(Luis Rodriguez, Dagoberto Gilb, Aimee Suzara, Michael Warr) Panelists include creative writers who have also been founders or key players in community centers, cultural spaces, magazines, and advocacy organizations. The panel will address the conflicts and confluences of meaningful community activism with writing of skill, integrity, and substance. How does one balance aesthetics, ethics, and social engagement? Where is the border between art and the pamphlet? Writers in communities of color face unprecedented violence today. Are we writers in wartime?

Published Date: September 6, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:03):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Michael War Louis Rodriguez, Amy Ra, and Dao Gud. You will now hear introductions of the panelists.

Speaker 2 (00:00:26):

Dao Gud is the author of Before the End. After the beginning, the Flowers Woodcuts of Women Retos, the last known residents of Ky Una and the Magic of Blood. He has published widely as well. In his spare time before becoming an amazingly accomplished writer. He was a union high rise carpenter for almost two decades, and he now is the executive Director of Centro Victoria, a center for Mexican-American Literature and Culture, the University of Houston Victoria, and is founding editor of the Beautiful Magazine Ache. If you're not familiar with it, just definitely check it out. Michael War, Michael War as book of poetry include the Armageddon of Funk Power lines, a decade of poetry from Chicago's Guilt Complex as a co-editor and we are all the black boy, all published by Thea Chacha. Press recognition for his writing includes the 2014 Creative Work Fund Award. For those of you who are not familiar, it's a very prestigious grant award from the Bay Area.

Speaker 2 (00:01:28):

Recognition for his right. Oh, I said that already. Sorry, just testing you. Are y'all paying attention? Did anybody catch it or did you miss it? I did it twice. Twice? Yeah. Okay. He also received the 2012 Penn Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in literature, and he is also the Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, which is also a wonderful excuse to come to the Bay Area and visit us. Yes, bay Area Pride. Right over here. Right here. Right here. Okay. And last but certainly not least, Luis Rodriguez is a novelist memoir, short Story Jones book writer, as well as a community and urban piece activist. So many things just wrapped up work as a poet laureate of Los Angeles. And again, in all his free time, published 15 books in all genres, including the bestselling memoir in one of my transformative favorite books, always Running La Gang Days in la. He is the founding editor of Tric Press now in its 28th year. Wow. And co-founder, president of tric and Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley. So you can see these folks are working in a lot of areas and I'm excited to hear them speak. And we're going to start with Amy Su. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:02:58):

Hi everybody.

Speaker 3 (00:02:58):

So we weren't sure if we're going to have the tech thing, but I'm going to start briefly talking while I'm showing you something. So I thought that if I had the ability to share some of my minutes with some of these youth, that would be one way I would love to share my time. So let's see if it works and it's not showing up.

Speaker 3 (00:03:28):

Maybe I can get some assistance. Okay. I might just, oh, here we go. Awesome. All right. So I'm just going to play a couple moments of this clip because I do have some words to share with you and just to bring, so for me, this panel was about breaking open the walls of what this kind of discussion can be and talking about inside and outside. And so this is one project, an example of a project I was able to be a part of working with a group called Cow Shakes as a theater artist, and then collaborating with a group called Asian called aal, which was a youth is a Oakland based southeast Asian youth organization that works with local communities and they do a festival called May Arts. So this is just a little tiny bit of it. Hopefully it works out.

Speaker 4 (00:04:29):

So right now we're at San Antonio Park. So our event is a Pal May Arts Festival. This is our 18th annual year of showcasing a p i Cultural arts. The youth have been working on it for a while, since about January, February, we're going to have spoken word, gorilla Theater, Filipino fan dance, and some more.

Speaker 3 (00:04:44):

My name's Amy Ra and I am the artist investigator with this project leading the Gorilla Theater Group. My role has been to work with this smaller group within the larger group to bring theater practices to help them craft a short section of plays. We're actually doing three short skits

Speaker 5 (00:05:03):

Conversation with him earlier, and he's not really trying to fail school. He's gone because he's getting bully for being gay and hanging out with his boyfriend.

Speaker 3 (00:05:11):

Was this the reason behind an all alarm stupid son? Why didn't he tell me? He

Speaker 5 (00:05:16):

Has been, but he's scared that you'll hate him because he's

Speaker 6 (00:05:18):

Gay. My dad is from Cambodia and my mom is from Laos, and this is my story all my life. I've been through hell back.

Speaker 7 (00:05:27):

They know that some people in our community are actually going through these problems, and it's not just something that we're doing because we thought it was funny. It's actually a pretty serious matter

Speaker 8 (00:05:39):

Get Juice.

Speaker 9 (00:05:57):

A big objective of this event is for youth to have a lot of fun, to just be out here and be very much themselves and be able to show what that looks like. And

Speaker 4 (00:06:07):

We're here today because a lot of folks are being forced to leave Oakland and especially in this neighborhood. And so we wanted to bring a pal, mayor Arts here to San Antonio Park because we just want to reclaim

Speaker 3 (00:06:18):

Space. There's a lot of changes happening in Oakland. Living in Oakland is very difficult as it is, but also coming from families of, again, refugee or war torn experiences.

Speaker 7 (00:06:27):

So I'm Vietnamese and Chinese, but my parents were refugees. I was born in Oakland and I've lived here all my life.

Speaker 10 (00:06:36):

I'm Cambodian and Vietnamese. My mom is Cambodian and yeah, my grandma and stuff, they escaped from the Kma Rouge.

Speaker 3 (00:06:46):

So I think that takes away from, oops, don't welcome a lot of the things I wanted to talk about in words actually. And so I speak from this intersection of both teaching as, so I teach at Deza College in Cupertino, and it's a community college now, but I was an adjunct for about 10 years and did all kinds of collaborations over that 10 year period. Me and partnerships like this have been a characteristic of my work in arts education. I also want to talk a tiny bit on creative collaborations that mesh teaching as well as performance and theater, working with different entities. And the main thing I want to say is the roots of my art ultimately are from being an activist. So this panel is called Writer. So writer or we might've heard Artivism. And I want to acknowledge that I sort of became an artivist or became a writer more formally because I was compelled to, it was almost an accidental role.

Speaker 3 (00:07:55):

I always wanted to write, but I never felt comfortable claiming that because it didn't feel like a job that you're supposed to grow up as a Filipino daughter of immigrants. And when I was in 2001, I had a experience living in the Philippines and volunteering with people on the US military bases and ended up coming back and co-founding an organization that addressed environmental justice, environmental pollution on the military bases. And then at that point, I felt like my voice was necessary to tell the story. So the question to me of this panel is how do we take on the role of writer? And I'll also say as educator, because we work inside institutions in both often, but also take with us the communities and the issues that we care about often that are part of our own identity and not dilute the messages that we're trying to get across.

Speaker 3 (00:08:50):

There's a quote that I'll share from Carlos Bosan, which is, it is only when we have plenty to eat that we begin to understand what freedom means to us. Freedom is not an intangible thing. When we have enough to eat, then we were healthy enough to enjoy what we eat. Then we have the time and ability to read and think and discuss things. So I feel like there's this tension between being a writer and being able to have a platform to communicate our work, but also the roots of the content that we're often generating. The challenges. I found a couple of challenges and then I'm going to, the way I want to close, this is actually advice I want to close in. You can take my advice or leave it, but I wanted to say a couple of challenges I faced in both of these worlds.

Speaker 3 (00:09:39):

So for me it's very reciprocal and I can't really separate my work as a teacher, as an artist. One is an educator. A lot of times I find that if you've heard of the article called Presumed Incompetent about Women of color in institutions of Higher Education, a lot of times I feel the actual experience of walking into classrooms and being questioned or that feeling as though maybe my knowledge is not valid and it triggers a lot of internal insecurities about what knowledge do I carry? This is not the same knowledge that when I was growing up, I didn't see teachers that looked like me, right? So that's one issue is sort of that our experience, our subjectivity in classrooms and institutions of educational institutions mirrors and brings up our own personal experiences depending on our identity. And for me, an example concrete example would be, okay, I recently was teaching Jamaica Kin Cades a small place, and we're talking about tourism and colonialism.

Speaker 3 (00:10:43):

And often the students who are white a lot of times, or maybe come from more privileged backgrounds and may be less aware of their backgrounds or the specificity of their backgrounds, will come to me and say, I only can see myself that she's calling me a piece of rubbish. She's calling me an ugly thing. And they're not able to see the perspective of the native of the person in the colonized state. And the people, the students of color are seeing themselves as the natives. I'm seeing myself as a native. So here I am in the class teaching a book, and I'm also invested in the text I'm teaching. And so this is a challenge that I face. The second challenge is then when I'm creating work. So I'm now shifting more to the collaborations like this or more so in institutions where they're lifting my work to the stage.

Speaker 3 (00:11:36):

So for example, in theater, I find that if I communicate stories that involve characters of color, people who are Filipino, and I either present a difficulty because casting is difficult suddenly, or maybe someone's afraid that the audience won't like it because theater audiences aren't usually people that look like the people I want to put on stage. So those are two challenges. And so to speed up, because I use some of my time with the video, I want to move towards what I see as sort of the core issue and the core kind of solution. And then a few pieces of advice, if you don't mind. So I feel like a lot of it for me is an internal shift, a retuning internally and being able to say, okay, I'm going to do it all. I'm going to, especially right now, I can't waste time. I have to both be inside the box, break the walls open, reshape the box, maybe explode the entire box if I need to create a whole new shape that no one has seen.

Speaker 3 (00:12:44):

These are the possibilities, right? I teach inside institutions, I depend on theaters or I depend on publishers, but at the same time, I want to question and challenge how much do I really need them? And the question for those of you who might relate, sometimes you might realize that they need you just as much as you need them. And so if that's the case, then here's my advice is one is I actually have a huge list and I won't be able to go over it in my very few, couple moments left, but I'll say, continue to keep guided by and express your intention. So I have a mission statement, which is a weird thing for a poet probably. And for me individually, I did that to continue this idea of to create and help others create poetry and theater for social change. And I've been using that as a mantra for myself and to kind of brand myself, because ultimately it's not even about how many publications or how many things I've put on stage.

Speaker 3 (00:13:46):

It's about what I continue to carry with all of my work and with the communities I work with. Second is to constantly be responsive to the needs and whether it's in the classroom or in the art, to use every opportunity to talk about what's important right now. Three, be don't be afraid to be a model. I've always thought of myself as a model and I know the time as a model, somebody that might represent and be okay to represent. Also know that, that you're not the only one. We want to encourage as many people to represent for all of these identities, women of color, Filipinos, L B G T Q, and people of all the different identities we represent.

Speaker 3 (00:14:37):

This almost last one is leveraging your positions that you have, whether it's in institutions of education or cultural institutions. Collaborate, always collaborate and push the envelope. So this is where I want to close with this is in the example of casting insists on those characters, they say, this is going to be difficult to cast. I insist I'm going to have a Filipino character. I insist I'm going to have a Chinese character, an African-American character. I can't change those characters because it might be easier to cast differently. This sort of requires fortitude for yourself. And to me, it's a way to work on decolonizing ourselves is to insist on those choices, but also to insist to everybody else around us that they have to adjust towards us and often to always be true to what it is that you need to communicate. So I'll close with this quote from June Jordan. Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. And this is ultimately what I think we need to remember because a lot of us are constantly navigating these decisions and feeling pulled between do it yourself, do it for the community, but also leveraging these different connections and institutions be true to whom to what you need to say and for whom you need to say it. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:16:13):

Thank you. Amy Cesar, for those of you who came in a little bit later, I read the bios at the beginning, so we're going to just to catch you up, we're going to continue on down the line. I did want to say thank you, Amy, for your words, especially about setting an intention. As a good segue, the intention of the participants was that they'd like to be in dialogue with you. So they're keeping their comments a little bit brief so that there'll be ample time to exchange. So be ready to exchange and interact. Alright. I have a lot of fortitude, as she mentioned, fortitude. So you will interact in exchange and if you leave, I'm going to call you out. No, I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. We got to keep it light. There's just too much. Too much heavy. Too much serious. Okay. And I love that you have a vision and a mission. I think everyone at this table has articulated multiple visions and mission statements for their projects and their legacies. So with that, I'm going to bring you up, Alberto, is that okay? Yes. Are you going to stay there? Okay. I'm just going to

Speaker 11 (00:17:11):

Be here.

Speaker 2 (00:17:13):

Do it. That's

Speaker 11 (00:17:13):

Cool.

Speaker 2 (00:17:14):

Cool. Thank you. Alberto

Speaker 11 (00:17:15):

Guild. Does this work? Yeah. Hey. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (00:17:22):

Let's see. Okay. I guess the best thing for me is just to talk about, I'm here for the magazine I do called My History is I come from my mother's Mexican. My father's a German who spoke Spanish and from East LA and both of them not educated. I don't come from an educated family. I had no educated friends. I never knew that you could go to college. I mean, you heard of it sort of like hearing of the White House. You knew it existed. And if somebody said, do you know what the White House is? You'd say like, what the fuck? Of course I know, but you don't really know anything. I didn't know about college, but I went to Vietnam. I'm a Vietnam generation, and at the time I came up, it was pretty clear I didn't want to go. So I went to junior college and went to a lot of junior colleges, did pretty well in school.

Speaker 11 (00:18:23):

I worked really hard. And then when I was done, I had to get a job and I became a construction worker, a carpenter eventually. But meanwhile, something had happened to me and that's that I fell in love with literature and started reading like a maniac. I had no idea. In those days there weren't creative writing programs. However, I think there were a lot more than I was aware. I just did not have any awareness of literature. In the Chicano world. There was only Luis Valez. The Theatro Sino came through town in Santa Barbara, went to school. There were things like that, but she'd gotten those. Publishing was rare and unheard of. And I didn't read literary books, who read literary magazines. I did not. But as I became an adult and started writing fiction, I learned there were literary magazines. And long story short, I did pretty good.

Speaker 11 (00:19:24):

I started publishing it Bang Nails. I put stories crazy, I mean all the time in the mailbox in the morning at five 30, so I could make it by six. And I just thought, if anybody knows who John Fonte is, I thought it was like a John Fonte you just mailed and eventually somebody would give you a lot of money, but they didn't give me a lot of money. But I did start getting published, and as time went on, I did pretty well. I had my books published by Grove Press, which I thought was amazing. As I got inside and upward into the world of literature, Grove Press, which is the most avant-garde mainstream press, or the biggest small press in the us, they really didn't know anything about Chicanos or about LA or about the West or about the southwest. My first book, typically they put a Sato cactus on the cover. I'm like, I had to tell him, well, not really.

Speaker 11 (00:20:44):

And I started feeling kind of lonely and I'm an original guy. No, I'm not really. But I did get why isn't, there's not even an editor here that I can talk to and have to explain why a ro cactus doesn't belong. Why you shouldn't put a woman, a flamenco dancer on the cover of my book. I have somebody like that that I could talk to and you can't because the dominant culture of literature is on the east. It's in New York, principally and Lin Boston, and then a few tangents. There was an era of creative writing where creative writing grew in the seventies as an alternative to the beat era was like if you look at beat era anthologies, most poets and writers don't come from schools. They were born someplace. Now when you see anthology, I was born at the Iowa Writers Workshop and that's it.

Speaker 11 (00:21:53):

So at some point I saw the problem that I was having, even with nice editors and I'm publishing, let's just say, I mean, I'm the New Yorker. I actually had to discuss things with the New Yorker that they didn't know and about Mexican-American culture, Chicanos, it wasn't Mexican. This isn't about a Mexican boy. I had to tell 'em that in their advertising. No, that's not correct. So my solution, and I say this as an activism and my activism, the way I see it is twofold. It's true that New York and the community that runs it, which is 98, 90 9% Anglo, wealthy, elite, privileged kids, I want my kids to be privileged. I want that. I would've done the same for them, but I did my best anyway.

Speaker 11 (00:22:58):

But they don't know, and their interests don't overlap with our interests. They don't care. They don't read Luis. They don't read a lot of us. And so I want to educate them and their attitude about us, by the way, is sort of that we're simple, that we're gang members or we're maids and things like that. Not too far off from Hollywood isn't far away. One of the reasons I was unique to them and was that all my characters are construction workers, generally speaking, and it was like anybody from growing up in the Southwest and in la, everybody, 75% of every Mexican and Chicano is a construction worker. Are you kidding? I'm going to have to explain to you why I'm doing that. It isn't an intellectual decision I made. I think I will write uniquely about construction workers who happen to speak Spanish. I mean really, they think that.

Speaker 11 (00:24:05):

So yes, it's to educate them that we're butchers. We do all kinds of jobs. We work in department stores. We do things that aren't just in the fields with the campesinos. We're not just bad. So yes, it's also that we have quality writers, and if you look at literary magazines in this country, the vast majority of quality literary magazines, especially now, they will put in their, let's say they publish 30 people and they'll have their black and they'll have their brown and they'll have their Asian, but 27 are going to be them. And they'll say, see, we do publish. So we get four slots a year in their magazines and they get a lot. And so it's like in a lot of ways, why should their focus be us? I really do see that. And so I say, let us have a magazine that the focus is us.

Speaker 11 (00:25:15):

Let us be the controller of what we want to say in terms of literature about us. Let us decide who is good and who is not good, not what you think by your stereotypes that is about us, the stories, the material, the quality, everything. Let us do this. That's what this magazine Wasatch is about. I will say on the other end of it, there's another side, and that's for us to see a lot of us because we don't have a lot. We're really trying to aggressively promote each other. We take everything and sometimes we need to say, no, you need to work harder. It needs to be better. And then you need a good magazine That isn't just what I always use as running metaphors. Look, if you can't run four laps a mile in less than seven minutes, no, you're not on the team.

Speaker 11 (00:26:25):

We can't have that. That's not what we do. And I mean that as a metaphor work. I mean as Luis know, I mean it's a lot of work. It isn't just one poem or one story. It's like you got a rejection, write 10 more stories. Just don't worry about your stories or your novel until you've written a hundred fifty, two hundred fifty pages. Yes, and maybe not that novel. Maybe the second or the third isn't that easy. Why should it be? It hasn't been easy for anybody, and it isn't also about what school you go to. It is I don't want in this magazine, it is. I don't want even know where you went to school or if you did. So that's what I do. That's what we such is is always such a, I would say is Iowa is 50% from the American West, which is Mexican American centric.

Speaker 11 (00:27:29):

So half the magazine is going to be somebody from Tucson, from Phoenix, from Albuquerque, from El Paso, from Santo, from la, from San Francisco, but of course the New Yorker. We'll publish somebody else here and there. We do that. We always have a couple of Anglos and we do all these things. I like that. My favorite Chicano writer is, do I like that kind of stuff? I have no problem with any of it, but this is about us. There are other magazines out. There's like maybe a thousand, so don't worry, you can't be in our magazine because you've got like 999 more we have won. And where the editor me, look for us, that's new. We look for good stuff by us, about us, for us.

Speaker 2 (00:28:29):

Thank you, thank you, thank you Dto Gil. Not just that we're not just that. I love what you said about being born as a writer in an era or a movement or a place. That's a really important thing to inform people about. Next we're going to hear from my Bay Area, buddy Michael War.

Speaker 12 (00:28:54):

Thank you. Give me a two minute warning, okay? Okay.

Speaker 12 (00:28:58):

Hello. Thank you all for being here. This by the way, is my most recent book. This is of poetry and protest from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, and it was published last summer by Norton. And when I appeared on Michael Krasner's forum on N P R for this book, he began the interview by referring to my introduction in the book. And it was a reference to me calling the book a tool. And I want to just share with you what he was referring to and why he posed, why he started the interview with that question. And this is the paragraph that I wrote as a lifetime practitioner in the arts, brandishing creativity, sometimes as a subtle and often blunt instrument for radical commentary and dreams of sculpting social transformation, I think of this book as a singular tool in a toolbox of many tools that will be lifted to help fix what L'S America.

Speaker 12 (00:30:14):

It is my intention to reflect the universe in which it is impossible for poets and poetry to exist in a social vacuum. Ultimately, there is no protective divide between the acts of the poet and the acts of the society and system in which they create the frequently automated brutality, unrelenting inequality, and senseless, unjustified, Amal police killings, confront and endanger each of us in some way at some point. This book is as much a call to action as it is a call to embrace the relevance and humanity of its creative content. So Michael Krasney was referring to that statement and specifically to me referring to the book as a tool. I don't think I gave him a very good answer in that interview. But what I did was surprise. I think everyone at the station that day by referring to memory, Hey, by referring to memory as a tool of transformation, and of course memory is not the only tool, but what our history is forgotten.

Speaker 12 (00:31:33):

When our history is disappeared and isolated from our current condition, then those acts of taking that history away, of taking that memory away, then they become a tool of oppression. And I want to also say that another tool of oppression, our lies, our fabrications, this is not new. What Donald Trump did not invent this, this is systematic. It is part of the taking away of history and taking away the lives, the value of these lives that aren't in the mainstream. Recently, the woman who made the accusations against Emmett Till, it was revealed over 50 years later that that was a lie. And today, what are we not hearing about? We are not hearing about police killings very much in the news today. The police killings have not stopped, but the telling of that story in our major media has stopped. And that's why it's really critical for us to tell that story, and that's what this book is about.

Speaker 12 (00:32:45):

So we have to use every creative tool that is available to us. Sometimes those tools are already made and within reach, but often those, they're tools that we have to create from scratch. So I was reminded of that interview with him on form when I read one of the questions that was posed as we prepared for this panel. And that question was where is the border between art and the pamphlet? So for me, it's an ever shifting border. It's an ever shifting line. I believe that while they are seldom the same thing, that a poem can be a pamphlet and a pamphlet can be a poem and a personal inflection in my life happened to me when I was in high school, and this was a critical moment in my evolution as a poet that the high school, I was at the black history teacher in that classroom, he gave us an assignment to write an essay on w e b, the Bo's black reconstruction in America.

Speaker 12 (00:33:55):

Now, I mean first of all, that's pretty heavy. And we were in high school reading that book, but it was the seventies, right? The Black Panthers were passing fires outside of my junior high school. But the thing is that I asked my teacher could I write my essay as a poem? And he had the sensibility and the consciousness to say yes. And so I wrote an essay. What I wound up writing was both an essay and a poem. So I see of poetry and protest. This book, by the way, it's on the Norton table so you can check it out. I see a poetry and protest in the tradition of the political pamphlet as well as the anthology of poetry that I stole in junior high, which was called 3000 Years of Black Poetry. When I stow that book, that's when I was introduced to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks of Nikki Giovanni of Ami Baraka of Victor Hernandez Cruz, and of Anonymous. I mean, that was another transformative thing that happened to me as a kid in high school. So for me, that book, 3000 years of Black Poetry remains a work of art that also spoke to me like a pamphlet that was distributed on the street. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:35:25):

Thank you, Michael. War under Time and everything. No pressure, Luis. I love what you said about the tool and the call to action, especially now more than our poetry is for many of us it's always been a survival mechanism, but I think it's just so telling. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that we're gathered here of all places right now. I know I did the intros already, but I'm going to take a little indulgence and say that for a very long time I followed this next guy around. I read him, I literally stalked him. I was reading going, will you be my friend? And he was always very gracious and very nice. And I will go out of the limb and say that I think I am one of the products or examples of many different types of examples and products of the work that he has done. Everything from being a fan girl to then being one of his published writers. So now I think he's kind of following me around a little bit, but I have just so much admiration and love for Luis Rodriguez. And so

Speaker 11 (00:36:33):

I want to start by saying that if you can on Saturday, we're going to have a candlelight vigil for free expression in front of the White House. Please come up because we want to challenge, but what we want to challenge, at least I feel what's important is what Michael and everybody else needs to be addressing the big lies because we all know everybody lies. But here's the problem, whether you know it or not, this whole country's built on a lie.

Speaker 11 (00:36:59):

And I am not saying I don't love my country, it's the only country I know, but that's what made me a writer activist to fight the big lies over our heads, the big lies with who we are as people, as indigenous people, as working class L G B T Q, every lie that has to be challenged. I'm going to speak to you as a native Chicano person native because my mother's RA and taro are in the chihuahua desert of Mexico, but they also go into parts of Texas and New Mexico. So when my family went from si Juez, Mexico when I was two and to the other side, we just went from my land to my land. People don't realize we have tens of thousands of years in this land. They put a wall and it doesn't change the fact that this is our land. You know what I mean?

Speaker 11 (00:37:48):

We're not immigrants, we're migrants, we're not immigrants. We're not, can't be. But that's what we're now, and I'm not saying that nobody else belongs here. We all belong here. However we got here, the one thing that isn't a lie is that now we have to forge a country where everybody feels that they're welcome and accept it and everybody can feel that this is the place in which we align our truths because we're totally disaligned as a native person, I have to say the whole basic idea of indigenous cosmology, and this is for all native people, native Americans, other ones across the continent and everywhere in the world, everybody's got native roots. No matter where you're coming from, is to align to nature in accordance with nature. Nature teaches you how to live, teaches you what to be careful about, teaches you about abundance, teaches you about the varieties of humanities and varieties of plants and diversity of life.

Speaker 11 (00:38:40):

It teaches you that it's natural and only society comes in and says certain people matter. Certain people are valuable, certain people got all the money, certain people are poor and suffering. And some of them might be people of color, poor white people, wherever it might be. So my thing is the big lie is what made me so hungry and so angry to be a writer. I started off not as a writer, I started off as an activist in the streets. I started off riot and getting maced. In those days it was mace. Now it's pepper spray getting beaten up. I started off in the Chicano movement. The Chicano movement brought me to life. I was a heroin addict. I was in the street. I was homeless. I was dead. Dead in my body, if you can understand that. And the Chicano movement brought me light and ideas and brought me fire.

Speaker 11 (00:39:29):

You know what I'm saying? That I could fight something that I was angry enough to say there is enough injustice in the world to keep me alive because I didn't have that before. And when you're in the streets at that level, you don't care if you live or die. That's why I could challenge everybody. I was telling that Gilberto, when I was in murders road at 16 years old do big guys came up to tried to cut my throat. People say, well, how did you do that? I didn't care if I died. That's what scared them. I stood up to them and said, come kill me. I dare you to kill me. If you don't, I'm going to kill you. And they got like, whoa, this guy didn't care. I didn't care. That's what made me dangerous. But guess what? I care. And that's what makes me dangerous now.

Speaker 11 (00:40:12):

And that's what we have to do as writers. We have to be writers who care, who have enough hanger and enough hunger to go out there and say, we're going to change this world. And we do it through our writing, through our poetry, through our stories, through the journalism that tell the truth. Because truth now, as they say is on the line. Truth is our battleground now it's all it has been. Michael is right. So I'm going to try to, I don't know how to do hashtags I would say, but if I did, I would say truth is our cause. That's what the writers, that truth is our cause. Hashtag truth is our cause. We need to make this the cause because the first thing the fascists do is get rid of the truth. And this is why we have to be as writers, the truth, our truth, the truth of our stories, our voices to make sure they all get heard.

Speaker 11 (00:41:01):

The diversity of voices. This is what humanity looks like. It looks like so many different things. And yet underneath each one of us, there's a commonality of loss, a commonality of pain, a commonality of struggle, a commonality of trying to get over as a human being. And we can all come together at that level. That to me is what's important and that's what we have to fight for as activist writers, wherever that might be. And that of course brings me to why I do what I do. I have the OCHA press for 28 years, which is amazing. Some of the press people out in the audience, and of course Michael War was with us from the beginning. And we've been doing this and it's now, it started in Chicago, which I'm very grateful to have say that I was in Chicago, I lived in Chicago, I got a lot of support in Chicago.

Speaker 11 (00:41:48):

We built a movement, we marry, we did a movement there with poetry that also said something. It wasn't just poetry, just to do it, to challenge the world, challenge the status quo, challenge ourselves to say that there's some vision to where we want go, what we want to do. The poetry slam that came out of there now is all over the world. But the press is also just about making sure that those voices and stories don't get lost. The ones that nobody wants to publish but us. You know what I'm saying? Because it's hard to get published in this world. I know. And so the is there. We have a center in the Santa Nan Valley called the bookstore, which if you ever go to San Fernando or come and visit, we're the only bookstore, art gallery and even filmed place in the San Fernando Valley, the northeast, the Mexican side of the valley, which is actually Mexican, central American.

Speaker 11 (00:42:39):

We're the only place for half a million people. There's no bookstores for them in the entertainment camp of the world. They can't even go to the movies. There's no movie house there. So we created this place so that this community can have a gathering place. And what happened when Trump got elected, we had several hundred people there, pissed off, angry. Some people were crying, some people upset, but we're going to do something angry that our families might be broken up. Many of 'em are going to be deported. Angry of not knowing what to do. One girl, the first girl to spoke, wanted to commit suicide. So I said, no, we're going to live to struggle through this. Our ancestors have been through worse. We've seen worse. Trump ain't nothing. We're something. You know what I'm saying? We are really it. And we're the ones that are going to make it happen.

Speaker 11 (00:43:26):

So for me, writer activism is our very life. There is no difference. There's no separation. You can't separate yourself. Put yourself out there as a writer, activist, be alive, have vision, have dreams that also carry 'em out. Talk, redo everything you got to do as everybody on this table does. The work that we do keeps us alive, but keeps our communities alive, keep this country alive. And that lie that this country was built on will go away because this is actually a beautiful country. It's a great country, but not because of the lie, because of the reality of it. With that everybody belongs. Everybody's beauties in their eyes, everybody's beauties and the way who they are, the way they really are, not the way somebody else today says as they should be. And that's what we're going to take to the period that we're in. We're going to change this world and we got it within our hands to do. Thank you very much.

Speaker 11 (00:44:20):

I am a working class person and like dago, I worked in that industries, I worked in steel mill, I learned all those trades before I was a writer. People didn't know I was a writer and I did all that. But here's what it is. I don't think there's a class divide that's real. I think it's one that's perceived and pushed down. There is no white working class. Anybody that says that is lying. There's one working class, it comes in, all colors comes in all genders and in all sexual orientations, that's the class that doesn't have to own nothing. That controls the big giant corporations and industries, the ones that have to work to make a live with people are telling white people you're different. Don't you think those white people who are suffering, who don't get a job that are trying to say that Trump is going to save, aren't going through what all the black and brown people and other people are going through.

Speaker 11 (00:45:08):

We're in the same boat. I tell people, I tell 'em, I talk to 'em as much as I can. We're in the same Titanic and we're not in the top row and they still die. We're at the very bottom. We know they died. So let's be clear, there is no white working class. There's one working class in this country and it comes in all colors and don't let Trump or anybody else tell you otherwise. You know what I'm saying? Because that's the divide. And that goes back from the start of the country when white people and black people used to be slaves together and used to run away and have rebellions together and somebody figure out, you know what, we're going to separate them. Blacks are going to be slaves forever. And whites will have so only slaves for a certain time. They'll get out and then they'll be used as slave. How do you say, controllers of the slaves. So this is what I would say. Don't let anybody divide the working class.

Speaker 11 (00:45:57):

I guess that's all true. But I think what we're really talking about, and it's unfortunate, but this country is based in racism, it's birth, and we haven't extricated ourselves from the two biggest racisms of this country, which are against blacks and against Mexicans. The Mexican one has gone on quite a long time. It's a history that isn't quite as well known, but it is 200 years of racism about Mexican people, Spanish lands and James K. Polk, the racist slave owning racists that took over the land from Mexicans. And that relationship hasn't changed. I do find it when people say working class in the media, almost invariably they only mean white people. A Mexican is never a working class. He's somehow Mexican. He never transcends this. And the black working class, black people, I even did it because that isn't, nobody talks about that. You go to union halls. So the bigger problem to me is racism. And boy, we could talk a long time. How do you do that? And I do think as long as we can't be open and have a dialogue about what the problem is. I mean now I sounds too simplistic, but yeah, I think it's not so much class. I think that the Trump revolt is racist period. I don't think it has anything to do with class.

Speaker 12 (00:47:56):

Well, one thing that I think where class does come into play is that we are living in a time where these are issues that we've been talking about for a long time, but historically things reach a certain point where they have a qualitatively different impact in many ways, none of it is new. It's been bubbling and the economy has reached a level where people, whenever this happens, people are more open to these racist tones and ideas, but also to fascistic ideas. And the point I want to make about class is that I think that we are in a period where literally there's an evolving, I think united front against fascism. I do think that we have reached a state in America where people are feeling it, where they are becoming concerned about basic democratic rights and that under those conditions there is the possibility of this united front. It's temporary, but the fact that the word fascism is even being spoken by a section of even the ruling class, I think is indicative of the state that we're in. And I was thinking about this a lot during the elections as well, but I just want to say that this is not in opposition to the point that's being made because the color line as Debo has called it, I mean that is the dividing that's a critical issue in American history right now because it's a tool that's used to divide us.

Speaker 11 (00:49:42):

Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 (00:49:44):

Okay. Oh hey, what's going? Hi. Did you have a question? Now

Speaker 13 (00:49:51):

I have a question for you, all of you where you all come out on a basic hands-on strategy for education. Because I do believe where there's crisis, there's opportunity. Healthy education has been under assault forever. I'm a big proponent of new freedom school, something that is organic that we control. We don't have people with these love jack of expectations of children of color. If any of you could give some practical tips or some of your experiences, I tried to sign up places I can't start my own school without can tutor. And I think that's what we're coming toward. I know where I'm from, our Delaware Valley area charter stuff is a done deal, but I don't mean in a good way. It's been modified and not for the safe of education. So peer experience, it's nice to hear you talk, but I just know when I leave there, I'm going to be

Speaker 11 (00:50:50):

Oh, that's true. Can I just say something really quickly?

Speaker 11 (00:50:55):

I really challenged the idea that you got to have all these college degrees and pay all that damn money, that debt and think that you're going to get anywhere. I think maybe the idea of having your own education, but I tell people if you're going to say you're not going to go to those schools, still educate yourself. Because the problem is people that don't want to go to school, they're not reading. They're not. No. Learn something. Go out and read. Get a library. Start your own school. I don't care if it's equated because the schools are the ones that are getting you in trouble. But learn things. That's the key thing for me. I didn't graduate from any college, but I'm learning all the time. I got a live like you wouldn't believe. But I'll tell you one of the reasons. I have four kids, two of my sons I want to talk about real briefly.

Speaker 11 (00:51:36):

One went to prison 15 years, can't get a job. Makes sense. Felonies can't get very hard to get a job. He's been working at it. I got another son that graduated from U C L A, Cuma laude, whatever that is. I don't even know what it is. Really good. Got an English literature degree. People might say that was not too smart. But he loves literature, he loves reading. He can't get a job. So I think education has to be advanced and expand and change the whole concept of it. Why go to all that depth and you still can't get a job. It's not working. What if we find a way to learn? But I would say for people doing that, learn, learn regardless of how you set it up, make sure you really learn.

Speaker 13 (00:52:16):

I

Speaker 2 (00:52:17):

Had mine was to the prior comment, so I feel like finish this one, then I'll return back to it.

Speaker 2 (00:52:25):

I really appreciate your question. I just wanted to chime in because I've worked in school reform for a long time and around community schools models. And I currently work for T N T P, the new Teacher project. And I think that now more than ever, writers and artists and people who have that lens and have that experience of that there are alternative educational models that a school like that image of the son who's struggling because of his prison background and the son is struggling even with a degree. So I think more people like us that are in those schools and teaching the professionals in whatever capacity through professional development, I don't think that's, it's going to take a while to deconstruct that, to completely destroy it. And the more of us that infiltrate those systems and try to help change them, I mean that's how I have found to make myself a little less anxious and depressed. So I just think to continue to do that is important.

Speaker 12 (00:53:18):

And I just want to say that we have to have a multitude of ways of educating and raising consciousness and bringing knowledge. I used the example earlier of I attended a school with the lowest reading rate in the entire state of California. That school was so bad, it doesn't exist anymore here in San Francisco, but I was a Jehovah's Witness. So all we did was read and write and speak. And so I graduated with people who could not read and write. I could, because of my family, I've lectured practically every major university, including the Kennedy School of Government. I won a national dominant award for writing. And so the reason I say that is because I was getting my education in a lot of different places. I often say that when I graduated from high school, that's when my education began. That's when Luis and I met at that moment in Los Angeles at a demonstration. I think this is a really critical point because we have to come at this where we are educating not just the people that we know individually, but we have the digital technology, we have the ability, this demonstration on Saturday. To me it's a classroom as well as a demonstration. And so we have to have this multitude of ways of raising consciousness and teaching everyone that we come in contact with.

Speaker 3 (00:54:55):

I'm going to find a savvy way to go touch this and then somehow go back to the class question. I had something to say and I don't want anyone to be depressed. So hopefully we'll have a positive one after that. But I think I want to