Sunday, January 6, 2008
Morena Clara
Aside from the fact that the late Lola Flores was the greatest singer and dancer in Spanish history, I would love her just for her role in the deeply camp, ironic and subtext-heavy Morena Clara. So many of the movies made under Franco found ways to undermine and work against the draconian censorship, but to me the ways in which this movie deals with gender, class and race politics is astounding. Lola plays an insouciant gypsy girl who is taken from her slovenly and lazy gypsy relations and adopted by a dandyish andalusian aristocrat in order to "re-educate" her in his lovely Orientalist style country estate. The opening sequence gives a surreal survey of Spanish history with the two leads - Lola and Fernando Fernan Gomez - cast in various historical guises: for example, Lola as a Moorish temptress and he as a victorious Christian conqueror.
You get the picture. The subjugated others are translated into a fiery female. It's so obvious that it's priceless. The whole concept of "reeducation" is also ironic because this is during a time when the regime was literally trying to reeducate those unfortunate enough to have been Republicans still living in the country. The title is also telling a dark light woman- she is not quite Gypsy/not quite Spanish (ie. White) a native informant who moves between the big house and the slave quarters, mediating between her marginalized family members and friends who are usually shown lounging in the fields or breaking into flamenco song and dance - the Spanish version of minstrels. Black skin/white masks - she is supposed to be lucky because she can "pass" and the white aristocrat welcomes her into his home in order to redeem her.
In this scene, Lola performs the title song, and in none-too-subtle foreshadowing, we see how the white aristocratic and rational male is overwhelmed by her sultry passion. It's hilarious.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Fever Part Two
Just to prove my point about the ubiquitousness of Dengue fever in Puerto Rico, here is a PSA from Island TV that I found on Youtube. (see below for my post on the racist article in the NYTimes about the alarming increase in Dengue fever and other "exotic" mosquito borne ailments in Itatly)
UPDATE 1/11/07
This morning I saw on the CNN crawl statistics on the marked rise in cases of dengue in PR which the crawl described as a "US territory."
This is the article from AP:
World News
Puerto Rico's dengue fever outbreak last year worst in nearly a decade
© AP
2008-01-10 23:30:00 -
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Puerto Rico saw 11,000 cases of dengue last year, the fever's worst outbreak in the U.S. Caribbean territory in nearly a decade, a health official said Thursday.
Dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes, killed four adults and four children in Puerto Rico during 2007, state epidemiologist Enid Garcia said
in releasing the final tally for the year. The oldest victim was 80 and the youngest 5 months old.
«It wasn't the worst we've had, but it was a serious epidemic,» Garcia said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The 10,964 cases recorded for the year were the most in Puerto Rico since a 1998 outbreak that caused 17,000 cases and 19 deaths, Garcia said. A 1994 outbreak totaled 24,000 cases.
In one of the worst years for dengue in recent decades, Latin America and the Caribbean counted nearly 800,000 reported cases and nearly 250 deaths in 2007, according to the Pan American Health Organization. Final figures were not yet available.
There is no vaccine for the tropical virus, which generally causes fever, headaches and extreme joint and muscle pain, among other symptoms.
Once thought to have been nearly eliminated from Latin America, dengue has gained strength in the region since the early 1980s in part because tourism and migration are circulating four different strains, increasing the risk of multiple exposure and making it more likely an infection will develop into the severe hemorrhagic form of the virus.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Venezuela
Here is an excellent op-ed piece on the heroism of the student movement leaders in Venezuela:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30krauze.html?ex=1356670800&en=2e78eb83a399ff2d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30krauze.html?ex=1356670800&en=2e78eb83a399ff2d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
2007 Baby's First X-mas
I am currently in the small town where I grew up, which is in sunny SW Florida. Here, bumperstickers prominently placed on cars admonish me to "KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS," roadside advertisements exclaim "Happy Birthday, Jesus!" and a visit to TARGET or the Olive Garden turns into a political battle for the soul of America as my pleasantly non-committal "Happy Holidays" is met with an emphatic "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"
Besides the quaint reactionary politics laced (like poison) with fanatical holiday flavor, I enjoy the local news, such as the full-page photo spread "2007 Baby's First Christmas!" (presumably all of the babies are Christian? WTF?!?!?) And though usually I find some of my favorite unique names in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, among telenovela characters or actors, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to find the following:
Dalton Lee
Makayla
Kadie
Camp Ross (as my sister cleverly noted, this is a name that only a drag queen should have)
Kyla
Kaleem Ta'Ree
DaQuan LaShawn
Fabulous.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Fever
The article below (forwarded by one of my favorite readers) about the spread of formerly unknown "tropical mosquito-borne" disesases in Italy reminds me of Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil" where "noble" technologically-advanced British risk their lives in Cholera-ravaged 1920s China. The characters however express a violently racist disdain and disgust towards the poor villagers throught the text. (In the movie, however, the narrative was cleaned up and turned into a banal Hollywood love story.) Below, the New York Times finally realizes that so-called tropical diseases are worrisome. Because they are affecting wealthy Italians. The story raises the possibility that "immigration, globalization and global warming" have led to the Europeans' succumbing to these sinister and exotic illnesess. It is only a problem when the white people get ill, because until now, I haven't read articles about these diseases in the paper. And dengue fever in particular is as common as the flu in PR - most of my family members have suffered from dengue fever, but of course, when the Italians get it, it's a crisis!!!!!
I love how globalization is only framed in terms of possible disadvantages to Westerners but no mention is made about its effects on the rest of the world. And though the journalist tries to be "fair and balanced" by speculating about other possible causes, the impression left on the reader is that non-white or non-Western people are impure, polluted, agents of contagion, and that through contact with them either through immigration or travel, diseases spread. These tropes go back to the Bubonic Plague I am sure, definitely if you read Elaine Showalter's book on the fin de siecle and syphillis, or take a look at the responses to the AIDS crisis and more recently Bird Flu, you can find similar types of responses. I think there is more in common with the last cases, given the racialized terms used to describe the alleged agents of contagion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 23, 2007
As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
CASTIGLIONE DI CERVIA, Italy — Panic was spreading this August through this tidy village of 2,000 as one person after another fell ill with weeks of high fever, exhaustion and excruciating bone pain, just as most of Italy was enjoying Ferragosto, its most important summer holiday.
“At one point, I simply couldn’t stand up to get out of the car,” said Antonio Ciano, 62, an elegant retiree in a pashmina scarf and trendy blue glasses. “I fell. I thought, O.K., my time is up. I’m going to die. It was really that dramatic.”
By midmonth, more than 100 people had come down with the same malady. Although the worst symptoms dissipated after a couple of weeks, no doctor could figure out what was wrong.
People blamed pollution in the river. They denounced the government. But most of all they blamed recent immigrants from tropical Africa for bringing the pestilence to their sleepy settlement of pastel stucco homes.
“Why immigrants?” asked Rina Ventura, who owns a shop selling shoes and purses. “I kept thinking of these terrible diseases that you see on TV, like malaria. We were terrified. There was no name and no treatment.”
Oddly, the villagers were both right and wrong. After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.
Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.
“By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” said Dr. Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna. “When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna any more. But I thought: this is a big problem for Europe.”
The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.
And if chikungunya can spread to Castiglione — “a place not special in any way,” Dr. Angelini said — there is no reason why it cannot go to other Italian villages. There is no reason why dengue, an even more debilitating tropical disease, cannot as well.
“This is the first case of an epidemic of a tropical disease in a developed, European country,” said Dr. Roberto Bertollini, director of the World Health Organization’s Health and Environment program. “Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn’t exist here previously. This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about.”
Was he shocked to discover chikungunya in Italy, his native land? “We knew this would happen sooner or later,” he said. “We just didn’t know where or when.”
It certainly caught this town off guard on Aug. 9, when public health officials in Ravenna received an angry call from Stefano Merlo, who owns the gas station.
“Within 100 meters of my home, there were more than 30 people with fevers over 40 degrees,” or 104 Fahrenheit, said Mr. Merlo, 47. “I wanted to know what was going on. I knew it couldn’t be normal.”
August is not the season for high fevers, Dr. Angelini agreed, and within days of interviewing patients she was intrigued.
“The stories were so similar and so dramatic,” she said. “But we had no clue it was something tropical.”
Hard-working shopkeepers could not get out of bed because their hips hurt so much. Able-bodied men could not lift spoons to their mouths. (Months later, many still have debilitating joint pain.)
From the start, doctors suspected that the disease was spread by insects, rather than people. While almost all homes had one person who was ill, family members seemed not to catch the disease from one another.
They initially focused on sand flies, since the disease clustered on streets by the river.
Canceling their traditional mid-August vacations (in Italy, a true sign of panic), health officials sent off blood samples, called national infectious-disease experts, searched the Internet and set out traps to see what insects were in the neighborhood. The first surprise was that the insect traps contained not sand flies but tiger mosquitoes, and huge numbers of them.
The scientific survey confirmed what residents of Castiglione had come to accept as a horrible nuisance, though not a deadly threat.
“In the last three or four years, you couldn’t live on these streets because the mosquitoes were so bad,” said Rino Ricchi, a road worker who fell ill, standing at the entrance to his neatly tended garden, where mosquito traps have now replaced decorative fountains. “We used to delight in having a garden or a porch to eat dinner. You couldn’t this year, you’d get eaten alive.”
Said Dr. Angelini: “They were treating the mosquitoes like an annoyance. They knew that mosquitoes could spread tropical diseases but they had peace of mind because they knew this didn’t happen in Italy.”
Ravenna immediately set about killing the bugs in the hopes of containing the epidemic. Workers sprayed insecticides and went into each family’s garden, emptying flower pots, fountains and the rainwater collection barrels to remove the mosquitoes’ breeding ground.
By early September, there were no new cases in Castiglione di Cervia. But there were a number of mini-epidemics in the region — in Ravenna, Cesena and Rimini — set off by tiger mosquitoes there. Each was controlled in the same way.
By that point, the doctors had cataloged the patients’ symptoms and tried to match them to mosquito-borne diseases.
“We realized,” Dr. Angelini said, “we were seeing a photocopy of an outbreak on Réunion,” a French island in the Indian Ocean where more than 10,000 people have contracted chikungunya in the last two years. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. By summer’s end, home-grown chikungunya had been diagnosed in nearly 300 Italians.
Chikungunya is spread when tiger mosquitoes drink blood from an infected person and, if conditions are right, pass the virus on when they bite again. Tiger mosquitoes first came to southern Italy with shipments of tires from Albania about a decade ago but their habitat has expanded steadily northward as temperatures have risen.
But the doctors were baffled by how chikungunya made its way into mosquitoes in northern Italy since no one in Castiglione di Cervia had been abroad. In the past two years France, especially Paris, has had a number of imported cases of chikungunya, in travelers returning from Réunion. But the disease has never spread in France, because the mosquito cannot thrive there yet.
Eventually investigators discovered a link: one of the first men to fall ill in Castiglione di Cervia had been visited by a feverish relative in early July. That relative, an Italian, had previously traveled to Kerala, India. Chikungunya traveled to Italy in his blood, but climatic conditions are now such that it can spread and find a home here.
Now it is winter in Castiglione di Cervia, near freezing as the sun went down on a recent evening and Christmas lights glowed across the piazza. There are no mosquitoes now.
But dozens of residents still suffer from arthritis, a known complication of chikungunya.
Mr. Ricchi, the road worker, says he still has trouble clenching his fists, and his left ankle has horrible pains. Three people in the town died after getting the virus, Mr. Merlo said, although all of those victims had other illnesses as well.
From the start, townspeople noticed that the very elderly never got the disease. Now it makes sense: “If all you do is walk the 50 yards from your home to the church, there’s not much chance to get bitten,” said Mr. Ciano, the retiree.
But the biggest mystery is whether chikungunya will emerge here next summer. In the tropics, it is a year-round disease, since the mosquitoes breed continually. But the virus can winter over in mosquito eggs, too, and no one knows if there are reservoirs of sleeping eggs in some pool of water in Italy.
With climate change at hand, Dr. Bertollini said, chikungunya will surely be back somewhere in Europe again.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/world/europe/23virus.html?ex=1356066000&en=ca727de283557522&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
I love how globalization is only framed in terms of possible disadvantages to Westerners but no mention is made about its effects on the rest of the world. And though the journalist tries to be "fair and balanced" by speculating about other possible causes, the impression left on the reader is that non-white or non-Western people are impure, polluted, agents of contagion, and that through contact with them either through immigration or travel, diseases spread. These tropes go back to the Bubonic Plague I am sure, definitely if you read Elaine Showalter's book on the fin de siecle and syphillis, or take a look at the responses to the AIDS crisis and more recently Bird Flu, you can find similar types of responses. I think there is more in common with the last cases, given the racialized terms used to describe the alleged agents of contagion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 23, 2007
As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
CASTIGLIONE DI CERVIA, Italy — Panic was spreading this August through this tidy village of 2,000 as one person after another fell ill with weeks of high fever, exhaustion and excruciating bone pain, just as most of Italy was enjoying Ferragosto, its most important summer holiday.
“At one point, I simply couldn’t stand up to get out of the car,” said Antonio Ciano, 62, an elegant retiree in a pashmina scarf and trendy blue glasses. “I fell. I thought, O.K., my time is up. I’m going to die. It was really that dramatic.”
By midmonth, more than 100 people had come down with the same malady. Although the worst symptoms dissipated after a couple of weeks, no doctor could figure out what was wrong.
People blamed pollution in the river. They denounced the government. But most of all they blamed recent immigrants from tropical Africa for bringing the pestilence to their sleepy settlement of pastel stucco homes.
“Why immigrants?” asked Rina Ventura, who owns a shop selling shoes and purses. “I kept thinking of these terrible diseases that you see on TV, like malaria. We were terrified. There was no name and no treatment.”
Oddly, the villagers were both right and wrong. After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.
Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.
“By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” said Dr. Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna. “When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna any more. But I thought: this is a big problem for Europe.”
The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.
And if chikungunya can spread to Castiglione — “a place not special in any way,” Dr. Angelini said — there is no reason why it cannot go to other Italian villages. There is no reason why dengue, an even more debilitating tropical disease, cannot as well.
“This is the first case of an epidemic of a tropical disease in a developed, European country,” said Dr. Roberto Bertollini, director of the World Health Organization’s Health and Environment program. “Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn’t exist here previously. This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about.”
Was he shocked to discover chikungunya in Italy, his native land? “We knew this would happen sooner or later,” he said. “We just didn’t know where or when.”
It certainly caught this town off guard on Aug. 9, when public health officials in Ravenna received an angry call from Stefano Merlo, who owns the gas station.
“Within 100 meters of my home, there were more than 30 people with fevers over 40 degrees,” or 104 Fahrenheit, said Mr. Merlo, 47. “I wanted to know what was going on. I knew it couldn’t be normal.”
August is not the season for high fevers, Dr. Angelini agreed, and within days of interviewing patients she was intrigued.
“The stories were so similar and so dramatic,” she said. “But we had no clue it was something tropical.”
Hard-working shopkeepers could not get out of bed because their hips hurt so much. Able-bodied men could not lift spoons to their mouths. (Months later, many still have debilitating joint pain.)
From the start, doctors suspected that the disease was spread by insects, rather than people. While almost all homes had one person who was ill, family members seemed not to catch the disease from one another.
They initially focused on sand flies, since the disease clustered on streets by the river.
Canceling their traditional mid-August vacations (in Italy, a true sign of panic), health officials sent off blood samples, called national infectious-disease experts, searched the Internet and set out traps to see what insects were in the neighborhood. The first surprise was that the insect traps contained not sand flies but tiger mosquitoes, and huge numbers of them.
The scientific survey confirmed what residents of Castiglione had come to accept as a horrible nuisance, though not a deadly threat.
“In the last three or four years, you couldn’t live on these streets because the mosquitoes were so bad,” said Rino Ricchi, a road worker who fell ill, standing at the entrance to his neatly tended garden, where mosquito traps have now replaced decorative fountains. “We used to delight in having a garden or a porch to eat dinner. You couldn’t this year, you’d get eaten alive.”
Said Dr. Angelini: “They were treating the mosquitoes like an annoyance. They knew that mosquitoes could spread tropical diseases but they had peace of mind because they knew this didn’t happen in Italy.”
Ravenna immediately set about killing the bugs in the hopes of containing the epidemic. Workers sprayed insecticides and went into each family’s garden, emptying flower pots, fountains and the rainwater collection barrels to remove the mosquitoes’ breeding ground.
By early September, there were no new cases in Castiglione di Cervia. But there were a number of mini-epidemics in the region — in Ravenna, Cesena and Rimini — set off by tiger mosquitoes there. Each was controlled in the same way.
By that point, the doctors had cataloged the patients’ symptoms and tried to match them to mosquito-borne diseases.
“We realized,” Dr. Angelini said, “we were seeing a photocopy of an outbreak on Réunion,” a French island in the Indian Ocean where more than 10,000 people have contracted chikungunya in the last two years. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. By summer’s end, home-grown chikungunya had been diagnosed in nearly 300 Italians.
Chikungunya is spread when tiger mosquitoes drink blood from an infected person and, if conditions are right, pass the virus on when they bite again. Tiger mosquitoes first came to southern Italy with shipments of tires from Albania about a decade ago but their habitat has expanded steadily northward as temperatures have risen.
But the doctors were baffled by how chikungunya made its way into mosquitoes in northern Italy since no one in Castiglione di Cervia had been abroad. In the past two years France, especially Paris, has had a number of imported cases of chikungunya, in travelers returning from Réunion. But the disease has never spread in France, because the mosquito cannot thrive there yet.
Eventually investigators discovered a link: one of the first men to fall ill in Castiglione di Cervia had been visited by a feverish relative in early July. That relative, an Italian, had previously traveled to Kerala, India. Chikungunya traveled to Italy in his blood, but climatic conditions are now such that it can spread and find a home here.
Now it is winter in Castiglione di Cervia, near freezing as the sun went down on a recent evening and Christmas lights glowed across the piazza. There are no mosquitoes now.
But dozens of residents still suffer from arthritis, a known complication of chikungunya.
Mr. Ricchi, the road worker, says he still has trouble clenching his fists, and his left ankle has horrible pains. Three people in the town died after getting the virus, Mr. Merlo said, although all of those victims had other illnesses as well.
From the start, townspeople noticed that the very elderly never got the disease. Now it makes sense: “If all you do is walk the 50 yards from your home to the church, there’s not much chance to get bitten,” said Mr. Ciano, the retiree.
But the biggest mystery is whether chikungunya will emerge here next summer. In the tropics, it is a year-round disease, since the mosquitoes breed continually. But the virus can winter over in mosquito eggs, too, and no one knows if there are reservoirs of sleeping eggs in some pool of water in Italy.
With climate change at hand, Dr. Bertollini said, chikungunya will surely be back somewhere in Europe again.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/world/europe/23virus.html?ex=1356066000&en=ca727de283557522&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Thursday, December 20, 2007
BREAKING NEWS - Ingrid Marie did not lie!
I'd like to send a shout out to my fellow Boricua Pageantry Fan, who shared this REUTERS news article first thing this morning. This is the very same friend that I literally watch Miss Universe with over the telephone - yes, sadly she lives across the freaking country, so we swap staccato bursts of bitchery during commerical breaks. Yet this very friend says I should not have a blog because I need to write my (academic) book instead. Here's to you, mami chula!:
I don't know what I love most about this story, the fact that it made REUTERS, the names of the police personnel, Eddie, Ivonne, etc., the quotes at the end about how people are just "fanatical" and "passionate" about pageantry? I am just glad our girl Ingrid Marie has been vindicated, and, if all goes well, we will wipe the floor with Venezuela at Miss Universe!!
_________________________________________
Probe: Beauty queen clothes were sprayed
By LILLIAM IRIZARRY, Associated Press Writer Wed Dec 19, 3:04 PM ET
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - After a flurry of accusations and skepticism, an exhaustive investigation has determined that someone did try to sabotage a beauty contestant's bid for the Miss Puerto Rico Universe by dousing her garments with pepper spray, police said Wednesday.
The attempt failed because Ingrid Marie Rivera maintained her composure while appearing before judges and cameras, then went backstage to remove her clothes and apply ice bags to her swollen and splotched face and body. She went on to win the crown last month.
Police will present the results of their three-week-long investigation to the district attorney, who will decide whether to file charges against the suspect, a volunteer at the pageant, said San Juan police detective Ivonne Reyes. Reyes refused to identify the volunteer or discuss a possible motive.
A black gown and the bathing suit that Rivera wore during the competition's final round tested positive for pepper spray, validating her claims of sabotage, police said. Allegations of sabotage were earlier questioned when another dress and a makeup brush tested negative for pepper spray.
"Miss Puerto Rico Universe was speaking the truth. She was being sincere about the allegations," Lt. Eddie Hernandez, a San Juan police spokesman, said Wednesday.
Extensive interviews led police to focus their suspicions on the volunteer and not a rival contestant, Hernandez said, adding that the pepper spray was likely applied when contestants and their assistants left the changing room. Five pageant officials who handled the clothes also were affected by the spray, he said.
About five volunteers worked during the competition, said pageant director Magali Febles, adding that organizers will screen volunteers more carefully because "there are some people who are very fanatical" about the contestants.
"We generate a lot of passion," she added.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Ingrid Marie Has Some Esplainin To Do.../Miss Puerto Rico...Petite?
She seems very much on the defensive...and is offering to take a polygraph. Stay tuned.
Luis Santiago author of a guide to pageantry
PETITE GUIDE TO PAGEANTRY:
By the way, during my brief visit to the Island I was lucky to get a few gems in the El Nuevo Dia newspaper including an article about Luis Santiago, Producer of Miss Puerto Rico Petite (aren't most Misses in PR petite, like me, Petite Maoiste?) and Miss Puerto Rico Teen (love how this is all in English?!) published a "Guia Completa de competencia y entrenamiento para certamenes de belleza" (only $49.95!) Sadly I never made it to BORDERS in Plaza Las Americas - the largest mall in Latin America- so I don't have a copy of this invaluable guide to Pageantry to which I can refer. Santiago is the Evil Genius behind Ingrid Marie's Meteoric Rise. According to the article he has also trained Queens like Joyceline Montero, Yizette Cifredo and Roselyn Sanchez. If I were not in the arts, I think I would have become an anthropologist and done a dissertation on naming practices in Puerto Rico. Awesome. And in the same newspaper's social section called "MAGACIN" (the "i" of course has an accent) I found yet more poetic nomenclature just two of my favorites are YAMIL and YARANIKS (the latter sounds like a potentially lethal type of sushi).
Ingrid Marie's Pageantry Mentor, Santiago's resume is as follows, he helped Ingrid Marie win Miss Global Queen, and three of his other Puerto Rican pageantry proteges also won at Miss Global Teen, and Miss Global Petite. This must-read pageantry bible gives tips on potential questions, pageantry walk, how to choose hair and makeup, and "Pensamientos para Jesus" as well as "Pensamientos para una reina" for inspirational reading.
MISS AMERICA: REALITY CHECK
Now I have learned that on January 4, TLC is launching a Reality TV series called "Miss America: Reality Check" that involves behind-the-scenes make-overs of misses. I may just have to watch this, but it could easily become a pageantry addiction.
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