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Armando Vazquez.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
Our three-alarm opera begins very early in our house each morning. First, Lady Whiskers, our huge Coon cat, meows politely, already in front of the bedroom door telling us quite empathically that she is ready to go into the darkness of the morning and begin her early dawn hunt. Our puppy, Maximiliano (Mad Max), hearing his sister, begins crying for attention and some warm milk. Half an hour later our family alarm goes off, all the while classical music is mesmerizingly reminding us to be mindful, trucha, and cool for the battles that lay ahead. This how we had begun our morning wakeup ritual for a while, until Trump ascended to the Monarchy of the United States roughly three weeks ago, and completely highjacked, assaulted, and disrupted our world.
Today our son will go to public school and will be assigned to continue reading Genesis. Our son is a great kid, trying not to get lost in the Western Christian indoctrination that is being shoved down his throat in a “high performance” California public school. My son’s daily fight at school is often a singular and brave attempt to retain his unique and beautiful cultural identity. His soft innocent eyes reveal a fear and apprehension that he does not yet fully understand and cannot assimilate in his heart and mind as to why one culture is so dominant and pervasive, and his culture is almost completely ignored and often scorned.
For the most part our brilliant and loving son is lost in a public school that has become an indoctrination detention center. My first impulse is to confront the administration and demand that the public school honor the “separation of church and state” doctrine. I check myself. I have already had way too many “confrontations” with the gatekeeping functionaries of the school that kneel and bow to the Trump Christian agenda. At the dinner table last night my son counseled and consoled me. He tells me it is only a book, and all the kids are reading it. “I just listen Maca” he smiles politely and assures me he is cool, “I don’t believe in that stuff. Lot of the guys, and especially the athletes turn to reading the Bible when they break up with their girlfriends. They are my friends, so I listen. They think by reading the Bible they will get their girlfriends back. That is pretty weak thinking: giving all your power to a book; no book can do that”. He looks into his dinner in disbelief and for answers to the madness. My eyes well up with tears. I am so proud of my courageous son, all I can do is smile back and tell him that I love him.
We go off to school and work, shell-shocked. Like much of the nation, we soldier on, trying to survive the living nightmare that we are all currently experiencing in this nation. I worked at the Public Defenders Office in Santa Maria. My job was to help homeless folks find safe and humane housing. My problem was that I worked for AmeriCorps, a federally funded nonprofit, that is prohibited from serving undocumented homeless people. To compound my personal dilemma, it had gotten around the Santa Maria court complex that “undocumented” homeless folks could talk to me about their homeless crisis. My tyrannical, by the book, supervisor aggressively insisted in shepherding me away from talking to the “undocumented”, for fear that I would somehow jeopardize the insane and inhumane federal dictates that prohibits providing direct homeless services to the undocumented. She could not or would not reconcile her “by the book, my way or the highway” mentality, and the fact that I was simply talking and attempting to assist every “homeless” person that knocked on my door. I did not check anyone’s legal “papers”. She made my work life a living hell. To retain my sanity and dignity I quit. I am a proud Huichol Mexican immigrant on my stolen land. I will not turn my back on any human being that needs help, immigrant or not. I have lost a job I loved, but I have retained my dignity and my humanity.
My partner is an immigrant, and after a lifetime of living in the shadows of this nation’s insane immigration laws and protocols she is on cusp of receiving her naturalization approval from ICE. King Trump came into office, and now all bets are off. My partner’s dreams of full legal residency, that she has bravely fought for most of her life are dashed. She is plunged back into the black hole. With the ICE raids taking place all over the nation we conferred as a besieged family and painfully concluded that for her safety and to protect the integrity of the immigration petition and its active status she had to quit her job. She informs her immigrant co-worker of her decision to go on an extended leave (go back into the shadow and hide!). Holding back the tears they embrace. The sisters all conclude that it might be prudent to follow my partner’s decision and lay very low. We say our final farewells, and we all walk out into the night uncertain about our future.
Trump has been in office for less than a month and he has completely disrupted the lives of our family. My partner and I are without work. Our son sees our struggle and tries to comfort us with his loving and gentile smile. He hugs his mom and tells us it will be alright. I don’t want to tell him that Trump and his goons are after him as well, with their vile and evil attempt to rescind the citizenship birthrights of children born to “illegal aliens”.
For now, we are together. We have our health, a home, our dignity, and our nuclear family to keep us lovingly watching out for one another, and hopeful that better days will come. But in my soul and heart I fear that if we do not stand up and fight this evil it will destroy my family and the nation that I love as well.
*This is a true story about real people. I am not trying to convince anyone. It is a cautionary tale, to be sure, that must be documented for my children and their children.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., was the founding member of CORE and the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Collective in Oxnard.