View from the Borderlands: The P Words, Politics and Power

View from the Borderlands: The P Words, Politics and Power: Let’s say your crazy aunt is visiting. The one who climbed out the window at night when she was a teenager. Let’s say she’s calmed down no...

The P Words, Politics and Power

Let’s say your crazy aunt is visiting. The one who climbed out the window at night when she was a teenager. Let’s say she’s calmed down now and is ready to lay some good wisdom on you.

Here’s what she has to say about a dirty subject hardly anyone wants to talk about:

The “p” words, politics and power.

Why are politics and power such touchy subjects? We’re really hesitant to learn that close-to-the-heart friend or relative thinks about something important in a different way than we do, and that disappoints us. But this aunt is bringing up both politics and power even if it makes a hairball mess. Maybe some good conversations get started. Also, how well is it working for us by not talking?

A Deep Dive on The P Words, Politics and Power

1.         Begin where you are. Informed political action, whether it’s voting or volunteering should always start with issues, values and concerns we deeply care about.  I learned to write my own Ten Commandments after reading The Happiness Project. The first of the Linda Commandments may be the most important, “Let Linda Be Linda,” which it’s never too late in life to learn. I don’t like salmon because I prefer prime rib and I avoid scary movies because I already studied for years with nuns.  Preferences are a good doorway to understanding politics. We like what we like and don’t like what we don’t. What are a few of the things that matter most to you? Writing a list of ten things that you care about deeply tends to clarify your ideas. Your list could include loyalty, freedom, family, animals, oceans... That list could lead to stepping away long enough from streaming video, Cheetos or what-not to get personally involved in the next election, or just as importantly, volunteering to read superhero comics to little kids at the grade school near you or across town.

2.              Move the focus outward and extend the timeline. This one takes more than a few days or weeks but pays off in big dividends.  Start with the folks that you see most frequently.  Take the perspective of a researcher collecting information by asking questions rather than giving your perspective. Besides, you already know how you feel! You’re trying to find out what and why people think about their lives, their homes, opportunities, their state, country and world. What are their concerns and what solutions do they believe in? What are you learning and how does it stand up to what you used to think?

3.              Check your inputs. What sorts of news, views and opinions are you consuming? Is your information diet skewed toward conspiracy theories and fear-mongering or do you have a news-free diet that helps you control your anxiety? Watch your use of social media, print and TV for a day or two to see if you can identify if your diet is on or off balance. Eli Pariser  offers some help understanding the kinds of political content the Internet feeds us, based not on seeing both sides of an issue, but on our previous browsing patterns, keeping us online, in our bubble and making content providers mulah.

4.              Revisit the Classics. What book or film first took the top off of your mind about politics and power? The ABC’s of power and politics have been laid out for viewing by anyone in books and films that are more than beloved. They are timeless and tireless teachers about we humans and our power plays. Here, in no particular order, are some of your Tía Linda’s favorites that made her the cranky old aunt she is proud to be:

A Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), Lord of the Flies (William Golding), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), The Diary of A Young Girl (Anne Frank), All The President’s Men (Woodward and Bernstein), documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America (POV/PBS) Animal Farm (George Orwell), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).

5.        Don’t Believe Everything You Think. This is so hard to do when our conversations have become so guarded that disagreeing with each other is often perceived as dangerous. I know Michael Jackson references are tricky right now, but I'm going there. Start with the wo/man in the mirror. Check the validity of your beliefs with these relatively short reads on politics and power: Hans Rosling’s, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (I fell in total love with this man watching his great TED Talks) and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

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View from the Borderlands: Around the campfire with Roma

View from the Borderlands: Around the campfire with Roma: It's not surprising to anyone who studies media why Steven Spielberg seeks to not allow certain films produced for Netflix to compete...

Around the campfire with Roma

It's not surprising to anyone who studies media why Steven Spielberg seeks to not allow certain films produced for Netflix to compete in the Oscar competition.

It's expected, then, that a new distribution and production system such as Netflix will provoke alarm from those invested in the traditional systems of film making and exhibition. 

In the 1950's and 1960's, media scholar Marshall McLuhan studied the way a new medium like television will overtake another, such as radio, by adapting and supplanting its parts (soap operas and sports programming) the way all conquerors dominate new territories.

Newspapers and TV, mediums that once held the reins on information supply to their mass audiences also cried foul when the Internet turned their booming business model into a splintered spectrum that offered specialized news and information, in unlimited supply, 24-7, to infinitely specialized audiences. 

Mass mediums such as books, newspapers, magazines and movies are by definition in the business of reaching the masses. In this model information is in short supply (limited pages, movie houses to exhibit in) to its audiences. Netflix, which is also a mass medium, has a different system of supply and demand that guides its business. Digital movies are not housed in warehouses or distributed in trains and trucks. They are easier to store and distribute via streaming.

The Alfonso Cuaron film, Roma, does more than leap-frog cinema's established structures.  By telling a worldwide audience the story of a Mexican household and its struggles in Spanish, and in black and white, it actually returns us to the communal campfire from which all story-telling was born. The need to tell the mainstream story for the you guessed it mainstream audience that was inherent in mass media and which held sway for more than a century, is no longer important.

Roma is an artist's work.  Roma is a highly personal project that is also politically damning as it both rips the bandages from the Mexico's wounds to its college students from 1968 and 1973 while also telling the story of displaced indigenous peoples that is just as timely today anywhere around the globe.  

Are you catching a whiff from the smoke of the campfire yet?  I think we can expect more intimate story-telling in the future if the Netflix model for Roma is any indication. 

Reporting from somewhere over San Antonio

I had just lost my TV news reporting job—Well, to be more precise, I had been fired from my TV reporting job. Publicly fired. Like in- the- newspaper-publicly. I hardly had any savings and my rent was coming up due. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and wondered just  how did I get here? What had happened?

First of all, I’d moved from behind the camera to in front of it— sort of by accident —by necessity, really. I had studied in college to write for TV and Film and to work behind the camera and I did that during college. But later the only jobs I could find in the newsroom, where I wanted to work, were on-the-air.   Since I had worked following a bunch of news reporters around, I figured with my Alfred E. Newman reasoning, that if some of the folks I’ve been working with could do News Reporting, so could I. How hard could it be? That’s the kind of girl I’ve always been —take a shot at it.  So, I did.

Second of all, and, it’s happened to me once or twice before, things don’t always go as planned. Well in my case, there was this man at work.  More precisely, a married man. Ugh. Just know, Yup, it got thick as mud. Even thicker. As thick as Chapapote. 

Back to me losing it in front of my bedroom mirror after this brief linguistic aside. “Chapapote” is the word we Laredoans called tar or asphalt. It’s the Aztec word for Tar. The original “hot mess”. These digressions are the blue in the blue cheese. The mint in the mint julep. All the good stuff’s in the digressions. Bit of a  cuentista in me. Storyteller. Maybe this tendency gives you a hint at why dry, factual TV news reporting was not working out for me.

Chapapote— Cool word, huh? Did you know you know some Nahuatl too? We can thank the Aztecs for Avocado, which comes from ahuacatl. Also thank the Aztec Nahuatl language for our tomato, guacamole, chili, cacao and best of all..chocolatl, which in Spanish is ’chocolate’, and in English is chopped to be chocolate.

Yay Nahuatl. Still spoken by millions in Mexico. So, not surprising the words had jumped across the river the way all kinds of our border culture jumps back and forth in the borderlands, the way its been since 10 thousand years ago when the Aztecs traded their goods with cultures all through the Great Lakes regions. 

You may still want to know more about me and the married man— It was all just a hot, Chapapote mess  —there won’t be much more about him. Only to say that once he and his wife became pregnant,  I moved 150 miles away to San Antonio.

But let’s go back to Laredo first. I grew up there. In the 60’s, Reader’s Digest magazine, which was a big deal at the time, named Laredo the poorest city in the United States. That wasn’t any news to us. We knew how poor we were.  Just look out the window onto our dirt streets. In Laredo, streets were an important topic. Besides the old western song “The Streets of Laredo”, the streets were rutted, caliche dust storms. Any vehicle no matter how slow going raised clouds of fine silt that drifted in doorways and windows and made it into  every nook and cranny of our homes. We knew that things were not right. For sure not like the homes and neighborhoods we saw in movies and on TV.  

Our mayor and the local political machine that ran the city were big time corrupt. Here’s an example: the mayor’s ranch outside Laredo had  paved roads. For miles. Paid for by residents’ taxes. The streets in our neighborhood went unpaved and dusty for years until my mother and our neighbors arranged to pay for our own paving. Then there’s the heat. Our temperatures are so hot that the tar in the asphalt melts— and if you should find yourself walking around barefoot around for some reason, say poverty— the soles of your feet would get all sticky and stained with Chapapote. 

As soon as I’d graduated from University,  some of us returned to Laredo and worked for the local TV station. I got a job making signs to use in local commercials.  My friend, Mark got a job as a cameraman and immediately went out and shot a news story about the sorry state of the streets of Laredo. He set his tripod in the back seat of a news car and filmed roller-coaster, dusty jarring footage of our unpaved streets of Laredo.  His footage ran on the news at 6 that night. The mayor phoned the station raising a big fuss and the next day Mark was re-assigned from the news room to  production where he got stuck shooting car lot commercials.

After stealing money from us for forty years, the mayor and his minions had become so corrupt that they got careless and got caught. Accounting irregularities in the millions—When the oligarchy finally crumbled, CBS Sixty Minutes came down to South Texas and they ran a segment showing our dummkopf mayor— who we dummkopf residents had kept electing — outright admitting what a crook he was. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Still don’t.

So, fast-forward past the married guy at the Laredo station, and now I’m working in the big city of San Antonio. This was the pre-cable, pre-Internet era, and TV was tops.

It was also the era of appointment television. If you wanted to watch a program, there was no DVR— you had to watch it when it was airing.  It’s so different now in the age of streaming. In San Antonio, the station where I had worked had the highest ratings.  If the TV was on, people were most likely watching us at 5, 6 and 10.

But now I was out the door and for me the glory was gone. I couldn't call up a city official and say, "Hello, this is Linda Cuellar, News Channel Five calling." All my clout was clouted over. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had to get used to it.  At 27, I would soon be too old to get another TV job. No one would recognize me in the supermarket anymore.  So, here I was fired. In public. In the paper.  No picture with the article thankfully!

There were three of us that were fired —all of us women-- and two weeks later, two men took over our three jobs, sharing the extra salary between them. Three women out. Two men in.  You do the math.

Here’s how I much later figured out how it all happened. First, however another brief digression to media history—

Remember this is before the Internet and audiences for the few stations in town were enormous. There was short supply of content and great demand from audiences.  In 1980, one of our local anchors made a million dollars a year.  For an example of how much smaller audiences are today, consider in 1980 the TV show Dallas had a 34.5 rating. This week's top show NCIS got a 7.5 rating.  With limited supply and lots of demand, TV and radio stations operated their extremely lucrative private businesses using something they still use today which belong to the American people, the public airwaves. Internet and Cable don’t use the public airwaves, so they essentially are private businesses. Stations are licensed by the government to use the airwaves through The Federal Communications Commission. The FCC at the time favored stations that complied with affirmative action laws —Those were good days for women and minorities and I was a two-for! I had a university of Texas degree in radio TV film. I was bilingual. But it’s not what helped get me jobs in media.  Stations got to check off two columns every time I hired on because I am both a woman and a minority. With the arrival of The new republican president that advantage disappeared. Reagan’s administration pulled the cord on affirmative action in the government and its agencies. Licenses weren’t going to be weighed against who they hired anymore. 

That’s how three women were replaced by two men getting the salaries we had been earning.

 After I lost my job in tv news I immediately took a news reporter announcer position at a radio station for a lot less money—But, it paid the rent.

Now, I did not make a great deal of money at my old TV job, but I was making even less at this radio job. Plus, I had to work a split shift announcing the news from midnight to 5 a.m. and then I’d go out in the heat of the afternoon to do live radio reports on traffic. I’d drive to the airport and board a clear, plastic bubble about the size of the cab of a small pick up --un-air-conditioned.  Inside this roaring heat bubble I sat, cradling a Diet Coke between my knees to keep my tummy from getting nauseous. I’d always had sitting-in-the-backseat- nausea, riding-in-boats-nausea, carnival-ride nausea.  Add helicopter nausea to the top of my nausea list.  The helicopter pilot was a taciturn guy who had been bumped from doing the traffic reports when I came along. He certainly wasn’t in my corner. He had the not-too-much-confidence-inspiring name of Captain K. He flew us very competently around the reflective, steamy air space hovering over traffic on the winding circular freeways of San Antonio,Texas, average August temperature at 4 p.m. 104. 

From inside this baking-in-the-heat whirlybird that roared from take off to landing at noise levels that I can only compare to being front-row center at two side by side heavy metal concerts, I had to monitor three things:
 
Number one, my Diet Coke. Number two, whatever the DJ at the radio station was playing or saying because every 6 to 8 minutes he would throw it to me to report about rush hour traffic as we flew over all the usual cluster of humanity in cars inching for home below us. I'd do this live, with no script. Not easy for me, the camera-person-turned-news reader to speak off the top of my head. My News Director, who had hired me, liked and encouraged me, but her programming counterpart, the Program Director not so much. I wasn't blonde and bouncy like he liked his women. But I have to admit, sometimes his criticism was justified. Sometimes I stumbled and stammered  My rough edges were really showing some days. My Alfred E. Newman, "how hard could it be?" logic was not really working for me. Number three thing I had to monitor:  the police radio channel. I had to listen carefully because that's  how I learned about car accidents on streets all over town that I needed to warn drivers about avoiding. There were the usual street names like you'd find in any city. Names like Main, Broadway or the numbered ones. We also have streets with all sorts of names going back in the city's 300 year history. Names like Nacadoches, Flores, Alamo, Houston, San Pedro, Culebra, Bandera, Losoya, Durango, Blanco as well as street names that led to ranches like Jones Maltsberger, Callaghan, or Babcock. 

The hot days passed one by one and the rent was being paid. My time with Captain K up in the whirlybird doing traffic reporting was getting easier and the program director at the station had stopped yelling at me every single afternoon. So things were looking up.

Then suddenly things took a turn for the worse. A huge truck on the freeway flipped over and dumped a load of asphalt across three lanes causing a massive traffic delay.

Well, I got so excited that day, something newsworthy had finally happened, that I referred to the contents of the truck not by the English terms “asphalt” or “tar” or even the Spanish term “brea” --as in the La Brea Tarpits in California--but  by the Aztec term “chapopote" ——I said it just a few times on the air, but when I finished my report my program director went bananas — he screamed at me "Why are you always speaking Spanish on the air?" I answered, "What do you mean? "Chapopote" ? That isn't even Spanish!  Do you mean each time I sign off with my name LINDA CUELLAR? Is that what you think I'm doing, speaking Spanish ? It’s my name, dude!!

It would take me a few days to finally catch on, but what the guy at the station yelling at me was saying-- in an indirect manner— because even he knew it was wrong-- was that he wanted to hear me pronounce Spanish street names with an English pronunciation instead of Spanish-- Blank-oh, Floor-es, Dure-ang-oh instead of Blahn-ko, Flo-ress and Du-rahn-goh. Too bad. I was pronouncing all words as well as I was able.

Between flying around like a sun-scorched Peter Pan in the heat above traffic and juggling way more than my upside down tummy could handle, both my time in-the-air and on-the-air was coming to an end. T’his time in a happy landing kind of way. In my usual how hard could it be approach, I applied for a new job, not coincidentally also located at the airport— working as a public relations manager for the airport.

 When I got the phone call at home letting me know I’d been selected, I found out I'd beat out a ton of candidates because of my on-air experience and my in-the-air experience flying around in the heat trying to keep it together with Captain K. I rushed back to the mirror in the bedroom and jumped up and down like Mary Tyler Moore in the snow.

And my salary? Twice what it had been in my TV job —plus the newspaper wrote up a nice story about my being hired. And this time with the story about me there was a nice big photograph.

Not My Abuelita,But That's What TV Is For

1962 Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaullipas, Mexico. 

I can imagine my Mexican grandmother, Ventura Molina Flores, so vividly. She was married at 13, had nine children and was fiercely anti-church but a great devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I have a memory from when I was about seven. She stands five feet tall, at her mesquite wood fireplace, cooking our breakfast and uses her bare hands to turn the tortillas she has just made on the blazing hot comal. After breakfast she stands out in her backyard of chickens, pigs, rows of corn and fruit trees watching patiently as my muscle bound teenage brothers try with all their might but fail to cut the mesquite logs for her to use in the fireplace. Nana, which is what we call her, wears her traditional black dress that all widows wore, pale flesh colored cotton stockings and tan cloth shoes that resemble moccasins. She sees the boys have given up chopping and trots out beside the now sweating grandsons and takes the ax.  Next, she expertly chip-chips ting-tings at just the right spots upon the logs to chop them to proper fireplace proportions. All our grand kid eyes are bugged out in surprise.

January 24, 2019, Netflix's "One Day At A Time" Episode 13 "Quinces"

"Quinces" is not the way my coming out would have played out with my abuela. She more than likely would have come after me with her ax instead of sewing me a tux for my quinceañera. The Cuban grandmother character played by Rita Moreno struggles in her three inch dancer's heels to climb her own tall mountain of centuries of her culture's homophobia, but she reaches the top. She chooses her granddaughter over convention.  Many tears of joy, disbelief, and wonder flowed at my house.

Does this only happen on TV? Does TV reflect cultural change or does it spark the change it first shows? Yes, yes and yes in the case of One Day At a Time producer Norman Lear, who has broken at least as many cultural barriers in his nearly 80 years of working in TV as my grandmother chopped mesquite logs.  

God bless all the abuelas as they stand guard protecting their children in the best way they know how.
 

Oh, the good old days of no social media

Is anything as heart wrenching as a teenager's mauling and cruel self judgment? Eighth Grade made me step back in time into my moccasins, tee shirt and cut off jeans when my world revolved around (some) my family and (mostly) friends.

1968-69 my eighth grade year ranks as the worst year in my until then much loved and secure life. That fall, I got tossed out of a girls catholic school I'd attended for nine years for exercising my writing and artistic abilities on school bathroom walls. And since my subjects were both innocent and came from powerful families, the nuns showed me the door. I never even got a chance to give my reasons for the graffiti:  a full-on war had broken out between two neighborhoods. It was rich versus the poor and the victor (the rich) had taken the spoils: the boys in my old neighborhood had left us girls they had grown up with for new girls who owned swimming pools, and whose maids served sodas to visitors. Was I pissed!!!

The spring semester of eighth grade I enrolled in public school where I knew not one person. My mom and I had to scramble for clothes for me to wear. I had no school clothes, only my old uniforms (bye bye) and play clothes. Add to this the general awkwardness of being 13, the onslaught of puberty, the crushing beauty of everyone around you-- except your own--to which you were blind. 

I made it to the end of eighth grade in my new school with some new friends to replace my old gang from catholic school and when the next year began, I flew like an eagle, joining clubs and becoming a junior journalist. I ended the ninth grade semester being awarded more recognition at the school assembly than I thought possible. There was a God and she was two people, my Journalism sponsor, Margarita Newton and my Physical Education coach, Gracie Alderete.

The heavy lifting during this hard time came from me, however. Losing like a cocoon the protective environment of my old school, where I had made merry mischief since kindergarten was harder than I expected. I cringed to think what people said behind my back, but thank God that I had no actual proof or even an idea, because there was no social media to document the gossip and rumors. 

Watching Eighth Grade makes me think how much harder it may be to grow up today because of the the additional pressures of images and text to tell you exactly what everyone is writing and saying about you --or not writing and saying.