Monday, June 25, 2007

1 hour writing, 4.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

Please welcome this week's monitor, Marco Mojica, in Santa Cruz, CA. Marco is a doctoral student in Politics (not a science) at UC Santa Cruz. He's currently enjoying being a new dad to his 8-month-old daugher Luna del Mar. Marco and I used to work together at Hispanics in Philanthropy, when the earth was young. Bienvenido!

A good start to the week. I did a couple of hours of math in the morning, catching up on what I missed last week. I'm starting to see how the different pieces of what I'm learning come together, but they're still a ways off from being directly applicable. Slow and steady....

Began working on the chapter about police systems in Latin America. I'm continually struck by how little attention the historical development of police and public-security systems gets in the literature. My work fits neatly into a gap between the civil-military relations literature, which is rich and extensive, but doesn't consider the police, and the literature on public-security reform, which is vibrant but incipient and present-focused.

Saw a couple of interesting movies yesterday at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival over at Lincoln Center. The Unforeseen is what would happen if Terrence Malick produced the local news; a fairly dry story about real-estate development in Austin became a poetic reflection on the environment and our place in the world. Cinematically, it was beautiful, and the struggle of a blue oasis in the reddest of red states to protect Barton Springs, a local environmental treasure, against rampant development, is substantively interesting, but the film was kind of all over the place narratively. The young filmmaker, Laura Dunn, is very savvy, though; she got Malick and Robert Redford to executive-produce (and Redford appears extensively in an interview, having grown up, as it turns out, partly in Austin), got Richard Linklater's cinematographer to shoot it, and got the top credits-sequence maker to do the opening and closing credits. "The unforeseen" might as well be the subtitle for the other film, Cocalero, an intimate portrait of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, during the last few months leading up to his election. Evo is of Aymara indigenous background, his party is called "Movement toward Socialism," he's the leader of a union of coca-leaf growers, and he was elected by the largest margin in history (according to the film). Yes, you read that entire sentence correctly; an indigenous (!) socialist (!!) union boss (!!!) representing coca-leaf growers (!!!!) was elected President in a landslide (!!!!!). While he's not the first Latin American president of indigenous background, it's quite a unique profile. Anyway, the film: the young director, Alejandro Landes, basically showed up in Bolivia three months before the election and pitched to Evo a documentary about his campaign, and Evo quickly agreed. What follows is spin turned inside out; we see the inside of Evo's dumpy bachelor-pad apartment, we visit his decrepit farm in the tropical coca-growing region, we see him jump in the creek for a swim in his underwear, we follow him as he hustles through the streets with no bodyguard to speak at a campaign rally, and twice, we sit with him as he gets a haircut (his bowl-cut is a sartorial splendor, and he's clearly quite proud of it). The best part is, all of these "unguarded" moments are the height of calculation on Evo's part; all go toward engineering his image as a regular guy, a man of the people. Fascinating stuff.

I'm interested to learn more about Bolivia in the context of my dissertation work, as it's one of the few Latin American countries that experienced a revolution in the 20th century. There really does seem to be a distinctive profile in the Andean region in terms of indigenous politics and regionalism created by difficult geography; that may be overstating it, but we'll see how it pans out as I learn more....

Tomorrow, I'll be back at the NY Public Library in the afternoon, and will continue both on the police-systems chapter and on the subnational comparison piece.

2 comments:

Marco Mojica said...

Su Eminencia,

Great Start to what it feels will be a productive week.

Here is your mantra for the week is: "slow and steady..." That's all we ask of you companero.

On Evo... his "I don't wear suits and ties" look has turned him into a fashion celebrity. His sweaters are now sold on the internet for $71. 06 (www.shop.com)while supplies last. If you want to make a statement against the the stuffiness bourgeois conventions, now is your chance. Capital always finds a way of pulling you back in. Socialismo o Muerte...??!!

On a more serious note on Bolivia, I believe elememts of the military and the police were involved in aiding the MNR come to power and in its ovethrow. Talvez hay algo interesante para ti en ese periodo (1952-1964)

Que tengas un merecido descanso
Marco

Marco Mojica said...

Su Eminencia,

Great Start to what it feels will be a productive week.

Here is your mantra for the week is: "slow and steady..." That's all we ask of you companero.

On Evo... his "I don't wear suits and ties" look has turned him into a fashion celebrity. His sweaters are now sold on the internet for $71. 06 (www.shop.com)while supplies last. If you want to make a statement against the the stuffiness bourgeois conventions, now is your chance. Capital always finds a way of pulling you back in. Socialismo o Muerte...??!!

On a more serious note on Bolivia, I believe elememts of the military and the police were involved in aiding the MNR come to power and in its ovethrow. Talvez hay algo interesante para ti en ese periodo (1952-1964)

Que tengas un merecido descanso
Marco