Increasingly charged...

...like the air of an August afternoon in southern Arizona:
above the heat, the clouds build, filled
with the promise and threat of rain and lightning;
the sky's electric...
The national discourse/debate/hand-wringing/scape-goating/concern both sincere and xenophobic--
call it what you will--
all of it about immigration--
gets more and more charged, every day.

A new resident in this borderland, I read the local paper, watch the national news, scan headlines on the Internet...and I have the occasional enlightening/disturbing doughnut. What I mean is, during a recent stop at a doughnut-shop, I saw this flyer pasted onto the side of a newspaper dispenser:

Now, I am by no means an apologist for illegal immigration. But to put words in God's mouth, as if the Creator takes sides in 'The Tortilla curtain' debate?...Wow. Partisan presumption, all the way...

(...I've been sitting here for a few minutes now, wondering how to type something that won't be too vitriolic in my disdain for people who would come up with such a flyer...)

Alarming, this abundance of historical aliteracy --not illiteracy, but rather the willful constructing of a bubble of ignorance of time and place beyond one's current everyday existence. YES--border 'control' and illegal immigration is a problem...YES something should be done..YES the lack of humane consistency in immigration policy is absurd...

But...To frame the dilemma in a jingoistic 'God bless America but damn all those outside our borders?' To thumb one's nose at darker-skinned south-of-the-border desert-crossers, while sneering 'sucks to be you?' And to do that while invoking 'christianity?'

It makes me want to spit venom--venom not to harm, but venom that would inject into someone a socio-moral conscience capable of empathy, if even for only a week. Venom that would make them crack open a book, make the effort to know personally at least one person from 'the other side', to translate 'wetbacks' into 'human beings,' to understand clear and present background issues instead of resorting to kneejerk reactions...

Fear of drugs, fear of violence, fears of terrorism, not to mention linguistic chauvinism and blatant racism--such a virulent stew in which to try to cook up anything productive in this debate-on-immigration that grows tiresome but no less urgent.

'To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome,' penned the writer of Ecclesiastes...But--here's one (more) thing to read to get a bit more of an understanding of what's going on just south of the border: Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea. Here's a link to more information about it...

On a related but lighter note, in yesterday's paper, I saw this cartoon:

So much for that. Never in human history have languages respected borders. Neither have borders respected humans. There's the problem.

...

Evenings are beautiful here...after sunset, when a storm has washed away the afternoon heat, the desert looks tranquil, even the urban jungle that sprawls across it...

Sunset monsoon photos

...so many things swimming around in my head since the last posting,
but before words, pictures. (click on them for a larger image)

And to preface the photos, a few words:
This afternoon my wife and I decided to drive up the Catalina Highway--the local cliché holds true: 'thirty miles, thirty degrees cooler.' We had a late-afternoon picnic in the shade of pines at 9000 feet, almost chilly in the 67-degree air. (That's the coolest we've been since we arrived here in early July!)

On the way down, just before the highway heads off the foothills, we stopped at a scenic overlook, since it was just about sunset...
...and this is what we saw, pretty enough, clouds to the SW of Tucson, over the Tucson Mountains:

To the left of the saguaros in the above photo, you can see where the clouds are a bit thicker.
Just a few minutes after taking that picture, those clouds began to leak a tiny stream of rain:

...and it grew into a few more wispy strands of a distant shower:
...and then it really began to pour:
Now that is indeed an 'isolated, localized' rainstorm, eh?We stuck around to watch the sunset-storm panorama for about a half-hour.

When I turned around, I was treated to this pastel-moon-rise:

...ahh, the desert sky can be like a drug...

...not that I would know...

...and just as we pulled out to drive back down into town, we noticed the scene below. (The photo's blurry since I was trying to snap the shot from the driver's seat before the clouds moved.)

...hmmm...gives the feeling of being watched, no?

Clouds and mountains in Arizona--never dull.

...current afterthoughts...

After posting the monsoon-photos I just uploaded, (in the 'sunset monsoon photos' posting) anything else feels like a letdown...but here a few more everyday photos, accompanied by thoughts just as mundane..but hey--when you have moved to a new place, even the prosaic is new, so...that's what blogs are for...

I've gone from Rainier-vision in our living-room in WA to Catalina-vision as I look out the window from my desk (when I'm sitting there, which is rarely) at work:

About a 1/2-mile away from there is the Tucson botanical garden, where I met my wife one HOT afternoon this past week after work. Surprising, though, how after living here for several weeks, we now feel 'cool' in the shade even on a 100-degree afternoon...

All throughout Tucson, since we got here, we've noticed the 'Mexican red bird of paradise' plants in bloom. When we lived in Nicargua, we saw them too, but didn't know the name...

...also at the Botanical garden, there is an example of a 'cristate Saguaro,' a mutation that occurs in about 1 in 100,000 cacti! Botanists are not completely sure why this happens--it could be a lightning strike, an 'impact injury' when the cactus is young...This is only the second one we've seen in our outings in and around the city:

A couple of weeks ago, just before the start of the school-year, we drove out west of the city, to catch a sunset at Gates Pass:

Now with the school-year underway, mid-week sunset-viewing drives will be a rarity...

One little detail about my new workplace that makes me smile is the manner in which many students address me.
About half of the students in this school are Hispanic, and they very earnestly call me "MEES-ter."
Not "Profe" or "MEES-ter my-last-name;" just "MEES-ter." Slowly, though, they are coming around to using "Monsieur." Poco a poco...

The socioeconomic setting of this urban school is a world apart from the semi-rural/suburban district I just moved from, where 90 percent are 'pan blanco,' compared with here--about 50 percent 'tortilla.' Add in the refugee population, and there are a whopping FORTY-SEVEN languages spoken in the homes of the students! Challenges, of course, but never a dull moment...

On my way home, I pass a little Asian market--alas, not the weird-snack-food-and-cheap-produce-paradise of H-mart--but it has the essentials: all flavors of ramen and udon, dried squid strips, fresh California rolls (kimbop) on Thursdays and Fridays, etc. etc...
...and, to my Engrish-lover's delight, whimsically-labeled candy, such as this:


Feeling crunky? Eat some chocolate...

---

Since I am a language teacher, I enjoyed this cartoon:


Yes, we are all human, and gestures can get you far...but sometimes not far enough, eh?
Achtung...Cuidado...Attention...Jo-shim-hae!!

---

I'm enjoying my new work environment as far as the students go...
I am not enjoying my new work environment as far as the bureaucracy goes...
...because nothing seems to get very far fast enough in a large organization.
There is much talk in the education-world today of 'smaller learning communities'--yay! Yes, we need to not have our adolescents channeled through institutions so huge that they become 'anonymous.' So let's break up our large schools into smaller 'communities' where students are 'known' and things are relevant for them....
...BUT, at the same time, maybe we should be applying this principle to the bureaucracy of large districts, where too often people make decisions without being in touch with reality---and then they can hide in their maze of 'central district offices,' anonymous from those who live with the consequences of their ineptitude.
No--I'm not bitter, and in all seriousness, things haven't been that bad...but I DO sense the world of difference coming from a small district, where accountability has a face on it, to a large district where incompetence hides in cubicles.
And so, the following comic strips really 'spoke' to me this past week:


And I guess that's how I'll end this posting, as negative as it may seem...

The sun also rises...and the cacti will bloom again!

Thoughts on a 'humid' Tucson night.

When the humidity here in southern AZ climbs above 25%, people start complaining about how 'muggy' it is.
But back east--whether you're in Boston or Savannah, on an August midnight when it's still in the 80's and the humidity is above 80% as well--now THAT's ' humidity.' Oh, and the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua from May to November? Ay...Gimme Tucson anytime...

And so here we are, parrots asleep, ceiling fans humming.

July 2007 turned out to be one of the three wettest months ever recorded in Tucson--a whopping six inches of precipitation! A 'wet' desert indeed...The dry 'washes' have turned into 'rivers' worthy of the name...for a few days or weeks, at least, before they become sun-baked ditches again...
...and so things are greening, as the photo below of nearby Sabino canyon shows:
(and it's only a 15 minute drive from where we live!!)

(click on any of the photos for a larger view...it 'usually' works...)

Beauty and greenery recorded on a digital camera notwithstanding, the Sonoran desert can be harsh.

It's a new and bizarre thing for me to live in a place where the local newspaper regularly has articles about bodies found in the desert--death from exposure, already nearing 200 just since January 2007!--almost all of them undocumented immigrants, 'illegals,' 'economic refugees,' call them what you will--they are people who have died while crossing the desert, looking for better-paying jobs, looking to join their husbands or wives living and working in the 'land of opportunity.'

I think this recent cartoon (from the Tucson Weekly) captures the heartbreaking irony well:

Radically different from the 'foundation myths' of Ellis Island, no?

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The other day, to take a welcome break from the endless unpacking and errand-running that accompany getting settled in a new city, we drove south down I-19--perhaps the only Interstate highway in the nation that has kilometer-signage instead of mile-markers--to Tumacácori (more in a future blog) and Tubac.

Tubac bills itself as the place 'where art and history meet.' I have to gag a bit on that p.r. schmooz-ese.
But it is a historic place full of art galleries; there you have it. There we went.

We stopped in a rug gallery for a bit--looking to see Navajo and Hopi rugs, finding fabulous things from Oaxaca as well. We began talking with the gallery-employee, who quickly informed us that the gallery also carried many pieces from Iran, Afghanistan, etc...I 'joked' with her--"oh, all those -stan-countries in the 'Axis of Evil,' eh?"
She froze for a bit, not knowing if I was kidding. One should be careful these days...

At ease, she continued showing us things, even though she got the vibes that we are not currently in the market for heirloom-floor-coverings-from-despotic-lands. She didn't mind, she was very kind...We began talking about 'cross-pollination' of ideas and motifs in textiles throughout history and various cultures and religions, and how motifs change based on people's daily lives, etc. etc...and I mentioned I'd read an article about the 'war-rugs' that began appearing in Afghanistan during the Soviet-war back in the 1980's...

Well, lo and behold, she said, 'we have some of them!'
She went into the 'vault' (seriously, that's what it was) and pulled out some pieces for us to see, unfurling them on the floor at our feet. I felt like an anthropologist, walking on a flying carpet of historical documentation.
Yes, really, that's how it felt. ;-)

Here's one. At first it doesn't necessarily scream out 'war,' --you just see geometrical motifs, a 'link' motif on the outside edge representing prosperity, perhaps...but look closer, and you see that the 'tree-of-life' motifs on either side are divided by a red diagonal line full of a convoy of war vehicles; jeeps, hummers, etc...

(click on pictures for detail)

We were shown several more--including some from the post 9-11 era in which instead of the Soviets, the US and/or the UN are depicted--these I won't post for fear of being labeled a pro- or anti-war-propagandist, depending on one's view. (In hindsight, I do feel bad that I made the gallery-worker nervous by saying that the rugs came from the 'axis of evil countries'...) And with current legislative debate about governmental spying powers, well...

But here's another one: Again, a cursory glance might not make you think you're looking at a textile-testament of violence in wool, but in this rug, the tanks, grenades, helicopters, bombers, and missiles quickly assert themselves after a second viewing.

Crazy crazy world. Where are the flowers and antelope of yesteryear?

Then again, even a thousand years ago--in 'civiilized' Western Europe, we have the Bayeux tapestry recording the Norman Conquest. Wool or linen, Kalachnikovs or crossbows--the history we weave...

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Back to the atmosphere.

Last night, the local news replayed again and again video footage of a funnel-cloud sighted south of Tucson, in Sierra Vista, my erstwhile childhood 'hometown' of three years. Tornadoes are very very rare in Arizona. Gracias a Dios. (Ah, how the weather always makes the news...) A few weeks ago, right after we moved here and the monsoons first began, one afternoon, I saw this from our front yard--not a funnel cloud, but definitely not kite-flying weather:

And then, just a few days later, after grocery-shopping...cliché, cliché, yes, it screams, but to drive home and see the rainbow ending precisely over 'home,' with a weeks' worth of food...not bad:

The rainbow-motif continues in the blog, I guess, after last year's posting...

Utility bills, (shocking as they may be) are presently beginning to arrive at our rainbow's end...so--we truly are 'home' in Tucson, now...

==============

And living here now, we're getting to know the street names.

Spanish, Spanglish and 'Manglish' (My term for mangled spanglish) abound in the local toponymy. A local columnist recently wrote about it. (THIS is the link to the column--WORTH reading! It's banal title: "Some street names in Spanish are ridiculous")

Just the other day, we drove by "Calle Sin Nombre." Oh, to live where the streets have no name--you too (ahem) can do so...'Rancho sin vacas' is the name of a development--Oh yeah--I live north of the "Rillito River" (which means 'little river river') in that cow-less-ranch place...One neighborhood is full of virtue, since some of the streets are named "Calle sin pecado" (sin-less street) and "Calle sin envidia" (street without envy). And okay--we all know a San precedes a guy's name--as in SAN Diego, or SAN Francisco--and that Santa precedes a female name or noun, as in Santa Fe or Santa Anna. (So...why is it 'Santa' Claus in English, hmm...)But here in Tucson there is a 'confused' 'San Anna' street...and also a place that is Santa 'FEE'...Hmm...

Since 1987, however, the county has had a polcy requiring Spanish street names to be reviewed by a qualified Spanish-speaking interpreter--a bit of local linguistic idiosyncracy bureaucratized away...Gracias to los rubber stampedos...