Breaking Through Blocks, Part 2, or "Si, Se Puede!"

I have never been much of a protestor, a disturber of the status quo. I attribute this, in part, to the fact that as a child, I was taught never to blow my nose in public nor rest my elbows on the table. I was told to soften my voice in public all the time and at home, told to talk louder because my mom and later, my grandma, couldn't hear me. My dad was very particular about sweeping the wood floors in our house without lifting the broom bristles from the floor and if I didn't (and he happened to be watching), he would let out a sigh and show me the right way to do it again. It never seemed that much different than how I was doing it, but I digress.

By the time I was twelve, I had this whole set of properlies to worry about and no time to think about larger issues, like say, the Gulf War or the Watts Riots. I was constantly concerned with how I did things, like eat a peanut-butter sandwich or run in gym class, and whether I was doing it correctly. I think my family was just trying to spare me the humiliation of doing these things in front of other people, people who really mattered, but they should've realized my twelve year old disposition, eager-to-please, self-conscious, and already an overthinker, only made this list of rules a neverending radio stream of "Shit -am I doing this right?" in my mind.

One of the first times I saw a confrontation in the locker room was in eighth grade. It was between Niki Walsh and Latoya Williams, two end-of-the-alphabet girls like myself, who I often sat by in classes or assemblies. They were arguing about racism and our school and, I think, but can't quite remember, accusing the other race of being too sensitive and of misunderstanding everything the other one did. They argued over the red benches and I sat at the end, barely breathing, watching out of the corner of my eyes while pulling on my socks very, very slowly. I remember feeling scared. I'd been taught not to fight (though my dad did advocate fist fighting), to keep quiet, to mind my manners, to be polite to people. I didn't know how to raise my voice like that. Girls and boys in the books I read always did, but I never connected that literature to my own life until I watched Niki and Latoya verbally go at each other until the bell rang.

Yesterday, I marched with with about 400,000 other people down Wilshire Blvd, protesting the fact that a group of people has been treated without much dignity, celebrating the fact that they are lifting their voices in protest about it all over the country. I feel a little bit proud that the two cities with the largest turnouts, Chicago and L.A., are the two places I hail from at this point in my life. I grew up around a lot of second generation Mexican-Americans whose parents didn't even bother to teach them Spanish. My aunt Fanny is from Mexico City, and though she is married to my uncle Billy and thus, a citizen, I believe that there was a point in her life in America where she was an immigrant without papers. The guys Russell works with, family guys, nice guys, hard workers, have no official papers; they are from a poor, agricultural part of Mexico and are here to work and to try and make life better for their kids rather than for themselves.

Speaking of these guys, I went to a birthday party for one of their daughters last summer. A lot of them are working on their English, and Russ and I are always trying out our lame Spanish, so we would talk in one language badly, then another. Some of them are already fluent and some of the husbands aren't even Latino -- one was from Iran and spoke four langugaes. After menudo, a comedian-clown, and fantastically sugary birthday cake, they turned up the music and all the adults began to dance. Young and old alike hopped out on the dance floor (the driveway) and started to salsa and sashay. The oldest guy, the patriarch of the family, is named Ephraim and I watched as he took his wife out on the dance floor and did a sort of salsafied box step with her, smiling and shy. Russ and I had to go soon after the dancing started, and before we went, Russ introduced me to Ephraim and his wife. He speaks no English at all, and neither does his wife, so there was a lot of hand gesturing, but somehow, we got the idea that he wanted us to dance. He wanted to see us. The others around him who heard him say this wanted us to dance, too, dance, dance, dance! they almost chanted. Immediately, my own little alarm bells went off. I'm not a great dancer and especially not with great dancers watching me. I shook my head and smiled, with that old thought that to do things, you have to do them correctly to avoid embarrassment.

And that's what was so great about the march yesterday. "Si se puede." Roughly translated, yes we can or yes it can be done. I marched and shouted and pronounced some of my Spanish words wrong, I bumped into people, I started conversations that I didn't know how to continue, and generally did a lot of things out of step. But for all the things I did wrong, I marched on and worried not about myself for once, but about something much larger.

Here are some of my favorite shots from yesterday. (I've posted all the shots from yesteday on my flickr account.) Enjoy.