I saw this troupe at NJPAC last week. It was a good performance. If you are a dance fan who hasn't seen them perform, I recommend that you catch them the next time they come to your town.
Some of their pieces are described here.
I was watching the 1952 film Viva Zapata! over the weekend and afterward I wanted to compare some of the details of the film to the facts of Zapata's life, so I did what one does in this Brave Digital Age: I looked-up Emiliano Zapata on Wikipedia. The film took some liberties with the truth (but no more than most such films of its time), but the piece of information on the Wikipedia page for Zapata that struck me the most was this item in the "Legacy" section of the page:
In 1969 students from the Black Student Council and Mexican-American Youth Association of the University of California San Diego proposed the name Lumumba-Zapata College for what is now known as Thurgood Marshall College.
Can one imagine American college students today making such a demand? If they knew who Patrice Lumumba and Emiliano Zapata were, would they wish to commemorate them thus? What strikes me more than anything else is the level of political engagement their demand evinced. Times have indeed changed.
