Zayunu

Within the last month or two, I've come across absolutely lovely sites that remind me of the reach (not to mention the diversity) of the nouveau Afro aesthetic. Just today, for instance, I came across Zayunu by Design, makers of ethnically elegant adornment.

Green Collar Jobs

Yesterday while driving and running errands I was listening to News and Notes on one of the NPR stations and heard an interview with a man named Van Jones who works with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Cali's Bay Area. His interview centered around a Green Collar Jobs bill that he and some others are working to push through Congress. If accepted, it will allot money to teach the poor/working class about environmentalism and train the people to work in the "green" jobs sector. He raised some really interesting points about the feasibility of the idea and the way that companies are choosing to send the majority of manual labor, blue collar jobs (once avenues that people of color took to escape poverty) to various overseas countries. Since green collar jobs are being phased out and there is such a push for all things "organic," "sustainable" and "eco-friendly"-- especially on the West Coast of the U.S. -- green jobs can occupy the place that blue collar jobs once did.

VJ also spoke about the ways that environmentalism has typically been the domain of the privileged and that they often have goals that seem abstract or remote to people who have concrete economic and health concerns related to the here and now (cuz it's all about the money, ain't a damn thing funny...). When environmentalism is "broken down," spoken about plainly (solar panels as a way to decrease grandma's electric bill, cleaning up the air so that little sis won't have to walk around with an inhaler in her pocket) it opens environmentalism up to a wider audience of people willing to work toward its ends.

Of course, I must say that this attempt to rally such interest is ironic being that most "people of color" are descended from ones for whom there was no name given to environmentalism; it was simply a way of life. Think of truck gardens from back in the day. Or Alice Walker's observations in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens about rose bushes sprucing up the weathered rural shacks. Even recently it was common to pass by housing projects and be uplifted by the sight of the container garden of a ghetto grandmama (herself a vibrant trans-PLANT from some country locale). And Latinos are still, by and large, landscapers and gardeners and migrant workers. In my neighborhood, many Latino families keep beautiful home gardens. As a matter of fact, just before I gave birth last year, I begged/bought a few tall sunflower stalks (my Oxum side couldn't help herself) from a Mexican family whose yard was filled from one end to the other with them.

In any event, there are lots of little (actually major) sidebars and environmental justice corollaries to this Green Jobs bill, the most obvious and exciting being that such training would be a benefit to the overall health of the workers, their (our) families and communities. Rather than take any more detours allow me to direct you to this Green Options Interview .

(Housing project image at top from The Welcome Project website)

These Shoes Were Made for...

The more technology invades our lives with impersonal, colorless and "branded" objects, the more value we find in beautiful [handmade wearable art]. In ways we can't always describe, we morn the loss of beauty and sensuousness in a merely functional world. It takes a long time [to make these objects] and the result is something that only time can deliver. ~Tony Cohan in Mexican Textiles: Spirit and Style

Latina magazine recently had a sidebar about a young entrepreneur named Kerry Clarkson Valdivia who commissions Peruvian cobblers to bring to make her line of shoes ideas.

Those of you who visit the link will see that she has some refreshing things to say about what inspired her entre into the fashion industry. For a young woman in her early twenties, she has a keen understanding, it seems, of the appeal of things exotic or unique-- not to mention the price tag that can be put on items possessing these attributes.

This should make folk think a little about how all things created--musical forms, foods, textiles, housewares--have meaning beyond their outer "skins." For example, the African ceremonial mask or Central American rebozo has virtually no meaning if the buyer of it does not respect the culture, traditions and belief systems that gave life to the product. Enduring art is fused, like a Siamese twin, to the handed-down ways that people communicate with God. To borrow a phrase: To love the fruit, we must respect the roots.

(Image copyright J. Watson-Aifah, 2005)