Tag Archives: by Jhenna El-Sawaf

Pierre Dulaine: All the World’s a Ballroom

Profile

To those that know of him, Pierre Dulaine is an elegant professional Ballroom dancer that went on to found a famous children’s dance and social engagement program in New York City public schools, a dance-world legend once played by Antonio Banderas. To those that know him, his students like myself, he is an eccentric dance instructor and beloved mentor who never misses a birthday, holiday, or accomplishment, and signs-off on his congratulatory Facebook comments with the rose emoji.

I first met Pierre at the Dancing Classrooms studio in Midtown Manhattan, where I was munching on gummy bears (co-founder Otto Cappel kept a giant bin in his office for the families) and waiting for my brother to finish his lesson. I was 7 years old, engrossed in a book, and not expecting to be approached by an adult, certainly not this white-haired debonair man with an impossible-to-place but definitely fancy accent. After a brief introduction, he scolded my posture and (gently) hit me with the end of his tie. I later learned that this is a gesture particular to Pierre, a playful reminder to straighten up. It would prompt one little boy, Pierre recalls, to guess that Pierre was a comedian, not a dance teacher, which makes him laugh until he cries: “I’ll never forget that!”

Pierre’s signature tie is missing during our Zoom call, which is about the only indication of the passage of 6 years since our last meeting and the current state of quarantine in New York City. Pierre notes that “this lockdown ain’t easy,” but says he’s pretty lucky and has been reveling in the newfound fresh air from his apartment balcony. Sans tie, Pierre is almost casual, though he still wears a crisp white button-up shirt as he sits at his desk, in front of a wall full of old family photos, a Palestinian flag, and various knicknacks. 

Born in Jaffa, Palestine in 1944 to a Palestinian Catholic mother and Irish Protestant father, Peter Gordon Henney was a world away from Pierre Dulaine. He and his family fled Palestine at the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, moving to Amman, Jordan, where Pierre spoke “English at home, Arabic in the streets, and French at school.” His mother made two meals for the family each day: one Palestinian for herself and the kids, and a separate plate of British food for his father, which was a shame, as “British food is so bloody blah,” Pierre recalls with a laugh. The Suez Crisis in 1956 forced the family (now targeted for being British) to relocate to Birmingham, England. 

A persistent school friend convinced 14-year-old Pierre to take dancing lessons, which he describes as disastrous. “I was very, very, very bad… she was shouting at me ‘NO! It’s 1, 2, 3!’ I grew up with Arabic music, I had no idea what bloody English or European music was!” Eventually, though, he found his rhythm, becoming a Ballroom dance instructor in London, where he’d change his name after thorough consideration. Known already as Pierre from his French school days, Pierre Henney wasn’t quite stage-ready. “Dulaine” then, was crafted for symmetry: to match the French sound and the two syllables of Pierre, while being easy enough to spell and pronounce for a Brit or American. 

 Pierre Dulaine traveled to New York for a “two week holiday” in late 1971 that has lasted 48 years and counting. Enjoying a successful career in dance with his partner Yvonne Marceau, Pierre decided to volunteer as a Ballroom teacher at a Manhattan public school. His experience transforming “thirty unruly children” into “ladies and gentlemen” sparked the idea for Dancing Classrooms, a program that, through dance, would teach public school children confidence, respect, and compassion. Nearly twenty years later, Dancing Classrooms would bring me and my brother from our Queens elementary school to Pierre’s Manhattan studio. 

After the program became successfully established in New York City, Pierre began to think more about bringing it home to Jaffa. When he was approached about teaching the program there, Pierre replied he would only do it “if we were to bring it to Arab schools, to bring Jewish and Arab children together.” His typically light tone turns earnest. “There are people in Jaffa, because it is a real Palestinian, Arab city, living on opposite sides of the street, and they don’t talk to each other.” 

When I ask about the experience of bringing Arab and Jewish schoolchildren together to dance, Pierre doesn’t mince words: “it was the hardest thing I have ever done. The families were very reluctant.” He recalls individual meetings with parents, winning them over with coffee and native-accented Palestinian Arabic. He convinced one Palestinian Muslim father, hesitant to let his daughter dance with a boy, that the program would be good for her academic and personal development— “Then whenever I had a problem with other parents, I’d send him to talk to them!” 

 More difficult were the children, who at first were “kicking each other, spitting at each other [and] refusing to dance.” One can only imagine this came not only from children’s typical refusal to follow directions or unwillingness to touch and dance with one another, but also the internalization of their parents’ fears and hatred. Pierre describes conversations with Arab parents that saw dancing with Jewish kids as “dancing with the ‘enemy,’” and Jewish parents that didn’t want their child to dance with a “dirty Arab.” After a few weeks, though, Pierre says there was a “softening” in the children and he began to see his familiar ladies and gentlemen emerge. Maybe it was the Arabic, or the tie comedy bit, or his Taurus-like-stubbornness, but, as always, Pierre got the kids dancing. His mother was proud. He’d later take the program to Northern Ireland, in honor of his dad.

 Why did it work? For Pierre, the answer is simple. “If you can get to talk to people one on one, play some music, and just dance and just move to it, eventually that brings them together.” 

 

Interview Transcript (edited for length and clarity)

Can you talk a little bit about your background, your family… What made you fall in love with dance?

You know, it’s most unusual that a person like myself would have ended up in dancing, but I’ll give you from the very very beginning. I was born in 1944 in Jaffa, Palestine. In 1948 at the creation of Israel we had to flee, there was a war, etc etc. We ended up in Amman, Jordan where I grew up, I went to a French School. My father wouldn’t allow us to speak anything other than English at home, so we spoke French at school, Arabic on the street, and English at home. I remember my mother used to have to cook two sets of meals every day: one Arabic for us, and one British for my dad. Honestly! You know, British food is so bloody blah. [laughs]. 

So that’s growing up, but then in 1956, we fled Jordan because we were British— there was the Suez Canal Crisis in Egypt. So we left very quickly and came to Birmingham, England. There, when I was about 14 I started dancing, very much because a school friend, a girl, in my class said “why don’t you go to this dancing school?” It was close to my school, and so I started taking classes. I was very, very, very bad, I mean, she was shouting at me “NO! It’s 1, 2, 3!” The problem was I grew up with Arabic music, I had no idea what bloody English or European music was! But eventually I really got it, and then when I was in the Silver class I stayed and helped with the Bronze, because there were never enough boys, and so on.

Later I moved to London, the big city, and that’s where I started working with Arthur Murray, got myself a partner… Then I boarded a ship and I got off in New York. I thought I would spend two week’s holiday before I went back to England, but then I realized I really had nothing to go back to. So I went into the Arthur Murray studio and they desperately needed an advanced dance teacher, so I said ok, I’ll stay for three months. That was the end of 1971, and now I have been here for 48 years! [laughs]. 

A couple years later, Yvonne came in looking for a job. Her last name was Mason, but there was already a Miss Mason at the studio, so she changed her name to Marceau. A year after that, we became dance partners. There’s a word in Arabic, I mention it in my book, maktoob— it means destiny. Her name being Yvonne Marceau, and my professional name being Pierre Dulaine, many people thought we were French, or maybe Canadian… And so we began to get somewhat famous, winning awards and things etcetera, and we appeared on Broadway in The Grand Hotel.

During the Grand Hotel days I volunteered at a public school, PPAS, Professional Performing Arts School, and I met 30 unruly children (laughs) that eventually became ladies and gentlemen. They seemed to eventually like it, and I loved it, and that was the seed of Dancing Classrooms… and this is the reason we are talking, when you think about it!

Basically, if I was to look back, for a Palestinian (half Palestinian) who was a refugee, who had to flee, for me to have ‘made it’ is really unbelievable. I take pride in it, not in a bigheaded way, but at the same time it is my parents who really suffered, because we lost our homes. Just imagine sitting where I am right now [gesturing to his home], and we have half an hour to leave or we will be killed. It must have been hard for my parents. But I’m glad to say that, had all of that not happened, as bad as it was, I would not be here, wouldn’t have made it. But I’m very blessed, I’m very lucky. 

That’s basically my background… and voila, here we are talking!

Quick follow up question, I’ve always wondered… What made you pick the name Pierre Dulaine? What was your thought process?

I was always known as Pierre, because Pierre is Peter in French, but Pierre Henney just did not sound right [laughs]. So I met this guy, and we sat down and came up with the name Pierre Dulaine: Pierre, two syllables, Dulaine, two syllables. It seemed to be right. At the time I was a 21 year old dance teacher. You change your name, and then everyone calls you “Mr. Dulaine,” and it just becomes part of it. 

But it was chosen because if you don’t speak French, and you see it written, you would say it “Dulaine.” And if you hear it, you could spell it within reason the correct way. I wanted another name, Pierre Aulin, a-u-l-i-n, which is a really nice sounding name. But if you don’t speak French and you see “Aulin,” you’d pronounce it Ow-lynn. So it had to be a French name, to go with Pierre, that could be heard or written by English-speaking person. Because the British people, just like the Americans, no offense, only speak one language [laughs]. 

*Brief interlude where we discuss that I do speak another language*

I wanted to ask you a bit about when you brought Dancing Classrooms to Northern Ireland, and Jaffa. What was your inspiration to do that, why did you want to take it internationally?

You come to a place in your life where you want to give back, and that’s how Dancing Classrooms came about, originally. But then I wanted to give a gift to the children from the place I was born, and that was Jaffa. There are people in Jaffa, because it is a real Palestinian, Arab city, living on opposite sides of the street, and they don’t talk to each other. And so when they did Take the Lead, I got to really know the producer, Diane Nabatoff, and I told her “I have a dream, I want to go back,” and she said “I’ll come with you!” I made it happen through a woman named Miri Shahaf-Levi who lives in Israel— she visited New York, wanting to meet me. We met, and she didn’t realize I was Palestinian with the name Pierre Dulaine [laughs] and I said I would only take Dancing Classrooms there if we were to bring it to Arab schools, to bring Jewish and Arab children together. Her eyes lit up, she opened up, and that’s how it started, that I went to the place I was born and we did Dancing in Jaffa.

So I did my mother’s side— she never saw the movie because she passed away, but she was happy knowing I was doing something for society with the children of Jaffa. It was the hardest thing I ever did, because the families, the parents of the Palestinian children, were very reluctant. But because I spoke Arabic with the Palestinian accent, they somehow trusted me. You have to remember, I’m sure you’re aware, Muslims typically don’t allow boys and girls to dance together. But because this was before puberty, and because I really got through and told them it would be good for the curriculum, good for their school work etcetera, they trusted me. Now the bigger problem was dancing with a Jew, dancing with the “enemy.” And that was a big big big thing. But they knew I had no ulterior motive, and they accepted it within reason. The Jewish families more easily accepted having to dance, but to dance with a “dirty Arab,” and to have it on film… but it happened. There was one Palestinian father who did not want his daughter to dance, so I took him aside, we spoke over coffee or tea. I told him it would be good for her confidence, that we are living in an international world now and she will want to travel, she will want to be more confident as a woman, and her school work would get better as well. Then whenever I had a problem with other parents, I’d send him to talk to them! So it really worked out very well.

Winding forward, I said to myself “I did something for my mother, now I must do something for my father.” I love my father so much that he is Protestant, and my mother is Catholic. And he’s Irish. And you know Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, they don’t talk to each other, they fight. So I got a hold of  friends in Northern Ireland, I worked in Catholic schools and Protestant schools, and there as well I brought the children to dance, together. It was successful as well. 

So you talked a lot about how the parents reacted, but how were the children? Were they reluctant to dance? 

UUGH! I mean, the Jewish schools, they were very reluctant. The Arab schools, they were IMPOSSIBLE. I broke all the rules of the Dulaine Method… I had to teach the boys alone, the girls alone, and throw some of the boys out for disruptions at first. And that was just in their own school! Once a week, we brought them together, the Jewish kids and the Arab kids… we had them kicking each other, spitting at each other, refusing to dance. The first three lessons were useless. But there was the softening over time, and at the end I was amazed… who knew they were like that!? It wasn’t easy, but it happened… I’m a Taurus, you see! I don’t take no for an answer. I have to say, speaking Arabic was the clue. Another teacher, say from America, could not have done it— they would have needed to translate, it wouldn’t have worked. 

What do you think is the role of dance, or art more generally, in situations of deep conflict or injustice?

Well, I just believe music itself is an international language. Music doesn’t have a nationality (well it does,of course) but you can like a piece of music not knowing where it came from. And if you like a piece of music, you will tap your feet, move… it’s innate in us, in people, in human beings. That is the centerpiece for me. If you can get to talk to people one on one, and play some music, and just dance and just move to it, eventually that brings them together. This is like what folk dancing is, the Hora, or the Dabke, music for those dances alone is fantastic! You put on a bit of music like that, immediately it brings people together. But how you bring opposite sides together in the first place… that is something else.

We just passed the 26th anniversary of Dancing Classrooms; what has changed in that time? What lessons have you learned?

Well yeah, 26 years of Dancing Classrooms, the 26th anniversary of my 50th birthday, they coincide (laughs). Oh I have to tell you something funny! I once went into a classroom, you know I joke around with the children, I ask who they think I am, what they think I do, I hit them with my tie… and one little boy raised his hand and asked “Are you a comedian?” (laughs) I’ll never forget that!

But what I’m admiring now with our teaching artists and this lockdown, our teaching artists are now doing online methods, and reworking the syllabus for the program to give an option for online, so schools have a choice next year. This is something I’m not in agreement with normally, but under the circumstances, until this nightmare is over with, I think it’s a wonderful step by you young people to figure out how to stay connected. I wouldn’t be able to figure it out!

Ok, lightning round:

Smooth or Rhythm?

… Rhythm!

American style or International?

American!

Performance, or Social Dance?

Uh… performance

Take the Lead, or Mad Hot Ballroom?

Oh-hoh-hoh [pronounced the French way, you know the way] Take the Lead!

You have to say that. And finally, gummy bears, or gummy worms?

(smiles) Gummy BEARS. 

Oh my god, Otto used to buy five pound bags from BJs… he used to go every Sunday. I loved it!

The Kids are Not Alright: Fox eyes and Digital Race-fishing

Op-Ed

In between videos of 15-second dances and POV’s, a disturbing beauty trend has emerged on TikTok: “fox eyes.” For those blissfully unaware, “fox eyes” refers to a specific eye shape and makeup style: slightly upturned, almond eyes, usually accented by a brown smoky liner and a straight brow. The blueprint is, of course, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, or any of the other exoticized white models du jour. Ever the innovators, TikTok teens have taken to shaving off the ends of their brows to achieve the look, while others pull their eyes back with their hands, or, more extremely, pull hair back from the temples to pull their skin (and eyes) into a new shape. These gestures in particular are troubling, as they recall racist gestures made toward East Asian people, as many Asian TikTokkers have pointed out. They rightly call the trend out for taking a feature of racist bullying and turning it into a momentary beauty ideal. Most importantly, one can’t fulfill this ideal by naturally having the features, but by manipulating the face to achieve a look typically associated with another race. 

Fox eyes are hardly the only index of this. The rising trend of white social media stars getting fake tans and appropriative Black hairstyles has been dubbed “blackfishing,” a play on “catfishing,” as influencers attempt to appear Black, or “biracial”, without being subject to the consequences of anti-Blackness and racism. Critics like Lauren Michele Jackson have written at length about the semi-misnomer of “blackfishing” — the perpetrators don’t actually want to be Black, they want the particular clout and financial gain of embodying Black aesthetics in a non-Black body à la Kardashian. This is the crux of these trends: they are about achieving a suggestion of ethnic ambiguity that doesn’t stray too far from whiteness.

Given that the very foundation of beauty ideals in the West is predicated upon racism, these trends come as no surprise. On the surface, the shift from defining “classic beauty” around white European features to this new composite of various non-White features might seem like progress, but it is actually profoundly insidious. To have the intended impact, these features must be expressed on a white or white-adjacent person — “fox eyes” is not about seeing Asian people as beautiful, it’s about seeing a feature cut from the racialized person and pasted upon a white person, as beautiful. It is appropriation, not appreciation. It’s also dehumanization.

This slide towards an ethnically ambiguous beauty ideal is indicative of eugenicist  racial-mixing thought, and recalls that infamous National Geographic photo story. If mixed people are construed as more beautiful (and the mix in question is nearly always one that includes whiteness or proximity to it), it is the literal breeding out of certain racialized traits and the fetishization of others that makes them so. Now, we are seeing this idea taken even further as white people scramble to fulfill this pseudo-mixed-race ideal. 

The online world enables this to an alarming degree. Trends take off and are thoughtlessly imitated by thousands of people (in the case of fox eyes, many of them teenagers). Trends change faster than one can keep up, moving the goalposts of beauty at lightning speed, seemingly always toward still being resolutely racist but with more steps involved to feign political “wokeness” (a word that’s similarly been digitized and appropriated, which feels fitting). Stripped of the idea of being a “TikTok makeup technique” or “Instagram modeling pose,” the fox eyes trend bears a striking resemblance to old Hollywood yellowface, but there is something about both the internet and the perceived frivolity or inconsequentiality of beauty that has allowed many of these trends to go unchecked. 

We understand beauty trends, especially those popularized among teens online, as ill-advised but nonetheless harmless expressions of herd mentality. Indeed, I doubt the kids are aware of how they contribute to the racist restructuring of beauty standards, but most people are not aware of how structures of power inform their understandings and behaviors, especially “personal” ones like beauty choices. That said, when it feels as though we are two trend cycles away from bringing back phrenology under a more hashtagable name, it is far past time to pay attention. If teens are mere sheep, look for the shepherd. 

Women Without Men: What You See Isn’t Quite What You Get, and That’s the Point

Movie Review: "Women Without Men"

Women Without Men (2009), originally a video installation by the visual artist-turned-director Shirin Neshat, is characterized by its powerful visual elements, but the first impression it makes is audial. A black screen faces the viewer as the adhan, call to prayer, plays. One of the film’s four central women sits on the edge of a white rooftop, her black chador and hair contrasting a grey-blue sky. The adhan underscores her evident turmoil, as she struggles to make a decision, and cuts out the moment she does. Her name is Munis (Shabnam Tolouei), a 30-something unmarried woman who lives with an abusive brother and longs to be part of the world of political action she hears through her radio. This is the first enigmatic vignette of the fragmented, otherworldly feminist film.

Munis is joined in the film by three other women, who become entangled through the physical and mystical sides of life. One is Munis’ best friend, Faezeh (Pegah Ferydon), religious and conservative but jealous and longing to marry Munis’ brother. Then there’s Zarin (Orsolya Tóth), a silent but expressive young woman working in a brothel, and Fahkri (Arita Shahrzad), an older woman who leaves her controlling husband and buys an orchard where all three women begin to live together: a women-centered Garden of Eden of sorts, or, more fittingly, Jannah, a hidden paradise. 

 The film is adapted from a 1989 novel of the same name by Shahrnush Parsipur, but adds a more political thrust. The setting, 1953 Tehran during the imperialist US-British backed coup of the progressive leader Mohammad Mossadegh, is more than just a backdrop to the film. British-American forces, seeking to maintain control over Iran’s oil, not only destabilize the political sphere, but exacerbate the personal turmoil of the characters. Munis becomes the political axis of the film, active in the pro-Mossadegh resistance, while the militarized imposition of the Shah parallels patriarchy’s violent repression of women. As the women struggle to free themselves from their individual circumstances and their subjugation as women, so masses of protesters resist the imposition of a new regressive government. 

Two images are central to Women Without Men: one is the long road, leading to a horizon, where all of the women walk. The other is a babbling creek, which comes to a cave-like opening that leads to the semimagical orchard. These images recur throughout the film, facilitating travel, transition, and rebirth in the literal and metaphorical senses. The women encounter and journey along these pathways often in silence, with only the sound of footfalls or water accompanying them.  The diegetic sounds, absent any dialogue, heighten these meditative and almost trance-like moments, leaving us on edge as we wonder what will happen next. In these moments, the women transgress the division between reality and mysticism, and between the physical constraints they suffer and spiritual freedom. 

The road and creek are physical images, natural ones, that bridge the gap between the magical and the realistic. The film plays with surrealist images and techniques: a faceless man, a woman suspended in flight mid-air, a doubling of a character that allows her to watch herself. They are reminiscent of the effects achieved by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, but in the context of the film and Neshat’s direction, this surrealism is distinctly Iranian. It is inextricably linked to the film’s mysticism, a narrative tool that rejects dominant, often Western, narrative styles. It is also thematically fitting: in a world where characters face repression, silencing, and control, they must find alternative ways to make meaning and express themselves. The Shah’s dictatorship and later the Islamic revolution imposed censorship of expression in Iran. Hence the elements of surrealism, magical realism, and other non traditional narrative and stylistic techniques for which Iranian cinema is known. Neshat’s particular approach to these elements suggests an intimate understanding of trauma and the subconscious: her surreal images always get at a hidden meaning or intention of her characters. 

Neshat’s direction and Martin Gschlacht’s cinematography pair perfectly to create the visual language of the film. Each image is created, navigated, and mediated by sharp, intentional camera movements that orient and disorient the viewer. An unflinching aerial shot shows Munis floating vertically in a howz, a pool, her dress billowing around her in what looks almost like a stationary version of a Sufi dervish. This stillness is contrasted in other parts of the film, especially those set in the orchard. One such moment shows Faezeh’s first encounter with the orchard, unmanicured and darkly beautiful. As she walks, the camera pans over her body 360 degrees, making us just feel just as lost as Faezeh. 

While the visual language of the film is largely effective, it is not entirely so. While Faezeh, Munis, and Fahkri are part of the images, Zarin is an image. Emaciated, traumatized, and close to death, she silently struggles and endures. We don’t get much of Zarin’s point of view beyond her suffering. She, compared to the other women, seems to be far more archetypal and one-dimensional, despite Tóth’s remarkable performance. Zarin feels like an anonymous image of the young, victimized, sex worker, rather than her own person. Her status as an image undermines the film’s evident belief in the complexity and richness of its women characters, especially those who are most vulnerable. 

Aside from this notable misstep, Women Without Men creates its own vocabulary of understanding, communication, and meaning. While rooted deeply in its historical and political moment, the film finds its home in a liminal space. Women Without Men’s pointillistic aesthetic gives us fleeting images that stay with us long past the credits— and extend the film’s resonance from 1953 to 2009 to 2020.

Not In Between Anything

Letter to the Editor

Re:https://thewellesleynews.com/2019/12/05/in-between-identities-navigating-being-mixed-at-wellesley-college/ 

To the Editor:

According to Jahanara, former president of the mixed student organization “Fusion,” being mixed means “not culturally belonging,” or being in-between cultures. As a mixed person, I don’t feel in between anything: this doesn’t make me a traitor to “mixedness.”

There is no universal mixed experience. Some of us may feel we “don’t belong” to a specific group, while others feel at home in multiple cultures. These experiences are, of course, shaped by structures of power—anti-blackness, colorism, white supremacy—and often by colonial histories. Boiling all of this down to a general “mixed” identity, one that we must all rally around in a specific mixed cultural organization, is not only facile, but asks us to bond not over who we are, but who we are not. 

The fact of the matter is that many mixed students belong to what Jahanara deems “monocultural” orgs (an inaccurate denomination given that most of these orgs are multi-cultural, and simply focus on a group of related cultures). She asserts, without evidence or detail, that such orgs “intensify racial or cultural stereotypes.” While a fair critique could be made, Jahanara instead pits “monocultural” orgs against the multicultural Fusion, a space presumably free of such stereotypes. Meanwhile, her entire basis for Fusion is a stereotype in itself: the stereotype of the insecure mixed person that belongs nowhere. 

I attended a couple Fusion meetings my first year, but I didn’t stick around: I soon realized that beyond the imaginary of “not belonging,” I had little to talk about with other people there. I chose instead to join WAWA where, despite not being “fully” Arab (whatever the hell that means), I was welcomed with open arms.

Over the Rainbow

Feature Report

I dug a stray piece of chunky glitter out of the corner of my eye, squeezed it shut, and opened. For a moment, there were only streaks of color: black, pink, gold. I was standing in the midst of thousands of people dressed in the colors suggested by the organizers of the first ever Queer Liberation March. It was June 30 in New York City, exactly 50 years after the Stonewall Riots. 

One avenue over, New York City was hosting “World Pride”— every two years, World Pride is held in a new city, kind of like the Olympics. In Manhattan, the biggest parade of rainbows yet drew out millions of people. My friends and I had devised a best-of-both-worlds plan: we’d spend the morning spent marching in protest at the QLM, then meet other friends that afternoon at the mainstream Pride parade to celebrate and collect free condoms and Capital One Bank rainbow phone wallets. 

Once we arrived at the March that morning, however, I didn’t want to leave. People in outfits that could only be described as protest art filled the streets: jean jackets embroidered with the names of transgender women of color murdered that year alone,  meticulously painted “ACAB” makeup paired with elaborate drag outfits, spray painted “gays against guns” tee shirts. My friends and I took a spot in the lineup next to a group with a banner reading “No Pride for some of us without Liberation for all of us.” We chanted, sang, and marched. I recognized signs with vintage slogans from the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in 1970.

The marchers hadn’t registered for the event; no cumbersome check-ins or barricades had been set up. Forty thousand people simply organized and congregated at the famous Stonewall Inn and walked all the way uptown on Sixth Avenue. This was intentional: we followed the original route of the 1970 march and travelled in the opposite direction of the 2019 Pride Parade (The Parade, Pride™, of course, travels downtown on Fifth Ave, best known for its expensive shopping). At intersections, volunteers in official shirts linked arms to prevent traffic from colliding with demonstrators in a show of support and solidarity. The activist collective that organized the event, Reclaim Pride Coalition, has a website which explains: “We March in our communities’ tradition of resistance against police, state, and societal oppression, a tradition that is epitomized and symbolized by the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.” They did not seek official recognition by the City or the false “protection” of police presence. They chose instead to return to the classic call to action: “Out of the sidewalks, into the streets.” 

We reluctantly left the March and arrived at World Pride. When we got there, barricades kept us from joining the parade and forced spectators to congregate on the sidewalks in huge crowds. NYPD officers not only guarded the barricades, directing us through circuitous routes to simply cross the street, but were marching themselves. Cop cars with details repainted in rainbow drove along behind a corporate float that threw freebies (flags, whistles, basically any rainbow-covered object) onto the sidewalks. This was unsettling, especially given that the Stonewall Riots, supposedly honored that year by the theme “World Pride: Stonewall 50,” were riots directed against police raids. Homophobic, transphobic, and racist officers of the NYPD had been the cause of the original revolution; now they were in it. The Riots were about liberation from an actively violent State and system.  The Queer Liberation March foregrounds Liberation. The Pride Parade is now generic, largely apolitical, and commodified.

Attending Pride after the QLM felt different from previous years; it felt empty. Beyond the sea of rainbows that, yes, was beautiful, there was nothing but a terrible irony. Almost every float in the parade belonged to a corporation. T-Mobile had a hot pink float, and one person in a rainbow “T” shirt ran to the barricade with a tiny flag emblazoned with the logo in the left corner. They smiled at me expectantly, and I accepted it. I wanted it to feel like taking a gift from a friend, to go home and place it on my corkboard as a memento, but it only felt like a symbol of complacency. I was being bought. I stared at the floats of unreasonably happy people, celebrating a sanitized idea of progress that I couldn’t help but see as false and incomplete. Pride™ seemed content to ignore the unresolved issues my community faces. The Queer Liberation March confronted them head on, in both celebration and anger. That was something to be proud of.

 

Micro-Realizations

Blog Post

My first ride in la micro down the coast between Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, Chile, was a bumpy one. Seated in the middle row of a small bus, I bounced in my seat as the driver flew down the main drag, ignoring reasonable speed limits. We stopped (or came to more of a brief pause, just long enough to get one foot on the step of the bus) near a fish market, and a few more people piled on. One of them was a woman selling Super8’s from several boxes attached together seemingly by magic and strung across her chest for convenience. I had no idea what the mysterious candy bar was, but the vendor very quickly sold me on her product in Haitian-accented Chilean Spanish: “¡Superochos, superochos, superochos! A crunchy, tasty snack, perfect after a long day of work or school, cookies bathed in chocolate!” I frantically gathered my pesos and tried to make my purchase before the vendor disembarked at the next stop. After losing coins to the abyss under my seat, I finally scored my first superocho.

I grew up in New York. I’m accustomed to walking through the streets with a pizza slice in hand, catching rogue cheese in my mouth while also trying to swipe a metrocard (this has about a 75% success rate). In Chile, I was happy to replace my pizza with a completo— a hot dog with avocado, ketchup, mayo, and sauerkraut. It comforted me as I acclimated to daily life and filled the gaps in my new eating schedule. My affair with street foods would soon grow from the safe-bet — and study abroad program approved—bus commute candy bars to empanadas de queso bought from the trunks of cars on lunch breaks, beachside sopaipillas (fried dough) from shopping-cart-rigged grills, and many, many approximations of falafel from vegan hippie youths, sitting just outside campus with their coolers and hand-rolled cigarettes.

Public transport and main streets weren’t just marketplaces for food, though. Vendors sold tissues on the train—a godsend when I caught an awful cold— or used clothing on the sidewalks. Outside grocery stores, they sold the products found inside for a fraction of their price. One day I picked up some laundry detergent outside Jumbo, the Chilean Walmart, from a Haitian family with adorable young children, whom I spoke to in our mutual second-language-Spanish. I purchased a hair scrunchie on my way to class after losing the ever-present one from my wrist, and chatted with the woman who was selling them to pay her daughter’s high school fees. Before launching into their sales pitches, micro vendors explained what brought them there: a collapsing economy, losing a job, moving cross-continent. Due to Chile’s own economic problems, the vendors relied on these sales to support themselves, children, ailing parents, or extended family back home. A Venezuelan doctor, struggling to make ends meet, sold me a red ballpoint pen.

When I first arrived in Chile, I wrote a journal entry about this street-vendor culture: how it added life to the city, shaped my days, and made me feel almost at home. This was true, but incomplete. Back in New York City, I had become desensitized to poverty. I had become so used to it, and the informal economies it creates, that I saw street vending as a feature of any big city and something to consume uncritically. Seeing it in a new environment and coming to understand its sociocultural and historical contexts challenged this perspective. In my program’s Clase Cultural I learned about the extreme income inequality in Chile, a remnant of the dictatorship’s neoliberal economic system. I bought my car-trunk empanadas from a sweet elderly couple who came to remember my order. After learning about the AFP pension system from a friend, I realized that, like many older people in the country, they received an insufficient retirement pension and had to take to the streets to make enough to survive.

  I was quick to romanticize my experiences, and what I perceived as the culture of the country, without investigating how it came to be. Now, I wonder about the woman who sold me my first Super8. Did she come to Chile expecting to find a better life, and instead met racism, xenophobia, and employers that either wouldn’t hire her or didn’t pay a livable wage? How long had she been selling candy? Who did she come home to? Who was she supporting with her sales? I like to think that she somehow knows she has given me a lot more than a candy bar.