There were rallies nationwide today and last week against legislation approved in the House of Representatives that would make it a felony to be in the US without proper papers. Although it is an open secret that America is built on institutionalized racism, this is embarrassing, even for us. I met with two members of Washington D.C.’s Youth Action Research Group this Saturday and again on the National Mall yesterday afternoon to talk about this proposed reform, their experience in America as the children of Latin immigrants, and the walkout they helped stage at their high school last week as a form of civil protest.

Jose Andrade
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

Jose Andrade is the 19-year old son of two illegal immigrants from Honduras. He is a senior at Bell Multicultural High School in Northwest D.C., works two jobs outside of school and hopes to attend college after he graduates.

“Before my mother hooked up with my stepdad,” he says, “she was terrified she’d be deported and me and all my brothers and sisters would have to go to foster homes. And she had the pressure of having to provide for us on top of that. She is the kind of woman that tells you her problems, too, and that gave me a lot of anxiety, growing up.”

“Now my mother and father can both work, but it’s still really stressful. My dad works in an auto body shop ad that’s never easy.”

Judith Reyes
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

Judith Reyes is also a senior at Bell Multicultural High School, hoping to attend college in the fall. Her parents came to the U.S. from El Salvador to escape the civil war and give her and her siblings a shot at an education that means something. “In El Salvador,” she explains, “the best schools in El Salvador are full of people from gangs. You get good grades by threatening the teacher, not by studying and working hard.”

Judith’s father is a cook, and her mother works cleaning office buildings at night. Her parents have temporary work permits as well, which also cost $500.

“My friend Jose (a different one) is an illegal immigrant to America. He’s only been here five years, and he’s a senior in high school now. He’s been in the honor society since 9th grade, and has a 4.2 GPA. He tutors kids, and he helped us organize this walkout. He might not be able to go to college because of his migration status. His parents came here, though. Was he supposed to just stay home in eighth grade?” Judith asks.

On Thursday, April 6th, Jose and Judith and several other members of the Youth Action Research Group organized approximately 150 students into a walkout at Bell Multicultural High School here in Northwest Washington, D.C. The students are protesting proposed immigration laws that would make it a felony to be in the United States without proper papers. Therefore, the families of millions of people would be abetting felons, thereby breaking the law themselves. The students also wished to show support for the DREAM act, which would essentially allow the immigrants and immigrant’s children to attend colleges in their state of residence at in-state rates, thereby making college infinitely more accessible.

The school has traditionally been a place for immigrants and the children of immigrants to attend high school. “It’s not like this walkout was the protest of the school,” Jose says. “Actually, we knew the school officials supported us, but they just can’t officially say it.”

But when you’re a senior in high school with a fast-food job, and zero political power, one of the only ways you can be heard is by walking out of school, even if the administration’s hearts are on your side.

“One of our teachers was mad at us, kinda,” Judith explained. “She was like, ‘if you had asked, we could have done something’, but if we had asked and then got turned down, we thought we might get in more trouble, so we decided to walk out alone and accept whatever consequences came.”

Jose was scared the walkout wasn’t going to happen at all. So was Judith, and I would bet all the students involved were pretty terrified.

“We left at 1:50, and by lunchtime, I was real nervous, hands all shakin’ and everything,” Judith says. “Kids was telling me ‘Judith, we’re scared, they’re threatening us with suspension if we leave.’ We said ‘nobody’s making you do this. It’s got to be what’s in your heart, what you feel is right. If you don’t feel it, don’t do it. You can only do this if you want to. ‘”

Jose was really scared at first, too. “I thought to myself, ‘man, if we go to leave and only like ten people walk out the door, I’m staying my ass in class,’” It is true that of 300 students who verbally committed to leaving the school in protest, only about 150 actually made it out the doors. Judith and Jose were really glad for their peers that joined them, and really disappointed in the ones that didn’t make it.

“After we left, though,” says Judith, “I felt like we did something good.”

It had to be scary to go outside school as part of an organized walkout and see the parking lot lined with cop cars. The students knew that police were going to be there to preserve the peace and keep everyone safe, but this student body has good reason to take a dim view of any sort of police involvement. A lot of spoiled honkies (myself included) read this blog, and we think nothing of the cops except when they busted up our beer parties and punk shows in college. These kids see them differently, which is a whole other post. Long story short: that shit must have been scarier that most of us reading this can imagine.

“ We had asked people not to confront the police, and kept reminding everyone that the cops were just doing their jobs, just watching,” Judith said. After the students walked out of school, they remained in the high school parking lot and conducted a peaceful march. Some flew flags, others waved banners, and some talked to reporters from the Washington Post.

The Washington Post. A small group of frustrated, orderly minority teenagers were able to attract attention to their cause from one of the greatest newspapers in the world. They were mentioned twice in the paper in the same week. If that doesn’t give you faith in the future and hope for America, The Man has bitten an artery in your soul, and now you, too are The Man. The truth hurts, honkies.

Jose elaborates, “We assigned people positions to keep the group together, like sheepdogs. We couldn’t have people just going home as an excuse to skip school.”

I asked Jose if he considered the opposing point of view at all.

“If you were to sit me down across from one of the Minutemen, and ask us to debate migration, they could probably out-argue me with a knowledge of the law. They probably know the history of the laws, the precedents, and they could make a case. But where I’m coming from, it’s a moral standpoint. They might be able to out-argue me by saying ‘the law say this and that,’ but the law is wrong. It’s going to be very difficult to convince them of anything when we argue values and morals, because they will have to share mine to see my point. It’s gonna be tough, man.”

I haven’t considered the opposing side at all, personally, and I’m not at all prepared to start anytime soon. I don’t have to be, either. This is a blog, not a newspaper.

I don’t want to hear a fucking thing from anyone about America’s immigration problem unless it’s from a full-blooded Apache. Once someone in Congress open his speech with a prayer to the Great Spirit and addresses America’s long-neglected permeable border in eastern Virginia, my mind will begin to open up. Until then, I’m digging in my white liberal heels.

I was an illegal alien in Australia for the better part of a year, and it was miserable. I worked as a dishwasher, a furniture mover, a kangaroo shooter. I wore a hairnet and sat in a windowless, A/C-less warehouse in the middle of the desert, stuffing plastic cutlery into plastic bags so that people on airplanes could eat without using their fingers. One job, I worked in the blazing sun heaving boulders into a wheelbarrow and pushing the wheelbarrow uphill. The world’s most poisonous snakes lived in among the boulders.

I was supported by a loving girlfriend, too, so I didn’t even have it that bad, all things considered. When I pinched a nerve in my back and had to lie on the floor and weep for several days, someone that loved me brought me food and icepacks.

Even though my basic needs for food and shelter were being met, I felt terrible pretty much around the clock. I could see how much stress I was causing her, and I felt the pressure of every stretched dime. I used to haunt the town center looking for work, looking at vineyards and hostels and construction sites. Some days I had to choose between paying for a vegemite roll at lunch and paying for a train ride home, or shoplifting lunch and paying for a train ride. Other days, I didn’t have to choose. I stole my lunch AND snuck onto the train because I didn’t have enough money with me to do either one.

All I wanted to do was work hard, pay my share of the rent and groceries, and pay taxes. That was all I wanted in the world.

When she came over here, the same thing happened. She was hired at an Indian restaurant in DuPont Circle and treated like a retarded dog. They routinely underpaid her, lied to her, and one time another guy tried to bludgeon her with a telephone. The whole staff was either Indian or Latin, and something tells me that that place’s tax returns were highly fictionalized. Now, whenever someone says that Heritage of India is a nice restaurant, I have to correct them. I say “the food is wonderful, but it’s not a nice restaurant at all.

If enough upper-middle class American white boys like me had had the same diluted illegal alien experience I did, we would not be debating “immigration reform” today. We would just be reforming it, and in a whole different direction. The last time I checked, America was built on the dreams and sweat of foreigners. That’s the beauty of this place: nobody is from here, and everyone is supposed to be working towards the same dream.

It’s been months, but finally, finally, Mister Babylon has a new post up.

As I’ve mentioned before, Mister Babylon is an ESL teacher somewhere deep in the Bronx, slugging it out for the forces of good. His love for his job and his kids does not preclude him from hating on them, and he describes the intersection of his life and theirs with sharp, hilarious detail. It’s worth going through his archives and reading every last sentence, but I have to warn you: if you do, you’ll be back every day, craving more and more, and the man does not post all that frequently. At all. My RSS reader creaks when he updates his blog.

Magic happens on its own time.

Kathryn tipped me off to an incredible series of stories on Kevin Smith’s blog. This is the Kevin Smith of ‘Clerks,’ ‘Mallrats,’ ‘Chasing Amy,’ etc. Called My Boring-Ass Life, the blog chronicles his daily life as a filmmaker and comic book junkie. The man is a professional writer, and it shows.

The stories I am referring to are long chapters in an epic true tale of Kevin Smith’s attempts to help his best friend Jason Mewes to kick a terriblt Oxycontin and heroin habit, all while filming ‘Dogma’ and ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.’ The stories are a little funny, incredibly sad, full of love and self-deprecation.

Here’s links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

That’s all I got, people. Happy Friday.

This may be the greatest piece of music I am ever associated with, and I can’t remember how we did it. We never practiced for it, played it once, and never played it again. I’ll never be able to play like that again, either. My neighbors at the time this was recorded are probably very grateful for that.

I can remember the dented cymbal, tied to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I can remember the tambourine around my ankle and the poor cracking maraca leaking beans rhythmically. We found the bass drum on one of our many late-night alleyway odysseys through Richmond, always started too late and after too much, too much, waaay too much.

I remember seeing Eric across the tiny room, teeth glowing yellow in the swinging bulb-light, grimacing and alternately bugging his eyes out and squinching them up tight as he ground the guitar line out.

I don’t know who played the bass. There were only two of us in the room, pushing the skin of our faces back with blinding, rattling repetitive sound.

Willie leaned up against the screen door downstairs and offered his critique: “Y’all SUUuuck! Y’all ain’t got no rhythm!” He might have been homeless and insane, but he probably had a point.

I think I had hooked Jeff Gordon’s busted-up rattletrap homemade theremin up to a delay pedal. At crucial points in the song, I’d lean over and manipulate the electromagnetic field around the theremin with my hand, madly twiddling the knobs on the pedal to create that bubbling whoop you hear during the breakdowns. My leg never stopped moving that tambourine and the leaky maraca never left my hand.

I like that phrase: leaky maraca.

The key, as I recall, to getting the theremin to do that thing was to envision its antenna as a staff of elastic taffy. My hand pulled long strings from it, and by keeping the strings exactly the same length, I could semi-predictably create the same sounds.

I think. It’s all pretty hazy.

Sometimes Eric crashed the cymbal by bashing it with the head of his guitar as he played…other times I sprayed beans all over the studio and whacked it with a maraca.

He leaned over the four-track and twiddled knobs with one hand while playing the guitar going with the other. The four track would only work if it was leaned sideways at a certain angle. We didn’t have the money to fix it. He’d have to doctor his amp, too, which would occasionally puke massive shrieks out the window and nearly deafen us.

There was only one take, one recording, of two people out of their minds on sound and vision. We played this riff, this semi-song for close to two hours. What you hear is the best part of the jam, where everything came together, edited out into three minutes and thirty or so seconds.

We were underpaid, overlooked, furious at work, great and terrible at our instruments all at once. We hadn’t met the third member yet, the woman whose presence made us a band. We were just nice guys, too creative for our town, drunk and angry and not even sure how to express it all.

Shit, I miss those days.

Here’s the track:

Mushroom, by Eric Browne, Jeff Simmermon, and God knows what all else.

Hey, welcome, Queerty readers and others. For clarity’s sake, I am posting a correcting that the subject of this story just emailed to me. Please, please keep this in mind when you are reading the following story:

“The Orisha are ok with all kinds of love, it’s disrespect that they are not fond of. The fact that I did not ask Oshun was disrespectful. Yemaya would not be happy if straight people were getting busy in front of her. And the Orishas love gay people. The majority of santeros are gay because the Orisha do not care if you are gay or straight, just that you love and respect them.”

Fierce Priest
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

Every writer knows that dive bars house their share of secret angels, but the Angel I met at the Raven on Friday night is no common gold-hearted barmaid. For starters, he’s a high priest in Santeria, a religion that fuses Catholic and Yoruban beliefs in a fashion very, very similar to Haitian Vodou — voodoo to the uninitiated. Angel is no stranger to a live animal sacrifice.

He doesn’t usually slum with breeders in dive bars like the Raven, either. Cobalt and Halo are a lot more his speed.

No matter whose speed was what, by three a.m., we were all stumbling down the same path. We ended up in Angel’s apartment, where he graciously, proudly gave me a tour of his altars and Orishas — all constructed by hand.

Orishas are not necessarily gods and goddesses, but may as well be for the purpose of this story. Wikipedia refers to them as more like deified ancestors, or mystical, invisible super-heroes. There are a lot of them, and without meaning to seem pejorative, they are like the X-Men on a very cosmic, intangible scale.

The Orishas each rule several aspects of life, and have their own distinct personalities. Yemaja, for example, is mother of all living things and the owner of all water. She has a powerful presence in Angel’s living room, casting her gaze over the living room, past the empty television cabinet and directly upon the couch.

“See, I take this very, very, seriously,” Angel said. “Maybe to white people it seems all weird and shit, but this is my spirituality. It’s my life…it’s bigger than just my life. I can’t just be all kissing on some boy on my couch here in the living room. Yemaja will see it. If I get to making out all hot and heavy with some boy on my couch, I always have to take it to the bedroom, so we don’t disrespect Yemaja.”

We met up again at the Brickskellar on Sunday afternoon for some beer and buffalo wings. Angel wanted to go to the ESPN Sports Zone because in his estimation, they have the best wings, but it was crammed full of overflow from the circus at the MCI Center. Hooters was his second choice, but ditto, y’know.

Angel told me about his last run-in with Oshun, the goddess of connections, love, and good times. To illustrate her powers, Angel swept an arm over the table and around his head saying, “This, all this, is Oshun. Laughing, new friends, new connections, a few beers, some food…this is all Oshun. She brings people together, but man, she does it in ways you can’t expect and it’s roundabout as hell sometimes.”

He had a crush on a guy recently, and crushes go the same way in his world as they do in mine. You just want that person you barely know in your life, NOW, straight away.

Most of us just have to suck it up and deal with it one way or another, but Angel has a few tricks available to him that many of us do not: he cast a spell. The spell was designed to bring this man into Angel’s life, which is incredibly dangerous. They barely know each other, and for all Angel knows, the guy could be some kind of axe murderer.

Doubly dangerous, Angel did not ask Oshun’s permission to cast the spell in her name. He did, however, make her a generous offering of oranges and honey, two of her favorite gifts. Angel wrote his name on a piece of paper and laid it across the name of his crush, sliding it under the skin of the five oranges. Oshun’s number is five. He said a prayer and cast the spell. It was Sunday night.

Friday night, five nights later, Angel and a friend were settled into a big communal booth at Cobalt, which, if you did not bother to click on the link up there, is one of DC’s better-known and more crowded gay bars. Angel and his crush met eyes across the room, and their pupils danced together. He texted his friend Michelle “the chase is on.”

Just as he was getting up, Angel’s friend’s ex-lover (that phrase CRACKLES with bitchy drama already, doesn’t it) huffed up. He demanded to know what his ex was doing with Angel, hurling false accusations left, right, and center and maybe being a little too heavy with the shoves.

I have hung out with Angel only twice, but I can tell you this. He might be small and gay, but he takes shit from NOBODY. I’m quite sure that he spat something terse and decimating at his accuser.

“Honey, the next thing I know, that motherfucker leapt through the air like he was Spiderman and shit, knocked me into a crowd of people. Drinks flew all up in the air, everywhere, queens were all screaming and flailing their arms, it was a mess, and we were like Alexis Colby and Crystal Carrington on Dynasty.”

I didn’t catch the reference.

Crystal and Alexis
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

“You know, like on Dynasty, that soap opera, whenever Alexis and Crystal would just go at it, fighting on the floor, hair and dresses all flying all over the place, scratching and shit.”

“Anyway, guess who pulls me up from the floor? The guy who I slammed into when that motherfucker attacked me, that’s who. And guess who that was? My man, that’s who.”

“My spell worked. Oshun brought him into my life, alright, but not the way I wanted it. He touched me, and held me by my hand, sure, but now he probably thinks I’m some kind of spic that goes around getting into fights at gay bars.”

People are all the time asking me, “what is this blog named like that for,” and all I can say is: What else can you say after you tell a story that involves dive bars, Santeria, and invokes Spiderman and the cast of Dynasty to describe a fist fight in a gay bar?

See the URL, people. I can’t make this stuff up.

…there will be a bigger post soon. I’m just exhausted at the moment. There’s a true tale of a Santerian priest with a leather fetish and a thing for Dynasty getting into a fistfight at a gay bar and giving me a drunken tour of his apartment at 4 am this past weekend. But it’s taking a little time to organize, and man, do I need some sleep.