Word: migrants
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...international popular culture, promoting this a cappella ensemble as a global emissary of isicathamiya and its sonorous hymns of protest and healing. For years apartheid repression haunted this music, with verses mourning loss of ancestral land to European farmers and love eroded by the distance between a Zulu migrant worker and his rural family waiting for him and his wages. Now in South Africa many isicathamiya performers no longer denounce white minority rule. New lyrics portray Africans straddling rural tradition and urban modernity, and dreams of well-being and the reality of suffering in a world of multiracial democracy...
...calls herself Thandiwe in Bulawayo or Louis Chikoka, a long-distance trucker. You begin to understand how AIDS has struck Africa--with a biblical virulence that will claim tens of millions of lives--when you hear about shame and stigma and ignorance and poverty and sexual violence and migrant labor and promiscuity and political paralysis and the terrible silence that surrounds all this dying. It is a measure of the silence that some asked us not to print their real names to protect their privacy...
Millions of men share Chikoka's sexually active lifestyle, fostered by the region's dependence on migrant labor. Men desperate to earn a few dollars leave their women at hardscrabble rural homesteads to go where the work is: the mines, the cities, the road. They're housed together in isolated males-only hostels but have easy access to prostitutes or a "town wife" with whom they soon pick up a second family and an ordinary STD and HIV. Then they go home to wives and girlfriends a few times a year, carrying the virus they do not know they have...
...also talk to agents in Manhattan eager to package this most mediagenic figure into a brand: big-ticket speeches taped to become one-hour specials; missions to Africa turned into PBS series, to do for the starving masses in the sub-Sahara what Harvest of Shame did for migrant workers...
...chief emphasis of the exhibition is on California as a place of incessant stress and conflict between groups and interests, as new migrant societies necessarily are. Each of its five sections corresponds to a 20-year slice of history, and tries to set forth (or at least to indicate) the dominant history, the winners' and losers' versions, of the era. It spends at least as much time and space on ephemera, from tourist brochures to labor pamphlets, as on certifiable masterpieces of art--which California has never produced in abundance anyhow...