A Walk through Little Havana on a Spring Day, or Heidi's Neighborhood Rap

I'm made my life in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood now for 13 years. Little Havana is beautiful and gritty. Tranquil and urban. Familiar and exotic. We're 50,000 of Miami's 392,000 residents. Ninety-three percent of us speak Spanish at the dinner table. Seventy-four percent are foreign born.

A Walk through Little Havana, on a Spring Day, or Heidi's Neighborhood Rap

Down the sidewalk at a gentle pace

Humidity surrounds like a lover's embrace

Bungalows and stucco and mission-style homes

Spanish spoken with the rhythm of poems

Grassy swales with trash pits and coconut palms

Fuschia bougainvillea and fire-red flamboyans

Little dogs defending turf, stray cats wary

Cut grass and peppery surinam cherry

Simmering chicken broth and picuala's apple scent

Neon-green lizard chased by strutting banty hen

Salsa and son and reggaeton

Cumbia, soca and bachata tones

To the window for a cortadito

Into the bodega, need a pastelito

Blue eyes give me away before I speak my gringa Spanish

But it's OK, I'm accepted -- no need to vanish

Girl at the counter says: "mi vida"

We just met but I'm her life, her senorita

After finishing my coffee, I'll be on my way

Just walking through Little Havana on a spring day.



ART AND DISABILITY IDENTITY, OR CRUSHING DUNG BEETLES BENEATH MY ORTHOPEDIC SHOE

Art Basel Miami 2014 is this week and naturally, art is on my mind. All year, I look forward to not only the main Basel show, but also the scores of satellite shows and gallery exhibits that have grown incredibly over the last dozen years. I always attend as many as my wallet and stamina allow.

 

Contemporary artworks most likely to draw me in address issues of identity: identity of an individual or a group or a nation. Art produced in Miami or by artists from the Magic City often deals with the identity of immigrants and refugees. At Basel, female identity or identity along the lines of sexual orientation are frequent themes.

 

But no matter where I go to view art – Miami, New York, Mexico City, London, Madrid and beyond – I find a dearth of works about disability identity. It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It simply isn’t anywhere near 20 percent of identity-themed art, 20 being the oft-cited percentage of people with disabilities in society.

 

It makes me a bit melancholy. It feels like one more confirmation of our lack of presence, of our lack of a voice. One more directive by society to either act/look/pass as non-disabled, or else go off to live in some mythical, isolated disability underworld.

 

Though I’m a writer rather than an artist, it seems like identity would be such a rich vein to mine for artists with disabilities. Just taking the stereotypes and roles that have been foisted on us and turning those back on themselves would make for provocative, edgy stuff indeed.

 

Want to disempower me with the label “wheelchair bound?” I’ll photograph myself in bondage gear, my ankles bound to this wheeled device that brings me power and freedom.

 

See me as a sorry little creature put on this Earth to make you feel better about your own troubles? I’ll paint you as dung beetle that I crush beneath my orthopedic shoe.

 

Think I sit at my window all day, looking at the world I cannot join and mourning my brokenness? I’ll make a movie that shows disability as the dominant culture, where so-called “normal” people hurl themselves down staircases in order to be accepted.