8Tucson, Arizona – September 4, 2013 – Season 2 of “In the Americas with David Yetman” premieres this Sunday, September 8, 2013 at 6:30 p.m. on PBS 6. The 10-episode series takes viewers across 7,000 miles of American landscapes. Host David Yetman ventures into Yellowstone National Park caldera and its geysers in the winter and later takes in lakeside beaches with smoking volcanoes in southern Chile in summer. In the Amazon in Brazil, Yetman and videographer Dan Duncan visit Japanese immigrant farmers who have become expert producers of black pepper, and in Guatemala are invited into the homes of Maya Indians as they assist in excavating archaeological sites built by their ancestors.
According to Yetman, a research social scientist at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, the ten new programs focus on a mix of landscapes, peoples, places, and cultures often overshadowed by more glamorous travel agendas. “We also travel to the Panama Canal, guided by an architect and a renowned naturalist, both with backgrounds not often available to travelers, to appreciate both the canal and its incomparable setting,” Yetman added. The Three Kings Festival in the Yucatán provides a startling contrast with the sophisticated works of the canal, as ancient traditions of the Mayas are renewed in the town of Tizimín.
The fireworks festival in Mexico occurs but once a year and is a spectacle most U.S. residents can hardly imagine. “That fiesta is, well, scary,” notes Dan Duncan, a winner of multiple Emmy awards and a producer/filmmaker at the UA Southwest Studies Center, who was upended and suffered burns during the filming. “But we saw fireworks unequalled anywhere in the world.” Duncan also uses his fluent Portuguese in arranging a carefully researched program on the heritage of descendants of African slaves in Bahia, Brazil.
Two programs of which Yetman is especially proud concern the building of the Sierra Nevada, the greatest mountain range in the United States, filmed along with a noted tectonic specialist, and the documenting of whistled speech among Indians in a remote village in Oaxaca, Mexico, a program funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
In the Americas with David Yetman includes ten half-hour programs each season and is a production of The Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, a department in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The series draws heavily on faculty from the University, including the departments of Anthropology, History, and Latin American Studies. The programs are distributed by American Public Television and are broadcast by more than one hundred PBS stations including seven of the ten largest markets. It is also distributed in all French- and German-speaking countries in Europe.
Arizona Public Media’s PBS 6 is the presenting station for the series, which is currently in post-production for its third season. Duncan and Yetman have begun field production for the fourth season.
Season 2 episodes, Sundays at 6:30 p.m. include:
September 8 – “Tultepec: Mexico’s Skyrocket Central” The small city of Tultepec, a suburb of Mexico City, specializes in the production of fireworks, supplying much of the country known for fireworks in its festivals. In March of each year Tultepec celebrates with dazzling, flamboyant, and hazardous displays of fireworks that wildly exceed any other in Mexico.
September 15 – “The Rainforest Nisei: Japanese Immigrants in the Amazon” Southern Chile is a land of forests, rivers, lakes, and volcanoes. It is also home to Native American and immigrant communities. We visit Mapuche Indians and German and Italian immigrant communities and the vast landscapes they inhabit.
September 22 – “The Rainforest Nisei: Japanese Immigrants in the Amazon” In the early 1920s, a small group of Japanese peasants received a land grant deep in the vast forests of the Amazon. Today their descendants have become prosperous farmers, raising tropical crops and pepper, all the while protecting large tracts of primary tropical forest.
September 29 – “Two Millennia of Mayas: Guatemala’s Cultural Legacy” Archaeologists have only recently begun to restore the important Maya city of Ceibal, situated along the Passion River deep in the Petén forest of Guatemala. We travel to the site with scientists directing the latest excavations and visit the homes of the Maya workers who are restoring the site.
October 6 – “Ice, Rock and Water: The Sierra Nevada” California’s Sierra Nevada is the largest and highest mountain range in the continental United States and, until recently, a geological puzzle. The source of colossal wealth in the form of gold and, now, water, it was a formidable roadblock to settlement of the state. We visit the range with renowned tectonic specialist Eldridge Moores.
October 13 – “Fiesta in the Yucatán: Maya Traditions” Each year on January 6, pilgrims travel to the ancient Maya city of Tizimín in the Yucatán peninsula to celebrate Epiphany. The festival of the Day of the Kings combines pre-Columbian and modern themes, all of them gilded with the touch of the Mayas.
October 20 – “207 Panama: A City and a Canal” Panama City has been a pivotal shipping port for hundreds of years-over water and over land. Today it has become an economic powerhouse, the Hong Kong of the Americas, thanks to its booming canal. But the canal cannot function without the services provided by the huge rainforest that envelopes it.
October 27 – “Bahia: Brazil’s African Connection” African-Brazilians provided Brazil with internationally renowned cultural symbols: samba and carnival. The center of African-Brazilian culture is the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia. Its connection to Africa—physical and cultural--helps us to understand the distinct cultural and culinary contributions from this vibrant repository of African influence, and to recognize the heritage of slavery.
November 3 – “Winter in the Caldera: January in the Yellowstone Hotspot” Yellowstone National Park is our first, and one of the most visited national parks. In winter, access is limited, and visitors and wildlife are challenged by deep snow and fierce cold. The frozen landscape is utterly transformed from summertime, and its explosive potential is even more evident.
November 10 – “Whistles in the Mist: Whistled Speech in Oaxaca” The Chinantecan people of mountainous northern Oaxaca, Mexico, speak by whistling as well as by talking. We visit their isolated community and see for ourselves how they use whistled speech to supplement—and sometimes replace—spoken speech.
For more information about the series visit www.intheamericas.org
To schedule an interview with Dan Duncan or David Yetman, please contact Dan Duncan or call 520-621-2484.
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