Thoughts engulf me in these passive days and chaotically ordered nights.
Stumbling from bar stool to riverside rock. Who am I? Why am I here? How
am I going to find what I am looking for? What am I looking for? All questions,
no answers so far. Perhaps I really am a photographer for El Andar wandering,
cruising for photos. Or am I a narco, a drug cop, documenting the daily
moves of the people I am going to bust?; a novio celoso of one of the meseras
at the Pasa Tiempo; a güero mexicano de Ixtapa; a marijuanero buscando
mota; a jazzista escuchando la poesía de la noche, de la calle; a
transvestite admiring the others que vienen a bailar; un evangelista buscando
almas perdidas para salvar; un fútbolista de vacaciones por Watsón;
panadero; hijo; hermano; cuate; católico; gabacho; irlandés;
portugués; italiano; alemán. Al menos, soy ser humano.
Paso por los bares (siempre los bares), taquerías, puentes, calles
e iglesias, caminando solo, y lo que veo es la vida pura, la vida digna
de la gente trabajadora; la realidad de Watsón. No hay por que romperla,
destruirla: es fluída como humo que pasa a través de la luz
en la noche, una historia que no se cansa de emociones.
I didn't know where I was going, only walking across the street towards
la Alcachofa, a cantina in Pájaro, to meet the dueño and ask
permission to photograph in the bar. I saw someone across the street. He
asked me if I wanted to go with him. I said sure, and we walked down and
met up with some of his friends and after introductions I began looking
for photographs. Javier and someone else were playing guitars while I talked
with someone else and then someone asked me if I wanted to smoke a joint,
so I said, sure. Then he asked me if I had any papers and I didn't and neither
did anyone else, so I continued talking with someone while someone else
rolled the joint in the aluminum paper wrapper of a Wrigley's chewing gum.
So then all the someones, including me, smoked the joint rolled in aluminum.
They asked me if the shit was good, but all I could sense was the metallic
taste at the back of my mouth, which stayed there the rest of the day.
En la plaza I am reading a book, to rest for a while between moments. A
man stops. "I guess you realize that if you keep doing that,"
he says, pointing to my book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, " you are
going to get an education." He smiles and says "No, keep on reading,"
and walks away.
Fui a la Frontera Club por primera vez con Fernando, "El Gallo."
He plays cards there daily. I have become the object of desire for some
in the Pasa Tiempo. Whether as a friend or as a novio, me desean.
But what of the people I am photographing? I have talked about perceptions
of me as fotografo, but what about the people fotografiada? Los hombres
y las mujeres, los vaqueros, los bailadores, los cocineros, las meseras,
los winos, del rio, los marijuaneros, los padres, las putas, las hermanas,
amigas, maricones, madres, troqueros, la placa, los dueños, los tomados,
hijos, mexicanos, humanos.
Güero is my name. Félix López, Gato, baptized me today.
I met him on the median on Riverside near Main and we talked there for a
few minutes, each confirming who we are at face value: student photographer;
gang member trying to break into college. He is 30, I am 22. But he is much
more than that. He is a brother, a son, a lover, story teller. Man, can
this guy tell stories. He made me think about a lot of things in those few
hours we spoke and drank and walked together. When he asked for money to
pay for his needs, who was I to ask what kind of fix he needs when I smoke
dope? Who was I to ask, a visitor from a different world. This guy sees
things and is able to communicate his ideas with fluid prose. I can only
hope to do that with my photographs.
Gato took me to San Andreas camp, a shanty town for migrant workers where
rent is high and images of the dust bowl in the thirties arose as we drove
through metal gates to a cluster of blue-grey houses stacked together in
the fields. This camp is now inhabited, but when the strawberry season starts
and more people come to the Pajaro Valley, other camps like La Maravilla
come to life. It is a miracle people survive in places such as these. There
is no good here. The owners charge $300 a person for a space on a mattress
on the floor. Gangs benefit by these places as much as the owners by bringing
putas into the camps, chiva too. People also live in caves in the fields.
Imagine human beings reduced to moles just to pick strawberries. Fuck the
strawberries. And if you want to get political with me, these are tax-paying
humans as well, to all the assholes who asked.
So then we went to a playground on Riverside. We played hoops, two on two,
with some kids. My team won, only because of this one awesome kid on my
team. I would get the ball, pass to him and he would shoot and score. No
problem, the kid had touch. So we went and bought a forty at some market
and walked over to the river and he showed me a shrine to La Virgen that
some homeboys had made for a gangmember who was executed (tied up and shot
two times in the back of the head) on the same tree. There I showed Gato
what composition means: it is the way he rearranged the shrine, fixed it
up, so that it looked good enough to take a photo of it, for him. Then we
walked down the river towards Main, the bridge, el puente, what they call
the Brooklyn Bridge, and sat down with a dealer and discussed the rising
street prices of heroin and the fact that craka is now in Watsón.
"What the fuck are you doing, don't even show him that shit if he hasn't
done it before," said the woman to Gato after he showed me what heroin
looks like. "What, do you want him to end up like me?"
Rigo de Nayarit me enseñaba lo que significa el escrúpulo
del sol. Como en la canción de Victor Jara, es la belleza de los
colores cuando el sol está saliendo. ¡Cuanto me alegro cuando
llega esta hora! Este momento, de veras es una maravilla. Lleno de amor
y alegría, veo la magia que Dios, o algo muy espiritual, me muestra
en esta hora preciosa.
So Gato and I went back to La Frontera and I watched El Gallo and some other
people play mostro, a card game with six barracas, falta a los de diez,
nueve y ocho. Gato left and then came back and gave me a consejo. A consejo
is a piece of important advice that someone, a friend, gives you when they
are worried about you. An example is Pedro, a soldador, welder, who gave
Sebastián, el cocinero de los tacos ricos frente al Pasa Tiempo,
un consejo that he should not drink so much and waste his money on his days
off. Sebastián took the advice and did not drink on his day off this
week.
Gato's consejo was to watch my back. That some people, not all or most people,
but some people will kick my ass just for walking around with my camera.
Just for thinking I was able to walk around with my camera. You know, there
are some people from where I come from who would do the same to Gato for
walking around a middle class white neigborhood in San Jose with his tattoos
and his raza skin just because of the color of his skin and how he decorates
it. Where is love and compassion, where is the humanity? "Siempre,
watch your back. If someone puts their hand on your shoulder, it means they
want something from you. From there, they can either do this," (he
motions with his fist to my kidney), "or they can do whatever,"
-meaning they have you where they want you. Fuck that, where is the human
spirit, by what means has this come to pass?
"You're going to get yourself in trouble doing that," said
a woman at San Patricio during the daily lunch at the Loaves and Fishes
office on the side of the church. She was referring to my making photos
without asking everyone at the scene. She was right. Usually I ask, but
on occasion I don't, especially when there are more than a few people.
First I parked at the Pasa Tiempo and was going to walk over the bridge
to see if Pedro was at the garage where he works to make a photograph and
on the way I met Francisco, Fernando and El Chicote at el puente. Ellos
viven cerca del río, limpiando el vidrio de los restaurantes: son
reciclantes. Francisco me cuenta que tuvo un accidente hace unos años:
perdió la mano. Está tratando de abrir su caso de nuevo. Sólo
que no pudo consiguir los documentos del hospital. Por eso voy con él
mañana a consiguirlos para dárselos a su abogado. El me pidió
ayuda porque no habla inglés. No soy trabajador social, no soy abogado,
ni trabajo en salud pública: soy un ser humano, nada más.
¿Donde están esos tipos que deberían ayudar a este
hombre sencillo? ¿En qué parte se han escondido? Cierto que
no son los que se llaman a si mismos "trabajadores sociales."
Cabrones. El puente is called the Brooklyn Bridge, separating norteños
from sureños.
¿Por qué? ¿Por qué hay tanto sufrimiento en
las almas de los seres en esta parte del mundo, el cielo de Watsón?
Me hace llorar porque no hay una respuesta, nunca veremos la respuesta.
Por eso, solo, lloro.
Ahora entiendo porque la gente usa chiva: no le hace, man.
Today I went with Francisco, uno de los winos, al hospital. Tenía
que recoger documentos de su visita al hospital hace tres años, para
darlos al abogado con intenciones de abrir su caso de nuevo. He had on a
new shirt and clean pants, dressed up for the journey into society away
from the river. Cuando salimos del rio, Francisco y yo, aunque él
me dirigía al hospital, yo era el pasaporte que él necestiba
para poder entrar al hospital. With my connections to mainstream society,
the color of my skin and my native English tongue, have functioned within
this society all my life and understand how to get what I need. Francisco
does not have this power for reasons that include not speaking English,
nor having had the opportunity to function in mainstream USA on a daily
basis. Cuando llegamos a la oficina de records yo le presenté a la
secretaria y él hizo lo demás. No me necesitaba ni para leer
ni hablar. Solo mi presencia.
To experience feelings of not understanding, confusion of the highest degree,
inextinguishable sadness, aimless compassion, solitude in your own country,
in a town not too far from where you grew up, is insanity. That is the only
word with which I can describe the disgust I feel at the realization that
we are constantly tortured by mechanisms of greed intent on keeping us ignorant
and docile, working in the plants, in the fields, in the offices for miniscule
gains without sufficient housing, without access to servicios sociales,
without power.
Today I had to leave Watsonville for a while. Had to get high and drunk
to face myself, my insecurities about the outcome of this project (Who will
it benefit if names are placed with faces?;What good will it do to write
about the labor camps? Why am I doing this in the first place?), as well
as my identity within the Watsonville scene. I am a day laborer in Watsón.
I leave to sleep in Santa Cruz. I don't have a good answer or even a feasible
answer to why I am in Watsonville, only that I am here.
I had to figure out why I was involved in this project. Without being sure
of my own intentions, goals, there is no question that I am trying to answer,
no path to follow, only a swirling confusion of language, sweat, alcohol,
smoke, and night life.
"El mexicano gasta en una noche lo que gana en una semana... el mexicano
gasta en una noche lo que gana en un año..." Making photos of
the card players at Pasa Tiempo I met Leonel, a 21 year old who works in
the strawberry fields along Highway 1. We were both drunk when he sat down
next to me. He was drunk on beer and I was drunk with the smells and sounds
and movements which surrounded me. The difference lies in the reasons we
were at the bar: I was there to find my dream, to create and explain with
photos, through the activities I witnessed, the humanity of this place;
Leonel was there to ease the pain of dreaming.
Back-breaking work six days a week demands relief, gratification, another
state of mind, excitement, love, friendship, lust, food, survival. And since
dreams are seemingly out of reach, there are daily things within reach and
can be bought and sold enseguida: botas nuevas, un vaquero, Marlboro, chiva,
20 dollar putas, coca, mota, cerveza, tequila, rón, tacos. To erode
the pain of fruitless dreams of going home for your mother's funeral; dreams
to have a house of your own. I met Pedro the first night I went to Watsonville
in the taquería outside el Pasa Tiempo and didn't see him again until
tonight, my last night here this week. He took me to Los Gatitos where I
made some photographs of billiards. Between sips of coffee, photographs,
and cigarette drags, we dreamt out loud about our lives, what we want to
do and how we are going to achieve our goals. At 21, a year younger than
me, Pedro is working here so that he can build a taller, una llantería,
en Tijuana. He told me that people think he is crazy for thinking on a different
level, with goals in mind. So, yes, there are dreamers in this part of Watsonville,
solo hay que buscar con esfuerzo a los soñadores, si quieres encontrarlos
en las cantinas.
La Cucaracha | Voces | Papalote | Subscription