Community is Everything
Communal-creative energy in two summer art events
Summer began with music in LA at the legendary Troubadour. West Hollywood Pride was happening just outside the venue. Electrical, defiant beauty and queer exaltation in the air, despite the overarching political doom mood. My bestie, Seth and I went to see a band at the Troubadour that I’ve long loved, Hurray For the Riff Raff. It was my first time there and my first time seeing this band that I’ve cherished for so many years and that reminds me of so many joyful moments.
So many happy people crammed together in such an intimate venue: a vision of a simple, organic, functional community, at least for one night. At one point, I was just looking at the blissed-out faces of the people at the very, very front, as they sang along to the gorgeous, “Ogallala” with its devastating conclusion:
I used to think I was born
Into the wrong generation
But now I know
I made it right on time
To watch the world burn
With a tear in my eye.
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The songs of Hurray for the Riff Raff have been subtly in the background for much of my adult life. This started when I was working in a bookstore in San Francisco with my friend Jeremy who introduced me to them. Besides evoking a kind of modern day punk vagabond adventure-world, their early roots rock-country songs also reminded me of the folk music of my childhood that my father loves. They also came to remind me of certain romantic summers in New York, spent with good friends, on rooftops, on long walks, admiring the Brooklyn Bridge. They are a group and a vision that bridges times and places while also guiding us tenderly into a shared, sane future.
Perhaps in my Las Vegas years I lost track of them a bit. But then last year, I was completely floored by their latest, novel-in-album form, The Past Is Still Alive. This album, especially, came alive within the context of my job teaching mostly under-served, mostly Latino students in a working class neighborhood in San Diego. For my students, as for the artist singing on the record, the past is this hardscrabble sacred home where their identity/integrity is rooted, watered, protected. For the present has been distorted and tyrannized by those who would demean their identities and their pasts. The present needs to be transformed.
Hurray for the Riff Raff is the singular, art project and vision of singer, performer and songwriter, Alynda Segarra. The musical group feels both like Segarra’s highly personal artistic project and also an evolving, inclusive caravan that brings many kindred wanderers together.
The Past Is Still Alive embodies a visceral sense of time while celebrating the formative stories of one’s life that can still be tapped into as power sources. It is both a melancholy and bittersweet record — and also a romantic one, not in the sense of romantic love, exactly, but in the sense of commemorating one’s colorful adventures of survival and art and meaning-making.
It’s also poetic storytelling rooted in the present and focused on the ongoing transformations and struggles that make life worth living; a novelistic folk music of personal quest and social struggle, at once creative, empowering, and beholden to community histories. The songs evoke a simultaneity of times and eras. Together they weave a hard-loved vision of a continuous present sustained by the quests, scars, loves, homes, good trouble, and exemplary defiances of one’s ancestors.
I wonder if there is a word for that: a kind of present-devoted, creative nostalgia interested less in progress/power and more in certain acts of continuity, preservation, restoration, repair. Obviously, our undertakings for now and the future are predicated on past experiences and patterns. But a lot of this is done mindlessly, our of habit, complacency, ideology, fear.
What if there is a more poetic temporal imagination that revives magical forms of the past to be be used again, as exemplars, as guidances, as architectures, in the present? Perhaps this is just what good art does, too. Spiritual practice, as well.
Certainly much of my own work has been concerned with this emotional and artistic concept of time. Often I’ve been accused of wielding too much nostalgia or “sentimentality” and fetishizing what is gone and absent. I know that my concerns are towards something larger, some social alchemy or creative reconciliation, collaboratively made, community-oriented, however much I fail at it: a heart-stirring something else that this music evokes so beautifully, as do my students who I am reminded of when I listen to these songs.
Their encore song, “Pa’lante” from their 2017 album, The Navigator is justifiably regarded as one of the most powerful protest songs of the decade. It’s a song I’ve taught, at least once, while also having taught several of their other songs. This is a song (and video) that need to be taught in history, art, ethnic studies, and language arts classes.
There’s another aspect to the kind of a nostalgia that honors the past on behalf of the present (and vice versa): the necessity of protest and focused rage and crafting art wide and wild enough to empower all sorts of others, to give an embodied voice to the voiceless, and make searing demands on the present.
The song has many wonderful write-ups online, including this one on Billboard. The link to the video is included. These lyrics condense the impossible dilemma of the immigrant and the refugee, that today, even more so, we are witnessing:
Colonized and hypnotized, be something
Sterilized, dehumanized, be something
Well, take your pay and stay out the way, be something
Ah do your best, but fuck the rest, be something
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Definitely pick up the record, The Past Is Still Alive and play it from start to finish. It plays like a companionable book or a collection of stories. Although the stories and lives it evokes are so different from my own, when I listen closely to the music and the lyrics I envision places I’ve lived, loved and wandered in: wandering at night in the Mission District of San Francisco, riding my bicycle through West Oakland, hanging in a New Orleans dive bar with my friend Andrea, exploring the old mining towns of Nevada. It’s an evocative music and a political music, all at once. The art and storytelling and the protests and the struggles are all bound together, as they should be. This show was on my mind, too, as I met up some of my teacher friends for a truly inspiring art show this last weekend:
I was so lucky to attend the opening reception for an art show, “Letras y Pintura” at the Chicano Park Museum. The show features several students I’ve had who contributed art work and protest signs for the exhibit. As well, a student I had last year gave an opening keynote speech. So it was the first time I visited an art show that directly connected to the educational work I am doing. This was the first time I got to witness my student’s lives and creations in a new context. And this is exactly the kind of community I know is essential for our spiritual and social survival: a community that is enabled by conceptual bridge-building and shared salvaging of resources, interdisciplinary experimentation, the mentoring of and advocacy for youth, and the relentless emphasis on the artistic and intellectual riches of everyday life, and especially in the lives of the under-represented, oppressed, and otherwise marginalized or silenced.
Chicano Park, of course, is an iconic, beautiful, and moving tribute to the community of Chicano and Latino artists and freedom fighters. The park itself is a testament to community resistance to racism, gentrification, and the structural, white supremacist oppression of city planning. A more in-depth and poignant history of the park as a site of resistance can be found here. Chicano Park and the Logan neighborhood feel like the true heart of San Diego and what gives this city its cultural vitality and life-affirming energy. At the same time, it also preserves the liberating potentials of our city history in full display for all of us to learn from.
Along with a few of my colleagues, I was so very moved watching a student of mine give the keynote speech at the opening reception. This particular young activist was instrumental in organizing a student-led walk-out protest at our school in March against ICE and racist anti-immigration policies. As an English teacher who focuses on the transformative powers of rhetoric, I was especially proud of him for applying his persuasive powers to convince our school admin to let students walk the full 20 minutes from our school to Chicano Park for the walk-out. A collective act of daring and a sacred community responsibility and a project of artistic courage all at once. Something beautiful and enduring must include all those aspects. It is so powerful witnessing a young person intervene passionately and persuasively in the often staid world of adult administration. This was a moment, indeed, where I felt humbled by the bravery of my students and where, I think, our admin did as well. More moments like these could add up. The transformations would be immense.
This whole art show really brought home the beauty of my last two years as a high school teacher at LMEC. I’m very proud and privileged to work in Logan as a teacher and mentor. Truthfully, as someone who doesn’t live in Logan and as a white person of privilege, I see myself, rather, as a lifelong student of the community. Indeed, as a student and apprentice to my own students and their families whose stories of struggle, determination, joy, and creativity are gifts I can always learn from. The work of living wholly always comes back to how we can more broadly experience and redefine education, even at the cost of our egos, status, security, and self-image. Every moment in life is trying to reveal our liberating abilities to serve and to learn. As I get older and more rooted on a spiritual path, I see how service and learning are intimately entwined. Without them constantly beseeching us to act and to listen, we wither up and our souls deaden. This is the heart of both art and education, of charity and activism. I remain, as ever, a beginner and looking forward to starting my third year as a high school teacher at LMEC next school year.
In middle age now, I’ve tried with some objective distance to look at things I’ve done and paths I’ve taken that might offer a positive vision for the future — my own and, perhaps, everyone else’s. As difficult as it’s often been, I can say I’ve felt most like myself as an English teacher over these last 13 odd years of being in classrooms. Whether teaching English Composition to freshmen college students at UNLV or teaching single parents and adult students at a community college or even my time teaching middle school, being a teacher in a classroom is how I’ve used what is most true to myself in ways that feel the most helpful for others.
It isn’t to say that any of this was easy (and the middle school work was the hardest work I’ve ever done), but taken as a whole the work has revealed a substantial foundation of meaning-making, creative labor, communal inquiry, and intellectual service that is very real and enduring to me. As I consider the fact that’ve I taught students all the way from 6th grade to high school to college students to members of the military stationed in Iraq, I see a beautiful, if complex continuity. I see fruitful connections and bridges and moments of collaboration. I see the kind of ramshackle, evolving community that I constantly dream about.
And I also see unfortunate barriers and narrow thinking. For instance, there is a pervasive belief or bias or prejudice that K-12 public school teaching and pedagogy is not a space for serious intellectual exploration or sophisticated creative or artistic work. All of that, we are told, is the province of academia and the Academy. Any sort of art, writing, publishing that is taken seriously is often associated with some kind of academic institution or funding. As a former academic, who admittedly often misses teaching college and the stimulating atmosphere of a college campus, I can understand this bias, to a degree. For college is a place of adult learning, a place people opt to go to and are willing to spend serious money on, and where their minds are more prepared for big, sophisticated ideas and the long hours required to understand them. College is ideally suited for being a place where intellectual constructions can circulate.
But what I’ve learned even more adamantly is that all the actual conditions, materialities, life stories, and social contexts that are at the root of those big, academic ideas happen, in real time, in public school settings and their attendant communities. Theory, art, and intellectual labor begin here and keep returning here. This is the root-world, the foundation-world. Nothing real gets thought without us.
As I keep growing into being an educator, whether its through teaching or other means or arts down the road, I want to keep working on the interrelated visions of academic work and public school work. Both institutions, many would argue, are in crisis mode. So building affinities and expanding community beyond their respective walls is one strategy of repair and perseverance. I want to keep demonstrating and advocating for the real artistic, creative, and intellectual breadth of public school work and practice. By necessity, this involves the communities as the larger, more experimental classroom. And furthermore, to show how the work and practices we do — that our students do, mainly, whether at school or elsewhere — is both intellectual and pragmatic, hands-on and conceptual, creative and subjective and attuned to community needs, political needs, and survival needs.
Which is to say that all of these considerations were emphasized so profoundly as I wandered the art show and then took an even longer walk through Logan afterwards.
I will elaborate more on all this, later. For now enjoy these inspiring images from the art show and please attend if you can: Chicano Park Museum.
