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Peaks of NYC freelancing

I didn’t pick freelancing, it picked me. After graduating from my masters at The New School my immigration status was such that, understandably, few employers were willing to take a risk at offering a full-time job with benefits to a South American graduate student (especially in this sociopolitical climate). Fortunately enough I landed on my feet and have been actively freelancing for multiple clients and outlets (such as The New York Times, Univision, SiriusXM, among others). I’ve taken a liking of this errant way of life, even though sometimes it means precariously stumbling from one paycheck to the next. 

However, all months were not created equal in New York City’s freelancing landscape. There at least two very pronounced lows: December through February and June through August. In film and in photography, these two lows correspond to radically different reasons since the former is dictated by cold weather and lack of light for outdoor shooting and the latter is due to people going on vacations and on-the-job exhaustion. In the face of this cyclic shifting sands, I recommend lining up your gigs in advance and/or choosing to vacation in said periods.      

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Picó, Carepa Style

The Urabá subregion of Colombia has many reputations, except for its choice of music. It is located on the Caribbean Sea, at less than a hundred miles from the Panamá border, just across the gulf that bears its name.  For the past twenty years, it stood as one of the most contested strategic zones of the country’s internal armed conflict. Its history was rife with violence, and most Colombians regard the subregion as isolated and backward; having little to offer but its rich natural resources for extractive economies. All throughout the 90s and early 2000s, paramilitary and guerrilla groups fought for control over the huge profit margins of the “banana axis”; Colombia’s enormous banana growing zone that comprises the municipalities of Apartadó, Carepa, Chigorodó, and Turbo which are also where Picó culture is most active. These municipalities have long been a focus of resistance, as the first settlers were freed slaves and runaway indigenous groups who ultimately gave way to racially mixed descendants.

Urabaenses could care less about how people from the inland of Colombia see them. Inlanders, or cachacos, are people without rhythm or style; they are stiff, socially conservative, and penny pinchers. Urabaenses identify more with the great transcultural Caribbean than with the hegemonic Colombian national identity. This is by no means an overstatement if you think in terms of the musical influences Urabaenses have embraced as their own. This aspiration to form part of the (Antillean) Caribbean can also be easily felt through Picó.    

As a native from the mountainous Colombian inland, I find Picó party scenes from the Colombian Atlantic Coast -which is predominantly of African heritage- to be unique. They signal towards a confluence of styles and genres that I only get a sense of in some reggaeton music videos. Nevertheless the videos fall short of the innovative patchwork seen in this region. Picós take inspiration in musical genres of African origin. From the 1960s throughout the early 2000s, Urabá listened to Jamaican dub and reggae; African soukous, highlife, and mbaqanga; and of course Colombian cumbia, vallenato, bullerengue, and porro. This display of variety of genres converged nowadays into the two genres du jour, known as reggaeton and champeta. What the scene nowadays lacks in the variety of rhythms it makes up in the pastiche of clothing styles that establish connections with new and vintage Latin American fashions.

Picó is transliteration in Spanish for “pick-up.” I initially thought it stood for the Chevrolet pick-up trucks in which they transport the massive sound system from one location to another. But it comes from the vinyl turntable pick-up needle, introduced with the electronic phonograph that the early set-ups used. Whoever collected exclusive and popular hit records, while being able to mix them artfully and pump up the volume on boot-knocking speakers, would be king of the block party in lower-income neighborhoods. One could say that a Picó is as much of a get-together or a party scene as a deeply entrenched celebration of the trans-continental African heritage. Regions of Colombia that are of obvious Spanish descent unfortunately, often overlook this.  

The youths I photographed declared their ignorance as to where the term came from (and did not seem care either, shrugging their shoulders in typical too-cool-for-that fashion). Every one of them journeyed that day some hundred miles from Carepa to Necoclí to assist this one specific Picó. When I asked a young woman to summarize what their scene was about she pointed to Estiven, a tall-and-shy type who was in all appearances their wordsmith. He said in a somewhat casual tone: “Our way, our style, actively shifting. Never sad for our past, because this is our culture, it is the future.”

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Deed of the week. We saved a furry fella from being crushed by this massive truck. Someone award me with an ice cold lemonade plz.

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These kids from Carepa (Antioquia, Colombia) have embraced the full spectrum of Caribbean fashion styles associated with reggae, champeta, reggaeton, and picó. Love their use of color.

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A perfect, mature example of the trinitary type of the cocoa plant. Seen in the innovative center for cocoa research, Granja Luker in Chinchiná. Yes, this is where chocolate comes from.

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Urabá- Land in dispute

Cuando entres al Darién encomiéndate a María; En tu mano está la entrada, en la de Dios la salida (When you enter Darién surrender to Mary; Entry is up to you, and exit is up to God.)

Inscription found in an abandoned fort in the jungles of Urabá. Cited in Mauricio Alí’s “Estado de Sitio: Los Kuna en Urabá” 

Five hundred and seventeen years ago, Antonio de Ojeda ventured out from the island Hispaniola (where the contemporary Dominican Republic and Haiti now stand) towards mainland South America. Hispaniola was the first point of contact the Spaniards had in the Americas, where they fought fiercely against and eventually exterminating the Tanío chiefdoms - Haïti, in fact, is a transliteration of the Tanío term Ayiti or ‘island of high mountains’. Ojeda, who had embarked on the second Columbus trip, sought then to become the governor of Nueva Andalucía by claiming the vast extensions of land that were reported to lie south of the island. After some years of exploration and rifles, Ojeda and his men settled in the Gulf of Urabá, two kilometers north of the actual Necoclí. Named San Sebastián de Urabá, the settlement was erected as a fortress in order to fend off the recurring attacks on behalf of the Urabaes natives, who supposedly had poisoned arrows to their advantage. The Spaniards weren’t able to hold the fort for more than eight months. When Ojeda fled leaving a handful of soldiers in charge, reports stated that the fort was obliterated in a siege shortly thereafter along with its defenders. It was the first settlement in mainland South America by Europeans. The following settlement by the Spaniards, Santa María La Antigua, founded on the other side of the gulf by Panamá’s ‘champion’ Vasco Núñez de Balboa, lasted roughly thirty years until it was razed to the ground by indigenous groups that had – allegedly- sided with Pirates in 1534.  

Since then the Darién – Urabá region captivated the imagination of many. It became known not only as the hideout of rebels, pirates, ‘savages’, and outlaws but also a safe haven for freed slaves, natives, and their racially mixed descendants. I will conducting fieldwork for the next 3 months around the Necoclí municipality, and part of my goal is to show, employing the visual ethnography approach, the different types of collective representations that characterize the area. But first, a brief sketch of history of the place.  

The dynamics of colonization in the region during the nineteenth century dictated a logic of extraction of natural resources that met an equally bountiful labor offer. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Urabá welcomed liberal guerrillas fleeing an intense bipartisan war that laid waste to rural Colombia, becoming their stronghold. By 1955, with the arrival of the infamous United Fruit Company, responsible for massacring some close to 30 banana plantation laborers in Ciénaga (according to official figures), the region started to be known as the “banana axis” and its enormous geostrategic potential became evident to ruling elites: both oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, are located less than a hundred kilometers from each other and the calm waters of the gulf made for a well-suited port for the exportation of natural goods. Paisa landowners and businessmen invested in a road that connected industrialized Medellín with Turbo calling it la ruta al mar (the route to the sea), and took it upon themselves to bring order where “chaos” ruled. It implied that the (white) civilizatory principles of the paisas would override what they saw as the cultural inferiority of native-descendant chilapos from Córdoba and African-descendant morenos from Chocó (although it must be noted that the racial makeup of these groups is much richer).

The atrocious practices of exploitation that were perpetuated with the American company were one of many consequences of the absence of the Colombian State apparatus - which is still felt to this day in many territories. Due to social unrest and the solidification of unions, with a deeply entrenched Liberal ideology humming in the background, the newly formed guerrilla groups of the mid-1960s found in Urabá an amicable welcome committee of angry banana laborers. Banana plantations are truly labor-intensive, demanding that there be some 70 workers every physical packing plant and twice as much in the growing fields, with working conditions that can prove to be terrible. The thousands of hectares of banana plantations in Urabá gave both FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and EPL (Popular Army of Liberation) an equal number in sympathizers. By the late 80s when the paramilitary groups started to the incursion on behalf of the State and the banana transnational conglomerates to restore –yet again- Order, plantations became killing fields with massacres sprouting everywhere an armed group sought to counter the influence of the other. The situation grew worse and escalated when the EPL partially demobilized under the presidency of César Gavíria, and the remaining troops joined the paramilitary, forming the highly specialized and feared Commandos, taking arms against the FARC guerrilla. The bloodiest chapter of this counterinsurgency battle took place in La Chinita neighborhood of San José de Apartadó in January 23rd 1994, when a FARC battalion unleashed its semi-automatic weapons against a block party that they claimed as full of EPL proponents and sympathizers were mingling together. Some 35 dead and much more wounded was the result of the heinous act, with innocent women and children laying among the victims.

The early 2000s were perhaps the bloodiest period perhaps in all of Urabá’s history, and it was all perpetrated by the AUC (United Self-defenders of Colombia) paramilitary forces, which were sponsored by both the State and the banana companies in the region.  The threat is still palpable to this day due to the fact they staged a demobilization under the Uribe administration and many of their combatants, left unpunished, constituted at its core the actual BACRIM (criminal bands). One such criminal band is the Clan del Golfo (Clan of the Gulf of Urabá) which is being heavily fought, not without its irony, by police as well as the military. Locals say that their rule was such, less than eight years ago, that no one in town would even dare pluck a fruit from land under their vigil, for everyone was paralyzed with fear of ultimately facing their extreme law-of-talion-type of justice. Their presence can still be felt as they retaliate against public authority figures and conduct extortion on every front. It is because of this scenario that private Colombian companies have dreaded investing in the area. But there is a glimmer of hope as people take it up to them reclaim this territory as a territory of peace, and hope for better opportunities in the future with a less ominous private mode of investment.

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More about these new types of opportunity on my next post... served to you fresh every week.               

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The cocoa forest inside Inversiones Necoclí, a productive project by Casa Luker that employs 130 + local workers. It is unprecedented in the region that a company employs both women and men, on equal terms, to work on the field - something that has been traditionally regarded as manhood’s dominion. 

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So ‘Life’ has taken me to yet another remote corner of this world. This time around I will be conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Urabá region of Colombia, thanks to my corporate sponsor and employer Casa Luker. Urabá is the northern-most part of the Antioquia State, where banana plantations have held, for decades, the locals by the yoke; companies like Chiquita Bananas are negatively associated in the region with activities such as breaking unions, extortion, bribing, etc. It is a region where latifundism has been the norm and opportunities for a dignified employment are close to null. Casa Luker, along with its NGO Fundación Luker, has a history of leadership in social entrepreneurship for the betterment of education and is pushing considerable efforts towards procuring a dignified wage with social security for its 130 local employees. More on this in my next posts.

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Seen in Necoclí, Colombia.

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Stills from a documentary piece on precarious housing in Parque das Missões,

 Duque de Caxias (Northern Rio de Janeiro).

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""Se o Tropicalismo se deveu em alguma medida a meus atos e minhas idéias, temos então de considerar como deflagrador do movimento o impacto que teve sobre mim o filme Terra em Transe, de Glauber Rocha, em minha temporada carioca de 66-67. Meu coração disparou na cena de abertura, quando, ao som do mesmo cântico de candomblé que já estava na trilha sonora de barravento -o primeiro longa-metragem de Glauber-, se vê, numa tomada aérea do mar, aproximar-se a costa brasileira. E, á medida que o filme seguia em frente, as imagens de grande força que se sucediam confirmavam a impressão de que aspectos inconscientes de nossa realidade estavam á beira de se revelar."""

Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical.

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Seen in Arpoador.

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Graffiti plays an integral part of the cityscape of Rio. Quality is outstanding.

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A Tale of Two Brazilian Cities

Anyone who has been brought up in a moderately, so-to-speak developed nation has known throughout her life the phenomenon of urban concentration: the progressive assimilation of the rural into the cityscape or, better yet, how the hinterland (a rural area destined to be exploited by an urban agglomeration) has now come to form an integral administrative component of the city to which it formerly only had economic ties. Think of the amount of people that have now come to form part of those urban agglomerations and how they’ve come, over generations, to identify themselves with the particular urban idiosyncrasy of the city that bid them welcome in exchange for their labor. It is no less a grueling process. It signifies the end of all that was captivating and bewitching of the rural environment to then face the disenchantment that lies at the very heart of an industrialized modern society. It requires a shift of values so radical that the only possible way out is to adhere to the values of a massive collective entity: with all its pain and glory, behold the City.

As with many other phenomenons in the realm of culture, no value is construed in the void. It always co-responds to, at the very least, another value (which is turn composed of a milieu of many other signifiers). It functions as a correspondence, and what catches one’s attention is how this might come to affect through and through the tvery cultural fabric of urban agglomerations: culinary habits and tastes, dressing codes, slang, etc. Take for instance the relationship of Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, and of Cariocas to Paulistas respectively. The cluster of representations that surround each cultural entity (e.g. being a Carioca) is defined in terms of not like or more than. So Paulistas have come to identify themselves as not unruly, not loud, not vain and more civilized, more hardworking, more serious; on the other hand, Cariocas regard themselves generally as not boring, not stressed-out and more lively, etc. Put all these traits together and you’ll end up not only with a stereotype, but like any wise grandma can assert, that there’s always some truth in stereotypes, you’ll also end up with a real power-relationship that plays out in ways of representation, one that pertains to two urban agglomerations that fight over economic and political hegemony: Rio was throughout most of Brazil’s history the capital and now is but a tourist highlight next to São Paulo’s bustling and dynamic business sectors. It also so much embedded into cultural practices and signifiers, that it carries onto what people from each city are supposed to eat: Cariocas do mostly feijão preto (black beans) while Paulistas go for feijão marrom (brown beans).  

So what about these two cities? Ask any Carioca you meet about a how Paulistas are, what their city is like, and they’ll tell more in five minutes than what I will ever able to in a lifetime (also, I was only in São Paulo for four days). But listen carefully, because they’ll actually end up talking about what defines them as a city dweller, not to mention how their class, status, and education is related to their ‘beloved’ city. If you don’t happen to meet by chance anyone from Rio, ask someone from Los Angeles how people in San Francisco act and dance. The closer in distance two cities are, plus the relatedness of their economic and political activities, the wider apart they’ll be in terms of what defines them according to their dwellers.

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Inconsistencies of the everyday in Rio: rich country with a vast majority of homeless people. Housing (habitaçao) is a real problem with no real solution in sight. Real estate prices in Rio de Janeiro have increased 15.2% from last year. 

Talk about market speculation.

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Cristo Redentor welcomes you to Rio*

The statue of Christ Redeemer (Cristo Redentor in Portuguese) is a sight that lurks around every corner in Río de Janeiro. The Corcovado (hunchback in English), is the hill it rests atop, as it stands out 700 meters high from the beach promenade of Avenida Atlântica. The dimensions of the statue resemble those of the Statue of Liberty. And the symbollic prowess of the landmark lies in a successful combination of gesture and terrain: the Redeemer opens his arms wide in sign of forgiveness to all sinners who have strayed from the rightful path, and the high-ground thoroughly emphasizes its benevolent supremacy.

Or that’s what we are made to believe. That’s the effective power of well planned architecture, in this case the type of architectural strategies that reigned in the two modernist decades par excellence when the landmark was under construction and was then completed: the 1920′s and 30′s. The statute was built in art deco fashion by a French sculptor to signify Brazilian devotion to both christendom and progress; a type of modern Christianity that welcomed migrants of all credos and ethnicities from Western Europe. However, not immigrants from other hemispheres of the globe, whose beliefs, religious practices and races could trigger tensions with the linked association of whiteness and progress. Ordem e Progresso (order and progress), the two words that compose the motto of the Brazilian flag, are of course two synonyms for white (male) and European in the cluster of representations surrounding modernism. Both Christ Redeemer and the Statue of Liberty became icons to the newly arriven European immigrants of the so-called New World. And it is no coincidence that both face the seas while slightly turning their back on the city they’re supposed to be a representative icon of. In Brazil, these many other non-European immigrants established instead in the city of São Paulo. 

*special conditions may apply

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