A Peña and Day Off
Hey everyone, it is President’s Day! There are no classes held today on the Evergreen campus and pretty much everything is closed there. Though I never have class on Mondays anyway, it is still a nice break for all of the other students here. I am instead, working on writing a paper that is due tomorrow synthesizing the Zapatista movement, eco-sufficient economic practices, and the pervasion of dominant narratives. Difficult? Yes. Engaging? Absolutely.
I realize that this is my first post in a while, but I’ve been really busy for the past few weeks. I’ve been writing a Student Originated Studies (SOS) research paper about the West Virginia coal mining wars. It is such a large part of our history that has been entirely left out of almost every textbook! Though it was the largest insurrection since the Civil War, the Mine Wars never gained due recognition because of the large influence of private companies and military intervention. Even one of the first implementations of the USAF was during this conflict, even though it ended quite comically for the bi-planes that were used. Overall it has been a so interesting researching this topic.
This past Friday, my class and a few others got together with a group by the name of Sin Fronteras and had a peña in the Longhouse here on campus. A peña, traditionally, is a clandestine South American meeting where poets, musicians, and artists can express their work without fear of abduction, oppression, or torture (all of which happened in countries, like Chile for example, when there were military coups like Pinochet’s). What makes a Peña so fascinating, for me anyway, is that rather than having a et program like a performance, is that it is entirely reliant on audience participation. So, many of classmates performed spoken word, music, read poetry, enacted skits and theatrical pieces, and displayed art, among other things. Also, there was food! We had a group of maybe fifteen, myself included, that took charge of the food and prepared food, including but not limited to, jalapeño cornbread, red chicken curry, posole, Trinidadian curry, pico and guacamole, veggie curry, rice and beans, lentils, key lime pie, and mixed berry pie. Yum!
Well, I hope you are all enjoying your day off, if you have one. If you are coming to Evergreen this week, I will probably see you around! We have a ton of people on campus this week, it is so exciting! Ciao.