She brings not only light, but fire.

© St. Martin's Press

AOC: The Fearless Rise and Powerful Resonance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Edited by Lynda Lopez

Alexandria inspires me, as she has so many others, to be more, to do more, to fight, to be informed, to be brave, to clap back when necessary, to wear my hoops and red lipstick boldly, to speak my flawed Spanish shamelessly, and on and on. Enjoyed reading these impassioned tributes to her and recognizing myself as part of a collective of strong women [and supportive men] who have been called to action by her light and fire.

The Imagined Threat of a Woman Who Governs Like A Man by Rebecca Traister

"It's this very possibility that's exhilarating for some, chilling for others: that women, and in this case, progressive women of color, newly elected in historic numbers, might team up in defense of one another, come to each other's aid, exact political revenge on those who would vanquish their allies in ways they have never been capable of before. Because it's not that women in the past haven't had the will or desire to respond to the affront of having been stepped over by powerful men; it's that they have not had the numbers, the voice or the chutzpah that comes with those things until very, very recently. What's scary to so many about Ocasio-Cortez is that she's acting like a politician with power."
(pp. 69-70)

In No Uncertain Terms by Natalia Sylvester

"What I couldn't have known is that my Spanish was never fated to be perfect. How could it be, when English was the main vehicle through which I consumed everything? It was the language of my friends, my teachers, my textbooks, and the movies, TV shows, songs, and stories I loved...But when you speak you first language only at home, it becomes your second. It becomes the carrier of all things domestic, its development stunted like a grown child who never makes it out on their own. Which is why, the first time I heard AOC speak Spanish on national television, I experienced pride, horror, shame, joy, and relief all in the time it took her to form one sentence."

(p. 72)

"To deal with the shame of hearing my own flawed Spanish come out of someone else's mouth, I first reached for the cheapest of coping mechanisms, comparing and critiquing AOC's fluency. How easily we perpetuate internalized harm, especially if we've never stopped to interrogate its roots."

(p. 73)

"If language is power, then my Spanish, flawed as it may be, has served its purpose by allowing me to help others."

(p. 80)

"I've watched the video of AOC on Univision 5, 10, 15 times. It occurs to me that I've been leaving myself out of too many conversations out of fear, and I think maybe if I watch her closely enough, I'll learn how to speak Spanish with more confidence. 

In it, there's no room for AOC to overthink or rehearse her answers, and even more impressively: it doesn't matter. When she approaches someone on a sidewalk to talk about the 2020 census, they respond to her warmth and passion, not her grammar. When Tejeda asks about her favorite food and AOC says, "Mofongo, soy puertorriqueña," the two Latinas laugh in mutual celebration of their community. 

There's no challenge to her identity, no doubt cast over her worth. Her Spanish is not flawed, it is simply honest, a more true representation of what it can mean to be first-gen Latinx in the United States today. Rooted in one place and now grounded in another, we find we are constantly translating, journeying back and forth. We find that our language, and the stories it carries, is not a straight path. Not necessarily English or "proper" Spanish or even Spanglish. Not the right words or the wrong words, either.

Here, in the conversations that those like AOC are creating, we don't need to apologize for our language. We have the words we learned at home, the ones we know by heart. They are good enough, powerful enough. They will be heard."

(pp. 82-3)

The Center Will Not Hold. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Counting On It by Erin Aubrey Kaplan

"Ocasio-Cortez made us remember who we are because of who she is: she's not simply a person worthy of being elected—bright, informed, empathetic, people oriented. She comprises all the demographics we need to see more of in government right now: female, Latina, of color, young, concerned about climate change and all the other big, paralyzing crises that have piled up over years and are bearing down on all of us, whatever our demographic. In the version of the near future that puts America on a fast train to ruin, unwilling or unable to break the momentum of any big crises, she is a road sign that says: turn here. Ocasio-Cortez brings not only light, but fire."

(pp. 85-6)

Latinas Are So Money by Carmen Rita Wong

"The power she has is twofold: (1) She has the confidence of conviction. She understands that money and economic policies shape our lives in this country, particularly the lives of people of color. (2) Her knowledge of the system is the fuel she uses to push ahead through the pile-on of dudes dismissing her at every turn."

(p. 113)

"...This is about understanding how revolutionary it is to have someone who looks like us, who shares our history and our expansive underrepresented culture, speaking to power. And money—boring, scary money—is key to leveling the playing field. AOC knows that. Now millions more of us are getting to know and see that, too." 

(p. 120)

P.S. I voted early today and felt powerful, hopeful, and brave.

& an update from my journal on Election Day: "Strangely (or not) I feel as I did four years ago: very hopeful. The whiplash of emotions after Hillary lost stunned us all into silence at first and then action in ensuing weeks. I know the risk of the same outcome is very much alive, but still I feel hopeful." 

The way in which a country strengthens and develops its culture is by opening its doors and windows, widely, to all intellectual, scientific, and artistic currents.

© Farrar Straus and Giroux

Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America
By Mario Vargas Llosa

wild how inevitably history repeats itself.

"Fujimori's trial lasted almost seventeen months, was televised, was attended by journalists and international observers, and the accused enjoyed all the guarantees to a defense. The three-member court, presided over by a prestigious criminal attorney, magistrate, and university professor, Doctor César San Martín, whose conduct throughout the proceedings was of a calmness and uprightness recognized by all sides, issued a sentence that should be published and read in schools across Latin America—abridged, because it is almost 700 pages long—so that new generations learn, through concrete events and identified people, about the tragedy of human suffering, public insecurity, criminality, distortion of values, lies, and contempt for the most basic civil rights in modern society in a country, and within the corruption and degradation of institutions of a dictatorship like the one Peru experienced between 1992 and the year 2000, when Fujimori, failing in his attempts to be reelected in rigged elections, fled to Japan and quit the presidency via fax."
(p. 38 from "Warning to Dictators"; Madrid, April 15, 2009)

"But it is vain to attempt to reason thus with those who have made the logic of terror theirs. It is rigorous, coherent, and impervious to dialogue. The greatest danger to a democracy is not terrorist attacks, no matter how painful or onerous they end up being; it is accepting the rules of the game that the terrorist tries to impose. There are two risks to a democratic government in the face of terror: to become intimidated or to go too far. Passivity in the face of attacks is suicide. To allow instability, psychosis, and collective terror to spread is to contribute to creating a climate that favors a military coup d'etat. A democratic government has the duty to defend itself, firmly and without any inferiority complexes, with the assurance that by defending itself, it is defending all of society from a greater misfortune than what ails it. At the same time, it cannot forget for a second that all of its power depends on its legitimacy, that in no case should it go beyond what laws and "ways"—which are also the essence of a democracy—allow. If it goes too far and commits abuses, jumps over laws like a bullfighter in pursuit of efficiency, relies on misdeeds, it could be that it defeats the terrorist. But the latter will have won, revealing a monstrosity: that injustice can lead to justice, that the path to freedom is dictatorship."
(p. 55 from "The Logic of Terror"; Lima, December 1980)

"Let's briefly summarize what nationalism consists of in the realm of culture. Basically, it asks one to consider what is one's own absolute and unquestionable value and to devalue all that is foreign as something that threatens, undermines, impoverishes, or degenerates the spiritual personality of a country. Although such a thesis withstands the most shallow analysis with difficulty and it is easy to demonstrate how prejudiced and naive its reasoning is, as well as how unrealistic its aims—cultural autocracy—are, history shows us that it takes root with ease and that even countries with an ancient and solid civilization are not immune to it. Without going too far afield, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Soviet Union, Franco's Spain, Mao's China all practiced cultural nationalism, trying to create a culture that was pure, cut off from and protected from the hated corrupting agents—foreignism, cosmopolitanism—through dogma and censorship. But in our days, it is in the third world especially, in underdeveloped countries, where cultural nationalism is preached more stridently and has more followers. Its defenders start from a false assumption: that a country's culture is, like natural resources and the raw materials held by its soil, something that must be defended against the voracious greed of imperialism, and kept stable, intact, and unpolluted, since its contamination with anything from the outside would adulterate it and make it vile. To fight for "cultural independence" and to become emancipated from "foreign cultural dependence" with the goal of "developing our own culture" are habitual formulas in the mouths of so-called progressives in the third world. That such catchphrases are as hollow as they are cacophonous, true conceptual gibberish, is not an obstacle to the many people finding them seductive, due to the air of patriotism enveloping them. (And in the realm of patriotism, Borges has written, the people only tolerate affirmations.) They allow themselves to be persuaded by them, even the media who believes themselves to be invulnerable to the authoritarian ideologies promoting them. People who say they believe in political pluralism and in economic freedom and that they are hostile to the idea of only one truth and omnipotent, omniscient states subscribe nonetheless to the theses of cultural nationalism without examining what they mean. The reason is very simple: nationalism is the culture of the uneducated, and of these, there are legions."

"The way in which a country strengthens and develops its culture is by opening its doors and windows, widely, to all intellectual, scientific, and artistic currents, stimulating the free circulation of ideas wherever they come from, in such a way that its own tradition and experience is constantly put to the test, and corrected, completed, and enriched by those who, in other territories and with other languages and in different circumstances, share with us the misery and greatness of the human adventure. Only thus, subject to this continuous challenge and encouragement, will our authentic, contemporary, and creative culture be the best tool of our own economic and social progress."
(pp. 92-3, 96 from "Elephant and Culture"; Lima, November 1981)

Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it.

©Penguin Random House

We Were Eight Years in Power
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates has had an incredible journey. I love reading his work because he makes me smarter, and he does so with eloquent, precise language.

Each of the eight The Atlantic essays featured in this book can still be found online, but the bound compilation is worth purchasing for his insightful notes alone. All of the essays were new to me, with the exception of "My President Was Black," which I wrote about last year.

A true revelation for me. One of its central themes: this country was built on a foundation of lies, plunder, and cruelty. Coates' anger, disappointment, and cynicism surrounding this fact is palpable. The conclusion seems to be that this nation cannot make meaningful, permanent progress until we can accept its whole truth. I agree.

"At that moment, in that classroom, going through all the mandated motions, I could not see it. I could not see anything. And like almost every other lesson administered to me in a classroom, I don't remember a single thing said that day. And as with all the other buried traumas accumulated in the classrooms, I did not allow myself to feel the ache of that failure. Instead, I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliations and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of these old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare."
("Notes from the First Year," pp. 6-7)

"I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafes seeing young poets flip through "The Waste Land," or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster."
("Notes from the Second Year," pp. 35-36)

"The twentieth century, with its struggles for equal rights, with the triumph of democracy as the ideal in Western thought, proved Douglas right. The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women's suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.
In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved–to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people–is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they'd pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery–chief among them, its flag–still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of "freedom." It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War."
("Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" p. 80)

"Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after. The barbarian Andrew Jackson rejoiced in mass murder, regaled in enslavement, and died a national hero. For three decades, J. Edgar Hoover incited murder and perfected blackmail against citizens who only sought some equal pursuit of liberty and happiness. Today his name is affixed to a building that we are told was erected in the pursuit of justice. Hitler pushed an entire people to the brink of extinction, escaped human censure, and now finds acolytes among some of the very states he conquered. The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.
Ideas like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me. The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given. It was then that I was freed from considering my own morality away from the cosmic and the abstract. Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. So I loved directly and fixed myself to solid things–my wife, my child, my family, health, work, friends.
I found, in this fixed and godless love, something cosmic and spiritual nonetheless."
("Notes from the Fifth Year," preceding the essay "Fear of a Black President" pp. 110-1)
"Fear of a Black President" earned Coates a National Magazine award. 

"At thirty-six, with a now eleven-year-old son, I felt, for the first time in my life, a sense of financial stability. Kenyatta was back in school and had transformed herself into a scientist. She still worked part-time, but it was less necessary. Soon it would not be necessary at all. I took pride in watching her grow. She was always introducing me to things–Paris, pre-Code Hollywood, E.L. Doctorow. And now she was adding the wonder of cells and biological systems to her repertoire. I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow. I had not known to look forward to it, and I guess that is because so often it does not happen, or perhaps when it does people generally grow apart. I don't really know. All I can say is seeing Kenyatta remake herself from liberal arts savant to med student, and doing so in service of her own mission, has been one of the great pleasures of my life. It was resistance: We do not have to be what they say about us. And it was more, something that I was actually lacking in my own life: service."
("Notes from the Fifth Year," preceding the essay "Fear of a Black President" p. 117)

"To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country's shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate–the kind that HR 40 proposes–we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion–and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper–America's heritage, history, and standing in the world."
("The Case for Reparations, pp. 200-1)

"This was a shocking definition of "political correctness" proffered by a politician of the left. But it matched with a broader defense of Trump voters. "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks," Sanders said later. "I don't agree." This is not exculpatory. Every Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one."
("Epilogue," p. 358)

"Still there was nothing inevitable about Donald Trump's election, and while great damage has been done by his election, at the time of this writing it its not yet the end of history. What is needed now is a resistance intolerant of self-exoneration, set against blinding itself to evil–even in the service of warring against other evils. One must be able to name the bad bargain that whiteness strikes with its disciples–and still be able to say that it is this bargain, not a mass hypnosis, that has held through boom and bust. And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related–but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal–a world more humane."
("Epilogue," p. 366-7)

*Must-reads*
This is How We Lost to the White Man
American Girl
Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?
The Legacy of Malcolm X
Fear of a Black President
The Case for Reparations
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
My President Was Black