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Spanglish 101, Introduction, The Cast, Part 1
With my apologies to the First People for any offense perceived as intended or a result of my incomplete knowledge of their past, their traditions.
[This story is an excerpt of a narrative from an unpublished manuscript of a work in progress by yours truly. Though not finished, it is copyrighted material (Viracocha Trotamundos, 1996), and may be refered to by apropriate credit to the author, but not published or diseminated without expressed consent from the author]
“Once upon a long (very long) time ago, in a land close at hand, lived a people, the Children of the Word of the Great Spirit in the Sky. And they spoke with all the sounds of Air, Earth, Water & Life. They were fierce, independent, proud, and happy. Their days were long and plentiful and their nights joyfull and given to the telling of long stories about the time before them, in the days of the Old Fathers. They also took great pleasure in displaying their creative talents by making all the sounds they heard and new ones that they would create for each new story. They would repeat the ancient stories, sound by sound, the ones from the Old Fathers, and they would make new ones, to tell at the Gathering of the People.
On the first New Moon, the clans would meet to judge the story that would represent them at the next New Moon, to be repeated each New Moon. At the Second New Moon the clans of each Tribe would judge the story that would be the Tribal Story at the next New Moon, Then the Tribes of each Nation, would do the same, then the Nations of each Old Father would do the same. It varied from time to time, depending on how many new nations, tribes and clans were formed as they walked the land.
There came a time that The Gathering would happen once every couple of generations, and the more time passed between the Gatherings, the more new words were being formed, the more distinctive, their speech, their customs, their way of living became the less they understood each other and the more animosities were displayed. At The Gathering marked by the Star of the Serpent, fights broke out, and blood was shed. The Elders of the Gathering understood that they would each have to walk their own road, and that the People were no longer one. They cried and parted with the Hope that one day their descendants would dream a Gathering of the People and that they would be one People again.
Their legacy has been obliterated by the passage of many generations and many people and by the history tellers as one where only the names of various regions, landmarks, animals and plants survive somewhere in the languages that their descendants spoke and from which we have inherited some.
A People once lived and walked the land between the North and South Poles, who dreamed and danced, who spoke thousands of languages, who constructed marvels and walked away, who left their marks on the ground for no one to notice, but from above. And their many times removed descendants, spoke new tongues and few remember the words of the First People:“Until the Next Gathering”
A Language is more than a collection of sounds bound by rules, structure and meaning. It is also rhytm, sequence, sound and vibration that elicits an order, a pattern in that which we perceive and that which is within the realm of our perceptions as it is transformed by the creature that must communicate.
It is in the New World that all this comes together. The ‘Babel’ of nationalities, languages, cultures and identity that have played for some 50 generations.
Join us while we explore with a view from the house the word built. Here at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the nu children of the word take it to where ever it goes, stand at the edge, and try to see what lays ahead, they imagine it, they name it, they speak it and it is.
Sam Diaz
In the Service of Poetry, Art, Community