By Laura Smith

A few years after launching Village in the Village (ViV), it became quite apparent to members of the board of directors that the workload of running this operation smoothly was getting to be too much. In fact, some of our early board members retired from the board, exhausted, after putting in countless hours of effort.  Fortunately, we felt secure enough in the stability of our membership and our finances to consider finding some help.

What seemed like a straightforward task was, of course, complicated. We stumbled around for a bit until finding the perfect fit. Sarah Pastore, a Corrales resident, and mother of two Corrales Elementary School kids, joined our group as an administrator in September 2018. Almost two years later, we can’t imagine how we ever managed to get along without her.

Sarah has been a wizard with technology and communication. She never hesitates to take on a project —from planning an event, making signs for a garage sale, designing brochures, helping to write up grant proposals, to signing up new members.

I talked to Sarah recently by Zoom to find out how her work and life is going. First, she told me that working for ViV is the best job she’s ever had. She thinks all of our members are fascinating people (She’s right; we are). She went on to say, “Being part of this organization has meant more to me than I could ever fully describe, and I’m grateful every day for the opportunity to be part of it. The trust and appreciation of our members has given me confidence, and a purpose beyond what I had imagined. I’m proud of the work we do in Corrales and am honored to call the members of ViV my friends.”

I wondered how she was doing with her boys at home all day because of COVID-19. She said there’s no place she would rather have them be than at home. She worries quite a bit about how schools will safely reopen in the fall.

She admitted that working from home and managing home schooling for Jonah, age 6 and Jackson, age 8 can be tough. In fact, much to her dismay, after the second day of “home” school, Jonah remarked, “We don’t really learn that much at this school.”

Sarah bustles from getting the kids going on their computers to throwing a load in the washer to keeping the boys from disturbing their father, JJ, who also works at home. Sarah said that JJ has frequent phone calls with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Those calls can’t have boisterous boys in the background interrupting. Sarah somehow juggles to keep the boys occupied while their dad works while simultaneously performing her responsibilities for ViV.

Since ViV has gone mainly digital, we have fairly frequent virtual meetings.
Sarah and I laughed recalling the boys streaking (in their underwear) in the background during one of our ViV Zoom board meetings. Sarah tries to keep the boys busy with art projects around the neighborhood. They recently made chalk drawings around the mailboxes down the street. The family celebrates the end of the school week on Friday afternoon with kid-friendly happy hours.

Despite her busy schedule, Sarah remains positive and optimistic about ViV’s viability during the COVID era and the future. She’s proud of the work she has done to keep members connected. Sarah sets up and runs the virtual lectures presented to our members in our Discovery Series. She continues to send useful educational material about current conditions and challenges faced by our members.

Sarah would like to see more people step up and volunteer to help us keep people connected. Specifically, she’d like help setting up virtual interest groups such as book clubs, garden discussions or game groups.

We are excited to announce that just this week ViV was awarded a Quality of Life Grant from the Governor’s Commission on Disability.

With hard work from Sarah and the ViV grant committee, led by board member Nancy Handmaker, we will be receiving financial support for technical training. We plan to contract with Corrales Tech Services Librarian Brynn Cole to help us develop a curriculum designed for our members. This training will occur with safe social distancing, mask-wearing, or in some cases remotely.

Our primary goal is to increase social integration among senior villagers with and without disabilities using various digital platforms. Our hope is that with specialized training we can increase members’ skills and comfort level with technology.

After training, ViV will offer a number of virtual small group activities to keep socially isolated seniors “alone while together.” During this program, we’ll keep track of progress, participation and results. We plan to share our analysis with other villages or community non-profits. I’ll keep you posted on our progress going forward.

ViV is opening up for business again on a limited basis while maintaining social distancing. We have masks and hand sanitizer for members who need them. We welcome new members. You can donate or join ViV to help support our activities, to volunteer, or to receive services.

For information please go to http://www.villageinthevillage.com

Zuni, October 2019

The Zuni nation’s primary industry is producing art. From inlays of semi-precious stones and pottery to kachina dolls and animal fetish carvings, Zuni artisans produce hundreds of items increasingly on sale at artists’ cooperatives on the reservation. An estimated 70 percent of reservation Zunis are engaged in producing art or traditional crafts.
In land mass, the Zuni reservation is the largest of New Mexico’s 19 pueblos, but that is still less than five percent of the tribe’s traditional use territory before the mid-1800s. Subsistence farming and ranching remain significant to retaining traditional lifestyles. This nation of around 20,000 south of Gallup has another significant export: lessons in sustainability, perhaps better understood as survival. Although nearly 40 percent of Zuni people —they call themselves A:shiwi and have no clear idea where the name “Zuni” came from— live below the federally-designated poverty line, they have survived in their traditional homeland for at least 1,300 and perhaps as long as 7,000 years. And in some circles far and wide, that accomplishment is under serious study for generalized applications for human societies in the future. Back in 1992, a Zuni tribal representative, Jim Enote, and I were among the few New Mexicans to participate in the United Nations’ “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Sustainability was the primary theme of that intergovernmental conference that launched the decades-long effort to confront climate change, leading to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Governments around the world were encouraged to submit their proposals for how to achieve that hopeful goal. Few actually did. But Enote, representing Zuni, did.
The proposal was based on his recommendations on how to use a 1990 $25 million settlement from the federal government whose land and water use policies had devastated tribal territory. When he returned home from the Earth Summit, officially the UN  Conference on Environment and Development, Emote led a team that produced a 300-page report that was one of the world’s first major documents modeled after the UN “Agenda 21” plan adopted in Rio.
“Sustainable development is nothing new for the Zunis,” Enote is quoted as explaining in the book Eco-Pioneers: practical visionaries solving today’s environmental problems. “We wouldn’t be here if our ancestors had not acted sustainably. What we’re really talking about here is enhancing Zuni sustainable development.” Educated at New Mexico State University and Colorado State University, Enote’s degree is in agriculture. He has planted a crop on tribal land every year since he was a toddler.
Long time director of the pueblo’s A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, he is now chief executive officer of the Colorado Plateau Foundation, which directs funding for indigenous communities’ efforts to apply traditional knowledge to address persistent problems of poverty and environmental degradation. But if it seems the Zuni world view and influence are becoming more extensive, consider that in earlier millenia, that influence may have been much more extensive than it is now. As explained in exhibits and presentations at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum, the creation story tells of a contingent of Zunis migrating far, far to the south. An interpretive talk at the museum suggests elders think that may indicate Zuni ancestors settling in Central and South America. Zuni guide Otto Lucio, after leading a tour of the archeological site Hawikku, site of first contact between Native peoples and Europeans in New Mexico, said he hopes to conduct research in Guatemala to search for evidence of Zuni influence there. —Jeff Radford

Even though movie theaters are closed during this pandemic there are other ways to see films, such as via Netflix and many streaming options. For those who would like to see first-run films which would be in theaters now, Albuquerque’s own independent Guild Cinema is offering a home viewing option through Kino Now.

You can find a wide list of films at http://www.GuildCinema.com, and a portion of the screening fee goes to support the Guild. Unless otherwise noted, all films reviewed here are available at that link. This is a time to support each other and local businesses (including newspapers), if you can!

 Tommaso HHHHH Written and directed by Abel Ferrera. Starring Willem Dafoe and Cristina Chiriac. Plugs: None. Available at GuildCinema.com for a limited time. In his new film Tommaso, writer/director Abel Ferrera follows the titular fellow (Willem Dafoe), a man in his sixties who moved from New York to Rome. He’s living with his wife, Nikki, and young daughter while struggling with insecurity, personal demons and (apparently) trying to write a screenplay.

The film shifts seamlessly between reality and dream sequences, which is both a strength and a weakness. The audience is left off-kilter and it’s clear that Tommaso is (or may be) an unreliable narrator —both to us directly (in spots of voiceover) and to others he meets (he says, for example, that his child has no bed of her own, yet soon we see that’s false).

The film alternates between a handful of settings, all of which are about as plausible or implausible as the last. He’s in a room with his Italian-language tutor, then he’s home doing yoga in his underwear. He flirts with women half his age who have daddy issues, then complains that his wife is emotionally distant.

There are clips of Tommaso’s stories on film storyboards —but Tommaso isn’t described by anyone as a filmmaker. Writer and director Abel Ferrera is, of course, and the character is a thinly veiled version of himself (in fact Tommaso’s wife and child are played by Ferrara’s real-life wife and child). It’s a quirky conceit, but one that doesn’t fully pay off. Those aware of Ferrera’s biography and filmography (Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant, etc.) will find parallels and running themes (emotional turmoil, redemption, etc.), but a film needs to stand on its own merits.
Writers, of course, bend both fact and fiction to suit their dramatic needs. But with no recourse to some version of external truth, some third-party objective observer to anchor the story and reality-test Tommaso, we’re not sure what to think, and for all we know the whole thing is a dream, a fiction-within-a-fiction. This robs the story of dramatic tension because the stakes are never really explained.

Tommaso’s going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and then he’s (apparently) teaching dance or acting lessons (despite having no apparent expertise in the field). What are we to make of this? Are these erotically-charged scenes fantasies? Reality? Or some mix of the two?

Either would be fine, but Ferrera never really bothers to signpost, making it a frustrating experience. The is-it-real-or-hallucination theme can be quite effective (such as in Memento, The Usual Suspects, and Jacob’s Ladder for example) but typically more is at stake for the character.

Are the stories he shares at AA true? Is he even a writer? (Tommaso is ostensibly a struggling screenwriter but spends very little time writing —or even trying to.) At some point I stopped trying to figure it out, since Ferrera seemed to have little interest in revealing the answer. And that’s fine: you can abandon a plot and still be swept away in a film’s visuals or stellar acting. But despite Dafoe’s strong performance, Tommaso struggles to engage.

The film is technically well shot; Ferrera ably plays with light and shadows to represent Tommaso’s state of mind, making sure that his shadows are always nearby and that we see them even if he doesn’t.

The Rome night streets offer a comforting warm yellow sheen, though street lights, car lights, and others are glaring and often have faint lens flare, denying clarity in the light. The final shot is of a grim, crucified Tommaso staring into the camera with an accusatory glare, as if challenging the viewer and asking “What did you expect?” (or, to borrow from another film, “Are you not entertained?”). Ferrera has always been a demanding filmmaker, but Tommaso asks a bit much from its audiences.
Benjamin Radford