text:
The first book-length study of its kind, charting recurrent imagery of a fragmented past in Chicana/o murals throughout Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.
Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print.
An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas."
Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Indigenism and Chicana/o Muralism: The Radicalization of an Aesthetic
- Chapter 1. The Dialectics of Continuity and Disruption: Chicana/o and Mexican Indigenist Murals
- Chapter 2. The Chicano Movement and Indigenist Murals: The Formation of a Nationalist Canon and Identity
- Chapter 3. Graffiti and Murals: Urban Culture and Indigenist Glyphs
- Chapter 4. The Chicana/o Mural Environment: Indigenist Aesthetics and Urban Spaces
- Chapter 5. Gender, Indigenism, and Chicana Muralists
- Chapter 6. Murals and Postmodernism: Post-movimiento, Heterogeneity, and New Media in Chicana/o Indigenism
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chicana/o Murals and Indigenism
Two Aztec warriors, dressed in full regalia, clasp arms as they engage in a ritual dance with a mountainous landscape stretching behind them. Aside from inhabiting this idyllic environment, these heroes also physically reside within the barrio setting of East Los Angeles, where Ernesto de la Loza's Danza de las Aguilas (1978) mural is located. How did the meaning of these indigenous figures connect with the mostly Chicana/o and Mexican residents of East L.A. whose own experience was shaped by both urban life and native Mexican traditions? How was political, social, and cultural consciousness meant to be inscribed into this kind of iconography? As seen in the community murals that have transformed the urban landscapes of California since the late 1960s, the rehabilitation of indigenous history and culture became a crucial component in the growing politicization that saturated Chicana/o political thought with the onset of the Chicano Movement, or el movimiento. California became a significant site of mural activity because it possessed a mural tradition spanning most of the twentieth century, and, as art historian Shifra Goldman has written, the West Coast has led "the country in sheer [mural] quantity." But most significantly, the state had endured a bitter and prolonged colonial, expansionist, and postindustrial history that directly and indirectly informed the Indigenist subject matter of these wall paintings. The Indian of the Americas emerged within these murals as a timeless ideal and a fluid allegory of cultural affirmation that reconstructed Chicanas/os' fragmented past while providing entire communities with a vocabulary that celebrated their contemporary cultural practices. Moreover, the recognition that the continent of America was essentially indigenous territory became one of the most fundamental steps toward decolonization and liberation of oppressed communities.
Chicana/o artists employed the monumentality of the public mural to disseminate an iconography radicalized in large part through its indigenizing qualities. These murals cited indigenous culture in a multiplicity of ways and for a variety of different reasons, yet composed part of an aesthetic that continuously sought to firmly establish Chicanas/os' sociopolitical place in U.S. territory. Indigenism, in the Chicana/o context, functioned as an elastic metaphor of political consciousness that allowed for innovative articulations of cultural and gendered identity. Though many artists outside the Chicana/o community also practiced community muralism, and despite the fact that indigenous imagery was part of a larger whole that defined Chicana/o decolonial consciousness, Indigenism contributed significantly to the politicizing process of Chicano and Chicana mural production. In the social and political context of late twentieth-century U.S. history, the idea of an autonomous and independent indigenous voice necessarily posed a threat to the foundations of postcolonial and capitalist orders.
In this introduction, I lay out the theoretical framework that informed Indigenism in California Chicana/o murals from the late 1960s to the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, I argue that through the public mural, Chicanas/os found a unique and effective tool with which to assert agency from the margins. In subsequent chapters of this project, this theoretical analysis provides a methodological foundation that allows me to engage the visual vocabulary of these murals as well as to discuss the activities and aspirations of the individual artists or collectives who created them. Focusing on three major centers of muralist activity—namely, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay area, and San Diego—the question I ultimately want to raise is not whether the "subaltern" can speak, as Gayatri Spivak would posit, for we know that Third World and First Nation communities have achieved varying degrees of agency since the onset of colonialism, imperialism, and postindustrialization. Instead, the focus of this volume is to generate an understanding of the sorts of strategies deployed by the so-called subaltern in order to create a compelling and decolonized frame of self-representation. The Indigenist aesthetic that Chicana/o artists created provides a model for ways in which marginalized communities can empower themselves against the grain of dominant ideologies.
The images of indigenous America depicted in many California Chicana/o murals engaged a long history of Indigenist aesthetics and discourse in the Americas. The words "Indigenism" and "Indigenist" here will be distinguished and differentiated from the terms indigeneity and indigenous. Generally speaking, "Indigenism" refers to the act of consciously adopting an indigenous identity—which may otherwise not be fully self-evident—for a political or strategic purpose. The Indigenist posture often seeks to overturn historical processes in order to exact radical change. Indigenism as an ideology, however, can operate in favor but also against the needs of the native peoples themselves, and thus one must be cautious when resorting to it. Indeed, individuals or institutions outside of indigenous communities have utilized Indigenism in their quest to incorporate America's native cultures into articulations of national, cultural, or racial identity. Indigenism can constitute a political posture that seeks to construct race rather than define cultural practices. When such institutions or individuals generate Indigenist thinking, they are not necessarily identifying themselves as Indian but instead are acknowledging, in their own terms, the native presence in the country's cultural patrimony, with the ultimate goal of modifying or altering indigenous culture, often rendering it invisible or inconsequential. Mexican indigenous studies scholar Guillermo Bonfil Batalla argued that in most Latin American countries, modern Indigenist campaigns sought to assimilate and acculturate native peoples into national culture: "Indigenist policies in Latin American governments, in spite of their significant national differences, had one final objective in common: the assimilation of Indians." Bonfil Batalla further argues that the assimilation and co-optation of indigenous people forms part of a larger project of preparing nascent nation-states for capitalist enterprising. In the Americas, especially Latin America, Indigenism also emerged as a solution to identity crises arising as a result of political and social turmoil (wars, radical changes in government, movements of civil or human rights, etc.). Paternalist forms of Indigenism make up an integral part of a Pan-Americanist spirit that seeks to rid itself of European control while still maintaining Western institutions.
By contrast, indigeneity, as understood in this book, will refer to the organic expressions that emerge from the indigenous communities themselves, which may or may not have anything to do with the official Indigenism often espoused by nation-states. While these expressions may be understood and even appropriated by non-natives, indigeneity primarily serves the spiritual and pragmatic needs of indigenous communities and nations without necessarily having to profess an overt political and anticolonialist agenda behind them. Notwithstanding, Indigenist and indigenous expressions can overlap or even negate one another. Admittedly, we could argue that in colonial and postcolonial contexts, any expression of indigenous culture is inevitably Indigenist and thus political because, consciously or not, it counters dominant culture. We could also contend that there are cultural expressions within native nations and communities that fulfill both Indigenist and indigenous purposes. We will tread carefully in this volume as we navigate the nuanced and subtle distinctions between Indigenism and indigeneity and will proceed with caution through the problematic history of Indigenism.
The Chicana/o Indigenist aesthetic and discourse posed a unique phenomenon in the history of counterhegemonic struggles in the Americas, for it was positioned somewhere between Indigenism and indigeneity. As it emerged in various forms of creative and political expression during and after the Chicano Movement, Chicana/o Indigenism redeployed many of the strategies and tools of previous Indigenist initiatives but with critically different motives, goals, and outcomes. As with earlier Indigenist projects, Chicana/o artists sought to consciously and strategically embrace indigenous culture for political purposes. Some Chicana/o activists, intellectuals, and artists even looked to the Indigenist campaigns in Mexico after the Revolution of 1910 as a model for understanding how indigeneity can be incorporated in the construction of national formations. But within the cultural context of the United States, where indigenous culture is excluded on all levels of nationalist agendas, the act of proclaiming an indigenous identity as an identifying marker of the Chicana/o experience in this country was necessarily a subversive and transgressive move. Most importantly, however, Chicana/o Indigenism transcended the need to adopt politically strategic discourses and postures. While there were concerted efforts on the part of scholars, artists, activists, and intellectuals to adopt an Indigenist worldview that would challenge the stagnation of U.S. dominant culture, indigenous practices and beliefs have been important cornerstones of Chicana/o culture in North America predating U.S. expansionism and Spanish colonialism. The Indigenist aesthetic and discourse that would surface on the coattails of the Chicano Movement afforded the Mexican American community the unprecedented opportunity to be themselves, quite literally. Indigenous practices such as curanderismo (folk healing) and oral traditions, previously dismissed as backward, folkloric (i.e., quaint but not modern), and even superstitious by Western thought, were now celebrated and exalted during el movimiento, for these were the indigenous cultural markers that survived the ravages of colonization and connected the contemporary Chicana/o community to the great preconquest indigenous civilizations and cultures in the Americas. Moreover, in the process of reclaiming their indigeneity, Chicanas/os were seeking to rehabilitate the systems of collective support and communal protection that were prevalent among the native populations in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans who brought with them a more individualistic and capital-driven culture. Nevertheless, many of the Indigenist images and ideas Chicana/o artists and thinkers embraced did not come directly from their own personal indigenous experiences but from their process of politicization and self-education that prompted them to study Mexican history and culture, both ancient and modern. For example, the spiritual connection that Chicana artists and writers established with the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue emerged out of their profound readings of Mesoamerican texts. Nevertheless, Coatlicue, whose abilities included the extraordinary power to give and take away life and whose anthropomorphic features were both beautiful and horrific, represented the embodiment of polar opposites and contradictions, a characteristic that mirrored and legitimized Chicanas' subject positions. Because Chicanas/os were not indigenous in the same way that Native Americans were, their political consciousness reflected both Indigenist (politically motivated) and indigenous (organically manifested) proclivities. The hybridity, or mestizaje, within the Chicana/o community, while not negating the connection to other native populations, conditioned its activists to navigate between these two realms of political, social, and cultural being, namely, Indigenism and indigeneity.
If we think of ideology in its Marxist definition, that is, as a system of ideas that creates a "'false consciousness' [and] works in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless," as John Storey explains, then we can perhaps think of Latin American Indigenism more as an ideology than as an aesthetic functioning independently of the needs of indigenous people. In Mexico, the construction of Indigenism implied no overt intention to work against the interests of native populations, but there was an attempt to diffuse the possibility of revolts or insurgences among the country's indigenous communities, whose consciousness had been dangerously awakened during the Revolution. As opposed to an ideology of oppression, Chicana/o Indigenism emerged as a methodology of decolonization that sought to create not a false consciousness but alternative models of oppositional thinking serving the needs of Third World communities.
Although representations of indigenous populations date as far back as the conquest, the use of such representations to construct the nation-state signals a fairly modern phenomenon. Prior to the nineteenth century, European colonizers produced images of Indians in written and visual texts to further reiterate their own cultural identity and superiority in the face of growing miscegenation. Helmut Scheben, however, quickly pointed out that Indigenism, as an aesthetic and nationalist discourse, coincided chronologically with modernism, and Debora Castillo asserted that the act of sidelining indigenous culture while romantically appropriating it lies at the crux of modernist and postmodernist debates in Latin America.
Nations like Mexico, for instance, openly embraced indigenous iconography during the modern phases of their artistic development. This new aesthetic, though complicit with European coloniality, signaled a desire to proclaim a voice independent of foreign avant-garde trends. Indigenism, specifically in the Mexican context, did not provide platforms for self-representation for indigenous peoples, but rather created a state-sanctioned visual vocabulary that articulated a native identity according to the precepts of the new nation-state after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. As part of Mexico's educational reforms during the first few decades of the twentieth century, the education minister José Vasconcelos commissioned elaborate mural cycles to help the populace visually conceive the shape this new nation-state would take. The power of the public mural, as the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s knew, resided in its ability to not only prescribe ideology but also construct its own spectators. When addressing Mexican indigenous history and culture, Diego Rivera was perhaps the one muralist who best understood the role that murals could play in the creation of a national collective identity. The unproblematized and often romantic Indigenism that emerged in the mural cycles he painted throughout Mexico became emblematic of the nationalist ideologies regarding the Mexican native communities.
Contesting Modernism and the Avant-Garde
The spirit of the Chicana/o arts movement presented a diametrically opposed school of thought to the prevailing discourses and practices surrounding the visual arts in the field of art history and criticism, in particular, modern and contemporary art history. The categories that defined established art history as well as time-honored museum practices proved to be utterly irrelevant to the practice of Chicana/o art. The categories pertinent to the standard periodization utilized in traditional art-historical methodologies—namely, prehistoric, ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art—proved to be inaccurate and even obstructive to the understanding of indigenous art, including Chicana/o creative expressions. The classification "non-Western" was also fraught with recurring colonialist visions and discourses that defined indigenous arts as exotic and primitive. Of particular interest to this study, however, is the way European and Euro-American academic thinking constructed the role of art and artists in the modern era. Art was the result of the most elevated form of creative endeavor coming from an intellectual elite. Art existed independently and quite above the mundane goings-on of everyday life and existence. The artist, as the human vessel for this creative force, held a special place in society, for he or she (though mostly he) held neither responsibility nor accountability toward a larger collective. The artist often lived marginalized from society not because of any social injustice but because of his/her misunderstood genius and idiosyncratic lifestyle and personality. Modern and contemporary art history turned to the artist as the focus of attention, thus placing inordinate importance on an artwork's authorship. This "cult-of-the-artist" approach deployed by many art historians and critics has led to the publication of hundreds, if not thousands, of lavish monographs on "modern masters" such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky, just to name a few, granting them all celebrity status.
The obstinacy of the structures of art history and criticism, coupled with the refusal on the part of many art historians and critics to recognize the legitimacy and value of Chicana/o art, conditioned numerous Chicana/o artists and intellectuals to create alternative historical and physical spaces for the free expression and deeper engagement of indigenous aesthetics. For Chicana/o artists who came of age during the Chicano Movement, the models offered by scholars of modern and contemporary art regarding the role of art and the artist were exceedingly inappropriate and even outmoded. Many Chicana/o artists had such strong ties to community concerns that they saw their roles as artists and activists as the same. So, as stipulated by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, a critical "task was to re-think representation, the role of the artist, and the social function of art." Conversely, indigenous aesthetics provided Chicana/o artists with more fitting and culturally sensitive models for creative expressions. The old adage "art for art's sake," which defined creative expression as a function of its own internal machinations, was supplanted in the minds of Chicana/o and indigenous scholars with the motto "art for life's sake." Mexican Indigenist scholar Guillermo Bonfil Batalla underscored quite eloquently the fact that many indigenous cultures regard commonplace experiences (lo cotidiano) as necessary mediating occurrences that happen between an individual and the rest of nature. Without sacrificing individual creativity and artistic freedom, Native American scholar Daniel Heath Justice called for a form of creativity that is deeply ingrained in community concerns:
[The idea of art for art's sake] frequently brings with it a hypernarcissism and self-centered conceit that contributes to the destabilization of the basic values and kinship ties of tribal communities. . . . I believe it's fair to say that most tribal artists . . . are creating art not only for themselves, but also for the survival and enduring presence of Native people . . . It becomes, as Cherokee/Appalachian poet Marilou Awiakta has noted, "art for Life's sake, as opposed to art for Art's sake."
Like Native American artists, Chicanas/os were looking for ways to consolidate their creative needs with their commitment to community. Thus, by looking to various forms of indigenous aesthetics, both past and present, they found meaningful examples of art practices that existed in organic relationship to the community at large. The often collective nature of many indigenous arts also involved a process of transformation for both the artist and the community. While this transformation is primarily a spiritual one, it is also connected to other forms of transformations. For Chicana/o artists who invited local community members to collaborate in the creation of murals, this spiritual transformation also took the form of political revelation, whereby all those involved underwent a radical process of what Paulo Freire would call conscientização, or "conscientization," through which they became conscious of their own oppression but also of their own potential and power to bring about change at an individual and collective level.
Chicana/o artists could not afford to simply retreat into their studios to explore the contours of their own artistic imagination, for they were often compelled and driven to understand how their individual creativity related to the process of community building and preservation, a task they could not achieve by remaining in cultural, social, and political isolation. These desires of defining the self in relationship to community as well as to a spiritual universe were motivations that Chicana/o artists shared with other native peoples. But if artists had the responsibility of creating art that served objectives leading toward social justice, then art automatically became a form of decolonization. Through the process of developing an individual and collective creative expression, which can also be regarded as a form of empowerment and emancipation, artist and community alike begin to shed the mechanisms of a colonial system that has invaded their bodies, minds, and souls. By using art as a decolonizing agent, indigenous artists, including Chicanas/os, were subverting and overturning a very powerful yet pernicious tradition, namely, the practice on the part of colonizing powers of using art to further subdue and indoctrinate conquered and vanquished peoples. One must only look to the casta paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Latin America, to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American landscape paintings, or, even more recently, to the early twentieth-century political cartoons in major U.S. newspapers to understand how visual artists traditionally used the arts to literally and metaphorically reify colonial orders. The representations of indigenous peoples in these aforementioned visual traditions operated as circumscribing devices that contained and confined the social movement of the racial Other. If representation itself becomes hampered by a colonialist gaze, then self-representation necessarily implies a reversal of that process, as Steven Leuthold argues: "Indigenous self-representation primarily involves a shift in authority, implying that inherent in cross-cultural representations are the dynamics of power."
Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenism in Murals
Though we can speak of several important Indigenist moments in the history of the Americas, Chicana/o creative expressions of the 1960s and beyond were most significantly influenced by the Indigenist revival that occurred during and shortly after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Alfonso Caso, anthropologist and founder of Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, credited the Revolution itself with ushering in considerable changes in the way Mexico viewed its native populations: "One of the most permanent and constructive results of the Revolution was the consciousness and determination on the part of Mexico to resolve the indigenous problem." Though Caso saw the presence of native communities as a potential liability to the country's progress and urged their assimilation as a way to solve the "indigenous problem," Chicanas/os' interest in the Revolution and its Indigenist proclamations was part of a more affirmative and potentially transgressive process of self-definition. While various Chicana/o thinkers regarded the Mexican Revolution as a metaphor for the contemporaneous struggles they waged, its historical importance also held a more tangible relevance to Mexican Americans. As historians have pointed out, many of the events prior, during, and after the Revolution brought about one of the largest influxes of Mexican immigrants to the United States, with as many as 1.5 million people—approximately 10 percent of Mexico's entire population—crossing the border between 1900 and 1930. Many of the Chicanas/os who came of age during the conflicts of the civil rights movement were either the children or grandchildren of these immigrants. In the conscious imagination of many activists and artists, the Chicano Movement operated as an extension of the political and cultural debates instituted by the Revolution. After all, this event ennobled the cause of land reform to benefit Indians, and it also glorified leaders like Emiliano Zapata, whose indigenous blood symbolized the very essence of the Mexican nation.
Though Chicana/o muralism resides at the intersection of various currents and tendencies, the historical connection to the Mexican mural renaissance is quite self-evident. Nearly half a century prior to the flowering of Chicana/o muralism in California, the state had already become an important site for Mexican muralism. José Clemente Orozco's Prometheus (1930) in Pomona College, Diego Rivera's California School of Fine Arts mural in San Francisco (1930), and David Alfaro Siqueiros's Portrait of Present-Day Mexico (1932), originally located in Santa Monica, all offered a politicized modernist vocabulary that was previously unfamiliar to the current artistic scene in California and the rest of the country. As far as the generation of Chicana/o artists of the sixties and seventies was concerned, however, the most pivotal Mexican mural was undoubtedly Siqueiros's La América Tropical (Tropical America; 1932), located on Los Angeles's Olvera Street. Laurance P. Hurlburt, author of The Mexican Muralists in the United States (1989), explained that the mural's bold critique of imperialism and capitalism centered around the figure of the crucified Indian, an image that must have struck a chord with the Mexican American residents of the area. La América Tropical also demonstrated the powerful effects political statements coupled with Indigenist aesthetics could have when displayed in a public mural.
Mexican Indigenist art also migrated to California via the work of Alfredo Ramos Martínez, who had led Mexico's Academia de San Carlos in the early twenties and eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1929. His open-air paintings and indigenous subjects had considerable influence on many Southern California artists of the period. During the decades of the 1950s and early 1960s, several Mexican American artists contributed much to the area's artistic patrimony, even though their oeuvre often went largely unnoticed. Such was the case of Martín Ramírez, an artist active during the 1950s in the Los Angeles area, whose works on paper revealed, as Octavio Paz remarked, "forms, lines, volumes, and colors that express with a sort of exasperation the twin forces of separation and participation." Referring to Ramírez's experience immigrating to the United States during the Mexican Revolution and his subsequent bouts with paranoid schizophrenia, Paz erroneously and dismissively described his work as that of a solitary and isolated genius who neither exerted influence on nor received influence from broader artistic currents. Nevertheless, Chicago artist Jim Nutt "discovered" his drawings in 1968, and later, approximately one decade after Ramírez's death in 1960, the Mexican artist's work became the subject of various exhibitions around the country. Though he produced all his drawings while a mental patient at the DeWitt State Hospital (Auburn, California), subsequent interest in his art reinforced the Mexican American artistic tradition in California. Chicano writer and activist Ricardo Bracho found Ramírez's drawings to be "exquisite, unsettling, dazzling in their intricate craft and deep with Mexican cultural referent," and in 2004 he began writing a play entitled "Mexican Psychotic," based on the artist's life.
Painter and draftsman Carlos Licón, a Los Angeles artist whose style more closely resembled the Mexican School's social-realist tendencies than Ramírez's, established very early in his career a strong connection with his community when, in 1942, at the age of thirteen, he worked as a stage designer for the Mexican American venue Padua Hills Theater in Claremont, California. Four years later, Licón would actually meet the artist Alfredo Ramos Martínez and work as his assistant on a Scripps College mural. But, like Ramírez, recurring instabilities in his personal life often sidelined Licón's artistic production. A victim of drug and alcohol abuse, Licón spent a great portion of his adult life in prison on narcotics charges. But this period in the 1960s marked the most productive phase in his career. Displaying the stylistic influence of the modern Mexican artists of the 1920s and 1930s, Licón's work nevertheless remained more personal and introspective. A tragic feeling of pathos and melancholy often saturated his iconlike portraits and figural compositions. The legacy of his artwork would greatly inspire the artists associated with the Chicano Movement.
Though the work of Mexican American artists prior to the Chicano Movement remains largely unrecognized for its influence on subsequent generations of California artists, their contribution nonetheless provided an impetus and a sense of historical continuity to artists working during and after the civil rights movement. But because Chicana/o artists during el movimiento sought to produce an art that would challenge social and political categories and classifications, they took greater interest in media like the graphic arts, such as posters, and, of course, muralism. As had the artists of the Mexican School during the earlier decades of the twentieth century, Chicanas/os, too, found in muralism a particularly fitting medium through which to profess and disseminate their new perspectives on Indigenism as it applied to their growing racial consciousness. On the one hand, wall paintings functioned as grand platforms of cultural expression for preconquest civilizations, and, on the other, they served as highly effective instruments for consciousness raising in modern Mexico.
The elements of Mexican Indigenism that influenced Chicana/o muralists are not unproblematic, however, and they present difficulties when addressing the similarities and differences between these two important moments of mural history. Indeed, scholars must problematize the relationship between modern Mexican and Chicana/o art history. On the one hand, Chicana/o community murals emphasized the narrative and discursive continuity between Mexican and Chicana/o history. Indigenous figures such as Quetzalcoatl, Cuauhtémoc, and Benito Juárez are as much a part of the Chicana/o pantheon of heroes as are individuals from the U.S. side of the border, like César Chávez and Reies López Tijerina. On the other hand, these community murals express the specificity, innovation, and originality that is unique to Chicana/o artistic production operating independently of the previous Mexican movements. Consequently, the Mexican influence on Chicana/o art poses a number of pressing questions regarding the nature of Chicana/o creative expressions. Can we think of Mexican Indigenist iconography as merely a form of artistic influence on these community murals? To what degree was Mexico a source of inspiration or a point of departure for Chicana/o artists? If Chicanas/os were seeking to carve out an autonomous space for themselves in the United States, why look at Mexican history and art? In addressing these questions, I found a genuine danger in applying essentialist frameworks to Chicana/o culture. Thinking of Mexico as a culture of origin inscribed in the Mexican American consciousness would obscure the complexity associated with the formation of bordered identities in the United States. If we maintain an essentialist model, the recurrence of Mexican Indigenism in these West Coast community murals would inevitably be described as part of a static model of unidirectional cultural flow simply migrating from Mexico to the United States, thereby denying a certain degree of creative agency to Chicana/o artists. By contrast, thinking of the relationship between Mexican and Chicana/o art as a dialectic provides a more fluid model of analysis. Anthropologist Charles W. Nuckolls described cultural systems as dialectical phenomena in that they are "made up of dynamic conflicts between the whole and its parts." Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin, communication studies scholars Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery, in discussing the nature of interpersonal exchanges, commented on how forces of unity and difference (or centripetal and centrifugal forces) often collaborate in the formation of social relations. The relationship between Chicana/o culture and Mexican culture can be described as a relational yet conflictive and oppositional dialogue. Chicana/o art then becomes conversant with Mexican currents, but often in a critical and contesting fashion. Though a visual dialogue takes place between the Mexican and Chicana/o muralists, this dialogue often involves a multivocal process whereby dissenting and consenting voices contribute to the creation of a unified cultural product. Chicana/o community muralism can be regarded as that product, given that it simultaneously embraced and digressed from the Mexican canon. This element of "contradiction" and "opposition," however, does not point to stagnation in the cultural process, but instead ushers in the creation of an emerging new cultural system.
As seen in community murals, the dialectic process played a particularly relevant role in the construction of Chicana/o Indigenism. Informed by Mexican Indigenist thinking and iconography, Chicanas/os revived their indigenous roots by reusing cultural paraphernalia already circulating in other spheres. Even though the social and political arenas were dramatically different, Chicanos/os frequently cited and alluded to Mexican Indigenism and muralism in their work during the civil rights movement. As in Mexico, the emergence of Indigenism and muralism in the United States happened after a period of critical social and political turmoil. In many ways, Chicana/o artists saw a model of socially engaged art in the Mexican mural renaissance. But while the Indigenist ideology, along with the muralist projects in Mexico, formed a symbiotic part of institutional initiatives to rebuild the nation-state after the Revolution, in the United States, both became phenomena occurring on the fringes of official discourses. As such, Indigenism among Chicanas/os initially emerged as a counterideology, that is, an alternative to hegemonic discourses about marginalized minorities not only in Mexico but also in the United States. Indigenist imagery for many Chicana/o muralists arose as a means to express forms of resistance and protest not sanctioned by state apparatuses.
Regardless of whether Chicana/o muralists constructed Indigenism through the borrowing of different styles, themes, or concepts, this process generally remained a highly critical and interventionist one. Behind this redeployment, Chicana/o artists subverted the traits of more canonic Indigenist discourses in Mexico that sought to keep indigenous communities from active participation in rebuilding the nation. Likewise, the use of wall painting itself functioned as an act of subversion and decentralization of other modern mural movements that were institutionally supported and state sanctioned, like the so-called Mexican School of painting. The resurrection of Indigenist thought and aesthetics allowed Chicanas/os to build a nation without government sponsorship and on the fringes of the mainstream establishment. But, ultimately, the use of Mexican Indigenism signified for Chicanas/os the reclaiming of a culture and a history traditionally commodified by Western powers of colonization.
Aztlán and the Politics of Place and Space
When Chicana/o artists chose to use murals as vehicles for Indigenist aesthetics, it was not by coincidence or happenstance. One of the most significant connections between the concept of Indigenism and muralism involved the symbolic implications of space and place that both tendencies invoked. The concept of Aztlán composed an important element of Chicana/o Indigenism. According to Mexica history, the Aztecs migrated south to Tenochtitlán from a northern homeland called Aztlán. In the manifesto entitled "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán" (1969), written primarily by the Chicano poet Alurista with assistance from Denver muralist Manuel Martínez,34 Chicanas/os geographically identified this homeland as the U.S. Southwest. Regarding themselves as the descendants of the Aztecs who currently inhabited Aztlán, Chicana/o activists saw the Mexican American presence in this area as a fulfillment of this mythical return to the homeland. Not only did Aztlán, as a concept, contest the categorization of Chicanas/os as an invariably immigrant community, it also provided them with a physical and symbolic space that had previously been denied to them by official U.S. histories. To further legitimize the existence of Aztlán, many Chicana/o writers often cited a critical primary-source text, namely, the 1610 conquest chronicles of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá entitled Historia de la Nueva México. In the first chapter, Pérez de Villagrá describes in great detail the lands of the U.S. Southwest while also identifying them as the former home of the Aztec Empire. But Aztlán was not only a geographical location for Chicana/o artists and activists; it was also a spiritual space where decolonizing frames of mind could be fully realized. Aztlán was a concept capable of converging into one discursive space many of the concerns affecting Chicanas/os, as Rafael Pérez-Torres elucidates: "The ideas embodied in Aztlán draw together geography, culture, history, genetics, migration, tradition, heritage, unity, authenticity."
Like the notion of Aztlán, wall paintings, too, had the unique capacity to carve out physical and symbolic spaces for the articulation of identity. In turn, Chicana/o Indigenism, of which the concept of Aztlán was a crucial component, sought to push the national and psychological border that had marginalized Mexican-descent communities in the United States. Thus, muralism celebrated the urban spaces prescribed to the Chicana/o nation and often transformed the barrio environment into an Indigenist realm. Moreover, Indigenism, as an aesthetic, and muralism, as an artistic medium, both seemed capable of conveying the specificities of place and time while simultaneously asserting broader statements of social and political consciousness. Ramón García, speaking in more general terms, stated that Chicanas/os "produce an art of place, where location is central to the representation of the self in many individual and collective guises." Indigenism offered Chicanas/os a means by which to address the specificity of their indigenous roots without circumscribing their cultural identity. So when a Chicana/o muralist cited Aztec or Maya culture, for example, she/he generally did not seek to portray these images as, in the words of Ramón García, "static things to be imitated," but rather "as active things in the present."
The notion that Chicana/o community muralism is essentially an "art of place" implies that this practice is essentially site specific. Nevertheless, although many community murals must be understood in the context of the barrio setting and in relation to the period in which they were made, they rarely, if ever, remain static signifiers of particular moments and places in history. However, the site specificity of the Chicana/o Indigenist murals in California aligned them with the movement of site-specific work that emerged simultaneously in the 1960s and 1970s within more mainstream artistic spheres in the United States and Europe. According to art historian Miwon Kwon, site-specific work "focused on establishing an inextricable, indivisible relationship between the work and its site and then demanded the physical presence of the viewer for the work's completion." Artists who engaged in this type of work, Kwon continued, resisted "the forces of the capitalist market economy, which circulates artworks as transportable and exchangeable commodity goods." Site specificity functioned under the assumption that the space in which art resides is neither innocent nor devoid of meaning but rather laden with dynamics of signification and, as such, is necessarily complicit with its location. Chicana/o artists embraced site specificity for these reasons but also because of its connections to indigenous aesthetics, which, according to Steven Leuthold, are deeply rooted in space consciousness: "Indigenous representation rests upon social ties and a profound sense of place more than any particular medium, style, or subject matter." Leuthold further argues that in indigenous art the sacred quality attributed to particular locations and sites is accompanied by a sense of responsibility toward that place, its community, and its environment. For the most part, Chicana/o muralists conscientiously sought to work with the qualities that are already intrinsic at any given site, thus avoiding interfering with many of the natural dynamics that are already in place there. Conversely, the practice of transforming and manipulating natural spaces is one closely aligned with colonialist and imperialist enterprises. For instance, the architects of the Roman imperial basilicas sought to re-create the vastness of exterior spaces inside these ambitious structures, and the colonial urban planners of El Zócalo in Mexico City dramatically altered the environment in and around Lake Texcoco to establish the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Chicana/o artists were conscious of how colonial and expansionist states often disturbed and ultimately destroyed natural environments, and they therefore developed strategies to interact rather than disrupt the natural dynamics of space and place.
Another significant dimension to the issue of space in relationship to Chicanas/os' Indigenist consciousness centered around the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) as a key episode in U.S./Mexican history. The annexation of Mexico's northern provinces during the mid-nineteenth century changed the citizenship rights and social status of some 100,000 Mexicans, many of whom were indigenous inhabitants of the area. Chicana/o activists argued that this particular event in U.S. history explained the current marginalization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in this country. Richard Griswold del Castillo, in his 1990 monograph entitled The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, outlined the process of self-education Chicana/o activists underwent during the civil rights movement, when many learned about this treaty and its implications. During various public demonstrations, rallies, and meetings, activists like Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales and Armando Rendón stipulated that the U.S. government had violated the terms of the treaty and that Mexico was indeed entitled to a number of the territories now under U.S. jurisdiction. The historical dynamics triggered by the events surrounding 1848 were intimately connected to more recent histories of displacement such as the forced relocation of neighborhoods after the 1959-1962 construction of Dodger Stadium in the area of Los Angeles called Chávez Ravine. The significance and meaning of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave Chicanas/os not only the means by which to furnish their activist discourse with historical legitimacy but also an epistemological complement to the notion of Aztlán that further substantiated their mythical and innate right to inhabit North American soil. So while many Chicanas/os expressed the symbolic connection between land and indigenous consciousness in a performative manner through activist, oral, and written means, they most concretely achieved the reclaiming of this territory through the creation of murals that secured a place for Mexican Americans within the communities they resided in, as well as within the political and social landscape of the United States.
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Web Designing Sri Lanka
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subset: commoncrawl


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Practice Essentials
Nephropathic cystinosis is an inherited (autosomal recessive) lysosomal storage disorder caused by defective transport of the amino acid cystine out of lysosomes. The stored cystine is poorly soluble and crystallizes within the lysosomes of many cell types, leading to widespread tissue and organ damage.
The image below depicts an infant at the time his cystinosis is diagnosed.
Signs and symptoms
Three types of cystinosis have been described based on the age at diagnosis and magnitude of cellular cystine deposition: infantile onset, adolescent onset, and adult onset. Patients with the infantile nephropathic form of cystinosis (the most common and the most severe) develop symptoms early in life and, if left untreated, develop end-stage kidney failure by late childhood.
Signs and symptoms of nephropathic infantile cystinosis include the following:
Multiorgan involvement: May be mild to severe
Polyuria, polydipsia, dehydration, vomiting, metabolic acidosis
Hypophosphatemic rickets
Failure to thrive, poor/loss of appetite
Craves salty and hot and spicy foods; prefers specific food textures
May have recurrent bouts of fever and manifestations of heat intolerance
Left untreated, renal failure develops by age 7-10 years
Signs and symptoms of late-onset (intermediate) nephropathic cystinosis include the following:
More indolent disease than infantile form of the disease
Manifests most commonly in early adolescence; most diagnosed by age 12 years
Symptoms usually restricted to kidneys and eyes
Often doesn't develop complete Fanconi syndrome, but renal function deteriorates
End-stage renal disease within a few years of diagnosis, after age 15 years
The major complication of nephropathic cystinosis in patients older than 20 years is legal blindness, distal vacuolar myopathy, cerebral calcifications or atrophy, swallowing dysfunction, diabetes mellitus, and liver disease (eg, hepatomegaly, nodular degenerative hyperplasia).
Nonnephropathic cystinosis is considered a benign variant and is usually diagnosed by an ophthalmologist treating patients for photophobia, which may not begin until middle age and is not usually as debilitating as in the nephropathic form of the disease.
See Clinical Presentation for more detail.
A typical cystinotic patient has pale blond hair and blue eyes, although the disease also occurs among dark-haired individuals with brown eyes. Examination in patients with nephropathic cystinosis (progressive disease) may also reveal the following features:
Children younger than 1 year: Usually growth retardation, rickets, metabolic acidosis, and other chemical evidence of renal tubular abnormalities (eg, increased renal excretion of glucose, amino acids, phosphate, and potassium)
As children age: Prominent failure to thrive; without specific therapy, children remain below the third percentile in both height and weight throughout life
By age 1-2 years: Corneal crystals
By age 3-4 years: Untreated, cornea packed with crystals, causing early photophobia
By age 7-10 years: Previously noted symptoms now more severe; increased proteinuria, progressive renal failure, increased photophobia, thyroid insufficiency
Adolescence (usually age 10-13 years): End-stage renal disease; good adherence to therapy slows down-progression of renal failure by several more years
Delayed sexual maturation; in males, hypogonadism and infertility
Second or third decade of life: Retinal damage
Third decade of life: Cerebral calcifications; muscular and swallowing difficulties
Laboratory tests
The following laboratory studies may be used to assess patients suspected of having cystinosis:
Serum electrolyte levels: To detect the presence of acidosis (hyperchloremic, normal anion gap) and severity of hypokalemia, hyponatremia, hypophosphatemia, and low bicarbonate concentration
Blood gases: To detect metabolic acidosis and the degree of respiratory compensation
Urine testing: Findings include low osmolality, glycosuria, and tubular proteinuria (including generalized amino aciduria)
Urine electrolyte levels: To detect the loss of bicarbonate and phosphaturia
Cystine levels in polymorphonuclear leukocytes or cultured fibroblasts (for fetuses: chorionic villi or cultured amniotic fluid cells): Confirms diagnosis of cystinosis
Other studies used in the evaluation of patients with suspected cystinosis include the following:
Slit-lamp examination of the eyes: Corneal and conjunctival crystals (pathognomonic)
Funduscopic examination: Possible presence of peripheral retinopathy that is more severe on the temporal side than on the nasal side
Biopsy of the kidney with histologic examination: Changes vary with disease stage
Imaging studies
Renal ultrasonography: Obtain in patients with elevated urine calcium excretion to rule out nephrocalcinosis
Radiography of kidneys, ureters, and bladder: To evaluate possible urinary tract calcifications in patients with hypercalciuria or as a diagnostic evaluation of severe abdominal pain
Computed tomography scanning and magnetic resonance imaging: To evaluate adult patients with infantile nephropathic cystinosis with central nervous system symptoms
See Workup for more detail.
Cysteamine blunts the decline in renal function and improves the linear growth of children with nephropathic cystinosis, despite the fact that it does not ameliorate the defect in renal tubule transport. Oral therapy should be initiated as soon as the diagnosis is made.
Cysteine-depleting agents are used in the management of nephropathic cystinosis. Oral cysteamine therapy postpones the need for renal transplantation, whereas ophthalmic cysteamine is used to manage ocular complications such as corneal cystine crystals.
Indomethacin may limit water losses in patients with nephropathic cystinosis by both reducing the glomerular filtration rate and by sensitizing the collecting duct to the effects of antidiuretic hormone. It has been used to treat patients with cystinosis more commonly in Europe than in the United States. Careful monitoring of kidney function is required for this agent, because the glomerular filtration rate may be worsened by its administration. The ulcerogenic potential of indomethacin is its major drawback for treating cystinosis.
Treatment with recombinant human growth hormone improves growth velocity in young children with nephropathic cystinosis prior to renal replacement therapy. Growth hormone treatment is less effective for peripubertal/adolescent patients on renal replacement therapy.
Thyroid replacement is indicated in patients diagnosed with hypothyroidism.
Supportive therapy
Supportive care in the management of nephropathic cystinosis includes the following:
Replacement of urinary losses (eg, hydration, potassium and bicarbonate supplementation, vitamin D and phosphate supplementation; carnitine)
Management of volume depletion/dehydration states
Kidney transplantation in patients with infantile cystinosis corrects kidney failure and prolongs survival (the donor parenchymal cells are not homozygous for the genetic defect and are therefore able to transport cystine from the lysosomes). However, transplantation does not prevent progression of the disease in other nonrenal organs, and therapy with oral cysteamine is indicated in patients after kidney transplantation. Management of cystinosis with oral cysteamine must be initiated as soon as diagnosis of cystinosis is made.
Some patients with severe gastroesophageal reflux and cystinosis may require gastric/jejunal tube placement or Nissen fundoplication to achieve optimal nutrition.
See Treatment and Medication for more detail.
Nephropathic cystinosis is an inherited (autosomal recessive) lysosomal storage disorder caused by defective transport of the amino acid cystine out of lysosomes. The stored cystine is poorly soluble and crystallizes within the lysosomes of many cell types, leading to widespread tissue and organ damage.
Three types of cystinosis have been described based on the age at diagnosis and magnitude of cellular cystine deposition: infantile onset, adolescent onset, and adult onset. Patients with the infantile nephropathic form of cystinosis (the most common and the most severe) develop symptoms early in life and develop end-stage kidney failure by late childhood, if untreated.
Specific therapy with a drug that allows for removal of cystine from its lysosomal accumulation has been associated with marked improvement in the outlook for kidney function and quality of life in patients with nephropathic cystinosis.
Ingested protein enters the lysosome, where acid hydrolases degrade it to its component amino acids, including cysteine. Within the lysosome, cysteine is readily oxidized to cystine (a disulfide of the amino acid cysteine). In healthy individuals, both cystine and cysteine can normally enter the cytoplasm, where cystine is rapidly converted to cysteine by the reducing agent glutathione. Cytoplasmic cysteine is incorporated into protein or degraded to inorganic sulfate for excretion.
Cystinosis is caused by mutations in the gene that encodes cystinosin, the cystine-lysomal exporter. Because of the defect in cystinosin, cystine cannot leave the lysosomes and is accumulated there as birefringent, hexagonal, or rectangular crystals within cells of various organ systems.
In the infantile nephropathic form of cystinosis, the kidney is affected early in life by cystine crystals deposited in proximal tubule cells, presenting as Fanconi syndrome, usually between age 6-12 months. Proximal tubules are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of cystine accumulation. Fanconi syndrome is characterized by wasting of substances not reabsorbed in the proximal tubule, including sodium, potassium, phosphate, calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, and others. Metabolic acidosis and electrolyte disturbances ensue and contribute to the stunting of growth in children with cystinosis. Cystinosis is the most common inherited cause of Fanconi syndrome.
United States
In North America, the incidence of infantile nephropathic cystinosis is 1 case per 100,000-200,000 live births; [1] an estimated 400 individuals in the United States have cystinosis. Approximately 15 new cases of cystinosis are diagnosed each year in the United States.
The incidence of cystinosis is higher in certain subpopulations. France's Brittany province has an estimated incidence of 1 case per 25,909 population; the incidence in the rest of France is 1 case per 326,440 population.
Medical perceptions regarding the complications and outcome of cystinosis have changed over the years. Prior to the availability of renal transplantation, infantile cystinosis was considered a fatal disease, with a lifespan of approximately 10 years. By the early 1970s, the salutary effects of renal transplants had been recognized.
Cysteamine, introduced in the early 1980s, was shown to blunt the decline in renal function and improve linear growth in these children, despite the fact that it does not ameliorate the defect in renal tubule transport. However, the increased life expectancy afforded by the progress in medical and surgical treatment was accompanied by the development of serious complications due to the continuous accumulation of cystine in nonrenal organs, including the eye, thyroid, brain, liver, pancreas, and muscle. However, many patients survive into the third or fourth decade of life, some even survive into the fifth decade of life and are able to pursue fulfilling lifestyles.
Cystinosis is often considered a disease of fair-skinned individuals of European descent; however, it is known to occur in blacks, Hispanics, and other races around the globe.
The male-to-female ratio among cystinotic children has been reported to be 1.4:1.
Patients with infantile nephropathic cystinosis develop initial symptoms in infancy, frequently when younger than 1 year. In the late-onset (adolescent) form, symptoms are evident by age 8-12 years, and the progression is slower. The adult form of cystinosis does not include renal involvement and is limited to the eye (ocular cystinosis).
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XConnect - Hydrofinity's innovative, cloud-based laundry monitoring solution - makes it easy for customers to determine their return on investment. The XConnect box links to the Hydrofinity washing system and provides real-time monitoring on any smartphone, tablet and computer.
How the XCONNECT Portal benefits customers:
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This video will give you a tour of the system and how it works.


text:
I've read through countless tutorials and I keep coming up short. Here's what I've got:
-- I'm running RubyMine on my Windows desktop
-- I've installed Git on my WebFaction hosting account per their instructions
-- Git appears to be working fine on both machines
Here's what I'm doing:
1. On server:
a. mkdir project
b. git init
c. git add .
d. git commit <--- "nothing to commit"
2. On client:
a. Create new project in RubyMine.
b. "git init" in top directory of project
c. "Push changes" to server <---- "failed to push some refs to...".
What steps am I missing?


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Sermon for All Saints at Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, PA
What apparitions came to your doors on Friday night? My husband and I saw some interesting costumes on the street in New York â not children, but young men and women dressed up as rag dolls, elves, story book characters, a pirate, and some we didnât recognize. Lots of us have forgotten that those costumed folk are a backhanded way of remembering the saints. All Hallowâs Eve is supposed to anticipate All Saints Day, even though our cultural celebrations of Halloween have tended to focus on the least holy rather than the most holy spirits among us.
So who are the saints? In the church we work with overlapping definitions and understandings â that saints are all the baptized, that they are the holiest examples of Christ-followers through the ages, and even more broadly, that the saints are those who show us God. The catechism reminds us that they are the whole family of God, living and dead, bound together in Christ. Episcopalians and other Christians wrestle with how broadly to understand the family of God, and whether non-Christians are included, for we can certainly point to holy examples who show us what God at work in the world looks like â people like the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi. It seems more fruitful to remember that Jesusâ saving work was and is for the whole world, and that our baptismal promises are about living holy lives, together, in community.
But what we are doing here today, in baptizing these six very small persons, is consciously claiming them as saints of God. We say they are blessed in the sacrament of baptism, whether they know it or not. Our job, for new saints of any age, is to aid them on their journey closer to God. Once we baptize and anoint them, we will claim them as saints. We affirm that saintliness, holiness, blessedness is a state of being, rather than a list of accomplishments. If we can say that a small infant is a saint, then blessedness cannot really depend on the good deeds she or he has done. On the other hand, when we see blessedness in the life of another, then itâs a pretty good indication that God is at work in that personâs life, making him or her holy. We see signs of blessedness in the deeds of a saint.
So, saintliness has to be about both being and doing â both the blessing that is an inner state of being and the way in which that blessedness is expressed in the work of a life. Thatâs really what Jesus is talking about in his list of blessed kinds of people: those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who are meek and merciful and pure in heart. They are inner states of being that can be expressed in outward ways. Thatâs actually what we say about sacraments â that they are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. Saints are meant to be sacraments of God in human lives â in the very same sense that Jesus is the ultimate sacrament of God in human flesh.
Look around you at the saints. They include the folks you know are saintly, and they include some donât like very much. One of my favorites in our calendar of saints is Jerome. He was a monk in the fifth century, who translated the Bible into Latin. He was also a famously grumpy and arrogant fellow who made life enormously difficult for the people around him. If thereâs hope for him, well, then there must be hope for each one of us.
The saints are as varied as the breadth of Godâs human creation, and they will be found on all sides of theological debates and political contests. Indeed, God gives us such varied opponents as blessings for our own journeys toward holiness. There are saints among the folk who voted to leave The Episcopal Church. There are saints among those who have clearly stayed. There are saints who havenât yet made up their minds. They are saints because theyâve been baptized into this fractious Body of Christ, and there are saints among them whose holiness of life is abundantly evident. We dishonor them and God when we refuse to see their blessedness.
Where have you seen a saint this week, other than in a Halloween costume? And even those in costume may be a reminder that weâre meant to look beyond the surface, to seek the holy in the midst of the unholy.
Iâve been reminded of some little remembered saints this week, and the holiness evident in some mightily unholy circumstances. Patricia Hunter, who is a Baptist minister in Seattle, wrote a newspaper column to remind her community about four girls who died 45 years ago, when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed.[i] In the middle of the civil rights movement, four young women in Sunday School were murdered by some who objected to the color of their skin. They were gathering for prayers after a sermon titled, The Love that Forgives. We count them among the saints: Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. Blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and blessed are the peacemakers.
Fred Morris was in the news this week as well. He served as a Methodist missionary in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s.[ii] He was a friend of Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, and both of them were human rights advocates and vocal critics of the military in Brazil in those years. Morris was kidnapped, tortured, and then thrown out of Brazil in 1974, primarily for his work with Dom Helder Camara. A couple of weeks ago, the government of Brazil formally apologized to him, and gave him a cash settlement and lifetime pension. Today Fred Morris lives in Panama, where he teaches children about caring for the earth.
Another saint was responsible for getting Fred Morris deported rather than disappeared. Richard Brown was a very junior embassy official in Brazil who had the courage to demand to see Morris under Geneva Convention rules. He significantly damaged his career by publicizing the torture and demanding Morrisâ release.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter (and do) all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of Jesus, for your reward is great in heaven. Yes, the reward of the saints is great in heaven, and once in a while on this earth there will be healing and reconciliation when the saints do their work.
Saints are martyrs, living and dead, who are courageous witnesses to the love of God for all of humanity. Saints are those who are willing to stand up for what is right, whether it is the dignity of basic human rights or our duty to care for an increasingly tortured earth. Saints are peacemakers and peace-bearers, those who dream and hope for a healed world, and work to make it happen.
Sainthood is not defined by holding particular theological positions or ecclesiastical positions. It is given in baptism, and it is evident in works of mercy, justice, and humility. It is not ours to grant, but it is ours to acknowledge. It is already given, and yet must be sought the rest of our lives. It is often most apparent in the midst of strife, and pain, and grief, for that is where the light of Christ is most urgently needed.
Where will you share that light with the world?
[ii] Christian Century 4 November 2008, p8


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48 Joe Allen passes, two Danny Ward saves, two Martin Skrtel red cards avoided.
Joe Allen can pass a football.
We knew this already, but now Europe knows too.
The beautiful human being completed 87.5% of his 48 passes as Wales beat Slovakia 2-1 to register their first even win at a European Championship.
Slovakia dominated possession with 57%, but Allen ensured his side were not overrun.
No Welshman made more passes that Allen, who also worked tirelessly without the ball.
Meanwhile, fellow Red Danny Ward looked composed on his first start for Wales. The 22-year-old goalkeeper could do nothing to stop Duda's low shot on the hour, but he did make two decent saves, as well as many confident catches.
Gareth Bale and Hal Robson-Kanu scored the goals for Wales, either side of Duda's equaliser.
Liverpool were also represented on the losing side, with Martin Skrtel captaining Slovakia.
Skrtel was shown a yellow card late on for a rash tackle on Ben Davies, but he could have seen red.
In fact, Skrtel perhaps should have been sent off earlier in the game when he elbowed Jonny Williams in the penalty area.
Wales go top of Group B with their victory, ahead of tonight's second game between England and Russia.
Adam Lallana starts for England, with Nathaniel Clyne, Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Daniel Sturridge on the bench.


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Women's Wednesday #88: Authentic Reviews that Deliver to Your Bottom Line
Posted: January 9, 2019 by Anne Fleming, Car Buying Advocate
Consumers are relying on car dealer reviews more than ever before. Women use them the most, as much as 50% more than men. Women not only turn to reviews about a dealership, they also expect the posts to convey the most important part of the customer experience – trust. The emotional qualities of a review speak loudly to women and encourage or discourage a visit to your store.Read More


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Block unit-plays play a vital role in a child's life. It is not only fun to play but also develops language skill, cognitive skills, intellectual skills,physical skills, Cooperation skills. Etc. Though it doesn't have the fancy thing in it building blocks are great for developing intellectual, cognitive, social, emotional and physical skills.
Many scholars and early childhood educators feel the toddlers develop these skills in general when you play the block unit. I certainly agree into this and have listed what made me write about this!!
1.Builds Language development
2. Problem Solving Skill
3. Learning cooperation skills
4.Development in all the areas
5. Creativity
Block Builds Language Development
When I say this few people may think how a play can build a language development? But with this we can ask open ended questions to allow them to speak more on it. So in the end vocabulary will grow in shaa allah. For instance, Mama is planning to build a boat! Would you like to help in understanding what a boat is? So while constructing a boat we can use different colours of blocks and speak about the colors, shapes etc and analyze what if we change the order of the constructed boat.
Problem solving skill
These are the sample questions you can ask to kindle the problem solving skills in a kid. They will try to answer something out.
How tall can you build your tower before it falls over?Can you change your design to make the tower taller?Will a tower with a wider base be taller than a tower with a narrow base?Measure the height of your tower or count the number of blocks.Create a pattern in your tower. Alternate the color of your blocks.
Learning cooperation skills
Blocks can be played alone or with a partner. So while playing with a group toddlers can understand we need to hear to the other people's idea too. So when playing with dad/mom the toddler can think in to give a space to the partner to bring in on the idea. When the partner leaves a space for the toddler to do she/he will understand that they will have to give in space and allow the counter to work on.
Delevopment in All Areas
Block play requires fine and gross motor skills. Blocks enhance children's problem-solving abilities, mathematics skills, and language and literacy abilities. And constructing "creations" builds selfesteem and feelings of success. —Linda Taylor
Toddlers will use their creativity to move the blocks and plan to bring a better outcome. They use their creativity to make a cloud, boat, whatever they want. So for sure the imagination skills grow along them.
Don't be afraid to get down and play with the toddler. The more you play, spend time with them the more they open up. Kindle the thought processing and allow them to explore their imagination!!
A team of scholars in research identified the stages of block building. As children move through these stages, their cognitive development, motor skills, and social growth can be observed:
Stage 1: Blocks are carried by younger children, but not used for construction.
Stage 2: Building begins with children mostly making rows with similarly shaped and sized blocks on the floor or attempting to stack the blocks vertically.
Stage 3: Children begin making bridges using two blocks to support a third, which reflects understanding of spatial relationships.
Stage 4: Children learn to place blocks to make enclosures of different sizes and shapes.
Stage 5: More imaginative structures are built and children develop their understanding of symmetry.
Stage 6: The naming of structures introduces dramatic play and their block play becomes artistic.
Stage 7: Children engage in symbolic play as blocks are used to represent things they know, such as cars, airplanes, houses, and cities, as well as to stimulate dramatic play activities.
Wardle, Francis. (2002) Introduction to Early Childhood Education: A Multidimensional Approach to Child-Centered Care and Learning. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon
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text: Kevin Matthew Gilbert (November 20, 1966 - May 17, 1996) was an American songwriter, musician, composer, producer and collaborator born in Sacramento, California, later living in San Mateo, California where he attended Junipero Serra High School. He died at age 29 in Los Angeles from apparent autoerotic asphyxiation. Read More


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Finny & Veronica
Veronica and Finny just married in Tbilisi!
Love is without boundaries!
Highlights gallery for your wedding in Tbilisi!
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Gov. Christie's ratings have dropped in the latest Monmouth University/NJ Press Media Poll. Among registered voters he has a 47 percent positive to 49 percent disapproval among all state residents. Among registered voters it is 46 positive to 49 percent negative. His approval rating is about the same. The number who disapprove has increased by 9 points and mainly comes from the people who shifted from no opinion to negative. The state budget situation figures heavily into the thinking of those polled. "Two years of austere budgets may be taking a toll on the governor. Efforts to sell his reform agenda at town hall meetings generate a lot of media attention, but it appears that New Jerseyans who are paying the most attention to these events have already made up their minds about the governor's proposals," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.
As for the governor's Town Hall meetings, 46 percent say they have read or heard about them. Among those who have, 35 percent say they do a lot to help understand what's happening in Trenton, 30 percent say they do little and 30 percent say they don't do much.
Other findings:
— 53 percent say their municipal government has done a good job keeping spending down in the past year.
— 59 percent say their town is under the 2 percent property tax cap
— 47 percent disapprove of the Legislature's performance, 33 percent approve
— 54 percent say NJ is on the wrong track, 35 percent say it is not


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A federal judge has found Amazon liable for in-app purchases made by their children. Starting in 2017 Amazon will be starting a notice-and-claims process beginning in early 2017 to alert parents of their eligibility for refunds, and then to reimburse them.
This ongoing court saga begun in July 2014 when the FCC accused Amazon of making it too easy for children to run up bills while playing games such as "Pet Shop Story" and "Ice Age Village" on Fire tablets. In all, kids racked up over $86 million in charges to their parents credit cards.
The caveat behind this judgement is that the app descriptions said that they were a free download and made no mention of an in-app purchase. Amazon has since revised the app listings on the website and Android App store to alert parents if an app offers in-app payments.
Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times.


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Anyway, It's hard to find a good, trustworthy charity to give to. At least, when you are as skeptical and untrusting as me. I.e. when one understands that, in the words of T.S. Elliott,
[At least] "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves"
So I've decided to list a couple that I like. In ascending order:
1) American Refugee Committee. (though I get a lot of paper mail from them despite requests not to send). They have good ratings on the charity watch site and seem to be a good .org.
2) Water for People. I really like these guys. They take NO government money and have a very smart/reasonable approach to giving. (Standard "teach a man to fish" stuff, but also a basic understanding that people value things they have worked for more than things they are just given).
give today:
How's this for an argument against:
Hey, 19 Billion in government savings and untold billions in U.S. Citizen savings, that's not important right, not compared to the terrible risk that comes from getting drugs made in.... oh wait, they are made here.
Scumbags and Morons. They can't get the simplest, most obvious cases right, and yet you have hope for them fixing the entirety of health care.
I'm afraid there is no hope on that front.


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This CGI::Application plugin allows to add custom throttling rules to you application. Having implemented it now, it seems easy to use, flexible, and well documented.
My one complaint is that it lacks a "singleton mode" like the ::TT plugin for CGI::Application has. Currently, there are several methods that need to be called on each request to configure the plugin. A singleton feature would allow details to be configured once at server start time, requiring less time during each request. ( That said, I have no indication that current design presents a performance bottleneck. )


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A US Naval War College professor and secrecy expert who once worked as an NSA officer, has been accused in a complaint of taking a racy photo that was then posted online, and he was placed on leave.
A May text message conversation with a photo of a penis and professor John Schindler's name atop it was circulated on Twitter early Monday. It was unclear who sent it and who posted it.
A blogger sent a complaint to the War College's administration. The college's president, Rear Adm. Walter E. "Ted" Carter Jr., ordered an investigation. A college spokeswoman said investigators would look into whether the photo could have been falsified.
Mr Schindler refused to discuss the photo by telephone on Monday, citing legal reasons. He has deleted his Twitter account.
Mr Schindler is a professor of national security affairs and a former National Security Agency intelligence analyst. He has been critical of leaker Edward Snowden and others and frequently engaged in heated exchanges with critics on Twitter.
On his website, he wrote on Monday that he has been subjected to "nearly non-stop online harassment and stalking" for the past year and "things have now taken an ugly, indeed sordid turn." That post was later replaced with a much shorter statement, telling supporters he is taking a break from social media because of personal issues.
Mr Schindler has taught at the college since 2005. He also is a fellow at Boston University, according to its website. His resume says he was a senior intelligence analyst with the NSA from 1996 to 2004.
US Naval War College, in Newport, is a one-year, resident program that graduates about 600 students a year, according to its website. It said in a statement it could not comment further to protect the integrity of the investigation. It did not say how long the investigation would take.


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Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The Lord of the Rings template or the Gormenghast mold. The former type is characterized by much magic, questing, battles of good versus evil, Joseph Campbellian heroes, conclusive triumphalism, and a quasi-medievalism. Such novels always travel in herds of three books or more. The second category features strange, mind-bending venues, odd, idiosyncratic characters, problematical morality, enigmatical actions, open-endedness, interstitial hybridization, and a more elaborate and elegant prose style. Such books — nowadays sometimes subsumed under the banner of "New Weird" — are generally standalone novels.
But however valid this taxonomy, it ignores a third type of fantasy, a kind best exemplified today by George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones books — or as the series is more properly titled, A Song of Ice and Fire. The first volume of the five extant — A Game of Thrones — appeared in 1996, and the series will conclude, some unknown day, with two volumes as yet unfinished, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Naturally, in this mediaphilic culture of ours, the HBO series version of the novels has become the more well known and widely adored manifestation of Martin's brainchild.
And how does Martin's story differ in kind from the first two camps of fantasy outlined above? The focus of this third type of fantasy novel is on Realpolitik, the Machiavellian maneuverings of power-hungry people and nations. The supernatural is downplayed to some extent. Shifting allegiances between factions and families are paramount. There are no great quests or Armageddons. The characters exhibit the dicey morality of those in the Peake books but also the operatic ambitions and emotions of the Tolkien school. The more down-and-dirty aspects of the human condition are not scanted. Such novels tend to approach mainstream historical fiction.
Martin did not, of course, invent this mode, as he would be the first to admit. There were predecessors, however inchoate. And Martin's success has inspired a new generation of such novels.
If we mercilessly bypass all works connected with King Arthur and his court — a saga not totally irrelevant to Martin's — and also the medieval fantasies of William Morris, then perhaps the first book of this stripe is The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, an amateur writer and British civil servant. Published in 1922 and of course predating both Tolkien and Peake, Eddison's anomalous novel — followed by three loosely linked sequels, the Zimiamvia Trilogy — chronicles in ornate and lapidary language the mighty battles between the noble warriors of Demonland and the lowly slinking sorcerers of Witchland. So rousing are the battles that the victors opt at the climax for a magical rerun of the entire struggle.
Much admired by Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and James Branch Cabell, The Worm Ouroboros met an enthusiastic new audience when given a paperback edition by Ballantine Books in 1967. Part of the development of the fantasy genre as a marketing category, Eddison's book was soon followed by Ballantine's legendary and seminal Adult Fantasy series, which reprinted many classics. But series editor Lin Carter also discovered newcomers, such as Katherine Kurtz with Deryni Rising, which in 1970 launched what has since become a cluster of five trilogies and more. In a secondary world modeled on Britain in the twelfth century, a king's death triggers internecine struggles and the revival of old magics. The immediate sequels bring ecclesiastical factions into play.
Outside the fantasy genre and a bit earlier, in 1961, subsequently famed historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett began her career with the resonantly titled novel The Game of Kings. Following the picaresque exploits of Francis Crawford of Lymond in mid-sixteenth-century Europe and eventually expanding into a six-book series dubbed the Lymond Chronicles, the tale is replete with intrigue and derring-do.
Meanwhile, one of the shining stars of science fiction during the New Wave period of the 1960s was Roger Zelazny. Fans of his work eagerly followed him into the land of Amber in 1970, with the arrival of Nine Princes in Amber. Something of a science-fantasy mashup, the book capitalized on the romantic conceit of the multiverse, a trope that was brilliantly exfoliated around the same time by Michael Moorcock, whose own fantasies of the period are not unrelated to Martin's. In Zelazny's novel, the seed of a long series, one murderous family of continuum-jumping adepts wars among themselves in order to establish dominance across the dimensions.
Thoroughly steeped in all this genre history, Martin leaped into print himself in 1971, with the Galaxy magazine story "The Hero." The next twenty-five years leading up to A Game of Thrones would find Martin winning awards for his science fiction and also establishing himself in television by working on such shows as Beauty and the Beast. Of course, his fame now rests almost exclusively on his late-career fantasy work.
The fervent readerly interest in Martin's type of "dynasty fantasy," as the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction dubs the mode, has certainly encouraged some of his contemporary peers to work in a similar vein. Also, outside the fantasy genre, a handful of writers continue to follow Dunnett's lead.
Famed for his posthuman SF, Charles Stross exhibits another arrow in his quiver with the Merchant Princes series, launched with The Family Trade in 2004. A deliberate homage to Zelazny's Amber, Stross's saga tells of the Clan, whose genetic heritage is the ability to jump across parallel timelines. That the Clan uses this talent for drug smuggling, among other pursuits, is Stross's wry updating of Zelazny.
Back in the realm of non-fantastical historical novels, Bernard Cornwell is busy charting The Saxon Tales, seven books to date with an eighth, The Empty Throne, due out in the UK in October of this year. Launched with The Last Kingdom in 2004, this retelling of the struggles of Alfred the Great features many of the same frissons as Martin's books.
Steven Erikson has acquired a dedicated following for his series of books grouped under the rubric The Malazan Book of the Fallen, ten volumes commencing with 1999's Gardens of the Moon and full of multiplex warfare. So partisan are his fans, in fact, that Erikson has felt compelled to go on record as downplaying the "competition" between his books and Martin's. An interview hosted at Wired magazine's site found Erikson saying, "I remember talking to George a few times now. Both of us are kind of baffled at the vehemence between our fan bases."
Daniel Abraham's The Long Price Quartet, whose first installment is A Shadow in Summer from 2006, adds some man-in-the-street perspectives and some intriguing poetry-based magic to his "dynasty fantasy" account of the wars, covert and overt, between the city-states of the Khaiem and the expansionist empire of the Galts. Appropriately enough, Abraham also scripted the graphic novel adaptation of Martin's series.
Few fantasy authors of recent vintage have achieved prominence and acclaim faster than Joe Abercrombie. His debut novel from 2006, The Blade Itself, heralded the start of his universe known as The First Law. In line with Martin's own predilection for raw and gritty moments such as the infamous "Red Wedding" incident, Abercrombie's novels have been both chastised and lauded for their "grimdark" atmosphere, a charge the author has seen fit to address in an impassioned essay at his blog. Martin himself praises Abercrombie's work as "a kind of splatterpunk sword 'n' sorcery."
Finally we come to a work that is at once both a formative influence on Martin's books and a beneficiary of their success: The Accursed Kings cycle, centering around the deadly machinations among the French monarchs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The French author Maurice Druon began his series of seven non-magical historical novels in 1955 with The Iron King. Little known to an English-speaking audience, they nonetheless reached a certain impressionable young author named Martin, who has since gone on to champion the books as containing "all the good stuff that's in my books, minus the fantasy…" Martin's introduction to the new editions of Druon's books complete the circle of influence. As Martin proclaims, and as he and his affiliates continue to prove, "Historical fiction and fantasy [are] sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth."
The Speculator
Seeds of Ice and Fire
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The Lord of the Rings template or the Gormenghast mold. The former type is characterized by much magic, questing, battles of good versus evil, Joseph Campbellian heroes, conclusive triumphalism, and a quasi-medievalism. Such novels always travel in herds of three books or more. The second category features strange, mind-bending venues, odd, idiosyncratic characters, problematical morality, enigmatical actions, open-endedness, interstitial hybridization, and a more elaborate and elegant prose style. Such books — nowadays sometimes subsumed under the banner of "New Weird" — are generally standalone novels.


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Government Practice
The attorneys in the Government Practice Group at Adams, Stepner, Woltermann & Dusing, PLLC have extensive experience in providing day-to-day legal advice to public sector clients such as cities, counties, school districts and other forms of local government. In our capacity as general counsel to our various local government clients, we provide consultation, advice, and representation in the following areas and topics:
- Policy Development
- Ramifications of Proposed Legislative or Administrative Actions
- Public Bidding and Procurement
- Drafting Revised Statutes and Proposed Legislation
- Drafting Ordinances, Regulations, and Interlocal Agreements
- Real Estate Purchase Contracts, Easement Acquisitions and Preparation
- Property Acquisitions, Zoning, Condemnation and Eminent Domain
The experience in our Government Practice Group embraces a wide variety of specialties. We provide regular day-to-day advice on matters involving student rights; teacher tenure; certification; employment issues, including FMLA, ADA, and wage and hour disputes; open records and open meetings law; special education matters arising under Kentucky Administrative Regulations and IDEA; taxation and creation of nonprofit foundations; FERPA; general regulatory compliance; cable law and cable regulation; franchise negotiations; and board management issues.
Beyond our considerable expertise in the general counsel arena, the attorneys in our Government Practice Group are skilled litigators and regularly represent cities, counties, school districts, and other local governments in all areas of litigation in state and federal courts.
It is the philosophy of the Government Practice Group to provide to our public entity clients the highest quality legal services in a timely manner and on a basis assuring value added to the client. Our consistent goal is to get results and to solve problems in a manner that protects the rights, objectives and best interests of our client.
The attorneys at Adams, Stepner, Woltermann & Dusing, PLLC work best as team members with the governing board and/or senior management of each public entity client. Our professional responsibility is to proactively respond to specific tasks communicated to us and to provide day-to-day advice to assist our client in avoiding the potential risk and possible entanglement that comes with serving the public. We know that representing a public entity client is a public service and we welcome the opportunity to contribute in a positive way to our community.