California, Lesson One

Introductions

This picture is a close up detail of a rippled, tiled, decorative pool in sunlight. The flower shaped design at the bottom of the pool alternates four beige, broader petals outlined in purple with narrower intersecting forest green petals outlined in light blue separated by yellow and pink tiles, followed by orange broader petals outlined in burgundy intersected by narrower burgundy petals outlined in black and so on from the bottom to the top of the picture until the glinting sun and the rippling water make the designs hard to make out towards the top. I put this picture here because I’m writing about what California has taught me about sharing the earth justly across differences of history and access and I think this requires the determined discipline it takes to have real conversations that don’t get lost in the abstract. 

There’s not just one side to you, I know that-the myriad of miles between the dessert cacti at the bottom and the lush green wateralls at the top and everything in between like a colorful abstract. But when my tias and primas in Santo Domingo and El Seibo hear of an earthquake in California they think it is happening next door to our apartment in Pasadena when the center is outside Sacramento. I know the miles of coast, that favorite ride on the snaky highway one with the signs that warn of mudslides and falling rocks on windy, rainy days. But there was a time when the state only meant one place for me because I hadn’t yet traveled anywhere else. And sometimes I do wish that just like my primos and tios imagine we were so united as a state that we worked to heal the suffering as one community no matter where the shaking was actually taking place, seeing all the damage as ours to repair. 

I only knew California as San Francisco back then. The city was my entry to the state during a research trip my sophomore summer in college. I am not sure how I knew that there were gay and lesbian people there. At that time I did not yet use these words to describe myself. But I wanted to go somewhere to be safe. So far people around me in my Bronx childhood days seemed to whisper about gay and lesbian people and warn me not to associate with them. So far I would just feel angry that people were saying these things to me but I couldn’t explain why I felt so strongly. So far I did not feel safe admitting, even to myself, my attraction to women. I was shy. Quiet. But somewhere inside I wanted to find gay and lesbian people who spoke Spanish like I did and who liked short afros and Black skin and I thought the way to do this was to leave home and go to San Francisco where somehow I had gleaned through tv shows, songs, news items was a safe place. Because of my sheltered experience of the Bronx, I did not know that the people I was looking for were right next to me, riding the same four and D trains and buying raspado from the same street vendor. At that time the Bronx streets were not visibly safe for all of my realities.

When I got to Berkeley first, then Daly City and finally the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco, I started mapping the realities with my feet. I walked up the steep hills that would challenge my lonely walks around the city forcing me to stop and catch my breath and cautiously tread sideways and in zig zag in order to make it safely up and down its hills. 

I was looking for and didn’t know how to find the open and accepting San Francisco.