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Echale Chile!
This Saturday afternoon was filled with dancehall beats bumping on the ones and the twos, vegetarian tamales selling faster than five dolla' pizzas, Òfight for your education and your culture!Ó speeches, meditations calling on the Mexica ancentors and on the Afro-Cuban spirits and folks networking en espa–ol . This was the MAIZ Youth Concert (MYC) titled Ò Echale Chile!Ó that went down in East Side San Jo in October 2006. And there was plenty of it.
Plenty of chile to add flavor and spice for everyone to enjoy! Put together by an emerging community-based organization, MAIZ, the concert proved to be a space fusing politics, culture, services and education targeted to brown youth. The anti-Columbus Day concert successfully combined raising political consciousness through art and culture regarding brown (In my definition, it means folks that are traditionally stereotyped as Mexica/Chicano/Mexican/Hispanic/Latino, Mexican-American etc), issues in the United States (U.S.), the plight of immigrants, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Linking the youth's issues in the U.S. back to the motherland is not hard to understand, especially when you are living it.
Yet still, education was fun that day! By celebrating local bay area and statewide talent, performers and speakers were able to provide conscious education through their spoken word, hip hop, dancehall beats, cumbias and punk, Afro-Haitian dance, and folkloric jarocho somewhere in the mix. Local poets ripped the mic with their obsidian tongue while Cesar Cruz fused his poetry with speeches calling out the urgent state of youth. Los Angeles based hip-hop artists, Olmeca and El Vuh, integrated in their lyrics the complexities of indigenous spirituality, the root of corn in the Mexican community, and the EZLN movement. The women of MALAYA, a pinay based grassroots organization and FIFTH ELEMENT also showed their solidarity through their words and their dance.
The goal of the concert was to provide an alternative, positive, and safe, all-ages space for youth due to the lack of politically conscious, creatively engaging, and culturally sensitive places in the city of San Jose. And like people who are conquered or are in a controlled, systematic situation, we make space! Like the Mexica people ensuring the survival of their culture despite the Spanish conquest, slaves of Columbia dancing cumbia in their breaks, like the only female party (Gabriela Network) in the Philippines, like the peasants singing corridos in the Mexican Revolution, like mujeres talking personal politics in the kitchen, like the youth walking out during the 1960s blowouts in San Jose, MAIZ is making space for the youth today.
About MAIZ An organized group made of committees dedicated to developing consciousness in women and youth (including the LGBTQ community)-immigrant or otherwise- and as a result improving our self-identified social conditions. For More Information:
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