Chicano More than a Label - Part 3

Part 2

What impact do the labels people of Spanish lineage chose, have on the delivery of mestizo values. Labels in the form of identities convey a value set. What are the consequences of having ambiguous labels? Maybe a different way of seeing the same question is to look into the heterogeneity of the homogenous. The Spanish came and we believe they were a homogenous group, and we know they weren’t. The utility of this homogeneity is becoming more and more useless. I think this homogeneity is exploited by the hegemonic trait that comes with it. The sad through-line in this topic is the value of being white. 

I find my cultural labels having ambivalence.  I am feeling implicated in the corruption of a humanism under the display of actions of groups that share the Hispanic labels but loosely share the values. Chicano gives me a very clear boundary around what type of Spanish descendant I am. The polarity of American politics under today’s conditions stirs my curiosity for learning more about these ambivalently labeled identities. Who is leveraging these labels and what pernicious values are distorting the momentum of my labels. Focusing on Chicano and Hispano for now, I find an emotional wedge growing in me resulting in an itchy resentment building for Nuevomexicanos who are avaricious, propagating a conquistador toxicity.

 I want to investigate how the cultures near and dear to me are at odds with the class progress made over the centuries. The progress we have seen for Nuevomexicanos in areas like education, representation, and inclusion is alienating newer undesirables, elongating and warping the gap between Chicano ideals and Hispano ambitions. The beautiful nemesis in this thought process is that there isn’t and never will be a convenient identity that can fully articulate or represent mestizo peoples. The mind blowing truth in this same dilemma is that no one has any real form of undeniable ethnic identity other than mixed. This transfers into every other cultural system including politics. I have a conviction that until we have an early and fundamental pedagogy of paradox, we will continue to have cascading failures trying to deal with constantly morphing human concepts through binary methods.

The values that I feel once represented me, have grown to be complicated and a little more misrepresentative of me. I am stumbling across this argument during the time period where Conservative American’s are growing a message of blame, indicting Mexican Immigrants, and any other immigrants for the tarnishing of America. 

These predominantly Anglo European communities rallied under the message “Make America Great Again”. This ideology lured me into the divisiveness that my faith has always tried to teach me to avoid. Mathew 7: 1-5 has been engrained in me. In trying to comprehend the mantra, while trying to understand the bigotry in blaming illegal immigration (odd name for human nature), and wresting with the moral contradictions many of the Conservative Republican platform is built on I can only recommend that I see this hypocritical drama play out in my life. The indigenous origin story I tell myself I belong to is at odds with imperial colonizing ambitious self. My wounded and embarrassed Spaniard in me is fighting to “make me great again”, while my modest and humble rooted self is trying to protect me from the reckless and self indulgent momentum that becomes toxic poisonous to others around me. This is how I found myself being critical of the label Hispanic.  The Spaniard in me once carried a false pride in holding status over others. Any other part of me was villainized. The Chicano mindset helped me bridge the principles of paradox by helping me hold many halves in me with dignity at the same time.

Label Dissonance - Part 2 - Spanish purity is a real pity

Part 1

”Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” -Matthew 7:3

    One thing my mental health background helps me to understand is that we are all individually, familially, and communally needing to repair, refine and maintain a dignified lifestyle. Nuevomexicanos have plenty of repair to continue with while paradoxically needing grace from the punishment inflicted by the intruding realms. This typically means a growing Anglo presence. The idea of Anglo itself is a complicated concept. Much of which propagates a mythology of race reinforcing a European farce that motivates people to segregate, compare, and weigh. The aspiration for some type of purity that allows some people to situate themselves with power might always have a place in humanity. I haven’t reached a point in my life where my profits are more important than the communal wellness. This is idealistic. The term I like to use to describe this orientation is communal, because conservative culture has ruined any ability to use socialist neutrally. To be a better person I feel I need to look critically at me, my family, and my belonging systems often. 
    The current injustices towards Mexican heritage by conservative organizations, is the speck I am wanting to remove from a brother’s eye. The American conservative want to dismantle several systems that I find vital to my culture, prosperity, and understanding of liberty. Ethnic studies and affirmative action are among these. The basis for their position against these are complicatedly sensible from a theoretical position. For example, it isn’t helpful to use race as a distinguisher and equally it isn’t clear how racist discrimination and bigotry are rare enough to trust a merit based value system.The part I have concerns about are the lack of barriers around prejudice and corruption. If we don’t acknowledge these factors and scan for them we are propagating the imperial tactics that divided the melanin rich peoples from positions of power and safety from exploitation. The large grey area here is having a mature normal criteria for identifying toxic traits like prejudice, oppression, bigotry, cheating, corruption, lies, and deception. We want to legislate like we are not bigoted.  We want to civil empowerment like we are fair. We want to regulate like we aren’t corrupt. We want liberty like we aren’t greedy. This dissonance is rolling around in my head.  What is far more clear are ways in which I resort to these corrupt modalities. I feel I try to keep my grey areas small and steer clear of convenience. One that I have recently gained clarity on is a belonging system. I have championed for years being New Mexican, and I have not processed thoroughly the positions of privilege that my heritages have leveraged. 
    The prompt for these ideas stem from not being able to reconcile how family members could align themselves with a person like Trump. I have been holding this dissonance emotionally and contemplatively. Abortion laws seem to be the de facto reason, but beyond that there are still some concerning indicators that point to other potentially menacing symbols. The labels New Mexican’s choose hint at a lingering infection of the mind; we still carry the germs of racism. When we subtilely choose a label that favors a Spanish purity, we unconsciously align ourselves with the legacy of whiteness as power. So before I can ask the Federalist or Confederate American to remove the speck from their eye, I feel a need to give attention to the plank in mine. This is the Chicano way of holding the both/and. The art of the mestizo, we know how to hold the liminal tension found in competing truths. Or better the convenience of situating ourselves between the myths and lies.   
     Research around this topic explores the significance of a Euro purity, whiteness, and political power as key factors in the use of labels that Mexican descendants choose. Discourse on this topic presents how the identity politics has been materializing for over a century. New Mexico’s transitional periods from a Spanish colony to a Mexican province, and then into the eventual US take over have highlighted the leveraging of an allegorical Spanish purity. This theme shows an alignment with a racially safer European identity. John Nieto-Phillips writes about the beginnings of a caste struggle for Nuevomexicanos/as as their power was depleted under United States (US) rule (2004). Nieto-Phillips writes about the origins for Nuevomexicanos/as demand to show Spanish purity as an effort to establish a standing in the American social and civic platforms (16). As Nuevomexicanos/as leave the colonial period of dominance, Martha Menchaca details how land loss becomes a key motivation for the early identity struggle of Nuevomexicanos (246).  The theme of social relevance grows during this period.

    A trend begins for Nuevomexicanos indicating a grasping at European identity to plead for equality with the Anglo American (Nieto-Phillips 16). The generations that experienced a Mexican nation, around a quarter century, experience a widening wealth gap (Menchaca 271). Research helps to describe the early events that created New Mexico’s divide between the have and have nots and perspective on not embracing a Mexican label. Where Menchaca and Nieto-Phillips shape an understanding of civil conditions, there is a menacing topic of lynching of Mexican people that research has not been widely written about. The civil systems that Menchaca has written about skirts a more violent ethnic prejudice, white supremacy, and a “tantamount to state-sanctioned terrorism” that existed (Carrigan et al. 416). The power dynamics for the Nuevomexicano reverse going into US rule, and the embryo that will be a Chicanx identity forms in the womb of the region we now know as the borderlands. And here comes the “Hispanic” identity. Laura Gómez explores the origins of the term “Hispanic,” forming a confluence that begins to link the allegory of purity, caste-izing, land loss, and terrorism with an incentive to be more tolerated (52). Gómez reveals how the Hispanicization is the sanitization of a more radical form of label like Chicano (45). A throughline is observable in this tiring and bleak attempt at colonial purity and evolution to a modern submissive quality still needing to show belonging. Along with belonging there is some desperation for success or slanted form of prosperity.

    This research reveals a persistent need for control, authority, and influence through the epochs. These traits have tumbled around with paradoxical traits like harmony, dignity, and collaboration. There are Nuevomexicanos/as gravitating towards a Hispanic label and their association to the label Chicanx is not clear; it is still tumbling. Both carry responsibility to self-govern their potential to diminish the dignity of the people who use them. More importantly, each has potential for pursuing ethnic advocacy.  In the underlying history these labels still have a responsibility to help repair atrocities inflicted and endured. Gómez posits that these newer labels are “infused with political meaning,” despite not being clear in what the meaning is (55). What is clear is that there are paradoxical, maybe a less romantic term might be competing, regardless, there is a splitting that is leading to an ongoing split around becoming more agreeable to Anglo systems. The tug of war between a Hispanic elite, more conservative and in alignment with power and a Chicanismo that wants a more communal modality to chip away at the deviance of misused power, might be exactly what the colonial machine intended. It is not clear how to approach the lynching of Mexican descendants.  I have resolved that the cultural identity tumbling is not slowing down soon. The impacts of Hispanicization on the Nuevomexicano through a frustrated lens looks like the choking to death of a querencia. It is confusing because it could also be the opposite from a more hopeful lens. Neither label has obvious footings in these two perceptions. The newer label of “Hispanic” complicates the comradery that might be needed and raises more questions. Is solidarity between these two labels essential to the health of the people that use them? I would say to Hispanics:

“Feel free to identify as white while responsibly resisting the urge to turn it into any form of supremacy”

Part 3 

Work Cited

Carrigan, William D., and Clive Webb. “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928.” Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 2, 2003, pp. 411–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790404. Accessed 26 June 2025.

Gómez, Laura E. “The Birth of the ‘Hispanic’ Generation: Attitudes of Mexican-American Political Elites toward the Hispanic Label.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 19, no. 4, 1992, pp. 45–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2633844. Accessed 10 July 2025.

Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race : The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans, University of Texas Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unm/detail.action?docID=3443170.

Nieto-Phillips, John M. The Language of Blood : The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New                            Mexico, 1880s-1930s / John M. Nieto-Phillips. University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

            EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=5665a9f5-2deb-377b-b84d-78ecac91c9d8

Label Dissonance - Part 1 - Hispanics in Panic

How to deal with the Hispanic causing panic? Being New Mexican usually affords you a dog in the fight about how Spanish one is. This post is not about the measurable traits to help with this argument. This post is about my understanding of how the Mexican descendants in the borderlands, the North American Southwest, demonstrate heritage acrobatics to draw a phantom line between an Anglo heritage and a Mestizo heritage.  The idea of identity itself is phantom and only a frame of mind. The two words Spanish and Mexican qualitatively not only divide a mindset, but these contrasting signifiers ripple through in Nuevo Mexico’s politics, prejudices, and myths.

Most Hispanics aren’t white supremacist. White supremacist in this context is the belief that Anglo-euro white persons are superior to all other heritages, often using race as a criteria for this belief.  This post is also not about breaking down the semantics for what can be seen as white supremacy. I use this as a basis for describing a cultural divide amongst Mexican descendants in the borderlands. The fallout of the Treaty of Hidalgo, was a promise through a “sporked” tongue. This is the type promise where the agreements were implemented with the bigotry and system rigidity that ensure quick unraveling of any promises, and with an invisibility that left Mexicanos screaming with no one to hear.  The agreement was implemented in a way that provided loopholes, negations, and forfeitures in a manner that skirted the line of evil, while blowing past dignified. This was a colonial carry over from imperial tactics, but mainly just dirty.

This is where the Mexicano people likely consummated the Corsican relationship between Chicano and Hispanic. It served the newly acquired “American Citizens” a naturalized chance at running the prosperity obstacle course to retain their land, rights, and dignity. Many of these land owning Mexican descendants saw the landscape of this obstacle course. They learned from watching squaters, false claims, vigilante justice, and susceptibility to unchecked white crime. They learned how important it was to claim “White” as a piece of safety equipment.  New Mexicans found themselves at the mercy of the American’s appetite for all things profitable. 

The paradox here is the wealthy newly naturalized American citizens likely used similar tactics in their past to acquire their capital during the conquest. So the capitalist encounters a more vindictive capitalist and we have two bullies finding new ways to keep their power. The Mexican with much more to lose transforms themselves from Mexicano into something distinguished, Hispanic. The New Mexican northern Mexican villager who somehow had a direct flight from Santa Fe or Albuquerque to Spain. One of the very first Southwest Airlines  “gotta get away” deals. Joking aside, elite Nuevomexicanos among other politically motivated people used their Spanish lineage as a litigation tool.  

Nearly 200 hundred years later we have people who hold tightly this same Spanish purity myth.

Label Dissonance - Part 2

I offer me.

As I recognize my life’s tank dial, move closer and seemingly faster than ever towards empty, I accept how pain and love complement themselves more than ever.  I love that I feel pain free and simultaneously respect how pain filled life has to be.  My youthful self mildly glamorized a pain filled self perception and romanticized some struggles. I romanticized my story stirring up pain, replaying thoughts of hardship. I think through the years I have learned to value the reflective strategies that help me assess my pain; translate my pain versus indulging. My Catholic faith with its many flaws, provides me with tools that help me understand when and if my pain is phantom or real. Both my romanticized manifested pain and real wounds are impactful. 

The phantom pain lead to the stirring up of anger pangs, and the real pains hurt so bad I am led to anguish reminding me they still needing healing. I also get to taste the pain, regardless of its ontology, and can better determine if the pains are necessary or in vain. The strategy I feel most essential to my encounters with pain is embracing paradox.  My capacity to scan for paradox is a tactic my Catholic faith instilled in me. It is literally a believe system of contradictions where holding a concept made of competing truths is fundamental. In  the context of pain, it is the movement to find a balance between fear and trust. I have to hold the avoidance of pain with the absolute inevitability of pain, like a person who has to breathe in while going under water, building up a panicked eagerness to breathe out.  The paradox isn’t the breathing, the paradox is the desire to be where we don’t naturally belong to get a taste the forbidden, at the risk of drowning; we find a way to have both. There are tiny opposites in every paradox creating small revolutions of meaning. At the same time there is a consequential tranquility laying down a stillness. The struggle and or the dance to seek out this idiosyncratic balance is what I call a Chicano style. Finding a personal balance between two competing intrapersonal truths and offering that awareness as a contribution to the everyday interpersonal existence, a Chicano Style. Most healthy cultures have a similar system. 

I think there is something revealing about the mestizo attitude that encourages gravitation towards pain. My pride in a Nuevomexicano (Mexican-American) heritage gives me the bedrock to let my pain filled experiences flow right into a humility that my elders prepared me for. Hard work is the place where pain goes to be planted, beads of sweat cool the tempers, releasing tears dripped from the grief, hydrating my seeds of passion. Seeds of passion that were fanatic in my childhood and adolescence. Seeds of passion that were economic and political in my early adulthood. Maybe the social justice curiosity is how I have learned to deal with my pain.  Social injustice is the way for my pain to be externalized. How I approach the externalized is how I feel I will heal the internal. If I let the greedy American infuriate me with their disregard for my heritage or perceived dignities then I cannot learn about the defenses of those material imbalances of land, water, money, laws, comforts, rights, or culture. This is where my faith guides me into paradox. The greedy American is in pain, and maybe more pain than me. Their insatiability is the strategy they’ve learned to rely on to ease their pain. I have that same insatiability in me. The paradox is seeing myself as a greedy Chicano, while also defending myself from the toxicity of the greedy American. My peace of mind has to be found through the hard fight of treating my inner insatiable and building up a harmonious internal sense of enough. Then bring this feature to existence in the form of a Chicano ofrenda to my immediate world. 

I understand that my romance with pain, gave me the emotional state to write interestingly, at least to me.  And at least it felt more interesting as I revisit it.  Now I just feel the paradox. The fire that pain once lit, is now more of an irritating burn. I have found joy in the mediocre.  I can’t write like I used to. I often feel like my thought process is analogous to a cows digestive system. I chew the same topics, swallow, digest, absorb, regurgitate, and bite a few more blades of tragedy.  It doesn’t feel as poetic and color filled as it once did, when I was closer to my pain. I think that balance is easier to choose than preference.  My emotions aren’t as contrasting, making it harder to find the momentum to write. With acceptance comes comfort. I haven’t learned to write from comfort.

I wonder if this is a type liminal space that might help with saying goodbye to this world.  Does balance fit with acceptance?  Is acceptance an illusion that is really just expressing the condition of being option-less.  I once relied so much on my grandparents.  I relied so much on mothering from, of course Mom, and fortunately my Aunts.  I felt such hurt from the lost or missed time with an attentive father. And yet I had the attention of loving people,  I found perspectives that highlighted my pain and that I nestled up to. My pain was a fuel for my movement, pain was my rhythm.

I am losing my family and friends. I think this would bring on a sadness that I think I would channel into these perceptions to propagate the same outlets.  I’m not sad in the same ways.  I am a sad that feels as if it skipped straight to acceptance.  I am curious about my comfort with solitude.  What is it about balance that allows for an apparent comfort for being alone.  My life still feels meaningful but equally it is definitely feeling less certain.  I still want to live.

Life is still teaching me.

You can’t assassinate closeminded-ness, only heal it

 As much as I have worked through hate for Donald Trump I have not reached the depths of wanting him to suffer.  An attempt on his life was made.  A young adult, perched himself on a rooftop overlooking the event space for a Trump rally.  While Donald was performing, the young man took aim and fired a long distance rifle shot. The young boy unleashed the next round of spectacle and delivered tragedy and disappointment on us.  He has doused the flames of discontent with more malice.  I look back at the event and see how its chaos is a good reflection point for me.

What happens next will inform us about who we are?  I’d like to spend time on the we in question being the us as a country, but I am stuck on the we as a political mechanism.  I hope there is humanism in the situation.  I hope I am surprised by Donald’s responses.  I hope I am surprised by the sympathy that comes from our civic leadership.  I am ready to work through the opposite and typical bipartisan extremes.  I wonder how we will reflect on the symptom of violence as a preferential response to disagreement.  I am expecting the typical marketing spin, immature exploitation of the circumstances, the propagandizing of it, and the lack of curiosity for how we continue to rely on ending each other.

It seems appropriate to start with myself, for retrospect.  When I first heard that he was shot at, I didn’t believe it. That quickly transitioned to skepticism that it was likely staged. Then as more reliable sources were reporting on it, I felt shame for my own lack of sympathy for the man.  I feel disappointed that I didn’t have a strong sense of concern for his security.  I am asked to love my enemy, and this revealed to me that I have not evolved in this area of my faith.  I am ashamed that I even felt some feelings of redemption for all the asinine things he’s said and done.

I don’t want him as my President. I do want him humbled.  I do wish him justice for the hurts he has caused and I do compassionately feel that he deserves love.  Without letting go the anger and disappointment for who Donald has been, I can hold lightly the humanistic love for him and the suffering he must thrive in to have motivated a young man to hunt him down.  May I grow from my shortcomings and may we all analyze our responses.  My work is to enhance how I we see my enemies.

Immigrating Without Borders

    As a child, approaching adolescence,  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.  Santa Fe is the town of my formative years.  The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos, until I warmed up to the other curious meanderers.  In meandering I found amigos, carnales that passed the time filled childhood afternoons in similars ways as me. Santa Fe became a 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 quickly speculate that this must be why I’m ignored and the service sucks.  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.  Maybe the wait staff didn’t appreciate how I was so casual.  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.  

    I could 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

  

Conflicting Changes - Part 2

Part 1 

I start my cultural acrobatics functioning through the masculine perspective and from recognizing the patriarchal bias in my New Mexican region.  I preface this because I feel much of my orientation can only represent a view from this side of the gender border.  My conflicting changes have to begin with my gender.  I am not indulging the gender conflict currently enflamed in today's pop culture, I am writing through the male lens, a masculine privilege, and competitive instincts.  I have chosen to be a gentle warrior upholding values for ancestors who I feel had to drift from communal.  This identity has evolved from desiring to be a champion, dominant, and prestigious.  The deep dive into my cultural paradoxes have resulted in a condition that has at times been numbing.  I am human, diagnosed as Chicano.  Yes, diagnosed, better yet self-diagnosed.

My mother is my most influential teacher of focus, birthing me while only a maturing child herself, at 17. She was guiding herself and me into choices both blessed and ominous, yet mostly seeming to turn fortuitous.  My step-father is another.  My father in his brief opportunities to be with me, made a strong impact.  I had uncles and aunts that steered me and at times squished me.  These are my first attempts at loving relationships. I see these relationships are the bedrock for who I am and how I am.

I am about to describe how my darker shades of brown were made.  

This is not an attempt to disenfranchise myself or burn the bridges to my past.  This will be an encounter with my soils.  It will be a critical look into what building blocks and nutrients surrounded me and still feed my existence.  It will be the curious step into machismo, addictions, violence, criminality, and victimization.  It will be the first step towards taking responsibility for being bonded with the idea of being more human and less obligated to be lower case chicano.  It is a way for me to embrace the victimization in me by taking responsibility for not looking for the wellness that transcends labels and identities.

Conflicting Changes - Part 1

Part 1

Love is measurable, like counting the atoms that make up our universe.  We have an obligation to keep counting.  We paint ideas of being loved in romance, our passions, and heartfelt expressions.  That might only be half of its existence.  We are deeply capable of resisting care, and the potential feelings of emotional susceptibility. Maybe saying that practicing love has formidable obstacles.  Love has proportionate hurtful ways of being avoided, tactics for not being vulnerable.  I spent hours with people seeking care for behavioral, lifestyle, and relationship healing.  They were looking for answers, as if they didn't have the answers intrinsically or even as if there was an answer.  I find counseling, when done well, is addressing the ways we are not lovable.  And it might be important to say that mental health has disease and dysfunction that can't be reasoned with using this understanding.  I am talking about characteristics found in the heart of the human struggle bell curve.  I recognize, in a person’s creative demonstrations of independence, a pattern of resisting or avoiding love.  The cliché term is pushing someone away.

I am guilty of the action and prefer to think of it safeguarded sabotage.  I might blow up relationships, more like stress the durability, and likely exercise my reactivity with protagonism in order to reveal the depth of love that truly exists within them.  And for clarity relationships in this context are not limited to the romantic flavor.  I can’t say that it is test.  I can’t say there is any type of thoughtfulness in it.  I think it is a modality for emotional protection, and when reckless just a coping strategy.  I do this because so many relationships in my life have softly pinched me, bitten me, and socked me.  I am sure I have done the same.  

Because my safety is found in solace, I think the push is to restore some form of stability to organize my emotions.  I retreat.  My comfortable distance with gregariousness is kept by the angst from not knowing when my protagonism is not seen as agonism.  As I become intimate I am lured into vulnerability and this is where my first defense has been to sabotage for safety, like a tunnel rat might scan booby traps.  I blow that shit up.  Sometimes it is intentional, more often it just feels like I got entangled.

Experiencing this resistance to the vulnerability and safeguard from deep connection might be our love limit.  I want to explore this vulnerability as a spectrum for progress.  I find popular enjoyment in using the term push-pull.  And isn't this nature or expected.  Life is polarities dancing, generating a chaos that tends to result in creativity, consumption, or contribution.  It isn't dysfunctional and even better recognized as a natural way of being in or struggling for balance.  I have practiced curiosity when I grow aware of these tensions, and this has been a helpful tool for adding focus to the push-pull. This helps me to formulate messages to create healing "space" in and through the back and forth.  Space here is defined as a platform for confronting the barriers to a harmonious self concept or inertia to disconcerting for togetherness. 

In this next little series I hope to describe my struggle to hold the Chicano identity, while framing my struggle in the above described psychology of safeguarded sabotage.  I am going to describe the dysfunction I experienced growing to be American while being seen as something embedded.  I'll share my reflections on the symptoms of ignorance and neglect that come from the people, the humans, that label themselves Loving.

Pardoning the Ex-tradition of a Legacy

 I come from Latin privilege and Chicano scarcity.  My maternal grandparents are a large influence on who I became in life.  They didn't seem to struggle with identity openly.  They did label though.  And for whatever social influences or lack of need they rarely promoted any label themselves.  They established the bedrock for what I rely on as a character compass.  They created what I know as my family.  They were raised in a generation that inspired the need for a Chicano mentality.

My grandparents were taught under a regime of Catholic dictators enforcing laws that disabled a lot of their reckless creativity.  I paint with a bias that overlooks the love and tradition the same Catholic ordained paradoxically brought with them.  This Christian archdiocese, including the radical authorities, enforced a catholic tradition of shame and guilt right along side a message of stewardship and compassion.  The penitent façade of Catholic Christianity seemed to bind my grandparents into obedient stewards to humility, handicapping them, while protestant Anglos capitalized on their, reformed alignment with prosperity and wealth.  I don't need to be Protestant I need to radicalize my Catholicism.

My religious attitude paints with broad strokes.  I am inflamed by my commitment to the Catholic rules that don't seem to stifle the liberated "Christian".  Blessed are the meek, while my ego looks up at the Christians who seem to be lavished by the sleek.  I am dull by the sadness from the discouraged attitude the Catholic church has towards the spiritually creative and grip on dogma.  I am jealous of the prosperity that comes from Anglo-American Evangelical modalities.  I want the same freedom to interpret and create revolutionary mentalities around the gospel that aren't commercialized.  I want to dismantle the  faith that rooted my grandparents in hesitancy, fear, and obedience.  My grandparents died obedient Catholics and I want to die a believer in Christ.  I don't know how different these deaths are, and pray they lead to the same heaven.

Gettin it right

Part II

 "I'm not a smart man", my grandpa tells me, slopping up fresh pinto beans and green chili with a torn off piece of tortilla.  The tortilla creates a pocket when he slightly folds the tortilla piece while pinching the ends together.  This make shift spoon helps shovels spoonfuls of frijoles while at times becoming a bite of it's own.  "Don't be like me", he continues between bites.  He rakes the plate with each tortilla piece leaving small gravy tracks, whittling his pool of beans and chili into a shrinking portion.  "I wanted to go to school".  He describes how he isn't sure why he couldn't focus.  He hasn't shared what were his barriers but his rhetoric paints a story of an early exit, an easy exit.  

This baffles me because he is such a craftsman.  The education that he did excel in was not in a classroom.  It isn't listed on a transcript in a data warehouse that I can admire.  He doesn't have certifications hung on his walls, highlighting any curriculum that vetted his knowledge against other men.  And I don't know my grandpa as anything other than capable.  This is different than smart.

Grandpa, I want to be like you, and if not being smart is part of that then I will find a way to just be capable.  I want to learn how to come from my day of work and build.  I likely won't build cabinets from scratch but I will create.  It may be a poem, a story, or a reflection.  I hope I can be a learner like you.

Grandpa you didn't get it right, rather you got it well!  I hope you can feel on your new cosmic journey that there was never a smart way and you surely didn't have to avoid the wrong way so strongly.  I hope you see in the heavens that how you lived was valuable and worthy of praise.  The love so many have for you, should help you see that the lessons you mastered are accredited by the ethos.

At times it appeared hard to tell that you cared, were pleased, approved, or were impressed.  I needed more smiles that came naturally, and didn't have to wait for libations. I hope to learn to be sweet without the reliance of beer or two.  I hope to soften my feedback, because it hurt to hear your doubt come through in your praise.  And I remember how much it hurt hearing you doubt yourself, so I hope I can find a way to build confidence with the modesty I admired from you.  

How come you describe yourself as falling short?  I miss you, sitting down under a roof you built, reaching for a salt shaker from a cabinet you fashioned, pouring frijoles into a bowl grandma crafted, scooping chili from pan older than me resourcefully maintained.  You are quality.  Who taught you to hold yourself down?

Part I

Donde Frijole

 Part I

A polished soul.   I cherish how my grandpa aged.  Describing who he became, can only come with the fortune of knowing who he had been, accompanied by the nostalgia of how he saw himself through his many shared memories.    Remembering is somber, and it feels important to push through painful emotions with urgency because of a fear that the vividness of his memory will fade.  A part of me dies with him now gone. A part of me fights to keep him alive.  I feel the burden of carrying some tradition baring down on me, despite nothing really changing for me.  Getting to know my grandpa's love came with knowing of the painful lessons teaching me to let him go.  The love built up for him and from him was layered with every shared responsibility.  My grandpa worked.  If I wanted to spend time with him it was going to be more often working.  This is how I'll start.

Ricardo woke up  early for as long as I can remember.   His profession required that he was out the door early, far before I was awake.  And his bed covers were pulled up, no sign of him leaving anything messy.  I felt this was an important aspect of what manhood meant.   My grandpa began and ended his day with prayer. Kneeling in his tighty whities, his cotton briefs and white ribbed tank, he prayed in front of his night stand, head bowed. This is as vulnerable as I'd ever remember him.

I rarely saw him leave. As he drove by his childhood home in his truck, column shift changing gears, growling engine slowly warming up, I wonder what thoughts scrolled through his head.  My grandpa's truck was an iconic black 69' Chevy, decorated with wood patterned side trim, and a custom lumber rack. He drove by his mother's house on his commute out into the city and on his return. I have to believe this would make him smile. 

He left his body, lying on an emergency room's bed. His shirt was cut open, his chest red with signs of freshly reddened bruising from the fight his life, the damage left from intense chest compressions. His pants also unbuckled, and stomach bloated, visibily out of sorts, abnormally round. He appeared unconscious with a tube lodged in his mouth. This would be the worst and last I'd ever see him. This commute everything was left messy,  unlike I'd known him to be, and only because this goodbye was out of his control. I buckled up his pants.  I pulled up his sheets.  I put my left hand on his, the other on the crown of his head, and kissed his warm forehead.  I bowed my head and prayed. His work was done.

Richa was called home, November 9 th, freed from his body on a beautiful blue sky day. He was surrounded by loved ones and highly likely greeted in the cosmos by loved ones. And like his black work boots were polished and shiny,  his soul, in my eyes, was polished too. 

Part II

Aging justice

    The ego is a shadow that doesn't have to worry about the social stigma that comes with having white hairs.  Maybe a silhouette of what we think we need to be without the tired eyes.  I walk around looking through eyes that aren't aware of how I appear to others.  I walk around less tuned into what my ego is telling me.  I am curious about this found peace of mind, confidence, or obliviousness.  The idea that I am growing old, invites me to look at what ego means in this stage of my life.  

How does the ego participate in a vulnerable man's heart?  I hope it might be just a piece of me that gets comforted, a restlessness in my head less stirred by all the things I am disappointed by, but definitely the healing of bullied part of my psyche.  A self bullying.  The humility of a greying beard matching a blurring eyesight, feeding a denial lurking around highlighting all of my limits, tiring my sense of self.  Aging is a small reminder of this itchy friend.  The ego, the construct, the psychological scapegoat, steering my selfishness no longer seems ageless.  I might be a little sad about not needing my ego as much as my ego thought it was helping me.  I might even acknowledge or celebrate how it steered me in a direction that allows me to see it as a friend.

    As a young boy, my look in the mirror was a dazzling narcissism with a biting criticism.  As an adolescent the look in the mirror was an exercise in conforming with a confused sense belonging so that I might be satisfying to my elders and leaders.  I might now be an elder.  What also grew in my adolescence was a hope to be desired.  Desired, slightly different from satisfying, I realized that I wanted to stand out in order to be seen, especially by girls, possibly authorities.  My ego is how I describe the boy in the mirror.  Those moments when I look in the mirror and strategize as if there was something I could tweak to be perceived in a profound way.  The ego has been a tool for shaping a self image, cultivating a vanity.  I feel as if I needed to see my reflection to fix the flaws, hoping the adjustments would lead to profits of affection.  

I think my ego, mad at my body for so long, has now tired from the acceptance that humility has afforded me.  I see how time is replacing the angst that my ego once tickled.  The idea of being on the second half of a life's journey removes the need for an ego and emphasizes the hope for legacy.  A legacy seems far different from what the ego steered to. And yet it might have been the recklessness I needed to propel me into adventures that molded me.  My ego is digging through my dreams, hoping to find a place to relocate.  The true self doesn't have to look in the mirror often, a
nd my ego gets a jolt when I do.  A sadness and a madness because this is how glamour dies.          

False summitting is still summitting

 I am sitting on the cement foundation of a ski lift at the top of a false summit in the Santa Fe National Forest.  At the top of the Santa Fe ski basin's Quad chairlift.  Following the tree-line of a beginner run, I have just skinned up my first trek.  It is cold and daybreak, the grey blue filter that slowly unveils the rolling foothills .  This is my first summit on skis.  Skinning is new to me, the act of hiking up hill on skis sleeved with a cloth bottom to eliminate the slick surface.  I had envisioned myself in this adventure called skinning so many times while snow shoeing.  As my interest in being in the wilderness has evolved, so has my interest in accessing the wilderness in any season and in most conditions.  This new skill allows me to get around quicker and with less effort.  Sitting catching my breathe and oddly trying to cool down despite it being in the single digits, I find it still takes plenty of effort.  I am alone on a summit knowing the highest point is still another 45 minutes up.  I am stopping at a false summit.  Something my ego is itching with, ready to reject, and can't hold the idea of not continuing on up. 

    A false summit is the dreaded point on a mountain climb when you feel tired enough to desire that the destination has to be at the top of the upcoming peak, because your legs are telling you it should be.  The lack of anything behind the silhouette of the current horizon gives you that sense of relief that the work is nearly over.  Then as the distance closes, you find as you reach this point there is still so much more mountain to climb.  The false summit today reminds me of the importance of celebrating the journey just as much as I appreciate a true summit.  

    So I like skinning.  Skinning is another way to get into the wild when the weather conditions are truly wild.  I am absorbing that the perspectives I apply in my life are equally a moment in a journey.  Not everything is gonna a climb.  Today it is a false summit, turned destination, and tomorrow it may be a long fall down.  Having the skills to tussle with the paradox while feeling perplexing emotions is the journey.  Being both and is the humanity.  The the memory is the judgment.  And how I choose to implement the experience as a perception, is a skill.  So I continue on my journey.
  

NYC - A capitalist's Mecca

 New York is one of the worlds many union stations transferring money boarding transaction trains destined to finance some believed form of human progress, often creating a sense of American prosperity.  New York is the honey pot people can smell or envision from miles away. The NYC might be the Capitalist's Mecca.  The draw isn't limited to money, prosperity in any elite form might describe its appeal.  I have yet to hear, "I dream of visiting New York to feel the insignificance, view the disparity, and smell the consumption".  If you are an elite then you have some higher level presence in NYC.  There is an allure to New York City that reflects the American angst.  The ambition that seems to have an origin story sprouted in the 1600s through the spread of European immigrant commerce, later to make way for European migrants and refugees. The mercantile trade has been replaced by new modern goods to sell.  The digital age has overshadowed the industrial.  The gentrification still seems the same.  A consequence often ignored in favor of basking in the apparent prestige of luxury, despite the human cost to its inflicted.  

The Dutch called it a New something, the English called it a New York, and every generation since has added their form of New to their perception of it.  A part of me wished the Dutch would have called it shared something, and the English might have followed with Shared York.  Then today we wouldn't have the mentality of turnover and gentrification.  Would immigrants still be drawn to a Shared York.  Would there be such strong desire for individuals to separate themselves from the typical or mundane.  Would there be this illusion of certain types of hard work as inferior to innovation. The melanin rich types of hard work never lead to empires, yet empires are ultimately constructed more often than not by melanin rich laborers.  There is this magical preference for tycoons who have mastered the art of letting their money do the hard work.  These families then carry on a privilege that gets a superior distinction.  It looks a lot like a reasonable competitive advantage, yet they also get to call it earned.  Would we still believe in the lie that some earned a superior lifestyle because of some hard earned path if we measured effort in calories.  

Using a unit of measure that isn't so disenfranchising like currency might make it hard to score hard work in such lopsided ways.  I think we realize that the ownership of many innovations are ignoring much of the collective efforts that establishes the conditions necessary for these break throughs.  I see that New Yorkers along with most American's tend to ignore the sharedness of foundational human technologies galvanized by all peoples.  Ownership of technologies is the new monarchy.  The corporation is quickly becoming the new heritage.  The exploitation of these technologies has become what capitalists like to overlook when advertising to the world their exceptionalism.