What does it mean to be American, a Black one at that?
Preface: This blog is going to chronicle my #fulbright experience to Bolivia and Peru. As I've done in the past, the pen, will serve as my way of communicating. Over the years, I've come to love writing and the way that words give my feelings and emotions life (#yasssssss). I think this will allow me to express my heart in a lot of ways, so if you’re interested you should read up and share!
So let me give you some background. As most of you know, I’m a teacher at Evanston Township High School and I've been teaching for 5 years. At a conference discussing the impacts of race last October, a colleague and friend told me that there were a few openings for a Fulbright to Bolivia and Peru, the topic, Indigenous Voices in a Globalized World. I was like, hmm, this sounds cool, but never in my life did I think twice that I would ever go to Latin America. I thought myself, I should apply, and at 1:50AM, I started to complete my application and write my essay. About a month later, I got an email saying “Congratulations, you’ll be attending the Fulbright Hays Trip to Bolivia and Peru!” At the time, I don’t even think I could begin to process what this experience could or would be like. There was lots going through my mind in November. I was emotionally taxed from a lot of things in my life, going from being engaged to a great person, to processing the attacks on those with similar identities as me as a Black man, trying to understand the non-indictments over the deaths of the late Eric Garner and Michael Brown. My year teaching was filled with great challenges as I was privileged to teach the ESL section of United States History, with students whose families sought refuge from South Sudan and Iraq, along with students who immigrated here from the Dominican Republic, along side 1st and 2nd generation Mexican Americans and Guatemalan Americans, and those whose families have lived in the United States for generations. I saw my brother work to finish his 8th grade year in a charter school, while my mom sought desperately to get him into a solid high school with limited choices in a broken Philadelphia public school district. I also had my own exploration of identity that was spurred by a lot of things, one of which included teaching the Sociology of Class, Gender, and Race at ETHS. I was supported by some great people in my life, they all know who they are, even the one person who supported(s) me through things now. I questioned the authenticity of my organized Christian faith and began to realized how much of it was impacted by white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, structures of oppression that have been the source of so much hatred and othering in our society. All of these situations impacted me in very profound ways as I navigated my family whom I love and need to spend more time with and my true friends, who have showed up in very great ways.
As I worked to process what this particular trip would mean for me and had to develop a project, I was inspired by the work of late Chicana activist, critical writer, author, poet, and a damn great critic of the United States, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, organized religion, and the like, Gloria Anzaldua, who developed this concept of Borderlands Theory. It hints on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness and the fact that black people always had to navigate being black and being black in a white racist world. Anzaldua extended on that idea and suggested that people who are often oppressed, are created Third Spaces where they can exist without having artificial borders limiting their identities. And while her work is way more nuanced that what I just explained, it made me think about how I show up with my various identities, how my students show up in my classroom with various identities, and most importantly, her story being Mexican American and never feeling “Mexican enough,” or “American enough,” even though she was born in Texas made me think about how I important stories are in the way I teach history. Anzaldua starts her work giving a great narrative about the indigenous peoples who made America home and how that informed Mexican identity through Spanish imperialism and colonization. Today, there are aspects of identity that are hella complicated that she tries to communicate, and that’s what inspired my work with this grant. As a black man living in the United States, as a byproduct of hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow racism, and this bullshit notion that America has progressed, I know that the United States isn’t a safe space for me (peep my profile pix). At the same time, I wondered if there were experience in Bolivia and Peru for the indigenous populations that have any experiences like Anzaldua’s or like mine. That’s what this trip is going to help me process.
So, let me fast forward from November to June 19th, 2015. I’m packing my bags, to go, nervous as hell, just because its so far away, it’s for 6 weeks in a country where people speak Spanish, which I can understand somewhat well, but can just barely speak better than a 3 and a half year old on a good day, and where I would be learning one of the indigenous languages, Quechua. I had a great going away party, a surprise one, thrown by JC, Jesus, no not the Christ, but another Jesus with the same initials. Everything started to hit, not to mention, I was running late, CP time as usual, but hey, time is relative. I get to the airport and reunite with the 13 other great people going on this trip and start to relax a bit, especially since I got to finish Season 3 of Orange is the New Black (not bad IMHO). The flight from Chicago to Miami was awesome and I was reminded of the power of the human brain as I flew over the great city of Chicago, a feeling that didn’t last too long because I was passed out with my mouth open for a good portion of the flight. We started the descent to Miami International and I remember seeing such a beautiful sunset in the approaching night sky and thinking, damn, this is really happening. By the time I landed in Miami, I realized how real it was. I’ve never seen so many Latin/Spanish speaking destinations on an airport screen: La Paz, Recipe, Havana, Rio, just to name a few. It was so awesome. We boarded our flight for La Paz at 11PM, and I was lucky enough to get the middle seat, for 6 hours. After a long flight, with no wifi, or sleep, we landed in La Paz. It was very cool being on a flight where the flight attendants said everything twice, once in English, and then again in Spanish. As we landed in La Paz and deboarded the plane, I was struck with the fact that I was 13,000 feet above sea level, in the highest capital in the world. It took my breath away, literally, and to quote Ariana Grande from her “Eww” episode, “I was literally dying.” Altitude sickness is real, the struggle for oxygen is real and I spend my time in La Paz airport waiting for our flight to Cochabamba, sleeping and drinking that Coca tea, cuz it helps with altitude sickness. (This would be an appropriate time for “I’m in love with the Coco to be playing in the background...but that who idea is inappropriate and I do not condone that at all!) Boarding the plane to Cochabamba 6 hours after landing made me realize how much I hate heights and wanted to go closer to sea level, (Cochabamba, which takes forever to type, is at 8,000 feet above seal level, so much more doable).
But besides the altitude/height hype, I saw and realized some great things, the first of which was the number Quechua women walking around the airport. In their personally crafted garments of long shaws, skirts, blouses, and flat shoes, rocking hats to cover long black hair, I saw a culture that had long preserved traditions despite years of oppression, restriction, and marginalization. Quechua women walked around proudly wearing their culture and I though about how hard it is for that same feeling to be present for so many people of color in the United States (#racheldolezal). I someday hope to live in a place where my Black culture as well as other cultures of groups who have traditionally been oppressed can live without fear of being appropriated, and from what I saw in Bolivia, that wasn’t happening. We even saw a wedding party marching proudly in the airport, with Quechua mothers supporting their sons/daughters and grandsons/granddaughters. The other thing I realized when I got to the airport was one of things it means to be as an American traveling around the world, privilege. Now, I use this word lightly because there are so many contexts and levels for what this word means. In the United States, we use this word discussing the ways in which groups in power walk around without often giving a damn, typically white, heterosexual, upperclass, Christian cis-gender males, and how carrying those identities allows you the privilege of not having to think twice about the ways in which one exists in the United States. And there are so many iterations of what privilege looks like. I, myself, have a significant amount of privilege as a college graduated, middle class, cis-male, educator, Christian, etc. that many others don’t. In the borders of the U.S., sometimes, the privileges I carry don’t matter at the end of the day because there are still pretty oppressive privileged trump cards that exist (I can turn to the travesty and deaths of 9 Black people in Charleston for that) At the end of the day, when I leave this country, I have the ability to say that I’m “American” and that carries a different set of privilege when it’s contextualized in the rest of the world. I came from humble beginnings in Philly and now, existed in a country where 7 Bolivianos equaled 1 US dollar and an where an average meal at a fairly nice restaurant in Bolivia could cost me about 80 -90 bolivianos, or roughly 12 to 13 dollars, where that would be about $50 in the U.S. It’s quite something when you realize what you have, and it wasn’t until I got to the tour of the highlands by Cochabamba did I witness that realization up close and personal. At the end of the day, my colleagues reflected on their experience through two days. (We have 33 more to go.) In it they shared that they felt, community, a sense of awe, knowledgeable, gained a sense of perspective, gratitude, and gratefulness. Others described their experience as one full of diversity, stories, connectedness, identity, personal, juxtaposed and grounded. In all, I felt many of those myself. As I finish my first entry, I will say that I am challenged. This experience is going to push me to think in so many ways and we’ve only just begun. I’ll also let you know I’m tired and I think I’ll put the pen down for today before it’s too late.
While I haven’t had much of a conclusion to today’s work, in my opinion, you might feel otherwise, I’m wondering what questions you have for me and what comes up for you. What things should I consider here? I’ll also add that I’ll have photos up too, on my instagram @mrwin10 where you can follow those and see what I’ve been talking about. Today, I laid a lot of groundwork for the experiences I hope to process over the next 6 weeks, many dealing with identity, particularly my own, in the spaces in which I exist; I want to contextualize it with what I experience exploring identity, through the indigenous voices here, and through the Spanish-speaking world of Bolivia and Peru. The question above, “What does it mean to be American?” will kind of frame the conversation just a bit. Follow me and share with your friends (if you get to reading this far and talk to me!)
