Serbal Vidrio

Downy hair of the earth overtrodden in crushed dense wandering tracks—flesh of earth shaped by the imperfect impressions of travelers on whose feet travel worlds Cutting shifting tracks with days passing and passing lives, lives that slip away like mud washing from a disaggregating trail like displacing sediment along wending riverbeds Sense of place not my own placelessness abides in the places I pass through unbelonging thrives where I fail to inhabit

Content Warning: Political violence, Violence against migrants

Content Warning: Gendered violence, Homophobia, Transphobia

As I begin the final term of my first year in Eugene and am starting my first full term with The Student Insurgent, I feel a good deal of reflection is in order. As I flew away from my life in rural upstate New York, I expected to feel the world open up to me and to be engulfed by an array of new experiences reaching out for me, but the romantic projections of my life after high school were met with the reality of the mundanity of the life I have always lived.

Anthropology as a discipline may be more susceptible than most to infusion–not to say intrusion–by the political perspectives of its practitioners. This was certainly true of the outwardly colonial character of the discipline in its early days, when no attempt was made to hide the racist and imperialist beliefs and aims which underpinned its development. However, since the advent of a more critical anthropology in the early twentieth century which saw the advent of notions such as ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, and especially after the strengthening of critical trends in social science and philosophy in general in the postwar decades, anthropology has undergone considerable shifts in its political substrata.

It was past midnight and a gentle rain pattered against the roof of the shaman’s house, where we sat conducting a whispered interview on a pile of blankets by the fireside. The red record button of my handheld recorder blinked in the darkness. I strained my ears to catch what Taita Antonio, a shaman, ex-political leader, and land defender of the Kamëntsá people of southwest Colombia, said next: “Our fight is for life and for water.

Content Warning: Colonialism, Racism, Violence

There’s a word in Arabic, ghurbah, that one dictionary defines as “a feeling of longing for one’s native land, of being a stranger.” I think that feeling approximates what it is to live a diasporic being, but we diasporic bodies have no homeland. Mine is the history of the Jews, my ancestors who, through exile and diaspora, learned to live with uncertainty and placelessness. Not like my friends among the Kamëntsá, whose ethnonym supposedly means “people of this place with our own thought and language.

Content Warning: Sexual violence, Mental illness

The Kamëntsá are an Indigenous community of southwest Colombia whose ancestral homeland is the Sibundoy Valley, a mountain basin straddling the Andean highlands to the west and overlooking the vast Amazonian lowlands to the east. It is fitting that such a unique geographical position, situated between two vastly different ecological and cultural worlds, should be home to a people as unique as the Kamëntsá, who fuse Andean and Amazonian cultural elements, speak a language unrelated to any other, and whose forms of artistic and philosophical expression are singular in the world.

Content Warning: Colonialism, Racism

Content Warning: Queerphobia

There is a longstanding and possibly unresolvable debate in art criticism over the importance of distinguishing between art and artist. The school of New Criticism, developed in the mid-twentieth century, sought to isolate works of art as self-contained objects. In 1967 the postmodernist Roland Barthes declared that “the author is dead,” signaling a view of art in which the intentions and biography of the artist are not only irrelevant, but interfere with the viewer’s ability to admire and interpret works of art on their own merit.

Many words walk in the world. … There are words and worlds which are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds which are truths and truthful. … In the world of the powerful there is no space for anyone but themselves and their servants. In the world we want everyone fits. In the world we want many worlds to fit. — EZLN, “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” 1996.

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy If there is a paradise in these Indian lands, why isn’t there one in others’ lands? A solitary paradise suffocated by a space where violence, narcotrafficking surround it and little by little destroy it. A paradise where peace once reigned among its inhabitants, where respect and tolerance were the pillars of life. A paradise that today is only

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy We are not people from an alien world longing to keep living; we are not people from a land from which tomorrow they will say we left. We are not a people brought from other places, our roots are here. We are men of the trees, we are a people, we are a community born of the depths of the earth,

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Ariruma Kowii The forests are losing their vitality Their dialogues are agonizing, losing their clarity beginning to fall silent Their dreams crumble to pieces and silence begins to reign. Its song the song of the birds is faint and discordant, their hymns where will they be heard? The air arrives tattered, exhausted and delayed The rivers watch us with bitterness and desperation The entrails of the earth, nourished by poison, begin to expire The plants no longer bloom with fervor with the same enthusiasm as yesterday Tomorrow, fearful its face pallid and its body malnourished runs the risk of miscarriage Tomorrow, tomorrow is in danger tomorrow tomorrow runs the risk of never arriving tomorrow depends on us and so it is fundamental to recover our reason for being it is indispensable to care for its pregnancy to ensure that its delivery goes as it should that its child is born healthy and vigorous and that we all can lull it to sleep in our arms and christen it with the name of: Humanity!

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Tracy K. Lewis You from your steering wheel and me from my books, we dialogue, and in the Guaraní language we are strained by five hundred years of rain and fallen leaves and five thousand of dust, two nighttime continents, a whole Milky Way of mute space, until from the dregs of such divergence there arose something shining like the sun of Capricorn, caustic like red earth against blue sky, and sure like the slow ascent of the earth toward the Andes to the west: an honest companion.

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Jurge Luis Borges Chance found them in a strange age. The planet had been parceled up into different countries, each provisioned with loyalties, beloved memories, and an undoubtedly heroic past; with rights, grievances, and peculiar mythologies; with brazen forefathers, anniversaries, demagogues, and symbols. This division, the work of cartographers, made wars auspicious. López was born in the city that stands by that immobile river; Ward, on the outskirts of the city through which walked Father Brown.

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Subcomandante Marcos I Build yourself a rather concave sky. Paint it green or brown, earthy and beautiful colors. Give it a splash of clouds to your liking. Carefully hang a full moon in the west, let’s say about three quarters up its respective horizon. In the east slowly start rising a bright, strong sun. Get men and women together, talk to them slowly and with love, and they’ll set off on their own.

Part of a series on latin american poems Originally Written by Elicura Chihuailaf In this earth live the stars. In this sky sings the water of imagination. Beyond the clouds that rise from these waters and these soils, our ancestors dream us. Their spirit—they say—is the full moon; silence, their beating heart.