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45  On a late afternoon in June 2005, while I was conducting an interview with my Yalaltec friend Fabian at the university housing at UCLA, he told me the following Yalaltec joke about the arrival of the Yalálag patron saints in Los Angeles. Santiago (San Santiago Apóstol) goes to Los Angeles to make money to fix his old house in Yalálag. Once he repairs it, he suggests to Rosa (Santa Rosa de Lima) that she accompany him to Los Angeles so she can renovate hers. Then, Rosa goes to Los Angeles works hard, begins to repair her house, and tells Santiago that she does not regret having gone to Los Angeles with him. After Rosa and Santiago leave, Juan (San Juan Bautista) visits Catarina (Santa Catarina Mártir) and tells her that Santiago and Rosa went to L.A. together! He is hesitant, but asks Catarina, “Hey, why don’t you come with me to Los Angeles? We can have a good time and could make money and fix our houses.” But Saint Catarina walks away, startled and surprised by San Juan’s offer. But San Juan visits her again and persists, “If you do not want to stay behind and look like Toño (San Antonio de Padua), you should come with me. Look, Toño is lazy. He just likes receiving charity from Los Angeles. He likes spending all the money on his fiestas. He does not like working. He will never fix his house.” Catarina says, “Well, if you say that you are going to help me to renovate my house and we are going to have a good time, then let’s go!” At first hearing, I thought,“This joke is more than just a joke.” Of course, the joke may not have any significant meaning for the reader,or it may represent only a humorous story. However, I find that the narrative of the joke about the saints provides an exceptional record of the social and cultural processes that have contributed to Yalálag community formation in the United States.1 Throughout this narrative, the saints embody the social and economic forces driving Yalálag Zapotec migration to Los Angeles. The back-and-forth movements of C h a p t e r 2 BUILDING COMMUNITY AND CONNECTIONS IN LOS ANGELES 46 Zapotecs on the Move the patron saints in the joke—which vaguely point to the shift from circular migration to one of permanent settlement in the United States—and the ongoing connections that immigrants like Santiago, Rosa, Juan, and Catalina have built with their home community––reflect the social, cultural, and economic dynamics that constitute the transnational life of the Yalálag community that has developed between the city of Los Angeles in the United States and the village of Yalálag in Mexico.2 More important, embedded in this funny story is one crucial aspect of what Yalálag Zapotecs describe as “their way of thinking and behaving as a community,” and what I define as a system of practices of membership that have facilitated cooperation and communal action in the social and symbolic construction of the Yalaltec immigrant community in Los Angeles. Using the saints joke as a context in which Yalaltec people use humor to narrate their history of immigration into the United States, I examine Yalálag community formation in Los Angeles through the transnationalization of the Yalálag barrio patron saint fiestas and three Zapotec forms of social organization— gwzon or guelaguetza, communal service, and communal participation. I use these four names to represent typical immigrants throughout. Yalálag Barrio Patron Saint Fiestas in Los Angeles San Juan Yalálag, also called Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, is a Zapotec village located in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico (see fig. 2.1).3 Archeological evidence indicates that isolated groups were established in Yalálag long before the Spanish arrival during the sixteenth century (Alcina F. 1993; Chance 1989).4 As related in Yalaltec oral traditions, Yalálag was “founded by two Zapotec families, one originating from Tlacolulita, and the other one from Mitla. The first family settled in what today we know as the barrio of Santa Rosa de Lima, while the latter in the barrio of Santa Catarina Mártir” (de la Fuente 1949, 18).5 Around 1524, when the Spanish conquerors arrived at Oaxaca, they found the Valley and the Sierra regions at war. In the Valley, the Mixtecs were...

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