atlas(t): galleon trade edition

philippine history according to youtube

his is so awesome I want to cry.

It's a typical youtube homemade video of a song describing the conflict between Magellan and Lapu Lapu. It ends with Magellan asking for a doctor and telling his mama "don't you cry."

Now, wouldn't you want to die trying to bring Christianity to the Philippines ... or something ... and then being immortalized in a song like this? (Does anybody know who this singer is?)

NEXT!

Also, this history student made this video summary of the Galleon Trade for class. Love the music! Don't love the way history is taught: so that it leaches all the human idiosyncracy out of the stories and makes them a catalogue of dead numbers and dry anecdotes.

trader woff

This and other unattributed photos were stolen from www.wofflehouse.com, Woff's website.

rader Woff is here to speak, speak about the Galleon Trade.

Jenifer Wofford, by name, den mother, artiste, fearless leader, unspeakable admiral, grantwriter, ruffled trade, and the one to blame for all of this.

Speak, Woff! Tell us: what is the Galleon Trade?

... if we can find some other art spaces along the west coast of Mexico ...

Indeed! And how did you come up with this project?

It was 1998 and I barely understood what an internet was.

And where do you see cultural convergences among the three landing points of the project: Philippines, Mexico, and the Bay Area?

You have an incredible love of drama in both situations ... I don't know, good dancing skills? ... A real affinity for pork and salt?

Then talk about hybridity: in general, and especially with regard to the Philippines as a place of both race-mixing and cultural hybridity.

The tricky thing about talking about the Philippines, certainly from somebody who's a halfie herself, is ... it can become very self-congratulatory to talk about the wonderful future of hybridity. It's really narcissistic, too. ... At the end of the day, for me it's less about some nationalistic Filipino thing, for me it is more about the bigger condition of hybridity or about drawing connections across difference. Doing that through Filipino arts and culture issues for me feels the most--"authentic" is such a tricky word but I'll go ahead and use it--feels like the most authentic way for me to do it. I could do it in some ways just as easily through Malaysia, since I grew up there, and in some ways I have a lot deeper connections with that place, but it's a little trickier to make that fly. There's a very small Malaysian American community here, there's less of a network to actually make these kinds of parallels happen. --Also, I'm not Malaysian.