Corrections, Reflections, and Extentions

In which I learn to check in with all my relatives to get a fuller picture of our history.

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Transcript

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to forget. One's ancestors is to be a Brook without a source, a tree without Chinese proper. After I posted my last episode, I was contacted by a relative of mine who very kindly and gently corrected a few errors in my recording and my comments about my grandfather and his history. And in some ways, some of the details that she shared and some of the details that my mom shared afterward. Make the story of my grandfather and my great-grandmother a bit more poignant

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And they also make me think about the ways in which we filter. And we remember the tales and the stories and the details of what our parents tell us about our history. And our ancestors. So I just want to start with the corrections on my grandmother's life. Well, these are more of the extensions on my grandmother's life. So my, my great-grandmother. Uh, she stayed at the Lancaster industrial school for girls during and after the birth of my grandfather. And I'm just going to read here from the website to kind of give you an idea of the purpose of that school. So at the time of the school's funding and 1854. Many Americans feared that urbanization, industrialization, and immigration threatened to erode the nation's Republican society. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Sounds familiar to me. The growing masses of urban poor and rise in juvenile crime, alarmed national leaders, some open-minded and forward-thinking reformers at the time though, issued a belief in the innate depravity and believed. That proper environmental conditions and educational practices could uplift and correct the most troublesome and recalcitrant members of society. The school hybridized the school penitentiary and mental asylum to serve. And I put that in air The poorest girls rehabilitate any deviant behavior and keep any existing deviancy from, and I am paraphrasing here from infecting the rest of society. So the role and function of such institutions is obviously complicated. While this place may have been on the boundary between a jail and a school. Previous to its founding. There would have been no other place for my grandmother. If her parents and her family did not want to care for her. And I do want to also add that at the time. There was a enormous stigma. At the time, both of this founding and then my grandmother's life, my great-grandmother's life, there was an enormous stigma. And a lot of discrimination against Irish Catholics. And I think people are familiar that during Jim Crow era, as there were often signs that said, no blacks, no Catholics, and no Irish. So. Not to say that there was not white privilege accorded to. Uh, white people of Irish descent, but she was living at a time when there was an high amount of discrimination against. Irish Catholics. So the get to the corrections for my grandfather's story. He was not in fact adopted by a white He was fostered at three months from my grandmother to an elderly black woman in Eastern Massachusetts, who lived on a small farm. And following a fire on the property, he was transferred to another family at the age of five, the Alvarez family who lived in Attleboro, Massachusetts. So I just want to say that my great-grandmother did tell my mom that she never signed any papers. And so it is not clear. How he was fostered out or what she was told when he was taken. She would have been 12 or 13 at the time. So she would have been barely a child herself. So. Getting back to my grandfather and the Alvarez family. So the Alvarez family where CA veered. Portuguese. Now, I think this is important to note because Cape Baird was very important in the slave trade. And it was a waystation off the coast of Africa for a lot of slave ships passing, um, through to the Americas. And so I'm wondering if this family. Was chosen if they were possibly passing as white or if they just chose to identify as Portuguese, because that's how they thought of themselves, because I know that there is a lot of complicated relationship. With the American definition of whiteness and blackness among people who are from the African diaspora and other parts of the world who come here to the United States. I don't know how they, how, what their intention was, but he was shocked when at the age of 14, he was reunited with his family and he discovered that he was part black. So the background to that is that when veterans were returning from world war two, Massachusetts created. A veterans affairs program and some of the budget allocations necessary to fund that program came from other social services like foster care. So at that point, whenever possible foster services, reunited children with their biological parents. My great-grandmother's story is that she continued to look for him and was told by state agencies that she would have to demonstrate home ownership in order to get him back. So I don't know if. She did not have home ownership and they just returned him because the budget allocations made it necessary to leave space. Or if she met the criteria and the budget allocations took place. I only know bits and pieces and fragments from my grandfather's life because my mom had kind of a fractured relationship with both of her parents. And she can get into that or not that's her relationship with them. But my relationship with my grandfather, while it was. Cordial. I wouldn't say it was particularly warm. Um, he, we saw him very infrequently and he was warm, but also kind of gruff, he joined the military. And so I wouldn't say that we had a very deep or intimate relationship with him. So I didn't hear about any of his story from his perspective. I only know it from what I hear from my mom and. I think now what I'm going to hear and what I'm going to learn from my aunts and other relatives who. Take the time to listen to this podcast and i'm sure that they will have their own opinions about what i relate and how i characterize some of our family history but this experience of trying to dig up my family history, even just my family history for the past 50 to a hundred years. It has been, it's been a very difficult process, partly because I'm busy. And partly because everybody else's memories are buried or in the past, and they don't really talk about them anymore. And it makes me think a lot about. How my children are going to know my parents because they're going to experience them as much older people than I experienced my grandparents as. My grandparents largely passed away when I was in my teens and probably early twenties, but they were in their sixties and seventies. Whereas if my parents live. Until my children are in their early twenties. My parents are going to be in their nineties. And so their experience of grandparents is going to be very different than mine. And my both my parents are very healthy and I'm grateful for that. And they're both mentally very present and sharp. And so my children have a good chance of having memories of conversations and activities with my parents. But I'm aware that I didn't ask my grandparents a whole lot about their lives and maybe because they were busy or because of other reasons they didn't really share a lot with me. So I don't have stories of what it was like for them. In the twenties and the thirties and the forties. I don't have a sense for the rich history of their life, the experiences they had concerts, they went to anything like that. And so all of that is a way that culture and. Uh, way of being in the world, it gets passed down to you. And so really, as I'm starting this process, I'm realizing how attenuated. That connection has been to my past and how much I rely on the history related to me by the broader culture to really fill in what it was like for them on a daily basis. Even though if i had been more thoughtful about it i could have had some of that perspective and some of that information from them directly Now, one of the things that's complicated about talking about being a mixed race person. And about the kind of family history that I do have, where there is a lot of struggle and a lot of hardship and a lot of separation. Is that I don't want to fall into the trap of. The tragic mulatto. And if you're a white person and you haven't heard that term, it was something that was used. In the forties, fifties, sixties, whenever people have been fighting in this country against interracial marriage. And the term the tragic mulatto. Or the concept of the tragic mulatto was something that they evoked talk about how the children of interracial marriages were going to Lost and alone, not accepted by the white society or the black society. And it was a very popular trope to talk about how this was going to lead. To misery and depression. So not only did they believe that they, that when you were having. An interracial relationship that you were solely being white purity, but then they also tried to tug on the heartstrings. And talk about it. How this person with mixed race is a tragic figure who had never fit in anywhere. And so while that is obviously not. Always the case. I am talking about a sense of isolation and a sense of being a little bit. Of everywhere and nowhere in society. So I don't think that it's the entirety of a person of mixed I don't think it's the entirety of their experience in society. And I don't think that it should. I think, I don't think that that feeling or that possibility for that feeling should ever stop somebody from loving, who they love and bringing children into this world. I do think that it's something to talk about though and i think that it does exist for some people that feeling of isolation At the same time, there is tremendous power. To being in the middle to being not fully apart of either society. You can stand within the structures of power. Where people who have darker skin who are more, obviously black or more, obviously indigenous might be excluded on purpose or just as an not. Intentionally by the people who call us based together. But as an artifact of the kind of white supremacist structure that we live in and you can stand up and disrupt those structures of white Power. If you so choose and I think a lot of us are aware that it's not just a choice. It's an obligation to our brothers and sisters and cousins who need us to use our white, our light skin privilege to be able to cross those boundaries and to speak out in the, in the cause of justice and to open up space where there isn't any, and to give a safe space or a safer space for folks to come and speak directly to their experiences and on their own behalf. And so I think that when you have, when you come from this kind of background, it's important for the family to. Talk about all of this to talk about. White privilege to talk about. The fact that we do belong, that we are together because I think that my parents did an excellent job of talking about structural racism. About showing us racism outside of our family. But I think that it was abstracted in a way, and there was never a direct discussion that told us that sat us down and said, To my sister, you are going to be targeted for the color of your skin. And people are going to follow you around stores and people are going to make hurtful comments. And that they never sat down and looked at me at the same time and said, you have a privilege, you have lighter skin. You look wider. And so you are responsible for standing up and talking when you sense that there is injustice. Because you belong to this family. You all you and your sister belong together and you're safe here and you need to use your feeling of safety and belonging. As a springboard to be able to confront injustice in the world. When I was a teenager, whenever I thought about the color of my skin, I didn't think about the privilege of having lighter skin and the responsibilities and opportunities that came with I thought about how much i wanted to have darker skin how i want it to look like my dad i wanted to look like my sister i wanted to look like my cousins i didn't want to look like or be associated with the european oppressors and colonizers of course I was a teenager and so teenagers are naturally a little bit selfish and I'm not as experienced in the wider world. And I think as I got older, I started to realize more and more. How important it was for me to both claim my Chicana identity to talk about my families history to claim my ancestors and also to claim and use the lighter skin privilege that I do have a in service to greater justice and equality. Now, my parents might remember this differently. They might've tried to talk to us about it when we were in high school. And from what I remember of being a teenager, I would not be surprised if the conversations went over my But I do not remember having a conversation about the obligations and the privileges of lighter skin. I think that that kind of conversation. Societaly and between people really started taking off after I was a teenager. Even though it seems obvious. I think that the conversation around right now about talking about light-skin privilege, all of that is something that's really blown up into more of a public discussion over the last 20 years. So it could have just been me growing up in a small Being a little bit introverted and and selfish. And maybe somebody else somewhere was more aware of themselves as a political person and more aware of their skin color as existing in a political space in the world. But i was not It's possible that you've gotten this far into the podcast and you're thinking to yourself, Well, what does this have to do with spirituality? What is all. This family history and who you are and how you feel in the world. How does that have to do at all? With spirituality and the spiritual journey. The easy example is if you're considering getting involved in ancestor, veneration, or another kind of ancestry practice. Where are your people came from how they got to where you are, is a big part of that. It's important to know where they come from. So you can borrow from the practices of that place and know the best practices as it were. For ancestor, worship or spirit work, there are thousands of years. Of meditation and thought and practice. And ancestor, veneration and spirit work practices across indigenous religions around the world. All of those different cultures and specific traditions have different rules with how you engage with spirits and ancestors, how you talk to them, how you invite them in, or keep them out what to offer, how and when to offer. So why invent the wheel when you can borrow in an educated way from the indigenous tradition of the ancestors, from the places you can identify. Those rules and practices are built out of hundreds or thousands of years of practice. And looking back, we'll give you a starting point and a safe way to explore that kind of veneration. Oftentimes, if you believe, or you feel that there are spirits of the land and place. Many people who feel that way. Think it's polite to introduce yourself to those spirits. Uh, to those people, the mountains, the rivers, the ocean. To introduce them to the spirits of the people who brought you to the new place as you would if you stepped inside someone else's home you would say your name you would talk about who you are and where you're from and how you came to be where you are. Furthermore, I think that your spirituality is a part of you and informed by the self that you present to the world and that the world presents back to you.'cause you don't just come up with your own identity you were told that people around you who you are and that extends into your spiritual identity and how you conceive of yourself spiritually in the world And I think for a long time, I really struggled with the term. Spiritual and people talking about how they were spiritual, but not religious. And I didn't really understand, even when I started this podcast, I didn't have a good working definition for spiritual. Like, it just seemed to be that people who are spiritual, but not religious, occasionally went to yoga class. And they might light a candle and they might sort of maybe meditate. And that would be kind of it possibly. They also did taro and there might've been crystals involved. And so that kind of was my conception of what a person did when they said they were spiritual, but not religious. And anytime I would engage a little deeper and ask, oh, what's your spiritual practice? That would be kind of the response. Well, I make candles and I, and I sit in. I do yoga like twice, uh, twice a week. And I go for a walk in the woods and that's fine. I, I, I have to say nobody owes me an explanation of exactly how that connects them to transcendent reality. Um, but it, but it also seemed a little bit lonely and there wasn't a lot of talk of community or talk of how it connected them with or how they felt connected to. Uh, the wider world and to how it, how it affected them and their. Everyday life The dictionary definition of spiritual is not satisfying. The dictionary definition is being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things. And that's so broad that it's to me it's almost meaningless A friend of mine recently pointed me to an episode of the rich roll podcast, where he interviews a woman named Dr. Lisa Miller. Who's a PhD at Columbia university. And she has an Institute on spirituality where she studies spirituality and the benefits of the spiritual practice from a scientific standpoint. I found the podcast. Very interesting. I don't think I agree with everything that she says or how she frames things. But I do think that she has some really interesting points for people to meditate on and take into their own life and reflection. But one of the things that she said really resonated with me and helped me to understand what people might be, meaning when they say spirituality and she calls it at least one of the parts of it, she calls it, having the capacity. To see your connection to the transcendent nature of reality. One of the things she said that I absolutely agreed with her on is that this is an instinct that is inborn. This is something that we have all have as small children, is this instinctive understanding that we are a part of the world and we're not separate from the world. And at some point we are taught very firmly and maybe not just one time, but cumulative teachings over and over, teach us that we are separate. And that our understandings and interactions with the world that we're only imagining the sense of connection that we feel. One of the roles of organized religion is to mediate and interpret the experience of transcendent reality that we have as people. And they give us a framework and language and they put rules and guidelines around what our experience of the numinous and the sacred mean. They give you an interpretive framework for that Organized religions are also social and political forces. They are deeply woven into how we structure power dynamics within our society. And so I don't think it's a stretch to think that the way in which they tell us to. Um, the ways in which they mediate and interpret our experiences of the divine and the sacred, and then transcendent nature of reality. I don't think it's a stretch to think that they do that. At Or have historically done that in the service of perpetuating certain power dynamics within our society. There is a reason why emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman empire. There are reasons for these things. It's not just because he had a revelation from God. So we all know that race. And ethnicity are constructs of human society. And that at a genetic level, we are all so much more similar than we are different. And yet those human constructs have real and tangible effects on people's lives. I think that one of those tangible effects that they have is. How we understand our place in the world and how we relate to transcendent reality. Let me give you a personal example. I was raised Catholic and although I rejected Catholicism for reasons, which I will definitely get into in a future podcast. I still was in the mindset and the cultural framework of Christianity. And so whenever I thought about exploring my religious experience or my spiritual experiences and seeking out a spiritual path, The one that was always available to me and was most around me was christianity and the lexicon that i understood my religious and my spiritual experiences were through the language and the lexicon of christianity My experience of transcendent reality. I guess if you want to call it that. But my experience of the greater truth of existence is that it's inextricably bound to the earth and to the other non-human persons who share the earth with me. And I view it now as a relationship that I have not cultivated, but that needs to be cultivated in order for me to be a whole human being. Now, there are many wonderful things about Catholicism and about Christianity, and I'm sure that other people who find comfort in that religious tradition. Might take issue with some of what I'm about to say. But I don't think that a big strand of Christianity and Catholicism is about connecting to the earth and about connecting to the oneness of creation. The context that, that, that they couch that in is in your connection with God. And my understanding of Christianity is always that they have separated. God and his creation. And so when you interact with God, in my understanding of Christianity and the culture of Christianity that I grew up growing up in the idea is that God is separate from the creation. There is the deity. And then there's the creation. Now we worshiped the dad. And the DD gave us dominion. Over the creation. That hierarchical kind of structure. With God at the top and then Jesus, and then all the angels and then us sinners, humans. Petitioning God to be let into the gates of heaven. After we die, that hierarchical structure is a very Western European hierarchical structure. And European conquerors in Mexico and in the United States took that hierarchical structure and also constructed society to look like that hierarchical structure. They did that within the family, which you see now with the conversation around it, particularly in Southern Baptist traditions now with the man being the head of the household and the woman being under his leadership. Uh, that's a very common thread and a lot of, not even ultra conservative Christian circles. Right. And so they did that both within the family and also at the societal level. As it uh as it impacted and related to racial and ethnic relationships within society. So just as race and ethnicity are human constructs. So to our religions and religions go hand in hand with ethnicity and have been used to perpetuate racial oppression and separation. And what I mean by they go in hand-in-hand with ethnicity is if you think about different ethnic groups in the world, they will identify both by their nationality and also their religion. And sometimes their religion is characterized in terms of nationality. I'm. I'm an Irish Catholic. Or I am a Greek Orthodox Christian. And so ethnicity and religion go together. And in many places they've been used to perpetuate racial oppression and separation. So in the United States that religious structures, Christianity. Christianity has largely separated the deity and his creation and has actually gendered its divinity into a single gender. And then further perpetuated the idea. The humans are separately precious from all life on this planet. Then using its understanding of the nature of the divine and the relationship of the divine to people. It has directly developed and imposed rules and social structures that privilege people with certain phenotypes and those rules and social structures. Have been perpetuated and continue. Even if you are a person who is not religious and doesn't identify as Christian. The rules and the social structures that underpin a lot of the life in the United States are directly developed an imposed. From Christian. Uh, philosophy. So let's just say, and this is getting into a different topic, but let's just say it was not a generous sharing of the love of Christ that led to my indigenous ancestors, embracing Catholicism and Christianity. So to me, religion understood is the human structure put in place to mediate and interpret people's experience of transcendent reality. It's directly a part of the social structures that have led to the different threads of my identity. They drove and underpin the slave trade. They drove and underpin the conquest of the Americas and the even drove an underpinned, my white ancestors departures from Ireland and Germany. So to me, it's important to interrogate my ancestors and my history so that I can be better informed about what I mean when I say I'm interacting in a particular way with transcendent reality, or to me just reality. Uh, when I'm praying, when I'm giving things. So I'm not just doing it into a void. Or in a way that is irresponsible and uninformed. I think one of the other things that religion does that you're missing when you just identify as spiritual, but you don't have a kind of structure coherence around that spirituality. I think that one of the things that you're missing is the social aspect of religion is the sharing of that transcendent. Experience and the co-creating of that transcendent experience. And bound up with that transcendent experiences, all show also the social experience. And the social support that comes with that shared experience. And I want to say that I realize I'm glossing over in generalizing. A lot of Christian theology, there are a lot of mystical traditions and there've been many efforts throughout the history of Christianity to get rid of the different structures, the interpose themselves, between the person and the divine. As Christians perceive it and define it. There's even green Christianity that advocates for an environmentally sensitive and aware Christianity, they have started doing blessings of the pets, which in some ways. Advocate. Acknowledges the existence of a soul in an animal which in catholicism at least is sort of a radical idea the part of the reason why and how we can have so much. And so rich of a theological tradition is because Christianity has been simultaneously while developing all of these rich theological traditions. They've been very, it's been very busily involved in stamping out alternative philosophies and ways of interacting with the divine. And so as we spiritual seekers who have two or more heritage is, and a more complicated social and racial and ethnic identity move beyond a Christian framework and we develop our own spiritual practices. I think it's necessary for us to engage with and understand the historical religious forces that created our social identities and that color, our spiritual perceptions. So, if you are listening to this podcast and you're thinking, well, I'm very secure in my racial identity and my heritage, and I know my ancestors and I am firmly in comfortably identified as X. I think that very few of us have then reflected on what that means and how that has colored our perception. Of divinity and sacredness and our spirituality and our spiritual practices So to close out this episode, I would like to. Propose an exercise. Find a quiet space, find a pen and paper and write down for yourself who you are, who society has told you. You are. Your heritage, your racial and ethnic your social identity. Uh, where your people are from and write down how you be yourself, how you feel you are and what your, what you think your social identity is. And then sit and meditate on that and ask yourself how that social identity. Has mediated your interaction with the, with transcendent reality, how has it influenced or colored any spiritual or religious experiences you might've had? How it might have limited your understanding of the spiritual experience or closed you off from exploring other avenues. For example, my husband decided that since he did not believe in the Catholic or Christian, God. But that meant he was an atheist. And when he made that decision. He just didn't look past that basic dichotomy that if I didn't believe in God, The Christian God, then that meant I didn't believe in any God. And so having that kind of cultural, spiritual dichotomy limits us. Either, because it keeps us from exploring outside of our comfortable religious community that maybe doesn't quite fit us anymore, or we jettison any spiritual community, any religious community, and then we're sort of alone and we're disconnected spiritually and socially from. Uh, basic human experience of sharing the transcendent nature of reality. So thank you for tuning in to episode two of Casa. the rainbow house. And I hope that you tune in for episode Until then be blessed, get rest and stay healthy.