Pulular

Gente: The Cervantino is Guanajuato´s annual, several-week long arts festival that takes place every October. The festival officially began yesterday and now the city is bubbling with tourists, artists, musicians, journalists, police, and us. Events range from pricey ballets to spontaneous street movement to bars out-drink-specialing eachother in ridiculous ways. Video cameras and VIP pass-wearers stand out all over the city, preparing for the intensity of the complete immersion of the festival. Even though I lack the resources to attend most of the "official" events, it´s still a good time to be in the city.

Abejas: We´ve been working, busy as bees, on the Beehive project. Showing the posters to people and talking about them is moving along well. We´ve got some presentations lined up and we meet new people every day who are interested in what we´re doing. When Amolia took a flyer to a popular bar for young travelers, the owner promptly took one, left, and returned a few minutes later with 20 copies of the flyer at twice the size. A good sign. Our first real presentation (maybe even with a projector!) will be this Saturday morning and will be our testing event to practice our presenting and guiding of discussion. It will be a step up from just throwing the posters down on the UAC campus (in Querétaro) and waiting for people to come by and talk to us, which also was fun and productive but in a different way.

Indexing: Another productive use of my time is trading Abigail Spanish practice/tutoring for a beer or a snack. Too bad she's such a quick learner or the deal might really pay off.

Literatura: I can see now, as I crawl through El Laberinto de la Soledad, why Octavio Paz was so unwelcomed and heavily criticized by the intellectuals in Mexico when he first released this book. In the first chapter, he notes what he observes as the differences between people in Mexico, people in the U.S. and "los pachucos," Mexicans who leave Mexico to live and work in the United States. He describes the pachucos basically as social denigrates, who forget their own, "old" culture and refuse to embrace or even become a part of the new culture. This, Paz says, leads them to become like shadows, without substance, hiding behind their own resentment for both cultures and ultimately, themselves. This also leads the pachucos to act out in agression, which becomes a fundamental part of their identity. Paz also had interesting ideas about the differences between the "north americans" and Mexico. Although he makes comments such as that North Americans drink to forget and that Mexicans drink to confess, the most significant difference he notices is that in the north, people are "abierta," open. And in Mexico, "cerrada," closed.

In the second chapter, Paz goes into great depth and detail about the closedness of Mexicans, and the masks they hide behind to prevent anyone from discovering who or what they are. He says that for Mexicans the greatest fear is that someone will get past your defenses, beyond the máscara. This affects familial relations, work, education, love and pretty much every aspect of life. Later, he goes on and on about the ways and historical reasons that Mexicans hide themselves from others, refusing to assert an identity and so they become lost in their surroundings, completely complicit in becoming a "fondo," a background. He says that while some people walk, Mexicans scurry. And also that Mexicans utilize "la mentira," the lie, as a fundamental part of their verbal communication. No wonder his book didn't make people, especially Mexicans, feel that great. His ideas are interesting to me but his approach doesn't seem to be the best if he was trying to get Mexicans motivated to analyze themselves (which he states early on in the book). Still, I've only read two chapters and I know the next ones move into more broader aspects of the Mexican culture, rather than focusing on psycology and semantics.