What Happens Next

There’s a note to myself in the little Moleskin notebook I carry.

“May 9: Need to start transitioning blog to what happens next.”

I have a little bit of a confession to make: all the posturing and the politics that have consumed some of my posts lately? I know that stuff doesn’t really matter all that much. The bigness of the problems we face far outstrip the capacity of one person, one president, one nation. We need look no further than Burma this week to see that the problems facing one nation can eclipse the capacity of one world.

We are flawed vessels, you and I, so it’s no surprise that the structures we create are flawed, that the work that we do is flawed, that for however great we make our world, the flaw is a part of everything.

Below (one post back), I’ve posted a small audio piece from my trip to the border. I think it came together okay. It’s not the strongest piece I’ve put together, but hey, I’m still learning to do this sound thing. This piece tries to put out there a thing you may not have known about. And I guess that’s what I do: I see things and I echo them so that what someone didn’t know, they can come to know.

What can I say? The story of Texas and Mexico is a story that has worked its way deep into my mind. It is a story I know I’ll come back to, a story that needs to be told and told well. It is a story that confronts the history and mythology of two peoples and two nations, a story written in my bloodline even as it’s splashed gracelessly on cable news banners nationwide.

It is a story I’m still learning to tell. What can I say? I’m a flawed vessel.

———

In eight days’ time I’ll be boarding a series of airplanes, the first for Raleigh, then for London, for Bahrain, for Bangalore. I arrive in Bangalore, incidentally, in ten days; I’ll let you handle that math while I handle a 12-pack of Dramamine.

Transition to what happens next. That was the directive in the notepad. But in a way those things that already hapenned are what happens next. Find the thing, see it and feel it and bring it back with clarity.

I recognize that, ever since Zacatecas in March, I’ve fallen off that train a bit. I’ve succumbed to talking about — and maybe getting a bit too passionate about — the vast universe of things that don’t quite matter. So, let’s start over.

Hi. I’m Joey. Over the next two months I will try to be a vessel. I will try to carry the things I see where I am out into a wider place. There may be things I get wrong, stories I fail to tell well, pictures I don’t quite nail. Not gonna lie: I may succumb to aperture priority mode. But here’s the thing: it’s not just about the pictures and the sounds and the sudden staccato notes of the now sketched roughly on green notepad pages.

It’s about the people we meet, the stories we see and what we can bring back.

I’m hoping to post one more audio piece from the borderlands before I leave. It’s the story of Father James at Our Lady of Refuge Church. It’s the story of how a church found its mission at odds with its nation’s policy. 

What happens next? I dunno. But if you keep doing the thing, the thing keeps happening. 

-j

The Breakup

I know I promised to avoid idle words and politics in this blogthing, but this is more of a creative writing exercise: I broke up with Hillary. Well, I didn’t do it per se, but when I saw a website that asked me to write a break-up letter to the junior senator from New York, I wrote something. It’s written from the perspective of someone who might have actually dated her campaign in the first place, of course, and it’s a kind of a fantasy of the month after the breakup, after the dropout, a fictional reflection on how she left the race.

Writing this was fun. It was a chance to get in a different mindset. It was a chance to meditate on what it means to come to know and trust and love these people who run. But rereading it after I wrote it, it struck me how much the language mirrored something I wrote last year: a poem about the clumsy joy of first-time love and the slow tidal flow of the end. That strange simultaneous emotion, that juxtaposition of hope and regret, feels strong in one as in the other. 

Don’t get me wrong: the genre of breakup literature shares ever so many clichés. But there’s something else here. How seldom in life do we allow another person to come in? How seldom do we allow ourselves to be swept away? In love we come to own the joys and the sadnesses of our other, we allow our feelings and our hopes — to say nothing of things like books and plates — to get jumbled up. We allow it, and we adore it. 

A lot of people have lives that are jumbled up with politics right now. Acclaimed writer Nora Ephron is jumbled up with Hillary. So is Erin Vest. I’ve allowed myself to become jumbled up with Barack Obama; the number of mixed up plates is staggering, to say nothing of the hopes and the dreams. 

I know it’s the wrong analogy for politics. But I think a lot of us are jumbled up right now. We’ve tied the righteousness of our values, values that we hold inside ourselves, to someone other than ourselves. It’s not just picking someone for the job anymore. It’s personal. And it makes me wonder: If there isn’t a President Obama — or worse, if there is and he fails — what’s that breakup letter going to look like? 

Maybe we should start writing now, just in case.  

-j 

As submitted to nicetrygiveup.org:

Dear Hillary,

We started off rather well, I think. And it was going fine until this one night when you insulted a very good friend of ours — while he was sitting right there at the table! For a moment it looked like the whole evening was going to be a complete disaster, and I thought to myself, “this is why we can’t have nice friends.”

I don’t know. Some of your friends kept on telling you to be tough, to be punchy and aggressive. I don’t know why you listened to them, really. Sometimes I wonder if they were really looking out for you. What they didn’t tell you is that I liked you the way you were. All your real friends liked you for you, and you knew that. You didn’t have to pretend.

But you did. And, I dunno, when I saw you in those dark days, it felt as though I didn’t even know you anymore.

There were still some good times after that night, but let’s be frank. There were fights. There was yelling. We both knew where this relationship was headed, and neither of us could stop it. Then, on a crisp spring evening, we decided to part ways. You recognized the things that had come between us, and with a mutual sense of goodwill, we both let go.

Watching you walk away that night with such grace and eloquence, it all came back to me. I remembered that woman — no, that human being — that I’d fallen in love with, that I’d been in love with all along. And after watching you pretend for so long, I thought to myself: “She’s been in there the whole time.”

I wish it were not too late for us.

But it is.

The view from here

Spending a week in Virginia with friend Drew, pictured above. By my count this town is a two-thousand-mile-and-change journey from Zacatecas, where I spent last week. In a couple of days I’ll be back in Austin, working again, then back home to a grandmother that misses me dearly. 

Drew took me to a Point-to-Point race on Saturday morning; one of the officials is pictured above. The first point to point race, run in Ireland the 1700s, was called a steeple chase; the start and end points were churches, and the riders jumped their horses over fences and stone walls, keeping the steeple in sight. I felt a sense of history at this race; but for the horses, the officials’ dress would have seemed more appropriate at a costume party than a brisk morning in March. 

There are horses all around this place. They mill about outside the house where Drew lives; one morning I see one grazing in the front yard. The horses in this race —thoroughbreds with names like Westbound Road and Freddie’s Fortune — proclaim their lineage in the program. Inca Colony, son of Pleasant Colony and Inca Rose. They round the bend as names tumble from the announcer’s voice; he strains to see Native Mark and Hanko, neck and neck, bounding breathlessly toward a photo finish. 

The names have changed, but the races still run. The horses still graze behind fences and stone walls on the roadside. The years still pass in Virginia. 

Later that night we went to a mixed martial arts fight. I had never witnessed this sport before in person; although I had seen stills, nothing quite prepared me for the first punch. Sitting about 28 rows back, I could see the two fighters stepping into the battle cage, tight black gloves hugging clenched fists. The word was offered: “Fight.” The fighters took a step, then a step back.

Suddenly, the sound of skin impacting skin. Without speaker or amplifier attached, it raced down all 28 rows as though its primal urgency rejected even the speed of sound. The realization of motion: a punch to the face, and in that split second the punched man has shaken it off and begun reading his opponen anew with a step, careful, and another to the side. 

These men and women are athletes. And while I enjoy watching sports for the sheer amazement at what these athletes push bodies to do, the thing that impresses me most is the degree of focus, the singularity of sight that makes sport even possible. For an hour on that field, for the seconds on that hundred-yard track there is nothing else. The fighters enter the cage and an attendant locks the door; the metaphor is like poetry, because inside that cage, for those nine minutes, there is nothing outside. 

Shelley — the woman lifted up in the picture — had a legion of fans in the crowd, screaming her name. She and her opponent Mannie, on the left, fought through the full three rounds of this bout, landing punches and wrestling at points with faces pushed against the cage.

In the end, the points were tallied and the fight went to Mannie. But for Shelley, I like to think this moment must have seemed as brutal-honest-wonderful as that first punch. 

That’s the view from here. I’ll be back in Austin soon. 

  - j 

Notes from Zacatecas: An epilogue

The man gesturing wildly in the street is shirtless; tattoos stretch across his chest and down his arms. He seems thin, gaunt even; his shoulders are bony and his ribcage pushes against the skin of his torso. He wears baggy, sagging pants and a bright bandana. His name is Nene; he is cousin to Marisela and Oscar; nephew to Edelmira; the son of her sister who lives nearby.

“Soy loco, pero tranquilo,” he insisted the first time we met. “I am crazy, but calm.” He asked if we understood, “Entiendes? Soy loco… pero tranquilo.”

Nene’s situation has changed since we last saw him in January. Marisela reports that her cousin is in jail for stealing a stereo. There is something else there, just below the surface, but she doesn’t elaborate. I don’t push the subject.

When I met Nene, I immediately noticed the tattoo across his chest. “ZACATECAS,” it read, in an Old-English-like script. I made a few photographs of him, but when I made this one I knew I had the shot I wanted. It felt like the tattoo was part of this story. It felt like Nene was a part of the story too.

Walking down the street on Friday night I noticed dozens of teenagers packed into internet cafés; I saw hundreds more lined up outside of clubs. I saw a woman cradling her child as she worked in a Sno-Cone stand, and another, a beggar, sitting on the ground, shielding her infant with a pink tattered shawl. Riding la ruta ocho, the number 8 bus, I passed by colonia after colonia, each with hundreds of homes, more families, more people, more stories.

As I take my leave from Zacatecas, Oscar has found work painting the front of a new restaurant. I find him leaning on a ladder a few blocks from home, sleeves splattered in brown and light yellow. The kids are on break from school; travieso Jesús bounces off walls, gives his mother a headache. Next week is Semana Santa, the Catholic Holy Week; the family plans to make pilgrimage to the shrine at San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco.

In my prologue I hinted at some broad sense of story, about how Zacatecans might feel happier and less alone than we backward Americans. In hindsight that may have been too bold a generalization. The story of this place is far more complex than that. Yes, it is the story of free bread in Hidalgo street. But it is also the story of Oscar’s new job, the story of Edelmira’s tireless work, the story of the love within the three generations that live under that one roof.

It is also the story of Nene. I do not know Nene’s whole story, and what I do know, I’m not sure I should say. But Nene is struggling, here in Zacatecas, and the story of this place is his story too.

I wouldn’t dare parachute into this town and try to define it. I know that there are stories here I did not tell. I know that through every window, behind every door, in every face I see, there is another Zacatecas.

There is life in this place.

…and that’s about all I’ve got.

- j

Notes from Zacatecas: La Família de Edelmira Rosas

The photograph of Edelmira’s husband, fading yellow and white with age, sits in a place of honor beside the kitchen door. Below it a shelf holds a few burning candles, fake tattered flowers in yellow and white, an icon of La Virgen made of sparkly colored thread. Beneath the shelf stands Edelmira, the proud abuela — grandmother — in the family. She wears a pastel yellow apron, smiles at one of her granddaughters.

Edelmira is 50 years old; if her husband were still alive, he would be 80. Edelmira lives with her only son Oscar in the basement level of a residential block near downtown Zacatecas. Her kids are all grown up; the daughters live above her, one to the left, the other to the right.

“Somos pobres,” Edelmira tells me several times. “We are poor.” When I ask her if it’s difficult to provide for the family, she defers. One of her daughters works as a street vendor; both are married. Edelmira owns this house, and although she calls it a poor woman’s house, ownership means she doesn’t have to pay rent. Edelmira does have to provide for Ocscar, who is unmarried and out of work. When I first met her she jokingly told me to take him back to the United States, so he could find work there.

Edelmira herself works as a housekeeper for a nearby family. She wakes up before sunrise to prepare breakfast for Oscar, then goes to the house where she works to prepare breakfast for another family. Getting off in the afternoon, she dons her apron and cooks for the horde of grandchildren getting out of school. She says it feels as though she’s working all the time.

We dropped in on Edelmira in the afternoon, just as she was making a soup of nopalitos, or cactus, for the kids. She invited us in, served us a bowl and a few tortillas.

Not a lot had changed since our last visit in January; the children all looked the same. Marisela’s older daughter had learned some new English words.

“Tenemos un cat, un dog, y un chicken,” she said proudly.

The story of Edelmira’s family is the story of many families. Long ago she moved from the ranch to the city, grew roots and bore a family. There they live, along the same block, piled into the same building: Edelmira, the chicken, the cat, the dog, three children and six grandchildren.

And above it all, that fading image of Edelmira’s late husband. She told me his name, but I search and search through my notes, and I cannot find it. Still, the name of the man in the photograph isn’t the thing strikes me. It’s those candles on the shelf below. The shelf has the feeling of a small shrine, helped along by the flowers and shimmering image of La Virgen.

I imagine the candles dark and dormant. I imagine Edelmira, alone before sunrise. Too short to reach the shelf, she climbs a chair and strikes a match. I imagine the bright phosphorus flare, lighting up the face in the photograph every morning, every day.  

Notes from Zacatecas: The Past

Weaving this wanderlust trail through Mexico’s mountains and roads, I try my best to remember something that I often forget: this is a part of my past. If not this street or this city, this land is the land of my ancestors. This land is a part of me.

My connection to Mexico is both very real, and a bit obscure. What is certain is that my family crossed from Coahuila during the Mexican Revolution, early in the last century. Several years ago my mother spent a few months tracing the genealogy. Even after the Mormon Church FedEx’ed records on microfilm, the trail dead-ended with a small settlement at the base of one hill in Coahuila. Our own personal Mexico, where perhaps another hundred years of the past even now sit rotting in a cabinet.

On my trip to la frontera last summer I met John Neck, a resident of the borderlands and something of a Mexican history buff. Over a dinner of carne asada in Ciudad Acuña, he speculated that the records — birth and death certificates, wedding notices and the like — may have ended up in Spain. Long before Mexico, it was common for Spanish colonial governors to take such things with them. And as for Aztec roots, who can say? Some stories of the past are lost wholly to time.

My father’s mother is the only immediate family member that I think feels a connection to Mexico. Her father — my Great Grandfather, who I knew only briefly — felt connected to Mexico too. My grandmother speaks of riding horses on ranches in Texas, yet when it comes to Mexico, even she experienced it as a visitor, blazing years ago her trail through Monterrey, Mexico City, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Guadalajara, much of it on tour buses. She was born in Texas in the 1920s. Mexico was already a memory.

Memory can be a powerful thing, yet so many things seem forgotten. Long before my ancestors crossed from México to Tejas, another generation saw Tejas break away from México; another generation saw México break from Spain; another saw Spain colonize these ancient Aztec lands. So it goes, back to when an ancient people called the Mexica left their homeland of Aztlán, moved south and built a great city — Tenochtitlán — in the heart of what is now Mexico.

The Spaniards destroyed Tenochtitlan, and built Mexico City on the ruins. Further north, where once Texas and Mexico were one, the Rio Grande now marks an increasingly militarized zone between Los Estados Unidos and Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. The ancient tongues and the ancient lands are gone and forgotten. Yet the blood of the ancients still flows through me.

Weaving this trail, mile by mountainous mile, I try my best to see this land as a part of me. I sit here and wonder: Long before this city, long before these churches, these buses, these centuries of change, did my ancestors cross these hills, weaving their tenuous southward trail?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But even with so much of the past forgotten and gone, I cannot help but look out of smudged omnibus windows with a sense of wonder.

Notes from Zacatecas: The Perils of Travelogue

A colleague of mine once spoke of a novel way of looking at documentary photography: documentary photography as therapy. The premise of this idea, at least by my understanding, was that in walking into a stranger’s life and offering to be a witness, the photographer can work on the story and help the subject to gain a better sense of their own story — a sense they may not have been able to arrive at without the photographer’s intervention.

Now, it’s not the journalist’s role to put his (or her) subject on the couch. Cable news anchors are notorious for doing this. But I do like the idea that, as we try to draw truth from a subject’s situation, it’s possible for both to distill a truth that neither the subject nor the photojournalist would have arrived at alone.

Having said all that, I can also see the other side of the argument: who the hell are we to march into someone’s life and have the answers? Who the hell are we to say what’s what after parachuting in for a day, a week, a month?

Nowhere does this sentiment strike me more strongly than when I travel. When I went to New Orleans six months after Katrina, I saw the devestation of the lower ninth, the revelry of Mardi Gras partygoers, the strained police force and city services. Traffic lights remained out in many places; a thirty-foot tall barge that had landed on a school bus remained on the school bus; miles away, in the recovering seventh ward, a home that had collapsed on an SUV remained on the SUV.

When we came back, the story ran with the headline: “New Orleans Still Broken.”

But was it? On the same trip I also saw workers rebuilding homes, saw the Zulus preparing for the Mardi Gras parade, saw — for better or for worse — drunken college students and Girls Gone Wild cameramen pouring money into the local economy. At a Sunday church service, I saw families returning to the parish for baptisms months overdue; they waited to come home to baptize their children. And at the end of mass, the pastor went around the room, asked people to call out loud to fellow parishoners if their businesses were reopening. Many people called out. Many people were proud to be open.

You may be wondering what these musings have to do with Zacatecas. Well, it goes something like this: I can’t tell the whole story of Zacatecas. There are thousands of different stories of Zacatecas. And as for me, I barely speak the language, and in traveling here, my sense of the place isn’t the strongest it could be. These are the perils of writing a travelogue: whatever you write, it’s but a small part of the story.

I’ve already mentioned Zacatecans’ propensity for spending time together. I don’t want to overstate it; arriving on the night of La Rosca was a coincidence, and as to whether the whole town often gathers in jubilation, I couldn’t say. But days after the Rosca, on a Friday night, I saw hundreds of people — teenagers mostly, but young kids and adults as well — gathered in Genaro Codina plaza. A pair of clowns was hosting something not unlike an American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. They would grab teenagers from the audience, have a dance-off, give away prizes.

All across the world, people gather to have fun on Friday nights. This much is no surprise. But in this plaza, on this night, the feeling was different, more free. Strangers danced with each other before a crowd of hundreds. The clowns, at close range, made fun of people in the audience — even, at one point, calling me out. But it was good-natured fun, and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

One one level, I wouldn’t dare come here, a thousand miles from home, and put an entire city on the couch. I wouldn’t dare to judge this culture, having been steeped only in my own. But being here, you cannot help but feel the emotion of this place, of these people. It makes me wonder whether this is the norm, and the American sense of boundary and indifference is not the exception.

We live. We love. We do. But here it’s on the streets, exuberant, exposed and all around, not cooped up in apartments and backyards. And while I know this is only one part of one story, I think it’s a part worth noting.

Notes from Zacatecas: A prologue

Immediately after the Mexico trip, I had meant to scan all my images and present something. I wasn’t sure what format it would take, but I had pages of notes and rolls of film. I didn’t get on that as quickly as I should have; life got in the way. 

Life is still in the way, but heading now back to the hills of Zacatecas, I need to cement those first impressions. But before impressions, before notes, before anything else, a prologue. 

Political scientist Robert Putnam, in a book almost a decade old, discussed a thing called “social capital,” a fancy word to describe social interaction with other human beings. And after studying social capital in America, he realized something: in the last thirty years of the 20th century, social capital was on the decline. 

A recent study by the National Science Foundation found that the number of “socially isolated” people in the United States has doubled since 1985. One in four Americans say they have nobody to talk to about their personal problems. When asked if they have no one outside of family to talk to, that number doubles to 50%. 

People aren’t just more friendless. Since the 1960s, the number of family picnics has declined by 60%. The number of family dinners has declined by 40%. 

In short, we are more alone than ever. 

With that in mind, the first entry, straight from the notepad, from my Zacatecas week: 

Day 1

Observed El Rastro Reyes, a huge celebration of the Feast of the Three Kings in the town square and main street, Hidalgo. It occurs to me that, unlike Americans, Mexicans have their heads on straight. We get together — everyone — maybe two or three times a year. Yet tonight, for this feast day, a teeming mass of people flooded the street to partake in free sweet bread. 

In 2008, our government will subsidize millions of boxes that recieve digital TV signals, in the hopes of ensuring uninterrupted television service to the people. Meanwhile, this government in Zacatecas will subsidize thousands of pounds of bread, to be placed in the town square, in the hopes of bringing people together. 

I almost always see parks and plazas in the US sparsely populated; a few groups here and there, playing frisbee or soccer. But tonight, this city was _teeming_.