She isn’t only a poet. Harjo’s a performer, professor, playwright, and musician with the band Poetic Justice, and recently a memoirist (her memoir Crazy Brave came out in July 2012 from Norton). She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the PEN Open Book Award, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement Award, among many other accolades. Through her art (and beyond), she’s an activist, pioneering for the recognition and respect of indigenous and writers of color within the realm of literature and academia. As a Native American of the Muskogee Creek Nation, she was born fighting for rights of indigenous peoples in her homeland of Oklahoma and throughout the country.

Harjo’s distinct and brilliant style of prosaic poetry is what inspired me to talk to her. Her poetry is rhythmic in a way that I have never known poetry to be. She consistently employs a subtle level of repetition in her poetry, which, depending, can make her poems sound political, forlorn, or exhilarating.

I was fortunate to briefly converse with Harjo over e-mail about her memoir, her journey as a writer, and her theories on poetry.

***

The Rumpus: In your memoir, Crazy Brave, you talk about the “knowing.” The “knowing” is a clairvoyant inkling that lets you know when life is going to change course. How does the “knowing” play a role in your life today?

Joy Harjo: The “knowing” is a vast field of intelligence beyond mental clatter and any kind of dividing line. It can be seen as a being, and it is, many beings, and it is, a geometric flow, and it is—it is part of all of us, or, we are part of it. The intelligence is metaphor to the thousandth-plus power. It is small and it is large. Creative artists immerse themselves in this flow. You cannot force it. I believe you can feed it or turn your back on it; no matter—it is still dynamically at work.

I listen to the “knowing” more directly and willingly than I did when I was younger. I tend to by hyper-analytic, which is useful, especially in revision, but not when in the creative and/or listening mode. I’m learning how to shift and how to trust.

Rumpus: How has the “knowing” influenced your writing? Do you feel like your style has changed as your awareness has grown?

Harjo: The “knowing” is part of the inherent person. A person is many streams of events: persons come together in a coherent structure (or maybe sometimes not so coherent!).

Rumpus: You attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts and studied a myriad of mediums, among them poetry. You say in Crazy Brave, “We began to understand that poetry did not have to be from England or of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.” Do you think academia and the industry of poetry has becomes less Anglo-centric? Do you think we’re progressing in the respect that popular poetry is becoming more diversified? Or no?

Harjo: As a poet, I was present at the beginning of the multicultural literary movement in the mid-’70s. There was great resistance in the academy. There still is. I was told that a voice against my hire in a major university believed that multicultural literature was a sham. This was in 2000. A colleague in my first university hired in the mid-’80s sauntered into my office and called me a primitive poet. And anything of indigenous/aboriginal origin often falls away into the “disappeared” or “exotic other” category.

Some of us emerge despite the difficulties. Poetry is always diversifying. That is the nature of art. There will always be stalwarts of Euro or even other classical traditions, who dismiss any version or branch. This is true in Muscogean dance traditions, jazz, or any other form.

Rumpus: I think of your poetry as anything but primitive. Your poetry always has a very strong, fresh narrative voice. How did you struggle against the “disappeared” and “exotic other” labels in your writing?

Harjo: I still struggle, or rather I should say, I am aware that these forces of thinking are still very present—there’s an investment in this country and perhaps all of the Western hemisphere to disappear indigenous peoples. It’s not necessarily a calculated plan. The disappearance happened when physical, mental, and spiritual violence was used to take over lands, when indigenous peoples and cultures were pronounced inferior or even demonic. To accept that there are still indigenous peoples with major cultural and social accomplishments means that the story, or the wound, will have to be reopened and examined. I just have to keep moving and honor the indigenous presence within myself. That’s not necessarily an easy thing to do in this American social structure.

Rumpus: You mentioned that Crazy Brave took you fourteen years to write. For someone who ingeniously cranks out new art, music, and poetry at such a frequent speed, I gather that writing your memoir must have been a very deep, visceral undertaking. Can you expound upon the experience of writing it, and how has its publication affected you?

Harjo: There were three starts to the memoir. The first was as a collection of memory riffs, based on songs. That title was A Love Supreme. The second was as a short story collection. That book, when I stopped that track, was at almost two hundred pages. The third was a collage of vignettes, stories, dreams, and poems. A year before publication, my editor at Norton, Jill Bialosky, wrote to say that the book was being called in—and I gave up and wrote the memoir that was waiting for me to be brave enough. I thought I was only seven years late, until I read the contract after turning in the final manuscript. I was horrified that I was fourteen years past my delivery date. The first days of publication, I felt stripped down and raw. That feeling is both terrifying and liberating.

Rumpus: You say “poetry came into the world with music” and that “most poetry isn’t on the page.” Do you think that with the advancement and popularity of technology we are reverting back to the indigenous style of poetry, and veering away from the academic format? Or do we continue to remain stagnant?

Harjo: I believe that we always return to the root, in some manner or other—there’s a kind of spiral looping back to keep integrity of form. Even written-down or printed forms are inculcated with elements of orality. Poetry, dance and music came into the world together. The academic can be rigid and dogmatic at worst, and at best, rigorous and demanding in preciseness of form. When I say “academic” here, I mean verse with Euro-Anglo derivations.

Rumpus: Your poetry and music are obviously void of such derivations. Do you think you would be a musician if you hadn’t been a poet first?

Harjo: I am a musician…I was going to say that if my music hadn’t been so stifled in my early teens, I would have been a musician first, but my writing was not safe in my home. It was most likely less threatening to take to a pen than to perform with my voice and a horn. You cannot hide when you are singing by voice or horn.

Rumpus: You say that poetry is “to get to that place without words.” To me, that means poetry is a journey of speaking and it ends with catharsis. Could you go into detail on that statement?

Harjo: The first time I stated this was probably in the mid-’80s, when I was in Denver and spent several nights a week in the jazz clubs, listening. I wasn’t playing saxophone yet. I heard where music could go that words could not—words can be more easily bound by culture, language, and other expectations. Music also has parameters of construction and expectation, but can saturate and move—beyond words.

…I don’t believe I particularly mean that a poem necessarily must end with catharsis. Words are representations and architectural materials for a structure through which meaning is derived, through which spirit can move. The “without words” is that which cannot be finally captured. It can be experienced. Catharsis can be the initiating impetus or occur many times within the body. Catharsis doesn’t have to necessarily be the end event.

Rumpus: With that theory in mind, what poets do you share the stage with (metaphorically)?

Harjo: Robert Sullivan, the Maori poet, comes to mind. Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Jim Morrison, Jayne Cortez (a great inspiration in my journey to return music to poetry in the original traditions of poetry), Ray Young Bear, Patricia Smith… I’ve literally shared the stage with Cornelius Eady and my Arrow Dynamics band for the New Mexico Jazz Workshop’s Jazz Deconstructed series. We performed our original songs. Both Cornelius and I sang. I played saxophone and flute.

Rumpus: Are those the same poets who influence you?

Harjo: Yes, and no. Charles Bukowski was an influence. Pablo Neruda. One of my utter favorite poets is Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet. There’s Ruben Dario, the Nicaraguan poet. Then there’s the poet of saxophone, John Coltrane. I would also include Jim Pepper.

I always tell younger poets to feed the source of the poetry. To give honor and thanks to those who came before us, and to take care of those who are following. You can do this by honoring your mentors with your gift, and literally feeding their spirits. When I taught creative writing classes at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1979 and 1980, I involved the students in teaching creative writing to Albuquerque Indian School high school students. We are in a dynamic continuum.

Rumpus: That’s a great teaching method. How has teaching shaped your poetry?

Harjo: I’m not sure that teaching has shaped my poetry. I have been inspired by teaching, by being in the classroom, which is an active creative space, or can be. The atmosphere of competitiveness and rigidity in academic institutions in this country has set up major tests for me. I have had to learn how to make it work on behalf of my students and myself. Sometimes we even fly a little. This whole earth is a teaching institution.

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

I discovered “She Had Some Horses” while preparing for the poetry class I teach at an elementary school in San Francisco. Harjo’s poems ache with grit, grief and nature. They feel like that moment of insomnia when twilight breaks. Her lines are curt and heavy but they construct delicate stories. I thought She Had Some Horses would be perfect for kids this young, whose imaginations are still lush and wild. To them, horses are still spirited creatures, not farm workers.

My students are eight through eleven years old. Some of them are at their grade reading-level, some are above and a few still can’t spell. My students don’t have the compulsion to analyze or to second-guess themselves. They’re quick to voice their instincts. But at the same time, they’re terrified of being wrong. Some days I feel like I’m a teacher, and others I feel like I’m just a referee hopelessly demanding that kids stop teasing, stop yelling, stop throwing pens.

At many schools, teachers have to adhere to a curriculum predesigned by a corporate education company. I am lucky that I get to make my own lesson plans. We’ve read Carl Sandburg, Rita Dove, Pablo Neruda and Luisa Valenzuela untranslated. Every kid in my class speaks Spanish at home and English in school; their brains are racing to simultaneously master two languages. Their poems are often a composite of Spanglish.

I can’t teach poems that have words with too many syllables, or poems about sex or violence or drugs. Although most of these kids already know about that stuff, and the meanings of the words they’re not supposed to hear or say. I must pretend that they don’t and that their minds are wholesome and pure.

I want to be a writer and I also want a job where nobody tells me what to do. So, the two hours a week when I teach, I feel like I’ve made it.

She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

We only read the first half of part one of the poem, and I ask if anybody has any thoughts about it.

“The horses are magical,” says Silvia, a fourth-grader.
“The horses are supposed to be something else,” says Emanuel, a fifth-grader.
“Yes, perfect!” I say, this is probably the most in-depth analysis the class has made about any poem we’ve read.

I tell the class the horses mean more to Native Americans than they do to us. I explain that they are supposed to be a feeling, that they’ re something important to her, they’re her community. The repetition of “she had horses” is to express their significance.

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

“I don’t get it,” mumble a few students. I falter. I realize I was being too conceptual. Then I tell them these horses are horses but they’re also everything and everybody that she loves or make her feel sad or happy.

I could say more but I’m always afraid of saying too much. The poem is a gorgeous chant that swims laps in my mind. It’s about horses and it’s not. It’s something that I read over and over again just to bury myself deeper into its staggering meaning.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

It’s time to write. I put on Stevie Wonder and a few kids rock in their seats to the music. I instruct them to write about something or someone that is important to them, and define them using Harjo’s style of repetition. But instead of “she had horses…”, to say, “my sister…” or “my dog…”. Some of the students almost get it, but really just end up writing physical descriptions, “my turtle is small, my turtle has a hard shell…”

But, Kimberly, a fourth grader has got it:

My sister when she uses a red marker she thinks about blood.
My sister is plenty of books.
My sister people thinks she is my aunt.
My sister she loves to study
My sister her eyes sparkle like a star.
My sister she sings like a jazz singer.

Kimberly’s is an ode to her sister just like Harjo’s is an ode. The repetition in both is a comforting reinforcement.

In the introduction to her book, She Had Some Horses, Harjo says, “it’s not about what the poem means, it’s ‘how’ the poem means.” And maybe that’s what helped turn poetry around for me. A poem is just the flight of colors and the collision of stories. No scrutiny needed.

Everybody raises their hand to read first. I declare every poem “awesome”, “beautiful”, “amazing”. I dole out compliments like the guy who hands out flyers that say “COMPRAMOS ORO” down the street. Sometimes I am surprised by my own generosity, but to me it is perfect, beautiful and amazing when anybody can be this vulnerable and proud.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Joy Harjo
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Seele im Raum” by Randall Jarrell
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
• The Rumpus Interview with Nataly Kelly
• The Rumpus Interview with Kitzia Esteva

This was the main concern I had when I spoke with Nataly Kelly, the recent co-author, with Jost Zetzsche, of Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World. The book celebrates the unsung role of translators. It is flooded with examples of instances of where we overlook the hidden-yet-blatant presence of translation, from television shows to emergency hotlines. For most translators, translation isn’t merely a profession—it’s a full-blown passion. Translators are married, emotionally indebted to their second languages.

Kelly is one of these translators. She is the Chief Research Officer at Common Sense Advisory, an independent language research firm in Boston. She is also a Fullbright recipient, former court interpreter, and translator for María Clara Sharupi Jua, an indigenous poet from the Ecuadorian rainforest who writes in her native Shuar. We talked about Kelly’s journey from growing up in an only-English-speaking household in Illinois, to becoming a bona fide Spanish interpreter. We also discussed the difficulties of translating across cultures, the emotional barriers that interpreters face, and what it really means to be fluent.

***

The Rumpus: What made you want to be a translator, and what was your path to becoming one?

Nataly Kelly: Well, I grew up in a very small, rural town in Illinois. We had very limited diversity. Not many languages were spoken in that little town—it’s about one square mile—and most of the people who live in the community are living in the countryside. They don’t live in the town—if you want to call it a town. So, I guess it’s one of these things if you’re not exposed to something and then when you’re exposed to it…it really makes you hungry, one of those.

I had a lot of pen pals when I was growing up, in different countries, and I was starting to see that they spoke multiple languages and were writing to me in English. They were in places like Malaysia and Costa Rica and Switzerland, and they all spoke English, and I was thinking, Well, I don’t speak their languages. So, when I started high school, Spanish was available, and I began taking Spanish. And I started to go insane with Spanish, I just became obsessed. I started to read every book I could find in Spanish and listen to music in Spanish. It was kind of hard to find those things. I would have to drive to a city, and even in major cities nearby, there weren’t a lot of Spanish materials. I started to volunteer at this migrant workers council nearby in Peoria, Illinois, and then I started to meet people who spoke Spanish, and some exchange students who spoke Spanish, and then I was speaking Spanish all the time. When I went to college, I was already pretty fluent in Spanish, and they told me, “You should go and study abroad because we don’t really have any courses for you here—your levels are at a senior level, so you should go and study abroad.” So, I did. I went to study in Ecuador, and I took most of my Gen Eds at an Ecuadorian university, and I transferred them back to a university in the States. I won a Fulbright to go back to Ecuador, and I did sociolinguistic research. I fell in love with Ecuador.

Rumpus: You mention fluency. It is such a tricky term to define. Many people believe that once you’ve got the grammar down, then you’re “fluent.” I, for one, do not believe this to be the case. In Found in Translation, you talk about the journalist, Rob Gifford, who is a foreign correspondent for China and has been working in China for more than twenty years. Yet you say that he still “relies on professional translation and interpretation when it comes to specialized topics—like economics.”  In your experience, what are the qualifications to be determined fluent?

Kelly: Rob is fluent in Chinese. To me, fluency means you can express and say whatever you want to say, you know. But there are different degrees of proficiency in a language. And there is actually a scale of proficiency. Somebody who might be a native speaker might take the proficiency exam and they might not get the highest possible score, maybe because they don’t have high levels of education. It’s not really based on grammar, but it’s their ability to use the language—can they discuss politics? Can they discuss high level concepts? Can they talk about things in more than just a simple way? So there are actually guidelines that can measure proficiency. But fluency is an ambiguous term for sure.

As for being a translator or interpreter, many people are fluent in multiple languages—some people even speak two different languages natively—but they might not be able to pass a translator or interpreter exam because you have to have depth of knowledge. In the case of Rob Gifford, he might have been able to interview and does interview other people, but in certain domain areas in politics and economics, he doesn’t have all the cultural knowledge and the context and depth of terminology he might need to understand someone. So that’s the real difference. Even though I was fluent in Spanish, I wouldn’t have been able to pass an interpreting exam at that point because I didn’t have enough specialized terminology, and at that point I didn’t have any practice at interpreting skills, so I wouldn’t have been able to pass it for that reason either.

Rumpus: What are the specific skills to becoming an interpreter that you had to really study for? Or was it something you just built upon over years of experience?

Kelly: Well, to get my first job, which was as an interpreter with AT&T, I had to take a test. Pretty much every interpreting test is testing for a few things, and one is completeness and accuracy. So, is the interpreter retaining all the information and is it coming across accurately? They’re looking to make sure that you remember everything that was said, which is a real skill that interpreters have to practice. Memory length—that’s something you can grow with time. At the height of my interpreting career, I could repeat back a sixteen-digit credit card number without writing it down. I could remember it temporarily in order to say it in the other language, but if you asked me a minute later I would have forgotten it.

You need your long-term memory as well, because you have to have note-taking skills for consecutive interpreting when you’re listing to a long segment, and then you have to repeat it back exactly as someone said it. I knew my memory had improved a lot beyond what was normal when I was out with friends at a restaurant, and the waitress came up and listed all the specials in great detail, and listing all the details about how each thing was prepared. She left and someone said, “Oh, can anybody remember what the soup special was?” and I repeated it back exactly as she had said it: “It’s a crème du tomate with a dash of sour cream, and it’s fresh roasted tomatoes in a gorgonzola, blah, blah.” I remembered all the detail, and I said it exactly word for word without even thinking. Everybody looked at me like, You are a freak, but that’s when I knew, Oh, that’s my interpreting instincts kicking in. I do this every day for my job, and you don’t ever do it in the same language, but I had just repeated it back because I still had it in my short-term memory.

Rumpus: Do you still feel like you have that skill? Or do you have to keep it up in order to retain it?

Kelly: You definitely have to keep it up. I mean, I haven’t interpreted now for several years, aside from volunteering. If I wanted to interpret professionally again I would definitely have to work on it, I’m sure. I took a court interpreting exam when I was at the height of my career. I’m not sure I could pass it again if I just walked in tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t because I’d have to restudy all of the legal terminology. I’m sure a lot of it would come back to me pretty quickly but I’d definitely have to study again.

Rumpus: So you really can’t apply the metaphor “it’s just like riding a bike.”

Kelly: No, no. You can, to a degree. I’d probably not fall off the bike, but I wouldn’t be a professional bike racer. I’d probably not win the Tour de France.

Rumpus: Do you still feel like you’re emotionally indebted to Spanish? In your book, you talk about how people are emotionally attached to languages they have learned and/or grew up speaking and how that kind of hinders their translation abilities. Did you feel that when you were translating in Spanish?

Kelly: Well, I think when you become really bilingual you have to like using language for different things. I still speak Spanish quite a bit with friends, and I read in Spanish, I listen to radio and watch TV in Spanish. There are just certain things, you know, people who speak both languages speak in Spanglish a lot. Mixing, mixing terms and mixing with some of my friends. I really do mix a lot. There are just certain things that sound better to say in Spanish than they do in English, because there are just some things that don’t translate that easily, and it’s just faster to say it in one language versus another. But yeah, I love Spanish and I’ll always speak Spanish, and just speaking it is not the same as interpreting it, of course. If I wanted to be a court interpreter again, I would have to prepare for a few months to get myself back up to speed.

Rumpus: You mention that a big reason why native bilingual speakers have trouble becoming professional translators is because they have not mastered legalese—can you elaborate on legalese, and how someone can become fluent in it?

Kelly: Yes, so there are all kinds of study guides for interpreters who want to take the court interpreting test, and dictionaries. A lot of it is just simply studying the dictionaries, studying the glossaries, and just studying the legal system and terminology and how to say it. There are also lots of passages that judges will use, and common phrases, especially when they’re sentencing. So, becoming familiar with all of those is pretty critical. That said, you never know what can come up in court. People can commit all very different strange crimes. You never know what kind of things they’ll steal. They might have stolen a bag out of someone’s car that contained all kind of things that you might not know how to say, and it might be something new, like a new product that didn’t exist before—it could be a Scrunchie, it could be something like that. Little things like that—you’d just have to know all of that terminology in order to interpret it. You can never be over-prepared to be an interpreter.

One example of a legal term is “arraignment.” A lot of people don’t know what that means in English, let alone in two languages, or how to say it even if they’re fully fluent in both languages and bilingual. So “arraignment” in Spanish, you actually say “lectura de cargos,” which means “the reading of the charge.” So in Spanish, it actually makes way more sense than in English. I feel like, wow, if only we just said that instead it would be much easier in English. Maybe people would understand what’s going on in the courtroom. But, that’s a real difference between languages—it’s just the way that languages are.

Rumpus: You mention that Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham is the hardest thing to translate. What authors or literature are the most challenging to translate?

Kelly: There’s a story in the book about this poet, María Clara Sharupi from the Ecuadorian Amazon. I’m actually her translator. I didn’t say it in [Found in Translation], because I didn’t want there to be too many stories about me, but some of the words in her language are really hard to translate. There’s a word that means “the song that is emitted through the fragrance of a plant.” Whenever there’s two cultures that are so distant from each other, that’s really when you have a hard time coming up with equivalents.

We also mention in the book The Simpsons translated into Finnish. And that particular translator is a comedian, as well as being a translator. There are all kinds of Simpsons references that are a nightmare for a translator. And there’s an episode called “Homerpalooza,” and you think, we know where that comes from, that’s a cultural thing—Lollapalooza. We can’t expect that people in Finland, Korea, or Mexico are going to know what that is. That kind of thing, it’s almost impossible to translate. You have to come up with a different equivalent in that target culture, not just the language. So in that case, “the song that is emitted through the fragrance of a plant,” you know you can’t say all that in English. I had to come up with something that implies it’s a sacred song, but using some of the other words in the poem to bring in the element of nature to try to make sure that’s conveyed without destroying the lyrical quality of the poem. Because if you used all those words to explain it, the poem isn’t beautiful anymore and nobody would want to read it, and people would think she’s a terrible poet and it would all be my fault. You know, so it’s a huge responsibility that the translator has to make sure the translation is done right.

Rumpus: Does the original author usually have complete faith in their translator? Or are there challenges with working with a translator because, depending on the circumstance, they don’t know what has been written or said?

Kelly: Well sometimes the translators don’t even get to communicate with the source text author. In fact, that’s the norm. Most of the time, the translators aren’t able to even ask them for clarifications. There are some exceptions, but the general rule is that they can’t go back and ask them things. They have to research it on their own. It’s just the nature of the business. In the case of The Simpsons—you know, [with] the subtitles, she’s not able to go and talk to the original writers, they’re too busy. They have so many translators that are translating The Simpsons, if they took the time to clarify, the writers would be doing nothing but that. So, it’s really not practical.

In the case of literary translations, sometimes you do get access to the author if the author wants you to translate their work, which is the case for me with María Clara. But many literary translators don’t have access. Like the Dr. Seuss translator—she didn’t get to clarify with him, she had to go on what she could research herself and what she thought would be faithful to the original.

Rumpus: Right, but in your situation, María Clara does verify what you’ve done.

Kelly: Well, I write to her in Spanish and I explain to her, “Oh, I chose this way of saying it, which might not be the exact equivalent but it’s the closest, and it has these connotations.” Especially when it’s something that’s so closely tied to her culture, I feel that it’s very important for her. I’ll always check with her, and say, “I have a few choices in English, and one of them has this kind of connotation and another one has this—what do you think is the most accurate in this case?” She doesn’t know anything about the words that I’m using, but I’ll give her a description, and sometimes she’ll give me more input that will help me make the best choice.

Rumpus: You talked about this in your book and in your NPR interview: that translators often have to be unbiased and go into emotionally dense translation situations completely unattached. How do you deal with this challenge? You talked about this with the Nuremberg trials translator, Peter Lest.

Kelly: Oh it’s very, very difficult. Interpreters are often interpreting for people in really difficult situations. You know, the situation with Peter Lest of the Nuremberg trails. You have interpreters that are interpreting in Abu Ghraib, military interpreters in combat zones. There are examples right and left, even interpreters that are working in hospitals, or in prisons—I have interpreted for prisoners over the phone. But yes, you interpret some pretty rough things. If you’re interpreting for victims, sometimes you’ll interpret really traumatic, horrible things that were done to them, cases of abuse. I have interpreted for an abuse hotline where people can call in to talk to a counselor about things that have been done to them, and you’re saying these words in the first person, you’re saying them aloud as if they happened to you, and it’s hard not to imagine them when you’re saying them. It’s really, really difficult, some of the things we have to interpret. I had a colleague who was interpreting on a 9-11 call, and she actually heard a murder taking place while she was on the call. She could hear it in the background, people screaming and crying, and she could hear the sounds of people being stabbed because [the caller] was screaming, “He’s stabbing me,” and trying to get help. Interpreters really do deal with horrific situations a lot of the time.

Rumpus: And do you find those situations draining or empowering?

Kelly: You know, they’re both. You feel at the end of the day, maybe you’ve helped them in some way. In the case of interpreting for victims of violence, I always feel relieved that they were able to share their story, because I know it’s important for their healing. In the case of that 9-11 call, I know it’s horrible for that interpreter, because she never knew what happened to the victim. She was pretty sure that they died. Sometimes, when you’re basically a witness to a crime, that’s not something you’d anticipate. I can’t think of any real rewarding side to that—it’s just a horrible experience—but there are definitely rewarding moments.

I have also interpreted for an organ donation bank. Basically, after somebody dies, they will call the family and these people have a very tough job. Somebody has just found out their loved one has died and is being asked to donate their eyes and other organs, and you have to ask them specifically. I’ve interpreted for people who’ve said, “Well, will he be without eyeballs in the casket?” And like, these questions, I thought, I never knew people had to think about these things. I’ve had to interpret these things and people crying, screaming, and saying, “No! Don’t ever call me again!” Some people are actually willing to, because you know that will benefit another human’s life or it could save another person’s life. So that is fulfilling when you can work with someone and make it happen, but I really do not envy the people who have to make those calls every day.

Rumpus: You talk about translator, Peggy van Mossevelde, who translates Harlequin novels into Dutch. But there was one instance where she left out a sentence about a woman being unable to live without a certain man in her life. And she said, “I don’t know about other countries, but I felt that Dutch women wouldn’t like such a an extreme degree of surrender.” On the topic of cultural translation—how often do you face situations like this, where it’s not just the words but the cultural context that needs to be amended?

Kelly: There are so many, that interpreters and translators come across them all the time. I had a situation once where I was interpreting for a patient from Latin America, and I could tell from the mothering accent and the way she was using Spanish that she wasn’t very educated. She was mispronouncing words and not using correct grammar—things like that. She explained that her son was blacking out, and the doctor asked, “Well how long has this been happening?” And she was like, “Oh, since was a baby,” and he [the son] was fourteen. The doctor was in shock, because he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t brought him to seek medical attention sooner.  I had to explain, “Well, in some parts in Latin America there might not be access to a doctor. It might not be possible if people don’t have the money to take someone to a doctor to seek treatment. This might be the first chance in her entire life to bring her son to a doctor,” but that, for the Western doctor, it was unbelievable. His judgment was, What kind of parent wouldn’t take their child to a doctor? He’s so far removed from the reality that she was from, that he couldn’t even begin to identify what it took for her to even get him to the doctor and probably to immigrate to this country.

Another time I had another major cultural barrier, I was interpreting for a woman who had a stroke and she was recovering, and so the speech therapist was giving her exercises and simple questions to help her with her memory and also with her pronunciation. She [the therapist] was asking, “Who brings you the menu in the restaurant?” and she [the woman] would reply, “The waiter.” “Now, who takes care of the flowers at the park?” And she would say “the gardener,” and [the therapist] was trying to get her to say these things. Then the speech therapist asked, “Who do you borrow a cup of sugar from?” We know the answer to that, but nobody outside of the United States would understand what the correct answer is. So, I tried to interpret the question and she was like, “Why would I need a cup of sugar?” So I had to interpret back to the therapist, “Well this is not a common tradition outside of the U.S.” So, she tried to ask, “Well if you needed to borrow something who would you borrow it from?” And the woman said, “My family?” And so it was a major cultural difference and in that same conversation. The therapist basically gave up on that question and moved on to another question.

So, yes there are tons of cultural differences like that and in some cases, you’re trained to identify whenever there is a cultural difference and explain that sometimes the gaps are so big that it’s almost impossible to get the two people to understand each other because the gap is far more than linguistic—it’s cultural.

Rumpus: In your book, you quote David Crystal, who claims that 3,000 languages will die in the next hundred years. That’s one language every two weeks, and a language is considered dead when the last person speaks it. What are you thoughts on dying languages? Do you think there is a strong enough campaign to save them?

Kelly: I don’t think there is a strong enough campaign to save them. It’s an issue that is very close to my heart because many people who speak, it’s not their fault that they’re born to a community that speak a given language. And because of globalization and because of different dynamics of power in different countries, their language is seen as something less than another. Especially if they’re in a minority group, often the only way they can have any success economically or politically in their country is to learn another language. It’s not a bad thing to learn another language—that would be great if that’s all that were happening—but far, far too often they’re not learning the other language. They’re giving up their other language and then they’re not teaching it to their kids. So, what happens is, when a language dies humanity loses knowledge. So, in the case of the rainforest where María Clara is from, a huge percentage—I believe it’s one in every four—pharmacological products that we use in the United States actually come from the rain forest. Only about twenty percent of the rainforest plants have actually been categorized, and people like María Clara—who have knowledge of the traditional healing practices, and they know which plants the animals eat when they’re sick with a certain condition—they have observed what plants can heal different things, and many, many cures for diseases have come from the rainforest. So, if there’s a cure for AIDS or cancer or many of these societal illnesses that plague us, chances are that’s where they will be found—the cures will be found in the rainforest. But if you have a language with a word for a specific remedy or plant, people can no longer refer to that. The children lose that knowledge, not just of their language but of their culture, and so humanity is impoverished when languages die.

Rumpus: Do you think people are encouraging their children to learn Spanish and only speak Spanish so that they can be stronger participants in a more global sense? What do you think the reasons are for why those aboriginal languages are disintegrating?

Kelly: Well, in many places it’s because the people of power speak a different language, a colonial language. In the case of Latin America, it’s Spanish. There are some strong holds in different parts of the world. We got billions of people in Latin America that speak languages like Quechua and Aymara, so there are millions of people speaking those. Those are not really endangered languages, but there are some languages that only have a couple of speakers left, and others that only have hundreds and those are the ones that David Crystal is mostly referring to. The ones that will die because they have so few speakers left, that in a couple generations there just won’t be anymore speakers. Usually these are very poor people in very poor communities that don’t have much chance of developing new campaigns to teach their languages to others.

There’s this misconception that a lot of parents have, that if they try to teach their kids both languages that they’ll somehow be missing out in both languages. It’s not a fifty-plus-fifty-percent-equals-one-hundred-percent. Children’s brains can absorb many languages, but many parents don’t understand that. I heard just the other day, a woman, and she was probably a Chinese speaker, and she was struggling to speak English with her son with an accent, and he was correcting her when she tried  to order something at a Starbucks. When she tried to pronounce something he corrected her in front of everybody, and he was a teenager and you know, I was thinking, How sad he can’t communicate with his mom in Chinese, and she’s obviously only speaking to him in English. Here he is correcting her, and yet her language is probably the most important language of the future. I was thinking how sad this is, he’s almost treating her as if she’s dumb because she’s bilingual and he’s not.

Rumpus: Well, hopefully someday he’ll get it.

Kelly: I hope in this country we will have a more enlightened attitude towards language-learning, because that’s happening right here in the United States. We are linguistically poor in a lot of ways because we have all these natural linguistic resources in our country, but we’re not making the most of them. We’re not harvesting them and really having a plan, which is why when we need to recruit people who are bilingual, we can’t find enough, even though we have enough immigrants we should be able to produce a pretty multilingual population of young people. But no, we encourage them to just learn English in school only.

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• The Rumpus Interview with Luis Negrón
• The Rumpus Interview with Joy Harjo
• The Last Poem I Loved: She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
• Thriller Education
• The Rumpus Interview with Kitzia Esteva

This past summer, she, her mother, and her aunt were passengers on the UndocuBus, a revolutionary campaign that was organized and comprised of undocumented people around the country. The five-week journey began in Phoenix, Arizona and made its final stop at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I recently talked to Kitzia about the fear and empowerment she embraced while on the UndocuBus, her work as a community organizer, and what Obama’s immigration policies mean to her.

***

The Rumpus: The story of how you and your family came to live in the U.S. is pretty powerful. Could you tell us about it?

Kitzia Esteva: So, my family actually came to the U.S. before I did. My mom, my two nephews, and my sister came to the U.S. seeking treatment for my older nephew, Chuy, who was diagnosed with leukemia in Mexico. We know now that it was the environmental degradation that was at fault. At the hospital, the doctors didn’t know what was wrong. Said it could have happened to anybody. We did some research much later when we learned about environmental racism through community organizing, and realized that it had to do with the factory we lived near by. Every once in a while there were toxic chemicals that were released into the air, and they said it was accidental. This factory actually belonged to a U.S. company—I don’t remember the name of it, but it was located in Cosoleacaque, Veracruz, where my nephew lived. And we now we know that it was the cause of his leukemia. It was a big deal, especially for my mom, who was doing social justice work in Mexico, and for her to know that it was the U.S. who was responsible for my nephew being poisoned.

My family came to the U.S., and I came two years later. We all had a really hard time finding treatment for Chuy here, and most of my sister’s time was spent in the hospital. It was a really hard battle for five years. Now that we know that his leukemia was really the responsibility of the U.S., it’s one of the reasons why we went on the UndocuBus. We wanted to really challenge this idea that “we’re criminals” or that “we’re crossing boarders because we’re adventurers, or just like to break the U.S. law,” when in reality we’re escaping a lot of bad things like disease and death. We have to escape terrible conditions that the U.S. has contributed to, if not caused.

Most of us are still undocumented in the country. For me, there are a lot of things to say about the idea of the American dream and what that means. When I first got here, we lived in Oakland in a really small apartment. I was used to a bigger home and more of a safe community in Mexico. I came to a community that was ridden by police brutality and poverty. Our apartment had such small living quarters. Four months after I arrived, my mom lost her job and we landed up at a shelter. So we didn’t have this ideal situation where immigrants come and they find fortune and get rich, and buy a house and get dogs. That’s really a fantasy for most people. For us it was definitely rougher than we had it in Mexico. Yet, the only reason why we had to go through this and move to the U.S. is that we wanted my nephew to get better, and we wouldn’t have been able to get that treatment in Mexico.

Rumpus: What was the experience of your nephew getting help? Do you reflect upon it as a positive one, or a struggle?

Esteva: Actually, my family hasn’t told me everything that they went through. I think they wanted to spare me a little of the difficulty and the pain. But I do know that it was hard to find an insurance that would cover for my nephew’s treatment. We had to get him chemotherapy and radiation, plus all the other medicine and drugs that he had to take because of the side effects. It was really expensive, and we had no money when we got here. We spent all the money we had in getting up here from Mexico. So, it was a bit of a rough time trying to find an insurance.  But, we did have luck that he did have doctors that were compassionate and really tried to help. Which speaks to the resources that the U.S. is able to accumulate, and provide something like that—whereas in Mexico, you’d have to have three houses to pay for such serious health care.

Rumpus: The No Papers, No Fear UndocuBus is a super, amazingly brave and revolutionary endeavor. You were a passenger for two weeks—what was that experience like, being there with your mom and aunt? And what were your goals for the mission?

Esteva: My mom was on the UndocuBus for three-and-a-half weeks, and my aunt was on there for five days. So, I didn’t overlap with my aunt, Manuela, but I did overlap with my mom for two of those weeks. I’m very grateful that I have a very political family that has a lot of fire for fighting back against injustice and against things that are at the core of our oppression in this country, as well as against things that might not be necessarily at the core, but are solidarity work.

Specifically, my mom has been a huge influence in my life, my worldview, my willingness to fight, and my commitment to the struggle. So, I have to start from there and give her props. She is really one of the people who introduced me to social justice from when I was little. Being on the bus with her was a reunion for us. Since I had been going to school at UC-Santa Barbara for the last four years, and then I moved to in L.A.—I hadn’t spent much time with my mom in close quarters in about five years. I had little breaks where I would go visit my family, but they were never together that long—a week tops, and we don’t see each other that frequently. The bus was a very hopeful space, and I definitely saw my mom heal in my different ways. She had been dealing with a recent diagnosis of diabetes and a bunch of other health issues. I saw a lot of improvement in her health just by her participation on the bus. When it brings hope—when it’s building something—it can also be healing for the builders of that hope and struggle. I can say that I learned from her and the adults on the bus that we’re fighting.

One of the intentions of the UndocuBus was to highlight the stories of those people who are not the “chosen ones.” President Obama made an announcement about Deferred Action and the youth—how great they are, how much they’re fighting for this country, how much they want the American Dream and how hard they’re fighting for it. Yet, he didn’t mention the reality, which is these youth have parents behind them every step of the way. That’s the case with my mom, anyway. He is kind of blaming the parents for their families being here, as opposed to really giving respect to the parents who fought hard to send their kids to college, provide for them, and make the really hard decision to bring them to this country. So, another one of the reasons why I wanted to join the UndocuBus is to highlight that story of my mom. I owe her a lot of my ability to survive. It was good to be there with her, and share our story together. I need to give my respects, gratitude, and, really, credit to my mom’s struggle in this country, and try to create change not just for her, but all of the adults that are being viewed as criminals and viewed as not worthy of getting documentation, or getting deferred action. That conversation needs to change to one about dignity, where we are raised to confront the atrocities this country has imposed upon immigrants.

I think that as I was on the ride with my mom this became more and more clear. I think that maybe the roughest moment was when we decided to do the civil disobedience. It was really nerve-wracking to know that my mom was going to get arrested. It felt very powerful to know that I was going to be there with her and that we’re going to do it together, and that we have a powerful story to tell and share with other people. Also, that we have a powerful campaign to really support the struggle and show other communities and other groups that we can rise together, and show how powerful we can be. It was challenging at times, because I had my own doubts about doing the civil disobedience and especially the risks it held for my mom.

Rumpus: What were those doubts or fears?

Esteva: The fear of being arrested and not just being deported but detained. People end up in detention centers for months and months, sometimes even years. It’s not just about putting yourself in the position to be incarcerated, but there are horror stories of people dying because they’re not getting medical treatment. So, there might not be a guarantee that my mom would get her diabetes treatment. There’s so many doubts beyond the fear: am I going to be removed from this country? We live with that every day. But what can happen to a person inside the detention center? It’s not just a question about deportation, but about criminalization and what it means for our community to be criminalized, which is to be imprisoned for trying to survive. Removal is a huge deal to undocumented folk, because it separates families and creates a lot of hardship. A lot of people are also placed in detention centers for a long time, which is also a hardship. These detention centers reflect a culture and a way of life in this country. We have two million people in prison and they look like us, too. They’re black and brown, so getting arrested embodies all of that criminalization and re-enslavement. I think I had a lot of questions and anxiety about what it would look like if we were arrested and detained for a while—for my mom’s safety and wellbeing.

Rumpus: And did your mom have similar doubts that reflected yours?

Esteva: I take leadership from my mom. I think she had a position where she was really hopeful. She knew if we did get detained, the community was going to fight back and get us out. That’s one of the things we were trying to accomplish there. If people see we’re organized and have the numbers on their side, then they definitely can fight back, win, and get out of a detention center and get out of harm’s way. Because when an arrest becomes public, the public eye can actually save people from I.C.E. and deportation. So, my mom was on the hopeful side. She knew that she wasn’t going to stay inside for a long time.

For me, after hearing all the horror stories, I was a little on the freaked-out side. I was worried: what’s going to happen if we’re inside for a while? Or: what’s going to happen if I was able to stay in the country because of Deferred Action and she doesn’t get to stay? We knew all of those risks, and we had a huge, super-brilliant group of lawyers that were fighting the legal battle. We had an amazing community throughout the country that was organizing itself to get us out. I didn’t share most of my anxieties with my mom, but she did share her hope and it was contagious. So, in that sense, my mom had a more in-depth understanding of what was going to happen, and understood the legal and organizing tactic would work together to get us out, as it did.

Rumpus: I’m sure that memory of being at the Democratic National Convention this September is still very vivid. Could you illuminate your experience of staging a civil disobedience at the DNC and being arrested?

Esteva: So, there were ten of us who were committed to being arrested on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. It was a very diverse group of people. It actually kind of happened organically how we decided to participate. We had youth, we had elders. I believe my mom was the oldest within the people of the group, and there were domestic workers, day laborers, I think five of us were queer, there were two families. It was a very diverse group and really represented the diversity of the immigrant community in many ways. We were not just representing the UndocuBus as a whole, but the groups of people who are being criminalized and attacked.

We went to the convention with the idea that the action was going to happen pretty quickly. If you know about conventions, they always have a ton of police force. They bring police from out of state—police officers from all over just to have “enough” police presence at the convention to repress the activism. I guess they’re always expecting that there’s going to be some sort of marches and people protesting, so they’re ready for it. When we arrived at the intersection, there were already police there. As soon as we put up our banner, down the police proceeded to block the street right behind us. I don’t know if I could count how many police officers there were on bicycles; my focus was on my comrades who were chanting with us, who were also there. I was centered on the struggle we were in together and not necessarily on the police. At some point, I forgot that they [the police] were there, because we were expecting to get arrested right away. It actually took a little over an hour of the demonstration before they proceeded to arrest us. One thing I thought was amazing is that there was a lot of media there. We had a really successful media team. We had a team of artists who were creating the beautiful art that we displayed throughout the campaign, and the media team was basically making sure that we were getting a national level of attention. I don’t know how many media outlets were there, but I could count with my eyes that there was about one hundred different media outlets that showed up to the action.

I remember feeling a nervousness walking to the demonstration, but once I got there I felt a little bit more relaxed. I felt [a] huge sense of liberation and empowerment with the people who were there with me, and specifically holding my mom’s hand. It was really the power we have as a family, and two women who are committed to the fight for the long term, and with all the other comrades who were being arrested. We were speaking out our stories. We were on point about what we were arguing about and why we were there. I think it was an important step to go to the DNC; to make that space outside ours when we are always excluded from it. We used that space to speak to the President and his administration in the middle of the election, and really talk about what he has done to our communities. You know, he has been the president who has deported the most people in the history of the U.S. We were bringing the demand to stop deportation and stop the criminalization of our communities. We were demanding that the Obama Administration stop the terror and attacks from the police and other racist forces. It felt like a really powerful, strong moment in history. I think I’m always going to look back with very different eyes every time I’m learning from it. And, I feel twenty times more powerful because I was holding my mom’s hand and I could feel the connection of generations of people struggling to end injustice.

Rumpus: I am in very much awe of what the UndocuBus did. The videos documenting the efforts of the UndocuBus are extremely powerful and inspiring. You were talking about Obama and how he has deported nearly 1.2 million immigrants, more than Bush or any other president. What do his DREAM Act and Deferred Action mean to you?

Esteva: There are a lot of people fighting for the DREAM Act. I have a lot of respect for people who are fighting for the struggle, and the youth that is staging civil disobediences and engaging in a more militant way. I definitely think that it’s an important act to have, but I think that a lot of people have a delusion as to what Deferred Action means. I think that on the one hand, people who are able to apply for it feel that they have a little more of a leeway. They think it’s really the right thing for our community, but it really doesn’t help a lot of our family members. It doesn’t help my mom, nor my sister. It’s really not enough. For myself, it gives me the opportunity to work legally in this country if I’m able to get it, and I’m still in the process of getting my paperwork together; I’m not even sure if I will get it. But I feel like it’s only a small step for so many of the small things that need to happen.

However, I need to remember that Deferred Action would not even be an option if people hadn’t been fighting for it and fighting for something even bigger. So, I think that in a broader scope, our demands have to be bigger and our struggle has to be bigger, too. I think that our power is the responsibility of the community and the people fighting—not the other way around. To say that the Obama Administration has done anything really great by enacting it, I think that the real credit goes to the people fighting. Yet, it’s not enough, it’s really not enough. We need comprehensive immigration reform; we need to stop the attacks on our communities; we need to stop criminalization and all the really racist attacks on our civil rights coming from a lot of places in the South but also a lot in California. And so that goes beyond Deferred Action or the opportunity that people might get through the DREAM Act if it passes. Perhaps a little more than a few thousand people will benefit from these opportunities. It’s a small minority, and the majority of us are not criminal in any way or form—we are just struggling to survive.

Rumpus: So you think the majority of immigrants can’t benefit from Deferred Action or the DREAM Act?

Esteva: I think that a good amount of youth will benefit from it, but the discourse of who’s deserving of staying in the country is not helpful. To say that I deserve to be here, and then turn around and say that my mom doesn’t deserve to be here, is a disservice to me and a disservice to my mom and our struggle as a people. Maybe some people feel like it’s some negotiation, or it’s something where you have to take the good with the bad. However, I think that this country has already attacked Mexico and the rest of the Third World so much, and the repercussions are the reason why we are here. We are at least owed our dignity and our ability to survive in a way that’s legal so that we can actually defend ourselves.

There are just so many abuses that workers receive because they don’t have documents. For example, there are the day laborers that don’t get paid after working weeks for a few weeks, because their boss has decided that because they don’t have documents they can just call I.C.E. on them. It leaves people vulnerable to not have documents, and it’s really hypocritical because everybody’s really benefitting from the labor and the resources we as immigrants provide. The discourse about who deserves to be here and who is criminal gets really blurry. How do you even figure out who’s who? We’re all in the same family. To say that the blame is on the parents—I don’t blame my mom, and I don’t think most people would blame their parents for being here in the country and being undocumented.

Rumpus: I agree—there are a great many reparations that still haven’t been delivered on behalf of the U.S. to Mexico. The New York Times ran a debate piece that compared the struggle of immigrant rights to the struggle of the LGBTQ community for civil rights. What are your thoughts and feelings about that comparison?

Esteva: I think that there is some room for comparison, and I don’t want to get too much into comparison, but just to say that queer people are also undocumented. On the UndocuBus, a third—if not more—of the riders were queer, and I include myself in that group. So, when we talk about civil rights as immigrants, we talk about the ability to even become a legal resident. Marriage is one of the ways to become documented. If you’re in a committed relationship with someone of the same sex, what does that mean? It means you’re aren’t able to qualify for relief, because we don’t have marriage equality in the country. I think that the queer community experiences similar levels of criminalization and the distinctions in the law that says that some people are outside the law. In most states, if you’re transgendered, you’re not protected by anti-discrimination laws, and that’s the case for undocumented people, as well. That’s an exclusion from the law.

Exclusion hurts everybody, not just a specific group. That’s a similarity I would bring up. Also, when you allow somebody to be discriminated [against], that means that there’s other groups that are going to follow. There are a lot of queer people who are undocumented and are fighting for just immigration reform and anti-criminalization for the undocumented, but also for queer people. Our struggles are not seen as being connected, they’re seen as two different things we have to fight for. But, in our case as “undocu-queer,” they come together. One of my favorite people on the UndocuBus, Angel, used to boast about how when he got arrested and ended up at a detention center, he was in drag. He was just coming out of a show that he did at a bar. He’s a drag queen artist and super-involved in the queer community, and to him it was a funny, exciting thing that he was still in drag when they took him to a detention center. Our communities are very diverse, and even though it’s funny and an exciting thing that he was able to express his queerness while as an undocumented person, at the same time there’s a lot of vulnerability that queer people have in detention centers. We see transwomen that have been killed at the hands of I.C.E. in detention centers, because they were not provided AIDS medication, for example. There are so many vulnerabilities that queer people can have in detention centers and through the immigration process.

Rumpus: Do you feel that being undocumented is a status or an identity?

Esteva: I had a conversation about this on the UndocuBus with a few folks there, and specifically people that came to the U.S. when they were younger. I think it’s both a status and an identity. For some of us it’s an identity, because it’s the only identity we’ve known for most of our lives. It becomes an identity when you present it and introduce yourself with it at every point during your struggle because of what you’re fighting with. It becomes an armor of really representing yourself with a fierceness of what it takes to be who we are. On the UndocuBus we’d introduce ourselves as, “My name is Kitzia Esteva. I’m undocumented, I’m queer, and unafraid.” To say “undocumented” and “unafraid” and is a part of our identity. The undocumented part might not be our choice, but we’re not afraid of saying it. It’s something that we’re struggling with, but it’s also something that we shouldn’t be struggling with.

On the other hand, when we talk about it, it’s to bring about pride and to say we’re proud to be in this struggle, even though it’s a difficult struggle. Even though those labels mean a lot and might mean a lot of pain, they also mean a lot of learning, growth, and the fire to fight. So, I think that it’s both. Being undocumented is definitely a status that creates a lot of limitations and difficulties for our communities. While we were on the UndocuBus struggling with that fear to speak out and fight and change the conditions we’re facing. It’s a status of vulnerability and exclusion for a lot of us who are learning to cope with it, and come out in some ways, and talk about the parallels of being queer and undocumented. To talk about it as a source of strength and really confronting the state who put us in this position without fear—that’s the message that we’re putting out.

Rumpus: Would you say that vulnerability is a big theme in being political?

Esteva: I think that issue of criminalization is something that I’m really committed to fighting. Not just in the realm of immigration, because it goes beyond that. The U.S. has the biggest prison industrial complex in the world. That means a lot of people are pushed to criminal acts because of poverty. A lot of people are criminalized for things that shouldn’t even be considered crimes. One of the organizations that I participate here in L.A. is fighting back against the criminalization of black and brown youth who are getting ticketed and having to go to court for arriving late to school, something that shouldn’t even be considered a crime. There’s a lot of other ways to solve that, but it’s not through the police state and not through the courts. It has a lot to do with the students’ economic background, with the resources they have in school, and with the transportation in L.A. (which sucks, but people are also fighting to make better). A lot of youth and communities are fighting to make this better, but the state is not really responding to the problem. It’s causing a lot of issues, including students leaving school. It’s criminalization, and it’s also an issue on how the system is abandoning black and brown communities. It’s about fighting for resources that are also needed.

Rumpus: Can you go into detail on the fight against truancy tickets in L.A. public schools?

Esteva: Yeah, sure. There’s a coalition of different community organizations that were fighting the truancy tickets and one of them is the Labor and Strategy Center. They were fighting for the Commuter Rights Campaign. It’s one of the biggest campaigns fighting truancy tickets here in L.A. Truancy tickets were when high school students were getting ticketed on their way to school a few minutes late. These are $250 tickets and are usually given to very low-income students. It’s a fine and a citation to appear in court. It’s an economic hardship, but it’s also having to miss school, the difficulties of being in court, and the intimidation from the police when they’re stopped for “truancy”—which is actually just lateness for any reason that could cause a person to be late. I know that when I was as in school, I was late a bunch of times because either the bus was late or I had to take one of my nephews to school before I went to school. So, I related to these students. Ninety-five percent of those students were black and brown, and certain high schools were getting more targeted than others, where there the population is more black, brown, and low-income. So, the Community Rights Campaign, along with other organizations that are also fighting against criminalization, fought to change the law and were able to amend it. The Truancy Law is a city code that says students should be ticketed. So, now thanks to the campaign, the new law is they get a warning the first two times, and then only the third time can they get a ticket, which can never exceed $200, including court fees.

So from $250 each time that you’re late, to $200 total after three strikes is a huge jump. The $250 didn’t even include court fees. It could have been up to a thousand dollars. It might be a student that was late because they couldn’t pay their monthly pass, and so they had to walk to school instead of the bus—they already have a huge economic hardship. Instead of finding a way to provide that student with resources so that they can succeed in school, and get to school on time, they [the state] are creating more economic hardship. At the end of the day, it’s really favoring the police state over the welfare state. We need more counselors and teachers, yet teachers are getting laid off  left and right, and we have more cops taking over space in the school and intimidating youth. Our communities don’t really have a good relationship with the police, because we are under attack from police brutality every day. So, truancy tickets are not really an answer for the youth.

Rumpus: There’s a major lack of political theater in this country. I know that as a community organizer you’ve been involved in political street theatre. What are your feelings on the impact it had on you and the community you were reaching out to?

Esteva: I think that art and theatre are really great tools to both bring people out, and agitate the community and raise consciousness. But it’s also a tool for fighting. My first experience with political theatre was when I was seventeen, back in high school in San Francisco. I participated in a youth program called the Mime Troupe. Everybody thought it was silent theatre, but it was actually acting satire. It was a political space in the way that we learned to create plays was through using satire in combination with the Theatre of the Oppressed. We created our own skits and performed on two different weekends. The first play I was in was about immigration and gangs in San Francisco. It was about connecting immigration and racism, and the question of who gets involved in gangs and why. It was the background story of people who are involved in gangs. The point we were raising is that we could have been gang members because of the conditions we face in the city as immigrant and poor working class youth with little opportunity.

When I was living in San Francisco, I was a part of PODER (People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economical Rights), an organization where I was in charge of building the theatre component in the summer. With the youth, we presented a theatre piece based on difference sites of pollution in San Francisco, and who is being affected by it and side effects, like workers and residents in the Bay View Hunters Point who are being poisoned from the hazardous waste coming out of the PG&E plant. The plant used to be a navy base where they were testing nuclear power. There’s still leftover toxic chemicals, and the community is being contaminated with radiation. It’s the only black community left in San Francisco, right, and our performance was about the conditions of environmental racism, and focusing on the side effects of how it affects people’s health and their psyche.

The last performance I was involved in was with the Bus Riders Union. It was a piece about Measure J, which was just defeated. If it went through, it was going to put a lot of money on the MTA to continue building rail and freeway, thus contributing greatly to the already very polluted area. It was also an issue of environmental racism and pushing away the already-gentrified black and brown communities here [in L.A.] to bring in transit-oriented development. So, we staged also a street theatre performance as a tool for education, and to expose Measure J. I was actually the “J Monster,” who accelerated gentrification and pollution—the evil things that our communities are facing, and are yet being asked to pay for. To me, street theatre is a didactic way of presenting information. It’s a way of personifying the attacks on our communities and demonstrating the ways of how we can fight back.

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