Search Results for: California

The Price of Dominionist Theology

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Eve Ettinger | Longreads | January 2020 | 17 minutes (4,367 words)

Dave Ramsey comes into the building through the back door in the receiving room behind the store. He’s wearing a black turtleneck and a leather jacket and jeans, and he has security with him — several large men looking alert and formidable. I can smell his cologne behind him as he walks through the store. I take the back elevator up after him, to the third floor where his event is, and the elevator is suffocating with the bitingly bright cologne wafting off his body. I feel like I need to vomit.

I want to push past his security and confront him, to make him look me in the eyes and tell him how much he hurt me. I want to slap his face and eradicate the smile that follows me everywhere through the store today — on the signage for his event, on the covers of his books, in my memory from the hours of videos I’ve seen of him talking about how to not be “stoopid,” how to get out of debt quickly with a “snowball,” how to not be a “gazelle.” I want to break through the character of popular finance guru Dave Ramsey and make him see me, a fragile 24-year-old heartbroken about losing everything familiar in the space of a couple years — a loss that felt like it had snowballed directly from his teachings.

It’s like the story of the mouse and the cookie: Dave Ramsey and his mentor, Larry Burke, gave my father the idea that debt was sinful. Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible (Quiverfull theology), they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans myself, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap and the school gave me a good scholarship package. The school also didn’t allow students to take out federal student loans (given their conditional exemption from Title IX). Because I went to that college, I met my boyfriend, who had private student loans because his family was too rich for him to get a scholarship package. Because my boyfriend had student loans, my father tried to break us up. Because my father tried to break us up, we got married in a rush. Because we got married in a rush, his family gave us a wedding gift of paying for us to take Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class. Because we took that class and were shamed into agreeing with Ramsey’s teachings by our parents, we spent all our undesignated remaining funds after rent and bills paying off my ex-husband’s student loans and didn’t have any bills in my name because I didn’t have a credit score, and ate cheaply at home and lived in a shitty illegal basement apartment in DC with a former Nazi as our landlord. Because I didn’t have a credit score, when I needed to leave my husband, I couldn’t rent an apartment of my own, and because we’d been paying off his student loans, I didn’t have savings to buy my own a car to commute to work. Because… because because because.

And here I was: living in yet another a shitty, illegal apartment with two fraternity brothers in a sort of sleazy-and-more-impoverished New Girl setup in Los Angeles, divorced at 24, and working hourly wage jobs because the PTSD from my marriage was so bad, I couldn’t hold down the kind of salaried job I was actually qualified to hold. I was starving because I was broke, and I was slowly building up a credit score with a loan on a car (a relatively new car, because only a dealer would sell to someone with no credit history) and a tiny credit card that I was using to pay for my gas and groceries every week. My part-time retail job at Barnes & Noble meant that I was supposed to help facilitate Dave Ramsey’s book signing event that night at our store.

I felt lightheaded — hungry, angry, and panicked about being so close to this man whose legacy in my life had been a mindset of scarcity and fear for as long as I could remember.

Dave had $1,000 in cash that he was going to give away in a couple of chunks to the attendees. The money was tucked into white envelopes — symbolic of his famous “envelope system” for budgeting, based on the concept that handing over physical cash would be psychologically harder for people than swiping a credit card, thus leading them to reduce spending. My mom used that system for years, as did other homeschool or Quiverfull moms I knew. It was a sign that this person was like you. It was an in-joke within our community.

That night in the Barnes & Noble, Dave held the envelopes aloft, standing at the top of the escalators on the third floor of the store before a crowd that surged around all three levels, faces craning upward to look at him. He was glowing a little with sweat, light reflecting off his bald head and glasses. Everyone around me was dazzled, excited. Cash money lit a primal instinct in everyone around me, and for a moment I felt like I was in church during a revival. I half expected someone to fall to the floor, taken up by the Holy Spirit in the heat of the moment. I felt as if I was the only person in the building whose feet were still on the ground, who was unmoved by his waving cash in the air like a conductor casting a spell over an entire orchestra. Our regular store security was unmoved as well, and I caught the eye of my favorite guard — a kind, retired cop who had regularly rescued me from clingy young male customers begging me to change my mind and give them a date. He shook his head a little, a baffled grin on his face.

I don’t remember what Dave was saying to the crowd. I’ve heard his lines so many times that they all run together in my head now, vague and cliched, but the energy was biting. He was angry; restrained, but there was a sharpness to his speech that night which I had never picked up on before. He sounded to me like he despised the people who were there to hear him, and I wondered if I was imagining it. But when my friend the guard talked to me about it the following day, I discovered I wasn’t the only one. “He was pretty intense, wasn’t he?” he said.

“I hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t understand why he does gigs like that if he’s so rich and dislikes his followers so much.”

“Me either,” I said.
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Violence Girl

Photo by Martin Sorrondeguy

Alice Bag | Violence Girl | Feral House | September 2011 | 43 minutes (7,823 words)

 

By the autumn of 1977, new bands were popping up all the time. Seemingly every week, someone who had been in the audience the week before was now onstage in their own band. The Masque reopened in mid-October with a gig featuring a band called the Controllers. The Controllers weren’t really a new band, in fact they had been one of the first bands to rehearse and play at the Masque from its inception, but they had never had a proper coming-out show, so I think of their October 15th show as their debut. Their music was tight, fast, and melodic, and some of their songs were almost poppy which was nicely balanced by the imposing figures of Johnny Stingray and Kidd Spike, who sang up front and played with a ferocity curiously incongruous with their lighthearted lyrics. The band would evolve and get even better over the next several months, with the addition of an old friend of mine named Karla Maddog on drums.

When punk came along, it was just the perfect vehicle to express who I was as an individual. It was something completely new and wide open. Just a couple of years later, that would change, and people would have to fit into preconceived notions of what punk rock was or wasn’t, but the early scene had no such limitations, because we were the ones creating and defining it. If you had been at the Masque in 1977, you would have seen very eclectic shows, ranging from the Screamers to Arthur J. and the Goldcups, from Backstage Pass to the Controllers. There was no clearly defined punk sound, no dress code; all you had to do was show up and make your presence known. The movement was one of individuals and individual expression, each of us bringing our heritage and formative experiences with us in an organic and, in my case, unplanned way.

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(Who Gets to) Just Up and Move

Patrik Dunder / Getty

Nicole Walker | Longreads | January 2020 | 21 minutes (5,273 words)

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. — Louise Erdrich

***

Like white settlers did in the 1800s, the trees are moving west. Unlike the pioneers/white settlers, they’re not going very fast. About 10 miles a decade. It will take a long time for the trees to decimate buffalo populations, turn prairie into wheat, kill indigenous populations, and establish Walmart as the largest employer. Still. They’re coming. Thirsty, trees of the east move westward, as, due to climate change, the rain in the east is drying up. Fortunately, rains in the Midwest grow heavier. The trees, tempted by this, send their seeds a little further to the left. It’s mainly broadleaf, deciduous plants like the Scarlet Oak that want to move. Beware Gambel Oak, you scrubbier version. The big trees are coming for your rain.

Salt Lake City had once been the home of the Ute People. Utah gets its name from the Utes, but no one really talks about them. They had escaped white settling for longer than other Native Americans — mainly because of the time it took to bring first trees, then backhoes, then politics to the Salt Lake Valley.

In the 1600s, they were among the first to procure horses from the Spanish and they traded with Hispanic settlers, but remained unmolested until 1847 when the Mormons arrived. Before that, the Utes and some bands of Shoshone people had lived among the rivers and the lakes, catching fish and organizing plants alongside the banks. The rivers were everyone’s and no one had fences, but then the Mormons came and, although the Mormons didn’t kill the Utes straightaway, they pushed the Utes toward the Uintah Basin where there are few rivers and few fish. After moving Utes to a reservation and then taking that reservation back, they forced them into allotments where, even with irrigation, the ground was too salty and sandy to be of much agricultural use. The Mormons shrugged their shoulders and went back to plan their Days of ’47 Parade. The Ute children were sent to Indian Boarding Schools like Albuquerque High, from where half of them never returned home. Move out, the white settlers said as they pulled lines from the Book of Mormon to claim this as their one true home, where God himself told them to come in, make yourself comfortable.
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Witness Mami Roar

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,486 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My mother feared removal and separation from her children long before Trump became president. I crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with her and my younger sister in 1992. We walked from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, and boarded a plane to Chicago where my father, already a permanent resident, met us. We were stopped at the airport in El Paso. Officers handcuffed my mother and separated her from my sister and me. At 5 years old, I sat in a black plastic chair, with my 4-year-old sister crying on my lap, waiting for my mother to return. The men interrogating her harassed her with questions about her family and made comments about her appearance. 

Years later, as we sat around my mother’s kitchen table in Cicero, Illinois, she remembered that the officers tried to convince her to go back. “Me decian que que bonita soy,” they told her. A woman as beautiful as her should have no problem making a better life for herself in Mexico. At 23 years old, my mother had already heard her share of promises from no-good men — including from my father, who was the reason for the journey in the first place. If I had been thinking only of myself, my mother said to me, I would’ve stayed in Mexico.

“Tengo que pensar en el futuro de mis hijas,” she responded when the men asked why she was willing to risk it all. Her daughters’ future is why she left her mother and siblings in Mexico and why she believes she endured many years of mistreatment from my father. 

* * *

The climate around immigration in the United States today is not the same as it was when my family immigrated in the 1990s. And yet the violence and the terror feel familiar. Even though my mother made it past the border and was eventually reunited with her husband, she lived in constant fear that any wrong move could lead to deportation. Raids were a real possibility for her every day and would become a real terror for my sister and me as we got older. Today, many immigrants and asylum seekers have been apprehended and are now detained in detention centers and for-profit jails across the country. Images of overcrowded cages with brown children wrapped in Mylar blankets abound the news. The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human. My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

Growing up, I often asked my mother to tell us the story of how we got to Chicago. My curiosity was grounded in a desire to learn where I belonged and a frustration because  our lives were filled with violence and pain. Even though I grew up in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American community, where mixed status households were common, keeping our undocumented status to ourselves was paramount. Protecting the secrecy of our status meant we also needed to be silent about the trauma occurring in our home. Letting friends, teachers, or cops know about the violence always meant risking family separation. 


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In The Nation, Isabela Dias recounts a story of an undocumented woman, Nancy, who was deported back to Mexico after helping to convict her rapist. After many years of physical and emotional abuse, Nancy reported her boyfriend for sexually attacking her in their home and applied for a U visa, the resident authorization for undocumented people who witness or are victims of a crime. Because of an enormous backlog, Nancy was deported before she could receive the visa, and her U.S.-born children had to follow after her. Dias reports that since President Trump took office, the backlog for U visa applications “is now more than 134,000 pending cases” — only 10,000 visas are granted each year. While they struggle to survive in Mexico, Nancy and her children wait for her U visa application to be processed. Throughout the narrative, most of Nancy’s concern is the future of her children: ‘“I dream that they will have a career one day,’ Nancy says. ‘I want them to think big. Then, it will have been worth going through all of this suffering.”’ Nancy’s words remind me of my mother, who never pressed charges against my father for beating her. She never applied for a U visa; she probably never knew it was an option. 

* * *

In 2011, before my 24th birthday, I received a master’s degree in English literature. By then, I had been living in Southern California, away from any family, for about two years. I had also started what would turn into a five-year-long emotionally abusive situation with a man also enrolled in a graduate program, and I was living my best life as a high-functioning alcoholic with high-functioning depression. When I passed my exams, I called my mother from Riverside, California, to share the good news.

“No he de hablar ingles pero ahora mi hija es maestra de la lengua,” she said, laughing  at not being able to speak English while I was about to receive a master’s degree in it. I sat on a concrete bench outside the humanities building, holding the phone with one hand and plugging my ear with the other. The day was bright and hot. Students walked around me. The chatter of the campus made it difficult to hear my mother speak from some 2,000 miles away in Cicero, Illinois. My friends, also in graduate programs at the campus, stood a few feet away, waiting to celebrate me.

The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human.

“Todos mis sacrificios y todo este dolor ha valido la pena,” she said. All of her sacrifice and pain, she told me, had been worth it. My lungs burned from holding my breath too long at hearing my mother’s voice filled with pride. Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart — because I didn’t have a summer job, which meant I couldn’t send money home and wouldn’t be able to pay my own rent; because I resented her so much; because I hated myself and didn’t want to be alive; because I believed I wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t share any of this with her; instead, I thanked her and we got off the phone. My friends stood around me and we shared celebratory tequila shots.

* * *

When my mother moved to this country at 23 years old, her new support system consisted of her children, her husband, and her husband’s family. She didn’t know the language, she didn’t know how to drive, and she only had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education. My mother tethered her life and her children’s future to her husband, a man who had been sent to the U.S. by his mother in hopes that the change of scenery would force him to mature. Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine what it’d be like for a young married couple, 23 and 24 years old, with two daughters, 5 and 4 years old, to be in a new, strange country unable to return home. In my investigations, I’ve gathered that the root of their rocky marriage was my father’s desire for independence and my mother’s insistence on codependency. He probably didn’t want to be married and have children, while her Mexican upbringing taught her that husbands are the only way to a better life. These conflicting desires culminated in a tumultuous, violent, and traumatizing union in the U.S. — wherein my father, a permanent resident, had the upper hand over his wife and children, all of whom were undocumented. 

In their text on immigration and domestic violence, Edna Erez and Shannon Harper suggest that battered immigrant women are “forced to make an inordinately difficult choice between remaining in an abusive relationship or leaving. If they leave, they may risk their legal status, facing deportation, and losing custody of and contact with their children.” As a child, I saw this up close with my mother. I don’t know if she believed everything my father said because she had limited access to information or because she loved him. When my sister and I would plead with her to leave him, she’d look into our round baby faces and ask, “¿Y adonde vamos a ir?” Where could a mother of two, then three, then four children go without money, without a car, without papers? My mother feared shelters. She thought worse things would happen to us there. She tried leaving a few times. Often, it didn’t matter where we’d run off to, because my father always found us and brought us home — without a fight from my mother because she believed it would be different this time and she wanted a home for my siblings and me. Hope was all my mother had to her name. I don’t doubt my father used his power to manipulate my mother. I don’t doubt he lied to get her to stay or to keep her quiet. I have an easier time understanding my father as the villain of the story than I do understanding why my mother stayed. 

* * *

My memories of the beatings come in snippets. They were so frequent, I can’t keep them in order in my mind. I can’t remember if my mother sneaking us out of our apartment in the middle of the night came before or after he punched her so hard we had to take her to the hospital. Or if it was before or after he tried to make it all up by taking her on a date, then slapped her and kicked her out of the car. Or if it came before or after his near fatal drug overdose, which they told us kids was heat exhaustion. Maybe it was after she ran and hid under our kitchen table begging for her life, or before he dragged her by the hair across the living room. It could have been after that time he almost choked her to death, or when he beat her while she was pregnant with my brother, or when she got so drunk at my aunt’s house she walked outside barefoot and I gave her my shoes. Maybe we left after I caught her in the hall with a razor blade to her wrists. I still have night terrors of the beatings and I don’t know if they’re memories or if they’re just dreams.

When I was a teenager, what terrified me more about the beatings was the idea of becoming solely responsible for my three younger siblings if one day my mother decided to leave. By the time I was the oldest of four I was 13 years old, which meant whenever my parents fought, I had to give my 12-year-old sister instructions on where to hide, when to call 911, and how to keep the babies quiet. When their fighting was too much for my sister and me, we’d each carry a baby and go outside. I, like my mother, needed a way out. I planned for college to be my exit strategy. I’ve never had the courage to admit it but I believed that if my mother left us, if she saved herself, I wouldn’t be able to leave for college. I believed I needed her to stay with her children so I could make it out. 

The violence and the reasons for the violence evolved as I got older. My father started beating my mother shortly after they got married at 17 and 18 years old. Both sets of their parents were violent with each other and both sets also struggled with alcoholism. At first, other relatives would intervene. “No, ya, asi no. Cálmate, hermano,” I’d hear my father’s sisters say. My instinct was always to cover my sister’s eyes. Eventually, there was less and less adult intervention, which meant I had to step in if I wanted my mother alive. I regret never being courageous or strong enough to kick my father’s ass. “Please, please, please, please, dejéla,” I pleaded, hating myself for having to be the one to beg for her life. I started calling the police even though we weren’t supposed to. The cops would show up, I’d translate, and depending on the cop they’d either take my father away or tell him to take a walk — it didn’t matter that my mother’s face was always bloodied. My mother never pressed charges, and she never let him spend more than a night in jail or at his sister’s house. “Pero dejélo,” I’d plead — begging her to save her own life and mine. “¿Y quien paga la renta?” Making rent was always, and continues to be, her burden. Even when her literal life was on the line, my mother knew that without money there was nowhere for her and her children to turn. 

* * *

Recently, a female student in her 20s came up to me after class and asked me to approve a video for her essay assignment on advertisements. The assignment was for my Introduction to Composition and Research course, where I ask students to choose an advertisement and do a close reading of the narrative choices the company uses to sell the product. Students usually choose typical ads from major companies like Nike, Coca-cola, Dove, etc. One student chose a commercial screened during Super Bowl 49 about domestic violence. The ad, titled “Listen,” features a voiceover using dialogue pulled from a real 911 call of a woman insisting on placing an order for a pizza until the operator understands that the woman can’t ask for help. While the phone call is happening, the camera pans throughout a large house showing a punched hole in one of the walls, broken class on the floor, dirty dishes, and household items thrown about. The ad ends with the NO MORE Project’s slogan, “When it’s hard to talk, it’s up to us to listen.”

My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

My heart raced, my breaths shortened, and my hands shook as I watched the video. I widened my eyes, willing them to swallow the tears threatening to burst out of me. “Yes, this will give you lots to write about,” was all I could manage to tell my student as I  hurried to collect my belongings and rush to my office. When I made it there, I cried real, ugly, large tears. I covered my face to muffle my cries in case any of my colleagues were nearby — because, even though it’s been 10 years since the last time I witnessed my parents physically abuse one another, when I’m triggered, I’m a child again, calling 911, yelling for help while my father beats my mother, and no one comes to save us.  

* * *

In a photo taken one month before we left Juarez for Chicago. My mother sits on a blue bench in front of a house with a barred window. Her hair is dark and permed. Her smile is wide as she looks at my sister and me. Her hands clasp a soda or beer can. My aunt, in a red dress, with similarly permed hair, sits next to her, looking at her. My sister, my cousin, and I are at the center of the photograph. We wear matching outfits, my sister and I — brown shorts, white tops with brown stripes, white long socks and black Mary Janes. A month later, we’d arrive to Midway Airport in Chicago wearing those same outfits. In the photo, my sister holds both her hands to her mouth — biting the nails of one hand, using the other as support. She looks at something or someone outside the frame. My cousin looks in the same direction. I stand tall with my arms behind my back and smile directly into the camera. Whenever I ask my mother about her decision to immigrate to the United States she says she saw me and my sister the day the photo was taken and knew we had to leave. It wasn’t because she trusted my father was what was best for her; she left because she wanted my sister and me to have careers. “Tienen que mirar a lo alto,” she says to me. You have to aim higher. 

Women like my mother traverse worlds looking for a better life and what they find instead are entire countries telling them their lives aren’t worth protecting. Statistics vary, but generally one in four women and one in nine men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in four children witness intimate partner violence in their homes, according to cases filed in state courts. National statistics don’t break down into more complex pieces where I can find my mother, where I can find myself. There are four women and two men in my family. Four of six were undocumented at some point in our lives. Two of six have experienced physical abuse in our lifetime. Six of six of us have dealt with emotional abuse. Three of six struggle with alcoholism. Six of six live with a mental illness. One in six has diagnosed depression and PTSD. Six in six are still forcing the pieces of ourselves together.

“We must acknowledge the lack of mental health resources [immigrant mothers] faced [in the U.S.] and in their native land. They were never provided effective ways to deal with their pain,” Nia Ita writes in the magazine Fierce. “As a result, our moms are burdened with their mothers’ traumas while holding onto their own lost childhood and relinquished dreams.” My mother made herself into a vessel to hold her own and other peoples’ traumas — her husband’s, her mother’s, her children’s. I often ask her to seek out a therapist and she says she has God. I tell her I’ll pay for it because I don’t know the kind of health insurance her factory job provides and she says, “No, mija. Ya te he quitado suficiente.” My own therapist often has to remind me I can’t unburden my mother of her trauma. Today, it very much feels like my healing is in conflict with hers — as if only one of us can make out of the pain we’ve experienced. Like when I was a teenager and needed her to stay so I could leave.  

* * *

The beatings didn’t immediately stop, but my mother wielded pots and pans to protect herself until they did. I don’t know what changed in her that made her fight back and speak up. Because I witnessed it all, it felt like she changed overnight. “No grito, asi hablo ya” is my mother’s favorite retort when my now grown siblings and I tell her that she’s yelling at us when she speaks. “It’s not yelling, it’s my new voice,” she says. When you’ve been forced into silence, physically beaten into submission, there isn’t a gradual progression to a louder, unbroken voice. As soon as my mother learned to love the power of her own voice, she roared through her apartment demanding we hear her. 

Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart.

My mother, my sister, and I received our permanent residency in 2004, after 12 years of waiting and thousands of dollars spent hoping our applications would be processed. Having her permanent residency has certainly helped my mother find her voice. After 31 years of marriage, she hasn’t left my father and I choose to read that survival strategy as the way the lives of many immigrant women are complicated by a long life of poverty, cultural marginalization, and language barriers. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I understood my mother’s act of staying as a terrible choice. As an adult, I understand how she, and many immigrant women in those situations, didn’t have a menu of healthy options to choose from. I comprehend the complexities involved now, but the little girl inside of me still feels like she chose him and not me. 

When I see my mother now, I don’t always know how to approach her. I still desire a relationship that isn’t ours — one that isn’t riddled with trauma, one where she can protect me. In all of my feelings of abandonment, I’m also still grateful for my mother and her sacrifices. Lately, I witness my mother’s persistence, vulnerability, flaws, and love from afar. I don’t need to understand her choices, but I also don’t need to be a part of them. Growing up, her greatest fear was forced separation — either by deportation because of our citizenship status, or by the state’s child protective services because of domestic violence. Our distance now is our best attempt at surviving all of that. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
To Be Well: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir

* * *

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez is an Associate Professor in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College in NYC. She is an immigrant of Juarez, Mexico and raised in Cicero, IL. Her work has been published in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Hispanecdotes, Everyday Fiction, Acentos Review, Newtown Literary, and So to Speak A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

Still Waters

Participant, Killer Films

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  9 minutes (2,330 words)

About halfway through Dark Waters, after corporate lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) has agreed to hear out farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), after he has seen that hundreds of cows on the Tennant farm have died, after he has connected this to their town’s water system, after he has linked that to the chemical company DuPont, after he has tied that to PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid), after he has found that PFOAs are a man-made forever chemical that can cause tumours and that the company that runs the town is effectively destroying everything within it, after all of that he’s about to sit down his pregnant wife (Anne Hathaway) to explain it to her when she looks at him square in the face and says, “I’m not listening to this.”                          

That should have been the tagline for the movie. It should be the tagline for the world. Dark Waters’ largely ignored release mirrors the larger apathetic response to the climate crisis as a whole. And yet a number of critics who saw it threw away their nonstick pans (PFOA is used to create Teflon), proving the film had the power to spur people on to some kind of action. But if it’s that effective and that timely — show me a global corporation that isn’t hoarding power and destroying the planet — why is no one talking about it? Why did only two movies seem to grab all the column inches over the past few weeks: Marriage Story, a movie about Noah Baumbach’s (sorry, “a couple’s”) divorce, and The Irishman, a movie about an aging mobster? Surely the planet has greater reach being, you know, where we actually live? 

That seems to be the problem. Dark Waters is not just about one plutonium plant (Silkwood), a single nuclear power plant (The China Syndrome), or even a Catholic church abuse conspiracy (Spotlight), it’s a story about systemic corruption that courses through the entire world. As the film’s director, Todd Haynes, told the New Yorker, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions.” No one wants to listen to that.

* * *

Environmental films have been around almost as long as films themselves, and our responses to them have varied as much as our responses to the natural world. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short The Plow That Broke the Plains, about how aggressive farming created the Dust Bowl, was actually sponsored by the U.S. government. But then World War II ended and America got richer, which meant a lusher population if not a more fruitful landscape. Lorentz wanted to keep making political movies (and what are environmental films if not political), but no one was funding them — one of the most popular films of the 1940s was called The Best Year of Our Lives. Then, in 1958, a woman named Olga Owens Huckins noticed that ten of her favorite birds had died after a DDT mixture was sprayed around her home and alerted her biologist friend Rachel Carson — she responded by writing Silent Spring.

With the 1962 arrival of Carson’s opus on pesticides — the DDT mosquito spray turned out to be killing Huckins’s birds, poisoning marine life, and was possibly also carcinogenic to humans — Americans awoke to the world around them and its abuse by corporate America. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 (not to mention Earth Day) to sate their concerns, while activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth sprouted up, outcrops from the era’s wider counterculture movement. This was an epoch in which regular people speaking truth to power could actually be heard. In 1976, All the President’s Men was one of the top five highest grossing films of the year and it remains the high-water mark of whistleblowing movies, while 1979 remains one of the best years ever for overtly political filmmaking in Hollywood. That year both Norma Rae, the Sally Field starrer about union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and The China Syndrome, about the safety coverup at a fictional nuclear plant, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For the latter, Jack Lemmon won Cannes’ best actor for his role as the plant’s shift supervisor, and for the former, Field won the best actress Oscar. Both films were critical and commercial successes. It didn’t hurt that the nuclear power industry accused China Syndrome of mendacity, only to be hoisted on its own petard less than two weeks after the film’s premiere by the Three Mile Island nuclear partial meltdown and radiation leak in Pennsylvania.

But the 1980s came along and activism turned into consumerism. The average American now wanted reassurance, not revolution. So they reverted to conservatism, they pushed the government to deregulate, and instead of paying taxes, they watched their money pile up around them as they stayed indoors watching MTV, only trekking to the movies for escapist blockbusters. They were encouraged to buy and buy and buy, spending rather than questioning. If there was disaffection, it wasn’t with the corruption of higher powers so much as the corruption of their own psyches. In the midst of all this, Silkwood was released in 1983, with Meryl Streep playing another whistleblower. Despite its star power — Streep being Streep, Cher getting serious, Kurt Russell going dramatic — the film didn’t have the same success as its predecessors. Audiences now preferred ghostbusters and gremlins and Indiana Jones, an archeologist who unearths fortune rather than failure.

In the following decade, going to see a movie about the planet usually meant going to see an action movie with an non-man-made threat — asteroids were a favorite. From Deep Impact to Armageddon to Dante’s Peak to Volcano, these were movies about nature attacking us rather than the other way around. It speaks to how out of touch they were that Disney executives of all people, part of the corporate community that helped mold Hollywood into an action-hero-centric fantasy universe, would think that Michael Mann’s studious 1999 slow burner The Insider, about Brown & Williamson Tobacco’s attempt to silence whistleblowing biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, would have the same traction as All the President’s Men two decades prior. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it didn’t land a huge audience.  Circumstances were different for Erin Brockovich, the film about an energy corporation poisoning a California community that came out a year later. Julia Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world and though she wasn’t playing a superhero, the story presented her as its clear heroine with the enemy an equally clear corporate entity (Pacific Gas and Electric) negligently harming a specific location. The film is shot warmly, the dialogue is colorful, and the narrative is propulsive. Most important, it has a happy ending. The road to Erin Brockovich’s $2.5 million bonus at the end of the film led to an Oscar for Roberts and $256.3 million in worldwide box office.

That was the last time a big screen eco-thriller saw that kind of fanfare, the dissipating attention coinciding (after September 11th) with dissipating attention to nature as a whole. A Gallup poll graph tracking Americans’ interest in environmental protection versus economic growth from 1985 to 2019 shows the former steadily decreasing to a trough around 2011 — the aftermath of the great recession of 2008 — before it starts increasing again, while the latter is almost its mirror opposite. So the more people focused on the economy, the less they did on the environment and vice versa. It’s telling that the media’s favorite climate movie of the past two decades is The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 B-movie in which a series of weather events coalesce into a new ice age (he had it the wrong way around). More of a grab at cash than epiphany, the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle is essentially nightmare nature porn, the money shot a hero conquering climate change. Unfortunately, the real story is a lot less euphoric. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us,” Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, told the New York Times in 2017.

An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film of former vice president Al Gore’s 2004 global warming slideshow, sort of tried to get that across. Despite its dryness, audiences seemed to have some thirst for an updated climate checkup and upon its release, it broke box office records, got standing ovations, and won the Oscar for best documentary. It has been credited with rejuvenating the environmental movement, though the aforementioned Gallup graph questions how much it actually did. This wasn’t like Blackfish, where it was clear SeaWorld was to blame, or Super Size Me, which could point the finger at McDonald’s. Who do you hold accountable for global warming? As Stoknes said, “It’s hard to go to war against ourselves.” 

More than a decade elapsed before Sir David Attenborough shocked his audiences by finally changing his tone from wonder to dread in the Netflix series Our Planet. “I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist. My life is the natural world,” he told TIME. “But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” The natural historian was able to piggyback climate change awareness off an established brand in the way HBO miniseries Chernobyl would later riff on the 1986 disaster everyone knew about. Proving that television seems to be more hospitable to climate content, the latter dominated the discourse for weeks. Part of that was the arrestingly horrific first episode, but much of the talk also heavily associated the worst nuclear disaster in history with Trump. “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies,” show creator Craig Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

Dark Waters isn’t so different. Though it’s based on a lesser-known disaster, this one is farther reaching. The film adapts the 2016 New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich about Bilott suing DuPont on behalf of thousands of West Virginians and Ohioans affected by PFOA (the company settled for nearly $700 million in 2017), so the events it dramatized are more recent and the ties to those in power more direct than Chernobyl would be. “I hope that the movie starts to spur bigger conversation about who our government is actually working on behalf of,” Ruffalo, who is also a producer on the film, recently told Fast Company in the rare bit of mainstream coverage. Instead we were too busy trying to figure out how autobiographical Marriage Story was or whether Martin Scorsese was right about Marvel movies not being real cinema. When Haynes’s Dark Waters was covered, the question was not why this stylish auteur had made this ambling eco-thriller, but why he hadn’t made anything else. A master of deconstruction, Haynes had in fact denatured the genre beyond its basic elements — the company, the chemical, the casualty, the turncoat — to create a film that echoes the futility of our current circumstances. Bilott isn’t a hero; he’s a human being who sees a fellow human being destroyed by a corporation, who is himself destroyed by trying to help. Every advance is only an inch, every setback a foot. When he finally, after years, uncovers the truth, when he proves DuPont has in fact poisoned people, there is no happy ending. DuPont simply rejects reality and refuses to accept responsibility, forcing Bilott to file no fewer than 3,535 personal injury lawsuits.

Haynes was inspired by Silkwood and All the President’s Men, but the world we live in is now DuPont’s. This is a year in which only 65 percent of polled Americans believe in prioritizing environmental protection at the risk of economic growth, in which the latest climate talks ultimately came to nothing because world leaders would rather quibble over technicalities; a year in which six of the top 10 grossing films were made by Disney, in which a movie like Dark Waters actually increases the stocks of the company it calls out because, as the president has proven time and again, being honest about how awful you are is more rewarding that not being awful at all.

* * *

“Here’s the thing: for many of us, climate change isn’t a disaster movie, it’s a kitchen sink drama,” climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote in Scientific American earlier this year. And though we’ll watch kitchen sink dramas, we prefer our humdrum slogs toward justice illuminated by big stars, or at least a romantic plot. Climate change is too relentlessly depressing; we need some kind of hope so that it doesn’t all seem so impossible, or at least distracts us from the allure of giving up. But I can’t think of anything less hopeful than denial. I can’t think of many things more depressing than the woman sitting next to me scrolling through her phone during our screening of Dark Waters while Bilott described how a company had put so much PFOA into the world that she almost certainly had some of it inside her body — maybe the critics who watched the movie and just wondered why Haynes hadn’t made another lesbian melodrama; maybe the wider audience that continues to go to the movies and conduct the various other aspects of their lives without focusing on the largest scale of all because it’s too abstract compared to an unpaid bill or a sick relative; maybe the part of that audience that could actually change things and doesn’t, like that scene in Dark Waters where Bilott holds up a picture of a baby with a congenital deformity and DuPont’s CEO, while affected, ultimately does nothing. As Haynes explained to The New Yorker: “There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Longreads Best of 2019: Food Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in food writing.

Mayukh Sen
James Beard Award-winning writer and Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

The Chef Who Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Grit (Julia Bainbridge, Heated)

I tend to agree with most criticisms of using the first-person in profiles: Who cares about the writer? Why the throat-clearing about yourself? Who asked about you when I’m just trying to read about Rihanna? It takes a writer of real skill, and very little vanity, to pull off this first-person trick. I marvel at the way Julia Bainbridge gently, unobtrusively inserts herself into this Heated profile of chef Iliana Regan. In doing so, Bainbridge allows the reader to understand the subject in fuller, more generous terms.

There is a current of melancholy that runs through Bainbridge’s piece, pegged to the release of Regan’s National Book Award-longlisted memoir, Burn the Place; you get the sense that the writer understands her subject intimately. (I should note that Regan’s memoir inspired a number of very fine pieces, including those by Deborah Reid and Helen Rosner. Read those, too.) Certain details — the nervous tug of a sweater, the smell of cigarette smoke and beer wafting from a bar — could’ve read like strained flourishes in a lesser writer’s hands, but Bainbridge uses these observations sparingly, bringing Regan to life. She works carefully, sentence by sentence, with some turns of phrase that stop me dead in my tracks. “The alcohol is gone,” Bainbridge writes at one point, “but the -ism remains.” Bainbridge shows that the first-person, when deployed correctly, can showcase a profile writer’s empathy, not their ego.


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A Woman’s Work: Becoming a Home of One’s Own

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | December 2019 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

This essay began very differently a few months ago. I had started writing it at the same time as the previous one in this series, “Till death do us part,” and, just as I observed while writing the fifth one, the very act of writing it resulted in a real-time evolution of my understanding, processing, assessment, and reassessment of what I was writing about, to the point that by the end of the essay, it was obvious I was not the same person who had begun writing it. Just as I’ve changed from the beginning of an essay to the end of it, every few months I look back on my life and think, yet again, how much more like myself I feel. Three years, three months or three pages — it can be a long, slow recovery, or it can happen in shorter but exponentially more intense increments. Recent widows and widowers will either be glad to know, or be dismayed to know that, well, from what I gather, and with luck, it never really ends.

***

Immediately after my husband Michael died I found myself alone in the house we had been renting from his daughter for the last year and a half. It had been full of his relatives for a week, from the moment he came home to die. Now, it was empty. Empty except for our stuff, and not just our stuff from our life together: preparing for a future that would now never happen, for the six months of treatment and recovery we had expected to live through after his surgery, I’d stocked up on six months’ worth of toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap, dish soap — soap and cleaners of every kind — dry goods, anything that was heavy and not available within a mile’s walk for me, since I don’t drive. Now, I felt like a stowaway on an abandoned frigate, floating along aimlessly.

I still had our dog, Hammy, with me, a 14-year-old poodle named after the noir fiction writer, Dashiel Hammett, of the “Thin Man” movies, whose dialogue Michael and I often quoted to each other. Hammy, too, was close to approaching the home stretch of his life, but for now he was there to stand guard while I cried on every floor of the house, with a preference for the one in the kitchen. Have you ever noticed that the kitchen floor is somehow the most suited for letting your knees give out before crumpling to the floor in wretched tears? I recommend it. I suppose it’s because the kitchen is where so much of coupled life happens. That’s where you will have eaten together, had coffee in the morning together, sipped hot lemon water and honey to ward off colds together, cooked for each other. If you’re going to mourn your lost partner, it might as well be in the place where the spirit of your partnership seems to occupy every cupboard, shelf, and drawer.

A friend immediately insisted on “sitting shiva” with me, which, as a modern adaptation (though I’m not religious and am unfamiliar with this Jewish tradition), took the form of bringing me my favorite coffee beverage, a cortado, from my favorite cafe so I wouldn’t have to go outside with my leaky-faucet eyes. This is exactly how the crying began to feel: tears that puzzlingly continued even when I thought I was done crying. I mused that it was as if a pipe were broken inside me and I might need to call some kind of metaphysical plumber soon.
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The Queering of the Baby Bells

Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio

Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 |  23 minutes (6,272 words)

 

In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)

One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.

Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in investigative reporting.

Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.

Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)

Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.

The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)

I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
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Wonderful Things: The Kid Creole and the Coconuts Story

Luciano Viti / Getty

Michael A. Gonzales| Longreads | December 2019 | 31 minutes (6,214 words)

 

As New York City wallowed in social and economic disarray during the early 1980s, music still ruled supreme. The boom bap of rap bubbled in the outer boroughs, and dance DJs delivered their sonic sermons at clubs like Better Days and Paradise Garage. A cluster of recording studios in Midtown Manhattan became the sound factories of choice for top-tier projects. There was the Power Station, where Chic and Luther Vandross recorded, and Plaza Sound Studios, where Blondie and the Ramones worked. Meanwhile, engineer Bob Blank opened Blank Tape Studios in 1975 at 37 West 20th Street. Catering to recording artists who had less money but still sought quality sound, Blank Tape was housed in a building that was occupied by photographers and fashion manufacturing, but the studio soon became popular among offbeat artists such as Arthur Russell, The B-52s, and Talking Heads.

“Not necessarily because we wanted to be offbeat in the beginning, but because we were so off the beaten track in the New York City studio scene at the time,” Blank said in 2009, “the only people who would walk through our door were the people who couldn’t get uptown into the big studios.” The studio earned a reputation among listeners. In the Village Voice in 2010, writer Andy Beta wrote, “The label credit ‘Recorded at Blank Tapes’ triggers the same reverence that ‘Van Gelder Studio’ inspires in jazz heads or ‘Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals’ suggests to soul aficionados — a sure sign that whoever the artist and whatever the cut, it’s worth a listen.”

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