Two New Books & A Slew of Fall Events in Houston

Hi all,

Happy to announce that I have two new books of poetry coming out this fall: 

The Every Wild (Mouthfeel Press) & Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina)

I also have a bunch of upcoming events in Houston where I would love to see you:

Thursday, October 24 - Creatives as Caregivers: Balancing Art and Family at HCCC 
Saturday, October 26 - The Unsettlements - Walk Through, Lunch & Writing Workshop at two locations
Saturday, November 2 - Artist Conversation for New Suns with Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud at Lawndale
Friday, November 15 - Gulf Coast Afternoon Conversation at Basket Books & Art 
Friday, November 15 - Gulf Coast Reading at Lawndale
Tuesday, November 19 - Joint Book Launch: No One Gets to Fall Apart by Sarah LaBrie & my new book The Every Wild at Basket Books & Art

And one more event with Gabrielle Civil on December 3 at Basket Books & Art. More info on that one coming soon.

Hope to see you at one or some of these events. And if you can't make them or don't live in Houston, please consider getting the books or requesting your local library buy copies.

You can pre-order The Every Wild from the Mouthfeel website or wherever books are sold. Forthcoming in November.

Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas is being published in Spain by a wonderful small press, Editorial Ultramarina, and it is a bit more difficult to buy at the moment in the US, but if you want a copy, I have about twenty copies now and I will have more soon. So you can come out to an event in Houston & I will happily sell you one! Or if you can't make an event or live somewhere else in the US, you can fill out this Google Form, and I can mail you one. It should be available on the press website for purchase soon. And I want to get my website set up to make book sales as well, but I have not figured out how to do that yet lol.

Ah and if you made it this far, you are lovely, thank you. And let's work hard to get the US government to stop selling arms to Israel. Free Palestine. Protect Lebanon. Stop genocide. Support transitions away from death and destruction and oppression. Support just transitions in all forms. Speak up. We have choices and options. As artist Li(sa) Harris kept saying after Beryl, there is power even when the lights go out. Pay attention to language and what we say and what we give away with careless words. The power is not gone.

Yours in loving breakage,

Jadine~JD

Whose Pedro Lemebel?

(Originally tweeted a shorter version, but here extended for reading as an essay.)

I am confused to see this translation today of a crónica by Pedro Lemebel in the Paris Review. As far as I understand it, this text should not be coming out right now. There is a legal battle in Chile currently on-going over the rights to Lemebel’s writing. As I understand it, this crónica and an anthology due out in 2024 from Penguin should not be happening. Let me explain what I understand.

First, let me start by saying (for those who do not know) that Pedro Lemebel was a daring and vitally important marica writer from Chile whose work has been crucial for me, as a queer/trans translator & reader of Latin American lit for decades. Lemebel’s joy & social critique, the anger and the sense of play is wild and fun and incisive. Lemebel’s daring and brilliant work deserves to find its readers around the world through widespread publication and varied and capable translations. That is not what is happening now.

The short version of the story is that there is a legal battle over the rights to Pedro Lemebel’s writing. There has been no reporting about this in English-speaking media that I have found. There has been ample coverage in Spanish though, for example here. Upon Lemebel’s death, the rights were left to Lemebel’s brother, Jorge Mardones. Jorge had a child out of wedlock, Geraldine Mardones, who he never recognized or supported. Lemebel, as could be expected, was kind with Geraldine, included her in the family and supported her. Since his death, Jorge’s three children have monopolized the rights to the estate and excluded Geraldine from decision-making, attempting to keep her out of the family and not give her any control over her uncle’s writings. They have treated her as an “illegitimate” daughter and sister with no regard for her or her wishes. Over the last years, she has spoken out for her rights to be involved in the estate. While the three other children have attempted to profit off Lemebel’s writing by controlling rights & attempting to sell rights to the highest corporate bidders, Geraldine has said publicly that Lemebel’s writing should be more freely available, that his writing should not be sold off and controlled by neoliberal agents of corporations and the gatekeepers of the literary industry in NYC. Geraldine is pushing for the writing to be re-published in more democratic ways and for the work itself to be amplified and multiplied in many different editions. As I see it, Geraldine is fighting for the excluded and unrecognized, within the family and in the larger society for queer and trans and travesti people who continue to be excluded. The family continues to try to keep her out.

Some years ago, I was working to translate some of Lemebel’s writing, when we were told by a US agent supposedly representing the family that we could not do those translations. She stated she was working with the rights-holders, and later I discovered that this agent was working only with the “legitimate” children and without informing or including Geraldine Mardones. It is sad as a queer/trans translator who loves Lemebel to be told only cis-hetero (to the best of my knowledge) translators would be allowed to translate the work. Since there is a legal case pending in Chilean courts right now, my understanding is that all publications have been placed on pause until the resolution of the legal case. Therefore, though I am not a lawyer, this crónica and this Penguin publication might be in violation of that Chilean legal decree.

Beyond these obvious rights issues, these translations that are happening now are not being done in ways that honor histories of Latin American--and specifically Chilean--maricas & locas, travestis & mujeres trans, la joteria & sex workers. The renderings of the published translations gloss over specificities of these maricas & locas, travestis and others in Latin America who have dissident sexualities & genders. As a translator of many LGBT authors & as a queer/trans translator myself, this is distressing. These are complicated topics & should be handled with care by individuals with an intimate knowledge of these issues of language, life, love, and embodiment. The baroque language and complicated syntax is another (exciting) challenge for translation and for English-speaking readers. Translating Lemebel would be very hard work, and it deserves care.

Currently, the Penguin anthology is titled, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles. This title just pisses me off. The use of this word “queer” in the title papers over all of the complicated histories of local terminology and lives in Spanish. Lemebel was incredibly smart & strategic with language, how to play with it, how to undermine Global North definitions of sexual & gender dissidence. His performance of the Last Supper with a crew of travestis is recorded in a video by Gloria Camiruaga. The performance is archived on this page of Lemebel’s performance group, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. The actors are specifically referred to as travestis, and this insistence is crucial to the work that Lemebel did, shifting between genders and performance and genres to challenge every convention. This anthology title--& erasing travesti with "queer"--reads like a clever USAmerican marketing ploy to try to sell more books, make it marketable & recognizable for US readers, with no regard for everything Lemebel’s writing means. I have seen many of the same issues with many of the other recent published translations. I do believe in multiple translations of Lemebel, and yes let a thousand translations bloom, but only after the legal issues have been resolved in Chilean courts. In a world where queer and trans people continue to be under attack, it matters who translates us, who does this work and how it is done. These are aesthetic and political questions that must be considered.

It needs to be said publicly that there is a battle over Lemebel’s legacy and US agents and translators are acting like nothing is going on. And the Paris Review and Penguin appear to be publishing like nothing is happening.

On the Penguin page is a Lemebel quote, ​​“I speak from my difference,” but the original is "Hablo por mi diferencia" -- I speak for my difference, with it, because of it. As always Lemebel saying a million things with one preposition. More care is needed, at all levels of this process of translation. These translations and the lack of approval from all heirs erase that difference, replacing it with a marketable First World “queerness” in opposition to Lemebel’s working-class marica critique & wildness. I have not said anything publicly until today, but I needed to say this.

If there are publications that would like to publish my thinking on this, I’d be happy to write this up in an essay. In Chile, you can also speak with Victor Hugo, El Che de los Gays who was a friend of Lemebel and currently works with Geraldine Mardones and her legal team, fighting for the wider distribution of Lemebel's work.

The Unsettlements: Poetry & (Un)Monuments

We will be having a gathering to read the poems of Houston poet Lorenzo Thomas out loud communally from 10am - 12pm on Saturday, November 18, 2023. We will also talk and write together. We will meet at Allen's Landing Park at 1005 Commerce St, Houston, TX 77002 by the bayou.

Coffee and breakfast tacos will be provided.

We will read from the book The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas83/the-collected-poems-of-lorenzo-thomas/. Bring your copy or read from photocopies that will be provided.

The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics.

Lorenzo Thomas was a poet and critic. He was part of the Black Arts Movement in New York City and a member of the Umbra workshop. Thomas authored poetry collections that incorporate the personal and the political, including Chances Are Few (1979, reissued in 2003), and The Bathers (1981). Thomas also released Dancing on Main Street (2004), Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (2000), and Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (2008). Thomas graduated from Queens College in New York in 1967 and continued on to graduate studies at Pratt Institute. He joined the Navy in 1968 and served in the Vietnam War. Thomas first moved to Houston as a writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University in 1973. He taught writing workshops at the Black Arts Center and was an English professor at the University of Houston's downtown campus.

This event is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

Some Feelings + Trash + A Note on We

Hi all,

In March, a wave of heat descended much too early on these Gulf Coast swamplands. Suddenly, midday felt too hot to go outside with any comfort. I got scared when the heat arrived. I wasn't ready for the onslaught.

But as April arrived, so too did some not too cool and not too hot days, and the reprieve is appreciated. I find a definition of "reprieve" as "temporary respite" or "relief or deliverance for a time."

I've been very much in my head these last months (or years?) but I started dance classes last week, and moving my body has been a relief. Pliés and relevés and hip swerves and jumps and arcs of motion tying head to torso to arms.

At some point in the middle of last night, I woke up briefly with the realization that, just like any other friend, sometimes I show up for myself and sometimes I don't, but I still have to recognize an underlying love is there, even with all the attendant missteps.

Mostly these days, I find writing and art-making to be a little bit too removed from other people or the world or I feel it as far too little in the face of the onslaught. I'm craving something else, even though I don't know quite what to call that otherwise.

I had a poem come out in The Brooklyn Rail that I'd love if you'd read and share with people who might enjoy it: A Note on We. It's trying to think about who "we" is when we are with one another.

I remember once in high school when I wrote a text in the school newspaper that was very emotionally intense, the headmaster, a Benedictine monk, brought me into his office to make sure I was okay. 

Also, a book I translated—a book that I love, by a person I love—has just been released into the world. It is called Trash. For several years, I lived with the voices of these three women whose lives intersect in the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. I tried to imagine and recreate those voices in some various Englishes of El Paso and Texas.

I remember the first time I drove down I-10, tracing a path between the mountains and along the course of the river, I had an eerie sensation that I would end up living there at a later stage of my life. Maybe that sensation was really the sensation that the voices of the place and the dust and the afternoon desert wind would come to live in my body, i.e. translation.

I wrote an essay recently about that same river but a different part of it, about trying to get closer to it physically in the area around Del Rio with my friend María José Crespo. I wrote about her art and accidental beauty in unexpected shapes for Southwest Contemporary.

When the heat arrived, I had to water and water the little seedlings I'd planted. Many of them died when I left town on a little trip away for a week. 

Most days, I feel my desire wilting, withering with the force of the years and the breakages and the heat of the onslaught. Most days, it is a challenge to believe.

But then when I actually am able to muster the courage to make something, and then the bodyfate and the nerve align to make something otherwise feel possible, then there is a reprieve, a temporary respite, a deliverance from the weight of it all.

And I make something again. Or a few little somethings. And share them.

Yours,

JDP

An Introduction to the Particles of A Stranger Light Anthony Sutton

Read at Basket Books in February 15, 2023

  

I begin writing this little essay in my bed. I never write in my bed. I begin writing this long hand in my journal but I write one sentence and then move to the Notes app on my phone. Seems more practical. That was yesterday.

Now I am re-writing the piece from yesterday, sitting at my kitchen table and working on my laptop.

Now I am re-reading at a long plastic table.

Now I am here in front of you. 

Time shifts so quickly. The now over days that intermingle together in one piece that seems like a unit and actually is not. Its unitariness a figment of the imagination. A sleight of hand. A feigning.

How I am writing this is also how I was reading Anthony’s book Particles of a Stranger Light. Or what I was reading is also now in this essay. I mainly read the book in bed, which seems like an ideal place to read this book.

And as the poet reminds us, “It’s impossible / to finish a conversation / when the beginning is erased.” So I thought I’d include the beginning. Of this essay and of me knowing Anthony.

Twelve years ago when I was trying to figure out how to make small attempts at fomenting spaces to nurture non-normative writing in this city, Anthony was someone who kept showing up, to wander through the space of an installation of books in a museum or to take a class in that installation or to attend a series of performances that were also readings that were also sculptural installations and a workshop. Anthony was someone who would come in and linger and ask questions and engage, someone who seemed moved by the wildness of these forms clashing. He would watch and observe and listen and take notes, and maybe that’s the humble thing that the poet can always do.

+

This essay is a part of a conversation, but also a presentation. Like a debutante ball. Like the presentation of the poet in society. We form a society, at least tonight, a small temporary society to celebrate this book coming into being. I wanted to read Anthony’s book and to think with it, to present that book to you and to build a context for it, to set up a little runway and let these poems strut down, each one of them unique, new and beautiful. I wanted to say something about what the poet has made, what it might mean and why it matters.

+

The book begins with a desire to finish the conversation, but that desire is interrupted by a temporary loss of self, an infringement on the poet’s personhood. I won’t go into the details. The poet is in a body, but that body is unknown or distant, unreachable, the body becomes an object. The poet is outside of his body, but we don’t get any psychological terms for that outsideness: the poet doesn’t turn to pop psychology terms that we have been encouraged to use to relate to our lives. I want to make a list of all the words that Anthony does NOT use to filter experience, but because I am so happy to be able to rest from those words, I will not use them here either. We’ll try to inhabit the space of the poems instead.

These poems collect, but they’re concise. The poems are slippery, because they are specific, not making large claims. If the poet has an epiphany or some momentary certainty, they’re like flashes in the midst or in the mist.

As one poem says: "certainty is an act of control. Even when feigned. " The world is asking the poet to toughen up, but these poems refuse or maybe they don't refuse maybe they play with the idea of toughening up and then quickly grab a drink or a surfeit of drinks and collapse later in the early hours of the morning on a river bank in dappled light of the rising sun

+

The book proffers a creation myth born out of blatant copyright infringement, it is Friday the 13th and Jason is “slashing every one of us,” slashing all the bodies and then the creation of the world coming out of that. The poet writes:

We took his skin and made the earth.

We took his mask and made the moon.

We took his machete and made all of you.

An implement of violence become the creation story. How to create something of the slashing …. For all of you

+ 

Out of all the slashing, the poet is still perceived as something whole by others, something to be measured, defined, categorized. There is a questioning in these poems about how the poet is perceived by the people around them, the endless pull to gender one another and the endless pull to define each other with some word existing before we had even met one another. Fitting each other into boxes and pushing each other in no matter whether we fit or not. These misidentifications a kind of ticket meted about the authority figures we become for each other, and as the poet writes:

"then I stuffed the ticket in my wallet and drove to work."

The poet is often headed to work or work is always looming in the poems.

The poet brings to the poems a long list of men: Auden and Dante and Frank O'Hara and Catullus and Barthes and Derrida and Jason and Keats and Robert Haas and Kazim Ali and Prince and Icarus and number of lovers.

These are poems that linger in the complications of loving men, the complications of letting men in the mind or the body.

The poet writes: "Most days I am more anarchist / than sex object"

And — "I am expected to be / more of a man than a person."

The poems come up with other words as men (or the people formally known as men) look away from each other and into mirrors at one another

The poet lingers on a light fixture in a jail cell. It becomes a kind of sunlight or imitation of sunlight. The poet can't see the sun

Lovers and love are dangerous, potentially violent or striking or failing

Dating apps in the phone are always threatening

There are multiple little deaths

Alcohol and hangovers the next morning

The poet receives phone calls from a mother concerned about the crying of car alarms and the tears of a grandmother in the Philippines, a place the poems reference as both far away and perilously close, a dictatorship hanging still in the humid air of the ghost thickets

The poet gets tired of talking about himself, runs out of things to say or things they want to say and suddenly animals are falling from the sky

One of the epigraphs to the book is a Godard quote about a film that is partial or a film never quite made, but always imagined as a potential life, a life impossible to attain, a yearning for something else

The poems end up producing something that we can read, something that we can see, some thing that the poet has wanted for us to see, even if that thing is the continuing impossibility.

There's something about the poems where the reader is able to hold the pieces together and see how they fit, making sense of all the senseless things, or unmaking sense out of the things so fixedly defined, for the gift is how the poems take everything apart into pieces and then become an invitation to someone else to try and read it all as a whole

Here we are muddling around muddying ourselves another muddy morning

The poet says,

“Yes, I was here / and though / I was not / What I was / when we met / I still was”

And I say back:

yesterday you were not / who you were / when me met / but you still were

An Homage to Our Roots? Undue Cultural Appropriation in Mexico

Yásnaya Elena A. Gil

Translated by JD Pluecker

 

(This text was originally published in Spanish as with Gatopardo in March 2020. I translated it, and it was published at Entropy Magazine in July 2020. Entropy closed in 2021, so I am re-publishing this translation here so that it can continue to reach readers. A PDF of the essay as it originally appeared on Entropy is here.)

One of the clearest signs of the position held by indigenous languages in Mexico is the small number of spaces that exist for their instruction. Preparing a course to teach an indigenous language presents a multiplicity of challenges, not solely related to grammar, but also to issues that stem from the constant attacks on the use of these languages over many decades. As a consequence of these attacks, indigenous language study and the development of diverse methodologies, materials, and didactic resources—for their teaching as a second language—is totally incomparable to what exists for hegemonic languages.

In a city like Oaxaca, nestled in Zapotec territory and surrounded by many communities that currently speak or previously spoke Valley Zapotec, it would seem natural for there to be a variety of spaces offering instruction in the language for people who do not speak it, whether Zapotec people or not. When spaces do open for learning indigenous languages, I am continually asked a question that over time has become more insistent: if I don’t belong to the group that speaks a certain indigenous language, is learning it cultural appropriation? This same question worms its way into other settings as well. I’ve read compelling analyses that question whether it is cultural appropriation for someone to wear a huipil without being part of the community that produces them or whether doing a temazcal sweat also involves an appropriation of a culture that one does not belong to, and a whole slew of other related cases.

Answering these questions is no simple task. I’d like to posit some ideas that I think should be considered in order to attempt to develop responses through collective discussion. The frequency of these questions already indicates a concern that it’s hard to imagine surfacing years ago. This topic has been being debated for quite a while in the neighboring country to our north, where situations like the use ritual garb belonging to indigenous peoples at costume parties has sparked controversies and debates that allow us to discern the functioning of diverse systems of oppression.

In theory, I’d like to argue in favor of exchange, contact, and appropriation of cultural elements; one of the things that seems to me most important and also very difficult to impede is the flow of cultural elements between peoples, cultures, and nations of the world that makes it practically impossible, at this point in time, for there to be “pure” cultures that have not taken elements from others, resignifying them and incorporating them into their cultural systems. What’s more, in the contemporary world, it’s complicated to think about cultures as closed entities with absolute borders that make it possible for us to identify where one culture ends and another begins. For example, I strongly believe that Western wind instruments, like the trombone, trumpet or clarinet, have been adopted to make traditional music that I feel and read as profoundly Mixe, as something that belongs to my culture. Zapotec peoples in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, who also have extraordinary philharmonic bands, might feel something similar. The elements of different cultural traditions flow freely and are adopted, investing them with new interpretations, uses, and meanings that continually enrich the cultural diversity of the world.

Nevertheless, not everything ends up being so simple. Interaction between cultures does not happen in a context of equality and harmony, as certain discourses about diversity would have us believe, disregarding the fact that the societies that produce cultures have been categorized and placed into hierarchical relationships. World cultures are enmeshed within a network of structures that order them and arrange them into hierarchies; the elements of humanity are interwoven in structures of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. For this reason, I’d like to make an important distinction between cultural appropriation and undue (or improper) cultural appropriation, as it has been referred to specifically. This kind of appropriation happens when a privileged person appropriates certain cultural elements of other populations for their own use or benefit while keeping oppressive relations intact. In addition, this appropriation retrofits oppression into a new updated version, becoming a means both to benefit those at the top and to continue pursuing extractivist practices, taking elements considered valuable, while the rest is discounted and attacked.

For example, though indigenous lands in the United States continue to suffer from invasion, at the same time elements of Native culture are taken piecemeal to be used on runways for Victoria’s Secret. When the oppressor class considers a cultural element of the oppressed class to be worthy of contempt, members of the group will face discrimination because of it; however, when that same element is found to be an exploitable resource, the oppressors will appropriate it. In light of this definition, the fact that Mixe craftspeople have designed sneakers with the form and the look of Converse sneakers—but with traditional Mixe embroidery—cannot be considered undue cultural appropriation, though some people have insisted on the opposite in conversations with me. Just as there is no such thing as reverse racism, there is no such thing as “reverse” undue cultural appropriation. Something becomes undue cultural appropriation when a cultural element of an oppressed group is exploited by someone without any experience of the oppression endured by that group.

In the United States, the phenomenon of undue cultural appropriation has its own characteristics related to racial and ethnic categories. The population classified as white engages in an everyday form of racism that emerges in an updated form as undue cultural appropriation when they use the feathered headdresses of some Native tribes in shows or when they take elements from the African American musical tradition, decontextualizing them and obtaining financial benefit or recognition, while structural racism continues unabated.

Nevertheless, in Mexico, the phenomenon takes on other characteristics through the operation of mestizaje. I’d like to emphasize mestizaje as an operation and a narrative constructed by power, more so than a genetic fact. By now, we know that all of us in the world are products of genetic mixture; everyone in the world is mixed, genetically-speaking. Nonetheless, racism classifies bodies by identifying individual phenotypes that it organizes hierarchically, privileging some features and oppressing others systematically.

If we consider the fact that in 1820 approximately 70% of the population in Mexico spoke an indigenous language as their mother tongue and that now we are just 6%, we can see that the large majority of the people who identify themselves as mestizo were actually de-indigenized over the last two hundred years. This is a population that the structural racism of the State needed to portray as mestizo instead of indigenous; for this reason, the State stripped them of their languages, cultural elements, and sense of belonging in order to assign them a more white-washed identity, called mestizo: a Mexican identity constructed with diverse elements from a variety of places, peoples, and traditions. The objective of the Mexican State has been to convert the entire indigenous population into mestizos, or to say it another way: to de-indigenize them. In this context, if the mestizo population—who has been stripped of a sense of belonging, tribal affiliation, language, and culture—takes a cultural element from an indigenous group, can it be called undue cultural appropriation? Wouldn’t it instead be a way of challenging that process that turned them into mestizos? The mestizo population could then return to cultural elements that they were stripped of, not as appropriation but rather as a way to challenge the aims of the State.

Yet again, the answers are hardly simple. The mestizo population does not share the same experience of oppression as the indigenous population; when I say this, I do not mean that they do not suffer the effects of racism, but the experience of that oppression is different from that of people belonging to a political category like “indigenous.” In many cases, the category of mestizo is maintained by an aspiration toward self-whitening, entailing a disdain for indigenous peoples; despite this, mestizos often return to those communities just to find specific cultural elements for their own enjoyment, though their disdain is unaffected. All too often, the mestizo population forgets that it is a de-indigenized population and oppresses indigenous peoples in novel ways. The phenomenon is obvious when a population—that is read as white and very privileged—carries out operations of undue cultural appropriation, but it becomes more complicated when dealing with mestizos. Though the use of a huipil by certain people can be read as love for the roots of Mexico, that same huipil on a Triqui indigenous woman (or on the body of a woman who is racially read as inferior) is understood in a different way and indicates her belonging to a discriminated category. In any case, undue cultural appropriation in Mexico is almost always portrayed as an homage to the roots of the country, as if indigenous peoples—suffering under structural oppression—were a simple stockpile of elements to be appropriated to serve as cultural foundation for a State that has gone to great lengths to make them disappear.

This situation has its origin in the very foundations of Mexico as a nation. Unlike the formation of other countries, the Mexican State designed an identitarian discourse that, at its root, is based on undue cultural appropriation. Concurrent to its systematic oppression of Nahua peoples, the State appropriated elements that were part of their tradition and language; for example, the national coat of arms is based on Mexica elements. Folklorization allows the State to appropriate cultural elements from indigenous groups, which it will subsequently refer to as “elements of Mexican culture.” They are not elements of Mexican culture; they belong to concrete people who resist mining, megaprojects, and extractivist projects implemented or licensed by the Mexican State—which both is currently and historically has been the most flagrant undue appropriator of the cultures of indigenous peoples in this country.

These practices have reached absurd extremes, for example in 1930 when, hoping to reinforce nationalism, Pascual Ortiz Rubio attempted to replace Santa Claus with Quetzalcóatl. In the chronicles of the period, an official announcement was made that dispensed with a foreign tradition in order to replace it with a character who—already unduly appropriated—was characterized as being profoundly “Mexican:” the feathered serpent. The government organized an event in a huge stadium in which a person playing Quetzalcóatl handed out candies and presents to thousands of children brought into the space. Mexico was not created through a pact with the peoples and nations who were to constitute it; instead, a small minority created the nation by attempting to make indigenous people disappear into a new category called mestizo. As they oppressed them, the nation took elements from their cultures. Once it had appropriated cultural elements from indigenous peoples, it placed them in a large basket called “Mexican culture” from which the population can take decontextualized elements and call it an homage to their roots.

So then, is learning an indigenous language undue cultural appropriation? Is wearing a huipil, if we do not belong to the people who produce it? It is when that action perpetuates the mechanisms of undue cultural appropriation that the same Mexican State used to lay the foundation for its project of mestizaje, or when the approach leads to cultural extractivism, while leaving oppressive relations intact.

On the other hand, if the approach is founded on a deep questioning of one’s privileges and challenges practices of mestizaje built on racism and colonization, the implications could be different. Whenever we come into contact with cultural elements of indigenous peoples, we could begin to question the systems of oppression that make the existence of cultural appropriation possible. In Mexico, these systems are hidden behind the discourse of mestizaje and a supposed homage that ends up converting indigeneity itself into folklore.

 

Miniscule Structures

by Yásnaya Elena A. Gil

Translated by JD Pluecker

 

(This text was originally published in Spanish as an Opinion piece at El País in April 2020. I translated it, and it was published at Entropy Magazine in May 2020. Entropy closed in 2021, so I am re-publishing this translation here so that it can continue to reach readers. A PDF of the essay as it originally appeared on Entropy is here.)

 

When it came time for the French biologist Jacques Monod to title his extraordinary book Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, he elected to borrow words attributed originally to the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. The complete quote by the well-known “laughing philosopher” goes: “Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” Rather than enter into a debate about the merits of this quote in the context of the current situation, I’d like to return to the most disconcerting passages from Monod’s book, which provided an entry point into the passionate debate about whether viruses qualify as living beings or not.

 

Viruses are thought to be biological entities comprised of genetic material that infect cells, where they can reproduce themselves over and over again. Viruses are so tiny that the majority cannot be observed through normal optical microscopes: miniscule structures that transit the space between what is inert and what is alive. Throughout the history of humanity and even before their discovery, viruses have provoked crises and revealed the way that other kinds of macrostructures function in the world.

 

The novel coronavirus has precipitated a pandemic of COVID-19 around the world and provided a detailed image of a gigantic, socioeconomic structure—capitalism—within which oppressed sectors of the population are terribly vulnerable to the destruction wrought by this disease: communities with limited access to the health system, people unable to follow prevention guidelines due to their economic conditions, or migrants at borders where the violation of their basic human rights has become commonplace. Furthermore, official reports have shown that along with the elderly, people with diabetes, hypertension, or obesity are especially vulnerable to this new miniscule entity.

 

A considerable percentage of COVID-19 deaths in Mexico are related to these conditions of inequality. By 2015, it was calculated that approximately 415 million people in the world suffered from diabetes, and the ever-growing consumption of industrialized food products paved the way to its rapid emergence in the top ten of fatal diseases. Capitalism as a macrostructure has created entire sectors that are intensely vulnerable to the microstructure of the new virus as it threatens our debilitated immune systems, which were previously undermined by the consumption of processed food marketed through advertising as desirable. By contrast, in large cities, so-called organic food has become a luxury item which people in poverty cannot afford. This extremely tiny virus has made its home in structures already corroded by the social mega-systems that order the world: in a great many cases, the virus multiplies, infects, and destroys those bodies that have already been previously exposed, debilitated, and impoverished by the capitalist macrosystem.

 

Seduced by the macrostructures, we’ve been taught to believe that their disappearance is impossible; we believe these structures to be indispensable. Narratives of world history—particularly the history of nation states—center on civilizational milestones that explain the creation of social macrosystems. The transition from nomadic societies to agricultural societies is frequently explained to be a crucial condition for the existence of social stratification that would further develop in urban areas. This state of affairs would later give birth to empires and slave-holding societies with a labor force able to construct colossal edifices that are traditionally narrated as historical antecedents of the contemporary sociopolitical macrostructures par excellence: nation-states. The Mexica empire—its glories and its edifices—are thus narrated as a part of The History of Mexico. The development of a governing class is marked as a sign of development in this positivist historical path that we have been taught to desire. Social stratification is lauded as a necessary condition for societies to transform from being simple villages into city-states at the supposed dawn of history in distinct parts of the globe. We celebrate this path to the construction of social macrostructures. Nonetheless, alongside the wide avenues where the great passages of history in the mega-structured societies have taken place, there have always existed miniscule social structures: communities, villages, towns that repudiated social stratification on the road to a linear, civilizational development. These included nomadic peoples and social systems that have administered a commonly-administered life far from the great centers of civilization, and whose existence at times has not even been recorded by history itself.

 

This passion for the macro prevents us from registering other possibilities; it leads us to think that a megastructure with a central power like the Mexican State must exist. This fascination with the macro means that when I speak about possibilities for self-governance and about societies based on mutual aid and reciprocity, I often receive responses that emphasize that it can work in small villages, but that it would never work for a metropolis like Mexico City. I answer by inviting them to undertake an imaginative exercise: let’s think of Mexico City as a conglomeration of self-regulated miniscule structures based on self-government and reciprocity that establish alliances with other multiple miniscule structures to resolve needs and concrete problems as needed. Let’s just suppose for a moment that this would take place in neighborhood assemblies that regulate living together for neighboring families, who, when necessary, collaborate with other autonomous neighborhoods. Seen from this perspective, Mexico City would not be regarded as a gigantic and inevitable structure but rather as a network of miniscule structures that reconfigure alliances as necessary (for example, to produce or exchange medical supplies in the midst of a pandemic) but that administer communal life in neighborhood-level, autonomous units. We could even go further and imagine the world not as the sum of nation states—these sociopolitical megastructures with centralized powers that have parceled up the world and established borders—but rather as a shifting, collaborative, and adaptable conglomerate of miniscule social structures. An example is found in my own community, where the operation of the assembly is constituted as a force that impedes the creation of a governing class and allows for any professional or agricultural laborer or preschool teacher or carpenter to participate as members of the communal government for a set amount of time, after which they are replaced by others.

 

In the face of these oppressive systems, miniscule structures are the ones that have resisted the best and made survival itself possible. Following the establishment of the Spanish colonial order and the destruction of the macrostructures of the great Mesoamerican rulers, in many parts of this territory many of the survivors created relatively autonomous microstructures grounded in a practice of mutual aid, self-government and what the Mixe anthropologist Floriberto Díaz and the Zapoteco anthropologist Jaime Luna have called “communality.” Far from the celebrated moments and historical monuments of the last 500 years, our microstructures have resisted the oppression of macrosystems like colonialism or the creation of the Mexican State. Our microstructures have defended our territories and the resources we hold jointly: the commons. In our miniscule structures, we have made life itself possible despite the centralized powers and governing classes of the macrosystems showering death upon us. Outside of the register of history and practically in silence, we have reproduced our cultures and our peoples, despite it all. I relate this experience with a sentence that appears in the text created by the Indigenous Action Media: Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto whose post-script reads: “Our organizing was cellular, it required no formal movements.” Let’s leave behind the formalness of the macro, and let’s organize the world in cellular structures.

 

Despite the fascination with the macro inculcated in us, we must accept that their operations are simply incompatible with the construction of more equitable societies based on self-governance and mutual aid. The nation state as macrostructure is in crisis and responds badly when it needs to protect our lives in the middle of a pandemic, because by its very definition it cannot personalize care. By contrast, I think about the effects that a miniscule biological structure would have in a world in which macrostructures like capitalism and nation states had not created vulnerable sectors like migrants along deadly borders, people in extreme poverty who are not able to follow sanitary recommendations, people who capitalism has sold industrial foods that have caused diabetes. I think about a world of miniscule structures of solidarity where the food supply and the quality of foods had been administered in a more just and organic way, where taking care of the elderly were more collective, where there were no nations requisitioning medical supplies needed to face the pandemic and denying them to others because they belong to another nation state and then deciding to close their borders to migrants. What would be the level of mortality of the microstructure of the virus in a world in which macrostructures like capitalism did not exist? Faced with the pandemic, the types of care and the problems we are facing could be dealt with communally in miniscule structures grounded in relationships of solidarity and cooperation with other microstructures. These activities fit under the slogan I heard mentioned first by the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva but which she had heard a long time before then: think globally, act locally. And our locus is the miniscule.

 

In The Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar—the monarch of a great empire—narrates a worrisome dream: a great statue appears before him made of a variety of materials: a golden head, silver torso, bronze waist, iron legs, and clay feet. A rock falls and hits the statue’s feet; as they are made of a weak material, they cause the entire statue to collapse even though the rest of the statue is made of more solid materials. Nation states are idols with feet made of clay that waver even when a small stone strikes them. This small stone is a structure that dwells in the space between what is alive and what is dead. A stone that is magnified by a pandemic in the echo chamber of capitalism. Resistance will be miniscule. Some people might lament the loss of the idol’s golden head or the magnificent edifices built with slave labor, but we will still have our lives. As Isabel Zapata writes in her books of poems, A Whale is a Country: what is miniscule always lasts.

 

The Unsettlements: Moms

This morning I was reading Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez. She writes so movingly about Jeanne Córdova, a butch Chicana Los-Angeles-based writer and organizer who passed some years back, a forebear to Raquel. She writes about butch intergenerational love, how the previous generation of queers enabled us to live, and how we forget them at our own peril. Reading Raquel reading Jeanne, Raquel writing through Jeanne's writing, Raquel living through Jeanne's living is what it means to forge lineages, not just inherit them, to fashion them out of the mud and the tears and the blood and the joys, the loss and the beauties.

Raquel writes, "...as [Jeanne] neared her fortieth year and saw all the ways the movement was moving right along, with new blood coming to tend the outgrowth from the seeds of change she had helped to plant in the early seventies, it made sense for her to interrogate her truer callings."

In the midst of 2020 and the pandemic, I shifted my relationship with the language justice organizing that had been a huge part of my life for fifteen years. I decided I'd try to make a way into what felt like a "truer calling" of ancestral work, even though it felt scary and overwhelming, but also joyful and crucial.


So here I am. Since The Unsettlements: Dad in 2019 at Lawndale Art Center, I had an idea I wanted to work with motherhood and femininity. Over the last years of writing poems, my conception of lineage has shifted, both blood and genetic connection and into other kinds of queer and artistic lineages.

And now, I have the good news that I will be in residence this fall at Artpace in San Antonio to work on The Unsettlements: Moms with my birth mother, Claire D. Pluecker (on the right in the pic above with my kid, Elena), and with my dyke mom, Linda L. Anderson (in the pic on the left above next to yrs truly).

The work is artistic research into the lineage and life of my birth mom and also the lesbian feminist and labor organizing and life of my dyke mom. What we pass down, what we retain, what we lose, what we recover, what we destroy, what we disassemble. And my white queer, non-binary self is in there too (somehow, eek). The lines of research with both moms are happening at the same time, as I am interested in how these two women and their very different meanings and materials speak to one another, how they clash, how they conflict, and how they combine within me. In that process, I am attempting to consider the legacies of white supremacy and the wonders of queerness and femininity in the same space and time. An attempt to dismantle whiteness and embody a generationally-inherited queerness, tinged with struggles around “mental” health and accessing joy. I'm full of emotions, joyful and scared and very grateful for Artpace's support, and that seems like the right mix.

I wanted to share the good news. I also watched this video on Youtube this morning, with Jonathan Van Ness and Alok, and an audience member suggested we inhale self-worth and exhale doubt. So *inhale* *exhale* here goes a little celebration.

I'd love to hear your news as well if you feel like connecting and have the time and space for it.

Blog is back

This blog has writing from a previous blog called Bad Texas on Blogspot from the golden era of blogs in the 2000s. I imported the blog from Blogspot to Squarespace at some point and many things were radically corrupted and I left it behind. But just now, I noticed that a blog post still came up on a Google search and I figured I might as well make the blog public again. I have not written here in a long time, but I sometimes feel the urge to blog again, so I am setting this up anew to see if I end up using it at all. We shall see…

Plant the Seed: A Generative Workshop and Reading

PlanttheSeed.jpg

Saturday, March 31, 2018 - 3:00 PM  6:00 PM

The Black Labrador4100 Montrose BoulevardHouston, TX, 77006 United States 

Presented in conjunction with FuenteCo

Co-led by Franciszka Voeltz and Jennifer Morales, "Plant the Seed" is a workshop designed to break writers through barriers that keep them from creating the work they are meant to write.

Together we will practice moving forward in our writing—without apology. Writers of all levels and genres are welcome (including those who don't call themselves writers) to join in the work and play of cracking open our writer-hearts, busting out of our stuck practices, and harnessing the power of what emerges. After working through a series of generative exercises designed to help you create fresh work and break you out of habitual patterns, we will close the session by naming new commitments to our writing—planting the seed for future work.

The workshop session will be followed by a reading featuring our facilitators, Franciszka Voletz & Jennifer Morales, as well as an open mic. The reading and open mic are free and open to the public—if your inspired to read brand new writing from the workshop or something finished you brought along, we'd love to hear you!

Sharing your work and reading at the open mic is always optional. Facilitation will be in English, but you should feel free to write in any language.

PLANT THE SEED GENERATIVE WORKSHOP

3 pm- 6 pm

READING & OPEN-MIC

7 pm - 8.30 pm

featuring Franciszka Voeltz & Jennifer Morales
Open to the public

This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers.

Franciszka Voeltz

From the crossroads of writing and social practice, Franciszka Voeltz writes poems-to-go on a portable typewriter for magnificent strangers in public places, curates a collective poem to the entire planet, and has two decades’ experience facilitating community writing workshops and readings in living rooms, at universities, and everywhere in between. Writing together is her favorite way to be with people. Voeltz’s chapbook POETXTS is available from Imaginary Friend Press, and her work has appeared in journals including Dark Mountain, Analecta Literary Journal,and Adrienne. Voeltz is the recipient of various poetry fellowships including those granted by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Art Farm. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of California, San Diego.

Jennifer Morales

Jennifer Morales is a queer Latina poet, fiction writer, and performance artist whose work across genres wrestles with questions of gender, identity, complicity, and harm. She has led writing workshops for all ages—1st-graders through adults—and has been called (by the adults, not the 1st-graders) “a natural-born teacher.” She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University-Los Angeles in 2011. Jennifer’s first book, Meet Me Halfway (UW Press, 2015), a short story collection about life in hyper-segregated Milwaukee, was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year.” Reviewers called it “a compelling debut” (Booklist) and Jennifer “an impressively gifted writer” (Midwest Book Review). Excerpts of her unpublished novel, Junction, appeared in The Account (spring 2017) and in Happy Hours: Our Lives in the Gay Bars (Flashpoint, 2017), edited by S. Renée Bess and Lee Lynch. Recent publications also include poems in MAYDAYand in "Pulsamos," a special issue of Glass Poetry dedicated to the Pulse nightclub victims. She’s the president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center, building literary community in rural Southwestern Wisconsin. www.moraleswrites.com

"[A]s a thriving branch of capitalism, contemporary art is adept at transforming such critiques into saleable content. Because contemporary art’s driving brand-identity is criticality, reproaches like Hopkins’s are often incorporated into contemporary art’s vision of itself. Old patterns of domination are thus reproduced, under the guise of self-reflexive progressivism."

- Mitch Speed at MOMUS

Isonomia

In The Human Condition, Arendt borrows a phrase that she takes from Herodotus called isonomia, which is the principle of equal liberty. And she says you need to have a political community which is capable of responding to isonomia, or this principle of equal liberty. And it’s — basically, the principle of equal liberty says, “Well, how come I’ve got total freedom of movement and you haven’t? How come my child gets a really good education and yours doesn’t? How come my mom can grow vegetables in her garden, and your mother’s garden’s just been blown to bits? That’s not good enough.”And she says we need to have — there needs to be enough in the way we think about political democratic life to allow citizens and people to act on the principle of equal liberty. And on the one hand, the situation we have now is a kind of phobic repudiation of vulnerability, everyone’s vulnerability, which is very, very bad.

- LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE here

The public discourse is not hospitable to complexity and restraint, which makes it fraught territory for academics. The fruits of their labor often are demanding texts that few people wish to read or careful lectures that rely on the patience and good faith of a captive audience. Politics is a different game: Pick up a megaphone and your voice may carry. But the message can get distorted, and the feedback can be deafening. - From an article on Seth Abramson