I am a passenger in this neighborhood, in this country, on this pale blue dot hurtling through the cosmos. I race my three-year-old daughter up the stairs of the 

 pyramid in Denver's La Raza Park to show her David Ocelotl Garcia’s sprawling four-sided mural 

 for the first time. She holds my hand and twirls in ever widening circles, marveling at the spiraling Nahuatl iconography depicting the travels and travails of the people of Aztlán. She may not remember these stories, they are so easily forgotten, so ephemeral. They shape-shift, metastasize, migrate. They are the journey and we the pilot.

As the story goes, Ruben Salazar ducked in to the Silver Dollar Café when the Los Angeles riot police turned the Chicano Moratorium march into their own private hunting grounds. He wasn’t the type who panicked when things got hot. He’d served as a 

 war correspondent in Vietnam, covered the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, gone undercover to report on drug cartels, witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City. Salazar had just propped himself on a barstool near the entrance to the Sliver Dollar and was about to take a sip of beer when a 10-inch wall-piercing projectile of tear gas was fired through the doorway. It struck him in the head, likely killing him before his body hit the floor.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department called his death an accident. They argued that officers were attacked by rioters while responding to a call from the owner of the Green Mill liquor store who had requested protection from looters (a claim he later denied).

“Salazar was killed," wrote Hunter S. Thompson in 

, "because he happened to be in a bar where police thought there was also a 'man with a gun.' They gave him a chance, they say, by means of a bullhorn warning...and when he didn't come out with his hands up they had no choice but to fire a tear gas bazooka into the bar...and his head got in the way. Tough luck. But what was he doing in that place anyway? Lounging around a noisy Chicano bar in the middle of a communist riot?”

After he joined the prominent Spanish-language television station KMEX as News Director, Salazar continued to write a weekly column of unapologetic, incendiary, erudite articles on Mexican-American affairs for the 

. But at KMEX, he had license to give the Chicano anti-Vietnam War movement a legitimate platform. He exposed police intimidation and violence in Mexican-American communities. He amplified the voices calling for education and social reform in the barrios of East LA. He waded into the deep and sordid injustices occurring on the homefront that his previous editors wouldn’t (or couldn’t) publish and ended up a martyr—one whose name is whispered by few.

Ruben Salazar was killed on August 29, 1970. Three days later, police “discovered” his body among the debris inside the boarded up Silver Dollar Café.

A thousand miles east of Los Angeles lay the deserts of Aztlán, a mythical homeland of the Aztec diaspora corresponding to the southwestern United States. The term refers to the conquered lands of northern Mexico that were ceded to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. When Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales introduced 

 at the first Chicano national conference in Denver in 1969, he redefined Aztlán to signify not just a homeland of myth and legend but a polity of disposessed peoples stretching from California to Colorado. The land of 

“Aztlán,” wrote Gonzales, “a mythical land of the Aztecs? Aztlán an abstract illusion of a Nation? Aztlán a common denominator that 

, the mestizo, the Chicano can agree upon is not based on a 

 of romantic delusions. It is conceived on the foundations of history and the reality of its existence can and will be proven by law; not a law based on political courts of injustice and cold Anglo legalities, but based on human fact and historical inheritance.”

The public pool at Columbus Park in Denver’s Northside neighborhood was 

 place to bein the summer of 1971. A place where young people could ride the wave of Chicano pride—where 

(the community) gathered for “splash-ins,” hung out, networked for jobs, and forged cultural and political identities. What outwardly resembled a cool refuge on hot summer days signified a social inflection point: Mexican-Americans finally had a place to call their own. It seemed only fitting that those who gave Columbus Park vitality and meaning should rename it La Raza Park.

Ten years later, a crowd gathered at La Raza to commemorate the anniversary of the park’s renaming. They were waiting to see Corky Gonzales, the Denver-born featherweight boxing legend and founder of the national Chicano movement Crusade for Justice, who was scheduled to attend. The day Ruben Salazar was killed, Gonzalez had been laying low in an East LA hotel near the Chicano Moratorium demonstration—barely evading police by huddling in the back of an innocuous flatbed truck as cops searched the area.

The celebratory mood at La Raza was tempered due to Gonzales’ presence and residual hostilities from a Brown Beret demonstration at nearby Highland Park the previous day. At noon, a phalanx of police cars arrived and the SWAT team surrounded the park. They ordered nearly 400 people to disperse, claiming event organizers had failed to secure a permit. (This was disputed by Arturo Rodriguez, the longtime manager of La Raza Park who spoke as a respected community member and city employee.) Protesters hurled bottles and rocks at the cops, who retaliated by firing tear gas into the crowd and unleashing dogs on those who refused or were too disoriented to flee—demonstrators, park employees, children, women, the elderly.

Corky Gonzales never addressed the crowd. But the enduring tragedy was that the city council decided to fill the pool with concrete and restore the name Columbus Park. A farewell fuck you from the city to la Raza. Years later, a faux Aztec pyramid was erected on the site where children used to learn how to swim.

I bring my daughter to the playground at La Raza Park on a blazing afternoon in early September. We race up the steps where two homeless men are sitting in the shade of the hollowed out 

 pyramid, leaning against their tattered belongings. On a picnic table next to the playground, surrounded by spruce trees, a grandmother is enjoying an afternoon 

with her grandkids. Across the park, a biracial couple lounges under an elm tree smoking a joint. Northside is now called Sunnyside. A once-inimitable Denver barrio is in the throes of gentrification, its past memorialized in a thin coat of spray-paint on the walls of the last taqueria.

There are no signs of the gathering that took place here in late August when community members commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium and celebrated the removal of all Columbus Park signs from La Raza Park. The signs were taken down quietly on June 26th when shelter-in-place orders were still in effect.

David Ocelotl Garcia’s mural adorning the interior ceiling of the 

 pyramid is one of the few reminders of the public pool where the community once gathered at La Raza Park. He describes 

as having been composed like a book. “Each scene flows into the next story. It goes from creation, to a tribal ceremony, to the Mexican Revolution, to the Mexican-American war, to the journey of the people who came to the States...and ends with the characters going back to the earth.”

It has taken fifty years, but someday soon La Raza Park signs will be driven deep into the earth and the 

 will represent a hard-fought home on the journey of the people of Aztlán.

*To see more of David Ocelotl Garcia’s artwork visit: 

Dispatch from Aztlán

Harry Gamboa Jr. first published on ArtsEverywhere in the 

 series, edited by Matthew Stadler. That essay, titled 

, is an account of his coming-of-age in 1960s East L.A. This second essay looks at the emergence of his photographic artistic practice. The text concludes with a gallery of works spanning decades of his work.

On January 31, 1971, twenty Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies were in attack formation on Whittier Boulevard while facing a peaceful group of youths who were marching slowly along Arizona Avenue in protest against human rights violations against Chicanos in East L.A. The police pointed their rifles, shotguns, and pistols at the protesters and fired a barrage of live ammunition without warning, inflicting bodily injury without discretion or mercy. I saw several acquaintances fall to the ground wounded or lifeless. Many people were hit in the shoulders, legs, and arms. I recognized a neighbour who was strewn across the sidewalk bleeding out through a terrible head wound. The sound of bullets flying past me and then striking the flesh of others seemed to take place on a separate audio track as screams of terror and anguish subsided to almost a whisper. The brutal atrocity was one of many undocumented attacks in East L.A. during the 20th century.

I managed to run in a zigzag pattern and escaped death through clouds of acrid tear gas while getting to the next block where I found my friend John Ortiz crouched down in the back seat of my 1966 VW Beetle. Several deputies advanced forward making a brutal sweep of the area while randomly firing their weapons. I put the key into the ignition and started the engine as a volley of buckshot hit the car’s concave hood, causing lead pellets to ricochet and shatter the windshield. Glass fragments tore into the skin around my eyes while plastic/rubber lining particles scratched both corneas. The bleeding, tears, and pain made it difficult to see the road as I dodged those fleeing along Hubbard Street and accelerated to avoid a blockade at Ford Boulevard. Finally we made it to the onramp of the northbound 710, then picked up speed when I transferred over to the 10.

The continuous burst of smoggy wind that blew in my face caused streaming blood to become a crimson spray that covered much of the car’s interior. John was already smeared with the blood of others and was laughing as he used a pocket knife to etch amateurish pictures of pigs onto a stolen deputy’s helmet. He had “liberated” it from a burning patrol car that was set alight during the chaotic response to the police riot.

“Those motherfucking pigs were trying to kill all of us, but we were already born dead. Not enough guns to kill all the Mexicans. Besides, they mostly shoot themselves. Suicide is always the easy way out for those pussies.”

“John, don’t let anyone see the helmet or we’ll be targeted. You can dump it when we get to the free clinic. I need someone to take care of my eyes.”

“You’re a blind angel, man. You act like there is so much more left to see. Drop me off when we get to Soto Street.

John strapped the decorated helmet onto his head when I pulled over to stop just past the freeway offramp. He got out and spoke to me through the broken windshield.

“You look like a zeroed-out zombie with those eyes.”

He walked away without looking back, seemingly unaffected by all of the violence, the blood, and the existential absurdity of illegally wearing the semi-metallic headdress of law enforcement.

“Hey John, I can barely believe my eyes.”

The continuous bleeding obscured my vision and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I drove cautiously until I managed to arrive safely at the Rap House Free Clinic where I often worked various freelance jobs as a Youth Peer-Counselor and as a projectionist for the weekly informational film screenings regarding pregnancy prevention, sexually transmitted diseases, and psychedelic drugs. Dr. Terence Cronin was on duty and promptly stitched my wounds to halt the loss of blood. He handed me a complimentary packet of Erythromycin capsules to ward off infection and a small bottle of medicated eyedrops. He and the several other volunteer physicians were experts at emergency care resulting from their experience as mandatory military medical service personnel in the Vietnam War. I would often have conversations with him about contemporary literature, urban lore, and film-noir.

“You are definitely hanging around with the wrong set of comrades. The blabbing KFWB radio bullshit just announced that all of you Chicanos were threatening the police and that they had to defend themselves by using force. You’re lucky not to be in a body bag.”
He offered me a worn paperback book, 

“It’s a great read but seems highly unlikely that the British, Nazis, and Mexicans would celebrate Day of the Dead with such high-octane tequila so close to my favorite two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. Maybe you like to play with fire too.”

He lit a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring towards the ceiling.

, I’ll read the novel when I can get my eyes to follow the printed word.

“You’re nineteen years old without even the slightest sliver of social status. When are you going to let everyone know why we should care if you live or die? It’s your responsibility to share your vision while you still have eyes in your head. How are you ever going to be the object of desire and not just another easy target of hate?”

He placed a small orange plastic container filled with Valium in my shirt pocket.

“Find yourself a place to rest, take two of these, and today’s nightmare will seem like a distant dream.”

I walked out of the clinic relieved to think that I might heal soon. When I got into my car, it occurred to me that I was fortunate to have recently purchased it from a family who had lost their son to the war. The car allowed me safe passage out of a deadly situation and also the freedom to go anywhere. I drove the length of Sunset Boulevard from Boyle Heights to Echo Park, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, to Pacific Coast Highway and then continued northward past Malibu to Zuma Beach. I pulled over to park at the edge of the sandy beach as the sun dipped into the ocean just before nightfall. The deep scratches in my retinas were still burning as tears flowed uncontrollably. It had been an incredibly bloody day. I wished I had pictures. I leaned my head back on the car seat and placed several drops of medication on each eye and swallowed two capsules. The burning sensation seemed to seer the memory of people being struck by police bullets. No one had expected to be wounded or murdered. My angry tears were momentarily at a safe distance from East L.A. The soothing sounds of the Pacific Ocean waves and the psychopharmacological effects of the drug lulled me into a dreamless sleep that kept me comforted through the night.

“Hey, buddy, you doing O.K.? You alive?” An elderly man was tugging at the door handle, causing my car to almost tip over.

“Barely.” I opened my eyes but everything looked foggy in the bright sunlight.

“You’ve got to move your car or you’ll be towed. They’re making a Hollywood movie and I’m not sure if it’s gonna be Linda Lovelace or Annette Funicello, but one of them wants to give Zuma Beach a mind-blowing performance. You wouldn’t want security to throw sand in your face.”

“Now that would suck. Thanks for the warning.”

The old man laughed at me as he took a sip from a small bottle of cheap vodka.

The car started quickly but was there enough fuel for the fifty-mile drive to Los Angeles State College? I was enrolled full-time there, intent on remaining as an undeclared major while performing at a nominal level to pass a few classes as a full-time student so that I could maintain my Selective Service Class II – S (Student Deferment), to avoid getting shipped to Vietnam. I was against the war and wasn’t interested in being at war in Los Angeles. I was not a violent man. The 

 bumper sticker on my VW stated my views and practice succinctly. The speeding cars, trucks, and motorcycles competed for open space on the road endangering each other in their rush to reach the freeway. The wind blowing through the gaping hole where my windshield used to be played havoc with my vision, but I managed to overcome traffic jams and reckless speed demons to arrive safely at my usual parking spot on a hill known as “Metro,” overlooking the college. I stepped onto the asphalt and was amazed by the numerous pockmarks on the VW’s sturdy metal exterior inflicted by the insufficient firepower of the brutal L.A.P.D. deputies.

Many other students managed to find free parking spaces along the winding streets and were walking down the familiar pathways that would lead us all to the main entry point of the college campus where several long-haired young people were wearing headbands, love beads, and fashionably torn clothes distributing mimeographed flyers that announced forthcoming protest actions:

The majority-white student population of the college contributed to the popularity of Students for a Democratic Society, a radical organization that often staged protests and other actions (without fear of being gunned down in the streets, as was a common police tactic at Chicano protests in the surrounding Mexican American neighbourhoods of East L.A.).

I arrived on time at King Hall for my Psychology 101 class taught by the acclaimed psychologist, Dr. Michael Wapner. He would often drink coffee and always smoked cigarettes along with half of the students who would puff away in the classroom. His manic movements and hypnotic speaking style held students in suspended animation during two hour-long lectures that delivered brilliant insights into human consciousness and unconsciousness.

“We are being consumed by the daily media meat grinder. Television is a terrible way to treat your mind, learn to be human beyond yourself. Seize the horizontal and vertical controls and you will achieve the power of perception over others.”

My bloodshot eyes and bloodstained shirt appeared to have impressed another student in her late 20’s who was sitting next to me. I recognized her as someone who was usually present at political rallies, sit-ins, or whenever students had campus-wide protest marches.

“You look like the luckiest guy in the world,” she said to me. “I’m sure that if Jimi Hendrix had some of your expertise he would’ve lived to enjoyed another day.” She held out three LSD tablets. “Maybe you should try this Purple Haze to push you into the next realm of reality.”

“No thanks,” I said. “All of my hallucinations are too real.”

“Suit yourself, free love is never free, unless I say so.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth as an industrial bell rang loudly, announcing the end of class. The enticing bait of assertive sexuality and mint-flavoured lips would have persuaded me had I not noticed the glint of a badge and a gun in her handbag as she got up to leave. Probably she was connected to the dark legacy of COINTELPRO, an illegal domestic surveillance program, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, designed to entrap activists and ensure their imprisonment or disappearance. Professor Wapner looked nervous and agitated. I could sense his trepidation as he lit another cigarette.

“She was pouring it on thick. Your autonomic nervous system could have blown a fuse. Fucking uncover cops. Luckily, your picture didn’t appear in today’s newspapers. More than a dozen Chicanos have been charged with assault on police officers and other serious crimes. Better get rid of that blood splattered shirt. If there isn’t a revolution of consciousness soon, we’ll all be targeted by the police state.”

“Thank you, professor. I’ll try to avoid the spies in our midst.”

The idea of a police state was too abstract for me to fully comprehend at the moment. I left class and walked down the crowded hallway bathed in pinkish fluorescent light making everything nauseatingly off-colour while eradicating the shadows of the many nameless students. I had the momentary sense that I was invisible and everything around me was a mirage. King Hall was also a nuclear fallout shelter for general use in case of a National Emergency. The thought of being entombed forever in this brutalist structure by a thermonuclear blast was demoralizing and I was happy to exit as quickly as possible.

A bank of vending machines in the middle of the campus commons area sold junk foods and canned soft drinks to anyone with coins. I placed some dimes in the two newspaper racks for single copies of the Los Angeles 

. According to their reports, the police encountered rioters in East L.A. and they were compelled to utilize force resulting in one death and several injuries to some police officers. The black and white photographs of young Chicanos clenching their fists did not truly reveal that they were actually pleading for the police to stop shooting at us. Other pictures implied that the police were in fear for their own safety. There were no images or written text indicating the many critically wounded or possibly dead protesters or anything that would indicate an opposing Chicano point of view. I was struck with the realization that they had cameras and we did not have such a technological advantage to advance our voice to a broader public.

Pus was dripping from the corner of my eyes and infection threatened my vision despite my repeated use of eye drops. It would be unsafe to drive, so I left my car parked on the hill and decided to walk from campus for several miles along City Terrace Drive and across the hilly terrain of Hazard Avenue to rejoin the dysfunction of family life in the small house where I had grown up in Boyle Heights. When I arrived there in the early afternoon, I crawled into bed and emptied the drops into my eyes, swallowed a combination of several antibiotic capsules and anxiolytic tablets, then pulled the blanket over my head. For the most part, I remained there motionless and silent for over a week until the early morning of February 9th when the powerfully destructive 6.6 Sylmar Earthquake struck all of Southern California. The intense shaking caused a portion of the roof to literally crash down on me. I crawled free and uninjured from under the rubble and made sure that the rest of the family was safe too. I dusted myself free of crumbled stucco particles and dressed myself in my usual attire of denim pants and a black sweatshirt. My inexpensive work boots would protect me against walking over broken glass or any other sharp objects. A ballpoint pen, folded sheets of lined paper, a few coins, and my car keys were already in my pocket. I had more than twenty-five dollars in my wallet along with a valid driver’s license and the life-saving II – S draft card. I stepped out onto the street feeling reassured and confident as a survivor of yet another disaster. I walked towards Esperanza Street while looking at the structural damage to the neighborhood.

A strange sense of clarity came over me as the sun was rising. My eyes were feeling much better and were not overly sensitive to the light and cool air. The subtle range of hues and the shadows cast on the walls stood out in sharp relief. The texture of the blackened asphalt and disparate blades of green lawn grass appeared to take on previously unrecognized connected patterns between nature and human products. The obvious movements of trees in the slight breeze contrasted with the few clouds that flowed slowly in the sky. As I continued to walk, I encountered several people who were intent on getting to work on time despite the catastrophic event. I noticed their determined faces, all Mexican, with impressively combined Aztec and European traits that formed radiant dual-warrior smiles from disparate lands as they struggled through the uncertainty of late 20th-century angst.

“Hey, where you going? The earth is going to swallow us anyway. Man, my house fell down and now there is nowhere for me or my kids to sleep. The 

 will set the dinosaurs free to eat you and me. Can’t you see? I’m a poet.”

Gloria Le Meur was always walking around the neighbourhood looking for her unidentified husband whom she married when she was only fifteen years old. It had been less than a year when she had found him hanging by the neck from the flagpole in front of the library. The death was officially declared a suicide but everyone assumed it was a gang-related murder. She performed improvisational spoken-word poetry at his humble funeral then went home to shave her head, and began wearing his clothes, and often carried a portable radio that played white noise static that usually matched her state of mind. Many people believed that she was the doppelgänger of her departed spouse.

“My Mister was going to meet me somewhere, mind if I walk alongside you, you know, just for kicks?”

Her twin boys were eleven years old and they took it for granted that they would have to hunt down their mother on a regular basis. Their resilience was proven by their relentless pursuit of enterprising activities in school and in the neighbourhood. I was certain that they would be looking to return her to the safety of their fenced-in front yard.

“There is no way for me to stop you, Gloria. Maybe you’ll enjoying walking with me for seven miles in a straight line to L.A. State College. I need to pick up my car and set everything into motion. I’ll give you a ride back from there.”

We were almost at Whittier Boulevard where the Julian’s Furniture store building is located adjacent to the cemetery, an aftershock shook everything with an extreme jolt that caused a few bricks to fall off and crash on the sidewalk only a few feet away from us. A large, deep, gaping fissure opened up in the middle of Esperanza Street that stretched for more than a city block. I looked down into the unstable crevice and was surprised to see millions of wriggling earthworms.

Gloria was holding my hand as her razor-sharp nails scratched my lifeline with unexpected tenderness. Several hundred headstones were visibly swaying as the liquefaction affected the landscape that was often used as a playground or as a place for lovers to fulfill a dying wish.

“My husband, my husband, my husband…”

Another sudden major shaking of the earth caused Gloria to lose her footing. I pulled her up against me as the momentary ditch sealed itself with a loud crash that caused the asphalt surface to shatter into brittle flakes of rock and hardened tar while releasing an enormous cloud of dust that was imbued with 

 gas. There were strange lights flashing in the sky that could have been prompted by the earthquakes to form electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere. Gloria turned up the volume on the radio as we walked on Whittier Boulevard towards Indiana Street. Shattered windows, broken beams, and twisted steel were interspersed with super-sized potholes to create a surreal layer of visual cues on top of an already dilapidated environment of hundred-year-old structures. Many of the business establishments had faded painted multilingual signage in German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Italian, and English that indicated the historic demographic shifts of various ethnic groups that had passed through Los Angeles. Everything appeared to be so vivid to me at that moment.

“I don’t want to live in a city that is shaking all of the time.”

Gloria was drifting off into a delusional, internal epic poem that might take her to a phantom place. Slight tremors were occurring at irregular intervals causing sharp, loud cracks to form on the sidewalks. We picked up the pace on Indiana Street as the sunshine became evermore intense. The radio hissed and wailed while emitting high frequency tones that frightened the birds, causing them to fly away from the trees and overhanging power lines.

“The blue jays know how to live while the mockingbirds complain. Sparrows rob the pigeons and the hummingbirds scare the evil away. Urban owls are a let-down and a crow has nothing to say. I am the canary and you are the anti-condor. Let’s soar to where the air is thin.”

Gloria waved goodbye with an implied sensuality as she blew air kisses. I could see that her devoted sons had been following us all along and were happy to embrace their mother in the midst of natural destruction and distress.

I noticed that a police patrol car was moving slowly up the street and was not too surprised when it pulled up to the curb alongside me. “We’ve been given orders to shoot looters on sight. You look like you couldn’t fight your way through a minute in jail. We’d be doing you a favour if you were in fact, a looter. You know, shoot you.”

The police officer on the passenger side was giggling.

“Real gangsters don’t let assholes like you play-act being a homeboy because they’d force you to be their readymade pussy.”

The police officer behind the steering wheel was laughing out loud.

“We should run you in just for wearing those ugly bellbottoms. Better grow up to be a real man before you run out of time.”

They both smiled menacingly as the cruiser burned rubber with screeching tires and sped off beyond my sightline at a tremendous speed. Their inverted, coloured afterimage hovered before me for a moment as I recalled the details of their taunting facial expressions and the overall lack of humanity in their meaningless pitstop. I envisioned the insignia, killer weaponry, skin texture and tone of their hands and faces, the black leather gloves as well as the metallic spectral glint from the polished chrome surfaces and plastic emergency light fixtures. The afterimage faded but not the memory. I wondered what it would be like if I were able to capture such a threatening image on film when it presented itself in the form of these two intimidating sheriff deputies.

The remaining two-hour long walking journey was uneventful as the crust of the earth settled down. I peered at the many things and places in my surroundings that had fallen or shifted from place. I was very happy to be pain-free and to have regained my 20-20 vision. The cool breeze was refreshing as I walked up to my car that had been parked in place for more than a week.

“Hey, man. Power to the people. Be cool. Let me take my things out of the back of the car.”

A young man walked up to me while he was sipping sugar-free Tab from a can. He was draped in a tattered American flag and lifted his two fingers making the peace sign. He carried himself as though he were co-starring with Peter Fonda in 

. The word “Hippie” was painted across his forehead but recent slashes across his wrists told a different story.

“Yeah, sure. My days of using the car as a public storage locker are over. Time to move out.” He reached in and retrieved two of three cardboard boxes filled with miscellaneous valueless items and plastic flowers. “You can keep my books, and everything else in that box, man. You know, gratitude, and all that. I left Boston a few weeks ago in order to escape the weight of inherited privilege, but that was before I found Nirvana, man. L.A., it’s so heavenly in a dystopian sort of way. Why the fuck would I want to read 

 when there is so much sun to live out my destiny. Caviar tastes like shit. Expand your mind dude. 

As he walked away, I rummaged through the remaining box filled with pristine paperback books and a few other items. I noticed many of the interesting titles by several Russian authors: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, 

 by Nikolai Gogol for first reading. I was surprised to discover fourteen newly-printed ten dollar bills that were inserted between its cover and the title page. At the bottom of the box was a transparent vinyl coin purse that held several small pieces of folded paper with each containing a quarter teaspoonful of white powder that I assumed to be heroin. I immediately tossed the purse with its contents into a thicket of bushes that overlooked the hill and emptied my container of Valium into a drainage pipe that protruded from the ground near the edge of a steep cliff. I placed all of the books with my other reading materials into the front trunk of the VW and left the empty box on the sidewalk. I then drove to the auto repair strip on Mission Road where I found a shop that replaced my windshield, rotated my tires, and changed the oil for less than one hundred dollars.

I spent the rest of 1971 reading Russian literature and attending classes in a sporadic fashion. Much of my time was situated on the college campus where I met many people but I was also involved in publishing and editing, 

, a limited-edition Chicano magazine that would play a foundational role in the development of contemporary Chicano art. I recruited three artists, 

, to create new drawings for the magazine while I worked with John Ortiz to write as well as to seek out writers so that many new works of fiction and essays could be included in each of the issues for volume five.

I had never previously drawn pictures but was inspired to give it a try while being surrounded by the talented artists who I had met during the last year of high school at parties or on the streets. We would utilize the garage space behind the family homes of Herrón in City Terrace and Valdez in East L.A. to draw throughout the night while talking, joking, and sharing stories. Our youthful enthusiasm and competitiveness ruled out any notion of collectivism. We would work in tandem but were keen to define our boundaries and were always alert to state our respective claim to authorship of whatever we might say or do. Humberto Sandoval would often drop by. He had grown up with Herrón and was hyperkinetic, fun, and always attuned to financial opportunities. We were the irradiated generation that had nothing to lose and much to live for despite the odds. I was born on the day of the first Hydrogen bomb test in 1951.

We knew that President Richard Nixon was especially culpable in the disproportionate numbers of Chicanos being drafted into the military to fight and die in what we considered an illegal war in Vietnam. Many of our friends were already dead or in combat zones. None of us were interested in confrontational politics but we had ideas on how to attract attention to our concerns. We wanted to return to Whittier Boulevard to create a spectacle to counteract negative media stereotypes but also to dislodge the fear that permeated our neighbourhoods after so many lethal police actions against Chicanos.

In late December, Herrón constructed a huge crucifix out of cardboard, masking tape, and wire. He invited us to smear mud, paint, and other substances on it to give it a severely polluted appearance. We carried the crucifix on the morning of Christmas Eve following the route of traditional lowrider cruising culture on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. and then moved along Atlantic Boulevard to the U.S. Marine Recruiting Center. Herrón wore a white robe on which he had painted a bloodied Sacred Heart. His face was made up to resemble that of a 

 from the Day of the Dead. Gronk wore a green bowler hat with matching jacket while tossing popcorn at people from a large bag. I painted myself as a conceptual ghoul while wearing an actual bleached dog’s skull atop my head that was tied in place with a stream of white lace. We proceeded with our nonverbal quasi-religious procession while many shoppers filled the sidewalks. 

, a National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellow, took 

 as we walked from S. Burger Avenue to our final destination. We had already measured the doorway of the site so that the crucifix would fit in place as we shoved it in tightly at a vertical position to block entry, thereby preventing anyone in East L.A. from joining the military on that day.

The action was a success, but we were disappointed that no mass media was present to announce our debut performance. I would not become aware of Rosen’s photographs for many years but at that time wondered what we might have looked like in costume with the crucifix and how it all might in appear in context within the urban environment. The reality that we did not have a means to adequately capture imagery for use in promoting Chicano culture was dispiriting while the mass media was expending endless resources to create an intensely negative narrative that completely disregarded and disrespected our growing cultural presence. The end of the year was near and it had been an exhaustive dive into psychological, emotional, and physical stressors that served as a rite of passage into adulthood. A creative spark provided some hope for a way to lead my way into a more positive light.

In late January, 1972, I was talking with a few friends at my usual spot near the college campus library when a young female student approached and handed me an official blue summons form. I had no idea how she identified me but I was instructed to show up at the cash disbursement booth in the financial aid office within the hour.

“Don’t ask me, but somebody must really like you.”

I laughed nervously wondering how much I might owe in student fees. It took a few moments for me to be positioned at the end of the line along with forty students who were waiting for their turn to meet with the administrator.

“Hey you, that’s a summons form, you get to go to the front of the line.” All the other students looked at me with envy. I moved up front to speak to the woman sitting at a desk, talking to me through a small window.

“I’ll need to see your student I.D. and California driver’s license or birth certificate.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone walking around with their birth certificate.

“Well, that looks good enough. Please sign in ink, here and here.”

She pushed two printed documents towards me. I signed them without reading.

“Thanks. And these are for you.” She handed me an official letter that stated the three cheque totaling four thousand dollars represented a special one-time award of support for me. One cheque came from the fundraising efforts of community groups to support underprivileged Chicano students, another was from the federal Model Cities Program, and the last cheque was from an anonymous donor. A letter accompanying it encouraged me to utilize the funds to cover the cost of my college education. I’d never before been in possession of so much money. I ran to my car and drove to the nearest Bank of America where I cashed cheques for two thousand dollars, which I immediately stuffed into my pockets, depositing the rest in my meager savings account.

I called Herrón and Sandoval from a nearby payphone and asked them if they’d like to join me on my shopping trip to Henry’s Camera on 8th Street in downtown Los Angeles. They were excited and I picked them up right away. We entered the busy store that was famous for their radio, television, and print advertisements offering everything in photographic gear. I had no knowledge whatsoever regarding photography but knew that I had a unique way of seeing everything.

“So you wanna buy a camera, not just any simple thing. Well, have I got the camera for you, it is amazing dollar for dollar.”

He pulled out a camera from the glass case and ran through a couple of functions showing me how to load the film then placed the camera in my hands and encouraged me to take a few shots that would require me to manually advance the film while focusing the lens. I photographed Herrón and Sandoval.

“It’s that easy. What do you say, is it a deal?’

I pointed to a different camera that appeared to be a bit more expensive that had a separate body with additional lenses that could be attached for different visual results.

“So, you’re a professional. O.K. This here is the Minolta 101, one of the first 35mm cameras to have full-aperture TTL metering. The Rokkor lenses are made in Japan and capture light perfectly. You’ll be needing film too. The big thing nowadays is slide film, you know, so that you can project your little ideas onto big screens. I recommend a 50mm lens for everyday use and a telephoto lens when you’d like to see something closer than you can touch.”

“Great, I’ll take it. You got any film that makes it look like a movie?”

“This is L.A., and as far as I know we really are in Hollywood. We sell industrial level Kodak Ektachrome 400 film by the roll. The studios use it, why shouldn’t you take part?”

“Cool. I’ll take fifty rolls. Where can I get it processed?”

“Right here, anytime, all of the time.”

“You’ll be needing a tripod and a camera bag, that’s extra of course.”

I paid for everything with a stack of dollars.

Herrón and Sandoval were impressed and wondering where I might have come across enough money to spend it in what appeared to be an extravagant manner. We walked back to the car and put all of my camera equipment in the trunk then drove out to Santa Monica beach where we talked and laughed while drinking some inexpensive wine that I bought from a nearby mom-and-pop liquor store even though all three of us were still underage. It was a fun moment that seemed like it could last forever.

Nearly half a century has passed since that day, and I have taken countless photographs over the years in order to create a few images that have contributed to intercultural dialogue and understanding while capturing what to me are beautiful personal moments. My photographs were first exhibited in Mexico City at Museo de Arte Moderno in 1978 and the resulting photographs that I took of Herrón, Patssi, Gronk and Sandoval during the group’s Asco era (1972-1985) were introduced into the American and International contemporary art canon in 2011 with a major retrospective exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then, major museums and other institutions have included my photographs in their permanent collections and many publications have featured my works on their pages and front covers. In 2022, I’ll be serving as Director of the Photo/Media program at the prestigious California Institute of the Arts. Many intertwining relationships involving the people who are currently present while others have slipped away or vanished from recollection, have made a great impact on the visual narrative of what could be presented in an aesthetic manner or described in theoretical texts. It has always been wonderful to work with performers who effect a persona that enhance the actual lived experience of an entire era even if only for a fraction of a second via photography. Photographic images can document and define a period of time, place, and people.

From Scratched Corneas to Critical Focus

Imagine you’re sitting in a circle with nine other people holding the same script of a canonical play. Your circle is dead center of a stuffy gym without air conditioning in Mississippi and it is July. Birds swoop and puddles of water linger on the floor from the last rain. In four days most of the people holding this sweating, canonical script will perform this play, though it is clear now that most people in the circle have not yet read it. Imagine the script everyone holds is 

, and that six of the people in the circle wear red pants, which means that they live on death row and that the gym that holds you is in a prison. Imagine the heavy silence that follows when one of the men living on death row says of the play 

 that the point of the play is that“We know the main character’s going to die because it’s in the title.” You can’t breathe until he finishes his thought: “Knowing he will die makes us care about him the whole time.”

Before joining the circle of men living on death row in the stuffy gym full of birds and holes and puddles, you would have already been granted access to Mississippi State Penitentiary through a large gate off Highway 49 in the Mississippi Delta. After showing the guard your ID and answering “no” to her question about whether you have weapons in your vehicle, you would have entered the former plantation, also known as Parchman, sprawled across 18,000 acres in Sunflower County. As of 2025, around 2,500 men are incarcerated at Parchman, and the racial disparity makes visible the living haunting of the region’s history: 1,592 Black residents, almost twice as many as the 840 white residents.

After the gate, you passed the chapel, a hospital, an archives building, and an abandoned unit rusted over with Virginia creeper and wire. Those living on the farm who don’t wear red pants wear black and white stripes or green and white stripes, depending on their custody level. The vision of men in stripes working the fieldsmight feel like you’re in a Coen brothers movie if not for the real bites from real mosquitoes and the heat so heavy you have to carry it when you leave the car.Sometimes, if it’s not too hot or too cold, a man in green stripes rides a horse around the farm, moving slowly from one abandoned-looking building to another, each structure with a slumping front porch. Sometimes, ponies gallop through pastures, and people driving from one carceral unit to another stop to watch.

If you’ve ever been inside a prison as a visitor, volunteer, or staff member, you know the drill. First, there is the security screening, ranging from performative to intensely suspicious depending on the day or the staff member or the staff member’s mood on any given day. There might be a security screening machine large enough to take up most of the check-in station, or there might be a table and chair and a guard with a walkie-talkie. You bristle a bit, unsure what will be scrutinized and what will go unnoticed. Maybe your earrings are too dangly (even though you wore that exact pair inside last time); maybe this guard on this day doesn’t want you to bring inside your sunglasses (though you’ve been doing so all summer); maybe the guard eyes your shirt and you worry if the prison clothes you chose for this day are the wrong color or too tight or too low cut. It takes only a few times inside to learn that the arbitrariness you experience during a security screening is just a fraction of the arbitrariness the residents of this place experience daily.

After you’ve made it through security, you pass through a fenced pen with doors on either side that will not open simultaneously, trapping you for seconds and sometimes longer, depending on the whims or distractions of a guard watching you somewhere and pushing the buttons to open the doors. When you arrive at the gym, you will likely have a few minutes, maybe many minutes, to yourself because the participants, who stay across a yard of fences and concrete, are only summoned by a guard after you arrive. You can spend the unknown number of minutes shuffling papers, relationship-building with any guard who happens to be in the area, or letting your brain push and pull over what it would be like to never be able to leave here.

Currently, there are over 2,000 people living in the United States with a death sentence, the title “going to die” framing how others see them. Parchman houses the 34 men living on death row in Mississippi, and the one woman in Mississippi with a death sentence resides hundreds of miles away among other incarcerated women. These numbers change, as convictions and executions are ongoing; the number has already gone down less than a year after you worked on this play, when the state executed a 79-year-old man whom you never met, but who everyone you worked with had lived with for decades. The cases that lead to death sentences in the South get a lot of press, but you don’t know these cases and you don’t know these men well and they don’t talk about it and you don’t ask. And you haven’t been in the South long and you don’t make a habit of looking up the people in prison before you go in to work with them. A few days after producing the play with these men, however, you might be at home and comfortable in bed, from where you open your laptop and Google the men you have just collaborated alongside. The stories you read collide with the actual memories you have of these people. They are highly visible online, but the play enabled each man to make visible another version of themselves, one version among other versions of what happened and who they are.Several of the men who performed in this play publish their own writing, some of which you can also find online and read 

. Anyone who reads some of this writing or could see these men perform in a play will surely be more confused than when they saw these names listed on the internet next to the summary of a crime. You become more comfortable with confusion. Again.

is about a failing salesman named Willy Loman and his attempt to connect with his wife and two sons. Or, it is about capitalism and masculinity, or about pride and loneliness. Or it is about a man driven to die and who thus lives with his own death every moment of the play. What can any of us know about Arthur Miller’s classic without seeing it performed by a cast of men living on death row in Mississippi? What can any of us know about men living on death row in Mississippi without seeing them perform Miller’s classic play? People living with death sentences fight every day against death, playing the role that reminds everyone, on stage and off, to keep creating the ways in which we are alive.

When the actors arrive at the gym for rehearsal, you can choose between turning on the giant, industrial fan for relief from the heat or to hear each other and be a little bit hotter. If you have taught a class or facilitated a workshop or collaborated on a project with a group of people who want to make art while they are incarcerated, then you have probably felt it: the specific form of focus that does not seem possible in any other setting, despite the best efforts of professors, teachers, and facilitators in other spaces. This focus forms from a group of people who have not only chosen to be in this particular room, but have perhaps looked forward to being in this particular room all week, or even all month, for how what happens in that room breaks the routine of food trays, count, interrupted phone calls, commissary, food trays, count, count, count. When a group of people are in a room because they are choosing to make their life artful within a system and structure that seems to want nothing to do with art, it begins to feel like attention paid to one another. It begins to feel like care. It begins to feel like anything is possible. Whatever that group creates begins to feel like a soft spot on an earth whose surface seems to have become hard.

When a man in green and white stripes and plastic gloves pushes in a cart of food trays, you must stop for lunch. No matter if an actor is on the cusp of clicking into his character, no matter if someone is in the middle of the most important epiphany they have ever said out loud, or if nothing could feel less important than food at that moment, because actually nothing is more important than food at any moment for anyone who is incarcerated in the deep South or, let’s face it, almost anywhere else. One of the actors, the man who will play Happy, is also a preacher, and he will offer a prayer before beginning whatever meal the men in green and white stripes push into the gym. Everyone at the table will hold hands, and why wouldn’t you let yourself be part of a circle, attention paid to what all of us have and not what we have not.

Most of the men on death row in Mississippi have spent their time there on lockdown. Before 2022, these same men were on 23-hour lockdown seven days a week, shackled for any movement outside of their cells. There are stories from men who performed in this play and from men who live next to them about wearing flip-flops for years—summer, fall, winter, spring—because someone on the other side of the unit (and not on death row) tried to escape; stories about plumbing so bad that one man stepped out of his cell and saw a turd floating by; stories about people starting fires to get the guards’ attention; stories about people having sex with guards, people finding condoms in the food—prison stuff. 

Stories of waiting to see if a friend who was taken to the death house across the former planation might come back

, after all, because the thing about living on death row is that it’s never over until it's over.

In 2022, upper Administration had a change of the guard and listened to a few key staff members on the ground pushing for change on death row. First, there was the chaplain who cared an extraordinary amount about these men and fought for their access to programs, knowing that men with death sentences need programs just like anyone in prison. Non-profits, higher education in prison programs, and DOCs across the nation typically direct resources to incarcerated people who will“return to society,” justifying the time and money spent on these programs as an investment for all of us, those inside and outside, so that human self-improvement is bound up with contributing, being productive, and participating in economies of labor and consumption. So that another person’s life should be better because of the way it improves yours. Wouldn’t you feel better if someone leaving prison has read Gwendolyn Brooks, painted using the color wheel, or felt the vulnerability of literally (when costumes are possible) walking in another person’s shoes in front of an audience? (Wouldn’t you feel better if everyone you passed on the street or interacted with on any given day has read Gwendolyn Brooks, painted using the color wheel, and felt the vulnerability of walking in someone else’s shoes in front of an audience?). But art is not only for sale. There is intrinsic value in people making art even if—or perhaps because—they are labeled as people who will live in prison until they die (or are killed) in prison.

On death row in Mississippi, it started with a book club. This was possible only if the men in red pants gathered in the middle of the zone surrounded by a K-9 SWAT team with shock shields. Then the shock shields came down, and then K9 didn’t have to come every time the group gathered to talk about literature. By the summer of 2023, these men were crossing the yard—without chains—and spending time in the gym to rehearse for a play.There is always a staff shortage, so Major S., one of the first officers to be with the men with their cell doors open and their hands uncuffed, volunteered to sit on her days off in the stuffy gym with birds swooping left and right so that these men could do something new and creative. She watched and smiled and read along with the script during rehearsals. Actors went up to her for hugs and she talked about retiring soon, maybe in Florida, except it was hard to leave these guys. One day she brought muffins.

In theatre, you close the loop when you invite an audience in to watch the show.Of course, it feels good (and it matters) to play theatre games, to laugh, to imagine yourself as another person, but it’s only theatre when you turn to others: “see what we did?” If you have ever participated in a play, you know that it’s theatre when the shimmering of who you are shines through the facade of character, the both/and-ness of performing, of expressing and masking yourself at the same time. It’s theatre when this process of being-and-not-being is witnessed by others who are there to see your transformation. It’s theatre when everyone’s individual self-serving impulses and anxieties are subsumed by the whole, where the collective goal is prioritized above all else. It’s theater when a group of people work together to create something for another group of people, and believe with their whole hearts that what they offer to an audience is a new way of seeing the world.The play is the thing.

Every facility and DOC will tell you something different about who can and cannot attend something like a play. If you work your butt off, you might be permitted to invite a mixed audience of encouraging outsiders that might include lawyers, other volunteers, and teachers, along with off-duty staff members and approved residents in the facility. Some of these residents might wear red pants, other residents of the row, but most likely it will be men in stripes. If you’re really lucky and you really work your butt off, you might find a way to get actors’ family members in the audience. And maybe how hard you work bears no relationship to your luck.

Whoever makes up the audience, they will probably arrive early and all at once. When seated, they face the set: a water-stained wall, mustard-yellow plastic benches winged outward, and two rectangular folding tables leaned back the tall way. Enter Biff and Happy, brothers overhearing their father’s madness in the kitchen below. The brothers talk women, career, disappointment, possibility. Enter Howard, cooly rolling a cigar out of transparent tobacco and a paper towel (you could feel the audience breathe in with longing to smoke one, too); there is Charley pulling out a deck of cards that he and Willy Loman throw back and forth as they get angrier and angrier with one another; there is a plastic bottle of iced tea offered as a flask of whisky. Birds swoop over the heads of the actors and hop around at the audience’s feet.

In the q & a after the performance, people who already support the actors will stand up to celebrate their accomplishment. Chaplains, lawyers, and officers talk about hope, the actors taking care of their health, feeling the importance of getting out of bed every morning. A member from someone’s legal team might stand up and say 

 and mean it. There is an impossible paradox of feelings in the humming high of having seen a play that can exist only because of pain: to be so glad the play happened in this place and with these men at the same time as wishing that it didn’t have to.

An inevitable distraction interrupts this humming when someone in green and white stripes pushes food through the doors. This won’t be regular prison food, either, because you will have connected with one church group or another who knows the importance of home cooked food on special occasions. A preacher or a chaplain will bless the food and someone helpful removes the lids of pans holding fried chicken, mac and cheese, biscuits. The actors and the audience will break into worship song, and depending on whether you are there as volunteer, staff, or audience, you may be the only one who does not know the words.

A photographer in green and white stripes snaps photos of the play, the meal, headshots of the actors. If you are a volunteer facilitator, the actors might want a photo with you and ask you to share it on social media, and maybe you will, acknowledging the request of someone to be seen as an artist and unable to post the photo on their own; or maybe you won’t, worried by the weight of carrying either the brightness of the virtue signal or the darkness of what any victims might feel. People on death row have presumably done things that have caused profound suffering to individuals and families, and there are people out there who 

 these men in red pants, and these men in green and white striped pants and black and white striped pants, to suffer. What does it say about all of us that images of joy are political?

While you’re in the gym, tossing around soft juggling balls for warm-up’s, gathering up homespun props, or passing out certificates after everyone has eaten, it is easy to forget what’s in the title. Only later, when you are pumping your arms and your breath on a run, pushing and pulling your thoughts, are you weighted down by the title, of the deaths foretold. State-sanctioned executions are their own performance; death chambers have curtains that open and close. There are masks to obscure identities, there is a climax and a denouement. When the state has finally killed, the drama concludes. The threat is contained, and the public sighs in relief.In the official record, the loop is closed.

But until the state picks up the narrative, the men who act in a play about death while living with a death sentence continue living. Most people on death row do not have execution dates yet. Their cases drag on for decades through layers of courts, procedures, appeals, and hope.People who used to live next to these men have been released, exonerated, and expected to return to their lives and pretend that those decades of surviving on death row never happened. The man who plays Charley insists that when an innocent man is released, this is a cause for joy, yes, but also for acknowledging that the system fucked up: the exonerated man has been wronged. Who is pushed on stage when this happens and who stays in the audience?

Willy Loman takes his own life. The audience doesn't witness his death; they are suspended in knowing it will come. In the script, Linda,Willy Loman’s wife, Loman’s only mourner, cries alone at his grave, “Attention must be paid.” But in this production, you probably decide to cut Linda and her famous line. You have an all male cast in a homophobic part of the country, with minimalist props and time to rehearse. In this time and in this place, maybe this performance can only end with a question. When Willy Loman runs off the stage, every other actor calls after him, together: “Pop?”, a question that means more than a name. The actors will practice this again and again, inhaling together, and they will get the unison right at the performance. When Willy Loman runs off the stage, perhaps to die, and Howard and Biff and Happy and Bernard and Charley call after him, it is also men with other names—men with multiple names, as many names as you or everyone you know has, the names on birth certificates, the names your loved ones use, the names we call one another—calling out with concern, with alarm, with a question. Calling out for attention to be paid.

If you’ve ever facilitated a workshop inside a prison, maybe you’ve stayed late enough to leave with the sun setting. If you’re in a prison in the depths of the Mississippi Delta, the ground as swollen as the air, the land you drive away on was probably a former plantation, now gridded by long straight roads with deep cracks. You might see snakes resting on the warmth of the concrete after slithering from the fields that remember death and labor and suffering and pain and laughter and poetry. The sun is setting and you see it across a violent vastness and it should be hideous but it is one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen. If you have never seen a play inside of a prison, the feeling is kind of like that.

It’s in the Title

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my brother-in-law Dean Hedani. A founding partner of the San Francisco law firm Hedani, Choy, Spalding & Salvagione, he will be lovingly remembered as the father who ensured family continuity with the passing of his partner Melainie. Dean was a big sports fan of the Warriors, Giants and 49ers, however, this enthusiasm was unmatched when compared to his passion for the 2022 Hedani family pilgrimage to Topaz, which is recounted below.

“We rode through seventeen miles of alfalfa fields and greasewood-covered desert...the Central Utah Relocation Project was stretched out before us in a cloud of dust. It was a desolate scene. Hundreds of low black barracks covered with tar paper were lined up row after row. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels, and soldiers could be seen patrolling the grounds.”

Citizen 13660, discussing the bus trip to the “Central Utah Relocation Center,” the euphemism for the Topaz Concentration Camp

Part One: Salt Lake City to Park City to Delta

The last time we visited Salt Lake City was in 1975 during our cross-country road trip relocating from the Bay Area to the Big Apple. Already young veterans of the definitive 

movement, we were radical community activists rooted in the Chinatown, Manilatown, and Japantown communities. With New York’s Chinatown in our line of sight, we were excited, nervous, and full of anticipation for a new life in an unfamiliar place.

Of course, this uprooting came with trepidation: What kind of impoverished environment would play host to a gang called the Crazy Homicides? 

 I thought that having encounters with Chinatown street youth and other “close calls” would be enough preparation. (Some of those days, some of us would be armed.)

My sister saw us off from our hilly alley flat on Bernard Street, just north of Chinatown. Janet and I got into our 1973 Datsun 610 and crossed the familiar Bay Bridge, making short requisite stops in Oakland and Sacramento to say goodbyes to our families by way of Interstate 80 and its tributaries. Janet would always be teary-eyed leaving her close-knit 

 (Japanese American) family. And then off we went, straight east. Although she and I had traveled to Phoenix to see my mother’s family after we had married, I had never traveled beyond Nevada that far north. At the time, I-80 was the northernmost West-East cross-continental highway in the United States and it would eventually lead us to New York City. I opted against traveling the more southerly transcontinental route because the South in those days was still very much 

. My gas mileage was about 20-odd miles per gallon, and memories of the 1973 gas crisis were still fresh. We were guarded, yet felt relatively comfortable. Still, as Asians, we often felt like oddities at gas stations, restaurants, and truck stops.

After crossing the Sierra Nevada (and the infamous Donner Pass), our first proper overnight stop was Salt Lake City. Arriving late in the evening from the west, looking down on the Great Salt Lake as rain danced on the windshield and lightning flashed in the distance. Burning the brakes down the mountain road, the eerie panorama of a well-placed movie scene. In those pre-GPS days one used an AAA Triptik for precise directions. Janet and I were amidst our own journey of a lifetime, just like a movie, and with dramatically placed distant lightning at that!

To make a long story short, our road trip and arrival to New York City indeed was a memorable experience replete and populated with stories of struggle and activism. Janet and I homesteaded ourselves in the Lower East Side and became New Yorkers. Our relationship with our families in the West was never broken while we expanded our own family on the East Coast.

The flight from JFK landed two hours later than scheduled at Salt Lake City International Airport due to a forced layover in Denver after all the onboard restrooms failed. Picking up the rental car at the airport, we traversed the Wasatch Back region of the Rocky Mountains, towards Park City, a ski resort community 32 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The old mining town sits at an elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level, but these days it’s most well-known for Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. By the time we arrived, Bay Area members of the 

 side of the family had already arrived and settled into their rooms at the hotel.

This trip was a four-year effort in the making—a pilgrimage to the site of the Topaz concentration camp, euphemistically named by the U.S. government as the Central Utah Relocation Center. An endeavour spearheaded by our daughter, we were ultimately able to meet up with our extended family of 

, Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese from Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, and various points in California. The gathering was a highly anticipated opportunity to commemorate my 

Part 2: A Desolate Memory on a Foundation of Dust

Four years ago, before the pandemic, bringing up a family journey to Topaz would inevitably trigger a series of conversations ricocheting between the East and West coasts. There always was a quiet persistence when the topic was broached by our adult children. Topaz concentration camp is the site where both of my wife’s 

 (first generation) grandparents and her 

 (second generation) parents were incarcerated along with over 7,500 other people of Japanese descent.

Around that time several of Janet’s younger cousins, along with comrades and veterans of the Asian American movement, had recently passed. Always in the background of any family conversation was an understanding that Asian American demographics had significantly changed since the 1970s, as well as the recent unsettling rise in violent anti-Asian sentiments. When it came time for things to manifest there was an unspoken resonance to the significance of a pilgrimage to Topaz.

Pulling it off would be an achievement of logistical tenacity weighed with profound emotional and historical gravity. Excitedly, I shared the plan with my colleagues, my doctor, and others as I prepared to retire from professional life. Of course, that was in the months before the pandemic.

It is a disturbing reality that, to this day, most Americans are unaware that after the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government openly violated professed constitutional protections and cruelly targeted persons of Japanese descent. This manifestation of an imperialist, geopolitical struggle between two empires—the Japanese and the American—contesting Indo-Pacific dominance, would irreparably scar the Japanese American people.

In 1942, over 125,000 Japanese Americans residing along the West Coast were interned under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The majority were native-born U.S. citizens and their 

 parents, who were forcibly removed from their jobs and schools, then suffered the indignation of having their farms and businesses confiscated, and their community and faith institutions shut down, before being herded onto trains and disappeared into the desolate wilderness of the internment camps.

The forced displacement and incarceration were accompanied by racist, virulent demonization in the mainstream press coupled with rabid, physical attacks on persons and property. Much of the hatred was 

inflamed via William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire

, which had historically agitated the threat of “Yellow Peril” using a carefully curated assault of editorials, columns, articles, and political cartoons that “cultivated vicious hatred of the Japanese.” Racial hostilities made the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans not only possible but a crushing reality when Roosevelt authorized 

This waking nightmare left indelible impressions on future generations of documentarians, authors, artists, and social scientists who eventually emerged out of the dust of Topaz. Among the survivors were children’s author Yoshiko Uchida, artist Miné Okubo, author and illustrator of