Gossip and Morning Refreshment: Following the Abuelitas
This morning I arrive at the daily market early, by 9 a.m. I had chicken soup on my mind and want to make some, so I first stop at a stall where I know that cooking teacher Reyna Mendoza buys her pollo. Criollo, advises the woman standing next to me in the aisle as she […]
Editing Video with Subtitles: Zapotec to English
When our film maker participants interviewed Magda, she began answering their questions in Spanish but then switched over to Zapotec, an indigenous language thousands of years old that is spoken in villages throughout the Oaxaca valley. Zapotec is an unwritten language. To learn it, you must be phonetically agile. With Eric at our side, he […]
Zapotecs: The First Scribes
I am reading “Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years” by Jared Diamond, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. For anyone interested in the cultural, social and political history about human beings, this is THE book to read. Diamond asks the basic question, why were some societies able […]