the continuously fractured life

“We must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women.”

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Dolores Mission Peace Walks

Dolores Mission, a Jesuit Catholic Parish in East LA was established in 1980 to serve a neighborhood hindered by poverty and the effects of active gangs within the two-square-mile parish. In the early 1990s, a group of women in the parish met in search of a solution to the issue of gang violence in the neighborhood citing that gang-related killings and injuries were an almost daily occurrence.

One night, after a long discussion, seventy women (and a few men), began walking the streets, from one gang turf to the next, throughout the neighborhood. They met with gang members and offered them food and a listening ear. Throughout the night, neighborhood conflicts were directly interrupted.

From that night forward, the members of the newly formed Comite Pro Paz En El Barrio (Committee for Peace in the Neighborhood) walked throughout the neighborhood and within a week there was a remarkable drop in gang-related violence due to the nonviolent intervention. They had challenged the traditional, circular script of violence and retaliation and created, for a time, a new and more creative movement. By entering into danger, the group created a transitory space for peace where all parties witnessed each other as human. The gang-members were able to see, many for the first time that other members of the community were interested in them. At the same time, the women were able to address and confront their fear and anger and see the human face of gang members.

The women listened to the pain of the gang-members about the lack of jobs and police brutality, conversations which led them to develop a tortilla factory, bakery, and child-care center, creating jobs and giving people in the neighborhood opportunities to acquire job skills and conflict resolution techniques as people from different gangs worked together. Eventually, the women opened a school and moved from being the eyes and ears of the police to being trained to monitor and report abusive police behavior. This redefined the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the neighborhood.

Poverty, racism, and violence still exist in East LA, however, the peace walks served as a trigger point and a huge step toward creating a restorative environment.

 —

Information from:

http://www.dolores-mission.org/parish.php

http://www.thirdside.org/stories_01.cfm

Various class notes.

 

Things to Think About

1. What does this say about “bad neighborhoods”?

2. What does this say about women in those neighborhoods?

3. How does the role of confronting our own fear play into such situations?

Top Three Things I Like This Week

1. Freaks and Geeks. The 1999-2000 too-short series about high schoolers because, I just finished it and realized it’s so much deeper and more hilarious that I realized when I first watched it, in high school. Also, the opening credits are the greatest. 

2. The Iraqi Student Project. This peacekeeping organization helps war-displaced students obtain undergraduate degrees. I went to one of their fundraising events last week, a production of Unveiled written and performed by Rohina Malik. Check her out.

3. Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. A book of daily prayers and scripture readings for New Monastics, or for anyone else who’s interested. Read it online here. 

Phileena Heuertz on the importance of equally recognizing and learning from the femininity in God and in ourselves.

Worldwide, Unsafe abortion rates are on the rise. →

Things to Think About

Is being Pro-life, Anti-choice, Pro-choice, or Anti-life (or whatever you want to call that duo) really working for women?

Is this mode of discussion best suited for first-world concerns?

Are new or current, alternative ways to move beyond condemning or accepting abortion?

If we are Pro-life, how do we respond that while abortion is relatively safe in North America, it is almost 100% unsafe in Africa? How do we respond if we are Pro-choice? Can we respond together? Should North American’s respond or has this further complicated the issue?

Documentary Recommendation 019.

Dive! Ok, I admit that I’m a huge sucker for documentaries about saving the world, one stereotypically-quirky family at a time, but I can’t help it. Dive! is not only about reducing waste, dumpster diving, and kind-of combing your hair, but about action being taken to redistribute food to people who need it. Plus, it’s streaming on Netflix, right now.

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Transnationalism, pt 1

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Transnationalism is an ongoing, but uneven series of cross-border movements (of people, ideas, culture, political, capital, etc), porous when considering national boundaries. Transnationalism challenges the purity and rigidity of the nation-state and heavily considers cultures of belonging or not belonging and diasporas. It considers these cross-border movements to be both mobile and fixed and analyses the world from a place other than one’s primary nation and location. *

“…a transnational sensibility lets scholars see the movement of goods, individuals, and ideas happening in a context in which gender, class, and race operate simultaneously.” **

 

* Notes are mine.

** From Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis by Laura Briggs, et al. Pg. 633.

 

Things to Think About

1. Consider the national boundaries that you carry around within you. How have those been constructed?

2. It’s important in Transnational studies to separate empire and people, for example, I am part of the American empire but I am also a person who lives in America. Why is this distinction important?

3. How can we practice considering the fluid movement of borders but keep cultural relativism out?

Florence and the Machine playing Drumming Song at KEXP. Gaaahhh she’s even better with fewer instruments.