Still Resilient in Los Angeles

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JT_Red
Metro Red Line Station; Vermont Ave and Santa Monica Blvd.

When you’ve known a place your whole life, a place that you take pride in, where you’ve found love in, and where you’ve found yourself in, what do you do as that place is taken from you? When the people who comprise this place are people who look like you, or who speak the same language as you, who hail from that same “otherness” like you, what do you do as they’re taken from you, too?

I think of the local Metro’s Vermont and Santa Monica Red Line Subway station. A place where thousands of people pass one another by each day, past the flocks of pigeons nestled above in the station’s arches, and past the heaps of other people laying by the entrances to the terminal.

The birds cradled in the station’s altitudes are conditioned to the factors of the environment, which are often rather unfriendly to their livelihood: Food is scarce, competition for food is abundant, and the winds push people and traffic through their huddled masses daily.

The humans below, whether moving with the traffic or anchored to the sidewalk, are conditioned to the factors of the environment, too: Food and housing are expensive, finding decent work to afford decent food and housing is likewise competitive. As people push through flocks of pigeons in the race to get to it all, we push past one another too; over time, this has the effect of insulating us from the environment and from one another as a whole.

I think of my own experience in this sequence, in terms of just how many people I’ve walked past over the dozen or so years I’ve stepped foot through Metro’s Vermont and Santa Monica corridor. Past people conflicted by mental health disorders, addiction, or no place for shelter at night. Past people trapped in abusive relationships, police violence, or no access to a steady meal each day. Past children who had no choice. I’ve got a feeling that this is an experience which binds me with millions of other people in the U.S. today.

In the 21st century, America isn’t just pushing people away from its borders. It’s also pushing them from their homes, their livelihoods, and even from its street corners. In the pending displacement of Super Pan, my pueblo is dealing with wealth in this country, and the power of wealth to shove human beings out of the way instead of using it to uplift them and our community together as a whole; a legacy as old as the country itself.

But all around us are more mom and pop shops at risk of displacement, just as there are more Metro stations serving as shelters for more people with less than us. Not far off are also those individuals with wealth who simply want to take each of these spaces for their own benefit without pausing to consider how others can be harmed by such obnoxious claims to space.

If I’m somewhere in between, that is, not enamored by the power of wealth, but also not forced to sleep by the Metro stations at night, then just where do I stand? I pass by the less fortunate like everyone else, and simply try to be mindful, which is for the most part what I have to do. But I don’t believe I’ve always got to do things this way.

I believe there’s still a world to build right through the one we see now, both with and alongside others: a world that’s been here before, actually, and which still glimmers through the shadows in moments each day out there; a world of people helping each other, uplifting each other, and building great things as a result.

A world we have to fight for, and which we continue fighting for each day: Nuestro Pueblo, Los Angeles.

More on Super Pan in the Virgil Village SOON,

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.

Four Years of JIMBO TIMES the L.A. Storyteller

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JIMBO TIMES began just a little over four years ago following an epiphanous walk from my mom’s newsstand on Santa Monica boulevard the evening of August 19, 2014. It was near mid-night when the idea took hold of me, and I can still remember crawling from the apartment bedroom into the bathroom with the same laptop I write these words on now to spill out an ode to the city I call home.

Four years later, with the Back to School Party, a day of art, workshops and music for youth and families in my neighborhood less than a week behind me, I can think of no better place to be with J.T: The L.A. Storyteller.

If I’m fortunate enough to get four more years of this magical glitz through the stars, the idea is to do so not alone, but alongside more of Los Cuentos. Not only Los Cuentos, the shirts by Jimbo Times, but also with Los Cuentos de nuestro pueblo, Los Angeles.

What do you say, L.A? Do we dare dream of what could still be, might be, or should be if we only put our minds to it?

J.T.

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Poem in Hand, I Would Like to Welcome You With the Following

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I heard the sneers of discrimination at my schools before I heard the sonnets of poetry through them.

But the first time I faced discrimination based on the color of my skin, the language I spoke at home, or some other mischaracterization of me, I didn’t quite know the definition of the word, discrimination.

Similarly, the first time I heard my first poem, I didn’t quite know that it was poetry, either.

But in each case, my feelings told me what these things were. Today, they still do.

Now, I deploy words to work for me as my mother has worn every bone in her body to meet work over a lifetime; that is, pushing back against any rancorous winds which would seek to tame us.

My mother’s feet are waning into the ages now, yet with each new day, she makes one thing clear:

We will not go gently into the night;

Every moment we get, is another moment we give all we got.

J.T.

Why Work in Los Angeles? For the Stories

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Damn my co-workers. I’ve grown to care about them now, and quite fervently, at that!

It just happened: over the last couple of months they’ve turned into more than colleagues, but something of another wacky little family I’ve had the fortune of stumbling into.

Now, long after every drink and customer is served, and even after the lights go out, I catch myself wondering about my co-workers while we’re apart, and reflecting on all of the conversations we’ve had:

In the span of just a few months, through every word we’ve exchanged we’ve built whole worlds around each other. I’ve learned greatly from these worlds, and I can only keep learning from them. It is as exciting as it is strange.

On the one hand, it’s exciting because every day at work both my coworkers and I are getting closer to the next part of our lives, or to the next version of ourselves that we need to be. To do this alongside each other is to share a process of culmination. As we each grow by ourselves, we also influence one another to grow, creating a kaleidoscope, or an ever-expanding process of new perspectives.

In this way, I can see why people remain at certain jobs for years and even decades of their lives. It’s all a matter of taking one day at a time, filtering through the minutiae, and showing up again the next day because each time is so different from the last.

On the other hand, it’s scary to think of how my job has grown on me.

It happened more quickly than I could recognize it. One day I just got up from bed and found myself not only ready to go to work, but committed to it. At a time in my life when commitments are rather daunting ideas, the commitment to work is something different.

In the moment I realized I didn’t just have to go to work–but that I wanted to–I stopped seeing my coworkers as just some other group of people, but as my team: a cast of individuals who–like myself–were showing up to the task in order to keep the fight going.

At the same time, the meaning of work changed: apart from being a responsibility, work became a journey to create sustenance in the face of an uncertain future. It became about building a life, and building a life became a grand privilege to enjoy.

Alongside my coworkers — these People of Los Angeles — the privilege of building became something fun. It became mysterious to think about how we’d get through another shift together, and fascinating to think about how we always found a new way to joke and laugh together.

It’s even more fascinating to think about how I’m still there. As a result, every day with my coworkers isn’t just new, it’s a ride, a puzzle, and a story. Sure, the ride isn’t always a smooth one, but one thing’s for sure: it’s always an adventure.

In this vein, yours truly has been adventuring, and rest assured: the best is yet to come. As the holiday season brings us together again, there’ll be a world’s worth of more to share and enjoy.

With Honor and Respect,

J.T.