These are two of my Tecs from my Tec Alliance. Eventually there will be hundreds, over 500, I hope. A Tec is a citizen of the Tecumseh Republic. I have a poem by that name at the end of my book Yaviza. Panamá is the only entry and the only exit to the Tecumseh Republic. Tecumseh was a Shawnee Indian leader who tried to unite a pan-Indian nation in resistance against encroaching racist Americans in the early eighteen hundreds. Only from the heights of a tall thin hill in Panamá can the Tecumseh Republic be reached. Or at least from there by now. Tecs belong to the earth. They arise from the earth and they return to the earth. They inhabit a Tropical Lung as it breathes through them as a they. They arrive in sevens and depart in fours. They are who I see and how I see. They are variations on the human that include almost everything not usually considered so. They transcend technology and are fluent in its ways. Sometimes it seems there may be something Caribbean and/or Indian about them, and something else there, or also completely not those things. This quality I call Mobilian, which is also the name of a visual language that is increasing and that belongs to no one. Tecs are native to the future and they reach their roots back to the deep and eternal silence here from before. This is the silence that keeps the earth moving. Tecs know Saloma and how it triggers our mirror neurons to create empathy in interacting with the face and maybe now more and more through interfaces. Among many other things, Tecs are interfaces. They reach back to where the earth meets our eyes as we see that it is close, all close to the feet as our nerves extend far and differently, and distantly beyond. But the face, yes. And maybe the interfaces even more, if we learn to recognize through those. Or all together. The dual table is sometimes a vulnerability to the electronic body, which is now becoming something else.
In making this face I realized that now there is another language for me to create, Mobilian, an origin language for psychic and symbolic mestizaje moving against racism and for a more all-inclusive idea of the human. Mobilian is a visual language, a language of line and shape and color. Mobilian takes its root from Mobilian Jargon, a Southeastern North American Muscogean-based trade pidgin language that included words from many Indian languages and eventually included words from European languages. Its last known fluent speaker survived until the late twentieth century. Mobilian comes from Mabila, a Trojan Horse town that proto-Choctaw Tuscaloosa used as a trap to lure de Soto into an ambush. The battle of Mabila was among the first major conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans in North America and some say it was located in what is now southern Alabama.