Earth Day in Tlatelolco

April 22 is a day to celebrate our home, mother Earth. It was first proposed by an American senator, Gaylord Nelson, as a nationwide environmental protest. That first year, 20 million Americans
participated.

In 1990, 200 million people joined in a worldwide Earth Day celebration. April 22 is also my mom's birthday. That day, in 1990, I was very angry at her and I decided to both join the first Earth Day march celebrated in Mexico, and run away from my mom's birthday party. I spent the whole day marching, protesting and listening to environmental speeches.

This year, 2008, we had lunch in a nice restaurant with my parents and sister, to celebrate my mom's birthday (yes, I am no longer angry at her). Later I went to the Gregory Colbert's Nomadic Museum, "Ashes and Snow" at the Zocalo (central city square), and admired his amazing photographs and movies. Two hours later I went to "Animasivo", an Animation festival with environmental themes like Global Warming. All the works have an environmental message to spread to the world. Among all levels of quality, there were very interesting graphical proposals.

On Sunday, April 27, "Gala de Gea", another party, was celebrated, "a posteriori" to allow whole families to participate. It took place at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Three Cultures Square), named that way because it is surrounded by historic buildings from three different cultures and times in history: Aztec pyramids, a colonial church (from the time Mexico was a Spanish province) and a modern skyscraper. After the official inauguration and speeches, Julieta Fierro, a famous Mexican astronomer and science popularizer, ran a contest of mambo dancing. The team that moved a seismographer the most won. My team did it.

But the icing on the cake was when the crowd played a giant loteria (a kind of bingo game, but using pictures instead of numbers). All the pictures were photographs of natural scenes, like volcanoes,
glaciers, rivers, caves, and so on. The pictures were on big 4x4 boards on the floor. Instead of chips, people jumped on the squares when the name of the corresponding picture was called by the host. It was so fun that people wanted to keep playing, even after the prizes ran out.

After the game, several documentaries and videos were played on a giant flat screen. Most people were paying attention to the videos with great interest. It was good for my self esteem, for I participated in the production of some of the videos.

It was a nice, memorable, sunny day.