From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.

The post When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On August 15, 1947, my father George Mayer celebrated India’s freedom from 300 years of British colonial rule by flying kites with his friends off Howrah Bridge, over the Hooghly River in Kolkata.

Kites in India are made by delicately attaching colorful tissue paper to dry reeds using lehi, a glue made from boiled white flour. Thin kite strings are made with strong cotton fiber called manja, wrapped tightly around a decorated spindle reel or laddi. As kids taking part in a neighborhood kite fight, we would coat the first few yards of manja with powdered glass, making it easier to “cut” an enemy kite by slicing through their line. We’d send the vanquished kite floating across rooftops, chased by throngs of children.

Once a kite is airborne, flying it requires farsightedness and a complete disregard for the skin on your hands. I learned the art of kite flying alongside my sisters at the hands of our Chowrungee-born father. The skill lies in maintaining a delicate balance between tension and slack. When an enemy kite approaches, go taut to signal engagement and draw it in. Once your foe is in striking range, slack off to force an attack. Then pounce! Reel in the encrusted manja to slice the enemy’s string—a clean cut across its jugular.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna are Indian Americans at the top of American politics today. They fly different political kites—a mix of colorful stances cutting across the political aisle, engaged in different parts of our government. But they all are the children and grandchildren of people born under British colonial rule who fought for India’s freedom.

Their not-so-distant ancestors in all probability joined my father in flying kites on that August day in 1947. I would guess that they also joined him in passing along treasured lessons about maneuvering kites, steadfastness and drive, democracy and progressivism. This shared political heritage, imbibed from freedom fighter grandparents, inarguably shapes these Indian American political superstars’ visions for America today, even as they vary.

Kamala Harris has spoken of long morning walks on the beach in Chennai with her maternal grandfather, Painganadu Venkataraman “P. V.” Gopalan, “where he would discuss the importance of fighting for equality and fighting corruption.” They talked about principles of democracy, freedom, and equality. Those walks “really planted something in my mind and created a commitment in me,” she recalled in a recent post online. It “led me where I am today.”

Gopalan’s overt support shaped more than Harris’ politics. In the late 1950s, it would have been unheard of for a young Tamil woman to make her own way in the West, as Harris’ mother did when she emigrated to the United States to study medicine. Shyamala Gopalan Harris lived other taboos, too: marrying outside her caste, raising her daughters as a divorced mother. In that era, a father’s acceptance made all the difference—none of this would have been possible without it.

Gopalan was about 15 years older than my father. Both men would have been in the prime of their lives during the final throes of the British Empire. Gopalan was from Thulasendrapuram, a tiny village in the southern Indian rice-growing region of Thanjavur, a place that has witnessed political upheaval for millennia. Some of India’s most beautifully preserved ancient and medieval temples stand in this deeply spiritual place; many remain active sites of worship.

Most people in Thanjavur are Hindu Tamils, but they exist in relative harmony with neighbors sharing many religious traditions. The Church of Our Lady of Vailankanni, a Christian pilgrimage site renowned for miraculous feats of healing spanning hundreds of years, lies just 40 miles east of Gopalan’s village, toward the Bay of Bengal. The ancient Brihadeeshwara Temple also contains ancient Buddhist relics.  When I listen to Kamala Harris speak of her mother, “a brown woman with an accent,” I think about how Shyamala embarked on her “unlikely journey” from this place steeped in respect for different belief systems.

Nikki Haley’s life story is similarly familiar. Haley’s paternal grandfather served in the British colonial army, she writes in her autobiography, and her mother, Raj Randhawa, “lived in a large six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion,” in Amritsar, Punjab. Nearby was Jallianwala Bagh, a garden and popular gathering place with a deep, open well that quenched the thirst of locals, travelers, and pilgrims.

The garden is surrounded by high walls and densely packed housing tenements, with only one narrow passage for access. It was also the site of a notorious massacre on April 13, 1919. On that day, a crowd of around 10,000 gathered, some to protest a draconian British law criminalizing anti-government sentiment, many for the start of the spring festival of baisakhi. An overzealous British officer, nervous about the gathering, commanded his troops to seal the gate and open fire on the unarmed crowd. Hundreds were shot dead. Others perished when they jumped into the well to avoid the hail of bullets.

Gunshot marks on the walls of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India from the massacre on April 13, 1919. Photo by Moira Shourie.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a grotesque event that marked a turning point in India’s struggle against the British. Laying bare the empire’s barbaric means of subjugation, it galvanized the freedom movement and inspired Mahatma Gandhi to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement that exhorted Indians to lay down their tools and not contribute to the economy in a universal labor strike.

I have stood in that garden and pushed my way through its narrow gate—as has Haley, who visited the grounds in 2014 to honor those who died. Despite pressures from hardline populists, Haley has been steadfast in removing symbols of Confederate power, perhaps because they echo the violence that plagued her own mother’s life in Amritsar. I wonder how else this ghastly episode of colonial violence might have shaped Haley’s views on democracy and how people rise up to fight for it.

India’s struggle for independence also molded Ro Khanna’s grandfather Amarnath Vidyalankar. Active in Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, which accelerated Britain’s formal retreat from India, Vidyalankar endured two stints in jail for his actions. He sought to uplift Harijans or untouchables—people at the bottom of the caste system—and founded schools in rural regions for farmers and their families.

He also went on to serve as personal secretary to Lala Lajpat Rai, a key architect of India’s independence who traveled to the U.S. to meet civil rights leaders in 1916. I grew up next door to Lajpat Bhawan, the headquarters of Rai’s Servants of the People Society, formed to instill a sense of public service through wellness and employment programs. My sisters and I went there to buy freshly ground spices, enjoy the street food stalls in the fairs or melas they hosted, and to watch daily outdoor yoga classes where retirees practiced laughter therapy.

Working in such close proximity to Lala Lajpat Rai, I can’t help but believe Khanna’s grandfather imbibed the notion that extreme wealth should benefit the larger community. Today, Khanna represents one of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts—Silicon Valley, home to tech companies that have a combined market capitalization of over $14 trillion—but he also champions progressive causes like affordable childcare and free public college. Khanna’s politics are likely influenced by his grandfather’s ideals.

Freedom and democracy are not distant concepts to this generation of Indian American politicians, but a living legacy passed down by loved ones who sowed the seeds with their own hands. Harris, Haley, and Khanna understand that a striking kite stands out in a crowded sky. They also understand that a good kite flier must be sharp and ready to cut their losses, must be resilient and able to try and try again, must be able to maneuver around other kites, and must adapt to changing conditions. Much like a good politician.

Harris, Haley, and Khanna are an inter-generational string—manja—giving flight to their versions of these principles of democracy. They should fly their kite not only in celebration but as a banner of freedom, soaring through unknowable skies.

The post How the Shared Heritage of Harris, Haley, and Khanna Shapes Their Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nine years ago, when I spotted blood in my ejaculate, I made an appointment to see my urologist. I quickly found myself to be the only woman in the waiting room. A handful of men surrounded me, and I could see the gears turning in their heads, wondering why a person who presented as and looked like a woman was waiting alongside them.

“Is your husband in there?” said the man two chairs to my right. As a transgender woman, passing as the gender I align with is one of the most joyous and validating feelings. For those of us who have gone through male puberty with masculinizing factors, aligning our external social presentation with our innermost core identity of gender requires both effort and luck.

If we were not in a doctor’s office, I would have remained sociable and continued the conversation. But here, I tried to avoid it, hoping to prolong the secret that the urology appointment was for me. “No,” I said with a polite smile.

The waiting room brought up all too familiar feelings: anxiety, uncertainty, and the fear of what the remaining men would say or think if I was outed. It also highlighted one of the core tensions in seeking quality health care as a trans person: We need providers to honor our gender identity beyond the simplistic frame of biology while being attentive to biological needs often linked to sex.

As I approached the front desk, a receptionist inquired if I was checking in on behalf of my husband. A second receptionist—the one I had spoken to on the phone to make the appointment—pulled the first to the side and whispered that the appointment was for me, and that I was a transgender woman.

The first receptionist stammered, apologized for the confusion, and handed me a clipboard to fill out my medical details. I sat back down, feeling incredibly self-conscious. Now the entire waiting room likely knew of my situation, that I—like all of them—had a prostate that needed to be examined.

The expectation of rejection and the cost of self-policing has profound effects on transgender lives. We are forced to live a life of vigilance, knowing our gender can shift in the eyes of the public at any moment. This is exhausting, and it can also have devastating health consequences. In a 2020 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, 28% of transgender respondents said they had postponed or avoided necessary medical care in the past year out of fear of discrimination. Such fear inspires some trans people to cut off their history, drawing a clear line from the moment they transition and choosing to not look back on their “former” lives. But those lives also contain medical history that our bodies can’t discard.

Because of this, doctors’ visits often feel like a forced “outing,” where we have to disclose our history in order to receive an accurate diagnosis. Despite the legal and professional rules that govern medicine, medical professionals are still, in the end, human. Some are accepting and tolerant, others are indifferent and ignorant, and still others are just plain spiteful.

When I had my hip labrum cartilage repaired, I knew the bottom half of my body would be naked on the operating table, which meant my penis would be out in the open for all the doctor’s assistants to see.  The fact that I’d be under anesthesia and unconscious didn’t deter me from making an effort to boldly declare my womanhood while unclothed. I got a pedicure two days before my surgery and picked a bright fuchsia color—the same one I’ve used for over a decade—that I thought might help minimize the chances of being misgendered by the nursing staff as I waited for surgery.

But the day of the procedure, a snobbish blonde nurse looked me dead in the eye and called me “he” as she handed my medical chart over to my surgical coordinator. I made a polite attempt to correct her, but she kept referring to me as “him” and “he” to the other nurses. Finally, the surgical coordinator came to my side, rolled her eyes, and said with a nod: “I know, I know. Just ignore her. She’s just a bitch.”

Tragically, this experience is routine for trans people seeking health care. In a poll conducted by KFF and the Washington Post, 31% of trans adults reported that a health care provider had refused to acknowledge their gender identity, using instead their sex assigned at birth. Health care providers need to acknowledge our core identities even as we need to divulge our raw and tender histories. And precisely because this process can be so excruciating, it is critical for the transgender community—and the medical sectors that support us—to be consistent and precise with our language around gender, sex, and medicine. We must emphasize that being trans is about being seen for who we are as individuals rather than merely our biology, while also advocating for the quality, compassionate health care that our biology might necessitate.

Underlying all of this is the frustrating reality that doctors are fallible and sometimes misinformed, which means we must speak up for ourselves when the situation demands. Infuriatingly, the 2020 Center for American Progress survey found that one in three transgender respondents had to “teach their doctor about transgender people in order to receive appropriate care.” That was the case when I asked my general practitioner for a full panel of STD tests, only for him to ask if I had sex with men.  I was so afraid to come off as double queer—a transgender bisexual woman who had anal sex with men—that I lied and said I only dated women. “You don’t need the HIV panel if you don’t have sex with men,” he said. I was shocked at his ignorance, and to this day regret not speaking up to inform him that the spread of HIV isn’t restricted to anal male-on-male intercourse. I can’t help but wonder how many additional people he misinformed due to my reticence.

I remembered the cost of remaining silent while at a doctor’s visit last summer, when I needed an X-ray. “Are you pregnant?” the nurse asked.

“No,” I replied, “I can’t get pregnant.”

She looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “How old were you when you had your hysterectomy?”

As good as it would have felt to continue to play along as a woman who was born female and had gone through puberty as one, I instead chose discomfort. When I told her I was transgender, she nodded, thanked me for my transparency, and proceeded to strap the lead vest on my chest.  As the X-ray machine began to whirl, I smiled. It took bravery to own that moment of authenticity. But being honest with my nurse translated into better care for myself—and maybe the next patient she works with, too.

The post For Trans People, a Doctor’s Visit Can Be a Dilemma appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Several weeks ago, we convened a group of Muslims and Jews in our network to talk about the unrelenting pain we have been experiencing on, before, and after October 7, 2023, when everything that was already so broken in Israel-Palestine became exponentially broken.

It was days after the discovery of six Israeli hostages shot dead just before their captors fled. “I feel like I am mourning for Hersh [Goldberg-Polin]. I feel like I knew him,” said Ryan, who is Muslim. His grief was palpable. Deeply authentic. His words hung heavy in the air.

Then after a breath, he continued with equal weight, “And I can’t help wondering how many Palestinian Hershs have also been killed, along with all of the life and potential that lay ahead for them.”

With that breath, and what came before and after, Ryan modeled the full human compassion that has been counterintuitive for so many over the past 12 months:

Palestinian lives are grievable. Full stop.

Israeli lives are grievable. Full stop.

Full “Yes.” Full “And.”

In the words of Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “The time has come to be human.” She was exhorting negotiators and national leaders on CNN, but this holds true for all of us. As scared, infuriated, and desperate as we may feel right now, we need to remember that our fates and interests are intertwined. If we cannot find one another’s humanity, we risk our collective future.

We have worked together over several decades at NewGround, a Los Angeles-based organization that empowers Muslims and Jews to bridge divides that threaten both our communities’ well-being and our fragile democracy. This past year, we and our staff have convened diverse groups of Angelenos around the most difficult questions of this moment—from “Does the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’ mean the elimination of Israel—or of Jews?” to “Is Israel committing genocide of Palestinians?”—in a space where holding on to one another’s humanity is possible. Our network includes Jews, Muslims, and at times people from other faith communities, some with deep connections to Israel and Palestine, some without personal connections at all. We know that the conflict in Israel-Palestine is political and that there are always religious overtones to it, and we know that not all Palestinians are Muslim and that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. Nevertheless, no one in the NewGround network has been left untouched by the impact of the violence there and the polarization here.

And the hardest part has been trying to help even our own people to resist the dehumanization of one group or another. Our brains are wired to homogenize people we perceive as outside our “tribe”—a tendency that increases dramatically in high conflict.

We see how hard it is for some Jews, Israelis, and others to imagine Palestinians as parents who love their children. And how demoralizing it is for Muslims and Palestinians to have to prove their humanity at this most basic level. Muslims find themselves asking questions like, “How can killing 200 Palestinians to rescue four Israelis be justified?”

We see how difficult it is for some Muslims, especially Palestinians, and others deeply concerned for them, to see individual Israelis as anything other than evil aggressors. Jews and Israelis find themselves wondering, “How can you not see mothers taken from children, children taken from parents, people who have been working toward peace killed in homes and fields?”

Interests coming from many directions have been working overtime to convince us that only one group or the other has humanity and value. This is especially difficult terrain to navigate for individuals who have direct personal experience and trauma connected to one side or the other.

In the conversations we convene at NewGround, we strive to create conditions that help people share their pain and perspectives authentically—giving them the resilience to witness the pain of others, who can then, in turn, soften and open themselves to a wider range of perspectives. We pose hard questions where we know there are big differences, then ask people to stand on a spectrum of agreement and disagreement before speaking to why they chose to stand where they did. Or we might do a fishbowl exercise, inviting Muslim and Jewish participants to create two concentric circles, both facing inward. The outer circle listens—not talking—as members of the inner circle—either Muslim or Jewish—speak one-by-one and in discussion, in response to a hot question. When the first conversation concludes, the circles switch places. Afterward, the whole group talks. Working with a heterogenous group of Jews and of Muslims, at times with other faith communities present, ensures that participants can better grasp all that is at stake, rather than remaining in binary thinking.

It takes discipline to process our own pain, create space for our tears to flow instead of suppressing them, and care for the pain of others. It takes humility, especially amidst deep vulnerability, to say, “I don’t always understand, but I know I need to.” We continue to rededicate ourselves to holding tight to values expressed in both traditions: Each life is an entire world, and kindness and justice must walk hand in hand. It’s beyond challenging and yet it is essential.

Truly rehumanizing one another’s people requires recognizing specific lives lived and lost, not merely speaking of a generalized “suffering” of one group. Knowing people’s names and who they might have become in the world. Describing the hell in which people are continuing to live. Understanding that neither of our communities are monoliths.

So we remember the death and life of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, whose final interview with CNN was broadcast, per his request, only after he was killed on December 7, 2023. In the interview, he described the feelings of despair as a parent powerless to protect his children. Unimaginable calculations such as: “How can you hug your child so as not to scare them with what might feel like a ‘farewell hug’?” “Should we sleep in the same room so that if we die, we die together, or divide into two rooms in case some of the family might survive?”

And we remember the death and life of Israeli peacemaker Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7. Hiding in her home’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri, Vivian—angry at being forced to articulate a one-sided position—argued with a radio interviewer. “If I survive, then we will have a deep and complex conversation about two sides,” she told him. Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, is now engaged in peacebuilding full-time, and recently shared how moved he was to learn that a soup kitchen had been set up in Gaza in his mother’s name because of the relationships she forged with people there.

We are working hard, and against the grain, to expand the capacity for our people—and those beyond our network—to hold all this humanity and all this loss together. It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself. Especially when it feels threatening to do so because you know their pain is being used by others to delegitimize your own.

We learned from the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau that dehumanization builds in the gap between excess empathy for one group, and lack of empathy for the other. His findings on empathy and conflict resolution have helped us understand so much about our work in perspective building and conflict transformation. Unfortunately, at this moment, as we look out into rhetoric and actions in our broader communities, we are seeing much of what was described in his studies bearing out between our larger communities, both in Israel-Palestine and here at home. We are seeing things like triumph and glee at pagers exploding in grocery stores, or calls for all Jews to “go back to Poland.”

We know that the only antidote to this kind of dehumanization is inviting people toward rehumanizing one another. This will not stop the violence right away. But it is part of the calculus of any permanent solution to the conflict. And one powerful form of rehumanization is to grieve all of our people together, as Palestinians and Israelis do every year at a joint memorial ceremony.

In a session earlier in the year, one of our Jewish members, Eli, reminded us of the philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability.” Butler asks us to be attentive to whose pain, whose humanity is grievable, and whose isn’t. Grievability can shift depending upon the context, but it tends to fall where forces of power are concentrated. Speaking very generally, in mainstream American politics and media, Israeli lives are grievable and Palestinian lives much less so. On “the street” (including lots of social media and alternative spaces), Palestinian lives are grievable and Israeli lives much less so (and there is also a kind of power here, of a different nature). In the 2017 study “The Enemy as Animal,” Bruneau and psychologist Nour Kteily found that even in asymmetrical conflicts, symmetrical dehumanization contributes to prolonging violence.

These critical insights, along with those of civil rights scholar john a. powell, who urges us to “be hard on structures and soft on people,” remind us to acknowledge and address power imbalances and to remember that pain is pain and must also be acknowledged and addressed for us to move forward together. 

So our ask is very simple, yet extremely difficult: Seek out, listen to, and grieve one another’s stories. Even—and especially—when it is the hardest. Resist the way your anger and despair might pull you away from another’s humanity. Even righteous anger has an insatiable appetite; it can rob you of your own humanity and impact the way you become with others, including your loved ones. Re-member one another, and please remember for yourself: A key to stopping the violence permanently is to see beyond the exclusive, “us or them” view the world prefers, and expand our lens to a larger scope of dignity, security, and justice for all.   

The post Why Can’t We Grieve for All the Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Hija, you have to go. You’re going to miss the wedding,” said my mom, weak but urgent. My husband and I would be hosting my niece’s wedding in our home that April afternoon. My son Michael was setting up chairs in the backyard; my husband Ian, a judge, was getting ready to perform the ceremony.

Mom and I were in the county hospital ER, where we’d been for over 24 hours since she’d fallen outside her home.

I didn’t want to leave. But then two of my tias—my 90-year-old mother’s cousins, themselves in their 70s and 80s but always in and out of her apartment to offer help and company—swept in. They turned the eerie quiet of a Saturday afternoon ER into a familial space, sitting by her bedside, handing her water she couldn’t readily reach, adjusting her pillows and blankets. Go on, they said, assuring me they’d call and put me on speakerphone should the doctor come by.

On the surface, the gathering that was about to begin in our backyard and the scene at the hospital had little in common. But maybe they’re not that different. Weddings and hospitals are both about showing up for people you love. Weddings are about standing witness to someone’s love, showing that you will be the community they can turn to in times of joy and times of sorrow. A hospital is a place of sorrow, where the people you love hopefully bring moments of joy through sharing stories, photos, comfort.

In my familia, we understand that family and true friends don’t only show up for the good times. They visit the hospital or the jail, and they don’t miss your funeral. My family is originally from the Mexican state of Nayarit, but since settling in Los Angeles they have grown into an ever-widening circle of kin—literal and fictive. My tias showed up for mom and me that day, but they also provided me solace in knowing that our community will stand by her, physically and emotionally, as she navigates the challenges of aging, sharing joy in each other’s company no matter what the occasion.

Weddings and hospitals, for our family, are also about food. When someone gets married, we eat beef, chicken, fish, or pasta dishes at the reception. But the meal we all anticipate is the posole or tamales we eat together the next day at the recalentado. In Spanish, recalentado means “reheated,” though in these cases it’s a specially prepared meal; only the gossip is a rehash from the day before as we reminisce about the good times. Others take the opportunity to nurse hangovers, a spoonful of posole at a time. When someone is sick, my aunts prepare hearty guisados—stewed meats—wrapped in flour tortillas as burritos or folded into corn tortillas as taquitos. We brought tacos to my Tia Chayo in the hospital that we ended up sharing with her roommate, too, only to discover the roommate was on a restricted diet. The contraband tacos didn’t do any harm, but the roommate’s family grilled her on where she got them while we sat mum, stuffing our bags and coolers under my tia’s hospital bed.

Hospitals, like weddings, can grow our circles and strengthen our bonds. When hospitals limit patients to two visitors at a time, the rest of us sit in the waiting room. There, where Spanish speakers can feel like outsiders, on unequal footing with doctors wielding authority, fellow Latinos bring comfort and community, and people to ask their questions to, even if they can’t get definitive medical answers. There, they compare experiences, share stories about their loved ones, discuss how the hospital staff and doctors are treating them.

When my uncle passed after a fall and a stay in the ICU this past January, we couldn’t all be with my tia, his wife of 54 years, because we were in consultation with the doctors. On our hardest day, it was the señora she met in the waiting room who sat with her, holding her hand, offering comfort as only a comadre could. Theirs was a bond forged not through sacraments like baptism or communion, but through the shared experience of life’s passages. This time, it was the sacrament of saying farewell. It was a profound connection in an unlikely place.

Two images from the day of my niece’s wedding are intertwined in my mind. Standing in the sunlight, my niece is radiant in her short white dress with a flared A-line skirt, long sleeves, and embroidered collar, her shiny waist-length black hair vivid against the bright white tulle. My mom, 90 years old, lies in a paper-thin gown under harsh fluorescent lights, her neck supported by a brace. On the surface, the scenes have little in common.

But maybe they’re not that different. The reception was in full swing when I arrived home from the hospital. I dashed upstairs to throw on a dress and as I changed, I could hear the laughter wafting up from the backyard. Just then, I got a text from my cousin Karla, younger than my tias by decades. She was at the hospital. I hadn’t asked her help, but there she was. “The whole gang is here,” she wrote. “There are five of us! We’re trying to keep the laughter down so that they don’t kick us out!” The message flooded me with gratitude, though I knew my family didn’t need it. For us, whether in a hospital, at home, or at a party, being together is reason enough for celebration.

The post How Weddings and Hospitals Forge <i>Familia</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Days start early in the garden. As the sun rises over the Santa Clara Valley’s Diablo Range, we’ve already gathered and prepared seed beds for planting. The smell of damp soil fills the air as we carefully place fava beans into the dark earth. The soil under our fingernails and caked onto our knees doesn’t bother us—it reminds us of where our food comes from. We fill our bellies with warm coffee and pan dulce as we plant and discuss what the day will bring.

Silicon Valley might seem like a strange place for a gardening movement to flourish. Our plantings are hidden amid the palm tree-lined technology campuses of companies like Google, Cisco, and Apple, buried under the sounds of busy freeways, and packed neatly into an urban center where millions of people live. Yet the ways these gardens have found a home here can teach us a lot. By cultivating physical spaces to grow food in the margins of modernity—in the places ecologists call “ecotones,” where habitats, or worlds, collide and the unexpected emerges—we are also nourishing political spaces to live 21st-century life.

In 2012, while researching urban agriculture in Silicon Valley, I met the director of La Mesa Verde, an organization that teaches gardening and food literacy in the low-income communities of San Jose. She gave me a neighborhood tour, and then invited me to participate in a community action research project that would change my life.

For over a decade, I have been learning from, planting alongside, and writing about the home gardeners of La Mesa Verde. They live in parts—Alma, Alum Rock, Campbell, Willow Glen, Spartan Keyes, and East San Jose—where their options for fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods are limited. Most of the families in the program are Spanish-speaking, but it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual group of gardeners. With the help of the UC Master Gardener Program and the extensive farming and gardening knowledge of many of its members, gardeners who participate in La Mesa Verde are more than successful growers; they are advocates for community transformation. They share surpluses to challenge market logics. Their collective efforts promote their right to food and challenge their marginality by bringing together people who might otherwise not come together. They celebrate life by centering dignity in their efforts to transform their food system.

Countless nonprofits have popped up across the country to help alleviate the lack of access to quality food in many low-income communities. The belief is that state-sponsored intervention such as food pantries or the strategic placement of farmers markets are the best way to bring food into the community. There is an assumption that people living in these communities are too poor, busy, or ignorant to fix the issues they face related to food access themselves.

These communities are not naturally occurring empty “food deserts,” but rather they are products of food apartheid, or a food landscape that has been engineered in ways that benefit some and harm others. Ironically, even well-intentioned nonprofits seeking to “fix” low food access in underserved areas can end up prolonging it because their food charity interventions address the symptoms of hunger rather than the root causes of social inequality.

As I have gotten to know these Silicon Valley neighborhoods and the people who call them home, I’ve learned that community members address issues of food access in ways that do not fit the mold these initiatives promote. Food emerges from the neighborhoods’ lost, forgotten, and marginalized places. There are orange, lemon, lime, and pomegranate trees towering over houses; pinto and green beans climbing up chain-link fences; and yerba buena, epazote, and verdolagas propagating around foundations.

In fall 2013, I met a gardener in his early 80s originally from the outskirts of Mexico City. He and his wife lived in half of a two-bedroom duplex, with his daughter and her two kids next door. The best thing, he told me, was that while they had separate living areas, they shared a backyard, which was large enough for him to grow food and his grandkids to explore.

Gardening had played a central role in his life—as a kid he grew corn, beans, and squash in his family’s huerta (vegetable garden)—but what stood out the most from that conversation was how he explained the act of gardening as a reciprocal relationship between people and places. “Ser un jardínero,” he said, “es estar en comunicación. Comunicación con la comida, familia, comunidad, y tierra.” (“To be a gardener is to be in communication. Communication with food, family, community, land.”)

That afternoon, I watched him tend to his heirloom corn, summer squash, pinto beans, and jalapeno peppers. He moved through the garden as if in sync with its rhythms. It became evident that for him, gardening was less about food production, and more about cultivating relationships with his food through his labor—something most of us have lost touch with in recent years.

Labor is the source of value in these gardens, but not in the classical economic sense of how much things cost. Rather, value manifests in what gardens can restore. Most of us living under capitalism work for a living, and the more energy and time we invest in earning money, the less time we have for ourselves. Many of the gardeners I have interacted with hold part-time, low-wage jobs—sometimes two or three—that take them away from their families and communities. They are caretakers, food service workers, housekeepers, landscapers, and retail employees. But when they garden, their labor contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of their communities and cultures. Their simple acts of gardening challenge the capitalist ideal of individualism over all else because gardening does not separate people from community; it roots them in community. As a gardener told me one afternoon, “Tener un jardín es contra este sistema.” (“To have a garden is against this system.”)

Another La Mesa Verde gardener once told me, “When I go into my garden, I greet life.” He was doing more than referring to the ways growing food supports his physical health. By growing and sharing food, home gardens allow people to root themselves, regain control over their agricultural production, re-envision communal organization, and remind themselves—and us—how to be human again.

When we grow food, we work toward a reciprocal partnership with the human and non-human communities around us: We hope to support them as we rely on them to support us in turn. Gardening regenerates healthy soils, communities, peoples, and cultures. Silicon Valley’s home gardeners are growing food to feed the physical and spiritual needs of their communities—and they’re doing it at the epicenter of modernity and technology, in one of the most expensive and alienating places to live in America today.

The post The Radical Act of Gardening Silicon Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I was about 8 years old, my grandmother took me to a local fabric store to pick out a pattern for a dress we could sew together. Piecing together the brown pattern paper, cutting out fabric, and learning to pin and hem, I felt like I was solving the ultimate wearable puzzle.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was also preparing for my PhD in cell biophysics—the study of how cells, and the structures within them, move and grow. Cells form, and interact with, the squishy, stretchy template of our tissues, where they are always jostling and vying for space. When one cell contracts and gets smaller, its neighbors get pulled along, expanding to fill the space.

Life, it turns out, is another spatial puzzle to solve.

My thesis research rests on understanding how chromosomes, our coiled and packaged DNA, stretch and fold in the cell and what those shape changes tell us about the forces acting on them. On the surface, it is completely unrelated to the crafting I do to unwind—knitting scarves and hats, sewing crescent bags and pajama sets. But research shows expertise in fiber arts—like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and even fabric dyeing—may help build the spatial intuition I’ve needed for my research.

The study of how we perceive objects in the physical world and infer details about their relationship to other objects in space is called spatial cognition or spatial reasoning. The most well-studied of these skills are rigid mental rotations, which involve identifying a single object rotated in space. Mental rotations come in handy for architects, engineers, and plumbers, who need a good grasp on how parts fit together or how pieces will round a tight corner. They’re also valuable for chemists, who often have to visualize molecules too small to see from various angles to understand their structure.

Being good at rigid spatial reasoning doesn’t necessarily translate to success in other spatial tasks, many of which are less well-studied. The non-rigid spatial reasoning skills of mental bending and folding ask us to imagine how an object would look after being deformed. This is important for understanding fluid dynamics—how liquids and gases move in space—which atmospheric scientists and oceanographers use to study how wind or water flow. Cell biophysicists like the scientists I work with measure the effects of similar flows. They ask how fluid moves through cells to create currents, how proteins bend, fold, and fit together to create a functional cellular machine, or in my case, how chromosome stretching and folding signals to the cell whether it is correctly attached to the cell division machinery, which ensures future generations of cells will inherit all the right DNA.

I use some of the same science and engineering principles at my sewing table, to help visualize how swatches of fabric fit together to form a three-dimensional garment. Unlike simply slotting flat panels together to build a box, sewing a garment requires an understanding of how fabric drapes to fit around a body, how the shape of a pocket changes the way it bears weight, and how folding fabric before sewing can affect the final fit. Researchers have seen that students who performed better in apparel design courses also tended to score higher on some general spatial visualization tests.

Knitting, too, is a remarkable mechanical process. Taking a one-dimensional yarn that has little stretch or give on its own and winding it into a series of knots that can create a stretchy surface or even a three-dimensional tube is a feat of engineering. And the pliancy of the final product can change based on the pattern of stitches you use. Because of its flexibility and the versatility of patterns, knitting is perfect for crafting handheld versions of abstract math concepts, like Klein bottles and other manifolds, and it helps students reason through tough geometry and calculus problems.

Mathematician and crafter Dr. Daina Taimina turned to another yarn-based craft, crocheting, to create the first physical model of a hyperbolic plane. Inspired by this breakthrough, the Crochet Coral Reef is an ongoing community art project that reflects on climate change and honors female labor and applied mathematics. By developing patterns that riff on Taimina’s original hyperbolic plane, crocheters collectively create a rich marine ecosystem and explore non-Euclidean geometric space in the process. Multiple studies have shown how incorporating crocheting programs improved students’ STEM learning and math achievements.

Continued practice of fiber arts staves off age-related decline in spatial reasoning. In knitting hats, crocheting amigurumi, and sewing jackets, artists gain an understanding of the world around them—and manage to keep it. Perhaps this understanding of the physical world is woven into textiles of all kinds. Spiders, master weavers, are thought by some to have “extended cognition” because of the way their webs help them understand the world. They are known to reinforce areas that are particularly rich with prey, expand sections that haven’t been so fruitful, and adapt their web’s shape to its build site—essentially storing their life’s experience in the webs they weave.

Humans, too, have long stored memory in our fiber creations. The Inca and other ancient Andean cultures used quipus, fiber strings tied in a detailed knotting system, to record dates, census information, and even oral texts. Women in the ancient world wove classic Greek and Roman tales into tapestries, their creation a collective, social form of storytelling. A few years ago, a friend and I were inspired by the story quilts of Faith Ringgold to collaborate on one of our own. These textiles act as a physical representation of abstract knowledge, both in terms of the skill required to craft them and the cultural stories they record.

Why do we persist in building walls or imagining chasms between art and science, instead of weaving them closer together? The ageism and sexism are hard to ignore. You won’t see fiber arts as a rich source for building spatial reasoning skills if you’re convinced crafting is mainly a light activity for elderly women. Especially given the common perception that men excel at both spatial reasoning and math, while women are not naturally skilled. Data suggest men do outperform women at some rigid spatial reasoning, but that idea doesn’t hold for many non-rigid tasks. Maybe a first step toward equity in STEM is to stop viewing spatial reasoning as an innate gift granted only to a select few and instead as a skill we can all learn like any other.

For me, craft has been a critical part of moving my research along. Even when I tired of the lab and retreated to my hobbies, my brain was hard at work building the intuition to confidently analyze and interpret the movies I took of living cells dividing themselves in two. The art of crafting connects the abstract, twisting ideas in my head to a concrete reality I can hold, and untangles some of the thornier ideas in the process.

The post Can Knitting Help Teach Science? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I just wanted to be honest. I don’t want to get mixed up in this conflict. I want to remain neutral,” Geralt of Rivia tells his good friend Yarpen, a dwarf. “It’s impossible!” yells Yarpen in response. “It’s impossible to remain neutral, don’t you understand that? No, you don’t understand anything.”

Geralt, the monster-hunting protagonist in The Witcher fantasy series by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, believes that it’s better to abstain from conflict than to participate in events without fully understanding their consequences. But Yarpen has chosen to take a side and fight against the rebel Scoia’tael forces, sees good and evil, just cause and oppression. Thus, he finds Geralt’s refusal to fight injustice unacceptable, indifferent, and cowardly: “Get out of my sight with your arrogant neutrality,” he tells Geralt.

Their heated exchange helps us to think of neutrality as an attitude one can adopt. This attitude consists of an initial approach to any given conflict, in which you abstain from choosing any one side. Whether this choice arises from careful consideration or indifference is something distinct from neutrality itself.

When it comes to interesting and responsible ways of being neutral, fiction, particularly the sci-fi and fantasy kind, can help us contemplate a wider, more exciting range of possibilities than reality.

The reason for this is quite simple: not everything that is possible is actual. But if we think we know what is possible based only on what is actual, we are closing ourselves off to an honest examination.

When we pick up a sci-fi or fantasy novel with this “let’s see” attitude, we are practicing the rather technical concept of “neutrality modification.” The term was coined by philosopher Edmund Husserl, who claimed that the exercise could open a realm of investigation into the very nature of our consciousness, experience, and perception. Say we’re observing an orange on a counter. Our experience amounts to a visual perception of an existing object. In perception, we commit to the existence of the perceived object. But if we operate a neutrality modification upon that act of perception, Husserl would say, we have as a result “a neutral orange”: an orange that neither exists nor ceases to exist. An orange that is indifferent to the question of existence.

By reading so-called fantastical literature with the attitude of neutrality modification, we allow ourselves to embark on an exploration of the possibility realm: If we are on Mars, we resist the thought that tells us, “That’s impossible!” If we are in Narnia, we ignore the idea, “There’s no such thing as magic!” By temporarily suspending our beliefs about what is real and accepting the world the author offers, we see how possible we find it. We see how possible it feels to us.

Judging what is possible is a hard exercise, one that might engage physicists and logicians. But we can all consider and analyze what could be when it comes to thinking about human nature, right and wrong, forms of political organization, or relating to one another. We can, in other words, speculate. Speculation might be the summit of the human being’s ability to reason abstractly. But it is also an activity that profits from what philosophers like to call intuition, “direct contact” with the thing we are thinking about. In the same way that a memory can give us back the feeling we once had, albeit not so intensely, the human faculty of fantasy allows us to have a certain experience of that which is not (yet?) actual.

The fantasy and science fiction genres, also known as “speculative fiction,” are authored by professional speculators who spend their lives asking “What if…?” Their kind of fiction builds a possible world full of intuitions. These stories trigger in us the feeling of something we have never really felt. They allow us to better grasp what we mean when we say some things might truly be different from how they actually are. They help us reconsider why we think that certain other things should be deemed impossible.

The worlds of fantasy and science fiction are filled with the exploration of possibilities. They invite us to experience the extent of such possibilities not just rationally but affectively, intuitively, presently.

If you feel like traveling into the realm of the possible, do so with a neutral attitude. Forget that the world in which you live exists and is just how it is. Being neutral is a conscious attempt at canceling prejudices, at not judging before we know enough to do so. It is an honest attempt at submerging ourselves in the fictional world and its whole range of sensations. Neutralize your prior beliefs and let the author and their ideas penetrate you. Dive into their worlds and their stories. Live through the characters and pay attention to how these inhabitants of other (perhaps) possible worlds, think, feel, and act.

It does not matter if the possible will one day become actual. It does not matter if you think you know better. Be neutral. Be open to what is offered and allow yourself to live in a different, possible world. Be neutral, and you might be changed in ways you would not have thought possible.

The post Sci-Fi’s Lessons in Neutrality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In what’s now Norway, the country with the world’s second-longest coastline, Neolithic fisher-farmers once harpooned enormous bluefin tuna. As centuries passed, Norwegians refined the arduous fishing process, becoming nimble conquerors of the sea. Plentiful species like herring became staples of diet and livelihood. But in the 1960s, annual herring catches that had measured 600,000 tons suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The population had collapsed.

The cause, it emerged later, was technological. Norwegian fishers had adopted the power block to pull in nets mechanically, massively multiplying their catches. What they didn’t realize was how these hauls tested the limits of fish populations. The herring would take nearly 20 years to recover.

Now, new technology is allowing Norway to pioneer another kind of ocean harvest—and the consequences and damage could be even more devastating and longer lasting. On January 9, 2024, its parliament voted to permit deep-sea mining exploration, with hopes of being the first country to mine the seafloor commercially for minerals like copper and cobalt. Yet where the fishing industry needs stable fish populations, this prospective mining industry—which would extract to build modern electronics—has no inherent need to preserve life. The exploitation threatens to destroy complex ecosystems before scientists have even documented the life forms at risk.

Norway’s proposed mining is extreme even compared to proposals for deep-sea mining elsewhere. Most miners in other regions, including the central Pacific and Indian Oceans, want to harvest polymetallic nodules, which are mineral aggregations on flat seafloor areas. Mining Norway’s volcanic seabed would instead use remote-controlled machinery to completely remove hydrothermal vents and strip mineral crusts off seamounts.

It takes fierce machines to pry rocky surfaces from the seafloor. So far, the companies have kept their methods and equipment clandestine. Yet the enormous robots developed for ocean mining startups elsewhere offer clues as to what may be used: heavy-duty spiked drillers and cutters designed to crush into seamounts and vents.

These seamounts and vents, even inactive ones, support a surprising amount of life that can survive at extreme depths. The minerals on the volcanic formations offer hard surfaces for animals to cling to. Anemones attach to vent chimneys; sponge grounds grow, garden-like, across seamounts. Enormous basket stars with curling tree-like limbs whorl along the seafloor.

Deep-sea ecosystems also take a remarkably long time to establish themselves. On seamounts elsewhere, explained Tina Kutti, an ecologist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research, some corals live for 3,000 years. While those exact corals may not live on Norway’s seabed, what’s there is likely ancient, too. According to Kutti, as a general rule, deep-sea fauna “grow really, really slowly. They have slow metabolic rates because there’s not so much food.”

And then there’s all the life that’s still undiscovered. The deep sea is incredibly hard for scientists to study. Their research vessels often have to beat harsh weather, while the scientists themselves have to search out geologic formations in pitch-black water, like “children wandering around a forest at night with a flashlight, trying to count trees,” said Eoghan P. Reeves, a geochemist at the University of Bergen. Sometimes, he added, they make discoveries “about places that have been studied for years, when we shine the flashlight in a slightly different direction.”

Even in more accessible marine environments, scientists have struggled to understand how ecosystems function. In parts of the once-bountiful Oslofjord, more than 80 percent of the cod are gone, thanks to overfishing and modern pollutants. Marine experts long thought ocean fish would repopulate the fjord, but recent research suggests uniquely adapted fjord fish are effectively irreplaceable. Other species have fared worse. Today, much of the Oslofjord remains nearly lifeless.

Farther north, fishers along Norway’s coasts noticed unusually large sea urchin populations starting in 1970. The grazing echinoderms devoured kelp forests, and other marine life disappeared with the kelp habitat. Only recently have researchers learned the cause: as technology increased catches and fishers targeted more species, the urchins lost their natural predators. The kelp is slowly growing back today.

One reason for these past collapses was a pervasive belief that fish were so abundant they couldn’t be exterminated—and therefore fishing didn’t need to be regulated. Ocean science, tracing causes of collapse and possible paths to restoration, was key to recovery. Herring made a comeback in under two decades through a fishing moratorium. Urchin harvesting might return kelp forests to the country’s north and central coasts. Even the decimated Oslofjord may stand a chance, with new fisheries management.

The relatively fast recovery of life in shallower seas has been a saving grace. But the consequences of deep-sea mining could last far longer than those of overfishing, given the slow pace of the ecosystems’ regrowth. Species that die at that depth might take centuries to regenerate, according to Kutti. For some, regeneration may not even be possible.

Unlike with coastal environments, scientists are essentially starting from scratch to understand the deep sea. They currently lack the knowledge and technology to detect the damage deep-sea mining might cause—let alone regulate or mitigate it. Norway’s newly approved exploration process requires companies to conduct environmental baseline surveys. Yet these surveys will be of limited use, as they’ll only target areas with potentially attractive mineral deposits. “We have no data below 800 meters,” said Kutti. “It’s been shocking to us that the government hasn’t taken any big initiatives to start studying what fauna lives there on the seabed and in the water column.” Without independent research of the whole seafloor and how its ecosystems connect, attempts at regulation become shots in the dark.

“We [Norwegians] have a close connection to the sea, but also a history of using technology and bravery to conquer the natural power of the sea in quite brutal ways,” Truls Gulowsen, leader of the Norwegian Association for Conservation of Nature, told me.

While humans are capable of decimating ecosystems, we’re equally capable of safeguarding them by implementing restorative and protective measures. But there is another option, too: innovating away from environmentally harmful extraction. One alternative to deep-sea mining might be urban mining—recovering and recycling minerals from our built environment. Innovation isn’t just technology, after all. Sometimes, it’s the creativity to reimagine how things get done.

The post What Will Deep-Sea Mining Do to Norway’s <br>Oceans? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My favorite pecan pie recipe is from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; its slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in the ’90s in Mexico and grew up with the tantalizing promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This landmark trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional interconnectedness and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate delights: the chance to enjoy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or to buy the clothes Joey Potter wore in Dawson’s Creek, which we also now watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhoods, and with them, our identities.

I attended a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s expanding middle class and took pride in molding us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to college in the U.S. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I thought of myself as not only bicultural but binational too.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the ’40s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico inside the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her one day. Eventually, he did. They had five children. The last of them, my dad, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora but was eligible for U.S. citizenship through his mom.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, around 1997.

My dad was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to have dual nationality, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and, eventually, a Mexican work permit. In the late ’80s, his work permit expired, and he was deported out of Mexico. He crossed the border by foot, over the Laredo Bridge into Texas, carrying the official notice of his deportation from the country of his birth. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench inside O’Hare airport until enough hours had gone by that he could legally return to Mexico, where my mom and 1-year-old sister awaited.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deeply: I was both Mexican and American.

Ever since I can remember, my dad has tried to pass on his U.S. nationality to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he’s never lived in the States (outside of the winters and summers he spent at the family farm in Virginia), he always hit a dead end. Still, I remained convinced that getting my U.S. nationality was just a matter of time. If my grandmother had been American and my father was American, why wouldn’t I be?

When I moved to New York for grad school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my dad to request that I be given permanent U.S. residency through a green card. I could then, after several years, apply for citizenship. The reply from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came in the mail a few weeks later: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I needed to follow-up with the Department of State, which processes the residency applications of U.S. citizen relatives and, eventually, issues the actual green card. Because my case wasn’t eligible for expedited processing, it would have to wait its turn in line. Last time I checked, the Department of State was beginning to process applications submitted in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrating Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

Looking at the waitlist—and knowing I would not have documentation validating my binational identity for decades, at least—shattered something in me. The NAFTA promise that made us middle-class Mexicans think we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican and, as such, not always welcome.

I was reminded of this constantly while living in the States, though always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t pass as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” a woman on the other side of the phone replied when I called a public office asking—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me for the expiration date of my visa; I went out for a few weeks with a guy who ultimately decided he could no longer see me because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee a long-term stay in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I did not belong. I was not who I thought I had been.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out I was eligible for an O-1, also known as the exceptional talent visa. I just had to file the paperwork and wait three months. After some years with the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something felt off.

I knew my privileged education had unlocked a path for immigration that many people are desperate for. I recognized that being able to choose where to build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S. by any means possible wasn’t what I had truly been looking for. What I yearned for was a document that recognized my deep-rooted bond to my grandmother’s home. I had been searching, desperately, for something to validate my identity —papers I could point to that would say “You are of here, and also of there.” Yet documents alone couldn’t give me that. I headed back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City, I rented an apartment far from where I grew up. I began buying my produce at the local mercado instead of Costco, which is where my family usually shopped. My poultry and meat came from a carnicería around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than I ever had; in others, I felt like another digital nomad transplanted from the States to my own country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about going back to the U.S. dissipated, life took me by surprise. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. When considering options for delivering our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the U.S. It would be our way to give our baby dual nationality, opening up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done so and looked up doctors. But I decided against it.

These past few years, I’ve found a certain ease in my singular Mexican identity as I balance both the cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos for breakfast while listening to The Daily, bake peach pie on rainy Mexico City afternoons, and aloofly navigate the non-immigrant alien line at U.S. airports. While citizenship remains locked behind layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex blend of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my dad did to me.

The post The Borders Between My Mexican and American Identities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.