Thanks to Sidnee Snell for this beautiful gift to CMLC!

We are so grateful to receive this gorgeous quilt art from a textile artist Sidnee Snell to CMLC!

This quilt has “Yes” in nine different languages.  If you are interested in her textile art, please visit her website: http://www.sidneesnell.com/

News: Winter break

Holiday Closures:
CMLC will be closed for the winter break from December 23rd through January 3rd. The center will reopen Monday January 6th.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar

Hi Corvallis folks!
Tomorrow will be the last day to get some special holiday gifts for your friends, families or yourself at CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar. Come to support the international artisans and the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center.


Come to bid this beautiful tapestry from India! It's hand stitched traditional tapestry from India.
Decorated with mirrored and boho beads, gold thread and embroidery! Minimum bid $40.

 

Those stylish Crochet Headband are made by Virginia Reyes.

 All the purses were made by Otilia Andrade, who is from Guanajuato, Mexico.












 Those are some of Maria Rosas 's cross-stitch and crochet art crafts.




















Traditional Tin Oil Drum Wall Art from Haiti. Tin oil drum art is all handmade and usually depicts scenery from everyday life in Haiti. Minimum bid $40.




















Cooking Gift Basket includes cookbook of recipes from classed at CMLC, spices and flavorings used in some of the recipes, chili peppers, spatula, vintage dish cloth and more! Minimum bid $25.

Update: International Holiday Craft Bazaar (December 20th 10am -5pm)

Due to the inclement weather, CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar is ongoing until December 20th 10am -5pm. 

Here's the sign of the International Holiday Craft Bazaar outside the center, standing in the snow.

 

 

Come to CMLC shopping for multicultural handmade crafts by international and immigrant women who will be showcasing their merchandise, art, and services (proceeds from craft sales benefit the women). There are also some rummage sale and silent auction (proceeds benefit the center). 

 

 We invite you all to come and experience a wonderful shopping event!

 

December Events: Culture Exchange and International Potluck Lunch

Our next
Culture Exchange is on Wednesday December 18th 10:00-11:30 at CMLC. Before the potluck to share cultural and traditional stories from people who are from different cultural backgrounds or US people who have traveled the world.Everyone welcome!

International Potluck Lunch is on Wednesday November 18th 11:30-1:30 at CMLC. Bring a dish to share, bring a friend. Everyone welcome!

Weather Closures

 Please note that CMLC follows the Corvallis School District policy of closures. If, due to inclement weather, the schools are closed, CMLC will also be closed.

Update: CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar

Due to inclement weather, CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar is ongoing until December 20th. Thanks for your support and understanding!

it is only 5 more days until our CMLC Holiday Craft Bazaar

Mark your calendars for Dec. 6 and Dec.7!

 Come to our CMLC Holiday Craft Bazaar.

 Shop for your holiday gifts and

support our international community and

the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center!

Event News: http://visitcorvallis.com/events/events-listing-corvallis-oregon-dec-2-8/

CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar

Looking forward to see you!

The Changing Face of America

Sharing with you a interesting article!!!
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/funderburg-text

The Changing Face of America

We’ve become a country where 
race is no longer so black or white.

By Lise Funderburg

Photograph by Martin Schoeller

What is it about the faces on these pages that we find so intriguing? Is it simply that their features disrupt our expectations, that we’re not used to seeing those eyes with that hair, that nose above those lips? Our responses can range from the armchair anthropologist’s benign desire to unravel ancestries and find common ground to active revulsion at group boundaries being violated or, in the language of racist days past, “watered down.”

Out in the world, the more curious (or less polite) among us might approach, asking, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” We look and wonder because what we see—and our curiosity—speaks volumes about our country’s past, its present, and the promise and peril of its future.

The U.S. Census Bureau has collected detailed data on multiracial people only since 2000, when it first allowed respondents to check off more than one race, and 6.8 million people chose to do so. Ten years later that number jumped by 32 percent, making it one of the fastest growing categories. The multiple-race option has been lauded as progress by individuals frustrated by the limitations of the racial categories established in the late 18th century by German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who divided humans into five “natural varieties” of red, yellow, brown, black, and white. Although the multiple-race option is still rooted in that taxonomy, it introduces the factor of self-determination. It’s a step toward fixing a categorization system that, paradoxically, is both erroneous (since geneticists have demonstrated that race is biologically not a reality) and essential (since living with race and racism is). The tracking of race is used both to enforce antidiscrimination laws and to identify health issues specific to certain populations.

The Census Bureau is aware that its racial categories are flawed instruments, disavowing any intention “to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.” And indeed, for most multiple-race Americans, including the people pictured here, identity is a highly nuanced concept, influenced by politics, religion, history, and geography, as well as by how the person believes the answer will be used. “I just say I’m brown,” McKenzi McPherson, 9, says. “And I think, Why do you want to know?” Maximillian Sugiura, 29, says he responds with whatever ethnicity provides a situational advantage. Loyalties figure in too, especially when one’s heritage doesn’t show up in phenotypical facial features, hair, or skin. Yudah Holman, 29, self-identifies as half Thai and half black, but marks Asian on forms and always puts Thai first, “because my mother raised me, so I’m really proud of being Thai.”

Sandra Williams, 46, grew up at a time when the nation still turned on a black-white axis. The 1960 census depicted a country that was still 99 percent black or white, and when Williams was born six years later to parents of mixed black and white ancestry, 17 states still had laws against interracial marriage. In Williams’s western Virginia hometown, there was only one Asian child in her school. To link her own fair skin and hair to her white ancestry, Williams says, would have been seen by blacks as a rejection. And so, though she views race as a social construction, she checks black on the census. “It’s what my parents checked,” she says.

In today’s presumably more accepting world, people with complex cultural and racial origins become more fluid and playful with what they call themselves. On playgrounds and college campuses, you’ll find such homespun terms as Blackanese, Filatino, Chicanese, and Korgentinian. When Joshua Ahsoak, 34, attended college, his heritage of Inupiat (Eskimo) and midwestern Jewish earned him the moniker Juskimo, a term he still uses to describe himself (a practicing Jew who breaks kosher dietary laws not for bacon but for walrus and seal meat).

Tracey Williams Bautista says her seven-year-old son, Yoel Chac Bautista, identifies himself as black when he’s with her, his African-American parent. When he’s with his father, he’ll say Mexican. “We call him a Blaxican,” she jokes, and says she and her husband are raising him in a home where Martin Luther King, Jr., is displayed next to Frida Kahlo. Black relatives warn Williams about the persistence of the one-drop rule, the long-standing practice of seeing anyone with a trace of black “blood” as black. “They say, ‘He may be half, but he’s still the N word.’”

Certainly, race still matters in this country, despite claims that the election of Barack Obama heralded a post-racial world. We may be a pluralist nation by 2060, when the Census Bureau predicts that non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority. But head counts don’t guarantee opportunity or wipe out the legacy of Japanese-American internment camps or Jim Crow laws. Whites, on average, have twice the income and six times the wealth of blacks and Hispanics, and young black men are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Racial bias still figures into incarceration rates, health outcomes, and national news: A recent Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family prompted a barrage of negative responses, including claims of white genocide and calls for “DIEversity.”

Both champions and detractors of that ad based their views on what’s known as the eyeball test: A study of brain activity at the University of Colorado at Boulder showed that subjects register race in about one-tenth of a second, even before they discern gender. In May researchers reported that political conservatives are more likely than liberals to categorize ambiguous black-white faces as black. We assign meaning in the blink of an eye.

When people ask Celeste Seda, 26, what she is, she likes to let them guess before she explains her Dominican-Korean background. She points out that even then she has revealed only a fraction of her identity, which includes a Long Island childhood, a Puerto Rican adoptive family, an African-American sister, and a nascent acting career. The attention she gets for her unusual looks can be both flattering and exhausting. “It’s a gift and a curse,” Seda says.

It’s also, for the rest of us, an opportunity. If we can’t slot people into familiar categories, perhaps we’ll be forced to reconsider existing definitions of race and identity, presumptions about who is us and who is them. Perhaps we’ll all end up less parsimonious about who we feel connected to as we increasingly come across people like Seda, whose faces seem to speak that resounding line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Rural English as a Second Language Classes

CMLC is partnering with Strengthening Rural Families and Health Equity Alliance to provide free English as a Second Language(ESOL) classes in Monroe, Halsey and Philomath.

We are seeking volunteers who will receive free training in ESOL instruction and are from the community in which they will teach. The ESOL classes will be twice weekly and free childcare is provided. Please e-mail the center if you are interested in this exciting opportunity.

International Potluck Lunch and Culture Exchange

Join us for the monthly international potluck lunch!

Wednesday, November 20th, 2013
10 am – 11:30 am cultural and traditional life-story-telling-time
11:30 am – 1:30 pm International Friendship Potluck

Where: Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center, 128 SW 9th Street, Corvallis

Bring a new friend! Come for one or both events! No cost, only sharing!

CMLC International Holiday Craft Bazaar!

CMLC Holiday Craft Bazaar CMLC invites everyone to sell your handcrafted items! Friday December 6th 10:00 am-5:00 pm Saturday December 7th 9:00 am-3:00 pm •You receive all the money from your sold items •Sign up for a 2 hour shift – presence during the whole Bazaar not required •Traditional or cultural items especially welcomed •Items might include jewelry, hand sewn clothes, purses, paintings, knitted or crocheted items, embroidery, baskets, baked items (contact Dee if interested in selling baked goods), etc. For more information or to reserve a free spot, please contact CMLC