It was about 8 o’clock in the evening, a mid March by the first week, with the sound of wet tires coming in the conmag window. We were neat, clean, shaved and sober, and we didn’t care who knew it. We were everything the well-dressed alt-weekly managing editors ought to be. We were begging UFB for 33 million dollars.
It was raining, and none of the design editors brought umbrellas. We were fielding recruits for dyke night, but they were all bisexuals with boyfriends. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We’d tossed our last cigarette butt in the gutter outside Smitty-B, and now we were banging our heads against a $50 copy of an unreadable book. Literature, we were certain, was the province of the petty bourgeoisie. That’s why we were committed to the real work: tracking down the RISD alum who sold Hunter Biden and his ex-lover cocaine.
Women were not throwing themselves at us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We’ve got the work ethic of a prize stallion, and sometimes that means people get thrown off. Regardless, we’re in a monogamous relationship with The Indy. Well, someone is. We got talked into going to Episcopalian ash Wednesday. Well, someone did. We were spotted sneaking into the freshman lounge to heat up our small sad meal, and word spread around town like syphilis. It’s back, if you didn’t know. Get checked.
Masthead
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The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
At half past midnight, we gave up and started our soggy walk down Thayer. We brainstormed excuses for not writing our stupid reification paper: stuck on a very hard crossword, afflicted with bizarre and awful visions, upstairs neighbor’s radiator exploded, etc. It was hard to care about character count/page count/academic probation when we had a case to crack. Well, someone does.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
Week in Shitting Myself
sbeven7 • r/providence
While walking my dog I’ve noticed a huge amount of man-sized shits in the streets and I can’t tell if they’re dog or human. They look kinda human. Either way, stop it. Filthy animals.
AccordingLevel9439 • r/providence
One time on Federal Hill, an ex took a shit on the hood of my Jeep Grand Cherokee. He came back the next morning with a roll of paper towels and windex to try to clean it off before I noticed, but I saw him.
c Last week I shat myself on the streets of Federal Hill. It was only a little bit, and all of the garments involved have since been diligently boraxed. I am feeling clean as a whistle and entirely unabashed about the whole situation. I wouldn’t be telling this story if it were any other way. So really, withhold your condolences. If it helps you to imagine that this story is fictionalized, so be it, but know that I would never lie for notoriety. That would be far more shameful than soiling my pants. In all cases, I brought this upon myself, so I might as well face the consequences, accept the truth, concede. Here goes nothing:
“I am the Federal Hill Shitter, and I am not ashamed.”
A couple years ago, I found myself talking to a coworker at the water cooler (soon she would be my work wife, and I her work husband). Once we got to talking, we realized we have more in common than we had ever thought. We like the same computer games, we both went to high school, and our YouTube Shorts algorithms are alarmingly similar. As our boss always says, we really are two peas and a pod. We had such fun at the hydration station that we agreed to graduate our friendship out of the oppressive grasp of the Women’s Center cubicle and into the unnerving cold of the real world. Since then, we’ve been tethered together by our love of small businesses, adventurous auras, and chronic constipation, exploring the nooks and crannies of southern New England in the five-tonine after our nine-to-five.
When we are not on the town, we are on the feed—watching reels-based content by our favorite creators. We live vicariously through the butch lesbian shearing sheep fleece, and we express tepid opinions about that guy who only has one meal a day (often at a Longhorn Steakhouse). We love watching catch-and-release lobster content; we agree that there is something both uplifting and nuanced about seeing a crustacean set free with a fish in each claw. Above any other media entrepreneur, however, our allegiances lie with millennial millionaire mommy, Audrey Finocchiaro of The Nitro Bar PVD.
The truth is that we love her. Parasocially. There is just something about her assertiveness, her business savvy, her nasal candor that tickles our pickle in all the right places. After all, she is THE brash and brazen microbanged babe of the Newport peninsula, the Shark Tank Shiksa of the West End. She’s Big Mama. Our Big Mama. She inspires me to be a better woman, a better husband, a better business. For years we’ve dreamt of visiting Nitro’s original brick and mortar location in Federal Hill just to lay eyes on the owner of the sharpest peroxide-platinum bob on this side of the Narragansett Bay. For years I’ve sabotaged our efforts.
I wasn’t ready. I was weak and afraid, posing imaginary roadblocks, fearful of what would happen when I came face to face with a woman of her might. Knowing no amount of coaxing would have made me budge, my offispouse shoved me in a U-Haul. Next thing you know, we’re driving at 95 miles per hour down Atwells, wind in our hair and Aroma Joe’s rush in our bloodstream.
When we arrived, we dropped off our wagon and gallivanted towards Nitro. We stood across the street, mouths agape. After some meditation and two Ativan apiece, we finally felt brave enough to enter the premises. We put on our tiny beanies and Aritzia Super Puffs. We hit our pen. When I looked at our reflection in the Nitro Bar window, I saw two project managers at an Alt-J concert. “Nobody will be able to tell we just drove four hours from Western Massachusetts.”
They say to never meet your idols, so we didn’t. Audrey probably heard we were coming and disguised herself as a blood-orange Americano, because she was nowhere to be seen. We considered rioting, setting fire to the Nitro Bar, along with nextdoor DASH bicycles and all of its patrons. Making a plan, we prepared the torch, but immediately recanted, realizing that we couldn’t do Big Mama that dirty. After all, she built this business from the ground up. Nitro used to be but a wee coffee cart, arduously wheeled from venue to venue, slowly growing a dedicated following. We had the power to destroy all of this progress in one fell swoop. We abstained, choosing to fan only the flames of our idolatrous devotion to THE Lady of Brew.
Instead of Big Mama, we were greeted by some male barista. He looked bored in a way that only gay men in their late twenties are able to. He was wearing gray sweatpants tucked into a narrow boot. Choices. I watched him wink at himself in the reflection of the frothing pitcher before taking my order. I winked back.
Outside of The Nitro Bar, two Almond Breeze Cherry Vanilla Dirty Chais in hand, we felt exalted. Audrey may not have been there in body, but she sure was present in syrup. The first sip was heavenly. As all of the flavors merged into a mouthful of miraculous milk magic, the pains of our corporate imprisonment were tenderly soothed. I shed a single tear, which ricocheted against the sensibly sized to-go cup in my hand. The occasion merited immortalization, so we asked a gaggle of similarly hard, working professionals to take our picture in front of the Nitro Bar sign. A stranger with whom we bonded in line posed with us. In Audrey’s words, Coffee Concoctions Create(d) Community. The moment was electric, but as the camera shutter emitted its last flutter, something shifted.
We started walking towards the car. At first, it was manageable. All fun, all games, you know? But with each step I felt myself grow paler and the pain in my rear grow sharper. I put on a brave face. I slowed to a halt.
Shit my Fuck.
Whatever my bowels were brewing was going to be seismic. I tried to take one more step, but I fell to the ground, blinded by the pulsating intestinal pain which took over my lower body. I lay there, motionless, whimpering, as the sun set behind the elementary school on the corner of America and Europe street. I don’t know how long I was on the ground. It felt like eons, but aroused by the power of entrepreneurial zeal, instilled in me by my matriarchal hero, I recuperated. Clenching and coping, I limped modestly into the closest establishment, a rival of Nitro’s that I will maintain unnamed, lest I give attention to a coffee shop owned by another. Hand-on-crack, I reached the restroom door. No dice. Bathroom key. Rather, bathroom code. I punch in 69-420. No luck. Fuck my life. After systematically trying out what seemed to be every possible permutation of four digits, and having egregiously exceeded my monthly coffee budget, I fell to my knees. As it set in that I would have no choice but to leave, colon still brimming, I began to weep mournfully. In a last ditch effort I sealed my cheeks and waddled into the frigid Federal Hill sidewalk. I looked around and realized the streets were desolate. My work wife was gone, and with her both our
( TEXT MARIA GOMBERG DESIGN ANAÏS REISS ILLUSTRATION ROSIE BRANTLEY )
lattes, her departure a heartless immolation of the trust we once shared. Tears now streaming, I hobbled aimlessly, flailing. Losing a battle of my own creation, I began strategizing, but it was too late. In a last ditch effort I lurched meekly into an alleyway, preparing for desecration.
The scene was abject. Call me a scat artist, and I don’t mean in the ba-bap-wee-ooo-ap type of way. I mean masterpiece in my pants, streaks on my sheets, brown on my gown. Call me the Caca Flocka Dame, the way that I had no hands (they were both covered in shit). Call me Shit Girl because that is what I am. Fuck my life, I said. I liked these pants, I said. I shat myself on the streets of Federal Hill, will anyone ever love an aberrance like me? I said.
I felt lost and discombobulated, but once I became aware of what was left of my dignity, I began plotting to dispose of the evidence. Log in hand, I paraded through little Italy, two pounds lighter in body, but weightier than ever in spirit. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I threw my load blindly into a parking lot somewhere near Ogie’s Trailer Park. My ordeal was over, and it would have gone unknown were it not for this account.
So yes. It was me. I shit myself in Federal Hill, and now the entire PVD scene knows about it. All I have left is the hope that my plight might serve as a lesson. Either we learn from it or we laugh at it, as Audrey always says, right? So, here I am trying to impart some wisdom. Please, don’t listen to what they say, never trust your gut. She is fickle and treasonous. Since I have this captive audience, I want to send a brief message to my coworker.
To my coworker :
In another universe we are two dark chocolate orange mochas with pistachio cold foam.
Unfortunately, in the present one, I am the girl that shat herself on the street in Federal Hill. Your infidelity has destroyed this girl-marriage. Forgiveness is not given, it is earned.
— The woman once known as “hubby.”
MARIA GOMBERG B’26 is okay.
“SALVEMOS ATLANTIC MILLS”
A TENANTS UNION’S FIGHT FOR THEIR COMMUNITY
c It’s spring cleaning week at the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) offices in Atlantic Mills. Dozens of cardboard boxes are arranged across the floor, filled with EXPO markers and Sharpies, plaid-patterned wrapping paper, printer paper, a bottle of nail polish remover, a stamp and an inkpad, hanging folders, sticky notes, a 200-pack of Crayola crayons, tinsel, twine, and an old-fashioned phone that you hang up face down on a dialpad. Cindy Miranda, ONA’s president, beckons me inside with an offer of coffee.
Olneyville is a neighborhood of about 8,500, west of Federal Hill and bordered by the bend of the Woonasquatucket River. On Manton Avenue stands the Atlantic Mills building, a behemoth of brick and glass punctuated by two domed towers. Originally built in the 1850s as a textile factory, it is now the working-hours home to several dozen local artists, plus a church, a flea market, and several nonprofits, ONA among them.
For Olneyville’s largely immigrant community, ONA is at once a gathering place, organizing headquarters, and school. Founded more than 25 years ago, it offers math, computing, and adult literacy classes in Spanish and English. ONA has also hosted performances and fundraisers and advocated for Driver Privilege Cards for undocumented Rhode Island residents.
ONA shares Atlantic Mills’ right tower with the Puerta de Esperanza church, which, when I visit, is holding a birthday party. In the fluorescent-lit hallway outside the sanctuary, kids in matching T-shirts scramble around underfoot. Escaped balloons have found their way around corners and occasionally appear, glued to ceilings, outside the dozens of workshop spaces and artist studios that line the labyrinthine second floor. Most of these spaces have
ceilings. At one stall, gigantic green glowing eyes seem to peer over the door. The eyes are the work of BIG NAZO, an “intergalactic creature band” that has been an Atlantic Mills tenant since the 1990s.
Downstairs, the Big Top Flea Market is underway. The longest-running flea in Rhode Island, Big Top hosts dozens of vendors and more than a thousand customers each weekend. At a cost of 50 cents, you can enter and discover an eclectic mix of goods: consigned musical instruments, Latin American sports paraphernalia, shoes, clothing, and incense. Some vendors sell many of these things at once, as with Tito’s shop, which offers hundreds of electric keyboards, guitars, wind instruments, and accordions—plus a collection of disco balls, boxing gloves, and kitchenware. There are music lessons, too. “We have a little bit of everything,” Tito told me, in Spanish. What customers ask for, he tries to get. Recently, it’s been stuffed animals. I spot a cheetah, a snow leopard, and a dog with its tongue out.
But Tito, a retired musician who has run the store for two years, isn’t sure he can stick with it much longer. He at least makes enough for rent (“Gracias a Dios / Thank God,” he says), but there aren’t any savings. He has college-bound grandchildren that he needs to support. Many of his music students left after the Woonasquatucket River flooded in September of 2023—it’s flooding more and more often these days, due to climate change. His basement store filled with water and eventually mold.
He and his family cleaned it up. But in the last month, business has gotten even worse. Just past 7 a.m. on January 29—barely a week after Trump’s second inauguration—a group of nine men appeared in the parking lot in front of Atlantic Mills. They came in unmarked vehicles and wore plainclothes, but they were identifiable as law enforcement from their strobing tail lights and the way they conferred, burly and beanied, next to their oversized cars. “Providence Police have confirmed it’s NOT them, so assume this is ICE,” ONA posted on Instagram. “Move with
Word of the suspected ICE sighting spread fast, and Cindy says that no one at Atlantic Mills had an interaction with them. But fear spread quickly, too. Now, Tito says, people are less inclined to go to the Segundo, who sells hats, lanyards, and flags for every soccer team in Latin America, agrees. “People are scared to leave their houses,” he tells me, in Spanish. As a result, he fears for the future of the
But ICE isn’t the only reason Segundo is worried. There’s another threat facing all the tenants of Atlantic Mills—the flea market, ONA, Puerta de Esperanza, and BIG NAZO alike: a property sale.
For decades, Atlantic Mills has been a refuge from rising rents and prices. Cindy says that ONA, whose offices occupy about 2,000 square feet in the right tower, pays the current owners less than $1,000 per month, a rate which she says is relatively consistent
ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER )
across the complex. Jenine Bressner, an artist who has been a Mills tenant for twenty years, says they pay $1,200 per month for 2,400 square feet of studio space. (For comparison, the average one-bedroom apartment in Olneyville is about 800 square feet and pulls in almost $1,800 in rent each month.) Because of low rates, ONA is able to offer its services and pay its staff, Atlantic Mills’ artists can make their art, and Big Top’s vendors can sell affordable goods to the Olneyville community.
Currently owned by Florida-based Howard and Eleanor Brynes LLC, New York–based Eric Edelman plans to purchase Atlantic Mills. The first whisperings of a sale came in 2022. In 2023, Howard Brynes passed away and control of the building fell to his sister, Eleanor Brynes, a retiree in Florida. In August of 2024, Brynes confirmed that she would not pursue a deal with the city of Providence and would instead put Atlantic Mills on the market for $5 million. The sale is likely to be finalized sometime this summer.
Although Edelman said in December that no decisions about rent have been made, tenants fear that rents will skyrocket under new ownership.
In the least affordable city for renters in the nation, the current tenants of Atlantic Mills have nowhere else to go. Studio space is scarce and incredibly expensive.
“This fight goes beyond Atlantic Mills,” Cindy added. “When businesses and community spaces are displaced, entire neighborhoods suffer.”
“People’s grandparents worked here. People grew up going to the flea market. They went to music shows in these buildings,” Jenine told me. “Everyone has a connection to this place.”
In October, two months after Brynes confirmed she was listing the Mills for sale, ONA hosted a community meeting at the Olneyville Library. Turnout was overwhelming, with nearly 100 people packed into the tiny space.
From that meeting, an idea emerged. Atlantic Mills would join a swell of tenant organizing across the nation, from Los Angeles to Connecticut, and become the first commercial tenants union in the state.
Demands, pressure, negotiation
A tenants union is founded on the same basic principle as a labor union, but with tenants instead of workers, and a landlord instead of a boss. “The idea is using militant labor union strategy in the landlord/ tenant context,” explained Shana Crandell, Executive Director of the grassroots organization Reclaim Rhode Island. When tenants work together, they can force landlords to the table to negotiate stable, affordable rents and liveable conditions.
A tenants union’s “ultimate weapon,” said Shana, is a rent strike, in which tenants withhold their rent until the landlord concedes to their demands. But “rent strike is not the goal,” Shana said. According to Shana, the Connecticut Tenants Union, which has seventeen chapters, has won five collectively-bargained leases without once resorting to a rent strike. Public pressure campaigns are lower-risk and can be just as effective.
This article has been translated into Spanish by Mayriel Diaz Aguilar B’28 of SOMOS Latinx Literary Magazine
At the October 2024 community meeting, Providence-based journalist Steve Alhquist connected the Atlantic Mills tenants with Reclaim RI, which since the fall of 2023 has been focused on building a statewide tenants union. On March 30, 2024, the residents of 1890 Broad Street formed the Elmwood Realty Tenants Union, the first chapter of the Rhode Island Tenants Union (RITU). On December 21, 2024, the Atlantic Mills Tenants Union (AMTU) became RITU’s second chapter.
The Mills tenants made their announcement at a press conference in Riverside Park behind the Mills building. More than 125 people attended.
For more than a month following the December 21 AMTU announcement, neither Edelman, Bob Berle (the realtor coordinating the sale), nor current ownership responded to AMTU’s correspondence. Instead, they told the press that Edelman would reach out to the Mills tenants individually after the sale. “[It’s] a polite way of saying, ‘We do not acknowledge the union—fend for yourselves,’” said Emily Harrington, an artist at the Mills and AMTU organizer.
Tenants unions are a relatively new concept in the U.S. While employers are legally required to recognize labor unions that have the support of the majority of employees, no such requirement exists for tenants unions. That means that AMTU is counting on their pressure tactics to compel Edelman and Berle to agree to negotiate with the union, as a union.
On January 29, 2025, AMTU held a second rally. AMTU was asking Berle and Edelman to formally agree to negotiate with the union, to grant tenants 99-year leases (the maximum period allowed by law), and to guarantee immediate rent stabilization and an eviction moratorium for the duration of negotiations.
“As far as the law is concerned, as soon as Berle and Edelman buy the building, they can change the rent to whatever they want it to be,” Emily told me. “We are not protected from that at all.” Rent stabilization would ensure that Edelman and Berle couldn’t increase the rent beyond an agreed-upon cap, and a 99-year lease with negotiated terms could provide much longer-term security. It would also affirm the ownership that many Mills tenants already feel over their spaces, which they have cared for and improved over decades. In the meantime, an eviction moratorium would protect tenants from retaliation by ownership during the bargaining process.
Since Berle wouldn’t respond to their emails, they would deliver their demands in person. The group congregated at Memorial Park, at the base of College Hill, near where Google Maps said Berle’s office was.
It was an icy day, and Memorial Park was far from the Mills. Turnout was much lower than at the December 21 announcement event. But colorful and crisply-lettered signs—obviously created by artists— punctuated the winter air. “UNION STRONG” and “SALVEMOS ATLANTIC MILLS,” they read. Jenine held a thin wooden pole from which letters, in bright pink, seemed to float, spelling “ATLANTIC MILLS.” Jenine’s car had been totaled in an accident that morning, but they were here anyway. Holding the other poll was Shana of Reclaim RI.
First hovering at the outskirts of the group, and then standing contemplatively at the base of the World War I memorial statue, was an alien. He had a wrinkled pink face and five tremendously blue eyes, arranged in a V-shape at the top of his head. He held a sign, almost the height of his body. It was a wordless
painting of one of the Mills’ towers, rendered in purple, yellow, and blue, and thronged with people—no, other aliens, perhaps—who were climbing the tower, reaching for it, and holding onto each other. I wanted to approach him, but I was too nervous—how does a journalist comport herself around an extraterrestrial?
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of the BIG NAZO aliens—for whom Atlantic Mills was not just a workspace, but a space station, a portal.
After several short speeches at Memorial Park, the group started walking along North Main to Bob Berle’s office. “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power! What kind of power? Tenant power!” the crowd chanted. When we arrived, Emily spoke to the crowd gathered on the narrow sidewalk.
“We are currently experiencing in Providence the highest rental rate increase in the country. So if you’re here and you’ve had a harder time paying your rent in the last four years than you were when you were making more money, it’s not just you. The rent is too high; the rent is too damn high… That’s what the market can bear, but we can’t bear it anymore.
“We have to stand together and demand that we are recognized—our right to live in this city is recognized, our right to work in this city and make the communities we want to live in,” she continued.
To cheers, Emily and Eloi Rodas, ONA’s executive director, entered the building with their demands.
Relationships break the ICE
While they were inside, Jenine spoke to another one of the union’s goals: to support and defend Olneyville’s immigrant population, especially under a hostile presidential administration. “We want [to] protect the most vulnerable among us, particularly immigrants, in this moment,” said Jenine.
“The security of a long-term lease is more important than ever when there’s rampant discrimination and attacks on our immigrant communities,” Shana told me later. The process of organizing a union also requires building a network of relationships founded on trust. “You get to know each other in ways that you wouldn’t if you were just passing in the parking lot or saying hi at the flea market,” Shana said. “Those kinds of relationships…activate when members are under threat.”
The quick community response to the suspected ICE sighting (by coincidence, on the morning of the January 29 rally) is evidence of this. If the Mills tenants are forced out of the building—or out of Olneyville or Providence altogether—the relationships that allow the Mills community to defend itself from threats like ICE will be strained.
ONA and Atlantic Mills do more than shield tenants and community members from interaction with ICE. Immigration raids and new federal orders can create a climate of fear, making undocumented people reluctant to work, drive, and send their children to school. Now, more than ever, Olneyville will need an affordable shopping place like Big Top. The community will rely on ONA’s work—its educational initiatives, its advocacy, the ICE Watch Alert Channel that it is helping coordinate—to make it through the weeks and months to come.
Atlantic Mills, aka the Space Transformation Station
After Jenine and another Mills artist were finished
speaking, there was an awkward pause. I looked across the street. It was another alien! Taller and grayer than the first, he made a beeline across the road toward our group. “Here comes Glurbo,” said one of the organizers. Glurbo and the first alien hugged, foot-long clay fingers resting against Glurbo’s back.
After a moment, the group started chanting again, with vigor, up at the small brick building on North Main. The problem was that it was the wrong building. Emily and Eloi emerged, still holding the paper with AMTU’s demands, and explained: Bob Berle had, apparently, moved out of this office years ago, and the Google listing was out of date.
Quickly, the organizers tracked down a second address, in Wayland Square. Did people want to go there? A light rain had begun. They did. A few people left to get their cars. Someone offered me a ride.
As we waited for the cars to return, the first alien approached me.
“Databo,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Lily, with The College Hill Independent…”
“Databo,” said Databo, gesturing to himself.
“Hi, Databo!” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions about why you’re here today?”
“Databo, Databo,” said Databo.
Fortunately, right then, a couple of cars pulled up. I still had not mastered the art of alien-journalist communication, but that was alright.
Later, I talked to Minio Pinque, a creature-building teacher and director of BIG NAZO. He explained that the Yuranian aliens, like Databo—a recent addition to BIG NAZO’s roster—tended to hover at the periphery. “They’re visitors to the planet. They’re observing things,” he said.
“That’s what Databo is there to do,” Minio continued. “To support by watching…and being a witness.”
I got in the car with Jenine and their beautiful sign, which they told me was made from laser-cut letters and fishing line. Sylvia Atwood, an Atlantic Mills textile artist and Indy alum (!), was driving. At Wayland Square, Emily and Eloi successfully delivered the demands. It was raining hard now.
“I think we should picket here, all the time,” said Shana, looking the office up and down.
The group dispersed.
A dubious trade
For as long as Jenine can remember, the tenants of Atlantic Mills have taken it upon themselves to maintain the over-170-year-old building. Many of the Mills tenants are “licensed tradespeople, not just lay people making things worse,” said Jenine. “So rather than assigning responsibility to somebody else who might never even do anything, we’ve fixed so many things on our own.
“We care about this place,” Jenine explained. “We’re committed to staying.”
For most of the two decades that Jenine has rented space in Atlantic Mills, Howard Brynes and the building’s hired management tended it reasonably well. “I could find people working on site at least six days a week,” Jenine said. But the building’s tenants
were key partners in improving the building. They’ve fixed the Mills’ iconic spiral staircase and coordinated Internet access for the complex. More recently, after a mouse infestation halted ONA’s food donation program, the association ran a baseboard-building class. Community members learned basic carpentry and, while they were at it, sealed up holes in the building. When I visit the ONA office, Cindy points out the baseboards, which are simple two-by-fours, light wood, obviously new.
“Everybody wins!” I quip.
It’s only partly true.
“I can’t complain about [the building’s neglect] too much, because we benefited from it,” Jenine told me. The building’s inadequate maintenance and the efforts of the tenants to take care of the space on their own are probably part of the reason that rents have stayed so low.
“That’s one dynamic, for sure,” said Shana. The low rents can also be attributed to the fact that the Mills have been owned by Howard and Eleanor Brynes, LLC since 1953. There hasn’t been speculative trading on the value of the building since then.
And Howard Brynes, before he died, cared about making the Mills an affordable space for artists. “He wanted to advocate on behalf of the creative community… He wanted to protect us from unstable situations and evictions. I think that he is one of the greatest unacknowledged patrons of the arts in the history of Providence,” Jenine told me.
“It’s rare to find those people, I’m sure,” I responded.
They agreed.
The kind of mutually beneficial relationship that the owners and tenants of Atlantic Mills took part in for decades relies heavily on the benevolence of a single landlord. Now, after Howard Brynes’ passing, it’s becoming clear that nothing the Atlantic Mills tenants have done—muscling through deteriorating conditions, improving the space—has offered sustainable protection from abuse and displacement. In fact, the tenants’ efforts to improve the space are part of what might allow Edelman to rent the Mills’ units for vastly more than the current sum. It’s an irony that the union highlights in one of its demands: to “stay in our space, the space that we’ve made, the space that is ours and that we’ve made look like such a fantastic investment with our presence there.”
When I visit Cindy at the ONA offices, she doesn’t just want to talk about the risks of a sale—she wants to talk about what’s happening now. Since the announcement rally, ONA has been informally locked out of one of its two office units in Atlantic Mills on two separate occasions. The second time, Cindy says, management offered a rationale: The current owners were worried about “‘certain people’” being in the office. “Is it people of color? Is it people that are poor?” wondered Cindy. Shortly before the second lockout, ONA had hosted a fundraiser for the Haus of Codec, an organization that targets youth homelessness.
Cindy says that ONA has not been credited for the rent they paid during the lockouts. When the organization regained access to their space the first time, an original painting and several other items were gone, the doors to the attached kitchenette and family bathroom remained locked, and most disturb ingly, a small black camera had been installed on top of a bookshelf, in the back right of the room. No one at ONA had access to the camera’s footage. It was not a regular security camera on the building’s CCTV.
Since my visit, the camera has been removed, but all the office’s furniture and several plants went with it. ONA is now looking for donations to replace these items.
Acropolis Management, LLC wrote in an email to the Indy that they had “no role in removing any contents of the association’s offices” and were not responsible for the lockout.
Howard and Eleanor Brynes, LLC could not be reached for comment at this time.
Until AMTU is recognized by current and prospective ownership, the Mills tenants will remain vulnerable to their landlords’ antics. With the union, the tenants recognize a need for another way. They’re looking for a new relationship between landlord and tenant, one in which they can meet at the bargain ing table, eye to eye—but not as equal parties, not exactly. Because it’s the tenants who have cared for the space, who rely on it, who have built a commu nity in Olneyville and, unlike Edelman or Berle, know how the neighborhood feels. They can, and do, have the power.
As of Tuesday, March 4, Edelman and Berle still refuse to collectively bargain with AMTU when the
building’s sale closes. (“We are not aware of any law or precedent for a commercial tenants union, but we are making every effort to engage in good faith with the local community,” Berle wrote in an email to the Indy.) Meanwhile, AMTU says, the current owners have targeted several longtime tenants for eviction— including RIOT RI (formerly Girls Rock), a nonprofit which provides music education “to foster collective empowerment and the development of healthy iden tities in girls, women, trans, and gender-expansive youth and adults.”
“We understand the current owners had to resort to eviction to deal with tenants who had not paid rent for over six months, as well as others who were occu pying space illegally without a lease and not paying rent,” Edelman wrote in an email to the Indy. “As the incoming owners, we’ve been clear about our plan to offer new leases to tenants in good standing who do not currently have a lease once the sale is complete.” Edelman also noted that the flea market would remain in operation after the sale.
But AMTU argues that Acropolis is “relying on records of spaces and rents that conflict with longstanding verbal agreements and documented payment history.” They also claim that recent evic tions have been made without giving leaseholders an opportunity to pay arrears, or despite their attempts to do so.
“Acropolis is committed to navigating the difficulties and circumstances created by prior management,” a representative for the company wrote in an email to the Indy. “These situations are often difficult to resolve and include areas of conflict where records may not line up with what the management team are being told are differing verbal agreements.”
“We call on the buyers to recognize [the] union and commit to collective bargaining, and to cease and rescind evictions immediately,” Shana said. “Organized tenants in Rhode Island will not be displaced or allow our cities to be sold off to the highest bidder.”
So what’s next, if Edelman and Berle continue to resist union recognition?
“We are prepared to take collective action to ensure that Atlantic Mills remains a haven for us,” said AMTU.
Unions for all
After our main conversation, Cindy took me to ONA’s second office space. Rosario Pren, ONA’s literacy coordinator, came too. No sooner than we’d stepped into the second office, a man stepped in carrying a slice of vanilla cake with bright blue icing. Rosario and Cindy introduced him to me as the pastor from Puerta de Esperanza next door. “You want cake? I’ll bring you two more,” the pastor said. He came back a minute later and switched to Spanish: “Espero que le guste.” It was delicious.
Rosario has been teaching literacy and arithmetic classes at ONA since 2019. (Previously, she was a facilitator for the educational nonprofit English For Action, which closed in 2018). Rosario’s classes have made it possible for numerous students of all ages to
Mills on foot) and the fact that, more and more, the students have to work two or three jobs to afford rent. There just isn’t enough time to come to class.
The far-reaching consequences of Rhode Island’s sky-high rents are why Reclaim RI is building RITU, the statewide tenants union. “A mass base of organized working-class power, and tenant power in particular, is the only way we’re going to address the housing crisis,” said Shana.
Since Trump took office, Reclaim’s mission hasn’t changed—but it’s taken on new importance. “We’re focused on making Rhode Island a North Star in terms of what we can achieve [locally] as things get really bad at a national level,” Shana added. “We think the most important thing we can do to combat the rise of fascism is build strong working-class organization.”
Shana hopes that in Atlantic Mills—a community of people with tremendous energy, deep ties to their spaces, and strong relationships that pre-existed AMTU’s formation—the Rhode Island tenant movement will find a model and a beacon. “When they win… [a] collectively-bargained lease,” said Shana, “it’s going to be a precedent in Rhode Island…. We can start replicating that in union campaigns across the state.”
Cindy, Rosario, and I walked down the hall toward ONA’s first office. Eloi, in the bright red snow boots he’d also worn to the January 29 rally, was wiping down a metal desk organizer. There were picture books to stack and reams of paper to consolidate. Rosario bade us farewell. “Nice to meet you,” she said, in English. And then, in Spanish: “Ahora voy a trabajar.” She had to get back to work.
LILY SELTZ B’25 is a witness and a participant.
To support AMTU’s work, call your city councilors to urge them to continue their support of the Atlantic Mills Tenants Union and follow @weareatlanticmills for
The Stall Tells All A NOTE ON LATRINALIA ART WITHIN COMMUNITY
( TEXT AYLA LUCIA TOSUN
DESIGN ESOO KIM
ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault
c No doubt we are all familiar with latrinalia, or bathroom graffiti: tiled walls written up with years’ worth of scribbled words and images ranging from the outright offensive to the surprisingly heartwarming, to the politically significant. But latrinalia is a fragile art. In researching this article—which included visits to every bathroom on every floor of the Sciences Library—I discovered, heartbroken, that many of the bathrooms had been renovated, with all the graffiti scrubbed away. Even though I had saved a couple of photos over the years, there are many bits of latrinalia that I will never see again.
The term latrinalia was coined by American folklorist Alan Dundes in his 1965 essay “Here I Sit—A Study of American Latrinalia.” Formerly known as ‘shithouse poetry,’ Dundes offers the alternative that combines latrine (toilet) with the suffix -analia, meaning a worthless collection of something. Yet seeing as latrinalia has existed since millennia (the oldest known works having been recorded in the latrines of Pompeii), stall vandals have clearly found this practice worthwhile.
The bathroom is the intersection between the public and private space. This liminality offers artists the sense of being cleaved from the ordered world, in a space momentarily suspended from established cultural and societal norms. In that sense, like other forms of graffiti, latrinalia is anti-structure.
But unlike, for instance, street graffiti, the spontaneous inscription of latrinalia is inherently private as well as anonymous. Any bathroom-goer can be the author of a given piece of latrinalia, which is why the translation of bathroom graffiti into other media causes it to lose its luster. Off the Stall!: Unconventional Bathroom Graffiti is a project by American artist Jake Anderson that compiles artistic transcriptions and reworkings of bathroom graffiti he has observed. This translation, though honoring the original art, cannot preserve the same sense of collectivity as well as ephemerality. Though the original writers maintain their anonymity, their presence is superimposed upon by the rewriter. Thus, latrinalia becomes associated with the particular rewriter and its life is extended under a new form.
The communal aspect of the public bathroom thus plays an important role in the art form for both artists and observers. The unnamed artist agrees for their art to be viewed by chance groups of solo bathroom-goers. Though the formation of these groups is influenced by factors such as location and gender, the daily rotation of bathroom users is never the same. This social dynamic charges bathroom graffiti with the potential for collective action.
In the Fall of 1990, a list of men’s names appeared in the women’s second-floor bathroom of Brown’s Rockefeller Library. Women had begun writing down the names of their alleged assaulters. The ‘Date Rape List’ contributed to the call to action on sexual assault across college campuses nationwide. Emily Bell, an Indy writer at the time, described the appearance of the list as controversial: critics argued that the List would become rampant with unfounded claims. Though, it should be noted that the original list was accompanied by a comment urging women to write down only the name of their assaulter, or, if they were writing on behalf of someone else, to first get the other survivor’s permission.
The University attempted to erase the List by redacting the names in dark brown paint. But the women took a step further. In a surprise collaborative effort, students copied down the List into notebooks in order to replicate it. Rewritten lists appeared in bathrooms in the Gate (a former dining hall), Alumnae Hall, the Sciences Library, and Pembroke Hall. The proliferation of these lists was recounted with an almost mystical quality, as though spread not by individuals but by the power of the List itself or the will of the community of women.
When remembering the List, Erin Calfee B’11 discerns a false sense of unity, as the anonymity of the list makes it impossible to single out individual writers and rewriters. The varied conversations that occurred within the larger group of women became reduced to the homogenous voices of a select few. Not all women felt safe writing the names of their attackers; as Bell writes, one survivor feared that writing her attacker’s name would, in turn, reveal her identity. Thus, the private aspect of the bathroom becomes complicated. The ambiguity of latrinalia authorship can become another form of erasure in which the multiplicity of voices narrows down to certain individuals.
“You have erased our list, but that doesn’t erase their crimes. WE, THE SURVIVORS, ARE STILL HERE.”
The creative activism was brought to a national audience by the New York Times. In the end, Brown reformed its policies to explicitly define sexual misconduct as a punishable offense, allowing for restraining measures between the accuser and the
Inspired by latrinalia at RISD
accused, and providing counseling for all parties regardless of disciplinary outcome. For incoming members of the class of 1995, a mandatory meeting, “Sex Without Consent: Implications for Brown Students,” was held during orientation.
Jesselyn Brown B’92, one of the four spokeswomen for the effort, had said in her interview with Bell, “I think it’s important not to forget the rape list. Campuses tend to suffer from institutional amnesia. We need to remember so it does not happen again, so the same mistakes are not made.” Here, latrinalia acted as a platform for change. But if both the markings and their memory can be effaced by time, how do ephemeral art forms retain their value?
I was comforted by the writing of Ana Escobedo B’11 who had also felt the loss of her beloved latrinalia. She describes the women’s bathroom at the Gate and the poetry, both original and quoted, inscribed on the doors. Reading these lines of poetry had become part of the habitual practices of bathroom-goers. The latrinalia had embedded itself into their everyday life. Yet, because no one knew who had written the poetry, the writing essentially became composed by multiple voices: the original poet, the scrawler, and the readers.
But as is inevitably the case with bathroom graffiti, the bathroom doors were wiped clean, the writings never intended to last forever. Yet by etching themselves into our collective memory, the words live on, achieving a kind of immortality, even when the physical architecture changes. And is that not the power of art? To have a life of its own? Do the blank walls not offer a canvas for the future vandal to express their thoughts and political convictions? There is comfort to be found in the ephemeral. Even when this lavatory art oscillates between erasure and creation—whether that be adding new lines to existing ones, or something entirely new—latrinalia reminds us that the ambition of art is not simply the creation of material objects, but the actions, feelings, and scribbled replies that they elicit from the viewer.
AYLA LUCIA TOSUN B’26 knows the best bathroom on campus.
( TEXT DESIGN ILLUSTRATION
MEMORY AND MOURNING
IN HAN KANG’S HUMAN ACTS
MAY 1980, DECEMBER 2024
c On October 26, 1979, South Korean president Park Chung-hee was shot in the head.
A military coup soon followed, executed by Major General Chun Doo-hwan—the man tasked with investigating the president’s assassination. Chun was part of the conservative Democratic Justice Party, although he staged a coup for his personal ambitions rather than for the benefit of the party. Chun’s succession of Park’s authoritarian dictatorship with his own military dictatorship prompted an outbreak of pro-democracy movements across Korea. On May 15, 1980, 100,000 civilians gathered in Seoul Station to protest Chun’s self-ordained leadership, to condemn his enactment of martial law, and to call for direct presidential elections as a part of nationwide democratic reform. On May 17, 1980, Chun extended the existing martial law and implemented repressive measures such as the closing of universities and the banning of all political activity, setting the stage for the Gwangju Uprising in the far southwest of the country.
Gwangju City is a major city in the Honam region of Korea and the hometown of Kim Dae-jung, the 8th president of South Korea and a significant pro-democracy activist at the time. Chun justified his brutal crackdown on the demonstrations by insisting that they had been instigated by Kim, who was falsely accused of being a spy for North Korea. The conflict escalated from May 18 to May 20 as paratroopers indiscriminately opened fire throughout public spaces in Gwangju, harming and killing demonstrators and bystanders alike. By May 21, the Provincial Office in Gwangju was occupied by armed
protestors who drove the military away from the city, and resisted the government’s attempts at negotiation. Fearing a civilian counterattack, they were forced to withdraw, and for the next five days, the citizens of Gwangju controlled the Provincial Office. On May 27, Operation Sangmu-Chungjeong took place: troops enforcing martial law changed out of their uniforms, disguised themselves as regular soldiers, moved into the city, and reasserted control of the posts majoritarily without conflict. This was the first step toward the military’s complete reoccupation of the city.
Although the exact numbers are debated, 166 immediate deaths and 2,617 injuries constitute a total of 2,783 people recognized as victims of May 18. Out of those dead, 58 were in their teens, and 64 were in their twenties. Police and soldiers took violent retribution against residents, especially young people and students, who were at the forefront of organizing and participating in demonstrations. Both initially and over subsequent months, people were taken away and interrogated, tortured, and executed. Chun stayed in power until 1988, when a series of further protests against the brutality of his regime forced him to step down, ending his dictatorship. Later that year, his declaration was followed by a constitutional amendment that established a direct election system with a single five-year term, firmly cementing South Korea’s nascent democracy. Chun was sentenced to death in 1996.
The 5.18 commemoration ceremony is the only ceremony that is simultaneously broadcast by all three terrestrial broadcast companies. Kim Dae-jung
was the first president to attend the commemoration ceremony, during the 20th anniversary of the Uprising. Roh Moo-hyun attended for all five years of his presidency from 2003 to 2008. Attendance dwindled and the meaning of the ceremony was diluted after the conservative party took power with the election of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye respectively. Right-wing extremists have challenged the memory of the Uprising, calling it a riot instigated by North Korean communists, and conservative politicians have used such defamatory claims to justify their reticence about the ceremony. The absence of the leaders of the conservative party during one of the most important ceremonies in Korea signifies the ideological conflict the commemoration has come to symbolize, as it is no longer seen as a memorial but a political testimony.
The simplification of the Uprising into a symbol of modernity instead of an anti-establishment struggle speaks to the inaccuracy of the popular historical evaluation of the event as a civilian-wide sacrifice for the attainment of democracy. The narrative of Gwangju effaces its beginnings as an anti-authoritarian movement and channels its spirit into a broader national celebration of patriotism, where Gwangju is not mourned but rather honored as the blueprint of what good citizens should be doing for their country.
Human Acts, written in 2014 by recent Nobel Prize awardee Han Kang, uplifts anti-hegemonic narratives instead of erasing them. In the novel, she considers
seven different narrative voices clustered around one life lost: The Boy, Dong-ho, of the original Korean title, 소년이 온다, Sonyeon-i Onda, or The Boy is Coming By centering the characters’ lives during and after the Uprising, Kang suggests that the survivors of Gwangju are not the heroes or martyrs that the collective memory of Korea pushes them to be. Their personhood, taken away from them as the result of an all-encompassing nationalist rhetoric in the years after the Uprising and turned into nothing more than piles of bodies or numbers in a report, is returned to them.
In her 2024 Nobel Prize lecture, Kang deliberates on the Korean title of the novel, Sonyeon-i Onda ‘Onda’ “is the present tense of the verb ‘oda,’ to come.” By placing the killed boy in the present, she redefines the city and the people he represents not as historical artifacts or noble precedents, but as continuous presences. Because “human cruelty and dignity existed in extreme parallel” in the Gwangju of May 1980, the name now not only refers to the city itself, but also becomes a common noun that approaches us “across time and space, and always in the present tense.” For the characters in the book, and even for Kang herself, nothing ever dies, and nothing is ever allowed to die. Human Acts is not a historical novel. The open wound of Gwangju reaches across decades and distance, as a dark undercurrent of present-day Korea that slowly poisons the subconscious of its society.
In the chapter “The Prisoner, 1990” (or “Metal and Blood,” as in the original Korean), a man is interviewed by a professor researching those taken prisoner for their involvement in the Uprising. His memories of his participation in the demonstrations and his subsequent months-long detention constitute the most violent chapter in the novel, as he describes in excruciating detail the black Monami Biro pen that scraped away at his knuckle bones, the cigarette stubs against his eyelids, and the persistent hunger that turned him into a brute animal. The Prisoner also recounts his relationship with Kim Jin-su, a college student who had led the civilian occupation of the Provincial Office, and who took his own life a decade later. He and Jin-su are unable to forget the torture they endured at the hands of Chun’s military government: the desecration of their souls, the metamorphosis of their bodies into something lesser than.
Both The Prisoner and Jin-su cannot keep jobs; they rely on alcohol and medication to drag themselves through thankless days. Kang thus establishes the total dehumanization of the Gwangju citizens at the hands of the government. It is a brutality that lingers long after the deed is done, “the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.” The prisoners are starved and given meagre food to share— not only to inflict physical agony, but also to strip away their humanity. Men that were once prepared to die for Gwangju are degraded to fighting each other over scraps of kimchi and rice and to spitting out false confessions that fit neatly into a pre-planned narrative. The Prisoner realizes that the military wanted to prove that “you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals,” and that, therefore, their protests never mattered.
It is a deliberate breaking of the will, a calculated removal of individuality. Their bodies, once instruments to actualize their cause, become uninhabited lumps of meat. This decay is meant to expunge the meaning and purpose of the Uprising, much like how modern Korean remembrance effaces the individuals of Gwangju themselves and forces them into symbols of democracy when democracy itself is not completely blameless. In 2002, the victims’ bodies were re-interred in a new cemetery elevated to the status of National 5.18 Democratic Cemetery and were simultaneously recognized as Citizens of Democratic Merit. This acknowledgement similarly erases their individual identities under the broad umbrella of noble martyrdom akin to soldiers killed in national conflict—which also conveniently erases the role of the state in their killing. They are no longer people who existed beyond the Uprising: the meaning of their lives is found in their death and their belonging to a mass identity distinguishable only by the brutality they were forced to endure.
The second chapter of the novel follows the perspective of Jeong-dae, who speaks in the second person, addressing his friend Dong-ho. A middle schooler who is shot and killed as the military moves into Gwangju, Jeong-dae is separated from his body—a corpse that sits beneath hundreds of others
in a mass grave—and his soul is forced to watch as rot colonizes them. It’s not until he’s aware of another singular victim that arrives at the mass funeral pyre that he begins to hate the sight of their “filthy, rotting faces, reeking in the sun.” Unlike the rest of the citizens, who have been simply tossed into the pile, the new body bears traces of having been cared for. It is washed, wounds sutured, head bandaged. Jeong-dae feels envy and sadness at the sight of this, the “tangible record of having been … valued,” and the infinite nobility with which the body is thus imbued. Through the contrast between the two corpses, Kang suggests that the dehumanization of Gwangju by the state occurs not only in the inflicted pain and the subsequent cycle of memory and trauma, but also in the desecration of the bodies of the citizens.
No funeral is held either for Jeong-dae, nor the countless bodies that burned with him on that pyre. The care the clean body receives is a marker of nobility at the same time that it is an expression of grief, a methodical and controlled mourning. For those who could not mourn, however, grief stretches beyond and tinges their lives in its melancholic hue. Gwangju approaches the present not only because it leaves behind abrasions that ache at the sight of a Monami Biro pen, but also because so much of its mourning remains unfinished.
In light of this interrupted funeral, South Korea’s blatant politicization of the annual commemoration ceremony moves beyond the realm of disrespect into outright cruelty. To warp a funeral into a stage for political and ideological trial is egregious. In Korean, the ceremony is referred to as “5.18민중항쟁기념행 사,” which translates roughly to “May 18 Democratic Uprising Commemorative Event.” The word used for “commemoration,” 기념 or kinyeom, has been increasingly associated with positive connotations in recent years—Koreans will often say that they will buy friends dinner in celebration, kinyeom, of something good that has happened in their life. Thus, given the context of what the remembrance of May 18 has turned into at the hands of the South Korean government, it seems distasteful to refer to the anniversary of the Uprising with a word that now bears celebratory overtones. We cannot be celebrating the attainment of democracy at the same time that we mourn the loss of those killed by the government.
In the face of atrocious violence and a complete loss of sensibility, what does it mean to be human? How do we remain human in a world that forces us to be less than? Should we even want to remain human, if, as The Prisoner experiences, to be human is to degrade and be degraded?
Kang posits that the love and care we hold for each other may be the thing that nurtures the humanity in us. The Prisoner wishes his body could be wiped off the face of the Earth—but he remembers Jin-su after his death and bears his coffin. Jeong-dae, though filled with hatred at the sight of his own body, wants to go to Dong-ho at the moment of his death “to ease the terror [he] must have felt.” We find humanity in the washing of the body, the small bites and soju that The Prisoner gives to Jin-su on the last day he sees him alive, and the clarity Jeong-dae feels when he puts into words his desire to be with his friend in his last moments. +++
On December 3, 2024, I received a text from my mother during my 9 a.m. seminar: Yoon declared martial law. Crazy motherfucker
It was the first declaration of martial law in South Korea since Gwangju. Although it was reversed after only six hours, my eyes tracked every news update available for the following week. Yoon Suk-yeol, now former president of South Korea, driven by irrational fear, stated in his declaration that martial law was necessary to push back against the opposition (the Democratic Party) “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In “The Prisoner, 1990,” Kang writes that conscience is “the most terrifying thing in the world.” This short quote went viral on Korean X (formerly Twitter) for encapsulating the moment of martial law—applicable to both the elite soldiers who stormed the National Assembly to prevent the nullification vote from taking place, and the thousands of Korean citizens who rushed to the same place in the dead of night to prevent the realization of martial law. At the foundation of the country’s mobilization against martial law sat Gwangju—its memory and
presence, the determination and sense of responsibility that Koreans both young and old felt to stop it from happening again. Citizens began to make advance payments at cafés and restaurants so protestors could eat for free, and taxi drivers didn’t charge when they learned that riders were going to the demonstrations. All throughout December and early January, protests calling for the impeachment of Yoon abounded.
The lightstick became a symbol of the demonstrations as young Korean women in their twenties and thirties brought the lightsticks of their respective fandoms to Yeouido—the location of the National Assembly. The Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper, writes that the women brought the brightest and most precious thing they own to the protests. Korea’s response to martial law supports Kang’s thesis: what allows us to remain human are radical displays of love, care, and solidarity. The lightstick as a symbol of the demonstrations is reminiscent of The Prisoner’s description of what he felt in the moment that he and the other demonstrators were occupying the Provincial Office: “the brilliance of that moment, the dazzling purity of conscience.”
As Kang accepted her Nobel Prize, she wore a black dress, the color of mourning. It’s hard to imagine how she felt at that moment: to write a novel so dense with grief and love, urging recognition of the festering presence of Gwangju in Korea, and then to see the contents of the novel translated so vividly to the present day.
“Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?”
The chapters narrated by Dong-ho’s mother and Seon-joo, a factory worker who volunteered with Dong-ho, offer an answer to her questions. The love and grief Seon-joo feels for him is what reignites her will to continue living. When she returns to Gwangju to die, she sees a photo of Dong-ho’s body that makes her “blood seethe back to life.” Grief, then, might be the means through which the dead may save the living.
It might have been the enduring grief for Gwangju in all of us that moved Korea to the National Assembly, in the way that Dong-ho’s mother spends the years after his death protesting against Chun. But while her chapter, titled “Where The Flowers Bloom” in the original Korean, is interwoven with expressions of unbridled rage, most of it is told in a personal and sorrowful voice that, due to its use of the Gwangju dialect, is impossible to translate into English. Dong-ho is made human again in the depths of his mother’s memories—in the most striking reminiscence, she recalls when they would walk along the riverside to go see his father. Dong-ho takes his mother’s hand and pulls her towards the light, where the shadows don’t reach. “Why are we walking in the dark,” he says, “Let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”
On December 14, 2024, Park Chan-dae, floor leader of the Democratic Party, gives a speech explaining the impeachment motion against Yoon before the vote takes place. In it, he answers Kang’s question. The past can help the present, and the dead can save the living, because, he states, “May 1980 saved December 2024.” He adds that, if it hadn’t been for the citizens who rushed to the National Assembly in outrage over martial law and the lawmakers who climbed over the assembly’s fence to vote to nullify the declaration, South Korea now would have been no different from the Gwangju of May 1980. “South Korea, and South Korean democracy,” he says, “is deeply indebted to Gwangju.”
May 1980 and December 2024 teach us that we must love enough to resist, and remember enough to grieve. Grief, memory, remembrance, and resistance all result from love while also motivating it. Love moves us forward through times that only seem to be growing darker, through censorship and deliberate acts of violence to shame us into silence and diminish who we are.
Gwangju, through the decades, has become a common noun and continues to approach us in the present, suspended in time and space for all it represents. I dare to imagine it will take us by the hand and lead us to the path where the sun still shines and moments achieve their purest brilliance.
NAHYE LEE B’28 is standing where the flowers bloom
c My experience with my heritage language of Ilonggo is fragmented. I am always in a state of learning as I trace the speech of my parents and other family members. I hoped to share this experience with my peers by filling this souvenir of unclear dashed lines. I think about the power that language and design has to connect with others, and the opportunities that participatory design has to offer. I invite the readers to also fill out the worksheet (as shown here). Trace along the curves whether you are right or wrong. What matters at the end of the day is you try.
MEDIODIA R’26 has been loving a good burger.
Nahidlaw Ako Sa Imo Inkjet print, 3’’ x 5’’, 2024
RAFAEL
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE CHINESE CYBERSCAM
( TEXT CINDY LI DESIGN JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION NICOLE ZHU )
c “Did you open an account with AT&T China recently? We have an account under [your name] that registered over 4000 investment text messages in China under review.”
“We have a package waiting for you at the Chinese embassy, please return this call at your soonest convenience.”
“We confiscated some of your belongings from the border, did you arrive in [country] recently?”
Many Chinese international students traveling abroad for the first time receive these kinds of calls. Those who follow the callers’ compelling narrative soon find themselves, in one way or another, reporting to a local Chinese police department for identity fraud. Sitting alone on their phones, isolated from friends and family, they are scrutinized by ‘special investigation unit officers’ who demand personal information, 24-hour virtual surveillance, and absurd amounts of ransom. Within hours or days of contact, the investigators will disappear without a trace.
当下那个瞬间我大脑一片空白。我是麻木的， 是呆滞的。我甚至[到现在]哭不出来。
(That moment [when I realized this was a scam] my mind was blank. I was numb. I was stupefied. I couldn’t cry, even today.)
就是你会对自己被愚弄后感到的羞耻可笑， 无力的愤怒。对家人的愧疚。对过去的懊悔。
(You would cringe at your own shame for being fooled, helplessly angry. Immense guilt towards your family. Regret for the past.)
(You begin to doubt if real justice exists in this world because the moment [the scam] ends, they’ve shattered your every moral and belief. You start questioning everything),
expressed Little Red Book user 金灿妮, who posted to the social media platform detailing her experience with a police impersonation scam. She concludes with a warning, consoling other users and students studying abroad:
(If you’ve already experienced this scam or other unfortunate circumstances like these, I hope you won’t be too harsh on yourself, because everyone will fall for a scam eventually, you just haven’t encountered your own script. Don’t lose hope in humanity, because humanity was always like this.)
INTERNATIONAL SCAM CALLS, TRAFFICKED LABOR, AND THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL SUBJECT IN CYBERSPACE
While some of the comments on her post scolded her naïveté and lack of experience, remarking how gullible young people must be to fall for a scam so ludicrous in premise, many also extended their sympathy. Having been in the same position themselves, some commenters were thankful for her bravery in sharing her experience despite pervasive attitudes of hostility.
+++
“Hey, is this [your name] from work?”
“Is this doctor [your name]? Just wanted to confirm my appointment.”
“Are you [your name], I’m [alias], we used to be classmates in high school, do you remember me?”
After responding with “wrong number,” many people find themselves charmed by a stranger through text messages. They end up chatting with their new friend about life, perhaps love, and eventually, investment. For those who trust the financial guidance of their new companion, they might find growth in their portfolio, as promised—but not for long. Via this “pig butchering scam” (a direct translation from the scam’s Mandarin name, “杀猪盘,” which likens the person being scammed to a pig being fattened for slaughter), their new friend will encourage them to invest more, take out loans, and deposit their life savings. But when they attempt to withdraw earnings, the apps will lock up with nothing but error messages. Within days, their portfolio, along with their friend, will disappear without a trace.
“It came as a very innocent message,” one woman told the BBC. “I said, ‘wrong number.’ He came back, ‘you look Chinese. Are you Chinese?’ And I said yes.
He had moved [to America] just before COVID, and then COVID hit, and so he’s not able to go home [to China]. He was a lonely man in need of comfort...” As their relationship deepened, she would go on to give ‘Jimmy’ 2.5 million dollars. Another woman was told by her scammer that he was from the same town in China where she was adopted: “He spent at least a month, daily, talking to me and cultivating my friendship.” As their relationship strengthened, her scammer introduced her to investing in crypto with her father. When she realized she could not withdraw her investments, it was too late. “I messed up my life. I messed up my dad’s life.” They lost a total of $390,000. +++
“Work from home in online marketing in Thailand.”
“Translators fluent in Chinese and English for Tech positions in Taiwan.”
“Looking for Actors in Xishuangbanna for ¥10,000.”
Throughout the pandemic, Chinese criminal organizations operating on the borders of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos converted their waning gambling, smuggling, and trafficking operations into elaborate cyberscam centers. Now, still posing online as tech and translation employers in neighboring nations, scam centers draw in prospective young workers, primarily from China and Southeast Asia, and then traffic them into enclosed high-security complexes. As the Digital Forensic Research Lab explains: “Many of the victims are young, well-educated, computer-literate, and multilingual; and while they struggled to find gainful employment during the pandemic, their skills make them desirable targets for this type of work.” In these camps, they are confiscated of their passports and forced to roleplay online police officers, telecom companies, legal officers, tech supporters, and singles-ready-to-mingle.
“The scam groups need to give trafficking victims the illusion that they could work their way out of this system,” said Mr. Lu, a kidnapped worker who shared his experience in a cyberscam facility with the New York Times. Trafficked workers are given the opportunity to climb the ranks and earn ‘credits’ in the compound, but ultimately, they’re never anything more than exploitable labor to the criminal organizations. Quickly, Lu realized the impossibility of asking to be freed or paying his own ransom. When he reached out to his family in China and shared operational information about the criminal organization with the Times, he was tortured. The more he asked to leave, the more they beat him with PVC pipes and shocked him with stun batons. Videos of Lu’s torture were sent to his parents with a ransom attached. On the advice of Mr. Peng, a previous escapee who helps rescue other workers from these encampments, Lu’s
parents did not pay the ransom. Lu was rescued from the compound after 18 days of torture.
Rakesh, a chemical engineer in India looking for employment, accepted a listing for an IT job in Bangkok, Thailand, but instead found himself on the border of Myanmar. After having his passport confiscated, he told CNN, a Chinese man handed him a contract to become a professional scammer. “‘This you need to do... otherwise I will kill you.’” Rakesh refused and was thrown into a cell with no food or water for three days. He decided to do whatever it took to survive. Months into his confinement, he called an Indian embassy nearby only to be told by officials, “You people have landed in trouble by your decision, so you have to wait.” Another worker, Javed, spoke to CNN from the compound. He refused to work on the scams and was punished for his resistance, but he persisted. He told CNN, “I don’t want to destroy someone’s life because my life, my life is almost finished… If you can, please help us,” he pleaded. “Take us from this hell.”
There’s a cyberscam designed for everyone: your demise written by the life you’ve made for yourself.
Cyberscams are everywhere. Stories of financial ruin, emotional devastation, and labor trafficking draw international coverage, from police warnings to John Oliver segments. But the crime is located in cyberspace—a land in flux, incapable of retaining perfectly mappable borders to the material world. It is the production of symbols, simulations, and systems through servers, trans-Atlantic cables, satellites, Wi-Fi and VPNs, and human transportation that makes cyber ‘space’ a place of potential and imagination. The question remains, is just policing of online national borders even possible in such a space?
Cybercrime’s global reach, along with the expansive nature of the Internet, makes it difficult to police by a series of mutually assured nation states. Since most financially motivated cybercrimes cannot qualify as acts of warfare, they are instead relegated to the criminal legal system. Though each country aims to hold their citizens accountable for their individual transgressions, when it comes to international subjects and cases, the acts of defending citizens and bringing justice to the offenders are not always aligned. The precarious national affiliation of the harmed, the offenders, and the sites of harm become prominent in narratives of policing.
In warnings, press releases, and investigative reports, U.S. agencies such as the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the FBI consistently identify the “Chinese community in the U.S.” as the harmed group, despite the diversity in citizenship held by the targeted communities—there’s a notable difference in national identification between migrants, immigrants, and diaspora. IC3 asks people to follow steps that will “reduce the risk of becoming a victim,” a tactic derived from the FBI’s cyber safety strategy to “impose risk and consequences on cyber adversaries.” Acknowledging the impossibility of any organization’s ability to effectively combat all crime, in 2020, the FBI announced its intent to work with public and private sector partners to protect the U.S. network, infrastructure, and financial and intellectual property. This counterintelligence effort in the cybercrime sector is part of the “China Initiative”— established to counter “the grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.”
Despite attempts to differentiate “the Government of China and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” from “the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage,” the pervasive use of the umbrella term “China” creates what scholar Margret K. Lewis describes as “an overinclusive conception of the threat,” which “attaches a criminal taint to entities that possess ‘China-ness,’ based on PRC [People’s Republic of China] nationality, PRC national origin, Chinese ethnicity, or other expressions of connections with ‘China.’” In the context of criminal prosecution, not only does this framing transform “China-ness” into a condemned offense, but also the language itself “anthropomorphizes China into a condemned form,” a singular perpetrator instead of a complex governing body. Lewis argues that while the U.S. criminal justice system does not allow guilt by association, “the China Initiative has created threat by association.” Even when the agency occasionally clarifies that the Initiative is not targeting all individuals possessing “China-ness,” the distinction only goes as far as to create a binary of all “China-ness” as either for the CCP (bad, stealing, and maligned) or against the CCP (good, innovative, and freedom-loving).
For those within the “US-based Chinese community” who find themselves targeted by Chinese cybercrimes in America, whether to report such a crime becomes a matter of national security and personal identity. In the FBI’s framework, “Chinese in America” is a U.S. threat-by-association unless proven innocent. The phrase performs a double function; while “Chinese” is perceived as a constant possibility for “threat,” the preposition “in” both places the presence of threat in national space and defines that space as anywhere a threat might be present. By acknowledging that the possibility of crime is everywhere, the American network justifies its juris-
organizations responsible for spreading awareness and educating the masses, “个人应当加强电信网 络诈骗防范意识。单位、个人应当协助、配合有 关部门依照本法规定开展反电信网络诈骗工作。 (Individuals should raise cyber safety awareness; cooperate with relevant departments as anti-cyber fraud activities unfold).”
The bill rollout gave way to the launch of the “国家反诈中心APP (National Anti-Fraud Center app),” a combined online and offline information campaign where police officers led numerous community engagement and education efforts. Other communal efforts to warn citizens of cyber fraud can be exemplified with street banners. One such banner reads: “网恋邂逅高富帅，白富美，引诱投资被骗 20万，下一个会是你吗？谨防长线杀猪盘！ (Fell in Love online with a Tall/Rich/Handsome, White/Rich/Pretty, baited into investing and losing 200 thousand, will you be the next? Protect yourself from Pig Butchering Scams!)” This intensely multimodal and holistic containment of cybercrime is not without results. One press release from the state council writes “31,000 telecom scam suspects handed over to China by Myanmar” in November 2023, and “around 41,000 suspects transferred from Myanmar to Chinese custody” by January 2024.
The mobilizing of a physical border patrol to contain a national cyberthreat creates an almost inverse model for expanding digital national borders. Where the U.S. sees incapacitating ‘foreign’ attacks as the motivation for mobilizing sectors, China begins with the retrieval of betrayers to the nation. It identifies “China-ness” as something that should be contained and safeguarded to justify the use of force outside of the border, especially considering the already geopolitically-contentious relationship between China and Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. The identification of containment as desirable and patriotic also makes the very presence of “Chinaness” outside the border a source of shame.
On cybercrimes targeting “Chinese in America,” the CCP strategy for cyber defense is comparatively unconcerned with addressing the nationality of the targeted citizens abroad. The effort to reduce cybercrime in China, unlike in America, sets out with the belief that there is a defined digital ‘border wall’ to be protected at all costs. Whereas the U.S. portrays the threat as an external force jeopardizing U.S. infrastructure, the CCP focuses on the ‘stray Chinese subject’ in need of containment. This need also extends to land borders, with the cybersecurity bill in December 2022 giving border patrol, state council, national security council, and foreign relations the power to act on suspicion of cyber criminal activity. The same bill also made corporations and institutions responsible for risk-prevention and enforcement. In the language of the bill, nation-wide responsibility for cyber safety, both legal and moral, also falls on the individual. Not only are public and private sector
This shame is especially heaped onto the Chinese workers trafficked to the cyberscam compounds across the border. Chinese law enforcement is more likely to offer assistance to kidnapped and trafficked workers who choose to “自首” (directly translated as “suicide in honor,” though here it is simply “to turn themselves in”). However, many workers do not choose criminality when they have left the country’s borders. One escaped worker applied for a job in Thailand after having to drop out of university because of the posting’s appeal for “a generous salary [and a] better work-life balance.” Another worker found a position in Thailand after he had dropped out of school, scolded by his father for wasting time at a cybercafe and chatting with a childhood best friend. These workers were exploited by organized criminals—they had no intention to commit cybercrime. Yet, the Chinese state only offers them escape from scam compounds on the condition they re-enter Chinese borders as criminals: What crime did they commit? Attempting to leave the country?
For both the U.S. and China, the need to delineate national belonging and digital border walls becomes both a cementing and retelling of who belongs where and who, or what, is worth protecting. Faced with the mismatch of ‘nationals,’ ‘national land,’ and ‘national ideas,’ the subject of protection and prosecution falls doubly on the people caught in the fraud. After failing to reach and punish individual breaches of security, both national security forces turn to telling subjects to police their own actions through shame.
This transition from demands of compliance to reproduction of national security within the self reverberates through all levels of cybersecurity in both nations—reframing cybercrime as a failure of personal rather than national security. For the trafficked workers, diaspora, and im/migrant communities, this notion only further endangers their already precarious position to both states.
However, national shame hinges on a personal desire to belong to nationhood. For many citizens that find themselves between nations, the very act of clinging to one nation threatens their successful assimilation to the other. At the same time, as the nation stubbornly clings onto the individual, it denies their ability to participate in national belonging anywhere. One is forever haunted by nations, ‘allergic’ to the self.
Though a nation-less place, cyberspace also becomes the harbor for space-making outside of nations.
Criminal cyberscam organizations themselves may represent an extreme example of finding belonging outside of nations. Located in border areas and private channels, they have managed to both completely befuddle existing national security and make a mockery of the promise of capital economics through their own capitalist exploitation.
Across police impersonation, “pig butchering,” and working abroad scams, the root of the simulacra lies in a convincing appeal to both national allegiance and economic freedom—the two very fantasies that these organizers know to be impossible for the subjects they are scamming.
The police impersonation scam, at its core, relies on convincing the subject that they haven’t done wrong—it is someone else’s wrong committed in their name that forms the national threat. To continue cooperating with the ‘investigation’ is to clear the innocence of your name, protect your family from future fraud, get justice for the ‘victims’ of this nameless crime, and protect the future of the country. The scammers complete the illusion of surveillance with exaggerated tactics that cohere into a fantastical vision of effective policing: transfers between investigative departments and ranks, non-disclosure agreements, 24/7 photo and video tracking, detailed written confessionals, monitored financial activities, and high sums to post bail. Although much of the script and its premise seems ludicrous when observed out of context, an engaging hook like package deliveries, telecom complaint centers, or embassies, lends an air of authenticity and urgency that can nudge people deeper into the scheme.
For the “pig butchering scam,” the fundamental fantasy that victims have to believe is that someone might genuinely care for them and that they have absolute control over their investments. In a leaked onboarding script for trainees, scammers are told to start with a compliment. “每个人都一样，如 果有人赞美你，哪怕是假的你也爱听 (Everyone’s the same, if someone compliments you, even if it’s fake, you’ll be happy to hear it.)” Through caring and attentive conversations, they attempt to identify subjects who are likely to stay for the long run. A detailed schedule outlines topics of conversation like
work, home, family, relationship history, and zodiac signs. The scammers are supposed to ask about the subjects’ financial and emotional stressors, then build a personal story that suggests investment will be the answer to their pain points. There’s an emphasis on aspirations as the hook into investing: “找到过 去客户错过的机会，了解客户的梦想 (Find missed opportunities in clients’ past, get to know their aspirations.) 鼓励客户做事情不要只有想法而没有执 行力 (Encourage clients to act on their dreams and aspirations.)” Similar to the veneer of love and trust embedded in the script, the ‘trading platforms’ are rigged from the very beginning. One victim recounts to ABC News, “I was like, ‘I’m not giving you money. That’s not happening.’ So that’s when he started, ‘No, you don’t give it to me. You establish your own account, and I’ll guide you.’”
In the hiring calls that lure prospective young workers, there’s an emphasis on mobility—of workers being able to earn money and get out. Thailand, Xishuangbanna, and Taiwan, as described in these ads, are tech and tourism havens where you can have complete control over your work schedule and pacing. For the young people in countries like China, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where recent college grads have faced disproportionate unemployment, these postings for dignified, modern careers are a miracle. Critically, these postings also emphasize that you can go back. You don’t have to betray your national allegiance to pursue financial freedom—you can have both by working abroad and bringing wealth back to your family and country.
To an extent, all of these scams can be read through a frame of satire: broadcasted to unsuspecting subjects, primed by the failed promises of the ‘real’ national security and financial advice in their lives. Scam compounds act like a well-oiled performance troupe, transferring subjects from performer to performer until they are wholeheartedly captivated, giving every penny in the fear/hope that what beckons them is true.
The realism of these well-packaged schemes hinges on the mobility and unpolished aesthetic of cyberspace. Only in the world of grainy webcam footage, poorly framed office desks and white walls, homemade GIFs, and asynchronous photo-sharing can the aesthetics of ‘legitimacy’ become democratized. When border screenings, parking tickets, healthcare, insurance, and banking share the same low-fidelity liminality as a community blog or online shopping app, who’s to say which one is going to misuse your personal data? Through confusing
aesthetics of legitimacy, organized crime hijacks the outskirts of national regulation, crafting an economically ‘pure’ market. The product they sell, whether their ‘customer’ is aware or not, is the fantasy of national safety and financial freedom. In some ways, the real threat this parody poses to the government is cybercrime’s ability to transform national incompetence and falsehoods into a rampant and unstoppable global satire.
But the tug-of-war over ideas as profound as nationality and criminality has real costs on the people caught in the fray. In Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, she describes contemporary science fiction as “full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” A cyborg is also a creature constructed from social reality and lived relations critical to our political construction—a world-changing fiction. A hybrid existence without origin, without public or private, never quite real or fake. Avatars wear names like Jessica, Clara, Chang, and Wen, they are made and molded by private imaginations and the aspirations of their conversation subjects. They are ‘alive’ in the limbo of cyberspace, ready to praise and intimidate. They are also the outcries of a labor force bled dry. Thousands, crowded in a room with nothing but screens, tortured should they refuse, reproduce this dream until their bodies are broken and bruised, “a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic.”
Cyberscam’s very presence, everywhere yet untraceable, patriotic yet traitorous, transgresses every duality upheld by national fantasies. Their ability to simulate, exploit, and profit exceeds any nation.
To borrow from cultural theorist Mel Chen’s analysis, the story of cyberscam becomes “a story of toxicity, security, and nationality, [but] also necessarily about labor: when it is registered, and when it is hidden, and who pays what kind of attention to whose labor.” In its contagious, unstoppable form, cybercrime “achieves its own animacy as an agent of harm.”
Cyberscams’ crude mockery effectively forces hundreds of millions to confront the very incompetence of national promises. There’s nothing like fake police and fake investors caring more about your value than ‘real’ police and ‘real’ investors to make people lose faith in the promise of national belonging. In its wake, there’s no choice but to “witness the inherent brokenness of ‘races,’ ‘geographics,’ and ‘bodies’ as a system of segregation” across nations.
But I hope waking up from a cybercrime can also be an awakening from national shame itself. Despite the pain cybercrime can inflict, I am hopeful that the ability to recognize fraud and commit to disbelief can seed political power. +++
I was scammed by fake police.
On October 21st, 2023, I received a phone call from a telecom company stating, in Mandarin, that my name and my identity were being used to commit cybercrime in mainland China. Against my better judgment, I believed them. I cried. I believed the Chinese state had the ability to ruin the life of my family, scattered across three countries. For months, I lived the shame that I would never be a Chinese subject, yet for the people I called kin, I felt I must do my due diligence to a nation that holds no care for my being. Because I had no financial accounts in China for exploitation, my ‘case officer’ disappeared. Wrenched from political use, I fell, face-to-face with the reality that what shame I felt was only an amplification of shame I’ve carried my whole life as a transnational subject. Nothing was new, only my realization.
My sincerest gratitude to Professor Sunhay You. For your rigor, patience, and kindness. Without the foundations of Asian American Literature & Affect, I would not be the writer I am today.
CINDY LI R’26 is building silly websites to start a cyber revolution <3
something to
( TEXT COLE MESSINGER
DESIGN SELIM KUTLU
ILLUSTRATION
JULIA CHENG )
c In my waking hours I cave to caffeine addiction. Relief. Remember, death still waits around the corner. Is it ever painless? It comes in a few colors, maybe more, depends on who you ask, but I don’t know anyone who’s died.
Will I always be scared? I torture myself wondering what would you say if I asked, What are the things you want to tell me? What good are words anyway?
I ask you to resist entropy. Chewing gum and chain smok ing. We’re beating the traffic tonight. Jazz makes new colors: how do you tell someone you think they’re pretty? Red green—closed-eyelidded saxophone solo— yellow red green—honking horns. Smells of latenight/ earlymorning pizza. Stomp home on puddles. Buses drive by soaking. My umbrella broke years ago on a night with heavy winds I forgot the English language. Yours breaks trying to fit two in the space of one. Cowboys sans horses full speed down the highway. The backseat is cramped and more keep crawling in and on top of asses on laps on asses. Their names use bulbous sounds. I lose them all instantly.
This is when I tell you about the wealthiest people I know. In gory detail I describe the clothes they wear. An exercise in humanism. We agree that beauty comes with aging. It’s just fabric over our bodies: We joke about Brand Names. They’re going
In these foreign countries we travel, seatbelts are sacreligious: it’s common knowledge carcrashes only happen in america. I declare, god has abandoned us! You begin a lesson on Jouissance. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know the word. I nod along to your voice. Again again again.
Reds and whites. Browsing bottles with four-digit numbers and names in French. In offensive accents we speak to the characters at the register. Their anger amuses. We discover new synonyms for youth and run away without paying. My foot taps. We go home together and sit on the corners of a large Persian rug.
Now, I relive my past: the pain in my fingertips when I touched the spike of a cactus. As a boy I learned how not to cry. The memories arrive fractured. There’s no one to call for something new. I tiptoe time’s typical orga nization and I can’t remember whether my blood or tears were red. Am I dying? I speak just to fill the space between, something to keep from falling asleep.
Each conversation we’re talking around the pit in the center of our relationship. The words search for a rope, a bridge, something to—This isn’t unique. We find a rooftop, sitting on the edge talking standing looking down into the blackness. Each name we try it rejects. This is now a lesson in negative theology. It is not that. It is not that. It is not that. Each time we say those words we draw closer together. Solace hopes forgiveness. We take turns in a spitting competition. Will we talk ourselves into regret about the differences between love and sex? There is love without sex. Climax is a keyhole. Everything is duller in language none of it needs to be said. You take my finger and trace the shapes behind my eyes. Wherever I look I see glowing exit signs. I’m not ready to leave but here we are playing pretend, as if our actions have global consequences. In my waking life, I fall into each moment, a marionette suspended, tangled in thoughts and words, waiting for the strings to snap. I can’t recommend this sort of experience. We’re looking in the wrong directions, or not looking at all when I take a step forward and I find myself in the space between headlights and I realize I know everything: all my questions answered: death: love: and your voice in my head seems so far away now and all that’s left is red green green yellow red red green white.
COLE MESSINGER R’25 doesn’t know what to say these days.
MEANS HOME
THE DISCRIMINATION OF ARAB JEWS WITHIN IRAQ, ISRAEL, AND THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT
c “ ” Baba laughs to himself before asking, “Do you know what that means?” I shake my head. He lets a long stretch of silence settle between us before he speaks again. “You say this to the snails so they will leave their shell.” He waves his hand dismissively through the air. “Us kids, we must have been bored out of our minds. Singing to the snails, but”—he lifts his pointer finger—“it worked if you sang long enough.” He goes on to tell me how he would then pour salt on the snails and watch them die.
My Baba, Faroukh Natan, is part of a slowly disappearing community: Iraqi Jews. Prior to the establishment of Israel, there were an estimated 130,000 Jews living in Iraq, primarily in Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. With the acceleration of Nazism in the 1940s, anti-Jewish sentiment increased dramatically, and on June 1, 1941, during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, an antisemitic attack known as the Farhud broke out in Baghdad. During the Farhud, approximately 200 Jews were killed and an additional 1,000 to 2,000 were injured. The mass looting and destruction of over 900 Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues continued for nearly two days. These attacks irrevocably damaged the sense of security formerly held by the Jewish community in Iraq. Over 80 years later, the Farhud, and the increased antisemitism in following decades, is still vivid in the memories of surviving Iraqi Jews.
One evening, I am looking through a book of old photographs that Baba has kept from Iran and Iraq. I come across a black and white image of a handsome young man on a moped, with a slightly older-looking gentleman beside him. “That’s me. On my Vespa.” I am overjoyed by this glimpse at Baba, surely no older than I am now.
I ask who the man is beside him. “Our gardener. His name was Mohammad Reza.” I expect the story to end there, but Baba goes on. “He got run over by a car that broke his foot. We took him to the emergency room since he did not have any money. They were going to amputate his leg as it was cheaper than fixing it. Baba [Faroukh’s father] went there and paid for it. I remember, years later, [Mohammad] was part of the mob outside Baba’s office shouting ‘death to the Jews.’” These betrayals from those once close to Faroukh’s family often appear, almost casually, in conversations of his past.
Once, I asked him if he thought he would remember an act of kindness just as vividly. He said, “I do.” His family had lived in Iraq for as long as he could remember, right up until the Farhud. Faroukh’s
parents recalled that their neighbor, a Muslim man, came to them one day and told them he feared he would no longer be able to protect them. Up until that point, this neighbor had watched over Faroukh’s family and their home to prevent intruders, robbery, and vandalism. With antisemitism rising in Iraq, he felt his efforts were no longer enough to keep them safe, and he urged them to flee the country. In the early 1940s, Faroukh’s immediate family left for Iran. Many of his cousins, relatives, and members of the greater Iraqi-Jewish community remained, but any hopes of reestablishing the former conditions of Jewish life in Iraq were quickly fading.
+++
In a speech made at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in 1947, Iraq’s foreign minister Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali voiced concern that the establishment of an Israeli state would deteriorate the conditions for Arab Jews in the Middle East. “In Iraq alone, we have about one hundred and fifty thousand Jews who share with Muslims and Christians all the advantages of political and economic rights. Harmony prevails among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But any injustice imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine will disturb the harmony among Jews and non-Jews in Iraq; it will breed inter-religious prejudice and hatred.” Al-Jamali’s prediction turned out to be entirely correct.
In July 1948, among rising tensions between Iraq and the newly established Israeli state, Zionism was declared a capital offense in Iraq. Any Iraqi Jew could be convicted on the sworn testimony of only two Muslim witnesses. In the following months, Jews were forbidden from banking or making foreign currency transactions. Eventually, all Jewish workers and officials in government departments were discharged. Money was taken, homes were destroyed, and passports frozen; suspects were tortured, fined, imprisoned, or killed. The execution of Shafiq Ades, a Syrian-born Iraqi Jew, is generally considered the final act that solidified the need for Iraqi Jews to flee. Ades, despite no existing evidence that he supported Zionism (by some accounts, he was outwardly anti-Zionist), was charged with the offense of Zionism and accused of financially supporting the Israeli military. His trial lasted only three days, during which he was unable to plead his case, was allowed no witnesses on his behalf, and was found guilty by a known anti-Jewish judge. Ades was hanged in front of his home before a crowd of around 12,000 individuals. The execution of Ades, a well-known and well-respected businessman, displayed to the greater Jewish community that even wealth and status could no longer protect them. Even a Jew who expressed no support for Zionism was at risk. It solidified the assumption within Iraqi society that a Jewish Arab would, inherently, abandon any existing loyalties to their home country in favor of supporting Zionism and the establishment of Israel. As I continued to research, it became increasingly clear that the establishment of an Israeli state in formerly Mandatory Palestine played a significant role in the rise of antisemitism within Iraq. I found myself growing curious about Baba’s own perspective on this and if he felt any resentment towards Israel or Zionism. “No. Not really. I remember we were listening to the
radio when the UN announced [the establishment of an Israeli state]. [Our family] thought it was a good thing. We didn’t expect it to happen.” As I continued looking into the accounts of other Iraqi Jews, Baba’s categorization of Israel’s establishment as a “good thing” seemed to be a shared sentiment among a large number of Arab Jews at the time. The feasibility of Jewish existence in Iraq was dwindling, and there was hope that an Israeli state would deliver on its promise as a safe haven for all Jews. Some Arab Jews believed there would be a place for them in Israeli society, something they had been denied in their home countries. In many ways, the Iraqi government’s fear of Iraqi Jewish support for Zionism was self-fulfilling. Although Iraq had previously banned Jews from leaving the country, they temporarily reversed this ban in 1950. A bill was passed allowing a one-year time frame in which Iraqi Jews could emigrate to Israel if they relinquished their Iraqi citizenship. The Zionist movement was eager to facilitate this mass immigration. A Jewish population outnumbering the native Palestinians was the only way to fully realize early Zionist aspirations. Quickly, a massive airlift operation called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was established, aiding the arrival of 120,000 to 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel between 1951 and 1952.
For years, I have known these as real but distant facts. I didn’t know what intimate knowledge Baba held of this event. “It was the first time I was on a plane. 1951, I think.” It was just over a year after
(the Nakba, which translates to the catastrophe), in which the Palestinian Arab population was ethnically cleansed by the early Israeli militias through violent displacement, dispossession of property, and the suppression of identity, culture, and political liberties. By the end of
, over 75 percent of former Mandatory Palestine was claimed as the new
( TEXT BENJAMIN NATAN DESIGN KAY KIM )
Faroukh, Iran, late 1950s
Faroukh’s great grandfather (‘Iilyahu) center, his daughter (Rosa), to his left, and his son (Nahoum), with his wife to the right, Iraq, 1910s
state of Israel. Thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly 750,000 were forcibly displaced from their homes. The surrounding Arab countries were entirely unprepared for the massive influx of refugees. Israel was equally unprepared to deliver on its promise of refuge for the tens of thousands of Iraqi-Jewish refugees. Faroukh, his parents, and a number of his siblings were among the thousands arriving in newly occupied Palestinian territory. Faroukh’s family had come to aid their cousins, who had fled Iraq for Israel only months prior and were now being held in refugee camps. Faroukh tells me about the moments after the plane landed. “We [...] came to a stop and they wouldn’t open the doors. Then, you know, through the vent. Just like if you imagine Auschwitz. Gas starts coming out of the vents. I think they were trying to get rid of”—he pauses—“whatever.” I am horrified by this story and in disbelief that I have never heard it before.
I began my search for information out of desperation to prove that what my family went through had truly happened, that it had been real. The search brought me to a YouTube interview titled “The forgotten history of Arab Jews | Avi Shlaim.” Shlaim, an Iraqi-born Jew, is now one of Israel’s “New Historians,” a movement among Israeli scholars who interpret Israel’s history with a critical view of Zionism and the establishment of the country. Shlaim fled Iraq in 1951 as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and emigrated to Israel, forfeiting his Iraqi citizenship. In the interview, he describes his own story of his arrival to the country. It bears an uncanny similarity to Baba’s memories. “We were in for a shock because at the airport we were sprayed with DDT which is something you spray animals with. Insecticide. It was a horrible shock and quite traumatic.” This is how I learned that the “gassing” Faroukh had described to me in his story was DDT, a synthetic insecticide developed in the 1940s that is now classified by U.S. and international authorities as a probable human carcinogen.
When I call Faroukh and relay Shlaim’s story, he tells me it was nice to have his memory corroborated; he hadn’t been sure it had really happened.
Once Faroukh and his family were allowed off the plane, they were taken to the immigrant and refugee absorption camps called מעברות (Ma’abarot). Faroukh stayed at these camps only temporarily to provide support, food, and supplies to our family’s cousins. He describes the rations to me. “Some milk maybe, I don’t remember. Chicken, not other meat. Our rations—we used to give [them] to [our cousins] to eat. Absolutely no food, walking downtown and the only thing you could find, if you found it right as the guy came out, was boiled corn or felafel until they ran out. I mean basically if you aren’t there in the first 20 minutes, it [was] gone. They were starving.”
In the video interview, Shlaim echoes this account. “We lived in tents and the food was very poor, very poor. Quality of the sanitary conditions were very, very poor, very elementary, very basic. Some of the transit camps were surrounded by barbed wire and this evoked terrible memories and associations in the mind of Jews. One last point—the managers of the transit camps were Ashkenazi Jews.” Through my own research, I discover that in 1951, 75 percent of Jews from Arab countries were forced into these camps, compared to only 18 percent of Eastern European Jews. The Ma’abrot was an enduring aspect of the plight of Arab Jews.
The discrepancy between the treatment of European and Arab Jews was stark. Ashkenazi Jews were given priority with housing, leaving the refugee camps almost entirely populated by Arab Jews. In
Avi Shlaim’s words, “The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for European Jews.” It is perhaps, in hindsight, clear that an Israeli country which was established through ethnically cleansing native Palestinians would not have welcomed any Arabs with open arms, Muslim or Jewish.
When Faroukh speaks of Israel and the treatment of his family, he speaks with an air of pragmatism and resignation. “All the Arabs and people from the Middle East that had gone to Israel as refugees were treated as second-class citizens. Everyone thought the European ones were the educated ones, and that really never changed for many years.” His words are matter-of-fact. As our conversation about the camps continues, though, I begin to sense undertones of bitterness and resentment which are rare for Baba. “You could feel it there. There’s no doubt. They held people from the Middle East as inferior. [Israel] was a young country, but you’d think they’d be a little more conscious of that kind of thing. They’d just come from [the Holocaust]. The thought was ‘these are animals. They are uneducated.’ And that’s…I think that’s how they looked at us.” Faroukh and his immediate family did not stay in Israel. Instead, they left only a month after arriving and would spend the next few decades in Iran. Faroukh tells me later that he couldn’t wait to leave the camps.
When I speak to Faroukh, he rarely acknowledges feeling conflicted between Jewish and Arab identity. If I ask him outright if he felt obligated to suppress either one, he would tell me no. There are times, though, after we have spent hours exchanging our thoughts, that his tone will begin to shift. He will say things that, just for a moment, allow me a glimpse at a much more nuanced and conflicted view of himself and his identity. It is on one such occasion, after the end of a long phone call, that he says, “When you are standing on two logs in the water and they are floating apart, you have to pick one.” For just a moment, I imagine him in a river.
Jewish or Arab, Iraqi or American, citizen or immigrant, dangerous or vulnerable. I wonder what he has stood on, which logs he has chosen. They have all drifted so far apart. +++
When Faroukh was in his early 20s, he forfeited his Iranian citizenship and moved to the United States. It was only then, with an American passport, that he returned to Israel again. He received the reception
that, as a young boy, he had expected in this country which promised him a place of belonging. He no longer felt as though he was less than his Ashkenazi counterpart. He was an American Jew now, not an Arab one. Not the enemy which was to be feared. He had chosen his logs, and received affirmation that he had chosen correctly.
The more I came to understand Baba’s history, the more I began to wonder how deeply this ‘choice’ might run. In my childhood, I didn’t recall feeling a sense of closeness between our family and the Arab world. I wondered if it was just difficult to speak of or if a complete rejection of his identity had occurred. Faroukh holds resentment so strong that it is almost tangible. He recalls friends, coworkers, and community members who turned on him. He hears them chanting for the death of Jews, seizing his family’s assets, occupying his home, and ultimately defiling his memory of his entire country. I understood his resentment, but I wondered if there was tenderness too, for himself and his culture. I wondered if there was pride. Once I asked him if he saw himself as an Arab. There was no hesitation before he said, “Are you kidding? Of course we’re Arabs.” He is a soft-spoken man, but he said this with an assurance which nearly bordered on offense that I would ask such a question. “I always said that’s what we were. I never tried to hide anything.”
As Shlaim puts it, “We were Arab Jews. We spoke Arabic at home. Our culture was Arab culture. Our friends were Arab friends. Muslim-Jewish relations were normal, everyday experiences. There’s nothing exceptional about it.”
There are some individuals, including Shlaim, who propose Jewish-Arab identity as a bridge between two polarizing worlds. This is not my personal stance. I do not see the existence of Baba or my family as proof or encouragement that the native Palestinian people and the large presence of predominantly European Jews can simply learn to understand each other. It would be an insult to ask my Baba to extend understanding to the proponents of antisemitism in Iraq and Iran. It would be equally insulting to ask this understanding of Israel and Zionism from the Palestinian people. Instead, I see in Baba a people that have been denied acknowledgement, empathy, and understanding. He is not proof of a speculative future where everyone can come together and live in peace. He is someone that I must listen to without judgment, in the same way that we must understand, uplift, and platform the voices of the Palestinian people today. I am desperate to make sure my family’s language, suffering, culture, joy, and voices do not disappear entirely. I must do everything within my power to ensure this does not happen to the Palestinians. My obligation is because of my family’s Arab identity and because of my Judaism, not in spite of it. I must feel for the Palestinian people what I feel for Baba and our family. Both are people that, despite insurmountable cruelty, suppression, and devastation, are still present, still proud, still alive. The struggle must be shared.
When another man floats by you in the river, his own logs drifting apart, you must help him hold on. Tell him they came from beautiful trees.
BENJAMIN NATAN R’27 hopes he can see Baba’s country someday.
Faroukh and his father ثاول (Shawool, Iran, mid 1960s)
Raiding Roosevelt Ave.
THE POLICING OF
ASIAN MASSAGE WORK
IN NEW YORK CITY
In October 2024, New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched a multi-agency raid on massage parlors, street vendors, and sex workers in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens—specifically along Roosevelt Avenue. Adams called “Operation Restore Roosevelt,” and its displacement of hundreds of low-wage, informal-economy workers, a “public safety” measure targeted at a “deplorable” industry.
Over the past year, we have been working closely with Red Canary Song (RCS), a Queens-based grassroots collective of migrant sex and massage workers and their allies, to map changes in the forms of policing of Asian massage workers. Our project, Body Workers’ Atlas, shows that even in a legal landscape moving towards the decriminalization of sex work, the state has expanded its use of alternative strategies to crack down on informal labor performed predominantly by Asian migrant workers.
One such strategy utilizes the administrative power of the Department of Buildings (DOB)—one of the agencies that participated in “Operation Restore Roosevelt.” After the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced that they would cease prosecuting the charge of “prostitution” in 2021 due to the work of decriminalization advocates, the City saw a marked increase in DOB violations pertaining to massage work. Since then, DOB ticketing has overtaken prosecution of “prostitution” and “unlicensed massage” charges as the dominant form of policing.
Take for example the following DOB ticket (sensitive data redacted).
{
{
“Violation Time”:”06:30:00”, “Issuing Agency”:”DEPT. OF BUILDINGS”, “Violation Location (Borough)”:”QUEENS”, “Violation Location (Street Name)”: ”ROOSEVELT AVENUE”, “Total Violation Amount”:1250, “Violation Details”:”WORK WITHOUT A PERMIT. WORK NOTED: ERECTED FULL HEIGHT PARTITIONS TO CREATE 5 MASSAGE ROOMS, SUSPENDED DROPPED CEILINGS THROUGHOUT. WATERAND WASTE LINES ROUGHING IN BATHROOM FOR WASHING MACHINE, 3 PIECE BAT”,
“Charge #1: Code”:”B201”,
“Charge #1: Code Section”:”AC 28-105.1”,
“Charge #1: Code Description”:”WORK WITHOUT A PERMIT”, “Year”:2018, “Full Address”: } }
The evidence provided for the “WORK WITHOUT A PERMIT” violation, “ERECTED FULL HEIGHT PARTITIONS TO CREATE 5 MASSAGE ROOMS,” uses the spatial arrangement of the parlor as the basis for its criminalization. The official licensure process to acquire building work permits imposes requirements that disproportionately target massage workers, many of whom are new immigrants.
After identifying and cleaning relevant DOB ticket data, we found that not all tickets were issued on the same building code violation—DOB inspectors in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office cite several broad building violation codes such as “posting of unlawful signs” and “illegal use in a residential district.” This byzantine network of bureaucracy makes it nearly impossible for workers to reestablish their livelihood after a raid — rather than ‘restoring’ Roosevelt Avenue, these raids hollow out its community.
The evident increase in state violence against massage workers shows that ‘decriminalization’ in a police state is a paradox. Body Workers’ Atlas interrogates the false promise of decriminalization by placing DOB and arrest data alongside oral histories collected by RCS’s outreach team. These testimonies expose the structural precarity imposed on Asian massage work as narrated by workers themselves. We invite you to listen to their voices and explore the interactive map at www.bodyworkersatlas.com
ARMAN DEENDAR B’25 and SHRAVYA SOMPALLI B’25 hate Eric Adams.
Policing of Massage Work in Queens, NYC
The evolution of policing mechanisms used to target Asian massage work in Queens over the past decade. Hexagons represent spatial abstraction of data points to preserve some level of privacy since many records are traced to specific street addresses.
Prostitution Charges
Unlicensensed Massage* DOB Violations
*Unlicensed Massage is a charge introduced in the mid 2010s that almost exclusively targets Asian massage workers.
that is the call of the weifht , proceed with caution
my stomach shifts up yes no
just do yes no do you feel an itch ? you will . do not ignore it .
what is it right now ?
i measure anticipation & disappointment the weight of disappointmnet the fun of anticipation no , only a sweet , oft savory bite yes , like i bit my tongue the need varies all consuming mild , negligible , benign no , it grew full a long time ago . as much as there is new life i evaluate my strength yes a droning whoosh , like a notsosoft breeze
how do you know when it ’ s time to start over ? (
mmmm . umami is the best place to be which triumphs ? do not let it crush you . become something kinder , slowly go . now . do it go before it ’ s gone does your tree have capacity for more data ? sometimes starting over isn ’ t what we ’ re looking for . only an accumulation , a growth one more ring take note of your decisions , make sure they vary do you have enough ? use it ! waht does the humming in your brain sound like ?
things are good , you have pruned well that is the tailwind ! the time is upon you . do you want to ? you know what to do . we only ever do what we want does it have a metallic tang ?
birds chirping . not silence but quiet . no
SETTING IT ALL ABLAZE
Indie is starting over.
From the ages of zero to eighteen, Indie has trained her Decision Tree of Life on every dataset she could get her hands on. From the leftmost emphasis on Baby Einstein and learning to use the potty, to the more recent trends towards eBay lowballing and an overarching desire to run free, Indie’s Decision Tree of Life has encapsulated it all. The root of the Tree, however, is not some amorphous collection of past interests and sentiments, there are no hard-learned lessons there. The root is where the traversal has always begun, will always begin. The root asks a singular question. The root frames the answer. The root asks me (or do I ask the root): What should I even do?
That is the question, isn’t it? It’s why you ask me about epistemologies of queerness, and how to deal with the bitter weight of the known (and the unknown). What should I even do is the inescapable, guiding mantra which folds each moment into itself. Indie has slowly grown bitter at the regularity with which she is forced to answer this query. For her, the when and where are always informed by circumstance, they are variables over which she has no control. But the “what”? The “what” forces one into a costly, time consuming traversal down the Decision Tree of Life.
Indie’s Tree has worked relatively well for most of her life. Though the training data was relevant, it was not so viciously stuck to the Tree so that it became overfitted. Not to mention, Indie’s been pleased with the nodes she’s ended up at. She went “Crazy” only a couple of times, and sat “Still” when it was needed. But Indie’s tree has a bug. For months now, she’s been reaching the near-unequivocal conclusion to “Continue”.
Continuing is good when your path is set, and continuing is good when the standard deviation of your past choices has become too high. But there comes a time when you reach “Continue” by pure happenstance, and when you continue on through the weeds, you may be moving, but you are still in the weeds. Indie worries that she’s been reaching “Continue” in this way. Indie is missing her “Crazy” nodes and her “Still” nodes and her “Ask Me Again Later” nodes. Indie is bored with continuing, Indie is sick of the onward march. Indie wants to “Leap” and “Call Home” and “Sit on the Edge of the Water”.
The problem is this: Indie stopped training her Tree. She took one good long look one especially good day a little while back and decided everything she would ever need was there. She didn’t consider the fact that truths at one point in time become fallacies at another. She didn’t consider the strange compressing and expanding nature of the world. She didn’t consider she could become somebody different. And now, the Tree knows none of that. Here is the dilemma: Indie doesn’t know what will happen if she starts a new Tree. She doesn’t know where the training data will come from, let alone if she can trust it. She doesn’t even know what the decision nodes can be—although maybe that’s a greater gift than she gives the method credit for. What to do, what to do… Well, in Indie’s arboreal fashion—and in a turning of our very special tables—Indie has consulted the world. Indie is asking. And Indie built a tree. Feel free to use it. Feel free to fold it into a paper plane and throw it into a canyon. Feel free to send it to the first person you kissed. Indie doesn’t know anymore. Indie is setting it all ablaze.
THE BULLETIN 2025/03/07
HERE’S WHAT YOU MISSED
The Brown Political Union (BPU) was set to host a debate on January 24 titled “Local Police Should Comply With Federal Immigration Officials.” In response, the Brown Dream Team—a student group advocating for, informing, and supporting undocumented communities at Brown and RISD, as well as in Providence at large—called for the community to come out to the event to voice their concerns and perspectives. The debate was postponed and is being rescheduled for a future date. Here’s what the Brown Dream Team had to say:
Erin Teague, Chief Product Officer at Character.AI, discuss AI’s role in research, policy, and social impact. c Mutual Aid & Community Action Project Weber/RENEW: 401Gives Fundraising Champion sign-up Learn how to become involved in helping Project Weber/RENEW meet their 401Gives fundraising goal! Create a personalized funding page. Sign up here!
“The Brown Dream Team would like to clarify that we had no involvement in the cancellation of the Brown Political Union’s planned debate on immigration enforcement. The event was ultimately postponed because it was not registered with the Student Activities Office, as required by university policy. We recognize the importance of free speech and open discussions on immigration, although conversations about immigration should be approached with care and intentionality, ensuring that they are informed by the voices and lived experiences of those directly impacted. The Brown Dream Team intended to encourage members of our community to attend the event and participate in the debate, not to have the event cancelled.
In the aftermath of this decision, we were deeply disturbed by the hurtful and insensitive rhetoric online from some members of the Brown community towards the Brown Dream Team. The false claims that the Brown Dream Team was responsible for canceling the event led to misplaced blame, creating an unwelcoming atmosphere on campus for undocu+ students. The Brown Dream Team encourages thoughtful and responsible conversations that acknowledge the complexities of immigration enforcement, while ensuring that our campus remains a space of support and safety for undocu+ students.”
RIDDLES
Of ones and zeros Of sweat and bric(t) An unlikely hero for those who trick As old as history, though reborn in script For spices, I’m sure They put my maker in a crypt Who Am I?
c Arts Film-Thinking • Miklós Jancsó, The Round-Up Screening March 12, 2025 Smith-Buonanno Hall Join Il Cinema Ritrovato at Brown and Film-Thinking for a screening of The Round-Up (1966), a masterpiece by Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, followed by a conversation with scholars from Brown, Yale, and the University of Szeged.
Third Annual Providence Fundraiser & Community Event March 12, 6–8 PM 50 Valley Street, Providence Join us for an inspiring evening dedicated to uplifting immigrant voices and supporting the vital work of the Student Clinic for Immigrant Justice (SCIJ) on March 12 at United Way of Rhode Island from 6–8PM.
c Events @ Brown Writing is Live Festival March 5 to March 8 Leeds Theatre; Ashamu Dance Studio Check out new plays in progress by MFA playwrights all weekend long! Vogue with Omari Wiles March 10, 5–6:20 PM Ashamu Dance Studio Beginnerand mixed-level vogue class Fireside Chat: Building AI for Humanity March 14 Watson Institute Watson Senior Fellow Malika Saada Saar ’92 and
Illustration by Aaron Kovalchik B’03. In his own words, “Charles Schulz ain’t got nothin’ on
