By Tomás Moniz

It starts with a story:

My grandma, worried that her 3-year son had not spoken a word yet, had him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused and scared, he did. She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since, she says, and smiles thinking of her now 50 year old son talking his time away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.

This is not make-believe. This is how we find our voice. This defines our language.

Here is my story. Or the start of it. My name is Tomas Ignacio Aragon; everyone calls me Tom. This I know for sure. I come from families of lies, of stories to deceive you, to deflect discovery. As a bicultural child, I was not comfortable in nor completely accepted by either side of my families. In the white world of my working class mother, I was the visible mistake, the dark stain on the family name. White working class military folk, dealing with the daughter who runs away to find her place, to save the world in the late 60s, and comes home struggling to save herself and feed her two year old son. With her, I was raised to avoid declarations of race, of difference, trying not to discuss my brown skin and brown hair in a family of blondes and blue eyes, forgetting my Spanish, speaking English only. I hid my shame with my silence.

On the Chicano side, I was the product of typical male weakness, the sign of my father’s co-option and ultimate demise by white women come to save the poor, the natives. He was seduced by her presence, her education, her future. And those things he loved about her, she used to leave him when he found his place in el pinto, the typical educational facilities for poor Chicanos in New Mexico. His anger at her transferred in to his abandonment of me. No letters. No contact. My father running from the law, running, running, knowing the inside of a cell more than his son.

Wait. This is not a story. This explains nothing, so I create my own explanations.

I started writing to find my color, saying on paper in black indelible ink what I couldn’t to my classmates, to my first few lovers, to my mother and members of my own family: I am Mexican. I am white. I am.

‘Fight one bean you fight the whole burrito.’

I remember this saying as a warning white kids said about fucking with Mexicans in Ventura, California. I remember the sound that they made on the school bus, slapping hands, laughing, all building a solidarity of whiteness or non-brown-ness when one kid calls out ’smells like beans’ as the Mexicans leave the bus, walking down the aisle. At 15, I couldn’t stand it any more. I stood up and hit the kid in front of me with my backpack breaking my connection to them. I wanted to be the burrito. I am Mexican; I am not white. But in the end I was wasn’t welcomed. I am the one who had to find trouble rather than it finding me. It has been the same ever since. I walk the borders of cultures, the too white to be brown and too brown to be white. Sometimes hassled by both sides and sometimes passing into each. Sometimes seen as one of the boys, sometimes the affirmative action product. I enter college deciding to claim, to rename, to embrace and revel in my contradiction, my displacement, my ambiguity, my absence of certainty.

MEChistAs in college scoffing about my lack of Spanish and my complaint that meetings were in held only in Spanish. ‘Chale, man. What’s up with you?’ Because I was raised by a English speaking white mother. Awkward silence.

My teacher asked why the absence of Mexican American writers in a California literature class bothered me. Because I am one. Awkward silence.

This is the only way I can speak to you. I am an academic and I am not afraid to talk that talk — the hybrity of myself causes these contradictions that I embrace like old lovers knowing how to sooth each one, how to excite and comfort. I was freed in theory and abstraction finding voice in books by Moraga, Anzaldua. Finding fathers in Acosta, Reechy. Finding heart in the radical acts of violation and violence like Tijerina at the New Mexican courthouse, Murrieta’s refusal to bow his head, Los Crudos’ demand for an uncompromising politic, Rage Against the Machine’s connection to difference and abhorrence of authority. I became a bicultural, Chicano with no respect for authority, no time for lazy assumptions about race, culture, politics, class, sexuality. I found myself in the refusal to singularly define myself.

Wait. This is a lie. These words. Stories.

How do I claim myself: how to separate what I feel as a Chicano, as a male, as a person of privilege. How do you claim anything when you can’t claim the authenticity of your own voice? Remember: speak clearly, be careful if your pronunciation is off, if your skin fades too pale in the winter, present you color in your movements, your clothes, your lovers.

In a world that wants singularity, I choose both. In a culture that wants uniformed sexuality, I choose to embrace bisexuality. In a society that denies authentic autonomy, I found myself in anti-authoritarian histories, in the romance of clandestine organizations. I was seduced by the pen and the gun, by non-monogamist lifestyles, by radical, dissident Chicano nationalism, by the feminist rhetoric to reclaim our selves, our lives, our sex, our religion, our consciousness. This has defined me and hurt me. I tend to be the problem, the one who asks too many questions, who is never comfortable with the way it is. With the way I am.

But now I refuse to be silent or shameful or half or half-hearted.

I tried to avoid it for a while, but if I wanted to find and meet other anarchists in the East Bay, I needed to go to the Long Haul, an anarchist infoshop in Berkeley. So I took a deep breath, opened the door and entered, trying to free myself of my previous feelings, my stereotypes, my love and hate for the anarchist community; and yes, I know it ain’t one homogeneous thing, but regardless, my experiences with it have been fraught with good ol’ revolutionary angst.

Let me explain.

I have never been into the punk scene, I am not white, I became a father at 20 and had to think about changing diapers, not just about changing social structures. I remember being chastised by someone trying to get us to go up one summer to the logging protests and when I reminded him of my responsibilities, he snapped back: ‘what was more important.’ I wanted to punch him, to make him see his ignorance, the elitism of privilege, the typical dismissal of people with children, with jobs to pay for food and rent. Yet, this has happened over and over. Meetings at 6 p.m. or reading my child a bed time story? How to choose? It felt as if I could never fully commit, never be as dedicated as the people I met — mostly younger, white, students, who were mobile, who could survive on a fluctuating income. Now there is nothing wrong with this, but this was not me, not my experience, not my culture. But I knew that the anarchist views more closely resembled my views about how life could be lived than anything else, so I tried as much as I could to find that community. I brought my kids to meetings; I swapped childcare with other parents on my block (a nice way of realizing it truly does take a neighborhood to raise a child). I tried to figure out how to balance riding bikes with my kids around the block versus riding in critical mass, which is right at dinner time.

I realized I needed the anarchist community after years of trying to compartmentalize the seemingly disparate aspects of my life — the non-monogamist, the self-schooling parent, the activist, the Chicano academic, the fuck-the-police poet. But how I got to this point is another story. Is in fact many stories.

Let me start at the beginning

I began noticing the glaring discrepancies in my life; I grew up on hip hop and could see it being co-opted into cheap fronting and frivolity. This was not the community I was a part of, dressed in hand-me-downs and learning to break on ripped up sections of linoleum. I simply couldn’t handle the growing consumerism, the value placed on objects, after having lived in poverty, after scoffing at and detesting the symbols of wealth for so long (yes out of envy and jealousy at the time perhaps). Yet, I desperately needed to believe in the anti-authoritarian politics of NWA, Public Enemy, Freestyle Fellowship and others, for I was not hearing it from anyone else nor in any other way that spoke to me.

It continued in undergraduate classrooms in which I was appalled at the refusal to engage in anything but what was deemed ‘practical and possible realties.’ After being told that republicans and democrats held the only legitimate and viable worldviews, I wondered how the hometowns I grew up in — Las Vegas, New Mexico, Kailua, Hawaii, Ventura, California — were included in anything we discussed. How did these ‘viable’ political choices account for the poverty, the single mothers, the drugs, the lack of choices available? There had to be another way. And when I did make my way to an anarchist study group. I seethed at people’s unwillingness to even attempt to connect anarchy with issues of race and privilege. There had to be other ways. Other places. Others.

So I retreated for a while into my own experiences, creating and nurturing a lifestyle that embodied the values I couldn’t find elsewhere. I found connections with my imprisoned father and prison issues that introduced me to Attica, to my father’s penitentiary, to political prisoners. I reveled in becoming a father and was soon horrified as disciplined behavior became the primary learning objective in my son’s school. What could I do, where to turn? I refused to participate in the privilege of private schooling so that was out. And then I found The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and we created our autonomy, but struggled to connect with others who chose to homeschool for reasons of liberation rather than Christian bullshit and racist, classist fears about public education. Where were the other parents? People fuck, so I know people reproduce.

Moving to the East Bay from the city did help me meet more people with similar values. While attempting to create a relationship based on free choice rather than social coercion, my partner and I met another young parent questioning the rigid social definitions of what relationships could be. With the inspiration from Emma Goldman and the practical advice from The Ethical Slut, we began to embrace non-monogamist freedom to explore our own sexuality, our growing identities, our interests. But even here we felt out of place: we weren’t 50 year old hippies reminiscing about free love, nor were we new age converts trying to fuck while rubbing crystals and engaging in tantric poses. We were in our late twenties, we were looking for others more like us.

All these interests and choices of my life culminated in the tear gas of Seattle. Studying globalism as an advisor to student clubs on the campus I taught at, we decided to participate in the WTO protests, not realizing the dramatic and liberating events that we would be a part of.

So after the smoke cleared from Seattle and then DC and then Quebec, I realized that I could no longer chase the revolution, that I could no longer compartmentalize the different aspects of my life. I needed a way to synthesize them all. After ten years of making half-hearted attempts to connect with people who looked and lived so differently it seemed than me, I decided to toss aside my ego, my attitude, and my fears and both find and help create the community I wanted.

In the three years since I have made this commitment to be involved in the anarchist community, I have met some powerful and inspirational people; I have learned to see that resisting the oppressive and seemingly undefeatable social world we live in can be practiced in so many minute, marvelous and meaningful ways — in fucking, in gardening, in punk, in slumming it, in cooking. Perhaps even in crystals. I’ve been a part of RACE (revolutionary anarchists of color), been to and participated in the anarchist conference, started a zine, boxcutter, with a few others to explore aspects of personal liberation. I even staff a shift now at the Long Haul. With each step I try to bring my stories and my experiences with me. I want to be a part of something that combines theory and praxis, that can talk the talk and walk the walk, I want to work with people that I can learn from, that inspire me in my own efforts of teaching, parenting, living my daily life. I want to try and fail rather than remain safe in stasis. And yet, at times I still feel like an outsider to the radical/anarchist community. But now I know that I am apart of it, and so I have a responsibility to it, to help shape it. I am writing to engage myself in this process that will force me to embrace more of it, to be more involved in it, and to welcome other people like me — marginalized from the mainstream, yet not quite the typical anarchist — to join this discussion. I know many more people are out there, many more stories, and I hope we can start sharing them.

Anarchy is the radical approach to life of not simply living a fair equal and free life for yourself, but making the connection and working for the liberation and equality of everyone. It is anti-authoritarian; it is non-coercive; it is based on the principles of active involvement, of direct action, of a radical faith in diversity. Now this doesn’t imply that the struggles of all comminutes are equal. Therefore, it is imperative to recognize, within ourselves individually and within our individual cultures, the points of privilege we may have access to and benefit from. It is crucial in anarchist thinking to understand the workings of white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege and so on, and to work to destroy these forces. And one of the first things to realize is that the state in all its aberrations must go. We need to radically imagine new ways to relate to each other within communities of our devising — until then, police will always be an abusive presence of control and white privilege, behavior will only be tolerated that works to reinforce the status quo.

I am tired of anarchist thinking that only serves intellectual exercises and academic notions of social discourse and I fear generally white male punk violent angst against private property that serves only the transitory pleasure of the actor while serving to marginalize poor communities and heighten the repression of difference by condoned state terrorists — the cops. I also am tired of isolated individual anarchist practices that serve only the development and liberation of the individual who has access to and time for these pursuits such as veganism, voluntary simplicity and conscious social marginalization.

There is another way

People of color and the anarchist tradition are now set to revitalize that

I came to anarchy through sex and Seattle; and now that I’m here, now that I’ve plundered my way through the ‘classical or canonical’ texts (how ironic that so many fight for these labels as if this provides some authority to these anti-authoritarian texts), I’ve come to fuck it up, to shake it down and push it forward into the multicultural, diverse pedagogically flexible revolutionary philosophy it is. No longer will I be told that real anarchy is not related to struggles for national liberation, not about the praxis of living a life defined by radical honesty and trust, not about coalitions and communication.

For me anarchy must be linked to the individual only in relation to the communal, whether that community is lovers, or family, or children, or employers, or neighbors.

Political Sex

I cannot separate my political growth from my personal growth. Nor will I even try. I knew there must be something out there, something to validate what my partner and I felt but could not articulate — that true commitment, true respect and ìlove’ was not linked to ownership, possession, fear, and distrust. After years of working hard to ‘make it,’ to be successful, good, liberal citizens, we looked around and realized that there must be more than what we have been striving so hard for,. We rejected marriage, but were unable to articulate a philosophical reason yet, we had kids, but refused to become the conservative self-centered parents we saw other new mothers and fathers becoming, we were political in all the condoned ways — liberal democrat, wanting taxes to go to public schools and senior centers.

All wasn’t perfect; we each wanted things, but we wanted to be together, we each had attractions to other s but know it was wrong, we each understood that after working so hard raising three kids, a few years away from out thirties, that we had to change something or choose this path forever. And then came Emma and Andee.

Emma Goldman hit us like a ton of bricks — non-monogamy, freedom to do and love who you want, to choose to be together rather than to have to be together. The essays spoke deeply to our own unspoken philosophy. Andee the woman down the street whom we each were attracted to for various reasons, who seemed like a person

Let me tell you a story:

At 20, I hitchhiked from Las Vegas, New Mexico down the highway to see my father face to face. To try to find some answers. He tells me he fucked up. He should be out there with me, working with me, living life with me. Because, he says, I realized I’m a slave in here. And now I can only fight against other slaves. Out there, when I realized I was a slave, I coulda done something, I coulda fought back at least. Somehow. In here, it’s just fucked up.

My father explained that in jail, pencils are like daggers, you can write and you can stab. ‘Mira, ‘ he points to his arm, ‘here are the pencil tips that I cannot get out.’

This is not a metaphor.

This is a warning.

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