A new García Márquez novel, or not

On May 6 and 7, the news raced up and down the Americas and the Spanish-speaking world that Gabriel García Márquez was putting the "final touches" on a new novel, also focused on love, as were Love in the Time of Cholera, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores. This news came out after Gabo was interviewed by an old friend, radio journalist Darío Arizmendi, who went to see García Márquez at his residence in Mexico City. Arizmendi also claimed that the novel would be published before the end of the year. Since Arizmendi's considered a credible source and a friend of the Colombian writer, the news was taken at face value.

But the next day, after the news made the rounds, his publishers, both on the global level and in Colombia, denied having any news of a forthcoming novel, although they said they knew García Márquez was working on something. According to the culture editor of Bogotá's El Tiempo, Andrés Zambrano, quoted in Argentine newspaper Los Andes, it may have all been a misunderstanding:“Although Arizmendi is a very serious journalist and has had a long friendship with Gabo, he is not part of his most intimate circle. Let's compare his version with another source that does have a very close relationship with García Márquez and confirmed the fact that the news was not true. Also, the editor of Norma Colombia said that at 81 years of age, the author has his moments of not very much lucidity and he very well might have given that information out to Arizmendi."

Another possibility occurs to me: The novel does exist, and will be released before the end of the year, but publishers are being extra-secretive because of the piracy problems surrounding the release of García Márquez's more recent books.

I don't know, whatever the exact truth, for me it is another signal of the great man's decline, when friends and associates must talk over one another to disclaim or reaffirm news of a forthcoming book. The literary reputation of García Márquez will remain intact, but the solid, radiant man in the guayabera shirt who received the Nobel prize has given way to a man no longer in total control of his increasingly blurry public image.

On the other hand, I seem to remember vaguely reading somewhere that in fact Cholera and Melancholy Whores were part of a projected trilogy on the theme of love. I will not give up hope that PR flaps aside, Gabo has another trick up his sleeve, and will redeem what to me seemed to me the anemic Memories of My Melancholy Whores, with his next and perhaps final novel, if it exists.

(Note: Thanks to Out of the Woods Now for the original alert on this story.)

Five years without Mr. Sailormoon

Poet Waly Salomão, aka "Waly Sailormoon," was a key part of Brazil's literary/musical/artistic counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s and remained influential until his death in May 2003. He published criticism, poetry and wrote song lyrics for many of the greats to emerge out of the ferment of the Tropicália movement: Gal Costa, Maria Bethania and her kid brother Caetano Veloso, and perhaps most significantly, since their collaboration was a deep ongoing partnership between poet and musician: Jards Macalé.

With Macalé, Salomão wrote two of the best-known songs ("Vapor barato" and "Mal secreto") on Gal Costa's famous 1971 live album FA-TAL, Gal a todo vapor, a late brilliant product of Brazil's by-then beleaguered counterculture, which had gone semi-underground or been scattered to the four winds by the military dictatorship. Salomão also wrote a third song on that album, "Luz do sol," in collaboration with Carlos Pinto. Not only that, but he directed the live show, which went down as perhaps the most influential single live pop music performance in Brazilian history. This is how poet and journalist Torquato Neto described the show in the October 25, 1971 edition of his newspaper column "General Jelly," which evaded censorship with its cryptic, fragmentary, poetic, mystical language: "Gal's show, friends. FA-TAL is decisive, there's no drama in this fact. The poet Sailormoon, thank God, does not wash his hands. And how many blind and defeated people are out there, with well-scrubbed hands, my friends. Everything flowing, everything is an understatement, everything was on that stage ...

Macalé's second album Aprender a nadar (1974), a deeply textured and melodic sonic adventure, was also the product of a meeting of minds with Salomão. Their musical partnership was also anthologized in a more recent Macalé album called Real Grandeza. On its cover, there's a picture of the two chilling out together, in the hairy, bearded days of the so-called desbunde (slang that can be loosely translated as "letting loose"). This was the generalized term for the hedonistic, individualistic, somewhat post-ideological 1970s aftermath to the more protest-oriented late 1960s in Brazil.

Salomão is also known for his own poetry and a reflective critical biography of visual artist Hélio Oiticica called Qual É o parangolé? When he died, in May 2003, Salomão had been appointed four months before to head a national books promotion program by Culture Minister Gilberto Gil. In the Youtube video below, you can see Salomão recite part of his "Mal secreto" while sitting in a Rio bar; the song is then performed by Luiz Melodia.

2666: a critical odyssey

So it looks like the fat advance copies of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 in English translation have begun arriving in reviewers' mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how this book is received, after the gush of critical (and reader) enthusiasm for The Savage Detectives last year. My opinion, which goes against the opinion of many writers and critics (such as pioneering Bolaño booster Francisco Goldman), is that The Savage Detectives is the better work, more satisfying, less self-conscious, more fun, more a book that will outlast whatever hype becomes attached to it. And I think The Savage Detectives is a deeper book in the end though the themes of 2666 would seem perhaps to carry more ballast: death and evil.

I wrote about Bolaño for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2004, the year after Bolaño's death, and the review/essay was finally published on the cover of the Lit supplement in early 2005. I wouldn't add much more to my appraisal of Bolaño, except maybe a more detailed analysis of The Savage Detectives and how it fits into the context I lay out in that essay.

Scott Esposito also has an essay in Hermano Cerdo about Bolaño hype, his slight embarrassment over it, and what it might say about Bolaño's future place in the English-language literary marketplace (read: "world" literature canon).

Latin America's food problem

I've been interested lately in the big changes I see in Brazil and Mexico. Kind of like in China, large sectors of the underclass have come to access more prosperous and stable lifestyles, including everything from home ownership to private education and home computers, and in general opportunities that they were formerly marginalized from. But now global economic crises like the food panic and the spiking price of oil threaten that fragile but I think very positive change in these societies. The article is published below, with thanks to New America Media.

I have recently rejoined New America Media as a New York-based contributing editor. I'll be writing about Latin America, Latin Americans in the United States, politics, culture, media, etc. New America Media produces, aggregates and disseminates multimedia content for and from the youth, immigrant and ethnic media sectors on a national level.

Here's the story:

Food Crisis Reverses Middle Class Trend in Latin America

Editor’s Note: The food crisis in Latin America is eroding the spending power of the new middle class, and with it, their optimism in the future of the region’s economy, writes NAM contributing editor Marcelo Ballvé.

In Latin America, the global food crisis has done more than just trigger protests and force governments to scramble for stopgap solutions. The crisis has begun to reverse the most positive regional trend of recent years: the decline of poverty and the nascent emergence of a new middle class.

Boosted by consistent economic growth, low inflation and government social spending, working poor people across Latin America –especially in Brazil and Mexico – saw their spending power climb during the last five years, until they achieved the trappings of a middle class lifestyle. They began to enjoy expanded access to consumer goods, home ownership and credit, as well as more stable jobs and careers.

In Brazil, this phenomenon was dubbed the "China effect," since like in China it seemed as if a new consumer class had been created overnight.

The advent of a new middle-income sector (in reality a post-industrial working class or lower-middle class tied to the services industry) was widely hailed as a sign that Latin America was finally turning the corner in its struggle against poverty and inequality. As recently as late last year, The Economist published a long feature on the theme, headlined, "Adiós to Poverty, Hola to Consumption."

For a time it seemed as if there were no clouds on the horizon, and the economic rise of these households couldn't be checked. But now the food crisis is unraveling their spending power, the basis of their new opportunities. In every country in the region, inflation has reared its head again, mainly because of the spiraling upward trend of oil and food prices. Pay raises, if there are any, are not keeping pace, and the end result may be that millions slip back into poverty, their incomes slowly gnawed away by grocery bills.

One study, released April 18, estimates that the food crisis will cause up to 15 million Latin Americans to fall – or return to their former place – below the poverty line.

"This is a dramatic situation for a large number of people," said José Luis Machinea, director of the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, which released the study.

Many Latin American leaders have raced to limit or regulate grain out-shipments (Argentina's government has slapped a 27 percent tax on soybean exports), instill price controls, or promise government-financed food stockpiles. But after decades of deregulations, privatizations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA (which led to the liberalization of Mexico's corn market), it seems unlikely that state-directed efforts will turn out to be more than improvised defenses against the tide of price pressures.

What's certain is that the crisis is inflating the prices of Latin America's most emblematic and widely consumed foods.

In Mexico, an alliance of farm groups recently sent a strongly worded message to President Felipe Calderón, the subtext of which was this: It's the price of tortillas, stupid. It was their attempt to shake his administration out of what they believe to be its complacency in the face of the food crisis, which in Mexico has caused the price of staples like eggs, milk and corn to shoot up.

Their communiqué said that within months the price of corn-based tortillas would likely reach the psychological significant threshold of 11 pesos a kilo, or roughly the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. For over a year now, since the January 2007 protests against tortilla price-hikes dubbed "the tortilla wars," Mexicans have feared the advent of the one-dollar kilo. If it arrives, a return of the tortilla wars seems likely.

But instead of racing to implement concrete solutions, Mexico's government "has assumed a calming attitude of 'there's nothing wrong here,'" said Victor Suárez Carrera, head of the Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC), an association of small and medium-sized farms.

Although the government assures Mexicans that there will be no food shortages, "they don't say at what prices or with what economic consequences," Suárez added.

In Brazil, the trouble lies with beans and rice. For most Brazilians, it is the side dish – and sometimes the main course – of every meal. Delivering a report on inflation last month, Brazil's finance minister Guido Mantega said that if it wasn't for the "fiejãozinho" Brazilians eat every day (deploying the affectionate diminutive in reference to “fiejão,” or beans), then the projected inflation for this year would be significantly lower than the official figure of nearly 5 percent.

However, Brazilian media were quick to respond that inflation was worrisome precisely because it was being increased by the soaring price of everyday staples like beans.

As in Mexico, Brazilian leaders have tried to sound upbeat. Because their country is an agricultural powerhouse, one of the world's top producers of foods like corn, soybeans and rice (the only non-Asian country in the rice-producing top 10), government ministers have been quick to sound a positive note and hint at Brazil's invulnerability.

"If there's a country that can reposition itself quickly in order to increase its food production, it's Brazil," said Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva has gone on a counterattack, blaming rich countries' agricultural subsidies and corn-based biofuels (as opposed to Brazil's own sugarcane-based ethanol) for the food panic.

The reality is that despite Brazil's aggressive diplomacy on the subsidies issue and self-perception as the world's tropical food basket, it can do little in the short term to control the commodity markets, which are driven by speculation based on a variety of factors, including the spiking demand of India and China.

Meanwhile, hunger and riots are not precisely what Latin America's governments should be worried about. The food crisis threatens the region with something more corrosive: a creeping erosion of the optimism and belief in participative democracy that accompanied families' emergence out of the grind of poverty.

P.S.
I also wrote a related article recently for World Politics Review, on how this new working middle class was leading to precedent-setting statistics in Internet usage and home computer ownership in Brazil.

Fania Rumbles in Kinshasa (1974)

Researching something totally unrelated the other day I came across these videos of the FANIA collective and their performance in Zaire ahead of the historic "Rumble in the Jungle," between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. The two videos are priceless: Hector Lavoe's oversized glasses, red pants hiked up above the belly button, green shirt; Celia's exuberance, completely effortless, obviously, what a smile. There's a case to be made for Fania as one of the most interesting artistic avant gardes of the 1970s in the Americas. People like to talk about how the avant garde died after Dada and the heyday of crazy art for art's sake in the 1920s, "the religion of art" as Malcolm Cowley calls it. But I think the avant garde spirit just leaked into the space between art and life, and manifested in the form of a joyous philistinism, an art of living, and art that can't be recognized as such, singing, dancing, and walking down the street, or brushing your teeth, "nothing in your pockets, no ID," to quote Caetano Veloso. In short, the spirit of spontaneity, openness and flow embodied by Fania's musicians, individually and collectively.

Getting creole with it

Creolization of language is an ongoing process that is occurring up and down the Americas and accelerating in certain areas. Here are some of the most recent avatars of the generalized mongrelization: Spanglish, Portuñol or Portunhol, Jopará-- and heavily hispanicized Quechua, spoken everywhere in the Andes, with thousands of borrowed words peppering it (and a dynamic relationship with the Spanish-speaking linguistic context). In the past I've also written about a new emerging language, a written language more than a spoken one, called Engañol, which I postulated as a more radical version of Spanglish.

Some of the other representatives of this expanding creole genre, some long established: Haitian Kreyol, Jamaican Patois, Papiamento, Belizean Kriol, Saramaccan.

I'm sure linguists and university types argue about whether Spanglish is a dialect, a more minor linguistic aberration, or a creole-in-formation, or whatever. But in my mind, and thinking of friends' speech patterns as an example, it represents the same trend as those that led to the more established creoles: the melting down of standardization in established languages, cross-pollination, the softening in general of hardened patterns by a combinatory, inventive juxtaposition and/or fusion.

In any case, the creolization trend is seeping into the culture, not only in song lyrics: dancehall reggae, reggaetón, Belizean Punta Rock, but also in literature. In Brazil, poet Douglas Diegues, raised on the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, writes in what he calls "Portunhol Selvagem."

People are beginning to publish novels in the United States with titles like Loosing my Espanish (I don't like that title at all). Junot Diaz has been praised for his use of Spanglish, although having read Drown twice and begun The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I think what he's notable for is a wise, sparing and responsible use of Spanglish and a more liberal but also responsible use of Spanish-- in other words, the correct measures of each so as to avoid cheesiness and the sometimes gratuitous act of trotting out Spanish and/or Spanglish simply to impress upon the reader that, yes, this is an exotic piece of work.

One day at a book fair I heard a very well known Cuban American author refer to the "rich pulse of Spanish" or something like that, which "beat like a heart" beneath her English prose, and I almost wanted to vomit. People talk as if Spanish were somehow a less sober and exact language than English, more impassioned or something. In my opinion those are silly ideas to get caught up in.

Unless one is experimenting responsibly as Diaz does, or writing simply as one knows best, the same way one speaks, then one should leave the "exotic" sauce on ice in the fridge.

Until someone writes a book that deploys a hybrid of Spanish and English with the same fluidity and seamlessness that Anthony Burgess for example displayed with his invented language or dialect in A Clockwork Orange, then the correct measure for an English-Spanish hyrbid creole literature I think will always be restraint.

Prologue to eternity translated

I've been working on an essay for the Quarterly Conversation about Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), an Argentine author who mentored the far more famous Jorge Luis Borges and lent him many of his key ideas in 1920s Buenos Aires, and yet receives little credit for it, at least outside of Argentina. Arguably, Borges the international literary legend, would not have existed without Macedonio as a precursor. Some of Borges's principal metaphysical ideas, the illusory nature of time, the trap of individual personality, the permeability of life to dreams and vice-versa, the love of paradox, can be traced back to Macedonio. Here is a small translated fragment, one of many prologues (which take up over half the novel), from Macedonio's posthumously published Museo de la Novela de la Eterna:

Prologue to Eternity

Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done, God heard this said to him, and he still had not created the world, nothing existed yet. That too already has been said to me, he countered perhaps, from the old, indented Nothing. And he began.

A popular musical phrase was sung to me by a Romanian woman, and later I rediscovered it ten times in different works and composers from the last four hundred years. Without a doubt, things don't begin; or they don't begin when they are invented. Or the world was invented ancient.

Prólogo a la eternidad

Todo se ha escrito, todo se ha dicho, todo se ha hecho, oyó Dios que le decían y aún no había creado el mundo, todavía no había nada. También eso ya me lo han dicho, repuso quizá desde la vieja, hendida, Nada. Y comenzó.

Una frase de música del pueblo me cantó una rumana y luego la he hallado diez veces en distintas obras y autores de los últimos cuatrocientos años. Es indudable que las cosas no comienzan; o no comienzan cuando se las inventa. O el mundo fue inventado antiguo.

Nasty resurgent nationalism and the regional antidote

Where do you live? I live in the Hudson River Delta, on the largest of the islands washed by the river's effluence: Long Island, precisely on its far-western bulge, coursed and carved here and there by sounds and channels-- and run-off, much of it put underground by the city. Notice that I have not mentioned political geographies, by which I mean nation and other arbitrary divisions such as provinces or states or counties. Cities also are arbitrary at least in terms of their official limits, because metropolises spread stain-like across their territory, brooking no attempts to contain them, conquering even geographical divides, such as mountains or rivers (as is seen in images of the world at night, depicting the diamond-like sprinkle of lights clustered in highly urbanized regions, such as the Hudson River Delta and surrounding shores).

When most of us imagine the world, we imagine it politically. I suspect most of us are still more familiar with the political map of the world, its multi-colored patchwork of countries, and can bring this representation of the world to the mind's eye more easily than the physical map with its large swaths of green and expanses of brown, its relatively un-parceled look. We know nation is a fiction. Yet we cling to it very firmly, and the imagination latches onto it, drunk on the romance, the sentiment, the emotion of being a patriot, a lover, a belonger, a devotee of a certain arbitrarily determined parcel of land.

As of late nation has been making a comeback. We were fascinated with the idea that the world's borders were being erased, but as connections between nations multiply-- as immigrants, ideas and guns and money flow back and forth and squiggle through borders, illicitly or not-- the reaction is a palpable re-entrenchment of nationalisms. It has occurred previously, this nationalistic reaction to openness and an era of intense exchange. The 19th Century's last years were heady with the idea of cosmopolitan simmering, chock-full of trade and huddled masses of moving peoples and steam engines sprouting here and there, and this lasted until: World War I, when Europe's nations dug themselves into trenches for mutual massacres in order to gain a few paces in a field. OK, perhaps it amounted to more than a few paces, I mean the land at stake, but really, whether a border was here or there, or whether Alsace and Lorraine or this or that entity ended up on this side or that side, that wasn't the point, really. The point of course was to affirm nation.

When nation is threatened its fangs come out, and they do so in the form of jingoism, ultra-patriots, watchmen of all sorts, walls, trenches, fences. When nation is threatened it becomes nasty. Globalization does not mean the end of nation, but the morphing of it into something more vicious: a normalized jingoism.

It has become fashionable to speak of the rising nationalism of the Chinese, the Brazilians (flush from their recent oil finds and rising agribusiness potency) or the Russians (less so lately the Indians, but when the South Asian nuclear race activates again, the Indians will join this axis ). Yet clearly it is the United States that has been flailing its national dragon tail around with the most aggressive intent. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," goes the proverb. No, we are not at war with China, Russia or India, but perhaps the unspoken aim of all this warring against terror is to send them a message, in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were messages to the Soviet Union. I remember very well a pre September 11, 2001 essay I read on the nature of U.S. power, and which made a good case that it's not so much an exercise in quelling rogue nations, but a constant gamesmanship in which Europe, East Asia and Russia are continually intimidated so that they will play cards at a rhythm dictated by the big dog at the baccarat table.


After Sept. 11, 2001, it's all about stopping terrorists, and nukes in suitcases, etc., but terrorists may just be convenient foils for the desperate need of nation to confirm its reason for existence, seizing on an opportunity to produce jugfuls of patriotic antibodies. The terrorist, seen from this perspective, isn't just a threat and a murderer of civilians, which he most definitely is, but also a reason for the state's existence. I do not believe Sept. 11, 2001 conspiracy theories. I do not believe that world leaders in their heart of hearts welcome terrorists in order to prop up their crumbling nations, I simply observe that nationalism is on the rise, not coincidentally at a time of a global Dirty War against terror, in an age when here in the United States we've begun to build a high-tech border wall across thousands of miles to cleave ourselves from a peaceful, friendly neighbor to the south.

The counterweight to this nasty nationalism cannot be globalization, because globalization is too insubstantial. This is where the free marketeers and anti-globalization protesters have both gone wrong. You cannot be for or against globalization because in effect it does not exist. It is vapor, something in the air. It is like saying you are for the speeding up or the slowing down of history or time; it can't be done. Certain things can be accomplished, reforms and wholesale rejiggerings of systems can be achieved, whether your aim is to deregulate or to control certain aspects of economic and social change, but to either stop or fully unleash the forces of globalization is absurd, because like nationalism and other abstractions that humans become enamored of and are willing to fight and die over, it does not in fact exist.

That is why region might save us. I mean a regionalism based on the tangible realities of landscape and natural resources, and an ethic, probably, of stewardship, with regards to both human inhabitants and non-human entities. Also, the creation of a responsible built environment. There is a fellow who writes out of Louisiana named Max Cafard who in the 1990s published something called the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto. In it, he identifies himself as an inhabitant of the Mesechabe Delta, meaning the area around New Orleans, and offers a eerily prescient analysis (given Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath) of how the city's cavalier way of dealing with nature and landscape made the city vulnerable and, he hints, its continuity precarious. Interestingly, the most defining characteristic of region, as Cafard points out, may be its very undefinability, not because it does not exist and is only an abstraction, but because it is impossible to tell exactly where it ends or begins. Where does the Hudson River Delta end and begin? Where do the Everglades begin and end, or the U.S. South, or the Caribbean? Who can draw a boundary around the Sonoran Desert?

Cities are real, more real at least than provinces or nations, which are completely arbitrary, but what is not real is the politically-determined geographical entity that represents a city. Its metropolitan area is always only a fragment of the total urban weave, which has incommensurable tentacular offshoots and spokes and scattered spores. A city is like water: it loves to fill a vacuum.

Regionalists are able to see beyond the fool's gold of nation, province, county and metro area, and understand that all the complexity on which their life depends is ultimately tied in to concrete cycles of energy exchange that begin and end with nature, and ultimately, the sun itself. Everything depends on our relative location on this orb floating in space, and the contours of the land around us. Each place, whether highly anthropomorphized or not, has its spirit, which is another way of referring to its zillions of characteristics that add up to make it into something unique, tangible, real. Region is rooted in landscape and climate, not anthems or slogans, and region can't be penned in by any border, imagined or real.

In many places around the world regionalism is beginning to enter into a symbiotic positive feedback loop with ecological thought. Regionalism is a natural ally to environmentalism because it encourages thought and lifestyle based on natural systems such as a watershed, a mountain range or the idiosyncrasies of desert or rainforest. This points to what may be the saving grace of the fact that some of the most critical environmental problems are in poor countries with weak central governments, which can exercise only limited power in ecologically critical regions. If regional identities, like the caboclo culture of Amazonia, can be properly collaborated with, and local wisdom be well-tapped, then regionalists, and not capital city nationalists, could become the main protagonists in regional moves toward sustainability sprung from the grassroots.

In Latin America, and in many other parts of the world that have been shaped by weak nations, we are accustomed to think in terms of region: Llanos, Pampas, Cerrado, Amazonia, Altiplano, Costa, Sertão, Patagonia, Yungas, Chaco, etc. It is probably because of this that in Latin America we have produced so many regionalist authors of international relevance: Ricardo Palma, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Jõao Guimaraes Rosa, Romulo Gallegos, Juan José Saer. Other Latin American authors have taken the very concept of region and have made it a subject of their books, molding fictional areas that are not stand-ins for a real region as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County was, but a sort of ur-region, in which the very mind-frame of rooting oneself in a region is investigated (Alejandro Rossi).

In Exile's Return, his collective biography of U.S. writers of the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley says the emergence of the self-consciously separate "Lost Generation" of artists and writers was in part due to the jettisoning of regional identities that had tethered creators to land or region in the past (the New England Transcendentalists, etc.)

I think that soon, in art and literature, region will return. Eco-ethics, regionalism, and a healthy obliviousness to nationalism might coalesce into a new, morally rigorous, clear-eyed, non-sentimental and scientifically exacting regionalist style that might serve as the antidote to so much art and literature that is excessively national, fixated on the myths of nation, whether it is to critique them or elevate them. Our new Gods, someone has said, will be more intimate. It's true, they may be nearer to us than we think, they may reside in our own watershed, in the clefts between our hills, in the local forest that has shadowed generations.

Top photo: Martin Dürrschnabel

RIP Andy Palacio

I had just begun to get excited about Andy Palacio's music and his 2007 release Watina, when, shortly after arriving in New York, I learned he had died on Jan. 19, at the age of 47, of a massive stroke. A couple of weeks ago I attended an event at New York's City Hall where he was honored by proclamations and speeches; in attendance was Paul Nabor, a remarkable octogenarian who toured with Palacio's Garifuna Collective through Europe and elsewhere. It could be said that Palacio was to Belize and especially the Garifuna culture, what Bob Marley was to Jamaica and the Rastafarians in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Garifuna are descendants of African slaves shipwrecked in the 17th Century who intermarried with Arawak Indians; their unique language is a mixture of African and indigenous and also borrows from English and Spanish. The Garifuna live in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, but arguably, their spiritual Mecca is a little fishing village in Belize named Hopkins. In Hopkins the local elementary school teaches kids in Garifuna, and generally the village is the most faithful repository of Garifuna culture and language (it is also the setting for the video below). The Garifuna are now even more a diaspora community than ever, with tens of thousands living in the Bronx, and in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Palacio was instrumental in inspiring Garifuna youth to identify with their endangered culture, and elevate their music (including raucous Punta Rock) into the world music pantheon. Here is "Watina", an exemplar of the mellow parranda genre: