Search Results for: City Journal

A Reading List on Travel Influencers and the Politics of a Place

Photo by Oleg Magni

Influencers come in many flavors, including kid stars who make more money than you, self-made online traders involved in shady financial schemes, women hunters of #huntstagram, and COVID-denying wellness experts. At the end of 2019, brands were forecast to spend as much as $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022. The pandemic, however, has forced many influencers to shift business models and strategies, especially those whose livelihoods depend on traveling the world.

But even before COVID-19, jet-setting content creators entangled themselves in problematic scenarios, posing questions about privacy, safety, and ownership, among other issues. These seven reads explore the world of travel influencers in the age of Instagram, and the implications of the industry and its content on tourism and politics.

1. How Western Travel Influencers Got Tangled Up in Pakistan’s Politics. (Samira Shackle, November 2020, The Guardian)

In recent years, Western travel bloggers and “adventure tourists” have come to Pakistan to discover the country and write about its beauty, while some — like Cynthia Ritchie — have ended up becoming political voices. Ritchie, who calls her work strategic communications, has received extraordinary access to restricted areas and officials, and her critics accuse her of being “a propagandist for the military with a white saviour complex.” In response, Ritchie and others, like Polish travel vlogger Eva zu Beck, see themselves as truth-tellers and storytellers. At the Guardian, Samira Shackle reports on the politicization of tourism in Pakistan.

The fanbase that has developed around Ritchie can be split into two camps. The first enjoys her travel content, and her sunny portrayals of Pakistan. For the second camp, who actively support the military and spend their time on social media attacking anyone they see as insufficiently patriotic, Ritchie is a useful ally, an outsider who reflects their worldview. “More power to you Cynthia. Keep exposing the filthy culprits who have eaten up this country like mites,” wrote one Twitter user.

In 2019, questions about Ritchie’s links to the army intensified on social media when she posted footage of a trip to Pakistan’s heavily contested tribal areas. She told me that the trip had actually taken place in the run-up to the 2018 election, and that it had been part of an “interview process” at which military officials were “assessing and monitoring me, my experience, and determining my worth and capacity as an individual”, and that afterwards she was offered a big project. It is difficult to know what to make of comments like this, given that at other times Ritchie flat-out denies working for the military.

Having offered this puzzling explanation, Ritchie then dismissed the entire controversy over the pictures as just another fuss about nothing. “Look, if I had anything to hide, I wouldn’t be publishing these things,” she said. She pointed out that anyone who wants to travel to the tribal areas needs army permission: “You can’t access some of these areas without the military.”

2. Instagram Influencers Are Wrecking Public Lands. Meet the Anonymous Account Trying to Stop Them. (Anna Merlan, April 2019, Jezebel)

In the spring of 2019, when areas of Southern California experienced a vibrant superbloom, thousands of tourists trekked to the fields of Lake Elsinore to pose with the poppies. And when the owner of the Instagram account @publiclandshateyou saw a photo of an influencer sitting among (and ruining) the flowers while holding a can of soup, he’d had enough. At Jezebel, Anna Merlan talks with the man behind this account, who educates people on the negative effects of Instagram tourism on the environment.

Right now you’re focusing pretty heavily on damage done during the superbloom. That must be because it’s the hot thing to photograph right now.

Exactly. Previously it was graffiti on rocks in national parks, but the superbloom is the thing of the moment. Influencers see this cool thing, do what they need to do to promote their products or take a cool picture. And then they move on to whatever else is cool, whether it’s, for instance, going out to the California coast, going past “closed” signs and taking a picture under a waterfall. Or whatever. And then Lake Elsinore, where Walker Canyon is, gets stuck with the aftermath. The people who live there. They have a poppy preserve that looks like a checkerboard. The people who did the damage are long gone. They’re on to the next thing.

The pushback you get seems to be a lot of comments like “they’re just flowers,” with the case of the superbloom photos, or comments that you need to calm down and focus on “real problems.”

I do try to respond to that and try to provide my point of view and get people to see, who might have lived in a city their whole life, who might not understand the biology of these areas. I say to them, “You’re not wrong, but I think that a lot of these bigger problems are symptoms of people not thinking about the little things and their impact.” Whether it’s the impact of of me stepping on a couple poppies or me getting my takeout tonight in a styrofoam container, people aren’t thinking about the impact of their actions and that’s applicable to small things like going off the trail, all the way up to big global issues like climate change or microplastics in the water.

3. Selfies and Sharia Police. (Mehr Nadeem, November 2020, Rest of World)

Instagram is the last open social media platform in Iran, where Iranians have felt freer to be themselves. For high-schooler and influencer Roya, this means taking photos of herself on the streets of Tehran, sans hijab, or wearing bright eye makeup or going sleeveless — types of things that are frowned upon by Iranian authorities. But as Instagram evolves into more of a space for organizing and political change in Iran, the government has increased surveillance on the app, writes Mehr Nadeem at Rest of World.

The increased threat of arrest is giving pause to Iranian Instagrammers who once saw the platform as a safe space to post freely.

Vania, a 17-year-old aspiring violinist who created her Instagram account to post videos of her music, saw that her friends were becoming careful of their online activity in the wake of the crackdowns. “One of my friends sings [on Instagram], and she was so worried, she did an encrypted location of another country in the caption so that they wouldn’t think she was Iranian,” Vania told Rest of World. It’s illegal for women to publicly sing in Iran, unless they perform to female-only audiences.

Sahba, an Iranian artist based in Canada, said she has second thoughts before posting to Instagram, even from her home in Vancouver. “I wasn’t really worried until the November protests, when I saw how people were arrested on the streets because of their social media posts,” Sahba said. “I try not to censor myself politically, but it’s something that’s always going to be in my head.

4. Whose Facade Is It, Anyway? (Alexandra Marvar, February 2019, Curbed)

Posing in front of photo-worthy facades like colorful street murals and famous buildings is one thing, but snapping a picture on someone’s property — in front of their pretty pastel door or on their adorable wraparound porch  — raises issues of privacy and etiquette. At Curbed, Alexandra Marvar explores homeownership in the age of the Instagram travel influencer.

Travel blogger and micro-influencer Valerie Furgerson, @redgypsea, says she’s never had a negative interaction with a homeowner: “A sort of influencer photographer’s code that I live by is, if you’re going to be shooting in a residential area, know what shots you want to get ahead of time and be quick about it. Not all tourists live by this code,” she says. “We definitely saw full-on photo shoots happening at Rainbow Row in Savannah, complete with big reflective umbrellas. I have found that if you are respectful of the residents, they will also be respectful of you.” I came across Furgerson’s feed by searching for pictures of Rainbow Row and reaching out to users who did photoshoots directly on the shipping pallet-sized front porches of these private homes.

“I don’t mind people just taking photos,” said T’s pink-shutters neighbor (whom I’ll keep anonymous), “but really I find it an invasion of my space when it’s on my porch.” If she’s returning on foot to her home and sees someone on her porch taking pictures, she hangs back until they’ve wrapped up their activities. But on more than one occasion, she’s been startled to open her front door to a person, or a group of people, posing in front of her. “The other thing,” she says, “is that it opens up liability issues that I don’t even want to think about.”

5. What I Learned at the Most Instagrammed Outdoor Places. (Lisa Chase, July 2020, Outside)

While visiting Arizona’s iconic landmarks and tourist hotspots like the Grand Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, Lisa Chase, writing for Outside, examines our obsession with documenting ourselves in nature, and the evolving art and process of photography in the era of iPhone-toting outdoor enthusiasts.

There have to be 75 to 100 of us here, all with smartphones in hand, tapping away. One teenage girl positions herself in warrior one pose on a rock, her back to the sun, slender arms overhead, taking a selfie. Nearby there’s a group of French guys murmuring “C’est magnifique” as they take photos of themselves in the gloaming. I think about an article I’d read by Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who has studied the psychology of selfie culture. “A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment,” she wrote in The New York Times in 2013. “The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us ‘on pause’ in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations ‘on pause’ when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.”

6. Travel Influencers, Meet Authoritarian Regimes. (Krithika Varagur, October 2020, Rest of World)

In December 2019, celebrities and Western travel bloggers were invited to attend a music festival in Riyadh, put on by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, in order to promote tourism to the region. “The Instagram posts coming out of the festival looked more Coachella than Sharia,” writes Krithika Varagur, and for those who attended the event, criticism was harsh. At Rest of World, Varagur asks: How could these influencers accept a paid trip from a repressive monarchy?

Despite this, several prominent influencers turned down the MDL Beast trip on ethical grounds, including American actress Emily Ratajkowski and American model Teddy Quinlivan. Quinlivan, who is transgender, said on her Instagram story: “If you have any semblance of journalistic integrity, maybe it might be a cute idea not to take money from foreign governments that, um, I don’t know, openly kill and assassinate journalists [and] LGBTQ+ people. Suppress women’s rights, suppress religious rights – I mean the list of shit goes on.”

“Every traveler has an obligation to think about the ethical consequences of their trip. … But it is even more critical for influencers because they are such important role models, especially for young people,” said Dr. Ulrike Gretzel, who researches technology and social media marketing at the University of Southern California. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”

7. The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This. (Erin Griffith, November 2020, The New York Times)

“If you’re going to work from home indefinitely, why not make a new home in an exotic place?” In the New York Times, Erin Griffith shares the stories of those privileged enough to escape lockdown by joining the globe-trotting, remote-working set. But they eventually realize it’s not what they expect it to be. These digital nomads may not call themselves travel influencers, but the idyllic, away-from-home settings they work in — as they wait out the pandemic — are the same.

They Instagrammed their workdays from empty beach resorts in Bali and took Zoom meetings from tricked-out camper vans. They made balcony offices at cheap Tulum Airbnbs and booked state park campsites with Wi-Fi. They were the kind of people who actually applied to those remote worker visa programs heavily advertised by Caribbean countries. And occasionally they were deflated.

Others are struggling with the same vacation fatigue experienced by Mr. Malka, the Cabo-to-London-to-maybe-Bali wanderer. According to research conducted at Radboud University in the Netherlands, it takes eight days of vacation for people to reach peak happiness. It’s downhill from there.

When the pandemic hit, Mr. Stylianoudis, the lawyer, was on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. At first, he couldn’t complain about the tropical locale. Each day, after work, he swam in crystal-clear water. But after five months, he was itching to get out. He had become a regular at the island’s 7-Eleven. He even grew tired of the beach — something he hadn’t thought was possible.

The feeling of being trapped in paradise was hard to explain. “I started to feel like I was in a sequel of ‘Lost,’” he said.

Shades of Grey

Getty Images

Ashley Stimpson | Longreads | October 2020 | 26 minutes (7,001 words)

It’s been nearly a decade since the numbers were tattooed in her ears, but they remain remarkably legible. In the right one, dots of green ink spell out 129B: Vesper was born in the twelfth month of the decade’s ninth year and was the second in her litter. The National Greyhound Association (NGA) gave that litter a unique registration number (52507), which was stamped into her moss-soft left ear. If I type these figures into the online database for retired racing greyhounds, I can learn about her life before she was ours, before she was even Vesper.

Smokin’ Josy was born to a breeder in Texas, trained in West Virginia, and raced in Florida. Over three years, she ran 70 races. She won four of them. In Naples on May 12, 2012, she “resisted late challenge inside,” to clinch victory, according to her stat sheet. In Daytona Beach on April 17, 2013, she “stumbled, fell early.” Five days later, after a fourth-place showing, she was retired.

Read more…

Summer Mother

Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | October 2020 | 6 minutes (1,720 words)

Though my mother was an only child, I grew up surrounded by many aunts. These women, mom’s “play sisters” as she called them, were not siblings by blood, but were connected by long friendships, residual remembrances and childhood memories, as with Aunt Carol and Aunt Margret, who grew up with her in the Pittsburgh community known as the Hill District. After relocating to New York City in 1953, mom attended George Washington High where she had classes with Aunt Bootsie and Aunt Charlotte; after graduation, she began to hang out in various Harlem night spots including Carl’s On the Corner and the Brown Bombers, bar-hopping with my future godmother Aunt Myrna as well as with roommates Jill and Barbara, the only ones of her sisterly crew that I didn’t call aunt.

Read more…

Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court

Photo collage: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) / Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | September 2020 | 6,849 words (24 minutes)

 

The Equitable Life Building, at 100 Montgomery Street, sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Named after an insurance company, it was the first skyscraper built in the city after the Depression, a symbol of optimism rising 25 stories high with marble walls that sparkled in the sun. Today, it is home to all sorts of buzzy Bay Area companies, from Spruce Capital Partners (“investors and thought leaders in the Life Sciences industry”) to the OutCast Agency (“strategists and creatives” with “a hyper-growth mindset”). To get away from the hectic pace of investing, strategizing, and creating, tenants can burn off calories inside the building’s private gym or take their lunch break atop a luxurious rooftop deck. 

The Equitable Life Building is also home to the San Francisco Immigration Court, though it’s easy to miss. On my first visit last winter, the only hint that a court lay within was the scores of families in the lobby, clutching summonses and looking confused. The court is above, occupying the fourth, eighth, and ninth floors. Up here, the elevators opened into a slightly off-kilter dimension: A security line snaked into a cramped waiting room, which led to a winding and windowless hallway, from which one entered identical windowless courtrooms. It was deeply disorienting. I often encountered people fumbling around in the hallway, not sure how the hell to get out.    Read more…

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | September 2020 |14 minutes (3,715 words)

 

Hive is a series about women and the music that has influenced them, edited by Danielle A. Jackson. Read more at Longreads and The Believer

 

The voice of Margie Hendrix on “Night Time is The Right Time” comes at you out of nowhere, like an explosive, thunderous crack in the sky after a period of steady rain. Long after the song is over, it’s her words that stay ringing in your ear. You’ll belt out, “Babyyyyyyy!” in the shower, while out for a jog, or when giving your friends a hard time as they share their most trying relationship conundrum. On The Cosby Show, it’s her part that is most memorable when reenacted by adorable, pig-tailed Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam. In the 2004 biopic Ray, it was future Academy Award winner Regina King who played the role of Hendrix. King spoke of the difficulty in channeling the musician, as few references, visual or text, were available to use as inspiration for the role: “There isn’t a lot of information out there on Margie, so I had to rely on her voice to guide me.” The kind to stop you in your tracks, Hendrix’s voice remained unchanging, and from her earliest solo releases to her final years, it was an infallible offering from an artist who was moved to sing.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles. I’ve thought about her regularly for years, wondering how a woman with that voice could disappear from the public eye so easily, after making such an unforgettable appearance. It’s a thought that’s stayed with me, because it carries the sobering reality that someone can be incredibly talented — phenomenal even — and still find themselves omitted by history. It could happen to anybody, but it seems to happen most often to talented Black women who are bold enough to chase their dreams, then fall apart from the sheer pressure of it all. Women who are public but invisible and who are noticed without really being seen. Women like Margie Hendrix.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles.

She didn’t look like the performers most record producers wanted Black women to be. She was too dark, had a gap between her two front teeth and was a Southern girl with none of that Northern polish and glam. The music industry of today is incredibly corrosive and toxic, but it was even more so for Black musicians in the middle of the twentieth century, who dealt with nothing but no-good managers, unfair contracts, and stolen music credits. Anti-black racism and its social realities make it astounding that artists emerged who weathered through even when it seemed like everyone at some point or another crumbled, with many never making it back.  The argument could be made that had Hendrix managed to stay far from the drugs that would ravage her body, and kicked those bad habits, she would have lasted longer and achieved success rivaling that of her still living peers from that “golden” era. Yet the number of Black women uncounted and unnamed in music history makes it clear that this wasn’t only a question of sobriety. It was also about opportunity, and a perverse lack of care for the artists whose mental and physical health were secondary so long as money continued to be made. Hendrix’s death and eventual erasure from the mainstream were not simply tragic turns in a complicated life, but the outcome of a series of events that befell a woman unloved by those she committed herself to, and unprotected by those whose coffers she filled. 

Read more…

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Photo by Alice Driver.

Alice Driver | Longreads | August 2020 | 9 minutes (2,482 words)

“We need to see the name of the person. We need to know who you want to attract,” the vendor told me as he held up a handful of dried hummingbirds, their four bodies dangling from his fingertips by red pieces of string, feathers worn but shimmering emerald in patches as if clinging to life via sheer radiance. He wanted to know the name of a man, but I was thinking of a painting.

Frida Kahlo wears a dead hummingbird around her neck. She painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird in 1940 just after she divorced Diego Rivera and ended an affair with photographer Nickolas Muray. The dead hummingbird is considered a love charm in Mexico, and it is one that would endure and eventually be exported to other countries.

Read more…

The Endgame of the Olympics

burning torch next to smoking torch
imagedepotpro / Getty Images

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
Read more…

Notes for a Post-apocalyptic Novel

Photo courtesy of Len Necefer via Instagram

Len Necefer, as told to Frederick Reimers | Longreads | August 2020 | 3,211 words (12 minutes)

It’s early March, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, and I-25 in downtown Albuquerque is nearly deserted at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. It feels like a risky time for a road trip. After filling morgues in Italy, the virus is propagating across the globe and countries everywhere are closing their borders. No one seems sure exactly who transmits the disease or even how it is spread. Every day feels like living on a knife ridge. A light rain is falling and the signs hanging above the highway that normally display traffic times instead read: Stay Home, Save Lives.

I’m trying to save a life by dashing across five states. Driving eastward from Tucson, where I’m an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, I’m bound for Lawrence, Kansas, where my 72-year-old dad lives. He’d retired from teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University there four years ago, and has been living alone since. “I’ll be fine here,” he says, but when I ask him who can do his grocery shopping or who would take care of him if he were to fall ill, he can’t think of anyone. All his friends there have moved away or passed away. I can’t bear the thought of him riding out a pandemic alone if cities and states are locked down, and don’t really trust my older parent to take precautions against the virus. I’m going to get him.

I throw in some N95 masks and nitrile gloves I have from tinkering with the van engine, clean sheets for the van’s bed, and food to cook on the camp stove. I don’t want us eating in restaurants, and figure we can share the bed instead of risking a hotel. I notify my students that class, already moved online, is canceled for the week, and drive out of Tucson just before dark on a Tuesday.

* * *

The next morning as I’m driving through Albuquerque, I call my mom, who lives there with my stepdad Dan. I tell her that I am on my way to Kansas to bring dad back. “Was he open to the idea, or did you have to convince him?” she asks. My mom, who is Navajo, knows that like a lot of white guys of his age, Dad has trouble accepting help. He agreed to shelter with me for a couple months, I tell her, though I’m planning on him staying much longer. She invites us to stay with them on our way back through, and it’s good to think that at least right now, I’m within a few miles of her. This road trip has already gotten a little weird.

The night before, I’d driven until I was tired, past one a.m. I pulled off the highway to camp at a spot I knew in the open desert in western New Mexico — just a clearing in the saltbrush and sage flats off the side of a dirt road, earth packed down by the tires of successive car campers. I’d been surprised to see the broad white side of RV after RV appear in my headlights at each potential turnout. I had to drive a few extra miles to find a vacant spot. Other campers always make me uneasy when I’m pulling in late at night, and I really couldn’t understand what all these people were doing out here in the middle of the pandemic.

Their attitude towards the pandemic is, ‘It’ll work out,’ because for them, things always have.

Then in the morning, I’d been awakened by texts from friends in Salt Lake City, where there’d been a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. No one had been hurt, but the shaking had knocked the trumpet out of the golden hands of the Angel Moroni perched atop the highest spire of the principal Mormon temple; my friends noted wryly that the Latter-day Saints were counting on Moroni and his trumpet to herald the second coming.

Finally, two hours past Albuquerque, I pull off the highway to cook lunch at a place called Cuervo, New Mexico, that turns out to be a ghost town. Standing beside the van, waiting for the water to boil, I scan the crumbling husks of houses and a fenced-off stone church. Thinking of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel about a father and son traveling together through abandoned towns after an unnamed apocalypse, I laugh to avoid thinking of this rest stop as an omen.

That afternoon, driving Highway 54 through the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, more cars began appearing. I’m surprised to see a bowling alley and then a restaurant with full parking lots. Somewhere in western Kansas, I pass a group of high school kids playing full-squad basketball. At a gas station, people look at me strangely as I operate the pump wearing my mask and gloves, and it is obvious the residents and I are listening to different news sources.

* * *

In Kansas, I pass signs pointing to Haskell County, which I recognize from a podcast I’ve been listening to about the 1918 flu pandemic. The Spanish Flu is believed to have originated in Haskell County where it jumped from pigs to humans before hitching a ride to Europe with some local kids who joined the army to fight in World War I, where it mutated into the deadly strain that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide. It’s ironic: that so much vitriol is already being directed at China and towards Asian Americans, when the biggest pandemic in modern history began just miles from here, in America’s heartland.

The 1918 pandemic also hit my people hard, taking as much as 24 percent percent of the Navajo population. It was a population just a little more than a generation removed from an even larger trauma — the Long Walk of the Navajo. In 1864, the U.S. Cavalry forced the Navajo from their homeland in North Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern Utah, and marched them 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the winter, with only what they could carry. Hundreds died from starvation, hypothermia, or execution when they couldn’t keep up. By the time they left Sumner four years later,  more than 2,000 had died. We are taught not to talk about Hwéeldi — “the place of suffering.” Normally when I drive to Kansas, I detour far around it, but in this case, it lay along the fastest route; I’d passed signs for it in the morning. Late that night, I pull into a campsite at Pratt Sandhills, a vestige of remaining tall grass prairie spread atop ancient sand dunes. The dirt road is a pair of parallel puddles from a recent storm and the van loses traction here and there. When I finally turn off the ignition, it’s a day I feel glad to let go of.

* * *

I make Lawrence the next afternoon, embracing my dad, Edward, on the walkway to the small house where I’d spent much of my youth. He has the easygoing demeanor of a good teacher: attentive, warm, a mischievous sense of humor. He grew up in Detroit in the ’60s then joined the Peace Corps, teaching English and math in Liberia. Once home, he meandered through a series of jobs in the Bureau of Indian Education, and eventually got a gig teaching math at Haskell, where he met my mom.

“Have you thought about what you’ll bring to Tucson?” I ask.

“I’m all packed,” he says, and it’s a relief. I’d been worried we’d waste a few days wrangling over his belongings. But when we pull out of Lawrence in the morning, we’re in two vehicles, not just my van. He says it is because he doesn’t want to leave his car parked on the street while he is gone, but I’m sure he just isn’t ready to give up that independence. I’m frustrated because I know it will slow us down and leave us more exposed. It means more breaks — I assume he’s no longer capable of driving more than six hours at a shot — and more gas stops, since his Volkswagen GTI has less than half the range of my van.

At the first, just past Wichita, I say, “Let me gas up both cars, so we only have to use up one set of gloves.” He says “Okay,” but when I turn around after getting the second pump started, I see the back of him disappearing into the store.

We’d talked about staying out of buildings — paying at the pump, going to the bathroom behind a tree. Just a few hours in, and he’s already broken that. I stew angrily at the pumps waiting for him to return, trying to keep panic at bay. If I get upset, I think, he’s not going to hear anything I say.

“Dad, I thought we talked about this,” I say when he returns. “We have to make these decisions together. You have to take this seriously.”

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s talk about it. I can stay out of gas station restrooms, but I’m going to need to get a hotel tonight. My back is already stiff.”

I can’t budge him. “Okay,” I say, “but we’ll have to scrub it all down with Clorox wipes — every surface. Let’s try for the Kansas border,” I say. “The town of Liberal should have hotels. We’re exposed in Trump country, but at least we can take comfort in the name,” I joke.

A few hours later, I still feel we the need to lighten the mood, so during a stretch break beside the highway, I show Dad a few quarantine videos people are posting on Instagram — the sock puppet appearing to eat traffic on the street below, and people “rock climbing” across their apartments with ropes and harnesses. “We should make one,” I say. “How about ghostriding the whip?” I explain the concept of the meme, grooving to music alongside, or atop, a moving vehicle without anyone in the driver’s seat. I show him a few examples, and Dad is game. I crank up some music on the van stereo — the Snotty Nose Rez Kids — put the emergency brake on halfway, and put it in gear. Dad does the rest, strutting alongside the open door of the slowly moving van with his sunglasses on and his cap turned backwards under the bright blue Kansas sky, always happiest staying loose.

I post the video on Instagram with the caption, “My dad has ascended to the throne of Quaranking.”

Except that he hasn’t. He won’t give up on the hotel idea. In Liberal, I manage to convince him to drink a can of cold-brew coffee from the van fridge and drive a little longer. Two hours later, at sunset, we gas up in Dalhart, Texas, and I propose we shoot for Tucumcari, New Mexico, an hour and a half further — and in a state where the governor has put some precautions in place. Ironically, when we get there, those precautions keep us from finding my dad a bed. Hotels are only allowed fifty percent occupancy, and there are no vacancies. At the fourth and last hotel we try, Dad holds the door open for a woman also entering the lobby and she gets the last room.

He is dejected and exhausted. Driving for 12 hours has taken its toll. We cook a pot of ramen in the parking lot, huddled inside the van against the windy night.

“What if we just sleep here in the van?” I ask.

“I need my own bed,” he says.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I say.

“I’m going to have to get up to pee in the night a few times,” he says, now irritated, “and I don’t want to disturb you.”

“It won’t,” I say, but he’s not having it.

We decide to try to push through the last 175 miles to Mom’s house, but after 100 of those, I can see Dad’s headlights dropping further back.

“How ya doing?” I ask over the phone.

“I probably need to stop,” he says, and we pull over at a rest area, just an hour from Albuquerque, to sleep till morning. There are a dozen others there doing the same, towels tucked into their windows for privacy. Dad sleeps in his car. I can’t talk him out of it.

* * *

We spend two nights recovering at my mom and stepdad’s house in Albuquerque, knowing Tucson is just a day’s drive away. They are all friends and Dad has stayed with them before; any tension is on my end. Over dinner, I’m surprised at how much Dan and Dad minimize the pandemic, and how they assume things will get quickly back to normal.

“Guys,” I say, “it’s gonna be at least 18 months before there’s a vaccine, and because of your age, you’re both in a high-risk demographic.” I never expected to be parenting my folks so soon. “In fact,” I say, “if something does happen, I’m probably going to be the one who makes all the arrangements. I should probably have copies of your wills.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” says Dan.

It comes to a head the next day. I’d watched Dan come home from the grocery store, toss his mask on the key rack, and settle in without washing his hands.

“Dan,” I say, “if you really care about my mom’s health, you have to take this seriously.” He assures me that he is, but I can tell I’ve pissed him off. Later, I have an aside with mom.

“I’m pretty frustrated with Dan,” she says, “and I can imagine you are frustrated with your father, too.” I tell her I really did need their last directives and will documents. “I’ll get that for you today,” she says, “and we can talk it through.”

It’s not surprising that my mom’s approach to the pandemic has been markedly different from my father and stepfather’s. Both of the men are white baby boomers, members of a generation who’d had the freedom to live exactly how they wanted. Their attitude towards the pandemic is, “It’ll work out,” because for them, things always have.

My mother was born in Red Valley, on the reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico. She grew up trailing her family’s sheep herd to high camp each spring and back again in the fall. It was the same journey that my great-grandparents made twice a year, and the same one that my cousins and I tagged along on as kids, walking alongside the herding dogs, and running into roadside stores to buy candy with cash my grandfather or uncle would slip us.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Mom’s family have always been planners. It comes from migrating with the sheep, and from the cultural trauma of the Long Walk. In the summer of 1864, life was as it had been in Navajo country for hundreds of years. Then, in September, Kit Carson burned the crops, and in January an entire people were being force-marched across New Mexico. “You know, when society collapses, we need to be prepared,” I’d hear my grandfather say.

I’ve inherited that affinity for being prepared. I took my education all the way to a Ph.D., fulfilling the idea that it’s better to be overqualified for a job. I take pains to cultivate my relationships, knowing it leads to more social resilience. Before I drove to Kansas, realizing I hadn’t met all my neighbors yet and that such connections might be critical in the coming months, I knocked on every door to introduce myself and left notes at the doors no one opened. Even my van, fully outfitted for camping adventures, is subconsciously a backup home.

Which is why it is frustrating, and even a little scary, to watch my father resist my guidance. I’m sure it’s how a parent feels watching their teenage children make brash choices in a bid to establish their independence. I realize that all I can do is continue to offer support, and to remain patient myself. Which isn’t all that hard when you love someone, I realize that night as the four of us sit around the kitchen table sipping on whiskey and enjoying each other’s company.

* * *

On the last day we get on the road early, and with just a seven-hour drive to Tucson, I feel relaxed. When we stop for lunch, I can’t find the utensils to spread the peanut butter — Dad had stashed them somewhere after our parking lot dinner nadir — so I use a 19 millimeter wrench. If I were Cormac McCarthy this is the kind of thing I’d put in my post-apocalypse book, I think.

I’m excited to get home. “Maybe you should look at this quarantine as a trial run for moving to Tucson full-time,” I’d suggested to Dad the night before, glad that he seemed open to the idea. It should be a pretty easy sell — few places compare to southern Arizona in March, with mild temps and the Sonoran desert in bloom. Then fittingly, just around Wilcox, I see that the entire desert is carpeted with yellow and orange fiveneedle pricklyleaf. Clumps of the daisy-like flowers have erupted from the desert in a superbloom, spreading for miles across the basin southwards towards the blue ramparts of the Chiricahua and Dragoon ranges, storied strongholds of the Apache people who were some of the last Native Americans to resist white settlement. I pull off the highway, and Dad pulls in behind me. “Let’s take a little walk,” I say.

“Let’s keep going,” he says. “We’re only an hour away.”

I realized he isn’t seeing the flowers. “Dad, take off your sunglasses and look out there,” I say.

He lifts them up, looks around, and just says, “Oh.”

We walk out among the flowers on a faint gravel road, taking in the blooms and the tiers of mountains reaching southward clear to the Mexico border. We wander, just breathing and releasing the tension of driving. “How long do they last?” Dad asks.

“Only a week,” I say. “We’re lucky to be here.”

* * *

The next months are bittersweet. Dad loves Tucson’s ample cycling opportunities and is a good houseguest. Wary of culinary skills atrophied by two decades of bachelorhood, I do most of the cooking, though he does help pack the van for my next road trip. By May, Covid-19 has torn through my Navajo Nation homeland, inflicting the highest per-capita infection rate in the United States thanks to underfunded health resources and food deserts that have increased health risk factors. A Natives Outdoors fundraiser provides masks and hand sanitizers to communities on the reservation, which a friend and I make two separate trips to deliver.

By the time we return from the second, Dad has decided to move to Tucson for good. We’ve found a place for him to rent and a moving company to pack up his house in Kansas. I’m pleased of course, but also sad that our time living together again will soon be over. We’ve bonded over these strange quarantine times, but there’s also a real feeling of accomplishment to having successfully adapted our lives to each other. Multigenerational living is becoming rare — it challenges the supremacy of freedom and convenience, but in that we also lose something, additional layers and complexity to our most foundational relationships.

* * *

Len Necefer is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. His writing and photography have been featured in the Alpinist, Outside, Beside magazine, and more.

Frederick Reimers is based in Jackson, Wyoming, and contributes to Outside, Bloomberg, Men’s Journal, Ski, Powder, and Adventure Journal magazines. Follow him at @writereimers.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Cryin’, Dyin’, or Goin’ Somewhere: A Country Music Reading List

Richard E. Aaron/Redferns

There’s an old chestnut that says the older you get, the more you like country music. Even if you don’t relate to the guitar twang or the singers’ white rural experience, age lets you relate to the stories of struggle, heartbreak, and loss.

My dad raised me on old jazz and country, and his talented pianist brother Rick played country music professionally, from the dive bars of Phoenix, Arizona to Waylon Jennings’ touring band. Dad’s family were rural people from Oklahoma farms who moved to rural Arizona, then to the city. No matter how long he lived in Phoenix, he never lost his love of country humor or oration. Dad always said: People in country songs are either cryin’, dyin’, or goin’ somewhere. He also told an old joke: What happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your horse back, you get your wife back, you get your job back, and you sober up.

Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys were his favorite because they had the danceable, upbeat rhythm of jazz, but Dad loved different types of country. He didn’t like Johnny Cash, though. Cash didn’t swing. I’ve always owned old country albums, including Johnny Cash. My rock ‘n’ roll and jazz albums just got more play until time proved the old wisdom. Dad’s been sick for a few years. The blue chords of jazz resonate with me more than the saddest country ballad, but as I lose him in stages, and as I’ve labored and lost through the years, I’ve reached that age where I relate to country’s heartbreak more than I would like.

Country is a rich tradition that deserves an equally rich literary tradition. Collected here are some of my favorite stories that explore and celebrate it. Too many of my favorites do not appear online, like David Eason’s Oxford American “That Same Lonesome Blood,” about singer Steve Young, Barry Mazor’s “Make Me Wanna Holler: Loretta Lynn” from No Depression, and John Biguenet’s “The DeZurik Sisters: Two farm girls who yodeled their way to the Grand Ole Opry.” You can find them in copies of Da Capo’s Best Music Writing anthologies. The online pieces here should leave you shopping for copies.

* * *

Constant Sorrow” (David Gates, The New Yorker, August 13, 2001)

Ralph Stanley was one of the architects of Bluegrass whose band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, revolutionized American vernacular music and took them all the way to Carnegie Hall. Born in southwestern Virginia, the legendary banjo picker still lived out there at age 74 when David Gates profiled him. Gates is a journalist and novelist who used to work for Newsweek, but he’s also a skilled country musician who can stay up jamming into the wee hours. I briefly played drums with his Bennington College country band one semester, and he’s as lively a musician as he is brilliant a music writer. For this story, Gates accompanied Stanley on a tour and joined him at services at Hale Creek Primitive Baptist Church. It’s a fascinating read from a person who loves country music so deeply he wants to understand it from the inside.

A Lone Star State of Mind” (Mitch Myers, Magnet, September 24, 2002)

Texas multi-instrumentalist Doug Sahm was a legend during his 50-year recording career, and he remains a legend now, long after he died. Hailing from San Antonio, Sahm embodied Texas’ multicultural identity, playing everything from fiddle to steel guitar, and honky-tonk to Cajun to 60s psychedelic music. He’s known as a country musician, but his interests and abilities make him more of an American mutt, spanning genre, and bigger than Texas. Writer Mitch Myers untangles the myth from the musician, and finds good reason for the self-destructive Sahm’s enduring stature. Sahm was what Myers beautifully describes as a “redneck-hippie“ and “fast-talking cosmic cowboy,“ back when country musicians could have more fluid identities than the modern, stifling big hat/American flag/pickup truck strictures. Sahm’s body of work is all over the place, and Myers worked hard to make sense of it all. “In a world where American music martyrs like Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons command respect in terms of comprehensive reissues,“ he writes, “there’s no retrospective boxed set being planned for Sahm.“ This story led me to Sahm’s music, which I’m still discovering.

Imagining the Delmore Brothers” (William Gay, Oxford American, April, 2003)

Those who love Southern literature know Tennesse’s William Gay as a singular gothic novelist and short story writer. He published his first book at age 57. I’ve read his collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down multiple times, and I rarely do that. Thankfully he wrote nonfiction about music for the Oxford American, which he rarely did. His 2000 music piece “Sitting on Top of the World“ is not online, but his essay “Imaging the Delmore Brothers“ is equally fine work that imbues the musical past with life, and includes a surprising family connection to these musicians.

There was a great deal of Southern music recorded in the ’20s and early ’30s, until the Depression threw the skids to it. There were string bands beyond counting, and in Mississippi everyone seemed to have a guitar, and the blues seemed to be seeping out of the earth itself. This early Southern music had a common ancestry: endlessly recycled lines of poetry that had become a sort of archetype, or a code you could decipher with a guitar and a little skill.

The Delmores fused all these elements and brought something new to the mix—a tight, sweet harmony that had never been recorded before.

A long time ago I asked my mother, “What were they like back then?“

“Well,“ she said, “they were just nice soft-spoken country boys. Except when they played music. Then it was like they were…taken over or something.“

Sex, Heartbreak and Blue Suede” (Robbie Fulks, GQ, July 2003)

When Chicago musician Robbie Fulks got invited to play at Nashville’s venerated Grand Ole Opry, the Carnegie Hall of country, he couldn’t figure out why. A self-described “pop-punk-hillbilly obscurity,“ he uses the opportunity to tell the Opry’s story, how this sacred institution shaped American music, diverged from modern mass-market country, and why its culture of authenticity and respect still matters. This is a fun, on-the-ground story about a place whose history is alive and kicking.

LMPC via Getty Images

Push Play” (Chris Dennis, Guernica, April 6, 2020)

Dolly Parton is pure country but bigger than country, because she is bigger than life, and yet, you can’t talk about country music without talking about her. And are more sides to her career and influence than a hundred stories can contain. In this personal essay, one young man looks at his past tastes to explore the role Parton played in his ideas of masculinity and difficult coming out. “I think part of my magic, if I have any at all,” Parton once said, “is that I look totally fake but am so totally real.”

Living with Dolly Parton” (Jessica Wilkerson, Longreads, October 16, 2018)

Parton’s music and persona are easy to love, but they are not always easy to love publically, and as our tastes change with time, we often see our favorite musicians’ flaws. Like Chris Dennis in Guernica, professor Jessica Wilkerson reconciles with Parton and her own past fandom, asking difficult questions in this very probing piece: “I needed to confront Dolly Parton’s blinding, dazzling whiteness.“

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

This would be a trio of Parton stories, but Kimberly Chun’s excellent “Touched by a Woman: Dolly Parton Sings ’bout Peace, Love & Understanding” in Creative Loafing is not online, but it deserves a shout out, because it’s fantastic.

Willie Nelson at 70” (Gene Santoro, The Nation, October 30, 2003)

Lots of legends aren’t on this list: George Jones, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff. As with Dolly Parton, you can’t talk country without talking Willie Nelson. I’ve put these three Nelson stories in chronological order, to see him age, though in a sense, Nelson always seemed old to me. The country-stoner legend marked his milestone birthday with the two-CD The Essential Willie Nelson. Musician and critic Gene Santoro took the occassion to assess Nelson’s career, his appeal, and his enduring legacy. This is what the best reviews do: start small and go large, from a timely peg to a timeless exploration. An Austin-based source told Santoro: “Willie is the Buddha. He’s also a duet whore.” “In terms of consistent quality,“ Santoro writes, “he’s right, but Nelson’s duets, which have included outings with Charles, Cash and Dylan as well as U2 and Julio Iglesias, if nothing else do reveal Nelson’s prismatic musical curiosity.“

All Roads Lead to Willie Nelson” (Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone, September 4, 2014)

The life story of the country music great, now 81. “Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, ‘a bit of a mystery.‘”

The ranch and surrounding area are known to locals as Willie World. Nelson also owns Pedernales Cut-N-Putt, a nine-hole course you can see from his house. Next to that is a recording studio, and condos for friends, family and longtime crew members. Poodie’s Hilltop Roadhouse, a burger joint full of old Nelson posters and stage props, opened by his late stage manager Poodie Locke, is down the road on Highway 71; Nelson has been known to drop by for a surprise set. Drive to downtown Austin, and you’ll find the new Willie Nelson statue on Willie Nelson Boulevard.

With his youngest kids, Lukas and Micah, grown up and out of the house, Nelson spends his rare nontouring days driving around, listening to his Sirius XM station, Willie’s Roadhouse, sometimes going off-roading and carving out paths. “I’ve thought I was going to die a few times with him in the truck,” says his daughter Paula. “He’s like a kid, doing the whole cowboys-and-Indians thing. It’s his playground.”

Trigger” (Michael Hall, Texas Monthly, January 21, 2013)

Since buying it in a Nashville guitar shop in 1969, Willie Nelson has played the same Martin N-20 classical guitar. He named it Trigger. “Trigger’s like me,” Nelson told reporter Michael Hall. “Old and beat-up.”

Willie became the guitarist he is by playing this instrument, which he has worn and shaped with his own hands, working his very personality into the wood until it sounds like no other guitar on earth. Most nylon-stringed guitars have a rich, round tone, and they are difficult to tell apart. Trigger is so distinctive—low tones that thump like they have mud on them, high ones that chime like glass—that you can hear one or two notes on the radio and know immediately whom you’re listening to.

No guitar is as beloved—or as famed. On Trigger’s face you can see the topography of modern music, the countless hours Willie has spent playing country, blues, jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, swing, folk, reggae, thirties pop, forties pop, and eighties pop. Trigger was there at the very beginning of outlaw country. He was there at the first Farm Aid. And he was there when Willie serenaded President Jimmy Carter. He has shared stage and studio with Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. He has hung from Willie’s neck as tens of thousands of fans sang along to “Whiskey River.” And he has sat in Willie’s lap as Willie comforted friends, such as the time the two of them played “Healing Hands of Time” to Darrell and Edith Royal in their home after their daughter’s death, and then again nine years later after their son’s death.

Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton backstage at the 53rd annual CMA Awards, 2019. Robby Klein/Getty Images for CMA

Come Here My Song” (Aaron Gilbreath, Longreads, June 11, 2015)

The first story I ever wrote for Longreads was about country music. It uses a night at Trout’s, the last original honky-tonk in California’s rural San Joaquin Valley, to explore the unique sound and origins of California country music, particularly Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. I’d traveled to Bakersfield to do some reporting for a book about the region, and I started my two-week reporting trip at Trout’s. Instead of living country music history, I found a tightknit, fun-loving community of karaoke singers who revealed as much about this evolving region as it did about country.

Branded Man” (Andy McLenon and Grant Alden, No Depression, November 1, 2003)

Speaking of Bakersfield: When you sing ”Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys,” let’s never forgot Merle Haggard. Yeah yeah, this song’s not about him, but country wouldn’t be country without him. For No Depression, the magazine that celebrated outlaw and underground country, two writers celebrated California’s rural poet, the son of cotton pickers, who brought a lot of poetry and rebellion to country, and made California a place for serious country music, as much as others had made it a place for pop songs and folk tunes. Here writers Andy McLenon and Grant Alden make a serious case that, in their words, ”Merle Haggard is our greatest living singer and songwriter. Country singer and songwriter, if you must limit him. Just do not argue the point.” Take that, Waylon and Willie.

For Women Musicians, Maybelle Carter Set The Standard And Broke The Mold” (Tift Merritt, NPR, August 13, 2019)

“If Maybelle Carter — mother of country music, without whom country and rock and roll guitar would not exist — can’t make the great guitar player list, how can women musicians expect to be seen at all?”

Despite her many decades in the business and so many records sold, Maybelle Carter hardly received any honors during the peak of her career. Today, decades later, many, many more women are on the road; I imagine that would make Maybelle deeply happy. Women managers, women running production, sound and lights, women booking venues, women playing bass, women drummers, women rocking, women raising children on the road: We are Maybelle’s spiritual granddaughters. In the next 20 years, we will continue to bloom in music. But more and more, the world listens to music without context, without credits — no players, no provenance, no lineage — despite that information being readily accessible to us all. Social media allows everyone their own center stage; self-aggrandizing without depth perception — without a deeper sense of context in the present or in the history that has come before us — is an accepted way of moving through the world. This makes it even more essential to note how deeply the work of Maybelle Carter contributed to the music that follows her — for both women and men. Acknowledgement for the work of women — seen and unseen— is the only way to push this story forward for the daughters to come.

The Story of Country Music’s Great Song Writing Duo” (Dylan Jones, Longreads, September 2, 2019)

Every genre has its iconic songs. Country has countless. One of them is called ”Wichita Lineman.” Although the title suggests football, the lineman in this song worked on electric lines along a highway. Written and recorded by Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell, this is one of the most iconic songs of the 20th century, surprising as that sounds, and author Dylan Jones wanted to understand why, and how it came into being. The book he wrote about the song, Wichita Lineman, tells an incredible story of hard work, musical brilliance, and pure luck. We ran an excerpt.

The Promised Land

Trans activist Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2018. (Danielle Villasana)

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism. Read more…