ROOTS IN EASTERN EUROPE AND HONDURAS

My father, the late Dr. Arnold Krochmal, was the only son of Morris Krochmal (born 1892) and Leah Krochmal (born in 1898), both natives of Bucharest, Rumania, both of whom emigrated to the USA at the ages of 13 & 12, in 1905 & 1910 respectively. Morris made his name specializing in brocades and drapery after studying at Cooper Union, leading a quiet, productive life with Leah back when the Grand Concourse represented fancy living.

He, a world-class botanist and experimental horticulturist, fought in World War II on the beaches of Anzio, in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere throughout the European theater, rising to the rank of colonel. He spent his life traveling the globe promoting what he called “science for the people,”writing books, teaching and documenting his trips in photographs and slides. He made medicinal plants and naturopathy his specialty way before they became vogue in the West. He worked with small farmers in the developing world to increase crop yield and develop disease-resistant plants through processes now assigned to genetics. From Afghanistan to the Caribbean, from the former Soviet Union and Bulgaria to the Netherlands and Thailand, he worked tirelessly, driven by the divine task instilled in every decent Jewish person, devout or not: "the world is shattered to pieces and you have to fix it." Born a restless soul, he made his way as a freelancer when few people dared to do the same, cobbling together a varied set of skills that allowed him the freedom to see the world and lead the rich, consequential life he knew he was meant to live.

Arnold’s mortal remains rest in a small hilly patch in the middle of Harlan County, Kentucky, bearing the great honor -- he would have said proudly and wryly -- as "the only Jew buried here for miles around." He met Connnie, wife and companion of his later years, in the late 60s and adopted Harlan County and its people as his own.

Dr. Arnold Krochmal with the King of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, circa 1950.

My mother, Elsa Cabrera, is a retired Honduran English and Arts teacher now studying art, painting, yoga and tai chi and living in The Bronx. Her parents, Cristóbal Pineda and Mercedes Pineda, have their roots in the village of San Francisco de Ojuera, in the central western department of Santa Bárbara. Historians designate this region as a confluence of Northern Spaniards, a "lost" Sephardic Jewish community, various indigenous and mestizo peoples and a small branch of Celtic descendancy. She got her teaching degree on a scholarship to Tempe University in Arizona (where she met my father), then returned to Honduras to her teaching assignments. She tells of her trips to remote villages with no teacher on a donkey and unescorted, a scandal for a woman of good breeding at the time. Elsa, ever passionate about her career, was a vocal and active participant in all the major reforms of Honduras's public school system over the last 40 years.

THE GLOBETROTTING CHILD

So... my father used to tell the story of how I "broke out" into this world in the wee hours of the morning, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, interrupting a blueberry pie party he had been hosting with Mom...

A few weeks later, all of us (my father, my mother, my brother Maurice and I) packed up and left on our first trip of many extended travels, which would take us through Honduras and several countries in the Caribbean. First destination: the Panamerican Agricultural School in El Zamorano, Honduras, which had just hired Dad to teach. NOTE: I traveled home to Honduras in 2000 with my brother, who hadn't been there in 40 years. He conducted certain research on our lives while living there and sought out the house we'd lived in. We found none of that, but documents and institutional registries in the library did mention personality conflicts my father had with management or higher faculty. (Thanks for the legacy Pops.) On another trip I made in 2008, I actually located the house and spent some time at the school with my friend and high school classmate Dr. Abel Gernat,who teaches there now. That trip inspired this video...

We moved from Honduras to King's Hill, Virgin Islands. My earliest memories date from that time: I remember a house that seemed like a mansion to me as a child, and have a specific memory of toddling around the side of the house one day in my diapers when my walk became toil because I'd lost control of certain body functions and had an overloaded diaper.

For a short transition, we lived in Puerto Rico for a time. Then in 1966 we left to Dominican Republic, landing there immediately after the revolution. Certain details from that time also seem to have seared themselves into my memory, principally regarding smells. To this day, any Dominican restaurant I walk into in New York, the peculiar aroma and seasoning of their rice and beans brings me right back to that moment and place. I can hear Dad joking as he did all his life about the graffiti the revolutionaries had painted on the walls back then: "Yankee go home... and take me with you!"

A few years later, we moved again, this time to the small town of Berea, Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachians. There, our neighbors immediately and openly manifested their distinct displeasure with my family's presence. They proceeded, through acts of direct and indirect aggression such as breaking bottles on our front doorstep, threatening and bullying us on the street and other persuasive tactics, to physicall drive us out of several neighborhoods. Guess you can't blame them: Dad had all the markings of the New York Jew in both appearance and speech, Mom had her exotic, arresting beauty with the thick Spanish accent, my brother was the chubby oddball, and I kind of played peacemaker. Any reasonable neighbor in Berea at that time would have found us suspicious.

My parents separated in the late 60's, so while I lived in Berea with my mother, I would visit my father at his new apartment in Lexington, Kentucky. Dad had moved into an Arab neighborhood. He felt comfortable among Arabs. After WWII, he'd rented a Jeep and traveled alone through Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. My brother Maurice has possession of his slide collection, and may some day decide to share this fascinating visual record made by my father the Wandering Jew in his extensive travels across the globe in the middle part of last century.

HONDURAS: FORMATIVE YEARS

Arnold and Elsa divorced in 1969. In the fray, I remember my mother literally smuggling me out of the U.S. and returning with me to Honduras. As usual, we landed in the immediate aftermath of major political turbulence, this time in the days immediately after the war with El Salvador. The first few years, after the trauma of the previous years had subsided somewhat and once I'd assimilated as a Honduran, I began to discover my various callings. Around age 13, my bilingual skills won me the change to travel as an English-Spanish interpreter with my Southern Baptist missionary neighbors and the medical and dental caravans they brought to the country. We'd load Charlie Herrington's custom-made green Ford 350 8-cylinder truck up with medical and dental supplies, drive deep into the mountains up those hairpin-turn roads, reloading onto horses and mules, then finish whatever segment of the path remained on foot. They built churches, the doctors provided medical services and I provided language and guide services in these remote, forgotten places. The caravans would arrive and by that time word had already leaked out. Women, men and children walked for miles around to get seen, often measuring distances in leagues (leguas). Beautiful young ladies would show up at these clinics, often conducted using a tree stump as a dental chair, requesting that the dentists pull their two front teeth so they could later replace them with gold-capped teeth later on.

Inevitably, I ended up converting. Turned into a fiery adolescent preacher, actually. Some thoguht I might become a Latin American Billy Graham, another Luis Palau maybe. In 1973, Charlie (R.I.P.) and his family took me on a grand tour of a series of Baptist churches in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, where I preached hell, fire and brimstone.

Alas, then puberty arrived, drawing me drawn like a hummingbee to the opposite sex and to the distractions and temptations of the material world. Ultimately, I would find my own form of divinity and spiritual discipline in the arts. I never did tell my father about my life as a young evangelist. He would have laid an egg.

Later in life I realized with some sadness how influential some of these Men of God had been in stoking the Cold War era wars that brought so much bloodshed to Honduras and Central America, and for which the isthmus continues to pay the price today. Somewhere along the line, their great hearts and spirit of service had become distorted and the values of Christian service had turned into blind slaves of the most irrational anticommunism fever. Regardless, I cherishe these early experiences which bred in me my own brand of spirituality, strengthened my love for language, and fed the social activist in me from a young age. And I value Charlie Herrington as the man who in many ways filled the void in my life once I became separated from my father.

ACTING AND THE STAGE

So, then, the onset of puberty. Like other things in life, destiny, fate and love, which "happen to us" when we're neither looking for them nor expecting them, that's how I discovered, or rather how others discovered my acting talent. A high school classmate from the American School of Tegucigalpa (Honduras) reminded me of this in 2008. Mrs. Donna Pineda, our English teacher, gave me a first push when she assigned me to perform an early O'Neill scene for her class. Then my Spanish teacher, the great Santiago Toffé, a Spaniard whose life is an indispensable topic of study for his contributions to Honduran theater, gave me another push with the Segismundo monologues from Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. And then yet another fine day, as I shook off the last remnant of the evangelical fever from my adolescence, Ms. Romane Brant -- wh saw me perform the O'Neill-- pulled me out of the hallway and into a classroom and thus recruited me into the drama club. That was my definitive push into acting. The next play I performed, something inside me clicked. From this epiphany I went on to occupy the respected post of class clown. Class clown with good grades in those subjects of my predilection I might add.

Ms. Brant had lived for several years in Kabul, Afghanistan (this country is a recurrent motif in my life), where shed also run the drama club at the American School there and taken her charges from performance to performance in a blue Volvo station wagon that had miraculously survived only to serve the same purpose in Honduras and throughout Central America. The American Schools of Central America at the time held drama festivals in a different country every year, so we traveled to Guatemala and El Salvador. Under her watchful, nurturing eye, I cut my teeth on Moliére, the U.S. canon, experimental performance, mime, poetry and whatever else we felt like putting on the bill.

In my junior year, following the astute advice of Bob Cleary, I applied for and landed a Theater Arts scholarship to Brandeis University, in Boston. My official guidance counselor had chosen the University of Oklahoma for me. I never saw the fit.

Waltham, it turns out, Brandeis's home and the town famous for a now-shuttered watch factory, was part of the Northeast Rust Belt at that time, although I understand it's improved vastly. The institution, however, fit me to perfection. Founded with Jewish capital, the seat of revolutionary figures like Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis, it offered a rigorous theater curriculum that incuded acting, clowning, dance and movement, voice and speech and dramatic literature. Boston, "the Athens of the United States" with its almost 100 universitites, also turned out a perfect fit for me.

I finished my undergraduate degree a year early, so in what would have been my senior year I started my Master's. A year later I had the degree and thus departed to New York with it tucked snugly under my arm ... well, truth be told it was neither tucked nor snug, because I graduated owing the library for an overdue book and they didn't give me my diploma. We'll address this any day. So to be perfectly precise, without the document but with the degree and my dreams burning a hole in me, I sold my futon, bought a Greyhound ticket and came to the Big Apple.

Performers thank our Protector Entity or patron saint for the privilege of living in this city, which while sometimes a harsh taskmaster, sooner or later brings those with big dreams and perseverance to their knees with its charms You get inspiration from thinking of the inexhausible human and material resources the city offers, the idea of creating your own opportunities with a community of like-minded people, which can still be found even with all the economic downturn. I started my career as a set-building intern at Playwrights Horizons, and would leave with my jeans full of fiberglass to do the rounds of the staged reading circuit. I started acting in my first Off-Broadway productions and in the Hispanic theaters around 42nd Street. Later on, I would devour styles and genres, including classics -- in Spanish and English -- contemporary, political satire, sketch revue, folk, modern, then moved on to producing original works of site-specific and performance art.

A good portion of this I did with Repertorio Español, one of the most important Spanish-language theater companies in the United States. With a career in the theater, supported to some degree by the obligatory money-making supplementary careers (I did mine in non-profit, radio and print media for almost 20 years), living a Spartan lean life in a matchbox-size room with no bathroom or kitchen of your own, the opportunity to travel arose frequently. My work took me on tour to Canada, Scotland, Honduras, Arizona, Texas (with its jewel of a stage house designed to acoustic perfection by Frank Lloyd Wright and host of the Chamizal Spanish Golden Century Drama Festival), to Juárez, El Paso and upstate New York. The Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts has a record on video of all the plays we performed at that time. During this period I also took independent research trips to Portugal and Nicaragua. I had the additional opportunity to act in Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba with the National Theater of Honduras under the direction of Karen Matute.

Opportunities in the arts have always been in the hands of the entrepreneur, and in the theater we have the great tradition of the actor/manager dating back to the days of Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. Inspired by that tradition, and understanding that in time I wanted to produce original work, I meanwhile acquired producing, writing, promoting and fundraising skills.

In the early 90's, under the mentorship of Alex Mustelier and Daniela Montana, I acquired grantsmanship skills, winning awards and grants that allowed me to produce just such original works of theater. These include a Franklin Furnace Performing Arts Award for an original one-man show titled Deadly Transgressions: The Aftershock, The Aftermath and the Apology. Later on and a Manhattan Decentralization Grant to produce a modern-day adaptation of the Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes.

Where else but in New York City? For this last show we had two musicians playing with us, Kamran Hatami, a virtuoso of the Persian kemancheh (spike fiddle), and "Papo," an outrageously good timbalero. Papo, born with no no hands or forearms, would tie the mallets to his stumps with athletic tape and played like a virtuoso among virtuosos. All of us in the cast had to stay on our toes to keep Papo from stealing our thunder.

My first outings as a grantwriter and fundraiser had success to such a degree that they became another facet of my career. Towards the end of the 90's, I organized, performed and co-wrote a site-specific theater piece for an outdoor performance at St. Mary's Playground in The Bronx even while serving as Executive Director of the Federarion of Honduran Organizations in New York.

As the century came to a close, however, it became clearer than ever before that the theater had lost its once-revered status in the U.S.'s cultural life, victim in part of the demoralizing blow dealt by the religious right against all publicly supported arts in that decade, and in part to our own weaknessea, because we love ourselves so little that we have surrendered the field. As of 2000, I've shifted away from theater in order to concentrate on independent film. In some sense, I left behid the aesthetic of the ephemeral to pursue an aesthetic that makes greater considerations for the radius of action, the legacy, and the possibilities for development offered by the media of the future: film and television.

Of course, once a man of the stage alway a man of the stage; I'm born to walk the stage, and the stage has played a critical role in my education and professional development. This medium, so ethereal yet so powerful, relies on human communities working together to create the powerful elixir good theater represents for the human spirit. In the theater you can't dismiss the assistant stage manager who sweeps the stage: the unwanted presence of a sharp, rusty nail, after all, could cost the matinée idol his teeth! Because pursuing a life in the theater also requires you ti work in other fields in order to survive, that in turn makes us hardy, flexible well-rounded individuals. The theater has always been my greatest teacher.. It can't be beat as a social investment if you seek to build dialogue and cooperation mechanisms. And at the same time, it seems indispensable to me for the artist to assume responsiblity for his or her own personal welfare, which led me me to another chapter in my life: that of a promoter.

CULTURAL PROMOTER AND CENTRAL AMERICANIST

Distance from the mother country, among those of us who have emigrated either because we got the opportunity, we chose to or we find ourselves forced to leave our homelands, may spark deep, insistent curiosity about it, and the observations made from that distance may provide valuable insights when gathering that knowledge.

From my arrival in New York City in 1983 as a recent college graduate, the creation, promotion and performance of Honduran expressions has occupied a good portion of my time and energies. Starting in the mid 80s and extending over 10 years, Peruvian actress Teresa Yenque and I performed Honduras's longest-running theater piece, Timoteo se divierte (by Daniel Laínez), in venues throughout New York City. The title character in this "comic playlet," Timoteo, describes a terrifying but exciting first encounter with machines at a country fair to his neighbor, Felipa, in hilarious Honduran country parlance. Afterward I wrote a one-man ritual monologue titled Invocación Desde Huehuetlapallán based on my research travels to Honduras and Nicaragua, this last so I could see Sandinismo up close and reach my own conclusions about it, and also because Nicaragua itself because has always exerted an irresistible pull on me. Regardless of my judgments, I fell in love permanently, and that trip fed my Central Americanist sensibilities.

Around that time, Gwendolyn Bennaton (R.I.P.), who ran the Honduras Information Service in Manhattan, hired me as her assistant . To Gwendolyn I owe my success as a cultural promoter: she taught me to write a proper press release, which has helped me beyond what I could ever have predicted. As I've written in a posthumous tribute to her , Gwendolyn worked as a combination ministry of foreign relations, tourism, labor, and information, working her entire life for the betterment of her country without the official support her worked merited. From her I learned the foundation skills that would allow me to produce, write grants and promote.

Concurrent with my work as an actor, I began helping to organize and promote art exhibits, theater and dance performances, with a healthy component of Honduran culture. Principal among these: media promotion for the first official tour of the Ballet Folclórico Garífuna de Honduras to New York City. This sensational black dance troupe, despite its administrative problems, has set a precedent as a world-class Central American Africanist institution. The press releace caught New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson's eye, and he came to the performance. Later on, someone told me it had surprised him to see him in the theater, as he never stays for the second act (which I can't attest to myself). The big surprise and payback came later, when he published a glowing review of the performance. The Ballet filled the auditorium at Riverside Church to capacity several night in a row, on the other hand.

In 1988, I struck out on my own to develop in search of a more combative theater, with an aestetic that better reflected the late-20th-century New York City I lived in and that would open a channel up for my particular sensibilities. I began by translating the works of contemporary Salvadoran poets, and adaped House Under Sail (La casa en marcha, by Carlos Santos) for the stage under the titleThe Straitjacket: El Salvador Unbound. Rehearsals had already begun when in late 1989, rebel forces in El Salvador staged a major offensive that took the war to upscale neighborhoods in the capital of San Salvador. Concerned over events in the isthmus, I offered my language skills to translate war briefs coming in from behind rebel lines via fax for dissemination in English. The Chinese students had consecrated fax technology as the new tool for revolution after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China that June. Meanwhile, one of the Latin American theaters here in New York City prepared a Latin American theater festival featuring a roster of mostly international theater troupes. My calculation that we would be somewhat atttractive given the subject matter, given the historic moment, and given the possibility of a Cold War era massacre on the isthmus, in addition to the permanent invisibility of Central American theater and art here in New York City and the fact that we were located in the same town, did not work out. As we say, in the theater though, "the show must go on." We secured a venue at at Synchronicity Space, the New York Post provided coverage, and audiences all commented on the challenging, disctinctive language and style. Our souls, on the other hand, still had the undercurrent of sadness because of the human costs of the war and because of that very invisibility.

The rebuff radicalized me as a Central Americanist, leading me to WBAI 99.5 FM (Pacifica Radio). Santiago Nieves, my mentor in radio and my friend, opened the door to us and gave our show a full half hour.

Between 1995 and 1998, I wrote what amounts to a separate chapter in my life and dedicated my energies to executive work in the non-profit world. You can read more about that on my Development page.

In 1998, I returned to WBAI after getting expelled along with a group of co-tenants from our residence in The Bronx, in a building that had been taken over by the Casa del Sol Collective on 136th Street and Cypress Avenue. The case made a lot of noise in local media, with police, evicting us from the building using a SWAT team supported by snipers, and when we came out we saw that several blocks in The South Bronx had been cordoned off cordoning off with cage trucks, other agency operatives and the like. The large-scale operation had set its sights on a community of artists and activitists who had begun a borough-wide movement. The radio station became my haven, and I served a full 6 years there producing arts, news, World Beat, Honduran and Central American music and arts reports for a variety of producers and departments.

That same y ear, with Hurricane Mitch pounding Central America WBAI, in an act of generosity and a vote of confidence, handed master control over to me, and I coordinated English-language broadcasts to the Tri-State area and beyond. The grave crisis facing the country at that moment became the subject for WBAI's national and international listenership, known for their activist spirit and solidarity.

In the ensuing years, I moved on to finance, record, engineer and produce a series of programs that focused on Central America and reflecting the complex dimensions of our reality from my perspective as a Central American. As a volunteer producer at a community-based radio station with a long history of contestatary politics, I had the freedom to broadcast without censorship. The highlights of my work at WBAI can be found on the Radio page.

I last produced for WBAI in October of 2001. It had become financially unfeasible to continue to work as a volunteer, particularly after so mamy years of constant production, and the high-quality production I had made my calling card. When management rejected my several proposals for a permanent space in their programming, (and for which I promised to raise funds myself), I knew the time had come for me to move along.

I have no complaints. WBAI served as my radio school with Carlos Andrés Pérez as my technical mentor. Just like you heard it, but not who you're thinking. The station opened its doors wide to a current of pioneering Central American programming that hadn't been heard there yet. Producers at the station continue to call me when big stories break in Honduras, as they did after the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. On that occasion, they called on me to request that I schedule an early-morning telephone interview with Honduras's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Jorge Arturo Reina. Unfortunately, the Representative did not return telephone calls the morning of the interview, leaving WBAI producers waiting to hear his message and, which is more important, leaving a progressive, prime-time English-speaking audience well-suited to his message waiting, and at its highest because of the prime-time scheduling.

It is quite a wasted opportunity. The network of five stations that make up the Pacifica network, WBAI 99.5 FM among them, have had iconic status among progressive institutions in the United States and the world for beyond the last 50 years. Any social justice movement in the world that proclaims social justice as its mission would seek WBAI's audience as a matter of first recourse and without a need for a lot of analysis. Pacifica Radio has an aggregate listenership of almost 500,000 people, with some 50,000 paying subscribers. These last provide nearly 85 percent of its funding, and they have a collective ear finely tuned to Central America issues. In contrast to this incident lies the fact that many Hondurans championing various causes whose voices I broadcast over WBAI during my time there, conscious precisely of the country's isolation and the need to broadcast to international English-speaking audiences, have been appreciative of this most suitable radio platform..

Regardless, I believe that the causes dear to Honduras and the Central American isthmus can always count on WBAI's microphones to broadcast from a critical and progressive stance on Honduras. There will no doubt be opportunities in the future to collabonrate again, working always as a private citizen concerned about the country's future.

I consider radio the very foundation of information and communications technology, the most interactive of all media in that it draws the listener's imagination to meet it halfway. The larger portion of our planet's population still listens to battery-powered radio and local programming, so the medium remains as effective as ever. On the other hand, I also believe that we who work in the non-profit world and the progressive arena have the obligation to create healthy, prosperous working environments that reflect the very same ideals of justice and equality that we champion in our discourse and which can divorce us from the noxious notion that financial deprivation is a requirement in order to move ahead.

Much of my life's work revolves around Honduras and Central America, and my emotional stake in both remains as strong as ever as the content of this website shows. I've always taken advantage of my trips home (except for my 2008 trip) to walk paths unknown in the country I call home, to listen and document the voices of its people as they live, struggle and express their joys, aspirations and laments in their uniquely Honduran way. You're invited to share my experiences at the Honduras Gallery, on the Radio page and woven throughout this website.

TRANSLATOR AND WRITER

I've been translating and interpreting from English to Spanish and back for as long as I can remember, and my work covers theater, poetry and literature from El Salvador, Cuba, Honduras, Argentina, Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Some of these works I adapted to the stage. I've saved everything in my steamer trunk and over the course of the years I've accumulated an anthology of unpublished works in translation which I trust will find a worthy home. My work as a translator taught me much about the craft of writing until I found a channel for that talent as well.

In late 1995 a core group of Hondurans (director María Teresa López, writer Roberto Quesada, photographer Max Flores, myself and others) founded Nosotros los latinos, an alternative Spanish-language newspaper-magazine with a pan-Latino point of view. We wrote, in breadth and in depth, about the rainbow of Latino communities in the city, promoted artists, writers, dancers, independent film, and gave voice to individuals and organizations that don't usually get heard. We provided critical commentary on politics and other issues, published controversial writers who no one else would publish, and in short created a voice united in diversity. Until 1999, when it folded, I worked as a World Music staff writer with occasional theater and film reviews, with ocasional articles on a wide range of subjects. This relatively long-lived experiment demonstrated to me that contrary to what the media would have us think, Latinos do seek alternative media that will offer something beyond what conventional media offer. I would like to see more print and Internet magazines like Nosotros los latinos coming out of the world's largest and most diverse Latino city, attendant on our community's ability to revalue our cultural wealth and identitys.

A lifetime of training and experience allowed me to pass the Federally Certified Court Interpreter Examination, a stringent, 2-part affair administered by the University of Arizona and required for the Spanish language in Federal Courts, in 2005. This has opened another avenue of opportunity for me, while also saddling me with another responsibility. We interpreters are the guarantee that whoever goes through the judicial system can understand what is happening to him or her and so that the system, in fact, treats the accused fairly.

The combined skills of the writer and translator, along with knowledge of media technology, have anchored me somewhat through the lean years of "bohemia," and remain today one of the keys to my success. Language in all its manifestations allows us to explore the power of our character, submits us to a test of patience, hones our perceptive and cognitive abilities. The written word travels far and wide through time, landing intact in the hands of the studious and curious of the future. Without it, we bind ourselves as a civilization to our own stingy mortal life spans as individuals and, ultimately, to end up relegated and forgotten

DEVELOPMENT, FILM, GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING AND THE FUTURE

I offer a chronicle of my past, recent and future activities in the world of development and the non-profit sector, practically a separate chapter of my life, on my Development Page. The page shows various facets of my organizing contribution to the city and the community, including a monument and a green space. My current activities involve the launch this year of Bronx World Film, a development project revolving around the independent film industry. This year's edition spotlights Central American film in a continuing effort to make inroads globally for the expressions of the isthmus, along with a mix of shorts in a variety of styles from all over the world.