#immigrent

[bluesman56]

Grey by Tony

[ka-tagory9]

I’m not in the company of pianos very often anymore, but sometimes meeting one in an empty room I’ll place fingertips on keys … not press down. Letting loose a handful of notes is too far a cry from the sheets of music I once drilled or sight-read.

When I stopped playing the piano, it took nearly as long to forget as to learn. Eight years of weekly lessons and hours of daily practice will linger for a while. But eventually you are empty where the knowledge used to be, if you are determined to delete.

Generally, I hoard things, skills included. It’s a magpie philosophy of the good life: the slow aggregation of objects, relationships, abilities worth polishing. But piano was always someone else’s bauble. My parents are immigrants, middle-class in Viet Nam with aspirations to be so again when they came to America. And to them, piano was what people of a certain class did. Or rather, what people meaning to be of a certain class had their children do.

So when their fellow refugee friends came over for parlor-sitting, jasmine tea and cookies, there would come my eventual trotting out. It was like living in a Victorian novel, before the invention of TV or stereos, and people entertained each other by playing instruments. Minus, though, the bosom-baring dinner gowns; think more organ grinder and monkey.

So much the piano stood for. It was the shape of My Parents’ Sacrifices. They supported a roster of dozens of relatives back home, for the first two decades of their lives in the US; they set aside, as only the once ruined can, for major purchases and rainy days. Our brown, carved upright -- the ugliest but also cheapest piano in the store -- plus the hefty sum they paid to hire the good teacher, together represented our family’s only regular extravagance. And when the teacher moved, meaning two or three hours round-trip each Sunday clocked on L.A.’s 405, that gas and my dad’s foot on the brakes were added to the filial bill. His scowl said This Better Be Worth It.

[herriveroflove-blog]

Dulce Pinzón’s ongoing project photographs Mexican migrant workers in NYC as superheroes at their not-so-super jobs, which they take in order to send money back home.  From her exhibit’s page:

The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.

The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.

The principal objective of this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

Each photograph of the superheroes is accompanied with the person’s name, their hometown in Mexico, and how much money they send back.

See the full set here.