I have still been writing, just not for this blog (and I haven’t been reposting, oops). I have no strong opinions about my school newspaper, but writing for a specific audience with an editor has been pretty good for me. I suspect I’ll be coming back around to here, as I’m about to graduate, but until then, here’s this.
http://themhnews.org/author/rrslutsky-moore
Context being that I go to an “elite” liberal arts college where quite a few people are interested in Teach for America. I don’t think this is particularly stunning, but it needed to be written. Some day I will write things here that aren’t just posting stuff that I stick in the newspaper.
***
They have shiny posters, they send you semi-personalized recruitment messages, and they want you to join their highly selective, prestigious movement. Give them two years of your life, and you can help end educational inequity and finish up with preferential treatment from an impressive list of employers and graduate schools. Very attractive, but what exactly is Teach for America doing, and how does it affect public education in the Unites States? There is no doubt that students growing up in marginalized communities are overwhelmingly underserved by our public schools. This problem is frustrating and heartbreaking, absolutely worth all the attention it gets. Teach for America is easy to gravitate towards—they come to you, saving you much of the overwhelming and sometimes scary process of figuring out where to go and what to do after graduation, and, with a 12% acceptance rate, they’ll assure you and the rest of the world that you really do have it together. However, just because a proposed solution appeals to our sensibilities and offers us the opportunity to make the world a better place does not mean that we shouldn’t question it and consider what other, less well-advertised organizations we might want to partner with if we are serious about combating inequality.
Teach for America’s website describes three causes of education inequality. The first is the extra challenges children in poor communities face, and the last is a lack of policy change to address them. The second cause, the one TFA devotes itself to most, is the lack of a “critical mass of exceptional teachers and school leaders who deeply believe that all students in low-income communities can achieve at high levels”. While these are all very important factors to note and fight, they do not delve into the larger roots of the problem. TFA does include systemic change as part of its model—they believe that alumni will, having been exposed to the realities of the situation, move on to make and fund policy changes. Unfortunately, Stanford Sociologists Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt recently conducted a survey that found TFA drop-outs and non-martriculants to be more civically engaged than those who completed the program in areas such as voting and charitable giving.
Poverty is not a random sickness. It is a systemic problem brought on by conscious, often racist, divestment and maintained by exploitative and discriminatory hiring practices. Years ago, a high school education gave graduates the skills necessary to secure a steady job in a factory which paid well enough to support a family. Today these factories have found their way overseas where labor is cheaper, and when they return to the US to sell their products, many companies employ retail workers at appallingly low wages, often exploiting them (consider Wal-Mart, whose co-founder Sam Walton’s family foundation is one of Teach for America’s biggest donors). Add to this years of housing segregation and intentional divestment in poor and minority neighborhoods in a country where most families’ wealth is held in their home and where the housing market is such a big part of the economy that it can crash it entirely, and we have a fairly impressive indictment of the biggest names in the US economy, which, incidentally, are also Teach for America’s biggest supporters–In 2008 the New York Times reported that TFA’s annual dinner, “brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks.” Major donor Wachovia/Wells Fargo is being sued for steering working-class African-Americans into high-interest predatory “ghetto loans.”
These corporations do not want poor children to grow up to be critical thinkers who occupy positions of power and challenge the system—this would undo the structures that allow them to make huge sums of money, some of which they use to send their children to fancy schools and summer camps, where they acquire the social connections and cultural capital they’ll use to take their parents’ positions some day. Meanwhile, many poor children spend their summers at home bored, losing academic ground. There is no skilled labor shortage in this country. It is in the interest of the powerful in this country that poor children grow up believing everything they see on television and not daring to challenge a system that values them less than cheap overseas labor. And let us not forget the direct link between education inequality and racist financial institutions, specifically those involved in housing—school districts are funded by real estate taxes, and the racial make-up of a neighborhood continues to have a huge effect on property value.
So what is Wall Street doing involving itself in education besides working on its image? Successfully or not, our country spends a lot of money on education, and business would like to get into the game, whether through contracts to run public schools for profit like Edison Learning, LLC (a TFA partner in its School Leadership Initiative for Alumni which founder and CEO Wendy Kopp praises in her memoir), though an industry of pre-packaged testing and curriculum, through voucher programs that funnel federal funds to private schools, or, perhaps, through a marketable “brand” of teacher. Supporters claim that moving to a system of private and charter schools would “democratize” education, turning families into consumers of education with a variety of choices. However, do we really want to leave how our children are educated up to the market? Consider other industries, whether they be healthcare, groceries, or general retail, and think of the choices currently available in poor neighborhoods and towns. Do we want suburban children educated by The Banana Republic and Forever 21 while children in poor neighborhoods and towns choose between Payless, Walmart, or a long bus ride to a better brand name? Admittedly, this doesn’t sound much different from what we have now, but what should our goal be? We’ve seen the results of deregulation on our economy. There’s no reason to expect that it would look better in education.
Teach for America exemplifies the kind of business culture highly capitalist firms operate with. Like a large corporation, they have created a model that they apply to various school districts and regions—there are even international off-shoots. Teach for America’s five-week training, is a rigorous, fast-paced ordeal, where corps members face 18-hour days, something which gives them very little time to think critically or question. Trainings and later support are all dominated by alumni, many of whom have only just completed their two-year teaching commitment themselves. In Learning on Other People’s Kids, Barbara Torre Veltri comments to TFA’s cultural resistance to partnering more closely with those from outside the organization, such as experienced teachers, largely because of the negative publicity negative feedback could produce. One experienced teacher told Miner she’d been hired by the district to help with training, but a TFA Corps Member Advisor (a recent alum) told a corps member she was only there for the district’s insurance policy—providing feed back was TFA’s job. Business Week ranks TFA as the 7th best place to start a career in the US. Non-profit status notwithstanding, the organization sounds much more like a big business than the movement it claims to be. It should be no surprise that their focus and ways of measuring results are heavily based in standardized testing.
I connect this corporate culture to the missionary mentality I see at the root of Teach for America. Their needs-based approach only sees what schools lack, and the comparison being made is strictly with suburban schools. There’s no thought of schools succeeding on their own terms or even having any resources on which to capitalize. When TFA recruits at Mount Holyoke, it emphasizes that only 1 in 10 poor children will graduate from college, making the standard for comparison the experience we have here. The opportunity that we have here should certainly be available to everyone, but the implicit message is troubling. TFA focuses on students from elite institutions, those with the most professional cultural capital who have been trained to fill powerful positions in the system that has created the problems TFA claims to be fighting. This implies the issue to be a lack of this kind of thinking and behavior. Clearly, poor people’s problem is that they need to be more like “us,” something that can be solved by throwing those who are best at being “us” at their children. While it is true that learning these kinds of behaviors and thought patterns can help students do better in the educational system and access higher-paying jobs in that system, it denies the valuable cultural capital and other resources these communities have that are unique to them. This can be as vague as a tradition of break dancing or as concrete as specific program that directly addresses educational inequality in its own way. It is a positive thing to want to help, but to assume that just because you can write good papers and make it through a huge pile of readings every week you have what our underserved children need is misguided and arrogant.
By allowing Teach for America to become the most recognized name in education reform, we’ve handed the subject over to people who have little classroom experience and are certainly not the experts on what our kids and communities need—Wendy Kopp herself has never even taught. TFA and other well-known educational projects are popular with foundations because they have a simple model that can then be replicated and applied everywhere, an efficient idea that appeals strongly to business interests. We are slowly learning as a society that relationship and value-based strategies produce more sustainable, whole results than those simply driven by efficiency. These solutions are often small-scale and locally based. They aren’t going to email you or promise you a job with J.P. Morgan or Google, but they might be able to use your skills and energy. Next week I’ll be presenting some of these solutions along with a more classroom-based explanation of why Teach for America’s approach is not addressing education inequality in the United States.
This is going out in the school newspaper on Thursday. I am kind of nervous about backlash and losing the invisibility I’ve had lately on campus (I don’t know anyone anymore because I was gone for a year! Hooray!), but I’m also pretty proud of it. I spent an insane amount of time on it, which has included a lot of good, really important conversations (as I said to a friend of mine, sometimes you’re having a conversation and all of a sudden, DING, this little light goes on that says “THIS is important, now,” and it doesn’t matter if you have homework or whatever, you need to be fully present in that conversation at that moment) about it/through it. I feel like every time I bring this up with someone they say, “Oh, yeah, this is for me, too” on some level or another, which has been validating.
(trigger warning)
I am sick of my friends getting raped. Sometimes literally sick. I think that a lot of people are with me on this, but I don’t hear from them often enough. These days I feel more and more like those of us female-bodied folks who haven’t been raped are the lucky few, not the majority. The scary enough statistics, even the oft cited and disputed “1 in 4”, seem ridiculously understated–with the women I’ve been closest with the past couple years it’s closer to 1 in 2. I’m starting to assume all women are survivors until I’m told otherwise, and I should probably open this up to include people of all genders. Staying up all night feeling upset and scared and fragile and alone because I can’t talk to anyone about how I feel without violating confidence is starting to feel familiar. I don’t know how normal an experience mine is, but from this perspective it doesn’t make sense that people are not speaking up all the time. There are plenty of venues where discussions do happen all the time, but where is the mainstream outrage?
I’ve written this to give a report from my particular corner of this struggle and share my current strategy—fighting non-consensual sex with consent. I’m not an expert, just someone who’s learning. If I felt like there was enough being said, I’d leave it to those who have more figured out, but I don’t, and I think there are enough people for whom this might be useful. I also think it’s incredibly important that I speak out as an ally. Part of this is practical. From my experiences as a queer person fighting homophobia, I know that using your own story to fight oppression is often painful and exhausting, so it’s important that allies speak out. Another part of this is selfish—being close to those who are directly affected can be incredibly difficult, and I want to give this experience voice for myself and for others like me.
This is not simple. We can’t just hunt down all the mythical monster Rapists living amongst us and be done with it; we have to re-examine our thinking. Even though I’ve often heard the official statistic that approximately two thirds of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim (US Department of Justice, 2005), our culture’s discourse around rape—broadcast by TV dramas and news coverage of sensational and violent incidents—continues to focus on the “stranger in a dark ally” scenario. Not only does this idea give the (racist) patriarchy power over women through fear while conveniently encouraging fear of those who are different, it hides the possibility of fighting rape proactively and culturally, which we can do by participating in and advocating a cultural shift of how we think about sex.
In June I stumbled upon a zine called Learning Good Consent and realized something that I should have known all along—it should not be the responsibility of the more vulnerable person to say no and put on the brakes; they should be the one with their foot on the gas. Sex should not be something someone does to someone else, a destination to continue towards if the road is left clear. It is a collection of acts, and each should be treated as a different act, not just a more advanced version of another. Different acts are different for different people, so we should check in every time we do something new to see if we both want it and like it, even for intimacies not usually thought of as sex. Contrary to what all of the silent sex scenes we see in the media tell us, we cannot read each others’ minds, and even if we consider ourselves fairly good at reading each others’ bodies, sometimes the two actually have different things to say. So ask. Consent is not the absence of no. Consent is a clearly and joyfully communicated “yes, please!”
I’ve been re-examining myself in this context. Few of the sexual interactions I’ve had have been completely consensual under my new definition. Verbal check-ins are relatively new for me, and I’ve certainly been part of poorly communicated encounters that would have been different without alcohol. I’ve discovered months into a sexual relationship that the first time we had sex neither of us wanted to do more than make out and go to sleep. Consent gets complicated when you delve into it this far. I can’t say that anyone raped anyone else in the last situation, but we both failed to communicate well and check in. If I define consent as both people wanting what happens to happen, it wasn’t consensual.
Communication is also nuanced. There’s a big difference between “Is this ok?” and “Do you want me to…?”—if I’m indifferent I’ll say “sure” to the first question, but something weaker to the second. It’s an even bigger step to “What do you want me to do?” which is harder to go along with out of obligation because it isn’t a leading question. I’m not good enough at talking to be able to answer that question most of the time yet. I think that, especially as a woman, it’s been difficult to get past the socialization that I’m not supposed to (have to) tell my partner what I do and don’t want. I don’t know exactly how this silence got inside of me, but sometimes even when words are loud in my head, even when I feel very cared about, I can’t say them.
Sex feels a lot different with more talking and instructions, maybe even less sexy, but as the Philly Stands Up collective explains in “The Basics” (Learning Good Consent zine), “Discussions about consent echo similar ones folks were having at the beginning of the AIDS crisis—the initial resistance to using condoms gave way as it became clear safer sex could keep people alive.” If we can someday make highly communicated, highly consensual sex the norm, we won’t put each other in positions in which we need to say “no,” and it will be inconceivable to accidentally cross peoples’ boundaries and/or commit date rape. This might not visibly save lives, but it will allow a lot of us to feel more alive.
I know I’m dreaming big. This is a radical reimagination of sex, which could strip power from it and have a huge effect on gender relations. There would be serious resistance to overcome, and I don’t necessarily believe we’ll ever make this new kind of sex the norm. Nevertheless, it’s a goal I believe in walking towards—away from the silence which is our projected norm now. Silence allows the assault to continue unnamed and unchallenged, and we can’t settle for this. We need to talk all the time, everywhere about what’s wrong, how people are being hurt through non-consensual sex in different ways at different levels, and we need to talk, too, about what’s right, what we want, and what feels good. If we can challenge our cultural silence, we can challenge rape, and we need to, because right now we are (silently) losing more of our lives and our energy than we even know.
Consent Questions
Those in quotations from Support Zine, by Andrea, Cindy, and Able.
“Not all of the questions have right or wrong answers. We put them together with the hopes that it would help people to think deeply, and to help open up conversations about consent…please read and think honestly about these questions, one at a time”
“How do you define consent? Do you know people or have you been with people who define consent differently than you do?”
“How might someone express that what is happening is not ok?
Do you look for verbal signs or are there other signs?
Do you think it is possible to misinterpret silence as consent?
Have you ever asked someone what kinds of signs you should look for if they have a hard time verbalizing when something feels wrong?”
“Do you seek consent the same way when you’re drunk as when you’re sober?
“Do you think it is important to talk the next day with the person you’ve been sexual with if there has been drinking involved? If not, is it because it’s uncomfortable or because you think something might have happened that shouldn’t have? Or is it because you think that’s just the way things go?”
“Do you ever feel obligated to have sex?”
“Do you ever feel obligated to initiate sex?”
“Do you think that if one person wants to have safe sex and the other person doesn’t really care, it is the responsibility of the person who has concerns to provide safe sex supplies” and/or make sure they are used? How consensual do you think it is to have unprotected sex with someone who wants to have protected sex?
In the 90’s, Antioch College infamously passed a Sexual Offense Prevention Policy which stated that verbal “consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity,” and that “each new level of sexual activity requires consent,” although it specified that “use of agreed upon forms of communication such as gestures or safe words is acceptable, but must be discussed and verbally agreed to by all parties before sexual activity occurs.” What do you think about this?
(check out the policy here. It’s really a beautifully done piece of work)
http://antiochmedia.org/mirror/antiwarp/www.antioch-college.edu/Campus/sopp/index.html (there’s a pdf version, too).
My working crew has ended up being very small—four total with inconsistent attendence. They are wonderful and also challenging. I spend a lot of energy trying to get things to work with the two who dislike like gardening. I get talked back at a fair bit and this week have wondered if my being infinitely patient is a disservice to them, but so far I think that maybe just being honest is working. And I’ve explained to at least one of them that I feel some conflict between being the kind of supervisor I believe in (coordinator of activity, not boss) and preparing them for the jobs they’ll most likely encounter in the future (with bosses).
We are maybe getting somewhere? I don’t know how far we’re getting in the environmental justice project we decided to take on, which I have coordinated poorly because my life keeps getting hit by sizeable asteroids on the weekends and when you’re at an organization from before nine until after six or seven (and are getting paid for 20 or 25 hours a week), you don’t feel very motivated to spend your free time planning. However, we have had some pretty decent conversations. I think that when a black teenage girl feels comfortable asking you how it feels to have privilege and know it or if you were scared of black people when you were younger it means you are doing something right?
I still talk to them somewhat like a teacher, though. I need to remember when to step back from my role as an educator/role model (because yes, I think I have stuff to say that they should consider. I am definitely preaching/evangelizing), and I’m not sure I did enough listening/asking questions back in this situation), which pretty much ended up being a conversation about me and how I am different from a lot of white people. I know they have important things to teach, but it is not as visible to me as what I have close at hand to share from myself, and the situations in which we interact are usually in my territory/where I know more (this neighborhood, gardens, research on environmental justice stuff). I get frustrated over low productivity garden-wise, freak-outs over bugs, complaints, and then very excellent non-garden-related conversation will happen and I will be reminded that I am dealing with someone really intelligent and lovely.
That’s how I think I got out of the pretty substantial funk I was in over all the org stuff until they showed up. Work can be just as frustrating, and some pretty upsetting stuff has happened since then, but I’m no longer feeling generally depressed. I think the answer to all of that defensiveness/anger is just love, as cheesy as that is.
Today has been infinitely better than the previous few, so it seems like a good one on which to try to make sense of everything that has been happening.
Sometimes I worry about how well I’m doing on issues and then something will happen and I’ll know exactly what to do and feel a lot more confident that I have been ok all along. Maybe this is an illusion, and I just notice when I do it ok more than when I don. One of the morning teenagers was talking about being gay this morning, and I just reached across the table and high-fived her and said that it was awesome that there are so many other out lesbians at her school because I had been basically the only one. And let the conversation continue. ‘Cause they had it under control. The dudes were pretty fascinated, which I think is ok.
This morning, eight poor other teenagers who had been told in June that WorkReady couldn’t find them a placement got phone calls that they should report to the organization I work at at one this afternoon. Two showed up about on time, two more did but left because it was too far and they didn’t want to take the job (two more will get called in tomorrow or over the weekend), and three more showed up (late because of late notice) before three, at which point I decided that the poor things had had me talk at them and walk around in the heat enough and sent them home. This program started two and a half weeks ago, and they were supposed to start then, so now they have to come in on Saturdays to do some job someone’ll find for them and then be sent home early in order to make up the hour. Which is dumb because it’s not their fault the program isn’t organized (debateably the program’s—it got a ton of stimulus money thrown at it and wasn’t ready to handle this many kids, etc.). None of these kids signed up to garden (or knew that was what they’d been called in for) and they’re all from pretty far away, which’ll make for a very different group than the morning, but they seem smart, and I’m excited to figure out a project to do with them. The general garden work might be a little rough (1-6 pm).
There is a lot of other organizational bullshit going on that was only better today because I managed to not be around it. The women I work with feel really stepped on generally within the organization (not necessarily intentionally; it’s really complicated, and I don’t know if I feel capable of explaining it yet), and that situation is really sad and heavy sometimes—the future does not look very good for these gardens, I don’t think anyone really feels like they can do anything about it, and just being around all of that hurt is pretty hard lately.
This makes things sadder, and it makes getting work done with the morning crew (which I’m sort of partnering on? Mostly just supporting) a lot harder because people are upset. It’s not fair to expect people to work under the supervision (because the money comes from the job program through the org’s management and folks who are fluent in paper shuffling and grant-ese) of someone they feel is simultaneously (in the same space, no less) robbing them, even when said job is unrelated and the people who get the short end here are actually the teenagers. I can’t imagine how it must feel—I’ve been around for a year and it really gets to me, and they’ve been around for some 25 years. Things seem to be moving ahead, though—we had a meeting with a calendar yesterday and things that the kids and I planned are now getting done even when I’m not around (which is most of the time). And I am coping. Another incident where I felt I’d done ok—you just say “I don’t want to do this without you,” not “I’ve put in weeks here for nothing; I think I deserve a little help” and, so far, people come around. Very very simple truth + trust and then people come through for you. My roommate wants me to talk to the higher-ups about this, but I am not ready yet, do not know what to say, and don’t trust them enough right now. I don’t think I would be listened to and I’m afraid of getting “in trouble.”
I didn’t used to be so easily intimidated, and it surprises me how quickly the real world has taken my confidence. The building manager confronted me for staying here (I’m not on the lease, they’re not supposed to let me do that), and I spent all day freaking out. We’ll see where that one ends up when roommate talks to her. I have less than a month left until I skip town, but I really don’t want to move. When someone has the power to get rid of you and they act like it, they are scary. Especially when they’re dressed professionally, for some reason.
My mom believes very strongly in bringing children up to think that they are strong and smart and have the power to change things, and I grew up negotiating with adults confidently, etc. (pretty by the book Anne Laureau-style middle class entitlement, if you are like me and adore storybook sociology). I connect this all to a RadioLab episode (Deception) that I listened to that found that people who can lie, especially to themselves, are happier. They can fool themselves into thinking they’re the best (swimmer, therefore they win, etc.) and that the world ain’t so bad. Even after all of my rehearsals, I was unable to lie to said manager when it came time, although she confronted me with the truth and I feel like denying that and then lying is harder. I’m a real bad liar, and the conclusion to the scared punk song for my non-existent band lying scribbled on the floor in my borrowed room is that I guess I’ll just have to get stronger.
I’ve been finishing up this excellent, accessible reader called Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World (Joan Wink), and the conclusion has a section about how we should all have courage and patience, illustrated by a story of teacher working in a “very coercive school setting”—ie as part of a team that doesn’t share her ideas about being a “transformative educator.” This woman has to “be courageous enough to live her beliefs honestly” and share them and “accept the fact that she can’t control others’ beliefs; she can only live her own.” And there’s a lot in critical pedagogy (and a million other things…what do I call all of the ideas I’ve run into along the way?) about trusting other people and having an open heart…
I think I trust people because things that I’ve read or heard say that I need to, not because I really do. I pretend/work with the assumption that of course you’ll accept me/be kind/have a motivation other than getting into my pants because I believe that you should or because I know that assuming otherwise would be prejudiced, not because I really believe in you. I don’t understand how I can be so committed to changing the world and fighting injustice when I don’t really think that I love people. I’m all about community, but I never want to reach out to strangers.
There’s some progress on that one. I make myself reach out, and the rewards are real. I went to the grocery store with a bag full of mint yesterday and gave some to both people who asked me what it was, one of whom seemed fairly interested in growing some. And it was awfully nice to be the mint fairy. So maybe I’ll train myself eventually and it’ll become genuine.
Nevertheless, if I’m forcing it, I’m sure there are moments when that trust isn’t there and it should be. I hope this doesn’t keep me from succeeding in what I’m doing with the kids and teenagers this summer. But it is hard to believe in poor urban teenagers/kids when the first environment you ever encountered them in is the goddamn public school system, and even if you’ve since seen them in other places, they’ve never been environments that allow them to show what they’re really good at.
And out in the middle of all of this is me. This is something I’ve been avoiding for a while/been secretly defensive about. When I went to the media conference and social forum in Detroit, I was going to workshops of all sorts of different themes left and right. In the past I’ve been able to keep myself separate from a lot of the work that I do. Don’t get me wrong—I very much do this for myself as much as I do it for anyone, wrote an enormous final paper in December around “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you are here because your liberation is wrapped up in mine, then let us work together”, etc., but have been keeping it fairly simple lately. I focus on my oppressor identities, which makes sense because they’re very obvious, and form the most marked differences between myself and a lot of the people I am around. But I’m not just a financially secure white kiddo, I’m a dyke, and it’s been more clear lately that I’m not as problem-free around that identity as I’ve pretended to be. Just because you go to a woman’s college and are able to date without having to think about the fact that you’re omg dating a woman does not mean everything is perfectly fine.
I stopped coming out to kids/families I was working with after a pretty gnarly experience with it when I was 18, which was totally botched—me being defensive me (I will not will not will NOT act like there’s anything wrong with it) accidentally outed myself on my second day with a horrible class when I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t think that a lot of progress can be made on homophobia or whatever until there’s some trust established in the relationship, but…most of the kids I’m working with I have been working with for about a year, there’s the issue of dear lord that seven-year-old trans kid needs all the help in the world, and I really need to…trust. Because it’s fucked up to assume just because a teacher/family is from a certain background they’ll be less accepting. You’re supposed to bring your whole self to the table, because then you are completely invested and are helping with all you got. I am not bringing as much of myself to the table as I could. That is not being courageous. There are a lot of people who risk a lot more than disapproval every day and stick their necks out anyhow.
This is what I started to write while I was still in Oaxaca. I never finished it, but it’s an interesting point for comparison.
I am heading home in a week. A few days ago I desperately didn’t want to think about it, but now that my roommate has told me that the garden I’m going to be teaching/working in this summer is actually doing pretty well (she’s even planning on taking the beer bottles out next—there are probably not a lot of them, but damn, they get me down, except perhaps on the rare occasion that they drown slugs and I can laugh at the fact that they’re theoretically being useful). Getting home could be fairly anti-climactic…everyone is super busy, it’s hot, and going from observing other peoples’ 10, 15, 20-yr fights and projects in 2 hour lectures and writing papers about them to summer #2 of my own tiny little project could be really frustrating.
I am curious to see what stranger, more concrete things I am going to take home with me. I already know the ideological ones, I think. There are two of them. The first is an emphasis on creativity and proactivity instead of critique.
Where I am now (as of a week ago, but I think it all still applies)–
Coming home has actually been a lot easier than I anticipated in most ways. I am finding more connections than I expected, and have certainly managed to keep busy. My dreaded home country was very kind to me upon arrival—a stranger bought me frozen yogurt in the airport when my debit card pitched a fit (I hate airports and do not expect them to be sites of kindness), then my first day back I witnessed an entire trash bag of beer bottles being cheerfully hunted down by first and second graders following a breakfast of cinnamon rolls, a trip to the beautiful new coffee shop that has opened two blocks from the apartment (we’re going to ignore gentrification right now—they have dollar coffee), and a couple hours working on a gorgeous mural on a methadone clinic.
I’ve spent this week gardening, mostly in the main garden of the organization I work with, which means not alone. The head gardener is a beautiful, strong, brilliant, wise woman, who has been with the gardens since the beginning and seen them through many changes, good and bad. I was planning on spending a lot of time volunteering there this summer, because the gardens need a lot of help, but I was also thinking that it might be good to, you know, get a part-time job to try to cover at least a few of my expenses, so it was absolutely amazing when she informed me that there was about to be a position open (usually filled by a family member of hers) supervising the summer youthworks teenagers doing garden work and she wanted me to take it. I. is not necessarily an easy person, and the honor of being told that alone (outside the fact that yes, it seems I do have this perfect job) was enough to bowl me over. I am going to learn so much from her over the course of the summer and still don’t really believe this connection is where it is now. The night before last my roommate (henceforth KA) and I were at her house eating dinner/chatting until two in the morning, and are so amazed and honored that we’ve been left speechless, something uncommon between the two of us.
I may be deluding myself, but I’m starting to feel like I belong here, even though really the only thing I have done has been to come back instead of moving on. Landing this job gave me a lot of faith in my own principles—these days my rule is to know what you believe and work on it—reading, discussing your thoughts and how to put them in action with others—and then just trust yourself to do your best, knowing that it will be enough because it has to be. I’m not ready to throw any god into that mix, but some people are, and that is what I have been feeling.
But as of about yesterday reality has been showing its head, too. The morning after that amazing dinner, a friend of mine (former co-worker, about to graduate from college, lots of fun, loved children, wanted to fix stuff, liked to speak Spanish, really lovely person) that I last saw in August of ’09 died from cancer, and later that day, when I was chilling with KA at a neighborhood parade celebrating people who helped make the area safer, watching beautiful kids dance and sing and thinking about how senseless and unfortunate it is that she had to go through all that pain and doesn’t get to keep on growing and making the world a better place (but I’m still here, but my 94-yr-old grandmother is still here), there was a drive-by shooting at the other end of the park. I think that I am glad that I have not learned to tell the difference between fireworks and gunshots, but all the men (and then others) jumped up and started heading rather defensively in that direction. The pastor running the event told everyone to stay by the stage, and we did, and everyone kept on performing and watching. We learned that karaoke-inclined three-year-olds do better when given “Single Ladies” than when given “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” a couple of our students from last summer did a pretty awesome dance number, and the evening concluded with us sitting on the curb with a couple of guys, one of whom insisted that I “don’t even look white” (Spanish or Portuguese, apparently) and then later hypothesized that I was Amish on my rumspringa.
KA is mostly annoyed that this shooting hasn’t even made everyblock.com, particularly in the context of everyone flipping out over the Northern Liberties (CRAZY gentrification near where I used to live) waitress who got murdered biking home at midnight this week. Everyone is joining facebook groups on “Grassroots Solutions for a Safer Philadelphia”, which I have investigated and found to be overwhelmingly white and linking fun articles (ok, just one) talking about gentrification and how just outside of gentrified neighborhoods things can be a lot more “sketchy” and dangerous. I am also annoyed by this, as sorry as I am for the victim (and yes, I’m rethinking my rules of no walking alone after 11 but biking is ok until 2 or 3), but mostly I am sad about my friend and amazed at the contrasts. Don’t think I’ve ever been so simultaneously happy and sad at once.
I just spent some three and a half hours going over my paper with one of the high school students. It was awesome. Not only did I learn a ton, it felt kind of intimate. Maybe because it was a situation that I was familiar and comfortable with which managed to banish a lot of the cultural and power dynamics that are my existence here, or maybe it was because I actually understood for the most part what was going on. More than that, I think, but the “more” could just be the fact that it’s been a while. I think she enjoyed herself—we lost track of the time and she said we could finish tomorrow—and she wouldn’t even let me get her a quesadilla after missing dinner for me.
Also, the high school students are starting to call me “tú” (informal second person), which I always meant to tell them to do but never remembered while talking to them, and it feels pretty good. I am going to be sad to leave, I think, although I suspect if I stayed I would probably end up shaving my head to get the men to stop hitting on me. Juan Carlos has actually moved up considerably in the ranks because his strategy is not to drunkenly declare affection. Perhaps not, though, because I actually know how to deal with that—I say goodbye.
Paper is some 1,500 words too long (down from over 2,000) and includes about four pages of footnotes, ranging from extensive quotes to the fact that there’s an hour break at the high school for breakfast at nine.
May 5th:
I’m sitting on the porch outside of my room starting to get heartburn from the coffee I should not have had at dinner and listening to the various bugs and lizards and dogs of the night and trying to figure out how to start explaining tonight.
I got here with the idea of not just sending back an abstract of my paper to everyone I worked with. I wanted to sit down and go over it and make sure that all the quotes were ok and that I hadn’t misinterpreted this. Then, a few days after I’d arrived, I found myself observing a parents’ meeting, where I was introduced, and I told them about the same thing I’d been telling the students and teachers before observations and interviews, which included saying that I was going to share everything and ask for feedback before leaving. This is only right because I observed the parents and I observed their kids, and I observed their school, which is very much theirs.
I mentioned this on Monday to the coordinators of both schools, wanting to invite everyone but hoping that they would in fact not come, and before I knew it, “Reunión de Padres de Familia, 6:00 Miercoles” (Parent Meeting, 6:00 Wednesday) was written on all of the white boards in the secondaria and I was nervously writing “PAUSA” at key points in my outline while watching a room full of white plastic “Superior” (beer brand, I think) chairs fill up with parents and students and community members from the ages of, say three to seventy-something or eighty. Half an hour before, they had started to blast the invitation on the town loudspeaker. I was nervous this week for it, certainly, but I realized watching the slideshow of the pictures I’d let them upload from my camera (including me making a goofy face with an axe) that I felt very much like I had before first crossing the hammaca… I knew that I was going to do it, but had no idea how it was going to turn out, having serious doubts about my abilities and no idea how the bridge/people be like once I got out there.
I talked for almost an hour, and they listened. Apparently at first I was dancing around and my Spanish was a hot mess, but then I relaxed. I tried to get people to comment on each segment, but that’s not how it works here (although there was some laughter. For example, when I commented that sometimes Maestro Hugo talks a lot in meetings). You “exponer” and then the facilitators go up and beg for questions and comments and for a while no one talks, but then they do. And they did. Not in the way that I expected/planned at all, but with questions for me. Big questions. Big comments. Please go to Benjamín (my advisor is the academic director of all of the BICs and a fairly busy and sought-after anthropologist who does not always answer my emails very well) and tell him to give us this training that we all want. ?Por qué es el bachillerato una respuesta a la secondaria? (Why does the high school aim to be an answer to the secondary school?) How can the high school articulate with the secondaria? Does the investigation at the high school follow the work of the secondaria? (this from a student, who I told he knew better than I did) Do you think this kind of education should be expanded? What are you going to do with this investigation after this? Traditional education makes those who do go to university get their degree and stay in the city and forget about their pueblo that supported them. Will these students be different?
And from there it turned away from all being officially directed at me and lots of people (mostly from the schools) started talking about what does this town want out of education and we should have this meeting again, only with more people and this is what we’re trying to do over at the high school and this is where we are in the world. All the while referring to my having started this particular incarnation of the conversation.
I feel really honored to have participated in this. I am 22 years old and know almost nothing, and these people sat there for an hour, parents, elders, the Municipal Authority, teachers, giggly 13-year-old girls, high school girls leading toddlers in and out to go to the bathroom (brother or cousin, I think) listened to me tell them my interpretation of their reality and then asked me what I thought should be done. I am not sure if this is because I am white and from far away and everyone keeps calling me a researcher, because this is the way things are here, or because it is in fact very interesting to hear a total outsider’s interpretation. People are fairly respectful when other people talk. I would like to be able to declare that this is a culture of listening, but I do not know. I can say for certain that there’s more of an attention span for listening here.
I usually do not like attention, but for some reason I’m really alright with how this turned out. My last note/doodle on the page that was supposed to be full of suggestions is “It’s been a while since I felt so clearly that I. Done. Right.” (in saying I wanted to have a meeting) Which could be totally misreading everything, but that’s how I feel.
A lot of the questions were from the high school students. I really liked that. And I’m fairly sure that a lot of them missed dinner to stay at the meeting. A sizeable portion of the students at the high school come from other villages, and the town puts them up in the Municipal Authority’s buildings (same one that houses the secondaria and the library and where we met tonight) and feeds them in the school cafeteria. I found out last night that the budget is sufficiently stretched that they’ve been getting meat at the most twice a month. I, in my dependence upon restaurants and whoever decides to kidnap and feed me, frequently end up having to eat it three times a day. (Context for juxtaposition: in the States I eat vegetarian).
I was kidnapped today on my way to lunch, which I was not hungry for because I’d eaten eggs and beans (tortilla silverware) and two cups of café con leche with bread dipped in them for breakfast, and taken to the birthday party of someone who was turning 70. I think someone told me it was the fellow who found me on the mountain, but I didn’t recognize him, so I must have misunderstood…I think? I ate plenty of spicy barbecued meat/rice/tortilla and was then presented with cake AND jello, all the while drinking coke because that was the alternative to beer.
I realized towards the end that my buddy Juan Carlos, who has not tried to get me to sit down and talk for a while but who did present me with a ferrero rocher chocolate as I was leaving the internet café was sitting next to the door. He handed me a piece of paper on the way out.
ai like you, veri moch
am veri hoppe, for you.
I do not know what to do with this. The last time I got a note like this, it was written and stuck into the “R” section of the message board at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in front of my face by a short girl with a mohawk. We made out and then there was drama and then we found out she used to have my ex’s stage name tattooed on the bottom of her foot. Now we are fairly good friends who rarely see each other.
***
My landlord and I never really seem to understand each other… I was not sure for a long time exactly what the deal with my rent was, and I still frequently misunderstand him. I don’t know why…he’s a lot like my host grandmother in that he gives a lot of advice with “para que…” (so that) attached to it. He is very frequently standing around, leaning on buildings outside, etc. This morning I was coming back to my room from doing laundry, very obviously picking my nose, when suddenly there he is sitting on the porch. “Ya lo lavaste?” (basically “Done with your laundry?” Rhetorical). Oops. He’s 60 or 70 and I think he’s outside more lately because his wife went to LA for the summer to visit kids. Lots of children and grandchildren here and there. He changes dollars for people in town and I don’t know how many rooms he rents out to my sort and maybe to migrantes who are working on the highway (see Arroyo Blanco entry for pictures of “highway”. They’re paving this one).
Mostly, I see him talking to people around. I do not have much to say to him (at least not five times a day. Unlike other people in town, he doesn’t start conversations that involve mostly him talking or asking questions, just makes short statements that need replies), so I feel awkward, and this is probably why don’t like him that much, even though he lets me use the phone and his laundry soap. Although I guess he did use the word “atrasada” (behind) to refer to Arroyo Blanco, which I guess gives me a slightly better excuse. Slightly.
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