If My Mom Were Here…
For Mother’s Day I shared a post on Instagram about my mom’s many achievements not related to motherhood. She was a trailblazer in many ways including in the field of Chicano Studies where she founded library collections, and wrote “Dictionary of Chicano Folklore”, which is used in college curriculums, and “Cantina Confidential,” a novel she wrote right up to the very end of her life. I focused more on her accomplishments rather than the love and support she gave me because motherhood is hard and complicated and I believe she wanted to be known for her contributions to the world, as well as to the humans she helped create. My mother loved me but she wanted to do things with her life. And as someone who also wanted to do things with her life, I get it.
It has been 8 years since my mother passed away but somedays it still feels brand new. That is not an original thing to say, which doesn’t make it any less true. Sometimes I am grateful that she didn’t live through the hell-scape of the past eight years: if the cancer had not gotten her, the Trump presidency, pandemic, and horrifying gun violence would have chipped away at her will to live.
It’s been hard to understand the last few years. I have to remind myself what happened. Lockdown. George Floyd is murdered. Fires overtake California and the sky in the Bay Area turns orange. More lockdown. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Ongoing construction across my alley creates stress fissures (is that a thing?) in my brain. Trump Loses (Ok, so maybe world will not end)
In 2020 I began writing a play about the end of times called “End of Times Therapy” and worked so hard for The Man that steady exhaustion made me fall into a depression. until November went to Spain and healed myself with a dose of Barcelona. 2022 was a great year. I turned 100 (divided by 2) and went to Mexico, Portugal and all over California.
And here we are…the pandemic is over-ish and I made it out, albeit a little scathed. We were all broken by the pandemic to varying degrees. But I fared much better than most in the world. I saved money and got very used to my own company. I realized that if I could be with myself for weeks at a time alone at home then surely I could travel the world on my own. I wrote a play, created non-essential “art,” and walked around my neighborhood.
But much of the world did not fare so well. The number of immigrants entering the United States from all over the world at the US/Mexican border speaks to a humanitarian crisis in countries all over Latin America and the world. Countries like Venezuela, Haiti, Colombia lacked stability before the pandemic. Now war, corruption, climate change and poverty are driving people to risk their lives to come to the US which, by all accounts, while not perfect, is a better life.
This is all to say that I fell down a Tik Tok rabbit hole that took me to the Darien Gap, a 66 mile stretch of jungle that so far 100,000 people, thousands of which are children. And I came across this tear jerker of the American dream. After watching these videos I will never think of camping in the same. Extreme sports enthusiasts have nothing on the men and women who journey with their toddlers over hundreds of miles to face starvation, bugs, snakes, dehydration and god knows what else only to face a border that could send them back.
Below are some organizations that are supporting migrant efforts.
Border Angels
No More Deaths
Abba House