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Un mensaje a la comunidad puertorriqueña

Creo que hay que recordar que el arzobispo González Nieves lidera una campaña de odio y de discrimen. No se trata de meras “diferencias de opinión” entre los campos que luchan por un Puerto Rico libre. El trabajo que hace Roberto González Nieves es una labor estructural. Él trabaja a diario para fortalecer una espacialidad y una arquitectura legislativa de exclusión, marginación y violencia. El Puerto Rico que dibuja González Nieves es un espacio sin la homosexualidad abierta. 
En esta controversia que ha surgido sobre su puesto, González Nieves tiene una paridad con aquellos que lo persiguen a él. Son los unos para los otros. Y que quede claro, no se le está discriminando en su contra como hacen todos ellos juntos contra la diversidad de sexo, género y salud. No confundamos.
El capítulo más reciente de la controversia es éste del doble altar a Ramón Power y Giralt/Juan Alejo de Arizmendi que ha despuntado el que pidan la cabeza de RGN. Estos altares, para mí, son de un cierto fascismo, especialmente por ser la continuación de la previa colonia, la que vino antes del 1898. Pero ahora es esa idea de nación idealizada junto con el odio contemporáneo. No los podemos separar. Esto no se trata de unos meros gestos estéticos. De paso, son asuntos de poder muy medulares—una estética de una totalidad a la que no todas y todos pertenecen. Si González Nieves se dedicara a hacer un monumento a un Puerto Rico nuevo—de derechos y de desarrollo social y de educación sobre la pluralidad y la historia de la opresión—pues ahí estaría yo apoyándolo. ¡Si se hubiera buscado unas verdaderas razones para que el Vaticano se horrorizara! 
Pero volviendo al tema, no veo cómo se ha ganado el apoyo de la izquierda boricua. Al contrario. No puedo apoyar estas cosas menores—que en realidad representan cosas mucho mayores—como darle un “like” a una campaña pro-RGN. Tampoco voy a callar ante ellas.
Y es que no son cosas separadas, como si fuera la nación por un lado y los derechos por otro. Si algo trabajé en mi doctorado es que las luchas por los derechos inscriben nuevas ideas del patrimonio, de la ciudadanía y de la inclusión. ¿Quién queda adentro y quién queda afuera? La idea de nación que trae RGN no la comparto (y me temo que nunca la compartiremos). Por mí, que resuelvan ellos la disputa entre sí, solitos. O no la resuelvan. No me importa. De hecho, para aquellas personas con un compromiso de construir un Puerto Rico para todos y todas, es mejor que se sigan peleando aquellos entre si. En fin, me parece que nos tenemos que preguntar quién construye y quién destruye. Esa labor estructural a la que me refería al comenzar esta nota es una labor también de destruir — destruye alianzas, amistades, familias y vidas que no caben en su imaginario nacional. En la medida que los autodenominados defensores de la familia “tradicional” vean que se quedan solos y solas en un mundo que ha cambiado y ha mejorado, a lo mejor pueden reflexionar sobre lo que han jodido.
- Javier Arbona Homar

2:45 pm

Inbox: Medicine on the Edge at the Science & Justice Research Center, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

Please see the below announcement for a workshop this Friday and Saturday
that many of you will find interesting. Hosted by Science & Justice
members Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Nancy Chen from the Anthropology
department, this workshop features a number of previous S&J guests and
other scholars whose work is relevant to many of our themes.

Additionally, Karen Sue Taussig will also be presenting her work at the
http://ucsc.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=085949fb9f58f095f87b30c7e&id=62afa11eae&e=9f05b6bedd
Anthropology colloquium on Monday, “Mobilizing Life: Citizenship,
Subjectivity, and the Quest for a Molecular Medical Clinic.”
http://ucsc.us5.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=085949fb9f58f095f87b30c7e&id=f980626356&e=9f05b6bedd

Medicine on the Edge Workshop
May 3-4, 2013
Social Sciences 1 Room 261

Medicine exists to mediate the relationship between individuals and social
institutions. This reality is often obscured by individual and social
pursuits of cures and the daily use of therapies. The innocuousness and
ubiquity of treatment – from daily pills to medicinal teas – both obscures
and renders manifest the place of contemporary medicine. This
intensification of medicine in everyday life exists alongside the
increased use of complementary and alternative medicines, the rise of
comorbid diagnoses, and debates around medical citizenship and the state.
Medicine, while long a part of society, is increasingly the basis of
social engagement and political organization. This two-day workshop is
intended to address the ways that medicine has crept out of the clinic and
laboratory, becoming an integral component of contemporary everyday life
around the world. What are the political economies of medicine? How do
medicine and science rarify cultural expectations of normalcy? How does
medicine change interpersonal relationships and relationships between
individuals and institutions? How can medical anthropologists engage with
ongoing concerns of health disparities, forms of new medical technologies,
and notions of personhood and governance? How might anthropology inform
formations of global and public health? Medical anthropology stands poised
to address many of these questions, and to provide theoretical conceptions
of the individual and society that will push the social study of medicine
and science forward, and point towards possible futures for medical
anthropology itself.

Friday, May 3rd
1:30-3:00
TS Harvey (UC Riverside, Anthropology)

1:32 pm

12:32 am  23 notes

tigerlilylily:

omg im done

10:21 pm  1 note

[outbox] Can Fareed Zakaria write about universities?

RE: The Thin-Envelope Crisis

(Article by Fareed Zakaria for Time)

I’m of the opinion that if anyone isn’t entirely qualified to write about rising privilege, it is Fareed Zakaria.

After his plagiarism scandal where he was forced to quit from Yale’s board—he blamed an unnamed “assistant” for his lapses—he still gets a pass. Other journalists or academics would have been fired from their magazine or newspaper, or their academic department/lab. Instead, Zakaria —the unflappable friend of the richest and most powerful— still has the podium to write for Time and CNN. Setting aside the fact that those news outlets should not have reinstated him, he showed that if there’s a topic that should be off limits to him, it is universities. He gets a special privilege that most of us do not. 
 
Now, he’s right that there are certainly major problems with government, but can we blame politicians for what he calls “rising costs” at universities? The elephant in the room are the administrators, who have done an excellent job of augmenting their ranks at a scale that far outstrips the number of faculty hired (California Watch recently had a story by Erika Perez about this). Rather than tackle that, he deftly switches the focus midstream to “quotas” and what he singles-out as the issue of “underrepresented minorities.” (Everyone should read about how Blacks are not getting even equal treatment in the job marketplace, let alone “special,” and I’m speaking of those who have earned a college degree). 
 
Finally, he decides that what troubles him is the lack of “economic mobility” and that universities are the best path to attain that. But the problem with his argument is that he tells us in the article that administrators, left to their own devices, will stand in the way of most people’s advancement, as was the case for Jews at Harvard. His “middle class,” “economic mobility,” “merit,” and “minorities” are code words to hide the real issue: the combined force of racism, classism, and poverty. The lavishly paid people who run the public and private universities—he was one of them until his scandal, and he still gets to administer from the bully pulpit—cannot be trusted to make important decisions that affect the least advantaged of all. And finally, he needs to stop propagating those kinds of “Asian menace” stereotypes where he invokes the stats of Asians at universities to scare his audience, as if to say ‘look over here!’ The real problem is the one he doesn’t dare to speak of.

11:42 am

[inbox] Bicycles, Race, and Equity


Critical Urbanisms Student Workshop
This Thursday April 4
5:00pm-6:30pm 
575 McCone, UC Berkeley

Bicycles, Race, and Equity 

Two Berkeley PhD students will present their research and solicit feedback.

Making Visible the Invisible: Travel Behavior of Immigrant Latino Bicyclists
Jesus Barajas
Department of City and Regional Planning

“White Lanes”: Race, Class and the Politics of Bicycle Infrastructure
John Stehlin
Department of Geography

Please RSVP to actionmatt@gmail.com

4:15 pm  4 notes

4:33 pm

Tweet from Al Javieera (@AlJavieera)

Al Javieera (@AlJavieera) tweeted at 3:25 PM on Fri, Feb 22, 2013: @Sucesor58 Saludos monseñor, una pena que su idea de “identidad nacional” no sea inclusiva de toda nuestra gran historia de boricuas LGBTQ. (https://twitter.com/AlJavieera/status/305096028124758017) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download

7:41 pm

11:28 pm

11:00 pm

Really beautiful Minecraft house a Redditor built in Survival.

wilwheaton:

Man, this inspires me to do more with my little cabin by the lake.

Minecraft architecture.

8:29 am  210 notes

http://instagr.am/p/R82FFNKQtQ/

5:18 pm

10:38 pm  17,242 notes

(Source: jimmyneutronsdad, via hamhamclubhouse)

9:05 am

9:04 am

s.t.