Why photographs? Why playscripts and drama? Why song lyrics? Inclusionism run amok? Not enough writers?
I mean, it says right there in the title “Written Word” but then we’ve put in all this other stuff. Of course, the short answer is story: pictures and plays and songs tell stories. For the intrepid souls out there, a long answer is suggested at the bottom of this article in a link to a YouTube video about an alternative theory of the origins of language. Since it favors vision as a model for our linguistic ability and I’m a visual artist by training, it makes perfect sense.
But back to our story. Don Bartletti is a Southern California based Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist. His 32-year career at the Los Angeles Times and 10 years prior with other San Diego County newspapers took him across California and the United States and around the world for news and investigative photo essays. His website is here. His photo-journalistic essay of some 30 photographs documents the journey of Central American refugees making their way to the U.S. through Mexico. The photographs are currently exhibited at WNMU’s McCray Gallery of Contemporary Art, through October 4.
Bartletti will join Dr. Magdaleno Manzanarez as keynote speakers for the festival. Even though Bartletti is based a little further than our traditional grounds of New Mexico/Arizona/West Texas, his subject matter is so close to the heart of our theme for this festival (Writing Sin Fronteras) that we HAD to ask him to make a presentation (and many thanks to Western New Mexico University for making it possible to do so).
During a mid-winter festival planning meeting it was suggested we contact Bartletti as he was scheduled to make a presentation the following week in Santa Fe. I took the honors of visiting and I’ll just say: this guy is a riveting speaker. I took my built-in-shock-proof-$*%t-detector and I could find none. He spoke before hundreds of fellow journalists at a conference entitled Journalism Under Fire at the Convention Center, and he has indeed been under fire when he ventures to document these stories. During the Q&A whereby journalists asked a journalist really good questions it became obvious that Bartletti could be an anchor for this coming festival.
Here is Bartletti’s description of the beginning of Enrique’s Journey. “In the year 2000 I was the first American photojournalist to ride ‘La Bestia,’ the name migrants gave to the unscheduled freight trains that to this day transit Central American stowaways the length Mexico and to the U.S. border. The northbound fare was free but the physical and emotional costs were incalculable for those who clung to the back and side of ‘The Beast.’ All were accompanied by hunger, thirst, fear, robbery, amputation or death. The end station came only to the brave and the lucky.
“In a freight yard on the Guatemala/Mexico border, a squeaky voiced 12-yr-old Honduran named Denis showed me how to ‘Tame the Beast.’ His lessons enabled me to survive and photograph him and other children during the 3 months I took to document this remarkable migratory route from Honduras to North Carolina.”
Like Theseus into the labyrinth, Bartlett travels into the darkest of places and returns to our benefit. Come see him at the Southwest Festival of the Written Word in October.
And for those interested, University of California-San Diego cognitive scientist Martin Sereno gives a talk on a different way of looking at the origins of language.To skip to the good part go to 30:15 in this link.
