Description
Advanced Spanish for non-native Spanish teachers and teaching content with comprehensible novels.
Dates and time: Wednesdays from 5 to 5:45 Pacific Time (California)
Wednesday, January 25
Wednesday, February 1
Wednesday, February 8
Wednesday, February 15
Wednesday, February 22
Wednesday, March 1
Join us in our next round of advanced Spanish classes. We will have 6 classes around the book La marimba de mi abuelo.
Why I wrote this book: This book took me into a journey of self-discovery. I always knew there was a part of my history that I did not know.
Everyone in my family was always talking about our European roots, and although we clearly had other roots they seemed not to matter (colonial mentality).
I started putting the pieces together, gathering evidence, talking to people, reading between lines, reading about Colombian history, and finding that things matched.
After a couple years of research I wrote this story. This book is the result of real family history, Colombian history, and imagination (to fill in the gaps).
It is my attempt to reclaim my roots and re-write my own history in a more accurate way (decolonizing my own history).
It all started with my grandpa and the marimba he had in his house. I grew up playing it and being mesmerized by it. I thought everyone had a marimba in their house. ¡
Es obvio! Didn’t they have marimbas? But later I realized that most people did not even know what a marimba was. Then I found out that marimbas come from the Pacific Coast of Colombia.
They are called El piano de la selva. They are the instruments of the Afro-descendants from the Pacific Coast. Then I found out that my great-great-grand father came from the Pacific Coast, that he was black
(that explains all the shades of brown we have in my family), and that he fought in the army led by Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera. At this point my head had exploded, and my heart finally understood so many things.
This was not an easy book to write. I wanted to say so many things, but I had to choose one path to tell these very important stories.
It is written in a ‘documentary’ style. It is divided into three sections: Domingo, Luisa, and Jaime. Within each section the reader will find reflections about our Afro-Colombian history.
Us, the descendants of the ‘other experiences’, must reclaim the knowledge that was once denied, ignored, and even erased. We must rebuild our narratives based on who we really are,
not on who they told us we were.
Una marimba, en la casa del abuelo, nos lleva por un viaje a través del tiempo. En este viaje se van descubriendo las raíces de una familia, las conexiones con la naturaleza, con la música y con el pasado.
Cuando conocemos y aceptamos nuestras raíces, realmente podemos entender quiénes somos.
