Because there can never be enough personal revelation/aspirational art sites on the interwebs any more than there can ever be enough LOLCats.
It seems the most popular things people want to do before they die are: LIVE!, love, travel, sky-dive… oh, and
natch.
Which sounds like it may have been inspired by this piece of Situationist graffiti from the 1968 Paris revolt.
In response to my query, Sabrina told me the gangs weren’t a problem these days. I asked when the last flood had hit. “Last year. The water was up to here for six days” she said, drawing a line across her chest. Sabrina’s family lost all their furniture yet again. In my notebook I jotted down, “sometimes I wonder why they don’t just give in and go plastic.”
At the house, I tried to get a better explanation of how La Mesa had become safe. I wrote in my field notes:
I asked Rebeca how things were around the barrio and she told me that they were tranquilo, much better than before, that Maduro’s “Zero Tolerance” policy had worked, that there were no more gangs here. The problem now, she said, is with the [new wave of U.S.] deportees. “But how can that be?” I asked her. “There were so many gang members. What happened to them all?”
R: They killed them all.
A: Who? Who killed them all?
R: The same group of people killed all the different gangs.
A: But who were they?
R: A private group. Nobody knows. Everybody sees them do it, but nobody knows who did it. And they’re in league with the police.
Rebeca told me how once the year before, her son Omarito had been hanging out with some friends at a neighborhood store when they were stopped by two armed men. All three of the boys were told by the men to lift their shirts. On seeing that he (and the others) had no tattoos, the gunmen said to Omarito “te salvaste chico,” (“you saved yourself kid”) indicating that had it been otherwise, he would not have survived. Neither Sabrina’s bullet wound nor this episode shook Rebeca’s faith in cero tolerancia. It was, according to her, Sabrina, and everyone else I asked subsequently, an unequivocally good thing that these neighborhood children, many of whom had retained good relations with Rebeca and her family, had been slaughtered for the sake of security.
Still incredulous at the radical change in a town I had once found familiar, I persisted:
A: All of them? They killed every single one?
R: Yes, they’re all gone.
A: What about la negra, the one who was in la Dieciocho?
R: Ah, that Melisa … Melisa moved to San Pedro when they started killing them all. She started going to church and everything.
A: [excited] So she didn’t get killed!
R: No. They went and found her. They killed her too.
From: Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras
I never got to knaow Melisa very well. I first saw her on August 7th, 1997. I was eating tajadas (crispy fried plaintains) at a small neighborhood restaurant with Rebeca’s daughter Vanesa and Vanesa’s friend Elysa. An androgynous black girl with a shaved head wearing a t-shirt that read “O.J. 100% NOT GUILTY” in African National Congress colors came in. Elysa, whose boyfriend had been deported from the U.S. for gang activity, flinched. “She’s a Dieciocho,” she told me. “Everybody’s afraid of la negra.” The girl sat down by herself and ate her tajadas contentedly.
Later, I asked Rebeca about Melisa. Rebeca knew all the gang kids. “They respect me,” she had told me on various occasions. “I’ve known them all since they were this tall” (motioning close to the ground). Rebeca said that Melisa had suffered physical and sexual abuse and had been abandoned by both of her parents. Her participation in the gang, according to Rebeca, was understandable–as opposed to the other kids, who Rebeca said were just making trouble. There are many such exceptions to the rule that gang members are “evil.” I was often surprised by the failure of the many examples of personal victimization to change the general understanding of gangs as inscrutably savage.
In January 1999, I was again in La Lima. Hurricane Mitch had struck Honduras a few months earlier, and La Lima was one of the places hardest hit. Piles of sand had been left on the side of the road by the municipality to absorb the excess liquid, but in typical Lima government fashion, nobody had moved the sand onto the roads themselves in the months since they had been delivered. One afternoon around dusk, I was busy working on a photo essay involving a toy monkey, a pre-Columbian relic, and one of these piles of sand, when I was startled by two teenage boys I recognized as neighborhood gang members. I became nervous, having been warned time and again about being robbed or attacked by these children. I grabbed my camera more tightly and said hello.
“What are you doing?” one of them asked. I told them I was taking a picture.
“Do you need help?” the other asked.
I answered “well, yes,” and let them position Sancho, as Sabrina and I had earlier dubbed the anthropomorphic figurine she had found after the hurricane, in the sand. They seemed to find this wildly amusing. As I continued back to the house I chatted with them. We discussed the standard neutral topics–the mud, the weather, where I was staying. “Oh yes,” they told me, “we know Doña Rebeca.” A group of their friends was playing a few streets down, Melisa among them.
“You’re taking pictures?” she yelled. “Take a picture of me! Look! I am Dieciocho! Take a picture of me in my shirt!” She turned around to model her basketball tunic with the number 18 on the back and beamed as I took her picture. After that, whenever I saw her around town, we would both smile and say hello.
(continues in next post)
The companion documentary to the film Cidade de Deus (City of God): it uses clips, almost entirely without commentary or input from the film makers to show the constant war that day to day existance consists of in the favelas of Rio.
Life on the fringes of the neo-liberal empire: coming to a country near you soon.
More:
I’ve just decided it might be fun to use SU to catalogue my movie collection. If only there were a standard site containing a large number of movies that I could thumb to create it. Oh, wait, there is!
Could take a while of course, since I actually have somewhere in the region of 1000 or so; and that before I even get onto the ones I have seen but don’t own.
What a merry jape 😀
Who Is Alexander Grothendieck?
“Creating Trust Online”
Umm yeah right, by spamming people with Domain Registry of America type hijack scam emails, subtly implying that they are who the SSL cert is held, and should be renewed, with.
Do I want to trust a con-artist with anything whatsover to do with website or computer security?
Perhaps not.
