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inglés al español: The last drop: the politics of water by Mike Gonzalez. Translation mine. Detailed field: Ciencias sociales, sociología, ética, etc.
Texto de origen - inglés
INTRODUCTION
Where there is water, there is life. Without it, there is nothing. Our collective nightmares about the future always seem to centre on worlds turned into deserts. Some 85% of the planet’s surface is water. And much of what is not, from the land to the people who inhabit it, is also largely water. It sustains the body, nourishes the land, drives the wheels of industry, and transforms itself in many unexpected ways.
So why is it that in recent decades, the talk of a water crisis has risen to a cacophony, when for so much of our history we have assumed its availability and its continuing flow? How can there be a shortage of something that is everywhere we look, and that regularly cascades over us. Why has the talk of crisis suddenly become so insistent?
The reality is that there is not one crisis but several, but according to the World Water Report of 2014, “the crisis is essentially a crisis of governance”. In other words, it is not a natural phenomenon we are discussing, not simply that there is so much water and the world’s population is growing. The problem is one of the management and allocation of the water that exists on earth.
It is clear that climate change is happening; it is by now part of everyone’s day to day experience. The rainfall patterns over centuries have changed, the seas have warmed and the ice caps and glaciers are shrinking. Most Europeans know that winters are colder and the summers growing hotter. Recent tragedies have brought home in dramatic ways the changes that are to come. Hurricane Katrina has left us with tragic and terrible images – of the impact of the hurricane but more importantly of the cold cynicism of people in power, who abandoned the poor of New Orleans to their fate with so little scruple. The tsunami of 2004 killed hundreds of thousands in hours, and drove home both the unpredictability and the power of water. Yet for a long time after a group of concerned climate scientists from all over the world formed the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 1989, there was an often vicious debate calling their carefully researched and reported conclusions into doubt. The ‘climate sceptics’ who publicly questioned them were supported and financed by ‘Big Oil’ and ‘Big Coal’, whose influence and enormous wealth stemmed from industries that, according to the scientists, were significantly responsible for emitting the greenhouse gases that were leading to global warming and climate change.
The decade 2005- 2015 was declared to be the Decade of Action for Water and Life; the decade when the optimistic Milennium Goals would be fulfilled, among them the reduction by half of the 1.2 billion human beings still without access to clean drinking water as the century began, and the 2 billion plus without sanitation (a figure much less quoted but in many ways far more significant ). The international community’s decision to support these goals stemmed perhaps from the apocalyptic pronouncements that intensified as the 20th century drew to its end, and perhaps most dramatically the much repeated prediction by a Deputy Director of the World Bank that where the 20th had been a century of conflicts over oil, the 21st would be marked by water wars. The wreckage left by the competition for oil surrounds us still, from the systematic destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the endless crises in the Middle East. There have not yet to have been similar acts of wanton destruction in relation to water. Was the prediction wrong? Not at all, but there are many ways to wreak havoc, and many levels on which the water conflict will express itself. In fact, there are struggles everywhere over water, as significant and dangerous as the wars of position conducted between unarmed drones and rifles among ruins that we have become so accustomed to. The water wars, if they are allowed to happen, will be conflicts between desperate people facing “a general degradation of their living standards” . The struggles are beginning, and they are not restricted to the poor regions of the world; there are mobilisations everywhere as the awareness of the importance of water grows. As we write, Ireland is living through a determined protest movement against water privatization, great marches cross India again and again to demand democratic control of water, China faces water scarcity at a level so dramatic that massive tunnels are being built to carry water back to its northern regions, while in Brazil 100,000 indigenous families are being displaced by the Belo Monte dam which will flood their home territories to feed local metallurgical industries. There are insistent predictions of recurring drought in the United States and the implications of the shrinking ice cap for the planet’s future are part of the daily diet of public anxieties.
For the most part,however, these conflicts are of a different order, where the opposing forces are deeply unequal. The rich world of the north is prolific in its use of water, and a good proportion of the world’s fresh water is located in these regions; the water-poor live in the developing world where the public provision of water is a late development, and often unsystematic and subject to powerful external pressures. The increasingly common picture is, on the one hand, the control of water supplies by the huge multinational companies grown confident and powerful in a neo-liberal era, and on the other public enterprises under siege and local communities whose only weapons are resolution, mass organization and the combination of conviction and, in many cases, despair. The iconic struggle of the communities of Cochabamba in Bolivia in 2000 against just such an enemy, the Bechtel Corporation, was the first concrete demonstration that even such unequal battles could be won.
As to the Milennium promises, they remain largely unfulfilled; indeed the battle to provide water to the poorest on earth – and they are not only to be found in desert regions or the communities of Central Africa – still has far to go . The UN Water Development Report 2015 presents figures for progress towards the MDG targets that show 69 countries “seriously off target”- in other words unlikely to reach the santitation targets by 2030 - and 53 countries that will not meet the objectives for access to safe drinking water.
Conflicts over water are about far more than the provision of water in itself. Water, after all, is part of that range of resources that should belong to all – the commons -that have been appropriated and privatized at an increasing pace, as their distribution too has grown increasingly unequal. The response from the global market has been to attack, directly and indirectly, the idea that the earth is “a common treasury for everyone to share” , and redefine water as “an economic good” as opposed to a human right. In the slippery vocabulary of neo-liberalism that means that it should only be available to those who can pay. And what of the rest of humanity? What of those who were to be the beneficiaries of the Milennium goals conceived in an uncharacteristic moment of sentimental concern by the world’s ruling classes as they faced the imminent collapse of the Milennium clock? They were easily forgotten in the brutal realism of the age of globalization.
The explosion of writings about water reflect a real change in its use and distribution from the last two decades of the 20th century onwards. If for most of human history rain and rivers served human needs, in the industrial age rivers and lakes were sourced both for water for human use but also to drive the turbines of industry. The difficulty is that the discussion has centred on drinking water and, very much second, on sanitation and by extension on the individual and domestic uses of water. Perhaps this is the level at which we can grasp the significance of water in our lives. But the water use that is changing the face of the planet, with unanticipated and often hidden consequences, is not all visible to the naked eye. While just 10% of the planet’s water is dedicated to domestic consumption, the rest is divided between industry and agriculture, with the lion’s share (around 65%) going to agriculture. The population of the planet is increasing and with it food production. But agricultural production embraces much more than food crops – maize and sugar are harvested to produce bio-ethanol, an alternative fuel for cars and machines, for example. But it is neither cheaper nor environmentally friendlier than the fossil fuels on which we have come to depend so heavily. Oil production involves huge quantities of water, and increasing amounts as other reserves are mobilized – tar sands, shale gas and fracking for instance – which require even more water in the extraction process. But the decision to develop ethanol was not based on any considerations about the best use of water, or any other resource, but in anticipation of “peak oil” – the point at which half of the total oil available on earth had been exhausted – a point which may already have been reached but which is anyway close. The arrival of that critical moment could have generated serious debates about rationalizing, controlling and reducing our palpably wasteful use of oil – millions of private cars circulating with a single passenger while public transport is savaged everywhere, for example – as well as the huge proportion of other apparently unrelated goods which are by-products of oil – plastic in its millions and one manifestations, nylon and many others.
In the late sixties, as population growth became an issue of public debate, and dire predictions that current food production could not keep pace, a “green revolution” was announced that would multiply the productivity of food crops. Not for the last time, the word “green” laid a reassuring cover over large scale genetic modification and the use of chemicals and pesticides, but also concealed a massive increase in water use in agriculture. This was not addressed at the time, nor for many years thereafter, because water was regarded as a virtually infinite resource. Rivers were there to be seen, the exaggerated optimism of a dam-building age gave us huge man-made lakes. Industrialization spread into the developing world, and its cities grew at an accelerated speed, partly at least as dams and an industrialised agriculture expelled growing numbers from the countryside. By the later 1980s it was also possible to speak of water mining on a large and growing scale. The world’s rivers and lakes were insufficient to respond to society’s water needs, and the underground aquifers that hold 30% of all freshwater began to be mined – wells sunk deeper and deeper and human ingenuity placed at the service of finding ways to draw the underground water at a faster and faster rate, passing many times over the rate of recharge. Aquifers are recharged by the process whereby precipitation filters through or infiltrates the soil to replenish the aquifers, or flows into rivers and lakes as run off before they in their turn flow into the sea whose waters will evaporate at varying rates to become water vapour and in turn the rain that sustains the water cycle. A third source is evapotranspiration – the water caught within living beings that adds to the water in the atmosphere. This water cycle was the guarantee of the survival of the species – for we are ourselves 70% water. Harnessing water has been a permanent feature of human societies – storing it and diverting it to the crops in the fields, to sustain life. The Roman engineers have left evidence of a new phase, the transporting of water, wherever their aqueducts are framed against the sky. Other ancient civilizations – Babylon, Athens, Ur – developed sophisticated means of transporting water too, controlling and to some extent taming nature. And as Wittfogel famously analysed, in such “hydraulic societies” the control of water also brought with it power and inequality. But it is only with the industrial age that the power of water begins to be harnessed for commercial gain.
“During the first three-quarters of the 20th century absolute and per capita demand for water increased throughout the world. Freshwater withdrawals increased from an estimated 500 cubic kilometres per year in 1900 to 3580 cubic kilometres per year in 1990.”
The calculation per capita does not provide us with a true picture. In some countries, the U.S. and Canada for example, individual water use is far above the world average; in other parts of the world, in particular Africa and the Middle East it is far below that per capita figure. But beyond the unequal distribution of water, a critical issue as we address the likely shortfall of the Milennium Goals by 2025, the reality is that industry and agriculture are not only the direct users of the bulk of water, but they are also responsible for the shrinking availability of water overall. Industrial processes not only use water; they pollute and contaminate it, so that it will not and cannot be returned, but will reduce the overall amount of available water year on year.
The most significant change in the late 20th century, however, was that the increasingly intense public discussion about water scarcity produced not only a debate about how best to use our water, what processes we could develop with our extraordinary technological ingenuity, what level of wastefulness characterized our production systems, but rather a new enthusiasm among those who controlled the global capitalist economy. A new and potentially immensely profitable commodity had appeared in the global market place – water. Bottled, channelled, transported towards the richer corners of the world, it could yield enormous profits. How ironic, then, that the possibility of water scarcity, or rather its likelihood, could be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem it was incumbent on the whole of humanity to resolve!
Our starting point is that water is a key component in the maintenance of a decent human existence. That much is obvious, though the fact that it has to be argued at all exposes the cruelty of the global system. Once it was sufficient to dip a hand in a nearby lake or river, or channel its flow to irrigate the crops. Wittfogel’s definition of “hydraulic societies” described how human civilizations have arisen (and fallen) around water through thousands of years. But those water sources have become contaminated, polluted by the poisons of human invention, or simply drained, their natural cycle of renewal interrupted and undermined. And that has happened not only because civilisations and their cities have grown well beyond the river banks, nor simply because industrialization has accelerated the rhythm of change, but because it has happened in the framework of capitalism. Production may seem to be driven by techniques and machinery, but they in their turn are driven by values, purposes and the yearning for accumulation of those who own them. In that system of values water becomes a commodity , its use and allocation determined only by its market price. The sometimes abstruse arguments about use and exchange value become suddenly very clear when the subject is water. Water is life itself, as the cliché repeats in almost every language; yet today it is subject to the laws of the market, and to its contempt for life. When neo-liberal theorists describe water as an “economic good”, it is placed in the same category as an automobile or a dress from Dior. It is available only to those who pay, and those who cannot will suffer the predictable consequences. It is not a question here of who should pay less or more. To ask it about water at all is to come face to face with the central contradiction of capitalism. Water is for the benefit of all, a common resource. How to ensure that it remains so is our central concern as authors and activists. But just as water flows into every crevice so its democratic control affects every single human activity; a new and just world water order is only imaginable in a world governed by different values and shared collective purposes. Just as most water wars have in fact been local confrontations, so a new world water order will begin with local collaborations multiplying on a global scale. But it is an urgent matter, as we will show, to ensure that we never have to contemplate the fate of the last drop.
Traducción - español INTRODUCCIÓN
Donde hay agua, hay vida. Sin agua, nada sobrevive. Nuestras pesadillas colectivas sobre el futuro suelen centrarse en un mundo vuelto desierto. Un 85% de la superficie del planeta es agua y, del resto, desde la tierra hasta las poblaciones que la habitan, una gran parte también es agua. Sostiene el cuerpo, alimenta la tierra, impulsa las ruedas de la industria, y se transforma de muchas maneras inesperadas.
¿Cómo se explica, sobre todo en las últimas décadas,que las conversaciones sobre la crisis del agua han hecho cacofonía? Durante la mayor parte de nuestra historia hemos dado por sentado que siempre fluiría y que nunca nos fallaría? ¿Cómo es posible que haya escasez de algo que nos rodea por todas partes y que nos cae encima con tanta regularidad? ¿Porqué de repente tanta insistencia en hablar de crisis? En realidad no hay una sola crisis, sino varias. Según el Informe Mundial sobre el Agua de 2014 “en esencia estamos hablando de una crisis de gobernabilidad”. Dicho de otra manera, no se trata de un fenómeno natural, de que la población global está creciendo ante una cantidad finita de agua. El problema fundamental es la administración y la distribución del líquido de la vida.
Ya nadie puede negar la realidad del cambio climático; forma parte de la experiencia cotidiana de cada uno de nosotros. La ocurrencia de las lluvias ha cambiado a través de los siglos, los mares se están calentando y los glaciares y las capas de hielo se están encogiendo. Los europeos saben que los inviernos son cada vez más fríos y los veranos más calientes. Las tragedias de los últimos años fueron anuncios de los cambios por venir. El Huracán Katrina nos legó imágenes terribles , no solo del impacto del huracán sino también del cinismo frío de los poderosos que abandonaron a las poblaciones pobres de Nueva Orleans a lo que les esperaba sin el más mínimo escrúpulo. El tsunami de 2004 mató a cientos de miles en cuestión de horas, para recordarnos tanto la fuerza como la impredicibilidad del agua. En 1989, un grupo de científicos formó el Panel Intergubernamental Sobre el Cambio Climático (IPCC) preocupados por el futuro del planeta. financiados por el Gran Petróleo y el Gran Carbón, surgió el grupo de llamados “escépticos climáticos”, que pusieron en duda las preocupaciones y conclusiones del Panel . Sus inmensos recursos proveníande las industrias que ,según las investigaciones del IPCC, eran responsables en gran medida de los gases invernaderos que causaban el calentamiento global y el cambio climático.
La década 2005-15 se declaró la Década de Acción por el Agua y la Vida. Los Objetivos del Milenio declarados por Naciones Unidas en el mismo año incluían el compromiso de reducir por la mitad los 1,2 billones de seres humanos todavía privados de agua potable a principios del siglo XXI , y los más de dos billones sin acceso a la sanidad (cifra que se cita mucho menos a pesar de ser mucho más significativa ). La decisión de la comunidad internacional de apoyar estos objetivos se debía a las cada vez más apocalípticas declaraciones que se difundían a través de los medios de comunicación. La más dramática la dijo un Vice Director del Banco Mundial: el siglo veinte fue un siglo de conflictos sobre el petróleo, el nuevo siglo sería marcado por conflictos sobre el agua.
Dondequiera que miremos vemos las ruinas que ha dejado la competencia por el petróleo, desde la destrucción sistemática de Afganistán hasta las interminables y ruinosas crisis de Medio Oriente. Hasta ahora no han habido actos de destrucción parecidos como consecuencia de conflictos por el agua. ¿Estaba equivocada la predicción? En absoluto; las guerras del agua serán las luchas de gente común desesperada que enfrenta “una degradación general de sus niveles de vida” .
En China la escasez de agua es tan amenazante que se está construyendo un túnel de más de 2000 kilómetros de largo para llevar agua del sur al norte del país. En la Amazonía brasileña se construyeron seiscientas represas; cada una ha significado el desplazamiento de miles de familias y la inundación de grandes extensiones de tierra, por ejemplo la más reciente, Belo Monte, construida para abastecer a la industria metalúrgica. En Estados Unidos las sequías son cada vez más largas; y en el Artico la lenta desaparición de la capa de hielo acelera el calentamiento global.
Cuanto más crece la conciencia de la importancia del agua, tanto más movilizaciones se verán. En el momento de escribir estas palabras, Irlanda está presenciando protestas masivas contra la privatización del agua. En la India grandes marchas atraviesan el país exigiendo el control democrático sobre el agua.
Los conflictos del agua serán enfrentamientos muy desiguales. El cuadro cada vez más común es, por un lado, el control del agua por grandes compañías trasnacionales cuyo poder y confianza va en constante aumento en la época neoliberal. Por otro, están las empresas públicas y las comunidades locales asediadas, cuyas únicas armas son la determinación, la organización colectiva y el impulso de la necesidad. En este sentido la lucha de las comunidades de Cochabamba, Bolivia, en el año 2000 , contra un enemigo de esta índole, la Corporación Bechtel, resulta emblemática. Era la prueba de que las luchas pueden triunfar, aun ante un desequilibrio de fuerzas tan profundo.
En 2015, los Objetivos del Milenio están todavía lejos de cumplirse. Los que carecen de agua, que no sólo se encuentran en el desierto o en las comunidades del centro de Africa, siguen a la espera. El Informe de Naciones Unidas sobre el Desarrollo del Agua a Nivel Global de 2015 anota que
69 países están todavía “lejos de alcanzar” los objetivos en materia de sanidad para 2030, y 53 países no cumplirán los objetivos en relación al agua potable.
Los conflictos sobre el agua tienen que ver con mucho más que el abastecimiento. Forma parte de aquellos recursos comunes que deben pertenecer a todos , pero que.se han ido privatizando a grandes pasos; y en la misma medida su distribución se ha vuelto cada vez más desigual. La postura del mercado global ha sido atacar, directa o indirectamente, la idea de que el agua “es un tesoro común para compartir entre todos” ,. Insiste en que es “un bien económico” y no un derecho humano. En el vocabulario resbaloso del neoliberalismo esto significa sencillamente que solo los que pueden pagar deben tener derecho de acceso. Y ¿qué pasa con el resto de la humanidad? ¿Qué decir de aquellos que iban a ser los beneficiarios de los Objetivos del Milenio, concebidos en un momento de preocupación social muy poco característico de las clases dirigentes del mundo? Quedaron rápidamente olvidados en el realismo brutal de la época neoliberal.
El cambio en la forma en que se ha usado y distribuido el agua a partir de los años ochenta del siglo XX tiene su reflejo en el boom de escritos6 sobre el tema. Durante la mayor parte de la historia la lluvia y los ríos sirvieron a las necesidades humanas; en la época industrial los ríos y los lagos fueron explotados tanto para fines humanos como para impulsar las turbinas de la industria. La dificultad estriba en que la discusión se ha centrado en el agua potable y sólo en segundo lugar en la sanidad y el uso individual y doméstico del agua. Sin embargo, el uso del agua está cambiando la faz de la tierra, con consecuencias inesperadas y muchas veces ocultas. Mientras un 10% del agua mundial se dedica al consumo doméstico, el resto se reparte entre la industria y la agricultura, que consume la mayor parte – el 65%. La población del planeta va en aumento y con ella la producción de alimentos. Pero la agricultura incluye más que cultivos alimenticios. El maíz y el azúcar se cultivan para producir bio-etanol, por ejemplo, una fuente de energía alternativa para carros y máquinas; pero no es ni más barato ni más ecológico que las energías fósiles de las cuales hemos llegado a depender tanto. La producción del petróleo requiere inmensas cantidades de agua; mucho más cuando se trata del desarrollo de la explotación de las arenas bituminosas y el gas de esquiso o el fracking por ejemplo. Asimismo, la decisión de aumentar la producción de etanol no tenía que ver con la conservación del agua; se tomó para adelantarse al ‘cénit petrolero’, el momento en que se habría agotado la mitad del total de petròleo disponible en el planeta. El haber llegado a este punto critico pudo haber impulsado un debate serio sobre cómo racionalizar, controlar y hasta reducir nuestro derroche de recursos fósiles. Pero al contrario, el capitalismo ha estimulado cada vez más el uso de carros particulares y de todos los productos secundarios de la industria petrolera –el plástico en sus mil y una manifestaciones, el nailon, e incontables otros.
En los años sesenta se empezó a hablar públicamente del crecimiento de la población, y se predecía que la producción de los alimentos no podría mantenerse al ritmo; en ese momento se anunció que una “revolución verde” multiplicaría la productividad de los cultivos alimenticios. No sería la última vez que la palabra “verde” sirviera para encubrir la modificación genética en gran escala y el uso de químicos y pesticidas en la agricultura; pero al mismo tiempo desviaba la atención de un incremento masivo en el uso del agua. Esto no se enfrentó en aquel momento ni por muchos años después, porque el agua se consideraba un recurso virtualmente inagotable. Allí a la vista estaban los ríos, y el optimismo exagerado de la edad de las represas que nos dio enormes lagos artificiales. El mundo en desarrollo empezaba a industrializarse, y sus ciudades crecieron a una rapidez vertiginosa, en parte por las poblaciones expulsadas por la construcción de represas y la industrialización de la agricultura. Para finales de los ochenta se podia hablar de la minería del agua en gran escala. Los ríos y lagos del mundo ya no daban abasto a las necesidades del agua de la sociedad y se empezó a minar los acuíferos del subsuelo que contienen el 30% del agua fresca del mundo. Los pozos penetraron hasta cada vez mayores profundidades y la invención humana se dedicó a buscar formas de sacar el agua a ritmos cada vez mayores, y mucho más rápidos que su capacidad de recarga. Los acuíferos se recargan mediante un proceso de filtración de la precipitación que penetra la tierra , rellenando la cuenca acuífera., o bien fluyendo hacia ríos y lagos como runoff. Llegando al mar las aguas evaporan a ritmos distintos para transformarse en vapor y luego en lluvia que mantiene el ciclo del agua. Una tercera fuente es la evapotranspiración – el agua captado en entes vivos que se suma al agua en la atmósfera. Este ciclo del agua ha sido la garantía de la supervivencia de la especie –nuestros cuerpos mismos están compuestos por un 70% de agua. Todas las sociedades humanas se han dedicado a captar y almacenar el agua, para luego desviarla hacia los cultivos, sosteniendo la vida.Los ingenieros romanos nos dejaron evidencias de una nueva fase, el transporte del agua, dondequiera que se vean sus acueductos perfilados contra el cielo. Otras civilizaciones antiguas – Babilonia, Atenas, Ur –también desarrollaron formas sofisticadas de transportar el agua, controlando de esa manera y en cierta medida domesticando la naturaleza. Como analizó Wittfogel, en un escrito conocido, en estas “sociedades hidráulicas” el control del agua trajo consigo poder y una creciente desigualdad. Pero es solo con la llegada de la edad industrial que el poder del agua empieza a acapararse con fines de ganancia.
“Durante los primeros setenta y cinco años del siglo XX aumentó la demanda per cápita y absoluta del agua a través del mundo. La captación de agua fresca aumentó de 500 kilómetros cúbicos al año en 1900 hasta 3580 kilómetros cúbicos en 1990”.
El cálculo per cápita, sin embargo, no nos da un cuadro verdadero, pues en Estados Unidos y Canadá , el uso del agua individual rebasa por mucho el promedio mundial. Mientras tanto, en otras partes del mundo –Africa y Medio Oriente, por ejemplo – se consume mucho menos que la cifra por cabeza. Pero más allá de la distribución desigual del agua, la cuestión candente es la poca probabilidad de alcanzar las metas del Milenio para el año 2025,.La realidad es no sólo que la industria y la agricultura sean los que consumen la mayor parte, sino que además son responsables de la merma de la cantidad de agua disponible en términos globales de año en año.
El cambio más importante de los últimos años del siglo XX, sin embargo, fue que se discutiera con cada vez mayor intensidad la escasez del agua. Esto produjo un debate sobre las mejores formas de usar el recurso, qué procesos serían capaces de desarrollar nuestros mejores tecnólogos y qué nivel de derroche caracterizaba nuestros sistemas productivos. Por otro lado, eso despertó entre los que controlan la economía capitalista global un nuevo entusiasmo. Había aparecido en el mercado una nueva mercancía. Embotellada, canalizada, transportada hacia los rincones más ricos del mundo, ¡el agua podría generar grandes ganancias! Qué irónico que la posibilidad de la escasez del agua, o más bien su probabilidad, se viera como una oportunidad en vez de un problema que le correspondía a toda la humanidad resolver cuanto antes.
Nuestro punto de partida es que el agua es un elemento clave para garantizar una existencia humana decente. Esto es obvio, y el que se tenga que argumentar es una muestra más de la brutalidad del sistema global. Erase una vez bastaba con meter la mano en el lago o río más cercano o dirigir la corriente hacia los canales que regaban los cultivos. Wittfogel describió cómo las civilizaciones humanas surgieron (y se cayeron) en relación al agua durante milenios. Pero esas fuentes de agua se han contaminado, envenenadas por sustancias de invención humana, o simplemente se drenaron, una vez interferido o minado su ciclo de renovación. Y eso ha pasado no solo porque las civilizaciones y las ciudades crecieron mucho más allá de la orilla de los ríos, ni simplemente porque la industrialización aceleró el ritmo del cambio, sino porque todo esto ha ocurrido en el marco del capitalismo. Puede parecer que son las máquinas y la tecnología que impulsan la producción, pero el motor global son los valores, los fines y el deseo de acumulación de los que son sus propietarios. En ese sistema de valores, el agua se vuelve mercancía y su uso y distribución están determinados exclusivamente por su precio en el mercado. Los argumentos, a veces impenetrables, sobre el valor de uso y el valor de cambio se vuelven de repente muy claros cuando se trata del agua. El agua es la vida, tópico que se repite en todos los idiomas del mundo; y sin embargo hoy está sujeto a las leyes del mercado y su conocido desprecio por la vida. Cuando los teóricos liberales caracterizan el agua de “bien económico”, lo colocan en la misma categoría que un carro Toyota o un vestido de Dior; es decir, que está al alcance de cualquiera que lo pueda pagar, y los que no tengan el dinero sufrirán las consecuencias conocidas. Aquí no se trata de quién debe pagar más o menos, pues la pregunta misma nos enfrenta con una de las contradicciones centrales del capitalismo. El agua es para beneficio de todos. Es un bien común. Nuestra preocupación como autores y activistas es asegurar que lo siga siendo. El agua llena cada hueco y grieta, de la misma manera en que el control democrático afecta cada actividad humana sin excepción. Una nueva orden justa del agua solo es concebible en un mundo donde imperan otros valores y donde se comparten fines colectivos en común. Las guerras del agua han sido en general enfrentamientos locales, así como la creación de un nuevo orden del agua empezará con colaboraciones locales que se multiplican a escala global. Pero como demostraremos, es una cuestión urgente, para asegurar que nunca tengamos que enfrentar el destino de la última gota.
inglés al español: The village and the road by Tom Pow General field: Arte/Literatura Detailed field: Poesía y literatura
Texto de origen - inglés
The Village and The Road
Tom Pow
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (1)
To take the back road
out of the village
is to flirt with the illicit
To take the back road
into the village
is to imagine mastery
❇
To stop at a cemetery
between two villages
is neither good
nor bad luck
(Though that may depend
on where you happen to end up)
❇
To meet a cat in the village
is no great affair
To meet a cat on the road
is a warning
(Though about what
the proverb stays silent)
❇
To meet a stranger on the road
is to calculate risk
(And preferably to do so
before she does)
❇
To step beyond the boundary of the village
is to recognise the universe is boundless
❇
In Freudian terms –
To walk to the threshold of the village
then to return within its folds
is to threaten the impossible
❇
To watch your children take to the road
is to enter the world of metaphor
Among the most useful these:
rivers, valleys, canyons, seas
❇
A prayer for the village -
May you be as useful as a nest
And may your abandonment be swift
❇
Between the village and the road -
a heart, beating like a bird's,
a fox, like a blur of rust:
a song and a prayer
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (2)
In the village, they think of those
who have taken to the road
On the road
they think of the next village
❇
There are those on the road who never think
of the village
There are those in the village
who have made their lives an open road
❇
When the road turns to water,
you must grow fins
❇
There are countless dead villages
but no dead roads
(Discuss)
❇
You don't gather flowers
on the open road
for the open road
❇
You gather stories on the open road
for such times
as you have need of a bouquet
or to tell to yourself when darkness falls
and the faces
of all the flowers turn black
❇
Each night, its kindness
made the village glow
Wolves patrolled its roads,
letting no one
either in or out
❇
If I were to meet my dead father
I would choose to do so in spring
not within the confines of the village,
but casually on the open road
preferably in the early evening
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (3)
Twin brothers
One left the hillside village
The other stayed
till the first did not return
Their young sister
encouraged them both
Her renown grew
as a teller of tales
❇
I live in one village
but I dream of another
I walk down the road
the sun hot on my back
the books, an unmapped
road in my satchel
❇
She knew the roads
between villages
the paths through the forest
and a few more that once
skirted the fields
She lifted her head
to the blue steppe of the sky -
to the birds, above,
busy with nesting
❇
There were three roads
out of the village -
two led into the world;
the other to the sky
Now each of these roads
has been taken,
the village spins
uselessly in the wind
✻
Sunlight through leaves,
stippling bands
across a road
just before it curves
It's possible to love
when love
is a fixed point,
going nowhere
✻
Between the village and the road -
a moon of golden broth
shining in the darkness,
a pinch of earth for remembrance
The Village and The Road
El Pueblo y El Camino
by Tom Pow
translated by Mike Gonzalez
The Village and The Road
El Pueblo y El Camino
by Tom Pow
translated by Mike Gonzalez and
Marianella Yanes
for Alastair Reid -
something portable.
Abrazos
Tom and Mike
pueblo press
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (1)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (1)
To take the back road
out of the village
is to flirt with the illicit
To take the back road
into the village
is to imagine mastery
❇
Tomar el camino de atrás
salir del pueblo
es coquetear con lo prohibido
Tomar el camino de atrás
y entrar en el pueblo
es imaginarse poderoso
To stop at a cemetery
between two villages
is neither good
nor bad luck
(Though that may depend
on where you happen to end up)
❇
Detenerse en un cementerio
entre dos pueblos
no trae ni buena
ni mala fortuna
(Claro, eso puede depender
de dónde acabas)
To meet a cat in the village
is no great affair
To meet a cat on the road
is a warning
(Though about what
the proverb stays silent)
❇
Encontrarse con un gato en el pueblo
no es gran cosa
Encontrarse con un gato en el camino
es un aviso
(Pero el proverbio no nos dice
un aviso de qué)
To meet a stranger on the road
is to calculate risk
(And preferably to do so
before she does)
❇
Encontrarse con una desconocida
en el camino
significa medir el riesgo
(Y hacerlo antes
de que lo haga ella)
To step beyond the boundary of the village
is to recognise the universe is boundless
❇
Tomar un paso más allá del límite del pueblo
es reconocer que el universo no tiene límites
In Freudian terms –
To walk to the threshold of the village
then to return within its folds
is to threaten the impossible
❇
Según la visión de Freud -
Caminar hasta el umbral del pueblo
para luego regresar
y ocultarse en sus pliegues
es amenazar con hacer lo imposible
To watch your children take to the road
is to enter the world of metaphor
Among the most useful these:
rivers, valleys, canyons, seas
❇
Ver a tus hijos emprender el camino
es entrar en el mundo de la metáfora
Entre las más útiles están:
los ríos, los valles,
las quebradas, los mares
A prayer for the village -
May you be as useful as a nest
May your abandonment be swift
❇
Una oración para el pueblo -
Qué seas tan útil como un nido
Que el abandono sea rápido
Between the village and the road -
a heart, beating like a bird's,
a fox, like a blur of rust:
a song and a prayer
❇
Entre el pueblo y el camino -
un corazón que palpita
como el corazón de un pájaro,
el zorro borroso
óxido en el metal:
una canción y una oración
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (2)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (2)
In the village, they think of those
who have taken to the road
On the road
they think of the next village
❇
En el pueblo, piensan
en los que se lanzaron al camino
En el camino
piensan en el próximo pueblo
There are those on the road who never think
of the village
There are those in the village
who have made their lives an open road
❇
Hay gente en el camino que nunca piensa
en el pueblo
Hay gente en el pueblo
que han hecho de su vida un camino abierto
When the road turns to water,
you must grow fins
❇
Cuando el camino se vuelve agua,
necesitarás aletas
There are countless dead villages
but no dead roads
(Discuss)
❇
Hay un sinfín de pueblos muertos
pero no hay caminos muertos
(Comentar)
You don't gather flowers
on the open road
for the open road
❇
No se recogen flores
en el camino abierto
para el camino abierto
You gather stories on the open road
for such times
as you have need of a bouquet
or to tell to yourself when darkness falls
and the faces
of all the flowers turn black
❇
En el camino real recoges cuentos
para aquellos momentos
en que necesitas un ramo de flores
O para contártelos a ti mismo
cuando se pone oscuro
y la cara de las flores se torna negra
Each night, its kindness
made the village glow
Wolves patrolled its roads,
letting no one
either in or out
❇
Cada noche, brillaba el pueblo
por su bondad
Los lobos hacían guardia en los caminos
para que nadie
entrara ni saliera
If I were to meet my dead father
I would choose to do so in spring
not within the confines of the village,
but casually on the open road
preferably in the early evening
❇
Si yo me encontrara con mi padre muerto
preferiría que fuera en primavera
y no en los confines del pueblo
sino casualmente en el camino abierto
y de preferencia en la tardecita.
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (3)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (3)
Twin brothers
One left the hillside village
The other stayed
till the first did not return
Their young sister
encouraged them both
Her renown grew
as a teller of tales
❇
Hermanos gemelos
Uno abandonó el pueblo del monte
El otro se quedó
hasta que el primero
dejara de regresar
Su hermana menor
los animaba a los dos
Crecía su fama
de narradora de cuentos
I live in one village
but I dream of another
I walk down the road
the sun hot on my back
the books, an unmapped
road in my satchel
❇
Vivo en un pueblo
pero sueño con otro
Recorro el camino
el sol me calienta la espalda
Los libros, una senda sin mapa
en mi morral
She knew the roads
between villages
the paths through the forest
and a few more that once
skirted the fields
She lifted her head
to the blue steppe of the sky -
to the birds, above,
busy with nesting
❇
Ella conocía los caminos
entre pueblo y pueblo
las trochas del bosque
y otras más, que antes
orillaban los campos
Levantó la cara
hacia la gran estepa azul del cielo -
miraba los pájaros en lo alto
concentrados
haciendo sus nidos
There were three roads
out of the village -
two led into the world;
the other to the sky
Now each of these roads
has been taken,
the village spins
uselessly in the wind
✻
Tres caminos salían
del pueblo -
dos iban hacia el mundo;
el otro hacia el cielo
Ahora cada uno
ha sido tomado,
el pueblo da vueltas inútiles
en el viento
Sunlight through leaves,
stippling bands
across a road
just before it curves
It's possible to love
when love
is a fixed point,
going nowhere
✻
El sol penetra las hojas
pintando rayas
a través del camino
justo antes de la curva
Es posible amar
cuando el amor
es un punto fijo
que no viaja a ninguna parte
Between the village and the road -
a moon of golden broth
shining in the darkness,
a pinch of earth for remembrance
✻
Entre el pueblo y el camino -
la luna de caldo dorado
brilla en la oscuridad,
una pizca de tierra para recordar
Pueblo Press publishes limited editions of work related to Tom Pow's dying villages project (www.dyingvillages.com). Previous publications are Songs from a Dying Village (Cantos de un poueblo que se muere) y Ceann Loch Reasort and other Dead Village Walks.
Pueblo Press publica ediciones limitadas de trabajos vinculadoos con el proyecto de Tom Pow – Pueblos que se mueren (www.dyingvillages.com). Publicaciones anteriores son Songs from a Dying Village and Ceann Loch Reasort and other Dead Village Walks. (Ceann Loch Reasort y otros paseos por pueblos que se mueren)
The Village and The Road is published with the support of Creative Scotland for the International Poetry Festival I n Granada, Nicaragua, February 2012.
The Village and The Road (El Pueblo y el camino) se publica con el apoyo de Escocia Creativa para la Fiesta Interncaional de la Poesía en Granada, Nicaragua, en febrero de 2012.
Mike Gonzalez is a playwright, translator and critic. He has published extensively on Latin American literature and history. He is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Mike Gonzalez es dramaturgo, traductor y crítico; ha escrito extensamenter sobre la literatura y la historia latinoamericanas. Es Catedrático Emérito de Estduios Latinoamericanos en la Universidad de Glasgow, Escocia.
Marianella Yanes es escritora, periodista y dramaturga venezolana.
These poems were written in Culross, Fife, in March 2011. Thank you, Carol.
Estos poemas se escribieron en Culross, Fife, en marzo de 2011.
Gracias Carol.
The images by Tom Pow are from the sequence (1-50) of The Village and The Road.
Las imágenes por Tom Pow pertenecen a la serie (1-50) del Publo y El Camino.
Traducción - español
The Village and The Road
El Pueblo y El Camino
by Tom Pow
translated by Mike Gonzalez
The Village and The Road
El Pueblo y El Camino
by Tom Pow
translated by Mike Gonzalez and
Marianella Yanes
for Alastair Reid -
something portable.
Abrazos
Tom and Mike
pueblo press
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (1)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (1)
To take the back road
out of the village
is to flirt with the illicit
To take the back road
into the village
is to imagine mastery
❇
Tomar el camino de atrás
salir del pueblo
es coquetear con lo prohibido
Tomar el camino de atrás
y entrar en el pueblo
es imaginarse poderoso
To stop at a cemetery
between two villages
is neither good
nor bad luck
(Though that may depend
on where you happen to end up)
❇
Detenerse en un cementerio
entre dos pueblos
no trae ni buena
ni mala fortuna
(Claro, eso puede depender
de dónde acabas)
To meet a cat in the village
is no great affair
To meet a cat on the road
is a warning
(Though about what
the proverb stays silent)
❇
Encontrarse con un gato en el pueblo
no es gran cosa
Encontrarse con un gato en el camino
es un aviso
(Pero el proverbio no nos dice
un aviso de qué)
To meet a stranger on the road
is to calculate risk
(And preferably to do so
before she does)
❇
Encontrarse con una desconocida
en el camino
significa medir el riesgo
(Y hacerlo antes
de que lo haga ella)
To step beyond the boundary of the village
is to recognise the universe is boundless
❇
Tomar un paso más allá del límite del pueblo
es reconocer que el universo no tiene límites
In Freudian terms –
To walk to the threshold of the village
then to return within its folds
is to threaten the impossible
❇
Según la visión de Freud -
Caminar hasta el umbral del pueblo
para luego regresar
y ocultarse en sus pliegues
es amenazar con hacer lo imposible
To watch your children take to the road
is to enter the world of metaphor
Among the most useful these:
rivers, valleys, canyons, seas
❇
Ver a tus hijos emprender el camino
es entrar en el mundo de la metáfora
Entre las más útiles están:
los ríos, los valles,
las quebradas, los mares
A prayer for the village -
May you be as useful as a nest
May your abandonment be swift
❇
Una oración para el pueblo -
Qué seas tan útil como un nido
Que el abandono sea rápido
Between the village and the road -
a heart, beating like a bird's,
a fox, like a blur of rust:
a song and a prayer
❇
Entre el pueblo y el camino -
un corazón que palpita
como el corazón de un pájaro,
el zorro borroso
óxido en el metal:
una canción y una oración
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (2)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (2)
In the village, they think of those
who have taken to the road
On the road
they think of the next village
❇
En el pueblo, piensan
en los que se lanzaron al camino
En el camino
piensan en el próximo pueblo
There are those on the road who never think
of the village
There are those in the village
who have made their lives an open road
❇
Hay gente en el camino que nunca piensa
en el pueblo
Hay gente en el pueblo
que han hecho de su vida un camino abierto
When the road turns to water,
you must grow fins
❇
Cuando el camino se vuelve agua,
necesitarás aletas
There are countless dead villages
but no dead roads
(Discuss)
❇
Hay un sinfín de pueblos muertos
pero no hay caminos muertos
(Comentar)
You don't gather flowers
on the open road
for the open road
❇
No se recogen flores
en el camino abierto
para el camino abierto
You gather stories on the open road
for such times
as you have need of a bouquet
or to tell to yourself when darkness falls
and the faces
of all the flowers turn black
❇
En el camino real recoges cuentos
para aquellos momentos
en que necesitas un ramo de flores
O para contártelos a ti mismo
cuando se pone oscuro
y la cara de las flores se torna negra
Each night, its kindness
made the village glow
Wolves patrolled its roads,
letting no one
either in or out
❇
Cada noche, brillaba el pueblo
por su bondad
Los lobos hacían guardia en los caminos
para que nadie
entrara ni saliera
If I were to meet my dead father
I would choose to do so in spring
not within the confines of the village,
but casually on the open road
preferably in the early evening
❇
Si yo me encontrara con mi padre muerto
preferiría que fuera en primavera
y no en los confines del pueblo
sino casualmente en el camino abierto
y de preferencia en la tardecita.
THE VILLAGE & THE ROAD (3)
EL PUEBLO Y EL CAMINO (3)
Twin brothers
One left the hillside village
The other stayed
till the first did not return
Their young sister
encouraged them both
Her renown grew
as a teller of tales
❇
Hermanos gemelos
Uno abandonó el pueblo del monte
El otro se quedó
hasta que el primero
dejara de regresar
Su hermana menor
los animaba a los dos
Crecía su fama
de narradora de cuentos
I live in one village
but I dream of another
I walk down the road
the sun hot on my back
the books, an unmapped
road in my satchel
❇
Vivo en un pueblo
pero sueño con otro
Recorro el camino
el sol me calienta la espalda
Los libros, una senda sin mapa
en mi morral
She knew the roads
between villages
the paths through the forest
and a few more that once
skirted the fields
She lifted her head
to the blue steppe of the sky -
to the birds, above,
busy with nesting
❇
Ella conocía los caminos
entre pueblo y pueblo
las trochas del bosque
y otras más, que antes
orillaban los campos
Levantó la cara
hacia la gran estepa azul del cielo -
miraba los pájaros en lo alto
concentrados
haciendo sus nidos
There were three roads
out of the village -
two led into the world;
the other to the sky
Now each of these roads
has been taken,
the village spins
uselessly in the wind
✻
Tres caminos salían
del pueblo -
dos iban hacia el mundo;
el otro hacia el cielo
Ahora cada uno
ha sido tomado,
el pueblo da vueltas inútiles
en el viento
Sunlight through leaves,
stippling bands
across a road
just before it curves
It's possible to love
when love
is a fixed point,
going nowhere
✻
El sol penetra las hojas
pintando rayas
a través del camino
justo antes de la curva
Es posible amar
cuando el amor
es un punto fijo
que no viaja a ninguna parte
Between the village and the road -
a moon of golden broth
shining in the darkness,
a pinch of earth for remembrance
✻
Entre el pueblo y el camino -
la luna de caldo dorado
brilla en la oscuridad,
una pizca de tierra para recordar
Pueblo Press publishes limited editions of work related to Tom Pow's dying villages project (www.dyingvillages.com). Previous publications are Songs from a Dying Village (Cantos de un poueblo que se muere) y Ceann Loch Reasort and other Dead Village Walks.
Pueblo Press publica ediciones limitadas de trabajos vinculadoos con el proyecto de Tom Pow – Pueblos que se mueren (www.dyingvillages.com). Publicaciones anteriores son Songs from a Dying Village and Ceann Loch Reasort and other Dead Village Walks. (Ceann Loch Reasort y otros paseos por pueblos que se mueren)
The Village and The Road is published with the support of Creative Scotland for the International Poetry Festival I n Granada, Nicaragua, February 2012.
The Village and The Road (El Pueblo y el camino) se publica con el apoyo de Escocia Creativa para la Fiesta Interncaional de la Poesía en Granada, Nicaragua, en febrero de 2012.
Mike Gonzalez is a playwright, translator and critic. He has published extensively on Latin American literature and history. He is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Mike Gonzalez es dramaturgo, traductor y crítico; ha escrito extensamenter sobre la literatura y la historia latinoamericanas. Es Catedrático Emérito de Estduios Latinoamericanos en la Universidad de Glasgow, Escocia.
Marianella Yanes es escritora, periodista y dramaturga venezolana.
These poems were written in Culross, Fife, in March 2011. Thank you, Carol.
Estos poemas se escribieron en Culross, Fife, en marzo de 2011.
Gracias Carol.
The images by Tom Pow are from the sequence (1-50) of The Village and The Road.
Las imágenes por Tom Pow pertenecen a la serie (1-50) del Publo y El Camino.
español al inglés: Abraham Cruzvillegas- Autoconstruccion-Exhibition Catalogue General field: Arte/Literatura Detailed field: Arte, artes manuales, pintura
Texto de origen - español Autoconstrucción
Durante los primeros veinte años de mi vida presencié la construcción lenta de la casa donde vivía mi familia, todos participamos en ese proceso. En el contexto de una invasión masiva de inmigrantes procedentes del campo, con necesidades muy precisas, como vivienda, la construcción de mi casa, de mi colonia, comenzó en los años sesenta, en una zona de piedra volcánica al sur de la ciudad de México que no había sido contemplada en la planeación de la ciudad, si es que hubo alguna.
Los materiales y las técnicas usadas fueron casi completamente improvisados, dependiendo de las circunstancias específicas del entorno inmediato, en medio de una inestabilidad social y económica generalizada, no solo en México, sino probablemente en el mundo. Las soluciones estaban basadas en necesidades y situaciones concretas, como hacer una nueva habitación, modificar un techo, mejorar, modificar o cancelar algún espacio.
Por haber sido construida sin presupuesto y sin voluntad arquitectónica, actualmente la casa aparece caótica y casi inútil, sin embargo cada detalle, cada esquina tiene una razón de ser, de estar allí. La casa es un auténtico laberinto pulido por la pátina simultánea de la construcción, el uso y la destrucción.
Esa autoconstrucción, como se llama genéricamente a ese tipo de edificaciones, debe ser vista como un proceso cálido en el que la solidaridad entre vecinos y familiares es muy importante. No solo en términos de colaboración como tal, como un capital compartido, sino como un entorno educativo y enriquecedor para cualquier individuo como parte de una comunidad, para entender su propia circunstancia.
La serie de obras que componen el proyecto Autoconstrucción, parten de observar la casa como un todo, sus detalles y técnicas improvisadas o derivadas de la urgencia orgánica de componer un hábitat humano a como dé lugar, un espacio que deviene espontáneo, contradictorio e inestable. Las referencias originadas a partir de la observación de la casa se transforman, también de manera inestable, como obstáculos, rebabas, estorbos, saltos, brincos, sacudidas, irregularidades, desprendimientos, rebotes, quiebres o anulaciones, que apelan a lo local, en forma de una conciencia somática de lo inmediato, de lo urgente, de una presencia física en el tiempo y en el espacio: múltiple y simultánea
Muchas de esas obras evidencian mi voluntad de confrontar dos o más sistemas económicos radicalmente distintos, llevando a cabo matrimonios híbridos y mezclas inesperadas de materiales y técnicas.
No existe representación de los detalles técnicos de la construcción, sino una reproducción de las diversas dinámicas involucradas, observando sus entornos sociales y económicos como un andamio en el cual me muevo.
Aún cuando aisladamente algunas piezas pueden recordar figurativamente la estructura básica de ‘una casa’, más que simplemente presentar maquetas de arquitectura pobre, mi meta principal es producir conocimiento acerca de cómo la actividad humana genera formas, tratando de renovar para mí mismo un vehículo significativo para la invención y la creación.
Por otro lado, y como una banda sonora silente del tiempo y del espacio, junto con las esculturas que hago, hay una acumulación –igualmente contradictoria- de información traducida en dibujos, fotografías, imágenes en movimientos y sonidos, apropiados de libros, música, otras imágenes, y experiencias en mi vida.
Colecciones de carteles de cine, imágenes canceladas tomadas de periódicos y postales, pedazos de videos, canciones y tonadas, y textos secuestrados de mis lecturas, componen algunas de los conjuntos que comparto para atestiguar mi cosmos. Todos estos fragmentos son las piedras y tabiques labrados a mano que conforman las paredes, techos y pisos de mi casa.
Para la construcción de la imagen total de mi integridad recolecto a la manera del Atlas Mnemosyne realizado por Aby Warburg, como una acumulativa y afectiva búsqueda de signos expresivos en todas partes.
Buckminster Fuller decía que la materia se organiza por simpatía, cosa que aplica para mis colecciones de objetos, imágenes y sonidos, así como para mi obra tridimensional.
A través de mínimas transformaciones, sin anécdotas, sin narrativas e incluso tal vez sin ninguna habilidad, mi obra es la prueba de que estoy vivo. En mi obra, la transformación de información, materiales y objetos compone también la definitivamente inacabada construcción de mi propia identidad, como una aproximación a la realidad. A través de hechos.
SELF-BUILDING
For the first twenty years of my life I was a witness to the slow construction of the house where my family lived; we all took part in the process. Against the background of a mass invasion of immigrants from the countryside, whose needs were very specific – like housing – the construction of my house, of my colonia (my district) began in the sixties, in an area of volcanic rock (Pedregales de Coyoacan) in the south of Mexico City. It had never been included in any plans for the expansion of the city, if any such plan existed.
The materials and the techniques we used were almost entirely improvised, based on whatever was available in the immediate surroundings; the context was a time of general economic and social instability, not just in Mexico, but probably across the world. The solutions we found arose from concrete needs in concrete situations, like building an extra room, modifying a roof, improving or changing or eliminating one space or another.
Because it was built with no funding and no architectural plan, today the house looks chaotic, almost unusable; yet every detail, every corner has a reason to be where it is. The house is a true labyrinth, polished by the simultaneous patina of construction, use and destruction.
This self-building, the term generally used for this type of construction, has to be seen as a process full of human warmth and solidarity among neighbours and relatives. It is important not just as collaboration, as shared capital, but also as an enriching learning environment for everyone who is part of a community, helping them to understand their own circumstances.
The series of works which make up the Self-Building project begin by seeing the house as a whole, its details and improvised techniques born of the organic need to create a human habitat by any means necessary, a space which becomes spontaneous, contradictory and unstable as it progresses. The references whose starting point is the observation of the house are also transformed, in an equally unstable way, into obstacles, debris, constraints, leaps and jumps, tremors and unevennesses, falling materials, ricochets, cracks and disappearances which appeal to what is local in the form of a somatic consciousness of the immediate, the urgent, of a physical presence in time and space, multiple and simultaneous.
Many of these works express my wish to confront two or more radically different economic systems, creating hybrid marriages and unexpected combinations of materials and techniques.
The tehcnical details of construction are not represented; only the diverse dynamics involved are reproduced, their socio-economic context a kind of scaffolding across which I move.
Even when particular pieces in isolation might recall figuratively the basic structure of ‘a house’, rather than simply presenting models of poor people’s architecture, my main purpose is to generate knowledge and understanding of how human activity produces forms, trying to renew for my own purposes a significant vehicle for invention and creation.
On another level, and like a silent sound track of time and space, the sculptures I have made are accompanied by an equally contradictory accumulation of information translated into drawings, photographs, images in movement and sounds taken from books, music, other images and my own life experiences.
Collections of movie posters, crossed out images from newspapers and postcards, fragments of video, songs and ballads, and texts stolen from my own reading are some of the combinations that I have shared to provide testimony of my cosmos. All these fragments are the stones and bricks carved by hand to form the walls, roofs and floors of my house.
To construct the total image of my whole self I have collected things in the manner of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, as a cumulative and affectionate search for expressive signs wherever I go.
Buckminster Fuller said that materials should be organized by sympathy, a concept that I apply to my collections of objects, images and sounds as well as my three-dimensional work.
Through minimal transformations, with no explanations or stories and possibly even without much skill, my work is the proof that I am alive. In my work the transformation of information, materials and objects comprises the definitively unfinished construction of my own identity, as a way of approaching reality. By way of facts.
Traducción - inglés SELF-BUILDING
Introduction
The house where I was born and brought up was built, changed and eventually pulled down through emotional highs and lows (heat and cold) through the inertia of use and abandonment, through modifications and suppressions, and through a process of contradictions – artistic pretensions and stylistic aberrations - which together form a whole, a totality that now, forty years later, has become the raw material of practical observation.
The construction of my house, of my ‘colonia’, my district, began in the 1960s on land taken over by squatters, in a volcanic area to the south of Mexico City called Pedregales de Coyoacan . It was never been envisaged as part of the plan for the expansion of the city – if such a plan had ever existed.
The materials and the techniques employed in the building were totally improvised, based on whatever was available in the immediate surroundings, and amid general social and economic instability, not just in Mexico, but probably across the world. The solutions people found were based on concrete needs and situations, how to add a room, modify a roof, improve, change or eliminate some space or other.
Because it was built with no funds and no architectural conception, the house today seems chaotic, almost useless; yet every detail, every corner has a logic, a reason to be there. The house is a true labyrinth, polished by the simultaneous patina of building, use and destruction.
This self-building – which is the term generally used for this type of construction -should be seen as a process full of warmth in which the solidarity of neighbours and relatives is central – and not just in terms of actual collaboration, as a shared capital, but also as an enriching educational experience for anyone who is part of a community, a way of coming to know one’s own circumstance.
This project is a projection, a three dimensional perspective of the place, my house, raising it just as it emerged, improvising on the hoof, without a budget or a plan or any very clear objectives.
What interests me is the possibility of understanding (or inventing) reality starting from the approach to the place where you find yourself as a possible creative point of departure, recovering and using the materials at hand. In this project I refer specifically to the place where I was born, where I emerged as me, where I began to be who I am. I will point to other qualities of the context too, qualities that can also be found in other contexts, but in this particular case, those that are closest to me as a person.
I begin by looking around me: at the things inside the house, the house itself, other houses, my district, the city, the place where I live; the ways of working; collaborating, partying, dialoguing; the criteria that apply to the formal appearance of the houses; chaos, accumulation, instability, overcrowding, aesthetic promiscuity.
The main body of this publication consists of a breakdown into observations on particular fragments of the house, as it is today, almost inch by inch, recognising its accidental aspects, its richness, its details, and trying throughout to emphasize the lived experiences that transformed the material.
The references that arise from observing the house are shown here and in other projects, sculptures, books, exhibitions as obstacles, rough edges, interferences, leaps and jumps, tremors, unevennesses, collapses, reactions, breaks or eliminations, each of which independently refers back to the local, that is to the context – whatever that context is – in the form of an internalized awareness of the immediate, the urgent.
Each part of the project is improvised with materials found in each context – hence the local – on the basis of a non-aesthetic selection, that is a selection not based on taste. In any case what matters is the potential use to which the texts, objects, images and other materials can be put in building the whole, in fragmentary and indeterminate ways.
From the house as a concrete realization, as a process, as a metaphor, as paradox and irony, to the possible expressions that derive from it – my work as a sculptor, as an artist, for example – there is a bridge that ideally expresses and confronts economic, social and political conditions that are in their turn full of contradictions.
This project, like the house, the books I read, the music I listened to, the films I saw, all those experiences that criss-cross the definitely unfinished construction of an identity – of a house, I mean – represent a critical approach – at as time of crisis – to reality, with no element of nostalgia. These are the facts.
Abraham Cruzvillegas
SELF-BUILDING
During the second half of the 20th century, a major part of Mexico City grew in rapid and chaotic ways, principally because of the huge numbers of migrants coming into the city from the countryside in search of a better life. The people moved to the city, seeking work of whatever kind there was, drawn by the promise of post-second world war modernity. One consequence was the abandonment of the countryside by both state and business. The migration produced a disequilibrium that is still clear to see, although today people do not travel from the country to the capital, but instead go directly to the United States, where they can earn dollars, despite the long and arduous journey, the mistreatment at the hands of the US border guards and the dangers of living as an undocumented immigrant in a country whose policy on immigration is fickle and hypocritical.
As a result of those flows of population towards the city, hundreds of new districts appeared on the official maps, first established by the so-called ‘parachutists’, the first squatters, who were really pioneers in the best sense of the word. In many cases these wanderers have continued their roaming; the families that squatted on land and illegally founded the city in inhospitable places, on hills and plains, craters and dustbowls in the city, have intuitively – you might even say instinctively – redesigned the landscape and the city plan. The urban stain spread rapidly, like a giant amoeba that devoured all the spaces around the city in a process which is far from over yet.
On the other hand, and hand in hand with urban chaos, lack of planning, corruption, disorder and the massive and rapid growth of these unofficial zones – the best example here is Ciudad Netzahualcoyotl – there emerged a mode of construction that is beyond aesthetics, that dissolves in front of us into an organic and collaborative totality to which people bring human capital in response to the needs of others, opening private spaces on to the street to the improvised cooperative labour. Without needing to make reference to the taxonomies that speak about ‘popular architecture’ as an expression of the so-called people, this occurs in many parts of the world as a concrete manifestation of urgent needs and the capacity to improvise with the materials at hand.
What in Brazil are called ‘favelas’ in Mexico are known as ‘ciudades perdidas’ or lost cities, although in fact what was lost there was the battle against poverty. Because they were illegal, these areas created new paradigms for themselves and new rules for communal living, exchange and legality opening an infinite range of aesthetic, political and economic possibilities. None of this is an isolated phenomenon nor an accidental one; it has happened in many socio-economic circumstances across the world. The colonia, the poor barrio where I was born was no exception. It was embedded in the volcanic rocks of the Pedregales de Coyoacan that also embraced Santa Ursula, Santo Domingo, Ruiz Cortines, Pedregal de Carrasco, Huayamilpas,San Pedro Tepetlapa, Copilco and Diaz Ordaz , most of them set up by squatters from the interior of the country. Rogelio, my father, came from the mestizo community of Nahuátzen, in the western state of Michoacan; he arrived in the capital in the 1960s in what was to all intents and purposes a lunar crater inhabited by possums, rats and snakes, wholly barren and consisting mainly of lava with only occasional maguey plants, brush, weeds, shrubs, and abundant cactuses.
In ancient times the district was inhabited by the Cuicuilca people until it was devastated by the eruption of the Xitle volcano, Vesuvius to its Pompeii, about 2400 years ago. What remains of the Cuicuilca, one of the oldest peoples on the Mexican altiplano, is the round pyramid of Cuicuilco trapped between the Periférico motorway, the children’s hospital once known as IMAN (Instituto Mexicano de Atención a la Niñez), the School of Anthropology, two residential complexes – the Villa Olímpica and the Villa Panamericana – and two shopping malls, Perisur and Plaza Loreto.
My appendix was removed at IMAN when I was five; the operation lasted two hours, because I had contracted peritonitis as a result of the infection of that part of my digestive tract caused, according to my parents, by eating too much chile. My friends and I used to organize jalapeño chile eating competitions, grabbing them in handfuls from the barrel outside the shop on the corner and swallowing them without chewing so we wouldn’t burn our mouths. The winner’s prize was not to pay for what he had consumed. I was hospitalised at IMAN for nearly a month, convalescing; I thought myself very special, almost a martyr, until they brought another kid in to share my room who was completely enveloped in bandages, like a mummy. I found out later that he couldn’t speak at all, that he’d fallen off a fence outside his house which, like mine, was constantly being rebuilt, into a vat of boiling fat where they were cooking the pork crackling that they sold in the local street market. The boy had been literally fried. His father, a porter in the old La Merced market in the city centre, was building his own house with materials his neighbours gave him, things they didn’t use. He had become a builder out of necessity, under pressure because, you might say, he had become responsible for his family’s social mobility.
A large proportion of the men who could only find housing on this rough rocky surface were employed in building the city of Mexico as hod carriers, metalworkers, stonebreakers or unskilled labourers, given that they were almost all illiterate. You could say that they built their houses with their own hands, like the boy’s father. When a family managed to get together the money they needed to build a wall, lay bricks, build castles or just get rid of rubble, the neighbours would organize to help. In the spirit that there are always new possibilities in the future, many of those houses left bars protruding like stiff crowns¸in anticipation of future needs, future generations, future terraces, floors, balconies or extensions.
Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going. Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle as it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport. Opposite the corner where we collected our supplies of the vital liquid stood Casa Real, the only shop in the area at that time where you could buy building materials; by default that monopoly played a key role in the growth of my barrio. The only place to get a nail, wire, poles or anything else, was from that shop. Probably the only thing they couldn’t supply were the bottle tops we used to batten down the tar paper sheets that covered these bare households. You got those whenever you slaked your thirst. On the other hand, there were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish- always a source of excellent building materials.
The first squatters called my street ‘Peacock Street’ but the local government later changed it to ‘Nahuatlecas’ to fit in with a nomenclature that suggested, perhaps paranoically, that only indigenous peoples could live in these bare, thorny places, just like the mythical aboriginals who centuries earlier had seen there an eagle consuming a serpent while perched on a cactus (the central symbol of Mexico’s national flag). My ancestors are Purhépuchas and ñhañhus, but my father preferred to call me by Mexica names: Huitzlipochtli or Cacama, he would call out to me from wherever he was to ask for a coffee or a hand or just to annoy me. He used to call me the Aborigine too. My brother Jesús , (‘Chucho’)was also called Curicaveri, after the supreme sun god of the indigenous peoples of Michoacan; my sister was called Eréndira, after the daughter of king Tangaxoan II, head of the Hirepan dynasty in the huge and until the arrival of the Spaniards indomitable Tarascan empire. Apart from me, only my brother Rogelio was not given a non-western name, but now I would call him Attila or Atahualpa. On the same lines, the Ajusco district, and the surrounding districts of Ajusco-Huayamilpas, Ruiz Cortines, San Pedro Tepetatla and Pedregal de Montserrat are coordinates on the map of the Chichimecas, Otomíes,Aztecas, Coras, Mayas, Tarascas, Toltecas, Zapotecas, Totonacas, Nayaritas, Huicholes,Yaquis , as are the names of some indigenous gods and kings like Moctezuma, Meconetzin, Topiltzon, Netzahualcoyotl or Tochtli. Although it is true that these areas were inhabited by indigenous groups before the Europeans arrived, the Cuicuilcas, the Colhuaques and Coyohuaques, celebrated for their skill in stone-carving (they are reputed to have carved the Coyolxauhqui and what is known as the Aztec Calendar) have no streets named after them.
The flora and fauna of the Pedregal slowly disappeared almost completely; yet the volcanic rock, used as construction material, as a structure and as furniture, survived the asphalt, the pavements and the public works, and became ornaments on the facades and walls of the houses. In the sixties, the painter Diego Rivera together with the architect Juan O’Gorman created in San Pablo Tepetlapa (just five minutes away from my house) a space built entirely out of lava. It was intended to house his collection of pre-Hispanic art and as a multidisciplinary arts centre. Its structure makes reference both to the temples of the Mexicas and to modern European architecture. Inaugurated after Rivera’s death, the Anahuacalli Museum (as it was called) rises on a vast site where many of the original plants of the area have been preserved. Today people visit the museum to see the monumental altar raised for the Day of the Dead, but it is worth visiting the Museum not just for the building itself and the collection it contains, but also to see the site. In what is now the Huayamilpas Ecological Reserve there are also a number of species from the Valley of Mexico, the remains of a natural pool and a popular community arts centre. The first adult education centre in the area was also opened there in the seventies, and the first amateur football tournament was played out there on its muddy flats. Huayamilpas is also the scene of an Easter Passion Play in which the amateur actor playing the Nazarene is seen to fall three times under the weight of the cross onto the sharp stones and spiny bushes that are everywhere. This cruel spectacle became a great favourite with the people of my district, and the Pedregal district as a whole, perhaps because people enjoyed seeing Christ sweating and suffering, struggling with the rocks and facing adversity just like everyone else, after which he would go and celebrate with friends and family with ice cold beers.
The basic services reached my area little by little, which is why there were always trenches, road works and materials piled in the street, revealing the material that makes up the Xitle lava field When the sewage pipes did arrive people had already dug their own septic tanks . The volcanic rock was never discarded when it was broken down, but used as construction material, cemented over or levelled; when they dynamited La Esquina, one of the gigantic rocks that barred the way to Ruiz Cortines, the volume of rock displaced was so great that it filled that whole part of the street. The Federal District Administration excavated one area on the border between Ajusco and Santo Domingo and the University City to open a quarry and establish an asphalt plant to supply the city when its expansion began to accelerate (and embrace my district) several years later. This was after years of stepping over holes in the ground and piles of stones, gravel, sand, flint tiles and bricks where, over time, wild plants and weeds began to grow and eventually become bushes or trees – conserving those reserves. Some of these mounds are years old and are still there to be seen around the half-built houses. Sometimes they serve as improvised leaning posts for gossiping neighbours and friends; sometimes they become tables, or chairs or beds. The streets were levelled with earth that turned to dust in the dry months and became rivers of mud when it rained. Water was always present somehow – as concept, as necessity or as calamity. Great puddles in Santo Domingo, Ajusco, Santa Ursula and Ruiz Cortines were given names like The Lagoon, the Well, The Tank or just The Hole and became specific features of the area. Other descriptions were found to signify the social configuration. The Berlin Wall, for example, was a fence erected to physically separate the Santo Domingo squatters zone from the well-planned and serviced Romero de Terreros district. And there could be no comparison between the barrios and Pedegral de San Angel, both on the lava field; San Angel was beside the University City, which was well designed, planned and sold as an ideal ambience for economically privileged families. There the wild landscape coexisted with modern architecture, largely through the initiative of architects Luis Barragan and Max Cetto. In 1949, Cetto built his own house there – possibly the first on the Pedregal – with limited resources and a clear consciousness of the environment, using the volcanic rock and taking advantage of the “passionate dedication and creative imagination” of the Mexican workers when resources are lacking, above all compared with the German and North American workers he had previously worked with. Cetto’s non-traditional self-built house showed that the materials and the context could be appropriated by architecture, together with the terrain and its vegetation, in a projection that gained significance with Mexico’s economic progress in the fifties. When the wealthy districts were Lomas de Chapultepec, Polanco, Anzures and San Angel, the Pedregal de San Angel became the neighbourhood of politicians, nouveaux riches, young men about town and the in-crowd. In some films of the time you can see the stylistic diversity of the houses of the time –from Modernist Provincial to Xochimilcan Bauhaus, not to mention the innumerable UFOs, bunkers, atomic submarines and intergalactic protozoa that erupted there. A different example from the same period but on the other side of the city was Satellite City (Ciudad Satélite), located at the frontier between the city and the State of Mexico, an ideal spot for the proud Mexican middle class, planned and conceived as a satellite of the United States with supermarkets, malls and all the services necessary for the American Way of Life. Even before Ciudad Satélite was built, Luis Barragan collaborated with the eccentric artists Mathias Goeritz and Chucho Reyes in the creation of a work unusual for its time – a cluster of empty concrete columns painted in solid primary colours like those he would use in his emblematic buildings. The Satellite Towers, as they were called, originally built to cover steam ducts from a deep sewer, became a phallic landmark which in the end symbolised the economic decline of both its residents and the middle class as a whole. The expanding city, furthermore, reached its satellite and surrounded it with industrial estates and innumerable residential units, rapidly devaluing the original properties. The epithet sateluco, once used with some pride by the residents of the place, is today no more than a euphemism to point to the sad pretensions to social mobility of the inhabitants of this and other areas at the time. But Pedregal de San Angel preserved its status as an area of privilege. Planned by Barragan himself with many buildings designed by him, Cetto and other important architects, as well as the monstrosities mentioned above, Pedregal’s only near neighbour for a long time was the National University which functioned as an impassable frontier –in the sense of building factories or residential blocks – with the Pedregales de Coyoacan barrios. Pedregal de San Angel has no services like garages, ironmongers shops, dry cleaners, restaurants or grocery stores; no-one walks the streets except the servants who at weekends stand at bus stops waiting for transport to take them to visit their families, usually in the country – or in the poor districts of Pedregales de Coyoacan,.
In a period of intense gang activity in the pedregales, as in many other marginal areas in the city or the country, groups of young man called ‘bandas’ emerged, almost all of them identifying with the punk subculture of England or North America. In a reaction to the lack of opportunities, of access to education, work or housing, a territorial spirit began to assert itself which aspired to define that harsh territory as its own, indicated by graffiti painted by aerosol or brush on the walls marking frontiers or personal experiences, in the ‘warrior’ style - “I cut your name into the leaf of a maguey” or “Kilroy was here”. The Latosos and the Ramones, among many others, are still remembered in the labyrinthine streets of Santo Domingo for their daring and panache. The most famous in the whole city were Los Panchitos, on the west of the capital from Tacubaya and Escandon, San Pedro de los Pinos and San Miguel Chapultepec, El Chorrito, Daniel Garza, Cartagena and Bellavista, to Santa Fe and Observatorio. Their dress, style of dancing, of communicating and living, defined a whole era. Going to a gig by Tri (the short name for the pioneering group Three Souls in my Mind) or the many punk groups of the time –TNT, Síndromed’Punk, Masacre 68 or Atóxxxico might mean drinking beer straight from family size cans, smoking weed or head-banging. A huge number of young people also sniffed glue from plastic bags or industrial solvent (thinner) from rags during the concerts at which there would often be violence over territory, lovers or just for its own sake. The image of Tri’s drummer, Charlie Hauptvogel, swigging his Magueyin pulque from a can while Alex Lora mumbled misogynistic verses and the guitarist Sergio Mancera played a rock and roll riff, could only be disrupted by the noise of chains and belts clashing. In the end a truce was signed by among others Bandas Unidas Kiss (in the graffiti their sign was B:U=K) who brought together a number of the city’s gangs in what was called institutionally the Popular Youth Congress, which did not last because it was no more than a transitory phenomenon with party political purposes. At that time almost all the city’s walls, including the Berlin Wall in Santo Domingo, boasted images and manifestoes which over time merged with Virgins of Guadalupe which served to stop people throwing rubbish or urinating against the wall. It was said that when the city government opened gaps in the wall to give access to the Pedregales it was only to let the mounted police through, and then the Black Marias in raids that were aimed at rounding up political enemies, oppositionists and the leaders of the community organizations. There was even a rumour that a patrol car had been set on fire, with its occupants still inside, by one gang as a reaction to those actions.
In the Coyoacan Pedregales – indeed across the whole country – a movement began to claim back the land, under the slogan of Emiliano Zapata’s agrarian movement adapted now for the urban context “the land belongs to those who live on it”. Faced with evictions because there were no land titles, there were occupations on and around the pieces of land in which people organized shifts to maintain the action day and night, joining in on the way home from work or after school or suspending the housework for a while, in vigils that were occasionally full of music, laughter and animated discussion. One memorable protagonist of these actions was Doña Jovita Figueroa, who cooked nopales (cactus leaves) with eggs for everyone. In her house we watched the documentary called ‘El Grito’ (The Shout) by Leobardo López Aretche, banned at the time, about the 1968 student movement and its violent repression by the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz government. Together with Doña Jovita, many young people from other places participated in the urban struggle in Ajusco, including Gloria Tello, Martín Longoria, Leopoldo and Gilberto Ensástiga. Ignacio Medina and Jorge Alonso carried out research on the area which they published in an essay called “Urban struggle and capital accumulation”. And for her student dissertation the film maker María Novaro developed a project on the participation of women in the struggles in the Pedregales. The neighbourhood groups that became social movements were very diverse, from those with a religious origin, like the Christian Base Communities influenced by liberation theology, to the explicitly political Union of Popular Districts (UCP) based on the ideas of Genaro Vázquez, Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and Leon Trotsky, in a sometimes contradictory mix that arose from the dialogues between squatters, slum dwellers and left wing students, but with specific ends deriving from pressing needs. While the men worked during the day, women young people and children marched on the offices of the City government in the Zócalo square. There were endless marches, demonstrations and meetings where women wearing aprons and carrying shopping bags harangued the community: we chorused “The people, united, will never be defeated”, “Zapata lives, the struggle goes on” “The people in uniform are still exploited” “We are not all men but we are many” “People unite” “Minimum wage for the president so he knows what it’s like to live on it”, “Drag the bull out of the ditch” “Protest is a right, repression is a crime”, “See it feel it Ajusco is here” among the many slogans that were introduced by political parties, gay organizations, trade unions and other struggles, all of them suppressed.. In Mexico City the UCP brought together different community groups with similar needs; on a larger scale, in the face of a climate of open repression and official indifference the National Coordinating Committee of the Popular Urban Movement (CONAMUP) was radical in its demands and its actions. One of the most powerful and moving moments of those times, for me, was the huge CONAMUP march to Mexico City at the beginning of the 1980s; it was an endless stream of urban and rural families demanding recognition of the rights that they had already assumed for themselves.
There were many attempts by political parties to take control of the land movements for electoral purposes, in the context of what could not be seen as anything more than a proto-democracy made up of different ideological groupings opposed to the PRI (the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party). In general the popular organizations managed to almost completely defend their autonomy and their activity without subscribing to any party, although almost every party was involved, some in patronising and demagogic ways, like the PRI, and others with sincerity and consistency, like the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), the Mexican Workers Party (PMT) and the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT). In the 1976 the PRT supported the presidential candidacy of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who since those heady days has headed the Comité Eureka, an organization that demands the return of disappeared political prisoners never acknowledged by the State or the armed forces, among them her son Jesús Piedra Ibarra, kidnapped in Monterrey for belonging to the 23rd September Communist League. From 1968, as the student movement grew, militants and activists of organizations considered hostile to the political system were illegally detained, locked up and tortured, sometimes to the death, in the No. 1 Military Barracks in the City of Mexico as well as other prisons , official secure houses belonging to the repressive forces, and other secret locations. This period, which is probably not yet over, is known as the period of the Dirty War. Many people in the Pedregales sympathised with Doña Rosario, perhaps because the main neighbourhood organizations consisted largely of women. At that time people were very afraid of participating, of speaking out, of taking to the streets to demand basic rights, which is why the support given to Rosario Ibarra was seen as an act of bravery, when in fact it was no more than a sincere identification with the awareness of economic insecurity, crisis and the hope of a better future.
It was mainly in the mid- seventies that it became possible to bring together the different political forces, including some working underground, to engage in a dialogue about the transformation of society and the urgent need for democracy, especially in the wake of political reforms promoted by Interior Minister Jesús Reyes Heroles as an inescapable response to years of demands from the citizens of Mexico through political parties, trade unions, student and community organizations. Some people from my district turned, around that time, to politics, though from positions and with purposes as diverse as they were contradictory. Gilberto Hernández who worked for the Federal District, was known as El Tejas and was a member of the PRI. He was one of the first leaders of the district, and always wore a worker’s hard hat. He had bought a loudspeaker that he used to help people with any problems they had – finding a lost child, for example, or calling people to a local meeting; he also filled in any holes he found, never asking for payment, and wrote letters to central government demanding improvements on the roads, the installation of street lighting, better sewers and generally whatever was needed. El Tejas was a committed PRI militant, but he was never rewarded by his party ,as was customary at the time, with a political or adminstrative post. In the 1976 presidential campaign, Adelaido Ramos an illiterate collector of rubbish from my area was presented as a parliamentary candidate for the PRT; he was not successful, but it was a landmark, because he was a genuine candidate of the people. Later his son Bernardino did become a member of parliament for the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) which had been formed out of a fusion of several groups previously forming the National Democratic Front; the Front launched Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas as the presidential candidate in 1988, although the times had already changed. Rubén Morales, son of a labour from Nahuátzen (where my father was born) who had studied education at the National University, was one of the charismatic young leaders of the colonia. With no specific political affiliation, without money, without rhetorical flourishes, without heroic histrionics, and with only local support, he quickly organized and led a good number of the community – in the correct use of the word – to demand and resolve issues that faced the people of the district in their day to day life. Maestro Rubén, as he was called, died prematurely, the victim of police beating, in 1985. In the same way, and prematurely, the so-called left wing political organizations disappeared into coalitions which supposedly would have a stronger base in the unlikely event of a transfer of political power. As the world and its ways changed its names, the Mexican left too fragmented into confused and confusing hybrids, with interchangeable and negotiable ideologies, in pursuit of the benefits that could come with access to public funds, or even by ceasing to be in opposition, as if it were something out of the ordinary, a chance that had to be taken.
And amid these sometimes accelerated social processes, the Ajusco district began to take form and shape. As its precarious structures were erected, their use wore them down, evidence of a coincidence of conditions in which tastes, habits and needs imposed new methods, techniques, materials and ultimately aesthetic criteria on the houses and shared spaces like pavements, facades and points of access. The ornamental part, colours, plants and spaces for domestic animals were equally subject to fragility and improvisation. The aesthetic intentions generally responded to non-material needs translated into combinations of forms and materials which were often unpredictable – my district is irrefutable proof of that. A pearl of the Pedregales; among the original stones of the area arise unpainted cement columns, undressed brick walls, sometimes only whitewashed, in which are encrusted, in additions to the wild shrubs and creepers of the area - metal doors and windows with near-Rococo flourishes, borrowing heavily from the exuberant Churriguerresque style, with finishing touches on hand painted tin representing grapes or vines, suns or half moons with human faces, like those at Toluca, and with as a final touch representations of dogs guarding the property. I have no ironic intention in pointing up the specific features of the facades or the houses; what I am pointing to is the way they are translated using forms and materials whose combinations are faithful portraits of their inhabitants. Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.
In my district, the modes of shared living were transformed as certain needs were covered and others took their place. Thus the link between the original squatters who remained and those who came after was weakened or almost imperceptibly complemented. Through a constant flow of goods and attitudes between the squatters and the floating population, the supply of services and products began to increase as access via the Azteca by-pass and Pacífico, División del Norte and Insurgentes Avenues became easier. Informal traders invaded every corner of the district (or you could equally say that it entered the modern world) principally in the form of a huge, crowded open market where you could buy anything and which surrounded the Mercado de la Bola. The Bola is a key reference point and epicentre of the district, not only because it was the area’s first commercial centre but also as the site of political demonstrations and popular events, and because it remains the location for discussions and exchanges of energy around shared problems. It still is, rightly, a public square. Although the Market of La Bola was once also an improvised structure, its formal construction, financed by the city government, was made possible by the magnitude of the needs which shaped it; the population was growing daily and in the marginal districts there was no other source of food, clothing or articles of primary need, so the market was another urgent demand coming from the community.
Apart from participating actively in the social movements of the district, Maria de los Angeles Fuentes, my mother, helped to found the market together with an early traders organization, from the time it was first built with sheets of cardboard and tar paper until the geodesic dome which gave it its name was erected. Two markets identical to la Bola were built at the time in the city, in Itzacalco and the Circuito Interior, near Los Misterios Avenue; these milestones marked the growth of the city as sources of supply were established in poor districts. Parallel to the founding of the markets, she also organized adult literacy classes, although these had begun earlier. Like many other people, my mother became an intermediary between the community and the institutions; faced with the slippery demagoguery of the politicians and the stubborn evasions of the bureaucrats, she wrote letters, documents and manifestos, confronted candidates and leaders of the street sellers and sometimes being rewarded with threats and offered corruption of every sort.Don Angel Arteaga, secretary of the Market Traders Association in the eighties, was shot in the back inside his grocery stall; today it is run by El Taba, one of his sons, who also plays in a funk band. My mother sold underwear and school uniforms, and at some point was secretary of the Traders Association. Later when the supermarkets opened less than two kilometres from La Bola, she sold her business – since the market was about to go bankrupt – and went to work for an NGO promoting the defence of human rights.
My house sits between Netzahualcoyotl and Ixtlixochitl, two blocks away from La Bola Market, at the top of a hill from where you can see the El Ajusco mountain that gave the district its name. Many of its current residents are the original inhabitants or their descendants and although many of us have gone our different ways we still take some pride in our origins, perhaps because of the shared effort that was its beginning. In any event, a kind of endogamy, sometime more symbolic than real, has enabled ties of affection and family to develop that ultimately give meaning to the concepts of community and belonging. During the years when I lived in El Ajusco, and especially when I was a teenager, my favourite activity was to buy tortillas not from my auntie Tachi but from the other tortilla shop, with the tortilla mill Yum-K’ax, at the bottom of the hill where my house is. In those years I collected the papers in which the tortillas were wrapped by a young and shy shop girl, who always used blouses and bras through which you could see her huge dark nipples. The first time when I unpacked the tortillas, I found a text written in one of the columns in ballpoint pen which set out in strange calligraphies the names of the sauces which sat in plastic containers beside the salt and the scales: picodegallo, borracha, escabeche, mexicana, chipotle, ranchera, verde, roja, piquín and other stimulating tastes. Later I found sketches of the salt cellar by the scales, of the lumps of dough, of the tortilla making machine, of some evening client, of a pile of coins, of a chile pepper. Then there were texts that stretched and curled around the letters, forming elliptical stories that disintegrated into pure form without sense. Then there combinations of short phrases and little figures that created landscapes like those drawn by the Indians of Guerrero and Oaxaca on bark paper, with their arbitrary depths and tales in which the epochs came together, like the work of Piero della Francesca. So every day was different; I began to see all these as coded messages and to fantasize about the girl at the shop. One day she just disappeared and I stopped buying tortillas and then I left the district, but that woman whose name I never knew could have been the mother of my children, as happened with many of my neighbours, the daughter of the people who owned the shop, the boy who delivered the milk, the sweaty lottery ticket seller, the bus driver, the person who served at the pharmacy or the woman next door.
I was born on Mixteca Street, half a block from the La Bola market, in the home of Doña Chelito González, a midwife who also helped my mother when my sister Eréndira was born; she was married to Luis, the owner of the district’s first taxi. I grew up with Eréndira and Rogelio, my older brother, playing and splitting our head open on the stones, walking to and from nursery, primary school and secondary in Ciudad Jardín and the Atlántida district, in Coyoacán. Rogelio and I studied for our school certificate at Prepa 5 in Coapa, and Eréndira at Prepa 6 in Coyoacán. Later we went to the National University, on foot as before. Chucho, my younger brother, was born in 1977 and went to the schools that had now opened in the district, starting with the market nursery, growing up with the children of the traders and breaking his head open just as we had. My house was built mainly with help from Loreto Martínez and Pedro López, workers who always wore overalls and whose sweat smelt of pulque fermented with celery, pine nuts and coffee. Luis Pineda also helped; he came from Nahuátzen, and went to primary school with my father. Together with others from Nahuátzen and people from La Palma and La Mojonera, like Amparito Huerta, Priscila Zúñiga, Crucita and Pedro Huerta, Javier and Chabela Amezcua, Anastasia Paleo and Vicente Prado, he had coordinated the building of a chapel – La Anunciación – dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France, gathering resources and materials and finding workers. Every year in the first week of August, people from Nuhuátzen who live in the district organize an excursion to their homeland to attend the local saint’s celebrations. For La Aunciación my father hand-carved in avocado wood an image of Saint Louis, whose clothes and above all whose shoes are changed every year – because it is said that he wears the soles down walking back to his Nahuátzen. The main church of the district is certainly La Resurrección, on Aztecas Avenue, two blocks from La Bola. Its Jesuit priests played a key role in the ideological formation of the local coalitions fighting for land, in the 1970s, for many of them were supporters of the theology of liberation and participated openly in many of the activities of the community organizations. Among the first priests who worked there were Luis González de Cossío, Ciro Nájera, Jesús Maldonado, Alvaro Quiroz and Roberto Guevara. Half a block from my house on the corner of Netzahualcoyotl, there was a nuns dispensary where they taught the catechism, but it was what was called the Latin American Catechism. There is also a Christian church near the market, next to Don Eleazar’s house, whose family sell filled tortillas at the door of his house – they were the ones that Don Loreto and his partner Perico liked best.
Like a slow sculpture, my house was rebuilt by these people, with my family, putting in and taking out, raising and demolishing, assembling and glueing, tying and undoing. As with every house, street and square, daily wear and tear transformed the materials, leaving knots and holes, stains, breaks and slippages that take form in space, over time. The relations between people, inside and outside the houses, also transform spaces of course. To the left of my house lived Don Juan Alvarez, a cabinet maker and shopkeeper, also from Nahuátzen who was married to Carmela Prado , a cousin of my father’s. They had nine children , Lupana, Vita,Chucho,Reyna, Sarita, Beto, Nando, La Nena and El Gordo also called El Latoso. My father bought the land from Gildardo ‘El Guero’ Prado sold, one of Ajusco’s pioneering squatters, son of Anastasia Paleo and Vicente Prado, who owned the tortilla shop and brother of Carmela, Juan Alvarez’s wife. One day a leg from a table that he was making fell out of Don Juan’s house, perhaps mischievously thrown out by one of his many offspring. Perhaps because of the different levels of the houses, the leg fell on to my head like a missile, opening a wound in my head. Days later my father bought all of us kids orange helmets which I thought would make us easy targets for future table leg bombs and which we stopped using as soon as we realized how stupid we looked. To the right of my house lived Don Zenón Moreno, a retired bureaucrat and amateur artist. Opposite is the house of Doña Micaela Retiz who raised pigs and gave us injections when we fell ill and who was rumoured to be an abortionist; Doña Mimi Madrigal, who lived next door to her, who was said to be fortune teller. Next door to Juan was Doña Lalita Avila, who knew traditional medicine and did herbal purges. But the people closest to my family were Doña Martita Martínez, Don Chon Muñoz and their children Gera, Aurora, Ale, Martina, Juan Carlos and Paco, who combined an openly political attitude (they were tireless participants in the struggles to legalize the landholdings) with that party spirit that brought the street together for celebrations. I joined them in a rescue brigade after the terrible earthquake that devastated most of Mexico City in 1985. The Christmas parties, carol singing and all the other commemorative occasions organized by the Muñoz family and Manuel Alcántar, the baker’s, wife and children, were memorable. Juan Zúñiga, whose name in Purhúpecha was Chenguas was another of the original squatters; his large family lived around the corner, and he laid as many bricks as he held parties. One of his sons, Antonio, nickname Toñazo or El Barritas, was a big boy by Mexican standards; he always broke the piñata with the first blow and once, after a long party, he would literally drag me to the door of my house. I will always be grateful to him for that, because thanks to him I can say that I never fell asleep on the corner of the street. Well, at least not on the corner of Nahuatlecas and Ixtlixóchitl, site of the district’s first furniture store, whose Spanish owner, Manolo Taboada, married Irma Oceguera, the daughter of his landlords Conchita Green and Manuel Oceguera, thus recreating that racial mix of Spaniard and Indian which is so often mentioned as the root of our national identity.
Initially my house consisted of one big room of grey plasterboard and stones, painted white, with a roof of corrugated iron, an outside toilet which is still there, a concrete patio and a little room with a sink, also made of concrete. The façade of the house was and remains, like everything else in the house, a whim of my father’s: a black metal door within an arch of coloured bricks on a rectangular white wall which he describes as colonial style. Before we had running water we bathed with water from a jug in the middle of the patio, the two brothers standing in a tin bath to save water. Only later did we get a shower and piped water. Until then you had to go to the owner of the water, fill buckets and heat them on the kitchen stove. Gas came in tanks on a lorry that came when it felt like it and often we would have to roll the tank around the streets until we came across the lorry. The house was built on a crack in the ground and on various levels, so the front was at the high point, at street level, to the septic tank at the lowest level. Because the crack was wide occasionally rats, snakes and tarantulas would emerge and attract young and old to look. My father said that a pig once disappeared into the crack and emerged later, much later, rutting in what would become the market. People threw their rubbish into the dump at La Bola, principally because the refuse wagon came irregularly and when it suited. The sound of the bell announcing its arrival was music to the ears, even though the collectors invariably demanded a tip which had to be thrown noisily into an enamel cup suspended by wires from the wagon. Many people just dumped their rubbish in the street; others burned piles of rubbish on the street, as they had been used to doing when they lived in the country, raising huge flames and columns of black smoke.
The main part of the house was on that first terrace, at street level, and changed little over the years; it used large amounts of wood in a style that was vaguely reminiscent of the indgenous buildings of Michoacan, called trojes. There were walls and roofs of thin wooden sheets, , shutters of plasterboard and tiles, walls of coloured glass, and floors painted with red acrylic paint. At the rear of this first level was an austere kitchen with ample light and space, where we did our homework and ate, and where my grandmother Helenita Villegas and my Aunt Amalia Vera affectionately fought over the feeding of the household. Later, years later, when everything began to change, this became my workshop where I drew and entertained my friends. Because my father was an artisan and painter, most of the house was a turned into a workshop, though there was a circular saw mounted on a wooden board in one specific place, a high wooden table where Spanish white was applied to wooden boards before they were covered with gold leaf and decorated with flowers, birds and other motifs. Near the centre of house, in an airy and spacious room, there was an easel and drawing board where my father painted next to a small room where the paintings were polished and gilded. Both spaces were conserved respectively as a study and library and as a kitchen that was absurdly small for the size of the plot. Outside these two rooms was a water tank around which lived ducks, pigeons, rabbits, geese and chickens which my parents occasionally tried to raise in a spirit of self- sufficiency. After a plague of bugs from the pigeon loft that we hung from the wall between ourselves and our neighbour, we decided to destroy and burn it so that the only animals we would ever have from then on would be the usual dogs and cats, although they of course brought their own animals. The most familiar was a dog we called Pincel, other less affectionately remembered included Galactus, who lived for years on the roof and never stopped barking. He was a nightmare, until the day he leapt from the roof, ran down the street and disappeared forever – perhaps he was turned into the meat filling for tacos. We had a number of cats, including La Catrina, el Chamán, Tom and another that never got to have a name because it died while still a kitten after my father bathed it in petrol to get rid of its fleas. At one time there were trees on the plot, opposite the washhouse – fruit trees like a redcurrant bush, a pear tree, two fig trees a chile plant and an Uruapan avocado, as well as remnants of chayote, pumpkin and chilacayote plants. There is still a leafy lemon tree there, a nopal cactus, an apricot bush, a cherry tree and a bush that yields red pomegranates.
In 1979 my father began to give classes at the Metropolitan University’s Azcapotzalco campus; he became a full time teacher, which produced changes in the domestic sphere too, as certain spaces were no longer used for manual work. While the configuration of the house changed we came back from school and took my mother her lunch at the market, took Chucho to nursery and came and went edging our way around the machinery which suddenly made the house seem as though a bomb had hit it. For years the house felt chaotic, above all when my father decided to ‘modernize’ when the Institute of Social Security offered loans to its employees. At that time many of the features of the house which had emerged spontaneously were now lost in the ‘planned’ refurbishment or merged with the new adaptations. In this intermediate space, where the loan was not sufficient for everything so that not everything could be transformed or discarded for practical or emotional reasons, the house became completely chaotic, empty, unmanageable and above all ugly. After a car accident my father had to move around in a wheelchair, which he rented at first but which later became part of the furniture. In fact a congenital muscular condition had already meant that he had put in banisters designed by his friend, the architect Gabriel Jiménez, throughout the house, to give extra support in addition to the stick he had used since we were children. Corridors had to be adapted and ramps installed to allow the wheelchair through, and everything had to be adapted to his physical condition, which often caused accidents for the other inhabitants of the house who frequently fell or slipped on the new inclines that appeared in the house, above all in the summer, when it rained constantly. Once my mother broke all the bones in her ankle when she slipped on the edge of one of the ramps; it left her totally disabled and the last person who could help her was my father. But he did call Luisito Pulido, a powerful paramedic who was the son of don Luis Pulido, a cherished compadre, probably the first electronic technician in the area; Luisito resolved the problem quickly by taking my mother off to hospital. Luis chewed the bark of a mysterious tree (it might have been cuachalalate), and would spend whole days without speaking to preserve his powerful singing voice to sing ‘Las mañanitas’ and the other traditional melodies that he sang with his Zapoquilense mariachi band.
In the eighties, when the remodelling of the house was indefinitely suspended, the bedrooms became parking spaces and the second level remained as it was. The last part to be built has remained intact, although it is still being modified – a sitting room, bedrooms on three levels, a bathroom, a kitchen and the workshop where my father used to work which became an attic, a chaotic and impenetrable storeroom full of dust where the piled up boxes (they are still there) contain every sort of bric a brac, marked by name in a sort of flirtation with recycling as ‘Christmas decorations’ ’magazines’ ‘photocopies’, ’documents’ and so on. There are also planks of wood, wire racks, pipes, bits of metal, sofas, pots and pans, plastic containers, bottles and jars, pieces of corrugated iron, bags with mysterious contents, a bed, empty paint tins, an electric wheelchair, clothes, wire, newspaper columns, broken machines, my father’s tools and his easel, metal bits, baths, a bicycle, parts of a fence, sticks, car parts, a gallon of petrol, bags of cement, kitchen implements, cables, metal boxes, baskets, a pump and a broken mirror. In these abandoned objects are contained every phase of the life of the house and its inhabitants. Like my mother, my sister Eréndira now works with a human rights organization; Rogelio, my older brother is a teacher; Chucho, the youngest, works for a political party; my father, now retired, writes, reads and goes on dreaming of the improvements he can make. The house has always been a mixture of concrete needs and forms that refer to a strange notion of ‘architecture’. Walking through the fragmented space of the house, you can see how the heterodox transformation has occurred through the patina of wear, the accumulated remains of attempted improvements, momentary emergencies and their eventual failure. Time and energy are palpable in every detail; it forces you to be aware of your surroundings, of our presence there in an accumulation of moments that have never ended. The house is still changing. Partial remodelling, improvised adaptations and definitively unfinished changes are possible histories of the development of the house, all merging into a disconnected whole that is an abritrary sum of pure contradictions. Such is its appearance that our neighbours say that UFOs have landed on our house. In any event, the ‘colonia’, the district, if not the whole city, is a place where indigenous aliens gather.
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Ricalde, Humberto: Max Cetto Vida y obra: Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM, México, 2005
Romo de Vivar, Manuel: “La autoconstrucción: solución o agudización al problema de la escasez de vivienda”: Facultad de Economía de la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, en: http://www.economia.umich.mx/publicaciones/ReaEconom/RE14_07.htm, 2002
Salas Portugal, Armando: “El Pedregal de San Ángel” : Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Coedición con la Dirección General de Divulgación de la Ciencia, UNAM, México, 2000
Varios: Revista Palabras del pueblo “Fomento Cultural AC” No. 3, Octubre de 1975
Zamorano, Luis: “Ambulantaje y marginación: Una relación simbiótica”, en: Urbe y obra , Programa Universitario de Estudios sobre la Ciudad/UNAM
The photographs that appear in this volume were taken by the Cruzvillegas Fuentes family.
The images on pages 12, 13, 14, 24, 25, 26 y 27 are taken from Las mil y una historias del Pedregal de Santo Domingo by Fernando Díaz Enciso (2002) , publicado por la Delegación Coyoacán y la Dirección General de Culturas Populares e
The image on pages 22 and 23 are taken from Max Cetto Vida y Obra by Humberto Ricalde (2005) , originally from the Max Cetto Archive at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco.
The image on page 9 was taken from the web page of the University of Minnessota at Duluth, designed by Timothy G. Roufs in 1998-2007: http:// www.d.umn.edu /cla/faculty/troufs/anth3618/macuicui.html
The other original images and photocopied documents were kindly supplied by friends and family from the Colonia Ajusco.
The names and people mentioned in the text may be real, and the author reserves the right to respect possible disagreement about the content of the text
This text wase made by Abraham Cruzvillegas in Mexico and Paris between 2005 y 2008. It was completed during a residency at Cove Park and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Scotland, in the summer of 2008.
The author is grateful for the support and confidence of Alejandra Carrillo Soubic, Ángeles Fuentes Vera, Eréndira Cruzvillegas, Rogelio Cruzvillegas, Yolanda Flores and Rogelio Cruzvillegas, Jesús Cruzvillegas, Francis McKee, Alexia Holt, Louise Shelley, Marcelo Uribe, John O’Hara & The Vintage Vehicle Trust, Mónica Manzutto y José Kuri, María Gutiérrez and Gabriel Orozco, Isadora Hastings and Damián Ortega, Daniel Guzmán, Frances Horn and Gabriel Kuri, Alhelí Hernández and Jerónimo López, Mónica Gutiérrez and César Cervantes, Ignacio Perales, Anne Dressen and Niklas Svennung, Chantal Crousel, Eva Svennung, Gilbert Brownstone, Clara Kim, Francesco Bonami, Jens Hoffmann, Andrew Renton, Manola Samaniego, Amelia Hinojosa, Barbara Hernandez, Rodolfo Díaz, Daniela Baldelli, Laureana Toledo, Alberto Cabrera, the staff of the Centre for Contemporary ArtsGlasgow and Cove Park, and all the friends and neighbours , especially in the Colonia Ajusco, who participated and collaborated in the self-building of this project.
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Other - Professor of Latin American Studies, university of Glasgow. Taught translation and Interpreting.
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