The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 1

INSIDE: THE PROVIDENCE PUBLIC SCHOOL STATE TAKEOVER THE SPANISH FAR RIGHT, PAST AND PRESENT

A TRIBUTE TO TONI MORRISON

A Brown/RISD Weekly / September 13, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 01

the

Indy Contents

From The Editors

Cover Girl Olivia Reavey

It’s Friday the 13th. Conmag is full of fruit flies, but we are full of dreams. Below, please see our BUCKET (abbrev. BCT) list for our tenure as managing editors: 1. Make risotto in a rice cooker

News 02 Week in Invasion of Privacy Gemma Sack & Roxanne Barnes

2. Read the Indy every week 3. Learn inDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator

09 Francoists in the Shadows Clara Gutman Argemi

4. Develop a Bullet Journaling routine

Metro 03 We’re Not Gonna Take It Alina Kulman & Sara Van Horn

5. Establish “Disco Hour” at Copy post-1 am

17 Providence Bites Ella Comberg and Miles Guggenheim

7. Get sponsored by a hard seltzer company

6. Bring to light the fissures in our seemingly functional relationship

8. Reflect on our respective Twitter presences

Arts 11 Arriving Before the Light Gabriella Etoniru

9. A midnight smooch We promise this and so much more.

Features 05 To Kancil, With Love Zach Ngin

From our motherbug haven to yours, BCT

13 “It Needs to Be in Our Hands” Mara Dolan & Mia Pattillo Science + Tech 7 The Need for Speed Matt Ishimaru

Mission Statement

Literary 15 Then What Isn’t?

Miles Guggenheim

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Ephemera 14 Radio Silence Sindura Sriram X 18 Housewarming Alex Westfall and Jorge Palacios

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Sheamus Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

13 SEPTEMBER 2019

Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 01

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang Christie Zhong

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Miranada Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng

MVP Tiara Sharma ***

Web Ashley Kim

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

BY Gemma Sack & Roxanne Barnes ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Christie Zhong

Week in

Invasion of privacy SHE KNEW HE WAS TROUBLE

FINAL FRONTIER FOR FINANCIAL CRIME

“I think he knows his footprints/On the sidewalk/Lead to where I can’t stop/Go there every night,” sings Taylor Swift in her new song, “I Think He Knows.” Swift clearly did not dedicate these lyrics to her latest suitor, 26-year-old Richard Joseph McEwan, who has recently made headlines for his lack of footprints. On August 30, police apprehended a barefoot McEwan inside Swift's Westerly, RI mansion, and charged him for breaking and entering and willful trespassing. When asked about his exposed toes, he said he was "always taught to take his shoes off when entering someone's home to be polite,” according to the Westerly Sun. Evidently, McEwan’s advances were insufficiently chivalrous to woo Swift, a notorious romantic—perhaps he should have arrived on a white horse instead of his own two (nude) feet.

Summer 2019 was a big one for everyone’s problematic favorite parttime Rhode Island resident. In August, she released her seventh studio album, Lover, which became 2019’s best-selling album in the US in just two days, perhaps marking a comeback for the artist whom, in 2018, Forbes deemed “no longer relatable.” But this season has also been a ‘cruel summer’ for Swift, to borrow the title of one of her new tracks. Just two days before McEwan’s break-in, police arrested 30-year-old Jonathan A. Millen also attempting to trespass on her home in Westerly. Police Chief Shawn Lacey told the Providence Journal that Millen had been praying at Swift’s gate, alleging that she “was coming to marry him.” For Millen, "the story of us" looks like a tragedy, but for Swift, it might seem like more of a nightmare.

In July, another man was arrested near her Rhode Island home with a bag of burglary tools, claiming he was there to “catch up with Taylor Swift,” according to TMZ. Swift is no stranger to threats from obsessive fans, as the Independent has previously reported. In the last few years, numerous men have tried to break into her various homes or have sent her letters threatening rape and murder, forcing her to take precautions such as taking out a restraining order, carrying bandages with her, and keeping her whereabouts private.

These are not the only kind of stalkers who have fixated on Swift—she is one of the most divisive figures among ‘stans,’ or stalker-fans. Swift has millions of loyal fans who are ready to defend her status as a progressive icon, touting her support for gender and sexual equality. In response to her performance at this year’s VMAs (in which she flamboyantly declared her support for the Equality Act), gay dating app Grindr tweeted: “Taylor Swift just said ‘GAY RIGHTS!’ with her #VMAs performance️‍ [pride flag emoji] we stan forever!” But these stances seem stale in our political moment, when other superstars, such as rapper Cardi B, are calling for democratic socialism. Swift is not quite down with the revolution—the Joe Biden of the Billboard Hot 100, we might call her. Yes, queen!

For much of her career, Swift has tried to avoid politics, but that has not stopped anyone, from her devoted haters to her reluctant stans, from politicizing her work and public persona. She has been accused of performing queer allyship with “You Need To Calm Down” (the lyrics and video of which cheerily knock homophobia), slut-shaming other women, appropriating Black culture and objectifying Black women in her “Shake it Off” video, and fetishizing colonialism in her Rhodesia-chic “Wildest Dreams” video. And then, simply, there’s the fact that nearly every song of hers oozes heteropatriarchy. “You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess/It's a love story, baby just say, ‘Yes’”? Now that’s my feminist hero.

As Black trans activist Kat Blaque wryly quipped on Twitter (in response to the music video for “Lover” being Swift’s first to feature a Black love interest), “If Taylor Swift making out with a black man upsets her Nazi fan base, I’m here for it. Ugh, a woke queen. We stan.”

Between both harmlessly online and frighteningly real-life stalker-fans, Taylor Swift can’t seem to avoid drama. But if her music smacks of white feminism and internalized sexism, her male stalkers exude violent misogyny. They all stake some sexual claim to her, from Millen’s relatively innocuous “Love Story” fantasy to the far more menacing assault threats. Swift’s stalkers evidently do not care that Bitch magazine has declared her “White, Mediocre, and Fragile.”

Who knows—maybe they will if she ever decides to go to the Women’s March.

“They come from another world!” reads the tagline of the 1956 movie Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, warning us of the impending arrival of beings from outer space, coming to Earth to steal our identities and infiltrate our society. Astronaut Anne McClain has proven sci-fi’s predictive power. In August of this year, McClain’s former wife, Summer Worden, sued the space traveler for stealing her identity to access bank information while in space. McClain, notable for last year's all-female spacewalk-that-wasn’t, enjoyed a small moment in the spotlight, earning the honor of an impersonation from Aidy Bryant on Saturday Night Live. Her name will forever be written in the stars now, however, as the first ever lawbreaker in orbit.

Permanent Earth resident Worden alleges that, during her six-month period in space, ex-wife McClain accessed their formerly joint bank account without permission from aboard the International Space Station.

Worden has taken the not-so-small step of suing the outer space outlaw for invasion of personal and financial space. During tense conversations about their divorce and custody battle, Worden, a former CIA intelligence officer, became suspicious about the detailed level of information about her finances that McClain seemed to know. Worden discovered her account was receiving extraterrestrial contact when she asked her bank to pull a list of all the different computers that had accessed her account.

The computer registered to NASA and currently in orbit was the one that felt far out.

Despite the case’s exotic locale, it is following a disappointingly unremarkable legal procedure. Though NASA is less than eager to open up highly sensitive computers to legal investigation, this crime will likely pose no new precedent in the realm of space law. Should an astronaut commit a felony in the vacuum of space, the crime falls under rules similar to maritime law, which is usually reserved for crimes committed under ambiguous national jurisdiction. It is likely, however, that the rules of water crime don’t apply here. Considering that McClain is a US citizen impersonating another US citizen, she will face the gravity of her decisions in America’s regular, though perhaps less-than-stellar, justice system. As associate director for the air and space law program at the University of Mississippi, Michelle Hanlon noted of the situation: “The things humans do don’t stop when we get into orbit.”

McClain has made an undeniably great leap for humankind with this first. The Independent is grateful for her reminder that you can literally shoot for the moon, land among the stars, and still be curious how your ex-wife can afford a new car. As space tourism increases and corporations like SpaceX pioneer into the final frontier, we must recognize that wherever people go, all the dark matter within humanity follows.

-RB - RB

-GS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

WE'RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT

In late June, the Providence Public School District was rocked by a devastating report that implicated everyone from teachers to governmental officials in the alarming state of the city’s public schools. Released by Johns Hopkins University, the report not only revealed startling realities of the Providence Public School District, but also quickly became a touchpoint for an urgent statewide conversation about who is, and who should be, responsible for the city’s public schooling.

The report details the state of school facilities— including crumbling buildings, discolored tap water, and the smell of stale urine—as well as the phenomenon of teacher absenteeism, widespread physical violence, and a culture of low expectations. These disturbing descriptions provide context for an educational environment where, across grade levels, only 14 percent of students are proficient in English Language Arts and only 10 percent are proficient in math.

The report, however, provided little in the way of recommendations, leaving wide open the questions of who should take the much-needed remedial steps and how they should take them. Should the city or state government have control over the school system?

And how should this authority be transferred? The report’s findings seemed to invite the possibility of a state takeover, a course of action quickly proposed and subsequently approved, which will transfer responsibility for the Providence Public School District (PPSD) from city to state government in early September.

State takeovers, however, have often failed to improve educational outcomes and historically disempowered majority Black and Latinx communities.

The strong local and national reactions to this report—seemingly universal shock and alarm—belie how unsurprising these educational realities are for the teachers, students, and activists who work and study in Providence public schools. For Chanda Womack, the Founding Executive Director of Alliance of Rhode

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Island Southeast Asians for Education (ARISE), the report is a prime example of the ways that city government continues to dismiss student voices. “We have been telling the city that this is an issue,” Womack told the College Hill Independent in an exclusive interview.

“Young people have been saying this. But you needed an academic stance to validate that yes, there is a problem.” The report—which cost $50,000—was paid for by the Partnership for Rhode Island, a nonprofit made up of the CEOs of major Rhode Island employers like Hasbro Inc., CVS Health, and Brown University.

As Womack emphasized to the Independent, “We didn’t need a report to affirm what we’ve been saying and experiencing.” +++

weeks after the report’s release. Located in public schools around the city, these forums were a joint collaboration between the mayor’s office and the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE).

Normally sparsely attended, they drew the attendance of hundreds of Providence residents, many of whom voiced a strong desire to see the state assume control of the city’s public school district. Although Infante-Green claimed these forums were designed to incorporate the voices of students and parents directly affected by the school conditions, they did not necessarily amplify the voices of those community members. If the forums were meant to truly get the feedback of the community, Womack argues, each person at the microphone would have been allotted more than two minutes. For Womack, the forums were simply a means to showcase and validate the findings of the report. In her view, “this whole process has been extremely disempowering.”

Following the forums, RIDE released a 71-page proposal for the state takeover, outlining the major difficulties identified in the report and formally articulating the department’s plan. The proposal, which the city council is set to approve on September 13th, shifts the power structure of the school system: in addition to appointing a new superintendent, the proposal grants Commissioner Infante-Green control of “the budget, program, and personnel of PPSD and its schools.”

Infante-Green immediately received substantial national positive press for her seemingly bold state action, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal that lauded her for coming to Rhode Island to “make change.”

Yet the report, unlike past community feedback, has spurred the government into action. Early in August, Commissioner of Education Angélica Infante-Green submitted a proposal to the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education asking for a complete state takeover of the city’s schools. Formerly the Deputy Commissioner of Education in New York, InfanteGreen was appointed Rhode Island’s Commissioner in late March, making her the first Latina and first woman of color to hold the position.

After her request was granted, Infante-Green assumed all the powers of the mayor, school board, and city council in an effort to prepare school facilities for the upcoming school year. She also appointed an interim superintendent, Frances Gallo, the former Central Falls superintendent. The permanent superintendent, who will also be selected and appointed by Infante-Green, will take over from Gallo in September. +++ The city’s decision to cede power to the state government ostensibly resulted from a series of eight The bureaucratic efficiency promised by a state takecommunity forums that took place in the emotional over is certainly appealing. Many parents are frustrated

13 SEP 2019

Contesting the state takeover of the Providence Public School District

BY Alina Kulman & Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

by a school system mired in disputes between parties— including the city government, state government, and the teachers’ union—who share authority and responsibility for the city’s schools. With decision-making power collected under one superintendent and one education commissioner, there may be less room for complacency, as the PPSD, the teachers’ union, RIDE, the city council, and the mayor’s office would no longer be able to blame each other for the school’s failings.

State takeovers of public school districts have historical precedent. In Rhode Island, the state’s authority to take control of Providence schools comes from the Crowley Act, which allows the state to intervene in failing public schools if those schools have not shown improvement after a period of three years, although it does not clearly outline the process for taking over entire districts.

But if the history of state takeovers across the country are any indication, these transfers of power are rarely smooth, and they often exacerbate racial inequality. In his book Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy, Domingo Morel, a political science professor at Rutgers University and a member of the Johns Hopkins review team, argues that state takeovers typically obscure their own political and racist motivations. Although state governments’ outward facing statements may reflect intentions to improve school performance, Morel believes that school takeovers are ultimately a political tool to take power away from communities of color. In a review of 1,000 school districts, Morel found that majority-Black districts are more likely to be taken over than majority-white districts. Additionally, state takeovers are more likely in districts with rising Black political empowerment, especially those with increasing numbers of Black elected officials. In practice, school takeovers often mean large and indiscriminate firings of teachers and principals, and fewer people of color

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

representing their own communities on school boards. “tried everything” to get their opinions heard by With takeovers, Morel argues that government Infante-Green. “Nothing has worked,” Womack told officials often want greater control over the distribu- the Independent. “Even though they have been telling tion of state resources at the expense of communi- the public that we need community input, there is no ties of color: “Across the country, you have rural and action to align with that supposed value.” suburban state legislators essentially resenting that In response, ARISE and other activist organithese resources—that they perceive as their own—are zations took to the legal system, and filed a motion going to districts like Providence,” Morel told the against RIDE with the Rhode Island Center For Justice, Independent. a public interest law center. According to a press However, the history of state takeovers is not release published last Wednesday, the motion was monolithic. In his book, Morel cites the Rhode Island filed on behalf of community organizations, parents, state takeover of Central Falls public schools in 1991, and students; it demands a “clear” takeover plan from after a decade of fiscal and academic challenges. RIDE that emphasizes both transparency and commuAlthough Central Falls public schools were 40 percent nity engagement.

Latinx by 1990, the local school board was entirely For Womack, the declaration of legal filing is white, which alienated community members from simple and seeks to address the disconnect between their schools. After the takeover, the state government the community and the school system: “We're basifired the all-white elected school board, and appointed cally saying that any plan that you come up with that an entirely new board that included three Latinx does not center parents, students and community members. Since that takeover nearly three decades voices is not going to work.” Since RIDE’s takeover ago, the school board has maintained substantial proposal gives Commissioner Infante-Green nearly Latinx representation within a district with a majori- unbridled power over the school system, including ty-Latinx population. the power to appoint a turnaround superintendent Yet Morel emphasizes that successes like this are for Providence schools, members of ARISE and other rare. He argues that the vast majority of takeovers community organizations want to be at the table for disempower communities of color, and ultimately those decisions and appointments. “We’re asking you reveal a “flaw in the structure of our American democ- basically to honor your word,” says Womack. “Honor racy that is only familiar to poor communities of color.” what you’re saying by including us.”

Because of this dynamic, Morel, who is also a gradOthers in the Providence community have addiuate of Central High School in Providence, opposes tional suggestions for making RIDE’s school reform RIDE’s takeover of schools in Providence. “We have a more transparent. Representative Kislak suggests really unhealthy disconnect between the schools and looking for alternative standards to evaluate the takethe communities. These connections just don’t exist,” over’s success: “I know we’re going to be looking a lot Morel told the Independent. “I don’t see how the take- at the [test] scores, and that’s totally valid,” she told the over addresses this.”

Independent. “But scores are not the only thing that Additionally, state takeovers do not necessarily matters.” Kislak proposes a community-based process address the chronic underfunding that lies at the to determine the metrics to track the takeover’s effects heart of the educational crisis. Commissioner Infante- on school culture and performance. Debating these Green has yet to announce an increase in funding for standards would bring much-needed accountability Providence public schools. Instead, her statements to the takeover process, along with providing an addihave emphasized the need to use current funding tional opportunity for community input. more efficiently. According to RIDE’s proposal, the Morel suggests an immediate increase in the state’s annual school aid to Providence has increased number of school psychologists and community orgaby $84 million since 2011. Despite this funding, RIDE nizers, who can help students handle their mental argues that public schools continue to underperform health and external hardships before problems and “systemic problems prevent the district from “bubble up” in the classroom. He also believes RIDE improving.” needs to invest in a pipeline to improve teacher diverAccording to Morel, the level of funding that sity. “That’s a mid-term to long-term goal so that, as students in Providence public schools receive is teachers age out, there is an increase of focus on comparable to the state average. Equality, however, teachers of color, primarily from Rhode Island,” Morel isn’t equity. Many of the educational needs specific told the Independent. to Providence—such as the high percentage of English Language Learners who need supplemental +++ support—require, but do not receive, additional funds.

State representative Rebecca Kislak also believes According to Morel, there is rightful concern over that Providence schools are underfunded. “I’m not Providence public schools because the current condiconvinced that we fund our schools adequately,” she tions should be unacceptable. “But how do we create a told the Independent. “I think we’re going to need to long-term sustainable, healthy public school system? have that conversation.” She doesn’t know, however, You can’t do that without having the community be whether that conversation will happen this year or next part of that.” If anything is clear amid the debates at the state house. over the future of Providence public schools, it’s that

students, teachers, and community organizers need to +++ be central to the discussion.

While reposting a Twitter announcement by the Community organizations in Providence spent the Center for Justice, the Providence Student Union, entire summer calling attention to the potential pitfalls an organization that works to build student power of a state takeover at RIDE’s public forums. According in Providence, perfectly articulated the concept: to Chanda Womack of ARISE, members of her group, #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs. along with those in other community activist groups, ALINA KULMAN B’21 and SARA VAN HORN B’21 want Brown University to pay property taxes to the city of Providence.

METRO

04

TO KANCIL,

WITH LOVE The first time I saw mouse deer, I was sitting at a table in the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Nature Lab, sketching a salamander. From the beginning, something kept distracting me. My professor looked over my shoulder and asked if I had finished three sketches.

“No,” I said. “I keep getting distracted by that tiny deer.”

She lifted it from its position atop a cabinet of crystals and placed the specimen beside me on the table. “Ah yes,” she said. “This is mouse deer.”

It was the size of a small dog or a large rabbit. Its fur was brownish with faded white markings down its chest. Its legs were as thin as the pastel I was using to draw; they were mounted to a wooden stand with thin metal rods. A similar piece of metal poked through its forehead. Patches of fur were missing on its side and behind its ears. Its glass eyes were cartoonishly large.

An old label, barely taped to its base, announced its name: MOUSE DEER (Tragulus javanicus). It said that these “shy, solitary, monogamous” animals come from Indonesia. It added, “Silent, but they cry when frightened.” I was disturbed for a day, one might say seized with longing. The deer remained with me for the rest of the class. +++ Members of the Tragulidae family are mostly found in South and Southeast Asia, though a single species also lives in West Africa. The generic name Tragulus is an amalgamation of a Greek word for goat and a Latin word for tiny. Technically speaking, they are neither

mice nor goats nor deer—in form, they are midway between deer and pigs. Scientists consider them living fossils because they have remained largely unchanged for 30 million years. However, the ways that humans have made meaning with mouse deer vary widely across both space and time.

Kancil, as mouse-deer is known in Malay, features prominently in Southeast Asian folklore. In these stories, kancil’s cleverness and self-control make up for his diminutive size. In one of the most widely reproduced stories, kancil tries to find a way across a river.

In the river are crocodiles. Kancil calls out to them, complementing their size and strength. They flex their claws. They flash their teeth in the sun. Kancil says that they should wait for a meal bigger than a mere mouse deer—the king wants to prepare a feast for them. He tells them to line up, bank to bank, so he can count them. He jumps onto the back of the first, then the second, then the third. He counts aloud as he goes, until he’s across. And he laughs. And he enjoys his own laughter, he who isn’t being devoured. Not being devoured is the secret goal of an entire life.

Over the course of centuries, stories like that one have been told and retold. First in the languages of Southeast Asia, and then in the grammars of colonial rule: philology, ethnology, taxonomy. In the latter case, successive contexts of articulation—Orientalist journals, natural history museum catalogs, children’s books, travelogues—form a genealogy of the Western will to knowledge about Southeast Asia and its people.

The first European to assign a scientific name to mouse deer was Pehr Osbeck, an apostle of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Thomas Stanford Raffles, the colonial governor of Java and Singapore, was the first to distinguish between several species of Southeast Asian mouse deer. (His name later designated a subspecies of T. javanicus.) As Donna Haraway has written, men like Raffles were, “with excellent reason, at the forefront of nature work.” This work is critical to the production of race, gender, and empire.

Generations of soldiers and naturalists thus laid claims to the skins, skulls, and stories of the smallest deer they had ever seen. +++ During the age of empire, word of kancil began to spread around the world, effecting a transformation from material into spectacle, animal into specimen.

“The line that drew the animal body onto the page was essentially the same line that wrote it into sentences,” writes Giovanni Aloi, an art historian. The very word “specimen” is linked to the Latin verb specere – to see.

To fill the gap between words and things, taxonomic discourse requires individuals to become fixed and singular, representative of a multitude. But indexing life’s totality requires an equal measure of death: the 1915 catalogue of the British Museum, for instance, lists dozens of killed and collected kancil, with reference to dozens of others in the United States and elsewhere.

The earliest taxidermy animals were skins filled with sawdust straw and beaten into shape with wooden clubs; with developments like clay modeling and premodeled urethane forms, the seams became less visible. The greater the degree of realism, the more the constitutive fact of a mounted animal—its

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FEATURES

13 SEP 2019

Or, the smallest deer in the world

BY Zach Ngin ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Kathryn Li, Katherine Sang

death, maybe a violent one—is erased. “The power of this stance is in its magical effects: what is so painfully constructed appears effortlessly, spontaneously found, discovered, simply there if one will only look,” writes Donna Haraway. In taxidermy, “it is in the craft of killing that life is constructed, not in the accident of personal, material birth.” The stuff of life itself­—land and water, muscle and movement—is effaced in favor of a frozen moment.

Mouse deer entered the Nature Lab’s collection in 2002 as part of a large donation from the Boston Children’s Museum (BCM). According to an email from Rachel Farkas, the museum’s curator of collections, the museum once accepted everything it was offered. “There was little rhyme or reason to collecting local v. exotic flora and fauna,” she wrote. Kancil would likely have been displayed at some point, but the documentation is in progress. The specimen matches an accession from the Peabody Museum of Salem in January 1914, just a year after the BCM opened.

According to its website, the Peabody Museum (now the Peabody Essex Museum) dates to “the 1799 founding of the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.” The society members established a cabinet of curiosities for the objects they collected during their travels. Mouse deer could have been collected by one of them, but the particulars, such as the name of her collector and the reason she caught his eye, remain a matter of speculation, lost to the century since. I can only imagine, to paraphrase La Paperson, how her shape—the cherished hint of a figure—has haunted the maps drawn by his hand. +++ In 2016, the Nature Lab hosted an event called Love for Mouse Deer. The idea for the event began during parents’ weekend at RISD. Paper and art materials had been laid out on the tables, and visitors began drawing kancil. Most of the drawings were left on the table.

Betsy Ruppa, the lab’s coordinator, showed them to me. One had heart-shaped pupils, haloed by an electric explosion of red. I LOVE YOU, the caption read.

Another, with morbidly large eyes, spoke the word HAIL. Another was captioned with the injunction: free him.

“I started it with the drawing, just thinking those drawings were so funny. I wanted people to see them,” Ruppa told me. “Then this student, we were talking, and she said we should do a whole big event about finding her a boyfriend or a love interest.” And so kancil became the “bachelorungulate,” to quote one of the posters produced to promote the event.

Students volunteered to contribute baked goods and art. Ultimately, the event featured mouse deer stickers, mouse deer pencil cases, mouse deer cookies, mouse deer cookie cutters, mouse deer pins, mouse deer key

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ever leave Little Flower alone with the lady’s tenderness. And a five-year-old child, seeing the picture and hearing her family’s reactions, becomes alarmed. In that household of adults, this girl had up till now been the smallest of human beings, Lispector writes. And, if that was the source of the best caresses, it was also the source of rings, mouse deer embroidery, and a miniature felted this first fear of love’s tyranny. mouse deer mounted on a miniature stand with a +++ miniature label. The Nature Lab raised around a thousand dollars and purchased a taxidermy dik-dik During the winter of 1879, the American trading vessel as kancil’s lover.

I asked Ruppa how people react to seeing mouse Janet Furguson sailed from Singapore to New York, deer for the first time. “Everything from absolute loaded with a cargo of pepper and spices. Toward the love to absolute revulsion,” she said. “They think beginning of this long passage, a man who had been it’s creepy, they think it’s funny, they think it's dear, aboard recalled, they were met and surrounded by “the sweet. And then they read, ‘Silent, but cries when usual fleet of native bum boats laden with fruits and frightened.’ I mean, come on. What’s not to love?” I curiosities.” Among these curiosities were “some of have spent some time puzzling over what it is that the most graceful, beautiful little creatures one could elicits such strong reactions. Ultimately, it must be well imagine—five full grown live deer, not larger than some combination of its novelty and its familiarity, its small rabbits.” The Janet Furguson’s captain trades patchy fur and tilting head, its tiny legs and arresting an old silver watch for the five of them, and the kancil eyes. “I don’t know what it is. It just gives off some come aboard.

They live in a “Deer Lodge” built for them by kind of love, and people love it.” Ruppa said. “I know this is a dumb thing, but I think, what if we had a pet the ship’s carpenter. “In these comfortable quarters mouse deer here? What would its little feet sound like the little midgets made in safety a voyage of 136 days, walking on these creaky old wood floors? It would be becoming great favorites with the crew,” writes Daniel Carter Beard, our correspondent. During those days so sweet.” on the Pacific, one of the kancil—warm, tiny, pregnant, warm—gives birth to a fawn. When discovered by the +++ mate, a buck had eaten the fawn’s legs off, and it was Midway through my work on this project, I realized dead. This smallest of tragedies portends the losses that I had failed to find the language for this obsession. to come. As the ship arrives off Sandy Hook, three of It wasn’t enough to describe kancil’s eyes as wide and the kancil escape from their shelter and perish in the its legs as spindly. It wasn’t enough to say ‘cute.’ I saw cold. “Immediately after arriving at port the fourth, this on the faces of friends to whom I’d tried to explain a fine buck, fell a victim to our (to them) inhospitable what I was doing. I was speaking a lost language. But climate,” Beard writes. “The only survivor, a beauwhen I returned to a short story by Brazilian writer tiful doe … came into my possession; but she only lived Clarice Lispector, I knew I’d found it—I’d been found. about a week. In spite of all my care she too expired, The story begins when a French explorer ventures into killed by the cold breath of our New York winter.”

After inscribing the kancil’s death, Beard reaches Equatorial Africa to find the smallest people in the world. Among them lives the very smallest woman for words to describe the week she spent in his home. in the world. Seeing an immediate need for order, and “She was a timid little creature,” he writes, “but would to give a name to whatever exists, the explorer dubs her take food from my hand and allow me to stroke her Little Flower. He pronounces it shyly and with a deli- back.” He marvels and mourns: a pencil had looked cacy of feeling of which his wife would never have judged “thick and clumsy” beside her thin, delicate legs. His him capable: “You are Little Flower.” These words article, published in Scientific American, includes an illustration of the rare thing herself, a pencil in the found their way into italics, into this story.

Lispector’s is a story about imperialist nostalgia, frame for comparison, because it is good to possess, good mass media, maternity, laughter. When I read it now, to possess, good to possess. To quote Aloi again, “The line it’s a story about the human will to possess: the place that drew the animal body onto the page was essenwhere love and longing and domination cannot be tially the same line that wrote it into sentences.” This pried apart. Confronted with the smallest woman is the line of longing and love, the line that kills and in the world, all of the old colonial tricks—naming, brings the dead back to life. copious note-taking, visual reproduction—simultaneously express and defer this desire. Little Flower’s ZACH NGIN B'22 has a poster of Clarice Lispector image is printed, life-size, in the color supplement of hanging over his bed. the Sunday newspaper, so she can be possessed en masse. Lispector’s story moves from the Congo to the homes where people encounter this image. In one apartment, a woman cannot bear to glance again at her image, because it pains me so. Another feels such perverse tenderness for the African woman’s smallness that—prevention being better than cure—no one should

FEATURES

06

THE NEED FOR SPEED 5G and the next chapter of the digital divide

Scattered around the streets of Providence, clusters of gray boxes sit perched atop telephone poles and attached to the sides of buildings. They are antennas, and they form the basis for the next generation of wireless technology, known as 5G. Providence is one of several pilot cities across the U.S. that have been selected by Verizon as testing grounds for this new kind of wireless technology. Small sections of neighborhoods around the city have been installed with a network of 5G antennas. The connected areas include parts of Federal Hill, Mount Hope, College Hill, and Elmhurst.

Although Verizon hasn’t provided official reasoning for how its pilot cities were chosen, the choices reflect its priorities in developing this new infrastructure. The selected cities are relatively wealthy, with large populations of residents who already use high-end smartphones. The coverage areas chosen within cities are also revealing. They are usually neighborhoods with high density and wealthy populations: downtown business districts, college campuses, and upscale neighborhoods. The places that Verizon has chosen to install 5G are those that are already some of the most connected. To better understand the stakes of how this next-generation network is implemented, it is helpful to look back at the history of cellular networks.

Generations of wireless cellular technology are defined by their incompatibility with older devices.

Usually, incompatibility results from changes in hardware, software or both. In each generational change, new kinds of transmitters allow more information to flow across a broader range of frequencies. At the same time, new kinds of encoding can compress large batches of data more efficiently. Devices need to share the same basic hardware and software with the surrounding network in order to communicate, so changes tend to happen relatively suddenly as both phones and networks change over, leading to discrete generations.

In 1979, the first generation—1G—was the first set of consumer wireless cellular telephones. In the 1980s, the second generation introduced text messaging and greater bandwidth for calls. The advent of the third generation in 2001 improved data transfer speeds enough to allow mobile phones access to the internet.

4G, introduced in the mid-2000s, improved data speeds once again, allowing for video calls and other high-bandwidth applications that have become the heart of modern mobile phone use.

5G offers yet another increase in bandwidth and speed. Current 5G networks produce peak speeds more than ten times faster than the best 4G networks.

The transfer speeds of 4G, measured in megabits-persecond, will be superceded by 5G’s gigabits.

But the speed upgrade that 5G offers comes with added infrastructure requirements. 5G networks rely on higher frequencies than previous technology. This allows networks to carry more information. However, higher frequency waves are more sensitive to the material they pass through. The atmosphere absorbs higher frequency waves more quickly than low frequency waves, so 5G signals do not travel as far as 4G ones.

And obstructions like buildings and trees, which have little effect on 4G cell service, can block 5G signals. So while a single 4G transmitter can cover several miles,

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a 5G tower might only transmit within a few hundred feet and require line-of-sight to devices.

The infrastructure for 5G networks is being deployed with this constraint in mind. Today, transmitters placed on telephone poles and lampposts every few blocks only give spotty coverage, but a fully realized network might see antennas placed every few dozen feet, providing uninterrupted high speed connection everywhere. Although 5G transmitters are smaller and less expensive than their 4G counterparts, covering any significant area with a full 5G network would require an enormous investment in new infrastructure. Because of this, 5G networks will likely only be deployed in high density urban centers, where many users can share the same system. But rural and tribal communities already lag behind in rates of access to the internet. Deploying 5G to only dense urban areas threatens to contribute to a widening gap in internet access. +++ Although the internet is part of daily life for millions, many Americans living in rural or tribal areas lack access to adequate connections. In areas with slow or no internet access, residents cannot take advantage of the employment opportunities, educational resources, and health information on the web. Access to the internet empowers people and communities by connecting them directly to resources and information that improve their lives.

While internet access is a boon for education and a requisite for participation in much of the modern economy, it has not always been distributed equally.

Urban centers tend to have much higher rates of internet access than rural areas. This difference is often called the “digital divide.” The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broad powers to monitor the deployment of new phone and internet services along with a mandate to correct any inequities that they might find. The Act also requires the FCC to document their findings and progress each year in a Broadband Deployment Report.

From the very first of these reports in 1999, the FCC found that rural, low-income, and tribal communities were at risk of being ignored by internet service providers. The findings held true over the following years.

In 2012, the FCC reported that, while only 10.2% of all Americans lacked access to high speed wireless internet—with the benchmark then set at 5 megabitsper-second download speed—more than 27% of rural residents and 30% of residents of tribal land lacked access. As overall connectivity has increased, rural and tribal areas have become more connected: in 2016, the FCC found that only 0.4% of all Americans, 1.8% of rural residents, and 5.1% of residents of tribal lands lacked access to 5 megabits-per-second download. However, between 2012 and 2016, faster 4G LTE supplanted 3G as the widespread standard of mobile wireless, and the 5 megabit benchmark became outdated. When considering a more representative standard of 10 megabits-per-second, the nationwide population lacking adequate internet access dropped to 12.7% from 19.9% over the same time period.

However, for rural populations, the proportion stayed

constant around 30%, and for the population living on tribal lands the proportion actually rose slightly to 36.3% from 35.5%. As wireless technology has improved, the digital divide has often grown larger, not smaller.

The economics of scale are at the root of the digital divide. Because installing fixed internet connections requires running wires to each connected house, it is less expensive per-user to install wired internet in densely populated urban areas as opposed to sparsely populated rural areas. This has given internet service providers, which construct and own most of the internet infrastructure in the United States, strong incentives to avoid servicing rural areas.

Some rural and tribal communities have taken the issue of internet access into their own hands. Internet cooperatives, which are owned and operated locally, provide service to many areas that larger internet service providers do not. But in areas that are not serviced by either, residents are left to rely on slower services like dial-up and mobile broadband.

Some internet service providers have claimed that a fully developed 5G network could replace traditional wired service and help bridge the digital divide. In a public conference call earlier this year, AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson claimed that 5G could become a “fixed broadband replacement product.” Statements like this have been met with intense scrutiny by digital rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which have argued that even the most advanced wireless broadband pale in comparison to high-speed wired connections in terms of speed, price, and long-term infrastructure maintainability.

While 5G networks are fast, they are simply not as fast as wired options like fiber optic, and are often significantly more expensive for consumers. The development of 5G networks is unlikely to close the digital divide by replacing wired internet connections. More than that, because of constraints on where it can be deployed, 5G may exacerbate inequalities in wireless broadband access.

Because 5G towers have limited transmission range when compared with 4G, it’s unlikely that their use will expand to sparsely populated areas. 5G will likely remain limited to urban centers and other areas that already have higher quality internet connections.

5G deployment threatens to widen the digital divide by improving the access of those who already have it while not helping those without.

In the long term, 5G’s biggest potential for affecting the digital divide may lie in its ability to change expectations of what constitutes a high-speed connection.

As more users gain gigabit-per-second 5G connections, services will emerge that require those connections.

Many widely used smartphone applications require 4G levels of high speed internet connection, and were only made possible by the widespread adoption and implementation of 4G networks. Video-calling and high definition streaming would not be possible without the infrastructure required to support high-speed wireless internet. Although services that require a 5G connection do not yet exist, they are surely coming. And once they are here, consumers are unlikely to go back to using 4G-based services, just as internet users today would be left unsatisfied by low resolution videos or web pages that take minutes to load. Unless efforts are

13 SEP 2019

BY Matt Ishimaru ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN

Ella Rosenblatt

PROVIDENCE COLLEGE

BROWN WN UNIVERSITY UNIVE UNIVER NIVER ER ERSITY RSITY R Y

FEDERAL HILL

INDIA POINT

East Providence

5G coverage in Rhode Island For now, in Providence and other cities, the introduction of 5G networks means faster connections for a taken to continue to expand new internet technology select few. If you have one of the newest phones and live to all users as standards of speed and access change, or work in certain areas, you might notice that web pages rural and tribal communities will be left even further load nearly instantly and apps download in seconds. But most people across the state and across the country will behind than they are now. not experience the benefits of 5G anytime soon. As long as the networks remain restricted to certain areas within +++ a few cities, the digital divide threatens to grow. Without a substantial change to the way wireless networks are

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

distributed across the country, the newest technology could be a leap forward that leaves many Americans behind.

MATT ISHIMARU B'20 has no service.

SCIENCE + TECH

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FRANCOISTS IN THE SHADOWS Vox, the nationalist, anti-immigration party that broke uprising that sparked a civil war, during which he into Spain's Congress of Deputies last April, may be received military aid from Hitler and Mussolini, whom new to the Spanish political scene, but the far right he considered allies and role models. The Francoist itself is not. The Spanish and international media has era is remembered for its state-controlled takeover put forward a narrative that portrays Vox as the first of private life, political repression, and exaltation significant appearance of the far right on a national of “national Catholicism.” The dictatorship is living scale. While not strictly incorrect, this framing can history, too. If you wander any town in Spain, most misconstrue the role the far right has played in Spanish people over the age of 50 can tell you stories about politics. growing up with the Catholic cross and the portrait of The freshman Vox party and its 24-seat début the Caudillo on the classroom wall. made national and international headlines: this is the Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s first time a far-right party has held more than one seat was a complex affair which historians still try to make in Congress since Spain's transition to democracy in sense of today, but it is no secret that the transition 1975, following the end of Francisco Franco's 40 year- was led by the ruling political class of late Francoism— long dictatorship. Vox's victory has pulled the far right the same political class that founded the PP. Since back into the Spanish political discourse after years 1975, the PP has insisted on telling the story of how it of media coverage that comfortably treated Spain as brought democracy to Spain: “Spain has no violent Far immune to the far right. The Guardian wrote that Vox Right because we in the AP and the PP have made it has “gained a foothold unseen since Franco's death.” moderate, constitutional,” Manuel Fraga Iribarne , a The New York Times also described Vox's 2019 break- prominent official in Franco's government, told El País, through as the "crossing of a significant threshold" and Spain’s largest newspaper, in 1996. The Far Right has that, for the first time since Franco, “Spain was not also largely been treated as absent from the Spanish immune to the advance of far-right parties that have political sphere by the media. made inroads elsewhere in Europe.” The Times also So, when Vox began stirring up political campaigns claimed that “Vox is Spain's first far-right party since in 2014, it received little attention. It first caught the the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975,” but this public's interest in 2018 when it gained regional politis actually false. Before Vox, far-right sympathizers ical representation in Andalucía, a largely agricultural found an explicit home in Fuerza Nueva, a neo-fas- region in southern Spain, but it was not considered a cist party that held one congressional representative main player in the country's political landscape until between 1979 and 1982. after the 2019 national elections. During the lead-up Coverage that presents Vox’s rise as the first to the elections, Atresmedia, the media company instance of the far right having significant weight in that controls the country's televised electoral debates, national politics is misleading and even dangerous. banned Vox from participating on the grounds that its Focusing on the institutional absence of far-right screen time would not be “proportional” to its political parties before Vox suggests that the far right was previ- import, since it held no seats in Congress. Two nights ously absent from the political sphere, when a closer later, when Vox secured those 24 seats, its represenlook shows that far-right sympathizers have never tative Javier Ortega Smith delivered a victory speech: lacked a voice in Spanish politics.

“After tomorrow, they won't silence us again.”

The far right in Spain is hard to characterize, but Who is the “us” that Ortega-Smith was referring Spanish far-right tendencies since Franco have gener- to, and why do they feel silenced? Vox's electorate ally emphasized nationalism, the unity of Spain, and features a higher proportion of male voters, agriculxenophobia. Some far-right factions have espoused tural workers, and active-duty soldiers and veterans of explicitly neo-fascist views and practices, such as the military than any other Spanish party, according “national-Catholicism” and paramilitary violence. to a study by the Spanish Center for Sociological Beyond the national stage, minority far-right Investigations. Its voters oppose Catalonia's indeparties have long had a scattered institutional pres- pendence efforts and are concerned by corruption, ence in local politics throughout the country. Vox's unemployment, and an establishment political class breakthrough is significant because it is the first time they perceive as decadent. Although Vox itself rejects that far-right sympathizers have left the parent party the label of “far-right,” most English-speaking news and grabbed the megaphone for themselves on the outlets categorize it as such, and place the party national stage—but not because it's the first time they within the larger pattern of post-2008 nationalist have had a voice. populism that is sweeping across western, central, The Independent sat down with historians and and now southern Europe. Vox has run campaigns investigative journalists who have traced Spain's far with the slogan “Make Spain Great Again” and promright from the Franco era to the present. These inter- ises to protect its voters from the threats of feminism, views revealed that the Partido Popular (PP)—the immigration, and los progres (Spanish slang for “the establishment, center-right party founded by one liberals”). If Ortega-Smith meant that Vox has been of Franco's ex-ministers that has been running the silenced as a movement, his statement resonates with country on and off for over 20 years—accommodates a familiar argument made by other nationalist and politicians and voters whose ideologies range from populist representatives, like Donald Trump and the traditional conservatism to Francoism and neo-fas- leaders of Brexit: the media is guilty of silencing or ridicism. Spain is the only western European country grap- culing the buildup of populist movements. pling with the legacy of a fascist dictatorship whose far right is within the main conservative party.

The PP's Francoist representatives None of this is news to Spaniards. Ask locals Paul Preston and Julián Casanova, two internationin Barcelona whether they think the country was ally recognized experts on modern Spanish history immune to the Far Right before Vox, and you tend to consulted by the Independent, keep the term "far get different variations on the same answer: right" context-specific when characterizing events “Oh, come on.” (¡Sí, hombre!) in post-Francoist Spain. Preston is the Príncipe de The phrase is often accompanied by a down- Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies ward-twisting smile, a soft snort, or a mirthless at the London School of Economics, specializing in chuckle. the Spanish Civil War and the 40 years of dictatorship that followed it. His book, The Spanish Civil War, Vox and the tradition of the far right in Spain is one of the leading academic references on the topic.

The absence or presence of the far right in Spain is a Casanova is a professor of contemporary history at delicate subject, because discussion of it brings back the University of Zaragoza and a visiting professor at memories of the fascist-style military dictatorship that universities across Europe, Latin America and the ruled the country between 1939 and 1975. Francisco US. Both historians make frequent appearances on Franco seized control of Spain through a military Spanish media and contribute to El País.

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They agreed that what is now Spain's main conservative party originated from the ruling political class of late Francoism.

In May 1977, two years after Franco's death, Fraga —who had been Franco's Minister of Information and Tourism before serving as the regime's ambassador to the United Kingdom—founded the Alianza Popular (AP). That party rebranded itself as today's Partido Popular (PP) in 1989, winning its first national election in 1996. In EU politics, the PP operates within the same international coalition as Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party, the European Popular Party. The coalition is, according to its website, the political family of the Center Right.

Large families, however, often unite members from diverse backgrounds. The European Popular Party is no exception: the Partido Popular's origins are notably different from those of Merkel's establishment group. According to Casanova, the original Alianza Popular, while not itself a far right party, was “a coalition of notable Francoists.” Casanova points to Carlos Arias Navarro, AP's senatorial candidate for Madrid during the 1977 elections. Before becoming President of Franco's government, he was a fascist veteran of the Spanish Civil War nicknamed “the little butcher of Málaga” in 1937 for overseeing the execution of 4,300 people in the city of Málaga suspected of supporting the Republican cause.

While Arias Navarro himself was not elected in 1977, AP gained 16 seats in Congress that year. Seven of those representatives did not support the Constitution of 1978, the legal document that grounds Spain's democracy today; nor did AP support a 1977 law that granted amnesty to the dictatorship's political prisoners. For Casanova, this behavior, along with various AP members embodying “the image of the past,” shows that AP housed several Francoist higher-ups at

13 SEP 2019

BY Clara Gutman Argemí ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Kathryn Li, Katherine Sang

The far right in Spain's main conservative party that time.

Preston said that the late Francoist governments to which Fraga belonged were “very right-wing,” but he is “reluctant” to call them fascist or “far-right in the sense of the golpista far right”—a reference to the coup-staging Francoists of the 1930s.

The Francoists of the 1970s and ’80s were not advocating violence. Instead, they wanted to adapt right-wing politics to a democratic system while keeping the ruling political class of late Francoism in charge of the right. So, when AP became today's PP, “it welcomed those ex-Francoists” of Fraga's generation, said Casanova. While highlighting that the PP is “undoubtedly a democratic party in the formal sense,” he notes that “every time the past is brought up—historical memory, the Republic, the Civil War, the Dictatorship—PP representatives respond by using Francoist arguments.”

Take the example of Fernando Suárez González, Vice President of Franco's last government. Suárez González represented the PP in European Parliament from 1987 to 1994. In a 2018 interview with El Mundo, he agreed with the claim that Spain's present-day Right has a “Francoist DNA,” saying “How could it not? The mistake is to think that that's a problem!” This sheds light on the paradox at the heart of the PP: the party is proud of its Francoist roots while also framing itself as a champion of democracy.

PP representatives haven't just voiced views sympathetic to the dictatorship. The party has also shown a permissive—even supportive—attitude towards present-day expressions of Francoism outside the PP, such as the National Francisco Franco Foundation (FNFF).

Established in 1976, the FNFF is a private organization dedicated to "broadcasting and promoting the study ... of the life, thought, legacy and works

of Francisco Franco Bahamonde," according to its website. El País reports that the FNFF has praised the Generalísimo Franco and denied that the regime was a dictatorship, adding that the current Socialist government is considering outlawing the Foundation.

Between 2000 and 2003, under the presidency of the PP's José María Aznar, the FNFF received €150,000 in government funds. The public money was supposed to pay for the digitization of the FNFF's archives, but Raquel Ejerique, an investigative reporter for the online newspaper eldiario.es, exposed that the FNFF organization instead used some of the money to update its headquarters' facilities, including buying a new paper shredder. While investing public money in digitizing historical documents is not unusual, the digital files have not been released to the public, which is required given that the funds came from tax money.

The government has also denied that any of the money was used for purposes other than digitizing the FNFF's archives.

“It's surprising that the FNFF is a legal foundation ... as though it were pro-democracy, when its goal is to extol the dictatorship,” Ejerique told the Independent.

She explained that taxpayers who donate to the FNFF get a tax deduction, in accordance with a law that applies to all foundations that “benefit the public”— a definition that includes the FNFF. The law was passed in 2003, under the PP's mandate.

Beyond her coverage of the FNFF, Ejerique is facing criminal charges for investigative work related to the PP. After exposing that the PP's president of the Madrid region obtained a master's degree through a rigged grading system, she was accused of “embezzling secrets,” for which she faces a possible five-anda-half-year prison sentence. She and her editorial team await trial. The charge of “embezzling secrets” has been justified on the grounds that an academic

transcript is private information that should not be published. Ejerique, however, believes the charge is being unjustly wielded. “Lawyers have told us that journalists should not be prosecuted on those grounds.

We’re only doing our job.”

The PP's ‘orphaned’ far-right voters A 2010 study by the Spanish Center for Sociological Investigations shows that, between 1993 and 2010, 90% of Spaniards who self-identified as far-right voted for the PP. “Unlike what happens in other European countries, here the Far Right is inside the main conservative party,” sociologist Félix Ortega of the Complutense University of Madrid told the online newspaper Público.

The historians consulted by the Independent agree. “The civilian Extreme Right has been relatively well accommodated within the Partido Popular,” said Preston, describing those voters as having “[taken] refuge in the PP until their moment arrived.”

Casanova added that the part of the electorate that never condemned Francoism was “accommodated and comfortable within the PP.” Xavier Casals, a Catalan historian specializing in the post-Francoist extreme right, took care to stress that the ideology of some of the PP's voters does not reflect the ideology of the party as a whole, and said that “the PP has simply included those orphaned [far-right] voters who did not have a party of their own.”

While not all of its voters subscribe to far-right ideology, the PP has historically remained an attractive platform for the far right to voice its views. But, after 2008, things began to change. The new Ciudadanos party emerged as a center-right player that directly competed with the PP, attracting its conservative voters; Vox emerged as an explicitly nationalist party that attracted the PP's far-right electorate. Preston attributed the emergence of Vox, which was founded by two ex-PP representatives and an ex-PP militant, to “resentment of corruption under the Andalusian Socialists and anti-Catalanism.” Vox is different from the neo-fascist Fuerza Nueva of the ’70s and ’80s, the party that held one congressional representative in Congress for three years, in that it “arises out of the heat of the reactivation of the extreme right elsewhere in Europe,” which “was not possible before the 2008 crisis,” said Casanova. Preston added that Vox “is ideologically similar to Fuerza Nueva but it has not advocated violence in the manner of Fuerza Nueva” and other far-right militant groups.

Fuerza Nueva dissolved in 1986, giving some of its sympathizers enough time to fold into the PP and climb the party's ladder, until they eventually became its representatives. This is the case of Josep Bou, the PP's candidate for Mayor of Barcelona during the 2019 race. Before the mayoral elections, photojournalist Jordi Borràs published a document revealing that Bou had joined Fuerza Nueva in 1978. The PP candidate denied the allegation.

“Publicly, I told Bou that if what I had exposed was not true, he was welcome to take me to court,” Borràs told the Independent. Bou has not pressed charges.

This is not Jordi Borràs’ first time in the public eye: In 2018, he gained the national media's attention after he was assaulted by a far-right sympathizer who identified himself as a police officer. “What bothers [the mainstream right] the most is that I show them their resumé, that I shine a light on their past,” he said.

“There's a tendency in the Spanish state to deny its origins.”

CLARA GUTMAN ARGEMÍ B’22 would like to thank Lluc Salellas and Jordi Borràs for helping with the research for this piece. Moltes gràcies pel cop de mà.

Quotes given in Catalan or Spanish were translated into English by the author.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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ARRIVING BEFORE THE LIGHT I walk to work that morning. It’s a Tuesday. Something mellow is playing in my headphones, and my phone vibrates, and Toni Morrison is dead. I think I am shocked, and I think I am overwhelmed, and I think I am simply sad, but I am still walking to work, and the world is barely awake. And part of me feels as though I don’t have a right to these feelings. The truth is that prior to her death, I had never read a Toni Morrison book in full. I’ve read significant portions of Beloved and Sula, tracing the journeys of Baby Suggs and Nel and the Deweys. I’ve absorbed the pains of those Black and burdened and beautiful that grace Morrison’s written pages, but I have never left a story complete.

Toni Morrison, to me, had been an idea before she was a writer and before she was a person. She was an admirable Black woman and, by extension, a perfect role model. And, of course, it is significant that Morrison is Black and female and a writer. Her identity does not make her talent any more surprising. Too often, admiration for someone’s success is misguided shock at their talent because of their identity. The words Black and female and writer were not supposed to follow each other in a sentence. Yet here Morrison was, stringing together sentences that had previously been

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are you going to write about Black people?’” Of course, Morrison is correct, and I am not surprised that this video has circulated so widely. It seems most sensible to highlight her Blackness and her womanhood for the sake of themselves, to talk about her championship for marginalized identities, particularly in a country where acknowledging the existence of Black women is protest in itself. But when I think of Toni Morrison, I don’t think of this famed interview. I think of one she did with Time in 2008, where she was asked the question we think is all too commonly asked of writers and therefore never asked at all, “How did you discover your passion for writing?” to which Morrison replies, “I thought my deepest passion was reading, and then I realized there was a book I very much wanted to read When Toni Morrison passed, she, like many celebrities, that really hadn’t been written.” received post-mortem accolades. Her name seemed to grace every headline and dripped from tongues like the And here is where I find the most solidarity and solace sweetest honey. Excerpts from her most popular books with Morrison. She read with the same fervor with circulated the internet. Interviews did too, including which she wrote. More than anything, she wanted a video of Morrison with a white woman, where the the story in whatever form it was available. I discovwoman asks Morrison when she plans to write about ered reading somewhere between the ages of bedtime white people. Morrison decisively responds, “You stories and flashlights under the covers. I opened any can’t understand how powerfully racist that question book in the house that I could reach with my minimal is, can you? You could never ask a white author, ‘When stature, and I fell in love on every tattered, aging, impossible. In Beloved, she titles characters as forms of endearment and remembrance. There is a moment in the novel where “Beloved dropped the folds of her skirt. It spread around her.” I love this moment not only for its simple elegance, but for the way it closes an extended description of scenery. While the line is situated so comfortably within the work, if you allow the quote to stand alone, anyone is allowed to be beloved, allowed to be my beloved. The sentence may not be the best or most powerful of the novel, but it is a testament to Morrison’s ability to construct every sentence deliberately. Morrison could say, Black women are beautiful and I have a story worthy of being told. Even the most simple of phrases were enough to catch eyes.

13 SEP 2019

Notes and reflections on the life and legacy of Toni Morrison

BY Gabriella Etoniru ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Christie Zhong

brown page. Eventually, when I was tall enough, The Bluest Eye was within reach. The story of Pecola Breedlove rested on a forgotten shoe rack that held miscellaneous regalia (read: clutter) instead of shoes.

My fat fingers were able to grasp that book for a day before my mother noticed what I was holding and took the book away, claiming I was too young to read such a story. And I thought how strange it was that a story about me, or at least one I felt could be about me, was forbidden to me. Morrison says about her first work that “nobody had taken a little Black girl seriously in literature before.” But I think she could have ended the sentence after seriously, and the sentiment would have been just as true. What drew me to Morrison and Breedlove long before I knew who either was must have been the scent of camaraderie, the shared sadness, and a desire to be beautiful. My mother’s claim that I was too young to read my own story on the page felt bewildering. And I realize now that my mother did not think I was merely too young, but that the truth was too brutal and too relatable, because if nothing else, Toni Morrison was always honest. Morrison’s work was always able to poignantly acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy that seems to accompany the need to protect progeny from harm—real or not. Her short story “Sweetness” portrays such behavior explicitly. “I wasn’t a bad mother,” the narrator begins. “You have to know that, but I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her. Had to.

All because of skin privileges. At first I couldn’t see past all that black to know who she was and just plain love her. But I do.”

Of the outspoken character Pilate, in Song of Solomon, Morrison said, “Sometimes a writer imagines characters who threaten, who are able to take the book over.

To prevent that, the writer has to exercise some kind of control. Pilate in Song of Solomon was that kind of character. So I wouldn't let her say too much. [She is still very large.] That's because she is like something we wish existed. She represents some hope in all of us.” I wonder if there is more connection between Pilate and

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Morrison than simply a pen and paper and imagination.

I think of the ways Morrison threatened and continues to threaten the whiteness of the literary canon, the dominance of white narrative, and the way she was seemingly and wonderfully unable to be controlled. I think about the way Morrison said so much, and could have said even more, but didn’t need to.

And then I think about her representing hope.

Sometimes I think talking about passed and past writers and hope is too didactic, too on the nose, and far overdone. I think this act is especially true when talking about Black people and more so Black women, because there is a certain expectation that Black women are meant to be beacons of hope while rarely being allowed to carry it within themselves. But I will talk about hope in relation to Morrison because I cannot understand how else my young self, who did not know of her existence, much less her name, could have been drawn to her so quickly. I will talk about hope with Morrison because I am unsure of what else to do, because if I cannot draw hope after her death, then I am afraid of what else I will draw. What I seek, I suppose, is the ability to continue to treat Morrison’s work as a living being, even though Morrison is not. I want to memorialize her as a writer, not as her writing.

I need to draw hope from her work because I need its promised longevity, for it to stay relevant in contemporary discourse and recourse as the themes in her writing remain prevalent.

I know I am not alone in this situation, this position.

Although something deep inside me says Morrison was not afraid of dying and was not concerned with being a beacon of hope even though she was acutely aware of her own positionality, I feel as though, for her, death was written into her story much in the same way she wrote trials and tribulations, joys and overjoys into her characters’ lives. I am trying to find a way to pay memoriam to Toni Morrison without turning her into an idea.

I am trying to find a way not to tokenize her or turn her into mere iconography, though she is, simply, an icon.

them, because what I want to do is write better.” And I wonder if this is what made me love Toni Morrison so much more, the unabashed ability to be herself and write for herself. For her, writing was not only an art form, but a continued practice and a means for self-improvement. Her success was a byproduct of this exercise, and, for once, other Black women and men and children and queer people could see themselves on the page, unfettered and unfiltered. For white people, Morrison was almost their permission to survey the Black world, a gateway for their voyeuristic fantasy. She never wrote for the white audience, but she knew the white gaze was always upon her. I think there was an air of fascination at a Black woman who was successful without acquiescing to the white ego or gaze that entranced so many. Surely, then, her writing was worth reading. If her writing was not, well, she was not writing to impress anyone anyway. She was practicing, and in doing so she captivated everyone.

On forming habit, Morrison notes that “writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.” In these words, Morrison seems to consider her own success just as much a product of practice as one of mysticism and chance. Morrison’s routine in and of itself was a means of preparation, years and years of watching and waiting for the right moment, a glimmer of light. I am thinking of the way, too, that Morrison arrived before the light, but did not depart once it came. She stayed in it, writing away, basking in its rays, absorbing and reflecting the sun’s radiance. The light was meant to linger on her.

The Bluest Eye was no accident in timing. She was far too practiced and intentional for that. She waited for the right light, six years after the climax of the Civil Rights Movement. People were more ready and willing to listen to nonwhite people speak and write. Audiences were finally ready to take the story of a little Black girl seriously. Toni Morrison was there, just before the light rose over the United States, over readers white, Black and Brown. She rested there in the glory she had so diligently waited for. The exact point of contact Morrison seems to have made with each and every one of her readers is slightly unique--from the little Black girl who dreams of being white, but really just wants to be seen as beautiful, to the old mother who loved her child as much as she hated her child and ended up pushing her away. She relates to her readers without trying to forcefully grab us. And at these points of contact, she allows us to sit in the light with her, if even for just a moment.

I like to think that if I asked Morrison the vague, catch-all question of tell me about yourself, she’d say to read her writing, not because she wrote herself into stories, but because her stories contained what was important to her. There is another Toni Morrison interview I enjoy, conducted by Nellie McKay, in which our GABRIELLA ETONIRU B’20 is caught somewhere beloved author shares, “I am giving myself permission between wanting to do everything and wanting to do to write books that do not depend on anyone's liking nothing, so she'll see what happens.

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BY Mara Dolan and Mia Pattillo DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

“IT NEEDS TO BE IN OUR HANDS” An Interview with the Jane Collective’s Heather Booth In 1965, Heather Booth received a desperate phone call from a friend whose sister needed an abortion. Booth called around and eventually found a medical practitioner willing to perform the procedure, which was illegal across the country, in secret. As word of Booth’s actions spread, she began helping other women with unwanted pregnancies until the workload became too much for one person to handle. Booth reached out to other women’s liberation activists, and together, they formed the Jane Collective in Chicago. The Jane Collective worked to address unsafe illegal abortions by training themselves to provide women with safer and more affordable procedures. In its eight years of operation before Roe v. Wade codified the right to abortion across the United States, the Jane Collective would provide around 11,000 underground abortions, primarily to low-income women of color.

In the past year, the reproductive protections won by women in the 1970s and ’80s have come under greater and greater threat. As state-level legislatures have chipped away at abortion rights and access in states around the country, Roe v. Wade’s federal precedent feels more fragile than ever. The College Hill Independent took this opportunity to sit down with Heather Booth to reflect on her work and the legacy of the Jane Collective. We discussed the abortion rights movements of the 1960s and 2010s; resistance to the forces that control, harm, and even kill pregnant people; and how Booth took reproductive justice into her own hands.

Can you describe to me the path of a woman in Chicago who finds herself pregnant in the 1960s and is hoping to access an abortion?

Truth is, that’s not what we asked people. I can tell you what I suspect, but this isn't from personal experience.

I'm sure many women found no option. They turned to friends and family, maybe there was a midwife.

Amongst them, maybe there was a girl friend who suggested something that they do. Some probably inflicted harm on themselves. And many of them were those who didn't feel they were ready, and felt terror about the options. For those who were wealthier, they might have realized that there were other places they could go. You could go to other countries; at one point, you could get an abortion in New York, Colorado, or Hawaii. And they sought those options.

For those who were connected initially, it was through a college network at the University of Chicago.

Then word was spread through a college network in the Midwest. People came from University of Wisconsin and other places in the Midwest. They might have seen advertising around it, or heard from friends, and so on, that there was a number to call “Jane.” Early on, it was my personal phone number. As soon as I picked up the phone, you could tell there was a sort of a pause, and they weren't quite sure what to say. And so it was pretty clear what they were calling about, and I’d say, “Are you calling for Jane?” They would say yes. “Are you calling about abortion?” They would say yes. At that point, I’d tell them that I'm there to help them and had a few questions to put them in touch with a physician and a doctor who could work with them and provide the procedure. I’d ask them some questions: How is their general health? How far along are they? Where do they live? Do they have any funding? I’d tell them what the dollar amount was, I tell them what the range of time was, what the details were in terms of pickup and arrangements. Then I’d give them the name of

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the doctor, and they could make the arrangements themselves. I made sure that they could call me if they had any questions, before or after, go through what I understood what happened during the procedure, and see if they had any questions and any issues that I felt I needed to raise to, initially Dr. Howard, and then to Mike [two of the first doctors to provide abortions through the Jane Collective]. And that was it—I’d give them the number to call and who they should ask for.

You mentioned when Jane first started, you used your personal phone number. I'm wondering how you thought about and dealt with the risk of what you were doing, and if you ever had moments where you were questioning whether or not it was worth that risk, and potentially that fear?

I don't recall wondering about that. I had been in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Movement, and we were taking actions that might even mean risking my life. I was arrested. I realized I might risk arrest, but it was for a cause that matters for improving the world and people's lives. So it was a risk I was willing to take. I wanted very much to live, I did not want to be arrested, I did not want to die or be harmed. I certainly didn't want to harm others. But I faced that situation where you take actions to challenge illegitimate authority and challenge unjust laws. I also hoped that it wouldn't be public, no one would know. So I tried to minimize the risk. I didn't focus on the consequences a lot.

politics, human rights or international issues. I think there's a greater connection between the issues now than there was then.

There's a much more virulent right wing that is using abortion as a right-wing base-building issue, and it's become much more politicized. I think there's a new political divide on it. And then the rise of Planned Parenthood as a power force currently is quite different.

At one point, people didn't know how to do abortions.

Now, there's a whole generation of people who've learned how. There is a whole population that, number one, knows how to do it, and, number two, has the confidence that they can do it and the belief that they should do. So we have changed as a movement.

When folks call you nowadays and and tell you that there's a need in their community to form some some type of underground abortion network, how do you guide them? What kind of advice do you give?

More recently, I've been receiving an increasing number of calls from people who are interested in creating some kind of underground. I tell them what was involved, when I was involved, and raise certain things to consider. There's transportation, there's medical supplies, there's legal support. I understand there are new networks, but I haven't been tracking it. I wonder now if I should be tracking. With this decision about federal funding, if people give abortion counseling, it just means the services will be so much less provided. So legally, I think that the need will be even And do you feel as though those sentiments greater. were largely shared by the other women and the Beyond the technical cost and logistics and transfriends that you brought in?

You felt really as though the risk reversal was worth it, port, do folks ever ask you for more personal because you were fighting for something that mattered guidance in terms of dealing with things, like so much. One thing is, I didn't discuss it other than facing the inherent risk? with my husband and with my closest friends. Even I've tried to speak from experience, trying to be many close friends I didn't discuss it with, when I supportive of people who are looking for alternatives. was involved with Jane. So I don't know what we were I've really emphasized the need to focus on the fight, to thinking about. It wasn't the focus. It was 1965 to 1969 keep it safe and legal. One in four women of reproducwhen I was involved, a time of intense movement and tive age will have an abortion in their life. We have to struggle in the country: on civil rights, on the war in fight to keep this legal. This is an essential part of the Vietnam, and the beginning of a women's rights move- healthcare system. Current circumstances are such ment. We were struggling against very powerful inter- that I'm increasingly supportive of those who go on ests. And there will be risks involved with the horrors to restarting an underground, because the repression of what was going on, from massacre in Vietnam, the and oppression of women for full participation in the harm in division to our country, the selection of elected society of women's health is so serious right now. officials by elected officials, the unjust and murderous treatment of African Americans, the unjust treatment It feels like the Jane Collective never saw legislaof women—but they were things that needed to be tion or legal protections as the true answer to full bodily autonomy—they literally took women’s addressed. health into their own hands. Do you still feel How do you see today’s reproductive justice that same way today, or do you feel like the legal movement departing from the reproductive system and federal government can actually be the enactor of reproductive justice? justice movement in the 1960s?

For the similarities, [the movement of the ’60s] was I believe that on this issue, and on all issues, to make out of concern for women's health and women's role democracy work, we need an engaged population. We in society, and for the health of all people. And I think need people to take action, we need them to be orgathat's still true, that health and abortion are deeply nized, to reach out and engage others for democracy tied to all issues. There are also a number of differ- to work. It needs to be in our hands. I do believe the ences. Race, gender, and class analysis is much more government which represents us, if it is in our hands, seriously understood and embraced by people who should have laws to ensure that medical procedures are fighting on these issues. One portion of a move- that are necessary for people’s lives and quality of life ment around abortion came out of the eugenics move- are supported with full access. ment, out of a white, privileged, upper-class interest in population control. There's a greater understanding MARA DOLAN B’19.5 and MIA PATTILLO B’20 now that all these issues are tied together: immigra- will always pick up their phones. tion reform, civil rights, healthcare overall, money in

13 SEP 2019

BY Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN Christie Zhong

THEN WHAT ISN'T? Thomas did not see the squirrel. He saw a wooden chair resting sideways on the ground. He saw a broken glass on the coffee table. He saw water dripping onto the floor.

Abby had her hair up in a vertical ponytail. She was holding a cardboard box.

“Is he in the box?” Thomas asked.

Abby shook her head.

“You look nervous,” she said.

Thomas was not nervous.

Thomas was a groundskeeper. He had scared a moose off with a frying pan and a wooden ladle. He had pepper-sprayed a black bear. If anything, Abby was scared. Abby was from Los Angeles. She taught theater to middle school children.

Thomas sat down at the kitchen table. Searching the apartment again made him yawn, and he turned away towards the window to hide it from her. Outside, flat sunlight bore down on the shoppers. They crawled up the most popular street in town. Their street. The street with the best retail shopping in the state of Wyoming.

Thomas scratched his nose. He could smell coffee brewing. In the two years since they moved here, Abby and Thomas had never had a rodent. They had confronted ants. They had mourned a dead sparrow.

But they had never had to deal with rodents. Thomas turned from the window to look over the apartment again. He scanned the living room first, and then the kitchen. In truth, everything besides the bed and the bath was crammed into this central room. There was no need to distinguish them.

Abby lifted the box up to her face and cut one side

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open with a pair of scissors. She walked across the apartment and placed the box next to the bathroom door.

“Oh, the bathroom…” said Thomas.

“There you go,” said Abby.

“You trapped him?”

“I did.”

Abby walked over to the kitchen where Thomas was sitting. She took the table with both hands and dragged it over to the bathroom. The table groaned.

“Can I help you?” Thomas asked.

Abby turned the table on its side, so its legs pointed north toward the mountains. She put her hand on the edge of the table and stared at him.

“No,” she said.

Then she went for the coffee table. She took it, flipped it over, and placed it next to the kitchen table, so the two surfaces faced each other.

“Oh,” said Thomas.

He saw the plan. He liked it, but he figured it would probably take two people to accomplish. Someone needed to trap the squirrel at the end of the channel.

Another person had to close the door behind it. He figured it was best to let Abby realize this on her own.

“You can sleep through anything,” a voice said from the bedroom.

“What?” said Thomas.

“You can sleep through anything,” said Abby, crossing through the kitchen again. A line of red yarn followed her. It didn't seem to move until the last end slid through the doorway. She tied the beginning of the yarn to the doorknob and took the rest in her left hand.

“I wear earplugs now,” said Thomas. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh right,” said Abby. “Those are new, huh?”

Thomas nodded. Abby let slack out on the yarn.

“Am I starting to snore?” she asked.

“No.” “Talking in my sleep?”

“No. You’re fine, darling. You’re perfect.”

“Oh really? Then what isn’t?”

Thomas gestured to the open window. The whoosh of a car pressed down the road. A truck beeped. Thomas smiled. He raised an open palm as if presenting these disturbances like a roll of quarters. He hated town. He wanted to move up into the hills.

“Oh yeah, it’s like Manhattan out there,” said Abby.

She opened the bathroom door and walked around the tables. The yarn followed her. For a few seconds, they listened to the squirrel’s feet scrabble across the bathroom tiling. Then it appeared, looking out at them from the doorway, its jaw wobbling, obsidian eyes wide and unblinking.

“Wow,” said Abby, “it’s cute.”

She pulled the yarn. The door slammed shut, evicting the squirrel. It slid like a puck over the waxed floor, and hit the box with a thud. Abby taped the box shut. She put her hands on her hips and walked behind Thomas toward the kitchen sink.

“What, are you going to murder it?” said Thomas.

He walked over to the box and poked five breathing holes into the top with a pen. Then he flipped the pen around. He wrote, Squirrel, and turned to show Abby.

He expected a laugh. Abby poured muesli into a bowl and turned off the coffee maker.

“Can I make you something good?” said Thomas.

“No,” she said, “I don’t have time.”

13 SEP 2019

“Really?”

Fifteen minutes later, Thomas was downshifting “Yeah, no. No time.” the pickup truck. He turned onto a paved road which “It’s Saturday. I bought tomatoes, and avocado, and wound up the edge of the valley into the woods. Modern bacon.” houses, spliced by the cedars and the aspens, revealed “I know you did.” themselves in fragments, blurring and breaking like Abby bit her spoon. Outside a motorcycle gang action in a flip book. He turned into a driveway and rolled down main street. Every Saturday they did three followed it up a steep incline, where he reached the circuits through town before descending upon the Benchleys' property, a glass box overlooking two acres Applebee’s. of pasture.

“I hate them,” said Thomas.

In the summer, Thomas filled the pasture with “Hmmm…” horses. In the winter, he took the horses to a small “You don’t?” barn where a man named Duncan watched and fed “I don’t hate anyone,” said Abby. them with his cattle. For its beauty and sharp look, the She took her hair tie out. Her hair was in her eyes Benchleys' house was poorly insulated. Every winter again. it needed an obscene amount of heat to keep the pipes She stared at him, expecting more. from freezing. Now that the valley was a few days into Thomas was done. Abby stood up, cleaned her spring, Thomas figured it was time to turn the heat off bowl, and dumped the bottom of her coffee into the and save money. sink.

Thomas entered 5643 to unlock the front door.

“I think you select the noises you want to hear,” she Then he entered 2295 to disarm the security system. said. “You never complain about the frogs when we go He walked through a narrow hallway which opened up camping. You’re like, ‘isn’t it peaceful here,’ and mean- into a spacious living room, kitchen, and dining area. while there are frogs passionately fucking outside our Soft gray light streamed through the big glass windows. tent.”

It fell on the deserted white furniture and marble “They aren’t fucking. They are just asking to be countertops. A large rectangular window framed the fucked. It doesn't even compare to thirty motorcycles,” forest. The forest framed a meadow which Thomas said Thomas. had cut into trees. A herd of elk stood in the meadow, “You’ve fallen asleep mid-conversation with me,” surrounded by a circle of fences. said Abby. “What’s going on there?”

Thomas turned off the thermostat.

Thomas groaned.

Returning to the truck, he noticed a text from Abby walked back into their room to change. She Lucy. She said that she was ready for him, and it was was going to rehearsal. A month ago she had been okay if he wanted to bring film equipment into her yard. appointed the head director of the Jackson Hole Thomas was excited. It had been many years since he Community Theater. It was a good thing. She was had made a “fix-it-yourself video.” Before there was a happy about it. But lately this happiness had built itself waitlist for his services, he had found work by posting up into an oppressive confidence. There were times tutorials online. At 1 AM, in the dark silence of his when Thomas felt that he was the flattest character family home, he would edit on two computer monitors, Abby worked with each day. The questions she liked to hacking away at a picture of himself grinning beside a ask him now were more self-affirming than curious. paralyzed weed whacker.

“So you called Mark and he came over, right?

When he could bear it, Thomas chose not to use “Yes, you did yard work, in Wilson, with Jamie, the bathroom in the houses he looked after. Thomas yeah?” made it five miles towards Smith, before he had to Opening his phone, Thomas slowly went through pull over at a gas station. A few other buildings stood his unread messages. He had not planned on working beside it. Across the street, a group of construction today, but the requests were always coming. Today, workers sat together in the sunlight. Behind them the he had to check up on the Benchley house, but he also gray cylinder of a cement truck slowly turned as it set wanted something new. down the parking lot for a new supermarket. Thomas He scrolled until he found an unknown contact: got out of his pickup truck and walked to the bath307-093-8989. room behind the gas station. Even after the steel door 307-093-8989 had a broken fountain. closed behind, he could hear the sound of jackham307-093-8989 had introduced herself as Lucy. mers and nail guns. From here the next great enclave Lucy lived in Smith, not far from the Hoback Junction, of urbanite settlements would extend. Thirty minutes where Thomas had grown up. was the farthest they were willing to live from organic He was still hunched over the phone when Abby food. Like his Dad, Hank, Thomas resented the tides emerged from their room. She was dressed in a blazer of development. The sound of jet engines that filled and glasses. She reached for the box and tried to smile the valley every May for the national parks and every goodbye.

January for the ski slopes.

“Oh, I can do it,” said Thomas. “I’m driving out of “That’s not very Wyoming,” Hank's new favorite town today.” phrase. He would point to a pastel fleece, or a can of “Why?” said Abby. flavored sparkling water and say, “That’s not very “Well, I have work too.”

Wyoming.”

“No, why do you need to drive the squirrel out of Last Christmas Hank had purchased three pairs of town? I was just going to do it on the sidewalk.”

TruckNutz.

“Our sidewalk?” said Thomas.

“These only work with a trailer hitch,” he said, “It’s a squirrel.” passing one to Thomas and another to his older brother “Yeah, woodland fauna.”

Mark. “i.e. you can only attach them to vehicles.

“Not this one,” she said.

His family loved to sit down and talk about She picked up the box headed for the door.

Thomas’ work. He had taught them the word “mini“I guess we will see him again tomorrow, then,” malist,” and now every time he worked at a house they said Thomas wanted to know if it was minimal or not. After they’d “Him?” had their laugh at the house, they would move to the “Yes,” said Thomas. owners, asking what type of shoes they wore and how “Really?” they shook hands. Five drinks later they would direct “Definitely,” said Thomas. the fire at Thomas.

“Alright.”

“Thomas, are you becoming minimal?”

“I love you.”

“Are you and Abby going to buy a Prius?”

“I love you too.”

“That’s not very Wyoming,” Hank said when Abby Abby closed the door. Thomas listened to her feet had first come to meet the family. There was no food. hitting the stairs. Another yawn took over his face. He No drinks. They just sat her down in the living room poured himself a bowl of cereal and carried it to the and listened to Mark grill her on the history of fur window. A block down the street, Abby knelt before trapping. an oak tree and cut the squirrel out of the box. It scamThe second she was alone with Thomas in the car pered up the tree, gripping the trunk in an awkward Abby burst into tears. Over and over Thomas told her hug. For a while, Abby stood there watching it move how endearing she was. How well she had handled from one branch to the other without gravity or reason. the situation. How she had perfectly overcome it. How Then she waved goodbye to it, turning her back as she good she looked. moved up the street towards the community theater.

“If someone asks me a question here,” she had said, Cue the hawk, Thomas thought.

“I have to be able to answer it.”

The address was an old white farmhouse with a

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small covered porch that had no chairs or benches.

Many yards behind it the gray ruin of a barn sagged in a green field. Thomas grabbed his tool belt and his camera bag.

The top of Lucy’s head barely reached the median height of the doorway. She had short graying hair, glasses, and a red-tank-top. She was maybe 72. The smell of air freshener escaped through the open door.

“I remember you.” she said.

“Hey,” said Thomas. “How are you?”

“You’re cute,” she said.

Thomas looked over Lucy’s head into the house.

His eyes followed a long, maroon floral carpet. He had no recollection of the carpet, the home, or Lucy.

“Can I get you a glass of water?” she asked.

“No thank you,” said Thomas.

“So modest,” Lucy smiled.

They walked through her living room. The same painting of a snow-capped peak hung in two different places. There was one in the hallway and one in the living room. In the living room, three separate daguerreotypes of hunting dogs were arranged in a V formation over a mahogany table.

A black, circular table stood at the center of the yard, a lone chair docked beside it. On top of the table, an ashtray cradled a dying cigarette. At the edge of the property, a row of lavender bushes hugged a pale wooden fence. In one corner a marble angel held up a bird bath. In the other, a stone fountain stood over a patch of dry mud.

“There’s the fountain,” said Lucy.

“Okay,” said Thomas.

“If you film,” she said, “you should stand behind the lavender bushes.”

“I will,” said Thomas.

“They are the only damn thing I can take care of,” she said, walking back to the house.

The screen door slammed.

Before Thomas set the tripod down or adjusted the frame, he knelt to diagnose the fountain. To his disappointment, the problem revealed itself immediately. A sycamore leaf hugged the filter, plugging the flow of water. Thomas pulled the leaf off. He put the pump in. He filled the fountain with a garden hose. It ran perfectly.

Thomas unplugged the fountain. Dumping the water out again, he pulled out the pump, and wrapped the leaf back around the filter. With the tripod set and the camera recording, Thomas returned to the base of the fountain.

“I thought I would do a quick video about fountains,” he spoke to the camera. “It’s a short video because this is an easy problem to fix. And you shouldn’t let repairmen or big garden stores get the better of you or any other fountain owners you know.”

Then he coughed. He looked away from the lens.

He stood up and walked behind the camera. There was no need to review that take, he knew it was bad.

Sometimes when Thomas tried to be matter-of-fact his voice slipped into a droll, attractive tone. A long time ago Abby had told him something about acting. Not acting was its own way of acting, she had instructed– “don’t be so proud.”

Thomas couldn't remember where she had said it. By the time they had met, he had stopped making videos. She had seen them and laughed and complimented him, but she had never given notes. He had never let her direct him. He had never attended her classes, even when she said he could come for free.

He thought hard to remember it: “don’t be so proud...” And nothing came. Maybe she had said it in an argument. When Thomas argued, he had a habit of arresting his emotions. He became robotic. He even lowered his voice, as if speaking from the furthest, deepest end of a piano. He was working on it. He was still working on it. She was patient. He was working on it.

“Take two.”

Thomas pressed record. This time instead of walking, he sauntered into the frame. He loosened his arms and his shoulders. He let his hands float behind him.

Thomas felt like an idiot.

But then he felt good.

He was gesticulating now as he spoke. He was goofier, bolder. He smiled and the blood ran up into his cheeks. It was like there was a real person standing in front of him.

LITERARY

16

PROVIDENCE BITES

BY Ella Comberg and Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Illustrator DESIGN Christie Zhong

Providence Can't JUMP by Ella Comberg I risk hyperbole when I say that the first time I rode a JUMP bike, it felt like I was flying. I have never driven a car before, so I imagine the freedom I felt on that first ride, around this time last year, was something like what might have inspired Springsteen to write “Racing in the Street.” 20 miles an hour down Hope Street’s smooth asphalt and I wanted to sing: tonight, tonight, the strip’s just right.

By April, the joy of that first ride, and many after it, would come crumbling down. If in certain ways JUMP bikes divided the city down political lines (some of us thought they’d get cars off the road, others threatened to kill JUMP bikers in ProJo comments), they also profoundly united the city by giving us, finally, something to talk about. But before the bikes became cloaked in discourse, they were, momentarily, exuberant. +++ When they first appeared in Providence last September, JUMP bikes signaled the long-awaited arrival of the sharing economy to the city. After the success of JUMP in much wealthier cities like San Francisco and Santa Cruz, CA, the bikes’ sudden descent on Providence boded well for the city’s image. If you build a service intended for the creative class, the logic seemed to go, a creative class might just emerge to use it.

Of course, one does not up and move to Providence simply because JUMP bikes make Kennedy Plaza look a little sleeker. And so, once they arrived, the bikes served the population that already existed in Providence: working class people, college students, high schoolers. With time, the once-foreign object began to appear in various corners of civic life. We saw the bikes floating down the river, kids rode them to school during last winter’s bus driver strike, and they appeared at the scene of several crimes. Ridership peaked in June of 2019 at around 2,000 trips per day—a staggering figure compared to the roughly 1,700 trips per day taken in the first nine months of JUMP’s existence in San Francisco, a city five times more populous than Providence. Despite myriad disgruntled complaints to 311 about bikes strewn on the sidewalk and riders without helmets, JUMP remained, unequivocally, a hit among its users.

But then, a month after Uber’s disastrous IPO in May of 2019, rental prices skyrocketed. A rider using a JUMP bike for 15 minutes a day would now pay $135

17

METRO

per month instead of $20. The increase in JUMP prices coincided, not surprisingly, with a decrease in ridership and an increase in theft. By August, Providence residents were taking only a few hundred rides per day, many of them illegal. As the ProJo reported, once teenagers figured out how to unlock the bikes with a little jimmying (rather than a barcode), all bets were off for sanctioned, paid rides. As the bikes became integrated into the cultural fabric of the city, the reality of their use wandered further and further from the techno-utopia which they were intended to usher in.

if Uber owns the app and the data, for a moment, on a sweltering August day, the bikes—in all their emancipatory potential—belonged to Providence teenagers.

Fate of a Disappointed Bridge by Miles Guggenheim At the edge of a flat stretch of grass gripping the shoreline of the Seekonk River, a plaque inscribed, “Gano Park—Centuries of History,” juts out from the earth.

Here, a thick slab of plexiglass protects an assortment of pictures and drawings. Combined, these different +++ modes of storytelling inject significance into the river bank. Jumping across decades and centuries, they cite By the time Providence Public School kids started events like Roger Williams’ landing and the founding riding JUMP bikes by the dozen through the city in late of the Narragansett Bay Oyster Company.

August, allegedly stealing snacks from dollar stores On the water, looming above Gano Park, the and terrorizing bystanders, their schools had already 111-year-old Crook Point Bascule Bridge is waiting to been so underfunded and mismanaged that they were be given its own stamp of relevance. Stuck in an upright unable to provide students with the education and position, it flies the dark color of rust high into the sky. support they need and deserve—not during the school Since its construction in 1908, the drawbridge has year, and certainly not during the long days of summer. been in the hands of the Rhode Island Department of Similarly, once the police arrived on the scene, the Transportation (RIDOT) and viewed strictly according force was already too entrenched in its racist practices to its utility and financial value. Such forces of to pursue any recourse for Black and Brown kids in the accounting nearly doomed the bridge in the mid 1970s, city other than arrest, leaving two children, ages 13 when it was no longer lucrative to run a passenger train and 16, in handcuffs. And when the ProJo reported the between Providence and East Providence. But they story a day after the fact, terming the kids a “bike mob” also preserved the structure in 1976, when it became committing “two-wheeled hooliganism,” the paper clear that the cost of its destruction would create a had already been so corporatized in its attempt to stay new liability all together. To skirt demolition costs, the afloat that the prospect of reporting more responsibly drawbridge was lifted, held in the air to keep traffic on injustice in the city became all but impossible. Amid moving down the river, and abandoned. massive public criticism of the kids for stealing the Living on in this final, melancholic pose, the strucbikes, of JUMP for strewing their technology across ture now often called ''the Stuck-Up'' is the subject of the streets, and of the city for letting it happening, we new discussion. In July, these various perspectives seemed to forget that the bikes were never the problem were put in conflict when it was revealed that RIDOT to begin with. The problem, when it really came down had plans to demolish the structure in 2026. In a press to it, was the schools, the police, the paper. conference with NBC 10 News, Charles St. Martin, The bikes didn’t matter much to Uber, either. The a spokesman for the department, cited incidents of $82 billion company only accrues loose change from vandalism, trespassing, and arson as proof that the a few hundred rides a day in Providence, even if the structure was a growing danger to the community. rides are more expensive than they once were. But News of the drawbridge’s impending death has drawn what Uber loses in profits, it gains in the more clandes- a variety of voices and opinions out into the open. tine game of data collection. Even when the bikes are “It’s an eyesore leaching iron into the water,” writes stolen, their location trackers stay on.

Christine Robillard St. Denis on one of the many polls It’s hard to know just how Uber will use the JUMP circulating across Facebook. Meanwhile, in the same data, and the premise of a physical service existing only thread of comments, Paul J Dallaire Jr. writes, “Leave for data mining will seem conspiratorial until we see it up, the bridge is iconic.” its results and, inevitably, wring our hands. But even According to an NBC 10 WJAR Twitter poll, 47% of 262 participants are in favor of demolition, while 53% are in favor of preservation. This conflict has been strong enough to draw Mayor Jorge Elorza to the scene.

Perhaps sensing that popular opinion is stacked in favor of the bridge, Elorza has proposed to transfer custody from the RIDOT to the city of Providence, which would preserve the bridge as a landmark, saving it from the wrecking ball. To do this, however, the "Stuck Up" will first need to pass before the RI Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission’s gaze, a state agency that takes pride in the ability to identify and protect what it deems historically valuable.

The bridge, of course, was not created to be a sentimetal monument. It was built to make money, raised into the sky to save money, and subsequently kept there for the same reason. Still, even without a clear purpose, the drawbridge cannot help but impose itself over the image and politics of Providence. Massive yet arbitrary, it is beautiful for the same reason it is ugly, sentimental for the same reason it is embarrassing. If it is anything for sure, the Crook Point Bridge is an image of time that has passed: a symbol that refuses to be forgotten, but that also has not been officially processed as “history.”

Whether the Stuck-Up stays or goes, whether we learn to see meaning in it or we forget it—RIDOT is forcing Providence to make up its mind.

13 SEP 2019

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO

fri 9.13

THE LIST sat 9.14

Witches' Night Out Market

Tacos and Marg Crawl

Feelin’ metaphysical? The Witches’

Three words: Tacos. Margs. The Rooftop

Night Out Market is having its very first

at the Providence G. Hosted by the

New England event at the Pawtucket

so-called “Bar Crawl Nation”—a group that

Armory Arts Center from 5PM-10PM.

insists drinking at their events is 100 percent

Admission is $5 and will provide you

optional, which makes this Bar Crawler

access to artisans, psychic readings,

assume the opposite—the Crawl will crawl

body workers, mini-lectures, and

its way through Downcity’s bars and pubs.

more. So skip the lame Friday-the-13th-

Come make a scene from Washington

themed pregames and indulge in some

to Westminster. GA tix $20, $50 for VIP

Transformative Touch and spiritual

(includes unlimited tacos for 1 hour. So, do

discovery instead.

with that what you will).

sun 9.15 mon 9.16

The Prince of Providence

Signs for Climate Strike In advance of Sept. 20th’s Rhode Island Climate Strike, come to this collaborative sign-building and general art-making hangout hosted by Climate Action RI and Providence and South County Sunrise. If you

This List Writer got into a Twitter feud with Waterfire’s official account last spring after she wrote an article implying that Buddy Cianci’s graft paved the way for the birth of Waterfire. Attend this musical biopic—quite literally the event of the fall in Providence—to hear the real story. Says the inimitable Boston Globe: “Buddy Cianci is the new Hamilton.”

are ISO climate change iconography for your sign, may we recommend a rising sun?

tues 9.17

Ryosuke Kiyasu at AS220 Ryosuke Kiyasu is about to grace Providence and no one is ready. The 35 year old drummer (in an expansive sense of the word) has been known to rip apart his instruments on stage, flail across the floor, and generally make people go oh shit. What’re you in for, you ask? “Anger, sadness and hatred,” he replies, “Negative energy makes up my show.” Count us tf in. Admission

wed 9.18

Damon Krukowski at Riff Raff Modeled on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Damon Krukowski (of Galaxie 500)’s new book Ways of Hearing examines the transition from analog to digital in music and audio broadly. If you are a member of the podcast-o-sphere in any capacity, you’ll want to be here. Bonus points for standing in line and eating a twinkie, as Galaxie 500’s “Strange” implores.

is $10 at the door. 8:30-11:30PM.

thurs 9.19 The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

Featuring brilliant filmmakers Brett Story

and Liza Johnson, this program puts a prison in conversation with a hurricane. Both films are experiments with form and offer a foray into relationships of power, inequality, and resilience. This is a screening you can’t miss.

So don’t. 7pm. Martinos Auditorium. Granoff Center. 154 Angell St. Free admission.