Chicago Columbus Day Parade returns to Loop amid controversy; Indigenous People's Day events planned
Val Warner, Ryan Chiaverini host parade broadcast on ABC7
CHICAGO (WLS) -- A big crowd filled downtown Chicago on Monday afternoon for the city's annual Columbus Day parade.
The Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, which serves the Chicagoland area, welcomed all to this year's parade. The day began with a Mass at the shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii and then a wreath laying ceremony in Arrigo Park.
Many attendees then made their way to the 70th annual Columbus Day parade, hosted by ABC7 Chicago's Val Warner and Ryan Chiaverini, that kicked off in the Loop at 1 p.m.
WATCH | ABC7 broadcasts Chicago's Columbus Day Parade
A two-day festival got underway in Chicago on Sunday at the Logan Square Auditorium, showcasing indigenous artists. Monday's performances will move to the Old Town School of Folk Music. Organizers said Chicago is home to 75,000 tribal members.
Columbus Day has become a controversial holiday over the years as people push to remove statues of Christopher Columbus and rename the holiday.
Several cities are opting no longer to celebrate it, and some big name politicians stayed out of the parade Monday.
https://youtu.be/1exxy-A8QmA"People have to understand this icon is important to us and every other group would want to respect their icons, heroes and traditions," Onesti said. "We are just asking for the same thing."
Community leaders gathered Monday in Rogers Park to talk about Indigenous People's Day.
"If you look at history, and you look at his own journals, the atrocities and the cruelty against Native American people is atrocious. So he should not be honored," said Les Begay, co-founder of the Indigenous People's Development Center. "This has never been an anti-Italian movement. It's an anti-Columbus movement."
RELATED | Chicago Indigenous People's Day celebrants call for official recognition
Meanwhile, the Columbus Day Parade is in its 70th year in Chicago, and Italian Americans say it's all about celebrating their traditions.
"The controversy that surrounds Columbus Day is very heartbreaking for us because what Columbus has come to represent are generations of traditions. It's something important to our ethnic group," Onesti said.
Because of the controversy, The Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans invited more than 25 other ethnic groups to participate in the parade.
RELATED | Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans kicks off Columbus Day celebrations with flag raising
"We think that every nation that comes to the United States should have their own place and tradition and what they believe should be respected," said Anna Krysinski, with Polish American Congress.
Costumes from Poland, the Philippines and Mexico did not go unnoticed by spectators. Much of the parade route was lined with visitors in town for the Chicago Marathon.
In the midst of crushing poverty, not long after being forced to walk the Trail of Tears, the chiefs still gathered together $170 (between $14,000-$20,000 in modern currency rates) to send to Ireland for relief during the Great Irish Famine in 1847.
Have you ever heard of this sculpture? Did you know about the Great Irish Famine, the Trail of Tears and US President Jackson's infamous Indian Exclusion Act?
History is so important to help our present day perceptions.
This sculpture is very beautiful, don't you think?
For more regarding: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kindred-spirits-sculpture
Do you know that every year most dictionary editorials publish their word of the year?
Cambridge Dictionary has just published their chosen word and it’s “homer”. “Homer” is the shortening for “home run” in baseball*. The thing is that, apparently, speakers not familiar with American English – or with baseball vocab- playing wordle came across this word and didn’t know its meaning, so they had to look it up in the dictionary. This meant a huge surge in searches for the word homer and that’s why it has been chosen.
*home run is when a baseball player hits the ball in such a way that the batter can make a complete circuit of all the bases.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/es/editorial/woty
However, not all dictionary editorials choose their word based on the number of searches a word has over the year, Oxford Dictionary, for example, holds an open voting, so if you want to have a say in the chosen word for 2022 this is your time:
https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/
By the way, if you are interested in playing “wordle” click on the link below:
https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
And Merrian-Webster's 2022 Word of the year is "GASLIGHTING".
This book written by the American author Bonnie Garmus has been a joyful discovery. I must admit I decided to read it beacuse I was intrigued by the cover, and being a scientific illiterate myself, this book has been a delight. I have selected some paragraphs from the New York Times Review to introduce you to it:
'It is hard not to read “Lessons in Chemistry” and wonder if Zott’s creator has achieved something similarly subversive, offering readers more substance than some, at least, expected — and changing their lives in the process.(...)
The dissonance between the implicit promise of the book’s American cover and its contents — besides its serious themes, the book contains a good deal of rowing, to say nothing of the sections narrated by the family dog, Six-Thirty (...)
“Lessons in Chemistry” is a book that defies easy categorization and which, depending on which of its suitors had won, or which direction the winning house had decided to take, might have gone a number of ways. For the same reason, it appeals to a range of readers. And whether because of the cover or in spite of it, the book hit its mark; sales are off the charts. Even the kind of rowing machine Zott uses has seen a spike in sales. And the book is now being added to syllabuses: One high-school teacher, says Garmus, is making her students read “Lessons in Chemistry” for a class on the American dream.(...)
In its brief life — “Lessons in Chemistry” was released in April, in the United States and Britain, by Doubleday — the book has become an international success, with six months on best seller lists in the United States and rights sold in 40 countries. Last week it was named Barnes & Noble’s book of the year, and this week, one of Amazon’s top 20 books of the year. There is a series in production on Apple TV+, starring and executive-produced by Brie Larson. It is on track to be the best-selling debut novel of 2022.'
Meet Warsan Shire, the poet
behind Beyoncè's "Lemonade"
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
...
This is the beginning of "Home" a poem by WarsanShire a writer who was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London.
Ms. Shire’s verse forms the backbone of Beyoncé’s album and its exploration of family, infidelity and the black female body.
1. From “Emptiness”
She sleeps all day. Dreams of you in both worlds. Tills the blood, in and out of uterus. Wakes up smelling of zinc, grief sedated by orgasm, orgasm heightened by grief [...] Sometimes when he'd have her nipple in his mouth, she'd whisper, 'Oh, my God.' That, too, is a form of worship. Her hips grind, pestle and mortar, cinnamon and cloves. Whenever he pulls out ... loss.
2. From “Denial”
I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake. Fasted for 60 days, wore white, abstained from mirrors, abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word. In that time, my hair, I grew past my ankles. I slept on a mat on the floor. I swallowed a sword. I levitated. Went to the basement, confessed my sins, and was baptized in a river. I got on my knees and said 'amen' and said 'I mean.'
3. From “Anger”
I don't know when love became elusive. What I know is, no one I know has it. My father's arms around my mother's neck, fruit too ripe to eat. I think of lovers as trees ... growing to and from one another. Searching for the same light. Why can't you see me? Why can't you see me? Why can't you see me? Everyone else can.
4. From “Forgiveness”
Baptize me ... now that reconciliation is possible. If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious. 1,000 girls raise their arms. Do you remember being born? Are you thankful for the hips that cracked?
5. From “Intuition”
I tried to make a home out of you, but doors lead to trap doors, a stairway leads to nothing. Unknown women wander the hallways at night. Where do you go when you go quiet? [...] The past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a f*cking curse.
6. From “Redemption”
You're the magician. Pull me back together again, the way you cut me in half. Make the woman in doubt disappear. Pull the sorrow from between my legs like silk. Knot after knot after knot. The audience applauds ... but we can't hear them.
Source and credits:
https://www.elitedaily.com/music/warsan-shire-lemonade-poetry/1473670
https://www.vogue.com/article/warsan-shire-lemonade-poet
https://adriennemareebrown.net/tag/warsan-shire/
https://lecturadialogica.blogspot.com/2018/07/hogar-una-poesia-de-warsan-shire-sobre.html
Barbara Kruger’s I shop therefore I am
– What you should know
I love reading about Visual Arts, especially modern one. It helps me to enjoy and understand it more.
I have also found it can be a good classroom activity and that students, once you get them hooked, enjoy analysing and making reasoned hypothesis. This is the topic of this post: Barbara Kruger's I shop therefore I am. Barbara Kruger is a USA artist.
I Shop Therefore I Am (1987) is the work of Barbara Kruger. It became an iconic artwork, being reproduced on items such as shopping bags as well as other consumer products such as t-shirts. Kruger has often derived images from the mass media and pasted the words over them, particularly in Futura Bold1. She then uses advertising to design her works.
Kruger associates his work with the modern consumer-driven society. The artist challenges the notion of identity construction through acts of consumption. However, she does not stop there in criticizing the shallow, consumer-driven minds of modern society. She went ahead to produce more artworks that bash consumer-obsessed individuals.Read this article for the whole text : https://publicdelivery.org/barbara-kruger-i-shop/
Remedios Gómez:
I've dcided to post it here since it's narrated by Will Smith and most of the astronauts interviewed are American.
Safe journey!!! :)
Sample menuAs for the holiday, I've begun a gratitude journal, now when it's easier than ever to focus on the things going wrong around us (new lockdowns, travel and food business restrictions, and more). I started it with the thought that at the end of the month, when my family always shared our three biggest blessings of the year with three symbolic kernels of corn that we put into a pumpkin basket as we shared, I could look at a whole list of daily compilations of good and positive things in my life.
Do you practice gratitude in any way?
https://www.countryliving.com/life/a25020918/what-day-is-thanksgiving/
Thanksgiving became a national affair in Canada starting in 1859, again beating the United States to the pumpkin pie. (Abraham Lincoln set the precedent for the annual holiday in the U.S. after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, when he gave in to decades of lobbying by women’s magazine mogul Sarah Josepha Hale and set the holiday for the last Thursday of November).
Unlike American Thanksgiving, Canada’s national Thanksgiving date took decades to become standardized and annual. In 1957, Canada’s parliament set the date as the second Monday in October. By then, the United States was celebrating their Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.
Though plenty of Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving, it isn’t a public holiday in three of the country’s provinces: Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. In Quebec, which has strong Catholic roots, the holiday has historically been downplayed. And Thanksgiving also isn’t the major travel and shopping event it’s become in the United States. The holiday may have come earlier to Canada, but its southern cousin is much more invested in celebrating.
More information about Louise Glück and her work in:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-gluck
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/nobel-prize-literature-winner.html
and don't hesitate to use poetry in the classroom, it's a great cultural resource.
Country and Western culture: music, dance and Lifestyle.
Click on the picture to see Andrea Luellen's presentation:
