Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Medicine Story una

My brother has become part of an exclusive club in Arizona that work on airconditioning.  A good OL' boys network he has entered as a result of the work of stepfather and mother. The day they married and merged Mexican with Irish, Arizona with Ohio. White with Brown to create my brothers upbringing. Class. My mother wanted her children to have class. So, she sent us to catholic schools where we learned about reading the classics and writing.  We went to museums, symphonies and spent time contemplating high art even as we were raised in low art forms of folk art among our granmothers and grandfather.  We connected with Mozart at the same time that we had our blood connection to the earth, the grapes, the watermelon fields, the land, the cottonfields our parents worked as children.  Thus, our culture became an eclectic form and mixture of Guadalupe altars, velorias, prickly pear medicine and old western cowboy, Good Ol boy, Willie Nelson and we worked daily to weave these two identities into one art form.  And this is how my brother raised two academically achieving and beautiful Mexican girls into first class majority women and empowered girls. These girls carried on the age old tradition of woman healers in our dreams and blood.  They used their high and low art forms, merged the medicine woman into a doctor and the promotora into a nurse.

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