^ illustration above called “Grandmother’s Prayers” by Anna Lee
I remember quinceañera season in El Paso so vividly. The girls of my youth, the girls who helped me roll my r's and wouldn't let me leave childhood with a bad Spanish accent, the girls with impossibly soft hair I used to braid at sleepovers while we watched Disney princesses swept off their feet and transformed into dazzling belles of the ball, the girls with actual godmothers – a concept so foreign to me – these were the girls suddenly becoming princesses all around me. In sharp contrast to the heavy-handed seriousness of the high-pressure, intensely studious preparation I resented for a Bat Mitzvah ceremony I didn't feel ready for at 13, the quinceañera felt like the wistful magic we watched unfold on screen.
The girls, in enormous gowns that consumed a wide circumference of majesty around them, draped with jewelry, hair pinned and sprayed into perfection, would parade through town flanked by their damas and chambelanes – also beautified, also glowing. Like a bride on her wedding day, she was the center of the universe, and you couldn't help but gaze as the pageantry sailed by. No matter how many quinceañeras converged on the same day, they all took my breath away. The Disney-fied indoctrination of our youth served us well: we were seduced by pomp and circumstance, by plays at royalty even if they only lasted 8 hours. It's the build-up that matters anyway, the months and months of dreaming that brief moment into existence.
Did those godmothers shake fairy dust on those goddaughters of my youth, the ones I once knew in their innocence, and bloom them into women overnight? Did they feel like women once they donned a gown so magnificent it can only be worn once, that can only be matched by a wedding gown some day in what felt like the distant future? Did the months of choreographic practice with their chambelán de honor romance the evolution of girl into maiden, with her whole community by her side waiting for her official reveal?
^ Wikipedia’s quinceañera entry provides a quintessential image to bring this to life.
Of course it's easy to project with awe and wonder from the outside, when I know it wasn't always blissful delight, when I know under the surface of all shiny veneers there is humanity and therefore there is struggle. I, like most women reflecting on those moments of our youth, also recoil in disgust as we consider how the patriarchy mutated once deeply held rituals and rites of passage into a reductionistic announcement of a woman's eligibility for wife-making and child-bearing. We are remembering how women’s rites of passage ceremonies can evoke ancienteternal wisdom and we are retrieving that.
But, I also know we were girls of a certain time, with more freedom than our mothers but less than the girls and youth of today, who are smashing the gender binary altogether. I also know we're still swimming in waters poisoned by the patriarchy and sometimes we make the best of it. We seek to belong. Full stop. And to belong sometimes means participating in the culture we hate because it's what we have, while simultaneously aware we need to dismantle it and cultivate and migrate into a healthier one.
Fifteen is an age of possibility. It is a threshold of young adult arrival. It is the year that so much initiation happens. It was the year when my first love took root – in the days when we still had to be dropped off at the movies for our horrifically, deliciously awkward first date, which I forced my cousin to accompany me on because I was so nervous (lol cringe). It was the year of countdown and preparation toward one of my favorite rites of passage: the driver's license. It was a year of profound becoming. The quinceañeras floating through one waltz after another in a gown that has now been admired by the whole world (!) was a cherry on top for my romantic soul, as a girl who once wanted to devote my life to wedding dress design. And though I couldn't have one of my own, I understood it. I felt it. I was so proximal to it, and I had my own pageantry with a mom whose love languages include dress shopping. Hours upon hours were spent in dressing rooms for proms and homecomings and my friends' quinceañeras and bat mitzvahs. And in those moments I was incrementally unfolding and claiming myself. You put on the dress and you shine in your tenderly maturing teenage body, and you see someone slowly releasing childhood, someone no longer playing dress up in her mom's closet but crafting one of her own. I'll pause to acknowledge that I don't mean a dress is what makes me (or anyone) a woman... this was one of many trails of transformation that meant something to me.
^ photo art by Yana Potter
A few days ago, a 14 year old girl named Valentina went shopping with her mother for her quinceañera dress in North Hollywood. In the midst of a raging global pandemic, the pair had arrived to the US just six months ago to reunite with Valentina’s older sister. Valentina was emerging into her becoming, happy, swept up in her own youthful dreams taking seed in new soils, blooming new life. The LA Times reporter says she was “finding herself in her adopted country.” Her father says he wanted to leave this country but she begged him to stay, saying this was the safest country in the world, the land of opportunities. She, like all of us, well-indoctrinated by the cult-ures that promise us so many things, that prey upon our earnest dreams for better, for freedom, that lie and then kill us and then lie about killing us and then make everyone lie to survive the lie.
Last night, I watched the bodycam video. I haven't done that since George Floyd, and instantly I regretted it. I did not have to see it to know it. I felt my stomach revolt against me in anguish. I felt the familiar dizziness of disassociation as my spirit evacuated my body when reminded just how unsafe simply living life is in a deathcult, simply shopping at a Burlington in North Hollywood, simply becoming a woman in the patriarchy. Every death is a tear in the fabric of human existence, a shattering of reality – suddenly a void where once was breathing, heart-pumping life. But early death feels like theft. Especially a death as senseless and horrific as Valentina's, as George Floyd's, as all who are murdered by men who wield too much power behind all that armor and all those guns. To be a cop in this country is to kill yourself and then lose all reverence for life.
I found myself synchronistically aligned with my dear friend Alex, who, just as I was watching the footage on one Instagram account's post, she was passionately responding to ignorant (literally, not judgmentally) comments by people quick to type without actually informing themselves. I messaged her with my heartache. We talked about how cops lead with their fear and rage all the way up on the surface, how they ensue chaos with their absolute recklessness. In the video, the murderous cop is yelled at repeatedly to slow down. Cops are trained like they're going into war zones. Alex reminded me of the paradox of George Floyd's trial: the prosecution had to prove that the murderer was out of line with his training, while the defense had to say his response was standard practice. And in the cruel pageantry of the American judicial system that is just another shrine to white supremacy, we can't actually indict the system. To break that down: the prosecution's win had to legitimize the hyper-aggressive, blood-thirsty, emotionally-disregulated, trauma-inducing/perpetuating training we all know is happening by saying cops are trained adequately, and Derek Chauvin was an anomaly breaking rank. If the defense had won, George Floyd would have been denied righteous accountability, but it's possible the supposed "standard practice training" his defense team was arguing for would be better scrutinized. As we watch another trial soon take shape in LA, we wait to see what contorted manipulations everyone involved will need to perform to somehow shave off a shred of accountability, knowing we are still far from the transformative justice we seek.
I don't want to promote an "us" versus "them" story with my writing. Instead, I want us to find our way back to the village. I think about this tragic event in LA, and I grieve that the clearly unstable, unwell man those cops were called for to begin with wasn't held in community. I grieve that some protector spirit wasn't in the vicinity of his violence with the courage to interfere and wrench the bike lock from his grip and de-escalate the scene until he could get the help he needed. I grieve those cops and the violence eating them alive from the inside out, the anger that overrides their humanity and turns them into carnivorous monsters. I don't deny that the way they live their lives must be a miserable hell for their souls. I grieve the girls and women that try, like all of us, to find some semblance of "normalcy" in this unwell country by shopping with their moms. I grieve the girl that tried to hang her shyness on the hook of a dressing room wall and put on a sensational dress instead. A girl who deserved to be the center of the universe in her infinite unfolding at her precious quinceañera, to arrive to that threshold of 15 and continue her initiation into womanhood.
In moments when my heart is broken, I turn to those that remind me why I'm here, that speak truths so resonant I'm brought back down to Earth to remember it is a revolutionary fire I am - we are - forged within. A fire that will scorch this devastatingly toxic patriarchal reality so that thriving life can flourish. And that world is dependent upon us finding ourselves beyond the machinations of separation where we are all interwoven and interdependent. Valentina depended so profoundly on the wellness of even one stranger who could have transformed that moment that left her dead. In the infinite possibility of how any day can unfold, we are all held in trust with each other, we are all co-creating safety.
Last week, Desmond Tutu also died. One day soon I'll write my love letter to him here, but for now he's present to surface the sacred truth of ubuntu in this moment.
“When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.”
I think about how so many in that scene mirror each other in humanity deprivation. The unwell man with the bike lock, the absence of someone with wise, integrated authority to apprehend the predator, the unwell man with a badge on his chest who entered the arena as a predator himself. It reminds me of James Baldwin's poignant words on replay in my life right now:
“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. And of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster. You could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.”
I grieve the world that does not yet exist: a world built on love. I see glimpses of it. I believe so powerfully in our courage and our ability to organize the world to reflect the universe's own language we know in our souls because it is our collective source. The universe speaks in love, love that knows no separation, no fragmentation. That we are separate is one of the most devastating lies we've been trained to submit to. I am you and you are me, and we hold that choice always in all ways. Am I the cop? The poet? Each of us holds this infinite potential. Each of us holds the power to live through love, to shape a world where love is our primary currency, our primary language, our primary commitment to each other.
^paintings called “Omira” and “Gone to the Green Spring” by Nadia Waheed settle my soul
In love, in care,
Rachel