Friday, March 15, 2024

Ransom for Six Sky






















On the day
8 Ben 16 Kayab
Six Sky of Río Azul
was buried.

Most likely during the year 450

Then in the late 20th Century
Looters took
the vessel
from her grave
Now Six Sky sits under a glass display
(anxiously awaiting liberation)
at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.
The looters kept no record,
but the people will always remember

In December 1985
140 small pieces of
gold
jade
obsidian
and
turquoise
were taken from
the National Museum of Anthropology
in Mexico City | Tenochtitlán
the thieves
sent
a message:
these priceless precious stones
are being held for ransom

Now, the Maya Zapatistas are paying the ransom
freeing Indigenous past and present
from the neo-liberal kidnappers, the grave-baron-land-robbers,
the military industrial complex of generals, soldiers, paramilitaries,
police, battalions, secret police, political parties, non-profits, politicians
and toastmasters of capital.

Six Sky
has been
resurrected,
scattered
between Detroit and Tenochtitlán
Seattle, Oakland, Matamoros,
Chicago, Toledo, New York
Organized into a community army
armed with the colors of the earth
their weapons are our ancestors
who have secretly taken over the underworld
putting ski-masks on the sun and moon

Gestating flesh and blood onto the skeletons of our dreamers
.
In the butterfly of our women
flutter two banners, two flags, their lips chanting
we shall dream
we shall win
we shall birth
we shall love
we shall shatter
we shall clench our hearts
we shall cry in community
we shall sing off the face of the enemy
we shall batter the helmeted soldier,
laugh at his bayonet
we shall stop the bullets, the bombs, the fires
And the new people
that Six Sky dreamt
in her deep sleep
in the year 450
emerge, rise, fly, speak with an earthen tongue
when we will swallow the sky
to become pregnant with clouds, rain, butterflies, milpas, babies,
chidlren-ancestors, who slept in our arms
and made thunder rise
from the maize, the frijol, the women, the men,
the elders, the still-born, the invaders, the raptors,
who remembered then:
Six Sky was resurrected in the sixth sun….

[1984-2012, unfinished words of mariposas | c.s]

Saturday, March 09, 2024

New 'zine! Raza for Gaza : Poets in solidarity with Palestine



To mark a two-night gathering of community with poets and musicians to express solidarity with the Palestinian people under siege in Gaza, the EastSide Arts Alliance with editorial Xingao published a lightning 'zine Raza for Gaza Poets in Solidarity with Palestine, featuring nine poets from across the world, as part of the "Raza con Gaza | Raza for Gaza" solidarity and justice movement culture celebration at the Eastside Arts Center in Oakland,  February 23-24, 2024.

Eastside invited people to make a generous as possible donation to either the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, the Middle East Children's Alliance for Peace or the Electronic Intifada and take a copy of the 'zine home. As City of Oakland Poet Laureate declared at the "Raza con Gaza | Raza for Gaza" gathering, 'This is a unique publication that you cannot buy tonight or anywhere else. Raza for Gaza is not for sale and you can get a copy when you support the organizations doing the work.'

The two-night gathering at the Eastside Arts Center featured three poets and three musical groups each evening. Poets Ayodele Nzinga, Mo Sati, Lubna Morrar and Leticia García and musicians Camellia Boutros, AntiFaSon, Diana Gameros, and the Duo Made y Feña with special guest Daniel Oñate, graced each evening with joyous sounds, passionate verses and heartfelt lyrics acknowledging the grim reality and resilient spirit of resistance of Palestinians under the Israeli genocidal siege of Gaza and occupied Palestine territory.

Raza con Gaza | Raza for Gaza Snapshots at the Eastside Arts Center

Here are some images of the two nights at Eastside Arts Center in Oakland (see bios of each performer at end of post).


AntiFaSon






Ayodele Nzinga performing two poems published in the'zine













































Lubna Morrar, poet.





















Duo Made y Feña with special guest Daniel Oñate 

















Diana Gameros.


















Camelia Boutros & band.














Mo Sati, poet.

Leticia García, poeta.



Diana Gameros & Camellia Boutros.

















BIOS OF THE POETS & MUSICIANS


AntiFaSon is a Son Jarocho project, a musical guest on Ohlone territory (aka Oakland). They amplify anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist and anti-extractivist feminist themes in Son Jarocho songs that form part of the larger history of Afro-Indigenous land, water and campesinx struggles. 

For more info visit their Instagram page: @somosantifason

Camellia Boutros is a Palestinian-Lebanese American composer and multi-instrumentalist based in San Francisco. Having performed as a trumpet player with a diverse array of Bay Area world music projects, such as Mission Delirium, Alaturca Connection, Inspector Gadje, and Banda Sin Nombre, Camellia approaches the music she writes with a custom modified fretless 12-string electric guitar, enabling her to write and perform music using the quarter-tone Maqam system. Her music and lyrics defy genre definition, forming an experimental blend of rock, folk, Arab, jazz, and brass music, all of which can be found on her first solo album Refuge.

For more info: Camellia Boutros Music https://camelliaboutros.com/about/


Diana Gameros is a singer, guitarist, pianist, composer, songwriter, music instructor and social justice activist, based in San Francisco, California. She was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, México and immigrated to the United States as a teenager to study music in Michigan. Over the last decade in the Bay Area she has released two albums of original songs written in Spanish and English, and Mexican classic songs. In 2014 Diana received the Emerging Leader Award by the Chicana/Latina Foundation. In 2015 she was named one of YBCA’s 100: creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions  and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture. NPR Music gave Diana an honorable mention to Arrullo in best Latin albums of the year in 2017. Diana was named one of SF Magazine’s 100 Artists: Artists Putting The East Bay On The Map, in 2018.

For more info: https://www.dianagameros.com/epk


Leticia García is a poet and an immigrant woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, a single mother and a powerful leader in the community, with deep compassion for the suffering of other immigrant women.

To learn more about Leticia, visit Mujeres Unidas y Activas: https://mujeresunidas.net

Lubna Morrar Palestinian, born and raised in The Town aka Oakland,CA. Long time Community organizer, business owner, artist... and sometimes a poet.

Ayodele Nzinga, the first Poet Laureate of Oakland, is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, a producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. Ayodele is co-founder of Janga’s House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of BlacSpace Collective. She is the Executive Director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation (BAMBD CDC); and founder and producer of BAMBDFEST International Biennial, a month-long arts and cultural festival animating the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland CA. Nzinga holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness; a Ph.D. in Transformative Education & Change; is a Cal-Shakes Artist Investigator Alumni; a San Francisco Foundation Arts Leadership Fellow; a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame; recognized by Theater Bay Area as one of the 40 faces in the Bay that changed the face of theater in the Bay Area; is recognized by the August Wilson House as the only director in the world to direct the complete August Wilson American Century Cycle in chronological order; a YBCA 10 Fellow, a BIPOC Circle Fellow and a VOICES Community Journalism Fellow. Nzinga is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland CA. Nzinga’s work for the stage has been reviewed internationally. Her blog is read in 81 countries. She is the author of Performing Literacy a Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent and her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Nzinga, a cultural anchor, is part theoretician and part partitioner. She describes herself as a cultural architect invested in creating structures for culture making.

For more info: Ayodele Nznga https://www.ayodelenzinga.com/about/

Mo Sati was born in Palestine, grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan, and now lives in Oakland. Mo is a poet, a writer, a playwright, and an artist. He participates in activist and cultural events nationally and internationally sharing insights about life as a refugee uprooted from his homeland. His poetry, writings, and artworks tell stories of the people of Palestine living under occupation. His work personifies emotions drawn from the day-to-day struggles of resistance to oppression as Palestinians fight to unshackle themselves from decades of military occupation. Listen to Mo Sati perform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpHLn0aL9Ks

Duo Made y Feña with special guest Daniel Oñate: Multi-instrumentalist composer and writer Fernando Torres and multi-faceted Puertorrican singer /interpreter and political activist Madeleine Zayas. Their eclectic repertoire is rooted in the Nueva Canción/Nueva Trova tradition of entertaining and educating about culture and pressing social issues.

Madeleine Zayas Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Madeleine Zayas is a Latin American singer/interpreter, dancer and choreographer and architect based in Oakland. She was co-founder of Buena Trova Social Club in 2012 and lead singer and co-artistic director of Madelina y Los Carpinteros since 2014. Madeleine has performed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, many U.S. Cities, and Santiago, Chile, and has shared stage with Wilkins, Cheo Feliciano, Inti Illimani, John Santos and Holly Near. She believes in art and cultural activism as a positive force of communication and a tool for social change.

Fernando Feña Torres is a Chilean exile, musician, composer and poet, journalist and founding ex member of Grupo Raiz. Fena is an expert in folkloric multi-instrumentalist. He began his musical career as a young boy inspired by the socialist government of Salvador Allende  A former political prisoner and exiled into the US, he has collaborated with Teatro Campesino and has performed in Bay Area and internationally along with artists such as David Byrne, Pete Seeger and Holly Near.

Daniel Oñate, is a highly qualified performer of piano, pianist, transverse flute and quena. He is also a composer, arranger and orchestra director from Southern Chile. He is a winner of the acclaimed Luis Advis contest, in the Chile Canta a Victor Jara version. He is currently completing a Masters in music at UC Berkeley.

Listen to Made y Feña's new song for Gaza in Would You


Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Altars for our living Oakland: Mass shootings
























Mass shootings

No one hardly
praises
our children
till they’re shot down on the streets
Desi’s mural
did not ward off
the bullets
or the liquor stores
that blew holes
in the soft bodies of teenagers
and in the livers of hopelessness
Hip hop has one more one less
octosyllabic story
to rhyme
Now not even a street corner altar
No candles
No balloons
No empty bottles of
Hennessy
No photographs
No vigils
Just the ghosts
and their unarmed drive-by cries
The new mayor sends
prayers
and
more police
to push our dead off the sidewalks
into the Santa Rita jail
the school of the future
the resting place of our martyrs-to-be . . .

arnoldo garcía | January 2023
Image: A wall in Oakland. (A feo photograph; 2021)

Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Café solidario: Brew Zapatista coffee, drink solidarity without borders


Everyday acts of living and surviving, as simple as sipping a cup of coffee, can unfold as acts of solidarity with other people who are in struggle and movement for justice and the land.

How can a cup of coffee chip away at the capitalist social-economic and political structures that have our communities the natural world, communities of color, Indigenous women and Indigenous people, migrant workers, undocumented children, women, men and elders, queer people and African Americas  struggling under siege?

I am not talking about just any old coffee. I am talking about Zapatista-grown and harvested coffee. Zapatista coffee is produced by an autonomous community, a people standing with self-determination, on their own lands and relying on their own shoulders.

Café Sin Fronteras

I am inviting you to a cup of solidarity coffee to break down the economic barriers imposed by neoliberal capitalism. My invitation means purchasing a bag or two of Zapatista coffee that has been roasted and packaged by Oakland's own Sin Fronteras Coffee.

"It has been a wonderful challenge to stay open and still provide coffee to folks. The special thing about our coffee work, however, is that we empower folks to make their local purchase have a global impact," the owners Rocío and José wrote in an email.


Order your Zapatista coffee on-line


Pick-up your Zapatista coffee freshly roasted by Sin Fronteras Coffee at:
Akat Café Kalli

1601 2nd Avenue

Oakland, CA



Take it from someone who has been drinking coffee since I was five years old: This coffee is bold, delicious and good any time of the day.

Sin Fronteras Coffee describes the taste:
"A medium roast coffee with notes of apple and cinnamon. This coffee is sourced from Zapatista Communities in Chiapas, Mexico."

Sign up for the Sin Fronteras Coffee newsletter here:




Waffles & Zapatismo

If you want to join me for a cup of Zapatista coffee sometime, join the Chiapas Support Committee in a Saturday session of "Waffles & Zapatismo" where we share consciousness-raising Zapatista-inspired liberation ideas and practices AND good tasting Zapatista coffee.

Check out the CSC website for information and opportunities to take action for solidarity and justice:

Monday, September 21, 2020

Earth Justice


SPARE the air
Spare the water
Spare the soil, the land, the sun
Everyday 
Spare the born to be
Spare the new born
Spare the children
Spare the young, the youth, the youthful
Spare the young and old, the abuelas & abuelos
Spare the elders, the ancestors and the dust
Spare the sacred sites and their people
Spare you, me, us, them
Spare the colors and the seasons
Spare the roots, the seeds, the flowering suns
Spare the rivers, creeks, oceans, clouds and the mud
Spare the wind that whirls on your tongue
Spare the waves across your skin
Spare yourself from the contamination
Spare the souls of everyone
Spare the two-legged creatures, the worms,
the serpent-clouds, the four-legged,
the two-winged, the insects and their nuptial bed
Spare the bees, the butterflies, the ants, the gnats, the mothers-to-be
Spare the future from the past
Spare the past from the present
Spare time from space and space from time



Spare everything except our hearts,
an offering to spare the cosmos from the human sacrifice
Struggle dismantle the extinction
Don't spare the human predators
Don’t spare the capitalists and their weapons
Don’t spare war and racism
Don’t spare the smokestacks and their e-industrialists...



[September 20, 2019]

Thursday, September 03, 2020

Five Questions




What were the best five lives,

the best five big bangs

the best five galaxies

the best five universes

the best five suns

the best five worlds

the best five centuries

the best five decades,

the best five years,

the best five months,

the best five days,

the best five hours,

the best five minutes,

the best five seconds

of a moment

of your family?


If you hear creaking mattresses

in the night of your home

is it ghosts or the orgasms

of unrequited lovers?



How many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandma’s, grandpa’s, aunts, uncles

have given their lives

so that you may have a shot at happiness?


What happens to you

when you see old photographs

of your ancestors,

do you fall in love with them

or do you wish they could tell you their stories?


Do you know

your grandmother’s favorite colors,

her birthdate,

the name of her first boyfriend,

if she loved someone other than your grandfather

and never left?

Will you be like her,

give birth to twelve children

with a man she may not love?

Will your love be that strong to survive anguish and wars?


My grandmother taught me

that my success was the offspring

of 1000 relatives and ancestors

who failed,

who struggled,

who suffered

and only knew happiness

as a legacy she, he, they gave to me.


I carry the anguish of thousands in my bones,

I get to smile, laugh, be nourished, be hopeful,

because they had no happiness,

only disease, deaths, harsh work

and tender lovemaking that birthed dead or dying children.


All my ancestors are light as an orgasm,

as deep as my belly laughs,

as clear as my tears.


When my grandmother tried to choke to death her husband

she was trying to kill the woman she never became.

She was a woman who loved women,

who loved me,

who loved plants and seeds,

who took care of all children

– because no child could be illegitimate –

who only believed in horizons

and where the waterfalls were her prayer beads.


She said:

You will become a revolutionary of love,

a revolutionary to destroy solitudes,

to resurrect all the old ones who didn’t make it

because they harvested someone else’s crops,

tilled their lands for other people,

who were killed by work and hate,

whose love was never honored,

whose lives mattered because they, she, created more life and lives.

My grandmother said she did not have children so that they would be slaves.

She had children so that they would have lives, not hers, their own.

And she would live in us, in me,

in whatever life we chose

and she would be free, lazy, drinking coffee,

have more free time to debate Protestants

and make her body the theology of the future.


My grandmother made love, made children, made a new god of her body…



[September 2013 | Oakland, Califaztlán, Ohlone Territory]