#yes this is about chicanismo

[knxfesck]

How to tell if the movement you think is possible to revitalize is Actually Past Saving:

[mujer--solitaria]

On Kanye

Anti-Blackness in the Chicano Community: For Chicanos and Mestizos to Reflect On, Especially Those of Us Who Are White and White-Adjacent 

I’ve been a long time Kanye fan. It’s something I credit one of my brothers for, and I never talk about Kanye’s early career or his legacy at length without referring back to my brother and how much Kanye means to us as a family.

I remember the first album like it was yesterday.

I will never forget that it was released on my brother’s birthday in 2004.

I don’t forget because my dad had just died a few months before.

The College Dropout was with me during that year.

He’d passed Thanksgiving Day week.

He was a cooker, among many things. I feel like I forget my English when I reach this far back.

My father was the chef of the family, a breadth of Mexican recipes and national identity he took with him when he left. I remember this giant Valentine’s day teddy bear he once tried to give me in, what felt like, the darkest part of our house. I knew it then, right then, that he was trying to cover his own sun. The novelty of his warmth, spoiled with the bile of an angry child and my belly hasn’t recovered since.

I wonder if this feeling is mutual. I wonder if the universe or something in it can’t get over me whenever I struggle with things outside of my control. I think this is what I’m always at odds with, this specter of another, different universe.

My life as a writer can largely be summarized as my saying,

Here,

take this from me. It can no longer live inside me.

I feel this way not just about what it means to write and the act of expulsing or forgiving what’s within, but also when it comes to not writing, as an act of forgetting what’s within. I repeat,

Please, take this from me. I can no longer live inside of it.

Take this moment away from my grasp and make me do something else. Anything else. Until I’ve blamed everyone else and all that’s left is me.

It has always been me. This is why writing isn’t easy. This is a euphemism for my work as a visual artist since.

It was actually my mom who did most of the cooking, and she was the only one who got it thrown back at her.

I yell at men all the time. Dark skin men, light skin men. I’ve yelled at them all these men I don’t know at some point or another on the street for some kind of harassment. * The more physical it became, the older I got.

Something happened, and it’s that nothing did. Il y a quelque chose de tres grave qui m’est arrive. It’s that with my privilege comes the power to repeat generational and institutional trauma. It’s an act of memory. This proximity is exact. It turns out men of color on the street are much more afraid of me than I could ever imagine. I have something to lose these days, but so have the men in my community always. Am I really about justice? Sometimes it can only be had in the street. Sometimes, whiteness must lose and it starts with me.

In private spaces with men I’ve dated, it’s a game of endurance.  I can tell when they want to, but they don’t. And then, when I wanted it to end, I’ve brought out my own jugular. I stuck out the corners of my face like this and pointed to clouds like that. Like a statue or a relic. I’m pointing to them right now. The only way to see it coming is to remember where you come from. Hallelujah, Baudelaire. Sas. But sas never comes.

"The Stranger" by Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

- I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

- Your friends?

- You are using a word whose meaning to this day remains unknown to me.

-Your country?

- I do not know in which latitude it lies.

- Beauty?

- I would love her gladly, goddess and immortal.

- Gold?

- I hate it as you hate God.

- Well then! What do you love, unfathomable stranger?

- I love the clouds… the passing clouds … up there … up there … the marvelous clouds!

—Translated by Sam Taylor, http://poems.com/Poets%27%20Picks%202015/0415_Taylor.html

I wanted there to be no doubt. I was broken, but he tried to break me during him, he tried to make me golden. Hallelujah.

I think this is our role, to also emotionally dive in. Decolonizing includes the utmost compassion and sensitivity. Not a seat on the bleachers.

It took 27 years for my mom and I to love her better.

But that’s not really true. What is true is that every year, it feels like the first time. It is true that love as an adult has taken a large amount of living from me, but it has neither begun nor will it end. Right now, at this moment, I am discovering that its probably supposed to be kind of fluid, right? That the way I love myself has a say in the way we love each other.

Is it crude of me to ask myself which love came first though?

I often take my time with Kanye alone because there are friends and people who say they cannot look past his ego. But as a Black man whose visibility is tied to his wealth, it is not the same thing to parade oneself and to be paraded, and some Chicanxs consider their misunderstanding of this to be neutralizing and progressive.

What we get back in return is what we’ve forgotten. I am currently conversing with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Conversing is a euphemism for reading, but one I find less troublesome.

How is it that we are supposed to be

humble

practice humility

humidfy ourselves when we must always look within

when we are alone,

when loneliness is a lifelong repulsion?

When solitude is a lifelong partner who we (begrudgingly) accommodate (by covering it up in Black slang), it is a euphemism for writing. The only lifelong partner some of us we have. And it is often we who let ourselves down first. This is how I knew I was an adult. How are we supposed to remain humble when we must strengthen ourselves with the same power we are torn down by? To have any ego about the whole thing means to reject some part of the equation.

How are we supposed to work with a city that insists we work for it instead? Los Angeles is the city of contradiction. How do u humidify its intentions? You call it chaparral.

To be Black in LA is to know Chicanx anti-Blackness. To have a small circle of friends and a larger circle of doubt. A degree in LA is to be well versed in white and brown liberalism, or Chicanismo, for short.

No. For some people, like Kanye, it is to strengthen themselves to price match the same power we have torn them down by. This proximity is exact. This is sense. This is now.

This proximity is exactly like love and horror. To talk about one without the other is grotesque, truly grotesque. Some of us don’t understand this. But the contemporary horror genre is an attempt to do so. To understand how you cannot invoke fear without invoking the space where love was supposed to be. But can you invoke love without pointing to where fear lives? A haunting like love takes years. You cannot tell me that you didn’t see it coming.

Racism isn’t humble. Mediocre white and white adjacent Chicanx men are arrogant for far less.

Last night I found out an ex was engaged and with child, all in a quaint picturesque home on top of a hill. This morning, I reread my own line about mediocre white men, and my world continues to turn against itself. I am convinced that if someone as ordinary as he can find idyllic pleasures, then yeah there is hope for me after all.

At the same time, I remember he dumped me because I was too poor, too depressed, and too willing to tax him for it. At the time, I still referred to myself as a brown woman, but I was struggling with how nonsensical and regional it all was. A true IRL non sequitur. To have a white guy make u feel like you’re at once the only white person in the relationship and the only brown one too. It was all so unromantic and not interracial.

It’s not that we are or are not the same. It’s that we won’t implicate ourselves.

It’s that we won’t let u be anything.

We can’t even be ourselves.

The difficultly of living in contradiction. It’s that there’s nothing there. Staring back. It’s that no matter how hard u try to have some respect for urself, all that matters is that the mirror not show u in it. Some of us would rather identify with that emptiness than show up.

We need to honor the people we begrudgingly are because of the people we are not. That there are parts of our surrounding we will never be at one with. Is that idea really so hard to expand with? And if those visions for something other are released. Do we dare.

I think the most painful thing said about me from someone who hurt me was that I never loved them.

No. To be Chicanx in LA, in South Gate is to live largely segregated from other white people and other people of color. Or to not see oneself as one is because Chicanismo in LA is self-salutatory. Self-referential. Self-referencing. Because Chicanismo needs you not to be otherwise. Because Chicanismo can thrive unchallenged.

Yes. To be Chicanx in LA is to build yourself up using the same thing that’s torn down by u.

To be Mexican in southeast Los Angeles is to look at the growing population of Black residents and call them a loss of property value. Some Chicanos here prefer Wal-mart to Black neighbors. Not unlike rural whites in the news. Someone once made the God-awful mistake of calling LA a suburb and now I can’t look away, I can’t undo it!

It is light and dark skin family members understanding where Trump is coming from and trying to break even. Call it mestizaje. Is this some twisted attempt at trying to take responsibility for oneself through punishment and contradiction. Contractions. Self-effacing. Take your pick. LA is a Libra, too. Is this internalized racism? Or a euphemism for it? I don’t understand.

The idea that Kanye is a narcissist is only an illusion about how many accolades we wish to deny him of. It is also an illusion about what we blame him for. In places where Chicanxs do not live in proximity to Black people, we look to Black celebrities and culture figures for clues on how to be less white, more white, Black, not Black. We study borders. We practice how to break them down and fund them back up. We take the barbed wire and make it our own. White supremacy, but make it Mexican.

Someone once made the God-awful mistake of saying South Gate was one of the most racially segregated cities, and now I can’t look away! I can’t undo it.

This essay is a euphemism for self-care and minor exiles. For the way we leave our cities and eachother. It was written in memory of. A memorandum. This essay is not an apology to Chicanos or to Mestizaje. It’s a love poem. Sas.

See also @bad_dominicana (2.0 and 3.0), @rachel.cargle, all Black thought, all Black art, all banality, True Detective season 3, Barbara Tucker – Beautiful People (Underground Network Remix)

 *Sike. I knew some of them, and by their first name. You know their last.