Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Julie Schwietert Collazo & Francisco Collazo
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Yesterday was International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, so we wanted to honor women we’ve met in our travels by sharing photos and a bit of their stories here.

Aura Trespalacios, the matriarch of the Trespalacios family, helps maintain the tradition of making filigree gold jewelry, a craft they’ve nurtured over generations. Mompox, Colombia

We spent hours talking with this woman in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, but I realize only now that we never asked her name. She roasts coffee and gives demonstrations at the Hacienda El Jibarito, Puerto Rico’s first agritourism inn.

This woman waits on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana. Her husband will meet her… on the American side. They’ll talk and touch through the small holes in the fence.

As I looked through our photos from Brazil, I realized that none of the formal meetings we were scheduled to have were with women. Women were a “backdrop” to the agenda.

Photos & Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
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We spent last week in New England, visiting properties in New Hampshire and Vermont while working on a story about what makes hotels “green,” or environmentally friendly.

It was Francisco’s and Mariel’s first trip to these two states, and my first return years after a childhood family trip.

These states have always struck me as a bit different from the rest of the US. Hugging each other, one is notoriously conservative, the other notoriously liberal. Yet both, in their own ways, seem deeply private, interested in preserving what they view as their own (whether land or ways of living), and marked by a certain nativism.

“It looks like the kind of place where people buy deer burger,” Francisco said as we entered the Franconia Pass in New Hampshire right at dusk. When I wrote that on Twitter, locals replied, “They don’t BUY deer burger; they shoot it.”

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We forget how diverse our own countries are. Not 300 miles from where we live in New York City, there’s this whole other world, a world where “Moose Crossing” signs replace “Pedestrian Xing,” where people shoot and skin the meat they eat, where people still make their own syrup.

It’s important to step into that world once in a while, to get away from billboards and buzz and the comfort of relatively anonymous urban living and to sit with people who talk about what it’s like to farm land, or make handcrafts out of timber leavings, or who are opposed to windmill farms because they’ll blight the landscape.

It’s important to remember to contest this popular yet fallacious idea that somehow we’ve all become homogenized.

Chew on that when you eat your next hamburger.

Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Francisco Collazo and Julie Schwietert Collazo
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We’ve visited many cemeteries while traveling: the Petit Family Cemetery on the land where I grew up in South Carolina, where the graves of slaves are indicated with simple rocks.

Cementerio Colon in Havana, Cuba, where the sister of Francisco’s son is buried.

The local cemetery in Mompox, Colombia, at night, during a ceremony honoring the dead, candles flickering on tombstones and families holding hands, some crying, some talking quietly, some entirely silent and meditative.

The municipal cemetery in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where ostentatious monuments marking the final resting place of former governors and famous families draw attention from the old crypts, cracked open by decay, displaying bones on the back retaining wall of the cemetery.

New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery

a cemetery in southern Chile

It’s not that we have a fetish for the dead. But there’s something illustrative about a place, a culture, and its people that can be narrated without words when you visit a cemetery.
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Perhaps you’ve visited cemeteries on your travels, too, or stopped at the graves of the famous dead to honor them or simply say you’d been there.

But like us, you probably haven’t spent much time at the cemetery in your hometown.

Woodlawn Cemetery, one of New York City’s cemeteries, is located in the north Bronx in an area that was considered rural back in 1863, when the cemetery was founded. More than 300,000 people have been buried at Woodlawn since then, and many of them constitute a Who’s Who list of American public life.

We visited recently:

The tomb of Miles Davis

The mausoleum of Augustus Juilliard, founder of The Juilliard School

The tomb of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights, famous for writing The Declaration of Sentiments

The tomb of Joseph Pulitzer, the so-called father of journalism. Founded Columbia University’s School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize.

The modest tomb of Ralph Bunche, who, among many other accomplishments, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African American to receive the honor.

What cemeteries have you visited on your travels and what have they taught you?

Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Julie Schwietert Collazo & Francisco Collazo
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I thought it would be impossible to top 2008, but here we are, on the first day of 2010, and as we take stock of 2009, we realize just how full and intense and incredible this last year was.

January

The first trip of the year was my work-related jaunt to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. I left there like I leave most places: wanting much more time to dig in deep and get to know and understand it. The trip to St. Kitts renewed my passion for Caribbean history and development, which had largely been dormant since leaving Puerto Rico and simultaneously putting my PhD studies on hold at the end of 2007. St. Kitts was also a special way to start 2009 because it was there that I learned I was probably pregnant!

From St. Kitts, Francisco and I headed to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. We were joined on our road trip by friends Emon Hassan and Kaitlin Foley. I led a group of students on an educational tour that culminated on the national lawn before the crack of dawn on the morning of the inauguration. Though I worried I’d lost my toes to the cold, I couldn’t have been happier to be a witness among hundreds of thousands of others to that historic moment.

February

In February, we said what we hope will be a temporary good-bye to Mexico City, as our residency visas were not renewed.

There was little time to process this huge move before I headed further south–this time to Brazil, to celebrate Carnaval in the cities of Recife, Olinda, and Pelourinho. While I enjoyed being a participant observer in the festivities, I was acutely aware of how the celebration is experienced differently because of race. Between my observations in St. Kitts and my experiences in Brazil, I was well on my way to making the decision to resume my doctoral studies.

March, April, and May

As winter wore off, we immersed ourselves into our city as never before: PEN World Voices Festival, the High Line, Governor’s Island… to name just a few.

June and July

The summer months were spent in Puerto Rico, our former home. In June, Francisco and I both led student tours for EF Smithsonian; in July, we conducted extensive research all over the island for an assignment for Fodor’s Puerto Rico (to be published in September 2010). B

August, September, and October

As the birth of our daughter, Mariel Paloma, approached, we revived our NYC immersion exercise. We visited museums we’d never entered before– the Museum of the American Indian, the NYC Police Museum, and the Museum of Chinese in America–and attended events like the Dragonboat Festival and Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival.

November

Boston and South Carolina were on the calendar for November. Boston for meetings and an emotional reunion with one of Francisco’s sons; South Carolina to celebrate Thanksgiving.

December

St. Thomas,

South Carolina, and

Florida:

Somehow, we managed to pack them all into December and touched down at home in NYC on New Year’s Eve, ready to welcome in 2010 at home!

What’s in store for 2010?
We never really know for sure, but Mariel’s first trip to Cuba is one possibility. We’ll be in South Carolina in June for my brother’s wedding. Puerto Rico never seems to be too far from our plans. And 2010 is definitely the year of America! We plan to explore the US like never before!

We’ll also be more faithful in updating this blog– both in content and in design. We have big plans for this year, so keep reading! And keep sharing your own stories with us, too.

Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Francisco Collazo & Julie Schwietert Collazo

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In June 2008 Francisco and I went to New Orleans to work with the Culinary Corps, a voluntourism organization I profiled in this article.

It was Francisco’s first time in the city and my third, but for both of us, it was our first post-Katrina visit and we were astounded by the amount of recovery work that still needed to be done. The photos below are from that visit.
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New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, closed after Katrina.

A tattered American flag that hadn’t been replaced, three years after the hurricane.

What do you do when your country hasn’t listened to you?

If even City Hall hasn’t been razed or rehabbed, what can we possibly expect for the rest of the city?

It’s always striking how some fragile items remain intact.

A house “tattooed” with search, rescue, and recovery information.

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To see the rest of our New Orleans photos, visit our New Orleans album on Flickr.

Other articles we’ve written about New Orleans:

*Top 6 Volunteer Experiences in New Orleans

*Top 10 Reasons to Travel to New Orleans NOW
*5 Tips for a New Orleans Escape