Spanglish as Creole, or, "pasame los hot cheetos"

Everyone seems to be writing books about the (not) new (emerging) language of Spanglish. I got to thinking about the idea of a "creole" language, one that emerges from a blending of two languages, and then becomes a sort of pigeon and then a new language in itself with traces of the original contributors. After spending a whole lot of time in South and East LA, San Diego and Tijuana, I've heard a lot of Spanglish. And, I'd say, some ideas about border culture, bi-cultural existence and spanish barrio life can only be expressed in Spanglish.

(Photo: arturovasquez.wordpress.com)

Missing Brazil

I've been missing Brazil, the place I spent 4 months learning and struggling and questioning last fall. I decided to post here an essay I submitted to a study abroad essay contest about my experience:

"Options for Failure and Success when living a 4-month break from your life"

Option one: Spend a whole day understanding nothing.

You cover up your pride with a piece of saran-wrap called humility and admit you don’t understand. You admit the words being forced at you don’t correspond to ideas you can relate to. You accept that you can’t show off your personality via jokes or emphasized quirks. You feel bad because it’s necessary to be understood, otherwise, you feel like you're not really being human that day.

Option two: Congratulate yourself for understanding everything.

At dinner, you follow the conversation close enough to be able to offer your own personal vomit story at the appropriate time. And you know this time the laughter is because your joke translated, not because you sound like a baby learning to form wants into words.

Option three: You can pretend you don’t know anything about language or culture.

Ask about traditions, try out your really embarrassingly out-dated slang, dance on the street with laughing, head-thrown-back disarray, and let a local swing you around. Let your face say, everywhere you go: “I’ve-lost-my-culture-can-I-borrow-yours?”

Option four: Be known and be proud.

Claim and own your foreign-ness. Be just self-effacing enough to be accepted, change some stereotypes about your people when possible. Admit you do have a culture and there are some things about it you think are worth emulating. Disclaim that you don’t speak for everyone from home. Laugh when you’re in a town small enough that the question "at which hostel is the American staying?" works better than an address.

Option five: Embrace the paradox.

Walk through the street, buy a cup of sugar cane juice made in front of you by feeding a stalk of sugar cane through a grinding machine. Enter the high-class mall where security men ride around on scooters. Open your laptop and pick up the wifi. Realize you don’t have to keep an eye on your laptop, because the security guard is doing it for you. Go back outside and have someone make a key for you in five minutes and then buy a bunch of bananas, a pair of hand-made rubber shoes and some spices to clear your sinuses from the same vendor.

Option six: Remember without crying too much.

Keep in touch

Yesterday I participated in a class discussion about what missionaries tend to leave behind after short term mission trips: dependency, if you're going to go cynical, garbage, if your going to go the literal route, and probably a lot of false promises. One idea that is particularly disturbing is that groups are typically encouraged not to give out their contact information ("you never know who might show up at your door someday"). Good sense should always be encouraged, but the problem with this well-intentioned advice is that when we travel, we are the guests but often act as the hosts. We go into a community, take pictures, talk to the people, get their story, and live "their life" for a bit.

This summer, I brought church groups to an apartment complex every afternoon to run a high-energy VBS. We came, somewhat invited, and definitely welcomed. However, we were in their space. We were in their literal backyards. We knew in which house each child lived. And yet, to let them have our email or address to keep in touch was out of the question because "who knows what they might do with it". This double-standard is a little paranoid, a bit patronizing and a big barrier to real friendship.

Knights of Prosperity

(Photo: www.filmaffinity.com)

I've been on a mad chase, of sorts, to figure out why it seems every tenth person I see in Skid Row is wearing an orange t-shirt that says "Knights of Prosperity". Seeing that there are a number of religious recovery programs and shelters in skid row, I assumed it was for a bible study or a church plant; maybe they made t-shirts for their summer bbq or their retreat in the pasadena suburbs.

After asking a handful of people where they go their shirt, I finally accepted that there was no real meaning behind it. "They were just giving them out on the corner of 6th and San Pedro."

Apparently, Knights of Prosperity was an ABC comedy show that never really took off. With a surplus of t-shirts and a small fan-base, the contracted advertisement company likely opted for a tax write-off and gave the t-shirts as a gift to one of the numerous agencies in the Skid Row region.

Now I'm not aiming at being critical of donations (although there is a good criticism to be made. The domestic violence shelter that we work with has gotten cow utter lubricant donated as well as thousands of Jerry Springer t-shirts, which they haven't yet found a good use for) because without donations from large corporations and family garages, our non-profits would suffer greatly. There is something to be said, of course, for donating what the organization needs, and not just what is convenient to get off of one's hands and out of one's pantry. And yet, as I read about the ABC Knights of Prosperity show that never really was, how the plot was to follow a group of robin hoods as they attempted to rob well known celebrities (like Mick Jagger), I can't but think it's a perfect irony.

Skid Row residents, who live off of both their own resourcefulness and others' generosity, do often have a robin hood attitude. It is not uncommon for a soup kitchen patron who I sit down with for breakfast to tell me, in less academic terms, how I should just subscribe to marxism and make my passion in life resource redistribution. And, often, I want to agree with them. And, just as often, I want to muse that hard work seems to make us happy, and that the Protestant Work Ethic might have some good retort to cries for redistribution. I wish I didn't conclude everything with "it's both/and rather than either/or!" but, I think it is. I haven't heard a rich man's story yet that didn't involve a dose of luck and a dose of hard work, and I haven't heard a poor man's history, either, which didn't have some personal failures as well as society's flops in the mix.

So, today, when I walk back from the library where I write this to the metro blue line that takes me back to my South LA home, I will undobutedly see a Knights of Prosperity shirt. Orange, likely washed in the machines of LA or Midnight Mission, and I'll think: "if we Robin Hood and J.P. Morgan had a child..."

The Green Monster

Augustus F. Hawkins Natural Park













(Photo: www.lamountains.com/parks)

There will always be critics of city government, and they’re right that alliances are made for the wrong reasons about all of the time. But the doomsday criticism from Mike Davis’ article “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space” might bee too much. (link to article)

He writes: “Here, as in other American cities, municipal policy has [answered] the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation. Taxes previously targeted for traditional public spaces and recreational facilities have been redirected to support corporate redevelopment projects. A pliant city government…has collaborated in privatizing public space and subsidizing new exclusive enclaves (benignly called "urban villages"). The celebratory language… is only a triumphal gloss laid over the brutalization of its inner-city neighborhoods and the stark divisions of class and race represented in its built environment. Urban form obediently follows repressive function.”

Self-sufficient redevelopment areas aren’t like old city streets; they are designed to keep some in and others out. They are "hermetically sealed fortresses" and random "pieces of suburbia [in Downtown]”. Apparently, they have “killed the street" and "dammed the rivers of life.” More devastatingly, they have slaughtered any dreams of “pedestrian democracy”: an intermingling of races and classes where they can see each other and must learn to deal with one another.
It is absolutely true that the redevelopment zones of LA Live and the Financial District, a few walkable blocks from Skid Row, have brought money and foot-traffic back to a formerly derelict part of the city. It is also true that the more natural process of gentrification, which is happening, for example on the periphery of the fashion district, needs no city funds or state tax breaks to push the homeless, the trash and the working poor into other corners of LA. Sure, there’s some elite misunderstanding of poor plight alongside natural processes here, but authority has always aligned to push the unsavory sights and smells somewhere else.

With regards to open space, though, the City of LA is not entirely the green(stealing)monster. In my area of South LA, the Nature Park (link) is bed to migrant workers, play space to small children and educational facility to bored kids in the summer. It is social space for middle-aged walkers and a safe running spot for the health conscious. Near China Town sits Elysian Park, where people dating each other watch businesses light up the night skyline. Not much further north, Echo Park’s central fountain is surrounded by hipster couples, Latino families and weekly, my group of suburban teenagers debriefing their week of city volunteering. My favorite public space is Pershing Square. There, I can eat my pastry or read my book next to four homeless people, all of different races, who are in different levels of sleep and stages of sobriety. Security guards make sure all are sleeping on the grass and not on the walls or benches and that the peace is kept. I find the area to be benign and the true definition of mixed-use; Pershing is a bathhouse, a library, a bed, a romantic picnic spot and a morning coffee hang out, depending on who you ask. In McArthur Park, migrant workers, homeless families, recovering users from the halfway house and other locals use the city's outdoor exercise equipment and walking paths around the central fountain.



(Photo: takesunset.com/neighborhoods)



(Photo: www.laavenue.com)

Universal calming effect

(Photo: dogs.thefuntimesguide.com)

Today I encouraged 7 high schoolers as they organized donations in the home/office/pantry of a very visionary, very compassionate, fairly goofy missionary from the Philippines, sister Luz. After 3 hours of more or less stinky (more moldy and less sanitary) cleaning, they were ready for a break, some soda and a nap. Instead, they sat down on Sister Luz's front porch as I let the 5 new puppies of her raggedy dogs out of the house. As I saw 15 year boy and 30 year old youth pastor alike stroke the little furry black faces, I realized some things are universal. Puppies and babies, oceans and sunsets, grassy meadows and sand dunes--they'll calm any walk of life, personality, or state of being.

And, to re-create the scene: we stroked our respective puppies as Sister Luz told us her life story of nurse to immigrant to born-again to business woman to shop owner to prophesying, traveling, organizing, do-it-all missionary.

Today I visited a friend in Pomona to attend his church, of which his father is the pastor. I sang hymns in Spanish, ate great Guatemalan style chicken after the service and made Nazarene connections like I can't help but do.

In the past week I've also:
-Explored Culver City (a metropole for Brazilian Immigrants; I'm trying to meet someone to practice Portuguese with) with a friend from San Diego
-Had dinner with a friend from New Jersey and talked about Community Supported Agriculture boxes (link)
-Met a friend for dinner in Pasadena to eat Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles (link)
-Attended LA Pride weekend in West Hollywood (man oh MAN the world is full of interesting people!)

Why do I mention this? I need to just write out my life sometimes to realize how often I drive, how much I live, how much I see, and the luxury of my full, fast-paced and, honestly, me-centered life.