Amelia Peláez del Casal (5 January 1896 – 8 April 1968) was an important Cuban painter of the Avant-garde generation.
Amelia was born in 1896 in Yaguajay, in the former Cuban province of Las Villas (now Sancti Spíritus Province). In 1915, her family moved to Havana, to the La Víbora district, and this gave her the opportunity to enter the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” at the rather late age of 20 years (students at this academy usually start at 12–13 years of age). She was among Leopoldo Romañach’s favourite students. By 1924, she exposed her paintings for the first time, along with another Cuban female painter, María Pepa Lamarque. She transferred to Europe in 1927, and established herself in Paris, although she paid short visits to Spain, Italy and other countries.
In Paris, she took drawing courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1927), and later entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and the École du Louvre. In 1931, she started studying with female Russian painter Alexandra Exter. The Zak Gallery hosted her paintings in 1933, and next year she returned to Cuba.
She received a prize in the National Exposition of Painters and Sculptors in 1938, and collaborated with several art magazines in Cuba, such as Orígenes, Nadie Parescia and Espuela de Plata. In 1950 she opened a workshop at San Antonio de los Baños, a small city near Havana, where she dedicated herself, until 1962, to her favourite pastime: pottery. She sent her paintings to the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1951 and 1957, and participated in 1952’s Venice Biennale. In 1958 she was a guest of honour and integrated the International Jury of the first Inter-American Paints and Drawing Biennale.
Aside from painting and pottery, she dedicated time to murals, located mainly at different schools in Cuba. Her most important works of this type are a 65-foot-tall (20 m) ceramic mural at the Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs (1953) and the facade of the Habana Hilton hotel in 1957.
She died in Havana in 1968.
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Today is Celia Cruz’ birthday.
A Queen who is now a Goddess in the Skies.
De Cuba a México by Celia Cruz
Celia loved México and México loved her and the Cuban music which she popularized and made a national staple. She performed duets with icons of Mexican music and covered Mexican standards, most famously Cucurucucú Paloma.
People like to play up the differences between Cuban@s and Mexican@s in the United States, but our histories our linked. At one point, México even tried to liberate Cuba from Spain and our countries have benefited from mutual cultural exchanges since before either of our nations were independent.
Pan-Latin@ identity is a polemic topic, but in Celia’s music it was and is palpable.
“The 10 Largest Hispanic Origin Groups: Characteristics, Rankings, Top Countries,” by the Pew Hispanic Center.
(Click here to read more.)
"… we have usurped all the kingdoms and lordships of the Indies… the natives of whatsoever regions we have entered in the Indies have an acquired right to wage most just war against us and to erase us from the face of the earth, and this right will be theirs until the Day of Judgement."
http://faniarecords.tumblr.com/
AH! SO excited, I am crying all the tears! FANIAAAAAA
Latin American Passengers of the Titanic
We already visited the story of Haitian engineer Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche, who perished in the Titanic while his pregnant wife, Juliette, and two daughters, Louise and Simonne, made it out alive and moved back to their native France. Here are more Latin American and Caribbean passengers and crew from the RMS Titanic:
- Prominent Mexican attorney Manuel Uruchurtu Ramírez, a first class passenger, boarded the ship in France, where he was visiting Mexican government officials who had been exiled from the country following the fall of the Porfiriato and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. He did not survive.
- Uruguayan businessman Francisco M. Carrau, together with a younger relative, José Pedro Carrau, both perished during the Titanic’s sinking. Their bodies were never recovered.
- Another Uruguayan, 71-year-old Ramón Argaveytía, survived an earlier shipwreck in 1871, only to die in the Titanic. He was on his way to the United States after visiting a relative who was a diplomat stationed in Berlin. His body was recovered and returned to his native Uruguay, although he had been living in Argentina for years.
- Brothers Ahmed and William Ali, Argentine natives of Middle Eastern descent, had purchased third class tickets to the Titanic and both perished during the ship’s sinking. Only William’s body was recovered, and he was buried in Nova Scotia, Canada.
- Edgar Samuel Andrew, a native Argentine of English parentage who had been studying in England, was travelling to the United States to start a job in New Jersey and attend his brother’s wedding. He did not survive.
- Servando José Florentino Ovies y Rodríguez, a wealthy Spanish-born businessman from Havana, was the sole Cuban passenger in the Titanic. His body was recovered and he too was buried in Nova Scotia, Canada.
- Florentina Durán y Moré and her sister Asunción, both natives of Spain, survived the ship’s sinking and eventually settled in Cuba. Florentina, who went on to marry fellow Spanish-born Titanic survivor Julián Padrón Manent, with whom she had been travelling, died in Havana in 1959. Julián died in the same city in 1968.
- Henry Watson “Renny” Dodds, a native of Demerara in what was then the colony of British Guiana (present-day Guyana), was a member of the ship’s crew. He did not survive.
- Peter Dennis Daly, a British businessman who survived the ship’s sinking, had married into a Peruvian family in the late nineteenth century. His oldest son, Nicanor, who lived in the United States, was the one who found his father hospitalized in New York, where he had been taken aboard the rescue ship Carpathia. Daly eventually returned to Lima, where he died in 1932.
Celia en Habana, 1950s.
why in the fuck are Taíno artifacts from la República Dominicana in a British museum?
WE dont even have that many as Dominicans so thats a damn good question. :|
Because EMPIRES yayyyyyyyyy
Dear empire-era Britons
People giving you artifacts as gifts: cool
Stealing people’s shit because you think it’d look nice in your museum: UNCOOL
Oh I don’t know. I think it’s kind of interesting and funny to keep these times to imperialism. Obviously if they country of origin wants an artifact back they should get it but if not just let the eduction be.
lol white logic: stolen items only need to be given back if people ask for them back. otherwise its ok to keep.
stay typically douchey.
because white people learning about our culture is so damn important right??? even if it means depriving Caribbean people of knowledge of themselves??? ALL Taíno artifacts belong in the Caribbean - where the people who made those artifacts are buried and where their ancestors continue to live today. and WE do want them back.
I also hate the argument that goes along with this: “They don’t have the resources to properly preserve and maintain these artifacts.” This is both, not your decision Imperialists and also completely your fault Colonialists. There is often complaint that, for instance, if people get religious items back they will use them and then they won’t be useful because they will get worn down.
THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOUR NEEDS AND WANTS WHITEMAN.
Some scholars estimate the Taíno population may have reached more than three million on Hispaniola alone as the 15th century drew to a close, with smaller settlements elsewhere in the Caribbean. Whatever the number, the Taíno towns described by Spanish chroniclers were densely settled, well organized and widely dispersed. The Indians were inventive people who learned to strain cyanide from life-giving yuca, developed pepper gas for warfare, devised an extensive pharmacopeia from nature, built oceangoing canoes large enough for more than 100 paddlers and played games with a ball made of rubber, which fascinated Europeans seeing the material for the first time. Although the Taíno never developed a written language, they made exquisite pottery, wove intricate belts from dyed cotton and carved enigmatic images from wood, stone, shell and bone.
The Taíno impressed Columbus with their generosity, which may have contributed to their undoing. “They will give all that they do possess for anything that is given to them, exchanging things even for bits of broken crockery,” he noted upon meeting them in the Bahamas in 1492. “They were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces….They do not carry arms or know them….They should be good servants.”
FUCK YOU CRISTOBAL COLON.
Fuck, this makes me so mad. Those are our ancestors, this is our legacy. Our peoples are the product of pain and extermination, but we carry the names of colonizers and slave-owners.
This is why I have no patience for all them white tears.
Lunar New Year’s celebration in Lima, Peru.
Chinese immigration to Latin America began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when tens of thousands of Chinese men recruited as indentured servants travelled out of the Portuguese colony of Macau, in China, usually destined to Peru or Cuba. Today, Peru has the largest population of people of Chinese descent in Latin America, with over one million Chinese-Peruvians living in the country, thanks in part to continued Chinese immigration in the 20th century. Most of Cuba’s Chinese-descended population left the island after the Cuban Revolution. However, over 100,000 people of Chinese ancestry remain on the island today. Mexico too received an early wave of Chinese immigration from China and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. A later wave of deportation, expulsion, and anti-Chinese sentiment beginning at the time of the Mexican Revolution halted the growth of the Chinese community in the country, and many Chinese Mexicans wound up back in China or in the United States. Still, a small but significant Chinese population remains in some parts of Mexico. Other Latin American countries with significant Chinese populations include Panama, Brazil, and Costa Rica. Not all Chinese immigration to Latin American comes from Mainland China—many Central American countries have received significant number of Taiwanese immigrants in the 20th century.
“Jerry Masucci Presents: Super Salsa Singers, Volume 1,” with Hector Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Cheo Feliciano, Celia Cruz, and Ismael Rivera, 1977
This is amazing!
