TRABAJOS

a santero’s altar

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Iowa Republican Steven King (no relation to the novelist King!)  penned a bill called the “English Language Unity Act,” which would declare English as the official language of the United States.  This guy also defends dog fighting, okay?

So the bill was taken up in a subcommittee hearing in Congress today – August 2. To make his opposition clear, Michigan Democrat John Conyers delivered his speech on the subject – in Spanish.

This evening on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, this bill was the lead story, with  the words TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS  in the background.

The word trabajos  literally translates as jobs. The Republicans are always talking about creating jobs and about how ending the Bush tax cuts on the top one percent would be a job killer, as though extreme wealth is synonymous with job creation. The facts say otherwise.  According to Bloomberg,  “fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population have annual income of more than $1 million. In the top two tax brackets, slightly more than one-third — 35.5 percent — were employers receiving business income, according to 2007 figures from the Treasury Department.”

Now, among a certain faction of Cubans – and here’s the trickster synchro –  the word trabajos means something else entirely. A trabajo is a ritual that a santero – a practitioner of Santeria, a Cuban mystical religion – performs for a specific purpose. The santero or santera usually goes into trance to perform a trabajo and his or her spirit guides are the ones who actually tackle the problem.

In Santeria, everything is believed to be the result of spiritual forces, and saints or orishas whom the santero calls upon for help are really the guys in charge.  So when a santero’s spirit guides go to work (trabajar) on the spirits that are causing your problems,  it’s as if your body and soul become a spiritual battleground. As the santero’s spirit guides intervene with these malign forces, anything can be mitigated: health problems, love and romance issues, career and financial challenges, karma, even spirit attachment and possession.

When we saw those words on Rachel’s show – TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS – we burst out laughing.  It was as if she were saying that the Republican party is badly in need of the kind of spiritual intervention that only a santero can perform, and  santeros are, oops, usually Latinos, who under King’s bill would be required to learn English before they could do anything in this country. It’s as if the Republican Party is possessed by some sort of malign spirit that screams for domination and control.

“They need Ruben to intervene,” Rob said.

“Or Nelly.”

Ruben and Nelly, a Cuban santero and a santera whom we got to know during our early years as freelance magazine writers, are a post for another day. But the trickster is definitely busy during this election season in the U.S.