“How long till we get there?”
“Just one more hour,” was always the guide’s response.
But just one more hour on a bus traveling on bumpy roads through winding hills turned into six more hours, and when the ChinaVine team arrived at the Jiuzhou Village in Guizhou Province the team was late, very late. The Miao people’s Sister Meal festival was over, and the intricate clothing the women had donned for the occasion was being removed. What the seven-member ChinaVine team, had hoped to capture in pictures and video had ended. But the residents of Jiuzhou Village forgave their Western guests. In an act of kindness, the women of the village put their festive clothing back on and re-performed many of the dances for their guests—even coxing ChinaVine’s three blonde-haired female members to join them in dance. As the sun set, the ChinaVine team was taken into a house where a large table had been covered in local delicacies. Each family in the village had made a special dish for this potluck dinner, and the ChinaVine members were the evening’s honored guests. Miao custom says a guest’s bowl should never go empty, which meant whenever a bowl was cleared of its contents, a Miao woman would come along and fill it again. There was also the rice wine, a whole bucket full, and according to Miao custom, the festivities couldn’t end until the bucket had been emptied, poured from seashells into the mouths of all those present. With their senses bombarded with food and drink, dancing and hospitality, the ChinaVine members said goodbye to their gracious hosts, and stumbled back onto the bus. “It was amazing,” says ChinaVine’s Tomas Valladares, “every sense was totally bombarded. It was just incredible.” This experience will remain Valladares’ most memorable from his three trips to China.
If ChinaVine has an unsung hero it is Tomas Valladares. The 26-year-old University of Oregon Arts and Administration master’s student has been working on the project since its foundation in 2006 and has been ChinaVine’s Project Manager since 2007. He has shot numerous photos and video and created a series of audio tracks for the project. He has worked with well over 50 people, on projects ranging from films to digital books. A self-described “media wrangler,” Valladares worked on both the original ChinaVine website as well as the new site—the latter commanding much of his present work. He also is currently working with the US Library of Congress to have ChinaVine’s 20,000 images and over 80 hours of video and audio files documented at the archive. But in June of this year, the graduate student will leave his four-year post at ChinaVine for good, handing over the reins to a successor. And he will be missed.
“Tomas Valladares” says ChinaVine cofounder, Doug Blandy “has brought to ChinaVine a passion for learning about China along with an ease of manner permitting him to fully engage in collaborating with our Chinese partners.” Blandy says Valladares’ knowledge of all things ChinaVine is immense and refers to the young man as “the project’s living interactive database.” And while Blandy says Valladares will be missed, he hopes to continue working with Valladares in whatever way he can.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6612652[/vimeo]In 2006 Valladares was an undergraduate at the University of Central Florida. The native Floridian had created a short documentary about his Cuban heritage for a class taught by ChinaVine cofounder, Professor Kristin Congdon. The film impressed Congdon, and the professor asked Valladares to join FolkVine, a predecessor of the ChinaVine project. When she and Blandy created ChinaVine in 2006, she asked Valladares to join the team. The following year he was Project Manager. He would occupy this position for two years while at UCF, and would continue in this role when, in 2009, he started graduate school at the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts.
Valladares says he’s not quite ready to give up the project he has labored on for the last five years. “But,” says Valladares, “I think I am ready to hand it off to the next person and go onto the next step.”
What his next step will be Valladares does not know. The graduate student is currently busy working on his thesis, organizing for the upcoming Cinema Pacific Film Festival, working on the e-portfolio project as a Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy at the UO, and has been working with the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Program. He is also, at least for the time being, still ChinaVine’s Project Manager.
Looking back at his time on ChinaVine, Valladares say, “It’s been awesome to have been there from the beginning.”
Truly inspiring.