25 minute read
The Journey of Finding Oneself Valeria Ortega
Q: What does it mean to be gender fluid for you?
A: The common definition of what gender fluid means is that you identify as different genders depending on how you are feeling in a certain day. It is also part of the non-binary identities It was hard to come to the terms with this identity. For me it is the closest thing that I feel related to and easier to take in. I’m currently in reconstructing the gender that was assigned to me at birth which is female, I would prefer to don’t pick a box but like I said before, most of the times you have to do it in this society we live in and I even see it more marked with gender matters. I say I’m currently gender fluid because probably in a short time I won’t identify like that, I used to be more between female and non-binary but I’m going more and more outside the binary. I’ve change a lot in the past years and is something that you can easily notice if you knew me before I started finding myself, I’m constantly trying to externalize what is happening in me and if it's necessary, which it is, explain it to people, but it is still hard. I haven't even talked to my family directly about this, I just know it's hard to understand and it I need to use the bathroom and I know I'm not the only one. Mostly I get in the women’s room yelled that it’s the ladies room. In good days nothing like that happens, but I always try to go
would be even harder for them If I sit them all together and tell them, I don't identify exactly as a woman but my pronouns are still primarily female. I talk about gender and non-binary identities 7 every time I can and I realize that even my sister who is a lesbian and we are part of lesbian friends of mine, so it makes me think a lot how this subject is complicated. But I mean, I know that many people, even if they are from the LGBTQ community aren't really familiar with what this whole spectrum of gender is.
Q: You say that you are fitting in a box that is demanded but also these alternative gender identities outside the binary aren’t exactly in a box, considering that male and female are the commonly gender identities said valid and real. How do you deal with this? Is it a problem?
A: It is a problem. I present myself mostly as what is considerate masculine but I rather act in a feminine way and that had put me in complicated and awkward situations. When it comes to go to public bathrooms I might choose if they are gendered. I deeply hate this process. I’ve had conflicts with people about gender neutral bathrooms because it’s something that they don’t approve and that don’t see it necessary, but they are. I’ve had discussions about it with colleagues and they always come up with the abuse card and that is problematic, some people assume that if we have more gender neutral bathrooms there will be more abuse reports, and that is not the point. If that's the worry people have, is offensive, to think that it's related. So maybe if we can't make all the bathrooms gender neutral, adding the option could be the solution. I think gender neutral bathrooms are necessary because I get into anxiety every time because I feel more comfortable in it but is common if I get derogatory confused looks or I get
the same community, she doesn't even really get it, that also happens with many gay and with someone. It’s easier for me to get unnoticed in the men’s room and I often do it in nights out or when the other one is in use, but I would definitely prefer to have the option of a neutral bathroom because I don't enjoy peeing in urinals. Another common situation I affront is with my IDs. Sometimes people think they aren’t mine because they look at the picture or read the name and then sees someone they aren’t expecting. It happens a lot when I cross to the U.S. CBP officers question me about my name to know if it is my real documents. I don’t understand exactly how useful is to mark gender in IDs, sometimes I don’t understand exactly what the obsession of knowing someone’s gender when they present themselves in an ambiguous way, I know that many people are curious and that is an important part to know how to communicate with someone, but also many think that gender has to do with genitals, so when they ask you if you are a boy or a girl, probably what they are wanting to know is what we have in our pants, that’s a weird thing for me now 8 .
Q: Because even language is gendered, how could it be? Can you imagine a world without these implications?
A: I think this is something all gender nonconforming 9 folks wish with. It would save many awkward situations, suicides and attacks to our community. I once saw a documentary about advertisement and gender and I mostly only remember how it started because it marked me. The film starts saying how our society is so gendered that when we meet someone and we can't fit them in the box of male or female we don't know how to communicate and the system falls so people get altered. Personally I think that this reaction is already a fail in the system, and I know that changing these aspects in something so universal as language is impossible, so the solution it might be as bathrooms, add another one, add a third gender that could be neither male or female, nothing too specific and normalize it. People should learn at school that sex and gender are different things, that sex means biological aspects as genitals, chromosomes or hormones and gender is in each individual, that is constructed and it depends on your context, where you live and your culture, they aren't the same and is extremely important to be aware of this. ●
47 Height should be just a number | Participant/Author to Participant/Author Valeria Ortega: Do you keep practicing team sports? Grant Chinn: I don’t actually, because, well I was on a team. For the first three years of college I was in Ultimate Frisbee 10 team and I completely gave up track and field and baseball. So I decided to join sports in college, just trying to, you know I just enjoy playing sports because they're fun, right. But these kind of discriminations that happened within sports, weren’t enough to discourage me from doing it. Something did feel wrong in that environment, because I would still hear a lot of people making jokes about my height and stuff, people questioning it. Also there is something about sports culture, I feel people are less accepting of people like me, or just less accepting of people in general, I’m not really exactly sure what it is, I mean I think it has to do with the competition aspect of it. I’m allowed as someone on a team to appreciate my teammates because of their performance in a sport, but that can be seen separately on how a person actually is. V: What it means to be like you? in what you say of not being completely accepted, it has to do with the discriminations you mentioned before? G: It did, especially being in sports culture. Because there were times where I would be wishing that I could grow, and a lot of time I would blame my mom because she is short and I would be like, mom why. When I should have been just like, it is what it is, just focus in what I can do, but it took me a while to just see that as that is who I was. V: You keep mentioning the “Sports culture” what does that mean? What is your conception of it? G: Sports culture to me is a thing that represents the competitive and thus sort of unempathetic side of society. When many parts of the culture are about trying to be better than another team or individual, it brings about this feeling of inferiority and trying to compare oneself to the accomplishments of others. A lot of the rhetoric within sports culture is very unfeeling. It forces people to give up a part of who they are in order to fit in with a team. And to be part of the team, it is hard to be outspoken about who I am as an individual. For example, when I was part of a football team in high school, my fellow teammates would always tell me that I should switch over to play a different position because my height was better suited for the position, and eventually I did switch because I thought I couldn’t succeed in that position anymore. I wanted to play the position where most of the players were way bigger, way taller than I was, Grant Adam Chinn is currently doing a bachelor degree on Cognitive Science in UCSD (University of California San Diego). He grew up and lived in the Bay area in a suburban town near to San Francisco until he turned 18. He spent many of his years immerse in team sports.
G: To be like me means to be short (5 foot 3 inches tall) and Chinese. Yes, not being completely and everything I was hearing told me I couldn’t redefine how that position was played in my accepted in the sports world was definitely due to the fact that my teammates always doubted own style because I couldn’t benefit the team in the best way possible. what I could do in sports because of my physical attributes, being both small and Asian. These
aren’t qualities that are normally seen in athletes, at least in the contexts I was playing sports V: People have this perception that a man should be tall, does that make you feel out in this game in. People would doubt my athletic ability because someone of my height shouldn’t be able to of masculinity?
jump far or run fast in the eyes of taller athletes. G: It does, I'll admit it still does. There are times, I like a girl and if she is taller than me, I still prototypical male – female relationship 11 . So I only see shorter girls as someone I would want
V: So, you've always heard these comments about your height in your daily life? Not only in the sports area but in life in general.
G: Yeah, people still make comments about it. Is interesting how it does affect people to see you, because it is super important, like in dances or homecomings, to find or ask to all these dances, like how am I supposed to dance to this girl that is taller than me. It does make it pretty difficult I'm not gonna lie, Or I guess we can come up with a new form of dancing. Then they like an inch taller than me. I guess I could get more creative on how approach at these kinds of situations, like maybe I could get High heels. But then that would be me not accepting my height so.
V: Does that make you feel shame?
G: For a while it did. I think I’m definitely at a place I recognize it and I know and I’m just like, ok yeah I’m 5`3 that’s how it is and I joke about it.
V: It took you a while to embrace and accept your height?
feel skeptical, like I’m not a completely awful personality but I’m short, so I don’t wanna take that extra step like make them a partner you know. Just because is not seen I guess, like the wanna wear high heels, and they are like man I can't wear high heels because my date is only
to get involved with.
V: How would you define what masculinity is? Is height that important? And it has to do with you idea of the “prototypical male?”
G: I define masculinity through how I see it defined in the sports world. And this is not necessarily anything I agree with, but I see masculinity in the sports world as someone who carries a lot of physical attributes to allow them to succeed in sports. Someone who is masculine in sports is someone who can take care of one goal, and that goal is to win the game and make it look easy doing so, possibly by dominating others. So yes, height is incredibly important because it is what many perceive to be incredibly important to the success of an athlete because statistically height is what enables us or is correlated to us being able to succeed in the sports that are popular in American culture - football, baseball, and basketball. And it’s true I think we see the prototypical athlete, like Lebron James, who has a body that doesn’t even seem real (he’s like 6 foot 8, 250 pounds of pure muscle), and this is the kind of athlete that will succeed in and appear effortless in the constraints of a basketballgame.
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1 Program of Contemporary Art Production, it’s an education program for anyone who is interested in learn how to create art by Relaciones Inesperadas. 2 Relaciones Inesperadas is a small institution based in Tijuana for creative people and artists. 3 Mexicans have the characteristic of being really physical beings (we tend to shake hands,kiss or hug each other to say hello, sometimes all combined) 4 Queer community as a general idea of LGBTQ community. 5 Most of the times sexual orientation and romantic orientation are seen as one thing, but for some people they are different. Sexual orientation is related to who they are attracted to sexually and the romantic orientation is related to who they fall in love with. 6 I would like to clarify that the next definitions are added for the understatement of these concepts as I define them myself and how I perceived them at a certain moment. Straight- people who are attracted to the opposite gender in terms of the binary (man and woman). Bisexual- people who feel attracted to two genders including theirs. Gay- people who are attracted to their same gender. Lesbian- woman who are attracted to another woman. 7 Non-binary identities are any identity that doesn't fit what it commonly means to be a man or a woman. 8 Before I had a wider conception and understood what gender really is I used to understand it as most people do, like if sex and gender were the same. 9 People who aren't completely comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. 10 Kind of an obscure, fast paced sport that combines the team and passing of a Frisbee to your teammates. There ia an aspect of soccer with the goal of scoring in an end zone like American Football. 11 The conception that the man has to be taller than the woman if they are a couple.
visit: www.collectivemagpie.org/book for this remainder and another conducted by Valeria Ortega and to download the full collection of 82 interviews
The wall has become an extremely politicized symbol of the region, of SD/TJ. Twenty minutes away from our home in San Diego 50,000 northbound vehicles and 25,000 northbound pedestrians cross the US/MX border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry daily. You can stand at the closest beach to that port at the International Friendship Park and be a part of the surreal i image of three different layers of border divisions. La Mojonera, or Western Land Boundary Monument No. 258 is a 9-foot high obelisk which sits completely out of place at the beach like a tomb marker from a historic cemetery. It marks the start of the 1,952 mile line separating Mexico and the United States. In 1851, representatives of the Boundary Commissions from each nation placed the marker together in a collaborative effort that seems difficult to imagine today. A foot away from the territory marker is a sight impossible to fully ii understand. There is a 10 foot steel fence that divides the concrete, then the sand along the beach and continues on into the ocean for several hundred feet as if to attempt to divide that as well. This is a security border wall to prevent the passing of people from Mexico into the United States as a result of the 1994 Operation Gatekeeper. The wall is made of steel military iii landing mat and has small gaps between slats. Separated families have used those spaces to see each other, talk and hold hands between the bars for years. The latest wall is a double v iv reinforcement, first built after 9/11 when more federal legislation allowed for increased security at the border. This secondary wall built in parallel, several feet away from the first, also vi put an end to the possibility of physical contact through the fence. It created a further strange division of a policed no entry zone between the two fences that is occasionally opened for cultural events and often increases the pain of this division. If you go there today, you will see the barren US beach of Border Feld State Park under watch of a border patrol officer. On the MX side, you can see the lively festivities of the Playas beach front, food vendors, live musicians, seafood restaurants and children playing. What we see here is a landscape that separates families, creates tension between nations and instills fear of each other. The wall is a constant reminder of war, failed humanity and the incessant power play for the 1%. President Trump’s scheduled 21 billion dollar border wall will only reinforce and reassure us of all of many years of tension.
The interviews transcribed in this publication share a Mexican-American border patrol officer reflecting on illegal immigrants, a criminal sketch artist profiling the accused inside the court, first hand observations of how the legend of Tijuana, the dangerous city, continues to haunt families over 3 generations, a self described racial identity fading away from racial tension, the resolution of an internal struggle caused by external violence, a pathway from religious crisis to the questioning of freedom and much more. These stories are tragically frustrating, violently unforgivable, some cringe worthy, or confusing at times, are all warmly exchanged, immensely complex and most surprisingly, they are strikingly honest and personal. They ignite the border from the inside rather than from the outside reminding us that the border does not start at the line between US and MX but it is here, embedded in our lives, in every one of us.
These are the stories that are here and remain here as a memory and history. These are the stories of the border residents. These are the stories of our border—the border that matters.
48 w i t h r e s i d e n t s o f T i j u a n a - S a n D i e g o Pressure | Self-Interview READ ALL 82 CONVERSATIONS Grant Chinn is 22 years old, born and raised in a town called Pleasanton, California which is in the Bay Area. He grew up doing everything a suburban kid was supposed to do in order to get to college and be set up for life: get good grades, stay out of trouble, and participate in some extracurricular activities. He currently lives in La Jolla, California and is a student at UC San Diego, graduating in June 2017 with a degree in Cognitive Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction. Confronting Privilege & Crossing Norms Border is an entity that prevents ideas from coming into conversation with each other, maintaining embedded ways of thinking on each respective side of the border. Grant Chinn is 22 years old, graduating in June 2017 with a degree in Cognitive Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction. He wants to work in the tech world to understand how it works and to shape his critical lens of the industry. He hopes to one day bridge the perspectives of tech and humanities to make technology inclusive and understanding. b o r d e r F O U R 1 7 c o n v e r s a t i o n s Transnationals Grant Chinn PREFACE & THANK YOU We are humbled and grateful to have had the honor and privilege to cross back and forth between San Diego and Tijuana, listening to the experiences of people living in these borderlands, over these last several years. Those who have shared their personal stories, for others to read, have inspired this rich publication. We thank you all for extending your sincerity, labor and trust in each other and to us—two complete strangers—during our Globos Workshops*. The generosity extended by each participant opened a space to consciously engage together, reflecting on the complex close(d) relationship of living within the region of the most frequently crossed border in the world—And all the mess, beauty and challenges that are a part of it. The resulting 82 conversations on the subject of border were produced via four seminars from an experimental Art & Ethnography course series: HOT AIR BALLOONS and INTERVIEWS from 2015-2017. The seminars were held in conjunction with the Culture, Art & Technology Program, University of California San Diego; the Transdisciplinary Program, Woodbury University at the School of Architecture; and the concluding seminar, Transnational Edition was held in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in addition to multiple sites in both border cities. MCASD hosted the seminar extending access and content to the their permanent collection and enabling the seminar to exist between multiple colleges, allowing joint participants from Southwestern College, University of California San Diego and Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. This interview collection and artwork consists of a series of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by millennials working collaboratively with each other and with us. * Globos Workshops were developed to produce a fleet of 25ft unmanned hot air balloons to be launched over the US/MX border at Friendship Park, TJ/SD. Balloon construction workshops were held at both sides of the border within many different communities and cultural centers. This publication is a four part series of conversations about the border. Preface & Introduction by Tae Hwang & MR Barnadas of Collective Magpie. Design by Adrian Orozco & Abigail Peña. Copyright. 2015-2018 All authors. . Printed at Diego & Sons, SD. Complete free download of 82 interviews can be accessed at www.collectivemagpie.org/book
A: Let’s start out broad. How would you classify a border in your life?
Q: I think that a border is something that separates people from being able to have a conversation between differing ideas. And this can take the form of conversation internally or externally between two people’s concepts and norms. The first thing that comes to mind is how this idea has manifested itself through me in the sports world. I grew up in a town where everyone was expected to be part of a team of some kind and thus I played baseball, football, and competed in track and field. I think the culture of my town was that sports promote teamwork and other kinds of intangibles to help us children in later life, but there are things engrained within sports culture that I think promote and elevate a culture that keeps others out. Granted, I was very privileged to be able to play sports where we needed to pay a lot for all the equipment and travel fees. Yet there was another level; when I played baseball, my teammates would come to practice and talk about how they had personal hitting coaches. At age 8. Talk about fostering talent early. I would feel inferior to my peers and ask my parents why I didn’t have a hitting coach, I wanted to have the same advantages. My parents said we could accomplish the same thing if we just went out and practiced at the park with my dad, but let’s be honest my dad didn’t know how to engineer my movements to train me to swing the bat in the most energy efficient way. I essentially had to rely on my raw athleticism to compete with everyone else, but being smaller than everyone else, I had to deal with other barriers to feel like I belonged in sports.
Q: Interesting that you would bring up privilege as a border. You touched on your height, so it sounds like a border takes other forms outside of just money opportunities.
A: I want to first say that in talking about being discriminated against in the context of sports, I feel incredibly privileged, because it is an enormous privilege to be able to compete with others in able-bodied leagues. But yes, so at 5’3” right now and being smaller than all my teammates throughout my sports career, I would hear my height being thrown at me at every accomplishment. People express surprise in saying things like, “wow you jump so far for being so tiny!” “for a short guy, you can jump pretty far, imagine what you could do if you were taller.” It took a toll on me since there were expectations that I couldn’t ever expect to meet, especially when I got to high school and started playing sports with people who hit growth spurts in much more exponential ways than I. The will to compete and get better for yourself is much more difficult when others are telling you that you will never realize what could have been. The anticipated growth spurt that would make me the best in the sport never showed up. My teammates in track and field assumed the roles of prototypical athletes: tall and lanky. But it makes sense in sports, where the most obvious connection is that physical attributes within a specific mold signify the greatest potential and athleticism. When I watch basketball I always hear the announcers marveling at the potential of an athlete who is incredibly tall. How those athletes could shatter all expectations and change the fundamental nature of how the game is played. In some ways I think that people would say those things because they can’t conceptualize a short athlete being able to compete with the prototypical athlete. It is a dissonance that their prototypical body that was told by the sports culture to be able to succeed could get beat by a body that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Q: So can you go more in depth about what it means to be a prototypical athlete?
A: I think to be a prototypical athlete, one must try to fit the standards of the sport. In track and field as a jumper, it always meant having long legs and lanky limbs, and if one was not modeled like the unrealistic standard of the role models – the olympic jumpers – then it is definitely easy to feel ashamed of oneself. My coach neglected training me for the more “promising” jumpers because my potential was not viewed as being comparable or worth the time. He couldn’t have known about my potential to jump unless he attempted to train me with the others. I felt helpless and confined to my identity as a short, lesser-potentialed jumper. There was a feeling of shame about who I was; it was the person I couldn’t change. I think it makes it even worse that within the culture of sports, being lesser than your peers in a competition setting is even more damaging to the self.
Q: What do you mean being lesser than your peers?
A: There is a certain way that people act in sports, towards the people they are better than. It is sort of scornful because the way competition frames people, it makes people feel like they have to act a certain way. That way of acting is kind of emotionless and unfeeling for the competition, and for others. Sometimes it gets so extreme that people will not care about what it takes to win. It’s easy as the winner to be focused on the personal struggle about why you won and what it took to get there. I know that no winner in track and field ever acknowledged that they won because they know their competition had lesser training and didn’t get started training early enough in their lives.
Q: So how do we then combat issues like the discrimination that arises within sports?
