On a Monday you receive devastating news, and you’re immediately surrounded by people who encourage you to rage about the effects of racism, classism, male domination, and fat oppression so you don’t take it out on yourself or anybody else. Then you somehow manage to hold it together on Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Thursday you become invisible because people ignore large, opinionated, and strident Chicanas unwilling to hide the big ugly cry to defy social norms that require us to pretend all is well. Then the bat call you sent by email works and the coven of smart women gather around a bounty of hot falafel and French fries to help you pull yourself together and think clearly. On Friday you squeeze in a weekend trip to El De Efe because you’re not allowed to take extra time off work so you can soak in your people and heal because—you know: the work. You take the trail of Mexican rice on the jet way as a sign that things are looking up. It takes you two hours to get through customs because there are only three agents tending to hordes of foreigners while Mexican nationals sail through, and though it’s a pain, you celebrate your people’s passive aggressive resistance against wall-loving USers. Then you’re wracked with guilt because the man who’s giving you a ride to the workshop site waited on you for three hours but you both have so much fun that you miss a turn and before you know it you’re headed to Cuernavaca. You arrive after midnight and a group of people you’ve come to love and others you will soon fall in love with are waiting to welcome you though they’re exhausted. Then you can’t sleep because the city and her people miraculously lift the funk you’ve been carrying around all week. On Saturday morning your phone goes wonky and you’re forced to disconnect from your life in the belly of the beast como le llamó Fidel a los Estados Unidos and then you spend the rest of the weekend sweating about how to undo the effects of capitalism on your brain by thinking about your relationship to money and consumption and hear how colonization and capitalism require your greed to operate. Then you’re asked to be honest about what you love about capitalism. You’re assigned to work with a team of interpreters who promote language liberation on the daily, and they teach you to say ‘arrejúntate’ or ‘arrenálgate’. Then you plan a gathering of Chicanx to consider how we’ve been raised as white and to aspire to whiteness and how that perpetuates white supremacy and you break a sweat because you know you’re right. Then it takes you twelve hours to get home because—you know: the climate—but you don’t mind too much because you’re traveling with a lovely comrade and compare yarn fibers with the guy next to you who knits while you crochet. You finally get home after midnight on Sunday, a week after you got that horrible news, and you can’t sleep because you’ve got to get up and face everything, but then you remember you get to lead a violence prevention training where you’ll spend three days with colleagues you adore flexing your intelligence and connection muscles. You take a breath and you remember your gaggle of family members and friends, the coven of smart women, and los inquietos y las malhabladas you’ve made a home with. Then as shitty as things are you’re able to exhale because—you know: there’s the love, always the love
Image Credits: the real duluoz
