A teenage girl prepares for the fiesta Quinceañera, a celebration of the 15th birthday.
Location: Cuba
Photographer: David Alan Harvey, 1998
Fifteenth-birthday celebrations were very popular in Cuba until the late 1970s. This practice partly entered Cuba via Spain, but the greatest influence was the French. The wealthy families who could afford to rent expensive dining rooms in private clubs or hotels of four and five stars held celebrations that were the precursors of quinceañeras, which they called quinces. These celebrations usually took place in the house of the girl or the more spacious house of a relative.
i’m so sick of this “give up on voting and just riot” mindset like y’know you can vote to try and stop more of these chucklefucks from gaining power AND ALSO riot and protest and organize in fact it’s ENCOURAGED that you do BOTH
Agree.. ppl are all upset that voting makes them ~complicit in the system~ but like it or not we are all In the Fucking System right now with people actively using it to make our lives materially worse. So we can try to vote for harm reduction within the system, instead of letting the system steamroll our human rights without any resistance. And once you’ve voted to keep Transphobe McAntisemite out of your local office, you can still protest and do mutual aid and build a strong community that is capable of existing outside the system.
tbh something i never hear anyone talk about re: homelessness is the common practice of police charging regular bribes out of tent campers under the threat of small-scale sweeps
in practice, you have to pay rent to fascist militiamen with no legal claim over the land you're squatting on to be homeless in america. every time a small encampment gets swept or a tent gets burned down it's more likely than not because of some dirty cop trying to squeeze more blood from a stone. civil society sanctifies this by making encampment a crime. the law follows & enables the extortion rather than producing it as an externality - technically federal land doesn't have any terribly solid anti-encampment laws but the cops will still harass you for money there
i live in an area with a large homeless population and the number of times my neighborhood, in which there was last a shooting afaik more than a year ago, gets buzzed by helicopters is NUTS. It's 100% an intimidation tactic and it has a specific set of targets
people mostly ignore all this. They ignore the cops circling in the sky, they ignore a tent or broken-down RV being in a vacant lot one day and a burned-out shell being there the next. Society's hands are not clean here, and in any other society we'd consider this corruption on a tremendous scale. But it's America so it doesn't count
hi - I’ve had trouble finding a satisfactory answer online for this: why is it that some adjectives precede the noun theyre describing? for example, “un buen profesor” or “la nueva maestra”. i love your blog and it’s helped me so much! thank you!!
Someone else asked a similar question that I have saved in my drafts I've been working on. I'll give you a short version before I go back to my drafts
Most adjectives go after the noun [el gato negro "the black cat", la luna llena "full moon" etc]
When regular adjectives go before the noun it reads as very exclamative and flashy, as if that adjective were in bold or italics. Full on extra emphasis [as in: El maravilloso mago de Oz "the wonderful wizard of Oz" which reads as "the wondrous" or "the marvelous" rather than simply "great" or "wonderful" in a traditional sense]
Some nouns change meaning depending on adjective placement; nuevo/a, and bueno/a are like that
More below...
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Another basic example: es una historia larga "it's a long story" vs. es una larga historia "it's a SUPER long story"
In the case of nuevo/a if it comes after the noun it means "brand-new" like "never been used before"
If it comes before the noun it tends to mean "newest" or "latest"
As an example:
la nueva maestra = the new teacher [f] / the teacher [f] who was just hired
la maestra nueva = the new teacher / the rookie teacher
If I saw la nueva maestra I would tend to think "just hired", if I see la maestra nueva I get the sense she's a teacher who doesn't really know how to teach but that might just be me
Other adjectives like this are mismo/a where la misma cosa is "the same thing" vs. la cosa misma "the thing itself"
A really common one is triste like if you see triste in front it means "dreadful", if you see it behind it's just "sad"
And there's antiguo/a, bueno / buen, buena, grande / gran, viejo/a, mismo/a, nuevo/a, mal / malo/a, triste, etc.
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In the case of bueno/a which is honestly more confusing, this is the way I was taught:
un buen amigo = "a good friend" = he was good as a friend
un amigo bueno = "a kind friend" = he was a good person who was also my friend
Similarly there's malo
un mal amigo = "a bad friend" = a friend who is not a good friend
un amigo malo = "a bad friend" = a friend who is a bad person
But there are certain expressions or set "collocations" [a set word phrase] that use them a certain way like un buen augurio "a good omen" vs. un mal augurio "a bad omen / an ill omen"
@argentinosaurus made some very good points in the tags! And please let me know if I am misunderstanding what's being said.
"Adjectives that precede the nouns they're modifying usually indicate a certain emotional response. compare: un hombre pobre vs un pobre hombre. [un hombre pobre "a man who has no money / a poor man" vs. un pobre hombre "an unfortunate man / a poor man"]
there's emotion there"
The rest talks about more grammatical matters which I don't know how many people know the linguistic terms so I'm hesitant to totally include it in full without a constant explanation on my part
But essentially they're saying that in a phrase like tomo el café frío "I drink cold coffee", the adjective frío is directly modifying café as a "premodifier" would in English - describing what the noun is, a quality of the "coffee"... your basic adjective function
The second - tomo frío el café - uses the adjective in a way that in translation is what we would call "an object complement" or "objective complement". This basically means that you're using an adjective to describe a noun in terms of a change or a modification of its original state... basically it reads as "I drink coffee cold"... meaning "I drink coffee when it has become cold"
In essence: "cold coffee" describes what it is, "coffee cold" describes what it has now become
[and important note this isn't an adverb like we aren't saying a person drinks their coffee "coldly" which makes it sound like the person is doing it without emotion... the "cold" still complements/modifies the "coffee"]
...But for our general purposes in Spanish, they're right in saying that un pobre hombre elicits a more emotional response. And in something like la Antigua Grecia "Ancient Greece", it makes sense in terms of it's not antiguo/a meaning "former", it refers to a Greece that has now become "Ancient" to us
That's how I'm understanding it, and that might help people understand it more completely in the linguistic sense
Reagan-era "stranger danger" panic has done so much harm to americans' sense of community. It cemented the idea that only the nuclear family could be trusted with the care of the child, deterred people from cooperative living with an extended community, and continues to place abuse victims in danger by perpetuating the misconception that most child abuse is done by strangers rather than someone they know. It is in our best interest to become more interdependent than we were raised to be.
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