I've not gotten to upload all that I wanted to upload....pictures and videos. I will have things ready for cultural lessons though for next school year. I don't have much realia to show, mainly gifts for people, but each item tells a story. I hope all have enjoyed reading this blog. If any one is interested in more detailed information about anything I've posted, please don't hesitate to email me mknappsmith@suddenlink.net and I'll respond as soon as I can.
Tomorrow is my last day here officially. I have class and then spend time with my host mom and sisters.....for once, I'm the oldest instead of the baby...lol.
Saturday morning, around 8am (9am EST) I'll be taking a 2 hr bus ride to the Mexico City Airport and my journey will end around 11pm in Charleston (gotta love long layovers in Charlotte International Airport (almost 4 hours to be exact) - I figure though, with customs and getting to the domestic terminal, finding my gate and a fresh salad, I'll have about 2 hours to relax.
My calves feel like steel from all the walking. I've certainly toned.
I've so enjoyed this journey, but it's time has come to end. I need to get home and get geared up for next school year....lesson planning, organizing, scheduling and well, life itself.
If any of you who are following this blog ever get the opportunity to study abroad, I strongly urge you to do so. It is a rewarding and blessed experience. I've learned so much about the language and culture that I love as well as much about myself....who I am becoming, who I want to become and what is important to me.
I so wish I could have shared this experience with my college Spanish professor, Sra Carolyn Halstead, and I know she is with me in spirit always, but I wish I could talk to her and tell her all the exciting things I connected to what I learned from her. She is the inspiration that helped to bring me to this point.
Te extraño mucho Señora.
This is an interactive experience for my colleagues and students while I'm studying in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Mexico City Museum of Anthropology
The jefe of the school I'm attending, Charley Goff, is an anthropologist, activist and progressive. Quite a man. He and his sister, Harriett, spent many years in Cuernavaca in their youth and both married Mexicans and settled here in Cuernavaca, running Cemanahuac.
When Charley runs the excursions I've attended, he is a wealth of knowledge that I appreciate greatly. I've been to this museum before, as a child, and when I brought students here with colleagues from Ohio back in 2005, but today, all was different. I saw things differently from all the things I've heard from Charley these past 3 weeks.
I'll post more tomorrow. I'm exhausted but happy. These extra 2 weeks have been wonderful, but I'm going to be glad to be home this Saturday.
When Charley runs the excursions I've attended, he is a wealth of knowledge that I appreciate greatly. I've been to this museum before, as a child, and when I brought students here with colleagues from Ohio back in 2005, but today, all was different. I saw things differently from all the things I've heard from Charley these past 3 weeks.
I'll post more tomorrow. I'm exhausted but happy. These extra 2 weeks have been wonderful, but I'm going to be glad to be home this Saturday.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (pictures coming soon)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz de Asbaje y Ramirez was born in San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City. She was the illegitimate child of a Spanish Captain, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, and a Criollo woman, Isabe Ramirez. Her father, according to all accounts, was absent from her life. She was baptized December 2 and described on the Baptismal rolls as "a daughter of the Church." The future poet was raised in Amecameca, where her maternal grandfather owned a hacienda called Panoaya.
Juana was a devoutly religious child who hid in the hacienda chapel to read her grandfather's books from the adjoining library, something forbidden to girls. She learned how to read and write at the age of three. By age five, she could do accounts, and at age eight she composed a poem on the Eucharist.By adolescence, she had mastered Greek logic, and at age thirteen she was teaching Latin to young children. She also learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl, and wrote some short poems in that language.
In 1664, at age sixteen, Juana was sent to live in Mexico City. She asked her parents' permission to disguise herself as a male student so that she could enter the university. Not being allowed to do this, she continued her studies privately. She came under the tutelage of the Vicereine Leonor Carreto, wife of Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo. The viceroy (whom Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography names as the Marquis de Mancera), wishing to test her learning and intelligence (she being then seventeen years old), invited several theologians, jurists, philosophers, and poets to a meeting, during which she had to answer, unprepared, many questions, and explain several difficult points on various scientific and literary subjects. The manner in which she acquitted herself astonished all present, and greatly increased her reputation. Her literary accomplishments soon made her famous throughout New Spain.
She was much admired in the vice-royal court, and declined several proposals of marriage.[1] In 1667, she entered the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites of St. Joseph as a postulant. In 1669, she entered the Convent of the Order of St. Jérôme..
In Juana's time, the convent was often seen as the only refuge in which a female could properly attend to the education of her mind, spirit, body and soul. Nonetheless, she wrote literature centered on freedom. In her poem Redondillas she defends a woman's right to be respected as a human being. Therein, she also criticizes the sexism of the society of her time, poking fun at and revealing the hypocrisy of men who publicly condemn prostitutes, yet privately pay women to perform on them what they have just said is an abomination to God. Sor Juana asks the sharp question in this age-old matter of the purity/whoredom split found in base male mentality: "Who sins more, she who sins for pay? Or he who pays for sin?"
Sor Juana's “thinking out loud” was especially dangerous because the Counter Reformation was raging. Anyone who challenged societal values and ecclesiastical dogma could be investigated by the Spanish Inquisition on suspicion of heresy.
Matters came to a head in 1690, when a letter was published attacking Sor Juana's focus on the sciences, and suggesting that she should devote her time to soft theology.
However, powerful representatives from the Viceregal Court and the Jesuit Order were her protectors and she was widely read in Spain, being called "the Tenth Muse". She was lauded as the first great poet of Latin America. Her work was also printed by the first printing press in New Spain.
In response to her critics, Sor Juana wrote a letter entitled Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Reply to Sister Filotea), in which she defended women's right to education. In response, the Archbishop of Mexico joined other high-ranking officials in condemning Sor Juana's "waywardness".
By 1693, Sor Juana seemingly ceased writing rather than risk official censure. However, there is no undisputed evidence of her renouncing devotion to letters, though there are documents showing her agreeing to undergo penance. Her name is affixed to such a document in 1694, but given her deep natural lyricism, the tone of these supposed hand-written penitentials is rhetorical and autocratic Church formulae – one signed, "Yo, la peor de todas" (I, the worst/meanest of them all (the women)).
She is said to have sold all her books,then an extensive library of over 4,000 volumes, and her musical and scientific instruments as well.
Only a few writings have survived, which are known as the "Complete Works." According to Octavio Paz, Sor Juana's writings were saved by the Viceroy's wife. In April 1695, after ministering to the other sisters struck down by a rampant plague, she is said to have died at four in the morning on April 17.
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