⁂ Letter to Astrid Silva
Moments of ignominy, prostration and regret for the movement.
⁂ Apologies for Astrid Silva;
On the evening of August 21st, 2016 mere weeks from the election of Donald Trump, I superimposed the face of Las Vegas organizer Astrid Silva over that of Jesús Iñíguez in an ICE van.
It became the defining image of Low Profile Dreamers, a brief, abortive suicide mission and an accelerationist gesture by Iñíguez, myself and others disgusted—I maintain righteously—with the endorsements of Hillary Clinton by Silva and others called uncharitably and bombastically, “high profile Dreamers,” during the 2016 election cycle. As dueling endorsements scandalized the politicized undocumented communities across the country, including that one by Erika Andiola (by no means the first but undeniably an-if-not-the Ur Dreamer) of Senator Bernard Sanders, that image circulated throughout our circles until they escaped the gravity of the moment and were flung far afield. Jasmine, a friend at the time and herself in Las Vegas, mentioned to me that at least two of Silva’s cousins themselves laughed at her as the image became momentarily viral in Las Vegas’ organizing community. I took cruel glee at the thought at the time because I believed it was righteous and so was I—two ideas which I now doubt eight years after Silva herself would have first contested them.
Low Profile Dreamers, a Facebook page which now exists as captive audience for my own vain gestures, was not the first of Iñíguez’s dissatisfied, contrarian projects. The first and most significant of which I can recall, Dreamers Adrift, captured the malaise hanging over the movements’ intellectuals, its most radicalized activists and its wagging tongues. I was enthralled by the page then; obsessed with its implications today. In the bitter pessimism, in the painful genuflections, in the pining for absolution and an escape to our political serfdom, I was finding a home for my most contrarian feelings at a time which demanded, as all crises do, hegemonic ideas and compliance with emerging poles of power and prestige. Movement contrarians are contradictions in terms; at the time, Iñíguez, myself and other devotees of the perpetual opposition to assimilation and belonging felt tragically heroic, an idea which I would now contest, again, eight years too late.
The image isn’t even a footnote (perhaps an endnote) in the death warrant of the movement at the precise moment in which its organizers, advocates and activists would professionalize out of necessity only to be adopted or subsumed by the pearl strand along the borders of legal services organizations who but-barely escaped the fire sale of our movements to a Democratic party which killed them as they were learning to walk and talk. However, when I see it now, I understand it as a historical moment with graver consequences than I anticipated as I laughed with a feathered lasso tool in Photoshop. Now, my hand trembles eight years too late to keep myself from throwing a rock which would ricochet and strike at the movement itself and at my place in the world. I could tender an apology, but find myself paralyzed, again, eight years too late by the implications.
I stress, the image and the outbursts of disillusionment from myself and others were not envious as they were called by observers—a Democratic Party and its sympathizers and budding undocumented careerists—even as I sat on the front page of Buzzfeed in handcuffs after arrest in Washington D.C.. This I do maintain even now eight years later, now ten years after California shook off the shackles of United We Dream, sundered the Dream Network for the first, final time and relegated CHIRLA’s network of community college organizations to the archives of the Megamarches’ histories. There was no envy. Jealousy? Perhaps. But, a product of a mentality of scarcity or personal ambition I utterly refuse to believe. The contrarians had won the argument long before Abuelita Hillary found herself Hispandering to California exilees in North Las Vegas to save the Senate seat. We won the argument, seems foolish to say as former acquaintances, like Luis Suarez running for City Council, or Hairo Cortez and Anthony Ng now in philanthropy, seemingly evince our dramaturgic concerns over creeping professionalization of what was then and could never be now a grassroots movement of youth willing to commit suicide figuratively and literally to escape our social conditions and oppression.1
This said, the image haunts me. It was a venomous strike which poisoned its creator and those who saw it. Astrid, my apologies may be too late, but they are sincere.
⁂ A second open letter to Jose Antonio Vargas;
I loved that the immigrant rights movement ate its own. Or, to quote Antonio Bernabé (QEPD), that the Dreamers are selfish. Self-criticism and ruthless takedowns were a vital part of the movement, a key element to analyzing it to which academics are not privy. These, more than the pyrrhic victories of DACA and DAPA, Ju Hong and Jennicet Gutierrez’s iconic heckling, the accelerated death of the Gang of 8 bill, are illustrative of the movement youth’s values.
In the devastating opposition to César Vargas’ sacred band of Thebans—The DREAM Army—there is the clamor for militant opposition to border militarization and U.S. imperialism.
In NDLON/CIYJA’s ferocious denunciations of Eliseo Medina and the CHIRLAs there is a demand for accountability and fear of exploitation (#SEIUsed).
In Yosimar Reyes’ charges for crimes of metric turpitude there is militant opposition to comprador politics and the sleight of hand of representation politics and appropriation of struggle by foundations and academics.
In the uncharitable, histrionic mocking and outrage over Gabriela Pacheco’s apology for coming the wrong way or her flickering nobility before a panel of powerful legislators is the exhortation for our excellence, the fear of the unintended consequences of our words and the acknowledgment that we had all been thrust into a historical moment larger than ourselves.
In Jose Antonio Vargas’ meekness before a ghostwritten “blistering critique” (to quote Latino Rebels) by myself and Luis Serrano,2 the mocking of the nationwide outrage over his detention at the Border (he crossed picket lines, he could cross the airport terminal; why are we diverting resources to a celebrity?, etc..), the seething hatred when he in fact crossed picket lines of undocumented hotel workers struggling against wage theft and intolerable conditions was a militant position against privilege and hypocrisy in truth or, more accurately called with the benefit of time and reflection, insinuated.
All these stand as significant triumphs of the movements’ obsessions with zealots’ grievances which became eventually ethics,3 but they must necessarily give us pause.
(Reader: I forgive you if you see envy at the heart of these)
IT IS TRUE that Our vitriol came from a childhood desire to be taken seriously, this is obvious. But, it was a communal tactic for holding each other to account so we would not be caught flat-footed at the historic moment where we, in fact, derailed Barack Obama’s presidency and defaced his Nobel-garlanded legacy before an international audience who saw him arrest and deport children for demanding their place at the table. Here we have an answer to Langston Hughes— a dream Deferred does not dry or crust over, it in fact, festers and explodes. It is not a question to me any more.4
HOWEVER, the image of Astrid Silva stands to me, as its creator, apart from the letter to Vargas. As does Low Profile Dreamers. It marks the moment when the august youth entered into error upon reaching adulthood, abandoned hope in hopes something would emerge from the wreckage. Its dangers were present in the aforementioned incidents; my hand trembles to write what comes next, now eight years later.
We defaced a movement and made ourselves intolerant and intolerable. This is one legacy among more august moments of the Immigrant Youth Coalition and of my Antelope Valley Dream Team. We gave into our collective œdipal desires and found ourselves eventually blinded and exiled after being first fêted as heroes who slayed sphinxes and solved riddles. Without elders like Vargas, we were finally, in truth, Dreamers who were, at last—truly adrift, most tragically from one another.
⁂ Rebuke of R. Vega Magallón.
On the evening Donald Trump was projected to win the 2016 election, I was in a drunken stupor holding a nylon flag inside a Salvadoran restaurant in Palmdale.
Among a torrent of texts at 11:42PM was the notification: “WE MADE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” written by one of the collaborators on the Low Profile Dreamers page on Facebook. I defaced a movement and made myself intolerant and intolerable. I don’t recall how I made it home safely afterwards, but I regretted laughing at Astrid and César immediately. Maybe not at Pacheco. I am unsure today if the consequences merited cruel opprobrium of someone who was a pioneer in the defense of human rights at the mercy of the agendas of powerful politicians who sought to trade in a token for a generation in power. I regret, now with time, mistaking her and Vargas as enemies with vainglorious intentions and not as susceptible to the same hubristic desires which I myself have failed to overcome on more than just this one occasion.
It was not Trump at first which I feared. Nor did my hand tremble eight years ago when I was called FAGGOT at gas stations, when my phone in the office rang with death threats and deportation rumors, I did not understand then that the victory of the Right at the election was in fact two rebukes: of our humanity as illegalized peoples, and, most devastatingly, of our failed leadership as actors in a pivotal historical moment which has been condemned to apotheosis in journals from California to Hamburg. I was then, as now, consumed by the fear it was also a tacit rebuke of César Miguel R. Vega Magallón. I was wrong. It wasn’t tacit.
My role in demanding a politics of vitriol at the heart of the movement and in its vanguard is weighing heavily on my mind today. I understand now the truth underlying Alessandro Negrete’s failed rear-guard defense to the Haas Jr. Fund’s retreat from migrant advocacy and the Irvine Foundation’s abandonment of our bodies as they were now all on the line with a Sulla in office.
I regretted and regret, much more bitterly, that the vitriol was not instead redirected and transformed by self-reflection; exactly as Neidy Dominguez lamented to me in San Francisco over a yellow American Spirit at the beginning of my œdipal journey. I regretted, without bitterness however, never instead having denounced Mohammed’s image with a rifle or the fracas of the Reforma 150 campaign with equal vitriol. We were, I realize, obsessed with the limpieza de sangre of our politics and not its actual threats, its actual failures or our own complicity in these failures just as a global-historical turn against us relegated us to tragic figures in a brief moment of collective hope. I regret most of all that we let ourselves be misdirected, that we became useful to our captors.
In San Francisco as in every city of California we had won the argument, not by establishing our reasons and defending them, but by silencing our friends and our pairs through mockery, insinuation, brute force and venomous rebukes. In the cruel opprobrium and crueler exigency (my contributions) of the movement’s final November there was no levity or hope left to keep it alive. There was not one gossamer shimmer to give us hope. The funders saw the consequences before we did. We defaced our movement, the corvids lined up, and the foundations turned their backs.
Did a meme affect the outcome of an election? Did we demotivate enough Mexicans and Central Americans with ballots in the mailbox to sway the outcome and divert history? Did Iñiguez’s blog, Yessika in her ROTC uniform and myself hypocritically with Kant underarm succeed in accelerating what was before 11PM just then only a pending threat? Soft.
What was left was fear, though no one admitted to being afraid. What descended upon us was the lawyers who one attorney at the Guild mentioned to me should never lead a movement. Was monkish lawcraft in the great home of a proscribed grassroots movement. Was legalese and fee waivers in place of our infuriating bromides for Education not Deportation. Was with their laptops at airport terminals in the bowels of LAX in place of our developing-still bodies in caps and gowns. Many hid the hands which threw the rocks behind their backs. Many more, thank God, simply sat next to the attorneys and became Greeks to Romans (or so they would believe; I am afraid for the first time to opine).
I became a Greek to no one and simply retreated to the jacarandas and galeanas of my childhood5 and abandoned the undocumented Americans to the consequences of our collective actions. Soft, here is regret.
+++
⁂ Mea culpa
It is not up to me if I am forgiven for my small, but undeniable role in the collective acceleration of the end of the grassroots immigrant rights movement.
The bodies are no longer on the line, but tended upon them. We have lost allies and friends, to disremememberance and shame in disrememberance and shame. From Guadalajara I saw more funerals unattended than I did from my Marxist perch in Lancaster, but none I lamented more than this collective dissolution, of the weeping red dye in our pennants dissolved in hidden and muffled sobs as America finally settled into our minds as our home and ourselves as Americans.
There are those who still refuse to acknowledge as much, I understand. However, their faces are stained red and blue and their eyes full of stars. Soft, here is regret. What heart through yonder window breaks? Mine, at least.
Upon returning to California the first person I messaged was Luis Serrano, pining for the movement which I had rebuked, abandoned and which in time will rebuke me after having abandoned me and which may yet proscribe me to wander America on my own for the final time. He called me back immediately, but I quickly surmised the dense network of friends and scoundrels no longer existed. I would return to Lancaster and resume my opprobrium and exigencies.
Soft, a final right wing turn.
Now, the Governor of California sharpens his knives on my empty cage. Now, the Vice President promises to deliver me if I accept the refoulement of my brothers and sisters in the nation whose flag is still only the rising dust under their feet. Now Trump menaces again and the lawyers with their laptops are staying at home and the Guild will not give me a second green hat.
⁂ America; for Ginsberg.
I’m taking my queer shoulder
off the wheel and
off the rack. America, you may now take
your rack from my shoulder, can I ask
America, will
you take your wheel
from my shoulder? America,
Can I still be great?
– vegamagallon@cesarmiguel.com
1 Ten years later, I am proud of them all, all the same.
2 I in fact contributed pitifully, the letter was nearly in its entirety ghost-written by a third party, Monica, who chose to go uncredited. The photo of myself and its generous caption however undeniably were Serrano’s genius contributions.
3 That the progenitors of strife were mostly light skinned or white Mexicans with Catholic upbringings is unwritten and under appreciated.
4 President Barack Obama’s choice of “Deferred Action” as the name struck me as poignant then but cynical now.
5 My nearly lethal return to Guadalajara was accelerated by the collapse of the network of allies and friends into despondency and self-preservation. I accepted my wandering, my exile. In truth, it was precisely this sphinx which I tended to and which pursued me for six years.
⁂ The initial version of this essay erroneously autocorrected an accent over Jose Antonio Vargas’ name. His name, as he has said many times, is Jose not José, disculpas Sr. Vargas.
Great 👍