Señorita Ruth

I’m getting tired of tossing stuff in the trash. Especially as I raise a child, the guilt I feel when I toss out another plastic container or glass bottle is getting pretty unbearable. So, what to do? There are several options to change your Carbon Footprint, even if solar panels are still outside your price bracket. In addition, there’s a slew of websites and books out there with valuable insight into the little things (and big!) that we can do to change our impact from negative to positive. Following are some of the most accessible ways to alleviate waste and guilt.

Recycling: The City of Albuquerque will pick up your recyclables road-side provided you have them separated and bagged appropriately. Alternatively, they also offer 22 drop-off points throughout the metro area. As the years have gone by, the city has expanded their recycling repertoire, now accepting all plastic bottles regardless of number, as well as plastics #s 1 and 2. This is in addition to corrugated cardboard, not chipboard (i.e. cereal boxes), aluminum, and any and all household paper, including the godawful obnoxious shiny paper of junk mailings. They won’t pick up glass for safety reasons, but you can drop that off at the recycling point nearest you. Overall, recycling around here can be pretty effortless, provided you’re willing to build into your routine the extra several minutes a week it would take to make sure waste is separated from reusable material. Like any good habit, this can be hard to incorporate into our already packed lives, but as a matter of priority, it’s certainly worth the effort to get the recyclable materials to the curb by 7 a.m. on trash day. A way to do this easily is to sort trash from the get-go. You can re-purpose several trashcans to do the dirty work, or you can find a solution like this one to keep all your cans and bottles out of sight. Or hell, you can build it if you’re carpentry inclined. A cheap and handy can crusher can be wall-mounted and kept out of sight in the laundry room or garage. This will help you save space and effort, as you’ll have to put out your aluminum recycling less often. If you use a sturdy cardboard box to keep all your old newspapers & junk mailings in, you can cut deep slits down the middle of each side, lay out the twine ahead of time, and viola! An easy way to keep paper tidy and mess-free when tying it up for the recycling man!

I was talking to a fellow grad student here at UNM who also works in Operations. He broke the news to me that UNM recycles only 30% of its paper and metal. Having worked in Administration here, I know that even with our extensive online systems, students, faculty and staff still generate MASSIVE amounts of paper waste. When I think of all the Daily Lobos discarded throughout campus, used up napkins from the Mercado, and the paper that paper reams come wrapped in (very meta), even 30% is a lot. Additionally, he mentioned to me that aside from recycling copper, UNM actually loses money by recycling. It costs .12 more cents to recycle paper and most metals than it does to toss all our trash in the local dumps. I find this statistic worrisome and a little confounding. As he pointed out however, the social cost we must pay for recycling will last for a long time before we start seeing the benefits (as in, lesser cost to recycle than dump) of our actions. This, however, should not discourage us from doing our share. In fact, it should light fire under our asses to get on the ball and keep using the systems in place to recycle, as the only way to bring down these costs is to standardize and mechanize these streams of material. Interestingly, I also learned today that a lot of our recycling goes to China as raw material, to be returned to our country later on as all the “Made in China” products that litter our homes and lives. Interesting stuff! So, keep recycling, or start if you haven’t already.

Reuse stuff at home: Coming from a family with a crafty mother, I’ve learned to look around and re-purpose stuff within my home. Like my mom, I’ve stopped throwing away Bueno Chile plastic containers because they’re the perfect size for a leftover side dish or extra grated cheese. The glass jars from my yummy Maranatha peanut butter are now used to store bulk raisins and nuts, which are better to buy because you’re not paying (or wasting) new packaging. You’re saving money & material. It’s a no-lose situation! How rare are those? Egg shells and coffee grounds have stopped going in the trash. Since I rent I’m reluctant to start the type of compost pile my dad has been working on for years. However, grinding up eggshells and mixing them and coffee grounds into the soil of your house plants is an eggcellent (awww!) way to reuse materials, giving directly back to the earth, and you’re able to enjoy the results directly. Receptacles, containers, and tubs with lids are things we use every day in our lives. It shouldn’t matter from whence they came, as long as they’re living out their working lives serving and saving extra food, buttons, or other small items.

Change your car habits: I know, I know. Easier said than done, right? And here is where I confess a dirty, nasty secret. I live 5 minutes away from UNM. I haven’t timed it walking, but since I can get there in less time than it takes to play one of my favorite songs on my favorite driving CD, I’m pretty sure that the walking is less of a hardship and more of the good exercise I need anyway. My excuses include: I’m always late, I have a kid that needs a car seat, it’s cold, it’s hot, etc, etc. I have perfectly good, rational ways to overcome each one of these obstacles, and yet here I am, typing this at school and accumulating a massive parking structure fee for the day. I read in a recent issue of the Alibi that Albuquerque was voted one of the cities best suited for biking. It’s true! Our bike paths are extensive and fairly rider-friendly. My next big purchase will be a good, dependable bicycle. Our transit system needs some work before some of us can depend on it regularly (ever try to get from Westgate to Tramway?), but it already serves many Albuquerqueans well (my neighbor included, his car sits quietly in the yard most of the time, unmoved), and the Red and Blue Lines have done wonders to expedite one’s journey down Central Avenue.

In short, there are a million different tiny things to do in our everyday lives that can cumulatively help shift the tide of wasteful existence we’ve been born into. It’s not gonna happen overnight, and being from a culture that’s used to instant gratification and immediate results, this may be a little frustrating. However, we’re all responsible for ourselves and each other, as well as the land we use for our benefit. While my intention is not to sound the Holier-hippie-than-thou horn of green judgment, I want to encourage everyone to take a bit of time to reflect on their use and usage. It’s a journey, not an instant achievement, which means we all have room for improvement.

Happy Earth Day!

I’m sorry, but the recipe will have to wait. I just attended a performance of the James & Ernie Show in the UNM Ballroom. I offered my students extra credit to attend, and I’m so glad to have seen some of them there. It was brilliant! I won’t do the show an injustice by trying to recapture it, but I will say this: if you get the chance to attend, do not pass it up. It’s a great way to capture some of the nuances we may or may not be exposed to in the rest of our lives. Their take on the multiculturalism we experience daily.

Check them out online:

James and Ernie

And if you’re on Myspace, request to be their friend because they’re “tired of Tom being our only friend”:

Jame and Ernie Myspace

Today’s blog post will be a recipe from Mamá’s Kitchen, just in time for dinner later on.

For now I just wanted to point you in the direction of Duke City Fix.

When I started this blog (this last weekend), I wasn’t sure what the state of blogging was in our oasis of technology. Now I know! Get your profile there and come say hi!

A warm welcome by the creator reminds me that this is a local, community-based effort, a social network worlds apart from Tom being your first friend on Myspace (I have one of those too, but you’ll have to work to find it if we’re not acquainted). I’m keen on jumping headlong into this effort.

Now, off to teach and learn. Stay tuned for Green Chile Stew later!

Are They Talking About Me?
What are the ideological implications of choosing an official language? What kind of underlying belief system does it betray? A major marker of culture and identity, language separates worlds of experience. And when it’s not your own, it’s often uncomfortable to have to deal with. Basic questions that seem both ludicrous and startlingly worrisome express thoughts and assumptions that begin to surface along the lines of “Are they talking about me?” This may appear paranoid and self-centered, but is also a reflection of the linguistic isolation monolingual American English speakers experience on a daily basis. The unique geographical position, along with the desires of the founders of the country, have combined to create an insular environment for English, much more so than in other parts of the world. In addition, American citizens speak one of the world’s most influential languages, affording them little motivation to learn a second language beyond the cursory high school or college curriculum experience. As any bilingual speaker will tell you, that’s not really speaking two languages at all.

So we have a naturally protected environment for “one nation, one language” to function as the ideological as well as the policy-based modus operandi. Our forefathers did not feel it was the role of government to dictate to the people what languages they should speak. Furthermore, it was not uncommon in the early days of this country, as it is now, for legal documents, pamphlets, and other official or quasi-official communications to be published in the myriad of languages that represent our multi-cultural roots. Spanish, German, French, and Dutch are a few of the first languages immigrants brought with them to add to the cultural and linguistic landscape of a country made up of transplants. From a healthy linguistic competition, English emerged as the early winner, the language to bind speakers of many languages together. To that effect, it is the de facto, conventional and fully accepted primary language.

Nested within our overtly anglophonic culture we have a long-standing tradition of multi-lingualism. Vestiges of true bilingualism exist in our efforts to expose children at every level of education to other Western European languages. Even in the face of this tradition and ideological motivations behind creating a country without an official language, however, there is a voice that in the form of legislation has asked both federal and state-level governments to adopt English as the official language of the United States. The current efforts by organizations such as U.S. English would see English adopted as the official language, and in such a capacity displace languages spoken in families and minority communities more than ever before.

What has English done for you?
Regardless of its (lack of) official status, English is the language of the people. Overwhelmingly used as the primary language in all walks of life, English is transmitted successfully to the kids of every generation, and of every cultural background. The American public school systems guarantee transmission by using English both in the classroom and in the playground. It’s the language of formal education as well as of informal communication. It’s present in every form of media, and is highly sought as a second language around the world and by non-native speakers in the U.S. Studies show that even those with no formal second language education, simply by being immersed in the culture, acquire a functional grasp of the language. Its far-reaching global status is recognized in Africa as well as Europe and Asia. It’s very apparent to the world that speaking English is associated with socioeconomic opportunities not available in many people’s first language, therefore it is desired. Most important to realize is that, even if not every person speaks English in the U.S., those person’s children will. Removing the ability of non-fluent citizens and visitors the ability to interact with the government and within their own communities by enforcing English Only doesn’t change the actualities of language use: People have different capacities to learn and retain a second language, but as long as that language is being taught as a first language, the status quo is naturally maintained by the majority language.

English Only policy seeks to reaffirm a status that it has no right to either create or uphold. A language becomes widely used and influential through use. Awarding it a legal status changes little in the way it propagates through the greater culture and society. Education, the media, and the variety of social exchanges that occur in English are responsible for English being the majority language. When understood in this light, the English Only movement is hollow and meaningless, a misplaced effort that could and should be used to attend to other, more pressing matters regarding the status of language and languages in this country.

Furthermore, there are the ramifications of legalizing a human cognitive facility. Like many other efforts in the past to regulate human behavior and categorize people according to ethnic or genetic markers, this effort will only work to strengthen the boundaries of an artifice upon our culture that we would do better without. Giving English legal status directly works against the social mechanisms we have in place by which to identify ourselves and each other. Governing people’s spoken lives will incur costs both financial and cultural that we should not be prepared to shoulder, and will doom yet another generation to a purgatory of self-identity as the same words echo as have in the past: “I don’t know my mother tongue.” We as a society are still dealing with the after-effects of the Native Americans who forsook Navajo and other languages after suffering through boarding schools and the rural elementary school children who suffered physical punishment for speaking Spanish in the classrooms of old Texas and the Southwest. These people kept their own children from learning their mother tongue to the detriment of their family and cultural identity, and encouraged them to only speak English. The fallacy in these efforts is that the children of immigrants become so quickly acculturated that any overt effort to do so by preventing the learning of another language is redundant and effectively irrelevant. It should be the ideal of a progressive, diverse society to encourage a healthy linguistic home environment. Bilingualism should not have a negative value when it comes to citizenship, participation and integration within the greater society.

English Only policies will cast a reign of shadows over minority language speakers. Legal immigrants and Native Americans alike who use the same services and interact with the same government as native English speakers stand to lose opportunities in official capacities. The time, effort, and money it takes to translate official U.S. documents into other languages has always been devoted to the same task since the 1700s, and in no way eclipses other government spending figures which may or may not be as significant. Beyond the bureaucratic consequences, by accepting this policy the country runs the threat of expediting the rate at which some languages become extinct.

Ethics and Progress
Beyond the questions of legality, which on their own are substantial, we also deal with the more abstract but just as crucial concepts that influenced the original decision to do without an official language. It’s been pointed out that the forefathers couldn’t have predicted how many languages we have to deal with. Yet I wonder how sympathetic they would be to our plight if they compared their technology to ours. We benefit from digital media that have brought the world closer together, standardizing and making available more languages to more people. It would stand to reason that we utilize these advantages to benefit all. However, even these flimsy arguments sidestep the underlying sentiment that drives policy efforts such a English Only. Claiming patriotism, these efforts eclipse more fundamental memberships that we should also feel a strong responsibility toward: American multi-cultural and multi-lingual culture, and the human race, wherein everyone has an equal right to speak the language they were taught to express themselves in.

Nations & Language
It’s easy to trace and understand the connection between the ideas of “one nation” and “one language.” These simple associations have outlined the language policies of western European countries from the middle of the 19th century forward. Even before that, conquering powers have understood the fundamental need to establish a common tongue amongst the newly conquered, often wildly different peoples they controlled. While effective in building a nation, these policies have also negatively affected countless languages and cultures across the world. It’s true that the motivations for the expansion of any given nation or empire are usually money, trade, and commerce. However, the underlying structure of such endeavors is language. In order to successfully interact with other cultures, even in the role of conquering or colonizing power, the language “issue” must be addressed.

It would be difficult to enumerate all the instances of languages being abandoned, by either will or force, for another as a result of cultural and social pressure. However, I don’t have to stray far from the Southwest to find evidence of multiple efforts throughout history to establish, through force, the use of the European language of power. First it was Spanish, and then it was English. The first established a trans-continental identity for a large number of inhabitants of the Americas, and the second redefined that identity as political borders changed and nations exchanged land for peace. As an example, New Mexico has belonged to the Spanish Empire, the Mexican nation, and of course the United States.

In this history, we have instances of Native Americans being forcefully acculturated into both Spanish and English speaking roles. A direct result of this forced acculturation is the loss of Native American languages. Across the country and the Americas, the status of native tongues is dire as they are constantly decreasing in usage. This situation is detrimental to those that study the world’s languages, but is more immediately a blow to the cultural and self-identity of the speakers. The punitive nature of forced acculturation becomes a deterrent when people that have suffered punishment are unwilling to pass on a minority tongue to their children for fear of similar repercussions on them.

Native Americans were introduced to Spanish in the 1600s, and it’s effected a notable difference in their respective languages from that time forward. Resistance to learn Spanish helped preserve Navajo, Apache, the Pueblo languages and others for 400 years. Yet it was impossible to successfully fend off the Spanish and later English language influences. There exist records, as they do all across the Americas, of priests and other workers collecting the words and meanings of these unfamiliar, radically different languages. These records are invaluable as linguists try to piece together languages that are no longer fully realized in conversation. Words and meaning have been lost beneath the wheels of progress in the majority language of the day, and eventually century.

Currently, in the same geographical area, English plays that role, surrounding communities that speak Native American languages, as well as Spanish, Vietnamese, and other immigrant languages. What are the effects of having English as a non-official majority language surrounding Native American languages that are on the decline in speakers? What are the effects of having linguistic and cultural contact with other major languages of the world where English is the majority and Spanish, Hindi, Farsi, German or Korean are the minority? These interactions breed consternation and worry in some, interest and research questions in linguists. For the sake of both, these issues must be addressed.

While the U.S. has never had an official language, a rarity in the day and age of the modern nation-state, the question whether to adopt English as the official language seems to remain uneasily unanswered.

Immigrations and Emotion
At a Q & A with the Monticello, MN Chamber of Commerce, Congresswoman Michele Bachman (R-MN) pointed out that America is being lost to immigrants, and that a fence at the border between Mexico and the U.S. from Arizona to Texas is a well-thought-out answer to the seeming problem. Following is the excerpt from the Monticello Times:

She touched on various topics, including the Iraq war, immigration control, healthcare and energy conservation.

She was particularly emotional about immigration, a subject that she made headlines with back in February when she was very critical of the system that allowed the woman charged with crashing into a bus in Cottonwood, Minn., to continue driving.

“We’re losing our country,” she said. “People are not assimilating themselves to America. They’re not speaking English, and you must speak it if you want to succeed here in this country.”

A Monticello businessman asked about a fence along the southern border of Texas and Arizona.

“The money is there. Why haven’t we seen anything?” he asked.

“Exactly. The money is there. It’s our (Congress’) fault. We aren’t doing our job here,” Bachmann replied. “And the argument that fences don’t work doesn’t hold water. Look at Israel and Palestine Fences work. Maybe people have too much interest or benefit from open borders.”

Where to begin! I’d like to address first the flagrant misunderstanding she seems to have regarding the “success” of fences in Israel and Palestine. Obviously a congressperson that hasn’t traveled to the region, or one who keeps up with international news, because if she did, she’d know that success is elusive in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and that the fence she so righteously champions is one put in place as a deterrent from a population with whom Israel is in frequent conflict, and whose goal is the ethnic cleansing of Israelis in certain areas they inhabit within that fence. In other words, the fence is part of a comprehensive defense system against enemies with whom they’re at war. At least one Minnesotan agrees.

To equate the necessity of the Israeli-Palestinian fence with one along the southern border of the U.S. is nothing short of ludicrous and incongruous. It minimizes the struggle between Israel and Palestine, equating it to the overblown immigration media circus in this country, and it further scandalizes an issue that gets little rational thought and much ideological abuse. This irrational urgency in finishing the fence between the U.S. and Mexico has lead to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, waiving (via congress approved waivers) more than 30 laws in place to protect property, environment, and people.

An immediate trigger of suspicion for me is the report that the congresswoman got “particularly emotional” regarding immigration policies. This is indicative of an opinion not based on fact or figures, but on a “gut feeling,” or a set of ideas cobbled together through hearsay or misunderstanding about the topic at hand. To be led, as a politician, by one’s emotions regarding any policy will inevitably cause one to proceed with blinders on, to champion things other than logical courses of action or clear-headed notions of the facts, thus motivating legislation that does not have a clear practical goal, but rather serves to stand as an ideological statement of such emotions. She appeals to those present by using words like “losing our country,” which is a baseless statement meant to rile the emotions. Again, a clear indication of a lack of knowledge regarding the issue, and furthermore an encouragement to others adopt similar myopic views.

Congresswoman Bachman would be well-recommended to visit the areas about which she speaks with such ignorant command. By standing next to and appreciating the full meaning of the wall between Israel and Palestine, I would hope she might come to appreciate its true purpose and reason for existence. By visiting the American Southwest and staring out across the vast miles of desert the border traverses, she might come to understand that what doesn’t hold water is her unilateral, uneducated view of what a fence will and won’t do.

A further discussion of immigrant assimilation, beginning with a critical view of English Only policies and the demystification of bilingualism will follow in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned!

Tell me a little about yourself
I’m always hard-pressed to fill in an “About Me” blurb or make an effort to “Tell [you] about [my]rself.” It’s certainly not an easy question to answer, and the more I think about it, the more complicated it gets. My reaction to such tasks is always the same: “Oh man. Where do I begin?”
Encompassing even some part, much less the entirety, of one’s being is challenging for many reasons. Self-identity is an abstract that is often hard to articulate successfully. How we view ourselves is dependent on outside factors and variables, many of which we have no control over. We internalize events around us, absorbing their effects on us and drawing conclusions about ourselves based on those experiences.
Self-identity is a complex matter. Not only is the average señorita plagued with questions of body image and adequacy as a person and a woman, but she is also bombarded with the meta conversations regarding these issues. Whether or not I should be worried about my weight, hair, the condition of my skin or how much money is in my wallet; it can all get rather confusing with experts and the media also weighing in. After all, the only way to get a good idea of who we might be is by looking at our reflection on the mirror of society. But the images we receive as feedback are often blurry, out of focus, or wholly questionable.
So, who or what are we?
Humans exist as a paradox between being unique and being just like everyone else. Our individuality is both precious and commonplace, as it is the most important journey we embark on, but only to ourselves. We talk about ourselves the most, we think about our own situations more than anyone else’s, and we view the world in an ego-centric way, one that often seeks out the benefit to the self above all else.
Contrasting with our self interest in the name of survival, we’re also social creatures who depend on each other for many of our needs and wants. We’ve created countless cultures and societies to fulfill needs that we can’t achieve on our own. Within these social groups we develop hierarchies, social networks, conventions, common ground and shared experiences, and many other indexes by which we identify with others.
Language is a telling marker of identity. We evaluate others by their speech, and are in return also dissected by the things we say. Words and specific ways of saying them announce to others where we’re from, our age group, our socio-economic status, and also betrays some of our world view. This reciprocal indexing occurs with nary a conscious thought, most of the time, and we operate in our day to day lives exacting very little effort to communicate our needs and wants.
So, really, tell me about yourself
A quirky grad student in the business of making observations about our language and culture. An immigrant with dual citizenship who’s been in the U.S. for over 15 years. A desert rat, born and bred all along the sands of northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. A mother, sister, daughter. An aspiring writer interested in art, music, politics, and many other things.

This space is an expression of all those things, an analysis of what makes you, you and me, me. If you know the complexities self-identity in the Southwest, stick around, I’m hoping to unravel some of those intricate tapestries. If you don’t know what it’s like, stick around, and gain new insight into the people and places of this significant American region.