Días de furia (noviembre 2019)

 

La sensación persiste. Ya vamos una semana en paro y le energía no baja. Todo el mundo habla del tema, que pa donde es la salida hoy, con que propósito es la marche de hoy, el ESMAD es un mierda, los gobernantes son patéticos, esto no puede quedar en el momento es el sentimiento de muchos. Tenemos miedo, miedo de subir la expectativa, de tener la esperanza que esta vez será diferente, que será algo más grande que el del 1977, tenemos miedo que no transciende, que nada cambia, que todo sigue igual. Todes lo deseamos, la Tierra lo necesita, pero no falta, nos falta mucho y creo que esta vez no lo vamos lograr. No me mal entienden, yo quiero que funcione, pero sí las historias existen, hay que mirarlos, nos falta más disciplina, espectacular que la movilización sea una rumba, que podemos bailar y también perrear a nuestra revolución, pero no puede quedarse en eso. Ya es el momento de iniciar las asambleas, tenemos que asumir que el cambio viene también de nuestra relación con la cotidianidad y ya es hora que tenemos que tomar las riendas de esto y dejar de esperar que otro, que se elige cada cuatro años lo va hacer. Sea nuestra comida, energía, residuos sólidos y líquidos, salud, educación,  como la vamos a solucionar nosotros sin papa gobierno? A eso vamos no? En que estamos si vamos a seguir con el mismo modelo, el que permite que florezca la corrupción. Todas las noches salgo, pienso en los año de Uribe, pienso en creación, pienso en Nico y Yuri Neira, la minga de resistencia del 2008, el ALCA en Miami en el 2003, pienso en como muchos hemos anhelado esto por toda nuestra vida y no hay nada más que queremos en estos cosmos es por nuestros pueblos ganar. Queremos sentir que esa esperanza que las cosas, que el mundo puede ser algo mejor, que no solo sea una opción para personas de otras latitudes, de otros países, pero acá en donde reinamos en la destrucción, la violencia, la desigualdad, la miseria, pero que nuestras esperanzas también podrán reinar.

When I cried in spill out- 7th grade

I had been teased before, normally, called names, threatened, struck across the head, pushed, kicked, I kept it in. Snitches get stitches y pues, quien quiere ser sapo? There were always other students who didn´t like me, I annoyed them, I was weird, eccentric, more into animals than sports, was friends with the weird punk and grunge kids, the shortest student in my grade, really I had been shaped to be bullied and have mastered fronting that everything is good.

After lunch all the students were put into an asphalted lot closed in by chain link fences kept between the cafeteria, part of the school and the parking lots. The hundreds of students that had lunch together were moved into this lot referred to as spill out while the next set of students came into the cafeteria to have lunch as the teachers finished their lunches and picked up their students from spill out. Normally the students would gather and talk and hang while that happened, others would play sports and games.

I don´t know what cause it this day but for some reason three students from 7^th grade Civics class with Mr. Russo decided that it was my day. I don´t remember how it happened, what led up to it, but at some point I was pinned up against the chain link fence by Alexis L., Khalid A, and Justin . I can´t remember everything that was said, but I was pushed, I was smacked I was told I was stupid, worthless, a faggot. Khalid whom I was in a group project with the year before me reclamó that I missed the day when we had to compile our data.

At some point I am bawling and all I know as that Security Guards appear and send the four of us to the Vice Principal´s office, Mr. Dreyfuss. We get to the office, the four of us before the VP and the security guards tell him what had happened. I´m asked if it´s true. I say nothing. What happened? Silence. What did they do? I look at the floor. We all get scolded, them for bullying, me for keeping silence and not saying anything.

Going up from the stairs, feeling ashamed, feeling less that anything, than dirt, I apologize to my bullies for getting us caught…

How much can I remember (k-12)

 

Realmente… I can´t tell you when it all started…. Because as long as I can remember, it has always been…. Cuando fuimos al Huila for the second time, Jessica was already born and I made a zoo with rocks and remembering each rock was an animal… or en el kinder, at Holding Hands, when Danny Hertzburg grabbed a zebra wing butterfly that had gotten trapped in Mrs. Roberta´s classroom and hastily captured it to put it in the aquarium of a Horned Toad to eat. I went crazy, berserk trying to set that butterfly free, mi madre was called and I was sent home from school.

I remember when I used to say that when I died I wanted my body to be fed to carnivorous animals at the zoo that would have a use for my body. I can´t remember if this was before or after I started to get sent to see Mr. Baumb, the counselor at Miami Shores Elementary when I was in Mrs. Benke´s third grade class, but at some point Nirza´s then partner, David, told me I could not tell people those things because it was not right. When I told my mom she told Nirza to not let David say those things to me and later Nirza scolded me for being a sapo, a snitch.

In Mrs. Benke´s third grade class the bullies I feared to most were Alexis Latimer, Nathan Haughn, and Joseph Dumbrowsky, Joseph used to be my friend but at some point decided not to. In third or fourth grade his mother was a doctor who burned some warts off of my knees because during elementary school there was a time that I had over 15 warts all over my legs.

I remember in Mrs. Sloanin´s first grade class when I always wanted to be on the girl´s team when we played girl´s against boys and when in Mrs. Ellis´s fourth grade glass Mills Hunter Howell called me a “Gaylord” when I tried to reach my arm into his baggy shirt without touching him so he would not notice and I was not successful.

I remember at some point during all of this, I started to get in trouble cause I would openly say that “I wanted to die” and managed to cut myself a few times.

I remember in 5^th grade the Clinton v. Bush elections where Clinton won, I remember the group of smart, rich girls with good grades, all white except one from India, Anjali Shaker, were all Republicans. My parent´s to this day as citizens barely grasp politics and had no affiliation, with no set line at my house… I remember being torn that all from friends liked Democrats but I liked elephants more than donkeys because they were wild animals and not domesticated ones.

My mom would buy me speedo type swim wear which I hated cause I was teased and others would call me fag. Opps!  

The year I was in fifth grade, was the year after the summer of Hurricane Andrew, my mom, sisters and I were in Colombia but my dad was at the house in Miami Shores when Andrew hit and we would find out later our German Shepard Timmy ran away from the noise made by the electrical generator in the aftermath. At least this is the story we were told. . Afterwards   

I remember when in Mrs. Bostick´s sixth grade geography class at Horace Mann Middle School a girl who was in our class, her father had been in the protests in Miami against the US backed Coup d’état in Haiti that took Jean Bernard Aristide out. Her father was killed by the police in those protests and we had exact instructions to be very nice and kind to our classmate when she would return in about two weeks. It bothers me to this day that I cannot remember her name.   

I remember how the counselor at Horace Mann Middle School, Joan Hall Edwards, would let me come to her office and remember when she found out that I wanted to die she paid a lot of attention to me and one day even had my dad pick me up from school early and spend the day at the his work at the closing store Mr. Santoro and the Galleria Mall in Ft, Lauderdale. I was unaware of all the stress I was causing I was just busy being in my head and feeling bad about the world.  

I remember the times we went to the children´s hospital to take x-rays of my wrists because I was abnormally short and my parents and the doctors were afraid I would never grow, I would not get my growth spurt till I was 19 or 20 years old, already in college, but the bullying and destruction of my self-esteem from being consistently the shortest child in the classroom, grade, sometimes the entire school is something that marked me and sometimes I feel I have a sort of residual Napoleon complex from soo many difficult experiences that I lived when I was really short. I think a lot of my aloof, distant, anti social and introverted nature comes from the coping mechanisms I developed during these years.  

Once, in seventh grade, Mr. Russo´s Civics Class, after lunch in “spill out”…. Darrly Polemani, Alexis Wilmot and Khalid Aquile all started picking on me, saying all sorts of things to me and pushing me, cornering me against a fence to the point that I started crying. Some other kids saw what was happening and told the counselors what we was happening, we were all taken to Vice Principal’s Mr. Dreyfuss office, I refused to speak, I refused to snitch, I was terrified what would happen to me if I did. When we left the office to go back to class, I even said I was sorry to them since I was not able to suck it up more and not get noticed.

In sixth grade our science teacher. Mrs. Edison, who was a little person, had a brown capuchin monkey as a class pet named Franny. I loved being able to interact with Franny, her Jack Russel Terrier Dogs, Zebra Finches and other classroom pets we had. Our very proper, 8^th grade, British science teacher, Dr. Roy was much cooler than any credit we gave him at that age. We were in his class when the OJ Simpson verdict was released and our entire school was put on lock down for fear of race riots. I remember the High School students at Miami Edison would get out of school an hour before us and would come to Horace Mann to fight when we were getting out of school.

I remember I had a child hood friend who I went to school with since 3^rd grade, Basil Warner, in 7^th grade he became very close to Ronny Phelhm and in fits of loneliness, jealousy and feeling abandoned I use to draw pictures of Ronny getting destroyed by all sorts of weird crazy weapons and dinosaurs and such, once Ronny found out, they made fun of me, eventually I got over it and we became friends. As I look back that shit is mad loco, beyond strange.

I remember in 8^th grade, for winter break, we took a road trip to Washington DC and NYC. In DC we stayed with my mother´s eldest sister, Maria Eugenia and her two daughters, Johana and Monica. My mom drove our huge van the whole way up. I remember many things from the trip but one thing post trip sticks out. After the trip in Miami, my mother sat us down and told us that she wanted us to have friends of a different “class”, we didn´t understand, she said she wanted us to have “more white friends and less latino and black friends”… my sisters and I went beserk, we told her she was wrong, I cited MLK, shit got tense. Years later I would learn that my classist, racist aunt had a talk with my mom and told her that she was not raising us right for different reasons. My uppity aunt was trying to bring the backwards, classist and racist culture of Garzón, Huila, Colombia to our Afro.Caribbean.Latino reality in Miami and we were not having that shit. Many and many a times in the future, each and everytime my aunts would speak their negative opinions about me to my mother, she would turn around and verbally attack me and try to force me to change to be different, to this day, her well-intended suggestions based on her narrow view of the world and her chosen values only cause more rift between us.

I remember wanting to go to the agriculture program at Turner Tech High school to be able to work with animals but my mother made sure I went to MAST Academy the special, blue ribbon, excellent school. I remember saying I didn´t want to be with rich kids as my main argument. I remember for the first time interacting with light skin, moneyed and entitled white and latino people from Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, Aventura…. I never really formed a group of friends in high school but would hop between cliques and crews but on the bus rides home when I use to take the school bus, which we called the Cheese Wagon,  I was on the back of the bus every day with the kids from Liberty City, Lil Haiti, El Portal and Miami Shores.

I remember always being super self-conscious of my body for being short, skinny and light skinned. I remember being bothered each and every time to the point that to this day I still do not know how to ignore it when people doubt, question or even tell me that I do not look latino, that I am not latino and that I could never be mixed or part Native, even though they know nothing about Huila. I know it is not important but it still stings, I keep in that shit cause it does not need to take up space.

I remember my high school summers in Garzón, Huila, when I befriended a group of people that in our adolescence, they were referred to as Los Pirobos, the fags, to for once start to feel a sense of belonging, even though they were all older and it was something of the moment.

I remember the perpetual desire of wanting to belong and how when I started to form a crew in middle school, we read the Outsiders, my imagination was taken aback about olde school gangs, socs and greasers, meanwhile my own neighborhood was in the middle of the early 1990s gangs of urban US and as Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings become common urban house hold terms, though I was living in Zoe Pound territory.

I remember all of my crushes... I think…. Katherine Herring, Maria Gutierrez, Vanessa Maya, Stephanie Kerston, Tarra Cooper… all the women crushes  faded out by later high school…. I remember it being exactly one week before thanksgiving in 1999 and being triggered by the MTV specials after the one year anniversary of the killing of Matthew Shepard, I realized I was bisexual, but refused to tell anyone until someone asked me if I was bi, cause I wasn’t gay. A week later Natalie Jordi was the first person to ask and after I told her I started telling everyone as I was properly colonized by white, middle class gay America and thought that was my reality. When my mother confronted me, it became an argument, my mother with openly gay friends, was telling her bisexual son that he could choose, and he should choose what is acceptable, had to choose to be straight. When she found out her initial response was, “No one in Colombia can know”.

In some ways, that was the beginning of the fracturing of our relationship… that since her hypocritical homophobia, her lies about her romantic relationships, her incapacity of acknowledging when she is mistaken and being able to apologize and her continual caring about what others think has strained that bond to just us being distant, as I am with nearly everyone in my life, loving but distant.

I remember not liking my dad. I felt he was always on edge, anxious, stressed, up tight, exhausted and over worked…. As I write this I start to reflect on my own personality issues. For some reason, today, I am not really that hard on my dad, growing up, nearly any time we had to spend with him was a drag. Whether it be car shows during one of his two days off each month or after him and my mother divorced a year after Hurrricane Andrew him taking us for 10 days of camping to the Smokey Mountains in North Carolina. My sisters and I always fought a lot, but my father had not patience for this. There were always arguments. I always felt tense around my dad. When he remarried I hated my stepmom Maria, I thought she was cold, frigid, mean, her kids we got along with them, sort of, but just something else. At some point… 

I remember my math tutor who was also Christian Garbayo´s math tutor, Silvia, a really nice Cuban lady was shot and killed by her drunk boyfriend in an argument in their hallway apartment on a Saturday night. Chrisitian and I did not go to the wake, we stayed at my home talking alone. I remember being in 9^th grade PE classes and admiring probably evening crushing on a really nice, handsome swimmer and surfer who was a senior, Lance Hall. With his twin sister Lori, they were the youngest children of my middle school counselor Joan Hall Edwards. April 20^th, 1997, Lance Hall and two other students including Melahn Parker who was driving, were returning back to Miami on Alligator Alley.  At some point Melahn falls asleep at the wheel, veers off, the ford explorer flips and Lance is ejected from the car, he is the only one who dies. Everyone at MAST was crushed, I remember visiting Joan at her home in Miami Shores across the street from Jonathen Simas´s parents, more than once, I remember her telling me it was my time to support her. At some point I saw Joan once in High School, she came to visit me for lunch, we chatted it was real nice, I lost contact with her after that, and as I write this, I become overwhelmed with how many important people impacted my life in a positive way and life is such in this day and age where time and space and drift make us loose these relations that when our memory brings them back, one feels bad as for not having been better in maintaining them. One feels fault.

Jorge Arana was a weird, always shaved head, Miami Cuban kid who was part of our class. We all knew Jorge had health problems but he kept it low key. Jorge unexpectedly passed during the fall of our senior year, 1999. He was the only one we lost. He really like sci fi, magic the gathering and read a whole lot. I don´t really know what he had, if it was leuquimia or what… the Class of 2000 of MAST Academy rolled out for his funereal. I can´t remember how long the line of cars was, but its Miami culture so you know there were a shit ton of cars.

Jorge Castro was Nirza´s first husband. They got married in our house. Nirza´s oldest child, Chrisitian was already born and Jorge who was much younger than Nirza had no issue´s taking Chrisitian as his child. Jorge was pure love, and was huge, he had been a high school football player and I loved wrestling and pillow fights with him. I remember once watching Star Wars New Hope for like the 100^th time in my living room I fell asleep and wake up was he had me carried as a baby and taking me to my bed. I was probably 16 or 17. Jorge passed from heart failure. He was younger than 25. His heart was huge but apparently his body was too big for his heart.

While I had many special teachers in high school, and most were brilliant, my most important lessons were not about schools subjects like literature, chemistry or algebra… from my chemistry teacher, Mrs. Jones-Roberts I learn patience and discipline, from Dr. Hood the physics teacher I learned to go with the flow, to be accepting and have a sense of humor, not take everything so seriously, from Mrs. Ulman, I learned to express myself through written words, I guess her creative writing class did teach me how to elaborate my thoughts and feelings through written word but more so, I learned to create my own refuge, a haven with writing, even if I don´t share it later on and just re read it alone and use it to study myself when I feel alone and in despair with my own existence.  

I remember during my High School graduation crying, crying way too much. For some reasons on stage, luckily somewhat in the back I started bawling as I though how this had no reverse, how shit was about to get serious and all the important relations I had created this far would fade out. For the most part I was right, and I get mixed up about this. When it is not entirely my fault. Robert Gonzales even scoulded me for drying like someone died. But I guess in a certain way, the person I was, that my family and my schools and my city had raised me, started to die, started to transform and become something way different. I look at everything I am from and all I can feel is alienation, a deep not belonging, not understanding, having deeply different values. Social media makes it such where I have nearly everyone from my past accessible with the push of a few keys but is that staying connected?