I’m Still Here
February 2026 Notes
I should be in Puerto Rico, eating an alcapurria, drinking jugo de parcha with a splash of rum in my maternal grandfather’s mountains, pero once again Border Patrol and billionaires, with their murderous and death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts ways has delayed my sabbatical so I am still in Los Angeles.
This morning I woke up, along with the rest of us, to news of yet another illegal war where bombs landed on a school. I woke up in a city where it is approaching an unseasonably warm 90 degrees. If this country believed in science or history all of this would mean something but we collectively don’t. Just like we still don’t collectively believe in boycotts of companies apparently whose heads apparently I’m living rent free in. Why else would a day labor center of the organization I help run, be threatened with eviction? I’m sure it has nothing to do with the bad press that company has been getting thanks to noise terrorism they chose to inflict inside the same parking lot where a toddler and their father, a customer. was kidnapped. Just like I’m sure that the surprise inspections and looks at my organization’s books under the guise of looking for “waste & fraud” have nothing to do with this big orange logo’ed company.
As Scot Nakagawa wrote this week re: Medicaid freezes in Minn.:
Authoritarian movements are built around a vision of the political body: the nation as a body, with some people understood as productive members and others as burdens. This is not incidental to authoritarian thought; it is foundational. The eugenics movement that undergirded early twentieth-century fascism explicitly categorized people with disabilities as “life unworthy of life.” The Nazis’ first systematic extermination program was not aimed at Jewish people, it was Aktion T4, the murder of approximately 300,000 disabled people, which served as the operational testing ground for the gas chambers that would later be used in the Holocaust.
Contemporary authoritarians do not use that language. But the underlying logic persists in polished form: the “deserving” versus “undeserving” frame, the relentless focus on “fraud” and “waste” in programs that serve disabled and elderly people, the social Darwinist assumption that dependency is a moral deficiency rather than a universal human condition. When Vance and Oz frame this as protecting “taxpayers” from “scoundrels,” they construct a moral universe in which the people who depend on Medicaid are not understood as the constituency the government serves. They are understood as the cost center the government must discipline.
Waste and fraud accusations are the new dog whistle when it comes to any service, any org, any thing that serves the humanity and dignity of all people, especially migrants and poor people.
Menos mal que no soy perra (at least not like that)
Despite state sanctioned assassinations and corporate manipulation of regulatory systems, I still found pockets of joy and hope. Like:
early Sunday morning walks along the beach with my boyfriend and sung prayers to the ocean in her Pacific form
Venice Beach New and not so new eating and drinking places in Los Angeles and New York City
The Benito Bowl with all its complexities
Keeping my commitment to my niblings of being with them during midwinter break and being not just the cool Titi but the coolest person ever in the eyes of nephew
Hitting the stacks in Loisaida Ash Wednesday church in the form of music and words
Lex brought me to church and to tears and to joy! Somatically stepping into my power
Reading Baldwin
I will be in Puerto Rico. I will be in Martha’s Vineyard. Tell me where else should I go? I am making itineraries! I will be there Later than planned but the plan feels more solid now even as the ground underneath us all shakes.
Hold on with me.
Amazing. Maybe if it works out, be somewhere I can come meet you :) cuz Martha's Vineyard?? that sounds amazing. I've never been. I really like providence and I really love the ocean.
or stop in Baltimore :)