There were many reasons for my attending the Allied Media Conference, including to see dear friends but I also went to help present, specifically this workshop:
M/others, Mamaz and Community Care-Givers Unite Through Truth-Telling!
Presenters: Rachel Caballero, La Semilla Childcare Collective; China Martens; Future Generation & Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind; Kidz Space; Katina Parker, New Orleans Labor of Love; Maegan “la Mamita Mala” Ortiz, VivirLatino/la Mamita Mala
Facilitator: tk karakashian tunchez, To tell You the Truth/New Mythos Project
TRACK: INCITE! / To Tell You the Truth
M/others (self-identified single, teen and welfare mamaz), mamaz and community caregivers around the country are telling their truths through zines, blogs, printed media, performance work etc, and using this process of truth-telling to create stronger selves, families and communities. In this 3-part, interactive workshop, we will share practical skills and organizing models, then strategize on how we can support each other year-round through a national network of mamaz and community caregivers. Come share your questions and your knowledge with us!
This session will take place in three one hour parts. Part one is a knowledge fair, showcasing the many incredible projects in the room. Part two is a skill share, giving you a chance to learn some specific truth-telling and organizing techniques, including: zine-making, social media, on-the-go-video-how-to, blogging 101, and building a radical childcare collective. Part three is a strategy session for all us m/other, mamaz & community cargegivers in the room to think, dream, strategize, and envision specific ways we can work together over the next year. We will explore questions like; What do we bring to the tables as mamaz? What support do we need? How can we fortify our national community and our families? How can alternative media-making further our movements and transformations?
This session prioritizes the participation of mothers and community care-givers of color, but is open to all.
The session started with TK Karakashian Tunchez, of To tell You the Truth/New Mythos Project introducing the audience to the session, how we got here, who we are are, and what we will be doing; basically laying the foundation.
I got the link to this song sent over to VivirLatino pero it’s not really a good fit for that space pero I really was diggin the song so I decided to share it here as I begin this summer filled with all sorts of apprehensions about money and trips and mami’hood.
Apologies for taking so long away from my true casita, a space where I blogged for years before I was “buzzworthy” and appearing on talk shows.
As Summer kicks off, I am reminded that as radical single mami media maker being called buzzworthy doesn’t pay my bills, won’t get me to an hermana’s wedding across the country, and doesn’t always make me feel safe. With iron bars secured on the windows of Casa Mala, feeling safe doesn’t trump my burning desire to speak/write out what I live and see in my comunidad. This is what I love and I really believe, even at 33 years old that I am not too old to be somewhat of an idealist and love what I do, love that my work includes mami’ing two amazing ChileRicans, maintaining VivirLatino out of pocket, working with young people, playing with palabras and doing what I can, yes to change this mundo I was born into.
Pero I need help. It’s humbling to admit this, that I am struggling to pay rent, pay my utilities, my metrocard, feed my children and myself while engaged in this hustle called vida. Pero my requests are humble as well.
Through the graciousness of two organizations, I will be attending both the Allied Media Conference this week and Netroots Nation next month. For the Allied Media Conference, I have been reminded of the power of the grassroots and have airfare, housing, and even food taken care of. I still need help for Netroots though.
Democracy For America gave me a scholarship to attend Netroots Nations next month in Las Vegas and are covering my hotel and my conference registration. What they do not cover is airfare, food, or the money I will need to spend on childcare for the weekdays I am away. For those that don’t know, I do all I do while taking care full time of my two hijas, one who is three and is home with me 24/7 (except for when her dad takes her, for a few hours three days a week).
So that is what I am asking for help with.
A trip from NYC to Vegas for Netroots towards the end of July costs about $450
Childcare is about $50
I also would like to eat while at Netroots.
If you have airline miles to donate please let me know (I’m not even sure how that works).
I was feeling massively aggravated on Sunday. Aggravated because there was laundry that needed to be done. Aggravated because el Chileno doesn’t believe in a visitation schedule and kind of just shows up after he gets done doing what he needs to do, even if that just means sleeping in because he hung out too late the night before. Aggravated because I would rather been at a rally against what the Israeli government did to the Flotilla instead of helping my 12 year old prep for finals even if I wasn’t so keen on the org behind the rally. I wanted a public space to express my anger with my presence, not just typed letters.
My frustration reminded me of my younger mami’hood days. Mami’hood 1.0 if you will, when if I wanted to go to a rally I packed up la Mapu and went. If there was a risk of arrest or if I knew I was going to get arrested, I let my mom know and she would stay with la Mapu. But that was in a different time with a younger, more willing, less tired mother, with a different, more easy-going child and with only one child.
I guiltily wondered, how many mamis were on board the flotilla and how they probably didn’t worry about their kid’s finals or dirty Dora the explorer panties.
I’m often asked how I do it all and most of the time I feel like I do it pretty damn poorly, from mami’ing to organizing, to writing. I feel like I’m always behind, always struggling, always broke. I mean my kids are generally great, smart and aware pero I feel like people are always watching me and not in a creepy please don’t break into my house again way, pero to judge.
Porque where I live, publicizing leaving my 12 year old kid could get a visit from CPS and then get my kid taken away. Where I live, my sister takes her pre-k class to a puppet show about safety and all the 4 year olds yell that they should not talk to the police officer because where I live it’s been feeling like Phoenix for a long ass time for familias. Where I live, the police knew me at first because my apartment was broken into, but now after seeing me at a few local rallies and marches, they know my kids and I and give us the “you deserved what you got” look.
“free range” is inaccessible, whether that be in the local Associated Supermarket where the free range eggs are $5.00 or in the local park where the mami/vendors hold their children tight next to the shopping carts filled with elotes or bottles of water.
I’m still frustrated that I can’t go to a million meetings and rallies planned this week because I am so broke ass right now and need to work doing something I am not really enjoying at the moment or because poroto is a little more inquieta than her sister and can’t be expected to not run into a line of police officers at a protest.
Everything is measured here, carefully.
I didn’t write when I posted this to VivirLatino, was the sacred space that the AMC has been for me in many ways. Not even so much because of the work and information exchanged but because it is the only conference where I have not yet had to cry alone, it is a space where I can reconnect with other hermanas I love and usually only communicate with online. Last year, bringing my then 11 year old was powerful for me and for her (although she rarely will admit it), meeting woman whom I refer to as if they were sitting with me everyday made flesh and real.
For the last two years, I have been blessed enough to attend the Allied Media Conference and both times my attendance was thanks to the generosity of others. This year, with the conference less than a month away, my attendance feels like an impossibility, especially since I would need expenses covered for myself and my two children who would have to travel with me but miligros do happen and even if not for me, for other amazing mujers whose work I respect.
We need to raise $4,000 to support travel, housing, food and childcare costs for 10 AMAZING mamas, community care-givers and their kids attending the AMC and USSF. Read more about them below. We need your help!
Please support the INCITE/To Tell You The Truth Track by making a donation on the To Tell You The Truth site by following the PayPal link on the bottom right of the page here.
As a thank-you for your donation, you will be entered into a raffle, with the chance to win one of the 2 FABULOUS RAFFLE PACKAGES of Mamas and Feminist of Color Media (described below).
For a $5 donation, you will receive one raffle ticket
For a $20 donation, you will receive five raffle tickets
For a $100 donation or more, you will receive 60 raffle tickets
Make your donation today here!
Raffle Package #1
* An INCITE! T-shirt
* The Gloria Anzaldua Reader by AnaLouise Keating. This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work.
* A one-year subscription to Make/Shift magazine. Make/shift creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there’s exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.
* I Was a . . . Student Nurse! by China. Every page oozes personality: a distrust of science, a vague but persistent spirituality, her own brand of low self-esteem, love for her children and friends, and a constant desire to be anywhere but where she is. And the setting–nursing school–is one we’ve never seen depicted from this angle. (Poems about genetic recombination and stoichiometry? Never saw that coming.) Sometimes we found ourselves screaming (at least in our heads) at China to get over her fear of hospitals. She’s the one who chose nursing school, not us. But it’s China’s ability to cause such reactions that keeps us reading.
* Los Viajes: a literary anthology by POOR Magazine. For a year and a half POOR Magazine conducted free bi-lingual, multi-generational, art and writing workshops in shelters, schools and community centers with migrant poverty scholars from across the globe to be included in the audio and print anthology called Los Viajes..Los Viajes introduces a new lens on migration of peoples across Pacha Mama informed by the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples.
* A DVD of Motherland, a Jennifer Steinman film. An honest and intimate look at the complexities of grief and healing, Motherland is about resilience, triumph of the human spirit and the power of unconditional love. It also reminds us of the vastly different ways in which disparate cultures confront deeply felt personal challenges.Each year over eight million families around the world suffer the loss of a child. In Jennifer Steinman’s moving and inspiring documentary film, a 17-day trip to South Africa transforms the lives of six grieving women from across the US.
* Dressy Bessy: holler and stomp – CD
* To tell the Truth Freely by Mia Bay
* Mamaphiles #4 – Raising Hell – Mamaphiles returns for its fourth issue with the theme of “raising hell.” The newest installment includes 34 contributors, including papa zinesters. Check in with your favorite parent zinesters and discover some new favorites as you learn about the many zines that have come out since #3 was released in 2007. In addition to fabulous essays, poems, artwork, and photos, #4 includes comprehensive ordering information about each contributor’s zine. This is all new material, no repeats of the pieces in previous issues. (118 pages, half size)
* “Program a Playshop” Residency at Gris Gris Lab in New Orleans, LA. Program a Playshop is a Gris Gris Lab signature community building residency. Advocates, artists, healers, activists can live and work at GGL for up to 10 days and produce a playshop for the New Orleans Community. Work must involve some aspect of one of these themes: healing work,art, food justice and urban farming, sustainable economics or woman-centered work.
Raffle Package #2
* AN INCITE! T-shirt
* The Gloria Anzaldua Reader by AnaLouise Keating. This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work.
* One year-long subscription to Make/Shift Magazine. Make/shift creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there’s exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.
* Slant by Laura Williams
* The Dancer from Khiva by Bibish. An autobiographical story, this is an unflinchingly honest memoir, The Dancer from Khiva is a true story that offers insight into Central Asian culture through the harrowing experiences of a young girl.
* Mamaphiles #4 – Raising Hell – Mamaphiles returns for its fourth issue with the theme of “raising hell.” The newest installment includes 34 contributors, including papa zinesters. Check in with your favorite parent zinesters and discover some new favorites as you learn about the many zines that have come out since #3 was released in 2007. In addition to fabulous essays, poems, artwork, and photos, #4 includes comprehensive ordering information about each contributor’s zine. This is all new material, no repeats of the pieces in previous issues. (118 pages, half size)
* Discovering Pig Magic by Julia Crabtree
* The Color of Violence INCITE! Anthology – What would it take to end violence against women of color? How does the mainstream antiviolence movement help? How does it hinder? When will we admit that repositioning women of color at the center of the movement— women more often harmed by the police, prisons, and border patrols than aided by them— means that we must address state violence?
* Once You Go Back by Douglas Martin
* Hermana, Resist : The Poetry Collection: “…media can be yours/and you can write your own history.” – Noemi Martinez. Authored and compiled by Noemi Martinez of Hermana, Resist this zine is breathtakingly beautiful and contains poems from 2000-2007.
* Resistance is a Duty! and other essays by comrades from Action Directe – Kersplebedeb
* I Was a . . . Student Nurse! by China. Every page oozes personality: a distrust of science, a vague but persistent spirituality, her own brand of low self-esteem, love for her children and friends, and a constant desire to be anywhere but where she is. And the setting–nursing school–is one we’ve never seen depicted from this angle. (Poems about genetic recombination and stoichiometry? Never saw that coming.) Sometimes we found ourselves screaming (at least in our heads) at China to get over her fear of hospitals. She’s the one who chose nursing school, not us. But it’s China’s ability to cause such reactions that keeps us reading.
* The Astonishment: Banana Sandwich
A subscription to make/shift magazine, one of the great raffle prizes!
This raffle is made possible with support from: Gris Gris Lab, New Mythos project (To tell you the Truth), INCITE!, Feminist Review!, Allied Media Projects (AMP) (more…)
Shoes were things mami and abuela before her never skimped on,
Even if we didn’t have socks
Or the socks had holes.
El pie
Each pie
Was unique enough to deserve it’s own special casing
That eventually would take the form of it’s wearer
Y ahora nos preocupamos de zapatos y papeles.
Es que ellos no saben que la magia es en los pies
no en el cuero
tampoco en la suela.
Cada uno de los diez dedos
estan cansados de trabajar en las tierras ancestrales
Y en las maquiladoras
Sueñan de los tiempos de baile and juegos de niños.
Ahora se colaboran
Kilometro por polvoroso kilometro
Caminando hacia algo prometido
Hacia la sobrevivencia
Marchando por la libertad
Corriendo de la injustica
Cantando viejas canciones de cuna
En lenguas denominadas ilegales.
Si nos identifican por los zapatos
Dejamos los zapatos a un lado
Al lado de los caminos ya hechos
Y las que se van a hacer al andar.
Forzándolos a mirar las arrugas
Incrustadas con historias y cuentos
Forzándolos mirar las unas
Pintadas de colores del arcoíris del sueno.
They don’t know
That the magic is in our feet
That we will now use to fight
A luchar
A marchar sobre la planeta que fue brindado a nosotros hermanos
Porque nos miran los zapatos
Sin entender que la magia es en los pies.
Cuando me di cuenta que al fondo del pozo
ya no quedaba deseos para mi
vacie mis bolsillos
asalte los cojines del sofa
y las alcantarillas.
Cambie las mondas encontradas por balas.
De las latas vacillas
dejados en tu camino
invente alcancillas
pintadas con las caras de los muertos
y tire mis deseos de plomo
uno por uno
ahorando por un dia soleado.
So there have been a ton of responses and discussions online in various spaces about Kiely’s song/video “Spectacular”. I’m not going to repeat the conversations. My mujer Bianca Laureano has a really good collection of responses to the video and links to commentary.
I think I was a little too old when the Cheetah Girls came out or maybe that was just never my tip, so I admit that I had no damn idea who Kiely was. My older daughter was never into the Cheetah Girls or any other sorta fake ass Disney’fied girl power marketing tool so she didn’t know who the hell Kiely was either (my younger daughter is more “girly”, if you will, in some ways so I may have to deal with that crap yet).
That said, when I saw the video, I shared the opinion of many that it was whack in more ways than one. It looked cheap and I’m not talking about Kiely. I also agree that at one point in the video it looked like Kiely wasn’t doing the “walk of shame” as it’s called in the video, but rather trying to get work if you know what I mean. Which is fine but then you get into equating sex-work with non-consensual drunken sex.
Si, that’s what I called it porque if you are too drunk to ask the person you are with to use a condom, it’s prolly non-consensual and it prolly wasn’t that spectacular either.
I’m not coming down on drunken sex or one night stands or that walk/subway ride the morning after. Jesus and los santos know how many times I’ve been there and done that. Pero if you need to get drunk to have sex, then maybe there is a problem. I’m not talking a glass of wine or two cuz everyone knows Mala likes her vino, but semi-conscious sex isn’t a healthy way to approach your sexuality.
Now I don’t think I or women like me were the intended audience, which made me wonder who the hell was? Was it young women coming into their own in terms of their sexuality? When does this happen? What age?
Of course young women are as varied as adult women in terms of their sexuality and that is something that needs to be recognized. I wasn’t planning on talking about the Kiely video with the young women of color I work with, some who are in their early teens and I wasn’t planning on talking about it with my daughter but it just so happened that sexuality conversations happened so I threw the video in there.
The first convo I had was with a student of mine who wanted to talk to me about an assignment her charter middle/high school had given her. The assignment was to find an ad or example in pop culture that promoted sex in an unsafe way (this was for her NYC DOE mandated HIV/AIDS prevention course which I have found so woefully poor that I have been known to host learn how to use condom and this is how your body really works sessions in my mom’s kitchen ). The young woman, who in many ways has internalized alot of the negative portrayals of gender, said that she thought of Victoria’s Secret. This kind of took me aback. Not because Victoria’s Secret is a great example of positive sexuality, but to me Victoria’s Secret is about selling sexy underwear to skinny white woman with an occasional token woman of color thrown in. Pero this young woman thought that being in your underwear = sex. This led to a conversation about the portrayal of sexuality in such binary terms (good/bad) with little room for young women of color to think positively about creating and owning their own sexual identities. This young woman, who did know who the Cheetah Girls were, thought the video was disgusting and that Kiely was acting “like a slut”.
Later that same night, la Mapu was telling me about the sexual antics of her friends, which at 12 means pointing out when boys get hard ons in class and who has a boyfriend/girlfriend and what that actually means. Somehow this ended up going to a conversation about sex toys and if I thought it was ok for young women to use sex toys. While making fish for dinner, because such conversations are not that uncommon in Casa Mala, I told her of course it was ok.
“You mean you wouldn’t get mad if if a young woman went to a sex toy store?” she asked all shocked.
“It’s not like she’s going to buy crack or something” I told her laughing,”
yeah it’s cool and masturbating is pretty much one of the safest types of sex you can have. She then asked if I had ever been to a sex toy shop and if I had any sex toys (girl knows I do already, they were all over the damn place after casa mala was broken into). This led to another convo about positive sexuality and ownership of sexuality and yes we talked about the Kiely video to which la Mapu just rolled her eyes and said, “why do you and your friends always find this crap?”.
Meaning she didn’t take the Kiely video all the seriously.
But what about young women who don’t have outlets or access to information regarding their sexuality. Do we leave them to the school system and Kiley? How do we engage the young woman of color in our homes and communities in terms of allowing them to learn about healthy, safe explorations of their sexuality?
Tiro mi deseo al viento
con tinta,
con vibraciones desde mis cuerdas vocales,
ofrezco mi verso en el altar del olvido.
Pero los poemas se hablan.
Entre ellos hay conversaciones
que los mortales no pueden escuchar.
El lírico es peticion
y otra stanza la respuesta.
I pray
that I have squeezed
all the juice
out if this
and I can throw away
the useless pulp
and start
growing
something fresh
that doesn’t have your name
Posted by lamamitamala 
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