The Approach of Light

We live in extraordinary times, in a nation with an unethical, bullying regime that sends troops to the southern border where there is no danger while sidling up to dictators around the world and stripping our disadvantaged and elderly people of resources. Residents in Flint, Michigan, still don’t have access to clean water, nor those in Puerto Rico to resources or a decent life.

In my students, though, I see such hope and resolve; they eagerly seek to learn more about the past and other cultures, and I wonder how their future will be. Having recently taken my freshman seminar class to the Field Museum in Chicago, where a docent led us through a verbal and visual historical journey to the “ancient Americas”—with focus on just prior to and during the first millennium CE—I found their endurance and avid interest impressive. Youth want to know today about earlier histories and cultures: how societies functioned; how they practiced agriculture, government and leisure, trade and warfare, public ceremonies; and how they envisioned or oriented their worldview, evidenced through art and myth. In other words, how they were like us. It helps them understand realities outside the present US reductionist scope.

Meanwhile, universities continue to struggle. Government support for public universities is now the least since the land-grant university system was created, and private universities or programs that pursue a social-justice focus are attacked. Enrollments keep decreasing, and societal critical pressure mounts, while those at entitled levels label a college degree useless. Newspapers and journals continue to debate the value of the humanities. It can all wear us down. Should we become a more resolute Sisyphus, relentlessly pushing the boulder up the hill again, in belief, as noted by Nobel laureate Albert Camus, that the struggle toward the heights is “enough to fill a man’s heart”? Is it enough? Is this what we need to do?

I prefer the fable from ancient Chinese mythology of “the foolish old man who removed mountains”—an elder who believed that his perseverance and will-power at least helped toward opening the way for his children or future generations—or the Mesoamerican myth about the young Q’anil, the bearer of bundles (cargador) for the wise and divine men of Jacaltek-Maya origin. As they journeyed to meet the enemy besieging their community, to perform their magic and cause it to desist, the young man was the only one who fasted and communed with the spirits, seeking strength and resolve. It was he who found power and wisdom by going up into the mountains and emerging as the man of lightning. We need inspiration and resolve to keep strong, to keep working to create responses that improve our societies and hold back hardship and danger.

The special section offered in this issue of Diálogo 21:2 seeks response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, which last year experienced intense hurricanes on top of an already deep fiscal crisis (similar to those suffered by states or cities on the mainland), without any appropriate attention from the American public, and which crisis continues. The article in this special section, by lead author Alan Aja of Brooklyn College, together with several expert scholars and in consultation with other experts, proposes a smart plan, with updated statistics and facts, to help remedy the dire situation, as it is referred to in the next account: an interview with Jorge Duany, long-term director of the Caribbean Studies Center in Miami who has published numerous studies on Puerto Rico and Cuba. The interview is conducted by Marisol Morales, a Puerto Rican native of Chicago. This timely special section offers important insights for Puerto Rico’s future and about our needed involvement.

The in-depth articles in the main section offer new thought for the study of literature, spiritual activism, and history. It is a wonderful occurrence when several contributors are junior scholars, exploring through existing scholarship and theory their own insightful approaches. The article by Reid Gómez brings history—both official and that ignored/erased—and perspectives on colonialism, language, and translation to...