THIS IS A SPECIAL DAY for a number of reasons. Here at UMX, I cannot help but think of my own, as this is The Unapologetic Mexican’s fourth birthday. That’s like 20 years in blog years! Empires rise and fall out here in a couple years! Seemingly sound friendships are utterly exploded in a three day flamewar! Massive campaigns ripple across the blogiverse, change the world, and then subsume into pixelated fade out in an eighth of that time!

And I’m still going, and still raising hell, and still talking to some of the same cool cats I met in the early days.

In that time, I’ve seen immigration and the human rights issues involved there, and the ones needing attention regarding the Latino community, become centered in the meanstream media in a way I never expected. I’ve seen numerous lists, groups, companies, and orgs spring up to address these needs. The landscape has changed a bit, the challenges remain the same, la lucha sigue.

Echoes. I became gradually more and more aware of all those issues for various reasons, but a lot of it began with my father’s activism/poetry/writing on our community’s situation. I’m thinking now of the late 80′s-ish Coors’ boycott. (People telling gente not to boycott AZ may not understand the tradition and success of our boycotts.) I remember jefito and Margarita takin’ me along to chill with some of their friends, and that issue came up on the way to their casa—no Coors, whatever we end up buying to bring over!

And I learned about Prop 187 through different pieces he  wrote, and it was HR 187 4437 that of course prompted the massive turnouts in 2006…it was part of that energy that gave birth to this blog. But our community has been in this struggle since I was born, and of course, much longer.

Here we are in 2010, and SB 1070 is not so different than the Sensenbrenner attack. Same poison, same sentiment, different name and state. Same backlash. And the bill is headed for the same defeat, if we stay strong.

Stay strong.

We may need to. I am hoping for the best. Remember, in 2007, the police stormed the LA march with tear gas and rubber bullets. That was their response to the massive turnouts in 2006. But we do not fear them. We will show up.

Today are the marches. All across this nation. (I’ll be in Salem). Let those who decry protest and marches and demonstration note of how we do, from coast to coast. And let those who join us be empowered and happy in their hearts, or at least stirred deeply with righteous fury. I send much love to all of you who are takin it to the streets. Feel this beat. Stay safe. Steer clear of provocateurs and tense police! Be loud. And be joyous!

[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.

EPISODE DOS of the new XOLAGRAFIK Diaries Vlog Series.

As promised last week, this one completes the changeover, and finishes the explanation. From here on in, vlogs will be about issues other than, well…vlogging. But as it is a change in the way the blog is operating, I wanted to cover the changeover fully…and I’m just figuring out a number of systems that go into making these. So it’s a bit of practice, too. And a call for collaboration at the end!

Also mentioned recently, if you have any thoughts to share with me on the Israel/Gaza situation in either video or audio form, please do get in touch. I want to theme Episode Three on this and would love to include you in the vid.

Otherwise, hope you enjoy.

The XOLAGRAFIK Diaries, Episode Dos ["The Nezuabot Would Know"] from nezua on Vimeo.

And once again, the YouTube page is here (Subscribe to the vids by hitting that yellow button).

AND FINALLY, after 12 days or so, I am just about done with the conventions and with flying and with huge political extravaganzas and with taxing my credit card and with blogging for Kenneth Cole Productions and with mixing my brain up with wildly fluctuating sleep schedules. Honestly, I have stretched my perception and comfort levels and environment to such a degree and for such a stretch of days that I nearly feel completely displaced from my own persona and identity. Nothing has remained reliable or constant: not time, not place, not people, not things, not activities. This has not been strange or disturbing as I am not so tightly wed to my “self” that I don’t know how to let these things go, should a moment present that might require it. I’ve done so before many times and I know how to roll, to shift, to adjust, to change, or just to unlock and let the gears turn until they find purchase again. If anything, though, it has been tiring. I will be glad to rest a little bit. As well as to use a full size keyboard. I am typing this entry, as I did the last one, on my iPhone.

I only regret that I couldn’t meet up with more people who extended invitations but when you both have schedules to get around and you don’t have a vehicle and are not staying downtown, these things are hard to arrange.

The two conventions had distinctly different flavors and themes (regarding my personal experience) but I won’t go into that too much here because I think I may expand on that for my last Kenneth Cole Blog (awearnessblog.com). I will say, though, that St. Paul basically felt like a land that was foreign to my experience. Not that I haven’t seen police get nasty, ugly, or violent before. It wasn’t that, it was the sheer numbers, the gas masks, the full body armor, the bikes, horses, strange military vehicles, huge formations, blockaded streets and National Guard units and camo uniforms. It must have come with an astronomical price tag and I don’t see what the point was, nor how citizens today so eagerly justify military and paramilitary presence in their streets. All of it gives me a very unsettling feeling in my gut. It seems most of the population is docile, wanting to be controlled, too comfortable, and alien to my understanding. Pathetic is another word I’d use. This subservience and rationalization that people are so happy to adopt is on the same continuum as the upper middle class bourgouise bloggers who now eschew protest, radical action, or assembling physically in large numbers to confront the system and it’s agents directly–and yet pat each other on the modem and agree they are crashing gates, shaking things up, or more laughably, “revolutionary.”

Reminds me of my last “citizen journalism” gig, for VIACOM/MTV. We were operating under the guise and brand of Citizen Journalism and yet we needed to secure more release forms than actual news units, were given constantly fluctuating rules, and last I heard (I resigned from the gig a while ago but am very much in touch with the friends and coworkers I made there) the supervisors were giving explicit and specific instructions on where to go and what to shoot, down to the shot, the content of the shot, the lighting of the shot, and told “the idea is to create a feeling that people are watching these [convention] speeches all around the country.” Levered on top of this was the very real threat that if the specific shots were not delivered, the “citizen journalist” is not to be paid a cent. Yeah. So much for citizen journalism (the essence of same) and up with Citizen Journalism(TM) the symbol.

Reminds me of The Huffington Post meeting with Pelosi, and Arianna Huffington polling her readers on what question we most wanted asked of Ms. Pelosi. Resoundingly, the consensus was IMPEACHMENT. (My administrative assistant tallied about 15 pages of comments and I have the data if Stoller or Bowers or any other geekboys want a pie chart.) Arianna substituted a different question, tried to gloss over it until readers began trippin out, at which point she offered a line about her own preferences and reasoning…which really made the idea of polling about as sensible as citizen journalism being directed and controlled by a massive corporation. I commented that HuffPost had abdicated its duties as a blog, was now in league with the MSM (which blogs supposedly exist to replace and counter) and corrupt warmongering politicians, and all that was left for The People (in the sense of trustworthy dialogue and information dissemination) were the smaller blogs–and true to form, my comment was deleted.

Corporate goodies, comfort, and personal glory and power are too tempting for most of us. I’ve seen friends I never would have guessed fall into this. I dont judge them too harshly or very long because I often need to feel my way también. Perhaps they will taste ash in their mouth and spit out the fake steak. I hold out hope. We need as many as we can gather en la lucha. Too many forces conspire to trick us, to drain us, to weaken us, to deceive us, to use us.

It is good to turn this way and that. It is fine to be unsure for a time. Or often. It is good to come home. It is better to realize you carried it with you all the while.

Tomorrow's iPhone Bloggers Begin Young!

AFTER MY LAST POST on how to keep in touch or keep tabs on me while at the DNC and the RNC, I’ve investigated a few things and realized it will be easier than I thought to blog without my own laptop, as WordPress has an iPhone app that allows you to blog directly, and so are there Flickr iPhone apps, so it won’t be hard to use Flickr after all.

In light of all this, and wanting you to have clear directions to tag along, I will list here very simply the ways to tap into this Neztronic flow.

• Kenneth Cole AWEARNESS Blog for daily post during DNC. (RSS feed here)

• Flickr (Nezua) for pics on the go! (RSS feed here or RSS Feed for DNC08 fotos only, tho honestly, all fotos for the next ten days will be DNC and RNC.)

• UMX for your regularly scheduled unapologetic goodliness when it happens. (RSS feed here)

• House of Nezua for simple, unpolished, personal jottings and goings on usually fashioned for a more intimate-sized crowd. (RSS here).

• Twitter for realtime blurbs from now until the end of the RNC convention (requires requesting to be added, no big deal.) My public Twitter stream that you can lurk at, or add without requesting being added. [This link was given incorrectly yesterday, this is correct.]

Okay! All we’re missing now are my GPS coordinates and you’ll have to talk to the NSA for those. 

If you are blogging from Denver, please feel free to leave comments here, too, so people can choose to keep an eye on you. I think it’s really wild, so many eyes and ears going and feeding back news. Completely smashes the format of packaged NEWS® product, but look at all the info that will be flowing. I don’t know how useful it all will be! But it sure will be spread out nicely, and wild and varied and from many viewpoints and not polished, and I think it’s really cool. Virtual Verite on the move. I sort of wish ole Stoney were still alive…I think he’d get a huuuuge kick out of what’s happening with “Citizen Journalism.”

Okay. I think I’m all ready, as far as my technology. Batteries charged, lenses cleaned, clothes washed, numbers taken down. Must print airport paper thing, something something. 

Oh yeah, the alms bowl, as Kai puts it. If you got ‘em smoke ‘em. And wish me buena suerte on these planes that get my nervous system so jacked up. 

Bueno. I’m out.

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY ARE FUSING at such a fast rate there’s not enough time even to consider all the ethical and sociological implications. But an obvious one is that there is no longer much of a separation between Them, Us, and It.
 

Here’s one of the better uses of YouTube and best examples of creating a short only from computer screens and still shots that I’ve come across lately.

One thought that rises in my mind is at the end when the video talks about all those things that we have to rethink…”borders” should have been a word. We see that the way we see “borders” is a construct of the past. And yet some are stodgily, dinosaurusly talking about laser concrete super-robot fence-walls. And in the face of today’s desperate migrations from a place of economic strife that our economy has worsened with imbalanced dealings! As if walling off the people but keeping the practices in place can accomplishing anything. Because their minds cannot imagine a world that treats a border differently than the ways they’ve imagined in the past. It reminds you of the old SciFi books where they would try, unsuccessfully to imagine the future. Sometimes you’d see devices that seemed futuristic to a mind from a past time, but revealed the confines of their mental arena. Like in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (which is a brilliant and unique series), wherein generations of people set themselves to a task of writing a multi-generational encylopedia for the future generations as they feel history will be lost. It is a wiki, in fact, before wikis. But they imagine it written on paper!

Mexico City’s own Alfonso Cuarón (director of Y tu mamá también) puts it well.

“I enjoy doing children’s films and I enjoy working with children, but in every single film I’ve done, the people I care to communicate with are young people,” [Alfonso Cuarón] explains. “I don’t know how good a communicator I am with older people in the sense that I just feel more comfortable trying to communicate with young people. For me, that’s where hope resides.” 

The way he sees it, evolution has moved at lightning speed when it comes to technology and knowledge, but at a snail’s pace when it comes to ethics and politics. His hope is that this will start to change with the generation behind his own. For while he acknowledges that plenty of people of his generation and older are struggling to address issues such as global warming and immigration, he has no faith in the politicians. 

Cuarón points to the tale of two walls as an example, recalling that when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the democratic world celebrated. “Because walls don’t work. Now the conversation is, ‘Let’s put a wall between Mexico and the States.’ Everything’s going into very archaic solutions, very archaic ways of seeing things,” he says. 

“I do believe in the younger generation, people that were born in this reality,” he adds. “Part of the problem of the older generation is that everything is a regressive thing, ‘Let’s go back to this paradise.’ That’s not going to happen. The younger generation, they know that this is the world they are living in. They have to transform this world.”

—Cleaning Up After the Children

Getting back/around/under/sideways to the topic of our Borgness, I look at the YouTube above, I see how Google owns and see everything in the New Frontier, and I connect that to this:

Yes, The Cloud. It’s a liaison “area” that connects your computers together, owned by Apple. Or Apple/AT&T, think of it almost as a room that has been installed…a pipeline or valve that connects all your information to itself so you can access that valve anywhere. And remember there are other parties sucking from that valve.

Tell them what you are about to do from moment to moment with Twitter. Share all your documents and business cards gained and receipts kept with the text-scanning and foto-scanning Evernote. Take fotos of your environment as you move about and Geotag them with Flickr. Instant message the dialogue all your ongoing relationships with AIM. Let everyone know where you are and where you spend your cash with Whrrl. And all the while we are watched by the Google Eye Mapmaker Gods. And every day new modes of surveillance are proposed or enacted. Drone planes, border towers, razor wire, laser skies.

Are we feeling safer yet?

We imagined the telescreen and got the Essence right. But the Symbol we did not. We didn’t see that we’d not have them as TVs, but as computers. And we imagined them bolted down. And we never imagined they wouldn’t be mandatory, but sought after as prizes and status symbols. And we didn’t imagine we’d not try to slip out of their sightline, as Winston did, but that we would strip down naked and dance in front of them at nearly every opportunity. We imagined generations compiling databases of information….but didn’t see that we’d be using them to construct these databases for the government, and not for the People. Nor that this great new technology would be used for the building of new walls, when the global information highway so obviously erases so many barriers.

THIS IS A SHORT AND SIMPLE REQUEST to all my lovely friends in FeedReaderLand. Yes, you! The one reading me now in an RSS reader, or a google aggregator, in Bloglines or in Buzz or Greatnews or Newsfire or NetNewsWire and so on! 

You—being the jazzy and hip tech-savvy sort—don’t visit blog pages individually so much anymore, and that’s cool. But in your growing up and spreading your technological wings, UMX has changed locations.

SO, if you have The Unapologetic Mexican blogrolled, I’d really appreciate it if you can take a moment and do like Manuél said: change your links over from http://theunapologeticmexican.org/elgrito to http://theunapologeticmexican.org/elmachete. Just go in there and replace “elgrito” with “elmachete” and we’re golden.

Gracias! And buenos dias!

PLEASE ALLOW ME…TO INTRODUCE MY POLL. It’s a page
of
text
and spaaaaace.

This will only take 30 seconds but it will sting for a full decade.

And I know it’s not your first time, so don’t act coy. Oh, how I love last spring’s expressionsets on this year’s droids! Precocious.
 

Having trouble keeping up? Let go!

Here we go, robot racers:

1. How big is your screen? 

2. What percentage of the time do you view bloglands through an 800 X 600 jobbie? [update: some peeps are being confused by my slingo. All I'm asking is how often you surf using an 800 x 600 monitor]

3. I’m going to write a word. You type back what your mind bounces up first. 

“effigy”

Buena suerte! No cheating! GOoOooOOOOº!

(PS since I’m testing, let me link here and test for trackbacks. Since I’ve upgraded this UMX installation to WP 2.6, no incoming links are registering as trackbacks. HoN is WP 2.5 so let me see if I can plant one over there.)