http://www.atlandsedge.com/research/

‍at land’s edge was an autonomous and unaffiliated pedagogical platform based in East and South Los Angeles that centered people of color, immigrants, the poor, the undocumented, and the indigenous. It was founded in 2015 and active until 2018. During this time, dozens of artists, scholars, and activists collaborated to mentor, support and develop cultural production that focused on radical political imagination and solidarity.

at land’s edge was founded by Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), and its co-organizers over the years included: Irina Contreras, Sandra de la Loza, Yasmine Diaz, Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), Gloria Galvez, Jen Hofer, Andre Keichian, Gelare Khosgozaran, B. Neimeth, Shruti Purkayastha, Rose G. Salseda, Weng San Sit, Penelope Uribe-Abee, Yajaira Villareal, and Suné Woods.

You gave them your songs and your speeches, and what did you get? A generation of parrots singing your America and The Star-Spangled Banner, thinking it’s their country they are singing about. . . . Watch out when they get their independence after this war. They’ll drive all of us away. They’ll try to unlearn everything, almost everything, you have taught them, even the language you have tried to force down their throats.

From Bienvenido N. Santos, The Volcano, published by New Day Publishers, Quezon City, Philippines (1986)

Every time [Imelda] said East she turned her head one way and every time she said West she turned the other East, West, East, West, and then we turned ours with hers, until we were dizzy, and stifling yawns. “The Philippines,” she said, “was ideally positioned to play the go-between for the East and the West, because it was neither one nor the other, but both.” She often used “I” when she meant the Philippines, and “the Philippines” when she meant I.
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Excerpt of “Chapter 27: Imelda,” from Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, published by HarperCollins, New York (1990).

Catholic nuns from the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception help form the first line of defense against Marcos troops on EDSA Boulevard, two miles from the headquarters of anti-Marcos leaders. Religious leaders were a key part of the “People Power” revolt that brought down Marcos on February 24, 1986. (Photo: © Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley/Kim Komenich)

The history of U.S. imperialism constitutes a particularly important site for understanding the subjectivity and self-activity of Filipinos. It created cultural, military, economic, and political ties between the United States and the Philippines, inaugurating, in E. San Juan, Jr.’s words, “this long, weary, torturous exodus from the periphery to the metropolis with no end in sight.” U.S. imperialism also transformed the Philippines into a major source of cheap labor and raw materials, paving the way for the incorporation of Filipinos within circuits of global capital. In short, U.S. imperialism set in motion a process that structures the lives of Filipinos today, a process that reaches into their lives, “not so much like a shadow as like a chain.”

. . . .

The historical amnesia surrounding U.S. imperialism has proven to be deeply consequential not just for the United States but also for those colonized by the nation. For Filipinos, it has come to mean grappling with the “spectre of invisibility” themselves, precisely because a full accounting of their presence necessitates a full accounting of a largely unthinkable history. Just as the notion of the United States as an empire has not fared well in dominant U.S. historiography, neither has the notion of Filipinos as colonized subjects. Within standard historical accounts, for example, Filipinos have all but disappeared, as evidenced by the erasure of the Philippine-American War and Filipino insurgency against U.S. imperial rule; if Filipinos appear at all, it is usually as objects of derision—savages unfit for self-government, economic threats displacing white labor, sexual deviants obsessed with white women, or ungrateful recipients of U.S. beneficence.

Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr., “Introduction, Critical Considerations,” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia (2006).

Excerpted lecture by Trinh T. Minh-ha (with an introduction by Litia Perta) at 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA, April 21, 2016. Presented in conjunction with a screening of Trinh’s film Reassemblage (1982, 40 min), the program opened Just Speak Nearby: The Politics & Practices of Art Writing, a two-day series of dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that explored the possibilities of art writing. Participants included Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), Simon Leung, Tisa Bryant, among others. Organized by Litia Perta.

Untitled (Lesbian Bed #7), 2002, Tammy Rae Carland

Tammy Rae lived in Durham, North Carolina (where I met her) and taught at UNC Chapel Hill before moving to California in 2002 to teach at CCA, where she met Gina Osterloh. Both Gina and I attended UC Irvine for graduate school at the advice of Tammy Rae, where we met.
-Hồng-Ân Trương

https://wexarts.org/blog/paper-tiger-box-and-1991

Paper Tiger Television was founded in 1981 as an experimental community media organization that believed that access to methods of communication production was essential to democracy. Innovating video art and the use of public access television, Paper Tiger challenged narratives driven by mainstream media through collaborative videos made by artists, activists, and scholars.

The Chinese Staff and Workers Association was founded in 1979 by a few Chinese restaurant workers and workers from other industries in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York who felt they needed a framework that would push the boundaries of the traditional union model for organizing workers. As the first workers’ center in the U.S., they organize based on the principle that workers can direct their own organizations and that the traditional union movement tends to further its own organizational goals and thus remains static, upholding hegemonic practices rather than pushing for fundamental systemic change. Today CSWA is a direct membership organization of over 2,000 members who work across various trades and industries, building coalitions with other labor organizations to fight for legal and human rights in the workplace and in the community more broadly. CSWA has had many victories for workers over the years, including winning a $1.1 million judgement against one of Chinatown’s most prominent restaurants, Jing Fong, in 1997, and the Chinese Staff vs. The City of New York case in 1986, when the CSWA sued the city for approving Henry Street Tower, a high-rise luxury condo. https://cswa.org/

In 1980, workers at the Silver Palace restaurant in Chinatown, led by the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, successfully pressured their bosses for a forty-hour work week with overtime pay, payment of the minimum wage, health insurance and other benefits. The Silver Palace became the first unionized restaurant in Chinatown.

Photos courtesy of the CSWA Archives

Image caption:
ILGWU members march through Chinatown to urge the remaining shops to sign the new contract, following the rally on July 15, 1982. Photo courtesy of The Kheel Center ILGWU Collection, Cornell University

The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society – that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

David Graeber

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. ‘The condition of black life is one of mourning,’ she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movement, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.
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From Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning”
June 22, 2015

Psychoanalysis teaches us that the dyadic deadlock of the imaginary domain — you versus me, black versus white — is resolved and subsumed in the symbolic realm only through an analytic third, through symbolization, triangulation, and the emergence of proper social relations. Bringing together these insights with whiteness as property and other scholarship from critical race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies provides a critical foundation to explore how race as relation can be extended for a comparative analysis of the history of the Asian American subject in regard to the subject of history. The model minority myth and the middleman thesis — of the Asian indentured servant as social buffer between the black slave and the white colonial master — exemplify some of the long-standing patterns by which the figures of the Asian immigrant and colonial laborer have historically triangulated black-white power dynamics globally.

From David Eng & Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC (2019)

Chinese Joss House at Weaverville, California, 1905 © Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
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In the late 1800s and early 1900s more than 2000 Chinese immigrants lived and worked in Weaverville as gold miners, cooks, builders, and loggers. Their community encompassed two blocks, including the Joss house, the oldest in America, and one of two remaining Chinese-built, rammed-earth structures in California.

“The Chinese Must Go, But Who Keeps Them?” 11 May 1878 by George Frederick Keller for The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp. © Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Chinese immigrants first arrived in the U.S. in the 1850s as laborers to work in the gold mines and on the transcontinental railroads, which they were instrumental in building. They eventually also took agricultural and factory work, especially in the garment industry. From the beginning of their arrival, Chinese immigrants experienced racial discrimination in every aspect of life. While industrial employers were eager for their cheap labor, they were scapegoated and blamed for social and economic decline. Racist propaganda proliferated in popular magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. Waves of violence against Chinese led to massacres, the burning down of Chinatowns, and forced migrations within the U.S. The Workingman’s Party of California, formed in 1877 to sanction legislative discrimination. Their slogan was “The Chinese must go!”

Surely the term expulsion doesn’t fully represent the rage and violence of these purges. What occurred along the Pacific coast, from the gold rush through the turn of the century, was ethnic cleansing. The Chinese called the roundups in the Pacific Northwest pai hua—the Driven Out.

From Driven out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer, published by the University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2008

Some reasons for Chinese Exclusion, Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Cooliesm, Which Shall Survive? (Washington D.C.: American Foundation of Labor, 1902)
© photo © Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

In many hostile towns, the Chinese refused to sell their vegetables, starving white households and hotels of fresh food. In the summer of 1883, Chinese workers in Shasta County declared a general strike. In Truckee they formed their own fire brigades. In Amador County they organized an armed militia of more than fifty members to protect themselves. They mutinied on the American slave ship the Norway. In Monterey and San Jose, they flatly refused to leave. Elsewhere they returned laundry, neatly folded but still dirty. In 1893, answering the call of red posters that were pasted on walls, gates, and barns from California to New York, 110,000 Chinese people refused to wear photo-identity cards required by the U.S. government to verify their immigration status. They paid for this mass civil disobedience with lynchings, night raids, and deportation.
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From Driven out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer, published by the University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2008

To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian Americans and other people of color remain unattainable, processes of assimilation are suspended, conflicted, and unresolved. The irresolution of this process places the concept of assimilation within a melancholic framework. Put otherwise, mourning describes a finite process that might be reasonably aligned with the popular myth of the American “melting pot” for dominant Western European ethnic groups whose various differences are legally, socially, and psychically forged into an ideal of whiteness. In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might usefully describe the compromised immigration and assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. The suspended assimilation, the inability to blend into the American melting pot, suggests that for Asian Americans ideals of whiteness are perpetually strained — continually estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.

From David Eng & Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC (2019)

In other words, the racial subject does not just speak against objectification or rail against stereotypes. In a profound sense, he or she is already constituted and spoken through, indeed subjected to, the compromised racial language and history of an inherited culture — of  race as relation and whiteness as property. Psychoanalysis insists that we are born into a world of others, that language precedes us, and that symbolic representations indexing a history of cultural norms and prohibitions frame our entrance to and existence in the world. Psychoanalysis thus alerts us to the fact that our agency is compromised and our will is limited from the beginning, that we are pregiven to and dependent on others, and that any assertion of an autonomous (racial) subjectivity, authenticity, or agency is an illusion already marked by and channeled through an otherness that will never translate into full psychic independence or social resistance. The racial subject, like any other subject, can speak only in and through a long history of prior race relations.
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From David Eng & Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC (2019)

Persistence of Vision with Gwendolyn BrooksBy Solmas Sharif

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/76976/persistence-of-vision-with-gwendolyn-brooksf

The text body-cry-hand-mother-life is a text which, decentralized, divests itself of Presence and circulates like a gift. In order for a life to sustain another life, the hand should have the right touch—neither disengaged nor possessive—or the "author" should let herself be traversed by the other (“a relationship between 'pierre' and 'je'; between 'pierreje' and 'pierge' or 'vierge'and 'verge' ...”) without trying to seize it, catch it or suffocate it by her presence, should be sufficiently "rich in humility, inflexible enough in tenderness to be no one" like an apple or a rose, "being pure joy before all naming" (Vivre l'orange, pp. 41, 37 [40, 36]; italics mine): "The one who lives totally for others, the one who lives his or her own generosity gives, even if his/her life takes place in the secrecy of a cell. Living is a gift so great that thousands of people profit from each life lived" (Passion, p. 188). One can in fact recognize the relationship "between' tirer' [shoot] and 'atteindre' [reach] or 'eteindre' [extinguish], and between 'eteindre' and 'tuer' [kill]; and between 'tueur' [killer] and 'tuteur' [tutor]." Living without enslaving (oneself), is to understand the flight of "plusje" [morethanI] and of the "pluieje d'oeufs" [I-rain of eggs] necessary for any liberation. "There are in the heart," says Artaud, "more than ten thousand beings: and I is nothing but one being.”  De/personalization or non-obstruction is not loss; it allows the emergence of possible being:

Finally, finally my envelope had actually burst and without boundaries. I was. From not being. I was. To the end of what I was not; for "I" is only one of the momentary spasms of the world. (Passion, p. 199)

In her own name she would have died of asphyxia. But once emerged trom the membrane of self. spread out unto all the ways, coming to dwell at the brink of all sources. (Vivre l'orange, p. 37 [36])

Transcendance of the (un)known opens out onto an limitless field. Everything remains to be done. From Trinh T. Minh-ha’s When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, published by Routledge, London (1991)

which orientation with sea
by Nhã Thuyên
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translated by Kaitlin Reesshe gives me a sense of place to go back to, your voice from last night flickering at the edge of my ear as two strangers together are finding their way to the sea, as if just she and no one else would lead the way, though whoever she is i don’t know, a vague pronoun, a distant presence, a gentle reminder, she’s never yet here, and more, is not here now, just she alone no one else knowing the way, google maps’ three hour walk from the hotel just a cheap trick is all, don’t worry, we’ll get to sea before dawnbreak in time to admire the sun, since the sky was still its velvety grey, stone paths still with untouched dew while half-closed horse’s eyes dream the wooden clomping of colonial hooves, while three-wheeled motos cast their gaze on a soundless bell tower, while death quiet windows hold traces of the ancient castle and sleepless morning stars, while gravestones pale the moon, my strange blind hand opens ready and is clasped in someone’s grip, as if that stranger were locating me in a possible place, a possible relation between me and sea, a possibility of sea, will be the sea before dawn breaks, will sun, the reasoning of eager steps, the breath of sea is rousing, the sea must be somewhere here, behind this slope, beneath that hill, left of me, right of me, on me, beneath me, surfacing me, descending me, facing me, far back behinding me, out yonder distancing me, right there alongsiding me, i’m backing to sea the way a cast away child hungers for home, i’m getting to sea as a city dweller thirsts for wild winds, i’m going to sea with the heart of a sailor, i’m coming out to sea with the kids who greet fishing boats, i’m entering into sea as a sleepwalker enters the abyss, i’m surfacing sea with deep dwelling mermaids, i’m descending sea following the steps of mountain goats, i stir bewilderment into my navigation by envisioning other possible relations with sea, other possibilities of sea, but the sea must be somewhere here, behind this slope, beneath that hill, left of me, right of me, on me, beneath me, surfacing me, descending me, facing me, far back behinding me, out yonder distancing me, right there alongsiding me, the breath of sea is rousing up a fragrance, now i need to know if i want to enter in or come out, be back or get to, surface or descend, if i step with the feet of homecoming or with the heart of a sailor, carrying dreams or street dust, as a guest who envisions belonging, who calls for tremendous immensity yet still dreads the strange water strange people, which sea is foreign, which people familiar, i reveal to you dear, in my land no one relishes in crossing the sea, plain no two ways about it, i reveal to you dear that i am here stricken with tremendous-immensity-indecision, a rare disease, scared and more wanting, shy and more electrifying, you must be somewhere here, behind this slope, beneath that hill, left of me, right of me, on me, beneath me, surfacing me, descending me, facing me, far back behinding me, out yonder distancing me, right there alongsiding me, the breath of you is rousing, now i need to know if i want to enter in or come out, be back or get to, surface or descend, approach or distance, be left or right of, be horizontal or vertical to, my feet still wanting, the firmament’s feet still there, illusory pedestal of sky, the horizontal line shaping the sea, the intercepting fence where tremendous immensity pivots, the innocent indicator of direction, the firmament’s feet still there, feet with an endless dream of moving while still fixed, the horizon sustains me upright, the horizon cuts me crosswise, the horizon fences me from falling into that further tremendous immensity, the firmament’s feet like my feet on earth’s surface, like my feet teetering on sea’s surface, a mattress teetering on waves, salt hunting skin, wind snapping face, the firmament’s feet still there, proper orientation, sure enough, she gives me a sense of place to be back to, she’s magically deceptive, or google maps’ not just a cheap trick after all, will come out to sea, enter into sea, get to sea, descend sea, surface sea, go to sea, be back to sea, be back with tremendous immensity, will sea before dawn breaks in time to admire the sun, i have seen the line at the bottom of sky crack glimmers of clear light, i pulse with tremendous-immensity-indecision, scared and more wanting, shy and more electrifying, the fear of not having a place to go back to is nothing compared to the fear of vanishing in the middle of that place, the angst of not being able to get to a tremendous immensity doesn’t touch that of being in the middle of tremendous immensity, getting to sea before dawnbreak causes much less misery than trying to resolve my relation with sea, to ease the heart, i should fabricate a bed out of sea, build a house out of tremendous immensity, even if the sea is just one tremendous immensity shredded on a map of belligerent corporations, am i in my region or your region, foreign waters familiar people, foreign people familiar waters, i have seen the line at the bottom of sky crack glimmers of clear light, i lift my gaze, your voice breaks across my ear, all at once a tremendous immensity is slit, i fear a false orientation, a misorientation with sea getting to river, my tremendous-immensity-indecision rises to a peak then softly shatters, facing me a river tiny as a stream, water choked with garbage glistening, google maps one huge cheap trick, or it’s the illusion of her disorienting me, making me non-orientational, in time for dawnbreak, tremendous immensity must be somewhere here still, behind this slope, beneath that hill, left of me, right of me, on me, beneath me, surfacing me, descending me, facing me, far back behinding me, out yonder distancing me, right there alongsiding me, the breath of tremendous immensity is rousing up a fragrance, now i need to know if i want to enter in or come out, be back or get to, surface or descend, approach or distance, be left or right of, be horizontal or vertical to, my feet still wanting, the firmament’s feet still there, the sun on whichever side it rises is still the sun, she whoever she is i don’t know, a vague pronoun, a distant presence, she gives me a sense of place to be back to, she gives me the illusion of proper orientation, who knows if this sea has ever been real, or if it has died, dried, began, concluded, had an orientation and was a disorientation, she had been the place to be back to and had been tremendously immense, two strangers have come out to sea, entered into sea, gotten to sea, descended sea, surfaced sea, gone to sea, been back to sea, or are still teetering on the bed entering into the abyss, still last night’s bed, the strange blind hands opened ready and clasped in someone else’s, teetering sea dream comes when the window cracks glimmers of clear harsh and dazzling light that ruptures the tremendous immensity of a black night, and i burst out laughing, hopeless, radiant, feral, i made it in time to break dawn surfacing the sea, i missed the time to break dawn surfacing the sea, in my ear, your voice still flickering, she gives me a sense of place to be back to, and i release myself into disorientation, tremendous immensity, but in fact, is that sense necessary?* “bottom of sky” is the literal translation of “chân trời,” which is commonly understood to be the horizon. With “chân” comes the concept of a base, directly referring to the leg or the foot, so that the space of the sky is seemingly standing on, held up by, this line.

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hướng nào với biển

‍nàng cho tôi cảm giác một chốn về, tiếng người đêm qua chờn vờn bên tai khi hai kẻ lạ cùng tìm lối biển, như thể chính nàng chứ không ai khác sẽ dẫn hướng, dù nàng là ai tôi đâu hay, một đại từ mờ, một hiện diện xa, một nhắc khẽ, nàng chưa từng nơi này, càng không giây khắc này, chính nàng chứ không ai khác biết lối, bản đồ google hơn ba giờ cuốc bộ từ khách sạn chỉ là trò nhảm, đừng lo, mình sẽ tới biển trước rạng đông để kịp ngắm mặt trời, đã từ lúc trời mìn mịt, những lối sỏi nguyên sương mắt ngựa lim dim mơ tiếng gõ móng dập dồn thuộc địa, những xe điện ba bánh ngó gác chuông câm, những ô cửa lặng phắc ủ dấu lâu đài cổ lọt vào những ngôi sao thức muộn, những ô mộ nhợt trăng, bàn tay tôi mù loà lạ lẫm mở sẵn và lọt thỏm trong kẻ khác, như thể chính kẻ lạ ấy đang định vị tôi một nơi chốn khả thể, một khả thể quan hệ của tôi với biển, một khả thể biển, sẽ là biển trước rạng đông, sẽ mặt trời, lý do của những bước chân ham, hơi biển đang lên, biển hẳn đâu đây, đằng sau con dốc này, dưới ngọn đồi kia, trái tôi, phải tôi, trên tôi, dưới tôi, lên tôi, xuống tôi, trước mặt tôi, sau hút tôi, xa tít tắp tôi, kề cạnh tôi, tôi về biển theo cách đứa con lang thèm quê nhà, tôi tới biển như khách phố khát gió dại, tôi đi biển bằng trái tim thuỷ thủ, tôi ra biển cùng trẻ con ngóng thuyền chài, tôi vào biển kẻ mộng du vào thăm thẳm, tôi lên biển cùng thuỷ thần từ đáy nước, tôi xuống biển theo bước sơn dương, tôi tự gây rối phương hướng bằng mường tượng những khả thể quan hệ tôi với biển khác nữa, những khả thể biển khác nữa, dù biển hẳn đâu đây, đằng sau con dốc này, dưới ngọn đồi kia, trái tôi, phải tôi, trên tôi, dưới tôi, lên tôi, xuống tôi, trước mặt tôi, sau hút tôi, xa tít tắp tôi, kề cạnh tôi, hơi biển ngát lên, giờ tôi cần biết tôi muốn vào hay ra, về hay tới, lên hay xuống, tôi đang bước chân kẻ hồi hương hay trái tim thuỷ thủ, tôi mang mộng mị hay bụi phố phường, làm khách biển mà tưởng quê nhà, đòi mênh mông mà vẫn bồn chồn lạ nước lạ người, biển nào lạ, người nào quen, tôi giãi bày người ơi, xứ tôi không ai mặn mà vượt biển, cực chẳng đã thôi, tôi giãi bày người ơi tôi mắc chứng lưỡng lự trước mênh mông, một căn bệnh lạ, sợ thêm ham, e dè thêm háo hức, người hẳn đâu đây, đằng sau con dốc này, dưới ngọn đồi kia, trái tôi, phải tôi, trên tôi, dưới tôi, lên tôi, xuống tôi, trước mặt tôi, sau hút tôi, xa tít tắp tôi, kề cạnh tôi, hơi người đang lên, giờ tôi cần biết tôi muốn vào hay ra, về hay tới, lên hay xuống, gần hay xa, trái hay phải, ngang hay dọc, chân tôi vẫn ham, chân trời vẫn đó, bệ đỡ ảo tưởng của trời, nét kẻ ngang tạo hình biển, rào chắn làm điểm tựa giữa mênh mông, dấu chỉ nỗi ngây thơ phương hướng, chân trời vẫn đó, chân trời mơ bất tận dịch chuyển mà vẫn vững vàng, chân trời nâng tôi, xẻ ngang tôi, chân trời rào chắn tôi khỏi ngã phía mênh mông xa hơn nữa, chân trời như chân tôi trên mặt đất, như chân tôi chồng chềnh mặt biển, tấm nệm chồng chềnh sóng, muối mặn săn da, gió biển táp mặt, chân trời vẫn đó, đã đúng hướng, quả thế, nàng cho tôi cảm giác một chốn về, nàng huyễn hoặc kì diệu, hay bản đồ google không hẳn trò nhảm, sẽ ra biển, vào biển, tới biển, xuống biển, lên biển, đi biển, về biển, về với mênh mông, sẽ biển trước rạng đông để kịp ngắm mặt trời, tôi đã thấy đường chân trời rạn những tia sáng rỡ, tôi đập rộn chứng lưỡng lự trước mênh mông, sợ thêm ham, rụt rè thêm háo hức, nỗi sợ không chốn về chẳng đáng kể gì nỗi sợ mất hút giữa chốn về, lo âu không tới được mênh mông đâu bằng ở giữa mênh mông, tới được biển trước rạng đông đâu làm tôi khốn đốn bằng việc xác định quan hệ của tôi với biển, để yên lòng, tôi sẽ phải nguỵ tạo biển thành giường, lấy mênh mông làm nhà, cả khi biển chỉ là một mênh mông bị cắt vụn trên bản đồ của các tập đoàn hùng hổ, tôi đang ở xứ tôi hay xứ người, nước lạ người quen, nước quen người lạ, tôi đã thấy đường chân trời rạn những tia sáng rỡ, tôi ngước nhìn lên, tiếng người vỡ bên tai, một mênh mông xé toạc bất thần, e mình đã sai hướng, đã lạc hướng biển tới sông, chứng lưỡng lự trước mênh mông của tôi dâng lên rồi vỡ toác ra nhẹ bẫng, trước mặt tôi dòng sông nhỏ như suối, nước lấp loá rác rến, bản đồ google một trò nhảm khủng, hay chính huyễn ảo nàng lạc hướng tôi, làm tôi vô hướng, đã kịp rạng đông, nỗi mênh mông hẳn vẫn đâu đây, đằng sau con dốc này, dưới ngọn đồi kia, trái tôi, phải tôi, trên tôi, dưới tôi, lên tôi, xuống tôi, trước mặt tôi, sau hút tôi, xa tít tắp tôi, kề cạnh tôi, hơi mênh mông ngát lên, giờ tôi chỉ cần biết tôi muốn vào hay ra, về hay tới, lên hay xuống, gần hay xa, trái hay phải, ngang hay dọc, chân tôi vẫn ham, chân trời vẫn đó, mặt trời lên phía nào cũng vẫn mặt trời, nàng là ai tôi đâu hay, một đại từ mờ, một hiện diện xa, nàng cho tôi cảm giác một chốn về, nàng huyễn tôi tưởng mình đúng hướng, biết đâu biển này chưa từng có thực, hay đã chết, đã hết, đã từng bắt đầu, đã từng kết thúc, đã từng có hướng và đã vô hướng, nàng đã chốn về và nàng đã mênh mông, hai kẻ lạ đã ra biển, vào biển, tới biển, đi biển, lên biển, xuống biển, về biển, hay vẫn trên chiếc giường chồng chềnh vào thăm thẳm, vẫn chiếc giường đêm qua, những bàn tay mù loà lạ lẫm mở sẵn và lọt thỏm trong kẻ khác, chồng chềnh giấc mơ biển đến khi cửa sổ rạn lên những tia sáng rỡ chói gắt làm vỡ toác nỗi mênh mông của đêm đen, và tôi bật cười, tuyệt vọng, chói loà, hoang dại, tôi đã kịp rạng đông lên biển, tôi đã lỡ rạng đông lên biển, bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn, nàng cho tôi cảm giác một chốn về, và tôi thả tôi vào vô hướng, mênh mông, thực thì, người có cần cảm giác đó chăng?

Not me sold out my people but they me. Malinali Tenepat, or Malintzin, has become known as la Chingada—the fucked one. She has become the bad word that passes a dozen times a dayfrom the lips of Chicanos. Whore, prostitute, the woman who sold out her people to the Spaniards are epithets Chicanos spit out with contempt.
The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer. We, indias y mestizas,  police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her.  Male culture has done a good job on us. Son los costumbres que traicionan. La india en mí es la sombra: La Chingada, Tlazolteotl,  Coatlicue. Son elias que oyemos lamentando a sus hijas perdidas.

From Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, by Gloria Anzaldúa, published by aunt lute books, San Francisco, California (1987)

Asian-Americans have long been used by mainstream white culture to shame and drive a wedge against other minority groups.

They are always caught in a no-win position between whites and Black Americans. They are thought to be “white adjacent,” but of course they can never belong to the club. They are persistently racialized, yet they often don’t count in the American racial equation. The central, though often unspoken, question underlying all of this is: Are Asian-Americans injured, or injured enough, to deserve our national attention?

To ask this question is to reveal something about how this country thinks about a racial calculus based on damage and hierarchy.…

I think of James Baldwin’s words “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”

When it comes to Asian-American grief, do Americans want to know?

From “What This Wave of Anit-Asian Violence Reveals About America,” by Anne Anlin Cheng, published in The New York TImes, Feb 21, 2021