Rally Against Hate & Nazi Rally + Playing with Video Effects

03/19/11 - A little context


     Today is the 8th anniversary of the Iraq War and the day the Nazis came to Claremont, California. We gathered in Claremont's Memorial Park and on the corners of Indian Hill and Foothill Blvd. on March 19, 2011 under awkward circumstances.  The announcement that the National Socialist Movement, a Neo-Nazi group, were coming to town evoked a series of emotions and reactions from friends, neighbors, coworkers and colleagues ranging from shock to anger to hurt to ambivalence and more.  The Nazis have a knack for unifying people as they hate pretty much everybody.  You have probably all looked at their website stating the requirements for membership, "those of pure White blood...not homosexual or Jew."  Though the NSM is against so-called "homosexuals" and have targeted gay pride, a gay church, and gay marraige in Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina, and unfurled their flags outside of Jewish synogogues, their agenda here in So Cal is different.  And I say "different" knowing that no aspect of human identity is removed or separate from the others. For example, one can be both queer and a migrant.  The NSM have stated that they chose to come to Claremont because the Claremont Colleges are pro-migrant. This is a compliment to many, as the colleges house scholar activists who encourage the humanization of migrants through their writing and by fostering student community engagement.  And there is a DREAMer presence that cannot be forgotten as one Claremont College student presented at the 'Perspectives on Queer Undocumented Identity' forum in Rialto today. Today people from the immigrant's rights movement, the anti-sexist movement, the anti-war movement, queer, feminist, animal liberation, anti-racist, religious, environmental movements....were all represented. We are all affected by fascism and we are all affected by anti-immigrant sentiment and laws.  

A little on Race and Immigration


How do you know race is there?  And is White really a race?  Critical race theorists have drawn up maps of how race can be perceived, performed, represented and embodied.  Though general consensus among racial theorists is that race is not biologically meaningful as a category, they have determined that social meanings are projected on race that are undeniably fraught with  real-life consequences.  Michael Omi and Howard Winant historically traced racial formation and racism in the US, arguing that race is cultural and historical, not biological.  They problematize the immigrant assimilation narrative,  pointing out that it requires white skin.  They say that people of color cannot fully assimilate to hegemonic Americanness as Americanness is equated with Whiteness.

Sentiment about race and immigration fluctuate radically in popular opinion and culture in the US, usually based on economic factors, demographic changes, and media representation.  Certain trends have emerged as to why outbreaks of anti-immigrant sentiment occur, the most prominent being a national crisis.   The US is facing a huge economic crisis.  Pair that with the fear of terrorism since 9-11 and the rhetorical conflation of immigrants with terrorists in politics, the news media, and popular culture, and what we end up with is a slippage in prioritizing the rights of immigrants.

According to law professor Kevin R. Johnson, "discrimination against immigrants often is legally acceptable." "The law" he said, "must police governmental conduct based on immigration status to ensure that it does not serve as a proxy for race."  Since today's immigrants are overwhelmingly people of color, when immigrants are targeted, it is impossible to ignore the racial implications.



A little on the Video

The first half of the video was the peaceful rally organized by Claremont College students intended to serve as a peaceful alternative to a confrontation with the NSM. The second half was the "protest" and "counter-protest," Nazis against people from various communities and movements. As you can see from the video, there was a lot of anger and shouting and the Nazis were clearly outnumbered. Though this is a good thing, it was also obvious that the scary ones were not the (approx 25) Nazis but the police, and this ended up dividing many activists between those that trusted the police to protect them and those that found the police to be worse than the Nazis.  This stemmed from the idea that the police have more power and that they chose to employ this power to protect the Nazis.  The photo below exemplifies one group's paralleling of Nazi's and Police.

In terms of making the film, I wanted to show what I saw and how I experienced the event.  The 'rally against hate' at Memorial Park was basically a group of people being shouted at by one person on a megaphone interspersed with music and chanting.  Why no PA system? one might wonder.  The city of Claremont thwarted the rally by not approving sound in the park.  Without being able to hear the speakers, people lost interest and meandered down to the "action," a corner of people shouting and even more cops posturing with humongous weapons.  Though people were both connecting with one another and fighting with one another, there was also just a lot of pure spectatorship.  In an anti-climactic ending to the rally, the police escorted the NSM after one hour, walking them back to their vehicles.   This incited some people to shout triumphant chants about sending the Nazis away, some people tried to follow them to the cars, and  some people just threw their signs away and went home.   I tried to show this sharp contrast between the peace rally and the counter-Nazi protest by showing the happy hippie music and the  great points made by speakers Professor Jose Calderon and SGV DREAM Teamer Johnathan Perez at the rally and the discord, heavy police presence, sirens, chants, and anti-climactic footage of Nazis just standing around at the anti-Nazi protest.  Playing with the police in the video was a fun way to make their presence less ominous and showing activist discord in the face of the police was a way of showing that the peace rally's intentions of unity and peace could not account for interpersonal anger and differing standpoints of rally attendees.  

A reading response paper I found from 2008 on Whiteness, Marxism, and Angela Davis

       I am reading about whiteness this week for a class and I was trying to find my old notes on the article "Whiteness as Property" which I read in my Feminist Theory undergrad class.  When I re-read my reading response on the 2 weeks worth of reading I thought wow, this sounds kind of like my previous post, so I decided to post it.  I realize that if you have not read these articles (listed below) the response might not make as much sense as I did not go into much detail on any one article, but maybe the response will inspire you to seek out the readings as they are all very poignant and important.

Cheryl Harris                “Whiteness as Property”
Linda Martín Alcoff      “What Should White People Do?”
bell hooks                      “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination”
Friedrich Engels            “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State”
Heidi Hartmann            “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”
Angela Davis               “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation”

Whiteness, Marxism and Angela Davis

    The last readings were interesting, thought provoking, angering and very smart.  There are several themes that manage to interweave their way throughout each of these topics, namely the law, humanity, Marxism, race, property, coalition building, male/female relations including marriage, confinement and liberation. 

    In Harris’s article for example, she speaks about the construction of race as property, and describes the relationship between whiteness as property and black slaves as “subjugated and treated as property” by whites. (77)  The idea that black slaves were considered property to white slaveholders was not new to me, but the idea of whiteness actually being property blew my mind.  It makes sense, whiteness as something that can gain in interest, as something of fiscal import; it is just not something that would have otherwise occurred to me.  It really is a great way to articulate something I have been feeling recently. 

       A couple weeks ago in my US Women of Color class, my professor asked us to share with her a little about growing up looked like to us in relation to Nellie Wong’s poem “When I Was Growing Up.”  I am usually very careful to speak last and not too often in that class since I am the only women’s studies major and I am also one of the few white students-I like to provide room for the women of color to learn from one another.  Well there is another white female student in the class who is a self identified anarcha-feminist who speaks a lot and takes up a lot of space.  When we were sharing about growing up, she decided to say that she doesn’t identify as white because race is a social construction.  I had a lot of complicated feelings about this remark and made sure that when I shared I spoke about my complicated struggle with my whiteness. 

       I felt and feel that not identifying as white is part of white privilege because only white people have the opportunity/choice to ignore race.  People of color can refuse their color all they want, but will constantly be reminded that they are not white.  What I am trying to get across I think is that this revelation about whiteness as property helped me to pinpoint even more how whiteness functions, whether purposefully or not.  Martin Alcoff also specifically spoke to this on page 264 when she said, “[r]ace may be a social construction…yet it is real and powerful enough to alter the fundamental shape of all our lives.”

       Going back to Harris’s article about property-whiteness as and slaves treated as-leads me to Engels’ discussion of how black slave women belonged “unreservedly to the man.” (167)  The implications of this are that “their” (white men) white wives were oppressed by one sided “monogamy” and “their” black slave women were oppressed through slavery including forcible sexual slavery.  So white men essentially owned all property including whiteness, land, their monogamous wives and their slaves, all of which were at their disposal for any form of exploitation they decided to employ. 

      Lastly, Davis spoke about how in the present day the US prison system parallels with and is impacted by slavery due to its (continued) oppression of black women and men.  Though she mentions that the number of black women prisoners is rising rapidly, she speaks mainly about young black men being under the direct control of the criminal justice system. (98)  Being “under the control of” and “being the property of” are two separate ways of explaining away human beings as being in the state of non-freedom also known as slavery or incarceration depending on the historical context. 

        Davis’s radical stance of prison abolitionism and decarceration as well as her view of black slave women as the “caretakers of the house of resistance” were very new and inspiring ideas to me.  I have always heard criticism of the mushrooming prison system in the United States, but until reading Davis’s articles, I have never heard anyone advocate to completely do away with them.  Her argument is very convincing however, and I am officially recruited as a prison abolitionist.  As I said in class, crime is a social construction and it is created with a white supremacist bias implemented by white supremacist institutions and by racist law enforcement, attorneys, and judges. 

        Davis’s socialism informs her abolitionism since were we to be a socialist government, ideally there would be no need for many of the so-called crimes we have now such as theft, vagrancy, and urinating in public which is rumored to soon be considered as a sexual offense.  These crimes, were poverty to cease to exist, would look very different and would hold different meaning.

       The law also holds a large part in each group of readings: Harris speaks of race as legally defined as blood-borne (82), Haartman and Engels speak of marriage as a legal form of oppression, and Davis speaks extensively about the role of the law in the continued oppression of people of color especially in relation to the prison system.  These acknowledgements of the importance of the law allude to the ideas that even with a Marxist analysis, legal reform is still looked to as an immediate goal perhaps on the way to the real revolutions that would take down the “patriarchal capitalism” as Haartman called it.  This I am sure is debatable, but since the theorists speak of the law’s progression, the implication is that as it becomes less institutionally racist, there has been some measurability of success in the struggle to end oppression.

      These articles call for a recognition of the humanity and necessity for equal rights among all peoples, and the need for coalition building in order to attain the ultimate goal of liberation.

Some Thoughts on Reading Capitalism and Slavery in a Grad School classroom

Do you ever sit in a class and think about how happy you are to have finished all the piles of reading, like you understand the concepts and are ready to discuss and then there is no intellectual space to do so?  Cultural Studies has differed in many ways from Women's Studies (my undergraduate degree) and one of the main differences is pedagogical.  My Women's Studies classes necessitated engaged crtitcal dialogue originating and perpetuated as much as possible by the students but facilitated when necessary by the professors.  This forced us to not only have done the readings but to have understood them enough to drive a conversation about them.  My classes were usually all women and there were enough brief silences that it felt right when I spoke, as if we were giving eachother space to take turns.  I didn't fear I would be interrupted or that my thoughts wouldn't be heard.  I realize this sounds utopian; of course not all my classes were like this, but the ones for W/St majors only really were.  My experiences here in private graduate school as opposed to public undergraduate school differ greatly.  Here in private school the students and professors are from different economic backgrounds whereas at state we were basically poor and working class.  Here the students and professors are mixed genders whereas in Women's Studies my classes and professors were almost all women.  And here in private graduate school competition seems to be emphasized as students seem to leap over eachother to top one another in regards to book critiques, reputation, and experience.  Though I have now been here almost a year I am still getting used to the alien concepts of competition in and outside of the classroom and feeling the unease and stress at not being quick and loud enough to say my thoughts before topics change.

Eric Williams

So I decided to write my thoughts on the reading this week for my Introduction to Cultural Studies class in my blog, though they are now influenced by the class lecture and discussion.  Today a classmate presented briefly on Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery and in their presentation they brought up immigrant labor today and asked several questions about the connections between William's argument and today's economic dependency on sweatshops and migrant workers.  The weird thing though, at least different for me from Women's Studies again, was that for this class we are assigned to present briefly on the reading and then come up with questions for the class.  In W/St we did this as well and would basically facilitate discussion based on questions we created.  However, today after the student asked the questions the professor facilitated the rest of the class not based on the student's questions but on their own and we never came back to the presenter.  I had thoughts on the student's presentation and as the discussion didn't focus on it and the space in the class was not open I thought I would share some brief thoughts here.  As a side note I worry sometimes that I am just a whiny student who needs to learn to shout things out in class and stop being shy.  But I know I'm not shy and that in classes where the professor expects the students to drive the discussion I still thrive.  I am not the quickest thinker maybe as I like to formulate my thoughts in my head neatly before saying them, but in cases of many Cultural Studies classes by that time the discussion has quickly moved on or someone has said a similar thought more quickly.

So here is my piece.  Eric Williams's arguments were basically that the beginning of slavery in the so-called New World by England and its abolition as spearheaded by England were not based on race.  He says that it began because it was economically beneficial to England and that it ended because it was no longer economically beneficial to England.  He argued that race was used after slavery was already in place to justify it, but that it was not the reason for slavery.  He also argued against the sentimentality of abolitionism and the idea that England was so heroic/brave/selfless and symbolic of hope and humanitarianism for abolishing slavery first as this was not the reason they did so.  I am down with Williams though I think he downplayed race a lot because his argument was primarily economic and he wanted to differentiate his argument from others.  I think that slavery was both based on economic need and the idea that people from other lands with different customs and languages and who look "different" from English hegemonic "man" were underdeveloped mentally because they had a whole different paradigm of value, intelligence, labor, family, etc.

Rosie the Riveter

In thinking about the connections between hatred of African Americans and slavery as an economic system, this brings me to my classmates connection with immigrant labor.  Williams's argument that hatred came later makes sense when you think about other situations including labor by anyone but white men.  Today there is this liberal feminist idea that Rosie the Riveter is a symbol of women's strength, women's inclusion, and women's rights.  Rosie symbolizes women moving toward equality in the labor force.  But really Rosie is also sentimentalized under the auspices of humanitarianism when in reality she was war propaganda which, once the war ended, changed her tune.  As men returned home, women was practically forced out of their jobs and the common sentiment was that women were taking mens jobs away.  Just as they were first called patriotic for working, they were then demonized and called unpatrotic if they did not immediately stop working.  Rosie's image in propaganda began to look like a huge buff giant stepping on industries like Godzilla to make clear that paid labor was once again a man's job.  Then take the bracero program in which Mexicans were lured to the United States to work and were then deported and sent back to Mexico regardless that they had started families in the US.  "Americans" began to show hatred toward them for "taking their jobs" and blamed them for their own bad economy.  In both of these cases the empowerement of the laborers were followed by hateful discrimiation based on the threat that women or immigrants would/could one day have access to the same privileges as white men.  This for many people is scary because to some equality is a zero-sum game.

Anti sweatshop poster calling it slave labor

Women and migrant laborers are not slaves.  Some people liken maquiladoras and migrant workers to slave labor but there is a difference.  I do think there are modern day slaves and that these are people who are trafficked whether by kidnapping or trickery into another location so as to be isolated and then forced to work without pay.  Undocumented laborers in the US and sweatshop workers outside of the US are often exploited in that they are underpaid for their work and sometimes not paid at all, forced to work in hazardous and unhealthy conditions and they are working without job security.  There are also issues such as sexual harrassment and assault, and all of these conditions and effects occur with impunity.  But as bad as the work conditions are, as overtly exploitative, this is still not slavery because slaves are the property of their masters and exploited and underserved workers are not.  To use the term slavery, even when paired such as in the case of "wage slavery" is to change the meaning of the term such as when the term "rape" is paired with other words like "raped my wallet."  The inherent meaning of rape is about the use of sexual means to gain power just as slavery is about owning a human being for personal use.  When used to describe situations other than these they are being misused and misappropriated to bring the weight of their own meaning to another issue.  Comparing and discussing slavery, servitude, and underpaid and exploited labor is fine, but a word with as specific and important a word as slavery should only be used to describe situations that are in fact slavery.

I hope that all made sense.

Cherrie Moraga - An Intellectual Biography

I have recently been thinking about my whiteness and the complicated relationship between my white skin privilege, my Chicana identity, my activism, my queerness, and how to negotiate issues of "passing" and being "read" as straight and white.  This led me to my old paper on "La Cherrie" who also had to grapple with these issues.


On October 11, 2008 parts of me shifted.  Like a drawstring bag filled with loose pieces, I was shaken, and some of my parts settled into new spaces.  Cherríe Moraga or “La Cherríe” as those (of us) who love her often call her, gave a speech entitled Still Loving in the Still War Years at Cal State Los Angeles for the 2^nd Annual National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Joto Caucus and her words fell on us like drops of moisture on dry skin.  The name of her speech was a throwback to her 1983 book Loving in the War Years and it’s title poem in which she argued that she lived in a “war time…where being queer and female is as rude as we can get.”  Clearly Moraga believed that not much had changed in thirty years.

     “It’s not about the ‘me’ it’s about the ‘we’ she said in her opening, reminding us about the role of the ego. “The whole notion of collaboration, especially politically, is such a great lesson to learn” she added as she thanked the organizers of the event (Still Loving).  As a woman who is well known for her collaborative works, Moraga has contributed much to the field of women’s studies through her joint efforts to document women of color feminism, Chicana feminism, and queer women of color feminism.   Cherríe Moraga has added significantly to many fields of feminist theory, most notably that of feminist identity politics, queer theory, Chicana feminism and intersectional analysis.  However, her work is much more diverse than just writing and editing essays and books.  She is also a prolific poet and playwright and has given speeches and presented papers at countless conferences and events all over the world.  

In her autobiographical work she said that she “wrote against absence, against that literary political site where I was not represented (Still Loving).”  Moraga’s mother was Chicana and her father Anglo.  In her writings she identifies as several contradictory and often negative terms.  “Half-breed,” a “product of invasion,” and a “betray[er]” of her race, as well as “queer,” “lesbian,” “pervert, and both “guera,” and “Chicana.”  These split identifiers are evidence of both Moraga’s identity politics and her playfulness with identity which allows her to both identify politically as certain things while keeping in mind the constructedness of such identities.  

She focuses on her relationship with her Chicana mother especially in relation to her race, gender and sexuality identity politics and documents her learning about heterosexism, patriarchy, and the family as a complicated site from this relationship.  “You are a traitor to your race if you do not put the man first” she wrote, referring to both her mother’s preference for her brother and acknowledging her role as a traitor for choosing to be lesbian (Loving 103).  Her experiences in a patriarchal family, along with her split Chicana/Anglo self, her working class upbringing, and her closeted queerness have informed her writings and helped her to acknowledge the intersectionality of oppressions.  The theme of betrayer and traitor weaves itself in much of her writing, along with the associated guilt.

Moraga’s poem, La Dulce Culpa (1983) and her essay A Long Line of Vendidas (1983) ground us in her childhood and how her relationship with her mother shaped her identity as a lesbian and a feminist aware of both her privileges and oppressions.  “What kind of lover have you made me mother who drew me into bed with you at six/at seventeen” she asks in La Dulce Culpa.  She goes on to describe her mother’s unrequited love for her father and implies that her closeness with her mother in the absence of his presence and his touch played a part in her acknowledging her queerness  (Loving 14).  

Vendidas spoke at length about her brother’s male privilege within the household and his unearned love from her mother.  “The only thing that earned my brother my servitude was his maleness” she said of having to serve him and his friends while growing up. (Loving 90) Moraga described this as how she perceived a Chicano family is supposed to treat men, which is to prioritize them, making clear her understanding of the weight that her ultimate betrayal of choosing a sexuality which excludes all men and “most dangerously, Chicano men” carried. (Loving 117)  This is an example of the intersectionality of the cultural gender oppression she experienced in her own home since it was not that just her brother’s maleness that provided him privilege, but his maleness in a Chicano household.

In Vendidas Moraga tackles the Chicano gender dichotomy of La Chingada, the passive, feminine “fucked one” and El Chingon, the active macho man, or “fucker” who she personified in La Malinche and Cortez.  She explains that Malinche thought that Cortez was Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god come to redeem his people.  Regardless, Malinche is portrayed as the betrayer of “her indio people” because she translated and procreated with Cortez; their “offspring symbolically represent[ing] the birth of the bastardized mestizo/Mexicano people.” Moraga personally connected with this story, considering herself the child of a “modern-day Chicana Malinche marrying a white man… (Loving 100, 117, 118)”

 This analysis contributed to Chicana feminism by both identifying Malinche as someone other than a traitor to her race and by problemitizing the blame that all Chicana/mestiza women have carried for the conquest of Mexico and all issues since.  Moraga even points out that though Chicano gay men are considered diseased, that because they are not women, they “do not suffer the same stigma of traitor.” (Loving 114)  This last quote contributes to queer theory in that Moraga adds both Chicana lesbians and Chicano gays to the story and does not erase the gendered and racialized aspects of their queerness.

In 1981 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua co-edited the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color thereby creating the secular Bible of what is now known as women of color feminism or third world feminism.  This book included an autobiographical essay that is now used in critical white studies, women’s studies and Chican@ studies called La Guera.  This essay marked the departure that she later wrote about in her poem For the Color of My Mother. “I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother” she wrote.  (Loving 60)  La Guera both documents Moraga’s journey from closeted queer “white girl” to lesbian Chicana as well as her internal journey in which she learned about oppression.

“When I finally lifted the lid to my lesbianism, a profound connection with my mother reawakened in me. It wasn't until I acknowledged and confronted my own lesbianism in the flesh, that my heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother's oppression--due to being poor, uneducated, and Chicana--was realized.” (This Bridge 29)  This quote is an example of intersectional analysis in that once Moraga experienced what she called the “discrimination of silence” about being queer as well as the difficulties she faced once she came out, she could recognize the interrelated oppressions that she faced as a female, working class, Chicana lesbian as well as understand and recognize her mother’s oppressions.  (Still Loving)


Also in La Guera Moraga more specifically addresses intersectionality.  As this is an incredibly relevant and brilliant quote, it deserves to be quoted at length.

"In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor.  The danger lies in ranking the oppressions.  The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression.  The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base.  Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place." (This Bridge 33)

Cherríe Moraga’s passionate argument that oppression must be looked at personally, politically, emotionally, internally, externally, and as multi-layered and complicated is a bold one.  Later in La Guera she discusses that the oppressor is more fearful of similarity than of difference and that all women “have in way been both oppressed and oppressor” but are “afraid to look at how we have failed each other.” (This Bridge 37-38)  Her courageous admittance to both categories of oppressor and oppressed are the ultimate proof of her belief in intersectionality; she can both acknowledge her ability to “pass” as white and see her skin privilege as well as understand her simultaneous sexual and class oppression.  Her ability to look at herself and, in retrospect see how she “rode the wave” of her privilege speaks to her idea that “it is looking to the nightmare that the dream is found; the nightmare being internalization of the values of the oppressor.” (This Bridge 39-40)  

In 1984 Moraga and Anzaldua rereleased the anthology This Bridge Called My Back using Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a publishing company Moraga helped cofound which provided space for women of color feminist writers.  Moraga has been able to make the people who are invisible visible by personifying them as characters in her plays, writing about them in her poetry, and including them in her books.  

“Having spent the first ten years as a poet and essayist with a fixed relationship to autobiography, it was a great revelation and relief to discover that I was not limited to my own personal biography as a writer, but that a much larger community of people could inhabit me and speak through me: La Raza.”  Her diverse cast of characters work to unveil the working people, the youth of color, the indigenous, the queer.  And in her quest not to betray herself or the people she portrays she also works to also perform for this same community. (Art in America)

Moraga has written over a dozen plays, the first of which, Giving up the Ghost, was printed in 1986.  “Ghost carries to the stage the discussion in ‘Vendidas’ of the definition of masculinity as the active chignon and of femininity as the passive chingada” Yabro Benjamin wrote in The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga.  (36)  Moraga does this through her main character Marisa/Corky who drifts between both dichotomous gender roles and her lover Amalia who drifts between two sexualities.  Her more recent play, The Hungry Woman (2000) also depicts a character, Medea, who similarly switches sexualities while her lover stays a steadfast lesbian who was “born that way.” (52) These characters provide an argument that contributes to queer theory by stating that queerness can be chosen, but can also be something that many feel has just always been there.

As Yabro Benjamin stated, Moraga’s Chicana lesbian characters portray pieces of the active and passive, fucker and fucked.  In Vendidas, Moraga addressed the white lesbian feminist idea that “the desire to penetrate and be penetrated…would vanish” because “women were different” and somehow transcendent of “old notions.” Through the characters in her plays, her autobiographical and other writing, Moraga argues against this idea, and the framework of lesbian as defined by white feminists, to allow for diversity, messiness, and complexity of gender and sexual identities.  She does not erase el chingon from the lesbian relationships and rejects the utopian idea that because men are not involved in the relationship, that there is no longer a “power struggle.” (Loving 125-126)  

In the play Heroes and Saints (1992), Moraga created a character named Cerezita who was born with the birth defect of having no body; just a head.  In Moraga’s 1992 article Art in America, Con Acento she stated that “This is the condition of the Mexicana woman…There is no body to inhabit between the polarized figures of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Chingada.”  Cerezita’s character very literally presents herself as the (un)bodily extension of the identity politics Moraga argues exists for lesbian Chicana women.  Neither La Virgen nor La Chingada reflect the Chicana lesbian, and though Cerezita is not lesbian, “a lesbian sensibility has created her.” (Art in America 1992)

Aside from the character of Cerezita, Moraga has included the amputated and fractured body in several of her writings.  The image of her mother’s disembodied head in the poem For the Color of My Mother, and the mutilated and legless body in the poem You Call It, Amputation are examples of these broken bodied themes.  “The body with its amputated parts is there and not there at the same time, much in the same way women’s bodies are theirs and not theirs” stated Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. (15)  Moraga’s “dismantling and recomposition” of the body, and specifically the Chicana body and/or the queer body are according to Yarbro-Bejarano “part of the process of making sense” of the multiple and split identities. (20)

Moraga’s emphasis on the body also emerges in her 2008 speech Still Loving in the Still War Years as she discusses gender reassignment surgery.  She expresses concern that in the future “sex change will become so commonplace that even transgender folk will cease to be queer” and wonders if the “lover-body we assume [will] no longer matter.” “What will be the site of resistance?” she asks.  This question makes evident the value she attributes the body in the scope of identity politics, especially for the queer Chicana.  Though I agree that many transgender people do not identify as queer and want nothing more than to be cisgender and heteronormative, this does not take away from queerness in any way, if anything it proves that regardless of gender and sexual rhetoric, in reality sex and gender are more fluid than even those who transcend gender and sexuality believe. In the same speech she acknowledges that being queer and of color does not necessarily make one radical and quotes her partner who said “not everybody wants to be free.” (Still Loving) 

Everybody may not want to be free, but Moraga is determined to keep the movement alive and maintain a feminist solidarity.  At the 1982 Barnard Sexuality Conference, Moraga described her “terrible fear” that though feminism “saved her” by giving her a place to safely love a woman, that her fear that she may once again be “thrust outside of the circle of acceptance” remained.  Her words were specific to a context when the movement was “breaking down around sex,” and though she stated that women of color were being played between white hands in this internal conflict, she still argued for feminists not to push each other out of this circle.  Though Moraga is quick to acknowledge when she finds an absence where women of color should be, she is a believer in a movimiento.  

Hear her speech from the Jot@ Caucus 2008

“First, we need to learn about each other” she states in her article A Unified Rainbow of Strength.  The concept of intersectionality plays a large part in the movement she envisions: “Given our identities, we have had to learn that a single-issued movement will not be about freeing us up…We refuse to postpone our womanness, our gayness, our color to make revolution easier for somebody else to swallow” Moraga said in 1982. (Rainbow) And now, twenty six years later in her 2008 speech, Moraga stays true to this idea: “Latino and Latina, Chicana, Chicano, Indigina and Africano origin queer people…do not have the privilege of a single issue movement” she said of the single issue battle for gay marriage.  

After the conference, I spent a glorious moment with “La Cherríe,” and had a chance to ask her what had awakened her consciousness.  She described the discrimination she experienced in coming out as a lesbian and the silent suffering that preceded it.  “When I came out, that was a moment of realizing I would never not choose freedom again” she told me (Still Loving).  As Moraga quoted her partner, not everybody wants to be free.  But Moraga, who has fought so hard for freedom, has thankfully come to realize the importance of that struggle and used it as a theoretical base for taking it to the “nightmarish” places necessary to fight for liberation for all oppressed peoples. 

Works Cited 

Moraga, Cherrie. “Art in America, Con Acento .” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12.3 (1992): 154-160 .

Moraga, Cherrie. “Barnard sexuality conference: played between white hands.” Off Our Backs 12.7 (1982): 23.

Moraga, Cherrie. Giving Up The Ghost. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1986.

Moraga, Cherrie. The Hungry Woman. Albuquerque: West End Press, 2001.

Moraga, Cherrie. Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End Press, 1983.

Moraga, Cherrie. “Still Loving in the Still War Years.” National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Joto Caucus. California State University Los Angeles. 11 Oct. 2008.

Moraga, Cherrie. “A unified rainbow of strength.” Off Our Backs 12.2 (1982): 6.

Moraga, Cherrie. Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1995.

Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua. This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by 
     Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1984.

Thompson, Lisa B. “Watsonville/Circles in the Dirt (review).” Theatre Journal 56.3 (2004): 523-525.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Life doesn't just magically get better, but you get stronger

Life Doesn't Get Better But We Get Stronger

This film was created by my friend Kitzia with my help. One exciting thing about somewhat figuring out how to make movies is helping others to express themselves cinematically as well. She had never made a movie before and was interested in making one after I told her about the whole "It Gets Better" phenomenon and showed her some of the movies.

"It gets better" was created in the wake of the young gay suicides that were taking the news by storm and meant to be preventative of more deaths. The idea was that an older LGBTQ individual would take directly to their webcam and describe the hard time they had as a youth but their subsequent survival, stating that "it gets better" if you stick it out. There have been a slew of criticisms of this movement.  Many bloggers stated that the campaign encourages youth to just accept bullying, and can I just add that this bullying meme is driving me crazy-the problem is much bigger than youth to youth name calling, it is a larger societal homophobia and heterosexism perpetuated mainly by adults.  Some stated that since most of the digital storytellers speaking to the webcams were white that the movement doesn't speak to people of color, and to add to this, another criticism that I haven't so much seen as felt was also based on identity politics as most of the faces represented on video were of men.  The most prevalent criticism is class-based stating that things only get better if you are rich like Dan Savage.  One of the most famous criticisms in the queer movement was in video form and was made by a woman of color (LuzLoca821) stating that it doesn't get better but you get stronger.  Her digital story was also made by speaking directly to a webcam.  Some other responses to "it gets better" include the youth-based video project "Make it Better" and the intersectional project "I Am Proof That It Gets Better."

When Kitzia expressed interest in the project we engaged in a discussion on all the criticisms as well as the good things.  I found many of the videos to be inspirational and am happy to know that people were being proactive about the suicides.  Though many people criticized the video bloggers for making videos instead of doing something, I don't think that these are mutually exclusive.  Many people are doing many things for the movement including making video and though some people are making videos as their first activity, this can be just the beginning.

A week later Kitzia showed up at my house with a poem she had written in Spanish.  Surprisingly, or maybe predictably,  her thesis was the same as LuzLoca821's though she had never seen her video.  I was excited to support an "It Gets Better" video that could both provide hope to youth, give representation to an underrepresented community, break form from the project by being in poetry form rather than in a rant, and by being in Spanish rather than English; literally speaking to a different audience.

 We decided to do partial talking-to-the-camera and partial video and photo, and it was a new form for both of us.  I had help from a friend, Samthropology, who taught me how to detach audio to layer over image and video and I showed Kitzia.  It was difficult to do something new and it has taken us a month to organize time and work out all the glitches.  In filming her talking to the camera it became clear that I needed to learn how to use a microphone and lights.  We used my floor lamps but the lighting is still not great.  I am hoping my next production class, Documentary Media, will teach me these skills.

Since the video is in Spanish I will post a translation as soon as Kitzia makes it.  But for now, a brief translation from me is that she is saying that life doesn't magically get better but you get stronger and urges people to seek out other queers and form their own battalion of queer warriors.  She tells her audience that they are stronger and more beautiful than they imagine and tells them to have hope, adding that they are needed.

I had a fun time video recording Kitzia and helping her to edit and brainstorm.  I think skill-sharing is an important part of the movement and am confident that she will share as well.

The 10th Annual Day Labor Soccer Tournament

After sitting home and hiding out from the rain for several days I decided to stop being a bum and to use the footage from the 10th Annual Day Labor Cup to make something more upbeat and fully bilingual.  I hope that the jornaleros, activists, organizers, students, and hopefully soccer fans find it meaningful.  So far I have already been asked by a soccer documentarian if he can use some of my footage. I hope that means that the event will be mentioned in his film. 




In other news today I had a meeting with an transnational feminist violence-prevention non-profit I work with about doing a series of activist filmmaking and theory workshops/classes in Guatemala this summer and making a few short films.  Everything seems to be a go.  I have already begun searching for and downloading academic articles in Spanish and choosing trusty English texts to be translated.  Thinking beyond next semester sounds easy now but I know I'll be hating life when all my classes and projects and my job start up again a few weeks.

A movie for the movement, not for the class

In my Visual Research Methods class we were given assignments to create movies.  For the activists in the class (and there were a lot of us!) we came upon some issues of audience and purpose.  Before this class I was experimenting in making movies for "the movement"; basically capturing actions and activism of different movements I am involved in: the student movement, the immigrant's rights movement, the undocumented student movement, the feminist movement, the queer rights movement,  the anti-racist movement, the worker's rights movement, the media justice movement, the global health movement and every combination and connecting movements.  But in making films for this class I was to make films based in the film and media theory we were learning and my audience was my professor and my classmates.  Things I was doing such as putting up video clips with my "voice" coming across as text between clips asserted myself as the voice of authority, and putting music to the images is a manipulative tool to incite emotions.  I needed to push myself to create self-reflexive films as well as to think about the ethical consequences of revealing people's full names, legal statuses, and locations.  At one point I had to make an ethnography and I was challenged to do so without doing it on a group that necessarily trusted me.  This pushed me to think about what should be done in terms of relationship building before filming people.  However, my work for class still differs from my work for the movement.  I would not place text on video or photographs for a class project, but I would for an educational video.

This brings me to what I am posting here: Eddie, an organizer for the a local day labor organizing center asked me to make a film of this years actions that the Day Laborers have been involved with to show at a recent event.  The funny thing is that afterward everyone was asking me to please put it on the internet.  Many of these people were part of or associated with the people who were considerably "concerned" over my video "Una Mirada a los Invisibles" being on the internet for fear of inciting Minute Men backlash.  I was wary and decided against it.  My video was then shown on Pitzer College's campus (and I was notified about 10 minutes in advance) at one of their weekly Day Laborer/student "Encuentros" and the next thing I know I am being asked to please put it on the internet so that the organizing center can put it on their website.  I finally decided to do it.  Since its on the internet I thought I might as well share it on my blog for all to see, so here it is: