Transcript - "On Trains: To All Migrants Past, Present, And Future"
February 10, 2022 -- Radical Kinship Series
Listen to "On Trains: To All Migrants Past, Present, And Future" with Angel & Keish, and special guest, poet, danilo machado.
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon, and welcome to our event," On Trains: To All Migrants, Past, Present, and Future. A live podcast recording about trains, undocumented, unauthorized migration, and seller colonialism".
A quick housekeeping note there's captioning available. If you look at the bottom right side of your screen, it says view full transcript, and you can click if you want captioning. I'm going to begin with the land acknowledgment. We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unseated lands of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and all familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to Native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley, more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp, and I'm the director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We are thrilled you can be with us for today's event, which is the first event this spring in our Radical Kinship Scholars and Artists on Undocumented and Unauthorized Migration. I want to thank our cosponsors for today's event: the On The Same Page program, the Multicultural Community Center, the Undocumented Student Program, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Thank you all so much for your support of this work.
I'm going to now introduce the fabulous organizer of the Radical Kinship Series and the moderator of today's event, Alan Pelaez Lopez.
Alan is an Afro Zapotec artist and scholar from Oaxaca, Mexico. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien, published by the Operating System in 2020, which was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, as well as To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement, which was published by Nomadic Press in 2020. I also am very excited to share with you that this Fall, Alan will begin a new tenure track position at SF State. Thank you, and I will now turn it over to Alan.
ALAN PELEAZ LOPEZ: Hello, everybody. Welcome to this virtual space. I'm really excited to be moderating this event. For those of you who are new to the Radical Kinship series, this year has focused on highlighting thinkers, creatives activists to work on the topic of undocumented/unauthorized/irregularized migration in the US.
And I'm going to be introducing our three speakers for today. And after I introduce them, they're going to take over and start their podcast recording after the podcast recording after the conversation. I would say it's going to be open for audience interactions, so feel free to use the chat box at the bottom of your screen or the Q and A box. Both of them will be open. You can either send some questions as the conversation is happening or at the end when we begin the Q and A.
So I first want to introduce Angel Sutjipto, who was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. For the past 18 years, they have resided on the Lenape and Matinecock, also known as New York City. Currently, they reside on Seneca and Mohawklands, also known as Morgantown, West Virginia. They are co-host of A Revolutionary Love letter. Angel also happens to be a creative nonfiction writer.
Her essay, discretion, is forthcoming in Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival and New Beginnings, an anthology, edited by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guinansaca, available this summer through HarperCollins publisher. In their spare time, they sing, tend to their cacti and read the tarot.
Our second co-host is Keish Kim, a migrant from the Southern Korean Peninsula and a co-host of A Revolutionary Love Letter podcast. Her research interests include transnational feminist studies, focusing on women of color, feminism, feminist disability studies, migration and diaspora narratives, and queer studies. Her dissertation hinges on unfolding and disrupting notions of rights and citizenship in modern state formations through centering narratives and cultural productions by queer undocumented immigrants in the US. Keish is a PhD candidate in American Studies. In her spare time, she's in the ceramic studio in front of the oven, going on bike rides and looking for a climbing gym, bringing all the lesbian stereotypes.
Born in Medellin, Colombia, danilo machado, who is our special guest, is a poet, curator, and critic living in occupied land, interested in language's potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020 to 2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Poem-a-Day, Art Papers, The Reclude, Gender Fail, among others. An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut, danilo is producer of public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum and curator of the exhibition, "Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text" at Franklin Street Works in 2019, "support structures" at the 8th floor gallery in 2020, and "we turn" at EFA project space in 2021. danilo is a cofounder and cocurator of the reading series Maracuja Peach and the Chat Book broadside fundraiser Already Felt: poems in revolt & bounty.
So you can obviously tell you're in the presence of really incredible scholars, artists and thinkers. And I'm going to leave the digital space for you all to introduce your work and what you're going to be talking about today.
ANGEL: Thank you, Alan, for that beautiful introduction. So we'll start off with a piece that we collaborated on together. So I'll start. The 7 Train, cutting through Munsee Lenape, Canarsie, and Matinecock Lands, rumbles in the distance. Bracketed on both sides by low rise buildings, the 90th street station stands on an elevated platform. You lean against the weather worn railing and look down at the Columbian and Ecuadorian restaurants, the 99 cent stores, and the offices of lawyers and notarios that line Roosevelt Avenue. You push yourself off the railing and step towards the platform to see if the incoming 7 train is local or express. It's local.
DANILO: small / paintings after Brian Kauppi @ Head Hi, Brooklyn. loops like subway lines like highway lines trafficked by bodies bodies in traffic held momentarily held in traffic bodies line like subway like loops curves like hips and not like hips like cable cords tangled electric bodies electric bodies mostly water color and acrylic on paper on paper paper bends and arteries and tubes tied or tied cartilage curved like limbs, like parentheses, like knees knees and calves bodies in motion blur fast fade forget glow gradient one ends begins both somewhere in the middle simultaneous at once reaching an unarrival not like gates or fences, but like waiting not like rooms, but like wading in water like line like rivers like loops
5, you catch yourself eyeing the boy whose soles and hands grip between aluminum whose body is hugged by checkered cloth crisper than yours. Watch the gap between the platform and the train. There's a moment when the train stops but the doors aren't open yet, and it must just be just a few seconds, even though it seems longer and it all feels so intimate, so still and we're so close and so far and who knows if they're thinking any of the same things?
Inside the subway car, there is an unspoken acknowledgment: we're all working class people. We're working class people going to work, to school, to church, to visit family, to hang out with our friends. We lug book bags, suitcases, musical instruments, grocery carts, laundry bags and even coffee tables from Craigslist or Ikea up and down several flights of stairs. Some of us move apartments using the subway because if we could afford to take a cab or hire a rental company, we would have. But we don't. As the 7 train snakes its way around Long Island City, we are taunted by rows and rows of empty apartments in whitewashed buildings.
Space available. This is not an ad, not for poetry, not for nothing. This is no gentrifying air taking space. This is a poem about language. Not yours, not mine. See it from the above ground train when it slows between cloudy windows and Unlocals on the local. See, English aligns itself with power. Unevenly. English is badly managed. It's reckless wrecked. English has caused enough problems. Let's cause some for English. I'll flip, flip it back. Flips and bend and break and shuffle and redistribute, wide, unpoliced. No military even in metaphors. No poems but bodies, not poets, but actions. No acts but of care, make many hard commitments to softness still.
ANGEL: Every day you witness Black, Brown, Asian, white, disabled, and folks experiencing homelessness walk through the train cars on crutches or roll on wheelchairs, shaking their donation cans. More often than not, you see black and brown men carrying speakers or guitars, traveling as a group that they can keep a lookout for cops. Their artistry cuts through the cacophony and brings to life culture born out of surviving the Empire State. On days when you are able to give, you give. Sometimes, though, you shake your head and mutter, "Sorry." On other days, you sleep right through everything, trusting your muscle memories to wake you up before you stop.
DANILO: BDFM downtown. I look up from my book. The sky is not yet dark enough to be confused for black, the fluorescent makes grays look silver as the bikes race the rain. I look over my shoulder to the cars parallel as we climb slightly above them. I open my mouth at the moon. Bulbs repeat in front of an unsettled machine with many windows reflective, so that the pale sweatered man across from you looks like he's floating. He'll disappear from your window as you enter Grand.
DANILO: Another New Year's Day, taking the train to the church for poetry. On the 2, two dykes rest their head on one another, talking with a friend about New Year's past. The three of them just missed the D at Barclays, where I wait for the N. I sit next to the boy I was staring at, Sterling Corded black headphones on a blue beanie eventually taken off. All is the same, or at least continuation. Queers mass travel show affection.
Boys gazed on platforms and moving cars. Half poems started in black notebooks. On the other side of me, someone sketches the bus in 2Bs, big eyes, shadows. It doesn't look like anyone on the train.
ANGEL: In recent years, you noticed the increasing number of people lingering near the turnstiles of the emergency exit door. "Can I get a swipe?" Is a familiar refrain. "Yes," you respond each time, pulling out your unlimited Metro card from your wallet as the other person moves towards the turnstile. You do not care about the specifics of their situation, where they are going or why. Only that you recognize the disproportionate violence people face when they get caught jumping the turnstiles. Up to $100 fine. Facing arrest. Coalition for the Homeless sued the NYPD in 2020 through a FOIA request for information on how they operationalized the Subway Diversion Project, a program intended to support people experiencing homelessness to get into shelters without criminalizing them. Instead, the Coalition says that multiple people received tickets and were even arrested being brutalized by NYPD. You think of Benjamin Marshall, a 15 year old boy, a student, a child who suffered a concussion at the hands of the NYPD for allegedly failing to pay the $2.75 fare. You are reminded that cops are not workers. The fact that you are employed and economically mobile, that you speak English and have some proximity to whiteness, even if you lack US citizenship, protects you from state violence. It is rare for you to fear for your physical safety every time you approach a turnstile or step on a subway platform. Yet you recognize the reality that for many people black, brown, Asian, disabled, people experiencing homelessness, and those who engage in forms of labor neither respectable nor taxable a commute becomes another place where constant vigilance is required to survive. A train ride is not an idlic passing of time and space, but instead another location where constant colonial imperial practices intersect with capitalist notions to police whose bodies can exist on a moving train, vigilance yet another place for and a type of fugitive.
DANILO: 1130 there's a boy behind you. You probably looked at him for too long when you got on. The white woman that boarded at Mohegan sits up front and insists on giving directions to the black driver. The woman that sits next to me, can't have two good lungs. At South Station, the automated voice warns about baggage restrictions. Its emphasis is queer and awkward. Capital One hogs the ceiling with billing billboards. The door is open long enough for you to get a draft in. For your safety, please be aware of your surroundings. I sit facing a flower shop and a humorless video instructing to take flight, and if that doesn't work, to take cover. And if that doesn't work, to take action. Carry on bags must not exceed 50LBS, and all baggage must have a personal ID tag, which are available for free.
KEISH: This time. When you buy the Amtrak ticket, you remember recent reports from networks of concerned friends and comrades. Border Patrol agents started to check identifications again.
ANGEL: In 2017, Syracuse Workers Center and the Syracuse Rapid Response Team organized actions to deter and condemn Greyhound and Amtrak for collaborating with Border Patrol and Ice.
KEISH: You remember the Chinese labor running under the tracks of the transcontinental railroad. You remember how Chinese immigrants concluded subversive networks for identifications to make a life in the white settler land. They were called "paper sons." You are reminded the Homestead Act stole land from Indigenous people for the railroad tracks to be laid. In February 19, 1942, with Executive Order 9066, signed by FDR, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes to military barracks, traveling hundreds of miles on trains to camps. In the picture by Clem Albers, Cold War politics does a good job to separate US cruelty from the same racist mechanisms that justified all genocide that happened before. Even just two months before this photo, Nazi leadership, under the guise of resettlement and deportation, filled their freight trains en route to killing centers via the European rail system. Photo by Clem Albers dated April 5, 1942, with inscription Santa Anita B-4114 Japanese arrival from San Pedro. You see civilians lined up the train lined up by the train and military personnel wearing metal helmets and holding guns. Who tended the lands before extraction and who works the land, under whose command?
Whose labor is exploited, whose temporary work visa expired? Who is standing in front of the hot boiling oil, making the French fries, timing between the frozen chicken patties while the children at home anxiously wait for dinner? Who is skipping a trip to the doctors because the insulin prices went up again? How many overtime hours go unacknowledged for the immigrant seamstresses working on a shipment deadline? And which part of the electrical boards came from China or Tijuana? The dispossessed gains yet another name with the refusal to comply. The fugitive, the criminal, the legal alien. You wonder if this is what modern fugitivism looks like and how mundane it is. It is almost as if you, we are all tangled in this elaborate web, one that shapeshifts as it stretches across time and space to ensnare the bodies of Black, Brown, Asian, disabled, formerly incarcerated, and people who are experiencing homelessness. Dear listener, whose face are you imagining right now? Do you see your own face reflected back to you? Can you see how these forms of state-sanctioned violence that you once thought you were protected from will eventually find its way to you?
DANILO: Symphony N to Astoria Ditmars. I closed my eyes and what opened them was thinking about the conductor whose consciousness I was deferring to. The train rocks as it scrapes the tracks. The open eyed workers facilitating this liminal commute to the end of the line deserve to be swayed by the caterpillar cars too. The announcement says that we are being held momentarily by the train's dispatcher. We are being held. We are being held.
ANGEL: Thank you so much, danilo, for ending us on that beautiful poem. So I wanted to ask all of us, what's our origin story? Who wants to start with an origin story? Should we start Keish?
KEISH: I guess so. You can go ahead, Angel. I thought this is a baton touch to Danilo, but they are still muted.
DANILO: I can start, if you'd like (laughs)
ANGEL: Sure. Okay.
DANILO: Thank you all for being here. And thank you, Alan and Center for Race and Gender for the invitation. This is such a joy. I migrated from Colombia when I was seven, and my family and I moved to Connecticut, of all places (laughs), and I lived there until about four or five years ago when I moved to Brooklyn, Lenape Land, where I am now. And in Connecticut, I grew up in Stanford. It was about 45 minutes from the city, and I grew up taking the train into the city. Some of these early poems are about those spaces, but also I was taking the bus. I wasn't driving: first because I couldn't, and then because I was stubborn and didn't want to. So I was always really interested in these liminal spaces. And I think a lot about why is it that those spaces were so formative for me and that sort of resulted in all of these poems. I'm still asking what is the relationship between these small migrations, these hour train trips, these bus trips, and later moving into the city, the subway the subway rides, and sort of like The Migration, like the plane ride when I was seven that I don't remember, and always sort of being thriving in motion and thriving in sort of, the in between. So, yeah, I've been writing these train poems for almost, like, ten years, and during the pandemic, stopped writing them a little bit because I wasn't taking the train anymore. And I don't know, after I started taking the train again, the stakes sort of felt different. Everybody's masked, and it's harder to cruise when everybody's wearing a mask (laughs) and I don't know that the experience is so different now. So I really appreciate this excuse to go back to the archive and think about sort of not just like a younger poet under different geographical circumstances, but also, like, those spaces themselves have shifted a lot, as everything else has, too.
ANGEL: Thank you so much, danilo, for sharing. I guess Keish and I can do our introduction now. I'm like, maybe we should have introduced because we're supposed to be used to co hosting a podcast, but forgive us. So actually, Keish, do you want to start with your story about how we came up with this podcast?
KEISH: Oh, I was actually going to ask you to do that.
DANILO: The Leos are shy today (laughs)
KEISH: What's interesting was, while I was brainstorming how to talk about the origin story, I just couldn't figure out where to start. Sometimes it's really a hard question, right, of where do we start? But, yeah, the podcast came about after writing together. I think we first wrote together, and we wrote a co-written essay called A Migrant Vernacular. And the essay essentially is inspired by Eve Tuck and C. Ree's A "Glossary of Haunting," and we wanted to sort of think and brainstorm some of the words that sort of haunt migrants and immigrant lives. Right? It can be airports, it can be trains, family, home, notice to appear. All these words kind of haunt our lives. And there was a moment where, y'know, when you're submitting an essay for publication, there's always a word count limit. And there was a desire to continue for us. And I don't know whose the idea it was, but we sort of came to this conclusion that we should continue. We're like, we need to continue this through a conversation, right? But the word Train was actually inspired by another artist, Miko Revereza. They have a film titled No Data Plan that was released in 2019. And they are a Philippinx undocumented filmmaker who rode Amtrak from Los Angeles to New York City because their DACA had expired and they did not want to risk and thought that trains were, quote, unquote, safer, right. The film is accessible right now on Criterion. The film is distributed by Sentient Films. And it's actually I mentioned all these origin stories because I came upon the film through another friend, Keisha Knight, who was a colleague of mine in a classroom and through our relationship, she introduced me to this film, which I then delve into and then shared it with Angel. And in our podcast, we actually interview Miko Revereza on his understanding of trains and fugitivity. And our writing is sort of alongside it. And it's kind of really exciting for us to be in conversation with danilo today because something that I noticed reading danilo's poem is that Angel and my writing is sometimes more of, like, a broader structural critique in a macro level. And danilo's poems really, really brought in the intimate spaces that trains deliver, right? And it added a different kind of tenderness to the experience, which I thought was such an amazing pairing. ANGEL: I can claim the idea of the podcast as mine because I didn't realize that it's like the modern day equivalent of, like, do you all want to start a band? Do you want to start a podcast? (laughs) So my apologies for putting out another podcast in the world, but also not sorry. Yeah, so what Keish just said we both started writing together, I think, like, February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. And then the pandemic hit, and we're like, okay, well, we have shifted all of our plans, and now we're just stuck indoors. And I think we developed a deeper friendship and relationship through our writing and also through our different artistic/academic endeavors. For me personally, I started creative writing in, like, late 2016, early 2017. And what had initially brought me to the page was grief over losing my boss and mentor, who was a white cishet Jewish woman and had passed away from breast cancer in mid 2015. And that was what brought me to the page and made me realize that I had to reckon with the grief that is caused by death, but also a lot of the grief that's not articulated from, quote-unquote being undocumented. Or learning to learn how to advocate for yourself in different settings when your parents or your adult figures in your life are not able to do that because they're working full time and taking care of other things. So, yeah, that's how I ended up being a writer and now a podcaster, I guess. Or just someone who dabbles in creative spaces. And yeah, as Keish was saying, I really loved reading danilo's poems because they were so tender and so intimate when looking at how we interact with each other in that metal car that we call, like, a subway or train.
DANILO: Yeah, if you two start a band, I would listen to it (laughs). similarly, I appreciated the pairing because sometimes I lean on the tender, on the intimate as a refusal of the violences that also needs to be named and that also needs to be contextualized and archived and made connections between as you do so swiftly in your writing. And sometimes those structural things seep into the poetry, for sure, and I'm definitely noticing them, but I feel that it's like a powerful gesture to, like, deny the reader. And for me, the reader is often somebody with a marginalized, with a criminalized experience somewhere. They deny the reader just another sort of place where those things are present and are reinstating those violences. And instead, I choose to write about, especially early on, the boys I was staring at on the subway.
ANGEL: Totally valid. Absolutely valid, I got to say. I wanted to maybe ask another question if it's okay with folks. So I know danilo, the three of us, you me and Keish, were talking earlier this week, and this idea of the public political body came up in our discussion, and I wanted to ask you if you would want to speak a little bit more about that.
DANILO: Yeah, I think for all of us, we carry our bodies as queer bodies, as undocumented bodies, as bodies of color, as sort of bodies with where public space is sometimes a threat in any number of ways. And also, we're always looking at the other bodies around us, too. Most recently, I'm so vigilant about if anybody on the subway car is not wearing a mask, but even before this, when the cop would be in a subway car, when even the conductor would come by checking tickets on the train, all of these bodies are policing publicness. And I think about that space a lot because it's so open and it happens so publicly, and sometimes it's a risk, and sometimes it creates this space for transgression, too.
KEISH: Yeah, I love that. I mean, there's a lot of details in, like, what people are wearing in your poems or how their body is positioned or what do they have with them. And what I also love in your details is I can almost trace where your attention is going to that person, that stranger who's across. And it's definitely a different lens than the one that we have, as you were sort of mentioning, when we are hyper aware of danger or threat, not that's coming from, like, Black and Brown body, that the state tells us that we should be afraid, but the State and the policing surveilling mechanisms, right. Yeah. Again, I just really love the details of that, because we're seeing people on a train in the transgressing way that the State refuses to see or won't allow us to see, right. That contrasts to the way that we've been sort of articulating how what does it mean for racialized undocumented, unauthorized, illegalized people to be aware of certain structural ways that we are taught to think, right. This is where the connection to stolen lands and Indigenous sovereignty comes in, right? For us to ask beyond and questioning the state, right, and settlersettler state taught notions of who is susceptible, who is allowed to be here, and taking a keener attention to whose histories are completely lost, right. There's just so much layers to it. I think that's also coming up for me when we're thinking about this public political, like, living in past bodies, right. There's a lot of intricacies to that.
ANGEL: Yeah. The one thing that struck me, danilo, from your speaking earlier, is you were talking about all the different kinds of migration, not just like the airplane, but also like, the train getting into New York City, leaving New York City, like, moving between boroughs of the subways. And you had this phrase of "thriving in motion." I don't know why, but that phrase just stuck with me. Would you want to say more on that or I don't know.... DANILO: I mean, the motion is like the in between is the liminal, the fugitive, the queer, the undestination, unarrival and indecisive blurred. All of these things that in some ways feel more like home than the origin or the destination.
DANILO: Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. It feels like a glitch or like a blip where time and space is suspended. And sometimes on the above ground trains, you're literally suspended. And it feels that time has a different I don't know, a different viscosity, a different sort of texture in those rides. ANGEL: Yeah, I remember those train rides. Like, if you're taking, I guess, all the Brooklyn bound trains that are headed towards Coney Island, where it's just, like, suspended. I wonder if this might be a good transition to share on what folks are currently working on. Or Alan, is there anything you want to add? Or you don't have to. I just wanted to open up the space to you.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Wow. Thank you. The collaborative piece that you all opened up with, I am out of my mind. Oh, my gosh. The way you triangulate it so much of the intimate domestic and also, like, the larger structures of imperialism, settler colonialism, war. I was quite taken when you all brought up the train and the role of the train and the Japanese internment camp, because I think a lot about how internment of Japanese peoples in the Americas created a wave of undocumented people from Latin America. And I know that a lot of countries in Latin America stripped citizenship from Japanese descendants and sent them to the US to be interned. And when internment camps ended in the US, they became undocumented in the States because they weren't citizens. They were born in the Americas. So thinking also like how the train is subjugated to facilitate the legality struck me. And danilo, the way that you entered that pace with, "we are being held, we are being held, we are being held" reminds me a lot of the train as a containment. But also, if we're thinking about Black studies, the way in which, for example, Christina Sharpe thinks of the hold as the place where the place in the boat where a body is held, the holding cell, the detention center, but also the hold of the hug, the hold of the embrace.I think that that ending really brings into perspective the multiple experiences of undocumented, illegalized, unauthorized, irregular migrants in the US. And how the train might serve as a place of rest, but it might also serve as a place of contention, a place of hypervilligence, as you named. And I feel like I'm just sitting here like, Holy crap, this opening has activated so much on my mind.
KEISH: Yeah, we definitely had fun. It kind of felt seamless when we were working on it. We talked for, like, ten minutes, and then we went onto the Google Doc. We just started cutting splicing, copying pasting. But I agree with you, Alan. I think there was a slight conversation between where should we end? Because there was a division between, like, should we end with the you questions to the audience. Who are they seeing? Who are they imagining? But I also felt similarly. I think the lines about being held was so captivating and important, and I 100% agreed that it encapsulates the nuances of the held in multiple iterations and definitions and possibilities. I think in so many ways, poetry and creative work opens up those possibilities for us beyond theories or critical ways of thinking. ANGEL: So I'm not sure how much time is allocated for Q and A, but should we do Q and A first and then talk about what are our upcoming projects, or should we talk our upcoming projects first and then do Q and A?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Maybe you can talk about your upcoming projects, and then we'll go into the Q and A.
ANGEL: Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much, Alan, for making that decision for us. I don't have any upcoming projects, so I'm just going to get that out so someone else can take the space.
KEISH: No, we do have upcoming projects. We have two episodes in the works. We took in a slight hiatus where we invited a lawyer this time, and we'll see how that conversation goes. So those episodes are coming in the next few weeks or so from our side. And where could they find us, Angel?
ANGEL: They can find us on instagram @migrantloveletters, plural. Or you can listen to our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, Stitcher and on Libsyn. It's also linked in the @migrantloveletters IG bio. What about you, danilo?
KEISH: Yeah, what's going on with you?
DANILO: I am doing a virtual creative writing workshop later this month with the Brooklyn Public Library in collaboration with the artist Smita Sen and their installation at the library. And the session is called Altar/Alter and thinking about the potential of change to honor and thinking about honoring the ways our bodies are changed by illness and sickness and disability, and how to use that transformation, or transformation in general, as a lens for altar making. For altar making. So that's coming up on February 26 [2022]. It's virtual at 02:00 p.m. Eastern. Otherwise, I'm going to be working on turning these train poems into a book (laughs). I'm working with my friend Jason, and we've just started and really driven by this process of going through the archive of pulling these poems for this conversation and really feeling that I wanted to sort of bring them together again. Because most of them have not been published. Some of them are aging, some of them are very old. And I haven't looked at them or read them in many years. So I'm excited to see what that process brings out.
ANGEL: And where can folks find your work, danilo, or if folks wanted to follow you online and things like that?
DANILO: Yeah, you can follow me at @queershoulders on all social media. And at queershoulders.com.
ANGEL: Before I forget, I think I forgot to say this in the beginning, but thank you, Alan, for putting this together, for introducing us to danilo and making this collaboration happen, and for CGR, for inviting us, and also for Ariana and Leti, for all the background work that they do to make this event possible. Shall we do Q and A?
ALAN PELEAZ LOPEZ: Yes. Okay. So if you are watching through Zoom, you can participate in the Q and A to the chat box or the Q and A box. If you are watching on Facebook, you can comment on Facebook and then that will be sent to us via Zoom. So please do engage with our three guests. These are questions on trains, fugitivity, undocumentedness, settler colonialism, so please don't be afraid. So I will read Leti's comment. I'm curious about trains as a means of traveling to the US. La Bestia, if you have something to add about that. KEISH: danilo or angel, do you guys have any thoughts?
ANGEL: Do you remember in the early drafting process, there was some questions I had around precisely La Bestia -- the question that Leti is asking. But I think we decided, or somewhere along the writing, we went for a more... I want to say more of an examination of train rides. I don't know, but within the US, because we were thinking sorry, primarily about Miko's films. So I think what I'm trying to say is that, unfortunately, we or I, rather, don't have much to add on La Bestia.
KEISH: Yeah, I was trying to get back to my notes and see if we can find that original version just because where train started from, our inspiration was from this particular film no data plan. I think we stuck with sort of the train ride from California to New York as sort of our boundaries of where the piece will be at but it is definitely worth continue thinking about. I'm definitely also writing sort of on the conversation that we've been having and on trains as well. So it's something to consider to think beyond US-Mexico border and just thinking more transnationally. It's a critical way to think about it, for sure, but at this time I also do not have answers on La Bestia yet.
DANILO: Yeah, similarly, I haven't thought too much about traveling into the US by train and haven't experienced it. But definitely, I think is rich for more thinking and research and getting my wheel spinning again in terms of unpacking even my own relationship with just domestic train rides and how they fit into not just sort of a broader historical lens, which sort of your work also got me thinking about. But also this transnational beyond the domestic, inter-domestic, experience as well.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: To comment on your opening, in your opening you continuously refer to disability into trains. And I think there is something to say about La Bestia as La Bestia producing a wave of disabled migrant populations in the United States, particularly from Central America. And the ways in which some of these folks who you're observing in trains, right, when we're thinking about disability, also to question like, oh, how does the State and how does imperialism, how does the nation produce disability? And one of those ways would be through the train ride of La Bestia. It's something that I think I'm also thinking about in relationship to Levi's comment and there are also two more comments have come in. I'll read N Cole's comment. Could you speak to your thoughts on trains/ train tracks used as US borders themselves? In both historical means for settler colonialism of occupied land and also in the contemporary sense of cities, especially, for instance, the way the subway becomes borders on Lenape Land/New York City.
KEISH: One can go into so many different fields of study and scholarships. Think about trains and train tracks as borders, right? A lot of spatial theory and urban planners speak about how certain train tracks and subway stations are positioned in a way to segregate cities on racial and class bounds, right. A classic example is Chicago, as it is with many other city designs in an urban setting. I also think some of the things that came up with conversation with filmmaker Miko Revereza was who rides the trains and why. We also have to think about prisons and incarcerates like holding cells and detention centers that are in rural areas for a particular reason to isolate certain people. And when people are released without a lot of money or nothing, oftentimes the only way to get back to find home is through these long train rides that is supposed to be more cheaper or safer or needs less identifications. And even thinking about how train stations historically has been designed, right. Some stations in the past had freak shows, like places for freak shows-- for train stations like Indigenous Life, as if it's archaic by the train station as tourist destinations.
KEISH: So in many ways I think trains and train tracks has been used as bordering and borders in multiple forms. I think that's sort of where my thoughts are going right now.
DANILO: Yeah, it reminds me of this recent conversation that's happening around the infrastructure bill and the roads. And recently people [?] said a very basic thing that said, like roads, the history of road mapping and road building is a racist one, which obviously but similarly to the building of trains. Thinking about highways and the ways that highways displaced predominantly Black and Brown populations in cities across America. And like trains, highways also make certain lands more valuable and more hospitable than others. Thinking about who wants to live close enough to the train stop, to the subway stop that you can walk through it, but not close enough that you can hear it from your bedroom and feel it from your bedroom. And thinking about housing and how that maps onto that. And again, thinking about disability and accessibility, like the ways that the subway system in many cities, New York included, is built, creates these borders between what stations are accessible and not. And literally for some people who can get off at a stop or on at a stop and who can't. And so thinking about those borders as well.
KEISH: There's also a new book that Ethan Blue wrote called The Deportation Express. It's more of a historical account of mostly white, but it goes to how this particular train was. Yeah, it just actually sent people from the west to the eastern coast for people to be deported. And many of the examples that Blue sites are people with disabilities and or public charges, right. And it's a very interesting book that people are interested in reading. It came out in 2021, I believe. But that also accounts for a particular historical account of how trains were actually designed to transport unwanted, undesirable and then disabled because of migration and economic system to be deported at the East Coast harbors.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. We have one more person who asked the question. We're going to close it off that way. So Nancy Vedaspack writes in the chat, I find the concept of trains as home interesting. I live in Switzerland and the country is connected to the train and bus network. As a visible brown Mexican American woman living in Europe, I have seen how the train often and these means of public transport enforced social hierarchies. I see that black and brown folk are checked more often than white Europeans and others. Are there any times that the train is not home but a checkpoint?
ANGEL: I think to answer oh, sorry. Go ahead, Keish.
KEISH: I think you got this one because we talked about it too.
ANGEL: I think this is where our conversation with Miko Revereza was really fruitful because not to give away Miko's film, but I think it's a film that is worth watching to figure out precisely that: the train does become a checkpoint. Especially when Amtrak gets close to the quote unquote border. Whether that means like the US mexico border or the US. Canada border. I think I'll leave it at that. Did you want to add Keish?
KEISH: No, I think I would really urge everybody to watch the film. It's on Criterion and I'll drop the link in the chat box. But yeah, it captures this sense of fugitive or surveillance and paranoia really well. And I think that we'll get at the question that was asked pretty much so.
DANILO: It just made that question makes me think about the experience of riding one of the buses where you have to get your ticket in advance. And I don't know, the system kind of taunts you that if you need to get your ticket and only because they might check it. Only because the police or somebody on the bus will check that you have it. And that sort of threat is a checkpoint. And always feeling like very not safe enough to not pay for a ticket. Even though I don't think they've ever checked it in my bus experience. But I'm sure when they do, they check it pretty selectively as the question the person was describing the question too.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. I know I said that one was the last question, but in the Q and A dropbox there was a really interesting question that was sent by Varun[?] Katar[?] And it says, this has me thinking about my ancestors journey on train 75 years ago across a newly drawn border as part of the partition of India and Pakistan. I'm also wondering how future generations relationships with trains may be different than today. Could you maybe talk about how you imagine trains 75 years from now? So a future oriented question.
KEISH: Looking at the poet, the poets and the creatives here.
DANILO: (laughs) Thank you Varun[?] For that. I'm just thinking free and accessible and for everybody.
KEISH: Yeah. I'm also thinking about there is a rail line between North and South Korea. There's a train system there that hasn't been used or obviously because it's so militarized and there's always this people's hope that the train will run again. That train will actually break down borders and bring them together. Right. It's a very hopeful vision and I think I hope that both governments are currently envisioning its reopening very soon. But I think that there are many ways of approaching trains through an environmental lens too to be a more sustainable way for people to move, for trains to be not surveilled, to be economical. Because something that Miko Revereza also highlighted is train tickets are not always cheaper than flights, right. So I think there are many ways that we can think about trains as a more sustainable, caring modes of transport where we don't have borders.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: I really appreciate that take and how the trains as a structure that is, like, on the land right. And can make a claim to, like, settlement and territoriality and borders. The way in which you propose this train as a form of unsettlement between North Korea and South Korea, when we're thinking about unsettled futures, I think that's really important. How can we reimagine the technologies of surveillance that have been forced on us or the technologies of mobility in the future? So thank you for bringing that up. I know that we are at time. Thank you, everyone, for joining us in digital space. I don't know if anybody wants to say any final words before we end the recording of the session.
KEISH: Thank you, Alan, danilo and Leti and just everybody who made this possible. As angel and danilo have said before, it was such a pleasure to working with you all, and I also love that we collaborated in our piece, danilo, it was such a phenomenal experience, and I hope that we can continue working together. Something that happens with me and angel is if you get caught in our circle, you can't really leave as easily as possible. But it's a nourishing one, not a containment. It's to sustain and nurture each other. But I'm so happy to be here. Thank you, everybody, for the questions and engagement.
DANILO: Thanks, y'all.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you.