[An Introduction to my Presentation at Kirwan Institute]

I am Joaquín. When I was eight years old, I changed my name to Jack. I didn’t intend it as a political statement, of course. I just wanted to fit in with everyone else.

With everyone else in the suburbs of Maryland, that is. That’s where my second family lived at the time the court proceedings were finalized for my legal adoption. My father, a politically-minded poet in his late 20s by then, was gone. Gone to the West Coast; gone to the South. Gone to the jungles of Chiapas, machete and pen in hand. He was meeting with ancestors and kin; photographing and writing about the Mayan Indians.

And gone from our lives. He and my mother (she’d say) had been Too Young to work things out. No doubt that was true. My mother was a Jewish girl from New York, and my father a Chicano vato from El Paso. They met on the campus of UCLA in the summer of 1968. I’d not begin to understand until much later the size of the cultural gulf that surely stood between them, as well.

At eight, I imagined I’d become anew. Cast away those things attached to my old life. It was a new time, a new life. I had a new name. And I could be a new self. I’d learn one day that changing who you are is not as simple as changing your name. But for the moment, I thought with these changes to birth certificate and social security card and school attendance sheet, I might finally fit in.

The feeling that I didn’t fit in had grown in me for a few reasons. One was my name. A name that on the East Coast in 1978, was an anomaly. A name that defies the rules of the English alphabet, and so, one that many people will mispronounce. My teachers were some of them. It was a name my peers would either fail to remember, or would in many cases ridicule. In class after class of Brians and Joshuas; of Lauras and Jennifers; of Matts and Tonyas, you learn something from being the one with the weird name. You begin to infer. You understand that you are apart from the others in more than just one way. With every souvenir license plate keychain in every gift shop that ignores your name; with every approach of  roll call from a new teacher and every introduction to a new person bringing dread to your belly, you are reminded you are Other.

By itself, who knows how much it would matter to have a name rare among your peers. And if it were a difference not attached to the many others that would not vanish from my eyeline over time, I imagine not much. Were this the only example of how I tried to conform to the dominant culture’s desire to eradicate my culture and history—and self—it would hardly matter. Here, it serves well as a symbol. And isn’t that what a name is for?

A name can tell us who we are. It can tell us where we come from, who came before us, and our place in today’s society. It can even offer glimpses into the future. A name will not always contain so many secrets, but mine did. And it had been left for me to discover this. I didn’t know it then—when I rejected it in favor of the plainest, shortest, easiest-to-pronounce and least-Spanish name I could think of—but it was as if I had been left a pendant with a treasure map to my own history and legacy inscribed upon it. I would some day grow to be very grateful to reach into my dusty pocket and find that map.

My father chose the name Joaquín from a poem written shortly before my birth; a poem important to the Mexican American community. The dramatic narrative foretold a confusion I was already experiencing as a boy, and portended a strength I’d need later.

I look at myself
And see part of me
Who rejects my father and my mother
And dissolves into the melting pot
To disappear in shame.

The name my father gave me tied me to my culture in the strongest possible way—by both naming me after Corky Gonzales’ quintessential Chicano as well as describing a path I was already walking. Come the day I turned to re-read the book my father gave me as a teen, I’d find my own past; my own troubled reflection, there in its passages. And I’d understand a bit more of those things that hence had only flitted about on the periphery of my vision.

Maybe I tried to vanish into the American Dream. Repurpose my outline. Maybe I wanted to become just like you; just like him; just like the boy in the poster, the one on the screen, the hero. I wanted to be the Fair one, the Right one, the Good one…the white one. I did not want to be the Mexican one. The one whom the world around me insisted was, instead, the Dark one, the Little one, the Bad one. The Criminal. The Servant. The Thief.

Culture is powerful. Media is powerful. For much of my life, the relationship was one-way. The current of news, opinion, metaphor, imagery, and storytelling was aimed at me. There was simply no way to wield that mechanism. The thick tongue of the dominant culture sang its songs into my mind and I sang along.

I thought that without a Spanish accent, divested of a Spanish name, and with lighter skin than my father, I could walk away from both my blood and what the world seemed to think of my blood. I was wrong. This cannot be done. You are who you are. Your family is your family. Your blood remains your blood. And whether you call it corazón or something else, your heart remains your own heart.

But I was right to understand that there were and are strong currents in place. Undertow that buoys a few, drowns many, and directs the rest into a preferenced route. We call the flow of information, evaluation, entertainment, iconography, story, and slant that is our collective conversation and counsel “the mainstream.” And depending on your relationship to it, you may be able to swim to your desired destination without much struggle. Or you may find yourself grasping for purchase and gasping for air.

At 18, I took my name back, and perhaps that was the first concrete step toward making my own path; toward standing strong against the tide that batters us daily. I’ve not looked back since then.

Because as the hate crimes perpetrated against Latinos rose higher and higher; as the Right Wing created a culture of fear against the US’ Southern border and all below; as conservative pundits repeatedly reinforced revulsion of the Spanish language and those who speak it or are otherwise touched by it; as the mainstream culture’s historically derisive lens on Mexico and Mexicanos became more intense and hostile in many places, preaching hatred to a virulent degree, I knew I had to grab a hold of that firehose of energy, and help filter and redirect the flow of news, opinion, metaphor, imagery, and storytelling. The world was being made more dangerous for my people, and for me.

This is the terrain from which grows all the content and action launched from my blog The Unapologetic Mexican today. These are the issues that can be found informing the articles I write, the videos I make, the art I produce. The themes of values in culture, symbolism in media, messaging in news copy or slant; racism; human rights; identity; ethnicity; language, power; history; community; self. The day I began my blog was hardly a first step to empowerment and self-awareness. It was an important one, though, making possible many subsequent steps.

When I present at the  Transforming Race Conference in March, I will speak about these themes and in what way I’ve been able to engage them, to make change; about the four years I have been keeping this blog, and all the ways in which it aided me in reclaiming a feeling of pride, and a greater understanding of how I can support and inform and empower the communities to which I belong.

New Media is nothing by itself; it is a hammer without the dream of the carpenter; a garden hose on a hot, arid, dusty day. All alone, New Media is but form awaiting function. But given you can access it to a reasonable degree, you can stop being a passive imbiber of the media and all its messaging. You don’t have to shout at the screen, you can speak your reply or alternate view from the screen, too. You need not rest at bemoaning the media’s slant because you have a greater ability to replace it. And you can add your strength to a purpose enjoined by many, and together, affect our common society.

This new format we call “blog” is not like a pad of paper; not like a radio station, not like a community bulletin board, not like a classroom, nor a movie theater, nor a newspaper, nor a meeting room. It is all these things and more.

My father said “in my day it was mimeographs and in yours it is la bloga.” He was speaking of  the activism begun in El Chicano Movimiento, the era from which the poem Yo Soy Joaquín sprung forth.  It is no longer 1967, it is now 2010. The shape of la lucha transforms, but the struggle remains at hand:

Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.

And in all the fertile farmlands,
the barren plains,
the mountain villages,
smoke-smeared cities,
we start to MOVE.

La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
Latino!
Chicano!

Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
And
Sing the same.

I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.

In the four years I’ve written my blog, I’ve educated myself and others. I’ve enjoined the national conversation, and been invited on panels of web influencers, and into progressive fellowships. I’ve found friends with the same interests, and together we’ve organized sites and groups to work together on issues that concern our communities. I’ve written and co-written pieces that have made it into print. I’ve had my blog used in college courses, and my videos in high school classes by teachers who found my writing online.  I’ve had librarians request copies. I’ve launched a weekly web show that is sponsored and that exists to support and empower and inform the Latino/a community. I’ve been employed as a columnist on immigration, and flown to various states to speak on these issues, and to accept awards for groups I’ve helped found. And all this, in place of fuming in the living room, hiding behind a phony name, or otherwise letting the fickle currents of the day sweep you wherever they may.

We are the new media. We are the new voice resounding with the old truths. We are the culture changing. And throughout all these changes, we are still right here and moving forward.

________________

Also posted at the Race Talk blog; written at the request of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s Media Relations Manager to help promote the Kirwan Institute’s Transforming Race Conference, at which I’ll be presenting in March.

Note: I wrote this as a prelude to the presentation. Not a mirror of it. This part of the story is very much about identity, about my personal journey…and that’s part of the story of this blog, and relevant to an Institute on the Study of Ethnicity. But I don’t want my presentation, itself, to be so much about the empowerment of one person. I don’t think that’s such an important or original story to tell. Or enough people are telling it already, we could say. Of course it’s an important story to me! We all want to thrive, we all want to better ourselves and our situations. But my presentation Unexpected Pathways to Empowerment will be focused more on how New Media can enable our community–any community–to become more empowered, and how many of us can tap into that and help it to happen. To me, today, that’s an important distinction to make. And connecting people to work for causes that aren’t part of the individualist recipe for success (and thus benefit a greater amount of people) is more important (especially these days) than any one person becoming well-read or well-known.

YO SOY JOAQUIN is a poem that means a whole lot to a lot of gente, and I am one of them. My father gave me the book in my late teens, and honestly, I didn’t look hard at it for another fifteen years or so. But when I needed it, it was there. Corky Gonzales‘ words were there for me when I reached for the strength I’d need to crawl out from under the cloak of shame that mainstream US culture reserves for the Mexicano, and embrace my proud, indian roots; my winding and intertangled—if not sometimes troubled—Mestizo roots; my enduring and strong Mexican roots. Señor Gonzales reminded us we are not historical drug dealers, knife-wielders, or dish-washers…and even when we are, we are something else, too. We belong to a legacy, we are tied to this land, we are descended from fierce warriors, and Indian kings, and beautiful culture and traditions that cannot be washed or stolen away by the dominant culture. We are something new, a combination of those things, and the unknown New that we forge here in an often-hostile environment.

Very empowering and proud ideas for the Indian still hunted on the land his ancestors once called home, a land he/her and his/her kin still call home. A land strewn with tangled paths, that disconnected from that understanding, can lead one to wander too far, and become lost.

Yo Soy Joaquín is un grito of solidarity and collective self-love and when it was brought forth in the late 60s, Chicanos gathered around this and waved it forth like a shining banner. My old man explained the impact of Corky’s poem like this:

“Here, finally, was our collective song, and it arrived like thunder crashing down from the heavens. Every little barrio newspaper from Albuquerque to Berkeley published it. People slapped mimeographed copies up on walls and telephone poles.”

—Juan Felipe Herrera

And not just on telephone poles! When I was born before the decade flipped, Jefito named me after this very poem. This is one small way that my fate and purposes and awareness were sown long before I knew that to be the case.

But one day in 2005, I walked up a hill with my back straight and with the light of ten suns in my eyes because I could carry a feeling of self-love and self-respect and a belonging to something much more beautiful and larger than myself…and it was the day I opened up this poem again and really took my time with it. Shortly after, I began this blog.

So thank you, Mister Gonzales. Once again.

On Friday, March 19th at the Denver, Colorado Auraria Campus Gym, there will be a symposium held to honor Señor Gonzales and his work. To register and find out more, call (303) 964-8993 or email char1551@comcast.net.

Or Nezua Leaves the Media Consortium and Moves On to What is Next

FOR THE LAST YEAR OR SO I’ve written a column on immigration matters for The Media Consortium, which was first called The Weekly Immigration Wire, and later The Weekly Diaspora.

Abruptly, the job has come to an end by my editor telling me on the phone they are not renewing my contract due to “editorial strategy.”

I’ll write  about the experience and related thoughts here to close up the story, as well as to think it out for my own satisfaction. I am taking my time with it and if you prefer curt and properly concluded writing, feel free to skip this post taking away nothing more than the fact that what comes after this point from TMC—whether it is called “Diaspora” or something else—is not my work.

I feel honored to have kick-started that new project of theirs and get it off the ground for the first 13 or 14 months. I’d be lying if I did not admit some frustration that I am let go just as CIR is centered, finally, in the national dialogue.

I publish this a handful of days after that happened. I’ve thought long and hard about what I should say, if anything, about my experiences. It is very hard out here in the NEW MEDIA [echo echo echo SHINE] world. You need to think about what you put live. I don’t want to react. Ranting was never a viable option; I’m not here to be petty. But the first draft of this post glossed over so much that I experienced, and mostly to put on a pleasant face professionally. And…yanno. To not Rock the Boat.

And the more I thought over the entire experience, the worse I felt about that. What do I do out here? I talk about my experience in the world, about ethnicity, about the power structures we run into, about immigration. About New Media. About writing…journalism…about allathat. Hey, that’s why the Kirwan Institute is flying me across the USA in a couple months. Dammit! Some people want to read about these things. And…as a writer type, I’d say until I write things down, they exist in a strange and nebulous place in my consciousness…likely to be erased by the everyday rushing of blood through my arteries, the living of the next breath, the What Is Important Today factor folding into the next day….

This is a Story About

It’s very tempting, when telling a story, to define the content as I did with the subhed atop this writing. It is natural to want to sum up, conclude, compartmentalize, prologue or otherwise provide a frame with so many words in order that your reader can better absorb the thesis.

But I can’t really say what this is a story about. It’s not just about my leaving my last job. Not at all. And yet, that was the departure point for much of it. Ultimately, I don’t want to predispose your thinking. In fact, I’d say it’s possible ten people could reach the end of this post and come away with different things. I’m not sure. But that’s how I wrote this. Not entirely sure of much except what it felt like to live and remember the moments.

This is a story about a number of things. People, the USA, society, gender, race, ethnicity, language, communication, media, blogging, challenge, lessons, immigration, people of color. Lenses. Business meeting art. Cultural change. More?

Marginalized Voices Are Being Mainstreamed…or Are They?

The job brought challenges. For them, I am grateful. They help me grow. They did and still do.

My very first one was perhaps due to the blurry crossover between what I do here at UMX all the time, and doing something that feels sort of the same, is often on the same topics, and written from the same seat!—but otherwise completely different in everything from process to pace. It is a business someone is running, and a job they offer me. Sounds obvious. But when you begin writing online—and when I began writing about immigration, specifically—it was from a very organic place and manner. I was going to say, I sometimes say, “I never wanted nor planned to write a word on immigration” but the truth of it is, I began the blog for the May Day Marches of 2006. That marked the official start. So I was bound to begin writing on it sooner or later.

But mostly what was driving me and my writing was wrestling with what IDENTITY means here in the U.S. to someone like me. I wrote about Chicanismo. And, también, about standing up to be counted among those willing to stare down the racists and those coming at mi gente from all sides. Talking about my family means talking about the border. And about American Indigenous. And about the war waged on us for many many years. It means talking about the power of the people, about programs like Bracero, about women who are on their knees cleaning the floors of the wealthy US citizens. Like mi bisabuela. It means talking about inequity. It means talking about immigration.

So my arc here has been a curriculum born from heart and only incidentally becomes marketable because of how long you’ve been at it, how much you run your mouth, the “hot” issues of the day according to Rahm, and an explosion in the new media frontier of which you simply happened to have been on the early tide of for serendipitous reasons.

When you find work through that path and segue over into a scheduled job…there are going to be a few places where you stop and say “Oh, wait. This is a wildly different thing.” With varying degrees of conflict required before it is clear. And here I may simply mean conflict to your expectations or personal running monologue.

I got there, though. In working that job. That’s one thing I feel proud about. Granted, it was not an easy transition. Me and my editor knocked heads a few times, especially early on. But that’s what having an editor is about. I have both been and had editors, and it is always a touchy relationship or one that takes time to feel out between any two particular people, as they will no doubt be passionate about words. But I grew to feel out the job. I grew to see that it was a place I section off my overall agenda and care and passion and feelings for the movement, and just earned my money doing what was required. For most of the time I worked for them, I felt good about TMC, because I was still allowed to speak my peace on the issues. That is, to use a lens that was not DC-centric, that was rooted in a more expansive and less border-frantic philosophy, or rather that spoke of the harm borders do, how they are in our mind, and how here in the US, immigration issues are not seen coherently, but too often a place where racism and imperialism dominate. But there were always tensions. I’m sure they existed for varied reasons, I won’t pretend to be omniscient. But there is going to be tension when you write from that place, and yet are involved with a media collective that hues to a different voice overall, one that is “independent” but yet still corporate in many cases, or DC-centric in ideology. That is only expected.

Though some things were not expected. One day my editor called me out of the blue to tell me she had issues with my “tone.” I was baffled. She didn’t mean my writing tone in the articles. She meant personally. On the phone. On emails. After a few minutes getting no clear picture of what this meant, I found myself getting frustrated, but tacked to the particulars to try and get clear of the indefinable accusation. I’d need a specific example. No, there was no real example to be had. I think the only one she could find was that recently I bragged about my blog “crushing” TMC’s blog in terms of activity. (Not respecting authority? Acting as if I were equal to them in status or power? Bad social etiquette? I said it in humor, after all….) Other than that, it was just an overall “tone” problem. I pointed out the good things I said about TMC recently as well, asked why we didn’t focus on those things. I didn’t bother to link her to my drowning maestro glosario entry, I honestly expect self-identified Feminists to already be familiar with these types of dynamics—surely she’s been told similar things by men who wanted her to offer up a bit of deference at any given moment?—and don’t want to insult them by snarkily throwing a bingo card into a tense situation like that.

So I mostly bite my lip while my belly flips. I end the phone call saying I don’t really appreciate the call coming during free time to convey what it had to convey, and I will continue to be as conscientious as I’ve always been. I felt very frustrated.

“For you, talking about race is a necessity; for us, it is a luxury.”

That quote is from a classic post in the classic iteration of UMX, back when the blogosphere just began to talk about race in the mainstream, it seemed. The person who made that statement was a commenter called “truth machine” who came by to make an ass out of himself for a short time one day, three februarys ago. The phrase was first offered as a cold observation of fact, and then again as a vehicle intended to deliver Wite Disdain.

It also communicates the difference in approach that can be found between many left-ward factions that otherwise share much agenda. For example, white feminists have the luxury of not having to factor into discussions of Feminism the issues that are particular to women of color. And as most know out here, that is actually an ongoing tension in organized Feminism.

This is one place tensions manifested at times between me and my last employers at times. The difference in viewpoints. Nothing antagonistic, as with ‘truth machine.’ But in a way that is useful to examine simply to learn about the new social and cultural terrain which we traverse here in the U.S. of A.

Other people are talking about this terrain, too, of course. Tracy Van Slyke, an owner of The Media Consortium, just co-wrote a book called Getting Beyond the Echo Chamber and in it she did a fair job—the best yet so far, I’d say, of any white progressive author writing out histories of the blogosphere—of looking around and seeing more of the terrain out here than normally recognized by many white progressive book writers: The black blogosphere. The women of color. The brown blogosphere. (Don’t remember if it got deeper than that in the book, I’ve a little left to go.)

Tracy quoted me in her book (forgive the self-referential move) as saying the difference in people of color and “identity-based” bloggers vs. white progressives is that (in about every angle of our activism) we are talking about our lives. Our families and their lives. About being in the crosshairs. About hate crimes rising against us. About very personal real-life up-close things. How our family came here, what struggle has been for our families, and finding a place, yet, where that story is told. Whereas the “Progressive” blogosphere often comes to these issues from a more detached, idealistic, altruistic, or theoretical place, when they do come at all. That’s just a fact, it’s not an accusation or a slur. It simply has to do with the history, overall, of our peoples. And what attention is given to the struggles of different peoples in the media, and why. And how that is portrayed when it is.

This is not an original insight, and it is not rare to hear it circulating in the blogospheres con melanin, but I was happy to get the sentiment into her book, happy that she included it. In fact, it made me feel very good about her and about the work they were doing.

Interestingly, there were some times writing the column when the same truth contained in that quote interfered with my work; or at least provided more challenge for me and my editor—a 20-something year old white woman. As I pointed out one day to my editor after having an article flat out rejected as a whole rather than being sent back to me with edit notes here and there—I am not like the fellow writing the TMC Economy Wire (very cool cat named Zach), nor Lindsey, who writes the Healthcare Wire. I am here dealing with issues that are inevitably personal and emotional. But maybe that’s not business talk. I have to admit there was nowhere really to go with that, once its said. So once I said it, I told myself I had to learn better how to compartmentalize. And I did.

Absorbing the Energies

What did I do to write on immigration every week?

I paid attention all week to news. This was (and is) how I know what’s going on, the landscape. I am on multiple list-servs, I am in touch with hundreds of people through Twitter and email and so on.

But the day I’d write the column, I’d open about ten or fifteen pages of articles (a predetermined list that was composed of independent news media who were members of TMC) and read through, slowly. If there are videos, I watch them. If there is audio segments of radio, etc, I listen. I sit and absorb ALL of this in one big undulating wave of information and energy. It’s quite a dosing!

So when the news would get thick with Mexican@s being mistreated or hunted, or in hate crimes being dismissed and the killers walking free, or when an abuela is manhandled or harmed in detention, it sometimes messed me up inside for a bit. I hope this is immediately understandable. Beyond the identification, I am an artist and certainly with my “nerve endings on the surface” as amiga Erika says of the artists’ condition. Shoot, I remember nights trying to write about these news stories and ending up in tears. And one time—it had to do with when a lot of abuses in the detention centers were coming to light—just ranting in my column. And then, as I wrote above, my editor called me back on the phone with a somewhat tentative “Um…this isnt really what we are looking for.”

She was right. It was my soul bellowing in pain, and yes, it was words coming from  a heart torn by barbed wire and thus, a voice that should sound out and perhaps be heard as one part of today’s human response to the immigration issue…but it wasn’t what they were paying me for.

I never submitted another article like that. I figured I’d just keep it in my blog, was grateful I have people willing to read what I write here.

Clash of the Lenses

I’d say I got the format down pretty damn well by the end. I became better and better at letting the words go without a struggle. I’d say pretty quickly. That night had a lot to do with it. Just a shift of the mindset.

I’ve been a fan of Poe for many years, many many years. And I’ve read up on some of my favorite authors as a boy and I know about Dickens and others getting paid to write in periodicals, or installments of fiction, and having to alter their words to make a buck. Knowing that is what prepared me, even, for selling art to magazines and such. You adjust to that particular market. My writing voice, which normally relies more on build, on rhythm, on music, and color, needed to fit into much sparer, dryer, “delivering news” type of style.

This reminds me of a chapter, again, in Beyond the Echo Chamber, by Jessica Clarke (directs the Future of Public Media Project at American University’s Center for Social Media and is the former executive editor of In These Times) and Tracy Van Slyke (the program director of the Media Consortium and is former publisher of In These Times.) The chapter is called Move Beyond the Pale, Male and Stale, and in it the authors predict the media landscape, if it wants to survive, must move beyond white male dominated viewpoints and the dispassionate, removed typical journalist voice; borrow a bit from the heart, soul, and fire of the blogosphere.

It is tempting here to make a cheap shot about how the edits to my work taught me the opposite, to tame down my voice. But that would be ignoring the very heartfelt and much-to-the-left thinking that they always allowed through, mostly in my final paragraph. I think just by hiring me, there was an example of media allowing less “stale” voices. And I do appreciate that. So yes, for what it’s worth, I do think they followed—or attempted to while I was with them—that dictum.

After all, this is a new media group. And as progressive as they want to be, they are a business that has to contend with the power structures in place. Anybody can talk about the white male centric landscape all they want. But it remains a power system that preferences certain voices and actions and views, nonetheless. These values and preferences ripple out and ripple down and ripple over, and I think they are worth talking about so that more and more people see the invisibled rule that shall never be spoken and can make a new way; can “move beyond the pale, male, and stale.”

Once I accepted within that writing about immigration with the job hat was very much different than writing on immigration for myself, the process became infinitely easier. In fact, after that took hold in me, I don’t think I ever bucked an edit anymore unless it said something new that distorted the orginal meaning beyond acceptability, or was something I could not approve being said about the Mexicano or undocumented community, or on the behalf of either. I didn’t need a fight, nor to be as intractably idealistic as a 19 year old would. I needed to write what was happening in immigration in the independent news circuit, and be true to myself. That was possible, most of the time.

But I did note the difference in our lenses and how that became a conflict at moments…and how the “brown” voice would be subsumed in a more anonymous, neutralized voice. And seeing that happen bothered me, sure. The media voice and how it handles mexican americans and white vs non-white is central to what got me out here, and what affected me as a child, and what needs to be shifted. If I am going to be involved in making media, then I have to feel good about how I am affecting the world in that specific aspect! Perhaps not every minute. But certainly when certain topics are being discussed.

Showing you an example of one edited—before and after—paragraph of my writing for TMC will give you a clearer idea than my describing the dynamic. (The original Diaspora blog post. The original source article.)

BEFORE TMC EDITS:

Reviewing Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, Emily Deprang writes on a story that unfolds on a bus trip from Tucson to Houston and back and “details four young Mexican women” in varying legal situations—two with papers and two undocumented. Thorpe’s narrative is told through the eyes (green) of a “pale” skinned woman who has the chance to get up close to the idea of people being the same despite their citizenship status and are, after all, “Just Like Us.” DePrang calls the book “an epic journey through the realities of undocumented life” and feels “[e]very American—documented or not—deserves to meet Marisela, Yadira, Elissa, and Clara.”

AFTER TMC EDITS:

Emily Deprang reviews Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America for the Texas Observer. The story unfolds on a bus trip from Tucson to Houston and back and “details four young Mexican women” in varying legal situations—two with papers and two undocumented. DePrang calls the book “an epic journey through the realities of undocumented life” and feels that “every American—documented or not—deserves to meet Marisela, Yadira, Elissa, and Clara.”

Those edits can be reasonably defended. Some of my wording is unclear “on a story that unfolds on a bus trip” or cluttered, and my editor was great at lancing that stuff away. I learned from it, you better believe me. I’ll watch your fingers when you play that git-tar!

But you’ll notice what has been taken out with the edits, as well.

If you read the original article, you’ll see that the author herself very much intended to draw distinctions—those of hue and ethnicity and the privilege that comes with being lighter, with having green eyes, with being white. (If you get a feel for the book by reading the entire article, you might argue that this idea is central to the entire book that is being promoted:

Late in the night, the bus crawled to a halt, kicking up dust and gravel, and the lights came on, waking everyone. Wordlessly, the bus rustled to life and passengers began rummaging for purses and wallets. The doors hissed open, and a Border Patrol officer mounted the steps and creaked along the aisle, asking passengers if they were American citizens. When he approached us, I looked up at him with my pale face and green eyes and said, “Yes,” a defiant little frown on my privileged face. I didn’t offer any documentation. His eyes flicked to Juan, who proffered his Green Card. The officer studied it with a flashlight, front and back, scrutinized Juan, looked again at the card and returned it. The bus was silent until the officer left, and it was silent for a long time after.

The write-up celebrates how They Are Just Like Us, but as you can imagine, this would be a strange voice to adopt for a person of mexican descent writing on the piece, as I was. “Them”? “Us”? It becomes tricky, navigating this post-racial world!

My editor seemed to have answered this challenge by stripping the paragraph of any indication of this tension. And yet that tension is what the writer is communicating. Here I feel…it was the editor’s inability to grapple, yet, with these issues that made these edits, that rendered the very important lingering upon these tensions into a muted, spare collection of much safer words.

Moments like that gave me great pause. I bounced the edits back, learned not to push too hard whenever necessary, just move on with the JOB. But I’d spin into inner dialogue. Questions.

Were we—TMC and I—furthering positive change by our relationship? Was a reality/voice typically marginalized and under attack at almost all times—truly being given a platform? Or was I facilitating nothing more than the appearance of them doing so—Tokenism?

These well-hewn paths are not unique to TMC or any one company, new or old. There are simply currents in place. Strong currents in place that rise from standing structures in the stream. If you are to find a new path, it will not be the one of least resistance.

When I was accepted into NYU Film and both my best friends were so jealous that they couldn’t hide their disgust. They had wanted to be filmmakers all their lives. And I decided when flipping through the Cornell book at the last minute that my long-time dream of acting would be best expressed in pursuing a Film and TV degree. And got into NYU. And when I was two hours south, and writing and shooting short films not much later, I always invited those friends to star or be crew in my films. I wanted to bring them in to the circle of possibility.

When a certain “brown” list serv began, I argued hard for a woman or more to be on the mod panel, to shake up the typical power structures. I wasn’t even on the mod panel, and believe it or not, it really was an argument. But the young male in charge acquiesced as we had both been in Chicago when the list was conceived, roomed together, and I was kind of “in on it” to some degree. I reached out to various women of color to ask if they were interested at that point.

When my friends and I began the Sanctuary, we did the same thing—reached out to bring in people who had less of a platform. I could go on, and there are many examples that do not involved me, but I know less about them.

Those who want to change the landscape and remake the power paradigms need to always be pushing power outward to the margins. There will always be those with less power in a given moment or situation, and who have suffered in ways due to that reality. And until they get more, the societal structure will be unsound and unjust. The more drastic the ratio of inequality, the more danger exists in that unsound structure.

Those who wish to hoard the power while pretending they are here to make a new day will meet conflict when they appear in the midst of those wishing to truly change the system. This happened recently on the aforementioned list-serv dedicated to “brown” issues or framing, and is in fact related to this story.

The Process of UnNatural Selection

There are bloggers out there who have written for years on immigra—Oh, hell. I was gonna totally background myself and put it all carefully without ever mentioning UMX so as to avoid the accusation that my care for an issue is all about my own ego! Now I’m reacting preemptively to idiots. Never worth the time. Which brings me anyway (isn’t that neat?) to the link I wanted to bring in. Because some responded to the next post I’ll link by claiming all I wanted was more blogroll links.

If you’ve been around since the classic days of UMX, you may remember this post. The post’s use of the word “front” is a double entendre. For me, that post stands out as my having finally internalized the realization that most white progressive bloggers at the time (or the ones known to me) saw their range of issues are universal ones, while issues that apparently disproportionately affected people of color (and especially MESCANS! for cryin out loud) are fringe issues, “pet issues,” etc.  You know! This was that crazy blogular year of 2007! Shit was blowin’ up ALL over! And that post sprung out of my seeing the reality of the mainstream focus as it applied to the Mexican American community, or the undocumented or the Latino community. It was also pretty raw because it was me reacting to the march the year AFTER the massive march in 2006. And those numbers inspired many, and made it feel that change was imminent. So when 2007 came and the march was stomped by the police walking in creepy military type formations because they needed to make a point about massive numbers of mexicans marching, it was jolting.

But in truth, the police attack on la marcha in 2007 was only a catalyst. That feeling had been bubbling up for a while.

It is clear now that the immigration issue presents a true challenge to human rights activists as well as those who identify as “Progressives.” And I’m sure there are many posts by many people saying as much; I’ve read many since then. And it was, in fact, a reader/commenter who summed that idea up concisely in one of my threads, which is where I got the title for “The True Front of Progressivism.”

I’m not claiming I originated anything. I’m making clear, using a narrative I can stand behind as witness, where tension existed on this issue, in some parts of the Internet. This is where I learned. Duke, a co-founder of the Sanctuary, could point out his own posts on how Dkos/Markos was insisting immigration was not a relevant topic for Democrats, and so on. Manuél, Kai, Mala, Kety—everyone could tell their part of the story.

No matter which angle you come at it from, the fact is, it has only been recently that immigration has become a “hot” issue on the Left.

In the last year or so many groups have sprung up. Groups that exist to advocate for immigration rights, lawyer firms with Twitter accounts that cater to immigration. While NDLON has been pushing hard for the issue for years, it is only now that the larger entities like Dkos and Netroots Nation and such are embracing the issue, devoting more time, money, space. They want a win. A Democratic win. And I’m sure they feel it is the Right Thing to do. Now.

So there’s some background. Now we come back to the present.

Remember that “Brown” list? Let’s call this (purportedly) Latino-centric list “BrownWorld.” Well, one day about a week ago, someone sends an email, happy about a panel of speakers pushing immigration as an issue. Happy because it’s a big media draw, and in large part because the well-known Markos Moulitsas (founder of Dkos) is pitching the idea that Now Is the Time for Immigration reform.

But right away, some voices spring up on the list, protesting that nobody who follows the issues regularly is being included. Some of these bloggers are on top of this nearly every day. For years. Remember, the white-O-sphere had been very resistant to seeing immigration issues as their issue. The Wite Disdain was offered in place of any humble examination that a greater justice could be had by the core issues being more inclusive or basically, just more aware of the actual real world. That reality is remembered by many. While others want to move past it without acknowledging it in any meaningful way. They probably see no need.

Yet, on the parts of the bloggers who were brushed off, a resentment brewed. We had been told these issues that drew crosshairs on our families were “pet issues.” “third rail.” Not to be included in the constant push for justice!

I am reporting how some were reacting to this announcement of this panel. For me…I had already learned. Didn’t and don’t really raise hell about it anymore. Don’t see the point. I’ll still make the statements I do about what I see. But it’s not like I do it to make it stop or make someone see. I make the statements I do…to make them. Because it’s what I see from where I am sitting.

The overall response from many after I wrote True Front was that I had been “begging for links” in my post. The focus mostly rested on my tone. Though nobody spoke to me directly, I got the feedback in various ways. Sort of a “trickle down” effect. There were sentiments expressed that nobody who blogs should ever “shame” people into acting  (…to save lives?). Okay. I think I agree with that, after all. I didn’t write to shame anybody into anything. I was calling it as I saw it.

But I got the message! Many were annoyed by it. Okay. What I chose to take away was “organize and support your own people and don’t expect the so-called ‘Progressives’ to get in on it.” And I think it was an empowering lesson and message, one that Malcolm X. touched on in his many talks to the African American community.

Then a year or two passes, and suddenly some of those same people are taking up the helm. Yes, I understand why those voices leaped up on the list when that panel was discussed. Markos was one of those people who had not long ago opined on the non-necessity of advocating for immigration reform.

Look, I’m 40. Not 20. I know a bit of how the world works. And in fact, having Markos get behind immigration is, I’m sure, a net positive for the promotion of the agenda in the media. I, too, understand the bafflement of those on BrownWorld who saw the panel as 100% a good thing and couldn’t understand why those damn immigration bloggers were complaining again! Hey! Immigration is now gonna get some backing by a blog star! Influence and all that. Of course, now that a person stakes a claim on the issue, the question comes into play as to what they might see as satisfactory as far as terms of the bill. What will they push for, exactly? What will they concede?

But off the bat, yes. The more voices, the better!

And I said so:

I am not suprised by the stars heading up the “cause.” But hey, I would love to see Markos and others get on this issue with the fever and passion and endurance and knowledeability and powerful stances I’ve seen for years from many smaller immigration-oriented bloggers, so who knows what will happen. Anything is possible.

So yeah. You can see I needed to acknowledge the truth of things. We don’t need any more hidden histories. But at the same time, it’s not a bad thing that he is speaking in support of immigration, come on!

The thread went on… .

It’s funny, on “BrownWorld” how there are a couple non-brown people (white) who can always be counted on to leap up when us oversensitive and whiny POC and put the pressure on to be quiet. I think part of it is this DC mentality that if everyone is cheering that the picnic was sunny, nobody will remember the rain. So a voice not in lockstep really rattles them, as if it portends gloom, foretells failure. Insecurity?

These unofficial list monitors say things that sound amazingly…Reaganite. They are like Progressives…until it comes to their reaching for logic born out of conserative thinking. Like telling us “I just think you are disempowering yourself” by pointing out the eternal preferences that overlook certain voices.

I think of Clarence Thomas who hates himself for Affirmative Action perhaps helping balance against historical and systemically entrenched injustice in his own path. Would that also be the logic of the BrownWorld Reaganites? That this program is disempowering to minorities? Either way, they leap up over and over, striving to hammer down the Last Word and help the system stay as it is. They never see the larger justice suggested by questioning certain entrenched value systems.

They identify too much with the standing systems that preference what they do. I get that. But it feels obscene on a “brown” list.

Let me tell you something, white people. If you are on a Brown-centric List. Don’t find yourself in that position. Also, males? If you are on a female-centered list? Don’t do the same thing to women. Also, ANY PEOPLE who are SUPPOSEDLY in a cause that disproportionately affects certain other-related people than yourself? Don’t be finding yourself all up in that issue laying down the law for them.

You’d think these things would be obvious.

Anyway, in the course of that conversation, the Reaganites offered a couple other points of view.

One was that it was an “All-Latino” panel, so what complaint had any of us? Always complaining, no solutions, they said. (Because…including voices that have been on the issues for years is not implied as a solution inherently in the original observation?)

They were saying that Markos Moulitsas is “Latino” in a political sense. I know they weren’t meaning it like GOP uses Michael Steele–for an appearance reason with no visible cultural stance or pride or agenda that prioritizes the community. Because that’s called a “token.”

But I don’t have to be so ungenerous either. It is possible, too, that Mister Moulitsas is just now thinking about how the issue applies to him and his family. Or not even. Maybe the rightness just happens to now be revealed to him. These things can be very personal and I wouldn’t attack someone for any pace they take, if it is natural. That would be meanspirited and just stupid.

So it wasn’t important until now. And now it is. Okay! At least now it is.

Yet what I DO take issue with is how when the media that had all gathered together to be in the presence of Markos’ Very Huge Megaphone and asked him what other bloggers were involved with immigration, he replied that he couldn’t think of any offhand. That there were some smaller bloggers who had been doing some good work, but he hadn’t yet figured out a way to reach out and help give them a voice.

I guess it did not strike him that one way to do so…would be to mention their name or blog at that very moment.

If someone is an expert on the social landscape of the Internet in any way…that is a bad position to stake out. To claim such distance from the very issue you are championing. After all, this is the same Markos who emailed me personally a few months ago to inform me he had put my name in the hat when Presente.org asked him who to look at for choosing their National Campaign Director! This is the same Markos that has The Sanctuary on his blogroll! He knows peoples names. Let’s not be silly.

But don’t take it too far: I do not think it was personal. I’m betting the omission at that moment was a reflex that simply felt “safe” when presented with the question.

Those who aren’t really interested in changing the landscape of power and only want their own chair on the dias do not push power outward. They instinctively hoard it to their table and cradle their arms around it.

Is this about my thirsting for links? Is this about me wanting an immigration blogger limelight? Nope. I made it clear how tied to that issue I am and why and what it’s not about. Additionally, I am much more involved in art lately than blogging (as you can tell by the blog since January 1) and I find myself in this different role and relationship to the issue not by accident.

This is just a story I want to write down here and remember.

The Gloves With Spikes Inside Them

Don’t they wonder? Those Reaganites on the progressive lists? They claim we are just over emotional, don’t want to solve anything, etc. We leap up passionately about the same things over and over…don’t they wonder why? Why we would do it, if we know it hurts us? Do they not think there are consequences to bucking these systems? Oh there are. Beyond being told you are whiners and ‘disempowering yourself’ by supposed allies. Beyond, too, being hushed by other people of color. Maybe older ones, maybe more careful ones. You can get some people of color very worried by rocking the boat too much, and they may lash out at  you for fear that they will reap consequence for your actions. They have become more practical, and often grew up in a time where it was much less safe to do so.

If you attack patriarchy, there will be consequence. If you attack white supremacy values there will be consequence. We know this. White people often HATE hearing about white people. And the talk need not even be so pointed; most visibly stiffen to even hear the phrase “white people.” Having the phrase appears means the normal invisibility of Whiteness is banished and that there IS a dynamic and that it CAN be named and described. It’s enough to get you thrown out of a holiday picnic!

There’s a reason I hid most cultural markers of mine as much as possible for years. There are currents in place. There are unwritten rules. If you push back…you will feel it.

First in the belly. A fear. You did something dangerous. Should’ve kept quiet. Don’t rock the boat. Why are you starting trouble? Shhhhh. You fear that every time you do this and do it publicly, it will come back in a form that makes your kids ask why you can’t afford things more and more. You will limit your job opportunities. You will make enemies. You will feel uptight. You will, at times, feel a target.

The effects of pushing back on power structures are not unknown to those who do it continually. If you had to assume these people of color were not being overemotional, but are in fact very RATIONAL actors…what would prompt them to do these things? What would prompt us to keep at it? Because many blows for justice come with a pain that marks the hand wielding the tool. Why would you keep swinging?

One of the Reaganites trying to shut down the mostly-POC complaints said he couldn’t understand how we kept saying the Progressive Blogosphere is mostly white. I replied that it was indeed viewed that way. I had just read Tracy’s book and as I mentioned, had been impressed to find the inclusion of histories of the brown blogosphere and black blogosphere and women of color-o-sphere in addition to the . I pointed out to him that in her book, in the chapter “Move Beyond the Pale, Male and Stale” Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke had pointed out that in fact, the Progressive sphere was viewed as white and privileged. I went on further to say that to ignore this was to fall into a blindness that Whiteness prefers: the invisibility of its own dominance in a sphere.

I felt pretty good about slinging out my employer’s book title and some content. I thought she’d like how I used it as a forward-thinking example of literature, aware of the demographics of our modern day and on the cutting edge of where media had to go. I knew my editor was on the list, and would read the email. Our call took place only a short time after that list meléé.

I was actually surprised when less than twenty seconds into the phone call, I was told I was being let go after 13 or 14 months!

A Different Direction

We had only been scheduled to speak about how to get the column done on Wednesday night. But after a neutral greeting sentence or so, my editor says “I’m glad we had a chance to talk” as if it were not expected. That line struck me as odd, especially as it led directly to “because we are not going to renew  your contract.” She went on to say tersely that now that the “[immigration] issue is heating up” they wanted someone “in DC.” I said Okay. It was a bit surreal for me. I hadn’t expected it at all. I’m the first one to write on this column for them, I got it off the ground, and I’ve been on it for years before this, and here I felt like I was the boxer who trained for so long, jogged to the ring in his satin red jacket and was told the fight was off before the bell rang.

I totally forgot to ask if she liked the plug I gave Tracy’s book. Nor did I argue. I just said ‘Okay,’ right away. To my ears, she sounded put off-balance by the quick agreement, if anything. Maybe she was expecting more resistance. Because she offered an explanation a second time, even though I hadn’t asked for more. “Yeah, we’re just gonna…take it in a different direction,” she tacked on. Hunh.

I wondered immediately what direction this might be. Will the new writer continue to pose questions like this on media calls? Will they continue to try and push awareness outward by continually advocating for more grassroots voices in the column? Whatever direction it takes, I hope it is one useful to the People. And also, yes, I do hope that The Media Consortium is successful in their plan of building a lasting coalition of smart, informative, independent media.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Obviously, there is no way to know exactly spurred the call. There could have been a few reasons. An “editorial strategy” that required I be FedExed the last of my pay within days; that would pay me for two more weeks, but required not another day of work from me. Strategy that thought it better to have no column at all for a couple weeks rather than have me write it; better to have no immigration blogger at all since none is waiting in the wings.

And Hell, I want to take it personally! But there is no point in that. Maybe the entire operation is faltering and needs to reboot. As I said, I agree that it is time for the next level. I feel it in my life, yes. And I was beginning to feel very frustrated by the lack of communication. Everything felt in flux with no clear direction of where it was going. By the end I was doing the work their interns had been doing for 8 months or so…before they just stopped. With no warning to me that I can remember. I used to bring it up, but stopped mentioning that the interns weren’t doing their part of seeding the article ladders, and just started doing that work myself.

In fact, the end came as a bit of a shock simply because I thought that I was getting my part down much smoother; that my editor and I had worked out a system that no longer included too much back and forth. I was even writing very much in the style I knew was preferred by then. Any conflict—or outward appearance of it at least—had disappeared.

But perhaps not. Perhaps I was just not in the loop there.

I think bloggers have it hard when we get hired by companies like this. What lead you to blogging? A need to call out the truth, no? A need to present your side of it? A need to join forces and support those you want to see grow? A need to stand up to step on destructive patterns and forces. Do these traits and needs go away when you get a paycheck? No. And is there a consequence to still saying what you want about what’s going on? Even if it takes place on a closed list? Yes, you better believe it. Is that what happened in my case?  I don’t know, can’t be sure, don’t care. It doesn’t really matter.  I wrote it here, as I said, because I feel there are things to learn and know by traveling the narrative. Even if one doesn’t agree with all the statements I made. And because I needed to write it down.

And now, I need to move on.

I hope I haven’t made any hard and fast statements about things, as I feel this is all very much part of a story and a learning that is far from over. I do not offer this account as the definitive chapter, but only one angle in on a narrow window of time. Perhaps added to other days and stories, it will help tell a larger truth.

And So It Goes!

I’ll end by saying thank you to TMC for 13 months of employment doing something I enjoy doing. For supporting my voice while they did. For teaching me a bit more about dry AP style journalism (that is not sarcastic at all!) And one more time for the cash flow. There were a few months were things were so bad on my end, my TMC gig was primarily responsible for insuring the rent got paid. So okay, there is a note of anxiety now, as finding another gig at this time is not necessarily going to be easy. But I am confident that my fate brought me here for a very good reason and that it will work out beautifully.

If you want/are able to help bridge the gap, donations will be accepted with gratitude.

And so it goes! And on we go. In a different direction. In two weeks I’ll be in the Yucatán. Sounds good to me.

I WAS TALKING or reading, or “conversing” on Twitter this morning and someone (@theapants? @newdemographic?) some friends, that is, were talking about entitlement. The feeling of entitlement, the sense of entitlement. And they struck on something I’ve been thinking of a lot lately myself. How the attitudes and viewpoints of those who raised me—two white people, one of them my biological parent—were given to me. Of course. I mean, of course you take on your parents attitudes to some degree. We were talking specifically about how People of Color being raised my whites, people who are mixed being raised by whites, produces a particular phenomenon. Results in attitudes of certain entitlement, and further, that when feels entitled, one generally gets more of what one wants. Granted, someone who has an entitled attitude in any area can be terribly annoying, too. And the discussion can, should, and does include the many harms this can result in. But welcome to the US, which feels entitled to everything on the planet. And acts on that. We do, for the most part, too, echo the chamber within which we are born. In sound, function, and in form.

But we also take on our own path. And part of that is thinking about these things, and determining how much can be kept, how much discarded, how much is valid and how much is destructive.

I think it was @theapants who said to me “It’s hard to admit privilege, as a mixie POC!” and I replied something about how it’s hard for anyone. We shouldn’t expect much less from power; all power seeks to increase and intensify, never wane.

But the truth is, it is not “hard” for me to admit this at all. Why would it be? It is not some kind of crime to have a feeling of entitlement! It is not some moral failing to have power. It is how you use it of course. And for me, the shame or the “hard” part would be in never examining yourself. In any area, not just in terms of identity or power or role in a culture. And I’ve been examining myself all my life, and will always do so. It’s not hard. It’s part of who I am.

I was glad to hear the discussion, at a time when it is in my own mind so prominently. I’ve been thinking about the attitudes I took from those who raised me.

My mother was a blonde (her hair darkened as she became an adult), blue-eyed Jewish girl in New York City school. She was (is!) a very smart person, and the daughter of a well-off man.

Of course she abdicated that family role and flew in the face of all her father’s wishes by getting knocked up by a Mexican cat in college—a college she attended very young after graduating valedictorian. But this was the late 1960s, and hers was the generation to spit in the face of the Establishment. What better way, hey? And thus, me. (Though I do think this pregnancy was not planned!) And my young life which had everything to do with 70s counterculture and rebellious reaction, and nothing to do with my grandfather’s modest amount of money (faded quickly, he wasn’t that well-off, just average doing Okay, really), nothing to do with his Republican/Reaganite politics, nothing to do with his conservatism.

My mother would tell me about her school days. That stuck with me. She told the stories from the vantage point of a very smart woman who found that as long as she got As, nobody in the school (administration-wise/authority-wise) could touch her. And she graduated that way. And she passed that on to me. And it always made a lot of sense to me. As long as I can accomplish and bring my intelligence to bear, nobody can complain and I need not feel shame. She never said it that way, but that was what I learned, I think. Of course she didn’t teach me about culture or race or the power structures in place, or the history of Jews or New York City, or any of that. So I never figured in those things. And I never realized, either, that people might react differently to a mixed/POC male with the same attitude that New York City schools would give to a blonde, young, smart, pretty Jewish girl. But they will.

From my adoptive father (and I don’t like to call him my “stepfather” because I was legally adopted and all my papers changed forever and a “stepfather” only marries your mother, doesn’t siphon up your state-sanctioned identity), I gained a different kind of entitlement. His was the entitlement of a young, white (Irish Catholic) male who lost his family young (11) and survived the Bronx mostly on his own. Daniel Day O’Lewis in Gangs of New York (or in There Will Be Blood) reminds me of him so much. Not just his looks, but his philosophy and rage. He was an artist, but crazy, and he made his way through society with a fury that threatened to burn holes in anyone who opposed him. Gearheart would rush forward into any fight as if packing heat. But he never (rarely?) had a weapon on him. I grew up watching him—although it would have been easier if I had only been a spectator rather than part of the Them that he opposed—take his fight to all of Them. I discarded many bigoted/racist lessons that were unwittingly handed to me immediately upon observing them (such as his fiercely homophobic nature) as I found those loathsome and needed no context or instruction to do so. The very way he reacted cast his view in a suspect light. Or something.

But in all that, he taught me many positive things, too, despite being the aggressor in my family and eventually being banished from our lives by each one of us. Personally, I find it important to untangle what was useful from what was not…and unhealthy and unrealistic to try and imagine any person as one-dimensional embodiments of our own demons and fears. But it takes time….

Why do our school books and mainstream culture revere the pioneers and the US settlers in our historical lore? I would whisper to you that the reason is the same reason that violence like my adoptive father’s can blossom in our culture, often unimpeded. Power respects power. Power respects gain. Power respects ground taken. Power respects efficiency and victory. Power would rather stand in a pool of blood and shout to the sky than listen to empathetic handwringing and reasonable explanations of justice or loss. (Which is why today’s maniac GOP are the true descendants of the US settlers; not the Liberals. Which is why the Democrats never win. Just ask yourself…is not allowing Indian reservations and borderwalls to stand very much like blaming women for being beat in their own homes? Think about it.)

So those were the lessons he gave me. That’s what he had to give.

Power may respect power, but it also has an appetite that only grows greater when it dines on respect. And it must be tempered with knowledge, with heart, with suffering. Those things I found not only in my own home, but very much along the way, on the path out of my house at 15 and on the road to Here & Now.

My Mexican family was different. In the much less amount of time I had with them, they were much, much different. Humbler. No purer, perhaps…but not infused with these senses of power, with some gushing of ambition, with an everpresent voracious appetite for gain. (Or maybe I wasn’t around enough to sense it.) Yet even later when I spoke to my father, he was always so much more careful, quieter, apologetic, unsure. His feelings were kept in, kept back, smiled over. Was that method or way of being The Answer? Perhaps he made less pockmarks in the heart of the world…but he took them into himself. In all his backing up, I think he almost walked off a cliff. It took my father years and years to finally shatter and begin to bellow out with his internal emotion, which he had been denied. By himself? By the culture? By the space we allow people of color? Very likely. And it was a space I never learned to cede.

Obama shows the danger of people of color raised by whites with this power infused in his mind, with the privilege imbued in his climb. With the lens of conservative and mainstream US, he tells people of color to Try Harder and Work Harder. To Stop Being Lazy and Irresponsible. He talks to us like racism and oppression is not historically imbued in our world and even our US lens on the world; as if it is not systemic; as if he is white.

It’s okay to have a sense of power and use it. But it is not okay to not be aware where you got it, what it models, what it seeks to attain, and then who you are talking to. Just because an eagle is raised by owls does not make it wise.

I fall into an odd space, I know. I wrote this in my early writings here. Back at El Grito, when I was a bit more rough around the edges, newer to the awarenesses I’ve nurtured here, a bit less sure, and probably louder. But even then, I knew what it was that created the confrontational and unusual mix that informs my voice here. I wrote of how I was the white racists’ worse nightmare. With the vocabulary and ease of English and cocky belief in my right to express and claim it all that a white American has; but with the agenda and heart and memory of the Indian.

I, too, seek and delight in power. As all energy-consuming organisms will. Here is my solution: Not to be part of the silence smothered over people of color, shoved into their lungs and making us to die, buried under ground so often stolen. But to use any and all powers and privilege in the struggle to bring justice to bear for all.

Power is not truly inherited, and rarely “deserved.” Power is taken. And yet, power is not a goal; it is but a way.

I THOUGHT FOR LABOR DAY, I’d take a trip back through the jobs I’ve held and some of the memories around those jobs. I picked up on the idea from a post I read at LFT.

I love Alfredo’s post because he talks about his Mexicano roots, and the time period, and for the Cesar Chavezness of the whole thing. I think of my own familia, who worked in the fields not so long ago.

My own story of work and jobs held and what it meant to my life is much less rooted in family, in solidarity, or in the things that make his post particularly inspiring. My own post is more solitary and threaded throughout with far more individualist thought. That’s very much how I saw things in that time. And for the most part,labor was to me, a dirty word.

Perhaps that in and of itself is a comment on the changing nature of culture, traditions, Mexicanidad vs. US Individualism. We come here rooted in family and labor and these notions of unions and solidarity—it is not too far a journey (fall?) to find yourself on that slippery ladder of US Suckcess, where a zero sum game and harsh divisions means someone must win and someone must lose. And that you are running the gauntlet all alone.

I’d say this post is also laid out in an unusual format. It reads as a cross between a collection of journal notes, a life story, and a list. It might frustrate at moments if a reader needs to know outside details or wonders how point A led to point F, but in the interest of keeping the lens focused, it is a narrative—complete with thought and emotion and life events—but all as related to work and the jobs I held and the place I was at (or not) in terms of what my true calling might be….

Despite its linear march and general movement from labor to white collarish work, I don’t mean to suggest a path of rags to riches. Mostly because I’m broke.

—–

potwasher at frost valley • 14 yrs old

I was still in high school, working when school wasn’t on. Part-time job. Had to get working papers to do this. I was paid minimum wage which was probably about $3.25. This was a big lodge in the woods. The pots were so huge that in order to scrub out the bottoms, I had to lean all the way in. I could’ve easily hid inside one. My skin got so soft and bloated from that ugly gray dishwater that I looked dead, like a dead boy’s hands, I smelled like stale, food-flecked, cold, soapy water.

laborer for private landowner • 15

I was out of my parent’s house for the first time, and living with a friend whom I went to high school with. It was very, very hard work. Tearing down drywall, hauling buckets of concrete chips, pitchforking wet hay from the bottom of an empty swimming pool into a truckbed, etc. I had no regular ride home and once I had to walk the thirteen miles. I hated that job so much, so much, so very much. I hated it all day long. I had to actually dig ditches and I was very miserable about that!

One day I broke the shovel I was using. I was digging a ditch for a long line of cable to be buried, and had come up against a tree root as strong as steel. The root stretched directly across where I was to dig. I thought that if I broke the shovel, I wouldn’t have to do that horrible, boring, hard work anymore. I levered the shovel under the root, leaned down on the shovel—letting all my weight fall on it, and the handle creaked. I bounced on it, and finally, it snapped. I went and showed it to the owner, who just pointed me to the shed, where there were three or four more shovels just like it. If my life story were a movie…that shot would represent a whole lot at the time.

It was shortly after this that I left high school. My principal had come up to me and put his arm—sarcastically—around my shoulders. He said “You know, you’re almost 16. We don’t have to keep you here anymore.” But I was way ahead of him. I had planned to leave for a while, already. and I did. I marched into the guidance counselor’s office on my sixteenth birthday and announced that I was quitting high school. And I did.

CAFO laborer • 16

I was living with someone I barely knew in a town eight miles from my parent’s house. I got a job at a dairy farm nearby to pay my share of the rent.

The Coops were my domain. They were not filled with people, but instead with chickens. And one other person: me. They are filled with a literal cacaphony of sound, a tumbling, battered, always scrambling, overlapping, clattering, clashing of animal vocalization and shuffling and clawing on cages. They are thick with the suffocating stench of urine and chickenshit, for under the floor are massive vats of it filled by the chickens simply defecating and urinating through the “floor” of their coops’ wiry bottoms, and into the openings in the floor beneath them. These rectangular openings in the floor stretched the length of the aisles, of course.

Again, walking end to end of one coop took you 1/5th of a mile. Walking back to the other end via the next aisle over took you another 1/5 mile. So walking the entirety of one coop was about a mile. And I oversaw a few coops. And walked them all day/evening. When I found eggs stuck and piled up somewhere, I fixed them, When the belt got flipped over, I fixed it. When I found a chicken dead in its coop (which happens all day because of the heat and the conditions and the number of chickens), I reached in and pulled it out and dropped it on the floor there. When the chicken was dead from pushing out an egg so big it ripped out its intestines, I had to pull all that out of the coop. I had gloves on, and sometimes it dries around the wire and it gets tough to do. Especially with all the chickens in the vicinity screaming at you and flapping about.

That passage (and a gruesome and detailed story) in more detail here.

physical therapy helper

My job was to wheel the sick and sometimes healing people in the hospital from their rooms to the physical therapy area, or back for the most part. It wasn’t all that hard, but it was uncomfortable for me. I was young, I had no skills for social graces, and I didn’t have a lot of understanding of what these people were going through. To be honest, I mostly had a huge feeling of shame when I saw people this way, people who could not even wheel themselves to the tiny, sterile room where they would go through whatever they went through in that room where I would leave them. I didn’t understand the feeling that rose in me so unpleasantly, nor did I have the depth to question it much more than I did. Sometimes the people I wheeled smiled at me, sometimes they ignored me, sometimes they grunted. I wanted to run from them all. I wanted to run from that horrible-smelling, horrible-feeling, lonely, ultra-white building.

hospital stockroom

…It was a dark, spacious room, the hospital stockroom. I was left alone to put inventory stickers on multiple items, and was summarily bored to tears all day. This was the beginning in a long list of jobs where I would entertain myself with an inner monologue to try and make my job more intellectually stimulating than it ever could be.

horse groom

My grandfather owned, raised and raced horses for much of his life. My family was sort of worried about my directionless motion that took me out of high school and had started me upon a path of low-paying, low-prestige jobs. My family was pretty poor, anyway (except for my grandfather), but everyone thought I would do well. All the accolades I had received since I was a tot, you know, everyone knew I was Bound for Great Things. When I began to have trouble as a teen, my future didn’t look so secure.

Some in my family thought this would be the perfect entry-level for a jockey career. I was small, lithe, and bound to remain small throughout my life. If I did well, there was little doubt that my grandfather—a well-known name among horse people—could get me the right connections. I was a licensed horse groom at 16, and quickly found that these beasts absolutely terrified me. My imagination was far too nimble to handle their starey eyes, their snorting and whinnying, their writhing and taut musculature, their gargantuan cocks, their awesome height and sharp hooves. I didn’t last long at this job at all, sadly. I knew others had hopes for me, and I hated to let them down. I was back to not knowing what i would do with my life.

mcdonald’s • 16

I was out of my parent’s house by now, and living fifteen miles away in a different town, with two other guys who worked at Mcdonald’s. From work, we lifted most of the food we kept in our apartment. Mcdonald’s all day, Mcdonald’s all night. 40s of Olde E after dinner, trying to keep up with the big boys who would carry me to bed when I got too drunk. A boring, demeaning, dirty job. Wearing ugly polyester, stuffing your face with greasy, junky food. Wiping up after rude and callous customers. It was at this job where I first experienced sex. Well, not at the job….
My manager invited me over one night and proceeded to seduce me. I had no complaints…was only disappointed when, after the weekend, she dropped me off at home—and wanted no more from me. She was 20, after all, and not “in love” or anything like that.

GA stockboy/scope assembly

I was living in some welfare housing development with a girl I met at a crisis center. I was 17, and my best friend was a schizophrene who lived next door. I worked two jobs. One was the midnight shift at Great American, a supermarket. I was a stockboy, and worked with two or three other people. I was very bored at this job, and still have scraps of paper from my breaks, where i would doodle and write ideas for songs or stories.

It is a different thing entirely, working these types of jobs once you have quit high school and removed yourself from the idea that there is something greater in store for you; that you are working just to make “extra” cash. It is an entirely different mindset. This is your life. This is how you support yourself. There is no cool crowd of friends in homeroom, there is no last day of school before summer vacation, there is no cool label of clothing for the month, there are no excited talks of college—which looms like a bright moon on the horizon. There is only the daily drudgery of your job, the dead-end hours at the end of the day, the small and desperate hope for the weekend. There is the impossibility of saving up, as every dollar from your minimum-wage job goes just to supporting yourself. There is the feeling that life is over, and the grand dreams handed down by the adult world were nothing but a big, fat lie.

I was exhausted all the time. I was seventeen and out on my own and working two jobs. My life was unfulfilling, boring, low-paid, and filled with not much but long hours of work. I had no time to myself. Or little time. On days off—when they were possible—I would take long walks with my tape recorder and talk to myself. My idea of fun was smoking a joint when I got home from one job and writing in my journal. There wasn’t time for anything else before I had to go to bed, so that i could work my other job. The other job was a boring job where I would sit in a small room with about six other people and assemble these little objects called “scopes.” They had little slides inside, pictures of guests at the hotel, smiling, on their way to the game room, holding hands in a bright flash of light. You hold the scopes up to the light and see a tiny world inside. You looked in them for a moment to make sure the picture was fitted right and then you snapped the keychain part together and tossed them in a huge box. The little happy people in their frozen worlds; you in a poorly-lit and cramped room, being paid minimum wage, breathing dust, dead tired…only wanting to go home and sleep. However, I did work with some interesting people and still recall some pretty eye-opening conversations.

cashier

The same thing, over and over. taking money, giving change. Working behind a convenience store counter. Shifting your weight when your feet hurt too much. Standing all day. Learning what it was like to be in retail. I never treated a cashier badly again, after having this job. You may dismiss them, and for you it is one brief encounter. But to the cashier, it is the same scene over and over and over again. Rude people, accusations that you short-changed them, being blamed for any store policy the customer doesn’t like…

landscaping • 18

I was working for the community college. I had been out of school for two years, and was not happy with the jobs I was finding. Everyone said I needed to go to school to get a Good Job. So I thought I might try that. Maybe college was better than high school. Lord, how I had loathed high school. A cliquey, nasty, superficial place not interested in truly educating—only in teaching you to memorize. Only teaching you the world’s lies. I had felt oppressed and misunderstood there; I resented that these people who taught me were not above petty vendettas, adultery, alcoholism and self-motivated cruelty. I had lost belief in the system and its appointed guardians.

But admittedly, college was better. I was no longer treated as a misfit or a troublemaker. I felt challenged by the courses, not utterly bored. I didn’t know, really, what I wanted to “be,” but I figured that since everyone had told me my entire life that i was an “artist,” then that’s what I should get paid for. So i majored in Commercial Art.

This didn’t last. What I realized was that a “Commercial Artist” is, essentially, an artist who creates in such a way that the things that make creating the most fun are removed and replaced by a monetary motivator. I switched to Photography. Of course, I soon realized that the same things applied to Photography, and I was truly lost. Learn how to make fake bubbles in coffee with soap? Study how to present liquor in magazine ads? This is not art. And if the world of Art was not for me…then what was?

I had long hair, I was a neo-hippie and an anachronism to such an extent that a senior photo major used me for one of the months of his calender assignment, which featured different genres of students. I remember the photo; I had been disappointed by it. My hair didn’t fall the way I wanted, my face didn’t look right. I had been shot with a 8X10 camera and the detail was amazing. The lighting was uninteresting, but I didn’t know that then. What I didn’t like was my blank, lost look. And the glimpses of ethnicity I saw peeking out. I didn’t think of it that way. But this was early in grappling with the poisons of internal colonization. The clearly shot photo presented me with myself and the confusion I was harboring.

When I wasn’t taking courses, I was working work-study in landscaping. I got to know the full-time landscaper/maintainence workers at the college, and this only strengthened what would become a kinship with blue-collar workers. People who have made their way toiling. Like my family had before me.

I was lonely at school. I would be on my knees on the grounds, pulling weeds, running my internal dialogue—making up my stories, movie-scenes, improvising lyric…watching students on the green, or in the parking lot. Wondering why I was never a part of those crowds. The poetry teacher said I was “rude” and I started ignoring her and her dry observations about brilliant poets and began writing short stories while in class.

Shortly after, I impregnated my girlfriend (not at this school). I was 18 and she was 21. I stopped making the 40-minute drive to the school, found a job in a factory. I never officially withdrew from college…just let my grades dim and flicker off, curling into a row of charred Fs….

factory floorboy

Back to the Real World of daily time clock.

I landed a job that required me to wear a hairnet. I was a “material handler” or “Floorboy” and was paid $7.15 an hour. This was pretty good pay. The job was extremely boring, of course. I would stack boxes on pallets and wrap plastic around them and move them with pallet jacks to other areas of the factory. That’s pretty much it. These types of jobs would make me feel insane after a while. My mind was far too busy for me to be happy there. I would live inside my head, singing, talking, visualizing, dreaming.

Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.

landscaping/laying sod

The job at the factory did not last. I felt like a failure because of that at the time. There was no way I could have been happy at those jobs, let alone with my life. Not then. I got a job riding (passenger) in Mack trucks to distant locations and unloading rolls of sod (farmed grass cut into strips and rolled up) from the truck, and laying it down. I remember I used to get so hot, I would fill my baseball cap with ice cubes and let the ice water drip and run down my neck and body while I worked. I was a tiny guy working with big, muscular laborers. I weighed about 105 pounds, at 5′ 6″. Now, i weigh 150 and have muscle to my small frame. Back then, however—and for a long time—I looked like someone whom the wind could pick up and carry away. But i was wiry and determined not to be the Tiny Guy Who Couldn’t Carry His Weight. I worked very hard to keep up. I remember one day I stabbed myself with a fresh blade (we used carpet knives as part of our job) and just wrapped up the wound with duct tape. When my boss told me to take the pants off in the van and clean out the wound, I told him I couldn’t look at it, because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So I finished the day, and went home to get in the shower. That wound bled for hours. It needed stitches, but I didnt feel like going to the hospital, that whole ordeal.

Sod is grown in black, fine soil. It gets everywhere. You are coated in it. You blow it out of your nose for days…constantly, if you work full time. Those showers were so amazing. Washing the day from your skin. I remember the feeling that I was entitled to do any damn thing I wanted to after work. I was working a Man’s Job. I was in a small, white-trash town with a tattooed, sexy, big-breasted, big-fisted Polish girl. These jobs were the way to gain respect in those parts. I would sit on the train tracks with Eddie and drink beers. I hated beer. And i hated my job. Eddie was okay. He laughed at me when I used the word “animosity” once. He had never heard of it. He liked it a lot. Everytime he saw me after that, he’d mention the word and laugh, approvingly.

The guy who owned this company was named “Jack.” Jack was a cowboy. Cowboy boots, loud talk, no real sensitivity to speak of. And he would bark his orders at everyone. That’s just the way it was. Of course, I was the way I was, too. And that meant that one day, I confronted him—I, at 18, skinny as a twig and half as tall as him—confronted this man who drove a Mack truck and owned his own business and wore pointy boots. I had to. I just said to him at one point, “You know, I am not your son. And I am not your dog. Don’t talk to me that way.” And he was shocked. He stammered and apologized. Told me he didn’t mean anything. That that was just the way he spoke.

dishwasher

A reprise as my famous dishwasher role. I began to notice what prodigious amounts of food people waste. Because I would have to scrape it into the trash when the busboy brought in the trays. Leftover rolls, soaked in spinach juice, smeared mashed potatoes with a cigarette butt stamped out in the middle. Torn-up sugar packets littering the plate, sticking to drying maple syrup, french toast—I would scrape it into the hole and rack it. Begin the process of washing, rinsing, feeding the dish machine. My own little assembly line. I didn’t really talk to anyone too much. And no one took notice of me. Just another Mexican boy (or did they see me as white?) in the kitchen. I was dreaming of big things, though…I had my guitar at home and was beginning to write songs. I had a new baby boy and a family I was trying to support. I hated my job and imagined one day I might have one I didn’t dread every morning. But really, it was all I had ever known.

counter person/cashier

I was trying very hard to keep work. My son was a month old, and I needed to be responsible. We had help from Section 8 (housing assistance), and it came in handy. We had a trailer in a trailer park and felt pretty good about it. My 73 chevy was not working most of the time, so I had to walk a few miles to work. It was Winter. Once I got a ride with two girls who stopped to pick me up—they said—because I had a “nice butt.” You know. Those were the 80s, and my jeans fit as 80s jeans did. Don’t remind me too much.

I got a cold, and this long walk became very difficult after a while. It was shortly after that that she and I broke up, finally. My butt couldn’t keep us together, clearly. Our fights had grown worse and worse until we essentially fought more than we got along. I fixed up my car enough to run and left it to her. Moved back to my mother’s for a bit.

part-time radio DJ

I was pretty excited by this job. It was one of my favorites, ever. And the first that actually involved creativity to any degree. I had, in that twisty windy way life brings you people you never expect to meet, met a person who was a regular voice on the radio in a small radio station. He came to be impressed by my speaking ability and offered me a shot at being a part-time DJ. Now granted, this was at a small, a.m., country radio station—but it was not hauling dirt, or bricks, or hay, or concrete. It was not pushing some heavy object from one place to another. It required more than muscular effort. And that greatly excited me. I got my FCC license (which I still have, as it does not expire unless revoked—as in Howard Stern’s case) which is required if you are to broadcast (on terrestrial radio). I learned how to read the AP feed, how to read news, and what the station’s format was. I learned how to smile when you talk so that listeners can hear the enthusiasm in your voice. I learned how to spin records, cue them, fade them. I learned what a “false” and a “cold” stop is. And ultimately, I was let go. I didn’t “fit in” with the feel of the station. But, hell. I don’t blame them. They were all middle-aged, beer-bellied country music fans. I was a fly in the ointment given that context. But i was a happy fly for a while. And it was a valuable experience and mostly a reminder that I didnt need to be stuck doing labor if I didn’t want.

Maybe.

freelance artist • 21

So at this point, I was living with the girl who inspired the song on my third (self-produced) album about a girl who works at the corner store. We were both living upstairs at her mother’s house and temporarily I paid my way by doing whatever artwork her mother needed. It was usually gifts for friends’ birthdays or the like. She had a live-in artist. I felt good about this. I was given a lot of creative room to paint things the way I saw them, and felt I wasn’t just taking without giving. It was a short-term arrangement and I knew it…but the ability to pay my way with my natural talents…it was…lovely. And I really can’t think of a better word.

recycling plant

Definitely one of the very worst jobs I’ve ever had. A huge empty-feeling warehouse with a conveyor belt that spanned its vast interior. Your job was, basically, to put gloves on and go through garbage as it came down the belt. You picked out bottles, slid them down this chute, separated cans and slid them down another. Junk you just let go by. The place stunk so badly…garbage juice on your hands. All day. It was very nasty. And guess what? There wasn’t even a sink to wash your hands in. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. I began to reminisce about school. But it was a faraway, impossible dream. Like so many others that flowed—like garbage down a chute—through my mind.

roofer (laborer)

Before this job, I was terrified of heights, stereotypically so. I still remember the first day on the roof, clinging to the chimney with one hand while trying to tear the flashing away from the brick with the other. I couldn’t pull too hard because if the metal suddenly tore loose (as I needed it to), I would go flying off the roof. Yet, I had to tear hard because it was dawn, and the tar that held the flashing on was cold and stiff. And there was frost on the roof to top it off. Did I mention this was my very first day and that I was scared of heights?

This was when I began to truly appreciate the callous, tough humor that ran through the hard-working man’s world. The kind of sensibility that led the other roofers to remind every new worker of the Immutable Law of Roofing: “If you fall, you’re fired! Before you hit the ground!” and laugh as they turned their backs, leaving you to figure it out. It was a world where a weakling, a loafer, or a fear-stricken crew member was a serious liability. And would cost everyone money. And that was not tolerated. It was a sink or swim world. You woke at 3:45 am, and best be sitting on your stoop at 4:30 so when the truck swung by nobody had to wait for you. You were on the roof when light first hit the sky. When peoples’ roofs were open, you had to use every bit of available daylight. At dawn there would still be frost on the roof so you had to be careful not to slip. For this reason, the hammer you carried had a long, curving backend to it. If you slipped and started sliding down the roof, you were supposed to swing that hammer with everything you had and punch a hole in the roof to stop your fall. (Or else you were fired.) I got my very own Estwing. This was when my fascination with hammers was reawakened. The initial interest began when I was eight and used to play one of my first albums over and over in my room, Abbey Road.

ralston purina

Dog food factory. My job was to push a broom and walk the big empty aisles looking for mice or spills of dog food. I was taught how to set and retrieve rat traps. Men on forklifts zipped around the dim interior and the air smelled like the gas that these machines burned for fuel. Sometimes the men would give me rides from one part of the warehouse to another as it was so huge. I would hold on tight to the cab of the forklift and stand on the fork, or the side of the vehicle.

I did my work faithfully but like so many jobs, found myself in a world of fantasy more than anything else. Monolithic ceilings, dark corners and aisles, towering stacks of dog food on pallets. I would push my wide broom across the smooth concrete floors, dipping in and out of the pools of light and pockets of shadow. It was quiet, and nobody really kept track of me. It was truly surreal. I would get lost for hours, duck behind the towers of dog food in the dark and edge along the wall of the warehouse, finding parts that seemed unexplored. I would find a stack of cereal (Ralston-Purina makes cereal, too) and bust it open, stuffing my face with puffed corn. My imagination would run wild in these dark pathways which held more echoes than life. Always, I was imagining, rehearsing, talking, visualizing, dreaming, monologuing.

I quit the job at noon one day. I walked into the supervisor’s office and very kindly told him I couldn’t stay another moment. The job was “suffocating my spirit.” He didn’t really know what to say to that.

office cleaner • 22

I was the guy who came after you left your nine-to-five, to clean your offices. To wander, alone through dim and softly-humming cubicle-smattered offices. I would bring my vacuum cleaner and my rags and spray and make sure your desks were clean; make sure that the floor had not one speck of paper on it, make sure that your garbage was fitted with a fresh bag and that the stinking coffee you dumped all over the can was washed off. I was the one who peeled your hardened gum from under the desk or off the bottom of the garbage cans. I was also the one who went through your drawers to keep my mind from atrophying. I would look at your family pictures and your papers from work, I would wonder what kind of person sat in that chair. It was a lonely, somewhat creepy job—to be in a place alone that felt so absent of life, yet so populated with the trappings of activity and commerce.

I lost this job by calling out sick one day and saying i was “mentally unwell” for the day and couldn’t possibly come in. Maybe they knew I was lying. It was one of the best times of my life, that I can remember. Well. Aside from the crappy job.

painter

I got a job with a contractor. He was only a year or so older than me but had his own company. He was a happy fella and I liked him. Most of the time. He was a white kid who grew up real poor and swore he would not be poor when he was an adult. He ran from that memory of poverty like it chased him full time. He seemed like a pretty white-bread kind of fellow, and yet a bit spunky. A Dennis the Menace sort of chap. No matter what, you had to admire his ambition. Except when he was your boss. Sometimes I wondered how he could have his own business, while I couldn’t even keep an office-cleaning job. But I knew the answer, too.

Jobs like this I would get in trouble, eventually, because I could not just “slap on” a coat of paint. I got too caught up in fine detail and motor movement. My employer would be like “Just slap it on! You’re taking too long! It’s not the Mona Lisa!” but…I have only one way of doing something; I can only do my best. And my best requires concentration and attention to detail. I don’t make the best housepainter. I get lost in the whorls, the swirls, the streaks, the curves, I grease on delicate vanilla valleys between trim and the wall, attend private showings behind the baseboard….

wallpaper hanger

I was taught a skill: paperhanging. I called this time “WorkCamp.” I lived in Bethlehem, PA for the sole purpose of working on a building in that town that was being constructed. I worked with a crew of men. We all lived in this apartment, and that’s the only reason we lived there. It was paid for by our boss. We worked seven days a week, for ten – fourteen hours a day. I was paid $60 a room (that I wallpapered in the hotel) I finished per day. If I could finish two rooms in one day (I couldn’t), I could make $120 a day. But even making $420 a week was amazing to me. Granted, all I did was work.

There were crews of teams who came in, one after the other. First, the framers, then the electricians and plumbers, then the drywall guys. Next, the carpet and furniture people. Next, we came in and put up wallpaper. After us, the painters and whoever else. It was seriously high-pressure. The guys I worked and lived with drank on their nights off. I didn’t feel like hanging in that scene. Instead, I’d spend time with my tape recorder, and the tape journal i have kept since i was 18, speaking into the mic.

I missed my girlfriend. Was both lonely and bored in that town. Met some artists next door. Hung out one night. My concept of having a lot in common with all artists took a huge hit.

Spent some money in the town’s tattoo shop.

landscaping

Working off the books doing various landscaping tasks: running a weedwhacker (the kind with a harness and handles for both hands shaped like a big U; the kind you use gasoline and oil for), clearing out wood into a truck, mowing, random labor. Me and my friend billy lived for the weekends, essentially. We would chill and often would co-write stories, one of us at the typewriter (Yes, I said typewriter), and the other one pacing around the room waiting our turn to steer the chapter. It was great fun. Our tradition was to light candles, drink heineken and smoke lots of herb, adlib aloud, bounce ideas, run with it. That was a good time but the job was just killing time. My boss, of course, paid me as little as he could without me leaving in absolute indignation. It was not a comfortable wage.

video clerk/salesman • 25

Here, I got to put a tie on and rent videos and sell TVs and stereos to poor people on “Payaway,” which meant they would pay 300% of the price over a period of time so that they could have their large screen TV in their trailer. This was an early time in my life where I felt an odd sense of having escaped, even if only slightly or temporarily, a fate wherein I still interacted with those who had not. And yet…not being part of any solution for them. It started me thinking, though the thought would take another ten years to form itself fully, complete with the answer.

I also had to call people up when they couldn’t pay for what they had been told was so easy a payment, ultimately. The phone duties, yeah. I had to answer the phone and say silly things like “Thank you for calling ———, where we always have a special deal! Ask me about our new summer stereo inventory! How can I help you?”

I kept this job for a year, which was quite a good length of time, but it was fun some of the time, so I could deal with it a little longer. it paid me $5.25 to start, and i think i left making $5.75.

roofer (apprentice)

This was the second time i got work as a roofer or roofer’s apprentice.

I found the work through my friend, who had walked up to some guys on a roof and inquired if they needed any help. It was a grueling job, as I already knew. Roofing was a job where you froze in the cold months, you baked and burned in the hot months, you carried lumber on your back up a ladder to the roof, or a roll of feltpaper (60 – 110 pounds) over one shoulder, while you climbed the rickety ladder two stories to the roof. This was a job where you carried a tiny can of raid in your toolbelt so when that hive of bees erupted from the lumber you were tearing up, you didn’t have to run, screaming, off the edge of the roof and get yourself…fired. Roofing was, maybe, some of the hardest work i’ve done. It paid me $8 an hour, off the books. It also got me in crazy shape and gave me a certain swagger when the whistle blew. I was a roofer, yo. I work from dawn to dusk every day. I was deep brown and toned and come nightfall, I was entitled to do whatever I needed to do to relax. That’s practically the Roofer Credo. The last part, at least.

I had come a long way from being afraid of heights.

Did i dream of other work? Did I still keep my mind busy with imaginings of a finer occupation? I don’t remember. I think by now, I had given up on that. I went home and played my guitar, recording my first and second albums on my little four-track. Woke up at five am and got ready for work, every morning turned on Bleach by Nirvana as a soundtrack to my morning ritual. I was living in an empty barn’s top floor, above my friend’s living space. There was no insulation, no plumbing and a long, orange extension cord that snaked through the room and brought electricity from downstairs.

cab driver

Quite a job. Working five pm to five am, a cabbie’s shift. The job was alternately boring, exciting, dangerous, informative.I was the chaffeur to last minute decisions, to broken marraiges, to drug runs, to wild nights out, to midnight journeys. I listened to dull people chatter away, to drunk people rant, to crackheads spark up, to crazy people and their creepy four a.m. questions. My coworkers would at times be robbed or stabbed and I wondered when it would be my turn. I would sit and draw cartoons about myself or my coworkers in those 3 a.m. fare-less moments when I was parked by the curb, engine running. I learned to fall asleep at the drop of a hat and wake the second I heard my number called on the radio. (Also useful on the Subway train, you’ll find!) Once, I decided I couldn’t bear cigarettes anymore (I had recently quit), and I started my practice of telling people they couldn’t smoke in my cab. It was, after all, against the law. But…people didn’t like that law and felt perfectly comfortable flouting it. Once, I told the owner’s friend—who owned a bar or two in the area—that he could not smoke in the cab and he flipped out. The owner called me on the radio and asked what i was doing.

“It’s illegal to smoke in a cab and I don’t want to breathe it in.” I said.
“Well…you can’t just kick everyone out who wants to smoke!” he replied.
“I guess that’s what we’ll have to see about.” I said.

I still maintained my tape journal and rambled to myself in the cab. I definitely dreamed of another job at this time. I know because I’ve listened to the tape. I felt stuck. I was in a small town and there were no jobs in any interesting fields…and i didn’t know how to get them, even when there were. I always defaulted to labor jobs; to jobs where nobody cared what you wore, if you had tattoos, or a college degree. For the hack job, I had to get a chaffeur’s license and promise the mayor of the town—in person—that I would keep an eye out for where the crack dens were. (That was a surreal meeting.) I had always sort of dreamed of the job and was happy to have finally achieved it.

The question was, what next?

laborer

Just another hard job moving dirt and stone around.

I felt I was idling. No, slipping backward. My girlfriend Annie left me for some new cat she was interested in at her job. I was feeling pretty down.

I decided to consolidate my defaulted student loans, get my shit together and head back to school.

stockboy/cashier

This job had a different feel, as I was back in school. Once again, it was easier to take a crummy job cuz I knew it was temporary.

Still, pretty soon I got into a conflict with a manager, who insisted on smoking cigarettes in the backroom because he was too lazy to walk into the parking lot. He clouded up the backroom and after i quit smoking cigarettes, breathing in smoke in a closed-in room caused my sinuses to immediately close up. My body is very sensitive, like this. I am subject to hives, heartburn, rashes—all when i get too stressed out or push myself hard. It is something I deal with. My body and mind and heart have always been this way—sensitive, resonant, reactionary, easily set alight.

Another way I caught it at work was because I had been assigned to draw up those little paper signs that tell you that the paper clips were on sale. Of course, I grabbed all the markers and made an art project out of it. While I sat and lovingly drew curves and shadows and tried to simulate the company’s logos (years and years before I ever laid eyes on a Trader Joes here in Oregon where they hire full time artists for this very purpose), I told myself I was getting paid to draw. Smiled to myself. Got reprimanded for taking too long. Too much attention to detail, you see.

public health inspector • 27

The President of the college was cracking the hell up at my jester cap with bells.

The first job I had that required a college degree. The only real time I felt what it is to be working for The Government.

First job to pay me anything like $11+/hr.

I was in heaven. No numbing out the mind while you sweated and carried lumber or rock or shingle or dirt (later I would reminisce over these jobs and how calming they are to the spirit). No stupid apron or polyester pants. No funny hat. I got to drive my car from site to site, set my own schedule and CARRY A CLIPBOARD. Whoa. I actually interviewed for this job. That was a first. Of course, I had a few points going for me in that interview. My mother worked her way from nursing student to director of public health over the course of my life, so she was well-known and well-liked in the county. And this job would be working for the DOH (dept of health), who worked hand in hand with public health nursing.

I was unsupervised all day. I was trusted with legal forms. I was competent, but these types of conditions at my workplace where…unprecedented.

I visited hotels, bungalow colonies, swimming pools, restaurants. I checked for violations of fire code and health code. My write-ups became legal letters sent to the establishment, carrying the full weight of NY health code and enforceable law.

It was sort of surreal. I walked the grounds. I didn’t know I’d be followed. I carried my clipboard around and anywhere I looked, people looked. Where I walked, they followed. When i peered at a spot of peeling paint, the owner would immediately radio his laborers to run up and fix it. If I stopped too long and hovered over some furniture that was possibly blocking a fire exit, there were two guys there a moment later to clear it away. I was offered food and homemade candies and pastries. Of course I knew that nobody necessarily liked me; they feared my red pen.

I would inspect the joint, make proper marks on my clipboard and then say goodbye. Drive to my next visit…but on the way, I would stop at my girlfriend’s, have lunch, whatever. This was one of the best jobs i ever had. I truly loved it. After a decade of jobs where you were pushed around, criticized by cro-magnons, disrespected, distrusted, and paid peanuts, I was my own boss. At least once I left the office.

I worked for the state, so I left the office around nine-thirty. Or ten. Or ten-thirty. Government workers don’t rush, you see. They don’t have to.

substance abuse counselor

I began as an intern, while still in school. In my junior college, I wasn’t sure what i wanted to major in. I had a year of photography and art behind me but i was scared to study art, now. I felt like I wouldn’t be thrilled by it due to the commercial nature…and i feared it was a frivolous pursuit. I was back in school to secure myself a career and I felt i should be more practical. Sometimes I do this. Mistake something that is eternal within me—in this case, my need to make art—as trappings. But life will remind you, no fear.

Anyway, I decided on Pre-Med/Psychology. I would follow my natural talent at understanding human nature, and I would get into a position wher e I could help. I would utilize my skills at communication and my natural empathetic bent. I would also earn some real money. I would be a psychiatrist. It was a Great Plan.

I studied Science for a while, which remains a great love of mine to this day. (Science, Psychology and Philosophy are a trifecta in the pursuit of truth, all searching for something beneath the surface appearance; all involved in seeking the heart of the matter, distilling essence behind symbol). I studied Pyschology, too. I mapped out a degree path that would begin with my AAS in Substance Abuse Counseling, after which I could work in the field and then move on to Med School.

I did receive my AAS in Applied Science; in Substance Abuse Counseling. I worked a few internships and fastened upon a group of adolescents, whom I formed quite a strong rapport with. But then, I understood them. I did not invalidate them or condescend to them. I agreed with much of their observations: that this world is fucked up, that the schools are, and that their parents—more often than not—were, too. It was all true. And they were used to hearing that they were the problem. They were just a reaction to a lot of problems.

I spoke to them on a practical level. they were being treated for behavioral problems and/or substance abuse issues. I did not moralize. I gave it to them in a very practical frame. They needed a guide to extricate themselves from the deepening chaos. They just needed a practical guidebook out. I told them, essentially, “Hey, I know. You are actually right. But know if you do A, then most likely, B will happen. That’s the way this world, and how life is. All the while you can think on what’s Right and what’s Wrong, figure it out. But don’t ignore the lay of the land.” etc.

The director was so pleased with me and my progress with them that by the end of my internship, she hired me on a part-time basis. She gave me my own caseload. Later, she offered me an Associate Director position. My own company vehicle. Right out of school.

I turned it down. And left counseling.

Diverted and rewrote my school plans.

I couldn’t bear it, you see. I cared too much, in the end. I saw so many of these kids, caught up in the system…where nobody understood or believed them. Where their homes were hell and school punished them for crying out. I saw the pain in their eyes. These young girls, boys. Their parents couldn’t hear them, couldn’t love them enough, and only pushed them further away. I remember one girl, I’ll call her Rosa. She was in trouble with law and with school and home. She was furious at life. She was tired of taking it. She had punched a boy in the head and popped his eardrum. She was ready to do it again. And if you knew her and her story….you might just cheer her on. But to the school and the law, she was a menace. And yet all I could tell her was to try and remain practical. Take practical steps. Remember practical consequences. Talk to her. Hear her out. And watch the system swallow her entirely, in time. The PhD at the clinic might change her meds…but she’d not escape her injustices.

I felt impotent, and useless. And as if I were being tied to a rack to watch the world burn. Nothing was going to change for them…it didn’t on the whole. Or I couldn’t bear to watch them fall any more. Either way, this was not the place for me, soaking up pain and sorrow and fury all day, every day. I was too sensitive to it….

And then I remembered the reason I’ve been made this way. I remembered—I am an artist.

There was something I was supposed to be doing.

film projectionist • 29

In New York City. At NYU.

I had transferred to a four-year school. My life was changing…was being changed. By me. I felt very accomplished. I had worked hard at my junior college, was on the President’s list, was Phi Betta Kappa, National Merit Scholar, President of two clubs, a speaker at the Freshman orientation, a peer tutor, received a grant for an essay, scored solid 4.0s every semester. I had, in fact, Kicked the Ass.

It had been a while since I had worked with a pitchfork, or a shovel, or a wheelbarrow. Academia ushers you into a corridor of jobs that are available to students. So it had been a while since I had sweated into a paper filter mask, breathing in sawdust and asbestos, or dead chickens. Now I was at a prestigious art school; the creme de la creme. Shoot! I was a film student in NYC at NYU. I could hardly believe it. I felt it was due to my decisions to change. To get out of the rut where I had been living in a small room at my mothers in the valley of upstate New York, distraught over my girlfriend leaving me, and with a broken truck that had only been given to me anyway. I felt I was in the big city because I had made effort, made decisions. Somehow I had come to believe that I had the power to affect my own destiny.

Being a film projectionist was a fun job. I was back in the dim control booth, spinning the reels of film, changing over from projector A to projecter B, when I saw the “cigarette burns” in the upper right corner of the frame. I was cueing tapes for students to refer to when they made their thesis speech in front of the class. I watched through one-way glass, listened on my headphones. I soaked up Visconte, Fellini, Godard, all the classics. I wrote letters to a cute girl in my basic production class, rewound film, goofed off, drew. It was a great time. I felt I was on my way up; I was part of something growing, of hope, of ambition. Those old jobs I held and hated felt like a million years away. At the same time, they felt as if they were right behind me, and I never forgot them. I mixed with rich kids. They usually looked as soft and spoiled as month-old cream cheese. I felt a fondness for the Latino/a janitors, pushing around cans, picking up after all these young privileged kids every day; invisible. I made it a point to speak to them, to say hi, to say thank you. That used to be my job.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about the change in roles.

film inspector

A small room. very small. a big closet. And a huge machine I sat at. It easily cost tens of thousands of dollars and probably a couple hundred thousand. It was for putting film on, to zip through it, to inspect it for tears and other damage. It looked like something out of a Science Fiction flick. It had sensors and arms and pads and lamps.

I worked for the Cinema Studies department, and went methodically through the 16mm collection, fixing torn sprockets, ripped frames. It was fragile and often rare film I was handling. I would go to work, close myself in this room and zone out. I had no problem with this job. I was rounding out my film education. I was not only studying theory, I was making film, writing it, acting in it, editing it, and learning how to project and inspect and repair it. I was glad I needed to work while I went to school, when originally I vaguely resented that others didn’t have to. But in the end, I was getting the larger film education.

dub room controller

Another dim control room. I learned to use patch bays and multiple decks, etc. rounding out the media education. After all the jobs I’d held, stuff like this was cake. Pure pleasure.

video floor tech help

I was working behind the counter on the video floor. Helping students with their AVID machines. Giving basic editing theory mini-lessons, or troubleshooting software issues. Checking them in and out of rooms, checking equipment in and out. Playing on the computer when nobody needed help. It hardly felt like work. But, again, once you’ve spent your days inhaling chickenshit odor so strong it thickens the air in your mouth, what does seem like work?

sound floor tech help

Same as above, but on the sound floor. Mixing boards, patch cables, DAT, Nagra. Drawing on the wood counter of the help desk. Doodling images and lettering. There was art all over the place back then. I think, since then, they’ve redone the counters, cleaned it up. But the walls and counters themselves used to be tattooed. The surreal experience of working in such conditions, with such responsibilities continued.

film production TA

Now that I had a year or so of film school under my belt, I became a Teaching Assistant in beginning film production. I worked with the teacher in the classroom; I helped the students in the editing room; I helped them shooting in the field; I acted in some of their films, I projected their film projects. It was great fun. I felt natural at teaching. I have patience with those trying to learn, I like helping them understand and gain new skills, I feel I was successful at communicating the knowledge I had gained.

It was very satisfying. And of course, I was amazed that I was being pretty well-paid to do something so…fun.

cinematographer

In film school, I concentrated on Cinematography. Before I was done with school, I submitted my reel to an independent production for a 30-minute film. I was very happy when the director chose my reel. We began work on his film. It was low paying, as it was an independent feature, and I was not even done with school. But it was the most amazing job I had ever had. Shooting film in New York City. Need I say more? Don’t get me wrong…it is very trying, very grueling. There is a world of pressure on you and you are bringing some hard-won skills to bear under less than ideal conditions, almost always. And if it looks wrong on the screen, or you waste film/tape/time/money in that—it’s your fault. Period. You are the director of your area. There is the Director, the Director of Photography (me), the Art Director… all at the top of their areas. Which means responsibility.

And usually you were working too hard to stop and let your mind imagine and fantasize. You didn’t need to. Finally you could plug in all that energy and creativity. But then, when I got a break or a moment, I would look out over the crew…and at myself riding with the director…or slip sideways in my mind on opening night, when the film finally screened at the Film Forum—and wonder how the kid who quit high school on his 16th birthday and dug ditches got to be a filmmaker in one of the most amazing cities in the world. Wow. Yeah, it was a pretty heady time.

I shot a couple films after this, and they were all great fun.

(video) assistant editor

A brief stint I picked up when seeking freelance work after school. Digitize clips, prepare the media for the editor. Freelance. Paid $20 – $25/hr. sit in a nice-smelling room all day, play with expensive machinery, eat lunch, nap on the couch. Talk on the phone.

(website) editor

A job I interviewed for. I started as an intern, working for $8/hr. I left as a supervisor/editor, getting paid $15/hr. This was after i graduated NYU, and had Film/TV degree. Finally, a job where my love of language and my love of teaching were both utilized. I couldn’t believe I was working this job and was very happy about it. I began to learn the high-pressure nature of jobs in Manhattan. The job lasted five months or so, before the company (a website branch of an advertising company) restructured and laid some of us off. My boss was so upset that he had to lay me off. He was a cool surfer cat from California who loved Sushi and told me “you have the integrity of ten men” with tears in his eyes. I actually ended up comforting him! As I was getting fired! What a smooth operator. I was very upset, and hated to lose that job. Less than a month later, my girlfriend and I—the girl i had written love notes to three years ago as I sat in the projection booth—broke up. A week after that, the World Trade Center was destroyed by two airplane suicide bombings.

I didn’t even try for another job. I just felt baffled by fate. Too much at once. No girl, no apartment, no job. And the sudden war and change of climate in my country and city convinced me that all had shifted into some unreal state where nothing I did mattered anyway. I turned again to art. I began to put energy into my music. It suddenly occurred to me that I had not worked on my music the entire time I had been with this girl; that I had put it aside for some reason. And that it was very important that I rededicate myself to it. So I introduced my music to the online world and began to gain a little self-confidence in presenting my work to people in large numbers. The responses I got online were so positive and passionate that I truly began to believe in my work.

Back to the Music

I went on the road. To find myself, to find the country, to feel out what had just happened to the world and what it meant in my life.

Whilst on the road, and in these towns, I had applied for various jobs—Assistant Manager at a small town supermarket, Gas Station Attendant, Cashier—but found a strange thing had happened. I was now “overqualified.” Here I was, in some small town (except for my stay in Hollywood, Florida), applying for some crummy job with a degree in Film/TV, and from NYU! Coming from a job that had paid me far more than these people were prepared to pay. Nobody would hire me. I just wanted to pull in some cash from some obscure job, keep my head low, lay in a pretty girl’s bed, play my guitar, dream myself back to healed. I couldn’t find work.

2nd AC

Years later, I found work again as an Assistant Camera on a 35mm production in Brooklyn. A “fight-club meets goodfellas” type of flick. Underground boxing in Brooklyn, funded by the Russian mob. I was 2nd AC, and I gave it my all. I often worked 17 hour days, ’cause that’s what was called for. I was back from the dead, I was back in New York. I told Herm, “There is a certain kind of person who makes it here. and if you are not that kind of person, you become that kind of person. And if you cannot, then you will not make it.” I knew, because not long after September of 2001, I had slid away from New York and riding that bus upstate, I cried. Watching the Statue of Liberty get smaller. For 18 minutes I cried, not caring who saw me that day.

graphic artist • 35

I don’t know how many jobs I applied for before I got a response; before I got an interview. Thirty? Forty? One hundred?

I had a system down for applying, and I would do it like clockwork. Finally, I got a bite. And then got an interview from a large crowd of applicants (100+). And sat through a group interview with four others at once, and finally scored the job from the final fifteen left at the end. I was being paid for Photoshop and Dreamweaver work! What I had spent much of the last two years doing, learning better. .

The job, I realized very soon, was not a viable one. I had issues with the subject matter we were dealing with. I had issues with the ultra-Right views that my boss felt compelled to have blasting from three televisions throughout the place. I had issues with the pay. I had issues with the way he couldn’t help but speak to me. I had to keep the job if I was to make my rent. But I applied and applied looking to get out. Meanwhile, my body began to react, with stomach issues, to being forced to stay at a job that was “suffocating my spirit”—something I didn’t normally force myself to do.

editor/designer • (publishing house)

Yet another job, amazingly, where I was being paid for my intellectual ability; my creative talents. Where I was being paid to do something I actually enjoyed. Sometimes while working at the publishing house, I would feel like a fraud; as if they would suddenly discover I should be out in the grass, or hauling stuff out of the basement, or on the roof, instead of sitting in a comfy swivel chair at a desk in front of a new Mac, reading and writing for salary.

MTV street team

Read about the competition, the announcement of winning, see the videos.

self-employed writer/videographer/artist • Now

I am paid to blog, as well as to write essays or produce videos online for various sites. This dovetails nicely with my own art business. I can do both from home. I’ve built up my computer situation and am equipped to produce media of all kinds from my small studio space. I am fighting to stay solvent right now, to stay afloat and things are pretty shaky. Then again, they’ve been for a year or more. And if I end up taking on a labor (or other) job on the side, I won’t mind. Things are different now than when I was 17 or 18 or 21. I don’t live with the desperation every day that I may never escape my lot. Then again, I don’t hold on to my “success” or position as tightly or reverently as I did as a student at NYU. I don’t equate job quite so much with worth anymore, just with situation and ability at the moment. Overall, I don’t see it as some linear and Western push away from Lowliness and toward Greatness. Though it’s easy to when you grow up poor or doing without, always feeling you are to be one of those who can’t have the good things in life.

I’m glad for whatever reason, I’ve moved outside of that view. Thinking about life that way is just too much work.

MUCHAS GRACIAS to the (five ultra-cool) readers who came together with sticks and farm animals to help me fend off the invading Comcastadors! Also big thanks to the people who just emailed words of comfort.

Since we are back stylin online in the full nine and divested of our messy stress vest, let’s do a roundup just to get things back in motion.

But first real quick I’d like to say that I always love working this way. I do not, of course, mean getting anxious and having utilities turned off. And yes, of course I feel good to deal with the immediate problem.

But on top of that, I’m not joking when I wrote that text below on this page, near the tamale photo: “It’s the new US culture” about barter or back and forthing between friends, rather than relying on soulless systems that end up funneling money into exploitative third parties. (Touched on it here, too.) These liaisons keeping humans from power. Banks, National colluding impersonal credit systems, corporations, Agricultural system, Priests. All liaisons that have us believe we need them to even do certain things at all.

Versus situations like the Tanda. Where we just do it between us.

It won’t be the new US way. We already see what happens when the larger amount of us need things to be fairer to us and less fair to the massive corporate golems who skulk about our national and global affairs, yanking this and squashing that at will. A new way won’t usher itself in through law. We see who controls the legislative process.

But I love when I see us bringing it there just by doing. Community gardens, community credit, community barter. (More community “policing” and maybe we’d need to call those stun-gun wielding maniacs into our neighborhood and homes less. And by “policing” I mean looking out for kids around us, and for women getting beat up in their living situations and such.)

The people who helped me get through the moment here are people I also do things for in turn. Or would. Which is why I keep it in mind when, like Prerna wrote, good situations or orgs or people are getting started, or need a hand at the moment. Because it comes back to you.

So muchas gracias. I’m still going to need to try and raise some cash for the Netroots Nation trip, so I’ll make a graphic and pop that in under each post. But the immediate crisis is past.

Today is a writing day, so let me just highlight some news I found interesting and then get on my way…

[One link removed since this morning, as I added the wrong URL and can't find original.]

• Remember Brad Will? They are still trying to cover up his murder.

• Mobs and Right wing pundits who use the holocaust in conjunction with violence and violent energy leveled by the Corporate state and trying to shut down conversations crucial to the process of a health plan that would help the People? This is like the Anus of Fascism blinking at itself in a mirror and seeing God.

• I hope the White House doesn’t get TOO cozy with the Latino vote. Stuff like this will affect you, bro.

• Like so many cultures…when we come here, we begin to die...

• …unless we think of new ways forward. Vacillating, extended, shivering with dream…

• Workers at a steel plant in Mexico owned by ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, went on strike today. And that’s what I love about Mexicanos. We know how to use the force of our people. Boycott and strike are long time Latin American traditions. Recognize.

• Obama visits Mexico to talk immigration and drug war. Nations are now bickering in border tongue. Mexico still lying about the ocean of human rights abuses that their military and police engage in. US breaking laws contained in NAFTA that would help Mexico do a little better financially. Walls and papers still the order of the day. They are gonna skirt around NAFTA a lil bit but how close are they allowed to get to the truth? When will we connect the last dot as a People and when we do, how do we act to protect ourselves under the rule of such massive and well funded thugs? The business interests that control US and MX law=>The law that then calls out armies and ICE squads to fence in, jail, or kill the People suffering under those business interests.

————

Peace out for now! Hope you’ve having a great day….

(a glimpse of a larger piece of art soon to be unveiled)

THERE IS A REACTIONARY NATURE inherent to the Internet dialogues, to the symbiotic nature between the many different kinds of writing. This reactionary process is necessary, and “good” as well as “bad,” as I see it. But at all times, it tends to have a current that moves you along rapidly.

Everyone once in a while I slow down and sit with myself to ask questions about the shape and function of the “us” that comes together out here.

Who are we out here? What are we doing? What way forward?

I’ve been asking myself questions along these lines since I began participating in the amazing new organism of collective conversation that the Internet makes possible.  Do they do any good? That is not, I’m sure, the point. The point is feeling out the fringes of a path forward, the point is simply to keep moving. And sometimes in moving forward, wander.

These posts do not promise any hard conclusions, just questions. Chances, are, too that it will be too long for a quick read. So please feel free to take a break at any spot to chew things over, and come back later when you’ve time. Maybe you’ll have some thoughts to share in the comments, then. Be open. Bring a cup of coffee, yerba mate, or tea.

CONTAINERS AND STICKERS AND A FRAGRANT FIRE AISLE

Lately there arises a tension between “Journalists” and “bloggers” having to do with traffic, mostly motivated by sinking revenues on the part of news organizations. It also has to do with who are “real” journalists, sometimes.

But what is the real core of the conflict? How real is this tension and how manufactured? Moreover, how important the conflict? How distracting? How that people so rather similarly vested become pitted against one another? Are we similarly vested? If so, what is the overlap?

I suppose there is a tiny bit of journalism in my own history. Or let me just say I at least got a taste through the stint I had with MTV News (Street Team 08). Hm. I at least own a copy of the AP style guide, although I rarely consult it. I write a weekly column for an independent news outfit. But “journalist” is never really how I see myself.

Whatever the label, I do think of myself as one of many today who makes it a regular business and practice to join in the effort to find truth between us, and in our society and in using words that address current happenings. I do take that seriously enough to take great effort with my words to be truthful and/or shaped in ways I feel may bring about, or help bring about, that end. Maybe I’m more of a general writer, or an “artist,” or a thinker (Bullshit Artist), commentator, I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that getting hung up over labels/titles seems a senseless use of time. Right?

Two different groups of people thinking and writing and talking with great energy about the challenges facing us all. Searching for a way out, a way through it. Trying our damndest to distill truth out of it all. But we cleave our numbers in two with words and then fight over whose survival matters more.

For me there aren’t little cubbyholes with all the different identities – intellectual, racial, sexual. It’s more like a fine membrane – sort of like a river, an identity is sort of like a river. It’s one and it’s flowing and it’s a process. By giving different names to different parts of a single mountain range or different parts of the river, we are doing that entity a disservice.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

A label for this kind of writing, thinking—I didn’t need one when I began doing it. And since (at least) the age of 14 when I sat in math class surreptitiously penning empassioned narratives on current events—papers not required by school but written purely from a personal need (I remember one day being so blown away that the Shuttle crew had exploded and we were all sitting in class and not talking about what it meant when it had instantly hurled me into an existential abyss of awe and hurt)—I’ve been doing this.

It is a joy to connect with the society manifested through the computer and the Internet, and find that there are many of us out here doing this new thing; this sifting through the gems and the trash and the bones and the rocks that teem at the foundations of our shared dwelling and along the shores of our freshwater springs.

I first met you all in 2001, in May of 2001 when I joined the online dialogues, though not in this blog. I was living in NYC, and when September dropped out of the sky later in the year, it was this global community I began talking to. I launched into high alarm and was ready to make war and was not considering soliciting outside opinions.

As time went on, through reading you, and talking with you about it (and sometimes fighting over it), I learned to absorb and integrate the many different points of view. Ones not necessarily Made in the USA, or at least not as loudly trumpeted. You attached roots to my thinking that span the world and feed on many waters and my vision has expanded as a result.

But my feet are here. My hands are here. I remain invested and interested in probing the cracks that wind through these cornerstones, the chasms rippling through the charcoaled stacks of our culture’s weakened concrete, reaching my fingers into hidden grottos to rinse under rivulets of errant rain and touch up on smooth shoots of greenery, seeking a better way. Inhaling the sunsoaked rays and sweet air that blows up out of new passages—pushing forward there. And finding new soil. And planting. And living in harmony with nature and what she brings.

YOU ARE JUST A PART OF ME

The standing system perpetuates its most corrosive elements quite easily and seemingly without our help—although we give it much. Even in interested  and continual observation lies the danger of getting caught up in the stream of symptomology and the surety of a joined reality.

Do you ever feel we are not even having the right conversations? Or that words don’t mean at all to some of us what they mean to others? As if a person comes running in a house screaming “The house is on fire, grow some mint!” And then another person in the room replies “No, we need to grow some Alfalfa!” And then a fight breaks out over alfalfa or mint. And then a third person says “This is unwise!!! Let’s do the radical thing and grow onions!!!”

The accepted modes of thought reinforce themselves and the standing order. What, then?

When grass is squashed under a board in the yard, it blanches, but it strikes out wildly toward light. it grows itself in new shapes. and it will find the day again. We need, sometimes, to think obstinately and passionately in a parallel non-symmetry, to be come  backward or sideways, or in someway find a new Way.

Are we helping things with all of this? What is being protected? Maintained? Are these areas in which I invest my energy worth the cost? Who is looking out for the return while we are busy worrying about food? Or finding it? Or while we are busy with an angry moment? Who is planning for the Winter? What will the Winter look like? Are we in Winter now? If so, how to prepare for Spring?

Watching the hulking machinery of government and the machinations of the global managers acting in these times, and the conversation that bellows and bounces about the airwaves and online as of late has me convinced we are spending too much time giving our energy to entities that would drain us until we die. And all the while, lie. And stuck to our IV tap, we stare, hypnotized.

Nor is it enough to keep our eyes on the national prize. It seems to me that the equations are egregiously incomplete without an eye cast over the world, entire. It’s only when you add up US actions domestically with US actions internationally with other nations’ concurrent actions and reactions and the history that ties all of us together that a bigger picture begins to emerge. I’ve been motivated to do this by the learning I did in late 2001.

Also, a broader view has been a natural outgrowth of exploring my lineage. In finding out who I am, and what has led me here. Wanting to understand the people in my history and in my bloodline who had to find a way to live, free from long knives and shattered crystal, free from fallow fields, times of war and barbed wire. And who found their way here, who struck out to come here. People who traveled across oceans and fields and war theaters to reach the U.S. of A.

Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on straddling of two or more cultures.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

And if only it were so simple as following dreams.

Here, today, in the land of opportunity and dreams and yet in front of us reveal themselves some unreliable or hostile actors. The White House is ultimately steered by bankers unconcerned with ‘constituents’ or ‘ethics’ or ‘humanity.’ The legislation that comes out of the White House is accordingly written. ”No taxation without representation” was a quote quite pertinent to the American Revolution. But do we really have representation now? No. “We” do not. Forget about domestic matters, Big Business calls even the international shots. It is clear that our massive media structures would in large part see many of us sicken and die. They simply don’t care about us. This is tyranny, perhaps of a subtler kind than proposed in our nation’s oldest documents, but nonetheless it is. Under layers of illusion.

I don’t intend to say that all is hopeless, nor that effort is futile. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t even bother writing here. Nor do I think outright revolt is needed. At least not by the typically understood definition of the word. I do think many tiny revolts are needed. From thought, mostly. Revolt from thought that binds and blinds and dumbly comforts and maintains.

When the People begin to learn the politics of the globe, the truth beyond their nationalized propaganda, their own government deems them increasingly Radicalized; a growing threat. Alberto Gonzales and Michael Chertoff have both confessed that they fear the Internet’s “radicalizing” nature, but that’s false. What is feared by the oligarchs is our gaining unfiltered information from other nations. They fear us talking to the Iranians in the street, or the Mexicans behind the “border,” or the Chinese, or the Venezualans, or Iraqis because they worry that we may—and by “we” I mean the people of many nations, the governed—may realize that we have more in common than not, that our strength is inexorable once organized, and that a very small elite is yoking us like beasts so that they can kick back and put they feet up on some plushy, leather seats.

Well, that’s how it is. That is the way of the world.

It’s been so as long as I’ve been alive. But just look them all now. Look at the lack of restraint. Look at how clear the lines. Artifice is nearly completely discarded because we all—us as well as them, if life could ever be so clearly dichotomized as I pretend with such a statement—are laboring under the illusion that things are, in fact, hopeless. That there is nothing to be done about it all.

But honestly, I don’t think that is true. I have a sudden and unreasonable hope that we can institute behavior that is incompatible with the larger and more destructive behaviors of our culture as well as cast off the illusion that makes so many give up before they might have a chance to start.

What behaviors do I maintain, in thought and action, that keep me rooted in one place? Or moving too slow or in the wrong direction? What tiny revolt is needed in my own life?

To be honest, there are very real challenges to our making real progress. One is that our own government worries more about putting punitive and deadly measures into place than it does in taking care of the People’s needs. Need a better example than the current pushback against a universal and humane health care plan?

Our own government fears peace as well as People Power. Containment areas. Protest permits. Arrests for showing up en masse, or just rubber bullets and tear gas on a crowd. Tasers, Tasers, Tasers, portable torture and terrorism. (Are you terrified to speak your mind to a cop now? You should be.) Borderwalls come in more sizes than 50 ft, or Virtual. They come in a conceptual flavor too. They attempt many walls around our thoughts, many fences cramming in the potential for possibility so that we never even consider what we can change. They give us TV shows into which we can fall and dream of freedom, drag it with us through a day, sweet scents in our minds, our hands on the levers and we keep working them.

The Eco-Terrorism charge is is a growing trend, I’d bet you. I see some of this up close where I live. DHS and the USA, too, fears those who care about the earth because that conflicts with the monied interests who care more about exploiting the earth’s resources than they do the Earth or her people. They put laws into effect that determine you are a “Ecoterrorist” if you do this, and they make those laws so that they can lock you up for the rest of your life. This is all in the name of businesses that would be hurt if their vampiric practices were halted across the board. I’ve reported on Ian Van Ornum, and the story took a while to unravel, but I should do a follow-up video. I learned that the reason the law came down so heavy on this kid was because DHS was in the area concerned with “EcoTerrorism.” There is a history here of activists

What are the well-monied elite factions prepared for? For increased war. For our suffering. They have no plans on changing their actions. But they are ready for us to react. They will put us down if we do, or we do too passionately. They will NOT, however, ease up on all the policies and actions around the world that engender more and more resistance. They simply prepare to find, control, contain, or kill the resistance to policies that do more for them than the greater WE.

Power never takes a back step – only in the face of more power.

—Malcolm X.

I see this in the US when our government invests more and more money and technology in crowd control weapons and surveillance of its own people and enacts more laws that controls our information gathering as well as our right to affect the government by use of civil disobedience, etc; I see it in Mexico, who under Felipe Calderón (and with the US’s great delight and help) is bringing violence to bear on social ills, and with the result of scores of horrendous human rights violations and over 12,000 dead in three years and no sign of a solution except a tired, wrongheaded, bloody Drug War model that continues to be shoved at fluctuating social symptoms. As the US does on the other side of the “fence.” The US’s border culture—which now riffs and zags across the entire country in the form of ICE—persecutes those belonging to the global South as it uses them for labor, as it drains their economic power and self-sustainability through treaties, and the answer proposed is a wall. “To keep us safe.” National Security.

This vampiric shape of dominance and hegemony is naught but pain, fence, concrete barricade, and bombs. We have to assume that the global managers are not stupid nor silly. The choices to keep hoarding wealth, to continue with State-sanctioned violence, and to refuse the treat the greater masses of people kindly are just that: Choices. Reasoned choices.

The insurance companies, themselves, are not the ultimate problem. Nor is Wall Street, the Corrections Corporation of America, the Pentagon, or Congress. Yet, all these things at their weakest, share an ailment.

There remains, eternally running rampant in the petri dish of the human soul, a virus of greed and powerlust and blindness that has bloomed brightly in the minds and hearts of the most powerful, and in a practical sense, makes them the enemy of the People’s better interests. This is most likely the nature of their pursuits, timeless, and I don’t see a cure for them. Especially when you look up, and around. At the past, at other nations, at the general work that is wrought by those we give our money, trust, and time to. At the age-old and unwavering patterns. At the monolithic and entrenched structures that feed and feed on our society. The agriculture business. The banking business. The criminal justice/corrections business. The media/entertainment business.

We cannot rely on these structures. Nor should we. As is said over and over, in the thick of all that is pressing—moral, economic, spiritual, social crises—our media is wrapped up primarily in incestuous, banal nonsense. The entire print/web/news industry seems for the most part more worried about bloggers stealing from their paychecks than they are in saving anything valuable in our culture or our world.

TAKE A SECOND.

I think the reactionary nature of what we do out here is good in the sense that it can help facilitate a few things: correct the deadthought that is blasted from the nationalized bullhorn; find ways to help those being harmed; organize around what is going on now. Be present so that if a timely move is needed, a timely move can be made.

But I think weaknesses are inherent to the shape and pace, too, in that reaction to faulty thought often presupposes a validity of the initial thought in/by/with its response. And in many ways today we need a new way, a new thought, a new reaction. Sometimes space and time is needed from a Thing in order to understand all the effects of that Thing upon your mind and being, and thus what the relation is, and then thus, what the desired relation is. And sometimes, again, one does not even wish to share the reality offered.

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Common denominator of violence, as well as shared focus.

Can we use the reactionary nature of the medium and social shape in a better way that we do? Can we substitute new reactions?

IS DREAMING OF/MAKING REAL CHANGE ONLY FOR THE YOUNG?

It may be expected to some degree, that I would underline certain things—Imperialism, Government control and abuse, surveillance, people power. After all, I am a child of a radical era in the US, having been born in 1969 and to a household of subversive types! However, I also see that that household assimilated itself pretty well into the culture, given a few decades. This may be, in part, because I am speaking of the “white” half of my family, and once the age barrier fell and they found income and cooled down a bit, they integrated comfortably with the overall cultural and social setup. I don’t know, and certain presumptions about others can be unfair to rest upon. Maybe I, too, will have less complaints with the system when I feel it is kinder to me, as well. And yet, I look out upon my fellow human beings and have a hard time stepping away from their suffering as it is tied to so much injustice and wrongness. And that causes distress within me, to see these things.

Either way, these people who (in part) raised me are not so subversive anymore (though I am sure they are hardly common types). They are as comfortable as you might imagine middle class people with integrity can get. The shape of thier dissatisfaction and conversations and actions produced nothing in and of itself (unless you count any effects upon me…and yes, I’d say that has to count). So I do not automatically prescribe similar forms of protest nor resistance, nor necessarily either of those things in the currently held definitions of the words.

Yet we do have to do something, don’t we?

Is there a window of time for radical movement and drastic action and then a window of time for growing things? A window of time for rest? One for teaching?

Which ways of making change are most important today?

I have friends in other nations who urge me to leave. Leave the US. And maybe that is the answer for me. But what about the US? What about the response that the global population should have to the very often maleficent deeds of the global managers?

What do we do to register our own truth?

Do we organize to bring all the homeless tent shelters springing up (and this will happen more and more) to rich residential neighborhoods? Do we stop buying supermarket food and band together for community gardens? Do we remove our money from the banks? Do we paste up signs all over the front of the Stock Market, little bloody dollar bills stuck to every glass window with red paint and crazy-glue? All of these?

All is not hopeless. We have far too many bodies and hearts and energy that we can access for us ever to think that.

But voting won’t do it. Letters to the editor won’t do it. Blogging won’t do it. All these things can be a part of the new way. I’m not saying it’s an either/or situation.

At the same time, is it really about what each person, what one person, can do? We often (and I’ve definitely been guilty of this) reduce these issues to ones of individual consumption or non-consumption or change. This feels a noble and right response. And it is, when it remains in the ideological and more abstracted range. Do what is right, live the right way. You remove your own contributions to harm, and you act toward good. And if we all did this, the problem would be solved. But will we all do this? Ever? Have you ever seen everyone do any one thing together?

Even were I to make my life as non-harmful as possible, or walk around Visualizing Peace every moment of the day, my doing so will not also equal my neighbor doing the same. As Derrick Jensen pointed out recently, (and linked above), “Shorter showers” won’t bring about Al Gore’s utopia.

On the other hand, enough wires braided to a thickness of one inch in diameter is still much stronger than a single wire of one inch diameter. And while one helium balloon in your hand won’t lift you off the earth, enough will.

IT IS NOT ABOUT GETTING THERE. YET. OR IS IT?

We will die before we see the world the way it should be. That is a fact.

In the meantime, we can aim. We can begin to move in the right directions, if we can’t get there. Aiming, in fact, is being there.

I wrote of actions incompatible with the sustenance of harmful structures and processes. I keep coming back to one of the biggest changes in my life, when I think about this. One of the few that remains unchanged. It is my putting cigarettes down over six years ago, probably a few more than that by now. I don’t count the years so much anymore.

I won’t take you through the entire cigarette tale. I started messing with them at 9 or 10, but didn’t begin really getting into them until 14. By my 30s, smoking had begun to become incompatible with life. I started to smoke my after-meal cigarette before I was even done eating. Not that I’m any Pavarotti, but I couldn’t sing as well anymore, my lung capacity as well as tonal quality was suffering. I would run out of breath during, ah, intimate physical endeavors.

It was the singing and that last mentioned fact that really did it for me. I wrapped the non-cigarette desire around a Dream I’d Always Had, and joined the local dojang (Tae Kwon Do school) on the first day I had zero cigarettes.

The increased exercise, joy, self-esteem of training passionately in martial arts was wholly incompatible with my smoking lifestyle. I did not “fight” smoking. I veered into a new direction totally.

I wrote of a virus of greed and blindness above. We need a new virus. We need not to jam needle after needle into our arm testing new virus-killers. You cannot kill a virus. We need a virus of positivity and kindness and fierce love reserved for the Real. We need to set it free, cheeks flushed red, hands glowing gold. We need to build, evoke, create actions and thoughts and structures that perpetuate themselves and reward people with results, with positivity, and with a joy that is incompatible to feeding the current structures and shapes.

I want to find what those are. I want to engage in those actions. I want to find new ways to see and be. I don’t want to get too comfortable in a bed of radioactive velvet. While I don’t want to bring violence to fight the greater violences (except if I walk across a human abusing another human, perhaps), I want to bring violence to the thought structures in my mind (and yours) that empower stasis or blindness.

While I have no answers, I am and have been thinking on it. I’m asking you to begin thinking too.

What can we do to undermine destructive practices in the world? To break our minds out of a dull and comfortable pattern of reaction that moves us very little if at all? What should we grow now to prepare for tomorrow? What should we teach our children, assuming we wanted them to see the world as it is, not as it should be? What should we pull the plug on?

It would be so easy to kick back and get in a rut of apathy, or even one of concern but well-lined with justified anger. Anger is not a low-temp fuel, a kerosene for a constantly-burning space heater. You’ll poison the air with soot that way. Anger is a a high-octane fuel that should be ignited when a swift or large movement is needed. And that is needed.

But so is careful thought, and actions taken up with no hesitancy, and much love.

NAGUALITY

When I found the brown blogosphere in 2006, 2007, I was all about learning and reinforcing Xicanismo. The old-tyme readers will remember those questions. And it was all about mi cultura. Much of what I missed out on in my youth. I read books on Mexican history, and sociological ones on Chicanos and the culture of Mexican Americans, the history of los Pachucos and studied Frida and Diego and Porfirio Díaz and so on. And so on. I still am. And I love knowing about, learning about all this. Getting in touch with the history of my people as well as indigenous philosophies/lifestyles and even later finding how much was projected gloss or glitz, and seeing how the important parts carry through today, and then—letting that settle…It is very important. It goes on. This, I think is something people need to do on their own. We become very dangerous when we think we belong only to ourselves and to a current moment, which is by necessity tied to a self-justifying upward climb. Such a detached existence knows nothing of another, of obligation, of interconnectedness, of what to fight or what to feed. Such an eye turns back upon itself with dissonance.

If you know your history
then you know where you’re coming from
Then, you don’t have to ask me
who the hell do I think I am
- Robert Nesta Marley

But like a vine will do, this understanding and study brought me to new areas. And so I embarked on the business and practice (still employed) of attacking, questioning, dismantling, confronting, replacing—whatever it takes—various types of thinking in my mind. I do it with efficiency and dispatch, leaning on other trainings to add force and vision (such as my study/education/experience with CBT—Cognitive Behavioral Training—in field of psychology). This is something we can do that is incompatible with much messaging out there which harms. In fact, I’d say this is seminal work. First work. But it, too, should not be named and dissected. This has been going on all of my life.

You note a few quotes in this post by Gloria Anzaldúa, whom I found by way of knowing women of color activists like cripchick and bfp. Gloria Anzaldúa is one of many great thinkers and writers that help to liberate the mind. On feminism, on mestizaje, on power and change. This is one place you can find the term Nagualismo.

I’ve done a lot of thinking and some writing about shifting identities, changing identities. I call it “shapeshifting”, as in nagualismo – a type of Mexican indigenous shamanism where a person becomes an animal, becomes a different person.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Another is here. If you read online in English-language pages (there are not many on the topic, of course), you will see some others focusing on various aspects of this type of Mexican shamanism. (This page, though hardly offering a coherent understanding overall, stresses the powers inherent in a Nagual to escape and elude enemies and oppressors.) Nagual is about magic, and fluidity, and identity…and a space where there is none. About the power of shapeshifting. This type of idea excites me, as it has long been a part of my mind, heart, body, experience. I’ve written of Tezcatlipoca, who is a protector of Nagualism.

Our natures are not static nor concrete. They never were. That is an illusion we are expected to maintain. It is a reaction to the terror of the void that spurs such early and insistent practice of this idea. But embracing the fluid and undefined nature of the human energy is a powerful form of resistance to many attacks and even social oppression. This part I can not or will not explain further. But I do encourage study and practice—not of the delineated and formal shapes of “Nagualismo” presented online, no. But of the overall idea. Try it out. Try it on. Take the energy you spend fitting into boxes and between lines and within expectations and set it free. See who it lets you be. You may find your strongest oppressor  takes the shape of containers you carry with you.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
—Noam Chomsky

Let’s get there. Let’s dare. Let’s think the impossible. Let’s unthink the possible. I may just be grunting and crooning in here, but it feels right. Let’s make strange noises as we dig through the rubble that weighs upon this world and our fellow humans. Let’s undo ourselves and speak a new language, one that at first sounds drastic and alien but very soon becomes the music calling us home.

THIS IS A MOMENT THAT OCCURS over and over on TV day after day in one shape or another. Granted, it’s FOX TV (the channel that is known for showing “Baby Snatcher” type chyrons “accidentally” next to a photo of Barack Obama as well as naming anyone arrested for impropriety in government a “Democrat”, etc etc), but FOX is a massive voice in US culture, funded by billions and pushed out to millions.

So what’s going on in this moment?

Well, here you have three white dudes talking about how wrong and how it is an “abuse of power” that a hate crimes bill was added to a defense spending bill.

The three rich white men also discuss how the Defense spending bill omits cashola for their new lusty F22 plane which McCain laments has never seen action in either Iraq or Afghanistan. (Isn’t that a dear smile on the old chap’s face?)

So. They want more money to kill brown people oversees and they call the protection of brown people here in the US an “abuse of power” by US government. And they end by saying (as you can see by the lil subtitle at the bottom of the image) that this combo leaves ‘us’ with inadequate defense.

Which ought to make you wonder…Whatchoo mean “us”?!

RED – I Should Tell Ya Momma on You

He’s blowin’ up on YouTube and has found his way to iTunes now! He won’t be homeless much longer, pienso.

But after we’re done enjoying his tune, do you wonder what the lesson is? Neustra cultura América would have us talking about one man’s talent and rise up from the dirty streets, would have us reify the superpowered individual narrative. And we all know it’s important to have a bit of that in our minds if we are going to make it through some long, hard moments out there in life.

But what’s another way we could take this? What other inspiration can we take away from stories like this—aside from the inspiration of poppin’ the neck just a bit and swaying, which is always joy!

(sombrero tip to @asialakay)

“Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.” – Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R) Alabama

THIS IS, SADLY, VERY TRUE. And that’s why on my way to the store today, I tried to kill a small bird. But let me start at the beginning.

You see, I was cooking up some breakfast in my kitchen, and a wasp stung me in the process! Whoa. Well, needless to say, I swatted it, but before I could lower my feelings of wasp-prejudice, an ant ran into view on the counter.

Well, since I am incapable of feeling two empathies or prejudices at once, I automatically was filled with a teeming understanding of what the ant must endure in this world, and as I crushed the wasp without remorse, I found myself musing upon the hard work ethic and admirable social skills of Ants.

Thus, my walk down the street after breakfast was predisposed to an anti-empathy that would, by necessity, attach to some non-ant entity. After all, empathy for one party is always prejudice against another. As everyone knows! So it went, and when I found a small bird on my path dragging a limp leg behind it, I found myself utterly and inconsolably prejudiced against it. I simply had no choice in the matter.

“Dumb stupid bird!” I thought, seething with a prejudice that flared within me like ten Alabama suns.

I threw a rock at the lame bird, but missed. Imagine my surprise when I reached down for a second stone, and accidentally grabbed a snake! Ugh! And worse than that, I couldn’t let go! O, If only I possessed the ability to base my feelings and thoughts on wisdom and understanding of the world and myself, instead of being a zero-sum human kneejerk reaction. But no, that is not how life works. There is Empathy and there is Prejudice, and never the twain shall meet, just as this life is nothing more than an ever-predictable dichotomized arc with no grays or overlap to keep things flexible and unknowable and fresh.

Yup. So there I was with the snake in my hand.

As I had used up my prejudice for the moment, I had no choice but to feel empathy for the snake that was, at the moment, sinking its curved fangs deep into the flesh of my hand. I quickly grew dizzy and nauseated under the beaming sun. All I could think to myself was that the skin of the snake was rather smooth and gee, it sure must be hard to keep cool on a summer’s day when you can’t even cool yourself through perspiration.

And that is how I came to understand Jeff Sessions (R) Alabama.