I have partook of too many LONG DISTANCE road trips in the last 4 years and this one is perhaps the longest. I am now in Minneapolis, eating some good breakfast at Hard Times Cafe befoe embarking on the longest day of a 6-7 day trip and a border crossing that hopefully will ring of great success (that is, no problems and a shiny temp work visa in my hands).

We started by heading north to Vermont to see family and friends and though I just wanted to stay we made a move on by headin back south and west and decided to do most of the driving in the US mostly due to time and wallet pressures. We had a lot more places to stay and gas is a lot cheaper. And with 14 metal titanium staples in my head, camping is not ideal.

More on the staples later…

Writing blog entries in South Africa did not come so easily, mainly for technological reasons. While for the first 4 days of my trip I had steady Internet access, most of my time was spent enjoying the Law and Society Summer Institute. Once over, I headed from Joburg to Durban and my access became much spottier, not to mention that Bernard, my indefatigable host, made sure the days were filled seeing the gritty but beautiful urban beach town, hanging with the crew of University of Chicago students/graduates that descended upon the city, and having a go at sufring in the Indian Ocean. In the evenings, I did have some free time, but they were too chilly for me to do much of anything but burrow myself deep under a small mountain of covers and pass out after a day filled with plenty to do and see.

The theme of the conference I attended was the intersection of rights and regulations and given the Summer Institute was held in South Africa, it was not all that surprising that much of the conversation centered on one class of rights, those of human rights. Since the end of apartheid, SA has become a particularly-impossible-to-ignore beacon for human rights, and acts as a sort of modern guiding light that has defined the meaning and institutionalization of human rights post-WWII. So if WWII and the Holocaust represent the generative genesis of human rights, South Africa represents a new era of human rights, a place that revisited, rejuvenated the discourse and implementation in a post-Apartheid Constitution that has been touted, world-wide, as exemplary for its generous commitment to equality and other rights.

In this respect, one feels, quite everywhere, the collective pride of a nation who managed to end a brutal regime and it did so under the gaze of world who followed the drama on TV screens, college campuses, and newspaper headlines. As SA has moved to another era of picking up pieces and trying to build a more equitable society, many in the world are still eagerly watching. But pride does not stand alone, in isolation, for it mixes with other collective sentiments. The collective admiration and pride of a nation, like the sweet water of a river, visibly and freely mixes with a more salty frustration and anxiety to produce an in-between brackish state of affairs. Pride in other words sits alongside social anxiety, which palpably manifests at different registers and tones, to texture the cultural and political landscapes of SA.

The frustration follows from the fact that many are still living in dire poverty and in the last ten years, many steady jobs have vanished. Shantytowns, the symbols and material conditions of apartheid, are still omnipresent (though very well hidden from the middle class and the rich). The ruling government, while having roots in communism and socialism, has to contend with a world-wide regime of neoliberal governance and, thus, must try to balance satisfying commitments with the outside world with delivering promised goods to its population, demands that often run uncomfortably counter to the neoliberal logic of deregulation and financial austerity. Alongside this or perhaps as a manifestation of it, the talk of the town, especially in Johannesburg, is of the rampant crime. As a sign of crime and fear, most middle-class and wealthy houses are adorned with metal fences, barbed wires, electric fences, and a simple sign from private security companies (Chubb being the most common in Johannesburg) that announce they provide armed response security to break-ins. This is serious stuff. And while some of the fear of crime is a self-perpetuation exaggeration of itself (and as my friends explained, before the end of Apartheid the monitoring of crime was not as common, so crime statistic can only go one direction, up), it has in certain parts of cities spiraled out of control. And if there comes a time when the crime abates, the architecture of barbed wire and security services is now really an architecture-in-place and will be hard to dislodge from the mental and physical spaces of SA.

So more than anything else, I found that the vibe of SA seesaws between pride and anxiety. As a visitor, you are enveloped in this dyanmic duality. You can’t help share in the pride now enshrined in national monuments and museums. But at the same time, you also are not sure what path the nation is heading in and you too share in the fear of crime and move your body and belongings cautiously through the cities.

There is no doubt of the governmental commitment to provide services like health care and housing, a commitment that in places like the United States seems to exist more like an endangered species on the brink of perpetual extinction. And so it was awfully refreshing to be in a place where talk of such things is not seen with a suspicious eye that in the US is often tagged as something that runs counter to the realization of freedom and a just society. But whether these important goals can be brought into the plane of existence is another question, one that is not unique to SA but is something that many other countries, especially Latin American countries, from Venezuela to Bolivia are also asking and trying to answer.

Bernard and others reminded me that South Africa is number 4 in terms of producing new millionaires, which is quite a remarkable statistic given how many nations there are in the world. But despite the poverty of the place, this wealth is evident and there was one place in particular that symbolized this: Melorse Arch. Located in Johannesburg, this is a “lifestyle” compound/gated community that mixes posh residential condos with posh restaurants and bars. To tell you the truth, I have never seen anything like this and it was probably been the most extraordinary thing I saw in South Africa.

The United States and Puerto Rico (where I am from) and undoubtedly many parts of the world are no strangers to gated communities. But Melrose Arch took the implementation of them to a whole new, somewhat disturbing, level, in part because the domestic sphere of expensive housing co-mingles so intimately with sites of accentuated consumption, reminding visitors that the point of life, (hence the name lifestyle) is to make money so as to consume, and to do so lavishly. And what brought this really home was that the South African Bond Market was also located here in Melrose Arch. In fact we could see the building clearly from our restaurant, which proudly displayed a large Elephant statute (which, I think, harkens to the large bull in Wall Street NYC). I guess if you are a bond trader, and dislike commuting, and like good places to eat, well this is the place for you as you don’t ever have to leave your complex. Work and play become seamless and thus this place is perhaps one of the most powerful signs that the point of work is to play, is to consume, so that a perfect cycle is reached in which making money is a path for self-pleasure (or at least nuclear-family self-pleasure), a form of life, that does not have to engage with the rest of society, literally. Of course, there are many layers of production that do exist and make a place like Melrose Arch possible yet are well hidden from the visitors and residents of the compound. But Melrose Arch is not fully gated. It is open to outsiders so they can enjoy the fine dining, and if you sit in one of the many outdoor tables, one can fully take in the glittering performance of this social cycle, and for some, undoubtedly it is a measure for and of the good life, the right life, that to which others will aspire.

What I find interesting about the place is that it captures, with unmistakable clarity and precision, the point of much of neoliberal economy, especially the love for finance (in which money seemingly is made out of nothing), a robust service economy (the service in the restaurant was unlike anything I have seen, with people bring you ceramic jugs of water to wash your hands, live entertainment, outdoor fires, and blankets, henna painters etc), and consumptive pleasure. To drive home the point, in Melrose Arch, there is not even a supermarket; lest there be any mistake, this place was constructed as a place of consumption, through and through.

There were many other posh areas in South Africa, and as I mentioned earlier, the impoverished areas were kept a distance from middle class neighborhoods, so much so, that in some areas, like Cape Town, you really had to go out of your way to see them (again this is very different from many parts of Latin America where, in an instant, poor neighborhoods switch to wealthy). On the other hand, quite visible were things like malls and there were a lot of them. Apparently South Africa has been a testing ground for the modern mall. To get to the malls, there are very good roads to travel (much better than most of Latin America) and other basic services like tap water, and infrastructure like airports and phones, are in excellent condition. So it was somewhat surprising and frustrating that Internet services outside of business are somewhat scant, expensive, and slow. Sure Internet services are the best in Africa and you can get Cable, ADSL etc. at home but you have to pay a pretty Rand for it and on top of it, the access is pretty slow. Now, there are many parts of the world where this is the case (though apparently in a study that compared 12 countries at a similar lever of development to SA, Internet access was 10 times more expensive in SA than the most expensive country which was Chile), but for me, it was the juxtaposition of having such solid infrastructure and wealth mixed with lackluster Internet access that made it somewhat odd.

And it also made me realize how much the Internet and access to it had not only saturated my life, but how I have come to see it as a something creeping close (though not the same) as a basic right. Of course, security and self-determination, food, shelter, and health services are for me are the basic architecture of human rights. Without these, existence in the most basic sense becomes difficult. Access to the Internet, though in no way is indispensable to the basic conditions of living, can at least greatly facilitate the type of political work and organizing needed to demand other basic human rights. In this sense, it is more like an extension of or at least serious complement to basic services like clean water, and it seems like once there has been an investment in securing fiber optic (which I am sure is pricey), the cost of maintenance compared to physical infrastructures is so much smaller that it is really worth the initial costs.

This bring up some difficult questions and vexing specters related to many of the human rights (in the Universal declaration), which are I think not so much so how to define them in a general sense (I think this has been laid out somewhat well) but how to specify them so as to realistically implement them . On the one hand, the flexibility and vagueness of human rights is what gives it tremendous currency. Folks around the world have wielded the discourse of human rights to make demands that resound strongly and profoundly. But once a proclamation of a human right has been made, like article 25:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control..”

it seems like the real hard work is about specifying and implementation. We may easily agree that an adequate standard of living may not be Melrose Arch but it still does need definition and a plan for implementation. And so there seems to be plenty of room in human rights politics to move from the state of declaration to that of strategies of implementation.

I have put a few photos of South Africa up.

Some of my favorites are:

joburg sunset

Bill Gates in Tighty Whitey’s

painting of Nelson Mandela

with friends at the NSA

in Cape Town with Anne-Maria

amazing table mountain

I am in the airport in Amsterdam on my way home to the US after a pretty decent nights sleep on the KLM from South Africa. This trip has been simply amazing, probably because I was taken around by locals, most of them who are U of C anthro students or graduate, all of them from South Africa.

I have already started to write a few entries but will finish them when I get back. In the meantime, since I started the trip with an entry about an adapter, here is some more information on them.

When I was researching the type of adapter needed for South Africa, much of the information on the web indicated that while South Africa took the M plug, one could get by with the British adapter as that is quite common here. I have to say that I never saw that type of plug at all… There seems to be one and only one type of plug so if you do come here, do purchase the South Africa-specific adapter.

I am in the Zurich airport en route to South Africa. I was thrilled that I had the right plug-adaptor to use because I have a long lay over. But when I wanted to pop it out to leave and explore the city, I found a very stuck adaptor. Very. 2 British guys assisted but to no avail. It may stay here forever so fellow Americans, you will always have a perma-adaptor in the Zurich airport. It is in the “Pearl: Bar” across from Bur Erry.. Just look and you will find.

Last month I went to Mexico to attend Debconf6 and then I traveled with 4 geeks to Oaxaca. Here are a few photos from the trip, which was quite lovely, though I stalled writing anything about it here because I was thrown into a strom of sickness during my last week there and into my first week here.

I have been to Mexico a few times before though usually in passing or in Baja, which is somewhat nice but desolate. This was the first time I had any sustained exposure to Mexico and it was quite nice. Some of my favorite things about the country and my visit are perhaps a little odd but they are what took me in and here are some of them…

For example, during Debconf proper, I feel in love with the following reptile and very surprisingly, because, when it comes to animals, I usually like the soft and cuddly and not the scaly and spiny. But…. this lizard was…. special. Here is how I found him: We were eating at a restaurant after a visit to some ruins and there we found this little guy caged at the back of the restaurant. I was more than a little miffed that he was trapped (and by butting his head against the cage, he clearly was saying I WANT OUT) and so was about to pull a “PETA move” and just let him out. But I decided that was not such a good idea so instead I went over to the owners to ask why the little one was caged. In answer to my query, they promptly pulled him out and told me he first that he was a chameleon (which does not seem right to me) and was usually free to roam but when there are a lot of folks (as there were) they lock him up.

He plopped the little one on my arm and alas, what I pleasantly found out was that a lizard can act an awful lot like a dog. He LOVED to be pet and basically had a look of all-out-pleasure when you stroked his back. And at times, with a particularily good stroke, he would even subtly smile and flutter his hind leg a little just like a doggie.

Aside from a special dog-like reptile, there were many other things that I loved about Mexico. The food at the market was divine, divine, especially the corn smut a.k.a huitlacoche and all the salsas were better than you could imagine. It is tragic that every city does not have a local market with such divine food.

The architecture of Oaxaca was especially stuning as was the whole city center. It reminded me of viejo San Juan in Puerto Rico but the buildings were a little lower (apparently because of earthquakes) and the environment was dryer and more expansive. Our hostel was courtyard style (as were many houses there) and I think the courtyard should be revived as the defacto style for housing as this is probably one of the most enticing and smart architectural styles ever (at least in warm places). While a home is suppsed to provide shelter to enclose, the courtyard brings some of the outside inside and some of the inside outside.

While in Oaxaca we met some folks from espora, walked a lot in the city, met up with other Debian folks traveling about, and cleaned out Vagrant’s ear which was truly … well I won’t go into that. We also drove for a few hours up to the mountains for a few nice hikes. The town hoped we happy trip and I think we did.

Mexico city, by a number of measures, is one of the largest in the world and I unfortunately only got to see the Zocalo area as well as the subway. The center was quite impressive and especially nice before a thunderous storm One night at the Zocalo we happened upon a free concert, the lineup including the Tijuana Nortec Collective.

One of the most dynamite parts of Mexico City is its impressive and I mean impressive subway system. In a nutshell, the system is large, clean, efficient, cheap, and quiet (thanks to thick and black rubber tires). The trains come quickly, ferrying the millions of riders who pay 20 cents for a ride on a lovely bright orange train. Every time I rode it, without fail, a vendor entered the car, loaded with a backpack that doubled as a radio/stereo, who was selling pirated music. I appreciated the sample and bought one disc chock full of mp3s.

Like most urban trains, the riders are silent and I have always wondered why this is so. When I go to PR, I ride the busses much more and there, as in the states on the busses, there seems to be more open flow of chatter. Perhaps it is because trains are quite comfortable and they lull already tired riders into a state of quite contemplation. Who knows.

So these are some of the things that I liked about Mexico but perhaps the most exciting part about the country was the clear political heatwave passing through, just as it is with much of Latin America. In the zocalo of Mexico City there were various stands protesting the attacks in Atenco, as well as general protests against neoliberal policies. The city of Oaxca was also filled to the gills with protesting teachers, demanding a pay raise. Thousands of them were camped out all over the city center, which is apparently a year rite. Sadly, in the last week the police broke up the protest, violently…

Hannah Wallach is not only amazing because she introduced me to the trippiest game ever, Rez (and is an amazing player herself), but has worked diligently over the last few years to get more women involved in free software. Not only is she one of the ladies that help ignite Debian Women, she has helped spearhead an initiative to get more women in Gnome via Google Summer of Code. So a double thanks to Hannah and read on below for some more info on the initiative.

BOSTON, Mass – June 13, 2006 – The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development.

The money originates from GNOME’s participation in the Google “Summer of Code” program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google’s program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google’s contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google.

“Free software prides itself on being open to anyone with a good idea, yet less than 2% of free software developers are female. We, as a community, need to be actively working to change this statistic, and programs like this one are a much needed step in the right direction.” said Hanna Wallach, a GNOME developer who is involved in several projects that encourage women to participate in free software development.

The Women’s Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD$3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged. Projects may either be related to GNOME directly, or indirectly via projects such as Gstreamer and Abiword. Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program.

Another Debconf has come and passed. This was my 3rd conference and surely to be one of the more memorable, partly because I showed up for the whole time (and am now traveling with 4 other DD’s in Mexico) and partly because of a few problems that plagued my visit. There is no doubt that I had a wonderful time but some of my attention was drawn away from enjoyment toward crisis management. For the first few days, it was due to computer problems (now sort of fixed) and then the last few days I had “Biella Hardware” problems in the form of one of the worst combo sore throats/ body aches that I have had in recent memory (now sort of fixed but not entirely).

Now that I am in Oxaca, I hope to spend a little time blogging about this year’s Debconf but before I wanted to pass along what I think has been one of the more amusing experiences thus far in Mexico. So yesterday a group of us (Jeroeun, Martin K, Micah, Vagrant) rented a car to head off to the Southern city of Oxaca. I have actually never rented a car in a foreign country, and I was a little concerned about everything from price to roads to cops. Amid my nervousness, the employee at Thrify was sort of reassuing and quite nice but he gave us some unfortunate news: he warned us that as we reached this one particular circular intersection in Mexico City we would be stopped by a cop (because we are tourists) and basically bribed. This was not surprising news to be but I was surprised at how upset this made me. (maybe because I have never had such an experience and thought I would mangle it when the time came to pass off the money or offset the bribe or whatever). Anyway, after we packed 5 bodies and copious luggage into our compact Nissan, we headed off somewhat prepared to face off the cop and decided it was best I drive as I was the Spanish speaker. We made our way through the congested streets and headed toward the intersection and as we got closer, I thought to myself “how are they going to spot us within all this traffic?” But you see, the thing about this intersection is as soon as you make the turn left, you hit a light and need to stop for a long time. And you see, this gives the cop ample time to switch on the “tourist radar” and spot the noticeable white bodies. Sure enough, within 30 seconds of stopping at the intersection, a Mexican cop walks over and there is where the fun began.

So he basically told me that I did not use my signal lights for turning when I made a left and that this infraction would cost me US $120. At this point I started to get a little freaked (I already dropped too much money on a rental car) but I remained calm and told him basically in Spanish “With all respect, officer, I think I used my light because I am in a foreign country and am very aware that I must follow all traffic rules.” After a little back and forth, I moved on to the “bribe stage.” While we were told that 100 pesos (10 US) was the typical bribe, we, being cheapskates, just offered 5 US. And then, magically, at that point, the officer said, “ok just go ahead and be careful not to repeat the offense next time.” I was shocked. I mean there was some money being offered right there and I was sure he was going to ask for a little more. But he backed off. Why?

I think it was a combination of factors. Ok so perhaps he was surprised that I knew what was going on. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I knew Spanish. But I think he the tipping point was due to cultural factors. I think he found it odd that there was this little woman driving a car with 4 grown and pretty large men. Given the gender dynamics in the country, this was just beyond his cultural comfort zone and he realized that I was badassss, and he just backed off. Ok, so I don’t really know if that is what happened but I like the explanation and am glad I got off the hook

If I were not going on Saturday to hang out with geeks in Latin America, I would instead go to “the shore” to check out this vintage computer fair. If you are in the area, it is worth a trip both for the computers and for the shore.

SO it looks like I know where I will be next year, the Great North, the land of the Polar Beaver, National Health Care and hockey, as I have accepted a two year Killiam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta in their Program of Science, Technology, and Society.

By most any standard, the terms of the postdoc are pretty sweet. Not only do I get 2 years with no teaching or administrative obligations, they have added an additional year of teaching, and even better there are a great number of folks there who also on the types of projects (both the hacker and pyschiatry ones) I am engaged in.

I have to admit though, once I located Edmonton on the
map, my eyes almost fell out of my sockets. As most may easily infer from my reaction, Edmonton IS far, by most any standard of the word. Ok, it is not as if I am going to Easter Island or Alaska, or some tiny town with one street, but it is not like one of those Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver that closely hug the American border. It is north of the northwestern city of Calgary. So even though I have had a secret desire to relocate to Canada and pledge my allegiance to the Red Maple Leaf ever since I first visited in 1997 (and found out that they *really* do lead a more sane life than we do here), this seemed a little too cold and north for my tropical comfort zone.

Knowing that I may have reservations about a University and city I knew very little about, the folks at University of Alberta were nice enough to get me out there to visit, which did ease most of my concerns and fears. Edmonton is a mid-sized city with a million people. And though it has all the recognizable markers of a big city (a glittering downtown skyline, bustling commercial mixed with residential centers, many opportunities for karaoke) it has some nice “nature” touches to it and in this regard, reminds me of Chicago a little for it also hosts a beautiful river that separates the city into a North and South Side. Instead of allowing massive development along the river, most of it (all of it) is protected as a park with ample trails, ripe and ready for cross country skiing and snowshoeing. Apparently it also holds the distinction of being the sunniest city in Canada and is also 3 hours from the Canadian Rockies (Bannf and Jasper) though it is also one of the coldest cities too.

Of course, Edmonton represents the proliferation of place in my life, which while I enjoy, is not always easy to juggle, practically or emotionally. With each new place are a group of people who will now be part of a bulging package of folks that I rarely see, unless they are academics, and we go to the same conferences, or they hang out on IRC with me (and then I do see them everyday). But as my mother’s illness requires me to go home to Puerto Rico up and above any other place (unless it has to do with work), I am slowly losing ground and touch with many of my relationships. I have not been back to San Francisco since I left nearly 3 years ago, which is hard to believe, I miss most of my friends weddings, and always am reluctant to just go somewhere, because I usually choose to go to Puerto Rico instead.

But in the end, this situation of constant moving may not at some level be ideal, it is by no means tragic. I am lucky that I can visit my mother, that I do see friends when I travel going to great conferences and do keep in touch with friend in other ways, and I knew very well going into academia, that we are like the birds, a migratory flock, especially as junior scholars.

Now, my mom is incredibly excited about this gig at the U of A. After I explained to her the process by which one tries to get a job in the academy (ie. competing with 100-300 people for one spot), she fully comprehended and registered the difficulty of it all with a whopping “Conchale, eso es impossible” (Damn it, that sounds impossible), and then shuffled her diminutive self away shaking her head in a bob of worry, convinced more than ever that my fate as an academic was doomed. This was my first year on the job market and it is as tough and wild (though fun) as I was told.

Right around the time I told my mom about my departure to Canada, my mom also happened to listen to some radio program on the news about Canadian beef and now she thinks that Canada is Land-Of-Beef. And the funny thing is that Alberta is Beef Country.. So what she imagines, is in fact where I am going. Now if my mom was able to see on a map how far I will be (and I won’t really try to drive this point home with her), I think her excitement-barometer may drop a few notches. And that is of course my biggest reservation. To get home is costly and long, requiring a flight either from Edmonton to Chicago to San Juan; Edmonton to Calgary to Houston to San Juan; Edmonton to Toronto to NYC to San Juan. But then again, it is not that bad (especially now that I have a half decent computer with a decent battery life). One can leave within a day and get there that same day if need be.

So afte a summer of travel and writing, off I go in September, and if you ever need a place to stay in Edmonton, by all means, mi casa fria, es tu casa fria.