All posts by Tina Vasquez

 
Blog

Today, Tell Your Family That Black Lives Matter


15927238842_2842d27336_z (2)Each year I go through the motions of Christmas, rarely ever feeling fully present. I spend the days leading up to the holiday cooking for my family and baking for my neighbors. I send out Christmas cards. I purchase whatever gifts I can afford. I spend the nights sipping bourbon, wrapping presents, and wondering why the holiday doesn’t fill me with the kind of joy and lightheartedness we see in movies. Then the day arrives and I remember why: my family can be intolerable.

I realize you’re not supposed to say that. To be clear, I don’t mean “intolerable” in a cute, bickering, loud kind of way. I mean that since my mom died, I’m the lone woman in a family populated by troubled white and brown men—white and brown men who seem to only be capable of bonding over one thing: antiblack racism.

There are two kinds of antiblackness prevalent in my family: the openly hateful and hostile racism that is easily recognizable, and something else that is more challenging to articulate, though painfully common. I have family members who ravenously consume black culture, who worship black athletes like Kobe Bryant, who solely listen to hip hop, but who also say the n-word, who believe “thugs” like Mike Brown got what they had coming to them, and who call President Obama every name in the book, giving a ten-minute spiel about how he hates Mexicans—evidenced, apparently, by his immigration policies. “Typical,” they say. “Blacks hate Mexicans.”

Conveniently, the people in my family can see racism when they believe they are the ones experiencing prejudice. Yes, this means that white family members believe in reverse racism, and that brown family members believe that because we have a black president, antiblackness is somehow a thing of the past and black Americans now have the upper hand. They express these sentiments while throwing around the n-word and dismissing the fact black men and women are being gunned down by police officers as if it’s open season. They don’t see the irony. This level of ignorance is alarming and dangerous, and it has always been this way in my family.

When I was a little girl, my father taught me to proudly proclaim, “Soy Mexicana.” It did not matter that I was biracial, my mother blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It did not matter that I was Americanized and spoke broken Spanish and had few connections to my father’s family, the bulk of whom stayed behind in Mexico when my father made the perilous journey to the States. I was Mexicana and it was something to celebrate and embrace. It was who I was, through and through.

As a child, antiblack racism thrived on both the brown and white sides of my family, but so strong was it on my father’s side that I began to think that hating black people was a prerequisite for being Mexican. I was led to believe that part of being brown was being antiblack.

For whatever reason—and I attribute it to nothing more than semi-decent critical thinking skills and luck (because hatred is very effectively taught)—I didn’t buy into this messaging the way other family members did. Not only did I know it was ridiculous to hate an entire group of people based on the color of their skin, but it didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed that the brown men in my family shared many similarities with the black men they hated and almost always failed to understand that black people were a part of our community, both literally in terms of location and figuratively in the form of Afro Latinos.

In the predominantly Latino city of Los Angeles where I was born and raised, Latino men are gunned down by police officers alongside black men in astonishing numbers. Latinos are also funneled into prisons and sentenced harshly for minor offenses. Low-income Latinos and black Angelenos are primarily impacted by gentrification, making affordable housing for their families and adequate schooling for their children a near pipe dream. My father and my brothers have all been pulled over by cops who had their guns drawn, guilty of nothing but driving while brown. Any sudden movement and there would have been the very real possibility that we’d be spending Christmas with an empty seat at the table and a hole in our hearts.

Still, I can’t convince my family that they should care about black lives. Writers like Aura Bogado have delved into how antiblackness is deeply instilled in Latino families. Black and brown solidarity is often discussed in progressive and radical circles, but personally, I’ve never seen it.

To be clear: this isn’t about the experiences of Latinos. This isn’t an “all lives matter” conversation. It is not my goal to decenter black people. I’ve simply felt the most reasonable approach to getting through to the brown men in my family is to make them understand how closely their struggles are tied to the struggles of the black community. I try, and I fail.

This isn’t specific to my family. Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 18 percent of Latinos surveyed were following the case of Mike Brown. Few Latinos seem to be following the aftermath. The movement born in Ferguson has been so powerful that it has spiraled out into cities across the country, where marches, protests, and die-ins demand that we remember the names of black men and children recently murdered by police, including Eric Garner and, more recently, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. As I write this, details are emerging about the December 23 murder of eighteen-year-old Antonio Martin, shot and killed by a Berkeley, Missouri, police officer just a few miles outside of Ferguson.

Needless to say, the murders of black cisgender and transgender women rarely get any attention. Black women have been leading the charge in these marches. It has also been black women who have kept the names of murdered black women alive.

The broader message behind this growing movement is that black lives matter. The message is deceptively simple, but for us white and nonblack people of color, asserting that black lives matter comes with the requirement that we continuously center black people. A working knowledge of white supremacy and how it benefits us—and why it must be dismantled—doesn’t hurt either.

It is a tall task that won’t be achieved overnight, but there are small, impactful ways you can push back against antiblack racism every day. Today, on Christmas, I am thinking of the families of recently slain black men and women, those who are facing that empty chair at the table and that hole in their heart. I can think of nothing more disrespectful than allowing the people at my dinner table to speak poorly of those who have lost their lives as a direct result of white supremacy and police brutality—and I won’t allow it.

When I was younger, standing up against antiblack racism in my family was read as being mouthy and disrespectful, resulting in punishment. I am older now and it is easier and safer for me to push back, so I will. In many of our families, every day is filled with antiblack racism, but it seems the holidays amplify it, whether because of alcohol or the “safe” setting family gatherings enable, allowing many to feel free to share the racist commentary they usually keep to themselves.

If you are a white or nonblack person of color who believes that black lives matter, you must behave as if they do when there are no black people present. It is harder than sending out a series of tweets or writing an article the bulk of your family won’t read. (I speak from personal experience.) Pushing back against your family’s antiblack racism is uncomfortable. Pushing back can be contentious. Pushing back can sometimes feel useless, but it is necessary.

I was once told by an artist I interviewed that the most important and transformative work we do is in our own family. I am committed to doing that work. Today, as many of us spend time with our families, I hope we can show up for black people. When our fathers or our mothers or our cousins or siblings assert that Mike Brown was a “thug” or that “police are just doing their job,” I hope we tell them black lives matter, and that they always have, and always will.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr
Blog

This Is How We Celebrate Our Dead


Día de los Muertos altar lit by candles
Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr

Last week when my two young nieces were in town, we went to a local theater to watch Jorge R. Gutierrez’s The Book of Life, an animated children’s film that is part heavy-handed love story, part love letter to Día de de los Muertos, the holiday on which those who have died are celebrated, a ritual that goes back 3,000 years. On NPR, journalist Karen Castillo Farfán wrote that the practice was developed by the Aztecs, who believed one should not grieve the loss of a beloved ancestor who passed. Instead, “the Aztecs celebrated their lives and welcomed the return of their spirits to the land of the living once a year.”

The Book of Life is one big visual representation of everything we have come to associate with the holiday: “dark” Mexican folk art, sugar skulls, papel picado in every color, and altars adorned with seven-day candles, orange marigolds, and pan dulce. The movie is bright and visually stunning, despite being about death—and the same could be said about Día de los Muertos.

A child in the movie who is unfamiliar with the holiday asks, “What’s with Mexicans and death?” As soon as the line was said, I looked over at my nieces, who I instinctively knew would be looking back at me. They were, and they had their hands over their mouths, stifling giggles.

Watching my nieces watch the movie was more interesting to me than the story line itself. My Mexican brother is out of the picture, and my nieces are being raised by their white mother and white stepfather in a white suburb in Utah. They are little brown girls who are painfully aware they are little brown girls in a sea of white faces. When they visit Los Angeles, they are hungry for ties to our culture, no matter how seemingly surface-level. Each time they are here, they want to go to Placita Olvera, the birthplace of Los Angeles. They want my dad to speak to them in Spanish. They eat menudo with my father, watching him out of the corners of their eyes; they roll up the tortilla in their hands just like he does, dipping it in the soup’s red broth.

During the movie, I watched their eyes flash with recognition every time they understood a word in Spanish or recognized the significance of a visual element. Afterwards, my nieces sat across from me at a restaurant, chatting about the movie. The oldest, who is eleven years old, said, “What is it with Mexicans and death, though?”

Growing up, the only thing I remember my dad telling me about Día de los Muertos was that Mexicans are passionate people who love in big ways, and the tradition of celebrating our dead was an extension of that. As a child, my family did not partake in any festivities.

The hunger my nieces have for Mexican culture is something I understand deeply. As a biracial Latina, I know what it feels like to have a tenuous grasp on your culture—and there are few things holier to me than culture. It encompasses family, traditions, and food, all the things that make me feel whole and human. Since the death of my mother four years ago, Día de los Muertos has become monumentally important to me and something I consider sacred, but every year there are more and more reminders that it is a tradition that belongs to Mexicans less and less.

Recently, much has been written about the appropriation and colonization of the tradition, which is increasingly treated as an extension of Halloween. There was that one time Disney tried to trademark Día de los Muertos. Each year, there are more stories of corporations promoting the co-opting and whitewashing of a sacred Mexican holiday. This year it was discovered that beauty retailer Sephora was encouraging employees to show off their “Halloween faces” using a step-by-step makeup guide for a Día de los Muertos-inspired look. This year we also saw an online petition created to stop the “Fiesta De Los Muertos Scare Zone” at Knott’s Scary Farm.

This year I saw Día de los Muertos displays for Cheetos. In Halloween stores, I saw “sexy” Día de los Muertos costumes for women, featuring a calavera mask, a sombrero, and a short dress embroidered with colorful flowers. On Halloween this year, I saw white children trick-or-treating in jeans and hoodies, their faces painted like sugar skulls. That was the entirety of their costume. Last year I walked into a local bar where white women had their faces painted similarly as they tried to talk customers into trying the pumpkin beer. I walked out.

There are many levels to the appropriation of the holiday, though generally speaking I’m most dismayed by the way white Americans pick and choose the pieces of us they want. Mass deportations in which Mexicans are the most often deported don’t seem to get a rise out of the same people painting their faces like calaveras for Halloween. When there is a mixed-status immigrant family about to be torn apart, I don’t see Disney, the supposed bastion of family values, advocating for family reunification. In my hometown of Los Angeles, white Angelenos love taco trucks, but don’t care when undocumented loncheras are targeted and criminalized for making a living. Of course, all of this is just to say that Día de los Muertos is just another instance in which white Americans want to claim the pieces of Mexican culture that appeal to them, while violently erasing its origins.

I have spent the past few days thinking of my mom. On the altar I made for her, there are flowers and candles; there are the many rings she wore and the small pumpkins she and I always bought together at this time of year. Yesterday at a panadería, I watched my aging father lovingly pick out all of my mom’s favorite pan dulce. He came home and thoughtfully arranged it on a plate, placing it on her altar and lighting a candle. Over the past couple of days, my father and I have eaten pan de muerto together, swapping funny stories about my mom. We have visited her grave, leaving bouquets of marigolds. Today, on the last day of Día de los Muertos, we will make mole together. Her favorite.

I don’t suspect I will ever stop mourning the death of my mother, but Día de los Muertos provides a rare opportunity to celebrate her in a way I’m not usually capable of. This is not a sad time of year for me. I spend these three days reflecting on how lucky I was to get such an unconventional parent who was deeply invested in my happiness. I spend these days thinking about how grateful I am that I was given twenty-five years with my mom.

I suspect this is the case for many of the Mexicans who celebrate Día de los Muertos in the US. In this celebration of those who have passed, we can reflect and honor our dead. We can feel more attuned to the ways in which they continue to make their presence known in our lives.

Everyone has traditions. Día de los Muertos just happens to be ours, and it is sacred. Please respect that.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Messy and Beautiful


liberty-for-all

Since I was a child, I knew I was going to be a writer. Early on, though, I was ruined by the romanticism surrounding the craft. I’d read too much Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles Bukowski. I did drugs. I drank. I wandered. At first it may have been to emulate my idols, but eventually it became about survival: running fast and hard from the horrors of an abusive home.

I don’t recall ever making the connection that all of my literary heroes were straight white men, but in the back of my head I knew that so much of how the world opened up for them would never be in the cards for me. But I kept writing, filling up composition books, not thinking about getting published so much as trying, word by word, to patch up my life.

In high school, several teachers took an interest in me, despite the fact I was a miserable fuckup who barely showed up to class. I read all of the writers they believed a girl like me should read. The men gave me Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus. The women gave me Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Not once did any teacher ever hand me a book by a writer of color.

I now understand this experience is hardly unique to me. If it weren’t for one of my oldest friends, Jessica Rodriguez, loaning me Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros in high school, I would have never known a Latina could be a writer. I mean, I knew Latina writers existed—they were my friends, fellow notebook scribblers—but I don’t think it ever occurred to us that one day we could hold each other’s books in our hands.

Diversity in literature is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Last month I attended a workshop run by the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), which sponsors programs for writers of color working in a variety of genres. I sat at the orientation looking around in disbelief at more than 150 writers crammed into a room at UC Berkeley, thinking, “Holy fuck, I had no idea there were so many of us.”

I was there because of the weekly comic strip I write with my best friend Julio Salgado. Liberty For All is his baby. In its early days, the queer, undocumented artist drew and wrote it himself and posted it on his Facebook page. When the comic was picked up by CultureStrike, I was brought on as the writer, giving the two of us the opportunity to work on our first project together after nearly ten years of friendship.

Liberty, the strip’s main character, is a writer without much of a filter. She is sometimes Salgado. Sometimes me. Sometimes our friends, lovers, or family members. She is never a stranger to us. By featuring her story, week after week, we hope she is seen as the quirky, complicated, sometimes problematic character we know her to be, rather than a laundry list of oppressions. But because of those less-than-conventional details of who she is—chubby, brown, undocumented, queer, feminist—I worry that mainstream audiences aren’t capable of recognizing her humanity.

Junot Díaz, the celebrated Dominican American author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and one of VONA’s founders, has spoken out about the tough environment writers of color face. In a recent New Yorker piece—an excerpt from an anthology of writing from VONA attendees and instructors—Díaz describes his particularly miserable experience studying in an MFA program: “That shit was too white.” It’s the “standard problem” of MFA programs everywhere, he adds. Díaz brings up the story of Athena, a Caribbean American woman he praises as a “truly gifted writer.” She dropped out of his program because it was simply too challenging to be a woman of color in that space. Over the years, he looked for Athena’s work, but it appeared that she had chosen not to pursue writing. Díaz seems to recognize the tragedy of this, if only in the distant way a man who “made it” can.

How much better are things today? The women’s literary group VIDA does a yearly tally of the number of women writers in various mainstream literary publications, from the Atlantic to the New Republic—both of whose bylines were more than two-thirds male in 2013. Inspired by this hard-numbers approach, Roxane Gay set out to find out where things stood for writers of color. She found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed by the New York Times in 2011 were written by white writers. (Today, few writers of color can be found even in the pages of liberal magazines, which may laud diversity in theory, but do not actually practice it.)

Gay also pointed out another issue: the identity hierarchy. “Race often gets lost in the gender conversation as if it’s an issue we’ll get to later,” she wrote. Yes, progress is slow, but it’s always the most needed voices that are forced to wait. And as we push for a racial mix that better represents the world we live in, does that mean we’ll also need to “get to” queer and transgender writers later?

At least people today are more willing to speak out about these issues—on social media, in particular. In May, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag went viral after it was announced only white writers would be featured at BookCon, a new reader-focused book festival held in conjunction with the annual trade show BookExpo America. It wasn’t the first time BookCon organizers had come under fire. A month earlier, they had put together a panel on young-adult literature composed solely of white men.

Another diversity-related dustup blew up on Twitter in May when writer Daniel José Older reacted to criticism of a story in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, an anthology he co-edited. A review chided one of the anthology’s writers, Troy L. Wiggins, for relying too heavily on “phonetic dialect,” calling it a “literary trick” that rarely works. Older tweeted that the reviewer was unfairly coming at a black writer for using AAVE (African American Vernacular English), even though critics have long called white writers—from Joyce to Shakespeare—“brilliant” for using vernacular in their prose. He and Wiggins, Older wrote, are “trying to stay true to our voices in a white ass world.”

In the comic strip Julio and I work on, many of the characters are queer, undocumented, body positive, sex positive, transgender, and people of color. They suffer from mental health issues. They live below the poverty line. They do bad things. In other words, they are messy and beautiful, just like our real-life communities.

Julio and I never had a conversation about being all-inclusive, but sometimes we get commended for our “diverse” comic. No doubt the nine other people in my graphic novel writing workshop—eight of whom were women—encounter the same weird praise. And that’s just it, really. When you give people at the margins the opportunity and platform to tell their own stories, what is reflected will look like intentional pushback against mainstream narratives. Our stories only seem revolutionary because they so often go untold.

At VONA, our instructor Mat Johnson told us we can’t hide behind our oppressions. We have to be good writers. Our only hope of getting mainstream readers to take interest in stories featuring people of color is by tapping into the human condition, those seemingly mundane and yet monumentally important life events that connect us all—and that magically render gender, race, culture, and class unimportant.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

May Is the Cruelest Month


The author as a young child held by her mother on a bed
The author and her mother.

May in Los Angeles is breathtaking. I know this because it’s all people talk about when the city explodes in Technicolor and flowers rip open. Everything is lush and living, or so they say. I live in Los Angeles too, but I don’t see it the same way. Not anymore. The sunshine is harsh. The colors unkind.

When I walk to the corner liquor store with my sunglasses on and hoodie pulled up, hoping to be left alone, neighbors still yell out, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I smile politely, nod. Always polite.

I stood on this same street four years ago, a few days before Mother’s Day. It was early in the morning, around 3 a.m., and I was on the phone with a steely 911 operator, wondering why she was being so cold to me. I realize now it was probably better that way, but in those moments I hated her. I remember saying, “This doesn’t feel real. This feels like a movie. Is this real?” There was silence on the other end of the line.

As the ambulance turned onto my street, I sucked in air like someone drowning. There were no sirens. No flashing lights. I wanted to see the EMTs rushed and sweaty. I wanted adrenaline. But they were calm and slow-moving.

It was my fault. I’d already told the 911 operator I knew my mom was dead.

During the month of May, I will give myself permission to self-destruct. I will drink more than I should. I will sleep more than I should. I will want to do things I’m not wired to do. Sometimes I will. Mostly I won’t.

I will spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood, that dark little strip club that has the power to turn my brain off. I will think about sipping double Crowns and mindlessly throwing crumpled bills onto the stage. I will think about the women and how I want to make eye contact with them in a way I’m usually not capable of. I will think about all the hours of work I need to put in to make a trip to Jumbo’s a reality. It will exhaust me and I will go back to bed.

I broke up more fistfights in my family home than I can count, and I never threw a punch. But this month, there will be days when I wish someone would dare to say something about my dead mom. I will fantasize about how that first punch would feel. And I will think about what my dad said after the EMTs confirmed that my grey-faced mother was dead and probably had been for hours. In front of these men we did not know, he said, “We didn’t even care about her.” It took everything in me not to jump across the bed and murder him.

Mostly, I will search for that hollowed-out feeling I get from Xanax on those days when the anxiety feels like it’s going to burst my heart. That sensation of floating unwittingly through my day, serene and untouchable—not sobbing in a grocery-store bathroom or sitting on the curb in an unfamiliar neighborhood trying like hell to steady my breathing and stop the tears so that I don’t have to deal with a stranger asking, “Are you okay?”

Last May, I lost my mind. Every day, I fought the urge to lie down in the spot where my mother’s body lay for hours before the coroner came. I went on long, meandering walks, listening to the same Perfume Genius album over and over again. (A word of advice: Do not have a soundtrack for your mental collapse. You will never be able to listen to those songs again without being snapped back into that headspace.) I tore apart a pink Bic razor the way I used to in high school. Those flimsy things do an impressive amount of damage. As I watched the blood rise to the surface of my forearm, I thought, “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”

This May, I don’t know what will happen. But I know there will be days when she is all I think about.

Four years ago, I bought my mom a pair of turquoise earrings for Mother’s Day. I had found them at a street fair. My dad and uncle and I had tried to talk my mom into going with us, but at that point she only left the house for doctor’s appointments.

So we left her behind and talked shit about her at the fair. We sat on a green bench on Third Street, the sun beating down on us, the smell of roses everywhere, and talked about forcing her to go on walks, forcing her to quit smoking, forcing her to get it together.

At the fair that day, I took pictures of my dad and uncle beaming, standing in front of glorious restored cars from the 1950s that shined Larkspur Blue and Goddess Gold.

When I look at those photos now, I think about how my mom at that moment had less than twenty-four hours to live. I look at every picture taken before her death the same way. My favorite picture of us smiling with our big, bright eyes? We only had twenty-two years left together. Those pictures from her birthday in 2009, those pictures of her hanging ornaments on the tree, those pictures of her looking dazed in the background as my nieces danced around the living room? She would have less than 365 days left. She didn’t know it. Or maybe she did.

I write this on the anniversary of her death. It’s a beautiful May day. When I walk out my front door, I actually hear birds chirping. The smell of honeysuckle and orange blossoms swirls around. All this afternoon, my dad and uncle have tried to talk me into going to a street fair, the same fair where I bought my mom those Mother’s Day earrings that I would later bury with her.

I was going to give her those earrings. I was going to cook her favorite meal, those bloody steaks she loved so much. I was going to get her pink roses, the kind she bought me on my birthday. I was going to, I was going to, I was going to. But I never got to.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Losing Mama


At the height of my teenage apathy, my mom made me squeal with delight by smuggling a kitten into our home in a cardboard box she’d found at work. She burst into my bedroom excitedly and shoved the box toward me. When I saw its tiny, grey nose and bright, yellow eyes, I fell in love just like my mom.

Mama the catMy dad, however, had a strict “no pets” policy. Caring for a cat would cost too much money, he said. He and my mom already struggled to afford food. For days, my parents fought over the kitten while I held out hope I could have this one little, good thing in a house that all too often felt devoid of good things.

Shockingly, my mom won the fight. I was given the task of naming the kitten. I chose “Cindy,” sort of as a joke to make my best friend Cindy laugh. That was the cat’s name until a year later when she gave birth to a litter of kittens in a cupboard in my parents’ house. We kept one of the kittens, Jacky, and gave the rest away. Overnight, Cindy became “Mama.”

When I talk with friends who aren’t “animal people,” it’s difficult to articulate just how big a part of your family a pet becomes. For thirteen years, I knew I could walk into my parents’ living room — no matter how unpleasant that experience could sometimes be — and there Mama would be. She would sit on my lap, rub her face against mine, and purr. If I spoke to her, she’d meow in response to everything I said.

Mama helped my mom to cope, too, during some hard times. Ten years ago, my mom was laid off. She had worked for over two decades as a janitor at a hospital. It was the only job she’d ever known.

After she was let go, my mom’s world became very small. Once a woman who had refused to leave the house without a face full of makeup, long nails painted bright red, and a cloud of perfume around her, my mom stopped caring about her appearance. She stopped leaving the house. She stopped talking. She stopped getting dressed. Her life stopped.

I thought she was horribly depressed — and I’m sure that was part of it, but physically, she was also broken. I made doctor’s appointments for her and refilled her prescriptions. I wrote her doctors pretending to be her, hoping they could tell me what exactly was ailing her. It all fell flat. She’d spend her days sitting on the edge of her bed, watching TV and chain-smoking, seemingly unconcerned about the state of her life.

Mama, who was without a doubt my mom’s cat, sat beside her. Or on top of her. Or somewhere on the bed with her. She was always near.

Three years ago, my mom died. The night before, I cried for hours, knowing in my gut that something was very wrong. I called my older brother and told him I needed help. I didn’t know what to do, I said. I was panicking, and we were losing our mom.

My brother was wrapped up in his own life, battling an addiction I wouldn’t be aware of until later. He offered me no advice and little comfort. Afterward, I sat on my bed and cried even more. Mama sat by my side, rubbing her face against me and intermittently meowing.

When my mom died later that night, she was alone. Not even Mama was in the room with her. The only indication my mom ever existed was in the few things she left behind: a hairbrush, some expired makeup, pajamas, and her cat.

The rest of my family couldn’t pull it together after my mom’s unexpected death. My two brothers left their children in my care in order to go out drinking into the early morning hours. It was even worse when they stayed home and drank themselves into a stupor, crying unabashedly about how my parents didn’t love them enough. My dad sat on the couch, frozen.

As for me, I’ve never felt safe letting myself be vulnerable in front of my family. When you grow up in a house where basic needs — such as knowing you’re loved — go unmet, you learn to make it appear as if you don’t have needs. To do otherwise is setting yourself up for disappointment.

In other words, falling apart after my mom’s death wasn’t an option for me. Instead, I hustled to pay for the funeral, shamelessly hitting up my editors for advances and scouring Craigslist for affordable plots. I sat through excruciating sessions with a Catholic priest who scolded my family for not being Catholic enough — while happily taking $300 to appear at my mother’s funeral. I cared for my nieces and cooked for all of the family that had suddenly come out of the woodwork, showing up at our house bearing sympathy and expecting a meal in return.

I didn’t cry in front of anyone, ever.

I would lose it when no one was around. No one, that is, except Mama. She always seemed to be there. When I howled in pain on the floor, she would look panic-stricken. When I got up and composed myself, she’d settle on my lap, purring.

Animals are so powerful in their love and kindness. Very few people have provided me with the kind of comfort Mama did after my mom’s death.

Eventually, Mama became a free agent, loving everyone and belonging to no one. After a few months, she settled on my great-uncle Willie, then seventy-nine years old, who had been homeless before my mom invited him to live with our family. Fast friends, they soon spent every moment together.

I, of course, had Jacky, Mama’s baby. He’d stuck with me through bad relationships, family blowups, and even a move to the Arizona desert that made us both miserable. He consoled me as I was grieving.

Three years after my mom died, Mama became seriously ill. Last October, I went out of town for two weeks. When I returned, Mama had dwindled away to skin and bones. I had the same gut feeling about her that I’d had about my mom. When I saw the vet the following week, I was blunt: “You need to tell me what I already know.”

It was cancer. The vet gave her a few weeks to live.

I knew it would be rough, but what I didn’t expect was how much my experience caring for Mama would mirror the final months of my mom’s life. In the weeks leading up to her death, my mom had often asked me to sit in bed with her. At the time, I felt that being in such close proximity to my fading, ill mother was too overwhelming. After a few minutes I would come up with an excuse and leave the room. In retrospect, I deeply regret not spending that time with her. It wasn’t really her illness that frightened me; it was my need for her. I needed my mom to return to who she was, to become my mom again — not this sick, depressed person I didn’t even know how to sit next to.

I wanted Mama to feel loved and comforted by my presence, but I couldn’t shake that same selfish need for her to return to normal, to fatten up and follow me around, meowing. I knew it wasn’t a possibility and never would be again, and that sense of loss made me hesitate, just as it had with my mom.

Late at night, when no one was around, I held Mama, crying as I traced her brittle bones with my fingertips. When I spoke to her, she looked up at me, but could no longer respond the way she used to. Her mouth would open, but no sound would come out.

Soon, Mama could barely walk. She ate voraciously, but it was never enough. She rarely moved. She lay on a pile of blankets on the coffee table, a place she was never allowed before. For whatever reason, it was the only place she wanted to be — and so we let her be.

We scheduled her to be put to sleep on December 14. That day, in a rare display of energy, Mama pulled herself up, jumped/fell off the coffee table, and stumbled to the front door. When she was well, she would stand in that same spot meowing, demanding to be let out into the front yard, where she would stretch herself out and slow-blink in the sunshine. I picked her up, and together we lay down on the lawn. She rubbed her face into the grass. The last few days in Los Angeles it had been forty degrees. That day, it was seventy-five, and Mama soaked it up. I sat there in pain, knowing what she didn’t.

One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life is my dad and my uncle Willie crying over Mama, running their hands over her bony back, telling her they loved her just moments before the vet gave her the injection. I had to leave the room. I couldn’t bear to see the men in my life so fragile, couldn’t stand to see Mama die right before me. I walked out of the room without saying a word, walked through the hallway and out past the waiting room, smiling at the receptionist as I passed, only to turn a corner outside the building and burst into tears.

When I got home, I crawled into bed and held Mama’s collar close. I traced its edges with my fingertips, thinking about how little of the physical world we really leave behind. Soon, Jacky jumped into bed with me, purring into my neck. As I drifted off to sleep I thought about how we’d both lost our mothers and how we would find comfort in each other.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

The Brutal Beauty of Sister


Sister film posterAt the heart of Sister, Brenda Davis’s documentary debut, are three inspiring stories of an Ethiopian health officer, a midwife in rural Cambodia, and a traditional birth attendant in Haiti. When Davis met Goitom Berhane in Ethiopia in 2008, she was taken with his vivacious personality and dedication to solving the maternal health crisis in his country. Berhane’s example encouraged Davis to explore women’s health as an international human rights issue. Eventually, he became a central figure in her film.

We meet Madame Bwa in the poverty-stricken Shada neighborhood of Cap-Haitien, Haiti. An aged woman who struggles with basic survival, Madame Bwa has delivered more than 12,000 children with no formal medical training.

In an area of Cambodia that is littered with land mines, Pum Mach puts her own life at risk so that geographically isolated mothers and their children may live through the common event of childbirth. In one of the more ghastly moments of Sister, a nineteen-year-old girl delivers her baby by caesarean section thanks to Mach identifying the child as breech and securing transportation to the nearest hospital, which is several hours away.

These moments make Sister as beautiful as it is brutal. The film showcases the passion of health workers who overcome incredibly difficult circumstances to combat the alarming rate of maternal and newborn deaths occurring around the globe — deaths that, with adequate care, are almost entirely preventable.

In The Fray spoke with Davis about her family’s experience with child mortality and the challenges of filming a tragic topic.

When did you develop an interest in maternal and child mortality?

My grandmother gave birth to sixteen children in rural Nova Scotia. Four died during childbirth and one died at the age of two. She lost her first child when she was nineteen and her last at thirty-nine. I remember my cousins coming together to buy a gravestone for all the children my grandma lost. They spoke about it casually because this happened a lot where my grandmother lived, but it had a lasting impact on me.

Why did you choose to explore this topic for your film?

As an artist, I’m interested in storytelling. If a subject is compelling to me, I want to pursue it, but I don’t want to speak for people. I want them to tell their own stories.

I was very fortunate to find people willing to tell their stories in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Haiti. We were able to show similarities in women’s experiences, despite entirely different cultures, while also focusing on local strategies. The unifying theme to every story is a lack of access — access to basic health care, access to emergency obstetric care, and access to family planning.

How are health workers attempting to close these gaps in access?

It’s difficult to articulate just how important health workers are, and in many instances, it goes beyond the service they’re providing. In Ethiopia, Hirity Belay is a young woman who walks to places where there are no roads to provide women with the care they need to have healthy babies. While that service is invaluable, you must also consider what an amazing example she’s setting in these small villages. One of the things that inspired the name of the documentary was Hirity’s relationships. The women would often call each other “sister.” I thought this was so beautiful and warm.

Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.
Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.

In the case of Madame Bwa, being a traditional birth attendant has been passed down through her family. The work she does is important to her community, and for the most part Madame Bwa lives off donations from the families she helps. Traditional birth attendants fill a gap where there is nothing. I’m not a medical professional, but I don’t understand why so many people want to eliminate traditional birth attendants. They’re making a difference, and with a bit more support, they could be making a much bigger impact.

I found many of the scenes hard to watch, not because they’re graphic, but because they are heartbreaking. How do you approach filming people’s intimate tragedies respectfully?

In Ethiopia, we spent time in the hospital without cameras and became a familiar presence. The women often didn’t understand why we were filming or why anyone would be interested. I’d explain that we wanted to show what was going on in their communities.

Sister was definitely difficult to film, and the director of photography and I constantly struggled with the fear that we may be invading a woman’s privacy. When you’re meeting people in such intense and difficult circumstances, you constantly grapple with whether or not you’re being sensitive and respectful.

In some respects, I feel like Sister is a war movie. Women everywhere — but especially in developing countries — are fighting for their lives. What you see was exactly what was happening. The women, health workers, midwives, and birth attendants all speak for themselves and tell their own stories. It was a conscious decision not to narrate or pretend to know the answers.

What do you hope viewers take from the film?

I hope Sister encourages people to think critically about what the United States does that affects other countries — from a its inability to grow food to being littered with land mines. People should think about how they’re connected to what’s happening in other places, or how they’re complicit in it. Donating funds is awesome, but it’s not enough.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Photo credit: SayLuiiiis
Blog

A Latina in Limbo


photo of a young woman with Mexican face paint.
Photo by SayLuiiiis

I recently read Lindsey Woo’s contribution to a series of writings about feminism and race on NPR’s CodeSwitch blog. In her piece, Woo discusses the frequent exclusion of Asian American women from conversations concerning race in the context of feminism and poses an important question, one I ask myself often: who is considered a woman of color?

I talk about race — a lot. I constantly initiate discussions with friends and colleagues, and find that even in our supposedly postracial world many still deem race to be an uncomfortable subject. Although I believe attempts to have a dialogue about race are important, another part of me does it for purely selfish reasons. These conversations help me to figure out my own relationship with race. They validate and invalidate my opinions, and give me a better understanding of where I fit as a light-skinned Latina.

My mother’s family is self-proclaimed “white trash” with roots in Tennessee. My father’s family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. In the 1960s, my dad crossed the border into the United States, where he lived for twenty years as an undocumented immigrant before obtaining citizenship around the time I was born.

The legacies of two vastly different cultures live inside of me. One side of my family has former Ku Klux Klan members. The other has undocumented immigrants. Holidays meant a feast of fried ham, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese that was served alongside mole, tamales, and flan. Backyard barbecues featured Johnny Cash and Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline and Ritchie Valens. The blending of cultures is a beautiful thing, but it can also be confusing.

Being biracial means growing up with a keen understanding that your identity is not yours alone. It is something others feel entitled to foist upon you, including your friends and family. You carry the weight of racial tensions that not only exist in society at large, but also among those you love.

My mother’s family stopped talking to her because she had married a “wetback.” I didn’t know my maternal grandfather for the first eight years of my life because he refused to see me. According to my mom, when I was born he took to referring to me as a “mutt,” so she shielded me from his racist epithets and maintained a safe distance.

After members of my father’s family settled in the Los Angeles area from Mexico, they made many jokes at my expense. They told me I could never be a “real” Mexican because my mom was a gringa, but my dad insisted I proudly tell the world, “Soy Mexicana.” He now teaches the same to my biracial nieces.

It’s hard when neither side of your family embraces your blended ethnicity, and it set the stage for the identity crisis I’ve been having for twenty-eight years. As a Latina whose pallor matches my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother, I don’t feel comfortable with the label “woman of color,” although it is often ascribed to me in the context of my work. In some ways my reticence is the product of not having the emotional bandwidth to defend my right to use the term when I come up against backlash, particularly from people of color.

I understand the discomfort some darker-skinned women feel when a light-skinned Latina identifies as a woman of color. After all, we are often the recipients of racial privilege that comes when we are (mis)perceived as being white. At the same time, my dark hair, ethnic features, and clearly Latina last name all place me squarely in the category of being raced. I try very hard to understand my place on the racial continuum, but knowing which side I’m supposed to be on isn’t always clear. And it is always shifting.

My identity has been shaped by my experiences as a Latina feminist. I resisted my father and brothers’ violent machismo, and also make sacrifices for my family that most white feminists don’t understand. Yet, fellow Latinas tend to have a deep appreciation for my family’s complicated love. Despite my skin color, identifying as a white woman was never an option for me.

A recent Census Bureau report shows that children in America are more racially diverse than they’ve ever been, and the fastest rate of growth is among children who are multiracial. Mixed-race people are rapidly becoming the new norm, but we still live in a world where we’re expected to choose and neatly conform to just one thing.

I often wonder if Chicana writer and feminist Cherríe Moraga, who was born just ten miles away from my hometown, underwent an exploration of her own identities that’s similar to the one I’m engaged in now. A woman of Mexican and Anglo ethnicity, Moraga is one of the foremost authorities on race and feminism in America. Her story gives me hope that I will one day reach the place where I no longer allow others to question my identity, the place where I determine for myself who I am and who I will be.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

How My Mother Lives

After her mother's unexplained death, a young woman ponders the long-term toll of not having access to adequate health care. A toothache brings on psychic hysteria about whether her own eventual demise will align with that of her mom.


photo of graffiti
Photo by MP Cinque

I don’t know why my mom died at the age of forty-nine because my father refused to allow an autopsy. His superstitious and deeply traditional beliefs mean I’ll never know the cause of my mother’s death. Was it a complication from having high blood pressure? Did she have a heart attack? At this point, all I can do is speculate — so I do.

A theory I’ve come up with recently is that her death may have been caused by problems with her teeth. When my mom was in her thirties, her teeth began falling out for some unknown reason. By the time she died, she had only a few left in her mouth. I wonder if the pain and swelling in her face before she died was due to an untreated tooth abscess. A recent study shows that oral infections are causing more hospitalizations, and if left untreated, a tooth abscess can be deadly when bacteria spread.

“When money and access are not problems, an abscessed tooth can easily be treated with a root canal or an extraction,” reports the New York Times. “But increasingly, Americans rely on hospital emergency rooms for dental care, instead of regular dentist visits — a trend exacerbated by a lack of insurance coverage and trouble paying out of pocket.”

I remember times when I was growing up that my family used old newspapers instead of bathroom tissue because my parents couldn’t afford toilet paper. Having narrowly escaped homelessness, my father solicitously cut the newspaper into squares, and we laughed at the extent of his effort because that somehow made it less dispiriting. Some days we had electricity, and some days we didn’t. But the presence of stressed out, overworked parents was ubiquitous.

My tale of ill-fitting, hand-me-down, thrift-store clothes and sharing a bedroom with my older brothers is not unique. Anyone who grew up poor can tell you similar stories of the challenges that come from not having what you need, materially and emotionally. They can also tell you what it’s like to make decisions about their lives without the assumption of ever achieving financial security. It never occurred to me that I could have a life that didn’t involve economic struggle, and I wonder if my decision to become a writer isn’t a result of this. Who would seek out a lifetime of poverty other than someone for whom it was a prophecy?

Being a writer means I have no health insurance, no steady paycheck, and no stability. While writers who aspire to upward mobility say they’re simply “low income,” as though the condition is temporary, my intimate familiarity with life below the line of poverty makes me uninterested in feigning comfort through euphemistic niceties. It’s not comfortable juggling deadlines for a dozen publications while not technically being employed by any one. I thought I had accepted my lot, but a few weeks ago I began having problems with my teeth.

The dull ache persisted for days. Overwhelmed by my circumstance, I immediately assumed the worst. This was the beginning of the end. In two years, I’ll be thirty, and my teeth will start falling out. Soon after, I will die penniless and alone just like my mom.

I know this line of thinking probably seems extreme. A toothache doesn’t typically bring on psychic hysteria about one’s impending death, but if my life has taught me anything, it is that every misstep can be the start of a downward spiral. One illness can be the difference between making do and ruin.

For months I’ve been putting together a referral binder for a women’s recovery center where I am a volunteer. As soon as my tooth began to ache, I poured through the dental resources, frantically calling each practice to beg for an appointment. They all said the same thing: our budget has been slashed, and we are unable to accept new patients at this time.

One clinic told me their wait-list is over a year long. Another said my only option was to show up at 6 a.m. because the only way I would be seen is if I were one of the first three people in line, although that was only for extractions. All the receptionists I spoke with were deeply apologetic, and I could hear the sadness in their voices. I assume they spend a good amount of their days turning away people in need. Despite these women’s compassion, I cracked. I reached my emotional limit and commenced to sob.

As I wept, I thought back to every crappy clinic I’d visited. I remembered the crackpot doctor who used Google to answer my routine questions. I recalled the times I’d been ripped off because I couldn’t afford another option. I thought about the number of clinic staff who’d told me that if I only had a child I didn’t want and couldn’t care for I’d be eligible for health insurance through the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) — but even that doesn’t include coverage for dental work.

I realized I’d gotten so used to receiving poor treatment that I no longer believed I deserved better care. I wonder how many other uninsured Americans believe the same.

I wonder about the lives of people who have health insurance. I imagine the ease of having a dentist who will make an appointment for me because they fear losing my business or care about my well-being. I consider what it must be like to drive to an air-conditioned dentist’s office without having to wait for a perpetually late bus in the smoggy, summertime heat while being harassed by men on the street. I think about handing over a copayment instead of waiting for the visit’s bill, and carelessly allowing the dentist to address my toothache without fear of how much each piece of gauze will cost me.

I want to say I felt happy for the people for whom going to the dentist is not a time of stress and struggle, but my tears in that moment contained only hatred for them and the entire American medical system.

We often don’t consider the long-term toll — personally and as a country — of what it means to have a nation of people who can’t access adequate health care. In addition to our physical depreciation, new research confirms the negative neurological effects of a life plagued by financial anxiety. Having scientific data to back up my personal experience is oddly comforting yet disconcerting. Mostly, it is evidence of the injustice of poverty.

photo of Tina with her mom
Tina with her mom.

When the poor are treated as collateral damage in a fight between wealthy, well-insured politicians, people like my mom die. It wasn’t so long ago that she and I were snuggled together on the couch, giggling at the sight of my dad cutting that newspaper into squares. And when I am able to find the humor to commiserate with others like me about the absurdity of our situations, I know my mother lives on through me. She gave me what she could when we had nothing at all.

I still haven’t been able to see a dentist about my toothache, and though I have moments when I fear my mother’s and my fates will be the same, the memories of what my mom gave me drive me to keep fighting for something better than she had — so I do.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Deferred Dreams from My Father


photo of Tina and her dadWhen I was growing up, I knew my father had become an American citizen around the time I was born in 1985. What I didn’t know was that until then he’d been living as an undocumented resident of the United States for more than twenty years. Never anxious to talk about this part of his life, my father simply didn’t volunteer the information.

Like many children of immigrant parents, I was told story upon story that began, “When I came to this country…” But certain details of my father’s journey weren’t shared until I was twenty-six. Even after all these years, the story of how he emigrated from Mexico isn’t one my father likes to tell. He came from a generation where one’s citizenship status was something not to be discussed. I only learned of the specifics because I poked and prodded until he finally gave in, saying, “Tell my story when I’m dead.”

To people like my father, in spite of being an American citizen, these stories remain unsafe to talk about publicly. In the back of his mind is the lingering fear that telling his story will somehow get him deported. If not deported, then he will lose his job, or some other bad thing will happen. Silence and secrecy are my father’s only means of protection.

When I told my dad about the Dream 9, a group of undocumented activists who openly defied US immigration law in an act of civil disobedience last month, he told me a story he had never shared before. After being in the United States for five years, my dad reached a point where he’d had enough. He was always hungry, tired, and on the verge of homelessness. Working under the table without papers resulted in constant exploitation, and all he wanted was to go home to his family.

Without a dollar to his name, my father walked along the Los Angeles highway with his thumb out, hoping someone would give him a lift to San Diego so he could cross the border into Tijuana. Once he arrived, he planned to find a job and save enough money to return to his parents, who lived in the Southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. But, as he puts it, fate intervened.

My dad walked along the interstate for an entire day, and not a single person stopped to give him a ride. Since it was the 1970s and hitchhiking in California was fairly common, my father (ironically) took the drivers’ unwillingness to pick up a poor, brown man as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to return to Mexico, after all. He resigned himself to whatever fate was keeping him in the US, and walked all the way back to LA. For the next fifteen years, my dad worked backbreaking jobs that kept him one paycheck away from homelessness, separated from every family member and friend he’d ever known.

It’s difficult for me to think about what my father’s life was like during those hardscrabble years, but still I ask him to tell me. He explains the ways he was able to scrape out a living in a country he felt didn’t want people like him and made it as hard as possible for them to survive.

When he shares his pain, I see my father differently than the angry, quiet man I associate with my childhood. My dad had every intention of living the American Dream, even after years passed and it remained out of reach. He’d wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, and to give my brothers and me opportunities that were never possible for him. Instead, each day was simply about surviving. My father worked hard as a janitor to support our family, but he and my mom were never able to climb out of poverty. There was no time for dream chasing, so my father acquiesced to a dream deferred.

As the Dream Act is adopted in various states and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows undocumented youth to obtain driver’s licenses and work permits, I think of the adversities undocumented youth won’t face that my father had to overcome. I think of how the Dreamers, as they’ve come to be known, represent the unfulfilled desires of my father’s generation. So many of our parents secretly came to the United States, where they hid and were silent because to do otherwise would mean giving up what little they had for which they’d sacrificed everything. To them, immigration is not just a political issue; it is a life force that is brutal and beautiful, full of pain and of love.

My dad still struggles with using the term “undocumented.” For him, the word “illegal” comes much easier. He spent twenty years in a country where his existence was criminalized, and that feeling of not belonging isn’t something that “papers” can fix. My dad still behaves like that twenty-something kid who wasn’t protected under the law. He fears men in uniforms. He can’t speak out against those who treat him unfairly. He is constantly worried that everything he’s worked so hard for can be taken away in an instant.

When there is no ability for you to speak openly, no politicized community creating safe spaces, and no internet to connect you anonymously, you’re an island that internalizes what you’re told. The Dream 9 is helping my dad connect to his chosen country, to heal the hurts of its past abuse. Perhaps that is too much to ask from nine young people. But as they risk their own livelihoods for the sake of their communities, people like my father, whose lives have been steeped for so long in silence and in fear, are reading about their courage with tears in their eyes, in awe of a generation that refuses to hide in the shadows.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Without Papers, Without Fear


photo of Dream 9 marching to the US-Mexico borderOn July 21, nine Mexican nationals openly defied US immigration policy, and more than ten thousand people watched the event unfold through a live, global webcast. I held my breath as activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) — who are now known as the “Dream 9” — walked arm-in-arm through the streets of Nogales, Mexico. I felt the squeeze of anxiety in my chest as they neared the US-Mexico border. And I sent a silent wish into the universe that the gamble these young people are bravely taking won’t be in vain.

The Dream 9 are all longstanding residents of the United States. Six of them — Rosie Rojas, Maria Peniche, Adriana Gil Diaz, Luis Gustavo Leon, Claudia Amaro, and Ceferino Santiago — had been deported or left of their own accord prior to last Monday’s action. The other three — Marco Saavedra, Lulu Martinez, and Lizbeth Mateo — are prominent leaders of America’s undocumented youth movement. Before making her way to Mexico, Mateo paid her tuition for Santa Clara Law School, where classes begin in August. Martinez also expected to return to school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is majoring in gender and women’s studies.

If the Dream 9’s plan fails, each member will be deported. They will be separated from their families, and the lives they’ve built in the United States will be irrevocably changed. The danger they face is significant. Under President Barack Obama more people have been deported than any other president in US history. Still, they each chose to take the risk.

“In the United States, undocumented immigrants run the risk of being taken from their home, no matter where we are,” Mateo wrote in The Huffington Post. “We have won many fights against deportation, but not all of them. It’s time to take away the power deportation has over us.”

NIYA is a radical, youth-led organization working to ensure justice for undocumented young people living in the United States. Its members routinely participate in acts of civil disobedience to resist threats of detention and deportation that terrorize their communities. They also take cues from past social movement successes by conceiving and executing actions that will attract national media.

Last summer NIYA made headlines when Saavedra and fellow organizer Viridiana Martinez were intentionally arrested in order to infiltrate the Broward Detention Center in Pompano Beach, Florida. Once inside, the young activists began collecting the stories of dozens of detainees who qualified for release under President Obama’s 2011 prosecutorial discretionary guidelines, yet continued to be held for several months. When NIYA released their findings in a press conference, Saavedra and Martinez were swiftly released.

“My son is a warrior,” Saavedra’s mother, Natalia, told Colorlines. Despite her courageous words, Natalia fears the treatment her son will receive now that he has been transferred from Florence Detention Center to Arizona’s notorious Eloy Detention Center.

Although the Dream 9 knew they would be detained — the US Border Patrol had informed NIYA that the young people would be arrested and deported as soon as they reached the border — they did not anticipate having their phone calls restricted. (An Eloy representative has denied restricting the activists’ calls.) On Thursday, the six Dream 9 women began a hunger strike. Now, all of them are refusing food until they are released. Mateo, Amaro, Santiago, Martinez, Saavedra, and Felix have been placed in solitary confinement for refusing to eat.

NIYA’s strategy for the Dream 9 is to request humanitarian parole for the detainees. According to US Citizen and Immigration Services, “humanitarian parole is used sparingly to bring someone who is otherwise inadmissible into the United States for a temporary period of time due to a compelling emergency.” In an interview with NBC Latino, Kiran Savage-Sangwan, a member of the Dream 9′s policy team, explained that a humanitarian parole request is required to prevent the activists from becoming targets of kidnapping or other harmful criminal activity.

“Each will be interviewed by an asylum officer to establish each has a credible fear of persecution if they are denied admittance to the US,” said Savage-Sangwan. “These young people are certainly not a threat of public danger. They are not going to flee. They knocked on the door of the US to re-enter, so they should be released pending litigation of their asylum claims.”

A collective action this bold is unprecedented in the undocumented immigrant movement. If successful, it will establish a path for others who have been deported from and would like to return to the US. According to NIYA spokesperson Mohammad Abdolahi, the organization has a list of people willing to replicate this strategy. Just hours after the Dream 9 were detained, thirty people gathered at the US-Mexico border hoping to enter the country.

It’s been said that this is a publicity stunt, and the Dream 9 have been called audacious, disrespectful, silly, and petulant. But the young people are responding to an immigration system to which these words could be equally applied. People who have been torn from their families undertake perilous journeys in order to be reunited with their loved ones. As a result, hundreds of migrants die every year while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.

photo of eight of the Dream 9 activistsDuring their march through the streets of Nogales, Saavedra shouted, “When President Obama is deporting our families, what do we do?” His eight companions yelled in unison, “Stand up! Fight back!” This is what fighting back for the Dream 9 looks like. And to my eyes, it is a radical demonstration of the love they have for their community.

For the Dream 9, it’s not enough that undocumented students are provided with a pathway to citizenship. They won’t wait for Congress to gut and pass a toothless and elitist comprehensive immigration reform bill. Instead, they are fearlessly putting their own lives on the line to highlight the flaws of the system. They are holding the Obama administration and other politicians accountable for their unfulfilled promises.

If the Dream 9 are released, and this action is successful, it won’t be because President Obama and other elected officials came to their aid. It will be because undocumented activists and their allies demanded these politicians make good on their assurances to those at risk of deportation.

As I write this, petitions are circulating that call for the Dream 9’s release. Allies are sending letters to their state and national representatives. Sit-ins and vigils are cropping up across the country. The nationwide outpouring of support demonstrates the direct correlation between increased mobilization and progress. It was undocumented activists and their allies who demanded the passage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the DREAM Act in twelve states. Don’t let politicians rob them of these victories by claiming otherwise.

As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who was undocumented in the US for more than twenty years, I feel an overwhelming connection to the Dream 9. I’ve thought of them several times a day since watching their march to the border last week. I wonder if they are worried or if they are in high spirits. I wonder if they can sense the deluge of gratitude and appreciation through the walls of their confinement. Most of all, I wonder when the American government will allow them to reunite with their families.

So, let’s bring them home.

UPDATE: On Tuesday, August 6, each member of the Dream 9 has successfully established the “credible fear” aspect of humanitarian parole.  Their cases now be heard by an immigration judge, who will decide whether to grant asylum.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Still in Search of Justice for Trayvon Martin


photo of protestor holding a "Justice for Trayvon Martin" signI was never confident that a jury comprised almost exclusively of white women would convict George Zimmerman of second-degree murder, but last night’s not guilty verdict still left me breathless. I had wanted to believe that my worst fears weren’t true, that I am not living in a country where a man can get away with killing a seventeen-year-old child because that child is black. But the verdict sent a clear message: black people’s lives are not valued in America.

This case has been rife with racial tension from the beginning. It took Florida police six weeks to arrest George Zimmerman after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Their inaction brought to mind similar examples of legal injustice in US history, and many began to draw parallels between Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till.

During the summer of 1955, two white men brutally tortured and shot fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi because he whistled at a white woman while buying bubble gum at the local grocery. The white woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, enlisted the help of his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and the two men kidnapped and murdered the black child before dumping his body into a river. In a gross miscarriage of justice, which many credit as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury.

When I learned the story of Emmett Till’s lynching, I didn’t understand how it was possible for these two men to get away with murder. After all, America’s foundational philosophy is “liberty and justice for all.” But when a victim is black, and the accused and their jurors are white, accountability can be elusive. We learned that lesson fifty-seven years ago, and we are still learning it today.

The morning before the Zimmerman verdict was reached, journalist Aura Bogado appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show and pointed out that, although the Zimmerman trial is not about gender, the all-female jury is getting a lot of attention in the media. “It’s actually five white people and one person of color,” Bogado said. “They’re seen as women; their whiteness is not seen.”

This sentiment was echoed by Maya Wiley, president of the Center for Social Inclusion and another commentator on that episode of the show. Wiley pointed out that Zimmerman’s lawyers played to the racial fears they believed the white women jurors would possess by calling Olivia Bertalan as a witness for Zimmerman. Bertalan, a white woman, conveyed her appreciation of Zimmerman’s efforts to help her feel safe — including giving her a dog — after two black teenagers broke into her home.

“They called a white woman to talk about the two black men who terrorized her in her home,” commented Wiley. “That was to reinforce to white women on that jury that [they] need to be afraid [of black men].”

Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, understood the climate of race-based fear in a time of Jim Crow laws and legal segregation. To help white people understand the brutality that had been inflicted upon her son, she insisted on having an open casket at the funeral. Mamie Till is reported to have said, “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”

The world did see what was done to Emmett Till. Photographs of his bloated body and severely mangled face were featured in newspapers internationally.

Unlike Mamie Till, Trayvon Martin’s mother wasn’t given the courtesy of choosing whether her son’s dead body would be displayed publicly. Instead, MSNBC and Gawker made the choice for her. (Warning: This link contains graphic violence.) As a result, millions of people have seen Trayvon Martin’s lifeless body. Like the photographs of Emmett Till, the image haunts me.

After the verdict was announced, many Americans took to Facebook and Twitter to express their devastation, outrage, horror, and shame. Some pointed out the hypocrisy of Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict in comparison with last year’s verdict in the Marissa Alexander case. A 31-year-old, black mother of three, Alexander was found guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband as he threatened her. No one was harmed, except Alexander and her children; she received a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years in prison.

Amid talk of possible rioting after the verdict was reached, blogger Jay Smooth made this comment on Twitter: “The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George Zimmermans.” His comment made me wonder whether they were saying the same thing nearly six decades ago when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam got away with murder in Mississippi.

No parent wants their son to be the next Emmett Till. Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin now share Mamie Till’s pain of losing a beloved child in a national tragedy. After the verdict was announced, Tracy Martin tweeted this emotional response: “Even in his death, I know my baby is proud of the fight we, along with all of you, put up for him.… Even though I am brokenhearted, my faith is unshattered.”

For me, I will continue fighting until it is no longer the case that a man can walk free after killing a black child in America. Hoodies up!

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

They Cut the Fire Straight Out of Me


photo of the cat in The Beast of Times
Photo by Marisa Becerra.

When my best friend’s partner said there was a play about “queer animals” featuring an undocumented cat that I simply had to see, I was wary. Frankly, I didn’t think the play would be any good. But I agreed to go anyway, reservations be damned, because sometimes revelations occur from doing the unexpected.

My friends and I made our way to The Beast of Times on its second to last showing in Los Angeles. Written and performed by award-winning performance artist Adelina Anthony, the play’s heavy-handed description — “a satirical and queer allegory [that] explores the contradictions and pains of coming to political consciousness as ‘Other’ in a world where environmental and ethnic diversity are quickly becoming passé” — obscures the fact that Anthony’s off-kilter sensibility is actually quite accessible and incredibly funny. Similar to David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, the characters in The Beast of Times reflect the idiosyncrasies of what it means to be a human being.

Once the audience became comfortable inhabiting Anthony’s bemusing world, the play took a serious turn when the aforementioned cat reveals the scar of her ovariohysterectomy — or what we humans call ‘spaying’. “You will not be having any sex or offspring,” a turtle tells the cat. “They cut the fire straight out of you.”

The cat begins hissing, twitching, and pacing. She hacks angrily and uncontrollably, as though coughing up a hairball. Before her meltdown is complete, the audience learns she is having a “soul memory,” and the cat begins to speak:

1928: I am a Native girl, a child who will barely reach puberty when they come for me. Canadian officials will sterilize entire tribes. 1944: In Puerto Rico I will have la operación. For decades, a third of our female population will endure forced sterilization by the US Empire. 1965: I will be poor again, so you can count me among the one million women who will be sterilized by the Brazilian government …

The monologue continues to trace nearly a hundred years of international reproductive atrocities committed against poor women of color by their governments. It’s hard to explain how a woman wearing cat ears and thrashing about on stage could move me to tears, but it did. It reminded me that I had forgotten to allow myself to feel pain, but the power of art is it can break through your defenses and force you to feel once again.

Like many people, I have become desensitized to certain kinds of violence and degradation, particularly the kinds that disproportionately affect women. The cat’s affecting monologue made me feel as though I were having my own soul memory. I was experiencing the pain of things that had never happened to me, but still managed to leave deep wounds. These tragic events flooded my mind:

Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. After they’d killed her family, including her six-year-old sister, five American Army soldiers raped and killed a fourteen-year-old girl in Iraq. We call this the Mahmudiyah killings.

Jyoti Singh Pandey. On the way home from the movies, a mob of men fatally raped a twenty-three-year-old medical student on a bus in India. We call this the Delhi gang-rape case.

Anonymous victim. In Ohio, an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl was dragged from one location to another and repeatedly raped for six hours by two high school football players, while fellow students uploaded images of the assault to social media sites. We call this Steubenville.

These stories are never-ending, and they became overwhelming while watching the cat’s scene in Anthony’s play. That week, a member of the paparazzi opted to snap photos instead of intervene when millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi repeatedly choked his wife, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, during a twenty-seven-minute altercation at an exclusive restaurant in London. The morning of the day I attended the play, a woman was chased down and stabbed to death by her estranged husband in an affluent Los Angeles suburb — the restraining order and her reports to the authorities failed to keep Michelle Kane safe. There comes a point when we simply have to shut ourselves off, but what then is the cost?

Something about Anthony’s play breathed life back into me. Her words stoked an internal fire I thought I’d lost that felt a little like rage and passion, but also like remembrance and gratitude. I don’t know if the world will ever be a safe place for women, but I do know that silence is a form of complicity, detachment, and resignation — and that is unacceptable.

When violence against women is everywhere we turn, we must choose action not apathy. According to the United Nations, up to seventy percent of women worldwide experience gender-based violence in their lifetimes — most often at the hands of her partner. Violence is the leading cause of death and disability to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. It is time for our stories of survival to counteract our fear. Anthony’s powerful storytelling was a catalyst for me. It broke through my catatonia and provided a vital antidote to being resigned to life in a beastly time.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: