Author: Aylen Mercado

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Opinion The Last Word

Don’t Just Vote: Lead Others to Do the Same

CREDIT: Tmcphotos | Dreamstime.com

Pulling up to El Gallo Giro on Lamar Avenue, I hurried behind my mom as she grabbed a handful of volantes from the car and walked into the restaurant. She asked the manager if she could pass them around, and a second later she was introducing herself to everyone, one by one, and handing them a flyer.

Some entertained a conversation. Others received a flyer and continued eating, and my mother moved on to the next person. I don’t remember what was on those flyers, probably some kind of community event. But it wasn’t the flyers that left an impression on me. It was watching my mom move through the room and approach each individual with a paper in hand and a smile on her face. I stood a few steps behind her as she made her rounds, watching in amazement. The conversations were brief but personal.

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Can’t you hear me knocking?

My reaction to this also left an impression on my mom. When she shares this story, she laughs as she recalls, “Me preguntastes, Mamá, ¿cómo hablas con extraños?” How do you speak to complete strangers like that? I was about 7 years old then. I couldn’t recall anything in school that would prepare me to do something like what she had just done. In a society where we’re supposed to watch out for ourselves and our family, Mom was bringing in the community around her. She wasn’t talking at people, she was listening and connecting people to each other.

That was one of my earliest memories of seeing “ground game,” as political campaigns call it, in action.

Last week, I was driving back into the city when I was reminded of this moment. My Spotify-curated playlist “Your Top Songs 2016” played in the car, and I was driving through Jackson when Bambu started rapping about the ground game. Bambu is a father, organizer, and Filipino American hip-hop artist from L.A., and, like my mom, he’s not shying away from having one-on-one conversations with his neighbors. “That’s the beginning of groundwork / Building on that face to face / And not just on that Facebook, organizing on a Twitter page.”

Bambu ain’t wrong.

As technology and social media advance, it’s easy to lean too much into those tools. The primaries are getting here closer and closer (early voting in Tennessee starts on February 12th). We cannot rely on social media to do the work for us. The posts, shares, and retweets may be good at distributing some information, but they’re not enough to activate the change we need.

Campaigns know this, too. Having a strong ground game, having conversations with people directly, is the most effective way to turn out voters, and you can learn a lot about a campaign that is investing in this work.

To some, knocking on doors or making cold calls to voters isn’t the most exciting part of activism. It may even seem daunting. But we have to think of it as a muscle we’re exercising. You’re not going to knock out a marathon tomorrow morning without any training or preparation. You have to practice, run a couple of races; you’ll make mistakes, and you’ll get better. It’s similar to having a conversation with someone in the context of furthering a movement or political campaign forward. You’ll get people who are on board with you and others who will disagree. No one expects you to have all the answers — just to be a part of something larger than yourself.

Social media protects us a bit in this way. We sit comfortably behind our screens, away from confrontation or rejection, but without having real conversations with our friends, family, and neighbors, we’ll continue to be in a cycle of reacting to news, logging off, and not doing anything to change it. Getting active in your community and learning about and supporting other communities can be enjoyable and healing. Don’t just stick around when it’s fun and convenient. Lend a hand because when you need it, your community will be there for you.

We need you now. Our city needs you now. So put on your walking shoes, and let’s talk to our neighbors.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

2020 Resolutions: It Doesn’t Matter What Month You Start

CREDIT: Mikalai Bachkou | Dreamstime.com

In January 2019, I started writing in a red spiral notebook. I’m not much of a journal person, but apparently in January 2019 I must have thought a last-minute Walgreens notebook purchase would make me one. I wrote nine entries that month, and like many of my past attempts to be someone who journals, I left my notebook with many, many more untouched pages.

This time last year, like many folks, I made a list of things I wanted to do to better myself. I wanted to include healthier habits in my life, like writing daily, being outside more, getting up early to exercise, learning a new language, and reading a new book every week. Today, I can’t say I fully checked off all of those goals. I read books, but not 52. I exercised, but I blame the sporadic, cold Memphis weather and the fear of street harassment and cat-calling for not running outside consistently. Je ne something parle français.

It wasn’t that the goals individually were asking a lot from me. In fact, many were pretty reasonable. For example, another goal was to drink more water. I’d say that’s a pretty low-bar ask of myself. The mistake I made was that I was trying to do too much at once. I was stacking up so many things at the beginning of the year that by the end of the first month, I had forgotten most. The timeline I set up was not reasonable for me. With all the things I was juggling then, I could have probably found time to read one leisure book a month. One a week was nearly impossible with my work schedule.

I was exhausted by the end of the day, and I felt worse knowing that I hadn’t read through 30 pages of a book. I would even talk myself out of it. I’d think, I didn’t hit 30 pages today, tomorrow I have the same schedule so it’s probably not going to be different. As someone who sets really high personal expectations, the number of daily goals I laid out for myself was stressing me out. No one was forcing me to do this. I wasn’t being evaluated for my progress. What began as simply making goals to better my health was actually steadily doing the opposite.

For someone else, these goals may be a walk in the park. This may also already be a part of someone’s daily routine. It just didn’t work for me. It was too much. I never paused to think about how these goals aren’t fixed and that I could actually shift them since I was the one who set them. I was overwhelmed with getting through a day of work, resting, and then getting through the next, and I kept pushing my goals back further until February when I dropped them altogether.

Mikalai Bachkou | Dreamstime.com

Baby stepping to a better you.

That second month, I threw my list out except for one goal: exercise. My roommate was walking to the gym in the morning anyway, and doing one goal with a buddy, and accountability, helped me keep my goal as a habit. By going to the gym, I inevitably got into the habit of drinking more water. In March, I wanted to learn to skateboard, which many people around me advised against since I’m not a 13-year-old with time to heal any broken bones and, well, health care is expensive. Despite all warnings, I began skateboarding to the gym because I convinced myself that skateboarding would get me there quicker, meaning I could sleep in for a few more minutes. At first, my logic wasn’t sound, as I could barely stay on the board for more than a few seconds, but in time, I was knocking out three goals: exercising, being outside, and drinking water. Four weeks into my skateboarding journey, I actually did fall and break my foot, but now I know more about my body and can name my metatarsal bones. Win, win.

So, this new year, my advice is to hold off on those goals until February. If you do make goals in January, make your list, but give yourself the space to realistically do three, or at least start out at three and then add on. Besides, time is what we make of it, so who’s to say you can’t set up or add resolutions on the second week of March? Any new week or new day can be our time to make small, steady changes in our lives.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing South.

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Opinion The Last Word

Scooters Are Seasonal: Memphis Needs Year-Round Public Mass Transit

CREDIT: Mkopka | Dreamstime.com

Driving down North Watkins/Cleveland Street, I fumbled as the four-lane road turned into two to make way for the bike lanes. I’ve driven down this road many times since the lanes were repainted following all the redevelopment in and around the old Sears building, but, somehow, I still manage to forget that the right lane ends.

My friend Diana is riding along in the passenger seat. As we pass the fleet of bicycles and electric scooters parked around the Concourse, she says, “If people were just given free bikes, I think they would use them more.” I look back at the scooters and imagine a world where everyone has a bicycle. Would we even have the fleets of e-scooters in our city?

When the scooter companies were setting up shop in Memphis, I remember one of the biggest selling points was that these scooters would be the solution to the first/last mile problem. The first/last mile refers to the “getting to the door” parts of a commute that a bus or car can’t get you to. Scooters are for short-distance trips to fill these gaps.

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A closer ride with thee?

We now have at least four options to choose from: Bird, Spin, Bolt, and the recently released OjO seated-scooters that operate through Explore Bike Share. Lime pulled its scooters from the streets in October, and although they didn’t provide concrete reasons for the move, they did mention that in the winter, the size of Lime’s fleet can’t compete.

The companies promoted that the scooters are here to help folks make their connections. When the Bolt Chariot scooters came in, they claimed that addressing transportation needs and gaps of “under-served neighborhoods where there isn’t transportation or infrastructure to the interior” is part of the company’s philosophy. Ideally, this would mean connecting people from where they are to public transit (i.e. the closest bus line, train, subway). This could work in cities with more robust and well-funded public transit, but in Memphis, where we have an under-funded bus system, it just doesn’t cut it.

The city’s now-permanent Shared Mobility Program, which kicked off in June after a pilot phase, is planning on expanding the fleet of micro-mobility vehicles in Memphis to 3,000. During the announcement of the program, a city spokesperson made the statement that “More options means more access.” There definitely will be more companies to pick and choose from, but these options do not necessarily mean more access. It’s actually about who has access to those options.

When you look at a map of the city and see where these scooters are located, the “who” becomes clearer to define. So, I downloaded the Bird, Bolt, and Spin apps to look at their scooter distribution. I didn’t go into Explore Bike Share because their scooters and bicycles have docking stations. I also found that the organization is more transparent about their ridership and data than the scooter companies.

A majority of the scooters are where you would expect: Downtown, Medical District, University District, and Midtown. Bolt and Spin have a handful of scooters in neighborhoods outside of this corridor but not in significant numbers compared to Downtown.

If you put the scooter locations over a map that shows the percent of workers by ZIP code who use public transportation to get to work, it aligns almost perfectly. The ZIP codes along the east to west corridor that runs in the middle of the city (the districts mentioned earlier) have significantly fewer people who are dependent on public transportation. North and south of this corridor have higher concentrations of people who depend on the buses to get to work. But you won’t find many scooters in these areas.

Scooter companies will come and go, and it’s pretty clear that they tend to stick to high-traffic tourist areas. I’m interested to see what data these companies will report back through the Shared Mobility Program. In the next year, we will hopefully have the numbers to see how many people are using the scooters and where, and we’ll also know whether or not they are using them to connect to a bus line.

If micro-mobility companies are coming in, then public mass transit must be built up along with shared-mobility options. Independent of scooters and other micro-mobility connections, we must have reliable bus lines that can get Memphians to and from work, school, and hospitals. We need public transportation that is sustainable, reliable, and truly accessible to all Memphians.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Housing Game: Investment vs. Human Rights

CREDIT: Calvin L. Leake | Dreamstime.com

All of my bedrooms and homes growing up had term limits: four years. Every four years, my family moved. The consistent cut-off period was, at least to my knowledge, purely coincidental, but as it became a pattern, I became accustomed to it as an adult. There’s something about hitting the three-nearing-four-year mark in a single residence that, to this day, makes me itch for a change of scenery.

As a child, I enjoyed moving. It was exciting to start over in a new space. As with a KonMari Method, I would evaluate what objects I wanted to bring with me to my next home. I liked to plan out what my new room would look like. I still enjoy moving as an adult, but it’s not without its drawbacks. I still evaluate and reflect on my possessions, but more so for the purpose of fitting everything in my car and avoiding U-Haul expenses. As a 7-year-old, I definitely did not consider the stress, time, and costs tied to moving from one place to the next. I was much less aware of the reasons for our moving, reasons that are more real to me now.

Calvin L. Leake | Dreamstime.com

The Nine Apartments, Memphis, Tennessee

These realities didn’t escape my parents. They were aware of the rising costs of living because they could see it right in front of them. Rent increases. Someone gets sick, and health-care costs increase. As is the reality of most working families, housing takes up a significant amount of a household’s income. To remain housed, to have a roof over your head, rent or mortgage payments must be made above all else. We are all one accident, one crisis away from missing a payment that will price us out of our homes.

I recently went to the inaugural Memphis Housing Summit, and I was captivated by how one presenter challenged us to rethink housing insecurity as a spectrum. Prentiss Dantzler, a professor of urban studies, showed a line with homelessness on one end and homeownership on the other. In between there was a range of housing situations, including emergency shelters, transitional housing, public housing, and rental housing.

I’m simplifying it a bit, but just visualize a large spectrum where each of us fall somewhere along the line. We’re all in this housing spectrum, and we are all affected by housing insecurity to some degree. Much of this is due to the cost of living, which keeps rising and rising. So even if you happen to live years without any additional expenses such as medical bills, education expenses, or even having kids (because children are very expensive) — if you do not have any of that, if your income is not increasing to match the rising cost of living, you will not be able to afford to live in your home. And unless you have a family or network to fall back on, you will be moving or be without housing.

How is it that so many people in our city and country currently do not have housing and so many are on the verge of being without it? There are many reasons. One I find to be significant is that we don’t have living-wage jobs to keep up with the cost of living. This affects all working people from those working in the food service industry to educators to health-care workers and many more.

Zooming out a bit, the commodification of housing and land has also largely overshadowed the fundamental function of housing. The result is that we often see investment in housing only when it is deemed profitable. If we approached housing as a human rights issue, as it is recognized under international human rights law, then we would see a change in how we respond to housing. We may prioritize creating more affordable and accessible housing for everyone, rather than investing in multiple projects that rent apartments for $1,000 a month.

Shifting to a human rights frame, we also flip the narrative around housing. As Leilani Farha, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, has said, “If governments were doing more and really understood that this is a human rights issue of the highest order and an urgent matter, I think we’d be in a different place today.”

Farha points to the role of the government in not sufficiently implementing policies (for example, living-wage policy and tenant protection laws) that address housing insecurity and homelessness. When we look at it from that angle, we begin to see the structural exclusion of people from accessing safe and healthy housing.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

What I Learned From Working on the Memphis City Election

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Perhaps the least exciting fact I can now share about myself is that I think that early voting is the bee’s knees. I’ve lived in Memphis for more than 15 years, and while I’m not eligible to vote and sometimes I use idioms I’ve picked up without 100 percent confidence that I’m using them correctly, I still hold that early voting is the most wonderful time of the year (sorry, winter holiday enthusiasts and Andy Williams admirers).

Think about it for a second. In this past municipal election, there were 18 early voting locations that, with the exception of the Shelby County Office Building, were open six days a week to all voters. There aren’t any assigned locations during early voting, so an eligible voter could walk into any early voting location with their ID and vote instantly. Heading back home after work, school, or the grocery store, and feeling informed about local politics and candidates? You could just pop into any location and cast your vote. It’s probably quicker than going through a drive-thru (which would be a great idea for a polling place if the election commission hasn’t considered it yet). Isn’t that so exciting?

Jitdreamstime | Dreamstime.com

Well, it was for me when I learned about it, and as it turned out, even though early voting has been around in Memphis for at least 20 years, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how it works. In the couple of weeks leading up to the October 3rd elections, I canvassed with Memphis For All, an independent political organization that works to improve voter participation and create progressive infrastructures that address the important issues that affect Memphians across racial and class lines. In this short time, I learned a lot about our city, local elections, people, and myself.

Like many Memphians, I’m still a bit lost on how the geography of districts works. I talked to some people at the edges of the city who forgot they could vote in local elections or maybe hoped that by moving far out enough they could avoid it altogether. For others, it was obvious they were in the city limits but they weren’t familiar with the candidates running for mayor or city council. There weren’t any campaign or election yard signs, door hangers, flyers, or anything of the sort in some of these neighborhoods that would suggest that campaign teams had canvassed the area before.

Given the history and current state of restrictions on voting that have disproportionately affected racially and ethnically marginalized communities, early voting is, of course, a great step toward increasing voter turnout by making voting times more accessible. But how was this information, or any general information about local elections, not reaching all Memphians? As we made phone calls, sent individual texts, and knocked on doors, it became clear that face-to-face time with folks was important for candidate name recognition and to bring more attention to the importance of local elections.

We knocked on thousands of doors and walked up and down countless neighborhood hills and apartment complex staircases. We talked to Memphians on their porches, front lawns, and, to some who initially thought we were trying to sell them AT&T internet, through their window blinds and storm doors.

We talked about public education, health care access, living wages, voting rights, and much more. I learned that people didn’t know the early voting locations and some were unsure about their assigned polling location for election day. While the list I worked from had many voters on the younger side, most of the people who answered the door were over 35. A handful of the people I talked to weren’t eligible to vote because of a felony conviction and wanted to learn more about voting rights restoration. Once I got into a conversation where the person realized I wasn’t trying to sell them cable, they opened up about their experiences on elections and voting. Each day the summer heat was unrelenting, but as we walked back to our cars as the sun went down — with fewer flyers in hand and more voter pledge cards filled — I packed up feeling energized about my city and her people.

I’ll continue to think through the fact that this year we had the second-lowest turnout in city elections ever because it’s a reality we cannot afford to shrug off. Yet, the results of the elections have not diminished how I feel. If anything, it has made me feel more confident in the work we did through Memphis For All. Of course, we’ll all look back and think about all the “should haves” that could have increased those numbers: “We should have done this. We should have done that.” But it’s in these numbers that we also had some of the best conversations with Memphians.

There are lessons in each exchange we had where we learned about the questions, concerns, and visions for our city from folks of truly all age backgrounds. If I had to do it all over again with weather forecasts in mind, I would pack more Gatorade in my bag and head back out to have those conversations. In one neighborhood, we met a group of young black girls around the age of 6 who, taking a break from their apartment’s playground, confidently approached us curious about what we were talking about to the adults. They wanted to learn more about what mayors and city council people are and what they do, and as we were heading back to the parking lot, they ran up to us with the Memphis For All door hangers in hand. They each pointed at the photos of Tami Sawyer and Michalyn Easter-Thomas and eagerly proclaimed, “That’s me.”

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

Rebranding Summer Avenue

In recent years, the Summer Avenue Merchants Association has been working on a marketing initiative to “rebrand” Summer Avenue as an international district. Part of this effort has included the installation of banners and flags that represent business owners’ countries of origins. According to the association, between Highland and White Station, business owners along Summer Avenue hail from more than 30 different countries.

I had heard of the Summer Avenue Merchants Association before but was not too familiar with the rebranding efforts until I reviewed some of the news coverage on the association and its work. While I am sure that they are moving forward with this marketing initiative with the best intentions, I was disheartened reading some of the language used to describe Summer Avenue and the vision they have for it. I invite them — and all of us who frequent the area — to consider the implications of naming Summer Avenue an “international district.” It is a beautiful thing to see the various cultures celebrated, but when that celebration is not accompanied by any support for the communities who contribute to the changing cultural and economic landscape that the international identity is built from, we are doing our neighbors an injustice.

Planet Fitness on Summer

Summer Avenue and its residents have changed drastically over the past decades. Anyone who grew up in the surrounding neighborhoods before the 1980s can attest to that. This has been true for people within these neighborhoods who have created greater access to culturally specific food and multilingual news resources, as well as Memphians from outside the neighborhood who patronize businesses in the area. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recognized the growing presence of the immigrant population, undocumented people, and mixed-status families and entered the neighborhood and community spaces, terrorizing families.

I bring this up because this is one of the many things that the Summer Avenue Merchants Association and other leaders of the rebranding effort should keep in mind. Are we simply going to take people’s national identities and use them as a marketing strategy and ignore them when their family members or neighbors have been taken on the way to work or school?

Additionally, what does it mean for our city to officially recognize this area as an international district when it does not fully accept its immigrant communities? Is there an equal investment in the communities who contribute to the richness of the Summer Avenue landscape (and their safety) as there is with the rebranding?

In the High Ground News article “Summer Avenue to rebrand as an international district,” former County Commissioner Heidi Shafer was quoted as saying “the Latino community can offer a really strong family unit, and I want to strengthen that every place we possibly can.” Though this may sound like a compliment paid to Latinx families, it is important to recognize the context of that statement in a majority black city, where black families are stereotyped for being “broken,” and in a historical context that black residents integrating white neighborhoods would make it possible for families of color to move into these neighborhoods.

Given that context, the implication is no longer “Latinx families are strong” but rather “Latinx families are stronger than black families.” This is racism that puts being Latinx and black as mutually exclusive, positions black families as inferior, and pushes black families further out from the vision of Summer Avenue. Non-black Latinx people should reject the generalization that Latinx people have strong family units because statements like that can be weaponized to divide communities of color.

Ann Daramola writes, “The question of rebranding is the question of ownership, audience, and power.”

Daramola challenges us to think about who the audience is in rebranding efforts. Which audience is being prioritized? The merchants association describes Planet Fitness and Aldi’s as “desirable new businesses,” in contrast to “less desirable merchants like unlicensed flea markets and laundromats.”

What is lost here? In a neighborhood that already has nine laundromats, according to the association, it seems that these services are important to the area. For people who may not be readily able to afford washing machines and their upkeep, accessible laundromats are vital. The question then is, what are the underlying reasons that can explain why they “deter new development”? Are these sought-after businesses prioritizing the comfort and security of certain audiences?

The flea market that was replaced by the Planet Fitness was a missed opportunity. Flea markets are informal economies in communities. For various reasons, they may be people’s source of income. They are also spaces for social exchange, a convenient place for communities to engage and exchange news and information — which is important for current and new residents of the neighborhood to be able to acclimate. Fitness centers offer recreational activities that some may benefit from if they have the time, and time is a privilege, too. We cannot dismiss a flea market as “less desirable” when it was a resource for many in the surrounding communities. If efforts to renew the license were unsuccessful, next considerations could have been: How can we work with vendors, see them as potential local business owners, and create structure to equip them with the skills to sustainably run a business? Imagine the ripple effects of that.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

The See-Saw of Race and Power

CREDIT: CNN Video

On July 30th, images of a bright pink seesaw installed at the U.S.-Mexico border flooded my social media and news feeds. On the Mexico side of the wall, children lined up for a turn on the seesaw. On the U.S. side, a handful of people, mostly adults, got on the seats at the other end.

Though temporarily installed (for about half an hour), the seesaw will exist forever in digital memory through the photos and videos that documented it. Messages of love and unity accompanied them, and people celebrated the seesaw for allowing U.S. and Mexican kids to play together. As the co-architect Ronald Rael described, the “Teetertotter Wall” was meant to foster “joy, excitement, and togetherness.” But when I first came across these photos and videos, I didn’t see what most people saw or wanted to see.

Despite many reports suggesting kids on both sides playing together, coverage of the seesaw on the U.S. side showed mostly grown adults. Images that were widely circulated of actual children on the seesaw were of children on the southern side of the border. On the surface, images of smiling and laughing brown kids evoke positive messages. If that’s the level where we choose to stop, then we can agree that some of the goals that Rael and his partner, architect Virginia San Fratello, set out for this art installation — to bring joy and show that people on both sides can build positive relationships — have been accomplished.

CNN Video

Coverage of them should be, too.

But art is not that simple. Border narratives are not simple. The border, the wall, and the realities of immigration, colonialism, and militarization bound to it are multilayered.

When Rael and San Fratello said, “The wall became a literal fulcrum of U.S.-Mexico relations” and that the Teetertotter Wall reflects “how the actions on one side of the border have direct consequences on the other,” they presented a limited way to understand immigration. While it may not have been their intent, the consequence of this framing is that we neglect to consider the significant number of Central American asylum seekers who present themselves at the U.S. southern border. It also doesn’t recognize the role of the U.S. and Mexico in the oppression of Central Americans, especially black and indigenous Central Americans.

All that is lost in the coverage of the bright pink seesaws.

In their statement “Borderwall as (Settler Colonial) Architecture, or Why We Prefer Bulldozers to Seesaws” Dubravka Sekulić, Elise Misao Hunchuck, and Léopold Lambert write, “The immediate public acceptance and celebration of this project flattened it into a palatable image of hope, concealing if not erasing real and pressing concerns.” They emphasize that “this is less about the installation itself than its publicization” because the coverage of the seesaw suggests that this art intervention can make the wall a part of a playful landscape. In that brief but well-documented and later publicized moment, all we see is the smiling and laughing faces of brown children. It doesn’t challenge us. And because we are not challenged to think of the border and what it represents and supports in a different way, we consume images of brown smiles and then those images, like anything “viral,” enter and leave our social media feeds.

This leads to another point that unsettled me. These images of children that are meant to make you feel — something. Images of children, especially black and brown children, are often used for this purpose. Smiling faces to make you feel one way, faces full of tears to feel another. A recent example is the series of raids that happened in Mississippi where images of grieving families and children were spread across the internet.

The 2018 worksite ICE raid in Bean Station, Tennessee, that took 97 people was about 440 miles away from Memphis, and while there have been raids in Memphis before, this one had been the largest in a decade at the time.

For perspective, Canton, Mississippi, one of the six cities that experienced worksite raids, is less than half the distance from Memphis that Bean Station is. Around 680 people were taken from worksites last week. For some cities, it was the first day of school for children. Their faces of grief and trauma were shared and retweeted over and over. Some may say that this was done to raise awareness, but a recurring problem is that images of black and brown people experiencing violence at the hand of the state are not made for awareness; they are exploited for white consumption. The images of the smiling brown kids on the pink seesaw similarly serve to aid a comfort that obscures a call to challenge and act. Journalists and photographers need to think about their role in documenting these events. Are you amplifying the voices and stories of people with dignity and respect?

Bringing awareness does not require photographing children without their or their parents’ and caretakers’ consent. What these children and communities need is resources and support, now more than ever.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

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Opinion The Last Word

Lesssons From Countess de Castiglione: Inventor of the Selfie

For artists, self-portraits have been a way to explore form, movement, and representation with the most accessible model around: the self. As technology has advanced, the length of time required to create a portrait of oneself has significantly been reduced. If you have a camera or smartphone, you can snap your own image in an instant. Access to additional features allows you to also manipulate the image in countless ways.

Photography was introduced in 1826, and in the 19th century, it was a luxury. However, for the young aristocrat Countess de Castiglione, time and money were no match for her creative drive. Collaborating with photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, the countess created over 400 photographs of herself. The exhibit “Countess de Castiglione: The Allure of Creative Self-Absorption” at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens recently had on display more than 30 pieces of her work. Though Pierson managed the camera, I learned that it was the countess who was the director. She made the decisions on the poses, the costumes, and the props in each photograph. These were her selfies.

Countess de Consligliore

Some argue that self-portraits should not be confused with today’s selfies. They insist that self-portraits have a precision behind them that is lost in selfies. While selfies are more immediate in their results, that doesn’t take away from the thought that can be put into things such as framing and lighting. Take anyone who has posted “golden hour” selfies on social media and they’ll tell you, lighting is key. On the other end, contemporary artist Ai Weiwei has multiple selfies he’s shared. When asked to take selfies with others, he insists on holding the camera. He calls himself the “the best selfie artist.”

What remains constant is how art is used to create a representation of someone. What changes is the medium and who controls it. Many agree that the countess was obsessed with her representation and that her photography was motivated by her narcissism and self-absorption. She went into debt financing her photographs. Though she did share some of her work, much of it was for her private collection. Undeniably, however, she pushed not only photography as a form of art in its early years but also women’s role and agency in self-representation. The countess’ authorship in photography was her practice of being able to express and represent herself on her own terms at a time when a woman’s image was mostly controlled for them.

Still today, we are uncomfortable with women’s control over their image. Maybe this is part of what unsettles us about selfie culture — people controlling their image often in a way that is counter to what is prescribed to them. In her experimentation with self-expression, the countess created how she wanted to be captured in the moment and remembered in time.

This is a lesson we can take from her. Be fearless in your self-expressions, whether you keep them private or make them public. Maybe take selfies like Ai Weiwei. Find art and beauty in your daily life and don’t jump to judge others when you see them being their honest self.

Art is always changing. Photography in the early years after its invention was not considered art. Technology has allowed us to photograph and record at any moment. We don’t necessarily consider selfies an art, but artists like Ai Weiwei have incorporated it into their art practice. There have even been exhibits that specifically drew from selfies made with mobile phones. People today use selfies as a form of art and expression in ways that may not have been conceivable when “selfie” was widely introduced as word in 2013.

Selfies, over time, are probably going to change in use and meaning in the same way self-portraiture and photography have. Perhaps opening up what are considered accepted mediums of art can help us find new artists that help us see the world in a new way.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Context is Complex: Race, Names, and Education Don’t Always Add Up

In Memphis, we’re all pretty familiar with this one question. It’s an ice-breaker question we’re all guilty of pulling out when we first meet someone. It helps us place them in the vast landscape of the city, and it’s often the first question we ask: So, where’d you go to school?

For me, that was usually the second question I got, right after “Where are you from?” If my answer — “Memphis” — didn’t satisfy their curiosity, they followed up with “Well, where are your parents from?” if not the more blatant “Where are you really from?”

Years ago, I would be stumped by this interrogation. I’d ask myself if Memphis wasn’t the right answer, then what was? I felt that I knew the ins and outs of Memphis. I knew what streets to avoid during rush hour, when to move lanes in advance to avoid certain pot holes, and where to go for a late-night pizza run. I was the human Google Maps of Memphis.

Joseph Hernández

Despite the fact that I regard Memphis as my hometown, people asked (and continue to ask) these questions because they are trying to place me somewhere.

Where are you really from? It seems like they are trying to place me anywhere but, apparently, Memphis. To them, I don’t fit their idea of what a Memphian looks like, and I’m not the only one. There are many folks from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds who don’t neatly fit within the U.S. black and white racial binary boxes. This is not necessarily a reflection of change. Rather, this is a reflection of how these boxes that were constructed have never fit the complex reality of people. This results in an assumption that just because someone fits within this fabricated box, they and everyone else in that box share the same experience.

I was reminded of this while I toured “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now,” a current exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The exhibit has silhouettes from the late 18th-century to the recent works of Kara Walker, Camille Utterback, and Kumi Yamashita. Many pieces were from prominent 19th-century artist Auguste Edouart. As I walked through his surviving collection of silhouettes, one name caught my attention: Joseph Marion Hernández. The label read “Joseph Marion Hernández was Florida’s first delegate to the House of Representatives and the first Hispanic member of Congress.”

A gallery attendant shared that he was surprised to learn that back in 1822, a Hispanic man was an elected representative. Big win for representation, right? Well, a lot of people thought so, too. I found that today Hernández’s tenure in Congress is celebrated as a bold move toward diversity. Multiple articles and books memorialize him as the first Hispanic (some even say “Latino”) member of Congress, especially during Hispanic Heritage Month.

This is where it gets tricky. One may think that because I have a Spanish-language last name and I speak Spanish that I would be excited to see Hernández, supposedly “someone like me,” up there. In actuality, I have very little, if anything, in common with him.

Hernández’s parents originally came to what is now Florida as indentured servants from Menorca, an island of Spain. They later accumulated land, owned plantations, and depended on labor from enslaved black people to build their wealth. Born in the then-Spanish colony of Florida, Hernández built on that capital, marrying a wealthy widow and expanding his sugar cane and cotton plantations. He owned, according to one estimate, as many as 150 enslaved black people. Other estimates suggest several hundred enslaved people worked his plantations.

When Florida became a U.S. territory, Hernández dropped Spain and pledged his allegiance to the U.S. As a wealthy, land-and-slave-owning man, why wouldn’t he? He controlled over 25,000 acres of land. This man was not about to pick up and go anywhere. Through the Spanish Land Grants and later as a member of Congress, he was able to keep and advocate for his land and power.

Hernández’s advocacy came in the form of advancing slavery and supporting the forced removal of the Seminoles. Hernández and the slavery-reliant U.S. economy also felt threatened by indigenous and black people organizing against settlers. Seminoles resisted their removal. Along with enslaved black people escaping slavery, they destroyed several plantations including one of Hernández’s. He spent his last years in yet another sugar plantation, one his family owned in Cuba.

I do not celebrate Joseph Marion Hernández. He was a land-grabbing Spanish plantation owner who sought wealth through the enslavement of black people not only in the U.S. but also Latin America. He acted only to preserve his land, wealth, and power. This is why context matters. Without it, we mindlessly celebrate him as the supposed pillar of representation and diversity.

When we ask, or asked, what school someone went to, what we are subconsciously doing is trying to frame how to understand each other. But sometimes that framing itself is distorted from the beginning. It’s true we can find some comfort in knowing where someone went to school because we can try to pinpoint immediate similarities and differences. We know that there are differences between public and private schools and even between public schools; however, there are different experiences within a single public school. What we then learn is the name of their school and not how they navigated through it.

It’s not until we peel back the layers that we understand those experiences. It’s not until we look through our critical eyes that we understand how important and complex context can be.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian pursuing an Urban Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies degree at Rhodes College.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Women of the South are Speaking Out

CREDIT: BertaCaceres.org

International Women’s Day was March 8th. National Women’s History Month started on March 1st and ends on March 31st. As this month comes to an end, I can’t help but feel that March needs to extend for a few more days, maybe weeks.

The days of the month don’t necessarily have to change (Just think about whoever would have the job of rearranging the rhyme “30 days has September.”), but what if we could live each day as if it were International Women’s Day, or each month as if it were National Women’s History month.

BertaCaceres.org

Honduran activist Berta Caceres

I don’t mean the type of celebration that, for example, ICE did on its Instagram page. That was a whole performative mess. The image posted on March 15th that read “ICE celebrates Women’s History Month, Strength through Diversity” left me with so many questions. Who is this intern that manages their social media? Are they a mastermind who has curated their Instagram page to make the irony and contradictions in ICE propaganda incredibly easy to find? Or do they really believe this stuff?

Either way, we better not be running things that way. We’re not going to be like those Democrats who tweet and post about listening to black women one day and then attack Ilhan Omar, a black Muslim woman, the next. When black women bring attention to the connections between black, brown, and indigenous struggles, as Omar has in addressing genocide in Central America and the role of the U.S., they are frightened. They are frightened by what black women have to say when they finally hold the mic.

Indigenous leader and environmental activist Berta Cáceres is known for her expression, “They fear us because we are fearless.” Cáceres was a Lenca indigenous woman born in La Esperanza, Honduras. She was dedicated to the protection of indigenous life and land. She led indigenous movements to defend natural resources that were threatened by the illegal projects of multinational companies exploiting natural resources and breaking international law. On March 2, 2016, Cáceres was assassinated in her home. Cáceres knew she was being targeted for being an outspoken advocate for human rights, as many environmental activists are. “They follow me. They threaten to kill me, to kidnap me, they threaten my family. That is what we face,” she stated.

Two years and 12 days after Cáceres’ assassination in 2016, Rio de Janeiro councilwoman, Marielle Franco was shot in her car on March 14, 2018. Franco was a queer Afro-Brazilian politician and human-rights activist. She was a favela resident, mother, and defender of human rights. Like Cáceres, Franco spoke out against injustice. She was known for addressing police brutality, economic inequity, and reproductive rights. In her campaign for city council woman, her motto was “I am because we are.” Growing up in the favelas, under-resourced, highly dense neighborhoods in the periphery of the city, she was a symbol of the resilience of Afro-Brazilians in creating community following the abolition of slavery.

Lia De Mattos Rocha, a friend of Franco, wrote about Franco’s life in a piece originally written in Portuguese and later translated into Spanish, then English. She noted how Franco marked a change from the traditional ways of Brazilian politics. “The change that we wanted to see in our institution,” she writes, “was embodied by her. Marielle was different from them, but she was like one of us: She came from struggles, social movements, black university collectives, Carnival groups, funk artist culture.”

Marielle Franco and Berta Cáceres were black, indigenous women who confronted structures that did not see them, or people like them, as human. They charged forward with dignity and marched fearlessly, knowing that black women and indigenous women like them have historically been targets of corporations and the state. Women like Franco and Cáceres continue to be targeted. They are familiar with this threat, and they carry that weight every day.

It is difficult for me to speak about them in the past tense, because in my heart, I feel them and their energy, commitment, and passion as alive. I see them in many black and brown women I know today. While these women are not in Honduras and Brazil, there are thousands of black, brown, and indigenous women there at this moment who very much embody Franco and Cáceres. But the women I know are in the U.S. South, the Mid-South, the deep South. They are often not seen; their work may not be shown in highlights of the evening news; but their communities see them. We see them protecting black and brown people, families, and communities, fighting for our dignity and our future. We see their pain and exhaustion. And in the bright moments of coming together, we see them shine.

I speak the names of Berta and Marielle into the days beyond International Women’s Day and National Women’s History Month. Their stories go beyond these few words, as do the stories of black, brown, and indigenous women around us. All we have to do is listen — really listen — and follow their lead.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian pursuing an Urban Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies degree at Rhodes College.