Writings

Women’s Desire in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent…”
Sigmund Freud, 1926

Did boys have to aspire to be Jesus? They were fornicating like rabbits while the church ignored them and pointed us women toward our destiny – marriage and motherhood. The other alternative was putahood. In my neighborhood I knew only real women, neither saints nor whores, naïve and vulnerable huerquitas like me who desperately wanted to fall in love, with the heart and soul. And yes, with the panocha, too.
Sandra Cisneros

February 2007 – download Women’s Desire in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros

Kokusaika

The Effects of Modern Velocity and the Necessity for A Global Food Culture

In the first part of this paper, I use the McDonaldization thesis as a tool for assessment of the degree of cultural homogenization. In the second essay, I look at the evolution of food supply systems in developed and developing societies, the global trends in food production and consumption and why emerging economies embrace the fast food industry and want to affiliate with the ideas behind it. In part three, I look at the case of Japan, where cultural diffusion has become a nearly natural cultural condition and the Japanese have a wide choice of cultural and political affiliation through food. China, on the other hand, is still in transition. The localization of McDonald’s there can serve as a mirror of the complex shift from traditional to modern social organizations. My conclusion is that developing economies undergo Americanization in various degrees while maintaining local culture and ethnic consciousness. McDonald’s then is the standard measure for functional homogenization.

February 2006 – download Kokusaika (pdf, 293 kB)

Canto Jondo

Nana Terazie was hell on men, because even at this modern time and place the dream of every man is to conquer his woman. Five years after we met, I still had the feeling that if I were to talk to her for three days and nights continuously I would walk out of that room and say, I don’t know who she is, because I’d have lost sense of who I am. I had this drawer full of her letters and pictures. She wrote to me from everywhere. She wrote the most magnificent letters. She made me dream about her, which is unusual. I dream seldom of people, still less of people I actually know. And if I do, they usually don’t do the things she was doing in my dreams. I can’t explain what it was about her that could awaken someone’s sensual imagination half a world away.
(…)

Sept 2005 – download Canto Jondo (pdf, 55 kB)

Jouissance

I discovered tango on one of these nights when it’s safer to go out. I saw these people rummage through each other on the dance floor; their hands were elbow deep in the other’s soul and they seemed to enjoy…

It’s not the passion that brings two people together but the sadness they carry. I once performed a waltz. We pushed each other gently through nostalgia. It was about friendship and consolation in touch, about lying to each other that it all makes sense and laughing at each other because it doesn’t but – oh – it is so beautiful to indulge in the oblivion of dreaming through melody and space. We were very beautiful, like two butterflies courting each other into a cloud of April rain.

September 2005 – download Jouissance