“Dewey thought of happiness as a stable condition of
personal development involving moral courage and calm self-composure. A happy person is one who has actualized her
unique potential to respond to physical, biological, and social situations in ways
that create meaning and value. The aim
of education is growth in the sense of actualizing one’s unique potential to
achieve a stable, courageous, and composed character capable of making unique
contributions to the community.” World Tribune 30 Jan. 2015: 2. Print.
I’ve been tired lately. Same-old habit of overscheduling
myself. I’ve also been working hard, and thinking hard, about the education of
the children that I work with. This
means, that unlike long and lazy days, like my winter and summer break- from-teaching
days, where my mind can wander, and contemplate daily stimuli, and where I can
read and nap, and capture it all in a daily entry, my teaching days are wintry,
and they make my bones ache and often my mind and heart ache, and I am often
depleted. This does not lend itself to
my writing.
I lose track of days, and I get buried, and before I know
it, weeks pass, and I haven’t written anything.
For some reason, I understand my rhythm now, and I am not beating myself
up about it. I just say, my summer and
winter breaks, are my writing months.
And I am ok with this.
I went to see Culture Clash’s revival of Chavez Ravine at
the Kirk Douglas Theater in January. I was
completely captivated by the whole show.
Being in a theater again reminded me of my theater and acting days. Looking at the set, made me imagine their days
of rehearsal, when they are not in costume or make-up, when the lighting is yet
to be done, and it is simply a flooded stage to run and block lines on. I thought of reading the script and going
back and forth on where emphasis should be in the lines. There was a deep longing for me, to be back
in the theater scene, back on a stage, and working with scripts and crafting
delivery.
From the beginning to the end of the play, I felt a
tremendous pride in the accomplishment of capturing the multi-faceted narrative
of 1950s Los Angeles. I loved the tying
in of the fact, that while the building of Dodger Stadium completely decimated
a mutli-racial, mostly Latino, community, what became of that space, continues
to occupy the minds and hearts of Latinos in Los Angeles who are hyper-Dodger
fans. I was surprised by the covert
moves to discredit and defame a public housing advocate who actually wanted to
serve the public interest in developing Chavez Ravine. It is disgusting how this public housing
advocate was dragged into McCarthy hearings and accused of being a communist
and therefore stripped of his livelihood with the city of Los Angeles. Behind closed doors, a group of wealthy white
men decided to move everyone out of Chavez Ravine so that they could build a
stadium to bring a baseball team to Los Angeles.
I grieved for the struggle of the people who felt that it
was THEIR land, and therefore THEY should determine what became of that land,
and how in spite of their mobilizing, organizing, passion and fundamental
belief in their right as property owners to have the final say, they were
kicked out of Chavez Ravine, underpaid for their property value, and for those
who made a last stand, they were hauled off in police cars. The film projected on the wall of a young
latina, being dragged out of her home by four policeman completely choked me up. I cried for the history of having our land,
our homes, the fruits of our labor, stolen, over and over again, for 500
years. But beautifully, we keep
fighting, we keep resisting, we keep organizing, y no nos dejamos.
In the days that followed our seeing Chavez Ravine, I knew
that more days were passing, and that I was not writing. The play made me yearn for my days of
theater, but it also reminded me about how much I have to say about
Chicano/Latino history in the Southwest.
It reminded me of how I want to write a story about the kid in Los
Angeles who read the sign, “No dogs and No Mexicans allowed” on the restaurant,
and what it meant to him to keep walking to the next place to buy a soda
pop. I have the story of the young
Chicana who was supposed to go and visit her father in San Diego, and then
decided she wanted to spend the weekend with her husband after all, only to
come home unannounced, to find her husband in bed with another woman, and how
she then went and shattered all of the windows on his nine lowriders in the
driveway. I have the story of the woman
who escaped the construction of the San Gabriel Mission, and how she survived
weeks in the wild, only to be found and brutally tortured and put back to
work. I have all of these stories in
me. Seeing Chavez Ravine, filled me with
passion to tell these stories.
It is not to say that I will be good at telling these
stories, but as the quote above says, we all have something unique to
contribute to our communities. I believe
that for 10 months, my contribution is to work with small children in their
first year of transitioning to elementary school. But the other months, are for
spirits to possess me, and use me as their vessel to tell the untold stories of
adversity and triumph for Latinos in the Southwest.
We all have a reason we are in this world. There is something that each of us has to
do. I know that storytelling is one of
my reasons for being here. I am happy
that I am on the journey.
