Immigrating Without Borders

     I immigrated from Albuquerque’s city life to a quieter Santa Fe.  Santa Fe is 50 some odd miles north of Albuquerque along the Camino Rael; the same byways of the original Spanish colonizers.  This is the town of my formative years.  The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos.  The place where I would rush my homework after school to maximize the day light I had to play pick up basketball, baseball, and football with the barrio kids.  The desert mountain refuge that allowed me to ride my tank of a street bike on seemingly endless dirt trails, winding through chamisa fields and piñon tree mazes.  It was in hind sight a major blessing because it shrunk my bad influences.

    Santa Fe is the mountain town that can move, when necessary, with a city’s pace.  Santa Fe in the 1980’s was a place that gave me an expanded understanding of New Mexico’s lifestyles.  It also opened my eyes to people of different cultures.  Santa Fe gave me more opportunities to see integrated spaces than Albuquerque.  It is also a city that has lived up to its slogan, “the city different”, and is even more different now as I see through middled age eyes.  The streets are nearly the same.  The buildings mostly familiar.  The smells resurrect youthful memories.  The people, the ambiance, the attitude are all impactfully different.  The most accurate way of describing this feeling is to say that I am an outsider in a place I once felt I belonged to. 

    I don’t want to write with a victim mindset, and I want to honor the observations I feel now.  The home I knew is tainted.  And I understand that what I may find tainted, others obviously find evolved.  As I walk through the plaza area, I recognize how it is no longer functional.  It isn’t a downtown as much as it is a historic Disney-like playground for touring Texans.  I have to be more accurate and share that Santa Fe’s tourists are clearly comprised of so many more populations than Texans, but this hurt I feel resonates through that mild prejudice towards Texans.  I think it points to the privileged hypocrisy of legislating against Brown culture in its impoverished form but romanticizing its Southwestern spin.  It might be disgust for the best of both worlds they epitomize where they get to despise most immigrant Mexican people and vacation in New Mexican quaint culture sanitized of anything truely New Mexican other than a traditional meal here or there.  Santa Fe has grown into a tourist destination.  

    Of course it is both and.  Many state government offices are nearby and the national hot spot is a gold mine for tourist dollars.  I am talking about New Mexican functional.  I am talking about the New Mexico Rael not the New Mexico True.  I cannot see New Mexican faces.  Even when I think I am seeing New Mexican faces they are really Mexicano faces.  I am writing about this evolution as a way of understanding that the culture and conditions I have aren’t anything I should think I can persist.  The New Mexico I was raised in is going away.  I am proud of belonging to this fading flavor of humankind.  

    I come to this conclusion after some small experiences as an adult.  I can’t know what Santa Fe was like for adults when I was a child and so maybe New Mexico as I know it isn’t going away, it is possible that I am going away.  Regardless I recall this itchy event that sits in my mind.  I walk into a distillery.  This distillery is in a renovated part of the city that used to be an empty Rail area.  It used to be a shortcut into downtown at the furthest part of south downtown Santa Fe.  This place is trendy.  It looks like what I remember Denver being.  It is decorated with modern  everything.  The place is nearly empty and I enjoy a pour of a craft gin.  After around 2.5 hours of work, I don’t need another gin, but I also find it surprising how I have not been asked if I needed anything.  I let this observation simmer as coincidence and chalk up the poor service to bad timing.  I rationalize away my typical feelings of being discriminated.  And some of it is that a part of me appreciated being left alone.

    Then my girlfriend arrives and I note the place has filled with happy hour customers.  The wait staff that I encountered are the same people, but entirely different personalities.  I walk to get some water from a water station and look around noticing the people who have filled the front area.  I stand curiously and scan each face.  I gradually have an awareness and some level of feeling stunned.  I am socially disoriented because every patron is Anglo.  I have a surreal feeling of being a visitor.  Not only a visitor but a nuisance because now I have that long lingering self-doubt that lies to me and says mentally that I don’t fit in here.

    I had just come off the mountain and I was not matching the implied dress code.  I was in comfortable bottoms, a non-matching mid layer sweater, hat hair, and tennis shoes.  I made a second round of rationalization, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt.  Then a group of scraggly, un-groomed, tennis shoe and torn jean wearing anglos sat at the table next to me and my partner.  I note that they now get the attention of 2 servers.  Then I can no longer do the injustice to myself and realize that it may not be discrimination but the Santa Fe that embraced me is not on this side of town.  I could write another couple of hours taking some emotional ownership for what happened to me in this brief encounter with the city of my youth.  I save that for another day.  I think more importantly I have to continue to see these American refugees as finding a quieter and nourishing place, just like my mom and I back in the 80’s.

Santa Fe the landscape is not very different and Santa Fe the people are being inundated by the afflicted and possibly fatigued American Rat Racer.  I understand that being aware of the classism this has and continues to create will likely be something I can only write about because hanging on to a New Mexico that resembles me is my romance ready to be steamed rolled by modernization.  I don’t recognize this Santa Fe, and like its gin I am only a recipe derived from its local ingredients, and susceptible to mixing with a variety of ingredients from all over the globe.  I grieve the Santa Fe that raised me, and I learn to be hopeful despite the perceive expulsion. 

Feliz Dia del Doctor Rey

On my favorite holiday, I’d like to revisit some words from Saint King Jr.  Without getting into the details or context of this prompt, let me answer his simple question.  What is my life’s blueprint?   I have years of contemplation.  I have sat with plenty of emotions to stir the heart and force me to consider my constitution.  So as much as I want to get lost in this question I am going to try and keep it simple.

When building a structure most projects begin with a design.  The analogy implies we start life with a plan.  And I didn’t, that I know of.  The vision of my structure changes frequently.  My blueprint is not a design of what I hope my life can be, but who I have maintained to be.

 

Who I am maintaining is respectful of who I have been and who I still have an opportunity to shape.  The three core principles Dr King Jr mentions are belief in self, excellence through achievement, and being beautiful.  I cannot say that these qualities have always been apart of my design.  At times I have not had any of these.  These times are rare.  A majority of my life has been holding some of these in scope, and when the spirit finds me, I have all three. 

I am worthy of kindness.  I have learned to add self-valuation slowly.  I grew it out of a desperation to be extraordinary, with the paradoxical balance of knowing I can disappear.  I know the unit of measure here is dignity.  When I think about this quality in terms of who I am, I think it is in believing that I am worthy of kindness.  I think understanding that my appearance might default stereotypically as brown and suspicious; more as a young adult.  Now as I grey, I feel it is tapering and I might be seen more as older.  I have a history of vetting perceptions.  I have learned to function out of a self-concept that forces me to minimize comparison and rely on competency.  I don’t necessarily shine, but I am durable.  I am not invincible, but I will often be impactful.

 

I would like to thank Dr King for helping me to appreciate, once again, the need to achieve.  After an early childhood rooted in aspiration and accolades, in middle adulthood I resisted greatness.  I thought this was a vice.  I can now reframe the idea of achievement as a dignified excellence.  I have a grounding in a family filled with athletes who taught me to practice.  I had a grandpa who said, “measure 2 times, and cut once.”  When impatient he would bark with a New Mexican accent, “Do it right, or don’t do it all”.  Practice helped me understand that being good is only a doorway, stepping into the room and finding the next entrance is diligence.  Practice means learning something so that it can be repeated with quality.  I don’t mix in aspirations or trophies with this understanding of achievement . I think I measure my experiences with the unit of measure of dignity.  The accomplishment is what Dr king might describe as the beauty in my soul.  My blueprint helps me have an endearing appearance, or how I have learned to see my soul.  I don’t check my status as a human, and this helps me practice the first quality and have self-belief.

 

My faith has engrained a communal orientation.  My blueprint is for building a person that must contribute to the greater good of all.  This is key piece to my blueprint.  Dr King frames this as being beautiful. Throughout my life I had the Catholic voices of the profound in my minds ear.  This is a call to sow beauty.  Since the unit of measure is dignity, beauty is not aesthetic, it is nutritious.  The façade is unnecessary, in favor of a soul that inspires.  I was raised in a family that treated me as beautiful.  This allows me to understand how I can steward others.  

I am under construction.  I am still a work in progress.  I am remembering that during the project I must take my eye off the prize and look at the blueprints.

I am not as shiny as Saint Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and I am learning to be just as soundly constructed. 

 

Disappointment, shame, and other vitamins and minerals of the soul

 I came across some emotions as I learned about a family member who shared how they payed for a cleaning service.  Disappointment surfaced in me in a way that I realize is not healthy.  And I know the feeling is an essential aspect to my human experience, a real response from the bowels of my limbic system.  A gut feeling.  I am irritated by the idea that people chose not maintain and clean their home and delegating this life chore to a sub class of people.  I judge and cannot unsee this as an irresponsible act of paying another person to clean me as “serviceable”.  I know this is a judgment on my part, and the pain this concept creates in me is a reminder of the idea that my grandmother’s brilliance was distracted and her creative vibrance was derailed by the irresponsibility of a class of people who lured her away from aspiration, to clean their messes.  Not only to clean their messes, but to clear time so they could find luxurious activities, selfishly satiating their lives.  Is this fair of me to surface these darker emotions.

I don’t want to create shame,  I know the effects of shame and I know how it cannot be synthesized by our hearts.  And it is still useful.  In holding on to this paradox of shame and its utility, I find that it might be a vitamin to our soul.  Something essential to our growth but equally something that cannot be absorbed by us, our bodies.  This is a seed for meditation.

Shame does not seem to be a condition that should be transferred, and even the idea of sharing it might need to be avoided, in favor of transcendence.  The root of all soulful vitamins might be to dissolve the compounds and bonds of trauma, pain, and grief to release the healing, their nutritious cathartic energy of grace.

The healing is mine.  The healing is loving through the disappointment.  The cathartic energy is being able to transcend the paradoxical encounter of shame and the moment, so that I love the other in front of me, before I resort to shaming.
 

Pedagogy of the Mestizo

I want to teach my culture to and with those who appreciate the legacy of heritage.  I did not understand, in my own proverbial backyard, there is an organized and professional way to learn to do this. Through my understanding of Chicano Studies I did not consider that I might contribute my own self-labeled Chicano journey to this program.  Me, as a young learner, treated knowledge as preparation for a trade.  University sowed the ideas of discovery into my mind, growing an authority, allowing me to share knowledge beyond a career.  My maturity and hardship inspired me to transcend my learning into a creative service through counseling. I am once again sharpening my learning, hoping to sharpen my contribution to my communities by giving back an organized and vetted perspective on what created me.  I feel very unworthy and know what Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and New Mexico did to me is worth researching and replicating.   

I spent hours with people seeking care for behavioral, lifestyle, and relationship healing.  They were looking for answers to miseries, as if they didn't have the answers intrinsically, at minimum nearby, or even with the possibility that an answer didn't exist yet.  I have a background in counseling, and strong desire to shrink the social gaps mestizo communities are closing.  I have a desire to turn this tour of duty in Albuquerque’s social battle for wellness into an ethnography.  I learned that communal wellness through the vocation of counseling alleviates individual relationships.  Now, I’d like to transcend those individual experiences into a map of patterns for the potential of healing groups, through ideas.  I would like to contribute concepts for healing where in counseling I felt I was providing a smaller step, maybe relief. 

I find counseling, when done well, addresses the ways we are perceiving that we are not lovable.  And it might be important to quickly note that there are mental health diseases and dysfunctions that can't be reasoned away using this understanding. By reducing my mental health training down to working through a few hard knox lessons in self-love, I am not trying to minimize or overlook any forms of medically based modalities. I am trying to address the more humanistic and collective experiences with hardship.  The common pain-filled angsts troubling populations that need support and attention but not necessarily the clinical treatments and prescriptions, are opportune topics for research. 

I would like to present or describe how Love, as a cultural trait, is an essential nutrient for agency.  Cultures that build agency into their pedagogy know how to heal and thrive.  Love orientates us towards harmony. Harmony in a communal form is culture done well.  Culture done well becomes heritage, and defining “well” is what I hope to discover.  I want to explore and map the Love qualities found in my mestizo heritage.

The mental health field is a vocational way of contributing attributes of wellness to a community and it is not my preference for pedagogy.  Through my introspection and discernment on how and what could help me grow into the man the world might need, God might expect, and most importantly who my grandma invested in, I realized the ultimate pedagogy was in the modesty of their lives.  A lifestyle of civic duty, religious loyalty, resourceful sustainability, communal dependence, and within a lower class.  I want to share this pedagogy.  

I want others to know that learning does not necessarily mean having to split atoms.  I want to share that learning to be communal might be just as world changing as putting a rocket into space.  The modesty of the New Mexican is overshadowed by the provocative celebrity of the brilliant jet setter.  The meritocratic modalities should not be the only orientations that we have to offer our learners.  What I hope the Chicano Studies program can challenge me to do is organize my desire to package lessons of modesty, mostly in the form of love, into a curriculum of culture.

I am curious about integrating my analytical skills, mental health training, and passion for the stewardship of my heritage's traditions.  I want to focus this curiosity on finding patterns for cultural wellness. I want to participate in the ethnography of my New Mexican lifestyle by leveraging it as a case study for this exact pattern seeking.  I want to explore this ethnography through the Chicano lens.  The Chicano lens gives me the closest prescribed vision to articulate and set scope for what heritage means for me. I align with the perplexities brought out by the Chicano movement, particularly the identity struggle, civic stewardship, and a intellectual potential for shaping Latin communities.

   

I am talking about treating these identified patterns as medicinal qualities.  I want to re-align learning with culture in a way that brings agency to traditions being overshadowed. I want to align our recent ancestral traditions with contemporary tools not to regress in lifestyle but to enhance the mestizo gaps in cultural authority.  I want to contribute to this legacy in peer reviewed and criticized ways.  I want to orientate some mindsets so we are staring into the heart of healing by suggesting cultural medicines. 

That brings me to this request.  I want a formal platform for describing or shaping these patterns in a way that can mature them into something presentable.  I aspire to validate the patterns of humanistic traits expressed through a unique Latin flavor.  I want to contribute to the legacy of Mestizo minds.  I hope to learn how to teach the human experience through a topic that provides more familiar and intimate pedagogy for peoples of Spanish Mexican origins.  I want to learn to write my ideas so that the qualities  found in my modest family systems can be packaged as reliable.

And with this I put one small step towards an education in Chicanismo.

Morbid Manipulation

 I have been keeping up with the conflicts around the world as reminders for living simply and humbly as a small token towards shrinking my culpability in these global conditions.  As I have been staying aware of the Palestinian struggle, I came across a synchronous intersect between my trauma interests and insight into the Arab injustices being morbidly manipulated to fuel a long lived punishment of Palestinian communities.  I felt it important to clear a little space on my small soapbox to contribute to the algorithm.  I have a Palestinian bias knowing that being against Israeli policies is not being against Jewish peoples.  I also understand that taking sides is not what is needed in this complicated situation. But collaboration is.  I can only grow more aware of what I can do to shrink injustice understanding balance has a formidable opponents. 

Conflicting Changes - Part 4

 Part 3

Where did the ability to self abuse originate?  

If I take a critical look at the people in my barrios that perpetrated on the homes, bodies, and minds of their neighbors, their motive seems to be some disillusioned type of prosperity.  In most cases the prosperity was a way to afford addictions.  In my narrow understanding of why someone would break into a home and rob, it sadly would be to convert the goods into drugs.  It was the drug dealer who chased some perverted vision of prosperity.  The drug dealer from my narrow understanding of dealing, could sell poison to a neighbor because they desired a better class of living. Granted these explanations are the simplest and narrowest of conclusions they don’t deviate too far from the thorough versions.  I thought self abuse was a cultural trait.  Then I learned more about the opioid crisis. 

The Sackler family shares the same perversion as “Diego the dealer”.  Despite the sophistication and education of Richard Sackler, his desire for prosperity motivated him to sell poison to his neighbor.  And like “Diego the deal
er” he’d argue that he wasn’t poisoning anyone, rather he wasn’t the irresponsible one.  Providing poison shouldn’t implicate someone in the actions of the consumer.  What the consumer does with the prescribed compound is their responsibility.  A pharmacist and “Diego the dealer”, some brown sociopathic person capable of consciously delivering poison to a person, is not very different from Richard Sackler.  The scale to which each of these men are unfortunately working to increase profits are not comparable.  The corporate dealer of chemicals is on a scale far greater than “Diego the dealer”.  The end goal of both is, maybe power, status, visibility, prestige, vanity, or prosperity.   The goal reflects a human trait, greed.  Brown people aren’t the deviants anymore than other peoples.  Brown consequences sadly are more harsh though.  When I look at my barrios and grieve the way we can treat each other, I can no longer say this is a brown thing.  This self destruction is a human thing. 

Now for the major difference.  Where these 2 men are not the same is in the eyes of My America.  “Diego the dealer” is a different and apparently more deviant type of poisoner.  When “Diego the dealer” is discovered to be poisoning people he is imprisoned.  Unlike Richard Sackler, a man who camouflaged himself in a pharmacists smock was able to poison globally.  I don’t know what type of trait creates this disparity in perspective.  My lazy self resorts to bigotry, racism, and oppression.  Republican’s likely have some acrobatic philosophy to rationalize how this disparity could be sensible.  Democrats might use a different type of evasion to distance their culpability by suggesting they were only functioning in the rules and laws that are mandated.  I think it is far more important for me to emphasize how “Diego the dealer” saddens me.  I think the only way to describe this is disappointment.

10 years ago I might have gotten stuck on the injustice for how the Sachler family didn’t have to unravel their family, throw away their freedom, nor pay any substantial consequence for their savagery.  Today I try and recognize how I am being “Diego the dealer”.  Who am I poisoning?  What is my desire motivating me to abuse my neighbors?  I can’t simply vent about Richard, I have to find the pain I am running from.  I have to find the pain that feeds my desire in a way that might be growing my potential to be greedy.

Conflicting Changes - Part 3

Part 2

The darker aspects of my culture are simply expressions of communal pain.  Without diving into excuses or reasons for class structures in My America.  My America being the  America in my head.  I have to see how inferior or maybe less desirable my peoples are.  I had to accept early on that beans and chili were considered poor foods. I had to accept that drug dealers weren't safe, tattoos were shame filled, and when you couldn't afford rod iron for windows a piece of wood would keep robbers out.  I sadly write that the community I was raised in beat the shit out of itself.

I have to come to terms with the self hatred.  In this context the self is our neighborhoods, our homes, and our streets.  To say it in another way we would rob ourselves.  This isn't absolute and it was a proportion that does NOT reflect the common home in my barrios.  And it is a measurable toxicity.  Looking back it seems really risky for people in my communities to invest in anything nice.  It meant taking the risk that it would eventually be stolen.  The dark markets were significant.  We often had things stolen.  

For my sanity I have to remind myself and you the reader that this toxicity does not define us or give validity to stereotypes.  It gives fodder for the convenient ways My America rationalizes its laws to alienate me.  It uses this toxicity to build a case against trusting me.  It leverages this toxicity to paint a fearful picture of who I possibly can be.  And it is not who I entirely am.  It is who I am when I am wounded, desperate, and surviving. 

I am numb when I think about how far behind I was intellectually.  My intelligence by My American standard was measured by how many "A's" I could put on the little card I took home to my mother.  I did not realize that what was important to discover wouldn't be integrated into my barrios. Despite being near nuclear minds and physicists with leading ideas, we were valued more for our barren land and maybe expendable lives.  I wasn't asked to experiment or adventure into sophisticated concepts or technologies.  I wasn't invited to use my imagination to the extents that other classes of people were.  I was taught to compete and at its worst, fight.  I was not being taught to learn, instead I was being groomed by the vocation monster.  The vocation monster was the human resource machine that My America created to enrich itself.  The vocation monster continues to feed on Latin lives, seeing the people with my skin tone and in my barrios mostly as labor. We simply are Consumable.

And the conflicting darkness in this is believing that I wasn't designed to excel and lead.  My barrios were filled with laborers who might have let their curiosity dry out.  The fatigue of the mundane and remedial drove my communities to be subservient.  The darker side of the Hispanic is in its alignment with an Anglo authority that still to this day resents sharing authority with Latinos.  This submissiveness leads towards a self policing of the toxic kind. The darker side of the my barrios is the division between the Hispanic and the Chicano.  We divided ourselves and added a handicap to our self protection from the disease of colonization.  Like scar tissue, on our brown faces.

Part 4