Some of you may remember that back in 2015 the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) announced plans to shut down the I-55 bridge over the Mississippi in Memphis for nine months. TDOT said it needed to do so in order to install a “roundabout” interchange on the Memphis end of the bridge. The entire project was to begin in early 2017 and last through November 2019, effectively screwing up traffic across the bridge and through South Memphis for two years.
It didn’t happen. And that’s mainly because some people with common sense (including this newspaper’s staff) raised hell against it, pointing out that shutting down the “old bridge” was a nightmare scenario, one that would funnel 100,000 vehicles a day (double its then-current traffic count) across the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and expose the entire Central U.S. to a potential shutdown of commerce should something happen to the one remaining bridge.
Over in West Memphis, state Senator Keith Ingram’s hair was on fire. He rightly pointed out that the shutdown would “devastate local economies throughout Eastern Arkansas and would cripple emergency services in the event of an accident or natural disaster.”
The late Phil Trenary, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber, cited a post-9/11 study that showed that closing both of the city’s bridges would have a negative economic impact of about $11 billion to $15 billion per year, adding that the impact on business would be “significant to not only the local economy but to the national economy.”
The Flyer’s Toby Sells wrote a comprehensive cover story on the subject. We editorialized against the shutdown vociferously and often. Eventually, thanks to building public, political, and business opposition, the TDOT plan was mothballed, hopefully forever. The area’s leaders came to recognize that Memphis would be in big trouble if we ever got down to one bridge.
Oops.
As we all know, thanks to the discovery of a fissure in a structural beam on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, the feared “down-to-one-bridge” scenario has happened. And as was predicted in 2015, traffic is backed up on I-40, through the city, and on the south I-240 loop, as 80,000 vehicles a day are funneled across a narrow highway bridge built 70 years ago to handle one-fourth that amount of traffic.
Imagine if the break on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge had been discovered in, say, June 2017, during TDOT’s proposed shutdown. Or worse, imagine if something should go awry on the I-55 bridge now. Can you say Helena, Arkansas? Or Dyersburg, Tennessee? Those are the nearest two Mississippi River crossings. Local — and national — commerce would suffer a horrific hit.
But thankfully the TDOT bridge-closure didn’t happen in 2017. People raised hell. The bureaucrats were stopped. Now, with any luck, the “new bridge” gets fixed in the next couple months, and we get back to normal. But we need a new normal. There’s a lesson to be learned here, and the time to act on it is now.
We have two bridges, both over a half-century old, both facing deterioration and maintenance issues. It’s obvious that Memphis needs a third bridge across the Mississippi. And it isn’t just about Memphis. It’s about the entire interstate commerce system through the middle of America, North and South, relying on a rickety, aging infrastructure that was built for the 1960s and 1970s. A new bridge addresses current and future issues. It could integrate with the I-69 corridor and maybe even incorporate space for future high-speed rail. Why not think big?
It’s not like we’d be asking for the moon. St. Louis has six major bridges across the Mississippi. Davenport, Iowa, has three. Hell, Dubuque, Iowa, has two bridges. We’re tied with Dubuque, people. It’s in our interest and in the country’s interest to plan for the future, not to wait until the two extant bridges fall completely apart. Officeholders and business leaders from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi need to get together and form a commission to explore the best way to get this moving.
Patching a crack with overlaid slabs of steel is a temporary solution, a band-aid that doesn’t address the overarching issues of a deteriorating infrastructure. Moving toward getting a new bridge should become a priority now — not when we’re forced to deal with another bridge shutdown. We’ve been shown a glimpse of the future. It’s time to face it, realistically.
Millar, Turner, and Taylor at Health Sciences Park (Photo: Jackson Baker)
In the wake of a previous circumstance of tenseness and hostility at Health Sciences Park involving the disinterment of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest, a press conference at the park on Friday, June 11th, was at least partly designed to clear the air, and to a large extent it may have.
The three principal speakers at last Friday’s press conference were County Commissioner and NAACP leader Van Turner of Greenspace, the nonprofit which now controls the large tract formerly known as Forrest Park; Lee Millar, president of the Memphis branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; and Brent Taylor, a longtime public official and the local funeral director who satisfied the state requirement for a technical advisor regarding the disinterment of the Forrests, destined now for a new gravesite at a Middle Tennessee site honoring Confederate history.
As Turner expressed it, “Hopefully, all sides were satisfied” — meaning the Black Memphians for whom the removal of the graves and monument meant a “full circle” expungement of former injustice and disregard as well as those whites who equated Confederate General Forrest with glory and their heritage. “I think the Forrest family wanted their ancestor to lie in peace, and there was never going to be any peace here,” Turner said.
Millar attested to the friendly cooperation and a general meeting-of-the-minds between himself and Turner, and Taylor, who saw himself as situated “in the middle” between communities, agreed that “all sides are happy with where we are. Both communities believe that we did this right.”
Asked what the future disposition of the park might be, Turner said he’d received “many recommendations,” but “Right now, we just want this to be a park, not to have any more symbolism here for a little while. We’d like people to just enjoy the park”
• Ellen Hobbs Lyle, the Nashville chancellor who ruled in favor of expanding mail-in voting last year at the height of the pandemic and subsequently incurred the wrath of the state Republican establishment, said last week that she wouldn’t seek another eight-year term in 2022. The suit that she ruled on was pressed by the ACLU and by a group of Memphis petitioners, and Lyle’s ruling was stoutly resisted by the state’s election authorities, who managed to get its scope reduced somewhat in an appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Subsequently, measures to punish Lyle were pushed by GOP legislators in the general assembly but were rejected.
• Governor Bill Lee announced last week that his administration would go ahead with a 37-mile wastewater pipeline connecting the still dormant Haywood County industrial megasite to the Mississippi River. Construction of the $52 million project could begin in the first quarter of 2022.
For some time, I’ve been the de facto book reviewer for the Memphis Flyer, as well as Memphis magazine and Memphis Parent. It’s a gig I’ve cherished and enjoyed, and I fully expect my byline will still appear alongside the occasional book review, if with a somewhat diminished frequency. The downside of being the company book reviewer, though, is I didn’t always feel free to explore every book that caught my fancy. If it wasn’t published recently, didn’t have a local angle, or was just too darn weird, I’d save it for some indeterminate future date. There were too many books to read for work, too many stories to sample and share with my fellow Memphians.
Well, those days are done, and recently I read the (terrifying, disturbing, excellent) new novel by Rivers Solomon purely on the recommendation of a bookseller at one of the local indie bookstores. (Thanks, Stuart!)
That novel, Sorrowland, follows Vern as she escapes from a religious compound and flees to the woods. The compound, Cainland, began as a refuge for Black Americans, a cooperative movement where they could look out for one another since so few others cared to take on that task. But at some point, the people of Cainland were set on a different path. Vern, plagued by hallucinations and strange aches, eventually learns that Cainland was infiltrated as part of a government-led COINTELPRO maneuver, one that transformed the haven into a house of horrors where its inhabitants were unknowingly experimented upon. Sorrowland is a work of fiction, but its pages are dotted with references to real, documented instances that prove its plot is plausible. Predictable, even.
Timing, as they say, is everything, and the timing for my dive into Sorrowland couldn’t have been more perfect if I had planned it. (I did not.) I began the book the same evening, literally hours after I drove to Health Sciences Park to take a photo, for a Flyer Politics Beat Blog piece, of the former resting place of Confederate general, slave trader, and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife. Those days are over, too. Last week, the Forrests were removed from our city and are now on their way to a site in Columbia, Tennessee.
I am not sorry to see those bones leave Memphis.
Yes, Forrest is a part of Tennessee history, and I believe students should learn about his part in it. His legacy is that of a man who robbed Black men and women of their dignity, freedom, and lives. It’s a legacy we should never forget or banish to the back corners of our minds, but anyone whose CV reads like the one listed above has no place in any public park. If one of your biggest accomplishments would now be classified as a crime against humanity, you don’t get a statue.
We get to choose who we put on a pedestal, and we should make those decisions together as a community. Choosing not to enshrine someone in a place of prominence isn’t erasure or cancellation or rewriting history. It’s just a matter of choosing who we celebrate, and I think that we can find better heroes.
Every Memphian should feel welcome in our public parks, and using a public space to honor someone with a history of oppression sends a message that more than 60 percent of our city’s population is not welcome. That message, intended or not, just does not sit well with me.
Ralf Golden and Toriano Banks (Photo: DeMarris Manns)
This is the South. This is where you make bourbon. Right? Not if you’re Toriano Banks and Ralf Golden. You make tequila.
Banks, 47, and his business partner, Golden, 37, are founders of Disbelef Tequila. Banks came up with the idea when he worked in nightclubs. “Being in the industry, I saw that tequila was being sold in abundance,” he says.
Banks, who also has his own clothing line, Baseball Rich, and owned a record label, Toriano Entertainment, saw where George Clooney sold his Casamigos tequila company for $1 billion. “That lit a fire up under us.”
In 2017, Banks went to Mexico, where he met Jose Villanueva, who works at a distillery in Jalisco. “First thing he told me was I need to get a license,” Banks says, “but I didn’t know tequila could only be made in Mexico at that time. That killed the idea almost.”
Villanueva said Banks could make the tequila in Mexico and ship it to Memphis. “I did studies on what was selling and what wasn’t. I studied market prices and things of that nature.” He decided to go with a clear “blanco” and an almost-gold “reposado.” The color “comes with the aging.”
Bottles were expensive in the United States, so Banks told Golden, “Let’s go to China and find somebody who can make bottles for cheap.” That meant another trip to his bank. “I realized we were in over our heads. We made 100,000 bottles at the beginning.”
Meanwhile, they tasted various tequilas, which their distiller shipped to Memphis. Banks didn’t want theirs to have the “burnt” or “harsh” taste associated with other tequilas. He wanted something people could drink in a cocktail or straight.
Disbelef was the perfect name. “You drink it, and you’ll be in disbelief: [You’ll think,]‘This is not tequila,’ but it really is.”
When their tequila was ready, Banks and Golden shipped the bottles from China to Mexico by sea. “It’s cheaper that way. So now you get to Mexico, you have to have someone pick up these bottles from the dock and take these bottles to the distiller to be filled.”
Banks then had to find a distributor, but he couldn’t get a meeting with any local distributors. So he eventually got his own distribution import license.
Then came the pandemic. His other businesses were suffering. “Money was stressed. We got all this tequila and money tied up. Bank loans to pay.”
Majestic Wine and Liquor was the first liquor store to handle Disbelef tequila. It was a hit. “We sold maybe 1,000 bottles the first day.” But Banks says, “We were missing one number in our license. So we couldn’t sell from October 6th all the way up to December 9th.”
They eventually got everything cleared up. “We were back rolling. Since then, Disbelef tequila sits on the shelves in over 100 establishments throughout the state of Tennessee.”
Most people probably would have given up at some point, but Banks says, “I am a very driven person. Outside of the Lord waking me up in the morning, I push myself. It’s hard to tell myself I’m going to do something and not accomplish it.”
And, he says, it doesn’t hurt “having a business partner like Ralf and a strong woman behind me like my wife Synettra Banks. She’s the infrastructure of the company. She does all the paperwork. She’s a partner.”
Future plans? “We are going to have four flavored vodkas in the first quarter of next year.” Why vodka? “Sean Combs is doing very well with Ciroc. People are taking to vodka just as well as tequila, so I want in on that.”
Does Banks take a nip of his tequila every now and then? “We do tastings a lot. So if we’ve had a successful tasting, I may take a shot later that night just to give myself a pat on the back.”
But he says, “The less product I drink, the more money I make.”
Bluff City Balloon Jamboree (Photo:
Chasing the Son Photography/Ewing Marketing Partners)
Want to spend the weekend with a windbag full of hot air on Father’s Day? That windbag is not dear old Dad — though you can take him on his day — it’s a hot air balloon at the inaugural Bluff City Balloon Jamboree.
At dawn, you can witness the mass ascension of balloons, and right after sunset there will be a spectacular balloon glow. In between will be a festival-like atmosphere. In the morning it is free to watch the balloons. There is a $10 entrance fee to the rest of the festivities, including tethered rides at $20 per person.
“You will want to be up close and personal with everything in the afternoon, shop the vendors, eat the food, do the carnival rides, and see the balloon glow,” says Susan Ewing of Ewing Marketing Partners.
It’s a great event for the whole family, and the proceeds from the event will benefit education through Collierville Rotary Club, Collierville Education Foundation, and schools throughout the Mid-South.
Tickets must be purchased online in advance. There will be no ticket sales at the gate. Otherwise you’ll have to stand in the Target parking lot near the event site at Maynard Way and Byhalia to see the balloons. That would be deflating.
Should you want to keep your feet on the ground, there will also be an art marketplace and informational booths featuring displays of artists and artisans, with an opportunity to learn about services and products offered by local and regional businesses.
Bluff City Balloon Jamboree, Maynard Way and Byhalia in Collierville, TN, Saturday, June 19, noon-10 p.m., and Sunday, June 20, 1:30-10 p.m., $10.
The month of May brought a lot of changes in Memphis’ Orange Mound community. Let’s go back so that we can move forward. The Collective (CLTV) was a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring and propelling African-American culture in Memphis. Primarily the focus for CLTV was on the arts.
Note the verb “was.” In mid-May, the organization changed its name to Tone and expanded its mission to the community as a whole. By the end of May, it was announced that Tone had partnered with Unapologetic, a music-centric arts and culture organization, to develop the United Equipment tower and surrounding property on Lamar.
Now, the partnership is having its first event at the Orange Mound Tower. The celebration will host musical performances, food trucks, games, and more to celebrate the legacy and freedom of those who came before. In a historically Black neighborhood, community-forward Black ownership definitely honors the Black community and ancestors.
The Juneteenth Family Reunion will be the first event at Orange Mound Tower. (Photo: Jesse Davis)
The emphasis on family for this Juneteenth celebration is intentional, says Victoria Jones, founder and executive director of Tone. “Family reunions used to be a highlight of my year when I was a kid. The desire to expand that experience to include the artists and creatives I have grown to call family through the celebration of freedom was a huge inspiration for our Juneteenth Family Reunion. We are inviting our ancestors into the space — it’ll be a real family affair as we celebrate their perseverance and hope that got us this far.”
Juneteenth Family Reunion, Orange Mound Tower, 2205 Lamar, Saturday, June 19, 5-11 p.m., free.
Jay Myers lives, learns, and teaches by example. And he loves to tell about all that knowledge he’s accumulated running his own successful business.
He’s just published his third book on his adventures as a company man, first for other firms and then running his own show, a production that became so successful that he sold his business (even though he resisted, a little).
The book, being launched this week, is Rounding Third and Heading for Home: The Emotional Journey of Selling My Business and the Lessons Learned Along the Way, and the grist for his tales are the obstacles that came at him like wild pitches — yes, he loves his baseball metaphors — and how he managed to use skill and a bit of luck to turn them into hits.
Myers founded Interactive Solutions Inc. (ISI) in 1996, an “audio-visual integration firm” that developed expertise in the swiftly evolving field of videoconferencing.
He recounts that in nine months, beginning with the day he got fired from his job, he put together his business starting with no money, secured/lost financing on the way, got a melanoma diagnosis, and endured a supplier embezzlement.
It did get better. He got ISI into distance learning and telemedicine and grew the company. Still obstacles found their way. In 2003, the accounting manager embezzled $257,000 and nearly killed the business. Then the Great Recession came along and messed up everybody’s plans.
Yet Myers — now a member of the Society of Entrepreneurs — was not going to suddenly turn risk averse. When the recession hit, he doubled down and doubled sales, coming out stronger than ever. He was deft at pivoting and reinventing.
And he wasn’t planning to sell the business. There were plenty of inquiries, but when one of the top companies in the field came courting, he had to listen, and he liked what he heard.
The process was both profound and instructive for him. “Selling the business is way more than a financial transaction,” Myers says. “It is a life-changing event.” After going through it, he decided he had another book in him. “I thought, ‘How did we get here? Why us?’ And that’s when I started reflecting on the lessons learned.”
The book is as much an encouragement from a mentor (he loves doing that) as it is a how-to when it comes to selling a company. The people he wants to reach are “working so hard every day to build their business and grow it. I want them to understand how you build value in that business.”
And that could be to eventually sell it, or maybe to hand it over to the next generation or the employees.
Rounding Third is an easy read, told in Myers’ engaging voice and chock-full of insights that have value whether you want to sell a business or just run a business well or even if you aren’t in business. Life presents obstacles no matter where you are and these are adaptable tips.
“I think one of the advantages I had in writing this is that I went into a fairly good amount of detail,” he says. “I got educated about this process because I had to understand what the endgame was.”
His first book, from 2007, was Keep Swinging: An Entrepreneur’s Story of Overcoming Adversity and Achieving Small Business Success. In 2014, he published Hitting the Curveballs: How Crisis Can Strengthen and Grow Your Business.
“I feel like I’ve stepped up my game considerably with this book because it’s so instructive. The other ones were storytelling and fun and inspirational, but this one, you can take notes and a small business owner can be helped with some options.”
Meanwhile, Myers is plenty busy now that he’s not in the CEO’s chair. He’s continuing to write for an industry magazine, he’s a volunteer mentor with the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and he also mentors through the Fogelman College of Business & Economics at the University of Memphis where he’s the executive in residence.
And he’s started a podcast interviewing business executives, including local luminaries such as Duncan Williams, Dr. Scott Morris, and Carolyn Chism Hardy. The podcast is titled Extra Innings, but the content is all business. Again, the die-hard New York Yankee fan loves his baseball metaphors.
Frankie Paz and Jocelyn Vazquez, two Dreamers,
have made Memphis their home since
their last interview with the Flyer five years ago. (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Bright-eyed, fresh-faced, impossibly optimistic — they stand in their caps and gowns on the cusp of achieving their hopes and dreams, ready to take on the world. That is the vision of the Dreamers — the young immigrants brought to this country as children, planning to make their way in the world, if given the opportunity.
Twenty years ago, the bipartisan Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) proposed the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) to create a path to citizenship for Dreamers. On June 15, 2012, two years after Congress was unable to bypass a Senate filibuster and pass the DREAM Act, President Obama announced his executive action, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and said:
“These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents — sometimes even as infants — and often have no idea that they’re undocumented until they apply for a job or a driver’s license or a college scholarship.”
Just over five and a half years ago, on January 14, 2016, the Memphis Flyer published a cover story titled “American Dreamers,” which featured two DACA students, Jocelyn Vazquez and Frankie Paz, who lived here in Memphis. At the time, Vazquez was a senior high school student at Immaculate Conception High School in Midtown and Paz was a first-year student at Christian Brothers University. Just kids!
But like so many DACA recipients, Vazquez and Paz are no longer kids
For Vazquez (left) and Paz, Memphis is home — a place to grow with family, contribute to their communities, and follow their dreams. (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Dream On
Vazquez and Paz are still living here in Memphis. While the optimism still shines, it has been tempered by lessons we all learn when becoming adults. However, their particular paths to adulthood have been made more difficult by the political realities of the past five years, including a viciously anti-immigration administration in Washington, an insurrection merely five months ago, and a seemingly dim future for the kind of political reform needed to modernize our immigration system.
DACA has given hundreds of thousands of young people the opportunity to stay in the U.S., study here, work here, and contribute to the nation. President Trump tried to rescind DACA in 2017 during the first year of his presidency, but the courts intervened. On June 18, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled against the administration, finding its actions to be “arbitrary and capricious.” The 643,000 young people — their friends and family, teachers and employers — breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Durbin has not forgotten about the legislation he introduced 20 years ago. The Illinois Democrat remains determined to see the DREAM Act pass the Senate, and, speaking from the Senate floor on January 21, 2021, the day after President Biden restored DACA via executive action, he said, “Without DACA, hundreds of thousands of talented young people who have grown up in our country cannot continue their work and risk deportation every single day.” But even he recognizes how the prolonged battle has occurred while the lives of these kids continue to evolve, noting, “These young people, known as Dreamers, have lived in America since they were children, built their lives here, and are American in every way except for their immigration status.”
Jocelyn Vazquez (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Making Opportunity Work
For Jocelyn Vazquez, DACA has allowed her the opportunity to study and work with some protection, though she (like all DACA recipients) must re-apply to the program every two years at a cost of $495. Thanks to DACA, according to Vazquez, “I’ve been able to do something with my college degree. I have a driver’s license and a sense of protection.”
She graduated from Rhodes College in May 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and is now an eighth-grade English Language Arts teacher at Kirby Middle School. She takes a visible pride in the connections she has established with her students, a process that has developed despite the multiple challenges of being a first-year teacher, virtual teaching, and then switching to in-person teaching this past March.
Frankie Paz (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Frankie Paz began college at Christian Brothers University here in Memphis in the fall of 2015; he earned a full scholarship through an arrangement to help Dreamers, offered through an outside foundation in partnership with CBU. Paz studied business with a concentration in sports management but was unable to complete his degree due to shifting family dynamics, health concerns, and work.
However, CBU represented a fantastic opportunity for Paz. On campus, he met supportive people in the administration and on faculty, but he also learned that he was largely on his own — as a first-generation college student, he had little family support and now realizes he was growing up and becoming an adult. “I began to network and learned how to meet people, talk to them, and came to understand that interacting with a wider community is fundamental for success.”
From CBU, Paz took a job with United Airlines. He interviewed for a ramp agent position, but the interviewer quickly saw Paz’s potential and placed him in customer service. United management wanted to move him to Denver permanently, but Paz, in consultation with his girlfriend (now wife), decided their future was with family here in Memphis. He is now working at a company owned by his father-in-law that specializes in customized construction work.
While these professional paths might imitate those of any young Memphian, President Trump’s attempt to roll back DACA presented serious stressors for Vazquez and Paz. Vazquez remembers the tensions associated with waiting on the Supreme Court decision in 2020: “The long three-year period between Trump’s attempt to rescind DACA and the June 2020 ruling created a constant stream of anxiety.”
Vazquez adds that Trump’s anti-DACA rhetoric shaped her thinking about money and savings: “When you don’t know if protections offered here in the U.S. and the safety of home and community will be uprooted from one day to the next, you try to save more money — you never really feel completely safe.”
Mauricio Calvo, executive director at Latino Memphis, underscores Vazquez’s sentiments. He worries about the tremendous human potential that’s wasted as DACA is rescinded, then brought back — i.e., as the political process takes precedence over the needs and aspirations of young people living in our nation. “These DACA recipients have been in a state of limbo for so long. It’s a challenge, and it means people have to make really difficult decisions,” Calvo says. “Does a person decide not to attend law school, given that there is a question about whether she could actually practice law once she graduates? Does a company pass over someone for a promotion because there is a question of what will happen with DACA?”
Paz does not dwell too much on DACA, but it is always lurking in the shadows. The 24-year-old comments how “the threats during the last few years were always there.” He diligently renewed his DACA eligibility documents this past January. He followed the 2020 presidential election, and though he cannot vote, he supported the candidate “who I thought would work to bring the nation together.” Stating the obvious, Paz says, “There’s just too much division here.”
Making Memphis Home
Family dynamics define the day-to-day life of Vazquez here in Memphis. Vazquez’s family has taken full advantage of various opportunities here in the U.S. For example, her younger sister — following in Vazquez’s footsteps — graduated from Rhodes College on May 15th with a bachelor’s in pyschology.
Vazquez’s mother no longer cleans homes for a living; instead, she opened a small restaurant here in the city, reflecting the determination, drive, and resilience of our neighbors. Her father has shifted his work from construction to property management and real estate. Her parents, especially her father, still retain the belief of so many first-generation immigrants that if you work hard enough in America, you will be successful. Vazquez’s experiences and the tenuousness of DACA, however, have left her a little bit skeptical of that notion.
To a close observer of experiences like Vazquez’s and Paz’s, “potential” is the word that best defines DACA recipients. Daniel Connolly, a reporter and author, has been covering immigration and the local Hispanic community for more than a decade. Connolly authored the critically acclaimed 2016 work of immersive journalism, The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America, which is a moving account of Kingsbury High School student Isaias Ramos and his family as they navigate life in the U.S. — in Memphis.
“These young people — it’s in the interest of society to help develop their potential,” says Connolly. The hope, optimism, human capacity, and youthful promise of kids like Paz, who was also featured in his book, continue to inspire Connolly.
Developing and nurturing the potential of DACA youth makes sense for purely practical reasons: The 643,000 current DACA recipients arrived here on average when they were seven years of age and have lived more than 20 years in the United States. They are the parents of 250,000 U.S. citizen children. It is estimated that, over the next decade, Dreamers with DACA who continue to work legally in the United States will contribute $433 billion to this nation’s GDP and will pay more than $12 billion into Social Security.
While the Dream Act languishes in Congress — 20 years on — and the politicians in Washington throw DACA around like the political football it has become, the young DACA kids grow older and become adults. “While the political fight goes on, the DACA youth are moving on with their lives,” notes Connolly.
The journalist gently brings up the Samuel Huntington paradox. In 2004, Harvard political scientist and cultural theorist Samuel P. Huntington (d. 2008) published a polemical book, titled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Huntington predicted a total social, linguistic, and cultural bifurcation in the U.S. based on immigration and data trends from Latin America. “Samuel Huntington,” comments Connolly, “wrote of a societal split and tried to frighten us by writing of a Spanish-speaking minority that never assimilates.” The journalist continues, “It’s actually the opposite of that — people are quickly finding their place in society, and this is a very hopeful sign for this nation.”
Up until a couple years ago, Paz lived with his mother in Memphis, but he moved out on his own and settled in an apartment complex in Midtown. Ironically, his neighbor in the same complex was Daniel Connolly. This was a certain sign for the Memphis journalist that Huntington was simply wrong. Integration was prevailing past the Harvard theorist’s bifurcation.
Paz — a newlywed — recently moved to East Memphis with his wife and has grown through his experiences. He has learned how the concept of family expands and evolves as the years progress and told us about gaining expertise in “budgeting, how to live and share with another person, how to be a better person.”
Vazquez said she loves Memphis and wants to stay here as an educator. “I lived in a big city [Houston, Texas], and a small rural town in Mississippi — Memphis seems like a perfect balance between those two extremes.” She is getting ready to move into a rental home near the Crosstown Concourse in the city she has chosen as her home.
Paz, together with his wife, plans to work in property investment here in the city; Memphis is home. “I see such great potential in this city, so much improvement and such opportunity for growth.” Paz has been here for a dozen years; as a two-year-old, he traveled with his family from Honduras to California and then to Memphis.
Calvo reminds us why it is so critically important to listen to the stories of Vazquez and Paz. “You know, generally, as a society, we become less sympathetic to people as they grow older,” states the Latino Memphis director, a bit wearily. “We need to understand that DACA didn’t solve the larger problem, it merely cracked the door, and that door can be closed. It’s cruel to show them the possibilities in America while not finishing the [legislative] job and giving them a full and unhindered chance at life.”
Like so many DACA recipients, Paz and Vazquez continue to move forward and have grown from young idealistic teenagers into adults confronting the realities of life’s challenges. They are our neighbors. They have chosen Memphis. As Paz says, “I can see myself staying here. I have only vague memories of Honduras. I want to build something in Memphis. … I want to contribute to Memphis.”
Nextdoor user Lisa Boling called out what she believes is a double standard at The Memphian Hotel over the weekend.
She claims her daughter and her boyfriend were asked to remove their full-brim hats before they could enter the hotel’s rooftop for drinks. They declined and left.
They came back later, took their hats off, entered the rooftop area, and found “older white men” wearing baseball caps. For this, Boling said the hat rule depends “on who you are” and wondered if “this fits into our artsy eclectic personality of our neighborhood.”
Posted to Nextdoor by Lisa Boling
Pass the Phone
“I pass the phone to someone who asks the nurse, ‘Are you ready for the gun show?’” That was Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo in a new public service announcement advocating for COVID-19 vaccines.
The YouTube video is styled after the popular “Pass the Phone Challenge” that permeated TikTok and Instagram recently. The #PassthePhone901 post features Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, Register of Deeds Shelandra Ford, Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, and more.
Target fire
A weekend fire at the Collierville Target had some members of the Memphis subreddit perplexed. One heard someone set the chip aisle ablaze. Another heard multiple fires were set on purpose. Someone heard it was just an electrical fire.
Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki.
Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win.
When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series.
Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event.
Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again.
In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster.
Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length.
Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking.
