heads up

i feel the need to write this in english… mi gente here in el sur in general know more about me then those i left en el norte… the last couples of months have been hard in terms of personal health, in about two months i´ve  had chikungunya, shoulder trauma, an umbilical hernia, nasty rumors where i live and spiritual attacks… it seems like most of that is over now, but the camino to recovery es larga… i am taking this as a momento to reflect upon my concepts of health, comfort and privilegio…once i get over the hernia, which may or may not include surgery, i hope to train, get built to avoid that type of injury in the future. the chikungunya will take about tres years to get out of my system and in all i´m having to come to conclusions about life decisions that i am not too excited about. in general, la vida en buena, and i have tons going on in terms of lucha and resistencia por la tierra, but also projects and creando new things. 

In the last couple of months i´ve been forced to realize somethings and having to accept them  and seguir adelante. Toda mi vida… since i was like 9 years old i had total claridad of what i wanted to do…. live in the campo in Huila, rural, where my familia is from… it would not be years later in searching my soul and perplexed by mi identidad as a student en la Universidad that that somewhat boring farmer country region where mi familia is from, is really where we are from, is where we are propio too.

Yes, mi papá´s people are Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe that came to this hemisphere 101 years ago by way of Montevideo, Uruguay and all of my mother´s people identify with their descendencia española, irregadless if they are all mestizos, though my mom´s dad, mi abuelo Jorge who i spent summer vacaciones with is original from here, and his mamá and his abuela, Sinforoza Ramón are from here. Sinforoza came from a community that lived on a foothill known by their surname, la loma de los Ramon. Though being Native and being from La Jagua does not give too much clarity of who we are. 

Identidad is thick in La Jagua, founded in 1540 as a pueblo de indios to evangelize and enslave Native folks from here and forcibly brought from elsewhere. Even before its colonial founding it was an important community, a strategic natural port between the junction of two ríos connecting the different Peoples of the Upper Yuma Valley with the Amazonia, the Central and Oriental Andes Mountains and what today is called the Colombian Massif. As if being a port with a constant exchange of peoples from surrounding regions did not make identidad hard enough, in La Jagua los elders say we are from the Jaguos (a peoples not documented anywhere) and the documentos de archive  say La Jagua was founded with Tama people (the Tama are not originally a Nation or Peoples, but a regional term for natives captured in the Amazonian regions of Caquetá and Putumayo and sent to Huila, irregardless of what community they were from or what languages they spoke). There are Nasa people say we are Nasa,Yanaconas say we are Yanacona and the maps made speak of the Yalcon and the Andakí. i have my own conclusiones that once i gather up the arguments and evidencias, i´ll put out there even though it may not be liked by everyone.

Since the 1520s the Españoles  raped and plundered esta región, they came and did so long ago, and the Huilense people hoy son producto of this mixing by conquista y colonización. You still see it in peoples´ faces,  original last names like Ninco and Cumbe, people who still heal with plantas  and the ciclos of la luna,  people who have copper weights on their chiles or atarrayas (cast nets) to keep the Mohán away, people who weave alpargatas (footwear) and mochilas (shoulder bags) from the fibras of the fique plant, and people are weary of brujeria and the hundreds if not thousands of tumbas that are found everywhere that is flat landed and not in the flood plains of the Yuma or the Cuacua rivers. People who call their kids güipas, bats are chimbila, the alpargatas here are called kimbas, and hang aloe plants, sábila over doorways. Traditional comidas still preparado and eaten are tamales wrapped in hojas de plátano, caldo de cucha (armored catfish soup), morcilla de choclo (corn sausages), colada y bizcochos de achira (achira root porridge and bisquits) and when I wander the campo side I keep an ojo on the look out for piñuela fruit (relative of the pineapple) or pitayá roja (red dragon fruit). None the less ask any of these people if they are indígenas? Ask them if they know what lenguas we spoke? Ask about our traditional beliefs and not Cristo… for me, the responses are disappointing if not outright deprimente.

i am the hijo raro of immigrantes, the one who did and does not want to live the immigrant, settler life my parents worked so hard to create in the EE.UU. buscando mejores oportunidades, the sueño americano... a la mierda… fck it! even as a niño i knew i did not want that way, and that was way before i had any ideas decoloniales, because even if los gringos blancos and most others there think i look, and i can speak and act like them, i am not like them in the capacity that i have not lost my origen or relationship to that lugar y gente so i do not need to create a fantasy that that is my home even if i was born n raised there, i am not from Norteamérica (even though most here say i am), and really do not want to live there being part of ese sistema. i know i am also very mixed and by phenotype and blood pass as being very european but again… my relations, heart, tempo, blood always since infancy have been of Huila. as an adult, to know it, to live it, to put it in practica, es mi choice i have the privilegio to do so, i can ir y venir siempre en cuando tengo money for tickets, but the privileges my parents worked and fought hard to alcanzar, to give their kids what they didn’t have… for the most part, rechazo esto, not interested, not all of it, pero mucho. in that search for self and coming down here i have found myself at odds, en choque with most of my familia extendida and the vast majority of mi tiempo i spend in other spaces not with them. i have created my own path and life.

i remember when i returned a La Jagua as an adulto, once the Quimbo Dam was announced… habia estado 2 years working in other communidades in the use of art y cultura as ways to protect their territorio, what i have done for a long time… though before it was facil, i was the mono (light haired), the gringo, the extranjero, el de afuera, i was the aliado and was very comfortable in doing what i needed to do and making sure to not over step boundries, conocer mi lugar … i remember thinking i would operate the same way in La Jagua….little did i know that the folks would not have that. i remember the asambleas where i would remind, “Yo no soy de aquí but my abuelo was, i am here to apoyar”….. support?!.. folks weren’t having that y me obligaron asumir roles of leadership and coordinación…. i would retort that “i am not from here and it is important for you all to take on these roles”…. And then i would be told that “i was too complicado that i am from there but i was just and raised somewhere else, eso es todo”…. And cuatro casí cinco years later lo que se ha ido construyendo en La Jagua, the folk active in eso we have lived through a lot… including momentos where we were doubtful … we had mis steps along the way but la gente original we are still around…..

Almost five years later, resisting against a dam that will destroy the territorio de mi gente, the geografia of my niñez, space and places so dear and sagrado to me and many others that, and having been doing this with people who always have known me, the “nieto gringo de Jorge luna”, people who knew me as a güipa and here we are…. the company claims they will start filling the reservoir next month…. because of the hernia i am supposed to take serious care of mi cuerpo, not force myself and well, this is all happening now. complex challenges… i spent most of mi vida joven con pedos de identidad to find my own lugar, the place de mi familia and spend the last five years defendiendo it with others from what seems as un desastre inevitable to end up being like another 5 milliones de Colombianos, displaced, obviously with a whole bunch of privileges, but none the less desplazados… like the other 200,000 displaced in Colombia from dams.

Most people in our movement have been bought, sold out, most never really believed we could liberate our tierra,  even when we recuperated the farms in 2013 for 6 meses before we were forced off.  Most continue to have views of “explotando la tierra”, planting mono-crops with chemicals, see wildlife and forests as taking up space, loving what they see on the TV, desiring to speak english, not caring or valuing what or who we are, our territory and over all… not to mention macista, homophobic, judgmental and hypocritical. i have had to learn to coexist and tolerate words, attitudes, -isms, -fobias and people that within many other urban insular socio-cultural communities i have been a part of, none of that would ever happen. Its not from any olde people,  its with compas de proceso. The complex part is that many times it is these same people who you want nada to do with and when you least expect it, they got ur back when mas lo necesitas. The folks who have claridad that we are fighting to liberar la tierra and not for money, somos pocos, and most of those have moved on to other things, since febrero this year i spend most of my time alone, solo, con nadie, walking the logged forests, see the chopped down trees scattered next to the ríos, remembering how those days que los cortaron only one person came out conmigo to see if we could stop it o por lo menos document. Mis ojos still are searching for a pitayá that may have escaped the destruction, amigos animales that still may be around, most others feel their time in the resistancia to the dam was a loss and have found it easier to turn their backs on la tierra and its other inhabitants…. i spend less and less time in the pueblo and even por la noche walking, nostalgically walking mi territorio remembering how it was a year ago, how it was cinco años atras, 15 years ago, 25 years ago… hasta que me recuerdo.  The workers watch me, me miran en silencio y yo no les digo nada and they usually do not say anything a mi.

Seems que todo menos my heart and sangre are telling me leave here, which i won´t until this capitulo del Quimbo is over, but yeah, it seems like there is nada for me here. Folks are no longer into building and organizing, much less resistance and lucha…. The community that 5 years ago had no more capacidad organizativa then what is required for actividades de Holy Week or tornamentas de futbol grew exponentially to organizar road blockades for weeks, face off riot police and paralizar la obra del dam. but now, ahora retornado a lo normal …. i have my criticas for why things resulted this way…but i am merely one person in a vast región called Huila with many particular characters and nadie es profeta en su propia tierra.  What keeps me focused as we wait to see what happens, if a last minute court decision saves us form the dam, or an earthquake destroys the structure r if they fill it, ahora que sigue… i keep my energia enfocada  on filming. In addition to spending a lot of alone time afuera, poco a poco i have been accumulating footage, grabaciones and lately interviews to attempt to make a documental film with the communidad, my first, which tells the story de La Jagua. ojala by mid next year este terminado.  

So here i am, the only thing that seems right in my life is my partner who is in his territory, trying to finish school and survive the current chaos that is Venezuela, trying to figure out where we can live once he finishes, where can we create community and home? Where plantas and animales out number humanos, where there is community to create and struggle with, where we will not be attacked or cast away for being two male bodies que se aman, where we will not be colonos… settlers…. Toda mi vida i knew exactly where i wanted to be and grow and had mi identidad so tied to the place where part of me and mi gente are propiamente from, but now that I have made it here… i have not found what i wanted and i still have not been able to totalmente accept it, what i wanted is so intrinsically tied and conectado to donde soy yo and i am just left with a perplexing uneasiness of where to echar raices, spread roots, from where to resistir, crear, grow and transformar and not be a colono. i plan to continue building, creating and resisting with the same regions i have been for all these years, even my own, and that is planned at least until the end of next year… but not yet the place where WE can do all those things and vivir creando una familia, our own family… time will tell. Mientras tanto… i hope we cross paths pronto, por que by the way….  i will be visiting el norte, Turtle Island, North America for some time later this year.  ;)

i just wrote all of that in spanglish after i said i needed to write in english... hijole mein, wut is up wit dat? lol