Category Archives: familia

Single Mami’hood and Sexuality Under (Wed)lock & Key

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Yesterday two states, Michigan and Arizona, held their Republican presidential primaries and my womb apparently is on the campaign trail. At the last GOP debate in Arizona, all of the candidates took a lot of time to blame single mothers, especially brown single mothers, for many problems in the United States. The mainstream media, including a front page New York Times article, has fallen in line attacking single mothers of color and our kids for the poor state of the economy, crime, failing schools and the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran. Ok maybe not what’s happening in Iran but the arguments are just as ridiculous.

This revived attack on brown single mami’hood is just another front of a war of anti-Latino sentiment. It’s root is that same that led to anti-immigrant laws like SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama. It doesn’t take a big leap to move from targetting anchor babies to calling my being a single mother of two a “social catastrophe”. It’s not hard to say that poor brown people with uteruses shouldn’t choose the type of families they want to create when in some states it has already been determined what books shouldn’t be put in the hands of our youth.

As Bianca Laureano points out one of her recent RH Reality Check columns, the cultural and sexual habits and values of Latin@s are still read through old, racist narratives like Oscar Lewis’s La Vida and  Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family. Rich Lowry, who was given a whole page to trash brown single motherhood in the same issue of TIME that highlights the power the power of the Latino vote, cites the Moynahan report as just the beginning of how a problem of “the underclass” (people of color) has climbed outside the realm of race. In other words, brown loose morals are catching. According to the editor of the National Review (full disclosure : I went to high school with the online editor of the NR), us poor, people of color just aren’t following the example of the upper classes who cling to marriage as a class rite of passage. Marriage, according to Lowry, is a way to climb the social ladder, if only we poor single moms would get on that ladder and find ourselves a good man. Lowry goes so far as to suggest a public service campaign in favor of marriage mobility with First Lady Michelle Obama as its spokeswoman.

There are quite a number of problems with the arguments presented by Lowry and by all who point to single mamis as the downfall of modern society. The whole family model relies on the invented notion of a whole, nuclear family that only really exists in the realm of 1950′s sitoms. I took enough sociology and history classes to know that The good ole days were never that good. The family model we are expected to aspire to leaves out extended families and families of choice including LGBTQ families. The assumption is that because I don’t have a ring on my finger that my kids are not inside a warm, loving home with multiple people caring for them. It assumes that the only legitimate relationship comes with a certificate. It assumes that it is better to be in marriage that contains violence than it is to be single it also assumes that women of color don’t have a right to control their sexuality.

It’s not that women of color have more sex than white women, it’s that the state has always intervened to control when and under what circumstances we will have sex and what the outcomes will be. Slavery, sexual violence via colonialism, forced sterilizations, rape, forced abortions, forced child birth, childbirth in chains, non-consensual medical prosedures and experiments have all been used as ways to control our allegedely uncontrolable sexuality. Women like me, unmarried women who haven’t achieved a certain academic or economic status, women who aren’t white – well we are just expected to keep our knees locked unless told or forced to do otherwise. Enjoyable sexual experiences are not for us.

We, women of color are blamed for having children out of wedlock and then having those children have more children. Forget the fact that according to a recent report by The Guttmacher Institute
the teen pregnancy rate dropped by 37% among Hispanics. The fact that the rates of teen pregnancy among black and Hispanic teens remain 2–3 times as high as that of non-Hispanic white teens isn’t blamed on a failing healthcare system or a failing education system (have you seen what passes for sex ed?). It’s blamed on our hot blooded culture. A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens. But instead lawmakers like Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) want to pass laws that limit access especially to poor people of color.

I am sure that many would love to use my picture, my life, my story as a poster for what not to do. A Nuyorican twice single mami, without a college degree, struggling financially. It’s easy to give a white man like the editor of the National Review a page in a major magazine about my poor values than to ask someone like me how I am making it. It’s easier to have a major magazine run a feature on how important my vote is as a Latin@ than to confront the reasons why my vote is more important than my right to decide when and what goes in or comes out of my body. It’s easier but that doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t mean that while people are trying to lock my knees together, I should lock my lips.

Checking in

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I have not been doing as well as I would like when it comes to my personal goals in this new year. So far I am finding myself coming up against the same frustrations of not enough quiet time in this very crowded two bedroom apartment. My very soon to be five year old is as energetic as ever and that wonderful, curious energy is demanding. My teen has her own demands, as does my mother, especially as we balance cooking, cleaning, and caring for each other’s feelings as we deal with some tough issues in the family. My dear baby sister, whom I love, has her own demands and she doesn’t even live here.
I haven’t been writing like I should, like I promised myself I would.

I have taken some time to assess some these frustrations and how many of them are of my own making. I am not good at saying no. I am not good at drawing lines around my needs. Watching my mother in her role of information carrier regarding the state of my very sick aunt, I can easily see where I learned this behavior. We give until we are so emotionally exhausted that we shut down and shut out.

For me alot of this comes from feeling like I don’t deserve to take space/time for myself. I placed myself in this role of young single mother twice so I should deal. What the role of a big sister/older daughter is and should do is followed as if in a script, not according to my vision of how these positions should play out in a way that feels good. I even see it in my relationship with my partner. A few weeks ago it actually pained me to tell him I couldn’t do something because I was writing. I actually apologized and even as I did it it felt excessive and unnecessary.

Awareness is only one part of this. Changing patterns and rebuilding relationships around a different way of playing your roles in life is a completely different matter. I am working on it.

Revolutionary Intimacy & Role Playing

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The title of this post insinuates something sexy but it’s not really. What this is really about is about learning that changes are painful and that past lives cannot be returned to if we want to grow.

The most important relationships in my life right now share one common theme : space. Not just physical space – like distances that have me moving closer to some and being farther from others, but emotional space- an opening or closing of the heart/spirit in order to heal and evolve from that hurt.

I have been going to a new church every other week or so – it’s not a church of Jesus, Allah, Buddha, the Orishas, Santos, or God but it is not a space absent of those concepts either. I teasingly call it “white people church” because well it is overwhelmingly white, especially compared to my once local predominantly Dominican/Mexican Roman Catholic Church. My relationship with church, any church, has always been complex : raised with Santos/spirits, then Catholic saints and school, practicing Zen Buddhism for a bit, drawing closer to my ancestors/muertos and now Unitarian Universalist aka White People Church. My struggle has been among my cultural need for ritual, my spiritual need for closeness with the universe and all that have been in it/are in it, and my desire to be in community/create community that reflects my morality/radical love/revolutionary desire.

Is that too much to ask for?

Continue reading →

Reading and Writing

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My four year old is learning to read and write. A few months in Pre-K has made her interested in identifying the letters of her name, her sister’s name, my name. My journals and and notepads and filled with scribbles that look more and more like letters and words. Sometimes in between the letters are stick figures which together, in preschool hieroglyphics, tell a story.

I visited Poroto’s classroom yesterday and was impressed with ho quickly a group of 14 4 year olds adapted to new routines including sharing lunch at a communal table, borrowing books from the library, helping new classmates find their cubbies. There were of course things I didn’t like – like the counting of children by their assumed gender- it’s amazing and scary how quickly children are taught to identify themselves into two neat categories.

In this period of transition I feel like I’m learning how to read and write again as well. I am struggling with finding space and time to write. Despite the fact that my mother’s apartment is bigger than what Casa Mala was, the actual space to be creative- the quiet needed- has been hard to come by. I blame the additional distraction that cable tv offers everyone, myself included. I do have a dedicated desk space, something I didn’t have at Casa Mala. It’s been helpful as new opportunities to write for major publications open up. I’m still trying to organize myself. Many of my books are still in bins and will likely stay there until this transition shifts into another one.

There isn’t anyone to show me the new routines though. No one to hold my hand and no one to celebrate the letters of my name and what they create and will create. I have been creating alot lately – controversy, poems, performances. I’ve reclaimed writer as I try and claim space.

But I’m still learning to read and write and translate the signs the universe is whispering to my soul.

Sin Llaves

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Handing over those three metal keys, separated for the first time in five years, from a family of keys that included the keys to my mother’s apartment where I work and the key to my pareja’s house on the other side of the country, felt like a defeat. It felt like an acknowledgement of my failure as an independent adult woman. It was ad admission of my inability to keep a roof over my daughters’ heads. I walked down a street, that wasn’t particularly a beautiful street, it was crowded with garbage and people, and tears filled my eyes. I had walked down that street so many times in my life. When I was in High School, I walked down that street in the opposite direction, to the house where I lived with my father, his wife, and her daughter. Back then the Italian immigrants had (grudgingly) made room for the Dominican immigrants. Five years ago, I was 7 months pregnant, and I moved into my tiny one bedroom, with my then partner and my daughter. That street was no filled with Italians, Dominicans, and Mexican families. I knew every shop keeper and would wave and saludar a medio mundo everyday.

Three years ago, when we broke up, I was determined to keep my little apartment, with it’s leaky ceiling, loud neighbors, and occasional mice. Two days ago, I felt like I had surrendered.

My landlord and I parted ways with a chorus of apologies. They never did fix the leaks. I never seemed to be able to pay my rent on time and I bounced alot of checks.
“You’re a nice lady”, the husband of the husband and wife team told me.
And I left thinking they were a nice couple and in many ways they were. They never threatened to evict my little family, even as the rent came later and later and then in pieces.

On my ride on the 7 train to my mother’s, where I have temporarily moved my family into, I fell into deep sobbing surrounded by two big shopping bags of the last items that slept in Casa Mala : A vejigante mask, a box of chocolate cake mix, a Piri Thomas cd, among other things.

I don’t have keys to a home that is truly my own. In many ways I never did. I didn’t own the space that once was casa mala. Why do we even feel like we need to have/own space as opposed to share space? What is it about this place/country/society that makes it feel dirty to return to living with an extended version of family? Independence is praised and interdependence is looked upon as deficiency. Clearly I internalized some of these messages myself, even as I opened up casa mala to numerous friends.

There’s an overused saying about one door closing and another one opening. A donde los llaves que me quedan me llevan.

Gas y Sillas

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These are the two things I have lived without for awhile.

The gas got cut off sometime in December, after Christmas when I was struggling to pay rent and electricity and internet. We needed a roof over our heads. I couldn’t imagine not having lights. And well internet. Um I really need internet. Bill paying usually is a juggling act like that. What bill can get put off so that other needs like food are taken care of. Gas seemed like the most expendable item. The gas in casa mala isn’t linked to the heat, so we stayed warm, we just couldn’t cook real meals, boil water etc.

We haven’t had chairs for longer. 6 months maybe? No se. When I first moved into casa mala with my ex over four years ago, my mother bought us a table with chairs that have all broken into pieces. We have all gotten used to sitting at the table in shifts to eat. Or maybe the kids sit at the table : one on a half broken stool from a local 99 cent store, and the other on a storage ottoman. I sit on my childhood bed which doubles as our sofa (we don’t have one of those either). This way is the closest we get to properly sharing a meal together. When guests come, we all shift so the guest gets to sit on the storage ottoman, the best seat in the house so far.

These were things I didn’t talk about. There was/is a certain shame in not being able to cook because I could afford the gas. And anyway I felt grateful that in the cold cold winter, without gas, we still had heat. I had no right to complain or feel bad. I could cook at my mother’s house and then bring the food home to heat up in my microwave.

The furniture..eh. I never really complained too much about it. No even inside. I think I only felt bad when guests would come over and there were no real seats for everyone.

So when my federal income tax refund came (really my poor person’s earned income credit), the first thing I did was get the gas turned back on and I ordered chairs. We all cheered as a family when the gas came back on. I could have kissed the guy from National Grid. Boiling water, cooking rice and beans. The chairs arrive today and I can’t explain my excitement over some inexpensive chairs. My kids are excited that we can all sit at the table together and even have an extra chair for company.

Shall I reserve that spot at la mesa for you?

What Do We Tell/Show the Children?

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Holy winter break batman. When the kids are off from school, I barely have any physical space to myself, let alone mental space to process things out via typed text. In the space I occupy with my daughters, this space between Egypt, Libya, Puerto Rico, Bahrain, Algeria and Yemen, I have woken up on many mornings wondering how, what do we tell/show our children about movement(s), justice, and responsibility?

In the space I occupy with my children somewhere between Egypt, Puerto Rico, Libya, Bahrain y Algeria, in the same country as Arizona, Mississippi and Wisconsin, they bear witness from afar. And when I speak of my children, I am not just speaking of my biological daughters but of the community who sit almost daily at my mother’s kitchen table. I read aloud from the news. Pull out maps and point to these places.

My children are movement children. You can ask my mom and sister, who still laugh at the fact that La Mapu’s first full sentence was “No Justice, No peace”. Poroto, has traded in her “si se puedes” for “Egypt, Egypt, Egypt”. La Mapu has taken a renewed interest in one of her patrias, Puerto Rico, one afternoon surprising me by asking aloud from my mother’s living room as she watched cartoons, “how do the liberation struggles in the Middle East translate to the student struggles in Puerto Rico?”

I nearly cried with pride.

While she fought with her sister on the floor of Julia de Burgos in El Barrio, I noted she argued because she wanted to pay attention. She was watching the videos I have been watching and reporting on for months, of Puerto Rican students getting beaten, tear gassed and sexually assaulted. She was paying attention, on her own terms.

I stopped forcing la Mapu to meetings, conferences and rallies as soon as she was old enough to stay a few hours by herself but she can’t escape that this is the world we live in, impacting loved ones, some whom she has met, some whom she knows through their blogs and twitter avatars. Last night, she cried over the dead in Libya and all I could do was hold her.

But what of the children who are left unaware as I was as a child. When I woke up at age 16 and suddenly realized I had been lied to about history and my role in it, I felt angry, betrayed and motivated. My life has never been the same.

I am participating in an event as a story teller in a local museum in a few weeks. The theme is art and activism. How do I talk with children who don’t witness and navigate these spaces on a daily basis or are like those Central Park horses with their eyes fixed on the tiny camino in front of them, blind to the rest of the world around them that they stand in the middle of?

I have never lied to my children about the struggles that exist in this world. Some of them they experience on their own, some of them through my work/life. But what of the children who are shielded? How to hold their hand slowly, open their eyes slowly so they are not afraid but awakened?

That is the question that has been waking me up for weeks.

I welcome answers/suggestions.

Humbled and Blessed

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Mala breaks it down on the mic at the Bowery Poetry Club with her favorite lover between her legs, a glass of wine This past Sabado evening, I had the pleasure of reading at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the debut performance event of the NYC Latina Writer’s Group.

I have been doing this poetry reading cosa for quite a few years now and it never gets old. The nerves start to rattle, I get flushed, then I get up on stage or in front of the mic and I just go, vibe of the audience, spit, flow, speak, release. Whenever I get off the stage I need a smoke. I’m usually trembling and it takes a few minutes for me to regroup, center myself. It’s like an amazing orgasm with an amazing lover who yes, really loves you.

There were two things that made this last reading extra special. One, my mom showed up. It was a total surprise and a nice one. For all my locuras, my mother has been one of my greatest fans. She was there when I was barely 18 and first read at the Nuyoricans and here she is now, wondering why the fuck I haven’t published a book yet. It’s not always easy having your mom in the audience, especially when my poems talk about fucking alot of the time. Who wants to hear about their daughter’s sex life, fucked up relationships, and struggles with politics and identity? Apparently my mom does because she keeps showing up to hear what’s new and I love her for that.

Two, the event was livestreamed. I had so much love coming from the twittersphere, it was almost more than a twitterputa could take. Kai, Bianca, Kevin, Maia, Alex, Lenee…and a whole mess of other loves of mine thank you, thank you, thank you. Just knowing that you were there in your chosen places on this planet we share, watching me, sharing that moment with me, gets me all kinds of teary eyed.

One of the things that I have really felt in these two weeks without poroto, has been how blessed I am. I really have surrounded myself in real life and in virtual life (and in intersecting places) with such an amazing group of gente. There are people that I really respect professionally and can count on personally. They are my extended familia and you, here, reading this are too.

xoxox
Mala

Not in Our Image

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A few events in my recent life have made me think about the aspirations we create for our children and the way parents push in an effort to have their kids be the best and the smartest. Even public school admission has gotten competitive, toddlers and pre-schoolers take lessons and classes, and there are tapes for babies so they can read. Our babies can’t be babies because we have to worry about them getting ahead.

I see this all the time with some of my tutoring students. It’s not bad enough that in school high stakes testing have reduced the curriculum to test prep and not critical thinking skills. Part of the reason I get paid is to make sure that students pass numerous state wide tests. Pero that’s not enough. I have some parents who push their children into taking iq exams so they can place in gifted and talented programs or be placed in a fast track in school. My main goal with the students is to teach basic skills and more, pretty much everything they lose when they are practicing filling in bubbles. Also, given that nearly all of my students are young women or color in mixed status immigrant families, part of what I do if offer safe space for them to discuss other parts of their lives they normally don’t. For example one junior high school student was being sexually harassed by a school mate. Another was the victim of ethnic and religious slurs. It’s one thing for these girls to speak to their parents and school administration, it’s another thing to give them space to discuss how it made them feel and how they can become empowered after dealing with such things.

Pero some mom’s push. Push their kid into taking tests they aren’t ready for and prepping for advanced placement tracks the kids don’t really want but adopt because they have to. What I have seen happen is that students neglect their “real” school work so that they can put in extra time on the special classes, meaning they get even less skill practice. Additionally, these children become so stressed and so obsessed with being the best that they will do anything, even if that means lie and cheat to maintain the illusion that they are doing well. I have a third grade student who went from being a sweet and very smart young girl to being a stressed out wreck who lies to me all the time and is failing. I’ve told her mother that I think the fast track classes are too much for her but I am ignored. After all I’m just a tutor who has been working with this student one on one for four years now. And I worry because I see this young woman shutting down emotionally in many ways, becoming less communicative.

I’m already looking at high schools for la Mapu and I have to remind myself that this is her high school experience, not mine. I’ve been there, done that. We went on out first tour of a high school yesterday and I suddenly found myself turning into an old critical vieja. I checked the skirt lengths of the girls and how much makeup they wore. I listened and counted grammar mistakes when they spoke to parents. I was visibly disgusted when the computer department explained, with pride, how they do a project which focuses on the difference between going to an ivy league college vs a state college. These differences included going to Europe or staying in your hometown, buying a car or buying a metrocard, being sophisticated or being well, not. And what did that student mean when she said anyone could be in the honors program? What the hell kind of honors program is that? And no art class in the first year? Then I had to step back. La Mapu loves looking at art pero she’s not an artist. I rolled my uniform skirt up to my boxer shorts’ hem in high school. And so far I think I’ve done a good job at discussing and exploring class issues and the economy with la Mapu so she knows that your college or even lack thereof is not a direct measurement of your intelligence or worldliness.

No se, I think my job as a parent is to respect each child’s natural talents and inclinations and support them the best way I can not push them into some model of success as defined by the mainstream education system which really strikes me as cold and uncaring especially of the whole child. My job isn’t to make my child do anything but rather help my child become strong enough for her to decide what she wants to do for herself. Our children come from our lives but they are not be raised in our image, rather they are raised so that they can create their own.

Casa Mala Lives, Pero Mala is Worn the Hell Out

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In many ways I’m feeling like a failure, even though in the eyes of the world I’m not. I’m just doing what I have to do. I’m working long ass hours so I can pay rent and keep taking care of my children. This means however that the things I do out of love and compulsion: writing, blogging, poetry, organizing aren’t done, or are done in pedacitos because by the time I get home, or poroto is napping or asleep for the night, all I want to do is lay the fuck down. I have to prioritize what pays my rent, my utilities, my metrocard and food. Health care is a luxury I haven’t had the benefit of in almost three years, even as mujeres in my family get cancer or cancer scares and hey, I’m getting to “that age”.

I have small moments that sustain me. Margaritas, sex toys and cupcakes (oh my) with some amazing sister/mujeres after a reading. Late night phone convos that remind me that I am not alone in how I think and why I do do what I do to the point of exhaustion.

What I think I sacrifice the most is my mental well being. This isn’t sustainable and I need to know how to make it so.