Notes From A Native Daughter

Episode 67 is the great Howard Jordan - he's a perfect match for today's times and Puerto Ricans.

Fierce and gracious both, the Mayor of San Juan. It appears true the administrations don't care if we die. It is so grotesque and real, it's unbelievable. So much so that you don’t believe it at first. Rats working behind the scenes, colluding, arguing, imposing bureaucratic paperwork before humanitarian urgency, lying, confusing the people, letting them rot so to speak. But then you see it, and it is nauseating. Words don’t come easy. I’m tense, irritable, working very hard to stay the course, sifting through emails and feeds looking for stuff, reading what is being said. I think all Puerto Ricans are adapting to everything being different. This Cheat Sheet keeps changing but it’s still made to help people. And, although I cannot foresee what the future holds in terms of people's behavior and their accountability to projects, in the whole I know people here are decent and they want to work hard. So go at it knowing the task will get done.

Status.pr

Maria Tech Brigade - Puerto Rico Tras el Paso del Huracán María Google doc.

Llamada Diaria - Red de Apoyo Mutuo Post María

Maritxel Carrero

Jennifer Concepcion | Center for Disease Control - [email protected] They are in contact with folks on the ground in Puerto Rico for the first time. Focusing on water treatment

Karen Vega coordinates services to connect people without a home with social services. She stops working on Oct. 17 and will offer pro bono services to people arriving in US with medicaid, shelters, etc. | Her words: Are there any social workers getting organized? Bilingual social workers are needed here. Buscan gente joven buscando empleo. No pagan bien pero pagan. Mucho trabajo pero tiene su satisfacción porque van ayudar gente. [email protected]

Water Filter | Lifestraw.eartheasy.com CODE LF30OFF Water Filter 30% Discount

Rosa Cruz-Cordero - get on her list - [email protected] - monthly newsletter via Hunter College about news and events.

ACTIONS:

Cancel the Debt | Cancel Jones

Carmelo Anthony Puerto Rico Relief - The Players Tribune

Efecto Sombrilla - efectosombrilla.org | Contact Tara: [email protected] Uniting efforts of farmers around the island, have centers in Miramar Hato Rey ready to accept seeds, etc. Any help, ideas, contacts to get the sustainable agriculture back on their feet contact Tara

EcoKit Duffle for Puerto Rico – EcoKit Duffle | Yarani Del Valle Piñero (facebook), Aris Mejias, and Isa Gandia, Organizers | Thru isercaribe.org the EcoKit Duffle initiative delivers eco-friendly survival materials. Yarani works and collaborates with several organizations and coalitions on the island.

Giving Solar Light to Puerto Rico - John Leguizamo solar4pr.org

Pregones / Teatro Rodante Puertorriqueño – Pregonesprtt.org – Relief Drive for Artists Join Pregones in helping Puerto Rican artists with their peer-to-peer relief drive. Because the arts are VITAL in the reconstruction of our nation!#ArtistsPR #Relief #P2P http://pregonesprtt.org/you/donate/

Proyecto Enlace del Caño Martín Peña - martinpeña.org The Trust Tierra del Caño Martín Peña won the UN-Hábitat For A Better Urban Future World Prize in 2016.

Puerto Rico x Puerto Rico - Prxpr.org The founding partners and leaders of the PRxPR Fund are five highly respected, senior Puerto Rican born and raised business professionals who bring diverse extensive US and international experience in key areas of operations, legal, financial, technology, government, and marketing. All monies raised by PRxPR Fund will be disbursed based on criteria determined by official expert authorities on the ground and their vetted needs assessment. We will work closely with trusted local organizations to ensure that we provide relief in a way that will have maximum impact on the neediest communities in PR.

Puerto Rico Rises - [email protected] - Puerto Rico Rises

Creating a line of distribution completely separate from PR government/municipalities. They have trucks, drivers, logistics coordinator, containers, and 300 volunteers in the island waiting to start. Seeking 20 volunteer coordinators to be trained and spread around the island as lead coordinators. PPR trucks are going to be tracked, they have 11 security companies that are joining to protect everyone’s security. PPR needs contact with Municipalities and 20 leaders. We are almost there.

Susie Ran Kim - Solar & Connection to Puerto Rico - From the Go Fund Me page | The two back to back hurricanes have bisected the entire island- leaving so many people with destroyed homes, little access to water, gas, electricity and all forms of communication. Immediate needs are power, clean water, and connectivity. My name is Susie Kim. I am a co-founder and Artistic director for Newfilmmakers Los Angeles and have been producing the science and art documentary Bifrost into the Aurora which is based out of Puerto Rico for the past 3 years. By luck, I was in Los Angeles when the hurricanes hit Puerto Rico, watching everything go down. Since then, I've been able to maintain communications with our production team, our friends, and the university students to understand how to best help. Together with friends, families, and support from our community in the US, we are organizing together to address the immediate needs of the island which is energy, connectivity and clean water.

Taller Salud - www.tallersalud.org - Taller Salud is a community-based, feminist grassroots organization that works for the integral well-being of girls, young women and adult women, targeted primarily at low-income communities. Since 1979.

Voices for Puerto Rico – Voicesforpuertorico.com – arts and culture - This is another crew of Latino celebrities and influencers who join Mariem Pérez, Carlitos Ruíz, and Adriana Teresa Letorney to aid and support relief efforts.

Dad sent me this video back in March. Danny en Collores...

If you are Puerto Rican then you know El Valle de Collores by Puerto Rican poet Luis LLornés Torres. Mrs. Higuera, one of my school's Spanish teacher from Cuba, assigned us to memorize el Valle De Collores for Spanish class. We had to stand in front of the room and recite out loud. I loved it, and her, Mrs. Higuera, and the poem. Dad, here so proud of Puerto Rico's bounty. Todo es diferente hoy. Everything is different today. María was ferocious to her, la Verde Luz. But, after a knock out it's back up again, one step at a time, one day at a time. Defeat is humbling. I'm not saying Puerto Rico is defeated. Because it isn't, but the storm beat it so. Puerto Rico te amo. You are not alone. With a heavy heart and in full awareness and solidarity with all the towns, countries, and people suffering around world.

Going indie as a designer was not in her plans. Necessity came knocking and she took her sewing skills and put them into action creating Skin Onion in 2012.

Lady Onion, as I now call her, is also an actress and appears in the upcoming (October 26) Puerto Rican film Sol de Media Noche, starring opposite Pedro Capó. Though we talk about the film a little bit in this conversation, our exchange centers more on her clothing experiment turned brand. I love that when necessity and desperation knocked at her door she made something of it. Her garments are soft, flexible, purposeful, and timeless.

Young, beautiful, and committed Lady Onion is just like her wearable expressions soft, flexible, and purposeful.

#skinonion #arismejias #sewing #clothingdesign #soldemedianoche #nfand

Episode 64 | Five small community-based arts organizations: BronxArtSpace, Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, En Foco, Inc., Literary Freedom Project, and Puerto Rican Institute for Development of the Arts make up the Urban Arts Cooperative - UAC. Bill Aguado, is spearheading the endeavor.

Bill’s career is ample deep. This beautiful article by David González of The New York Times says it best.

The crux of UAC is “to build a financially viable alternative to the existing local arts council and institute strategies for arts support that does not rely on the traditional 501(c) nonprofit model while meeting accountability standards set by funders.” Press Release 7|10|17.

The synthesis of the message is to assess and empower present and future artists, particularly those who reside in The Bronx, Harlem, and Washington Heights. UAC received seed funding from the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund in The New York Community Trust.

Bill and Ron Kavanaugh, of the Literary Freedom Project, are welcoming like-minded individuals and collectives to join the cooperative to build new models of existence for artists from The Bronx, Harlem, and Washington Heights, though it could serve as a model for others.

I’ll be participating with UAC. I recognize we need one another, now more than ever. Together better than separate. Artists.

Grateful for Bill’s time, seriousness, commitment, and candidness.

Bill Aguado

Ron Kavanaugh

Episode 63: In the eye of the beholder. Photography. Silence. Song of Myself. A

Chilean filmmaker Fernando Guzzoni is a poet. His film Jesús is a powerful coming of age film with a different bent. Inspired by a true event Fernando writes to slash your viser off your face.

Theatrical roll-out of Jesús begins September 1 in New York and follows a DVD/VOD on September 19. See his other two works, La Colorina and Carne de Perro (Dog Flesh).

#FernandoGuzzoni #Jesus #LaColorina #DogFlesh CinemaTropical #NFAND

I have spent most of this summer editing. Listening again, to all the people I spoke with this past year and who make up the Hostos Community College community. I spent another chunk of time editing interviews with people close to Evelina López Antonetty, the Puerto Rican leader who established United Bronx Parents. And I’ve devoted another slot of time to just reading history and pondering how all these voices fit in the context of today.

I begin a whole new weekly share in the form of a radio hour segment, the first week of September, when Hostos Community College officially sets off on celebrating its 50th Anniversary, for the College’s internal and external community. I’m on the hot seat and feeling it.

And there’s more but for now, Kim Sanabria. Something about her sincerity, her cadence, her serenity, and her story, just gripped me.

For those of you who’ve seen me these past few months, I’m sad these days. I may not look it, but I am. Fortunately, people like Kim send me off to the sphere of optimism and hope and reaffirming the notion that education is a moral imperative.

#HCC #Hostos50 #ESL #Education

This is episode 60. One of the awesome things about doing this podcast/program for the past sixty-weeks has been the chance to speak with and listen to a lot of wonderful people. It’s kept me present to the fact that there is a lot of goodness despite all the social and political parasites and white supremacists, here and abroad, who with their ignorant and retrograde intellect, insist on bringing us all to the precipice of death.

One of those good people is Melissa Rendler-García. She has been working in advocacy and policy of public health for over 20-years at a global scale. From the heart of the Amazon to Romania to Afghanistan to Central and South America, Melissa has worked on issues from malaria to cancer. Her main service, to support government ministries and agencies like the Union for International Cancer Control in bringing global attention for funding to pandemics and preventable diseases like cervical cancer, affecting poor and developing nations.

In this episode, she talks about her journey into the field. I’m super proud of her and admire her strength of character. Listen to her story, her sense of humanity might just give you a little jolt of inspiration.

Healthcare is an issue close to my heart and should be for all of you. Our pre-existing condition is being born. For now, here is one of my favorite people, proud to call her a sister, an advocate of all of us and we both agree that healthcare is a human right.

Talk about real. Manny Vega is super real. Legit all the way. All the way.

Praise the Lord.

Before recording our conversation Manny showed me this spectacular book he’s been working on for 4-years. It’s a fantastical sight of black ink drawings over brown paper. The light blue leather bound of the book, a little less than a meter in size, has about 80 pages, each one a drawn world filled with life flushed in nuance and inspired by the act of surrendering.

As he tells it, to surrender is to trust in your angels, your madrina, the Gods, and the ancestors. Each second of creative action is trust in surrendering. Not surrendering as meek, but surrendering to the most high in silence and pure expression of sincere enthusiasm.

Manny is enthusiastic for the action of creating in the moment - one drawing is an 8-hour stretch. Here and there is a state of being.

He let me take one picture from the book and it turned out to be the chameleon. Fancy that. Look at him in the branch, knowing the right hue will appear at just the right time. Good dust spreads wherever the art finally arrives to rest.

Manny's heart is in his art. Surrender.

In a few words. Here in this share, George Emilio Sanchez talks about being committed to social justice and its fusion with the creative arts. At a time when the relevance of the Humanities is being questioned, George gets doing it and from its very fringes. He teaches not just at Staten Island College helping to spread good, but throughout a wide network. Best advice he can give, “Listen, listen, listen…”