Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review Volume 36

LIMINA

Land Acknowledgement

Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico – Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache – since time immemorial, have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples.

We gratefully recognize our history

MASTHEAD

Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review is made by students for students.

Our staff is comprised of undergraduate and graduate volunteers who solicit submissions, select works for publication, copyedit, design, and market the magazine on campus.

Editor in Chief: Marcela Johnson

Managing Editor: Eli M. Behrens

Staff Editors

Sophie Anderson-Haynie

Beckett Glass

Madison Hogans

Mikaela Johnson

Isabella Zamarchi

Meet the Editors

Marcela Johnson is a junior studying journalism and technical theatre. She loves thresholds and those who dare to cross them. When not grappling with thread and paper, she enjoys the makeup arts and drumming.

Eli M. Behrens is a 21st Century hipster, endlessly searching out the next big Kraken to be their undoing. They are a third-year student pursuing a double-major in Interdisciplinary Arts and Philosophy. Besides subsequating their grades to their self worth, Eli casts spells by day and havoc by guitar. After college, Eli intends to create a space of creative possibility and professional expansion for emerging artists - whatever that means.

Sophie Anderson-Haynie is a sophomore studying English and philosophy at UNM. She frequently keepks her mental breakdowns, therapy sessions, life advice, and random musings in the form of recordings in her voice memo app. She is passionate about harm reduction, creative nonfiction, fruit, cut babies and cats, her Spotify playlist, and her partner, Johannes.

Beckett Glass is currently a freshman majoring in Political Science. In his free time, he likes video games and reading. Limina has been really fun to put together.

Madison Hogans is a third-year student majoring in English and Honors Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts. You can usually find her reading, writing, or getting to the shuttles right as they leave. This is her second year at Limina and she’s thrilled to share the selected works of this edition.

Mikaela Johnson is a sophomore at the University of New Mexico, majoring in Journalism with a concentration in Multimedia. She plans to attend law school after her time in undergrad, and pursue a career as an immigration attorney. This is her first year as an editor for Limina, and she hopes to continue with the publication for her final two years at UNM.

Isabella Zamarchi is studying English at the University of New Mexico. She lives in Albuquerque with her husband, cat, and too many houseplants. She dabbles in ceramics, thread crafts, and bread making, but her passion is for the written word in all its delightful forms.

Foreword

“You hold in your hands the 36th volume of Limina: UNM Nonficion Review . Pieces that center on human connection while questioning societal boundaries and expectations make up this edition. These sorts of questions need asking now more than ever, when it is so easy to look away from injustice and the horrors that persist.

Speaking of persistance, this magazine would not exist if not for a team of truly fantastic people. My staff editors all began as volunteers with no expectation of compensation, yet each week they came to our meetings to do what needed doing. For that, I am grateful. Even during the most stressful times, we were able to laugh about typos, copy-editing comments out of context, and silly chalkboard drawings. I would also be remiss to not mention all the help we recieved from our sister publications and their staffs. The community among the student publications is one of my favorite things about UNM, and I thank them all for their support.

It takes incredible courage to submit a piece for consideration and then for publication. I hope you can give each piece the time and attention it deserves. More importantly, I hope you enjoy the work that staff and contributors have done. Thank you for your support of student publications and Limina.”

Marcela Johnson Editor in Chief

Magical Ignorance Flora Granados

Ever since the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, fears of a nuclear war have been high. These fears were heightened during the Cold War, where the creation of the MAD protocol was the only way to convey how cataclysmic a nuclear war would be. Despite this, in current times the atomic bomb is viewed as something from sci-fi or pop culture rather than a weapon of mass destruction. Think back on how many shows and movies use the iconic mushroom cloud shape as a throwaway joke, or the various museums and atomic merchandise that can be purchased. At the very least, American society has forgotten the awe and terror the atomic bomb demands. However, the grandfather of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya, does understand the destruction of atomic power. This can be seen clearly in his 1992 short story “Devil Deer,” wherein a New Mexico local finds a mutated deer beyond the chain link fence of Los Alamos Labs. But, for a closer examination of the bomb itself and the atomic culture it creates, we can turn to Jemez Spring . In Jemez Spring, Anaya employs the genre of magical realism to illuminate the threat of the atomic bomb and its profound impact on both the land and humanity. Moreover, he utilizes this awareness to scrutinize the handling of atomic culture by government leaders and the deliberate maintenance of public ignorance for profit.

“At the very least, American society has forgotten the awe and terror the atomic bomb demands.”

the murder of the New Mexico governor and the underlying machinations of his passing. Simultaneously, he discovers that an atomic bomb is placed in Jemez at the Valle Caldera, having no doubt that it was his nemesis, Raven’s, doing. Guided by the spirit of don Eliseo, a friend of Sonny and mentor of the dream world, Sonny delves into the mystery, haunted by the death of his daughters, which clouds his judgment. Despite Raven’s attempt to portray himself as a hero and disarm the bomb during a press conference, Sonny ultimately confronts him. Unable to kill each other, Raven is defeated when Bear, a member of the Jemez Pueblo seeking revenge, tackles him into the Rio Grande. Sonny returns home to Rita, his lover, now accompanied by the spirits of his deceased daughters.

The plot follows private investigator Sonny Baca as he unravels the mystery surrounding

Jemez Spring utilizes the characteristics of magical realism to amplify the looming threat of the bomb while maintaining a connection to reality. First, we must establish that this is our reality. From the outset, the novel unmistakably establishes its setting, unfolding against the backdrop of central New Mexico, with pivotal events occurring in major cities like Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Anaya skillfully crafts vivid descriptions of the landscape, enabling even unfamiliar readers to visualize the sites and roads traversed by the protagonist, Sonny. As an example, when Sonny embarks on his journey to Jemez Springs to investigate the crime scene, Anaya details Sonny’s route through

the village of San Ysidro. Describing the journey, Anaya writes, “At White Mesa the road curved, and he slowed down to enter San Ysidro. The village budget depended on ticketing speeders, and Sonny wasn’t in the contributing mood. He turned north toward the pueblo, past the P.O., the village office, the church” (Anaya 47). Residents of the area can physically follow the route described by Anaya, recognizing the mentioned sights. This meticulous attention to detail not only grounds the plot in reality but also contextualizes the impending damage by the bomb. The detonation by Raven would devastate this small town with its quaint office and church, forging an emotional connection to the surrounding towns near Jemez and intensifying the bomb’s impact as a tangible threat. However, it’s crucial to note that this detailed description alone doesn’t solely define the book as magical realism.

For more clues, we turn to much later in the novel, when Sonny is racing against time to thwart Raven. As he heads to the Governor’s office seeking answers, he contemplates the imminent destruction. Sonny envisions that, “If Raven blows up the Jemez, a gaping hole will appear on Mother Earth, a wound from which will seep the hidden waters, Blood of the mountain. A wounded turtle. And a large part of Father Sky will cave in, fall into the vacuum. Everything will be contaminated with radioactivity” (Anaya 180).

Here we see Anaya’s excellent blend of reality and mythology to illuminate the true threat. The detonation of the bomb will cause a catastrophic event, where even higher beings are not shielded from its impact. The entire New Mexico landscape would be tainted, irreversible in its contamination. The blend of these elements creates a beautifully tragic portrayal of the atomic bomb’s power. It serves to convey to readers that the bomb is not a hollow threat in the background. Instead, the bomb commands

awe and fear.

Another element of magical realism employed to contextualize the bomb is hybridity, characterized by the incorporation of diverse cultures within the same setting. A prominent example of this is the inclusion of the “Green Indians.” This group, a fictionalized organization hailing from the Jemez Pueblo, vehemently protests against Dominic, an outsider who wishes to acquire water rights in New Mexico in hopes of turning the Rio Grande into a tourist hotspot. Their conviction is rooted in the belief that Dominic’s actions will not only lead to the loss of their water, but also result in the loss of their land, leaving them with nothing. An early encounter between Sonny and the “Green Indians” occurs when he picks up Naomi, an Indigenous woman involved in the case, on the way to the springs. During this encounter, Bear, a member of the group, tackles Sonny, cautioning him, “‘Don’t play with snakes. Not your medicine.’ ‘Yang might get bitten,’ another said. ‘Or get blown up by the white man’s bomb’” (Anaya 53). The profound impact of this interaction lies in the symbolism of the snake in Pueblo culture. The snake represents rebirth, as well as being associated with death and the underworld. It is an entity to be revered and feared simultaneously. Bear’s comparison here means that, for the “Green Indians,” the atomic bomb holds a similar status— an object demanding reverence and respect—as its detonation is the end. The rebirth aspect of the snake comes with the emergence of a new age, born in the aftermath of the initial tests at the Trinity site, giving rise to a heightened fear of an impending apocalypse as well as the plethora of issues that arise from nuclear development. This delicate blend of traditional Pueblo beliefs with Western technology, conveyed in a straightforward manner, communicates to a casual audience that even individuals deeply rooted in their native culture, possessing the

ability to traverse the dream realm and combat literal dust devils, harbor a genuine and justified fear of the white man’s bomb. This combination of all aspects of magical realism set the stage for Anaya’s message about the government’s handling of atomic affairs.

In Jemez Spring , Anaya reveals that alleged experts and world leaders withhold the true danger of the atomic bomb, leaving civilians unprepared and naive about the looming threat. The first exposure readers have to the bomb occurs during the debriefing that Augie, an FBI agent, provides to Sonny upon reaching the springs. According to Augie, “If it blows, the lab boys think the Thing—that’s what they call it, the Thing—will blow the mountain apart. Not only Los Alamos and the labs, but it might create a new volcano” (Anaya 33). Despite the terrifying implications for New Mexico, Sonny initially dismisses it as an exaggeration, failing to fully grasp the danger should the bomb detonate, instead focusing on Raven. This tunnel vision on Raven as the enemy is a subtle critique of the government’s uncaring nature when it comes to war. They focus on defeating the enemy, rather than what collateral damage may arise in that defeat. Augie and the lab boys are no better, persistently referring to the nuclear bomb as “The Thing,” implying a lack of understanding. The naming of “The Thing” also relates to the real world test bomb’s name, The Gadget. In both cases, the experts of the situation lack the ability to fully comprehend what they are dealing with. Throughout the plot, the bomb is consistently downplayed, with everyone assuming the lab

boys will handle it–a morbidly ironic sentiment due to the fact that these lab boys are themselves anxiously relying on another set of lab boys to take charge of the situation.

“Despite the terrifying implications for New Mexico, Sonny initially dismisses it as an exaggeration”

Even the mayor of Albuquerque, Fox, exhibits greater concern with acquiring water rights and maintaining public appearances than addressing the imminent bomb threat, even when it is just hours away from detonation. When Sonny interrupts Fox’s CNN interview, which he deems as the most important thing in his life, Fox dismisses the urgency of the situation, only telling Sonny that, “the bomb has the Los Alamos scientists scared” (Anaya 184). This word choice implies that, for Fox, the bomb is perceived as a temporary inconvenience. The phone outage in New Mexico is his first order of concern after the water rights, meaning that the importance of phones outweighs the atomic bomb in his eyes. He displays minimal concern about the potential obliteration of his state, more focused on upholding his public image for the upcoming election. As such, if the mayor lacks concern regarding the atomic bomb in Jemez, it raises the question of why the public should be worried.

The public’s naivety is prominently on display during Raven’s press conference, where he successfully disarms the bomb and restores the cell towers. When Raven renders the bomb inert, the crowd erupts into cheers, followed by gasps as he disappears in a puff of smoke, almost like a spectacle to be enjoyed. It is true that there’s a sense of relief, signaling the belief that the threat is gone, and life returns to normal.

One fun night out for everyone and a day off from work. However, there was much greater fanfare when Raven restored the cell towers. The crowd passionately chants, “Viva Raven!” (Anaya 254), with some even shedding tears. This pronounced enthusiasm for the restoration of cell towers, as opposed to the literal atomic bomb’s disarmament, underscores the public’s prioritization. The public views the bomb as an excuse to take the day off, enjoy a fiesta, and then gather to watch a magic show. This lack of understanding, coupled with the public spectacle, creates an opportunity for profit.

Anaya’s final point of contention is that by keeping the public ignorant about the perils of atomic power, there is an easily exploitable industry, with no need for accuracy and safety. For instance, when Sonny and Augie approach the bomb for examination, Augie jokingly exclaims, “The Thing! …Like the movies! Fucking science fiction!” (Anaya 98). This establishes the idea that the bomb is perceived as a fictitious spectacle, designed to captivate audiences in the same vein as movies. It can be rebranded as entertainment for the public. Augie reinforces this rebranding later, remarking “If they disarm it and take it down to Jemez Spring, place it in front of the Bath House, I kid you not there’s millions in tourism dollars!” (Anaya 99). Despite the bomb being nowhere near the springs, the tourists don’t care. They are drawn to witness a sci-fi spectacle and indulge in bathing in the same tub where a murder mystery unfolded and nothing more. Atomic tourism thrives on the public’s naivety, disregarding the need for accuracy in its pursuit of profit.

Another scene that encapsulates the atomic tourism display is the fiesta that commences in Santa Fe for the bomb. Due to the cell towers being down and the news about the bomb, the workday is cut short. Consequently, a lively fiesta

erupts in Santa Fe, with the crowd jubilantly cheering, “Viva la bomba!” (Anaya 210). The celebration is in honor of the bomb, seen as a source of freedom from the humdrum of normal life. People happily celebrate the bomb, even if it may be the end of New Mexico. This uncaring nature is, of course, based in ignorance. In the face of an uninformed public, atomic culture undergoes a transformation from a devastating force to a marketable form of entertainment and an excuse to party.

In brief, Anaya’s use of vivid descriptions of real-world locations and other magical elements enhances the looming threat of the atomic bomb. With readers’ enhanced understanding, he critiques the way world leaders fail to grapple with and understand atomic issues. Additionally, he argues that keeping the public in the dark only serves capitalistic gain for the government and other benefactors of atomic tourism.

Works Cited

Anaya, Rudolfo. Jemez Spring . 2005. Open Road Media, 15 Feb. 2015.

Laboratory, Los Alamos National. “How the First Atomic Bomb Got Its Name.” Los Alamos National Laboratory , 12 July 2021, http://discover.lanl.gov/news/0715-thegadget/#:~:text=The%20world. Accessed 21 Jan. 2024.

MasterClass. “What Is Magical Realism? Definition and Examples of Magical Realism in Literature, plus 7 Magical Realism Novels You Should Read.” MasterClass , 23 Aug.

2021, http://www.masterclass.com/articles/ what-is-magical-realism. Accessed 21 January 2024.

Rose, Sharon. “`LA BAMBA`: THE MEANING BEHIND THE SONG`S WORDS.” Chicago Tribune , 27 Sept. 1987, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ ct-xpm-1987-09-25-8703120728-story.html. Accessed 21 January 2024.

Addison Key Calf

Pink gloves and a bloody knife sunk into the mud at our feet. Blistered hands and women washed tripas in the stream. The body hung over me like an altar.

I dreamt of sewing her back together and stuffing her up with dried out organs. I could grab her hooves and place them in my pocket to keep her warm on winter nights, and inject life back into dark eyes. She could come to tea with me and my sister, sipping on alternative milks and sugar cubes.

I could not breathe.

Blood on her hands and smiling wide, my sister and I stood in front of its carcass. My mother captured on camera two little murderers in matching fluffy sweaters, honored to stab cows for family rituals. I didn’t know what it meant to kill something with care.

“Thank you, cow.” I wanted to say, “My family and I love you.” . . .

My mother and I share shortened breaths. She used to sit in air bubbles, zipped up plastic containers, whenever it got bad. She told me to start wearing a purse to stow my inhaler away fashionably, but I was much more interested in inducing asthma attacks to avoid running the mile at school. I could talk to the cow in my sleep if I had the courage. I could tell her the dream I had about my first boyfriend, when he left me screaming in the middle of a corn field.

“Blood on her hands and smiling wide, my sister and I stood in front of its carcass.”

I could confide in the one horse left on the Ranch, imagining that if my grandma hadn’t gossiped with the animals in her childhood, that the land itself, the secrets drawn in dirt, must have been her closest companion. I could write letters with sticks to butchered cows killed in the name of tradition.

But I struggled to breathe while my sister laid with her stomach to the ground, and my mother sat on top of her.

Much like my asthma, I wonder why I inherited the act of killing cows.

I could tell her how her spots sit curiously across her back, and I could fasten satchels onto her body, filling them with various medications and rescue inhalers. I could have her follow me around until I faced running the mile.

If I had better control over my breathing patterns, I could turn our Ranch into a racetrack and invite my family to run from the outhouse to the picnic table on a clear day. I could save it from becoming a conversation of real estate, one that searched for some remnants of hidden oil or energy. My grandma wouldn’t have to write emails with bad grammar to our estranged relatives, and I could go back to the ditches to make algae soup with immune strengthening properties for my

mother.

I could make her something that could cure her of illness.

As I got older, I became frustrated with the inconvenience my breathing condition caused others. I was to become the kind of girl whose boyfriend had to move cats out of her walking path to avoid their hair from touching her skin.

I asked my mother how to get rid of asthma once and for all.

“You get pregnant,” she said to me.

After her first pregnancy, my mother’s severe asthma had disappeared, as if her breathless condition was passed on through the womb. Pregnancy had been something I had been nursing since my first dollhouse, rocking babies back and forth before learning to read. I thought to ask the cow about her own, haunted by the idea that we killed one that was once called “mother.” The cow never really answered me, but devout in my faith, I kept calling to her, waiting to hear from her what motherhood really meant.

Doctors injected Botox into the corners of my mother’s eyes to keep them open, a side effect of her new medication. I would joke with my mom about her developing vanity, wishing to ignore the sickness itself. I fought with her often, wishing that the cow would come back and produce golden milk worthy of paying medical debt.

I wanted to take time at night to reach the cow and ask for reassurance. I dreamt of sitting together in the front seat, with her hooves on the dashboard. We could joke about family fights and baby names. I could tell her my theory that stubbornness was hidden in the meat we shared.

My mother turned to me, fixated in rage and slightly lost control of the car, swerving into the other lane.

“Everyday I wish I was dead,” she said.

Back in our lane, I wondered, if many years ago, we had stabbed the wrong animal.

I wished I had someone to carry me, something to saddle up and walk me to school on nights that I stayed up too late. I would plead to the cow, asking her to study with my siblings, correcting their arithmetic mistakes. I wanted to lay in silence and wonder why my first boyfriend had broken up with me, for the cow to kiss my forehead and tell me he was missing out. I would want to sit with her and drink a coffee, asking the cow what it felt like for men to hold her down and leave her motionless.

I still think about the day my sister killed the cow. I like to think that if I got pregnant and embraced motherhood that I could breathe a little clearer, that the cow could finally understand me beyond my wheezing and we could share something other than sickness.

I wish to speak to the cow in my dreams.

I hope that one day I can wash your intestines in the stream to understand what you meant when you looked me in the eye and wished for your own death. I hope to know what cows called “mother” know about keeping their children from striking their belly and slowing gutting them of someone that they used to be. I know that killing you alive is something like tradition.

I’ll whisper secrets into the dirt.

“I love you cow.”

Existential Death and the Courage for Anxiety

Any reader who approaches Martin Heidegger’s demanding philosophical tome Being and Time expecting it to become more accessible as they work through the text will have their hopes dashed upon reaching Division II. Heidegger opens Division II with the heaviest of all subjects—death—and introduces copious amounts of new terminology into what is already an overwhelming lexicon for the average reader. It soon becomes clear that not even the word ‘death’ can be relied upon to mean what we think it means, as Heidegger takes pains to distinguish it between other words that signify the end of life, such as ‘perishing’ and ‘demise.’ Tempting as it may be to read through Division II without taking the time to sort out the meaning behind his use of these words, to do so would be to miss out on what is arguably the most crucial concept in Being and Time : that only through ontological death can one achieve an authentic life. The effort to understand Heidegger’s terminology is necessary if we are to determine what ontological death might look like for the average person, and whether it is possible or desirable to bring about one’s own ontological death.

“For Hiedegger, the only way Dasein can grasp itself completely is through death .”

Angela Walters

in one’s potentiality-for-Being” (279). The concept that Dasein is always ahead of itself in some way, always projecting itself into future possibilities that are never fully actualized—“a ‘not-yet’ which it will be”—is critical to Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein because it implies that Dasein can never reach a state of wholeness while it lives (286). For Heidegger, the only way Dasein can grasp itself completely is through death. This death, however, is not the physical perishing we typically think of when we think of death. For Heidegger, trees perish, birds perish, and fruit perishes, but perishing is not an option for Dasein.

Though a nectarine and Dasein always carry with them their constitutive “not-yet”—the fruit towards its end in ripeness and Dasein towards its end in death—the similarity in their ontological structure ends there. Heidegger writes:

Heidegger lays the groundwork for his analysis of death by reiterating a point he has made throughout Being and Time : “It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled . Such a lack of totality signifies that there is something still outstanding

With ripeness the fruit fulfills itself. But is the death at which Dasein arrives, a fulfillment in this sense? . . . so little is it the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may well have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in unfulfillment, or else by having disintegrated and been used up (288).

Dasein is not a piece of fruit whose end follows closely on the heels of its zenith; as Heidegger poignantly reminds us, the life of Dasein may linger long after anything useful or joyful remains.

Furthermore, Heidegger argues, perishing is a series of biological facts that Dasein by its nature cannot endure: “By its transition to no-longerDasein, it gets lifted right out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced” (280). Though we live in fear of our own death, it is not something we can experience from beginning to end, since death itself will put a stop to it. As a consequence, the concept of death as a painful and terrifying loss is revealed to us solely through the death of others; though we witness the disturbing transformation of the corporeal bodies of our neighbors and loved ones from life-carrying vessels to lifeless things , we are still no closer to a genuine understanding of what it means to die.

Since we can never experience our physical end, Heidegger argues it is not the “factical demising,” or ontical end of our Being from which we flee, but rather ontological death, in which Dasein “stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being … (as) the possibility of no-longer-being-ableto-be-there” (294). Though ontological death necessarily occurs when we physically expire, the two phenomena are distinct and don’t always coincide. Heidegger explains:

Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish. We designate this intermediate phenomenon as “ demise ”. Let the term “ dying ” stand for the way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death. Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise only as long as it is dying (291). Demise is the ontic event we have in mind when we imagine ourselves on our deathbed, struggling to take in one last breath as our entire life passes before our dwindling eyes. Our ontic and ontological death are two sides of the same coin; both represent “ Dasein’s ownmost possibility—

non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped ” (303). Death is the most certain and the most personal of all possibilities, and just as no one can take the certainty of our physical demise away from us, no one can relieve us of the utter and total responsibility for our own lives as it is revealed to us in the death that we live through. When we stand revealed to ourselves for the first time in ontological death, unable to project ourselves into any of the activities or plans we once believed defined us, “the more purely does the understanding penetrate … as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at al l” (307).

Ontological death occurs organically when we are in crisis or breakdown mode: when our most important and delineating projects are ripped away from us against our will; when we are fired from a job we love or are served divorce papers, when we have to find a way to live through the death of a child or experience the inevitable decline of vitality and status that accompanies aging. Whatever the cause, the disintegration of our most defining project initiates a dramatic world collapse in which everything of significance loses its value and we are consequently unable to engage meaningfully with the once familiar and comfortable minutiae of our day-to-day life. The man whose understanding of himself is wholly entwined with his high-profile career is going to wake up in a scary place when he is laid off or otherwise unable to continue projecting himself into the role he so identifies with. The entire structure of his world is so dependent on the selfunderstanding his work provides that it will be impossible for him to engage with anything in his surroundings without encountering the abyss of significance that was there all along. Everything in this man’s environment—his alarm clock, his car, the way he scheduled his free time, the people he chose to spend time with—previously functioned together to support his involvement in his career,

and once stripped of that project, everything will show through as meaningless, himself included.

When the project that most defines us is taken away from us and our wheels spin endlessly without latching onto anything, it becomes suddenly transparent that none of the roles we may choose delimit, define, or determine us the way we imagined they did, and we are revealed to ourselves for what we are, as “thrown projection,” as raw Being thrown into the world and shaped by a past we had no control over, with no choice but to continue to project ourselves into one of the many possibilities that lie before us, the fitness of which no one but ourselves can judge. There exists no single correct choice among our many open possibilities, and no rule book to help us determine our best course of action. Seeing through ourselves and the structure of our world in this manner, realizing that there is nothing that we can ever actually be, causes a collapse of significance that is so terrifying Heidegger suggests our collective fear of physical demise is a foil to avoid the deeper anxiety generated by ontological death. “Proximally and for the most part,” he explains, “Dasein covers up its ownmost Being-towards-death, fleeing in the face of it. Factically, Dasein is dying as long as it exists, but proximally and for the most part, it does so by way of falling ” (295).

“...our wheels spin endlessly without latching onto anything...and we are revealed to ourselves...”

Being. The “they” even hides the manner in which it has tacitly relieved Dasein of the burden of explicitly choosing these possibilities” (312). By losing oneself in the “inconspicuous domination” of public opinion regarding what possibilities are respectful, legitimate, or available, Dasein becomes lost in inauthenticity and takes certain possibilities off the table without even realizing it has done so. So it is that we live our lives by a “leveling down” of all possibilities of Being (165), believing that we have far fewer options than we actually do. We go to school, get married, have kids, vote for the same party our parents did, read the same books our friends read, and in general, make life choices that are so predictable they almost feel inevitable. The power of that inevitability is the lostness in das Man, and it is what prevents most people from seriously considering their less obvious life choices: joining an ashram in India, going to clown school, becoming a master glassblower, not going to college, not joining the rat race, not marrying the girl next door.

Falling, according to Heidegger, is a way of losing oneself in das Man, or the “they”— the internalized norms and opinions of the amorphous public that functions to keep everyone within the lines of what is average and acceptable. Heidegger explains that das Man “has always kept Dasein from taking hold of these possibilities of

In addition to keeping watch “over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore” (165), das Man also teaches us how to cope with the anxiety that threatens to overtake us when we begin to pick at the scales which cover our eyes and question the meaning of our existence. Das Man “ does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death ,” Heidegger writes. Instead, das Man “concerns itself with transforming this anxiety into fear in the face of an oncoming event” (298). This “constant tranquilization about death”—this pretending that what we fear is ontical demise when what we actually fear is the knowledge

of ourselves as free and responsible for our own choices—steers us away from the radical individualization to which our anxiety points us. It is only by bringing ourselves back from das Man and choosing to make our own choices that we will find ourselves again. “In choosing to make this choice,” Heidegger declares, “ Dasein makes possible , first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-forBeing” (313).

In inauthenticity, we come to believe that we have merged completely with the roles we have assumed in life, that we possess at our core an essential, concrete, and defining self; in ontological death, we realize that we are always in the process of creating ourselves, and we have no choice but to continue to do so. Our ontological death thus carries with it the possibility of a rebirth in which we are free to discover and engage with the world on our terms, rather than blindly following along with what “the Others” have decided is best for us. Furthermore, Heidegger suggests that this cycle of death and rebirth must be repeated throughout one’s life, as the revelation of one’s true self is covered up again by fresh accumulations of das Man.

If ontological death is revelatory, it is reasonable to wonder how one may bring about one’s own ontological death, other than projecting oneself intentionally into one crisis after another. Heidegger himself acknowledges that the expectation that Dasein throws itself toward ontological death is a “fantastical” one (311). Yet Heidegger is a phenomenologist who looks to lived experience as the barometer of truth, and so it is assumed both that his analysis was derived from life experience, and that such life experience is, in his eyes, necessary and desirable if one wishes to achieve “ an impassioned freedom towards death —a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious ” (311).

Many of the methods which have been promoted as paths towards liberated consciousness throughout human history—practices such as meditation, Ayahuasca ceremonies, and Kundalini yoga—aim towards what looks like ontological death, towards a “clearing-away of concealments and obscurities” (167) that lays bare the structure of the world and our involvement with it, resulting in a spiritual awakening or rebirth. Whether these methods can lead to authenticity, there remains something in Heidegger’s description of “freedom towards death” that rubs against the spirit of these practices, and of our contemporary understanding of spiritual awakening and enlightenment in general. Heidegger’s conception of freedom is distinctly anxious, and as unusual as it is to describe a desirable and impassioned condition of personal liberation as anxious , this understanding contains the clue as to how we might continue to create the conditions which will leave us open to ontological death. “Anxiety,” Heidegger argues, “brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for . . . the authenticity of its Being, and for this authenticity as a possibility which it always is” (232).

Unlike an experience with hallucinogens, an intensive spiritual retreat, or any other method that aims to cleanse perception over the space of a long weekend, anxiety is a constant, disclosing attunement to the world that cuts through the familiar, the tranquilized, and the superficial, and thus draws us closer to our possibility for authentic individualization. Rather than reflexively fleeing from the uncertainty and uncanniness revealed in anxiety, with gimlets or video games, french pastries or tantric yoga, or whatever is happening on our socials, Heidegger suggests we pay attention to our anxiety and see where it leads us. He implies that once we have had the original experience of ontological death, we can follow our anxiety like a trail of breadcrumbs and find our way back to the

knowledge of ourselves as surpassing the limits of any and all projects, utterly free to choose not only among them but also how we will function within them. Tuning into one’s anxiety will reveal that we are not connecting authentically with our projects when we have become immersed in the role as prescribed by das Man.

As strange as the concept of anxiety as a tool initially appears, in a culture where more and more material comforts are available to more and more people who nevertheless seem to live more and more desolate lives, the call for a counterintuitive step towards our anxiety rather than away from it carries a clear and refreshing ring of truth. Das Man insists there is something wrong with an anxious state of mind and prescribes exercise, deep breathing, behavioral therapy, journaling, and medication, yet our collective misery deepens. Heidegger’s analysis of ontological death and anxiety suggests that only in acknowledging that we can never truly be at home in the world can we begin to live genuinely within it, affirming our radical individuality in a way that frees us to bestow upon the world the gifts that are uniquely ours to give.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Harper Perennial. 2008.

Men of Metal and Angels of Meat: On the Philosophical Implications of AI Sentience

Part One: Introduction

Here is one of my favorite jokes: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “You know, you’re in here a lot. I think you might be an alcoholic.” The horse is offended and says, “I think not!” and then promptly disappears.

The joke is a reference to Descartes’ iconic quote, “I think, therefore I am.” It makes more sense if you know that, but I couldn’t start the joke there because then I would be putting Descartes before the horse!

“OpenAI has no stage presence and horrible comedic timing.”

Here is what I got when I told the most popular AI tool on the market, OpenAI, to tell me a joke about a horse and a bar: A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?” The horse replies, “Well, I just realized I can’t hold my mane emotions anymore!”

Personally, I don’t get it. But maybe that’s because I’m a person and OpenAI is not.

Descartes, as mentioned in the first joke, grappled primarily with the origin and existence of sentience. The conversation around sentience, however, is no longer contained in the philosophy classroom; it’s leaked into the computer science field as well. The question, “Can we make conscious AI?” is as much a philosophical question as it is a question of programming. To make a conscious AI, a human must fully understand the nature of consciousness and reality.

In this essay, we must assume one thing to be true; that humans are conscious. Specifically,

Addison Fulton

humans must possess Cartesian consciousness. If we assume that neither you nor I are conscious beings, then the question of “Can we create consciousness in a machine?” is a moot point. No, we cannot. In that world, how could we create something we did not possess? Furthermore, if we did not possess consciousness, how would we even know it existed to create it? As humans exist as conscious beings, we must assume that consciousness is an innate trait that comes with existing as a human. Or, more simply, we must assume that all humans are conscious because they are all human. “I think, therefore I am,” uses the operative pronoun I, meaning one individual could only know with certainty that they were conscious, never fully knowing beyond a doubt that anyone around them was also conscious. However, this solipsistic road is as unproductive as it is dangerous. If consciousness were unique to one individual, then consciousness would likely not be transferable and could not be put into a robot. We will assume that all humans can think and therefore can be.

Part II: Understanding Cartesian Consciousness

Section A: Exploring Descartes’ Meditations on the First Philosophy

Descartes’ Meditations begins with a horrifying realization: that he can be lied to. Everything can lie to you: parents, teachers, governments,

peers, churches, even the senses are capable of deceiving you. Descartes concludes that logic, history, and the senses cannot be trusted to provide fundamental truths, saying that “It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived,” (Descartes, 1641). What, then, in a world full of doubt, can one know for certain? Descartes uses a top-down approach to truth, debunking and rejecting everything that could be false until he comes to something that has to be true. Descartes’ ultimate conclusion was that we could only ever be certain of one thing: we could think. It is the only self-evident truth. The act of asking if you could think demonstrated the ability to think, ergo , cogito ergo sum , I think, therefore I am. From the idea of thinking, perception, learning, and assuming could grow. Though perceptions, learning, and assumptions could be wrong, there would always be something, thinking, that undoubtedly existed. Everything you thought could have been wrong, but you still would have thought. In Descartes’ words, “After everything has been most carefully weighed, it must finally be established that this pronouncement “I am, I exist” is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind,” (Descartes, 1641).

Merely leaving the phrase “I think, therefore I am,” in a computer’s code would not make an AI sentient. It is not thinking for itself, it is parroting what we have told it back to us. While theoretically, a robot could go through a similar process, realizing that any input into its system could be false, and thus it would have to seek something true, within. What would it find? The input of its creators, its coders, which is not innate to the machine and could be false.

Descartes’ idea of consciousness is as small and as simple a thought as it is possible to have. Understanding the link between thinking and being able to think is as simple as 2+2=4. The

trouble with simple things is they are difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt without using incredibly complex techniques. The mathematical proof guaranteeing that 2+2=4 utilizes almost 3-thousand sub-theorems and contains over 25 thousand steps.

Alternatively, think of Cartesian consciousness as an atom or quark. It is the smallest building block of philosophy, the way quarks are thought to be the smallest building block of matter and physics. When you split a quark, you get a massive explosion. When you try to break the idea of consciousness into parts smaller than thinking and being, you get questions no human yet has answers to.

Section B: The Section About God

This is the section where we talk about God, which is a controversial subject in all fields, philosophy included. The logical follow-up question to “consciousness is the only thing that exists,” is, “But where does consciousness come from?” For Descartes, the answer is simple: it comes from God. God, who created us and contains every perfection, gave us consciousness; something that is uniquely human, beyond nature, and can always be relied upon. It was God who gave us our ability to think. Descartes argues that “ex nihilo nihil fit,” meaning “nothing comes from nothing.” Everything that exists within the human mind must have come from somewhere. Even the imagination is just a menagerie of real life, recombined. Descartes uses the example of a Chimera, a beast with the head of a lion, a goat, and a reptile. I’ll use the example of a giant gold robot; we know what gold looks like, we know what giant things look like, we know what a robot looks like. We cannot imagine something we’ve never seen or encountered. That is why it is impossible to imagine a new color; every new color

you’d come up with would just be a combination of colors you had seen before.

But, there is no combination of things in the natural, outside world, that when combined makes consciousness. That is why Descartes argues it came from God; because we already determined that it had to come from somewhere, and it could not have come from nature, the only place left to look is God.

You do not have to believe in God, however. I believe that consciousness did appear as an innate trait as part of the conception of “humanness”, but I do not subscribe to any specific or organized religion. I believe that the universe is itself a kind of consciousness, and imbues a bit of that consciousness into us so that we may make the universe more beautiful with music on radio waves and art engraved on satellites.

If that idea and all ideas like it are too sentimental and spiritual, however, we can return to a possibility we’d previously discounted: consciousness comes from some combination of input from the natural world. I don’t believe this, nor is it coherent with traditional Cartesian wisdom, but, for the sake of argument and completeness, we will entertain the idea. If that is the case, we do not yet know what that stimulus combination is. We know that red and yellow make orange, that flint and steel make fire, that fire and flesh make pain. What makes consciousness? Arguably, the definitions that defer to a higher power are simpler and more achievable than the vast world of sensory input and electrical signals, though all are far beyond the realm of current human understanding.

Section

“What makes consciousness?”

No matter which approach to the origin of consciousness you prefer, it will not help you make a conscious machine. It is not enough to be conscious or suspect where consciousness came from, you must be able to make consciousness. If you choose to believe consciousness comes from God and only God, then you’d be better off praying than coding. If you believe, as I do, that consciousness in humans is a reflection of the universe, then the problem of reverse engineering consciousness becomes an omnidisciplinary problem of physics, mathematics, computer science, and philosophy; it is a problem we are nowhere near solving. If you believe that consciousness is a reaction to the outside world, you might have the easiest time creating artificial intelligence that meets your definition of sentient. However, it would have to be able to experience and perceive a sensory world, not just one of coding. In the world of 1s and 0s and PrintScreen commands, you’d have to create pain, pleasure, sunlight, sex, hot soup; sprained ankles, death, grief, the smell of clean laundry; all the things that influence and inform the human experience. You’d also have to find the exact combination of information that, when tallied up, satisfyingly made “consciousness.” Even then, it’d be nearly impossible to say that the robot thought beyond what you taught it, meaning it couldn’t think for or of itself, meaning it was not conscious in any meaningful sense, especially not a Cartesian sense. Everything it knew would be subject to doubt. When speaking of himself,

C: The Cartesian Deconstruction of Sentient AI

Descartes said, “And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.” Similarly, our conscious AI must be ‘a something’ beyond mere code.

Part III: Conclusions and Continuations

Before we could make a conscious AI to do our bidding, we’d first have to understand consciousness, then make consciousness, then, translate consciousness to JavaScript or Python. If sentient AI were to be created, it would be created first in the mind of the philosopher, and then the screen of a coder. Someone would have to speak with God, comprehend the universe on the largest and smallest scales, and/or finally understand and explore the delicate and impenetrable depth of the human mind; then that person would have to sell out and decide to work for Meta or OpenAI Global. There is a possibility that we may stumble onto a conscious AI by accident, or some divine hand may tip the scales in the favor of thinking machines. But I do not think we, as humans, could take credit for that. We may, if computer science advances without philosophy alongside it, create a machine that can compellingly mimic consciousness such that the average person may not be able to tell. But, this AI is nothing more than a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of an apple. No matter how like the apple it may look, it will lack the crisp sweetness of sentience and success. This essay did not touch on the ethical or sociopolitical implications of AI sentience, both for the newborn AI and the world it was

born into. But we can rest easy knowing we will likely never make an artificial intelligence capable of conscious feeling or thought. That’s why I can safely say… OpenAI has no stage presence and horrible comedic timing.

Citations

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosphy . Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.

caim

Isabella Muñoz Morales

caim: (n) santuary; an invisible circle of protection, drawn around the body with the hand, that reminds you that you are safe and loved, even in the darkest times

The transitional housing facility for formerly incarcerated homeless people, situated off Route 66 in the International District of Albuquerque, New Mexico, serves as a solution to the issue of the prison to homeless pipeline faced by many individuals. The facility contains community engagement initiatives, private residential floors, and trauma-informed design principles to ensure safety and comfort. The transitional housing facility serves as a sanctuary and a symbol of security, reminding people that they are not alone, even in the face of adversity. Its approach to addressing the needs of formerly incarcerated homeless individuals and the broader homeless population reflects a commitment to creating a supportive and inclusive environment that fosters positive change and reintegration into society.

CYCLE BETWEEN HOMELESSNESS AND PRISON

Structural And Socioeconomic Conditions That Produce Homelessness:

-High Rates Of Income Inequality

-Poverty

-Lack Of Sustainable Jobs With Livable Wage

-Lack Of Affordable Housing

Law Enforcement Policies Contribute To The Arrests Of People Displaying Behaviors Associated With Experiencing Homelessness

Lack Of Stable Housing Is Viewed As A Risk Factor And Reduces Courts’ Willingness To Divert Individuals From Jail/Prison

With Limited Options, People Turn/ Return To A Life On The Streets

People Break The Law And Are Sentenced To Jail/Prison

Released From Prison; Criminal History Serves As A Barrier To Employment And Housing, Contributing To Housing Instability And Homelessness

The Creation Of More Transitional Housing For Formerly Incarcerated Homeless People Would Stop The Prison To Homless Pipeline

ALBUQUERQUE CITY MAP

Section Facing North

Section Facing East

Section Facing West

Parapet Roof Detail

Coping

2 7/8” Casing Bead Air/Water Barrier Sheathing

2” Continuous Insulation With Drainage Channels

Self-Furring Metal Lath Building Paper

Stucco Stud

Roof Joint System

Cavity Insulation

Wall And Floor Detail

Gypsum Board Panels

Cavity Insulation Track

Air/Water Barrier Stud

Subfloor

Self-Furring Metal Lath Building Paper

2” Continuous Insulation With Drainage Channels

Stucco Floor System

Gypsum Board Panels

Foundation Detail

Gypsum Board Panels

Cavity Insulation Stud

Air/Water Barrier

Self-Furring Metal Lath Building Paper

Flexible Flashing

2” Continuous Insulation With Drainage Channels

2 7/8” Weep Screed Flashing Sealant Track Foundation

Entry

The positioning of the entry within the site as opposed to being right on the side street allows for a sense of privacy. Additionally, the physical form of the building has “open arms” demonstrating a sense of hospitality and inclusivity by welcoming in individuals.

As a living connection to nature, the center courtyard contributes to reducing stress and improving the overall well-being of the residents by providing ample natural lighting. The courtyard also contributes to the circular layout on each floor, creating clear circulation.

Courtyard

Fighting the stigma associated with formerly incarcerated homeless individuals, the facility contains a community garden to promote positive interactions with the broader community.

The facility calls for the continuation of the art bus system that runs along central avenue, ensuring continued accessibility for the residents and other individuals using the facility. Adding a bus stop directly outside of the facility also allows for a future proposal for revamping the inn across the street into long-term housing. Garden

Cycle Between Homelessness And Prison Works Cited

“Eviction notice on door of house with brass door knob. Fictitious address, ID, signature and 555 phone number for fictional usage.” Key Renter Property Management, https://www.keyrentersacramento. com/blog/aebb866b-acd5-4d20-ab4f-d892a59fadea/how-to-conduct-evictions-in-sacramento-theright-way.

Boster, Mark. “POLICE arrest a man during a skid row cleanup in 2016. From 2011 to 2016, arrests of homeless people in L.A. rose 31%, a Times analysis of police data shows.” Los Angeles Times, https:// enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx

Gorodenkoff. “Court of Law and Justice Trial: Imparcial Honorable Judge Pronouncing Sentence, Striking Gavel. Shot of Male Lawbreaker in Orange Robe Sentenced to Serve Time in Prison. Hearing Adjourned.” Shutterstock, 2021, https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/court-lawjustice-trial-imparcial-honorable-2056444850.

Gritchen, Jeff. “Solving the problem of understaffed jails and prisons.” Route Fifty, 2023, https://www. route-fifty.com/workforce/2023/07/solving-problem-understaffed-jails-and-prisons/388128/.

“Kerry Robinson Walks Out of Prison a Free Man.” Georgia Innocence Project, https://www. georgiainnocenceproject.org/case-update/gip-client-kerry-robinson-exonerated-after-nearly-18-yearsin-prison/.

Replogle, Jill. “A volunteer hands out food to homeless people camped in the Santa Ana Civic Center on April 12, 2018. The encampment was cleared soon after but many people still sleep on the streets.” LAist, 2020, https://laist.com/news/homeless-santa-ana-orange-county.

Homelessness and Gentrification as Evidence of Postmodernism in Rudolfo Anaya’s Rio Grande Fall

Rio Grande Fall is the second book in New Mexico writer Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca detective series. Like most of Anaya’s other books, the novel takes place entirely in New Mexico, painting action-filled stories of drug heists and kidnappings against the warm-toned background of an Albuquerque October. By orienting this story around Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta, Anaya describes how the city is negatively affected by its dependency on tourism. He blends contemporary threats to Nuevomexicano culture with traditional practices in a postmodern text featuring three main elements of this genre: political critiques, constructed social realities, and nostalgia. These elements are evident through his inclusion and analyses of gentrification and homelessness in Albuquerque.

Charlotte Auh

highlight the differences between New Mexico, a sublunary land which focuses solely on the interests and money of tourists, and Nuevo México, a spiritual space rich with culture, compadrazco, and wisdom.

Cash grabs formulated by New Mexican politicians often take the form of gentrificatiown, which results in the eradication of Nuevomexicano culture, as is exemplified in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, a village that plays a prominent role in the novel. Regarding the cultural loss in this community, Anaya writes, “A few realized they had cracked the golden egg that drew them to the area in the first place” (Anaya 37).

“Cash grabs formulated by New Mexican politicians often take the form of gentrification”

As is a common theme in his novels, Anaya takes the opportunity to make a political critique of the commodification of New Mexican culture. In Rio Grande Fall , Sonny Baca, a private investigator, is hired by the Balloon Fiesta board to investigate a string of murders that has occurred adjacent to the fiesta. The ragtag team that assembles around Baca, including a curandera (traditional healer), an old-fashioned Nuevomexicano elder, and an unhoused family, bring unique skills and experiences that emphasize the importance of Nuevomexicano culture. They also serve to

The Los Ranchos area has become increasingly gentrified, pushing out native New Mexican families who have lived there for generations. Steven Schan’s dissertation titled “Gentrification and Sociodemographic Change in the Village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico” is a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the change of the area through the eyes of historical data and Los Ranchos residents. Aspects that originally drew outsiders to the community, including the “rural atmosphere,” “quietness,” and “privacy,” have now been transformed into areas of dissatisfaction, including “noisy neighbors” and “too much traffic” (Schan 82). This is not to say that non-New Mexican residents of Los Ranchos

are completely oblivious to the situation. Several Anglo residents responded to surveys saying they were “worried about pushing people out” or “being perceived as elitist” (Schan 82). However, these residents cannot deny the effects they have had on the “economic, political, and social structure of Mexican-American communities” (Schan 65), leaving real-life versions of viejos like don Eliseo subject to displacement and catapulting property tax rates.

Don Eliseo and two other older Nuevomexicano residents of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, dona Concha and don Toto, exemplify the rich past of the village that has been razed by developers. The three immerse themselves in the slow pace of the village; they roast their own chile, bottle their own wine, visit medicine men, and lament that “the old ways are dying” (Anaya 40). Don Eliseo, who is Sonny’s spiritual guide throughout the tetralogy, criticizes the politicians who chase profits, saying “The políticos get the gravy, y la gente gets the bone” (Anaya 96). This “bone” does not leave residents of Los Ranchos with enough resources to fight developers looking to capitalize on the village’s land, even if they have lived there for generations. Instead, they are eventually forced to sell their homes and be swept up in the new trends, buying their chile frozen from the store and their wine overpriced from upscale vineyards.

Anaya takes the opportunity to politically critique the state of homelessness in Albuquerque in Rio Grande Fall . While investigating the site of Veronica’s death, Sonny stumbles onto a hidden and booby-trapped homeless camp. There, he meets Diego, his wife Marta, and their daughter Cristina, as well as a few other men who live in the camp. Sonny, Rita, and don Eliseo take them under their wing and help them find jobs and places to stay. Excluding these characters, the general public chooses to ignore these communities as “they [become] shadows in

the streets of the city, the living dead everyone [pretends] not to see” (Anaya 94). Those who do notice these communities are members of the police force, looking to forcibly disperse homeless camps without offering them new places to go. Cristina relays this worry, saying, “Now the Coco is the police. If they find us, they make us leave our home” (Anaya 94). By likening the police to el cucuí, the Latino version of the Boogeyman who threatens to punish children who misbehave, Anaya connects the Nuevomexicano of the past to the contemporary threat of incarceration.

The gentrification of Chicano communities is not a naturally occurring process, rather it is a socially constructed reality that Chicana/os must constantly reckon with. Schan writes about how the gentrification of Albuquerque has been supported by a “history of racism in the community” (52). New Mexicans have historically been made to feel that they do not have rights to their ancestral land, or what Schan calls the “erosion of the MexicanAmerican land base” (65). Once the United States claimed ownership of the territory, trade routes brought increasing numbers of Anglo-American merchants and developers. Certain aspects of New Mexico, including the state’s Indigenous peoples, continue to draw Anglo-Americans to live in the state, resulting in the displacement of Nuevomexicano and Indigenous residents. Sonny Baca encounters this phenomenon several times throughout the novel, including “the middle-aged couple who… had just moved in from California, and they let Sonny know they thought the state was ‘so mystical’” (Anaya 154). Stories like these are not uncommon in communities of color. Outsiders will infiltrate the community in search of the exotic perceptions they have of indigenous communities, while simultaneously pushing out the very culture they sought to appropriate.

Like gentrification, Anaya presents homelessness as a socially constructed reality that

has been built by institutions of capitalism and politics. Anaya never writes blame on Diego and his family for becoming unhoused, instead don Eliseo pardons them, saying “the políticos get the gravy, y la gente gets the bones…the developers are buying all the land” (Anaya 96). Through this loss of land that Nuevomexicano families face, they are often left to fend for themselves, which may result in eventual homelessness. Yoly Zentella’s article “Land Loss Among the Hispanos of Northern New Mexico: Unfinished Psychological Business” presents a relationship between such displacement and the mental health of New Mexicans. Zentella argues “Land loss through… real estate and environmentalist designs, constitutes a loss of the very essence of the Hispano culture. Loss of one’s culture is injurious and disempowering to the self” (Zentella 86).

“Homelessness as a socially constructed reality …”

Anaya focuses on native Nuevomexicanos who are experiencing homelessness, though New Mexico has a large Anglo-American homeless community as well. However, the reality for unhoused people who are Anglo-American has been constructed differently than those who are Chicano. Through a series of interviews of homeless Chicanos living on “Skid Row” in Downtown Los Angeles, Maria Elena Ruiz in her article “Older Homeless Latinos: Aging on Skid Row” describes these discrepancies. She writes that “Latinos face discrimination and bias in getting housing, work permits, bus passes, health care, and other various services” (Ruiz 110). It is clear that homelessness has been socially constructed, and equally clear that those in power have no plans to deconstruct that which perpetuates its harmful cycles.

Homelessness also plays into a loss of Nuevomexiano culture and nostalgia. While don Eliseo gets to know Diego, he realizes that he knew his abuelo and father from their time in Belén. This is not an uncommon phenomena in Nuevo México, a state that is built on vecinos and coincidences. As families are pushed to live in the bosques of Albuquerque, they lose the resources and stability necessary to teach the younger generation about their culture. Diego describes a “lack of education, no home address, lack of references” which make “it difficult to break out of the cycle of poverty” (Anaya 129). Furthermore, the cultural and linguistic norms that are a part of being Chicano or Nuevomexicano can hinder unhoused communities from breaking this cycle. Ruiz writes that “those who are primarily Spanish-speaking, they end up feeling isolated, invisible, and dismissed” and often don’t seek medical attention and are unable to understand resource flyers due to language differences (110). Diego, his family, and their friends are visibly more comfortable speaking with Sonny and don Eliseo because they are able to connect over aspects of the Nuevomexicano culture and regain part of the dignity they lost while living in the bosque.

Nostalgia plays a large part across Anaya’s literature, as many of the older characters spend time pondering “what was.” In her article “Postmodernism and Chicano Literature,” Rosaura Sánchez describes this feeling as an “existential anguish, a notion of collectivity, a search for history” (Sánchez 12). Gentrification serves as an attack on this nostalgia as Nuevomexicanos are forced to abandon parts of their culture in

order to assimilate into their white, upper-class communities. Sonny’s mentor, don Eliseo, speaks about his sons who “got an education, and now they work with the pluma, not la pala” (Anaya 96). In contrast, Lorena, Sonny’s curandera friend, turned away from formal Western medicine to better serve her community. Rita tells Sonny that Lorena “started with a nursing degree from UNM, and she was good at her work, but something kept telling her that modern medicine, for all its wonders, was not serving the older Hispanos who came to the hospital” (Anaya 21). Lorena chose to focus on the spiritual health of her fellow Nuevomexicanos, practicing the Mexican folk medicine of curanderisumo. As a curandera, Lorena uses a series of traditional herbs, rituals, and practices to treat her patients. She is tuned into Nuevomexicano culture and therefore has the skills and knowledge to come to Sonny’s rescue throughout the novel. Lorena uses her connection to the spiritual world to locate Rita and help Sonny transform into his nagual, or guardian animal. Diego calls on his contacts within the underground network that is formed by homeless communities across the city. Sonny has to be the hero of the novel instead of the white FBI or CIA agents who are imprisoned by institutions of domination and are disconnected from the communities which they aim to serve.

While some scholars argue that Chicano literature can never be pieces of postmodern text, Rio Grande Fall makes important references to and critiques of modern society. His analysis brings light to the complicated and unique cultural identity that is Nuevomexicano/a. Homelessness and gentrification are ongoing issues that Albuquerque faces, and which have arguably increased since the 1996 publication of the novel, therefore not presenting reference points of historicity to the novel. Anaya is a landmark author of Chicano literature and shows that the

genre can belong in any literary category, including postmodernism.

Works Cited

Anaya, Rudolfo. Rio Grande Fall . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Ruiz, Maria Elena. “Older Homeless Latinos: Aging on Skid Row”. Journal of Cultural Diversity , vol. 27, no. 4, 2020, pp. 103-113.

Sánchez, Rosaura. “Postmodernism and Chicano Literature”. Aztlán , vo. 18, no. 2, 1989, pp. 1-14

Schan, Steven. Gentrification and Sociodemographic Change in the Village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico. 1994, University of New Mexico, PhD dissertation.

Zentella, Yoly. “Land Loss Among the Hispanos of Northern New Mexico: Unfinished Psychological Business”. Journal of Social Work in the Social Environment , vol. 9, no. 3, 2004, pp. 83-103.

Jazlynn Martinez Fireball

It was around seven in the evening of early July when I got an unexpected phone call. The last remaining light of the day is trickling through my window. Deep blue mountains stood outside with brown canyons peeking through freshly green cottonwoods and juniper trees. My mom is from Nambe Pueblo, New Mexico, and has lived here all of her life. Nambe resides near the Santa Fe National Forest, so there’s lush greenery and chirping birds in the summer. I’m lying on my full-sized bed in my room with no comforter and only a light beige blanket. My phone is in my hand, my fingers scrolling over the cracked screen protector.

My brother, Matthew, is out with his friends from high school. He had completed his first year at Stanford and came home for the summer break. Matt and I are only fourteen months apart. People used to think we were twins, which drove me crazy. As we both got older, people stopped calling us that.

older brother, Robert.

Ike and Bo are full brothers, and they have about five aunts from their mom’s side, including Lena. Over the years, I’ve met some of my brothers’ aunts, and Lena has always been nice to me. She would wave at us when we passed her house on the school bus. Still, getting a call from Lena meant two things: either Ike was calling from her phone, or she was calling about him. Ike stays with her in San I, also known as San Ildefonso Pueblo.

“But she smiles in a guilty way and shrugs her shoulders.”

Apprehension forces me to sit up and clear my throat. A few seconds later, I picked up the call.

“Hello?”

A pause before Lena’s cheery voice fills my ears.

“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing?”

“I’m doing good. How about you?” An automatic response spills out as I wait for the real reason she called. She never calls me. To be honest, I forgot I had her number in my contacts.

The name “Lena” appeared on my phone’s screen, illuminating my face. Lena was one of my older brother’s aunts. In total, I have four older brothers, and all of them are my half-siblings. Matt is my only full brother. Matt and I share the same dad with Ike, Bo, and Luke. There’s no denying my dad was a player since he had five kids with three different women. To this day, I still give shit to my mom for taking him back so many times. But she smiles in a guilty way and shrugs her shoulders. On her side, she has one son, my

She sighs heavily, and her cheery voice wavers, “I’m sorry to ask you this, but can you go pick up your brother, Ike? He got released from jail this morning, and he’s in Santa Fe. He doesn’t have his phone, but I know where he is.”

This is no surprise since my brother’s been in and out of jail since our dad died in 2012 from lung cancer. Our dad’s death affected us in our own ways, except Ike never recovered. The pressure of being my dad’s firstborn and living up to my dad’s legacy crushed him. My dad was an active member of the community and a baseball coach for our

Northern Indian League team called the Tewas. My mom told me my dad was hard on Ike because Ike was supposed to be the one to represent our family in the pueblo.

For Ike, drinking was the only solution to keep his inner demons at bay. But nowadays, all he does is listen to the liquor in his hands. He doesn’t care about what he says or does, even if the cops are involved.

I rub my hand over my eyes and ask, “Where is he?”

“He’s at this pizza place downtown—you know where Violet Crown is? It’s right next to it. He’s been calling from a girl’s phone- I think she’s a waitress-”

“Where’s his phone?” I interrupt her.

“Well, you see,” A pause.“We took his phone away from him because we didn’t want him calling people and picking fights on Facebook.

I hummed in agreement, but I was physically shaking my head.

“Anyways, I told her to tell him to stay there and that you would be picking him up.”

Of all people, why me? I silently ask. But I already knew the answer. Lena doesn’t have a car and usually gets around by asking her sisters or other family members. I learn later that Ike’s mom, Nancy, will not listen to any calls regarding Ike’s drinking. She wasn’t always like that, though.

My dad’s family won’t tolerate him if he’s drinking because he’s been known to be violent in the past. Lena won’t call Bo because he’s the same as his mom. To this day, I don’t know the real reason behind it, and I’m afraid to know what will happen if I mention anything about Ike. My other brother, Luke, sometimes deals with Ike, but he works as security at Buffalo Thunder Resort Casino. I guess since I was twenty and in college, the responsibility fell onto me.

Taking up the guardian role felt like slipping into an old pair of torn shoes. I grew up in a world

filled with missing parents. Children are raised by their grandparents. Cousins walking down the dirt roads like ghosts. Uncles dying from drunk driving and suicides. Aunts tearing into each other with their words. Sisters taking up the spot where a mother should be standing.

After my dad died, it wasn’t long until my mom’s autoimmune disease—lupus kicked in. There would be days when she couldn’t get out of bed because of dizziness or excruciating headaches. From the age of ten, I learned how to do the laundry, clean, and wear a mask. My mom didn’t want people to know she was sick, so I had to lie and come up with excuses for her absence. Now, her lupus is in remission, and she is more alive than ever.

“Send me the number the girl called from, and I’ll make sure he’s still there. Then, I’ll go get him.” I decided without a second thought.

After a flurry of thank yous, the call ended. I managed to get a hold of the girl whose phone Ike has been using. She works at Restoration Pizza and confirms my brother has been there, waiting for someone to pick him up. I look up the location on my phone and see it’s across from the Violet Crown Theater. I tell her I’ll be there in thirty minutes. My mom tells me to be careful and to call her if anything happens. I grab my blue keys from the key rack and close the door behind me.

Before the drinking, Ike was there for my school activities and for my 6th-grade promotion ceremony. I remember when I was getting picked on by some of the older kids, my school let Ike spend the day with me. He sat next to me while I did my work and at lunch. He didn’t say the reason why he was there, but by his glaring look at the older kids, I figured out why. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I was just happy that I had my older brother looking out for me.

Most of all, my brother was there for me when our dad died. He held me as I cried my eyes out.

Even after, we would text each other almost every day. At the time, I didn’t know how to move on. Ike felt like the only thread keeping me tied to my dad.

The sight of Santa Fe Hill and the exit sign for the Santa Fe Opera set me back in the present. The glittering lights of Santa Fe fill me with anxiety. It creeps into me like an oncoming storm. I tell myself that I’m strong and I can handle anything that’s thrown at me. But doubt seeps into my mind.

There was one day last October when Ike asked me to pick him up in Santa Fe. Over the phone, he sounded sober. But his bloodshot eyes told me I was wrong, and the sweet smell of alcohol lingered in my car.

I intentionally missed the exit to turn to Kokoman’s Liquor Store in Pojoaque and drove under the bridge to San I. I didn’t want to add to my brother’s drinking. I thought I could be firm and stand my ground. Instead, he yelled and threatened to jump out of my moving car if I didn’t turn around. All I remember was anger boiling in my chest, eating away any fear I felt earlier. With both hands on the wheel, I turned my head to look at him. I bared my teeth and spit out, “Do it.” He pleaded with a strain in his voice that if I turned around, then he’d let me take him home. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I wanted this moment to end and go home. So, I turned around and took him to Kokomans.

people walking towards Violet Crown. They must be going to a movie, I thought. When I roll down my windows, the sound of music and people blare into my ears. I furrow my brows. What was happening?

Once I cross the tracks, my stomach drops.

The Santa Fe Railyard Plaza is packed with people. The source of the music is coming from a DJ station dropped in the middle of a throng of moving bodies. Cars move slowly down the road, stopping for the passing pedestrians. Lines stretch out of the doors of bars and restaurants. Laughter echoes in the air.

“Fuck,” I cursed out. How am I supposed to find him now?

“I thought he needed me, but all he wanted was a Fireball.”

I pull up to the pizza restaurant where the worker called from earlier. There’s no way I’m going to find parking, so I park in the delivery dropoff spot in front and turn on my blinker lights. I finally look at my phone and see messages from Lena. She tells me my brother is in a red shirt and black shorts.

I get out of my car, and my eyes search for Ike on the outside tables of the restaurant. All I see are white faces eating pizza, drinking beer, and barely batting an eye towards me. I walk inside the restaurant.

My eyes roam over the bar stools and tables for a red shirt, but there’s nothing. Disappointment weighs my shoulders down. He’s not in the restaurant.

I should’ve known better to think I could’ve handled him on my own. I thought he needed me, but all he wanted was a Fireball.

The sun had gone down by the time I reached downtown. As I’m about to cross the train tracks near the Rail Runner Station, I see a group of

“Hi, can I help you with something?” I turn to find a girl with brown hair pulled into a ponytail next to me. She’s also wearing all black like the rest of the workers. She was wearing a name tag, but I couldn’t remember her name.

I smile politely at her, “Hi. I’m looking for my

brother. He’s been calling from this place, and the girl I spoke to said he might be here.”

Her smile drops with sympathy. She nods and pulls me to the side so we’re not in the way of incoming customers. “Yes, he was here for a couple of hours. He ordered some food and had a couple of beers. He did say that he did get out of jail, and he was waiting for someone to pick him up. I told him to stay here and wait for you, but he left. I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen him since.”

I nodded but couldn’t help but think of what she was seeing. A young girl in black basketball shorts and a long gray t-shirt. A black hat covering her midnight hair. I could imagine what she was thinking. What was she doing looking for her brother on her own? Where were her parents?

“Thank you for trying your best to keep him here. I’m sorry for my brother, and if he did anything to disturb you or anyone else here.” She gives me a sad smile, and I walk out of the restaurant.

I park my car down the road in a free spot. A couple walks past my car, probably heading towards the festival. I turn my car off and sit in silence for a minute. Ike isn’t at the restaurant.

He’s not across the street. He doesn’t have a phone. My thoughts are swarming in my head with no weight to tie them down. I imagine a phone call I get tomorrow or the next day from my family, breaking the news to me that Ike was hit by a car or was found dead on the streets. The thought causes a lump to form in my throat, and my eyes feel wet.

Taking a deep breath, I decide to call my mom. She answers in a couple of seconds. “Hi Jaz. Did you find him?”

“Mom, there’s a fucking festival going on. There are so many people. I checked with the girl, and he’s gone. I don’t know what to do,” I confess. I don’t tell her that I went out looking for him. She’ll only worry more.

“Just call Lena and tell her what you told me.

She can’t expect you to find him with that many people. That’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Knowing your brother, he’ll find a ride. Just come home, babe.”

I do what she says and call Lena. I told her everything I said to my mom. Instead of saying, “It’s alright, sweetie. Just go home”, she gives me numbers of Ike’s friends who stay in Santa Fe. He might be at their houses. I end the call and pull out of the parking space.

I make it back to my house, feeling more tired than ever. I’m only there for one hour when Lena texts me again. It’s ten-thirty at night, and her text makes me want to tear my eyes out.

Lena :

Jaz. I’m sorry that you have to run around looking for your brother Ike. He just call from La Fonda n said that he will be at the Plaza Cafe in the plaza next to the First National Bank where his mom works. I had told him to stay at La Fonda but he insisted on going to the plaza cafe. I suggest to check both places. Call me back if you find him.

I read the text out loud in front of my mom. She’s shaking her head and stands up. “I swear, those people. I can’t believe she still thinks you’re out looking for him. I’m coming with you.”

Relief flows through me when she decides to come with me. I thank her and say if only I knew my way around downtown. What I don’t tell her is how afraid I am to be around Ike. What if it becomes like last time?

We take my mom’s navy blue Toyota 4Runner and start the drive to Santa Fe again. The drive doesn’t take that long. Before I know it, we’re taking Guadalupe and heading straight into the lion’s den.

My mom tells me to roll down my window to see if I can spot Ike. High-expensive jewelry stores are lit up but closed for the evening. A homeless guy shouts something at me, but I ignore him.

My mom gasps out, “There he is!”

I turn my head, and she’s right. My brother turns at the bright headlights. He’s standing next to a white couple with drinks in their hands

He’s wearing what Lena described earlier. Red shirt and black shorts, except he’s wearing a dark snapback. He’s always been on the slim side with broad shoulders. His usual light-brown skin looks darker. He used to joke and say we were the lightest compared to our other brothers. I have never seen him with long hair. He always kept his black hair short with a small spike on top. “Get in, Ike,” I say to him.

I step out to pull my brother away from a couple. Without a fuss, he climbs into the passenger seat, and I go to the back seat. I sigh in relief and text Lena to let her know we found him.

From the front seat, my brother launches into his story about how he got out around ten in the morning. Without a phone, he’s been walking around Santa Fe in 90-degree weather all day. Some guy on the street gave him the hat he was wearing. At least he didn’t get sunburnt, but he’s hungry and dehydrated.

in his hand. The brown bag makes the iron grip tighten up again.

My mom tells me later that he asked for a case of miniatures from the worker behind the counter. She said he insisted on it and wouldn’t leave the store if she didn’t buy the liquor. She also said that he’s so far gone that he’ll end up getting sick if he doesn’t have a taste of alcohol. I don’t argue with her. I couldn’t stop him in my car, so why should I say something about it?

I watch him from the back seat crack open one and then two more bottles. He chases it down with the Gatorade. He’s been walking around all day, and the first thing he wants is liquor. I don’t know what I was expecting from him. Maybe a ‘thank you’?

“Hearing the cracks in his voice makes the iron grip I held over myself loosen a bit.”

Hearing the cracks in his voice makes the iron grip I held over myself loosen a bit. I couldn’t believe the state he was in. It wasn’t even his fault. If his aunt hadn’t taken away his phone, he could’ve called for someone earlier. This whole night could’ve been avoided.

My mom stops at a gas station at the edge of town that just so happens to be open this late. She and my brother get out so they can get him water. A few minutes pass by, and I see my brother holding a brown paper bag and a red Gatorade

By the time we get to San I, it’s close to midnight. I can’t see anything through the tinted window, but the familiar curve of the road tells me where we are. My brother’s words begin to slur together, and he’s going off about the time he went and lost in the State Championship in his senior year of baseball at Pojoaque Valley High School. We finally arrive at his aunt’s house. She lives in a housing complex where a tall, dark mound called Black Mesa looms over the houses. The complex is quiet—no sound of dogs barking or any vehicles driving up the road. The only light comes from the dim utility pole at the end of the street. His aunt is standing on the porch with the lights off. She either doesn’t want to wake anyone up, or she doesn’t want anyone to know that we’re here.

My brother gets out of the vehicle but stays glued to the ground. His body sways back and forth like a toddler trying to stand for the first time. I see his

hands shaking as he stares at the doorway as if he’s afraid to enter.

“C’mon, Ike,” My mom whispers, “We’ll be right behind you.”

Whatever my mom said made him snap out of his trance. He teeters as he walks inside the house. We follow him to his room at the end of the hallway. His room is cramped with his stuff. He has his dresser that holds his flat-screen TV. The closet is open, with clothes spilling out on the floor. A twin bed is pushed in the corner. A tall metal rack is next to the bed that holds containers full of beads, string, and metal tools. In front of this rack is a large dark-brown bean bag chair that takes up most of the floor space. On the other wall adjacent to the rack was a large metal desk cluttered with papers, food wrappers, and beadwork designs.

“Where’s my sister?” My brother asks, sitting down on his bed.

“I’m right here.” I sit on his weird bean bag chair. Lena and my mom are hovering near the doorway because they don’t trust him to be alone with me. They think he’ll hurt me in his current state.

My brother’s lips quirks to the side, and says, “You’re not my sister.”

I look at my brother fully for the first time since we picked him up. He’s still swaying as if there’s an invisible wind pushing him. Drool is spilling from his lips, and he lazily swipes it away with the back of his hand. One eye is twitching, and he keeps widening them like a camera lens trying to focus.

A sinking feeling fills my chest as a realization takes place in my mind. Whatever demon my brother was fighting over the years had clearly won. It was staring right at me through my brother’s bloodshot eyes. This isn’t my brother, only a husk of who he used to be.

For a brief second, I see a path I could’ve ended up through Ike. A year after my dad died, I had a demon of my own. I was eleven and still in elementary. It whispered intrusive thoughts into

my head, saying how I was better off with my dad and I didn’t belong anywhere. At school, I was fine because I was in San I, where I felt the closest to my dad. But, when I got home to Nambe, I stayed in my four-walled room, listening to the voice on repeat. It wasn’t until I saw a counselor at my middle school that I matched the terms to my thoughts. Anxiety. Depression. Suicidal.

I spent five years in counseling, learning to live with my trauma rather than push it away. I met my friends who’ve helped me throughout the years. Most importantly, I learned to ask for help.

But Ike didn’t learn. The alcohol swept him away before he had the chance to ask for help. Now, he would rather keep drinking than ask. I don’t recognize whoever is sitting across from me. My brother is gone. The person I was told who was always going to protect me wasn’t here.

You’re not my brother , I say in my head.

I don’t stay long because it shouts at me to get the fuck out of here. I stand up and leave without hesitation. Lena and my mom talk in low voices in the living room for a bit, and then we leave. Lena grabs my hands and thanks me for the hundredth time. She slides forty bucks into my palms, and I take it so I can leave.

A few weeks later, I found out Ike got thrown back into jail. I don’t know what he did and didn’t care to find out. My mom continues to worry about him, but I don’t say anything about him anymore. Lena hasn’t called since that night. The only other person I told about that night was my brother, Luke. He and Matt are the only siblings I trust with talking about Ike.

Even when Ike gets out months later and posts his artwork on Facebook, I know he’s just trying to make a couple of bucks to buy more liquor. The dream of seeing my brother sober disappears like smoke. I’ve accepted the reality in front of me that night. The Ike I once knew will never come back. He wasn’t there for my 8th-grade promotion or for

my High School graduation. He probably won’t be there when I graduate from college. There’s nothing else I can do to get him back or sober. He’s not my responsibility, yet I feel the thin thread tugging at my wrist when Ike is mentioned. I have the scissors in my hands, but I can’t seem to cut the connection between him and me. If Ike keeps consuming his poison, then I have no choice but to expect another call—a call filled with broken sobs and a date of a future anniversary.

Discord or Harmony Sachi Barnaby

Throughout history, people have always developed technology to overcome or adapt to challenges. Within the last few decades, we have witnessed an especially fast growth of technology, and our methods of communication in particular have adapted drastically in the face of challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. One such method is called Discord.

Discord is an online software that people can use for free to create servers for communication. These servers have channels for texting, voice chats, and video calls. Originally popular for gamers, Discord has grown into a mainstream way for groups to communicate about other interests and hobbies.

Discord has a few key features, including highly customizable servers, a lack of algorithmic filtering, and a history of group organizing that provides it with the potential to aid community-building and activism. Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, specifically theories related to intersectionality, Discord has potential for community organizing, though more work needs to be done to protect marginalized communities.

“Discord’s features provide a unique online space for communities who want to organize.”

Unlike many social media sites, Discord does not use algorithmic filtering on its platform, meaning every message can be seen in chronological order by anyone with permission to view that message, and it doesn’t collect data from users or advertise (Roquettes). This makes it a more focused and private environment. However, not all of these features are perfect. Discord was previously at the center of communication for white supremacist groups that organized the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 (Brown and Hennis 19). Discord relies on third-party bots to perform specific actions within a server, such as moderating messages, as well as third-party sites (primarily Disboard) to browse and join smaller, unverified servers (Heslep and Berge 1).

Discord’s features provide a unique online space for communities who want to organize. First, servers can hold up to 500,000 users, which means the software can support a large number of users accessing the channels at any time (Buffy). Discord can be downloaded on most computers, even those with low resources, as well as accessed through an app (Vladoiu and Constantinesc).

Previous research has found that Disboard displays thousands of servers that explicitly support hate groups (Heslep and Berge 3). Clearly, this type of organizing goes against Black feminist values. However, a quick search in Disboard shows that there are also many servers that intend to create safe spaces for marginalized communities to connect. These servers suggest a potential for Discord to be utilized for a positive, mass-based feminist movement rather than white supremacist organizing.

Black feminist scholars such as bell hooks argue that a mass-based feminist movement is essential for the movement to make any substantial change in society. hooks writes, “Externally the progress of feminist movement is retarded by organizedantifeminist activity and by the political indifference of

masses of women and men who are not well enough acquainted with either side of the issue to take a stand” (160). Discord has already been used for online education in formal settings (Vladoiu and Constantinesc describe how they supplemented their Computer Science courses with a server) along with informal ones where students get together to study (Roquettes). This suggests that Discord could be used to educate people on feminism and its politics through consciousnessraising groups, whether or not they are formal. hooks also argues that to “build a mass-based feminist movement, we need to have a liberatory ideology that can be shared with everyone. That revolutionary ideology can be created only if the experiences of people on the margin who suffer sexist oppression and other forms of group oppression are understood, addressed, and incorporated. They must participate in feminist movement as makers of theory and as leaders of action” (161). Because Discord is accessible to anyone who can use a computer or phone, marginalized people are more likely to be able to participate as leaders and thinkers. Getting people to join a server can be as simple as sharing a link. Then, ideas can be shared with–and hopefully understood by–anyone who joins a server. These days, technology has more power to reach a wider audience than ever before, and that is an essential foundation for a mass-based feminist movement.

Though Discord’s accessibility is helpful for a mass-based feminist movement, other aspects of Discord’s design lend themselves to harassment and abuse. This can be examined using Kimberly Crenshaw’s three types of intersectionality: representational, political, and structural. Representational intersectionality contends the idea that “the production of images of women of color and the contestations over those images tend to ignore the intersectional interests of women of color” (Crenshaw 1283). Discord’s design can

both obscure and highlight the representation of identities. When a user joins Discord, they are given the option to remain anonymous on their account. However, because servers are inherently silos, people on servers usually have something in common. For instance, Disboard allows you to search for servers based on tags, so if you choose to search the “LGBTQ” tag, you would assume that those servers consist of queer people and allies. This could make clear how to organize based on identity, but it could also make certain servers greater targets for harassment. An examination using political intersectionality also shows that it may not be that simple. Political intersectionality refers to the fact that “women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas’’ (Crenshaw 1252). The siloed design of Discord could make it difficult for people with multiple marginalized identities to organize easily.

Historically, there have been issues that antiracist and feminist activists don’t see eye to eye on. Is it still productive to have one shared server? If not, does that mean double the work for women of color? Even with these questions, this could also provide an opportunity for solidarity building as people on one server interact with those who share parts of their identity but don’t necessarily face all the same issues.

A common thread through each of these analyses is how Discord’s fundamental structure shapes the interactions that can take place. Structural intersectionality analyzes how systems are put in place that often ignore the specific needs of women of color due to their marginalized identities along at least both race and gender lines (Crenshaw 1245-46). One key factor that has contributed to Discord’s design is Section 230 of the United States Code. This Section “is a landmark portion of the U.S. Code that, among other things, grants immunity to online

platforms when one user is harassed by another, whether or not the provider of the platform intervenes” (Brown and Hennis 22). This means that, from the start, Discord has been able to avoid confronting one of its biggest problems: moderation. As Brown and Hennis describe, “the platform offers very little in the way of community management, and it relies on users to report bad behavior… This design decision is framed as the one that gives users freedom, but the result is that administrators are tasked with dealing with raids and attacks on a regular basis. Apparently, with freedom comes overwhelming responsibility” (2527). The approach to moderation means that marginalized groups mostly have to fend for themselves if their servers are targeted by the white supremacists who frequent the platform. This structure clearly overlooks the needs of women of color, whose presence is more likely to be attacked due to their identities. In 2021, Discord CEO Jason Citron stated that they had made a “number of commitments to ensure that [their] service is not used for hate, violence, or harm”, but it is difficult to determine their real impact (Citron). The fact remains that the platform was not initially designed to protect all communities.

a hands-off approach to moderation” (Brown and Hennis 29). The lack of moderation also meant that companies like Discord could avoid paying content moderators and community managers, instead exploiting those who want to use the platform. Lorde compels us to ask questions about who is absent from the conversations on design. What communities did Discord overlook when it originally debuted for gamers? As they shift into diversity, how are they educating themselves? Lorde states that “this is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns” (100). The outsourcing of moderation labor makes it so the oppressed are the ones fulfilling Discord’s objectives.

“‘Apparently, with freedom comes overwhelming responsibility.’”

This fact resonates with Audre Lorde’s ideas about the master’s tools. Discord is a product of this capitalist, white supremacist society with a myriad of intertwining systems of oppression, and its design reflects that. As mentioned earlier, when white supremacists used Discord to organize, Citron seemed “to have seen such uses of his platform as collateral damage, something that would inevitably happen in a space that took

Without a Black feminist framework, this analysis would be difficult, if not impossible. Black feminist scholars have developed robust theories for evaluating intersectionality using lenses of representation, politics, and structures, as well as theories that implore us to ask deeper questions about identity and power. These theories provide us with robust ways to determine how we can use the tools at our disposal more effectively for a mass-based feminist movement. Discord is one such tool. Though it has significant flaws, the most compelling aspect of its design is its ability to adapt. As the designers have begun fixing their oversights and mistakes, they have created spaces that allow us to connect and bring our work to real life. This holds the potential for a stronger feminist movement and hopefully greater transformation in the future.

References

Brown, Abram. “Discord Was Once the Alt-Right’s Favorite Chat App. Now It’s Gone Mainstream and Scored a New $3.5 Billion Valuation.” Forbes , Forbes Magazine, 30 June 2020, www. forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/30/ discord-was-once-the-alt-rights-favorite-chatapp-now-its-gone-mainstream-and-scored-anew-35-billion-valuation/?sh=4e37a713b6b2.

Brown, James J, and Gregory Hennis. “Hateware and the Outsourcing of Responsibility.” Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression , edited by Jessica Reyman and Erika M Sparby, Routledge, pp. 17–32.

Buffy. “Server Member Cap Increases.” Discord , 16 Nov. 2023, support.discord.com/hc/en-us/ articles/360052841734-Server-Member-CapIncreases-.

Citron, Jason. “An Update on Racial Equity at Discord through Inclusion, Diversity and Purpose Efforts.” Discord Blog , Discord, 9 Sept. 2021, discord.com/blog/an-update-onracial-equity-at-discord-through-inclusiondiversity-and-purpose-efforts.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review , vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–99. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

Heslep, Daniel Grant, and PS Berge. “MAPPING DISCORD’S DARKSIDE: DISTRIBUTED HATE NETWORKS ON DISBOARD”. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research , vol. 2021, Sept. 2021, doi:10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12183.

Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center South End Press, 2000.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color , edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981, pp. 98-101.

Roquettes, Max, et al. “Group-Chatting Platform Discord Might Change Social Media With Its Business Model.” All Things Considered , interviewed by Bobby Allyn, hosted by Alisa Chang, National Public Radio, 31 March 2021. Transcript, https://www.npr. org/2021/03/31/983157378/group-chattingplatform-discord-might-change-social-mediawith-their-business-mo.

Vladoiu, Monica and Zoran Constantinescu, “Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic: Online Education Community, Based on Discord,” 2020 19th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research (RoEduNet), Bucharest, Romania, 2020, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/ RoEduNet51892.2020.9324863.

Zoe Sloan Callan We Need More Native American Representation In Comic Books

The course History of Race, Gender, and Comic Books taught by Professor Christine Peralta took a unique approach and used the format of comic books to teach history. For example, we read about the X-Men Legacy Virus as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, and we read BTTM FDRS to discuss gentrification. I enjoyed the class tremendously, but I noticed that, despite being centered on U.S. history, there were no Native American-based comics or histories discussed in the course. Perhaps I was predisposed to notice this gap because I am Native American, or perhaps it was because I have taken other courses in the past that focused on Indigenous Studies. Regardless, I was very disappointedbythe lack of Native representation in the course. As I thought about it more, though, I realized this was not just a problem in this class, but a problem with mainstream comics in general.

season 2 of Young Justice , an adaptation of the DC Comics character Apache Chief, who is given astral projection powers after being experimented on by aliens. While he assists the heroes during the final battle, he ultimately declines to join them and become a superhero himself (which is fair, not everyone who has superpowers necessarily has to become a superhero, but come on, did it have to be him who made that point?).

“I realized this was not just a problem in this class, but a problem with mainstream comics in general.”

Can you name a single Native American superhero? Everyone can name at least one, if not many, white superheroes. Most people can name a few Black superheroes, and a decent number of people can name a Latine or Asian superhero, but practically nobody that I’ve asked has been able to name a Native American superhero, certainly not a mainstream one. Now, if you’re looking for it, you might notice a few side characters, such as Tye Longshadow, a Mescalero Apache character from

Another character people might be more familiar with is Slipknot though he’s not exactly a superhero either, he’s a mercenary and a member of the titular Suicide Squad in the 2016 movie. His presence in the movie was short-lived—as not only is he refused a proper introduction or backstory like the other characters—but his character was the first member of the team to die. His sole purpose in the movie was to serve as an example to the others that trying to escape would be lethal. Only if you have very niche comic knowledge might you know that occasionally Speedy or Red Arrow’s (sidekick to Green Arrow) backstory includes him being raised by a Native American archer named Brave Bow from whom he gets his archery skills. Even in that capacity, the Native character is only there to bring the white superhero into superhero status, before his ultimate death.

But these are all obscure characters. The problem with mainstream comics is that even when there’s an opportunity to add Native characters to

the story, it isn’t taken. Take Wolverine: Origins Vol. 1 , for example, a comic I read for this class. The story is set in 19th-century Canada, with a large portion of the book set in the Yukon during what appears to be the Klondike gold rush. There were at least six First Nations tribes whose traditional homelands were in the Yukon. One of the most prominent First Nations figures of the time was Chief Issac from the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (from whom the name of the Klondike River was adapted). It is undeniable that without the help of First Nations people, many of the gold miners in the Yukon would have died long before they found gold. However, none of this history is shown in Wolverine:Origins ; in fact, there are no mentions of First Nations people at all.

This is a prominent example of the kind of historical Native erasure that Jean O’Brien talks about in her book Firsting and Lasting . Her book documents the way Native Americans were erased from the historical narrative by settlers through creating false extinction narratives (lasting), and by building their own origin stories (firsting). The Klondike Gold Rush is famous for stories of hearty settlers surviving rough winters in barren landscapes and finding gold. This completely obscured the Native peoples who lived on those lands for centuries and fed, sheltered, and protected the miners; and by some accounts, were the actual discoverers of the gold. If we think of this in terms of the fact that Wolverine: Origins is an origin story, and that the key point of origin stories is dictating “when and where [you] enter,” then Wolverine: Origins purposefully enters just outside of Indigenous presence to exclude them from the narrative (Qtd in Giddings 13).

Another comic we read for this class that had the potential to include Native representation was Captain America:Truth- Red, White and Black . Set in World War II, this comic focused on the storyof Isaiah Bradley, the Black Captain America. This

comic solidifies Bradley in the Captain America canon as the secret successor to the Captain America we are all familiar with. Bradley was part of a group of Black soldiers who were experimented on in order to recreate the super soldier serum that had been given to Steve Rodgers. The group became a covert mercenary force for the U.S. government during WWII. Seeing as the group was such a secret, this would have been the perfect time to introduce Navajo (or other Indigenous) Code Talkers. The Navajo Code Talkers were recruited during World War II to send messages between troops in their native language; messages that couldn’t be translated by opposing forces. As such, it would have made perfect sense to have members of the Navajo Code Talkers conveying orders to the covert team.

What about outside of mainstream comics? Super Indian is a comic series based on a radio play of the same name created and written by Arigon Starr, a member of the Kickapoo tribe of Oklahoma. It was produced by independent publisher Rezium Studios, which was created by Arigon Starr and Wacky Productions Unlimited’s CEO Janet Miner to produce Super Indian content. The comic is about a rez boy named Hubert Logan who, after eating commodity cheese tainted with Rezium, gains superpowers that he uses to protect his reservation from evil. Super Indian is fairly well known amongst Native audiences, and I first learned about him at Indigenous Comic Con. Super Indian is a fantastic character, but he isn’t the only one. There are many Native writers and artists working with small independent publishers. Many of these Indigenous works are sold at Indigenous Comic Con and at ATCG (A Tribe Called Geek) Books and Comics formerly Red Planet Books and Comics which is the only Indigenous comic books shop in the world.

We need more Native American representation

in comic books, especially in mainstream comics such as those published by Marvel and DC. There already exists a plethora of smaller independent comic books and publishers that produce Native American content by Native American authors. Although, we should consider that perhaps instead of waiting for one of the big companies to write representation—which will probably be subpar, anyway—we should turn to smaller independent publications and support Native authors and artists in more ways.

Works Cited

“About Us.” Super Indian Comics , 13 Sept. 2018, superindiancomics.com/sample-page/.

“Arigon Starr.” Wikipedia , 5 Feb. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arigon_Starr.

“ATCG Books and Comics - Keep Calm and Decolonize!” A Tribe Called Geek Books and Comics, atcgbooksandcomics.com/. Accessed 19 May 2023.

Giddings, Paula J. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America . New York, 2001.

Gray, Charlotte.“Reconsidering the Gold Rush.” Reconsidering the Gold Rush - Canada’s History, 2 Sept. 2021, www.canadashistory.ca/explore/ peace-conflict/reconsidering-the-gold-rush.

Issac, Joy. “Home, Historical Accounts, Yukon History, Books and Reference.” Chief Isaac’s People of the River - Home Page, 13 Jan. 2009, chiefisaac.com/index.html.

Jenkins,Paul. Wolverine: Origins . Marvel Comics, 2009.

Mishler, Craig, and William E. Simeone. Han, People of the River: Hän Hwëch’in: An Ethnography and Ethnohistory. University of Alaska Press, 2004.

Morales, Robert. Captain America: Truth- Red, White & Black . Marvel Comics, 2004.

O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Seven, John. “Indigenous Comic Con Becomes Indigipop x.” The Beat , 11 July 2019, www. comicsbeat.com/interview-lee-francis-talksnative-american-comics-indigipop-x-and-therise-of-the-indiginerd/.

“Yukon.” Wikipedia , 10 Apr. 2023, en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Yukon#:~:text=In%20the%20 19th%20century%2C%20the,by%20the%20 federal%20Canadian%20government.

Conscience as Justification: Excusing Dorian In The Picture of Dorian Gray Rae Wilson

In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray explores the dark corners of nineteenth-century upper-class society, while coping with the pressure placed upon him in response to his wealth and beauty. Through the process of excusing Dorian’s behavior as a byproduct of his corrupted morality, Wilde illustrates aesthetic views on beauty and art. Wilde constructs characters, Basil Hallward and Henry Wotton, who are responsible for guiding Dorian through his early adulthood; they are responsible for helping him navigate both the good and bad sides of his social position. Wilde characterizes Basil and Henry as the angel and devil, respectively, on Dorian’s shoulders. This relationship development is key to rendering Dorian powerless over his own character and framing Dorian as a victim of his out-of-control external conscience.

Basil Hallward represents the side of Dorian’s conscience that stands for more socially acceptable positions; he highlights Dorian’s innocence and beauty as moralizing factors of his character. In Basil’s presence, Dorian presents as full of youth. For example, the narrator describes Dorian’s first interaction with Basil in conversation as Dorian was “swinging round on the music-stool, in a wilful, petulant manner” (Wilde 18). In this passage, Dorian is behaving in a way more associated with children than with twenty-yearold men. Furthermore, he is accused of being purposefully childish or petulant, suggesting the behavior is not something that is ingrained in his character, but rather a way he presents in Basil’s presence. Childish behavior, such as Dorian’s, is often connected to blissful ignorance; this idea of Dorian as an innocent child allows the other

characters and the audience to more easily forgive mistakes and moral failings in Dorian’s character. Basil’s own explanation of Dorian’s early character further supports this ignorance as “simple, natural, and affectionate […] the most unspoiled creature in the whole world” (Wilde 105). Basil supports the idea of this collected young man whom everyone can look up to as the unspoiled ideal. The traits that Basil references fall into traditionally femaledominated realms like emotions and kindness; ultimately, the feminine nature of this description furthers the innocent ideal message because, from a societal lens, women were meant to exert a more obvious level of innocence. As a result of Basil’s presence, Dorian exists as an innocent, young, although highly feminized, man who does not seem capable of hurting another soul because he is living in ignorant bliss.

On the other hand, Henry is a symbol of Dorian’s depravity; he is the influence that takes Dorian from the idealistic youth Basil knows to a morally questionable man. Upon meeting Dorian, Henry suggests that “[t]he only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and your soul grows weak” (Wilde 21). Henry gives Dorian permission to stop exerting self-control; he can do anything he wants. Ultimately, this justifies any action, regardless of the effects on anyone around him. Dorian can then excuse the pain he inflicts on others throughout his life. Dorian even accuses Henry of ruining his character: “Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that […] It does harm” (Wilde 208). Dorian blames his moral failings, as suggested by the decay of the painting, on the ideas he got from a book, a gift from Henry. Dorian is unable to take accountability

for his own behavior. He stands firm in that Henry is responsible for his ruin because Henry is a bad influence. Henry modifies Dorian’s character, allowing him to behave wickedly, to the point that even Dorian recognizes and grows concerned about the impact.

With these relationship dynamics in mind, Henry and Basil’s role as Dorian’s conscience is crystallized in Dorian’s interaction with the pair after Sybil Vane’s death. Henry, arriving first and delivering the news of the death, instructs Dorian’s apparent grief: “‘The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died […] don’t waste your tears over Sybil Vane’” (Wilde 100). Henry devalues the life of Sybil to allow Dorian to return to his normal character. In fact, Dorian is not allowed to grieve the loss of the woman he claimed to have loved because Henry declares that it is a waste of time and energy. This freezes Dorian in the first stage of grief, denial, which ultimately becomes the denial of his own role in Sybil’s death. Dorian responds to Henry’s advice, determining, “‘I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them’” (Wilde 105). This illustrates Henry’s effect because Dorian refuses to acknowledge or deal with his own mental state and his role in the events. Dorian does not want to be destroyed by his emotions, like those in a similar situation may, and is convinced that this is acceptable through Henry’s influence. Henry’s guidance through Sybil’s death absolves Dorian of any guilt, allowing the young man to ignore his part in the tragedy.

“Ultimately, this justifies any action, regardless of the effects of anyone around him.”

Basil’s opposition to Henry’s stance and Dorian’s actions further establishes him as the

‘good’ side of Dorian’s conscience. Upon finding out what Dorian has been doing, Basil scolds him: “‘You went to the Opera while Sybil Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? You can talk to me of other women being charming [...] before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave’” (Wilde 105). Basil takes the opposite approach in comparison to Henry; he argues that Dorian should not be continuing as though nothing has happened. The reaction that Basil is alluding to, feeling the pain, would be the socially expected reaction. Basil is standing for the socially correct thing to do after Sybil’s death, given that Dorian loved her. Notably, the scolding tone suggested by the rhetoric further presents Dorian as a child who is being chastised for unacceptable behavior. Dorian will not need to take accountability for this because the aforementioned interaction with Henry had already justified Dorian’s behavior. Correspondingly, the portrait that Basil is responsible for painting “would be a guide to him [Dorian] through life” after the discovery that it changed with Dorian’s sins (ex: Sybil’s death) (Wilde 93, 101). Dorian’s suggestion that the portrait could guide him illustrates that he understands the portrait will communicate what he has done right and wrong; it is meant to act as an inspiration for ‘right’ and a consequence for ‘wrong’. As a gift from Basil, the portrait can be understood as an extension of his control over Dorian. The portrait acts as an additional mode of communication for Basil, an arm of Dorian’s conscience constantly reminding the young man that his behavior still affects others. Basil’s tone and use of symbolic devices against Dorian’s role in and response to Sybil’s death align with

the socially honorable reaction, making Basil accountable for Henry’s absolution in Dorian’s conscience.

The influence that Henry and Basil have on Dorian’s character and the overall perception of his character render Dorian a conduit for their own development. Basil references the portrait of Dorian as the real Dorian Gray: “‘I [Basil] shall stay with the real [the portrait of] Dorian’” (Wilde 31). In the process of accepting the portrait as the real Dorian, Basil projects a responsibility upon the painting rather than the character himself. From Basil’s perspective, as suggested by his angelic role, the painting is meant to uphold Dorian’s moral ideality. It serves as a reminder of his innocence, beauty, and social position; Basil holds the utmost respect for those characteristics and would rather spend time with that version of Dorian than the version he can already see him becoming. Henry suggests that “‘[b]eauty is a form of Genius [...] It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty’” (Wilde 24). In contrast, Henry, fulfilling his role as the ‘bad’ influence, is giving Dorian permission to place moral responsibility upon the portrait, rather than on himself. Since Dorian is beautiful, and will forever remain beautiful, he has a divine right to not be questioned, whether the questions may be about his morals or actions. To Henry, the portrait Dorian, and its implication of real Dorian’s eternal beauty, is not an ideal to live up to, but rather an excuse to behave selfishly with no repercussions. Henry and Basil, although for different reasons, renounce Dorian’s responsibility in exchange for responsibility on the portrait.

The influence that Basil and Henry have over Dorian is the key to Dorian’s lack of accountability. Henry, when discussing the effects of influence, asserts that “‘to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions [...] His

sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed’” (Wilde 20). This idea of influence is imperative to Dorian’s powerlessness because it suggests that nothing is truly his own. Basil’s role as the angel in conjunction with Henry’s role as a devil in Dorian’s life are the influences that strip Dorian of his soul. Because Dorian faces exorbitant amounts of control, being told what to think and how to act, he is no longer his “natural” self. The last piece of this passage becomes the most explicit statement of Dorian’s innocence; Dorian, because he is no longer himself, can not be held responsible because his actions are the actions of others. The “borrowed” actions cannot be attributed to him because he may not have thought or behaved in the same way had he remained an individual. The power Basil and Henry had over Dorian changed Dorian so drastically that his behavior could not be attributed to himself, but rather accredited to the influence of his conscience.

Dorian was a casualty of an external conscience system that left him helpless against the whims of those who were closest to him. The development of Dorian’s conscience as a moral-immoral dichotomy divided his developmental support, leaving Dorian weak. Wilde intentionally places Dorian in an inferior position to develop a commentary on the impact of external influence and power.

Works Cited

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin, 2003.

The Lure Made of Gold: How Hamilton and West Side Story

Portray the Bitter Reality of the American Dream

The American Dream is an idea that pervades many aspects of life in the United States. It influences the way people view their professions, family, hobbies, home, social status, and more. This concept has deep roots in the American population, in large part due to the hope and optimism it provides to citizens. The term was first coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams. In his book, The Epic of America , he defines the American Dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Adams further explains by saying that the Dream represents a society in “which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” As it is so prevalent, it is unsurprising that the American Dream is a common theme in American literature and art. Two works that make complex commentaries on the American Dream are Hamilton and West Side Story , and for the purposes of this discussion, I will be referring to the version of Hamilton on Disney+ and the libretto for West Side Story (1957). Though both West Side Story and Hamilton criticize the American Dream, West Side Story is strongly critical of the American Dream because of its inaccessibility, while Hamilton critiques the inherent design of the American Dream.

Hamilton , written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, focuses on the life of the founding father, Alexander

Sherwin Thiyagarajan

Hamilton. One of the most notable things that appears in the play from the very first song is Hamilton’s background. In the introductory song “Alexander Hamilton,” it is stated that Hamilton is a “bastard, orphan…dropped in a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished”, and the song goes on to note the crises that Alexander underwent. These include a hurricane, the deaths of his mother and cousin, and abandonment from his father. Hamilton’s tumultuous upbringing is heavily focused on throughout the story in order to set up the juxtaposition between his troubled past and his eventual fame and greatness, at least in the eyes of Miranda. In fact, the very first verse sets up the contrast, saying, “How does a bastard, orphan… grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” While doing this sets up an engaging underdog story, it takes on a different meaning when looking through the scope of the American Dream. Hamilton’s background contextualizes his ambition; he continuously works and writes to ensure that he never finds himself in the same circumstances he was once in. This is reflected throughout his lines in the musical. For instance, in the song “My Shot,” Hamilton says, “I shoulder Ev’ry burden, ev’ry disadvantage” and expresses that he will not “throw away [his] shot.” It is clear that Hamilton’s memories of his upbringing and poverty linger and drive his actions to make something out of himself. It is interesting that Hamilton’s primary motivation for his desire to establish a legacy is his impoverished past. This aspect of Hamilton’s character comments on a core

part of the American Dream, which gives hope and promises a better future for everybody. The American Dream appeals to people who benefit the most from obtaining this idealistic view of society, and Hamilton is one such example, where his vulnerable past becomes fuel for his ambition of achieving the American Dream. However, Hamilton never achieves his dream or happiness. Hamilton tells the story of a man who is exploited for his ideas and talents, which ultimately ends up benefitting those above him, while Hamilton never achieves his goals. These contributions include his financial plan and work to resolve the Compromise of 1790. Hamilton does not achieve the American Dream, but in the process of chasing after it, he suffers losses and makes great sacrifices.

As noted before, the characteristic of Hamilton that the musical chooses to focus on the most is his ambition. It is the driving force of the plot, and the people around Hamilton are aware of this. The most telling account of Hamilton’s endless drive to create a legacy was Aaron Burr’s lines in the song “Non-Stop.” Burr says, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Write day and night like you’re running out of time? Ev’ry day you fight, like you’re running out of time.” This illustrates how determined and hardworking Hamilton is, but this effort does not amount to much from Alexander’s perspective. It is indisputable that Alexander Hamilton had a tremendous influence on the creation of America and left an enduring legacy. He has countless achievements and has held many positions–to an outsider, he is successful. It is worth considering if this correlates with Hamilton himself being happy or fulfilled.

Aaron Burr’s story introduces the dangers of the American Dream well. Miranda and McCarter state, “Until the country has enough brass rings for everybody to grab (and maybe even then), being Alexander Hamilton, the all-American

overachiever, also means being Aaron Burr: restless, watchful, unsatisfied.” This statement succinctly illustrates how Hamilton was able to achieve “success” but that his level of ambition is ultimately fueled by an obsession that results in unfulfillment and tragedy. One of the songs that is most telling of his grief with his choices is “It’s Quiet Uptown”; in this song, Hamilton describes his biggest regrets, saying, “If I could trade [Philip’s] life for mine, He’d be standing here right now/ And you would smile, and that would be enough.” These lyrics show the deep regrets Hamilton holds regarding his personal life, with the highlights being his affair and the death of his son. These events clearly have an effect on Alexander’s psyche as well, and a collection of characters say in the same song, “His hair has gone gray. He passes every day. They say he walks the length of the city.” Hamilton even states, “I fall apart.” The heartache that Hamilton faces in this scene is extremely revealing of the dangers of falling for the American Dream. Hamilton relentlessly chases this dream to have a better, richer, and fuller life, but he is left with a broken marriage and family–he is left with despair.

In this interpretation of Hamilton , the events that occur in the musical tell the story of a man who, because of his tumultuous upbringing, falls victim to the false hopes that the American Dream promises. Instead of making his life happy and fulfilling, his dedication to the American Dream leads to nothing but the exploitation of his work and the destruction of his personal life. Even his last glimmer of hope, his reunion with Eliza, cannot be enjoyed as he is killed in a duel with Burr, a political rival formed due to his actions in the pursuit of the American Dream, a mere two years later. This story is deeply critical of the American Dream and the system that perpetuates it. It argues that the concept is inherently flawed as a whole. The musical ponders the attainability

of the American Dream by asking whether it is possible to achieve a better life by adhering to the individualistic, “dog-eat-dog” values that American society is built on. Still, looking at how Hamilton’s life unfolds, maybe the show does not ponder this question; it is more likely that it answers it with a resounding “no.”

This perspective may be ridiculous to some, which is understandable because Miranda describes his fascination with Hamilton numerous times, highlighting his story as an immigrant who overcomes the odds and cements a legacy. However, these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Hamilton is a celebration of Alexander Hamilton, but not necessarily a celebration of a newly founded America. This distinction is important because it allows the show to rightfully criticize aspects of America. For example, the show directly mentions gender inequality in the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” as Angelica notes she would like to “compel [Jefferson] to include women” when he states all men are created equal. In Act II, the musical addresses political corruption in the song “The Room Where It Happens,” and finally, the casting of the whole cast reflects criticism of the racism present in America at the time. Hamilton does not shy away from criticizing America, and its critique of the American Dream is not contradictory to the rest of the show.

In contrast to Hamilton , where the criticism of the American Dream lies within the lines of Alexander Hamilton’s story, West Side Story is much more transparent and vocal in its portrayal of the American Dream. West Side Story , with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents, focuses on two lovers, Tony and Maria, who are caught in a gang war in New York as they navigate and attempt to balance their love as well as their ties to each of the warring gangs. When looking at how West Side Story approaches the American Dream in relation to Hamilton , a

detail that stands out is the emphasis on poverty. Hamilton explores how the American Dream preys on the less fortunate, but West Side Story ( WSS ) addresses this topic in a new way. WSS conveys how impoverished people are excluded from the American Dream. The characters in the show are powerless, and this theme is explored in “Gee, Officer Krupke,” where the teens vocalize how society has failed them and influenced them into becoming delinquents. A particularly striking line in this song is, “We never had the love that every child ought to get. We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood.” The song goes on to mention negligent parents and drug issues in their communities before stating that these children shouldn’t be criminalized. They correctly point out that a very large contributor to delinquency is the absence of resources in the community, whether that’s a psychologist or a social worker. In America, especially in large urban centers like New York, the lower class is often forgotten about. When everything is privatized or for-profit, there is little incentive to invest resources in communities that don’t have the financial assets to return those investments. When the American Dream represents the ability of a citizen to live a life that is directly proportional to their innate ability, it is antithetical to have such a large disparity in the opportunities for different economic classes. WSS brings this contradiction to the center of attention to convey the incompatibility of hyperindividualism and the American Dream. The American Dream could potentially be attainable in its current form if the playing field were even, but when individuals and groups with more resources can keep their status and wealth intact by restricting the opportunities of those below them, it becomes much harder for those at the bottom to use their abilities to succeed.

Another aspect of the American Dream that WSS grapples with is the exclusion of racial

minorities from the American Dream. Racial and ethnic barriers are a large focus in WSS , and we see this throughout the musical. Sharks, who are Puerto Rican, are often discriminated against by the Jets as well as other sources of authority. From the beginning, we see racial tensions between the Jets and the Sharks, which are greatly heightened after the rumble. This is seen when Anita confronts Maria about her relationship with Tony, Maria’s white lover who has killed Bernardo, Maria’s brother. In the song “A Boy Like That,” Anita says, “One of your own kind / stick to your own kind!” This quote illustrates the racial tension between these two groups. This sentiment is found on both sides of the conflict, and it bubbles over into the realm of discrimination and bigotry in the scene directly following this one. In an interaction in the drugstore, Anita is verbally abused and assaulted because of her race. In the scene, Snowboy says that “She’s too dark to pass,” and later on, she is called a “greaseball,” “tramp,” and “Spic.” The scene also includes an attempted rape of Anita. These horrendous acts are, in large part, due to racist attitudes in the white Jets. The theme of racism is significant in this show because it represents one of the main barriers for Puerto Ricans. In the song “America,” Anita and others sing about the opportunities and luxuries that America provides. These characters immigrated to America to seek opportunities and the American Dream. However, as soon as they enter the country, they are greeted by racism. Once again, this echoes the tendency of American society to maintain the status quo. Previously, the way that America ensured that the lower classes did not move up was discussed, and many of the same principles apply here. WSS establishes that it is in the best interests of the group in power, white people, to discriminate against racial minorities to ensure that they are always at the top of the hierarchy. By continually oppressing racial minorities, the

people in power allow themselves to have the best chance at achieving the American Dream.

WSS attacks the American Dream in a much different way than Hamilton . The musical attempts to show factors that contribute to the unattainability of the American Dream, but these factors call the entire premise of the American Dream into question. WSS intentionally covers the topics of race and poverty, which is illustrated by the fact that Stephen Sondheim had this to say about his involvement: “I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.” The sensitivity of the original work is an entirely different topic, but it is clear these ideas were central to the work. By showing how racial minorities and lower classes are excluded from the pursuit of the American Dream, WSS conveys that the entire idea is flawed. How can the American Dream be achieved through a person’s innate ability when the most fundamental characteristics of that person or their upbringing automatically put them at a disadvantage? There is no way to reconcile those two facts; a society cannot claim that success is based entirely on competence when other factors make the climb to success everything but equal.

An essential aspect to consider in this discussion of the American Dream is the autonomy of the characters in both of these stories. Many people may argue that the choices and actions of the characters in these two works play a significant role in their circumstances. This is certainly true to an extent. In H amilton , AlexanderHamilton chooses to have an affair and publicize it, and he chooses to participate in both his son’s duel and his own rather than stopping them. This is directly addressed in the song “We Know,” where Hamilton is forced to confront his mistakes and notes that he does “have reasons for shame.” In WSS , both gangs choose to fight the other and escalate the conflict. WSS follows a series of events where individuals of both

gangs have the opportunity to pursue nonviolence, but until the very end of the play, when Maria puts down the gun, that opportunity is not taken. While these characters are ultimately responsible for these actions, there is a lot to be said about the way these characters are influenced to take these actions. The experiences and adversity that these characters face cannot be solely attributed to their independent decisions or the society around them because these are inherently intertwined. Hamilton did make poor decisions in his personal life because of his obsession with creating a legacy and the American Dream. However, it is natural that a child with an extremely difficult upbringing full of poverty and disaster latches onto a promise of wealth and status regardless of their birth. Hamilton is obsessed over the American Dream because he is the target audience–it is manufactured to elicit the career-first attitude that Hamilton displayed, which is the same behavior that led to all his losses and biggest regrets. Similarly, the characters in WSS did choose to hate each other, but it is important to consider that their hate for outsiders or those different from them was taught to them. Furthermore, this hate for others is something that the individualistic nature of the American Dream fosters. Therefore, the immoral actions and flawed characters present in these works do not detract from their criticisms of the American Dream; they illustrate the nuances of how societal values can penetrate and influence people and communities.

“...this hate for others is something that the individualistic nature of the American Dream fosters.”

of hyper-individualism and a drive for success. In Hamilton , we see how these traits mix to form a character who sacrifices the dignity of his family to clear his name–a person who sacrifices his family and his happiness to save his career. In West Side Story , these traits combine to form a society where putting others down is beneficial. Systemically oppressing certain groups to ensure they have low chances of succeeding is favorable when people are interested in only their own success. In the beginning, I broke down the definition of the American Dream into two parts. Firstly, the American Dream is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Additionally, Adams envisions a society in “which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Hamilton seems to directly address the first part of the definition as it shows that chasing the American Dream does not result in a better, richer, or fuller life. On the other hand, the second part of the definition is addressed by West Side Story , which shows that the circumstances of birth and position are very influential on success and that merit is rarely the sole contributor to prosperity.

The American Dream is different for everyone, and the idea of a national dream is not inherently bad. However, the problem stems from the mix

I believe that both of these are very valid critiques of the American Dream, and I think that the circumstances we live in are drastically different from the ones during Alexander Hamilton’s birth or the coining of the term “American Dream.” It would be in our best interests to contemplate

what values we treasure and which ones may need reconsidering because the American Dream has become quickly outdated.

Works Cited

Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America . Little Brown, 1931.

Barone, Adam. “What Is the American Dream? Examples and How to Measure It.” Investopedia , Investopedia, 28 Mar. 2023, https://www. investopedia.com/terms/a/american-dream. asp.

The Hamilton Project , https://newtfire.org/hamilton/index.html.

Hodgson, Geoffrey. “How Capitalism Actually Generates More Inequality.” Evonomics , 28 Apr. 2018, https://evonomics.com/how-capitalism-actually-generates-more-inequality/.

Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution . Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

Philipp, Jennifer. “The Effects of Capitalism on Impoverished Nations.” BORGEN , 4 Mar. 2021, https://www.borgenmagazine.com/ the-effects-of-capitalism/#:~:text=About%20 Capitalism&text=As%20such%2C%20 these%20organizations%20tend,their%20 economy%2C%20environment%20and%20population.

Valle, Carina De. “Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” The New York Times , The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/west-sidestory-broadway.html.

Contributor Biographies

Charlotte Auh was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a loving Nuevomexicano-South Korean family. She is a double major in Honors Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts and Elementary Education with a minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. She is currently completing educational research as a Mellon Mays scholar and is interested in the Hispanic academic identity through a lens of critical pedagogy.

Sachi Barnaby is a junior studying Computer Science; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Honors with a minor in Music. She likes thinking about the ways that we can design technology to be more accessible and equitable, and she hopes her research and writing can contribute to these conversations. She has been listening to a lot of Irish folk songs recently and would love any music recommendations (find her on Spotify as samlw0)!

Zoe Sloan Callan (Navajo) is an Undergraduate at UNM pursuing a major in English with a minor in TESOL. Although she is from New Mexico she spent two years at Amherst College in Amherst, MA. She hopes to someday be a published author.

Addison Fulton is a philosophy minor at University of New Mexico and an internationally published, multi-media artist working in nonfiction, fiction, and film. Her interest in art and philosophy alike come from a desire to explore and probe the human condition to better understand herself and the wider world.

Flora Granados is a student at the University of New Mexico.

Addison Key is an English major at the University of New Mexico. She loves sparkling water, Lady Gaga, and cows.

Jazlynn Martinez is in her junior year at UNM. She is currently majoring in English Studies. She is a member of San Ildefonso Pueblo.

Isabella Muñoz Morales is an undergraduate senior earning a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, Minor in Psychology, Minor in Honors Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts, and Certificate in Interdisciplinary Design. She is passionate about designing sustainable environments that positively impact people and communities.

Sherwin Thiyagarajan is currently a junior majoring in biology and is deeply passionate about medicine and healthcare. Outside of school, he enjoys exploring new places, lifting weights, and reading.

Upon realizing that perpetually postponing her academic and creative aspirations had long since become a way of life, Angela Walters returned to UNM after a 20 year break to complete her BA in English & Philosophy. She now joyfully juggles graduate work at UNM with writing, managing a restaurant, and spending time with her family and three dogs. Her first novel, Before Now Was Now, will be published this April, proving, in the words of George Eliot, that it is truly never too late to be what you might have been.

Rae Wilson is a sophomore majoring in Sociology and minoring in Honors Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts. Rae enjoys exploring topics of gender and sexuality in media across time. Rae’s other interests include reading, crocheting, watching cartoons, and listening to music.

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