SOME POSTS begin as a reaction. A reaction to ugly events involving hate crime, or discrimination, or persecutory legislation, or some other spur that launches anger, protectiveness, or an instinct to fight. These are necessary when they arise organically. And so is outrage in the social body.

I remember as a child being so amazed that so many (everyone, insisted my immature mind) took everything in stride. I mention this now and then: the sensation I had that the world was upside down and burning and everyone in the world (i.e., school, stores, etc) was happy go lucky and not talking about it. (I am sure this had something to do with the conversations and teachings in my early home and community.)

So, I grew to feel out of touch with society’s reactions and evaluations of life as presented in larger settings, TV, newspapers, general social dialogue. And I suppose that is part of the age. These are normal conflicts we have to evaluate at a certain age.

In too many cases we simply have to accept untruths or mechanisms that confuse the mind. We read the real thinkers in college, and then we pretend it was just for a course. We accept that when X is really going on, the TV will frame it as Y. We accept that advertisements, essentially, lie. We learn to restrain, perform, operate in society. We are taught not to be ourselves, as it does not pay. We are sent on job interviews to offer a well-groomed doppelganger which may have little basis on truth, but have more  to do with how you can appear a valuable commodity to a corporate mechanism. The media helps sell wars that feed the fatally wealthy, and focuses on celebrity nose jobs while the public is robbed blind on the backside by the bankers.

You know how this goes, top to bottom. Same as it ever was.

But did it jam at you in your adolescence? Did the first sweeping vista of disappointment make you weep? Did that initial understanding of how little we expected of ourselves make you angry? Did it nearly topple your mind to gaze out at the wasteland of hypocrisy? Did the wrongness matter? Did it touch your inspired soul, your feeling soul, your uncallused soul and provoke a reaction?

There was too much pretend-truth and too much noise and too many lies in the world, and too much apathy. When I was young, it chewed at me. It would not let me be. I could not imagine why there were not armies of citizens banding together to fix every ailment facing the People.

I was a little naive.

But to me, this is adolescence in US society as I’ve seen it, in more than a couple cities and states. Children, those vast stores of human possibility, reach the end of the playground grass. They must grapple with letting the reality of our sickened culture overwhelm the childheart with one, long, coal-tinged static-studded sigh.

We at least make a decision about how we as people fit in and engage when truth is a disrespected and nearly non-existent entity in a thriving system, when greed and fear are leveraged and fed, when misdirection and manipulation drives the media in most cases.

And with this body and mind…with this amazing system meant to rebel against untruth and to wade toward joy, we must force non-sense and illogic and ignorance into our own tubes. You are required to Get Over It and Learn How to Manage. It makes us ill.

Get on a few stomach drugs, some head drugs, have the doc say its cool, grind out the salary. Protest virtually. Do what you can and have time for which is mostly go mad or be distracted.

The American Dream?

Too cynical?

As I grew up, those times when someone was inflamed about injustice and saying “HELL NO, THIS IS NOT RIGHT AND WE WILL NOT ACCEPT THIS!” I felt my spirit respond in kind. The scales, as they say, fall off of my eyes. I could feel that truth ringing sharply right behind my breastbone, a massive silver bullhorn calling to me. And I loved them for that. For taking that on. I thanked the universe for whatever it was that compelled that person to speak, at that very moment, from a place that was truthful and outraged at whatever entity or action was trying to establish itself in our world.

That voice belongs to nobody, it belongs to all of us. We access it when it is time, when the moment calls for it. There will always be that moment in this very flawed world!

There is another voice, too. One that rises in the absence of reaction, maybe. One that needs a bit of stillness to emerge. One that listens, and hears those things being said, and lets them melt into the moment. And finds where they don’t quite nourish. Finds where they fail to adhere to a true shape. And seeks not to batter, deflect, crush, or challenge…but only to question. Only to probe and discover what may be overlooked.

If you listen to the dialogue on immigration, you hear so many voices rising up from fear. From fear of being diluted, to fear of being killed. You hear fears given voice every decade or less or more. You hear so much about—and from “both” “sides”—Securing the Border. Building the Danged Fence. Securing Our Borders. The Insecure Border. Lasers Every 500 Feet and Surveillance on The Border. More Troops to the Border. Nothing Can Happen Until We First Secure the Border.

We might rebut with the rational. With statistics about how crime generally (and now) goes down as immigration goes up. Or how there is no increase of violence that Leaps Over the Border. Take El Paso, Texas for one obvious example. El Paso, across the border from the very violent Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. El Paso is immediately accessible to non-supervised entry. El Paso is known as one of the safest cities in the USA.

Or I may sketch less specific and talk about how until we take on Mexico’s problems as our own; until we be fair to their economy and their chances of opportunity and stop acting like some rich cat on the Upper East Side calling the cops on a lone hungry figure in the street; until we see our economies intertwined, amassing violence and troops on the border is a super-destructive non-effective stopgap to the cold wind rushing into so many fearful minds.

But in the general, when I hear this shaming, persecutory, prison-preaching talk, what occurs to me underneath those thoughts or before them, is that these people talking about immigration in the public lens are very insecure. And that they may need to secure their own borders. To feel out their own perimeters, find where the air gets thin, and the feet scramble for purchase. Peer into their shadows to dispel the figures they imagine.

And I think until that happens, we can and will have no real progress.

After all, how can  you approach an issue that is so important and affecting so many people, and involves so many areas (Economics, Environment, Migration, Culture, Race, History and so on) if you have not yet first secured your mind? And your heart? If you do not do those things, you cannot honestly evaluate these dynamics.

To one of these politicians obsessed with force and armies and walls…I ask you: How will it feel (in you, personally, in your body and belly and throat and mind) to imagine millions of workers in today’s workforce being celebrated for helping to run this mighty engine? To see millions of unauthorized workers simply swept into the bosom of our workforce and economy? Legitimized?

Does your lip curl?

I’m not talking about reparations, just a shift in lens and consequent behavior, regard, and legislation.

I’m not talking about some abstract past workforce, or one that creates goods the rest of us never actually handle or purchase or use. I’m talking about the workforce out there right now. Many today, this moment. Many more will report tomorrow, on Monday. Those ones, those humans who are working. (Yes, for a moment I’m simply going to talk about workers.) The ones who accept not being paid when the boss feels like sticking them. The humans with no benefits, and who work long hours and for substandard pay. The ones who are on edge lately and ready to drop everything and run if ICE shows up.  Those ones. I ask you how would it feel, Mr. Politician, Mrs. Politician, for you to ponder their being given protections that insure they work a happy and safe workday and enjoy a fair paycheck? And instead of being vilified were suddenly welcomed and celebrated as part of the large, always changing, colorful, and strong American community? No shame, no criminal record, no more pummeling around people trying to hang on with one hand. Can you even possibly house that imagination in your body without any serious instinctive gag reflex?

Or do you feel a need—before connecting empathetically to another human who may be in slightly different circumstances for the moment—to first punish and shame them for not signing in at the door? Do watch them slink to the magical Back of the magical Line? To admit complicity. And error. And wrongness? All while ignoring the rest of the chain of consequence, which of course leads back to our own nation and government and even our own home.

Does this punitive projection soothe you?

With this litany of demands that unauthorized/undocumented immigrants admit wrong, be charged with a crime, pay thousands, take a walk of shame, and so on, it does occur to me that some people are certainly trying to secure something. But it’s not a border.

And I ask you, the People: Can those politicians evaluate what might be an honest and fair approach to these fluctuations in our population and workforce if they harbor gross ideas about Mexicans? Or if they see borders as a way to legitimately express socially-unacceptable race-based or white nationalist-related ideas? Obviously not.

If we want to pretend life is very simple, we might point only to the GOP. But many on the “Left” are certainly chomping at the bit to punish immigrants (aka Mexicans.) If you’ve read the concept paper drawn up for the possible forthcoming immigration bill, it involves much more ICE, much more money for them, more surveillance technology, body armor, and so on and so on and so on. Fact is, the forces that desire a police state are using the public’s general apathy toward immigrants and Mexicans to institute measures that would never, ever fly coast to coast, were the perceived target to be Regular Americans. That’s on top of scapegoating Mexicans, which is always in American Style.

Would that these mentally and spiritually and emotionally lacking political and punditry players would disqualify themselves from the dialogue, but that’s not how things work. However, if your mind is self-deceiving in this way, you cannot hope to fairly render an opinion about issues so large concerning so many. Period.

Political gamers, humanity is in dire shape.

This challenge comes to us in many forms right now. Wars over petroleum. Poisoned oceans with petroleum. Police state pre-pubescent and gangly. Class divisions becoming untenable. Economy severely unstable. Political dialogue false. Media turning to sheer propaganda stations. Banks taken over our economy. Corporations taken over the courts and both wreaking massive havoc on our national security.

It is an age old reaction to blame the powerless when we panic. We are better than this. California already apologized in the 1930s for panicking and shipping Mexicans to Mexico—many who had never been there in their lives! The focus now on Mexicans does not feel so different to me.

Our society is, in the next few decades, going to undergo some drastic changes. We must secure our own hearts and minds and be ready to deal with these changes in a way that is reasoned, loving, progressive, broadminded, flexible, and kind. We must first secure our own consciousness in a grounded, positive place before we can pretend to represent millions of human beings.

DESPITE my many misgivings on how What-May-Become-CIR is shaping up, the energy at the rally on Sunday in DC was undeniably strong, fresh, vibrant, positive, and loud. More like a loving block party, concert and picnic than a “march,” the National Mall hosted hundreds of thousands of people supporting our fixing the broken immigration system. I’ll have a video for you (the next News With Nezua video) that I am going to use to convey some of that energy to you.

Because there are separate aspects of any “cause” or political issue. Which is what makes the whole thing so frustrating sometimes. We all forget, we all remember, are reminded, when we talk it over. We begin pushing for the very best we can, as we should. Ideals lead the way. Then some others get angry and say that the first group is being too purist, or non-pragmatic. Compromises must be made. Then your undocumented friend says those compromises are cruel and unneeded and unnecessary. And then another undocumented friend says, hey—I’m willing to make those concessions. Then another citizen friend says but I am not willing to have a biometric Social Security card, and we shouldn’t let that be ushered in using this issue. Then someone else passes a link about a protest or march action and then someone else says isnt there more to making change than protests, than making noise? And then you attend a massive gathering like this in the absence of any movement from the white house after all the beautiful speeches made to la comunidad and you remember that every gathering is not about making an immediate change. Or rather, more comes out of something like this event than just definitive legislative action.

Sometimes you need to be around people who feel as you do, who look a bit like you, or have a name like you—especially when those things are under attack by various groups and voices in our nation. Especially when you are out there working that activismagic-whatever you do, making your heart visible and evident in the world, trying to chip away at wrongness because that gives you a lust for life, that makes you feel you have done more than take from the world. And that good things can happen, and that you are not alone, and that you stand with hundreds of thousands of other people. And that even though the people who would stab the very balloons out of the hands of mimes may be given too loud a voice at times, on the other hand, the people who know that justice is a right all humans have can gift each other with a very powerful weapon to place in the arsenal. And the event had a lot of that energy. It was very comforting to know that with so many Latinos around, even if we were dissimilar in many ways, we were standing together at the moment for things that go so often unchampioned or unmentioned by the most powerful voices in media, if not altogether slurred and derided. We were, for a handful of hours, a city of solidarity and flava and positivity.

And at the same time, all those aforementioned currents that can sometimes complement and sometimes contradict, were in play.

I saw a number of people who work this scene, the regulars, the activists (undocumented and citizens), some org people, some new media people…you get to know each other after a while! We always see each other at these events. Our feelings on what is right and what is possible overlap in places. And not in others. And always varying at different times, perhaps, depending on how the issue is playing out in Congress or on TV or in the White House. And to see that weave of multiplicity on the issue just in that group of people gives you a peek into how tough it has to be to move legislation with so many people in government, many whom are not just sometimes at variance with, but directly opposed to each other’s value systems and desires and ideologies, and many who don’t even deal in good faith, who are simply making decisions on cynical and power-based motives. It’s a wonder anything gets done. And it explains why so many of us on the Left are beaming sunshine out of our blogholes because the White House just passed insurance reform that still leaves us with a health care system that should hide in shame compared to that of many “less powerful” nations—not to make light of the very big deal that is this bill being passed, nonetheless….

One of these activist type friends I know—he is involved with one of the current orgs that speaks for/stands for/benefits from the Latino&Immigration type issues—was a bit bitter about the event. It was “cynical,” he said. “Why aren’t they telling people” that this is a big hoo-rah event when in reality, Schumer and others are lining up a nasty little deal before they even consider trying to sell it; a deal that involves National biometric ID cards/SS cards, and passing an English test (who says you have to speak English in the USA, we still don’t have any “official language,” after all!), admitting shame and criminality in being here at all (I’m still waiting to hear the US govt explain the reneging on NAFTA as well as many other actions that contribute to global inequality and spur immigration in the first place!) and blowing more money on a militarized and harmful border mentality and weaponry/wall, as well as funding (in part) Felipe Calderón’s drug war that has claimed over 17,000 lives by now. And I understand what he is saying. These things are not acceptable, in reality. At least not to me as a citizen. And I do live here, and have to live here for now. And so I feel I have a right—while not speaking for anyone else—to take part in pushing, shoving, nudging the world closer to where I feel it should be. Beginning here.

At the same time I could have said “Okay. Fair enough. But if that is cynical…then why don’t you tell that truth through the org you are attached to?” Because he does not, either. Nor do they. They stand for good things, too. But not the whole truth. Does anyone? Does anyone think the whole truth stands a chance in this nation? And yet you can’t really aim any lower and have too much self-respect. Because you know invariably that ideal will fall short, being channeled through an imperfect vessel—be it your own humanity, or Congress.

So it’s never cut and dry. We all have our interests, we all have to make a living, we all have to make compromise, we all have our hands stained from rowing in the Empire Ship, and even in those moments we truly want to do only good, only the right thing, that still doesn’t mean we’ll agree on what exact shape that Thing will be. We come from different places. We stand in different places. We’ve had different beginnings. I’m still personally trying to learn how to be true to my own vision, and at the same time make room for yours. In a way, I guess at heart, that is what the USA is supposed to be about. (At least judging by the mantras children are pressured to speak to the flag in school.) Lately I feel we are not being too successful at making that vision happen. But maybe as a nation born squalling and bloody and steeped in lust and reverence for property, as well as violence and exploitation of the Other, we just take smaller steps than those that satisfy me right away.

What is there to do but to keep putting energy toward such an idea, and toward fighting the good fight?

Which is why I thank Reform Immigration for America very much for making my trip possible. I appreciate the help in getting there, and the no-strings freedom to report the way I report. Speaking of which, I have to get back to editing the video. Meanwhile, here’s a slideshow of the fotos I took. Maybe they will give you an idea, for now, of what I’m talking about….

[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.

THIS VIDEO of children reenacting Thanksgiving is pretty funny. And reminds me of early quandaries I found myself in while playing “Cowboy and Indians.”

Thanksgiving. As I wrote last year, it is a holiday that is split, in my own mind and being. Of course I remember and cherish all the times various parts of my family came together on this day and ate, drank, and recounted family stories, looked at old photos, laughed, and got full on delicious food. But like many of our holidays, the truth (the blood) has been wiped clean from this glossy card (only $2.99!) and in its place raised a cluster of days upon which we shop, spend money, send cards, and often, if that’s all—forego a chance to learn lessons from the world’s past.

I don’t want anyone to stop enjoying themselves on any day of their life. I heartily cheer on one more day where people can gather, share love, share food and drink and laughter. In that sense, I’m quite the Tolkienite. Though some choose to fast, which I respect as a means of mourning lost opportunities to connect, and lost lives, and lost culture.

We know the results of forgetting important lessons and replacing them with feel-good fable. I think I cannot improve on last year’s words:

Thanksgiving is the earliest fable given to us along the path of mental indoctrination that allows the USA to continue its method. Some say now a great change has come upon us and we may have to shift the way we do things. Global powers now, no sole hyperpower, diminished American might, changing demographics. We’ll see. …

Nonetheless, the path is in place and it is a path that begins with commercially-crafted tales designed to distract us from the USA’s long-running methodologies of exceptionalism and crusade and in place of that, offer us patriotic pablum; saccharine feelgood fakery that suffocates entire peoples and their struggles. Ultimately, who benefits from these fables and the lessons they instill? Who benefits from the invasion of Iraq? From the mercenary armies we have there and are now launching into many nations and onto ocean vessels? From our military bases that multiply like virus? Who are the myths of Thanksgiving designed to benefit? What are the truths they are meant to obscure?

—Stolen Not Given

All that said, I wish you and yours another day of life, and joy, and a billion magnificent sensations. Including a full belly and a full heart. Today, tomorrow, and every day.

–

PS: the art used on the front page for this post uses Diego Rivera’s The Market of Tlatelolco from The Great Tenochtitlan.

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN THIS BY NOW. I wonder sometimes if my readers wonder when I don’t comment on stories that seem so very “Unapologetic Mexican.” I think the answer is not simple.

I think firstly, it’s sort of like why I don’t make the same drawn out post on Cinco de Mayo every year. Sometimes I link back, sometimes I may even totally not post on that day. You begin to feel a bit silly when you write out the same feelings and reasons for doing or not doing on a certain every year like clockwork. We change. The way we approach a day changes. Even if it remains the same feeling in our heart.

Then, too, there’s that feeling like “Oh, boy, I know I should post on this.” And sometimes defiantly responding to that voice is the voice of free will that says “But I am not inspired to blog on this now!” On a job, you don’t normally get to entertain such feelings. But since blogging does not pay me (not here, not in my blog), I can indulge those types of feelings. Thus, I’ve not commented at all on a few issues that have happened this week and provoked my thoughts and feelings, but I may.

Another layer of my not blogging on very UMX-ish issues sometimes is that the world has changed since I began this, over three years ago. And I, too, have changed. We’ve changed together. One of the ways in which the world (and by “world” I mean the society I meet online through news sites and media messages and blogs and people on software and fones and teleconferences and conventions and conversations in bars, too) has changed is it is paying much more attention to things like this! One payoff (if it can be framed in such a way) to the focused hate and violence that has stepped up from the Normal, is that more “Liberals” and “good people” are saying  ”Hey…it’s not cool if Mexicans are called sleaze!” or “Hey, people seem to be blaming a lot of crap on Mexicans and that’s not cool!” or “Hey, there’s a lot of messaging in the media that casts people of color in a gross way. And that’s not cool!”

Because, again, (a big) part of why I came out here and began this blog (which began at El Grito) was to add my voice to what felt like a deluge of anti-Mexican hate. I’m not saying all these voices are “here” forever, or see things as I do, or have the same aim…but overall, there is more company in exactly what I’m writing/saying most of the time.

Now, whereas issues would have once floated in the news ether a long, long time; or where I would’ve felt I was battling with only one or two people by my side, I look to my left and right quickly as I chug from my cantina and notice more and more people at the camp, polishing steel, dancing or eating in this army; unifying their voices behind these types of things. I don’t care why it happened, I’m glad, though. And not that I was alone, but now sometimes I feel okay sitting back because so many voices are carrying the fight. Seriously, just in the last three years I’ve seen a massive wave rise of pro-Latino, pro-immigrant voices, or coalesce. I’ve seen orgs form and I’ve been part of a number of efforts in activism. It’s very encouraging. Hell, the New York Times has written numerous articles just in the last few months that I never thought I’d see on their site.

So given these changes, it can be downright pleasant to keep working on other things, and watch my (proven or incidental) compas rouse up righteous around me. (I laugh at the possible funny chapter title now, “The Incidental Compa.” I think a very small demo would get that humor.)  I’m all “keep at it, I’ll get your back, bringin up the rear!”

But I guess there’s yet another layer as to why I let some things go by—especially things like these costumes that turn Mexicans (we know what that mustache is about) into aliens, that turn human beings into ugly villains, that throw another log of hate on the eternal bonfire of humanity.

Those masks pretty much say everything about how this culture can make you feel growing up as a person of color. To me, those masks sort of just say it all. They tell you the responses a person of color (Mexican in this case) will get in response to those recurring and early questions you have as an individual in a society when you look around at the We, to see where you fit in.

Are They Like Me? and Am I One of You? and Am I Loved and Am I Special and Am I Beautiful? and Am I Happy to Be Here? and How Should I Add to This Group? and How Can I Return to Society What it Has Given Me?

The “immigration restrictionists” are always trying to pretend that “IT’S” not about “Mexicans” or people of color, “IT’S” about “unregulated immigration” etc. But I think they are a bit too clever when they go so far as to embrace products that draw no such distinction and they show their true face by doing so:

But of course William Gheen (“Psychotic” leader of ALIPAC) and Lou Dobbs stand up for products that underline their own oldwhiteracist/greezysleeezy views.

But we in the Latino comunidad are supposed to be confused about  this message?

I’ll toss a stone or two in the online comment-field fest, and I do more when I can and when I’m moved by imperative or need, and sometimes don’t get enough sleep in doing so. But I guess the final reason I come at some of these incidents in due time is a need to pace myself in all of it, in all the haywire back and forth. This fight won’t end with Lou (even the day I visit his grave to dance on it and yes I will, Lou), or masks in Walmart, or even Walmart, or comment threads that only reinforce that there’s a lot of the “We™” out there that feels the same as it ever did. Though, yes, all those things are parts of “it.”

But “it” is larger and longer and deeper than all of that. This is and has been a long, long war. This foul spirit that rises and repeats and seeks to make mi gente retreat has been tearing at the land and the skin of the face and the hands of my people for hundreds of years.

Still we breathe, still we love, still we grow. Still, we fight.

Tomorrow, we will do the same. And the day after that, so will our children.

IT’S FUNNY. In the middle of June of this year—when Brisenia and Raul Flores were murdered by Shawna Forde and Eugene Bush and nobody was covering it—CNN got a lil bold, via Rick Sanchez, who can be cool on the situation when he wants to be. And by bold, I mean that someone repping his show got in touch with me and asked if I’d agree to being on a shortlist of people to speak/give opinion etc on immigration related matters, or at least this incident specifically. The cat from CNN repping Rick Sanchez’ slot mentioned that they wanted some voices/opinions unlike Lou Dobbs...which made me laugh and in my immediate honest reaction I forgot that CNN was the same station that did both shows and started riffin’ about how that was a pretty low bar and so on and basically was just real about how most people I know think Lou Dobbs is a crazy ass relic etc and only later it hit me that I said this to a CNN person…not that I regret it, I’m glad I got the chance to offer my feelings on good ole lou. But it made me laugh to realize a little later that it was the same channel.

My point is, clearly CNN sees the writing on the wall. And surely they know it’s only a matter of time until Dinosaur Lou ambles off into the acrid back pages of history; that this nation is way different a demographic than Lou imagines, that as fondly we all remember the Cleavers and the Hollies, this is the age of the Obamas and the Garcias! The smart move? CNN really oughtta go balls out for the “We are down with Latinos”; with “We are of this new day,” and just ice Lou, just get with the inevitable and pose like they are ahead of the curve. Because that would gain them a lot of cred, I’d guess, to the Latinos paying attention right now. CNN should just take the cash from the Ad buy that America’s Voice offered them to place this slick lil spot below during their Latino in America special.

But they turned it down. Ouch!

But, but, but what about…what about our shared journey and your sincere desire to “explore the diverse experiences and challenging issues facing Latinos in America”? I’m not feeling the love, yanno?

CNNito! Showing yourself to be in solidarity with the old, old, oldschool-white supremacist’s crew (Arpaio, Rush, Beck, Lou, Buchanan, O’Reilly, Imus, the list goes on, but not for too much longer) soon to exit Cultural Scene Right? and right before your much hyped Latino special? Not a good look, mi gente. Not at all. And you, as TV people, oughtta know this.

But then again, you are making it clear, eh? You don’t really care too much about what it’s like to be Latino in America.

(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”?!

The Famous Melting Pot T-Shirt

HOLOCAUSTIC SHOOTERS, Teabagger protestors, Anti-immigrant hate groups, Hate crimes rising, Birthers, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck…these poor souls are having a very hard time facing reality. The nation’s cultural demographics are changing to better match much of the world. And specifically…the POTUS is black.

These types, as much as some part of them might desire, cannot give vent to what truly troubles their mind, so they twist up their thoughts and use mouthsounds like “Fascist” and “Socialist” and phrases like “that’s not a Birth Certificate, it’s a Certificate of Live Birth,” or as Liz Cheney recently drizzled “People are worried that he doesn’t seem to want to defend the country” and so on.

To break the hatecode, reference the key set out by Lee Atwater in his famous quote on the “Southern Strategy”:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And that’s how those types talk about it now, too. And these same types of minds are going about harming very specific portions of the population in the same ways.

And the reaction this springs from? This fear that everything is upended and civilization is threatened by this strange unknowable “perversion” of time-honored power structures? It’s purely cultural in nature, of course. Otherwise, what is really changing so much? President Obama is a a political centrist. And a corporatist, essentially. And a hawk!! I mean, many important things aren’t changing a bit.

But even the President saying in a press conference what is simple fact—that blacks and latinos are arrested and incarcerated at disproportionate rates, and harassed for being brown™—terrifies some people! Granted, the people most disturbed by this are a rather gross lot and (if ya don’t mind my saying so) a lot of them will die before toooo long. (Sometimes for change you simply need for old, stodgy, crazy minds to fade off the earth to give room for new thinking!) Especially if they keep loading up on Viagra and taking trips to the Dominican Republic in search of… ?

But meanwhile, for the President to even dance close to a truth that brings us toward discussing institutionalized racism…well. You get scaredycats talkin’ like this:

“We’re finding out that this guy’s got a chip on his shoulder. He’s angry at this country. He’s not proud of it. […] Let’s face it, President Obama’s black, and I think he’s got a chip on his shoulder. I think there are elements in this country he doesn’t like and he never has liked. And he’s using the power of the presidency to remake the country.”

—Rush Limbaugh (via thinkprogress)

RUSH LIMPLY:

Of course you’re not being honest, Mister Limp-paw. Just making jowl-sounds. This is just a clever way of tapping into the whole “WHO IS HE REALLLLY???” thing. You know. Furrener, Other, Manchurian, etc etc ad nauseum. Yawn.

“Chip on the Shoulder” is of course “Uppity.” It’s the whole “I don’t like your tone, boy” thing. It’s the whole “why aren’t you acting obsequious and below me???” It’s the shifting paradigm of power and the ailing, arrogant, radio host is stamping his feet because The Most Powerful Man in the Free World (funny how absent that phrase has been lately, eh?) is of a phenotype that Rush prefers to think of as inferior. Not very complicated.

As far as the rest of the quote, well, I’m guessing that any person who runs for president sort of sees things about the world they don’t like and desires to change them. This, ah, might actually a prerequisite for becoming President, eh? But again. Some people, when they raise their voice are being “confident,” and others will be perceived as “threatening.” Depends on your sex, your phenotype, and your class. Rush is underlining traits that never bothered him in Bush, and not even in Clinton! Nobody ever said that Bill Clinton was trying to remake the nation!! That would have been like complaining that speaking people are using their mouths to send sounds into the world…and that’s bad.

But again, Rush is not using language to communicate truth. He is simply stoking racial prejudice. He is shouting in code to his listeners: BLACK MAN HAS POWER OVER YOUR LIFE. THE BLACK MAN IS CONFIDENT. THE BLACK MAN HAS POWER OVER YOU. IT’S EVEN POSSIBLE HIS PENIS IS LARGER THAN YOURS!

Rush is a lowlife with a chip on his shoulder trying to use the power of his pulpit to remake the country that he cannot accept as-is. He is just jealous that Obama’s pulpit is bigger than his. (And without pharmacological aids, either!)

[sudden daydream of obama leaning back in his chair, puffing up on a fat cigar and laughing at rush's agitation heartily...'ha ha ha! chip on the shoulder? i'll open up a can of chips on your ass, rush! and once you have one stack, you won't go back!]

Okay, reluctantly turning away from Mister Limply’s victim mentality, we can now address

LOU DOBBS:

Ah, Lou Dobbs the Birther.

For those who don’t know, “Birthers” are the Internet crazies who think the US is so haphazard you can become President without being vetted for citizenship status. Or to be more honest, they are racists who are sublimating their distrust and revulsion at seeing a black man in the White House into a ridiculous question about the validity of Obama’s birth certificate.

Lately, Lou Dobbs has taken on the cause. It seems his bosses at CNN aren’t taking to it to kindly, telling him now that it’s a “dead story.” And other places, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, are making statements of their own: Lou Dobbs should be fired.

We have a bit of a special relationship here at UMX with Lou Dobbs, as you can tell by reading the tagline on the header above (unless you are not reading the actual blog). He’s a clown. He’s a bigot, and he tries to use the power of popular outrage to remake the world the way he wants it to be. He has a chip on his shoulder. No. Wait, that’s a huge flake of skin. Nevermind. MAKEUP??!

Lou is baffled at the atypically strong pushback because he is used to doing what he does, and is a tiny bit behind the nation’s true zeitgeist due to his living in a bubble of his preferred reality, as well as under 1/8 inch of pancake TV makeup. This has kept his thinking process moist and primordial and it has yet to really sink in (nor for Rush) that Obama is both BLACK and PRESIDENT. So the things they are used to saying and doing are, in relation to the new terrain, now completely new actions with an entire new resonance. And thus, garner new reaction. As we can see playing out.

Others, too, are struggling with the reality that the nation did not just elect someone who appears black, but who has a bit of the non-white experience in him. In otherwords, sometimes he is gonna “think black,” if I may presume a tiny bit.

Others, like the Cambridge cops.

CAMBRIDGE PO-PO

Obama commented on the Skip Gates arrest. You know about the Skip Gates arrest? Dude (Harvard dude, that is) was bringing his luggage into his house from his porch (oh, Famous Black Academic Harvard dude, I should mention) and a neighbor called the 5-0 on him. (Which is probably the weirdest part to me.)

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

The police report said Gates was arrested after he yelled at the investigating officer repeatedly inside the residence then followed the officer outside, where Gates continued to upbraid him. “It was at that time that I informed Professor Gates that he was under arrest,” the officer wrote in the report.

Gates, 58, declined to comment today when reached by phone.

The arrest of such a prominent scholar under what some described as dubious circumstances shook some members of the black Harvard community.

(Bill Carter/Demotix Images)

He was arrested in his own house! Well, the cops asked him to step outside first. (It’s like a vampire thing, they have to be invited in by either you or a judge or the imagined sense that they “smell something.”) Then they cuffed him and took him to the station to do all those humiliating things they do to you in a booking. Search you, strip you, print you, (sometimes) x-ray you, treat you like meat and so on. So you can imagine the well-respected law professor was pretty pissed off about that. People not experienced with this process will meet the shock that comes when you realize the law allows for anyone to be controlled and caged and deprived of rights you personally might feel are inalienable. It’s upsetting. It’s especially upsetting when all you were looking to do was leave the encounter with some dignity, which is usually one of the first things a cop takes from you. That is, you know that when you have to be quiet and pretend you don’t mind being disrespected or bullied to avoid getting shot or tazed, then you have given up your dignity. (The spreading of the cheeks for a cops flashlight search for possible drugs? You’re across the bridge from Dignity at that point!)

Well, commenting on the issue, Obama spoke to the press, who reportedly “audibly gasped” as a whole (this cracks me up) when POTUS spoke up in defense of his friend and fellow-black man, and mentioned the harassment Blacks (“as well as Latinos”) face often, at the hands of the police (and we might add Asian Americans, Indians, other non-whites). I won’t get into how much I imagine was strategy (an eloquent gifted speaker using “stupidly” in such a charged situation surprised me right away and I wondered if it were a way to back off a “hastily uttered” statement later), but the pushback from many corners was tangible and vociferous, either way.

That right there is the part I want to weave into this narrative.

The police are outraged that Obama would dare factor in race. (When some—including myself—would like to see the idea extrapolated to all the situations where it applies.) That Barack Obama would suggest—by casually citing facts usually ignored in polite society—that race came into play at all in the treatment of Henry “Skip” Gates. The stunned police demand an apology or recantation just as the Birthers and Lou Dobbs demand he produce a Birth Certificate to their liking and approval.

You know. It’s not about the words “the police acted stupidly” and it’s not about, per se, the idea that Obama”brought race into it.” That’s not really what’s under the outrage. Just as the Birthers’ demands are not really about the piece of paper they claim to thirst for (and thus can never be sated, which makes Lou Dobbs’ exploiting their complaints dangerous and unethical and plain stupid.)

It’s about shifting the power back into the paradigm these people rely upon like an emphysema patient relies on an oxygen tank; it’s about DEMANDING something (like “keep your eyes on the floor” or  ”watch your attitude” or “get your hands up”) and having the black/brown/yellow/red man respond, listen, nod, agree, obey. This will soothe their outraged sense of hierarchy. Nevermind that fact that Obama irritates some members of the black community with his statements about personal responsibility (the MSM loves that “Tell the blacks to stop loafin off” junk, but hearing about racial profiling…not so much!)

These people—all in their own ways—are struggling greatly with the reality that is gradually being revealed for this nation. Because the illusion of white supremacy blankets mainstream culture in many invisible ways. Some of the most entrenched are institutional, it’s true. But many are in the dim storage rooms of our own minds; the stacks and lists and shapes of inventory where we assign importance and worth and acceptable roles and thus behavior to other people and types of people.

These outraged stances by Rush, Lou, Birthers, the GOP, the cops…they aren’t just strategy to throw us off the rails or distract us. They are real reactions. (Though the cable news networks may milk them because they titillate.) As much as the dominant culture arranges its media messaging to obscure the standard of Witeness as the invisible Normal, it’s not so invisible when the reference points shift. For these people mentioned above (and sadly, many more), to upend the hierarchies written in blood and for hundreds of years is like them waking to find that MC Escher has redecorated their homes overnight. They can’t find the back door and are worried any moment that their bed will turn into a car and sink to the top of the ocean.

-

It’s important for our society to start recognizing publicly these dynamics. But in the name of clarity, these essays on Whiteness are not an attack on just any person who happens to be fair-skinned or European. This is about a view, and about behavior. And I come to this place to do it, as I have been for over three years.

But I think Elon James’ recent writing on this made a good point. (The entire post is a great read):

So here I am. I’m Blacking it up even NOW. I have the appearance of a angry, fist-pumping, screaming, militant Negro. Please note: I am NOT an angry, fist-pumping, screaming, militant Negro. I’m not sitting here with my big afro thinking about how I’m going to take down the White man. I am an Average Black Person. I would much rather play my Xbox 360 and watch reruns of Scrubs (yes, I said it). I would much rather argue why Batman can, in fact, take down ANYBODY. I don’t want to rant and rail against the system and the perceptions of Blacks: I’m FORCED to. Why? Because I’m not deaf, dumb, and blind. If I had those three ailments perhaps I wouldn’t be able to tell how NOT post-racial America actually is.

I, too, would rather not talk about white supremacy, would rather not upset people and have to be ready for the lashback; would rather not have to deal with the hate mail that comes from online lurkers, not deal with the sting left by old friends who have walked away from me because they don’t understand this aspect of mine that feels so hurtful to them. (Stop identifying with a destructive mindset, taking it personally, and join me in the anti-racism fight!) I don’t want to rant and rail either. I, myself, love playing video games! I laugh at Scrubs! Hell, my white half even loves mayonaise and tries to buy hard rock electric guitar-heavy albums when the rest of me is busy dancing to Control Machete. You know. I just want to enjoy my days! And like Elon mentioned in another part of his essay, I have had plenty of moments over the years where I thought Okay, enough. You’ve made the points clear, and you’ve learned what you needed to. Time to start the foto-blog on body-art and leave UMX behind.

And then…on your way to the store, or a search engine, or across the radio dial, you’re hit with the wakeup again. That there remain a lot of people in power who just want people like me, and like some of my family and friends, kept in a certain place. And the fact that I hid from my Latinidad for years is directly due to the pain I felt from media messaging like the kind these lowlives are still sending forth, every day, without remorse.

So for now, this is where I’ll be. Doing what I do.

Oh, and PS: buen trabajo, Señor Presidente. Keep on with—ahem—ya bad self.