How Best to Honor an Abolitionist? Honor Abolition

By Lucia Nagler
Published 9/20/2022 6:23 am PST
Updated 9/20/2022 2:00 pm PST

Just last Fourth of July, the City of Pomona hosted Unity Day LA. It was a day marked by festivities and fundraising, and it began with the unveiling of black woman artist Manuelita Brown’s bronze statue of Harriet Tubman, followed by a ‘Unity Walk’ around the Park, and culminated in a host of events at Pomona’s Fairplex which included live music, comedy acts, and boxing. 

The event was orchestrated by Ray Adamyk, President of Pomona’s Spectra Company, a historic restoration and construction company. Adamyk, working in conjunction with Pomona’s Mayor Tim Sandoval, hosted the event as a part of his ongoing effort to raise three million dollars to restore Salem Chapel in Adamyk’s original hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Late in life, Adamyk uncovered the truth that the Chapel was Tubman’s last stop on her Underground Railroad.  

As to how her Underground Railroad that guided enslaved African-Americans ended up all the way in Canada, in 1868, Tubman said, “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer. I brought them all clear off to Canada.”

Brown’s statue of abolitionist Harriet Tubman is a powerful statement that has already made a major impact on the Pomona community - demonstrating to everyone the powerful impact that art can make in the community - and how much we hunger for representation. I hope that, in the future, Brown’s artistic vision, her representation of Harriet Tubman, will be more centered in the news features.  

That said, the event surrounding the unveiling raises other concerns. The City of Pomona leap-frogged over its own public processes in its introduction of the statue to one of its prominent public parks. Before Pomona’s Cultural Arts Commission and Cultural Arts Citizen Advisory Committee had an opportunity to review the 137 or so artist applications for public art in the city, this one singular application received preferential attention. By disregarding the public process, not only did the other artist applicants receive short shrift, but so did the public-at-large. All were left out of what should have been a very public decision-making process. Though the City of Pomona installed both the Commission and Committee to review all applications, by unveiling the statute before any kind of public review, the City determined that the recommendations of the Commission, the Committee, and its own City Planning Department were essentially irrelevant. 

Why this matters is that it is important that our public government remains responsive to public opinion when distributing taxpayer money and resources. In a democracy, it is important that decisions are made by the many rather than the few.

It is even more disturbing that in Adamyk’s interviews on the network news, Adamyk described the ‘Unity Walk’ as not only a walk for people of all races but also as a walk for the police and the community. During this walk, there was a heavy police presence.

I consider the spectacle of this photo-op moment of “community policing” tone-deaf - a whitewashing of Harriet Tubman’s legacy, overshadowing Tubman’s message of abolition. Everyone, including the youth in this community, deserves to learn about Harriet Tubman’s real principles and her opposition to unjust structures of power.  

Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and suffragist, believed in direct action. She broke the law and helped fugitives escape. They ran from slave patrols and the police in this country. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. 

The placement of Tubman’s statue at Lincoln Park holds a certain kind of irony. Though the two were contemporaries, Tubman never spoke with President Lincoln. During an interview for The Chautauquan magazine in 1896, Tubman stated that she did not like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War days and only learned to appreciate him after her friend, Sojourner Truth, told her Lincoln was an ally:

“No, I’m sorry now, but I didn’t like Lincoln in them days. I used to go see Missus Lincoln, but I never wanted to see him. You see we colored people didn’t understand then [that] he was our friend. All we knew was that the first colored troops sent south from Massachusetts only got seven dollars a month, while the white regiment got fifteen. We didn’t like that. But now I know all about it and I is sorry I didn’t go see Master Lincoln.”

Harriet Tubman’s true legacy is that abolition is an ongoing process and it is from this perspective that the installation of her statue needs to be viewed. Not as a mere gesture at ‘racial reconciliation,’ but as an ongoing effort to make things right. 

This most recent walk happened at the same time as the Pomona Police Department continues to target and arrest black youth at a higher rate than their non-Black peers. In 2021, Gente Organizada, located here in Pomona, released a report that 22.4% of youth arrested are Black while only making up 5.6% of the population in Pomona. Black female arrests account for 44.9% of youth female arrests despite only being 5.6% of the population in Pomona. (2)

Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Full-length portrait of Harriet Tubman (1820? -1913)
Harvey B.Lindsley 1842-1921 (Contributor)
Matte Collodion Print

This walk happened at a time when protestors fighting for women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive rights faced violence throughout the country. This walk happened as protestors were in the streets of Akron, Ohio because Jayland Walker, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man, was fired at 90 times and struck 60 times by eight Akron Ohio police officers for a traffic violation. 

UCLA Professor and Black activist Bryonne Bain tells us, “Los Angeles is ground zero for mass incarceration. With an average of 17,000 people incarcerated daily (as of 2015), LA incarcerates more people than any city in the world. The City of Angels is, in fact, the City of Incarceration.” (3)

According to a recent research initiative by Catalyst California, Los Angeles County’s jail system is the largest in the country. The incarceration rate for Black people in Los Angeles County is 13 times higher than that for white. White people in L.A. County are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate of 1.6 per 1,000, Blacks are incarcerated at 20.8 per 1,000, and Latinos are imprisoned at a rate of 4.3 for every 1,000. Per capita, blacks in L.A. County died at the hands of police more than four times than that of whites in 2015, the project found - and Latinos died at the hands of police nearly twice that of whites. (4)

1849 advertisement for the return of “Minty” (Harriet Tubman) and her brothers “Ben” and “Harry,” in which their mistress, Eliza Brodess, offered $100 for each of them if caught outside of Maryland

Per capita, Black people in L.A. County died at the hands of police more than four times than that of whites in 2015, the project found - and Latinos died at the hands of police nearly twice that of whites. (4)

According to the Los Angeles Times: Homicide Report, since 2001, 972 people have been killed by law enforcement in Los Angeles County, according to homicide records from the county medical examiner-coroner. Nearly 80% were Black or Latino. Black people make up less than 10% of LA County’s population, yet they represent 24% of law enforcement killings.  White people, who make up more than a quarter of the population, are killed in 19% of the incidents. (5)

Some of us may know police who are very good people (depending on who we are), but it is undeniable that, historically, the systems and structures of police have maintained the status quo in this country. According to the NAACP, “the origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’ (6) 

Policing helped enforce slavery and enforce Black Codes, strict local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to labor, wages, voting rights, and general freedoms for formerly enslaved people. Policing helped enforce Jim Crow laws, upholding segregation. Police have targeted and continue to target Black and Chicano activists. Police have worked against the interests of the working class and poor people.

Pomona does not need to be used as a fundraising and publicity stunt. Pomona does not need the city government and police’s performative gestures. Pomona needs real racial justice and change. Artist voices should be elevated. Pomona schools should have arts equity. How can we develop ways to keep everyone safe? Does this current system of disproportionate funding and support for police meet the needs of the people in Pomona?  Harriet Tubman’s legacy needs to be celebrated in authentic ways with the awareness that her mission does not belong to the past, but to the present and the future.

“I was free, but there was no one to welcome me in the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.” 

  • Abolitionist Harriet Tubman after she made 13 trips to bring 70 enslaved people to freedom beginning in 1849. 

Lucia Nagler is a member of the City of Pomona’s Cultural Arts Citizen Advisory Committee, but the opinions expressed here are strictly her own.

The Exploitation of Witchcraft in the Wake of Social Media

By Michelle Gatewood
Published 9/14/2022 6:00am PST

Crystals, altars, and burning sage. These are the apparent new staples of many households. I find that I meet more people who “practice” or are learning to than those who don’t. You can scroll endlessly on TikTok or Instagram with #beginnerspells, #babywitch, or simply #witchtok. 

While many content creators approach their videos with some semblance of respect, it’s impossible to ignore the uneasiness of watching a beauty-filtered video of someone explaining a binding spell obviously attuned to their aesthetic though apparently blind to whom their prospective audience may be.

Of course, I believe knowledge should be free. But these are not tutorials on how to, or change a tire or perform a derailleur adjustment. Spells should not be common knowledge. However, this is not an attempt to gatekeep. This is an opinion piece. The opinion is, that those who are quick to seek solutions to personal problems through witchcraft may be abusing and consequently disrespecting a sacred practice. 

So how did we get here? Was it escapism from COVID19? An outlet for the feelings of helplessness brought on by a global pandemic? Or perhaps just a consequence of the hyper and immediately accessible information on these platforms. After all, all it takes is one viral video to initiate a flood of others seeking the same number of views. 

In a 2020 article, writer Bianca Bosker suggested that the “rebranding” of witchcraft was likely to blame. Noting that previously, calling yourself a witch was associated negatively whereas now, calling yourself a witch equates to calling yourself  “intuitive” and “wise.” Naturally, this would attract many who struggle to feel empowered daily. 

Whatever the case, those who find themselves interested should be sure to interrogate their motivations. For example, if you find yourself in conflict with your partner, you could perhaps take steps to create open communication rather than turn to the option of a  jealousy spell. 

If, after careful consideration, you still find yourself met with a passion for witchcraft, acknowledge your place in a long history of culture. Consider the sources you choose to learn from and why. Is it just those sources that are readily available and currently trending? Are you simply seeking to feel a part of something greater? Would you choose to educate yourself if the internet did not exist? 

Would you desire to label yourself this way if there was no one to perceive you? 

LINKS

Bianca Bosker for The Atlantic

AUTHOR

Michelle R. Gatewood is a Mexican American poet and writer from Fontana, California. Her work often explores relationships and the language of identity. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from Cal Poly Pomona.

Interspecies Assemblage: The San Gabriel Valley through the lens of Jesús Romo

“Riding the River”

Text by Daniel Talamantes
Photography by Jesús Romo
Published 6/22/2022 6am PST

This essay was produced by Boom California, a publication dedicated to inspiring lively and significant conversations about the vital social and cultural issues of our time in California and the world beyond…. The Pomonan is Co-Publishing this Essay

Taking Shape of the River

“In it, you realize the river has no shape,” reflects Jesús Romo on his photo, “Riding in the River.” The photo depicts a pair of vaqueros wading through a tributary in Whittier Narrows. Above the horses’ cannon, water splashes above their knees, infusing motion in the still. Twilight eclipses a vaquero’s greeting hand and sombrero as his riding partner advances toward us—or is he following Jesús Romo? Ripples, ephemera, trace the contours of Jesús Romo’s ghost in the water, out of frame as he puts the scene in focus. The patina of ordered ripples contrasts with the shoreline brush of shadowy chaos.

“Riding in the River,” though taken recently, feels like it belongs in another place and time. The photo conjures modalities in movement, of diaspora, and an environmental legacy that were once ubiquitous in the region, but now reduced to a rare and confined natural space. Wilderness and vaqueros elicit a pathos or melancholic reflection of what could have been. While the photo may hint toward a better depiction of the San Gabriel Valley’s natural setting, it does not necessarily portray the accurate social history of Mexican and Latinx communities. Still, it shows how vaqueros or vaqueras have gained success in claiming public space and reclaiming Mexican presence in the San Gabriel Valley.

What remains of Whittier Narrows is only a hint of what the region used to be. As David Reid in East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte writes, “[Whittier Narrows] ensured the survival of some 400 acres of forest, lakes, trails, lawns, and soccer fields… preserved a link to the Whittier Narrows area’s history and to the natural world… and offers the first taste of the natural world to many locals.”1 Always under threat of development, Whittier Narrows, cleaved and siloed by the 60 freeway, 605 freeway, and Rosemead Boulevard remains a site of natural wonder, preservation, and recreation for the surrounding communities of Avocado Heights, El Monte, South El Monte, and La Puente, among others.

“Riding in the Narrows”

The oneiric quality of Whittier Narrows is troubled by the waking reality of the Whittier Narrow Dam. Despite community efforts to preserve Whittier Narrows by relocating the dam further down the river, the dam ultimately punctuates the city and county’s priority for energy extraction and management. But there’s a great irony here: the county’s erection of the dam had arguably secured Whittier Narrow’s survival. This is an important consideration. It evinces this space as an example of a contested site of culture and power. The dam becomes a veritable metonym for the industrial and settler control and extraction of diaspora’s flow. Just beyond the frame, a titanic urban landscape lurks. It encroaches. Matrices of roads and freeways, telephone wires, and pipes fasten to strangulate the veritable island of wilderness. Waste facilities, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers leech pollutants into streams and soil. The air over it so thick of smog can be noisome of sulfur, ammonia, rubber, or other strands of toxic fumes.

“Trail ride with Esteban and company”

In winter, without any other form of access or way bridge neighboring communities, Jesús Romo explains that the tributaries are the only passable trails connecting this natural corridor to his community of Avocado Heights, until they are too deep to traverse. Auto industries, waste facilities, and housing developments converted a rich agricultural and natural landscape into grids of pavement, fences, pipes, and wires. Avocado Heights, among many surrounding communities, became what city planner scholar William Fulton refers to as the “suburbs of extraction” where Latinx individuals, despite attaining political power, struggle in economic scarcity to find resources and fund public services.2 Furthering this, scholar Laura R. Barraclough writes in Charros: How Mexican Cowboys are Remapping Race and American Identity, suburbs of extraction like the many in San Gabriel Valley, “[find] themselves empty-handed, with few strategies available beyond luring businesses such as casinos, pawn shops, and scrap metal recycling yards—all of which…extract any remaining wealth from already-disinvested sources.”3

“Employee at feed store near Sports Arena”

Situated between the Puente Hills, California canyons and Whittier Narrows, Avocado Heights is an unincorporated neighborhood east of the 605 freeway and just north of the San Jose Creek which feeds into the San Gabriel River. The town’s population remains approximately fifteen thousand people, yet it is surrounded by much larger cities such as City of Industry, La Puente, El Monte, South El Monte, and adjacent to a constellation of other unincorporated communities such as Bassett and North Whittier. A distinct feature of Avocado Heights is its designation as an equestrian district which traces its legacy to the vaqueros of early Californio’s and Mexico—of which hold a vast majority of the demographics. And while Avocado Heights has a prominent identity and agency of its own, its characteristics are as interpretable as the river.

“Rancho Jimenez”

“Mis tíos”

Wading through the river, vaqueros interact with assemblages of making and being. Contested sites, specific histories, and cultural exchanges emerge and submerge in expression of power and resistance. Though we can abstract histories and narrative from the photo, “Riding in the River” is material. The photograph is now a part of Whittier Narrows’ ecology. It is a fragment of the location, both as a living portal and as artifact. It would not exist if not for its historical contingency. Despite attempts at cultural erasure or despite the elision from regional, state, or national narratives, Avocado Heights is immutable. Photographs expose. They are taken, putting moments, people, and places into focus.

“Colitas”

“Community desfile”

“la paseada patron saint festival in Avocado Heights”

“Community desfile” and “la paseada patron saint festival AH style” are celebrations of the patron saint festival, La Paseada. Celebrated in Avocado Heights annually, this is the second biggest event in Avocado Heights Park after the Easter celebration. Romo says, “Starting a few years ago after a group of different families in the area formed an association to raise money and connect with their loved ones back home by several individuals who were undocumented and unable to visit their home communities.” The organizers of the event originate from Las Palmas, Jalisco and like most patron saint festivals, these are religious celebrations that coincide with the whole community having the week off.

The celebration in Las Palmas is known for having a large cabalgata (cavalcade) to inaugurate the event, Romo continues, “Given that this is horse country, we all join in their festivities in the Avocado Heights version as if we are there in Las Palmas for the week.” Along with the tamborazo, a reina (queen) usually carries the American and Mexican flag while following an altar containing the patron saint. The Independence celebrations in Yahualica, Jalisco are on September 16, 2016. The celebrations in Avocado Heights and among the equestrian community, at times, closely resemble the celebrations in Mexico.

“Industry Expo feria de caballo español”

It is not uncommon for the escaramuzas and charros of the San Gabriel Valley to compete with some frequency down in Mexico, or to attend an annual coleadero at their ranch, and then to come back to the US and give an update to their family and group of friends about the latest community gossip, who’s the leading equestrian athlete, and what musical group headlined the event. For being a relatively small neighborhood, Avocado Heights epitomizes in many ways this unique bilateral relationship with Mexico. These are not relationships that exist because parents grew up in a particular place, but rather, these are relationships that are constantly reinforced by the consistent back and forth travel that occurs for recurring events, such as the patron saint festivals, or the patriotic independence celebrations.

“Privadita”

“Filming a music video”

“Horse Parade in Jalisco”

On September 16, 2016, in the city streets of Yahualica, Jalisco, Romo joins a cabalgata underway. The vaquera centered in the photo is named Nadia. And while she doesn’t announce her sexuality publicly, she is widely known in the horse community for being a prominent fixture at horse events and is often seen accompanied by her partner. Romo explains, “After marching on horseback in the parade, Nadia hired the banda and it was myself and one other escaramuza, kind of a protege of Nadia’s, who joined her for an impromptu parade once again throughout the town.” Nadia was not dressed in the typical escaramuza outfit, but rather a charro outfit. “She triumphantly led us on a long-winded post-march route with a loaded gun in her holster. It was a very public and triumphant display and I just had to document the photo.”

In Nadia’s story we have a unique exposure to the dimensions of gender embodiment and representation. She is both a leader and yet presents herself in traditional charro outfits. Likewise, her partnership, according to Romo, remains a discretionary fact. It is no doubt the case that vaquero culture celebrates and predominantly masculine traits. Yet, it is and historically has been a space and identity that has opened gender fluidity and resistance. Across the United States and in Mexico, vaquerx spaces foster hetero-, homo-, and transsexual performance. Massive conventions occur every year in cities including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Mexico City which host queer reuniones vaqueros. The events feature live performance combined with regional Mexican food, drink, music, and dancing. Though these conventions are unique, they also amplify the reality of the vaquero/a/x everyday—one very present in Avocado Heights. Romo, who established his ranch in Avocado Heights as a queer space for artists and vaquerx, disrupts masculinized narrative in his photographs’ style and through his positionality.

Historian Susan Stryker argued that gender representation is analogous to a digital image. She writes, “It’s unclear exactly how [a digital image] is related to the world of physical objects. It doesn’t point to some ‘real’ thing… it might in fact be a complete fabrication built up pixel by pixel or bit by bit—but a fabrication that nevertheless exists as an image or a sound as real as any other.” Like the digital image, gender is a construction, not a material fact. Pixel by pixel, bit by bit, the bodily stylings through clothing and accessories, a person’s behaviors and interactions, their movements, dancing, songs, vocal utterances, and expressions add up to the mix of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality identifications present in vaquerx lifestyles.

Away from the recursive performance of male bodies in vaquero spaces, Romo shares that out on the trails, men transcend typical male behaviors and share intimate details and stories about their lives with each other over bonfires. They exhibit acts of care, play, and bonding that transgress traditional male roles. Heteronormative behavior characteristics are often found to be more fluid where the binary gender model of nuclear family orientation is out of the picture. Men and women ride together in the desfile around the central park of Avocado Heights to show off their horses, socialize, and play. Performative gender hierarchies, though present here in there, are most often ambiguous and indeterminable within these events or settings. Vaquero/a/x practices can disrupt imposed binaries and essentialist notions through endless re-imaginings of sexuality models/gender models, white/brown bodies, and middle class/working class lives. Vaquero/a/x performance digitizes and decolonizes the body. Like music, it blends and flows in measures and meter imperceptibly.

“Towards the San Jose Creek River Trail”

“Ranch in Avocado Heights”

Horses become the witness of human behavior. Witnessing their play, love, and connection, exists an entire irreducible lifeworld. The horse, the viewer from vantage of horse, is immersed. They can grasp a sense of the embodied experience but are always in some way dispositioned. One can lament the separation, but the degrees of connection and distance are innate in every interaction, whether that is by photograph or in embracing a partner for the dance. The interaction between man and animal exposes gestural language. In behaviors between animal and human, or photographer and researcher, or dance partners are modes of interaction, coding and decoding practices, and unconscious and conscious choices.

In “The Vaquero Way” a horse trainer, Sheila Varian explains, “The Vaquero method of training is a beautiful song sung with the softness and beauty of the rhythm of the horse. It is about the total harmony and togetherness of horse and rider.”7 The process of becoming a vaquero often begins at an early age. Training involves more than the act of breaking or taming a horse, but developing a mutual relationship, a partnership with another being grown from mutual respect. The best horses are trained over varied terrain and can navigate their surroundings through experiential learning. Feeling and unity with the horse comprise the methodology.

“Pajaretes”

“Recycled wood chips”

Like a photographer and their subject, or a historian and a past culture, animals and human beings train together to become “available to events.”8 French ethologist Jean-Claude Barrey’s analysis of a phenomenon called isopraxis. To him, isopraxis articulates the “unintentional movements” of muscles that fire and contract in both horse and human at the exact same time.

“Talented riders behave and move like horses… Human bodies have been transformed by and into a horse’s body. Who influences and who is influenced, in this story, are questions that can no longer receive a clear answer. Both, human and horse, are cause and effect of each other’s movements. Both induce and are induced, affect and are affected. Both embody each other’s mind.”9

Animals and humans, like material and their environments become response-able. The interface reveals that between space and place, signifier and significant, forms lose distinction. Through iterations, intention, and idiosyncratic relations, emergent patterns evince rich cultural understandings.

“Herrero”

The complex, interactive relations described between Avocado Heights’ connection with horses, their fellowship of other riders, how the vaqueros/as become innate stewards of the land, and how this connection ties history to the present situates humans, nature, and horses are central actors in the story. As anthropologist Anna Tsing invokes, “Species interdependence is a well-known fact— except when it comes to humans. Human exceptionalism blinds us.”10 No matter the cultural variety available, many believe humanity, the biological human, is a constant. Instead, from molecule to ecosystem, humans reshape as they are reshaped. In considering the domestications that closely knots humans with horses and all other organisms, Tsing asks, “What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence?”11 She and Haraway submit that humanity is an interspecies relationship. It is more than us. It is more than human.

With the connection to the horses, the specific natural history of the San Gabriel Valley, and continual exploitation of the community’s health, Jesús Romo’s photographs convey that we are indelibly intertwined with our environment. Our subject of human nature and what is natural has historically excluded, or marginally considered, nature as a critical element of culture and society. Human behavior is a part of natural processes and never exempt from them. Everything from viruses, evolution, mycelium, deforestation, drought, food systems, tectonic shifts, to cosmic events are essential explanations for behavior. Environmental racism through development discourse is not just material but epistemic violence. Between fact-retrieval through the modalities of linguistic conventions, embodiment and space, or nature, these are “exposures” which emancipate past stories, events, places, things, and people from the rigor of hegemonic, settler, colonial regimes. As each modality can lead one down a lifetime of research for just one subject alone, the researcher alone depends on this collaboration to make something of the findings. The intention of the project and the responsibility of its representation are most important.

Photographs, when not outright exploitative practices, almost ensure a type of embodiment or positionality less credible in alternative medias. Jesús Romo’s positionality, affiliation, and agency inspire an even greater trust in the content and intentionality in representation. Jesús Romo ’s photographs are exposures of interspecies assemblage of the San Gabriel Valley.

Notes

[1] David Reid, “Whittier Narrows Park,” East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, edited by Romeo Guzman, Caribbean Fragoza, et al. Rutgers, 2020. 191

[2] Barraclough, Laura R. Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity, 1st ed.. University of California Press, 2019. 164

[3] Barraclough, Charros, 159

[4] Kara L. Stewart. ”The Vaquero Way.” Horse Illustrated. November 16, 2004

[5] Donna Haraway. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008.

[6] Vinciane Despret. ”The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society. Vol. 10(2–3): 111–134. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X04042938

[7] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. [1] Ibid.

Daniel Talamantes is a writer from the Central Valley of California. He is working toward a doctorate at Claremont Graduate University currently as an environmental historian, ethnographer, and environmental justice activist. Essays, short stories, and poems of his have been published with Entropy, Elderly, SF Chronicle, Soft Punk, to name a few. His first poetry chapbook Ruminate Emergent was the winner of the Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series and set to be published Fall 2022. 

Jesús Romo is an activist, photographer, and resident of Avocado Heights. You can find him on the trails and fighting for clean air, water, and land with and for SGV residents.

Boom California is a free refereed online media publication dedicated to inspiring lively and significant conversations about the vital social and cultural issues of our time in California and the world beyond. It aims to be the place where the most serious discussions are happening about the world in California and California in the world. To do this we host academic conversations in the forms of peer reviewed articles that both highlight and advance scholarly discourse about California culture, and do so in a manner that is public-facing and oriented toward the social and practical concerns of ordinary Californians.

Harriet Tubman Was An Abolitionist In Case You Forgot

By Julian Lucas
Published 8/15/2022 6am PST
Updated 8/15/2022 6:30pm PST

“Defund the Police” might be a phrase that ‘pisses’ many of you off, but if Harriet Tubman were alive today she would be a police abolitionist. She would be a prison abolitionist. She wouldn’t call the police for help because she would understand their goal is to arrest and incarcerate. Being born into slavery, she understood what is was like being held in captivity. Furthermore, we should all know, or at least should understand, that our modern-day police originated from slave patrols.

Harriet Tubman would understand who is disproportionately arrested and incarcerated in the US.

If Harriet Tubman had been alive during the Great Migration, she would have been guiding 6 million Black people from the rural south to the urban north to escape Jim Crow laws and the formation and rise of the Klu Klux Klan. She would have helped guide my father’s family out of Greenville, Mississippi to the south side of Chicago.

If Harriet Tubman were alive during the Great Depression, she would have fought for including Black people in the New Deal because we all should realize, by now,  that Black people were left out. Harriet Tubman would have helped my grandmother Mattie, my aunt Sis, and my great-aunt Minnie obtain social security benefits, unemployment insurance, and federally-insured subsidized loans. Instead, those so-called ‘government handouts’ were often only issued to White Americans. 98% of the subsidized loans were issued to Whites so that they could move away from Black people to create the suburbs in places like Pomona and Covina, California or Park Forest, Illinois. 

If Harriet Tubman were alive right after WW2, she would have helped my father, Thomas Lucas known to his peers as Be-Bop among other aliases depending on the setting. Harriet would have also helped over one million other Black GIs, receive their benefits from the GI Bill - benefits that would have given them a ‘leg up’ on obtaining college degrees and housing. If the GI bill had been made available to the Blacks as promised, it would have helped them enter the American middle class. My father, a US veteran, wouldn’t have had to run underground gambling joints and work in bowling alleys fixing the bowling machines if he had the same opportunities extended to him as were extended to his white peers.

If Harriet Tubman would have been alive during the Civil Rights years, she would have supported Malcom X. She understood that while Martin wanted to integrate, Malcolm knew that the fundamental problem was that the Black communities lacked the resources of the white communities. 

Harriet Tubman understood all this because she had received only $200 for her three years of service in the Civil War, under Abraham Lincoln. Harriet was no fool and wasn’t going to settle for less. She spent the next three decades seeking the additional compensation she deserved. During the late 1890s, she submitted her affidavit to Congress explaining her request for payment of an additional $1800 as the proper compensation for her military service commensurate with what her white peers received. She understood there was a significant gap in pay between Whites and Blacks - a gap that exists today. 

Harriet carried a pistol and a sword during her missions to free slaves just as Malcolm felt it was necessary to guard himself and his family with a rifle. 

If Harriet Tubman had been alive, Malcolm and Martin wouldn’t have died violent deaths by gunshot but would have been laid to rest peacefully of natural causes. If Harriet Tubman were alive during the War on Drugs era, she would have saved my cousins, Alvin, Kenny, and Kylie, including the millions of Black lives that were lost to the system and to early graves. Harriet understood that both business and the government benefit from prison labor, and she would have also understood the school-to-prison pipeline and how it systemically targets Black and Brown youth. If Harriet Tubman were alive today, she would have done more than kneel in protest alongside Colin Kaepernick, or march in a Black Lives Matter Protest. She knew well the injustices - the killing of Blacks at the hands of the Police and the overrepresentation of Black people in the prisons. I know this because she said, “Every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away.” Harriet’s statement reminds me of the time in my life when I was a Black youth growing up in a predominantly White city being constantly harassed by police.

So when people get upset over the phrase “Defund the Police!” - remember that Harriet Tubman would have been fighting the whole time to abolish the police and prisons because let’s not forget, Tubman was an abolitionist. 

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Whites make up 76% of the population, but only 69% of the arrests, while Blacks, who make up 14% of the population, constitute 27% of the arrests. Furthermore, Black U.S. residents (465 per 100,000 persons) were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white US residents (133 per 100,000 persons) at midyear 2020.

LINKS
FBI Crime Report 2019
Jail Inmates 2020
How the GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to A Million Black WII Veterans
For Black Artists, the Great Migration Is an Unfinished Journey

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, creative strategist, a purveyor of books and writer in training, but mostly a photographer. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking unhoused veterans to housing.

Book Review: CITY ON THE SECOND FLOOR

City On The Second Floor: A work of mastery about the social and civil structures that we live and work under. An intellectually riveting description of the struggle in America today, put together with the patience and  skill of a precision clock maker.   A tremendous work of our times.

Review by Eddie Grijalva
Published 6/5/2022 9:47am PST
Buy Book —> Flower Song Press

Some poets write of love and bravery. Some write of politics, plague and war.  Matt Sedillo writes of America today, which means he writes of all these things, though he does so with ferociousness.  He writes during an age of great transition and wrath.  The very face of America is changing, which scares a lot of people.  Powerful ones too.  Though when the powerful become remorseless in their actions towards the less powerful it takes an equally remorseless (also fearless) pen to alert the masses that a sword of Damocles looms overhead.  City On The Second Floor, the third book by Matt Sedillo and second with Flowersong Press is a foray into sociology and his version of a love song/intervention to Los Angeles, the city he was born and raised in.

 

Excerpts from L.A. IS FULL OF PIGS:

“Los Angeles is falling apart / In the streets, in the suburbs / In the wind / In a barely kept Hollywood

bathroom / Wheezing, vomiting, coughing up blood / The past few days, these past few years / I have

spread myself across this sprawl / and fear this drive may kill me / May kill us all and I wander / Over to

general hospital / Between whose walls desperation wears in high concentration / Across the faces of the

shopworn / And prematurely ill alike as they wait upon news of illness they cannot afford to have /

Survival without insurance / This may take a while….”

 

“…Los Angeles is full of good people / Who time to time / can turn a blind eye / to killer policy ....”

Sedillo’s last book: Mowing Leaves Of Grass, was a visceral yet intellectual sally into ethnic studies which took on a life of its own in the Chicano community and beyond. It is now taught in ethnic studies classes in universities around the country.  City On The Second Floor is an indictment of the governmental systems that created the society we’re all stuck with today.  One of racism, police killings, gentrification, consumerism as God, environmental exploitation, suffering of the poor and many other travesties.  Sedillo isn’t shy about it either, he’s a fire-spitter and he’s mentioned before, “ I’m not here to make friends” .   He’s been described as, “The stone-cold best political poet in America '' and the “Poet Laureate of the struggle”.  He’s been featured in a litany of publications, including The L.A. Times. He’s also appeared on CSPAN and has spoken at over one-hundred universities. He’s been compared to everything from a Biblical Prophet to a lyrical Marx. Whether you agree with his politics or not there are   undeniable truths in Sedillo’s historically dense works, or what the Chicano streets and Dr. Jose Prado—the Sociology Professor who authored the foreword—calls “La mera neta!”

Even with the deadly serious nature of the topics Sedillo covers in City On The Second Floor, he expertly balances them out with a bit of comic relief.  For example, in his poem Precarious Rex: after reminding us, “Just how precious little / Democracy there is in the way of things”, he then tempers this hard lesson with a bit of levity:

“An invitation to reunion with a dear friend / Only to be met with attempts to be roped in / Into

some type of / Academic pyramid scheme / A tenure track position / In Carbondale Illinois / I would

rather die / A thousand deaths / in all the chain restaurants / of Monrovia / Then…./ I woke up

in the back of a rideshare/ Better there than the jailers I suppose, though I could not help but / Wonder if I had left the bar of my volition / Checked my pockets / losing tickets / still in place / I am after all / A fool

of / Odd and tragic / Sentiments….”

Having lived in the region of Carbondale in Southern Illinois (go Salukis) for a time as a young adult, I totally understand why one would rather, “die a thousand deaths” before committing their future to a life of academic exile in middle America, which I found particularly funny.  Sedillo skillfully uses this technique of weaving humor amongst some of the heaviest topics known to mankind throughout this volume of work.

With an extensive knowledge of history and philosophy Sedillo uses the cold hard facts of the past to demonstrate the ethical and moral dilemmas that are still right in front of our faces today.  As a result of this historically-deep research used to craft these poems, Sedillo speaks with the authority of a Will Durant.  Though also possessing a healthy suspicion of political and social structures he displays a natural instinct to investigate power, similar to a Mike Davis.  And akin to a Martin Espada, he’s on a mission to reclaim the historic record and undo the whitewashing of our past.  We are watching the blossoming of an incredible talent.  At this pace with his tremendous erudition, work ethic, and unflinching ability to tell the whole absurdly-tragic truth, in my humble opinion, he has the ability to be as important to the twenty-first century as Ginsberg and Neruda were to the twentieth.

Another theme in City On The Second Floor is that of environmental exploitation and the global warming that it’s ultimately leading to.  He touches on this subject in a few of the poems.  Painting a vivid picture of environmental crimes and the consequences we’ll all pay so the powerful can globe-trot and strip goods from the hinterlands of weaker nations to feed the insatiable appetite of ever-starving industry.

 

Excerpt from Storm Warnings:

“When it all finally goes down / When the Titanic / Finally sinks / When there is nowhere / Left to hide the money / When the Alps finally melt / When Switzerland / Becomes a barren desert / And the Caymans/ Are buried / Miles below / Sea level / The fortune five hundred / Will set up / Tax shelters / On the moon /

A storm is brewing / From the winds of Fukushima / From the ash of Three-Mile Island / From the

Criminal negligence / The killing plunder / You can hear the distant thunder / strip the Earth to feed

Industry / Pillage the country / To please the city / Milk the city / To engorge the capital / Make weapons capable / Of destroying the planet / Turn profit /  From tankers that poison / The ocean / From factories /

That darken the sky / And a storm is brewing / From the ghosts of Bhopal ....”

As mentioned before, there’s history in every nook and cranny of this volume, lessons in every throwaway line.   He invokes the environmental disasters of Fukushima and Three-mile Island.  Two well known nuclear accidents in Japan and America respectively, though he mentions a third incident with “the ghosts of Bhopal”.  Which refers to a gas explosion at a Union Carbide Plant near Bhopal, India that killed three-thousand instantly and poisoned hundreds of thousands more in 1984.  It’s still killing people today and is considered one of the world's worst industrial accidents.  Here Sedillo reminds us of the true cost of industry while at the same time teaching a historical lesson and confronting the reader with a moral dilemma.  It is also a “storm warning” to the billionaire class.  Reminding them of the fact that they can run but can’t hide from the effects of climate change and the social chaos that comes with.  Eventually  the Earth will reckon with those who marshaled the wrath of the wind.  Golden parachutes are useless in category five hurricanes.

 
The Sea:

“Whatever it is we are doing / It is only making the storm stronger / There is land under the water /

And there too we drill / Capitalists dream of bottomless pits / Then piss and shit the bed plastic / All life

began in the ocean / And there too we kill / There are mountains under the water / Cities too I imagine /

Arrogant and delusional / One day the sea will swallow us whole.”

City on the Second Floor is a call to action.  Especially to the Chicano community.  Sedillo is on a mission to get his message across to as many people as possible. This book is his, “ Molotov, tossed towards Camelot”, his way of sounding the alarm.   Will we hear it though?  We can all smell what’s in the air in America today and we know that something is wrong in the way of things. Maybe we can’t put our finger on it, but a self-taught Chicano intellectual from Los Angeles just put a big red X on it for us all to see. I take an optimistic view of this complex work: that even though the world and our society are the way they are today, if we wake up and start pulling in the same direction the descendants of the poor and suffering of this world can shake off their yokes and experience a more saturnian society in their future. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys well-crafted, deep and meaningful, historically inspired poems, with an edge. It’s a powerful work destined to become a classic.  Following his seminal work, Mowing Leaves of Grass was always going to be tough. Though Sedillo definitely rose to the occasion and answered the bell with this sublime volume of Poems.

What it Means to Live on Indigenous Land

Illustration from De Agostini Collection/DEA/M. Seemuller/Getty Images

By Pamela Nagler
Published 5/31/2022 8:51am PST

It was in 1958 when then US Senator John F. Kennedy wrote his best-seller, A Nation of Immigrants, that he advanced the notion that the United States could be best understood through its immigrants - excluding the reality of millions who had neither lived the immigrant experience personally - nor lived it generationally through the experiences of their ancestors.

Indigenous people were already here when the immigrants arrived, and it was not long after the immigrants or settler-colonists arrived that they demanded the import of enslaved people from Africa to labor for them.

It is a myth that the US is a nation of immigrants, but based on this untruth, our nation has constructed a national story that continues to perpetuate itself - morphing into new constructs. It is, at the heart, a false story used to justify the primacy of our nation’s position in the world, and it has permeated our textbooks, been taught in our schools, been circulated by our politicians, and has contributed to our national rhetoric and the way we think about ourselves. This myth forms the basis for what we call American Exceptionalism - a belief held by many that the United States is so inherently different, so uniquely superior, its values so exceptional, that our political system - and our history - is beyond comparison. It’s a distorted view that is useful to prop up our regime because it tells us - and everyone else - that our country is both destined - and entitled - to play a distinctly positive role on the world stage.

Mitt Romney, in his acceptance speech as Republican nominee for President, in 2012, said, “Optimism is uniquely American. It is what brought us to America. We are a nation of immigrants.”

Former President Barack Obama, speaking at a Nevada high school in 2016, said, “We are a nation of immigrants, and that means we are constantly being replenished with fighters who believed in the American Dream, and it gives us tremendous advantage over other nations.”

That same year, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton evoked the Statue of Liberty, when she said that it serves to remind “us of who we are and where we came from. We are a nation of immigrants and I am proud of it.”

Nicholas Galanin "Never Forget" art installation, part of Desert X outside Palm Springs, California, in 2021.

All this rhetoric masks the violence involved when settlers first arrived here and killed, raped, removed indigenous people so that they could live on their land. Further, it whitewashes the truth that their new settlements were often built or propped up with the labor of the enslaved.

The more accurate lens to look at the foundations of our nation is not through the lens of immigration, but through the lens of settler-colonialism. And even though settler-colonists may have called themselves immigrants from time to time, they were not. They did not move to new places to live among those who already lived here. They did not come to assimilate - to learn their language and customs - they came for land and opportunity that they could not find in their home country - and the removal of the indigenous people was part of their so-called 'immigration.' 

Contemporary Rebecca Dunbar-Ortiz tells us:

“The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous people as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide.”  

And so there it is. As a nation, we tell ourselves stories to motivate ourselves, to move ourselves forward, to justify our actions and our history. By refusing to tell the authentic stories of our real origins, by refusing to utter the actual word, genocide - state-sanctioned murder and erasure - we are refusing to acknowledge what’s at the root of the problems we face today. Institutional racism, wealth and income inequality, poverty and the unhoused, lack of access to resources, the destruction of our environment also define us as a nation, but our country, rooted in fraudulent narratives, dismisses who ‘we’ really are. Sly hint - we aren’t only immigrants. And even at that, the immigrant experience is a widely divergent one.

REFERENCES
Dunbar-Ortiz’ Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler-Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

The Secret Behind My Empathy

By Michael Tennant
Illustration Rebecca Ustrell
This was produced by Curious Publishing The Pomonan is Co-Publishing this article.
Published 5/17/2022 10:03Am PST

Michael Tennant, is an award-winning media, advertising, and nonprofit veteran for companies like MTV, VICE Media, P&G, CocaCola, and Google. In the 2000s, he sat front seat to the rise of VICE, today’s leading voice in millennial media, and brought with him a dedicated approach to long-term authentic community building. He created Curiosity Lab to be a radical example in media and advertising of business diversification and progressively inclusive hiring practices. Today, Curiosity Lab is a growing product, content, and consulting business that uses storytelling to drive change.

Empathy and consistency have been my guide and the secret to my recent good fortune. At first, this routine of consistent empathy check-ins with myself literally saved my life. When I learned of the passing of my older brother, I turned to the habits that gave me a guaranteed instant escape, drugs, and alcohol.


It was when my body seized up and I thought I’d have a heart attack if I went to sleep, that I knew I needed to form some other habits or it would cost me my life.


From a life or death situation to living every day as though it might be my last. Reflective questions became my default. Questions like, if today was my last on this earth, how would I want to spend it? Or, if the way I’m spending my time, with this person, or that task, doesn’t feel good to me, then what’s the point in me doing it?

Empathy, my dear friends, is not about how I treat other people. It’s a part of it, yes, but the real daily consistent work is more about how I respond to the emotional quality of what I encounter. How am I feeling? How are those who are involved feeling?
It is a different orientation toward the world than what I was taught, or what I know naturally, so it really does take daily practice.

The good news is that this approach has allowed me to work at a high level, while also listening in for signals that I need a break in order to remain resilient. My body has some consistent ways of warning me about burnout. My shoulders might get tense. My skin might be sensitive to the touch. These are extreme cases that I’ve only recently learned.

Some relatable ones to most people might be the pit that might develop at the top of my abdomen every time a name or situation is brought up. Or a situation that visits me in my sleep, my meditation, or when I’m trying to rest and be at play. These were once the very situations that I drowned in a bottle and obsessed over with willing commiserates and some lines. Today, these are the uncomfortable situations that I address head-on with myself and the ones that I love.

Rebecca Ustrell is an artist and the Founder and Director at Curious Publishing, Project Manager for Curiosity Lab, and Event & Engagement Coordinator The Arts Area.

Critique of Zionist Propaganda

By Gilbert Aguirre
Published 2/23/2022 6:00Am PST
Photography Ahmed Abu Hameeda

An email sent to UCR students from the UCR Life email list on May 27, 2021, caught recipient’s attention with the subject heading: Antisemitism then and now. Instead of providing information on antisemitism, an abhorrent form of discrimination which has no place in civil society, the piece intended to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and erase the existence and justified resistance of Palestinian people. This is my critique of the interview of UCR Jewish Studies professor Michael Alexander, and his interviewer Omar Shamout, for the disingenuous framing of critiques of the apartheid, settler-colonial state of Israel as antisemitic. Their discussion can be read here (1).

In the article’s opening lines, anti-Zionists educated on what anti-Zionism and antisemitism are, are made aware that the framing of this article is entirely disingenuous— the working definition of antisemitism in the article comes from the Anti-Defamation League, which classifies antisemitism as being “based on age-old stereotypes and myths that target Jews as a people, their religious practices and beliefs, or the Jewish State of Israel” (2). I will repeat that antisemitism, like all forms of prejudice, is absolutely abhorrent and must be destroyed by any means necessary. However, in framing critiques of Israel as antisemitic, activists fighting for justice in Palestine are silenced, as the Anti-Defamation League’s definition of antisemitism functions to quell dissent of Israel. Shamout proceeds to frame the purpose of his interview with Alexander as a response to “data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League [which] shows an increase in violent attacks, vandalism and harassment of Jews in the U.S., around the world, and online, since fighting broke out between Israel and Gaza’s militant rulers Hamas earlier this month.” So, in analyzing this framing, actual antisemitic attacks are being lumped in with “vandalism and harassment,” keeping in mind that the working definition of antisemitism in Shamout’s piece includes critique of Israel as antisemitic, vandalizing the term “Free Palestine” on a wall, or critiquing Israel on twitter would also qualify as antisemitic. Again, critiquing Israel is not antisemitic, and this framing portrays a fictitious world in which critiques of Israel have the same material impacts on Jewish people as violent hate crimes committed by white supremacists.

Additionally, the data compiled by the ADL reporting an increase in antisemitism is contested. In an analytical article published by Jewish Currents, a magazine committed to leftist Jewish discourse, Mari Cohen questions and analyzes the data and methods that contribute to the ADL’s report. Cohen, like many leftists, is concerned by the weaponizing of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and her analysis contributes greatly to how the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism contributes to misinformation and skewed data— which the ADL’s report exemplifies (3).

Another part of my critique will include the constant erasure of Palestinian people and Palestine as a sovereign state. In the quotation provided above, Shamout makes his first attempt, through the phrase “fighting broke out between Israel and Gaza’s militant rulers Hamas—“ not Israel and Palestine, not the Israeli Defense Force and Palestinian’s resistance movement, not Israel’s occupying force and the Palestinian resistance; Shamout erases Palestine entirely, as if it were a dirty word. Shamout proceeds in the next paragraph to use the problematic framing that critique of Israel equates to antisemitism to assert, “while hatred toward Jews is sadly nothing new, these incidents are framed against the backdrop of recent Middle East violence, a surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment,” which implies that Palestinian existence is itself a problem. So I ask, what exactly does the term “pro-Palestinian sentiment” imply? What makes “pro-Palestinian sentiment,” in other words defense of Palestinian’s right to exist and resist violence from the state of Israel, support hatred towards Jewish people? Would the international movements and demonstrations against police violence after the murder of George Floyd be considered “pro-Black sentiment”? Why is Palestinian existence framed as a problem?

Shamout almost comes to see that anti-Zionism is separate from antisemitism when he asks Alexander, “Many of the recent antisemitic incidents have used the term ‘Zionism.’ Can you explain what Zionism meant historically, what it means today, and how the term has been used by racists to target jews?” To which Alexander gives a bloated, incoherent response that doesn’t state the clear intentions of Zionism, which is a colonial project whose modern conception was proposed and propagated by Theodor Herzl (4).

Zionism, a political position, is framed by Alexander as, “simply Jewish nationalism: the desire for the Jewish people to have and hold their own state,” ignoring that this political position hinges upon the colonization of Palestine, and the genocide of its native occupants. Alexander seems to support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as he states, “Let’s not forget, the logic of self-determination implies the cleansing of everybody else in order to achieve a majority. Cleanse or be cleansed. The logic is stark, but to date it remains the main means by which nation states are formed.” So I ask, how did UCR News allow this violent, genocidal speech to get published to its student body? How can a professor be unashamed of giving a defense of what he himself refers to as “the cleansing of everybody else in order to achieve a majority”?

Shamout, expecting an answer to the question “So it’s fair to say that not all critiques of Zionism should be cast as antisemitic?” receives another bloated, asinine response where Alexander goes to further defend genocide. Alexander proposes a both-sides defense of genocide in his next monologue, again not answering the question, as he states, “Zionism is as legitimate and as problematic as any other nationalism”— to this point I argue that nationalism against an oppressive force is legitimate (5). Nationalism against colonizing forces has been used historically by Cubans proud of their nation’s decolonial revolution, the Irish Republican Army’s resistance against British colonial rule, and Palestinians’ fight against the Israeli government that actively pushes Palestinians out of their homes, murders Palestinian children, and bombs densely populated territories (6).That nationalism is quite separate from nationalism that seeks to oppress another group, and expand the nation’s borders, disregarding human rights and international law— which is precisely what Palestinians have been resisting since the birth of Zionism. Alexander continues, “it is problematic in the sense that having formed an ethnic majority, Israel turns around and polices its remaining minorities.” As a reminder, the minorities Alexander refuses to name are Palestinians. Additionally, the Palestinians Alexander refuses to name have only become minorities as a result of Israeli occupation, a modern project that ironically results in some Palestinians being older than the illegitimate state of Israel. “Nearly all majorities do this. This past year, we all saw once again how the American policing of minorities is no exception. The problem of minorities is systemic and is not particular to Israel or to the U.S. Yet that does not excuse Israel from the need to acknowledge and cease the violence of its nation building.” Although implicitly, excusing is exactly what Alexander is doing. To both-sides and what-about state violence via settler-colonialism and white supremacist policing in both Israel and the United States is a disingenuous deflection that attempts to justify the violence of Israel. Alexander is saying— Yeah, it sucks, but that’s just how it goes. By putting on an apolitical mask, in this case and in any other case, it is very clear that the person engaging in the both-sides / what-about argument is on the side of the oppressor. In the last two sentences of his pro-genocide diatribe, it appears Alexander returns to answer Shamout's question on whether or not all critiques of Zionism equate to antisemitism, I am not sure because Alexander has thus far shown a clear aversion to answering any question directly. He states, “I would say this is the great moral imperative and conundrum of the Jewish people in our time. Still, it is a conundrum that rightly should be admitted and shared by hundreds of nations and national movements.” Again, an asinine non-answer that serves to conflate all Jewish people with the ideology of Zionism, to serve Alexander’s personal political agenda. 


At the interview’s conclusion, Shamout asks Alexander, “what do you think are the best ways to combat antisemitism in our communities, both physical and online?” to which Alexander does not speak to antisemitism, but once again to the prospects and effects of propagating Zionism without consequence. His opening statement to this sentence is, again, incoherent, so I’ve done the work of decoding it. He states, “I would need to expand the purview of the mandate to include the elimination of Islamophobia and the denial of Palestinian rights to a free and self-determined state.” This thirty-one word sentence means almost nothing, but serves to frame the Israeli occupation of Palestine as a religious issue. Contrary to what Alexander is propagating, there are Palestinians of Muslim faith, Christian faith, Jewish faith, and atheists (7)— keep in mind the question Shamout asked concerned how to combat antisemitism, but Alexander’s monologue concerns Zionism. In the following sentence, Alexander reveals his true intentions as he states, “it would also have to include complete civil rights for Palestinians and other minorities who are Israeli citizens.” By granting Palestinians citizenship status, he is finally revealing his agenda as a one state solution Zionist. Under the proposed civil rights, Palestinians won’t have their land, and they would be citizens of the illegitimate state of Israel that imposed itself unto the Palestinian people.

Ultimately, this interview published by UCR News is unacceptable in its disingenuous framing of a human rights issue that affects the lives of real people, and has affected the lives of Palestinian students at UCR. In framing critiques of Zionism as antisemitic, and speaking almost exclusively to Zionism in an interview which is supposedly about antisemitism, Alexander constructs an argument that, within the argument’s fabrication, cannot be critiqued without being antisemitic. Furthermore, the answers Alexander gives are so bloated and incoherent, I don’t understand how he is a professor at UCR, as I’ve had more coherent and substantive conversations with my five year old brother, who would stand firmly against genocide if knowledgable enough to understand it— not provide a both-sides / what-about defense so that his in-group can commit atrocities without critique. To be explicit, my use of “in-group” is not an allusion to an antisemitic conspiracy, but a direct contention of the conflation of critiques of Zionism as antisemitic— a clear and obvious disingenuous framing that uses identity as a shield and weaponizes actual hate towards Jewish people, which has material consequences and thus should not be minimized to serve a political agenda.

LINKS

In Defense of a Lone Revolutionary: Christopher Dorner, Resistance, and Narrative - Parts One & Two

Essay by Gilbert Aguirre
Parts One & Two
Published 02/03/2022 11:05 Pm PST

Dorner’s Story

“The warranty of sanity is worth only as much as the social processes that generate it. I perceive a difference, however, between the collective outrages that we sometimes label madness and the idiosyncratic act of an individual “ Robert M. Cover, 1982


This is an analysis of ex-LAPD officer and former Navy reservist Christopher Dorner who was entrapped and killed by police in 2013. Southern California police conducted a manhunt for Dorner after he was the prime suspect in the murder of former LAPD captain Randal Quan’s daughter and her fiancée. Dorner posted an eighteen page manifesto on Facebook with the opening lines:

“From: Christopher Jordan Dorner /7648

To: America

Subj: Last resort

Regarding CF# 07-004281”

The case file number at the end of this citation refers to the complaint levied against Dorner that lead to him being fired by LAPD. This complaint was levied against Dorner, in his perspective, because he called out the abuse of his partner Teresa Evans who kicked a handcuffed, mentally ill man in the face. The reason Dorner sees the complaint levied against him as retaliation is because the department claimed he fabricated the incident entirely, and that lying about Teresa Evans’ conduct is the reason for his termination (Dorner,2013). 

During the investigation that lead to Dorner’s termination, Dorner claims to have revealed a conflict of interest amongst the Board of Rights judges that were to decide on his case, as the judges were friends and close colleagues to Evans, but of course these conflicts of interest were undressed (2). Thus, in response to having lost his job, Dorner states,

“I have exhausted all available means at obtaining my name back. I have attempted all legal court efforts within appeals at the Superior Courts and California Appellate courts. This is my last resort. The LAPD has suppressed the truth and it has now lead to deadly consequences.” Christopher Dorner, 2013.

The feeling of betrayal, and disillusionment of the prestige of empire because of how its corruption affected him, lead to Dorner’s individual acts of violence for personal redemption. After killing the daughter of the former LAPD captain who represented Dorner in his case, as well as her fiancée, Dorner was traveling east through Southern California and had shootouts with cops in Corona and Riverside. Including Dorner himself and the couple he killed, five people died in the process of the manhunt. Dorner was finally entrapped in Big Bear, California and surrounded by police in a cabin. They set the cabin aflame with Dorner inside, he was reportedly found with a gunshot wound in his head, likely fired by Dorner himself.



State Violence “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”
—Carl Schmitt


Abolitionist scholar Dylan Rodriguez makes the important clarification that “police brutality” is a ham-fisted term, that rather the brutality of the police is simply cops doing their job. In his own words, Rodriguez argues, the term police brutality “is often used to refer to violent police practices that are utterly, ritually sanctioned by law”. Dorner speaks to this in his critique of Latino cops targeting and harassing Latino immigrants— because of their marginalized status in the United States empire, law sanctions more violent consequences for undocumented citizens. To this point, the former police chief Randal Quan— who represented Dorner in his case to the Board of Rights— and whom’s daughter Dorner killed, refers to himself as “a cop who had been respectful to everyone he arrested” (LA Times, 2013), the irony of this statement does not escape this writer just as it should not escape the reader. It is tremendously easy for a cop, whose occupation permits him to wield and exercise power as he sees fit, to view himself as having engaged in respectability politics while ruining the lives of others— this is simply what the job of being an arm of the state requires and incentivizes. As an arm of the state, the former LAPD captain Randal Quan is illusioned by his role of power, and is unable to see the contradiction of respectfully enforcing law to arrest and imprison the populace he claims to protect. Quan was so illusioned, he couldn’t imagine how someone, anyone, would want to retaliate against him or his family as a result of the “respect” he showed while subjugating Los Angeles community members to state violence.

In searching for Dorner after he was known to be the perpetrator of the murder of Randal Quan’s daughter Monica Quan, and her fiancée Keith Lawrence who was a Public Safety Officer for USC, Southern California police were on high alert (Research 15). And, as police on high alert typically equates to extreme violence without provocation, nearly killed three innocent civilians in Torrence, California. 

The first women, who made the mistake of driving a truck while Southern California police were conducting a manhunt, were delivering newspapers in the early hours of the  morning. The women, 71 year old Emma Hernandez and her 47 year old daughter Margie Carranza were going about their daily shift, delivering newspapers to a house that was under high security due to one of the residents being a high ranking officer. The truck Hernandez and her daughter were driving in was shot at over one hundred times (Sasha Goldstein, 2019).

A 4.2 million dollar settlement was eventually reached for Hernandez and Carranza. However, the discourse at the time makes it clear that police feel entitled to their power, and thus should only rarely face consequences. A “use-of-force expert” interviewed for the Los Angeles Times critiqued the large settlement, because “a payout of this magnitude typically comes in cases with crippling injuries and deaths” (Andrew Blankstein LA TImes 2013). This reality reveals that the motive of operations for the police is, again, not on accountability or public safety. The women shot at over one hundred times by seven different cops, each sustaining gunshot wounds, is somehow not enough damage or terror to justify a high settlement.

This sly, disingenuous discourse that surrounds— not “police brutality,” but policing— is what Christopher Dorner was disillusioned with. The lack of accountability sustained by state violence and disseminated through mass media and pseudo-intellectual rightwing discourse exist to reinforce the idea that police have a right to exist, and that their existence is somehow separate from, and not intrinsic to, extreme violence and repression.

Resistance

“Any group that seeks the transformation of the surrounding social world must evolve a mechanism for such change. There must be a theory and practice of apostolic ministry to the unconverted, a theory and practice of Leninist selection of cadres and class-consciousness- raising activity, or a theory and practice of legislation and deliberative politics. Of course, some associations - most limited-purpose ones - strive for small change in a world understood to be unproblematic if ill defined.” —Robert M. Cover

In this section I will be critiquing Christopher Dorner’s attempt at resistance. As I have made clear my support and admiration for Dorner’s resistance, here I will critique the individualist nature of his actions by placing it in context with an editorial released by The Black Panther Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, in 1968. Although he sought to wage a war against the police, his resistance was shortsighted and not based in firm ideological ground, despite his staunch commitment to egalitarianism, informed by his liberal conception of race and indoctrination into the empire’s nomos, namely the illusion of American exceptionalism and the prestige of empire. In Dorner’s manifesto, he offers the problematic assertion, “I’m not an aspiring rapper, I’m not a gang member, I’m not a dope dealer, I don’t have multiple babies momma’s,” this inclusion in the manifesto functions as Dorner’s attempt to separate himself from racist stereotypes of Black men. Instead of critiquing these caricatures as problematic and rooted in white supremacist ideology, Dorner repeats them as truisms, so to say “I agree with those descriptions of The Other— believe me when I tell you I am not them— I am one of you.” In the manifesto, he continues; “I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member, I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me”.

I draw this point to critique Dorner’s ideology, which throughout his manifesto ranges from radical, to liberal, and even to prideful of the US empire. His logical ground, firmly against corruption but unable to see that the empire he praises is itself corrupt, lead him to confusion and anger— these feelings are what produced Dorner’s militant, shortsighted action.

So, what is resistance in the wild west? And where did Dorner go wrong? I will answer these questions with an excerpt from The Black Panther from a larger editorial entitled “Correcting Mistaken Ideas.” In the editorial, written by a Black Panther member by the name of Capt. Crutch,  the writer critiques the hyper-militant ideology of members of the Black Liberation Army— asserting that their refusal to work on propaganda and community outreach renders them useless and a threat to the revolutionary movement. A list he provides is pertinent to understand the misguided base of Dorner’s resistance. Captain Crutch states:

“The sources of the purely militant viewpoint are:

  1. A low political level

  2. The mentality of mercenaries.

  3. Over confidence in the military strength and absence of confidence in the strength of the masses of the people. This arises from the preceding three.”

By applying this critique to Dorner’s ideology, which he presents in his manifesto, and observing its impact on how his resistance manifested materially, we can better understand where Dorner went wrong. In observing a critique of The Black Liberation Army by The Black Panther Party, we are able to see how a political organization aimed at revolution, which understands “military affairs are only one means of accomplishing political tasks… We must not confine ourselves merely to fighting,” (Crunch) can work to provide an educational basis that would quell the purely militant viewpoint, and provide a network of resistance, as opposed to individual and isolated acts of violence against the oppressor.

The “low political level” Crutch critiques of the militant viewpoint are present in Dorner’s manifesto, as Dorner praises corrupt politicians such as “honorable President George H.W. Bush”; affirms to Hillary Clinton that “much like your husband, Bill, you will be one of the greatest… He was always my favorite president”; provides encouragement to Governor Chris Christie, stating “you’re the only person I would like to see in the White House in 2016 other than Hillary” (Crutch, Capt. 2017); and his misguided praise of Joe Biden, stating, “I’ve always been a fan of yours and consider you one of the few genuine and charismatic politicians” (11). Moreover, along with displaying a low political level in his manifesto, Dorner also displays the mentality of a mercenary, as his direct action against the LAPD, he states numerous times, is being done to clear his name— Dorner states explicitly, “The attacks will stop when the department states the truth about my innocence, PUBLICLY!!!”. These beliefs held by Dorner, alongside his racialized critique of the populace he separates himself from, further articulates what Crutch calls an “absence of confidence in the strength of the masses of the people” Thus, although being released forty-five years before Dorner’s resistance and death, his ideology and ill-informed resistance are precisely what Crutch criticizes. Crutch does not stop at criticism in his editorial for The Black Panther, he proceeds to offer solutions:

“The methods of correction are as follows.

Raise the political level in the party by means of education. At the same time, eliminate the remnants of opportunism and putschism and break-down selfish departmentalism.

  1. Intensify the political training of officers and men. Select workers and people experienced in struggle to join the party; thus, organizationally weakening or even eradicating the purely military viewpoint.

  2. The party must actively attend to and discuss military work.

  3. Draw up party rules and regulations which clearly define its tasks, the relationship between its military and its political apparatus, and the relationship between the party and the masses of the people.” (23)

These solutions, beginning with raising the political education of party members, an insistence on political training and its relation to militant action, and the enforcement of these practices via party rules are important in leading to an understanding of why Dorner’s story is critical to both narratives of resistance, and resistance in praxis. It is clear that Crutch is not disavowing the Black Liberation Army, but is rather being critical of them because their praxis, void of ideology, makes them less dependable, and thus harder to be in solidarity with.

PART TWO

Crutch’s critique provides a roadmap for people who both believe in and practice resistance against state violence, and also illustrate the importance of critical solidarity. By being critical and honest about Dorner’s low political education, his mercenary mentality, and his lack of faith in the rest of society, we are made aware of the necessity for political education and a network of support for radicals, disillusioned by the prestige of the United States empire.


Myth

“The very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative “

—Robert M. Cover,

In killing Dorner, the LAPD was able to end the narrative and stop his resistance by denying his right to go to court. If Dorner had been tried in a court of law, courts would, hypothetically, publicly validate the abuses Dorner called out in his manifesto— or they would be seen as unsubstantiated and unworthy of attention because Dorner himself would be on trial, not the reason for his action; a tricky reality of the verisimilitude of the court of law. The ethical man— broken by racism and corruption he witnessed firsthand in a system he had faith in —was again betrayed and silenced by a state sanctioned execution that parallels the American tradition of a lynching.  His death, and his body set aflame in the city of Big Bear is representative of what the violent arm of the state is capable of doing to its adversaries; not police brutality, but a state sanctioned murder— police simply doing their job. Dorner, who shed blood because he was broken, is representative of an individual has been sold a lie and grew to hate his role within it. 

In a New York Times article written after Dorner’s death, a liberal op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow wrote a piece titled “Don’t Mythologize Christopher Dorner,” in which he expresses disgust at those who make a hero of Dorner, and apologize or empathize with his action. He states, “fighting for justice is noble. Spilling innocent blood is the ultimate act of cowardice. Dorner is not the right emblem for those wronged by the system,” (Blow 1) but as someone who was wronged by the system, and as his resistance was informed by the ideology of that system, how is he not its emblem?

When Blow cites KTLA’s condolences to “anyone that suffered losses or injuries resulting from Christopher’s actions,” he acknowledges it as “the right sentiment: condolences for the victims and condemnation of Dorner’s actions. Period” (1). The narratives of both Blow and KTLA omit:

1. the two women who were misidentified as Dorner while delivering newspapers who were shot at over one hundred times (Goldstein 1), and

2. the man who, twenty five minutes later, was shot at after his truck was, again misidentified, and rammed by the same department.

Through both revisions, these acts of violence that are a direct result of police negligence and thirst for blood are framed as being a result of Dorner’s actions— not the police or their abuse. The passive voice in Blow’s critique is astounding— the narrative propagated by his omissions are unsurprising. In addition, Dorner’s entrapment and the burning of his corpse is both synthesized and editorialized in the sentence: “Christopher Dorner… who died this week in a cabin fire while on the run” (Blow 1), the section omitted by ellipses is used to call Dorner a fugitive and state his crimes. Blow’s intent is clear— to villanize Dorner and condemn anyone who sees him as representative of resistance and a possibility for accountability and change.

I argue the opposite of Blow’s op-ed— Dorner needs to be mythologized, not only to praise a man broken by a corrupt system, but to let the arm of the state know that we, as victims of their violence and members of the communities they occupy, will support and stand for anyone who is against them. As a corrupt occupying force that exists to protect property and reject accountability, resistance in its many forms should be praised to send a message. A message that states a corrupt, violent organization is deserving of whatever bloodshed comes as a result of their abuse.

In mythologizing Dorner, not only are the police made aware of their unrespected role of power, they are also aware that the public they occupy is against them. By praising revolutionaries, and even an admittedly shortsighted radical like Christopher Dorner, we create a network of support that uplifts resistors. We are aware that violence and the threat of violence brings change. Dorner himself stated that he was waging a war against the police because of their corruption, and what they did to him for calling it out. Critiques of Dorner as an egoist fall short of acknowledging the national context of early 2013— this was before the Black Lives Matter movement, and there were no major organizations to absorb his radical resistance. Instead, because there was no support network of resistance for Dorner, he was compelled to act alone in order to begin the violent change we need to combat a violently corrupt police force. Thus, through a framework of critical solidarity, people who believe in resistance and revolution can set the social and ideological base of escape for possible revolutionaries like Christopher Dorner by allowing Dorner to be a myth, identifying how his ideology impeded his resistance, and using the narrative of his resistance to educate and liberate people trapped in the illusion of American empire.

Blankstein, Andrew, et al. “Women Shot during Dorner Manhunt to Receive $4.2 Million from L.A.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 23 Apr. 2013, www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-apr-23-la-me-dorner-settlement-20130424-story.html.

Blow, Charles M. “Don't Mythologize Christopher Dorner.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/opinion/blow-dont-mythologize-christopher-dorner.html?_r=0.

Cover, Robert M., "The Supreme Court, 1982 Term -- Foreword: Nomos and Narrative" (1983). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 2705. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2705

Crutch, Capt. “Correcting Mistaken Ideas.” The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner, 2017, pp 21-23. Print

Dorner, Christopher. Manifesto. 7 Feb. 2013. Pdf

Goldstein, Sasha. “LAPD Officers Who Shot Innocent Women during Manhunt for Vengeful Ex-Cop Violated Policy: Report .” Nydailynews.com, New York Daily News, 10 Jan. 2019, www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lapd-cops-shot-women-violated-policy-article-1.1602272.

Research And Destroy New York City. Communiqué From An Ex-Cop. 2013. Annotation of Christopher Dorner’s manifesto. https://researchdestroy.com/dorner-communique-from-an-ex-cop.pdf

Rodríguez, Dylan. “Beyond “Police Brutality”: Racist State Violence and the University of California.” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 2, June 2012 pp. 301-313. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23273518 

Lady Winchester by Matt Sedillo

Poetry By Matt Sedillo
Published 02/08/2022 10:27Am PST


Lady Winchester
I.
That is no country for guilty conscience
Laughing, learning in summer near lakes named in remembrance of murder
The young in their way stand as living monuments to generations of forgetting
II.
An aged truth unrenewed is a thing of genocide
The naming of avenue
The making of highway
The forging of boulevard
The foundations of national celebrations, psyches
Bodies of literature
Schools of cinema
Standing in pools of blood
III.
Oh pioneer
This is no place for honest reflection
And I have therefore traveled north
Towards doors and staircases that lead nowhere
Filled with rooms that reach for the dead
Passageways to escape their revenge
IV.
Once I heard the story of Lady Winchester
Building her mansion until the day that she died
In her time a marveled destination
For escape artists
Today sold as mystery to travelers and tourists as curiosity
Of what is past and passing
And they too in their way stand as living monuments
In a home built by rifles
In the great American tradition known
To run from ghosts

Matt Sedillo has been described as the "best political poet in America" as well as "the poet laureate of the struggle" by academics, poets, and journalists alike. He has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums such as the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, and at over a hundred universities and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, among many others. He is the current writer in residence at Re:Arte and author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (Flowersong Press, 2019), and City on the Second Floor (Flowersong Press 2022)

Instagram @matt_sedillo
Website Matt Sedillo

STILL HERE - “Ehkwashim!”

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas
Published Dec 6, 2021 9:52am PST

The Original People of the Los Angeles Basin & the Channel Islands (4,000 square miles). The Los Angeles Basin has always been well-populated. Sometimes we fall into a habit of thinking that the Native people who lived here, before the Spanish, Mexicans, U.S. citizens came, were few, primitive, isolated and without technology, but nothing is farther from the truth.  

The Los Angeles Basin was heavily populated then, just as it was now - and the people who lived here were well-connected to each other through trade and culture that extended westward to the islands (they were navigators who negotiated the sea in plank canoes) and westward to the American Southwest and up into the northern regions and south to Mexico and Baja California.

There was an extensive network of trails - just as there’s an incredible network of highways and roads and freeways today. There is also a widely circulated belief that the people of the Los Angeles basin are extinct, but this is simply not true - they are still here, living and working amongst us - some 4,000.

The indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin lived in a patchwork or mosaic of ecosystems - a few miles to the South, it was desert; to the east it was mountains; to the west, it was ocean. Ten miles one way or another, people spoke slightly differently, harvested somewhat differently, hunted in different places, celebrated somewhat differently - according to their environment and customs. This is not so different from the towns and cities that dot Southern California’s landscape today.

Living in 100 or so villages or rancherias of 100 people or so, the original people had no name in common for the 5,000 who lived here, but they had names for other people who lived elsewhere - mountain people, desert people, coastal people - but those who inhabited these rich river valleys fed by rivers and springs from the mountains, self-identified by their village or rancheria rather than their linguistic group.

Make no mistake - this area was not a desert until we made it one. The story of the original ones who lived here is the story of rivers where the foliage was so dense, a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from Los Angeles to Long Beach and never touch ground. Families would wake in the morning and bathe in the river, warming themselves by the fire as they combed their hair and prepared for the day.

In the case of those who lived in Pomona, they called themselves Toybipet, the inhabitants of Toybingna - located nearby were the rancherias of Cucamonga and Asuksangna (Azusa).  On the Pomona High School campus, there is a graveyard for 118 bodies buried at what’s called the Palomares Cemetery. In 1837, Californio Ygnacio Palomares received a Mexican land grant for Mission San Gabriel’s Rancho San Jose - a vast cattle ranch. Palomares Adobe, located nearby, was located right next to a Native rancheria because that’s what the Spanish/Mexican colonists did, locate their rancho near a Native rancheria so they could take advantage of Native labor. When Ygnacio Palomares arrived, he reportedly said that the valley was filled with Natives.

Courtesy of Julian Lucas 2021

Since 2006, four organizations have claimed to represent the people of the Los Angeles basin: the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe, the Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians); and the Gabrieleño/Tongva Tribal Council. Tongva comes from an Gabrielino informant at the turn of the last century. Kizh means ‘people of the willow houses.’ Gabrielino refers to the fact that they were descendants of those who lived at the Mission at San Gabriel. 

In recent years, the state of California has broadened its History-Social Studies framework to include more information about Native Californians - how they lived before colonization, how they were affected by the arrival of settlers, and how it is important that California public schools teach that missions were “sites of conflict, conquest and forced labor.”

The people of the Los Angeles Basin never ceded their land to Spain, to Mexico, to the U.S. We live and work and play on their ancestral lands.

Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

“For Purposes of Labor and Lust” Human Trafficking & Enslavement in California, 1850 - 1875

Excerpt by Pamela Nagler
Published 11/17/2021 6:00am

Even though California entered the Union as a ‘free soil state’ rather than as a ‘slave state,’ California’s state legislators immediately set to work to install Native American slavery in such a way as to not arouse dissension from the abolitionists back East. Simply stated, Native American slavery in the U.S. was simply not viewed in the same way as Transatlantic African slavery.

Under California’s vagrancy and indentureship laws, the Anglo-Americans kidnapped, bought, sold and received ‘proprietorship’ over men, women and children. Children were the easiest target - more malleable, and less likely to run away. After a massacre (and there were plenty in those days), ruthless white men would scoop up the orphans for sale, trade or personal use. Women were sought after as well - as one observer stated, “for reasons of labor and lust.” Often, the men were simply slaughtered.(However, that said, there is plenty of evidence of captive men laboring on ranches for no pay.)  

For sure, Los Angeles had its auction block, where Native labors were bought and sold 52 weeks a year, but the slavery enacted under California’s so-called ‘apprenticeship’ or ‘indentureship’ laws was closer to what we would today call human trafficking rather than the chattel slavery of the South - not exactly slavery de jure, but certainly slavery de facto. 

Though California’s slave trade is little known and rarely discussed, it was was enormous, and its effects can only be roughly estimated. Contemporary historian Andrés Reséndez in his ground-breaking book, The Other Slavery, wrote that according to one estimate: “this act may have affected as many as twenty thousand California Indians, including four thousand children kidnapped from their parents and employed primarily as domestic servants and farm laborers.”  

However, not all children were ‘kidnapped’ - ruthless men often slaughtered their parents, their families, their people and took them captive.

Much went unreported - slavery belongs in a shadow world of its own - however, there are plenty of newspaper and court reports, Native testimony and official documents submitted by Indian agents to substantiate the magnitude of it: 


“Ready Gain”

Northern California Colusa County pioneer Henry Clay Bailey wrote in 1897 about what happened in his region in the early years just after U.S. takeover. He explained that the ‘kidnappings’ often began with slaughtering the men, and sometimes the women in a Native encampment:

“Not many of the present generation of Californians know that in the early ’50’s a regular slave trade was carried on in the mountains bordering the upper Sacramento Valley, from Clear Lake to Stony Creek. 
Vicious and desperate characters, for the ready gain to be obtained by the trade, would locate a small band of Indians, make a sudden dash upon the camp, revolvers in hand, shoot as many of the men as possible, and sometimes the women, too, and scatter the rest of the band. The raiders would then catch all the boys and girls between eight and fourteen years of age who had remained near the camp. 

Then they would start out for a market, perhaps to fill orders they had already obtained. These men would stop at nothing in their greed for gain, and in their eyes their captives were legitimate merchandise.” 

____________

”A Charitable Act”

Ranchers and cattlemen hired men to kill the adults in a Native rancheria or village, before dispersing the children among themselves, which they declared an ‘act of charity.’ Sacramento Times, March 5, 1853, Exciting News from Tehama – Indian Thefts - Terrible Vengeance of the Whites:

 “In Colusa County, local stockmen Thomas and Toombs hired men for $100 a month to ‘hunt down and [k]ill the Diggers, like other beasts of prey…Captain Rose took one child. Mr. Lattimer another, and the others were disposed of in the same charitable manner among the party.’”

Note that the editors likened the Native to “beasts of prey” and used the derogatory racial epithet, “digger.” By dehumanizing California’s indigenous people, it made it that much easier to justify their slaughter and enslavement.

___________

“Stealing and Selling young Indian boys and girls”

Often, these men who killed the adults, killed them in order to obtain their children for sale. The Daily Alta, San Francisco, 1855:

“One of the most infamous practices known to modern times has been carried on for several months past against the aborigines of California. It has been the custom of certain disreputable persons to steal away young Indian boys and girls, and carry them off and sell them to white folks for whatever they could get. 

In order to do this, they are obliged in many cases to kill the parents, for low as they are on the scale of humanity, they [the Indians] have that instinctive love of their offspring which prompts them to defend them at the sacrifice of their lives.”

___________ 

”Abduction Attempt”

Kidnappings often occurred as a result of warfare, but this article revealed that  the attempted abduction of a Native woman or child could happen at any time. Sacramento Daily Union, 1857:

“some white men near Yreka attempted to carry off the squaw of one of the Indians in the vicinity. Her husband interfered, and was knocked down and beaten by the abductors.” 


Note the pejorative use of the epithet, “squaw.”

____________

“Bright Little Specimens”

This newspaper article reads like an advertisement for native children. Sacramento Daily Union, 1857:

“The Pitt River volunteers have returned to Yreka. carrying with them a number of native children who were given to different families in that place. The Union says some were bright little specimens and no doubt will be of much benefit to those who raise and care for them.”

______________

“To the Highest Bidder”

This article spoke admiringly of the system that delivered ‘delinquent’ Indians to the highest bidder. Marysville Weekly Express, 1859:

“They have a singular way of dispensing justice to Indians in Fresno County. An Indian sentenced for any delinquency, to be imprisoned for a certain time, to labor, to the highest bidder. The system, naively remarks a paper in Mariposa, works admirably, though we do not know, of its being practiced in any other county.”

_____________

“Indians [were] being hunted for their children”

News of this shameless trade in children reached the East Coast, and was brought to the Senate floor in 1860. The Senate officially condemned California for allowing this practice. However, distracted by the looming secession of the Southern states over African-American slavery, the US Senate took no direct action.


The Boston Transcript in 1860 printed a scathing expose on the child slave trade written by one of their newspaper correspondents. The author noted that in order to capture these children, who sold for between $50 to $100, the slavers had to ‘‘make war on the Indians.’’ He reported that he ‘‘stopped at one house on the trail in the deep gorges of the mountains, and saw six poor naked urchins who had been recently captured.’’ 


Further, he reported that the man who held these children was a ‘‘brutal rascal [who] pointed to one boy and said, with the greatest coolness imaginable, that he ‘had killed his daddy yesterday, and thought he was not quite big enough to kill, so he brought him in,’ and showed us a huge knife with which he had slaughtered the unresisting native.’’ 

_______________


“Loathe to Part with their Offspring”


In an article in the March 1, 1860 Humboldt Times, the author lamented that there were not more indigenous children to work in the homes of the settlers, "but the Indians have been hitherto loath to part with their offspring at such ages as would make them most susceptible of training.”


As if it were a stretch of the imagination that parents would not want to part with their children.

________________

Sexual Captivity

An editorial in the Sacramento Union, 1860, decried the sex slave trade:
“The most disgusting phase of this species of slavery is the concubinage of creatures calling themselves white men with squaws throughout various portions of the State. The details of this portion of the ‘apprenticeship’ system are unfit to commit to paper.” 

________________


“For Purposes of Labor and Lust”

This editorial made it explicit that Indians were not just traded as servants, but also for sex. Marysville Appeal, 1861:

“it is from these mountain tribes that white settlers draw their supplies of kidnapped children, educated as servants, and women for purposes of labor and lust…


there are parties in the northern portion of the state whose sole occupation has been to steal young children and squaws from the poor Diggers who inhabit the mountains, and dispose of them at handsome prices to the settlers who, being in the majority of cases unmarried but at housekeeping, willingly pay $50 or $60 for a young Digger to cook or wait upon them, or $100 for a likely young girl.” 

___________________

For the Children’s “Protection”

George H. Woodman was arrested for kidnapping thirteen (or sixteen, by some reports) young Indians, with the intent to sell them. However, he was both discharged and exonerated because he made the case that if he didn’t ‘employ’ them - others would, and that he ‘protected’ the children from unscrupulous dealers. The Sacramento Union and Mendocino Herald, 1863 stated that Woodman claimed that living next to an Indian rancheria, he often “employed several of the natives and protected their children and has thus interfered with the speculating purposes of other parties.” 


“When they find a rancheria well stocked with young Indians, [they] murder in cold blood all the old ones” 

In 1862, the Alta California republished an article from the Ukiah Herald:

“Here is well known there are a number of men in this county, who have for years made it their profession to capture and sell Indians, the price ranging from $30 to $150, according to quality. Some hard stories are told of those engaged in the trade, in regard to the manner of the capture of the children. It is even asserted that there are men engaged in it who do not hesitate, when they find a rancheria well stocked with young Indians, to murder in cold blood all the old ones, in order that they may safely possess themselves of all the offspring.” 

__________________

Runaway Captives

Captive slaves escaped, or attempted to escape. After disclosing that one young captive who had been held against her will by a US military officer and his family had managed to escape, the article explained that the captives were not always the perfect slaves that the white settlers had hoped for. Humboldt Times and Maysville Appeal 1861:


“Several instances have occurred lately of Indian apprentices absconding from the parties to whom they have been indentured. One young Squaw that been in service for some months in the family of Capt. Tomlinson, ran away a few days ago, taking wearing apparel, some forty dollars in money and and other valuables which she had stolen from other members of the family. Experience teaches that the natives do not, as a general rule, become reliable servants. Each individual who has one, will of course insist theirs is trustworthy, until the contrary is proven.” 

______________

Reward Offered for  Runaway Slaves

When children ran away, their captors would sometimes run a public notice in the newspaper, offering a reward. Marsyville Daily Appeal, 1861:




$50
REWARD

LOST

TWO INDIAN GIRLS, ONE ABOUT

Ten, the other fourteen years old.  The oldest

Is tattooed on her cheeks and chin.  Both had on dark

Calico dresses, and the hair of each was cut close.  

Any Information that will lead to their recovery will be

Liberally rewarded: and any person returning them to

Me shall receive the reward above named.

J.H. WRIGT

Plaza, Marysville 

Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

Rape & the Conquest

Photography Julian Lucas 2014

Photography Julian Lucas 2014

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas

“In the United States, violence against indigenous women has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. Though available data is limited, the number of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and the lack of a diligent and adequate federal response is extremely alarming to indigenous women, tribal governments, and communities. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.”

  • Indian Law Resource Center

The Conquests did not introduce rape to the regions, but they did introduce rape on a scale not seen before. The Spanish Conquest of California, as it was elsewhere in the Americas, was a masculine conquest and sexual assault having very much to do with it. Rape, sexual assault, was systemic to the Conquest.

The European invaders in the Americas believed that not just the lands, but the people, were there for the taking. It was not just about taking possession of the land, but about taking possession of indigenous bodies as well. Explorers, conquistadors, soldiers, sailors and Padres alike believed that the Americas and the Amerindians simply waited in ‘darkness’ and ‘ignorance’ for them to claim possession. In order to do so, the conquistador arrived with shiploads of weapons and strategies to gain the supremacy that they thought they deserved. Rape - sexual assault - was just one of these strategies.

Rarely did the conquistadors bring their own women. Women were there to be ‘acquired’ along the way, and this kind of thinking permeated everything the conquerors did. They routinely evaluated the lands they encountered as barren or fertile, placing value on the territories as to their usefulness for themselves. They routinely enslaved the peoples they encountered to serve their needs, and they subjugated women by sexually assaulting them.

In the early days in Alta California, it was customary for the explorers and invaders to describe the inhabitants as “quiet” and “tractable” - a projection of what they hoped for. When things did not go well, they instead described them as ‘hostile savages’ (though sometimes, they called them this even when things were going well). Integral to their evaluation of indigenous peoples was whether or not they could be subjugated, and how easily. 

On their explorations, sea captains and land explorers routinely kidnapped or “took” natives to serve as servants or translators - and they also routinely raped the women. Later, when the soldiers arrived to invade, occupy and colonize the Californias, they not only conscripted anyone they could to labor for them, but they raped the women or “took” them as concubines. It was part of the formula. Contemporary historian Virginia M. Bouvier describes that, in California, the indigenous people faced an “explosive sexuality” from their Spanish invaders. 

It is common to think of rape as a single horrible, ‘intimate’ action between an aggressor and his single victim, but rape in California had a scale of its own. It was multiplied hundreds of times by the soldiery. It was not just a single terrible act of aggression against one woman, but the symbolic castration of the men connected with the women. The physical ramifications of the assaults went beyond a single violent act. The rapes restricted mobility and the inhabitants of a rancheria’s ability to procure food. These assaults set up a cycle of fear and hatred, with retaliations resulting in casualties. The indigenous men who struggled to defend the women often wound up dead. In the end, rape became an act against the entire community, leading to the subjugation of everyone. 

Rape was both physical violence and psychological warfare, and it enabled the conquerors to gain territory and loyal subjects for the Crown.

In Las Californias, in both Baja and Alta California, these predatory soldiers were responsible for the spread of syphilis, ‘mal galico,’ throughout the indigenous communities. Disease became just one more way that the revolution was won against them. Syphilis, if it did not kill outright, weakened them, made the people more susceptible to other diseases, living as they were in the unsanitary conditions they endured in the missions, enduring the maltreatment of the Spaniards which included the systematic use of torture and incarceration.

Spanish soldiers, trained for war, trained to kill Indians, trained in the belief of their racial and cultural superiority, raped. They considered both sexual violence and exploitation as the ‘spoils of war’ - something deserved as a consequence for their service as soldiers. At times, they raped because they were bored. They raped for sport. They raped because they could. Their duties as soldiers did not occupy all of their time. Rape became a crime of opportunity. The conquering males, isolated, without their wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, took advantage of their circumstances. Sexual conquest was part of the language of the Conquest and It was fed by a literature and philosophy that promoted race and gender supremacy while romanticizing the vanquishing and the ‘taking.’ The conquistadors - the military and the missionaries - took advantage of the fact that In the Spanish patriarchal casta system in the Americas, indigenous women ranked on the lowest rung on the race, gender, socio-economic ladder.

And while the Spanish Crown, the Spanish government did not officially sanction rape, the officials expected it, anticipated it, and whatever they said about it, they lacked the will or the means to stop it. Tacitly, they recognized that it furthered their goals of  reduccion - of dislocating people from their ancestral lands and placing them in mission compounds modeled on Spanish townships as a means to turning them into loyal, tax-paying citizens for the Crown.

The Franciscan Fathers in California certainly railed against the multitude of sexual abuses. They considered each rape an act against God, but there was also some self-interest in their protestations. They recognized that the rapes were detrimental to their effort to convert California. In the end, however, no matter how much they railed against it, the Fathers had little effect in either stopping or curtailing the widespread, systemic abuse, and they remained complicit because they relied on the military to sustain the mission institutions that they valued so much.

The California military governors only half-heartedly placed any sanctions whatsoever on their own troops. Punishments were few and arbitrary, haphazard, and, in the end, ineffective in curbing the violence. It was a soldiers’ job was to terrorize and control, and the military and government officials simply recognized the efficacy of sexual violence - rape carved out space for them to take possession of the territories and coerce the people into Spanish compliance.

Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

LINKS

Dear BIPOC Artists We Need to Create Our Own Ecosystems Outside of the Systems of White Supremacy

Text By Jessica Ramos
Graphic By Annika Izora

It’s been an entire year since the start of the pandemic, where our fundamental systems have been viewed again with new eyes. While it’s true that we’ve been living in a period of flawed fundamental systems, many people have began to take notice with events that transpired during the pandemic: the murder of George Floyd, lack of government aid, and the need for essential workers to show up during the peak of the pandemic, my dad included, who worked a non-essential sales job during an exceptionally traumatic and dangerous period of our generation. Society is flawed from our legal system to our job market to our politics. This is especially for Black and Brown people who are dying at faster rates during the pandemic than white, wealthy people. 

Rodney Diverlus, the founder of the Canada BLM chapter, wrote in a 2020 article for CBC, “This year is an opportunity to break out of this cycle we know too well...Let us respond with a broad proliferation of Black arts practices, institutions, and practitioners.” He claims that instead of trying to fit into broken institutions that don’t serve us, why not create our own?  Naive as it may be, being a Latina writer who moved abroad and created a freelance career from scratch, I’ve been able to find hope in art and in artists, and in my ability to create a media career on my own. 

In 2020, Black and Brown artists were scared, worrying over how they were going to survive. It was tough enough already as we operated within institutions tied to white supremacy and that are set up to see us fail. But as Diverlus writes, and as I’ve seen discussed in digital spaces on socials like Instagram and Twitter, what if there’s a different route for BIPOC creatives to take? One that sustains us, cares for us, and gives us back power? 

Design Courtesy of Annika Izora

Design Courtesy of Annika Izora

I didn’t grow up in the art world. As a child of an immigrant in a single-income household, surviving was what was important. So the first time I was introduced to the concept of creative ecosystems was through a graphic designer, Annika Izora. Her graphics, reminiscent of 90s nostalgic color gradients, stopped me from the scroll. 

Her stance on interdependent creative worlds inspired me. Her collected database on ‘Creative Ecosystems & Funds That Support Black People’ (which she published during the pandemic) showed me resources I didn't know existed.  She also created a sheet where artists can exchange skills based on their needs and what they can offer, introducing the concept of how a creative ecosystem could work in the digital spaces. 

From her work, I was introduced to the community space she helped design and built by Naj Austin. Ethel’s Club is a club for Black and Brown people to share ideas on wellness, art, and business and feel safe and seen, though I haven’t been able to afford the price point at this time. I also found Brwn Art Ink is a “nomadic community incubator to support the arts ecosystem for artists, cultural practitioners, and communities of color.” And these are just a few of the digital spaces that are highlighting the importance of BIPOC ecosystems, independent of white supremacy. 

A BIPOC ecosystem could be a complex network of interconnected systems that we find within our cities or digitally. From cultural systems to social good, they could provide connection and the sharing of ideas. In a study by the European Commission on what creative ecosystems are, they say “...cultural and creative ecosystems are the nurturing ground for innovation.” For BIPOC artists, these types of contained ecosystems could be a fundamental part of our practices. 

As a Latina freelancer living abroad with no peers, community and mentorship are two things that I crave. So I’d say, consider joining an arts ecosystem through a digital space or by joining a meetup in your area. If you don’t have one, start one. Collectives, like Tyler the Creator’s Odd Future and Jelani Aryeh’s Raised by the Internet have helped push these Black and Brown creatives towards success and production of ideas. 


Creative ecosystems, specifically for Black and Brown people, overcome some of the biggest hurdles that they’re often faced with, like funding and community. By funding Black and Brown artists, we allow them to thrive instead of solely survive. By creating safe spaces with each other in our communities, we give back to the people in those communities who stand to make a difference. We broaden our opportunities by offering communities. And most importantly, we separate ourselves from a system that wants to see us fail. 

Jessica is a Salvadoran freelance writer with interests in cities, art, social justice, and the intersections between. Originally from LA county, Jessica graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a BA in English Education and took that degree to Madrid, Spain where she now teaches English to high schoolers when she's not busy reading and writing.

@jayaramoss
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Alien

Photography Jacquie Ray From the Series, “We Shed” | Courtesy of Bree Leche

Photography Jacquie Ray From the Series, “We Shed” | Courtesy of Bree Leche

Text Bree Leche

During my first pregnancy, I found how people's views of me changed as my body had changed. I learned that there were many unspoken rules to what pregnant people could and could not do. Even though pregnancy is just a natural process (literally, how any single human comes into the world), there seemed to be a strange preoccupation with it and/or desire to control it.

I was often put into a box and infantilized for my decisions. People were appalled at how I rejected their ideas of who a person transitioning to motherhood should be. Even strangers had an opinion about my body, and how I should be moving in it. I was questioned for hiking in my pregnant body, for working, for enjoying a beer at a bar, for engaging in kink, and for showing my bare belly during the summertime.

I've always wanted to do it on my own terms, coming up with my own concepts for new roles I've taken on. As a wife in an open marriage, as well as a sex and relationship coach who guides people how to properly listen to their inner voices. Creating and collaborating artistically through my pregnancy feels like another chance to instill that feeling.

The images presented are a part of a larger art project, which includes images of myself during pregnancy and postpartum that expanded folks’ imagination on who and what “mother” can and can’t be. This set was created in collaboration with photographer and contemporary erotic filmmaker Jacquie Ray. The body of work is all shot on film, and are simultaneously, maternal, erotic, strong, vulnerable, familiar and alien.

I hope that they challenge and expand what pregnancy represents, and make us ask ourselves why we have a difficult time allowing mothers and mamas-to-be as multifaceted and magical as they are.

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Not from here, ni de alla: Finding Identity in Liminal Spaces

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Text L.V. Loya Soto

My mom has always told me, “por que no eres un nina normal” echoing one of the reoccuring punchlines of La familia P. Luche. Like Bibi P. Luche, I was also la rara, a studious quiet child who was unlike the rest of my family. I was someone who relied on this withdrawn nature to mask the struggle and confusion I felt within. I’ve always felt different. At first, I thought that meant I was wrong.


Femininity, especially femininity from a traditional Mexican perspective, was like a heavy beaded gown, fun for a game of dress up every now and then but not sensible for long-term wear. When I was young, and my parents were still together I was their golden child. A sweet and smiley little girl who adored playing dress up as much as she loved climbing trees. My amá took pride in my appearance, picking out darling frilly outfits for me to wear. She would spend hours on my hair, pulling my thick dark brown mane this way and that. Pigtails and braids and curls and barrettes in every color. Time with my mother was so precious, especially after the birth of my first brother and my parent’s subsequent divorce, when her time became dominated by her 40-hour-a-week warehouse job. Before the divorce, my mother would read to me as I sat in her lap and we rocked back and forth in her big plush rocking chair, her accented English the music of a mother’s love in my ears. After the divorce, the only time she had to spare was used to get me ready for school, waking up extra early to do my hair after she had already gotten ready for work, my baby brother packed away in his baby carrier fast asleep. I cherished this time together even if I had to bite my lip to keep from squealing as she stretched hair across my scalp. La belleza cuesta, she’d say the times I did protest. Beauty costs.


She would be exasperated when I returned home each day, sweat plastering stray hair to my face, my pigtails wilting, my pretty clothes covered in thick sap from scaling the surrounding trees. This was the last time I felt some semblance of agency in my body for quite some time, feet searching for the next secure knot, arms pulling me up higher and higher until I was above my apartment complex, looking out over my corner of the world and wondering where I fit in it. I climbed trees and raced neighborhood boys until my developing body suddenly made it improper for a girl like me to be out in the streets. This was around the time my mother married my stepfather after a brief courtship at work. My stepfather was an alcoholic with enough traditional Mexican machismo to be terribly confused and angry at me for failing to meet his expectations of femininity. Especially when my mom is un mujer propio, never leaving the house without her hair or makeup done. Extremely demure, my amá serves it to them in her signature silver eyeshadow, blue eyeliner and pink blush. No lipstick and neither hemline nor neckline showing more than what was appropriate. My stepfather couldn’t understand how someone like me could come from someone like her. Not only was I indifferent about my appearance and developed an aversion to frilly girly clothes, but I refused to play my part as doting daughter. The worst part was that I was smart, which meant I was willfully disobedient, a cardinal sin as a first born girl child.


I kept being struck by how unfair this was—why was my body changing? How could something that once pulled me strong and true to treetops betray me so terribly? At 9, my breasts started budding, and I was already a head taller and several pounds heavier than the rest of my classmates. My body hair turned from golden to dark black and seemed to cover me all over. I had stretch marks across my hips, legs and breasts. I felt like a werewolf mid-transformation. I felt alien and wrong. My children’s clothes did not protect me from the adults who sexualized my body. Men would call out vulgarities from cars, honking their horns as they whistled at me and my light up shoes, my sequined Bobby Jack sweater. At this point I was already a sexual abuse survivor as well, and this new body frightened me to no end. I grew my hair long and wore it down. I lived in oversized sweaters year-round, trying fruitlessly to hide in the fabric. This shame I felt about my developing body extended to shame about my ethnicity as well. Which I also tried to hide.


I developed a healthy amount of internalized racism that manifested in lies to classmates: I was half Italian in grade school, born in Italy in high school. I lied about who I was, where I came from, to try to distance myself from the way I saw my mother treated. I was terrified of ending up like her, a beautiful strong honest woman who was pregnant at a young age and shackled to a full-time warehouse job. I didn’t want to putter around the house, spending all of my free time cleaning up after everyone else. The more I distanced myself from my heritage, the more I assimilated I became the more control I felt over my future. The less Mexican I felt, the less indebted to these sexist traditional ideals I felt. I hated the assumption that I would get married, have children, and serve them all a plate before I sat down. I hated that family would ask me about prospective boyfriends before prospective colleges. I hated being delegated to housework when none of my brothers had to so much as wash a dish. I love my family, and owe my life to them, but the sense of duty that hung over my head was suffocating. Once in high school, I joined marching band, pride club, yearbook—desperate to find obligations and responsibilities at school that could act as fuel on my rocket out of town. The sense of duty I forged, independent of my assigned gender or ethnicity, wholly dependent on my skill and talent, felt earned instead of inherited. It was hard not to feel resentment towards my culture, especially since representation was few and far in-between.


Our Mexican culture exists in liminal spaces—on the car radio, on television, at certain markets or family parties. We have to extend our hands, and ask for bits of Mexican culture, as we seep in American ideals. Although Latinx people were all around me growing up—both in the towns I lived and at school—I never saw them in positions of power. I went to school in Pomona, Ontario, and Chino where all of the teachers I had were white up until college. I didn’t know any whose parents went to college. Parents in our neighborhoods were forklift certified, employed at the various warehouses that continue to pollute communities in the Inland Empire and San Bernardino County. Those of us who expressed interest in higher education were encouraged to seek out practical careers. Many went to vocational schools and became nurses and dental assistants, drawn to a steady paycheck with unwavering demand. Artists, writers, and those of us with stars in our eyes were met with much less support when expressing pursuing things related to the arts. This was seen as a waste of opportunity and potential. My mother hardly spoke of her time in Mexico, but she would often remind us of the struggles she faced to get to school, telling us of the miles she’d trek in the early morning while the sun still slept behind the horizon. Sacrifice, guilt and the shouldering of burdens seemed to be the only constant in our culture, the only things taught.


Although Spanish was my first language, it quickly felt clumsy and heavy on my tongue, worn away by lack of practice or immersion. As my mother’s first born, I have been her translator since grade school, sitting in on phone calls to bill companies, performing alchemy with each whispered word. I’ve witnessed firsthand how quickly patience is lost if you don’t speak the same language. Ditto if your accent is too heavy. I quickly understood that English was prioritized in every conversation, often with little to no Spanish alternative. English became my best subject, a strength hewn by a love of reading born of my mother’s bedtime stories. Meanwhile my Spanish has stuck around conversational grade school level. I can read, if I take my time and sound out each word but can’t write much, at least not confidently. I’m grateful for the scraps I have, since a few of my younger brothers, like many other Latinx first and second generations, can’t speak Spanish at all. Language, like any living thing, must be nurtured and shown love or, like any living thing, it can die. Many families don’t speak Spanish because their grandparents had their knuckles rapped by wooden rulers for every word spoken at school or church. In my neighborhood, foreign languages only mattered on high school transcripts and resumes for part time jobs at the mall. In the real world, no one gives a fuck if you speak Spanish. Value, love and appreciation for our culture must be taught or this world makes us forget, or worse—assimilate.


High school was a major turning point for me. My involvement with marching band and various clubs meant I was on campus often, granting me freedom to find myself. It was my involvement with the pride club in particular that spurred my self-discovery, starting first with the realization that I was not merely an ally, but a member of the community. The more I was able to immerse myself and learn about queer culture, the more confidence I built. Our advisor was wonderful, taking the time to not only teach us about the various categories and labels in the queer community, but queer history through film and documentaries. Even though there was no singular person we learned about that matched my identities exactly, just learning about queer existence was enough to propel me to seek out more. I was delighted to find instances of queer Mexican people and communities especially, their sheer existence a radical act of resistance against our staunchly traditionalist culture. Finding representation and validation in gender nonconforming behavior throughout Mexican indigenous cultures, like in the Zapotec culture of Oaxaca where the muxe reside was life changing. The more I widened my understanding beyond the American and colonized paradigms I was taught and the more I was able to connect to my culture, and ultimately with myself.


I’m queer, nonbinary and Xicanx, identities that exist in liminal spaces, in the in-between, ni de aqui, ni de alla. I’ve spent so long reciting the ways these identities cancel each other out, that I thought someone like me was not allowed to exist. I thought the combination of these identities would make all of them invalid, leaving me with nothing. I thought I was an oxymoron, a negative zero, my string of identities shining like fake pearls around my neck, betraying my secret to the world before I had a chance to figure out who I was. Now I wear them with a newfound pride forged with the help of community, advocacy and intersectionality. I still don’t know exactly where I fit, but now I know that I can make room.


I’ve always felt different. But now, I no longer feel wrong.

L.V. Loya Soto is a writer, multimedia journalist, and artist from California. they are a magazine and opinion writer, with a passion for the radial impact of immersive storytelling.

DRAG Loss

Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Short Story & Photography By Amy Zapata
San Bernardino, CA

In the four years, I have taken photos of the DTLA drag scene. An assorted collection of images and video footage of artists and places, an archive from places that are now closed, from performers that have moved or retired. Remembering nights at bars, watching Ursula Major perform as I staple dollar bills to her arm, watching the blood trickle down. I have seen burlesque dancers capture the attention of audiences. Witnessing short-lived nights and performers creating spaces for other artists, trying to house a place for their fellow Queer performers. Sissy Spastik, who no longer performs, added her Chicago flair to the DTLA scene. Sissy’s look and makeup still some of the best I have ever seen. Memories are created in those moments, when the moments end the photos are what is left.

A part of being an artist is showing up. Being a photographer is bearing witness, documenting what is there, what others are missing, what will never be again. Even in the still, change is the constant. Having spent most of my time this year at home, the times I have driven through Los Angeles, I start to see all the changes that I have missed. Like so many of us, drag performers have adapted. The movement towards digital video performances has given way to a different way to connect, to perform. My brother, the drag artist Jean Decay and other DTLA drag artists made the shift to digital drag nights, and instead of the still images, I once took it now helping film videos 6 ft apart. My participation is tied to the creation of the performances. Showing up means collaborating on ideas, pushing what can be achieved in this new landscape. When this is over, it will be a digital collection of works from that year when we all stopped.


Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Losing the ability to show up, we are perpetually missing out. There are moments happening, unable to be captured that will always be lost. There is something to be said about loss, it makes bearing witness that much more important.  

WHY DO WE CONTINUE TO DEMOLISH AND TRY TO BAND-AID OUR WAY OUT OF BLIGHT?

Illustration Rebecca Ustrell Concept Julian Lucas

Illustration Rebecca Ustrell
Concept Julian Lucas

Photography Julian Lucas 2020

Photography Julian Lucas 2020

Text & Photography Julian Lucas
Published January 5, 2020 7:13am PST
Updated 01/20/2020
Updated 2/14/2023
Illustration Rebecca Ustrell

I regret to inform you, another cool-ass building with potential has been taken from us. The act of demolition resulted in yet another empty lot. I even left a couple of voicemails inquiring about the space and my call wasn’t returned. 1377 was actually demolished over the summer months. It sure did hurt my feelings, as I am a Mid-Century Modern aficionado.

Built in 1954 and zoned for office use the building was used as an orthodontist who we learned passed away. Naturally, 1377 became a place for squatters and people who had an addiction. Hmm, to think if only we had real affordable housing and if we really believed in HARM REDUCTION, then squatters wouldn’t squat and there would be a nice place for people to get high without trespassing on private property. But, since Pomona would never come to grips of having a safe injection site for people with an addiction, we will continue down the road of squatters and haters.  


Why do so many older buildings face demolition in Pomona while others are pardoned from the bulldozer? Who decides and why isn’t anyone stopping the creation of empty lots?

The Historical Society of Pomona Valley is a non-profit historical society, which is a museum based organization with no legal power. The HSVP has been successful at designating buildings as historical and has advocated for buildings as well however, the powers that would be would be the Historic Preservation Commission. The Pomona’s Historic Preservation Ordinance passed in the 1990s, which stated any application to demo buildings built before 1945 has to be presented before the commission. Currently there is an ad hoc committee that has been established to change the rule to 50 years so Mid Century buildings and other design types as they become older.

Until this rule is changed, buildings built during the 50’s or after can be torn down, at the land owner’s discretion. And if you think the city will help, good luck. Usually developers and city people don’t give a rat’s ass about what the community wants.

There are few safeguards for this kind of thing. Many city staff don’t live in the city so nothing is of value to them, and developers are just there to make a profit.

Photography Julian Lucas 2020

Photography Julian Lucas 2020

Anyway, the building could have been a dope ass coffee shop or a cool ass bakery. We need to be operating towards a vision of today, not 1989. We need sustainable businesses that everyone can enjoy. We need to make an effort to hold commissioners and city leaders accountable. We can’t continue to tear down and put a band-aid over blight.

Links
Safe Injection Sites
Harm Reduction

It is now February 2023, all of the debris from the demolition was cleared and hauled away creating yet another lifeless lot in the city of the Pomona. Maybe housing? Maybe another fast-food chain? Who knows, maybe we’ll wait another 3 years before theres life again.

Julian Lucas, is fine art photographer and photojournalist. Julian loves to create images that evoke emotions. Julian has lived in Chicago, Inglewood, Portland, and the suburbs of Los Angeles County.