“The East German government claimed that the Wall was an “anti-Fascist protective rampart” (“antifaschistischer Schutzwall”) intended to dissuade aggression from the West. Another official justification was the activities of western agents in Eastern Europe…. Most of these positions were, however, viewed with skepticism even in East Germany, even more so since most of the time, the border was only closed for citizens of East Germany travelling to the West, but not for residents of West Berlin travelling to the East. The construction of the Wall had caused considerable hardship to families divided by it, and the view that the Wall was mainly a means of preventing the citizens of East Germany from entering West Berlin or fleeing was widely accepted.”
—”Berlin Wall,” Wikipedia
“Llevamos un mundo nuevo en nuestros corazones; ese mundo está creciendo en este instante.”
—Buenaventura Durruti
In 1988, we were juniors in high school—me at Overfelt, my homeboy at Independence High, both on the East Side of San José where we grew up.
We had both just transferred out of the rich, white, prestigious, Jesuit all-boys college preparatory in another part of town, closer to the west side, where our good grades and hard workstudy ethic just weren’t enough to overcome the feelings of being out of place in this alien world of water polo players, flipflop dudes, sunbleachblonde hair, and parkinglot cokesnorts up the noses of the future subprime-loan-profiteering rulers of the world. In the end, even though we’d both done well, and even though we knew we were on the fast track to the Ivy League if we wanted it, we’d both decided to ditch the rich and come back home.
It wasn’t a particularly “conscious” political decision—after all, at the time we were just 16-year-olds who lacked the analytical tools, knowledge, and contextualization, to apply a clear, explicit class/race/ethnicity critique to our decision.
But it was just something that we knew in our guts—that analytical, critical awareness that functions outside the formally sanctioned realms of academic discourse and political ideology. When I would go with my mom to help her clean the houses of the parents of some of those rich, white boys, as she hustled maid money; when my homeboy’s mom would roll up in her janky hooptie to pick us up after school sometimes—while the other students drove themselves off in beamers, benzes, and the occasional hardtimes Lexus. When we, and all the other Latino workstudy underclassmen (i.e., all the Latino underclassmen on campus), worked as “waiters” at the Junior/Senior Ball in polyester red-and-black-and-white monkeysuits, serving lobster and prime rib to fratboys-in-training and their ParisHilton-in-training dates (and stuffing ourselves with fat, untouched, leftover lobster tails in the kitchen destined for the garbage).
When we crawled on hands and knees across the entire football field picking up tiny rocks and putting them into buckets—our first workstudy job in blazing August heat, before our Freshman year classes had even started—so that the field could be mowed and prepared for the campus football stars.
In all these moments, and in countless others that were often too subtle to pinpoint, that required reading between way too many lines—color, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality—we recognized that the price to be paid for being able to poach off and steal the knowledge that had been hoarded here, was far too high.
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