El Sol XII, 2022

EL SOL

Issue XII - 2022

Warriors for peace Holocaust survivors Rose Schindler, Benjamin Midler and Gerhard Maschkowski — tattooed by Nazis — continue their mission

EL SOL Resilience

IN THIS ISSUE

Resilient people in our community lead the way out of a pandemic.

Table of Contents EL SOL SUMMER 2022 • ISSUE XII

Resilience 6 LETTING THEIR HAIR DOWN A visionary hair salon helps the LGBTQ community to be itself.

10 COME BACK WHEN NORMAL Southwestern’s relationship with anti-gay university troubles LGBTQ students.

16 WHAT'S IN A NAME? Chicano leaders call for baseball's Texas Rangers to change its name.

Mexico's Women Demand Change. Activists insist 50,000 women and girls were assaulted and murdered last year in one of the world's worst nations for femicide. P70

Acknowledging a Tragic History.

Leticia Cazares leads effort to establish a new relationship with Indigenous Kumeyaay. P62

26 HAITIANS FLOOD TIJUANA Refugees from the hemisphere's poorest nation face relentless hardship.

78 CHICANO PARK'S GUARDIAN ANGEL A mysterious homeless migrant becomes the beloved protector of a cultural holy ground.

34 A RARE SONGBIRD Talented singer-songwriter Jessie Lark makes creativity personal.

37 ENTERING A NEW FIELD Former farm worker Erica Alfaro overcame poverty and violence to become scholar, author and role model.

81 ‘WE MUST NOT FORGET’ A determined team of 90-year-old Holocaust survivors teach younger generations that all lives are special.

40 ROSARITO UNDER ATTACK Once-beautiful Baja beach town savaged by sewage.

61 REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN A dusty, forlorn cemetery is a paupers graveyard of 1,000 unidentified migrants.

Gorillas in Our Midst. Intrepid San Ysidro ex-Marine survives close call with a 600-pound silverback in Uganda's Impenetrable Forest. P46

COMPILED BY NICOLETTE MONIQUE LUNA AND CAMILA GONZALEZ 4

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94 RACISTS CO-OPT FIRST AMENDMENT Extremists hijack right to redress government to spew hate speech.

96 DISABILITY RIGHTS ICON FIGHTS ON Judy Heumann tells students to practice ‘feisty’ activism.

EL SOL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Nicolette Monique Luna STAFF WRITERS

Ailyn Dumas Lesley Garate Camila Gonzalez Diego Higuera Nicolette Monique Luna Anette Pedrotti Esteban Preciado PHOTOGRAPHERS

Ailyn Dumas Camila Gonzalez Esteban Preciado Staff ARTIST

Ji Ho Kim ASSISTANT ADVISER

Kenneth Pagano Faculty ADVISER

Dr. Max Branscomb

Style guide developed by Nicolette Monique Luna under the guidance of Kenneth Pagano.

EDITOR’S MESSAGE Nicolette Monique Luna EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

W

e are still here.

We are still working, learning and chasing our dreams.

So many of our contemporaries are not. At least 20 percent of American college students have left higher education. Southwestern College is down 30 percent. Our publications class is one third the size it was in February 2020.

COVID has batted around the borderlands of San Diego County like a piñata. We were one of America’s first hot zones in 2020 and we have been in the red ever since. We are, at this moment, experiencing another spike that is filling our region’s hospitals. While most of America took a deep relaxing breath this spring, our region has trudged along the ‘Rona Highway.

Nevertheless we persisted. We have been blessed by remarkable role models in our community that continue to show us that human beings are capable of great resilience.

Our cover story about local Holocaust survivors reminds us that people have dealt with trying times before on a scale much greater than problems we might have. There is nothing like meeting courageous men and women branded with tattoos from Auschwitz and Birkenau to provide perspective. It was an honor to help tell the stories of such remarkable souls.

Resilience lives in the mighty heart of civil rights leader Judy Heumann, America’s greatest ever disability rights champion. Tough as she is brainy, Heumann fought through polio to lead some of the most memorable protests of the 20th century and author some of the best policy of the 21st. Images of courageous disabled Americans exiting their wheelchairs to crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to demand passage of the American’s with Disabilities Act are inspiring 30 years later.

This issue of El Sol Magazine is a compendium of stories and art celebrating the resilience of our one-of-a-kind community here in the borderlands. COVID is no match for us.

Si Se Puede!

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RESILIENCE

PHOTOS COURTESY OF HAIRSLAYERS STUDIO

LETTING THEIR

HAIR DOWN

Hair Slayers Studio is the go-to salon for the region’s LGBTQ community and has drawn customers as far away as wine country Temecula and desert El Centro

By DIEGO HIGUERA

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A

pride flag painted on the door was like a glimmering rainbow welcome mat for the young man with a chipper step but tired eyes.

There were other cues that Hair Slayers Studio is a little bit different.

Jack Skellington is clearly in command of a freaky mural that is a 2D hall of fame for animated horror heroes like Oogie Boogie, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the Corpse Bride. A deranged doll that could throw down with Annabelle loomed up front next to a bowl brimming with Halloween candy. Harley Quinn’s bat hung within arm’s reach.

Make that a lot different.

Hair Slayers is the place the LGBTQ community gets its hair done.

Like a skilled stylist who shapes purple hair in the manner of a clipper-wielding Michelangelo, Tanya Alfaro and her sassy salon have carved out a name for themselves throughout the county. And in just six months.

Customers stream in from wine country Temecula to the north and the broiling Imperial County city of El Centro to the east. Chula Vista Mayor Mary Casillas Salas is a fan and issued Hair Slayers Studio a City Proclamation honoring its contributions to underserved people in the community. October was entirely booked with wall-to-wall appointments.

Hair Slayers’ stylists are relentlessly talented, but to many customers the welcoming, non-judgmental vibe of the salon is even more important. Members of the LGBTQIA community stop in to visit even when they are doing the Werewolf of London and their hair is perfect.

UCSD Sophomore Lucas Lima said he was slayed.

“My brother was the first to spot the pride flag in the window, and he said ‘we should go there because I’m tired of going to barber shops’,” he said. “Even though he’s a big dude, he doesn’t feel particularly comfortable in predominately cisgender male spaces, like barber shops tend to be.”

Lima said his brother had a great Hair Slayers

Safe welcoming

affirming space

A safe, welcoming, affirming space signals that facilities and resources are available to everyone of any sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. It is a space that celebrates LGBTQ people and respects the culture of the community. It is a judgment-free zone of inclusivity, compassion and love.

Source: San Diego Pride

“It’s amazing to know that my customers feel comfortable enough with me to show me a picture of themselves and to tell me their stories."

Tanya Alfaro, owner Hair Slayers studio EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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experience, so he went, too.

“It’s nice to finally have that safe space!” he said. “As a trans person, it’s nice to be able to have a gender-affirming haircut because it really comes down to how your stylist perceives you as either more feminine or more masculine. They have control over your expression. We really needed to go somewhere more LGBT friendly and Hair Slayers was exactly that.”

UCSD student Rhiannen Callahan said she also had a great experience at Hair Slayers Studio.

“I wanted my hair to be more reflective of who I am and how I wanted to express myself,” she said. “Coming from a very conservative town was always very scary to me. (I was told) ‘You were born female so you must look super girly and frilly and like all the stereotypes’.”

Callahan said she did not feel comfortable with traditional feminine hair styles.

“Finding a place that understood me and my desire for an androgynous look was something I was always scared (to ask for),” she said. “When I asked for (that style) at home (stylists) always said ‘no, that’s not going to look good on you’ or ‘I don’t know how to do that’. It was really important for me to find a place that would and Hair Slayers was the place.”

Hair Slayers stylists are also convention slayers. Even the studio’s mission statement is a red carpet for people who often feel uncomfortable or unwelcomed in the broader community.

“Hair Slayers is a year-round celebration of Halloween with an artistic and thematic atmosphere inspired by horror culture, magic and the artistic works of Tim Burton and Bram Stoker. We are a safe place where every freak, weirdo, goth, punk, artist and visitor is welcomed and celebrated. You get the quality of an upscale salon in a wonderful environment that celebrates your uniqueness.”

Owner Tanya Alfaro is eccentric, but also grounded in the art form and trained by masters like Robert Cromeans. Her freak flag flies with the confidence and experience of a seasoned

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stylist marinated in the culture by some of the best in the business.

“I hear stories from my clients and I’m just so surprised by the anxiety related to their hair,” she said. “One of my adult clients wanted a more gender-neutral haircut, but was scared to get it done because of what her parents might think.”

Alfaro said the LGBTQ culture is slowly asserting itself in parts of the United States and she considers herself a student.

“I’m still learning about being all-inclusive and the different pronouns,” she said. “There are still so many different things I’m learning and I’m teaching my daughters. (For so long) people held back because they were afraid of what others might say or think.”

Trust is an essential element of a healthy relationship and a good hair styling, Alfaro said.

“It’s amazing to know that my customers feel comfortable enough with me to show me a picture of themselves and to tell me their stories,” she said. “It makes opening a salon here worthwhile, it makes it special to me.”

Alfaro and her crew are practiced in discretion, she said, and respect everyone’s boundaries.

Chula Vista’s proximity to the Mexican border and its blended culture can make things complicated for members of the LGBTQ community, she said. Mexico is evolving, but still behind the United States in accepting members of the LGBTQ. “Not everyone is comfortable enough to say ‘this is who I am’,” she said. “Because we are so close to the border (many) people here won’t say anything like that. But I am seeing people that live around here or close to the border come in just because they see the pride flag.”

Hair Slayers Studios at 730 Broadway is nestled in a generic strip mall, but all connections to the routine and typical are clipped at the door.

Expression is encouraged, but secrets are safe. In fact, Alfaro insists, everyone is safe. Hair styling, she said, helped her “to find my tribe.”

“Inner beauty is your job,” she likes to say. “We do the rest!” n

TRANS VISIBILITY DAY

ILLUSTRATION BY JI HO KIM / STAFF

Transgender people are America's most abused, murdered and assaulted population. Right-wing states like Texas and Floria are actually attempting to criminalize transgender people, their parents and their allies. The Editorial Board of El Sol Magazine enthusiastically supports all transgender Americans and transgender people across the globe. We soundly condemn transphobic elected officials attempting to villainize Trans people to breed fear for their own political gain.

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE

ILLUSTRATION BY JI HO KIM / STAFF

THE WORST COLLEGES FOR

LGBTQIA+ Southwestern College’s relationship with Point Loma Nazarene University troubles LGBTQ community

By DIEGO HIGUERA

prominent San Diego County university that has reciprocal programming with Southwestern

College was recently named as one of America’s most anti-LGBTQ colleges.

Point Loma Nazarene University was included on Campus Pride’s 2021 “Shame List” as one of “the worst, most unsafe campuses for LGBTQ youth.”

Campus Pride, a 20-year-old LGBTQ rights

organization based in Charlotte, North Carolina, included PLNU as one of 180 American college or university campuses that marginalize or mistreat students and employees from the LGBTQ community.

Southwestern College, conversely, professes to be a public institution of higher education that values inclusion and diversity, including LGBTQ students and staff. SC, however, entered into a contract with PLNU to teach upper division classes on the Chula Vista campus in four subjects and to facilitate SC students studying at PLNU or transferring to the university. Students who complete the reciprocal program would receive Bachelor’s degrees from PLNU. SC’s website outlines the relationship.

“Southwestern College partners with Point Loma Nazarene University to offer you a variety of bachelor’s degrees that you can earn without leaving SWC’s campus. Earning your bachelor’s degree from Point Loma Nazarene University

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opens new doors of opportunity in your professional and personal life, and can help you achieve your career goals.”

Degrees included in the arrangement are nursing, criminal justice, business and child development.

SC freshman Jen Valenzuela, who said she is a member of the LGBTQ community, was one of many students who said they found the relationship between SC and PLNU troubling.

“I don’t question them being on that list for a second,” she said. “Being Christian and queer is a big no-no. I should know. I had to leave the church because I was queer.”

Valenzuela said growing up as a Christian who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community can be traumatizing. She said PLNU is not a good place for LGBTQ students.

“Imagine a very, very open and outspoken queer person decides to take child development and ends up at Point Loma,” she said. “How do we let them work on their degree for years and then have them end up at a place where they won’t feel welcomed?”

Southwestern College’s claim that students can complete a Bachelor’s degree from PLNU entirely on the Chula Vista campus is not true, Valenzuela said. It is possible, she said, that an LGBTQ student could be forced to finish Bachelor’s degrees on PLNU’s main campus.

“I know a lot of people who need to take certain classes (on the Point Loma campus) for their major that they are not able to

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At the heart of the claim that the Bible is clear “that homosexuality is forbidden by God” is poor biblical scholarship and a cultural bias read into the Bible.

— Human Rights Campaign

take at Southwestern College,” she said. “My mom, for example, took most of her studies at Southwestern, but then she had to go to Point Loma to finish her courses in child development.

When my mom was a student they didn’t tell her she was going to end up at Point Loma. If they’re going to eventually have you go over to Point Loma, then they should absolutely let you know from the very beginning when you are deciding your major.”

April Ramirez, an SC sophomore, agreed. She said Southwestern College is hypocritical for saying it values diversity and civil rights, but is in league with a college like PLNU that considers LGBTQ people sinners and outliers.

“I’m upset because Southwestern College has its own SAGA (Sexuality and Gender Acceptance) group, so knowing that we are connected to a school that’s on that list while we have a club that is supportive of sexuality and gender rights does not seem like a good fit for us,” she said “It gives us a bad look, to be an inclusive campus but be connected to a campus that is not as inclusive.”

Ramirez said she is worried she may have to enroll in upper

division classes at PLNU and is concerned about the university’s anti-LGBTQ reputation.

“I’m someone who is in the child development (major) and might need to take some classes over there and I wonder will I be uncomfortable over there?” she said. “Will I face repercussions if I say something that isn’t according to their policies?”

A LONG MARCH FOR LGBTQ RIGHTS

C

ampus Pride Executive Director Shane Windmeyer and his board first put PLNU on its “Worst Campuses for LGBTQ” list in 2016 when the university donated $50,000 to fight California Senate Bill 1146, the Equity in Higher Education Act. SB 1146 would prohibit discrimination in institutions that receive or benefit from state financial assistance or enrolls students who receive state student financial aid. More than 70 percent of SC students receive some form of state or federal financial aid.

SB 1146 also called for closing loopholes that allow private colleges to opt out of Title IX of the federal Higher Education Act of 1972 signed by Republican

President Richard Nixon. It would require private colleges and universities to disclose its Title IX exemption and inform students in a clear manner that it does not follow all federal anti-discrimination rules.

Ramirez said LGBTQ identifying students should at the very least have the right to know what universities do not follow Title IX and are allowed to discriminate.

PLNU’s catalogue briefly references its policies toward LGBTQ students and staff, which is says align with the religious views of the Church of the Nazarene.

“It is God’s intention that in the sacramental union of marriage a man and woman may experience the joy and pleasure of sexual intimacy and from this act of intimate love new life may enter the world and into a covenantal community of care,” reads a section sub headlined “Human Sexuality.”

The passage continues: “Students are expected to abstain from sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage.”

“PLNU seeks to be a community where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons are treated with dignity, grace, and the holy love in the Spirit of Christ.

We recognize the complexity of current issues related to same-sex attraction, samesex marriage, and gender identity. The university desires to faithfully care for all students while engaging these conversations with respect,

care, humility, courage, and discernment.”

PLNU also offers “counseling” for LGBTQ students, but the catalogue said nothing else about the nature of the counseling.

Southwestern College, on the other hand, is committed by state and federal law to follow the non-discriminatory guidelines of Title IX, which reads, in part: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participating in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Under the Welcome section of its official website, SC spells out its prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation; gender; gender expression (a person’s gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth) gender identity and other characteristics related to a person’s sex.”

Campus Pride Executive Director Shane Windmeyer and his board first put PLNU on its “Worst Campuses for LGBTQ” list in 2016 when the university donated $50,000 to fight California Senate Bill 1146, the Equity in Higher Education Act. SB 1146 would prohibit discrimination in institutions that receive or benefit from state financial assistance or enrolls students who receive state student financial aid.

“And while much progress has been made since then, clearly there remains a lot more work to do as we develop and train future leaders to create safer, more inclusive communities on campuses.”

RUNNING AFOUL OF LGBTQ COMMUNITY

W

indmeyer said right-wing universities like PLNU are anachronistic and unable to evolve with a society that has finally begun to accept and embrace its LGBTQ citizens.

PLNU has run afoul of local LGBTQ advocates for many years. In 2012 PLNU denied a

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LGBTQ students attending PLNU are forced to meet at an off-campus site, where they can safely gather. The student club regularly meets to discuss issues affecting the LGBTQ community, student life at PLNU, and to check in on each other.

Father James Martin has urged Christians to start a new, inclusive dialogue between the LGBTQ faithful and the Church to create a more solid sense of welcome and solidarity.

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charter request for a student LGBTQ club. In 2014 the university published a policy that announced it expected LGBTQ employees to practice celibacy and that it considered marriage to be between a man and a woman.

A year later, in 2015, the scenic, oceanfront university announced it would no longer allow any weddings on campus after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

Campus Pride has work remaining, said Windmeyer.

Its 2021 “Shame List” has 180 colleges and universities, the most ever.

“Campus Pride was founded 20 years ago with a vision of campuses and a society free of anti-LGBTQ prejudice, bigotry and hate,” he said in a statement. “And while much progress has been made since then, clearly there remains a lot more work to do as we develop and train future leaders to create safer, more inclusive communities on campuses.”

Alumnus Gerardo Muñoz said PLNU richly deserves its place on the “Shame List.”

“You’re paying them money to abuse you. That’s discrimination,” said Muñoz.

“You’re giving them your life for four years, your mental health that they don’t even care about.

The whole school is meant to be loving and godly and now you don’t take care of your students, that’s unacceptable.”

Muñoz said his PLNU experience was “taxing.”

“It really does affect your education,” he said. “Like, you

have to deal with that on top of homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, sexism, on top of the stress already of going through college and what you want to do in life.”

Muñoz said his experience was peppered with anti-LGBTQ incidences of “love the sinner, hate the sin” that “left scars.”

“I had this class where we read this book about this guy who said that he was able to find God and his sexuality, that they don’t have to go against each other.

I thought that was lovely,” said Muñoz. “But then the reaction from the class was a bunch of guys who literally said ‘Why do we need to read all about these ... and then proceeded to drop all the F-slurs. They would tell you they love you, but then they would hate everything you are.

There were so many times I’d leave class shaking.”

PLNU alumnus Taylor Christine Spencer, a member of the LGBTQ community, said her PLNU experience made her feel set apart from other students.

Anti-LGBTQ beliefs and actions permeated the campus culture, she said.

“It’s to the point where I don’t want to tell people which college I graduated from anymore,” she said. “It’s like this mix of fake niceness. It’s a lot of people who are trying to act very holy, they hate the sin, love the sinner.

There’s definitely the status quo and what their ideal Christian is like and if you aren’t that person, you are othered.”

Spencer said some faculty expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiment in classes and used anti-gay

slurs in front of students.

“I found out that a professor said about my friend that he was glad that (f-slur student) was gone,” she said, tearfully. “And that broke my heart, because even though he was such a great student some of these professors were saying these nasty things.

And it was from a teacher that my friend respected and looked up to.”

Spencer said American universities should not be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ students, including Christian institutions. Public schools that partner with racist or homophobic private schools just give them cover, she said.

“I wasn’t able to be myself,” she said. “I wasn’t able to figure out who or what I was (while I was) there. I felt guilty and ashamed because I was getting traumatized all the time.”

VOICES FOR CHANGE AT PLNU

S

ome students who identify as Christian and LGBTQ acknowledge that PLNU can be a rough place for LGBTQ people, but they have not given up on the university.

Jason Que, a sophomore at PLNU who identifies as LGBTQ, said members of the LGBTQ community need to stick together and find allies.

“I haven’t been to any other university, so I don’t really know a comparison,” he said. “I think that generally the people in my (LGBTQ) community that I surround myself with are very

“All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.”

— Harvey Milk

supportive.”

Que said LGBTQ students can be stigmatized for their sexual orientation.

“I definitely think that it’s because Point Loma is a Christian university, so that might have something to do with that stigma,” he said. “From my standpoint with the church in general, the church is pretty set on (the doctrine that) every child deserves a mother and father.”

A budding group of students is quietly demanding change, including PLNU sophomore Jessie Taylor, the diplomatic co-leader of Voices of Love, a student organization dedicated to providing safe space for LGBTQ students and others who feel “othered.”

“Getting VOL (established) as an official group on campus was not easy,” she said. “The Nazarene affiliation with PLNU makes it difficult for queer voices to be heard as it does not accept LGBTQIA+ to be full members of the church.

Although I am unaware of all the formalities and technicalities the group must have gone through to gain a small foothold in the PLNU community, I am sure that countless diligent individuals were involved in the

creation and establishment of this incredible group that I’m immensely grateful for.”

Taylor said she believes VOL is making a positive difference and can help guide the conservative campus into the 21st century.

“I like to think that VOL has helped countless students find a safe space to meet fellow queer individuals or loving allies on PLNU’s campus,” she said.

“Being able to make connections without the looming fear of having to come out or hide an integral part of yourself is a huge part of VOL that I think everyone involved with the group is endlessly grateful for.” n EDITOR’S NOTE: El Sol made concerted efforts over the course of several days to contact representatives from Southwestern College and Point Loma Nazarene University for comment and the opportunity to share the point of view of their colleges for this report.

El Sol made multiple attempts via email and telephone to contact the SC administrator in charge of instruction as well as PLNU’s Director of Public Affairs. None of the current senior administrators at SC worked at the college when it entered into the agreement with PLNU.

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RESILIENCE

ILLUSTRATION BY JI HO KIM / STAFF

PHOTO COURTESY OF DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY/ UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

WHAT’S

IN A NAME? Chicano leaders call for the Texas Rangers baseball team to reject namesake’s violent history

By CAMILA GONZALEZ

orvenir, Texas, has no Texas Rangers baseball fans.

It has no baseball fans.

It has nobody.

Porvenir is an uninhabited ghost town in the West Texas borderlands because its inhabitants were exterminated or driven off in 1918 by the Texas Rangers – the paramilitary vigilantes, not the baseball team. After murdering every man and teenage boy in the frontier village, the Rangers sent away the surviving widows and children on a forced march into the desiccated prairie.

CONT ON PG 18

MURDER AT LA MATANZA Historians say Texas Rangers killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of Mexicans and Tejanos in South Texas from 1915-19, calling the victims “bandits.” They were actually legal landowners, ranchers, farmworkers or Latino Texans traveling in their home state. This photo was taken in October 1915 by Texas Rangers proud of their work.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF TEXAS RANGER HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM

THE PORVENIR MASSACRE WAS JUST one of many perpetrated by the Texas Rangers, according to historians. Formed in the 1820s as a private army for a corrupt governor who wanted to rid Texas of Native Americans, the Rangers grew in numbers in the early years after the Civil War to resist settlements by freed Black slaves and Mexican-Americans. They have been described by academics, historians and Latino leaders as “America’s Gestapo,” “the Nazis of Texas” and “the Lone Star Ku Klux Klan.” Many Rangers, in fact, were active members of the KKK. Gente Unida founder Enrique Morones said he does not understand why a Major League Baseball team would name itself for “a gun slinging, racist, terrorist organization.” He is calling for the Texas Rangers baseball team to change its name.

“A name like the Texas Rangers is a mockery to the Mexican people and to all Mexican-Americans,” Morones said.

“Glorifying a hyper-violent private vigilante army that brutally murdered, raped and expelled people of Mexican ancestry from their own lands was an American genocide.

The Texas Rangers have been portrayed as heroic cowboys guarding the range, but they are actually lawless thugs.”

Morones, a former vice president with the San Diego Padres, said he is heartened by recent decisions by the Cleveland Indians and Washington NFL franchise to change their names after years of pressure.

“We want Major League Baseball to accept its responsibility and remove the name of Texas Rangers from its Arlington, Texas franchise,” he said. “The league should no longer profit off the suffering inflicted on our people. Neither should MLB confuse the players’ popularity with acceptance of the Texas Rangers’ namesake nor what those hired guns did to tens of thousands of Americans of Mexican ancestry.”

CONT ON PG 20

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA

A BLANK STARE Former San Diego Padres executive Enrique Morones said his meeting with former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush (r, then governor of Texas), elicited just “a blank stare.” Pictured in Bush’s Texas Ranger office are his father, President George H. W. Bush (l) and baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan, an MLB broadcaster.

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OZZIE MONGE PHOTO COURTESY OF OZZIE MONGE

50 YEARS OF DEBATE, BUT SDSU STILL THE AZTECS

S

an Diego State University’s mascot and nickname, The Aztecs, came to the Montezuma Mesa in 1925 and was generally not controversial until the early 1970s when the American Indian Movement began to gain influence in the United States. Early attempts to start a conversation about the Aztec name and the Monty Montezuma mascot were brushed aside in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Wealthy alumni threatened to halt donations to the university, which was growing in enrollment and ambition.

In 2001 the university renamed the mascot and gave it a new outfit that was supposed to be less of a beefcake cheerleader and more in line with an Aztec warrior of the 1500s. The new iteration of the mascot first appeared in 2004 to mixed reviews. Traditionalists were upset that Monty Montezuma was sidelined and younger activists, along with a group of SDSU professors, argued that any Aztec mascot was inappropriate.

Zuma the Jaguar was introduced in 2010 as a secondary mascot in an effort to test market an alternative. It was an unsuccessful effort, and Zuma was quietly put out to pasture in 2012.

American Indian Studies Professor Ozzie Monge brought the issue to the

public again in 2015 with a paper that argued against the name and the mascot.

Monge decried the “noble savage” stereotype and said SDSU had reduced the Aztec people to “a good luck charm.”

In 2018 battle lines hardened.

SDSU faculty and students organized an effort to do away with the Aztec, while more than 9,000 supporters of the mascot signed an online petition to “Save The Aztec.” In February SDSU President Dr. Sally Roush appointed a 17-member Aztec Identity Task Force to re-examine the issue. That May the committee recommended keeping the Aztec name, but was split on whether to retain the warrior mascot. Roush accepted the recommendations and the Aztec remains the moniker of the university. Few people involved said they believe the debate is over.

Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune, SDSU Daily Aztec, SDSU President’s Office report Decisions on Aztec Identity

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PHOTO COURTESY OF ENRIQUE MORONES

“The league should no longer profit off the suffering inflicted on our people. Neither should MLB confuse the players’ popularity with acceptance of the Texas Rangers’ namesake nor what those hired guns did to tens of thousands of Americans of Mexican ancestry.”

Enrique Morones, Gente Unida

Attorney Sheryl Ring said the Texas Rangers baseball team is named for “an American Gestapo.”

“The original Texas Rangers are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents,” she said. “The Rangers were originally formed in the 1820s to forcibly exterminate Indigenous and Native peoples from Texas, with an appalling body count.”

Ring said the Ranger’s terror campaign continued into the 20th century and included prolific lynchings of Black and Latino Texans well into the 1930s.

“The Rangers killed thousands of innocent civilians in a one-year period during the early days of World War I,” she wrote. “They justified the carnage by saying they were trying to dissuade Mexico from siding with Germany.”

The 1918 Porvenir Massacre was a culmination of these murderous activities, Ring said, but even subsequent hearings in the Texas legislature did not slow down the Rangers. If anything, she said, they further emboldened the Rangers and their extrajudicial executions.

Morones agreed. He said the misanthropic activities of the Texas Rangers never fully abated. After Porvenir the Rangers worked to drive the NAACP from Texas. In 1956 they helped to prevent the integration of Texarkana Junior College, allowing a White mob to hurl rocks and racial slurs at minority students attempting to attend classes. They attacked Black children in towns and cities across the Lone Star State who attempted to

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integrate K-12 schools.

Journalist Doug J. Swanson’s book, “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers,” examines the long history of racism and lawlessness.

“They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents,” he wrote. “They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the South.”

Chicano scholar Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez, a native Texan, said he has first-hand experience with the Ranger’s violent intimidation tactics.

“My first encounter with the Texas Rangers was in 1962 when I was a teenager,” he said. “I attended a rally to oppose segregation in my hometown. As we were heading home we were pulled over by two cop cars. One was Texas

BLOODY HISTORY Doug J. Swanson’s ‘Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers’ is considered a seminal study of the group that began in 1820 as a private army to exterminate Native Americans in the Texas territories.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DR. JOSÉ ANGEL GUTIÉRREZ

“They’re laughing in our faces.

(The Texas Rangers commit atrocities) against Mexicans, and yet who goes to the baseball games? Mexicans! That is because we do not know our own history.”

Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez, attorney,

Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington

Rangers, the other local sheriffs.”

Gutiérrez said he and friends were just a block from their homes when Texas Ranger Alfred Y. Allee forced him from his car, then slapped and kicked him.

Gutierrez said his mother saw what was happening and burst out of the house with a loaded shotgun.

“Touch my son one more time and I’ll kill you,” she said.

Gutiérrez said he was sure they were all about to die, but Allee waved off the other cops and they left.

In 1966 the Texas Rangers were brought in to break up a strike by farmworkers in a rural area south of Crystal City in Zavala County, Gutiérrez said. Mexican and Mexican-American farmworkers were beaten, kicked and shot. One laborer, Magdaleno Dimas, was killed.

Naming a baseball team for the Texas Rangers is an affront to Latinos, Gutiérrez said.

“They’re laughing in our faces,” he said. “(The Texas Rangers commit atrocities) against Mexicans, and yet who goes to the baseball games? Mexicans! That is because we do not know our own history.”

Morones agreed. Latino players are foundational to MLB, he said. More than 30 percent of major league players are Latinos, including many of its biggest stars.

Gutiérrez said the education system in Texas and most of the United States is “Anglo-centric” and too often overlooks historic episodes of violence and mistreatment of minorities. Most

Americans, he said, never heard of Porvenir, the destruction of the Black town Rosewood, Florida or the White riots of Tulsa, Oklahoma which burned a thriving Black business district to the ground. The Texas Rangers, he said, got the Hollywood treatment.

“Everything written about the Rangers is glorious, fantastic, wonderful,” he said.

“None of that is true. They are murderers of Mexicans and they have been for a long time.”

While working with the Padres in the 1990s, Morones had an opportunity to meet with the managing owner of the Texas Rangers Baseball Club, Texas governor and future U.S. President George W. Bush. Morones pressed his case that his team should not be named for the Rangers. Bush, generally considered a moderate on race for a Republican, was not receptive.

“I got nothing but a blank stare,” he said. “Governor Bush wasn’t having it.”

Domingo Garcia said he likes baseball, but is no fan of the Texas Rangers moniker.

Garcia said his mother, grandmother and grandfather lived in Porvenir. Pedro Cano, his great grandfather, and Chico Cano, a great uncle, lost their land resisting the Texas Rangers.

“Remember, the Anglos write the history,” he said. “So Chico Cano is a Mexican bandit even though he was a resistance fighter and hero to the Latinos.

The Texas Rangers are responsible for the lynching of 5,000 Mexican-Americans.

CONT ON PG 25

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HIGH PROFILE NAME CHANGES

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chool and sports nicknames have been slowly evolving since the early 1970s, with dozens of professional and college teams moving away from the use of Native Americans as mascots.

Not fast enough for Native America advocates.

Stephanie Cross, a University of Oklahoma doctoral candidate, said about 770 schools still have Indian-based names or mascots, including at least 100 that still use the derogatory slur “redskins.”

“Schools across America are perpetuating the myth of Native Americans as aggressive, warlike and savage,” she said.

Cross and the makers of the 2017 documentary “More Than a Word” call for the Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Black Hawks and Atlanta Braves to join the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins as professional sports franchises that abandon Native American names and imagery.

Native American mascots are the most common among those drawing criticism in the United States today, but there are others. There is organized opposition to names and images that depict white settlers, Confederates and other white supremacists, Crusaders and names hostile to Muslims, and names that glorify violence.

Here are some professional teams and universities that have abandoned Native American and white supremacist names or symbols:

1972 Dickinson State University of North Dakota drops The Savages as its mascot and eventually settles on Blue Hawks.

1969 Philadelphia Warriors move to San Francisco and become the Golden State Warriors. The team abandons its mascot, a cheerful Indian caricature dribbling a basketball.

COMPILED BY EL SOL STAFF

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Stanford University changes its name from The Indians to The Cardinal (and later to The Cardinals).

1973 Eastern Washington University discontinues The Savages to become The Eagles.

2000 The College of William and Mary changed its nickname from The Indians to The Tribe, a name that has not entirely placated its community.

1974 Dartmouth College stops using The Indians and switches to The Big Green.

Nebraska Wesleyan University dumps The Plainsman to become The Prairie Wolves.

Seattle University discontinues The Chieftains to become the Redhawks.

1979 St. Bonaventure University dumped The Brown Indians and The Brown Squaws to become The Bonnies.

1991 Eastern Michigan University moves on from The Hurons and rebrands as The Eagles.

1994 New York’s St. John’s University replaces The Redmen with The Red Storm.

1997 Miami University of Ohio abandons The Redskins to become The Redhawks.

1999 Oklahoma City University retires The Chiefs and becomes The Stars.

North Carolina’s Elon University dropped The Fighting Christians and adopted The Phoenix.

2006 Midwestern State University of Wichita Falls, Texas changes from The Indians to The Mustangs.

2007 University of Illinois drops its Indian face mascot and logo, but retains the name Illini.

2008 Arkansas State University retires The Indians to become The Red Wolves.

2018 The Cleveland Indians stop using blushing Chief Wahoo as its mascot. In 2021 the team announces it will change its name to The Guardians.

2020 The Washington Redskins, under pressure from FedEx, which purchased naming rights to the stadium, announced it will abandon its name and logo. The franchise will rebrand as the Commanders.

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COLLEGE DROPPED APACHES IN 2000

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outhwestern College had its own moment of reckoning with an inappropriate nickname and mascot. For reasons long lost to history, in the mid-1960s SC’s sports teams were christened the Apaches. An accompanying mascot was a leatherfaced profile of a Native American man much like the image on a worn buffalo nickel.

For generations the name and mascot mystified thinking people in the community. Southwestern College had Mayan-style architecture and the Apaches never lived in the South Bay. San Diego County is Kumeyaay Country with a little bit of the Shoshone Wedge in the area that is now Escondido.

Like good soldiers, though, faculty and students embraced the Apache.

Legendary baseball coach Jerry Bartow – a full-blooded Native American – named the baseball field he built with his own hands Apache Junction. SC’s student newspaper, originally called The Southwesterner, changed its name to The Athapascan, the ancient language spoken by The Apaches.

Efforts by Native Americans in the 1970s and 1980s to pressure high schools and colleges to eliminate Indian mascots bypassed Southwestern. It just did not seem like anyone’s priority, though in the 1980s The Athapascan switched its name to The Sun. Change came in 1998 after Dr. Serafin Zasueta took the helm as college president. A child development scholar, Zasueta had served in K-12 schools

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in poverty stricken communities of Southwest U.S. Native American reservations, including the Dine’ (Navajo) and Hopi.

Empathetic to Native American culture and steeped in their history, Zasueta was receptive to a proposal by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation. Newly affluent San Diego County Native American gaming tribes made a push to eliminate Indian mascots in the region. A Sycuan leader offered Southwestern $10,000 to purchase brand new uniforms for all its athletic teams if the college would change its name and mascot.

Zasueta and the coaches agreed.

There was some pushback in the community, mostly based on nostalgia, but it was insignificant. Zasueta thought the college needed a photogenic, powerful animal from Mesoamerica to tie in with the Mayan architecture. The jaguar pounced at the opportunity and became the college’s new mascot in 2000.

SC’s first jaguar was a kittenish spotted cat that did not exactly strike fear in the hearts of collegiate athletic opponents. S/he was sent back to the jungle and replaced with the badass black jag today’s students wear on sweatshirts and football jerseys.

Bartow changed Apache Junction to Jaguar Junction, which he admitted rolled off the tongue with a certain elegance. SC’s Native American godfather sent five Jaguars to Major League Baseball, but none to the Cleveland Indians.

They stole the land of Mexican-American people. They committed robbery and arson.”

History books, however, paint the Tejanos as the bad guys and the Rangers as the noble heroes, Garcia said.

“No baseball team should be named after a domestic terrorist organization,” he said.

Morones said naming a team the Texas Rangers is no different that naming a team after terror organizations such as Isis, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or the Proud Boys. Legions of American Latinos of the Southwest are descendants of victims of vigilante crime, he said, and have violence embedded in their family histories.

“We will never erase that stain and we must never forget those innocent people killed or the women violated,” he said. “We must not forget families who saw their lands stolen at gun point and their rights denied because of the color of their skin.”

Young Americans have begun to challenge the presence of statues and monuments around the nation that glorified the Confederacy, slave owners and people with histories of violence, Morones said. Many Texans are calling for the removal of Confederate statues at the state capitol and on the grounds of the University of Texas. Cities and towns with statues and monuments to the Texas Rangers are also initiating discussions about their appropriateness. Last year Dallas Love Field Airport removed a notorious statue of Jay Banks, a Texas Ranger who recruited other Rangers to assault Black children attempting to go to school.

That is a good start, Morones said, but even cosmopolitan, multicultural San Diego has racist statues.

“In our downtown in Horton Plaza is a statue of Pete Wilson, the architect of Proposition 187, a racist, anti-Latino bill that did a lot of damage to Latinos all over

the state,” he said. “Wilson is a symbol of hate and division, which has no place in a multicultural city like San Diego. Our city is one third Latino, but has a statue of a man who dehumanized and demonized the Latino community for personal political gain.”

A hot, dusty wind drags through what remains of Porvenir. Desolation reigns. Its ghosts have wandered a century, mostly forgotten.

Gutierrez said he will never forget and will not rest until the Texas Rangers join Cleveland in finding a new name. The Rangers, however, are playing hardball and have given no indication they will need new uniform tops any time soon.

“While we may have originally taken our name from the law enforcement agency, since 1971 the Texas Rangers Baseball Club has forged its own, independent identity,” read a 2020 statement from the team. “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry, and discrimination in all forms.”

Ring scoffed.

“The Rangers cannot reject bigotry in any form when they are named for an agency created for the purpose of exterminating Indigenous people, murdering Latinos, and attacking Black kids,” she said. “The law enforcement agency known as the Texas Rangers are a white supremacist institution.”

As American Latinos become wealthier and more powerful, racist marketing campaigns like the Frito Bandito, Taco Bell Chihuahua and Burger King’s Texican Whooper are not tolerated and are not long for the air. As once deep-red Texas becomes younger, diverse and purple will the Texas Rangers finally get shot out of the saddle?

“We shouldn’t have to wait,” Morones said. “The vigilante Texas Rangers were losers. The baseball Texas Rangers need to lose the name – now.” n

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE PHOTO BY JOHN MOORE / GETTY IMAGES

HAITIANS

FLOOD TIJUANA,

SEEK ASYLUM IN U.S. AND CANADA

By CAMILA GONZALEZ

W

ZONA RIO, TIJUANA—

hen Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 he kicked opened the Gates of Hell.

For 529 years on the tropical land that is now Haiti, humanity has demonstrated inhumanity at its sadistic worst. Genocide, extermination, slavery, rape, disease, torture, brutality,

Planet Earth's unwanted people As U.S. immigration authorities began to deport immigrants back to Haiti from Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, thousands crossed the river back into Mexico to avoid deportation. At a White House briefing Alejandro Mayorkas later confirmed 2,000 migrants had been repatriated to Haiti and 5,000 migrants were being processed by homeland security agents.

assassination, kidnapping, mayhem and murder have defined the rule of Spaniards, French, Americans, dictators, generals and despots.

That is why Jean Martinez is in Tijuana.

It’s a long story, he said, but he has time.

He has no job, no family with him and no prospects, so he has plenty of time.

People have been fleeing Haiti since 1493 when the indigenous Taino people ran from Columbus, though Martinez said he was lured away by Brazilians.

Barely a decade ago Brazil seemed on top of the world. It was frantically building scores of glimmering new stadiums and athletic facilities for the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics – the planet’s two largest sports events. Fueling the feverish construction boom was cheap labor from destitute Haiti.

Eager laborers were shipped and flown in by the tens of thousands to construction sites in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Manaus, Brasilia, EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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MAP / ADOBE STOCK

Belo Horizonte and others in the jungles and coastal cities of the world’s fifth largest nation.

They were promised great jobs and a path out of permanent poverty.

There was work, but the jobs were far from great and the path out of poverty was illusory, said Michelet Remy, a Haitian refugee who was able to cross into the United States but who lives in a streambed near a Home Depot store.

At least, he said, he is no longer marooned in Tijuana.

“Once we were done with our project, Brazil was done with us,” he said one morning as he waited for work on a Mission Valley sidewalk.

“We were turned loose and they said go back home. We (asked how) we would get there and they said ‘swim for all I care, but leave.’”

Remy said most of the workers from Haiti were paid just enough to subsist while they were in Brazil and had no savings to take back home. So legions did not go back. They headed north. Some hitched rides on trucks and trains,

Hopeless in Haiti Haiti’s Gross Domestic Product of $1,358 and average daily earnings of $1.95 make it the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. A series of corrupt, kleptocratic governments have skimmed off what little wealth remained. Haitians rarely have the opportunity to become educated and most have no reliable way to earn a living.

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PHOTO BY ADRIANA HELDIS / VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

Unwelcomed anywhere Dark-skinned, French-speaking Haitians have an even more difficult time in Mexico than other mistreated refugees, according to UNESCO and American human rights organizations.

The man pictured at left is one of the very fortunate few to find work in a city where they are not welcomed.

Helen La Lime, who is the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Haiti and head of UN’s integrated office in the country, has voiced deep concerns over the “ever-growing polarization of Haitian politics” and the increasing tendency by some actors to resort to violence.

Source: UN News

Remy said, and a few lucky ones were about to find work on northbound boats.

The rest walked.

They walked through Brazil, the Guianas, Venezuela and Colombia, Remy said, snagging rides when possible. Then they walked up Central America and into Mexico. Like Central American refugees, the Haitians bought train tickets if they could earn a little money.

Otherwise, they surreptitiously hopped the trains, including southern Mexico’s notorious La Bestia (The Beast), which has sheered the hands, arms and legs off countless refugees — the refugees it did not kill.

Martinez said he was lucky because he arrived in Mexico by plane. He made it to Tijuana, but there his luck ran out. He hit The Wall and an overwhelmed American immigration system gutted by Donald Trump and his administration. Haitians are at the back of a line that does not really exist.

Hardship has accompanied Martinez his entire life, he said.

“My reason for coming to Mexico is because of the situation in my country,” he said. “My life was threatened in Haiti and I had to leave.

(Poor) living conditions, political corruption and violence has strangled my country. When you are younger you expect the situation to improve, but it never improves. I have no future in Haiti.”

Haiti’s dark history of colonization, slavery, cruelty, superstition, corruption and stupefying levels of violence have gutted a once-promising nation. Educated Haitians and EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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PHOTOS BY SERGIO FLORES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

its fragile middle class fled generations ago.

Kleptomaniacal dictators and military officers have spirited away most of the nation’s wealth.

Even before the coup d’états, assassinations and kleptocracy of the 20th century, Haiti was marinated in brutality and tragedy. Whipsawed by the Spanish and the French, the colony of former slaves and their descendants revolted against French rule in 1791 and fought a bloody war until 1804. France engaged in a scorched earth campaign that demolished plantations and infrastructure.

Haiti won a pyrrhic victory. In exchange for diplomatic recognition the new nation was forced to pay ruinous reparations to France, which it did from 1825 to 1947. This caused Haiti to seek loans with high interest rates from American, German and French banks that sank the nation in crushing debt.

Haiti has never been close to digging out.

Historians and political scientists generally seem to agree that Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s most dysfunctional and snake bit society.

Martinez said he has lost all hope for his homeland.

“The crisis in my country is enduring,” he said. “It is never ending.”

Mexico, he said, is not much better. Camped by the wretch-inducing smell of the sunbaked sewage choking the Tijuana River canal, Haitians are at the bottom of Mexico’s racist caste system based on skin color. Light skinned Mexicans like the blonde, green-eyed rubia 30

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

“My reason for coming to Mexico is because of the situation in my country. (Poor) living conditions, political corruption and violence has strangled my country. I have no future in Haiti.”

Jean Martinez, Haitian refugee

PHOTO COURTESY OF UN NEWS

LAND OF TURMOIL

5,000 to

10,000 An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Haitians have found themselves in Tijuana at some point since around 2015, according to Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA), a Southwestern California nonprofit that advocates for Haitian migrants in the U.S. and Mexico.

Source: Time

U.S. is no promised land Some Haitians living in a Mission Valley streambed said they have been expelled from multiple countries.

"Been kicked out of five, six, who knows? I lost track," said refugee Michelet Remy. "We hide and (keep to ourselves) so the Americans don't kick us out, too." Remy and other Haitians said their dream is to live in Frenchspeaking Quebec.

models shimmering on billboards make up the ruling class. Mestizos occupy the working class middle, while dark-skinned indios are shunned and mired in poverty.

Black Haitians are the new punching bags of la frontera, and Martinez has his bruises.

“No one here likes Haitians,” he said.

Jason, a Haitian refugee who uses just one name, agreed.

“There is a lot of violence and pain in Tijuana,” he said. “(Mexicans) do not do anything to help Haitians. People in Mexico are afraid of Black people. (They) avoid walking on the same sidewalk.”

His job as an Uber driver is barely keeping him alive, Jason said, because the pay is so low. He always asks to be paid in U.S. dollars because that is what the landlord demands.

Like so many Haitians, Jason said his dream destination is not the United States, but Canada. The bilingual province of Quebec has booming cities like Montreal, Quebec City, Laval and Longueuil that tend to be accepting of French-speaking Haitians.

“Things would likely be better (in Canada),” he said.

Remy also said he would like to find a way to Canada, though so far he has not gotten much more than 20 miles from the border with Mexico. His French has a Haitian lilt, part Cajun Creole but all Caribbean.

“Quebec has French-(speaking) brothers and the Canadians are nicer to Haitians than Mexicans and Americans,” he said. “Some Haitians (speak enough) Spanish to fake it, but Tijuana and San Diego suck if you only speak French.”

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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Working as a day laborer is rough, he said, and sometimes workers toil all day or all week only to be stiffed. Still, he added, he would rather sleep in a San Diego canyon than anywhere along the border in Tijuana.

Emmanuel Philippe Auguste said he arrived in Tijuana at the end of October after a hemisphere-spanning trek from Chile where he and his wife lived for four years following the Rio Olympics.

“When you are living on the streets you realize the world is not so kind and does not have your best interests,” he said. “There is no help for Haitians in Tijuana.”

Auguste and his wife left their children behind in Haiti, he said, and they have not seen them for years. Guarded and quiet, he looked genuinely stumped when asked what he hoped for in the years ahead.

After an uncomfortable and melancholic pause, he sighed and cast his eyes skyward.

“I would like to live somewhere where I am (considered) legal,” he said. “I just want to take care of my family.” n

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PHOTO BY JOSEPH ODELYN / AP

So close, yet so far Haitians in Tijuana hold a vigil right at the yellow line that is the official U.S.-Mexico border. The guarded border crossing is steps away on American soil. Many spots like this one have disappeared after American Border Patrol and Immigration personnel fenced off the yellow line to push refugees onto Mexican soil so they cannot claim to be on American soil asking for asylum.

PHOTO BY MATTHEW BOWLER / KPBS

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMMIGRATION IMPACT

HAITIANS:

Desperate to flee poverty, sent away by Brazil and Chile, Haitian refugees cluster in Tijuana dreaming of Le Nord Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations, is just 675 miles from the richest. Once blessed with the same beauty and natural resources of its conjoined neighbor, the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s history on the island of Hispaniola is markedly different.

A few facts about the land of “Liberte’ and Fraternite’”: • Haiti was the second nation in the New World to gain independence following the United States. Haiti fought a revolution against France from 1791-1804 when self-liberated slaves drove off colonial rulers.

• Haiti is the world’s oldest Black republic.

• The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haitians earn an average of $1.95 a day and have a GDP of only $1,358.

• Haiti has been occupied by Spain, France and the United States. The American occupation lasted from 1915-1934.

• Notorious strongman Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier oversaw a reign of terror from 1957-1971.

• Duvalier’s 19-year-old playboy son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ruled from 1971-1986.

• Pope John Paul II visited Haiti in 1983 to scold Baby Doc Duvalier and the military for corruption, violence and dysfunction.

• In 2010 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed more than 250,000 people and injured at least 300,000. More than 5 million people were displaced.

• Nearly 4,000 schools were damaged or destroyed by the quake, most have not been replaced.

• Haiti’s last legally elected president, Jovenel Moises, was assassinated on July 7, 2021.

Sources: BBC International, United Nations Development Programme, historyanswers.co.uk, Britannica.com, UNESCO, New York Times.

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALAN HESS FOR JESSIE LARK

A RARE SONGBIRD Jessie Lark’s precocious talents continue to make beautiful music

By LESLEY GARATE

J

ames Henry knew singers.

During his remarkable career, Southwestern College’s former professor of commercial music worked on 90 gold and platinum hits, recorded with Stevie Wonder and Prince, and was nominated for a Grammy with African music legend Miriam Makeba.

He said Bonita Vista High School grad Jessie Lark was one of the best singers he had ever worked with.

“That lady is Taylor Swift on steroids,” he growled as Lark, the artist formerly known as Jessica Lerner, filled in a harmony on a rousing dance track she had written.

Lark blushed at the comparison and changed the subject. She has her own future to write.

Her newest EP, “After (H)ours,” includes five new songs by the versatile singer-songwriterguitarist-pianist who starting performing when she was 5 and commenced playing solo gigs when she was a teenager.

Like many young singer-songwriters, Lark said she started out as a singer and later earned the hyphenate.

“At first I didn’t have the idea of writing

“When you (are communicating) it makes your art more sincere, it makes you perform better and more vulnerable. That’s what people are there for. People pay to go see a show because they want to have an emotional connection with the music and songs.”

— Jessie Lark

A RED GUITAR, THREE CHORDS AND THE TRUTH Jessie Lark urges young songwriters to be thoughtful about lyrics because songs have power.

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

35

songs, I just wanted to sing,” she said. “As I got older I realized that you want to make a name for yourself, you have to write your own songs.”

Lark’s voice is clear as glacial ice and expressive as a flock of songbirds. She was nominated for a San Diego Music Award in the category of Best Singer-Songwriter and has performed throughout the region.

Inspiration for her lyrical songs comes from love, heartbreak and betrayal, but also everyday experiences that make humans human. Her music is emotionally transparent.

“If it’s a song you really poured your heart into, it’s all there,” she said. “You’ve told the story so fully there is nothing else to say and no need for additional context.”

Songwriters are storytellers, philosophers and even sources of wisdom, Lark said, so the lyrics deserve attention. Good songs are those that resonate with large swaths of listeners.

“You want to be specific, but you don’t want to be so specific that people who listen to the song can’t hear themselves in it,” she said.

Artists crave inspiration, Lark said, but discipline is important, too. Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Lark likes to schedule writing time. Sometimes inspiration follows.

“You need to be able to write even when there isn’t a perfect inspirational moment,” she said.

It helps to be a fan of a wide array of musical forms, she said, and to constantly listen to good music by other artists. Songwriters never want to copy others and be derivative, but they do need to learn constantly and develop a broad musical vocabulary. She also said it is good to be a critic.

“If you feel kind of ho hum and you can’t hold a conversation about music, you really need to dive into the work of other people,” she said. “Enjoy it. Dissect it. Argue with your friends. (Be a) creator and a consumer.”

Quiet and thoughtful by nature, Lark said the idea of standing on a stage with a microphone and a guitar strapped over your shoulder can be exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

“It’s hard to perform and put yourself out there,” she said. “(What helps me) is remembering that it’s not about you up there.

It’s about the song and it’s about the message 36

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

you’re about to share. It’s the same when you’re just talking to somebody. If we got nervous before going to talk to somebody like I’m talking to you right now (you cannot worry about) ‘I hope she likes me, I hope I say the right thing, I hope I come off okay.’ That would cause me to be in my head instead of focusing on messages.”

A transparent singer is vulnerable, she said. A great performance can happen when an artist is in “the flow,” a place of comfort and concentration where nerves subside and creativity pours forth.

“Your brain and your body are just vehicles to perform that message for other people,” she said. “When you (are communicating) it makes your art more sincere, it makes you perform better and more vulnerable. That’s what people are there for. People pay to go see a show because they want to have an emotional connection with the music and songs.”

COVID-19 and the ensuing chaos slowed Lark’s momentum as a live performer, but may have been a blessing in disguise. Like many great artists throughout history, she turned away from a locked door and opened another.

Lark adapted and learned new skills. She began sharing music and performing live on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube from home.

Twitch enabled her to perform globally and interact with her audience in a more intimate way. Her Twitchcasts, “JessieLarkMusic,” run every Tuesday from noon – 3 p.m. and Thursdays at 9 a.m.

“After (H)ours” is a COVID labor of love, she said, a ‘Rona rose growing from the rubble.

Tracks include, “Love Don’t Change,” “Come on,” “Go Slow,” “Under These Sheets” and “Fly Away.”

Like Sir Elton John and Dave Grohl, Lark enjoys collaborating with other musicians.

She writes with the band The Rogue Pilots and performs in their upcoming video. She is featured on the new Joe Dreamz music video “Phase.” She also enjoys doing charity gigs, including her favorite, the San Diego Blood Bank.

Cancelled gigs could not cancel Lark’s enthusiasm for music or the bright future awaiting her.

“Music never goes away,” she said. “It is always around because we need it.” n

RESILIENCE PHOTO COURTESY OF ERICA ALFARO

ENTERING A NEW FIELD Former farmworker Erica Alfaro transcended abject poverty, domestic violence to earn a Master’s degree and became an author

By NICOLETTE MONIQUE LUNA

E

rica Alfaro’s life would be a great screenplay except for one problem.

No one would believe it.

She was a 15-year-old mother born to immigrant farmer workers in a violent relationship who was rescued by her brother, dropped out of school twice before earning a Master’s degree, breaking the Internet and becoming a successful author.

And that’s just Act I.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ERICA ALFARO

ACCIDENTAL INTERNET STAR

“If you want a better life, you need to get a good education.”

A

lfaro had a brush with fame in 2019 shortly after earning a Master’s in education from SDSU. Grateful for her noble and hard-working parents who always supported her, she posed in her Master’s graduation regalia flanked by her beaming mother and father in the same North County strawberry field her family toiled in when she was younger. The photo was an Internet sensation that has been emulated by graduating children of migrants ever since.

Earning a Master’s hood was never on the mind of 15-yearold Erica as she gave birth to her son, Luis. The child’s father was violent and abusive to the young mother and baby. Abuse rained down incessantly until Alfaro’s brother intervened. He convinced his beleaguered sister that she did not deserve the malicious treatment and urged her to exit the relationship. He also said he would personally protect her, no matter what.

Her brother’s devotion gave Alfaro the courage to escape a dangerous situation. Even though she was fleeing for her life, she could not outrun the guilt she felt. Like many victims of domestic abuse, she felt guilty that her son would grow up without a father. She said she also felt guilty for not leaving sooner and allowing her son to see her being abused.

Susy Alfaro, her sister, said domestic abuse can be very complicated and Erica needed time to sort out what had happened to her.

“The hardest part (of Erica) going through domestic violence

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Erica Alfaro

GROUND BREAKER 'BREAKS' THE INTERNET In an effort to honor her parents, Alfaro was photographed with them in the same strawberry field where they once worked. The photo has been shared all over the planet.

was my nephew being a witness,” she said. “He was very young and he was trying to defend his mom.”

Alfaro was free from her violent abuser and supported by her family, but had little else going for her. She was a high school dropout with a young child and no way to earn a living other than picking crops.

Her moment of enlightenment came in a dusty San Ysidro tomato field one afternoon thanks to her wise, weary mother. Alfaro said the words are forever etched in her memory.

“This is our life,” she recalled her mother telling her. “We did not have any other options than to pick crops. If you want a better life, you need to get a good education.”

Alfaro dusted herself off and applied for a GED program. It was a struggle, she said, but she eventually earned a high school diploma.

Success in education was intoxicating and Alfaro came to realize that she was as bright and capable as any of the other students surrounding her. She enrolled at Mira Costa College and earned an Associate’s degree in psychology. More important, she transferred to CSU San Marcos to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in psychology.

After a strong start, a setback.

Luis developed a medical condition that required more and more of her time. Alfaro said she started feeling exhausted and overwhelmed caring for her young son and taking upper division classes. Her grades plunged and she was ruled academically disqualified.

When Luis began to stabilize she returned to Mira Costa College, discouraged but not defeated. Her husband

PHOTO COURTESY OF ERICA ALFARO

Jose Esquivel said Alfaro was relentless.

“I learned from her not to give up and not to take no for an answer,” he said.

San Marcos re-admitted Alfaro after she clawed her way through classes she had retaken at Mira Costa. She earned her BA in psychology and decided to keep climbing. She was accepted into the Master’s program by the Education Department at SDSU and completed her MA in May 2019.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS NOT FOREVER

S

hortly after earning her Master’s hood, Alfaro hired a photographer and drove with her parents to a strawberry field where they had once labored.

Strawberries are among the most difficult foods to harvest because they require farmworkers to crawl on their hands and knees through the dirt rows for hours on end.

There are often unpleasant surprises beneath the leafy vines, including venomous spiders and rattlesnakes.

Her radiant parents had realized one of their dreams when they stood in the late spring sunshine, feet planted in the soil where they had scratched out a living.

“Los sueños se hacen realidad,” she said. (“Dreams become reality.”)

This was more than metaphysical greeting card sentiment for Alfaro, she explained. Dreams and goals need to be clearly defined before there is any hope of achieving them.

When a person can visualize what awaits at the end of the journey, the bumps and setbacks become just part of the trail.

MÁ!

FELICIDADES MA

m CSU San Marcos. e her graduation fro rat leb ce is, Lu n, so Alfaro and her

“You can use your adversities as an excuse to stop or you can use them as motivation to keep moving forward,” she said.

Esquivel, her proud husband, she Alfaro’s decision to write her book, “Harvesting Dreams (Cosechando Sueños)” was driven by a desire to inspire others. The process was very emotional, he said.

“When she would write the book she poured her soul (into it), she poured her heart out,” he said. “I got to see those tears and that happy face when she completed a chapter.”

Inspiration and encouragement are gifts Alfaro likes to share, Esquivel said.

“Young Erica didn’t know if someone else in her position could be successful,” he said. “The mission of older Erica is to share with others what is possible. No matter the obstacles, no matter the background, no matter what

happened, there is always a way to succeed.”

As her book tour winds down, her speaking engagements have heated up. Alfaro is a popular keynote speaker at high schools and colleges. And, in a sweet irony, she is now a human resources manager at the same tomato field where her parents once worked.

“Somehow, I completed a full circle,” she said.

Act I is complete and the curtain has risen on Act II of the Life of Erica Alfaro, farmer worker turned scholar turned professional. She sees strawberries and tomatoes from a different point of view, but swears never to forget where she came from or the sacrifice of her parents. Like the hero in any story, she knows it is now her obligation to share her new powers with others back home.

Her journey continues. n EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE

ROSARITO:

PARADISE UNDER ATTACK Once-beautiful beach community overwhelmed by sewage, dumping

By CAMILA GONZALEZ PHOTOS BY CAMILA GONZALEZ

ROSARITO, BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE—

R

osarito ought to be paradise.

In the brisk pre-dawn of late winter, Baja’s famous chaparral hillsides slope gently toward the azure ocean, giving way to a flat sandy beach touching the horizon in every direction.

Pelicans skim the incoming swells above a quartette of bodysurfing dolphins. Shorebirds sing their primordial greeting to the dawn, a moving musical performance occasionally halted for a quick bite of sand crab.

Gradually the garish light of day lifts the veil of fantasy and exposes a grim reality. Hillsides fragrant with chaparral and bobbing butterflies belch forth streams of raw sewage. Shards of glass, sunbaked plastics and mounds of trash pock the beach like a minefield. Styrofoam and cardboard tumble in the breakers, then retreat in the backwash to tumble some more.

Rosarito is best viewed in the gloaming

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from far away. Distance lends undeserved enchantment.

Paradise lost.

As the sunlight evades the hillsides and touches down on the smoky sands, people pour forth in a karnevil procession. Vendors push taco carts, entrepreneurs lug gas station coolers with churros and old women with discarded Amazon boxes steaming with homemade burritos amble across the sand. Men with leathery skin in ragged pants and frayed straw hats drag children’s wagons full of iced beer.

Paletas to follow.

Teenage Wasteland

Danny Rodriguez said he wants to love his hometown, but despairs over the unchecked dumping, polluted air and untreated sewage. Any open land in or near Rosarito is usually an impromptu dump site with toxic materials and rats.

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Vendors selling twisty bracelets, threadbare t-shirts and lovely ironwood carvings come ashore, stepping over rivulets of sewage, soggy half-buried trash and still-glowing charcoal from the night before.

Paradise destroyed.

GOD’S BEACH DEFILED Rosarito is a proto-resort town just 22 miles south of the San Ysidro border crossing, but it seems a continent distant from the manicured shores of Coronado, La Jolla and Del Mar that were made in the same burst of creation. Blessed by God or Mother Nature with even better surroundings and a superior shoreline to those iconic American beaches, Rosarito has been despoiled by carelessness and callous. It is a miracle underappreciated and unloved.

Environmental degradation snuck up on Rosarito as it has on other sublime slices of Baja beauty like La Mision, Playa del Mar and Calafia. As population grew in the once-desolate coastal areas of Baja California Norte, so did environmental pressures.

Homes and businesses sprung up like ambitious squatters, without infrastructure. Sewage systems are virtually nonexistent, treated as an inconvenience rather than a necessity.

Rosarito’s 21st century residents manage sewage like an 18th century problem. Most use latrines. Some are connected to septic tanks without drain fields, others to byzantine open air ditches of wastewater that are not disposed of properly. One Rosarito enclave of 748 households generates 7.6 liters of untreated wastewater per second, 170,000 gallons that soon finds its way into the ocean.

Trash pickup is spotty and roadside dumping is prevalent. Mounds of household refuse combine with detritus from factories and construction sites.

Baja’s dumps are semi-improvised trash cemeteries stashed in out-of-the-way hollows and valleys. They are unsupervised, uncovered and teaming with rats.

Clouds of screeching seagulls give them away.

ATTACKED BY AIR, LAND AND SEA Rosarito and its surrounding areas are at the tipping point, according to residents like philosophical 15-year-old beach lover Danny Rodrigues.

“Ten years ago the city was not as polluted,” he said.

“It was nice to go outside to enjoy the fresh air, but now when you go outside it smells nasty and you know the air is contaminated.”

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170,000 A 2012 master plan proposal identified the households in the area of Ampliación Lucio Blanco, on the north side of Playas de Rosarito, as families in critical need. The people there used latrines, septic tanks without drain fields and open air ditches for wastewater disposal, posing a human health risk from direct contact with raw sewage, as well as an environmental risk for contamination of groundwater and surface water.

An estimated 748 households in this subdivision are generating approximately 7.6 liters per second (lps) or 170,000 gallons per day (gd) of wastewater that is not being disposed of properly.

Source: North American Development Bank

“Ten years ago the city was not as polluted. It was nice to go outside to enjoy the fresh air, but now when you go outside it smells nasty and you know the air is contaminated.”

Danny Rodrigues, Rosarito resident

infections. He has to carefully watch each and every step to avoid serrated remains of broken beer and tequila bottles. He sighs as he winds through a shoreline graveyard of abandoned toys, chip wrappers, fluttering shopping bags, straws, cans, plastic cups and tires.

“It sucks and it’s sad.”

SEWAGE RUNS FREE It gets worse after a 10-minute walk to a spot just north of the rowdy beachfront Papas and Beer franchise in Rosarito. A fetid fecal stream flows directly out of the city straight into the ocean. Its warm, turgid water has an eye-watering stench that makes clear its cloudy origins.

This particular sewage outlet snakes under Benito Juarez Boulevard, the main arterial road. It drains past Dr. Yadira Moreno’s dental office, which is just 50 feet from a canal where untreated sewage collects after coursing through the city. Dr. Moreno has lived in Rosarito for 43 years and loves her hometown, she said, but dreads the direction it is headed.

“It is very complicated,” she said. “You have to factor in the trash, untreated sewage and the thermal power station. They all generate a tremendous amount of contamination.”

Rosarito’s thermal power station discards its untreated waste directly into the ocean, said Moreno.

“I think the biggest issue in Rosarito is the government’s failure to construct a sewage plant to

Rosarito's River Styx

Untreated sewage and industrial wastewater flows straight to the beach and into the ocean.

After a rain storm this canal brims with a torrent of sludge that sends tires, car parts and junked appliances tumbling past homes and restaurants on its way to the beach.

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treat the sewage,” she said. “We absolutely need a sewage plant. The pollution from the thermal plant is damaging our health.”

Moreno said she long ago gave up on the fouled beach and ocean.

“I do not go swimming at the beach,” she said. “I do not enjoy it because when I see the brown foam along the shoreline I believe it is excrement.”

There is plenty of blame to go around, Moreno said, but ultimately the government is to blame for the contamination of Baja California’s once-pristine beaches.

“Our government is not taking responsibility or making the (infrastructure) investments necessary to protect the beaches. Hotels are also responsible for discharging raw sewage into the oceans. I think that is where we need to start to fix this problem.”

Moreno is not optimistic about her hometown’s future.

“In 10 years Rosarito will have little or no tourists because the beaches will be too contaminated,” she said. “There will be a point where no one will want to use these beaches. That time is nearly upon us.”

Abelardo Lopez Valenzuela, who has lived in Rosarito for 17 years, said he has a similarly glum outlook.

“Truthfully, I do not think things will change because every day it gets worse,” he said. “Near the beach they continue to build hotels and more factories, but no sewage treatment facility.”

Valenzuela also blamed locals and tourists who trash Baja’s beaches then leave.

“There is always disorder,” he said. “People should be more conscientious and take care of these beautiful beaches. They cannot be bothered to pack out their trash.”

Law enforcement and government action is required, Valenzuela said.

“Tickets should be issued and fines should be high to discourage littering,” he said. “I love going to the beach, but it is difficult to enjoy with all the pollution.”

ENVIRONMENTAL AWAKENING Americans ignore the plight of Baja’s beaches at their own peril. Marine biologists and environmentalists in the United States warn that trash and sewage know no borders. The prevailing coastal countercurrent pushes Baja California’s beach water into Alta California. Southern beaches like Imperial Beach, Silver Stand and Coronado have all been affected by sewage and contaminated water that 44

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PHOTO COURTESY OF SURFRIDER FOUNDATION

Paradise Defiled

Baja California's Pacific coastline between Tijuana and Ensenada hosts unique ecosystems and was once considered one of the most beautiful ocean fronts on the planet. Not anymore. Indiscriminate building without infrastructure has made towns and cities like Playas de Rosarito headwaters of toxic sewage and open trash pits.

Long-time Rosaritans have not given up hope but say a tipping point is at hand.

SURFRIDER STUDY: “Since January of 2021, the beaches in Southern San Diego County have been closed due to toxic waste and sewage flow for 215 days.”

flowed north, according to research by the Surfrider Foundation, a non-profit organization that has been calling for action and aid for the health of the beaches and coastal communities along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Since January of 2021, the beaches in Southern San Diego County have been closed due to toxic waste and sewage flow for 215 days,” according to a Surfrider study.

Once ships passing in the night, environmentalists from the U.S. and Mexico have recently formed meaningful alliances and have begun working together, thanks largely to efforts by WildCoast founder Dr. Serge Dedina, who is currently mayor of Imperial Beach.

WildCoast, Surfrider and other American environmental advocates support the passage of the Border Water Quality Restoration and Protection Act languishing in the United States Senate. Like many congressional effort related to the borderlands, lawmakers from unaffected states do not seem to understand the border environmental crisis and have not supported solutions.

Nascent efforts are also stirring to life in Mexico, where CESPT (The State Commission for Public Services of Tijuana) proposes extending waste water services to the area of Ampliación Lucio Blanco on the north side of Rosarito.

Mexico has recently purchased American sewage pumps made with trash shredders to prevent the drains from clogging and spilling over during bursts of rainfall. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this month that it is making arrangements to double its capacity to 60 million gallons of wastewater a day. Construction is expected to begin this summer.

Francisco Javier Estrada Ortiz, a personal trainer at Rosarito’s Fitness Center, said he has lived in Rosarito for 28 years and is not ready to give up on his oncebucolic home. He called on the Mexican government to prioritize the environment over unmanaged tourism.

Without one, he said, Rosarito cannot have the other.

“Locals and tourists are all responsible for the contamination at the beach,” he said. “We need to build awareness to combat these problems. We need to start a campaign to encourage regular clean ups at the beach. That would be a start and that is something regular citizens could do to start things off.”

Ortiz said Rosarito is beautiful and needs to be saved. Mother Nature could not be reached for comment, but she would likely agree. Paradise needs help. n EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE

MAP / ADOBE STOCK

GORILLAS

IN OUR

MIDST

San Ysidro’s Esteban Preciado spent his winter break in Uganda’s Impenetrable Forest with a pack of rare mountain gorillas that changed his life

By ESTEBAN PRECIADO PHOTOS BY ESTEBAN PRECIADO

BWINDI NATIONAL PARK, UGANDA—

H

iking up the outside of an extinct volcano caldera in the tropical Impenetrable Forest of Uganda was like running on a stair climber in a

Surreal Family Reunion

Preciado and his small group of gorilla trekkers encounter a pack foraging in the steamy Bwindi National Park Mountain Gorilla Reserve. Mountain Gorillas, despite their enormous size and strength, share 98 percent of a human's genes. They are generally peaceful, but will fiercely defend themselves and family members if they feel threatened.

sauna. Equatorial heat was oppressive and the humidity of the Bwindi mountainside made us feel as if we were steaming in a crock pot.

During my five years in the United States Marine Corps we had gone on countless grueling hikes with heavy packs, but nothing like this.

It was worth every sweat-drenched, sun baked second. We had finally entered the ancient home of the Bwindi Mountain Gorillas.

Mother Nature is wise to keep the gorillas separate from humans. An adult male silverback can weigh up to 600 pounds of rippling muscle. A gorilla’s waffle-sized hands can crush a human skull and snap arms like a wishbone. They can uproot trees like pulling weeds and press 1,000 pounds over their heads as easy as people put a can of soup on the top shelf of the pantry. When people surprise a gorilla it may be the last thing they ever do.

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I wanted to see one up close, in its own environment.

I did, but not without an arduous, globe spanning journey.

SIMIAN DREAMS Why would a kid from San Ysidro High School fresh out of the Marines want to go to the deepest, most remote part of Central Africa to commune with Mountain Gorillas? I don’t even remember when the idea first entered my mind it had been so long. It felt like something I had always wanted to do.

Mountain gorillas, despite their enormous size and strength, share 98 percent of their DNA with humans. Next to chimpanzees and bonobos, they are mankind’s closest relatives on the planet. We eat many of the same things and behave in ways reflective of each other.

They can learn and pass along knowledge. They have a culture.

They are one of the most spectacular yet dangerous animals on Earth. They are also one of the rarest. I had to see them. And, for the first time in my life, I had the time and money to do it.

GORILLA TREK Last July my journey began when I started researching the path of a “gorilla trek.” An organization called Conservation Through Public Health was my guide. Founded by Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka, CTPH is an environmental tourism organization that monitors the health of the mountain gorillas at the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest as well as the wellbeing of native Batwa farmers.

Environmental tourism organizations like CTPH have successfully made the case that it is in Uganda’s best economic interests to protect its gorillas from poachers and habitat loss.

Bwindi was sustained by gorilla tourism.

My travel checklist was lengthy. I needed a “gorilla permit,” a licensed tour guide, and a flight to Uganda. I needed a crash course in mountain gorilla behavior and, even more important, a lesson about how to behave around a temperamental 600-pound silverback male and his 400 pound mates.

Uganda is just about as far away from San Ysidro as any place on Earth. A flight of nearly 16 hours over the Arctic Circle crossed a lineup

Long, Hot Hike

Bwindi National Park is many miles from any human settlements and the gorilla reserve is nestled in the caldera of an inactive volcano that hosts a tropical rainforest where the Ugandan mountain gorillas live. Sweltering heat, drenching humidity and a steep ascent make the hike very challenging. Native Bwindi have adapted to the climate and altitude, but North Americans and Europeans struggle.

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of time zones before touching down in Doha, Qatar for a nine-hour layover. Next was a six hour flight to Entebbe, Uganda and a two-hour cattle call through Ugandan immigration and COVID testing. I would have another layover of four hours before squeezing aboard a small propeller plane that would take me on a 1 hour, 10 minute hop to Kihihi. Uganda’s lush emerald rainforests gave way to massive Lake Victoria, one of the world’s greatest bodies of fresh water and the headwater of the mighty Nile River.

Lake Victoria is Africa’s version of the Great Lakes, so expansive that it felt like we were flying over an ocean. Even thousands of feet in the air I could not see the other end.

We landed in Kihihi to continue the marathon.

It was a jostled one-hour car ride over roads with aged cracked pavement stretches that gave way to dirt. That got us to the town of Kabale. Though we were in the very heart of central Africa, tiny Kabale conjured one of those frontier western towns you might see in American movies, substituting the desiccated dust of the Wild West with luxuriant verdigris scenery of a beautiful rainforest.

After more than a day and a half of sleepless travel, I finally had a good night’s rest at my cabin at the CTPH lodge. I dreamed of gorillas.

Martin, my host, woke me early. We ate breakfast and laced up for a short hike to the Bwindi Ranger Facility for a life-saving lesson on how to act around gorillas.

“Stay calm,” the ranger told us. “The last thing you want to make mad is a silverback gorilla.”

Visitors were admonished to avoid showing their teeth, not to beat on their chests and not to stare.

If we made eye contact we were warned to quickly look away so the gorillas do not think you are staring at them. If an angry gorilla approaches we were

King of the Forest Puts Family First

Preciado and his group encountered a family unit (l) led by a 600-pound silverback male (r). Female gorillas often weigh more than 300 pounds and even juveniles have strength that exceeds most humans. Gorillas have very large hands capable of pulling up small trees and crushing hostile intruders. Their bite force exceeds that of bears and lions. Human visitors need to be quiet, move slowly and be respectful.

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coached to lie on the ground and act as small and unthreatening as possible.

My group of six trekkers included a married couple from Spain, a man from Seattle, and two German backpackers. We boarded trucks that took us 30 minutes east of Kabale to the starting point of the hike to the Bwindi gorilla reserve.

SOLDIERING ON During my five years in the Marines I did a lot of hiking. We hiked up and down the muddy hills and mountains of Camp Pendleton with more than 60 pounds of gear slung over our backs. We kicked up dust in desert outbacks and struggled through the calf-burning sand dunes of beaches.

None of that truly prepared me for the gorilla march up to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. It was the most difficult hike I had ever done. Muddy, slippery rainforest trails were all uphill and at altitude. We were constantly on the incline as we navigated deep ravines and narrow walkways clinging to hillsides.

Uganda’s heat was searing and even your sweat seemed hot. It was relentless without even a snatch of relief under the canopy. My ego also wilted as we watched passing Batwa natives of Bwindi pass us by with a leisureliness that had us muttering in disbelief. They had worn out shoes and baskets packed with fruits or piles of sticks skillfully balanced atop of their heads.

It was all worth it.

Bwindi’s rainforest was one breathtaking sight after another. Our erstwhile enemy, the Sun, was also a master painter. Its golden rays illuminated the lush broad leaves of the forest, and the azure sky complemented the emerald mountaintops on every horizon.

Bringing Up Baby

A baby gorilla approached the humans and began to play with Preciado's backpack. It then put its young but powerful hand on his shoulder. It was a memorable moment, but a park ranger urged Preciado to back away lest he draw the ire of the silverback male just 20 feet away.

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Our relentless ascent had stretched nearly seven miles before we reached the topmost edge of the caldera. Spread before us was an ocean of trees and verdance. It was a stunning reward for our efforts. Better still, we were finally hiking downhill.

GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST Our ranger escorts announced what we were all waiting to hear — the gorillas were not far. Their interpretation of “not far” meant at least three more hothouse miles through the dripping, teaming forest. We trudged on through a rainforest that was, in a word, alive.

Life was as ubiquitous as the steamy air and thousands of animals squawked, called and squealed as if to welcome us or warn us. Even at our throbbing feet were beetles, centipedes, and egg sized insects. There were the tracks of jungle elephants, monkeys, big cats and, of course, mountain gorillas. We were walking in the eternal land of life, death, rebirth, extinction, evolution and hope. We were in humanity’s cradle, the same African heartland from which sprang our earliest ancestors

A rainforest canopy is a dense thatched ceiling that parses the sunlight judiciously. Few illuminating rays make it to the ground, but those that do seem to celebrate in a dance on the forest floor …. In the muddy darkness I got my first glimpse of a mountain gorilla. before they roamed off the continent.

A rainforest canopy is a dense thatched ceiling that parses the sunlight judiciously.

Few illuminating rays make it to the ground, but those that do seem to celebrate in a dance on the forest floor. These fleeting beams of light from Father Sun lit the stage for our hosts.

In the muddy darkness I got my first glimpse of a mountain gorilla.

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KEEP CALM AND RESPECT GORILLAS Mountain gorillas, despite their intimidating size and reputation for fiercely defending each other, are actually gentle creatures who follow a culture of live and let live. They are highly intelligent and curious. They lack a sense of territoriality that makes many other large African animals so dangerous.

That said, humans are no match for an angry gorilla. Humans can safely approach and observe gorillas in their habitat if they follow a few guidelines: Small groups. Gorillas tend to live and travel in small packs, so they are generally accepting of small groups of 5-8 humans.

Short visits. Like most humans, gorillas do not like to be stared at or feel like they are being examined.

Visits of about one hour reduce the risk of stressing or disturbing gorilla packs.

Free of disease. Gorillas share 98 percent of our genes and are susceptible to many of the same viruses and bacteria that sicken humans.

Keep clean. To reduce contamination and the spread of disease, visitors should wash their hands before seeing gorillas and refrain from smoking, eating or drinking.

Silence is golden. Gorillas use vocalizations to communicate.

Chatting and loud noises by humans confuse and irritate them.

Keep to yourself. Give gorillas plenty of space and avoid approaching them. Never attempt to touch a gorilla or any large animal in the wild.

Keep your mouth closed. Baring of teeth is considered a sign of hostility among gorillas.

Avoid eye contact. Silverback males, in particularly, consider direct eye contact a challenge.

Visitors who accidentally catch a gorilla’s eyes should immediately look away.

Be respectful and humble.

Gorillas sense intentions and will defend each other if they feel threatened. An angry gorilla will bare its teeth, roar or beat its chest.

Humans who see these behaviors should get on the ground, look away and “get small.” These behaviors indicate that the visitor acknowledges the gorilla’s primacy and does not wish to fight.

Sources: Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress, “Gorillas in the Mist” by Dian Fossey

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It could have been my last.

I was in front of the group when I almost walked right into a grazing female. Her midnight fur somehow perfectly cloaked her 300 pound body in the thick vegetation.

Luckily for me I was able to back away without spooking her. I collected myself with a deep breath and noticed the rangers pointing out the pack with two adult females and two babies.

Commanding the scene was the king of the jungle, an enormous male silverback gorilla.

We moved off to a “safe” spot barely 10 feet away from the business-like mothers and the frolicking babies.

We had all done our homework on mountain gorillas, but that does not fully prepared you for your first moments with a gorilla family in a rainforest thicket. They are massive and muscular creatures that radiate strength and power. Their ebony fur is mottled with debris of the forest, including dirt and the pollen from the sea of plants and foliage they wade through. Adult gorillas have long ragged, matted hair that resembles obsidian blades of grass.

I was close enough to the females to see into their coal black eyes as they scanned their surroundings, making sure their babies are close by and safe. Baby gorillas have fur that is fuzzy and looks so soft you want to touch it.

You dare not.

Baby gorillas are much like human toddlers that require constant parental supervision.

They are balls of energy that jump from trees, wrestle with each other, and pester their mothers with playfulness. They are extremely curious, which demonstrates their intelligence and also their naiveté. Like dogs, they stop and sniff nearly everything. They fondle and grab anything they can get their vise grip hands on such as sticks, rocks and bugs which they put in their mouths to taste. They even sampled some of our camera equipment.

Their curiosity was contagious and almost got me in big time trouble with the scowling silverback.

Crouching silently about 10 feet from the pack among the ferns and broadleaf plants doing my best impression of a National Geographic photographer, I noticed one of the baby gorillas making his way towards me.

A Real Swinger

A young mountain gorilla climbed and swung in the branches near the human visitors. Young gorillas are excellent climbers and can hang for extended periods of time with one hand while they snack on leaves. Like most human children, young gorillas are very curious and tactile. They came closer to the humans than their much larger parents.

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I thought nothing of it at first because I was concentrating hard to get the best pictures I could. I figured the baby gorilla, despite its curiosity, would not approach a strange and unknown figure.

I was wrong.

Behind me I heard little footsteps and rustling. A little gorilla approached me and reached out to touch my sweat drenched shirt.

This small baby gorilla probably had the grip strength of a man because when he grabbed my shoulder I felt it.

Our training from the rangers kicked in and I remembered the admonition to remain calm.

I was strangely at peace in this transcendent moment. I had a wild gorilla examining me. I was not afraid and strangely serene. I actually felt honored.

Thankfully I did not get too caught up the moment. I was able to turn my camera into selfie mode and capture my brief encounter with this magnificent creature.

Seconds later came a stern warning from a ranger to back away. I immediately understood why. One of the most protective mothers in the animal kingdom was not even 20 feet away. A lordly silverback was just a few feet further.

Silverback mountain gorillas are built like tanks. They are 500-600 pounds of muscle that a bodybuilder would envy. Their bite force is about 1,300 pounds per square inch, biological jargon for “they can bite through almost anything.” They have more power in their jaws than even lions and grizzly bears. Their glistening silver hair is an indicator of their age and status.

Then a nearly fatal mistake.

A roar shattered my reverie and I unintentionally made brief eye contact with the silverback, which they consider a threat. It opened its cavernous mouth and brandished its dagger-sized teeth. He looked into my very soul. He did not seem to like what he saw.

For the split second I saw this angry display and heard the thundering roar a primal feeling welled up in my chest. I was at the mercy of an animal that could rip me apart like a steamed chicken. There was nothing I could do but hold very still and hope he lost interest.

Even as I wondered if I was about to be dismembered, I felt blessed. Pumped full

Sharing a Special Part of the Planet

Native Bwindi People live just outside the Mountain Gorilla Reserve and partner with the Ugandan government to protect the area and its exceedingly rare occupants. Illegal poaching during the 20th century drove mountain gorillas to near extinction, but the population rebounded thanks to international pressure and the establishment of ecotourism programs that make protection of the gorillas profitable.

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DEFENDER OF GORILLAS PAID THE ULTIMATE PRICE Californian Dian Fossey is the best known and most accomplished mountain gorilla primatologist. For 20 years until her murder in 1985, she lived among the gorillas of the volcanic mountain region of Rwanda, not far from the Bwindi gorilla populations of Uganda.

Fossey’s seminal book, “Gorillas in the Mist,” was a best seller and raised public awareness to the plight of the rare and precious mountain gorillas of Central Africa. Prior to her book, mountain gorillas were racing toward extinction due to poaching, war and habitat destruction by farmers and loggers. Fossey’s fierce defense of the Rwandan gorillas and her unorthodox ways likely led to her murder by locals who wanted her out of the way. There is no consensus as to who killed her and the list of suspects is long.

Africa’s gorilla population was estimated to have been less than 200 at the time of Fossey’s death, but her book, and a subsequent Oscarwinning film version of “Gorillas in the Mist” starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey, brought global attention to the plight of mountain gorillas. Ecological tourism and the protection of gorilla habitats by the governments of Uganda and Rwanda are credited with a steady rebound in the gorilla population. Current estimates range from 7501,000 mountain gorillas, still a perilously small number, but an improvement from Fossey’s time.

Fossey is greatly admired today for her vision, scientific talent and staunch advocacy for Africa’s wildlife, but she was intensely disliked by many Africans and Europeans during her years in Rwanda. She battled African poachers, trophy hunters from Europe and North America, potion sellers from China and zoos in developed countries. She spoke out against habitat destruction by energy companies, loggers and corporations harvesting the natural wonders of Africa.

Ironically, Fossey also opposed the burgeoning eco-tourism movement, which she predicted would slowly overwhelm gorilla habitat and interfere with the research of primatologists. She also feared human visitors would infect gorillas with disease. In retrospect, Fossey was prescient to warn of these outcomes, though a new generation of environment activists argues that eco-tourism motivates nations to protect and maintain its natural resources because it is profitable to do so.

Sources: “Gorillas in the Mist” by Dian Fossey, “A Forest in the Clouds” by John Fowler, Mother Jones Magazine and the Foundation for National Progress

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of fearful adrenaline, I paradoxically felt fortunate for this most genuine moment in the web of creation. Billions of humans through millennia lived and died without experiencing this kind of moment. I was reminded that the world is so much bigger than I thought it was and that I am but a minuscule part.

Lucky for me, my existence in this world continues. The baby scampered away and father silverback did nothing else, turning its fierce gaze toward its meal. I spent one more hour communing with the majestic animals as the mothers tried to manage their younglings and the prevailing silverback munched on fruits and leaves.

We watched in wonder as the pack moved away deeper into the dense underbrush. The silverback gave us a final reminder of his preeminence when he effortlessly uprooted a small tree I had leaned my 200-pound frame against minutes earlier. He pulled up the tree just because it was in his way.

RETURN TO MY FUTURE We turned and headed back, still deep in the Bwindi rainforest, but already feeling like we had departed the surreal meeting grounds of the mountain gorillas. Hiking back was surely the same distance and strenuous, but none of that mattered. Our transcendent and humbling experience made us feel blessed and light.

It was a mere two day later ­— just a pair of revolutions by our vast yet tiny planet ­— that I was back in the United States. My 16 hour, 15 minute return trip was a non-stop reel of dreams as gorillas foraged, played and raged in the secretive, sacred forest that now lives in my memory. n

At Home in the Shadows

Mountain gorillas, despite their size, can be hard to find under the cloudy skies and thick rainforest canopy of the Impenetrable Forest. Their onyx black fur makes them stealthy and difficult to spot from a distance in the surreal lighting of the Ugandan jungle.

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RESILIENCE

REMEMBERING

THE FORGOTTEN

By CAMILA GONZALEZ

C

hicano Park on Dia de los Muertos is a festival of color, food, drink, art and la raza magica. Honored dead are serenaded, toasted and served wondrous plates with chilled tequila.

About 125 miles to the east nearly 1,000 forgotten bodies with no names bake under the rust tinted dirt of the Terrace Park Cemetery in lonely Holtville. A gathering at festive Chicano Park prays for them, too.

Then they visit.

A caravan of cars makes a two-hour trek over the mountains, across the desert and almost to Arizona. Caretaker Chuck Jernigan cranks apart the dusty lock and swings open the gate with the No Trespassing sign. Activists from Gente Unida solemnly file in.

Windswept Terrace Park is where dreams come to die. Most died badly. America’s largest non-military graveyard of the unidentified spreads flat as a quiet lake of pulverized brick with no headstones and not one blade of grass.

A tilted smattering of pale handmade crosses twist out of the desiccated earth, the only acknowledgment that this is sacred ground.

“You are not forgotten,” murmured Gente Unida founder Enrique Morones. “No olvidados.”

Morones has led the annual visitation for nearly two decades and he expressed sadness that so little has changed.

“Not one of the persons here thought they were going to die,” he said. “They came here to work or to reunite with family. No one ever thinks they will end up dead and buried without a name in a pauper’s grave.”

America’s antiquated immigration system is to blame, Morones said, along with predatory American and Canadian business and agricultural practices that have impoverished millions of Mexicans and Central Americans.

“Conservatives like to say migrants need to get in line so they can enter through the border crossings, but that’s not possible,” he said.

“There is no line. Do you really think so many desperate people would drown in rivers, die in deserts and freeze to death in mountains if there was a line?”

Iranian refugee Ari Honarvar, vice president of Gente Unida, recited a verse of poetry in memory of the immigrants.

“We are from the great beyond and to the great beyond we shall return,” she read. “We are from the ocean and to the ocean we make our way. We are not from here or there. We are from a placeless place, and to that we journey.”

Chaplin Frank Modic had special messengers to carry the prayers to Heaven. Radiant monarch butterflies lent lightness and hope.

“We use butterflies to celebrate somebody who has passed away,” Modic said to the hushed gathering. “The butterfly is a metaphor, a theological metaphor for transformation, renewed life and being set free.”

Terrace Park’s silent graves are relentlessly permanent, Modic said as the butterflies pranced in the warm morning sky, but the spirits of the dead buried there are free and one with the eternal. Morones said the deceased can only rest when the living help those who come after to avoid their fate.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF NELVIN C. CEPEDA / THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

ACKNOWLEDGING

A TRAGIC

HISTORY Southwestern College lifts all facilities fees for Kumeyaay People

By NICOLETTE MONIQUE LUNA

I

n 1960, Sweetwater Union High School District Superintendent Joe Rindone rented a helicopter to soar over the largely empty South County to look for a spot to build Southwestern College. He chose a spot near the conjunction of two-lane Otay Lakes Road and desolate Telegraph Canyon Road because it was flat, accessible and would, he predicted, someday be the geographical center of Chula Vista.

About 12,000 years earlier native Kumeyaay People chose the same land for a village.

Resetting a relationship

Dr. Stan Rodriguez (l) of Cuyamaca College oversees construction of a replica Kumeyaay hut. Southwestern College Governing Board members have approved a verbal land acknowledgment to read prior to public campus events.

They chose well. There was a nearby water source, arable land, mild climate and a nice view. As any 21st century real estate agent might say, “Location, location, location.”

During the settlement of California and Mexico by Europeans, the Kumeyaay People were, as anthropologist Florence Connelly Shipek famously described it, “Pushed into the Rocks.”

Once-migratory people who spent summers in the mountains and wintered at the beach, the Kumeyaay were forced ever eastward as their land was farmed and developed by invaders.

Southwestern College trustees have officially acknowledged that the college is built on Kumeyaay land and is making efforts to connect with its original occupants. Trustee Leticia Cazares led an effort to establish a verbal “land acknowledgement” to be read at the start of certain college events. Her next proposal created a new policy that allows the approximately 20,000 Kumeyaay tribal members to use campus facilities and fields without charging rental fees.

Cazares said the move was long overdue.

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PHOTO BY EL SOL STAFF

community not only knows, but acknowledges and appreciates that we are on Kumeyaay lands and that this is a way for us to at least partially give back and do some repair of the damage that has been done throughout history,” she said.

Erica Pinto, chairwoman of the Jamul Indian Village, said the respectful gestures are appreciated.

“It started with the (SC) board publicly acknowledging at every board meeting that the district operates on what are historically Kumeyaay land,” she said. “Recognition goes a long way for the tribal community, but going beyond acknowledging and taking action that provides a tangible benefit, like free use of facilities for the tribes, is a big step in the right direction.”

SC’s new policies have inspired other South County school district to consider similar gestures. South Bay Union School District leaders also adopted a land acknowledgement for the K-6 district that serves Imperial Beach and the southern pockets of San Diego adjacent CONT ON PG 66

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Land Acknowledgment Southwestern College officially adopted language for its Kumeyaay Land Acknowledgment March 14, though it was previously used at governing board meetings and had its public debut at the college theater production “Superhero Planet” in May 2021. It reads: We acknowledge the land upon which we sit and occupy today as the current, traditional and ancestral home of the Kumeyaay Nation.

Before they were colonized and genocide occurred, Kumeyaay territory was vast and included Baja California to the south, Palomar Mountain to the north and the Salton Sea to the east. It included Southwestern College locations in Chula Vista, San Ysidro, National City and Otay Mesa.

Without them, we would not have access to this gathering or any of the services and benefits our district provides.

We take this opportunity to recognize the more than 500 years of demonstrated resilience and resistance in the face of violent actions taken by colonizers in efforts to separate them from their land, culture and one another. We acknowledge that despite this history, the Kumeyaay Nation continues to be an active, thriving people who contribute to the health and benefit of our region.

Let us not only remember but acknowledge, as a conscientious political act, that the land we are on is occupied Kumeyaay territory.

Kumeyaay Indian Nation The Kumeyaay, referred to as Diegueño by the Spanish, were the original native inhabitants of San Diego County. The Kumeyaay, Yuman-speaking people of Hokan stock, have lived in this region for more than 10,000 years. Historically, the Kumeyaay were horticulturists and hunters and gatherers. They were the only Yuman group in the area, the first people who greeted the Spanish when they first sailed into San Diego Harbor with the Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo expedition of 1542.

The boundaries of the Kumeyaay lands changed with the arrival of the Europeans.

It once extended from the Pacific Ocean, south to Ensenada in Baja Norte, Mexico, east to the sand dunes of the Colorado River in Imperial Valley, and north to Warner Springs Valley. North to northeast, their territory was bounded by other Indian nations — the San Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla.

Today, Kumeyaay tribal members are divided into 12 separate bands: Barona, Campo, Ewiiaapaayp, Inaja-Cosmit, Jamul, LaPosta, Manzanita, Mesa Grande, San Pasqual, Santa Ysabel, Sycuan, and Viejas.

One of the largest owners of land in San Diego County, Kumeyaay governments have jurisdiction over approximately 70,000 acres concentrated in East County from El Cajon, Lakeside, Poway and Ramona, to the desert. Of the total acreage, more than 15,000 acres are unusable to the Kumeyaay because the El Capitan Reservoir was removed from Indian Government ownership. The reservoir feeds the San Diego River east of Lakeside and is located within the Capitan Grande Indian Reservation, which is jointly patented to the Viejas and Barona Bands.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MISSION TRAILS PARK FACEBOOK

Ancient Kumeyaay Land

San Diego County's popular Mission Trails Regional Park was at one time a center of the Kumeyaay People. Its eastern mountain area (above) includes Cowles Mountain, Pyles Peak, Kwaay Paay Peak as well as South and North Fortuna. (below) The Mission Trails Dam was created by the Kumeyaay and later expanded by Spanish settlers as a water source for the San Diego Mission de Alcala.

ADOBE STOCK

Source: Viejas Band of Kumeyaay

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PHOTO COURTESY OF ERICA PINTO

to the I-5. SBUSD Board President Marco Amaral said his district also wanted to publicly support the region’s Native Americans, particularly the Kumeyaay.

“We saw what Southwestern College did and we thought it is a great idea,” he said. “Is it enough? No, but it is a good first step.”

Amaral said he is glad that many Americans are looking back at the nation’s history with an eye on the treatment and mistreatment of Indigenous People, African slaves and immigrants.

“It speaks to a larger conversation of reparations,” he said. “The United States has always had a difficult time coming to the fact that we have treated various groups with a lack of dignity and respect as well as a genocidal complex.”

Cazares said the Kumeyaay People’s catastrophic mistreatment at the hands of Europeans began shortly after explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailing for Spain came ashore in what is now San Diego Bay in 1542. Though Cabrillo and his crew did not stay more than a few days in this area and did not encounter the Kumeyaay, they were engaged in violent fighting with the native people of the Catalina Islands.

ERICA PINTO CHAIRWOMAN, JAMUL INDIAN VILL AGE

“Our people are story tellers at heart. It's in our DNA. Small measures like this help provide for these opportunities. We think it’s the right thing to do and we look forward to the ability to use the facilities to share our stories!”

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Subsequent Spanish incursions from the south were deeply antagonistic to the Kumeyaay, despite the Natives’ friendly welcome of the newcomers. Kumeyaay were forced to farm crops for the Spaniards and were compelled to build the San Diego Mission and other early buildings. Kumeyaay were reported whipped, beaten, starved, sexually assaulted and forced to convert to Christianity. Many thousand died of diseases the Spanish introduced.

Kumeyaay People were later mistreated by Mexican and American settlers who were in a struggle with the Russians for California.

Mexico awarded Kumeyaay land to powerful dons in the later 1700s and early 19th century.

After gold was discovered in 1849, California was fast tracked for statehood in 1850.

Newly installed American politicians and elites confiscated vast tracks of Kumeyaay land and prevented the Indigenous People from practicing their sustainable lifestyle of migrating between the mountains and the coast with the seasons.

During the climax of Indian Wars from 18801900, Kumeyaay survivors were forced to live in the arid hills of what is now San Diego’s East County. Their population dwindled to about 1,000. Annihilation loomed.

Nearly a century later California voters passed the Tribal Government Gaming and Economic Self-Sufficiency Act of 1998 which allowed County tribes to engage in gaming and build casinos. The effort helped to lift thousands of Kumeyaay out of poverty, but centuries of institutional racism and financial isolation of the region’s Indigenous People did deep damage that lingers today, said Pinto.

“Our People’s lands have been stolen,” she said. “Many of our People have been placed on reservations, usually in rural areas, on undevelopable land, away from economic opportunities. As a result, many of our tribes and their members do not have the resources to pay for the use of facilities (on college campuses), let alone education.”

Pinto said the Kumeyaay need access to urban facilities “to tell our own stories.”

“Our people are storytellers at heart,” she said. “It’s in our DNA. Small measures like this help provide for these opportunities. We think it’s the right thing to do and we look forward

PHOTO COURTESY OF LETICIA CAZARES PHOTO BY EL SOL STAFF

to the ability to use the facilities to share our stories!”

Cazares said she would like to see SC add classes on Kumeyaay history and the Ipai language. She also said the college should consider waiving registration fees, though she said that would require action at the state level.

Pinto welcomed those and other ideas to improve educational opportunities for Kumeyaay People.

“Given many tribal members do not have the resources to advance themselves, education would be important,” she said. “Finding ways to provide education and outreach to encourage advancement would be important. We also believe curriculum, staffing and programming could be improved to help tell the story of the tribal community, specifically in the San Diego (County) region.”

Cazares and Pinto both said the relationship between the Kumeyaay and Southwestern College would continue, and both parties would work toward mutually-beneficial innovations.

“It is a new era,” said Cazares. “I am optimistic that we can accomplish many, many good things.” n

A Mobile Society

LETICIA CAZARES SC GOVERNING BOARD MEMBER

“We want to ensure that the campus community acknowledges and appreciates that we are on Kumeyaay lands and that this is a way for us to at least partially give back and do some repair of the damage that has been done throughout history.”

Kumeyaay moved between the mountains and beaches with the seasons. Huts, like the recreation at the Tecolote Canyon Trail (above), were made from branches and interwoven leaves. A village site (below) at the KumeyaayIpai Interpretive Center in Poway includes metates (grinding holes) used to mash up acorns, a staple in the Kumeyaay diet.

PHOTO COURTESY OF COOL SAN DIEGO SIGHTS

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! e r d a m n e n e i t o ¡N

MURDER OF JOURNALISTS

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE INDEPENDENT

OUTRAGES

BORDERLANDS Tijuana photojournalist, television reporter killed just six days apart

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Lonely Vigil Lourdes Maldonado Lopez's dog, Chato, awaits her return, unaware the Tijuana journalist had been murdered a day earlier. Chato was adopted by an American family.

By ANETTE PEDROTTI

C

TIJUANA—

hato the brown pit bull came home and sat quietly on the front stoop, waiting loyally for his friend, Lourdes Maldonado Lopez, a prominent Mexican journalist.

Maldonado will never return to her Tijuana home. She was murdered the previous day, joining a frightening list of Mexican journalists assassinated in the line of work.

Already this year three Mexican news professionals have been executed, including two in Tijuana. Photographer Margarito Martinez Esquivel was murdered just six days prior to Maldonado.

El Economista journalist Yolanda Morales photographed Chato, an image that went viral around the world and became the symbol for all Mexican journalists who will never return home. (Chato was adopted by an American family.)

“Mexico treats its journalists barbarically,” Morales said. “We live in a unified region along the border. California and Baja California are adjacent, but during this terrible time we feel as if we are very far apart.”

Emmy-winning ABC10 TV News Assignment Editor Vanessa Nevarez agreed.

Her experience with violence directed at Mexican journalists began about 14 years ago when she was Editor-in-Chief of the Southwestern College Sun and an intern at Univision.

“Those were bloody years,” she said. “We heard and saw some horrible things. Threats on scanners, emails to peers of explicit images of decapitated heads.”

At least 50 Mexican journalists are known to have been murdered in the past three

years. Mexico is considered one of the most dangerous countries on the planet for members of the news media.

Esquivel was a freelance photographer known in equal parts for his courage and generosity. He was a popular “fixer,” a slang term for someone who assists foreign journalists in Mexico. He had just stepped out his front door on January 17 when he was gunned down.

Maldonado, a veteran broadcast journalist, was brutally murdered in her car just outside her home on January 23. On February 8 three people were arrested for her murder. Baja California Attorney General Ricardo Ivan Carpio said the murders do not seem to be related, despite the similar nature of the killings and the fact that they happened less than a week apart.

In 2019 Maldonado expressed publicly that she felt her life was in danger during a legal skirmish with Jamie Bonilla, the former governor of Baja California. Maldonado publicly asked Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for protection from Bonilla, who lost a court ruling to Maldonado for nonpayment of her salary when she worked for his television station.

She wrote a prescient message on social media that said: “I fear that one day I’ll leave my house and won’t return. That scares me.” n

“They are without mothers!”

“No Tienen Madre!” is an illustration by legendary Chicano artist Salvador Barajas created for El Sol Magazine to honor Lourdes Maldonado, Mararito Martinez Esquivel and all of Mexico’s murdered journalists.

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MEXICO’S

WOMEN DEMAND

CHANGE Thousands of women protest sexual violence in the streets of Tijuana

By AILYN DUMAS AND NICOLETTE MONIQUE LUNA PHOTOS BY AILYN DUMAS

TIJUANA—

M

exico’s beleaguered women have had enough.

“Ya basta!”

Thousands of women from Baja California Norte and their American allies filed through the bloody streets of Tijuana

A sign of revolution

Thousands of women came to Tijuana to express outrage at the nation's culture of femicide. A protester's sign reads “Grandmother: I Came to Shout What They Made You Keep Quiet.”)

for the March for Women to protest Mexico’s unchecked epidemic of femicide — murder and violence to women and girls. Hundreds of handheld signs demanded change.

“Cansus de Oirlo? Nosotras de vivirlo!” (“You are tired of hearing it? We are tired of living it!”)

More than 5,000 Mexican women and girls were sexually assaulted and murdered in 2021, according to government counts.

Activists insist the number is higher. Much higher. Perhaps 10 times higher.

“Que ser mujer no nos cueste la vida!” (“Being women should not cost us our lives!”)

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Protesting Mexico's toxic machismo culture Mexican women and their American supporters disregarded Tijuana police and federales to protest the nation's epidemic of femicide. (above) "I am the aunt of girls you will never touch." (below) A play on words in Spanish that says both "Love yourself" as well as "Arm yourself."

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in shallow pits throughout Mexico — if the remains are found at all. Mass graves in Tijuana, Irapuato, Acapulco, Juarez and other femicide dumping sites often have uncountable numbers of dismembered bodies ­— all female.

“Que llegar sanas y salvas a casa sea normal y no suerte!” (“Arriving home safe and sound should be normal, not luck!”)

Tijuana is one of the most dangerous cities in the world for femicides, according to United Nations data, and Mexico is one of the world’s five worst countries for the sexist murder of women and girls.

Mexico’s toxic culture of hyper-machismo has rendered women as weak and “less than,” according to protesters. Most attacks on women are never prosecuted and some human rights activists insist that nearly 9 of 10 femicides go unpunished. Women who report rape and domestic violence are typically dismissed as hysterical liars by the male-dominated Mexican judicial system. Justicia is fleeting.

“El machismo se aprende en casa.” (“Sexism is learned at home.”)

“Killing women for sport is too easy in Mexico,” according to Maria (a pseudonym), a Mexican-American fronteriza and Southwestern College student who participated in the march.

“Many thousands of men in Mexico treat women like disposable sex toys. Even little girls and grandmothers are not safe. It’s horrible and it must change. We must change the toxic masculine culture.”

Tijuana’s March for Women was mostly peaceful, but at times frustration boiled over.

At least one bus stop was destroyed and some women spray painted messages of protest on walls and monuments. Police hovered nearby, but did not interfere. Television and print journalists were there to document the protest and monitor las policias.

Unlike American women’s marches populated with male supporters, the Tijuana event was almost exclusively female. That is what organizers wanted.

“Women need to fight for their agency,” said Maria. “We must demand our rights and take them from the asesinos, the killers of women and girls.”

“Wey no! Ni una mas.” (“Dude, no! Not one more.”)

Protesters acknowledged that men need to be

Ya Basta! (Enough!)

(top) Protesters march toward a statue of Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc in the center of Tijuana. (l) "Sexism is learned at home." (above) "Arriving home safe and sound should be normal, not luck." Demonstrators are calling for a seismic change in Mexico's men-first culture that diminishes and endangers women.

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Female Lives Matter

Protester draws attention to Mexico's astronomical murder rates of women and girls. Government data said 5,000 women were sexually assaulted and murdered in 2021 alone. Activists insist the number is closer to 50,000. Mexico is checkered with burial pits of unidentified women. Unmarked mass graves have been found in Tijuana, Irapuato, Acapulco, Juarez and other femicide dumping sites with dismembered bodies.

Faces of the Disappeared and the Dead

Hundreds of protesters held aloft photos of murdered and missing women. United Nations human rights officials rank Mexico as one of the world's five most dangerous nations for women and girls. As many as 90 percent of femicides go unreported. Rape convictions are exceedingly difficult to obtain in Mexico's male-dominated courts.

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Scenes of Violent Crimes

Protesters damage a transit station where a Tijuana woman was recently murdered without police attention. Women activists complain that Mexican police and judges almost always side with rapists and abusers, then make matters worse by blaming the female victims.

United Nations data supports their claims.

part of the solution. Maria said Mexican men need to rethink the way they treat Mexican women.

“Everyone has a mother,” she said. “Everyone has an abuelita. Most men have sisters or female cousins. Would they rape and murder them?

Hell no! Why then would any man think it is okay to rape and murder someone else’s mother, grandmother, sister or cousin?”

Purple, the color of bruises and contusions, is the color of the Mexican Women’s Movement.

Protesters waved modified Mexican flags with a bar of morado replacing the red.

“Mexico’s president (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) has done nothing to help his nation’s women,” said Maria. “He has not stood up to machismo culture. Unless he does, he is part of the problem.”

Hope, esparanza, gives Mexico’s women new strength, she said.

“We are finally uniting, we are finally starting to speak up. We have been silent for way too long, like hundreds of years too long. No mas! Change is coming.” n EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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Mysterious and beloved, Antonio Camarillo is at home forever in the San Diego shrine he protected

CHICANO PARK’S

GUARDIAN ANGEL

By LESLEY GARATE

BARRIO LOGAN —

His best friend Jose Cruz Mendoza io Camarillo was a said Chicano Park embraced Tio and he mystery, even in death. embraced the park.

Like a lost angel he “They took good care of each other,” seemed to drop in from Mendoza said. “He was always there, out of nowhere. When keeping an eye on things.” he left the Earth in Gente Unida founder Enrique Morones February, admirers called said it was no accident Chicano Park was him a guardian angel returning to Heaven. always pristine and void of graffiti during His 33 years of fiercely loyal stewardship Camarillo’s residency as its guardian angel. of Chicano Park earned him the honorific Morones said he often escorted university “Guardian Angel” and a place on a mural students and Chicano scholars to Chicano alongside other Chicano heroes. Camarillo Park. An introduction to Camarillo was part would say he was no angel but he embraced of the ritual. El Angel Guardian would regale the role of guardian. them with stories.

Little is known about the early life “Tio loved our beautiful Chicano Park of Antonio Chavez “Tio” Camarillo very much and made sure it was always other than he was originally from spotless,” said Morones. “He knew so Guanajuato, Mexico and a huge much about the park. He was kind of fan of the Club Leon soccer like a (museum) docent and would team. He was once married, answer questions if you asked him. but no one seems to know if He was an encyclopedia of park he had any children. Nor did history.” acquaintances know what he Camarillo, after 33 years, was did in Mexico before crossing la almost as iconic to the park as its frontera for good in 1989.

Tio Camarillo world-renown murals and colorful He came upon Chicano Park Indio-Chicano ceremonies. His long and rarely left. Without housing for most of silver mustache, caballero sombrero and his 33 years in the United States, Camarillo cowboy boots were unmistakable, as was his considered Chicano Park home. insistence that the past stay in the past.

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“Tio was such a wonderful and rare person. I know his spirit lives on in the park amongst the pylons under the bridge and the community that makes that park a vibrant and important place for Chicano history.”

Chelsea Pelayo, Chula Vista resident

He declined offers from his hermano Mendoza to visit Guanajuato and other parts of the United States. He said he was happily plugged into la tierra firma of Chicano Park, occasionally posting up in a nearby cantina to watch his beloved Club Leon on TV. Chelsea Pelayo, a Chula Vista Chicana studying medicine in New Mexico, said Camarillo was essential to the park and the broader community.

“Tio was such a wonderful and rare person,” she said. “I know his spirit lives on in the park amongst the pylons under the bridge and the community that makes that park a vibrant and important place for Chicano history.”

Morones said Camarillo was a rock in the winds of history. He cleaned and raked Chicano Park in the tense days after 9/11, through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, during COVID and across six presidencies.

“None of that mattered to him as much as the park,” Morones said. “He could not control everything that went on in the world, but he could impact the park and help to make people happy.”

At least twice the outside world shattered the solemnity of the park. In 2016 a drunken sailor drove a pickup truck over the side of a Coronado Bridge off ramp, plunging into a crowd at Chicano Park. Four visitors attending a classic car show were killed.

Camarillo was there to help clean up the aftermath and repair the damage.

In 2018 Camarillo joined Morones, Chicano muralist Salvador Barajas and more than 1,000 other allies of Chicano Park to defend it against a mob of white supremacists calling themselves Patriot Picnic 2.0. A ragtag coalition of about 60 Klansmen, Trump supporters, Minutemen and neo-Nazis threatened to deface the park’s collection of murals, but they were turned away without making so much as a scratch.

Most days were much less eventful.

Camarillo marked them by tending to the park and chatting with visitors. Mendoza said Camarillo did not know a stranger. He made it a point to know the San Diego Police officers who patrolled Chicano Park and

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Barrio Logan.

“Tenia un character charismatico,” he said.

“Others were attracted to him.”

Tio was in poor health his final two years and frequently hospitalized. Mendoza and his wife Gloria visited him regularly. On the day he asked a nurse to shave off his mustache, they said they knew the end was near. Camarillo died that day at age 82, decked out in emerald Club Leon gear.

Camarillo wished for his ashes to be scattered around roses Mendoza planted in Chicano Park to honor La Virgen de Guadalupe. Mendoza granted his friend’s request, dusting the plants growing not far from the Barajas mural featuring a sprightly Tio with his flowing mustache, weathered hat and worn cowboy boots.

He is at home in the park forever more. n People wishing to contribute to the cremation fund for Antonio “Tio” Camarillo may send a check made out to Gente Unida with the notation “Tio Funeral” on the memo line. Mail checks to: Gente Unida, P.O. Box 86598, San Diego, CA 92138.

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‘A Wonderful and Rare Person’

Tio Camarillo is mourned by his best friend Jose Mendoza (top) and Gente Unida founder Enrique Morones at the site of a Salvador Barajas mural in Chicano Park that honors el angel guardian.

ILLUSTRATION BY JI HO KIM / STAFF

Regional Holocaust survivors continue to share their stories of horror, survival and joyfulness with younger generations

ECHOES OF THE SHOAH

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RESILIENCE PHOTO COURTESY OF SANDRA SCHELLER

CANDLE AND STAR / ADOBE STOCK

‘WE MUST

NEVER

FORGET’ An intrepid group of 80- and 90-year-old Holocaust survivors continue their tireless efforts to teach tolerance and peace.

By NICOLETTE MONIQUE LUNA

O

n January 27, 1945 allied troops liberated Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp where at least 1.1 million Jews were killed. Shocked citizens of the world cried “Never again!”

On October 31, 2021 persons unknown spray painted Nazi swastikas, anti-Semitic messages and

PERMANENT REMINDER

(l-r) Holocaust survivors Rose Schindler, Benjamin Midler and Gerhard Maschkowski show the tattoos they were given by the Nazis at the Auschwitz and Birkenau extermination camps.

The trio, gathered for Maschkowski’s 97th birthday, remain active speaking at schools and gatherings about the shoah (the Hebrew word for Holocaust).

anti-LGBTQ screeds on the walls of Bonita Vista High School and Middle School just across the street from Southwestern College. Citizens of the community cried “It’s happened again!”

Holocaust survivor Rose Schindler had seen it all before … in Czechoslovakia in 1943.

“That is often how it starts,” the 93-year-old told assemblies of BVH students days after the vandalism. “We also had messages on the walls.

They told people we were criminals and sinners. At one time (Jewish people) were the leaders of (our home) city. Then, because of the Nazis, people in our community began to look down on us. Suddenly they did not like what we were doing. They began telling us we had no rights.”

Schindler and most of the dwindling family of EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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“So many (survivors) are soldiering on, but the time will come when we will not have their voices to remind us about the horrors of the Holocaust.”

SANDRA SCHELLER PHOTOS COURTESY OF SANDRA SCHELLER

Holocaust survivors tend to be, against all odds, cheerfully optimistic people. They profess to being worried, however, about young Americans who, as time marches on, are distant from the Holocaust and unaware of that savage time in history when German Nazis exterminated more than 6 million Jews.

Planet Earth’s “never again” generation is running out of time. A quintet of determined Holocaust survivors relentlessly continue their work as messengers from the dark times of the shoah. Schindler is joined by 94-year-old Ben Midler, 86-year-old Ursula Israelski, 88-year-old Louis Peschi and Gerhard Maschkowski, who turned 97 this month.

Sandra Scheller, a Chula Vista Holocaust scholar and human rights activist, said the world is nearing a time when no Holocaust witnesses remain.

“We are steadily losing our last Holocaust survivors,” she said. “Our Holocaust survivors are all in their eighties, nineties and one hundreds. It is essential that we help them teach younger generations about what happened to the people who suffered through the Holocaust and those who were killed. So many (survivors) are soldiering on, but the time will come when we will not have their voices to remind us about the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Scheller, the daughter of Holocaust survivors Kurt Sax and Ruth Goldschmiedova Sax, is working tirelessly to amplify the voices of the region’s remaining survivors – particularly with children and teenagers. She spent years shepherding her mother to hundreds of school assemblies, television appearances and recording sessions. Ruth Sax was a 2018 Southwestern College Honorary Degree recipient.

She died in December 2018, but not before enjoying her Bat Mitzvah at age 89.

Inspired by her mother, Scheller curated an exhibit at the Chula Vista Public Library Civic Center Branch called RUTH: Remember Us, The Holocaust. It opened in March 2020 and has been extended through August 2022 due to pandemic-related closures.

RUTH tells the stories of local Holocaust survivors and has a rich collection of artifacts from World War II. Scheller said her mission is to tell the stories of Holocaust survivors and to eventually establish a 84

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Ruth's Work Carries Forward

A cutout of Holocaust survivor Ruth Goldschmiedova Sax is on display at the Chula Vista Library next to the actual dress worn by her mother in a Nazi concentration camp. Mrs. Sax received an Honorary Degree from Southwestern College and was Grand Marshal of the Bonitafest. She died in 2018 at the age of 90 shortly after enjoying her long-delayed Bat Mitzvah.

permanent museum in the South Bay. “This exhibit is a seed, a gift to my city,” she said. “Like any seed, it takes people to water it and nurture it. I am hopeful it will find a new home.”

Chula Vista has an unusual number of Holocaust survivors, Scheller said, as an active community coalesced in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Chula Vista should be home to a Holocaust Center,” she said. “This loving community gave Holocaust survivors a chance and in return the survivors gave their love and best efforts to their community.”

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LOUIS PESCHI

LOSING MY RELIGION

Some members of the Peschi family converted from Judaism to Catholicism so they could travel in Yugoslavia to escape the Nazis. Louis Peschi was captured anyway and would have been shipped to Auschwitz were it not for the fast thinking of a clever uncle.

Scheller has been actively seeking out Holocaust survivors and interviewing them on video to preserve their experiences for future generations. She has a YouTube channel with interviews of her mother, Ruth Sax, as well Schindler, Midler, Israelski, Peschi, Maschkowski and other Holocaust witnesses.

“They are amazing stories,” Scheller said. “These people endured so much brutality, yet they are such loving and generous souls. They are all determined not to let the Holocaust be forgotten.”

Scheller urged the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to carry on their work.

“I hate to say it, but in five years there will be many fewer survivors still with us,” she said. “We, as the second generation, need to stay on top of things to keep the message going forward.”

Louis Peschi, 88 Louis Peschi was born in 1934 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now part of Croatia). His mother and father were Jewish, he said, though not particularly religious.

On Easter Sunday 1941, Peschi

A BIG FAN OF THE YANKEES Louis Peschi with a trio of American soldiers during the liberation of Italy, where he moved with his parents to avoid the worst of the Nazis’ ethnic cleansing of Jews.

A PIONEERING ISRAELI Louis Peschi grew up confused about his religious beliefs and his Jewish heritage because his parents told him to pretend he was Catholic in hopes that he would survive Nazism. As a teenager in 1948 Peschi went with his father to the brand new nation of Israel, where he lived for seven years before immigrating to the United States.

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ROSE SCHINDLER PHOTO COURTESY OF ROSE SCHINDLER

and his mother traveled to Belgrade, Serbia to visit his grandfather and uncle. They were unexpectedly caught up in the Bombing of Belgrade, which killed an estimated 70,000 people. Trying to return to Zagreb by train they came to a screeching halt. A railway bridge had been destroyed in the bombing. They made a perilous journey home only to discover German officers staying in their house. The Nazis left in the morning and the Peschis thought they would be okay.

Soon, however, Peschi’s father was informed by his German business partners that the next time he encountered Nazis the soldiers would kill his family.

Only Catholics could travel, so they converted and were baptized.

“We converted just so we could live, survive,” said Peschi.

His parents sent him to live in a small provincial town with his Catholic aunt and uncle. He hid in plain sight and played the role of a Catholic boy.

“I had to hide my name, I had to hide who I was, I had to hide everything,” he said.

Somehow the authorities caught on. When Peschi was in the second grade he was arrested and jailed by the police. His aunt stayed with him. His uncle was able to negotiate with the chief of police for the boy’s freedom. He was spared a terrible fate.

“I got out at six in the evening,” he said. “At midnight all the people in the jail were put on a transport and ended up in Auschwitz.”

Most of them were never seen again.

His resourceful uncle found a woman to take Peschi to Italy where he was reunited with his parents.

After the 1945 liberation of Italy, Peschi’s parents divorced. He returned with his father to Yugoslavia, but three years later they moved to Israel where he lived for seven years. In 1955 he joined his mother in the United States after she managed to get him a Visa.

Rose Schindler, 93 “Young people who care about peace and justice need to pick up the torch and carry it forward,” Schindler said. “The Holocaust ended more than 75 years ago. Most of the survivors are gone. There are fewer and fewer left to pass on their stories.”

Research by social scientists verifies Schindler’s concerns. A 2020 Pew Research Center study reported that half of American teens and young adults do not know much about the Holocaust, the concentration camps or the Nazis’ mass 86

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PHOTO COURTESY OF SANDRA SCHELLER

‘A Seed’ for a Permanent Museum

Ruth Goldschmiedova Sax's daughter, Sandra Scheller, curated the critically acclaimed exhibit "RUTH: Remember Us, The Holocaust" on display until August. Scheller is working on establishing a permanent Holocaust museum in Chula Vista. 'RUTH' was one of the most visited exhibits in the history of the Chula Vista Public Library.

extermination of Jews.

“It’s not your fault,” Schindler told her young audience. “It’s the passage of time. As time goes by people tend to forget. We cannot let that happen. We need you to help.”

Born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia, Schindler called herself a “happy child” until she and her family were arrested by Nazis and shipped by train to Auschwitz, the notorious death camp in a corner of Nazioccupied Poland.

Days after she arrived, a haggard but kindly man she did not recognize approached her. It was her father, an orthodox Jew who she had always seen with a beard, suit and tie. He was clean shaven and dressed in drab prison garb. She told him her two sisters were with her.

“Stay together,” her father implored Rose.

“Survive and tell the world what they’re doing to us.”

Her father and brother died in a slave labor camp.

Rose and her two sisters miraculously survived the

Jews are a small but mighty minority who have contributed much to America Jewish people are a small minority of Americans, according to the 2020 census, representing 2.4 percent of the United States population. It can be argued, however, that Jewish Americans have had an outsized influence on our nation and culture.

Bob Dylan, Steven Spielberg, Natalie Portman, Harrison Ford, Barbra Streisand and Daveed Diggs are Jewish as are sports giants Aly Raisman, Sandy Koufax, Rod Carew, Theo Epstein and Hank Greenberg. The great Albert Einstein was Jewish as is Bernie Sanders.

California is about 3 percent Jewish and so is San Diego County. There are no reliable measures of the Jewish population in the South Bay, but Jewish leaders and demographers have estimated that its percentage is higher than the state or nation.

One possible reason is the thriving Jewish community in Mexico, which American Jewish scholars say is concentrated in Mexico City and Tijuana.

JEWS IN MEXICO Jewish-Mexican-American filmmaker Isaac Artenstein said Jews have thrived in Mexico for about 500 years, but particularly since about 1910 when turmoil in Russia compelled Jewish people to immigrate to North America. World War I caused more Jews to leave Europe for the United States, but untold numbers were not allowed entrance. His documentary “Tijuana Jews” concluded that a wave of immigrating Jews settled in Mexico instead.

“In the early 1900s many European Jewish immigrants hoping to enter the United States were blocked, so they ended up entering Mexico through the port of Veracruz,” according the film.

Jews entering Mexico came from Russia, Poland, Turkey and other parts of Europe where anti-Semitism was swelling.

“Mexico basically welcomed European Jews with open arms,” said Artenstein.

Thousands of Jews still hoping to enter the U.S. came to Tijuana. After World War II others joined them, including a wave of Holocaust survivors. Many of Tijuana’s iconic businesses and restaurants, including Dorian’s, were started by Jewish-Mexicans.

“I grew up eating lox and bagels,

chilaquiles, and rice and beans,” Artenstein said. “It is also wonderful that vodka and tequila are both kosher!”

JEWS IN CHULA VISTA Historians Steven Schoenherr and Susan Walters researched the influence of Jews in Chula Vista for their 2011 book “Chula Vista Centennial.” Much of that research did not make the final version of the book, but was published online by the South Bay Historical Society. Schoenherr and Walters zeroed in on a few notable Jewish Chula Vistans who made substantial contributions to the community.

Dr. Alvin May An optometrist, Dr. May moved to Chula Vista in 1943 and opened a practice.

He became president of Tifereth Israel Synagogue and helped attract other medical doctors to the city, include fellow ophthalmologist Dr. Robert Penner.

Dr. Robert Penner A founder of the venerable Temple Beth Shalom, Penner served as a member of the San Diego Port Commission.

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He may be best known as the husband of legendary KPBS journalist Gloria Penner.

Sam Vener A Chula Vista Harbor Commissioner, Vener owned vast tomato and cucumber fields at the foot of E Street and south along the waterfront. He was active in the Chula Vista sister city initiative with Argentina city General Roca, for which the park on the northern end of Fifth Avenue is named.

In 1975 Vener famously quit the tomato business by throwing open his fields and giving away his final crop. He said labor costs made it unprofitable to continue.

Lowell Blankfort Arguably one of Chula Vista’s most important citizens of the second half of the 20th century, Blankfort purchased the “Chula Vista Star News” newspaper and built it into one of the best community papers in the nation. Under Blankfort’s stewardship, the “Star News” had a staff of about 12 reporters, four full-time photographers and a staff artist. He was progressive ahead of his time, advocating for equal pay for women, passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, environmental protections, the decriminalization of marijuana and humane immigration policies. Many of his young journalists went on to notable careers in the news media, politics, education and business. Blankfort was a fierce defender of student free speech rights.

Dr. Leonard Servetter Dr. Servetter became principal of Rosebank Elementary School in 1963 and by 1975 was superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District. He famously

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told a “Star News” reporter, “My religion doesn’t enter into my job, but it does affect my philosophy. My religion teaches how to conduct myself, to be concerned, to help those less fortunate and not to embarrass anyone in public.” Servetter was universally respected by younger South Bay educational leaders and was a mentor to many.

Helen Waterford A Holocaust survivor, Waterford joined forces with former Hitler Youth Alfons Heck and the pair made presentations about the destructiveness of fascism and anti-Semitism during World War II and beyond. Their depictions of the mistreatment of Jews from their very different vantage points were compelling and life changing for thousands of students and community members who attended their talks.

Anne and William Hedenkamp The education and civic activists had a Chula Vista Elementary School District campus named in their honor in 2003. Anne Hedenkamp was a Congregation Beth Israel “Woman of Valor,” a labor union activist and co-founded the sister city relationship with General Roca, Argentina.

Steve Kowit One of Southwestern College’s best known and most loved professors, Professor Kowit was

a nationally-revered poet, editor and critic who was friends with Bob Dylan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac. He was a peace activist and animal rights advocate who used his facility with language to inspire young Americans to become involved with meaningful causes in their communities.

Kurt and Ruth Goldschmiedova Sax Holocaust survivors who actively helped other Jewish immigrants to get on their feet in America, the Sax’s were pillars in the Chula Vista community. Kurt was a leader in the Temple Beth Shalom, which in 2012 received an historic designation from the Chula Vista Historical Preservation Commission.

Ruth Sax was a tireless speaker and witness for Holocaust victims and survivors.

She spoke at hundreds of schools, service organizations, conferences, churches and historical gatherings, sharing her harrowing experiences at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt as a young Jewish prisoner.

Mrs. Sax was present an Honorary Degree

from Southwestern College in 2018. She was also Grand Marshal of the Bonitafest, California Senate “Mother of the Year,” and “Woman of Valor” at the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival. She is the central subject of RUTH: Remember Us, The Holocaust, the ambitious exhibit at the Chula Vista Library.

Jessie Lark Born Jessica Lerner, the prodigiously-talented Bonita Vista High School graduate is a criticallyacclaimed singersongwriter and recording artist. She is also an actress who has starred in “La Pastorela” and other regional musical productions.

Sandra Scheller A gifted artist and costume designer, Scheller worked for Cirque du Soleil for many years in Las Vegas before returning home to Chula Vista to assist her mother, Ruth Sax, as she continued her Holocaust witnessing into her 90th year. Scheller has taken up her parents’ torch and helps other Holocaust survivors to schedule appearances and make presentations. She curated the RUTH: Remember Us, The Holocaust exhibit at the Chula Vista Public Library and has a YouTube channel with interview of Holocaust survivors. She is currently working to establish a Holocaust Center in Chula Vista.

ROBERT PENNER PHOTO COURTESY OF SAN DIEGO JEWISH WORLD LOWELL BLANKFORT PHOTO COURTESY OF PARADISE POST HELEN WATERFORD PHOTO COURTESY OF UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM STEVE KOWIT PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA KURT AND RUTH SAX PHOTO COURTESY OF SANDRA SCHELLER JESSIE LARK PHOTO COURTESY OF ALAN HESS

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF BEN MIDLER

horror of Auschwitz.

“I promised my father I would tell the world what they did to us,” she said. “I am keeping my promise.

Now I need younger people to keep telling others what happened during the Holocaust.”

Surviving the atrocities of Auschwitz took courage, determination and shrewdness, Schindler said. Also a great deal of luck. She and her sisters had another power that helped them to stay alive, she said.

“I had hope,” she said. “Hope is what kept us going.”

Benjamin Midler, 94 Ben Midler agreed that hope and optimism were essential to his survival. So were other strategies.

“I volunteered for everything,” he said. “I learned that it was not a good idea to stay in one place for too long. Your chances of being killed were greater.

So I volunteered for every work detail and every project hoping that I would seem valuable and they would keep me alive.”

Midler said he grew up in a Polish city that was 65 percent Jewish “with a temple on every other block.” His father made a good living selling milk as a distributor.

He was 11 when his happy childhood turned into a six-year struggle to survive. In 1939 Germany declared war on Poland and partitioned the country. Germany took control of the western half while its then-allies the Russians took over the eastern portion. Midler said in the beginning of the occupation the Russian side was better for Jews than the German half.

“We could do most of the things we had always done except run businesses and practice our religion,” he said. “The Russians did not want us going to Temple on Saturday.”

Jews who fled the German side without permission that were captured by the Russians were shipped to Siberia and put to work, he said.

Matters took a turn for the worse in 1941 when Germany declared war on Russia and took over the entirety of Poland.

“The happened on June 22, 1941,” he said. “I remember that clearly because I was 13 and looking 90

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BEFORE THE STORM

Young Benjamin Midler (front) with his grandmother and grandfather in Poland before the 1939 Nazi invasion.

forward to my Bar Mitzvah. I never got to have my Bar Mitzvah as a teenager. I was 88 years old and in America when I finally had my Bar Mitzvah.”

Polish Jews were forced to wear cloth Stars of David that read “Jude.”

Failure to do so meant summary execution. He and his family were forced to live in a Jewish ghetto created by the Germans. Each family was allotted one room in a house or apartment.

“It was very difficult,” he said. “We were all forced into very small spaces without enough food or mattresses or blankets.”

Midler said the German captors realized the same thing and decided to cull the population of his ghetto. Soldiers took his father and others into nearby woods and shot them, dumping their bodies into a mass grave. He said it was years after the war before he learned what had happened to his father.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BEN MIDLER

Midler said he is alive today because of “three miracles.” His first miracle happened in 1943 when the Jews of his ghetto were rounded up and stuffed into railroad freight cars. They were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered.

Their bodies were cremated in groups in large ovens designed specifically to eliminate bodies after mass executions. There was not room for him in the car, so he was left behind.

Miracle number two happened at the Birkenau extermination camp when his well-intentioned uncle advised young Ben to tell the Nazis he was a mechanic. His uncle thought the Nazis needed mechanics and would spare them. At the moment he was face to face with a scowling Nazi officer, the 13-year-old panicked and told the truth.

“I worked as a presser in a tailor shop,” Midler said. “So I told the German officer I was a presser.”

It saved his life. Young Benjamin was sorted into a group of tailors and cobblers. All mechanics were killed. German and Russian soldiers needed uniforms, coats and shoes, so Midler survived by making and repairing clothes. Afterwards he worked in a quarry making gravel for muddy eastern European roads.

His third miracle was his strategy of volunteering at the right moments.

“By volunteering for every difficult job and working hard I was able to stay alive,” he said. “I was motivated by my belief that my family was still alive and that if I could survive I would see them again someday.”

He never did. He learned years later they were all

A New Life in America

Benjamin Midler and his wife, Esther, (l) with their family. Midler survived a tragic, dangerous childhood during the Nazi era, then military service in the Middle East as a young man to become a successful American business owner. He is author of the book "The Life of a Child Survivor" and remains active as a Holocaust educator.

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF URSULA ISRAELSKI

murdered by the Nazis.

Teenage Midler struggled with malnutrition while he was a prisoner and he was afraid of not getting enough to eat to stay alive.

“I always ate all of my food right away,” he said.

“Some of the other people would save some of theirs for later, but not me.”

In a hushed voice Midler said he also consumed uneaten food he found next to people who had died.

Most days food rations were no more than a stale piece of bread with or without marmalade in the morning, a small bowl of clear soup at midday, and a piece of bread and butter in the afternoon. Often there was not even butter, he said.

In 1945 Midler’s prison was liberated by the Russians. A rare Jewish officer in the Russian army saved Midler from further suffering by taking him to Russia to recuperate before returning him to ravaged Poland. Over the course of a year he was shipped to Czechoslovakia, Italy, Palestine and Cypress before ending up in the brand new Jewish homeland of Israel in December 1946. He was drafted into the Israeli army in 1948 to fight in the Arab War with the Israeli Defense League. He served until 1950.

He eventually located uncles and cousins in Argentina and the United States. He moved to the Chicago area in 1978 and worked in the dairy industry. He later bought an auto parts store from his son-in-law and turned it into a successful business. In 1984 he retired. He and his wife Esther joined a friend in Rancho Bernardo. He was married for 71 years.

Midler became an active advocate for Holocaust survivors and one of the region’s most respected mourets (teachers). He also published an autobiography, “The Life of a Child Survivor.”

“I know by now I survived the Holocaust so I could speak up and tell others about the tragedies that took place in the hope that history would not repeat itself,” he said. “The Holocaust must not be forgotten. We must speak up and fight back by confronting anti-Semitism. There is a rising tide around the world of bigotry, hatred and prejudice that is built on intolerance. We should confront hatred and racism forcefully (without) compromise to stop atrocities and the persecution of people because of their religious beliefs.”

Midler extended his arm to reveal the tattoo he was given at Birkenau. B-2433 was still dark and clear across his inner forearm. So many prisoners came through Birkenau the German eventually had 92

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Amazing Grace

Trapped in a series of dreary orphanages and foster homes, Ursula Israelski was gifted a pair of used ballet pointe shoes. She taught herself advanced ballet moves, including the very difficult toe dancing of prima ballerinas.

PHOTO COURTESY OF URSULA ISRAELSKI

like a ghost. I looked at her… and I didn’t know who she was.”

Her dreams of living again with her mother dashed, Israelski returned to a churn of abusive orphanages and foster homes until she was 18. She was sent to live with her father, but the nightmare Ursula Israelski, 86 ground on. Her father was Ursula Israelski was only abusive and mean, she said, 3 in 1939 when she and so she left. her mother fled their native A moment of grace came Berlin to avoid capture by when she was given a used Nazis. They went to Belgium pair of ballet pointe shoes. where they huddled for two She practiced the positions years in a tiny attic, much like and moves of ballet alone in Anne Frank and her family. front of mirrors for hours on Like the Franks, they too were end, imagining herself as a eventually discovered by the graceful and athletic prima Nazis. ballerina. Her love for dance Young Ursula was 5 when Life is So Special and the performing arts SS officers showed up at their After years of fear and depravation, helped her to redirect her door and took her and her Ursula Israelski (r) was thankful to be a thinking about her dreary life mother to their headquarters survivor of the ravages of World War and find happiness through where they huddled in terror II and determined to live a long and expression. all night. In the morning happy life. She immigrated to Pendleton, Oregon Some orphanage friends German army trucks arrived and later moved to the South Bay's Paradise Hills community. invited her to join them in and the crowd of Jewish Israel, which had just been prisoners massed at the recognized as a nation. headquarters were ordered aboard.

Israel transformed her, she said.

Nazis wedged as many Jews into the trucks as “All my life I felt like I was nothing,” she said. “I possible, but Ursula did not fit. felt so inferior. I was told I would never amount to “They didn’t take me,” they said. “They took anything.” everyone else. I stood there by myself. The truck Israelski eventually returned to Germany where drove away with my mom. I saw her wave at me as she married before moving to Pendleton, Oregon. In the truck drove away.” retirement she moved to Chula Vista and regularly Abandoned and utterly alone, Israelski was sent volunteers at the public library and as a Holocaust to an orphanage. Then another. Then another and witness. another for the next decade. She estimates she lived “Ursula is a superstar,” said Scheller. “She is in about 15 different orphanages or family homes. such a good speaker. She has made invaluable She said she suffered constant physical, mental and contributions to the world with her advocacy for sexual abuse.

Jewish people and her testimony about the shoah.” n When the war ended in 1945 Israelski was about 13 years old. Her mother miraculously survived concentration camps and later that year they were reunited.

RUTH: Remember Us, The Holocaust will remain on She said she did not recognized the pallid, exhibit in the main Chula Vista Library through August. It skeletal woman she was presented to. is open during library hours and there is no charge. Visitors “I can still see her in that bed,” she said. “I didn’t may pick up a copy of Southwestern College El Sol Magazine recognize her. She weighed only 28 kilograms (61 X, which features Ruth Goldschmiedova Sax on the cover as pounds). She didn’t have any hair and she looked well as a detailed recounting of her Holocaust struggles. to issue five digit tattoos.

Most never left the gruesome camp.

“On behalf of the millions who can no longer speak, I am the voice of their dead, burned bodies.”

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RESILIENCE EDITORIAL CARTOON BY JI HO KIM / STAFF

EDITORIAL

RACISTS CO-OPT FIRST AMENDMENT

T

his program has a history of ferociously defending the First Amendment and this staff is committed to carrying on that legacy. The newspapers laid out in our newsroom’s archive paint a remarkable story of Southwestern College students battling authoritarian administrators, board members and their henchmen (and henchwomen) going back into the 1990s.

In each and every case, the offender was trying to cover up an illegal act that later came to light.

Like a schizophrenic roller coaster, SC has enjoyed periods of enlightened leadership by men and women who respected free speech, and endured wanna-be tyrants who attempted to shut it down, most recently a 2019 attack on the newspaper by a vice president. We pledge to continue to be vigilant.

America’s First Amendment is broad and expansive for a reason. Our Founding Fathers wanted citizens to have the ability to engage their elected officials and share their thoughts. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton did not like each other, but they agreed that robust discussion of issues was the best and most democratic way to find solutions and make policy. It had the secondary benefit of empowering citizens and encouraging Americans to feel ownership in their democracy.

Unfortunately, a wave of extremist scoundrels have hijacked the First Amendment to use as a screen to spew racism, hatred and violence. They have crossed a line and entered a netherworld

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the First Amendment was not designed to protect.

Anti-vaxxers and other political extremists have made a sport out of hijacking public meetings and turning them into orgies of insults, racism and attacks on public officials. Worse, they are threatening elected officials, health care professionals, educators and journalists at their homes and jobs under the guise of exercising their First Amendment rights.

Just as you cannot scream “fire” in a crowded theater, you cannot stand at the microphone at the San Diego County Board of Supervisors and call the County’s leading health official – an esteemed Black woman medical doctor – an “Aunt Jemima.”

County Supervisor Nora Vargas and her colleagues on the board sat quietly as they were called savage names by right-wing anti-vax, anti-government whack jobs. One

man told former Marine Nathan Fletcher to shoot himself in the head and urged another supervisor to hang herself. He told Vargas he hoped she died quickly of clogged arteries.

A sludge of vile poured forth from the unhinged man as he attacked the supervisors, but Vargas leapt to the defense of San Diego County Public Health Officer Dr. Wilma Wooten when he called her the N-word and other racist epithets.

“You can’t call her that!” Vargas told the man. “You can call me fat all you want, but you can’t call her that!”

Vargas, in the heat of the moment, nailed the essence of the First Amendment.

People of good will can disagree about policy, but too many of the “post-truth, alternate facts” fringe are abusing the First Amendment to threaten public employees.

America’s veneer of civility has been scrubbed away with course sandpaper

by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller and their fellow travelers. They begot the Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert crazies at the national level as well as the San Diego man who would reduce the lifetime achievements and public service of a well-respected Black woman to an illustration on a bottle of pancake syrup.

Their ilk will likely continue with the toxic excreta for the foreseeable future, but they do not get to hide behind the First Amendment.

Vargas and the supervisors have a tough tightrope to walk: How to curtail racist hate rants at public meetings without diminishing legitimate free speech. All five supervisors from both parties have said they are adamant about protecting free speech and the right of San Diego County residents to share their opinions at board meetings. Vargas, Fletcher and Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer also believe they need to protect County employees.

Gone are the days when we can just shrug off nut jobs who rant at public meetings. Our ironically named “social media” has allowed local whackadoodles a national platform. We should have learned after former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used social media to put a bull’s eye target on Arizona Congress Member Gabrielle Giffords. Responding to Palin’s post, a man shot Giffords in the head.

Recent developments are deeply troubling. Racist and hateful messaging by national figures like Boebert have become Jim Crow-style code for “harass, injure or kill this person.” Boebert’s once easyto-ignore Islamophobic comment about Congress Member Ilhan Omar has put Omar’s life in danger. Same for Congress Member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she was murdered in a video by GOP wingnut Gosar. Both women have been bombarded with death threats.

This scenario is playing out across the nation for governors, state legislators and local board members. School boards in Poway, Santee and nearby Lemon Grove are under siege from extremists staking out their homes and threatening their families over masking policies and the right-wing’s latest obsession, critical race theory. (That is a topic for another day.)

The Editorial Board of El Sol Magazine supports Supervisors Vargas, Fletcher and Lawson-Remer as they work to protect County employees from hate speech and violence, while honoring the spirit of the First Amendment. Public servants like Dr. Wooten have the right and the expectation of a safe workplace. The nut case who insulted her has the right to express his disagreement with public policy, but not to target County staff.

The First Amendment is too precious to allow it to be abused. It is worth fighting for. We are glad Supervisor Vargas agrees. n

EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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RESILIENCE PHOTO COURTESY OF JUDITH HEUMANN

DISABILITY

RIGHTS LEADER PLEDGES

TO FIGHT ON Legendary Heumann encourages ‘feisty’ activism

By ANETTE PEDROTTI

J

udy Heumann may be America’s greatest winning 2020 documentary “Crip Camp: civil rights leader that hardly anyone A Disability Revolution,” Heumann said has ever heard of. disabled Americans still have much to fight Few Americans have so for. profoundly changed the national “I want to see feisty disabled landscape for so many. people change the world,” she said.

Heumann is a disability warrior “If you’re not loud in the disabled who served two presidents, has community, you’re dead.” six honorary doctorates and was Like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin described by the Washington Luther King, Dolores Huerta Post as “a badass.” Her recent and Cesar Chavez, Heumann appearance at Southwestern used peaceful but assertive civil College attracted few but inspired disobedience to demand change. In Judith Heumann 1977 she led the 28-day occupation virtually everyone in attendance.

President Obama’s Assistant of the federal Health, Education and Welfare offices in San Francisco to Secretary of Education and Rehabilitative Services and subject of the Sundance awardadvocate for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation 96

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF AP IMAGES

Act of 1973 which gave every disabled person in the U.S. the right to attend public school.

Previous to this landmark legislation, most disabled students were institutionalized rather than educated.

Some Southern members of Congress attempted to derail the legislation by drafting “separate but equal” laws for disabled students. That helped to draw able-bodied African-Americans into the cause, including the Bay Area’s formidable Black Panther Party.

Black leaders said at the time that AfricanAmericans “had been on the wrong end of the separate but equal bullshit for far too long” and were inspired to support the disability cause.

Black Panthers brought food and water

ONE PAINFUL STEP AT A TIME

Heumann led the Capitol Crawl, an emotional protest where disabled Americans left their wheelchairs and crutches to crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol demanding passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. EL SOL / SUMMER 2022

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“I want to see feisty disabled people change the world. If you’re not loud in the disabled community, you’re dead.”

Judith Heumann, Disability Rights activist to the protesters, helped bathe those who needed assistance and took on other care roles. When the FBI cut the phone lines, hearing impaired protesters used American Sign Language to communicate with allies on the outside. The sit-in lasted 28 days and Heumann’s army of the disabled was victorious.

Psychology instructor Shannon Cappa, whose graduate work focused on the mental health and rights of disabled Americans, said Heumann changed history.

“She was the Malcolm X of the Disability Rights Movement,” Cappa said. “She was and remains a fierce proponent for the rights of disabled Americans.”

Heumann’s next major protest again fueled national change. In 1990 she led the Capitol Crawl, an audacious rally in Washington D.C. At the end of the rally, 60 activists left behind their wheelchairs and crutches and crawled up the steps of the capitol building demanding the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is considered the most important legislation in American history for the rights of the disabled.

“It was our Civil Rights bill,” said Cappa.

Heumann said the ADA was only a first step. Too much of America is still inaccessible to its disabled citizens, she said, including its transportation and public education systems.

“If I am supposed to feel grateful for accessible bathrooms, when am I ever going to feel like an equal in the community?” she asked the SC audience.

Too many American institutions just follow the letter of the ADA laws but not the spirit, Heumann said. Cappa agreed.

“We are guilty of that here at Southwestern College,” she said. “It’s not about minimal compliance and checking off those boxes. ADA is about true inclusion. It is about Universal Design architecture that makes our facilities usable for disabled Americans. It is about disabled people having a seat at the table.

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Able bodied people, even well-intentioned people, cannot make decisions for the disabled.”

Restrooms remain “ground zero” for legions of disabled people, Heumann said, because people who are worried about whether or not they will be able to urinate are often too afraid to venture out. Too many disabled people intentionally dehydrate themselves before boarding an airplane or going to school because they know they may not find a restroom they can use.

Cappa said restrooms remain a problem at SC because many of the doors are too heavy for people with disabilities to pull open or have handles that are too high to reach from a wheelchair.

“Then there’s the issue of washing your hands,” she said. “Oftentimes the soap is too high or there is no sink for people who are using a wheelchair.”

“Crip Camp” is a revolutionary film, Cappa said, because it captures so much of the past half century of disability history in the United States. It is told primarily through the point of view of Heumann and other disabled Americans.

The documentary begins with footage from the seminal Camp Jened in 1969 and moves on to the 1977 San Francisco sit-in. Originally scheduled for a theatrical release, “Crip Camp” was scuttled by the pandemic and is now available online.

Cappa said it was an honor to having a great American like Heumann speak to SC students and staff.

“Having Judy Heumann at Southwestern College is as significant as any of the many civil rights leaders we have hosted,” she said.

“Most people – even most well-educated people – do not know about the Disability Rights Movement. It was our Civil Rights Movement. Judy Heumann changed the world for disabled people. We have ADA because of Judy.” n

EL SOL Resilience