Last night, Bwog enjoyed the literary and cuisinary culture of the Latino-Caribbean with the volunteers and novice poets of Voices UnBroken.

Bwog arrived to the Voices UnBroken Poetry Slam a little late last night, but there were still plenty of maduros to be eaten and plenty of amateur poets to be heard. The reading drew a relatively small group of socially inclined and literary minded students to pay tribute to the work of the Voices Unbroken volunteers, whose mission is to bring creative writing workshops to prisons, residential treatment facilities, and various other transitional settings in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. Despite its small size, the event lasted a solid three hours and filled the auditorium on the fifth floor of Lerner with the smells of what could be called pan Latino-Caribbean cuisine and the sounds of what it is to be young and of color in New York.

Although the poetry of isolation and ethnography can often air on pedestrian side of things, last night the poets expressed a remarkable sense of honesty and cogency. The student poets embraced the open-mic and unabashedly read, rapped and sung work that ranged from highly crafted mediations to recent observations to spur of the moment improvisations.

It seemed all too auspicious that moments after Bwog arrived that one Stephan Vincenzo, infamously of CC '12, stepped up to the mic to read his lengthy Bildungsroman styled poem, "Where I am and Where I would be." And indeed his poetry is as epic as his persona.

Welcome back to the Best of series in which Bwog analyzes the best in a category of chosen food product!

This week, we take a critical eye toward perhaps the only apolitical Middle East controversy on campus. Join us as we debate the virtues and vices of three of Morningside's falafel-purveyors: Amir's, the Cart on 110th and Broadway, and Jerusalem Restaurant.

Amir's:

You don't have to worry about staining your shirt when you eat a falafel at Amir's. The tidiness of the sandwich here, however, is not necessarily a good thing, as Amir's falafels tend be on the dry side. While the fried falafel ball itself is crispy, its crunchy exterior overpowers the moist doughiness of the interior. The veggie condiments also give the sandwich an additional crunchy fresh kick, but overall there's no messy, sauciness that makes falafels so savory.

Many of you may have heard the distant rumblings of this news, but Bwog has recently received enough on-the-record information to post about a series of newsworthy events that will start tomorrow morning. And so:

Remember Solidarity, the anti-racist coalition with the long list of demands? Turns out six of their members are going on a hunger strike (water and gatorade allowed), starting tomorrow at 8:00 am, to pressure the administration into action. Their reference point is the great student hunger sit-in of 1996, which resulted in the creation of the ethnic studies department--many of their demands involve further empowering ethnic studies, in a plan to clear up unfinished business.

The precedent has been set apart from 1996, however. A 9-day strike went down at Harvard last May, when students deprived themselves on behalf of school-employed laborers, and this article from the Boston Globe has a good chronology of other recent strikes, which have been a lot more common than you'd think.

The striking group plans to make their intentions public knowledge at a dinner at 6pm this evening, so they have no official statement as yet. But campus awareness has reached the tipping point, so Bwog posts--despite threats to withhold information for publishing before the public release.

And, of course, we'll keep you updated with other news as it develops.

Ancient History (1968)

This is where Columbia got its name—since debunked by decades of relative apathy—for radical campus activism. Spurred by Columbia's ties to the defense establishment and its proposal to build a gym over Morningside Park (which would have had Jim Crow-style separate entrances for University affiliates and for the community), the Student Afro Society and Students for a Democratic Society (led by Mark Rudd, whom Bwog caught up with last spring after an SDS chapter dubiously restarted on campus) decided in April 1968 to occupy several campus buildings including Hamilton Hall and the President's own office. Pictures from a Newsweek cover story of scruffy young men (this is pre-female-integration) kicking back in President Grayson Kirk's chair, feet on the table and cigars in hand, shocked the nation. Wikipedia, as usual, has the details.

Fast forward a few decades...the Ethnic Studies fight

Aside from a few more Hamilton barricades over South African apartheid in the 1970s and 80s, the next big dust-up occurred in 1996, when 100 students barricaded Hamilton (it must be easy to take over), 23 were arrested attempting to blockade Low, and three went on a 15-day hunger strike to demand the creation of an Ethnic Studies department. They failed. Their modern protégés are still trying.

Observations from an Ethnic Studies teach in Wednesday evening, courtesy of Bwog correspondent Karen Leung.

No introductory lectures, no Asian American studies classes, and only four courses in total to support Comparative Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino Studies: These were this term's course offerings from the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. It's about the same at Barnard, which has four classes to support Africana Studies.

That sorry tally, among other issues, prompted Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge's teach-in Wednesday night, headlined by people with roots in the 1996 student protests that brought Latino Studies and Asian American Studies to Columbia. Spec's write-up misrepresented a few opinions voiced at the event, and an op-ed by student activists in today's paper sets out their vision of the issue. Here's my take.

Activists thrive on successful precedent, and the teach-in served that purpose in part by drawing connections between now and actions a decade ago. Ethnic studies, said panelist Marcel Agueros (once a protester, now an Astronomy postdoc), will be perennially valuable for how it pierces the double vision of diversity at Columbia: "the numerical diversity of which the university is very proud, and the intellectual diversity" (which doesn't look as great on a recruitment brochure). In another parallel, panelist Sung E. Bai M.A. '91, Ph.M. '94, talked of how the activists depend on each other for support. Each group took risks and made concessions for the community—even though the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) had been established in 1993, African American students endangered their academic careers for Latino and Asian American studies. Coalition efforts continue today through USCC and Making the Connection: Building a United Community of Color (charmingly abbreviated to MCBUCC).