THE KEYS LEADERSHIP ACADEMY @ CAFÉ ON A
WINTER/HOLIDAY 2014 EDITION MAGAZINE
Peace, Justice, One Love- One People, One World Edition
“Mexico Is a Mass Grave”
NO JUSTICE NO PEACE
SIN JUSTICIA NO HAY PAZ
MEXICANO CUANDO?????????????????????????????
Political Graffiti Part IV Historical Truth Matters Normalistas
“Mexico Is a Mass Grave” By Rodolfo F. Acuña
In a world of molting (AKA distortions) the disappearance (NOW CONFIMED KILLED)
of 43 normalistas from Ayotzinapa on September 26 in Iguala, Guerrero will soon be
forgotten. Like most human travesties they will be remembered only by those who cared or
loved them. We live in a world where the truth does not matter and reality can be erased
by a wagging of the dog.
(http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/wag+the+dog.html).
American media has given this event cursory attention much as the case of the wars in the
Middle East. The attitude is that if it is not reported it does not exist. Indeed, I have only
seen only one item in the Los Angeles Times, a paper that used to boast that if it did not
report it, it was not news.
The narrative is easy enough to understand. Normalistas are college students training to be
teachers. Students at the Ayotzinapa Normal School traveled to the small city of Iguala to
ask for donations to help finance their trips to Mexico City for the annual march
commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre.
Apparently the impending visit unsettled Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife
María de los Angeles Pineda Villa who were hosting a parade and fiesta celebrating
María’s charitable work. Not wanting María de los Angeles’ party spoiled the couple
entered into an arrangement with the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos,
(http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2014/10/what-is-guerreros-unidos.html) and police Chief
Felipe Flores Velazquez, to have the problem disappear. Two of María de los Angeles’
brothers were senior members of the cartel.
On September 26, 2014, a bus carrying 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural
Teachers College of Ayotzinapa was intercepted by the local police and handed over to
Guerreros Unidos. What happened then is open to conjecture. Some have testified that the
students were burned alive; others say that they were disposed of by the cartel.
The truth be told, violence in Mexico has increased since the 1980s, and it has molted into a
neo-liberal state. In the current crisis, the government trying to take the heat off PRI have
uncovered multiple graves in the area, leading one observer to remark “Mexico Is a Mass
Grave.”
In order to understand the political significance of the Ayotzinapa normalistas, it is
important to understand who they are and know their history. The massacre at Tlatelolco
is well known even in the United States. Lesser known is la matanza that occurred in
September 1968 in San Miguel, Canoa in Puebla on the advent of Tlatelolco. Five hikers
who were employees of the Autonomous University of Puebla were lynched by 2,000 town
people who had been whipped into a frenzy by the local priest.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUfp3QzVn-I).
Tensions in Mexico have accelerated since the signing of the North American Free Trade
Agreement in 1994. The majority of the 43 disappeared normalistas grew up in rural
Guererro farm towns devastated by Mexico’s post-NAFTA economy and the privatization
of the Mexican economy that has wiped out the Mexican rural farms and increased rural
poverty and lawlessness.
During these years Mexico has become of vassal of the United States adopting its neoliberal economic policies. It has fought the U.S.’s war on drugs increasing violence and
unrest. The Mexican government has fast-tracked the molting of Mexico – stripping the
people of the constitutional guarantees of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and has
privatized Mexico’s public resources.
History matters to many Mexicans who still bask in the memories of the Mexican
Revolution of 1910, the first social, political and cultural revolution of the 20th Century,
paving the way for Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the anti-colonial wars of the century.
The ghost of Zapata still rides down streets Iguala.
The Mexican Revolution began on November 20, 1910, and raged for a decade. More than
a million Mexicans fled to the United States during this period with another million dying
trying to create a new society.
The Ayotzinapa Normal School was founded in 1926 in the aftermath of the Mexican
Revolution as a teachers’ boarding school. The normalistas of Ayotzinapa took this
tradition seriously and participated in the progressive struggles of the nation. They were
part of what is known in Mexico as the rural school movement where Mexican youth went
into the countryside to teach rural Mexicans to read and write.
Mexicans know their history of self-sacrifice. I know Mexicans of my age group who
remember the rural teachers who would come for one or two years. Many were not trained
but they were enthusiastic with dreams of building a new society as they taught their young
charges the words to the Intenacional. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf6z2Vrfcmg)
The rural schools were founded in the post-revolutionary period for children of peasant
families. Teachers have defended revolutionary values even in the face of the government’s
move to privatize, globalize and atomize Mexico. Today’s student protests are about socalled education reforms modeled after US programs that are increasingly for the one
percent.
In our world a normal school is a teachers’ college. Many American universities started out
as normal schools, e.g., University of California at Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, the
California state College system, etc. They have a long tradition.
Contrary to popular belief education in the United States has not always been universal.
More often than not it was democratic. The vaunted Puritan educational system was for
the faithful and limited to those elected by god.
During the 19th century very few venues extended free public education to new immigrant.
In 1872 the New York Times wrote the principle of universal education had been
popularized “in New England and other portions of the country” was changing owing “to
foreign immigration and to unequal distribution of wealth, large numbers of people have
grown up without the rudiments even of common-school education.” Over 5.6 million
people in the United States did not know how to read or write. Only four states had
compulsory education laws.
By the turn of the century, California was one of the few Southwestern states that
compelled children to go to school, but even then law was enforced occasionally. Texas had
enacted a compulsory education bill in the second decade of the 20th Century that was not
enforced until modern times.
During this period the United States ranked last among the “civilized” nations of the world
in the length of the school day and year. Texas ranked thirty-eighth in the number of
children enrolled in school and New Mexico ranked fortieth. By 1913 only seven of eightyseven students graduating from New Mexico’s public high schools were of Mexican origin.
There are those who forget history and those who never read it. In a recent letter to the
faculty California State University Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand boasted that
molting (the privatization) would take the university to a higher level. Harry said that the
only thing that was slowing CSUN down was a few critics. If the provost had read a history
book, he would know that progress is brought about not by molting, not by the “invisible
hand” of the market, but by people like the normalistas who were willing to sacrifice
themselves and to say this is not right! This is not fair!
ANALYSIS: The militarization of police
agencies from Ferguson to the Middle East
Image credit: Todo Poder al Pueblo Media Operations
Dedicated to the victorious people of Palestine and Ferguson, MO.
The Todo Poder al Pueblo Collective is proud to present the following perspective on the
militarized operations of domestic police agencies, which are formulated, planned, and tested
alongside overseas allies of U.S. imperialism, such as the Israeli Occupation in Palestine and
the Gulf Arab regimes, who are united in waging war against the oppressed.
Police violence towards our communities isn’t an “accident” or freak occurrence, but is the
exact plan and purpose of the police and other armed bodies of occupation connected to the
state. Within the United States, these practices are carried out not only through armed force, but
through institutionalized violence: in Salinas, CA, counterinsurgency practices drawn up in
collaboration with the U.S. Military are utilized against immigrant communities; throughout the
country data-sharing programs with the federal government such as fusion centers and the poliMigra “Secure Communities” programs have led to record deportations; meanwhile, in
communities of color such as Oxnard, Fresno, Los Angeles, and Orange County, anti-gang civil
injunctions have been imposed which effectively revoke the rights of residents in the affected
areas.
We thank Roqayah Chamseddine for writing this important article and we hope that organizers,
workers, students, and families recognize the importance of studying and sharing it, and fighting
back to take control of our communities.
The militarization of police agencies from Ferguson to the
Middle East
By Roqayah Chamseddine
Originally published on Al-Akhbar English (Lebanon)
The arming of US police agencies with military-grade weaponry and tactics can be traced back,
at the very least, to the creation of the paramilitary “Special Weapons and Tactics” Unit (SWAT)
in 1967. In Overkill: Rise of Paramilitary Policing journalist Radley Balko notes that what
inspired the heavily militarized SWAT team of today was “a specialized force in Delano,
California, made up of crowd control officers, riot police, and snipers, assembled to counter the
farm worker uprisings led by Cesar Chavez.” Balko writes in August 2013 for The Wall Street
Journal that by 1975 from this first experimental SWAT unit grew to “approximately 500 such
units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by criminologist Peter Kraska
of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13 percent of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had
a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80 percent.”
LEFT: A SWAT team member deploys a flash-bang device outside the garage of an apartment
where an armed suspect was believed to be barricaded in Port Hueneme. (Rob Varela—Ventura
County Star) RIGHT: Israeli military patrols the streets in the West Bank city of Hebron on July
6, 2014 (Abed Al Hashlamoun—EPA)
In War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, published in June 2014
by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it is reported that federal programs “are arming
state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war with almost no
public discussion or oversight.” One such policy is the Department of Defense (DoD) Excess
Property Program, or the 1033 Program, which “provides surplus DoD military equipment to
state and local civilian law enforcement agencies for use in counter-narcotics and counterterrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety.” Items provided by the DoD include, but are
not limited to, mine-resistant ambush protected armored vehicles, aircrafts, grenade launchers,
countless machine guns, magazines, bomb suits, forced entry tools and units of surveillance.
In the small city of Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown,
was shot multiple times by a police officer on August 9. Witnesses say that the police officer had
initiated a confrontation with Brown, and then physically assaulted him, as reported by Margaret
Hartmann for New York Magazine:
“Brown’s friend, Dorin Johnson, says they were walking in the street when the officer pulled up
and told them to “get the eff onto the sidewalk.” Johnson says the officer then reached “his arm
out the window and grabbed my friend around the neck.” Witness Piaget Crenshaw said he saw
the officer chasing Brown. “They shot him and he fell. He put his arms up to let them know that
he was compliant and he was unarmed, and they shot him twice more and he fell to the ground
and died.”
After the murder of Michael Brown, protests began to quickly take shape in Ferguson in
response, not only at the scene of the crime but in front of the Ferguson Police Department
headquarters. The police response to these protesters, many of whom literally had their hands
raised above their heads while shouting “don’t shoot!”, was alarming – dogs were called, and
heavily armed police officers lined up, intimidating the men, women and children of Ferguson.
At least one police officer was recorded shouting, “Bring it, all you fucking animals! Bring it!”
Extremely troubling was the implementation of a no-fly zone over Ferguson, meant “to stop
media from flying over the area to film.”
The targeting of Black communities by law enforcement is historic and ubiquitous; it has long
colored every aspect of life for even those indirectly impacted by police actions – when
systematic racism meets a militarized police force the outcome is continued dehumanization of
Black bodies,
“Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.” – Syreeta McFadden
societal acceptance of black deaths at the hands of the police and a disastrous escalation,
oftentimes with public approval, of violent tactics against the Black people and communities of
color. Modern US police departments share a colonial history that gives context to police
violence of today – recognizing this framework is essential when examining how police brutality
has developed historically. From constables in the 1600s who made up a sort of “neighborhood
watch,” wherein they would capture slaves and prevent them from organizing for payment, the
slave patrols of the early 1700s, the brazen appointment of police officers by way of their
political affiliations in the 1880’s and stop-and-frisk, adopted from English common law, we
learn that not only is violence an inherent part of the institution itself but it is a necessary
component which allows for the state to control its citizens, and it has emerged and developed in
the most destructive of ways. Police officers are trained to use force and are given the most lethal
of weapons in order for them to do so and, according to data presented in the June 2014 report by
the ACLU, this violence is overwhelmingly directed towards people of color. “Sixty-one percent
of all the people impacted by SWAT raids in drug cases were minorities” and a majority are
Black:
“[W]hen the data was examined by agency (and with local population taken into consideration),
racial disparities in SWAT deployments were extreme. As shown in the table and graph below, in
every agency, Blacks were disproportionately more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than
whites, sometimes substantially so. For example, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Blacks were nearly
24 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were, and in Huntington, West
Virginia, Blacks were 37 times more likely. Further, in Ogden, Utah, Blacks were 40 times more
likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were.”
Despite this, the focus on the actions of individual officers, while warranted, should not
overwhelm the discourse – the data presented by the ACLU is not only an indictment of police
officers alone but of the police institution itself. Police agencies have created an environment
which not only employs violence against minorities but encourages violence against them.
Present-day US law enforcement as an institution has cooperated with a long list of state
agencies which are integral components of the larger machinery of government as well as
international police forces. The joint training between the United States and Israel is one such
example. In May 2010, 50 retired US admirals and generals vigorously argued that Israel is a
security asset in a letter to President Obama, that “American police and law
enforcement officials have reaped the benefit
of close cooperation with Israeli professionals in the areas of domestic counter-terrorism
practices and first response to terrorist attacks,” they wrote in part. In 2010, the Anti-Defamation
League publicized that it had sponsored 15 senior law enforcement officials – including from the
FBI, NYPD and Boston Police – to take part in an intensive “counter-terrorism training mission”
in Israel so that they could share “information, strategies and tactics,” then again in 2011 and
2013. This program, which was first established in 2003, has sent over 115 state, federal and
local law enforcement executives to Israel. In 2013, members of a US bomb squad from Arizona,
including a US deputy, traveled to Israel for training which included “going to a West Bank
outpost with the Israeli National Police bomb squad… learning about port inspections as they
relate to counter explosives and counter IED operations.”
One of the reasons for this training? “To improve techniques and tactics they use along the USMexico border.” The ADL is not the only organization boasting of this militarized US-Israel
Jerusalem Post, 3/2/14: Israeli defense firm Elbit has been awarded a $145 million contract by
the Department of Homeland Security to construct a series of surveillance towers on the
Arizona-Mexico border.
partnership. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has an entire publication
dedicated to this “strategic partnership,” noting that “Israel has worked with multiple American
agencies, including the FBI, NYPD, LAPD, and the Washington, D.C. Police Department.”
According to the pamphlet not only have the U.S. Capitol Police undergone training in “Israeli
counterterrorism techniques” but the partnership between these two colonial entities is far
reaching, even beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement, with FEMA and the National
Guard “often [traveling] to Israel to participate in Israeli homeland security drills.” The United
States is not only learning from the brutality of the Israeli occupation forces but sharing their
knowledge with other nations. The Middle Eastern Law Enforcement Training Center, which is
co-sponsored by the FBI and the U.A.E. at the Dubai Police Academy, where FBI agents offer
special training courses that “[involve] many aspects of law enforcement, including ways to
combat white-collar crime, violent crime, forensics and counter-terrorism.” The United States
also conducts military exchange programs in places like Egypt where US forces and Egyptian
forces take part in joint military exercises, and offers FBI training to Egypt’s secret police who
“routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition” according to victim testimony.
Police institutions, which continue to work and expand under the guise of law while merging
with the most prominent characters behind war-making, including the arms industry, lobbyists,
and politicians, demand that communities, most often those of color, surrender what little
autonomy they have so that they may receive “protection.” That they are ever permitted to
collect on this guardianship is of no consequence because these institutions define protection and
determine, for everyone, what is a most satisfactory response to any and all actions on the part of
the community members.
Black men and women have long fought, with their blood, for the decentralization and
democratization of the police and the right of their communities to determine their future without
threat of police brutality – the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, written in 1966, is a clear-cut
example. “We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People,” the
program reads in part. “We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by
organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from
racist police oppression and brutality.” An article in the Palm Beach Post, published in 1969,
reads “Decentralized Police Sought By Black Panthers”:
“Six intense Black Panthers have come in out of the West as advance men for a national
conference which will drumbeat a simplistic theme – decentralize the police systems of big cities,
place the cops under neighborhood control and give each community its own police
commissioner.”
US police forces uphold white supremacy with their racist implementation of violence, where in
places like Ogden, Utah, Black people “were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT
raid than whites were,” according to the ACLU. These forces work towards the preservation of
capitalism, and the police, as an institution, use elitism, violence and authoritarianism in order to
preserve the state.
Decentralization is not only possible but proving to be a necessary process in order to dismantle
the structuralized and militarized brutality that communities of color face at the hands of racist
paramilitary police forces. The police have proven that they are not accountable to the
communities they allegedly “serve and protect,” and so in order to implement restorative justice
the institution itself should be dismantled and replaced with an organization that is transparent,
represents the diversity of these communities and which, most importantly, is limited in regards
to the scope of the organization’s power.
Roqayah Chamseddine is a Sydney based Lebanese-American journalist and commentator.
She tweets @roqchams and writes ‘Letters From the Underground.‘
Artwork by Corina Dross: New poster to raise money for those arrested in Ferguson. All profit
goes to Anti-State STL, who are organizing financial support for folks on the ground.
Political Graffiti: Part V,Contradictions
It is St. Augustine’s Fault! By Rodolfo F. Acuña
One of the most difficult chores for activists is recognizing how they acquired knowledge
and why they react in so and so manner. I know that I am passionate about what I do,
write and that am often intolerant – a characteristic that some people interpret as anger
but stems from strong feelings as to what is right and wrong. I am not religious, indeed I
don’t believe in the hereafter or spirituality. Nevertheless, I recognize that my core beliefs
were formed by my Catholic upbringing. I was raised in a day when only Catholics went to
heaven and Jews were said to have killed Christ. There was right and wrong, a mortal and
venial sin; although we believed that the former was the most interesting.
Like most Catholic boys of my time, I wanted to become a priest. However, doubts kept
creeping into my mind like when the priest told my sister that she should stay in an abusive
marriage because it was her cross. That along with whiff of perfume woke me up to the fact
that this was not my calling. Nevertheless, it imbued me with a missionary spirit. My
favorite movie along these lines was Robert De Niro’s The Mission [
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcJdjXr2d6g ]
However, I recognize now that these altruistic roles aside from promoting religious values
also nurtured the cult of the hero that drives too many of us. I never questioned this
impulse until I was teaching in a high school and one of my colleagues was a former nun. I
naively believed that once a priest or once a nun you were always a religious. Religion was
much more dogmatic than it is today when you can rationalize being a good Catholic and a
bigot toward immigrants or gays. For me this is a contradiction that surely should
condemn the nativist to burn in eternity. One day in the teachers’ smoking room I asked
Marguerite, a former nun, why she had left the convent. She sighed and gave me a very
measured response saying that she was a sister for over ten years and that she prayed
intently always capping this meditation with the expression Ad maiorem Dei gloriam “for
the greater glory of god,” [ http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/13507/for-the-greaterglory-of-god/ ] a saying familiar to me because of my Jesuit training.
As Marguerite described it, one day while in deep prayer she had an epiphany. [
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany ]. She asked herself whether she
was a nun because it was for the greater glory of god or whether it was for the greater
glory of Marguerite. When she realized that she was deluding herself, she left the convent.
My own awakening was not nearly as sudden or dramatic. As a kid I expressed the same
fervor as Marguerite. I supposedly wanted to change the world for the greater glory of god.
My world was comprised of comic books and bible stories. One of my first heroes was St.
Augustine of Hippo (354-386) [ http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02084a.htm ]. I guess
that I was first drawn to him because he was a sinner. However, like every human being,
the more I learned about him the more critical I became. My criticism grew as I studied
scholasticism http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Scholasticism and the
importance of solving contradictions became more apparent and important.
There was one Augustinian story in particular that brought me to my Marguerite moment
after which I could not live the contradiction. The story goes that St. Augustine wanted to
understand and be able to explain the Holy Trinity. Augustine spent over 30 years working
on his treatise De Trinitate [about the Holy Trinity] [
http://canonandcreed.com/2013/05/15/augustines-de-trinitate-my-complete-summaries/ ].
Oversimplifying the problem Augustine sought to solve the mystery of how there were
three separate persons in one. At first I could pretty much accepted that it was possible
because god operated under different rules. However, Augustine explanation only raised
further contradictions: “if your view of God does not match the reality of God, you do not
really love God and your faith is a false faith!”
The explanations of my religious teachers further heightened the contradiction. One that I
heard repeated since the third grade was the story of Augustine trying to understand the
Trinity. In deep thought he was walking along the beach when he suddenly came upon a
little boy who was all alone and playing in the sand. Augustine saw the small boy running
back and forth from the water to the sand. The boy was using a sea shell to carry the water
from the sea and place it into a small hole in the sand.
Augustine asked, “My boy, what are doing?” The smiling boy replied,
“I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole,”
Dismayed Augustine replied that it was impossible for the hole to hold all that water. The
boy and looked into the eyes of Augustine and said, “It is no more impossible than what you
are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your
small intelligence.” Well, I could not buy that.
Some say that the boy was Jesus. The message was that there are limits of human
understanding – which I conceded was possible. But for me contradictions have to be
resolved. Instead of resolving the mystery of the Trinity it made me doubt it, a
characteristic that has formed my character.
If everything was resolved by faith there would be no need for scientific knowledge or
reform. If we had taken it on faith that the Church Fathers have a pipeline to God we
would still be discriminating against homosexuals, Jews, and Moslems. The world would
still be thought to be flat and we would be driving around in a horse and carriage.
My rupture with scholasticism was over the question of faith. Scholasticism is a method of
learning that puts a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to resolve contradictions. I
found it rigorous. Problems were broached in the form of a question with responses and
counterproposals. My disenchantment with the method came down to the appeal to
authority. Although scholastic thought was in theory the conjunction of faith and reason it
had its Augustinian Moment where faith trumped reason. So I then began to doubt and
found scholasticism useful but eventually amusing and hopelessly antiquated. Nevertheless,
scholastic thought continues to influence our cultural, social and political traditions. Take a
majority of the American electorate where a false faith has eclipsed all reason.
They believe an Ayn Rand fairy tale. They have faith in American institutions although
they are riddled with corruption and the Supreme Court Justices are in the pay of
corporate America. Given my background, it is difficult to respect university
administrators who justify their pillage of student funds with myths such as molting or the
invisible hand explanations substituting myth for reason. It is difficult to tolerate Chicanos
and Chicanas who claim to love their community in mind and then sell out its interests.
Contradictions must be broached if there is to be justice. It is not Just Us. We can only
speculate what heights Augustine would have reached without the shackles of faith.
THE ACUÑA ART GALLERY @ CAFÉ ON A
The Acuña Art Gallery @ Café on A has had a historical presence in the Ventura County art scene for 15 years.
During this period we have hosted many important and cutting edge art exhibitions, such as The MUSES, 2004; the
Chicano Movimiento, 2006; on the Avenue and the Universe, 2008; Barrio Life and Death; Mujeres y sus Visiones,
2009; Los Four and friends, 2009; Blacc America, 2010; and just recently Minerva, 2014. Café on A has had
countless art shows, it has been the home to many renowned as well as emerging artists. The Acuña Gallery is an
edgy, eclectic and community based gallery.
We are thrilled and honored to be hosting Collective Voices-Abundant Years Exhibition which is dedicated to
Professor Vincent Flocco who created and developed the Oxnard College Ceramics Workshop. It is also a tribute to
Betty Bennett, Josie Magallanes and Fumi Moriya, Ceramicists from Oxnard College, a collective group of artists
who where treasured by faculty, students and co-artists.
Landscape
Vase & Face Rattle
Japanese Landscape
by Betty Bennett
by Josie Magallanes
by Fumi Moriya
Featuring Artists Illona Battaglia Aguayo, Jacqueline Biaggi, Lynn Creighton, Maureen DiGiglio, Schzelle Frangis,
Cecile Gurrola-Faulconer, Gina Lawson Egan, Francisco Magdaleno, Mark Mueller, Janet Neuwalder, Mary OtaniKobashikawa, Pat Putnam, Jacklyn Sanford, Gail Suval, Jenchi Wu and Artists from Café on A Collective. The
Exhibition opens to the public on Friday, October 24 with a reception for the Artists beginning at 5:30 p.m. The
show ends on November 24, 2014. The exhibition is curated by Jacqueline Biaggi and Armando Vazquez. This
exhibit will bring together some of the most important, creative and talented ceramists, sculptors and artists. Join us
to experience the majesty and transformational power of community, artists, passion and love coming together to
create a unique, historic and important art exhibition for the ages at the Acuña Art Gallery.
JANUUARY 24, 2015
THE ORIGIN OF THE CHICANO STUDIES PROGRAM Y MOVIMEINTO
@ CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NOTHRIDGE, CALI
A photographic exhibit of that historic period by Jose Garcia
Café on A 438 So A St., Chiques, Cali.
September 8-October 30, 2014 6-9pm
Special Reception: Sunday, October 12 (Dia de la Raza), 2014
Photo by: Jose Garcia, circa 1973
JOIN US IN THE CELEBRATING WITH MUSIC, SPOKEN WORD, PHOTOGRAPHY AND FRIENDS
THE ORIGINS OF THE CHICANO STUDIES PROGRAM @ CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY,NOTHRIDGE
Que viva Chicana(o) Studies
ARTIST THAT WILL ALWAYS MATTER!
The unlikely survival of Gil Scott-Heron*.
By Alec Wilkinson
Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the “godfather of rap,” which is an epithet he doesn’t really
care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called “The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was
probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds
as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the
references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the
time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and
recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but “The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised” made him famous.
Scott-Heron calls himself a bluesologist. He is sixty-one, tall and scrawny, and he lives in
Harlem, in a ground-floor apartment that he doesn’t often leave. It is long and narrow, and
there’s a bedspread covering a sliding glass door to a patio, so no light enters, making the place
seem like a monk’s cell or a cave. Once, when I thought he was away, I called to convey a
message, and he answered and said, “I’m here. Where else would a caveman be but in his cave?”
Recently, I arrived at his apartment while he was watching fight films with Mimi Little, whom
he calls Miss Mimi. Miss Mimi helps run his affairs and those of his company, Brouhaha Music;
the living room of his apartment is the company’s office. They were watching Muhammad Ali
knock down George Foreman in the eighth round of the Rumble in the Jungle, in Zaire, in 1974.
Scott-Heron was wearing baggy gray sweatpants, a red-and-white-striped polo shirt, and white
socks, and he stood in front of the television, lifting one foot, then the other, as if the floor were
hot. When Foreman collapsed, Scott-Heron pretended to be Ali chastising him as he lay on his
back. “That’s the best you can do?” he said. “I had about enough of you.”
“It’s done now,” Little said.
“I thought you could hit,” Scott-Heron said. “You hit like a baby.”
A crowd flooded the ring. “Look at these silly people,” Scott-Heron said. A large black man in a
blue blazer wrapped his arms around Ali from behind and lifted him, and Ali waved his arms like
a cranky baby. “Brother try to pick up Ali here. He says, ‘Put me down.’ ”
All you could see then of Ali in the blending swarm was his head and shoulders, so he looked
like a bust. “Ali’s thirty-two, having been exiled to nowhere,” Scott-Heron said. “Unbelievable
odds. I like to see unbelievable odds, because that’s what I’ve been facing all these years. When I
feel like giving up, I like to watch this.”
The phone rang, and Little answered. She said it was Kim Jordan, his piano player. Little
covered the phone and said, “She wants to know what to practice.” Scott-Heron had a
performance that week in Washington, D.C. He kept his eyes on the screen. “ ‘Lady Day and
John Coltrane,’ key of A,” he said. “ ‘I Call It Morning,’ ‘Give Her a Call.’ ”
“He’ll give you a call,” Little said.
“No, that’s the name of the song, ‘Give Her a Call,’ ” Scott-Heron said.
Little hung up, and Scott-Heron sat down on the couch, facing the screen. The couch was brown,
with so many little black burn circles that they seemed worked into the fabric’s design. A few
extension cords crossed a rug on the floor, and lying at his feet among them was a propane torch.
Taped to the wall facing him was a piece of paper on which he had written, in capital letters,
with a Sharpie, “NOTHING NICE TO TALK ABOUT? NOTHING GOOD TO SAY? NO YUKS? NO
SMILES? THEN SHUT UP. THE MNGMT.” On the shelf of a cabinet were some books, and some
DVDs, which he buys at a video store next door to the Apollo Theatre, on 125th Street. He
especially likes shows and movies and cartoons from his childhood, such as “Top Cat” and
“Rocky and Bullwinkle” and “Underdog.” “Your life has to consist of more than ‘Black people
should unite,’ ” he said. “You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day. If you aren’t having
no fun, die, because you’re running a worthless program, far as I’m concerned.”
Little said that she was leaving to run errands. Staples was having a two-to-a-customer sale of
something she needed a quantity of. “I’m going back two or three times,” she said. “I have a
disguise, and I know where four Staples are.”
When she left, Scott-Heron seemed briefly at a loss, then he said, “We should listen to some
music.” He put on a song of his from years ago called “Racetrack in France,” which is about a
festival he played in the seventies. “I don’t feel as comfortable playing something of somebody
else’s,” he said shyly. “I can’t say how the good parts got put together.”
Sometimes when I spoke to people who used to know Scott-Heron, they told me that they
preferred to remember him as he had been. They meant before he had begun avidly smoking
crack, which is a withering drug. As a young man, he had a long, narrow, slightly curved face,
which seemed framed by hair that bloomed above his forehead like a hedge. The expression in
his eyes was baleful, aloof, and slightly suspicious. He was thin then, but now he seems strung
together from wires and sinews—he looks like bones wearing clothes. He is bald on top, and his
hair, which is like cotton candy, sticks out in several directions. His cheeks are sunken and
deeply lined. Dismayed by his appearance, he doesn’t like to look in mirrors. He likes to sit on
the floor, with his legs crossed and his propane torch within reach, his cigarettes and something
to drink or eat beside him. Nearly his entire diet consists of fruit and juice. Crack makes a user
anxious and uncomfortable and, trying to relieve the tension, Scott-Heron would sometimes lean
to one side or reach one hand across himself to grab his opposite ankle, then perhaps lean an
elbow on one knee, then maybe press the soles of his feet together, so that he looked like a
swami.
Scott-Heron’s voice has always been more of a declaimer’s voice than a singer’s voice—when
he was young, he sounded like a writer singing. In 1971, he recorded a second version of “The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and the bassist Ron Carter, who played on it, told me, “He
wasn’t a great singer, but, with that voice, if he had whispered it would have been dynamic. It
was a voice like you would have for Shakespeare.” Smoking cigarettes erodes a singer’s subtlety
and range, and Scott-Heron has smoked for decades, making his voice less versatile but raspier
and even more idiosyncratic.
Scott-Heron says that he writes songs and records them all the time, but he has made only two
albums since 1982. (Between 1970 and 1982, he made thirteen.) He writes at night, when it is
quiet, but only, he says, when the spirits bring him a line or a melody.
Recently, though, Scott-Heron has returned to prominence, having released an album called “I’m
New Here,” which has brought him a new, younger audience. It is the result of the British hiphop producer Richard Russell’s sending him a letter in 2005 asking if he wanted to make a
record. As a teen-ager in London in the nineteen-eighties, Russell had seen Scott-Heron perform.
He also knew his music from clubs that played rare groove, the British term for obscure, older
soul, funk, and Latin records, which hip-hop musicians covet for samples.
Scott-Heron and Russell met in 2006, at Rikers Island, where Scott-Heron was being held for a
parole violation. Since 2001, he has been convicted twice of cocaine possession. The first time,
he was arrested by cops who said that they saw him shake the hand of a man on a street corner
and accept a small piece of tinfoil. The second time, cocaine that he had hidden in the lining of
his bag showed up on an airport X-ray. A guard read on Russell’s paperwork the name of the
prisoner he had come to see and said, “Don’t tell me it’s the Gil Scott-Heron.”
“I’m New Here” is a reverent and intimate record, almost more field work than entertainment—a
collage partly sung and partly talked, and made largely from fragments of Scott-Heron’s poetry,
handled here in a voguish manner. It presents a notional version of Scott-Heron, which is ScottHeron as hip-hop practitioner.
Scott-Heron recorded the songs and his poems, and Russell added the hip-hop tracks that
accompany them. “This is Richard’s CD,” Scott-Heron says. “My only knowledge when I got to
the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have
somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me
or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
“I’m New Here” is twenty-eight minutes long and has fifteen tracks, four of which are songs, one
of which Scott-Heron wrote. Russell left the microphone on between takes and during
discussions, and so he collected asides and observations, which he presents as interludes.
The record starts and ends with excerpts from a poem written thirty years ago, called “Coming
from a Broken Home,” which includes the lines “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown /
before I knew I came from a broken home.” Russell embedded the reading in a sample from a
Kanye West song, a hip-hop self-reference, since Kanye West had already sampled Scott-Heron.
The first song, “Me and the Devil,” by Robert Johnson, is an account of a man who hears the
Devil knocking early in the morning on his door. In Johnson’s version, delivered in his clear,
glottal voice, the character is a violent reprobate. Scott-Heron portrays him as boastful, lunatic,
and malignant—proud to be acknowledged by someone capable of appreciating the true cast of
his soul. He amended one of the words, though. “I have this philosophy from further back in my
family about beating women—that’s what this song is about,” he says. “ ‘Me and the Devil
walking side by side, I’m going to beat my woman until I’m satisfied.’ That’s why the Devil’s
coming to get him, that’s why he’s going to Hell, because he’s a hitter, he beats his woman. And
that’s why he’s expecting him, because he’s resolved. I’m not hooked up that way, so I sing,
‘I’m going to see my woman.’ The song’s like a confession.” (Even so, Scott-Heron pleaded
guilty in 1999 to assaulting a woman named Monique de Latour, who said that he threw a
drafting table at her and cut her hand.)
The song Scott-Heron wrote, “New York Is Killing Me,” is a blues sung against a spare
background of syncopated handclaps and looped fragments. His voice is weary and raw. “The
doctors don’t know, but New York is killing me,” he sings. “Bunch of doctors come around, they
don’t know, that New York is killing me / I need to go home and take it slow down in Jackson,
Tennessee.”
More than one romance threads itself through “I’m New Here”—the most prominent of which is
a younger man’s veneration of a charismatic elder. Aside from liking Scott-Heron’s music,
Russell regards him as “genuinely philosophical,” he told me. “He’s not hung up on time or
ordinary circumstances, and I’ve never come across anyone as interesting to talk to.” Russell has
said that a difficulty of working with Scott-Heron was that sometimes he wouldn’t show up. A
philosopher might miss appointments, but so might someone with a propane torch in his
apartment, even if he is a philosopher.
There is a gentleness in Scott-Heron’s nature that suggests his childhood among the stern,
intelligent women he pays homage to in “Coming from a Broken Home.” His father, Gilbert
Heron, who died in 2008, and whom he never much knew, was a soccer player who grew up in
Jamaica. In Chicago, Gilbert met Scott-Heron’s mother, Robert Scott, who was named for her
father and called Bobbie. “It was after the war, working for Western Electric,” Scott-Heron told
me. “He also played for the Chicago Maroons, or something like that. A Scottish team came
through, and he scored on them, which was not what they had come for. They was all white. He
went to Scotland, and the legend goes he scored the day he arrived. He was dubbed the Black
Arrow, and played professionally for three more years.”
Scott-Heron’s parents separated when he was two years old, and while his mother went to Puerto
Rico to teach English he lived with his grandmother in Jackson. “My grandmother was dead
serious,” he said one day, sitting on his couch. “Her sense of humor was a secret. She started me
playing the piano. There was a funeral parlor next door to our house, and they had this old piano
that they used for wakes and funerals, and they were getting ready to take it to the junk yard. She
wanted me to play hymns for the ladies’ sewing circle that met every Thursday, and she bought
the piano for six dollars, and she paid a lady up the street five or ten cents a lesson to teach me to
play four hymns, ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ ‘Rock of Ages,’ ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’
and I can’t think of the other one. I was eight years old, and I had started to listen to WDIA in
Memphis, and they would play the blues. When I was practicing, I would have to mix them,
because my grandmother was not big on the blues. When she was out in the yard, I can play what
I want, but if she’s in the house I got to mix John Lee Hooker with ‘Rock of Ages.’ ”
The phone rang, but he ignored it. “I found my grandmother dead,” he went on. “It shook me up.
I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn’t stirring. I went in to
wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis”—he leaned back and held his legs and arms stiff—
“and I’m done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he
dropped it. I went outside and saw the woman from the house going to work, and she came and
took over. I was twelve.”
With his mother and her brother, Scott-Heron moved to an apartment in the Bronx, and his
mother went to work for the city housing authority. Before long, his uncle moved out, and his
mother couldn’t afford the rent, so she put her name on a list for an apartment in a project in
Chelsea, in Manhattan. “Black people didn’t want to live in Chelsea, but we just wanted to go
somewhere,” Scott-Heron said. “We started in ’65. It was eighty-five per cent Puerto Rican,
fifteen per cent white, and me.”
The young woman who taught Scott-Heron English in his sophomore year at DeWitt Clinton
High School had gone to a private school called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is in
Riverdale, a prosperous section of the Bronx. “She was assigning all these books that didn’t
mean anything, like ‘A Separate Peace,’ ” Scott-Heron said. “Finally, she asked me a question,
and I said, ‘Look, can I get out of here? This just sucks.’ I told her—I figured she knew—‘I can
write better than that. I been sitting here writing better than that.’ I handed her something from
my notebook, and she gave it to the head of the department at Fieldston. They asked me would I
come to a meeting. I said I might walk out, but we met at the Howard Johnson across from the
Bronx Zoo, and I got a hamburger and a strawberry shake out of it, while they asked me would I
take a test to see if I could go to their school.”
After he took the test, the school asked him to another meeting. “They looked at me like I was
under a microscope,” he said. “They asked, ‘How would you feel if you see one of your
classmates go by in a limousine while you’re walking up the hill from the subway?,’ and I said,
‘Same way as you. Y’all can’t afford no limousine. How do you feel?’ Anyway, it just happened
to be the day that my mother was sabotaged by this diabetes. We took a break, and I called my
uncle at the hospital, and he told me, ‘Come down here,’ so I went back to the meeting and I
said, ‘Whatever you’re going to decide, you decide, but I have to go and be with my mother.’
From the way I handled it, I learned later that they thought that this was a sign that I was mature
enough to handle whatever would come my way from the school.”
Scott-Heron was one of five black students among a class of a hundred, and in his second year he
got in trouble for playing the piano. “They had a beautiful Steinway they used for the choir and
the chorus, but I got caught using it to play the Temptations,” he said. “A guy came in and
screamed at me to stop, and they put a sign up saying ‘Do Not Play.’ A few days later, he came
in, and I’m sitting under the sign playing the piano. So they told me they were going to call my
mother, and I laughed—not because I was being disrespectful, although he took it that way—but
because I thought, You really don’t want to get my mother into this. But they called her and told
her to come to a disciplinary meeting, and the evening before she asked me what had happened,
and I told her. And she said, ‘Well, did you hit the man?,’ and I said, ‘No, I was playing the
piano.’ I tried to explain that there had been no rule against it until I did it. A lot of kids had been
going up there to play ‘Chopsticks,’ I said, and she asked me again, did I hit him. She had
reached the conclusion that I had done something so awful that I didn’t want to describe it,
because she couldn’t imagine that they had called her up there to tell her I had been playing the
piano.”
The meeting took place around a horseshoe-shaped table. “My mother listened to them, and
when they were finished she said, ‘You all know where we live, and the difficulties of our life,
so I’m not going to talk about that. We got burglaries, assaults, muggings—it’s not the best place
to raise a child—but whenever something happens down there that might involve my son, I don’t
call you. I figure that’s my area, and this is yours. Now, I have read your discipline handbook,
and what I suggest you do is expel him, because it’s this way or that, near as I can tell, so what
I’m going to do right now, since this is your area, I’m going to leave and go to work, because if I
don’t get there soon, they’re going to take half my day’s wages from me, and when I get home
this evening he’ll tell me what you decided, but, if you’re asking my opinion, you have to expel
him. We have really enjoyed it here, and it has added to my son’s life, and I think we’ve added to
your ethical-culture thing, but I’m going to go now, and you’ll excuse my son because he’s got
to walk me to the subway. Thank you all very much.’ She got up and put on her coat, and I took
a hard look at the man who had started all this, to say, ‘See, I told you… you didn’t want to get
my mama involved”
“She walked to the subway in a stone silence. All she said was ‘I want you to leave these
people’s piano alone. You’re not here to play the piano.’ I said, ‘What if they expel me?’ ‘Then
you won’t have to worry about it; you’ll be someplace else. You leave these people’s stuff alone,
and when you tell me something from now on I’ll believe you.’ ”
Scott-Heron was made to stay after school three Wednesdays in a row to wash out the brushes in
the art room. A classmate, Roderick Harrison, says that he remembers two things about ScottHeron. “He could hold a classroom or a hallway in thrall” is one of them. The other recollection
is of his mother. “She was,” he told me, “imposing.”
At the end of June, at a concert in Central Park, Scott-Heron played one song from his new
record, the rhythm-and-blues standard “I’ll Take Care of You,” but for the rest of the concert, as
is customary with him, he drew from his older catalogue. Later, he was joined by the rapper
Common, who said that as a child in Chicago he had listened to Scott-Heron and that it was an
honor to occupy the stage with him. Then Common began to rap, but stumbled because the pace
was too fast. He asked the musicians to slow down, then he asked them to go even slower, and
then he started again, sounding not quite so agitated and more earnest. The song he recited was
called “My Way Home,” which includes samples from Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where the
Hatred Is.”
“We been sampled,” Scott-Heron told me. “I don’t want to tell you
how embarrassing that can be. Long as it don’t talk about ‘yo mama’ and stuff, I usually let it go.
It’s not all bad when you get sampled—hell, you make money. They give you some money to
shut you up. I guess to shut you up they should have left you alone.”
The epithet “godfather of rap”—derived from the claim that Scott-Heron originated the form—is
partly apt but also partisan. The case for him as proto-rapper goes like this: at the beginning, he
had company, the Last Poets, who in the late nineteen-sixties in Harlem recited poetry while
accompanied by conga drums, used mainly in Afro-Cuban music. “Compared to Gil, their stuff
is very stripped down,” Bill Adler, the hip-hop critic, curator, and record executive, told me. “It
was like a park jam that got onto a record. Nothing but beats and rhythms. They embodied a
revolutionary idea of black manhood, and Gil likewise. He wasn’t as potent as they were—he
was more musical—but at the very beginning you can think of Gil Scott-Heron as a one-man
Last Poets. People often confused the two, or thought that he was a member of them.”
Scott-Heron went to Lincoln University, the historically black college in Pennsylvania that
Langston Hughes had attended. The Last Poets performed there in 1969. “Gil was the studentbody rep,” Abiodun Oyewole, one of the Last Poets, told me, “and after the gig he came
backstage and said, ‘Listen, can I start a group like you guys?’ ” A strict honoring of rap origin
legends would say that it begins with d.j.s in the Bronx, among African-Americans, Puerto
Ricans, and Jamaicans, in the summer of 1973, and especially with a d.j. named Kool Herc. The
people involved were going to parties where they could dance to a spare form of recorded music
that had been arranged so that the pulse was foremost. The language and the stories that went
along with them were simple. “Hip-hop has its own super heroic myths and stories,” Greg Tate,
the hip-hop critic, says. “Gil is a genre to himself.”
The legacy of the Last Poets and Scott-Heron was more deeply embraced by second-generation
rappers with social convictions. Among these was Chuck D., of Public Enemy, who told me that
he first heard Scott-Heron when he was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies. Scott-Heron and
the Last Poets are “not only important; they’re necessary, because they are the roots of rap—
taking a word and juxtaposing it into some sort of music,” he said. “You can go into Ginsberg
and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word. He
and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else. In what way necessary? Well, if you try to
make pancakes, and you ain’t got the water or the milk or the eggs, you’re trying to do
something you can’t. In combining music with the word, from the voice on down, you follow the
template he laid out. His rapping is rhythmic, some of it’s songs, it’s punchy, and all those
qualities are still used today.” When I asked Scott-Heron what he thinks when people attribute
rap music to him, he said, “I just think they made a mistake.”
Scott-Heron was one of the first musicians signed by Clive Davis, in 1975, for Arista Records. “I
had seen a live performance, where he was very striking,” Davis told me. “Very charismatic,
absolutely unique—the verbal and the performing abilities—he was electrifying, and based on
his song ‘The Bottle,’ and ‘The Revolution,’ and seeing him, I signed him. He was very
compelling as a speaker—the wit, the turn of phrase—it was all very special.”
Between 1975 and 1985, Scott-Heron made nine albums for Arista, and then they parted. “I
always felt tremendous regard for him,” Davis said. “You see the success of a Jay-Z or a Kanye
West, and I always felt that Gil was as charismatic as either of them. Seeing him in his prime, the
ability to dominate a stage—Gil at his best was an all-timer.”
A theme that Scott-Heron often brings up at performances is how people say that he disappeared
during the past decade—during the years, that is, when he was serving time. Not long ago, he
sold out the Blue Note, a club in Manhattan. “I read all of those reviews that said I disappeared,”
he said. “Wouldn’t that be great if I could add that to my act? Come up here and—poof!” Then
he said, “I had read how great I was before I disappeared. It makes me afraid to show up.”
When I first began visiting Scott-Heron, he would leave the room at intervals and go into his
bathroom. The next time I went to his apartment, he went into his kitchen and a stream of smoke
drifted out. One day, I turned around, and he had his crack pipe to his lips, and after that he
didn’t bother to leave the room anymore. Sometimes he would fall asleep in the middle of an
interview, and I would excuse myself.
Monique de Latour, an artist who lived with Scott-Heron for three years beginning in 1997, says
that he would smoke crack for four or five days without rest. The longest she saw him stay
awake was seven days. She knew he was getting tired when the things he said no longer made
sense. “He would be talking about baseball and say someone had scored a touchdown,” she told
me. Periodically, he would disappear—he says he was trying to get away from her. To find him,
de Latour would check the phone to see whom the last call had been made to, which was
sometimes a clue. If his propane torch was gone, she began visiting the hotels he liked—the
Casablanca, on 145th Street, or the Old Broadway, on 126th, or the New Ebony, on 112th, where
he was eventually banned for setting fire to his room. He would check in as Benjamin Safir. “As
in Ben Safir, as in Been Safer,” she said. The desk clerk had been paid to tell her that he wasn’t
there. “I would find a crackhead who didn’t care about Gil and give him half a ripped five- or
ten-dollar bill,” she said. “I gave him the other half after I had checked out what he told me.”
Sometimes de Latour found the door to Scott-Heron’s room left ajar and Scott-Heron asleep. She
took photographs of him lying on the hotel bed, which she hung in their apartment in the hope of
forcing him to face his circumstances, but he wouldn’t look at them. If she didn’t find him in the
hotels, she called the neighborhood hospitals and then the police precincts. Not infrequently, she
found him locked up for trespassing or loitering. Once he was arrested as Denis Heron, which is
his half brother’s name. When he missed a court date, the cops went looking for Denis.
According to de Latour, after a couple of days of smoking, Scott-Heron would sometimes make
holes in the walls looking for microphones and cameras. On the door of their apartment, he
would post menacing remarks, which he would change every few weeks or months. One said,
“For all visitors we despise. I will pray to ‘the spirits’ that you and all who conspire with you
condemn your souls. You have been seen. You are known. You will be paid.” He believed that
bad spirits came with crack, and to counteract them he would give money to charities.
When he ran low on money from royalties, de Latour says, he would arrange for gigs and insist
on a deposit to pay for the band’s airfare. He would spend the deposit, then arrive with a twopiece band, which was all he could afford. When his money ran out altogether, he slept,
sometimes for two weeks. “He could sleep until he knew the next check was coming,” de Latour
said.
De Latour would try to get him to leave the apartment, because he couldn’t smoke crack in
public, but he almost never would. His teeth fell out and he got implants, some of which also fell
out—one time while he was onstage in Berlin. “I saw him once at Eighth Avenue and Twentythird,” Bill Adler told me. “This tall guy staggering across the street, and I recognized Gil
immediately—he’s very tall and distinctive—and he’s clearly whacked, and he could have been
dead right there, stumbling across the intersection.”
In the fall of 1999, de Latour told him to choose between her and crack, and he chose crack and
moved in with his mother, on East 106th Street. She was in poor health, and shortly after he
moved in she died. “I went with Gil to the funeral, and he was such a mess,” de Latour says. “He
was already going downhill, but he was going more downhill once his mother died.” After the
funeral, he moved out of his mother’s apartment. He ignored the eviction notice the landlord sent
him. Her belongings were auctioned. Even so, de Latour said, there were many moments of
tenderness between them. “There is a very gentle person inside Gil,” she said, “but very remote.
It’s the little boy who lived with his grandmother in Jackson. He used to say to me, ‘I wish you
knew me before I was like this.’ ”
Scott-Heron spent July on tour in Europe. His tour manager, Walter Laurer, says the tour has
gone smoothly, and Scott-Heron says he hasn’t used any drugs for more than a month.
Anyone familiar with Scott-Heron’s career knows that early on he had a partnership with a
musician named Brian Jackson. In 1969, when they were students at Lincoln, they wrote songs
together. Eventually, they made nine records. They parted company in 1979, although they made
a few attempts to play together again. “We’ve had a few falling outs,” Scott-Heron told me, “but
this last one, I think, is permanent.”
Jackson still records and performs, but he has a day job as a project manager in the City of New
York’s I.T. department, where he began working in 1983, when, he told me, “I woke up one
morning and realized I wasn’t getting my ASCAP checks anymore for publishing. I called and
they said, ‘We don’t have you listed as a recipient.’ I said, ‘I could show you some checks that
you just sent me,’ but they said that didn’t matter, and I didn’t have the money for a lawyer to
find out what had happened. I sent for the papers to prove that I was a fifty-per-cent partner of
Brouhaha Music, and I found that the company had been dissolved in 1980.”
“Somebody should have pushed the mute button on that motherfucker,” Scott-Heron said of
Jackson. “Our accomplishments show what kind of people we are. The way our careers have
gone, you can see who the spirits favor.” On another occasion, he said, “I would not take a dollar
from Brian.”
Scott-Heron says that in 2003 Jackson stole money that was meant to be used for his bail;
Jackson says that, after the bondsman refused the money, he used some of it to pay members of
the band for shows that were cancelled when Scott-Heron was arrested at the airport. He also
paid some of his own bills. Jackson told me that, as Scott-Heron was about to go to jail, they
spoke. “I thought it was time to go to him and say, as a friend, ‘Are you O.K.?’ He told me,
‘Yeah, I’m O.K. I’m doing better than you,’ meaning I was the one having to scratch for a
living.” In one of the interludes on “I’m New Here,” Scott-Heron says, “If I hadn’t been as
eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as introspective, as selfish, I wouldn’t be
me.”
At the Blue Note, when Scott-Heron touched on the subject of prison he said, “They say my new
record proves I came out of jail angry. Nobody comes out of jail angry. They come out of jail
happy.” He wore dark trousers and a cap, and a suit jacket with a label that said “Jos. A. Bank”
sewn above one wrist. When he finished talking, he sat down at an electric piano, which looked
like a desk. His hands formed chords. He began a song called “Show Bizness,” which has the
refrain “Do you really want to be in show business?,” then he stopped. “I used to be with Clive
Davis,” he said. “I don’t think he liked this song. Not in that key.” He started in a second key.
“Show business, want to be in show business,” he sang, then stopped again. “Now I don’t,” he
said. He sang the words softly to himself as he searched for the chords, then he started a third
time and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” At one moment, he leaned his head back and closed his
eyes, and it looked like the expression of an ecstatic.
One of the last times I went to Scott-Heron’s apartment, he rose from the couch now and then to
make slow journeys around the room. His movements appeared to have a purpose, for he spent
some time opening drawers and meticulously sorting through the prescription bottles and foldedup dollar bills and scraps of paper they contained, but he didn’t say what he was after. When he
found a lottery ticket that hadn’t been scratched off, he sat down and carefully ran a coin across
its surface.
He was wearing jeans and a black-and-white shirt with the buttons askew. It was the morning
after he had been expected at a video shoot downtown to make the second video for “I’m New
Here,” and he hadn’t shown up. Meanwhile, the crew and the filmmaker had waited through
most of the night. When the phone rang, he said, “That’s those people from the video shoot
trying to get me,” and he didn’t answer. “They all think it’s some kind of mixup when I don’t
show up where they are, but being too omni-visible is a bad idea. The kids at the record company
are very enthusiastic, and they have a lot of friends they have made, and they all want to have an
interview, and the only problem is they’re asking the same things people asked me a long, long
time ago, because that’s what they do when they’re starting—you ask questions you already
know the answer to. I don’t want to disappoint them, but you can’t disappoint unless you have an
appointment. They don’t know I only like to talk to people who have something to talk about
other than me. Like everybody in New York, they know everything. How can you tell them
anything?”
He tossed the lottery ticket on the floor. “It’s the death of the vertical,” he went on. “They have
taken all this time to stand up straight so that they can say ‘I.’ They’re very proud of that. The
way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the
only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and
they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they;
they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.
“I am the person I see least of over the course of my life, and even what I see is not accurate.”
The phone rang. “This is Brouhaha Music,” he said. “Who the fuck is this?” He leaned back and
talked softly, with his eyes closed and a hand on his forehead. Then he hung up and rubbed his
neck with one hand, while turning his head from side to side. “I’m trying to stay out of traction,”
he said. “I feel like I got a piece of gravel up at the top of my spine.” He lit the propane torch and
touched the glass tube to his lips. “Ten to fifteen minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” he said. “I
could have had an operation a few years ago, but there was an eight-per-cent chance of paralysis.
I tried the painkillers, but after a couple of weeks I felt like a piece of furniture. It makes you feel
like you don’t want to do anything. This I can quit anytime I’m ready.”
He touched the flame to the tube. “I have a novel that I can write,” he said next. “It’s about three
soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate
later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all
three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they
were alive.” He raised the torch, then paused and said, “I have everything except a suitable
conclusion.” ♦
*Brother Gil died on May 29, 2011, but his musical genius will live on forever
REFLECTION ON THE CHICANO ART MOVIMIENTO: A PRIMER
BY ARMANDO VAZQUEZ
SETTING THE STAGE
At the turn of the twentieth century, art in the Americas made a radical departure from the
yoke and pervasive influences of Europe. In fact, Europe and the entire Western World was
experiencing tremendous social upheaval. The old order was being challenged on all fronts;
the First World War loomed over the horizon. All of the political “isms” were on the tips of
tongues of the world’s intellectual political and social theorists and revolucionarios, ready
to spew fire and revolution to the world. The art world was being transformed into a
revolutionary maelstrom. The Dadaist and the Surrealist would create chaos in the art
world. As always, the Americas lagged behind the Europeans in breaking away from the
classical chains of western art homogeneity.
The global whirlwind that smashed much of the old order was especially profound in the
art world. Art in the United States for the first time became original, fresh and uniquely
American. With the advent of the industrial revolution and the demonstrative superiority
of the American capitalist system to the rest of the Western World, all sectors of American
life were buoyed with creativity, originality, legitimacy and power.
This was also true for art in the United States. The birth of Modern American Art was,
however, a closed shop: racist, aloof, pretentious and elitist. American art was an AngloSaxon, male- dominated bastion. It would remain so for another 50 years. It was not until
the early 1950’s that Chicanos, Jews, Blacks, Native Americans, and women by singular
sheer artistic genius and courage, were able to penetrate this monolith know as “American
art and culture”. But, of course it was not nearly enough. Success for the minorities was
singular and isolated; minority groups were completely excluded from full participation in
the American art scene. It was not until the 1960’s that the wall of exclusion and
segregation came tumbling down around the traditional American art citadel.
MI BAUTISMO
In 1967 my older brother, the last of the silent stoic warriors for Uncle Sam, went off to war
in a distant land called Viet Nam. It was the year that my idol, Muhammad Ali, was stripped
of his title for refusing to go to war in Viet Nam. Ali’s refusal, was, as he put it, “ I have
nothing against the people of Viet Nam; they have never called me nigger.” The Johnson
administration, in political free fall and moral decay, escalated the Vietnamese war effort,
and in the United States, internal war in the form of urban riots raged in over 100 cities
throughout the nation. Leading the war protesters were many young Chicanos, Blacks,
Native Americans and other minority groups that opposed the war and the discrimination
that they faced at home. In 1967 I came to understand that the war to be waged was on the
soil of this country.
In 1968 I registered for the draft, and was prepared to go to jail as a conscientious objector,
no longer the stoic warrior for Uncle Sam. I would not fight “their” war. That was the same
year that I turned my back on a dream. I knew that year that I could never be a professional
baseball player: simply put, I was not talented enough to play at the pro level. I replaced my
baseball gear with pencils, brushes and canvas, I wanted to document and create this
fascinating period of the Sixties, and I was intoxicated by the revolutionary movimiento. I
became a Chicano artist that year. In 1969 I was admitted in the EOP program at San
Fernando Valley State College, and somewhere along the way the draft was eliminated and
replaced by the lottery system, me raye! my number was never called! So I remained in
college.
NUESTRO CUENTO
Two historic events in the Chicano Movimiento helped shape and define Chicano art and
the direction that the Chicano art and cultural movement would follow.
El Plan de Santa Barbara, was conceptualized, drafted and written by students in 1968 at
the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a Chicano liberation manifesto, a blue
print for educational, cultural and socio-economic change for the Chicano. We proclaimed
to the world that we as Chicanos were demanding and would assert and fight for our
freedom to forge our own cultural and artistic identity.
In 1965, Cesar Chavez and Luis Valdez would form their historic collaboration and combine
guerilla teatro with political protest. The United Farm Workers and El Teatro Campesino
created a brilliant and scathing artistic backdrop to the UFW”s national grape boycott
campaign. It was sheer genius: political theater on the often hostile and deadly grape fields
of Califas. In short order the entire nation became aware of the farm workers struggle in
the fields of Delano, California. The campesinos and students joined forces and created a
historic synergy that fueled the Chicano movimiento and in the process liberated countless
artist, scholars, and intellectuals in the Southwest to move forward toward a Chicano
aesthetic that was new and exciting.
In 1968, in the city of Sacramento, a group of artists, poets and radical scholars formed the
Royal Chicano Air Force; originally know as the Rebel Chicano Art Front. The Royal Chicano
Air Force, were two California State University art professors Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa,
and Ricardo Favela, an art student. Satirists and gifted social commentators, they
popularized two art slogans, “la locura lo cura y aqui estamos y no nos vamos”. These gifted
radical artists combined poetry, prose and visual arts in their works that were bold and
revolutionary, and grassroots in its orientation. The Royal Chicanos Air Force goal was to
create political conscience, promote the art and education in the barrio, and explore our
history and culture as Chicanos.
In Los Angeles there were two seminal art groups that would forge a new Chicano art
sensibility, the first was Los Four, which included the late Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert (Magu)
Lujan, Roberto (Beto) de la Rocha and Frank Romero; later the collective would include
Judithe Hernandez and John Valadez. Los Four were the intellectual vanguard of the
Chicano art movement of the early 1970’s.
It is safe to say that this grouping of artists, known collectively as Los Four, “legitimized”
Chicano art in the Anglo American art world and inspired the younger Chicanada to forge
ahead with a school of art that would come to be known as Chicano Art. Today, Frank
Romero, Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Lujan, Judithe Hernández, and John Valadez represent a
group of Chicano artists that have obtained international respect and are admired by
producing original and exceptional bodies of work throughout their artistic careers. Los
Four opened the commercial door to all in the Chicano art world.
The art group Asco, was composed of Gronk, Willie Herron, Patssi Valdez and Harry
Gamboa, to be joined intermittently by Daniel J. Martinez and Diane Gamboa. Asco
members were street punks, involved in everything from street actos, punk music
performances, and various mural works that today are considered master works of the
golden age of the Chicano Mural period. Asco was a young rebel art posse bent on taking
over the streets for the sake of art, anarchy y asco. The group Asco also focused its sardonic
eye on the Chicano Movement and punctured the romanticism of the cultural nationalist.
Asco was more about anarchy and rebellion than Chicano purity and self-determination.
In 1984, Guillermo Gomez Pena and his art cuates began The Borders Art Workshop/ Taller
de Arte Fronterizo a cultural artist/ activist amalgamation of radical think tank research
and discourse projects, public actos and visual arts spectaculars, and political activism that
bridged las fronteras of San Diego and Tijuana. Gomez-Pena always the intellectual genius
of the Chicano art movement proclaimed that Taller de Art Fronterizo was, “a bi-national
collective that combined critical writing, site-specific performance, media and public art
with direct political action …on both sides of the border.” Chicanismo, according to GomezPena, was looking at the world without borders and art was the jackhammer that would
crumble the walls of xenophobia, tribalism and nationalism.
Judy Baca, the founder of the Social Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, introduced a
Chicana feminism that, frankly, was missing in the early days of the Chicano art evolution.
Baca directed the Los Angeles River Mural Project, the largest continuous mural project in
the world. Baca has also assisted countless young artist with their careers in the Los
Angeles area with her business acumen and political know how and well placed palancas. A
critical contribution made by Baca was that she brought to the male- dominated art table
the discourse between Chicano art and its views of machismo, racism, sexism, violence and
misogyny as viewed by the Chicana artist. To Baca and the other Chicano Feminist artists,
the status quo in the art world, and in particular, Chicano Art, would not be controlled by
the myopic machistas. There were many more Chicano art warriors, intellectuals, scholars
and others that helped create the school we have to recognize as Chicano art. The current
success of Chicano art did not just materialize; we fought hard to create our own unique
place and identity in the American and international art scene.
These were my Chicano art mentors. I wanted to contribute, participate, document and
create in this fascinating period of the Sixties. Like many of my art comrades, the Chicano
Movimiento intoxicated me. 1967 was cathartic and revolutionary for me. The dialogue
world and I changed forever. Like so many people of that period I came to question the
entire order of things, and how they operated. I would come to learn how to dissect the
American systemic and institutional construct with a critical mind; I would never again be
satisfied with the old order. I evolved into a Chicano artist and activist.
ACADEMIA Y ATRE CHICANO
The Chicano Movimiento open the university doors for me, as it did for thousands of
Chicanos throughout the United States. It was here that my revolutionary ideas were
honed, encouraged and directed. College life was glorious and intoxicating, I had found my
niche: academia and Chicano art.
We were there at the beginnings of the Chicano Movimiento, a group of student artistactivists from throughout the Los Angeles County brought together at San Fernando Valley
State College, later changed to California State University at Northridge. The group, that
later came together to form the nucleus of El Jardin de Flor Y Canto in the early 1970’s, was
developing a unique, bold and social activist art philosophy and style that connected with
the community and its social and political concerns.
From every barrio throughout southern Califas we were brought together in the turbulent,
exciting and fertile halls of academia. Everyday at CSUN there was a Causa; dawn delivered
another revolutionary day. The civil rights struggle at the university and the communidad
fueled our artistic work. Arte was an indispensable arm of the moviemiento
.
EL JARDIN DE FLOR Y CANTO
As we grew as artists, we felt the need to expand our artistic endeavor far beyond the
university; this is where the idea of a community cultural center had it inception.The
original group of artistas that formed the El Jardin de Flor y Canto collective was
Smiley (Ismael Cazarez), Guillermo Bejerano (Billy), Joe Bravo, Frank Martinez, and
Armando Vazquez. Sergio Hernandez was involved with El Jardin de Flor y Canto along
with other commitments that he had with art groups in Los Angeles. By the time the Jardin
was opened, Sergio was already producing his seminal cartoon strip, “Arnie and Porfi” for
Con Safos magazine, still considered the best cartoon strip of the Chicano Movimiento.
The mission of El Jardin de Flor y Canto was simple: help fuel the movimiento with our art.
We took to the street and began mural projects throughout the San Fernando Valley and
the greater Los Angeles County. Some of the murals painted during that period were highly
controversial; many of the murals were condemned as incendiary and highly political and
were quickly white washed. I am sad to note that probably all of the murals that we painted
during this period (1972-1976) are gone, covered up or destroyed.
Back at El Jardin de Flor y Canto, in the tiny quarters we called both studio and art gallery
an incredible energy emanated from our art collective. We painted and experimented,
shared a communal artistic experience that was all consuming, it fed us, made love to us,
implored us to create and work with the gente of our communities.
El Jardin de Flor y Canto was the incubator for many political and art ideas. It served as the
home for some talented artists that emerged in the ensuing years. It would be wrong to
suggest that great art was produced during this period. However, it is clear that this
magical period in the early 1970’s, El Jardin was a critical and formative artistic experience
for many of us. Today Chicano artists like Frank Martinez, Ismael “Smiley” Cazarez, Joe
Bravo, Guillermo Bejerano, Ramon “Psycho” Cisneros, and Sergio Hernandez, Felix Perez
and Armando Vazquez are well known and respected in the art world. They all got their
formative start at El Jardin de Flor y Canto. Just as quickly as the Jardin was born, it
disappeared. The core group of us lasted about 4 years; it was enough to convert us all to
disciples of the Chicano Art Movimiento.
ENTER THE RUDY F. ACUNA ART GALLERY AND CULTURAL CENTER
One rainy winter afternoon, my business partner Dr. Deborah De Vries and I were looking
for a building in the downtown Oxnard area. We wanted a commercial building that would
serve as a multi-purpose space, suitable for the arts, instruction and would hold a large
number of people for meetings, seminars and community events. I wanted to revive the
spirit of the EL Jardin de Flor y Canto in the ombligo of Oxnard. By sheer luck and
providence we found the Cafe on A Street, located in heart of downtown Oxnard. Since we
opened the door to the community, approximately five years ago, we have been honored to
host and participate in hundreds of cultural, political and social events at the Cafe on A,
with our community. My dream has come true; I am again involved in the noble affairs of
culture and the arts.
The Acuna Art Gallery @ Café on A has had a historical presence in the Ventura County art
scene for 15 years. During this period we have hosted many important and cutting edge art
exhibitions, including the Los Four and friends show in 2009, The MUSES exhibition in
2004, the Chicano Movimiento exhibition in 2006, Barrio Life and Death show by Felix
Perez, Mujeres y sus Visiones exhibition in 2009, Blacc America exhibition by Felipe Flores
in 2010, on the Avenue and the Universe exhibition by Govaan in 2008, as well as our
current exhibition Minerva, and many others art shows. We have been the home to many
renowned as well as unknown or up and coming artist. The Acuna Gallery is community
based, edgy and eclectic and we abhor the much traveled main stream.
We are thrilled and honored to be hosting the Collective voices-Abundant Years Exhibition
in October, 2014. The show will be curated by Jacquie Biaggi, Vanessa Acosta and Armando
Vazquez. It will bring together some of the most important, creative and talented ceramists,
sculptures and artists in area together to this historic arts exhibition. The reception that
you are attending here tonight, represents another important passage for me: it will be the
first time that I have exhibited my artwork in over 27 years. In fact the last time I showed
publicly was at El Jardin. I have come full circle and I am honored to be a Chicano artist,
basking tonight in the glory and splendor of our Chicano culture, art and history. Y como
dicen los carneles del Royal Chicano Air Force! el rollo sigue!
WHEN THE SKY FALLS
By ARMANDO VAZQUEZ
Mijo si se esta callendo el cielo, muevete! esas pobres almas que cien del cielo los a regresado
Dios para repagar con eso que se les olvido, respeto al misterio de Dio y a lo ajeno aqui en la
tierra es la paz, me entiendes criatura de Dios?
Mi sagrada Santitos
The rain dances lightly against the windshield of
my car. The drops of rain splash a sort of code to my brain...make the call... Pull off the damn
freeway and make the call fool. Make the call the rain commands me; inexplicitly I pulled off
the Hollywood freeway…fear… terror…dread… my constant companions these days accompany
me to the first phone booth that I can locate. I begin to dial my home. The line is busy, in the
driving tempest I am burning up with panic, I wait a few seconds and redial; the line is still busy.
I am about to hang up the receiver when I hear a female voice commanding me to turn slowly
around. I think I’m tripping, this shit can’t be happening, it is the fever that has overcome me;
until I feel the pressure on the side of my ribs made by a sharp object.
“Despacio hijo de tu chingada madre”, the voices quivers with rage and madness.
As I turn ever so slowly I continue to feel the sharp object pushing up against my trench coat. I
can’t determine whether the object is a gun, a knife or a sharp stick. I move slowly as the voice
commands me.
“I am going to cut you ball off fucker.” shouts the woman. I am now looking at her , she is a
middle age burned out veterana; in this driving storm she is wearing a tiny black mini dress,
red high heels and lots of makeup. Brilliant crimson lipstick is smudged all over her mouth; and
she is holding a huge butcher knife against my ribs.
A fucking crack head hooker, my mind races, I don’t want to make a stupid mistake, freaked out
and end up skewered by some deranged hooker. This can’t be happening, I think. I am super
naturally cool, I pray that I will not panic; the demented woman is stone cold serious, she aims
to do me serious harm. Your freak out and you die pendejo!
“I am going to kill you”. She pushes her face up against my right ear. She is breathing heavily. I
can smell the alcohol and her madness.
She is pushing the knife so hard against my side that it begins to rip through the heavy trench
coat. I’m fucking dead I think, and then I am reminded by the celestial raindrops to stay super
calm, control the situation. Control your fears and you control the monsters that are out to kill
me. Be fucking cool fool, or you’re a dead man. The driving rain slaps my face, reminding me to
stay in control.
“Move again, even an inch and I will kill you before you take another breath”.
“What do you want from me”, I manage pathetically, “Who are you?”
“Shut your filthy mouth…you…you….pathetic pig.. I will make you suffer, believe me. I will make
you suffer.” She is no longer slurring her words.
“What?” I protest.
“I am here to make you suffer like you made my sister, my mother and me suffer, me entiendes
puto?” She yells, “The pain and the misery you have caused all of us will end now, it will end
this night. But before I kill you…You will suffer and you will beg for mercy, just like my mother
begged you. Then I will kill you…gut you like the pig that you are.”
I can see it, now, is it a huge knife that she has against my ribs. My mind races, searching for a
clue, a hint, a key to this insane and deadly puzzle. Then my mind goes blank, this fucking shit
does not compute. Why me? That question repeats itself over and over again in my mind. Why
me?
The rain begin to pummels us she is oblivious to the onslaught. In fact the rain is sobering her
up; the down pour is invigorating her.
“Please let me move closer to you, so I can see your face” I request, the petitions of a dead
man. My mind races, I am about to lose it, I can feel the panic overcoming me again. Then I
hear a voice, is not the voice of my executioner, but the voice of my jefita. She tells me that if I
am to survive I must get close enough to look into the eyes of this monster. In her eyes you will
find her weakness.
“Now turn around slowly, I want to look closely at the pig that I will kill tonight.” The loca
commands right on cue.
“Please take that knife away from my ribs, I will not hurt you.” I stare into her blood shot eyes,
then slowly she plunges the knife deeper into my trench coat, the end of the knife has cut
through the trench coat. I can feel the cold steel penetrating my flesh.
“Please pull that knife away from me. Let me explain, look into my face you have made a
terrible mistake ...you don’t know me… look at me… Please look at me, you don’t know me. You
have mistaken me for someone else. I don’t know you lady!” I quiver in terror.
“Puto I would know you in heaven or hell, you will die… don’t move closer… Stop looking at me,
turn around, you are not ready to look into the eyes of the God of Vengence”
“What?” I manage through my terror.
In this moment of surreal madness and terror my heroes begin to counsel, coach and scream at
me; Jim, Willie, Elgin and Muhammad, remind me to be quick, decisive and strong! That voice
again, mi jefita; listen, attack or die.
With lightning speed I leap, almost fly back, away from the mad chola’s knife. I rip off my
trenched coat, she is thrown off guard, just enough time for me to pounce on her. By the time
she recovers I have both of her hands clutched by my vise like hands, she will not break loose. I
will break both her hands and arms before she gets away from me. She howls like a ghoul as we
struggle and fall off the narrow sidewalk and on to the gutter of the parking lot of this mini mall
from hell. The driving rain has proven to be my salvation. The mascara runs into her eyes, her
blond bleach hair limps over her eyes temporarily blinding her. I want to hurt, hurt her bad; she
is slow, fucked up and fat, the punching bag for the pimp that she thinks I am. A voice speaks to
me, “don’t hurt her she is sick”
“What?” I scream to the mysterious voice.
Sick, sick, sick is the word that keeps assaulting my mind. I fight the impulse to jam her nose up
into her brain; grab the knife and ram it into her throat. I can’t do it. I look into her blood shot
eyes, she is crazy with madness, pain and rage. She will not stop fighting me, wanting nothing
more than to kill me or be killed.
I have quickly, deftly overpowered her. Before she knows it I have flipped her on her huge ass. I
push her face into the enraged gutter full of rushing rain water. I will drown this bitch from hell
if she does not stop fighting me. She will not stop fighting me. I flip her on her back again and
slammed my head against her noses. Blood, hers and mine is now all over us. Again and again I
pushed her head under the rain water that angrily rushes past us. I can feel her arms go limp; I
want to drown her...
Drowned her?
Murderer?
I gather myself and rip the knife from the limp lifeless body. I throw the knife away from us and
toward the direction of the street that now acts like a small enraged river and the rush hour
trafffic that drenches us and zooms past us indifferent to the surreal death dance taking place.
The knife hits the bumper of a passing car and incredibly bounced right back almost directly in
the area where the woman lays dazed and confused. I let go of the limp woman and run to the
public phone booth to call cops. Before I can dial the operator I see the reflection on the glass
door of the phone booth of the monster coming at me, knife in hand read to plunge the
butcher knife into my heart.
I turned and landed a short right punch to her mouth; she falls, like a drunken fat cow that has
been shot in the head, into the gutter and the rushing rain water. I pulled her away from the
telephone booth and screamed at her. Don’t hurt her any more, command the celestial voice.
“Look at me, for God sakes look at me!” I scream at the mad woman.
“I will kill you”, she replied as she attempted to get on her feet.
“You don’t know me; I have never seen or met you. You are trying to kill a stranger”.
Incredibly before I say another word the woman is up again, charging at me. She is on me again,
scratching, howling, biting and ripping her nails into my flesh.
“I’ll rip your eyes out of faces you miserable pig, I will kill you” she screams.
For the next minutes the mad woman and I tumbled and flopped, again and again, all over the
small parking lot of the strip mall. I notice that patrons of the mall are now watching the
macabre wrestling match, no one interceded…no one gives a fuck. I hear laughter. What the
fuck is going on; is no one going to help me. No one get it, that this crazy bitch is trying to kill
me, no one gives a shit.
In LA no one give a fuck fool, man up puto, or die. I got to kill this woman, end it, but as much
as I want to snap this bitches neck; I can’t, the voices won’t let me. So we wrestled for what
seems to be an eternity. Out of the corner of my eye I see a patrol car rushing by, I grabbed the
woman and dragged her into the oncoming patrol car and the rushing traffic. A final desperate
move, the cop car will stop or crush us both, I decide I have no other choice. The cop car comes
to a screeching stop and two burly cops rush out of their patrol car, draw their guns and yelled
at us to stop and put up our hands. Rescued, salvation at last or so I think.
“Stop…Alto..Stop!” yells the fat Chicano cop, “Stop or I will shoot.. Stop or someone is going to
get killed”
I pulled away from the woman and raised my hands and immediately the woman is on me
grabbing my hair and ripping at me face. The white cop was taking no shit, fucking Mexicans all
they understand is a gun to their head. The white boy cop put a gun to the woman head and
commanded his partner to do the same with me. The cop slaps his gun against my head.
“sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, keep your hands high or die” the Chicano cops screams
into my face.
“If these fools move blasted them” the white cop commanded. The white cop orders us to lay
face down in the driving rain. Thank God I think I’ve survived this nightmare.
“Who is this whore? You got serious issues fool?” laughed the white cop.
“What?” I replied, the nightmare was not over. The cops have figured it all out, a pimp and his
whore. I am beating the shit out of my bitch. The cops are sympathizing with the plight of the
mad woman that they mistake for a prostitute.
“You’re a fucking chicken shit pimp beating the fuck out of your whore. Did she burned you
fool, not enough money asshole? You fools make me sick”. Spit the white cop in my direction.
Shut the fuck up and don’t say a thing, the voice counsels me. This fool cop has a hard on for
you and he will roll you, fuck your shit up real good, maybe even kill you. So shut the fuck up,
take your ass beating like a man. Be cool fool, the rain calms me down. The cops think that I am
this woman’s lunatic pimp. OK I got it, silent, cool and maybe you live through this.
“Fucking coward what was the fight about?” the white cop pulls hard on the hand cuffs that he
had just placed with my two arms behind my back. I remain silent, the woman continue to
scream at the top of her lungs that she will kill me.
They had made up their mind, they knew the whole story; they know that I was the pimp and
the poor woman was fighting for her freedom. I was the enemy, she was the victim. Bust the
fool, if he resists cap the fool. The nightmare continues.
After an eternity the cops sort the madness out, she is finally identified.
“A 5150, a fucking wacko!” laughs the white cop!
“ Yeah, I remember now. Ain’t that one of those fucking locas from the nut house around the
corner?” questions the Chicano cop.
“Yeah, maybe.” Replies the white cop.
The cops make a couple of calls and then the rabid woman is placed into the back seat of the
patrol car. The Chicano cop removes my handcuffs. He tells me that she is a mental patient that
escaped from a nearby lock down facility.
“What did you say” I ask the cop.
“She is a fucking basket case, she escaped. You Ok?
“Yeah” I manage
“You’re lucky to be alive. Get to a doctor” The Chicano cop states as they drive the woman back
to hell.
I am left with deep cuts, bruises and scratches all over my body and the deepest wounds and
scratches are on my face. She has bitten me all over my body, she has broken the skin on both
of my hands, she has dawned blood. I am covered in blood. I’m fucked, she has AIDS, VD,
Hepatitis, Gods know what, I call my doctor, and he advises come in quick!”
“You have live through it fool is what the rain types on my face. I look to the heavens and thank
God and my jefita. I acknowledge the divine intervention, the gift, I am alive.
This bazaar and surreal brush with death was a precursor of things to come. Subsequent events
would continue to test my resolve and my sanity. Death would be my constant companion for
the next few years.
Some days later I learned from one of my brothers that the night of my assault my mother had
suffered another heart attack.
“We rushed her to the hospital, she asked for you all night. She kept telling us that she knew
that you were in trouble, she had me go look for you”. My brother concluded.
We never told my mother about the attack, she could not have handled the story; it was too
fantastic, too bizarre and sick to explain. I had a hard time accepting that the incident had
happened. I looked at my scares and the scratches that I still had and I knew that I was lucky,
real lucky to be alive. Yeah that nightmare had occurred, the demons that possessed that
women had conspired to have her kill someone, anyone, I was the proverbial wrong man at the
wrong place at the wrong time, yet I survived.
A few days later I followed up on the mad woman by calling the LAPD, and they told me that
the woman had escaped from one of the many lock down psychiatric facilities located in that
part of South Central LA. I wondered to myself, how many poor mentally sick patients are
warehoused in the ghettos hellholes of LA. Driven by madness they escaped to attack and
terrorize the unsuspecting community. It is a dirty ugly little secret that frequently blows up on
the innocent and bring tragedy to the folks of South Central LA. I was one of the fortunate
survivors.
My Sagrada Madre
I should have died that night, stabbed to death or suffered some other horrible fate. It did not
happen. I knew after that night that I would not die of a random act of violence or a heart
attack. I think my saintly mother made a deal with her God and agreed that she would suffer
heart attack, after heart attack for over thirty years for the entire family. No one else in our
large family has ever had a heart attack since.
I vividly remember when my mother suffered her first heart attack. On one of those rare
occasions that the entire newly immigrate family was together. We had traveled to Lincoln Park
to ride the boats on the manmade lake and enjoy a full day of carne asada and tripas on the
shore of the lake. My father had rented one of the bigger boats and almost the entire family
jumped in; in the middle of the lake my mother began to complain of dizziness and then she let
out a scream that brought terror to all her children.
The captain of the small vessel made a bee line to the shore; we knew my mother was in bad
shape. My father, and my older brother helped my mom out of the boat and they sat her down
on the grass. I ran to get a blanket out of the car and we kept her warm. My father
administered cold compresses of alcohol soaked towels to my mom’s neck and back. She
moaned for a few hours, then slowly
he got better. In those day there was no 911 call; we had only one choice; take our mother to a
hospital out in the middle of the huge city or tough it out. My mother didn’t want to go to the
hospital. She suffers through the pain, as she would do so hundreds of time in the ensuing
thirty years.
We returned back home in fear and silence, my mother prayed to the Virgen and I spoke
directly to God; I asked him to heal my mother. My younger three siblings, babies really, didn’t
understand what was going on. But even at my tender age of 12 I was scarred for life; the
trauma of that day was indelibly singed in my soul. This magnificent india, was not invincible.
The pain and terror that I saw in my mother’s eyes would stay with me; it remains with me as
though it happened yesterday
My mother never went to the doctor after that initial heart attack; she never did in those early
day. What was the point, the doctor could not do a thing for my mother. It was another time,
another place, another mind set, the Mexicanos of El Monte were segregated economically and
medically in those day. We were stoic Mexicans that prayed a lot for miracles. The sublime
undercurrent of the day was that Mexican were inconsequential, incapable of maintaining good
health, cheap and easily replaceable, beyond redemption. My mother understood this
prejudice and so she would not go to the doctors,” a esos doctors gringos. Para que? No nos
entendemos”.
My father was now in perpetual and silent panic; when my father panicked he invariably
summons our abuelita, my mother’s mother. Upon hearing of her daughter’s heart attack our
beloved Chavelita left her pueblo of Ahualulco and her two bachelor drunken sons. She would
remind with us for the next seven years. It was during this visit that I learned that my Chavelita
was a curandera.
Chavela Aguila, La Curandera
Chavelita was a magical spiritual woman; she knew the medicinal properties of hundreds of
herbs and plants. Her teas, pomadas, banos de vapor, and massages, where all mixed and
blended with indigenous and Catholic prayers and songs that she whispered throughout the
course of the day. For the following seven years my mother did not suffer another major heart
attack, she attributed the good health to the power and magic of grandma’s hands. During this
period, when my mother and my grandmother were together, I recall were the happiest days of
my mother’s life.
My mother turned over the matriarchal reigns to my abuelita. and my jefita in turn became
one of the many loving children of the household under the magical spell of Chavelita. My
father paid reverent attention to all of my abuelitas commands and admonishions, no matter
how odd or silly they were. Even Mariano, the oldest of my brothers, closed his mouth, and
paid loving attention to Chavelita. “ You will not carry on with this curse, that your abuelo and
you tios have given you”, my grandmother stated to Mariano as she rubbed his head and back
with an anointment that she put together to cure him of his alcoholism. It worked he didn’t
drink a drop of alcohol while she was there.
Mi abuelita could not be at two places at the same time, we learned
that my uncle Tele has died back home; he had drunk himself to death. My grandmother return
to bury her son, and then shortly thereafter she was dead as well. I never got to see my abuelita
again after she return to bury my uncle Tele. My grandmother’s only remaining son, Juan, came
to live with us and he brought back the curse of alcoholism. In no time Mariano and my uncle
Juan were back to their drunken misery. Without my grandmothers wisdom ,divine powers and
firm hands they could not live sober lives.
Just before my grandmother left for good, she took my mother aside and revealed to my
mother the source of her illness.
“The pain that you suffer is in your heart, you have locked it there, and this is what is killing you.
You must let the pain and venom out, look at the harm that it is doing to you. Speak to Diego,
he is a good man, talk to him. You must release the pain and the bad spirits and memories that
you have in your heart. Do this mi hija and you will get better, let the pain out, share it with the
family, let it go or it will kill you. Forgiveness and love will bring you peace, it is the best
medicine I know”.
My mother didn’t follow her mother advised, she was a quiet, fatalistic, and stoic india. When
she learned of her mother death she became even more quiet and reflective; her mind was
always with her departed mother. In less than a year after the death of my grandmother, my
mother suffered another major heart attack.
This time we did take her to the hospital. After what seemed like hundreds of test administered
on her, the doctors diagnosis that our mother was obese, with high blood pressure and an
irregular heartbeat. My mother was instructed to radically alter her diet or she would die. In
the ensuing twenty years my mother would suffer heart attack after heart attack, she didn’t
change her diet. All my mother knew was how to cook, eat, feed and love and take care of her
familia, she knew little beyond that. She could not change. It proved to be impossible for my
mother. So she suffered, and her family anguished.
My mother would undergo two major open heart surgeries, the third would kill her.
The first heart surgery was experimental. In those days the heart surgeons were experimenting
and exploring a new medical frontiers and my poor mother was one of their first guinea pigs.
The first operation was a disaster. She was back on the operation table in less than a year. My
father was permitted to view the second operation, and when he exited the operating room I
vividly recall he had the look of a man that just seen the face of death itself. It was a look of
terror. Years later he revealed to us that the surgeons had literally sawed my mother chest
plate apart and removed her heart from within her chest. She lay there on the operating table
like a slab of beef ripped open by this team of butchers.
“Dios no permite esas cosas”. He said in horror. He felt guilty; completely hopeless that he had
not protected his woman and at the same was complicit in the sacrilege that was performed in
that operation room.
After the second operation the family fell apart, the pain was too much to bear, we sought
refuge in the usual vices, we descended into self pity and loathing to escape the pain. My
mother could not bear the disintegration of her family. She announced that she and our father
would return to Mexico.
“Mexico is where I want to spend the last years of my life. You children will have to visit us”. My
father wanted to live on the border, close to a major US hospital in the event that my mother
suffered another heart attack. Mexico was not yet ready for major open heart interventions.
My mother and father lived comfortably for over a decade in Tecate, she as always suffered
silently, valiantly. She was away from her children, and the weight of life that her children
dragged around like a huge mill stone around our collective necks. Mis padres started a small
thrift shop called the Segunda Juarez. It was very successful, my mother and father were
respected and celebrated owners of their small store due to their patience, generosity and
kindness. Everyone in the in the neighborhood loved them.
With my mother gone I was like a wild man that could not find his peace, my anchor was gone.
So I ran and ran, away from my family, away from my responsibilities; away from love, away
from soul. I lied to myself and convinced myself that on the road I could out run my depression,
my monsters, and my pain. So I made my life simple I ran from everything and everyone.
I was on the way to the airport headed to nowhere again, that horrible night of the attack by
the deranged woman, when I heard my grandmother speak to me.
”your mother needs you, go to her”. Is all my abuelita voice said.
After the telephone booth attack I figured I better follow up on the instruction of my abuelita. I
went to Tecate and brought my parents back to my San Fernando home to spend a few weeks
with the family in Southern California area. She was happy for a few days and then she wanted
to go home, she wanted to be in Mexico, spend her last day in peace in her native land.
Tengo mucho trabajo en Tecate. I want to go home Chato”
“Si madre” I promised her that I would drive them back to Tecate the following weekend,
She was sitting close to the fireplace, the flames danced in front of her. She did not take her
eyes off the flames, finally she said to me, ”Something is wrong”.
The phone rang, it was my older brother, I could detect the urgency
and pain in his voice, “Is Mom and Pop there?”
“Yes, they are right here with me. Want to talk to them?”
“Listen, I just received a call from Maria, Salvador is in the hospital, he is very sick. Maria could
stop crying. Salvador is real bad. We have to tell the viejitos.”
“This will kill Mom”. I replied quietly into the phone.
“Salvador is dying they don’t expect that he will make it through the night. You got to tell them,
and get them to the hospital he might not make past the night.”
I decided to tell my parents that Salvador was in to hospital, but I spared them the details. I
prayed that it wasn’t as serious as my brother had stated. We drove in silence to the El Monte
hospital. It was raining again, and the message from the gods was death is near. The rest of the
family members received us when we got to the hospital. Salvador is in the intensive care unit,
one by one we walk into the intensive care unit and seek out our brother room. The stench of
death is overpowering.
I find Salvador and he is near death, he has tubes in his nose and mouth. Salvador does not
move, his eyes are open. His motionless eyes are the color of poached yellowish grey eggs, they
are non responsive, yet they reveal the pain and terror of in his soul. I kiss my brother’s
forehead and then walk out of the hospital; I walk into the cold winter night. The rain has
stopped, I am on the verge of uncontrollable panic, I hyperventilate, I fall to my knees and cry
out to the Gods.
“Why…why” I scream into the dark skies above me, “Dear God why
Salvador?”
I return back to the hospital we stand and sit in the waiting room, we avoid each other eyes and
we remain in silent prayer. The family members find corners in the darkness of the waiting
room, no one leaves, we close our eyes. Mercifully the morning comes and we all awaits the
morning round report from the treating physician. The doctor finally comes to the waiting room
just before noon.
”I just visited your brother he is not responding. His kidneys have shut down completely, he had
an awful lot of fluid in his lungs, and his heart is enlarged. The medication that we have
administered to your mother is not working. You should start making plans in the event that he
does not make it tonight. Your brother is dying he may not make it through the night.”
The entire family remains for the second day and night in the waiting room, no one can make
us go. Morning comes and my brother is still clinging to life, but just barely.
“His organs are still not responding to the medication”. The doctors try any number of
medicines and combinations, still nothing is working.
“Your brothers will to live is amazing, he should be dead by now”. The doctor state coldly to
me.
On the third day of this ordeal my brother is still alive. It is a miracle that he is still alive I hear a
nurse state. The dialysis treatment is finally working. The lungs are clearing up, and for the first
time since being admitted Salvador is slowly moving his limbs. We are permitted to sit one at a
time next to our brother. On my shift I notice that his hands are twitching. A good sign I think to
myself. He is coming out of the coma, I thank God. I kiss his twitching hands.
On the fourth day I am alone at the hospital, my family
members have left to sleep, eat or bath, and go to work or church and converse privately with
God. I walk into my brother’s room and he is sitting up on his bed. It is a miracle!”
“Chato” my brother smiles to me.
“Salvador..Salvador” is all that I could mange and I begin to weep and fall to the floor like I have
been shot. This is truly a miracle!
“Get up Chato, it will be OK. I have seen the light of God, I know where I am going. It will be
OK.” He smiles at me and gently grabs my hand with his trembling and weak hand.
“What Salvador? You are going to get better and get the hell out of this hospital.” I am able to
whimper.
“No Chato, I will not leave this hospital, not alive anyway” he continues to smile at me.
“What are you saying, you will get well” I protest meekly.
“I have been given this blessing, this sacred time to talk to you and tell you that it will be OK. It
is my time, it is time for me to let go. I am going to a good place, I know that. Take care of the
Gordita, ayuda al viejo. Help Maria with the family, she will need your help” he speaks in a
gentle whisper, he continues to smile at me.
“Claro, Salvador, claro !” I manage.
I sit with Salvador throughout the afternoon. He is exhausted, but in apparent peace, the look
of terror is gone from his eyes. Salvador whispers that I should come near. I lean over and he
places the gentlest of kisses on my forehead. We stop talking, our hand still clutched, he closes
his eyes and never speaks again.
The next day my brother dies. I don’t tell my family of my last conversation with Salvador, they
would not believe it, and I could not explain it. I think to myself did that conversation really
happen or was I just hallucinating. I have never discussed this last conversation with any, it was
Salvador’s spirit that was speaking to me, and his body was dead. I know that now. The peace
and calm that radiated from Salvador to me that day before he died is something I have had
never experienced, before or since. I too was made blissfully calm from the love and spiritual
energy that emanated from my bothers departing soul.
The death of my mother and Salvador was too much for my father to take, within a few months
of my brother’s death my father was reduced to a dead madman walking.
My father, Pedro Vazquez, died 15 years ago, and there is not one
day that passes that I don’t think about him and his beautiful life of monastic simplicity,
service, sacrifice, wisdom, generosity and love that he gave to family, relatives , fellow
workers, indeed every human being that he encountered. My father was that kind of man. My
father always attributed his moral and philosophical development and maturation to the love,
guidance, and wisdom given to him and his siblings by his mother who was reverently called
Madre Elvira by everyone in the small Mexican village where they were all raised. Madre Elvira,
a widow, knew that if her family were to prosper, then her boys, the Vazquez brothers, would
have to leave the dusty village and travel to El Norte to seek work and a better life. With her
sacred blessing and the simple admonishment of, “Mis Hijos, cuidense un al otro!” the Vazquez
brother were sent off to in the fields of El Norte.
My father’s death was a long dragged out torturous nightmare
that spanned more than a decade. He was imprisoned by Alzheimer’s for the greater part of his
last 10 years of his life. From the onset of that dreaded disease the man that I knew and
worshipped was cannibalized and gutted by the disease. When the acute and ravaging
symptoms of the early onset of the disease struck my sister Rosalba moved in with my father.
She took the lead in caring for the now vile, cruel shriveled monster of a man that masqueraded
as our father. I stopped visiting my father after the onset of the Alzheimer’s disease. The gentle
saintly man that that now yelling obscenities to my sister was no longer my father but a demon
from hell. If the dementia will not kill my father, then I will erase him from my heart, obliterate
him out of my mind, and await his death. Truth is my father was dead, yet he walked around in
a fog of acidic, morbid madness for more than a decade. Seeing my father walk around his old
Tecate home like a goddamned zombie scared the shit out of me. The madman would grab a
broom, mop or stick that he would find in the yard and lash out at my poor sisters, maybe in his
madness he saw the likeness of his wife, our mother, in the faces and voices of his daughters.
Who knows?
He would throw food and drink at his daughters, who were besides themselves trying their best
to work miracles with their stricken father, but it was an impossible task. No one could or would
reach him; he took that pain, anguish and his many lifelong secrets to his grave. He spent the
last years of his life committed to his madness and evil deeds in the stench and darkness of his
Tecate home. My sisters try as they might could not leave the house for fear that that our
father would burn down the house or seriously her himself if left alone. They became prisoners
of the Tecate madman.
The few times I visited my father at the very onset of the illness convinced me that some
demonic spirits had taken over the body and mind of my father. Perhaps it some type of
diabolical reincarnation that was taking place, and I wondered what could the previous soul
that resided in my father have done that would deserve this evil and cruel sentence of utter
pathetic madness. I have always respect the old barrio adage of “the comeback is a
motherfucker”, but what of this celestial anomaly, my old man lived a life of total fidelity and
loyalty to his family and he get the royal fuck at the end of his life.
What then God, my old man’s God? You know that old school Mexican God of resignation,
futility and shoulder shrugging. My old man was a tough honest man, who did not suffer fool
lightly, he earned and paid his way through life, he did not take a morsel from any one’s plate.
He kept his up on his end of the celestial karma; he kept his mouth shut, and only spoke to
make sense of the moment, of the work, of the love that he gave to his family. My old man said
little but his action, his work ethic and his dedication to his family was without limitation or
boundaries. His sacrifice, toil, and work for us was without boundaries and had no end, through
his love and daily toil he performed miracles for his family. So at the end of my life, my father
long ordeal with dementia, remains one of the dark and painful mystery of karma gone terribly
wrong. What the hell sent my old man to the depths of a dementia that not even the devil
deserves that fate. Of course I am today troubled by the thought that I may someday be
stricken with my father acute and ravaging disease. When that day comes I will take a bullet to
the head or jump in front of an incoming train.
In the work that I do with troubled and broken youth I profess a
lot of love absolutes; about the power of love, that love is the key, that love will change even
the cruelest heart, that love is the mightiest force in the universe. But at the in the middle of
the night when you are by yourself and your having your nightly conversation with your God or
your devil talking about absolutes and love is the most obscure and inconsequential topic on
the menu. Madness is always front and center, maybe with my old man it just over took him,
cold cock him good. He never saw it coming, after all he had played by the rules, he felt a bit
inoculated, and who could blame him. A life of good deeds to be repaid by unrelenting
madness, what kind of bullshit God is that? Perhaps he secretly went to the dark side once too
often and never came back. Who is to know?
So yeah, if my old man created the mold of good hard working, honest and faithful living and
ended up a babbling madman, what the fuck can I expect at the end of my rather sinful and
profane life? The thought scares the holy ghost out of me, but fuck it what can you do? Well
like the man says don’t look back because it might be catching up to you, you pray and roll with
a God of action and spiritual prosperity. So I have made it my mission to get on the good side of
karma, if you know what I mean. Hedge my bet with the celestial gods and the lords of the
underworld, working righteously both side of the fence. But of course in the final analysis there
are no guarantees it is all after all a crap shoot.
When we buried our father it was as though we were
finally exorcising a mighty weight from our collective souls; as a family we were able to breathe
again. The weight of that old man’s pain was lifted from all us and we were freed. Free for the
first time in over a decade. So in the end both of my parents had lived into their old age
wanting nothing more, deserving nothing less that to retire into a golden age of rest, love and
peaceful coexistence with their immediate small town Mexican world. Instead they were dealt
the cruelest of hands, loaded with pain, paralysis and finally madness. In the end we had lost
the loving, kind and selfless memory of our beloved mother and our servant father, instead we
were left with memories of pain, chaos, more pain, and madness.
All the piety, the reverence, the resignation, and the incessant praying that both my jejitos sent
to their God, was it all in vain and hopeless? Perhaps it was heard and acted on in some far
away black hole the universe. Or is it all a celestial crap shot?
I must have been about eight years old, I sure I was no older, yet even at that tender age I could
sense when I was being conned. Growing up in Tijuana for a couple of years teaches a kid that
around every corn there is conman just itching to take your money, pride or dignity, sometimes
all three at the same time. I learned quick! You had too in those mean streets of TJ. The biggest
cons I found out very early in my childhood were the pious bible thumpers, church going
hypocrites, that took the limosnas given to them by day by the tourist and poor and they spent
it on the cantinas and the whores at night. Yeah I saw them for what they were cheap, lazy two
bit cons, I avoided them like the plague, they never paid for a shoe shine and always
complained.
One night the family was watching some news show that was highlighting a trip of the Pope. He
looked like a silly gaudy clown, that is what I thought and I voiced it.
My father heard me and he walked up to looked me directly in to eyes and quietly stated, “In
this house we do not disrespect God. Do you understand mijo?”
“Si padre” I meekly replied.
I never again uttered sacrilege in my father’s home. I kept my thought about the church and
their madness all in my head. Even today whenever I catch a glimpse of the Pope and his
vaudevillian religion I shuddered and shake head, these were clowns and they were rendering
the ignorant Mexican changos the royal fuck! My mother and father made religion plausible
even in the wretched existence that was their world in Mexico. It was a faith so strong and true
that I knew it was a blessing from our ancestors of millenniums past. It was faith, his God, my
father would remind that got us to El Norte. When my father went mad I lost what little faith I
had in God, you see my father was my god, and then one day he was gone and a madman took
his place. God is dead!
I came to this nation as a Mexican immigrant child some 50 years ago;
we migrated from a country that offer very little but hunger and poverty to my family; to a land
of incomparable promise yet capricious, often cruel, and arbitrary delivery of that golden
American dream promised to the huddled masses. Almost immediately I witnessed,
experienced, and felt the unique selective privilege that this country would anoint on some of
its citizens and deprive so many others. This special privileged abundance of opportunities was
laid before the chosen ones that learned how to “wire” and pray to the true god of things and
trinkets, they were then anointed to participate and play out this thing called the American
Dream. We the mongrel herd were left out in the cold, abandoned to contemplate alienation,
poverty and madness.
In my youthful mind I discerned a lot of what I came later in my life to understand as madness,
it was all around me. Our next door neighbor in our home in El Monte was call John Baloney, he
was a grotesquely obese racist and pedophile, he was nuttier than a shit house rat. But because
he was a white man he had a run of our quiet street. He molested, berated, and otherwise
terrorized the little girls and boys that he ordered on his filthy lap. No one stood up to him; he
screamed obscenities to all of the Mexicans and Native Americans that populated our Orchard
Street. No one ever called the cops on him, in those day we knew nothing about cops, it funny
but I don’t ever remembering seeing cops in America circa 1958. One day John Baloney just
stopped screaming, keeled over in front us kids and collapsed in a heap. The fat pig had
suffered a massive stroke and in a matter of weeks he was dead, taking all of his sins with him
to hell.
The hatred and abuse that we suffered as kid of color in the America of the late 1950’s made us
perpetual outsiders. I felt, living in this new country call America, that I was always outside of a
huge candy store looking in, barred from entrance, while other white kids frolicked inside. I
want to be inside so I knew that I had to learn to play the game. I became an altar boy, played
along with the superstitious gesticulation of my parents and their godly slave owners. I became
a Cub Scout and a baseball player. Much later in my life I realized that I had no hand in making
those fateful decision. It was my father that jumped me into the American game. The American
paradox of abundance for some and the denial to others has always fascinated and deeply
disturbed me about this country. Why some got most of the America’s ample blessing and
other lived in total deprivation troubled me and at the same time motivated, drove me to learn,
work hard and attempt to learn and wire the rules of the game in this country, that I felt should
include me. So I did, I played the game to the hilt. The over achiever, the dreamer, the
Americano wannabe, the nice Mexican boys; all the while dragging my Mexican insecurity,
pathos and madness everywhere with me.
I wanted to learn how to “wire” and play out my dreams to the fullest of my life in this country.
I, also, wanted to work toward helping those at the periphery of America’s abundant
cornucopia gain access, privilege and power. I knew I was in for a lifetime of bitter pain,
alienation and battles; with some wins, but mostly defeats and loses that would test my
resolve but to date have not broken me. It would and could be other way that was what my
God had in store for me and I embrace the anointment. I have been blessed, perhaps cursed to
be a servant of the people. This country gave me the opportunity to fully understand, prepare
and work toward the inclusion of all of us into the American Dream. I dedicated my entire life
to what I have come to understand; namely that our rights, freedom and liberation comes from
the philosophical practiced art of unconditional love. Love, I know now, will find a way, always;
and that is what I have come to learn and share with my brothers and sisters.
But by the time the death of my jejitos rolled around I was a jaded nonbeliever, and I too
plunged into the depths of mental illness and depression.
Mental illness had always frightened, fascinated, mesmerized me; it
has always held me hostage, a slave to my own monsters and fantasmas. I have tried
throughout my lifetime to ignore and hide from the many varieties of mental illnesses that have
afflicted and surrounded me, my family, friends and the folks that I work with in the
community. Like so many of my brothers and sisters, I hid from mental illness through alcohol,
ignorance, denial and bravado. And now my jefito, this god, my god reduced to a babbling
pathetic madman.
In my youthful mind I discerned a lot of what I came later in my life to understand as madness,
it was all around me. Our next door neighbor in our home in El Monte was call John Baloney, he
was a grotesquely obese racist and pedophile, he was nuttier than a shit house rat. But because
he was a white man he had a run of our street. He molested the little girls and boys that he
ordered on his filthy lap. No one stood up to him, he screamed obscenities to all of the
Mexicans and Native Americans that populated our Orchard street. No one ever called the cops
on him. One day he just stopped screaming, he suffered a massive stroke and in a matter of
weeks he
This country gave me the opportunity to fully understand, prepare and work toward the
inclusion of all of us into the American Dream. I dedicated my entire life to what I have come to
understand; namely that our freedom and liberation comes from the philosophical practiced
art of unconditional love. Love will find a way, always; and that is what I have come to learn and
share with my brothers and sisters. But by the time the death of my jejitos rolled around I had
become a jaded non believing cynical fool and I too plunged into the depths of mental illness
and depression.
I am today a prototypical pocho Americano, a Chicano male, the
benefactor of a twisted and schizophrenic machismo legacy, and my principal macho mantra is
denial and super stubborn resistance to anything that I do not understand. That is why denying
that mental illness afflicts many of us is on the very top of our macho stupid list. Of course, I
witnessed the devastating effect of mental illness on me, my loved ones, and the people
around me, and often in callous stupidity and fear I attributed the condition to personal
weakness. The true and sick macho proclaims; mental illness does not exit, it is about personal
strength or weakness! Punto aparte, I wanted to fight mental weakness like my old man
fought! And yeah look at how he ended up at the end of his life.
My beloved Mother, bless her soul, told me one time, “Take care of your younger brother, he is
sick, incurable with weakness”. Of course my mother was talking about mental illness she just
didn’t have readily available Webster’s dictionary or the western European mind set to call it
mental illness. Nonetheless she saw it, and she knew that my little brother would suffer, and
suffer he has. His way of coping; alcohol abuse, violence, denial and a pathetic lack of
ownership of his life, of love, and his own self worth that reduces him to a potential and tragic
poster child for the desperate need for mental health services to Latinos in our communities.
We had the same mother and father, the same loving upbringing, yet my little brother is sick.
He still denies that he has a mental illness, and he will take stubborn macho denial to his grave.
I love my carnalito and I don’t know how to help him, hell I don’t know how to help myself
when it comes to mental illness! It has always been our eternal affliction and help is nowhere to
be found. So I ran in panic this was my pathetic way of dealing with the mental illness. I was
always running around lost in a labyrinth of denial; panic stricken and running deeper toward
my own ever festering mental illness quagmire. I knew no other way! So like the foolish macho
that I am I gritted my teeth y me fajaba. No one had ever given me another direction! In our
Latino community we continue to be afflicted with physical illness; and mental illness continues
to be a personal weakness or character defect, shameful that must be hidden and denied.
Mental illness is one our many dirty little secrets.
So when my jefe came down with Alzheimer’s at the back end of his life we hid him from
society, it was our dirty little secret. It was my dirty little secret, I obliterated my jefito from my
existence. We could not face that fact that my father had come down with a dreaded disease
that no one could cure, and besides in the briefest of moment the dementia would life and he
would be normal, so said my sister. It was the devils work, fucking with us, tickling us with
absurd hopes of my father’s remission. It didn’t happen, it only got worse. Today, my mind is
always preoccupied and at times overwhelmed by the fact that I could be stricken with
dementia. I have the fear that I will end up like my father, when and if that day come I will kill
myself, jump in from a train. I will not be enslaved by this disease, I will end it quickly. In the
mean time I will run, run away from all of my ghost and fantasmas and in the process of running
come across a new set of monsters.
Death, dementia, the impending apocalypse was
haunting me, it would ran me out of LA and away from my father’s memory for a long time.
Fatima and I would escape into Mexico every chance we got. I was running away from
everything that reminded me of my mother, father and brother. We hung out in all of the
beach resort towns, Rosarito, Vallarta, Acapulco, Cancun, Aukumal, Isla Mujeres. When we
ran out of money we would return to LA for a few months, just work long enough to save
money and then return to the jungles and remote beaches of Mexico, away from the repressive
ghosts of LA that haunted us. We would stay in Mexico for months, fight the memories and the
pain of failed dreams and broken promises with cerveza and tequila and attempt to cleanse our
minds of the things and lives unceremoniously abandoned back in LA. We repeated this
desperate cycle of running away for years. It was during the end of the many monetary panic
attacks back in LA that we experienced that I was frantically hunting for a job that I fortuitously
read a small obscure employment add in the LA Time that simply read: Wanted bilingual
couple, with some real estate experience, mechanical skills and loves to work with tourist.
Apply immediately. I called the phone number provided and in a matter of two week Fatima
and I were in Cancun. We would work as managers of a vacation resort time share company
headquartered out of Palm Springs and Acapulco. We remained in Cancun for more than three
years. They proved to be the three longest and most dangerous years of my life.
I had a million real and imaginary responsibilities , but the one crucial and absolute
responsibility for me was in the words of the company’s owner, Judge Eastvold,”Keep the
fucking tourist out of jail. and for god sakes if one of those miserable drunken fuckers drown on
your watch Mexico will not be big enough to hide you and or your crew. Do you read me son?
So go, show our folks a good time. If you are as smart as I think you are, you’ll make a lot of
money and have a great time doing it. Don’t steal from me son, I’ll find out. You can make
money without stealing from me. Do you hear me young man?
“Loud and clear Judge” I replied.
After three years of drunken madness we would eventually leave Cancun and returned to Los
Angeles to attempt to start a family. Initially we had been run out of Los Angeles due to poverty
and stupidity and three years later we ran back to La to have a family. Is that fucking crazy or
what? Cancun was no place to raise a family in that day; too much partying, to many demons,
to many Cuba Libres, too much Mayan pathos and curses. If that didn’t kill then the
backstabbing double crossing friends would get you killed and dumped in the Bojorquez
mangroves with a couple of bullets to your head for good measure. We were childless and
drifting apart, I was drinking myself into very serious trouble, Fatima was giving up hopes that I
would come around, she had lost her will to go on without children, she wanted out. One day
Soledad presented me with an ultimatum, her or the jungle. I was fully prepared to tell her to
leave. I would stay and die a coward, alone in the jungle way from my fantasmas and demons,
away from my father and the pain and failure of Los Angeles. Leave me you can do better
without me I told Fatima. She gave me one last chance and we abandoned Cancun. We
returned back together and in a matter of months Fatima was pregnant with our first child, it
was a miracle child. A second miracle child followed in three years.
Fifteen years later we returned to Cancun with our two boys. Fatima and I wanted our two boys
to experience and learn to love our Cancun, our Mexico. We also retuned in the hopes of
finding the extinguishing spark to our lives that we had in those early years in Cancun. We
wanted to reclaim and share with our boys the promise, innocence and the excitement of those
wild beautiful years. We wanted our boys to experience a Mexico that we knew and love and
that we knew was quickly being destroyed by the greed and avarice of the multinational
corporations, the corrupt and inept government functionaries and the cancerous
narcotraficante familias that were making their presence felt even before we left Cancun.
We feared that in our 15 year absence from Mexico that our beloved Cancun we knew would
be gone forever. At the same time we wanted to remove our boys away from the omnipotent
presence of the Los Angeles rat race, the big brother omnipotent computers, and the mindless
march to consume and discarded the hundreds of toys and material shit that we had purchased
for them. We wanted to run away, again from our guilt and sins; even if it was for just a few
weeks. What we found in our return to Cancun was shocking. It was no longer a green tropical
paradise; it was now an obscene amalgamation of every known and newly invented vice to
mankind with a pathetic grotesque Mexican twist. Mexican madness, pendejismo and genius
have created Cancun; a magnificently decadent, over the top opulence with countless five star
hotel, world class ecological sites, expensive restaurants and discos; and yes world-class Malls.
We had traveled damn near 3000 miles to reach a more expensive shopping mall nestled in the
Mayan jungle. While on our trip we had learned from the locals that he Mexican Congress was
about to pass a national lay that would legalize gambling throughout Mexico, the thieves where
hoping to turn Cancun into a serious contender as the gambling capital of the world.
“Can we go to the Hard Rock, and then to Planet Hollywood and then to Mc Donald’s for
dinner?’ inquired my youngest boy.
Their eyes wide open not missing a thing, as the taxi made it one hour journey from the
international airport nestle in the jungle in the out skirts of Cancun and droves to our final
destination the zona hotelera and then to the end of PoTaPok road and the shores of the of
Bojorquez Lagoon.
“We’ll eat at the hotel”, Fatima asserted as she shook her head incredulously as we both
recoiled in horror. Our paradise in the jungle was being transformed into a fantasy circus
hybrid with elements of Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, Vegas and Disneyland rolled into a macabre
drunken collective vulgar testament of man insatiable war against the God’s magnificent
ecological wonders. Leave it to the Mexican to fuck up the Garden of Eden is all I could think.
Carlos Fuentes, novel”Where the Air is Clear” comes to mind when we enter the rich opulence
of Cancun. It is for the super rich and the want to be super rich, that breathes a different, or at
least think they breathe a different air sanctified and purified by the devil himself. The mega
rich Mexicans reside, if only occasional here in Cancun; it is a weird conglomerate of politicians,
narcotraficantes, international business men and financiers, and world class real estate
developers. They have colonized all of the local Mayan population and enslaved them as the
new slave labor that is building the new pyramids to the Green God of Greed. I felt shame and
guilt to see what I had been complicit in creating. But we were here and we would make the
best of it , and no we would not go to the mall, the Hard Rock or any of the money trap that
populate the entire zona hotelera. We would avoid the tourist traps and take our kids to the
jungle, to Akumal, to Isla Contoy, there we would find peace and perhaps a bit of our collective
soul and spirit.
When we reached the Coral Mar time share condominiums to our astonishment, the two lonely
condo towers that I had personally supervised in their construction over fifteen years ago,
where now surround by six other beautiful buildings, a meticulous manicured landscape, and
Bojorquez mangroves were pristine. I had the fear that the place would be abandoned and my
boys would be frightened to death if we ran into one of the local henchmen and dope fiends
that use to hang around the Coral mar in the old days. As we drove around the zona hotelera,
we saw many deserted and abandoned construction projects; drug deals gone bad I thought to
myself. The grand old Sheraton hotel-time share operation was now being consumed by the
jungle vegetation, eventually I was often told by the indigenous, “the jungle always wins and
reclaims what it has lost.”
Since our departure Cancun has seen hard times, many of the
larger timeshare companies vanished from one day to the next, leaving thousands of gullible
and naïve tourist from around the world with a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge. We were
saddened but not at all surprised to hear about the fleecing of the international tourist
community by the cutthroat time share industry. That was the principal reason that we had left
Cancun, we were up to our eye balls in corruption and swindles that would eventually get us
killed or thrown in jail. In those fast and dangerous days corruption swarmed about us like flies
on a rotting carcass.
As the official administrators of the Coral Mar time share corporation we were, of course,
complicate in the ripping off of the drunken tourist. I have been around lot of shady and
unscrupulous dealings in my life, but nothing compared to the shameless display of lie,
deception and debauchery that took place when a time share salesman dug his claws into a half
drunk, sun burned tourist. It was like taking candy from a baby, a drunken baby at that. It was
conducted in the backstabbing language of sun, fun, y gringo dolares, the illusion of choice
between a snow bounded winter in Minnesota or the beach white beaches of the Mayan
Peninsula, all played out by legalized kidnapping and extortion with the help of rivers of tequila
and cerveza. Once the time share vultures had you in their torturous talons you were doomed.
When we were hired by World International Resorts Corporation to manage the Coral Mar and
the subsequent build up that would take place on the Pok- ta-Pok Peninsula, we had negotiated
that we wanted no part of the sells end of the business, how stupid was that. Judge Eastvold
the wily old fox just shook his head and puffed on his huge cigar. The truth was that Fatima and
I did not know what we were getting ourselves into. We were, however quick learners and
adapted quickly to the many idiosyncrasy and nuances of both Mayan culture and the fast and
dirty Mexican capitalism that that mutated cancerously throughout the region, with the time
share industry as one of the most vile and lethal strains of the deadly cancer know as
unregulated cutthroat capitalism.
The day that we arrived at the end of a god forsaken stretch of the
Pok-Ta-Pok road that was surrounded by the Bojorquez Lagoon we were met by this
Neanderthal who grunted that he was Memo. He was wearing a pair of filthy cut off jeans,
sporting the largest nappiest Afro I had ever seen, and a huge gold chain that had a monstrous
lion pendent hanging menacingly between his huge ripped chest. He reminded me of Mr. T on
acid. The taxi driver was given a mad dog glance from Memo, who immediately drove off,
leaving a trail of dust as he sped away. We were in the middle of the Mayan jungle, with a
crazed Mexican Hulk and not another human being within 10 miles. The night was black, dotted
by the most brilliant starry night sky that I had ever witnessed. “Welcome” Memo smiled to us
in his broken English, extending his huge hand to greets us“
“Gracias” we both managed meekly. Memo could see the shock and disbelief on our faces.
“Don’t worry, be happy” he continued to smile, “Every one that I have greeted at this spot has
the same expression of shock, it will be OK. They think that they have land on the far side of the
moon, but no you are in Cancun.”
“Where the hell are we?” I managed.
“You senor, are at the end of Pok Ta Pok road, but very near to God and the best bars in the
world.” He laughed. “And I am sure you two are thirsty and hungry so let us get some tequila
and food in you. You will feel much better.”
Memo pointed out to the body of still shimmering body of water, “ That is Bojorquez Lagoon,
full of alligators and drunken tourist”. Memo stopped laughing, “But that is a story for another
day”.
Memo walked us up to our third story condo. He tried the light switch, the light did not come
on. “Damn fuses they blow out all of the time. Or maybe Junior just has paid the bill yet, who
know, but we have plenty of candles and matches in all of the condos.”
emo waited down stairs near the huge palalpa near the lagoon. About an hour later we walked
down and Memo threw me some car keys and point to a new VB van.
“That my friend is your car while you remain here, I drove it in from Merida myself. It is a great
Combi, you will need it to get around. So tonight I will show around the zona hotelera, where
the tourist play and lose all of their money.”
“Memo”, I managed,” We are tired and would like to sleep and rest.”
“No my friend I have been instructed by Junior that no matter what time you came he wants to
see you at the Crystal, so we must go. We cannot piss off Junior, me entiendes!”
We drove out of the darkness of the jungle and into the brilliantly lit Kukalcan through fare of
the zona hotelera. Within a half an hour we were sitting next to Junior and a small army of
drunken angelic looking beach boys, sun burned middle age Anglos dressed in ridiculous looking
polyester pants and white shoes, beautiful scantily dressed young woman, young Mayan and
Mexican youth that were just teenagers, all were drinking, dancing. All were having a great time
on Junior’s tab. Junior stood up and had a brief conversation with Memo, he slipped some
pesos into Memos hand, then he walked over to us and gave both of us a firm abrazo.
”Welcome to Cancun. We have been waiting for a pair like you for a long time. But tonight eat
drink, enjoy, tomorrow we start making serious money” As he walked away he handed me two
hundred dollars.
“Enjoy and let’s make some serious money”, is all he said as lead his posse out of the most
famous disco in Cancun. A few minutes later we made a mad dash for the exit, we were bone
tired and in shock. Memo walked behind us not saying a work, he would shadow us for the first
few months of our stay in Cancun.
“No one senor will fuck with you as long as Memo is with you”, he smiled,” It is my job to keep
you safe, until you get the hang of it. The way things are done in Cancun, me entiende?”
“Si Memo te entiendo” I smiled back and shook his hand.
Memo would sleep in the palalpa, quiet and deadly like a Jaguar, always vigilant. We returned
to our condo, and now the electricity was on, when we turned on the lights we found ourselves
a beautiful, modern exquisitely appointed condo. The floors were polished beige marble tile,
the walls were painted with a textured off white color that complemented the marble floors
beautifully. The two bath rooms were huge, with small individual swimming pools for bath tubs,
there was running hot and cold water, huge window throughout the condo that let in the
wonderful sweet breeze of both the Caribbean Ocean and Bojorquez Lagoon winds blow gently
throughout our condo. We bolted the front door, exhaled for the first time in hours and prayed
silently and bid a fond goodbye to the world that we knew. In shock, we did not sleep a wink
awaiting the light of day to bring an end to the longest night of our lives.
“My dear God, what have I gotten us into?” I prayed silently. God would not respond that night.
In the coming days, weeks, and months we came to witness firsthand the sleazy and
underhanded time share operations, from the Mayan orphans or lost children that were placed
strategically at busy corner of the zona hotelera, with dirty snotty faces, gum boxes in one hand
and dragging along a younger sibling all a suckers hook to elicit sympathy for the unsuspecting
tourist.
“Stop a tourist and you got their attention and their wallet” La Senor Venegas was proud of
remind all of the time share sales crew. Stopping a tourist was the surest way to separate the
soft and easy marks from the rest of the tourist herd. Then came the runners the seemed to be
everywhere in the zona, in the morning rounding up all of the tourist that they could snag,
almost kidnapping and forcibly escorting them to the time share presentation scam that they
were hustling for.
Once inside the air conditioned presentation room the old jaded sun burned on the run outlaw
gringos took over. The tequila and cerveza flowed, the gringo sale staff never stopped talking or
grinding until they got the credit card number that they coveted. Having made their killing the
entire staff would retire to their favorite bar for a night of debauchery, where they would spend
all of their money, and repeat the pathetic ritual of fleecing the tourist the next day. We got the
tourist the next day when they were officially closed and new members of the international
time share fraternity.
Fatima and my job was to keep the tourist happy now that they were official time share
owners, sober and fleeced for anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars for the privilege
of owning time share in some god forsaken part of the third world jungle. Fatima and I did the
best we could to keep the tourist out of jail, away from the alligator in the lagoon, and away
from the countless pick pockets and swindlers that buzz around the tourist like flies on a rotting
carcass. Coral Mar like most of the newly built structures in and around the zona holtelera was
beautiful to look at but once you got into the entrails of the build there was one horrific
problem after another. Put simply Coral Mar was a fraud, nothing worked. We constantly ran
out of water, and we were surrounded everywhere by water. The availability of electricity was
sporadic at best and there time that we went days with electricity. Transportation was nonexistent; the taxi drivers would not venture to “the end of the earth, not enough traffic, no
money”. Junior would have to bribe one of the owners of the taxi company to send “fleceros”
rouge taxis to pick up our guests.
Funny thing the guest were cooperative and seldom complained, they were mostly shit face
drunk, with second degree sun burns; yet happy to be away from their freezing Canadian or
mid-west or eastern United States homes they were escaping from.
When we did get an occasional trouble maker we would remind them that the Cancun jails
were nothing to joke about, serious business those jails and the jailers were sadistic pigs. The
truth was that even the police did not venture to the end of Pok-Ta-Pok, what was the point no
money, no mordidas, no one to roll. It was rumored that the only time the cops ventured to the
end of the swamp was to dump a body that they had interrogated a bit too violently. They
would wait for the night to fall, then dump the corpse into the mangrove lagoon and the
alligators would do the rest, saving the cops with having to come up with some pathetic
explanation as to the death of one the local citizens at the hands of the police.
With the help of our incredibly loyal and hard working staff we got through the first year, no
drownings, no one hauled off to jail, no disappeared, no homicides, all tourist alive and account
for.
Judge Eastvold sent us a money gram for our efforts, “A job well done, and keep up the great
work!” said the message.
The building and the tourist were easy to deal with compared to the Mexican way of doing
business. We were completely out of element, lost and without anyone to help us navigate the
incredible intricate and complicated nuances and proclivities that governed the way the rich
and powerful did business in Cancun.
The lord and master of Cancun and Quintana Roo was a man by the Salim Ackash, of Moorish
heritage and a fiercely competitive cut throat soul, that wanted to someday, “control all the
business that matters in our Mayan world, nuestra peninsula” he would tell me after I had
gained his confidence.
“You have a very bright future here my friend you can navigate effortlessly in both world, that
of our gringo friends and our Mayan world. Work with me my friend and I will make you rich
and powerful.” He proposed on more than one occasion.
“Senora Salim you are very kind, our stay in Cancun as I have told you is temporary, and we will
leave back to the states. It is our home, but while I am here I will work hard, and I am always at
your service” I replied, reminding him that I was not for sale or purchase.“Muy bien but until
that day comes you and I will work closely to assure that the gringos get what they want and I
get much more of what I need.”
“I am at your service senor Salim”.
No one ever crossed Salim. Those fools who did ended up in the mangroves of the Bojorquez
Lagoon, The cops call it “el zambutazo” water boarding Mexican style. The offending
perpetrator handcuffed behind the back, blindfolded, screaming for mercy would be dunked
over and over again into a pen of swarming alligators. It was a horrible death, ripped to pieces
by the alligators, while at the same time being slowly and methodically drowning to death. No
one fucks with the Arabe; el zambutazo was Salim’s calling card and deadly reminder. It was
rumored in the bars of Cancun by know it all gringos that the CIA had learned the techniques of
water boarding torture from none other than Salim Ackash and his band of thugs.
Salim was happy with my work. I made sure that all material and supplies were purchase from
his companies, from his vendors, from his friends. All of his contracted workers were working at
Coral Mar, they were all making great money and all the work was on schedule. Judge Eastvold
in Palm Springs received nothing but glowing reports from Salim about the work that Fatima
and I were doing at his Cancun resort.
“Keep my people happy, and I will keep you happy and safe.” Salim would gently shake my
hand. In Palm Spring Judge Eastvold and all of the rest of the World International brain trust
could not believe how quickly the addition building were being constructed and passing final
inspection.
“It is because of the gracious effort and hard work of Mr. Salim” I reported.
“No that is not it young man, we have had a working relationship with Salim for along time,
much longer than I would like to remember, but we have never come in on time and at
contracted price. The work you are doing is fantastic.” Judge Eastvold bellowed over the
telephone.
“What can I tell you Judge it is your company and business contacts that have made this project
at Coral Mar work out. I can tell you that senor Salim has helped me every step of the way.”
There was silence at the other end of the telephone.
“Be very careful boy, I need you in Cancun. I need you alive” Eastvold whispered over the
phone.
“Yes Judge always.” I now knew exactly what Eastvold meant.
Salim continued to provide all of the workers, we paid them excellent wages. All the building
materials were provided by Salim, and he kept both the cops and the union thugs away. Salim
contracted all of the Mayan workers from throughout the region, and he provides the best
skilled and hardest working men around. In turn all of the men were very loyal to Salim.
“I have to be fair, but tough, real tough. Estos indios will drink themselves to death if you don’t
take full and total control. When they make demands or threaten you, you must act quick and
decisively. They will smell your weakness and exploit it.” Salim counseled
”I will keep that in mind” I replied meekly.
Salim played everyone against each other; he would goose the workers every now, rile up the
work force. A subtle reminder that without Salim, and the cooperation of his workers the job
would not get done. Salim the mastermind always got what he wanted. One day it would be
more hours for his men, the next day it would be higher wages, the following week it would
threats of a strike or an impending raid by the cops. All this madness orchestrated deftly by
Salim. It was his world and he had his hand in everything. During one of these threatened
strikes I attempted to negotiate with the leaders; they would hear none of it.
“We are way behind schedule”. I pleaded.
“Your problems are not ours, not enough material, not enough man power, what we can do?”
replied the leader, a devil by the name of Tono.
“Hire more men, I’ll approve it”
“Salim will not approve more men.” Tono replied.
“I run this operation” I stated like a fool.
“ Senor Salim is in charge”, Tono lead the workers out of the office, they could hardly contain
their disdain for me. I knew that I had made a crucial tactical error. Salim would hear of my
stupid and treasonous act. My first lesson on Mexican labor would follow the next day when
the men failed to show up for work, they were on strike. The only man that showed up was
Tono and he was drunk and threatening a workers revolt. He had been sent by Salim to put me
in my place. In the days to come I would have frequent confrontations with Tono. He was a
bully, a monstrous bully when he was drunk. Tono was a loud mouth and a gossip, sly and
cunning always stirring up trouble with the workers, doing all the dirty work for Salim.
No one trusts Tono, but everyone gave him a wide path as he had the
reputation of using his machete during bouts of rage. I came to learn that he would verbally
and physically abuse anyone that stood up to him. He began harassing all of the woman that
came to work at Coral mar, and he was would not stop harassing our maids. The head maid,
Dona Lola , came to me in tears.
“Don Rosario, I hate to bring you this issue, but if I don’t I am afraid that one will get killed. It is
about Tono, he is harassing and threatening all of us, he is making our work here a living hell. I
caught him the other day sneaking into the condo that my younger daughter was cleaning. I
told him to get out. He got out by told that he would have my daughter one way or another. If I
tell this to my husband I am afraid that someone will die, and I don’t want it to be my
husband.” She cried in pain.
“Lola why didn’t you come to me earlier?’ I asked
“ Tono said that if I got you involved he would kill you. I don’t think he was machining idle
threats, Tono is a monster.”
“I think it is best that I quit and then Miriam will be safe. That horrible man goes only after
young and innocent girls, he would not dare try to touch me, I would stab him and he knows it.”
Lola cried.
“No Lola, it is Tono that must go, God not you Lola.” I pleaded.
“He is el Diablo, Don Rosario, he will get hurt you if confront him.” Lola wiped the tears from
her eyes and returned to her work, convinced that I was powerless to control this evil man.
I told Fatima what Lola had confessed. “I knew it all along he is evil, he steal everything that is
not nailed down. He has deals with all the delivery men. He is on the take with all of the
vendors, that is what Don Cuco told me and Lola confirmed it a few days ago.”
“Fatima why didn’t you tell me this before?”“And get you hurt or maybe killed, no I don’t think
so. We didn’t sign up to be cops. Call Junior and have Memo or someone take care of Tono, it
cannot be you.” She pleaded.
That night I could not sleep I had to deal with Tono, so I planned a strategy to deal with him. I
knew that reasoning with this guy was pointless, he would seem me as a punk, a coward that
used words to fight his battles. If I confronted him with the allegations made by the staff he
would simply deny everything. He would faint outrage at the accusations, and then counter
with a verbal assault on me. Perhaps he would attempt to instigate a fight with me. I knew that
I had no good choices and I could not avoid confronting him forever. I would move quickly and
surprise him I would do the attacking at my time and at in my element. I would catch him by
surprise, when he had his guard down for a split second, by the time he recovered it would be
too late. I laughed to myself, smart lady that Lola wanting me to take care of Tono, leave her
husband out of it. I finally fell asleep, knowing tomorrow someone die. That night all my dreams
were about water. I got up earlier than usual I did not want to awaken Fatima. I went down to
the palalpa and had coffee with some of the staff that had breakfast before work. Tono was
already there loud and obnoxious as usual. I called out to Tono, her turned around gave a
phony smile and returned to his buffoonery.
“I want to talk to you Tono, and it will be right now” I demanded.“I am eating”
“I said now” as I pulled on his chair, “and I mean this very moment.”
Tono leaped to his feet, balling his fist ready to attack.
“Meet me by the pool in ten minutes I will have your last pay check”, I turned my back to him
and walked away.
“What?” screamed Tono.
“I said ten minutes by the pool.” And I kept walking. I made him wait, I wanted to enrage him,
get him so blistering mad that he would make stupid mistakes. Get so that he was so consumed
with hurting that he nothing else on his mind. I could see him feverishly pacing the length of the
gigantic pool that lay next to the palapa. Finally after about forty minutes I stepped out of my
third story condo. I slowly walked down the stairs and as I approached Tono I again smiled. I
could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“You’ve been drinking Tono”, he didn’t respond.
“I think you are drunk, and for the constant drinking while on the job and your harassment of
the staff I am letting you go. I have your wages and I expect you off the property of Coral Mar
immediately. Me entiendes Tono?”
“ Conmigo no juegas, Don Roasrio.”
“Esto no es juego Tono, you can’t harass the female staff.” I look straight into his drunken face.
“Those bitches are liars!” he shouted at me.
“No Tono, you are the liar and a drunk and we don’t need you here anymore. I have spoken to
Junior he has approved this action.” He staggers toward me, we are now nose to nose.
“Aga lo que le da su piche gana, but you will pay”
“Junior is on his way with Memo and the boys. I have called the police and I have talked the
most of the staff and they support and they want you gone. Me entiendes Tono”
“You will pay for this, te juro you will pay”, He raised his right hand and pointed shaking finger
in my face.
“Do what you must but I want you off this property immediately”, I turned and walked toward
the palapa.
As I expected the second I turned he was on me. He had taken the bait, Tono in his enraged
state grabbed me in a drunken bear hug. I had him exactly where I wanted him, near the pool. I
knew that if I could get us into the water he was a dead man. Tono was like a wild animal,
howling and cursing as he tried to knock me down. I had to keep my feet I could not fall. I
staggered, dragging Tono closer to toward the pool. As his hand reached my neck our bodies
tumbled awkwardly into the water.
The second we hit the water, Tono released the death grip that he had around my neck. I kicked
away his panic stricken body and turn to face him. I Kicked him in the gut and ripping his hands
away from my body, I was now free. I caught a glimpse of the terror in Tono face as he tried in
panic to climb an imaginary ladder of water as he sank deeper in the water. I swam quickly
behind and wrapped my legs and arms around his torso and neck, we continued our deadly
descent to the bottom of the pool. As he fought me I could feel his body go limp as he flayed
and grabbed once last time in the water; it was the water dance of a dead man. As we reached
the bottom of the pool I could feel his body go completely limp, he was not fighting any longer.
I let go of him. The truth is I did not want to kill Tono, but I knew that if he lived he would try to
kill me. It was him or me. He floated face down to the top of the pool. I dragged him to the
edge and with the help of Fatima and Lola I pulled Tono out of the pool. My trusted security
guard and his son came to assist me. No one said word.
“Don Roario we will take it from here” Not another work was spoken, ever. The two loyal men
dragged Tono’s body toward the lagoon. The next day it was reported that Tona body had
drifted onto the banks of the 18th hole of the nearby golf course, where a half drunken and
horrified tourist spotted the body and reported it to the staff. The police came around and
question some of the staff, they questioned Fatima and me. No one ever said a word. The truth
is Tono had many enemies including the police. So the investigation died out quickly, I thought
it was over, I had forgotten about Salim, and he was not please with the circumstances and
death of Tono. Salim was omnipotent, and he had just lost one his most trusted informant.
Salim never spoke to me directly about the death of Tono, but word got back that he was
seething with anger toward me.
“Tenga cuidado, don Rosario, Salim can be evil and vindictive” Lola advised. “Keep away from
him”.
“Lola I can’t stay away, I have to work with him on all of the construction projects. No I can’t
run from him”
“Then he will hurt” Lola walked away.
A few week later a shipment of small refrigerators were being shipped from Miami to the
Cancun airport. I was directed by Salim that I, and no one else, had to pick up the shipment.
“I have waited for the refrigerators for more than a few months, it is important that customs let
them go through. Don’t send one of your changitos. I want you to handle this yourself” Ordered
Salim.
“Muy bien, I pick them up myself, they arrive tomorrow.” With that I walked out of his office
and waited the next day to come.
I woke up early the following day, gas up the Combi and headed toward the airport. As thing
would turn out I never made it to the airport, half way there my van died out mysteriously, I
couldn’t get it to start. I got a ride back to Coral Mar and had one of my changitos to go the
airport in a borrowed truck. When Joaquin had not gotten back by night fall I began to worry. I
still could not travel as my van was at the mechanics, so I waited. It was not until the next
morning that I learned of Joaquin fate. He had been arrested by customs agents; the small
refrigerators were full of cocaine. I took a taxi to the jail where Joaquin was being held and he
told me that it was a set up.
“The cocaine belonged to Salim, the custom guys just wanted you. When you didn’t show up
they got pissed off and arrest me. They wanted me to call get you over here and arrest you too.
I told them to fuck themselves, that when they roughed me a bit”
“Ahi, Joaquin I am so sorry. What can I do? How can I get you out of jail? Who do I deal with?
Who do I pay off?”
“No don Rosario, I am here until Salim orders my release, short of that I better make myself
comfortable in this shithole. Let my wife know where I am, OK!
“Of course Joaquin and I am going right to Salim. We have to make this right, if he’s got bronco
with me then we have to settle this today.”
“Senor let it go, he will have you killed. That is what one of the puercos told me, you were being
set up by Salim. You were going to be arrested and then disappeared. Pay back, me entiende?”
Joaquin smile pathetically at me a walked to the darkened corner of the cell he was in, “Just let
my wife know where I am, please”.
“Claro, I will go to here immediately and we will get you out.’ I replied.
I had no intention of first going to Joaquin’s wife, what would that accomplish. I would only
frighten the woman. No first I had to go see Salim, even if it cost me my life. Besides I had
nowhere to go, I still had to think about Fatima. They would go after her to get to me. So I
instructed the taxi to take me to Salim’s office. He was out I was told. So I waited.
I could see that one of Salim’s henchmen was making what appeared to be frantic and wild
gestures with his hands as he spoke on the phone. Something was agitating this man
tremendously, before I figured what was going on, Salim walked down the corridor of the huge
building toward me.
“Salim” I greeted him. ”they have Joaquin in jail on some phony charges. Only you can get him
out.”
“He is out already, I have given the order.” He turned to me, “and you my lucky friend have
been spared by the gods. I will give you 24 hours to get out of Cancun. You have caused enough
damage to me. 24 hours, not one minute more, do you understand?” He turns his back on me
and walked away.
“Muy bien”, is all that I could say.
“If you are here one minute after the 24 hours that I have given you to clear out of Mexico,
your wife will find you with the alligators in Bojorquez.” He disappeared into the cavernous
building.
Fatima and I collect all of our money that we had stashed in the condo and jumped in the van
and head to Merida. No need to gather anything else. There was nothing here that we wanted
to take with us except our lives. And the lives of those yet unborn miracle children that God
would bless us with soon.
My mother and father always proclaimed that God moves in mysterious way, this was a fatal
resignation but a pristine and exacting faith in their spiritual compass that lead them to heaven.
And so like every mother son before me I had to come to that epiphany that if you open your
heart to love, the mind and all the other senses will surely follow.
And that bring me to my own divine journey into fatherhood. Before
we could say thank you Lord our children had grown into young adulthood. Last week was my
son Jesus’s 18th birthday. Today, he is a man in the eyes of society, and will be blessed or
cursed
with all the afforded responsibilities and benefits that are bestowed upon adults of this
country. In fact, my son has been an “hombrecito” for as long as I can remember. He has
always, it seems, demonstrated, extraordinary maturity, intelligence, integrity and kindness to
everyone he meets. As an athlete, in soccer or basketball, he was always the
leader. He was not the best athlete on the field, but because of his intelligence, work ethic and
love of the game and his teammates, all responded to Jesus’s leadership. He worked tirelessly
to create teamwork, so that all of his teammates would participate to their fullest potential in
the game. In the classroom, Jesus has always excelled. As a senior at Ventura High School, he
has a 4.0-plus cumulative grade-point average and has more than 20 units of college credits. He
is a member of Who’s Who Among American High School Students, National Honor Roll Society,
and The Society of High School
Scholars, California Scholarship Federation. Jesus has participated in a variety of youth
leadership conferences all over the county. All of these activities are a precursor to a career in
serving his community. In middle school, Jesus decided to explore classical music, and was
convinced by his music teacher that he had the temperament, work ethic and aptitude to take
on one of the most difficult instruments in the orchestra — the oboe. Today, Jesus is
considered one of the best high school oboists in the state.
In October, our son was struck down with a horrific disease. Jesus was diagnosed with multiple
sclerosis. By the end of October, the MS had completely ravaged my son. He was confined to a
wheelchair. The prognosis was grim, and so began Jesus’s medical odyssey into the unknown.
With God, family and friends, “nuestro hombrecito,” took on
the illness as his greatest challenge. The power of love has made our son a courageous man.
Multiple sclerosis is a diabolical mystery that attacks the central nervous system. A
typical side effect of MS is extreme fatigue, weakening of limbs, migraine-like headaches and
numerous other physical and psychological effects, and these symptoms and attacks can
manifest at any time. Our son has suffered mightily in the past six months, but each day, this
courageous young man wakes up with the strength and fortitude that only love can create and
sustain, which he will use to defeat this disease. One day he will! A disease like MS affects the
entire family. Our life as we knew it has been altered irrevocably and forever. The entire family
will have to work as a team to fight this disease. It may be a medical battle for the rest of
Jesus’s life. The family is committed to this lifetime of support, advocacy and love for our son.
We were always a close and
united family; Jesus’s illness has brought us closer; our love for family grows deeper by the day.
Many young men and women will turn 18 this week in Ventura County, and some of these
adults will do battle with their problems, illnesses and pains — both physical and
psychological. For far too many of our county’s youth, their struggle will be solitary. Trusting no
one, they will be full of fear; their only defense against an indifferent and cruel world will be
violence and rage. The arrival into adulthood for many of our sons and daughters is
meaningless and cruel. Far too many lack even the
rudiments of socialization into the greater society, which, of course, requires an individual
sense of worth, pride, discipline and service — foreign attributes for this abused, troubled,
vulnerable and isolated population of young adults. Without love, respect and a sense of
meaning and purpose for their world and the greater community, many of these young adults
will develop anti-social pathologies, attitudes and
behaviors that serve for their individual survival and little else. Sooner or later, strapped with
psychological monsters, fed by drugs, alcohol, deviant peer modeling and a hatred and rage
that know no limit, they will come home to create harm, destruction and pain in neighborhoods
throughout this county. Sociologists, parents and good common sense tell us that 18 years of
“good or bad” living is more than sufficient time to shape and mold us into whom we will be as
adults. A child’s life can be full of support, guidance, tenderness, respect and unconditional
love; and a kid like Aaron has a real chance to blossom into a manifestation of God’s love here
on Earth. Or an indifferent society — and make no mistake, it is society’s doing — can fill a kid’s
life with pain, hate,
abandonment, violence and fear. And society will ensure that these troubled souls will attack
the world precisely as we have programmed them to — full of rage and madness that will push
them to lash out at everyone and everything in society that created them.
We have worked with thousands of these damaged, at-risk young adults over the past decade,
and they are perpetually at our doorstep, begging, pleading and acting out for attention,
guidance and love. What should we do? The question before us as a just society is how do we
deal with these troubled souls? Who will play God with these lost
and often-violent sons and daughters? What manifestation of God will we invoke? Will it be the
God of mercy, unconditional love and redemption for all? Or will it be the
God of vengeance, judgment — an unforgiving, eye-for-an-eye God? I dare say that for today,
for the sake of expediency, we have called on the latter God to guide us in dealing with our
most troubled and at-risk youth. It has been a cruel and
unwise choice. We are failing miserably and sending far too many of our young people to jail,
isolating them to the farthest margins of society, making them permanent outcasts of an evergrowing underclass. Or we can commit as a society to long-term rehabilitative and restorative
community programs that are guided by love, mercy
and redemption.
At the onset of my son’s illness the family was in full blown panic 24/7, there was not a second
that our mind and soul was not tortured by a million thoughts, visions and scenarios about the
end of the world as we knew it. So we prayed and prayed, we had nothing else. We went to
therapy early on hoping that a therapist could help, they over course made thing worse. The
truth is we were in deep denial, we made things worse, because we had lost our faith. What I
do remember from one of our first session was hearing a female therapist tell us straight out
that our son’s catastrophic illness would destroy and breakup our home. What she did not tell
us was that she was a high priced bull shitter, that was looking for a dramatic sound bite at our
expense. What our son’s illness has taught us over the past ten years is that love is the most
powerful force in the universe, and the key to unlocking that liberating power is unconditional
faith.
Very early in my life I knew that I would be a worker/hustler in my community, it took over 50
years of work to become a descent servant. As my jefitos would remind me constantly life is a
mystery. Late in my father’s life before dementia got a hold of his brain he would tell me. “Mi
hijo nothing suprises me”, whether it was my brother’s horrific drinking, the racist that we
encounter as dirt poor immigrants in the in the fifties in this country, the death of my brother
or his grandchilds, the fucking life of backbreaking toil nonstop toda la pinche vida , and you
know what loco, the man never bitched or flinched not once. So I have been working
oftentimes against myself to honor the legacy of my jefito and then I came to true calling in
helping out of luck and troubled souls in the community try to find themselves, much like I have
been trying to do all my life. After many failed attempts the KEYS to empower youth In Oxnard
was created and the core principle that we adhere to is that unconditional love can provide the
miracle of redemption to anyone. Of course, along with love, you must have a strong long term
empowerment program. In 10 to 15 weeks, the KEYS program
provides young adults with enrollment in a community college (with full support and guidance
of college staff), career training, a job, academic support and remediation, arts and cultural
appreciation, hands-on art projects and activities, community improvement projects,
researched, purposeful and progressive activism — all with a capable and caring, broad-based
mentoring network and the support of respected leaders
of the community. The KEYS program has far more successes than failures with
the “untouchables” who no one wants to work with. But even when a young adult backslides,
gets in trouble, or drops out of our program, he or she is not deemed a failure. We have no
failures in the KEYS program, “only detours on our new road
to redemption.”
The young adult who took the temporary detour, once he/she is back on track, is immediately
readmitted when he/she agrees to respect the principal re-entry rule of the house, which is,
“Welcome back to your new life of love, respect, and service to your community. Work hard to
improve your community.” For the unconvinced and doubtful, we invite you to volunteer as
adult mentors in our next KEYS program, which will begin
April 5. Give us your time, your energy, your expertise and as much love as you can heap on
these young adults and I promise you will witness miracles of transformation right before your
eyes. This is not rocket science. Give a kid hate, he will hate.
Give her/him love and she’ll give love. The problem, as we see it, is that our society has acute
attention deficit disorders and has lost its common sense. We want the quick,
fast and easiest fix. We forget that love, kindness, caring, respect are not so much actions as
they are learned and ingrained attitudes, which, of course, take many years to
inculcate into individuals, and much longer into the greater society. So, we can continue our
tough-on-crime draconian policies and continue to send our sons and daughters to jail, and we
have solved nothing. Or we can commit long term, as a society, to
turn penitentiaries into universities, juvenile jails into art and cultural centers, “three strikes”
into “three home runs,” guns into paintbrushes, hate into love, violence into
peace, and I assure you that kids like my son Jesus will populate this great nation and we will
create a society that will be quite capable of solving its problems through love
and peaceful resolution.
This is my way of paying it forward. I truly believe in that the universe is this breathing giant
heart of energy, the soul if you will, in what appears to be meticulous infinite physics colliding
with order and chaos to create all things. It is just happenstance that we human are not a
meteor, water on Mars, or a Black hole, a cockroach perhaps in our next lifetime.
Sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize, the journey we undertake, is not of our own
doing, but rather it is because of celestial intervention maybe just inexplicable happenstance.
Nonetheless, there we are on a strange road, with both good and bad stretches, lots of pot
holes, dangerous curves and many blind turns. The wise traveler understands early on that this
is a preordained journey, to heaven or to hell, sometimes it seems to be the same destination.
So it was for my son that somewhere in a dark hole of the universe his journey was mapped
out. It would be an arduous and lonely journey that few of us could undertake, and even fewer
of us could masterful navigate. So masterful has my son cosmic and earthly navigation been
that yesterday’s bleak trek has now become a spiritual calling of the highest order. Jesus , my
son has developed in his arduous trek the purest essence of God; this journey has tempered
and chiseled him into the spiritual being that he is today. On this journey Jesus has touched
everyone, family, friends and strangers in such a kind and spiritual way, that all of us that know
and love him are made to feel and be better persons for our experiences with him. This is the
gift that God has given to him, the courageous traveler, who has now become the wise and
noble young prophet.
You are 25 years young my son, and no father could ever be more blessed and honored to a
have a son like you, and you know Jesus that has always been so.
As a baby you radiated happiness and love for everyone. As a pre-school child you were already
a considerate and kind gentleman (toddler), who eagerly shared his toys, school supplies and
snacks with your fellow students. You were already teaching your toddler friends to play, share
and work together. You were born to be a leader. You understood and practiced at the earliest
of age the Godly act of unconditional love and service; and your small world radiated back love,
respect and admiration.
You moved on to elementary school and in the class room and the playground, I remember that
you were always the “child” teacher, guiding, encouraging, teaching, and helping out your
fellow students to be the best they could be. Both the kids and the teachers loved and admired
you.
You moved on to junior high, already a scholar and leader in a world of adolescent angst. For
the first time you were exposed full blown to the idiosyncrasies and the predilections of both,
good and bad, children and adults. Here again your clam, assured, intelligent and loving
disposition and deeds provided direction, guidance and example to other junior school friends
and acquaintances. In fact it was during this period, as I recall that some kids came to respect
you in a way that I have never witnessed, then and now. This grouping of friend would become
your special companions of today.
It was somewhere between junior high and high school that for so many of us the journey
becomes, tricky, complicated, difficult and at time painful to travel, and so it was for you my
son. For many of us that period, the end of innocence, evaporates at warp speed; for you it was
wrap speed multiplied by infinity. Remember always, son, that in the full fury and destruction
of the storm that it was you that keep us anchored to hope, love and a better day. Without
your love and spirit, I don’t know what would have become of us, and all the while you bore the
entire weight of our pain. Aaron, fully understand how courageous and Godly that is, I will
never forget your valor, courage and love. I am so blessed to be your father!
When you were accepted in Cal it was the proudest day of my life, when you decided to go to
Berkeley I was even more proud of my most courageous Golden Bear, no one deserved this
more than you. The road got rough, again and again. Despite the treacherous stretches of time,
you over came every obstacle place in front of you, you willed your mind and body to succeed.
My beautiful golden son you have carved out a courageous and bold legacy at Cal. You grew as
a bold, articulate intellectual; your empathetic heart and spirit grew as well. You finished your
university career at UCSB, a marvelous testament to your spirit of perseverance. Albert Einstein
was quoted as saying that perseverance is the most important of human attributes. It is what
gets humans from earthly profanity to the bliss of the sacred mind. You are now in a sacred
place my dear son, a sacred place of your own making. A holy place that you have captained
and navigated on this long and winding road called life.
Today pullover stop your for a infinite moment your journey; get off the road and bask in the
golden glory of your life and the love that you have share with us your family and friends. Give
thanks to God because momentarily we will be back on the road, and you know what mi hijo, I
know there will be many rainbows guiding your journey in the days to come. This is the journey
that we all take as we traverse the universe searching for answers to the mysteries of life. We
are like shooting stars, all of us, he for a celestial second and then gone to illuminate so other
corner of the vast universe following the heart beat of God into infinity and back. Some of us
however are suck into a celestial black hole of hatred and pain, a power second only to God’s
love, and so it was for this lost soul.
My name is Alma Rebelde and I have lived as a modern day slave for the greater part of my life.
I have always lived in numbing catatonic fear. My life has been so dark and blurred with terror
that I don’t remember any of the many painful events that I have endured in color; everything
that I recall was in the bleakest shades of grey and black. Even the blood and filth that ran
freely and often from my young body was the color of mud. I don’t recall ever looking up a sun
filled sky and seeing a brilliant ball of gold, to me the sun was always in eternal eclipse, it
blocked the warmth of the sun’s rays on my delicate and tortured body. What I do recall was
frigid darkness, sometimes I thought I would see a shred of dim brown light and I would make a
mad dash toward what I prayed would be my freedom, always I ran into black walls that would
swallow me up. I was born to a cruel and sadistic mother, who abandoned me at birth. I never
knew my father; I believe that I was conceived by my whore mother’s drunken and careless
encounter with a faceless, nameless trick.
One day bored she was gone in to the night never to return. She left me in the care of an
equally sadistic grandmother, who threw me to her three grown sons when I was just three
years old. These animals would rape and torture me continuously until I was seven years of age.
The rapes and the torture became more perverse and sever with each passing months, my
screams and wails were silenced with beating administered by my uncles as they raped me; and
if that wasn’t enough I would get beaten savagely by grandmother and admonished to tell no
one. My screams stopped. My body was in continuous shock from the constant assaults. These
rabid dogs literally beat my voice from my body; it ran away with my soul. Even when the
torture was protracted and bloody I would not scream.
I was born in the small village of Los Perdidos in the state of Michuacan. It was an extremely
poor, God forsaken and isolated village. Many of the young men had long ago deserted the
village; there were no jobs, no money, no sun, and no hope in the past, the present or the
future. So the men got drunk. There was little else to do and so they remained drank all day
and night long. My uncles were drunk all of the time. This is what I remember of my life in that
village of the damned, men drinking all the time, getting drunk and then fighting with one
another and then turning their sadistic attention to the rape and torture of their daughters and
wives.
I don’t know if the entire adult male population of that village was complicate in the rape and
the torture of the woman, but my small mind immediately discerned, that the entire village did
nothing to stop the raping of the women of the village. Never not once did an adult intercede
on my defenseless behalf to rescue me from those monsters.
Everybody in that village knew what was going on and no did anything about it. Children, young
woman and wives learned that it was their miserable fate; suffer in silence the torture with
stoic resignation. There was no point in trying to fight it or change it; their lives, my life would
be full of rape, beating and torture. The women prayed to a God of futility and resignation and
the men act out their atrocities in the name of Satan.
At the age of seven my estranged and long lost mother show up at my house and announced to
my grandmother that she would be taking me away from this hell and taking me to a place she
call El Norte. The monster arrived with a new man she called him her husband. Within the week
they had smuggled my younger brother and me into California.
Immediately the raping began, my mother would get lost most of the day, leaving me alone
with my “stepfather” and he would rape me. In the beginning I would fight him but I never
screamed. I figured in my tortured young mind that just like in my village, in this strange and
cold house, no one would help, so I didn’t scream. My stepfather soon introduced alcohol into
his daily rapes and assaults. In the beginning he gave me beer, telling me that it would make me
relax and that I would have a good time with him.
I needed little persuasion to drink and quickly graduated to hard alcohol. I eagerly consumed
all the beers and tequila that he provided for me. By the age of ten I was drinking almost on a
daily basis with the man, in perverse and sick way I decided to stop fighting and gave into him.
The only time he got a fight out of me was when I was sober. This was our sick deal he would
get enough alcohol and get me drunk, he got to rape me; we both got what we wanted. In the
beginning the alcohol seemed like heavenly sent nectar; I would get drunk, pass out and feel
nothing, the gods had finally intervened. It seems unfathomable that a small female child can
come to expect that rape; beatings and torture were cruel but inevitable conditions of a girl’s
and woman’s life. I had no control over the men who raped me and as far as I could discern no
one, absolutely no one care what happened to me. Very early on in my life I figured that my
only purpose in this life was to stay alive no matter what I had to do or what I had to endure.
Eventually I was acutely addicted to alcohol, so along with the rapes, torture and beating I now
had the additional horror of being a pathetic and defenseless drunk and I had yet to reach my
eleventh birthday.
Just like my grandmother, my mother delivered me to her rapists who turned out to be all the
men in her life. She knew that my stepfather, my uncles and any man she brought the house
was raping me; For the rest of the time that I would live with here she would throw me to any
man that came into here life. It was about this time in life that I came to realize that the two
women in my life that were suppose to shelter and protect me were in fact the two monsters
that were responsible for handing me over to men so that they could raping and torture me.
This realization did nothing for my safety or sanity, so I drank as much as often as I could, I was
now living my conscience hours in a drunk stupor attempting to kill myself and all the horrific
memories that were driving me mad.
In one of these drunken hazes my mother drove me to a whorehouse, she cut a deal with the
owner of the bar, and before the end of the night I was working as a child prostitute in the most
notorious bar in Oxnard. My diabolical mother decided that she would make sell me, the
worthless and rotting piece of meat that I was, to her own pimp and would turn torture and
rape of her daughter into a cash enterprise. So here we were mother and daughter working for
the most sadistic pimp in town.
At the tender age of eleven they were selling my body to hundreds of men, I was a drunken
whore and I had absolutely no idea of how I could get out of this nightmare. In fact in those
days I was already a full blown slave to my mother who knew how to administer just the right
diabolical combinations of beating, alcohol and attacks by the many men that she had under
her sick control. My mother was, put simply, my sadistic master and I was her drunken slave.
My life as a child prostitute was uniquely pathetic and surreal. My pimp sold me to the highest
sickest tricks. They wanted young freaks that were totally defenseless. In these shit holes I
learned that there were many child prostitutes being sold throughout the bars in Oxnard. We
were all child slaves, ignorant, tortured and terrified living only to serve our pimp and our
addictions. This was our life; there was no other option for us; except for an occasional and
mysterious death. So we silently prayed that one day our lord would extinguish our lives and
takes us to another world.
A world, we beg God that would be without men, rape and pain. But in the mean time we were
all intent on keeping our pimps happy and breath in our lungs, so we worked. In my case I had
two pimps, my mother and the master pimp, who control most of the prostitution in the bars
that I worked in throughout Oxnard. My mother and my pimp took all of the money I made. I
never saw any of the money that I made. It did not matter at that time; I was too drunk to
control my money. All I cared about was getting my tequila so that I could maintain my
constant intoxicated I don’t give a fucked up state. At this point in my life all I fixated on was my
alcohol, all I wanted was to stay drunk, and for this condition I was willing to do anything for
and to men, and so I did.
In bars prostitutes learn to be vicious. You learn to strike first, strike often and ask question
after you have defeated your enemies and greedy whores. A soft weak whore is a worthless
starving piece of rotting flesh, dying a slow coward’s death. In the bars Alma Rebelde developed
the reputation of being the hardest and most vicious whore in the local bars, I took more
broken beer bottles to the head that I can remember, In fact the brain damage that I have
today is directly attributable to the savage trauma that my head suffered during those drunk
days in the whore houses of Oxnard.
As much as I survived a life of terror and torture and always had death nipping at my heels, I
wanted to live. In the depths of my heart I search for a meaning to my life. As much as search I
could find no reason to live and then one glorious day my search stopped and I found my
meaning to life in Oxnard. I started running around with some homies from Colonia, soon there
after I was jumped into the gang. I had just turned thirteen years of age, a seasoned whore who
could drink, fuck and fight any homie into a comatose stupor.
So when the time came to getting jumped into the gang by getting my ass kick, I welcomed the
punk ass love taps that would be leveled on my frail body by my homies. As they kicked my ass I
swear that I was in heaven, a euphoria came over me, I was sure that I had found my meaning
to my life. I took on the name of Alma Rebelde. It was the name that the homies anointed me
with, it was my badge of honor. They had honored me with this name because I wouldn’t take
shit from anyone; friend or foe, cross me and you had hell to pay.
Soon I found out that life in a gang is a crazy macabre insane asylum inhabited by deranged and
dysfunctional chemically fueled lost and heartless souls that respond only to violence, but in
the beginning I loved this new life. I had homies that would watch out for me; treat me as an
equal and not just a whore. I had everything that I needed, all the alcohol that I could consume,
all the uncomplicated sex with scrubs that I wanted, total protect from any fool that would
mess with me, and free crash pads that I could black out in, with the only fears that I would
have sex like a lobotomized bitch in heat with and a pack of wild dogs. Sex with an unknown
number of sex partners, it was a trade off that was too good to pass up, and over the years I
pass up very few of these housing accommodations and fucking opportunities.
After only a few month of my life in a gang came the real drama and the realization that I was
no better off in the gang, than at the bars. The violence in a bar is somewhat predictably, for a
whore it comes from a pimp that been short changed by a whore or in a fight with a fellow
whore who is trying to take one of your tricks. In gang life you quickly come to understand that
violence comes at you at anytime, from friend or enemy at any time of the day. Guns and
knives are everywhere and in a drunken rage your closest homie will pull out a gun or a knife
and extinguish your life in one insane instantaneous moment.
In the world of gangs you trust no one; nonetheless, you need to have your back protected, so
you create a false alliance or two. Perhaps you drag an unsuspecting and sexually inexperienced
fool into homie love and you drag him around by his genitalia where ever you want him to go.
So this silly fool fell in love with me and I had the badly needed protection I needed to keep the
dogs off of me. This homie love had many downsides and they generally all begin when your
boy starts drinking, and then he can become your worst nightmare. In a drunken rage your man
can wage war on you and not one of his homies will step in to help you. You are his meat, his
bitch, his punching bag, his alone, and no one will breach that standing rule.
The ultimate sacrifice you make to your man is that when he calls for a mission into enemy
territory, you as his hyna must jump. You don’t have a choice, you go and you keep your mouth,
and if the mission requires hurting or killing your enemy, so be it. You punk out and you die, so
you waste a fool. It was on one of these drunk and drug induced nights that my man demand
payback for an earlier killing of his closest homie. No questions, no plans, no pussies, you jump
in the ride and you drink up all the courage that you can possibly steal and drink before you
drive into enemy territory.
The yesca and the alcohol kick in and soon the fear is gone and revenge is what drives the
deranged collective missile of hatred. In an instant my man makes a suicidal mistake. He jumps
out of the car and is met immediately with a barrage of bullets. He falls to the ground and I
know that instant that my life was over, I was dead. I did the only thing that Alma Rebelde could
do; I jumped out of the car and shouted to the enemy to kill me as I ran to my fatally wounded
man. At the age of sixteen I knew that I had to die that night along side of my man. Incredibly
the shooting stopped, even the enemy has a code of honor, and you do not blast an unarmed
hyna that makes a suicidal dash to her fallen warrior. I screamed at the hidden enemy to shot
me, to kill me you, but those puto only laughed. I was met with the only thing worse than
death, living in a purgatory filled with shame. I became an instant outcast.
By the time the word got to the hood that my man had been killed I was branded a puta snake
that had pushed my man to his death. My life in the gang was over, if I stayed I was free meat
to any and all of the homies, rotting flesh, a ho’ to get a homies nut busted, nothing more. This
was my pertinence; I had to open myself up to every homie that want my contaminated flesh
and I returned to the bars.
I got lost for years in a drunken whoring stupor in all of the dingy whore bars in Oxnard. I want
to forget the guilt and pain that I experienced that suicidal night. So I did not have the courage
to be sober for even a minute. So I maintained a perpetual drunken stupor that stretched over
years. I don’t remember much from those years. My drunkenness was a defense mechanism,
of course, your mind just short circuits painful information and attempts to wiping out all of the
sordid and pathetic details of a forsaken and lost soul. I was a human pin cushion in those lost
day, men stuck every imaginable body part into me. When they were finished raping me, they
would then begin torturing me with, guns, knives and mechanical tools.
As much as I provoked and dare men to kill they couldn’t. I came to the conclusion that I would
not die at the hands of my rapist and torturers, but rather my death would come in a
cataclysmic rapture that would liberate me forever.
Since men could not kill me, I awaited the fury of my forsaken God to lay me to eternal rest.
Then one day I stumbled filthy drunken into a sort of eclectic heaven on earth, I walked into the
Café on A. My God, is one tough motherfucker, he has made nothing easy on me. Life has
always been one eternal mystery, most if not all my answers have come at the end of a man’s
fist or penis, pathetic revelations, but that has been my life up until I met my guardian angel.
By this time in my life I trusted no one , not even a messenger from heaven, I’d figured this
angel was on his way to nowhere, so I would fuck him and back stab him in the same moment
of treachery and I’d dispatch him to hell. He had sent a weak punk ass angel and I was now the
chingona black widow and I was devouring unsuspecting male at an unprecedented rate, even
alarming for me, so how could this punk stand up to my rage.
I walked up to this angel, he walked toward me and he stretched out his hands in a gesture of
love. I grabbed his hands and I felt the electric pulse of bliss, nothingness and peace emanate
from his hands. He immediately open and exposed his soul to me. At this point in my life I had
know two constants, brutal pain and the euphoria of alcohol. Love, surrender and peace were
impossible concepts for me.
Love and hate, like blood and oil are a dysfunctional mix, yet I could feel something gnawing at
my heart. I was in full blown panic, so I let loose all of the fury and hatred that I could level on
this man. I returned to what I do best, treachery; and so I slipped the angel between my legs
and slowly began sucking the life out of him. But as I was sucking life from him he was injecting
me with love. He had the antidote for my poison and it was unconditional love. I was like a wolf
caught in one of those deadly steel traps that snapped shut around my heart, and he would not
let go. Nonetheless, I tried my extensive sick repertoire of dirty tricks to bring him down to my
sewer.
For a while I had him tripping real hard, walking on eggs, and he would occasionally lose
control, but he never stopped loving me, he never gave up on me. He showed me once and
always that love is nothing without deeds, “con hechos se cultiva el amor”.
So this is what this angel had done for me for over ten years, I would pull him into danger and
he would pull me back. I don’t know how many times I lured him into an ambush and danger,
he never back off, he was always there for me. I could not kill him, but to my shame I never
stopped trying. Then the mighty power of love overcame me and I realized that just like men
could not kill me I could not kill this angel and I surrendered.
At the end of the tenth year of war that I had waged on this man, I came out with a rapturous
victory, a miracle, through the power of love for the first time. On December 26, 2006, I was
reunited with my four year old son who had been stolen from me by my sadistic mother. He
had been in the clutches of this devil for over a year. In the lowest depth of my misery and
depression I thought that I would never see my son again.
But then it happened, a miracle just like the angel had prophesied. Love will never abandon
you, you must defeat your fear and guilt, and he told me over and over through the years. God
had sent me an angel of flesh and bones, blood and guts, a man of such tenderness and love
that I went from a killer of souls to a mercenary for love. The angel showed me that fear would
not scare him off and that love conquers all.
There were many time, too many to recount that I lied and manipulated him and set him up. He
walked into the jaws of the dragon and came out unscathed; he was protected by sacred
decree. He would approach me and question why I had betrayed him? I bowed my head and
would do it again and again. His response to my treachery was always, don’t betray me again,
and of course I would.
And so this treacherous drama played out for over ten years, and then the only event that could
stop me cold in my pathetic steps occurred. My son was stolen from me by Satan herself. This is
when God and the angel entered into my heart for the first time. My God turned his back on
me for one second and my son was gone. When God turned back around he asked me “Child
do you get it? Yes I replied, he countered, get to work and lead with love. I stopped battling
and attacking the world and for the first time in my life I focused on the love of my child and the
love for my angel. I looked into the eyes of the angel and I made a silent sacred vow that I
would wage a sacred battle against Satan to win back my child.
During the entire one year legal battle I often doubted that I could battle my satanic mother
and win. But I know now, unquestionably, that God’s love is the most powerful force in the
universe and he anoints us with all of his power and love to overcome any and all adversity in
that horrific and protracted legal fight. We must first surrender to love. Today in love’s divine
grace I have been reunited with my precious son. I will dedicate and surrender fully to love. I
will become a gardener of love, planting, nurturing and cultivating love everywhere I am and
with every child of God that I encounter.
I wanted to die a thousand times and then through the power of love I was resurrected and
Magdalena lifted me from the grave. Magdalena’s message that I came to understand was that
through my pain and suffering I could be delivered to another life. A life that I didn’t yet
understand but it was a sacred process that would transform me. This path toward God’s path
would encompass my complete surrender to love. And since I had experience so much
suffering and betrayal at the hands of man it had been impossible to trust any human, even a
man that had shown me unconditional love and support for the previous ten years. The truth is
that I had never paid attention to the lessons of the heart; I was just trying to manipulate the
world and stay alive.
My thoughts, all of my thoughts for the greater part of twenty six years were processed in fear
and total darkness, I had absolutely no point of common normal reference, and I could not
compare good and evil. I lived evil and so my mind was filled only with hatred and guilt. My
guilt, of course, emanated from my childhood rapes, so of course with every subsequent rape
and sexual assaults by men perpetuated against me, I threw my body back to the dog to be
raped and tortured again and again.
My body represented filth to me, and I made every attempt to detach myself from my body, so
I got drunk and stayed drunk for years. If living in a near comatose state was not enough to
shed my filthy disgusting shin, I created situations where men would torture me and inflict a
level of pain that temporarily would make me forget about my guilt and shame. When men
were not around or I was to drunk to stand or walk, I would find tools and homemade torture
devices to inflict torture upon my body. When the blood started flowing I would find a fleeting
release of sorts from the hell that I had come to create. So how could a deranged and lost soul
possibly get out of this nightmare? The truth is I knew that I would never get out of my
predicament; I would be released from my demons
When I died. So I made every effort to end my life. I now understand that my death I so
frantically worked to execute was in fact a symbolic death.
But a slave that is kept in total darkness knows nothing of abstractions and that is when the
hand of God intercedes and he produces a human being that will guide and teach the lost and
belligerent soul the complexities of love, surrender and finding a path toward peace. At this
point in my life I understand that without divine intervention I would still be in some shit hole
selling my body to world. But at precisely the sacred moment he came into my life when I had
been beaten into a soulless shell. I was an empty vessel that could be refilled with the power of
love. I could not have been transformed one second earlier. I just was not ready I still had
enough hatred and loathing that I would not surrender. But the moment I was ready I felt a
rapture that overcame me and all of the hate and sorrow that I had carried all of my life was
lifted
In that moment I knew that I was transformed, and that Alma Rebelde had died and that
Magdalena was now my constant companion and spiritual guide. What I have come to
understand in this new life is that I now have the capacity to feel love and compassion at the
most profound, rapturous and sometimes mysterious levels. But my heart and soul know
exactly what my mind and body is receiving from the universe, and I have no fear.
I now have the capacity to follow the trajectory of the unknown and through love I can now
close the distance and separation from fear and theory to love and actualization in enlightened
speed that I uniquely possess through the power of love and surrender.
A life filled with pain and suffering is ripped violently away from petty emotional vacillation and
self indulgencies such as vanity, conceit and avarice. So when I began my journey toward
surrender and enlightenment I gratefully did not have that baggage. I am not being boastful in
this proclamation, merely reporting what I know to be true in my heart. So my trek was made
simple from blistering hatred to love and surrender, a simple and direct path, but a journey that
took me twenty six years to begin.
My previous twenty six years were full of screams, wails and then there was silence. Now I
know to complete my journey successfully I must speak, I must confess to my angel. I must
reveal all of my life to this man and in the process be cleansed and liberated. I still have yet to
find my full voice, as though someone other than me is speaking. I can’t believe the words and
revelations that spew freely from my mouth. Who is uttering these confessions, not Julie, not
Alma, no it is some else. I have been possessed. There is a deadly toxicity in silence and denial,
the serum for this infection is communication and confession. I had opened up my body to
hundreds of men in my past life, now I would open up my mind and heart to this man for the
first time in my life.
He asked me to talk, to open up, and through this process we would enter a realm that I had
never experienced. At first I was fearful that in revealing my past I would lose him. Instead what
occurred was that I was exorcising my demons, he never judged me but he would not put up
with my lies. When he caught me in a lie he was extremely hard on me, never letting me get
away without helping purge the vile and poison that were my lies.
He always pushed me to go beyond the superfluous and into the specifics of my horrific and
monstrous life. You will expel those monsters, but you must speak, and speak to the truth as
you know it, he has continuously admonished. So we are now in our second year of surrender
therapy, and love continues to grow within me through my process of confessional liberation.
I had woven such a tangled web of lies and deception that it seemed impossible to untangle the
mess. I had always lived by my survival instincts, so I lied. I lied to everyone at anytime about
anything. That was the way I stay alive. Whenever I communicated with a human I lied, or l said
nothing which was a lie nonetheless. At an early ago, the truth is I don’t remember when I
replaced the truth with lies. So when this man came into my life I was a raw blistering abscess
of lies. My entire mind was infected and I had no way of finding a cure. In fact, initially, in the
face of love I lied even more, if that is possible. I knew that he was aware of my lies, but I
figured that the sex would make him hold on for a while, after all that all a black widow has the
smallest window of time to effectively devour her mate. Much as I tried not t hurt him with my
lies and actions I could not control my instinct to destroy him.
I lied about everything to him, about my fidelity to him. What a pathetic fool he was to believe
me. Before the words I’m sorry had come out of my mouth I was fucking another fool, and I did
this for more than ten years, and still he stuck around. Go figure, you know! I told him that he
was the father of my child. He knew that I had fucked a million men, all during the time that I
was making “love” to him. He never denied my outrageous assertion; he promised me that he
would care for the both of us forever. I hated him for his nobility in the face of my lies; it was as
though he was throwing scalding shit on me as I pushed yet another lie in his face. He smiled
and assured me that I would be a good mother. I was not a good mother and he knew it. He
saw what I was a pathological liar.
I guess I tried to be a good mother in the beginning but I didn’t know the first thing about taking
care of a baby. I was consumed with guilt and fear that I would again fail in this endeavor. I
could take care of all men, yet I was incapable of caring for the basic needs of my child. In my
anguish in step in my mother and slowly began robbing me of all control of my child.
Almost overnight I lost total control of my son’s care. I mother with her brutish force and evils
ways quickly relegated me to the role that I knew best, that of servant tramp for the entire
family. She began pushing me out into the streets, with her screams she admonishing that I
had to bring in some serious money for the care of the child. So at that point in my life I had
two choices one betray my angel and demand that he live up to his responsibilities as a man, or
I could return to the street and start tricking fools. I choose the former that way I didn’t have to
get my hands dirty. The angel rolled over like punk; and I start extorting money from him in a
scandalous way.
This sick and deranged imprisonment prove to be more than I could tolerate. I was consumed
once again with guilt and remorse; remorse maybe for the first time in my life. Living in that
torture dungeon was now impossible for me to subject my child to. I had to escape and rescue
myself and my son from this hell, and so I did. In the process of fleeing I left my son in the evil
clutches of my mother. I was separated from him for over a year and every second of that
separation was by far the most difficult tribulation that I had to endure. I would have welcomed
a hundred beating at the hands of my many tormentors to get my son back, but it was not to
be. God had other plans for me.
I had nowhere to go so I turn to the Café again, I asked the angel to let me stay,” for a few days
until could find a permanent place”, I would remain holed up in the Café for close to one year.
It was during this time of almost total isolation that I came to terms with many of my demons. I
decided to remain in self imposed exile form the world that I knew. I wanted to exorcise my
demons. I would kick them cold turkey with the assistance of nothing other than my love for
my kidnapped son and my steadfast angel.
The year long isolation provides me the opportunity to get into my soul. I learned to meditate
and release in the realm of nothingness. It was liberating and in this process I learned to trust
my heart. My heart told me that my guardian angel was in fact the man that I would take as a
loyal and trusted companion
This was the cosmic plan to rescue a tortured soul from the depths of hell. Through an
excruciating slow process of healing and self discovery I was transformed from a sinner to a
saint, from a slave to an emancipator, from a heartless and cold prisoner to woman burning
with love for her son and her man. Of course the job is of redemption for a modern day
Magdalena is never done. I know fully that I have a long way to go. I am the first to admit that I
am a novice to the straight world. I am one of those women that may never travel beyond the
city limits of Oxnard. But in my heart I have traversed the universe and had looked into the
face of God.
Holy redemption is sloppy, I was transformed and I had my son. He would never leave my side
again. I have purged all my toxic family members. I have an excellent job that solidifies my
foundation for my son and me. I have acquired a sense of purpose and meaning to my life, and
it is based on love, surrender and peace. I am now a woman at peace, a wife that surrendered
fully to love, and found that as she looked around that her angel had cut off his wings and had
jumped into the human abyss never to be seen by me ever again. As I was falling the to the
depths of the abyss a newspaper slapped me in the face and even thought it was pitch black
and I was falling a million miles an hour I could read the tragic death story of three souls that
had also fallen into the abyss.
The article written anonymously read as follows, this summer we have witnessed the death
and after effects on our community of three very different human beings, two were young men
in the full flowering of their youth, the other was a man made ancient and decaying from the
sheer pain and force of his guilt and shame. All three are children of God, and truly redemption
and eternal peace will come to all three. What will we as a community do with the lessons they
have left for us, about us, within us; lessons on courage, sacrifice, and humility; lessons on how
we help, love, and embrace our fellow brothers and sisters?
On Thursday, July 6, 2006 we attended the memorial service for David Dorvich, a courageous,
intelligent, loving, highly spiritual and peaceful young man of 24, who had battled with cancer
for the greater part of the proceeding 18 years. For those many friends, family and loved ones
who attended the ceremony was a life altering experience. David’s immense love was present
and every heart in the mass gathering was touched by the holy life and community connecting
power of the celestial spirit that is now David.
In the same week, Walter Medina, age 25 was killed by two Oxnard police officers, in what the
local media characterized as a “violent and deadly gun exchange”. We did not personally know
this young man; what we know about Walter, what was gleamed from the newspaper accounts
was a portrait of an often troubled and sometimes violent young man.
The local obituary page made mention of Medina’s sense of humor, and of being a loving family
member, a man who liked to work with his hands. The portrayal of the young man by the local
media at best provides a glimpse of the dark shadow of the man. Maybe in this young man’s
short life no one really knew him; maybe he did not even know himself. In our work with
troubled youth we have come across hundreds of Edward Medina’s, youthful men and women
whose lives are fueled by rage, fear, hopelessness and a total alienation and disconnection from
the fabric of society.
This is a harrowing isolation that removes these souls from any spiritual connection, away from
the warmth and immense power that only love can generate. Alas, emotion such as love, trust
and compassion are often foreign to these youth. These youth are in extreme moments of self
loathing, hate or despair, the walking dead among us. The pathetically tragic youth who are
killed; the media has come to call those deadly encounters suicides at the hands of cops. Lost
youth desperately courting death, who are unable to cope with life’s many trials and
tribulations.
Walter will be buried and folks will shake their collective heads and lament “What went
wrong?’ In the life and death of Edward most things went wrong; the young brother never had
a chance to bloom spiritually. We pose the following question? Is our community better or
safer with the death of Walter, or will there be countless more troubled souls who will take
Walter’s place and attack the very society that failed and abandoned them?
The sudden death of Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron, from a massive hear attack stunned
the nation, and put an end to the tragic fall from grace for one of the most powerful, corrupt
and ruthless corporate executives in our nation’s history. This man, at the height of his
immense power, had every thing that the material world could bring, yet he was not satisfied,
he wanted more. The more he got the more corrupt he became; greed drove this man to
madness. Somewhere in his quest for untold riches, he forfeited his soul and his spirit.
Connections with the richest and most powerful did not help him find love, peace or happiness.
The tragic life of Lay is emblematic of our country’s priorities, the acquisition of wealth and
material goods at all costs. We believe there is a direct correlation between the lives and
deaths of Walter Medina and Kenneth Lay; it is that we have created an America that is willing
to sacrifice a million Walters because of an almost pathological distortion of society’s priorities,
so that a very few and super rich men, like Lay, can have unfettered access to their material
wealth. The countless millions of Walters who live in vacuums of poverty and pain are the raw
fuel required to feed Lay’s monstrous empire.
In David’s death we cannot help but question the unfairness of the cosmic order of the
universe. David was a child of God, a wonderful son, a loving brother and a courageous teacher
to anyone who came to know him in his short, youthful life, and now he is gone. Or is he? At
the memorial service, David’s loving peaceful presence was felt by all of us. The spirit of David
nestled lovingly and deep within all of our hearts. This sacred energy filled the overflowing
church, turning it into a holy place: this was a transcendental experience that we will never
forget, how can we, if David’s grace touched us all? We are better human beings for having
attended the service, for having been touched by David’s holy presence and we connected with
his love. For many of us who attend the services, David’s death and his life have opened new
doors into our understanding of the meaning of love and spirituality. In the wake of David’s
death, we are made aware of the magnificence of the human spirit. In David short life, he
reminds us all that through love we can all transcend the profane and illuminate and practice
the sacred in every interaction that we have with our fellow brothers and sisters. David’s
sacred light is illuminating today and forever on the souls of Walter Medina and Kenneth Lay.
One day when the souls and spirits of Edward and Lay are soothed and healed, with the help
and love of David and all the loving spirits of the universe, they will come back to earth to carry
on the work of love that David is conducting throughout the universe. According to the Koran,
there is an explanation for our re-centeredness out of this community pain: “Wherever you
turn, there is the face of God.” In the face of God I see my son’s and daughter’s face. But I also
see the faces of a million Walters, David and yes a million Kenneth Lays.
I told Bobby one day, my life and my many my trials and tribulations. He especially like my story
about my short harrowing adventures in Cancun. He didn’t laugh, even though by this time
Bobby was punch drunk and seem to laugh at everything that was wrong in his life. He didn’t
laugh, he was serious.
“I should have gone with you man” he took a long hard drink from his huge bottle of beer and
continued, “ I was defenseless really, not really ever prepared for the fame, the money, all of
the blood sucking and all of the bloodletting that came into my life after I became famous, after
you left.”
“I couldn’t be around Bobby, I told you that from day one. I felt bad for you and Val, and I knew
that Johanna was going to suffer a lot. But I didn’t think that I would have the strength to fight
all of the pussy, drugs, pisto and feria that was circulating around you in those days. So I
jammed.”
“I had no one after you left. Richard was on the run by then, everyone else just wanted a piece
of me.”
“I saw that real clear brother. But by then it was way too late to turn back, you know?”
“I was good at boxing, what else could I do” he questioned his bottle of beer
“One of the best ever, brother. The day that you pummeled Little Red, you could have beaten
anyone, that includes Arguello, Pryor, Olivares, any of those fuckers.”
“Yeah that night I was invincible, Little Red couldn’t touch me.”
“It was a master piece.”
“That was the night, after the Little Red fight and the wild drunken celebration, Val made here
first of many ultimatums. Quit or I will leave you she told me.” She knew that the fight game
would ruin our marriage and kill both of us. She knew, somehow she knew all of this would
happen and it scared the hell out of her.”
“It was rough cut throat business Bobby and there was nobody smart enough to watch out for
you. Joe tried, Val tried, her familia tried, but they were no match for the vultures that circled
around you. That way I got out, I could see what they were doing to you and your family. You
boys said they had it covered so I just got out of your way.”
“I felt like I was a prisoner to those people, sometimes I didn’t know half of the people that
were in my house. Val tried a lot of times to kick them out but they just would not go.”
“Yeah Val called me early on, then she just stop calling. Maybe it was because I always gave her
the same pathetic it is not my business answer. I couldn’t do anything you know that, right
Bobby?”
“Yeah I know Rosario. I never had a chance to tell you how the end came, how Val killed
herself.”
I was startled that Bobby would want to open up the deep wound that he had in his heart
about the circumstance and subsequent death of Val. But Bobby was into his beers and it was a
man giving his old friend his last will and testament. I figure that Bobby didn’t have long to live,
not the way he was drinking, not with the horrific pain that he was carrying in his soul.
“You know Bobby, I have gotten bit and piece from so many sources, the newspapers, some of
the old homies from the Group. I have seen Johanna once or twice over the years and she has
given me some details. So yeah, I have an idea of what happen, why don’t you tell me what
really happened.”
“By the time I fought for the champion ship for the first time against Mercado we were already
on rocky fucked up ground. I was party way too much and I was running around with all kinds of
wild women. Val found out about that and tried to pretend that it did not matter. But of course
I was breaking her heart. She started to do lot of drugs, acid, lot of dope, and who know what
else. I wasn’t around, but Pops would tell me that she would lock herself in her room and would
not come out for days. She was totally depressed and I was not there for her.”
“What about the kids, you had three kids Bobby. What happened?”
“The truth was that I wasn’t there for them. Johanna was basically raised by my mother and
the two boys were raised by Pops and Momma. I was never around, by the time I was out of
boxing completely they were out of my life. I hardly got to know Bobby Jr. before I knew it he
was dead. Val went to pieces after his killing and she blamed his death on me. Yeah, I was the
cause of his death I was never around, he had no male role model, no good anyway”
“Yeah, we got lost as young father, most of us, shit probably all of us in the Group got lost. We
didn’t know what the fuck we were doing back then. I was a horrible father and I abandoned all
of my responsibilities. That is why I travel so much, to get away from the responsibility of being
a father.”
“Well I couldn’t run far, so I ran to drugs, alcohol and women. The vices that all fucked up
boxers run too. And don’t forget all of the leeches and moochers that were all around me that
would not let me breathe. Where could I go?”
“That is when you decided to move to Oroville, right?”
“After the death of Robert, Val threatened to leave me again if we didn’t get out of the valley.
So we moved up north. Thing calmed down a bit, the family gave us the breathing room that
we need. I thought that despite my son’s death that things might get better, but the promoters
would not leave me alone. I was broke again so I had to go back into the game and I repeated
the same fucked up shit that had always got me into trouble. “
“You had gone through all you money?”
“Rosario there is this myth that I went through a couple of million dollars, the truth is that I
never saw but a couple of real good pay day in my entire career. The attorneys, the promoters
and at the end of career my crooked managers stole all of my money. I was always real broke
going into all my fights. I was fight to pay bills, the taxman, and only God know what else. The
game sucked the blood out of me. So when I bought that small farm outside of Oroville I was
really happy, happy as I had been in a long time. So was Val, it was the one and only time I did
something good for Val without thinking of me first.”
“So what happened, what made Val snap?”
“Another woman I met here of all place right in Oroville. I was bar hopping with Ernie and
Junior one weekend and the wild redhead is just following us around to all of the bar. A crazy
white woman that knew more about boxing than anyone that I had ever met was stalking
Bobby. She adored me, and told me she didn’t care if she had to share me with Val. She didn’t
mind. She lied and Val found out about her. A confrontation occurred between Val and this
woman, a fight at a bar. Val had all her family with her that night so apparently the woman got
the beating of her life from Johanna, Rosemary and a few other drunken cousins. Anyway they
all end up in jail and the woman pressed charges against Val. She was looking at jail time when
she killed herself.”
“That I didn’t know. The fight and the legal stuff, this is the first time I have ever heard of this.”
“We kept it real quiet, Val retreated to our ranch and she basically locked herself in her room,
seldom coming out. When she did she was high or drunk. She was completely gone by then.
Rosario as God is my witness I never thought she would take her life.”
“So is it true that she killed herself with a shotgun?”
“No, no it was a small .22 rifle, a rifle that I kept to scare the coyotes away, they were always
close to the house killing our chicken, fucking with the dogs. So every know and then I would
shoot at them and try to scare them off.”
“Where were Pops and the other?”
“By that time Val was left alone a lot at the ranch. She wanted to left alone, she would tell her
parents and Johanna to leave her alone. She wanted to be alone. So they would return to the
Valley and visit just about every weekend. Val killed herself on a Wednesday. Johanna found
Val on a Saturday morning when she arrived at the ranch.”
“Where were you brother?”
“Lost like a coward, running from one drunken bout to another, from one whore to another.
The night of Val death I was partying with that same woman that was going to put Val in jail.
God forgive me for all of the shit that I put that woman through. But you know, I know I will
never be forgiven. Johanna has never completely forgiven me, Val side of the family hates me,
and I fucked up everything and everyone that I loved.”
“God forgives brother”
“Yeah I’m working on that right now as you can see, a couple more forties and I’ll see God just
fine. I ask for forgiveness every night right before I pass out.”
“You got to let go of the booze Bobby, it will kill for sure”
“That is what I am praying for, the sooner the better.” He takes out the last huge beer bottle
from the filthy gym bag.
Before he can take a drink from the bottle, I grab it from Bobby’s hands and hurl it against a
telephone pole. Bobby falls to his knees at the sound of the bottle crashing against the
telephone pole. He kisses the sidewalk and weeps.
“You remember what your mother use to tell you each and every time we went out. Just as we
were getting into your car, you, me and Richard. Do you remember?”
“Yeah I remember Bobby, I remember like it was yesterday. She would tell me if the sky is
falling, mi hijo, just get out of the way!”
“Yeah that is what she uses to tell you, and you know what Rosario, I should have followed her
advice.”
The problem is we don’t follow advise, instead we plunged into the abyss; into the blackness of
total chaos.
In his best selling and seminal book, Chaos, Making A New Science, the brilliant writer James
Gleick writes, ”Where chaos begin, classical science stops, for as long as the world has had
physicists inquiring into the law of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in
the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuation of wildlife populations, in the
oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and
erratic side—these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities”. In the social
sciences chaos is relegated to academic purgatory, only fools like Norm Chomsky, Paulo Freire,
Rudy Acuna, Cornell West, and a hand full of others, attempt to seriously look into the
maelstrom that is social chaos--the erratic side of orthodoxy; the side that Father Boyle calls the
“edge of the periphery” where chaos reigns and has been left intentionally in a black hole of
fear and ignorance by the cowardly status quo.
But that has never deterred the contemporary social science engineers and charlatans of
social order and safety; you know them, the college professor, the cop, the probation officer,
the slick DA, the unscrupulous mayor, the grieving mother or father who has just lost a son or
daughter to violence from proclaiming their expertise. They are all experts at what they think
they know about crime and punishment in a petrified and catatonic world, you add chaos into
the mix and they know nothing. But that has never stopped rabid cops, maniacal politicians, or
mad dog DA from fanning the flames of fear and lies to create a spooked critical mass of often
fabricated statistics and crime trends so they can push their law and order monstrosities upon
the frightened masses.
So at the end of our lives Bobby, Richard and me were the ideal poster children for the cops,
the PO’s and all the institutional maggots that would quarantine, corral and jail us in the name
of safety, sanity and salvation for the community. But of course it was all hypocritical lies, a
coward’s game; we hurt no one but ourselves and those we loved, true Chicanos, twisted and in
pain. We were never able to take the admonishment of my jefita, “Mijo cuando se esta
callendo el ciel movete”. In fact the sky came down crashing on our glorious heads.
THE KEYS LEADERSHIP ACADEMY
Unconditional love
Unconditional love is not so much about how we tolerate and endure
each other, but rather how we welcome and embrace each other, no
matter the circumstances. Unconditional love is about how we
promise ourselves to never under any conditions stop bringing the
flawed and humble truth of who we are to each other.
Much has been said about unconditional love today, in the noise of the
egos it has been badly misconstrued as an extreme form of turning the
other cheek; pathetic advise to anyone who has been abused or
suffers in pain. This exaggerated passivity is quite different from the
unimpeded flow of love that nurtures, strengthens and guides who we
are. In truth unconditional love does not require passive acceptance of
whatever happens in the name of love. Rather in the real spaces of our
daily relationships it means maintaining a commitment that no event,
condition or circumstance will keeps us from bringing all of who we
are to each other with pure unadulterated love.
This is the mission
that guides us. Dr. Debbie de Vries, Armando Vazquez