Snow, solitude, and ongoing struggles

So it was snowing a lot this past weekend--and it's coming again. For those of you in parts of the country where it doesn't snow very often, it can be so beautiful and serene. It can also be isolating and, what can I say, it often intensifies one's sense of aloneness. I'm not sure why this is so, except that it has something to do with wanting to share that experience of beauty as well as the "clean slate" that a snow-filled landscape seems to offer.

I try to do my part in the struggle "out there", the so-called real world of action and decisions where people's life chances are made and unmade. I also try to be honest about my limitations--about what I can and cannot do. Today was a day of affirmation in many respects. Today a local "Dream Act" organization and many of its constituent partners held a lobby day at the state capitol for school youth to rally and meet with legislators to try and convince them that as recent immigrants they, too, have a dream of attending college one day. These youth embody not only democracy, but what is best about this country. They are the latent potential and talent of our communities who are here with their families because, as I've said before, "we were there" in there homelands systematically changing their economies, the political and social structure of their societies, even their culture. But, through no fault of their own, they are a blank canvas upon which some of the worst elements of this country get projected. They want nothing more than to be like "us" and "we" hate them for it. There's some kind of self-loathing going on. Yes, we "Americans" give mixed messages--we say: "We want and need you to sustain our comfortable lifestyle by picking our food and working our factories, and building our houses and serving our food, but we don't want you to be our neighbors, or utilize social services, or have the right to be healthy or eat well or have insurance or, 'god forbid' get too educated!"

Unfortunately, contradictions like this are integral to the very foundation of this country. It's hard to call a place a true home if one cannot feel safe and respected. Of course we can demand it and we must continue do so, but it causes a restless psyche, this sense of both arriving and yet still having a long way to go. This is not something that only people of Mexican descent feel. It's shared by many immigrants. It's exacerbated by those who were here long before the so-called "founders" of this country. A few decades back, Chicanos saw in the label Mexican-American a sign of our second-class status in society. To be seen and respected as citizens we had to emphasize both our heritage and our legal status. Well, Chicanos may no longer be hyphenated Americans, but by almost any measure our community still doesn't enjoy equality. For those who think about this and feel the continual dis-ease of not fully belonging, we feel a need to qualify our status with quotation marks to signify our awareness of this condition. We're "American," or as some would say Americano, to signify linguisitically a broader sense of identity that is not fully aligned with official nationalism. We're stuck between the quotation marks, we're enmeshed in ambiguity, in suspended meaning. Sounds like we're in the same old place, no?

A friend has told me that I think too much--particularly when I'm down. That I'm going to drive myself crazy by trying to find answers that aren't as complicated as I think or fear they are. This could be true but I struggle to communicate with myself, with others, to make meaning of my life. Sure we all do. It's not that I think my internal struggle is any more important than the next person's, it's just that I am driven to make connections, to understand, to seek the truth of my life because I feel a need to. Okay, that's not a very coherent or logical train of thought. An emotional tautology?

At some point, I am going to have to tell you more about me if you are going to "travel" with me so you can understand where I'm coming from. I should probably stop for now because I am truly rambling, but I can say this much, which is not a claim to distinctiveness, but simply an attempt to connect to others: My life has been a constant search for connection--between myself and others, between my inner and outer worlds, between my fears and hopes. I want to feel whole and loved. I want a place to call home that feels safe and secure. A place where I am wanted.

Is that such an odd desire?

The bigger battle: Reflections on where we are

What follows is a copy of and editorial I just submitted to La Prensa de Minnesota. Staff and faculty from our office maintain a monthly column there to do our part to enhance the quality of public discourse by and about Latinos. It occurred to me after I wrote it that I may as well post it here as well because addressing what’s at stake in the daily battles being waged is what I wanted to share here next anyway.

As contributors to this column from the Department of Chicano Studies have noted over the last several months, our community faces numerous challenges, locally, regionally, and nationally. Be it educational success and access, economic, labor, or environmental justice issues, disparities within the criminal justice system, immigration reform, equitable access to social services, or just plain old respect from those we live, work, play or pray with (or in close proximity to), the unfortunate reality we are faced with is one that presents a perpetual challenge to the Latino community.

We are not alone.

Our struggle is a local and a national struggle. Our struggle is a continental struggle. Ours is an historic struggle of epic proportions. And, in many respects, the sheer size of it makes it a human struggle that gives it meaning beyond us; that is, it’s a universal struggle—for justice, for human and civil rights, for basic dignity and respect without which no definition of freedom, liberty, justice or equality can make sense.

All around the U.S., communities are struggling with how to respond to the continued Latinoization of the U.S. Fearful of change, threatened by cultural and linguistic difference, ignorant of how our well-being, our histories, and our destinies are intertwined, many small towns around the nation are reacting to change by trying to legislate a monocultural, monolinguistic, monochromatic, and monotonous world that targets vulnerable populations and further marginalizes them. It’s nothing more than child-like nostalgia for a simpler world of days gone by; which is to say, it’s people with privilege, power, and prejudice acting under the guise of democracy. All around the U.S., small, once homogenous communities, often built on indigenous lands and sites of former plantations, be it in Texas, New York, Illinois, California, Georgia, and the list goes on, have passed laws forbidding the employment of and rental of housing to gente sin papeles. This act of going after those who are labeled as non-American with such lust and fervor is often performed in the name of patriotism. This targeting of those who are perceived as not-American is an un-American act par excellence, because it is, in my opinion, a betrayal of what is authentically American—a continental identity that was forged in the cauldron of colonialism.

It makes me sad. But ignorance also enrages me when it is defended as self-righteousness, because it is based on a false sense of a “natural’ order. It privileges those with money and papers because these “things” are seen as the basis of power and legitimacy. It disenfranchises those whose realities have been shaped by “our” national policies of both past and present. These are policies that have systematically destroyed local economies, self-sustaining agrarian systems, the communal ownership of lands, and autonomous communities not organized around capitalism. In their place, what has been propped up are economies and powers structures that contributed to the proliferation of maquiladora economies, military regimes supported by oligarchies, systematic efforts to subvert democratically elected governments, and which support the intense repression of people organizing for political and social justice.

As an educator, I have no choice but to have hope. But I am not naïve. One does not plant seeds without believing that they can sprout something beautiful and useful.

We need to remember: We are not alone.

We have each other. A beautiful community of passionate, committed, hard-working people who have justice on our side. Real justice transcends papers of any form, documents or money. Real justice appeals to moral laws and natural rights that should be afforded to all because of our common humanity. I do not believe we are alone in our struggle, for there are others all over the world who have experienced similar historical trauma and who stand strong, not just to survive, but to pursue justice so they may thrive.

I don’t mean to or need to romanticize our community. In fact, to do so, would be to foster another kind of ignorance. We must be at our best to make change. Thus we must be vigilant in holding high expectations of each other. Not only must we be there for each other in recognizing that a wrong done to one is a wrong done to all, we must also recognize that we have many allies in this struggle. We cannot be agents of social change in whatever work we do unless we believe that the capacity exists for more people to accept the fundamental principles of fairness and equity than there are those who would deny them to others. These bridges of human understanding and common cause exist now as they always have. It is our job to become master engineers at building those bridges so that the walls of ignorance become useless, ineffective and relics of the past.

On Bulges, Bikes, and Bigger Battles

I was telling a friend the other day that I feel like I really need to lose at least 20-25 pounds before I begin this trek. One part of me thinks this is a perfectly reasonable goal because I am confident that once I get into my exercise routine the pounds will melt away. While I have been exercising some there isn't a regimen that I'm following just yet. I am definitely one of those people whose weight has fluctuated over the years. To be sure, the sedentary lifestyle of a professor / administrator doesn't lend itself to burning too many calories during the workday, even if I do feel like I'm constantly scrambling to meet deadlines and running all over campus to attend meetings. But, in my early 20s when I was doing really hard physical labor I also gained a lot of weight--overindulgence in junk food and beer. I lost about 50 pounds back then just from doing sit-ups and running. Going back to running was a return to an earlier love. In high school, before I took a job in between my sophomore and junior years, I would often run the six miles home. At times I raced the Old Clinton Avenue bus from downtown to Denver Harbor to see if I could beat my friends and sisters home.

Running became a passion for several years, and I participated in a few not-too-well-planned out marathons, including the very first Houston-Tenneco Marathon held in the early 1980s. Over the years my time got better with each effort. One of my best times was in the 1986 New York Marathon. Don't go looking at the record books, I was never competitive; it was all about finishing not placing. So a 3:35 freezing cold and adrenaline inspired time was pretty darn good for me. But my first marathon experience wasn't even planned. I was living in Montrose with my good friend Anthony Reilly and he and I would take our jogs around Allen Parkway. A couple of days before the marathon we decided, what the hell, let's do it. I remember that it was a double loop course and when I came around the 13 mile mark I saw him in front of me walking and searching me out. When we locked eyes we just laughed and silently agreed that, yeah, we had given it a valiant effort and could say we ran in the race even if we only ran half of it. I don't think either one of us had ever run that far before. I did run cross-country for a while in high school, but when it was deemed necessary for me to get a job to help pay my tuition, that sporting venture was dropped. Over the years, I would try out for football (a disaster because of my small size) and baseball (a fiasco because of the small-mindedness of our coach). Needless to say, there would be no letter jacket for me.

I ran in graduate school but the routine was lax because it was at this time in my life that I "came -of-age" politically, and learning how to dig in and take a stand proved to be much more important than the individualized sport of running. But it's importance as a source of vitality would come back to me when I needed to dig deeply within my emotional and spiritual reservoir to survive a lonely year as a visiting professor at Brown University in '95-'96 (see pic at Kerouac's grave). I would run in the snow and round and round the track of the indoor gym to stave off isolation and despair. It worked. I came back to Texas very trim and toned, and very much aware of just how Tejano I was--and happily so!

I can't say that I've had a lifelong relationship with bikes. In a family of 8 children it's not like we all owned our own. They tended to be communal and generational as they made their way down the entire sibling chain. I remember us younger ones had a tricycle or two we shared, my two older sisters had big blue bikes, one we would later use for paper routes, and I remember the bright orange Stingray bike my brother earned when he was in high school selling flower seeds or some such item door-to-door. He was always so good about setting a goal for some prize or another through his salesmanship. I recall the nice 8-track stereo he got a year or two after that. Of course, I was strictly prohibited from riding that bike. Naturally, that didn't stop me from taking it around the block when I knew I could do so before he came home. And naturally, it would lead to disaster one day when I came barreling down the sidewalk, hopping the street curb at the end of one block and bouncing onto the street (which was so cool because this bike had front shock absorbers) and ran full speed ahead into the side of a car that had pulled right into my path. I flew off the bike and landed on his hood with a big thump that made a dent and then rolled off the other side. I didn't have the luxury of thinking about the cuts and bruises from the accident. I saw trouble from two directions--the driver because of the dent on the side and top of his car, and then the damage that was done to the crumpled Stingray whose long front wheel forks now seemed to have the elbows of a cricket. The driver was both mad and afraid as he hopped out and began yelling at me. For a moment I though he might hit me so I asked if he wanted me to go get the cop whose car was parked at the Dixie Maid malt shop across the street. When I said this I think we both assessed the situation and decided we'd better cut our losses. I was worried that the parents might have to end up paying for his car. He probably realized that he might be liable for not approaching the intersection with more care. So he said something to the effect that I should be more careful and took off. With him gone I began to let the next level of fear sink in as I saw how badly damaged the forks, the wheel, and the handlebars were damaged. In true Mendoza kid fashion, I took that bike home and tried my best to twist it back into shape in the hopes that I would never have to tell my brother that his new bike had, uh, been really broken in that afternoon. It didn't work, of course, and it was one of those evenings when you're glad you have parents there to keep fraternal violence from getting out of hand.

This incident may have had something to do with me hooking up with a cousin of my next door neighbor for a while who ran a sort of chop shop for bikes out of my neighbor's garage. I didn't steal any bikes but I did learn how to disassemble, reassemble and paint them in various configurations, like so many bikensteins that went on to live another life in a new and improved form.

I can only recall owning two other bikes since that time. A ten speed in my mid 20s that I would ride to my parent’s house on Sunday afternoons--a good 20+ miles each way. But going across town on Houston streets really requires a road bike, and I gave it up after a while because of flats I'd pick up going over railroad tracks and pothole riddled streets. I mail ordered a pretty cool road bike about 6 or 7 years ago that I used to go on long rides down mission trail in San Antonio, alone or with my colleague Rudy Rosales. When I moved here a few years later, I left it behind with him to let his niece use it.

This has turned into a long post, so I'll pick up on the issue of bigger battles in my next post.

Why do this? How you can help...

Beyond what I've explained in the first posting, I'm doing this because I feel the need for a big challenge, for a life-transforming experience. Maybe it's my very own mid-life crisis. Hey, there are worse things one can do! To be sure, I'm at an age where one begins to take stock in what the sum of one's life has been, to wonder if you've done all you want to do, and what's left undone. At the very least you feel compelled to start a list of all that you still want to accomplish so you won't have any regrets. It's an unfinished and long list for me. This fits in that category of doing something a little crazy, but which I think can also fulfill several objectives at once.

For quite a while now I've been wanting to really test my writing abilities--to finally discover whether or not I have it in me to write creatively. Mas o menos I've been able to write for an academic audience, but I always go back to that idea of being a writer I had when I first encountered Chicano literature: To be able to convey my/our "authentic" experiences to readers, Chicano and non-Chicano alike, in some kind of fashion. I don't want to romanticize authenticity here, I just mean I want my writing to be real, to matter. Of course I want it to be good in some way, too. I don't think I'll ever be able to truly be free in my writing if I don't first write through the lens of experience. In this way, I think I'll be less self-conscious about the creative and aesthetic elements because I can focus on tangible experience.

Something else: From the outset, I've thought that this project might lend itself to something else very tangible. As you can imagine, as a professor I'm very invested in educational opportunities for Chicanos/Latinos. Here in Minnesota, more so than I ever had to think about before, we always have to think about the pipeline of students. This is why I work with a Chicano Charter School in St. Paul (Academia Cesar Chavez, www.cesarchavezschool.com/) and a Latino afterschool program in S. Minneapolis (La Escuelita, www.laescuelita.org). While being on the board of these organizations doesn't lend itself to working with students firsthand, it does keep the issues in front of you and creates the opportunities to support institutions and staff that can make a real difference. With that said, I want to ask each of you to consider "sponsoring" this ride of mine by pledging a certain amount for each mile I ride. Every cent of the money will go to students at La Escuelita and students who major in Chicano Studies at U of M. I don't have the mechansim set up yet to take pledges or one-time donations, but I hope to soon. The map below is my latest route. Via highways it's about 7,350 miles. While I don't plan on riding along highways, this will give you an idea of the distance so you can start calculating how much you want to commit!

Can I do this?

No doubt, this journey will be one huge personal and physical challenge to me. Though I harbor faint memories (illusions?) of being athletic, I can't fool myself about what I need to do to make this trip--about how far I am from being ready and how far I need to go. And yet, in what I hope is not just an exercise of the imagination, I like to think that that my own struggle to realize this journey can be seen as a metaphor for the journey and challenge this nation must undertake to make itself right again. At best, then, it will be a journey of reconciliation between the ideal and the real that is premised on the need to confront certain truths about and limits with my/our present condition. My hope is that A Journey Across Our America will be not only my story, but the story of many whom I encounter who are both part of the problem as well as the solution. No doubt my voice will be foregrounded here, but I hope to offer much needed insight from voices that aren’t often heard in formal media venues.

It's mid-February and I have to get serious about preparing myself. Part of that preparation is about writing regularly, about preparing to expose myself, my fears, hopes, disappointments, the pain and loneliness I'm sure to experience even as I anticipate big rewards in the energy, hopes and ideals of people. So, my next few entries will be practice runs for me as I share my efforts to get in shape through exercise, eating healthier, and being disciplined.

Below is a map of the route I was going to take if I had a year to do this. It looks like I'll only be able to do this for six months, so I'll definitely have to modify the route. At this point, I think I'll go into the southwest but focus most of my time in the midwest, south, and east coast where the demographic changes have been most intense. (NOTE: I've since changed the route--see above maps for the latest route.)