The Propaganda Hypocrisy of this Past 4th of July in the Land of the Free 2019
 
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless …

---Frederick Douglass (an excerpt from a speech at an Independence Day rally in 1852

The United States of Amnesia seduces its people to embrace forgetting and pimps unfettered consumption disguised as freedom. For all the 4th of July discounts that marked this recent holiday, it’s Frederick Douglas’ quote from a speech some 157 years ago that haunts me, and it rings true to the atrocities currently committed at the Southern border in the name of liberty.

Maybe, you drank the Kool-Aid and decided to barbecue. You might have even bought some weed if you reside in states like California or Colorado, where marijuana, once criminalized, is legal to heighten your freedom of choice and support your stoned denial as "fake news."   

But Douglas' words echoed my sentiments exactly on this past Independence Day, and his questioning of salutes to a “false freedom” are mine because of the raging anti-immigrant hysteria gripping “Lady Liberty” by the throat. This “freedom-loving” nation has migrated deep into the “Dark Side.”

I dare to ask, “What did this past 4th of July mean to immigrant children jailed in cold cages, who were struggling to simply sleep on cement floors with torturous lights kept on inside border concentration camps, which are placed far, far away to hide their bloody tears?”

“What does this blaring propaganda freedom and flag-waving mean to mothers told to quench their thirst with toilet water by inhumane border guards lacking any sense of decency?”

“What does it mean to immigrants hunted down in towns across the country in the land of the free?”

“How do they sleep at night these entrusted border patrol officials doing their duty, or do they crawl into hell holes where their conscience is devoured by heartless devils?”

We are bearing witness to human cruelty at its strategic best to dehumanize immigrants in this “beacon of democracy.” I did not blast any fireworks to toast this obvious hypocrisy that is more myth than reality for people branded as “illegal aliens.”   

I did not lift any wine glasses to cheer lies wrapped in the comfort of blind white nationalism. I find no reason to toast more blood spilled in the name of some grand freedom granted to the privilege few, while children die of dehydration and abandonment in cages, children that look like my nieces and nephews, children the age of my two bilingual boys.   

Instead of rocket’s red blares and bombs bursting in air, I can only offer a clarion call to the United States of Amnesia to remember the words emblazoned on its iconic Statue of Lady Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me …

Does it say in parentheses only the Irish immigrants, the Polish immigrants, the Italian immigrants are to be welcomed? All immigrants have come to these shores under less than favorable circumstances. The Latin American immigrants seeking asylum at the Rio Grande border are yearning to breathe free, but they are brown and black immigrants in a nation whose White House embraces white supremacy. 

Let's dare to remember that a "precondition to doing violence to any group of people is to make them less than human." No human being is illegal!

We will remember these dark times for their blatant cruelty and condoned official terror when the beacon of democracy allowed children to die in cages because of criminal negligence, and let them perish of dehydration while many buried their heads in an empty symbol of stars and stripes.

No flag-waving future 4th of July will protect those of you who remained silent while a cadre of criminals ran amok with democracy because they proclaimed to make “America great again.”

Like Douglas said in 1852, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless …  

José Torres-Tama

The Trauma of Bearing Witness to Brutal Cultural Deportation of My Immigrant People by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in their Tricentennial Anthology

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Excerpt from Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This Deep South sultry port city of New Orleans has been my muse and adopted home since 1984, and three days after Hurricane Katrina exposed the weakness of poorly built and under-funded federal levees that breached in her cross-hairs, I escaped my beloved Babylon by the Bayou on a stolen school bus operated by a Yin Yang duo of heroic buccaneers. 

They were rescuing African American families, and I was on the same bus the iconic composer, singer, and native son, Allen Toussaint, rode out of the social storm that followed the natural tempest.

The Jefferson Parish School Board Bus our good pirates commandeered delivered us to an illuminated and dry Baton Rouge Airport as midnight merged into a new Thursday of September 1, 2005.  We were catapulted into a dream reality with lights and electricity from a world that had become a living nightmare only eighty miles away.  

I had to flee a U.S. city in peril—not via the efforts of “authorized personnel”, or the many invisible “FEMA armies of compassion”, who were AWOL, absent without leave a week after Katrina hit—but via a pirated vehicle operating the kind of rescue mission only imagined in a Hollywood South film version of “Hotel Rwanda”. 

When recalling what happened, it plays out like an improbable contrived screenplay, but we were delivered to the welcoming arms of Andrei and Laura Codrescu. In their petite vehicle, they ushered our traumatized bodies to the safety of their home. They offered us priceless refuge, scrambled eggs, and internet access. 

From there, I wrote my first post-Katrina essay titled Hurricane Katrina and the Chaos of New Orleans in Her Aftermath. This piece was distributed widely and published on various internet sites, and with the support of writer friends such as Ariel Dorfman and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, the piece went international. 

It was the first account by a Latino writer who had survived the storm. I was a real life media-branded "refugee". I had not witnessed the storm on TV, but had actually escaped a city submerged in social chaos and despair. This essay was also distributed widely through the support of the National Performance Network (NPN) and its presenters. 

Shortly thereafter, Leo Garcia, the ED of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA extended an invitation to me, as an artist in exile, and he encouraged me to transform that essay and others that followed into a performance piece called The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina. With an NPN residency grant and Leo's support, I debuted The Cone in November 2005 at Highways in California, two months after my harrowing escape, and it was the first piece staged across the country actually written, performed, and conceived by a storm refugee.

In the thirteen years since, I have dedicated much of my writings to documenting the contributions of my Latin American immigrant people who have been invaluable to the rebirth of New Orleans, and from 2006 to 2011, I contributed radio commentaries to NPR's Latino USA that explored the human rights violations immigrants have been subjected to while rebuilding a once devastated and flooded city. Maria Hinojosa, the award-winning journalist and host of Latino USA, introduced many of these commentaries that aired nationally. 

These writings have been transformed into a total of three performances, two solos and the Taco Truck Theater ensemble show. My life experiences inform my work, and when I returned a month later on October 1, 2005, I was witness to a remarkable and unexpected site: Thousands of Latin American immigrant workers were covering all neighborhoods of the devastated Crescent City—like a locust of reconstruction angels engaged in the epic recovery. 

They were on thousands of rooftops laying down hundreds of miles of plastic blue tarps to cover water damages. They were on every construction site across the city.

Immediately, I began documenting their stories through informal Spanish language conversations on the streets, and trying to understand how they managed to inhabit a city that had been under a state of Martial law—where you couldn't get in or out.

They were smuggled in on purpose to assist with the massive rebuilding efforts, and because of the undocumented status of most, they became victims of wage theft at the hands of ruthless contractors. They suffered random police brutality; deplorable working and housing conditions; and human rights violations at the hands of abusive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents.

Communicating in Spanish, I developed trust and relationships with this imported Latin American labor force, and began filming interviews. Later, I photographed the public protests reconstruction workers staged with the Congress of Day Laborers / El Congreso de Jornaleros—especially every May 1 for International Workers’ Day.

Congreso activists have exposed a myriad of human rights abuses and health risks reconstruction workers have been subjected to in the toxic waters of the flooded city. They have exposed the disappearances of immigrants in local jails while others are held indefinitely to profit a city that thrives on the incarceration of Black and Brown people as one its big businesses.

In 2018 the city celebrated its Tricentennial of European existence since a slave-owning-Choctaw-Native People-killing French Colonizer arrived to “discover” an area that was already populated by numerous indigenous tribes that included the Atakapa, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Caddo, Houma, Natchez, and Tunica people.

All of whom the celebrated Bienville began killing, and spilling their blood into the Mississippi River. Unabashedly and unashamed city elders continue to frame near genocide and extermination of our Native People as European discovery.

Bienvenidos / welcome to the slave-port Catholic city often called the Big Easy, but generally know as New Orleans. Let's dare to remember that New Orleans has a brutal history as a major slave port that its French "discoverer" supported, as did the Spanish, and the profitable U.S. Slave Trade. 

The commerce that made New Orleans the wealthiest city in the Union by 1850 was an abhorrent but profitable flesh-selling business of African people. Before the black liquid gold of oil, before the celebrated tourism industry, and before the expansive commerce of private prisons in a Louisiana state that incarcerates more people than the entire country of China, the port city spawned a brutal business trading human flesh for profit and personal possession to build the U.S. Empire for two hundred years through the Mississippi’s once pristine waterways.

This is the most difficult truth that will not be told to the tourists who come for many of the cities big festivities such as the upcoming 2019 Mardi Gras and Jazz Festival. Exposing such a bloody legacy may not be the best for business, and like the rest of the United States of Amnesia, New Orleans peddles in forgetting its tortured history.    
 
That disturbing legacy continues to haunt her in most aspects of public accountability and local governmental responsibility to the descendants of enslaved Africans who built the empire and the wealth of this once highly renowned slave port city.   

For six months a year, New Orleans contends with what I perceive to be the karmic vengeance of hurricanes originating their threats in the African continental shores from where slave ships once departed centuries before with human cargo. Perhaps, these storms are amassed screams of enchained Africans incarnate as water Furies from one century to another, furious water balls of human horror from the Middle Passage, and punishment for the port city’s participation in most mortal of sins—enslavement of other sentient beings.    

Not surprising, the most neglected story of the city’s 2018 Tricentennial is the immense contributions Latin American immigrants have made to our epic reconstruction in the thirteen years since Hurricane Katrina. City elders have disappeared an immigrant community that has contributed their sweat, labor, and love to our reconstruction. 

This should not be surprising in a city with a history of slave labor that engages in the disappearance of that legacy on its tourist brochures. I have engaged in a variety of cultural acts of resistance to challenge this plantation narrative because our heroic immigrant people have resurrected New Orleans from its post-Katrina deathbed, and the city owes its rebirth to our Latin American community.

How does the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and its Executive Editor Dr. Nancy Dixon (PhD) repay such contributions in their official Tricentennial anthology titled New Orleans & the World? 

With Executive Publisher, Bryan Boyles, now the ED of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the LEH publication celebrates our contribution by brutally deporting our immigrant community from their version of history—as if we barely existed.

We have been disappeared in their high-end anthology.

When I personally called Dr. Dixon back in late February after Mardi Gras 2018, believing her to be an ally, and inquired about this egregious omission of our immigrant people in a book she had the editorial powers to decide who would be included, she responded, “the book was rushed,”

We opened our conversation with Spanish niceties because Dr, Dixon is fluent in Spanish, and I wanted to hear from her directly why this act of a brutal disappearance had occurred.

I responded, “So, Nancy, we were rushed out of this history book!” 

Frankly, I would like to see Dr. Dixon rushed out of her job as a scholar and teacher at Dillard University because her act of brutal deportation of our immigrant people is simply unacceptable, unforgivable, and exemplary of white privilege to decide who shall be forgotten.

We have been rendered invisible in the LEH’s version of this city’s three hundred-year chronicle, and Dr. Dixon and Mr. Bryan Boyles are two of the main culprits of this cultural atrocity and disappearance.

During an era of raging anti-immigrant hysteria, it is disgraceful when an organization with humanities in their moniker becomes a gatekeeper—deciding who shall be remembered and who shall be forgotten—and practically exterminates us into non-existence.

I reference Dr. King’s quote at the beginning of this essay because I am sure that Dr. Dixon, Mr. Boyles, and the LEH staff consider themselves the “good people”, and their silence since I’ve been holding them accountable is as brutal as their act of deportation in an anthology that has been celebrated to no end locally by the press.

The current administration jails immigrant children in cages and their mothers are flown to detention centers hundreds of miles away, and our immigrant people have become invisible in this tourist industry-driven whitewashing of history.

The people of New Orleans know that thousands of Latin American immigrants have contributed to our rebirth and reconstruction, and they face brutal real life-threatening deportations as they try to remain in a city they have helped to rebuild post-Hurricane Katrina.

To add insult to their tenuous status, our immigrant people have been brutally deported from current history by an organization that is serving as a cultural gatekeeper, and dares to call itself the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Their act of deporting an immigrant community that has given of their sweat, labor and love to our rebirth is simply inhumane.

They need to re-brand themselves as the Louisiana Endowment for the Inhumanities.

Latin Americans have all dealt with U.S. supported dictatorships that have disappeared our people in Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the list goes on!

It's disgraceful, unacceptable, and beyond shameful for the LEH and its editors to publish an anthology that has been distributed throughout libraries across the country, and 100 years from now, their historical deportation of our immigrant people will live as the alternative facts and lies of our post-Katrina history.

Yes, there is one page titled Little Honduras on page 33 of the LEH'S anthology in 207 pages and two other sentences that mention that Latin American workers as helping the rebuilding post-Katrina.

From a recent Facebook post Dr. Dixon immediately disappeared, she boasted that one page of inclusion, and noted that I was looking to malign her.

It never ceases to amaze me how white privilege refuses to ignore the reality they drive and how unaccountable they deem themselves to be—especially so-called white liberals who construct borders around themselves as untouchables for their sins against us.

This is not a matter of maligning for some benign oversight, as one writer put it who is included in the book, this is a historical crime against our people. Like all crimes, consequences are inevitable—especially when such an editor is being celebrated to no end because of this book by a local press core that appears to be clueless to our disappearance.

It has been hard living in the Big Easy for the immigrant community here, who struggle to remain in a city they have helped to rebuild with brutal deportations traumatizing families, and the LEH and its editor of this anthology have perpetrated and even more traumatizing act of disappearing us from history for the next 300 years.

I have been deeply committed to telling our immigrant people’s story for the past thirteen years of our post-Katrina rebirth and renaissance, and New Orleans has been my adopted since my arrival in 1984.

I will continue to scream loudly and hold the LEH accountable for their sins against our people, and for their brutal disappearance that makes them accomplices to the anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States of Amnesia, which seduces its citizenry to embrace forgetting.

As a socially conscious visual and performance artist, arts educator, published poet, and journalist, I am here to remember that our immigrant community rebuilt New Orleans, and I will speak truth to perverse abuse of power to my last breath in this lifetime and the next!

Ashé y Adelante y Si Se Puede!

The Bearer of Difficult Truths: Because I Dare to Remember Against a Culture of Amnesia

My memory will retain what is worthwhile. My memory knows more about me than I do; it doesn’t lose what deserves to be saved. ---Eduardo Galeano 

I believe in remembering a people’s truth. 

I believe that writers and artists can be instrumental in creating work that serves as the conscience of our times.  I believe in chronicling the personal experience to counter the “official accounts” that inevitably cultivate historical lies to silence and control, and render some people invisible, los invisibles, by disappearing them through the controlled mainstream media tentacles of misinformation.

In the Latin American tradition, I believe the poet, writer, and artist has a social responsibility, a mythic duty, to document and articulate the people’s struggle, la lucha de la gente, when they are denied effective means to have their voices heard in their fight against oppression and their many oppressors.

Since the storm, I have been reminding the citizenry of New Orleans and informing folks nationally and internationally that the post-Hurricane Katrina Big Easy, the romantic birthplace of Jazz, was rebuilt by thousands of hard working Latino immigrant workers, and most were cheated of their promised pay by ruthless local and national contractors.

They were brutalized by local police officers; languished in New Orleans Police Dept. jails without due legal process; subjected to the most abhorrent working and living conditions imaginable; some became indentured servants within hotels in the French Quarter; others were conveniently deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents after they finished many a construction job.

In June of 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its research data that up to 80% of Latino laborers who aided the reconstruction of New Orleans were victims of wage theft, and the “undocumented” status of many was exploited in a city that has a long legacy of labor exploitation.

Immigrant men and women gave of their sweat, blood, and some of their lives to rebuild an ungrateful city that abused their labor—as easily and effectively as it exploited enslaved Africans when “cotton was king.”

It should come as no surprise.

My brown people, my Mestizo brothers and sisters, who are descendants of a mythic and painful oppression exacted from one century to another by the cross and sword of Spanish Colonizers, other European plunderers, and the unfettered capitalism the U.S exports, became, and still are, the new people of color to exploit to no end in this post-hurricane reconstruction epoch.

Brown became the new black in the dirty South, a soil soaked with the blood of the systematic oppression of the “colored others.”  Today, in New Orleans and in many parts of the South, many African Americans still struggle to gain a very elusive state of equality in the same terrain they raised with their arduous labor from one generation to another, and I write this introduction in the wake of a series by the Times-Picayune New Orleans daily which exposes the state of Louisiana as the biggest incarcerating machine of people in the United States, with rates of imprisonment that overshadow China. It is astounding, and most behind bars are disproportionately African American.

The jailed people of color now include many incarcerated immigrants as well because making more prisons has become a huge industry in the world’s prison capital, and immigrants have been easily snared as new occupants for the big business of jails and their jailers.

Fear of incarceration has been a big factor in keeping the immigrant labor force under control for a perfect storm of labor abuse.  Since most immigrants could not speak English and were fearful of reprisals by their bosses if they complained about being cheated and their inhumane housing conditions, they were the ideal workforce to brutalize in this Deep South port city that has built its wealth on slave labor—just like its fatherland.

The vicious cycle continues: Welcome to the new “Slave Labor Fiesta” of Twenty-first century USA.

*****

This is an excerpt of the introduction for the creative non-fiction book I have been working on titled Hard Living in the Big Easy: Latino Immigrants and the Post-Katrina Reconstruction of New Orleans.  The sardonic title is from a seminal piece that was recorded as a radio commentary for National Public Radio’s Latino USA, a weekly news journal.  The renowned Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa introduced the commentary, and the piece aired nationally for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2006.   

It was one of the first radio commentaries that explored the labor abuse many immigrant workers were experiencing as they toiled in the rebuilding efforts.  This book is dedicated to the thousands of Latino immigrants who gave of their blood, sweat, and some of their lives to rebuild the flooded pueblo of New Orleans after the epic devastation caused by the failure of the federal levee system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a storm that was a Pandora of water and winds that revealed a country mired in lies and the incompetence of the Bush regime.  "Dubya" and his criminal cronies abandoned the people and city of New Orleans at its most desperate hour, and this should not be forgotten.

“The city that care forgot” has never officially cared to thank the immigrants in any way, but I remember what they have contributed.  They, the invisible, los invisibles, are a big part of the reason why the pace of the recovery has been so strong after such unimaginable wreckage the Big Easy was post-Katrina.

I remember them.  I have not forgotten.  I honor their memory.

It is the dirtiest little secret of the reconstruction of New Orleans.  

It remains the untold and most neglected story of the Big Easy recovery, but as an immigrant myself, it is my duty to speak the unspoken and chronicle the many challenges my immigrant brothers and sisters have faced in rebuilding this historic port city.  Many fight to remain, but many are courageous enough to stand up and fight for their human rights!  ADELANTE!

 

Make art that matters!

José Torres-Tama

ArteFuturo Productions

1329 Saint Roch Avenue

New Orleans, LA 70117

www.torrestama.com

504.232.2968

The Media Silence about LA Dodging Anti-Immigrant Laws & The Cone at Shadowbox

Amigos and virtual community:

Today, July 29, 2011, marks the first year anniversary of Arizona's infamous SB 1070 officially becoming a law, and since, it has spawned other states to follow. The new confederacy of Southern states signing harsh anti-immigrant laws has grown considerably this summer, and Tennessee is expected to join South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia with similar Arizona copy-cat laws that demonize Latino immigrants. In Louisiana, the great news is that two such laws, not one but two, were actually voluntarily withdrawn by their respective legislators. A highly effective grass roots campaign and coalition to oppose the passing of these bills was formed by local organizations such as the Congress of Day Laborers, PUENTES New Orleans, Catholic Charities, and the Jesuit Social Research Institute of Loyola University.

Representative Ernest Wooton, an Independent from the Belle Chase area, was forced to voluntarily withdraw his bill called The Louisiana Citizen’s Protection Act or H.B. 411 in a legislative session on June 6 in Baton Rouge. Wooton made a show of continuously identifying "illegal aliens" with exaggerated emphasis on the word "illegal". Had it passed, his bill empowered local and state police to detain anyone they suspected of being undocumented. The $11 million fiscal expense to implement his bill was not received favorably by Louisiana legislators already grappling with a $1.6 billion budget deficit. However, even the state's conservative lawmakers did not exhibit a bloodlust to criminalize Latino immigrants who have been vital to the recovery of this Gulf State post-Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and post-BP oil spill. I filmed three legislatives sessions in Baton Rouge, and while I am no fan of this state's red conservative tendencies, I have to confess that Wooton's colleagues did not exhibit his outrageous passion in trying to pass his odious bill.

In May, Representative Joe Harrison, a Republican from Houma, was forced to table his bill H.B. 59, and in the Judiciary committee I filmed, he encountered strong opposition to his anti-immigrant law by Representative Joey Bishop, Democrat from New Orleans, and Representative Walker Hines, a New Orleans Republican who in late 2010 switched ranks from his previous Democratic affiliations. Both were critical and unsupportive of a bill that criminalized Latino immigrants who had helped to reconstruct the devastated city after the flood. It was grand political theater indeed, as befitting the inherent drama of Louisiana politics, but the biggest headline that this Gulf State has resisted drafting a despicable anti-immigrant law is nowhere to be found in local, statewide, or national media news. This great good news story has been flying below the media radar, and outside of a short Associated Press article that followed the initial deferment of HB 411 in mid June, there has been nothing. Simplemente nada!

The New Orleans Times-Picayune daily hardly mentioned it and public radio stations have been silent as well. One would think that this would be great news to profile for the local and statewide Latino community and for the national community in general. Unlike its neighboring states of Alabama and Georgia, Louisiana has not joined in passing another Juan Crow law.

For those of you who may not know, the 2011 summer marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, a heroic coalition of racially integrated black and white students who risked their lives riding on Greyhound and Trailways buses into the segregated Deep South. In Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, they encountered terrorist-like attacks by Ku Klux Klan members, local and state police, and white residents opposed to their commitment to desegregate public facilities, restaurants, and buses. The Freedom Riders challenged the racist Jim Crow laws that kept the South in an officially condoned state of apartheid. Fifty years later, this hatred has been reborn in Juan Crow laws that openly demonize a new race of color. Fear in the Deep South is rearing its ugly face again. We must not relent in defeating this new cancer! Adelante MI Gente!

WHEN AN IMMIGRANT DIES IN NEW ORLEANS…
Also, on July 29, 2010, the Congress of Day Laborers held a vigil and protest that took place in New Orleans. Latino immigrant activists and their allies took to the streets to protest the mysterious death of José Nelson Reyes-Zelaya, a twenty-eight year old El Salvadorean immigrant. He died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after 24 hours of being in their detention facility. Members of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice filed a Freedom of Information Act petition that was handed to ICE agents in front of their offices on Poydras Street (across from City Hall). To this day, the NOWCRJ and the Congress of Day Laborers have not received any further information. Shortly after his death on July 17, 2010, ICE authorities released a statement that the death of Mr. Reyes-Zelaya was a result of "apparent asphyxiation" from suicide. He was the eighth immigrant to die in ICE custody by July 2010, and customarily, ICE classifies these deaths as "suicides".

Sadly but not surprising, there was hardly any news coverage in the local media or public radio station about this tragedy, and it exemplifies how little immigrant lives matter in New Orleans, a city that has been rebuilt by thousands of Latino immigrants after the storm. Currently, Latino immigrants are fighting for the right to remain in a city that they have reconstructed, but they live in a parallel universe where their suffering goes unnoticed.

THE CONE OF UNCERTAINTY: New Orleans after Katrina
We rarely hear enough about the Latino connection to New Orleans, and in the many post-Katrina narratives, our stories of trauma and displacement were practically non-existent in the mainstream media. Even in the more thorough National Public Radio coverage, Latinos and the large Vietnamese community were missing in action. Fortunately, NPR's Latino USA did cover our stories, and I did an interview with them days after I escaped the flooded city on a stolen school bus, which was rescuing African American families. I was on the same bus that the iconic composer and musician Allen Toussaint was riding out of the social storm, and I intuited that if Mr. Toussaint was getting on that bus I needed to hop on as well.

Also, the rebuilding of the city owes much to the Latino immigrant work force that was brought in by the thousands, and they cleaned out the Superdome and the Convention Center, salvaged the city's many hotels to reignited the tourism engines, and repaired churches, hospitals, schools, and many homes. As an immigrant myself, it is my rightful duty to tell this untold story of the Katrina experience.

The Cone of Uncertainty is my multimedia show that chronicles my escape, and it's informed by the dramatic film footage captured by Afro Cuban filmmaker Williams Sabourin O'Reilly, who began filming at five in the morning on Monday morning as the storm was still passing through. For the 6th Anniversary, The Cone will be remounted in full for the first time since it was shown in New Orleans in March 2006 for three shows only at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, as a work-in-progress when the city was still fragile. The Cone will be presented at the latest alternative theater venue in the Big Easy called the Shadowbox Theatre, which is located on Saint Claude Avenue. It runs Thursdays through Sundays from August 25 - September 11. The exact dates and more details are below.

Make art that matters!

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

ArteFuturo Productions Presents
The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina
José Torres-Tama’s Critically Acclaimed Post-storm Multimedia Solo

WHERE: Shadowbox Theatre @ 2400 Saint Claude Ave. (in the Marigny)
For tickets call 504-298-8676 or go to www.theshadowboxtheatre.com.

WHEN: Thursdays - Sundays, August 25-28, Sept. 1-4 & Sept. 8-11, 2011
All shows @ 8PM - $10 at the door & 2 for $16 (All Students $8)

"Cone pulls no punches in describing ‘the apocalyptic abandonment’ of New Orleans’ people." ---American Theatre

"But like the best performance artists, Torres-Tama seduces his audience through humor and the ability to play disparate characters." ---Theater Journal

ABOUT THE CONE: José Torres-Tama was a firsthand witness to the apocalyptic abandonment of a city whose people were made to beg for water and buses before television cameras. He offers a politically provocative and moving work that sheds light on the Latino immigrant experience of post-Katrina narratives, where Latinos were rendered invisible in all the mainstream media coverage. Performed with a magical realist Latino voodoo aesthetic, The Cone is an inventive fusion of personal stories, exaggerated characters, and dramatic film footage of the storm. Torres-Tama plays five distinct characters and invokes the spirit of a nearly three hundred year-old city that has engaged in an arduous reconstruction process.

SHOW’S HISTORY: The Cone of Uncertainty debuted at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles in November 2005 with support funds from the National Performance Network www.npnwqeb.org. The Cone script was further developed through a ‘05/’06 Fellowship award from National Association of Arts and Culture www.nalac.org, as part of a Ford Foundation initiative to support Latino artists. The Cone has toured extensively across the country with performances at LSU, Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Maryland, and numerous art centers. In January 2011, it was staged at the prestigious National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque.

In May 2009, The Cone made its European debut in the United Kingdom with performances at Roehampton University in London, the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, and the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales, as part of an international tour that was profiled in American Theatre magazine’s March 2009 issue.
http://www.torrestama.com/cone/index.html

RE: Anti-Immigrant Hysteria Overshadows 4th of July Freedom Celebrations

Amigos and virtual community:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless …

--Frederick Douglass
(an excerpt from a speech at an Independence Day rally in 1852)

I have come across this Frederic Douglas quote a number of times before, and with another Independence Day passing over us, let’s address the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom while anti-immigrant hysteria is sweeping the country. For those of you who may not be counting, Utah (March 15), Indiana (May 10), Georgia (May 13), Alabama (June 9), and South Carolina (June 27) are the most recent states that have joined Arizona in passing harsh legislation that demonizes Latino immigrants.

In the name of liberty, these edicts usher in a new Juan Crow era. Like Arizona’s SB 1070, they employ flawed and broad language that makes all Latinos subject to detention if we look undocumented enough. As an Ecuadorian immigrant with a permanent suntan, the Fourth of July has always been a difficult holiday for me to fully embrace, as difficult as other U.S. holidays with historical baggage like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.

One celebrates a so-called “discoverer” who mistakenly named the indigenous people of the Americas “Indians” because he thought he had landed in the Indian subcontinent of his original destination, and the other celebrates the beginning of genocidal practices to remove the American Natives from their land. For the uninformed, any questioning of the harsh historical realities that these holidays mask usually renders the inquirer unpatriotic.

That would be me, and when I bring up the inherent flaws of a holiday of gratitude for the slaughtering of American Natives celebrated by slaughtering millions of turkeys across the land, you can imagine that I may not be the most welcomed guest to this big eating party. In addition, I have been a vegetarian for more than thirty years. I do eat fish on rare occasions, but in general, the kill turkey day of thanks is a tough one for me on many levels.

However, I am inspired to question because I like to believe that questioning governmental injustices is the most patriotic exercise afforded by our constitutional rights. But myths that have been ingrained as truths are hard to crack in a country that readily sweeps its disturbing legacies under a carpet embroidered with popular and grand beliefs that portray its pursuits as the most noble. The political proclamations that we are the cradle of freedom in the modern world will be even more difficult for me to stomach this 4th of July in the wake of the many states, especially in the South, that have recently passed anti-immigrant laws.

South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley is the latest Southern governor to enlist her state in the new anti-immigrant confederacy. Ironically enough, she is the U.S. born daughter of Indian immigrants, as in the India Columbus was looking for, and she rode a wave of Tea Party endorsements to the Governor's Mansion. Speaking at her signing of bill S 20, Republican Senator Grooms, a supportive colleague, identified the targets of this law with the usual hateful rhetoric Conservatives spew to demonize Latino immigrants. “They cling together in illegal communities and bring with them drugs, prostitution, violent crime and gang activity.”

If only the Statue of Liberty in far away New York Harbor could have heard him, and shouted back her compassionate and honorable petition, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” If only Lady Liberty could chime in on the immigration issue, maybe, she would point out that the persecuted immigrants of today are the “huddled masses” the poem below her colossal feet aspires to embrace.

Instead, my stomach turned while watching the YouTube press clip of a woman of color joining good ole boys in directing hatred towards my immigrant brothers and sisters. It’s so brilliantly insidious when Republicans conscript people of color to push their xenophobic agendas. We have seen this before and the GOP’s revered Ronald Reagan, who left us the first Trillion-dollar deficit, knew the valuable political trend he was initiating with the appointment of uncle Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

These are strange times, and like myself, I don’t imagine other Latino immigrants too eager to wave those ubiquitous U.S. flags made in China on the 4th. One hundred and fifty plus years ago Mr. Douglas pointed out the contradictions of Independence Day celebrations for enslaved black Americans in the South. Today, immigrants know too well that they live in a parallel universe where freedom remains an abstract ideology far from their reality of being proclaimed enemies of the state.

These laws implicate all immigrants, especially foreign-born brown people or people that can be perceived as foreigners because they speak with an accent. They exemplify a divisive surge of xenophobia that is not uncommon in times of great economical despair. We have seen this before, and it is a painful truth of the many paradoxes in the so-called land of the free.

Make art that matters.

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

Juan Crow Laws Flying in the Southern Breeze

Amigos and virtual community:

In mid June, Louisiana recently dodged a grave anti-immigrant law that was deferred by a local legislator, and the statewide Latino community and the many immigrant families and workers who have been invaluable to the reconstruction efforts of New Orleans can sigh in relief. However, the real story is that this major news item has been flying below the local media radar. It has been barely covered in print and web media, and news radio stations have added to the silence of a tremendous victory for Latinos, especially since neighboring Alabama and Georgia have passed dramatic anti-immigrant bills that inspire racial profiling and make school teachers accountable for reporting foreign-born children, as in Latino boys and girls, to the authorities to verify their legality.

The Alabama and Georgia laws are disgraceful, and the media silence is just as shameful. Human justice for immigrants is the Civil Rights issue of our times. Below is my full essay.

--El JTT

Juan Crow Laws Flying in the Southern Breeze

Across the nation and here in New Orleans, cultural celebrations have been staged to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, but in the wake of this legendary Civil Rights event that challenged segregation and institutionalized prejudices in the South, states like Alabama and Georgia have recently passed harsh anti-immigrant bills. Both laws empower state and local police to decide who can be considered “illegal or undocumented” and detain the suspects until they prove their legal status.

They open a racial profiling door that will undoubtedly lead to stopping people with a permanent suntan, brown looking Latinos and/or even light-skinned African Americans, who could be mistaken for Hispanic. As if we need more incentives given to police in Dixie who readily suspect anyone outside their Caucasian color line? It’s hard to imagine a blue-eyed Auburn quarterback or his Georgia State sandy-haired counterpart, both with their respective jerseys, arousing the suspicion of their local sheriffs.

It looks like a new millennium version of Jim Crow. These Juan Crow rulings tragically welcome another era of fear for the colored other, and while the illegal moniker is used like a new word for terrorist, it is all part of a strategic sideshow to direct the anger of millions of rural and small southern-town folks, many of whom are unemployed, towards another race that can be collectively criminalized.

In both Alabama and Georgia, Republican legislators have pushed anti-immigrant laws with the support of a predominantly white electorate being manipulated to hate immigrants today the same way two generations ago their fathers and grandfathers were taught to hate their black neighbors, who were supposedly taking their jobs back then. The more things change the more they remain the same, and even the infamous KKK is channeling their vitriol towards a growing population of Latino immigrants in the South—not just the undocumented.

In this Gulf State, Representative Ernest Wooton, Independent from the Belle Chase area, voluntarily withdrew his bill called The Louisiana Citizen’s Protection Act or H.B. 411. It proposed to make a criminal of anyone who transported an illegal alien to a hospital or church if the person knowingly knew the foreigner’s status was questionable. H.B. 411 passed the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee in late May, but in early June, its $11 million fiscal expense to implement precluded its passage in the House Appropriations chamber.

Louisiana has a $1.6 billion budget deficit, and any regulation carrying an additional financial burden had little chance of surviving a legislature grappling with dramatic cutbacks. The withdrawal of Wooton’s bill comes on the heels of a similarly deferred anti-immigrant bill called H.B. 59 by Representative Joe Harrison, Republican from Houma, Louisiana. Harrison was forced to withdraw his bill in May after New Orleans activists from the Congress of Day Laborers and PUENTES along with allies from Catholic Charities and the Jesuit Social Research Institute of Loyola University mounted a successful campaign against it.

The great news is that Louisiana has resisted the new confederacy of Southern states implementing laws that generally vilify all Latinos because of their inherent flaws in using broad language to detain anyone who may “look undocumented”.

I am a brown man, often mistaken for Creole here in New Orleans, and under such laws, a policeman can randomly decide that I look like an illegal alien. Wooton’s law would give the police the power to detain me, and if I did not have my U.S. passport to prove my legality, I could be jailed.

In an interview, I asked Mr. Wooton about this measure, but he emphatically replied that his bill was not a racial profiling initiative. For now, I am relieved that I do not have to contend with this scenario, but when I go on vacation and cross Alabama and Georgia on my way to the Florida beaches, I will have to bring my passport with me just in case.

My cafe con leche complexion generally inspires reasonable suspicion from most white officers in good ole Dixie. However, we may just need to stage a wave of immigrant freedom riders in Greyhound buses to converge en masse in Alabama and Georgia to challenge these Juan Crow laws against our people.

Make art that matters.

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

ALIENS ARE COMING Lecture at TULANE University's Freeman Auditorium 7PM - FREE

After a national four-city tour of the ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS performance piece, I am back in New Orleans to present a multimedia lecture called ALIENS ARE COMING: Fears of a Brown Invasion & the Vilification of Latino Immigrants in the USA. This lecture is the accompanying program to the ALIENS performance piece, and it is informed by the research I have conducted over the past three years on the rise in hate crimes against Latino immigrants.

ALIENS ARE COMING TULANE, FRIDAY, MAY 13 Freeman Auditorium:
Latino immigrants in the United States are no longer living la vida loca of Ricky Martin’s 1990s popular anthem, and I find myself longing for those days when we were supposedly ushering in a new Latino boom. ALIENS ARE COMING explores the widespread hysteria, driven by political zealots, concerning “illegal aliens”. Right-wing conservatives and Tea Party Candidates (is there a difference?) have divisively stoked the fires of xenophobia to a mad frenzy, and they have inspired hideous hate crimes against Latinos—whether they are rightful citizens, legal residents, or undocumented workers.

They have employed fear mongering against Latinos across the United States, and the word “immigrant” itself has become synonymous with criminals and terrorists. In ALIENS ARE COMING, I comment on the current vilification of Latino immigrants as a strategic cultural practice not uncommon to a country that has engaged in the accepted genocide of American Natives, the enslavement of Africans, the demonization of Muslim culture, and the imprisonment of more than one-tenth of its current population while proudly calling itself the capital of the free world.

This is a heady and humorous performance analysis of a brief history of abuse of power in the U.S.A., and I will open the program with an excerpt from the ALIENS performance piece. In addition, I will present a collage of the best hits of "illegal aliens" 2010 campaign ads produced by the pushers of fear. You know who they are.

ALIENS ARE COMING will be presented at the Tulane University Freeman Auditorium inside the Woldenberg Art Center (Drill Road and Newcomb Circle) on Friday, May 13 at 7pm.

http://www.tulane.edu/~newcomb/lectures.html

The lecture is FREE and open to the public. The program will serve as the opening event for a photography exhibition called The History of the Future/La Historia del Futuro at the Newcomb Gallery, which brings together the photographic collaborations of Michael Berman and Julian Cardona. Their fine art images document the people and the landscape of the U.S./Mexico border region. www.newcombartgallery.tulane.edu

My lecture presentation at TULANE has been made possible with support from Tulane University’s Interdisciplinary Committee for Art and Visual Culture (ICAVC), Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

CONGRESS OF DAY LABORERS MAY FIRST MARCH:
Also, I will explore the contributions of Latino immigrants to the reconstruction of post-Katrina New Orleans. This glaring fact of the reconstruction remains conspicuously absent from most of the mainstream post-Katrina media narratives. This August, it will be six years since the reconstruction, and the remaining Latino immigrant workers and their families, who have reconstructed this city with their sweat and blood, are a persecuted people. They are being targeted and deported in greater numbers. Their labor has been exploited by an ungrateful city, and it is becoming harder for many to live in the Big Easy,

“The city that care forgot” has never officially cared to acknowledge the contributions made by the thousands of Latino immigrants who have been invaluable to our recovery. It is the greatest untold story of the post-Katrina rebuilding, and I continuously repeat it because it is one of the most egregious omissions of our recent history. Official governmental and cultural institutions remain suspiciously silent about the abuses many immigrants have suffered during the reconstruction. Thousands of private businesses and local homeowners, the many galleries/museums and cultural arts organizations, and the general public have all benefited from their arduous labor.

Some day soon, it will be recognized for what is: one of the greatest perpetrations of extensive labor abuse in the history of this country, which has an insatiable appetite for labor exploitation. As much as it breaks my heart, the exploitation of labor should come as no surprise in the port City of New Orleans, which was once built by the slave labor of an African people. Since the storm, the new slaves of color have been the brown Mestizo Latino immigrants, and they transformed "chocolate city" into an enchilada village, rebuilding a destroyed metropolis that would not be where it is today without their labor.

Latino immigrant workers were responsible for bringing the Big Easy back from the dead with a committed work ethic of epic proportions. Like a locusts of reconstruction angels, they descended upon the fragile pueblo, and restored the engines of the viable tourist industry by salvaging the many flooded hotels before they were condemned. They put up roof after roof on house after house that allowed residents to return home. They refurbished the now majestic Superdome, and it has become the most iconic symbol of our progress with the New Orleans Saints football team reigning as the 2010 Super Bowl Champions.

In last year's epic BP oil spill disaster, it was Latino laborers who did the heavy cleaning on the soiled Louisiana shoreline. This entire Gulf Coast state and its people have benefited tremendously from the Latino immigrant labor force, yet they are now fighting to remain. The RIGHT TO REMAIN was the prevailing theme of the recent May 1 demonstration by el Congreso de Jornaleros/The Congress of Day Laborers. They took to the streets of downtown New Orleans to proclaim their human rights and ended their march at City Hall. The series of new images here are from that march.

Make art that matters,

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

Fear Mongering of Immigrants Is Alive and Well in Louisiana

Go to LATINO USA'S site at
http://www.latinousa.org/932-2/
to hear the full program and an edited version of this commentary
that began airing across the country on Friday, February 11, 2011.

In the weeks following the Arizona shooting of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, we heard from both parties about a need for civility in framing political discourse and differences. The hate mongering rhetoric employed by most Republican Tea Party candidates in the 2010 elections was loaded with vitriol, and we kept hearing a cry to “take the country back”. Coming from mostly white conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, I find this phrase disturbing, especially with a multiracial president in the White House whose detractors only see a black man in the highest office.

Rarely is Obama referred to as the multiracial executive chief that he is, and the media plays along with this racially limited depiction of a hybrid president. Unfortunately, this divisive omission echoes one of the biggest fears still lingering in this country, which is the fear of the races mixing. Obama is the scariest representation of this great white fear nestled in the crevices of the old patriarchy, and its so-called Grand Old Party is bearing witness to the overall complexion of the general population change across the country.

We Latinos are becoming a greater factor, and the permanent suntan of most of our people is changing the color spectrum dramatically. Brown is the new black, and it frightens the old guard to the core of their wavering stranglehold on power. As such, its insidiously strategic politicians stoke the fires of xenophobia within its similarly scared base of supporters to take us back to the good ole’ days when their power and abuses of it went unquestioned.

How far back do these folks want to go? Perhaps, they long for the nostalgic 1950s when lynchings of African Americans was a ubiquitous sport in the South, keeping colored folk in a constant state of terror. Latinos and Asians were similarly marginalized, and Texas Rangers had lynching parties of their own with brown Mexican bodies as the strange fruits rotting in the brutal Southwest sun. Across the great land of the free, people of color were not afforded the freedoms exercised by their white counterparts, and we lacked a political voice to challenge the blatant institutionalized racism of those dark times.

In his 2010 re-election campaign, Louisiana’s Republican Senator David Vitter succeeded in taking us back a few decades. His “illegal aliens” attack ad had brown men crossing a ripped up border fence and receiving hefty welfare checks at the expense of white taxpayers. This was pure fabrication because undocumented workers are not eligible to receive such benefits. Just as disturbing was the endorsement Vitter received from the Times-Picayune. The local newspaper recommended voting for a candidate who first painted himself as “Mr. Family Values”, and was caught with his hypocritical pants down in 2007, linked to the notorious DC Madame’s prostitution ring.

That outing prompted a New Orleans Madame who proclaimed Mr. Vitter was a constant client of the Canal Street brothel she ran in 2002. When his opponents brought up the prostitution infidelities, the Senator’s response was that “his God” and the good people of Louisiana had forgiven him. In New Orleans, Latino organizations such as PUENTES and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce had no forgiveness for Vitter’s offensive ad, which criminalized all Latinos with Hispanic looking actors arriving in droves to cheat the state. With the support of prominent leaders from the African American and Vietnamese communities, they organized to have the thirty-second race baiting promo off the air.

It equaled Sharon Angle’s commercial, which pushed fear of “illegals” into the hearts of white Nevada voters, but that state’s Latino electorate flexed its massive muscle, defeating the Tea Party candidate’s gubernatorial ambitions. In Louisiana, Vitter’s hate and fear campaign yielded victorious results. Even in the blue city of New Orleans, the Republican garnered strong support, but I would not be surprised if he is found to have hired undocumented workers to reconstruct his home after the storm, exploiting their labor while criminalizing them simultaneously.

Latino immigrants continue to do much of the reconstruction work in the Crescent City, but they are repeatedly cheated by contractors who exploit their tenuous status and don’t’ pay them. Criminals target them because they are known to carry cash. When they are murdered, their lives mean little to the local police, who corroborate with ICE to deport them. Under local Sheriff Gusman’s watch, dozens of immigrants have literally disappeared after they were picked up. In early February under freezing temperatures in front of his jail, the New Orleans Congress of Day Laborers held a twenty-four hour vigil to protest his brutal practices. They called out the names of Leornardo Ortiz, missing since 2008, Guadalupe Saldibar, missing since 2009, Jesus Contreras since 2010, and a dozen others for whom they held signs with silhouetted dark figures with the year they were disappeared next to their names.

I hope that New Orleanians wake up and smell the café con leche and have the decency to acknowledge the inhumanity that many immigrants have suffered here while rebuilding our city. Gusman, a Democrat, abuses his authority, and Vitter used fear as his re-election platform. Neither have been models of civility. When police officials and politicians engage in direct vilification of a people, they contribute directly to the general mistreatment of those targeted. In a depressed economy, undocumented immigrants are easy scapegoats.

How many believe that they are loosing their jobs to immigrants and are willing to pick up a weapon like the Arizona shooter to release their hatred, the kind of hatred inspired by Vitter’s poisonous campaign and the human rights violations exacted by the local sheriff?

Make art that matters,

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

ALIENS at The Shadowbox Theatre in New Orleans for a Three-week Run

Amigos and virtual community (distribute with cyber abandon):

ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS made its national debut at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans last weekend with four well-received performances, and we have moved the show to the Shadowbox Theatre at 2400 Saint Claude Avenue (corner of St. Roch) in the Marigny neighborhood. The Shadowbox is the latest arts jewel to line the developing Saint Claude Avenue arts corridor.

ALIENS Performances @ The Shadowbox Theatre
September 23-26, Sept. 30 - Oct. 3 & Oct. 7-10, 2010
All shows @ 8PM - $10 at the door & 2 for $15

Follow the link below for tickets and more information:
http://www.theshadowboxtheatre.com/Shadowbox/Blank_2.html

ALIENS is the interdisciplinary performance I have been developing since March of 2010, and the script is informed by interviews I have conducted of Latino immigrants in Houston, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, the cites of the three commissioning theaters for the project.

ABOUT ALIENS: Through this Sci-fi Latino noir multimedia solo, I satirize the status of immigrants as "aliens" and explore the rise in hate crimes against Latinos across the U.S. ALIENS dares to asks the hard question about the immigration debate, “Since the Pilgrims arrived without papers and were the first illegals, why were they not deported?” Cultivating a hybrid sci-fi visceral stage look, I shape-shift into numerous Latino “extraterrestrials” who bilingually challenge the flaws of a country built by immigrants that vilifies the same people whose labor it exploits, ay caramba!

Go to the link below for more information on ALIENS:
http://www.torrestama.com/site/aliens.html

The key collaborators in ALIENS include the amazing John Grimsley of Dog & Pony Theatre Company, who has added his visual theatrical genius to a creative lighting design that brings out the sci-fi aesthetics. The spacey satirical film shorts are created by Bruce France of Mondo Bizarro (a.k.a. El Video Vato). Billy Atwell (a.k.a El Audio Dali Vato), a key collaborator from New York, has created an engaging original sci-fi music score that accompanies some vignettes. The classical recordings of opera vocalist Claudia Copeland will also be featured in the production.

ALIENS is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by MECA (Houston) in partnership with GALA Hispanic Theatre (D.C.), and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. ALIENS has also been supported through a Community Arts Partnership grant award from Alternate ROOTS.
http://alternateroots.org

Make art that matters,
José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

Capturing Los Invisibles & Bringing Them Out of the Shadows: Curator’s Notes

Generally, the photographers in our communities are the ones that see what most of us miss, and the good ones capture the unseen with acute vision and sublime compositions, transforming our normality into an artful reality. At the beginning of this project when we put out the initial call to photographers in late June, Andy Antippas and I were struck by how few submissions were in as the July 30th deadline approached. We extended our call to early August and continued our outreach to photographers local and national.

In numerous conversations with well-known photographer friends about this project, most confessed that it had not dawn upon them to document the thousands of Latino immigrants that were all around us rebuilding house after devastated house since the storm. A few did express intentions to photograph this historical convergence of Spanish speaking laborers here, but somehow never did. The lack of entries became a testament to the conclusions I have formed for the past five years; that the Latino immigrant laborers rebuilding New Orleans have been ubiquitous and invisible at the same time. If the photographers, who are the ones with cameras as their natural appendages to frame the less noticeable, had not managed to focus their trained eyes on the immigrant workers, how was the common man and woman expected to render them visible? They truly had become the invisible, and we were wondering if there would be a photo exhibition at all.

In Spanish, los invisibles is the term often used for those who have disappeared or are missing because of political intolerance under the many past dictatorships in our Latin American countries. It is a complicated term, but it aptly applies to the conditions of undocumented Latino immigrants in a United States gripped by hysterical fears that the alien other is taking over. While they have not been disappeared, they are without a doubt a shadow people. Their vulnerable status has transformed them into a transparent people that are not recognized as fully human. It makes their suffering an obscure painful story easy to ignore because foreigners are classified as “aliens” in the country, extraterrestrials from the Planet Other with a marginalized existence.

We are grateful for the photographers in this exhibition whose third eye did see los invisibles and have submitted documentary photos, immigrant portraits, and images of day laborers at various pick-up points across the city. Aoife Naughton and Wes Wallace, now living in Dublin, Ireland, submitted their work across international waters. Their 2006-07 series documents immigrants at two major pick-up points, Lee Circle and the Claiborne Avenue and MLK Blvd. intersection. The photo titled “Lee Circle I” is probably the most haunting depiction of huddled laborers waiting to be chosen. The gray-greenish black and white tint of the image transforms it into a science fiction still that evokes an apocalyptic holding station for day laborers.

“Claiborne Avenue III” is a portrait of a defiant worker for hire who could easily pass for a Pancho Villa look alike, if Pancho had risen from the dead to put up Sheetrock. With folded arms, he is distinguished by a striking mustache and a disheveled Everyman’s attire of someone familiar with hard work. In “Claiborne Avenue V”, two workers are standing against a large painted wall of the Big Easy Deli. The two figures are ironically cornered before the painted wall ad that declares, “Open 24 Hours”, as if to suggest that immigrants are for hire for all hours of the day. It is one of the most striking images in the show. Collectively, the ten photos Naughton and Wallace have contributed reprise a comprehensive study of immigrants at these two major labor pick-up points. They have captured poignant portraits that magnify the workers' humanity, vulnerability, and manly cojones needed to stand on a street corner in search of work. This act itself is one that we should honor because only the brave and needy engage in such a dangerous activity.

Abdul Aziz focuses his photojournalistic lens on a recent 2010 May Day demonstration. His “Strongest Little Voice” depicts a proud fist-to-the air immigrant girl leading a congregation of marchers that carry a horizontal banner in protest of Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 legislation. Almost mythically, she appears to be a modern-day Mestiza brown Joan of Arc, leading her people to battle with her own banner whose only visible words STOP are enough to imply a halt to the criminalization of immigrants.

In “The Carousel for Democracy”, Craig Morse catches two Honduran young men in a moment of relaxation, perhaps in between jobs, atop plastic carousel horses. The image echoes a Diane Arbus surreality that is both comical and oddly disturbing. Wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, the young man in the foreground is straddling the petite plastic horse in an almost awkward man-child pose with a cheesy replica of the Statue of Liberty in the background. This juxtaposition gives the photo a political resonance that maybe the promise of prosperity in the land of opportunity is not as real as imagined.

Meryt Harding’s “Believe” is a half body portrait of a worker with an Obama campaign Tee-shirt, where the candidate in a messianic posture seems to be recruiting more believers like an Uncle Sam with a sun tan. What is often loss in the Obama rise to the White House story is that Barak exemplifies the greatest dream an immigrant here can have: That their U.S. born offspring can ascend to such a powerful position. Obama is the Hawaiian-born son of an African immigrant, and there is a tenderness and hopefulness in the face of this Latino man sporting this shirt. Maybe Obama can deliver the positive immigration reform that many Latinos who voted for him are waiting for.

Mario Tama’s “Migrant Day Laborers Help New Orleans Rebuild Series #1” manages to frame a lesser know aspect of the immigrant plight, as many trek thousands of miles from their countries of origin and leave families behind to work on this side of the border. His image focuses on a worn color photograph of a five-month old baby boy being shown to the viewer by a young father whose sculptural caramel-colored face recedes in the background. It is a photo within a photo, and we learn that it is the son the immigrant laborer has not seen because he made the journey to New Orleans before his baby’s birth. There are hundreds of stories like this among the many immigrants who have labored hard to rebuild the Big Easy over the past five years. It is my hope that this exhibition can humanize a people that have been rendered invisible.
--- José Torres-Tama

LOS INVISIBLES: Latino Immigrants in the Post-Katrina Reconstruction of New Orleans

Year five of the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans is upon us, and the dirtiest little secret of the recovery is that our rapid progress owes a tremendous debt to the Latino immigrants who have labored hard to rebuild the Big Easy. While the BP oil spill disaster is our latest reminder that we are a new millennium epicenter for man made and natural tragedies, the many setbacks that this recovering mini-metropolis has experienced include a nationally high murder rate and a corrupt police department under federal investigation.

Nonetheless, the city and its resilient people continue forward, and most people I speak to recognize that the Latino work force has been vital in transforming New Orleans into a livable city and a functioning tourist destination, still open for business even with the toxic oil that looms in our Mississippi waterways and the Gulf. However, the story of Latino immigrants and the reconstruction remains conspicuously absent when the post-storm narratives are accounted in the local and national press.

It’s as if the immigrants are living in a parallel universe as invisible inhabitants, laboring in the shadows of a science fiction reality. For years, los invisibles have been physically visible everywhere on rooftops and numerous construction sites, but they are ubiquitous and nowhere at the same time. The undocumented status of many has transformed them into a transparent people that are not recognized as fully human. This condition makes their suffering an obscure painful story that most prefer to ignore because foreigners are classified as aliens in this country, extraterrestrials from the Planet Other with a marginalized existence.

I recently interviewed three young day laborers, and each man shared stories of being cheated by ruthless contractors and local businesses. One worker with a wife and three children had put in two weeks at a major hotel in the French Quarter, but when the promised payday arrived, he and the dozen men in his maintenance crew were told to leave the premises by the gringo manager who threatened to call immigration authorities. He was left with no money to pay for his rent or buy food for his family. Crushed and defeated, he turned to Catholic Charities for some food support.

The second gentleman was a victim of wage theft a number of times, and with tears swelling his eyes, he spoke of great despair and loss of dignity as a man when he could not provide for his family. Even more crushing was that a contractor of Latino descent had robbed him as well, mocking the work crew that they should be paid in rice and beans. Abuse of power over the most vulnerable workers should come as no surprise, and while the three men reported that most contractors who had cheated them were Caucasian, legal Latinos have joined the exploitation party. Also, many immigrants here have been crime victims of young black men who know that workers carry cash on them. The word on the street is that immigrants are human ATM machines to violate and withdraw cash from, dehumanizing them further.

The youngest of the group was nineteen when he arrived two weeks after Katrina hit. He worked twelve-hour days while sleeping fourteen to a trailer meant to house one person. Nine months later, a huge metal dumpster fell on his left hand. The white contractor who hired him refused to call an ambulance. Fortunately, his working partner had a cell phone, but by the time he arrived at the hospital, half his hand was practically sliced off. While most doctors recommended severing his entire arm to protect from a major infection, the lone African American surgeon, who had a son the same age, intervened and performed five miraculous surgeries to reattach his hand. During his convalescence, this injured worker had a major epiphany that led him to become an activist.

Living in a shadow society, most immigrants are left to silently absorb many social blows because of their station, but all three of these men have joined the Congress of Day Laborers to fight for the rights of immigrant workers who have contributed their blood and sweat to rebuilding a city that has turned a blind eye to their struggles. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that 80% of the immigrant labor force that reconstructed New Orleans was basically robbed of their rightful wages. The insidious tactic of employers calling immigration instead of paying rightfully earned salaries is commonplace in the slave labor fiesta still taking place here. Fears of deportation have kept thousands mute, but these men have undergoing a mythic transformation from silent martyrs to vocal activists.

With the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice and other committed immigrant rights’ advocates, they are fighting to have an ordinance passed that will criminalize wage theft. Theirs is an epic battle to humanize immigrants who have been rendered invisible by a city and a people that have benefited greatly from their noble labor. If we dared to count the dollar losses over five-years, we are talking millions, maybe billions, that have been stolen from men and women who have repaired a once very broken city. New Orleans, its citizens, and the new mayor need to bring the immigrants out of the shadows. Give them the visibility they deserve in the Crescent City.

José Torres-Tama

ArteFuturo Productions

2426 Saint Claude Avenue

New Orleans, LA 70117

www.torrestama.com

504.232.2968

"Make art that matters!"

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Thank the Latino Immigrants Who Reconstructed New Orleans

From New Orleans during Thanksgiving Weekend 2009:

“The city that care forgot” has never officially cared to thank the thousands upon thousands of Latino immigrants who have been invaluable to the ongoing reconstruction since the federal levees failed to hold back the fury of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.  As the calendar turns to a national time of thanks, the legislators and citizenry of New Orleans should offer a sincere declaration of gratitude, unas mil gracias, to the immigrants who have accelerated our progress in year four of this arduous recovery process.  

The greatest dirty little secret our current reconstruction is that it owes much to the Latino immigrants who were responsible for cleaning the human waste and refuse of the Convention Center and Superdome, salvaging the many hotels of the city’s tourist industry before they were condemned as health risks, and putting up roof after house roof that allowed its residents to move back home.  They have worked at an incredible pace, but a recent Southern Law Poverty Center analysis notes that up to 80% of the immigrant workers here have been cheated out of their proper pay by ruthless contractors and other local businesses needing repairs. 

They exploited their cheap labor and used the undocumented status of many to callously and criminallly cheat them out of pay.  The common scam is to threaten to report workers to immigration authorities after the job has been completed.  With deportation fears looming, thousands become silent victims of wage theft.  But there is some light to this dark story, and in a bold effort to acknowledge the social injustices perpetrated on the New Orleans immigrant labor force, City Councilman Arnie Fielkow announced this past summer that he was proposing a bill to criminalize wage theft, offering protection to all workers in the city, legal or illegal.  

In a city not known for progressive labor reform, this was a monumental move forward to protect the most vulnerable workers in town.  In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed a major  victory in July, and through a class action lawsuit, 39 immigrant plaintiffs won unpaid back wages in the sum of $175,000 from a New Jersey company that had cheated them.  I am an immigrant myself, from Ecuador and legal, and it has broken my heart to witness how most New Orleanians have turned a blind eye to the violation of immigrants’ rights.  From artists and arts leaders in the so-called liberal cultural institutions to a lack of interest in covering labor abuses in the local newspaper and other media outlets, very few have been willing to address the issue.      

For many immigrants, it has been hard living in the big easy after the storm, but their resilience is evident in the new businesses that have been founded.  In the Broadmoor and Mid City neighborhoods that took up to eight feet of water, you can now eat at El Riconcito, Taqueriea Gerrero or the Fiesta Latina Restaurant.  For grocery shopping, you can go to a large supermarket called La Guadalupana, and for quick bites, you can feast on a budget from the many Taco trucks that abound at busy intersections. 

A common positive that locals often spoke about as the Hispanic population grew after Katrina was the greater abundance of Mexican and Latino restaurants, which added more salsa flavor to the gastronomy of a city that loves to eat.  As we enjoy the Latin cuisine, it is important to remember not to demonize the cooks.  

So do the right thing this Thanksgiving weekend, and thank an immigrant for their invaluable contribution to our rebuilding.  Similarly, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are making positive contributions in urban and rural communities across the nation.  Most likely, they are doing the jobs no one else wants to do for extremely low pay and under the worst working conditions.  They all deserve at least a nod of thanks.  These are hard-working human beings.  Así que, por favor, un poquito de gracia y arriba y arriba.