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        newmaya: new who?// What's in a name?
      
     New who you ask? Is this one of those pretentious claims to ethnic identity? Is it the latest greatest in a line of hemp clothing coming out of, you guessed, San Francisco ? What's the deal? Mostly you wanna know what's in a name really and, above all, who?

     I'd like to say that I spent months in the deliberation of this name, but not so, esta machasa de le pelicula did little more than stumble upon it somewhere between Gloria Anzaluda's expanse of borderland, Joy Harjo's new natives and a little help from mi mai and for good measure let's throw in some of that unconscious gook that I'd like to think I inhabit or muck my way through. As the Californians love to say, “it's all part of the process” right after the quite annoying, “just let it go, let it go.” Pues pa'lante.


      Miranda in one of her dreams, must have heard the three women speaking to her and asked herself in what dark backward of fatherless time she fled to in fear. In the past she'd wondered into dreams and been told that were she to become aware of the fact that she was dreaming than she could control the dream, become that quetzal with its red and green plumage scattered about its head and flee, burn through the walls, before the voices beckoned her to walk through the empty corridors. By that time she wouldn't know what was dreaming and what was waking. By then she would hear them calling first with a whisper and then amongst themselves, the laughter, and her name, in “wonder,” and her body would follow . ¿Hace cuanto tiempo no has venido a vernos? ¡Ingrato que sos! Veni, veni. In desperation she would think of ways to fall through the open cracks of the floors or crawl beneath a door como esas cucarachas que mamá said had crawled into her aunt´s ear and eaten half of the eardrum, but she would crawl into her bed, into her study, into her life and close the door behind her, as she´d always done. As she´d always been told to do. How easy it could be. But night would have a way of seeping into her skin like the voices and she'd know at that moment that even if it was a dream, it was the only thing she had now, this journey to them and to waking.

     In Shakespeare's play she is a young woman whose arrival to the island marks the beginning of a process of self-discovery. In the opening scenes, she asks him to tell her who she is, Prospero reveals to her the story of her birth and her real parents and she admits to having been haunted by dreams of women who nurtured and tended her. And it is she who teaches Caliban the language of their master, their father, who intervenes once the relationship is sexualized by Caliban. It is Prospero who saves her purity and redirects her attention to a more appropriate match and another male caretaker. Miranda's awakening is too dangerous for her to possess and so it is controlled by Prospero. But Miranda's story emerges and it is a journey that must be undertaken to discard those false identities imparted on her by others. It is told in her mother tongue, just as the women used in her dreams, and also in the tongue she has come to know well and twist to her convenience.

     And so we learn that the mayans had their own tongue, that the Popul Vuh is an exercise in academia guesstimation, but there really is no way to know what really went on with Los Mayas . Like Caliban they escape the grasp of language, teleology and enter the realm of the mythic.