Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education

Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education

Presents

The Peace Poets

Come be a part of the movement!

Saturday, November 20th

3:00 – 4:30 pm

FREE!

Come enjoy an afternoon of creativity and performance. Working with students of all ages, the Peace Poets empower youth through fun artistic exercises and encourage youth to express themselves creatively through Spoken Word Poetry and Performance. Teaching youth the power of words and self expression, the Peace Poets have touched the lives of youth around the world.

Casita Maria

928 Simpson St. 6th Floor

Bronx, NY 10459

A Wake

A wake. This mournful gathering was more live than most protests I've ever seen. The people sing and jump. The news says Nestor Kirchner died of a heart attach yesterday. The people say he is as present as ever. I believe the people.

Prohibido Olvidar

Prohibido Olvidar = To Forget is Forbidden... This sign is always in la plaza de mayo in front of the presidential palace. Memory is a tool for justice, forgetting is a tool for impunity. The brutalities of war are facilitated by amnesia. Every Thursday the mothers of the disappeared still march in front of this sign. They've been marching for thirty years... They say justice is slow, but every step toward it is worth taking... We can never forget they say, Never. I wonder where somebody will be disappear tonight? Who has forgotten?

El Che

In the middle of the night people chant socialist slogans at the sky. An ex president has died unexpectedly and the pueblo is in the streets for his wake. The line to get inside is forty blocks line and the plaza is on fire. Effigies of music, burning bonfires in the air. This huge flag with el Che is hoisted up above a chanting crowd. Che is also on the wall inside the presidential palace above he coffin of the deceased...

El Rio

Sebastian gives the thumbs up while chillin next to Azul y Johanna at The River. This young man is unafraid to lift his voice up for any type of joke. Little by little he has begun to also speak up from his sensitive side. Turns out he has many revolutions to say. Last week he asked the teacher if she'd let us come early and stay longer. He's about it.

Circle of Peace

The Circle of Peace in Argentina aka El Rio, The River, where we've been doing workshops using Poetry as a tool to eradicate violence and discrimination in schools. This group of 13 year olds is overflowing with energy. They are like music you can't turn down. I've come to love them. We've come to love each other. And the process of education has begun in the heart... as real education always does.

Week 6

Week 6 of the Peace Poets in South America; we started a circle of peace in Uruguay, it was epic. Keeping the movement growing always, check out the picture below. Peace!!

Pollution

Today I hit up la villa

Out in Carillo I kicked it with Pablo, Eric, Jonathan, and Sergio and Alfonso.

On the bus home I met Hernan. He is a construction worker who used to swim in the river the 46 bus is driving past as we’re talking. It looks like an oil spill with garbage sprinkles. Why do we pollute so much? I wonder out loud. “–because we have not learned that tomorrow is born from today,” he says.

Spit Hernan Spit my brother.

Subte

The subway in Buenos Aires is called the Subte. Its like a dingy old living room on wheels. We barrel through the bowels of the city as the teenage boy tucked away into his hoodie sleeps to the train’s rhythm and the Peruvian mama listens with a grin to hear daughter begins a story that gets trapped in her chubby cheeks next to two old ladies who speak in a horse race about the boy who still asleep next to an old man with emphysema. Whoever said there is no country for old men had never been to Argentina. The doors creek goodbye.

Goodbye.

Vendor

There is a guy selling 8 foot high Bolivian flags. With great success. That’s patriotism.

Beyond Borders…

I used to have a friend who was one of those really really dark skinned people from India. Those folks got a certain beauty. But I never expected to see one in a Bolivian music group playing the Zamponia. There are borders where we don’t even see…

20/20

Maria can’t see out of one eye. But she works and studies and raises a daughter in the borderlands of Buenos Aires. A Bolivian unafraid to greet me with ocean water smile and a “que mas Señorcito?” as we walk next to each other through the river of trash left by the day’s festivities. What more? She asks me, a typical Bolivian greeting. What more? Well Maria, I would just like enough insight to be able to see with both my eyes things as they really are.

Toys for Big People

You know those big inflatable bouncing rooms that they got at festivals for kids play in?… society needs more of those, for people of all ages to jump around and not get hurt.

Watch ya wallet…

Seven out of the eight Argentineans I spoke to on my way to the Bolivian hood told me to watch my wallet over here. I’m sure they were just trying to look out and all. Probably the same as people say it if you coming to the BX or going to the Bonlieu or the townships or the favelas or the slums up in quito or the borderlands, but while my wallet is tucked tight in my front pocket, I’m sure I feel more peace of mind here than where the rich and the tourists waddle around in a state of worried wonder. Here we yell and laugh and eat whatever.. cuz why not? Wallet security is no guiding principle.

Alfredo’s Niece

The two-year-old Bolivian can barely walk but she grabs a baby size fist full of boldo and fills up a plastic bag. She looks at me. I must be a customer. She hands me the bag. I take it. She smiles. She fills up another bag. And gives it me. I put them both back… she frowns. Way ahead of the game.

Alfredo

He sells every herb. And coca. The sacred leaf of the Aymara and the Quechua people. The illegal substance that numbs or runs the angry and empty people. Alfredo has been in Buenos Aires for two years and has mastered the Argentinean accent. It’s a matter of survival. Racism kills. Damn. Can he live?

Bolivian borderlands

I haven’t been here in 7 years… Chicha, Chancho, Silpancho, Salchipapas y mamas en brightest colors dancing that simple Bolivian two step with their papacito wearing matching suits, wasted at 1pm. The borderlands of Buenos Aires sway back and forth in front of me to the baaaw boom of Andean drum beats and the wwwwhhhiii huuuwwww huuuwww hhiiii or the pan flute… enough to convince me that I’m back under Tunari, the snow capped god above Cochabamba, Bolivia. The land where I realized if I’m not a brother to you all, I am nothing. I eat a salteña and sit down on the grass next to Alfredo. This hood full of immigrants is medicine. And I didn’t even know I was sick.

Pigeons in Buenos Aires

Across from the window I work it there is a concrete ledge. Two pigeons chill there. Today, one lay down, putting its feet underneath its belly and its head along the ledge. The other walks over and began to nestle her head into his neck. It seemed she was using her beak to clean him off or give him a little massage. Maybe he needed a couple seconds on the shoulders to chill him out after all that poking his head around so intensely. I wonder why humans don’t feel comfortable to give massages in public? And why do we think we are so much more important that pigeons? And why these pigeons are getting so close to this open window I’m standing in and why it’s freaking me out? I wanna learn to fly.

Under the Bridge

What the hell is that? You ask as you pass underneath the bridge on paseo colon and the beginning of 9 de Julio. Here at the intersection of two streets, one named for the celebrated bearer of genocidal colonialism and the other for the date of independence when that colonial rule finally ended…it smells like death. Its loud and dirty and chaotic, the highway above feels like it might fall on you and the colectivos (buses) rumble by at way faster than a safe speed. Its ten pm and by the yellow glow of the street you see what looks like an archaeological dig. You squint. You lift your gaze from the deep hole next to the sidewalk to see a collection of papers with something typed out on each. In the center of the space you finally make out the figure of a human, dug out in the dirt and painted on the ground. It’s a symbol you recognize. It’s the figure that represents the disappeared. You realize, here under the bridge, where independence and colonialism meet, you are in a graveyard.

EQUALITY

As I write these pages, a young man, maybe fourteen years old leans against the wall five feet from the window of the café I’m writing in. his air matted down with dirt, and his faded red sweater torn. He appears to be one of the thousands of children who live on the streets of this city. Again, I return to me being well fed and stable enough and economically privileged enough to have the tools to be writing a book… this is our reality. And inequality slaps with the back of its hand. I never deny its existence, but like most of us, I pass moments when I’m not thinking about it. But its always close by. And as it makes me sad, I remind myself, I will accomplish nothing for no one if I get stuck in cynicism and say ‘Aww, this is how it is, I can’t change it,’ Or if I feel ashamed of my privileges and renounce all of them and go live in the streets in solidarity. (Of course, time spent in pain and danger is one of the most precious tools to live and act in solidarity and should be practiced in an honest way when necessary and practical) And so, I think not of an ideal world with total equality, but instead of a world where everyone has dignity and basic human rights. This is my dream. And this is the vision that will guide my pen, my feet and design all the days I’m lucky enough to live.