EL TO TÓ DE GUILLÉN CULIPANDEA POR LA PALESIANA CALLE ANTILLANA

Durante mi último año en el City College de NY (CCNY) tuve de frente a dos grupos de estudiantes, reclutados en las zonas suburbanas de los EEUU para trabajar como maestros en los barrios latinos de la ciudad. La mayoría de estos jóvenes eran blancos clases-medias que habían estudiado español en las universidades de los EEUU. Uno de estos dos grupos pude domar. Al segundo -colonizado (recuerden que no todo puertorriqueño asume una postura como colonizado o colonialista frente al “gringo”) al fin- lo mandé para el infierno (luego les cuento). El primero tomó la asignatura que yo dictaba sobre el aprendizaje y enseñanza de la lecto-escritura en español en las escuelas bilingües primarias. 

Puesto que durante mis anteriores años académicos mis estudiantes eran todos latinos, no estaba preparado para lo que encontré en las "interacciones" a princiopios de clases, las primeras reuniones del grupo. Fluentes y muy seguros de sí mismos, los "sububarnos" se quedaron con las discusiones en clase. No tenían dificultad en entender las lecturas académicas, temas, teorías y prácticas que allí se discutían. Los latinos, jóvenes inmigrantes pobres, graduados de colegios y universidades públicas de la ciudad, eran opacados por aquellos muy seguros y sofisticados estudiantes.

Sin dejarle saber lo que había observado, para evitar lo que se estaba dando en clase: el control de las discusiones y la segregación en grupos étnicos, hacia la tercera semana transformé la estructura y enfoque de la clase: los puse a  discutir las lecturas y proyectos en grupos pequeños. Con el resultado que durante esa tercera semana los clases-medias suburbanos, una vez más, se quedaron con las discusiones. Todavía no quería abordar el problema públicamente y para la cuarta, mi muy didáctico “genio creador” me sugirió que los pusiera a leer y luego a discutir cómo integrar en sus aulas los poemas afro-antillanos de Guillén, Cabral y Palés Matos.

Fue en ese momento cuando los jóvenes latinos, en su mayoría descendientes de dominicanos y puertorriqueños se quedaron con el piso. Con ellos no había que discutir las funciones estilísticas, morfológicas, sintácticas, léxicas, significativas de la muy palesiana “Tembandumba de la Quimbambas”, meneando “masa con masa” sus grandes nalgas, “culipandeando por la calle antillana”, o que el “bembón” de Guillén no se tiene que quejar porque  “Caridad se lo da to, to”. Y allí, el “to, to” de Guillén  despertaba la risa y obligaba a menear sus hombros a los caribeños mientras los “clase-media” suburbanos, mimados y reclutados para salvar a los “people of color” no sabían de qué carajo se hablaba, ni podían leer al ritmo de una plena, una rumba o un son.  Que la compresión de un texto no se limita al cerebro, y si es literatura caribeña, como el negro en la canción de Celia Cruz, "hay que tener tumbao". 

TOLERANCIA Y GUACHAFITA

El diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua define el vocablo guachafita como alguien falto de seriedad, orden o eficiencia. Este vocablo es usado de distintas maneras a través de Latinoamérica, a veces es deletreado con hache en vez de ge, pero el significado es más o menos el mismo. Su uso en Puerto Rico ha ido desapareciendo; los guachafitas, no. Andan por ahí a tutiplén. No dudo que tenga origen arahuaco o quechua o guaraní. Los viajes y mercados influyen los usos y códigos del lenguaje; y los hablantes de quechua, arahuaco y guaraní hace rato que andan viajando, vendiendo, comprando y hablando entre ellos y con otros. 

“Su obra es innovadora, de un valor literario extraordinario”: díjo un editor-mercader de libros. Cubra los gastos que se lo publicamos. Sí, Pepe hubiese dicho mi abuela, quien desconfiaba de los guachafitas de verbo rápido y halagador. La necesidad de crear falsas expectativas no se limita a los mercaderes de libros ni a los políticos de turno. Se encuentra en el diario vivir de todos nosotros: los médicos que te dan cita a una hora para luego encontrarse uno con un montón más de pacientes con cita a la misma hora; la señora de clase media que estaciona su todo terreno frente la entrada del garaje de tu casa y dice, sin mucha preocupación, “yo vuelvo rápido”; la amiga que no se plantea el que puedas tener otros compromisos, “paso por allá entre jueves y domingo”; la empleada de oficina que se pone a hablar con sus compañeros mientras el cliente espera pacientemente; el chofer de taxis que se niega poner el metro y quiere cobrarte un suma exorbitante para un viaje de San Juan a Santurce.

Crear falsas expectativas está basado en el engaño, en el deseo de hacer creer que algo va a ocurrir. Y mientras esperas, el guachafita logra las metas concretas que le motivan a formular la ilusión de que te están sirviendo, ayudando, “algo va a pasar”. El editor-mercader busca dinero y mientras lo consigue te otorga el premio de la letras, el médico en algún momento te dedicará diez minutos para hacerte creer que le preocupa tu salud, la amiga espera que surja algo más importante que tu compañía y con la posible visita te convierte en su persona más importante, la empleada espera lograr estar de buenas con sus compañeros, el chofer de taxi espera explotar a todo el que pague sin protestar. Los guachafitas están todos por ahí, mercaderes de deseos.

Todos “guachafamos”: el político que nunca implantará políticas discriminatorias; el sacerdote que te ofrece el paraíso si le confiesas tus pecadillos; la madre que te seduce con amores para que no le crees problemas; este escritor quien espera cambiar a todos los lectores para que disminuyan un poco la “huachafería” y mejorar un poco el país. Y uno frente a ese juego cargado de ex[ectativas, tolera. Tolera porque es más difícil cambiar patrones culturales, nocivos o no, que seguirle el rumbo a los guachafitas.

DECORADORES Y FRANK GEHRY EN SANTURCE

Santurce está lleno de muebles, balcones, puertas, mediopuntos, formas y líneas Bau-Haus o Art-Deco en sus casas, edificios, paradas de guaguas; tratados y exploraciones a lo Frank Gehry en la Calle Canals. Ariel (pintor y estudiante de arquitectura graduado de Pratt), Ramón (arquitecto graduado de Yale) y  Marie (pintora, restauradora de arte graduada de CUNY) conocían las obras y planteamientos teóricos del reconocido arquitecto canadiense, entendieron la exploración y usos de piezas industriales y rústicas para decorar el apartamento en la mencionada calle donde existen dos o tres Bau-Haus y un edificio Art-Deco emblemático: el Telégrafo. Hablaron primero sobre la arquitectura en Santurce y luego sobre el experimento en la sala y dormitorio. La exploración no funcionó por asuntos de espacio y no por asuntos de piezas o fundamento estético. Dos faltos de conocimiento generales y erudición en formas, colores, luces en todas y cada una de las áreas del saber, arte, arquitectura, diseño de interiores y exteriores -una figurita femenina con ínfulas de ser "chic", pero que sólo lee a Vanidades y con un diploma de high school,  y su equivalente masculino sin diploma, que ni Vanidades lee, nuevos pequeño burgueses- vieron la exploración y querían ayudar con la decoración: "Es que los cuadros deben combinar con la pintura de las paredes". 

ASYMMETRIES OF POWER: THE PUERTO RICAN GAY MAN AND THE CCNY WHITE LESBIAN

"Some people of color act white, some homos act straight" was said by one of the gay men in my downtown latino gay, artsie, literary and trasgressor groupie, when I told them the story about the birkenstock wearing, curlie hair, feminist, progressive educator -she was allowed to use the Center from where I was expelled-, white  lesbian in the CCNY School of Education. Right in front of one of my Puerto Rican female colleagues she put me on the defensive by questioning my statement on the USA military bases in Puerto Rico. She was not interested in understanding my point, lbut more so, was trying to embarrassed me in front of snother Puerto Rican. Why do white people do that is a question people of color usually explore when one of them is puposedly cornered in front of other members of the group. The same issue is discussed by homos when a straight person does it to a member of the LBGTT community. In this particular situation, it was a white lesbian doing it to Puerto Rican gay man in front of another Puerto Rican. Luckily, Puerto Ricans also explore that issue when one of their fellow ethnics, gays or not, is used by a white person in order to, among many reasons, to show force.  The three Puerto Ricans at the CCNY School ol Education also discussed the white lesbian and the gay Puerto Rican power driven event and its related asymmetries of gender, race relationships; quite interesting topic, yet very annoying for those going through the experience. The white lesbian thought she was going to get feminist solidarity from a Puerto Rican woman by using a Puerto Rican gay man. "No, nena, you didn't" is what I thought, when having the discussion with the two other Puerto Ricans "mujeres"'  -as far as I know are not lesbians- but are mentally and politically clear enough to know when not to be manipulated by a birkenstock wearing, curlie hair, feminist, progressive educator white  lesbian in the CCNY School of Education.

DENSITIES

He felt completely empty inside, kind of weightless, during that night when right before going to bed he could not get a glass of milk. Unable to go to sleep for a while, blaming not having the glass of milk, he thought about his love for milk and his upbringing, until he realized that he no longer missed his mother. After that night he was never to have sleeping problems again nor the need to drink a glass of milk before going to bed. 

She was always the second in command. Power for her was not about leading projects that would make an impact in her field or serve to transform society. It was about control, leading groups that followed her instructions, who would not dared to challenge her. She was about meeting whatever requirements or standards were in place. Power for her was concentrated, dense, never expansive. It was not the type that would dilute itself and involve others, bringing a larger and evolving mass together. She could control, but would not grow. Dense and static. 

A papyrus pressed over a hand carved rock created a new story. It was photographed by an author with no personal files of his own nor hand-written material left in his possession. The palimpsest was documented, registered in chips, stored in a man-made cave in Utah; later on downloaded in New York, was used as background in a multilayer visual text as part of a selfie. The curator tried to link the work to the world of spirits, to no avail, since his framework of reference was the human condition. The artist believed in the dilution and transformation of what can be perceived at a given moment, losing its old form as it becomes part of a new type of matter. 

Moving to a new place was usually quite a festive event, with friends helping and suggesting possible decorations, dinners to celebrate the continuous exploration of the world, from the perspective of a new home. The experience -though, cumbersome- was light. Not so, three or four generations later: most friends are dead, the few ones left are too old to help with boxes and dismantling and assembling furniture, cabinets; no much more of a world left to be explored, while packing and unpacking the sum of very dense photons of the self integrated into what carries so many years of history, 

Each object thrown away took a weight out of my own density. I felt lighter, not missing an entity that was once part of mine: books, tools, notebooks, computers, mattresses, an Omar Rayo lithograph, a set of depression era plates, Ariel’s paintings of rocks, his tables, a photo of my mother. Some objects took longer to disappear from my mass, moving slowly out my consciousness, lightening up the body, becoming themselves detached from my self. Although it is almost impossible to know how the old inhabitants of the Caribbean basin and Meso América applied their ch’ull cosmology, one wonders if it provided the formula to understand how to completely separate one corpus from another. Is it possible?

The nightmare kept coming back, repeating itself, often enough that it marked me so hard that whenever I recall it, my body shivers. The fear of having an absence of walls or furniture or people, a complete empty space with no end to it, forces the creation of one, where security, protection, and the belief, the idea that there always be a safe place, a home to feel connected to, be part of a particular relationship -symbiosis- protected by others, something else; quite difficult to separate from the fear of abandonment, to avoid lacking density, takes over the body.

Wool feels protective, caring, can hug you and put you to rest, like the lover next to you at night, both slowly losing sense of a different self, embracing bodies, falling asleep in each other’s arms; the mother who tightly holds and cuddles the baby, and tenderly moves him to the crib, replacing her arms and chest with a security blanket; the wool filled comforter, becoming so attached to a body, unable to separate itself, making it a physical extension, part of the same body's density. 

(from the book in progress, Densities, 2019)

MOTHERS, COLLEAGUES, GODFATHERS AND LINGUISTIC STRATEGIES

When I was a kid, my mother, quite often, would tell me I was lying, and I would go on trying to explain to her that I was not, maybe I was lying, but she could not stop threatening me, and continued asking me questions and pushing me with her verbal aggression, and I continued answering her, and it became a verbal struggle until she would jump on me and beat me up real bad. It did not help that she was an alcoholic in a home where violence was part of the normal daily life. The last beating took place when I was around 14 years of age. At that point my cousin was there (she was living with us -poverty was part of a larger extended family-) and told my mother I was telling the truth. My cousin and I have spoken about that event and others trying to figure out what was wrong and what was beneficial in our upbringings. As it usually happens with many children, I became like my mother. I can lose patience very easily when people do not answer my questions or I feel they are giving me some kind of deceiving answer or making fun of my statements. Now, I know that it is better to stop the interaction and move out of the conversation. I see that kind of destructive behavior in a lot of non rational parents, going back and forth with kids trying to demonstrate how wrong those kids are, as well as, among many adults, with each of them going nowhere;  at times, leading to violence. There were times at CCNY where I could not express my ideas, becoming frustrated, because some of my colleagues where more concerned with proving I was wrong, than trying to understand my perspective or framework of reference; making the matter more complicated when my narrative style or syntax or phonology was influenced by my native language: Spanish interfering into the English being used. There were quite a few times that I tried to explain this interference to the person or persons I was speaking with. Some of my colleagues or students would understand and learned from the situation; except one, an African professor, a very cynical and borderline cruel man, who would used his own experience to compare himself with me, in order to demonstrate that, while he came from a bilingual context, did not have such linguistic problem. Inflated egos cannot see what are their “true” problems or are not able to reflect upon anything that is beyond their small worlds; as if we were all alike. My quebecoise godchild is 10 years old and French is his native language and gets frustrated when not finding the appropriate English word or phrase, when talking to me. His bilingual parents, that are more patient than me, stare at both of us, wait and smile. I let him try to find the word he wants to use, and then I go into Spanish and mention similar words to the French ones, and when he finds the one that he wants to say in English, we go into the web and get a translation. At least, I can assure myself that there has been some progress when dealing with communication issues and mastery of related strategies. What I always knew saved me: that in spite of my linguistic limitations, my Aristotelian mental temperament, my Kantian intellectual capacities, my Skinnerian cognitive problem-solving strategies and my broad and always expansive kultur were superior to mostly everyone else’s, including my mother’s and the limited ones of the petite colonial African academic arribiste. Given that self awareness and culturally driven id and ego, I knew my linguistic strategies would improve; reassured by Philippe Aries dictum in his classic, Centuries of Childhood. He suggests, on the use of physical punishment and the ideas on how children and adolescents are perceived at a given time and place, that the older generation will try to improve the educational conditions provided to the newer ones; a statement that has been proven by how my "compadres" listen and talk to their kids, including my godchild, and  to "el padrino." 

EN CCNY, VARGAS LLOSA Y LOS PULGARES DE LOS YOUTUBERS

El antropólogo Néstor García Canclini estudia los comportamientos de esas nuevas tribus literarias cuyas modalidades sociales y académicas -ya sea en cafés pseudoexistencialistas en Morningside Heights o Santurce, con wifi, o con data del cel en las aulas- los van a llevar a tener descendientes con los pulgares más largos del mundo. En una entrevista para un diario argentino -que no fiché- Garía Canclini sostuvo que la literarura estaba muy viva y dinámica; que los libros seguían siendo leídos, aunque, abordados de otra forma, incluso, lecturas comunales tipo época pre-imprenta. Usó como contexto y evidencia su visita a la Feria del Libro en Guadalajara, y la diferencia en la cantidad de público que asistió a dos conferencias o happenings tecnos; una ofrecida por el escritor peruano Mario Vargas Llosa, y otra, por unos youtubers que escriben o arman, bajan y suben, transmiten a través de la red cibernética mientras socializan, leen, escriben y oyen conferencias. La sala de Vargas Llosa casi vacía, con una audiencia bastante predecible. La de los youtubers, abarrotada: tatuados, veganos y antiganos, interactuando entre ellos y con los dispositivos y todos a la vez y cada uno por su lado, vuelvo y repito, a la vez.  Después de un estudio informal de unas aulas en CCNY, Escuela de Educación, encontré -dada la educación de masas que depende de medidas de masas e intenciones para neutralizr masas que sirve de substancia en las escuelas- que los maestros, administradores y facultades de pedagogía no enfrentan ni usan estos nuevos modos de hacer pedagogía interactiva, literatura crítica, intertextualizada e intermodal, multifuncional y rica en fuentes y algoritmos. No se han enterado; y firmemente creo que, después de estar bien familiarizado con los criterios que usan los "líderes educativos" de CCNY, et.al., para escoger facultad, no van a hacerlo en buen tiempo. El próximo estudio incluirá las medidas de los pulgares.