Bodega Chronicles

Gentrification is not just about lattes and man buns, it’s about history and economics and local policy and politics, and, fundamentally, it’s about systemic racism.

Everything interests me,            but nothing holds me.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going.

accismus

El lenguaje político está concebido para hacer que las mentiras parezcan verdad y el asesinato parezca respetable, y para dar una apariencia de solidez al puro viento.

Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.

The dual, hyphenated, personality is an Anglo creation. According to this concept, there is no hybrid cultural self. It is part of the Anglo imagination that we can keep our culture and assimilate, a position that would be contradictory if both cultures were understood as informing the “real” fabric of everyday life. But in thinking of a Mexican-American, the Anglo imagination construes “Mexican” as the name for a superexploitable being who is a practitioner of a superfluous, ornamental, culture. Being “American” is what supposedly gives us (dubious) membership in that “real” culture, the culture of the ideally culturally-unified-through-assimilation polls illegitimately called “America.”

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit.