a swastika in her Ganesha design. I was really proud of Caleb (a high school freshman), because he knew the history of the swastika, its importance in so many Eastern spiritual traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism), its auspicious origins, and its appropriation and transformation into evil by the Nazis. A big shout-out for public education in Racine! Far too many westerners have no idea about this.

In contrast to Rohini’s rangoli, there were two women (sorry I failed to get their names) who worked together on theirs. They worked from a very rough, impressionistic sketch on paper, and began by using crayon and yarn like a compass, to draw concentric circles on the tarp. They then shook different colors of sand through a sieve, filling the center circle with blue, and creating a tie-dye effect in the outer circle. Once they filled the two circular areas, they drew designs in white on top of their blue and multi-hued backgrounds. They added in purple and blue circles surrounding all this at the end, and after drawing on it in white they finished their rangoli with various candles. If I were to choose a style of rangoli-making as my own, this would be it: highly spontaneous and emergent.

I was happy to see a man creating rangoli. Unlike the ladies who sketched their designs on paper, Hemendra had his design on his cell phone. He drew the design in crayon on the tarp, and then filled in background color around it. Like the ladies, he used a sieve to apply color, and also used his hands and fingers to draw fine lines of the design. Unlike the others, he used a stick and his fingers to “cut” designs into the colored sand, and he sprinkled colored sand over the top of the design as a final touch on his creation. Hemendra was very methodical, and the last to finish.

All three rangoli turned out beautifully!

No festival is complete without food, and there was plenty of it at IndiaFest! Our family ate non-stop, it seemed, from the time we got there to the time we left. Homemade Indian snacks, main dishes and drinks definitely helped us enjoy the hot afternoon.

Another activity we very much enjoyed was taking our family photo in front of a green screen. The guy charged us $10 and said he’d email us ten photos: our family in front of the Taj Mahal and in various other iconic Indian locations. How absolutely cool is that?! We haven’t yet received those photos, so I can’t share them with you here. There was also a guy selling bubble blowers to the kids, and I tried to get some photos of the bubbles, something that is always challenging. Below I share with you a couple.

We noticed so many commonalties between Indian and Mexican cultures, including the love of: family, joy, color, dance, visual arts, “bling,” makeup, food, music, and singing; respect for tradition and the embracing of modernity; the ease with which cultures, languages and religions are mixed; and the inclusive hospitality.

Words don’t suffice to extend my gratitude to the Indian-American community of southeastern Wisconsin. Thank you so very much for allowing my family this opportunity to feel “at home” in a community I grew up in, that you have helped make richer, more multicultural and inclusive. Thank you for teaching us and sharing with us as a family so generously. Happy Independence Day!

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Part of the My Global Life linkup

Mexico Beats Vietnam 6-0!

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We have new best friends, and they are terrific! The young men from Hanoi were excellent, friendly and courteous athletes, and it was truly a pleasure to meet them! In contrast to the empty feeling after our hosts, Lafayette, beat us last night (in their defense, it was midnight, and everyone was tired), as Mexico won 6-o today, our boys thanked and cheered the Vietnam team in heart-felt Mazatleco style, and took mixed group pictures. We were told repeatedly that Vietnam is hoping we go on to win the Series. Viva international friendships! The Vietnamese team told us that one of the Mexican jerseys we gave them would go into their “Hall of Fame” in Hanoi. Cool, huh?

It was a sunny, warm and humid day here in Indiana, and everyone was in good spirits. The crowd today was much smaller, no doubt because the local team wasn’t playing today (they only play every other day as long as they keep winning). Our boys played very consistently, scoring in four of the seven innings. Various bases were stolen, and after the game, several of our players were asked for autographs by young fans. It was wonderful to see.

Pedro was our pitcher today; he pitched the entire game, and he did a great job. Considering Mazatlán played the last game yesterday, the first game today, and travelled 55 hours to get here, our boys did not show any fatigue. Congratulations and job well done!

You can view the full game here:

http://livestream.com/accounts/1037086/events/4179081/videos/95630090/player?autoPlay=false&height=360&mute=false&width=640

Remember that from that same site you can watch all games via live-streaming.

We will play again tomorrow, Sunday, again at noon. We will play the loser of the game that is going on as I write this—either Puerto Rico or Michigan. Click here for a link to the updated bracket.

DSC_0367PS: Puerto Rico won vs. Michigan 3-1, so we’ll play Michigan tomorrow at noon. Go Patasaladas!!!!!

Mazatlán Plays in the World Series!

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Thanks to so many of you who chipped in to help support these teenagers to reach their dreams! National champions, Mazatlán’s own Muralla Pony League (Colt) team travelled 55 hours—yes, FIFTY-FIVE HOURS! The Vietnamese team in this tournament only traveled 36!—to reach the World Series in Lafayette, Indiana. Teams that earned the right to play include Vietnam, Czech Republic, Mexico and the USA.

Greg and I are very excited to be with our local Mazatleco boys and their families, cheering them on. Click on any photo to see it larger or view a slideshow.

The team arrived one day later than planned, so didn’t have much time to get unkinked or settled in before the tournament. They arrived at the ballpark excited and raring to go! César Aguilar was the starting pitcher, and pitched a terrific six innings of the seven inning game, leading 3-2 over Lafayette’s All Stars. The seventh inning saw us go through two pitchers in the quest to find a closer, and led to a most discouraging 9-3 loss at midnight last night.

Mexico played their first game last night under the lights, which of course kids in Mazatlán are not accustomed to doing. The Mexican team had by far the loudest of any cheering section, complete with tricolor shirts, hats, face paint and flag.

We still have the opportunity to win the Series, though we have to win all the remaining games. While we played the last game last night, we play the first game today—not exactly thought-through scheduling, to my way of thinking.

A really cool thing yesterday was that all the players from all the teams in the Series went out onto the field, surrounding the in-field. Two teams of physically challenged kids played two innings of baseball, with help from the boys in the tournament. Talk about a tear jerker! The parents in the stand of these kids were bursting with pride and joy, watching their kids hit the ball and run the bases. A wonderful event to behold!

Long-time Mazatlán snowbird Valerie Bird’s niece and family live in Indiana, and drove two hours to join our cheering section last night. Mazatlán was well represented by the families that travelled north, and also by several dozen local Mexican-American families who showed national pride to turn out and cheer us on. Many thanks to them! Many of those families are also hosting our boys, so they don’t have to pay hotel.

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Wish us luck today! It looks to be a hot one, which should help us. We play Vietnam at noon. Should you want to watch this live via video streaming, or see yesterday’s events, click here.

Here’s video of tonight’s game:

https://livestream.com/accounts/1037086/events/4179078/videos/95545895/player?width=640&height=360&autoPlay=false&mute=false