This year: Thank you, Los Angeles

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Downtown Los Angeles; Spring 2018
Downtown Los Angeles; Spring 2018

In the flash of time that’s been this past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to take part in a handful of experiences that I couldn’t have anticipated at the beginning of 2018.

As early as April, for National Poetry month I got to team up with the Friends of Cahuenga for Cahuenga Library’s first-ever Open Mic Saturday.

Then, over the summer, I made the trek out to the states of El Salvador and Guatemala for the first time. After that, fluttering with a burst of energy from these two trips, I also managed to see Oaxaca, Mexico one more time, too.

On recovering from all the jet-lag, I beamed with inspiration from the various people and places I was able to meet through these adventures, and decided that good ole Los Angeles needed something special to show for the summer as well.

Enter the first-ever Back to School Party at El Gran Burrito this past August.

“BTS” in “East Hollywood” was a very special day for the families which J.T.L.A. has been dedicated to over the past four years, and after consulting with the team, the consensus is clear: next year, we’re doing it again. One hundred percent.

Now, as the year winds down to the holiday season, I find myself in yet another privileged position as I get to oversee another special project with a batch of L.A.’s middle school students.

Over the past few weeks of getting to know the class, their stories have motivated me with a lightning force, and so I’ve thus decided to take a moment to recognize them as the most critical actors in the journey that is JIMBO TIMES: The L.A. Storyteller.

Connecting with a young person who may recognize ‘J.T.’ somewhere farther “down the line” in ten or fifteen years is a gift. We are fellow citizens, after all, and the better we can learn to co-exist now, the better we can co-exist tomorrow. In the same regard, I know that supporting each other in the present moment makes it all the more likely we can support each other in the future.

Which future? The one for the next Los Angeles, that is.

It’s for this reason that I walk into the latest L.A. school I get to be a part of with all of my heart and mind brimming for the students. Even if our meetings together eventually simply fleet into memory banks since “at the end” of our project we’ve got to part ways, as the world does, there’s still truly no such thing as disconnecting.

There’s only putting a rain-check on our reunion, because like the very ideas nestled in between the textbook and the classrooms that belong to all of those who claim them, J.T. will remain at these schools too.

“Your mom always wanted to be a teacher.”

When my tio said this to me one recent afternoon, I averted my gaze towards his figure, as if to determine whether the words could ring true or not. But the words just hung there, decorating the walls. Of course they were true. I don’t know how I could have missed it in twenty-seven years as my mother’s son, but now I don’t have to look back; I can look forward.

The future is ours, Los Angeles. It’s whirling in the present moment now, because I’ve seen it affirmed that everything from this point forward is not just an opportunity for me, but also for Mama and all of our pueblo. From the pueblos of El Salvador, then, on through Oaxaca, and from the neighborhoods of Los Angeles all the way out to Japan alongside J.T.L.A:

Thank you for all of 2018, Los Angeles.

“You can’t eat cars.
[But] you can eat chocolate cars…

Yes. Write that down!”

J.T.

Better Late Than Never: Educating One Young Hyena in Los Angeles, Part I

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Tokyo, Japan; Summer 2017
Tokyo, Japan; Summer 2017

It was 2007, or what was supposed to be my Junior year at John Marshall High. But like most students in the Los Angeles Unified School District that school-year — 48% according to official estimates — I wasn’t set to graduate on time.

Most of high school was a whirl-winding hayride for me, and “the race” in which I fell behind saw me slipping as early as 2004 when I was a Freshman on “B-track.”

At that time, LAUSD still had “track” or rotation systems instead of its year-round schedule, and as opposed to the more pleasant “A”or “C” tracks, “B-track” was supposed to be where “the troubled kids” were at.

But the differences were all the same to me as a Freshman. Almost as soon as I stepped through the gates at Marshall, I looked around — at the teachers and counselors and supervisors — and rolled my eyes with a passion. Like generations of teenagers before me at L.A.’s public schools, I felt at odds with them.

They didn’t know a thing about me, I thought, and yet they wanted to direct my life like if it was their right.

But it wasn’t just that strange adults wanted to teach my teenage mind without knowing anything about me; it was also that so many of the teachers I met seemed worn out by the subjects they were supposed to shepherd us into, and even resentful or downright hostile to me and my peers for being the students assigned to them.

I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but since the first day of class, while my teachers could certainly recite their subject, they had next to no idea why it was supposed to be useful to the students before them. This came off in the tone of their voices as they called our names on the roll-sheet.

One by one like a monotonous record, it’s as if every name they announced was another extension of the hour they had to put up with us; as if they were forced to be there just as much as we were. I could only slouch further into my seat as roll call went on.

Eventually, I knew I’d have to make a choice. I could either go to class and be miserable, or I could just find somewhere else to be. Since teachers and students alike were so disinterested, I told myself, going our separate ways was the only natural thing for us to do.

In the mornings, I’d skip Health and Math classes, link up with some of the handful of friends I’d made over the first few weeks at Marshall, and slither through the hallways with them towards an exit. When we’d come upon a short fence located just a small walk away from the restrooms, we’d jump it with lizard-like sensibilities.

Moments later, we would find a corner nearby, huddle so as not to be spotted, and use the time to chill and “chop it up,” or talk.

For a time, my chosen education was what I learned in these conversations, which were mostly centered around romances, “beef” or trouble with other kids, and occasionally, what we might truly want of ourselves apart from escaping our classrooms.

We’d have these conversations in our adolescent voices, filling them with our “benign” adolescent ideas, but the dialogue we created in the experience still felt more genuine than any I could engage in with either my teachers or counselors at the time.

Around noon, when the bell for lunch would ring, my peers and I would jump the fence back to school for the day’s meal.

Following lunch, we’d just ‘coast’ through the last two periods of the day. And when the final bell rang just before 3:30 PM, we’d dash past the doors of our classrooms and race through the gates towards the street. I thought I was so cool,

But fast forward to nearly three years from that first, disoriented semester in the high school landscape, and my goal wasn’t to get out anymore, but to get back in; at sixteen years old, I sat in the dean’s office at Marshall pleading with Mr. Cook to give me a second chance back into the school.

The time since Freshman year had slipped past me as quickly as my body had slipped past Marshall’s fences. In less than three years, I ricocheted across four different high schools after being expelled from Marshall during my second semester for too many ‘truancies,’ “F” grades, and other offenses.

The clock was ticking, and I could finally appreciate the fact of it, but the question between me and Mr. Cook in his office was clear:

Was it too late?

Seated in the same chair from which only two and a half years prior I’d stare down at an expulsion, I assured Mr. Cook that in fact it was not too late, and that I would “be good” for a second chance indeed. He looked at me then, and I returned his glance in kind.

At the time, Mr. Cook must have been approaching something like his mid to late forties, punctuated by the fact that he was in the early stages of a balding process, and which also showed in his calm demeanor as I made my case to him. There was an earnestness in his demeanor, and when it came time for him to decide, Mr. Cook didn’t quite give me a smile, but he did have this look of resolution on his face; like when a person realizes they’re going to get rid of someone by giving them exactly what they want.

I was back in.

I was given a second chance at Marshall in 2007 three years after wanting so desperately to get out. But there was one catch.

In the second half of the 2006-2007 school-year, I was behind on an entire year’s worth of credits, meaning that I was a Sophomore when I should have been a Junior, and that I would be a Junior when it was time to be a Senior getting ready for graduation.

The likelihood that I could graduate on time was thereby slim, but like generations of young people at L.A.’s schools before me, as the prospect of a basic education flailed out of reach, I took my chances.

After all, at that point, with so much time away from Marshall despite starting there, I was just happy to be back at my home school. I could sit in Marshall’s classrooms again, and this time, start off on just the right note.

When I first got back, I was re-entered into “A-track,” which was colloquially known as the track for “the smart kids” because it contained the school’s Magnet or advanced classes.

I was originally a B-tracker when I started at Marshall in 2004, but on A-track in 2007, I did just what was needed: getting to class on time, turning in my homework and assignments, and otherwise keeping a low profile.

There was only one problem: I didn’t know or very much like any of the A-track kids. The A-track kids usually came from the uppity sides of town like Los Feliz, Atwater Village or Silver Lake, and it showed in their lingo; they spoke in much “cleaner” or complete sentences than my friends and I, and therefore lacked any sense of coding or subtlety for good measure. In other words, they were like, ‘totally,’ white-washed.

At the same time, since the A-track kids all knew each other, they invited each other to one another’s house-parties. I’d never known any of my old friends to have houses, which seemed like weird extravagances to begin with, but then when the A-trackers would talk about them in their totally complete sentences, I just felt more out of place.

As the months went on then, although my academics on A-track got me off to a strong start back at Marshall, I lobbied mom to help me get back to “B-track,” where the lot of my friends from the old neighborhood were.

I figured that being back around so much of the old crowd wouldn’t prove to be that much of a challenge, but once I got the chance to see for myself, it wouldn’t be so simple.

In the fall season at the start of the 2007-2008 school year, in what was my second semester back at Marshall, mom and I got me back to B-track, where the rabble-rousers and old friends were at.

My schedule subsequently turned into a mixture between two types of classrooms. In one period, I’d find myself with students who were right on schedule with their graduation date, and in the next, with my old peers again, most of whom were not set to graduate on time.

Apart from graduation though, it was personally reassuring to be back in classrooms with students who knew the same corners of the neighborhood that I did, and who walked into class with the same gusto; it was this very familiarity that I was looking for when I asked Mr. Cook to let me back in to Marshall to begin with.

To no one’s surprise though, when my old peers and I found ourselves reunited again, we’d make a ballad of it. I rabbled with them not in each and every class where we’d reconnect in again, but just in the ones that met the right conditions.

In English class, for example, where we’d have a different substitute teacher every three days because our actual teacher was constantly dealing with health problems, my friends and I ran circles around the subs with the age-old antics: spitting paper-balls at one another, writing letters to the romances, and unifying against most, if not all of the subs’s agendas.

As it was in Freshman year, if substitutes came in to establish authority over the class, my peers and I weren’t having it. But unlike in our Freshman days, instead of resenting our subs and making our way out of class, this time my friends and I simply laughed them out of the room. We had learned.

By contrast, when it came to Geometry class, I still joked around with the few of my peers who sat in the room with me, but just on occasion since I knew I couldn’t afford to fail and retake the course later.

In my Programming course, where I had none of my old friends alongside me, I was in the top tenth percentile of the class.

I had different types of performances then, but because I opted to joke around with my old gang in classes like English, my strong start back at Marshall was om precarious footing.

Two months into the 2007-2008 school year then–which was by then also supposed to be my last at Marshall–I was still not projected to “catch up” on enough credits graduate on time.

And soon, the two types of performances I was putting up since returning to B-track would have to come to terms with each other. This would be no clearer than in History class with Ms. Hart.

Ms. Hart was an older Jewish woman with curly gray hair in the History department at Marshall. There wasn’t much that was extraordinary about her as a teacher, but like so many of the disinterested types from my Freshman year, she was clearly just not a big fan of her job.

Classes like History at Marshall were a traffic jam, with ay least 30 students to the room. There were also virtually no Teacher’s Assistants for History, and since it was a subject riddled with events and timelines that seemed to speak little to the present moment, it was easy to derail lessons into debate about what actually was and wasn’t important for us students to know in the present day.

By then, it also must have been Ms. Hart’s tenth year with the subject–if not longer–and so she had plenty of reason to be exhausted.

But along came me and my peers like a pack of young hyenas, and all we saw in her weariness was a green light for our coordinated folly; even if we were in the later part of our teens at that point, and even if we could still graduate if we “just put our minds to it,” the fact of the matter is that most of us didn’t want to hear about graduation because we were resigned to the prospect of not graduating.

That’s where the complication lied; even though I identified with so many of my peers being behind on credits, replete with the anticsg of it all beside them, I still personally believed that I would somehow manage to graduate just in the nick of time.

Sure my grades were mixed since I’d gotten back to “B-track,” but even if I joked around like it didn’t matter to me, there was a resounding belief within me that I could and would still make it happen somehow.

I’d feel good then as I’d walk into Ms. Hart’s classroom with a mischievous smirk on my face, ready to rile up some rowdiness and turn in just enough work for a “C” grade.

At two months in her class, I showed her that on the one hand I was capable of any of the assignments she gave me, just like when I was on A-track. On the other hand, I also showed her that I was even more prone to getting carried away joking with my friends at the expense of the lesson plan; a true B-tracker. This contradiction would only get me on her bad side.

Ms. Hart’s class took place during fourth period, and I remember the one late morning when I got to our classroom early and she wasn’t in yet; I kicked my feet back on the desk, hollered at ‘my boys’ as they made their way in, and prepared for another hour of casually sabotaging the class.

A moment later, when the bell rang for fourth period to start, Ms. Hart walked in curtly, scribbled a few instructions for an assignment up on the board, and took a seat at her desk.

She then pointed at the board without saying a word; it was her way of telling us that that she wasn’t the one to be clowning around with that day.

When I registered this, I made a half-hearted attempt at abiding by her request, but my effort didn’t last long. Within some ten minutes, I crumpled up a piece of line paper down to a tiny paper-ball and set my sights on my old friend Brian a few desks away.

Brian nearly always got a kick at even a hint of disorder in class, and the sound of his laughter was usually so contagious that it nearly always served as the spark which lit up the rest of the belly-aching throughout the room.

I then flicked the tiny paper-ball towards Brian, which patted against his cranium and floundered across the floor. His infamous cackling proceeded to bellow out, and predictably turned the other heads of the class in our direction.

But this time, Brian was hardly at the outset of his laughter before Ms. Hart’s eyes shot up from her desk and fixed their gaze on me with laser-sharp focus. Ms. Hart then proceeded to march towards my seat, and I gulped, knowing that one way or another: it was coming.

Ms. Hart would go on to call me out that day. About how I never took anything seriously. About how life wasn’t just some big joke. And about how she actually knew just why I was such a clown.

By then I was used to hearing the first two statements from her, but the idea that she suddenly knew something about my character was different.

Maybe she had discovered some part of me that perhaps even I didn’t know about at that point; her words both perplexed and engaged me.

And so I asked Ms. Hart then, half in curiosity and the other half in a type of defense:

“Well, just why am I such a clown Miss?”

That’s when she slammed me with it:

“It’s because it’s clear to everyone that you won’t be graduating on time.”

For a moment I was astounded at the certainty in her voice, and unsure if I could trust what my ears had heard. So I asked Ms. Hart just what she meant by what she said. That’s when she repeated from the high tops of her lungs:

“IT’S OBVIOUS TO EVERYONE IN THIS CLASSROOM THAT YOU’RE A CLOWN BECAUSE YOU WON’T BE GRADUATING THIS YEAR.”

After months together, she had finally gotten my full attention, even if it was only by hurting me that she could do so.

I didn’t say anything to Ms. Hart for a moment, choosing instead to just shrug off her words until I could finally muster,

“Okay Miss, if you say so.”

But I remember going to lunch that day feeling broken.

Ms. Hart hung me out on a limb in front of everyone, and suddenly the gravity of being a year behind on my credits weighed in on me like the tagging or writing on the walls that filled so many of the school’s restrooms.

It didn’t look good, and if I didn’t do something about it fast, Ms. Hart would be right, just as Mr. Cook would be wrong for allowing me back in to Marshall in the first place.

Only then did it dawn on me that I had a choice to make a again.

J.T.

Helena Maria Viramontes: Their Dogs Came With Them (2006)

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‘L.A.’ in 2018 is a city of over 10 million people by the last estimate, and in several other ways significantly bigger than what it was in the 1970s, when Viramontes was a teenager through its avenues and boulevards picking up the fulcrum on which her novel rests.

Yet a glance at L.A. then reveals a world not radically different from the one which appears to be on the brink of collapse today, particularly for urban youth in the city: the Vietnam war raged on, while at the same time the 1965 Watts Riots left the city in a state of racial insecurity and opposition to the police state; simultaneously, Black and Brown communities increasingly found heroin and other drugs infiltrating their neighborhoods, while at L.A.’s schools and California’s universities, institutional racism spawned further battle lines for the sunshine state; on the east sides of Los Angeles especially, bitter memories of the erection of L.A.’s freeways in the early 1960s left communities there weary of the city’s urban development; and not far along, youth ‘delinquency’ and incarceration marked the outset of a prison industrial complex that nearly fifty years later our communities are still mired in.

These are the living nightmares of what was then still a newly modernizing world which inspired the heroine that is the amazing Viramontes. Her literary gifts unwind similarly to a nightmare, or as genuine superpowers around the mind of the reader for immersing us like veins into bodies of suffering deviating from the wake of an uprooted Los Angeles. In Their Dogs Came With Them, the micro-histories that make up the city are given life on the literary big screen, where they shine like a golden Pontiac, roaring with desire and pulling all in their midst to the edge of what might be possible with just enough forgetting, even as total forgetting is never quite possible.

In the opening chapters of the book, we meet Ermila, along with her Grandmother, the latter of whom is haunted by memories of a life in fear, anxiety, and racial hostility in L.A.:

“A bespectacled Grandmother didn’t see the child lift the box to show off her award. The sunlight scarred her vision, and Grandmother couldn’t quite discern the child holding on to Miss Eastman except for the white teeth of the teacher talking to the child as they walked the dark corridor to meet her. Grandmother had watched the escalating heat rising each and every day, the glass thermometer bursting, its red mercury spreading infectious green-tinted rage. Miss Eastman grew larger and darker, and the child swung her pink gift in the shaded hollowness of the corridor. No longer immunized, Grandmother knew it was only a matter of time before the roaming packs of Negroes would claw out of the television’s own green guts, riot-rushing to lift and overturn cars and set fire to all the neighborhood had worked for, to anything flammable on the living side of First Street. Though the teacher passed the child over to Grandmother tenderly, Miss Eastman appeared so black, she was green.”

Grandmother, who is the only caretaker in her granddaughter’s life, also speaks to the apprehension–or Americanization–of the time, which, much like today, was dominated by the mystical spell of late night news, albeit through the color or green televisions that were just making their way into so many living rooms. And while we never learn much about Grandmother’s own childhood, she’s a woman many readers will recognize right away, as are each of the novel’s figures in its surreal sequence of events.

Memory ‘lapses’ form major parts of each character’s time with us, making for a surreal timeline that moves through Their Dogs, but a few themes stand out most consistently for this reader: Viramontes’s work is deeply concerned with upbringing and the burdens placed on youth coming of age in a world that at many turns appears to be dis-invested in their humanity, and which at others appears to be teeming with life so palpable it can’t simply be passed over as anything but extraordinary. Ermila, who is probably the novel’s second most rebellious figure, carries this most naturally:

“She collected observations as one would collect ice-cream sticks: a youth riding a wobbly bike on the muddy shoulders of the street; a skinny cat roaming through the tall bird-of-paradise stalks; two comadres chatting between a fence; an old crooked bird man who fed his flock of pigeons daily. The desire to be on the other side of the fence, to run away and join them, was so strong, it startled her.”

There is also, no matter how much a reader might hope for the novel to do otherwise, a refusal to let go of the traumas which turn youth from hand-held creatures brimming with the future in their eyes into unintelligible monsters weighed down by their pasts, depending on which side we meet their glances from; a heartbreaking memory from arguably the novel’s most compelling figure, “Turtle,” demonstrates this clearly:

“Tio Angel lunged at his brother Frank, and after the bump and break of furniture, the fall and jingle of Christmas tree, the grind and gravel of glass shards, Turtle heard the screen door screech open. Turtle dug her fingertips underneath some shingles, terrified of falling, and she peered over the roof’s edge and saw how awkwardly the scuffling shadows flew into the nopales.”

Each page through the novel is filled with piercing uses of language such as this, at times nearly unbearable to digest. But just when violence threatens to steal the show, Viramontes follows with paragraphs that are simply mystical and delicious concoctions of sounds for readers to sift through, reminiscent of the late great Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, though with a voice distinguished by the duality of a young woman both trapped and liberated by femininity and age. When Ermila and her girlfriends mightily get back at an ex of hers after their recent breakup, for example, they smuggle their teenage glee for the more adult-like professionalism over the affair, driving the sequence through with a galvanizing energy to dwell in:

“And just as they had converged, they pulled away in opposite directions slowly, sluggishly lest they call attention to themselves, not rushing to leave the scene of the crime, though it was a difficult task not to explode adrenaline all over the place. They had to silence the forcefulness of their delight, hesitating to acknowledge one another’s glances. They strolled away in separate directions, carrying the flakes of metallic paint, bluish palms, the color of yams on their hands, barely containing their collective sense of invincibility. Whatever laughter or disbelief, whatever overblown nerves Ermila had suppressed, now raised her spirit to the point that her steps felt buoyant and she felt an enormous craving for adventure.”

These are the lines which make the novel not just a reflection on childhood, but a dream through the thin space between actuality and imagination, like the gravity that separates us from the stars only physically, but not in our fantasies. And they are the micro-histories and maybe even sub-atomic histories that Viramontes unravels with such mastery for a novel so gorgeous it contains something for everyone. What is the best literature, after all, if not an expression for the whole world and all of humanity to observe together, opposite of one another, and more. In Ben, whose character haunts the novel’s trajectory more than engaging with it directly, any reader who’s ever felt a tinge of uncertainty at simply “going with the flow” will relate:

“Thank you, he said. Being late for class, Ben said he’d better get going because seats became scarce in his Intro Soc class. But the young woman shouted to his back, A gift for you, hermano. And then ran up to him, removed her beret and placed it on his head. And at that instance when he looked directly into her eyes, Ben would’ve given his life to walk upright without hobbling, to push his chest out, to brave the mental eye of the tornado and be absorbed by something larger. The woman cocked her head to read his stunned expression, and he turned to mask it. His leg plagued him like his fear. He resisted being lifted up into a gathering mass of swirling political storms. He refused to be clearly defined as Chicano, and for that, he refused to belong to a fluid movement, joining her, joining them, joining other Chicanos to become a part, to become a whole and not just stay forever in between.”

I am unmistakably shaken by Viramontes’s astounding historical prose and document, which ultimately erupts into a brilliant crescendo or joyride through Los Angeles with her characters no matter how dark the space. Even before the uncanny finale, however, each moment in the novel is a memory mixed with a wish, an ode to friends and members of her community across the ages; our people thus become one and the same; and our struggle to look beyond Los Angeles’s smog and out towards the night sky in hopes of better days, a ritual encompassing every last one of us.

Their Dogs Came With Them is an achievement for literary aficionados, artists, scholars, and witnesses of all kinds everywhere. And from this day forward, the book is not just with JIMBO TIMES, but it’s embedded into our reading’s subatomic consciousness. With each new young reader we get to meet, then, we’ll be sending this book their way. Nuestro Pueblo will know Viramontes’s name.

J.T.

Show and Tell: The Sock-Puppet

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I will never forget the anguish I put my mother through as a child. So many dreams. Dreams that are memories now and also pain mixed up with love and a desire to let them be known.

I remember the sock-puppet for show and tell. It was a cloudy afternoon when the dim orange lighting of the kitchen washed over the peeling walls as I begged and pleaded with mom to help me with my show and tell project.

I needed something to show. Mom worked in needles. She worked in sowing, in making something out of nothing but a string of yarn. She agreed to help me then, making my anguish into her anguish as the hours seemed to trap both of us in their midst. It was still early in the afternoon when I sidetracked her with my last minute request, and we could take the whole evening if need be, but the next day still loomed like the clouds through the windowpanes, into our souls and slowly more coldly.

As night encroached I didn’t know if we would make it. All I could feel was my heart pouncing as time managed to swerve right above our every angle and motion.

Mom kept her personal sowing machine in the kitchen, and it didn’t dawn on me that she did so because that’s where she could get more work done for her shift at the garment warehouse the next morning. It didn’t occur to me that she had already had an eight hour work-day by the time I made my request to her, and that she had already picked us up from school, and that she had even managed to prepare dinner for us to curl into the evening with our bellies full.

All that dawned on me was my show and tell. The sock puppet needed to be real, and to come alive like the ones on Mr. Rogers’s. I needed to be able to hold my puppet, and to tell its story like an expert.

So I went back and forth between the kitchen and the living room checking on mom and her hands at work, keeping an eye on her angles as she shaped the dimensions of the puppet underneath the magic needle. She gave life to my dream on that day, which was also my pain, in one of the earliest instances of a lifetime of last minute races against time and everything that seemed possible that I’d embark on with her. We would share anguish over each other and one another’s fates through the course of many years in this manner. Years which would also seem to dash just above our heads as we scrambled to meet them with our best minds.

Before late into the night, mom stretched the hands and legs of the tiny sock-puppet before my eyes. I remember looking at it in that moment, as if to look into the depths of imagination itself, and feeling at once that it wasn’t like what I expected.

Made purely of black yarn, it didn’t look like the sock-puppets from Mr. Rogers’s. And it barely fit through my hands. I also couldn’t move the legs if my fingers were placed through the puppets’ hands, and likewise couldn’t move its hands if my fingers were placed through its legs. At least, not in the seamless way that appeared to be most right.

What’s more, our sock-puppet had no face. It was just the figure of a body, but it had no personality.

I barely mustered a thank you to mom before taking it from her hands then, as I figured that I could maybe still make it work, if only I gave it some eyes and some lips and a nose. I then retreated into the living room with the soft garment in my hands, placed the puppet’s body down on the plastic table where my brother and I did our homework, took some scratch paper out of my backpack, and set out to give the tiny figure its rightful personality.

I won’t ever forget the face I would forge on the sheet then, because it was the most natural face that came to mind in that moment; the only one in the entire galaxy that I could draw with some ease. After cutting out the circle of paper that we’d glue onto the figure’s circular-shaped head, I gave the sock-puppet curious wide eyes, brimming bright eyelashes, a roundish nose with just a small lumping tip at the end, and a set of large, wise lips. It was the face of my mom.

Even if the figure wasn’t quite what I expected then, I would still have something to show for show and tell. And my mom’s face before my anxieties–just as her hands motioning through the darkness of the night to still save the day–would remain with my memory through a lifetime; every dream come true for me now is only an extension of everything possible through the tiny sock-puppet with her eyes.

J.T.

10 Things We Learned from an Incredible Time at Our Back to School Party this August 25th, 2018

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After 36 days of non-stop planning for our first ever BACK to School PARTY at El Gran Burrito, I needed at least a couple of days to rest and relax, to enjoy a bit of silence, and to reflect on just what it is that actually happened this special Summer of 2018. A few things in particular stand out now, listed below for all our folks to see.

1. When you have a dream, it’s important to claim it, value it, and also to be able to defend it when necessary. The fact of the matter is, while I spent the last month in particular running around from one area to the next to keep our “Back to School” Party ‘on track’, I had visualized the event as early as June 26, 2018, when I sent the following note to the team of volunteers who helped us put together our Open Mic Saturday event at the Cahuenga Public Library in April:

“As school is out in the neighborhood and the summer has just kicked off, I know there are droves of parents around the library looking for a place where ‘the fam’ can cool off. Thus, I’m interested in putting together a second gathering for the community, probably some time in August. However, first I’m going to do some more walking and ‘surveying’ through the neighborhood to be certain on just what would work best at the moment. At a glance my guess is that any event to do with skating, sports, painting, or other outdoor activities would be key for garnering some interest from our young people, and as with the Open Mic, we’d make it economic and volunteer driven.”

Getting this ‘on file’ was a matter of stating my intention with the event for myself personally, as well as for the larger body of my community to consider. From there, the idea could germinate for all of us, and this was a key factor in what would eventually become a push to move “Back to School” forward.

2. Not everyone will understand your vision, and not only is that okay, it’s great. Not long after sending the aforementioned note to the team of volunteers that helped with Open Mic Saturday, I was first met with silence when I sought feedback for its contents, and then, upon persisting about a response, was told that the idea seemed to be too ‘rough’ or ‘unready’ in its form to see through. Then, to make matters more challenging, on trying to vouch further for the essence of the event I was given an official “no” from the administration at Cahuenga, whose approval was necessary for the event to take place there. I found this to be devastating for the gathering’s odds of moving forward, but would not stay down before too long.

3. You have to defend your dreams, sometimes even from your own doubt. In the days after I was met with the official ‘no thanks’ for the event, I found myself reeling. Even if some greater part of me knew that the gathering still had to happen, to think that there was suddenly no location for it defied the logic of the whole thing. I fell into a kind of deep slumber then, mired by feelings of rejection and self-doubt. And yet, I knew I’d have to pick myself up from that point. So I got my mind off the event for a day or so, took some leave from the neighborhood towards other vecindades where I could speak with a different band of folks about what happened, and determined to get back to the drawing board only after this much needed ‘get-away’. Finally, a few days later on Sunday morning I found myself galvanized enough again to get back out to the ole neighborhood to inquire about ‘this event’ again in a few different directions. Then, from out of nowhere, we actually found a location.

4. When you finally get the ‘yes,’ tell the world what you need next. On landing the support of El Gran, I scrambled to  find out what further support I could muster since time was running out for an ample planning period. So I sent out a survey to the community on the afternoon of June 29th, waited to see what responses I could gather, and upon hearing back just enough of what I needed from folks, registered that it was time to span my wings for lift-off. By the morning of June 30th, there were officially 27 days left before August 25th, or the date for which I’d originally proposed the event. That was three days less than there were with Open Mic Saturday, but this time, I knew a few things I didn’t know in the buildup for Open Mic Saturday. That is, just where to go, and where not to go.

5. Any team anywhere is affected by a vision, or lack thereof from its leadership. 27 days to plan the event was cutting it close, but I knew enough from what I’d seen in my ‘visions’ leading up to the ‘green light’ for “Back to School” to reach out to a handful of people. So I searched through my lists, texted and called the contacts I could interest in ‘just a conversation’, and from there, discovered the subsequent pieces to the puzzle through various questions from these contacts in our ‘convos’, as well as through their suggestions and other feedback. Then, once we were able to consolidate our shared visions, it became clear that we had to inform the whole hemisphere what kind of support we’d need. But first, I needed to consolidate one more time.

6. The best investment any ‘leader’ can make with their team is the one of ‘leading’ by example. Even if the contacts who became the allies who would go on to become the partners in the making of the event could agree in sentiment with the vision for the special day in our community, in addition to drawing out or brainstorming the vision together, it was also necessary for us to ‘get out there’ together for the event as time permitted. This meant visiting the site of El Gran together, speaking with Don Pedro and Doña Guadalupe together, meeting with other potential attendants and collaborators of the event together, and more, in order for us to share in the experience of discovering more pieces together. At day’s end, these shared experiences would prove integral in bolstering our abilities to support one another once it became necessary for us to find our respective roles to drive our shared vision through. And so, all of it was like practice for our biggest day of them all as a team.

7. Raising money for a cause is no light stroll through the park, but when you believe in the mission, it’s your mission. In weighing out the different needs for “Back to School,” I realized that it would be something of an exacting request for the base of supporters out there to consider, though not an altogether unreasonable one. But further complicating this request was the fact that there were only fifteen or so days to rally the financial support; there was no guarantee that the team and I could pull it off, yet the unwavering belief in our goals for the event was clear to people “up and down” throughout our networks, and slowly but surely then, like the sunlight in each day, we reached the evenings with just a little more of what we needed than the night prior.

8. Reminders are everything. People need to be reminded of the things they need to do. And we’re people too. We need reminders too. In the rush for the event to make its way through were numerous moments in which even if I thought the goals for “Back to School” were clear and stated for all to see, it was still necessary for me to “go back to the basics,” or touch base with the very reason I asked the team to embark on the effort with me, and to be reminded of that. This wasn’t always easy, but it was 100% worth it each time I could manage to truly listen to the parties outside of myself and respond accordingly to their needs or inquiries. It’s what made me an effective leader as opposed to just a leader in name.

9. Volunteers are life. It’s simple. Following every item the team and I could cross off our lists, and after reaching out to every perceivable ‘end’ in our midst for the event to shine under the sunlight, there were still no guarantees. Where would the people come from? And at what time? Then, how on earth would we get everything we needed to be done in time?

But in our greatest hour of need, our volunteers for “Back to School” arrived like a legion of envoys for the mission. They literally lifted our dreams from the page onto the gates of El Gran, upon the walls of the site, into the hands of the people of the pueblo, and more. They believed too. And thus these volunteers literally completed the team and I on Saturday, August 25th. Finally, when setup was wrapped up and everyone was in position, as the music fluttered into the airwaves while the clock ticked away, from out of nowhere, como palomitas llegaron…a rescatarnos. Otra vez mas. Nuestro Pueblo. Los Angeles.

10. Thank. Everyone. Thank those who said yes, thank those who said no, thank those who never responded, and more than anything, thank everyone who came through. Do. Not. Forget.

Thank you Los Angeles. Thank you team. Thank you supporters from afar. And thank your people, too. Thank the daylight. Thank the planet earth. Thank the Milky Way galaxy. And thank even the Black Holes for not swallowing these living quarters into their midst yet, too.

And one more note; a bonus note: Our pueblos DO need these days in our community, and so our pueblos WILL have them. As such, this is only the beginning. The future is no longer waiting. We have arrived.

J.T.