KIMBERLE’S PLAYLIST
I only picked four songs for this because I think these were all enough to properly encapsulate the mystery and complexity of the story. This Is Me Trying by Taylor Swift is a song about trying your best and trying to show others that you really are trying. I think this was a good song to describe the phone call between Kimberle and the narrator at the start of the story. She’s feeling suicidal but shes also asking for help. Its almost a twisted way of her showing the narrator that she’s still trying. Burned Out is more about the narrator in her moment of just complete exhaustion between having to deal with Kimberle and also her mom’s cat, all while also worrying about the potential murder that will happen, it just matches very well. Class of 2013 is back to Kimberle, relating to how she’s basically a drop out drug addict living on someone’s couch, the only difference here is that in the song, Mitski is talking to her mom and not an old acquaintance like the narrator in the story. Liability can relate to both characters who feel an isolation in their lives. They both just feel like they only have themselves for most of the story.
PANDORAS BOX
In this article by Pink News, we see a man do the next closest thing to what Arturo Arias writes about in Pandoras Box. In the story, Juan is a man who falls in love with a beautiful woman and ends up somehow magically changing to a woman and having to deal with the difficulties of eing a woman and having to learn how to properly present himself as a woman. In the article I chose, a man did something similar where he dressed up in drag to try and experience the way women are treated like when they get catcalled and other forms of street harassment. These two are also similar in the way that the Man in each story end up with completely different outlooks and are shocked with how different life is as a woman.
Photography and My interpretation
Mexico is known for being particularly Catholic, like many other Latin American countries. So the moment my eyes landed on the first picture by Dulce Pinzon, my little Mexican heart fluttered. As a child, I remember being dressed up every 12th of December to go to church and honor La Virgen De Guadalupe. She’s our patron Saint. With the festivities we always held, it was always a given that we would hear the story about La Virgen and how she decided to make Mexico her home. The picture by Pinzon portrays a young indigenous man named Juan Diego who first saw La Virgen in the desert part of Mexico. This is where the second picture I chose from Graciela Iturbide’s page comes in. Her picture just seems to illustrate to me the area that the Virgen would’ve appeared for the first time. The two pictures go hand in hand to tell the Mexican story that I grew up listening to ever since I was a child.
Porcupine Love
The weeks after I returned from Don Juan’s session, there was an eerie calm in my place. Where I would usually sit and contemplate with my hand in my pants and many anxieties plaguing my every thought and movement, I just sat and stared into space. The emptiness in my soul becoming more and more prominent as time passed. After what seemed like hours but in reality was only a few minutes, I walked over to my computer and opened my email. There she was.
Antenita.
Her name no longer felt like the temptation it once was, not after the freedom I felt during Don Juan’s session. My therapist rang my phone but I didn’t answer, knowing that overanalyzing my love life would only make me revert back to my old ways. I chose instead to let it go. Accept the insignificantness of my life and accept I didn’t need anyones love. While staring at Antenitas name on that screen, I felt nothing. I convinced myself I couldn’t feel anything. While I deleted my email account with the help of instructions I got online, I went numb. I stared at the confirmation screen for hours and then got up and went to sleep. I would only ever see her in my dreams now.
Just me and Antenita in my dreams.
Mexican Heaven and I’m No Longer Here
There’s a certain pain that comes with being Mexican, at least thats what the poem tells us. I took Heaven to mean The US in the poem written by Jose Olivarez. He writes about it so tragically and the experiences in the poem seem like excerpts taken from life. In Mexico, many people call the US “El Norte” meaning The North, so the analogy of it actually being the US is really interesting. The movie “I’m No Longer Here” explores the struggles Mexicans who just come to this country can face and it seems to go oddly hand and hand with the poem to portray the Mexican existence in the United States as something negative and harmful to us. The Mexican experience is different for everyone here but these two pieces of work show us just one dark side of what its like here.
Link to Trailer: I’m No Longer Here
La Guera
Audio Transcript: The story named “La Gurea starts with something a lot of first generation Chicanos can identify with which is being the first in your family to attend school all the way until college. I don’t think there was ever a time in my life where college wasn’t an option, it was always mandatory. I was just waiting to graduate so I could go off and finish my schooling in a college like I was told and it was fine, I never questioned it. Now here I am, In college, fulfilling the dream that was set for me for as long as I could remember, discussing things like government policies and trying my best to work through the immense pressure. Sometimes I wished it wasn’t like this. Sometimes I wished it was less Black and White. I wish the pressure wasn’t as bad as it is. But there’s nothing I could do about it. The internalized fear of being a disappointment runs deep in the minds of Latinx people like me, all we can do is just dream and try our best.
Written By Cristal Ramales
