Once upon a black time.... HISpanic in history_ Human zoologic shows

We offer a little passage way into our BCN history in black and white perspectives:

FLASHBACK_1:
1_ BROTONS, Ròmul. Parcs d'atraccions de Barcelona des de 1853 fins a l'actualitat. Barcelona: Albertí Editor S.L., 2011

Tibidabo’s oldest mechanical attraction is a century old

On 22 may 1915 the Ferrocarril Aeri (aerial railway) was opened, one of Tibidabo’s most emblematic attractions.

FLASHBACK_2:

ETHNO shows - A. Marco Greco 


The "ethno-shows" are the first ground contact between the worlds so-called "exotic" and our standardised western  urban population (from London to Moscow, Paris Barcelona, ​​Milan to Madrid). 

The "cheap-entertaiment" gives the rich and the poor ones, the educated and the workers, children and women too, the feeling of entering another dimension.Looking at these archaic worlds, the inhabitants of the city seem to feel, without frustration, the members of a winning empire. The savage / civilized binomial present in the aesthetics of these shows, is comforting, a true instrument of popularizing the idea of ​​race hierarchy: a formidable combination between scientific and popular racism.  

FLASHBACK_3:     BAR-CEL-ONA 

Núm. 968 – Barcelona 30 Juliol 1897

  Los Ashantis.
Nigger people - 150 crowd.
open all day and night at  Ronda de la Universidad, 35.
Entry ticket 1 peseta; every Thu,  2 pessetas.

These Africans  are real and show a crystal truth: their Blackness. Blacks are more "other" than the other  indigenous, as their sexuality linked to primitivism and bestiality are easier to explain and justify. 

Cover your body, girl

1. 1900, vino la troupe indígena de Búfalo Bill que contaba con la presencia de varios indios americanos. 
2. También vino un grupo de inuits de la península de Labrador. Se instalaron en el teatro El Nuevo Retiro antes de desplazarse a Madrid. La prensa, al hablar de los esquimales, destacaba la altura media de las mujeres: tan sólo 1,25 metros. 
3. Pero quizás uno de los espectáculos humanos de más éxito fue la presencia de un grupo de cien senegaleses en el Tibidabo, en el espacio que ahora ocupa la atracción del avión. Venían de una gira por Le Mans, Nantes y Amiens. Estuvieron entre marzo y finales de agosto e incluso se vendieron postales.
4. El último zoológico humano del que se tiene constancia en Barcelona es el de la tribu fulah, de Guinea Ecuatorial, que se instaló en 1925, también en el Tibidabo, aunque ya con menos repercusión.

FLASHBACK_4:

Modernity and the self  (by Andrea Meza and Guido Abbattista) 

• Hagenbeck's Empire of entertainment  “ethno shows / human zoos”, which had started in Hamburg in 1875 

• Paris exposition in 1878, living human ethno-exhibitions properly speaking, with full village reconstructions, 

• anthropological exhibits, also in the form of living human exhibits meant to document the human and cultural national varieties – as it happened at the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair with the first true American anthropologist, Frederic Ward Putnam

Cultural notes: 

note 1_ USA: 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the classification by race expanded to include the measurement of “mulattos”—persons of mixed black and white ancestry. By 1890, the census racial classification scheme reflected a growing preoccupation with identifying persons with even the slightest hint of African ancestry, adding categories for “quadroon” (persons with one-fourth black ancestry) and “octoroon” (persons with one-eighth or less black ancestry). 

note 2_ 1933


   Even Chilean Salvador Allende wrote something in the 1930's!!!) 



note 3_

  



the last organized exposition of this kind was recorded at the Brussels 1958 universal exposition where, just on the wake of the Belgian Congo independence, a Congo village was erected and authentic Congolese people hosted in it, soon to be dismantled, however, and its guests repatriated, under the pressure of public and diplomatic protests. 

the color of her money in HIStory - pay discrimination

Women World Cup champs 

win waaaaay less money than men

• The women's team won $2 million from FIFA for winning this year's tournament.
• Last year, the German men's team collected $35 million after winning the 2014 World Cup.

• In fact the 16 men's teams that were eliminated in the first round of last year's World Cup each got $8 million, or four times as much as the championship women. The U.S men's team, which finished 11th, won over $8 million.

U.S. women soccer players charge pay discrimination

March 31, 2016: 3:06 PM ET

Soccer star on inequality: 'Enough is enough'

Players on the U.S. women's national soccer team say they are being discriminated against because they are paid less than members of the men's team.

"The women's team does the identical work as the men's team, except they have outperformed in every way," said Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer who represents the women. "The U.S. Soccer Federation made a profit of $16 million on the women's team last year. It had a loss on men's team."

Texas at night -terrible loss

BA player Bryce Dejean-Jones killed while breaking into Dallas apartment, police say

NBA player Bryce Dejean-Jones joined the Pelicans as a free-agent rookie last year.
He had recently signed a three-year, $2 million deal with the team.

NBA player Bryce Dejean-Jones was shot and killed early Saturday after he broke into a Dallas apartment he believed was his girlfriend’s and instead startled a man he didn’t know, according to police and his agent.
The 23-year-old New Orleans Pelicans guard “kicked open the front door” to a unit in the Camden Belmont Apartments, just east of Central Expressway and Fitzhugh Avenue, about 3:20 a.m., police said.

(NBA.com)

Police said the man who lived there woke up, grabbed his handgun and “called out” to the intruder. But he got no answer.
When Dejean-Jones kicked the door to the bedroom, police said, the man fired, apparently in self-defense.
Dejean-Jones ran out of the apartment and “collapsed in the breezeway,” police said. He was taken to a local hospital, where he died.
The Dallas County medical examiner’s office confirmed his death Saturday, saying an autopsy had not yet been performed. His agent, Scott Nichols, told ESPN that Dejean-Jones died from a gunshot wound to his abdomen.

Management at Camden Belmont sent an email to residents that said Dejean-Jones had been trying to get into the apartment of an “estranged acquaintance” and “inadvertently broke into the wrong apartment.”
ESPN reported that the acquaintance was the mother of Dejean-Jones’ child.

Nichols told CNN in a statement that the NBA player was in Dallas to visit his girlfriend for his daughter’s first birthday. He said Dejean-Jones was visiting her new apartment for the first time and, when he came back to the apartment later that night, he went to the unit directly below hers.
Dejean-Jones, his agent said, was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It’s unclear whether the unidentified man who shot Dejean-Jones will face charges.
Under Texas law, a person is allowed to use deadly force to defend himself in his home. It also says a person using force cannot provoke the attacker or be involved in criminal activity at the time.
Police are investigating. They do not believe that Dejean-Jones was armed.

R. Mitchum's hobo years - through the 1929 depression

“I never take any notice of reviews - unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now." –  

                     Robert Mitchum

Robert left school at the age of 14 and made frequent freight-hopping trips around the country, working as a laborer, coal miner, boxer and aircraft assembler. Run-ins with the police gave him a lifelong antipathy to authority.

  

1- Mitchum Sings  -redtreetimes

https://redtreetimes.com/2010/05/27/5066/

Okay, he was a great actor.  But it was some of the other details of his life that caught my eye.  I discovered he was one of the “wild boys of the road” during the Great Depression, young men and women, often no more than 15 or 16 years old, who were cut loose from their families during those dire times, told that they were a burden on the family and that they must go out on their own.  It was estimated that during the peak years of the Depression, when unemployment was over 25%, that there were over 250, 000 of these wild boys riding the railroad boxcars and hitchhiking around the US seeking work and a better life.  It was a life of violence, depravation and hardship, one that is a little known footnote to the history of that time. 

After leaving this life as a hobo (the term is supposedly derived from hoe boy when migrant workers followed the crops by riding the boxcars) Mitchum found himself in the world of movies and never looked back.

The Ballad of Thunder Road, he even wrote this.

ACTING ---- Here

 his eyes and look-a-like --- here

2 -  What Made Them Great: Robert Mitchum

June 24, 2013 by Alastair Newport   

http://blog.onthebox.com/2013/06/24/robert-mitchum/

Classic Westerns, Thrillers and Noirs full where real men like Kirk Douglas and Humphrey Bogart manned about, saying manly phrases like ‘damn it’ and doing manly things such as drinking neat liquor, rescuing dames and sticking to their principles.During this weirdly masculine period in the history of acting, there was one man who was even manlier than the rest, whose being was powered by some kind of super testosterone made unavailable after August 6th 1917. He wasn’t just rougher and tougher than his Hollywood contemporaries; he was rougher and tougher than anyone. His name was Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum lived through the great depression of the 30’s where like so many, he rode the railroads and drifted from town to town looking for work. At the age of 14 he was arrested for vagrancy and spent 90 days in a chain gang doing hard labour…I don’t know what you were like when you were 14 but personally the idea of drifting and chain ganging would have seriously got in the way of my girl chasing and weed smoking career and would have no doubt killed me.

Eventually falling into acting and finding himself in Hollywood, Mitchum found some success playing villains in B-movie westerns films and TV slowly building enough attention to be cast as a lead in the genre that would make him an icon, Film Noir.

It was the 1947 Noir ‘Out of the Past’ (known sometimes in the UK as ‘Build My Gallows High’) that really cemented his place in the firmament. 

3- Throughout Robert's childhood, he was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When he was 12, Ann sent Robert to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware, where he was promptly expelled from his middle school for scuffling with a principal. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister, waitress and stage actress Julie (originally Annette) Mitchum, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. 

After being expelled from Haaran High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including a ditch-digger for the Civilian Conservation Corps and a professional boxer. He experienced numerous adventures during his years as one of the Depression era's "wild boys of the road."

 In Savannah, Georgia he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. It was during this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly lost him a leg, that he met the woman he would marry, a teenaged Dorothy Spence. He soon went back on the road, eventually riding the rails to California.

http://www.meredy.com/robertmitchum/biography.html

4- American Legends: The Life of Robert Mitchum

https://www.createspace.com/5008255

Mitchum plays anti-heroes who are victims of circumstance, but even as he is placed in situations beyond his control, he maintains a cool, if dispassionate countenance. Mitchum was, in short, neither a hero nor a villain but someone who seemed to defy the often-simplistic distinctions between protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain.

Even so, for someone who put on such a cool façade, Mitchum certainly experienced a great deal of hardship. From the death of his father, James, to his rough adolescence—much of which was spent traveling on railcars during the throes of the Great Depression—Robert Mitchum lived the part of the hard-luck antiheroes he portrayed onscreen. Up until his adult life, there was little indication that he would grow up to become anything more than a working-class factory worker, let alone a world-famous movie star. It is telling that Mitchum remained within the confines of the gritty noir and western genres; to imagine him acting in a romantic comedy would be antithetical to the reputation that he built. Mitchum was, to be sure, one of the premier A-list stars of the 1940s and 1950s, but he was a leading man in the hypermasculine mold of Humphrey Bogart rather than the more diverse skill set of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart. In any event, one of the great mysteries of Robert Mitchum’s career is that for all the poor luck that his characters experienced, he still was able to affect a debonair sensibility that made him identifiable–a man to which viewers were irresistibly attracted, even if his characters did not necessarily warrant such a response.

This biography looks at the process that led from Robert Mitchum rising from impoverished Depression-era youth to leading Hollywood celebrity. Mitchum’s harsh childhood, including the premature death of his father and his dangerous life on the road, are discussed, as well as the process that saw him ascend through the acting industry.

The Sign of the Broken Sword -comments

The story starts with the description of landscape and the description of St. Clare’s monument, which is a sort of exposition, where the main hero of the story and the place where the story will begin (or, more accurately, one of the stories) are presented.

            It is necessary to say that author turns to retrospective, thus creating a framed structure of the story - the priest and his companion are narrator and listener and from Father Brown’s lips we hear the true story of St. Clair’s crime.

            So, there are two settings also: the past and the present. In both stories the exposition is scattered:the narrator often returns to preceding events, revealing the reasons why St. Clare did such a horrible thing, which is, though, typical for detective stories.

          

EGGpen notes here 

Narrator explains some details about·      St. Clare,
·      Olivier,
·      Lieutenant-Colonel Keith, - autobiography
·      Olivier's own dispatches,
·      The major  Murray—an Ulsterman-  a Puritan.
·      Colonel Clancy, - an Irishman;
·      Espado The Vulture ... Catholic,  a sort of soldier on no side
   

SUMMARY . REAL action.

St. Clare leads his men on a suicidal assault to produce that ...................................

But his surviving soldiers ................. the crime nevertheless, and they ............. St. Clare with ...................................................

To read the abridged story:

http://ma-serendipity.blogspot.com.es/2016/05/on-sinners-and-saints-broken-sword.html

    PART 2:

Žižek’s analysis

of G. K. Chesterton’s story, “The Sign of the Broken Sword.” In that tale, the detective-priest Father Brown has spent many years unraveling a terrible mystery.

As Father Brown tells it,

·      General Sir Arthur St. Clare had served as one of 3the best officers of the British Empire; in death, he had become revered as both a war hero and a Christian martyr. General St. Clare had been a prudent, conscientious and quietly brilliant commander. In his last campaign, St. Clare fought against the Brazilian patriot Olivier, a man esteemed for his extraordinary chivalry.

·      On the fateful day, the otherwise careful St. Clare led his troops in an unaccountably foolish assault against vastly superior forces.

·      Most of his men died, and the rest were captured, including St. Clare himself. True to honor’s form, Olivier released his prisoners.

·      All the more unaccountable, then, was the fact that St. Clare was hanged on the field of battle: “‘He was found swinging there after the Brazilians had retired, with his broken sword hung round his neck.’”

So there were two mysteries:

1.    why had “‘one of the wisest men in the world acted like and idiot,’” and

2.    why had a supremely chivalrous man “‘acted like a fiend’”?

Father Brown asks his lone companion Flambeau a series of seemingly irrelevant questions:

‘Where does a wise man hide a pebble?’  ---> ‘On the beach,’ answers Flambeau.

‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf?’ ---> ‘In the forest.’‘

But what does he do if there is no beach? Or no forest?'

       --->  'Well, he must make a beach. Or grow a forest'. ‘A fearful sin.’

The double mystery is solved if one knows that St. Clare has murdered a fellow officer and needs to cover up the crime.

“‘And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in.’”

St. Clare leads his men on a suicidal assault to produce that field of corpses. But his surviving soldiers discover the crime nevertheless, and they hang St. Clare with the murder weapon hung around his neck.