Bi-lingual, Bi-culturalable to slip from “How's life”to M'estan volviendo loca,able to sit in a paneled officedrafting memos in smooth English,able to order in fluent Spanishat a Mexican restaurant,American but hyphenated,viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,perhaps inferior, definitely different,viewed by Mexicans as alien(their eyes say, “You may speakSpanish but you're not like me”)an American to Mexicansa Mexican to Americansa handy tokensliding back and forthbetween the fringes of both worldsby smilingby masking the discomfortof being pre-judgedBi-laterally.This paper presents a micro-scale examination of archeological field praxis and its impact on archeologists, students (foreign and indigenous), and the local communities that both host and labor for them. It is a reflexive journey that attempts to bring coherence to the multiple and changing registers of meaning, contradiction, and transformation that have taken place during excavations at Bosutswe in “post-colonial” Botswana. We discuss our interactions with one another and our encounters with “the past” as we sought to validate, transform, or escape the contemporary entanglements of multilateral “pre-judgments” that have their roots deep in the soil of colonial encounter.Pat Mora in her short poem, Two Worlds, captures some of the contradictions inherent in a post-modern, post-colonial, transnational world, where one is sometimes offered the possibility of inhabiting multiple universes, with multiple cultural and linguistic positionalities, and sometimes even trans-ethnic or transnational identities as possible choices.
Bookjoy! Día to Celebrate 25 Years: A Visit with Founder Pat Mora
