The Immigrant Experience

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez is a series of articles and essays about adapting to a new culture and a new language after fleeing to the U.S.  to escape an imminent threat in the Dominican Republic which was then ruled by a dictatorship led by Rafael Trujillo.  As I wrote here before, I have long been a enthusiastic follower of Alvarez's writing. It has always seemed amazing to me that someone could arrive here as a child with only a rudimentary grasp of English and end up being recognized as one of the greats among contemporary authors writing in English.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a novel about the flight from horrific violence which has driven so many Mexicans to seek refuge in the United States.  The author spent four years researching and writing the story of how a mother and her young son traverse the length of Mexico overland while under constant threat from cartel gangsters and the often corrupt and equally violent police. Much of the vertiginous journey is on top of railcars of north-bound trains referred to as La Bestia. The final leg is under the guidance of human traffickers through the unforgiving Sonoran Desert which has claimed countless migrant lives.

Dreaming of Home by Cristina Jimenez tells the story of being brought to the U.S. as a child by her parents who were fleeing violence and a chaotic economy in Ecuador.  Jimenez recounts the trauma of growing up in a country in which she felt unwanted and in constant fear of deportation due to a lack of documentation.  Eventually, fellow students and teachers helped her toward the courage to speak out about the fundamental human rights due to her and her generation of young immigrants.  She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of  United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, and she is currently a Distinguished Lecturer with the City College of New York’s Colin Powell School and a co-instructor with Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. Jimenez was instrumental in United We Dream’s successful campaign for President Obama to sign Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) into law.

Adventures in the Multiverse

 I entertain the thought at times that I am making some progress toward emerging from musical illiteracy, but then something comes along to correct that idea. Most recently I was brought back to reality by the discovery of Patti Smith.  I would hope I am not the last person on Earth to find her, but I have to admit the possibility. 

In my defense I am pretty sure that Patti Smith and I inhabited parallel universes which only intersected a few days ago when I stumbled on a picture of her on the cover of one of her books in which she is arm in arm with the photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. That improbable pairing prompted me to download her book, Just Kids, to my Kindle.

Just a few pages into the book I found that we were both wandering around the streets of New York's East Village in the late 1960s, eating in the same cheap Polish restaurants and searching for a new life vastly different to what we had known up to that point. A few years older than her,  I had made it all the way through college and was able to find work pretty easily. She often slept in the street and really lived hand to mouth for a couple years.

Part of my NYC journey was spent in a basement photography school in the Financial District learning the basics of the craft. Patti Smith developed an interest in photography which included a life-long attachment to a Polaroid 250. (One of the polaroids in her Instagram stream shows the Gem Spa at 2nd and Saint Marks which was just a couple blocks from where I lived.) From there our paths diverged significantly.  My path led me through San Francisco and Idaho to New Mexico.  Patti Smith, after the rocky beginning mostly stayed in NYC, always knowing who she was and working toward achieving fame as a writer, poet, artist and musician.

I thought Just Kids was excellent and I finished it in a couple days.  Her Instagram stream is also worth a visit; it was recently turned into a book as well.

An American Radical

 

I have hesitated writing about Susan L. Rosenberg and her book, An American Radical:: Political Prisoner in My Own Country I came across the book recently by accident while browsing through biographies in the collection of my local library.  It was published over twenty years ago and therefore not in great demand and easily available.

It may be the best book I have ever read.  I'm sure I will be unable to adequately support that judgement with my words.  Of course, that is of no real consequence since anyone else can easily acquire the book and make their own judgements about its value.

Rosenberg was arrested in 1984 in the act of transporting explosives and guns to support armed rebellion.  She was given a fifty-eight year sentence, of which she spent sixteen in high-security prisons around the country.  She ultimately won a commutation of her sentence in the last hours of the Clinton presidency.

An American Radical presents a vividly detailed account of what it is like to face a life in the American system of incarceration.  Rosenberg survived the experience thanks to allies in and out of prison, along with her stamina, intellectual capacities, and emotional resilience.  Those same qualities allowed her to craft her epic story and -- unlike the vast majority of inmates -- to come out a better, more complete, person than when she went in.

Playback

During a recent visit to a local used books shop I came across a copy of Life in Mexico by Frances Calderón de la Barca.  The book takes the form of a long series of letters written by the author to her family in New York from Mexico.

The story of travel and adventures in 19th Century Mexico begins with the marriage of Frances Inglis to Ángel Calderón de la Barca in 1838 at about the time the Argentine-born aristocrat was appointed to be the first Spanish Ambassador to Mexico following that country's establishment of independence from the Spanish Empire.  They make an arduous trip from New York to Vera Cruz by sailing ship and then travel overland by horse-drawn carriages to the Mexican capital which becomes their base for exploring central Mexico.  Given the author's social position and her husband's diplomatic status, the judgments exhibited regarding Mexican life are not without racial and class biases, but the author nevertheless shows herself to be a keen observer of Mexican society in the troubled times following independence.

Warring creole-led factions contested control of the capital city.  Bandit gangs often ruled large parts of the rural countryside, so that travel was only marginally safe even with armed escort.  In spite of these hazards, Don Calderón and his wife, during the two years of their residence in the country,  managed to navigate the complicated social and political scene with aplomb, and they undertook epic tours of Central Mexico's historic landscapes, often involving many days on horseback over treacherous roads.

In addition to writing letters home to her family about her adventures, Frances and Ángel also maintained a correspondence with the historian, William Prescott, and undertook the acquisition of information crucial to the development of his ground-breaking History of the Conquest of Mexico.  Prescott at one point even sent the couple a complete Daguerreotype outfit for the purpose of recording images of some of the country's historic sites.  That effort, using the recently-invented photographic process, apparently met with little or no success, but the couple was able to provide significant documentation supporting Prescott's quest.  The historian was later able to reciprocate by aiding Frances in the publication of her book, and providing a preface to the first edition.

The importance and difficulties of mail communications is alluded to many times throughout Life in Mexico.  Letters, packages and commercial goods commonly spent a couple months in transit, and each successful arrival was a cause for celebration.  Frances' straight-forward, unadorned writing style was well suited to communicating a good word-based approximation of her adventures and the exotic places she visited.  At the same time, she was clearly conscious of the limitations of the written word and she tried in several ways to communicate a fuller representation of her experience through non-verbal means -- an idea which today would be subsumed by the concept of multimedia.

Daguerreotypy was too new in 1840 to offer any real chance of success to a couple enthusiastic amateurs.  Frances, however, had better luck with a much older, better developed non-verbal communications form, music and musical notation.  In her sixteenth letter Frances recounts a trip by coach which passed the great pyramids of Teotihuacan on the way to the country estate of a friend.  Writing from the hacienda she reports that :

"In the evening here, all assemble in a large hall, the Señora de _____ playing the piano; while the whole party, agents, dependientes, major-domo, coachmen, matadors, picadors, and women-servants assemble, and perform the dances of the country: jarabes, aforrados, enanos, palomos, zapateros, etc., etc."

Frances includes in her letter the verses of three of the popular songs played at the gathering and says: "The music married to the "immortal verse," I have learned by ear, and shall send you."  In the twenty-sixth letter, the scores of three of the pieces played at the hacienda appear as Frances wrote them out.

These episodes of the book which focused on 19th Century Mexican popular music were the most vivid parts of the story for me.  As someone with no musical talent or education, I had never given much thought to scores and notation, thinking of them always to be little more than recipes for reproducing compositions.  What was clear from the stories told by Frances, however, was that musical notation could be used to communicate the sounds of a specific performance, one that took place at a great remove of time and place.  This may seem a trivial observation to those who are musically literate, but I think it is an idea still worthy of some reflection.

The resources which Frances Calderón de la Baca had for reproducing and transmitting sounds involved processes which are identical in fundamental ways to modern sound recording and production.  She had a method for encoding and decoding sounds, a transmission channel, and technical instrumentation for reproducing the recorded sound patterns.  The great difference between then and now, of course, is that a very high level of operator skill in both recording and  performance was required to achieve fidelity in reproduction.

To put those ideas into context, imagine the receipt of the letter containing the musical scores.  It seems very likely that the Frances' New York family would have gone into the music room after dinner.  A relative or friend who was the most skilled pianist, or perhaps the most familiar with Frances' playing style would sit down at the piano, smooth out the letter's paper, prop it on the music holder and play the tunes that Frances and learned and recorded in a far-away place.  I picture her mother closing her eyes briefly and imagining Frances there at the piano.  I propose this scenario with some degree of confidence because I was able to re-enact that scene shortly after finishing the book.  I am not able to play the piano we have in the house, but when Margaret's accomplished piano teacher came by one evening she played the three tunes for me.  So I closed my eyes too for a moment, and Frances was there in the room.