Painter Juan Miro in His Studio. Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images
Sophie Beck |The Point| November 2018 | 31 minutes (6,109 words)
The difficulty began with the title of a painting at an exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Joan Miró. The title was Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars (1969). I particularly like this title. The painting itself pleases and eludes me at the same time—the woman’s upturned face has a serenity and happiness that comes of no clear aspect; she has stopped doing something to contemplate the heavens. I can’t make out what objects are in her hands and, if I were to read an interpretation, I’d probably find it questionable. There are two stars: one twinkles and the other spirals. Next to the painting was a sculpture I didn’t like, and then another sculpture constructed of found objects I considered meaningless to the point of being irritating. There was a whole room beyond that full of pieces I didn’t look at very closely. It was crowded in the museum that day. People around me shuffled, stopped, and shuffled, deep in their audio tours.
I stood before Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars absorbing the elements—woman, star, spiral star not shaped like a star, inscrutable other stuff—then it followed me into daydreams and lodged in a fold of my mind. I am not an artist or critic and lay no claim to any special understanding of Miró’s work or methods. I am not his admirer, countryman or contemporary. I just started liking the guy despite not liking the guy. I couldn’t stop thinking about him so I wanted to write about him, but the more I wrote, the more I came to believe that the key to his fantastic work, to the sheer volume of work—he kept working without pause from age nineteen to ninety—was that he was phenomenally boring. It seemed that only Miró could take the fact of being Miró and make something lustrously reality-bending, inspired, haunting and gorgeous out of it. To be removed by one degree, to write about him or his work, is to risk crafting something tedious to read. My initial essay flamed out so thoroughly that I threw it in the digital garbage on multiple occasions. Each time, I fished it back out again, attached to the gleaming scraps of something resiliently and stubbornly salvageable.
Still from Christmas in Evergreen.
Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma
Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)
In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.
Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”
“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“
In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.
How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:
Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.
It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.
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IMAGINARY AMERICA
“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”
Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”
He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.
Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.
So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“
What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.
The Illustrated London News (1848)
Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.
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ART IMITATES ART
A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.
Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.
Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.” TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay.
As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”
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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME
These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.
This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”
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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.
“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.
The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.
Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership.
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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE
Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”
“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.
And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”
In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“
From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.
Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”
The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.
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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS
It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.
In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.
Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”
We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.
We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.
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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.
Max Abelson A reporter on Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where his work often goes in Businessweek. His stories were included in Columbia University Press’ Best Business Writing anthologies in 2015 and 2013.
Good investigative journalism can leave you with that curdled taste of outrage in your mouth, but only great journalism can introduce the world to a whole new kind of loan sharking. And it takes something really splendid to jump from a millionaire city marshal to a gangster named Jimmy Dimps, a Maltese Shih Tzu named Coco, a town called Canandaigua, a drug smuggler named Braun, actual piles of cash, bloody vomit, and 30,000 court cases. Faux and Mider’s work is the best I’ve ever read on predatory lending.
My favorite story on commerce of the year has more in common with the dreaminess of the nuclear sequences from Twin Peaks: The Return than the everyday stock charts on CNBC. In one sense it’s a story about absolutely nothing, if you consider that the news peg is basically some packages that started arriving at someone’s house one day. But it’s also a story about everything — Christianity, con artists, bookstores, the Internet, real estate, obsession, startups, copyrights, maps, and moisturizer. I was very sorry when it was over.
We meet the Pastor* in a Pollo Campero, the famous Central American fried chicken restaurant. It is necessary to negotiate with him to enter the neighborhood, a notorious MS-13 stronghold, and then it is necessary for him to negotiate with the gang leaders to bring us in. In El Salvador’s poor neighborhoods, unofficial borderlines are everywhere. Navigating them takes a certain level of finesse.
It is tempting to think you can just drive through a neighborhood without a problem, that you can get in and out without alarms being raised. But this is not the case. The gangs see everything, and anyone on the street can be an informer. The penalty for trespassing can be death.
The neighborhood we are planning to enter is regarded by some as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. Strangely, the Pastor tells us that the neighborhood is actually relatively safe for residents, since the area is completely controlled by MS. It is the gray areas being fought over, where gangs bump up against one another, that are the most violent. When we enter the neighborhood, the Pastor jokingly says, “Welcome to the most secure place in the country.”
All four windows are rolled down. Windows always need to be down in gang neighborhoods. They have to know who you are. The lookouts are everywhere. The Pastor points them out: a child, an old woman, a shopkeeper. “Everyone here is involved,” the Pastor says. A young man in a baggy polo and jeans speaks on his cell phone as we pass. “Un soldado,” the Pastor says. A soldier.
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There are up to 60,000 active gang members in El Salvador, according to the International Crisis Group, with another 500,000 people in the country connected to the gangs. This, in a country with a population of just 6.4 million.
The Pastor is a tough-looking man, with a shaved head, solid upper body, and a gold chain dangling on his chest, clad in a polo shirt and dark jeans. He is well respected and is even able to go to other gang-controlled neighborhoods. He wanted to do a beach trip that day, but the idea of taking some of his former gang-member congregants, many of them heavily tattooed, proved too taxing.
In El Salvador’s poor neighborhoods, unofficial borderlines are everywhere. Navigating them takes a certain level of finesse.
We are with the Pastor because he has agreed to take us into his neighborhood so my photographer and I can follow him as he walks the streets of the slums, trying to convince residents and gang members to become born-again Christians. In El Salvador, Jesus saves. For the young men caught up in the vicious cycle of violence perpetrated by gangs like MS-13, the church is the only thing that can save them. Embracing Jesus Christ and becoming a born-again Christian is the one way that gang members will allow one of their own to leave and strike out for a better life.
Pastor William Arias. Photo by Neil Brandvold.
In the slums of El Salvador, in the jails, in the poverty-stricken rural villages, a revolution of sorts is happening. Based on who you talk to, it’s either the only salvation for El Salvador’s tens of thousands of violent gang members, or it’s a con intended to stop them from facing retribution for terrorizing their fellow countrymen for years in brutal, heinous ways.
***
A brief history of the gangs, how they came to be, and the havoc they have wrought across the country: El Salvador went through a brutal civil war in the 1980s between leftist guerillas and a right-wing government backed by an oligarchy and the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the country as refugees, with many ending up in Los Angeles. There were already a number of Salvadoran gangs in existence there, among them MS-13 and 18th Street, but they were small scale, sometimes just a group of friends who partied together. The gangs grew exponentially during this time with the sudden influx of poor, sometimes battle-scarred refugees, and they served as protection against black and Mexican gangs. A change in immigration law in the United States in the 1990s saw hundreds of gang members deported back to El Salvador, a country reeling from the war, which ended in 1992 and left a serious power vacuum and weak institutions. The gangs took advantage and spread out, increasing in numbers. The murder rate also rose dramatically, and in 2015 and 2016 El Salvador had the highest of in any peacetime country. For comparison, El Salvador, a country of just over 6 million people, had 6,600 murders in 2015. New York City, with a population of 8.5 million, had approximately 350 murders.
The gangs see everything, and anyone on the street can be an informer. The penalty for trespassing can be death.
The Pastor has been on the frontlines of this battle. The Church has always had a strange relationship with the gangs, with pastors and church groups being the only organizations allowed to work in gang-controlled communities or to advocate for gang member’s rights, negotiating truces. Somewhere along the line, gang leaders decided that if a member found God, he would be permitted to leave. Gang members and church officials will both tell you that the church is one of the few things the gang respects. Often, church organizations are the only groups allowed to provide community services to residents in gang areas, with nearly all NGOs and the government prohibited from doing so.
And that is how the Pastor is allowed to spend this particular morning attempting to convince a young gang member to abandon his allegiance to MS-13 and welcome Jesus Christ into his heart without fear that he will be executed for his transgression, even going so far as to dare him to scrawl an “18” on the wall (MS-13’s rivals are the 18th Street gang, which has split into two factions: 18th Street Revolutionarios and 18th Street Surenos).
The Pastor says he is friends with some of the gang members, but he can never grow too friendly. He never accepts favors. Never does favors. Never asks for money, never gives money. He has known many of them since they were little and growing up in the neighborhood. It is necessary to be on good terms with them to operate here, but that doesn’t mean he does not tread lightly. “Preaching on adrenaline is not easy,” he says.
He walks the streets with some of his flock to head deeper into the barrio. Paved, wide streets with murals listing the Ten Commandments turn into narrow dirt roads with unrelenting poverty. A man with a shovel tries to clear an open trench where raw sewage flows next to his home. Corrugated tin shacks with walls that are nothing more than vinyl banners of corona promotions hung on chain-link fences. Stray dogs and chickens pick through garbage-strewn streets.
The Pastor stops to talk to a mother and her son standing in the doorway of their home. The boy is young, maybe 11 years old, but this is the age when the gangs start to make inroads with young people. In a neighborhood like this, it is not very hard for them. There are few opportunities. The Pastor realizes that this is a crucial age for the boy, when the everyday decisions he makes can determine whether or not he lives to make it out of his teens. “The life of a person, if I bring God to them, if I take Jesus to them it means that something different is going to happen. It’s not going to be the same result,” the Pastor says. If the Pastor does not reach the boy, the gangs have an easy target to recruit.
Somewhere along the line, gang leaders decided that if a member found God, he would be permitted to leave. Gang members and church officials will both tell you that the church is one of the few things the gang respects
The next stop is a gang member who looks to be about 18 years old. He politely entertains the Pastor’s aggressive conversion pitch. The Pastor is trying to convince him he must fear God more than he fears the gangs, for it is God that truly has the authority. “Put an 18 up here,” the Pastor says to him, encouraging the boy to scrawl the mark of a rival gang on a nearby wall. “They’d kill me,” the teenager replies.
“You are afraid of them, right? You have fear that they would punish you? Yes or no?”
The teenager nods. “But you aren’t afraid that God will punish you?” The Pastor keeps going, trying to get the teenager to accept Jesus. He tells him he should accept God now, before it is too late, before he is put up on the cross to be crucified. The teen is noncommittal, and they part ways.
***
The Church has always had a strange relationship with the gangs in El Salvador, and has often been seen as a somewhat neutral arbitrator. Church officials have helped negotiate gang truces and have always been on the frontlines of conflict here. Many here actually trace the key moment that began the civil war to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a tireless advocate for El Salvador’s downtrodden, who was killed by a sniper while delivering mass.
Romero, unlike the Pastor and the majority of churches who work with the gangs, was Catholic. He was also a vocal proponent of liberation theology, a movement that rose up during the ’60s and ’70s in Latin American Catholicism and preached social justice, standing up against political and economic oppression. The movement came together nicely with leftist movements that were rising up in El Salvador, but soon put the Catholic Church at odds with the right-wing government and oligarchy that ruled the country.
El Salvador’s right-wing elites and the government, backed by the United States, fought a vicious war against the left-wing guerilla groups. They also promoted Evangelicalism as an alternative to Catholicism while simultaneously persecuting Catholics. Whereas liberation theology was encouraging the poor to rise up and fight for their rights, Evangelicalism focused more on having people accept their fate and leave it up to God — exactly the kind of message that would discourage participation in social justice movements. U.S. Evangelicals came down to preach in waves, and there are even accusations, never proven, that the CIA was involved in promoting the Evangelical movement. From 1988 to 2009, Evangelical Protestants went from 17 percent of El Salvador’s population to 35 percent. Estimates now put the number at 40 percent.
And it is growing. “You could say that every day in this country, dozens of men are leaving the gangs, looking for the right path in the arms of the lords,” Pastor William Arias tells me. His numbers may be a bit exaggerated, but if there is anyone who knows the burgeoning evangelical movement among gang members, it is Pastor Arias, having been a member of MS-13 for 15 years. This is not hard to surmise, as the letters ‘M’ and ‘S’ are tattooed on his forehead. Two teardrops are under his left eye, and there’s a spider web behind his right ear. Beneath his collared shirt and blazer, across his prodigious stomach, are a host of other MS-13 tattoos including a fairly large hand doing the devil’s horn fingers that has become the gang’s signature hand sign.
It is a cloudy day when the Pastor introduces us to Pastor Arias. Arias is a friendly man, all smiles and handshakes, with a gravelly voice that carries years of hard living. Pastor Arias leads us to his home, a tense walk past a gathering place for some of the local gang members. Though not exactly fond of having journalists in their neighborhood, they begrudgingly accept those with the pastors as long as they are not photographed.
The house is a small two-bedroom shack, with a dirt floor. Living the life of a convert does not appear easy. These men go from being able to demand payment from anyone in the neighborhood to living in poverty, with barely enough money to feed themselves.
Arias is now heavyset and broad-shouldered, but he shows us photos of himself as a young gangster. He is thin and muscular, with his head shaven, arms crossed, and staring into the camera in front of a large piece of MS-13 graffiti. Arias is what they call an OG, or original gangster. He claims to have been jumped in to the gang in 1990 by one of the founding members in the country. He was 11 years old.
Arias’s tale of getting wrapped up in gang life and later finding an exit through the Church, echoes what I’ve heard from nearly every former gang member I’ve interviewed. There are certain highlights that arise in the stories of every gang member turned Christian: a poor family, a rough childhood, and acceptance into the gang at a young age. Violence. Drug addiction. Depression. Jail. Near-death experience. Survival. Awakening.
Pastor Arias came from a poor, broken family. His mother was always working, and his father was addicted to alcohol and drugs. He took to the streets at 7, and was addicted to sniffing glue a few years after that. That’s when he found himself in the company of MS-13.
“When you’re young, you need someone to listen to you, to respect you. That’s what I was looking for, people to fear me and respect me,” Pastor Arias says. Many gang members, like Arias, speak of joining the gang as if they were searching for a family, of some sort of structure. As the writer and researcher Stephen Dudley illustrates in a groundbreaking report on MS-13, and in an op-ed in the New York Times, the gang can be thought of as a social organization more than a criminal enterprise. Dudley, who runs the Insight Crime website, says that the gangs function as a type of surrogate family.
There are certain highlights that arise in the stories of every gang member turned Christian: a poor family, a rough childhood, and acceptance into the gang at a young age. Violence. Drug addiction. Depression. Jail. Near-death experience. Survival. Awakening.
That’s not to downplay the allure of money and power to gang recruits. These days, Pastor Arias adds, the poverty is so overwhelming in neighborhoods like his that some mothers push their children into the gang life.
Pastor Arias says the first hint of his conversion came in 1999, after serving a three-year sentence. He was still heavily addicted to drugs when he got out, but his brother, another gang member, had become a Christian. His brother tried to win him over, but he wanted none of it. “I told him I didn’t need any God, that the only thing I needed was the hood and the hood was my family, and that he better not talk to me again because he had betrayed me by leaving the gang,” says Pastor Arias.
At the same time, he was battling addiction and crippling depression. He was paranoid, always worried that the police or rival gang members were plotting to execute him. He remembers attending a huge party one night, and walking outside alone. “Everything was quiet, there was an emptiness,” he says. “I felt so alone, I felt like less than trash.” He heard a voice, urging him to kill himself. The next morning, he was arrested and eventually sentenced to eight years in prison.
The next few years were hell. Nobody visited him, he said, except for his mother — and God. Prison conditions were atrocious, and Arias says it was a constant battle between life and death. One night, he thought he was being set up to be murdered, and he prayed to God and swore that that if he lived he would convert to Christianity. He survived, and shortly after he was freed on a technicality. He converted when he got out.
But the transition from former gang member to law-abiding Christian was not an easy one. Former gang members face social stigma. Many in El Salvador are not so willing to forgive. It is one thing to speak of redemption when the gangs have not preyed on your community. It is another when they have targeted you and your loved ones. Pastor Arias doesn’t blame them either. “It’s hard because the gang has planted so much fear and suffering that it’s hard to forgive. Especially me. I hurt my community so bad in the past,” he says.
Can he forgive himself, I ask. He finds comforts in the Lord’s words. He does not hold onto your sins, he says, he throws them away.
The issue of earning a living is a bit more challenging, especially when your only means of income have been violence and drugs. There are few government programs, and it’s almost impossible for former gang members to get normal jobs. Pastor Arias recalls not being able to pay his bills. “When you’re in a gang, it’s basically easy. Money, whatever you need. I would only need to go out in the corner and people would give me money,” he says. The temptation to go back to the gang life is ever present.
Now, though, things have changed. Whereas at one point his own family did not think he would last six months as a law-abiding convert, local parents trust him to take their children to Sunday school. “When He forgives you, He doesn’t hold on to your sins. He throws them away deep, he doesn’t remember what you did,” says Pastor Arias. “That comforts me, even though society doesn’t believe in me, even though they don’t approve the change, because you are aware that your past life doesn’t exist anymore.”
His own daughter is about to graduate from secondary school, where she studies accounting, and go to college next year. Her photo and various awards she’s won are everywhere in Pastor Arias’s tiny living room. He calls her the pride of the family. “She’s a great example for me,” he says.
The following Sunday, Pastor Arias invites us to his church service, located down a dirt path from his home.
Whereas at one point his own family did not think he would last six months as a law-abiding convert, local parents trust him to take their children to Sunday school.
Outside the church, a boy catches my eye. He looks to be about 14 years old and is dressed the way that young gang members do. I’m told that he’s a lookout, keeping an eye on the foreign journalists with the cameras. It is unnerving, and I start to wonder just how accepted outsiders are in the barrio even with the consent of the pastors.
A short time later, two suit-wearing men approach the teenager from inside the church and drape their arms around him. They escort him into the church and have him kneel right below the podium. He is joined by another young teenager who seems far more willing. Pastor Arias is preaching from behind the podium, extremely animated, screaming and sweating, his gravelly voice echoing through the room. “The easiest prey for the devil is the youth!” he booms into the microphone. The crowd nods enthusiastically.
Both teenagers are about to receive Jesus, to be born again, in front of the congregation. One teenager begins to cry. Pastor Arias blesses them. “You know what the devil is saying today? Now those two escaped me! Only a little more and I would have had them but I couldn’t because the hand of Jesus saved them!” The crowd applauds. A small victory for Pastor Arias.
The young lookout walks outside the church and hugs his grandmother, who is also crying. I approach him to talk, but he is nervous and says he can’t be seen talking to us. A few minutes later, two active gang members walk by, clearly sent to investigate the situation. The boy is nervous. Now he may be the target. While the gangs mostly accept the evangelical route of escape, it does not mean that it is something they all celebrate.
As Pastor Arias explains to us, “It’s the only way out of the gang since the gang has only three exits: One is prison, two is a hospital, and three is death. The only way out alive is through God, and the gangs know perfectly that there isn’t another way.”
Like Pastor Arias, most gang members only come to realize this while incarcerated. Prison is where the majority of reformed gang members find it in their hearts to find Jesus. The Apanteos prison is located about an hour outside of San Salvador. It is an MS-13 prison. In El Salvador, the prisons are divided by gang membership. Mixing the two together is far too dangerous. Gotera, an 18th Street prison, has become famous for its Christian converts, with some saying it numbers over 1,200.
***
On a balmy day in May, we’re led into a section of prison where approximately 300 former members of MS-13, clad in white shirts and white shorts, alternate between praying fervently and listening to fiery preachers deliver sermons. It is quite a compelling scene. To say the men are enthusiastic would be an understatement. They sing hymns as loud as their voices will let them. They clap so hard their hands must throb. Some have tears streaming down their tattooed faces.
Incarcerated men at the Apanteos prison, which houses MS-13 gang members. Photo by Neil Brandvold.
The government of El Salvador has initiated a program called Yo Cambio, or “I Change,” in the prisons. It is part of a massive effort to teach gang members new skills like forestry, basic carpentry, sewing, and masonry, and how to be productive members of society. We watch team-building exercises, the kind of things you’d see at a corporate retreat. Trust falls. A dance performance. There are nice gardens being kept in an open courtyard. The young men are smiling, laughing, and generally having a good time. It is not the type of thing one expects to see in prison in El Salvador, though the productions are clearly staged for our benefit. We are not allowed into the sectors where active gang members are housed. And while we are at this prison, rumors swirl of grievous human rights violations occurring at the maximum-security prisons where gang leaders are held and journalists are not allowed. At one point during the reporting trip, a local journalist shows us a photo alleged to be of a gang leader locked up. The man is rail thin, and accusations are made that the prison system is starving him and other gang leaders. There is only the carrot and the stick here. Nothing in between. Repent or die.
Aware of all this, it is still hard not to be impressed. We are accompanied by only one guard and the prison director, a short, middle-aged woman. We are surrounded by one-time members of the most fearsome gang in the Americas, and there are no issues or concerns for our safety as we wander around this section of the prison.
We ask the prison director to speak to the most fearsome reformed gang member she could think of. Jaime Salvador Ceron Orlanna has been sentenced to 71 years and has served nine years of his sentence. He speaks with a tic that makes him constantly blink. He was a gang member for 25 years, he says. “When I look at myself in the mirror, I never thought I could ever change having done those evil deeds in the gang,” he adds. He thought he would die a member.
Jaime describes his previous life of “parties and murders,” of having seen an “infinite” number of young teenagers killed simply for not obeying a gang member. He now calls himself a “recycled human,” adding that before finding Jesus, he was “human garbage.” Asked whether or not he thinks society can forgive him and his fellow converts, he’s unsure. He swears he is sorry and recognizes he’s been a part of his homeland’s destruction “for having been the root of this evil that now takes over the country.”
He shows off a giant MS-13 tattoo on his back that contains satanic images and references to the Illuminati, which he used to believe in. There are always talks among the former gang members of making deals with the devil, of the devil taking over a person. The occult figures somewhat into MS-13 lore, from the devil horn signs to other more satanic imagery. For these men, with some of the things they’ve done, the devil and his work is more a than metaphor. It’s real, whispering in their ears, convincing them to commit heinous acts and now perhaps trying to convince them to go back to their old ways. What better way to stave off the devil than to commit to Evangelicalism?
Nearby, the prisoners have broken into groups of 15 or so people, with various preachers and pastors in training practicing sermons to a small audience. A short man with intricate tattoos crawling up his throat warns of not falling victim to temptation. “The word of God says that Satan, the devil, took Jesus to the desert to tempt him, and the will of the enemy is to tempt us with hollow things. Maybe when we leave here tomorrow someone will say, ‘I have a deal’ or ‘You can steal that car and nothing will happen, you ask God’s forgiveness later and everything is okay.’ Those are the hollow temptations of the enemy, and how they’ll try to seduce us.”
The incarcerated converts are all aware that remaining on the path on the outside is not as simple as it is on the inside. Temptations are found in abundance, and rehabilitation programs are not. A frequent complaint heard from former gang members is that there are little to no options for gang members once they are released. They say the government provides no training or job placement program, and social stigma prevents them from gaining employment in a country that already has a lack of opportunities for even upstanding citizens without criminal records.
For these men, with some of the things they’ve done, the devil and his work is more a than metaphor. It’s real, whispering in their ears, convincing them to commit heinous acts and now perhaps trying to convince them to go back to their old ways.
Wilfredo Gomez is painfully aware of the circumstances that converted gang members face upon release in El Salvador when he greets Jorge Luis Migran, a young former member of 18th Street who was just released a week prior after serving three years of what was initially an 11-year sentence. Migran was initially sentenced for homicide, extortion, and a host of other charges, though many were dropped. He says he made a pact with God to get off drugs and after failing the very next day, he got sober after that and has now been clean for five months. What saved him was being transferred to a prison with more converts and gaining better treatment. “I looked at the future and I wanted to be someone,” he says. “I was tired of crime.” He is worried, though, about getting a job and providing for his 3-year-old son, who he was only recently able to meet. And he is worried about the lure of women and drugs.
Gomez oversees a program that will house Migran and help him stay on the straight and narrow path. He lives in and runs a rehabilitation center in the Eben-Ezer Church inside the notorious 18th Street neighborhood known as La Dina, an area so notorious for gang violence that even hardened Salvadoran crime journalists were apprehensive to venture inside last time I went. The church is an oasis in a crime-plagued neighborhood, though even with permission from the local 18th Street clique to visit it’s unwise to venture more than a block or two in any direction.
It serves as a base and home for the recently released converts to live and work. It also doubles as a bakery, where the converts who lack employment opportunities bake pastries daily to sell at local shops. Bakeries have become something of a typical business for former gang members, so much so that police officers crack jokes about yet another gang-run bakeshop. It allows the gang members to earn a living, just a couple of dollars a day. Entering the church most days, we were met by cheery former gang members, giant 18s tattooed across their face, basting freshly made pastries with syrupy concoctions.
Gomez himself is a former gang member who now preaches at the church and oversees much of the operation. If there is a biography that captures the life cycle of El Salvador’s gangs, it is most definitely Gomez’s. Born in the country, at age 10 he fled with his family as refugees during the civil war of the 1980s and ended up in South Central Los Angeles. Gomez describes how he thought everything would be OK when he reached the states, but he soon found himself in a neighborhood where violence and poverty dominated the environment as well.
A participant in Wilfredo Gomez’s program. Photo by Neil Brandvold.
His family life soon fractured. His parents divorced, and Gomez often found himself alone. He was also bullied by others in the neighborhood for being Salvadoran. “Being in the States and being Salvadoran, not knowing the language or the culture, it put pressure on me, and I found a way to fit in or to belong or to feel part of by having different types of friends. That’s how I initiated friendship with gangs and gang members and girls that sympathized with gangs.”
Gomez estimates that there were 20 different gangs in his junior high. He lived on the corner of 18th Street and Union in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the 18th Street gang, though he had yet to join them when he was assaulted after school one day because rival gang members had suspected he was already a member of 18th Street. Members of 18th Street in his neighborhood saw him banged up and took him under their wing, going with him to get revenge and offering protection in the future.
From there, he was a full-fledged member. Arrests and incarceration soon followed, with Gomez going in and out of institutions until he was deported in 2006. When he arrived back in the country, it had been 20 years since his family fled. Police met him at the airport, took photos, and warned him that the situation down there was different, that because of his tattoos he would be targeted.
Life back in El Salvador wasn’t easy. Gomez was living in a cheap motel and unable to find work. He ran out of money, and felt himself drifting back into a life of crime. He had no connections to the gangs back in El Salvador though, and considered himself unaffiliated. He was scared to leave the motel, scared he would be kidnapped and killed by any gang that saw his tattoos. Fed up one night, he went to a bar and got drunk. There, he met members of 18th Street who asked him to go with them and join up. Skeptical at first, he gave in when they showed him their various “18” tattoos.
A few months later, he was back in prison. “I lasted like three months and twenty days free out here [El Salvador]. I got sentenced to ten years in prison for strong-armed robbery. I went to prison out here and believe me, prison out here ain’t no joke, nothing like the States,” he says.
In prison, there were eight beds for every 50 people. The conditions were awful. The food inedible, the bathroom situation so atrocious he won’t even begin to describe it, and he constantly had fungal infections. But he had a bit of notoriety due to his status as a deportee and his size. He fell into the prison life, sometimes using his size to his advantage, and won respect from other gang members. But five or six years into his sentence, he got horribly sick.
In prison, there were eight beds for every 50 people.
The sickness was Gomez’s wake-up call. The other gang members, sensing his weaknesses, mocked him and treated him poorly. The Christians inside kept trying to pray for him but he turned them down. His body kept breaking down. He later found out he had tuberculosis.
One night, he was coughing up more fluids than usual, feeling a great “white heat” on his body. “I was crying, and I remember one of them [the Christians], he whispered to my ear, and he was like, ‘Do you want to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior? He wants to heal you. He wants to save you. You’re not going to die.’ Dude, I don’t remember but I told him, ‘Yes, I do.’ Then I received Jesus as my lord and savior that day, and here I am, what four years later? Healthy as a bull, with a different mentality, with a different life, and now I know God is real.”
Gomez started preaching in jail, seeing it as his newfound purpose. Because of his previous notoriety, he developed a reputation of sorts; the badass, fierce deportee who woke up one morning and found Jesus. Other prisoners were touched by his story. “I’m a leader again, but not for the darkness, not for evil,” he says. “I’m a leader now for the light, for the good.”
The idea for the program at Eben-Ezer Church came to him the day he was released. Not expecting anyone to be outside the prison waiting for him, Gomez was shocked to find members of the church there. “Here comes this pastor and he tells me, ‘We’ve been waiting for you. We heard what you’ve been doing in there, and we heard what God is doing in there, and we’re here to help you.’ I was like, wow. I never had a family. I never had nobody waiting for me when I got out of prison, not even in the States.”
Other prisoners were touched by his story. ‘I’m a leader again, but not for the darkness, not for evil,’ he says. ‘I’m a leader now for the light, for the good.’
He was inspired to start doing the same for other ex-gang-members-turned-Christians getting out of jail. There’s now 11 of them staying at the church. Gomez sees it as a halfway house, to help those recently released get started and adjust so they don’t fall back into the same traps. They provide food, shelter, and guidance, and the hope is that the newly released will soon be on their way. But many gang members no longer have family members willing to take them in or are not able to gain any sort of employment, especially those with many tattoos. “If they have no family, if they really have no family, they have no economy [economic prospects], no one to help, they can stay,” Gomez says.
Others are scared of threats, and the church provides a refuge. Becoming an evangelical Christian, however, is not a panacea for gang members looking to escape retaliation for previous acts of violence in general, though being a church member does afford some protection. Reformed gang members can still be targeted by rival gang factions and on occasion even by members of their own gang who are upset they have left too abruptly or think that they have converted to escape a debt or internal punishment.
Former gang members must never be seen wavering from their commitment to Christ. If a gang member is seen out hitting on women at a bar or drinking or doing drugs, anything that may give cause to suspect the commitment to living a pure lifestyle, it can set them up for a death sentence. There is also the matter of police, many of whom think once a gang member always a gang member, or who suspect anyone with tattoos as being an active member.
Because of this Gomez keeps all members of his church under strict rules. They are forbidden from doing anything that could put the church in jeopardy and make it appear as if he and his congregation are harboring active gang members. Any violation of the rules, and a gang member can be kicked out. He doesn’t blame anyone for being suspicious, either, but he knows in his heart they are on the right path.
“I used to love the gang, I used to say the gang was in my blood,” he says. “I used to hate MS-13. I used to think about destroying them, dropping a bomb on them like Hiroshima. But now, all I want to do is preach to them and tell them Jesus loves them.”
When Gomez converted, he says there were maybe only a few dozen members of 18th Street that had converted to Christianity. Now in the 18th street prison Gotera, there are upward of 1,000. “Something’s happening. Something is really happening,” he says with an incredulous chuckle. “I dream one day of having an area or a building where I can house both of them, where I could have MS-13 and 18th Street together worshipping the Lord without any restrictions, without any fear in their hearts.”
As I speak to Gomez, the former gang members are doing errands around the church’s common spaces, sweeping and mopping up the floors, cooking for one another, and getting ready for church services. It has the feel of a frat house, albeit one filled with well-behaved frat boys. Some are retiling the floor, others painting some of the walls. As the church service start draws near, those with more egregious tattoos apply makeup to cover their faces while others take out their nicest button-down shirts and iron them, stopping to apply cologne.
With the men joking around and laughing as they clean and get ready for the day, it’s hard to reconcile the scene with the knowledge of their crimes. What to make of the men here, or the converts in general? Some of whom have killed, not just killed in a war or for profit or shot a man in the head, but tortured, butchered, chopped up men into little pieces, and now tell you that he found love in Jesus and is a changed man? Men with 666 tattoos on their foreheads basting pastries, mopping floors, and smiling as they bring you coffee and ice cream cake to celebrate a roommate’s birthday? Is redemption even possible?
When the church service begins, a steady rain is pouring down. A warm-up band wails on electric guitars as their singer, dressed in emo fashion with windswept bangs, sings emotional pop-punk odes to Jesus. Men with full faces of tattoos sing along next to old grandmothers from the neighborhood. Wilfredo is nervously studying his notes for a sermon he will give. One former gang member holds his newborn baby in his tattooed forearms, a bandage over an eye that was shot. The bullet is still in there.
That night, Jorge Luis Migran is welcomed to the group. All the former gang members line up to shake his hand and welcome him to the flock. There are smiles and tears. He won’t have an easy time adjusting, but for now he looks to have escaped El Salvador’s vicious gang wars.
A few weeks later, a member of the program is gunned down right outside the church. The rumor is that it was a hit by MS-13. Later that month, another recently released convert is brought to the church.
*Some details, including the name of this Pastor, have been withheld for safety reasons.
***
Danny Gold is a journalist and documentary producer. He is a 2018 Pulitzer Center grantee for reporting on gangs in El Salvador.
Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.
When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.
Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.
So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.
Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”
By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.
The sun did not shine, but it was hot as hell the day a memorial stone was unveiled for bluesman Robert Johnson near a country crossroads outside Greenwood, Mississippi. About seventy-five people filled the tiny Mt. Zion church, a row of broadcast video cameras behind the back pew and a bank of lights illuminating a hoarse preacher as he praised a man who reputedly sold his soul to the devil.
There was no finality in setting the stone. The attention came fifty years too late, and even if his memory is more alive today than ever before, Johnson’s rightful heirs still have nothing but the name. This service was not about the body of the bluesman, which lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the vicinity; it was about the guitar-shaped wreath provided by Johnson’s current record label, and about the video bite that would be beamed into homes around the country that April 1991 evening.
South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks beating abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the United States Senate chamber, 1856. Lithograph by J.L. Magee. Getty Archive.
Bowie knives first appeared in the early republic after civilians stopped wearing swords. A sign of aristocracy, swords went out of fashion after the American and French Revolutions, and even British gentlemen stopped wearing them. Social pressures encouraged men to replace swords with concealed weapons, and changes in clothing accommodated this shift by introducing more pockets in men’s coats and pants. Sword canes and percussion pistols offered more discreet forms of self-defense, but sword canes took time to unsheathe and were brittle, while pistols were inaccurate and unreliable. After the sword became socially taboo, none of the period’s other weapons replaced its usefulness in a melee.
Such fracases flourished on the southwestern frontier. Slavery was predicated on violence, and white men resorted to physical brutality to assert their authority over blacks, women, children, and each other. A code of honor encouraged men to duel and feud over misunderstandings and insults. Unsettled territories like the Old Southwest fostered fighting because they lacked local law enforcement and efficient courts. If lawmen existed, they often belonged to feuding clans. No wonder people literally took matters into their own hands. Read more…
Every addict is a lawyer and my brother is no exception. On the first winter day that feels like spring, the boys next-door get too rowdy. Beer cans fall to the ground under a faint February sun. Frat boys slur-shout along to Drake and make my thin walls quake. I huff and puff, and I consider putting on my boots and crunching over through the melting snow to tell my neighbors I have a sick kid (“Will you please turn it down?”), but instead I pull my bathrobe tighter and text Hank. I feel like you know about noise complaints, I write.
Huh? he texts back.
I know it’s only 5:30 and a Saturday, but I’m trying to work on my thesis, I have a deadline, the undergrads next door are having a party. I’m about to cut their wires.
It’s not too early to call in a noise complaint, he writes. It just depends on how loud.
I thank Hank and call in my noise complaint, and as the sun goes down I screenshot our text exchange and go back to writing, as I always do, about him.
Every addict is a pharmacist and my brother is no exception. In June, our mother asks for Hank’s take on a new pain medication before allowing our youngest brother, struck by spina bifida in the womb, to be put on it. I am less inclined to take his advice when it comes to my own medication: “Xanax is as bad as a drink,” he says, and perhaps for him, that’s true. Like my mother, I go to Hank for his take on medicine in general, on how various pills may or may not interact with one another, even if I don’t always follow what he says. As an addict, he’s come to know the law, from its loopholes to its nooses, as intimately as he knows how ADHD meds mix with benzos, or how much vodka can steady withdrawal shakes until he can figure out his insurance for the hospital.
Every alcoholic is an addict, but not every alcoholic is taken seriously as such. I think about this every time I refer to Hank as an addict in conversation with others or on the page by myself: I think about this a lot. “Addict,” I say, and the faces of the people I’m speaking to grow still in sympathy; “alcoholic,” I say, and their faces are blank. The word alcoholic doesn’t mean much to them, or maybe it’s that the word alcoholic could mean anything. “I’m basically an alcoholic,” a man said to me once over drinks, laughing, and then frowning when I didn’t laugh too, when I stood up from my barstool and asked him if he was OK. It’s a joke, he said, you should joke more. But words matter to me, and that one matters in particular. Read more…
When eleven high school students went missing in a single county on Long Island in just two years, law enforcement shrugged. Most of the teenagers who disappeared were recent transplants from Central America, and many of them were last seen heading into the woods, lured by the promise of weed. The Suffolk County police department responded with stomach-churning indifference, telling frantic parents that their children had simply run away.
Hannah Dreier chronicles an upside-down world in which one boy’s mother – an envelope factory employee who speaks no English – is left to piece together what happened to her son. Based on more than 100 interviews and voluminous public records, Hannah Dreier’s storytelling is as vivid as it is effortless. She builds upon an accumulation of damning details — like the fact that one Spanish-speaking mother, whose son was murdered, had to pay a taxi driver to interpret for her at the police station. (“He kept the clock running and charged her $70,” Dreier writes.) “The Disappeared,” which was turned into an episode of This American Life, is a devastating work of both relentless reporting and empathy.
Michael A. Gonzales Contributor to Catapult, The Paris Review, and Longreads.
Fans of vintage New York crime stories will love Sarah Weinman’s brilliant Brooklyn-based tale, a sordid story that only gets worse the more you read. Weinman takes the reader into the mind and home of a con man named DeVernon LeGrand, a pretend preacher who kept a stable of women who dressed as nuns and begged on the streets. Of course, in true pimp fashion, LeGrand took most of their money. After moving his flock to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in 1966, things get worse for the crooked organization as it eventually becomes involved in kidnapping and murder. Although in the early 2000s I lived four blocks away from the scene of LeGrand’s various crimes for thirteen years, I had never heard of him or his house of pain and death until reading Weinman’s wonderfully written piece.
Jeff Maysh Contributor to The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Daily Beast. Author of The Spy with No Name.
I write about unusual heists from middle-America, so I was game for this Michigan lotto scam story from FOIA-bandit Jason Fagone. In crime writing it’s the characters who make for a good yarn, and I was all-in on this Mom and Pop who used brain-power to beat the system, and the odds.
Why actor Spyros Enotiades told his story to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee I don’t know (there must surely be a bounty on his head), but the storytelling was extraordinary. Undercover capers don’t get better than this.
Jayati Vora Managing editor at The Investigative Fund.
This photojournalistic investigation into how gun violence affects black communities explores how living with that violence can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just like experience with war can. But unlike with returning veterans, gun violence-plagued communities don’t get the funding or mental health resources to help them cope.
This is fantastic longform that embodies what I think social justice reportage should be today. It combines an under-heard, first-person voice with a gripping true story about one of the most crucial issues in America today, incarceration. Betts, who is a lawyer and a poet, also gives his tale an unexpected literary feel, with a comprehensive gloss on the sociology behind juvenile crime, prisons, jailhouse lawyers, and the limited social possibilities for ex-felons.
Omnipresence (Ann Neumann, Virginia Quarterly Review)
This multimedia criminal justice story is about how too-bright, all-night lighting in housing projects, and faulty design overall, contributes to a troubling level of surveillance in poorer communities under the guise of fighting crime. It makes something as basic as sleeping uncomfortable for thousands upon thousands of law-abiding citizens. I really like this story’s taxonomic, poetic style, as well as how architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella gives the story a more formalist visual valence than your typical housing piece.
In the book Popular Crime by Bill James, the author writes that the phrase “something terrible has happened” is “the best title ever for a crime book…those words turn the ‘crime story’ inside out by exposing the human beings standing on what otherwise appears to be a vast and grisly stage.”
We’re hardly ten percent of the way into the story in “Blood Cries Out” before someone uses those words to tell her husband that the unthinkable has occurred: there’s been a murder right across the road. And the vast and grisly stage? Small-town Chillicothe, Missouri, where two men have amicably farmed the same land for years, until one of them wakes up in the middle of the night with a bullet in his face and his wife dead beside him. The wounded man initially suspects his daughter’s abusive boyfriend, but then changes his story and accuses his farming partner, and then his farming partner’s son, which results in the sort of twisty and utterly corrupt legal process worthy of Making a Murderer part three.
The piece is full of letters and depositions and secret meetings and a lot of paperwork, but on occasion, it vibrates with poignantly biblical/Americana-esque undertones, from the title (plucked from Genesis) to lines like, “[the victim’s] murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, [the innocent man’s] conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land.”
I published a book and wrote a lot of my own pieces in 2018 — including one for this site — so, oddly, I didn’t keep as good track of longform reporting produced by others (podcasts, however, that’s a different story, but this is Longreads, not Longlistens). But I keep returning to Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil” because it makes fresh a story long consigned to easy tropes. Marshall, who also co-hosts the stellar podcast You’re Wrong About… and is one of my favorite true crime writers, gives voice to the myriad of women and girls Bundy murdered, shows him as something far less than an evil mastermind, and demonstrates why, with particular clarity, “the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.”
When Americans think of “the border” as a narrow and specific line, we neglect the legal reality that the term actually applies to a border zone, a much larger halo covering up to 100 air miles from any U.S. land or coastal boundary. The zone touches parts of 38 states, covering 10 in their entirety — and within that wide rim, anyone can be subjected to a warrantless search at any time. In this signature longform reality check, Melissa del Bosque digs into the history of how Congress vested U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with alarming, far-reaching powers to search and detain even long-term residents who’ve never committed a crime at surprise, “suspicionless” checkpoints.
In a series of sweet, anonymous snapshots, Shiho Fukada talks to and photographs a growing cohort of Japanese seniors: “otherwise law-abiding elderly women” who have found a solution to the loneliness of aging in the reliable comforts of prison. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior, Fukada reports, and 90 percent of them are arrested for shoplifting. From the simple things they steal (rice, cold medicine, a frying pan) to the circumstances they’re trying to escape (bedridden or violent spouses, invisibility, loss, and financial strain), the details of this story make structural inadequacies to meet the unmet social and healthcare needs of an aging population all too clear.
Adam Boffa | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,324 words)
The oil industry in the U.S. has had a busy few years. In North Dakota alone, barrel production increased more than tenfold between 2005 and 2015. The state’s daily oil barrel output surged from a low of 90,000, and within a decade it was consistently producing over one million barrels of oil per day. A majority of this oil was extracted via fracking, a controversial practice linked to a litany of harmful health and environmental effects. But if there were to be a public reckoning with fracking’s dangers in North Dakota, it would have to overcome steep challenges. A recent collection of research on the oil boom includes Sebastian Braun’s account of how pro-fracking sentiment, propped up by corporate lobbyists (like the American Legislative Exchange Council) and others who stand to gain, is so strong in the state that, during a speech at an energy conference, the audience didn’t bat an eye when a presenter likened EPA regulation to terrorism. Braun, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of American Indian Studies at Iowa State University, alleges that this lobbyist-generated atmosphere of consensus is hostile to local researchers investigating topics including air and water quality. Another study in the collection by Ann Reed, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at ISU, points to the oil industry’s spending on “community outreach initiatives” within the state, funds which it disperses in order to establish a positive reputation for itself (and, as a side effect, make some citizens feel pressured to stay quiet about their apprehensions regarding the industry’s practices). As of 2018, the state continues to set daily oil production records.
It’s not just North Dakota, of course. Similar efforts helped silence debates around fracking, pollution, and renewable resources in the lead-up to this year’s elections in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona, eventually helping defeat reform initiatives in those states. But these are only regional instances of the broader, global trend of the suppression of research and stifling of public discussion on the impacts of fossil fuel extraction. The most significant example probably involves Shell and ExxonMobil, who studied and documented the catastrophic effects of climate change decades ago but kept their findings confidential and, in ExxonMobil’s case, funded denialist campaigns and anti-regulatory efforts based on false information. While the public spent years fruitlessly debating the legitimacy of climate science, oil giants obscured evidence, promoted research amenable to their interests, and kept drilling, happy to make hay while the warming sun shone. Read more…
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