benedicto-sinfiel

[benedicto-sinfiel]

Crowds

Almost all the decisions we make in our daily lives have more to do with automatized rituals than with autonomous acts, much less with gestures of freedom. Our days are more-or-less predetermined by the voracious demands of the economic system. Since we are young, they teach us to love work and hate play, despise it even. Anyone with a job knows what I’m saying. As you might expect, my daily ritual during work days was the stuff of nightmares one would find in a J. G. Ballard novel, a form of terror grounded on perpetual boredom and minor yet pervasive anxieties. Daily, I somehow found the strength to leave bed, ate breakfast (if time permitted), and then rushed to catch bus 299 which leaves me two blocks away from the warehouse. I work alongside what they call mojados (undocumented immigrants), old chinese women with fragile skin, and some aging felons under extreme heat while being submitted to increasing forms of domination. We load boxes of regional citrus fruits for a living. Our work speed is defined by the capacities of the conveyor belt that moves the fruit laboriously through such advanced technology as to give one the impression that such marvels ought to lessen the burden of work rather than raise it. After we pack a box full of grapefruits or oranges, we place it on our worn-out shoulders and carry it to the back of the warehouse, where they check the quality of our work and keep tabs of our loads. We get paid by the box, not by the hour as is legally required. If we can’t keep up with the minimum speed allowed - 6 boxes an hour, at the least - you get pushed back to the street without a paycheck or a job. “There are hundreds just like you just dying to take your place, best not forget,” the managers make sure to remind us a few times a week. At 75 cents per box, 70 boxes per day on average, 430 per week, we ended up with around $200 come pay day, after the bosses had taken their cut for providing water and rotten foodstuffs. I thought, they give us water as a trucker feeds oil to his truck, all while denying us pavilions of dreams and spaces of hope, and they charge us for it! This is why, as the worker-poet T-Bone Slim wrote, this is why workers are broke everyday but payday. The thieving bosses pay us just enough to keep us alive, for us to show up at work the next day. It’s a losers game, and fewer and fewer are winning these days. The first thing I noticed while walking into Bodega Fruta Libre was a group of five new workers who, as usual, were being given quick instructions before being thrown to the aggressive orders of the conveyor belt. It was their first day, hell even before the official start of their first day, and their faces already carried the look of doom, the look that says - I know something bad is coming, I’m not sure what it is, but it is out there, waiting for me, like a yearning leopard waiting to devour his tragically easy prey. Later I learned they were from Ethiopia. During our 20 minute lunch break, they were already complaining about the work. “This is too fast. My arm - almost gone, man!” expressed one of them. Him and his friends began to laugh about it, making jokes only they could understand in a blend of Amharic, english, and some obscure sounding language. We waited at the bus stop looking like a murder of crows, silent, bleak, and essentially harmless. Our friends from Ethiopia were visibly uncomfortable, I knew the look, but after a week of being here they would learn what it feels like to be worn slam out by the violence of the conveyor belt, at least physically speaking. I decided to introduce myself, lest they get the wrong idea about us. “Rough first day?” I asked. “Yes, friend. Rough shit indeed,” said one of them with a grin, “by the way, my name is Ife.” “I’m Antonio, see y’all tomorrow,” I said and waved hello-goodbye to the rest of them. Their young faces looked exhausted. Today had been their initiation into the American nightmare - the seemingly invisible cruelty that underlies the rhythm, flow, and quality of our lives - and they didn’t even know it, yet. I got off the bus on the corner of Elsa and Fields street and decided to walk home the rest of the way, making a pit stop at the Montes’ corner store. Then, the nightly ritual began: a few shots of whisky and a steady stream of whatever drink was at hand, today it was rum and coke. I sat down and thought of better things to come. That was the only thing that made reality pleasant. Dreamin’, that is. The intoxicating effect led me down the royal road where memories, history, and dreams converge. I saw strange snapshot images like the flashes created by fireworks: tired detectives, piles of bodies scattered like leaves in a warehouse, machines engulfed by fire, the reflection of the moon. Then, a more familiar montage of despair and hope: visions of youthful torment gave way to the gleaming spark of the cold flame that lit within me during the eventful days of yesteryear. I stumble upon crowds, a sea of enthusiastic, exalted, and enraged faces trying to find words, each other, themselves. They did it with such urgency that made you think they had never attempted to express themselves before. The crowd was debating it all - work, cities, music, jokes, buildings, poetry, love, history, and the importance of games. “What to do? Where to go? Who will join me?” wondered the multitude aloud with piercing eyes. “Let’s unbury the dead and conjure the ghosts that haunt us!” shouted someone in an attempt to win over the crowd. “The tears of the bosses are the nectar of the gods!” said another as the crowd laughed and enjoyed itself, merging and blending in unexpected ways, giving way to new forms and shapes. “Society is a carnivorous flower!” announced someone else. The crowd went on debating and throwing everything into the destructive force inherent to the critique of everyday life. A strange sound began to engulf everything. The atmosphere and our mood mutated as the blinding red and blue lights of freedom captured the night sky, the buildings, and the faces in the crowd. The sound of police sirens benumbed us and we were forced to disperse by the burning shower of rubber bullets and tear gas thrown our way. The passing of time has the effect of demolishing everything that stands in its way. People, places, my own self, were constantly changing, but nothing new or better ever seemed to replace anything. Old buildings were demolished by the city and nothing was built in their place. We live among ruins in a forgotten border town. I sat on bus 299 headed to work. Last night I dreamt of crowds and today I am immersed in them as I make my way to work. Real life crowds seem to be united by their disunity, I thought. People walk past each other daily without ever stopping to think about how much we would gain by embracing each other, which is to say ourselves. Where are the starving, restless crowds of yesteryear?

[benedicto-sinfiel]

The old ones

Here I found my place. If people could ever really belong to a place, this was it for me. How could I refuse the one place in the world which gave you access to living humanity? During the turbulent times of yesterday, I learned that the world was in all corners of the city, in the parks and plazas painted across the city, even in the four walls that kept me caged day after grinding day and in the drunken thought-patterns that would brighten the night and illuminate the shadows emanating from anonymous power-structures. All one needed was the willingness to look and walk through what one saw. I felt at home with the worst off layers of the working class early on, and I wasn’t a communist, or any type of activist or militant, at least not really. What attracted me was something else that was hard to explain even to myself. I simply landed there one day from god-knows-where (one of the effects of these streets is a case of amnesia that evaporates the moment you set foot on the outside) as if from outer space and never left. Sometimes I lived and slept in the streets, sometimes I scored cheap apartments that could be paid with a couple of work hours a week. Now I am old and work in a fruit packing warehouse in south Texas and I need many hours of work (over 40) to pay the bills. Today has been a good day compared to most. The electrical grid at the warehouse burned out so they sent us home after only 2 hours of work (normally we packed them fruits for 10 to 12 hours at the least). So there we went, following orders as usual from those used to giving them out, hurrying into streets that released some foul sewer smell from its pores. Today was also good because the surprising leisure time helped me remember to see the streets I inhabit after a long period of hibernating mindlessness. I remembered that they represented the dark corners of my past and my unconscious. But they had also presented me with an alternative way of life - an alternative to the miserable alternative. These streets were inhabited by tragically luminous angels criminals prostitutes and unknown radicals that would put any college-educated “radicals” to shame. They were simply searching for (and rarely finding) ways to cope in the barbed wire ghettoes that entrapped those who dare set foot in its marvelous passage ways that led one to ever-increasing sources of masochism: forms of pain that one learned to enjoy because each blow on our heads bodies and souls symbolized our collective refusal to take part in what the rich call civilized society. There has been noticeable change in recent times. Many or most of the newcomers are here because they were condemned to these streets by the almighty logic of the market, whereas in my day we came willingly, looking for something angelic, something beyond what so-called civilization offered us. We wanted to escape the drudgery and monotony of work. The worst part of it all was that, almost as if by magic, people would somehow morph into their jobs. It was as if their identities had been assigned to them before birth. I know the youth desire to “make it” in the “real world” because they have never experienced it. They only know it through it’s mirages and fables - the visions of wealth, leisure, travel and happiness. Those that actually “make it” know the torturous levels of suffering necessary to be wealthy. They travel the world with broken hearts and souls, unable to meet and relate to (or even congregate with) the humanity that lay behind the ruins they visit. They take pictures as if that was the main purpose of their travels. I suppose those come in handy when it comes to impressing the other broken souls dwelling in the affluent parts of the city, but they could never convey the truth behind the image. Similarly, one must have experienced the liberating effect of these streets yesterday to get an idea of it. But there is hope: the illusions and myths which condition the way we see the world can never replace the worldly historical reality. You know, reality, the shadow beast that everyone runs away

[benedicto-sinfiel]

new latin american weird

The weird as affect and modality emerges every time we confront, whether directly or indirectly, those situations that effectively exist yet should not exist: situations such as extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, senseless violence artificially caused by private property, the division of labor and rampant exploitation. The cultural critic Mark Fisher categorizes the weird as “affect, but also as mode: mode of film and fiction, mode of perception, and ultimately, mode of being.” Within the context of Latin American reality, the experience and representation of the weird diverge from yet are similar to those in Britain described by Fisher. It isn’t surprising that Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón was able to capture the essence of everyday life in Britain in Children of Men: the eerie dystopian nature of contemporary capitalism, marked by war, poverty, and social decay, as portrayed by Cuarón, is not a situation particular to any one nation state, rather it is our shared global condition at the turn of the century.

It is a fact that around the world, in the global nation that is called Capitalism as film director Bong Joon-Ho recently stated, violence underlies the daily life of the working poor, farmers, factory workers, social reproduction workers, and all the other social layers of the dispossessed, those that own nothing but their bodies, their capacity to work. Take for instance Mexico’s narco-military ‘alliance of progress’ that has turned cities and towns into battle fields of a seemingly never ending war, or the exponential rise in homelessness that has become more and more visible in metropolitan centers around the continent, or the condition of indigenous people throughout Latin America akin to those faced under colonial rule. When confronted with such situations, we feel uneasy, we question what lies behind such horrors: are they the consequence of our human nature, or megalomaniac leaders, or a primal death drive, or is it something that can be eliminated? Such visible examples of the social horrors caused by capitalist social relations can sometimes hide the invisible horrors that the majority has to endure for the accumulation of capital to continue without interruption, without regard for human life or natural ecosystems, as if an alien life force had taken control of society and organized it in their interests.

This is the main contradiction that the weird aims to problematize: the prevalence of extreme, or barbaric, forms of poverty amongst the most advanced technological development ever seen by humanity, objectively capable of eradicating poverty and elevating humanities standard and quality of life. As Fisher writers, “the form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage: the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.”

What I want to call the New Latin American Weird – an aesthetic sensibility that cuts across literature, film, music, and painting – deals with the history, politics, culture, and identity of Latin America by exposing and questioning and problematizing both the visible and invisible horrors the workers and dispossessed in Latin America have been condemned to by the imperialist centers and their own national lumpen-bourgeoisies. Thus, the new weird tendency denotes an attempt to broaden our view and understanding of the inner functioning of the world in which we live, a world full of weird situations that are hard to accept when confronted by it whether face to face, through literature, or another medium. In a continent like Latin America, where violence, death, and phantasmagoric imaginaries have long histories, these realities are rooted in the fabric and experience of everyday life amongst the oppressed who endure the negative side effects, or consequences, of the dialectic of capitalist progress.

The tendency towards the weird grew significantly in what we could call Latin American literature, that is literature written by both provincial and cosmopolitan Latin American writers, during the 1990s as a response or a challenge to the narrative of the end of history and the end of political and cultural rebellion that it promoted. The New Latin American Weird is the synthesis of three critical movements/historical moments: gothic, noir, and modernism. From modernism they employ the imperative to experiment and challenge literary, ideological, and political conventions. Despite borrowing from avant-garde aesthetics, these artists have thus far been unable to develop a practical revolutionary politics which were essential to the avant-garde, an impotence that can be explained by the waning of class struggle that has prevailed since the global (temporary) defeats of 1968, the anti-colonial movements and revolutions of the global south, and the civil rights movement in the U.S. The battlefield for these writers, for this literary and aesthetic tendency, became that of language and ideology, and their battle cry became the defense of radical imaginaries and critical world views that challenge the monolithic political views and socio-cultural experiences of the world under capitalism, where the workday never seems to end and the money doesn’t afford us any new or interesting experiences.

Some of the artists and works in this tendency are Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile or 2666, Mariana Enriquez' Things we Lost in the Fire, and Amat Escalante’s films Heli and The Untamed.

[benedicto-sinfiel]

Ethnographic Notes

This guy that passive-aggressively bullied me in high school now owns a factory in Reynosa. Owning a factory at the border basically means he exploits hundreds of central American women at inhuman pace to satisfy his meaningless leisure. Last night he invited me over to his place in Cimarron to “catch up”. Can you imagine? I agreed in a flash. The second I hung up the phone I felt a strong desire to conduct some kind of ethnography on the people who usually fund them to sell bullshit things to the poor. Thinking about all the things I could dissect from a day with an arrogant chicano factory owner felt like hitting the jackpot. One step closer to mapping the metaphysics of la frontera, I thought in fervor. Soon after, I thought: this asshole really went from bullying my teenage weakass self to bullying hundreds if not thousands of helpless women whom he treats like animals. What a guy, huh? Then: What did he want to talk about? What did I want to tell him? Shit, I should question him about the recent wave of strikes in the maquiladoras around Reynosa and Matamoros, about the never-ending imperialist wars, his thoughts on the military dictatorship overtaking Mexico disguised as narco violence and how he benefits from it to keep his workers in line, about the state of the art world and anti-art positions (he is a ‘musician’ and owner of a ‘intelligent dance music’ label (read: business), you know the type), maybe about the struggles of immigrants and workers inside Empire, etcetera. Is this shit worth exchanging my solitude for? There’s this Nietzsche quote that says something like… argh, who gives a shit what he said. I will go if only to glimpse at the fronterizo exploiters who freely traverse the U.S.-Mexico border – and the world, for that matter - to live what they think is the good life. Still not fully convinced by my own logic, I kept asking my self: how could I not go? This guy was the kind of bastard that drove a Mercedes-Benz at 15 as he divided the school cafeteria along class lines, just like his daddy taught him to do every day as he inculcated him with rotten ideas: “son, you are better than those poor brown ugly miserable bastards. Never reduce yourself to their level. We were born to rule, to lead, to civilize them.” What else did they teach this poor sadistic sack of shit? After an hour or so of further deliberation, I became determined to find out. “Ey, cabron! Como vergas has estado?! Verguisima que le caiste,” was the first thing he uttered to me in a weirdly enthusiastic tone. (The Spanish welcome was meant to remind me and himself of his nationality. His type loves to feel Mexican just to proclaim their superiority over the indigenous and the poor in Mexico since they feel inferior to the rich whites within Empire.) “Ey, man. Oh, you know.” “YEAH, MAN. I KNOW,” he says laughing. “It’s been a while!” He pats me in the back. “Come on in!” He brings two beers to the living room, a space decorated in expensive yet nasty furniture replete with the records he sells, expensive computers, and musical equipment he uses to produce what he calls intelligent dance music. I grab a beer, take a swig, and look around the room. Lame abstract art made by his businessmen buddies decorated the walls. I begin to question my decision. Why? To begin, I had never seen this fool act in such a manner, at least not towards me: why was he beaming? What was he hiding? This fool bullied me throughout my first and second youth and now he wants to drink beers and reminisce on the good old days of humiliation, pain, and blood? What kind’a sick game is going on here? I remind myself the only reason for my presence: sociological inquiry. You are here as an ethnographer, of course! “So, Andres, hijo de la chingada! How are things at the factory?” / I think: God damn it. That’s no way for an anthropologist to behave… Ease in. / “Hah. How did you know about that? Not that it matters. Things are fine, you know. Better than ever, I hear.” “Oh. I heard about the wave of strikes that’s been taking place and, well, that shit made me happy,” I respond. “It’s about time!” “Hah. It’s a bit more nuanced.” “Nuanced? It’s simple: folks finally ready to stop being treated like animals. What’s there to think’a bout?” “Hey, how ‘bout n’uther beer,” he retorts while walking to the fridge. “Sure, sure. Keep ‘em coming. Heheh…” / I think: I’m a fucking coward. Getting along with the enemy. Get in his face. Make this motherfucker talk! Shit, I’m not a savage detective. I’m an ethnographer. At least for today. Ease in. Ease in. /

[benedicto-sinfiel]

Black Seas and Lagoons under American Highways

What is a progressive city that houses tens of thousands of houseless people dying of hunger and curable diseases? In a city like Austin, Texas – “the capital of weird” – the mentally ill hungrily roam the streets together with the beautiful criminals and the miserably dispossessed. In front of the world-renowned University lie a scientology church, gringo mass chain taqueria, and a visible sea of houseless folks, manufactured beggars, thirsty alcoholics. It is important to remember the difference between the weird and the eerie and its implication to understand the phantasmagoria of contemporary American cities designed in the image of the ghosts of empire pasts. Our imaginaries are as colonized by the past as they are haunted by phantasms, ghosts, aliens. Recently, I have been attempting to construct a map of our world – the world of ghosts. A map that charts the city through its zones of decay, erosion, and ruinification. We know that the city is but the enemies’ cities. Sometime in the 1940’s, amidst the death stench of world war 2, Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary: “I am tired of being a ghost. I am tired of being a mystery. I want to take form, to appear, and one only gains visibility by action.” Reading these lines gave me the confidence to rob a bank, an ambition I’d had for over a decade. Actually, that’s complete bullshit, but you probably knew that. Why would I ever read such a thing? The deeds of the footloose, solitary ghosts are what inspire such people to write, is it not? Their stories are not the product of their imaginations, they are but the narration of our exploits. Is it true that the homeless and the criminals resemble ghosts? I heard that once in a Hollywood gangster film. If memory serves me right, it was said by a savage detective in a southern gothic noir when a janitor appeared to him and reminded him of a ghost, a pale, frail, angelic ghost. He failed to recognize the cause of his unconscious impulse: janitors have also, along with the immigrants and the homeless and the criminals, learned the art of shadows, the science of ghosts. There is no other way to survive for us. You pass by our cities yet you fail to see us. Your apathy also effectively converts us into ghosts, invisible, shadow, dangerous ghosts. We live under American highways, those roads you ride everyday to and fro work, your daily tribute to the Gods – whose Gods? It took you excluding us from your world for us to see it for what it truly is and you for who you really are and we for who we now are. We built a continuum of ant colonies without Queens: we have also killed the Kings. There is no chaos or irrationality besides the one that organizes your society. We are not animals. We are fighting against animals, savages, barbarians. We are fighting against your world. We have many ways to fight against your world. We rob banks because the second we enter a palace of commodities we stop being ghosts and our fleshy messy reality is restored: we are seen! Cameras, yes, but also the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, we are seen confusedly, or rather disgustingly, and at that moment we again remember the reality of your world. We used to await for the barbarians but they were us, they are you. Kill the one in your head. Destroy your job, your highways, your cities – there are beaches beneath the streets.