Well folks, this dispatcher is being recalled, I'm closing up shop
and going home to Jonathan. So I'll sign off with a few colors and tidbits:


First, red: flamboyan trees, in brilliant bloom now like New England maples in fall. I've fallen in love with their big exuberant seed pods, called machetes, which get sooo much energy from the monster sun.


I spent three days in Ticul, visiting Carlos Ake' Poot and his family.
His 20 year old daughter takes care of 6 children, her neighbor, 10,
with sibling parents in the States, a boarding-house, everyone off to school in shifts.


This is the family station wagon, a trici.

In Ticul, the taxis are tricis with motorbikes in stead of bicycles.

The littlest kids have to wear topabocas to school for flu protection, but they don't seem to mind.

I'm off on one last trip, to Chetumal for interviews, then it's time for some hard farewells,
but so looking forward to my family and beloved friends...

Southwestern towns with "casas tristes"

Criss-crossing southwestern Yucatan where many migrants in San Francisco are from, you see local and transnational economies cheek by jowl.


Concrete houses with fancy columns, next to Guano ones, but empty, since it takes a US salary to maintain them; they're known as "casas tristes". The social pressure to keep up, take the risk and head north is palpable. Now with jobs in the US scarce, the question is what's happening to families of migrants: reports say remittances are way down, affecting 7% of Mexican households. And the economic toll from flu and the decline in tourism is heavy.

Guano houses are super well-designed for the heat; this one has closed walls, but most have poles for walls that let in air, and the straw roof makes great shade.

The columns on these houses are signs of status like in the southern US.

This drawing by my student Samuel Canul Yah shows glyphs which read "Ba'ax u k'áat u ya'al t'aanil", the translation my students chose for the word "semantics", or "what words/language mean." Maya glyphic writing spells syllable by syllable, with marks for phonetic and meaning add ons, and reads from left to right, two glyphs at a time, then down a row. The drawing will be the cover of a glossary of semantics terms we put together this quarter, in Maya, Spanish and English. There's general move here to make Maya more visible, more common in public life, on the radio, on signs, in bureaucratic communication, and in print, since almost 40% of the population speaks it. About time after 500 years of being stigmatized and silenced.

On the right you'll find a poem and story by Ana Patricia Martinez Huchim I translated into English. Enjoy!

The flu scare is subsiding, for the moment, in DF people are dolling up their tapabocas (facemasks), public institutions are slowly opening their doors again. It's 105 in the heat of the day, and the sun is a dragon whose breath you avoid, but the nights are lovely. I'm off to Merida to arrange interviews with various players in the Maya exam project, the last lap of my journey.

Fito Haro plays "Rema"

Don Martinez Martín telling a story in Maya, with music and dance

Hello hello out there, I'm alive and well, a lapsed blogger, yes.. with good excuses: 10 visits, many trips, 3 conference papers, teaching, a big project... But now public life  in Valladolid has ground to a halt for flu prevention: schools are closed, people are playing it safe, staying indoors, except for teenagers who are happy to be set free. So far, NO FLU in Valladolid... it's an uncrowded city, but it's easy to get spooked; we're trying to look at it as a vacation. Times like these, we all need a big dose of art, so I'm doing lots of drawing, and put up photos of the arts in Yucatan on the link to the right, to remind myself and y'all of Mexico's deep well of strength.

My teaching's done, already missing my students, who finished off their term by making a Maya glossary of semantics terms with definitions and examples, as far as I know, the first book of Maya semantics.  Samuel Canul Yah, a talented draughtsman, drew glyph versions of the phrase they coined for semantics, "Ba’ax u k’at u ya’al t’aanil"... I'll put it up when it's scanned.  Now I have a month for research, but my project has changed: I'm documenting the first national test of communicative competency in Maya, which  I got recruited  for, since I have a front row seat. It's first time Maya proficiency has been measured on this scale or in any systematic way, and it's considered a potential model other indigenous languages here which is one reason to document the process.  It raises all kinds of issues: how you standardize a language which has been marginalized for 500 years and has been the language of resistance; which alphabet to use, because although native speakers generally don't write it, language has a long complicated history of written forms; and how to leave room for local variation in speech.  The purpose of the test was to improve bilingual ed. programs by finding out who is proficient and who isn't and giving the second group training.    The Rectora of UNO, my school, is directing the project, and the team includes Maya-speaking students from both UNO and the Intercultural University of Quintana Roo,  5 Maya teachers, a linguist, me and a tech crew.  In Feb. the team wrote the test (see photo link below), which was piloted and then administered in March...We just spent a week holed up in a crazy Catskills-type resort in Telchac Puerto on the north coast to evaluate the oral and written sections. Very moving how these  first generation college students rose to the occasion; they're well on their way to being linguists and teachers, as you can see in the faces in the photos on the link to the right>>>>

Only a month left here... hopefully the craziness will settle down ....

Start of month 2 & fiesta de la Candelaria

Can't keep up!!!! Busy weeks... a group of four of us just turned in a research proposal on bilingualism at UNO, major chaos getting the grant in, to put it nicely. A big treat: watching my friend AnaPatricia's linguistics students rehearsing a choral poem in Maya, made with stories they had gathered, hip young kids reading Maya beautifully, very moving....you can see them in photos of UNO to the right >>>>>>>>>>>>

Meanwhile, the plaza in front of my house has exploded into fiesta: mass up to 8 times a day, sometimes in Maya, "Por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi grande culpa"; bells ringing, off-key songs to la Virgin de la Candelaria, who gets dressed in a different outfit each day, then paraded around, all punctuated by fireworks; last night it all came to a head with mariachis until 1am... the plaza filled with people holding sacred herbs lining up to get a chance to brush the Virgin's dress; people selling clothes, swirled candy, churros and holy trinkets; papel picado flapping in the wind, all practically inside my bedroom!!! Yesterday, mid-sermon, a police motorcade roars up, sirens blaring, loud speaker asks permission to ride through the mass in hot pursuit. No problem!!!

Some new slides from the last two weekends on the link to the right >>>>>> 

 First, two cenotes (limestone pools) at  Dzitnub: one  called Xk'eken, "female pig," discovered when a pig had piglets there; the other, with light streaming in,  a photo taken by my housemate Chip. Last weekend, friends Pedro and Violeta took us to their land northeast of Valladolid, JUNGLE... Pedro warned us about creatures, mostly timid but who might be surprised, and the black sap of the Chechem tree that can cause passers by to swell up!!  another with waxy medicinal bark; I was shamed into climbing  down a 20 ft. rickety ladder into a huge cave with its own cenote: hot and dank like the tracks under Grand Central in August. I lasted 7 minutes. 

Lela la Vagabunda, who turns 89 this year,  arrived today, in her camper; so looking forward to her company! Kim says a vulture flew into Lela's windshield; big mistake for the vulture/ zopilote!!! 

I'm staying in a house that survived the Caste Wars of the 1850s,  thick walls plastered with the material they used in Classic Maya construction, very cool, a garden kitchen; I study in the hammock... see photos below.

I'm working with my linguistics students to take semantics terms and translate them into Maya with definitions and examples, so there'll be a Maya semantics book when we're done. The onomatopoeia  words are a trip: Xplux (the sound of slipping), chuk chuk chuk (engine sounds), ts'oc, puc, wiix (pronounced weesh) for pee... 

Welcome to blogolandia, which I'm just learning to navigate, after a hectic week of landing, getting settled and work....

You can skip the bla bla and go straight to the PHOTOS, using the link below.

Classes started last week, I have 23 students, mostly bilingual Maya-Spanish speakers from local high school "preparatorias", so far a smart, curious, skeptical, funny group, in their 5th quarter of Mayan Language and Culture Studies, studying to be interpreters and translators, some interested in research and some hopefully going on to be a new generation of Yucatec Maya linguists I feel honored to teach.

First few days were a shock: I'm too tall,  know-nothing, a  Martian; had to learn too many Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedures: punch in using your handprint, passwords, keys, get  signatures from some elusive person there who just left..but I'm slowly getting the logic: get up when roosters crow and birds start chattering because it's cool; walk to school BEFORE the sun is high and bakes everything; don't walk fast; answer in Maya when people make comments but be prepared to be the butt of jokes; hang up the wash just before it gets hot; wait until 5 to shop because nobody's out, etc etc etc. In the middle of everything, I can make out the sweet sounds of life here, a beautiful melody!!!!

Valladolid is fair sized: 40,000 people, many Maya speaking, old colonial buildings, big church on the zocalo, bustling on the weekend, surrounded by Maya-speaking towns. Went to Tizimin,  big town in nearby cattle country,  not so Maya-speaking, with two friends-fellow faculty members, one a talented Maya writer whose stories I will try to post, the other a scholar of colonial documents who grew up in Campeche. We went to the Three Kings fair/feria, passing en route bike  riders carrying torches, their flames bobbing along in the dark, a tradition for the Tres Reyes Magos.

Enjoy the photos.