No More Deaths is a Tucson-based humanitarian organization that's mission is to help end suffering in the desert along the USA-Mexico borderlands. Throughout the year volunteers patrol migrant trails looking for people in need, giving medical aid, and placing water and food in strategic locations in the hope that it might save a life.
The summer months are a crucial time in this work, and to assist NMD in their mission I am asking for donations from friends, family and strangers to be collected between July 1st-15th. These donations will be driven out to Arizona in the 2nd half of the month.
For your convenience, there will be multiple drop-off locations around Los Angeles County. (If you or your organization/business/work would like to participate as a drop-off location please email me at xochitljulisa@gmail.com)
What to donate:
socks
running shoes
hiking boots
baseball caps
backpacks
jeans
t-shirts
underwear
You can also make a monetary donation directly to the organization by going here.
Where to donate:
BEYOND BAROQUE LITERARY/ARTS CENTER
681 Venice Blvd. Venice Beach
HRS: M-F: 8pm-10pm S-S: 11am-10pm (check event calendar for exact times)
http://www.beyondbaroque.org/calendar.html
TIA CHUCHA'S CENTRO CULTURAL & BOOKSTORE
13197 Gladstone Ave Sylmar, CA 91342
(818) 939-3433
Mon–Thurs: 2-8pm | Fri: 2-10pm
Sat: 11am-6pm | Sun: Closed (Cerrado)
ESPACIO 1839
1839 1st St
Los Angeles, CA 90033
(213) 399-9811
Wed - Thu: 12:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Fri - Sat: 12:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Sun: 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm
MARISCOS JALISCO
3040 E Olympic Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90023
M-S: 9am-6pm
Last year alone, 179 remains were found along the AZ-Mex borderlands.
For more information please visit the No More Deaths website.
Here is a poem inspired by my time on the border with No More Deaths. The video is directed by TV director and movimiento activist, Jesus Trevino.
Showing posts with label Human Rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Human Rights. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Upon Volunteering to Head to the Arizona Border: I'm Sick-inducingly Frightened
Today I received the acceptance of my volunteer application with the human rights group No More Deaths, and I suddenly feel like vomiting, fainting, and jumping around all at once. I wonder if such a feat can be done.
No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist social justice group based in Tucson, Arizona. Their mission? To do what the name states, ensure no more deaths of border crossers in the Sonoran desert. I learned about No More Deaths two years ago when I conducted an interview with Walt Staton, a young man and No More Death’s volunteer, who was fined for littering when he placed life-saving water bottles in key points along the border to help save individuals from dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion. In certain areas like the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, it is considered a crime to leave out water for border crossers even though water is a basic human necessity and people are dying in large numbers every summer. A year ago this month, it was reported the bodies of 40 illegal immigrants were found on the Arizona border just in the first two weeks of July, with the total number of deaths being in the thousands "since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect in 1994."
See, I read articles like this one and I feel my breath shorten and like I need someone to start fanning me before I pass out--you know, like in the old movies and news clips--because I don’t know how I can face these real tragedies in person. It’s so much easier to deal with it from a Google search in the safety of my living room.
Immigration is important to me, obviously. It has been since I was a young teen, since my parents instilled in me this awareness for social justice, since I knew my parents were immigrants. And I care about finding positive and socially conscience alternatives to the immigration issue in this country. And yes, I care about saving lives, or more so, I care about spreading awareness of government laws that intentionally or unintentionally cause harm and death to individuals. This is important to me, but hey, I’m no saint. I'm not even that nice most of the time.
What I am is a writer. And as Iranian poet, Sholeh Wolpe once told me, we must each use the resources we have to do our part. So I try as a writer and poet to do that thing I do, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes, I feel like I’m exploiting the issue from my laptop, and it’s when this feeling creeps into my consciousness that I begin to consider crazy ideas like voluntarily going into a detention center or camping out in the Sonoran desert in the middle of August. These types of ideas are the ones that make my friends raise their eyebrows and go, “Oh, Xochitl, you always love to get ‘real.’” But I don’t necessarily love it. It’s more like a personal dare. If you cared, I tell myself, then you’d get out there and do something about it. But it’s so scary, I reply. What are you, chicken? Come on. You can do it! (these conversations are not out loud). So I sign up, even though I’m scared shitless because I worry doing nothing is even more cowardly. And anyway, it’s not like it’s a lifetime commitment. I’m going for 11 days. And anyway, I can always write about it. (That’s the advice people always give me. Come on this trip. You can write about it! Why not move to another town? You can write about it!) But honestly, writing is not my main goal, though I should probably place it high on the list.
My main goal may just be to survive the week without freaking out or losing my mind. My goal is to be apart of something positive and important, life-savingly important, even though just thinking about camping in the desert for 7 nights with only a sleeping bag, hiking in the blistering August desert heat, and constantly fearing the moment I will walk around a sage bush to find some wounded hopeless person on a seemingly deserted road (I don't even want to consider the death part of No More Deaths) makes me feel like crawling into my skin, sinking down to the hardwood floor, and seeping into the cracks. I feel possible of conducting such matter bending acts if it means I don’t have to go, but then I hear myself, You claim to care about immigration, and now you just want to hide?
Sometimes it isn’t enough to write about a subject. Sometimes you have to experience it, but that is sick-inducingly frightening! Coming face-to-face with human suffering is not my idea of fun, but I once again dare myself to try. To try and survive, I guess, because the people I will be out their helping are surviving something much more difficult then I will ever experience as a privileged American living a relatively easy life in Los Angeles with the comfort of family, friends, a good education, and stable job to support me. So I challenge myself to be uncomfortable for a short time in order to try and understand the suffering of others, and maybe even help someone in the process.
If you would like to help, No More Deaths asks all their volunteers to raise $400 in order to support lodging, supplies, and food while with them. If you are able, I would really appreciate your donation, even if it is $5. I promise to do the rest.
You can send your donation to my Paypal account at xochitl_julisa@hotmail.com, or email me for other alternative forms of donations.
No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist social justice group based in Tucson, Arizona. Their mission? To do what the name states, ensure no more deaths of border crossers in the Sonoran desert. I learned about No More Deaths two years ago when I conducted an interview with Walt Staton, a young man and No More Death’s volunteer, who was fined for littering when he placed life-saving water bottles in key points along the border to help save individuals from dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion. In certain areas like the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, it is considered a crime to leave out water for border crossers even though water is a basic human necessity and people are dying in large numbers every summer. A year ago this month, it was reported the bodies of 40 illegal immigrants were found on the Arizona border just in the first two weeks of July, with the total number of deaths being in the thousands "since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect in 1994."
See, I read articles like this one and I feel my breath shorten and like I need someone to start fanning me before I pass out--you know, like in the old movies and news clips--because I don’t know how I can face these real tragedies in person. It’s so much easier to deal with it from a Google search in the safety of my living room.
Immigration is important to me, obviously. It has been since I was a young teen, since my parents instilled in me this awareness for social justice, since I knew my parents were immigrants. And I care about finding positive and socially conscience alternatives to the immigration issue in this country. And yes, I care about saving lives, or more so, I care about spreading awareness of government laws that intentionally or unintentionally cause harm and death to individuals. This is important to me, but hey, I’m no saint. I'm not even that nice most of the time.
What I am is a writer. And as Iranian poet, Sholeh Wolpe once told me, we must each use the resources we have to do our part. So I try as a writer and poet to do that thing I do, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes, I feel like I’m exploiting the issue from my laptop, and it’s when this feeling creeps into my consciousness that I begin to consider crazy ideas like voluntarily going into a detention center or camping out in the Sonoran desert in the middle of August. These types of ideas are the ones that make my friends raise their eyebrows and go, “Oh, Xochitl, you always love to get ‘real.’” But I don’t necessarily love it. It’s more like a personal dare. If you cared, I tell myself, then you’d get out there and do something about it. But it’s so scary, I reply. What are you, chicken? Come on. You can do it! (these conversations are not out loud). So I sign up, even though I’m scared shitless because I worry doing nothing is even more cowardly. And anyway, it’s not like it’s a lifetime commitment. I’m going for 11 days. And anyway, I can always write about it. (That’s the advice people always give me. Come on this trip. You can write about it! Why not move to another town? You can write about it!) But honestly, writing is not my main goal, though I should probably place it high on the list.
My main goal may just be to survive the week without freaking out or losing my mind. My goal is to be apart of something positive and important, life-savingly important, even though just thinking about camping in the desert for 7 nights with only a sleeping bag, hiking in the blistering August desert heat, and constantly fearing the moment I will walk around a sage bush to find some wounded hopeless person on a seemingly deserted road (I don't even want to consider the death part of No More Deaths) makes me feel like crawling into my skin, sinking down to the hardwood floor, and seeping into the cracks. I feel possible of conducting such matter bending acts if it means I don’t have to go, but then I hear myself, You claim to care about immigration, and now you just want to hide?
Sometimes it isn’t enough to write about a subject. Sometimes you have to experience it, but that is sick-inducingly frightening! Coming face-to-face with human suffering is not my idea of fun, but I once again dare myself to try. To try and survive, I guess, because the people I will be out their helping are surviving something much more difficult then I will ever experience as a privileged American living a relatively easy life in Los Angeles with the comfort of family, friends, a good education, and stable job to support me. So I challenge myself to be uncomfortable for a short time in order to try and understand the suffering of others, and maybe even help someone in the process.
If you would like to help, No More Deaths asks all their volunteers to raise $400 in order to support lodging, supplies, and food while with them. If you are able, I would really appreciate your donation, even if it is $5. I promise to do the rest.
You can send your donation to my Paypal account at xochitl_julisa@hotmail.com, or email me for other alternative forms of donations.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Preparing to Interview Sholeh Wolpe: Educating Myself on Iran
June 2009 only one thing was on my mind: graduating. In the final weeks of my MFA program, I frantically worked through the last bits of requirements, practicing my 15 minutes of poetry in the mirror, thumbing through the notes and handouts of my senior lecture trying to smoothly verbalize theories I was worried I didn’t completely grasp. This left no time for the outside world. At the exact same time citizens of Iran were gathering in the streets to protest against a corrupt election and tyranical government, Twitter was a flitter, and the entire world witnessed a young woman’s murder captured by the camera of a phone. Did I take much notice? Not really. There was no time.
I remember classmates talking about Neda. I remember people in the commons area saying, “Can you believe what’s happening in Iran?” but I shrugged it off and kept my focus on the hoops in front of me. Then Michael Jackson died, and it was like the whole world stopped. It started with a text. Someone announced, “Michael Jackson is dead,” and suddenly the students around me flipped open cell phones and laptops. Perez Hilton (I went to Perez and got mocked), TMZ, New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, where flashing before screens as we waited for updates, texted, and Facebooked. Neda was Dead. Iran was imploding on the other side of the world, but here in my world Michael was dead.
A year later, the year anniversary of my MFA, the Green protests, Michael’s death, The Splinter Generation (the zine I edit for) was allowed to republish two poems from Atlanta Review’s Iran Issue. The poems represent some of the first voices to come out of the Green Movement of Iran. This lead me to invite the guest editor of that issue, Sholeh Wolpe, Iranian poet, translator, and editor, to be a guest on Splinter’s BlogTalkRadio show, Splintered Thoughts, and for some lucky reason she agreed. I was instantly paralyzed by my ignorance.
How can I interview a woman about Iran, when it barely broke through my own consciousness? How can I interview her when the main memories of last summer were my senior reading, and listening to Man in the Mirror and tearing up with classmates? How can I talk about Iran when I am so far away in a different country, a different culture, a different state of mind?
I asked our main editor, if he might want to do the interview instead, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I was the one with the idea; I would be the one to do it. But a year later, and I still knew nothing. What to do, but get to work reading articles, watching documentaries, and reading poetry.
There is a fear that drives much of my work: I am a vapid idiot. I worry that at any moment I will be discovered and kicked out of the creative club, my MFA stripped and my computer cleaned of every poem and essay. There will be a brand too (a t-shirt that reads “stoopid” with an arrow pointed up), that way when I go to poetry readings those around me will be properly warned. Is it that big a fear? In a way, yes. I don’t read the paper, reading novels and poetry books are work not entertainment, I can’t quote Vonnegut, the Brontes are strangers to me, William Carlos Williams an impossible uncle, and worst of all, I like reality T.V., the really bad stuff.
Not wanting Sholeh, or any Splinter listener to know the evil truth, I went to work, and discovered a very complex situation with a beautiful culture and people faced with a tyrannical government. One thing I know, Iranians are not their government.
The women stood out to me. Banned from government, made to wear hijabs/niqabs/burqas, restricted in their public goings on, and mostly tied to the home, life is difficult, and yet, they fight. They enter university, wait to marry, and conduct individual protests like allowing some of their hair to be seen below veils. Perhaps a small protest, but it speaks hugely to the strength of the individual.
Before speaking with Sholeh, I searched the cyberspace for a whole universe of knowledge, downloaded, and reflected, but I am still so very ignorant. I have never lived this existence, will never live it, and I feel there is a whole lexicon of knowledge and culture I can never crack. I feel so unequipped, and yet I must try. I may never feel knowledgeable enough to talk about Arabic Nations, and the struggle in Iran, but what I can do is question, search, and when I have someone like Sholeh Wolpe, a poet and activist, I can ask and listen.
I can share my own fears and inadequacies because we are all human. All of us, know matter where we come from, what religion we grew up in (I grew up Catholic), what websites we consider news, what news channel we watch, what country we were born in, what side of the border we stand, what side of the war we happen to be on, are individuals trying to live, trying to be brave, trying to learn.
Highlights from the Sholeh Wolpe interview on poetry, politics, and Iran to come.
I remember classmates talking about Neda. I remember people in the commons area saying, “Can you believe what’s happening in Iran?” but I shrugged it off and kept my focus on the hoops in front of me. Then Michael Jackson died, and it was like the whole world stopped. It started with a text. Someone announced, “Michael Jackson is dead,” and suddenly the students around me flipped open cell phones and laptops. Perez Hilton (I went to Perez and got mocked), TMZ, New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, where flashing before screens as we waited for updates, texted, and Facebooked. Neda was Dead. Iran was imploding on the other side of the world, but here in my world Michael was dead.
A year later, the year anniversary of my MFA, the Green protests, Michael’s death, The Splinter Generation (the zine I edit for) was allowed to republish two poems from Atlanta Review’s Iran Issue. The poems represent some of the first voices to come out of the Green Movement of Iran. This lead me to invite the guest editor of that issue, Sholeh Wolpe, Iranian poet, translator, and editor, to be a guest on Splinter’s BlogTalkRadio show, Splintered Thoughts, and for some lucky reason she agreed. I was instantly paralyzed by my ignorance.
How can I interview a woman about Iran, when it barely broke through my own consciousness? How can I interview her when the main memories of last summer were my senior reading, and listening to Man in the Mirror and tearing up with classmates? How can I talk about Iran when I am so far away in a different country, a different culture, a different state of mind?
I asked our main editor, if he might want to do the interview instead, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I was the one with the idea; I would be the one to do it. But a year later, and I still knew nothing. What to do, but get to work reading articles, watching documentaries, and reading poetry.
There is a fear that drives much of my work: I am a vapid idiot. I worry that at any moment I will be discovered and kicked out of the creative club, my MFA stripped and my computer cleaned of every poem and essay. There will be a brand too (a t-shirt that reads “stoopid” with an arrow pointed up), that way when I go to poetry readings those around me will be properly warned. Is it that big a fear? In a way, yes. I don’t read the paper, reading novels and poetry books are work not entertainment, I can’t quote Vonnegut, the Brontes are strangers to me, William Carlos Williams an impossible uncle, and worst of all, I like reality T.V., the really bad stuff.
Not wanting Sholeh, or any Splinter listener to know the evil truth, I went to work, and discovered a very complex situation with a beautiful culture and people faced with a tyrannical government. One thing I know, Iranians are not their government.
The women stood out to me. Banned from government, made to wear hijabs/niqabs/burqas, restricted in their public goings on, and mostly tied to the home, life is difficult, and yet, they fight. They enter university, wait to marry, and conduct individual protests like allowing some of their hair to be seen below veils. Perhaps a small protest, but it speaks hugely to the strength of the individual.
Before speaking with Sholeh, I searched the cyberspace for a whole universe of knowledge, downloaded, and reflected, but I am still so very ignorant. I have never lived this existence, will never live it, and I feel there is a whole lexicon of knowledge and culture I can never crack. I feel so unequipped, and yet I must try. I may never feel knowledgeable enough to talk about Arabic Nations, and the struggle in Iran, but what I can do is question, search, and when I have someone like Sholeh Wolpe, a poet and activist, I can ask and listen.
I can share my own fears and inadequacies because we are all human. All of us, know matter where we come from, what religion we grew up in (I grew up Catholic), what websites we consider news, what news channel we watch, what country we were born in, what side of the border we stand, what side of the war we happen to be on, are individuals trying to live, trying to be brave, trying to learn.
Highlights from the Sholeh Wolpe interview on poetry, politics, and Iran to come.
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