Abuelita Instincts

Published April 18, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form

     Tim Z. Hernandez was a featured writer at last weekend’s Book Festival at the Visalia Public Library.  He spoke about the history of his project to restore the names of 28 Braceros who died in 1948 when the plane crashed that was deporting them back to Mexico, a crash made famous in Woody Guthrie’s song known as “Deportee.”

           

     This project’s history has been beautifully rendered in Tim’s book All They Will Call You (2017), one of two books which were chosen by the Tulare County Public Library for this year’s Book to Action program.  The title comes from the last lines of Guthrie’s song:  “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane.  All they will call you will be deportee.”

           

     As I listened to Tim’s story, I remembered how my friend Sylvia Ross, another author featured in Saturday’s festival, once described Tim as “eye candy.”  He is delicious to look at, but at least half of his attractiveness is the energy inside his body and words, unified by the task of conveying the message inside his project.  What I heard is that Grace stands on the side of humane compassion, and you can, too. 

           

     Tim was born in Dinuba, went to Redwood High School and COS in Visalia.  He identifies himself as a poet, but his role as a story gatherer and re-interpreter is clear.  When he found the news article that first informed him of the 1948 plane wreck, still considered the worst in California’s history, he was actually working on another book, Manana Means Heaven, about Bea Franco, the person known only as “the Mexican girl” in Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road.  But the story of the nameless farmworkers captured his attention, and he began to follow their lead while still rewriting Bea’s story.

           

     Restoring names, restoring identities to people from his culture that white culture sees only as a category is a fine mission in life.  It restores dignity and presence to the people themselves, and it helps reduce the ungainly hubris and ignorance of white culture for those of us stuck on this side of the line.  But more than that, it gives credibility to a form of truth – and power – that many of us suspect, even reject.  And that is the form of knowing that comes from our guts, the accumulated knowledge of culture passed down and built up through the generations, what Tim called “abuelita instincts” in his talk Saturday.

           

     That term came out when he was telling the story about finding the first list of names of the 28 Braceros buried in a mass grave in Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno.  The priest in charge of the cemetery had a list, apparently from the list of “passengers” on that flight prepared by the U.S.  government.  Tim went down the list and noticed one mistake after another in the spellings of common Mexican names, mistakes which told him – through his “abuelita instincts” – that there was much more to this story than anyone knew.  The missing stories led him on a journey to find what wasn’t there, a brave move that most people would have avoided for fear of failure if nothing else.

           

     On Tim’s website (www.timzhernandez.com) I stumbled onto a photo he’d posted of two farmworkers in a field, bent over, working.  One has an infant on its back, legs dangling, facing the camera.  It is Tim.  He writes of the photo:

           

     “It was taken in the fields of Wyoming in 1974, the year I was born.  I am on my father’s back while he and my mother are working.  They were only 20 years old at the time.  Neither had ever made it past the 9^th grade.  They were young and scared, but driven by fierce ambition.  I like to think that while they were looking forward, into the future, I was there, bound to them, with my eyes on the past.  And it only occurs to me now, as I write this, that maybe this is how I ‘ended up here.’”

           

     In restoring the names and identities, the stories, of people who our culture has wanted to keep nameless, unknown, Tim’s work healing the past has made us a better present.  From that point we all can work together for a better future.  God bless his abuelita instincts, and his willingness to follow them.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial poet who doesn’t always like hearing from her grandmothers.  You can send her your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Sources of Power

Published April 4, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “There are two kinds of power,” a man once told me, a black minister from South Africa I met in Davis.  He’d come to speak about peace at a conference we were holding through the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and so I listened carefully to what he said.

           

     “The kind of power we normally think of is ‘power – over’:  the power of one person or group over another.”  That helped me understand why I automatically recoiled at the word.  Power Over is the greatest source of pain I can think of, for what it causes us to do to ourselves in defense of the threat of being overpowered by someone or something as much as the actual fact of it.

           

     “The other kind is ‘power – with,’” he continued, laying before me pictures of movements of peoples across continents and across centuries.  It is the power of unions, of co-operatives, of student groups and racial minorities.  In fact, it is the power of militaries as well: people committed to working together at risk of self for the benefit of something bigger than themselves.  Having just mentally walked through the Last Supper, that not-so-good cross of Good Friday, and the mysterious disappearance from the tomb of Easter, it’s not hard to see Jesus’ ministry as another form of Power With.

           

     Another man once told me of a third kind of power:  Power Under.  As a small farmer and a member of this community, he practiced this kind of power as a means of survival.  Many of us do.  It’s that “under the radar” form of self-protection and maintenance, staying out of harm’s way from those with plenty of Power Over.  So many of our undocumented neighbors have been practicing this form for so long, it makes it difficult to imagine another way.  It also makes it dangerous.

           

     As our young people have taken to the streets and the legislatures to protest our inability to protect them from gun violence in their schools, I have both cheered and wondered.  As the recent shooting of Stephon Clark by police in his grandma’s Sacramento backyard illustrates horribly, once again, our young black men aren’t safe anywhere.  Neither are the DACA students and their parents, whole families flying under the radar for years.

           

     Do we have the power to fix any of this?  I think we do, together.

           

     In a New York Times editorial last week, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated repealing the Second Amendment.  His arguments were sound and based in the constitution.  Perhaps in the face of losing all gun sales, the NRA’s backers would be divided and weakened into allowing our legislators to pass regulations against the worst weapons, the ones we do not need in our closets much less on the streets.  Perhaps if fewer guns were in our closets and on our streets, our police officers’ fingers would be less itchy.

           

     Our undocumented neighbors, however, need another solution.  They need us to come forward into our public forums and speak for them, we who do not need papers, who do not face having our lives ripped apart by speaking.  We need to advocate for legislation to be passed in Congress to make legal pathways to citizenship for people who are operating as citizens but flying under the radar.  We need to be walking with them in spirit while they stay low.  It’s what our citizenship allows – and calls us – to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who often feels powerless but for words.  You can send her your ideas for reform c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.