We All Have a Mission

“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.