Chapin City Blues

What follows is a slight rewrite of a class assignment. The assignment was to write a response letter to “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” by Gloria Anzaldúa which can be found in the pages of A Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Because I am a creature of habit, I did deviate from just responding to Gloria’s piece.

Dear Gloria,

I tried writing this letter in parts, hoping that it would sound more like a conversation. There was this urge to stitch your words with those of Cherríe Moraga as there moments in both that opened memories, conversations I had with others and those I overheard. 

I tried writing this in parts, subsections (more like fragments) that were laced together with an intention of making sense in the end. This is normally how I write these blog posts; they are written as stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes they stay a disorganized mess which aligns with the scatter-brain methods of my thinking. Other times, I make an attempt to put order to the chaos. My brain, much like your floor, is lined with fragments—sentences wanting to become paragraphs wanting to become stories. 

Maybe I write because I need the world around me to make sense. Or maybe because if I don’t, I may go mad with the voices that echo throughout my thoughts. 

“White Girl with White Thoughts”

I carried Trayvon Martin in my mind, in my heart, when I began writing an earlier draft of this post. He has been on my mind since reading Cherríe Moraga’s experience on the train:

The train is abruptly stopped. A white man in jeans and a tee shirt breaks into the car I’m in, throws a Black kid up against the door, handcuffs him and carries him away. The train moves on. The day before  a 14-year-old Black boy was shot in the head by a white cop. And, the summer is getting hotter.

“La Jornada: Preface 1981” by Cherríe Moraga, p. xliv

I thought about Trayvon Martin because his death was the first to jolt me out of the stupor I had been living in. Maybe it was maturity finally catching up to me at the age of 28. Maybe it was because Trayvon was only nine days older than my niece. Or maybe it was because when he was killed, I was just a few months shy of becoming a father.

It was two years later that the conversation about Trayvon arose again. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, was gunned down by the white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The protest born from the tragedy gained news coverage with the so-called leftwing media focusing on the few bad actors—the rioting and violence (most of which was perpetrated by the growing police presence). I vented my frustrations to a friend, a white woman who spoke better Spanish than I ever could, a mother of two beautiful, half-Latino boys.

“Why do you even care? You’re not even black.” 

Her words, nine red wasps, stung me. Stung me because how does one correlate empathy with race? She would go through life thinking every small inconvenience was a slight on her, a case of reverse-racism. I thought about the life her two sons would experience and how it would differ from hers based on the color of their skin. She will always be white, while they will always be seen as Mexican. And no amount of her using her whiteness to shield them will ever change that.

“On of the Good Ones”

A conversation overhead in a bookstore. Maybe it happened in the wintertime. Donald J. Trump occupied the white house. Or maybe he was newly elected. Two white men—possibly Winter Texans—stood in the current affairs section discussing which political authors were worth reading. Sean Hannity was on the top of their list, but she wasn’t (they did not even have the decency of calling her by name). 

One of them grabbed a book by Dinesh D’Souza.

“That’s a good book,” his friend said.

“Yeah? But he’s brown.”

“Oh, but he’s one of the good ones.” 

In his bed to run for the 2024 presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy learned that no matter how many cheers he earned for kissing the ring, bending the knee, and regurgitating white supremacist talking points, he would still not be granted a seat at the table. Iowan Republican voters expressed caution about supporting or voting for him. Because of his brown skin, his hard-to-pronounce and foreign sounding name, some Iowan voters believed (perhaps feared) that he was Muslim. 

He was one of the good ones until he was no longer useful. 

There is a growing number of queer conservative content creators (the majority of them anti-trans and white) pushing bigoted talking points on social media platforms. Because of them I learned about Ernst Röhm, a high-ranking gay Nazi who had a close relationship with Adolf Hitler (possibly not in the way you’re thinking. Possibly.). Hyper-masculinity was praised within Nazi Germany; Hitler even promised to rid the country of homosexuals, using anti-Semetic reasoning to justify the purge of both groups. But not Röhm, with his war-scarred face. He oozed hyper-masculinity. He carried out atrocities in the name of the Führer. But it was not enough to save him. 

In the end, after all he had done for the Third Reich, Hitler called for Röhm’s death.

He was one of the good ones until he was no longer useful. 

“What Scares Me; What Brings Me Hope”

“You carry the world on your shoulders,” a friend once wrote to me. She was talking about the worried and fears I had in my twenties. I was single, suicidal. The feeling of Aloneness closed in on me every night; a feeling that I would later feel again in my thirties. This was around the same time that I found the stage, taking part in every open mic night that came my way. I became a fixture in the local poetry scene. Another friend went off to refer to me as a staple. Where poetry went, I was there.

Writing saved my life then, and those venues were the only therapy I could afford.

I try not to carry too much weight these days. I’ve learned to take it slow. To not stress too much about the things (or people) I cannot change. I have become comfortable in my aloneness, seeking refuge there when the world around me becomes too much to handle.

And there’s a lot to handle these days. 

I wonder—would the state of this country surprise you? Would it disappoint you? How would you react as white women lined up and voted for the Dollar Tree brand of Germany’s former dictator? In 2016, 47% of white women thought living under a blatant white supremacist was more favorable than living in a country run by a woman. In 2020, that number shot up to 53%. And would it surprise you that it was women of color—the majority of which consisted of Black women—saved this country from a second term? 

Would you share my anger and heartbreak to know that the Texas governor is “securing” the border with razor wire, while busing migrants to other states on the taxpayer dime while Texas families starve each night? (This is ironic considering the amount of people who echo the disinformation of the undocumented receiving government aid.) Would your heart break to learn that there is an ongoing campaign demonizing the queer community? How trans individuals are referred to as “groomers” by the people who continue to abuse children? 

I can’t end this with a pessimistic mind. Because as bad as things seem, it’s hard to ignore the cacophony of voices, radical activists that sprout overnight and blossom by morning. These young, often queer, often BIPOC, people came out of the womb* fighting for their right to exist. Their fight to take up the same space as white, cishet people. People who would rather see them in cages or forced into conversion camps. They use their social media platforms to educate others. They call their state representatives. They organize and take part in protests; they’ve even organized online protests in a virtual world.

And I hope they discover your works and have you as their guide.

*In an original draft, I accidentally typed “wound” instead of “womb.” Now I wonder if I had your “herida abierta” in mind.