Finding Jenny Vincent

To make some improvements on my documentary about Spanish immigrants,"Weaving with Spanish Threads," I decided to add some music. One piece I wanted was a traditional Spanish song that the immigrants would have listened to and played after they moved to California. I found just what I wanted on a music album arranged and produced by Jenny Vincent and performed by her trio, music she found in a collection created back in the 1930s.

In tracking down the rights, I found Jenny Vincent herself. Jenny Vincent is an activist and musician, and in bygone days, played with the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.  She is now 101, lives in New Mexico, and still jams with her musician friends every week.  They come to the nursing home where she lives.  
On the CD with the music I wanted, she plays the accordion but now, at age 101, that instrument is too heavy for her so she plays the piano.  

Jenny Vincent came from a privileged background.  As a young woman, she played classical piano. but after she became an adult, she found her passion in the workers' rights movement, and turned to playing folk songs on the accordion.  She spent her life as an activist and is still deeply committed to the rights of the powerless.

Craig Smith, a writer and musician, and one of the people who gets together with her each week, has written a biography of her called Sing My Whole Life Long:  Jenny Vincent's Life in Folk Music and Activism.  You might want to look it up.

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We've used some of Jenny Vincent's music in our documentary, Weaving with Spanish Threads:  an Immigrant's Tale, and in the trailer (HERE) for that documentary.  Or if you want to listen to one of the jam sessions, go HERE and HERE.

Mexico´s indigenous civilizations - the Maya: Uxmal, personal recollections (part 2 of 2)

The Maya, like the Aztecs after them, constructed pyramids and ball courts, as well as monumental palaces.  They held the serpent as being especially sacred.  They also engaged in human sacrifice,  although not on as large a scale as the Aztecs.

The palace and ballcourt at Uxmal with me on a hill above it.

The Maya had a complete, written language which has only very, very recently been deciphered.  They also produced a lot of chocolate...perhaps something you don't consider important but to many of us, well, chocolate is a really good thing!

Around the same time that the Maya flourished, on their southwestern borders, contact with the smaller civilizations of Olmec, Mixtec and Zapotec influenced Mayan culture.

I was lucky enough to visit the city of Uxmal when I was around 11 years old.  My mother and uncle took me on a trip to Mexico (financed by my generous grandfather).  My mother, who loved traveling, decided we should go to Yucatán.

The pyramid at Uxmal.

My mother didn´t like going to the places that "everyone" went, so instead of going to the much better know Chichen Itza, we visited Uxmal.  At that time, my father was teaching at Tulane University, and Tulane has been very prominent in the archaeological work related to the Maya.  I´m not sure if that is why we were able to go there, but at any rate, I got to climb the pyramid.  I also learned, when at the top, that an archaeologist had died the week before right about where I was standing.  He feel from the top of the temple.

I climbed down more slowly than I climbed up.  I climbed down very, very carefully.

We also got to see a cenote, one of those mysterious bodies of water than come up from underground, and where sacrifices of young maidens are supposed to have taken place.

We even got to swim in the cenote.

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Eve A. Ma and Palomino Productions are currently working on a documentary about Mexican immigrants and Chicanos which deals briefly with the Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec and other of Mexico´s indigenous civilizations.  Find out about this by signing up for our newsletter LINK.

Mexico´s indigenous civilizations - the Maya (part 1 of 2)

Along with the Aztec, the Maya is the best known of Mexico's ancient civilizations.  There were others as well - Olmec, Mixtec, Zapotec and so forth - but the Aztecs in central Mexico and the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula and further south, through what is now Guatemala, are generally considered the country´s two great antecedents.

Mayan civilization seems to have been mostly a collection of city states joined by a common language, cultural heritage, and artistic aestnetic.  The Maya flourished for much longer than the Aztecs, and covered a wider territory.  The civilization began, flourished and declined centuries before the Aztecs started to rise to power.  It was at its peak between 250 BC and 900 AD, but there are Mayan settlements in Belize that date back to 2600 BC, and their calendar begins on the equivalent in our years of 3114 BC.

Mayan ruins in Guatemala.  I think this is Tikal.  My mother took the photo, so I´m not sure.

During this long historical period, there were ups and downs.  For example, around 100 BC, the civilization as it existed at that time underwent a great downturn which some characterize as a collapse, only to revive and surpass its former glory in the 250 BC - 900 AD period.

The civilization went into an even steeper decline around 900 AD.  No one is exactly sure why, but one theory that recent investigations point up to is that a prolonged drought was exacerbated by declining rainfall due to building over former forest and crop lands.

(We might want to draw a lesson from this, ourselves....)

One way or another, after about 950 BC, most of the southern part of the Maya civilization ceased to exist for all practical purposes, and many cities were simply abandoned.  In the north, on the Yucatan peninsula, Maya cities continued to flourish including the ones at Chichen Itza and Uxmal.

From the same ruins as above, probably Tikal.

In 1450 AD, however, there was a revolt against the most powerful and extensive of the Mayan kingdoms rule that was enough to extinguish it and throw others into decline.  Some Maya cities and towns continued in existence in reduced form until the Spanish conquest.

It took the Spaniards nearly 200 years to complete the conquest of the Maya, however, the last city state falling in 1697.

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Eve A. Ma and Palomino Productions are currently working on a documentary about Mexican immigrants and Chicanos which deals briefly with the Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec and other of Mexico´s indigenous civilizations.  Find out about this by signing up for our newsletter LINK.

Cotton, hot sun, and "gitanos" in southern Spain - HISTORICAL NOTES (part 2 of 2)

HISTORICAL NOTES:
For centuries, gitanos have been on the margins of Spanish society and economy.  But when they began to work in large numbers as farm laborers in southern Spain, all of a sudden they becamse desirable contributors, at least as far as the señoritos and their families, the large land owners, were concerned.  These large land-holding families helped protect the gitanos.

This happened mostly in Andalucía, a large region in the far south of Spain which includes eight provinces.  Because of its mild to hot climate and large farming estates,  it´s also home to large numbers of gitanos. The large farm holdings, a reminder of the Roman estates and the later Moorish period, have grown crops such as grapes and olives for many centuries.  The grapes are best in the lower land, and are used to produce some very fine wines.  The olives are more common on the hillsides and going up into the mountains.

Ripe cotton.

Cotton, and beans such as favas and garbanzos, were also planted extensively in the 20th century although they were not as important as the grapes and olives.

In the late 20th century, mechanization eliminated many of the farm working jobs.  By that time, the democratic government which succeeded Franco had set up a social safety net, so gitanos and other poor or marginalized people could live on their social security benefits when they didn´t have a job.

The singing that our little heroine was listening to in part 1, by the way, is what is called flamenco.  Had you already guessed?

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We are working on a documentary about flamenco and its connection to the gitano community.  Go HERE to see the web site and a trailer, and HERE to sign up for our newsletter so you can keep up with the progress on our work.

The Bracero program & Mexican farm workers in the U.S. (part 2 of 2)

The bracero program was continued in one form or another long past the end of World War II.  It ended in 1964 due to fears that the Mexican workers were taking jobs from native born citizens of the United States.  In addition, a serious car accident involving a bus loaded with braceros in which many were killed helped convince the Mexican government that the program needed to be ended.

At the outset of the bracero program, Texas (a major user of Mexicans as farm laborers) was unwilling to join it.  This was because its farmers wanted to pay lower wages and be less careful about the conditions under which the workers lived.  The workers entered the state illegally, and thus were particularly vulnerable.  The farmers insultingly called them “wet backs,” since many of them had to swim the Rio Grande in order to enter Texas, and employed them by the thousands.

The Rio Grande Valley.  Map courtesy of University of Texas at Austin.

In 1946, however, the government of Mexico withdrew all its workers from Texas due to serious abuses and at that point, the state entered the bracero program.

There are many sites on the internet which talk about the bracero program and farm laborers from Mexico.  The Smithsonian recently organized an exhibition about it, which can be found on-line and which I like very much.  The exhibition includes some great posters with especially fine photographs, plus text in both English and Spanish.  You can find the posters at: http://www.sites.si.edu/bracero/Bracero%20Posters.pdf, and learn more about the traveling exhibit at http://www.sites.si.edu/bracero/.  

Another one of the wonderful Smithsonian posters (with photo: Leonard Nadal).

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We are in the process of creating a documentary, Strong Roots, Bright Flowers:  Arts of Mexican Immigrants and Chicanos, which talks about the bracero and other farm labor programs as they are related to the creation of música norteña/TexMex music.  You can see a trailer from it on YouTube - go to this LINK; or sign up for our monthly newsletter here LINK where we can keep you up to date.

Cotton, hot sun, and "gitanos" in southern Spain - (part 1 of 2)

The mid-afternoon sun was high in the sky, and she guessed that the temperature was well above 45° (our 100°).  Her straw hat at least protected her face, but she longed to lie in the shade next to a cool stream.

She could hear her oldest brother in the row next to hers, as he sang.  He was a lot farther up his row.  He worked fast.

She wore work gloves because otherwise, the cotton bowls scratched her hands, but the gloves made her pick the cotton more slowly and made her hands sweat.  Her parents, in the two rows on the other side, and the other adults didn't use gloves because they needed to get the harvest in.  If they didn´t, they'd lose their job.

Half the field away, there was another group of 12 working on their rows.  With the two groups working from sun up to sun down,  the cotton should all be harvested in 3-4 days.  If nothing went wrong.

Last year, she's put her hands in a bees´ nest and even though she ran fast, she got a lot of stings.  That really slowed things down.  She had to stop work for the next few days and her mother took off the first afternoon, to tend to her.

She didn't understand why no one in the other group ever sang.  In her group, all of them family, there was always someone singing...singing to  help pass the time and forget about the aching backs and sore hands while they worked;  the young men from the men's and boy's cortijo (sleeping shed) singing at night to their girlfriends in her cortijo;  the old women and men getting together outside at night after work, singing the old songs just for the sheer pleasure of listening them.

When she asked her mom why no one in the other group sang, all her mother would say is that "We are gitanos (Spanish Gypsies).  They are not."

She wished the field were smaller, but she knew that when they finished with this cotton, the neighboring estate owner would want them to work there.  And after all the cotton was gone, it would be nearly time for the olives.  Then the grapes.  The adults started in mid-spring, pruning the grapes.  The fava beans came next, and everyone worked on those.  Then, the garbanzos, cotton, olives, and the grape harvest.   The grape harvest was the big one, the really important one.  Without the grapes, they might not have enough to make it through the year.

A field of fava beans in Andalucia, southern Spain.

She knew that because her mom and dad told her when she complained about how hard it was to spend months and months harvesting crops.  They told her she needed to get used to it, because when she was 14 or 15, if she wasn´t already married and probably even if she was, she would have to work harder, like the other adults.

In the winter, when there was no work in the fields, they lived in town.  Her dad told her the town was called Jerez de la Frontera, and that it was part of a big country called Spain.  He told her that there were other countries in the world, but they didn´t matter because they were far away.

Her two oldest uncles didn´t live in town, though.  They lived in little shacks made of tin out by the river.  She liked to go visit them sometimes but was glad she didn´t live in a shack.  In her family´s rooms, when it rained, the water didn´t leak in and in the winter, the cold air didn´t come in around the cracks.

Even though in her family´s rooms, they had to bring water up from the well in the courtyard to have something to drink and for her mom to wash up.  In the summer, one corner of the courtyard smelled really bad because that was where the outhouse was.  She didn´t much like going to the outhouse in the summer, it was so stinky, but you had to get used to it.

[We'll conclude this with part 2, which we'll publish on Nov. 1, 2014.]
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We are working on a documentary about flamenco and its connection to the gitano community.  Go HERE to see the web site and a trailer, and HERE to sign up for our newsletter so you can keep up with the progress on our work.