How did Hambrientos Vagabundos start?
It was the summer of 2004. My cousin Shaggy and I decided to go driving
south of Mexico. We just took a few belongings, some "tortas"
— the Mexican version of iron ration sandwiches — and a little
money. One day by the highway, in the middle of nowhere, we found ourselves
eating three days old tortas that, at the moment, tasted like heaven's mana.
Then and there the "Hambrientos Vagabundos" — that is Spanish
for Starving Vagabonds — were born.
What is Hambrientos Vagabundos now?
In a way, during that trip and the years that came after it, what started as a
joke evolved to a kind of philosophy. The road went from just a causeway leading
to a goal into the objective itself. The, once physical, starvation mutated to
a hunger for knowledge, culture, traditions, for everything new. Suddenly, it
was not possible to be lost anywhere anymore.
hambrientosvagabundos.org
I'm a person who is always searching for something to do; the useless and the
weirdest, the better. Maybe that's why I decided to study physics. Sometimes,
when I'm stuck, I have to take a step back in order to try to see the whole picture.
It is in those times that I get to do something completely unrelated. In these times
hambrientosvagabundos.org grows.
This webpage started as a decompressing excercise to learn
HTML. Then it was modified
as an excercise to learn CSS.
Later, javascript was the goal.
In this the latest iteration, the objective is to learn to combine
PHP scripting with
SQL database integration.
The HV's Logo
My cousin and I have personal different logos for the Hambrientos Vagabundos. Mine is the one shown at the header of this web page and it was built on the following basis:
The feet are the vagabonds. There are two sets of them in the shae of a cross aligned with the four cardinal points. They represent the wandering to me. The cross is due to the fact that I am a Roman Catholic Christian. They are two sets because I believe that, even when we wander alone, God is always with us. Wandering in the world, we wander with and within God.
The spiral in pre-Colombian cultures represented the whelk. I was born in the Huasteca region of Mexico. One of the possible meanings of Huasteca is small whelk. Also, the whelk in the indigenous cultures of pre-Colombian Mexico represented the whole, the Universe. The place we wander. Thus the spiral is both below and above the feet, embracing them.
The butterfly was the pre-Colombian indigenous symbol for change. I am also a
physicist and I find delightful how, when you put two or more thing together, non-expected
behaviour emerge. I believe we are all entangled and form part of a greater whole. In this
sense the feet's heels form a butterfly.
