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.

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.”

*
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.

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.
*
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?

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.

**
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.
**

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.

**
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

There’s the temptation to see Memorial Day as a sale day. As the day the pool opens for the summer season. As a day for a backyard BBQ.

If you’re not directly affected by the war–and by that, I mean, if you don’t have a loved one or close friend serving in the military or living with the physical or psychological wounds of a past war– it’s easy to see Memorial Day just as a much-needed day off of work.

It’s preferable, perhaps, to avoid thinking about the war, especially if you (like me) are liberal. And it’s easier still not to think about the people serving when you don’t know them personally, easier to think of service members as a group, and not as unique individuals with diverse backgrounds, political opinions, and aspirations.

Today, I’m thinking about the men I met last October when I visited the US naval base and joint task force detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Far from the gaze of Americans, isolated on an island that doesn’t want them and where most of them don’t want to be, beyond the reach of ordinary Americans to know, see, and talk with them, the service members who are at Guantanamo have largely been cast as a group of bad guys and have little–if any–opportunity to contest that characterization publicly.

Yet as I sat with the men at meals and interviewed them at length, what struck me–and humbled me–over and over again, was how unique each person was. This one wanted to visit “Cuba proper.” That one thought the US immigration policy is unfair and inadequate. This one was a poet. That one wanted to be a professor. Few, if any, of the men I met fit any of the stereotypes we like to foist upon service members.

You can read more about the men’s stories on my travel blog. And while you’re BBQ’ing or swimming, or just enjoying the day off, take a second to think about the people who serve in the military. Whether we agree with the war or we don’t (and I don’t), every man and woman fighting is someone with a dream, a political opinion, and a past that might surprise you.

Shot in Manhattan on May 17, 2009.

I’m pretty much convinced that there is no better place to be in the spring and summer than New York City.

There’s so much to do: like riding bikes for free along the Hudson River.

Yesterday, we took advantage of Bike n Roll’s recently launched free bike rental program, which we learned about thanks to @Newyorkology on Twitter.

We picked up our steeds at the South Street Seaport location and biked for three full hours along the Hudson.

It’s a good thing I’d read up on these cycling tips from daily cyclist and Matador colleague Carlo Alcos; otherwise, I might not be alive today.

It’s astonishing to me how oblivious people are to the world around them– hey, pedestrians! I know you’ve got the right of way, but I’m a 22 weeks pregnant woman on a bike (and I can’t remember the last time I was on a bike), so how’s about walking single file when you see a bike coming?!–but I won’t focus on that.

Instead, I’ll just say this: there’s no better way to cover some serious ground in Manhattan AND enjoy it than on two wheels, and if I had to commute any farther than my current trek from the bedroom to the living room/office, then I’d make sure to talk with Carlo and another cyclist and Matador colleague, Hal Amen, who knows a good bit about how to choose a bike.

Years ago, I read Richard Wright’s Native Son.
To be candid, it didn’t remain in my memory–not like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God– and I suspect that’s because I didn’t know much, if anything, about Wright. Most likely, Native Son was an assigned read in an African American Literature course that was never contextualized within the framework of Wright’s own background or biography.

Francisco mentioned Wright last night, talking about another of his novels, Black Boy, and the reference sent us searching for some background about Wright. Among the most interesting details: he lived in self-imposed exile in France, wrote more than 4,000 haiku in the final years of his life, and though he’s best known and remembered for his fiction, he was a fine travel writer as well.

As I read his daughter’s introduction to Wright’s Haiku: This Other World, a collection of just over 800 of his tiny poems, I felt sadness at not having known more about him earlier, and excitement at having rediscovered him:

“Holding too much rain,
The tulip stoops and spills it,
Then straightens again.” -Richard Wright

“We are born with dreams in our hearts, looking for better days ahead.”- Jimmy Santiago Baca

The theme of immigration has been on my mind lately: the phenomenon of people who come from all parts of the world to all parts of the world.

The exhibit “They Won’t Budge,” currently on display at the Schomburg Library in New York, explores the immigration of Africans to Europe. The photographs and videos left me unsettled with a flood of questions. They provoked me to explore the immigration experience more, to think about it more deeply–not only the causes of mass migration, but to analyze immigration from my own experience. Although the exhibit concentrated on the treatment of African immigrants in the European Union, it didn’t address at all the characteristics of the countries from which the immigrants arrive.

It’s difficult for me, as an immigrant, to put all the responsibility for suffering and loss on the countries to which we emigrate. I can’t overlook the responsibility that our home governments have to represent, protect, and ensure the well-being of citizens and visitors alike. Is Italy more responsible for a Nigerian than Nigeria? Does Spain have more responsibility for a Moroccan than Morocco itself? Or the United States more obligation toward a Mexican than Mexico? What about Cuba and its responsibility toward Cubans? Where do the human rights of the immigrant begin and where do they end? We suffer and die without our own governments even knowing or caring. And when they reclaim us, it’s to judge or imprison us.

To stay in our own countries would be a threat to the stability and continuity of our governments because of our needs. Instead, we are at the mercy of the winds that blow us from one place to another. Children abandoned in shelter doorways where other people become responsible for our well-being. A global burden. We look at one another with embarrassment.

If I could ask a question of the leader of every nation, it would be this: “How do you feel when you hear news about the abuse or death of one of your citizens abroad?” But I wouldn’t expect they’d care much: mass migration is an escape valve that’s actually beneficial for immigrants’ home countries, helping their governments avoid confronting problems, helping them maintain status quo, and causing their own citizens to go out into the world to ask for bread in a foreign home.

The reasons for immigration are many and they are varied. In many of our countries, “freedom” is a concept full of traps, rules, and obstacles that hardly allow us to breathe. Many of us know hunger intimately because we don’t have food to eat. And there’s another common element in the majority of our cases: the profound indifference of our countrymen and the fragile psychological and mental state of immigrants, who, as a group, have failed to be protected by our own societies. We haven’t been capable of organizing ourselves into societies that function for everyone’s well-being and progress. That’s the case inside our own nations, but it’s also the factor that promotes dehumanization and abuse within the internal policies of each country to which immigrants migrate.

It’s a sad story for the thousands of us who cross the seas, walk across deserts, and suffer in the attempt. We’re the children of no one. It’s crucial that we set aside our prejudices and emotions so we can begin to look for more practical, tangible solutions. The indifference of the international community, coupled with political violence, has made immigration a universal problem that’s as serious as global warming and epidemics.

But for those of us who are immigrants, it’s not a political problem. It’s a personal one.

“We don’t want you and we don’t need you!” were the good-bye messages Cubans who left in the Mariel boatlifts of 1980 heard as we boarded boats. But it’s the phrase heard by every one of the thousands of immigrants around the world who leave their homes, uncertain if they’ll arrive safely somewhere else.

“Hostile mountain ranges,
hard sky,
strangers, this is it:
this is my country,
I was born here, and here is where my dreams live.” -Pablo Neruda

**

“Todos nosotros hemos nacido con suenos en nuestros corazones/buscando por dias mejores en el futuro.” -Jimmy Santiago Baca

En dias recientes me ha dado vuelta el tema del inmigrante: personas que llegan de todas partes del mundo, hacia todas las partes del mundo.

La exhibicion “They Won’t Budge” (“No se Moveran” en español) de muestra en la Biblioteca Schomburg de Nueva York, explora la inmigracion de personas procedentes de Africa que residen en Europa de manera ilegal. Las fotografias y videos promovieron en mi una verdadera inquietud y un torrencial de preguntas. Me trajo a la misma vez a explorar y a meditar profundamente, no solo en las causas de la inmigracion masiva, sino tambien en analizar este hecho desde mi experiencias personales. Aunque esta exhibicion se concentra mayormente o exclusivamente en los tratos de los inmigrantes en los distintos paises de la Union Europea, estas no tocan ni exploran el tema de los paises de las cuales estos inmigrantes proceden.

Me resulta dificil como inmigrante poner toda la responsabilidad del sufrimiento y la perdida de cada vida en los paises a donde emigramos. No puedo dejar de culpar a los gobiernos que se liberan de la responsabilidad de representar, proteger y asegurar el bienestar de sus ciudadanos dentro y fuera de ellos. Hay mas responsabilidad en Italia para un Nigeriano que en Nigeria? Mas responsabilidad tiene Espana para un Marroqui que en Marruecos? Mas responsabilidad para un ciudadano Mexicano en los EEUU que en Mexico? Y que hay de Cuba de responsabilidad para los Cubanos? Donde comienzan y donden terminan los derechos humanos del inmigrante? Todos padecemos y morimos sin que el gobierno de nuestros paises de origenes se preocupen o se molesten. Y cuando nos reclaman es para enjuiciarnos y encarcelarnos.

De permanecer en nuestros paises seriamos una amenaza y un problema para la estabilidad y la continuidad de estos gobiernos. Sobrante humano y peones politicos a merced de los vientos que soplan de un lado a otro. Hijos abandonados en puertas de conventos para que otros se responsabilizen de nuestro bienestar. Una carga global facil de patear de un lado a otro. Con verguenza cuando nos miramos los unos a los otros.

Si pudiera hacer una pregunta al lider de cada nacion esta seria, “Como te sientes con las noticias de la muerte y abuso de cada ciudadano de tu pais en el exterior?” Este problema de las inmigraciones masivas a mi entender son una valvula de escape beneficiosa e inmediata para resolver y mantener el statu quo. Clave exacta para asegurar la permanencia de sus gobiernos incapaces de gobernar a su mayoria. Haciendonos salir por el mundo a pedir pan en casa ajena!

Las causas y las razones para una inmigracion son muchas y muy variadas. En muchos de nuestros paises las libertades estan llenas de trabas, reglas, y obstaculos que apenas nos dejan respirar. Muchas veces conocemos el hambre porque no hay que comer y nos llenamos de esta experiencias de una manera muy tragica. Pero hay tambien un elemento muy comun en la mayoria de nuetros casos: la profunda indiferencia ciudadana y el estado psicologico y mental que como grupo hemos fracazado profundamente en protejernos personal y colectivamente en nuestras sociedades. No hemos sido capaces de organizarnos en sociedades que funcionen para nuestro bienestar y progreso. Esto de hecho son factores que conducen a que colectivamente enfrentemos deshumanizacion y abusos de una manera colectiva e individual fuera y dentro de nuestras naciones. Y por consiguiente las politicas migratorias y el trato refleja exactamente la politica interna de cada pais de donde venimos. Ni mas ni menos.

Triste es la historia para miles de personas que cruzamos los mares, caminamos desiertos y perecemos en el intento como hijos de nadie. Es muy importante dejar a un lado los prejuicios y las emociones para buscar una solucion practica y tangible. La indiferencia de la comunidad internacional unida con las violencias politicas han hecho de la inmigracion un problema universal tan severo como la globalizacion, el calentamiento global, y las epidemias.

Para nosotros los inmigrantes no es este ya un problema politico sino personal.

”No los queremos y no los necesitamos!” fueron las frases de despedidas para los cubanos del exodo de Mariel, Cuba en 1980. Pero es tambien la frase de despedidas en cada uno de los miles de inmigrantes que abandonamos nuestros hogares sin saber a ciertas si llegamos todos!

“Hostiles cordilleras,
cielo duro,
extranjeros, ésta es,
ésta es mi patria,
aquí nací y aquí viven mis sueños.”

-Pablo Neruda

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