Adriana Corral & Vincent Valdez: Requiem

Adriana Corral & Vincent Valdez: Requiem 1.

00/00/0000: My sense of who I am stems from my upbringing in multiple places—living between Chicago, Illinois and Latin America (Medellín, Colombia and Zacatecas, Mexico) and my longing for a more complex representation of place and identity. As a first-generation American, I have never felt wholly rooted to one country, one culture, or even one city. For me, this mixture of “home” or “belonging” is not inherent and has imprinted a certain series of questions many children of immigrants ask themselves—who are we and to which history do we belong?

There’s a multiplicity in who we are and who we can be and those strengths are what help represent our citizenship.

2.

1493: To Whom It May Concern: How many battles are people of color fighting? When do we give up and when do we continue to push forward?

For how long? I try to remember the phrase “The past is painful, the present is precarious and the future is free”.

As a means of moving forward. But then I come across this….

AD 1493: The Pope asserts rights to colonize, convert, and enslave Pope Alexander VI issues a papal bull or decree, “Inter Caetera,” in which he authorizes Spain and Portugal to colonize the Americas and its Native peoples as subjects. The decree asserts the rights of Spain and Portugal to colonize, convert, and enslave. It also justifies the enslavement of Africans. “... Out of our own sole largess and certain knowledge and out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the authority of Almighty God conferred upon us in blessed Peter and of the vicarship of Jesus Christ, which we hold on earth, do by tenor of these presents, should any of said islands have been found by your envoys and captains, give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south, by drawing and establishing a line from the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south, no matter whether the said mainlands and islands are found and to be found in the direction of India or towards any other quarter, the said line to be distant one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde. With this proviso however that none of the islands and mainlands, found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered, beyond that said line towards the west and south, be in the actual possession of any Christian king or prince up to the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ just past from which the present year one thousand four hundred ninety-three begins. And we make, appoint, and depute you and your said heirs and successors lords of them with full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind…” —Pope Alexander VI, “Inter Caetera” And the questions cycle through again.

3.

1801: On a farm in The Hudson River Valley near Newburgh NY Charles Wilson Peale excavated the first complete skeleton of The America Incognitum. It was the French naturalist named Georges Cuvier who established that these elephant like bones belonged to an extinct animal now known as the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and concluded that all such creatures must have died out in the distant past. Cuvier’s study of the mastodon established the idea of extinction as a natural fact. The idea was controversial and flew in the face of religious beliefs and the creation Myth itself. Curvier concluded that now-extinct species have been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. These were the first to ponder the impermanence of life and infinite and cyclical destruction and rebirth.

4.

February 1, 1843: is the year my third great grandfather Manuel Banegas crossed the Rio Bravo del Norte to migrate north from Paso Del Norte and started working with a small group of Mexican settlers to dig acequias and establish a farming community in the Mesilla Valley in present day New Mexico. For six years this community was in a grey area on the international boundary because of an error on the map of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in

1848 during the imperial expansionist land grab by the United States. After the Gadsden Treaty was confirmed in 1854 it was designated part of the recently acquired United States territory. This was the date the border literally crossed my great grandfathers farm and this region’s history was altered forever.

5.

December 29, 1845: The Republic of Texas is annexed and joins the United States of America. Territories that were once part of Northern Mexico, and before that home to countless indigenous peoples, become the 28th state in the union. The official treaty states that people of Texas “shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States”; my ancestors, who called Northern Mexico home, are now American citizens. Generations later I will cite the refrain “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” in a futile attempt to explain my American identity to someone else.

6.

April 13, 1873: On this date, an Easter Sunday, in a small north Louisiana parish named Grant, in a town called Colfax, a white supremacist paramilitary group murdered over 150 African-Americans in what has become known as the Colfax Massacre—although, to this day white supremacists refer to it as the “Colfax Riots.” No one was, or has ever been, punished for their participation in this act of terror even though their names were, and remain, well-known. This is because, in response to this violence, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that effective said the federal government was powerless to protect black people from acts of terror committed by white supremacist paramilitaries; a decision that ensured that further acts of terror would occur. In the end, this one, brutal event accomplished its goal: it greatly retarded the fight for equality for all, reversed significant political and social gains for African-Americans, and helped lead directly to the Jim Crow Era. Perversely, white supremacy, on this Easter Sunday, was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War—and Justice and Equality for All were executed.

For me what makes this date so indicative of America, and the sickness it still suffers, is not that this happened, but is how we have chosen to misremember this date. If you visit Colfax today you will find only historical markers.

The first, erected by the State of Louisiana in 1950, stands on the site of the massacre. It reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” The second, located in the local cemetery, is a monument to the three white supremacists who also died during their act of terror. This monument reads, “Erected to the memory of the Heroes, / Stephen Decatur Parish / James West Hadnot / Sidney Harris / Who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.” Memorializing acts of violence and hatred—or those who fought for unjust causes—as though they were principled and noble demeans us all. Yet here we are, doing just that, to this very day.

7.

OCTOBER 18, 1898: On October 18, 1898, as the U.S. and Spain negotiated the terms of a treaty in Paris, Federico Degetau wrote from Biarritz, France, to U.S. President William McKinley requesting that the treaty include an arbitration clause on behalf of the Puerto Rican nation (país). Degetau identifies himself as an elected representative from Puerto Rico serving on the Spanish legislature. Several weeks later, Degetau received a courtesy response from Secretary of State John Hay informing him “that your letter has been placed on file for consideration.” The circular file, no doubt. Undeterred, Degetau traveled to Paris and met with the Secretary of the Commission for the treaty and also wrote to one of the U.S. members of the Commission (who responded in French).

His lobbying efforts did not secure an arbitration clause, but some of his language with respect to maintaining Spanish intellectual property rights and duty-free trade in the new U.S. territories were added to the treaty. Degetau returned to Puerto Rico in mid-November 1898, where he quickly took up formal roles in local governance and was shortly elected as Puerto Rico’s first Resident Commissioner serving in Washington, D.C. On October 18, 1898, the same day that Degetau wrote to President McKinley from Biarritz, Francisco Oller— the most prominent Puerto Rican artist of the time—painted Portrait of President William McKinley based on a photograph in the recently published English-language book Photographic History of the Spanish-American War. Both Degetau and Oller were engaging McKinley in the period prior to the 1898 Treaty of Paris that would establish Puerto Rico as a colonial holding of the United States, a status that continues today. Oller was concerned with developing arts and culture on the island, with the artist establishing six art schools between 1873 and 1904, and becoming a professor of drawing in 1902 at the Universidad de Puerto Rico (then called the Escuela Normal).

These schools were open to both sexes, typically free, and predicated on the importance of education through art for all people as well as for the nation. Degetau amassed a significant collection of over 100 paintings that he donated to the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, where it is now a cornerstone of the museum that was subsequently established on the campus.

This date is meaningful to me as a moment that makes clear how art can intervene in politics through individual and collective actions. In Puerto Rico since at least 1882, the visual arts provided a tool in the struggle for either autonomy from or equality within the Spanish Empire, and then subsequently in relation to the United States.

This included access to art education, painting as a form of political commentary, acquisition of art collections, and plans for a national museum. In the early years of U.S. rule over Puerto Rico, several paintings by a native of Puerto Rico living in Biarritz were acquired by Degetau and shipped to the United States. Customs saw these paintings as foreign products requiring a tariff, while Degetau argued that the artists, as a Puerto Rican, was also an American. The struggle over the status of these works was resolved when the U.S. government declared that the painter was indeed an American artist but not a U.S. citizen, and that the same logic applied to “an American tribal Indian or a native Alaskan.” In 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court used this precedent to make it official with respect to Puerto Ricans entering the mainland: they were noncitizen nationals. This decision was part of an administrative and juridical response to a fundamental and widely debated shift in U.S. territorial expansion, from settler colonialism to imperialism. But what happened in the process of keeping citizenship white is that the Supreme Court divided American nationality from U.S. citizenship. It did so as one of a series of grudging, peculiar, and ambiguous compromises as U.S. colonial rule encountered a push back from Puerto Ricans like the ones initiated on October 18, 1898.

8.

September 19, 1910: The Mexican community boycotts the newly segregated schools in San Angelo, Texas due to unequal educational opportunities. The school board responds by saying “to admit the Mexicans into white schools would be to demoralize the entire system and they will not under any pressure consider such a thing.”

The school boycott in this small West Texas town occurred almost 60 years earlier than the Chicano walkouts in California. Although I attended public schools in San Angelo from first through twelfth grade, I never heard of this major civil rights event until I came across it while doing research in my mid-thirties. As a white male from West Texas, my worldview and social position was certainly shaped by my hometown’s hidden legacy of both racism and civil rights action.

9.

January 25, 1913: The United Fruit Company starts its new passenger line of steamships, designed to move bananas and tourists between Colombia, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Louisiana and New York.

The steamship line complemented the company’s control of railroad and telegraph infrastructure in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia and Panama. The establishment of banana plantations and rail lines led to innumerable and uncounted deaths of workers during construction and harvest, the immediate massacre of more than 3000 workers in Santa Marta, Colombia on December 5 and 6, 1928, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, a general sway over public policy there and here, and the ongoing human and environmental disasters on large swaths of United Fruit lands in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Colombia. The United Fruit Company is, physically, one of the corporate reasons “we are here, because you were there.” Another instance of tu placer, nuestro dolor.

10.

June 19, 1916: Mayor Tom Lee writes a telegram to the surgeon general in Washington, DC requesting funding to build a delousing facility for Mexican laborers. “Hundreds dirty lousy destitute Mexicans arriving at El Paso daily/ will undoubtedly bring and spread typhus unless a quarantine is placed at once/the city of El Paso backed by its medical board and state federal and militia officials here feel that the government should put a quarantine/please investigate and advise me this is necessary to avoid typhus.”

11.

October 16, 1916: Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

12.

1924: “Compared to old Europe, which had lost an infinite amount of its best blood through war and emigration, the American nation appears as young and racially select people. The American union itself, motivated by the theories of its own racial researchers, [has] established specific criteria for immigration… making an immigrants ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual.”

–Adolf Hitler, praising the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924

13.

December 2, 1942: John P. Paluzi Enlisted in the Marines. A first generation American (his parents were Italian immigrants) signing up to fight for his country in a world war. He never talked about the war, but hearing about it from other members of the family always intrigued me. The fact that he made that sacrifice for his country is something I was always in awe of and will always be proud and grateful for that.

14.

June 6, 1944: The photo that captured the Normandy invasion, on the beach codenamed “Omaha”, left a significant impression on a young boys’ heart. Photographed by Robert F. Sargent and so accurately titled Into the Jaws of Death, he captured the landing of the U.S. First Infantry Division off the coast of France to face a true nightmare. The picture peaked my interest into further researching the event, the players, the positions, the strategy, the war, and world at the time. In doing so, I began sympathizing the sacrifice and pain endured, while empathizing the love and pride for America with those brave soldiers aboard the vessels. My ardent fervor for learning about history has always existed, but my voracious pride for being an American has been built off of this moment that led me to continue to educate, participate, and do my part to protect the integrity of the America we call, O Beautiful.

15.

August 1945: The Atomic bomb, “Little Boy” was the first nuclear weapon dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber. The proceeding bomb, “Fat Man” was dropped on the city Nagasaki, killing an estimated 130,000-230,000 people in both cities, most of who were civilians.

16.

August 9, 1945: The Bombing of Nagasaki. I was in history class when I learned that my late teacher’s grandfather was one of the tail gunner on the jet that dropped the atomic bomb onto the Japanese town of Nagasaki.

As a person who felt separated from the events of history because I didn’t have any attachment to the events, I suddenly was overwhelmed with emotion as I realized that the depicted “evil” in history were humans too, who may have or may have not agreed with their own actions.

17.

November 11, 1948: James Baldwin, age 24, tells his family he’s leaving the United States: “My mother had come downstairs, and stood silently, arms folded, on the stoop. My baby sister was upstairs weeping.” That night he flies to Paris.

18.

June 15, 1950: My only brother was released from military duty one day before all discharged were frozen due to the Korean problem. My parents, family and friends were extremely relieved. My other brother had been killed in WWII.

19.

January 1951: My great-grandmother submitted her master’s thesis to the education department at the University of Texas at Austin in January of 1951. While working as a school principal in Edinburg in the 1940s, she saw increasing numbers of immigrant children in schools as a direct result of the Bracero Program. She examined their treatment, relations between them and other students, and the effect that deportation raids had in classrooms along the US-Mexico border from El Paso to Brownsville. In many instances, she writes of the sudden absence of these children from school and the effect it had on their classmates. Reading her thesis today, it is not dissimilar to the horrific accounts of family separations that were brought to national media attention in the summer of 2018.

Under the Trump administration, the number of ICE workplace raids skyrocketed, leaving communities torn and schoolteachers left with the responsibility of comforting students whose parents or classmates were suddenly gone. However, what’s horrific is not the novelty of President Trump’s policy, but the familiarity of it (Native American, African American and Japanese American narratives come to mind). Although social media concern has waned, stories of immigrant family separation tragically continue—nor are they new, only forgotten.

20.

July 25, 1952: Constitution Day in Puerto Rico, which in any other country would be called Independence Day, but given that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, it cannot claim that celebration. Instead on July 25th islanders celebrate the creation of the island’s constitution and of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. July 25, 1952, seemed to usher in a new era of US-Puerto Rico relations, based on consent of the governed and mutual understanding. Today in 2019 with Puerto Rico living under the power of a Fiscal Control Board that can effectively exercise power over nearly every facet of island life, the Commonwealth and the island’s Constitution seem like empty promises.

21.

Summer of 1953: The first time my father crossed without papers into the U.S. through the Tijuana border was in 1953, when he was 14 years old. A border patrol agent caught him and handcuffed him to a telephone pole so that he could chase after another unauthorized immigrant. Before handcuffing my father to the pole, the migra, who was pissed off at my father for running, threw my father’s sack lunch at his face. There was a bottle inside the sack that broke and gashed my father’s forehead. “The wound wasn’t too serious,” my father tells me. Decades later my father took a pilgrimage of sorts, which led him to the spot where he was handcuffed to a pole. There’s a fancy restaurant near that spot where he and my mother sat down to eat the most expensive meal they could order. That was all the revenge he needed.

22.

April 11, 1954: The most uneventful and boring day of the 20th century. Every day something of significance occurs, but nothing remarkable had happened on the said day in 1954, according to experts who inserted over 300 million important events of the century into a computer search program to calculate.

23.

1957: An image that is very vivid in mind even today was traveling on the train from Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico to Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua, Mexico with my grandmother Petra.

I was around 7 years old and remember seeing the different people that boarded the train as I set next to my grandmother.

The most interesting people to me where the Tarahumara Indians that boarded the train.

I remember the color of their clothes and the sandal type shoes they wore.

When we reached Cuauhtémoc my grandfather Raymundo was waiting for us at the train station to take us to the village where they lived and where I would spend my summers as a young boy.

As we left the train station on my grandfather’s horse drawn buggy all I could see at a distance where the Tarahumara Indians walking toward the mountains.

24.

December 27, 1958: That Date is very important to me, because that is the day my Uncle was born but sadly he has died. That date is very important because my uncle and I were very close and he motivated me on a lot of stuff and if it weren’t for him I don’t think I would have gotten this far in life.

25.

1960: Sabidura 4 by the artist Gego

Line as human the relation to express the relation between points, something that is entirely abstract in the sense: of not existing materially in nature.

Line as medium indicates materially the relation between points in space, expressing visually human descriptive thought.

Line as object to play with.

26.

7 de Julio de 1960: By this date I had turned 12 years old just a month earlier. It was Summer, school was out, and in the space of 24 hrs I departed Cuba with my older brother and landed in the United States. I had visited the U.S. before but knew no home but Cuba. There were no goodbyes and, as it happened, many others were also leaving Cuba and our lives were tearing, fragmenting and leaving us with no country beneath us. I would soon realize that my experience of home was becoming a memory, never to be regained. I would also eventually realize that despite the searing pain of separation from all I held dear I was fortunate to have my family and together we would start anew. The hope for a restart or beginning is what the United States has symbolized since its founding… until now.

27.

1962: Woke up. Randomly picked up a book from shelf on my way to bathroom.

The Selling of the President 1968.

Opened it up and landed by coincidence on this Appendix quote— “Nowadays everybody tells us that what we need is more belief, a stronger and deeper and more encompassing faith. A faith in America and in what we are doing. That may be true in the long run. What we need first and now is

to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. “ Daniel Borrstin/ The Image 1962 28.

June 5, 1963: When I was thirteen years old I remember feeling the excitement as I walked with my family to capture president John F. Kennedy parade down Montana St in El Paso, Texas. He was there campaigning. This was the first time I remember feeling excited to be an American. However, it was a few months later that we were morning the untimely death of John F. Kennedy. I was stricken with sadness and kept recalling that moment when I saw him parade in the convertible just two blocks away from where we lived.

29.

November 21, 1963: My mother Josephine O. Guerra meets President John F. Kennedy upon his visit to Brooks Aerospace Medicine, where research for space travel and centrifugal forces is going on. She is in line to see the president and he stops shakes her hand and asks about the important work she is doing. My mom is ecstatic, proud and hopeful for the nations future. Does not want to wash her hand again.

30.

November 22, 1963: I was a senior in high school in San Antonio, Texas. I remember being called to an unscheduled assembly by the school principal that day and hearing from him that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. Most of us broke down in tears. One girl cheered. I felt afraid.

31.

November 22, 1963: The day I became an American was not the day I swore allegiance to the USA when I became a Naturalized citizen at age 18. I still longed for Brazil where I was born and my dreams were of there and the Portuguese language I so loved.

The day I became an American was November 22nd, 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. By then I was a young mother with two very young sons, living in Metairie, Louisiana just outside of New Orleans. I watched television for hours in total shock as crowds on the streets of New Orleans cheered at his death, and the solemn transfer of power took place on Airforce 1.

It was that shock and disbelief that such a senseless and brutal thing could happen in America that galvanized me into true citizenship.

32.

November 22, 1963: I was on my way from the motor pool in Fort Lewis, to the company area getting all our baggage back and package cuz we were heading out, somewhere, we didn’t know where but we wound up on our way to Vietnam. I heard that President Kennedy was assassinated. That gave something to look forward to going.

To see what we can do for our country. Not what our country can do for us. I will always remember that.” what you can do for your country not what your country can do for you”

33.

November 22, 1963: As an 11-year-old, sitting in a classroom in a small, remote west Texas community, I recall a teacher, with a smile on her face, stepping into the classroom stating that President Kennedy had been shot. My first reaction was sorrow, then confusion. During the days following, I stayed glued to the television, which was not generally allowed in our household, watching and listening to try and determine why anyone would have a smile on their face when announcing such a tragic event?

34.

November 22, 1963: One of the saddest and most memorable days of my life was November 22, 1963, the day that the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. President Kennedy only served 1,037 days. I was in my mid-twenties during his Presidency and to me and other dreamers, he represented our hopes for the future of the country. His courage, leadership, values, charisma and optimism sparked the idealism of my generation, one founded on peace and social justice and the equality of all people. In his words “the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” He advocated better working conditions, more public housing, higher wages, lower prices, cheaper rents and more Social Security benefits for the aged.

In his inaugural address, he inspired all of us to see the importance of civic action and public service by his historic words by the challenge to “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

The hopes and dreams of this “Camelot” period ended on this fateful day and we have not seen its likes, sadly, since then.

35.

November 22, 1963: I was an eleven year old 6th Grader at St, Henry’s Catholic School President Kennedy was our first elected Catholic Leader. During class Sister Christina turns on the television and the excruciatingly painful news of the President’s assassination is in full view, being replayed over and over. We are instructed to go home and be with our loved ones for the enormity of this horrific act is sinking in. The nation’s hopes and dreams are dealt a huge blow. My interest in politics and human nature is heightened forever. We can only dream of what could have been. My mother cries, I am sad for America, A pall over our country. Innocence lost.

36.

November 22, 1963: I was born four years later to the day. Every year, as I celebrate my birthday, I think about this fateful day in American history. A single shot changed everything for one man, one family, one city, one nation, and one world. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination marked the beginning of a dark era in our country’s history that shifted from seeming innocence to one of violence, fear, and mistrust. We’ve recently entered another period of darkness. It’s essential that good people stand up to represent the qualities of light and reason in the face of this darkness.

37.

1966: I’m a senior. My school counselor met with me for what I believed was to guide me through the college application process. She asked me why I was in her office and I told her I wanted to go to college. She told me that I wasn’t college material and I should consider taking shop classes. To her, I was just the son of poor people who didn’t graduate from high school. To my parents I was a son who could accomplish anything I set out to do.

The same attitude was shown by them to my younger siblings. I am forever grateful to have had wonderful parents who believed in me.

38.

March, 1966. My father, then a Catholic priest, marched with Cesar Chavez in California. I happened across a PBS documentary about the Delano to Sacramento march years ago and saw my Dad marching in B&W video. It was something he was very proud of, as am I.

39.

March 15, 1966: Was the day I met my now Husband of 53 years Guadalupe S. Olguin. He was walking down Rivas, en el mero hueso del westside. Lost, looking for his mother’s new home. The smell of homemade tamales filling the air. He asked for directions and we haven’t stopped guiding each other since.

40.

August 1, 1966: My mom would tell the story of how she had morning sickness, pregnant with my older sister, on August 1, 1966, so she didn’t go to campus on that day when the gunman went to the top of the UT tower and started shooting, killing 16 people (including one unborn child). She would have passed the tower at that time, on her way to class. A chilling story, but always mythical to me, until as a young adult, I heard about Columbine and the reality sunk in. And now, almost weekly, young white men in America commit similar acts of terrorism.

41.

June 12, 1967: This is the date of the decision of the Loving vs. Virginia case that tore down anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. I am the product of an interracial marriage, my father is black and my mother is white. I am married to a person of a different race. Without the Lovings, I wouldn’t be who I am today; I am eternally grateful for their bravery and their will to fight for the right to marry who you love, no matter the color of their skin.

42.

April 4,1968: Today is January 21, 2019—Dr. Martin Luther King Day - a day to celebrate the life of a man who stood for all good in man - peace, love, charity and equality.

My family was a product of the deep South—ingrained in prejudice and racism. My generation was, hopefully, the one to stop the cycle - at least it did for me. I went to college at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY in 1962 and moved into a large women’s dormitory. A young black woman moved onto the same floor and, the first time I met her, I was struck by her extraordinary courage and brilliance. We became friends and her friendship changed my life. This was in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and all of us were aware of the strife and racism that was, not only prevalent in the deep South, but it was all over the country.

It was November 22, 1963, my sophomore year in college, and I was going back to my dormitory from town. I saw people crying—a woman ran up to me weeping and screamed “the President has been shot”! I ran back to the dormitory and everyone was crowded around a small TV—hanging onto every word. I felt an indescribable bottomless despair and fear—I’ll never ever forget that day nor that feeling.

It was April 4, 1968 and by now I have graduated from college, married and am living in Pittsburgh, PA. The news is on—Martin Luther King has been assassinated - we were stunned beyond belief—how can this possibly happen —not again—how much hate is in this world? We were in grief, again, and watching the TV all evening and the next day. On April 5 we watched the casket on the conveyer belt into the American Airlines airplane—the casket was placed in the passenger section, not cargo as usually required by law, so that Mrs. King, family and friends could be near his body—a sign of deep respect.

When the plane landed in Atlanta, the steps were pushed up to the side of the plane so that the passengers could deplane. The sea of people, thousands, waiting for Dr. King’s casket and family, was immense and endless—and quiet. A man in an American Airlines captains uniform came out of the door onto the top landing and helped Mrs. King down the steps. I was stunned—it was my father, David Chambers.

I called my mother in Nashville, TN immediately and asked if she was watching the TV and if she knew where my father was - she wasn’t and she told me that my father was on a flight to Chicago. She didn’t know and I didn’t tell her he was on TV. The FBI had asked him to keep it quiet—he had organized the transport of King’s body. It was a dangerous order - for the times were angry and turbulent—a riot of tremendous violence and horrific consequences could have erupted at any provocation. My father was changed for the rest of his life. He is still alive at 98 and remembers every minute of that day and of that event vividly—indelibly imprinted—I will never forget it either.

Two months later, June 6, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. All of us were again reminded of our violent times and hoped for a future where racism and hatred no longer existed.

Today we remember Dr. Martin Luther King and his immeasurable sacrifice and contributions to humanity. We now have a president - a man without moral fiber or knowledge - who is driven by greed and power - who is challenging our democracy with his racists policies and who is attempting to destroy our laws and freedom of the press.

We all must remember those who have given so much to keep our democracy alive and fight against those who seek to destroy it.

In great respect, love and admiration for those heroes.

43.

April 4, 1968: My dad, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn and my mom, a Creek and Sioux Indian (the nomenclature of the day) from South Dakota had settled in a small town in southern Oklahoma where my dad worked for Halliburton. It was and still is a hateful little place. It was early spring, I had just turned fourteen. A week and a few days later Martin Luther King was murdered, assassinated. I was walking to the grocery store and heard it in my transistor radio. And that was the day I realized it.

That was the day I realized that all the effort and chances my parents were taking in our town- working to desegregate the public pool, supporting the only nursing home that was run by a Baptist black pastor and was available to black citizens, providing lifeguards and swimming lessons on the ‘east side’ of town, supporting civil rights on that micro level as best they could-they were doing it for my siblings and me. They had by example after example wanted to shape us into true ‘persons’. (A word used back then by a Jewish individual as a compliment.)

That was the date I took a deep breath and realized that the world was not just my existence in that town. But even if it was, it was time for me to start figure to out what it was I was going to stand for, regardless of consequences.

44.

April 4, 1968: I was a senior in college and remember walking into the lobby of my dorm and seeing a large group of other students all gathered around the television and then hearing from one of them that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed in Memphis. There were tears again. How can this be!? I felt dismayed.

45.

May 1968: My father was working in the lettuce fields of Oregon, along with a group of men from our home town in the state of Durango, in Mexico. One of those men, who was also my uncle, receives a letter from home where his wife tells him, among other things, that I had been born. I am my dad’s fourth child, but the first baby girl, the one he’d been waiting for. He immediately begins to secretly wish to be caught and deported so he can go home and meet me. His wish comes true. I learned this story years later, as an adult, when I call my parents from a work trip to Eugene, Oregon and I tell them that I just had the best salad ever that consisted of the freshest lettuce.

Still on the phone, my father begins to narrate the story of working in the fields of Oregon and his desire to meet me. The after taste of the delicious salad turns bitter in my mouth. Far from being an activist, my father simply recounts (sometimes even funny) anecdotes about his experience as a migrant laborer in this country and the importance of their role. He does wish more people would “listen.”

46.

May 6, 1968: El Paso, Texas. I am attending Texas Western College, which is now University of Texas at El Paso, and I get my military draft number of 89 which means I will be drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. The U.S. is fiercely fighting communism. Luckily the war started winding down and I was never drafted to go to serve, but many of my friends did serve and some were killed in combat, I often think about them, they were great friends and the life that could of been with them! It was a sad time for the U.S. and the war came to an end as the TET offensive began the defeat of communism in 1975 as declared by president Nixon. Communism was seen as a great threat to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

47.

October 3, 1968: In a bloodless military coup, left-wing Peruvian General Juan Velasco seized power, deposing the democratically elected administration of Fernando Belaúnde, under which he served as Commander of the Armed Forces. Through a military revolution, General Velasco became Peru’s 58th president. Three years later, in 1971, Velasco’s then oppressive military dictatorship spurred my family into voluntary exile in the US. I was a little over a year old--my brother a few months old--and we would grow up in Miami, Florida, living in between worlds and in between cultures (US and Hispanic). When you’re an immigrant, you’re never truly home, anywhere. But as a direct result of our upbringing--operating in between worlds--we developed an expansive and inclusive worldview and are committed in our work to making sure everyone feels welcome, included, and meant to be here.

48.

November 2, 1968: Students at San Francisco State College began the “Third World Strike” to demand the immediate creation of an Ethnic Studies Department, the substantive hiring of nonwhite faculty, and the expansive recruitment of nonwhite students. Inspired by the international student movements and civil rights organizing, the five-month strike helped spur other strikes across the country, including at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell.

Their pervasive demands to reimagine who belonged in a university and what constituted knowledge triggered significant institutional change, but also launched repressive and even violent responses. I remain grateful to those students for making my life as a student, researcher, writer, and professor possible. They give me faith in collective action.

49.

November 2, 1968: I am 10 years old. I entered our home in Floresville and heard the telephone ring. I answered the call and the person on the other side stated they wanted to speak to my mother. I looked at my mother and told her “someone wants to talk to you and they sound like someone died”. My mother gets the phone. We look into each other’s eyes. I start crying and screamed “Daddy’s dead, Daddy’s dead!” My father was dead, he died in a motor vehicle accident. His vehicle stalled on the railroad tracks and the train impact killed him instantly. Our lives changed forever. My mother is strong and now a single parent of 4 small children from ages 6-10 years old.

50.

1969: In the late forties, my grandparents moved the family from a small town in Connecticut to the outskirts of Philadelphia after grandpa got a promotion. Not too long after relocating, the family woke one morning to find a cross burned on their front yard. Needless to say, Irish Catholics were not welcome. They promptly relocated to North Jersey. Years later, my father moved our family to the Norfolk area of Virginia where my dad worked ship yards. I remember the horror of seeing confederate battle flags on neighbor’s front porches. In my sister’s thirdgrade class, in 1969, the only black student had to move after his family’s house was burned down one night. And needless to say our family moved away from this darkness.

51.

February 1969: I don’t remember the exact date, but I do remember that it was a frozen February day in 1969. My mother, as she did, was giving a music lesson on one end of the house and I, a six-year old second-grader just home from school, had to watch television quietly in a room on the other. It was about 4:30 pm, but in Rochester, NY the sun sets at 4:15 pm in February, so that means it was pitch black outside. I hand-cranked the knob on

the TV to the local PBS station, probably hoping to find a muppet show to watch. Instead, I found myself staring in horror at a documentary that focused on African-American men and women sitting at a Greensboro cafeteria counter surrounded by screaming white people who were pouring milk on their heads. Then the image switched to a Montgomery man lying the ground in a fetal position while a policeman permitted his German Shepard to tear the man apart. I had never seen this material before and I had never known that people could treat each other that way.

I cried right there and then, on the spot.

It was unusual for me to speak much about my daily emotional state, but that evening at dinner I elected to recount this horrifying moment to my parents – two of the finest people I’ve ever known. We decided that I should write a letter to my congressman outlining my outrage, and I did, in three sentences. We mailed it, and about a month later I received a four-page response that included a summary of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and a bromide from Rep. Horton (R-NY) that the government was aware of the problem. For some reason, that reassured my six year-old self that everything was going to be alright. It wasn’t and it probably never will be.

This taught me many lessons. First, our connections as humans far outpace our differences within the species – or, at least, they should. Second, if you’re angry, speak up, because no change happens without people who are willing to be condemned by those who hold the power. Third, hold your elected officials accountable, but don’t believe them when they tell you that they’ve got this.

But also I learned this: images have an unusual power to elicit responses of viewers that can stay with them for the rest of their lives and can change the way they view the world. Never underestimate that power.

52.

April 21, 1969: I was drafted into the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War on April 21, 1969 at the ripe old age of 21 years and 4 months. Government policy at the start of the war was to draft all men into the military at 191⁄2 years of age.

My dad and family drove me down to the Air Force recruiting station early that morning where I checked in and took the oath for induction into the armed forces. Shortly thereafter, I and four other new inductees were put in an official Air Force car for the ride to Lackland AFB for basic training. I remember staring out the window during the ride to Lackland wondering if I would live through this adventure and make it back home again after it was all over.

We arrived at Lackland AFB about an hour or so later, where we were interviewed and given a short physical.

They asked a lot of questions to try and find out if we were medically fit or mentally ready to serve. Not surprising, some were turned down. Those that were accepted, me included, were sent into a room with lines painted on the floor and a large American flag in front. We were told to line up along the lines and then asked to step forward to “voluntarily” be sworn in.

Well, that was it, I was now the property of the United States Air Force. We were then taken by bus to the reception center on the base. When we arrived, the meanest man I’ve ever come in contact with up to that point in my young life, jumps on the bus and starts yelling and screaming orders. “OFF THE BUS! DOUBLE TIME! LINE UP!” At the reception center we were given a complete bald haircut, more testing and were issued our uniforms. Then it was off to 8 weeks of basic training where I met much meaner training tech sergeants.

Next it was off to Keesler AFB Biloxi, Miss for 52 weeks of advanced technical training on specialized aircraft electronic systems. I graduated from the Electronic Technical School with the rank of E3 and received orders for my first duty station overseas at Kwanju AB Republic of Korea.

My next tour of duty I received orders to report to Ubon AB, a war zone in the South East Asian country of Thailand. It was considered a war zone during the Vietnam War because the air war was being fought from eight American bases in Thailand.

I boarded a Flying Tiger Airlines plane and headed out across the pacific on a 25-hour plane ride. Our first stop was Guam for refueling and change of flight crews. The whole time we flew with the sun in daylight, but the rest of the way was in the dark.

Things got pretty quiet on this last leg of our journey because reality was setting in fast. I did manage to sleep a little, but mostly I just did a lot of thinking and trying to imagine what was in store. Once over Thailand, the stewardess announced we were over the country and to wake up and get ready for landing. I remember looking out the window; I had a window seat, and seeing the vast darkness and every once in a while, a small point of light in the distance.

It wasn’t long before we were landing at Ubon AB in Thailand which is just 20 miles from the Vietnam border.

The date was October 6, 1972 somewhere around 11: at night if I remember correctly. Just before getting off the plane, the flight crew thanked us for flying Flying Tiger Airlines and said something like “We hope to see all of you back with us in a year for the ride home”. We all looked at each other wondering which of us here wouldn’t make that flight back to the “World”.

It was an experience I will never forget and all of us in my crew made it back to the “World”.

53.

July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong’s voice crackled from the car’s radio speakers, “the Eagle has landed.”

At that moment, Gary Boyd and a friend were in route to the University of Texas in Austin for a weekend fraternity-rush party. They then pulled to the side of the road near Junction Texas, opened the trunk of Bobby’s new Oldsmobile Cutlass and popped the top on two cold Schlitz beers.

“Cheers” we exclaimed, “we are on the damn moon!”.

They downed the beer, put the empties back in the cooler, and drove on to Austin.

54.

AUGUST 15, 1969: In my lifetime there have been only a few moments when the true spirit of America revealed itself as a common zeitgeist, a condensed experience reflecting the positive nature of how people can come together to simply celebrate our true nature. Perhaps one of the most emotional, heartwarming, bonding, moments was at WOODSTOCK in the middle of the summer of 1969, when a half a million people came together for four days to simply be together to celebrate music in a new blossoming culture that only looked to the future.

55.

December 4, 1969: Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in a pre-dawn raid led by Illinois States Attorney Edward Hanrahan. The Chicago police, Red Squad, and FBI were involved in the planning of the Raid, which was essentially a state sanctioned political assassination. No one involved in the planning and implementation of the murders ever spent a day in Jail.

56.

May 4, 1970: I had been protesting the war in Vietnam since 1967-68, my last year of high school. I’d always believed that as Americans it was our right to protest. That belief ended on May 4, 1970 when members of the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of unarmed college students protesting Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Four students were killed, 9 wounded; one of the wounded was permanently paralyzed. Of those shot, some were protesting but some were just observers. That May I realized: no American is safe who steps out of line to speak truth. From Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s song, “Ohio”: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, We’re finally on our own; This summer I hear the drumming; Four dead in Ohio.”

57.

August 5, 1971: Drinking a beer at my home at the time.

The TKE house at Marshall University. I think most of the guys were there, at least most from my class, in front of the main TV. The Vietnam draft was about to be drawn for guys born in 1952.

Like an end of life lotto for us. The student deferment had been dropped.

First date, not mine.

Second day, not mine. Cautiously optimistic by number 20. Too soon.

My birthday was number 21.

The first 97 dates had to report for induction.

A date I’ll never forget.

A waste of lives on both sides and a mistake America continues to make.

58.

August 16,1971: This is a day that I think of often. It is a day that shapes my work, the historical narratives I tell, and my personal identity. This is the day that started our new lives. This is the day that Mom and Pop courageously left their hometown of Sabinas, Coahuila in Mexico and crossed through the Piedras Negras Border Crossing into Eagle Pass, Texas. Mom was 16, Pop was 17, and my brother Tomas was 5 months old. This day is my parents’ greatest gift to us. It is our family’s story of love, courage, sacrifice, and hardships. On this day they left their four living parents, 23 siblings combined, friends, family and every comfort they knew. My mother and father remember this day vividly. It is the day that they chose to leave their querido Mexico. It is the day that made their three future children Mexican-American. It is one that all four of us children can recite verbatim because we know the story so well. August 16, 1971 will be one of Carmen Mota del Beltran y Dario Mota Estrada’s lasting legacies.

This is my American story.

59.

August 1972: I registered for the draft at the post office as I was turning 18. The Vietnam war was ongoing and I had been involved in anti war protests. I decided I would register as a conscientious objector. I was living at home still. My father heard my registration status from my sister and came storming into my room. “If you are drafted and they come to me I will tell them they should take you. I don’t support your status. I will tell them you played football” I believe that was the moment it was clear I had to leave home.

60.

December 15, 1973: The same year I realized I was gay, mesmerized by Richard’s feathered hair in the 4th grade, a 65% plurality of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. While I was celebrating my graduation from university, the Supreme Court ruled that consenting adults did not have a constitutional right to engage in “homosexual acts in private.” For the next 17 years, I thought about that basic fact almost every day. I buried my first love knowing it. I committed to my partner of 21 years knowing it. I was 39 years old before sleeping with the man I loved was legal in America. I’m grateful for that legal affirmation, but with no federal case law explicitly protecting LGBT housing or employment rights, I started my own business… just in case.

61.

The date is August 9, 1974: This was the day that Richard Nixon resigned as president of the United States. I went to a restaurant with my brother and a friend. I was only 13. We wanted to listen to his resignation live on the radio in a public space. This day for me took away the perfect sheen of the United States. I used to think corruption only happened in foreign countries but now I understood. The US was not special or better. The US had a corrupt government and presidency just like so many other countries; countries that people called backward because they were run by people of color. Now a white man in the most powerful country of the world was resigning because he was a liar and a crook. Just like in places all over the world.

62.

May 5, 1977: This date is significant to me because it is the day that Joe Campos Torres was murdered by police officers of the Houston Police Department after being arrested for disorderly conduct at a bar. Torres was a Mexican American solider, who had recently returned from the Vietnam War. His beaten body was found on Mother’s Day, three days after his death, in Buffalo Bayou and confirmed to have drowned. A year later, when the police officers were convicted and sentenced to one year of probation and fine of one dollar, the news spread through the Mexican American communities in Houston. This led to riots in Moody Park, a small park in the Near-North side of Houston, signifying the outrage of the people.

I was born in 1981 and was not a witness to these events, but I did have family members that were witnesses.

Joe’s story was a common tale in the barrio. I grew up in a Chicano home and my father, also a Vietnam Veteran, remembered clearly those significant days. He would always remind me to appreciate my culture and to keep my Brown pride in a world were our Raza was hardly acknowledged for our achievements in society.

Almost 30 years later to the date, activists and community advocates against police brutality organized the first annual march for the remembrance of Joe Campos Torres. We marched alongside Janie Torres, Joe’s sister, and the rest of family in solidarity. Since then, the march has been held every year to bring to light that police violence towards people of color continues to occur in our neighborhoods and the responsible persons are hardly ever held accountable.

I will continue to stand in solidarity with our communities of color in recognizing police brutality as a violation of human rights. The death of Campos on May 5, 1977 will forever be engrained in Chicano history.

63.

August 1977: I left the study of engineering to pursue the liberal arts at a very small college run by Benedictine monks. There, I would see my religion, my country, myself in entirely new ways. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my education at that small college would provide a foundation for exploration that continues to serve me now.

Frederick Douglass notes in his first autobiography that learning to read and write provided him a “pass” out of slavery. Never physically enslaved, I nevertheless have found a type of liberation through liberal education. Such an education can mitigate the effects of our time, when words are thrown about as though they mean nothing.

64.

1979: We were stopped at a red light, I was in the passenger seat, and a guy crossing the street looked at the Buick, then at us, flipped us the middle finger and said, “Go home, camel jockeys.”

However hard I try, I can’t remember if, then and there, what the guy said made any difference to me.

I was seven—what did I know about crisis? As for the guy, before the light turned green, my father floored the pedal and ran him over.

65.

September 23, 1979: I was a junior in college and helped organize a group of two van loads of students to attend the No Nukes Rally in Battery Park landfill at the undeveloped “beach” that was at the base of the six-year-old World Trade Center towers. We were part of a crowd that grew to almost a quarter of a million people by some accounts in the largest anti-nuclear power demonstration to date in the world. The experience -- listening to speeches by the likes of Jane Fonda, Barry Commonor, and Ralph Nader, and music from Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, Pete Seeger and others -- impressed upon us young people, dressed in jeans and tie-dye, that we had a voice that should be exercised. It made me realize that speaking out against wrongs, demonstrating for fair play, and showing solidarity with like-minded individuals was more duty than a right of an American citizen. I never forgot the impression it made on me and it is something that has continued in my practice as an adult, and one I hope I’ve passed on to my sons.

66.

May 18, 1980: I turned 5 as Mount St. Helens erupted about the same time as my birth. The explosion leveled the top of the mountain by over 1,000 feet. Billowing ash filled the air, turning day into night. (Images from that day eerily reverberate with those of downtown Manhattan on the day of the World Trade Center attacks.) Meanwhile, I swung at a piñata and ate piña colada cake with a gathering of mostly white children in the middle class backyard my Tejano parents hustled to keep. Piña colada cake was my favorite, especially when made by my aunt Rebecca, who died way too young. I wonder how much rum, if any, had been poured over the pierced sheet cake that day before the thick Cool Whip-based frosting was smeared over the top of it.

67.

1 de Septiembre de 1982: Roberto Suarez Gómez writes from Camiri, Bolivia, to President Ronald Reagan, Washington D.C., United States, discussing the conditions of his voluntary surrender on the premise to defend his son’s liberty, who had been recently detained and extradited on charges of illegal entry under a false identity; “…Es sin duda una tarea de distracción como las que acostumbra utilizar el sistema norte americano, donde la víctima es mi país, mi persona y mis familiares… … Por este motivo fue detenido en Locarno con sus hermanos menores y su madre, quienes fueron brutalmente golpeados y torturados por los policías del país que se autotitula abanderado de la democracia y de los derechos humanos, bajo los cargos de ingreso ilegal y falsedad de nombre… …sólo por ser norteamericanos merecen las protección de su gobierno, mientras que destruyen las plantaciones de los pobres campesinos bolivianos y vuelven nuestra ecología irreversible…”

As a relative of Saurez, I view this letter for its attempt to encapsulate and sustain ideas surrounding embodiment, belonging. I’ve inherited this history of how one exists with the land. Suarez comes from a family running resource extraction enterprises in Bolivia, starting with rubber and eventually coca leaf export for cocaine production. It’s informed my perspective to suspend an intricate view of resource management, its inequalities under imperial legacy and thought. As a linguistic space, this letter shows entities variously figured — losing or possessing definition, becoming “victims of prejudice or inheritors of privilege.” What are the limits of being, in terms law, property, and under a nation?

Translation of letter extraction: “...It is undoubtedly a task of distraction, such as those normally used to the North American system, where the victim is my country, my personhood and my relatives... ...Under this motive, he was detained in Locarno with his younger siblings and mother, whom were brutally hit and tortured by the police of a country that calls itself the bearer of democracy and human rights, with the charges of ilegal entry and false identity... ...only by being north american you deserve your government’s protection, while they destroy the plantations of the poor Bolivian farmers and irreversibly return our ecology...”

68.

March 1983: I was in my third year as one of two African American docents at the San Antonio Museum of Art. That day, I guided a group of African American middle school students through the Nineteenth Century Portrait Art Gallery. A young girl spoke up, “Mrs. Pierce” she said, “there is something wrong in here. There are no Black people on the walls anywhere in here.” The words of this young girl caught me totally off guard. It was a resounding, life- changing, experience for me. I had to admit to myself that growing up in the segregated south in the fifties and sixties, I had become immune to being invisible in public places. Here, I was willing to volunteer my services in a place that did not celebrate my own rich heritage -- a history that I had learned from the community and Historically Black Colleges of my native Nashville.

The school districts of San Antonio send children to the San Antonio Museum of Art everyday, by bus, not by choice. They supported it as an appropriate activity for children. Never did they consider that for African American children, this was a further form of exclusion. The message to these children was that their people do not create art worthy of these walls. This situation is analogous for Latino children as well. Hearing that young lady’s query created a mission for my husband and me as we have committed ourselves along with others t o correcting this form of discrimination-- especially institutions that receive public funding. While diversity in museums is improving, there is still much more change required.

69.

September 8, 1983: I was fortunate enough to attend college in Dublin, Ireland. During my first semester, I was required prepare an oral presentation on a topic which now eludes me. The professor announced that materials like overhead projectors, photocopiers, markers and things like that were available for students use in the basement supply room. So I made a list and went to the supply room. Upon arrival, I barked my requests to the person at the window and their immediate response was, “Oh! You must be the new American joining us this year.” I wish I could say it was my Texas accent or my skin color that clued him in, but it wasn’t. He made it clear that Americans have a demanding way of asking for things and it was clear that my self-entitled American attitude had just been checked. On this day, my interaction with the person at the supply window spotlighted my own lack of awareness as a person and as an American and I learned that I would grow as a human being by keeping it in check.

70.

January 22, 1984: marked the 52nd anniversary of the 1932 peasant massacre, or “Matanza,” in El Salvador, in which up to 30,000 civilians (mostly indigenous people) were brutally killed by the Salvadoran military. That day also marked the beginning of Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, a nationwide mobilization of artists organizing that took place in over twenty-seven cities across the United States and Canada. Artists Call was intended not only to oppose the US government’s interventionist policies in Central America but also to raise money for and awareness about Central America as well as to build international solidarity amongst artists and other cultural workers. As the slogan for Artists Call, which appeared on the poster designed by Claes Oldenburg, makes clear: “If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own right to make culture.”

71.

December 31, 1984: 8:15 in the morning, our apartment exploded. It blew me and my roommate out of the building into the parking lot where we came to a few moments later to a scene of dumbfounded confusion. I asked ‘what happened?’ and he replied ‘it blew up, it just fucking blew up.’ His girlfriend severely injured, the woman in the apartment below ours, dead, and many others injured - and us, walking around with only scrapes and bumps.

With sirens approaching people from the surrounding area descended to help where they could. In a time when all seems in turmoil, remember that in a material world be grateful for the good luck you’re dealt and know that most people, anywhere, are essentially good.

72.

May 13, 1985: The MOVE compound on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia is attacked and bombed by the Philadelphia police. When I was living in West Philadelphia during my years at college, MOVE was a presence in the neighborhood. I wandered over there sometimes to be around their vibe. They lived collectively according to radical ideals, including animal rights and veganism. Their original ideals were compromised over time, but it was an utter shock that they were attacked and bombed.

73.

January 28, 1986: I was 10 years old and home sick from school. Sitting in my best friend’s basement (who was coincidentally also home sick), I really wanted to watch the Challenger Space Shuttle launch. Everyone had been following the story of school teacher Christa McAuliffe becoming the first civilian astronaut. My friend had no interest in the event. So I sat there alone, no parents, no teachers, nothing but that explosion blooming on the TV screen. I remember, in that moment, understanding how the world is simultaneously small and fleeting as well as vast and strong. It was overwhelming. And, to know that an ordinary citizen was aboard made me realize that outer space wasn’t unreachable (even if the launch was a disaster). This moment cemented my personal interest in approaching the world with awe and wonder, and a dedication to fostering the collision between art and science.

It was also an eerie precursor to the kind of surveillance society we live in today, where everything is broadcast, where we have all become collective witnesses - the Challenger disaster, the LA Riots, OJ Simpson, 9/11. This day in 1986 is the first moment of true awe and terrifying sadness that I remember, and also, my first understanding of solitary yet collective witnessing - all of which I carry with me today.

74.

June 30, 1986: United States Supreme Court hands down decision on Bowers vs. Hardwick, upholding, in a 5-4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing sex between consenting, same-sex adults in private. I was 20 years old, born and raised in Atlanta, when I read the article reporting on this in the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper. I had never been to New York City, where I ended up living for many years, and had limited travel experience outside of the southern United States, but I thought to myself: “I am getting the fuck out of this state, and hopefully this country.” No thanks. Fuck these people. They will not rule me. I’ve always considered myself a human being and citizen of the world before I’m an American, and Bowers vs. Hardwick confirmed that in the most blunt way possible.

75.

1987: I don’t know the date but I was about 5 years old. My father was running from law enforcement and took me and my three brothers with him into hiding in a Mexican border town. My younger brother and I caught a disease that turned my ear and chin into a scab. My father was forced to return to the U.S with us and turn himself in so we could get medical attention. We were then placed in a state foster home. Before I even knew what being American meant I experienced the rigid dichotomy of its systems.

76.

July 3, 1987: Read article in newspaper— “18 Illegal aliens die in locked boxcar.” It was the day before our nation’s Independence Day and people who were seeking a better life were literally abandoned in a locked train car to suffocate and die in the overheated brutal Texas sun. An accident of birth separated me from the same fate.

Somehow, geography determined destiny. I had just come back from studying Art in London--and was constantly reminded I was Mexican--unique--exceptional. I could be accepted...because I was the right kind. Everywhere I have ever been--everything I experience reminds me that all that matters is that all people deserve all the kindness and acceptance of everyone--beyond labels or any measure of any criteria. Anything less reveals how monstrous and cruel we can be. Never felt less American than that day.

77.

September 1987: I was 26 years old and a recent transplant to LA from NYC. A friend and I went to San Francisco to visit some people he knew. Staring at the number of “For Rent” signs lining the streets of the Castro, I realized that each vacancy represented a death brought on by the continuing AIDS Crisis. The following year the Surgeon General sent explicit information to US households on how to protect themselves from AIDS. This was the first time a federal authority had provided advice to all US citizens since the CDC identified the first US death from the disease seven years earlier. By the end of that year more than 61,000 people had died from the epidemic.

78.

On a June day in 1988: On a June day in 1988 two families came together: one with the heritage and cultural of centuries in South Texas, the other from North Texas with Eastern European culture and tradition arriving in the early 1900s. This image symbolizes the coming together of two families to create a new younger family, eventually with children to share their culture and traditions for the future. Today when this family celebrates with tamales and kolaches, the priority of family strengthens which is one of their common values that has stabilized their foundation. Her family has shared their love of the Spanish language, celebrating their children’s quince (15th birthday) and starting Christmas on December 24th. His family tradition of building and creating for their home from the earth up surrounds them every day. In the truest of American traditions, this family will continue to grow with their traditions, continuing some of the old and some a blend to create a new family culture uniquely their own.

79.

June 15, 1988: The night my daughter, my first child, was born. The very moment that she came into this world, she came screaming and fighting. But the minute they put her on my chest she wriggled her way to the crevice between my neck and clavicle and immediately started suckling. The nurse said “she knows where she’s safe.” It is also the last moment we were so completely connected. After that distinct moment in time I have never worried more about protecting something or someone outside of myself and she has spent every minute of her existence working to grow as far apart from me as she humanly can muster.

80.

September 1988: As a child I use to spend a lot of time daydreaming, most of those moments were spent coming up with theories, such as the Barbie theory which was an attempt at a creation myth. I have learned in my adulthood that some of these theories were worthwhile investigations… such as the theory I came up with in Mrs. Lowrey’s 2nd grade class where I was introduced to infrared light. The theory goes like this – it’s impossible to consider colors, there is no true blue or true red, only our relationship to the specific color is true. So in my theory I felt that to truly talk about colors one must vividly describe them. The essence of the idea was (in my adult words) that there are no absolute truths, only relational truths. For example, a hummingbird could be blue to me but in a snake’s infrared vision it might be bright red. I presented the theory in my 2nd grade class. My classmates found the idea ridiculous, they couldn’t believe that I was so stupid. I felt embarrassed – but I also knew secretly that the world was not so binary or simple. I still feel this way – and I continue to try to think about empathy from other perspectives, including nonhuman perspectives…. Though living in the U.S. right now, things seem increasingly binary, just as they were in my 2nd grade class… up or down, right or wrong, left or right.

81.

December 1, 1989: December 1, 1989: 2,000 Christmas trees were delivered by C-17 military transport aircraft to the Kadena Airbase in Okinawa, Japan. They were lined up on the runway and sold at a fraction of the transportation cost to families of military service members, like ours. I asked my mom if she remembered shopping for one, and she remembered something even weirder: a pyramid of fresh snow, kids sliding down from the top as it melted in the tropical climate. She said it had been flown in from a mountain in Korea.

82.

February 1991. I was at the San Antonio Rodeo and Operation Desert Storm was under way. We stood for the national anthem and I suddenly had a profound sense of connectedness to those at the rodeo with me, and, seemingly, to the rest of America. There was a great deal of stress and apprehension in the nation at that time with what felt like the first major overseas conflict we had engaged in since the Vietnam War. There was a national concern and awareness of the need to pull together to support the men and women who were putting their lives at risk. Agree or disagree, it was not a time for dissension but a time for everyone to row together as one.

I grew up in the Vietnam era and had a natural aversion to the idea of mass armed conflict in foreign lands. This lived side by side with my feelings of pride for my grandfather’s service in World War II. It was, in one moment, a feeling of determination, anxiety, connection, and hope mingled with the active awareness of the swirling mix... maybe a quintessential moment of feeling “American” with all its inherent contradictions.

In retrospect, it seems a bit histrionic in the moment, it felt like a choice at a crossroads to work however I could for the common good.

83.

June 4th, 1991: I am five years old and boarding an American Airlines flight to Raleigh-Durham, NC with my parents and three siblings. I know we are moving to a new place which my teachers and classmates refer to as “America”, but I have no concept of geographical distance or cultural place. My greatest concerns are whether or not my friends can still come over on play dates or if America has Sesame Street. I first realise that we have left home as we are boarding the plane. The childhood confusion of the physical move is further permeated by language difficulties between two conflicting versions of the English language. I adapt to the new climate and culture but am never able to fully integrate into it.

84.

October 16, 1991: The day George Hennard drove his truck through the window of Luby’s Cafeteria, someone called me (this was before texting and the internet) to tell me someone was shooting people in my hometown of Killeen, Texas. I laughed sardonically! “Yeah....and....?” It’s the kind of Army town where you expect some sort of trouble. “No, really! Turn on the TV!” So I did and saw the bodies of the dead and injured being taken on gurneys to ambulances after one of the town’s first mass shootings--there have been more since then. I knew some of the families affected and my mom almost went there for lunch but it was too crowded that day. That was the day I felt American, I’m sad to say. It felt like a place where this was bound to happen.

85.

November 7, 1991: The news came to me, at my all-boys Catholic High School in California, in the form of a slur: Magic Johnson is a fag. A few moments later, when my mother picked me up from school, she filled out the story for me: “He just announced he is gay and has AIDS,” my mother said, quoting a local Sacramento talk news radio show. I was 15, too young to drive, and even if I wanted to Google if this story were true, that website hadn’t been invented yet. On the car ride home, I considered what it meant that the person whose posters covered each wall in my room might be someone—and something— that I was taught at school was wrong: a homosexual. “I don’t really care who he is,” I said. “Good,” my mother told me. “You shouldn’t care,” she said. I didn’t expect that response from her, a woman raised in a small village in Tanzania, who was, and is, a more devout Muslim than I. Later that night, on the Arsenio Hall show, we learned that the news report was wrong: Johnson did not come out as gay and it turns out he has HIV, not AIDS. But by that point, I knew the real revelation that day was from my mother and not from my favorite basketball player.

86.

Summer of 1992: I remember it was the Summer after I graduated High School and turned 18. My father and I went together to register me to vote and for selective service. I felt as if in one day I had been initiated into what it meant to be an American. I felt pride in knowing that I could have my political voice heard and vote in a democracy. Then at the same time feeling a little scared that I was also saying to our country if you need me to die in a war to preserve that democracy, I will.

87.

1993: In the early summer of 1993, I moved back into my parents’ house, lost and nervous and emotionally drained. It was the first time I’d “gone back to live at home” since I’d left 14 years prior. A year before that, I’d started following the teachings of meditation and Kriya yoga of Paramahansa Yogananda, and after arriving at my parents’ home that summer, I engaged obsessively in savasana, meditation while lying down in the corpse position. One late, hot night, many months later, I broke through, pierced the veil, understood, and the next day, for the entire day, I experienced a pure, indescribable joy. I could see right through everything around me—the trees, the streets, the sky, the people—all gossamer, there and not there, real and a dream, solid and ethereal. From that day, nothing really mattered, yet since that day, nothing has ever mattered more.

88.

September 1993: While having lunch at the New Mexico State University’s cafeteria, I read an article in the Las Cruces local newspaper reporting tens of deaths for hunger at the Tarahumara region. The victims were Raramuri, the native population of the Sierra Madre, close to the US-Mexico border. After lunch, I walked through the backside of the building where I saw two trash containers full of leftovers from the restaurant. The US is a big waste factory. A deep sadness and impotence accompanied my first realization of what America means.

89.

January 1, 1994: Subcomandante Marcos: “In the world we want everyone fits. We want a world in which many worlds fit. The nation that we construct is one where all communities and languages fit, where all steps may walk, where all may have laughter, where all may live the dawn.”

Fourth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, (Jan. 1, 1996).

90.

June, 1994: I will always remember that summer as the time we got shot out of our house. I had just finished my first year of high school. The night before we left was the worst our house had ever been shot up; the police found three different calibers of shell casings in the street this time. That meant that there were three different shooters. I was born and raised there and had many friends in the neighborhood but I was happy we were going. I found out there are no good hiding places in a wooden house when you’re getting shot at.

91.

June 17, 1994: I was 19 years old, living out on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer and unexpectedly pregnant at a point I knew I couldn’t/ did have the resources to be a parent. On June 17th night after going to Boston to have an abortion I came back to house I was renting a room to find everyone watching the news coverage on OJ Simpson driving his white jeep on LA freeways with the police trailing him. Later that month my landlord went through my trash and found out I had an abortion, and he kicked me out. MA was a state where I could get an abortion

easily, I had been able to simply tell the doctor I saw and go set up an appointment right away. I don’t regret my choice- I’m glad I had it and recognize I’m one of the lucky ones living in a part of the country where it was simple.

So many women I know have had to make the same choice. Later that year in December 1994, a gunman killed two people working at the clinic that I had gone to. Since the dialogue on pro-life has only made it harder and more dangerous for providers. It is clear that with the current administration our choice is being threatened and I’m horrified. Seeing anything about OJ randomly always brings to mind my experience and the rights and safety of women in this country is something that is still decided by men.

92.

August 8, 1994: The U.S. Border Patrol initiated its Prevention Through Deterrence policy as part of its National Strategy, with an explicit goal of fortifying urban areas in order to funnel migrants into the harsh wilderness. The policy has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the desert environs of the American Southwest, yet has failed to deter people in desperate situations from attempting the journey.

93.

May 5, 1995: I had arrived to the United States nine days before, for the first time on the American continent, ready to start my PhD in Horticulture at Michigan State University. On this day, President Clinton spoke at the Commencement Ceremony and I was there. I still remember that it was a beautiful sunny day and it all felt very surreal. I really thought that I was living a dream: I was in a stadium full of graduating students, and cheering parents, relatives and spectators. Every day I hope that the next President of this country, that has given me so much, will be a real leader, just like Clinton on that day (and most of his presidency), who will succeed in uniting people again.

94.

August 28, 1995: Calvin Klein, Inc. take out a full page in the New York Times to apologize for their controversial CK Jeans ads shot by Steven Meisel as we as announcing that they would be pulled from print and television.

Leading up to this moment the campaign generated a contradictory confluence of outrage and interest that in my recollection was one of the initial instances of and the blueprint for the concept of viral marketing.

By ceding to moral and religious pressures the groundwork for manipulation of both societal influence and our political process was laid and still remains the way by which power and majority are wielded.

95.

October 3, 1995: I remember this day like it was yesterday.

For the preceding 31 years of my life, my personal experience with racism was almost nonexistent.

That all changed on June 12, 1994. The events of that day created a division between the black and white community, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since before the civil rights act passed in America.

In the eyes of many blacks there seemed to be a rush to judgment of “our” black icon.

“O.J.”, “The Juice”! Someone who was looked up to As a sort of God. On the other hand, it seemed as though almost 100% of white America seem to be ready to hang O.J. Simpson in the “public square”, without so much as an investigation.

The “us versus them” attitude’s in our communities with regard to this trial was palatable. At work, in the grocery store, at school, everywhere!

The “Trial of the Century” Was amazing to watch. It consumed the entire nation for what seemed like forever.

October 3, 1995—The Verdict There I was at a tax sale auction on the Bexar County Courthouse steps attempting to purchase foreclosed properties.

I was the only man of color a monks the other 100+ bidders in the crowd. On this day I was sure to bring my little battery operated TV with me just in case the verdict came in during the auction. All of a sudden in the middle of the auction someone shouted, “The Verdict is in!!”

The entire auction literally came to a standing still… Auctioneers, bidders, everyone! You could literally hear a pin drop. Seeing that I was the only person with the TV, the entire group of men and women formed a crowd around me to hear the verdict.

“Not guilty“!! Realizing that I was literally surrounded by dozens of people who were expressing their anger and discussed in a variety of ways, I suppressed my own emotions of relief for a later time. Not because I believed that O.J., was totally innocent though to this day I struggle with that. But because for that one day, there seem to be equal justice, “The Jury has spoke.”

96.

1996: My first time stepping onto soil in another country was as a child visiting my Aunt and Uncle in Brownsville, Texas. Over this long weekend with my family I would cross the border to Matamoros, for many residents along the Texas / Mexico border this must have been commonplace. For me, living some 3 and a half hours away from any border town this was a new experience. I remember the vivid colors of the shops and cantinas, small children playing in the streets selling chicle, families walking and talking together, plucked chickens on display in the butcher shop window, and my enchiladas at dinner. Merely scenes of everyday life, I remember feeling in awe of my surroundings. They felt so different from life in South Texas. I remember dusk that evening walking back across the border. In my memory it is orange and purple and grey. I often reflect on these small, dear memories, perhaps for fear of forgetting them, and am always overcome with nostalgia. They are happy, happy memories. I begin to imagine how I might have been shaped given the opportunity to form a greater connection to the place where my family came from. To have had a small glimpse of a different world at a time in my life when I was so impressionable left a mark on my heart that will remain with me always. It sparked curiosity and wonder in me as a child and helped me to see from an early age that we aren’t so different from one another. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered my mothers’ ancestors came to Texas from Tamaulipas. It is odd and powerful to realize that the home my great, great grandparents left behind for America not so long ago is the place where I felt American for the very first time.

97.

January 9, 1996: My parents, Maximino and Maria de Los Angeles Rodriguez became citizens of the United States of America. Both had crossed over from Mexico as teenagers in 1946, met in Texas, married, raised 11 children, then after 50 years decided to become citizens.

98.

January 27, 1997: The day I launched my solo dance career and founded my dance company. As a Latina, with no financial support except for my personal savings, I entered uncharted waters, both nervously and excitedly.

I’m happy I took a leap of faith to follow my dream. My investment paid off with experiences and memories of a lifetime.

99.

June 6, 1997: I went to the ROAR music festival at the Polaris amphitheater in Columbus, OH to see Iggy Pop. The set ended abruptly during the 3rd song when Iggy attempted a stage dive into the crowd. Unfortunately, due to the popularity of the movie Trainspotting, most in the crowd were electronic dance music fans and they fled from Iggy’s descending body in a panic. Iggy Pop went head first into the concrete floor, with hundreds of people watching and no one coming to his aid. Iggy was taken to the hospital for a broken collarbone. The rest of the band enacted revenge on the audience, smashing music equipment into the crowd with many severe injuries, resulting in ROAR Fest being cancelled.

100. July 1997: I will never forget the day when I was helping my Grandmother make up her bed, it was the summer of July 1997. I was a sophomore in High School and was beginning to question my cultural Identity. As I was helping her fit the clean sheets onto her bed, I asked my Grandmother if we were Mexican, she took the sheets and snapped them in the air, looked at me and proclaimed with a loud voice “We are goddamn American!” I froze for a second because she startled me, but I realized how powerful that moment and those words were. It made me think of how much my family has sacrificed and given to pursue the American dream.

101. August 1997: I was busy hauling sections of a modular steel “sound room” into an audiology research lab at Harvard University. In truth, it was a sound-proof room—the kind used for diagnostic hearing tests—but insiders lingo sticks, even now. Installing these rooms was back-breaking work. Whether you were a burly guy who’d been doing it for years, or a slight young woman like me with a summer job on her Dad’s construction crew, this job tested your mettle.

As I rounded a corner of the hallway, shouldering an 8-foot long steel connecting joist, a doctor stopped to tell me that the women in the office had been watching me all day and were so impressed with the work I was doing. Her expression radiated a kind of expectant solidarity. This was 25 years after Title IX, and being just shy of 20 myself, I had been part of the first generation to experience its full benefits. I played sports. I had a strong sense, throughout my childhood, that my choices were my own. And I relished being able to hang-in with the boys—to play, what had been, their games.

But on that day, the doctor’s exuberance fell flat. I stared blankly at her, for probably too long, before mumbling a small thanks. I could see she was disappointed in my response. Like she’d expected something more from me.

Pride? Defiance? Gratitude? I clearly signified something more to her and her colleagues than just “a laborer.”

If my response was muted, it was because that summer I witnessed countless people insult the men on our crew, see them as an inconvenience or discount them entirely. I bit my lip as a male doctor berated them on this job, loudly and at length, for a perceived mistake—one that was his own. I made note of how prominent the doctors’ badges and credentials were–visible markers of their education—and the assumed invisibility (and expendability) of the expertise on my Dad’s crew. They were the only ones in the region at that time with specialized skills to install this diagnostic tool—so essential to those very doctors.

I’ve come back to this moment many times over the years. The novelty of what I represented to those women that day, somehow trumped the labor, expertise and even the personhood of those working alongside me. It shaped my perspective on how we value labor in America, and solidified my respect for each individual’s contributions— which, regardless of gender or class, are in their own unique ways, hard-fought and not always won.

102. May 23, 1998: Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, Austin. This day represents some of the values that I cherished the most about the U.S. (not America as it has an imperialistic meaning that makes invisible the rest of the countries in the Americas). My wedding. Trilingual ceremony. Prayers in English and Hebrew, poem and Bible read in Spanish, exchange of vows in English and Spanish. Two religions sharing the blessings (Lutheran and Judaism).

Two nationalities (U.S. and Argentina) coming together. Multicultural celebration (Mexican food, Texan and Latin music). Committing to share my life with an incredible woman who every single day fights for the right of immigrants. And a renewed commitment to justice and happiness. “te quiero porque tus manos trabajan por la justicia …y en la calle codo a codo somos mucho más que dos … te quiero porque tu boca sabe gritar rebeldía… te quiero en mi paraíso es decir que en mi país la gente viva feliz aunque no tenga permiso” From the poem Te Quiero by Mario Benedetti read at the wedding.

103. September 2nd 1998: I was on vacation with my family, a road trip through Maine and Nova Scotia, it was beautiful. We woke up in our Peggy’s Cove hotel on September 2nd to the sounds of the news blaring from the TV in the room next door. A plane had crashed just 5 miles from the shore, it was a flight from New York to Switzerland and a fire on board had caused the plane to go down shortly after takeoff. My parents were worried, we knew our friend Jay was scheduled to fly to Switzerland, he did so frequently for work. Jay had gone to college with my parents and was part of the family, we spent holidays together and went on weekend hikes. We drove to our next stop, a bed and breakfast in Bar Harbor, still waiting on news about the flight. The next morning when we woke up, my dad wasn’t there. We went downstairs to the front porch where he was reading a paper, I remember it was plastered with headlines about the crash. He told us that Jay had been on the plane. I remember screaming and running into the parking lot. My parents and sister ran after me, and we collapsed, crying together.

We packed our bags and drove the 9 hours home in silence. I still think about the chances that we would have been so close in proximity to him in his final minutes of life. Over the following days and weeks, I kept every article about the crash and felt some degree of comfort knowing that he, along with the other 228 passengers most likely were not conscious when the plane hit the water. I thought about who he was sitting next to, who he may have comforted, and who may have comforted him as the plane descended; the intimate moments between strangers in times of need.

104. April 20, 1999: This was the date of the Columbine High School shooting. I was in middle school and it was the first school shooting that I could remember. It made my upcoming transition to high school seem terrifying. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting at a high school in the U.S. For me, it felt like the world really changed after “Columbine”; I kind of woke up from this idea that I was safe at school. I started checking entrances and exits when I was in places of high density. Where would I go, what would I do if there was an active shooter? It became a much scarier world after that date.

105. April 20, 1999: : 20 de Abril de 1999- Masacre en Columbine High School, tenía 3 meses de haber emigrado de mi país a Estados Unidos. Estaba en High School también en el noveno grado. Apenas entendía lo que se escuchaba en las noticias pero las imagenes eran tan aterradoras que me pregunté, eso significa estar en Estados Unidos?

106. May 18, 1999: Growing up with a Mother who was raised in a Catholic convent and a Father who was blindly devout to the Southern Baptist Church, at an early age I was painfully aware of how at odds my lifestyle was with my upbringing. On this day, I decided to come out to my Father and he called me “disgusting” and said that my lifestyle was “debaucherous”. I felt that he immediately forgot who the young man standing in front of him was.

This experience broke me into pieces but allowed me to re-glue myself in an image that was not one that was given to me but one that was truly my own. On this day, I realized my own strength.

107. November 12, 1999: President William J. Clinton signs the Financial Services Modernization Act (aka the GrammLeach-Bliley Act) into law, repealing significant portions of the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933 (aka the Glass-Steagall Act). Glass-Steagall had established a legal separation between commercial and investment banking, preventing financial institutions from utilizing depositors’ funds for risky investments. The passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed banking, brokerage and insurance companies to merge. These new, larger financial institutions were now able to utilize depositors’ funds and debt obligations in investment banking. This enabled risky investment practices involving home mortgages which led to the subprime mortgage crisis, a major contributing factor of the Great Recession of 2007–2009.

Glass-Steagall also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to restore confidence in U.S. banks amid the Great Depression. It is one of the portions of Glass-Steagall still in effect at the time of writing this text (December 2018). President Franklin D. Roosevelt originally opposed the establishment of the FDIC, saying, “We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.” (The First Press Conference, March 8, 1933) In 2008, the five largest investment banks were deemed “too big to fail” and received a $700 billion bailout plan from the United States federal government through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (aka Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP). During the same period, 8.6 million people lost their job and the unemployment rate rose to 10.1% while household net worth fell $11.5 trillion (17.3%).

An excerpt from President William J. Clinton’s “Remarks on Signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act”: “It is true that the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate to the economy in which we live. It worked pretty well for the industrial economy, which was highly organized, much more centralized, and much more nationalized than the one in which we operate today. But the world is very different.

Now we have to figure out, what are still the individual and family and business equities that are still involved that need some protections? And the long and often tortured story of this law can be seen as a very stunning specific example of the general challenge that will face lawmakers of both parties, that will face liberals and conservatives, that will face all Americans as we try to make sure that the 21st century economy really works for our country and works for the people who live in it.

So I think you should all be exceedingly proud of yourselves, including being proud of your differences and how you tried to reconcile them. Over the past 7 years, we’ve tried to modernize the economy, and today what we’re doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated walls, and granting banks significant new authority.”

108. 2001: My Junior Year at Bladensburg High School, 2001, my mother had bought her first home in Riverdale, Maryland about 3 years prior to some financial struggles. As a seamstress she never had one upholstery shop she worked for because they would always go out of business so it wasn’t unusual for her to go without work for a month or two. But after 6 months of unemployment, having my mother, my siblings and I shower at friends’ houses and not being able to keep up with the growing debt, we were evicted from our home at the end of the school year. With my two older sister not being home and I being the oldest in the house, I swore then I would do everything I could to help out financially. I worked full-time that summer and barely graduated my senior year because I would skip school to go to work (parties too but mostly work - ain’t even gonna lie). A year after graduating high school I knew what I made at a hardware store wouldn’t be enough to prevent this from ever happening again to my family. The American Dream that my mother chased became a myth for me and I enlisted in the Navy to ensure I would always have money to give her. I didn’t join for a romanticized yearning to protect this country instead I saw it as a way of protecting her from this country.

109. May 2, 2001: 2 de Mayo del 2011- Osama bin Laden fué derribado por Las Fuerzas Armadas de Estados Unidos.

Y ya con 2 hijos varones tratando de superar los anteriores acontecimientos nos hicierón creer que el “enemigo” habitaba en otras tierras cuando desafortunadamente lo tenemos en este país. Tengo miedo de que mis hijos están creciendo y tengan que salir allí, al mundo donde ya yo no puedo protegerlos.

110. September 2011: “I, Mia Villarreal, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” Born and raised in America, saying this oath was like owning a team I’d been playing on my whole life. I was invested; committed to its success.

111. September 11, 2001: This is a day that was significant to all Americans I am sure. Though the reason that this informed how I see the American experience was that despite the catastrophe that the country was enduring at the time, many people continued to wait in front of a concert venue close to where I lived, in the hopes that a cancelled Weezer show would somehow still happen. People seemed sad and it was hard to determine whether they were pissed because of the attacks, or the fact that the concert was cancelled, or both. Regardless of the reason, encountering this moment cemented the idea in my mind that American dreams in whatever scale or form, can potentially also imply myopic fixations.

112. Sept 11, 2001: I was 6 days away from my first marriage. I was at a Denny’s with my father and step-mother, neither of which ever came to visit, when the waitress told us someone had just flown a plane into the World Trade Center. I didn’t know what this actually meant until I got home and turned on the news, by then both planes had hit the building. My initial thought was, ‘We are at war and we have to unite around our government to defeat whoever just attacked us,’ which as a lifelong critic of government and power was very out of character for me.

My next thought was, ‘Nothing will ever be the same.’ The fears born on 9/11 lead to illegal wars, secret torture and imprisonment, hyper militarized police, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, blatant racism directed at Muslims and Arab Americans, and the erosion of privacy as we have traded rights and anonymity for perceived security. Our post 9/11 country and world bare many scars and problems as a result of our government and society’s response. Politically, economically, morally, every part of our culture felt like it fundamentally altered in the wake of that day, leaning ever more towards fascism in the pursuit of order and safety. In 2004 Osama Bin Laden stated one of his goals was to bankrupt America. We have been in a state of financially ruinous war, as well as an internally amped up culture war since 9/11. In many ways Bin Laden achieved his goal.

113. September 11, 2001: As a dual citizen, Israeli and American (New York) my worlds combined in the most tragic way on 9/11. Terrorism became a reality that surrounded me and brought me to fear.

114. September 11, 2001: On the morning of September 11, 2001, I stood at my apartment window in Brooklyn from which I could see across the East River to Lower Manhattan where smoke was billowing from one of the Twin Towers. As I stood watching, a plane struck the other tower. I had no comprehension of what I had just witnessed.

I was starting a new job that day in Manhattan; I didn’t want to be late. Naively, I walked to the subway station on my block and took the train to Times Square. As an American, I had always been sheltered from the immediacy of the violence that is a by-product of our imperialist impulses. The putrid odor of the disaster eventually faded but the sense of vulnerability that also permeated my very being that day did not.

115. September 11, 2001: 11 de Septiembre del 2001- Los ataques terroristas en New York. También otro dia “normal” en High School. Esta vez ya no temia por mi vida y mi futuro, sino por el futuro y la vida de mi primer hijo quién solo acababa de cumplir su primer año.

116. September 11, 2001: San Antonio, Tx, I was sitting in American History class, first period, an announcement was made that a plane had struck the world trade center in New York City, but class would not be cancelled. We jeered at the teacher, requesting to see the images on the TV in the corner of class, he declined and then refused.

Over the course of the day, the images of the event and the eventual fall of the two towers were painted for me by peers who had been allowed to view the catastrophe in this or that teacher’s class. I was obsessed with what was happening on the east coast...another plane hit the pentagon? This was not an accident, the repetition indicated intention, a plot, not an accident. I left school listening to the reports on the local radio news, lusting for the image, the images that were not available in the timely nature of now. I went to Yvette’s house, she was watching the same news on every channel, the first collision, the second collision, views from the sky and the ground and the

veils of smoke. For some the image stays fixed with its iconic, symbolic veil of tragedy, mystery, and complexity.

I was so moved, watching the event over and over again, feeling myself loosing feeling with every angle, every pass, but more and more curious. Who made this thing? Who made this image? How did it all work. The images, more permanent than the event, became a catalyst for many of my future inquiries as an artist and educator. I keep excavating this deep wound for meaning, for light.

117. September 21, 2001: My father died on 9/11/2001. Not in New York, but in Florida. With our country in turmoil and confusion, the days following my father’s death delayed me in uniting with my mother, now a widow. It took me 10 days to secure a flight, from San Antonio to New York, which is where Papi wanted to be buried. You see, New York breathed new life into my Cuban father. New York was a rebirth into our American Dream. My father made a choice to flee Cuba and to denounce the tyranny of his homeland. When I was ten years old, and with only what we could carry, we left Cuba. As my flight into La Guardia was descending, it flew over the fresh site of what was the World Trade Center. I could see from my window the gray smoke still rising from the ashes and hovering over lower Manhattan. At that moment, I found myself reflecting on Papi’s solemn gospel that America’s freedom and strength were the envy of many nations. Yes, the Towers and many lives were pointlessly lost. And had Papi been alive to witness the tragedy he would have said that America is still the land of opportunity, and we will overcome.

118. Oct 7, 2001: Even at a moment of supreme vulnerability, American colonial dominance seeps in everywhere.

Following the events of 9/11, a photo of a pro Osama bin Laden demonstration in Bangladesh dominates the New York Times front page. In the forefront, a protester holds a poster featuring a large photo of bin Laden. A second glance however reveals the muppet Bert from Sesame Street peering over bin Laden’s right shoulder.

The protester got the poster from a printer in Dhaka. The printer, Mostafa Kamal, had scoured the internet for a powerful image of bin Laden to use in his photo collage design. Completely unfamiliar with Sesame Street, he unwittingly found what he was looking for on Bert is Evil, a parody website created by artist Dino Ignacio, featuring the character alongside infamous people and events. Kamal printed 2000 posters with this image and the AP and Reuters distributed the Bangladesh protest photo globally. Kamal later printed a new pro bin Laden poster with the image of Bert removed.

119. November 1, 2001: The first time I heard about a political election in my life. I was very confused at the willful arguments on the radio.

120. May 2003: I was on a trip cross country from Florida to LA and was spending the night in Houston. Earlier in the day I was pulled over by a cop who said I was criminally speeding. Meanwhile, I knew that the over packed car couldn’t even reach the speed limit. When I argued he said to me: “In Texas, they trust cops more than the people.” I checked into a motel late that night and at about 3am there was a booming pounding on the door. Terrified, I yelled out asking who it was - only to hear a whispered “we are going to have to break the door down.” I realized I had to open the door and was met with a gun in my face. My companion and I were pulled onto the open air walkway in our underwear while we were held at gunpoint while another man searched our room and belongings.

It turned out they were undercover DEA agents that had a bad tip. What is freedom if the people who claim to hand it to you can take it at any time for any reason or none at all.

121. 1/11/2004: Driving from El Paso to Lubbock: First stop, the body of 20 year old Christopher Maldonado is laid to rest in a cemetery on the edge of town. Six hours to go. Back on the road as the Franklin Mountains disappear in the rear view mirror, so does my naive sense of security. Value systems are permanently altered. Approaching the hypnotic West Texas plains, my paradigm has shifted.

122. 12.31.2004: The day that I lost my mother when I was only 3 years old.

123. February 6, 2005: An ATF agent whispered to me that he had noticed a lot of “un-patriotic artwork” in our apartment.

124. March 9, 2005: Who would have thought that being a border kid from the El Paso/Juarez region would shape me into an international carbon Ph.D. scientist with a mission to improve human livelihoods worldwide? Raised on the border allowed me to have a mix of US-Mexico cultures and also enjoy the benefits of the U.S. education system.

While pursuing my environmental science degree at the University of Texas at El Paso, I had opportunities to suc-

ceed in the STEM field. During the fall of 2004, I was invited by one of my mentors, Dr. Aaron Velasco, to participate in a national SACNAS conference in Albuquerque NM. SACNAS is an inclusive national organization dedicated to fostering the success of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans, from college students to professionals, in attaining advanced degrees, careers, and positions of leadership in STEM. During the 2014 SACNAS conference I was introduced to a new community of scientists, a new familia. It was during this big conference of 3000 + scientists that I noticed that there were many scientists in the US that were bilingual like me, when speaking English they had an accent like me, we all shared stories of those times when we felt like we didn’t belong in the STEM field. And they also had “pachangas” like me! Science finally felt like home!

This inspiration drove me to bring the SACNAS feeling back to my other STEM friends at UTEP. So on March 9, 2005, along with my colleague Milka Montes, we co-founded the SACNAS Student Chapter at the University of Texas at El Paso (SACNAS @ UTEP).

Since then, the chapter has won numerous awards and mentored hundreds of minority students in STEM! The chapter has helped graduate many diverse STEM minds and achieved great achievements in the STEM field worldwide! We have helped UTEP, a US funded institution, build a stronger and more diverse science! Being raised on the border allowed me to see that sometimes depending on where we come from, we sometimes might not feel welcomed in a space or time. This is true in 2018. However, the border also taught me that having two backgrounds meant having two advantages! The key is to turn these advantages into opportunities and most importantly, make sure to invite, include, and retain others with you! I believe I have done this and clearly, there is still much more to do in the future. We need to embrace our differences, recognize our strengths, and empower those who are oppressed. We all, just like me, need help not just to achieve our dreams and to also help others achieve their own dreams.

125. July 23, 2005: : I had committed a number of felonious crimes by this time, but the crime that lead to my first arrest wasn’t committed by me at all. I was taken in for questioning and even after a polygraph “proved” my innocence, the police still weren’t happy with my negative attitude and the fact that they hadn’t found the culprit. After a few hours of grown men trying to break me, a 14 year old boy, my mother barged in demanding they let me go. So they did.

This incident instilled a deep mistrust in the very institution I thought was meant to keep me safe. This incident made me realize I can’t trust the police, and now 13 years later I’m still constantly looking over my shoulder. I can’t imagine the mistrust my friends and family who aren’t straight, white, and male, must feel. My heart wrenches every time I hear of another person of color getting killed by the police. And every time I read news headlines of racist cops killing out of ignorance and fear in order to uphold a racist system, I remember how lucky I was that day, and every day, to be white because innocence doesn’t matter in American society.

126. April 10, 2006 Jersey City: Jersey City- My wife, Nanette Hernandez, and I go to Liberty State Park to hear our son, Mateo Cartagena, speak at an immigrants’ rights rally on a day that 102 cities held simultaneous protests in support of our country’s immigrants—all led by Latinos and Latinas. That spring saw millions of immigrants hit the streets to demand dignity. My son led an unauthorized high school walkout, marched through Jersey City without permits then spoke to hundreds of sympathizers. Like his sister and our immediate family, dissent runs through our veins.

127. April 11, 2006: House of Blues, the Wailers lyrically preached to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery none but ourselves can free our minds improvising the anger, fear and all emotions marinated in the Bayou post the slaughter of communities and habitats by man made hurricanes. Jazz raging on Frenchmen Street. Looting by NOPD. Our city became a radioactive laboratory. Outsiders saw financial potential. The revolution of grassroots was sparked per the people of New Orleans had awoken from the euphemisms of the greatest Nation. The deception of help and support from Earth’s ‘most ethically perfect government’, Bush Jr & Cheney Inc., shielded with their squad of mercenaries, Black Water. Federal, State and Local would impose power upon us door to door not with help but to take inventory of each structure on the Anarchist voodoo ridden streets of New Orleans and take each citizens guns. We would become stronger by uniting and standing together. I had awoken to see the requiem of a city. I found my calling, as a critical thinker I became an activist. I stood for those whom couldn’t voice themselves, they had no representation per they had remained cogs as products of the system by the system per our systematic slavery’s demand. I would call upon the spirit of Fred Hampton. “I am a revolutionary”. Make levees not war. Only those of color, of lower class and status were affected most and as we began to use the Master’s tools, the Master became alarmed in time to avoid its demise. The Danzinger Bridge killings would be the norm to

dismantle the grassroots movements. I was broken by the overwhelming power and excessive force so ran and drowned in bourbon, whiskey and sorrows. “Amigo, no te aguites.” Un mestizo como yo? He would be one of many migrants from Latin America we would bring over contracted by the company whom recieved the reconstruction money, Halliburton. I would wake the next day and begin work towards law clinics for the legal support my mestizos in that city desperately needed y el sueno y la lucha sigue en mis venas, come mi alma despacito con desesperacion para seguir ayudando y con la idea de que un dia este sueno se una realidad.

128. October 4, 2006: I went to live and work in PingGu, China. A person came up to me and asked where I was from.

I said America. It was the first time in my life that I actually had to refer to myself as American to other people, even though I had always known it. I experienced a re-realization, that I was not only black but American as well.

I got used to saying it more and more, but it was hard to at times, when I thought about much of the violent and racist history that makes up the American fabric.

129. 01-30-2007: The morning my premature daughter was born. She came two months early and weighed 2 1/2 pounds but came out screaming and crying. It was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. My next thoughts during the day was my responsibility to raise this child to make great choices and to help our fellow world citizens and the earth.

130. September 13, 2007: The day my Mother died, and the birth of my guilt for my so many wrongs as a son.

131. 2008: Recession – I remember my friends getting pulled out of private school and put into a public school.

132. July 1, 2008: That is the date my sister was born. I didn’t know it then but that day impacted my life a lot. My sister and I get along really well and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

133. 08-21-2008: This is the day I lost one of the most influential women in my life to breast cancer. She taught me to be strong and always push through no matter what. I was the child she could never have because of her treatment. She didn’t let her illness get the best of her until her peaceful final breaths.

134. September 2008: I graduated from college around the same time as the 2008 financial crisis. I had to go to the emergency room even though my school insurance had just expired and none of the internships/part-time jobs I was lucky enough to scramble offered benefits. As I was getting more and more medical bills that demand immediate payment lest my credit be forever ruined, I began to question what kind of government does not take responsibility for their sick citizens and the absurdity that one’s ‘trustworthiness’ could be tarnished by failing to pay for social service that should have been free and universal to begin with.

135. September 29, 2008: My family went into inner turmoil as the stock market crash of 2008 occurred this is known as the panic of 2008.

136. 11/2008: During this time the first black president, Barack Obama, was elected into office and this gave me great hope. It made me feel that as a black person I could reach for the stars and succeed, maybe even become president one day.

137. November 4, 2008: This was the first time I’ve ever felt truly proud to be an American. The election had just taken place that day, and positive returns for Barack Obama were edging out Senator John McCain. We were dancing around the living room with friends, truly ecstatic to live in a country that elected someone who’s platform was hope. Looking back now, that feeling of exuberance and pride for my country seems like a dream.

138. November 4, 2008: After working for months doing phone banks, door to door outreach, and registering voters, Obama volunteers were gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, when Barack Obama was declared President. The optimism was a physical wave. Nothing was heard but screaming; strangers leaping to embrace one another. The restaurant staff set their trays down and joined in the cheering. When minutes had passed and the shouting died down, a white woman turned towards me, beaming. “We could never have done it without them.” A large group of black women was holding hands and singing at a nearby table. WE. THEM. In one sentence the white woman had not only divided the populace, but taken credit for victory, relegating black citizens to “the help.” US. THEM. Even in what might have been a historical moment of unity, racism spoke, drowning out all the cheering, speaking softly, and with a smile.

139. November 4th, 2008: was a very hectic day during my first semester in graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. That day I decided to pull an all-nighter finishing a video for our first year exhibition. While I debated whether to have another coffee refill, I heard loud cheering right outside my window. I peeked out and saw approximately two hundred students marching down and celebrating with furor. Searching for the news, I went online and learned that Barrack Obama had just been elected the first African-American president of the United States.

140. Jan 2009: Obama’s inauguration in January 2009; it was a really big milestone for people of color. I went to school and thought, “I know racism is not dead, but this shows that it doesn’t have all the power.”

141. January 20, 2009: Saratoga Springs, NY. I was at Yaddo, an artist’s colony, watching President Obama’s first inauguration with about a dozen other folks. It was in the teens that day, and the heat was out in the one room that had a TV, so we were all in parkas and gloves, our breath steaming in the air. The TV was a old-school model, maybe 16.” There was no cable—only rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. Fuzzy picture, freezing conditions, everyone bitching about both—until the ceremony started. And then we all watched, in awe, as the first Black president was sworn in and addressed the nation. My heart was so full. It seemed, that day, that we had finally started to rectify some of the terrible racial injustice on which our country was founded. Even now, knowing the ugly backlash that came after, that remains one of the most beautiful memories of my life. And a bright spark of hope, in a very bleak time, for America’s future.

142. Jan 20 2009: Crammed into our office lunch room me and my colleagues are watching President Obama’s first inauguration take place. I am working in London and we are all full of excitement that during this protracted period of global strife and recession the first black President has been elected. There is a buoyant sense of hope and expectation for change: Will this mark the moment when America steps forward to lead the rest of the world towards a more peaceful and just future? Only time will tell…

143. January 22, 2009: It seemed like every night my mom was asking me to translate a list of questions for an important test. I felt proud that I knew some of the answers. I had just learned some of the material in history class.

In Spanish I explained to her some of the things I knew, like what the 13 stripes on the U.S. flag mean, what the branches of government are, and what an amendment was. One morning ride to drop me off at my middle school she was all dressed up and I could sense she was nervous. When I came back home that day she seemed much more relieved and happy. I did not realize the importance of it back then but I was happy she passed her test and she was happy that it was her first day as a U.S. citizen.

144. September 29, 2009: My grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War, laying his veterans hospital bed naming the end of his battle with cancer. He said to me “I’m not good enough to live.” My grandfather, who served our country, not good enough to live how is that fair?

145. 10.2009: This was the first day I was allowed to legally drive alone. I remember getting into my 2004 Ford Ranger pick up truck and driving my self to high school. Being able to play my own music and drive alone for the first time was such a liberating experience. It was one of the first times I felt fully free and autonomous.

146. October 26, 2009: San Diego, California.

We stayed in the kitchen because it was the brightest room in the house and you could still see parts of the sky from the windows. All of the other rooms took on a gray pallor, and the windows were darkened with a thick coat of ash. We were restless, because we hadn’t gone outside in two days – we couldn’t breathe.

147. November 2nd, 2009: Lost in translation.... lol Hi Mijo, Here’s the translation of the song. I wanted to help you to pronounce the words.

Love You! Grandma The Supremes- No puedes dar prisa al amor

No puedes dar prisa al amor No, te necesitas esperar Ella dijo que el amor no biene facil Es un juego de dar y aceptar 148. June 10th, 2010: I am a 22 year old young woman away from my border hometown in Texas for the first time, attending a friend’s wedding in Ohio. My mom calls me on the phone to check on me and I respond to her in Spanish like I always do. I hear in a disgusted tone a remark: “Is that girl speaking Spanish?” and it’s the first time I realize and feel like a minority. It opened my eyes to the reality that I am part of a culture in my own country that is widely misunderstood and looked down upon.

149. June 26, 2010: When I was 10 years old I always loved to go outside and play with my neighbors. The thought of my father always came to mind. I always remember the day he left when I was just two years old. I always hoped that someday he would come back and tell me he loved me. While I was playing with my neighbors, my mom called me inside and she handed me her phone and it was my father. He was sobbing over the phone saying that he loved me and hoped to see me again. Ever since that day I would always remember the day he called me. I still remember the exact words he told me when we were talking over the phone. Hopefully one day I will get the chance to meet him one more…

150. July 2010: I was in my Dads car while he was inside my Moms house they had a guy down the street that had a Pontiac GTO. I think he was testing his speed so he came down the street doing 110 I think and he lost control and hit the back of my dads truck while I was in the back seat and My dads car swung around and the man who owned the GTO totaled it.

151. 11-2010: November of 2010 is significant to me because it was the first time my parents took me to Puerto Rico to meet my Dad’s side of the family. With this trip I got to meet my distant cousins and learn more about my other race.

152. December 10, 2011: Life can’t be real. Growing up in a small East Texas town where racism thrived and the motto was always “us vs them” can’t be life. The past is where the pain lies, but the future is what you make of it.

Your perception of life doesn’t have to be the same as the majority which can be challenging for the minority. Her teachings always revolved around making your own decisions and when I say her, I am referring to my grandmother, the person who raised me. When others spoke ill of my father, she remained silent, allowed me to form my own thoughts of what I believed versus what I heard.

However, this day will always begin with a moment of silence because this is the date when she passed away.

This also happens to be my father’s birthday. I thank her for the lessons she taught me about this life. If I would’ve allowed the opinions of others to influence my decisions, I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with him now.

When I say him, I am referring to my father who experienced heartache at an early age with the passing of his father. I didn’t know how to process the death of someone as close to me as my grandmother, but received support from him based on his past.

This is the future. Life is real and was never so apparent than this date itself.

153. 2012: When I was seven years old I was genuinely happy with how my life was going. Then one day, my mom received a phone call from my grandma that my grandpa was sick. We wanted to go and see him as quickly as possible, but my dad kept telling us that he would be fine. One day he decided to take us, but I had a feeling that we were too late. As soon as we got there, we saw everyone crying, and he was already in a casket. At that time I was too little to realize what I had lost. I despised his demise when years passed. I felt empty and to this day I still do. I wish I could’ve seen him before he passed.

154. 2012: When I was seven, my most memorable memory was when I was throwing a little football with my dad.

He would tell me that I would be the best QB in the entire state. I always have it in my head and that’s one of my motivational memories, to push me to greatness.

155. May 19, 2012: Birmingham, Alabama. My 50th high school reunion. All white. An aged band playing our music.

A sudden realization of my blindness to Jim Crow oppression. A blow to my heart. The beginning of a path of rectification and relearning my history.

156. October 4, 2012: I will always remember this day because its the day that my cousin died. We were very close so he played a big part in my life.

157. October 8, 2012: This is the day I lost my mom. She passed away from a heart attack in her sleep.

158. December 23, 2012: I sat in a hangar at Fort Bliss, El Paso, TX with my mother, stepfather, and boyfriend. They waited with me as I held my weapon and we all tried not to cry. My parents waited with me as strangers with high rank told their daughter what to do and they could do nothing. My boyfriend waited with me as we both wished we had a little more time. They waited with me until the moment of goodbye. It was time to get on the bus, the plane, the helicopter, the truck; to the airport, to Alaska, to Kyrgyzstan, to Kandahar. They waited for me to return home, knowing the relationships we had with each other would never be the same. I would not be the same.

159. Dec. 25, 2012: I was 11 years old when my mom passed away. I was at home and my mom was on her way back with my Tio. She had been with my grandpa and grandma and my Tio was driving her home. My Tio fell asleep and crashed. The only person that died was my mom and that was a bad Christmas Eve. 160. 2013: When I was 11 years old I played baseball in Laredo, Texas. I love playing baseball, but I wasn’t as good as the other kids on my team. When we had games I never played for the whole game. I would cry and cry because all I wanted to do was to at least play one inning in one game. The coach told me, “Just quit you are not going to be good at baseball.” A few days later he kicked me off the team. I felt so sad, I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t quit, I kept working and working and right now I am one of the top prospect players in high school to make it to varsity as a freshman.

“When life throws me a curveball I am going to swing for the fences every time.”

161. 2013: My uncle passed away. My uncle had different types of cancer, and was very very ill. I was in the fourth grade when I got called out of class. My mother had taken me to the hospital with the rest of my family. We all knew he wouldn’t make it, but it would remain in God’s hands. After a while in the hospital we heard the news of him passing away. It did hurt and it still does, but I know he remains safe with God. It hurts losing my uncle, my best friend, and my father figure. I do hope I get to see him someday, because he’s that missing piece in my heart.

My uncle didn’t deserve any bit of what happened to him, but now he looks over us.

162. 2014: My dad was deported and it hit me really hard. I am going to be without my dad. I am always sad and I am struggling with it. It was really sad that I had to learn this so young.

163. Feb. 3, 2014: This date is important to me because this was the day that my first sister was born. It’s really important because I have always wanted to be a role model for a little girl.

164. 06.07.2014: I stopped drinking today.

165. August 2014: August 2014 the day I break my leg and the doctor told me that I would not walk again but I worked hard and I walked again.

166. August 26, 2014: I first visited the Karnes City, Texas immigration detention center that holds families - parents and their young children - in a for-profit jail while they pursue refugee protection in the United States. I accepted the case of a young Salvadoran woman and her toddler son who were fleeing targeted gang attacks and threats. In the wake of increased arrivals at our southern border by Central American children and families fleeing violence, the Obama administration had decided to massively expand immigration detention, focusing on depriving women and children of their liberty during proceedings. I had worked as an attorney in international human rights and immigrants’ organizations, addressing situations in Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia as well as the United States, in addition to teaching and directing a law school immigration clinic that represents individual migrants facing deportation. That first visit to a family detention center and the dozens of visits that have followed impacted me as the most impactful human rights violation I had known. The facility lacked basic conditions for children, medical care was altogether insufficient and sexual abuse

complaints quickly arose. Immigration authorities announced publicly that they would detain asylum seeking families indefinitely. My students and I had to advocate aggressively for that initial family, and many others since, to go live with family while undergoing their immigration proceedings. It was very difficult for me to understand how the Obama Administration could resort to the practice of locking up trauma survivors seeking protection in this country under our laws. I continue to view the decision to open family detention centers in the summer of 2014 as a tragic decision that mars Obama’s legacy. The decision left a detention platform in place, which has allowed the Trump administration to develop a cruel machinery of detention and deportation of refugees, which will forever mar the history of this nation.

167. September 26, 2014: Austin, Texas. The police disappeared 43 students south of the border. Ayotzinapa was a new word to me, the town were these youths attended a rural teacher’s school, and the beginning of an international crusade for justice. From that day on I’ve learned what international solidarity truly means. I experienced it on American soil.

26 de septiembre de 2014: Austin, Texas. 43 estudiantes fueron desaparecidos por la policía al sur de la frontera.

Ayotzinapa era una nueva palabra para mí, la ciudad donde estos jóvenes asistían a una escuela normal rural y el inicio de una cruzada internacional por la justicia. Desde ese día, he aprendido lo que realmente significa la solidaridad internacional. Lo experimenté en suelo americano.

168. October 18, 2014: We were pronounced man and wife- and the first interracial couple in my family. Month’s prior my mom expressed her concerns about what that would do for my future. I will never forget the disdain in her voice when she said our children would be Mexican. It holds space in my heart right next to the tears of joy and love she showered us with on that day in October.

169. 11.2014: Bumped into my uncle at a family reunion this past weekend. While watching family, young and old, out on the dance floor, my uncle mentioned in passing how just last week he’d been dancing half naked in full tribal attire as the chief of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians in front of uniformed USMC personnel for an annual appreciation of peace ritual. Hopefully they get their land back from the recently closed El Toro Marine Base.

170. November 26, 2014: A tiny bird dies in a scientist’s cage in Hawaii.

The bird is a po’ouli, a black-faced honeycreeper, and it lived on Haleakalā volcano on Maui. It was the last pó ouli in the world. The pó ouli was not big or impressive like a bald eagle. it was quiet, defenseless. No one tried to save it until it was too late. Its story in not unusual. Animals and plants are disappearing around the world. They cannot live in a crowded, hot, polluted, paved, plasticized Earth. What we did to the pó ouli, we are doing to ourselves.

171. Dec. 29th, 2014: The hospital was sterile and familiar, though with shockingly large rooms, we entered the labor and delivery unit. Music was playing softly and shades blocked out the blazing sun. My brother asked that we whisper and my sister-in-law was just getting used to her epidural. As a manager of a maternity clinic in the harsher part of Cebu, Philippines with its loud noises, heavy humidity, and pregnant moms walking around ready to pop, I felt completely lost. I had only been away for a half year, but the reverse culture shock made me nervous, and frustrated. It was supposed to be loud and messy! Didn’t they know?

172. January 4, 2015: I was in a maximum security mental hospital in Vernon, TX. On this day I was started on a medicine called Clozaril. Within a few days my symptoms cleared, such as psychosis, delusions, hearing voices, and having extreme mood swings. This was a last resort medicine as I had tried every other medicine available for anti-psychosis. Within 12 months I was able to leave the hospital and go to a less restrictive mental hospital in Kerrville, TX. I met a variety of individuals in those hospitals, some who had killed people. Andrea Yates was one of the persons I crossed paths with and you wouldn’t think by knowing her and interacting with her that she had committed such heinous acts. I think every effort should be made to help people with mental illness before it is too late. There is a lot of stigma around mental illness which has delayed the effort for politicians to make changes in the mental health system. I have subsequently been released to society and have completed an associate’s degree and will be graduating with a BFA in Studio Art with a minor in English Writing in May 2019.

173. February 5, 2015: A time that was important to me was when I fell off the rock-climbing wall and sprang my knee.

174. April 14, 2015: It all started when I was in elementary school at Santa Maria. I was in the fifth grade. I was doing my work and laughing at my friends when the teacher’s phone started ringing. She called me saying “Rebecca you are leaving for the day.” I was so confused, why I was leaving? That’s when I saw my mom crying, I started asking her what happened? Why are you crying? She didn’t answer me until we were driving home, she told me, “Rebecca your big brother passed away, they shot him.” My heart just broke. I immediately started crying. It hurt me so much knowing I wasn’t going to see him again. We got home and I saw my dad, Tia, Mom and my little brother crying, my heart was just broken. We decided to go to Houston for several days to see what happened.

My big sister was crying when we saw her and she told us the funeral would be in two days. Two days passed and we were at the funeral, everyone from our family was broken, even me. We saw pictures of him and this song was playing “see you again.” That song reminds me of him because I know I will see him again in heaven. I will never forget. The last time I saw him was in December 2014. I still cry whenever I think of him.

175. June, 12, 2015: June 12 is my birthday, so when I woke up on the morning of my 18th birthday to find out that a mass shooting at pulse nightclub, had just occurred parentheses the deadliest in American history at the time) I was horrified. As a proud member of the LGBTQ community, I was terrified for one of the first times as a young gay pursing living now. I had thought for the most part that our community spaces, bars and clubs, were safe.

This event was a paradigm shift for me, revealing that violence can still rule. I tried to remain strong so that “violence won’t win,” but I can’t help feeling afraid at times.

176. June 17, 2015: My parents got divorced, but before that they would always fight for every single thing. The worst part is that my dad has somebody else and I haven’t seen him in a long time. I still remember when I would take him a full glass of water while he worked in his little workshop in the backyard of our house.

177. 06.26.2015: On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution requires all states to grant same-sex marriages and recognize same-sex marriages in other states. My partner of thirty-four years and I had discussed getting married in a state or country that permitted same-sex marriage (as many of our friends had done) for several years prior to that ruling, but decided that it made no difference if we continued living in Texas where none of those marriages were recognized.

Because of this ruling, I immediately asked my partner if he would marry me—to which he answered “yes.’ We were married in Houston four months later.

178. 09/18/2015: My grandma beat breast cancer.

179. 10.25.2015: On Sunday, the twenty-fifth of October 2015, my partner of thirty-four years and I were married in Houston, Texas. Our wedding invitation read “The Supreme Court of the United Sates of America and our families request your presence at the marriage of…”—a direct reference to the ruling by the court that allowed same sex marriage in every state.

180. Dec. 13, 2015: The day my mother passed away. It was in my first year of middle school, by mid September she started feeling pain in her abdomen or middle back, her skin as well as her eyes were yellow. In October we were called in, my mom was in the hospital, she wasn’t responsive. She couldn’t talk, she couldn’t hear, and she couldn’t see. We spent a lot of time with her. She was looking better each day. We missed three weeks of school just to be with her. My family and I did our best to be by her side. We cleaned her, we fed her, we told her how much we loved her and how beautiful she was. December 13, 2015, I remember everything like if it were yesterday, my mother was lying there in the hospital bed resting. I was grateful that she lasted a month. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

181. 2016: My father got sick and had to stay in the hospital for two months. Not only was it hard for us seeing him sick but it was also hard on us financially. That school year we could barely afford our school supplies.

182. January 5, 2016: San Antonio. Freedom. Liberty. Death. My father’s freedom gave him the liberty to choose his death. My freedom gives me liberty until my death. It’s my American way.

183. January 11, 2016: This was the morning that I was going out with Michael.

Chicago Outfit Michael.

The Michael who worked alongside Jackie Cerone, and was being groomed to follow ‘The Lackey’ as the next Mafia Boss. I was filled with curiosity and anxiety. Michael was going to take me around to all the places in Illinois where they actually murdered people. Not the places that the movies claimed. I was mentally going through all the conversations we had previously had and wondering if at any point I had offended him, because if I had, then this could be my last meeting. Ever.

I had lived in Vegas for five years, in New York for three and was now in Chicago. Three major US cities that had huge mafia influence, so there was no denying the power of these men. These immigrant men, who had entered this country, dealt with discrimination and hostility, had seized opportunity in prohibition and thereafter, disregarded law and earned billions of untaxed dollars. They were the definitive symbols of the American Dream. They had defied everything and were the ultimate self-made men.

I picked up Michael. He always looked immaculate, dressed in a suit, pressed shirt, tie, polished shoes and a long dark wool coat. Imagine every stereotype Mafioso and that’s exactly how Michael looked. He got in the car and we drove. He gave me directions and I went where his directions led and on the way he talked…

He told me about the famous movie stars he slept with, how he would hide his money, thousands and thousands of dollars a week, his wardrobe of tailored suits, Italian shoes, and his walk-in closet with a 360 mirror. He told me about the fancy restaurants he ate in, the parties he went to, the expensive gifts he received from the Boss and his life of mostly playing golf, and handling the mafia gambling enterprise. And he also told me about the people who were killed and what had led to their demise. And after we had finished the tour, he asked me to take him home.

As we drove, he was quiet.

Then, as he looked out the passenger window, he told me about his father dying, and about visiting Jackie in prison when Jackie was sick. About how his ex wife was shot by her new husband (nothing to do with the mafia), how the internet destroyed the gambling business for them, and how he now had no money.

We reached his apartment building. He thanked me and got out the car. And as I drove away, with everything he had told me whirling about in my mind, I looked in my rear view mirror.

He was there, watching me.

And as I drove a great sadness washed over me. Because that was it.

The American Dream behind me, behind all of us. A thing of the past.

184. January 21, 2016: That was my first Spelling Bee Championship. I was in third grade. I remember I was so nervous that I almost didn’t participate. Then I realized that I was prepared so I decided to stay for the competition.

I’m really glad I stayed because I ended up winning that day. This first win gave me confidence and set me up for the next 3 consecutive wins.

185. March 2016: When we were told that my Mom had cancer many things came to my mind. We were told that she was going to need surgeries, chemotherapy, and many other cares. She needed to have surgeries as soon as possible because she was at risk of her cancer spreading through her body. Which was more complicated since we didn’t have enough money. We asked my grandpa if my parents could borrow money to pay the hospital expenses. My mom was really scared to have chemotherapy since she could lose her hair. Looking at my mother at the hospital for six hours without knowing how she was doing or if she was in pain. I thank God my mother is fine and she’s with us. The process was long, yet we never abandoned her.

186. March 25, 2016: This was the day Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren died. Naomi survived three death camps during World War 2. She said that her family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren were her legacy of good triumphing over evil. She made a profound impression upon me and my life is forever changed having known her.

187. 03/27/2016: This was the day I met my best friend! I choose this day because she is the best thing that every happened to me, I have been through so much in my life from being homeless to being raped and she and her

family have been there for me through it all. I now live with her and her family because they took me in after I was verbally abused and assaulted by my mother! I will never ever forget where I come from but everyday I wake up next to her it’s never on my mind because they make me feel safe and supported!

188. June 26, 2016: My mom received a call from my aunt saying that they had killed my uncle. That day was the saddest day I’ve ever had because my uncle was more than just an uncle to me. He was more like a best friend. I was sad seeing my mom cry a lot. After those days, I started getting very sad and slowly falling into a depression. That made me the person I am now. I am still fighting my depression after two years.

189. 10/2016: I don’t know the exact day that I found out I was different. No lo puedo decir porque sí lo digo las personas alrededor de no me amarán o no quiere lo mismo. Si lo digo a mi madre ella va a intentar regañarme. Y lo que yo tengo no se puede cura. I am afraid that my mother is not going to love me the same. Hasta ese día no lo hecho, o decir. Everyone in my family is homophobic. My grandmother said the most offensive word, faggot. That kills me inside every time. I have to sacrifice my happiness for my family and friends so that their happiness stays.

Everyday it kills me inside that I can’t come out of the closet because I’m afraid that my family won’t love me. My hands are tied, and I don’t have anyone. To this day my hands are tied together.

190. November 6, 2016: Election day in the United States. The out come of the election was a devastating loss when Donald Trump was declared the winner. His election violated every ideal of what we consider to be the heart of democracy and truth. To me personally, years of work to promote equality and justice seemed to be wasted.

The stunning realization that an election could be totally perverted was unbelievable even though we had seen it before. The trauma to the nation and the world as a result of Trump’s election would be far worse than we could even imagine.

191. November 8, 2016: Trump election, as a Mexican citizen, this was a day that I will always remember as a moment of uncertainty for the future. The value of Mexico’s currency shot down against the dollar, many of my closest friends who are Trump supporters celebrated, and I had no clue how exactly the election would affect Mexico or myself.

192. November 8, 2016: I strode down to the polls in downtown San Antonio for my first vote. My first time as a voter was full of excitement as I finally felt that I was an adult, and of course, was going to help elect the first woman president of the Unite States. I submitted my slip, and stepped outside with pride.

My surprise and disappointment that evening was tremendously bleak.

193. November 9, 2016: I awaken suddenly from a deep sleep and immediately reach for my phone, just to confirm the news I expected to read. As the reality of the alerts I see sets in, I feel as though I’ve been punched in the gut, like somebody has died. This was not supposed to happen. In the days, weeks, and even the months and years that follow, I mourn the loss of what I so recently, and so naively believed was taking form, an America that mirrored my own values. This new normal is far from it. This is not my America anymore.

194. November 9, 2016: Wednesday, November 9, 2016. I woke up this day to the Trump presidency and had a tiny shiver of fear for my green-card carrying English husband. Later that day, we initiated his citizenship process. It was the day when I realized that none of us would be immune to this new world of fear, and I wept for my country.

195. November 9th, 2016: The morning after Donald trump was elected everything felt weighted and dark. All I could do was take a walk in a semi catatonic state. The significance of this date is not because my “side” lost, but because it was revealed to me, as a white person, how alive and well racism is among my fellow white Americans.

My liberal bubble, also a luxury of privilege, was burst, and I saw everyone around me differently.

196. December 10, 2016: On this day, Silbina Bustamante was pronounced dead in a hospital in Phoenix, AZ. My grandmother was and still is a beacon of mystery and resilience. A woman with an abundance of obstacles and of multiple nationalities, she created community and her own language while demonstrating generosity and a sly sense of humor. Since her passing I have found myself contemplating what I know of her life and her story and how they drastically differ from the mythological and dominant American narrative. This chasm between narratives inspires me to create my own compass and keep resisting.

197. 2017: My dad had surgery and it was sad and scary. He was having a surgery in which they took something out of his stomach. The process was difficult because when he was sick he would always vomit and cry because it would hurt. While he was having surgery, I was at home with my older siblings. After he came out of his surgery I couldn’t see him because I am a minor. After his surgery he was a little weak but today he is doing fine. Thanks to God everything is good now.

198. 2017: The day of my grandmother’s funeral I kept thinking, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to see her again and that I wasn’t going to hear her voice. She was a wonderful woman. I was so heartbroken but at the same time I knew it was time for her to rest because she had suffered so much. I wish I could see her one more time and tell her that I love her.

199. 2017: 2017 was a great year I became more mature and gained a stronger relationship with life. I had a spiritual experience that showed me things I had never seen before. My mind had a mental and physical increase which helps me see life in a more mindful and extraordinary perspective. I have a growth mindset and see life in an objective view.

200. On 1.20.2017: Inauguration Day for President Donald Trump, my friend and tenant at 225 King Wm, Alexei Wood, a photo journalist, was arrested and charged, along with 229 others, with inciting a riot, engaging in a riot, conspiracy to riot and 5 felony property destruction charges, facing a maximum possible sentence of 75 years for being in the presence of, while shooting film and taking photographs of the protestors. He was acquitted on 12.21.2017 after a trial in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. and all charges were later dismissed against him and the remaining 229 defendants.

201. January 27, 2017: It has been seven years that I moved to the United States from Iran. Since the beginning, I always felt eager and open to learn the new culture and the language. I faced to many difficulties but always admired Americans to be generous and humble toward immigrants until the Trump Executive Order happened.

I never forget that morning after his signature, I was walking on the street and found myself pretty hopeless. I couldn’t see the same way I’ve seen United States before. Although many Americans in California joined the mass protest at the airport to help to release many people who captured at the airport’s security, still majority of Americans think being a Muslim equal to be a terrorist. I faced to many racist attitudes after Trump Executive Order in New Orleans. For example a mother told me her child is crying when he sees me because I have an accent. A man didn’t accept my favor and said I have an accent and many more which seems not important but makes me realize every time that here is not my home.

202. March 26, 2017: This day was important for me because, it was the day I made my performance for women equality. Another reason why this day was important for me is because, I was allowed to create a skit that talked about social issues that involved women’s rights. To add on, it allowed the crowd to understand a woman’s struggle from the media by portraying the women as just an object, as well as not being powerful and wise.

203. May 6, 2017: New York City. The only time I returned to the World Trade Center since 9/11. A New Yorker for 3 months when my office building shook that morning. I emerged to a snowstorm of paper and people spouting fragments about attacks. I marched north from Wall Street, and by City Hall watched the first tower fall. The memorial, an abyss, acknowledged my loss of innocence. Tourists taking pictures as my face pulsed and swelled from sobbing. I thought about the places in the world that witness horrific loss every day. To be American was to be spared more than not.

204. 08/2017: Something that happened to me in 2017 is starting my first day at high school. I have been waiting for this moment ever since I was in middle school, which is why I have 110% in everything that I did in middle school so that I can be able to go to high school and after high school be able to succeed in life in general.

205. August 11, 2017: I did not truly understand our nation’s racism epidemic prior to this day. More horrific than a gunman acting on his own, I witnessed brazen hatred and organized bigotry. I witnessed the America that my nonwhite friends describe. And in the following days, I witnessed American politics trump human decency.

206. August 12, 2017: Charlottesville. Standing on the far margins of a crowd, my 8-year-old holding my left hand, my 6-year-old holding my right hand. Hard to think over the sound of helicopters circling overhead. Don’t take your kids in there, says someone wearing a shirt with a confederate flag. Someone just tried to run me over, says someone wearing a tie-dyed shirt. My children, present to witness this collision of the past and the future.

207. August 14, 2017: August 14, 2017 is the first day I started high school. It’s dearest to me because I showed myself that I was moving into the next chapter in schooling. I did not go to the school of my choice, but I, still to this day am making the best out of it. Hopefully I can continue to do well and just become who I want to be in my near future.

208. 08.23.2017: The date my wife and I successfully submitted an immigrant fee payment of $1320 on behalf of my father to obtain green cards for six family members immigrating from the Philippines. My parents waited nearly 24 years from the time they originally filled out the paperwork to the day my family members arrived in the United States.

209. August 31, 2017: When you witness, or experience a horrific event there are images that hold onto you; images that will forever be conjoined to the experience.

Weathering Houston’s hurricane Harvey, I was glued to the TV and Houston’s social media postings. My eyes soaked up videos of contaminated waters creeping in the homes of nearby neighborhoods. I witnessed daring rescues of families as they were evacuated. In amazement, I watched mothers and children pile into garbage trucks, elderly folks in wheel chairs airlifted by helicopters. Through social media calls for help, it became obvious our cities first responders could not get to every home in need. Proudly, I saw brave Texans of every ethnic background convert their flat bottom fishing boats, and jacked up pickup trucks into life rafts and search for those who called for help. No Texan would be left behind.

210. September 5, 2017: Trump decides to repeal DACA (Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals) and that same day my delayed DACA renewal arrived. From then on, me and approximately 800,000 dreamers live in constant uncertainty and fear.

Solo me quedan 285 dias para permanecer en casa y mis ataques de ansiedad no tienen fecha de caducidad.

211. October 2, 2017: I entered the role of National Collector for the Archives of American Art. The Archives has been collecting the papers of the United States’ most significant artists and arts institutions since 1954. I feel the same weight of responsibility today that I did on that first morning. Being not only among, but responsible for these collections, along with our whole staff, is an incredible privilege. It’s also amazing and humbling that I am in the role of shaping our nation’s art history currently. I think often of the collectors who came before me, and who will come next. The particulars of who we each are certainly impact how we look out on the country’s arts, but this role also requires a constant effort to expand our notion of national significance beyond our own histories, tastes, and personalities. I love being in this lineage.

212. 11-23-2017: Thanksgiving Day, Thursday November 23rd 2017 After preparing our camping and cold weather gear, we left our Turkey Day dinners early. Many of us veterans drove out to Standing Rock, South Dakota, to support indigenous communities in their protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. As we drove, I stared out the car window and saw all the other people preparing for their own cold night of camping in front of department stores for Black Friday sales.

213. 2018: The day my brother Ray died at the age of 20. It was in the summer of 2018 he was one of my heroes in life.

214. 2018: It was around four in the morning my mom was drunk and so was her boyfriend. They came into my room while I was sleeping. Her boyfriend had just gotten back from Corpus Christi. My mom wanted me to see him because I was asking about him earlier. He was hugging me and everything… He was hugging me and scratching my back. They left my room and then my mom’s boyfriend came back into the room, he was scratching my back.

Then, I felt his hand move towards my breast. I pushed him away, he said he liked me and that he wanted to kiss me. I told him to get out of my room. I was freaking out, I was scared. I texted one of my sisters and she came to the house, her boyfriend called the police. They questioned my mom and I. My mom’s boyfriend got away and denied that he had wanted to touch me. The worst thing was that my mom didn’t believe me. I left the house with my sister and I stayed at her house. I didn’t want to see my mom or her boyfriend. I told my dad and he said to get out of my mom’s house and to stay with my other sister. I stayed there for a couple of months. I moved back in with my mom, I have my own room and I lock my room every night when I go to sleep. I won’t forget this ever.

215. January 16, 2018: My father died on that day.

216. January 21, 2018: As you slept, I listened to the rats scuttling across the ceiling panels and thought how different this might have been for you. Your first woman would have been an abducted girl. She would have cried. You would have raped her. Instead, you got out and you got me. And I love you even when you remind me of your father. What would he think of us? Lakwena would say it’s maber to have a lawyer in the family.

217. March 4, 2018: In the Spring of 2018, through the org that I direct, Black Cube, I launched Adriana Corral’s first monumental work, Unearthed (Desenterrado), solitary 60-foot flagpole, which hoisted a large-scale white, cotton flag. The site-specific project reflected on the deeply-rooted history of labor along the United States and Mexico border. The artwork was sited within the center of the historic grounds of the Rio Vista Farm in Socorro, Texas, a facility most notably recognized as the only standing processing center for the Bracero Program. Known as one of the largest foreign worker programs in U.S. history, between 1951 and 1964, the Rio Vista Farm processed more than 80,000 Mexican workers per year. Today, the program is described as a period of “legalized slavery,” according to findings from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Working with an artist to acknowledge unrecognized American history was deeply moving. I learned about the power of reconciling (not accepting) the past acts of violence. Working with the artist to produce a project along the U.S.–Mexico border helped me to realize that by acknowledging our darker pasts can lead us to understanding, and later on reconciliation. I felt that through meeting former Braceros that understanding an event, or moment, itself becomes a form of holding.

And that in this space of understanding, we are forced to reckon with what has happened, which draws us closer together. Understanding builds empathy. Memorials, monuments, or counter-monuments like Unearthed (Desenterrado), signify the confrontation of understanding.

218. April 2018: I made the B honor roll in Edna Karr High School. I was proud of myself, because that was my first time on the honor roll.

219. April, 2018: I come from the US-Mexico border, born in the Mexican side, received my education in the American side. Both cultures have been part of my identity, but I’ve always felt more related to my Mexican heritage, where my childhood memories come from, my family, my culture. This date marks the time that I’ve lived half of my life in the American side. Most of my adult life has been spent here, where most of my friends are, went to college, and created my career at. Now, I feel a sense of confusion to identify myself with one side or the other.

220. April 20, 2018: My son and I participated in a peaceful protest at Houston City Hall. ‘March For Our Lives’ was a call by student activists to end gun violence. There have been over 100 documented mass shootings in this country since 2000. Mass shootings have been defined as indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims. Nineteen years ago, Columbine shook America to its core. Now, it’s not even among the ten deadliest shootings in modern history. “After Columbine, it was hard to imagine things getting much worse. At the time, the shooting at a Colorado high school was the deadliest school attack in US history. But then came Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook. With 13 victims dead, it was also one of the deadliest shootings overall. But then came San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Thousand Oaks. In the nearly nineteen years since Columbine rocked America to its core, the country has seen so many more mass shootings that the attack isn’t even among the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern US history.”

221. May 21, 2018: I received the saddest news from my mom. My dog, Princess, that I have had for 9 or 10 years had been killed. My heart dropped. I didn’t know what to do or how to act. My cries and laughs were with her.

222. May 24, 2018: My Momma graduated from nursing.

223. 25 May 2018: Her name is Roxsana Hernández Rodriguez. She died on 25 May 2018. She was 33. I read she wanted to open a beauty shop. “Her death was entirely preventable…” I do not need to read the autopsy reports to know she was tortured, that she suffered, died, and was buried. Perhaps she, too, will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. I want to believe in the resurrection of the dead and I dream of the life of the world to come – one where beauty shops are situated on every corner. Roxsana could make us all beautiful. Eso es lo que le pidiera a la Virgen de los Treinta y Tres. Please make us beautiful. I have studied, am conversant in the long history of the barbarous United States. And still I was stunned at the news of her death. I read she tried several times to come to the US. Perhaps she did not know of the mundane brutalities and everyday violences against QTPOC and indigenous people in the US. Perhaps the violences she was fleeing from were greater than those she

imagined she was fleeing toward. I know she was imprisoned in the Cibola County Correctional Center. I know I do not know everything that happened to her there. I know she was held in ICE’s infamous hieleras and incarcerated in a ‘special’ unit for transgender migrants and asylum seekers. I know that she was handcuffed. I know she was beaten. I know she was dehydrated. I know these inhumane practices produce profit. Not justice. #BeautyShopsonEveryCorner #AbolishICE #MigrationisBeautiful #AguaEsVida #HumanitarianAidIsNeverACrime #NiUnaMas #TransJustice #SayHerName #RoxsanaHernándezRodriguez #SayTheirNames #JusticeforAll 224. June 17, 2018: My grandfather always said, “We didn’t choose to be American, the Rio Grande did.” My family was lucky enough to be born on the right side of the Rio Grande River, while others have had to fight to cross it in hopes to seek refuge. On this particular day, I remember calling my father to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. As usual, my mom answered, so I asked her if she had spoiled him, and what fun and exciting things they were doing to celebrate his day? She said, “How do you think your dad wanted to spend his Father’s Day? Trying to protect children. We spent our day protesting at the children tent camps. “A father’s job is never done!”

225. June 18, 2018: It was the beginning of summer when a very special soul was taken from this world. I was in summer school and it was 2 o’clock, everything seemed to be normal. I had just come out of lunch and wanting to go home. Next thing I hear is the name of a famous singer as I walk down the hall. I didn’t think much of it. I got home and jumped into bed. A notification popped up on my phone and I see the headline. My heart dropped and I tried to hide my emotions. Shot and killed, XXXTentacion, Florida rapper. So many people were confused.

I thought he was a prodigy. I lost hope, his music really helped me with problems I had. So many people were shocked. His real name was Jansen Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy. He was a really talented person. To this day I still think about him, he is someone I don’t want to forget. Thank you, XXXTentacion for helping me. Long live XXX. 226. 7/4/2018: The 4th of July is important to me because my grandpa is a veteran and he takes that day very serious mostly because it represents the declaration of independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation.

227. 07/05/2018: This was the date I decided to run for public office for the very first time. It was time to give back to the community that helped me become successful.

228. 07/22/2018: The day I started my road trip to five other states in the west. This is important to me because I received a small glimpse of what else the world has to offer. There are so many places I want to explore and this was the start!

229. August 3, 2018: I chose this date because this is the day that a very important person to me died.

230. 09.30.18: This date is the Sunday my father, Luis Angel Guerra, passed away. My father often told stories of his struggles growing up at a time when speaking Spanish was not allowed in school and he was met with violence in the Southside San Antonio neighborhood where his family lived. He raised us as far from his childhood home as possible in order to “give us a chance at life” and he encouraged us to work hard and pursue our dreams. He had a tremendous amount of pride in his three daughters and our careers as a Firefighter, a Chef, and an Artist, respectively. He was my connection to family’s history and his belief in the three of us solidified our futures.

231. October 20, 2018: Harpersville Alabama. The day black and white families came together for the rededication of the cemetery at Klein Plantation and a homecoming meal in the house that many of their ancestors had built. On behalf of my white side of the family, I apologized to the black descendants of the place for many wrongs across the generations, and particularly for the history of enslavement there. We are tied together in a complex web. I felt hope.

232. October 27, 2018: Shooting in Temple. As a Jewish person, it made me realize how personal and how divided the world has become. Some of the recent attacks have not been as personal to me but realizing that that could have been me, on a day that I had also attend the temple made it suddenly real.

233. November 8, 2018: As a recent college graduate I was initially overwhelmed with the questions, “Now what?” The past week I’ve applied to many positions I would be thrilled to work for, and then it dawned on me this morning.

Although these initial applications have a slim chance of turning into a job, I am allowed the opportunity to try. I was blessed to receive an education, on a full scholarship, and now, I have the possibility to work for a place I

could only dream of being a part of. It was a small but emotional moment for my own American Dream. This is the same morning I discovered this project, and it feels serendipitous. Thank you for allowing me to share.

234. November 8, 2018: A few days after midterm elections, I do a private champagne room with three Republican lobbyists for the anti-sex worker rights politician Marco Rubio. They are celebrating the end of campaign season at one of New Orleans’ famous strip clubs. The grueling 2.5 hours spent with these men were a perfectly illustrative sliver of my American female experience, a mental health professional described it to me once as “slow trauma”—it came as no surprise that the same men who were not in support of sex worker rights came into my place of work that night and sexually harassed, attempted to grope, belittled, and disrespected my coworkers and I. I was sure to remind them 4 times in the last five minutes that Republicans did not hold the HOR and sent them on their way. I have not been able to return to work since.

235. Nov. 10, 2018: “When my father died it was like a whole library burned down.”

—Laurie Anderson, World Without End July 4, 1926—Nov. 10, 2018 He was 15 when he opened his first business: A makeshift hamburger stand across the highway from the sunbaked cotton fields of Robstown, Texas.

The bread man assured him he wouldn’t need all the merchandise he had ordered. He was just a kid and didn’t know what he was doing.

But the young Benito Lozano knew this: He had picked the right location.

“When the cotton pickers crossed the road in the afternoon, tired and hungry, they could smell the onions on the grill,” he said. “Hell, on my first day I ran out of hamburger buns and had to run to the Piggly Wiggly to get some more.”

Lozano, a proud and loving father of nine children who never graduated from high school but through his own enterprise enjoyed a long and successful business career, died Nov. 10 at a nursing home in Houston. He was 92.

His was an unconventional life, and he preferred it that way. He was a barber, a boxing trainer and promoter, a restaurateur and, in an only-in-America twist, an immigrant turned immigration consultant who made money helping others gain their citizenship through the federal government’s amnesty program of the 1980s. His heroes reflected his ideals: Joe Louis (a man’s man), Rudolph Valentino (a lady’s man) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (America’s man).

For much of his life, he carried these few treasured items in his wallet: his 1950s-era poll tax receipt (evidence of the racism he experienced throughout his life); a picture of himself as a dangerously handsome man in his 20s; a $2 bill for good luck; and a piece of scrap paper with his personal philosophy scribbled on it: “The greatest risk in life is the one not taken.”

He was self-made and self-possessed, proud of blazing his own trail, of being an American, a Korean War veteran and, of course, his many business ventures.

“I’m like Frank Sinatra,” he liked to boast. “I did it my way.”

Born Benito Refugio Huerta Lozano in Monterrey, Mexico on July 4, 1926 to Josefa Lozano and Florencio Huerta, he was the youngest of four children.

He was still an infant when his parents divorced and his mother took him and his brother and sisters to live in Texas. He liked to tell the story about how his mother carried him across the border on a pillow stuffed with cash— money made from the sale of a house his uncle had won gambling.

The family settled first in Kingsville and then Robstown, a small farming town near Corpus Christi.

His mother, a former school teacher who never learned to speak English, supported the family by opening a string of Mexican restaurants. She was successful and the family lived a solid middle-class life in a two-story house off Main Street during the worst period of the Depression.

Naturally curious and ambitious, Lozano learned quickly as he watched his mother work. He was the only child to master English and in his early teens took a more active role in the family business, shrewdly advising his mother to increase her prices and supplies of coffee, beans and other staples before war-time rationing took hold.

“I always had a good mind for business,” said Lozano, whose calling card years later was emblazoned with the credo: “A fast nickel is better than a slow dime.”

It was in Robstown where his dreams and ambitions took shape. This is where he learned about the rewards of being his own boss. Where he learned to box and fell in love with the sport listening to Joe Louis’ fights on the radio. And where he had his first brush with history, when President Roosevelt and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho paid a brief visit during a whistle-stop tour in 1943.

For a Depression-era kid, FDR was the real deal and epitomized America’s can-do spirit as it entered WW II. “If he were alive today,” Lozano liked to joke years later, “he would still be president.”

A romantic, his passions included big band music and ballroom dancing, popularized in the films of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was particularly inspired by the style and dress of Valentino, Hollywood’s first male sex symbol who was known for his expert skills on the dance floor, especially the Tango.

In 1950, Lozano joined the Army and served a brief tour in Korea, where he was wounded and earned two purple hearts. Upon his return, he married Delfina Valdez in Corpus Christi. The couple had five children before moving in 1965 to Houston, where their remaining four children were born.

Over the course of his life, Lozano would own and operate more than a dozen barbershops and restaurants, including Taquitos Cafeteria and Chito’s World’s Best Fried Chicken. He also pursued his passion for boxing. His fighter Porfirio “Blackie” Zamora became Texas lightweight champion in 1964. He also helped train Robstown’s Humberto “Lefty” Barrera, who went on to compete in the 1960 Olympics in Rome alongside another young fighter by the name of Cassius Clay.

“When I look back, I feel proud of what I accomplished,” Lozano said of his life. “I did everything I wanted to do.”

Lozano is survived by son Benito Huerta and daughter-in-law Janet Chaffee; daughter Susana Monica and granddaughter Nickelle Monica; daughter Yolanda Lozano, partner Eddie Powell and his son Daniel, and granddaughter Samantha Powell; daughter Leticia Lozano and son-in-law Jeff Roberts; son Carlos Valdez Lozano; son David Jonathan Lozano, partner Kevin Kreinbring; son James Daniel Lozano, daughter-in-law Vicky Lozano, grandsons Jonathan and Andrew, and granddaughters Andreana and Juliana; daughter Linda Christina Steptoe, son-in-law Derrick Steptoe and granddaughter Brittnay Eckwood; daughter Lisa Lozano Reyna, son-in-law Edward Reyna, granddaughter Christine and grandson David. He is also survived by his brother Mandy Garica and sister-in-law Pauline; sister-in-law Petra Lozano; and brother Abel Garcia and sister-in-law Emma.

236. November 13, 2018: Is the day I gave birth to my daughter Aurora Luna Olguin. In a world where the leader of our nation is #45. Knowing he has no respect for women, No respect for Native Americans, his view on people of color from all backgrounds, his views on land, water & oil. All these things make my daughter who she is.

Knowing that I now have a bigger fight. Fighting to teach her the truth of her peoples history, her community’s music, her family’s art, the land where her and her ancestors have roots growing along the rivers and oceans and into the brown and red soil we sprout out from.

11.13.18 the day a Beautiful Brown Baby Girl gave me Hope for a better future. A better future because she will grow to be a proud strong woman of color who knows her history and where she came from.

237. November 30, 2018: I flash back to a 15 year old me sitting in my room late at night reading a book on the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. The CIA helped topple democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of protesters are tortured, disappeared and murdered. I cry in anger at what the US government destroyed and what Chile lost. Today former president George H.W. Bush died.

238. 2019: One of the most personal things that happened in my life is when my mom was arrested.

239. January 26, 2019: Pursuit of American dream.

240. January 29, 2019: I grew up in Nassau Bay which is a small neighborhood, a city in its own right actually, just across the street from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It was the late 60s and 70s. Our community was filled with astronauts and patriots, some of the greatest engineering and intellectual minds of the time. We put men on the moon. The world of the Jetsons, on TV, felt like it was just around the corner. We were the center of the universe and anything was possible. A childhood friend of mine even had a red phone on her kitchen counter because when her dad was in outer space that was the line he could call her on. The extraordinary was every day and the stars were the limit.

Fast forward to January 29, 2019 and you go from the brilliance of childhood to the reality of middle-age… This is where I sit today.

We have an embarrassment, at best, for president. It seems like we’ve gone from having a common goal as a country, working together for progress, to a dog eat dog kind of existence with trickle down racism and division, completely devoid of vision. I want to believe the arc of democracy is long and will prosper in the end but this is definitely a dark and trying time in our history. It’s heavy on my heart because I have a son and I’m so embarrassed at the shape that this country is in. What have I done? I have voted, yes. In the recent midterms I actually knocked on doors and phone-banked but prior to that I didn’t understand that a democracy has to be nurtured and tended. It’s not a done deal. It’s something that you have to tend to every day. If our leaders don’t have the vision then we the people need to. We need to get clear on what we stand for and exemplify it every single day: a welcoming heart, a hand up to those in need, hard work and determination. I think it’s my hope that truly makes me American. A hope that one day I’ll see this beautiful phoenix rise from the ashes to finally blaze with liberty, freedom and justice for all.... that, and flying cars!

241. February 19, 2019: I am visiting my 90-year-old mother who lives at a continuing care community on Amelia Island, Florida. We go to dinner at the “big house” where 80 or so older folks are having their evening meal. It is a special night since there is entertainment. Pianist John Springer is playing the piano and fielding requests, most of which are songs from the 30’s and 40’s. These old folks are children of the depression who served in WW II, men and women who are considered the greatest generation. Now they are shadows of their former selves; broken in body, losing their eyesight or hearing and often, their grip on reality. When John is finished with his set, he says, “I never finish the night without this song, so will you all stand.” And they rise, holding hands around the table. John starts to play God Bless America, and they all join in to sing about America, the land that they love. They are the best of America, believers in her strength and justice, the land of the free. They fought for it. It makes me weep.

242. April 4, 2019: Requiem completed, a three-year project.

243. TODAY: Always now, forever arriving, and simultaneously slipping away in the moment we acknowledge it, “today” conjures a form of presentness we can all strive for: one in which the urgent, the pleasurable, the minor, and the necessary can all be met with equal thoughtfulness.