LOS ‘HIPPIES”: Expresion de unecrisis

By MARGARET RANDALL

TEXT IN SPANISH

Scarce 1968 First Edition book

Published by SigloVeininunoEditores SA, Mexico City, Argentina & Spain:  1968 First Edition.

This scarce book  is a Softcover with 110 pages with a 16-page insert of black and white photographs by Bob Fitch. Back wrapper has author’s photograph.

Size of book is 6 inches by 3.750 inches.  Condition light cover wear, small edge tear, sheets toned due to paper quality but clean, tight and no chips.                    

First Edition, translated to Spanish from English by Felipe Ehrenberg. There appears to have been no English edition, with the translation being made from the author’s manuscript.

This is an anthology of writings on the U.S. counterculture,

Civil Rights  and Black Power movements, originally appearing in the underground press and magazines, but mainly about the hippie counterculture, Diggers, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Psychedelic rock music , the California San Francisco Haight-Ashbury scene, etc.

Margaret Randall was a poet, left wing political figure and Civil Rights activist who spent many years in Mexico and Latin America involved in revolutionary politics. Both Mexico and the US tried to deport her.

The photographs were taken by Bob Fitch a leading social movement photojournalist. His photographs were used to promote civil rights, labor rights, and war resistance movement.  

MORE ABOUT == Margaret Randall (born December 6, 1936, New York City, USA) is an American-born writer, photographer, activist and academic. Born in New York City, she lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and other colleges.

In 1958, she met with Elaine de Kooning in New Mexico, where the painter had a teaching position and they became friends. Margaret Randall being a fan of bullfights would take Elaine to Mexico to watch these events.

Randall moved to Mexico in the 1960s, married the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón and gave up her American citizenship. She moved to Cuba in 1969, where she deepened her interest in women's issues and wrote oral histories of mainly women, "want[ing] to understand what a socialist revolution could mean for women, what problems it might solve and which leave unsolved." Her 2009 memoir To Change The World: My Years in Cuba chronicle that period of her life. She lived in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1980 to 1984, writing about Nicaraguan women, and returned to the United States after an absence of 23 years.

Shortly after her return in 1984, she was ordered deported under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. The government’s case rested on two arguments. First, while living in Mexico and married to a Mexican citizen, she had taken out Mexican citizenship, thereby presumably losing her U.S. citizenship. This was in 1967. In addition, under McCarran-Walter, the government claimed that the opinions Randall expressed in several of her books were "against the good order and happiness of the United States". The INS district director gave the justification that "her writings go far beyond mere dissent". With the support of many well-known writers and others, Randall won a Board of Immigration Appeals case in 1989 ordering the INS to grant her adjustment of status to permanent residence and restoration of citizenship.

 She travels widely to read and lecture. She was a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and also taught briefly at the University of New Mexico, Macalester College, and the University of Delaware.

Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay).

Recent books include Che On My Mind (essay), The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones  (poetry), and Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (essays), .To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (memoir, with photos), Narrative of Power and First Laugh (essay), and Stones Witness, Their Backs to the Sea, My Town, Something's Wrong with the Cornfields, and Ruins (poems, with photos), and As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacía (poems in tribute to the disappeared of Latin America, in bilingual edition, translations by Leandro Katz and Diego Guerra). Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018 was published by Wing’s Press in 2018. In 2020 Duke University Press brought out her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary.

Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Collection at the Round House in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2017 she was awarded a medal for Literary Achievement by the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2019 Poesía en Paralelo Cero gave her its Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize, and Casa de las Américas in Cuba gave her its prestigious Haydée Santamaría medal. That same year the University of New Mexico awarded her its Doctor Honoris Causa in Letters. In 2020 she won AWP’s George Garrett prize and Chapman University’s Paulo Freire distinction.

The desert of the U.S. Southwest is her spiritual home, and ancient ruins—here and in other parts of the world—are increasingly her greatest source of inspiration.

MORE ABOUT == A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.

The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.

In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Monterey Pop Festival popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people.  

In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970.  Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asiatic spiritual concepts have reached a larger group.

The vast majority of people who had participated in the golden age of the hippie movement were those born during the 1940s as well as the early 1950s. These included the oldest of the Baby Boomers as well as the youngest of the Silent Generation; the latter who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the pioneers of Rock music.