De la gente del Foro Alicia. I'm / a criminal / I'm 20 years old, I'm young / I have no right / to education, to work / to housing, to health / and to a lot of other things too.
De la gente del Foro Alicia. De la gente del Foro Alicia. A Short Olympic Survey
Border-Crossing Olympians Unite!
Borders matter less and less. But on both sides of the border, these border crossers provoke concern, anger, inspiration and passion. Mainly, they face the wrath of the nationalists on both sides who think their border crossing is either taking opportunities from citizens or a treason to their "real country." These arguments are made both in Mexico about the "Americans" and in the US about the "Mexicans". These national definitions and tags for people seem outdated and retrograde, especially in Post-Nafta North America. Most of us are in motion all the time. Monterrey is Texas. Houston is Mexico. Michoacan is California. California is Baja. Arizona is Sonora.
A good list of writerly residencies.
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Make a note of that one. Or use this note as a link to return to.
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Now have Facebook. In addition to the preexisting Blogspot, Skype, Messenger and Gchat. Not sure why all these things exist. Oh yeah, to keep in touch.
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Not sure what being in such touch provides. Besides making our heads heavy and weighted. Makes us not want to unplug. Makes non-electronic communication strange.
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Know the people will now begin to demand the acquisition of a MySpace, a Twitter, and who the hell knows what other cyber appendage to add to my brain. I wonder what our cyber appendages would look like visually.
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That's why we all need residencies. To turn off the cyber appendages while in natural spaces and lively mechanical spaces. Make a note of that.
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Make a note of that one. Or use this note as a link to return to.
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Now have Facebook. In addition to the preexisting Blogspot, Skype, Messenger and Gchat. Not sure why all these things exist. Oh yeah, to keep in touch.
°
Not sure what being in such touch provides. Besides making our heads heavy and weighted. Makes us not want to unplug. Makes non-electronic communication strange.
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Know the people will now begin to demand the acquisition of a MySpace, a Twitter, and who the hell knows what other cyber appendage to add to my brain. I wonder what our cyber appendages would look like visually.
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That's why we all need residencies. To turn off the cyber appendages while in natural spaces and lively mechanical spaces. Make a note of that.
Bush, Georgia, Russia, Sharpie Maps of the US and Aleksandra Mir
So first, I think everyone should look at the articles that poet and provocateur Linh Dinh is posting at his blog Detainees about the conflict between Russia, Georgia, the US, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, NATO and more more.
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This article by Lisa Karpova from English Pravda illuminates the problems with post-Iraq US foreign policy, i.e. we have no high horse to stand on. Or even a small miniature horse.
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Thanks to Linh Dinh I also now know about Aleksandra Mir whose
works often take the form of social processes that are open for anyone who wishes giving the work meaning. The work of art is an exercise that operates in everyday life; a humanistic and playful organism with a large social appetite.
Here is a rad project she did drawing communal Sharpie maps of the US with her friends:
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This article by Lisa Karpova from English Pravda illuminates the problems with post-Iraq US foreign policy, i.e. we have no high horse to stand on. Or even a small miniature horse.
°
Thanks to Linh Dinh I also now know about Aleksandra Mir whose
works often take the form of social processes that are open for anyone who wishes giving the work meaning. The work of art is an exercise that operates in everyday life; a humanistic and playful organism with a large social appetite.
Here is a rad project she did drawing communal Sharpie maps of the US with her friends:
I believe in these kinds of communal projects which mix text and people and communal life and visual art. Yes I do. And here are more photos from the Church of Sharpie. Awesome.
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I also recommend you read this interview with Aleksandra Mir on a blog called myartspace. In it she provides tips for emerging artists:
"Don't even think of getting involved with drugs. Limit your drinking. Only social smoke. Eat basic nutritious foods. Dress warm. Be honest. Be on time. Be generous. And with all this, stay angry."
In Monterrey. El Cerro de la Silla. Saddle Mountain.
No placid air. All kinds of plastic hair. The storm is swelling on the sidewalk brushing everything inside and sweeping us along. We don't think consciously about death but sure we all feel it coming. No lights to dazzle no dancing as if we could breathe. Suffocated by a heavy cloud of yearning and anger and madness tears and slapping. Weighed down into a long trough of once white tiles this sweat and stink is pressed out of our insides and streams down the walls and into the sewer system. All of us ends up in the sewer system after a brief pitstop on dancefloors. Despite the name this is no garden and there is no white cross. We saw our first phenotypic foreigner tonight and paid him no mind as we all are foreigners honestly. None of us is native. How would we begin to count the foreigners. Piss and blonde hair and jutting bands of fat and groping tight T-shirts and delicate gestures and chancing upon a vagabond in a corner and eyes blazing with attitude and eyes stunted by their own lucid visioning and eyes startled by the brown skin and foundation and powder and jackknifing mohawks and spikes. Somehow this jackhammered floor and rivulets of soily sweat and meandering streams of urine and alcohol and neon fabrics glistening and torn. All of this seems closer to justice than any policy paper or legal decision or manifesto or political poem. Let's not write a political poem about Mexican transvestites. Let's not write political poems about steel-shouldered migrants just off the bus from Honduras. Let's not write political poems about those others because honestly the lines are not tenable. The battle lines are not defendable and the trenches were not dug deep enough. With no lines all this risks being a mess and I can accept that just like we accept grinning long-legged teenagers in short skirts with ancient balding four-eyed trolls and the air coolers stuck in the walls recirculating our evaporated drool and grimy liquidity mixing in the exterior evaporated drool and grimy liquidity. These walls are cliff faces sheer vertical barriers and the police stalk the perimeter. Tattered T-shirts and gum wrappers with first names and phone numbers scribbled in eyeliner. The guy was ready to sleep with whomever most likely he needed the cash. Honestly all these juicy details make a good adventure story. But let's not write a political story about Zapotec mariachi drag queen divas in rainbow-colored sarapes. Let's not write a political story about the women in short shorts and wifebeaters dragged up into the back of police pickups. Let's not write a political story about our friends with STD's who we sleep with anyway. Later after the limelight and the calls for another round and another song and after haranguing each other take care and then above the steaming streets above the towering pillars of transportation above the squat concrete facades of this blighted district the reddening rays of first dawn illuminate us as we meander on sidwalks stumbling and murmuring our goodbyes. Justice you told me is not larger than our joy no more important and much less foreseeable.
Mahmoud Darwish (15 March 1941, al Birwa, Palestine – 9 August 2008, Houston, Exile)
Text from a poem from the book Fewer Roses (1986) by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. (Light installation by Jenny Holzer. Photo by Phil Gyford.)He Embraced His Murderer
He embraces his murderer.
May he win his heart: Do you feel angrier if I survive?
Brother...My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?
Two birds fly overhead. Why don't you shoot upwards? What do you say?
You grew tired of my embrace and my smell. Aren't you just as tired of the fear within me?
Then throw your gun in the river! What do you say?
The enemy on the riverbank aim his machine gun at an embrace? Shoot the enemy!
Thus we avoid the enemy's bullets and keep from falling into sin.
What do you say? You'll kill me so the enemy can go to our home
and descend again into the law of the jungle?
What did you do with my mother's coffee, with your mother's coffee?
What crime did I commit to make your destroy me?
I will never cease embracing you.
And I will never release you.
*** Updates *** See this Eulogy to Darwish by one of his translators into English, Fady Joudah. The New York Times obituary (Thanks, Echo!). And also a very thoughtful discussion of translations of Darwish and his place in the Arabic and world literary stage by Hosam Aboul-Ela on the Words without Borders site. También, información en español en La Jornada.
Lo que le viene al robapatrias
En el Álamo no habremos de dejar ni un sobreviviente, tal como se hizo hace más de cien años, cuando nuestros antepasados acabaron con todos, incluso con el más cobarde de ellos, un pobre diablo que se escondió tembloroso bajo su cama, y que al ser sorprendido imploró perdón de rodillas. Pero ninguna piedad habría para un robapatrias, y el metal le entró por la carne y el gringuito gritó y lloró y se sumió en contorsiones.
- David Toscana, El Ejercito Iluminado (2006), 111
El Premio Aura Estrada / The Aura Estrada Prize
I've written here before about my friend Aura Estrada and about her life and her tragic passing last year. Now everything is in motion for a new prize for a young woman writing in Spanish, the Aura Estrada Prize, which will be inaugurated this November at the Feria Internacional de Libro en Guadalajara:
The Aura Estrada Prize will be awarded biannually to a female writer, 35 or under, living in Mexico or the United States, who writes creative prose (fiction or nonfiction) in Spanish. The prize will include a stipend (how much depends on how much we are able to raise for the endowment, but we hope it will be approximately $15,000.) It also, so far, includes residencies at three writers‘ colonies, Ucross in Wyoming, Ledig House in New York, and Santa Maddalena in Tuscany, Italy. Residencies can last up to two months each. Granta en Español will also publish an excerpt of the winner‘s writing.
If you are interested in supporting the scholarship, there is a way to donate at the website. Also, in addition to all of her work already published on the Internet and in print, you can read her writings next year in an anthology to be published by Almadía.
We miss you Aura.
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He escrito aquí antes de mi amiga, Aura Estrada, de su vida y de su muerte trágico el año pasado. Ahora, en noviembre en la FIL Guadalajara, van a inaugurar un nuevo premio dedicado a su memoria y a ayudar a escritoras de la lengua castellana a sobresalir a nivel mundial, el Premio Aura Estrada:
El Premio Aura Estrada se entregará a una escritora de 35 años o menor, que viva en México o en Estados Unidos, que escriba en español narrativa de cualquier género. Tendrá una periodicidad bianual. La ganadora recibirá un estipendio de un monto aproximado a los $15,000 US dls. dependiendo de la cantidad que se recabe, y por lo menos tres residencias en las siguientes colonias de escritores: Ucross, en Wyoming, Ledig House en Nueva York, y Santa Maddalena en la Toscana, en Italia. Cada una de estas tres residencias tendrá una duración de hasta dos meses. Granta en español publicará una colaboración de la ganadora.
Si te interesa apoyar economicamente a la beca, pueden donarle fondos aquí. También, además de todo lo que tiene publicado en el Internet y en revistas ahora, podrán leer sus escritos el año que viene en una antología de Almadía.
Te extrañamos Aura.
8.7.8
8.7.8
8.7.8
8.7.8
8.7.8
It's the one the only once in a lifetime palindrome birthday.
El único palindromático cumpleaños que voy a tener.
At one time at one moment you felt love for one person and it surrounded you multiplied you exponentially making air light and light air robbing you of bitterness and anger and pain and when the moment passed you still said you loved that person out of respect for that feeling and maybe since then that emotion that overwhelming tenderness that sense of expansiveness and joy has arrived again or maybe it hasn’t for quite some time but despite its momentary fragmented appearance you called that feeling love and then subsequently you loved that person. So now there is love the feeling a noun something which is of an instant and beautiful and fills you with light and air and then there is love the verb the state of being and the action that you do more or less it is supposed constantly. Between the two the noun and the verb there is a semantic distance. It’s not just a question of semantics or maybe it is and that’s what makes it so important. Semantics. Love is a moment then an explosion of air and light and to love is a daily decision to hold tight to that feeling and shelter it and to await its twinkling reappearance. But the verb love is comprised of many small moments and is not a constant state at all but a kind of arc on an XY graph with points on it but love is never a line. That moment you felt reappears at intervals sometimes often and sometimes less so always out of the ether and unexpected never willed or called into being and in the meantime the verb of love ties these moments together but could never be constantly felt in that way and so the semantic distance between love and to love is clear. If only how to love in the wide expanses between the appearances of the noun of love were so obvious.
Minardi!
"Introducing the first truly mobile office: the Walkstation." More info here at the Steelcase website.
This image is especially posted for Minardi. Check out Minardi's blog, Gold, Silver and Money. It is sufficiently random and producted-oriented and creepy to be perfect for his blog, . Like the Happy Feet or the Say-A-Blessing.
Yes, Minardi, Technology has improved our lives once again. The good news is you can still have awkward office talk at your new Walkstation. They thought of freakin' everything.
From the first moment, pulling open the heavy metal gate that seals off the front patio where the cars are parked. A little kid yelling. Walking down the street and then down the hill seeing people the entire way. Eyes glancing, watching, observing. Up the stairs into the Metrorrey. Packed so full of faces, noses, arms, legs, torsos, breasts, thighs and every second more packed. Drowning in flesh and hairstyles and biceps and labels and brandnames and perfumes and ballcaps and cellphone ringtones and neon colors Made in China and the eerie music played over the speakers, the Andean pipe music that creeps people out worldwide. Standing and watching and waiting and forced to examine every last decision of every last person. The old woman in her polka-dotted nylon shirt who pushes her way into the already full train car, elbowing a twentysomething fresa girl and physically moving her out of the way so she can reach around her and grab the pole for balance. Another woman dashing to make it into the train I just left and I stop and watch her, people streaming by me on both sides, just to see if she'll make it.
Entertain thoughts of writing one of these people every day, clearly fiction then, obviously imagining. Walking down the stairs from the Metro above ground platform down to the sidewalk to wait in line to transfer to the bus. Another woman elbows past me down the aisle to grab a pole for balance. As the bus pulls away, the same boy from yesterday with his hair styled back into the mullet-mohawk and a long tuft of frizzy blonde hair sticking out of the back. His fuzz still there blowing behind him as he mutters quietly to himself, looking upset about missing the bus. The next one will be a long wait, see.
It's impossible to know what anyone is thinking by looking at them. Especially when that other person is not even thinking in this language I am using to write. But feelings are not in any language, I guess. Feelings like how the woman in front of me must have felt when the bus rounded a particularly sharp turn and my body, my pelvis slammed into her. Feelings. The bus trundled and rocked along, I wondering if I had a camera if I could look at it like I was looking at the pictures, but with the flash turned off, and secretly snatch a photo of the young man sitting in front of me, his head halfway out the little plastic slide-open window, staring wistfully at something invisible. Barely made it off the bus and hurried across the little cobblestone crosswalk and into the traffic circle. (Crossing a "cobblestone crosswalk" sounds so typical, so traditional, so México Profundo and so far from another true statement: crossing a ten lane highway with six lanes going under and four going over, anchored by a traffic circle.) Two rotund woman, both short of stature, in yellow uniforms swept the side of the road around the traffic circle, sweeping up dust and flowers and leaves.
And I, hurrying off to work, sleepcrusted eyes and worn down and glad not to be driving in a lonely compartment separated from everyone else, equally isolated whether on a twenty-two lane highway or a no-lane side street in my own neighborhood.
Entertain thoughts of writing one of these people every day, clearly fiction then, obviously imagining. Walking down the stairs from the Metro above ground platform down to the sidewalk to wait in line to transfer to the bus. Another woman elbows past me down the aisle to grab a pole for balance. As the bus pulls away, the same boy from yesterday with his hair styled back into the mullet-mohawk and a long tuft of frizzy blonde hair sticking out of the back. His fuzz still there blowing behind him as he mutters quietly to himself, looking upset about missing the bus. The next one will be a long wait, see.
It's impossible to know what anyone is thinking by looking at them. Especially when that other person is not even thinking in this language I am using to write. But feelings are not in any language, I guess. Feelings like how the woman in front of me must have felt when the bus rounded a particularly sharp turn and my body, my pelvis slammed into her. Feelings. The bus trundled and rocked along, I wondering if I had a camera if I could look at it like I was looking at the pictures, but with the flash turned off, and secretly snatch a photo of the young man sitting in front of me, his head halfway out the little plastic slide-open window, staring wistfully at something invisible. Barely made it off the bus and hurried across the little cobblestone crosswalk and into the traffic circle. (Crossing a "cobblestone crosswalk" sounds so typical, so traditional, so México Profundo and so far from another true statement: crossing a ten lane highway with six lanes going under and four going over, anchored by a traffic circle.) Two rotund woman, both short of stature, in yellow uniforms swept the side of the road around the traffic circle, sweeping up dust and flowers and leaves.
And I, hurrying off to work, sleepcrusted eyes and worn down and glad not to be driving in a lonely compartment separated from everyone else, equally isolated whether on a twenty-two lane highway or a no-lane side street in my own neighborhood.
Me puse esta camisa hoy porque me gustan las letras. Dice Metallica en letras grandes inclinadas, esas letras que son como relámpagos. Esas que ya conoces, verdad, con la gran M y la gran A que forman un tipo puente en medio. Espero que la camisa le guste a él también. Siempre se ve más punk que yo. Hoy también. Hoy hasta más, con sus jeans súper apretaditos, sus botas negras. Hoy me dio un panfleto que dice también en letras grandes, también letras que se ven como relámpagos, dice "Hagamos del Punk nuevamente una amenaza" y tiene un tipo vestido igualito tocando su guitarra con violencia. Me dio el panfleto hace tres horas. Vino a mi casa, me lo dio y se fue. Dijo que tenía que ir a la casa de su mamá unas horas, un compromiso pues. Me puse a leer el panfleto anarco-punk. La rebelión, la actitud anti-autoritaria, las nuevas palabras como anti-autoritaria. Decidí que a mí también me gustaría ser una amenaza. Ahora necesito botas negras y jeans más apretaditos se supone. Y pues hace rato, él regresó a la casa y salimos juntos. Vamos a la casa de una amiga. Esa amiga siempre nos da chance de pasar un rato a solas en su cuarto. Es súper buena onda la chava. Pero hoy, realmente no me importa si hacemos algo a no. Antes de subirme al Metro, paseamos por la Macroplaza. A cada mendigo que encuentre en su camino le da por lo menos diez pesos. Lo merecen, dice. Viven mal, dice. Hablamos de los ochenta, de lo que leí en el panfleto, de todo eso, y la plática estuvo chida. Quiero comprarme las botas primero. Lo he pensado, y, sabes qué, estoy cansada y cuando llegamos a la casa de la amiga, me voy a dormir un rato. Nunca dormimos mucho allá. Pero hoy estoy cansada.
Entre San Antonio y Cotulla
Good luck y buena suerte
en el camino y on the road
y stuck in Texas y atrapados en Tejas.
I knew my day was headed downhill when I got the email. She had obviously grown up and was in the process of becoming famous and who can blame her. Before, when she wrote me, it made me want more from myself, challenged me to be better, to make me a better woman. One year, she had gone back to the country where her parents were born on a roots type of trip, one she did often, and she returned with stories about her grandmother, her aunts all the people who loved earthworms and forested mountainsides and growing small plants and weeding. They all seemed like good people, the people who she was from. They made her whole and when she brought the story back we talked together about wholeness, about the men we were living with, about the dreams we'd whispered to each other in high school. That year we had reconnected. She said my multicolored apartment was beautiful, she seemed to envy something about me carving out a space in our town. The slight tinge of envy in her voice made me feel better about my choices in life. It had been ten years since we met. We were those girls no one talked to or cared about, the ones who discovered their rebellion in black nail polish and Converse sneakers. In her email, she talked about London, riding the Tube, about her shock and delight at carousing with famous people and writers who would change my life if I had just ten minutes with. While she was doing that, I was surviving a shitty week; I got drunk more than was recommendable for my already damaged stomach, ended up in bed with a guy I'd sworn I'd never sleep with. Everything seemed to smell like mold all week no matter where I went to. All my sentences end with hanging prepositions. In the email, all her sentences ended perfectly, independent and subordinate clauses hung together like Christmas lights on the tree. Her life had become a Christmastime special, the kind of rags to riches story that warms hearts, and my life had become a series of regrets and mistakes, a long avenue of neon colored strip malls with crap stores selling discounted goods that look flashy and original from a distance, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be fakes, knock-offs, bad industrial reproductions of something which had begun as a good design and ended up rotten. To be more specific, her email was a list of enviable encounters with famous people, really famous people like Nelson Mandela and Joan Didion and Spielberg. The email was actually a kind of response to a long, drunken tirade about letting go of dreams I had sent her a month before. She had never responded to it and I wondered why after so many weeks of not responding, she'd decided to respond to me at the moment she did. When she was in London, at the top of her game, when she had so much to report. I realized something at that moment. And I got up from my computer, walked across the curtained house, blinds drawn and roller shades pulled down to keep out the infernal summer heat, through the midafternoon shade to the refrigerator and popped open a beer. The window by the kitchen table was still open a little. I'd cracked it in the morning when the air outside wasn't so overwhelmingy hot. I closed the window, pulled the blind shut, and took long sips from my beer. I had no plans for that night, no idea of where I would want to go or who I would want to see. Today seemed so much better yesterday, when it was a tomorrow full of hope.
La historia de hoy
Dos jóvenes de 23 a 24 años
Llevaba sentado en el café desde las diez y media
Esperando que apareciera en cualquier momento.
Habían dado las doce, y seguía esperándolo.
Eran más de la una y media, y el café estaba casi vacío.
Se había cansado de leer los periódicos
mecánicamente. De sus tres solitarios chelines
ya sólo le quedaba uno: en tan larga espera
había gastado los otros en cafés y coñacs.
Había acabado los cigarrillos.
Tanta espera lo estaba consumiendo.
Tras tantas horas solitarias,
había empezado a tener pensamientos inquietantes
sobre la vida inmoral que estaba llevando.
Pero cuando vio entrar a su amigo...
fatiga, aburrimiento y pensamientos desaparecieron a la vez.
Su amigo traía inesperadas noticias:
había ganado sesenta libras a las cartas.
Sus bellos rostros, su exquisita juventud,
el sensible amor que compartían
fueron refrescados, estimulados, vigorizados
por aquellas sesenta libras de la mesa de juego.
Y llenos de alegría, vitalidad, sentimiento y encanto
Fueron –no a las casas de sus respetables familias
(en las que ya no se les aceptaba)–
a una familiar y muy especial
casa de libertinaje, donde pidieron una habitación
y bebidas caras, y volvieron a beber.
Y cuando las bebidas se hubieron acabado
cerca ya de las cuatro de la mañana,
felices, se entregaron al amor.
Llevaba sentado en el café desde las diez y media
Esperando que apareciera en cualquier momento.
Habían dado las doce, y seguía esperándolo.
Eran más de la una y media, y el café estaba casi vacío.
Se había cansado de leer los periódicos
mecánicamente. De sus tres solitarios chelines
ya sólo le quedaba uno: en tan larga espera
había gastado los otros en cafés y coñacs.
Había acabado los cigarrillos.
Tanta espera lo estaba consumiendo.
Tras tantas horas solitarias,
había empezado a tener pensamientos inquietantes
sobre la vida inmoral que estaba llevando.
Pero cuando vio entrar a su amigo...
fatiga, aburrimiento y pensamientos desaparecieron a la vez.
Su amigo traía inesperadas noticias:
había ganado sesenta libras a las cartas.
Sus bellos rostros, su exquisita juventud,
el sensible amor que compartían
fueron refrescados, estimulados, vigorizados
por aquellas sesenta libras de la mesa de juego.
Y llenos de alegría, vitalidad, sentimiento y encanto
Fueron –no a las casas de sus respetables familias
(en las que ya no se les aceptaba)–
a una familiar y muy especial
casa de libertinaje, donde pidieron una habitación
y bebidas caras, y volvieron a beber.
Y cuando las bebidas se hubieron acabado
cerca ya de las cuatro de la mañana,
felices, se entregaron al amor.
- Constantino Cafavis, Traducción al español de Cayetano Cantú
Más información sobre Cafavis lo tienen aquí en un ensayo de la querida tamaulipeca, Sara Uribe. Por cierto, estamos esperando el próximo ensayo de Sara sobre la literatura japonesa contemporánea y el peligro del prejuicio sin fundamento. Ja.
The jellyfish dead on the beach washing up to shore stranded on the coast was the first sign of homesickness. Also the refinery towers rusted storage tanks and rocky embankments. A weak blackened stream emerging from a natural canyon or well a ditch or some word that is placed between canyon and ditch. After turning back reencountered footprints rounded voluptuous marks smooth and disparate each one a unique impacting. Elicited a certain sensitivity a tenderness a softness of heart and watching the marks the question whose footprints are those and who has walked this way and imagined a body and the body was smooth and tender as well and a sense of loss permeated from shoulders into elbows and back down to ankles as if this body were submerged repeatedly in water like laundry in a washing tub gently by hands of habitual work. All around the spray of the sea sandy rocks coated by a yellowish orangish algae a wall built to protect the homes in the distance on both sides towers rise up and it seemed yet to be everything the word beautiful was invented to signify. But then again the dead jellyfish refinery towers rusted storage tanks potholed pavement on the way down dusty embankments plants suffocated by dust and the drainage stream I could not cross. Also algae and walls and industrial tourism maybe are not what beauty is. Whatever the case may be the space in this heart reserved for this day will not include what is beautiful. This heart stakes a claim to what was amiss. And all of the wrongness made one pine for home.
(Foto by Abraham Palafox. See Abraham´s fotoblog here. Gracias, Abraham.)
(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)
A Vocal Witness
I can't recommend enough a great essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a federally certified court interpreter working at the Postville ICE raid in Iowa. The essay has sparked a number of New York Times articles and video and a lot of discussion. It is a principled, ethical response to an incredibly heart breaking job. In one part of the essay, one of the Guatemalan immigrants says to his interpreter, "God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine." Therein lies the injustice and the ethical dilemma of the interpreter who works with ICE, especially in this era of "fast-tracking" and trumped up criminal charges. I think this essay is a model for the good a person can do when faced with that dilemma--be a vocal witness to historical injustice. Here are some quotes:On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid ...officials boasted... was "the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history." At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about.
...
I arrived late that Monday night and missed the 8pm interpreters briefing. I was instructed by phone to meet at 7am in the hotel lobby and carpool to the National Cattle Congress (NCC) where we would begin our work. We arrived at the heavily guarded compound, went through security, and gathered inside the retro "Electric Park Ballroom" where a makeshift court had been set up. The Clerk of Court, who coordinated the interpreters, said: "Have you seen the news? There was an immigration raid yesterday at 10am. They have some 400 detainees here. We'll be working late conducting initial appearances for the next few days." He then gave us a cursory tour of the compound. The NCC is a 60-acre cattle fairground that had been transformed into a sort of concentration camp or detention center.
...
Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepad in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí...), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their nationality, which was imposed on their people in the 19th century, they too were Native Americans, in shackles. They stood out in stark racial contrast with the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court.
To read the entire piece, go to this page at The Sanctuary website.