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SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2012
LIFESTYLE F e a t u r e s
Zapotec Indians recreate village fiesta in California group of Zapotec Indian women dug a hole with their hands, building an oven out of mud to roast hot peppers, garlic and onions in the backyard of their home in Central California. At dawn, they cooked enough thick, chocolaty sauce - called mole negro - to feed hundreds of farmworkers who would stream in from across California and as far as Washington and Oregon to celebrate St. John the Evangelist, the patron saint of a Mexican village more than 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) away. Zapotecs who worked in California once travelled back home to Coatecas Altas and other villages in Oaxaca to attend these fiestas. But as border security tightened and illegal crossings turned expensive and dangerous, many of them found a way to honor their saint stateside, in the small farmworker town of Madera. For the third year in a row, Zapotecs gathered in Madera in the days after Christmas, cooking and eating mole, building an altar, parading giant papermache dolls and dancing into the night to brass bands belching out traditional chilenas. The fiesta takes place over several days, simultaneously with that in Oaxaca. “This is about community service, about coming together to help and support each other,” said Alfredo Hernandez, a volunteer from Madera who helped organize the celebration. “It’s important for us not to lose our culture. And since we can’t go back, we do it here.” Zapotec is one of the two largest linguistic Indian groups in Oaxaca, and its people are among the newest wave of US migrant workers. In California, an estimated 30 percent of farmworkers are now indigenous, according to the US Labor Department. In Oaxaca, the Zapotecs lived for more than 2,000 years cultivating corn and beans, adhering to a practice of mandatory community service and specializing in crafts. Tucked in the mountains, Coatecas Altas known for intricate baskets and mats hand-woven out of wild palm leaves. But over the past few decades, their way of life collapsed. Facing an economic crisis in their country, a flood of cheap American corn brought about by the free trade agreement and declining government support for small farmers, Zapotecs began to migrate for better opportunities, said Sara Lara Flores, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied Zapotec migration. Those who moved north of the border prior to the 1980s settled mainly in Los Angeles, but the past decade saw Zapotecs streaming into rural Central California to work in the fields. Juan Santiago, a student at California State University in Fresno, started the fiesta in Madera to help organize his community. Santiago, 23, came to the United States with his mother when he was 11, joining his farmworker father and four brothers in Madera. He is the first member of his family to graduate from high school and go to college. Life in California poses tremendous challenges to his people, Santiago said. In Madera, where 77 percent of the 61,000 residents are Hispanic, the Zapotecs have faced a double language barrier with English and Spanish, and experienced a double culture shock. Many of area’s 5,000 Zapotecs are young people who lack basic education and live in poverty, having few job options without legal immigration documents, Santiago said. In the fields, Indians often get paid less than other Latinos. Three years ago, Santiago organized the Zapotecs’ first community assembly in Madera and was elected its president. One of his first orders of business was to transplant the practice of community service. That volunteer work, he said, gives young people something productive and positive to do and encourages leadership. Community work is key to the survival of the migrants, Flores said. “This celebration allows for the ties of solidarity and mutual help that characterize indigenous people to be reinforced,” she said. “It helps them face the atmosphere of hostility and intolerance that many encounter.” The fiesta, which included a run from Fresno to Madera and a basketball tournament, also promotes the Zapotec culture and language among the youngest generations, which are quickly becoming Americanized, Santiago said. On the day of the fiesta, after attending mass, more than 1,000 Zapotecs crammed into a rental hall at the Madera Fairgrounds. They prayed, lit candles and placed bouquets of flowers before a mobile altar of St. John the Evangelist, made to look just like the one in Coatecas Altas. Giant paper mache dolls danced under a ceiling filled with papel picado, colorful wafer-thin paper banners hand-cut into elaborate designs. Platefuls of mole and cups of tepache, a fermented pineapple drink, were handed out to the crowd. At the end, in a special ceremony, Santiago and fellow committee members passed four ceremonial staffs to newly elected committee members and volunteers, who will continue the tradition of community service for the next three years. —AP
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Indian artist Harwinder Singh Gill displays a creation made with 250 small flags of different countries reading “Happy New Year 2012” on new year’s eve in Amritsar yesterday. —AFP
Florida was weird as only it can be in 2011 id you hear about the giant Lego man that washed up on Siesta Key beach? What about the man who walked into a bar, ordered a beer and disappeared for 30 minutes to rob a bank, only to return and finish his drink? Or how about the puzzling story of the baby grand piano that showed up on a sandbar near Miami? That’s Florida, where weird is an everyday event. Over the past year, a 92-year-old woman fired four shots at a neighbor who refused to kiss her, a Delray Beach man cut off a piece of a dead whale that washed ashore - planning to eat it - and an 8-year-old girl gave her teacher some marijuana and said: “This is some of my mom’s weed.” The piano was a mystery for about a month. On Jan 1, 2011, the charred instrument showed up on a Biscayne Bay sandbar, a couple hundred yards from shore. A 16-year-old student eventually admitted he put it there as part of an art project. A day after it was removed, someone set up a table with two chairs, place settings and a bottle of wine. It’s still not clear how the 100-pound, 8foot-tall (2.5-meter-tall) Lego man washed ashore. The local tourism bureau hoped to use Lego man to promote the area, but the man who found it has placed a claim on it. He can keep it if the owner doesn’t collect it before early next year. As for the bar-bank robber, he was arrested at his watering hole, not too long after the holdup. Author Tim
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Dorsey, whose novels include Florida strangeness both real and fantasy, said the state is an odd place because of its diverse, highly transient population. “There’s pockets of strangeness all over the country, but here it’s a baseline lifestyle. There, it’s the aberration. There, it’s the tail end of the bell curve. Here, it’s the peak of the bell curve,” Dorsey said. Young people made up a large part of the peculiar tales. In Palm Beach County, an elementary school teacher opened an end-of-the-year gift from an 8-year-old student’s grandmother and found toiletries and a loaded handgun. A Tampa woman upset with her 15-year-old son’s bad grades forced him to stand on a street corner with a sign that read: “Honk if I need an education.” A 15-year-old Florida Keys girl who is a big fan of the “Twilight” books and movies was afraid that her mother would get upset by the bite marks her boyfriend gave her after they acted out her vampire fantasy. She made up a story about being attacked; doubtful investigators got her to tell the truth. Deputies arrested an 18-month-old’s father after they found the man passed out in his mobile home while the toddler was in the yard picking up beer cans and drinking them. Pasco County deputies said a woman walked into a bank with a 3-year-old boy and
robbed it. A homeless man held up a Tampa bank, fled on a city bus and handed out stolen cash to passengers. And while he didn’t rob it, an unhappy Palm Coast bank customer left quite a deposit. He urinated in a drive-thru bank tube and drove off. Animals always account for a fair share of odd news. At the Miami airport, a Brazilian trying to get through security was caught with several baby pythons and tortoise hatchlings in his underwear. A woman found a 7-foot (2.1meter) alligator in her bathroom, and a man stored his dead cougar in a freezer. In northcentral Florida, an Ocala ice cream shop got rid of its costumed mascot - a waving vanilla cone - because passers-by kept mistaking him for a hooded Ku Klux Klansman. In unusual crime stories, two managers of a Lake City Domino’s Pizza were charged with burning down a rival Papa John’s as a way to increase business. Two deaf men using sign language were stabbed at a Hallandale Beach bar when another costumer thought they were flashing gang signs. And finally, a North Naples man who was pulled over for a traffic violation called emergency services and reported a shooting nearby to get out of a ticket. He still got a ticket and was also charged with making a false emergency services call. —AP
This Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011 file photo provided by the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, shows a 100-pound, 8-foot-tall statue made to look like a Lego man that was found on Siesta Key beach in Sarasota, Fla, Tuesday morning. —AP
South Korean girl group T-ara pose for the media for the 2011 MBC Korean Music Festival in Gwangmyeong, south of Seoul, South Korea yesterday. —AP
Couple of South African leopards on Malawi mission he leopards won’t like that!” jokes ranger Fyson Suwedi as his pick-up truck rattles along the bumpy road that leads from the airstrip to Malawi’s Majete Wildlife Reserve. In the back are the two special passengers, transported by plane from South Africa across 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on a mission to repopulate the Majete. The leopards-a male and a femalehave behaved during the journey to their new home, where they will hopefully reproduce. Proclaimed in 1955, the Majete reserve suffered extensive poaching which severely depleted its animals’ numbers. But a conservation group took over management after a 2003 deal with Malawi’s government. Since then over 2,500 antelopes, elephants, buffalo and rhino have been reintroduced. This leopard operation’s twosome were caught in rural South Africa after their hunting spree
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A sedated leopard lies in a cage before its transfer to Malawi in Hoedspruit, as part of an animal repopulation project between South Africa and Malawian nature reserves. —AFP
wreaked havoc on farmers’ ostrich populations. At the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in northeast South Africa, where the leopards spent a few weeks before the move to Malawi, the morning of their journey they are quickly sedated, inoculated against rabies and cat flu, washed, and put into cages. A few volunteers from the centreactually tourists who pay to work with the exotic animals-are helping the operation. “The male is 22 months old and the female 17. Unfortunately we’ll have to wait a year or two before they can reproduce,” explains Brian Jones, the wildlife rehab’s director. But head veterinarian Andre Uys believes the felines are older, as much as five years for the male and two for his future companion. After the leopards are moved into their separate cages the journey can finally begin. The first stop is a
nearby airfield, then an hour’s flight to Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport, where the last administrative details need to be tied up. All the paperwork however was not ready on time even though the African Parks Network, the non-governmental organisation that runs Majete, started the process seven months ago. “We cannot afford any further delay because the animals are going to cook (in their cages). It’s hot in here,” an impatient Uys says on his cellphone. A whole range of documents is needed to transport the animals out of the country: both veterinary services and customs’ environmental protection management have to authorise the move. Then the operation needs the stamp of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the international animal trade policing body.
But finally the Cessna airplane takes off from Nelspruit, only four hours behind schedule. Flying over western Mozambique, three-and-a-halfhours later it touches down on the private runway of a sugar factory near Majete. The last papers are signed, and the two cages are loaded onto the pickup truck for the last stretch to the reserve. The leopards have been awake for a while now and are calm, though they growl at each other from time to time. “They shouldn’t have been fed yesterday. They should have been starving to travel,” says Uys regretfully. Usually leopards respond better to the drugs if they do not eat before traveling, but these two had a rabbit “snack” for dinner the previous evening. At the reserve the endangered big cats are freed at last, but kept apart in enclosures. “They are under stress. If they were released together
now they would kill each other,” says Uys. This will be their home until mid-January while they recuperate from the journey. When they are set free after that, they’ll probably hang around the area for another week, then take off to explore the 700 square kilometers (270 square miles) of their new domain. Each wears a collar that sends a satellite signal so park officials can track their movements. Perhaps they will meet the other two leopards from South Africa that were released in October. And more big cats are coming. Next July, lions will arrive in Malawi to do their bit to repopulate the Majete reserve. —AFP