The end of Babel

It was a really good movie in which 3 different countries were connected. There were different borders, specially in the Mexico part with the little children and the nanny. How did the arabic man didn't accept the money? that was really something to admire. He did everything he could to safe the American woman's life and he didn't accept any reward.

The Japanesse def girl was looking for someone to love her and have sex with, but she was rejected because the police officer didn't want and he knew that was not right. She started crying because she also knew that it was not right because she really wanted someone to love her.

And I thought that the dad was the one who killed her mother, because when the officer asked him he was acting like suspicious and well I think he sold the gun because of that too.

QEP IMovie Final Project

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmeE_xgVC5E

My Imovie is based on my journey to the USA and the opportunity given by Shenandoah University.

Special thanks to my Family and my Friends who are always there giving me their hand to go on even if it's the hardest thing to be away from all of them. Love You<3

BABEL!

We started watching this movie called BABEL, which I haven't seen before. The theme is kind of complicated but if you get concentrated on it, you will catch up on everything.


There has been a lot of borders in between the movie and some of them I forgot, but the most recent was the one of the niece of the Mexican nanny with the kids, crossing the border of Mexico and US and he evaded the police men and ran away. I'm really enjoying it and I'm looking forward to next week, so we can finish watching it and then commenting about it. :)

Carrying the Panama flag*

Last Wednesday, during the celebration of the international week @Shenandoah University, the committee had an international convocation in which all the flags were going to be carried by students, even if they were not from that certain country.

I had the opportunity to carry the flag of my country, dressed with one of the traditional dress of my country and we walked all together to the chapel. In the meeting, there were some guests who were talking about the importance of this activity and how Shenandoah interact with people from all the world.

During the meeting, the president Tracy Fitzimmons announced the places of the GCP program and the groups. The countries are Oman, Egypt, Belize, Peru and Burma. I was so excited about this program but sadly I didn't get it. However, I will be participating until i get it because I still have 3 long years :)

Going Global First Year Seminar Displays

Today we had a convocation on the BSC Ferrarri Room for our QEP Class.

In this convocation some of the QEP First Year classes were displaying their Imovie projects about their QEP Topic. It was a little hard to get to see all of them because all the freshman students were walking around the tables and it was a mess but the ones i got to see were from the Violence Against Women and their Imovie topic was based on showing the different types of problems that affect women. They were very good prepared and also interesting new stuff to learn from. Another group i saw was Please Accept Me For Who I Am and their videos were about how people treat persons with disabilities in their countries. It's a very long topic to discuss about because not all the countries treat disabilities person as they need to be treated and it's very sad.

I really liked the idea of making an I movie for a QEP final project and I'm sure that all of us (Border Identities Group) are going to create good ideas and work as the best we can.
The only thing I disagree was that it was not the right place to show this projects because people was going crazy everywhere and it was kind of annoying!

Imovie - Daddy Yankee, el mejor de todos los tiempos!

Borders in Music

One of my examples is Freddy Sky, a Panamanian "Reggae" singer with his song "Dime que si"
which has a Hip-Hop rythm and the lyric is in Spanish. He made up his own song, only that he used Hip-Hop for it.

Comando Tiburon "Te Pille", with an Afro-Caribbean rythm that is known in Panama for a long time because of our mixed ethnicity and races.

Jimmy Bad Boy - "Sigo Pensando en ti", This song has Trance/Electro rythm that comes originally from Europe.

Music Playlist at MixPod.com

In my country we can find different type of mixed rythms on our music because we have different races influences on our culture. When Panama was starting to grow as a city we received people from different ethnic roots and races. For example: African-Americans, Jews, Europeans, Asian, Indians, and bunch of other different races. That's why Panama is called "Crisol de Razas" or "Rainbow of Races."

Falling Moon by Ting-Yu

This performance was about a poem called Falling Moon where she represented a ghost and while the pieces of the song were going on, she was like seeing all this beautiful scenes of the poem and she make us understand all this by the way she moved.

All the dance was an inspiration of that moment, she never practiced like all the same movements. It makes the dance more attractive, because we got to see how she feels the music inside when she was performing.

What did you "see," "hear," "sense" and "feel" when watching the Falling Moon performance? How do you think your response to this performance and NATYA is shaped by your cultural and social conditionings?

What i see was that she was very concentrated, enjoying what she was doing, she was confortable. The music that we listened too, mixed with the sounds the man made with the different instruments made the story more cool but the only thing is that i got distracted a little bit when he moved from a place to another. My feelings of this dance is that looks so relaxing and cool, i really wish i could to that.

I always admire different countries cultural traditions. For me, both of these performances were beautiful and interesting. But something i really want to say is that i liked more Falling Moon than NATHYA, because it was not as complicated.. It was very simple and attractive.

NATYA Dance Theatre

The NATYA Dance Theatre is dedicated to to perform different dance expositions based on Bharata Natyam, which is a classical dance style from South India that combines Technic and Energy. The Bharata Natyam has three diverse types of Technics: Nritta, Nritya and Natya which is the one the dancer showed us today.

I saw all of her different expressions and the way she moved her body and her hands and I think that is hard to understand most of her movements meanings but it's such an interesting dance. I like to learn from other cultures, and i have not seen India's dance like this never.

What questions and values did the dance performance convey?

This dance performance conveyed a lot of traditions and historical characteristics. The Technic she used to perform her dance were very simple and attractive.

Was it anything you expected? Why or why not?

I never thought about India dance before, and this show opened my eyes to a new world. The way she used her face expression and her hands movements to explain a specific aspect of the nature around her.

I liked this show and I hope that Shenandoah open the doors more often to more countries to show us artistic and cultural traditions.

The end of La Bamba

This movie showed us bunch of different boundaries between the same family and in other situations. One i remember that was very obvious was when Donna passes right in front of his house and she asked him if that was his house and he said no, that it was down the street. He hid his own reality.

In the end of the movie he came back from California where he was singing in some concerts and his mom received him with a big surprise party and with all his family. His mom was very proud of his son but something that she didn't pay attention to was when Bob saw that she was caring more of Richie than him. During the party, Bob acted very awkward and Richie decided to talk with him and ask him what was his mood all about. They started shouting things to each other and they end up fighting. While fighting, Bob gave him the last punch and he pulled Richie's necklace off.

I really think this was a very important part of the movie because after this happened, Richie started falling down. His lucky life was ended when Bob took his necklace off. The necklace had a real meaning with something religious. :)

Hunger of Memories book conclusion & La Bamba

This week we end with Richard Rodriguez's "Hunger of Memories" which is a very interesting story based on his life as a Mexican-American. His family thought that writing about his family's life was not a good idea but he felt comfortable with all the things he wrote about because that was his life, and that was how he grow up.

In the Wednesday class we started watching a movie called "La Bamba" which is most about how there are borders between the same family, for example Richie and Bob. In this movie, Richie loves to play guitar and he is part of a band with some friends. He decided to try singing alone and his mom helped him with his dream and after this an owner of a disc company asked him to record his songs and this is how his life starts to be pretty. As i can see, their mom is concentrated on Richie's life and his singer career and she doesn't cares about Bob's drug and alcohol problem. This fact is going to separate the family and cause problems, we will see.

This movie seems to be connected in a way with Hunger of Memories because Richie doesn't speak Spanish but he understands and he grew up in a Mexican family but living in the US.

I'm sure that we are going to enjoy this movie, and there is going to be a lot more comments about boundaries created in the scenes of the movie.

Rich-heard Road-ree-guess

He is a Mexican-American citezen who moved to the US while growing up. His family lives in a neighborhood surrounded by americans, they are the only Latinos in the street. When Richard started school he realized that moving from his country was very sad, because now he needed to get used to different culture, characteristics, and a lot of other facts.

He was on a Catholic school, with teachers that were nuns. These nuns went to his house to talk to his parents about his English speaking part and they made the family start speaking english in the home too, because Richard didn't spoke English at the school. This change made Richard learn English and also able to answer questions in the classroom. The language represented a boundary for him as to his parents, because his other two brothers were able to speak English well.

Something that never changed at home was their believes and their customs. the Virgen de Guadalupe was always going to be their saint. God was always the one who guided their lives on the right way. Everything he did, he made it in name of Jesus Christ, our father.

Something that really took my attention was the chapter about the professional life. Here comes the biggest problem that the United States of America has, and it is the Racism. When they offered opportunities of job to people, they prefer the white than the black and latino people. Probably is because of the image, or because those people think that we are not intelligent or educated and that's very bad. I think that now we should start trying to change people's mind and make them realize that we are all the same, humans. We can all think, work, act, move, pay, and do whatever we want to do, because we should have the same rights in all the world.

This book identifies myself a lot. It's just because of that both us come from other country, and getting used to other cultures is not easy, it takes long to feel comfortable with all the american society.

Where the Water Meets the Sky..*

An extraordinary story about women from Zambia who were taught how to make a film. This new knowledge worked as a way to speak about their lives and their problems and how they challenge their own cultural traditions.

I think is a great opportunity for this women so that they can share with the world the reality where they use to live daily and how they take care of their problems without anyone's help. Their lives have been very hard, most of them grew up with aunts and grandmothers and others just grew up orphans because most of their parents had AIDS.

It really hurt how hard is to explain us each of their lives stories, because is something that they have lived and I'm pretty sure that having to remember this is not a good thing but all of these women were trying to pick the best story to make a film about it.

Finally they decide to film Penelope's story which is based on an 18 year orphan and her struggle to provide for herself and her siblings in the wake of her parents’ deaths. This was the story which had like all the other women story in it, so that's why they chose this one.

And obviously all this women were proud to be helped and to be filming this type of movies which had made them become popular and better known around the world. Sometimes we think we know everything but when we start really opening our eyes to different cultural traditions, we can be sure that we never stop learning from other people or other things.

I really liked this story, although i slept in a part of the movie, the settings and the same background of the story really made me think that sometimes we think we have the biggest problem, and we don't. Outside there is other people who really is needed, and we need to be happy with what we have and use all the resources we have too.

Mi Familia/My Family by Gregory Nava

This story chronicles three generations of a Mexican family's emigrating to the East of Los Angeles. The story starts when Jose Gonzales, the Dad of the family, wants to find a job to get money for living. He travels to los Angeles to meet with "El Californio, who was born in the city when it was still part of Mexico. This men offered him work with the corn crops and they became friends.

Jose meets Maria, the mother of Chucho, Isabel,Paco, Toni, Jimmy and Memo, who was an American citizen. During the time she was pregnant of her first baby, she went to the groceries store and that she was caught and deported to Mexico by the U.S. Federal Government in a mass roundup. Two years later, she makes it back to Los Angeles with Chucho to meet with his husband.

In this parts i can identify the first two borders in the movie, when Jose walks to Los Angeles and then when Maria finds the way to go back home with her son.

Right in the middle between Mexico and California were the family Sanchez settled. In the beginning, this situation wasn't a big deal. The eldest daughter Irene gets married. Chucho and Paco, the narrator of the story, were grown up. Memo and Jimmy were the new additions in the family.

The outstanding moment starts right in the wedding of Irene, were Chucho and his "crew" face with Butch Mejia and his men who start to bother him. Chucho had the look of the angel of the family, because he was the first son and his father Jose loved him a lot. What their parents didn't know was that he was involved in marihuana business and they received the call from the police station to alert that Chucho was doing this kind of things. This day was the start of Chucho's wildness. After he fought with his dad at home, he left the house. He preferred to leave, than regret from his mistake in front of his little brothers. Mr. Jose was disappointed, heartbroken and very sad. Later Chucho involved in other big problem during a dance when his rival Butch came to bother him and his girlfriend. In the middle of the fight a knife appeared on the scene and Chucho killed this guy accidentally. After this event, Chucho became a fugitive by the police. Later the police was chasing him and he got shot by them in front of his brother Jimmy, who was playing nearby.

So many years passed and Jimmy became in the biggest hard-heart person in this world, he went to jail because he became an angry man following in his brother step's becoming a fugitive like him. Jimmy was very upset and mad with all this problems, because he never knew the reason but he felt that the police men did it in purpose. Jimmy had a big trauma for 20 years after this accident until he gets in love with Isabel who felt the same way as his. He felt a relief when he shared the anger he had to Isabel who also confronted the scene when her dad was killed in front of her face. He had a baby with Isabela but sadly she died right after she gave birth and Jimmy enraged attacked the doctor who helped Isabela during the surgery and full of this anger he assaulted a jewerly and the police caught him and he went to jail again.

Later, when he came out of prison he wanted to meet his little baby. The little kid was very crazy, because he grew up only with his grandparents who represented nothing for him! His mother died and his that just came out of prison and this kid didn't pay attention to his dad at all.

This movie has a lot of borders . We talked about the bridges when Jose crossed and then when Jimmy was on his way to work. Other one is the border between Toni and the Priest she wanted to marry after all, because in our religion that's not normal neither allowed. Also there was a border between the friends of Memo and his family because they thought "William" lived in other conditions, so they were feeling uncomfortable in his house, the way they looked to their crops was not the best and to the dog in the middle of the way, everything!.. Memo was trying to hide his childhood stories and his family background too.

Borrowed words from other languages

All the countries in the world use in their language words that aren't on their same language because the words can't be translated to their language. Probably there are differents reasons for each of the countries but this is one of the important ones.

In the United States people has adopted different languages expresions and words that can't be translated in English, and one of this translations are types of food, clothes and some others. For example Patio.. Patio is known in spanish as a yard but a specific type of yard; Some houses have these yards and they are like around the house and in the back part of the house decorated with some plants and flowers that makes the greenyard atractive. But here, people use this word"Patio" to refer just to a plain part of the house for example: with some chairs and tables, with and outdoor view and that's not what it really means.

In Panama, we use the word "OK" because it means like "everything is fine" or "esta bien" and its like shorter than all this spanish words. Also, we use "Jeans" for jeans ..haha, as simple as that, I think that it's because it was an american invention so it doesnt has any other way to call them. I meant, we have changed our language so much, as Dr. PG said, we don't speak the same way people used to some decades ago! We have fixed it and changed it a way so that words are not complicated anymore. For example

Some years ago--------Now
Chiflar-------------------Silbar ( to whistle)
Camiseta---------------Suéter (sweater or shirt)
Libreta------------------Cuaderno (notebook)

These are only some changes we have made on our language and we can't leave behind the Panamenian sayings or well the panamenian words that can't be translated and that is so bad because when you want to use that specific word there is not any word that can replace it.

And about the book chapters we have read "pendejo" there is no translation for that word. It's kind of fun because the word is unique but at the same time is not fair because there is no way to use it in other language:(

I really miss my native language because I can't express myself fluently in English. English is not my native language but I can express myself whenever I have to.

Borders between people

Last week on Monday, we spoke about people who feels inside and outside their region or country border. In this case Dr. PG used Obama and Mcain who were running for Presidential position on 2008.

Obama was born on Honolulu, Hawaii which is part of the US and where he grew up too. He graduated from Columbia University and the prestigious School of Law of the Harvard Law School. This man had been living on many different places in the US so that we can say he is fully grown on American grounds.

John McCain III was born on the Canal Zone, Rwpublic of Panama. From this point the problem starts; he is not fully "American", well that's what some people said. He went to 20 different schools, one of them was Episcopal HighSchool on Alexandria,VA; he graduated from the Naval Academy, US. and worked as a naval aviator. After all this, he moved to Arizona where he started with the political studies.

The American people though that not being born in US was a big thing because if someone wants to be the president of the US, the person should be born and live in the US so people can trust you, because you are supossed to know all the problems and all the things the country had and has, so the person will help to fix all the problems. I really think this is not a problem, because people have the right to learn new things everyday and if McCain didnt grow up in US well he did learn about the country history and problems after moving and settling to his new home in the US, but in the other hand, Obama grew up in American ground, he lived as a american teenager and enjoyed all the american traditions during his chilhood and all his family did too so this made his image look atractive to the US citizen because they felt this man had the tools needed for doing a good job as a president.

In other case, we can use Dr. PG's story. He was born on North Carolina but then his Mother is Mexican and his Dad from Ohio! so he is a mix of races, languages and different cultures. He considers hiself half-and-half so he will be located in the middle between US and Mexico.

In these examples we can see that Obama is situated in the US with all the knowledge required, but McCain would be probably in the border between Panama and US because he has this panamenian heritage which didnt help him much during his campaign. and finally Dr. PG will be situated in the border between Mexico and US, because he has family in both countries.

In my case I can say that I'm 100% Panamanian but there is a feeling that i don't have the knowledge and needs of the country sides. It's weird how this feelings come to my mind when I start thinking about it.. Viva Panama =) i love my country!

Going Global First Seminar Year

Q.E.P 101-124 Going Global

Border Identities

Professor: Bryan Pearce-Gonzalez

Mentor: Brittany Lewis

Student: Blanca Navarro
ID# : 227330