Politics

The blackout has left me with time to reflect on my Texas childhood. A daughter of immigrants, white-washed and shamed for my brownness and non-compliance to the Texas Way, this blackout has ignited an anger I've felt for most of my life. The failure of Texas goes beyond wifi. It is a failure of ethos.

In the past five months, incidents of women getting threatened, hurt, or killed at their American workplaces appeared on national news. On November 12, the NY Post outed a paramedic as a sex worker, resulting in a barrage of threats. The exposure also jeopardized her job. On January 6, we saw Congresswomen hide in their offices in lockdown while gallows were being erected for them outside their work building. On March 16, we learned that six women in Atlanta were killed when a mass shooter came into their place of work. It’s clear from these incidents that the prestige, location, or salary of a woman’s job has no bearing on how safe she is at work. When society normalizes gender-based violence in the home, it also normalizes gender-based violence in the workplace.

What makes the accusations against Matt Gaetz so plausible is the ubiquity of men like him. Many of them work for state, like my former coworker John William Gunde, a high school teacher arrested for sex with a minor, currently on paid administrative leave.

A young Black person is ticketed and almost arrested for jaywalking by a maskless cop who believes his helmet will protect him from covid-19. Meanwhile down the street, a white woman operates a dine-in restaurant against the law, with 22 citations from the city and gas bootlegged from a neighboring apartment building. Jasmin Roberts explores the highly uneven and racialized application of the law in Long Beach.

I’ve only been out of work for 11 days at this point. Yet I awake each morning to an attached PDF, an embedded link, or a “heads up” on some new job. Through the morning haze, it’s typically the first alert I see on my phone. For some asinine reason, everyone finds grounding in their […]

Elitist sandwich expert and NYTimes columnist David Brooks writes that the desire of public school teachers not to die of covid is a disaster for children. Myriam Gurba disagrees.

David Frum warns Democrats not to give residency to Latinx frontline workers. Don't listen. Biden’s immigration policy as voter enfranchisement: a coalition of Latinx voters and newly naturalized citizens will be the next Georgia swing

It's no secret that the US has long undermined self-governance in Latin America while pretending to be the greatest exporter of democracy in human history. I recall an aphorism attributed to Porfirio Diíaz, "Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States." With that lens, I see this coup attempt as evidence of how weak US institutions, beliefs, and democracy truly are.

Using the word "brave" exalts certain traumatized people as heroic and casts others as failures. All victims of assault deserve to have their experiences dignified with validation, not just those who earn it through "bravery."

The classroom is where many white women may mimic the power of a strongman and the power asymmetry widens when a white teacher is placed in charge of a racially minoritized class of students.

“Are you Black?” my first crush, a white boy, asked me as we played together in the sandbox at school. I wasn’t sure. I thought of my nickname “negrita” but I didn’t know how to explain that I’m the darkest in my family or why it seemed perfectly natural to be identified by my pigmentation. When I couldn’t answer, he ran away from me.

In the same way that I believe the protests must riot and must loot and must burn shit down, I believe we have a right to defend ourselves. Not just to defend ourselves, I believe we have a right to riot and loot and burn shit down when it comes to these fucking fascist predatory fucks who are in home and on the street.