Ámbar Past

Ámbar Past (* 1949 in Durham , North Carolina ) is a Mexican poet and visual artist of American descent. Past grew up in Brooklyn, NY, Chattanooga, Tennessee, El Paso, Texas, San Francisco, California, and Oregon . She is the mother of the artist Tila Rodríquez-Past .

Life

Ámbar Past was interested in books from an early age and made her first book when she was four. At the age of seven she had written her first volume of poetry. From the age of eleven she worked in a printing company .

Past immigrated to Mexico at the age of 23 and became a Mexican citizen in 1985 . She first worked as a traveling teacher for the Mexican National Indian Institute (INI). During this time she lived in mud huts of the Native Americans in remote areas of Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala . For over 30 years she has lived in small villages in the highlands of Chiapas . There she learned the Tzotzil language of the Maya .

In addition to traveling extensively ( Latin America , Europe , the Middle East and Asia ), she has worked as a circus performer , housewife , amber carver , paper maker , soap maker , cook for Thai cuisine and as a reporter for a Chinese-English newspaper.

Amber Past is the founder and director of the award-winning arts and literary magazine La Jicara , one of the most artistically appealing magazines in Mexico. Her volumes of poetry have been shown at book art exhibitions in the United States, Mexico, Austria and Italy. Her poems and stories have been published in literary magazines in Spanish, English, Italian, Bosnian, German, French and Japanese. Her book The Lady of Ur received an award for "best use of a serious subject" from the Movable Book Society.

Artistic work

Ámbar Past founded the graphics - collective Taller Leñateros (such as "workshop of forest lands") in San Cristobal de las Casas . She participated in the founding of the Weber - Cooperative Sna Jolobil for Maya artists as well as the Mayan writer collectives Sna Jtz'ibajom . She is President of Libros Prehispánicos AC

Past's first writings appeared in Tzotzil ; For example, in 1978 the anthology Slo'il jchiltaktik about autobiographies by Tzotzil-Maya women and in 1980 Bon , a manual for Maya artists and craftsmen about natural dyes . In Spanish and English, at least some of the elaborately handcrafted volumes of poetry have been published (Chapbooks):

Taller Leñateros

1982: Yayamé
1986: Mar inclinada
1989: Nocturno para leñateros
1992: The Sea on Its Side
1992: El bosque de colores (a children's book )
1994: Caracol de tierra
2003: Dedicatorias
2003: La fe
2004: La Señora de Ur
2004: Cuando era hombre
2004: Caracol de aire
2006: Huracana

From the fund of more than 30 years of collecting , recording and translating the ritual poetry of the Tzotzil , two bilingual anthologies have been brought out by Taller Leñateros:

1998: Conjuros y ebriedades,
2005: Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women.

Work on Incantations was triggered by a severe epidemic in the Chiapas highlands in 1975 . In particular, many children died. Past reports that she saw a mother in the cemetery who buried her dead child wrapped in a gangway. The mother offered her dead child one last sip of Coca-Cola , muttering the following prayer :

Take this sweet dew from the earth,
take this honey.
It will help you on your way.
It will give you strength on your path.

According to the publisher, Incantations is the work of 150 people who have worked on it for 23 years. It is the first book in over 1,000 years to be written, illustrated and compiled by Mayans - the first book since the sacred codices of the First Mothers' Fathers.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Past, Ámbar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Mexican poet and visual artist of American descent
DATE OF BIRTH	1949
PLACE OF BIRTH	Durham , North Carolina