![]() ![]() Proceed on I-90 west to exit 6A (I-787 Albany/Troy) ramping to the left onto I-787S Albany. Take the Massachusetts Turnpike to the New York State Thruway, exiting at B-1 (I-90 West). Take either a left to enter P1 or a right to enter P2. The next light is the entrance to our parking lots. Turn left at the next light onto Western Avenue. Take a right onto Partridge Street (just past St. Continue west on Madison Avenue for approximately 2 miles. Take your next right onto Madison Avenue (Route 20 west). Take a left at the light and a left at the next light onto Broadway. Follow the ramp straight towards the sign for Broadway and the traffic light. Proceed north on I-787 to Exit 4 (Madison Avenue-Route 20 west). Take the New York State Thruway to exit 23. Take either a left to enter P2 or a right to enter P1. The light after North Main is the entrance to our parking lots. As you approach the light at Allen Street bear left at the top of the triangle to stay on Western Avenue (Route 20 splits with Western Avenue at that juncture and becomes Madison Avenue) continue straight through the lights. Take your next right on to Western Avenue (Route 20). At the end of the ramp, turn right on to Daytona Avenue. Continue west on Route 85 taking the Western Avenue exit. Proceed east on I-90 to exit 4 (Route 85-Slingerlands/Voorheesville). Take the Northway (I-87 South) to I-90 east. Directions provided are to the LaSalle Lot (P2) and/or the Lally School of Education Lot (P1). She photographed these pictures for us.The College of Saint Rose is located between Western Avenue and Madison Avenue in Albany. This new source of inspiration is still evident in Cuna molas today, as witness those displayed here, from the folk-art collection of Avon Neal and his wife, Ann Parker, who are frequent visitors to the San Blas Islands. ![]() During World War II, when Cuna men began working in the Canal Zone in great numbers, their wives culled new decorative ideas from the newspapers, periodicals, and whatever sundry items the men brought home. They were strange designs-flora and fauna, abstract patterns, even Christian symbols-for whatever delighted the eye of a Cuna housewife soon appeared on the colorful fabrics. ![]() And since the women were in the habit of decorating their bodies with paint, they gradually began to transfer these designs, in a unique reverse-appliqué method, to the molas, or panels, out of which they fashioned their blouses. One of the influences that missionaries who visited the Indians had was that they persuaded the women to give up nudity. Many settled on the Atlantic coast others paddled to the islands offshore and built crowded villages of huts on more than fifty of them. ![]() The Cunas are descendants of the Carib Indians, who, pressed by warring neighbors and ravaged by disease, fought their way from the Pacific side of the Isthmus. The Cunas sell the coconuts for about a nickel apiece or trade them for goods, especially cotton cloths. Then, too, all the islanders had to offer-in a time when gold, silver, and precious stones first lured acquisitive Europeans to the Isthmus-was the coconut, which is still the staple of the Cunas’ meager economy. Cuna women still travel each day in dugout canoes to mainland streams to fetch water for cooking. Perhaps it was the lack of fresh water that made them less than desirable. Although they are idyllic-palm covered, wafted by soft breezes, and mosquito- and snake-free-the islands were uninhabited, except sporadically by Caribbean pirates, until the Cunas settled on them in the middle of the last century. The San Bias Islands are a string of nearly four hundred islets that stretch for some two hundred miles along the Atlantic coast of Panama, within sight of the mainland. Yet they have taken the culture of the norteamericanos to their bosom and in a way that would astonish the advertising men of Madison Avenue, who must only dream of similar conquests at home. Among them marriage to an outsider often led to ostracism and, some say, ritual killing in times past. The unconscious victims in this case are the lively womenfolk of the Cuna Indians, who live on the San Bias Islands off the coast of Panama, a tribe so fiercely independent that until recent times no outsider could safely spend the night on their islands without permission. With the pictures on these pages, therefore, we are happy to report on one of its conquests so subtle and secret that neither the conquered nor, for that matter, the C.I.A. Y anqui imperialismo, as any good Latin-American orator will tell you, is a pretty insidious affair. ![]()
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